The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  Night Time Musings of Bindy Mackenzie

  Thursday, 1.00 am

  Still can’t sleep. My mind has wandered far from images of inky black mud. I am thinking, instead, of open doors.

  Often I hold a door open because I think someone is behind me, and then I discover they are actually a long way back. There was the incident with Finnegan, but also, at Kmart the other day, I held a door for my supervisor, who has a knee-brace and walks with a cane. It took light years for her to limp over, even though she tried to hurry so as not to hold me up. ‘Thanks,’ she panted, but I heard something other than thanks in her voice.

  I therefore believe that I am not very good at:

  judging distances

  Further Night Time Musings of Bindy Mackenzie

  Thursday, 2.00 am

  I have stomach cramps.

  I wonder if training in archery or firearms might help to improve my ability to:

  judge distances

  Further Extended Night Time Musings of Bindy Mackenzie

  Thursday, 3.00 am

  At least, there is this: today I revealed the poisonous souls of two more people.

  Second Further Extended Night Time Musings of Bindy Mackenzie

  Thursday, 3.05 am

  Wait, no, it was not today, it was yesterday! Now it is the next day. It’s early the next day, of course, but it is the next day. The Thurs-day. The Thor’s day. Thor is the Norse god of thunder and so am I, I just realised, the god of thunder, the goddess of storms, for I know how to bluster and I know

  Oh, what am I talking about.

  Let me say this. I treated my symptoms of anti-climax by doubling my efforts. It was like getting two planes on the runway instead of just one, or twice as many engines, or twice as many flight attendants, oh, what I am talking about.

  Anyway, two poisonous souls instead of one. And I spoke their souls to their faces instead of just writing them down.

  I felt a shadow of guilt as I did this and here is why: there is a difference between poisonous and venomous.

  A poisonous animal is one that has toxins inside it. It doesn’t attack you, but let’s say you eat it? You die (or you get sick).

  But a venomous animal has something like fangs which it uses to attack you—to inject you with its venom. You don’t have to eat it, you just have to get in its way.

  Briony, Elizabeth and Sergio are merely poisonous. They don’t mean to do harm, they’re like a sea-cucumber or butterfly. Their poison is really a defence against predators. They are not so culpable as the venomous ones: Toby and Emily and Astrid.

  And so I felt the shadow of guilt when I turned on Briony and Elizabeth today, and yet I wonder now: why feel guilty? Remember what Briony wrote on my Name Game? I believe she has just the right mix of stupidity and manners to write something as nasty as this:

  You can’t help who you are, Bindy, and maybe you will change this year? Good luck with Year 11.1 think you will change.

  She probably believed it would encourage me.

  Elizabeth Clarry, meanwhile, is often short and sharp. I therefore conclude that it was she who wrote:

  A hit too smart.

  Too smart for what, Ms Clarry? Too smart for you? Can’t run fast enough to keep up with my brains?

  So.

  No guilt.

  They ought to know the nature of their souls, and I have revealed them. (Although, it was disconcerting to discover that Briony already knew about her soul. Her mother is a marine biologist! Who could have predicted?)

  Next week, I will complete my task.

  The final victims are Sergio and Astrid.

  Sergio is innocent enough, but, like a platypus, he can surprise you with a spurt of venom. (I suppose that technically makes him venomous, since he can attack, but not very often, and not in the same league as that venomous three. None is in the same league as Astrid.)

  I believe it was the platypus who wrote that I wear my hair ‘weird’ and suggested that it takes ‘guts’ to do so. Sergio has laughed at my hairstyle before, and is just the sort of person to twist cruelly into ‘compliment’.

  There is no doubt in my mind that Astrid—the sea wasp—wrote this:

  I have never spoken to Bindy, but I am sure that behind her extremely annoying personality she is a beautiful human being.

