Who’s Karen?
“Well, what do you think?”
I shook my head suddenly realising exactly where I was: in the top floor of the library with Lisa standing before me. I didn’t know what to say, so she carried on.
“According to police reports, Serene had been drifting away from her parents and anything to do with them. There were also small traces of THC in her system but a much higher dosage of alcohol. The police report made it clear that these were probably the causes for the girl – ” Lisa raised her fingers to quote the next part with a good dose of sarcasm “ – ‘terminating’ her life. They said that the effect of THC could have put her into a delusional state, either of being indestructible or making her problems seem a lot worse than they were. Well, the reports say all this and they sound quite convincing, but I wanted to see what you thought.”
She left an unasked question dangling there in mid-air but I still didn’t understand why she was telling me this stuff or why she thought I would know anything.
I had to sit down.
I moved to a set of cushioned chairs next to a window and looked down at the pavement below. I had no recollection of walking those pavements to get to the library entrance, I had no recollection of walking down the main street or even turning at a set of lights to get onto the main street. I do have a vague memory of walking across a lot of grass and through some flower beds, but honestly, that could have been from any other time I had visited the space behind the museum or the gardens in the adjacent park. It kinda scared me that I had no memory of walking here, nor how or where I managed to meet up with Lisa so that we were both here together. I had never had such a long period of memory lapse before.
“Well, what do you think?”
What did I think? I wanted to know what the fuck was in that weed!
I turned away from the window and placed my arm up on the back of the seat so that I could run my fingers along a bookshelf that ended next to where I sat. “What do I think Lisa? I’m not a fuckin’ reporter, I’m not someone who goes after answers like they were available to be found in some hidden area of a room. I don’t know what you want me to say. I don’t even know why you would think I’d know anything.”
“Because, David, you are the only person I know with drug connections.”
“You make me sound like a dealer.”
She supplied me with a sarcastic apology. “Sorry.”
I didn’t appreciate it.
“Well, it’s not just that. It’s the fact that she was a part of your church, and you’re the only person I still …”
I was furious. “It was our church! Our church! You were there too. So what if I was brought up in it, so what that I had spent my entire life worshipping in those walls. We were both there together, and you can’t deny being in that church meant any less to you.” I suddenly became aware of how loud I was talking and looked around me as everyone in the library stared at the two of us. I buried my head in my arms letting my voice fall to the ground. “I was out of there before you anyway. I haven’t felt a part of anything for over a year now.”
“Well, I’m sorry David. But I did invite you to my new church and that option’s always open to you.”
“Thanks, but it’s not really my scene.”
She was silent.
I raised my head leaning back on the seat. “I was kicked out of church three and a half months before…” I had to swallow hard to get it out “…that girl killed herself. For crying out loud, even you were there closer to it happening – didn’t you see any signs that something was going to happen?”
“Well, no, David, I didn’t. But that’s mainly because I had left also, about three weeks after you. And I never knew her, anyway. She was in that group that I never really talked to, said ‘hi’ couple of times, but after you were gone, I had no real reason to stay.” She looked down at the ground between us. “Rickerton called me into his office and tried to convince me that you were beyond saving and that I should keep away from you for fear of the devil taking yet another into his possession.”
“The bastard.” I fidgeted with the spine of a book on the shelf. “How long did it take him to get that message to you?”
“Oh, it was about ten or so days later, after things had calmed down. He made random references to it in his sermons but never directly spoke about it, then he called me in, realising, I think, that I was the only one of your friends from outside of the church that he might not have any direct influence over so tried to make it sound like you were the devil inherent. That’s kinda when the reins got tightened and I was on my way.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I kind of cruised around Sunday to Sunday, looking at different churches, seeing what each one had to offer. Met Wendy at a really coolly decorated Anglican church over East, but neither of us were that keen on their subdued nature. She said to me that she had come from out of town and had attended other Anglican churches that totally knew what was going on, and weren’t scared to change their approach to accommodate the new age, but this one was stuck in the past. So we kinda got together and did the circuit for a while ‘till we saw Claire singing her guts out at City Light, then we knew that we had arrived at the right place! We went up and introduced…”
At this point I kind of drifted off and let her ramble on about their meeting and how the three of them had hit it off straight away. I didn’t really care. At the most it made me feel like she was giving me more reason to hate her for finding a new life that had made her happy. I couldn’t understand why she would tell me all this stuff so enthusiastically, like I would somehow enjoy hearing about what I was missing out on. She smiled with so much ignorance as she talked about all her exploits with her friends, all the stupid stuff they got up to as they cemented their friendships. Lisa was getting extremely good at the proverbial ‘slap in the face’. And I was getting extremely good at remembering the days on end that I had been stuck in my room hating my life.
