by Darren Groth
ARE YOU
SEEING
ME?
DARREN GROTH
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
Copyright © 2015 Darren Groth
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Groth, Darren, 1969–, author
Are you seeing me? / Darren Groth.
Originally published: North Sydney, NSW : Woolshed Press, an imprint of Random House Australia, 2014.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4598-1079-2 (bound).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1080-8 (pdf).—
ISBN 978-1-4598-1081-5 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8613.R698A74 2015 jC813'.6 C2015-901548-0
C2015-901549-9
First published by Woolshed Press, 2014
First published in the United States, 2015
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015934240
Summary: In this novel, twins Justine and Perry have left their home in Australia and embarked on the road trip of a lifetime in the Pacific Northwest.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cover images from Shutterstock.com: silhouettes © freesoulproduction, crack © farmer79, tentacles © shockfactor.de, car © Jennifer Gottschalk, road sign © VoodooDot Jacket design by Christabella Designs and Teresa Bubela Author photo by Lauren White
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
www.orcabook.com
For W, for J and especially for C
We are all dependent on one another,
every soul of us on earth.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
TABLE OF CONTENTS
JUSTINE
PERRY
JUSTINE
PERRY
JUSTINE
PERRY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JUSTINE
PERRY IS STANDING ON THE far side of the metal detector, feet planted on the red stripe. Beads of sweat dot his forehead. His right leg twitches, keeping pace with some inaudible rhythm. At regular intervals, his lips curl inward then spring open, releasing a loud pop. He’s stuck. He’s been stuck for a while.
There’ll be another announcement over the PA soon. I imagine it being a little more pointed than its predecessor: Ms. Justine Richter, Mr. Perry Richter, you are required to board Flight 47 to Vancouver. Your fellow passengers are waiting for you to end this madness. Can you blame them for getting upset? I can’t…What is your problem? Are you unaware of anyone but yourselves? You think the whole world should bow to your needs? The two of you are an absolute disgrace.
I attempt to catch Perry’s eye with reassuring nods and here-is-your-loving-sister hand gestures. I won’t approach him or get in his face. I won’t negotiate either—speeches are useless when my brother has reached this level of anxiety. It’s like trying to draw attention to a lit candle during a laser show.
The stolid security officer holding the metal-detecting paddle displays a frown. “Please step through, sir,” he says for the millionth time.
The sour business suit behind Perry huffs and places his hands on his hips. “No worries, pal,” he says. “It’s not like we’ve got planes to catch or anything.”
Perry hears none of it. His hands are clasped together on top of his head. A pronounced lean has gripped the left side of his body. The pops have morphed into heavy sighs. The soles of his shoes remain fixed to the red stripe.
This is my nightmare. Sure, there are any number of planks in the rickety suspension bridge of our trip that could give out and send us plummeting—the flight, the hotels, the road trips to Okanagan Lake and Seattle. Foreign places, foreign people. Foreign everything. And, of course, The Appointment and all of the question marks it entails. But to go wrong here? Here? At the airport? On the list of places you’d want to avoid acting out of the ordinary, the airport would rank number one with a bullet. Or maybe a Taser.
I pull the rubber band at my wrist, let it snap back. The blossom of pain strangles the panic, rouses a resilience honed over the last two years. Perry needs help—it is right and just that I provide it. This is his time. His ultimate holiday. He deserves all the patience and tolerance required to make the next two weeks a memory for the ages.
I take a couple of steps forward and stand tall, framed by the metal detector. Like a mime playing to the back row, an exaggerated level of animation overtakes my movements. I nod my head until my neck hurts. I tap my watch with large stabbing points of the index finger. I wheel my arm over like an air guitarist in full flight. The performance makes a minor impression; Perry has returned to vertical, and the volume has been turned down on his sighs. I’m ready for a second dance of persuasion when a voice to my left interjects.
“He’ll get there, miss.”
I look toward the reassurer. It’s the security officer seated by the X-ray machine. She’s a cement block of a woman with dyed black hair and a red blotchy face. In contrast to her body, her expression is open, soft. The conveyor belt of luggage that is her charge has been halted. I hesitate, wary of reconciling compassion with authority, then nod.
“I’ve got a nephew like him. Similar age, by the look of it.” She juts her chin and sits up a little straighter in her chair. “You’re doin’ real good.”
Nephew or not, she has no real clue, but I mouth the words thank you anyway.
As I turn back toward the stalemate, she adds, “You take as much time as you need.”
Her gracious sentiment is not a shared one. The paddle wielder has dropped the sir from his requests. The suit barges back through the line in search of a security station that “doesn’t have a goddamn retard holding everything up.” A small part of me is proud of Pez for upending their crappy little ordered empires. The rest of me is still locked on his unraveling.
