Checkers

by John Marsden

  It was only a week later that the Whites were at our place for a tennis party. Everyone was sitting around being very elegant: ‘No, really, you go on, I’ve just had a set . . .’, ‘Isn’t she marvellous . . .’, ‘Oh, well played, partner . . .’, ‘Let me get you a drink, darling, you’ve certainly earned it . . .’ Mark was there, scabbing a cake, but we weren’t allowed to play: it was an adult party. Suddenly a strange cat, a reddish-coloured one, trotted down the drive and leapt onto the little wall beside the garage. Without thinking Mark yelled out, ‘Muggins, Checkers, Muggins.’

  Like a ground-to-air missile, Checkers launched himself straight at the Whites’ place. He didn’t even see the visiting cat, although the cat saw Checkers and was gone in a blur of orange.

  A second after he’d yelled out, Mark realised what he’d done. By then it was too late, of course. Mr and Mrs White were seriously angry. ‘Well, really,’ Mrs White said, standing up. ‘June,’ said Mr White, turning to my mother, ‘this is the bloody limit. These kids have got no respect for anything. They just do as they like.’

  My mother started falling apart. You get to recognise the symptoms if you’ve seen it often enough: the trembling lower lip, the head dropping, having to lean on something with both hands. Normally Mrs White was pretty sympathetic when Mum couldn’t cope—Mrs White always blamed Dad—but this time she was too fired up to be sympathetic. Mark and I had to stand there, with our heads down too, while we got told what irresponsible, immature, untrustworthy little criminals we were.

  I wished Mum would stick up for us at times like this, but she never once did. It was the same when we were in trouble at school. She wanted everything to be so perfect: tennis parties, her children, the appearance of the house, herself. She went into instant spin-out when they weren’t. Sometimes it seemed with me she was spinning out all the time, because I was never perfect, not once, ever.

  Anyway, the tennis party struggled on. Mark and I had to apologise, Checkers was tied up, and the conversation, from what I heard of it, got very lame. It was a long time before the Whites spoke to Mark or me again.

  But it was a typical episode from life with Checkers. Where he was, nothing was predictable or dull or in a rut. That’s one reason I’d love to have him with me now, in here. This place is so predictable. They need a Checkers to brighten them up-staff and patients both. It’s funny, because all of the patients are weird in their own special way. Apart from Ben with his attention deficit hyperactivity, there’s Oliver with his eating disorder, Emine with school phobia, Cindy who tried to kill herself, Daniel with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Esther who’s ‘query psychotic’, according to Sister Llosa, when I heard them discussing the patients at the change of shifts one day. I think that means they’re not sure whether she’s totally off her board, or just normal average crazy like the rest of us.

  In a way, though, Daniel seems the most crazy. I don’t know how an obsessive-compulsive disorder works, but there’s something quite funny about it to people like me, who haven’t got it. The strange thing—or one of the strange things—is that Daniel can laugh at it, too. He actually laughs at the weird stuff he does, but he can’t stop himself doing it. For instance, one of his obsessions is with cleanliness. Like my mum, only worse. He spends four, five, six hours a day in the shower. This causes problems for some of the staff, like Sister Norman, who’s obsessed with the fact that Daniel is gay, and gets nervous when any guys are in the bathroom too long with him. She goes around looking for male nurses she can send in to check out the situation, and if she can’t find any she sails in there herself. The more paranoid she gets, the more Daniel teases her. When someone who’s in on the joke, Oliver for example, is in the bathroom Daniel drops all the pick-up lines he can think of, in a loud voice, while Sister Norman goes into a frenzy outside. She knows Daniel’s just stirring her but she can never be quite sure, and it drives her crazy: the steam floating out of the bathroom and, with it, Daniel’s voice: ‘Oliver, that’s such a big one . . . wow, look at that . . .’

  Daniel spends so much time in the shower he gets all pink and wrinkly. But his obsession with cleanliness isn’t just to do with taking showers. A couple of days ago he lost ten bucks and, about two minutes after I heard him complaining about it, I saw the money, blowing along the driveway near the basketball court. I chased it, grabbed it, and took it in to the Dayroom and tried to give it to him. He took one look and backed away fast.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Where’d you find it?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Outside,’ I said. ‘Blowing down the drive, across from the court.’

  ‘I can’t touch it,’ he said.

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I wish I was. But I can’t, not when it’s been contaminated like that. Listen, if you want to do me a really big favour, change it for a new one on Wednesday, when the bank comes. Then I’ll be able to have it back.’

  It was weird. I can’t imagine living like that. That’s why Daniel never plays basketball, of course. In fact he spends most of his time indoors.

  He’s got other obsessions too, not all related to cleanliness. He won’t go into a new room until he’s touched five different types of wood. He said it started with the saying ‘touch wood’, and he got in the habit of touching wood before any new experience, then he figured that the more different types of wood he touched, the more lucky he’d be.

  He gets dressed in a certain order, even buttoning up his shirt by doing alternate buttons, starting at the bottom, then going back down.

  Like I say, I don’t know how he survives. I don’t know how he gets anything done in life.

