Creepy and Maud

by Dianne Touchell

  Am I sounding creepy? Love is sort of creepy. When you fall in love, you presuppose all sorts of things about the person. You superimpose all kinds of ideals and fantasies on them. You create all manner of unrealistic, untenable, unsatisfiable criteria for that person, automatically guaranteeing their failure and your heartbreak. And what do we call it? Romance. Now, that’s creepy.

  Of all the things I watch when I’m supposed to be doing my homework (Merrill: ‘You’re not getting any smarter reading that goddamn book! Now get in your room and do your homework!’), it’s Maud’s hair pulling that I love the most. Her fingers are thin and white and her hair quite wiry. I know I’m supposed to say something like: ‘and her hair is like spun gold ablaze in the lamplight with an incendiary burnish.’ But most days it really looks like it could do with a good brush. She winds lengths of her hair around one finger (usually an index or middle finger) and then pulls quite hard, letting the hair slide down and off the finger in a smooth ringlet. I can feel my own scalp tingling, just thinking about it. Sometimes she pulls really hard, and thick strands come away in her fingers and she flaps her hands wildly as if they are covered in cobweb. I find myself breathing through my mouth, watching her.

  It’s called trichotillomania. I didn’t know that at first. It wasn’t until I noticed her pulling all her hair that I did some research. And I do mean all. At first I got really excited when she slipped a hand inside her knickers. I’ve never seen a girl do that before. But it didn’t take me long to realise there wasn’t a lot of pleasure involved, just concentration. And that same hand flapping. Well, I guess she’ll never have to wax. Once I watched her sitting in front of her mirror, tears streaming down her face, as she pulled out her eyelashes.

  I went to the public library to do my trichotillomania research. I had to. You see, we don’t have internet access in our house. Mum still gets her sausage recipes off the backs of tins of condensed soup, and Dad still has porn delivered by the postie. Mum still pays bills with a cheque book and buys dresses at real shops, and Dad still plays golf on a real green with a real club. They’ll never go virtual. Or mobile. (Don’t get them started on the multifarious evils of mobile phones.) I don’t give a shit one way or another. I once considered using the computers at school to google some stuff I was interested in, until I realised we have higher security than the defence forces connected to our school computers. One errant keystroke, one digression from the stated research agenda, and an alarm, a fucking alarm, goes off in the librarian’s office. I’m serious. Then teaching staff appear out of nowhere, as if they’ve commando-rolled from somewhere in the stacks, and some poor bastard trying to find out the symptoms of chlamydia is collared and spirited away. It’s a thing of beauty. Thing is, even at the public library, where access is unmonitored, I head for the books. I like the smell of books. It relaxes me. And you don’t have to sign up for a twenty-minute allotment of time if you’re there to read books.

  So it was there in the stacks of the public library that I found out that trichotillomania is about stress relief. Poor Maud. Funny how anxiety affects different people in different ways. Funny how you can get addicted to your stress relief. Maud has her plucking. Dad has Dobie Squires. Mum has her wee nips. That’s what she calls them. Wee nips. ‘I’ll just have a wee nip,’ she’ll say. ‘Is the sun over the yardarm? Time for a wee nip.’ When the truth is she’s been nipping since the sun was actually up. I mean, no one really believes that plastic bottle she carries around is full of Ribena. When I was little, I used to find glasses sitting on windowsills behind the curtains, half full, with a couple of insects struggling on the grimy surface of cheap red. Mum would get caught when the doorbell rang or one of us came home early, quickly stash the nip and then forget about it. I never said anything. Just washed the glasses and put them away. I don’t think Mum thinks of herself as a drunk, because she’s never descended into casks. Back when Mum and Dad used to have people over (when people would still turn up, if invited), she would look down her nose at people who rocked up with a cask. ‘What a pisshead,’ she’d say. ‘Wine in a fucking cardboard box!’

