by Debra Oswald
Celia could hear Kieran’s voice rasp as the tears came. But she said nothing.
She had seen Zoe sink into the occasional sad funk, but she hadn’t thought her daughter had the capacity for such black moods. Now Celia found herself replaying scenes from the last year, wondering if Zoe had been struggling, wretched, but keeping it to herself.
Marcus, Zoe’s father, had generally been a buoyant man, but sometimes he’d tumbled down into a gloomy state, sluggish, hopeless. He wouldn’t discuss it with anyone – even with Celia only a little – and he would keep going, doing whatever he was obliged to do, but only by pushing himself. Celia would determinedly interrogate everything that had happened, everything she’d said, anything that could explain his misery. If you could understand the cause of something, you could fix it or at least avoid being vulnerable to it in the future. But Marcus always assured her there was no use searching for a reason – at least, not a reason commensurate with the level of his melancholy. ‘Wait it out,’ he would say. But Celia would always continue to fret and question and analyse, until her husband’s regular upbeat, energetic self came back to her.
‘I didn’t know what to do for Zoe,’ said Kieran. ‘And I thought if we could drive up north, where it’s warm, Zoe could get . . . we’d get back to the way it was. Put ourselves back into a proper rhythm. A person’s gotta have some sunlight on their body. And Zoe was up for it. So we could make things good again. But we needed money – for petrol and maybe a better car than Sheena’s bomb, if we were going to drive right up to north Queensland. I was so desperate to get Zoe somewhere better, I didn’t think straight. My mate Mick always knows how to get money together fast. So, I asked him. I thought it’d be okay. But Mick, he’s not a good person.’
Kieran was crying, contorting his face so much, some of the cuts reopened and blood was beading on his forehead again.
‘What happened?’ asked Celia.
‘Mick knew where some guy kept big rolls of cash in his house. Massive house, on this five-acre place near Dural. Mick reckoned the owners were away, so it’d be snack easy. I never wanted Zoe to be there. “No way are you coming,” I said. But she said, “I want to make sure things don’t get out of hand.” She didn’t trust me not to be a dickhead when I was around Mick.’
‘So, she went with you and Mick to the place?’
‘Yeah. I mean, I knew that was probably a mistake. It was a mistake.’
The boy hesitated for a moment but Celia gestured – Keep going.
‘Okay, so we drove out to the house in Sheena’s car,’ he went on. ‘No one home – Mick was right about that part. But he didn’t know they had guard dogs. Big black vicious rottweilers, two of them. They were barking like crazy and giving Mick the shits. And then Zoe got upset because Mick hurt the dogs. She got so upset, she took the car and pissed off. Which was good. Because Mick was going spare, especially when it turned out there was no money. He started smashing stuff up. Pushed my face into the broken glass on the floor and then there was so much blood in my eyes I couldn’t see properly. I just ran out the door, up to the main road. Anyway, I was glad Zoe was safely out of that place.’
‘The last you saw of her she was okay?’
‘She got bitten on the hand by one of the dogs. Mostly she was shaken up. About Mick hurting the dogs. And she was mad with me. But she was okay, yeah. Then later on, I couldn’t find her. I figured she’d driven home. That’s why I came here. She’ll come home. That’s why I’m here.’
Zoe floated just below the surface, trying to push upwards to be fully awake, but at the same time she was so very tired, limbs aching, head heavy with fatigue, it was easier to sink back down into sleep again. She was in her own room at home – no need to open her eyes to know the position of the bed under the window and the location of every object on the white-painted desk, the posters on the blue walls, treasures on the windowsill.
She rolled onto her side and became aware of dampness on the mattress. The smell, a sharp ammonia smell, disturbed her enough to register she must’ve wet herself, and then to recall she wasn’t in her own bed.
The bare mattress was on a linoleum floor, alongside milk crates full of empty bottles and old newspapers. She wasn’t clear-headed enough to remember where this room was, but she definitely wasn’t home. And she knew she was alone and ill – febrile, shivering, heart tapping out a rapid, tinny beat. She should get up off the mattress, wash herself, but she was too feeble to stand up.
