Riggs Crossing

by Michelle Heeter

  ‘Mrs Crabtree, are you sure it was Trell Anderson you saw running from that burning building?’

  Mrs Crabtree turns red. ‘Are you calling me a liar?’ she squeals indignantly. ‘Are you casting aspersions on my character?’

  ‘No, Mrs Crabtree,’ Clarissa replies acidly. ‘I’m not casting aspersions of any sort. I am questioning your attitudes toward African-Americans, the reliability of your memory, and the accuracy of your eyesight.’ Clarissa turns to the judge. ‘No further questions, Your Honour,’ she says.

  Of course, Clarissa wins the case. She always does.

  Even so, Clarissa isn’t overjoyed. ‘I have a feeling I’m going to be representing Trell again someday,’ Clarissa says grimly, as she snaps her briefcase shut.

  After the episode ends, there’s the usual five minutes of ads. A model strides down a dark alley and knocks on a door. When the door opens, she pulls off her dress so she’s wearing nothing but lacy red and black underthings. ‘Ripper,’ a voice whispers, as she steps into the darkened house. Then the screen goes black and Ripper Intimates is displayed in red type.

  I switch off the TV when a McCain’s frozen food commercial comes on. I hate that part at the end where they say, ‘Ah, McCain’s, you’ve done it a-GAIN’. One night, that commercial was the last thing I saw before I went to bed, and I heard it rolling through my brain about a hundred times before I could get to sleep.

  I climb the stairs, put on my pyjamas, and climb into bed.

  Ripperrr, the TV voice purrs.

  ‘Ripper!’ Daddy used to say, if something really pleased him. ‘Ripper got me best patch,’ says Ernie.

  I jerk awake, run to the light switch and turn on the light. It takes me a few minutes to calm down. I pull out a book out from under my bed. Georges Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large. It’s too advanced for me to understand. Or maybe it’s just boring. That’s the best kind of book to read if you’re trying to go to sleep. I still haven’t figured out why a woman is named Georges, or why George has an ‘s’ on the end, or why it’s ‘writ’ instead of ‘written’. I put the book away, turn off the light, close my eyes, and think sand, sand, sand, sand, sand, sand, until I fall asleep.

  Chapter 9

  Today, instead of asking me lots of questions, Lyyssa has given me a notebook. ‘You might want to use it to write down your feelings. You know, like a journal or diary.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, taking the notebook. It’s spiral-bound with two hundred pages. I like it, even though I know it’s another one of Lyyssa’s techniques to get me to tell her things. I’m glad she gave me a regular notebook, instead of some twee little pink book with ‘My Secret Diary’ written on the front in fancy letters, and held shut by some tiny metal lock that anyone could break. Karen was looking at one like that at the two-dollar shop in Westgardens Metro like she wanted to buy it, but Bindi and Cinnamon made fun of her so she put it back. For once, I had to agree with Bindi and Cinnamon. I hate cutesy, phony things like that. They’re embarrassing.

  ‘You’ll need a pen, too,’ Lyyssa says, opening the supply cupboard and giving me a choice of four new pens. There’s a black fine point, a black roller ball, a blue ballpoint stick pen, and a blue gel ink pen with a rubber grip. I pick the one with the rubber grip.

  Lyyssa says I can stay and talk if I like, or we can skip today’s session if I prefer.

  ‘I don’t really have anything to talk about. Is it okay if we skip the session?’

  Lyyssa seems a little disappointed, but she says that’s fine and lets me go. I take the notebook back to my room and sit on my bed for a few minutes, admiring the crisp, unspoiled white pages. I know I don’t have to worry about hiding it. Lyyssa may be a stickybeak, but she’s also a fanatic about ‘respecting boundaries’. Just the same, I decide I’ll keep it underneath my mattress.

  There’s a space on the front of the notebook to write your name. But since Len Russell isn’t my real name, I don’t bother.

  I think about what I want to write in the notebook. Something has been floating in the back of my mind all day, bothering me, distracting me. I try to put my finger on what it is. I sit quietly for a few minutes, and then I remember. It was something I was thinking about last night before I fell asleep. I pick up my pen and start writing.

