‘Yeah, yeah,’ the boyfriend says, annoyed. The girl only stops ragging on him when she hears the two Asian girls talking. She stares at them for a minute.
‘Foreigners,’ she mutters. ‘They come to my country, they can speak my language.’ Then she remembers that she’s mad at her boyfriend and starts in on him again about that thing he didn’t do, and they head off.
That Aboriginal girl was speaking English. Shouldn’t she be mad at the Asians for not speaking Aboriginal? Can she speak Aboriginal?
I’m getting confused about this when a guy who’s been hovering at the other side of the ambulance buzzes past me, circling the crowd. He’s old, maybe fifty, and is wearing an army helmet. He’s not normal. His clothes are dirty and his face, what you can see of it around his sunglasses, has that hard, crazy look. He’s carrying three library books in one hand and a tambourine in the other. He starts skipping, shaking his tambourine, doing some jerky little dance as the ambos load the sick boy into the ambulance. When they slam the door shut, the weird guy gives his tambourine a long shake, then an abrupt smack – rrrrp, BANG! As if to say, ‘That’s all, folks!’
The ambulance drives off and everyone in the crowd stands there a few seconds just blinking and looking stupid, trying to remember what they were doing before the guy OD’d and the ambulance came. The guy in the expensive shirt reaches for his ringing mobile and flips it open. ‘Hello? Yeah, we’re on our way, be there in five.’ His girlfriend squeezes his arm again, and they cross the street. A man outside a strip club says something to them, and the girlfriend squeals and does the arm-grab thing to Expensive Shirt. Does that girl ever talk? Does her arm work if it isn’t hooked to some guy’s arm?
The Asian girls move onto the footpath. The tourists amble off like a couple of confused cows. The flabby guy stuffs the rest of his chicken nuggets into his mouth and looks around for a rubbish container for the paper bag. I remember that I’m hungry.
I don’t really like the look of most places I see. There’s a KFC and a Hungry Jack’s. KFC? No thank you, not after seeing some fat guy eating KFC while he’s looking at some other guy lying in his own vomit. And I’ll probably never go to Hungry Jack’s again, after being embarrassed to death when Lyyssa took us there. There’s a Copenhagen Ice-cream and an Asian place with fish in the windows. I walk as far as Potts Point, where there are nice restaurants with outside tables, but I don’t want to blow all my pocket money on one meal. Anyway, they’d probably think I was weird if I walked in all by myself.
I walk back toward the station, passing a tattoo parlour with bikies hanging around outside. I don’t look at them. They might be harmless, but you never know. I don’t look too closely at the strip clubs, either. Normally, the men standing outside try to invite people inside, but when I walk past, they either pretend not to see me or else look a bit concerned.
‘You all right, there, miss?’ a big Samoan guy asks me quietly. Usually, when someone says that in an area like this, what they really mean is, I’ve got drugs to sell, if you want to buy any. But this guy really does seem to care if I’m all right. He probably thinks I’m a runaway or a street kid.
There are men who would pay to have sex with someone as young as me, or who’d force themselves on someone as young as me, even though I’m nothing special to look at. Half a block back, some skinny moll in a tube top, tight shorts, and thigh-high boots gave me the evil eye like I was a competitor. Yeah, right. I’m wearing no makeup, my hair smells like chlorine, and I’m carrying a backpack. Who’d think I was on the game?
I ignored the moll, but I smile at the Samoan. ‘I’m just getting some takeaway,’ I tell him. The Samoan guy seems nice; I wouldn’t mind talking to him some more. But I keep walking.
I’m almost back to the station and still haven’t found any place I want to eat. I end up standing in front of a pizza place I passed by earlier. I look at the pizzas in the glass case. They have sausage, peperoni, Hawaiian, and vegetarian. The vegetarian pizza is still round and perfect; nobody has taken a slice yet. Three-fifty a slice, the sign says. I pull a five-dollar note from my back pocket and look for a shop assistant. There are two young Asian girls and one young Asian guy behind the counter, but no one makes a move to ask what I want.