  I have two things to say about Astrid:

  1. She lied when she said she had never spoken to me.

  2. She is the most venomous of all.

  Third Further Extended Night Time Musings of Bindy Mackenzie

  Thursday, 4.03 am

  Strange, after a day like today—I mean yesterday, of course— a day when I revealed two souls, and furtheralsomore . . . what a strange and wonderful word! Furtheralsomore. I love it. Anyway, furtheralsomore, I refused to attend their Saturday ‘get-together’ at Try’s house—they will be wasting time, filling in foolish ‘confidential’ questionnaires and talking about themselves, but I will have a wondrous Saturday! After Kmart, I’ll get homework done, maybe summarise my History notes, work through Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist, Complete Piano Exercises, match up some of my odd socks. I’ll write my speech for English next week. I always win that speech contest. I’ll feed the ca—

  But where was I?

  Ah, yes, strange. Strange that my symptoms of anti-climax persist even after revealing two souls.

  I still have the headache, my stomach hurts, and I’m so tired. Yet I cannot sleep tonight—perhaps I fear a return to that dream of corpses and tree roots. My arms are so heavy and numb I scarcely believe that I can lift them.

  Auntie Veronica said at dinner that she feels the same way herself, so I suppose we still have that virus, but how long can it last?

  ‘What a coincidence,’ Uncle Jake said. ‘You two having the same thing!’

  What does he mean? Why should we not have the same virus? We live in the same house! I don’t understand him.

  And more to the point, and furtheralsomore, he doesn’t pronounce the word correctly. A university professor!

  ‘Co-inky-dence,’ he says, and it makes me want to kill him.

  Further Final Extended Fourth Night Musing Times of Bindy Good Night Mackenzie

  Thursday, 4.52 am

  Oh, I must confess it.

  The Venomous Seven,

  What seven? What seven?

  What Venomous Seven?

  There are the poisonous (Briony, Elizabeth and Sergio), there are the venomous (Toby, Emily, and unforgivable Astrid), but even the poison and the venom adds only to six—and all along I have lied when I have called them the Venomous Seven.

  I did it because it rhymed.

  They are only Six, and

  Finnegan

  Finnegan

  Finnegan Blonde

  IS NOT AMONG THEM!

  Why did I disgrace him by including his name in that number? Oh, the number seven, it disgraces him! And just for the sake of the rhyme! (Or anyway, it was an internal half-rhyme. The assonance of those recurring v’s and e’s . . .)

  But why does he disgrace himself, I perplex me, by mingling with the musk-oxen?

  I do not know him well, of course, but I know this for-certain-sure: he is neither poisonous nor venomous.

  No. I see it in his eyes: kindness.

  That rare and valuable—it was he who wrote those simple words, the only kind words, the jewel among the mud, on my Name Game:

  A fast typist.

  My breath stops at the sight of them.

  He is an enigma, a mystery. How did he come to float into our FAD group, the sunlight at play in his hair? Nay, how does he continue to float? I fear his toes must brush against the tops of their heads. I fear he must tarnish his toes. He is in danger! Every moment he spends among them his sweet pink toes are in danger! In danger of inky black mud!

  (I have never seen his toes and must admit, I do not know that they are pink.)

  As his buddy I should advise him to drop out of FAD. It behoves me, nay, it is my
duty to give him this advice!

  (Maybe he and I should drop out together? We could spend FAD session time engaged in joint study sessions. It’s not a bad idea.)

  For now, at last, I fall asleep yet my eyes blur with tears at the thought of his words: a fast typist.

  He must have seen me typing earlier that week, the week of the very first FAD session.

  How generous of him to have noticed me, before we were even introduced.

  14

  A day in the life of Bindy Mackenzie . . .

  Monday.

  Worst day of my life?

  It began with this:

  Uncle Jake, in the kitchen, with the box.

  Usually, it’s just Veronica and me at breakfast—sometimes chatting quietly, sometimes spooning out our grapefruit wedges, lost in thought.

  But there was Jake in his blue flannel pyjamas, ripping up a cardboard box.

  ‘Bind, you look as bad as I feel,’ said Veronica, and immediately dropped her head onto the table with a clunk. She closed her eyes and appeared to fall asleep. Sometimes Veronica is much like her four-year-old daughter.

