Clancy of the Undertow

by Christopher Currie

  I try to move my fingers but nothing really happens. It’s like my thoughts are on the other side of a fogged-up window.

  ‘Hey there,’ says Mum’s voice. I follow the sound and her face is there. There’s a plastic curtain behind her and maybe I’m in the shower? Why would I be in the shower? I concentrate harder and remember our shower curtain is green. This curtain is a patterned blue.

  I think I say, ‘Hi,’ but I’m not really sure this is what’s come out of my mouth. All the lines of things are fuzzy and then I can’t remember if things are actually supposed to have lines around them. I hear music, somewhere.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Mum’s pulled her hair back so I can see her freckles. On the window next to the bed there’s water running down in racing lines.

  And then I remember the rain and the lightning and the cliff and the car and then it’s all tumbling back like a dream except in reverse because memories are flooding back from real life instead of my subconscious.

  ‘Angus,’ I say. ‘He’s on the thing.’ I try to lift my head but I’m already too dizzy from talking. ‘He’s got the backpack, but he’s fallen off.’ There’s the image of my brother’s face, twisted up, spattered with mud.

  Mum squeezes my hand again. ‘Angus is okay,’ she says. ‘He’s here as well. He’s fine.’

  Here? I think. Here. Then I roll my eyes, like der, Fred. Hospital. I’m in hospital. ‘What happened? How long…’

  ‘You had an accident,’ Mum says. ‘You were driving.’

  She talks like she’s not even mad, which doesn’t make sense. I was driving. No, I crashed the car. I remember. My first time behind the wheel and I crash the car. ‘Is Angus’s ute okay? I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Clancy. For goodness sake. You were so lucky. You were both so lucky.’

  ‘Did I wreck it?’

  ‘There was a road crew. They were there, otherwise…’ Mum wipes her eyes with a tissue.

  There’s the set of legs rushing up towards me on the road, a jolt in my shoulders as I wrench the wheel. ‘I swerved. They were in my way. I could hardly even see.’

  ‘You went off the road. They said the car rolled. In a field. You were so lucky.’

  Yeah, I think. Lucky: I get it. My mind’s trying to ratchet further back—something else I have to remember—but nothing will catch. ‘Angus is okay?’ Then, ‘Did he get out? How did he get out?’

  ‘You really…You told them, Clancy. You told them where he was, how to get to him.’

  ‘I did?’ I can’t remember this at all, which is probably why I gave them the right directions.

  Mum nods. ‘They said you’d tied your jumper to a tree. So clever. They found the tent, and you’d broken branches so they could find the way.’

  The jumper. Time’s jumping backwards. Had I broken the branches? I say, ‘A good scientist is always prepared.’ Then I cough, and my chest explodes in pain. And it’s like this has jump-started all my nerve endings because the rest of me starts to hurt, too. ‘Aaah. What’s going on in there?’ I rub my side, where the worst of the pain is blaring out from.

  Mum guides my hand back to hers. ‘You cracked some ribs,’ she says, ‘among other things. You bruised your coccyx.’

  ‘My coccyx?’ Jesus, even when I hurt myself it has to be the most embarrassing-sounding place. ‘What about Angus?’

  ‘He’s broken his leg and some other bones, got some cuts and bruises. He’s still under sedation, but they say he’ll be fine.’ All the while, Mum hasn’t even sounded angry or asked why we were messing around on clifftops in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Is Dad here?’ I say.

  ‘He’s taking a little walk,’ she says. ‘Titch doesn’t really like hospitals.’

  ‘Poor Titch.’ The little bastard was probably guilting Dad into guiding him on a healing journey to a vending machine. Titch hates not only hospitals but anything that doesn’t feature the phrase flavour explosion.

  ‘Reeve was here too. Earlier.’

  ‘Reeve? Reeve’s here?’

  ‘He was who called us. Last night. He was at the hospital. He found out everything he could and stayed so he could fill us in.’

  ‘He called you? What? Why?’

  ‘They found his phone number in your pocket. It was all you had on you.’ Mum reaches over me to the bedside table. Reeve’s business card, crumpled and smeared with mud. Reeve Lewis: Senior Executive Retail Law Enforcement Officer, Esq.

