Solo

by Alyssa Brugman

  When I smile, my lip splits. I lick it and taste a drop of blood.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I tell him, with my stake still in his neck. ‘But you can’t come after me any more. Get it? This is over. I’m leaving you here. I’m walking back by myself.’

  He laughs at me. He is laughing hard and his red eyes are bulging.

  ‘What do you want from me? I confessed. I’m repentant. What else is there?’

  He’s rolling on his back, his red face grins.

  ‘You can’t kill your history,’ he says to me. ‘You have to live with it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The things you do. You have to live with them, every day. For ever.’

  I stare at him. ‘But I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry about what happened to you. I didn’t know that it would turn out like that.’

  He stops laughing.

  ‘Can’t we have a truce?’ I ask.

  He shakes his head. ‘You don’t get it. Everything you do you have to carry with you everywhere. It doesn’t go away, no matter how repentant you are. There’s no truce, Mackenzie.’

  ‘Ever?’

  ‘Ever.’

  Then I turn around. Using my stake like a walking stick, I head back into the bush.

  There’s a road. I found it before. I’ll find it again.

  7

  CACTUS FLOWER

  In the clearing, my tent slumps in creases and folds like an old woman’s face. The ludicrous metal tripod is tipped on its side. I can see a few scuffs in the leaf litter, but other than that there is no sign that anything has changed.

  I stand on the rock at the river’s edge and watch the water jostling against the stones. I slip my pyjama top over my head, step out of the bottoms and stand naked on the rock for the moment, letting the sun soak in. A willy wagtail scolds me from a low branch, and the river applauds. I slide into the icy water. The cold numbs my flesh, takes my breath away. The water tugs at my hair and steers my limbs downstream as I breaststroke against the current.

  When my muscles start to fatigue I hold my breath, turn belly-up and let my body drop to the bottom. I open my eyes and see tiny bubbles escape from my nostrils and race each other to the surface.

  The water spills off me as I climb onto the bank. I lie flat on a long, warm boulder. My fingers creep over the rock surface into tiny hollows the size of thimbles. The sun tingles like gentle teeth. A breeze touches my skin where elastic hems would normally be and I feel exposed and hardy at the same time, like a cactus flower.

  When I am dry I duck into the tent and dress in fresh clothes. I inspect the cuts on the bottom of my feet. The serrated edges are grey and swollen from the water. I’m surprised, once I pull on a pair of thick socks and my boots, how little they hurt.

  While the fire crackles and spits into life I take down the tent and roll it back into its olive-coloured bag.

  The camp counsellors will be here soon. I wonder whether they will just toot the horn or come along the track to collect me.

  I feed my pyjamas to the fire and peel back the lid from a can of baked beans. The translucent flames dance and weave through the fabric like lively sprites. The smoke drifts over me, heating my face, while my wet hair soaks the back of my T-shirt. I have never felt so clean.

  I hear the eighteen-seater trundling along the road for a long time before I see it through the trees. I extinguish the fire with a billycan of river water and then I carry my bags along the path to the side of the road.

  8

  20 543 838 PEOPLE

  The counsellors took me straight to the sick bay. Bethany lay on a cot with her face slack and dopey. She smiled when she saw me.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I asked.

  ‘My coping strategies got away from me,’ she murmured.

  I sat down on the side of her bed.

  ‘The drugs they give me make me shuffle when I walk. You know.’ She frowned. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘I know,’ I told her.

  Bethany took a sip of water. I helped her put her glass back on the bedside table.

  ‘I’m going to get you a whistle and a light for attracting attention. You can wear it around your neck for whenever those coping strategies get out of control.’

  She smiled again. ‘Toot, toot,’ she said to me.

  Callum was sitting in the courtyard outside. I could hear guitars and drums in the mess hall – people practising for the jam session after dinner. Most of the others had gone kayaking for the afternoon. A few stretched out on the lawn reading, plucking at the grass and talking.

  ‘How was finger-painting?’ I asked, dropping my bag.

  He shaded his eyes with his hand. ‘I’m definitely cured. You?’

  I smiled. The skin on my face felt tight. ‘Actually, it was better than I expected. I was all ready to slay the demon, but I changed my mind.’

  ‘It’s still out there?’ He mocked a gasp.

  ‘Yes, I suppose he is.’ I scuffed my feet along the bricks.

  He patted the seat next to him. ‘Who’s your demon?’

  I did my breathing, waiting for the anxiety to subside. Callum watched me. After a few moments my heartbeat slowed to normal and I began.

  ‘When I was little I would spend time after school in my Dad’s laboratory, which was in a warehouse on Farley Road, a few streets away from home. There were always customers waiting for their baggies of pills and powders. They looked sick and impatient and mildly embarrassed, as if they were people at a normal chemist’s shop.’

