by Nicole Trope
Kevin is afraid of Daddy and his slaps. Daddy doesn’t slap me. I am his Little Bird and you can’t slap a Little Bird. I think. I think you can’t slap a Little Bird but I don’t know.
‘Just you wait,’ Kevin says to me when I drop food on the floor or spill something or take too long in the bathroom. ‘Just you wait until you’re big enough and then you’ll see.’
I close my eyes and wish for Andy’s mum to drive faster and faster.
‘Thank you for the lift,’ I say when we get home. I get out of the car quickly. I need to see how Mummy is.
I ring the bell and wait for her to open the door. Andy’s mum waits in her car watching, watching, watching. The door opens and Mummy doesn’t come outside, just sticks her arm out and waves and Andy’s mum drives away. Inside the curtains are all closed and the house is dark and so, so hot.
‘I’ll put the air conditioner on,’ she says. ‘How was your day?’
She cuts up an apple and puts a spoon of peanut butter on a plate for me. I tell her about Andy shouting in class and Mr Stanley making him sit on the ‘have a rest’ chair and about Maisie and me skipping ten times together before the rope got tangled and about my new reader with a little black-and-white dog on the cover.
Mummy nods and smiles and smiles but I can see the smile hurts her face where her flower is growing.
‘Is your head feeling better?’ I ask and she nods.
‘Much better, love. Why don’t you get your homework out now? We can do your spelling words together while I get dinner ready.’
I sit at the kitchen table and Mummy and I sing the spelling words together. She makes roast chicken with a golden, crispy skin and crunchy potatoes because that’s Daddy’s favourite. She makes broccoli as well but she covers it in cheese that goes all bubbly in the oven. Roast chicken is my favourite too. But I think Kevin doesn’t have a favourite food. He eats everything. He even likes Daddy’s yucky food. He just sits down and eats and eats until his plate is empty and then he says, ‘May I be excused?’ Daddy likes us to say, ‘May I be excused?’ Even Mummy has to say it if she wants to go away from the table before Daddy is finished eating.
Kevin comes home later when the sun is nearly going to bed.
‘Did you have a good day at school?’ Mummy asks him and he shrugs his shoulders. Then he looks at her. ‘What happened to your face?’ he asks and Mummy doesn’t say anything because he knows about her sore heads but he still likes to ask her and then he shakes his head like he’s cross with her and he goes to his room.
She makes sure the kitchen is clean and sparkling before Daddy gets home and she gives me another snack because Daddy says we must all wait for ages and eat dinner together because we are a family but I get hungry.
I have my bath before Daddy comes home so I am clean and sparkling just like the kitchen, and Daddy brings a big bunch of flowers because he is sorry that Mummy’s head is sore. It’s so big that Mummy has to put it in her biggest blue glass vase. The flowers are yellow and purple and they match the yellowy purple flower on her face. I open my mouth to tell her about the matching but then I don’t say anything. Mummy doesn’t like to talk about her hurting flowers.
We all sit down as a family and everyone gets to talk about their day.
‘And what did you do with all your free time?’ Daddy asks Mummy.
‘I cleaned out the linen cupboard,’ she says softly and Daddy nods because he likes things to be clean and sparkling.
After dinner Mummy reads me a chapter from a book about a pig named Wilbur and a spider named Charlotte, and I want to cry when the farmer wants to hurt Wilbur but then I am happy when Charlotte makes words in her web that say Wilbur is ‘some pig’. When two chapters of the book are finished, Mummy cuddles up to me while I fall asleep. I close my eyes and pretend I am already dreaming when I hear her start to cry. I feel some of her tears splash onto my pillow near my face so I know she is crying a lot but I don’t open my eyes because I know that she wants me to be asleep if she’s crying. She doesn’t like me to hear her crying.
I think her head is still really sore and I don’t think Daddy’s yellowy purple flowers made it feel any better. Not at all.
8
Kevin
The food in hospital is revolting and I find myself longing for the nutritionally balanced meals of the private sector prepared by chefs. But I remind myself that this is better than prison. I look down at my plate of colourless food and think mildly about flinging the tray against the wall and then I force myself to remember where I am. I can eat bland food easily enough, but looking down at my dry piece of chicken and overcooked broccoli, I feel slightly sick.
I take a deep breath and remember that I can eat anything if I have to, and I need to maintain control so there will be no flinging of trays. I mostly manage to keep my anger in check. It may not seem like it to someone viewing my life from the outside, but mostly it is in check. It helps sometimes to visualise my anger, to see it as a simmering black sludge that pools at my feet. When it’s out of control, when I cannot stop myself from doing the kinds of things that get me shoved into a hospital or thrown in prison, I imagine that it’s because I have allowed the sludge to bubble up from my feet and take over my body. Sometimes I catch it just as the dark sludge starts to rise and I can imagine that I’m holding a giant bucketful of cold water. The water thins the sludge, settles it down. I can’t remember which psychiatrist taught me that visualisation technique – probably the first one I went to see. Dr Gorman had a bushy grey beard and hairy nostrils. I spent a lot of time looking at his nostrils. I couldn’t believe that anyone would allow themselves to walk around like that. He had a picture on his desk of a woman and two children so presumably he was married and his wife could have said something to him.
