Checkers

by John Marsden

  Daniel hangs around us a lot, trying not to get his hands dirty, but also trying to crack on to Oliver. He’s obsessed with Oliver. Oliver doesn’t mind him, he’s gentle with him, but then Oliver’s a gentle guy, gentle with everyone, maybe that’s his problem. I like Daniel, and I’m sort of fascinated by him. I’ve never met anyone so openly gay, and it seems amazing at his age, at our age. He’s comfortable with me, with all the girls, really. I suppose he doesn’t feel threatened by us. For that matter I suppose we don’t feel threatened by him. He’s more like a girl in some ways: the more girly we are, the more he likes it. He gets so excited about our clothes and makeup and stuff. I’m a big disappointment to him because I’m not very girly: I’d rather play basketball than talk about my hair. We sort of tease Daniel a bit, and we probably shouldn’t, but I can’t help it and I don’t think he minds. He’s only got us, really. Oliver’s nice to him but they don’t go off and have big D & M’s or anything. Ben’s so nervous of him that when Daniel comes within a hundred metres it’s like Ben needs an instant Largactil shot, 200 mls, stat.

  Anyway, it was Checkers I set out to write about, but I keep getting distracted. I was remembering that first day, the feeling of opening the box, hoping it might be a dog but still scared to hope too much in case I was disappointed. I wasn’t disappointed. There was a pair of bright eyes, an outsize head cocked to one side, a pink tongue, a grinning, cheeky mouth, and an outrageous white and black body that looked like the tiles on our bathroom floor might go if there was an earthquake. His coat was like crazy paving. I fell totally in love with him, straightaway. He had such an alert head on such a crazy wacky body. He was so unlike the Jack Russells and golden retrievers and standard poodles that everyone’s got around our neighbourhood.

  And he was so different to the kind of dog that I’d have expected Dad to get. With Dad, it was like everything had to be the way everyone else did it. Our house was exactly like you’d expect the Finance Director of Rider Group to live in. We had the two BM’s, because that’s what you have if you live the way we did. We got the house at Providence Bay because that’s where everyone goes, and whenever we were there Dad wore La Mer or P&S or Heritage: shirts, shorts, jeans, boardies, didn’t matter, whatever it was it’d be one of those labels. It was so exciting for Mark and me every morning at breakfast, trying to guess which label he’d have on today. Sometimes I wished he’d go and get something from an op-shop or Dimmey’s—anything to prove that he didn’t do things just because our friends did, or because someone powerful, like Jack, told him to.

  Yes, one of the few times in his life that I’ve known Dad do something unpredictable and different was the night he came home with Checkers.

  I picked Checkers up and held him against me. He wasn’t the kind of dog you hug really tight, like a labrador. Right away I sensed that. He had too much independence, too much pride. He gave my nose a long lick, which freaked Mum right out, then he took an eager look around. It was like he was saying, ‘Right, which way’s the great outdoors? I’ve got a lot of exploring to do.’ I put him down. Mum said, ‘Oh, not on the floor. Murray, I don’t want him in the house.’ Checkers immediately spread his back legs and did a little piss. I gave him a smack on the nose and air freighted him outside, leaving Mum to clean up the puddle. Checkers didn’t seem at all discombobulated (I love that word) by the smack on the nose. He zigzagged around the yard like James at the Year 10 formal. I could hear Mum trying to start an argument about the dog but Dad was still too high to get into that: he wouldn’t listen.

  Mark came outside with me and Checkers. ‘What are you going to get for your birthday?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I was cross with him for even thinking about that when something so exciting as a dog had arrived in our lives.

  ‘I want a motorbike,’ he said.

  ‘Well, good for you.’ Then I added: ‘What’s the use of a motorbike? There’s nowhere to ride it round here.’

  ‘I don’t care, I’ll find a place. I just want one.’

  ‘What do you reckon we should call the dog?’

  I was asking him but I already felt the dog was mine. I’d felt that from the moment Dad carried the box into the house—and it was sort of understood and accepted by everyone else too, without anything actually being said. I suppose it was because I was the one who’d been begging for so long.

  Mark just glanced at him and said, ‘He’s the dumbest-looking dog I’ve ever seen. What did Dad have to get one like that for? I wanted a red setter, like the Wakefields and the Stewarts.’

  ‘Honestly, Mark, why do you always have to be the same as everyone else?’

  ‘Why do you always have to be different from everyone else?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Well, I’m not the same as everyone else. I just like red setters, that’s all. Is that a crime?’

  ‘Well, anyway, what are we going to call him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He looks like the bathroom floor, doesn’t he? He looks like someone smashed all the tiles up in the bathroom. Call him Bathroom Floor.’

  ‘He looks like a chessboard.’

  ‘OK, call him that then.’

  ‘Chessboard? That’s the name of the Walkleys’ horse that won all those races. The Rawson Stakes. I’m not calling him that. They’ll think we got it off them.’

  ‘Call him Drafts then. Or Checkers.’

  ‘Checkers? That’s not bad. I quite like that.’

