by Sabina Green
I frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“You caused an accident today,” he said matter-of-factly and it didn’t sound at all like he was reproaching me for it. “Why don’t you do something good to make up for it?”
“Like what?” It felt silly to keep clutching the key as a possible self defence weapon. The man next to me was apparently some kind of a saint, he clearly wasn’t about to pounce on me.
“I don’t know, that’s up to you. It can be anything… Buy lunch for someone who doesn’t have money. Mow your neighbour’s lawn. Put back trolleys left around a supermarket car park by selfish people who didn’t feel like pushing them back to the trolley bays. Tell people they look nice… or just stop and talk to them. You’ll make their day.”
I immediately thought about the Animals and Environment Protection Association and the missed phone calls I reacted to with silence.
“The list goes on and on,” my driver continued. “Choose whatever you like.”
“Actually, I already know what I’ll do,” I said resolutely and a little expectant wave of excitement washed over me, a welcome change from the grief and fear of the last few days.
“Really?” He sounded like someone who didn’t expect much and indeed rarely got much from others; he seemed genuinely pleased by my willingness.
He carried this sort of religious vibe, trying to recruit others to his faith. I may be an atheist, but I understood it. There was so much cruelty in the world, it made sense to at least partially even the score with good deeds.
“Really,” I assured him, and while we were turning into my street, I realised: “You’re doing it now, aren’t you? You’re repaying somebody’s kindness by helping me?”
He hesitated for a second. “Maybe.”
He might as well have said a definite yes, and I finally understood his unusual willingness to help, not only at the scene of the accident, but also later. I wondered what kindness had been shown to him, that he’s helping me to this extent, but it seemed inappropriate to ask.
“Here we are,” I woke up from my contemplations. “Number thirty one.”
I thanked him for the ride and his understanding. It was only after the tail lights of his car disappeared around the corner, that I realised I don’t even know his name.
Frank
Connie was late and it wasn’t like her at all. I rarely ever asked her to keep me updated, but since we started living together again, she phoned me if she got delayed. Just so I didn’t have to worry.
So now I was worried. I kept abandoning whatever game Ruby and I were playing every couple of minutes to peak out of the window, just to check if I see Connie’s car.
The afternoon slowly turned into night. I tried calling her number several times, but it went straight to voicemail. Am I being ridiculous? Like a mother hen who cannot rest before she’s counted all her chicks? I tried being calm, but there was an unease in me I couldn’t shake.
It was half past eight when I nearly did the one thing children hate their parents doing. I was about to call Emma’s number to ask about Constance–maybe they went for a drink after work and forgot to mention it–when I finally heard humming of an engine and voices outside.
I peeked out through the gap in the curtains. It was a strange car that left after a brief moment. Somebody drove my daughter home? Where was her car?
Connie was standing frozen on the driveway, so I walked out and stood next to her.
“I had an accident, Dad,” she said in a tight voice, and started crying. She hid in my arms, let herself be hugged and sobbed for a while.
I didn’t want to make it harder for her, so I didn’t mention how worried I was, and that to hear about her crash was like being punched in the face. She told me how it happened, and my stomach twisted.
“Thank God nothing happened to you,” I managed to say and silently added: After losing Penny and Wyatt, I couldn’t lose you too!
“The car’s in a really bad shape,” she said.
I shook my head. “Never mind the car. It’s just a piece of metal. You can use mine before yours is repaired, anyway. You’re ice cold, let’s go inside. I’ll make you some tea.”
I led her inside the house and she was as easy to guide inside as a limp rag doll. I put the kettle on and brought her a fluffy blanket from the laundry room. She let me tuck her in as if she was a child.
She looked towards Ruby’s room. “Where’s she?”
“I put her to bed a moment ago, she’s fast asleep,” I replied and after a short hesitation added: “She was asking about you.”
She missed her Mum. She had been glancing at the door today nearly as much as I had. But I wasn’t going to say that to my daughter. She still looked ill at ease and I wasn’t going to add to that by making her feel guilty. Connie deserved some space to deal with this distress.
I got two big mugs of tea and sat next to her on the sofa. She settled into the pillows and stretched her legs so that her feet were nearly touching my thighs. The main thing was she’d made it home.
Me–a mother hen! I never would have thought…
Neither of us said anything, even though Connie must have been bottling up a lot and I had lots of questions; but the silence between us wasn’t uncomfortable. We were sipping from our mugs and after a while she reached for the remote. She was never a fan of watching TV, so I guessed she was probably looking for something to occupy her thoughts. I understood that only too well.
She switched through a few channels before she got to a news report. They were talking about a large bushfire in New South Wales, followed by a surfer attacked by a shark, resulting in the man’s leg being amputated, and then showed photos of a car accident in Melbourne which turned fatal for all eight people involved.
