I said, ‘It looks like we’re only going to get one option here whether we’re vegetarian or not.’
‘I don’t know how you could not eat meat. It’s just too yummy,’ one of the girls said, shrugging.
Bethany pursed her lips but she didn’t defend herself. We lapsed into silence again.
I ate my wrap standing up and then waited in line for a plastic cup of juice.
While Group B cleaned up, Wendy handed us on to another counsellor, Stefan, who gave us a creative writing exercise to do. Stefan told us to think about someone who provokes a strong emotional response in us and write a positive statement about that person.
We were sitting in a circle outside, under a fig tree. There was a breeze and we could hear birds. It was obviously supposed to be a stress-free, stimulating learning environment.
I held my pen above the paper and thought about what I might write.
Callum has a cleft in his chin. I’d like to press it with my pinkie finger.
My counsellor has a clear voice like a radio announcer on the classical station.
Pop’s fingers are wrinkly, bent and swollen like tiny sweet potatoes, but he can thread a hook on a fishing line, patch a crab pot with fancy knots and write love letters to Nan in handwriting that swirls and twists like a tango on the page.
I tapped my pen between my teeth. Bethany was scribbling away. I peeked at her paper.
My brother has a good imagination. He is also good at team sports, for example, soccer. One time at Easter he stole some of those chocolate eggs with the cream in the middle off the counter at the newsagent (which was bad), but he gave me one (which was nice).
Bethany looked over at mine. I grinned at her and wrote, Callum has a nice bum.
Bethany smiled and then whispered, ‘It’s supposed to be someone you feel negative about.’
I hadn’t heard that part.
‘Yes,’ interrupted Stefan, ‘think of someone who might have made you feel sad or angry – someone who might have disappointed you in the past.’ As he walked towards where I was sitting I scrunched up the paper so he couldn’t see what I had written.
They might call it creative writing, but it seemed to me much more like the affirmation exercises that my counsellor makes me do.
My counsellor (the one who thought wilderness therapy would be just ace) says that you can be angry about something a person has done, but your anger is unlikely to change how that person behaves. She says the only person whose behaviour you can change is your own.
I poised my pen over the page again and tried to think of something positive to say about my parents, other than that after I turn sixteen I won’t have to see them any more.
Stefan wanted us to share with the rest of the group so I quickly wrote, ‘My mother has very long eyelashes.’
Most of the others had written something about their relatives, except for a boy so fair he was almost albino. He wrote about the staff at the video shop at his local shopping centre. I wondered if he so struggled for something nice to say about his family that he picked someone at random, or whether there really was an incident at the video shop that scarred him.
I had an incident at a bakery once. I watched him, wondering if he was a kindred spirit.
Callum wrote, ‘My mother is emotionally nomadic,’ which I thought was cheating, because it wasn’t positive, it was negative dressed up as ambivalent. I was disappointed. I wanted him to say something about himself. I wanted a handle that I could use to open the next conversation, so when it came time to say mine aloud I said, ‘My father is customer-focused.’
5
MONSTERS
Night-time at the camp wasn’t as loud as I expected. Every now and then I could hear muffled laughter coming from one of the other cabins, or the scuffing feet of a camp counsellor on the beat. I could hear night birds calling, and insects, but traffic only rarely.
It’s amazing how quickly you can adapt to quiet. Every time Bethany moved, the whole bunk would squeak.
‘Lie still, will you?’ I hissed.
‘I can’t get comfortable! The mattress sags in the middle.’ She wiggled and the bed screeched.
‘Lie on the edge, then.’
‘What if I fall out?’
‘You won’t fall. What’s the matter with you, anyway?’
Bethany rolled over and sighed. ‘I’m worried about the Solo. Are you doing one?’
‘I go out after you come back, I think. Have you changed your mind?’
I could hear her breathing, and the crumpling sound as she moved under the doona.
‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s all right now. You’re here and I feel like an idiot being scared, but by myself in the dark with all that bush around me, with all that space, and no one else . . . Do you think that’s dumb?’
‘No, it’s not dumb.’ I had been thinking the same thing. ‘They said there will be patrols checking for the flags,’ I reassured her.
‘But how often? Once an hour? Once a day?’ she asked. ‘And a flag seems a bit kind of, passive, you know? I want something that makes a noise.’
‘An air horn like the ones they have at the football. La cucharacha la cucharacha. That would draw attention. Even a whistle. You could wear it around your neck, or tie it to your shirt – a whistle and a light, like they have on lifejackets on aeroplanes.’
We lay in silence for a moment and then Bethany said, ‘I don’t know if a whistle is going to help you much if nobody has noticed four hundred tonnes of metal falling from the sky.’
We both giggled, and then tried to muffle it as we heard boots stamping along the concrete outside. ‘Go to sleep, girls!’
We lay still and waited. I closed my eyes.
The bed squeaked again. Bethany said, ‘My brother has this book on serial killers. It’s really sick but you can’t help reading it. You know, the weird thing is that those guys say they don’t know why they do it. Some of them say, “The devil made me,” or “I heard it in the dogs barking,” but most of them don’t. They don’t know why.’
I opened my eyes. In the gloom I could make out the floral pattern on the underside of Bethany’s mattress. Tree branches bowed and tilted outside the window, making shifting shadows on the walls.
‘I reckon most people are a little bit nutty,’ Bethany said. ‘Like my mum, when she does the washing she pegs out different colours in separate parts of the Hills Hoist. There’s a whites and a darks opposite, and then blues and reds. Sometimes if she’s got a brown colour you can see her standing there frozen while she’s deciding if it’s a red or a dark. And if she runs out of room in the quarter, she won’t put it in a different quarter – she goes and puts it in the clothes dryer. That’s nutty, isn’t it? But she’s not killing anyone. I just wonder how fine the line is between pegging in colours to roasting small children, you know?’
‘Yeah,’ I whispered.
‘You know what else? Psychos look like ordinary people. That’s what scares me the most. Except Ivan Milat. Have you seen pictures of him? He looks like a real freak. But the others – like David Berkowitz and even Martin Bryant . . . He just looks like a uni student. He looks like someone who’d play guitar. When I go through that book of serial killers and look at the pictures I always wonder if I saw one of them walking down the street, if I would know. The truth is, I don’t think I would.’
‘Unless it was Ivan Milat,’ I said.
‘Have you ever read a book on psychos?’ she asked. ‘I mean, have you ever looked up a book to see if . . . you know. It’s just those books only say stuff from the outside. They say things like, “experiences acute depression” or “exhibits irrational behaviour”. So how much is acute? How do you know if you’re being irrational? They don’t say what that feels like from the inside.’
‘Hey, do you want to hear a joke?’ I whispered. ‘It’s not my joke. I heard it somewhere.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘There’s this guy and this serial kil
ler walking through the bush, and the guy says, “I’m really scared,” and the serial killer says, “You’re scared? I have to walk back by myself!”’
Bethany laughed. Then we lay quietly for a long time.
‘Hey, Mackenzie, are you asleep yet?’ she whispered.
‘Mmm.’
She said, ‘I reckon the worst monsters are the ones you know.’
I lay in the dark with prickles up the back of my neck. In the patterns on the underside of Bethany’s mattress I saw faces – red faces, choking and purple. I closed my eyes and did my breathing.
6
ALOPECIA
There’s a girl at the camp who has big bones without much flesh on them, and thin lips, and she looks forty already. She wore one of those Cancer Council pastel cloth sunhats the first day, and then the next day – no hat.
Her hair is a short, wispy mouse-brown, but dotted randomly over her head there are tufts of hair missing in perfect circles about the size of a twenty-cent piece.
She caught me staring.
