Checkers (7 page)

Oh, such a long day, such a hard one. Ever since the time I spoke in Group, told Daniel he'd make a good social worker, Marj has been putting pressure on me. Dr Singh, too. I think they're hoping I'll be their star patient, the psych legend, make them famous at conferences from here to the Gold Coast. But I haven't done like they hoped: I haven't said much else in Group.

No, today was hard because of Cindy. She's been in trouble for a long time. She keeps fighting the staff, abusing them, not doing what they want. For instance, we're meant to write heaps of stuff, as part of our programme. Sometimes I think I do more writing in here than I ever did at school. We have to write about our family, like who's the boss and what they do to hold that position (make that who
was
the boss in my family), who's the most submissive (used to be Mark, really, even more than Mum, which did surprise me when I realised that—score one to you, Dr Singh), what things caused the most arguments. Even though my family's changed so much, I still have to do it. But Cindy's either too lazy or too something, I don't know what. She never does any, and no matter how much pressure they put on her, it makes no difference.

Her parents came to visit a few times lately, not just for Family Therapy but for real visits, but it didn't seem to help. They always looked so pale and grim, as though Cindy being in here was the end of the world. Matter of fact, most of the parents who visit look like that. Especially when their kids are being admitted. You see them down in Reception, and it's like ‘Ohmigod, how could this happen to us? Where did we go wrong? What will I tell my friends at tennis on Tuesday?'

Cindy was always hopeless when her parents came, ratty at everyone, foul to them. She reminded me of a feral cat I once saw being pulled out of a trap by Peter the Possum Man. Spitting and kicking and yowling: that was Cindy. Her parents looked all right to me, but I mean, how can you tell? They all know how to look, especially in the kind of suburbs we live in.

One of the complications was that even in here Cindy lived a double life. There was the way she was around the staff and the way she was with us. Most patients give up on that kind of game when they come in here. We don't have the energy for it any more. But Cindy kept it going. For instance, she has this friend who works in the pub around the corner, and a couple of times she's talked the staff into letting her go to the milk bar for an ice-cream or a Mars Bar. That's what she says she's doing. What she really does is go straight to her mate in the pub and pick up a bottle of something toxic. Last week it was a litre of vodka. We mixed it with Fanta. By lunchtime the bottle was empty. We were kind of rowdy all afternoon. I don't know if Marj noticed anything, but I guess we got away with it. Yesterday it was half a dozen cans of UDL, the vodka and orange, I think. I didn't get to see it. I didn't get an invitation. For once I got lucky, because they were busted when Daniel was sick in the corridor, right near the nurses' station. He tried to make it to the bathroom and failed. Big mess on the carpet, and bigger mess for Cindy, when they found out she'd brought it in.

They were really angry. Sometimes, just when you've decided they're all friendly and nice in here, they pull some totally fascist act, like turning off the TV five minutes from the end of a movie and making us go to bed. The way they went after Cindy, it was like we were back at school. They called her parents in and did the whole number. Fair enough, I suppose, but it freaked me out a bit. These days I can't handle conflict at all, any kind of conflict. If I see someone arguing with the kitchen lady about the ice-cream being too soft, I'm like, ‘Beam me out of here'.

So Cindy got it from everyone: Dr Singh, Marj, Sister Allen, even the night staff. No-one could have predicted what she'd do. She came to Group this morning but she wouldn't say anything, even though Marj wanted to talk about it. Daniel, Oliver, Ben and even Emine owned up to drinking, so in the end Marj just concentrated on them and explained how dangerous alcohol was with our treatment and medication and stuff. Then sometime before lunch they found Cindy hacking away at her wrist with a pair of scissors she'd pinched from the nurses' station. Luckily they got her before she'd done much damage. They dressed her wrist, and bandaged it. And then they committed her.

It was horrible. We're all voluntary patients here, so anyone who's committed gets taken off to Janda Park. I've only seen it once before, with an old guy who started attacking the orderlies because he said they were agents of the devil.

