She left soon after dinner and he’d never asked her over again. After a few months he’d stopped thinking about the night and what went wrong. He went back to the tough, bossy ‘independent contractors’ in the eastern suburbs. Women in their mid-to-late thirties who’d have the condom unrolled within a minute of stashing their cash in the toe of a high-heeled shoe.
He waved Jenny’s words away. ‘Like I said, I decided to downsize. Simplify my life.’
‘Graeme, that place must have been worth what? Six hundred thousand? More? You must have a hell of an investment portfolio.’
He shrugged and, thinking of Katie’s eggshell skull, he pressed on. ‘So what do you say, Jenny? Will you at least come and meet her? Tell me what you think?’
Jenny chewed her bottom lip. He saw she wanted to ask more about his move, understood that her curiosity would not allow her to say no to him now. She arched her arms over her head and cracked her neck from side to side. She blew air out between her lips. ‘Righto,’ she said. ‘Where and when do you want me?’
26.
After he pulled her off the stair rail, Adam told Katie he wouldn’t let her out of his sight. He was worried, he said, that she would ‘suddenly decide’ to try again. She told him that it wasn’t sudden and it wasn’t a decision. She tried to explain, so that he would ease off, stop hovering, but she couldn’t think of the right words. He stroked her head until she fell asleep and when she woke again the room was bright and he was snoring beside her.
She pulled herself up and went to the bathroom, then went to the kitchen and grabbed a beer. She lay on the couch and turned on the TV. She watched part of a documentary about animal attacks and wondered why bears never clawed out their own hearts. Why did horses never throw themselves over cliffs?
She watched Oprah, Judge Judy, Dr Phil and Deal or No Deal. When the news came on, she turned the TV off. She couldn’t cope with the shouting of red-faced men in grey suits or the close-ups of blood-stained driveways and sheet-shrouded bodies. She didn’t want to deal with the feeling that the camera crew was right outside her window, the arresting officer about to bust through her door.
She crept through to Adam’s empty room and grabbed a navy windbreaker from his cupboard, pulled it on over her T-shirt and shorts. She slid into a pair of thongs she’d left in the bathroom, pocketed her lighter and smokes and left the flat.
The dusk was shockingly bright. The sky was pink and orange where it should have been charcoal. A trio of students in pastel shorts and halter tops stopped talking as they passed her. She stared straight ahead, hands deep in the plastic pockets. She wished she had glasses and a hat. She wished she had a beard. She walked carefully, making sure the entire front foot – heel to toe – was down before she lifted the back foot and brought it to the front. Each time her heel connected with the ground she said to herself see it’s fine but her body knew her mind was not to be trusted.
‘It’s like this,’ she imagined telling someone. ‘You’re alone in a skyscraper. You sense a presence somewhere in the building but it’s very far away, probably on the ground floor while you’re up on the fifty-fifth. As time passes, you sense the presence moving closer. You try and distract yourself with work, phone calls, running up and down the corridors. There’s a rustling noise that won’t go away. Is it at the fifty-third floor already? The rustling becomes a roar. You turn your stereo up as loud as it will go, dance faster, count backwards from one thousand, try and remember the names of all your teachers from kindergarten onwards. You realise that if you’d evacuated back when it was a whisper you would be safe by now. As it is, the noise and all it threatens to bring with it is in the elevator. And then it’s there and you can’t breathe or see or imagine that anyone will find you and you stumble to the window and you have a moment of clarity, understand how easy it is to jump from a burning building.’
Loony tunes, someone said and she realised she’d been speaking aloud. She was at the bus stop and there were faces red with laughing or with the effort not to. She tried to get away, tripped on something invisible and fell down hard on her palms and knees. Taxi! someone called. She got up and moved away from the laughter, saw ahead not home but the King’s Tavern which was at least dark.
Inside, she blinked until the brightness was gone. She heard her name and walked towards it, saw Dom and sat beside him, held up her palms with their white grazes and tiny spots of blood.