  It’s Saturday. A girlfriend of Daddy’s is here, not one I’ve seen before. Now that she’s curled her hair and put on all her makeup she doesn’t have anything to do, so she’s sitting in a lounge chair looking bored. I’m playing Milk Jug with our dog Reggie. Milk Jug is his favourite game. You take an empty plastic milk jug by the handle and Reggie jumps up and sinks his teeth into it. Then you play tug-o-war, trying to pull the jug toward you as Reggie pretend-growls and pulls in the opposite direction. Reggie could pull you off your feet if he really wanted to, but he’s smart enough to know that doing that would ruin the game.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid to let her play with a pit bull?’

  I don’t know why she’s so concerned about me playing with the dog. She didn’t care when I burned my hand on the kettle earlier.

  ‘Reggie’s a staffie cross, not a pit bull.’ Daddy’s watching the cricket on TV and doesn’t bother looking at the lady when he talks to her. He talks to the lady like he talks to all of them, like she’s kind of stupid and not really worth talking to.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid he’ll bite her?’

  ‘He’s a sook,’ Daddy says, and turns up the sound.

  ‘Don’t you think you should get him de-sexed?’ The lady raises her voice to be heard over the TV.

  Daddy hits the mute button, sets his feet on the floor and looks directly at the lady. If she doesn’t shut up after Daddy does this, then she really is stupid. ‘A dog like that has two purposes in life: to fight, and to root. You take both those things away, he’ll go crazy.’

  Then Daddy turns the sound back on and puts his feet back up on the coffee table.

  Once I’ve finished writing, I read what I’ve written. Then I close the notebook and put it under my mattress.

  Chapter 10

  Today is my last regular visit with Scott, the physiotherapist. We’ve been doing exercises to help me extend my range of movement. After being inactive those weeks in hospital, I was pretty stiff and inflexible. Since I’m working with a tutor rather than going to school, we have to decide on a type of exercise for me since I won’t be doing sport as a class.

  Scott is soft-spoken and gentle, not really the kind of person you’d think of as the ‘sporty’ type. He’s broad-shouldered and tall. You wouldn’t immediately guess how strong he is. I could feel the strength in his hands when he was working on my shoulders and lower back.

  ‘Can I take up racquetball?’ Clarissa Hobbs does racquetball.

  ‘Racquetball?’ Scott looks at me through his rimless glasses and blinks. ‘Well, I don’t see why not, but racquetball’s not that popular. It might be difficult for you to find a place to take lessons. Why don’t you try tennis?’

  I figure tennis will do.

  ‘And can I start lifting weights?’

  Scott frowns slightly. ‘You can do light weight training,’ he says. ‘Just dumbbells – no barbells and definitely no weight machines. Your bones and muscles are still developing – I don’t want you pumping iron and risking injury. And don’t even think of dieting,’ Scott cautions me further. ‘You’re a mesomorph – stocky and muscular. There’s no sense in starving yourself to make yourself look like Lila-Rose and LeeLee. You’re not built that way.’

  I’d rather be dead than look plastic and phony like Lila-Rose and LeeLee, who probably started wearing thick makeup at age three, but I take his point. Scott says he’ll ask Lyyssa to order a tennis outfit for me, and arrange lessons at a gym twice a week.

  ‘Can you swim?’

  Can I swim? I think about this. When I scan my brain for swimming, I come up blank, just like when I try to remember anything about my mother.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Everyone should l
earn how to swim,’ Scott says firmly. ‘We’ll sign you up for swimming lessons once a week.’ He makes a note for Lyyssa to get me a swimsuit as well. ‘That should be enough for the time being. If you decide you want to spend more time at the gym, speak to me or Lyyssa. We can look at getting you a pass so you can go as often as you like.’

  Scott gives me some pamphlets about healthy eating and exercise, and tells me to call him if I have any problems.

  It’s a short walk from the physio’s office to the Refuge. When I get back, I go into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of milk and spoon in some Milo. I’m planning on having a nice afternoon snack by myself, so naturally Bindi and Cinnamon have to ruin it by barging in.

  ‘Better not drink too much Milo, Len,’ Bindi snipes. ‘You’ll put on weight.’ Bindi is an ectomorph, tall and angular, with razor-sharp cheekbones. Her hair is naturally curly, but she irons it straight every morning and pulls it back into a skin-tight ballerina’s bun.

