PHENOMENA: THE LOST AND FORGOTTEN CHILDREN

by Susan Tarr

  He didn’t answer her.

  “Malcolm? Us?”

  “Nah, just some idiots farther down the street.”

  He’d often thought about the world’s particular attitude toward himself, and the others, and the reason for it. Something within him responded to an apprehension within his own heart, that he did not belong in his life, but somewhere else. At night he sometimes dreamed chaotic, multi-coloured dreams and in the daytime his thoughts still lingered in them.

  He didn’t talk for a while, but then he suddenly started up again. “Mummy and Daddy took me in the cable car. Right to the top. For my fifth birthday.”

  “What’s a cable car? Can we go in the cable car?”

  He thought about that particular birthday when he was a regular boy with a regular family. He remembered that ride, sitting on the outside bench seat or swinging from the leather straps, held up in his father’s arms. He talked for a while longer about riding the cable car, sometimes as far as Roslyn or Mornington. But those memories were distant. Yet he could see in his mind the timetable board and the clicked tickets he tucked into his shorts’ pocket.

  “Can we? Where’s the cable car?”

  He reverted to the safety of dates, saying, “It started in 1881. But it’s all gone now. We went a long time ago but you would have enjoyed the ride.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Going Back

  Malcolm was content.

  As he saw it, all was mighty fine in his life. He’d lived at Seacliff Mental Hospital and at Maclaggan Street for most of his life, and this house with Julie was surely as good as it could be.

  Until she fell.

  Someone – to be specific, that grey-faced, grey-hands Grey Lizzie – hadn’t bothered to mop up the spilt water on the linoleum in the bathroom because of the germs. So Julie slipped and fell against the hard surface of the bath. It was some time before anyone found her, her tiny broken body in a growing puddle of red. She never screamed for help; that was not her way. She lay shocked, growing chilled until someone complained that Julie was hogging the bathroom. That same someone pounded on the door.

  “You’ve had enough time! You know the rules!”

  The querulous voice of Grey Lizzie insinuated itself through a crack in the door. For good measure she wrapped the doorknob in her hanky and shook it. With a clatter, Julie’s cane slid from its resting-place against the jamb.

  Julie’s dead! Julie’s dead! Julie’s dead in the bathroom! The words chanted and buzzed through the house like the singing of summer crickets on the telephone lines. Get Malcolm! Julie’s dead! Dead!

  “Julie? It’s me. It’s your Malcolm.”

  His voice soft against the crack in the door, willing her to speak, to be alive, his whole being shrouded with fear, still hoping, dreading.

  He played with the doorknob, rattling and squeezing it long before he turned it. Opening the door a fraction, he tilted his head sideways so he could peer through the slit into the bathroom with his one good eye. He spoke sideways, through the gap.

  “It’s me, Julie. It’s your Malcolm.”

  Her naked thigh turned translucently white with cold, the red tide beyond on the black and white linoleum. He saw this. Opened the door wider. Her face, a strange colour, lips as purple as pansies. Fair hair, dark like wet string, stuck out from her head like a crooked halo.

  His throat closed down, strangling his words. His eye squinted against what he saw.

  “Julie? Are you all right?”

  The others crowded, clamouring, frustrated by his bulk. Whining. Petulant. Grey Lizzie the loudest.

  “It’s our bathroom too,” she said. “It’s our home too. We want to see what’s happened, so shove over.”

  To Malcolm they’d turned animal; wild dogs excited by the smell of blood. He stood firm, barring the door with his body.

  Grey Lizzie was relentless, bawling, “C’mon! Let’s see Julie!” Punching his shoulder repeatedly.

  Barely registering the blows, he considered carefully what he should do. He held the doorknob tightly so there was no chance anyone might wrest it from him. Then he turned his body slowly and placed his hand firmly in Grey Lizzie’s clamorous face. When he released the doorknob, he used his other hand to shove at some anonymous blue woollen jersey. Fists and elbows, shoulders, everywhere. With his boot, he manoeuvred them all back until he was able to slip inside the bathroom.

  He was with Julie, his bulk filling the small space from side to side completely. The door shut tight behind him.

