A Small Madness

by Dianne Touchell

  ‘Why are you so angry, Michael? This isn’t about me at all, is it? Still going to marry her, Michael?’ Liv dropped her hand to her side before saying, ‘Has she miscarried?’ Michael dropped his eyes then. Liv stared at his forehead and waited. ‘Michael?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Has she miscarried?’

  ‘I don’t . . . I’m not sure. Probably.’

  ‘Probably? Michael, you’d know if she miscarried. She’d bleed like a fucking stuck pig!’

  They stood together, heads bowed slightly, in such a way that from a distance it might appear as if they were friends. Michael felt so comfortably detached from everything in that moment, that he believed he could stay standing in uncomfortable silence with this girl he hated forever. Little vacuum of nothingness. He remembered how easy it had been to girdle those trees. He could even remember the smell of the living tree flesh.

  ‘Okay,’ Liv said coolly. ‘Here’s the thing, Michael. You’re pissing off the only person who gives a fuck. Do you get that? I’m Rosie’s friend.’ It was the gentle conversational tone which made Michael look up at Liv. ‘Being accidentally knocked-up is not the end of the goddamn world. But the bullshit you two are running just might be. I can’t believe I was jealous.’

  ‘Jealous?’ Michael wanted Liv to be jealous. He wanted her to envy Rose, to envy him.

  ‘Yeah, jealous. Crazy shit.’ Liv laughed and said, ‘You see, Rose told me you loved her. I guess that was the least dodgy of her delusions.’ Liv turned then and began walking away. She crossed the park and got to the street counting her own steps. When she reached the pavement she turned back. Michael was sitting at the picnic table between the caution tape and the swing set. His backpack was on the ground and his head was in his hands. He looked as if he were praying. And Liv decided she was staying out of it.

  The least dodgy of her delusions. Michael couldn’t get the phrase out of his head. He tried not to think about it but somehow hearing Liv say it out loud had snapped him back into reality with a whip-cracking shock. He had to sit down on the bench next to the picnic table and resist the desire to scream. And he knew he had to talk to Rose. Really talk to Rose. He had to sit down with her and drag her through the bramble of whatever fantasy it was that kept her unthinkingly functional while he himself was close to falling apart. They had decisions to make. Because despite Rose’s protestations and Michael’s prayers, it wasn’t going away as they had imagined it might. Michael had seen Rose using a safety pin to secure the zipper in a favourite skirt because the zipper teeth no longer met.

  He called Rose from the park but she didn’t answer. During the walk home Michael began to wonder if he should tell Tim. He knew his only motivation for doing so would be to feel the relief of having the knowledge shared. He knew Tim would keep his secret. He also knew there was absolutely nothing Tim could do to help.

  Help. It was the sort of word that was usually screamed. It was the sort of need that usually required screaming. People yelled help when there was a fire or they were injured or someone was attacking them. Other people responded quickly and efficiently to this yelling. But a whispered help, that was different. Whispered helps are full of secrets and shameful desperation. Rather than halve the burden, a whispered help will divide the crisis and let it gain strength and complexity: a sort of emotional mitosis. Not unlike passing a disease on to the one trying to save you. And if nothing would change as a result of the whisper anyway, if all it would do is bring about the inevitable outcome, only sooner, then why bother? Better just to fall down and wait, isn’t it?

  When Michael got home he knew something was wrong. His father was sitting in the recliner by the bookshelf, his reading chair, with no book. This in itself was not particularly alarming; however, the precise way in which he was tracing the pleat in his trousers with the corner of the envelope he was holding was. Up and down, up and down, accompanied by the swish, swish of the thick paper against wool-polyester blend, like a razor against a strop.

  ‘Do you know what I have here?’ his father began.

  Michael dropped his backpack but did not respond.

  ‘I have a letter from school. It asks for confirmation that you were absent from school with parental permission on Monday, Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning of last week.’

