Catch Me If I Fall

by Barry Jonsberg

  ‘Because he will only sleep in your room,’ I said.

  ‘Because you haven’t put in the training.’

  I sighed. I loved our dog, but maybe I’d just have to live with the fact that he preferred my brother’s company. All the reading I’d done on cats and dogs had told me it was common for pets to prefer one owner over another. And I didn’t want him to become a … a … I smiled. A bone that Aiden and I would fight over. That was the phrase.

  ‘What else can he do?’ I asked.

  Aiden stood and clicked his fingers. Z jumped to his feet and sat at Aiden’s, tail wagging, looking up in adoration. At another hand command he went around Aiden’s legs and sat to his left, facing me.

  ‘Impressive,’ I said.

  Aiden smiled. ‘Oh, there’s more. Ready, sis?’

  ‘Sure.’

  My brother pointed at me. ‘Go,’ he said.

  Zorro didn’t hesitate. He darted at me and sank his teeth into the calf of my right leg. It was so unexpected, I didn’t even feel the pain for a second or two. Then I yelled.

  ‘Leave,’ shouted Aiden and the dog let go, sat down, tail wagging and looking up at me as if expecting praise.

  ‘What the hell, Aiden?’ I shouted. I bent over and examined my leg. A small dribble of blood oozed from a couple of puncture marks.

  ‘God, sorry, Ash,’ said Aiden. He came over and knelt before me. ‘I didn’t mean for him to do that. He’s supposed to grab, but not with enough force to break the skin. I’m so sorry. Here, come on. Let’s get some antiseptic on that.’

  It took me a few minutes to calm down. The wound wasn’t bad at all, little more than a scratch really, but it was the surprise more than anything that got to me. Aiden bathed the punctures and stuck on a band-aid.

  ‘Guess I need to rethink that bit of training,’ he said.

  ‘Guard dog’s good,’ I replied. ‘But not if he’s going to bite all of us. That’s not really the idea.’

  ‘Let’s keep this to ourselves, hey, Ash? I don’t want any more confrontation with Mum.’

  I agreed, but couldn’t help but think confrontation was exactly what my brother seemed to be aiming for.

  ‘Aiden. You’ll be going into the clinic again tomorrow,’ said Dad over our vegetable curry. Mum was right. It was delicious and creamy and tasted of … well, I didn’t know vegetables could taste that good. I hoped she hadn’t used up all those spices in the one dish.

  Aiden sat at the table with us. I felt sorry for him. That green stuff for every meal. Not even a chance of trying a curry. That was bad enough, but watching us eat it must be torture.

  ‘I thought I was done,’ said Aiden.

  ‘We thought so too,’ said Dad. ‘But your doctor rang up before you got back from school. Some blood samples they took were ruined at the lab, so they have to do it all again. Just a day stay, that’s all.’

  Mum was eating her curry very slowly and deliberately. She also was staying out of this conversation, maybe because she knew she and Aiden were likely to get into a fight if she said too much.

  ‘Will this be the last time?’ said Aiden. ‘I can’t tell you how tired I’m getting of being in that place.’

  ‘Hopefully.’ Dad took another forkful of curry. ‘But it’s the doctors who decide, not us.’

  12

  It wasn’t a day stay, at all. Aiden was in for three days. When I asked Mum and Dad why, they said that there had been some complications in his treatment. Nothing to worry about, but the surgeons had gone back into his head to stop a little bit of bleeding that the tests had detected. All very routine, and he’d be coming home tomorrow. I was glad. I missed him. Z missed him as well and, although he slept on my bed for those three nights, I knew he really wanted to be with Aiden.

  I was shocked when he finally got home. The head bandage was back on, though thankfully not the frame, and my brother appeared exhausted and not really interested in anything. Zorro went completely nuts when he came through the door, and jumped up, barking and whimpering. Aiden smiled and put a hand down to be licked, but even the dog couldn’t seem to lift his spirits. He went to bed and didn’t come out until morning. I wanted to go and talk to him, try to cheer him up, but I worried that I’d be stopping him from resting, so I didn’t.

