Cracked

by Clare Strahan

  He holds up one packet. ‘For sleeping.’ He holds up the other box. ‘For waking up.’

  Keek’s phone rings, making me shiver with nerves. He says, ‘Dad,’ and turns it off. He punches out two ‘sleepers’ and six ‘wakers’ and hands me half. ‘Happy mothers’ day.’

  I stare at the pills. ‘I’m scared.’

  He shakes the pills in his palm. ‘Prescribed by a doctor.’ Keek spits out the words. ‘Can’t get safer than that.’

  ‘My mum doesn’t think so.’

  Keek says, ‘Yeah? Well I don’t give a fuck what your mum thinks,’ and slams them down with a slug of vodka.

  I don’t want Keek to go wherever the pills will take him, without me.

  The train rattles along. It’s nearly an hour’s travel from Fernwood to the city. We suck down the vodka between stations, waiting to see what will happen to us.

  The drunk sits up once and stares, bleary eyed. We stare back. No one speaks. He sinks back down and snores twice, then silence.

  An old lady gets on, dragging a battered shopping trolley, intent on counting and recounting a pack of tiny cards; and a pair of metal-heads in full regalia, drinking beer. We stagger through the connecting doors until we find another empty carriage.

  Keek says, ‘Sometimes I hate him.’

  ‘Your dad?’

  ‘My brother.’

  He crumples. I sit next to him, my arm around his shoulders.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’ He rubs a sleeve across his face, but the tears keep coming. ‘Everything I do, everything I say – it’s all about him. All my life I’ve been compared to him. One day, I’ll be older than him. That’s all my eighteenth is about, to her – I’ll be older than Matt, he’ll never be eighteen, and Dad—’ He slaps his palm against a pole and it rings faintly, a lost chime of childhood. ‘He’s never fucken there. And when he is there he gets angry and then they fight and it’s still about Matt. I hate them.’ He puts his head in his hands. ‘Hate them.’

  I hold him as the sobs come harder. A group of party-people get in, see us and change carriages.

  Keek’s breathing slows. He sighs and rubs his face. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Don’t be sorry.’ I take the bottle and drink. It’s still foul, but comforting; a cleansing burn. I pass it back and watch Keek finish it off; then kiss him. I can’t get my body close enough to his; the only safe place in the world. I want him to touch me and when he does, something in me explodes. This is what it means, I think, to want someone inside you. We hold each other and the train chugs on, clanking through the night.

  It’s energising to cross between carriages while the train is moving, and a relief to get away from the sound of the empty vodka bottle rolling around on the floor, but this is the last one. I tag it gently, lovingly. A great wave of calm and wellbeing washes over me.

  ‘You know what I want to do?’

  ‘What’s that, CB?’ Keek hooks my legs over his, leaning back; his tears, everything bad, seems far away.

  ‘I want to paint Lucille and Retrieve the Planet somewhere it’ll be seen. Where it’ll matter.’

  ‘Like, where?’

  ‘Dunno. Somewhere big.’

  Keek kisses me. ‘Sounds like a plan,’ he says.

  The train pulls into Flinders Street station. Blood pounding, I have the jitters. I’m thirsty, thirsty. I need space, air, a drink of water. We lurch off the train. Lurch, stagger, crash into each other and laugh.

  ‘Settle, settle,’ I say.

  The platform is quiet, but we stop to collect ourselves in the hopes of making an inconspicuous exit. I manage to buy some water from a vending machine, but have a hard time swiping my Myki. Keek dashes through with me.

  A man’s voice calls, ‘Oy!’ but we are gone, running up Flinders Street.

  We stop to catch our breath, then weave through the thin crowd, past St Paul’s Cathedral, through the deserted square, up past the theatres and over to Bourke Street. At Spring Street, we stand across from the billion steps of Parliament House with its three flags flying.

  A busker plays Stairway to Heaven on an acoustic guitar and it all comes flooding in: Mum and Mr McKenzie, Lucille, school, Robbo and the Herbs, Keek’s brother, the sound of old trees falling.

  ‘Like there,’ I say, pointing at Parliament House.

  ‘Like there, what?’