‘Excuse me,’ I say. A girl standing next to the cash register looks at me and blinks. The other girl walks into the back room, then walks back out again. The boy is sitting at the table doing nothing. All of them have a kind of glazed look in their eyes.
‘Ex-cuse me,’ I say a little louder. ‘Could I get a slice of vegetarian, please?’
The girl who came out of the back room says something to the boy in Vietnamese or whatever, and he says something back. She says something to the girl standing next to the cash register, who looks over her shoulder, then slowly turns her head back to me and tries to get her eyes to focus.
I put the five-dollar note on the counter. ‘Veg-e-tar-i-an,’ I say, loudly. ‘One slice.’
The girl has no idea what I want. She makes a squeaking noise that means, ‘What?’
I point at the pizza and make a ‘one’ sign with my index finger.
The girl finally gets it and picks up a pair of tongs. She grabs a piece of pizza, drops it on the floor, and shrieks. The boy at the table gabbles at her in Vietnamese, then gabbles something at the girl who keeps going in and out of the back room. She grabs the tongs and puts another slice of pizza in a paper bag for me. The first girl just stands there looking at the floor where she dropped the first piece. I’m annoyed that the slice I got was the second slice from the pizza, not the first slice. I push the five dollar note to the second girl, who has to think a minute before she can work out how much change to give me. I pull some serviettes from a dispenser and leave in disgust.
Chapter 15
I get back to the Refuge just five minutes before eight. Lyyssa is in the kitchen with Cinnamon, drying the dishes from dinner. ‘Just in time, Len,’ she says to me, looking at the clock.
‘I’m never late, am I?’ I say.
‘No, you’re not,’ Lyyssa says. ‘But we missed you at dinner.’ Cinnamon gives me a nasty look meaning she didn’t miss me, and neither did Bindi. Bindi is up in her room. Lyyssa has learned not to put Cinnamon and Bindi on kitchen duty at the same time.
‘I got some takeaway,’ I say. ‘Here, I’ll help with the rest of the drying. Cinnamon can leave if she wants.’ I put down my backpack and grab a tea towel. Cinnamon throws down her tea towel and practically runs out of the kitchen and up the stairs to where Bindi is. If I didn’t know better, I’d say those two were lezzo lovers.
There are only a few things left to dry, so I got some brownie points with practically no effort. Normally, I would watch some TV, but I feel tired. I try to read the ending of my book before I go to bed, but I can’t concentrate.
It must be about eleven when I wake up. I feel dizzy. I’m going to be sick. I run to the bathroom and vomit into the toilet, but that’s not the end of it. I keep heaving and heaving even though there’s nothing left in my stomach. Then I start to cry. I’ve never felt so bad in my whole life. I want Daddy, but I don’t know where he is. I hear Cinnamon stomp downstairs and pound on Lyyssa’s door. ‘Len’s puking her guts out,’ she yells, sounding annoyed. Then she stomps back to her room and closes the door.
‘Len!’ Lyyssa’s in her bathrobe. She kneels beside me and rubs my back. I’m embarrassed about the vomit smell but Lyyssa doesn’t seem to mind. She helps me rinse my mouth out. ‘Here, let’s get you back into bed.’ I stagger back to my room, hanging onto Lyyssa for support. Lyyssa brings me some cherry-flavoured medicine and two cans of Coke.
‘You poor thing. It must be the flu. I hope the rest of the kids don’t come down with it.’ Lyyssa puts the wastepaper basket next to the bed in case I have to be sick again.
‘It’s not the flu.’ I’ve taken a few sips of Coke and I’m starting to feel a little better. ‘It was the pizza.’ Even though I know I should just keep my mou
th shut, I tell Lyyssa about the pizza place and the Vietnamese kids and the guy lying in his own puke until the ambulance took him away.
‘Well, it wasn’t pizza that made him sick,’ Lyyssa says, with a hardness in her voice I’ve never heard before.
‘I know. It was heroin. I know all about that.’
Lyyssa is quiet for a good few seconds. ‘Len, you’ve gone to a place specifically off limits. If the Foundation or DOCS hears about that, they might say I breached my duty of care. They might want to move you to another home. A place where you’d have less freedom.’