  He was slightly better the next day, but some of that fight seemed to have gone out of him. He answered Mum and Dad politely when they talked to him and he was very concerned about me, asking how school had been and whether I’d been okay without him there looking after me. That was puzzling in itself. This docile brother was much more like the old Aiden, but still …

  ‘Mum?’ I said. She was reading a book in the library, while Dad was tending to the vegetable plot. It was early evening, so the temperature had dropped considerably and it was pretty comfortable being outdoors.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Has Aiden got brain damage?’

  Mum put the book down then.

  ‘What makes you say that, Ashleigh?’

  ‘Because he’s having all these mood swings. Before the accident, he was pretty calm, then after he was … I dunno, a bit crazy there. I was just wondering.’

  Mum patted the chair next to her and I sat down. She chewed on her bottom lip for a few seconds and sighed.

  ‘We’ve been worried about Aiden too, Ash,’ she said. ‘I won’t lie to you. You’re not the only one to have noticed the changes in his temperament. He’s always been such a … predictable child. You could rely on him one hundred per cent. But now … well, he’s rather difficult, to be honest. His behaviour is … unexpected.’

  ‘Charlotte said it was probably puberty. Hormonal changes. That would account for it, wouldn’t it?’

  Mum raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, you’ve talked to Charlotte about this, have you? That tells me a lot about how worried you are. Yes, puberty would explain it, but so would the head trauma he suffered on camp. And his mood switches started immediately after that. So I think you’re right to be concerned, Ash. I really do.’

  ‘But he’s going to be okay, isn’t he?’

  Mum smiled and patted my leg.

  ‘I’m sure he is,’ she said. ‘You know that your father and I will spare no expense – and that clinic is expensive – to get Aiden back to the way he was.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want him the way he was, Mum,’ I said. ‘He’s much more interesting now. Before, he was … well, you said it. Predictable. I’ve always loved Aiden, but now I like him as well. Do you know what I mean? I’m all good with unpredictable, I just don’t want him to be ill.’

  Zorro started being a very bad dog indeed and this helped with Aiden’s recovery.

  A couple of days after he came back from the clinic, we both went for a swim. As always, Z paced along the sides of the pool while we did laps. He’d stopped jumping in and now appeared to be a little scared of the water. According to Mum that’s because he was learning. ‘A baby will have no problems with water’, she said. ‘But later it will learn to associate it with danger. That’s why it’s good to teach a baby to swim before it becomes scared. Leave it too long and then you have to train it to overcome the fears it’s developed in the meantime.’ Z, it seems, was employing something Mum called ‘deep learning’ to have a healthy worry about drowning, even though it was physically impossible for him to drown.

  Anyway, Aiden and I were chatting after a few laps and we noticed that Z had disappeared. Aiden tried whistling, but he didn’t reappear. After a few minutes we forgot about him entirely. I was asking my brother about the clinic. It had never really interested me before, but now I realised that the whole place, and what happened there, was a complete mystery.

  ‘So what are your doctors like?’ I asked. ‘And the nurses?’

  ‘I never see very much when I go to the clinic, Ash,’ he replied. ‘I go in and my doctor, Mr Sinclair, talks to me for a while in his office. Then the nurse – always the same nurse, chatty, friendly Sue who insists I call her Sue – she gives me an injec
tion as I’m lying on a stretcher and then … well, I wake up in a private room. Mr Sinclair does some tests and then I come home. Bit boring, really. I’ve never even seen the operating theatre.’

  ‘That happens every time you go in to have your intestines … scrubbed, or whatever?’

  ‘Every time.’ Aiden kicked off from the side of the pool and floated on his back. ‘With the head injury I got at camp, it’s pretty much the same deal. Except this time, when I wake up Mr Sinclair gives me these … well, I suppose you’d call them intelligence tests. A whole bunch of strange questions. I suppose they’re checking to see if my brain’s still working as it should.’ He swept his arms out, tipped upright and trod water. ‘Everyone’s worried about my brain,’ he said. ‘You, Mum, Dad. I wish you wouldn’t. I reckon it’s working better than ever.’

  Later, he knocked on my bedroom door.

  ‘Come and see this, Ash.’

