by Darren Groth
“You knew something was going to happen, though, didn’t you?”
“Yes. It was obvious.”
Leonie turns to me. Her gaze is hopeful, pleading for some shared sense of awe.
“The patch of ground was like two tectonic plates,” Perry continues. “When the bike landed, it came down on the fissure, which is the gap between the two plates. The lower one pressed into the higher one and caused it to fly out of the ground. It was like a tiny version of a 9.0 tremor.”
Leonie wants another cigarette, but the pack in her purse is empty. She keeps searching, pulling out several empty pill bottles. Perry’s declaration from this morning surfaces in my thoughts: I never needed medication.
“So, this is what you meant?” she asks.
“Pardon me?”
“Before, when you talked about the shifting ground?”
“There is instability here, like I said.”
She bites her pinkie fingernail, nods. “You said it’s at home, too.”
“Yes.”
“Is something going to happen at home, Perry?”
He sniffs and flicks his hand. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Something like we just saw? Something unexpected?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
He flicks his hand a second time. “It’s not obvious like today was.”
“Do you suspect someone might get hurt?”
“No.”
“No one will get hurt?”
“No, I mean I don’t know.” Perry takes hold of his right earlobe in a pincer grip. “I would prefer not to talk about this.”
“It’s okay. I’m just trying to understand.”
“Yes, but I would really prefer not to talk about this!”
“Leave it there, Leonie,” I say. I take hold of Perry’s wrist and give three quick squeezes. “That’s enough ‘trying to understand’ for now.”
She can’t let it go though. Approaching Horseshoe Bay on the return journey, with my brother fast asleep for the third time today, she draws me back into the paranoid analysis. “What do you think is going on in his head?”
“When he’s napping, you mean?”
“No, with the whole shifting-ground-instability-at-home thing.”
I prop my elbow on the open driver-side window and rest my chin on my hand. “You want to know what I think? I think he’s got an inkling of what we’re about to ask him, of the say he has in our future. In your future.”
Leonie glances over her shoulder. Perry is snoring. “You think he knows I want to come back?”
“I reckon he might.”
“And the fact that he will decide if it happens…You think he sees that?”
“No, I don’t think he”—I use air quotes—“sees it. He’s just making some logical conclusions, putting two and two together. He’s quite capable.”
“I think he’s more than that. I think he’s gifted.”
“No, he’s capable. He’s more aware than most of the world around him. He notices things in people that might not be clear to others. He takes in a lot—more than he’s equipped to handle, in fact. He senses energy and he feels change. Does that make him worthy of respect? Absolutely. Does that make him…I don’t know, the Oracle of Delphi? Hardly.”
“He has a gift, Justine—I’m sure of it. The third-eye chakra. The Ajna.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“He really is Extrasensory Perry.”
“Not the way you see it.” I take my right hand off the steering wheel and pat my forehead with the heel of my palm. A short, abrasive laugh leaps from my throat. “Boy, after all these years, you still want to think of him as a freak of nature. A handicapped freak as a child, a gifted freak as a man. He’s not a circus act, Leonie. He’s just different. Okay? Unique. He’s loving and caring… The best brother I could’ve ever had. And he shouldn’t be tagged with a label, certainly not one from a bloody chakra chart. Okay? He’s just like the rest of us—amazing in his own right, and no better or worse than anyone else.”
The argument slides into silence. On the winding Sea to Sky Highway, we pass cars and cars pass us. Near the turnoff for a place called Cypress Bowl, Leonie opens her purse again and rummages around. A spare cigarette in the clutter? A pill that escaped from the bottle and is lying among the shopping receipts and spare tampons? No. She takes out a cloth to wipe the smudges from her sunglasses.
Are you seeing me? That’s the question she should be answering.
And Perry should be the one asking.
“PEZ, CAN WE HAVE A CHAT?”