‘It’s called alopecia,’ she said.
‘What’s it from?’ I asked.
‘It’s usually stress-related.’ She blinked. There was even hair missing from her eyelashes.
Later that day I saw her in the bathroom. She was sitting in the corner with her back to the tiles, stuffing pills in her mouth.
I could feel the edges of an anxiety attack – the ringing in my ears and the mouth full of saliva – but instead of letting it wash over me, I lunged. We wrestled for the packet. Her fingers were white with the strain. The foil crushed in my hands.
Her grip loosened and I tugged the packet away, holding her by the shoulder.
‘How many have you taken?’ I asked her while I folded out the foil wrapper.
‘Give it back! It’s none of your business!’
It was Vermox.
I looked at her scalp again, at the patches there so pink and naked. ‘Do these make you bald?’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘Do they make you feel good?’ I asked her.
Her thin lips turned down at the sides. The white residue from the tablets congealed in the corner of her mouth. She looked three and eighty at the same time.
‘If they don’t make you feel good, and they make you bald, why do you take them?’ I asked her.
She whispered. ‘For the worms in my head.’
‘And does it help? Does it fix it?’
She looked wretched – damned. ‘Shut up. I have learned helplessness. You can dob if you want, but they can’t take them from me. It’s over-the-counter. They can’t do nothing.’
I threw the foil wrapper at her and it landed in her lap. I knew what learned helplessness was. My counsellor told me about this experiment they did where these scientists put dogs in cages and electrified the cage. Then, after a while, they only electrified half the cage and the dog wouldn’t try to escape to the un-electrified half because it had learned helplessness. It sounded like a crock of shit to me. Besides, what sort of bastard wakes up in the morning with an experiment like that in his head?
7
TRUST FALL
We had to do compulsory trust-building activities every day before lunch. On the first day my partner was the albino video-shop boy. He wrapped a blindfold around my eyes. The last thing I saw were his eyelashes, sparse and white, and his pale grey eyes that tilted upwards, making him look mean and piggy.
He grabbed my hand and took me on a winding path to a tree to feel its surface.
My tree was cool and unyielding, with pockmarks and divots. I ran my hand all the way around it and discovered a cicada shell clinging to the far side.
Something stung me and I pulled my hand away. ‘There are ants,’ he told me. ‘Where your hand is now.’
‘Yeah, thanks,’ I said.
He led me back to the starting point. Those who had been blindfolded then had to pick their trees by sight.
I looked across the lawn to where the trunks huddled together, stripped bare and pink and with a texture that looked like marzipan. Their old discarded bark draped around their roots in strips and sheets.
I picked the telegraph pole a little to the right. Videoshop boy’s disappointment was not in keeping with the spirit of the exercise, I thought. He doesn’t know how many hours I’ve spent wearing eyeshades.
On the second day we made a human machine. Bethany and I started because we were hungry, and no one else was going to do it. We stood face-to-face and put our palms together and pushed them back and forth. The boy they call Rumpelstiltskin joined in by bending at the waist and lifting Bethany’s ankle in time with our pushing. The Vermox girl then did air punches over his head, and so on until everyone made a part in the machine.
I can imagine that if we were all wearing silver costumes and there was some funky industrial music playing and strobe lighting it would look really cool.
Callum was last. He stood at the edge and tilted his head from side to side, which I thought was a bit passive, and he’d only done it for a few seconds when Wendy said we could stop.
On the third day we did the Trust Fall with Simon. We were told to stand on one of the tables in the mess room and fall off it backwards into the arms of the others.
Callum was excused. He sat out in the sun reading a magazine and sweating.
It made me cross. Trust was hard for all of us. But more than that, I knew that I would do an exercise that made me feel uncomfortable just to be close to him.
When you pike out, I feel invisible.
8
WORKSHOPPING IT
On the morning before my Solo we had another affirmation-dressed-up-as-creative-writing task to do. Bethany had gone on her Solo, so when I was deciding where to sit I sauntered towards Callum as though I was picking a spot at random.
