Cracked

by Clare Strahan

  No. I don’t understand anything except that I’m scared. We haven’t done anything. We’re no threat to anyone or anything. If only Keek hadn’t used all that bloody tape. The wires and the mobile phones made the cops crap themselves. It isn’t fair. We haven’t done anything. And even if we had, it would only have been free art. Art can’t hurt anybody. Can it? My eyes and scalp are still burning. It’s horrible. So horrible I can’t help but cry. I hope Keek’s all right.

  ‘I’ll repeat the question: do you understand?’

  Mum puts her hand on my arm. ‘Come on love,’ she says softly.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘We’ll give you a charge sheet with details of the charges against you.’ He turns to my mother. ‘You’ll find pamphlets from Legal Aid near the front desk there,’ he nods out to the police station proper, out into the rest of the world, ‘or the court will appoint a lawyer on the day. They’ll explain and give you advice about what to do next.’

  He ticks something on the papers in his clipboard, then taps his blue pen on the table in front of me. ‘The police prosecutor will describe the events from our point of view, then your lawyer can explain your side of the story. So you better start thinking about that, Clover, what your side of the story is, because nothing you’ve told me today is very convincing.’

  At home in the shower, Mum helps me mash ripe tomatoes into my hair and on my face. ‘This will neutralise the burning,’ she says.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No.’

  But to the relief of us both, especially me, it works.

  The summons arrives in the mail less than two weeks later. Mrs T and I look on while Mum opens the envelope.

  ‘Three weeks,’ she says.

  I ring Keek after school. ‘They’re doing our court thing on the same day,’ I say. ‘We’re the “co-accused”.’

  ‘That’s good, I guess.’

  I want to see him so bad. ‘Yeah, I guess.’ I curl the phone cord around my fingers until they ache.

  ‘I did that English test,’ he says. ‘You can still do it, if you want to. I asked.’ I love Keek when he’s being earnest, but the thought of school is like being filled with sand.

  ‘I don’t think I can go back. Mum’s investigating other schools.’

  ‘Yes, you can go back.’

  ‘I can’t talk long, coz of it being your mobile,’ I say.

  ‘Guess what.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ellen’s pregnant.’

  ‘No way. To who?’ Poor Ellen.

  ‘Well, there’s the drama. Half the footy team are shitting themselves. But it’s weird – it’s like the go is that if you’re not shitting yourself about Ellen, you’re probably a virgin.’

  ‘What does she reckon?’

  ‘She won’t say. But anyway, we’re off the Herb radar – no one cares about us. Cho and that are all good. And Mark and Alison are amusing, now that I’ve totally accepted I’m a nerd.’ He laughs. ‘And they want to see you.’ I hear him breathe into the phone.

  ‘I want to see you.’

  ‘I want to see you too. Is your mum—’ ‘Don’t even ask.’

  I take my questions out to Lucille and the big flat rock near her grave, but she doesn’t think I should go back to Fernwood Secondary either. I feel a wash of pity and embarrassment for Ellen. She has a big mouth about who she’s going to hook up with, but the only person that I know she’s actually slept with is Robbo.

  ‘God,’ I tell the dog. ‘That could have been me.’

  Mum comes to share the rock. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Mr and Mrs McKenzie got married because of Keek’s brother, didn’t they?’ I squint at my mother, willing her to tell me the truth. ‘Because she was pregnant.’

  ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘It’s true, though. Isn’t it.’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means they were young.’

  ‘Would you please tell me?’

  Mum breaks a stick into tiny pieces, drops them and peers at them like a fortune teller. They appear to indicate she should spill the beans. ‘At school everyone thought Maria was away with glandular fever, being looked after by an aunty up north where it’s warmer. Dave went all distant and weird, but I always thought . . . Anyway, then Maria came back and they were joined at the hip, but never seemed very happy together. He was quite an arse, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘What about the baby?’

  ‘I didn’t even know there was a baby, for ages. Later, it came out that her family had pretended that her aunty had adopted him; nothing to do with Maria. As soon as Dave turned eighteen, even though Maria was still only seventeen, they applied to court to be allowed to get married without their parents’ consent. They wanted their son.’ Mum arranges leaves in a pattern around the soothsayer sticks. ‘It was a big thing. Everything coming out. Then they moved away.’

