A Small Madness

by Dianne Touchell

  That’s when Mrs Shaw placed a hand, feather light, on Rose’s arm and said, ‘Let’s have a talk.’

  It was the touch that did it. It might just as well have been a tourniquet of barbed wire. Rose yanked her arm back, spinning her body.

  Liv stepped forward, convinced Rose was going to lose her balance.

  Rose looked Mrs Shaw hard in the eye and said, ‘Don’t touch me.’

  Mrs Shaw opened her mouth but didn’t speak. Behind her, the laps had stopped. Students bobbed in the lanes, or leaned on the edges of the pool, their tentacle-legs waving just below the water’s surface. A swim coach had emerged from the small office to the side of the change room. He made two steps towards the trio. Rose needed no further motivation to bolt.

  She ran from the pool, up the small grassy incline that led away from the school. She skirted the hockey field, vaguely aware of the hoot and holler of those in the midst of a game, ran past the student car park, past the groundskeeper sheds, watched the street being pulled closer and closer to her by pure will and pounding feet. When she reached the street she kept going, the elation of escape overriding the burning in her calves and the ache in her lower back. She ran two blocks uphill in the direction of the ocean before collapsing into a bus shelter and vomiting on the pavement.

  She sat in the bus shelter, oblivious to the vomit on her shoes, and cried. When her phone chirruped she dug it out of her bag and read the text from Liv: I’ll always be here for u.

  The back pain was a welcome distraction. It wasn’t a sharp pain so much as a dull, drawing ache like a fish hook in the base of her spine being occasionally tugged. Sometimes the tugging went on for a long time and Rose began to imagine herself rising in the water, rushing towards the light of a clear blue sky against the cold pressure of an opposing current. And then the tugging would subside and she would just bob about beneath the surface of that quickening ache, seeing daylight distorted and shiny from a long way away. Sometimes she vomited. The vomiting frightened her. She preferred the fish hook.

  Michael sat on the bus willing every stop to be a massive alighting of slow-moving people with heavy packages or children in bulky, difficult-to-manoeuvre prams. When the bus lumbered past a stop without crawling to a halt to accommodate time-consuming passengers, Michael found himself panicking. His self-control had been fraying for weeks and delaying his arrival at Rose’s was the only thing preventing that last thread from being pulled right down to the quick of his guts. Rose had called while he was in his physics exam. They weren’t allowed to have phones on them during exams and even though there was no frisking at the door, Michael had tucked his into his sock. He had ignored it for as long as possible, but eventually the consistent vibrating against his malleolus began to register in his teeth. He had slapped his unfinished paper onto the supervisor’s desk and walked out. When he checked his phone there were five missed calls from Rose and a text message: Come quick.

  Rose straddled a chair in her bedroom and rocked back and forth. Her room was so hot. She had pulled the chair under the air-conditioning duct but the draught fell on her in a moist film. Her mouth felt dry and her lungs felt wet. She remembered her mother saying the air conditioning didn’t work well in the humidity. She leaned over the back of the chair and turned on the electric fan as well. Her forehead prickled as it dried out in the warm blast from the blades. She began humming to herself, a rhythmic close-lipped chant that was caught by the fan and thrown back at her in a distorted tremble. Crying, she reached for her phone to call Michael again but accidentally dropped it on the floor.

  It had started before the sun came up. Initially it wasn’t too bad. Rose ignored it as best she could. When her mother left for work, Rose took a handful of painkillers she found secreted in her father’s bedside table. She pinched the half-empty packet of cigarettes she found in there too. But as the heat of the day began bleaching the small patch of sky visible from her bedroom window, Rose was gripped with it. The earth tilted, the poles shifted, and the sudden realisation of what was happening to her hit her with agonising loneliness.

  Michael wasn’t here. He hadn’t called back. The only thing protecting Rose’s sanity against her fear, in that moment, was the sensational shock of feeling as if her body were turning inside out.

