Red.
She turned the handle on the door to the second bedroom, the mirror image of the ‘nursery’. ‘Aubrey?’ She pushed open the door.
Red. On the pale-grey carpet. On the mobile phone, in its spider cover, charging on the bedside table. On the posters of Taylor Swift stuck to the white wall. On Sidney’s old copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Red on the amber-glass spider.
Red and black. Something burning?
The red drops flickered into flames. Sidney became too heavy to stand, she dropped to her knees. Time unfolded, and she was not in Aubrey’s room, but still in the car. Dean Cola’s car. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have come back here long ago.’
Grass, earth, screaming, broken glass. Skyline and stars. You cry for your mother and I reach across to the passenger’s seat — through blood and flames — and hold your hand. Everything melts into Rothko smears.
‘Sidney!’ Christos was banging on the car’s window. ‘It’s all right. I’m here now.’
‘I want to come with you,’ she whispered to Dean Cola.
She wasn’t sure who got her out of the Fairlane. She was being carried from another time, another place — not Aubrey’s house, not Dean Cola’s car — the neat bedroom at Sandro D’Angelo’s pretty house, looking over Christos’s shoulder. Her big firefighter hero. Saving her, for the first of many times. The white sheet was soaked with blood.
The light had come on. Christos’s left eye was swollen and bruised. He had blood on his shirt and jeans. As he bent down towards her, she saw the rough, callus-like bumps through his hair. Glinda, the goat, had the same bumps where she had been disbudded. Sidney had cowered against the bedhead, screaming when Christos tried to come near her. She wasn’t sure if the screaming was in her head or in reality. She wanted her mother. Over and over, she screamed for her mum, but, again, she wasn’t sure if the screaming was only on the inside.
Christos must have wrapped her in his brown aviator jacket (it was still hanging in her wardrobe when she got home from the hospital six months later).
The party was over, the heavy metal music had stopped, those boys were gone. Petra was gone. Coke was gone.
Other memories from that weekend came like pulsations, like irregular heartbeats — some clear and loud, with blankness in between. Fear and shivers. Jesus and monsters. Voices telling her to try to die. She tried hard to. Christos sitting beside her somewhere — her house? her bed? the sofa? Christos helping her to shower. Blood running from between her legs, and down the drain. Period? Haemorrhage? Christos stroking her hair. Christos feeding her painkillers, or sedatives, maybe sleeping tablets.
Christos telling her he’d warned her about her behaviour, that this was her fault. And then saying he was sorry. I love you, I love you, I love you, he’d said. I’ve always loved you. I’ll take care of you from now on. I won’t let anybody hurt you or scare you ever again. Coke and those blokes left you for dead. Lucky I was there. Lucky. You would have died if I hadn’t been there. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Nobody else will ever want you now, not after … your behaviour. But I do. In a way, it’s not a bad thing. It’s taught you a lesson. And it’s brought us together finally. A secret we’ll keep. (Not the worst secret — that was yet to come.) I promise I won’t tell. Do you promise too? Promise. You’re mine now. I love you, I love you, I love you. Lucky, lucky, lucky.
SIDNEY HAD been staring at the melted colours of custard and smoke for some time. The colours started to solidify inside their outlines. Pale-yellow walls. No windows. A tall grey cupboard looming in the corner.
Outside the custard-coloured room, something hummed — a vacuum cleaner? Something rattled — a trolley? Some ‘good mornings’ were exchanged. Sidney’s head ached. Her arms were heavy, cumbersome to lift from under the bedsheets. She couldn’t feel her hands. They were wrapped in some kind of tight, bandage-like gloves.
Her legs were OK; she swung them over the side of the narrow bed. She was on the sea. She and Dean must have made it to the Spirit of Tasmania after all. The boat rocked, and she lay back down, pulling her knees up to her chest, hoping for smoother sailing.
The next time she slid her bare feet down, they froze on the concrete floor. Froze and burned at the same time, but she liked the feeling, was glad to feel something.
The space wasn’t a boat cabin; it looked more like the hospital room she’d been in after Sandro D’Angelo’s party, but maybe it was a jail cell. She’d done something bad?