An ambulance came at about five o'clock, with two policemen. Apparently you've got to have cops, when someone's committed. It's the law. It was the same when they took the old guy, but I'd thought it'd be different for Cindy, seeing she's young and not dangerous or anything. Cindy looked absolutely terrified. Why wouldn't she? She stood there, so pale-faced and thin, between these two big cops. We all said goodbye. She just smiled at us and said, ‘Don't worry, I'll be fine,' and stuff like that, but you could see how scared she was. It was as though the spirit had gone out of her.

I feel bad now that I was so bitchy to her. I didn't like her before but when I saw her standing there behind the ambulance suddenly I felt I really liked her. Bit late for that. But that's me all over, changing my mind too late.

I feel lonely tonight. I miss my family, even if they are such a mess. I even miss Mark. I can't bring myself to think about what's happened, what I did. I don't know, I suppose all the stuff leading up to the big disaster wasn't my fault. It just took me to finish it off. I can't stop thinking about it. Without me it might still have worked out OK. When Dad punched out the reporter, that was bad. Maybe that was the beginning of the end. It encouraged all the other reporters to start hounding him more and more. They thought it proved that he was a weak link, that they might get more good footage if they pushed him enough. If he'd taken out a gun and shot one of them, the others would have been totally rapt. It would have given them such a great story.

What happened though was that things went quiet again for a while. Mr Watkins sued for assault, and Dad was summonsed for it as well. He settled the civil one out of court, straight away, and the other one got adjourned for four months. He had enough self-control not to hit anyone else. He was very quiet at home, hardly spoke to anyone, and when he did it was only a word or two: ‘No', ‘Yes', ‘Pass the salt, please, Mark', ‘Get that dog away from the table'.

To Dad Checkers was always ‘that dog'.

The only new story that the papers played around with was a rumour that Dad had a secret meeting with the Premier in March. The Premier issued another statement denying he'd ever met Dad. But the big issue was still the contacts between Mr Koneckny and the Deputy Chairman of the Commission. Although they'd both been chucked out of their jobs, the press was screaming for an explanation of what their conversations were about. They both said it was just general chitchat about the inquiry, nothing sinister or illegal. The Premier said he believed them, and wasn't going to waste public money on a Royal Commission. And it seemed to rest there. No-one had anything new and the Premier seemed like he was going to ride out the storm, as he'd done plenty of times before. The opinion polls had him eight points ahead, so I guess he wasn't too worried.

One night Dad announced we were going skiing. He took me by surprise. He hadn't done anything spontaneous for months, apart from punching out the reporter. There was still a week of school to go but that didn't bother him: there'd been a good dump, the best of the year, and he wanted to go tomorrow, tonight, this instant.

We went the next day. The worst thing was putting Checkers into kennels. I felt like I'd abandoned him when I saw his sad face peering through the wire netting of his pen, and heard his yelping begin as I walked away. Poor thing, he'd never been left before. The lady who owned the kennels made it worse by laughing at Checkers when she saw him. ‘Goodness, he's an unusual one,' she said. ‘Where'd you get him?'

I'd never actually asked Dad where he got Checkers. He'd said something about a friend who'd been looking for a home for a dog, that was all. In the car on the way back from the kennels I asked him some more. I was always kind of nervous when I was alone with Dad, so it was good to have a topic to talk about for once; a safe topic.

‘Oh, I got him from a business friend,' he said vaguely, as he tried to sneak through a gap in the traffic at a roundabout. ‘No-one you've met.'

‘How many puppies were in the litter?'

‘Just the two. The mother wasn't meant to breed with the father. She's a pedigree cocker spaniel, he's a crossbreed border collie from down the road. Your dog's lucky he wasn't drowned at birth.'

‘What happened to the other one?'

‘They kept him, I think. His wife, I think she wanted to have him. She was the one who stopped them being drowned in the first place.'

‘Does Checkers look like his brother?'

‘Yes, very, as I recall. I didn't take a lot of notice. It all happened kind of quickly, on the spur of the moment. I was so excited about . . . there was so much happening that day . . . Well, my mind was on other things, put it that way.'

The next morning we left for Mt Whiteman. That's always been my favourite, that and Tremblant, when we've been to Canada a few times. Whiteman's a long drive, and I get carsick going up the last bit, but it's a small price to pay. We stopped at Bronson for lunch and to hire some chains (Dad hadn't got around to buying new ones since we changed cars) and I bought some very cool, very expensive Ray-Bans. Everyone seemed more relaxed, happier; even Mum. She doesn't like skiing, and we'd had to work hard to persuade her to come, but I was glad we had when I saw her going through the clothes racks in the ski shop, just like old times.

