One weekend, it is another friend’s eighteenth birthday party. As the sun sinks below the nearby train station, people start arriving and the music gets louder. Anna and I start drinking and I smoke a couple of cigarettes. An hour into the party a guy approaches me and asks if I want a pill. I decline. This is the first time I’ve been offered drugs. They are not yet part of my world, but it won’t be long before they are.
I don’t know most of the people here, but I know a handful, so I move between them, chatting, drinking and smoking. There is a recklessness to my behaviour: it is not about relaxation, it is about forgetting. I start to feel sick and try to find Anna. I look around, ask a few people, but no one knows where she is. Someone suggests I look downstairs near the carport as there are several people hanging out there. I take the steps slowly, trying to steady myself with the handrail. When I reach the bottom I hear a siren in the distance and a few people start running up the stairs. People are shouting and someone grabs my hand and pulls me behind a car.
‘Sit down. The cops are here.’
I obey and rest my head in my hands.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I don’t feel well.’
‘What did you take?’
‘Four Cruisers, I think. Maybe five.’
‘What else?’
‘Nothing, that’s it.’
The cops walk past the car and up the stairs.
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘Lean over the garden. I’ll get you water when the cops go.’
Everything comes up at once. Vomit and tears spill out onto the plants. The soil becomes a river of yellow. I wipe my eyes and mascara smears across my cheeks and fists. Sweat runs down my forehead and as I lean over to spew again the boy pulls my hair back from my face. The music is turned down and we hear the police warning everyone upstairs to keep it down or they will come back. I turn to face the boy.
‘I’m Teo,’ he says.
The cops come back down the stairs, get in their car and leave.
Teo stands. ‘I’ll get water for you.’
When I wake the next morning, Kris is lying next to me.
‘Good morning. How are you feeling?’
‘What happened? I think I got sick.’
‘I don’t know, bub.’
Kris stays over two nights in a row. On the third day he comes over in the afternoon but then his mum calls and says he has to go home. I cannot sit still without him. When he leaves, I drive to visit a friend at her boyfriend’s place. Leah and I went to primary school together, and she knew both of my sisters well. The three of us sit on the couch watching films and smoking cigarettes. I have my own packet now. I hide them in my glovebox and clean my teeth before I go home.
Time passes. I have university exams in a few days: Crime, Punishment and Society, or Philosophy and Psychiatry, or other such subjects. I’ve done a lot of study but I don’t feel prepared. When everyone else at university speaks about exams they seem to know what they’re doing, like they’re the most natural thing in the world. I have always liked studying and enjoy doing assignments but even before the accident I found exams stressful. I get all worked up the night before, don’t sleep well and wake up grumpy and tired and have to sit the exam in a half-daze. With my bad sleeping habits and excessive crying, I am having trouble focusing.
I am almost constantly on the edge of overwhelm. Sometimes, when I am out partying or socialising with people who didn’t know my sisters, my emotions recede, my body stops vibrating, and I forget about the pain at home. But otherwise my feelings are waves that sweep over me again and again. I am in the ocean, struggling for air as the waves keep coming, one after another, and someone is below, pulling me further underwater.
After my last exam, the drive home is a bad one. I cry most of the way, my body lined with anxiety. As I drive, tears run down my cheeks; at the traffic lights, I sob. It feels like an internal voice is shouting at me, but I can’t understand what it’s saying. When I get home, Dad is in his office and Mum has left a note on the kitchen bench saying she is down the street at a family friend’s and to call if I need her. I get the lighter from my glovebox, walk inside the bathroom, lock the door and take a razor from the packet under the sink. I run the shower and turn the exhaust fan on, flicking the lighter and holding the flame to the plastic surrounding the blade. It begins to melt. I use my fingernail to scratch back the hot plastic, exposing a few millimetres of the razor’s edge. After working the flame around it, I scratch back the plastic, millimetre by millimetre. I don’t know how long Mum will be—she usually returns as soon as she knows I am home—so I try to hurry. It is difficult to be in the house with her without feeling monitored. I have been thinking about cutting for some time and am desperate to make the most of this window.
It feels like it takes forever. I can’t leave the shower running much longer in case I haven’t heard Mum come in. When the blade is free from the plastic, I turn the water off and put my ear to the door.
Footsteps. Shit. They are coming closer. And then a knock on the bathroom door.
‘Hi, Chloe.’
It’s Nan. Nan often comes over for a couple of hours to help Dad with his paperwork. I call out hi, say I will be out in a minute. Oh crap, I think. The water has been running but I haven’t showered so my hair isn’t damp. She calls out that she is going down the back, to Dad’s office. When I hear the back door close, I sprint into my room, grab some clean clothes and make a dash to the bathroom. I shower quickly, trying to wash the trembling from my body. I hide the blade in my jewellery box and run out to put the lighter back in my car. Mum is a known snooper. She comes home not long after.
Then Kris calls to say he is coming over and the razor and the bad voice are forgotten for the night. It is always this way: he is the person who calms me, and the person I hurt most.
