by Lee Hayton
I expected it so much that I was almost past the turnoff when I registered that his car was in the driveway. He was home.
For a minute, I almost walked past. I could continue on to the park and take the time I’d promised myself. Sort my thoughts into order. Sort my speech out. Sit down and take in the end of the day.
But then I might miss him. If he was home early, I couldn’t trust it would be for the day. He may be paying a flying visit before going back to work. He may be changing to go out for the night. He may be doing a thousand different things with a hundred different time limits, and if I left now to gather my thoughts there may be no one left to distribute them to.
I pulled my hands through my hair to make sure that it was free of any grass. There was little I could do about my frayed and stained jeans, or my tatty sweatshirt, but I pulled them into line so they were at least as neat as they could be.
When I drew back my fist to knock, I hesitated. There was no way he would believe me. This was a useless exercise. There was no point.
But I forced my knuckles to tap on the door. I held my hands to my side and locked my knees so my legs wouldn’t turn and run. I waited while no one answered the door, and then I made myself knock again. Louder.
This time, there was a response. Mr Fa'amoe opened the door and his eyebrows raised when he saw me. Then his smile fell away, and his brow furrowed in anger.
‘Vila’s not here, and, to be honest, I don’t think you should come around here any longer. You’re not welcome.’
He made to close the door, and I forced my foot forward, to jam it open.
‘I’m not here to see Vila. I was here to see you.’
The force against my foot didn’t decrease. ‘To apologise,’ I added. ‘For my behaviour. And for getting your daughter into trouble.’
The pressure on my foot eased, and the door opened wider.
‘Well, I really think that you should apologise to Vila instead. She’s the one that you hurt with your actions.’
‘I will. Tomorrow. I just wanted to apologise to you first and make sure that you were aware it was my fault. Vila didn’t know what was happening.’
Mr Fa'amoe moved his hand further up the doorframe and leant his forehead on it. His body was still using the door as a shield between us. He still didn’t invite me in.
‘That’s very odd. Vila said yesterday that you didn’t know what was going on and none of it was your fault.’
I stared at him, but if he was lying then, he hid it well. Vila was protecting me, even lying to keep me out of trouble. I didn’t understand.
‘But, I…’
‘We didn’t believe her. In case you’re wondering. We’ve worked very hard to make sure that Vila gets a good shot at life. That she gets a fair shot at being anything that she wants to be. We know that she would never get into trouble like that by herself. Stealing. Carol and I raised her better than that.’
I felt the slap. In another situation, I would’ve responded to it. But it paled in comparison. There were bigger stakes at hand.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know that she’d said that…’
‘That’s because you ran away yesterday when I specifically said to stay here because we wanted to talk to you.’
‘I wasn’t feeling well. I needed to get home and lie down.’
‘I could’ve driven you. It would’ve been safer. Instead, you just up and walked out and left Vila on her own telling us a bunch of… a bunch of baloney.’
‘I’m very sorry.’
‘You’ve said that. Was there anything else? I need to get back to work.’
I stared at him. The words that I needed weren’t there. I should’ve gone to the park and practised after all.
‘There was something…’ I started. But then I couldn’t think of where to go with it.
Mr Fa'amoe stood in the doorframe, his eyebrows raised. He was flushed from his outburst. There was a line of sweat clinging to his brow. He didn’t look like someone who wanted to listen.
‘Funny you should mention stealing,’ I said. As soon as the words left my mouth his face pulled into itself and darkened. ‘I think you’ve been stealing something too.’
The words had come out wrong. I’d meant to say I’d stolen something from him. But when I tried to correct them my mouth refused to say it.
And there was something weird going on with Vila’s Dad. I expected he would grow even angrier, but instead he pulled back. His head nodded forward. Not in a determined way as the result of thoughtful action. More like an unconscious response to a truth.
‘I haven’t stolen anything in my life,’ he said quietly. His posture relaxed against the doorframe. He even opened the door wider and gestured me inside. It didn’t make sense. I’d said completely the wrong thing, and instead of slamming the door in my face he was making me welcome.
I walked into the lounge and took a seat on the couch. The pale floral covering was beautiful and unsullied. Too late I thought of the grass stains and dirt that covered my jeans. I tried to sit lighter on my bottom so it wouldn’t press my grubby imprint on the clean fabric.
‘I haven’t stolen anything,’ he repeated as he took a seat next to me.
‘Where’s your file on BRAC1?’
He looked at me and his lower lip was trembling. ‘I really don’t think you’re in a position to ask me about my work, young lady. Not after the trouble you’ve been causing.’
‘Except it’s not your work, is it? That’s why you’ve got it hidden away in your briefcase instead of filed in your drawer.’
He stared at me, his gaze level. ‘I think you should keep out of things that don’t concern you.’
‘I think that you should keep your head down. They’re after you. They’re after both of us.’
Mr Fa'amoe stood and paced the length of the living room. ‘No one knows I’ve taken that file. No one.’