  The fracture rumbles. Power. That’s what its imposing size, those many grey stairs are about; the flags flying over cold stone. I gaze around. Further down the street, a guy hunched over in a blue duffel coat spews as he walks; not even into the gutter, but along the footpath at the edge of the buildings. My stomach lurches. He wipes his mouth and keeps walking.

  Keek shudders and says, ‘Jesus.’

  It’s crazy; acres of concrete and asphalt and misery. In a swoop of pictures, I imagine how the space, the land, might once have been. Like it used to be down at the creek, maybe, but bigger, older, deeper, alive with night noises. We aren’t far from the river, people would’ve lived here. Just lived. But now the whole place is polluted: tar and concrete, endless offices, trees like prisoners, and no one minds – but if Keek and I lit a campfire, the cops’d be all over us like a plague. I can’t see one star. When did people get so afraid of outside; need to flatten everything into smooth hard lines, block out starlight, sunlight, the moon? My heart collapses in on itself with sadness.

  Keek says, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack.’

  ‘Me too.’

  We sit and smoke, clutching our chests.

  A gust of wind blows takeaway food rubbish across the street to the lowest step of Parliament House. It was the Victorian government that wrecked my creek. They could’ve saved it, could’ve figured out another way, but they care about all the wrong things: not the environment, not art, not kids. They say they care about stuff, but then they take away money from everything good and give it to . . . I don’t even know who they give it to. Not schools. Not hospitals. What do they do in there? I’ve seen Federal Parliament in action on television at school – if we kids carried on like that, we’d be expelled.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’ I say. ‘They’re meant to be like – like parents, looking after things, but they just fuck about, obstructing, confusing, lying, cheating.’ I nod, my head heavy with importance. ‘The piece . . .’ I stop myself from crying. ‘Retrieve the Planet. There.’

  Keek looks over to Parliament House, all oblongs and pillars and square edges. ‘Parents,’ he shouts, his voice slurring, then screams, his body jerking with the effort. ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘Shit. You scared me.’

  The busker packs up his guitar and leaves. I’d give him money, but can’t negotiate my pockets.

  ‘I could be dying.’ Keek’s voice is liquid calm, now, and rolling out of him. We sink together like melted sadness. ‘And it’d still be about stupid dead stupid Matt.’ He yells again, a wordless roar of ragged anger, his body rigid in my arms, and slumps. ‘I wish . . .’ And his longing hugs the air. ‘I don’t hate him, Clove. I don’t hate him.’

  He cries in my lap and I stroke his hair until a big sigh rumbles out of him. He sniffs mightily, rubs his face on his sleeve and rolls on his back with me as a pillow. A delicate wave of tears ripples from his lips to the curve of his chin and back, but then he smiles at me.

  ‘I’ve always thought you were pretty, Clover Jones. Even at primary school.’

  Keek takes my hand and kisses my palm. It’s the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he says. ‘Shit, I gotta sit up.’ He sits up, burps and then laughs. ‘Let’s do your crazy art thing.’

  We stuff around, struggling with the annoying tape on our ridiculous costumes, kissing, taking more pills and arguing over our grand plan. We finally agree that it has to be the huge slate wall left of the foot of the stairs. Keek will handle the stencils, I’ll paint, then we’ll run in opposite directions and meet at St Paul’s. The s
ecurity guy patrolling the steps seems to have disappeared, but we’ll still have to be quick. I pull the gear out of the bag; only a few tins and mostly homemade, but they’ll have to do.

  It seems like such a smooth plan. An antidote.

  Keek pulls out the stencils and drops them.

  I’m annoyed. ‘Don’t unroll them here—’ An amplified voice drowns me out. ‘Victoria police. What’s going on?’

  Keek says, ‘That’s not in the plan.’

  The street is empty. Everything is strange and far away, as if I’m looking through binoculars backwards. ‘Are they talking to us?’

  ‘I fucken hope not,’ says Keek. ‘Let’s go.’

  We go, but the voice says, ‘Stop.’

  We stop. There’s a divvy van on Spring Street.

  People gather behind it like extras in a film.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ instructs the voice. ‘I’m Senior Sergeant John Ellis. How about you tell us what’s going on.’

  ‘As if we know what’s going on,’ Keek laughs. It’s infectious. Keek cups his hands to his mouth and shouts, ‘We’re representatives from the Bad-taste Party and we have a list of demands,’ and semi-collapses next to me.