Callum was wearing what looked like suit pants cut off at the knees, a singlet, boots and a bowler hat. He also had a string of carved wooden beads around his neck.
He smiled one of those brief closed-mouth smiles that you give to people when you are reaching across in front of them in a lift to press the button for your floor, or picking up the magazine they just put down in a doctor’s waiting room.
Simon said we had to choose an object from our childhood and talk about it with our neighbour. He gave us a piece of paper so that we could ‘workshop our ideas’.
I sighed. I’ve been workshopped before. Simon wasn’t going to fool me into some kind of personal revelation.
I picked up my pen and scribbled the first thing that came into my head.
When I was about seven, a friend of the family gave me a pair of eyeshades – the ones you wear on a plane to shut the light out.
I would wear them around the house and pretend I was blind, trying to sense objects without seeing them. I wanted to learn how to use sonar like dolphins.
Sometimes you can feel things, for example, wind across your skin, or your hair lifting off your face when you are near a door or a window. If you listen, you can tell the shape or vastness of a space by the quality of the sound. I experimented by talking into one of the kitchen cupboards and then in the lounge room – the biggest room in that house.
Other times I would lie on the floor on my back and let the eyeshades take me places. I saw the most extraordinary things. I’d open my eyes in the blackness and feel my eyelashes flutter against the silky material.
There is an old man with tiny strands of hair on his head, as though he’s walked through a spider web. He’s shuffling along the street wearing nothing but baggy green underwear. I can see his sloping shoulders and his potbelly. His nipples sag. He has wispy white hair rolling across his chest like a cumulus cloud.
I wonder if I’m simulating dreams when I’m wearing the eyeshades, or maybe I am actually dreaming, or maybe somewhere in the world there is an old man shuffling down the street in green underwear.
Callum and I swapped sheets. Callum had written:
A long time ago some
kid threw a rock over a bridge and it killed a lady driving underneath. They built fences – nets above the bridge – to stop people throwing rocks at cars. You’d think people would know not to throw rocks.
There was an overpass near our old house. The fence is about a metre and a half high. You could still throw a rock if you were determined to do that.
If they really wanted to stop people throwing rocks they’d need to build a fence to eternity, or take away all the rocks. Where does that end? Does everyone walk around with a bulletproof vest and a crash helmet in case someone decides to do them harm?
Wouldn’t you think people should know not to throw rocks at cars? At some point people have to decide not to throw rocks.
Callum whispered, ‘Wow, yours is really good.’
I said to him, ‘I come from a long line of rock-throwers. You can’t stop people throwing rocks.’
‘I come from rock-throwers too. Well, one rock-thrower, and one who just cowers in the corner waiting for it to stop.’ His chin jutted out and he stared me right in the eye.
‘If you could be the thrower, or the thrown-at, I know which one I’d pick,’ I countered. ‘But I don’t even think you get to choose.’
‘Of course you choose!’ He was angry, but tired at the same time, as though I was a new enemy in an old war. ‘You think that’s the solution? You’re going to be a rock-thrower?’
My cheeks burned crimson. My mouth filled with saliva. I had a feeling that if I stood up I would find that I’d wet myself. My counsellor tells me that during periods of extreme apprehension my mind manufactures physical symptoms of distress. I twisted in my seat. Now I couldn’t get up even if I wanted to. I let my hair hang across my face.
Sometimes I can’t bear to be in my own skin. It’s like being embarrassed but ten times worse. I want to run until I have left myself behind, but I can’t run that fast.
I feel stupid and childish, as if I am watching myself from the outside and I don’t want to spend time with me. That’s when I think about it. It’s not because I’m sad or depressed the way you see it in the movies. It’s as though I am so embarrassed that I have to leave. There’s only one way to truly leave.
Solo Page 2
