A Small Madness

by Dianne Touchell

  Rose looked at her mother long enough to understand that her gaze would not be returned. So she watched the shadow from the banksia tree outside the window rattle about on the slick linoleum tile beneath her mother’s chair. Sometimes in high wind the tree would rock forward just enough to scrape against the window like Catherine Earnshaw. That’s what Rose imagined anyway. That a ghost would have a lithe touch and sound like nature at the window.

  Violet lived a life that had diminished her to the point of glances. No real eye contact, just a hooded flash of white at whatever confronted her. Rose wondered if self-preservation was at the root of her mother’s need to avoid people’s eyes and the reason she must now have felt so personally affronted by the bold pain she saw in Rose’s. Rose knew that if her mother really looked at her now she would see way beyond the cat’s cradle of carefully woven facade Rose clung to. But she didn’t. Violet studied the hospital blanket and Rose stared at the banksia’s shadow until her eyes felt like fat, furry grapes that could be popped with a blink.

  ‘Mum?’ Rose’s voice quivered a little.

  ‘Had to hear about it from strangers,’ Violet said quietly.

  ‘Mum, I’m scared.’

  ‘Do you know how that makes me look?’

  Rose closed her eyes and listened to the blood in her ears until everything else sounded a long way away. She heard her mother’s voice, registering the slight chirrup returning to her tone as she said, ‘Well, it’s all over now. No one need ever know. We’ll speak to the school. I’m sure there is a contingency in place for students who miss exams due to illness. We’ll say you were admitted to hospital for exhaustion . . . or food poisoning. You don’t have to worry about it. You just get well. Did I tell you your father’s on his way home? He was able to get a flight straightaway. Everyone was so understanding when they heard his daughter was sick in hospital. Don’t you worry about . . .’

  Violet’s voice drifted away down voluminous hospital corridors, winged and optimistic. When Rose opened her eyes, her mother was talking animatedly at the hospital blanket.

  Back at home, on bed rest, iron supplements and cigarettes, Rose grew to understand just how invested her mother was in the exhaustion/food poisoning story. Rather than settle quietly and privately into her daughter’s recovery, Violet proactively disseminated news on the phone regarding the speed with which her daughter’s illness came on, the unfortunate timing of it, the understanding and support provided by the school in the case of someone as high-achieving as Rose falling ill during exams, and the rapidity of Rose’s recovery which was, after all, a testament to her strength and commitment to her future. The church rallied behind Violet and there were even flowers from the youth group leader that Violet placed in Rose’s room with the kind of mawkish flourish usually reserved for new mothers. Rose grew angry at her mother for not recognising the irony; Violet told Rose not to be ungrateful and to finish her dinner.

  Meals were delivered to Rose in bed, on a tray. Her father would occasionally pop his head in the door and ask after ‘his girl’ and tell her she looked much better, and Rose began to wonder whether her father was actually given the same story as the youth group leader. Rose cut a small square out of the corner of her bedroom flyscreen with nail scissors and used the hole to poke her still-smouldering butts out into the garden bed below her window. At night, she dreamed of the fallen leaves beneath catching fire, and the fire spreading and taking the house and her away in tiny flesh-smelling sparks, like living fireworks, while her mother and father and the youth group leader watched and waved from below.

  Michael didn’t visit. Rose wondered if he had been told he couldn’t.

  Liv came and sat on Rose’s bed. She immediately noticed the new mattress. Felt the brittle sigh of a plastic mattress protector as she sank onto it. Smelled the stale cigarette smoke and remnants of cleaning fluid. Heard Violet knock and wait for permission to enter the room before easing the door open with a hesitance that suggested a fear of what she might see or smell. Noticed the carefully staged mood of the recovery and the unspoken expectation to participate in the delusion that Rose was a victim of something far outside her own control.

  ‘In the nineteenth century,’ Liv said, ‘ladies with the Romantic Disease would lie in state in sanatoriums built at high altitude, surrounded by flowers and deferential staff wearing crisp white.’ She looked from side to side. ‘There’s a whiff of that here, Rosie. Do you feel your weakened state has made you more spiritually aware?’