I have trouble falling asleep. I go to bed at ten and I’m still awake at eleven, twelve, one in the morning. I don’t know what to do and am unable to see how much my parents are suffering too. I wake them, ask them to take me to the park; they climb out of bed and take me to a nearby swing set. It is two in the morning now, and we are the only ones here.
Mum takes me to visit a psychiatrist in Liverpool. I am pleased with myself for knowing the difference between a psychiatrist and psychologist. I have wanted to study psychology at university since I was fourteen years old.
The first time we visit, I am surprised. His office is not what I pictured a psychiatrist’s office to be. It is grey and drab, and the water cooler is always empty.
(Years later, after I seek out therapy for myself, my mother says to me, ‘Isn’t it funny? You’d think that when you’re not ready is when you’d need therapy the most. But that’s not true, is it?’
I shake my head. ‘No, it’s not.’)
Each session, he asks me a series of questions, and I give him a string of half-hearted responses, barely listening to him or myself. What I do ingest, and remember all these years later, is what he says at the end of each appointment: ‘The accident is a tree in the ground. At the moment, your life is a desert and there is only one tree growing. In time, your life will grow into a forest. There will be many trees, and the accident will be just one of them.’
I think, for me, this is now true. But for my father I’ve not seen any other trees grow.
I come to hate night-time.
(Even now, this hasn’t changed.)
Once I fall asleep, I sleep through until morning. But getting to sleep is difficult. It scares me to be alone with my grief.
One day after a visit to the psychiatrist, I am home alone and notice Lisa’s door ajar. The doors on the girls’ rooms have been kept shut since the accident. I push the door open. Everything is still in its place, but there are no clothes on the bed or toys on the floor. It looks like Lisa’s room, but doesn’t feel like it.
>
Moments earlier, I felt fine. But when I step into her room, I curl up on the floor in tears. And then the voice comes. It says horrible things. It says I was a bad sister and calls me a coward. I try to think about something else but that doesn’t work. I try punching Lisa’s pillow but that doesn’t quieten it either. And then I remember the razor sitting in my jewellery box. I walk out of Lisa’s pink room, slamming the door. The physical expression of my anger feels good. I get the razor from my room. I want the pain, and I don’t. I need help, and I can’t ask for it. I want to sleep forever, and I can’t bear the idea of sitting still for a moment.
After making sure the house is still empty, I retreat to the bathroom and sterilise the razor with my lighter. I slump down onto the tiles and lay my left arm across my knee with the palm facing up. Press the tip of the razor against my inner wrist, and pause.
My body is saying no: the hand holding the blade resists; my heart rate has tripled. But my mind is saying yes: Don’t be a coward, it urges.
I slide the razor across my skin. A few small bubbles of blood form on the surface. That’s it? I thought blood would spill down my arm and onto the floor.
I return the razor to the starting point and dig the corner in a little deeper. It really fucking hurts. Yet again, the movies have lied to me. What happened to the scene where the young girl does one quick swipe across her wrist and her clothes are soaked in blood as she slumps to the floor and the credits roll?
I start again, in a new line parallel to the first. I try to push a little deeper but the same thing happens. I can’t tolerate the pain, let alone enjoy it.
(In hindsight, I do this not because my body wants it but because my mind has clocked it as a possible coping strategy, and I don’t know what else to do to make the overwhelm stop.)
When Kris comes over the next day I keep my wrist hidden until I fall asleep. He wakes me with a rough jerk and demands to know what happened.
‘Nothing.’ I roll to face the other way.
‘What do you mean, nothing? I can see the mark. What happened?’
‘Go away.’
‘No, I will not go away this time. Bub, what happened? Did you try to cut yourself?’
I break down and cry in his arms until I fall asleep. When I open my eyes in the morning Kris is already awake. He is always awake until I fall asleep and most mornings when he stays over I wake to his stare.
‘Did you sleep?’ I ask.
He smiles, leans towards me, kisses my forehead. He already has my hand enclosed in his. ‘What are we going to do, bub?’
‘What do you mean? Want to go to the beach?’
‘Yeah, we can go to the beach. But we need to talk about your arm first.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Kris promises to take me to the beach but only after I tell Mum what I have done.
It is always my mother who deals with my mess. My father exists in a bubble of protection. We are afraid to upset him. Sometimes, I want to say: Have you noticed you still have two of us left?
(I spoke to my therapist about releasing this book. I had to ask: ‘What if my father commits suicide?’
She says he is more resilient than I think he is, that he has spent many years enduring this pain and that perhaps the book will open up conversation for the better.
The question of my father committing suicide is always floating in the back of my mind. Although they probably perceive my actions otherwise—I never come home as often as they want me to—my parents’ emotional states hang heavy on my shoulders. One of the biggest shifts with finally seeing a therapist, all these years later, is learning that I am not responsible for my parents’ happiness. This is difficult to learn, and I struggle to find a middle ground between empathy and self-care. Ultimately, do I think my father would commit suicide? No, I don’t. But even as I write these words, such certainty concerns me.)