  Somehow though, despite the individual weirdnesses of the people in here, when you put them together, the effect is dullsville. I don’t know whether it’s the staff or the drugs or the monotony of the daily routine, or all those things. Maybe every institution is like this. But it sure is getting on my nerves.

  I suppose that’s the ultimate joke. We’re here because of our nerves and the place makes us worse. Some joke, some catch.

  ‘Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22, and let out a respectful whistle. “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

  “It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.’

  I love that book. But we could teach the guys in Catch-22 a thing or two.

  CHAPTER SIX

  My life seemed to fall apart so quickly. I don’t suppose it was that quick really; it just felt that way. The first hint of trouble came when I was reading the paper one day in the school library. I don’t often read the paper but I was skipping History and I’d told Miss Mackay, the Librarian, that I was there to do an Issues essay for English. So looking at the newspaper seemed to be the best camouflage, even if I’d just planned to read the star signs and ‘Far Side’.

  But, when I got to page five, I saw the name ‘Rider’ in the headline, so I stopped to have a look. It was a name I was used to seeing in the paper: usually in the financial pages, but not always. Jack kind of attracted cameras, and reporters. He didn’t give a damn what anyone thought, so that meant he did some radical things. A lot of them really upset me, like the time he demolished the old house where Frank Langston used to live. Jack knocked it down before the Langston Society could take out a preservation order. Typical.

  This story was about the casino, of course. An Opposition member of parliament was asking questions about Rider Group and the contract. She said that there was a sudden rise in share prices two months before the contract was announced. So she asked the minister, ‘Were the directors of Rider Group engaged in trading the company’s shares in early June? Did they have prior knowledge that they had been successful in their tender for the casino? If so, how could such knowledge have been obtained?’

  In reply the minister accused the member of being on a fishing expedition. He said the Government had monitored the tendering process closely from its
inception and was totally satisfied with the confidentiality of the Commission. The member’s attitude was typical of the Opposition, who skulked around in the shadows trying to find corpses where no corpses existed. They would serve the people of this state better if they tried to do something constructive once in a while.

  And that was pretty much all the newspaper said. Most people reading it would probably have thought that was the end of the matter. Not for me, though. I felt my face go red as I sat there, and the sweat prickled my skin. It was obvious what had happened. Once they knew they’d got the contract they’d gone out and loaded up on shares. I don’t know a heap about the stock market but I know that’s illegal. It’s called insider trading.

  Still, I wasn’t totally blown away about it. I knew there were always things going on that you wouldn’t necessarily want to read about in the newspapers. Not just with Rider Group. It must be the same with any big company, surely. And there had been controversies with Rider Group before. I had a lot of faith in Jack being smart enough to navigate through any storm. Jack and my father.

  As it turned out, though, this controversy went on a bit longer than most. The next day there was a report that the Stock Exchange had asked Rider Group to explain the rise in its share prices in June, and to provide information about any trading in company shares by its directors for that month. And, the next day, Dad issued a statement saying that all dealings by directors had at all times been honest and above board, that the company had nothing to hide, and would co-operate fully with any requests for information from the Stock Exchange.

  Then it was the weekend. Saturday morning I had breakfast with Dad and he was pretty relaxed. ‘Look, it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Just a backbencher trying to make a name for herself, and Leslie Croft trying to prove that he’s worth all the money the Stock Exchange pays him.’

  Sunday we went to Jack and Rosie’s for a barbeque. Jack was even redder in the face and louder than normal, putting his arm around everyone and breathing fumes of Scotch into their faces. Everything seemed larger than life that day. The jokes were louder, the laughter longer. Everyone seemed to be shouting. Then Mark came out to the garden, from the TV room. ‘There’s something going to be on TV in a minute,’ he said, ‘about Rider Group.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Jack said. ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mark said. ‘Something about a company in the Bahamas.’

  Without a word Jack went inside. We all followed. No-one said anything. There were no kids in the TV room, just a man’s face on the screen talking to the empty room.

  ‘. . . kind of animal would do that?’ he asked. ‘Rip off an old-age pensioner by preying on her worst fears. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Next, Laura Bailey’s exclusive story about the mystery company in the Bahamas who’s bought a slice of one of our biggest corporations.’

  The ads ran their course, and still no-one spoke. I kept looking from Jack to Dad and back again. Dad looked nervous, but it was impossible to tell with Jack. He stood there holding his drink, glaring at the TV. I suppose his tight grip on the glass was the only clue that he was not completely relaxed.

  Finally the ads finished and the man came back on. I knew the programme—it was ‘Max Locke’s Spotlight’, but Max must have been on holidays. I don’t know who this guy was. He said something like, ‘And now a Spotlight exclusive: Laura Bailey reports on a mystery company in the Bahamas that’s been buying up big in Rider Group. Who are the secret investors who already own a good slice of our newest casino?’