  I pulled a leaf off the eucalypt. ‘My father made amphetamines. He’s in jail. I have spent my whole life surrounded by junkies and drug dealers.’

  ‘We all . . .’ he started.

  ‘Please,’ I interrupted. ‘Don’t stop me now, because I’ve never told anyone this before. This is a bit of a moment.’

  Callum nodded for me to continue.

  ‘Scott, my brother, worked there. When the police raided, he ate all the drugs. He was hiding the evidence. He panicked, and instead of running, he tried to protect my dad. My dad should have tried to save him. He didn’t even try. I thought Scott was my monster, but . . .’

  I rolled the leaf over in my fingers.

  ‘In a secret place I’m glad my dad went to jail, because if he hadn’t I would have tried his pills the way some kids steal smokes from their parents. By now I would be taking them all the time and I would be exactly like Itsy, like my mum. I’m proud that I don’t take drugs. That’s one thing I can feel good about, because I could have been a junkie too. It would have been easy. It would have been easier. You don’t have to deal with anything.’

  I took another breath and plunged on. ‘So he’s the real demon. My dad. And I don’t know how much of the bad stuff I’ve done is because of how I’ve grown up, or because being morally corrupt is in my blood. How can you tell? Does it even matter?’

  Callum looked me in the eye, but he didn’t speak.

  ‘I can be different from them both. That’s what I decided out there.’

  ‘We all have parents in jail,’ he said. ‘Everyone here has.’

  I nodded, because I knew. That was the asterisk.

  The camp counsellors asked us to write about someone who has ‘disappointed’ us. I knew when I heard the passages written by the others that ‘disappointment’ is an outrageous understatement for the way we feel about our incarcerated parents.

  My father stole my mother from me in dolly steps. In his absence she wasted away a minute at a time. The other dealers scuttled all over her like spiders, and she melted away.

  I don’t know if Katie Winter was instructed to invite me to her house by her father, or whether she truly wanted to be my friend, and then I just blurted out what my father did, in front of a police officer. Eight-year-olds shouldn’t have to keep secrets, shouldn’t be made to tell lies. Either way, while I have to live with what happened to Scott and how my family collapsed, I’m choosing to stop feeling guilty about it.

&n
bsp; ‘I’ve showed you mine, now you show me yours,’ I grinned.

  Callum lifted up his shirt on the right-hand side. The whole right side of his torso was a chaos of thick scars. The criss-cross marks on his forearms made sense now. Defensive wounds.

  ‘The shark got you after all?’ I joked. I reached out to touch his ribcage.

  ‘Don’t!’ He jerked away, pulling his shirt down. ‘No, actually, one night my mum handed me a bowl of spaghetti, but I dropped it on the floor, and then she stabbed me twelve times with a paring knife. So now I have a bit of a thing about people . . . girls, women in general touching me, which is kind of, you know, because I’m still a guy, and hetero, and fully functional . . . You can imagine. Sorry, I’ll shut up now.’ He blushed.

  ‘Your mum is the shark.’

  ‘My mum is the shark,’ he repeated. ‘The rock-thrower.’

  ‘And your dad?’

  ‘My dad lets her.’

  I scrunched up the leaf and smelled it, letting the clean aroma fill my nostrils. I remembered him in the car and the woman touching his shoulder. When he got out of the car he’d had a slight sheen of sweat over his face. He had looked through me because he was doing his own form of breathing.

  ‘So you’re excused from trust.’

  ‘Yep.’ He stared at his shoes.

  ‘You should do it. The Solo, I mean.’

  Callum rocked back as though I’d struck him. ‘No! I can’t. I’m not ready. You saw what happened to Bethany. I’m not good at being alone. Or being with people.’ He smiled briefly, but it looked more like a grimace.

  ‘You won’t be alone, you’ll have your demons. You can even borrow mine, if you like.’

  It was a quip – a pretty good one too.

  Callum laughed. ‘No. Maybe one day. Maybe they would let you come with me. You could protect me. Crazy warrior woman.’

  He smiled at me.

  ‘I guess with you having your girl-touch thing and me with my unpredictable violent tendencies, it’s not going to work out for us, is it?’ I waited for the mortification to set in, but it was all right. Just a twinge.

  ‘I guess not.’ He stared across the lawn. ‘Unless you choose to stop being unpredictably violent and I decide to stop being thingy.’

  ‘It’s not really as simple as that, is it?’

  He shrugged. ‘No, but at least we’re talking about it.’

  I nodded and we both watched a sparrow hopping around the garden.

  I’d been so nervous around Callum, but he was way more damaged than me. I wanted to put my arms around him. That’s never going to happen.

  I can be his friend – just his friend. No demands or expectations.

  It would seem I’ve found the motivation to create and sustain healthy relationships. My counsellor will be ecstatic. It’s a risk, but there are 20 543 838 people in this country who are not my mum and dad. Sometimes you’ve got to take a chance.