The Shadow Girl

by John Larkin

  So despite spending the night under His protective umbrella, I wake up thinking about this worm that eats little kids’ eyes. Well, that and the noise of the cleaner out in the foyer. By the sound of her vacuum cleaner going back and forth across the carpet and then clattering over the tiles, she also moves in mysterious ways.

  I check my watch. It’s only seven-thirty in the morning. It occurs to me that the homeless don’t get much of a lie in. They have to be up and gone before their hidey-hole, their sanctuary, is discovered. No rest for the wicked. But the cleaner is out in the foyer and hasn’t come into the church itself yet, so I have a few moments to myself. I hit my mental snooze button.

  As I’m lying there half-unconscious, I recall another story about evolution. This type of bird lived out on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean and this bird’s staple diet was eggs – lizard eggs, or the eggs of another bird, or whatever. And it survived by puncturing the shell with its beak and then slurping up the goo inside. Gross. During one particularly harsh year, the thing whose eggs it ate was missing something from its own diet. The missing thing wasn’t enough to kill off the other animal but because of this missing dietary thing, the eggs that year were much harder than before. So hard, in fact, that the egg-goo slurping birds had heaps of trouble puncturing the shells with their beaks. But a few of them had really sharp beaks, so they didn’t have any trouble at all. And the next year when the same conditions were repeated, it was only the birds with the sharp beaks that survived. Which left sharp-beaked birds to mate with other sharp-beaked birds and so every bird produced after that had a sharp beak to cater for the eggs that had become hard, and the blunt-beaked ones died out. So the theory of evolution is right there, proven in two generations of birds; and yet it’s still called the theory of evolution. Go figure.

  That’s what I have to do to survive. I have to evolve. I have to become a sharp-beaked bird.

  I ease the top half of my body out of my sleeping bag, trying to put as little weight on my damaged wrist as possible. I then reach into my backpack for one of humankind’s greatest achievements – pen and paper.

  I open my notebook to a fresh page but I’m forced to write with my right hand because my wrist is so sore. I press against the point where Creepo squeezed it and the pain almost makes me throw up, only I’ve got nothing in me to actually throw up. I think my wrist might be broken, and I know that I’ll have to deal with it.

  I suck on the end of my pen and then jot down my to-do list:

  1. Get something to eat

  2. Go to doctor’s to get wrist fixed

  3. Get some money

  4. Find somewhere to sleep tonight

  5. Develop bigger brain

  In the end I decide not to go to Father Kelliher. I’d heard from other kids that you have to turn up at DOCS or the police station with a knife practically sticking out of your head if you want to be removed from your parents or guardians. And even then the parent/guardian could just as easily say that the child had done it themselves. Though just why a child would stick a knife in its own head is anyone’s guess – to get away from the parent/guardian I suppose.

  So even though I’m convinced that Father Kelliher is the one person who would go out of his way to help me, if the authorities can’t find any trace of my parents (and there can’t be much left of them after so many years decomposing out there in the forest) then they’ll hand me straight back to Creepo and Serena. And then as I’m slowly decomposing and becoming part of the forest’s ecosystem myself, all Creepo has to do is report me as a runaway and that would be that. So I’m going to the police, or Father Kelliher, or anyone else in authority, over my own dead body.

  I wriggle the rest of the way out of my sleeping bag and pack it up one-handed. The cleaner has moved into Father Kelliher’s change room (at least I’ve always assumed it was his change room. He can’t arrive from the rectory already in his priestly robes) so I’m able to slip out of the church and into the bathroom without vac lady seeing me. I do some quick head maintenance (wash face, rub fingers over teeth, comb hair) with my unco right hand. I’m just about to leave when it occurs to me that I don’t want to be lugging my sleeping bag around with me all day. I’ll look like a runaway. Fortunately the bathroom has an old metal locker. Maybe it was installed in preparation for the day there’d be female priests. Ha! Fat chance. I open the locker, which is mercifully empty of the non-existent female priest’s stuff, and wedge in my sleeping bag. My saturated clothes from last night’s deluge aren’t dry enough to wear yet so I drag them off the railing and stuff them in the locker with my sleeping bag and clank the door shut.