A bird-like woman floated in and perched beside Sidney on the bed. She was hiding something inside her tiny fist. ‘Don’t tell anybody.’ Birdy checked the room or cell nervously before handing Sidney a lolly snake. ‘The Chinese ghosts were arguing inside the walls of my flat. Day and night. Day and night.’ She clawed at her hands. ‘In the end, I couldn’t stand listening to them anymore, so I tried to gas myself in the oven.’
Sidney nodded. She looked at the snake in her compression-gloved hand but couldn’t feel it. It wriggled and she dropped it. Birdy flew away.
Nobody tried to stop Sidney as she walked out into the long corridor. Nan was there. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, a purple tinge to the grey. She was wearing her white dress with the little violets. She said she was a fortune teller for Jesus now, and He had told her that the Devil was conspiring against Sidney. It was just a matter of time before the torture started. ‘Shock treatment,’ Nan said. ‘Remember that from last time? We’re never getting out of here alive.’
Nan told her that Dean Cola and The Great Catsby had survived the great fire. They were locked in another room and if Sidney ate or drank anything the Devil would torture them too.
The sound of squeaky, rubber-soled footsteps approached. Keys rattled.
‘Quick, the Devil’s coming. He’s going to rape you again,’ Nan said.
Sidney scurried back to her room. She tried to hide in her bed, pulled the sheet and blanket up over her head.
‘Hi, Sidney. How’re you feeling?’ Not the Devil. One of His subjects?
Sidney peeked out from under the bedclothes and said she was scared, she wanted to go home, she wanted her mother. The Devil’s subject proffered socks.
‘Don’t touch them!’ Nan said. ‘Those are the Devil’s socks.’
The Devil’s subject unlocked the grey cupboard, and placed the socks on a shelf. Sidney could see a pile of her long-sleeved T-shirts and denim skirts in there, a tube of burn cream, a few books, and a portable cassette recorder and a cassette tape.
‘If you ever think you want to hurt yourself,’ the Devil’s subject said, ‘call a nurse straightaway.’ She indicated the big red emergency button near the door. And then she tried to feed Sidney some sort of fluid on a spoon.
‘Spit it out. It’s poison. Devil’s milk!’ Nan said. Sidney spat it at the Devil’s subject and pushed her away. Two more of His subjects came in and held her down while the first injected the Devil’s milk into her leg instead. The room swam, but she could still hear them talking. Bubbles of words surfacing. Blood pressure low … Won’t eat or drink … Meds … Hands … House fire.
Nan told her to sleep — it was the only escape.
The Devil sat beside Sidney’s bed, holding her gloved hands. When he leaned forward, she saw the buds where his horns had been.
‘Get away!’ she screamed and kept screaming until one of His subjects appeared. Subject and Devil exchanged meaningful looks, a secret code, and Devil said he’d come back later.
His subject watched Him leave, and then said, ‘Hi, Sidney. I’m Avril, your nurse for today.’
Perhaps Avril really was a nurse — it said so on her ID tag. She placed a plastic cup of something that smelled faintly orange on the bedside table.
‘I don’t live here.’
‘Where do you live, Sidney?’ Avril said.
She didn’t know. She had another headache, and he
r hands hurt.
‘Do you know where you are?’ Avril said.
‘Hell?’
Avril smiled knowingly. ‘No, sweetie. You’re in our psychiatric unit.’
Sidney saw Birdy’s snake still on the floor and, worried it might get her into trouble, looked quickly back to Avril.
‘Before that, you were in the burns unit.’
Sidney didn’t understand. She looked at her hands and tried to pull off the compression gloves. They were too tight. She tore at them with her teeth. Flesh charred red and black, and melted waxy white like the grilled cheese Mum made. Her little finger was gone. She screamed. Avril injected more Devil’s milk into her leg. Nan said it wasn’t milk, it was semen — they were impregnating her with the Devil’s semen.
Sleep.