  Michael knew that at any moment he would be asked for an explanation. He had been expecting this to catch up with him sooner or later. How could he explain to his father that each absence had been absolutely necessary: on each of those occasions he had been sick and tired. He was feeling sick and tired now. Why did people diminish that phrase? It was the perfect description for the sort of seasickness that wallowed behind his eyes more and more. He had timed two of those absences to coincide with hours he knew his mother was out of the house and had snuck home and gone to bed. He seemed to sleep better during the day lately for some reason.

  Michael braced himself for the booming reprimand and demand for an account of his whereabouts, but it didn’t come. Instead his father got out of his chair and walked slowly towards Michael until they were face to face. Michael went to take a step backwards but his father grabbed his upper arm. He leaned in so close their noses touched. Incongruously, Michael found himself wanting to laugh and squeezed his bladder tight to try to prevent it.

  ‘Don’t disappoint me,’ his father whispered. ‘I won’t brook it. Do not humiliate me again.’ He let go then, pushing Michael back just enough to cause a stagger and awkward recovery against the doorframe.

  That was it. Michael thought about bending down to retrieve his backpack but was afraid he would fall over. His father walked away then, turning back briefly to say, ‘I called the school. Told them you were sick.’

  Rose saw the missed call from Michael and went to her room to call him back.

  ‘Do you want to come over for dinner?’ she said immediately upon his greeting.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Come on,’ she pleaded. ‘You haven’t been over for dinner for ages. Didn’t see you much at school today. I hate Thursdays. I missed you. Anything much happen today? I had my History mock-up. I’m going to ace that exam.’

  Small talk. Ordinary and chirpy. Chirpy like a bird. Alert like a bird in a frenetic escape from a predator.

  ‘Mum’s going out later,’ Rose singsonged. ‘We’d have the place to ourselves.’

  ‘Is your dad away again? Didn’t he just get back?’

  ‘He was back for a month.’

  A month? Rose’s father had been back a month and was gone again already? Michael hadn’t seen him once. Had a month passed? Longer even? Time seemed to be moving without taking Michael and Rose along with it.

  ‘So,’ Rose continued, ‘come for dinner. Come for . . . whatever you want.’

  Come for whatever you want. Trouble was, Michael didn’t want it anymore. He couldn’t bend his perception the way Rose seemed to be able to. Her body had changed. Beneath all those tracksuit pants and baggy T-shirts she had taken to wearing like a uniform, her torso had become as tight and shiny as a giant hornet’s sting. There were swellings everywhere.

  Michael thought about telling Rose about his fight with Liv, thought about telling her about his fight with his father, thought about telling her about his fight with himself. Instead he said, ‘I can’t come for dinner.’

  Rose felt herself tensing. It wasn’t just the words, it was the tone. There was a sadness in it that she had seen and heard in Michael often lately. ‘So why did you call?’ she asked. Rose had felt sad sometimes too. She felt sad about not sleeping in her mother’s bed anymore. Sleeping in her mother’s bed, even when her mother wasn’t in it, was comforting. Like being held. And because the purpose of going to bed was to sleep, there was no expectation for conversation and Rose was able to rest there, beside her mother’s breathing. The darkness of her mother’s night-time room was like fingers in Rose’s hair – the only time of the day she need not comfort her mother with the reflection of a happy home s
hining like a well-polished mirror in her tired face.

  Now Rose slept in her own bed every night on sheets that were patchy with crust that smelled of Michael. Her mother had left fresh linen on the end of Rose’s bed. She usually changed the linen for Rose but she’d stopped doing that. She didn’t ask why Rose had stopped crawling into her bed either. Rose couldn’t risk it. She couldn’t risk her mother feeling something besides Rose moving in the night.

  ‘Michael?’ Rose said when the silence on the other end of the phone began crackling like static. ‘Michael, why did you call?’

  ‘Do you know what we’re going to do?’ Michael asked quickly.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I love you,’ Michael replied, before hanging up.

  The least dodgy of her delusions.

