Jolt

by Bernard Beckett

  PRAISE FOR BERNARD BECKETT AND Jolt

  ‘Jolt reinforces Bernard Beckett’s distinguished position as

  one of New Zealand’s literary luminaries…Jolt is daring,

  innovative and provocative…A damn fine thriller, and a real

  thrill of a book.’ Viewpoint

  ‘He pushes the boundaries of fiction for teenagers—and we

  need him.’ Magpies

  ‘This is one great teenage thriller and I can’t recommend it

  highly enough.’ Weekend Herald

  ‘A top-notch quality piece of writing. Hooking, unforgettable

  and credible.’ Wanganui Chronicle

  ‘Funny, raw, fantastic…The most exciting young adult author

  writing in this country.’ Kate De Goldi

  ‘Beckett’s superb writing is both raw and immediate.

  Fast-paced and hair-raising, this thriller literally grabs

  the reader from beginning to end and provides one

  mean ride along the way.’

  The Star

  ‘A taut, very compelling thriller with an edge-of-seat

  cinematographic quality which makes it a must for every

  secondary school library. It’s a most accomplished adolescent

  novel—stunning, in fact. Highly recommended.’

  Theschoolquarterly.com

  ‘An exhilarating read.’ The Listener

  ‘Rating: 10 out of 10. Jolt is a fantastic book. It is the best kidult thriller I have ever read—compelling, frightening, numbing, action-filled and taut with suspense. You have to read it.’ The Northern Advocate

  Bernard Beckett is one of New Zealand’s most outstanding writers. He is the author of the prize-winning novel Genesis and works as a high school teacher. Jolt is his third novel. It was a finalist in the 2002 Senior Fiction Category of the New Zealand Post Book Awards, and made the 2002 Children’s Literature Foundation of New Zealand Notable Books List.

  bernard beckett

  JOLT

  Text Publishing Melbourne Australia

  The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishng Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  www.textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright Bernard Beckett 2001

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Longacre Press in 2001

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2009

  Design by Susan Miller

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Beckett, Bernard, 1968-

  Jolt / Bernard Beckett.

  ISBN: 9781921520211 (pbk.)

  For secondary school age.

  NZ823.2

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Doctor Found

  1

  APRIL 15 Once, when I was seven years old, I stole the teacher’s chalk. I needed it, for a game I was playing. A girl in my class, her name was Susanna, told on me, and I was kept in all lunchtime. That afternoon I wagged school for the first time. I looked up Susanna’s address and walked twenty minutes to her house. Having checked there was nobody home, I strangled both her pet rabbits. I can’t tell you how much better that made me feel.

  I was sent to see a child psychologist who, according to my parents, diagnosed an overdeveloped revenge instinct. I remember there was a lot of talking, and I was made to draw pictures. At some stage he pronounced me cured. He was wrong.

  Last night I saw the Doctor and immediately knew what I have to do. I have no choice. I will kill him. I only caught a glimpse of him, across the ward, acting like any doctor acts, as if the cracks the earthquake opened up are deep enough to swallow his past. I wish I could have kept staring, so he might have turned and caught my eye and seen the murder there. Then he might have felt some of the fear that he deserves. But this is his territory and I am not stupid. Surprise is the only weapon I have. I understand this and so I survive.

  Twelve days ago, if you’d asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to say what surviving was, not really. I know it has been twelve days because I heard the newsreader say it, on Lewis’s little plastic radio. He has the bed across from me, although he is almost never in it. He is a wanderer, padding up and down the ward all day, his bare feet quiet on the sticky floor. Cleaning comes last, in times like these. His radio is always with him, pressed close to his ear while his free hand fumbles with the opening of his hospital pyjamas, as if he is showing the world how little he has left. Or perhaps he is just pretending, the same way I am. Perhaps he has his own reasons.

  Twelve days since the earthquake. The looting is finally under control, if the radio is telling the truth. The road north has reopened, but only to official traffic, and they’re saying the airport might never be rebuilt. So people couldn’t visit me, even if anyone knew I was here. The power is still out, apart from emergency generators. The official death toll stands at seven hundred and twenty-three.

  Then Lewis’s instincts took him out into the corridor, beyond hearing range, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

  Twelve days. There were definitely five days in the bush, I remember that much. And this is the second day in here, since I stopped taking the pills they bring around on the silver trolley with its deranged wheel. So five days are missing. Days spent lying out in the paddock, before I was found, or out cold in here, with lines of forgetting feeding my wrist. Plenty of time for the Doctor to make his plans, to invent excuses for the drugs he thinks he is giving me. Well I have plans of my own now, plans I will not let him see. Plans of rabbits, plans of revenge. Plans to turn surviving into living again.