  I’m wondering where on earth I’m going to sleep tonight when there is a gentle tap on the bathroom door.

  ‘Is anybody in there?’

  My heart thumps violently against my chest. Why had I messed around? Do I subconsciously want to be caught? I really don’t know. That’s why it’s called a subconscious, I suppose.

  I think about wedging myself into the locker – I’d certainly fit – but she’d hear the rattle of bone on metal or metal on metal as I clanked the door closed behind me.

  ‘Hello,’ she says again, but this time she knocks a little harder. ‘Is anybody there?’

  ‘Just a sec.’ I decide to be honest and slowly, reluctantly open the door, hoping that vac lady will be so overcome with maternal love at the sight of my utter patheticness that she’ll reach into her wallet and hand me a fifty to tide me over for a while.

  She looks me up and down as if she’s examining a stain on a priest’s bedsheet. ‘Who are you? And what are you doing here?’ She’s quite terse. Not at all maternal. Not in the least bit Christiany. She’s certainly not about to go for that fifty. Fortunately she’s attached to the church rather than the school and although I’d seen her pottering and doddering around before, she hasn’t got a clue who I am.

  She folds her arms and glares at me. ‘Well? What are you up to?’

  ‘I’m cleaning my teeth.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s morning and they need cleaning. Only I haven’t got my toothbrush . . .’

  ‘But why are you cleaning them here?’

  I hit her with my best mournful look. I try to think like a puppy. I go all wide-eyed.

  ‘Because I’m homeless and I haven’t got anywhere else to go.’

  ‘Well, you can’t stay here.’

  I drop the puppy look. ‘I thought this was a church and it’s supposed to look after the poor.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with me.’ She turns on her heels. ‘You wait there while I phone the police.’

  As if anyone would ever do that.

  ‘Bitch!’ I shout after her.

  I quickly grab my sleeping bag and damp clothes from the locker and race outside. Luckily she’s latched the door open, so I don’t have to haul it open myself.

  The sun is so bright it hurts my eyes. I pause for a moment and struggle to heave my backpack onto my shoulder, blinking at the day and what it might have in store for me.

  I don’t have long to linger because the vigilante vac lady is soon hot on my heels.

  ‘The police are on their way. You’d better wait there.’

  ‘Why don’t you blow it out your bum, you old bag?’

  ‘Well, I never . . .’

  ‘Maybe you should. Might stop you from being so uptight.’

  I tuck my sleeping bag under my arm like a rugby ball and race off. And with that, I’m officially on the run.

  FOR A SATURDAY MORNING THE MEDICAL CENTRE IS PRETTY QUIET. I suppose it’s a bit too early for sporting injuries to have happened and anyone involved in a Friday night brawl will be at home sleeping it off or else slumped in the hospital’s casualty department.

  On the walk from the church, I used most of the few dollars I had
to buy a couple of buns, then took the back streets to avoid Creepo and vac lady’s riot squad. As I walked, I came up with a cunning plan to get in to see a doctor despite not having a parent or guardian with me or any money or even a Medicare card. The plan was that my mother, who would be mentally deranged for the exercise, had sent me along to register and queue up, while she did a bit of shopping for mad women’s things. I didn’t quite know how, but I intended to make the receptionist scared of my mother so that when she didn’t show, the receptionist would be relieved and let me in to see the doctor out of pity. My name should still be on file from when I had the flu a couple of times, and a bout of tonsilitis a few years back. At some point while I was waiting I was going to take a call on my non-existent mobile. The caller would sadly inform me that my mother, my poor widowed demented mother, had had a complete mental breakdown in the muesli bar aisle and been carted off kicking and screaming to a psychiatric hospital. My tears of anguish would be brushed away by the kind-hearted receptionist who would break medical centre protocol and allow me in to see the doctor. As it happened, when I went up to the reception desk, all she did was ask me my name and whether or not I’d been there before, and that was that.

