Behind

by Nicole Trope

  ‘I’ll get him some professional help,’ he said, standing up. ‘You’re obviously incapable of dealing with anything beyond this silliness.’ He gestured around the room. Ingrid had blonde hair and freckles and I couldn’t help laughing when her face turned beetroot-red. My father put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Nothing to laugh at here, son.’ When I took off my shirt later, I had his fingerprints on my back.

  I think about the house question because I can’t stop an image of it from appearing in my mind. It’s meant to be an easy leading question that takes you back to childhood in a non- confrontational way. The idea is that I describe the physical characteristics of the home I had when I was a child and that leads me into a discussion about what my childhood was like and who hurt me, etc. It’s boring but I don’t want to be regarded as a recalcitrant patient. They tend to start upping your meds then or they make sure to watch you swallow them because surely if you were taking all your meds you would be behaving. Surely.

  ‘I lived in a very nice suburb,’ I say.

  She doesn’t say anything, just leans forward and furrows her brows. I’ve never really noticed a woman’s eyebrows before but hers are thick and dark and look like they could use some attention. Even in here I make sure to maintain my appearance. I like to keep things neat and I make sure I do my 200 press-ups and sit-ups every day. I like watching my muscles bunch and move. I like that other patients look at me and back away. Size is power. I know that. I am big enough to not have to worry about anyone threatening me. I’m the threat. I’m who people should be scared of.

  ‘My father was an actuary,’ I say and she writes that down, even though she has all that information already. My file follows me from hospital to hospital, doctor to doctor. It’s pages and pages and pages on a computer. A nurse showed it to me once. She liked me, really liked me. We used to have sex in my room after lights out and I convinced her to show me my file on the staff computer. I read through it quickly enough, catching terms like ‘psychopathic tendencies’, ‘dissociative disorder’, ‘attention deficit disorder’, ‘bipolar disorder’. My psychiatrists have never agreed on exactly what’s wrong with me. I didn’t quite understand her interest in me – I mean, she had obviously read my file – but then I realised she was just like all the other women I have ever slept with. She thought she was going to rescue me. It’s strange that when my father suggests no woman will ever want to be with me, he forgets to account for all the women who think they can rehabilitate a damaged man. I have never had to look too hard for a willing body.

  In my file I read that everyone had a different opinion and a different drug they thought I should try. But I don’t need drugs. I’m pissed off. That all. I’m really pissed off. I ended it with the nurse after she showed me the file. She had nothing left to offer me.

  ‘Your father was an actuary,’ Dr Sharma says. She doesn’t enjoy long pauses.

  ‘He worked in insurance,’ I continue, ‘and he made a reasonable amount of money so we had a nice house in a nice suburb. We didn’t have a pool because my mother really wanted a pool…’ I stop talking, irritated that I have said more than I should have.

  ‘Did your father not like the idea of a pool?’ she asks, quick as a wink.

  I ignore the question as the large bright green expanse of our garden appears in my mind.

  My mother asked for a pool. I loved to swim and so did she – it was one of the few things we shared so naturally my father refused us a pool. He made the money, after all. Physical power and abuse are one thing, but I have no doubt that my father enjoyed the mind games even more. Every year for at least three years, as spring rolled around, my father would start bringing home brochures from pool builders. He would leave them lying around, and if neither me nor my mother said anything, he would begin reading them all the time. He would start asking our opinions about designs and what kinds of tiles would be good to use. He would spend time in the garden staring at the space, holding a brochure as though he was trying to visualise the pool. And every time he did this my mother and I would eventually suspend disbelief and start joining in the conversations. When our excitement reached fever pitch it would all stop, just stop. The brochures would disappear, and if either of us asked about it… I have a rib that never quite healed right – I call it my ‘pool rib’ for obvious reasons. I actually think he smiled as he hit me. I was stupid enough to utter the words, ‘But you promised.’

  ‘Everyone breaks their promises,’ he said as his fist swung towards me. ‘Remember that.’ I learned that lesson but I didn’t learn it from him, surprisingly. I learned it from my mother. When I was twelve, I broke my ankle at school during a game of basketball at lunch. I attempted a jump shot and landed strangely, rolling my ankle and cracking the bone. I was in the school office with my foot up on a chair and a cold pack on my ankle when my mother rushed in. I knew they had called her but I thought she would send my father, and I didn’t expect the strained look of worry on her face. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, smiling when she saw me, relieved, I suppose, that I was sitting up and basically okay except for the ankle.

  ‘You came,’ I said because by then my father was the one mostly dealing with the school over the problematic behaviour I had begun to display.

  ‘Of course I came. I promise I’ll always come for you if you need me.’

  A year later, she broke that promise, and that’s how I really learned that everyone – absolutely everyone – breaks their promises.

  I don’t tell Dr Sharma any of this, continuing my description of the house instead. ‘It was a two-storey house with timber window frames that had to be sanded and cleaned regularly or they swelled in the wet weather. We had someone come in every six months or so. Both my parents loved timber and so there was a lot of timber in the house. We had timber floors – wide boards that were stained a kind of honey-brown – and timber doors in all the rooms, stained to match.’

