Peeling the Onion

by Wendy Orr

  The pain is creeping up from my neck, over my head, through my brain, blocking everything on its way. I hold my head between my hands, resting on the table. The cafe is dark; is black. I slump forward onto the table just as Dad slides a jelly slice in front of me.

  I can see again. Dad's holding my shoulders, propping me up in the chair. The jelly slice is smashed. Raspberry; my favourite. The shop owner is rushing across with a glass of water; the cafe is very quiet, everyone staring at the girl who can't remember how to sit up.

  'I'm all right.'

  I drink the water to prove it, and start to feel a little better.

  Dad and the shop owner help me out to the car, like a protester being escorted off the premises by police. Dad wants to take me to a doctor, but I've seen enough of them for one day. I talk him into taking me straight home to hide in my own bed.

  Sadness is grey, despair matt black and anger blood red. Bitterness is almost beautiful, like an iridescent poisonous bug—shiny black shot through with a deep, reddy purple.

  Jenny's planning again. "Why don't you and Hayden come to the production with Costa and me? It's Oliver—I've heard the rehearsals and it sounds great.'

  Because I don't want to leave the house; because this deep feeling about knowing I'm supposed to be with Hayden doesn't translate into us ever having a good time together; because I just don't feel like watching a bunch of pretend orphans dance and sing while a drunk murders a prostitute.

  Poor Jen. She hasn't had much luck talking me into anything lately. Shopping, clothes, hair; she wants me to experiment, play the game—but they just don't seem important any more.

  'I know how much your foot hurts,' she says, trying to convince me to wear my mini skirt for out-of-uniform day, 'but at least your legs still look great. And you're so slim! Wish I had your willpower.'

  I don't know if I still have willpower. The next doctor I see will probably find that's been damaged too.

  Then she wants to braid my hair. 'You've had it just tied back for ages'—since Mum combed the glass out in hospital—'don't you want to try something fancier?'

  Braiding was for karate. And it takes too long—I can't be bothered. Jenny tries a few different ways of pulling it back and tying it up, but the next day I can't remember which one she said looked good, and yank it into an elastic again.

  She can't be having fun, being with me. She's lively and bubbly; she needs a friend who's alive. She's just being kind.

  I'm running to answer the phone. Quickly, smoothly—perfect symmetrical steps springing off the balls of my feet. Running like an athlete.

  'You idiot!' I tell myself. 'You could do it all along—you were just too scared to try.'

  A ray of hope makes my whole day glow, though I can't remember why. Must be a sign I'm getting better.

  The phone rings; I leap up instinctively and try to run—my ankle gives way and knocks me to the ground. I remember the dream as I stagger up and across the room in my usual hobble—right foot dragging, everything hurting.

  I reach the phone as it goes dead.

  If I thought life was going to go on being like this forever I couldn't take it. Wouldn't take it. No one could make me.

  CHAPTER 10

  I'm in Mr Osman's rooms again, with the damning evidence of scans held up against the light.

  '... never walk on rough ground again.' That's what the CT pictures tell him. What are they, a crystal ball?

  But I don't say anything so witty; I sit there stunned. 'Never' is such a big word; a cold word, when you put it with an everyday verb like 'walk'; a gigantic carved lump of silver ice. Never never never never.

  He's using it again; this time for high heels.

  I didn't think I'd care about that, but I do—I want to choose. If the pain gets worse—worse? There's worse?—I can have my foot fused; frozen, so it doesn't move at all. Worse, worser and worst. The best thing for now will be a splint, some kind of orthotic device. Worster—infinite worses. Now I've got rid of the neck brace I can wear leg irons.

  I find my voice at last, though it comes out in a squeak. 'But you said it was just sprained!' I'm not going to be able to finish the sentence without crying—sprained ankles get better.

  He blusters a bit. The first X-rays didn't show the extent of the damage, sometimes these things are hard to pick. But my broken vertebra definitely seems quite stable, he adds cheerfully. Still in the wrong place, but not likely to snap again and kill me.

  That's really something to celebrate, now that I'm crippled for life.