  Sometimes I see Maud drinking. She has a bottle of Southern Comfort behind a doll’s house in her wardrobe. She pours a bit into a can of Coke. I found out about it when I started using binoculars. (I told you, love is creepy.) I have these huge binoculars that used to belong to my grandmother. When Merrill packed her off to a nursing home, her house was cleaned out and all her stuff divided up. For some reason, I was given this pair of binoculars the size and weight of a small bar fridge. I’m serious. If I use them for too long, I have to rest my elbows on my desk. They came in a black leather case lined with red velvet. Just awful. Anyway, I was trying them out one day and there was Maud kneeling in her wardrobe, adding a nip to her Coke. I’d never noticed that before. Prior to being given the benefit of a close-up (thank you, Nanna), I thought she was in there playing with the doll’s house. I’m sort of relieved about the drinking. Sitting in the dark, playing with a doll’s house, seemed disturbing. I’ve also noticed she plucks at her hair more when she’s out of Comfort.

  Of course, the big question is: what the hell was Nanna doing with binoculars? Especially these ones. She wouldn’t even have been able to lift them out of the case.

  FOUR

  Alice ... explained, as well as she could, that she had lost her way.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by your way,’ said the Queen: ‘all the ways about here belong to me...’

  —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871)

  I am looking through the binoculars the day I first see Limo-Lionel hit Maud. It’s confronting, let me tell you. It feels right in my face, like he has hit me. She knows it’s coming before I do, so it has obviously happened before. I see her shudder before his hand leaves his side. Shudder, not flinch. A little tremor that flies up her body and into her face like a stiff breeze filling a windsock. Then: bam! Makes a cracking sound. Leaves a welt on her cheek. Then Limo-Lionel shouts: ‘You live in my house, you do things my way!’

  I reckon that’s been said to, or yelled at, every kid at some stage. Not always accompanied by a slap. Merrill stopped hitting me the day I overtook him in agility and height. You live in my house, you do things my way. There are a couple of problems with this statement. The first being Maud doesn’t have a choice as to where she lives. She’s stuck there, just like I’m stuck here. She has no money, no friends, no choices. Hang on, I might be projecting a bit there. But it’s a safe assumption. If she had somewhere else to go, she wouldn’t be sticking around to be belted by Lionel. She wouldn’t be spiking her Coke and plucking herself raw. So that whole ‘you live in my house thing’, always hollered as if accommodating one’s own offspring is actually a huge favour to them, is a nonsense.

  The other problem with this time-honoured, browbeating parental mantra is the whole concept of the ‘my way’ thing. For a start, there are bound to be, at the very least, two ways of doing everything in every household. Why else is Mum on the Ribena and Dad turning Dobie Squires into Cujo? Why else does Limo-Li kick his wife’s very expensive hairless cat across the room whenever he sees it? Not just when he sees it, actually. I’ve seen him seek the poor thing out just to put the boot in its bald arse. So every household has a divided government to begin with. It’s the natural law, simply because by the time we kids are of an age to start thinking about our own way, our parents can’t stand the sight of each other.

  So ‘their way’ is hardly a shining beacon of rationality. Even without knowing the details that pre-empted Lionel’s outburst, I’d place a safe bet that the ‘my way’ he was braying about has more to do with trying to control himself rather than Maud. Therefore, whenever I hear ‘You live in my house, you do things my way’ (and I’ve heard it a lot in my own house), my dickhead translator kicks in and I hear: ‘My whole life is miserably out of control, I’m switching to controlling yours.’

  It’s that day, Slap Day, I decide to make contact wit
h Maud. We’ve seen each other at school, of course, but I’m not the sort of guy she’d ever look twice at. Let alone speak to. Other kids think I’m creepy. Especially the girls. I don’t actually mind being thought of as creepy. My Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM) defines ‘creepy’ as: ‘having or causing a sensation of revulsion, horror, or fear, as of creatures crawling on the skin.’ This does not make one a target for bullying. On the contrary. It actually takes the target right off you. The jocks think I’m beneath them, the emos are afraid of me and the girls think I’m asexual. Perfect. I just slip under the radar. Mostly.