  ‘Yeah, you’ll get even fatter, as fat as Karen,’ stupid Cinnamon chimes in. Cinnamon shouldn’t talk – she’s a pear-shaped endomorph. But she probably thinks her big boobs make it okay to have a big arse.

  ‘I’m not fat,’ I say. ‘I’m a mesomorph.’ I say the word slowly and carefully, so they’ll understand. Bindi and Cinnamon have a vocabulary of about a hundred words between them, not counting the four-letter ones.

  ‘A MESOMORPH!’ Bindi screeches. She and Cinnamon start screaming with laughter. ‘Come on, Cin, let’s get some food and leave the mesomorph to pig out on her Milo.’ Bindi grabs a bag of Doritos from the cupboard and Cinnamon gets two Cokes from the fridge and they clatter out of the kitchen, hooting and saying ‘mesomorph’ over and over. They’ve left their school books from Ramsay on the kitchen table. Remedial English. Mathematics for Morons. History for Retards. Design for Delinquents.

  I stare at my glass of Milo. I spoon out the chocolatey grains floating on the top and flick them into the garbage. Then I make myself drink the rest of it, even though I feel like dumping the whole glass down the sink.

  Chapter 11

  I’ve been here for a couple of months now. My life has settled into a routine. I have lessons with Miss Dunn. No matter what they tell me, I’m afraid they’re going to send me to Ramsay if I don’t learn enough, so I always do my homework. I read books from the library. I go to tennis lessons and swimming lessons. I avoid Bindi and Cinnamon, without making it obvious that I’m walking around them. You can’t let someone know you’re afraid of them.

  One night I don’t have anything better to do, so I look into the lounge room where Bindi and Cinnamon are sprawled on the lounge and Karen is in the brown chair. I survey the room before going in, working out that I can sit on the red two-seater couch, across the room from Bindi and Cinnamon. Karen doesn’t take her eyes from the TV. Even though there’s only some noisy fast-food commercial playing, you’d think it was the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. Cinnamon gives me a quick glance of mild dislike, and Bindi stares at me for a moment with her eyes narrowed. They don’t try to keep me from coming in, though. The lounge room is common property and they know it.

  I settle myself into the sagging, musty-smelling red couch. The couch got here just a few days after I did. Some man showed up at the door and made a big deal about having a ‘donation’ for us, when all he really had was an old piece of furniture that he couldn’t sell at his garage sale and couldn’t be bothered taking to the tip. Lyyssa helped him unload it from his lime-green ute and carry it inside. He never took off his sunglasses the whole time.

  For some reason, I decided the couch was female and gave her a name. I called her Clementine. I didn’t tell anyone this, of course, I just named the couch inside my own head.

  Clementine the couch is red. Not burgundy, or maroon, but bright, screaming scarlet. And the fabric isn’t just plain velvet, it’s crushed velvet. New, Clementine probably looked fashionably outlandish, like something an artist would have in the house. Twenty or thirty years old, she just looks run-down and sad. But the lights in the lounge room are always turned down low, so Clementine’s shabbiness isn’t so obvious.

  The noisy commercial ends and a Channel Eight News Bulletin with Dan Martin and Susan Simons comes on. After Dan Martin reads the national news, mostly boring stuff about the session of Parliament in Canberra, Susan starts on the world news. All female newsreaders are pretty, and Susan Simons is prettier than most. But she has a hard, determined edge that sets her apart. It makes you pay attention to what she says.

  ‘In New York, a well-known publicist has been arrested for allegedly driving her four-wheel drive vehicle into a crowd outside a nightclub,’ Susan says, looking straight into the camera. ‘Witnesses say that Lucy Grubb, publicist for several prominent actors and the daughter of an influential New York attorney, was angry at being told to move her car because it was blocking a fire hydrant.’

  They cut to some news footage. ‘She just went postal!’ some guy in a polo shirt says in an American accent. ‘She yelled, “– you, white trash!” and just ploughed right into a whole crowd of people!’

  They’ve bleeped out the dirty word, but you can tell it was ‘screw’.