  Rose managed a brief but genuine smile. ‘I don’t feel anything much, really,’ she replied. ‘Relief that it’s over. Have you seen Michael?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Liv said.

  ‘Does he know I’m sick?’

  ‘Don’t know what he knows,’ Liv said. She had seen Michael at school recently when they’d sat the same exam. She hadn’t approached him, even though she’d wanted to. She had looked at him and he had flicked his eyes in her direction several times, but they didn’t speak. Throughout the exam, he had kept leaning down and touching his ankle with a bizarre tic-like repetition. Liv thought he probably had notes in his sock.

  ‘Mum took my phone off me,’ Rose said.

  ‘I know. I called you and she answered.’

  ‘She talked to your mum.’

  ‘I know that, too,’ Liv said. ‘I think that’s the only reason I’m allowed in to see you. She probably thinks it’s safer having me on the inside.’ Liv paused, wondering how to get where she wanted to go. Her mum had told her not to ask. Her mum had told her to mind her own business.

  ‘Rose,’ she began, ‘Rosie, what happened? Where is it?’

  Rose knew that Liv would understand. Rose felt the words, the explanation, the night that felt like a story that had happened to someone else, rise in her like her dream fireworks. But, as always, since the moment in the hospital when her mother had found her too abhorrent to look at, Rose’s craving to spit out the facts was suddenly choked. Instead she felt the foulness of the truth sit in her mouth like a wad of over-chewed gum. So she said, ‘It was a terrible miscarriage, Liv. I didn’t realise what was going on, at first.’ Rose began to cry. ‘It hurt badly, and then it was over, and I flushed it away. I’m so glad you were here for me, and as soon as I’m over this stomach flu, I know I’ll feel better.’ She paused before saying, ‘I know I’ll get better.’

  Liv held Rose’s hand feeling appalled. There was obviously no way to ever get where she wanted to go in this conversation because Rose herself had already been sucked into a survival lie that was impenetrable. Liv leaned forward and kissed Rose on the cheek. ‘I have to go, but I’ll be back tomorrow.’

  ‘I love you, Livvie.’

  ‘I love you too, Rosie.’

  As Liv pulled away and stood up, she noticed Rose’s breasts were leaking.

  During the next week a frail normality returned. The sort of normality based on routine and the embrace of the familiar. There was a tacit understanding that Rose’s exhaustion/food poisoning, once passed, would not be alluded to again. Rose privately sat the exams she had missed by special arrangement with the school, and felt confident and satisfied upon their completion. Rose and Liv were as close as they had ever been, as if the preceding months of non-communication had never occurred. Rose’s father left for work again, leaving his girls behind for another few weeks of agreeable together time. And Rose’s mother joined a book club started by the president of the Ladies Auxiliary at church, the first book selection of which was The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne.

  One thing did not return to normal, however. Rose and Michael still hadn’t spoken to each other since it happened. They somehow, instinctively rather than intentionally, avoided each other. Rose had developed a kind of emotional catatonia that scared Michael. She was always with that Liv and that scared him too. She seemed disturbingly vacant and had developed a shuffle when she walked. Once when Michael was approaching her on the street she had stopped and gazed at him with a tiny but friendly frown, as
if she had been suddenly confronted by someone she knew a long time ago and was having trouble putting a name to the face. Michael had turned and walked away because looking at her left him winded.

  With final exams over, the long wait for scores and search for summer jobs began. They were all on the cusp of applying for their futures, as if the future were an impassable gateway that required all manner of romancing and coercing to allow the next generation through. Michael understood that his future would not simply come to him. The days would not open up, filled with promise and prospect; he must pry open his own life as if it were a tight fist hiding a shiny penny. But, truth told, he had very little fight left in him.