The weather was pretty foul but we got to the carpark without using the chains, and caught a Toyota up to the hotel. We were staying in The Max, a new place, very big, a bit over the top with all the white marble and chandeliers, but at least the rooms weren't pokey like they are in a lot of ski lodges. Mark and I had to share a room, because the place was so heavily booked but even though he dropped his stuff all over the floor as per usual, I could still get from the bed to the door and back without breaking a leg.

I saw Susy Thieu the moment I arrived. I assumed she'd given school the flick for a few days, same as me, but it turned out she was with the PLC ski team, training for the inter-schools. Within three minutes she introduced me to six guys, so I was set. I knew I wouldn't be seeing much of Mummy and Daddy, let alone little brother, for the next week.

I've got a theory about skiing, and that is that you improve over summer without having to do anything. In other words, whatever standard you're at when one season ends, you start the next season at a higher standard. It's not very logical, but I honestly believe it works that way. So I felt good the next morning. I'd had the skis tuned and waxed and whatever else they do to them, the snow was good, I'd been on 195s for half of last season and was confident, so I just went for it. The weather was lousy: windy and cold, with bad visibility, little ice particles blowing straight into our faces. Hardly anyone was around. Mark came with me but Mum and Dad were still in bed.

For three hours we skied our asses off. Mark's better than me, technically, but I'm more aggressive, and that morning he really had to struggle to keep up. ‘Suck on it, little brother,' I thought, skiing straight onto yet another lift without him.

‘What's the hurry?' he asked me at one point. ‘It'll still be here tomorrow, you know.'

I didn't know what the hurry was. I still don't. I wasn't thinking about it. I just wanted to go as far and as fast as I could. I flashed past people at Concorde speed, not caring if I ran them off the slopes or into trees. I made my knees work like they were on springs. I skied every slope on the mountain, and invented a few runs of my own. ‘You're crazy,' Mark said as he caught up with me in the lift queue, still huffing and puffing from a great route I'd just found, down the side of McCaskills Shoulder.

He was right, of course, and my being in here proves it. Except I more or less know why I'm in here. I don't know why I was crazy that day. But suddenly it was over. Suddenly I felt the numb coldness of my face, the burning red skin, the sand-blasted cheeks. I felt the ache of my knees. I felt the rumbles of ravenous hunger in my stomach. I turned to Mark.

‘I'm going back,' I said.

‘I thought you'd never ask,' he grumbled.

I wasn't actually asking, just telling, but I think he was too wrecked to know the difference.

The rest of the six days was totally different to that first morning. I hung round with Susy and the PLC squad, stole their guys off them—well, tried to—gave my fake ID a huge workout, partied, skied, and partied some more. You don't have time to get tired because everything just keeps happening around you and all you've gotta do is hang on to the roller-coaster and not think about how tired you are and how long it is since you last had a sleep.

Somewhere in the world right now I guess people are skiing and drinking and partying and cracking on to each other but in here our one pathetic attempt has ended with Cindy stabbing her wrist till she's got bloody gashes all over it and then being taken off in an ambulance to a closed ward.

I was telling Oliver all about our skiing holiday and he sat looking at me with his brown calf eyes and a little smile on his face. When I'd finished he said, ‘God, if Marj could hear you now.'

‘What do you mean?' I asked, although I knew.

‘I haven't heard you talk that much since . . . well, I've never heard you talk that much.'

‘I don't want to end up like Cindy,' I said.

It's sad when you look at Oliver and his beautiful big eyes and you realise how beautiful he must have been before he got anorexia. I know looks aren't everything, and I'd rather have a guy with personality than looks, any day, but it'd be such a bonus to have both. I remember reading an article in a magazine about what it's like to go out with a stunning-looking guy, and all these girls who'd done it were saying how it's good but sometimes they're up themselves or other girls try to take them off you or no-one notices you any more. One girl said the guy could never walk past a mirror without stopping to look at himself. Another one said a girl came up to her and whispered, ‘How could you ever catch a guy as gorgeous as that?', which must have been nice for her self-esteem.