  I padded along behind him to his room. I was surprised by how he’d made it his own in such a short space of time. He had a projection of the solar system on his ceiling and this amazing miniature railway track. It was only a circle of a metre in diameter and just one train ran around it, but it was cute as anything. He’d been given it by Daniel at school, who’d had it as a kid, but said he didn’t want it anymore. I think I’m developing Mum and Dad’s passion for antiques, Aiden had told me.

  But when I entered his room, it wasn’t any of that that took my breath away.

  ‘Oh, my God, Aiden,’ I said. ‘How did this happen?’

  Almost every bit of material in his room – the bedclothes, a shirt that had been slung over a chair, a small rug next to his bed – had been ripped to pieces. It was a mess. And sitting in the centre of Aiden’s bed, surrounded by chaos, was Zorro, looking very pleased with himself. His tail wagged as he looked to Aiden for approval. I was able to work out the answer to my own question pretty quickly.

  ‘Mum is going to go mental,’ said Aiden.

  Actually, Mum didn’t go mental. Not at first. She found it interesting and quizzed Aiden on the training techniques he’d employed. When he told her about the hand gestures he’d been using to give commands, she nodded.

  ‘Ah, that probably explains it,’ she said. ‘You’ve taught it that a movement of the hand means that something is expected of it. But its problem is that it sees all hand movements as a command. You were both in the pool when it disappeared off to do this, right?’ We nodded. ‘Then I suspect that when you were swimming, the dog watched your hand movements in the water and thought it was supposed to obey whatever that command meant. I just don’t know why it would interpret it as a signal to destroy.’

  A light went on over my head, but apparently it had also gone on over Aiden’s. He explained to Mum how he’d trained Z to grab an object by pointing a finger and the verbal command ‘Go’. He also confessed to the dog biting me at this command.

  ‘You hurt your sister, Aiden?’ Suddenly, judging by her tone of voice, I thought she would go mental after all. ‘I can’t believe you’d be so irresponsible. What on earth were you thinking?’

  ‘It was an accident, Mum,’ I said. ‘Zorro was supposed to grab me, but I guess he didn’t know his own strength. It wasn’t Aiden’s fault.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Mum replied. ‘Not so sure at all. Anyway, I believe that’s the explanation for the ripping up in your bedroom. The dog thought you’d instructed it to do that. It was just being obedient.’

  ‘I didn’t say the “Go”,’ said Aiden. ‘And Zorro is a he, not an it.’

  ‘I’m pleased you find it so convincing,’ said Mum. ‘But the dog is a machine. Never forget that. Anyway, the algorithm responsible for its learning obviously decided that part of the command wasn’t necessary. I told you, it learns for itself and, like any real dog, or person for that matter, sometimes its learning is faulty and mistakes are made. Having said all that …’

  Mum cocked her head and looked at Z. He was still on Aiden’s bed, but now he was lying, head resting on his front paws and looking up at us with those big brown eyes. It was breathtakingly adorable, more so because of the mess around him. I’m sorry, he seemed to be saying. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, but I’m sorry. I was with Aiden on this. Z might be a machine, but he was a real dog as far as we were concerned.

  ‘What?’ asked Aiden.

  ‘I put a limiter in its behaviour algorithm,’ Mum said, though it was more like she was talking to herself. ‘It shouldn’t be able to override that, no matter the training you give it and the learning it does. I must have made a mistake somewhere.’

  She stood for a few more seconds and then clapped her hands together, which made Z blink in surprise. I think Aiden and I did as well.

  ‘Okay. I’ll keep an eye on it. Now. You kids. First of all, clean up this mess. You know where to find fresh bedding. When that’s done, you can make a start on retraining the dog.’ She pointed at Z. ‘It’s meant to be a toy. If it destroys anything else then it will have to go.’

  We must’ve both made groans of horror because Mum held up her hand.

  ‘This is non-negotiable. I will not have a machine that can cause you physical harm in the house.’ She looked at me. ‘Whether it’s by accident or not. So be warned. And if you want to keep your dog then I suggest you make your retraining of it really good.’