  ‘And what about your room? What did that look like?’

  ‘A conventional room for a boy, I suppose. When I was younger it was decorated in blue and white with pictures of boats and trains. When I got older my mother took those down and my father bought me these giant framed pictures of cars. I liked cars.’

  ‘What kind of cars?’

  ‘I had a picture of a Lamborghini Veneno in red and a Bugatti Chiron in black and a Ferrari in yellow. I had models of them as well, small die-cast models. They were really expensive.’

  I stop speaking and stare at the wall behind Dr Sharma’s head. I am sitting in a leather armchair and she is sitting opposite me in the same kind of chair, and all that’s between us is a rectangular wooden coffee table with slightly rounded corners because you never know what can be achieved by a lunatic with the broken corner of a wooden coffee table. The room is painted beige, that’s the only way I can describe it – it’s a plain beige square. It’s a neutral room. There is nothing here that can trigger a person or upset anyone.

  I should have loved my room at home. The few times I brought over a friend – one friend in particular, James – he was amazed at the double bed and the beautiful posters gracing the walls. He was also amazed at how neat it was.

  My socks were lined up in colour-coded rows in my drawers, and my shirts were hung by colour in my closet. There were no plates on my floor or mugs under my bed. There was no underwear stuck behind my desk like a typical teenager’s room. Everything was pristine.

  ‘Do not show my mother this room. She will never get off my back,’ he laughed.

  I spent a lot of time over at James’s house. He was one of four brothers and their house was always complete chaos. When I was twelve, I was allowed to start sleeping over at friends’ houses and I took the opportunity to be out of our home whenever I could. I loved sleeping at James’s. His family would sit down to dinner any time between five and eight in the evening when someone decided to cook. James was the youngest so he was never expected to do much, but his parents both worked so his brothers helped around the ho
use. More often than not they would order takeaway for dinner, and then when it arrived the whole family would tuck in as they sat around the kitchen table, and there would be talking and laughing, and the food tasted amazing, and all of them would give each other shit about something or other. In my house the food tasted good when my mother cooked but it was always hard to swallow in the oppressive silence my father’s presence led to. Only the clink and clank of cutlery made any noise at our dinner table unless my father asked a question that required an answer from one of us.

  I remember one night when dinner was over, James’s mother stood up from the table and said, ‘Well, I’m exhausted and I’m going to have a bath. Clean this up, will you?’ and then she just walked out of the kitchen. I couldn’t believe that James’s father allowed her to do that but he did. He smiled and said, ‘Enjoy it,’ and then he stood up, cleaned up a little and then went, ‘I’ll do the rest tomorrow.’ Then he left as well.

  I started tidying up and James said, ‘Just leave it.’ I loved being over at James’s.

  I realise that Dr Sharma is staring at me and that she can see I’ve drifted backwards in time. I really don’t want her to ask me about that so I say, ‘We had a big garden and the whole lawn was this amazing deep green. My mother took care of it with some help from a guy who came every week.’

  ‘So, your mother enjoyed gardening?’

  I shrug my shoulders. I have no idea what my mother did and did not enjoy except for swimming but that’s not much to go on. When I think about her, she’s a cardboard cut-out of a person. She always looked good with her smooth brown hair neatly done and her make-up perfect and her clothes without a stitch out of place. She was very pretty – unless she had a bruise. That made her unattractive and far too real. I hated looking at her when she had a bruise.

  I spent a lot of time not looking at her.

  ‘Our house was always neat, always clean. There was never anything out of place.’

  ‘That must have been hard for your mother,’ she says. ‘Children make a mess. I know because I have two of my own.’

  ‘Oh, how old are they?’ I ask and I smile and I watch Dr Sharma sit up straight and remind herself that she should not be giving away personal information.

  ‘My mother liked to clean,’ I say. She must have liked to clean. It was pretty much all she did. ‘And my father liked things clean.’

  And wrapped up inside those two statements is a whole, terrible, traumatic life.

  I lived by myself for a couple of years when I was in my thirties. I had a job delivering those giant water bottles that they have in offices.

  ‘Beneath your intellect,’ my father said when I told him, and I thought about quitting right then but for some reason I got up and went in the next day. The work was easy, especially for someone my size, and it was difficult to have an issue with anyone since all I had to do was walk into the office, swap the empty water bottle for a full one, collect a signature and go.

  I rented a small one-bedroom apartment an hour away from Sydney in a building built right on the highway. I was as far away from who I had been as a child as I could be. The noise at night was horrendous as giant trucks rumbled up and down the highway, shifting gears, but I quickly got used to it and I did well at my job. I bought cheap furniture and everything else that I needed, and it was my intention to allow the apartment to just be. I wasn’t going to do my washing too regularly or tidy up or worry about dirt or about making everything ‘sparkling clean’. I was going to let the space resemble James’s house, with its chaos and its mess and the feeling of freedom that blew through the space like air. But I couldn’t do it.

