Behind

by Nicole Trope

  ‘Get a degree and the world will be your oyster,’ his father, Bernard, always said, but everyone has a degree now. Every year a whole new generation of graduates becomes his competition. He is losing. He can feel he is losing. A degree isn’t enough, not nearly enough. He should have kept taking courses, kept learning. The business software industry moves too fast, and now the amateurs are better than the professionals. Teenagers have thousands of followers on Instagram just from posting random pictures. His company is struggling to garner any kind of attention for their product. He feels like they are shouting into the wind. No one can hear them.

  ‘I thought you’d be sleeping,’ he says when he answers the phone.

  ‘Ben, someone’s in the house,’ she whispers desperately.

  ‘Oh my God, what?’ he asks. His heart rate immediately ramps up, the blood pounds in his temples. ‘Rachel, are you sure?’ He stands up straight, feels his shoulders stiffen. He has to protect her but he is forty or fifty minutes away from home.

  ‘I’m certain,’ she says. ‘I was in bed and I heard someone moving around downstairs. I’m scared. Please come home.’

  He can hear the terror in her voice and he searches frantically on his desk for his keys. ‘I’m coming, Rachel. Hang up and call the police. Call the police now.’

  ‘Okay,’ she replies and he can hear she’s crying.

  ‘Rachel, my love, just calm down and call the police. Where’s Beth?’ Why hadn’t she already called them?

  ‘I’m in her room with the door locked.’

  ‘Good, good, I’m on my way. Call them now, call the police.’

  ‘Okay, okay I will,’ she sniffs. He hears her take a deep breath, feels a tinge of satisfaction that he is able to calm her down. He likes to think that only he can do that. That’s why she chose him. Of all the men she could have had, she chose him.

  He leaves the office at a run, gallops down four flights of stairs before realising his stupidity, instead taking the lift the last twelve flights down to the parking garage. His car is the only one there, and as he races towards it, he imagines someone jumping out from behind a pillar. Anything is possible. Someone is in the house. Someone is in their home. Their new home where the dining room stands empty because they cannot yet afford the large table that will be needed to fill it. It’s supposed to be their forever home, but now it has been invaded. Everywhere feels like a threat.

  He is grateful for the late hour and light traffic. He puts his foot down, risking a ticket but hoping for a police car behind him as well. He will lead them straight to his house. He won’t stop. He imagines them behind him, feels the relief that seeing their flashing red and blue lights would give him now. Has she called the police? Are they okay? Should he call her again? What if her mobile ringing gives her away to whoever is there? Could an intruder get through the heavy, solid door of Beth’s room?

  ‘Idiot!’ he yells at himself. ‘You bloody idiot!’

  He shouldn’t have worked late again, shouldn’t have left his wife and child in a new house where a security system has yet to be installed. But the huge mortgage keeps him behind his desk every night, looking for ways to ramp up sales so he is not one of the marketing executives sent on their way as the company struggles to maintain a foothold in the saturated market.

  He races up to a red BMW, changes lanes and changes back again to get in front of it. In his rear-view mirror, he sees the driver shouting and, he is sure, swearing at him.

  Ben wishes this… What would you call it – a blip? Maybe but it feels like more than just a blip. It feels like a steady slide in the wrong direction. Whatever it is, he wishes it would have happened before they started building the house – long before. He would have made many different choices. They would have made many different choices, and right now Rachel and Beth would be safely tucked up in their small apartment, where help was only a raised voice away.

  Rachel was, up until a few weeks ago, working part-time at a primary school, but it was an hour away from their new home, and just as she started looking for something closer to where they now lived, she was given the devastating news about her mother. He is bearing the financial burden now, and on days like today, it feels very heavy.

  ‘I don’t need such a big house,’ Rachel said but he wanted, needed, to give her everything. He loves seeing her happy, seeing her smile and laugh, loves those moments when the slight sadness in her eyes disappears briefly. He still can’t let go of the feeling that she is too good for him, too beautiful. If he gives her everything, she will never want to leave.