  So now I’m sitting in the waiting room silently breaking off bits of bun in my backpack and stuffing them into my mouth when the receptionist’s not looking. Not that she would give a rat’s anyway.

  After a short wait I’m in with the doctor, the smell of disinfectant making my mostly empty stomach lurch and growl.

  Dr Chen is a young, pretty, locally born Chinese woman and I’m a little jealous of her. Actually, I’m a lot jealous of her. I want her life. Though if I had her life, was a qualified doctor and everything, I wouldn’t be working in a crappy little medical centre in a suburban shopping centre, looking after snotnose kids and flatulent grannies. I’d be a volunteer for Médecins Sans Frontières in Africa, trying to find a vaccine for that disgusting eye-eating worm. Still, I shouldn’t be too hard on her. She only looks about fifteen and maybe she has uni fees to pay back to her parents and stuff before she’s allowed to go out and be a real doctor and do worthwhile work.

  She goes through her admin procedure, asking me my name and date of birth and everything, although it’s obviously written in front of her. She’s just ticking off my answers in her head, making sure that I am who I say I am. Seriously, though, who else would want to be me?

  When that’s over she asks me what I’ve done to myself. She seems so sweet and innocent, the way she puts it.

  I tell her about my arm and point to where it hurts the most.

  She examines it, but even though her touch is very gentle it still makes me flinch.

  ‘That is sore, isn’t it? You poor thing.’

  My eyes are all watery now. Not because of the pain, which is bad enough, but because of her kindness. Her sweetness. I want her to take me home and look after me but of course that’s never going to happen. Not in this life. A droplet of misery dribbles down my cheek. I’m falling in a pathetic heap and I’ve only been homeless for about twelve hours. I’ll need to toughen up if I’m going to survive.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  My mind goes into meltdown. I’d been so caught up with cunning plans for getting past the receptionist, that it hadn’t occurred to me that I might have to explain my injury to someone. An educated someone at that.

  ‘I fell over.’ Oh duh! I’ll be using Mum’s old trick next and saying that I’ve been walking into doors.

  ‘This looks more like you’ve been hit by something. Or someone.’

  ‘I hit something when I fell.’

  ‘What did you hit?’

  ‘A brick.’

  ‘A brick?’

  ‘That’s right. I fell down the back steps and hit the ones at the bottom. They’re made of bricks. The back steps, I mean. The front steps are too. But I didn’t fall down them.’ Shut up, will you!

  ‘But you must have landed like this for the brick to have hurt you there.’ She twists her own arm at an awkward angle and shows me the position she means. She’s good all right. Smart. She should be working on the eye-eating worm vaccine, not listening to my bullshit.

  ‘I can’t remember, I was, er, drunk.’

  ‘Drunk? You’re only thirteen years old.’ She pauses and then readjusts her attitude to deal with the modern teen. ‘Do you really drink?’

  ‘Not drunk. I meant asleep. I was sleepwalking.’

  I can tell that she doesn’t believe a word I’m saying, and frankly I don’t blame her. Less bullshit comes out of an average cattle station in a whole year than what’s sprouted from my mouth in the last five minutes.

  She starts jotting something down on a pad. ‘You’ll need to have an X-ray.’

  ‘Can’t you do it here?’

  ‘We don’t have X-ray facilities. There’s a radiologist centre across the road. Is your mother or father with you? They’ll just need your Medicare card.’

  And now I’m officially stuffed. Unless . . . unless I can run with the story I hatched to hoodwink the receptionist.