  When we told Dad later that we’d chosen ‘Checkers’ he looked quite shocked.

  ‘Is that a joke?’ he wanted to know.

  We didn’t understand what he was talking about.

  ‘No. How do you mean? He just looks like a chessboard, that’s all, but we didn’t want to call him that because of the Walkleys’ horse. So we thought we’d call him Checkers instead.’

  He calmed down then and even seemed amused.

  ‘I suppose it is quite appropriate,’ he muttered, and went back to reading BRW.

  We went to dinner that night to celebrate the contract. We met at Jack and Rosie’s. They were all there: Bruce and Mona, Doug and Emma, Dermot and Chris, and all the various kids. Everyone was just as high as Dad. Jack was off his head, mad, drunk with the knowledge of all the money he was going to make. While I was watching him I reckon he drank half a bottle of Scotch but it didn’t have the slightest effect. He was getting off all right, but not on alcohol. He could have drunk tomato juice and he wouldn’t have come down one bit.

  The party did get wilder and noisier, though. Half an hour after we got there Jack had a pair of scissors and was chasing all the men around. Every time he grabbed one he cut his tie off, about a centimetre from the knot. The cheapest tie would have been a hundred and fifty bucks, but they all thought it was the best joke of the year.

  The idea was that we’d go to a restaurant, but Dermot talked Jack out of it because no-one was meant to know that they’d got the contract. As Dermot said, if we all arrived in a restaurant yelling and laughing and celebrating, it’d be on the front page of tomorrow’s papers. Drunk or sober, Jack was smart enough to understand that. He suddenly turned on us kids and gave us a long talk about how we mustn’t tell anyone or it’d be bigger than the collapse of the Weimar Republic. I hated Jack when he talked to us like that and I hated the parents, the way they stood there and let him do it. We all knew Jack controlled our lives, but I didn’t like being reminded of it.

  I was pleased we weren’t eating out though, because I had Checkers with me, and I’d been worried about how I was going to smuggle him into a restaurant. Jack called a pizza place and, without asking anyone what they wanted, ordered twice as many pizzas as we could have eaten. ‘Good news for Checkers,’ I thought. We kids went down to the pool room and shot pool and watched TV and boasted to each other about how cool we were. I got sick of it pretty soon and played with Checkers. I didn’t like any of them much, and the conversation was so hyped up and wanky that it made me sick. Event
ually I fell asleep in a corner of the room with Checkers sucking on my finger. The yelling and laughing of the adults from one end of the house was echoing the screaming of the kids as they wrestled and told pathetic jokes and chucked pizza at each other.

  I read this back and I think it sounds terrible: I sound terrible, like a square. I don’t feel like a square but perhaps I am. Here in the hospital it doesn’t matter so much. Because there’s not many of us, us teenagers I mean, we’re nicer to each other than we would be at school. Ben, for instance. At any school in the southern hemisphere Ben would be given a hard time. He stands out as a prawn-head; you can pick him from a hundred metres. But we’re quite good to him, we talk to him when he stands still long enough, and no-one gives him too hard a time, even if he thinks we do.

  For once I am tired tonight. Maybe it’s all that fresh air with Marj. But I think I will be able to get some sleep. Might as well try, anyway.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I think Checkers missed his mother. He wasn’t that young but I think he still needed her warm tummy to cuddle into, to nuzzle his soft head against. I put him in the laundry, in a cardboard carton padded with a couple of towels I stole from the linen press. Mum and Dad had gone to bed. Dad was disgusting and for once Mum was pretty wonky. We’d had to come home in a taxi, and it was quite dangerous, with Dad’s drunken burbles about the contract, and Mark and me and even Mum trying to shut him up. I’m not sure how much the taxidriver knew about finance, but we’d had it drummed into us from the days of rusk sticks and play dough that we must never never say anything outside the family. That’s why we hadn’t needed Jack’s lecture.

  The best I could do in the cab was to get Dad talking about birthday presents again.

  ‘What do you want?’ he kept asking me in a sad old voice, as though he were on his death bed. ‘What is it you want? Go on, say it. Say anything.’

  I tried to joke him along.

  ‘An A in every subject.’

  ‘No, go on, don’t be funny. You’re always funny. Say something you really want. Go on.’

  ‘Friends I can trust.’

  ‘No, no, you’ve got friends, haven’t you? Oh no, say you’ve got friends. I want you to have friends.’

  I was embarrassed that the taxidriver was listening to this.

  ‘Yes, Dad, I’ve got lots of friends.’

  ‘Oh good. That’s good to have friends. I want you to have friends.’

  ‘OK. I’ll tell you what it is that I’d really like, that money can buy.’

  Even though I don’t think I’m as materialistic as Mark, I’m not stupid. If someone comes along and offers to buy me anything I want, I’m not going to tell him to piss off.

  ‘Come on, come on, tell your dad what you want.’

  ‘I want us to have a farm in the country, where we can go for weekends and school holidays.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Mark, suddenly waking up. ‘I could ride my bike there.’ Then he thought again. ‘Not every weekend, but. I wouldn’t want to go there every weekend.’