Still, I wouldn't mind giving it a go. I think I could handle the pressure.

Anyway, Oliver said to me, ‘So what did go wrong with your family? It all sounds perfect to me.'

‘Perfect? You've got to be kidding.'

‘So what went wrong?'

‘Are you serious? Do you really not know?'

‘Why should I know? You never say anything in Group, and even when we talk by ourselves, it's like there's a whole big area that you avoid.'

‘But you must have seen it in the newspapers.'

‘Oh, sure. But I don't remember much about it. I didn't know I was going to meet you one day, so I didn't take a lot of notice. It was one of those big financial scams, wasn't it?'

‘Thanks a lot.'

I don't know why I said that. I hadn't minded him saying it was a scam, not really. After all, that's what it was, and now everyone knows it. I think I just said it to make him feel guilty. It's so easy to make Oliver feel guilty. It's almost a game.

‘Oh sorry, sorry.'

‘Don't worry about it.'

He didn't say anything for a while, which made me feel guilty, then. Maybe that was his game I don't know. We just sat there, smoking.

‘Well, anyway,' he said at last, ‘I don't know much about it, that's all I was trying to say.'

‘But Scranton resigned.'

‘Oh, yes, I remember. That was because of all that stuff, was it?'

I was amazed. This had been a part of my life for so long that I couldn't believe there were people out there who hardly noticed it. People who only read the sports section of the paper, only looked at the evening news to see the horror and murder stories; people who yawned any time you mentioned politics or business. Oliver's an intelligent guy: it just happens that he's not interested in that stuff. He and millions like him. Maybe all the fears I've had, that the staff and patients in here were too interested in me, kind of spying on me, were just my imagination.

It reminded me also of something I used to wonder about a lot. It's like that song in
Camelot
, the musical we put on at school: ‘What do the simple folks do?' I used to wonder what it was like for people living ordinary lives, where their parents worked in offices and factories and stuff, and they washed the car every Saturday morning, and going to, like, Sizzlers was the biggest thrill of their week. As far as I know none of my friends ever wondered about this stuff, which is another reason I think I'm a bit of a freak, like I don't belong. But I was fascinated by it. What do the other people do? How do they talk to each other? Why do they watch those terrible shows on TV, like ‘Bloopers' and ‘Make-a-Date'? I mean, do they really like them? How can they care so much about some stupid football team that they go along dressed in special jumpers and scarves to watch them
train
, for Chrissakes? I mean to watch them
train
! And hanging around shopping centres all the time, after school and weekends even, I mean what's that
like
? Being totally rapt in the fact that your boyfriend's got some revved-up, purple, chrome-gleaming, fat-tyred, over-painted panel van. Maybe I really am a snob, but it's not that exactly. I mean, they'd have as little understanding of us as I have of them. I just want to try to get a grip on it.

Maybe I will when I get out of here.

Oliver's not that much different to me, really. I mean, not in his background. Sure he lives out in Spicers Gap, but he goes to a private school, Risden, and his father's an advertising executive. His real father I mean: his current stepfather owns a McDonald's, the one before that ran a trucking company, and the one before that had a meat-processing company. Four fathers. Oliver's had so many changes of name that now he doesn't have a surname. He decided about six months ago that he would just be known as Oliver, nothing else. He's the only person I've ever met who doesn't have a surname. He's even made the hospital take his stepfather's name off his files, so now they just have Oliver on them.

He's strong in so many ways, like that, with his name. People who don't know him well, for example Cindy, think he's weak, but that's not the whole story. I suppose you'd have to say it takes a lot of strength not to eat. I don't think that's a weak thing to do. Especially for a boy. I'd never heard of a boy with anorexia till I came in here, but Marj says it's quite common. Oliver doesn't look too bad at the moment, and he is eating three meals a day, but there were times when he was shocking: they wouldn't let him out of bed for a week at one stage, just after he got admitted.

And the way he kept going after me this morning, that was pretty strong. ‘So what did go wrong with your family?' he asked again.

‘What went wrong with yours?' I asked back, trying to throw him off the scent.

He laughed. ‘Marj would call that a very red herring, a scarlet one. You know what's wrong with mine. I talk about it in Group, you don't.'

