A Small Madness

by Dianne Touchell

  They continued eating. Even though Michael ate quickly, he found himself having to heave his senses through the slowly passing minutes, dragging his consciousness after him like a dying dog. He thought about those last words his father had spoken. Opportunity is fragile. He had been hearing the same sentiment expressed at school lately, although obviously intoned with far more optimism and enthusiasm. It was funny how the same aphorism could be peddled as either hope or admonition. Of course the school guidance counsellor didn’t use that exact phrase, but the implication was the same. Two sides of the same coin. Michael’s future was a fragile opportunity that he should be both grateful for and terrified of.

  There hadn’t been much for Michael to discuss with the guidance counsellor when he’d had his appointment earlier in the day. Michael had wondered how this woman decided to become a guidance counsellor. Had she herself sat in his chair one afternoon, years ago, and said to the person sitting opposite, ‘I want to do what you’re doing now’? If she had, and if she’d ever had any sort of passion for the position, that time had long since passed. She seemed inappropriately poker-faced for someone who was supposed to be inspiring others in their chosen career paths. She sighed a lot and kept scratching her armpit.

  ‘Good grades, good subjects, good attendance record, good reports.’ Sigh. ‘You can pretty much do anything you want. You’re very lucky to have such opportunities ahead.’ Said in a tone which implied choice was a bad thing. Sigh. ‘So, what do you want to do?’

  ‘I’m going into medicine,’ Michael had replied.

  Sigh.

  This is the woman students come to with their personal problems, Michael thought. Problems with teachers, problems at home, problems with friends. There was even a boy in a wheelchair who used this woman’s office when he had to pee. Everyone knew about that. Michael couldn’t smell pee. There was a door leading to another office, an inner office, behind the guidance counsellor’s desk. Maybe the wheelchair boy peed in there. Maybe the people with real problems went in there and there was someone else, someone who didn’t sigh and scratch, someone who listened to problems all day long, someone only certain people had access to. The very deserving, the very disturbed, the very disabled. An inner sanctum. The holy of holies.

  Michael imagined what it would be like to just say it. As the words formed in his head he could already feel the relief of it, the unburdening, the respite from responsibility, all the proper grown-ups stepping in with options for his now terribly fragile future: My girlfriend is pregnant and doesn’t want me to tell anyone and I don’t know if that’s the right thing or not and I’m scared and stupidly angry at her when it’s not just her fault and now I’ve let everyone down and nothing I do from now on will mean anything because of this one mistake. But he didn’t say it. There was something blatantly uninviting about this scratching, sighing woman in front of him.

  ‘Well, here is some information on the different campuses and their criteria. Application forms, subject handbooks, contact numbers. Feel free to make another appointment if you need anything else. You can make appointments through the registrar. Good luck with your preparation.’

  Rose knew her mother was suspicious. For a start, she’d hidden the ibuprofen.

  Violet was almost certain Rose had a virus. She wanted to take Rose to the doctor and find out why she was so tired and why she didn’t feel like eating.

  The truth was, Rose did feel like eating. She was hungry all the time and the crawling pain that hollowed her out when she denied herself food became addictive and satisfying. She began denying herself more and more, with the zeal of a flagellant. She marvelled that she could manage to lose weight rather than gain it. The tiny swelling below her bellybutton was hardly noticeable. Rose even allowed her mother to see her naked, such was her faith in her control over her own body. She knew it would be more suspicious to refuse her mother access to the bathroom while she dried off after a shower. They often used the bathroom at the same time and Rose had discovered that people very rarely see what they are not looking for. Her mother had merely commented that Rose was looking pale and a bit drawn. Rose had felt like laughing, so she did. And her mother had laughed too and it was as it always had been. Rose felt powerful and happier than she had in weeks.

