Zo

by Leanne Owens

  Tell them everything, she imagined Zo’s voice again, underlining the fact that when he really spoke to her, it was quite different from when she imagined it.

  Then I’ll go to jail, she replied to imaginary Zo, there is no statute of limitations on murder.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ally’s Story Starts

  Kamekura Private Hospital, Queensland. May, 2019

  ‘Is anyone else a bit nervous about what Ally is going to tell us today?’ Sandy asked the gang as they ate breakfast. Even dressed casually in a white linen shirt tucked into blue jeans with just a touch of foundation, she managed to look incredibly glamourous.

  ‘I keep asking myself,’ said Lynette, sitting next to Sandra, similarly dressed in jeans and a deep blue shirt with a minimum of makeup, ‘what is the worst she can tell us?’

  ‘Do you think there’s more than Zo?’ Peter asked, looking back and forth between the two women.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sandy screwed up her nose, ‘but I’m worried. And how can I pretend that her stories about Zo are real when I know they’re not?’

  ‘You’re an actress, sweetie,’ Lynette grinned and bumped her friend’s shoulder with her own. ‘You act. I’ll be acting.’

  ‘What did she tell you before?’ Nick asked the four friends. ‘I’m gathering she did try to tell you about it, and it didn’t work out.’

  Peter, Andrew, Sandy, and Lynette glanced at each other guiltily, remembering what they’d done when she had trusted them with her version of reality.

  ‘She had started to tell us,’ Andrew murmured, his eyes downcast with shame, ‘bit by bit, she was telling us. A sentence here. A hint there. It wasn’t all at once.’

  ‘You have to understand,’ said Peter, his face strained as he tried to justify what they’d done, ‘from about age eleven through to well into our twenties, she was this pillar of perfection in our lives. So strong, so smart, able to solve all problems. She guided us, she helped us, she made us. She had always had a bit of an obsession about Florence and history, about Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, the entire Medici family. Even at school, in our European History class, she would talk of them as though they were still alive, showing us drawings in library books that Da Vinci had done and explaining them as though Leo, as she called him, had spoken to her about them.’

  ‘It was freaky,’ Sandra shook her head, remembering the early days of Ally’s problems. ‘She even learned Italian by the time she was fourteen so that she could read anything those Renaissance Florentines had written. Who does that? But we accepted her fascination with that period and people as an eccentricity, nothing harmful.’

  ‘It began to get bizarre, though,’ Lynette took up the story, ‘after her father died. When you’re fifteen, you don’t usually worry too much about death, but she began talking about souls and heaven, and whether reincarnation was possible, and if there was even such a thing as souls that stayed around. We thought it was just a side effect of losing both parents so went along with her talk, but we were kids, it made us uncomfortable and we never really understood.’

  Andrew nodded at that, ‘I heard her words, but I didn’t get the message. After school, I guess we became absorbed in our own lives. We were going places. She did her teaching degree, and for the year in Hollywood with Sandy, she did some tutoring and bar work, then back here she taught Italian and English at high schools while we went out into the world to make our mark. We were in our mid-twenties when she began telling us that she was in love with Lorenzo de’ Medici, or Zo, as she called him. At first, we didn’t think it was any different from, say, someone saying they were in love with a movie star or a character in a book. Lynette was going to marry Donny Osmond when we were thirteen, so I guess we treated it like that. I think it was our acceptance of those early revelations that gave her the courage to talk about her love one Christmas in the late eighties. And we didn’t handle it well.’

  There were a few seconds silence as they each remembered that Christmas, shaking their heads at their own thoughts and memories.

  ‘We’d noticed it getting worse,’ said Peter. ‘She was more reclusive and showing other signs of schizophrenia - agitation, excitability, mental confusion, paranoia, fear, apathy, anxiety, and the whole Renaissance delusion that was growing out of hand. She was a text book case. You could look up any list of symptoms for the disorder and she had most of them, but she refused help and refused medication, insisting it wasn’t a delusion - it was real.’