  I can’t pretend her words weren’t scary. We loved our dog, even if he had bitten me, even if he had been naughty. But we both knew by the expression on Mum’s face that she wasn’t bluffing. I vowed that we’d work hard on training to make sure Z didn’t destroy anything else in the house. But if he took a playful bite out of either of us … well, we’d put up with that.

  And keep it secret.

  It was the last week of school and I must admit I was glad. We’d only have two weeks off before we were back again, but I was looking forward to the time away. Mum had even said that there was a possibility she’d take us with her on her four-day conference trip to Perth, which was scheduled in that break. That was exciting because Mum had never taken us away with her before. She explained that it was dependent on a number of things, the main one being, of course, the weather in what was left of Western Australia. There had been three cyclones that season that had come perilously close to doing to Perth what one had done to Darwin forty years before – levelling the city to the ground. Nobody there had had the energy, money or labour resources to rebuild it. Mum said she’d flown over the Top End once and the sea and the bush had reclaimed the city completely.

  So, the weather was a key factor. And Mum said that even if we went we’d have to stay in the hotel during the day. In the evening she’d be able to show us some of the sights, her workload permitting.

  We kept our fingers crossed.

  But events made all of that irrelevant.

  It started so innocently. It was Thursday afternoon – one day to go – and Mr Meredith was giving us a quiz about Australian history. Most of the class were feeling dozy; it was very hot outside and the air conditioning was having difficulty coping. Maybe that had something to do with it. But Mr M had made us all stand up while he asked us a series of questions that had true or false answers. Things like, ‘The Great Barrier Reef was officially declared dead in 2030. True or false?’ If we thought it was true, then we linked our fingers together and put our hands on our heads. If we thought false, then we put our hands on our hips. Whoever got the question wrong would sit down and the winners would stay standing. Then we’d be asked another question until there was only one left – the winner, who Mr Meredith said would get a totally underwhelming prize. He said it was based on a very old game called ‘Heads or Tails’, but no one in the class really cared about that, or the quiz. I went out in the second round, which wasn’t a problem. I could sit down and drift off somewhere in my own head.

  It got to where there were only three left – Daniel, Charlotte (of course) and Aiden. I suspect Daniel got there by watching what Charl
otte did – a pretty sound strategy and one that must have occurred to Mr M because with only three left he got them to stand facing away from each other.

  Daniel lost in the next round, which left two. I should’ve told Aiden to sit down as well. Charlotte never makes mistakes.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Mr Meredith. ‘Are you excited at our finalists? Slugging it out for the main prize.’

  No, we all thought. Well, I thought, and I imagine my thoughts weren’t too different from those around the room.

  ‘Here we go. Maybe the final question, we will see. True or false? The highest temperature ever recorded in Australia was 59.8 degrees Celsius in Oodnadatta in South Australia.’

  Charlotte immediately put her hands on her head. Aiden waited a few seconds and then put his hands on his hips. We had a winner. My money was on Charlotte. Obviously.

  ‘The answer is …’ Mr M tried to keep the suspense going, but probably realised there was no suspense to start with, so he gave up. ‘That is true, so Charlotte is the winner. Well done, Charlotte. You have won —’

  ‘That’s wrong,’ said Aiden.

  That stopped everyone. For a moment we were all frozen. Charlotte beaming at her triumph, Aiden still with his hands on his hips and the rest of us just blank.

  ‘I assure you it’s not,’ said Mr Meredith. ‘I looked all this up last night to make sure, Aiden. I’m sorry, but that’s the correct answer.’

  ‘The highest temperature ever recorded was 61.1 degrees in Birdsville, Queensland,’ said Aiden. Our teacher just stared at him. Aiden held his hands up in surrender. ‘Look, I’m not bothered,’ he continued. ‘That’s fine that Charlotte’s won. Seriously.’ He looked in her direction and gave a thumbs up. ‘But I think you’ll find that the temperature you looked up was the last official highest recorded by the Bureau of Meteorology. Birdsville got sixty-one plus about ten years after that but BoM had stopped keeping records by then because it was all meaningless. Point is, Birdsville was unofficially the highest but that record’s probably been broken since. I mean, who knows?’