‘Someone not only knows you’ve taken that file, they know that I took it off you, and they know that I hid it. And if they’re onto me, they’re certainly onto you.’
He paced the floor, back and forth, back and forth. And then he stopped right in front of me. ‘I want you to leave. You need to leave right now.’
He grabbed a handful of my sweatshirt and pulled me up off the couch. I pushed back at him, but he didn’t let go. He dragged me over to the door and pulled it open.
‘Stay away from me, and stay away from my daughter.’ He pushed me out of the door and slammed it behind me.
I turned and hammered on the heavy wood. ‘Mr Fa'amoe please listen to me. You’re in danger. Your family is in danger.’
There was no response, and I tried again. My hands flat against the surface, both slapping in time on the wood. ‘Please, you have to watch out for yourself. You’re in danger. They’re coming to get you.’
A window opened off to my left. He was in the kitchen. He had a phone in his hand.‘Get off my property or I’ll call the police. I’m serious.’
I opened my mouth to call out a warning again, but he waggled the phone in his hand and my words stopped short of forming.
‘Get off my property,’ he said again. His voice was a low growl, and he held the phone as a weapon.
I turned and got out of there.
Coroner’s Court 2014
Vila adjusts her shirt. She pulls at the collar and fiddles with the small pearl button that holds it closed.
‘I was quite angry that she had just left like that. Without a word. And then she didn’t turn up at school the next day and I started to get worried. She’d really hit herself hard when she fell down. I wondered if she’d ended up in hospital or something.’
She jerks her hand away from her throat and sits on it. She’s staring at a point on the floor in front of her; it’s where there’s a divet in the floorboards. The hall used to be used for musical recitals. The divot formed in front of the cellist. A tiny chink in the floor and the cellist found that if she rested the point there she didn’t have t
o squeeze her knees as tightly. One year, two. She moved on to other things, marriage, motherhood, but the divot remained.
I wish I could snap my fingers and tell her to get a move on. Listening to this testimony has been alternating between entertaining and frustrating, but the emotive response has now passed through into boredom. Come on, already. I’ve been through this once before, so it doesn’t hold the thrill of the unknown. Get to the good bits.
‘She went to see my father. I didn’t know it until I got home. He was riled up like I’d never seen. He’d been angry because of, you know,’ she waved her right hand in circles, ‘The shoplifting and stuff. I’d never really been in trouble like that before. But he was wild, just wild.
‘He told me that she’d been around there sputtering garbage. Not,’ Vila turns to the coroner, ‘Not like lies or anything. Actual garbage. Like she couldn’t form sentences or anything. He said she was just making sounds, and pointing and gesturing. In the end, he’d had to throw her out. Then she just started banging on the door and yelling that he was trouble, he was trouble, he was gonna get his. Making threats and stuff, I don’t know. She’d torn up some of the flowerbeds where she’d stomped up to the kitchen windows. Mum cried over that; she spent ages getting that looking nice.’ Vila paused and her hand popped out from under her to fiddle with the button again.
‘In the end he’d had to threaten to call the police to get her to leave. He was so angry,’ She shook her head in recollection. ‘So angry. He had a lot of stuff going on with work and everything. We thought at that stage we might have to move to another city. And then I get in trouble, and my friend turns up and starts threatening him and yelling. He was not happy.’
Vila smiles at the memory. I sit there seething with resentment. There I was trying to do him a favour, and instead he made me out to look like a gibbering fool. Some people, eh?
The Grey Man enters the makeshift courtroom. I can feel his presence before I even notice he’s there. He turns in a slow circle, in that way he has, surveying everything. You can see him noting every last detail. Remembering it all for later reference.
And then he comes over and sits on the back bench. He sits on the back bench where I sit too.
‘Hey, Daina. How’s it going?’
I look him over from top to toe. His face is still the youthful mask that the Grey Man sported when he pushed a gun into my five-year-old face. Time won’t ravage him any more than it can now ravage me.
‘Have they started to talk rubbish about you yet?’
‘They started with the rubbish. Now they’re onto the complete make-believe.’
He takes my hand in his. I didn’t even realise I still had appendages until I feel the warmth. He gives a low chuckle.
Watch this. See this now. A dead girl in a courtroom being comforted by her imaginary friend.
At least someone’s still got my back.
#
I follow my mother when she moves into a back room. Her new friend Christine comes with her. There’s a sheaf of papers in her hand. I know what that is. As part of the pathologist’s recommendation, there was a forensic psychiatry assessment done. Trying to piece together my mental state at the end. Trying to pull together half-remembered incidents from half a dozen witnesses all recalling events through a filter of their actions, being seen in their best light.
And if you think that Bones has a hard job, trying to work out what killed someone from the evidence of their physical bodies, you ought to think again. These people, because no one does this job alone, these people had to work things out with no body, no physical evidence, nothing but words from unreliable sources. Conjuring up a mental state that it can take years to diagnose when you have an actual patient in front of you. Pity them.