  Violet tried cooking only Rose’s favourite foods. She kept bowls of fresh fruit out and convinced herself that Rose was probably grazing between meals. She bought multivitamins that the chemist told her had been specifically formulated for teens and placed one on the breakfast table every morning next to Rose’s cup of tea. It always vanished and Violet convinced herself that Rose was swallowing it. She noticed that Rose’s weight loss seemed to be accompanied by a kind of emotional shrillness Rose had never displayed before. Rose was high-pitched happy, her movements and responses as sharp as her collarbones. Violet put all this down to the stress of final exam preparation and the fight that had suddenly ended the lifelong friendship between her daughter and Liv. Rose’s mother did, however, check under Rose’s bed and in Rose’s wardrobe for jars of vomit. She had seen a midday movie once where a girl with an eating disorder purged into jars and stashed them in her bedroom. Violet didn’t find any vomit and was so relieved she stopped looking for anything else. People rarely see what they are not looking for.

  Sometimes when Rose thought she was unobserved, her mother could see a tiredness there that seemed more than physical. She would always ask, ‘Rose, are you all right?’ and Rose would smile and say, ‘Yes,’ and her mother would accept this because her love and her worry were already webbed with greenstick fractures and she didn’t think she could cope with honesty. Not just now. Not yet. And besides, it was none of her business.

  Rose started smoking when she found out it starves the placenta. She found out it starves the placenta in Biology. She rarely paid attention these days, so she was pleasantly surprised when her brain was able to filter out this one piece of applicable information: smoking restricts blood vessels thereby reducing the flow of oxygenated blood through the placenta. The placenta is starved. The foetus doesn’t grow properly. Rose heard ‘carbon monoxide’ and ‘cyanide’ and ‘starving’ and ‘stillbirth’.

  Starving. She already knew girls at school who smoked to reduce their appetite, but it suddenly had further-reaching implications for Rose. Smoking could keep her weight down, as well as possibly get rid of this virus inside her. Pollution, after all, had been known to close down entire cities for days. She imagined her internal organs being wrung like a tea towel, blood flow restricted, arteries atrophied, bones clunking together as her skin wrapped around them like parchment. The virus starving.

  It was easy to pinch cigarettes from the packets her father bought to take back to work with him. When she first started smoking it made her sick and she was relieved to feel this different kind of sickness. She had to go to bed as soon as she got home from school because she felt like she might vomit. Her chest burned and her mouth tasted like a shoe smelled.

  She wasn’t brave enough to use the smokers toilet at school. Everyone knew about the smokers toilet. Even the teachers, who regularly raided it. They rarely apprehended anyone. No one finished a full cigarette in there. It was a place of quick drags, frenzied flushing and back-slapping congratulations at triumph over the system. It always smelled bad and there were usually a few floating butts in bowls. Everyone knew the girls who used the smokers toilet. That’s why Rose avoided it. Being seen by a regular in those particular toilets would be so disastrously out of character for Rose that it would draw more attention than the smoking itself. So Rose smoked in the student car park. It was situated a comforting distance from the administration block and was bordered by a patch of unkempt bush populated by magpies and dumped rubbish. Incongruously termed the School Nature Strip, it was avoided by everyone out of fear of swoopers and snakes. Rose would squat by the bumper of a parked car to smoke and then flick her butts into the scrub.

  She smoked as many cigarettes as she could when she was
there. Not just one, but three, sometimes four, back to back, sucked down head-spinningly fast. She would spray herself with Impulse after each tobacco binge and chew gum until her jaw ached. Still, she had seen her mum smelling her laundry as she sorted it. She had seen Michael’s dad at church turn towards her, inhaling with furrowed brow. She didn’t care.

  When Michael sniffed Rose’s hair she pretended it was a romantic gesture even though he squinted and looked sad. When Michael had dinner at Rose’s and her mum dipped her head coquettishly to one side and remarked, ‘Michael, I think you might be smoking,’ he’d said, ‘Yes,’ without really thinking about it and because he loved Rose.