  I smile. Thank Christ I never clean out my pockets. If I hadn’t—

  And then I remember Sasha. And running from the house. Leaving Nancy. The car. Macca’s. The observatory. The kiss. No, no, no. And then, impossibly fast, the rest of it falls into place. All my fuzzy thoughts finally snap into focus and I remember all of it. I kissed her. It happened. It really did. I try to shrink back into the bed, to disappear. If only I could slip back into unconsciousness. There’s no responsibility there. Where’s the machine that turns up the painkillers?

  I must make a noise because Mum goes, ‘Are you okay? I can get a nurse if it’s the pain.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘What is it?’

  I can’t tell her. Oh God. The biggest mistake of my life. One hundred per cent real. A wave of exhaustion comes over me, and I realise my jaw is clenched shut. I try to relax it, but I can’t work out how. I stretch my eyes wide. My skin feels so heavy, like it’s sinking down through the pillow. ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I hear myself say.

  ‘Nothing to be sorry for, sweetie. I’m just glad you’re safe.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Not about Angus or whatever. I left you all behind. I abandoned you.’

  ‘Don’t try to say too much. You probably just need rest.’

  ‘I got all…’ the words just aren’t there. ‘I got all tangled up.’

  ‘Tangled up?’

  ‘Everything’s gone wrong. I got everything wrong. I thought Sasha liked me.’

  ‘Who’s Sasha?’

  There’s an echo in the room. This makes no sense. Everyone knows who Sasha is. Everyone knew Sasha. ‘She’s got the car, but it’s not hers.’ I close my eyes. ‘She’s going to be a model and she invited me. And I tried to kiss her and then I was going to…off the tower. But it wasn’t water.’

  ‘Maybe just let yourself rest,’ says Mum’s voice.

  ‘I loved her,’ my voice says. ‘We were going to live in a cabin and eat dinner. We’d eat late.’ My thoughts are getting spongy.

  Mum squeezes me hand again, but it feels like my arm’s at the end of a really long road. ‘Ask Dad when the cricket starts,’ I say.

  ‘Okay, sweetie.’

  ‘I love you Mum. I love everybody.’ I’m nearly at the bottom of a comfy dark swimming pool. ‘I just wish I knew what the hell I was doing.’

  42

  I wake up at what appears to be the right time for a nurse to bring me breakfast. I sort of nod at her and she leaves me with a teabag steeping in lukewarm water, a tiny orange juice and travel pack of Special K. I never get Coco Pops. This reminds me of Nancy. Just another victim of my recent scorched-earth social policy. Another casualty of my misplaced loyalty.

  Everything was fine up until Dad’s accident. I was getting by fine on my own. Maybe I could again. Except I’ll never be allowed to. By the time school starts, everyone in Barwen will know about Sasha and me. They probably already do.

  There’s no way I can go back to the Beauty Station. One Raylene McCarthy I can handle, but it won’t stop with just her. Buggs’s family and the rest of the Barwen royalty will be out in force. Eloise doesn’t deserve that, having to ruin her business to keep me on. The only thing worse than employing a murderer’s daughter would be employing a murderer’s gay daughter.

  All these thoughts are with me constantly. Probably I should be enjoying the isolation of a hospital bed. Perhaps I should be absorbing every overacted moment of the silent soap opera playing on the TV bolted to the wall. Maybe I should appreciate the l
ack of input from the old woman lying on the bed next to me, snoring through her open mouth. I should be lapping up these moments of anonymity, while my identity is still just a tick or a cross on a doctor’s clipboard.

  A rustling noise shocks me, and I look up to see Reeve in the doorway with a bunch of cellophane-wrapped flowers so crazily colourful they can’t possibly be real.

  ‘Oh hey,’ I say. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘How are you going, more like.’

  ‘Been better, I guess.’

  ‘They said you were awake, so…Does it hurt? You broke your rib?’

  ‘Three of them, apparently. It’s not so bad. I’m riding on a fluffy morphine cloud most of the time, anyway.’

  Reeve goes, ‘Always with the morphine,’ with a perfectly executed Dr Hibbert chuckle.