  So I take a deep breath and launch my twisted tale of woe. About my widowed mother going bonkers and being spirited away by the men in white coats and how in my confusion and loneliness I’d got into her liquor cabinet and chugged down half a bottle of vodka and had fallen down the steps (back steps, not front) and hurt my arm, which is why I was too embarrassed to tell her the truth. But everything is going to be all right now because my aunt is on her way from Paraguay (I particularly like this bit. I mean, who would invent a relative from Paraguay?) to take care of me and make sure that I don’t get into the liquor cabinet again. I should have left it there, I suppose, but I keep going, banging on about how I want to be a doctor too and how much I admire her and how I want to volunteer for Médecins Sans Frontières and come up with a cure or a vaccine for that eye-eating African worm. I’m practically hyperventilating when I finish.

  I suppose I was hurling so much crap at her that she couldn’t deflect it all. In the end she phones the X-ray place across the road and gives them a brief breakdown of my tragic circumstances, leaving out certain details like my future volunteer work and my Paraguayan aunt. She then reads out my Medicare number from the file and that is that.

  I saunter over the road, wait for about half an hour – the first of the Saturday morning sporting injuries are turning up by this point – have my X-ray taken and I’m back at the medical centre before lunch – though just what I’m going to do for lunch, short of scrounging around the food court bins, is anyone’s guess.

  Dr Chen removes my X-rays from the envelope and sticks then up against the backlit screen.

  ‘Mmnn,’ she says. ‘It’s fractured all right.’ She points to the painful bit on the X-ray and I nod, though I can’t really tell which bit is fractured, apart from the pain of course. That’s a bit of a giveaway. ‘It’s quite a nasty one too.’

  I shake my head. ‘Bloody steps.’

  ‘Actually, it looks more like a compression fracture. As if you’ve had something heavy pressing down on your wrist. How are things at home?’

  I gulp. She’s fishing. I’ve got to get out of here before she calls the police too.

  ‘I told you.’

  She makes that ‘mmnn’ sound again. She doesn’t believe me. I don’t blame her.

  ‘I’m going to have to put your forearm and hand in a cast. Are you left- or right-handed?’

  ‘Left.’

  ‘Well then, you’ll just have to get by as best you can until your aunt arrives from Paraguay.’ She actually smiles when she says that.

  ‘My aunt is coming from Paraguay,’ I mumble. ‘It’s one of the two landlocked countries of South America.’

  ‘Hmmm?’ says Dr Chen as she gets organised.

  ‘The other is Bolivia.’
I wish that I would shut up.

  ‘What colour do you want?’

  I ignore my own rambling and consider the options. I feel like being girlie and choosing pink. But in the end I go all emo, letting my hair fall down over my right eye. ‘Black, please.’

  She soaks the bandage in some water and starts unravelling it around my wrist. The water is very warm and it feels lovely as she unfolds the black bandage up and down my arm and my hand. When she’s finished she tells me to wait while the cast sets. With the sun streaming in through the window, I could happily crawl up on the examination table and fall asleep. I feel safe here with Dr Chen. Or at least I do until she drops her bombshell.

  ‘I was worried about you,’ she says as she’s washing the flecks of gunk off her hands and arms. ‘So while you were over the road getting your X-ray I phoned your parents.’

  I can feel the blood slowly draining out of my head. ‘My parents?’ I gulp and then come clean. ‘My parents are dead.’

  ‘Not according to them they’re not. Their contact details were in your file.’

  What has she done?

  ‘Your mother isn’t in a psychiatric unit. She sounds rather lovely in fact.’

  ‘She’s not my mother, she’s my . . .’ I trail off. I’ve painted myself into a bit of a corner here. I can’t even keep track of all my lies. Maybe it’s time to try the truth. ‘She’s my aunt.’

  ‘From Paraguay? She didn’t have much of a Spanish accent.’ Dr Chen chuckles at her own joke.

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘I understand you’ve got a very active imagination. That’s what your mum said. Told me not to believe a word you said.’

  ‘Dr Chen. I need to tell you the truth.’ Well, bits of it anyway.

  Our conversation is interrupted by a knock on the door.

  ‘Dr Chen,’ calls the receptionist. ‘Her parents are here.’