  Then they crossed to the reporter, who was standing on a beach somewhere. It was meant to be the Bahamas but it could just as easily have been Bondi. She launched into her story. What it boiled down to was that a shelf company called Pinto, with a paid-up capital of two dollars, had bought about eight per cent of Rider—and had done it in four days in June. The company had only two directors, a Mr and Mrs Wills. There was a couple of minutes of video of a man and a woman on a veranda and then in the garden of a white mansion. You could only see blurry figures, glimpses of them through the trees. Laura Bailey’s voice told us that the Wills were a British couple who had lived there for eleven years and were listed on the census forms as investors. That was all there was to it really. They’d managed to stretch thirty seconds’ worth of information into a four-minute story.

  When it was over Jack just shrugged. ‘Not much in that,’ he said to Dad, who nodded.

  ‘What’s it all about?’ Mark asked.

  ‘It’s a company that’s bought some Rider Group shares,’ Dad explained. ‘We’ve been wondering about them ourselves, but that story didn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know.’

  We went back outside to the barbeque, but the party had quietened down, and everyone went home early.

  So, that was how it all began. A few questions in Parliament, a story on TV. Now, as I lie here, it feels like my whole world has shrunk to this little bed. From living in the big house, where we had the pool and the court and all those downstairs rooms, to this tiny house of white, with its light blue bedspread. When I sleep, which isn’t very often—even with the tablets—I get right down under the sheets, pulling them over my head. The air gets a bit stale but I feel safer, more secure, doing that. It’s my white cocoon where I can be a caterpillar, a grub, never to turn into a butterfly or even a moth. It’s the safest place I know. It’s the only time and the only place where I can feel some peace.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  No matter how hard I try, I’m still fooled by appearances. I know it’s wrong but I still fall for them. Whether it’s a good-looking boy who I think must be really nice, or a drunk who I cross the street to avoid, or an old lady who I take for granted must be conservative and old-fashioned . . .

  I thought Esther was crazy, the way she hums to herself and walks in patterns, the way she collects bits of string and ties them together in a long rope, her endless questions to the kitchen staff about the food they’re serving. Well, she may be crazy but at least she’s interesting and intelligent. I realise that now, after talking to her for hours tonight. We started talking in the bathroom. When I went to wash my hands, standing next to her, I realised she was trying to slip a piece of paper under a silverfish that was scurrying around in the handbasin.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. It was the first time I’ve ever spoken directly to her. I don’t talk to anyone here much, except Oliver.

  ‘Saving its life,’ she said. And laughed.

  ‘Saving its life? Why bother?’

  ‘Why would I want it to die?’

  I just looked at her and she laughed again. Laughter’s not a sound we hear a lot in this place, and Esther’s laugh is quite nice.

  ‘It’s such a complex little creature,’ she said. ‘So delicate. Imagine how long it’d take to make one, if you were a human insect-maker. You could spend your whole life working on it and still not get even one finished. And we kill them so casually. A quick squish of the finger and a moment later we’ve forgotten that we did it.’

  I started to feel guilty. ‘Is that why you’re so fussy about what you eat?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  We got talking about everything then. I leant against the wall for a while, then gradually slid down till I was sitting on the cold white tiled floor. Opposite me, Esther did the same. When we got too cold we moved out to the corridor and went down past the staircase, where there’s a little dead end with a dried-out palm in a pot. We settled there quite comfortably. Esther did most of the talking. She was very interesting. She lives in Sanford but she doesn’t go to school, never has. She is a ‘home schooler’, something I’d never heard of before. It means she does school by correspondence, with her parents helping. They live on a half-hectare block and grow their own vegetables organically and keep chooks and make their own bread and annoy the neighbours. I guess they would, in Sanford. It’s not exactly a suburb filled with hippies—which is what they are, in some ways.

  Then everything went wrong. H
er mother got sick, really sick, with cancer of the uterus, and she had to spend long periods in hospital. When she wasn’t in hospital she was away in the mountains, or even interstate, trying different cures, natural therapies and stuff. For about fifteen months she wasn’t around much, and Esther’s father couldn’t cope with that, because he depended on her pretty heavily. So he spent most of his time at his mum’s place in the country, having a nervous breakdown.

  He wanted Esther to come with him but she wouldn’t. For one thing she wanted to be able to visit her mum in hospital; for another, she felt she had to look after the chooks and the garden; for a third, she doesn’t like her grandmother.

  So, for weeks on end, Esther was there alone. ‘I liked it,’ she said, ‘but I think I did go a bit crazy.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I asked. I was fascinated. There was no-one at my school who lived like this.

  ‘Oh well.’ She looked at me for a minute, as if working out what she should say. She’s very beautiful, Esther, like a gypsy, with long ringlets framing her dark face, and deep eyes. She always wears orangey-browny-earthy things, and lots of silver jewellery. I’ve never actually met or seen a gypsy, but I imagine that’s how they look.

  Finally she decided. ‘I think I have an animal in my head,’ she confessed.

  ‘An animal?’ I was shocked, but I wanted to laugh.

  ‘Yes. I know it’s crazy—at least, I think I do—but that’s why I’m in here.’

  ‘What kind of animal?’

  ‘Well . . . I’m not sure exactly. A little warm furry one, like a possum or a feather-tail glider.’