She wanted to be home. She could never face going home. She wanted Kieran to walk through the door. She wanted the door to be bolted shut so she could hide from everyone. She wanted her mother to appear and nurse her back to health. She wanted to die in this place, unseen, so she would never have to be seen by anyone and it would all be over.
Sinking back down into the fever-sleep, she found more noxious dreams waiting there for her.
One night, months ago, not long after she and Kieran had first arrived in Sydney, Zoe had woken up, shaken by a dream.
Kieran had scooped her in against him. ‘You okay, baby? Having a nightmare? Tell me about it. That’s the trick. That way you can get the nightmare out of your head and gone.’
Zoe murmured ‘No’ but Kieran held her tight, urged her to tell him. So she described the dream, in which she’d been walking through some kind of car park.
‘The other people wandering around the car park – I knew they were dead . . . the way you can just know stuff in a dream?’
‘Yeah, I get you.’
‘I recognised faces,’ Zoe explained. ‘The lady who used to run the kiosk at the pool, this kid from primary school who died. My father was there too.’
Zoe had often looked at photos of Marcus – dead before she was born – but she never imagined her father as a dead person.
‘Maybe it’s a beautiful thing,’ Kieran suggested, ‘you seeing your dad like that.’
Zoe could tell Kieran didn’t get it. Nothing about the dream was beautiful.
‘There were others,’ she said. ‘People who aren’t dead yet – only, in the dream they were. Everyone’s internal organs were turning liquid, like soup. Then I saw you and me sprawled out.’
Zoe didn’t give Kieran any detail, didn’t tell him that she’d seen their bodies rotting in front of her like a sped-up movie, like time-lapse photography on a nature program. The two of them decomposing, liquefying, until there was nothing except a greasy slick staining the concrete.
Kieran ran his hands up and down Zoe’s warm flesh. ‘We’re not dead. Look at us.’
‘But we will die. That’s the truth of it.’
‘We won’t die.’
‘One day.’
‘But not now,’ Kieran said. ‘Here we are.’
He wrapped his arms around her, as if he would hold her in life with him that way. ‘Don’t have dreams like that. Wake me up next time. I’ll stop that horrible stuff filling up your head.’ He peppered Zoe’s forehead with a dozen kisses.
She had stopped sharing her bad dreams and her bad thoughts with Kieran. He didn’t understand and it would just upset him if she pushed to make him understand. There were occasions when she would be feeling low and Kieran would be so bouncy, so perky, it annoyed the shit out of her. She’d snap at him and then a second later feel lousy about letting her misery infect his beautiful spirit. Then she would be even more disgusted by herself.
She was a repulsive and stupid person, so stupid she was dangerous. It would be just as well if she decomposed into a gelatinous pile that could seep into this mattress and disappear.
‘Zoe.’
Someone was saying her name repeatedly, nudging her shoulder.
Zoe opened her eyes to see Sheena crouching beside her.
‘What have you taken?’ Sheena asked.
‘Nothing.’
That was true. For weeks now, Zoe had steered clear of any substances, even booze.
When they were on the picking circuit, camping out, Kieran and Zoe had g
ot pissed a few times on port. Zoe tried smoking joints but because she’d never been a cigarette smoker, she just coughed and that was a waste of good weed.
In Sydney, Kieran had been anxious about the drugs floating around, wanting her to be cautious, but Zoe had a list, a list of things to try. To begin with, she had enjoyed the way speed fizzed through her veins and the warm, cushiony, boneless torpor from the downers. Her one go at a hallucinogen was too frightening to repeat – she was afraid the distortion might never wear off, as if mechanisms inside her could twist permanently out of shape.
She wasn’t like Kieran. He could get wasted but he always bounced back. For Zoe the come-down was too harsh, her disposition too unsteady, her capacity for darkness unknowable. The risk was there that she might never come back from one of those black moods.
She couldn’t explain this to Kieran, so she just tried to laugh about it with him. ‘I want to be a wild girl but I’m no good at it!’