Dr Gorman’s method only works to a point, obviously, so here I am again.
Dr Sharma wants me to write in a journal. Every psychiatrist I have ever met wants me to detail my thoughts and feelings and experiences in a journal as though that’s the answer to everything. Feeling suicidal? Write in your journal. Want to kill someone? Write in your journal. Hideously damaged by the psychopath who raised you? Well, of course, write in your journal.
Each time I leave the hospital I leave with a collection of journals. I am a prolific writer. It’s the most useless activity I know of and that includes the ridiculous arts and crafts I’m always expected to take part in. Basket weaving has an almost soporific effect on me. As soon as I get my hands on the thin strips of bamboo, I want to fall asleep.
Lunchtime in a psychiatric hospital is the worst time for food. You can’t really screw up cereal and toast, and dinners, for some reason, tend to be okay, but lunch is always hideous. It’s usually some strange mix of leftovers from dinner the night before.
I stare down at my plate and wonder whether I should write an entire journal detailing the reason that so many patients in hospitals are angry and aggressive is not their mental issues but rather the awful food. I chuckle to myself as I eat the lot, swallowing every bland, mushy mouthful. At least there is an apple on my tray as well. You can’t mess up an apple although I wouldn’t put it past the Lyndon Public Hospital to try.
I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t decided that whisky was probably the best way to drown out the voices in my head.
‘You’re a real disappointment of a human being.’
‘Your behaviour is the reason you’re alone.’
‘It is impossible for people to love you.’
‘What is wrong with you?’
‘You make me sick.’
‘You’re pathetic.’
‘You have completely failed.’
‘No wonder every woman eventually leaves you. How could anyone tolerate a life with you?’
You have to hand it to my father – he doesn’t need to say something more than once for it to become embedded in my brain. He doesn’t need to be here for the words to repeat themselves on a loop. I imagine he wouldn’t even need to
be alive – I would still hear his disappointment over and over again. I savour the idea of him being dead for a moment, swallow it with a mouthful of broccoli mush.
‘Why do you keep going home?’ my one and only friend asked me the last time I returned from yet another sojourn at a mental facility. ‘You’re too old to keep going back. You can live by yourself.’
I didn’t know how to answer. I have tried to figure it out as the years go by, and the nearest I can come to explaining it is that I’m still tethered by the chain he has always held me by. I imagine the chain being linked to an ankle bracelet, and if I try to leave him, it cuts into my skin and I can’t function because of the pain. He is all I have. I don’t want to have no one. I don’t admit this to anyone because it makes me feel pathetic.
He’s right anyway. I am a complete failure. He is a success. He was and is a very productive member of society. He was the smartest person in his firm, the guy with the best-looking wife and the man with the biggest, neatest, most impressive house. My father did everything right. But when he closed the front door, locked it behind him and looked around at his perfect life, the rage he’d been concealing all day had to go somewhere. He doesn’t need therapy, though. So I’m in here and he’s in sustained denial. He doesn’t have an issue with my rage. He has an issue with my inability to hide it from the world at large.
I should have just taken that bottle of whisky back to my small, square motel room where free Wi-Fi was the biggest drawcard they felt they had. But I like people-watching. I shouldn’t really have enough money to go to bars but my father is kind enough to supply me with supplemental income.
‘You could have been anything. Your IQ is in the genius range. You could have been anything and yet you’ve chosen alcohol and failure.’
Poor Dad. Things have definitely not worked out the way he hoped. He had a plan for perfection. The perfect house, the perfect kids and the perfect wife. He had an idea of this Christmas card, picture-perfect family, all smiling widely in matching red sweaters.
The trouble is, we live in Australia. It’s too hot around Christmastime to wear sweaters. You have to wear T-shirts and T-shirts don’t hide bruises very well.
The trouble is, his wife and children hate him.
The trouble is, you can’t beat perfection into someone.
Although he tried, he really tried.
Poor Dad. We were all just a whole lot of trouble for him. And yet he keeps giving me money. I suppose he has no one else to give it to. He does little else with his life now except tidy the house, over and over again, moving things one inch to the left and one inch to the right, making sure there is no dust anywhere. Obviously, he should be in here right along with me but he’s old now, not really capable of hurting anyone, at least I don’t think so. He spent years doing that. Now he just cleans.
I chew up the last bite of my apple and look around at the other patients. So many of them are staring at nothing. Everyone is doped up on something for their depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, general not fitting into society illness. I am also doped up – according to my drug regimen at least. I stare and look vacant when I can and I am amassing quite a collection of pills behind the toilet in my room. We have to clean our own bathrooms. It gives us purpose apparently. I think that’s something Dr Sharma decided on.
It suits me. I know how to make things clean and sparkling as my father used to say.