  And it was time for a house, for a proper home. He is thirty-five already. His father had two children and a house in the suburbs by the time he was twenty-five.

  ‘It’s a different time,’ his mother, Audrey, kept telling him. ‘It’s not easy to save enough for a deposit these days.’

  ‘Don’t stop him from trying to have it all,’ his father said. ‘If you can push yourself a little financially now, it will all be worth it in the long run.’

  Bernard has always been big on his children pushing themselves. All through their school careers, if they took up a sport or an instrument, they had to display an almost unnatural dedication to that hobby or his father stopped paying for lessons. Ben’s sister Louise played netball and piano and violin. She practised all three as though her life depended on it. Ben bounced around from soccer to tennis to guitar to karate and finally settled on nothing, much to his father’s disapproval.

  Every day he got up and felt the need to prove that he could do this whole husband, father, provider thing as well as his own dad had done. But now everything feels like it’s changed. The optimism he had a few months ago is dissipating into thin air. He’s started chewing his nails again, a habit he thought he’d kicked long ago.

  He changes lanes once more, sliding in front of one car and then switching back again. He wonders how the person got in. Is it a man? It must be a man. What if there’s more than one? His stomach twists. How will she defend herself against more than one of them? Are they there to steal something or do they have a more sinister intent? Who would want Rachel’s two-year-old computer and their five-year-old television anyway? Is it a drug addict looking for some quick cash? If so, he hopes they’ve found Rachel’s purse and left already. But he sees hands all over his wife and daughter, a man’s hands, and he wants to vomit. He pushes his foot down further. If he gets caught now, he will lose his licence. So be it.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he mutters as he turns into a single-lane road and pulls up behind a slow-moving truck. He glances at the road ahead and, finding it empty, pulls out onto the wrong side, accelerating past the vehicle and pulling back into his lane. The truck behind him honks at his stupidity. It was a dangerous decision but he had no other choice. Are the police there yet? Do they even know how to find the address? It’s a new housing estate and the blocks on either side of theirs have yet to be developed. The only indication that anyone will ever live next door to them is a giant pile of building materials on one of the plots of land. But so far, no one has even arrived to begin the project.

  There are empty lots all over the estate, all sold but waiting for their owners to begin building. Their house is one of only a handful occupied.

  ‘Maybe we should rent for a while longer, just until more people are done building. It’s going to be really noisy during the day and kind of creepy at night,’ Rachel said when their house was ready to move into.

  ‘We can’t really afford to keep paying rent and the mortgage, babe.’

  And now look what’s happened – someone has taken advantage of their deathly quiet street to break in.

  He races up to an amber light that turns red as he gets there but he keeps going, keeps pushing his foot down on the accelerator.

  A fifty-minute journey, heart hammering the whole way, takes him twenty-five minutes with no police in sight.

  By the time he turns into his street, he is dripping with sweat, his mouth dry with fe
ar. When he sees the lights of the police car, he feels again like he might throw up. He draws up to the house, screeches to a stop and leaves his car door hanging open as he sprints inside to his family.

  3

  Little Bird

  I creep quietly on tippy-toes into the bedroom where she is curled up in her bed. ‘Mummy,’ I whisper but she doesn’t answer. I go right up to her, right up to her ear, and whisper again. ‘Mummy.’ She opens her eyes. ‘Morning, sweetheart,’ she whispers back. She is lying all curled up underneath her blankets with her legs against her tummy in her lacy white pyjama dress. I like to sleep like that too. Her room is still dark because she hasn’t gotten out of bed to pull back the heavy grey curtains and let the sunshine inside. That’s what she says whenever she opens the curtains: ‘Time to let the sunshine in.’ Whenever she says it, I like to imagine Mr Sunshine with his friendly smile, knocking on the window: ‘Hello, hello. Can I come in?’ I like it when she lets the light in, when she lets the happiness in from outside, because sometimes there’s not enough happy inside our house. I scrunch my toes on her carpet. It’s thick and Mummy told me its colour is dove grey. I like this carpet. It’s soft, like feathers.