  Squatting, he brushed the back of his fingers against her cheek. He reached up the cold damp wall to the rail above for her towel, and covered her nakedness. She was so small lying there, so still and broken. The upper half of her body slumped down against the bath, whose feet had cruel claws like a lion. Like the park bench at the Queens Gardens.

  Like that they remained, stuck in time. Malcolm and Julie, together, on the cramped floor space of the bathroom in the white roughcast house up Maclaggan Street.

  An ambulance arrived. It’s siren blaring noisily.

  People galloped up the front path.

  Bang went the front door.

  “He pushed me!” Grey Lizzie bawled. “He hurt me!”

  Someone clouted her a good one and shoved her into the sitting room, slammed the door on her squeals.

  Heavy feet pounded down the passage, past the linen cupboard. Stopped outside the bathroom. Huffing and puffing. They thumped, and they shouted through the closed door. They ordered Malcolm to stand up, open the door from the inside. Come out.

  “Just get up, man, so we can open it from here!”

  “Damn you, boy! Damn you to hell!”

  He was unmoved.

  “Come on then, lad. Do as you’re told. There’s a good feller.”

  He shut his ears to both the yelling and cajoling.

  With a fire axe, they smashed the door from its hinges, and so the ambulance crew, the hospital staff and all the others crowded into the doorway.

  “Has the dirty bastard killed her?”

  “Get him out of there!”

  “Easy, lad, come away then. Easy does it.”

  “If you don’t get out of the way, boy, I’ll make you, all right.”

  Someone’s heavy boot kicked his left buttock while a hand grabbed a fistful of hair. Then someone climbed onto his back, hooked him beneath his jaw, forcing his head painfully backward.

  Malcolm unfurled his great body. Silently he rose to tower over the ambulance officers, who immediately stumbled backward. He walked from the bathroom into the crowded passage. And stood there. Motionless.

  “There’s a good lad, then. There’s a good lad. Easy, easy.”

  “You can’t trust that lot, I say. They shouldn’t be allowed out. They’re too bloody dangerous.”

  Julie was whisked away efficiently by the ambulance men and a squad of white uniforms, crisply flowing veils and swinging, navy blue woollen capes, out to the ambulance on a stretcher, covered over with a grey blanket.

  Malcolm, gawping from behind the others, saw everything yet saw nothing.

  So – Julie was gone.

  Julie’s dead. Julie’s dead. Died in the bathroom. Died in the bathroom. Julie’s dead. Julie’s dead. Dead!

  The strains of that ridiculous chant started up, crickets filling the house, filling his mind, clouding his thoughts and blinding him. Grey woollen cardigan, blue woollen jersey, shuffling footsteps, chanting, singing, all idiots, all crazy bloody animals, should be locked up…locked up…locked up…

  “One of you needs to clean up this mess.”

  Julie – a mess. Softly merging pink and red shades of her life, of her inner beauty drifting toward the drain hole with its black hollow eyes waiting to drink her up.

  In silence, he registered that everyone’s eyes turned accusingly toward Grey Lizzie.

  “It’s all her fault,” Bob growled. “She should have done her job.”

  Grey Lizzie slunk off, grey knuckles
stuffed into her quivering grey mouth. Back to her paper lair.

  With everyone gone and the others seated at the table, Bob dished up dinner. But Malcolm turned and walked silently toward the bathroom to stand in the empty space where the door had been. Crouched down, he put his finger in the congealing blood on the linoleum and he stirred it. He did the same with the blood in the bath and it seemed to respond, first performing a swirling dance away from his finger then back again.

  Cupping his hands together and lifting the rosy pink film to his face, he cradled it against his cheek. His silent tears merged with Julie’s life and he moaned her name over and over.

  When Bob came to find him, Malcolm was covered in cold water and blood; he was cupping up the mess, trying to save her from the drain holes. Trying to save her life.

  Bob just patted Malcolm’s shoulder a few times. Then he led Malcolm to his bedroom, and stripped him of his wet clothes, dressed him in his pyjamas and saw him into his bed.