I’m still hungry but I won’t go up for more food. I can feel I’m gaining weight. It’s all the white bread and processed crap they feed us. I don’t want to be overweight and unfit because I have a plan to leave soon.
If I can just convince Dr Sharma I’m normal enough to be released but too sick to go to prison, I may have a small window while the courts wait to decide what to do with me. My theory is this: I am going to be charged for what I did. I am going to land up in prison or in this hospital for years. And if that’s the case, then I’m going to make sure I’ve dealt with the reasons for my rage. It doesn’t matter what I do now – I’m screwed – so I’m going to do what I’ve wanted to do for years.
It’s my intention to get myself some justice. After that I would like to simply disappear but I understand that’s probably an unlikely outcome. I’ll get caught and that’s fine, but before I do, I have a plan. It’s not exactly a fully formulated plan but it’s a plan of sorts. In truth, the idea has been brewing for years.
It started when I was only seven years old so I’ve been thinking about it for decades.
I look around the dining room, measuring myself against the nurses. There are no security guards here, even though this hospital does hold violent offenders, but rather just a collection of nurses and orderlies who look like they have been trained to kill you.
I’m big but not as big as nurse Bobby, who is at least six foot six and looks like he could lift me off the ground with one of his heavily tattooed hands. He seems to be here every day. If he wasn’t, I believe I would refuse to deal with all the bullshit therapy sessions and art classes and journal writing crap I am dealing with. I would just waltz right out of here. But Bobby seems to be keeping a special eye on me. I look over at him. He catches my eye and folds his arms, pushing his shoulders back and planting his legs apart. I shake my head and smile.
‘I’m not going to cause any trouble,’ I would like to tell him but that’s not really the truth. Not at all. Once I leave here, it is my intention to be nothing but trouble.
After lunch I am given fifteen minutes to make my one phone call. I don’t have anyone to call. I don’t have anyone I should call and yet I dial my home number anyway. I really can’t help myself.
I listen while a robotic voice asks my father if he will accept the charges. He hesitates before he says yes. He knows I’m listening. When I stayed at the private hospital, I was allowed to phone him as often as I liked, within reason. I was stopped from making calls after he complained that, one day, I had called him and hung up twenty times. ‘It was a joke,’ I explained to the head psychiatrist, whose name I’ve forgotten. But my father didn’t think it was funny. He never finds anything funny.
‘I’ll accept the call,’ he says. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine, sir. How about you?’
‘I am, once again, speaking to my son while he is locked away. I simply cannot believe we are doing this again, that you are doing this again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I mumble, and the instant the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. Yet I can’t help saying them. They were the words of my childhood. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ I said it so many times, despite all indications that apologising didn’t work. I still said it again in the hope that somehow, some way, this time would be different. As the words leave my mouth for the millionth time now, I feel something tiny stirring inside me. I realise that some small part of me is still hoping that it will help.
‘Don’t be sorry. Develop some consistent discipline about your life. Grow up. You’re forty-one years old. Who lives like this at forty-one? By the time I was your age I was head of the actuarial division at my company. I had this house and a family. What do you have? You have nothing.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I say again and I gently hang up the phone. I can feel the sludge bubbling up from my feet. I make my way to my room, skirting around other patients, knowing that if even one of them touches me or looks at me wrong, I might kill them.
Sorry, sir. Sorry, sir. Sorry, sir.
He likes it when I apologise, when he’s reduced me to a child again. It reminds him he’s still in control of something and someone.
Every time I find myself in hospital or in prison, I promise myself that this time when I leave, I will take that control from him. I know that every time I return home, I simply hand it over again but this time… this time is going to be different. I know it. I can feel it. This time it’s going to be very different.
9
Rachel
As she pulls into the park
ing lot she goes over the list in her head. There’s still so much unpacking to do and she knows that she needs to stock up on fruit and vegetables. Her list is comforting. It’s filled with practical things she can achieve, and as long as she’s going over it again and again, she’s not thinking about last night and about the sinister little gift that was left for her. She hasn’t thought about him. She hasn’t said his name but she has summoned the monster anyway.
She had tried to look for him once, when the whole world could be found on the internet. Curiosity and fear had driven her fingers and she had typed his name into the search bar and taken a deep breath, ready to push enter. But then her hand had begun to shake, her heart to pound. Would searching for him somehow summon him? Would she bring the monster back into her life if she acknowledged his existence? She had deleted everything and closed down her computer.
‘I need apples,’ she says aloud, pushing away everything else, ‘and pears and oranges. I need to find my slow cooker so I can make some stews to have for dinner.’ There are still so many boxes to open. She has no idea how they had so much stuff in their small flat.
It was not a good time to move, not now, but as Ben pointed out, how could they have known? The movers had been booked for a month and they’d given notice on their apartment. The landlord expected them out by a certain date and had already rented the place to another couple. They had no choice but to go ahead.
‘It will be fine,’ said Ben. ‘Everything will just work, don’t worry.’ She would like to throw those words back at him now but she understands that would be unfair. How could he have known?