  ‘She said she lived in two worlds at once,’ Lynette raised her grey eyes to Marcus and Nick. ‘This one and her imaginary world, only to her it wasn’t imaginary, it was as real as this one. Her obsession was robbing her of all perspective and she would be manic about her alter-ego Elli and what she was doing, swapping back and forth between seeing Elli as another person and as herself, speaking about her in third person and first person, back and forth.

  ‘Eventually,’ Peter told them, ‘we tried to make her see that it wasn’t real, that it was an understandable break from reality that seemed to have grown from the trauma over the death of her parents. What she went through was enough to cause mental problems in anyone. She had found her mother in the bath, drowned, and not long after, she and her father were holidaying in the Grampians and he died in front of her.’

  Both the Americans made sympathetic noises, imagining the pain the teenage Ally must have gone through, losing both parents like that.

  ‘We couldn’t get her to seek treatment,’ Peter continued. ‘She was adamant that both her worlds were as real as each other and she could not give one up.’

  He stopped, and buried his face into his hands, still haunted by their actions.

  Sandy patted him on the back supportively and continued. ‘Peter consulted with the psychiatrists he was working with at the time and the recommendation was to have her committed for treatment. It was for her own good. We did it with the best of intentions. We wanted to help her. Unfortunately, she was very resistant and didn’t respond to medication, and since she was also showing symptoms of chronic depression after several weeks, the doctors tried ECT, Electroconvulsive Therapy.’

  ‘Do they still use that?’ Marcus asked, surprised.

  Peter nodded, ‘It is very successful in certain cases. Don’t think of the barbaric movie style treatment. It’s done under general anaesthetic and it helps to kickstart the circuitry of the brain. There can be a few hours or even days of mild confusion when the patient first wakes and the brain is recovering. The results can be excellent.’

  ‘Not for Ally, though,’ Lynette told them. ‘No one seems to understand what went wrong, but when she came to, she was furious, she was like a raging animal and accused us of trying to sever the link between her and Zo. She said we’d betrayed her and let her down, that we’d turned on her and she didn’t want to see any of us again. Somehow, she broke out of the hospital that night and ran, and we never found her. She sent us all letters – I showed you mine, Nick – and she left our lives.’

  Nick’s brow wrinkled in thought. ‘And now you’re going to try and be there for her by pretending to believe in her two worlds?’

  ‘Disbelieving was a disaster,’ Sandy pointed out.

  ‘I want to hear the story,’ Marcus piped up. ‘If she’s created an entire fantasy world based in Renaissance Italy, then I’m all for her talking us through everything. It doesn’t sound much more alarming than authors who create fictional worlds and write about them, or method actors who become the character they are playing for the duration of the film.’

  When he put it like that, it didn’t seem quite so much of a mental health issue, and the four Australians began to feel a little more positive about what they were facing.

  Peter left everyone at the breakfast table as he walked over to the hospital to do some paperwork in his office. Around mid-morning, they headed over to meet with Ally. Gina stated that she could have visitors for an hour or two in one sitting. Nick draped an arm over L
ynette’s shoulder and they meandered slowly behind the others, chatting and laughing in a world of their own.

  When they entered the hospital, a nurse showed them to The Outback Room where Ally was waiting. The room presented a blend of autumn colours, with murals on the walls of rolling brown plains and outback skies. A carpet in warm tones of tans through to the reds of desert sands covered the floor and hosted a range of yellow furniture. Ally was sitting in one of the yellow recliners, her black hair tied in a pony tail and her face looking beautiful and serene. She wore Dr Who satin pyjamas that clashed with the décor of the room. There was something childishly innocent in the way she curled her legs up in the recliner and watched her friends enter the room, her face lighting up and stars shining in her eyes.

  ‘It really is good to see you all again,’ she said with feeling as they gathered around her. ‘More than good. It is amazing.’

  ‘You’re looking a lot better today,’ commented Sandy, touching her hair briefly with fondness.