Kieran said he didn’t care, that she was his spectacular girl no matter what.
But then Zoe felt guilty. Wouldn’t he prefer to get wasted with his friends, rather than sit around nursing the hangovers or managing the freak-outs of his piss-weak girlfriend?
‘No way. I’d rather be with you anytime, anywhere. We don’t need anything else.’
Kieran was right – when the two of them were together and it was good, they hadn’t needed anyone else. But now everything was messed up. Suddenly Zoe was swamped by that sensation that she had unbuckled inside and might never be able to reassemble herself into one coherent piece.
‘Cold!’
The shock of the cold water was like a blow to the head. Sheena had stripped off Zoe’s fever-sweated clothes and put her under the shower.
*
Sheena hadn’t planned to shove Zoe under a dead-cold shower, but the electricity had been cut off to this house, so, cold it was. She couldn’t deny there was a scrap of satisfaction in subjecting the stupid girl to a blast of icy water.
As she’d promised Joe, Sheena had gone looking for Kieran. She asked around, quizzing the losers her brother called his friends, but those guys had no useful information to offer. No one had seen Kieran or his pretty blonde girlfriend for a couple of weeks, to the extent that those morons could be expected to have an accurate sense of the passage of time.
Sheena checked out various places Kieran had lived, hoping to track him down. As a last resort she tried this huge old Darlinghurst terrace – Kieran and her second-youngest brother had lived here for a while way back when their mother was shacked up with a truck driver who wanted to live near the depot. Sheena knew that Kieran and Mick had sometimes squatted in the house when they needed to stay off the radar.
The place was empty now, any squatters turfed out, because the house was due to be gutted and then transformed into one of the dolled-up renovated terraces appearing along this street.
Sheena had almost walked away without bothering to look inside, but then she spotted a side window wedged open, and she climbed in. Pushing open the door to each room, she felt queasy with the fear she was about to confront the sight of her brother’s dead body.
In an upstairs bedroom, tucked behind crates of rubbish, she saw Zoe. There was a sting of disappointment to find her and not Kieran. Then again, it was a fucking relief she was alive. Sheena wouldn’t want to be lumbered with the responsibility that her brother had contributed to the silly girl’s death.
Slicing through the musty fug in the room was the stink of piss. The kid had wet herself. Sheena’s first thought was that Zoe was off her face on something, but when she knelt down, she saw the girl shivering violently and her forehead was hot to touch, like a child with tonsillitis that no one had been taking care of. Sheena then saw the reason for the infection burning through the girl – dog bites on her right hand, infected so the skin was red and swollen shiny-tight, with pus oozing from the puncture wounds.
She needed to strip off Zoe’s scungy clothes, haul her into the bathroom along the corridor and bring her temperature down quickly.
There were a couple of batik sarongs tacked up as curtaining in the front bedroom of the terrace. The fabric was dusty but cleaner than anything else to hand, so Sheena ripped the sarongs down and used one as a towel to dry Zoe off after the shower. The girl stood naked on the tiles, shivering with cold as much as the fever. Limp, compliant, she allowed Sheena to turn her, lift her arms, rub the sarong over her legs and buttocks and breasts, too ill or wretched to care, beyond any modesty. Sheena bound Zoe’s long hair in the damp sarong, then twisted it up on top of her head.
Sheena took off her own shirt – she was wearing a T-shirt underneath – and eased Zoe’s arms into the shirtsleeves, careful not to touch her poor infected hand. She tied the other dry sarong around Zoe’s lower half.
She had sluiced the bite wounds a little bit cleaner in the water but they were still lurid red and weeping pus. She had nothing hygienic enough to bandage them and figured it was best to leave them to air-dry until she could get proper medical treatment.
‘Is Kieran here?’ Sheena asked.
Zoe shook her head.
‘Do you know where he is?’
Zoe shook her head again, then she murmured, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I was looking for Kieran. Found you.’
‘I don’t understand why you’re helping me. You hate me. You think I’m some . . .’
‘I think you’re a selfish little bitch who doesn’t have any clue how lucky she is.’