  She had to get up to be sick again. She made it to the bathroom, holding on to the hall walls. She had nothing left to throw up and so dry-retched in convulsive spasms until the pressure in her bowel made it clear she needed to use the toilet. The sensation was powerful and invigorating. Rose sat and strained and waited for the relief. It was the only time she cried out.

  When Michael arrived he couldn’t find her at first and he thought, someone must have come home and found her and it’s over now and I can fall down. Then he noticed a smudge of blood on the hall wall. He found Rose in the bathroom, sitting on a towel and leaning up against the bath. She was smiling and brushing her hair. The smell hit him at the same time, metal and ammonia. It made his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. There was blood on the toilet seat and on the towel beneath Rose. All over her hands too. He walked slowly forward and reached down to take the hairbrush out of Rose’s grip. He caught her wrist mid-brushstroke and said, ‘You’re getting blood in your hair.’

  Rose stopped brushing and let go. The brush hung there on the side of her head, trapped in a wad of coagulated locks. Michael squatted down on his haunches and peeled Rose’s hair away, then dropped the hairbrush in the bath. He touched the side of her face, which was hot and wet and swollen from crying.

  Rose smiled again and said, ‘It went away.’

  Michael stood, but not straight up. He found that he had to drop back down to his knees for a moment and then use one knee to hoist himself upright. He walked to the bathroom sink and tipped all the toothbrushes out of the cup onto the vanity. Three people lived here but there were four toothbrushes. Why were there four toothbrushes? His own mother used a toothbrush to clean the tile grout in the shower but she kept the cleaning toothbrush well away from the ones that went inside people’s mouths. He quickly rinsed the cup and then filled it with water. He poured the water over Rose’s hands and then wiped them off with one corner of the towel she was sitting on. He filled the cup again and handed it to Rose. He lifted it to her lips and said, ‘Drink this.’

  Michael walked over to the toilet and looked. His mouth quivered with a rush of saliva. Barbs of perspiration stung his pores. He concentrated on his breathing, dropped the lid, and began cleaning up.

  It wasn’t as big a job as Michael had first thought. Two rolls of paper towels and a bottle of spray bleach conveniently stored in the cupboard underneath the sink. He stripped down to his underwear and put on a pair of disposable surgical gloves – Rose had a box of them in the laundry that she used when she coloured her own hair. She said the gloves that come with the box of colour were too loose. Twice he pulled the gloves off, carefully sliding them inside out, and put on a fresh pair. Eventually he had to ease Rose up off the floor. The bloody towel she had been sitting on stuck to her bottom. He peeled it off and helped Rose lift her T-shirt over her head. Then he got warm water running in the shower and helped her step into the recess. He squirted shampoo into her hand but she looked so confused that he stepped in with her and quickly washed her hair.

  When he was helping her dry off, he noticed the bright dribble on the inside of her thigh. He left her holding a towel scrunched up under her chin and when he returned helped her step into a pair of knickers lined with a sanitary pad the size of a surfboard.

  Michael was grateful for Rose’s vacant compliance throughout the process. If she had been hysterical he didn’t think he would have been capable of this shocking efficiency. And it was shocking. His every movement seemed to have a cerebral echo, as if it took his brain several seconds to register what his body was doing. He would begin to feel revulsion and fear, but too late – that moment has passed and I am now performing the next frightening, revolting task which I won’t re
gister until I’m onto the one after that. It was keeping one step ahead of the rabid dog, and the rhythm of it kept him focused and wired.

  Rose wandered into her bedroom and curled up on the bed. She tried to close her eyes but it felt too much like closing fingers around shattered glass. So she chose a point across the room and stared at it until she imagined she was a cat and a sympathetic inner eyelid fluttered down to ease out the light.

  When Michael walked in, dropping a large garbage bag in the hallway first, and found Rose wide-eyed and unmoving, it crossed his mind that she might have bled to death. The thought made him momentarily angry so he said, ‘Knock it off, Rose. You’re scaring the shit . . . out of me.’ He didn’t mean for his voice to get caught, but it did. He was high-pitched and shaky.

