Peeling the Onion (7 page)

I know it's the only thing I can do. I know he's being helpful. But reading for pleasure is not the same as getting through Year 12.

Haven't heard from Caroline since the day she came over with Jenny.

Why do I feel people have to call me? I'm not such an invalid I can't dial myself.
Just do it.

But it's a bad time: she'll call back later.

Later this week, I guess. Call the
Guinness Book of Records!
Throw a party and put my picture in 'You Can Do it, Girl!' for
Modern Ms:
I've made coffee for Hayden and me. A week ago I tried and wasn't strong enough.

'You couldn't lift a
kettle?'
'The point is I can do it now! Do you want some cake?

Caroline's mum brought a banana one today.'

He likes the cake, but maybe he should have skipped the caffeine, wandering around the room till he makes me dizzy.

'Would you sit down! You're as bad as Matthew!'

He sits obediently and begins picking up and turning over the magazines on the coffee table.

'How was karate yesterday?'

'Okay; mostly sparring again.' I get the feeling that wasn't what he'd intended to say.

'Isn't there a tournament coming up soon?'

'Well, yeah.' The magazines are now all neatly upside down.

'Are you going?'

'Would you mind?'

'I told you before! Why should you give up because some dickhead broke my neck?'

'I thought it might make you feel bad.'

'I'll feel worse if you don't go.'

'You're great, you know that?'

'I know.'

'Could I have a glass of cordial? I don't actually like coffee.'

'So why do you always drink it here? Do you think Mum won't let you come back if you don't like her coffee?'

How can a sheepish grin be sexy? If he kissed me would I stop being obsessed?

My big treat today is a trip to Mr Osman—and as Mum parks right in front of his clinic, I can walk in myself—no wheelchair!

We're going to have to wait a while. His waiting room is packed. I've never seen so many broken people—at least, people with broken bits—in one place before.

'How's the pain?' Mr Osman asks.

So strong, so overwhelming and constant that I can't remember life before it. My body is a vocabulary of hurting; I need shades of meaning to describe the screaming shriek of my neck, the exquisite torture up the back of my skull, the dull grind of the thumb and the fierce jab of a ten-centimetre nail spearing my heel.

'Not bad,' I say.

March already—first term more than half gone!—and evenings are getting darker again; Matt and Bronny are watching a sitcom before they go to bed. Gross adults and cute kids are stuck in another unbelievable predicament, blaring canned laughter and sentimentality. Mum and Dad say they hate it—but follow enough from behind their paper and book to snort in disgust. I don't bother pretending. The slippery surface of my mind is content with the meaningless action, the empty words which don't expect to leave a trace.

An ad break; Mum puts the kettle on.

'Look, Anna!' Matt shouts. 'A girl with a collar like yours!'

Cut from the sound of smashing glass to a girl with a scarred face crying as she struggles to stand up from her wheelchair. It's an ad from the traffic insurance, meant to terrify—I wonder if Trevor Jones is watching. I wonder if I'm going to throw up. Dad grabs for the remote control and knocks it under the couch. The ad goes on as he scrambles.

Bronwyn's voice is cloudy with tears. 'How did they get there so fast?' she asks. 'To make the film?'

'Will they make one of you, Anna?' Matt wants to know.

'That girl's an actor,' Mum explains. 'It's just pretend. Look at her arms—if it were real they'd be cut like Anna's. The scratches on her face are just makeup.'
It's obviously not the first time Mum's watched this ad in fascinated horror.

Bronwyn's face is still pale and pinched. 'Come and sit on my lap,' I beg.

Delicately, she leans over and gives me a hug, the butterfly embrace of one frail old woman to another. 'I'll hurt you,' she says, and has a cuddle from Mum instead.

Just as well—I've got the shakes again. My coffee slops darkly over my shirt.

'Caroline! It's so great to see you!'
And such a surprise that I feel ridiculously flustered.
'Do you want a coffee?'

'I've given up caffeine—it's amazing how much better you feel when you get all those toxins out of your system.'

Guess I won't put out the Mississippi Mud Cake.
'So how's everything at school?'