  I ate my grapefruit. Jake ripped up his cardboard box. Veronica dozed, her head resting on the table. Now and then she sat up, looked at her teacup, blinked, and rested again. We heard the sound of Bella shouting in her bedroom: ‘I have not been playing with the remote control! It’s not a toy!’ Bella often defends herself in her sleep. There was a grunt from Jake as he tugged at some masking tape on the box.

  ‘Jake?’ I said. ‘What’s that box you’re tearing up?’

  Veronica sat up and slapped her own cheeks.

  ‘Finally she asks!’ Jake beamed at Veronica. ‘Go look in the living room, Bind, and you’ll see what was inside the box.’

  I did as he asked.

  Standing in the centre of the room was a shiny, bright white baby swing. It was decorated with dolphins.

  I returned to the kitchen in confusion.

  It was much too small for Bella. Had they lost their sense of proportion?

  But Veronica’s eyes shimmered, Jake dimpled and grinned—and suddenly I understood. ‘You’re having a new baby,’ I whispered.

  ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ said Veronica.

  ‘We weren’t going to tell anyone for a couple more weeks,’ explained Jake excitedly, ‘but we saw that swing on sale yesterday and guess what, Bind, you’re the first person we’ve told!’

  I stood in the centre of the kitchen and exclaimed: ‘A baby!’ I’d never been the first to be told about a baby before. I tried to dance my hands about to show excitement.

  But I had a strange sensation, as if there were some problem I’d forgotten.

  ‘I don’t know if Bella’s going to like this news,’ Veronica was saying, ‘but I’ve got to say, I feel just like I did when she was on the way. I’m so tired and—’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I interrupted, realising the problem. ‘This virus that we’ve both got—isn’t that why you feel like this? I mean, are you sure you’re—?’

  Veronica and Jake looked at me.

  ‘Well, there are one or two other indications,’ Veronica began, gently. ‘And the doctor—’

  ‘But haven’t we got the same symptoms?’ I persisted. ‘I mean, I thought we had the same—’

  Uncle Jake stepped in.

  ‘Isn’t it a co-inky-dence!’ he cried. ‘You two have the same thing!’

  Now at last his ‘joke’ made sense.

  ‘Hey Bindy,’ he continued, ‘you must be pregnant too!’

  They both burst out laughing.

  That’s when I lost my mind.

  ‘WHAT’S SO FUNNY?’ I shouted. ‘WHY DO YOU ASSUME THAT I’M NOT?!!!’

  And I ran from the room.

  As I pounded up the stairs I was conscious of silence from the kitchen. Then, as I reached the landing, I heard Jake murmur something, and they exploded into laughter once again.

  At school, my subjects rolled grimly by, much like a convoy of tanks.

  In German, the room blurred with regret. I recalled the image of myself in the kitchen, dancing my hands to show excitement. I must have looked like a tree, stolidly fixed to the ground, its branches tossed by the wind. Shouldn’t the tree have uprooted itself, rushed to Veronica, and hugged her? Why had the tree lost its temper and sprinted from the room? Was that an appropriate reaction for a tree, when told news of a pregnancy?

  My face burned with shame. (And with confusion. Was I a girl or a tree?)

  I was so regretful that when Ernst leaned over, his fringe in his eyes, to say, ‘Bindy, you’ve gotta check out my blog. I’ve been riffing on the topic of Emily debating and—’, I interrupted him.

  ‘Ernst,’ I said coldly, ‘isn’t it time you got yourself a new name?’

  He was startled into silence.

  In Biology, I couldn’t really concentrate. I was wondering at my announcement that morning that I could be pregnant too. (I couldn’t.)

  At recess, I happened upon Toby, along with Briony and the evil Astrid, standing outside the tuckshop.

  I tried to skirt around them but they noticed me, and embraced me with their conversation. They were talking about the FAD event I had missed on Saturday. The one that took place at Try’s house. They wanted to tell me about it.

  They said that Try lived in an enormous house with no furniture. This house, it seemed, faced onto Castle Hill Heritage Park, and Try had taken them into the park for a picnic. She had brought coconuts along. She had instructed each ‘Buddy Pair’ to work together to get milk out of the coconut, using nothing but the objects in the park.

  ‘Finnegan had to do it on his own,’ Astrid informed me. ‘He looked so lonely. Just kind of wandering.’