  Rose missed Michael. A fraught status quo seemed to exist between them. It was as if each of them were precariously balanced over an enormous drop, an abyss that neither of them would mention even while it caused their voices to echo and the tiny patches of workable ground beneath them to crumble. He wasn’t coming around as much and he seemed preoccupied.

  So when he suggested they go to a movie she skipped a play rehearsal to do so. She was as giddily excited about the date as she had been those first few times they had spent alone together. Those times when she used to take extra care with her appearance, when she’d get the hair straightener out and agonise over wardrobe choices and let Liv do her make-up just for fun before washing it off and starting again because Liv always made her look like a hooker just for fun.

  Rose held dresses and jeans up against her body in front of the full-length mirror on the back of her bedroom door, and twirled a bit, and sometimes in her peripheral vision she imagined Liv sitting on the end of her bed chugging Diet Coke and exclaiming, ‘More eyeliner, woman!’ as Rose did own her makeup. When she was ready, Liv would always say, ‘You look beautiful,’ and Rose would know she meant it.

  Rose eventually chose a pair of black stretch pants and a black satin A-line shift dress that fell to her knees. Her mother knocked on the door occasionally, almost as excited as Rose herself, just to see if Rose needed any help getting ready. It had been a long time since Rose had made an effort to dress up and go out and Violet was thrilled and relieved with this sudden return of enthusiasm to her daughter. She even obliged when Rose asked for a couple of ibuprofen. Violet didn’t want niggling back pain to ruin Rose and Michael’s first proper date in months.

  Michael was late picking up Rose. The short walk to her place was almost thwarted at the first step when his father bailed him up about where he was going. Michael had told a lie, which was not believed, yet accepted. The only thing holding Michael together these days was a caul of lies that by this time had dried hard and set his face in a grimace.

  Rose noticed that face when she opened her front door, but refused to give in to it. They walked to the bus stop and sat down.

  ‘We need to talk,’ Michael said. ‘Well, I need to talk.’

  ‘Okay.’ Rose took Michael’s hand.

  ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ Michael continued.

  ‘Do what?’ Rose replied.

  Michael moaned then. He let his head loll backwards and looked straight up into the slowly darkening sky. Streetlights were just beginning to flicker to life. People were walking by.

  ‘You’re pregnant.’ It was the first time the words had actually been used since that day in Rose’s bedroom, so long ago now and yet as resonant as the second which had just passed. He turned to look at her then and she was smiling, tremulous and meagre, but a smile just the same. Her eyelid began to twitch. Michael envied in Rose what appeared to be a lesser struggle. His own fear of discovery was beginning to cause a rot from within. It was like waking in the middle of the night to find one arm asleep, experiencing that moment of horror at being attached to a dead thing.

  ‘No, no,’ Rose began.

  Michael could hear the excitement in her voice.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ she continued. ‘I have period pain, and today, today, there was some blood.’ She was fidgety with the thrill of the news. ‘I was right, Michael. I was right all along. I don’t think it was ever there. Not really. I just created this thing in my mind, you see. It’s not real.’

  ‘Rose.’ Michael said her name and nothing more.

  Rose began to cry then, smile and cry and twitch, exhilarated by the deep cramping she knew was the start of her period. She was frightened that Michael didn’t believe her. Frightened by how her own body had deceived her for this long. Here she was, finally rational and back in control, and Michael was cutting the rope that tied his raft to hers.

  ‘Michael, the bus.’

  But Michael didn’t get up and neither did Rose.

  Michael wondered if Rose could be right. He allowed himself a moment to consider the possibility that they had both been caught up in a sort of blind hysteria. He wanted that to be true. He thought about the book they had read in English: The War of the Worlds. They had talked about the dramatisation of the book on radio, and how people had believed an invasion was happening simply because they were being told an invasion was happening. A story about the sublimation of the human race had sublimated the human race. Not for long, but long enough to create useless panic. He looked at Rose. Her hand, fingers intertwined with his, gripped him a bit too tightly. He wanted her to let go. She was so pale. She looked like a little girl. He knew then that any panic he was feeling was justified.