  ‘And I feel better,’ she smiled at everyone. ‘Of course, I feel dreadful for putting Peter through hell with my selfish stunt, but it has worked out for the best, which I’ll tell you about when my story gets there.’

  ‘Not going to read us the ending first?’ Andrew winked at her.

  ‘No, the ending might be the start,’ she said cryptically, ‘or it might be something I never mention as it would be the end of me.’

  ‘Too confusing,’ Lynette held up both hands in a stop gesture.

  They spent another few minutes with small talk, then Ally pointed to the pile of yellow beanbag chairs in the corner.

  ‘Since this is going to be story time,’ she told them all, ‘I am going to be the story teller in the chair, and you can all be the listeners in the beanbag chairs around me. You’ll find a few doubles there if the lovebirds want to share one.’ She gave Andrew and Marcus as well as Nick and Lynette a pointed look.

  As they organised the shapeless chairs, Ally smiled indulgently over them. She knew they didn’t really believe her, but she also recognised that they were willing to try and listen without judgement, and that meant a lot. During the night, she had wondered where to start the story, and thought it would be best to start at the chronological beginning and just work through it.

  Peter made himself comfortable on Ally’s left side, with Sandy next to him, then Lynette and Nick snuggled into one of the doubles in front of Ally and Marcus and Andrew shared another to the right. It looked like a preschool story session, something that Ally had been aiming for as she felt like the teacher about to entertain her children.

  ‘Everyone comfortable?’ she asked.

  They nodded.

  ‘It all began with the pain,’ she told them, casting her mind back to childhood before she had become friends with any of them. ‘I used to suffer from chronic pain. Sometimes at night the pain became so intense that I’d black out, but Mum and Dad didn’t believe in doctors or hospitals, they were funny that way, so I had to put up with it. It was one of the main reasons I missed so many days of school – that and the fact that I loved wagging school, running wild along the Barwon River.’

  She smiled at them all, knowing they’d remember the fun of exploring the banks of the Barwon with her, like wild creatures. At high school, she had mentioned having some sort of illness that gave her severe pain, but she always seemed so healthy that it barely stayed in their memory that there had been something wrong.

  ‘Dad would preach to me,’ she changed her voice to imitate the strict tones of her father, running off some of his oft repeated sentences. ‘Suffer in silence or burn in hell for the sins of complaining, was one of his favourites, though he always seemed OK about complaining himself. Blessed are those who accept what the Lord gives them in suffering as they will have the rewards in Heaven, was another, and you can start to see a bit of a pattern emerging. Suffering is punishment for sins and must be accepted in silence, came out often. You should be able to see the fire and brimstone approach to religion in my house, and, if I felt pain, then that was punishment for my sins.’

  Andrew, Peter, Lynette, and Sandy glanced at each other. They hadn’t realised her father had been a religious nut. They had seen her parents at a few school functions and they appeared stern and unfriendly with never a smile to cross their lips. No one had visited her house to see how they behaved at home. Ally never invited them because she said her father didn’t like disturbances, but this sounded like he was disturbed – mentally.

  ‘So, I never got any help for the pain,’ she continued. ‘It just became a part of my life that I had to accept as my punishment for my sins, or so I believed. When it became unbearable, I wanted to be somewhere else. I prayed to be somewhere else. I prayed for the pain to stop, for the aching in my body to go away. Always silently. I knew that silence was golden. And then, one day it happened, in 1968, the year before you and I became friends, Peter, my prayers were answered and I found a way to escape the pain. That was the first time…’

  ***

  Her mind went back to the dark living room of her childhood home, with the walls that flickered from the images on television as men in shades of grey discussed the shooting of another Kennedy. Ally shut her eyes to blind her to the images, but the voices wouldn’t stop, nor the smells, nor the pain. She stayed home from school because of the pain, and it had become so consuming that she couldn’t think of anything else. She put her hands to her face, pressed her palms into her eyes, and tried to stop all thought, all feeling, all fear... all of everything. She wanted everything to stop, to go away, she wanted to be on the moon, or flying, or lost. She wanted to disappear. To be no more.