  I must take a second here, now that I’ve mentioned it, to talk about my Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM). I got it as a school prize at the end of Year 9. Closest I ever came to getting beaten up. You spend your entire school career building up a reputation as creepy and some idiot teacher gives you a dictionary as an ‘Endeavour Prize’. The only way I escaped with minor taunts and a bit of a shoving was the fact that they didn’t present me with a Bible. Anyway, I installed it straight away. Of course, I don’t benefit from the internet-linked part, but that doesn’t matter. I love it. Sometimes I’ll just sit researching words I haven’t thought that much about before. For example, I know that ‘idiot’ is the correct term for Mr Endeavour Prize, as it is a derivative of the Greek idiotes, meaning one who lacks professional knowledge. Yup. It was sitting in front of Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM) that I first started watching Maud.

  Anyway, back to today, Slap Day. After Limo-Li leaves her room, Maud sits on the end of her bed and starts twisting and pulling her hair. She doesn’t cry at all. I feel like crying for her. I want to make contact, some kind of contact that doesn’t involve her freaking out and Lionel appearing at my front door again. So I write this on a piece of paper in big black letters and stick it in my window so it faces out:

  —Alice explained as well as she could that she had lost her way. ‘I don’t know what you mean by your way,’ said the Queen: ‘All the ways about here belong to me.’

  I didn’t know she wore glasses. She’s never worn them at school. I step right away from the window so she won’t have to look directly at me and watch her inching closer and closer to her own window, scrunching up her eyes and pulling her mouth into a grimace. You know, the long-distance concentration sort of look. That’s when she puts on the glasses. Gosh, they make her look even prettier, if that’s possible. They are old-fashioned cat’s eye frames with shiny stones at the temples. The sort Elton John used to wear in the seventies. She is still tugging on her hair. Then she frowns. Then she smiles.

  Not a big smile. A trembly kind of thing, really. But definitely a smile. I would have preferred a big cheesy followed by a response. But I am willing to take this as a sign of cautious solidarity. She doesn’t tell Limo-Lionel and she doesn’t rush away from the window. They were my biggest worries. She isn’t embarrassed, or angry, that the scene was witnessed. She just looks tired and hollowed out.

  Have you ever noticed how most people don’t ever show what they are really feeling? Like the embarrassed/angry thing. It’s like people come with a switch inside, or the switch is built at some stage. If they are embarrassed, they get angry. If they are hurt, they get angry. If they are confused, they get angry. Hang on. Maybe it’s not a switch. Maybe it’s a short-circuit straight to angry. I have no idea how people get if they are happy. I don’t know enough happy people to know how they act.

  Anyway, there she is. Tired, hollowed-out Maud. With a smile like a shiver on a landscape. Still, it’s a smile. A smile that makes me brave. She backs away from the window then, sits on the end of her unmade bed, and resumes pulling her hair.

  FIVE

  Cree-py-Wat-ches-Me

  He scares me at first. But the scaring feels nice. Like the sting of a pull. Like the shiver of recognition. I have been seen. All-the-ways-a-bout. Here-be-long-to-me. He put that in his window for me, two fives that tumbled across the little space between us and read me and defined me in an instant. All the ways are all about—good is bad, love is disappointment, safety is dread. Here belongs the part of me who cautiously seeks the rest of the girl who caused all the ways to be all about. How does he know this about me? How does he know that those fives will click my hidden parts open? I like fives. I like fives that swell and drop like a cadence. There is a lovely finality to five syllables. It is like a deep breath, a rolling over in bed, a sit-down after a long stand-up. Sometimes I will manipulate what I say, out loud and in my head, to try and make it into five. It comforts me.