  I would come home at night and no matter how tired I was I couldn’t rest until everything was clean and the washing basket was empty. If I tried to leave it, my hands would itch and I would have to drink myself to sleep so I could cope.

  I hated him for that, for turning me into him in every way possible. Maybe if I’d gotten some help and stayed away from him, I would have been okay. But instead the pressure built up and one day I stopped for lunch at a pub, got drunk and smashed the truck owned by the company. Just like that, I was back home in my childhood bedroom.

  ‘Okay,’ says Dr Sharma, ‘what about you? Do you like things clean? And your sister? Did she like things clean?’

  ‘My sister and I liked what my father liked. That was the rule,’ I say. And then I decide on silence for the rest of our session. Sometimes I am worn out by these memories and these truths. Sometimes silence is easier.

  Dr Sharma scribbles down some thoughts as I stare at the wall behind her. I think about the word ‘sister’. She is thirty-five years old now. I imagine she looks just like my mother because even as a child she did. I see her as slight and pretty. But I have no idea who she would be. What she’s like.

  Maybe she’s angry like I am or timid like my mother was. I like to think I don’t care. But for some reason I do. I think my father cares as well. I know for a fact that he knows where she lives, where they both live, although he refuses to tell me. He’s always had access to private investigators because he worked in the insurance game, and if an insurance company doesn’t want to pay out, they need to catch you out. From the time they left, every few months some guy would turn up at our house clutching a buff-coloured folder that he handed over to my dad. He always came at night, kept his head down and his baseball cap pulled low over his face as though he was the one being watched. In winter he even wore a ridiculous trench coat, like he was Inspector Gadget.

  My father hid the envelopes in his study, making sure I never got to see them and even taking them with him when he had to travel for work. When I was around eighteen, I realised that he had never travelled for work before they left, only after. He was finding them, watching them. I believe that’s what he was doing. And as far as I know, he’s still doing it, although, presumably, Inspector Gadget now sends emails.

  I don’t know if he speaks to them or just watches them but I assume that if he did make contact, they would run. If I was them, I would run. They know how to run at least. I don’t know how to do that, am incapable of that. But maybe when justice has been done I will finally, finally be able to leave.

  When I’m home I often find my father in my sister’s room. It still looks exactly the same as it did when she was a child even though the pink curtains have faded with the sun. Her clothes still hang in the closet and her bed is perfectly made, a book with a bookmark next to her bed. He has this thing about lining up her small dolls on the windowsill. He rearranges them by colour or theme or something and then rearranges them again. ‘Maybe I should send them to her?’ he said to me the week before I landed myself in here.

  ‘Maybe you should visit her,’ I said.

  ‘I might just do that.’

  He has never gotten over them leaving. He may not be able to believe how I have messed up my life but he definitely still cannot believe what happened twenty-eight years ago. He still can’t believe it and I think he needs – now that he’s getting older and looking death in the face – to make them pay for messing up his picture-perfect Christmas card family. To really make them pay.

  I want justice for myself, but my father… my father just wants good old-fashioned revenge.

  13

  Rachel

  Rachel takes the money she has withdrawn out of the joint bank account from a pocket in the side of her bag. She wants to hide it before she leaves to see her mother later.

  She counts the money again as though it could have magically grown since she withdrew it but it is still only $300. If she has to run, she will need more, a lot more.

  The second doll was a warning, a threat. He wasn’t just watching her – he was watching Ben as well. She has no idea how he knew that Ben would bring it into the house instead of simply throwing it away. Maybe he didn’t care if she saw this particular doll or not. Maybe there are many more on the way. Twenty-nine. There were twenty-nine dolls. Twenty-eight. It has been twenty-eig
ht years since she and her mother left, ran, fled. She took two of the dolls with her, two of her favourites. She left twenty-seven dolls behind. Will he send her all twenty-seven and then turn up to hurt her?

  He wanted to let her know he was watching. She wants to scream in frustration. Beth has named the second doll Pinky, and when she was in her room this morning, Rachel looked at it properly to make sure she had actually recognised it, that it wasn’t just some dreadful coincidence, but she remembers it well. She had named this one Petal because her hair was the colour of the lush pink petals on a rose bush that grew in the beautiful garden of the house where she lived, where the grass was a vivid green and everything was always neat and tidy.

  How did he get into Ben’s car? She feels invaded, insecure, out of control. Is he watching her right now? Where is he hiding? He is a much older man now. Is he cowed? Stooped? Frail? Or is he still the same psychopath she lived with? She thinks about his big hands and what they did, what they could do, and she shudders.

  If she tells Ben, what would he be able to do? How could Ben stop him? No one could ever stop him, not until she did, until she stopped him and then they ran.

  Beth is waiting for her downstairs. ‘Pinky needs a house,’ she declared when they came home from school. ‘She needs somewhere to live and a bed to sleep in, and Charlotte says that she can bring her dolls over to play with Pinky. Charlotte has eleven troll dolls, Mum. I wish I had eleven troll dolls. They could all live together in the house we make.’

  ‘Oh, Beth, I don’t know… I have so much to do and I have to go back and visit Nana.’