I was surprised Connie didn’t turn the TV off. The news was usually mostly negative which she normally summed up with “one big depression” before pressing a button to silence this or that news reporter. But not today.
I didn’t protest and continued to watch world events. Since she started working at the police, Connie had shared various things with me and it didn’t seem so unbelievable anymore that the information released to the public was only about ten percent of the full story.
“Two days ago a video made by an activist group called The Collective appeared on myvideo.com, and since then it has reached more than seventeen million views. The reaction is intense,” the fervent news reporter was saying. “Speculations are rising, whether The Collective plans a protest or an attack against the government. This is now being investigated by police forces. We advise that the video is not suitable for younger audiences.”
The reporter and her studio disappeared and were replaced by a video made up of brief clips edited together in quick succession, narrated by an older female voice. It was over in two minutes and I was sure that it was just a shorter, edited version of the original video. If I was shocked by what got into the evening news, what could be in the rest of the video?
Connie must have been thinking on a similar note, she quickly turned off the TV, where the reporter had now moved on to another topic. We looked at each other silently, my daughter then put down her tea and reached for her laptop. She found the website and the video. She sat closer to me so we could both see the screen.
“Imagine there is cancer growing inside your body,” a voice of an older woman told us urgently over a microscopic picture of two cell samples, one clearly healthy, the other infected with a disease. “It demands space, multiplies, and kills. It causes your organs to fail, one after the other. You want to get rid of it. You want to live.”
A patient on a hospital bed, a team of surgeons working on him. An operating theatre, drips, screens.
“There isn’t a place for it in your body, in your world. Only one can survive, never both. Cancer must be eradicated.”
A tin
bowl with a blob covered with blood, removed from the body. Perhaps a tumour?
“And that’s how it is with everything that causes harm, isn’t useful, or stands in the way.”
Mold on a loaf of bread. Weeds in a garden bed. A rat under a wardrobe.
“From the beginning of time, everyone and everything on the planet has been striving for order and prosperity.”
A wide shot of lush green nature, forests, a lake, mountains.
A girl drinking a glass of water. A boy gathering blueberries.
“But what if a great imbalance develops? What if some take more than they give?”
Men with a saw on the edge of a forest, next to them a pile of cut down trees.
A butcher with a knife at a pig’s neck.
“What if someone leaves behind more than they should?”
An underwater shot of a coral reef covered with plastic of various sizes.
A fish stuck in a plastic shopping bag.
A beach, barely visible under a layer of rubbish.
“Every plant, every animal helps the ecosystem and the healthy life of the planet… except mankind.”
A factory and its high smoking chimneys releasing dark grey smoke towards the sky.
A person in a white lab coat injecting a balding rabbit, its skin scarred by previous attempts.
“Only mankind lays claim on that which doesn’t belong to it.”
An emaciated lioness in a tiny cage.
A hippo walking around on a small footpath in an enclosure that wouldn’t have been large enough for a Chihuahua.
A tiger obediently walking on its back legs on a circus stage.
A fox fur coat.
“It oppresses other species and drives them out of their natural habitats.”
A satellite picture of a web of cities taking over the greenery.
Six dead crocodiles and above them men with guns, fists raised triumphantly over the beaten animals.
Rows and rows of cut off tusks, fins, stretched out skins.
“It destroys itself…”
A junkie in dirty rags lying on a street, clearly high, with a needle still jabbed into his forearm.
An overweight middle-aged man forcing an entire burger into his mouth, his eyes set intently on a full plate in front of him.
“… and others.”
A CCTV clip showing a masked person aiming a gun at a woman behind a bank counter.
A plane flying into a high-rise building.
A guy clutching his heart, collapsing in the middle of a pedestrian crowd; people stepping right over him and walking on without a second glance.
“What if mankind has become the cancer of this planet?”
A ditch full of dead human bodies, a row of soldiers sitting nearby.
“We spread like cancerous cells…”
A crowded street. A traffic jam on a five-lane highway. A web of an incredible number of planes over Europe.
“We advance in all directions and destroy everything in their path, sucking the life out of Earth and leaving only pain and devastation behind.”
A landfill. Rubbish as far as the eye can see.
A dried-out lake, looking forsaken without any water in it.
A kangaroo carcass pulled away from the road so as not to be in the way of cars.
A starving African child with a bloated stomach.
Prison cells filled with men and women in their respective uniforms.
Politicians sleeping at a meeting.
A woman tied to a poll, naked and clearly tortured, her face twisted by pain.
Another woman with a face burned by acid.
A man kicking a dog chained to a tree.
“Cancer must be eradicated.”
The bleak music stopped and the screen went black. The last four words were pronounced carefully, with great emphasis. Did I just imagine it, or was there a sense of threat in them? I shivered.
“I’d like to watch it again,” Connie said and pressed play one more time. Her voice was strangely muted, she was frowning and her eyes were glossy.