THE DAY room resembled an airport lounge with the decor of a cubist painting: chairs and sofas, all mismatched colours, and geometric squares and rectangles with soft corners. The furniture faced a big television. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was on. Patients — some in pyjamas and slippers, some in casual clothes — sat around smoking, or shuffled around smoking. Metal ashtrays overflowed.
A woman was cuddling a doll and talking to the pattern on the sleeve of her dress. A man was trying to eat an orange, but his hands were shaking so much it kept dropping into his lap. Another was banging his fist on a table.
The walls were the same custard colour as Sidney’s room. She couldn’t resist — she walked up and licked the paint.
A man in jeans and a Reece Plumbing T-shirt and cap offered Sidney a cigarette. She couldn’t recall if she smoked, but she stopped licking the wall and thanked him. He helped her light up.
Everybody in here was overweight — because of the meds, Reece explained. ‘Except for the anorexics.’ Reece was scrawnier than most, although he had a pot belly. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. His greasy brown hair hung below his cap. He told Sidney, in a flat monotone voice, that he’d been here since 1984.
That couldn’t be right. Surely nobody stayed in here for seven years.
‘In ’84, me workmates at the shop started persecutin’ me through the radio,’ Reece said. ‘Sendin’ out defamatory messages through the airwaves and stuff, and buggin’ me phone. The missus, the family, even me bloody neighbours were all in on it.’ He sucked his cigarette hungrily and exhaled smoke. There was a tremor in his hand. ‘Hey, Bill,’ he called to a big blond man in a turquoise transport-driver’s shirt. ‘Happy hour, mate.’
Reece told Sidney that Bill had rolled his truck over on the highway because he thought the Russian mafia were chasing him.
‘Maybe they were,’ she said.
Bill shuffled over — he had ‘Bill’ embroidered on the pocket of his shirt. He reminded her of somebody.
‘Do they have drinks here?’ Sidney said.
Reece’s mouth twisted slightly and he made a sound almost like laughter. ‘No. It’s meds time, love. We’ll show you where to go.’
‘But I don’t want any meds.’
‘Haveta. Or they force ya.’
She’d suspected as much, as Voices had quietened and her stomach had swollen since she’d been in here. She followed Reece and Bill to the glass-enclosed nurse’s station, where they doled out the pills.
Standing in line, Reece looked around conspiratorially, and placed something in her and Bill’s hands. She looked down. A lemon sherbet lolly, like a silkworm pupa in crunchy plastic. Her mouth was too dry to water, but her stomach rumbled, craving sugar.
‘Shh,’ Reece whispered. ‘Lollies are contraband in here.’
‘What happened to your hands?’ Bill asked. His voice had the same oddly toneless, but slightly too loud pitch as Reece’s, and his tongue moved around in his mouth as though it had a mind of its own.
‘Burned them when I set fire to my mum’s house, apparently.’ She blew a cloud of smoke into the air. ‘The Devil saved me.’
Reece nodded, impressed.
She tried to smile, but the muscles around her mouth were too stiff.
‘HOW’S CATSBY?’ Sidney asked the Devil as he sat beside her bed.
He ignored her question and told her again how lucky it was that he had saved her from the fire at Broken River Road, that he had been there, just in time. Lucky, lucky, lucky. ‘Can’t wait till you see how I’ve fixed up the bungalow for us at Mum’s house,’ he said. ‘And a new Italian restaurant just opened around the corner.’
She decoded his meaning, and looked away, out the window. Dean Cola was walking down there, by the river, shoes off, jeans cuffs rolled up. He was becoming smaller, a black dot in the distance. She wished they’d let her out so she could run and catch up with him.
He’s disappearing. She wasn’t sure if she’d thought that or said it aloud to Nurse Avril as she entered the room, holding a black folder.
‘Why are you looking at the wall?’ Avril said. ‘What can you see?’
‘Salvation.’ Sidney stared harder at the river, squinting to see Dean Cola.
Avril wrote something in her folder, and talked about care plans, treatment goals, and healthy living programs. ‘I think you’d enjoy art therapy.’
The Devil nodded agreement. ‘Remember the physio said it’s important to keep moving your hands at this stage of healing?’
The more healed her hands, the further away Dean Cola.
