Disharmony

by Leah Giarratano

  He’d seen no more of sleepy Windsor during the day than a quick glimpse through the back of a paddy-wagon. Still, he couldn’t say he was sorry to see the back of it now.

  Goodbye, Holt, he thought. See ya, Toad. Later, Abrafo.

  Well, maybe he could do without seeing Abrafo later.

  He flipped open his Dwight inmate file and leaned back into the seat. Now, let’s see who I am, he thought.

  The first page was brief. Name, photo, date of birth and admission and a big red warning: DO NOT ALLOW ACCESS TO COMPUTERS. He studied his pre-intake, pre-head-shaved photograph. His dark brown hair hung across his eyes. He liked it that way – first thing on the agenda tomorrow would be to find himself a cap. He always felt better when people couldn’t see his eyes.

  The second page of the file was full of his charges. He skimmed through them. Itemised like this, it was quite the laundry list.

  Unauthorised access to data with intent to commit serious offence; unauthorised modification of data with intent to cause impairment; possession of identification information; fraudulent appropriation of data; obtaining financial advantage; making false documents; reckless endangerment, yeah, yeah, yeah.

  He flipped the page and was surprised to see the charges continue. Well, what do they expect, he thought, when they hit you up for every little thing they can think of every time you get pinched?

  He turned another page.

  Aha. This looks promising. A psych report. He wished he had a dollar for every psychologist/social worker/psychiatrist he’d been sent to see. He’d once asked a psychologist what the difference was between her and his psychiatrist.

  ‘Around a hundred thousand dollars a year,’ she’d answered.

  He didn’t understand what she was talking about, but that was the case most of the time when he had ‘a session’ with these people. How does that make you feel? they wanted to know. What do you feel about that? How do you think it would make your foster mother feel that you ran away/sold her car on eBay/set fire to her kitchen? Blah, blah, blah.

  Feel.

  He hated the word.

  At first he’d told the truth when they asked.

  Um, nothing.

  It’s funny.

  Ah, hungry?

  That just got him week-long assessments in specialised clinics and more therapy sessions. So he’d learned to listen to the other kids speaking about their ‘feelings’ and had tried to copy. At first it didn’t work. He mixed ‘excited’ up with ‘angry’, and ‘sad’ with ‘scared’. And what the hell he was supposed to do with ‘embarrassed’ and ‘ashamed’, he had no idea. As far as he was concerned, emotions were a super-big waste of time. Everybody seemed so miserable carrying those things around.

  But by age twelve, he’d learned enough that he could fake it around adults. He could speak to them for an hour or more without them cocking their head to the side, making that funny screwed-up face, and deciding that he couldn’t play with their little Johnny any more.

  And now, at fifteen? Well, now Luke could take those feelings that others had told him about and tell people things that would just about twist and turn them inside out. He’d found all that ‘empathy training’ he’d had in therapy over the years had come in very handy indeed: now he knew what was supposed to make him feel sad, scared, happy and ashamed, he could use those scenarios to make other people feel those things. In fact, when he wasn’t locked up, where staff had access to this file, he could make most people do just about anything he liked.

  The psychologists, on the other hand, well, they sometimes required a little more care. Not all of them, mind you. Like Mrs Grayson – a shrink he’d been sent to between foster families four and five. Life is a tapestry, she’d told him. We need to unravel some of the intricate stories that make up your life.

  Okey doke.

  She’d set him homework after their first session: Write a story about the most important moment in your life.

  Three hundred words and two re-runs of Touched by an Angel later, he’d had Mrs Grayson sobbing at her desk. He passed her her own box of tissues and that had sent her right over the edge. She’d cancelled her clients for the day and taken him out for pizza and a movie – The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift – so cool. Mrs Grayson had tried to suggest something else, but he’d given her the puppy-dog look that worked with all the Mrs Graysons he’d met, and she’d handed her credit card over to the dude at the box office. After the movie, when it was time to go home, he’d remembered that it was Thursday, and Thursday was tuna pasta bake (yuck) with foster family number five, so he’d told Mrs Grayson that today had been one of the best days of his life, that he felt he’d had a breakthrough, and that he felt safe with her.