  ‘But they came back.’

  ‘Yes, when Keek was – what was he, in Grade Three? Something like that. Dave told me recently that he made a few dumb investments, after Matthew’s accident. He’d worked hard, you know. Earning money and studying at night. Then he had a breakdown and couldn’t work and they went broke. And then his uncle left them that house.’

  ‘And now Mrs McKenzie’s stuck there.’

  ‘Dave’s never gone to school meetings or anything either. But you’re right, she is stuck. I think she’s ill. And lonely. He told me her family hasn’t spoken to her since, not for all these years. Not even when she lost her son.’ Mum shakes her head as if she can’t believe her own words. ‘Don’t want anything to do with Keek. Nothing.’

  I light the candle in its jar on Lucille’s grave. The flowers have withered and Mum spreads them out like heartbroken mulch. Yiayia has left a beautiful little stone dog. The little dog cool in one palm, I cup a hanging lemon with the other and put it to my cheek.

  That the lemon is alive on the tree strikes me as an amazing thing. I pull back, to stare; the lemon is growing before my very eyes, but I can’t tell. The lemon will keep changing, but even if I sit here for a month, I’ll never see it grow with my naked eye. From where I sat, it would seem as still as a photograph.

  Everything is moving and everything is still, both at once. Being alive is the same as dying. I sit back on the rock and poke with a stick at the few browning lemons, fallen and rotting. Once you’re dead – that’s a whole other thing altogether.

  I think of Lucille, under the ground. It’s impossible to imagine her there. Lucille disappeared with her last breath, Mum said, and I believe her.

  But where?

  Maybe Mrs McKenzie is comforted by the idea that her son is in heaven with Jesus, but it doesn’t seem like it.

  ‘Why is death so horrible, Mum?’

  ‘I think it’s only horrible for the ones left behind.’ Mum taps at a lemon and sends it gently swinging. ‘It’s how we evolve: birth, death, new birth. The spirit can see the big picture, but the soul is attached – so no matter how right it might be for the one who has died, it still hurts.’

  ‘What happens?’ I say. ‘You know, when we die.’

  Mum whistles. ‘You don’t want to know what I think.’

  ‘Yeah, I do.’

  Maybe hearing that I mean it, Mum settles herself. ‘Well, I think when we die, we excarnate – you know, the opposite of incarnate?’

  I nod, shrug and shake my head. ‘I guess.’

  ‘Well, we leave the body behind and excarnate through the moon-sphere, Mercury, Jupiter, right out to the Saturn sphere, letting go or transforming everything connected to our earthly life.’ She maps an arc in the air, like an invisible rainbow. ‘You with me?’

  ‘Yeah, sorta. Is that it?’

  ‘No. When we’ve gone out through the planetary spheres and we’re free,’ she tracks the arc to its highest point, ‘we see a vision of the great spiritual human being we’re meant to become and according to tha
t vision,’ her hand traces the completion of the arc, ‘we design our next life on the way back through the planetary spheres to earth.’

  She folds her hands in her lap. ‘Then, when we’re born, we promptly forget everything that happened to us in our existence between death and a new birth – Dr Steiner calls it drinking “the draft of forgetfulness”. And that’s what I think happens when we die.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Sounds like a lot of work.’

  Mum laughs.

  I sit back and cross my ankles. ‘So you think if people have a bad life, they designed it that way?’

  Mum picks a lemon leaf and rubs it with her thumb. ‘No, I don’t believe that. We’re all here to learn love, Clove. And sadly, people and peoples don’t always act in accordance with their higher selves – and they suffer; and cause suffering for others, preventing them also from acting in accordance with their higher selves.’

  ‘But why are people allowed not to act however you said – to wreck everything and make others suffer? I mean, there’s something seriously wrong with the world.’