  2

  I wasn’t even going to do Outdoor Education. Mum wasn’t keen. Year 11 is a time for more academic pursuits, she said, although I knew she was more worried about the cost. Not that we had any way back then of knowing what the real cost would be.

  Mr Camden sold me on it, the same way he’s been doing for the last fifteen years. There was an options day at the end of Year 10, when Heads of Departments talked to us about our Year 11 choices. Most of them shuffled out and mumbled apologetically into overheads you could tell they didn’t much believe in: ‘Careers in Mathematics’, that sort of thing. So it was easy for Mr Camden to make an impression.

  He strode out in front of us and smiled, like we were his reason for drawing breath. I saw a couple of the teachers behind him roll their eyes but he didn’t notice, or if he did he didn’t care. Mr Camden is a tall man who wears shorts all year round, as if this is proving some point. Simple, practical shorts; he’s not the sort who looks for complications. I’d say he’d be fifty. It’s the sort of fifty I hope to reach some day, with a face full of interesting lines, and eyes that can still hold an audience. Eyes that shone brighter with each component of the course he introduced. Kayaking, Civil Defence, First Aid, A
quatics. Calculus was never going to stand much of a chance.

  He built his presentation steadily towards a climax, the annual Coast to Coast expedition which all Outdoor Education students would be expected to complete. By that stage his arms were waving about as if he was preparing for take-off and his excited words were wrapped in spit. It was the sort of performance that would either hook you instantly or look ridiculous. He caught me in just the right mood.

  I was sixteen then and I was bored. It felt like the years were just washing over me. I needed something different. I was ready for Mr Camden and his demented enthusiasm. I signed up on the spot.

  3

  APRIL 16 This is my writing place. I stumbled across it yesterday. It was a risk, taking to walking, but I knew I couldn’t stay in that bed any longer, feeling myself wasting away, waiting for him to return. My whole body ached as soon as I moved. I must have been badly hurt, even more than I realised. If I bend too far forward my back is paralysed with pain, my ribs cut at me when I breathe in, and much of my body is yellow with dying bruises.

  From my bed I have a view of the corridor and I have been able to watch the other patients shuffling by. There are many ways of looking crazy and I have developed my own. I walk stooped, as much as my back allows, small steps with my feet barely letting go of the floor, and my mouth hanging open so I can feel the dribble puddling behind my bottom lip. It is the eyes that are most likely to give me away. It’s hard to stop them from focussing, to make them slow to turn, slow to notice. I have found that if I fight the urge to blink, a film of tears forms, keeping the world at a distance.

  Not that anyone seems to watch that carefully. I am sure this place is only a temporary ward, it feels half-finished; the people here are distracted, as if they have something more important they wish to be getting back to. The few people there are. Sometimes it is hard to find a nurse at all and they are always rushing, always looking tired. It must be like this everywhere, because of the earthquake. It makes it easier for me. It is only the Doctor I have to fear, and as far as I can tell the doctors only come in once a day, usually in the evening or at night, to hurry through their rounds.

  So I’ve taken to walking, and it’s such a relief to be out of the room that I have to be careful not to let a smile show. Along the corridors, lapping the ward. Past the nurses’ station, then the toilets, through the day room where visitors sit with patients, trying to pretend they don’t smell the piss in the air, trying not to watch the television. On to the rows of rooms, with our names written on cardboard tags, in case we forget. Mine says Chris, a name someone has made up for me, and I’m not telling them any different. I’m not telling them anything. Walking and watching, because it beats doing nothing.

  Then on my third lap I didn’t turn. It was as if part of me was trying to run away. To leave all of this. To pick up a phone, talk, listen to a voice I know, leave behind my unfinished business. I walked out through the doors as if I wasn’t a patient at all, just some guy called in to check the wiring, wearing hospital pyjamas. Out past the deserted reception, beyond the lifts and the stairwell, understanding the danger but feeling lighter with each forbidden step. I could only go so far though. Fate has bound me here.

  There was a door which looked interesting, with a small glass window I couldn’t see through because the other side was so dimly lit. I was surprised to find it unlocked and walked through to a short dark corridor, ending in an exposed concrete wall. I just stood there and breathed in the musty dampness, pretending I was someplace else, pretending I was nowhere. For a moment I relaxed.

  Two more doors led off from the corridor. One said Cleaning and was locked. The other said Boiler and I opened it—into this room. It’s not a proper boiler room, just a space for the valves and switches regulating the heating in this wing of the hospital. A small space, enough for someone checking the equipment to move around, and not enough air. There is a fold-up chair. Perhaps I am not the only one who escapes here. It reminds me of a cupboard we used to have at home, where I used to go to draw when I was little. That’s what made me think of writing. I had seen an exercise book in the waiting room and went back to get it. I found a pen in the reception area and walked back here with both stuffed down the back of my pyjamas. I am sure no one saw me.