I start to feel sick again. They could send me to Ramsay. Or some foster home. I can imagine what happens to kids in foster homes.
‘I know you didn’t go to Kings Cross to get into any trouble. But in a place like Kings Cross, trouble can find you.’ For once, one of Lyyssa’s bumper-sticker sayings is right on the mark.
‘I won’t go back there,’ I promise, and I mean it.
Lyyssa relaxes a bit. ‘Good. I’ll have to tell Renate Dunn to explain why you won’t be at your lesson tomorrow. But I think our secret is safe with her.’
I don’t know what Lyyssa tells the other kids about me being sick. She insists that I stay in bed on Monday. I read and she brings me my meals on a tray. And for some reason, Bindi and Cinnamon never tease me about the LeeLee Nelson song again.
Chapter 16
No sooner do I get over the food poisoning and convince Lyyssa not to take away my MyMulti pass than I manage to get into trouble over Scott the physio.
Scott clips the ultrasound film onto a light box and points at it with his pen. ‘See that bit there? That’s fluid in the sub deltoid bursa. You also have some inflammation in the tissue around the rotator cuff joint.’ Scott yanks down the ultrasound, puts up another, and points at a fuzzy patch with his pen.
My left shoulder was starting to hurt even when I wasn’t swimming. I couldn’t even pick up a glass of water with my left hand. When I rolled onto my left shoulder at night, the pain would wake me up.
Scott stuffs the ultrasound films back into their envelope and looks at me, his mouth pursed into a line. ‘Your condition is known as Swimmer’s Shoulder. It’s an overuse injury that can be caused by poor technique or overtraining. It appears that you deliberately pushed yourself too hard in the pool, in spite of my instructions to start out slowly.’
Scott’s getting angry with me is starting to make me angry. I’m the one in pain, after all.
‘Why can’t you just tell me what to do about it and skip the lecture?’
Scott looks even more annoyed than he was before. ‘Len, in addition to your physical problems, you have a serious attitude problem. If you’d followed my instructions in the first place, you wouldn’t have a new injury that might well be permanent.’
Scott sighs and starts writing on a notepad. ‘I conferred with Dr Mengers and he agreed that prescription anti-inflammatories are not appropriate. You can take Nurofen for the pain. The medication will be dispensed by Lyyssa or other Resident Counsellors.’
‘I think I’m old enough to take it myself.’
Scott doesn’t look up from his notepad. ‘Serious athletes, especially stubborn ones like you, often exceed the recommended dosage in order to mask the pain and continue training at an inappropriate pace.’
Scott keeps writing. I look around the room. There’s an anatomy chart of the human muscular system on the wall.
‘Can I have a copy of that chart?’
‘No,’ Scott says sourly. He purses his mouth some more and keeps writing on his notepad.
I look at his strawberry blond hair, his pale eyelashes. He’s wearing khaki trousers, a pink polo shirt, and white New Balance cross-trainers without a single scuff mark on them.
‘Are you gay?’
Scott smacks his pen down on the desk and rips the page from the notepad.
Ha. I knew he was gay.
‘I want you to follow this regimen exactly. Swimming three times a week, max, supervised by Kelly or another qualified instructor. She can design a workout to maintain the strength in your legs without aggravating your shoulder. Stuff like aqua jogging and treading water with leg weights. Do not strain yourself. Ice your shoulder for twenty minutes afterwards.’ Scott hands me the page of instructions, his hand shaking just a little. ‘Make an appointment at the desk to come see me in a month. And when you come back, leave the ’tude at home.’
’Tude. That’s American. Scott probably heard it on TV.
Chapter 17
Progress Report
Len Russell (AKA Samantha Patterson)
Len presented a subdued and quiet demeanour in the days following her recovery from a probable case of food poisoning. She seemed to deliberately avoid conflict with her fellow IWYR residents, and this non–confrontational attitude was reciprocated.