Perry closes Lost in Katrina, stands the book on the adjacent shelf and joins us at the dining table. He looks to Leonie, then to me, his face impish despite the stubble on his chin and cheeks.
“This is like the interrogation scene in Police Story 2,” he says, smirking and feigning cuffs on his hands. “That is an okay joke.”
I nod. “Yep, could’ve been better. Listen, we want to talk to you about something.”
“Is it to do with Leonie coming back?”
My heart vaults to the top of my rib cage. I throw a stern look Mum’s way—a warning to keep any Ajna chakra gibberish to herself. She clears her throat and drains the dregs of her third rye and ginger. “It is, actually,” I say, maintaining a watchful eye. “You had a suspicion of it, didn’t you?”
He unlocks his invisible cuffs with an invisible key. “We are going back to Brisbane in two days—I thought Leonie might be coming too.”
“Leonie would like to come and live in Australia again, yes.”
“Is she coming back to be a proper mother for us?”
I glance at Leonie. She’s like a human house of cards, afraid of collapsing with the next breath of air, staring at her clasped hands on the table. One thumbnail is wedged under the other, digging, probing. I’m on the verge of suggesting the question can be answered another day when she decides the time for a response is now.
“I imagine I would be…someone you could get to know, Perry. Over time. I think that would be the way to start out.”
Perry considers this for a good ten seconds, then nods. “Is she…” He stops, clicks his fingers, shakes his head. “It is bad manners to speak like this when the person is in the room and can speak for themselves.” He eyeballs the vase of carnations by Leonie’s left elbow. “Are you catching the same flight as us?”
“No, she’s going to—” I press my fingertips to my lips, extend a hand toward our mother.
“I wouldn’t come back straightaway,”she says.“I would settle things here, make some calls to people over there. Could take a little while. A few months at best.”
“I will be at Fair Go by then. It would be you and Just Jeans living together.”
“Um, it wouldn’t be…That could be—”
“Pez, Leonie wouldn’t move into our house,” I say. “And right now, Leonie returning to Australia—it’s actually not a done deal yet. It needs to be something both of us agree is okay.”
“Both of us?”
“You and me.”
Through squinted eyes, he looks at Leonie for the first time in the conversation. “Just Jeans and I will decide if you move back to Brisbane?”
“Yes.”
“Just us. Not you?”
“I went away. It’s up to you if I can return.”
“You are an Australian citizen—you could return whether we wanted you to or not.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“You could though.”
“I wouldn’t do it. I want to come back and be with you guys more than anything I’ve ever known, anything I ever will know. But I won’t come back unless the two of you allow it.”
Perry wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and starts making little grunting noises in his throat. “Have you decided?” he asks me.
“I’m not going to say at this point.”
“I think your face says you’ve decided yes. Is th
at correct?”
“Pez—”
“I would support your decision if you’ve decided yes.”
“Perry, you can read my face, my hands, my eyes, my toes…I’m not going to tell you what I’m thinking about Leonie’s return. Okay? This is something you must decide without knowing my opinion.”
Perry rubs his eyes with his balled fists. I move in beside him and put an arm over his shoulders. Our mother rises from the table and makes to step away.
“Stay there.”
She resumes her seat.
“You’ve got a full day together tomorrow, Pez. Just the two of you at the PNE. See how it goes. See how you feel at the end of it. Then we can talk about what happens next.”
He nods, gives me a hug, then collects Lost in Katrina from the shelf. He flicks through from start to finish four times in quick succession, the pages blurring like hummingbird wings.
3 April 2008
I’m sorry if this is hard to read. The numbness in my fingers is making it tough to write without it looking like a mess of chicken scratches. It won’t stop me doing your journal though. I promised I’d do it right up to your and Perry’s eighteenth birthdays, and nothing—not cancer or chemo or numbness or nausea or fevers or kidneys being on the fritz or losing weight like a jockey or bloody World War Three starting up—is gonna get in the way. Not with a mere six months to go until the big one-eight.