He took her wrists, held her hands up to the light. ‘What happened?’
‘Fell.’ He let go of her wrists, touched the top of her head and she winced away from him. ‘Fell on the top of your head?’
‘No, that was the . . . the other thing. Now just my . . . my hands and –’ She remembered her knees, pulled them up in front of her, hitting the table, tears leaking out. ‘My knees, too.’
‘Jesus, kid,’ Dom said, pushing her legs down, looking over her shoulder. ‘You on your own?’
‘There were some people.’ Again she saw their red faces. ‘They laughed.’
‘Yeah, ’course they did.’ Dom held out his glass, kept a hand around the stem as she guided it to her mouth and took a gulp of smoky wine. ‘This is the way the world will be destroyed,’ he muttered, ‘amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it’s all a joke.’
‘That’s true.’ Katie felt the tears running down her face. ‘Dom, that’s true, isn’t it?’
‘I dunno. It’s Kierkegaard, so probably true, yeah.’ He nudged her chin up, motioned to the door. ‘Look, you’re safe. Captain America’s here.’
She turned, saw Adam and slumped in the seat.
Back in her room she went to the wardrobe, raked out magazines with both arms, tore pages out at random, pain building in her chest. Pretty women crying and smooth-faced men shouting and scared eyes and shaved heads and scars and pale inner thighs with the unspeakable between them blurred out while the unspeakable in the girl’s eyes was right there for everyone to see.
‘Katie, darlin’.’ Adam was beside her, holding her hands still. ‘Hey, calm down. What is it?’
‘It’s true, what Dom said. Half of us falling and the other half laughing their heads off. It’s all coming apart and they think it’s a joke.’ But she knew she wasn’t saying it right, couldn’t expect Adam to understand. She let him help her into bed and wipe her palms and knees with wet, warm cotton wool. She watched through stinging eyes as he filled green garbage bags with magazines, hurling each full bag into the hallway out of her sight.
Time stretched out ahead of her like a race she was too tired to run. She craved sleep but her body confused it with death. She would begin to drift off only to have her heart and lungs jolt her upright, slamming into overdrive the way they’d done when she’d tried to die. Adam hovered over her, but he wasn’t in the pain with her like Gran would be. Her sleeping or not, getting up or not, eating or not, crying or not would not tear shreds off his heart, make him older and sadder and thinner. He was here for his own reasons and would get from her what he needed.
She used to think despair was contagious, but she understood now it was magnetic.
In the three days since falling over at the bus stop, Katie had barely left her bed. Adam brought her bowls of soup and slices of cheese on toast and refused to give her any beer until she’d eaten half. He tidied her room, hanging her clothes in the empty wardrobe, cleaning the windows with Windex and newspaper, and vacuuming the carpet. He bustled her out to the couch so he could change the sheets, then bustled her back in when he was done. He asked her if she was okay so often she wanted to rip his tongue out.
She woke to late afternoon sun and Adam leaning over her. The room smelt of vanilla.
‘Hey, sleepy. Come on out to the living room. Someone’s here to talk to you.’
‘I don’t want to see anyone.’
Adam placed his hands under her arms and dragged her up the bed. ‘I know that, but you have to anyway. She’s a really good doctor. A friend of Graeme’s.’
&nb
sp; ‘Graeme has a friend?’
‘Come on. She’s here on her own time just to see you.’ He pulled the quilt off her.
‘No point.’
‘Of course there’s a point. She might help you feel like yourself again.’
‘This is myself, Adam. That’s the thing. She can drug me up, talk me round, whatever. Sooner or later I’ll be back here. I always end up back here.’ She lay down and noticed the lower windowsill had split halfway to the floor at the entry point of the fourth of five bars. She closed her eyes.
‘I need for you to do this, Katie. If you love me as much as –’
‘Love is just brain chemistry. Mine has altered recently, in case you didn’t notice.’
She waited for what felt a long time and then opened her eyes. Adam stood straight, watching her, gripping the quilt in his two giant fists. ‘Bastard,’ she said. Her back ached. She sat up.