I was getting scared, like I was going to spill my guts, and I didn't want to. But I did want to, too.

We were already late for Group, so we ground out our smokes, left two more butts on the pile of disgusting dirty old ones already there, and went. For once—the only time ever in history—Marj was late too. She arrived at the door at the same time as us.

I don't know what it is about Marj. She sniffs things out better than Checkers, and he was pretty good. He once flushed a rabbit out of a bush at Clifford College, just by smell. He hung around this bush for ages, making little excited whiffling noises, twitching his nose so hard I thought it'd fall off. ‘Checkers, come here,' I kept yelling, but he wouldn't come away, which was unusual for him. He wasn't the world's most obedient dog, but if you got really mad at him he'd generally make a bit of an effort to veer in your direction. Anyway, after about five minutes this rabbit suddenly came belting out of the bush at maximum revs, and the chase was on. Checkers had his ears back, he was flat to the ground and he was focussed. He chased that bunny all around Clifford College. It was funny and embarrassing at the same time. It was a Saturday and they had cricket matches on everywhere but Checkers stopped every game. It wasn't just that he and the rabbit ran through the middle of each one, it was the fact that all the players were pissing themselves laughing so much that no-one could bowl a ball or hold a bat.

Soon the rabbit got so tired that it looked like the end of his bunny days, like he was off to bunny heaven. A few boys tried to help Checkers by making a dive for the rabbit, but he had a neat sidestep. That had already saved him a couple of times because whenever Checkers got too hot on his heels the rabbit would swerve and go in a new direction, and it took Checkers about ten metres to change course. So each time the rabbit would get a break on him again.

Things were looking terminally bad for the rabbit though. He was slowing right down, running out of puff. But just when Checkers was about to close on him, just when Checkers was opening his jaws for the big one, just as mothers were telling their kids to cover their eyes, the rabbit dived under the Science Block. At Clifford the Science Block is about two centimetres above the ground—well, say ten centimetres—and somehow the rabbit squeezed in there. Checkers had no hope. He'd been cruelly robbed, right at the moment when he thought he had it. He pulled up hard—he had to, or he'd have head-planted into the Science Block—and pranced around barking and yelping and sniffing. ‘That's the way life is, Checkers,' I told him, as I dragged him away.

Next weekend when I went there again to watch the second half of the game (it was Mark's team playing), they had a new sign up:
ALL DOGS MUST BE KEPT ON LEASHES
. It didn't say anything about rabbits.

But I was very impressed by Checkers' nose. It's not every dog that could have sniffed out a rabbit right in the middle of the city like that.

Well, I guess I'm even writing red herrings now, in here. So, back to today's Group.

OK, we got in there, we had a little discussion about Marj being late, and about Oliver and I being late. We're all meant to have very powerful feelings about anything Marj does, like when she's away, like she so often is, or when she's late, like she never is. But this time we at least got through that fairly quickly. Then, to my horror, she turned to me.

‘I think you've been quiet in Group long enough,' she said. ‘I think perhaps it's time you used the Group to help explore some of the reasons you're in hospital.'

I was shocked, embarrassed, confused. She wasn't normally assertive like this. She put pressure on me in subtle ways, and Dr Singh put pressure on in less subtle ways, for me to talk in Group, but I'd never heard her be so definite about it.

But the funny thing was, I sort of was ready to spill it. I nearly had to Oliver, outside, when we were having our smoke. If we'd been there any longer, I probably would have. I don't know what it was, maybe just that the time was right, maybe I trusted them now, maybe it was not having Cindy there any longer, but I did have this powerful desire to let it go. So I sat there hunched over hoping she wouldn't press me any more, hoping she wouldn't ask any more questions, but also hoping she would.

There was such a long silence that I finally gave in, and broke it. They do that a lot here, use silence to make people talk. It's pretty powerful, pretty effective. So at last I mumbled, ‘Everyone knows why I'm in here.'

Marj said, ‘Perhaps you could tell us in your own words.'

As I sat there thinking about that I made up my mind to say something about the whole mess with Rider Group. But when I did open my mouth I heard my voice say, to my big surprise: ‘I'm here because I killed my dog.'