  When darkness fell, a deep and impenetrable silence shrouded the house.

  Malcolm believed he had not looked after his Julie.

  It was Monday when Sister Evans next came. Grey Lizzie wiped and mopped busily, a look of guilty disdain on her face. Bob scrubbed the wooden tabletop and cleaned his coal range. He muttered to Sister Evans about the rust patches from the coal dust already showing on the roof. Malcolm sat on the hearth stool and stared blankly at nothing.

  With Julie gone his days were a continuous fog. Outside, the dark clouds seemed never to depart. Dank misty mornings, dank misty afternoons, and dank misty nights. The trees in the park had no green leaves; only drifts of dead leaves surrounded him. There were no more bright little flowers. No more birds. Alone in the park, maybe he would see the queen.

  He ate nothing, his chest aching with pain so intense he wondered if he might die. He hoped he would. Haunted by memories of Julie, of smells familiar, he stayed in bed, but even sleep wasn’t safe. Into the slow hall of time marched the night’s dark and dreadful hours. He didn’t sleep again. He went outside to the dunny or he wandered the house, checking and rechecking the bathroom from outside the door – but going no farther.

  Winter’s grip tightened about the house up Maclaggan Street. Snow banked against the windows. He stood outside, his frozen hands deep in his pockets, facing Julie’s window, the one facing the back garden, not the one facing the neighbour’s cold wall; the wall built to keep them out: keep them safe.

  Using his nail, he scraped the build-up of snow on the windowsill. But he couldn’t see through the net curtains. He stood there letting wind and sleet snatch at him, as winter swathed him.

  One day he ventured along the far end of the passage, past the new bathroom door, to Julie’s bedroom. After a long time, when he did turn the knob and push the door open a crack to see inside with his good eye, there was no one there. The room was musty from disuse. The casement windows were iced up. Green mould formed on the sill.

  Julie was indeed gone.

  He heard the deep groan pass through his open mouth as he sat on her bed, shaking his head in disbelief. He grabbed her pillow to his face, masking the appalling noise of moans from deep within, too painful to express through his throat.

  And he clutched at Julie’s dressing gown, with the tufts of candlewick missing from the front. She’d picked the tufts free, rolled them into balls, put them in her pocket.

  His fingers closed possessively around them. And he dragged the garment about himself, the fabric seeming to hold her smell and warmth. His head buried in the folds, he moaned his grief.

  The others were drawn to the dread howling that came from down in Dead Julie’s room. That’s what they called her now, and like shadowy ghosts they watched from the darkened doorway. He was oblivious as each slipped away, most back to the cosy sitting room, Bob to stoke the coal range, make another batch of scones. Whip the cream.

  While the moon crept silently across the square windowpane, he remained in the darkness, emptying his mind of everything except the night noises. The moreporks hooted mournfully – owls crying too. In the deeper reaches of his mind, in his secret valley, a dense mist had gathered, tender and insidious as the memories of things best forgotten.

  It was safer in the valley, on the inside.

  It was peaceful.

  CHAPTER 7

  Obliterated

  Sister Evans shook him vigorously. The others crowded, necks craning, around the bedroom door.

  “Malcolm! Talk to me!”

  He was passive when Sister Evans returned with an army of male attendants to escort him back to Seacliff Mental Hospital. Parked out front in Maclaggan Street was the hospital van – its open door a dark and hungry mouth waiting to swallow him up.

  Curtains were whisked aside as he walked down the footpath, unresisting, between two uniforms and was settled on the hard leather seat in the back. He heard the van door slam and the click of the lock. He stared blankly through the window, distantly noting the others on the front porch waving as if he were going on an outing. Perhaps to the beach for a picnic.

  He was unable to fully comprehend anything.

  His thinking shut down.

  Through rain and sleet, town and countryside, the van chugged and ground on toward The Building, wheels skidding, shimmying on loose rock and gravel, mud and slush spraying out the back.

  The familiar morgue stood solemnly to one side. The van manoeuvred the main entrance gates of The Building. Double-storey wooden barracks alongside featureless main blocks sculptured from grey stone bricks with neither ornamentation nor personality.