And then things go from bad to worse. Perry bends at the knees, buckling slowly, like Atlas defeated. The implications are immediate—if his knees hit the floor, it’s a done deal. He’ll go to all fours, then onto his stomach. Perhaps he’ll roll over on his back. Whatever the final position, he’ll be spread-eagled and staked. Ninety-one kilograms of dead weight destined for full-blown security intervention. The clock, previously at a premium, is seconds away from becoming redundant.
He’s halfway down when an idea strikes. I lunge for the counter and unzip the bag Perry packed for the trip. I scrabble around among his essentials, assessing their candidacy. The seismometer? Too valuable. The DVD of Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master II? Too fragile. The Ogopogo stuffed toy? Too childish. The CD of Polka Hits from Around the World?! Too…weird. The book Quakeshake: A Child’s Experience of the Newcastle Earthquake?
Bingo!
I snatch up the book and hustle into position. I turn side-on, then cock my wrist, ready for the throw. It’s all or nothing, anything but a gimme; the toss must negotiate the metal detector and land at Perry’s feet. If it falls short, it will lack the impact to snap my brother out of his descent. If it sails long, it will hit him in the head, leading to a million YouTube hits. The task would test a decent athlete, let alone a generous-hipped, Cornetto-eating girl who turned excuse letters for PE class into an art form. I take an awkward practice swing, then eye the target. Perry is now down on his h
aunches, rocking on the balls of his feet. It’s now or never. I draw back. A king tide of blood pummels my eardrums. The onlookers are panes of glass. Somewhere, in the distant burbs of my mind, I ask: How did my job description become flinging books at my twin brother to avoid disaster?
The throw clears the metal detector, hits the floor and skims a few meters before coming to rest at the toe of Perry’s right shoe. For a fleeting moment, there is only stillness, the wait to discover if the tall ship of clarity has dropped anchor in the swirling eddies of sensory distress.
Perry grasps the book. He opens it, begins flipping through the pages. After a few seconds, he stands up. The flush in his face is retreating. His breaths are slowing.
He is present.
He is seeing me.
I bite my tongue. “Come through, Pez. It’s okay.”
The command is barely complete when my brother walks forward. He holds the book out as he enters the detector, clutches it to his chest as he emerges on the other side. No beeps or buzzes or red lights. I glance at Paddle Man—he looks disappointed. Perry heads for the counter and his carry-on suitcase. He shoves the book back in among his prized possessions and pulls the zipper closed.
“I’m sorry, Justine,” he murmurs, fixing his gaze on the stack of empty plastic trays by his left elbow. “I was quite worried.”
“No kidding. Don’t you remember our talk this morning? We went over the detector stuff ten times. And we made sure you weren’t wearing any metal.”
He nods. “I remember. Those detectors don’t work properly. I saw an article online. Sometimes they malfunction and make noise when they don’t mean to. I didn’t want to hear that noise. It would hurt my ears. And I imagined the security man touching my armpits and the front of my pants, then yelling at me and throwing me to the ground. He thought I was a terrorist—”
“Okay, okay. It’s done now.”
“I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry, Justine.”
“Yeah, I know you are.”
I grab my bag and sling it over my shoulder. I’m about to lay bare the supreme urgency of our situation when Perry takes my hand. He secures only the middle, ring and pinkie fingers. It is a recognizable and comforting contact. He first held my hand this way in third grade. I can’t recall him ever holding my hand differently.
“Because we are late, I think it is logical we run to gate twenty-six.”
I scoff. “I like that—we are late.”
He tugs me along for a few meters, then releases. In a flash, he is past the duty-free shop and on the moving walkway, suitcase of consolations by his side. I set off after him, ignoring the leftover tremors in my legs and the visions of rickety suspension bridges in my head.
WHEN I FLOP DOWN INTO my aisle seat on Flight 47 to Vancouver, it’s a victory. We’ve made it this far. There is a journey to come—starting with fifteen hours nonstop across the Pacific—but this is a moment to savor. I want to ask the nearest hostess to give three cheers during the safety demonstration.
Perry is across from me. It was my plan to have the two of us sit together but apart, each with easy access to the aisle. It was also important that Perry be seated beside an adult. An early-morning need for a toilet or an attendant’s help could be a tad disruptive to a sleeping child. Not nearly as unsettling as a shouted quote from Shanghai Noon or an impromptu rendition of “Born This Way.” Though, if one of those meteorites fell from the sky…well, we’d all just have to wait until it burned out. Hopefully, the damage would be minimal. Firefighter Jus would, of course, be on hand with a bucket and a garden hose.
An announcement from the captain assures us we’ll be taxiing out to the runway in ten to fifteen minutes. There’s been a delay in the fueling procedure. I study Perry’s reaction to the news. He shifts in his seat and squeezes his hands together hard, causing the knuckles to blanch. He takes two long breaths. The passengers alongside him—husband and wife, late fifties, holding the morning edition of The Australian and a Kimberley Freeman novel—give Perry an obvious, but not unkind, once-over.
“Afraid of flying, mate?” the husband asks.