  ‘Did you pick a movie?’ he asked her.

  ‘No. What do you want to see?’

  ‘Decide when we get there?’

  ‘Okay.’

  Michael put his arm around Rose and pulled her in to him. They were reciprocally connected in the maintenance of a secret that Rose no longer believed to be true even as it grew wings inside her. Counterbalancing each other, breathing in unison, they waited for the next bus.

  Liv sent texts to Rose, which went unanswered.

  Rose took each text like an arrow. Her fingers would dawdle over the phone, ghosting a response, imagining Liv’s mother-touch, remembering that safe place. Then Rose’s belly would itch and she would be afraid again and, so, delete Liv’s message. But there was one message Rose didn’t delete: I’ll always be here for u. It was sent at the end of outdoor ed class.

  Rose had successfully avoided outdoor ed for three months. She’d had pulled muscles from playing squash on the weekend, migraines, diarrhoea, her period every two weeks, and sometimes she had simply not turned up. She’d been spoken to about her absences several times but had shown sufficient study-anxiety-related remorse for her behaviour to so far successfully avoid any real scrutiny. But scrutiny did come when she lolled outside the change rooms sans bathing suit yet again and calmly explained to Mrs Shaw that she had bad period pain.

  ‘You had your period last week, Rose.’

  Had she? Rose was losing track of time. She smiled awkwardly because she couldn’t think of anything to say. She needed rehearsal time.

  ‘I really do have bad cramps, Mrs Shaw.’

  ‘Just go back in there and change, Rose,’ Mrs Shaw continued. ‘You’ve got five minutes. I want you in the pool.’

  Rose returned to the change rooms and sat down on one of the long wooden benches, leaning back against a locker. She closed her eyes but found that without a visual rouser the smell in the room was almost unbearable. Chlorine and towels that smelled like wet dog, sweat and the sickly afterburn of dozens of aerosol deodorants sprayed day in and day out, all competed in air that was too moist and warm. Rose opened her eyes and waited for a swell of briny nausea to pass. She wished she hadn’t used her period as an excuse so often. Now, when it was finally forming like an iron cairn inside her, no one believed her. She grabbed her bag and walked out.

  Class was in full session. Teachers barked from the edge of the pool, girls dutifully completed laps, others sat in tight groups under sun sails, stretching their lithe limbs
and giggling. Rose used to be one of them. She could see Liv standing by herself near the bleachers, one hand pressed to her forehead in a salute against the sun, other hand on hip. With everyone occupied, Rose made her way quickly to the gate. She was almost out of sight when she heard Mrs Shaw.

  ‘Stop right there!’

  When Rose turned, she saw she was not the only one startled by the order. Several others nearby had also stopped and turned to look. A light breeze caught her T-shirt, so she pressed her bag in front of her. She saw Liv making her way slowly around the pool.

  ‘I didn’t excuse you, Rose,’ Mrs Shaw continued. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t . . . nowhere . . . home.’ Each tiny word Rose said was snatched up by the breeze. She couldn’t get any volume up, couldn’t fill her lungs enough to make herself heard over the hubbub.

  ‘What?’ Mrs Shaw started walking towards Rose. Everyone was looking now. Mrs Shaw approached from one side of the pool; Liv continued easing her way towards Rose from the other. The pincer manoeuvre skilfully executed just prior to an attack.

  Rose began backing up, a strange panic making her skin tingle with heat. Then Mrs Shaw was there, in front of her, like a bulwark. Rose couldn’t look at her.

  ‘Liv, go back to what you were doing,’ Mrs Shaw said, noticing Liv loitering at the flank. ‘This isn’t your business.’

  Liv didn’t move away. She waited, staring directly at Rose.

  ‘I said, where are you going, Rose?’

  Rose stared down at her own forearms clutching her bag to her body. She had to get out of there. She had to leave, now. She could feel herself burning with the need of it; she traced the spaces between arm freckles with wet eyes and said, ‘I don’t feel well.’