The doctor was so small and nervy Katie could’ve sworn she was a fellow mental case – anxiety disorder or anorexia, maybe. She sat in the armchair with her legs tucked up under her, swallowed her tea in large gulps and blinked her bulgy eyes incessantly. She told Katie to call her Jenny, then took down what Katie could remember of her medical history.
‘Okay, so I need to ask, have you ever attempted suicide?’
Katie suspected Adam and Graeme were in the hallway or kitchen straining to hear every word. She cleared her throat and spoke loudly. ‘You know I have. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Because the old man dobbed on me?’
Jenny shrugged. ‘I’m here to talk to you. I’m not interested in anyone else’s version of your experiences.’
‘Fine, yes, I tried to jump down the stairs the other night. It was an impulse and the impulse was gone as soon as Adam crash-tackled me.’
‘Any attempts before that?’
She paused, lowered her voice. ‘Yeah. Um, two, I guess.’
‘How long ago?’
Katie sighed. ‘When I was fourteen and then, I don’t know, three years ago maybe?’
‘Can you tell me about them?’
‘I can but I don’t see the point.’ She was almost whispering now. ‘They were both like this time, just a sudden impulse, really strong so no other thought can get through, then straight afterwards all this confusion.’
Jenny nodded. ‘Apart from these sudden impulses, do you ever think about killing yourself?’
‘Sure.’
‘How often?’
‘All the time.’
‘Do you think in specifics? Make plans?’
‘Sure, but they’re not plans in the way you mean,’ Katie said, keeping her voice low. ‘It’s a comfort thing. I’m scared that one of those impulses will come again, but if it does, I don’t want . . . There are things I wouldn’t want to survive, you know? So I’m always thinking – without even meaning to, it’s like a survival, anti-survival instinct or something – always thinking of things that would definitely work. If that moment comes again, I hope my, um, subconscious? No, my . . . I don’t know the word. I hope that even though I’m not thinking straight, the part of my brain where the sure things are stored will make sure I do it right.’
‘Do it right? Die, you mean?’
‘No one understands how risky it is. I keep thinking: what if Adam hadn’t stopped me the other night, and I’d jumped, but something caught me on the way down. Maybe my shirt got stuck on a railing, broke my fall. So I wake up – yay, alive, but oh, shit, paralysed for life. Or I step in front of a truck but it’s not going fast enough or it bounces me instead of crushing me and I wake up alive and with a nurse changing my nappy.’ Her stomach contracted. She pressed her hands to it, wished she had grabbed a beer before starting this. ‘The thinking, the planning, it’s just a precaution, see? So I can feel safer.’
Jenny nodded. Katie waited for her to speak but the quiet went on and on.
‘Listen, I’m being honest with you. I don’t want to die and even if I did I don’t have the energy to do anything about it.’
The doctor leant forward. ‘Can you tell me how you felt the other night? Before you tried to jump? How was that different to how you feel now?’
Katie remembered coming up with the perfect description of what it was like. Was that yesterday? Two days ago? The bus stop, the falling. ‘I don’t know how to describe it, but believe me, I’m a universe away from that right now.’
Another long pause. Katie lay back on the sofa, resting her eyes. Finally, Jenny said, ‘So you’re having thoughts about suicide but you have no plans to carry them out?’
Katie yawned. ‘Mostly my thoughts are about sleeping.’
‘I need a straight answer from you. Are you planning to harm or kill yourself?’
‘No.’ Katie opened her eyes, sat up straighter, raised her voice again. ‘Your friend, Graeme, on the other hand, now he is making final preparations.’
‘You think Graeme is suicidal?’
‘I know he is.’
‘Has it occurred to you that your own morbid state of mind might cause you to interpret information in a particular way?’
‘Has it occurred to you that phrasing a statement as a question is obnoxious and patronising?’