  I smile. It’s weird to see him. My thoughts are still a little muddled, but isn’t he supposed to hate me? ‘Hey thanks,’ I say. ‘I really owe you.’

  He waves a hand, like forget about it. ‘Probably the first and last time someone’s going to use one of my business cards.’

  ‘Your business cards save lives.’

  Reeve puts the flowers down on the end of the bed, eyeing the bouquet uncomfortably the way most boys do: I’ve given you these and now they’re yours and you can figure out what to do with them.

  ‘Sit down,’ I say. ‘You’ll only catch a minor disease from the chair, probably.’

  He says, ‘I’m just glad you’re okay. That you’re both okay.’

  ‘Thanks for the flowers. You didn’t have to bring them.’

  Reeve shrugs. ‘You have to bring something, don’t you. For some reason I had it in my head that you were supposed to bring grapes to people in hospital, but I don’t know if you like them.’

  ‘Flamin’ botoxed sultanas,’ I say, recycling a joke from months ago, a slow day at the shopping centre when we tried to think up insults for every item in the fruit shop.

  Reeve laughs, finally sitting down. ‘This was the second-cheapest bouquet they had at the florist,’ he says, patting the cellophane. ‘I hope you appreciate that.’

  ‘You know how to make a woman feel special,’ I say, trying to flutter my eyelids and probably not succeeding. Reeve’s face goes red. I’m an idiot.

  ‘Listen,’ I say. ‘Really. Thanks. For everything. I mean, I’m not the easiest person to get along with.’

  ‘Yes you are.’ He’s got the look of someone who’s trying to remember an obscure address.

  ‘No. I’m not. I ran off in the middle of lunch, for one thing.’

  ‘Well, that’s—I mean, it didn’t worry me. Why, um, did you though?’

  This is a good question. ‘I thought it was…something I had to do. I thought it was important.’

  ‘And was it?’

  ‘Not really. I thought it was. But it really wasn’t.’

  ‘Oh well,’ he says. ‘Good that you know now, hey?’

  ‘Was everyone pissed off?’

  ‘Not pissed off. Not really. Your mum and dad seemed…embarrassed, I guess, more than anything.’

  I cringe. ‘Yeah, I’ll bet. It was supposed to be this big together thing for the family. I put paid to that.’ Then, ‘What about Nancy? Was she okay?’

  ‘I think so. I mean, her mum sort of made them leave. The whole thing wrapped up pretty quickly.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Carla would definitely not want Nancy being around me now.

  ‘No, it was fine,’ Reeve says. ‘I just hung out with Angus and then got to take basically the whole lasagne home with me. It was amazing.’

  ‘You had to talk to Angus? Sorry.’

  ‘Nah, he’s cool. I never really hung out with him at school but he’s okay.’

  ‘My brother Angus? I’m sure there’s a head trauma specialist you could see while you’re here.’

  Reeve laughs. ‘He’s got some interesting ideas, I’ll give you that. But he’s a good guy.’

  I picture—again—the image of the dirt below the observatory, looming up towards me. I feel Angus’s grip on my arm, refusing to let me go. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘He actually might be.’

  ‘Up on the mountain,’ says Reeve. ‘That was something to do with Angus, wasn’t it? That’s why you were up there. Before lunch he was going on about this amazing discovery he was about to make. Wouldn’t say what it was.’

  There’s the other image I can’t shake: the black shape I saw in the lightning; the giant, moving muscle.

  ‘Just one of his schemes,’ I say. ‘One of many.’ For some reason, I want to protect my brother. I want his secret kept. ‘He owes you one as well.’

  Reeve shakes his head, like nah. ‘You’re the hero of this one, Clance. You’re the one who drove back down the mountain. I knew you were keen to get your licence, but man…’

  ‘They’ll never let me drive now. I left the ute upside-down in a field.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It was really…a really brave thing to do. Really brave.’

  A fresh wave of exhaustion hits me. ‘Why is everyone being so nice to me?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I feel tears welling up. ‘I mean, everyone’s acting like I’m this amazing person, but I’m just a weird freak. A crazy weird freak.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ says Reeve. ‘You’re the best person I know.’ He takes my hand, quickly, but his big hands are warm. His mouth is crushed up, like he doesn’t know what expression to make.