With a rare sternness in his voice, Kris says I tell Mum or he does. That’s it, he says. He doesn’t care if I break up with him, but she has to know. I think he is expecting me to put up a fight, but I am glad he gives me the ultimatum. This is exactly what I need. I can’t ask but I know I need help. My thoughts are scaring me. I say he can tell her, I don’t want to. I will stay in my room. He agrees. We are supposed to be going to the beach. A few minutes after Kris leaves my room Mum comes in. She walks to my bed without saying a word and hugs me. I allow myself the comfort for a few seconds, then roll out of her embrace and turn to face the wall without a thought about how she must be feeling.
‘Why don’t you get up and get ready for the beach, darling?’
I never liked that word, ‘darling’. It made me feel like a kid. Years later, when I tell Mum this, she says she calls everyone darling and means nothing by it. But she stops using it after that. Sometimes I still think about this word, how my mother used to use it, how it has been erased from her vocabulary. Sometimes I wonder if I would take it back if I could. I grieve for the parts of ourselves my mother and I have scoured from each other over the years.
We have a good day at the beach, Kris and I. I am glad Mum made him get the razor off me, but I like the little scab that is forming across my wrist. I don’t want anyone else to see it, just my parents and Kris, so they will know I need help. When we’re strolling through the shops along the boardwalk Kris helps me choose a thick leather bracelet that can be tightened to stay in one place and cover my wound.
Throughout all of this, I do not let myself think of my sisters.
I am standing in a circle of twenty or so people as we pass around a couple of joints the size of my forefinger. It is Kris’s friend’s birthday and a large group of us has gathered in the backyard of his house. The place is a three-storey affair with a tennis court and a split-level garden between the back door and the patio area.
One of the boys has rolled a pair of thick joints before motioning for everyone to get into a circle. The first joint reaches me quickly. I inhale deeply, exhale slowly. Repeat this, pass it on. I’ve been smoking a bit of weed lately and think I’ll need several inhales to feel any effects.
It’s been a while since Kris’s disapproval stopped me from doing anything I wanted to.
I don’t know where Kris is, but he won’t be far. The second joint reaches me. With alcohol, you feel the increasing effects as you take each sip. But weed is slow. You can take three drags and feel nothing until ten or fifteen minutes later when suddenly you realise you only needed one. This is particularly so when you haven’t rolled the joint you’re smoking. Although you might roll two-thirds tobacco and one-third weed, the person next to you could be rolling anything from two-thirds weed and one-third tobacco to 100 per cent weed. The question ‘Is it strong?’ might give you a rough response to the ratio question, but strength is always subjective.
I take the second joint from the guy standing next to me. Inhale. Exhale. I take a fourth drag before passing it on. A few minutes later, people’s faces and ears and shoulders blur together. Where there were previously distinct lines between one guy’s blue t-shirt and the white top on the girl next to him, their torsos and clothing now form a rainbow; one colour bleeds into the next.
When I was a child, every year my sisters and I would go to the Members Christmas Party at Mounties, our local community club. It was a one-day, outdoor carnival filled with pink fairy floss and unlimited rides. It was one of our favourite days of the year. I never had the nerve to try it, but each December I’d stand outside and watch Carlie ride the Gravitron. It was a wide cylinder with a floor that fell away once it started spinning, and the only thing that pinned her body to the inside pads as the ride spun around and lifted into the sky was the force of spinning so quickly.
After the fourth drag of the joint, its effects are how I always imagined the Gravitron’s. I try to focus on the bodies around me but they are outlined in luminous green light, an
d blend into one another. I look to the sky. The electrical wires overhead are covered in green highlighter.
I don’t know where Kris is.
I don’t know how I managed to stay upright, or where my mind went. But this is what I remember: coming to while crouched on cold pavement. The faces and bodies have disappeared. I am hunched low to the ground, my arms wrapped around my knees, Kris seated beside me. I ask him what happened.
‘I don’t know, bub,’ he says. He hugs me. ‘I think you greened out.’
My attempts at escape are turning into obliterations.
When I wake the next morning, Kris is gone. I climb out of bed, and head into the kitchen. He is sitting with Mum, talking quietly. I can tell that he has told her about my self-destructive behaviours.
‘I’ve made an appointment for you to see the university counsellor today, Chloe.’
I am too tired to object and so I nod, eat the plate of food she pushes in front of me, and go to change.
At the university, my mother comes in with me. The counsellor asks what happened and I tell him the truth: I have been smoking marijuana lately, had too much last night and flipped out. I am relieved to finally have something to say: I cannot verbalise my feelings, but I can talk about the events.
He nods, types away at his computer and prints me out a little sheet. Apparently, I can now take a break during class, leave early if I need to, maybe get an extension on an assessment if I can’t focus on time.
I nod and thank him. I am not sure how leaving early or taking mid-class breaks will help, but I am relieved to be able to get extra time for assessments. I have never sought an extension for an assessment before. But now I struggle to sit still for more than half an hour. Before the accident, I could study for four or five hours at a stretch, easily and daily. Now things won’t stick in my brain when I’m studying.
The Girls Page 6