by John Larkin
I do as I’m told. He puts something against the back of my head. It feels cold.
‘Tony.’
And then he’s on the ground crying. I turn around and pat him on the back like you’re supposed to do when someone’s upset.
He doesn’t carry me back to the car, they’re too busy holding each other up. The mud oozes betweeen my toes. It tickles but it feels quite nice. Cold but nice. I can’t keep up with them because my head’s still all fuzzy but they wait for me by the car. I climb in the back and lie down across the seat. He gets an old blanket out of the boot and throws it on top of me. I’m soon drifting off.
‘I just couldn’t,’ I hear him say.
‘Of course you couldn’t,’ says Serena. ‘You’re a good man.’
‘She’s a loose end,’ he says. ‘But she won’t remember. I gave her enough to put out a horse.’
When we get home he carries me into the bath- room and washes my feet. Well, she does. After that she puts me to bed. She tenderly strokes my face while I drift off.
‘It was just a dream,’ she says. ‘It was all just a terrible dream.’
I look at the garage door. The one that leads into the kitchen. But he’s not coming. Of course he’s not coming. It’s not our cash out there in the forest. It’s not mum’s jewellery or buried treasure. How could I have been so stupid? God knows what he drugged me with.
I climb out of the car, open the cupboard door and there it is. My lime-green backpack and matching sleeping bag.
I slip it on and hit the switch that operates the garage door. It slowly clunks open. I could have slipped quietly out the back door and disappeared. But I want him to know that I’ve gone. I want him to know that I know. I want him to feel the butterflies squirming all over each other in his stomach.
As the door is clunking open, I take out my diary and rip out a page and leave him a note on the boot of Serena’s car.
I walk out of the garage and slip away into the night.
WHERE DID YOU GO?
Nowhere. I just ran for ages. Must have been about half an hour. Maybe more. You know that dream where you’re being chased by a monster and you scream but you don’t wake up? I have that dream all the time now. He couldn’t chase me. He was born with one leg slightly shorter than the other. Or slightly longer, I suppose. Anyway, you know what I mean. I didn’t even know where I was or where I was going, but I ended up in this park, slumped on one of the swings. Trying to catch my breath. Trying to think. What to do. Where to go. It was getting late by then. I suppose my master plan had been to get the money, catch a train to the airport and just go. To Europe. To see my parents.
Did you have a passport?
No. Not on me, anyway. I didn’t say it was a great plan. Though I did have a passport because we were supposed to go on a holiday to the old country before . . . well, you know. But life took a different turn after that. Creepo hid all our documents away somewhere. Probably in his safe.
Okay, so you got away.
I ended up in the park. And as I was sitting there, thinking, I saw Creepo’s car turn into the street – not the paddock basher that my parents were in, the one he made Serena drive, but his good car, his four-wheel-drive ute, his pride and joy: the beast. He cruised slowly down towards me, scoping the park. The car stopped and the window slid down and he looked over. He was staring straight at me. And as he was staring at me I started to feel light-headed because I’d stopped breathing. But the glow from the streetlights didn’t quite reach the play equipment. Not much anyway. There was also no moon. So something was going for me. So there I was, sitting on the swing and he was looking right at me and my heart was thumping so hard I thought that he had to hear it.
How close was he?
About thirty metres, I’d say.
Why didn’t you hide?
I was hiding. I just wasn’t hiding behind anything. A couple of months before we were doing poetry in class. One of the boys did this one about the war. The nobility of battle, sacrificing one’s life that others might live, King and country and all that bull; pick your cliché. After he’d finished, the teacher, who was a casual because Miss Feathershaw was away stoned or shopping or something for the day, told us some stuff about World War I. Talked about the trenches and mustard gas and duckboards and bombs called whizz-bangs. And he said that at night, in no-man’s-land – that was the bit of land between the German and our guys’ trenches –
I know about no-man’s-land.