  Then Rose sat up, a smooth movement, and said, ‘Bring it to me.’

  Michael had no hesitation with his response. ‘No,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  Rose looked at him then and blinked slowly. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get rid of it,’ Michael said.

  ‘It must be buried,’ Rose said, in a tone one might use with a small child who should know better.

  We’re almost there, we’re almost there, Michael kept chanting to himself.

  Rose continued to look at him as if appalled by a bad joke.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ he said out loud.

  ‘It must be buried,’ Rose said again.

  They waited until it was dark. Rose’s mother had left a message on Rose’s phone. Michael listened to it. She was going out with the girls after sculpture class and could Rose heat up some leftovers for dinner? She might be late. Michael was pleased with the message. He listened to it twice. The events of the afternoon had swaddled him so tightly that it was a relief to hear that sculpture class was still going on and people were meeting after sculpture class, because it meant that other normal things were still going on outside of themselves. They were almost there.

  So they waited for dark. Michael wanted to go alone but Rose hadn’t let go of it all afternoon. He considered wrenching it from her grip and just taking off but in the end reckoned she had had enough wrenched from her body for one day. They didn’t speak very much while they waited.

  The dark finally crept across Rose’s bedroom. Their eyes adjusted so incrementally that they didn’t turn on a light but rather sat opposite one another just watching each other darken, Michael looking at Rose’s silhouette, Rose looking at the tiny grey thing in her arms. When Michael did switch a light on, he chose the hall light which set a yellowish pool across the bedroom threshold but did not come too close to Rose.

  She said it was the perfect place. She had said it earlier in the day and she said it again as they walked down the street towards the large stretch of bushland that had swallowed an entire grown-up woman. Without a trace. Rose chatted about the convenience and safety of it, with the same nonchalance she exhibited with any other small talk. Michael carried the gym bag. He had convinced Rose with surprisingly little difficulty that they should put it in the gym bag to transport it because it was protected that way.

  Michael counted the streetlights as they walked beneath them, feeling the light crawl across him, feeling exposed and vulnerable. Rose said they reminded her of the spotlights when she was on stage. After the fifth streetlight, just before they entered the sphere of its smoulder, Michael took Rose’s hand and veered off into the scrub. He led her reticently, saying, ‘Careful now, careful,’ until they were far enough into the undergrowth to use his phone screen as a torch without them being seen.

  When Michael got home he noticed his fingernails were caked with black dirt. He rubbed his grubby hands on his jeans until they tingled with the friction, but nothing could hide the dirt packed under the nails. He dragged one nail through his teeth and then spat. He was going to need soap and water. He should have gone back to Rose’s to clean himself up.

  He had walked Rose home but had not gone in. Her mother’s car was in the drive. He had given Rose very clear instructions before he left her: get straight into the shower; tell your mum you had dinner at my place; tell her you’re really tired; go to bed; drink lots of water through the night. Michael was winging that last one but he was frightened by the amount of blood there had been and he knew blood loss required fluid replacement. He made her repeat the instructions back to him. Rose had become very quiet on the walk home from the swallowing bush. It was as if something of her had been consumed there too, never to be seen again. He watched her until she opened her front door, then he doubled back and disposed of the towel in the dumpster.

  It wasn’t until Michael was standing at his own front door that he realised he had missed dinner without calling. He pulled his phone from his pocket.

  Three missed calls from home. He’d left it on vibrate.

  His mother was doing the dishes. His father was in front of the television. Michael walked deliberately, briskly, to the bathroom. The door was locked. He heard his father getting up, heard him making his way through the kitchen, heard a brief muffled exchange between his parents, worked the bathroom doorhandle frantically, shouldered the door a bit, palm-slapped it, heard his father behind him – and the door opened.

  ‘Drugs?’ Tim asked, standing before Michael completely naked. Tim reached behind Michael and locked the door. He quickly adjusted the egg timer to allow himself a further two minutes before stepping back into the running shower. The door was thumped once.