Through life and Connie’s work, I have heard a lot about the consequences of indifference, psychological and physical torture and abuse, but I still couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen.
Was it wrong that I agreed with the final statement? How many times have I wished that all the evil in people and caused by people would disappear? But it was a part of us just as much as goodness… and while there are people, there will be evil too. It was a vicious circle without a solution. I let out a sigh. That’s why those like Connie joined the system, to fight against violence. But no matter how hard they worked, they could never stop it. Desire for power and possessions, arrogance, cowardice, cruelty… All of this was just as deeply rooted in human character as love, devotion, the need to protect one’s family and be safe. These polar opposites will always be at war.
People are the cancer of the planet.
Cancer must be eradicated.
The image of men cutting down trees came back to me. It very well could have been me standing there… And the woman behind the bank counter. My stomach turned looking at the gun pointing at her.
“What do you think it means, Dad?” my daughter asked. Her forehead crinkled and her eyebrows pulled together in deep thought.
“Nothing good will come off of it, that’s for sure.”
She put away her laptop, reached for a mug of now lukewarm tea and I realised that I hadn’t drunk much myself. The contents of the video disturbed me and occupied my thoughts.
“Do you think that this Collective really plans an attack against the government?”
“No idea. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it did come to that.”
“Who would?” she said bitterly after a while and shrugged. “It’s awful, the stuff that’s happening in the world; the video didn’t cover even half of the issues… Global warming, the meat market, corruption, abuse of power. Murders, rapes, paedophilia. And what are politicians doing about all this? Nothing. Too busy lining their own pockets! Regular people can make some difference, but not much… We need actual leaders, not the idiots who hold power now.”
The video clearly affected Connie just as strongly as me. And what about those seventeen million views and an intense reaction the news reporter mentioned? She didn’t say what side the viewers leaned on, but I had a pretty good idea. Nobody ever said life on the planet is too idyllic, that we needed a bit more cruelty.
Maybe that was the point of the video. To inspire the public to create change, start a protest and get things moving. The Collective didn’t have to do anything else now, just sit back and watch.
Connie and I kept talking about the video and the overall message for a good while. Like so many times before, we started talking about rights and wrongs. My daughter couldn’t bear animal cruelty and that, combined with ethical and environmental issues surrounding meat and dairy production, lead her to become first a vegetarian and then a vegan. I hadn’t gone that far, but agreed with her and consumed animal products only as a treat; meat wasn’t an everyday thing for me anymore.
But trying to inspire people to try harder and be kinder has only led to good people being even better and trying harder, and the others remaining just as blind and indifferent as before.
I doubted either of us would get much sleep tonight because of the video, the car crash, and my daughter’s mysterious preoccupation last week. I knew she was locking herself in her bedroom all the time to be alone with whatever worry she was dealing with. Either that, or she suddenly needed more sleep than a newborn.
“Dad,” she said after a while, “I think you were right. I need to take a break from work, it’s been too much for me lately.”
I nodded in relief.
“I’ll take tomorrow off,” she continued.
“We’ll do something… all three of us.”
“I’d like that.”
She smiled, even if a bit lopsided, and I realised that it has been her first smile in a long time.
“Why don’t we go to the river? We can have a picnic.”
“We’ve just been there with Ruby…”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It would be nice to go back, though,” I added quickly, I didn’t want her to think it was a bad idea. “Main thing is, I’ll have my favourite girls with me.”
Connie
“It’s all over Facebook,” said Emma when I returned to work two days later. She was making coffee in the kitchenette, surrounded by the sergeant and two other policemen.
Relaxing by the water the previous day had definitely helped me. I lost some of the unpleasant tension in my shoulders, cleared my head and sorted out my thoughts and priorities. I could feel my Dad’s scrutinizing gaze on me all evening, he must have been wondering about my sudden mood change. But he didn’t say anything, and I spoke to him as light-heartedly as I could. When emotions threatened to overcome me, I quickly shifted my attention to Ruby and immersed myself in her games. At home we didn’t speak of the video again, although I wasn’t surprised that at the station it was a hot topic.
“It will cause a mess,” the sergeant mumbled, “and guess who’ll be dealing with it.”
The crowd in the kitchenette nodded in agreement. Every event or protest required police surveillance. Mishaps happened, crowds got over-excited. Sometimes there were fights, but I hoped that in the case of events connected to the Collective’s video, it wouldn’t come to that.
I didn’t take part in the conversation at the station. Instead I thought how, during my lunch break, I want to finally respond to those missed phone calls and do my bit to help a good cause, in any way I can.
When the moment finally arrived, I sneaked out into the parking lot and chose a place where I wouldn’t be disturbed. I dialled the number and listened to the ringtone until there was a click.
“Animals and Environment Protection Association, Andrew speaking.”