I’m not much into religion, Jus, but I’ve been trying to convince God that He should throw a miracle our way. Mainly at night, I’ve been chatting with Him. I hope you don’t mind—I’ve been using you as the big guns in my argument. I said it was pretty poor form for Him to give you such a dud hand. A teenager having to defer uni to care for her terminal old man and her disabled brother… How can He justify that? And then there’s the fact that you do everything—and I mean EVERYTHING—without a sigh or a sullen look or a single complaint. Without a split second’s thought for yourself. Why would He treat you so badly? Why would He punish one of His most beautiful angels?
I haven’t even mentioned how your mother skipped town. Might add that one to the plea bargaining tonight. You asked awhile back if I should get in contact with your mother to let her know what’s going on. My answer is still the same: What’s the point? She hasn’t dropped a line or sent a postcard or even requested to become a bloody Facebook friend in the fourteen years since she took off. Why would she want to be in contact now? Because I’m dying? She probably thinks I had it coming. No, I see no need to reach out to someone who walked away without the slightest peek over her shoulder. Unless, of course, she’s been belted with the generosity bat and would like to donate her pancreas, spleen, liver, lungs, etc., to a good and worthy cause.
PERRY
I CAN SEE IT.
Screaming and flailing. Punching my head, kicking the wall. I don’t mean to be violent. I don’t want to be out of control. It just happens. And I’m hardly aware it is happening. That’s because my mind has gotten smaller, lost a few of its other functions. It’s gone into fight-or-flight mode, as if I’m a caveman confronted by an earthquake or a dinosaur attack. Actually, some scientists call it the reptilian brain response. But I’m too young to know any of that. I’m only four years old.
I’m in the middle of the floor now, standing on my toes. There are blood-smeared tissues lying all around. And one in Mum’s hand. She’s holding it up to her eyebrow. I can see she has two purple bruises on her arms. She has a big purple-yellow one on her calf too. They look like they were drawn on with markers; I sometimes do that on my own skin. And the walls. And the clothes in the laundry basket.
She leaps forward and wraps her arms around me. I scream and throw my head back. We twist and stumble, headed for the floor. Then my arm is free, out of her hold. I swing and hit Mum on the side of the face. My eyes dim. Static fills my ears. Slowly, the reptilian brain begins to crawl away. I feel the floor under my hip and shoulder. And I feel Mum’s body behind me. And her arms across my chest. I stare at the fingertips of my right hand before reaching back to touch her cheek. It has a long scratch on it. If I knew anything about quakes and plates and fissures, I might imagine it as a fault line. I don’t.
I’m only four years old.
WE PASS THROUGH THE TURNSTILES at ten o’clock. I look around and right away I feel less anxious. Just as Leonie said, the PNE is very similar to the Ekka in Brisbane. The rides, the food, the crowd. The dirty people who are in charge of the attractions—the people Just Jeans calls Carnie Schwarzeneggers. One thing about the PNE is different though: the old Wooden Roller Coaster. It is the reason I have excitement as well as anxiety. As we pass by a group of pale teenagers talking about the Zipper, I decide to share some of my recent research findings with Leonie.
“The Coaster was built in 1958 and is made of Douglas fir. It has a top speed of nearly eighty kilometers per hour. It was in two movies—neither of them was very good and Jackie Chan wasn’t in them. I don’t think there have been any major accidents, not like the Timber Wolf ride in Kansas City, America, where a small girl was thrown out of the cars and died.”
“Would you like to go for a ride?”
“Yes, I certainly would.”
I have three turns on the Coaster, one straight after another. Each time, I have to wait patiently in line and listen to the Carnie Schwarzenegger’s instructions about keeping my arms inside the car. But then during the ride—particularly the big drops—everyone lifts their arms up and screams. So I do it too, so I don’t come across as a weirdo. And when I come back to the Carnie Schwarzenegger, I apologize for not following his instructions. He chews his gum and repeats the same things he told me before.