Perry directs his gaze at the armrest between them. He inches over in his seat, closer to the aisle. Closer to me. He shakes his head. “I like jets.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Oh, okay. Just thought you looked a bit nervous.”
Perry does like planes. He has several model bombers he built from kits. And he bought a replica Qantas jet from Myer the day I told him we had tickets to North America. Actual flying? No idea. This is his first ride in a big bird.
The man smiles and offers his hand. “I’m Ross, by the way.”
Perry accepts, pumps three times, withdraws. His eyes move from the armrest to Ross’s secured tray table. “My name is Perry Richter. I’m very pleased to meet you.”
“Good to meet you, Perry. This is my wife, Jane.”
“Good to meet you, Ross. Good to meet you, Jane.”
There’s a pause. Ross taps his chin twice, narrows his eyes. I recognize the signs. He’s had his first inkling that the young guy in seat 39G is not fashioned from a familiar mold. Bravo, Ross! Unless the association is patently obvious—Perry’s under stress or immersed in one of his favorite obsessions—it takes most people a while to suspect my brother is a bit skewiff. It’s one of his weightier burdens: look like everyone else, act like no one you’ve ever seen.
It’s also the main reason I’m up front about it. Before people get confused or angry or frustrated or gooey or freaked out, I give them the standard spiel: Perry has a brain condition that can cause him to feel anxious or upset in different places and circumstances. He has trouble with people—mixing with them and communicating with them—and it sometimes results in inappropriate behaviors. I appreciate your understanding and patience.
Depending on my own reserves of patience, I might embellish it from time to time:
What the hell are you staring at?
Why don’t you take a picture? It lasts longer.
If the wind changes, you’ll look like that permanently.
You’ve never seen a disabled person and their homicidal caregiver before?
At these times, I know for sure I am my father’s daughter. He never sought to explain Perry to the public. Let ’em get an education, he would say. If they don’t want to be educated, they can go jump.
I lean in as Ross’s education commences.
“Did you know that the earth is made up of four layers?” asks Perry. “There’s the core—actually two cores: inner and outer—and the mantle and the crust. The crust is where we live. No lie. I like the mantle the best out of the four. It’s mainly made up of molten lava, and the crust floats on top of it and is always moving. Isn’t that cool?”
Ross glances left and right, then nods.
“That’s a funny joke, saying it’s cool, because the temperature can actually rise to 5,400 degrees Celsius. Anyway, scientists call the moving convection. They also have a theory that we are living on a series of tectonic plates floating on the mantle. Some say twelve, others say it’s more than twelve. I’m not sure who is correct. One thing is certain, though—the plates can rub together or pull away from each other or smash into each other or one might go underneath the other. These events are what cause earthquakes to occur, and of course earthquakes are measured on the moment magnitude scale, but they used to be measured on the Richter scale. That’s my last name—Richter. No lie. My father used to say it was my scale and that was a funny joke too, because it was invented by Charles Richter in 1935, which is fifty-five years before I was born. In fact, it was twenty-eight years before my father was born—”
“Uh, Pez?”
Perry halts his runaway train of thought, takes a breath and begins lightly tapping the tips of his fingers together. He looks down at his seat-belt buckle. The couple stare in my direction.
“My name’s Justine Richter. I’m Perry’s sister and caregiver. Just so you kno
w, Perry has a brain condition. It can cause him to feel—”
“Brain condition?” asks Jane.
“Yes. That’s right.”
“So, is he one of those people who are very good with numbers?”
“I am good with numbers,” confirms Perry.
The husband arches his brow and twists in his seat. “What’s 1,491 times 6,218?”
Perry thinks for a second, then unbuckles his seat belt, leaps out of his chair and opens the overhead bin. Ross stares at me, eyebrows high on his forehead.
“It’s coming,” I say. “Takes him a little longer than the ones they trot out on TV.”
Perry closes the compartment and flops back down in his chair. He’s holding a calculator. “What were those numbers again, Ross?”
“I…I can’t remember.”
“Was it 1,491 times 6,218? Or was it 4,191 times 2,618?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Let’s try the first one.” Perry brings the calculator up very close to his chin and punches in the equation, emphasizing each digit entry with a small nod. When the sum is done, he thrusts the calculator at Ross’s face, causing him to rear back. “Is this the correct answer, Ross?”
“I’ve got no idea.”
“Oh. I thought you knew the answer.”
“You took the words out of my mouth, son.”
Perry wrestles with the meaning of this for a moment. He twists his lips this way and that, voices a quiet hum, then gives up. He stashes the calculator in the seat pocket, then starts playing with his touchscreen video monitor. I’m ready to provide some assistance, but he doesn’t need it. Within seconds he’s wearing earbuds and watching the opening sequences of a documentary on saltwater crocodiles.
I engage the couple with a clipped smile. “Perry has trouble with people—mixing with them and communicating with them—and it sometimes results in inappropriate behaviors. I appreciate your understanding and patience.”