But I don’t think she ever got it. Not then, nor anytime afterwards. It was like seeing somebody who called themselves a friend, and then never bothering to include you as a friend – all say and no do.
“…y’ know they have these rules, really strict about who you can and can’t see, but they’re designed to help you live a better life, and that’s cool with me because I know how worse my life could be.” She ended with a big smile on her face.
“Congratulations,” I said. “You’ve found a new life.”
“Thanks.”
She looked at me with enthusiasm. I wasn’t returning the feeling.
“So anyway, what I need to know now, is how Serene Gilligan might have got her hands on the drugs, who the people were she was hanging out with.”
I thought for a moment about random discussions I had had with my dealer over the last few months. We rarely had much to talk about – he was into growing, I was into smoking. But there had been some occasions that we had chatted about random subjects while he prepared either a bag or a tinny – whatever I could afford at the time – for me as I sat and waited: the movies, WINZ; other harder drugs I might be keen to try… fuck, the amount of times I said ‘no’ to anything that might lead me to an uncontrollable addiction! He was always keen to give a sample away for free, but fuck, was I going to try it? No Fuckin’ Way! Synthesized drugs were not my cup of tea, thank you very much! “Go to nature,” as Bill once said.
“Do you remember Delbo?” I turned my head to look at her directly. “That guy who used to sell tinnies that were filtered through with tobacco but he still sold them at normal price? I got told, not so long ago, that she went to him about two weeks before she died.”
“Oh, yeah, didn’t he get his head beaten in almost as soon as he started selling them?”
“Yeah, but he carried on selling them to young kids who didn’t know any better so he got his way in the end.”
“What did she go to him for?”
“He was the guy on her block that had all
the contacts.”
“See, you do know something!”
“Yeah, but I only remembered this the other day. And only because you had started talking about it to me. Otherwise there’s no real reason to remember random shit like that.”
“No I guess not.” She thought for a moment. “So it was drug related?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Sure, why not? Just like every other suicide in the world. Blame it on the drugs, it’s always the drug’s fault. Look, it happened after I had been kicked out of the church. There isn’t really anything else I can tell you. Why do you even care?”
“I don’t know.”
I knew she knew though, if not consciously, then at least subconsciously – people don’t persistently ask questions because they ‘don’t know’.
After a pause to look out the window and perhaps to contemplate her answer, she asked, “Don’t you think it sucks that there isn’t any better answer? Rather than just what the papers had to say?”
“Sure, but sometimes you just have to accept these things and let them be.” I wasn’t going to bother giving her the ol’ ‘it was her time and she’s in God’s hands now’ shit – not after having got that sort of talk for so long through my own life. And especially with the case of a suicide – God wants the person so he drives them to suicide? No, it was never ‘time’ for a suicide, but the act does leave the soul in the hands of the almighty regardless. And besides, the fact that Lisa hadn’t just left this subject to lie meant there was something deep inside of her that really needed to know the unanswered questions. But I had no idea of what that was. Lisa had survived her ordeal, had walked that close to the edge and made it back; it didn’t make sense that she wouldn’t understand why another person had stepped over the edge if she had been there herself.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, I feel like you’re wasting your time asking me questions. After what happened with me at church, and everyone had finally shown me just where they stood, I turned my back and tried to forget everything that had ever happened.”
She looked at me with some sense of regret in her eyes. Perhaps it was just pity, but I think there was a mutual feeling of letting the conversation end there. And besides, I was getting a serious bout of the munchies, so I told her that I was going to go and grab something to eat.
“Yeah, that’s cool David. I’m so glad you decided to come anyway. I’ve kinda been here for a while, going through the old newspapers, but there was so little said in the papers about it. So weird.”
“No one likes a depressing story,” I said without much sympathy.
She grumbled annoyance but I don’t think she was serious about it.
I wanted out. I needed food and fresh air, and being in a building wasn’t doing any good for my comedown. “I’m gonna take off now. We should catch up again sometime.”
She smiled. “Yeah definitely.”
I stood up giving a curt smile and then left. As I cruised down the escalator I couldn’t help looking through the huge windows, seeing her still seated in the same place, leaning her head against the back of the chair, reaching a hand up and rubbing her eyes. The floor passed over her as tall green pot-plants came into my field of vision. I felt as though that whole conversation had been a comedown all on its own. I knew what I’d be doing when I got back to the flat.
Part IV
– Indifference –
Tonight at work I robotasised myself.
I had to – the job was so dull that I could do nothing but turn my mind into a working machine that turned the cogs and levers of my body for me. Later I became a transfer station. There I was required to transfer boxes of frozen food product from a conveyor to stacked piles inside a steel container.