Well, anyway, he said that at night, when snipers and stretcher bearers and sappers were out in no-man’s-land and an exploding shell lit up the sky, rather than duck for cover or crouch down, the soldiers used to just stand still so they looked like a rock or a tree. I figured that there wasn’t much light reaching me from the street, so all I had to do was stay still and he wouldn’t be able to see me.
Not a lot of swings in no-man’s-land, I imagine.
Same thing though.
Did it work?
Am I here?
Okay.
I don’t know why he picked that park. Maybe he’d scoped all the parks in the area, figuring that I had nowhere else to go. No other relatives. No friends. Not close ones anyway. He was looking straight at me but he couldn’t see me. Eventually the window slid back up and he slimed away, and my heart stopped bouncing up and down like a basketball. And all the time I was thinking, my parents are dead, my parents are dead. And I couldn’t even remember what they looked like.
But as I was thinking about my parents and not being able to escape to Europe to see them, I knew that I couldn’t stay in the park. Friday night and all that. Gotta be some homeboys turning up eventually with a bottle of something cheap and a bunch of bad news for any girl who happens to be around.
Why didn’t you just go to the police? I don’t really understand.
I did. Stop interrupting.
Sorry.
As I was sitting there on the swing it was getting colder and colder and my wrist really started to hurt. I pulled up my sleeve and although it didn’t feel swollen, when I pressed my fingers against it, a jolt of pain shot through my whole body. After he left, I picked up my backpack and started walking. But my wrist was hurting so much that I had to stop. I took my spare jumper out of my backpack and made a sort of sling. It felt better not having to carry it by my side but it still hurt like hell and I knew it would be hard to run if I saw Creepo’s car again. This might sound weird but I actually started heading towards home. To their place. I wasn’t going there, obviously, but there was a cop shop in [deleted from transcript] Street. Problem was, I didn’t know how to get there from where I was without getting pretty close to their place.
It took about forty minutes to walk there and the only thing open as far as I could see was the chemist. I wanted to go in and get a proper sling and maybe some painkillers, but I didn’t have any money. Not much, anyway. I doubt that a chemist would go to uni for all those years and then stay open all night just so that he could give stuff away.
The cop shop was open of course. Always plenty of business in this area. The chemist, the cop shop, and Maccas a bit further down the road. Maybe they fed off each other. I’d heard that the cops get cheap food if they go into Maccas wearing their uniform. Maybe the chemist gave the same deal.
Creepo’s car was outside the cop shop. I didn’t notice it at first because it was parked behind a police van, but when I caught sight of it I threw myself up against the wall and into the shadows. He was probably inside reporting me as a runaway, in which case they’d hand me straight back to him no matter what I said, and from there it would have been be a quick trip back out to the forest. He once told me that a couple of his friends were coppers, so the other possibility was that they’d tear up any statement I made, call him over and from there it would be a quick trip back out to the forest. Either w
ay I was dead.
What did you do?
I went to church.
FATHER KELLIHER IS ONE OF THOSE PRIESTS WHO RECKON GOD’S HOUSE should always be open. I remember him saying that once and I kind of locked it away in my mind. Now that I’m a runaway I just hope he was telling the truth and not talking in that obscure symbolic way that religious people do – I still don’t know if Mohammed’s people had that mountain dismantled and carted down to him.
As I wait in the shadows in the police station car park for Creepo to emerge and either go home or shoot me, it starts raining. Thank you, God. A gentle pitter patter that built to a heavy blatter before culminating in a deafening onslaught as a close approximation of Armageddon swept in from the south. I’m not big on the whole doomsday thing, but if four skeletons on horseback had gone galloping and sloshing down the street at that moment I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.
I scurry into the doorway of a closed Chinese restaur- ant but the rain just bounces off the ground. It’s literally raining upwards. I’m desperately trying to think of somewhere that would be warm and dry and open. Then the image of the church flashes through my mind. A miracle? A sign from God? A stored memory? I couldn’t care less. It was somewhere to go. Twenty minutes later the outside foyer of the church is providing some shelter, but I would give anything to be inside. Warm and safe. Dry. Asleep. Even Creepo wouldn’t shoot me on consecrated ground. At least I don’t think he would.