Sheena sat Zoe on top of the toilet seat and unwrapped the sarong on her head. She used her own brush to smooth the knots out of the girl’s long, wet hair. That was when she copped a proper look at Zoe’s neck – the mottled plum-coloured marks staining the milky skin of her throat.
Sheena hated asking, but she had to ask, ‘Did Kieran do that?’
‘Mick.’
‘Is Mick hanging around here too?’
‘No.’
‘And your hand – those are dog bites?’
‘Yes. Dogs.’
Zoe refused to go to the police or a hospital. When Sheena pushed the idea, the girl started to cry, gulping for breath between sobs and pleading.
‘Okay. Okay. Settle down,’ Sheena relented. ‘But we have to get your hand fixed up. Stay there a sec. Don’t fucking move.’
She ran downstairs to the kitchen and fetched an old teacup, then found Zoe’s sneakers lying on the lino floor of the small bedroom. She filled the teacup with water and handed it to Zoe, who was still sitting on the toilet seat, obedient, or maybe just too feeble to move.
‘Keep taking little sips. Don’t guzzle it or you might chuck up,’ Sheena instructed.
She eased Zoe’s bare feet into the sneakers and tied up the laces. It was awkward, tying up the shoelaces on another person, and she was hit by the memory of putting on Kieran’s school shoes when he was a little boy.
Fucking Kieran. If he hadn’t pinched her car, Sheena would have had transport to cart his stupid girlfriend to medical attention. As it was, the best she could do was drape her own padded nylon jacket around the girl’s shoulders and steer her down the stairs.
There was no way Zoe had the strength to climb out the side window, so Sheena forced open the boarded-up front door – the wood on the doorframe was so termite-chewed and crumbly that the nails gave way easily with two sharp kicks. Sheena let herself relish the satisfying burst of violence it required.
She was hoping to hail a cab on the street but, typical of her shit luck, there were no cabs in sight. As they walked along the footpath, Sheena held Zoe upright and steady, with an arm round her waist, making sure not to brush against her injured hand. People were staring at the two of them – the scrawny woman with bottle-black hair, just wearing jeans and a T-shirt despite the cold day, supporting the teenage girl in a grubby sarong, with wet hair dripping down the back of a nylon jacket, a string of neck bruises and lurid puncture wounds on one hand. Let those fuckers stare a
nd think whatever they liked. Sheena didn’t care.
Luckily, the medical practice Sheena remembered was still on this street, two blocks down. And luckily, it wasn’t the kind of GP surgery with responsible, cosy family doctors who might ask questions. This was the kind of walk-in-off-the-street clinic where the dozy quacks didn’t remember one patient from the next and would write a prescription for valium or pethidine without even looking up from the prescription pad to eyeball the loser they were giving the drugs to.
Sheena spoke to the woman at the front desk and then parked Zoe on a chair in the waiting area. There were several individuals already sitting there – unsanitary types who looked as if they had germy spores flaking off their skin and were exhaling bacteria through their mouths into the shared air and straight into the open wounds of a teenage girl who shouldn’t be in such a shithole in the first place. Sheena realised she was instinctively leaning forward and sideways, as if she could use her body to shield the sick girl from being infected by these people.
When it was Zoe’s turn, Sheena steered her into the consulting room, trying to devise a plausible story for the doctor. She need not have bothered. The GP was an old dude, obviously over the job, and possibly without a complete set of marbles rolling around in his head. The doc didn’t care why this teenager had choke marks round her neck and untreated dog bites. He squinted at Zoe’s hand as if he were half-blind, then he yanked her arm closer, making the kid gasp with the pain of his clumsy fingers on her poor swollen hand.
‘They’re dog bites,’ Sheena said sharply. ‘Need to be flushed out and disinfected, yeah?’
‘Yes – uh – yes, that would be . . .’
‘How about I do that part myself later.’ Sheena didn’t want this incompetent codger hurting Zoe any more than was necessary. ‘But I need you to write us a prescription for whichever antibiotic you give a person who’s been bitten by a dog.’