Crooked Words

by K A Cook

twisted, distant voice, that she wanted to kill herself, although she didn’t know until that moment death was what she meant by making the shallow cuts on her wrists and forearms with the largest piece of the broken glass.

  Linda gave her more words, the kinds of words that sound like the shrinks on TV, the ones that convince teenagers to hate their parents: trauma, emotional abuse, self-harm.

  “Yes! Run away!” Linda puts her notebook down on her desk and leans forwards so far Eve can’t help but wonder why she’s not falling. “Why should you go back? You don’t deserve how they treat you. Why should you put up with it?”

  Eve shakes her head, her throat constricting. “It’s my fault. I’m a cry-baby.” Tears well in her eyes, proving her point, so she shakes her head and says the first thing that comes to mind to keep from crying: “I won’t do anything, I promise. I’m better now.”

  Linda lets out a long sigh. “I’d rather you stay here than go back to your family—okay. What’s going to be different now, if you go back? What keeps you from hurting yourself again?”

  No. She can’t keep Eve here, can she? Not when Dr Johannes already agreed that she’s stable enough to return home, as long as she takes her meds and joins the outpatient program? Not when she’s packed her bag and called Jessie to come and pick her up? She can’t stay, she can’t—not in these white walls where nothing smells real, where the living flowers wilt and die and only the plastic flowers endure and thrive. How can she answer the trees if she can’t even feel the touch of the wind? How can she escape when glass and concrete separate her from the sun?

  “I’ll take my meds.” She stares at her lap, tries to command her hands and voice to steadiness. “I won’t … I won’t be what I was.” Dr Johannes seems to think her meds will make a difference, if she tries hard with therapy. Eve doesn’t know how any meds can be so magical, but it doesn’t matter—she doesn’t need meds. She needs the trees.

  Linda stares at her and just lets the silence hang, so Eve rushes to explain, to sound like someone who means to do all the things required to stop being crazy. “I won’t cry, then. I’ll talk to people, and laugh, and things will be better. It’s my fault … because I’m in my room all the time. A freak. But I’ll get better.” She jerks her chin and meets Linda’s eyes. “I’m not crying here.”

  Linda shakes her head. “Do you think that might be because nobody’s abusing you here?”

  No, no, why is she muddling this all up? No. Eve doesn’t need to be here, in this pretend temple honouring lifelessness and sterility: she needs to go home, where she can sleep with her quilt outside on warm summer nights, wriggle her toes in the soft earth of the vegetable garden, laugh at the chattering parrots, press an ear to the trunks of the tall river redgums down by the creek.

  She needs to leave before all she can hear are the noises made by people.

  “Eve?”

  She bites down on her lower lip to try and keep from crying. “I just want to go home!”

  Linda nods, gives her a warm, patient sort of smile. Eve stares at her, digs the toe of her shoe into the carpet. Why isn’t she yelling? Why is she smiling when Eve’s being so stubborn? “I know you don’t want to stay here.” She waves a hand at the wall and the faded print. “It’s a bit grim, I know. But you deserve better than to go back to a place where they’re going to hurt you again—you deserve so much better than those people.” She shrugs, still smiling. “Can you stay with a friend? A relative? Can you live on campus?”

  Friends? Relatives? She wants to laugh. She’s the cry-baby eighteen-year-old who likes gardening and talking to trees and painting pictures with the blood from her arms; friends are a scarce commodity. She doesn’t have enough money to pay anyone board—how do crazy people get and hold jobs when she can’t even manage the first semester of university?—and none of her relatives are going to want to live with a girl that can’t wash a single lot of dishes without breaking something and crying over it. “I don’t…”

  “There are services that can help you. I can put you in touch with a social worker.” Linda leans forward further and then loses balance, snatching at the edges of the desk; it doesn’t slow her strange, passionate words. “You don’t have to go back there, Eve. You don’t. You can get out. You can start a whole new life away from those toxic people.”

  She looks so sincere that Eve opens her mouth, wants to reassure Linda that she has no such intention—that the glass and her arms and telling Linda that she did want to kill herself had shown her that much. If she’s such a fuck-up that she wants to turn her arms into bloody art, if she can’t manage school and work and behaving like a normal person that doesn’t cry over stupid things, what’s the point of pretending otherwise? No, she won’t go back … but she stops, closes her lips, swallows until she’s buried the impulse to speak. If she tells Linda her plan, Linda will tell Dr Johannes, and then no-one will let her leave—she’ll stay here, trapped behind these plain walls, until the trees stop calling.