  Rose was scaring Michael lately, too. She was becoming all sharp edges. It wasn’t just the weight loss. Michael had studied cross-section diagrams of pregnancy in all its mysterious stages: from a kidney bean smudge curled up in tight folds of rigid muscle to a bona fide thing, just like you see in prams on the street, getting so big it shoved internal organs out of the way as if it were building a snow cave. Rose’s ability to drag her body with her into plausible deniability should have made Michael shudder with euphoric relief, but it didn’t. He began to feel sick, like he had on the day she first told him she was pregnant. Her face was beginning to sink into her skull. She looked bloodless and parched. And something else was happening. Rose was twitchy and strident. Michael would sometimes hear her braying clear across the quadrangle. He would look at her and her skin shone like beached cuttlefish.

  When they spent time together she wouldn’t speak of it.

  ‘You look sick.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Rose would answer, always with a cadence of finality. Just like Michael’s mum. If I say it, it will come to be. I speak my reality and so create yours. No correspondence will be entered into. Except Michael never expected to be excluded from the truth along with everybody else.

  He wasn’t sleeping well. Was Rose? He wondered if that nascent snow-caver ever sent tendrils of sadness into Rose’s dreams. It lived in his. It pulsed and rolled and nudged like a manatee in his spinal fluid, and it wasn’t even growing in him. He wanted to ask Rose how she did it. But he knew she would answer, ‘Do what?’

  The week before school holidays two students were expelled for stealing a car and one fainted during a mock exam. Teachers began the precarious balancing act between propitious manoeuvring of their charges towards school and personal success, and unconcealed joy that another year of dragging combative no-hopers towards academic mediocrity was almost over. Students were advised to use their holidays wisely, as the last term would come and go relatively fast. The last term was coming and Michael could feel it.

  Michael knew he was being scrutinised. Fortunately the stinging panic that had sat like a film on his eyeballs ever since the kidney bean first appeared was erroneously identified by everyone around him as exam prep anxiety. Exam prep anxiety became Michael’s panacea. The askance squint he developed was mistaken for eye strain, the teeth grinding for concentration, the silences for meditative study, and fatigue for long days and nights of preparing to fulfil everyone’s expectations. There was an uncomfortable consolation in this for Michael. He could pull a little peace from temporary acceptance of his erraticism even while knowing it could never last. This was the eye of the storm and Michael knew it.

  Michael and Rose usually sat together in church. Sometimes they would sit with his family, sometimes they would sit with hers. When they stood to sing the hymns, Michael would just mouth the words so he could listen to Rose’s voice. He loved the swell of it. She made the hairs on his arms stand up. He once told Rose that her singing in church was like a pulse in a room full of corpses. She had said ‘Ewww’ in response, so he didn’t try explaining any further. He just listened. Every now and then some elderly parishioner with a voice like a foghorn would stand behind Michael and belt out the hymns, swallowing up Rose’s voice in an airstream of must and denture adhesive. It had always irritated him, but lately it made him so extremely angry that he would have to breathe slowly and grip the back of the pew in front of him just to stop himself from turning around and screaming, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ He had fantasies about it. He would imagine the slow turn to face the perpetrator, the slight faltering of their song as they recognised rage in his face, the inhalation of air that would carry that rage out of his chest and throat, and the release of the scream. It made him happy to think about it.

  Today they were sitting with his family and there was no elderly foghorn behind them. Michael was disappointed not to have the distraction of his rage to get through the sermon. Instead he decided to study the small girl squatting on the floor between pews colouring in. It was one of those DreamWorks colouring-in books based on some feature-length cartoon. He couldn’t place the characters. He knew he recognised them, but he couldn’t remember the name of the movie. This irritated him too. Then, when she began colouring outside the lines, Michael felt his anger build until he wanted to lean over and snatch the pencil out of her hand. He imagined her struggling to hold on to it and having to break a finger or two to prise it out of her hand. He imagined the girl screaming, her mother screaming, her father grabbing him and slamming him into a wall, the entire congregation turning, aghast, with wide eyes and hands over mouths. His own father looking at him as if he were a stranger. Then the relief came. That little bit of relief he could only access through rage. It never lasted long enough. He looked at the girl again. She wasn’t even trying to get it right. Just scribbling over Fiona’s face, ruining the page. Shrek. That was it. Shrek.