  ‘What list of demands?’ I want to know.

  ‘Retrieve the planet.’

  ‘That’s not a list.’

  ‘What’s your name, son?’

  Keek shrugs off the voice with an irritated, arm-waving dismissal and insists to me, ‘It is a list.’

  ‘One thing can’t be a list,’ I insist back.

  Keek gets to his knees and shouts, ‘We have one demand.’

  ‘Get on the ground.’ The threat is palpable. It blasts through the fog.

  Keek drops and we grab each other, crunching cardboard. His fake-bomb mobile digs into my collarbone.

  ‘I’m scared,’ I say.

  Keek nods. It’s like finding out your nightmare is real.

  More voices.

  The sky is a smear of grey with a brownish tinge. I see one star.

  People say things, but I can’t understand them. I don’t want to. I say, ‘Keek, please . . .’ But the words bubble out like toasted cheese.

  The star disappears, swallowed by streetlights and pollution along with the rest of the Milky Way. I think of Mum, down the creek on summer nights with Lucille free off the leash, my little-girl hand in her firm mother-hand, pointing up at the stars, telling me stories. Where will it end, the tree-killing, the asphalt: when there’s nothing left but ugliness? I sit up to throw the deodorant-bottle paintbrush, yelling, ‘Retrieve the planet.’ As it leaves my hand, a cop looms over me and sprays me in the face. Paint splatters on concrete. My eyes and face are burning. My hair, my neck, my chest.

  Keek screams, ‘Fuck,’ and flails away from me.

  I scream too. I’m blind. Hands on me, yanking my arms behind my back. I struggle, but the chasm opens and I fall forever.

  Keek and I ride to Canberra on his bike. We climb a tree and Alison Larder says, ‘Philip McKenzie, a goose walked on your grave.’ We break into Parliament House and hide in a potplant with Lucille. At night we sneak into the House of Representatives, but we lose the dog and Keek goes off down the creek, calling and swearing. When I finish writing, right across the box around the Speaker’s chair, instead of Retrieve the Planet, I’ve written How Dare You? Then Alison says, ‘Hey Jones, it’s your dad.’

  But Al has never called me ‘Jones’ and it’s my mum, with a face fairly divided between worry and relief. Oversized shower-curtains. I’m in hospital. I’ve never been in hospital before, but I know this is hospital. My head is filled with dishwashing water, but my eyes are jagged with fire.

  Mum takes my hand. ‘Thank God.’ Her jaw tenses. ‘Don’t ever do this to me again. Running off like that . . .’

  Dread spreads with the ache of my body, my burning scalp. ‘Keek?’ My voice is a croak.

  ‘He’s okay.’

  ‘Mum, my eyes are burning.’

  ‘It’s the capsicum spray. They’re all red and swollen.’

  ‘Capsicum spray? Why did they do that to me, Mum? I didn’t do anything.’ The tears make my eyes sting worse. ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Oh darling.’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘You’re under arrest.’

  ‘But we didn’t do anything.’

  She brushes hair from my face and dabs at my tears with a tissue. ‘You’re in the hospital and there’s a police officer sitting out there. They say you’ll have to go straight from here to a police interview. We might even have to wait for a lawyer and ask for bail.’

  ‘Bail?’

  ‘Bail means I can’t take you home until . . .’ She takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly, but tears still hammer at her voice. ‘Until they sentence you. Otherwise . . .’ She crumples.

  ‘Otherwise what?’

  ‘You’ll be locked up.’

  The nausea I’ve woken with is growing. ‘But we didn’t do anything.’

  Mum blows her nose. She pulls a piece of paper from her bag and reads from it. ‘Public nuisance, affray, bomb hoax. Reckless behaviour. Causing public fear of explosion. Attempted criminal damage and using a drug of dependence. That’s the list of things they told me you might be charged with.’

  ‘But we didn’t do anything.’ Well, we got drunk. Yes, I know we got drunk. A bitter taste at the back of my throat prompts other memories – Keek’s mother, her pills, his tears. I fish around for more, but all I can come up with is residue from the dream I woke up with. ‘We didn’t do anything,’ I say again, as if saying it will make it true.