  As soon as I began, the words came on in a rush, a rush of remembering, a rush of relief. Writing it down will keep me sane in this time of waiting and plotting his death. And it will help me to order my memories, which are still liquid when I try to grasp them, turned to slush by the drugs.

  I have another reason for writing this. It is my backup, in case I fail. I am going to post a letter to myself at the school. I am hoping that if I never make it back, if the Doctor wins, someone will think to open it. It will tell them where they can find this book, in the cavity of the wall behind the board I have managed to pull back, where I leave it hidden each day. So if I write it down, all of it, everything that happened, then even if I cannot kill him, there is a chance the world will know what he has done. But that would be a small consolation, a poor second best, and I don’t want to think about it now.

  I should tell what little I know about how I came to be here. I remember the five days up in the bush after the earthquake, but they are part of the Doctor’s story and I will write them separately to keep this in order. What happened later is less clear and mostly I am guessing. I must have been found by somebody and brought here, to Palmerston North, the closest hospital still standing. I was injured, concussed perhaps, exhausted, and badly dehydrated. But this is not a ward for the physically broken, instead I take my sleep each night amongst the mentally disturbed. The Doctor must have seen me come in. He must have felt so lucky, that the only witness fell into his hands this way. Then he found some excuse to have me transferred, it can’t have been too difficult amongst the mayhem. And he prescribed me the cocktail of drugs that I’m sure were meant to take my mind away. That’s the way I figure it anyway. A simple plan, or just the first step, while he decides how to deal with me.

  Only something went wrong, something I don’t understand. Somehow I stopped taking the pills. I don’t know how. I wish I did. All these empty spaces in my head frighten me. It could have been an accident I suppose, the pills knocked to the floor when a nurse’s back was turned. However it happened I have been set free. It was like slowly coming awake after a long sleep, still half-trapped in dreams, all the surroundings both familiar and strange, as if I had slept the whole time with my eyes open. Memories from the bush broke over me, and with them came the waking nightmares, all I have seen, the Doctor’s face at the centre of it always. The nightmare sits here still, just below the surface of my thoughts, revealing itself in part each time they move.

  I remember lying awake all through the night, trying to make some sense of the jumble, trying not to scream. Then the nurse came round that morning, pushing her trolley right through the middle of my panic.

  ‘Morning silent Chris,’ she chirped, not looking me in the eye, as if she knew there was nothing to be seen there. ‘Have a good night did we?’ She continued to chat as she took my pulse and my temperature, and while she did I made my decision. It just seemed easier, safer, to stay quiet, flood my mind with nothingness, stare straight ahead, give nothing away. But not that easy. There was a part of me that wanted to break down sobbing, cling to her, ask her all the questions that float without answers, ask her to tell me impossible things, to tell me everything will be all right. Instinct stopped me.

  That evening, after two more visits from the trolley, two more rounds of pretending to swallow, I saw the Doctor and no sight could have brought more certainty. Instinct had saved my life.

  Now I will keep pretending. I will wait until the time is right and then I will show the world that Marko Turner is not as useless as they all thought. I will make the Doctor pay.

  4

  The challenge of the Coast to Coast was for the whole Outdoor Education class to get itself from one side of the isl
and to the other in under six days. The way Mr Camden introduced it to us the trip was entirely ours. We would plan the route, assess the risks, do the organisation; he was just there to observe. The way it turned out was slightly different. Mr Camden isn’t exactly the observing type and he couldn’t resist dropping hints, guiding discussions, leading or prodding whenever he thought he could get away with it. We let him have his fun and by the end of term we had miraculously settled on the same basic itinerary classes had been using for the last fifteen years. We were to bus out to Riversdale and from there bike to the foothills of the Tararuas. We then gave ourselves three days to tramp across the ranges and planned to finish by rafting down the Otaki River with a full day to spare. Simple.

  We met up early on the Friday morning, to load our bikes onto the support vehicle and distribute the food most groups had bought in a mad rush the night before. By then we were as prepared as we could be, in a last minute slack-arsed sort of way. We’d covered all the theory in class but, looking around the gym steps, it was easy to see our practical skills were still minimal. Packs that wouldn’t quite close, equipment hanging off the sides, tempting the elements. People repacking for the third time, the gear expanding with each attempt. Heavy clothes that would get waterlogged and coats that would never with-stand mountain rain.

  It was the same with the bikes. I helped load up the trailer because I was nervous and it gave me something to do. There were perished tyres and rusting chains, brake cables only a couple of strands short of disaster. Maybe somebody watching would have thought we’d been poorly prepared but that wasn’t true. They might have thought we just didn’t care but that was wrong too: you could tell by listening in to the conversations that were starting, winding our nerves up, stretching them tighter.

  ‘Piss off, you carry it.’

  ‘I’ve already got the tent.’