'I hate my new home room—you know I'm not with you guys this year? And school's such a drag without you there, you better come back soon or I'll go crazy! There's no one to talk to!'

'Aren't you talking to Jenny any more?'

'You have to be named Costa if you want to talk to Jenny right now.'

'Meow, meow.'

'No really, it's sweet. But we all miss you; our last year together—we just want you back!'

So I go into my happy little vegemite act. I feel great, it hardly hurts at all; this frame is just a nuisance really—a precaution—doctors have to be so careful, don't they? And the cast, well nothing could hurt inside that! I'll be back at school in about four weeks.

A question mark flits at the back of my mind. It's four weeks since the accident—will I really be better, school-better, in another four?

But there was all that time wasted when they didn't know my neck was broken. Now that everything's sorted out it'll happen fast. School the beginning of April, Black Belt in October. If you want something badly enough, you always get there in the end.

C
HAPTER
6

M
y thumb is the first to let me down. It's done so many exercises it should look like Elle MacPherson—but after three weeks of workouts it still can't tell the difference between 'bend as tight as you can' and standing up straight.

'Twenty-five degrees,' Mr Osman says, and studies the new X-rays.

Twenty-five degrees is what the therapist said the first time she measured it.

'The bone's healed well,' Mr Osman says now, 'unfortunately ...'

Unfortunately the joint in the middle of the thumb—the one that wasn't supposed to be damaged—is affected too. Stuffed, though that's not the word he uses.

'You'll have arthritis in it, of course. If the pain gets too bad we'll operate and freeze it into a better position. In the meantime the OT can make you a splint.'

He hesitates.
Arthritis, operations
—
hasn't he run out of bad news yet?
'It's an unusual break; I've never seen one just like it. Were you holding anything in your hand?

A trophy.

If he says something funny I'll kick him with my fat plaster foot.
But he thinks about it and nods. He's satisfied.

I'm seventeen. I refuse to think about arthritis. I'll worry about that if I manage to get old.

The splint looks obscene. I think it's only my dirty mind, but Jenny gets the giggles when she sees it. Even Dad hides a smile.

'Only use this to do the exercises,' Julie said when she gave it to me. 'Don't wear it all the time.'

I think I'll be able to restrain myself.

Caroline hasn't been to see me again. I ring her occasionally, but it's always a bad time. She's about to go out, or have dinner, or has a friend over.

Hayden's another reason I've got to be better soon. I want to know what he feels about me and what I feel about him. And I don't know how I'm going to find out if we're never alone.

But tonight the kids are in bed, Mum and Dad watching TV in the lounge. Hayden's sitting on the family room floor by my chair; I remember the feel of his hair when he cried in the hospital, and I stroke it again now. Does he remember his head on my breast?

He lifts his arm across my knee and rests his head against it. 'I'm not hurting you?'

'My knees are okay.'

Why do I think about sex now, when my body's trapped and undesirable?

Very lightly, he strokes the inside of my knee, and I have a sudden flash of memory—the last thing I want to think about right now—of Hayden putting his hand on my leg as we drove, and my laughing and returning it to the wheel, then crossing my legs away from him, for emphasis. The right knee crossed over the left, the right foot against the door. Seconds before we saw the white car.

So that's why my right foot was smashed worse than the left. I'd wondered about that.

Two hands on the wheel didn't help anyway. I should have left his hand where it was.

How could Luke quit uni after doing two whole years? How can he bear not knowing where his life's going now? Just drifting, letting things happen; working in Mum's nursery could hardly be a long-term ambition.

'Sometimes it's not such a bad way to go,' he says, 'seeing where life takes you.'

'But how can you plan anything?'
Because that's one of the worst things about the way I'm living now
—
not knowing for sure exactly how soon I'll be back to normal and able to organise my life again.

'Sometimes it's good to go without plans.'

'So you don't have to change them when things go wrong?'

'That's a bit negative! More like the difference in philosophy behind karate and Tai Chi.'

'You've lost me.'