  ‘Yes.’ She drops the leaf. ‘I wish I could reassure you, but I don’t know.’ She frowns at the flame in the jar, as if it has hidden her thoughts, or is revealing them. ‘I’d like to believe it’s because we’re developing a new substance for the world. A spiritual substance. Love. Truly human love . . . that embraces but is greater than romance, and family, and identity.’ She brushes a yellow daisy with a fingertip. ‘Love that’s as real and miraculous as the wisdom in nature.’ Mum straightens up and the daisy nods, a tiny sun against the dark turned earth of Lucille’s grave. ‘But it has to be made in freedom – a free deed of the heart – and if we don’t have the choice not to follow our higher selves, then there’s no possibility of developing that freedom.’ She glances at me with a vague shrug. ‘I don’t know. We’re not free yet, that’s for sure. “No woman’s free while her sister’s in chains” as the old saying goes. More-or-less. Give or take a gender.’

  ‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about,’ I say, feeling irritated. ‘How are we supposed to know what to do, then, if nobody’s ever free anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think it’s got to do with the transformation of fear into love.’ She sighs. ‘If I’d known you were going to give me brain-strain, I’d’ve prepared a few notes.’

  Fear. That’s what is wrong with me. ‘I’m cracked with fear,’ I say.

  Mum puts her arms around me and I slide down her body to rest on her lap.

  ‘Remember grandma’s Leonard Cohen record you used to love so much?’ she says, stroking my hair. ‘Everything that’s not invisible is cracked, my love. How else will the light shine in . . . and out?’

  I cry, with the safety of Mum’s hands on my head.

  Eventually, I sit up. ‘Will Mrs McKenzie come to court, do you think?’

  ‘I hope so, for Keek’s sake.’

  ‘Me, too.’ I pick up my own twig to crumple. ‘So are you—?’

  Mum takes a big breath. ‘Dave and I are . . . I mean, I think it’s more than unfinished business from high school, but . . .’ She brushes her hair back with her fingers and twirls it into a knot at the base of her neck. ‘We made a mistake.’

  There’s a softness to her, as her hair unfurls and falls around her face. She’s . . . beautiful. Her eyes seem so sad.

  ‘He’s married.’ She sits up and tucks her hair behind her ears, my mother once again. ‘He’s married. And Maria would be utterly devastated by a divorce. And neither of us wants to drag us all into some horrible affair.’ She flicks away tears with her fingertips. ‘So that’s that, then.’

  ‘So—’

  She cuts me off, standing to kiss me on the top of my head. ‘Mrs T is coming over tonight. She told me to tell you she’s coming for a sitting.’

  ‘A sitting?’

  ‘Yes. She says you promised to paint her hands.’

  The next day, over baked mushrooms and salad, Mum says, ‘Dave and I have been conspiring and we think we might have come up with something.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, conspiring?’

  ‘By email and over the phone.’ She tuts at me. ‘But don’t think I’m going to start justifying myself every minute.’ She moves the salt and pepper to lay out a school information pack unlike any of the others; it’s like entering another world, other colours, the gentle, vibrant rainbow colours of Mum’s watercolour paintings and the Steiner-school fair. ‘Dave’s been looking at the mortgage for me – or as he says, “bringing my finances into the twenty-first century” – and, well,’ her face flushes red, ‘because houses in this area are now worth a ridiculous amount of money, even old-fashioned ones like Mum and Dad’s, and we have plenty of equity . . . how would you feel about doing your VCE at a Steiner school? The one in the country – where we go for the fair. What do you think?’

  My memories of Steiner-kinder are vague, warm and full of the smell of freshly baked bread; sitting with lots of children at a long wooden table and Mum bringing carrot cake for my birthday. I don’t remember any adults talking. Just singing. Like a bunch of real-life Julie Andrewses. There was always a candle burning. The annual fair is also their Open Day, so I’ve seen samples of the stuff the kids produce in the high school – it’s pretty impressive. And surely they wouldn’t still be singing all the time . . .?

  ‘We’d have to move.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about Yiayia?’

  ‘She’ll cope.’

  ‘But you—’

  ‘I’m ready for this, Clover.’

  ‘But, Lucille is here.’