  ‘Drugs?’ Tim asked again, slapping the shower curtain closed.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Michael replied, sitting on the toilet lid. It occurred to him this was the second bathroom he’d been in today that made him feel sick.

  ‘Very funny. Bit of advice. Don’t know what you’re into or what’s been happening but you’re drawing a lot of attention from Mein Führer, mein friend.’

  Michael slowly stood and filled his hands with handwash from the pump pack on the edge of the bathroom sink. He massaged it into his skin slowly before turning on the water. The thick, creamy soap blackened with grit and soil before slithering down the drain like a living thing.

  Tim wrenched the shower curtain back and said, ‘Will you turn the fucking tap off while I’m in here?’

  But Michael didn’t. He was leaning on the edge of the sink, water still running, smears of dark dirt dappling the basin. He was crying. Tim stepped out of the shower, water still running, and took Michael by the shoulders. Before he could say anything Michael fell into his brother’s wet chest and sobbed.

  Michael had never been a crier. In a house where self-expression of any kind was disapproved of, crying was an unusual event. Sometimes Michael would see his mother cry and it looked both painful and enjoyable at the same time. When he was very young he had cried when he was hurt or frustrated. His father would take his hand at these times and squeeze it until Michael felt that every bone was being crushed. The grip was always tender to begin with and then Michael would feel his thumb knuckle crack like a popgun. Gradually that crying reflex was trained out of him. Instead he became quietly and unobtrusively self-soothing.

  Now, as he gripped his brother and sobbed, he felt conflicted and guilty. He was even making noise with his crying: big, gulping, howler monkey swigs of air followed by piercing moans that made Tim hold him tighter and say things like, ‘Shhh!’ and ‘They’ll hear you!’ He cried for quite a while. Then he stopped, as suddenly as he’d begun, and dropped to the floor.

  Tim stood over his brother for a few seconds, naked and in shock, before grabbing a couple of towels. He put the first one around Michael’s shoulders and the second around his own waist. They were both startled by thumping on the bathroom door, followed by the egg timer shrieking. Tim quickly turned off the shower.

  ‘What’s going on in there?’ Their father. ‘Someone better answer me.’

  ‘Out in a minute,’ Tim called. Then to Michael, ‘What happened?’

  Michael looked at Tim blankly, a torrent of s
ensation burning under his skin.

  ‘You’re filthy. Is this blood?’ Tim rubbed at the spots on Michael’s sleeve. ‘Is this your blood?’ He began feeling up and down his brother’s arms. ‘Are you hurt? Did someone get hurt?’

  Michael couldn’t answer.

  Tim squatted down and began removing Michael’s shoes and socks. He gingerly coaxed Michael to his feet, pulled his shirt over his head and then began peeling off his jeans. Michael’s knees were caked in dirt, hard with it in places. Michael instinctively placed his hands on Tim’s shoulders in order to step out of each leg. Tim started the shower then and once Michael was under the running water, Tim pulled the shower curtain closed before saying, ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’

  And Michael did. He fixed his eyes on the tile grout, his retinas pulling together the edges of the small diamonds that created the mosaic wall. He stared, unflinching, as he talked, so that his vision swam, and the world threatened to turn inside out. Then he dragged his focus to the showerhead, the taps, his hands held out in front of him as if in supplication, feeling his optic muscles protest as he clicked through changes in depth of field. He talked, finding it harder and harder to re-establish visual acuity. Perhaps he was just tired. It had been a long day. The bathtub beneath him was white and curvaceous as the belly of a whale, the shower curtain rolling towards him like a comber about to fill his nostrils. He could taste it now, the bitter smack of seawater sweeping into his nose and mouth, but it was only his tears again, which baffled him. He talked as if no one were listening, and he couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t believe the rush the relief alone gave him, just to say it out loud. But something else happened as he talked too. All those preceding months of fear began to metastasise until he was shaking with the reality of what he had done. What they had done. He paused, stopped talking for just a moment in order to lean against those small diamonds and breathe. That’s when Tim’s hand appeared around the edge of the shower curtain and turned off the water.