The doctor smiled. ‘Okay, I’ll be straight with you. Graeme told me you had gone through his stuff and come up with this theory to explain certain choices he’s made recently. But you must know that his financial decisions have charitable motives.’
Katie rolled her eyes. ‘How stupid do you think I am?’
‘I don’t think you’re stupid. But I do think you are viewing the world and other people through a filter. If that filter was removed, then you might see it for what it really is: an act that is logical and consistent for a man who has spent his whole life giving up comfort and security to help others.’
Katie lit a cigarette and sucked back. The smoke tickled her throat and she coughed. ‘Or, depressed people are the ones with the realistic view of the world. It’s the rest of you that have filters. Soft filters that make everything seem nicer and easier than it really is. Maybe that’s all depression is: life without a filter.’
‘You know, there is something in what you say, but I still think you’re wrong about Graeme. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, though. I’m going to keep a closer eye on him, see if I can get him to talk about what his plans are. But I’m going to ask you to do something for me in return, okay? Take the meds I prescribe for you, have a chat with me once a week, call me if you feel dramatically better or worse or different in between our meetings. Do this for me and we’ll see whether we can’t get that filter working again.’
‘What if I don’t want the filter? What if I don’t want to see the world through a medicated fog?’
‘Oh, please,’ the doctor said, taking one of Katie’s cigarettes and lighting it. ‘If we all decided to do without our filters the whole bloody world would stop turning.’
Jenny called Adam into the living room and he came immediately and sat by Katie’s side, his hand on her leg, his eyes never leaving the doctor’s face. Katie couldn’t look at him, couldn’t bear the mad hope in his expression.
‘Katie seems to be suffering what we call rapid cycling, which means she experiences episodes of mania and depression in fast succession, sometimes switching from one state to the other within a space of days, or even hours,’ Jenny said to Adam. ‘In addition, she has a history of mixed states, which is when depression and mania occur simultaneously. Obviously, this is very dangerous and it’s what seems to have been going on the other night when –’
Katie drifted off. She knew the drill. There’d be different medication to try and instructions to keep careful watch while they waited to see what effect they’d have. There was a chance they’d make things worse or that nothing would change or that she’d feel better and then in a year or two her brain would find a way to outsmart the drugs and she’d be back where she was. She felt like she’d been listening to this speech for year
s.
And Adam sitting there like a ghost re-enacting the moment of his death.
27.
When Adam got home from work in the early hours of the morning, he would sit on the low brick wall out the front and smoke. Inside, Katie would be sleeping and so, presumably, would Graeme. Katie never went into Graeme’s room at night anymore; she hadn’t forgiven him for putting up the bars and for, as far as she was concerned, plotting his own death. Adam had stuck to the line about Graeme being a charitable old ascetic, but Katie was unconvinced.
Initially, Adam had been doubtful, too; afraid each night that he’d come home and find a bled-out corpse. But every time Graeme sought him out to enquire after Katie, he relaxed a little more. There would be no body swinging from the light socket or turning blue on the bathroom floor. If Graeme did plan on dying – and Adam’s doubt increased with each day – there would be no big scene, just an absence that seemed normal until enough time passed for it to be suspicious.
He finished his cigarette, and stubbed it out on the bricks. He noticed bright orange stains around his fingernails, realising as he did that there was more light out here than usual. He craned his neck and saw that it came from the front window of Phyl’s place. A shadow passed over his hands. He was in a scene from a B-grade horror movie; bats the size of eagles streaking overhead then circling the snarling griffins atop the shopping mall. He saw bats everywhere now. By day they hung like bloated, rotten fruits from the branches of the fig trees in Victoria Park. On moonlit nights you could see the detail of their wings, the translucent skin stretched over bones. He even noticed one hanging from a power line over the restaurant car park. A pink doggy-tongue hung from its vampiric mouth; its grey pug-nosed face framed by an outrageous collar of orange fuzz. ‘Been there a week at least,’ Rosa told him. ‘Their talons don’t let go even when they’re shot through with 40,000 volts.’
Smoke in the Room Page 18