  God, please help me. Please take me away. Please take me somewhere else. Please. God. Please. I cannot take this anymore. Please let me die.

  The shadowy man who often stood in her peripheral vision reached out for her and took her hand. Everything stopped in an explosion of light. The pain receded, swept away into a distant, disappearing darkness as the light flooded in. Pulling her hands from her face she reached out as if to grab the departing whirlpool of life, but it slipped away. The cold flickering room had vanished, replaced with a warm brightness.

  She blinked against the glare, squinted, and then held her hand over her eyes to block out the light that burnt her pupils. The sick feeling of wanting to die rather than continue for another second with an agony that would not stop, evaporated under a hot sun that beat down on her skin. The fear and the hurt departed, and the memories faded quickly, like a dream barely remembered... a fragment about a man who had died remained for a moment, but it belonged elsewhere, in an unimportant thought that slipped away.

  Hot bright sunlight bathed her skin. Soft grass beneath her legs cooled her. Her white dress spread on the grass like a flow of water. She held a small piece of charcoal in one hand and a block of rough pressed paper in the other. Trees whispered softly through the air, and flowers nodded knowingly in the gardens around her. She sat on the lawn of a vast garden on a summer day drawing horses, and a disturbing dream that touched her for moment died under the Florentine sun.

  ‘What are you drawing?’ a gentle voice asked from high above.

  She looked up to see an angel hovering above her, a halo of light around his head casting shadows on his face, the pure blue sky behind him a reminder that angels come from above. Her mouth dropped open as she gazed at God’s messenger who had come to save her from... save her from... she couldn’t remember from what she needed saving. The angel had come to talk to her, and she had no words to give him.

  He waited, slightly amused by the freshly woken child who stared up at him as though he were an apparition. When he halted his horse next to her, she had been asleep on the grass, her head pillowed on her arm, the charcoal and paper clutched in her hands. Her golden hair gathered in ringlets around her face and her features were finer than most of the girls of the region, hinting at a northern family. Such a beautiful child, sleeping in his grandfa
ther’s garden, her lips moving silently as though uttering a prayer to save her from the terrors of her dreams.

  ‘I see you’ve been drawing, what are you drawing?’ he repeated slowly in case the girl was not very bright. It would be one of life’s cruel jokes if such a beautiful youth had the blessing of golden looks while cursed with a leaden mind.

  Elli glanced down at her drawings then looked back up at the angel, her mouth still open in wonder at the revelation God had presented. Why had he sent her an angel?

  Then his horse moved a step sideways, moving his rider’s head out of the path of the sun so that his halo vanished, leaving a tall youth, some years older than herself, sitting astride a white horse. Her mouth snapped shut. She gathered her skirts up around her legs and jumped to her feet, taking a few steps back from the rider whose impatience showed on his strong features.

  ‘Horses. I like to draw horses.’ She spoke clearly, her voice telling him she came from a good family. This was no half-witted child of a peasant dressed up for the amusement of someone staying on his family’s estate.

  He slipped from the saddle with the ease of cat, and stretched his hand towards her, ‘Show me. I want to see your drawings.’

  For a second, she hesitated, but his dark eyes made it clear that he would not tolerate revolt from a child. He did not seem aware of their similarity in age. His bearing made it clear that command came easily to him and he expected obedience.

  She handed him her drawings and stood waiting his judgement. For several minutes he examined them, noting the lifelike lines of the horses sketched in charcoal, the expressions in their eyes, the shading of muscles that stretched to rear one horse skywards and bunched in knots to have another horse trot on the spot. He recognised the skill of an artist impossible in one so young, and it piqued his curiosity about who had created them, but he played along with the girl. If she wanted to pretend that she could draw this well, then he did not want to mock her on such a beautiful day. He would discover the true artist later.