  “I only mean to go back for a little while,” she says. Looking down at the floor or her hands seems too obvious, but isn’t looking at Linda’s eyes also just as obvious? Eve settles for Linda’s lips, but the words still feel fake—how can Linda not know she’s lying? “Until I’ve saved money. I’m going to get Jessie help me find a place to stay. She knows … about all this. Me. She’ll help.”

  Linda sighs and nods, her shoulders sagging, her lips soft and downcast. “Good. If you need my help, I’m here.”

  Eve stares at her, her heart pounding in sudden hope. “I can leave?”

  Linda pushes a lock of hair away from her face. She looks tired, too tired for such a short conversation. “I’m not a doctor. I can’t keep you here.”

  Relief makes her feel faint, dizzy, but also guilty. Eve looks away, at her hands, her feet, the walls, not sure where to look, what to say. “Thank you for helping me,” she says finally, the words sounding strange and awkward in her dry mouth.

  “You’re welcome, Eve. If you need help, anything at all—please ring. Please.”

  It shouldn’t be that easy, but somehow, it is. Get the last of her paperwork, get her prescriptions, have a final word with Dr Johannes, reassure her and the nurses that Jessie is coming to pick Eve up, head downstairs to the foyer doors. The medicinal reek in the hallway is just an annoyance now: she can almost hear the wind beneath the clatter of wheels and beeping machines and human voices. She can see the sky through windows. Eve turns her head, afraid that Linda has seen through her lie, has followed her, will drag her back to the ward, but no-one stops her as the glass doors slide open and she steps onto the footpath, surrounded by asphalt and car exhaust and the roar of traffic on the road ahead.

  It’s enough, though, that Eve can feel the wind brushing against her cheeks, cool and salty; she twirls around in circles, skips forwards, is giddy with the rush of air. Yes. With the sun warm on her hands and face, the hospital only a shadow at her back, she can imagine the rest. The lavender bushes at the back door release their soft, woody scent into the air. The boughs of the old peach tree drop their autumn leaves, surrounding the trunk with a corona of orange and brown. Rainbow lorikeets squawk and flutter in the tall stringybarks in the bush beyond the back fence, a darting riot of bright colour. Underneath the clamour she can hear the soft whisper of the wind through the leaves: Eve, Eve, Eve.

  She stops to pull off her socks and boots, toss them aside, wriggle her toes through the rough, prickly grass before the fence. There she pauses, her heart pounding in her chest, for she thought she heard someone shout—but this time the trees scream louder, their voices thrumming through her blood. Eve! Eve! Eve!

  She turns and scrambles up the fence, the wooden boards warm and rough under her fingers and toes. She doesn’t look back as she jumps off the top rail and into space.

  In the far-off distance, she hears the screech of tyres on asphalt and the crash of shattering glass.

  Eve lands and stops, shakes, waits … but the parrots ch
atter and the breeze, tangy with eucalyptus instead of car exhaust, teases her hair away from her face. Yes. Yes! She smiles, laughs, screams until the lorikeets take startled flight—and then skips through the underbrush in search of the trees calling her name, singing in time to the wind.

  Misstery Man

  “Misstery Man rescued three kids from a burning car in City North last night.” Hannah breezed into the office in a choking cloud of floral scent, a broad smile plastered across her made-up face. She sat down beside Darcy with a shrug at eir limp-wristed wave and placed the newspaper tucked under her arm on the desk. “The story’s all over the papers again. Yet another heroic triumph by our so-mysterious superhero.”

  Darcy couldn’t help coughing. Someone needed to tell Hannah to lay off the perfume—worse, someone needed to tell her to lay off the conversation. How many times was ey going to have to sit there and listen to eir workmates go over the same tired discussion?

  Ey sighed and looked anyway: ey could just make out the blurred catsuit-clad figure in the photo on the newspaper’s front page. Chances were that this latest story contained the same old spiel cluttering the media these days—maybe two lines, tops, about Misstery Man’s latest deeds, but whole paragraphs containing guesses and debates