  I wonder if Bronny has any spare dolls. Do you have to be a witch doctor to voodoo, or can anyone do it?

  I wake in the night with all the questions I was too stunned to ask. How much pain is 'some'? How rough is rough ground? Has Mr Osman ever heard that bones belong to people—and what does 'can't' mean anyway?

  And the one creeping through every thought, the one I smash back every time I see it: can I still do karate—or phys ed?

  And if not, will I still be me?

  Jenny's having concentration problems too. Just over a week till exams and she still can't go for more than thirty seconds without thinking about Costa. Her parents have put a fifteen-minute limit on phone calls but that doesn't guarantee what she thinks about when she hangs up.

  'Sometimes I think it'd be better if we actually slept together. Maybe then I wouldn't think about him all the time.'

  I stop doing my balancing exercises for a moment—it seems a bit insensitive to practise standing on one leg when your friend's talking about stuff like this. 'Sounds like a drastic solution . . . mightn't it work the other way?'

  'Probably—I was just joking, anyway!'

  'It didn't sound like it.'

  'I'm not ready for that kind of commitment.'

  'So tell him! Don't let him pressure you.'

  'He's not—it's me; I never thought I'd want to so much! I mean, he wants to—half the time I think he'd do it in the hall between classes if I suggested it—did I tell you about Chris and Brad?'

  'They're not together, are they?'

  'Very together when her dad caught them! They snuck back to her place at lunchtime, and guess who came home for a sandwich ...'

  'God, how awful!' I'm laughing so hard Mum comes in from the lounge to see what's wrong and I have to wave her away—but I can't help feeling sorry for Chris.

  'Would kind of put you off, wouldn't it? I figure that's why Costa doesn't mind waiting—he wants it to be so good we'll just have to keep on going—and that's what I'm afraid of. I really love him, I already love him so much—if I sleep with him I feel like it'll be total—there'll be no escape, that's it—we'll be together forever.'

  'I thought that was what you wanted?'

  'It is! Just not yet. Sometimes I wish that I hadn't met him yet! Why couldn't I have had this year with lots of fun, go out with a bunch of different guys, no commitment—and then met Costa and fallen in love?'

  'Life is tough!'

  'Sorry. I'm a great friend, whingeing about finding the perfect guy too soon, when you've got real problems.'

  'That's okay—I'm sick of mine. Yours are more interesting.'

  'Maybe . . . but I couldn't tell them to anyone except you! My dad's going to hang up if I don't say goodbye—back to the grindstone.'

  In the honesty of my bed at night I know I've never felt anything like what Jenny's going through. Loving someone so much it threatens to take you over, what's the saying? . . . consuming passion; being eaten up by love. No wonder she sometimes gets scared; don't know if I'd like it.

  But part of me can't help being jealous. How can Hayden and I ever get something going when he's still terrified that I'll break if he touches me?

  'What have you decided?' Mr Sandberg asks.

  'Martin thinks I'll be ready to do the English exam.' If you really work, he'd said; focus just on this one subject—not sounding convinced, but seeing how desperate I am to accomplish something.

  'It'll be a massi
ve amount of work if you defer everything to second semester. I need an answer for exactly what you're going to do by the start of next term.'

  'You'll get it!'

  Shouting would have earned a detention before, but now all I get is a raised eyebrow.

  But I've made one decision, that'll do for today—I'll worry about the rest after the exam. Lisa agrees, when she's finished telling me that Becky can roll over—both ways! Throw everything into English and see what happens.

  What happens is that I'm sure I've passed. Not brilliantly; ran out of time to finish the last essay, but I should have made a C; won't think any higher . . . but maybe, maybe a B.

  Luke picks me up afterwards; takes me home; makes me a cup of coffee and a sandwich. I tell him I can do it, but he knows me too well, knows I'm too tired and sore to bother.

  'Your neck's really hurting, isn't it? Do you want a massage?' He stands behind my chair, rubbing my neck up into where the muscles are screaming at the base of my skull, around on the aching shoulders and their tender blades. The tightness begins to melt. Feels good, so good . . . . 'You don't have anything else to do today, do you? Maybe you could do this all afternoon.'