  Following a few more tears, and a hug – ick – that night he’d had dinner with the Graysons. Her son and husband hadn’t seemed too impressed, but it was a barbeque, so it was all good in the end.

  He turned his attention back to his file and wondered what the next shrink would have to say.

  Dr Pettinger.

  As soon as he’d taken a seat in her office, he’d known that Dr Pettinger was no Mrs Grayson. She wanted to be. He could tell. She tried hard to like him, tried to trust him, but with every word he spoke she’d reeled herself in a little further. Her smile stayed the same, she remained always pleasant and encouraging, but with each response he gave to her questions she coiled herself a little tighter, retreating.

  He’d tried for sympathy.

  She’d asked another question, and his answer – which would have bought him lunch from Mrs Grayson – had sent her further back into her seat.

  He’d gone for anger; teenage indignation. That always got them going, trying to win him back again.

  But what it got him was a questionnaire. Three hundred items long. He’d done dozens of these things before, and knew they had built-in lie detectors. To be honest, he found them quite entertaining, especially when his responses generated pages of problems with which he was supposedly afflicted: generalised anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic attacks. He liked to vary his responses to generate some of the more exotic disorders. He was still trying for picquerism.

  Panic attacks came up all the time. Ha. He thought that was probably because he’d actually love to have had a panic attack. They sounded fun. Heart racing, adrenalin, dizziness. Kids in his last neighbourhood paid good money for feelings like that.

  He ignored all the psychobabble in Dr Pettinger’s report and skipped straight to the ‘Diagnosis’ section. He was used to seeing a list.

  Dr Pettinger had typed only one line.

  Antisocial Personality Disorder. Probable Type I psychopath.

  Huh. He’d never had that before. He decided to read the rest of her report. He didn’t like it.

  The first section of her report was entitled ‘Psychosocial Background’, and in the first three paragraphs he learned more about himself than he had in his entire life.

  Abandoned at birth.

  Those weren’t the words you wanted to see typed out about yourself in black and white. Abandoned equalled thrown away.

  He’d always known, of course, that he’d been fostered out at birth, but he’d always imagined that his parents had handed him over to the hospital, snug as a bug in a rug, praying for someone else to give him a better life than they could provide.

  Nuh uh.

  Instead, freezing cold on a train, on the run from juvie lockup, Luke Black learned that he’d been found, umbilical cord still attached, in a hard-drive computer box – without a rug – in the housing commission driveway of a Miss Janelle Wilson.

  Janelle had three other children, but as they were all then in the care of the state while she was in a psych unit recovering from her latest overdose, neighbour Jacquie Freeman and her then-significant other had taken him in. That is, they’d spotted the computer box, figured there could be something in it that they could sell, and carried it over to their house.

  Which was w
here, apparently, Luke had spent the first twelve months of his life.

  Jacquie and her boyfriend, wrote Dr Pettinger, had a significant substance abuse problem. When Welfare got around to actually investigating the welfare of their three children, they’d discovered that there were in fact four people not old enough to vote living beneath their roof.

  Jacquie, said Dr Pettinger, had eventually explained how she’d come to be in possession of him, and had apparently wondered whether she might, perhaps, be due any back-payments from the government for her tender loving care for the first year of his life. Not really, Luke gathered she’d been informed. Along with: we will spare you gaol time, though, if you hand over anything else the baby had on him when you found him.

  And that’s where his birth certificate had come in.

  On the next page, actually. It was a photocopy, of course, but still, it was a piece of him, a piece of him declaring who he was before he learned how to make the world believe he was whoever he wanted to be.

  It took a great deal for Luke’s heart to make itself known in his chest. In fact, he’d spent many years wondering whether he actually had one at all. Right now, he finally understood the phrase his heart skipped a beat. Three basic pieces of information were responsible.