“How did you like that, eh?” asks Leonie when I return.
“I didn’t get thrown out.”
“That’s good. You looked great up there. Just one of the gang.”
“No one else was saying pranayama when it was over.”
Following the Coaster, I have rides on the Enterprise, the Pirate Ship and the Hellavator. When we arrive at the Westcoast Wheel, I ask Leonie if she would like to join me. At first she says no, but when I’m almost at the front of the line she changes her mind. Two minutes later, we are suspended high above the PNE, the two of us together in a cage, defying gravity, looking out over a city that doesn’t know it is being watched.
“ARE YOU AFRAID OF EARTHQUAKES, LEONIE?”
“A little. Probably no more than the average person living in this city, I would say.”
“No lie, seismologists believe there’s a 37 percent chance of an 8.2-plus event and a 10 to 15 percent chance of a 9.0-plus event in the Pacific Northwest sometime in the next fifty years.”
“And what does Extrasensory Perry believe?”
I shrug. “I can never be sure whether something will happen or not. Nobody can, not even the best seismologists. I know one thing definitely, though: if it happens, living in a world of one is not an option. People will need each other.”
On the ground, I notice a man in a wheelchair on the path below the West Coast Wheel. An overweight woman pushes the chair with one hand; the other hand shoves a melting ice-cream cone into her mouth. When they reach the end of the path, the woman loses her grip. The chair hits a metal garbage bin, and the man gets thrown forward like a crash-test dummy. He groans and a long line of drool hangs out of his mouth.
“Whoops!” says the woman, pulling the chair free and keeping the ice cream away from the spazzing man. I watch until they disappear into the crowd.
“Is a fear of earthquakes one of the reasons you’d like to come back to Brisbane?” I ask.
“No, that hasn’t really entered into my thinking.”
“Brisbane is a good choice. Brisbane doesn’t have fault lines like here.”
“I’ve got one reason for coming back, Perry. Well, two, in fact.”
“I think it would be difficult living on a fault line.”
“Lots of people choose to,” Leonie replies. “They a
ccept it.”
“Some don’t. Some move away.”
The wheel shifts for the third time on our ride. It is our turn to go to the very top. There is a large bird—maybe a hawk or a bald eagle—flying in the distance, making figure eights above the houses. It looks similar to the one Ogopogo was watching at the lake. I wait for the cage to stop rocking before I speak again.
“Where did you go after leaving our family?”
Leonie sits up straighter and uncrosses her feet. She grabs hold of the nearest bar in our cage. “I, uh…I lived with my mother—your grandmother—and my stepfather in Cairns. She wasn’t too happy with me being there and you guys being back in Brisbane. We argued a lot. I moved out after about nine months.”
“Is my grandmother still alive?”
“No, she died toward the end of 1995.”
“Just Jeans and I were maybe five. Did we ever meet her?”
Leonie closes her eyes for an instant. She swallows, and it sounds like there is glue in her mouth. “Yes, a few times. When you were little.”
“I don’t remember her.”
“She loved you two. She didn’t spend as much time with you as she should’ve. I’m to blame for that.”
I move my head from side to side. Then I take the seismometer from my pack and place it on the seat. The Westcoast Wheel’s clunky motor kicks in again. Our cage starts steadily arcing back down to earth.
“Do you need to smoke a cigarette, Leonie?”
“I’m okay.”
“I don’t like cigarette smoke. It chokes my throat and my skin. And it dries out my eyes. But we are outside, so it won’t affect me much.”
“I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“So, you’re not addicted to smoking?”
“No, I’m not addicted, Perry. I’ve quit lots of times.”
I nod as we reach the ground and come to a stop. “You don’t have to quit again because of me.”
WE ARE SEATED ON A bench near the bumper cars, eating lunch. I’ve got chicken strips and chips. Leonie has a burger. She throws it in the bin after two bites.