  'I can think of worse fates.' But he does stop, eventually, when I've drifted into a relaxed glow, dreamier than sleep. I'm still half in it as I get up to see him go.

  And kiss him, I don't know why, it seems the right thing to do—a thankyou kiss—except it's so sweet, so good, pulling feelings from so far down inside me, and he holds me so tight and so long that I feel our bodies memorising each other—this is where I belong, this is where I want to be!—and when he leaves neither of us speaks.

  'What did you think of the exam?'

  Hayden's voice on the phone gives me a jolt of surprise; I haven't thought of him all day. Almost of disappointment; almost thinking that Luke might ring to say—what?

  There's nothing to say. Just a kiss between friends. No tongues, no hands, just a kiss. Doesn't mean anything. Nothing to feel guilty about.

  Hospital Mourns Distinguished Surgeon, the local rag announces in black type on the front page: Mr Osman is dead. He had a heart attack on Saturday in the middle of a squash game.

  I shouldn't have thought about voodoo dolls.

  I read on. He was playing with another doctor (gorgeous Alex?) who was unable to revive him. He was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead on arrival.

  Did he have time to notice the pain? To think, 'So that's why people don't like it!'—and a little stinging regret that he hadn't been nicer?

  My doctor's dead. That wasn't the way I thought it happened.

  But there's still a whole galaxy of other doctors the neurologist wanted me to see—doctors I've never heard of, a different doctor for every different part of me—so we're off to Melbourne for the school holidays. Aunt Lynda lives in Brunswick, in a tiny terrace house—two bedrooms, a lounge room and kitchen all lined up in a row with a narrow hall down the side and the bathroom and laundry tacked on as an afterthought. But she insists that there's plenty of room for Mum, the kids and me—Dad's glued to his office by Tax Time—and that we aren't putting her out at all. Nothing she likes better than an extra four people for ten days of doctors' appointments, and she's taken a week off to prove it.

  This morning she's taking Bronny and Matt to the zoo while Mum and I set off to the first waiting room.

  The secretary calls my name; I get ready to be a monkey.

  Lynda says she didn't think so many people would want to go to the zoo in the pouring rain. She says it's surprising how rain enhances rather than washes away certain smells. She says she always thought she had a dirty mind, but she was streets behind the monkeys. Matt starts to demonstrate what she's talking about, and she reminds him about the ice cream-bribe not to. Matt thought that was just for the zoo.

  Mum asks Bronwyn what she liked best.

  The Butterfly House, and she's brought me one in her pocket, since I couldn't go. 'It was dead already! Someone would have stepped on it.'

  Lynda remembers why she didn't have children.

  Doctors, therapists, technicians, tests on parts of me I didn't know I had—I know more than any careers officer about all the different health professions. I stagger from one to the other, answering the same questions, telling the same story until it blurs with the tests, the good advice and bad news, into one fortnight-long nightmare. I learn interesting facts but not what to do with them.

  The ringing in my ears is called tinnitus; it might go away or it mightn't. Neck pain sometimes gets better and sometimes doesn't; nobody knows why. My hearing's not that bad; if I can't follow a conversation the problem is more likely cognitive than hearing. Cognitive means thinking—I'm still smart enough to know that. I feel slapped. That's what I get for admitting the truth, for once.

  I still can't do the standing-up, closing-my-eyes trick and if it's a small doctor with slow reflexes I can knock him flying.

  But there's nothing wrong with my eyes, I can see the chart on the wall; can find the pinpricks of moving light on the black screen in front of me. The only reason I bump into everything is that looking around makes me dizzy, so my brain tells my eyes not to bother.

  I also get dizzy when I'm shut in a small dark cupboard and spun around and around in a chair. And when hot water is pumped into my ears I'm so dizzy I throw up. 'I don't think you'll ever be a sailor,' the technician says, mopping up the floor, the bed, her sleeve, 'you certainly do get dizzy!'

  Thank God for science. I might never have noticed.

  She gives me a page of eye exercises that might help. 'You don't need to wrap yourself up in cotton wool,' she says, 'just don't do anything silly—like crossing the street by yourself.'