  ‘I’m always going to disappoint you. I disappoint everyone.’

  ‘Why?’ His thumb moves gently over the back of my hand.

  ‘Because I can’t…I can’t be who you want me to be.’ My words are a loosened knot.

  ‘You don’t have to be anyone.’

  I stare at the bridge of his nose. ‘I can’t be…someone who’s with you. Is what I’m saying.’

  His thumb stops moving. He takes his hand away.

  ‘It’s not you, though,’ I say. ‘It’s not because it’s you. It’s anyone. Any boy…man. That’s not who I am. I really like you but I can’t…like you the way you want me to.’ My thoughts are in a spiral and I have no way of knowing if he understands.

  Reeve’s quiet for a moment. Then he nods. ‘I see,’ he says. ‘I mean, I understand.’

  I’m not ready to tell him. I just can’t. ‘You’re too nice,’ I say. ‘You deserve so much happiness, or wealth, or pancakes. A girl who can make you happier than I can.’

  He says, quietly, ‘We all need people who make us feel like ourselves.’

  The big, beautiful idiot is making me cry. I’ve got new tears welling up behind tears and more just behind. Like an army assembling. Like shark’s teeth. ‘Why are you so nice?’ I say.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I’m awful to you behind your back.’

  I laugh. ‘You’re going to make beautiful nerdy babies with someone one day, Reeve. And that someone will be the luckiest person.’

  He smiles. It’s killing him, I know, but he smiles.

  43

  Angus is discharged from hospital and I’m not allowed to leave with him. This strikes me as grossly unfair, since he fell off a cliff and I just fell over. Turns out I did the most damage slipping over in the rain, then the car crash endangered a random selection of internal organs. Angus just had clean breaks and simple bruising and other annoyingly straightforward injuries. One of my ribs came close to puncturing my lung, so I had to stay longer for observation. Somehow, the thought of being observed seems worse than anything my own body could do to me.

  In the afternoons I’m sometimes allowed to come down to what the hospital laughingly calls a garden, which is really just a pot-planted segment of negative space between two buildings. It’s not outside, exactly, because it’s walled in, but in the afternoon a wafer of light and some fresh air sneak through the louvres.

  I’m there in my wheelchair on the Sunday before school’s supposed to start, reading a compellingly bad romance novel, when I realise so
meone is standing behind me.

  ‘Mum didn’t really want me to come,’ is the first thing I hear Nancy say. She walks around in front of me. She’s wearing her sunglasses, even though it’s not at all bright.

  All I can come up with is, ‘Okay.’

  I try to stuff the book down the side of my chair. The nurse brought around a literal crate of books once I was able to sit up in bed and they were all Mills and Boon. Cheesy and embarrassing tales of initially doomed but eventually hunky-dory boy/girl love. Reading them is like sculling raspberry cough syrup.

  Nancy just stands there, and we’re both not saying anything, and it’s like our friendship is back to square one.

  ‘So,’ I say. ‘Listen.’ I drag a blanket across my bare legs. I haven’t seen myself in a mirror for a long time but I can imagine how I look. ‘Thanks for coming.’ Is this it? Is this the best I can come up with?

  Nancy shrugs. ‘I brought you a card. It’s from everyone at Nature Club. They were all going to come, but I thought you wouldn’t like that very much.’ She hands me an envelope. It’s homemade paper, pressed with leaves. Everyone’s written inside, with predictably insane handwriting except for Olive and Tom’s exact cursive. There’s no message from Nancy.

  ‘The paper’s nice,’ I say. ‘Did you make it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  This is going to go on forever. ‘I’m sorry I was a dick.’

  Nancy goes, ‘Which particular time?’ which is a fair point.

  ‘The most recent time,’ I say. ‘And the other times. And any future times.’

  ‘Right from the heart, then.’ Nancy starts grinding her teeth. I can see the muscles in her jaw moving.

  Bloody hell. ‘I really am sorry,’ I say. ‘I just—I feel like all I do in my life is apologise to people.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a reason for that.’