  His mother’s name was Morgan Moreau – his father’s name wasn’t listed.

  His mother had christened him Lucifer Black Moreau.

  And he had a twin sister.

  ***

  ‘Luke, you’d better come sit back here.’

  Luke tucked his Dwight file back into his jeans and made his way to Zac’s seat at the back of the carriage.

  ‘What?’ he said, dropping into the seat next to him.

  ‘We’re coming into Blacktown station,’ said Zac.

  ‘And?’ said Luke.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Zac.

  Me neither, thought Luke, but he could sense something wasn’t right. Something bad was waiting. The train crawled into Blacktown station. Eight uniformed officers stood clustered on the platform.

  ‘Cops,’ said Zac.

  ‘Transit cops, actually,’ said Luke. ‘But bad enough.’

  ‘What are the chances they’re not here to find us?’ said Zac.

  ‘Around zero to none,’ said Luke. ‘We need a plan.’

  ‘We’re going to wait right here,’ said Zac.

  ‘You need to brush up on what making a plan means,’ said Luke.

  ‘You’re just gonna have to trust me, Black.’

  ‘How about this, then,’ said Luke. ‘I’ll sit here until I think we’re gonna get busted, and then it’s every man for himself.’

  ‘Deal.’

  Ordinarily, Luke would have taken off already, bolted through the carriages and skipped out a door at the last minute. It would mean another chase when the officers saw him run, but it was better than just sitting here, waiting to get caught. But he’d seen enough in the past few days to know that Zac wasn’t ordinary, and to be honest, he was kinda curious to see what this kid would come up with next.

  The transits spread out. Four boarded the train up front and the rest at the rear. They were going to be sandwiched in by them. The minutes ticked away. The train didn’t move.

  ‘Find anything in your file?’ said Zac.

  ‘You could say that,’ said Luke.

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like I have a twin sister.’

  Zac sat bolt upright. ‘Anything else?’ he said.

  Luke half smiled, bemused by Nguyen’s intensity. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Something good,’ said Zac.

  ‘Well, I learned that I’m not good. You probably shouldn’t play with me any more. Apparently I’m a psychopath.’ He grinned.

  ‘Goddess Gaia!’ said Zac, his pale face now even paler, his dark eyes huge.

  ‘Who?’ said Luke.

  ‘Never mind. They’re coming.’

  Right about now, Luke really wished he had that cap. He felt completely exposed as two transit cops stomped down the stairs into their carriage. He almost closed his eyes, pretending to be asleep, but every muscle screamed at him to spring from the seat and run up the stairs behind him.

  Any moment now, he knew he’d have to do just that. The transits passed the two men at the front of the carriage, giving them cursory glances. The short one swept his eyes over the rest of the seats, passing blankly straight over them, then turned to his mate, a huge Islander.

  ‘Well, they’re not down here,’ said Shorty.

  ‘They’re probably not even on the train, bro,’ said the Islander, walking straight past them.

  Luke could have reached out and taken his radio if he’d liked. Stunned, not daring to even breathe, he listened to the two men meeting their partners at the top of the stairs and watched them step off the train.

  ‘What was that?’ said Luke. ‘What happened?’

  ‘There are still four to go,’ said Zac. He was trembling and sweat was beaded on his upper lip. ‘It’ll be harder this time. Just be quiet.’

  Right then, they heard doors above them whoosh open.

  ‘That’s the other doors,’ whispered Luke. ‘The ones that lead to the tracks. What are they doing?’

  Zac said nothing. His eyes were closed, his skin tinged faintly green.

  Now, from behind him, Luke heard the connecting doors open and the boots of the other transit cops entering the carriage above.

  ‘Are you looking for two boys?’ he heard a girl ask.

  It has to be that punk chick, he thought. She’s gonna give us away!

  ‘Get ready, Zac,’ he said, primed to run.

  He listened to the transit cop’s answer. ‘Yes, we are. Have you seen two males, aged around fifteen?’