  ‘No.’ Mum puts one hand to her heart and the other over my heart. ‘She’s here.’

  My lawyer, Janet, says in her clever, tired voice, ‘A show of family and community support is important. It will make an enormous difference to the judge.’

  She’s older than Mum and doesn’t dye her short peppery hair. She’s kind, but I can’t help feeling she thinks I’m a spoilt brat and there are more important things she could be doing with her time.

  ‘The worst-case scenario is that they treat it as preparation for an actual act of terrorism,’ she tells us. ‘Then they might consider detention.’

  My mother squawks and goes pale.

  Janet says, ‘But don’t worry, please. There was information on your computer they might consider radical, but nothing connected with any particular organisations, so I can’t imagine it coming to that. The main thing in our favour is that the kids were born here and are white.’

  My mother looks like she’s been stung by a bee. ‘That shouldn’t have anything to do with it, surely?’

  Janet’s voice is sad, and withering. ‘In this scenario, it has everything to do with it. But no priors counts for a lot. Like I say, don’t worry too much.’

  But we are worrying, all of us, when we arrive at the Children’s Court and Janet is nowhere to be seen. I feel sticky with guilt as my mother, Aunty Jean, Mrs T and Theo offer up their belongings for the scanner and walk through the metal detector like people associated with a criminal.

  To the right is the Family Court. We have to go to the left, for criminals. At a desk upstairs we’re told my case will be heard in Courtroom Eight and we are instructed to wait.

  There’s a scattering of people already sitting in the waiting area. A guy with tattoos on his neck and broad shoulders fills out his suit. He smiles at Aunty Jean and winks. She smiles back, but nobody’s smiles last long. Even Theo and his mother are subdued. A thin woman in a pink dress meant for someone younger hovers over two teenage boys, as mean as cat’s piss. One of them has ‘no remorse’ tattooed over his eyebrow. When he catches me reading it, I look away.

  Ten minutes later, Keek arrives dressed in a suit, curls gone, short back and sides. The boys shift in their seats and one whispers something to the other.

  Mr McKenzie bodily hands his son to Mum, says, ‘Can you keep an eye on him?’ and rushes off, back down the wide stairs.
/>
  Keek pulls at his collar. The top button is already undone. ‘Mum’s in the car,’ he says. It’s almost an apology.

  ‘You look nice, Keek,’ says Mrs T, giving him a hug. ‘So handsome!’ Theo shakes his hand. Aunty Jean rubs the back of his head as if he’s a dog. ‘About time,’ she says.

  Keek without hair is surreal. I want to kiss his ear, his neck, but feel shy. It’s like meeting him for the first time. Do I even know him? Maybe I don’t, but I want to. I haven’t seen him for weeks. But he doesn’t hesitate. He hugs me, right there, in front of everyone. With one arm still around me, he turns to my mother. ‘I never meant to hurt Clover.’

  ‘I know,’ she says, and I worry she’s going to cry. ‘Sometimes we accidentally hurt the people we care about the most. But we’re on the same side now. Aren’t we?’

  Keek nods, but I wonder if he’s convinced.

  Two men in brown suits appear at the top of the stairs. One greets Keek with a handshake and introduces himself to the rest of us as Dan. He pulls Keek aside and sits down with him to talk. I want to listen in on what they’re saying, but the other man approaches me.

  ‘Clover?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Ray Fahid.’ He shakes my hand, then Mum’s. ‘I’m here to represent you today.’

  Mum says, ‘Where’s Janet?’

  ‘Janet can’t make it, I’m sorry. Unavoidable. But she’s briefed me on your case and I’ve had a good chat with Dan on the way in. Without the complication of the hoax and affray, I would be confident of a Good Behaviour Bond without conviction.’

  ‘And with the complications?’ Mum asks.

  Ray gives a quick headshake. ‘It depends on the position of the police prosecutor. But I will do the best I can.’ He takes me to another row of seats in the waiting area, nearer to the tattooed man. ‘Now, Clover, can you tell me again – why did you leave the party?’

  I tell him everything I can remember, staring at his bony knees pressed up against his suit pants while he scribbles furiously in his notebook.