I didn’t care much for what the ‘frozen product’ was. I could have assumed it was bakery, but there was other stuff happening at the plant, like sauces and spreads, so for all I knew, these boxes could have actually contained packets of cocaine getting ready to be transferred around New Zealand; could have even been boxes of illegal horse meat; hell, it could have been boxes of body parts – my co-worker did look pretty suspicious in that respect. His shifty eyes, his brow almost sweating under the pressure of being found out…
The boxes were carried along a small conveyor belt from the freezers and then down a roller belt into my arms and with a simple swing of the body the box was in its place down on the floor or on top of other boxes that had already covered the floor of the steel container. This became less simple as the pile got higher and my arms had to work harder to push the momentum of the boxes up rather than straight across or down. A few boxes were missed and fell onto the floor before I could grab them, but I didn’t really care.
I had stopped caring a long time ago. It was too late to pretend that a simple job like this was going to make any difference, that plonking a leaflet in front of Mum was going to make any difference. I didn’t even care that I was working for minimum wage – it wasn’t like the job demanded anything more from me. Each new job became nothing more than a simple experience, something to give my physical body something to do, something to help me forget my past and forget what I had once been, to even forget what I had become. None of it mattered anymore; not my life, not this job, not the city and least of all a world that couldn’t solve its own problems. I was just one person who had little to offer any of it. I couldn’t even pretend that I could make a difference.
For so many years I had paraded an air of caring and sharing all the while preaching concern about the unfortunate, the suffering, and that it will end when every single one of us makes the effort to change the world for the better. But who was listening? And who cared? I can honestly say that I had once cared, but I had once also had a forum and an audience to help me care through. Now I just had boxes of frozen food, body parts and cocaine rolling down the line and swinging off the ends of my arms into big steel containers to be shipped to another country where Capitalism makes greed a virtue for the poor to envy.
That’s all I had. Work and a wage.
A minimum wage.
I thought about the fourteen dollars every hour I was earning while standing around waiting for the co-worker on the other end of the line to load the conveyor belt with more boxes; I thought about those slave labourers in some far away country working for five cents an hour, stitching up the shoes that I wore to work this morning. Did I care?
I couldn’t have cared less! Not my problem. Their fault for getting such a shitty low paying job. Fuck, I had it sweet! I stood around for about half an hour waiting to be told to do something, waiting for other workers to get their shit into gear, waiting for supervisors to figure out the instructions that had come down to them from management – I earned myself seven dollars in that half hour. I wouldn’t have traded that for a five cent job ever – would you?
* * *
I got moved around a lot, which helped relieve some of the boredom, but most of the jobs just didn’t have anything going for them so most of the time I was working while checking around corners to see if I could spot Lucas. We hardly saw each other which kinda bummed me out, because everyone else I talked to didn’t have anything interesting to say at all. I’d tell them what I used to do before this and they’d smile and say “oh, that’s nice” or “good on ya” and smile generously before turning back to reading their newspaper as if they actually regretted asking me in the first place. I came to despise talking to people, so I started shrugging dismissively whenever I was asked something.
Word got around the factory that I didn’t want to be spoken to so the only people who spoke to me were the ones that had to teach me a new job. And Lucas, but I saw so little of him that it didn’t really matter.
All I wanted to do was bend and twist the fat blunt-like rolls of pastry into crab-like claws as fast as I could; cut the thick trail of cookie dough into fat slabs or pack the slabs into boxes – whichever job they gave me; mix and cook the sauces in large bowls that required two people each to
attend to; take left over trash to the dumpster that I had once stolen from; and take a break in my car while listening to ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ and letting myself fall asleep for much longer than the allocated time I had been given.
I had to admit that I hated this job the most and had finally got to the point where I wanted out. I wanted out of it all.
Pure black looking clear
My work is done soon here.
Part V
– One Friday night –
“I need a break.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows. “Half an hour smoko-break not enough for you?”
I smiled. “I need to do something that isn’t work-related. Just cruise the streets or something. Shit, maybe even get drunk.”
He looked astounded. “Really?” But it was all mockery. “I never thought I’d hear you David say ‘I need to get drunk’. Stoned – yes; drunk – not so much.”
“Well, y’ know, as much as I hate what alcohol does to people, sometimes it’s nice to have a couple of cold ones.”
He looked out the window. “Yeah, nothing like a cold one on a cold Wintry day! Tina’s having that party soonish and that’s out Winton way, if you’re still keen.”
“The one you told me about after I got the job at the Laundry Rentals?”
“Yeah that’s the one. Her partner’s got some time off from work and is keen to pitch in with the food and stuff.”
“Yeah, sounds cool.” I remember we had talked about it a little while back after Tinsdale had invited his mates over one night and I decided to visit Lucas on a whim. “But I guess I need something a little sooner, just to break from the monotony of the work at this place.”
“Yeah, true. It’s pretty boring, but money is money. I think once I save a little I’ll quit, coz there’s only so much a person can take of this kind of work.”
I Am The Local Atheist Page 19