  Luckily she doesn't say it in front of Mum.

  Lynda gives me mint tea to help my nausea.

  'I grow herbs,' Mum says, 'I don't drink them.' She opens a bottle of wine.

  When the doctors say my vertebrae are stable it doesn't actually mean safe. No skiing, no horseback riding or contact sports—but a pretty girl like me would hardly be into boxing, would she? And if I go to a gym don't use a punching bag or work out with weights. Or use a hammer or a lawn mower; that could be bad. Nobody says exactly what 'bad' means. I don't think I know what anything means.

  People that make splints are called orthotists; 'Orthotics and prosthetics,' the guy explains, sliding the white plastic monstrosity into my shoe, telling me no one will notice the three centimetres sticking up over the edges, 'orthotic insoles, artificial limbs, all that sort of thing.' I picture storerooms full of artificial legs, hands, breasts? . . .

  'They'd send you to a psychiatrist if they thought you were crazy,' Lynda says, making everyone a calming chamomile tea for breakfast. 'The neuropsychologist will just be checking for brain damage.'

  Thanks, Lynda. Very reassuring.

  Mum's anxious to get going. She needs a detour into Rathdowne Street for a morning caffe latte.

  'I'll go mad if Lynda makes me any healthier,' she explains, adding an espresso to prove it.

  My mum the addict.

  For the neuropsychologist I don't have to undress—she just peels away my mind, asking about my memory, my concentration, my paying attention, what kind of student was I before?

  If I had to choose my own sessions of hell, I'd take naked body over naked brain. Naked body you've still got somewhere left to hide, but this is it, nowhere left to go—this is Anna, all pinned out on the dissection bench.

  Commonsense questions; general knowledge—so far so good. She tells me a story and I tell it back. Kindergarten games, getting harder, designed to trick, to make you feel worse when you bomb out. Lists of words, books of pictures—choose the ones you've seen before. The words are easy; the pictures impossible.

  Lists of numbers, to add and remember and add again but I've forgotten which one I'm remembering, which one I need and which one to forget, I can't even add the numbers, 'nine and six are fourteen,' I say, it doesn't sound ri
ght but by then she's said two more numbers, slippery ones, they slide through my mind, through the blackness and I hold my head in my hands to stop the swaying. 'Sixteen,' I say—it's a good number, as good as any—and hear her close the book. And sigh.

  'Well, Anna,' she says at last, 'I think we're starting to see a pattern here. The brain is an extraordinarily complex machine, and when it's injured . . . '

  . . . it can shut down so it doesn't have to hear anything it doesn't want to.

  Maybe I should care about this poor little brain, this sad, damaged little brain, but it doesn't seem to matter. Nothing seems to matter except sleep; I just want to let myself sink into the woolly blackness and never wake up.

  Mum and Dad say I've slept for three days, that's enough. They say I have to get up and go to school, as if one class a day could make any difference to my life.

  I'll get up tomorrow. Today I need to sleep.

  'You win!' I shout at Mr Sandberg, 'I'll drop everything except English and maths till next year.'

  'Let's hope your attitude improves by then,' he snaps, but still lets me slam out of his room without a detention.

  Home and back to bed.

  Mum and Dad are wide awake and arranging a nightmare: a pow-wow with all the chiefs and the killing reports to decide what to do about me. They've been phoning the insurance officer, phoning doctors, phoning teachers, phoning therapists. Busy busy busy. I wonder if Mum will bake a devil's food cake to celebrate this particular hell.

  I want my life back. I want to be me, the way I was the morning we set off for the tournament, five and a half months ago.

  Now mornings are black. I lie very still and pretend I'm still asleep. The day stretches out in infinite bleakness—when I move the pain will start. My bed is kind; it doesn't expect anything of me.

  'Anna!' Matt shrieks. 'Your boyfriend's here! Do you want him to come in and play? How come you're still in bed anyway? It's nearly teatime.'

  'I'll be there in a second.'

  I look awful. Pull on jeans and a jumper, brush my hair—don't look much better. Feel worse.