I push against the huge oak doors of the church, which must weigh about a tonne each. They don’t budge a milli- metre as my feet slide backwards away from them.
I try again by positioning my feet and shoving against the doors with my shoulder. They give a little bit but as soon as I stop shoving and try to slide in, they clunk back against the frame. God’s house may always be open, but He doesn’t make it easy to get in. Maybe there’s a metaphor in there somewhere. Or maybe the hinges need oiling.
Then it dawns on me that I’m being mind-meltingly dumb again. I don’t need to open both doors. It’s not as if I’ve turned up with the Israelites fleeing their homeland. It’s just me, my backpack and my rolled-up sleeping bag. Living with Uncle Creepo and Aunt ‘don’t act too smart’ Serena has obviously had an impact.
I reposition my feet against one door and push with everything I’ve got, which isn’t much. It gives just enough for me to slide my backpack and my sleeping bag in with my foot and, heaving against it again, I manage to slip in after them. The door clunks satisfyingly shut and the church folds itself around me. I feel safe. I feel loved. I feel protected. And although I realise that this is all probably taking place in my head, it still feels good.
I thank God for Father Kelliher. He keeps the big house open even though a couple of vandals got in last year and graffitied ‘God Sux’ on the wall behind the altar. They were probably looking for something to steal, but they were out of luck. God’s house might have been open, but the silverware had been locked away. It happened on a Saturday night, but the next morning in mass, rather than covering up the image with some paint or a shroud, Father Kelliher preached on declining societal values and the availability of spray paint.
Now that I’m safe inside, I realise just how wet I am. I’m leaving pools of water on the ground.
Fortunately the church is newish, or at least it is by church standards. Not only does it have a crying room but it also has toilets. His and hers. I always found it a bit odd that the men’s toilet has a top hat and a monocle on the door, while the women’s has a picture of some bimbo’s big hair from the 1980s. You would have thought that in church they might go for a picture of Moses and Mary or something. Is that being sacrilegious? Or are they trying to convince us lowly parishioners that mega-holy people don’t go to the toilet? The first time I thought of it was during a school mass. My shoulders were convulsing so much as I imagined Moses ducking behind a tree for a wee and accidentally dousing the burning bush that Miss Feathershaw told me off when we got back to class.
I strip off in the toilets and swivel the nozzle on the hand dryer around so I can dry off. I love the hot air blasting against my skin. I feel a little self-conscious about being naked in church but I’m not technically in the church yet and won’t be until I go through the inner doors and into God’s house proper.
After I’ve hung my wet clothes over the shower rail and changed into my tracksuit and spare jumper, I make my way through the inner doors and into the church itself.
Even though I don’t think He’s there any more, I dip my fingers in the holy water and make the sign of the cross. Some things are just automatic, I guess. Besides, Father Kelliher thinks He’s there and he’s the one who’s left the doors open (though he could probably put in a couple of lighter ones to make getting in a bit easier). So even if my sign of the cross wasn’t automatic, I would still have done it out of respect for Father Kelliher.
Apart from the dim glow given off by battery-operated perpetual candles flickering away in the far corner, the church is completely dark. I walk down the aisle and slip into the second pew from the front.
I unpack my sleeping bag from its carrier and yawn like a hippo. I’ve never been this exhausted in my life.
It’s cold in the church. Colder than I thought it would be. I put on an extra pair of socks and wriggle into my sleeping bag. In the rush of running all the way up here, of finding the church open, of getting inside, of getting dry, I’d forgotten all about my wrist. It comes back to me now as I try to zip up my sleeping bag. It’s so sore that I can’t do it. I have to improvise by pushing my feet against the bottom of the bag and then zipping it up with my good hand, then I practically have to dislocate my shoulder to get that arm back inside.