  ‘They just pushed the emergency button,’ Luke heard the girl say. ‘And they jumped down onto the tracks. They took off that way.’

  What the hell?

  Luke met Zac’s eyes. He looked just as surprised.

  They heard the transit cops clatter out of the train, yelling into their radios.

  Moments later, the train pulled away from Blacktown station. Luke let his head fall back against the seat.

  What a freakin’ night.

  A carnivale in Pantelimon, Bucharest, Romania

  June 30, 8.00 p.m.

  As usual whenever they went anywhere together, the boys took off as soon as they reached their destination. After paying for them all to get into the Carnivale, Hanzi and Luca began jogging towards the rodeo.

  Samantha and Mirela grinned at one another; the whole Carnivale was open to them. Now, where to go first?

  ‘Rides,’ said Mirela.

  ‘Animal farm,’ said Shofranka.

  ‘I was thinking sideshow alley,’ said Samantha.

  Shofranka and Mirela groaned.

  ‘You want to find Birthday Jones,’ said Shofranka.

  ‘Are you still hanging around with that little thief?’ said Tamas.

  Samantha spun on the spot. ‘What are you still doing here?’

  ‘Nice,’ said Tamas, theatrically raising a fist to his chest and ripping out an imaginary knife.

  Samantha blushed. ‘It’s just that you always go off with the guys to the rodeo,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mirela, smirking.

  Samantha stomped on her friend’s toe.

  ‘Well, that was in the days when kings with guns and mutants with swords weren’t running around after you,’ said Tamas, looking down at her.

  He seems to be growing about a foot a day lately, thought Samantha. And those shoulders! She blinked up at him. To her left, she noticed a group of giggling girls doing everything they could to attract his attention. She moved over a couple of steps to put herself between him and them.

  ‘You think we’re just gonna let you go around this place unchaperoned?’ Tamas continued.

  ‘Well, Luca and Hanzi seem to have done just that,’ said Mirela.

  The two older boys were now lost in
the crowd.

  ‘Yeah, well, they know I’ll look after you,’ said Tamas.

  ‘And exactly how would you handle a ninja with a sword?’ said Mirela.

  Tamas’s dark brows drew together and he opened his mouth to retort.

  ‘Would you two please give it a rest?’ said Samantha. ‘Please. Look where we are. Let’s just have fun.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Shofranka, her eyes serious behind her heavy spectacles.

  ‘I’ll be good if you will,’ said Mirela. She spat on her hand and held it up for Tamas to shake.

  He looked down at her. ‘Oh, I’ll be good,’ he said. ‘But I am not going to touch your spit.’

  ‘Well, just for that,’ said Mirela, ‘we’re going to the rides first.’

  And she took off fast, weaving in and out of the moving crowd as though they stood still. Samantha and the others hurried to keep up.

  One of the best things about this carni, thought Samantha, is that they have so many rides. And one of the worst things is how old and rickety they are. She stood behind Mirela and Shofranka in the queue for the Ghost Train, acutely aware of Tamas standing right behind her, so close she could feel the heat of his body through her clothes. At least it felt that way.

  It was a warm night. The stars were outshone by the gorgeous carnivale lights, but nothing outshone the moon, still fat and full, but not quite perfect, a day’s worth of silver shaved from the sphere.

  To distract herself from Tamas, Sam focused on the crowd. It seemed that half of Pantelimon was here tonight. Children cried and shouted, tired and wired from all the sugar and sights. Girls squealed, trying to out-shriek their friends. Bells rang, hammers clanged and mechanical rides screeched and sang. The night smelled of gunpowder and magic.

  Samantha wrinkled her nose and shuffled another few steps forward as the queue moved up.

  ‘Don’t you think the Ghost Train is just a little bit lame, Mimi?’ she said.

  ‘The Ghost Train is fabulous,’ said Mirela.

  ‘It is kinda lame,’ agreed Shofranka, walking backwards so she could join in the conversation. ‘But I still get scared every time.’