  ‘I’m hungry, Mummy,’ I say because I can feel my tummy talking to me. I have to wait until the digital clock in my room says 7 a.m. Sometimes I get hungry when there is a 6 on the clock but I always wait. That’s a rule. There are lots of rules in our house. Lots and lots.

  ‘Daddy is going to get you some breakfast as soon as he’s out of the shower, okay? Just go down to the kitchen and wait. He’ll be there soon.’

  She stretches her legs out and opens her arms and I lean forward and put my head on her chest. I can hear her heartbeat going boom, boom inside her and I can smell the sweet flower smell of her skin. I wish I could climb into bed and snuggle down next to her but I’m too big to do that now. I don’t know why I’m too big but Daddy said so and that means it must be true.

  ‘Hello, Little Bird,’ says Daddy, dragging wispy steam into the bedroom. He has a blue towel wrapped around his waist and I can see the hair on his chest, all curly and wet. He is big, bigger than me and bigger than Mummy, with lots of reddish-brown hair and big brown eyes. Mummy has golden-brown hair like mine. Hers is straight and soft but mine is curly. Mummy has green eyes like me too.

  ‘Remember, you’re too big to get into bed with Mummy now,’ he says. He says it softly but I can hear that he is cross with me because I have my head on her chest.

  I’m too big for lots of things now. When I was smaller, Daddy used to lift me high up onto his shoulders and then I would be bigger than everyone, but he doesn’t do that anymore. He used to let me lie next to Mummy in the big bed and sit on his lap, but now everything has to stop because ‘it’s time she grew up’. I heard him tell her that last night. Mummy said I was too young to walk to school alone but Daddy says it’s time so it must be time. Mummy said, ‘I don’t think so, Len. I’m not comfortable with it.’ And Daddy said… He didn’t say anything but now Mummy also thinks I can walk to school on my own. Daddy likes her to think the same as him. He likes everyone to think the same as him – me and Mummy and Kevin. We all think the same because Daddy is clever and big and strong. He goes to work in a high-up-to-the-sky office where he sells stuff called insurance. He makes money for our family so we can eat and have toys and clothes. He knows something called statistics about everything. He knows about how many car crashes there are and how many fires there are and how old people are when they die. He knows everything so he must be right about me walking to school.

  School is not so far away but I’m scared of the big growly dog at number fifteen who likes to show me his teeth and tries to jump over the gate to get me. I want to tell Daddy about the big growly dog but he doesn’t like to hear about anyone being scared. ‘Man up,’ he says all the time. But I don’t know how to do that. He used to just say it to Kevin but now he says it to me as well. Daddy said to Mummy last night that I had been ‘indulged’. I don’t know what that means but I think it’s bad so I’ll try not to be indulged anymore.

  ‘Ready for your first day of walking to school, Little Bird?’ he asks.

  ‘Tweet, tweet,’ I say and then Daddy smiles.

  ‘Leave Mummy now. I’ll be down soon.’

  I want to stay with her, but I know Daddy likes me to listen so I stand up and then I touch Mummy’s cheek with my eyelash. An Eskimo kiss, because an Eskimo kiss is gentle and soft and I know I need to be gentle with Mummy.

  Even though the curtains are closed, I can still see the flower, all red and purple, on her cheek. It’s not a nice flower. It’s a hurting flower. I don’t want to hurt her anymore. Last night when I went to bed, she didn’t have a flower, but now she does. They come in the night a lot, especially if she says to Daddy, ‘I don’t think so, Len.’

  ‘Off you go now, Little Bird,’ he says and I run downstairs to wait.

  I’m seven years old and I can get my own cereal but Daddy likes to do it for me. I think if I’m old enough to walk to school, then I’m old enough to get breakfast by myself, but Daddy makes the rules in this house. He says I’ll make a mess and he doesn’t like mess. He doesn’t like mess or noise. He doesn’t like shouting or crying. He likes me to smile and be his Little Bird.