When I’m settled in I say a little prayer for my parents, though I don’t even know why. Is anyone there? Is anyone listening? People pray for their sick children. Whole congregations and communities do. They die anyway.
After my prayer I wiggle down deeper into my sleeping bag, like a caterpillar into its cocoon. I thought the pew would be rock hard but I’m surprisingly comfortable. Surprisingly warm. Safe.
My eyelids are getting heavy but I try to stay awake a little longer. To think. To plan. To keep an eye out, to keep an ear out. For cars. For Creepo. Thank God all I hear out on the road are full Dopplers.
When I sleep, I sleep like the dead. Meanwhile, out in the forest, the dead roam the night.
DESPITE EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED, IT STILL MUST HAVE COME AS A shock when you realised that your parents were dead.
Not really. I sort of knew. In the back of my mind, at least. I mean, they had to be. I’d been told that they’d gone back to live in Europe. The old country. But no phone call? No letters? Emails? Not even a postcard? I knew something wasn’t right. Apart from that, the last time I saw my father he was lying in his own blood. No one could have survived that. And Mum had done it to him. She couldn’t have survived that. Not once Creepo found out. I mean, she could have escaped if she acted fast enough. I know that my father called Creepo when Mum had stabbed him, but he couldn’t talk because the knife must have gone through his voice box. Creepo would have seen that the call was from my father, heard his gargling, his strangling, his death, and even he, as dumb as he is, must have guessed that there was some serious shit going down. Still, she had time. It would have been half an hour tops before Creepo and Aunt Serena turned up with guns and disinfectant. Mum could have phoned the police, packed a couple of bags for us and bolted. Gone to a women’s refuge or something. Even overseas. To the old country.
So why do you think she stayed? She must have known what your Uncle Tony would do.
Catholic guilt, I suppose. She wasn’t that into the whole God thing, but when you’re born into it, it kind of hovers over you for life. I mean, they make us do reconciliation, confession, when we’re what, seven, eight years old? What mortal sin can you have on
your soul when you’re seven? You threw your brother’s Lego block out the window of the car on the way to the beach? Cast that child into the pits of eternal damnation unless he repents. So you walk around feeling guilty for the rest of your life. God! No wonder we’re so uptight. Catholics, I mean.
Did you have a plan?
Not at first. I just wanted to survive. When I woke up the next morning I was starving, and my wrist hurt like hell. I could have waited until mass started and then queued up for Holy Communion a couple of hundred times. Filled up on wafers. Stuffed myself full of God. But it was early Saturday morning, so God wouldn’t be open for business until later on in the evening.
So what did you do?
I decided to evolve.
THERE’S THIS WORM IN AFRICA. OR MAYBE IT’S CENTRAL AMERICA or Bangladesh. No, I’m pretty sure it’s Africa. And this worm survives by eating little kids’ eyes from the inside out. And then when the kid’s blind it just packs up and leaves. This worm doesn’t serve any purpose. It doesn’t compose symphon- ies, it’s not trying to find a cure for cancer or come up with a workable solution to global warming. It’s only reason for existing is so that it can eat little kids’ eyes. There’s no way a loving and caring God would have created something like that. Only evolution could throw up such an abomination. Darwin sucks.
Yet there are people who try to rationalise stuff like this eye-eating worm. Satan created it. Or God moves in mysterious ways. He has a plan. He’s displeased. He’s trying to test our faith. As if fifty million people dying in World War II wasn’t enough to test our faith, he’s up there sitting on his cloud, stroking his beard and thinking, ‘Hmmnnn, I think I need to test their faith a bit more. An eye-eating worm ought to do it.’ And why aren’t there any dinosaurs in the Bible? Seems rather a big thing to have missed. Or maybe the dinosaurs weren’t real at all and God just buried their skeletons in the ground to confuse us. What? The eye-eating worm not enough? The fifty million dead. The gas chambers. The shoes piled up outside the gas chambers. If there is a loving God, how could he keep out of that one?