  I will not tell my dad this time. My mum and dad do not like Creepy and they do not like his parents. I hear them talking. They do not know I listen, or think that if I do listen, I do not understand. They think I am disabled. Unstable. Incapable. But I hear them. I hear Creepy’s mum and dad, too. I hear them fighting and the fighting is almost like love. At least Creepy’s mum and dad make some noise. My parents do not make noise anymore. It is like everything has gone brittle about them: the corners of their mouths, the little dip in their throats where you can track a swallow, even their fingerprints. Did I make them this way? Did I spread this frailty between them?

  Creepy’s mum and dad must love each other because you only notice love when it is being replaced with loneliness, and there is nothing lonelier than giving all your loudness to one person. Once I heard them fighting with one another in their backyard and I got so excited I started to pull. When I looked out my window, I saw they were sitting opposite each other in plastic chairs, yelling and leaning forward at each other. And then I saw that Creepy’s dad was cutting the toenails on one of his wife’s feet while her other foot soaked in a tub of soapy water. Creepy’s mum was yelling ‘Shut up!’ but kept leaning her head back a bit and closing her eyes to the sun. I wonder what Creepy thinks about this hostile tenderness. Hos-tile-ten-der-ness. That’s a nice five.

  Everyone at school calls him Creepy. I even overheard the registrar, Mrs Jackson, calling him Creepy. There is something creepy about him. People avoid him and he does not seem to mind. He does not have any friends. He is always reading. I had not paid him any attention at all until he started looking at me through my bedroom window. When I did start to pay attention, I mostly noticed that he was unnoticeable. You would not even know he was in the room, or not in the room. Does that make sense? Even ghosts and secrets leave some sort of presence, but not him. He is like dust in the air. You know it is there but it does not affect you until the light hits it in a certain way. Even then, it is just a flimsy pall you can walk straight through. That is him: you could walk straight through him and he would not even leave a cold spot in your heart.

  Sometimes I look at him when he is not looking.

  I have never had a boyfriend. I have done some things with boys, but I have not done everything and have not ever wanted to do everything. I do not think about Creepy in that way, but I think about him differently to other boys. I think Creepy thinks about me in that way. But Mum says I misinterpret things and do not pick up on social cues. I just think I get angry because people never see me. Apparently, there is a medication for that.

  So sometimes I look at him, but only when he is not looking. He has a not-looking face. It is the face of someone who has quickly averted their eyes just before you turn to look at them.

  I have friends. The sort of friends you have for the sake of convenience. The sort of friends who do not know you and know they do not know you and that is okay with them and you. They are the group you hang around with, that give you credibility. My friends ignore that I pull my hair and sometimes eat it because they never see me do it, and if it is unseen it does not exist. They pretend I do not pull and I pretend Saz is not a cutter, Bec is not a klepto, Meg is not a compulsive liar and Alexa is not a slut. Alexa also has chlamydia, but that is common knowledge now and seems to have given her a bit of an edge. I would like a real friend but I do not know how you get them. I
asked Nancy if you could be friends with someone you do not talk to and she said no: communication is the bedrock of any relationship. Nancy is the lady doctor they make me see. They think there is something wrong with me, so they send me to her and then they do not talk about it. Sometimes I ask Nancy real questions, which, by definition, are always off topic. She listens and then gives me an answer that invariably invites more questions. Except I am never invited to ask more questions. Nancy is like the hunt master: she will let the dog sniff off track for pleasure every now and then, but she is always focused on the fox at the end. So I go away from my session, promising to think about things we discussed, and think only about the things we did not. Like: if communication is the bedrock of any relationship, why are all the relationships I have that are based on communication bogus?

  Creepy and I have communicated, in a way. That one little note is like a teaser to me. It is a little grab of something real, not quite there but more there in that moment than anything else. Like that sheen of dust in the air. Nancy would say it is not communication at all. Nancy would say it is the creepy boy next door trying to make a pass. Except she would not say ‘make a pass’. That is something Mum would say. Nancy would probably say ‘trying to manipulate you into becoming involved in inappropriate behaviour.’