  ‘Local authorities say that nine people were taken to hospital for injuries ranging from severe abrasions to a crushed pelvis,’ Susan continues. ‘Police have not yet disclosed whether Miss Grubb remains in custody, or whether bail has been set.’

  Bindi and Cinnamon explode into a fit of laughter. They think the whole thing is hilarious. ‘Screw you, white trash!’ Bindi screams at Cinnamon.

  ‘No, screw you, white trash!’ Cinnamon screams back.

  I just know they’re going to go around saying ‘Screw you, white trash’ for the rest of the week. They’re too stupid to realise that they really are white trash. They’re slutty and common. Bindi brags about her boyfriend who’s a dealer, and Cinnamon’s always going on about how much money she made as a stripper in Kings Cross.

  They’re the sort of girls that toffs can get away with crushing under the tyres of their expensive cars. But if Bindi or Cinnamon got behind the wheel drunk or stoned and mowed someone down, they’d be sent straight to jail.

  I burrow down further into Clementine and hope they shut up before the nine o’clock movie comes on.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Lyyssa is standing in the doorway. She must have heard Bindi and Cinnamon screaming ‘screw you’ at each other.

  ‘Nothing,’ Bindi says sullenly.

  ‘Bindi, I thought we had an agreement. We agreed that you wouldn’t watch TV after nine o’clock until you –’ Lyyssa catches herself in time, ever mindful of ‘breaking confidentiality’ or ‘betraying trust’. Lyyssa bites her lip. ‘You remember our agreement, don’t you?’

  Bindi’s not exactly stupid, but she has trouble in school. Probably, Lyyssa wants her to stop watching so much TV until her marks improve.

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Bindi sighs and gets up from the couch, pushing past Lyyssa and stomping down the hall to her bedroom. Cinnamon follows her. ‘Screw you, white trash!’ ‘No, screw you, white trash!’ I hear them saying to each other, before going into their rooms.

  Lyyssa looks confused. ‘What was that all about?’ she asks.

  I tell Lyyssa I don’t know. Karen turns her eyes back to the TV.

  Chapter 12

  To get to my tutoring sessions with Miss Dunn, I walk to the main road and catch a bus.

  If you’re over twelve at the Refuge, you get a MyMultil train, bus and ferry pass along with your pocket money. It’s cool that you can go pretty much any place in Sydney, but the rule is that you’re not supposed to go to a certain list of off-limits places, like Kings Cross and Redfern.

  There are a couple of people I keep seeing on the bus. One is a dwarf man with dyed purple hair who always has headphones on. Another is an European-looking lady who always carries lots of shopping bags. Today, they’re both on the bus. It’s going to be the same bus ride as always, o
r so I think, until the woman sitting behind me starts talking.

  ‘I am not a loose woman!’ she says loudly.

  I turn around in my seat and glance at her. She’s older, wearing a daggy sweater, with short hair and a face set in a permanent frown. Her eyes have that million-miles-away look. Not the full quid, Daddy would have said.

  ‘I said, I am not a loose woman!’ she says, even louder. She’s not talking to anyone on the bus; she’s talking to someone who’s not there. Even so, everybody on the bus, except the dwarf who’s nodding to the music on his headphones, starts finding something else to do. The European lady pulls a letter from her purse and pretends to read it. A uni student pulls a textbook out of his backpack and opens it. Another student turns his head to the window.

  ‘Please stop casting as-per-sions upon my character!’ the woman says firmly. She has trouble pronouncing ‘aspersions’. Why bother using words you can’t pronounce?

  The bus fills up gradually. A noisy group of teenage boys gets on, and their loud talk drowns out the woman who’s not the full quid. They’re also drowning out the dwarf’s music – I see him purse his mouth, look annoyed, and turn up the volume.

  ‘I do not sleep around,’ I hear the woman mumble, as I pile out of the bus with all the people getting off at the University bus stop.

  Miss Dunn has me wait in her office while she takes care of some business upstairs. While I’m waiting, I look up ‘aspersion’ in the dictionary that I find on one of the bookshelves. Slander, calumnious report or remark. In other words, telling lies about someone. I kind of figured that was what it meant.

  ‘Sorry to keep you, Len,’ Miss Dunn says, coming back into the office. She notices me putting the dictionary back on the shelf. ‘Did you want to borrow one of my books?’