  She holds me with a penetrating look. ‘Sometimes things look worse than they are.’

  I know she’s talking about Mr McKenzie and that makes me think of Lucille. I dissolve into tears, the uncontrollable kind that come when you’re six and have hurt yourself falling out of your tree. Tears that demand someone – your mother – make everything better. A wave of gratitude embraces me with her arms, accompanied by a wash of sadness because she can’t fix things anymore.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I manage.

  ‘Oh,’ says my mother and I hear a glimpse of how much she loves me in that encircling sound. When she can speak, she says, ‘We’re going to be all right, Clover. We’ll get through this. We’re still uncurled, we’ll get through.’

  ‘Uncurled?’ Even now, my mother is as weird as ever.

  ‘Your grandmother curled up. Before she died. She . . .’ Mum’s eyebrows and shoulders briefly weigh up the alternatives. ‘Curled up. I don’t know how else to describe it. Shrivelled sounds so . . . Anyway, we’re not dead. We’ll get through this.’

  ‘Where’s Lucille?’ Asking is like popping a blister, when the skin is left raw.

  ‘Wrapped up. Waiting for you to get out of here. David’s dug her grave. Under the lemon tree. It’s kind of him.’

  ‘So are you two . . .?’

  She looks away. ‘I don’t . . .’ Her shoulders rise and fall in a rolling stretch. She holds my hands and kisses them. ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re friends.’

  I almost feel sorry for her.

  ‘So, is he mad?’

  ‘Probably.’

  A cheerful nurse shoves the curtain back and proceeds to prod and poke me. But she can’t do anything about the burning except give me a damp face washer. Then a doctor. Then another cheerful nurse. I answer the same questions many times, guessing that somewhere else in the building, in another room of curtains, Keek is doing the same.

  Then come the police.

  It’s humiliating, being arrested. The police are not sympathetic to my feelings.

  ‘You made your bed,’ says the officer who drives us, me hungover and crying, back to the police station. ‘Don’t blame us if it’s uncomfortable.’

  They’ve already been to our house and confiscated stuff – books, the computer, art supplies. Not even Yiayia could stop them. Imagine not believing Mrs T?

  They
think I’m lying about everything and won’t let me see Keek or tell me anything about him. It is already too easy to doubt myself – I can barely remember getting off the train. The dream has faded and when I picture the events, we did paint Lucille fetching the world back from the brink of destruction, painted it big – but I’m not sure where. But we haven’t made any mark at all, apparently. And anyway, our non-graffiti is the least of our problems.

  ‘Bomb hoax is a serious matter,’ says Senior Sergeant Ellis, pushing himself back on the cheap chair, crossing his ankles and folding his arms over his paunch. ‘Affray,’ he adds, as if that were supposed to explain everything.

  I think my mother is going to scream, but she presses her palms into the table. ‘I think it’s clear,’ she says, ‘that the kids did not intend a bomb hoax when they wore the costumes to the party.’

  ‘But they did google homemade bombs and they didn’t stay at the party, did they?’ Ellis taps his forefinger on the neat crease of his shirt sleeve and I feel a horrible urge to rip his tapping finger off his hairy hand. ‘Instead, they took themselves off to threaten the seat of government in this state; shouting abuse, threatening damage. Thousands of dollars have been spent, Mrs Jones, in the interests of security, because of your daughter’s idea of a joke.’

  ‘I prefer Ms Jones, if you don’t mind.’

  Ellis sits up and points his pen at her. ‘It’s time you both faced up to the seriousness of what she’s done.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ says my mother. ‘What happens next?’

  Ellis pulls his clipboard to him. He nods at me, sharply. ‘What did you think you were going to achieve?’

  In an avalanche, I see international headlines: Graffiti Girl sends Message to the World. I see my father’s hands – smooth, not hairy and white like Sergeant Ellis’s – pick up the paper and see my photo and know. I see him rush to the airport ready to find me, and Mum. The neediness of my own delusions creeps redly up my neck.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘Right,’ says Ellis. ‘We’ve decided to give you a summons, so think yourself lucky. That means you will be released on the condition that you appear in court on the date specified in the summons to answer the charges. If you do not appear when required to do so, you will be arrested and brought to the court. Do you understand?’