  His father said nothing when Michael stopped accompanying the family to church. At least, he said nothing to Michael. He no longer asked after Michael’s day at the dinner table. He no longer offered to take Michael out for a drive. It was the withholding dance. A sly, punitive conscience-tickle that would usually have motivated Michael to seek out his father’s approval and re-engagement with more vigour. But Michael didn’t. His impetus rusted to a halt in the face of a silent aggression he believed he deserved. His family had been his centre. Without that firmness, his circle was not just.

  Michael heard about the party from Ryan and Sam. Everyone was going. It was the sort of event that Michael would previously have talked to his father about. His father would have dropped him off, and picked him up afterwards. His father would have spoken to the parents of the host, and, if the party was unsupervised, permission to attend would have been denied. Michael told his mother he was going to a movie with friends after dinner because he didn’t want to worry her and he wanted her to have something to tell his father when his father asked her where Michael was. She kissed him on the cheek and told him to have a good time.

  They started drinking in the car. These were the friends he knew, the friends who would never ask what was wrong, who would never suspect his sullen silence to be anything other than the cultivation of maximum velocity drunkenness. Michael sucked down every can handed to him, the tart, the syrupy, the astringent blasts of unknown brews that cleared his sinuses and heated his organs. He was not a drinker; he didn’t even like the taste. But the pounding throb of the car sub in his spine and the mesmeric speed with which things standing still flew past his window, awakened something in Michael already forever altered and needing to be quieted: his conscience. The alcohol smacked his better judgement into silence. It was the first peace he had experienced in months.

  By the time they arrived at the party, the neighbours had already called the police once to complain about the noise and sound of breaking glass. He didn’t know whose house it was. Several cars were parked on the front lawn, one of which had reversed into a concrete birdbath, knocking it over and taking out a tail-light. They made their way to the front door to find it locked: the flyscreen had been pried off and was lying, slightly buckled, on the verandah. One of the decorative leadlight panels in the door was smashed. They followed the sound of music and revelling down the side of the house to the backyard.

  Someone thrust a cup of something into Michael’s hand as he made his way through the crowd. He tripped over a crying girl who was sitting on the ground leaning up against an esky. He was shouldered roughly, and accidentally, by someone who spilled the contents of their plastic cup over his arm. Ryan and Sam had already peeled away from him to complete their own reconnaissance, so Michael found himself alone in the centre of a cacophony of writhing blitheness that was the first thing louder than his own thoughts in days.

  That’s when he saw her: Liv. Leaning up against a tree near the back fence, her fingers hooked into the belt loops of some guy’s jeans. This guy’s hands all over her in a drunken frisk.

  Michael didn’t know why, but he walked straight over to her and said, ‘Is she here?’

  Liv extricated herself from the muddle of limbs encircling her and stared at Michael in disbelief.

  ‘Is who here?’ she said.

  ‘Rose.’

  ‘Hey, buddy,’ the frisker said impatiently. ‘Wait your turn.’

  ‘Of course she’s not here,’ Liv replied. Then, ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘I thought she might be . . . here. With you.’

  ‘We’re busy,’ the frisker said.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ Liv said, pushing him away. She looked down at the cup Michael was drinking from. There was a cigarette butt floating in it. She slapped it out of his hand. The remnants of warm, grimy swill that had once been a beer splashed across the frisker’s shirt.

  He took a step back, arms extended and said, ‘Fucking bitch,’ before shoving Liv against the tree.

  Michael took a swing at the frisker then, but failed to connect and fell facedown onto the grass. The fall seemed to take a long time. He watched the ground coming closer and closer, waited for impact, his throat burning with nausea. He stayed where he landed.

  From his prone position, the undulating lawn looked like a foreign landscape as vast and complicated as any planet. The blades of grass were taller than trees. Michael imagined being a pinhead-sized visitor in a land of giants, ducking and weaving between smooth painted toenails that threatened to crush him. There was one in front of him right now. Slightly chipped polish, a plaited gold toe ring. Then a white knee descended like a moon inches from his eyes and he realised Liv was sitting on the grass next to him.

  ‘We buried it, you know.’