  ‘Tweet, tweet,’ I sing as I wait for him and I try not to think of the big growly dog. ‘Tweet, tweet.’

  4

  Kevin

  I sit up straight in the chair, my legs wide and my hands on my knees, as she pulls out her notebook, taking out her pen and staring at me, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She’s going to fix me. I can see she thinks she’s going to fix me. I roam my eyes up and down her body, starting with her short black hair and ending with her feet, stuffed into blue ballet flats that look a size too small. I prefer my women to be a little more delicate, a touch more graceful. The best way I can describe Dr Amanda Sharma is square. She has broad shoulders and big hips and a strong jaw. I wonder if she has a husband or wife at home who sometimes says, ‘Maybe don’t take a second piece of cake, Amanda.’

  I wonder if, when her partner says that, she meekly removes her hand from the plate or if she tells him or her to get stuffed. I wonder if she plays some strange sport for a woman, like rugby. I see her huffing across a field, charging into her opponent. In just a minute I have invented a whole life for Dr Amanda Sharma and I can almost hear her saying to her partner, ‘I had a really difficult patient today, scary-looking and not inclined to accept help.’ I want to tell her that I used to be a lot scarier. Age has wearied me.

  But I could still leap out of my chair and beat Dr Sharma to a pulp. The large nurse standing outside the slightly open office door would stop me, of course, but I could get in a few good blows.

  She’s quiet while I look at her, giving me all the time I need. I return my gaze to her face, expecting her to at least be a little flushed. Most women find this level of scrutiny alarming but Dr Sharma doesn’t even look mildly concerned. She is staring at me, her nearly black eyes fixed on my face. I lean forward and enjoy the way she moves subtly in her chair, as though trying to increase the distance between us.

  ‘So,’ says Dr Sharma when she decides she has let my silence go on for long enough. I’m surprised at the high, girlish voice that comes out of her. ‘Do you want to talk about why you’re here?’

  I laugh, and I instantly dismiss Dr Sharma as a joke. Her approach is an insult to my intelligence.

  But I’m here for twenty-one days whether I like it or not. Even an overpriced lawyer could not get me released any earlier. This is an involuntary admittance to a public hospital. There is a smell here, of antiseptic and desperation and fear. There is also a beaten-down exhaustion about the staff, as though they have little hope or expectation that anyone in here will get better.

  This is not, as the saying goes, my first merry-go-round. The goal I have right now is to serve out whatever sentence the courts hand me in this hospital, regardless of h
ow hideous it is. Because they will be handing me a sentence. Too many people watched what I did. Too many people will tell the same story. And I’ve been to prison before. I show a ‘pattern of behaviour’. But I’m not going back. I would rather be declared insane so I can spend however long they sentence me to in here, dabbling with paint and attending group therapy.

  I need to prove to Dr Sharma that this is where I belong. Here is better than prison. In here, the system, the doctors and the nurses are all easier to manipulate than the bunch of sadists who run the prisons. I’m not going back. Been there, done that – got the blood-spattered T-shirt. The first day I went out into the yard for some sunshine and exercise I could literally feel every single other prisoner eyeing me up and simultaneously plotting to beat the crap out of me just in case I thought my size was going to keep me safe. After the first week I had four broken ribs. After the second I had a broken arm. After the third I put another prisoner, a man named Malik, in the hospital and then everyone left me alone. But I was a lot younger then.

  This is the third time I have been involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital in the last twenty years. The first time it happened, when I came out of my drug-induced haze, I actually thought it might help. I had never been on a public psychiatric ward before. I had already had two stays in a luxurious private hospital set amongst lush gardens where the fees exceeded $5,000 a week. Wind chimes clinked and water fountains bubbled wherever I walked. I was there to manage my anger issues. I don’t have issues with my anger but society sees things differently. The expensive private hospitals didn’t work and the heinous public hospitals didn’t work either. I still have ‘issues’ and I may have just overstepped a little too far this time.