Still, at least they weren’t under the gun on this one. You should see them try this game when someone’s been in their care. That’s a graceful dance if ever I saw one. Don’t step there, that’s blame. Don’t step here, that’s an oversight.
And now my mother needs some help to understand. Because there she’s been, blaming herself for all of my downfalls, and there I actually was, a victim of her genetics.
Christine pulls her into a side room and they sit down on a bench to look at everything. A break in proceedings after Vila’s testimony. My mother expected to be here the whole day, so she’s using this time. Christine assigned as well. At least this one will come easily to her. She trained in psychiatry. She knows what all these words mean.
There won’t be a witness for this one. The coroner will read the report and enter it into evidence that way. There’ll be people in the courtroom who will never know what’s written down here. They could ask, but they don’t know enough to. There’ll be conclusions made that they’ll be completely in the dark about.
My Grey Man stays close by. He’s my protector and my challenger. My friend and my enemy. The person who is best for me, and my worst influence.
He is the kindest person that I know, modelled on a man who threatened me a little girl. His guise is just that. Not a clue to his internal makeup. Not a pathway to enlightenment. A mask that he wears because he has to wear something, and looking in the mirror is a hard task for a teenage girl to master.
I listen as Christine explains my symptoms. She doesn’t know about the flashes of colour, and how I could taste them and smell them. She doesn’t know that my Grey Man told me my friends were giving me hallucinogens so I could explain them away.
She doesn’t know why I stopped eating. The fear I had of being poisoned. She only knows that I did stop. That I did stop and I lost weight and I started fainting and my body hair grew thick and lush to try to shelter me from the cold.
She knows these things because other people saw. Other people reported these symptoms. And none of them did anything about them. They just stood back and watched me fade away. Watched as my speech turned to gibberish, and my actions turned erratic, and my responses became unhinged.
They watched in so much detail that they managed to fill up twenty pages of a psychiatric report. Twenty pages. And at no time did anyone reach out a hand to me in help.
My Grey Man enfolds me in his arm as my mother listens to a report on my mental state that means absolutely nothing, a decade too late. Its only usefulness in knowing how to treat someone, to bring them back from the brink of insanity.
You can’t bring back a dead girl.
Chapter Twelve
Daina 2004
I spent the next day avoiding my mother. Not as hard as it might seem. She was passed out when I slipped down the stairs in the morning, fully intending on going to school. When I ducked back home a few hours later, she was in her room – with company. When I headed out again, she was asleep on the living room floor. That was the only worrisome one.
Her gear was still by her body, the tourniquet still in place, though loose. I stepped as close as I dared to make sure she was breathing. Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell. It was slow. I had nothing to time it with but my own breath. She was expending only half the effort I was. But there were no hitches, no stop-starts.
She’d collapsed on one side. It was close enough to the recovery position that I felt free to leave her there. As I walked out the front door again I could feel a mean-spirited child in the back of my head shouting – I hope you die. I hope you overdose and die.
But that was foolish and shortsighted. The little child didn’t know half the trouble it’d be in if that truly happened. It was bad enough trying to work the system around a parent who was incapable. Try to do it with a dead body in your lounge, and you’d find out what difficulty really was. And there was no way I was going to some nasty CYPF family or home this late in the game, and no chance that Dad’d suddenly find room in his heart and his home for me.
The day was overcast. As I walked out of the house for the second time that day, it started to drizzle. At least it cleared the footpaths of people though the traffic on the road increased.
I’d f
ully intended to walk into class this morning; I even had the forged note in my hand. But there was a car sitting on Langdon’s Road opposite the entrance. A large black car that raised the hairs on the back of my neck, and dropped my body temperature another five degrees.
I didn’t get close enough to tell if there was really anything odd about the vehicle or its occupants. I wasn’t into taking any more chances. My close encounter the day before was still fresh in my mind, along with the frustration caused by Vila’s dad’s refusal to listen to me.
As the Grey Man had stated, though, he was old enough…
I was still fighting with myself as I walked away from the school gates. Surely someone who was seriously into disguising themselves wouldn’t use a car that stood out so much from the standard school traffic. If they were trying to hide, then wouldn’t they use a silver vehicle, some standard import model that would just get lost in the crowd?
But the thought that they wanted to stand out brought its own horrible conclusions to mind.
I headed over to Vila’s house. There were half-formed thoughts about maybe meeting her on the way and telling her to watch her back. Not a likely scenario considering I could hear the bell go before I’d reached the end of the road, but it gave me some direction.
Maybe she’d taken the day off anyway. Maybe her dad had taken my warning seriously and the whole family was now packing up ready to make a run for it.
There was no one at home. Even Vila’s mother was nowhere in sight. I knew she worked part-time, but I still hadn’t clocked the exact timetable so I couldn’t judge if her absence was standard or not.
I sat in the park for a while and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. My head was stuffed full of thoughts, but none of them connected, and none of them required any input from me apart from anxiety. And that I could give in spades.
Back home. No relief from the panic.
There was pressure building in my stomach. I kept expecting something to happen. Something bad.