'Karate's goal-directed—if it's an opponent, you hit them; if it's a brick or a plank or whatever, you break it, right?'

'That's the general idea!'

'Tai Chi is more inner-directed; it can be used as a martial art but it's based on Taoism . . . if you think of life as a river, no matter how huge a boulder is, the river flows around it—might have to change course a bit, but it still gets where it's going—and the rock gradually gets worn away.'

'Doesn't sound like much of an adrenalin rush!'
Which is the best part of karate, even something as artificial as brick-chopping
—
part of your mind knows that it's impossible to smash that brick with your bare hand, and the rest of you knows that you can, and you concentrate, visualise
—
and let loose and do it, do the impossible . . .

He's grinning. 'So what are you breaking now?'

'My plaster,' I admit—
does he read everyone's mind, or just mine?
'You still haven't told me why you left uni.'

He shrugs. 'Business studies was bad enough, but when I got into the advertising stream I really started to hate it. Every assignment was worse; in the end I could barely force myself to do them—it was all completely alien to the way I think. Why should I want to manipulate people's minds to buy what I want?'

'So why'd you do it in the first place?'

'I thought it would be something my dad and I could share—he's totally wrapped up in his work. Pretty mature, eh? I was going to live with him, get to know him . . . maybe I even wanted to be like him, strange as it sounds.'

'Not that strange—he's pretty successful.'

'He's paid a price for it! Which is okay for him, it's his choice—but it's not mine. I figure there has to be something more important than money and power, prestige and all that; eventually I realised that it was my life and I'd have to work out what to do with it myself. It didn't exactly improve my relationship with my dad, but I guess that's the price
I
have to pay.'

I'm not sure about his 'life as a river' theory, but at least he's open and honest—no bull! When he's talking about something serious his eyes go dark—then suddenly he's teasing again and they go back to that deep, brilliant blue.

FLD. Foot Liberation Day.

I follow Mr Osman out to a back room, with shelves of instruments. The power saw is the one that grabs my eye. It must be the reason the floor's linoleum—bloodstains are a nightmare on carpet.

The ferocious saw whirrs and whines, slicing the plaster but—miraculously—not me. My right leg looks like a plant that's been growing under a rock, skinny, white and wrinkled.

It feels light and free.

I've brought my right sneaker in a bag; I put it on and parade up and down the hall—
I'm walking, I'm normal!
—while Mr Osman watches, frowning.

'I'll write you a referral for physio,' he says. Jeans! With the fat foot gone I can wear what I like—the bottom half, anyway. Maybe I'm even glad that they're the old pair, the ones that weren't cut off in Casualty. I feel more like me in well-worn denim.

When my foot touches the floor in the morning it feels as if some idiot's come along and hammered spikes up through the floorboards. Looks like it'll take a while to get used to not having the plaster. I still walk like a baby, legs straddled wide across an invisible nappy, arms out for balance.

'Come in three times a week,' physio Brian says, grunting with the effort of trying to yank my ankle into the shape he wants. When he's exhausted he lends me a wooden rocking board so I can practise at home. Just a few minutes, he says, three times a day.

Bend, stretch, pull it up, point it down, swivel in circles. Looks so easy when Brian's foot does it.

Coming home from physio I'm tired. That's my excuse anyway. I miss the doorway to the kitchen; hit my shoulder, scrape my thumb.
Sticking out like a sore thumb.
Such a stupid expression; such a stupid-looking thumb. Weak, red and stiff; wouldn't be so bad except when you think of it being like that forever. Or worse.

But compared to the other things . . .

I offer my thumb up as a sacrifice, a bargain with God or whoever makes the rules: I won't complain about my thumb, if you heal my ankles and my neck.

Jenny on the phone, 'What's that tapping?'

It's the ankle-rocking board. My parents are always complaining about how long Jenny and I talk—at least now I'm doing something useful at the same time.

'I knew you'd be happy once you got some exercises!' But you don't know what happy is till you can't do something normal and you learn to do it again. This morning Sally was curled up on my armchair—so I sat on the couch. Even better, a while later I managed to get off it!