Approximately two weeks after Len’s illness, she requested an appointment with physiotherapist Scott Nelson. Scott, in concert with Dr Mengers of St Stephen’s Hospital, has developed a program to help Len recover from her injuries and maintain a healthy level of flexibility and muscle development. Since her first consultation with Scott, Len has shown extraordinary motivation to improve her fitness and achieved excellent results.
Len reported pain in her left shoulder and elbow. It is unusual for Len to admit pain. Len has never faked illness and is loath to admit any weakness. I immediately arranged an appointment with Scott at St Stephen’s physiotherapy unit.
Before Len had returned to the shelter after her scheduled appointment, I received a phone call from Scott, who reported that Len had questioned his professional judgment and taunted him about his sexuality. Scott is married, but currently identifies as bisexual and has recently separated from his wife. Scott reported that as a result of Len’s comments, he is taking two weeks stress leave.
I invited Len to my office for a conference as soon as she returned to IWYR. I explained that Scott had complained of her being rude, and emphasised that such behaviour jeopardises the arrangement in which IWYR residents get priority, high–level medical care from St Stephen’s. Len seemed surprised at Scott’s complaint and became indignant. Len produced the list of instructions that Scott had given her, and showed me that she had copied the instructions into her spiral notebook on the bus. I accepted this as an indicator that Len values Scott’s professional judgment and plans to follow his instructions.
Len was considerably less cooperative in acknowledging that she had made unacceptable comments that caused offence to Scott. Len refused to address the issue of her own behaviour, and repeatedly tried to change the subject to times when she had felt offended by others. Len claimed to have been offended by the conduct of young Lebanese men, and said she had nightmares about them. Len’s explanation was fractured and emotional, but she seemed to be referring to a well–publicised pack rape in which the alleged perpetrators were of Lebanese origin.
Len agreed to write a short note of apology to Scott, but flatly refused to participate in an exercise examining her negative stereotypes about ethnic people.
It is likely that Len is suffering confusion about her own sexual orientation. Len prefers unisex clothing and disdains cosmetics. Perhaps labelling Scott as ‘gay’ and lashing out at ethnic men for alleged sexual misconduct is Len’s way of masking confusion about her own sexuality.
To prevent Len’s prejudices toward people of ethnic background from becoming entrenched, I have arranged for next month’s IWYR outing to be a dinner at a Lebanese restaurant in the suburb where the pack-rape occurred.
Chapter 18
A fortnight after I write an apology to Scott, I get a reply.
Dear Len,
I was very pleased to get your letter. I do accept your apology, and it means a lot to me that you offered it. As a result of personal stress, I was impatient with you during our consultation. I apologise for this.
My new partner and I have decided to relocate to Melbourne, where I have accepted a new
job. I hope you will continue practising your swimming and tennis, but at a reasonable pace, please! Enclosed are some diagrams of exercises to improve the range of movement in your shoulders.
With best wishes,
Scott
After I’ve finished putting the diagrams up on my wall, I get a blue icepack for my shoulder from the freezer, then head into the lounge room. I’m in a good mood tonight. My homework is finished, so I can watch TV. And it’s a Mrs Rowles weekend.
Twice a month, Lyyssa goes away for the weekend and a part-time social worker, Mrs Rowles, looks after us. She’s not like Sky Morningstar or Jo. Mrs Rowles is about fifty-five, short and wiry. Mrs Rowles runs a newsagency with her husband, and just does the two weekends a month with us for the extra income. Mrs Rowles views herself as our custodian, not as our psychologist/parent/saviour. She pretty much leaves us alone, knitting and drinking tea in front of the small television set in the guest room, keeping her door open in case we need anything.
Tonight, the house is quiet, almost peaceful. Karen and Shane are asleep. Cinnamon and Bindi are upstairs trying on clothes and doing stuff with their hair. I’ve got the lounge room to myself.
I switch on the TV. On the 8:30 news bulletin, there’s more about Lucy Grubb. They show a picture of her at a Hollywood party looking sexy and wild, then a snap of her walking down the street in New York City in a black jumper and trousers, her blonde hair blowing in the wind. I’m torn between feeling admiration for her glamorous lifestyle, and hatred that she can squash you like a bug if you piss her off.
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