  Yet who told him it used to be a beautiful castle? Who had he listened to? He looked up at the narrow barred windows. He knew those cell doors had slits in them. It was inconceivable The Building had ever been a castle.

  Mrs Green was sweeping the path outside the canteen, and opposite, behind the high wire fence, the big children wandered aimlessly about. The van bypassed the admission block, driving straight to the men’s ward.

  He was walked to an iron-framed bed next to a locker where he would keep his toothbrush and comb. This minor detail of his toothbrush and comb in the locker encroached into his brain – it must be attended to carefully because the major details of his life were now in chaos.

  Voices. “…and in this ward you’ll have no other possessions. They’ll be placed in store for you…”

  For later

  For when

  For if

  A staff nurse, white cap, white uniform, green epaulettes, was talking to the attendant. Something to do with his general size, weight and measure of medication. Passively, he swallowed the pills from the plastic eggcup. And he lay down on the stiff bed and waited for the dark sleep, to die and be with Julie.

  But they hauled him off, sat him upright on a chair, and left him there. He folded his hands and waited. He didn’t want the drowsiness to creep up on him, sneaking him away into a deep silence. He wanted to greet it, note each step it took. He thought about the van, The Building. Now the waiting.

  The Staff Nurse returned. Someone said he would need to evacuate his bowels. Why didn’t they say shit? Someone said he should be ready. Ready for what? Ready for Julie? Yes, he was ready.

  He was escorted to the communal bathroom, and he offered no protest as attendants stripped him naked. Obediently he lay on the concrete floor, closing his eyes, drawing his knees up to his chest, his mind shut to all things unpleasant. He stood as they dressed him in pyjamas, was compliant when they dragged him onto a trolley with a rubber sheet stretched across it.

  Out of the ward and down the endless corridors, the trolley wheels drummed soothingly, rubber against rubber. Through the doors, push and bang, more rubber. Sterile white and green painted walls, the ceiling a swimming whirlpool of electric light bulbs racing above him, all voices merging into one.

  Rubber against rubber, faster now, and thrumming…

  Leather straps were fastened securely around his wrists and an
kles as attendants pressed down on his knees and shoulders.

  Julie smiling down at him. Nearly there.

  A nurse dabbed cold paste on each of his temples before fitting strange things to his head. Efficiency. The white team working in unison. Working fast. The Box; he knew what it was – they’d talked about electroconvulsive therapy in the wards, and at the house. A doctor spoke of voltage as he held two black things like the long earpiece of a telephone.

  Ready now, drifting peacefully closer to Julie.

  When the shock registered, his brain screamed. His body instantly convulsed. Eyes wide open; the agony of it. Eyes clamped shut; the agony of it. His whole body arched with the great force. He fiercely ground something in his mouth, bounced backward onto the trolley, fighting with all his might against the leather straps trapping him there. But still he bounced. His feet strained downwards, ankle tendons stretched to ripping. Hands curled into tight fists, nails drawing blood from his palms.

  More voltage. More high-pitched screaming in his brain, accompanied by lightning flashes, blue and red. Then white. Growling and howling deep inside. Animal noises. Deafening. Competing with the red agony…

  The flashing lights inside his brain subsided, replaced by a haze of senseless pain coursing through his entire being. Around him, the team moved on; he was non-existent. The swish of starched uniforms, hard little caps, navy woollen pants, squelching of rubber soles on painted floors. So vividly clear, yet somehow slowly distorting, dark shadows moving away…

  The silence. Soundless – drifting on and on.

  Constrained by leather straps.

  A voice that soothed and consoled, then other voices of satisfaction and approval over a procedure gone well. And the levels of medication? Who was really sure? He was a big, big man.

  Everything gone…

  Obliterated…

  When Malcolm finally woke to the drug-induced echoes of moans and whimpers, he wondered who could be so desperately miserable they would carry on like that. He was aware he was soaked in cold piss. His jaw ached interminably. His head pounded relentlessly while his entire body throbbed and jangled. A gurgle of sound. Who was that? He wished the whimperer would shut up so he could sleep.