  ‘He was wandering lonely as a cloud,’ Toby explained.

  ‘A cloud with a coconut.’ Astrid was wistful.

  ‘Astrid and Emily tried to strangle their coconut,’ said Toby.

  ‘They used the ropes from the climbing equipment.’ (That was Briony. I am always surprised when she speaks.) Astrid shrugged, proudly.

  It seemed that nobody had got the milk out of their coconut. There had been a sudden downpour, and they had all run back into Try’s house, where she offered them towels and freshly baked banana bread.

  ‘You should have been there, Bindy,’ said Astrid. ‘Try’s got this massive big dictionary? You would have just gone off when you saw it.’

  ‘I would have gone off?’ I repeated, acidly. ‘Like old cheese?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  But before I had a chance to explain, the three of them had launched into an animated discussion about their favourite kinds of cheese.

  In Modern History, our assessment tasks were handed back (and a new case study was assigned). I got 18/20. Fine, I thought, the scale must be tougher than usual. But I happen to sit behind Elizabeth Clarry, and there at the tilt of her shiny white page was her mark:

  19/20.

  I closed my eyes and that beautiful red number shimmered. 19. What was it doing on her assignment? Surely it was my 19! I checked to see that the papers hadn’t got mixed up, but no, this was my paper, and Elizabeth Clarry had hers. Yet, there was no doubt: Elizabeth Clarry, long distance runner, Elizabeth Clarry, Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing—Elizabeth Clarry had my mark.

  I spent recess looking for the teacher, Ms Walcynski, to demand an explanation but could not find her.

  In Maths (Extension 1), Ms Yen was writing up a theorem on the board.

  I noticed a flaw in her logic and called out a correction. She turned, she frowned, and Lucy Tan announced that I was wrong. There was no flaw in Ms Yen’s logic, said Lucy primly, but, she reassured me, she could see where I’d got confused.

  Ms Yen smiled, thanked us both, and carried on.

  At lunchtime, in the library, I opened my Maths textbook and considered the theorem. No matter how many times I reworked it, I could not escape the conclusion that Lucy Tan had been right.


  I was mortified.

  I flicked through the textbook to a later chapter. I would learn all about quadratic polynomials! One day, Ms Yen and Lucy would humbly ask my opinion on the relation between roots and coefficients! ‘Ah, Lucy,’ I would smile, tenderly. ‘I can see where you’ve got confused.’

  The prospect of Double English did lighten my heart somewhat. To my surprise, our ‘temporary’ teacher (Miss Flynn) has continued to show up each lesson. And she gets to the heart of the texts. She is softly spoken, inclining towards knee-length skirts and pastel cardigans. She often refers to the notes on her desk as she teaches, squinting down at them ferociously. And she has a trick of drumming the fingers of one hand onto the palm of the other when anyone talks nonsense for too long. This is an effective way of cutting the nonsense off. (I admit, I have begun to hope that our missing teacher, Ms Lawrence, will never return from her surfing trip.)

  More to the point, this English lesson was to be the final day in our oratory contest.

  The last few students would speak on topics of their choice, and Miss Flynn would declare the winner. (Winners from each class then compete, and the champion represents the school.)

  Each year, it is I who represent the school.

  I had given my speech yesterday, and was quietly confident.

  But today, Emily Thompson spoke, and may the planets spin like marbles, may the sun slip like egg yolk from the sky—Emily Thompson was a hit.

  She was informative and entertaining, and she had the class in fits.

  And guess what her topic was?

  That those who employ foul language are staining the fabric of our society.

  The very topic I had given her as a ‘practice debate’. She even mentioned that I had come up with the topic. (Everyone tittered.) She then proceeded to treat it as a joke, offering a satirical survey of ‘swearing’ and ‘cursing’ through time.

  ‘Why are people afraid of swearing?’ she cried. ‘It’s only words. It’s only letters of the alphabet!’ Then she took up a box which she had placed on a nearby desk, opened the lid and tipped a noisy pile of white squares onto the floor. The box was a Scrabble game and the squares were letter tiles. (She did this for dramatic effect.)