  Liv leaned down closer and placed one cool palm on Michael’s back. It reminded him of her hand on his chest that day in the park.

  ‘What did you say?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘We buried it.’

  Liv drove Michael home. They didn’t wait until the party ended. Those things never had a real ending anyway, just a disinterested winding down once someone got arrested or the number of the unconscious exceeded that of the remaining drinkers.

  As soon as Liv was able to coax Michael into an upright position, she loaded him into her mother’s car and took him back to her place. She was going to take him back to his, but she didn’t know if he’d be able to make it to his front door, let alone find his bedroom quietly to pass out. Rose had told Liv about his parents. It didn’t seem right to allow Michael to be found lying on the front doorstep in the morning covered in his own vomit, even though recent events did cause Liv to pause and consider the justice of leaving him in exactly that position. On the way home she had to stop on the side of the freeway for him to lean out of the car door and be sick.

  Once home she dragged him inside, cursing a blue streak at Rose, him and herself. In the hallway outside her bedroom door, just a few steps from her bed, he slid down the wall like an avalanche – Liv knew there was no way she could halt the momentum of all that dead weight. So she let go, stepped over him, pulled her dress up over her head, and crawled into bed.

  ‘Liv? Livvie!’

  In the morning Liv was woken by the sound of her name being hollered from somewhere else in the house. She sat up, checked her phone for messages, and then responded.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes. You want coffee, baby? Oh, and there’s a boy in the hall.’

  Liv looked over the end of her bed and saw Michael in the exact position she had left him in. He had just begun to stir.

  ‘Yes, please. I know there’s a boy in the hall,’ Liv called back.

  ‘Have you checked it for a pulse?’

  Michael was pulling himself into a sitting position. He leaned back against the hall wall and closed his eyes. Liv’s mum appeared then. She stepped over Michael’s legs, sat on the edge of Liv’s bed and handed her daughter a cup of coffee.

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  ‘So,’ her mum said, looking directly at Michael.

  ‘Hello. I’m really sorry about this. I don’t know ... ’ Michael’s tongue felt like a dead rodent. There was a blacksmith pounding red-hot metal behind his eyes. His jeans were damp with night sweat and his shirt sported a large scab of dry vom
it from mid-chest to waist.

  Liv’s mother stood before saying, ‘I’ll get you something.’ She stepped over his legs and strode back up the hall.

  Liv sipped her coffee and watched Michael shifting uncomfortably on the floor.

  He said, ‘I think I’m hung-over.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘No. I didn’t drink last night.’ Liv put her coffee down and propped some pillows against the wall at the end of her bed. Then she snapped her fingers and pointed to the nest she had created. ‘Take your shirt off, then get up here.’

  Michael did as he was told. He pulled his shirt up over his head then wiped his face with the only clean bit he could find. He held it in front of him, looking questioningly at Liv, who pointed to a plastic-lined wicker wastebasket next to a one-eyed rocking horse. Michael dropped his shirt in and then crawled on hands and knees across the bed until he was sitting against the pillows. The comfort was exhilarating. Liv’s mum walked back into the room with a cup of coffee in one hand and a water bottle in the other. She handed them to Michael and walked out.

  ‘Do you remember last night?’ Liv asked.

  Michael took a swig of water, and then began sipping the coffee. He said, ‘Bits and pieces. I’m in a lot of trouble.’

  ‘I was going to take you back to yours, but this seemed easier. I’m not even a hundred per cent sure which house on that street is yours. I might have left you on someone else’s front doormat.’

  ‘No, I . . .’ Michael paused. He was lost. And for just a moment he enjoyed the sensation of the bereft vanishing of any rational thought or feeling.

  Liv’s mum stuck her head around the corner of the doorframe then and dropped some clothes on top of the rocking horse saddle, saying to Michael, ‘Clean shirt, pants. Have a shower if you like. I have to go.’ Then to Liv, ‘Take care, baby girl.’ Liv’s mum scanned the room briefly, then quickly picked up the wicker wastebasket and took it with her.