SIDNEY SAT at the little table in her room. Lined up in front of her were a towel, a tube of burn cream, wet wipes, and a stainless-steel bowl half-full of soapy water. She couldn’t bring herself to look at her hands without their dressings and compression gloves; they felt cold like lead, and so exposed and fragile. The metallic coldness spread through her whole body, made her teeth chatter.
The nurse visiting from the burns unit was blonde and somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties. She draped a blanket around Sidney’s shoulders. ‘Remember we need to moisturise before we cleanse?’ She had the ghost of a lilting accent. Irish? ‘For scar management and because your skin’s very dry,’ she said, pulling disposable gloves on.
Sidney held her breath and shrank inside herself.
‘The sooner you learn how to do this for yourself, the better.’ She squeezed cream from the tube onto the pads of her fingers.
‘I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can. You’re a very strong girl.’
Sidney didn’t understand; the Devil had told her she was weak.
‘I’ve known people who’ve given up after much, much less than you’ve been through. How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Wow. You’re awesome, Sidney.’ The nurse rubbed the cream into her wounds. ‘Little circles, remember?’
Please, God, no. She tried to pull away; the nurse held onto her arm and kept massaging in circular motions.
Sidney was given plenty of pain relief before the dressing changes, but the pins and needles still turned to knife-stabbings along her hands and forearms. She chewed her lip, sniffed up tears, and wished the Devil had left her to die in the great fire.
The nurse’s touch became firmer and firmer, but surprisingly less and less painful.
‘It gets easier, sweetie.’ The nurse removed the cream with wet wipes, and cleansed the wounds with the soapy water. Sidney looked down at the dead-skin flakes and dried blood sloughed into the bowl.
BILL WAS sitting on a sofa in the day room, singing a country song and twanging a guitar. You could do a lot of damage with guitar strings. Why weren’t any staff watching over him? A shaft of sunlight through the window caught the side of his face, and Sidney realised who he reminded her of: herself.
‘Bill, I think you’re my dad.’
He stopped playing and stared at her as she sat next to him, his tongue moving, always moving.
It was obvious — Bill/Billy, he was a truck driver, a
nd he had the same alien-coloured eyes as Sidney. ‘Do you remember a girl called Faye?’
‘Nah.’
‘At a truck stop on the highway a long, long time ago. Don’t you remember?’ Do you remember? and Don’t you remember? volleyed from one side of her brain to the other, as if in a tennis match.
Bill shook his head. Perhaps he was trying to shake words out too. ‘If they ever make me go out there again,’ he said, ‘I’m gonna drive my truck through the city and kill myself and everybody else too.’
‘I want to stay here forever too, Dad.’ Don’t you remember? Do you remember? ‘Do you know a song called “Mama Hated Diesels”?’
‘By Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen?’
‘No. Some Australian guy. Ringo somebody. Or Lucky.’
‘Nah. Definitely Commander Cody.’
‘I don’t think so.’
He plucked his guitar and crooned, ‘Mama hated diesels so bad. Mmm, mmm, it had somethin’ to do with Dad …’
Sidney felt drowsy; she curled into the fetal position, and closed her eyes, her head resting on the cushion next to Dad’s leg.
‘One day the local sheriff told me they had found, her body by the road, she’d been flaggin’ diesels down …’ Singing relaxed his tongue, and brought tone to his voice, somehow, and the song was a lullaby, like the hum of the highway.
‘Dad,’ she said once he’d finished. ‘If a song is playing when you die, do you think it plays forever in that place?’
He didn’t answer.
‘What would your song be, Dad?’
She must have fallen asleep. She woke alone on the sofa to sounds in her head like a needle stuck on an old record, spinning, spinning, crackling.
THE ART room smelled like primary school: pencils, Clag, and paint. Classical music played. Patients’ artwork lined the walls alongside posters of Van Goghs, Kahlos, and Manets. Sidney had spent her first art session staring at A Bar at the Folies-Bergère — the locket around Suzon’s neck — knowing that it held the answers to everything, the elixir to get home.
All That I Remember About Dean Cola Page 22