  Even though Dad was totally off his face and not responsible for what he was saying, I was still curious to see how he’d react. He was trying to get some words out but as the taxi pulled up at our front door all he managed was, ‘Well . . .’

  He said that about ten times.

  He and Mum crashed and bumped and burped and swore their way to their bedroom, Mark went to his, I put Checkers in the laundry and went to mine. Not having his mother, poor Checkers yelped continuously. I was lying awake, maybe because I’d already slept for an hour or more in Jack’s pool room. Checkers’ unhappy cries were like a toothache. I listened to them for half an hour, waiting for him to stop, but it seemed like he was going to whine forever. I reached the point where I couldn’t stand it any more. So up I got and padded out to the laundry.

  Checkers went into a frenzy of delight when I opened the door. It was the first time that he’d shown absolute delight at the sight of me. Come to think of it, it was the first time anyone had shown absolute delight at the sight of me.

  I carried him to my bed and we snuggled in together. That was the start: I had him in there every night after that. At first I smuggled him in, but after a few fights with Mum I wore her down. He slept on the foot of the bed, wriggling himself up further as the night wore on. I had to learn to sleep with my legs folded. By halfway through the night he’d have worked his way to the middle of the bed and I’d wake all cold and bent up, and I’d start pushing Checkers back down to the end. He was so heavy to push. He wouldn’t co-operate at all. He got quite grumpy about it, sometimes. It was like pushing a dead body.

  I miss him now. It’s so lonely in this bed. Maybe it’s not so good having your own room. Oliver’s gone home on weekend leave and there’s no-one here I want to talk to. The place is half deserted. Ben’s here, but he’s spending all his time talking to the old people. They’re the only ones who have the patience to put up with him. Cindy’s here but she just watches TV. Dreaming other people’s dreams. And the only other one’s Esther, but she’s so drugged out at the moment she’s over the Himalayas and still drifting.

  So I’ve spent my time wandering and sitting and watching, and smoking more than I should. I wish I could think straight. My mind gets hold of something and goes over it and over it, pulling at it and tearing at it until I think I’ll end up as mad as Esther. It’s not always things that have actually happened; sometimes it’s things that I wish had happened or that I’m scared might have happened. Tonight, before I started writing in this, it was me confronting Jack. It was so real I could smell it: I saw the veins in his face, around the nose, and I could see the anger in his transparent blue eyes.

  I was sitting at one of the wrought iron tables outside Sebastian’s, sipping a hot chocolate, when he suddenly appeared, dropping heavily into the seat opposite me. I burned red but didn’t speak.

  ‘Well, young lady,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re satisfied with what you’ve done.’

  I still didn’t say anything.

  ‘Or is there some more damage you think you can inflict? More lives you can wreck?’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I said.

  ‘Oh? That’s an interesting theory. You’re not a six-year-old, you know. You are responsible for what you say and do. You might like to pretend you’re a child, but I’ve got news for you.’

  ‘That’s not news.’

  ‘And you’re not mentally retarded. At least I didn’t think you were. Maybe I was wrong about that.’

  Silence.

  ‘Was I wrong? Are you mentally retarded?’

  ‘People don’t use the word “retarded” any more.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’m not politically correct enough, is that the problem? Well, let me tell you something, young lady, I’ve never been politically correct. I wouldn’t have got where I am if I’d been worried about that bullshit.’

  ‘Yes, and look where you are.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for you, there’d never have been a problem.’

  ‘There was a problem long before I came along.’

  And suddenly, according to my imagination, I’d be on my feet, screaming, ‘Why didn’t you leave us alone? Why did you have to drag us in? You’re scum, filth. I hate you. Go away. You deserve everything, everything, you understand? Everything that you get. It’s not my fault. IT’S NOT MY FAULT.’

  It was so real I was trembling. None of it happened of course. But for hours, while Cindy gazed at the TV, I watched this movie in my head, running it over and over, changing the dialogue each time, trying to find words I could say to him that would be more powerful, more effective.

  I’d actually had a few hot chocolates with him at Sebastian’s over the years. Rosie went shopping in Lisle Street every Saturday morning and Jack sometimes went with her. But he got bored quickly and started looking for someone to talk to, someone to entertain him. Three or four times I was that person. I liked it; it made me feel quite grown up. Heads tur
ned as we sat down; people pretended not to be impressed by the fact that he was sitting a couple of metres from them; waiters were faster, smoother, oilier than they ever were for me alone. I copped the power of Jack at its full blast on those occasions, and understood a little how Dad could have become so completely at his beck and call. But I still resented them both: Jack for making it happen and Dad for allowing it.

  Now that I’m writing about it, I’ve calmed down a bit. That’s good. I was in full panic attack mode in the TV Room, and trying desperately not to let the staff see. I don’t want to have my drugs increased again. I want so much to be able to do it on my own, and in this place I don’t think I’ll get that chance. I’ll end up like Esther, a spaced-out koala, staring at people as though I’m in the zoo, up the top of my gum tree and off my face on eucalyptus.