  Michael and Rose got out of the church as quickly as possible after the service. They used to hang around, mingle, accept and answer questions from well-intentioned old people, friends of their parents, elders of the church. They used to get involved in the youth group, help organise safe group outings to safe venues where the boys and girls could pair off safely and flirt and kiss. They used to join their parents in the church hall after service for a cup of tea and a piece of dry cake donated by some woman who received far more gratitude for her efforts than was deserved. But now they just got out of there as quickly as possible. They would sit together on the limestone wall that bordered the car park and hold hands and not say very much at all. Sometimes they didn’t hold hands. Michael would say something like, ‘How are you?’ and Rose would say, ‘Good’ and Michael would say, ‘Not feeling sick or anything?’ and Rose would say, ‘Why would I be feeling sick?’ and Michael would feel like crying. Or breaking a little girl’s fingers.

  Sunday was family day in Michael’s house. It always had been. After church they would go home and there would be a roast, even on hot days, and in the evening a light dinner of sandwiches stuffed with leftover roast drizzled with coagulated leftover gravy. There would be homework to do and usually a football game on TV. Michael’s mum would do the ironing. It wasn’t that they spent every minute of the day together; it was just an understanding that they would share their time and tasks in a kind of family bubble. Guests were unusual on a Sunday. Phone calls, in or out, were rare. Michael used to love Sundays, but now they seemed too quiet. He began to long for a neighbour to mow a lawn, just so he could concentrate on some white noise other than the thrumming in his own head. He couldn’t study, couldn’t follow the football, couldn’t hear what people were saying to him. His father began to get annoyed, and motivated, by having to say everything twice to Michael just to extract a response. And the one thing Michael dreaded was his father’s motivation to pay more attention to these subtle changes in behaviour that Michael could neither control nor predict.

  It was on a Sunday that Michael and his father had their first fight. They had disagreed before but the outcome of any disagreement in Michael’s house was preordained. Years of modelling from their mother had taught both Michael and Tim that backing down and thanking their father for pointing out the flaws in their own thinking was the most productive course to take in any difference of opinion. Michael not only accepted t
his, but he also believed his father to be right. Recently, however, his mother’s acquiescence had begun to smell like submission. And without a neighbour’s lawnmower to meditate upon, his father’s approach began to smack of bullying.

  The fight started with this: ‘Michael, I don’t like repeating myself.’

  This worried Michael immediately, because if his father had already repeated himself and didn’t like it then he was bound to be hacked off at having to say whatever he didn’t like repeating yet again. Michael considered trying to wing it and pretend he had heard, but the possibilities were numerous and whatever his father had said might require follow-up action which Michael couldn’t possibly wing. He could hear his mother humming at the ironing board.

  ‘Sorry, Dad. I am listening.’

  ‘And now you’re lying to me as well,’ his father said.

  And there was the trap. Michael was familiar with it. His ‘I am listening’ had just slipped out. He hadn’t thought it through, and it was a lie. But it was a lie of preservation in the face of being set up. He began to think about all the ways his father set him up. Set them all up. His father was inordinately calm. It occurred to Michael that his father might be enjoying this.

  ‘No, Dad. I’m not lying. I wasn’t listening before, but I’m listening now.’

  ‘Don’t play games with me, Michael,’ his father said, shifting slightly in his chair. He was reading the paper, or pretending to. He didn’t take his eyes off the page, just shifted ever so slightly, making the paper creak as he adjusted his centre of gravity. Michael knew that tactic as well. It used to terrify him as a boy. His father was preparing to get up. If he had to.

  ‘I don’t think Michael meant anything,’ his mother said, her voice rising to an edgy chirp.

  ‘Not really your business, Maureen. And we don’t really know what Michael means these days, do we, Michael? We know he doesn’t listen and we know he lies about it. We don’t know much else. I think it’s time we put some strategies in place to get you back on track, young man. For a start, no more after-school activities. Once you’ve been accepted into medicine you can do whatever you want, but for now we’ll see if a more disciplined approach to life can help your hearing problem.’