The Full Ridiculous (7 page)

‘Can I speak to Rose, please?’ The voice is older, male, with a rough edge to it.

‘Who can I say is calling?’

‘I’d like to speak to Rose O’Dell, please.’

‘Yes, this is her mother. Who’s calling?’

‘Constable Lance Johnstone.’

‘Um. Why do you want to speak to Rose?’

‘It’s regarding an incident at the school.’

‘Do you mean the ar… ar…’

‘The fight with the other lass.’

‘Oh. What do you want to talk about?’

‘I’d just like to ask her some questions is all.’

‘What kind of questions?’

‘About the fight.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s, er, imperative that we ascertain what happened.’

‘Um, Constable, you must be aware that Rosie is a minor. I’m happy for you to talk to her but only if I am present.’

‘Oh, yes, yes, of course.’

‘Do you want me to bring her down to the station?’

‘No, no, that won’t be necessary.’

‘But if you want to talk to her…’

‘Look, I’ve got a bit of a full plate at the moment; I may have to get back to you.’

You wake from an ugly dream, sweaty and dry-mouthed, to find Wendy frowning into the small mirror above the old chest of drawers with the missing knobs. She tells you about her conversation with Constable Lance Johnstone. You tell her about your conversation with Jason Lind. Could the Pessites be behind this? Why did the cop ask to speak to Rosie without identifying himself? Why didn’t he follow protocol?

Wendy has an epiphany: there is no Constable Lance Johnstone. Someone pretending to be a cop has called to give you a fright. Quickly she dials the local police station and asks to speak to Constable Johnstone. There is pause. She puts her hand over the receiver, ‘Well, there is a Constable Johnstone,’ she says.

But is there a
Lance
Johnstone?

Someone comes on the other end of the line. In his unmistakable voice, Constable Lance Johnstone identifies himself. Wendy hangs up.

A panicked discussion ensues. Could he have known who was calling? Could he tell what number was calling? Is it illegal to call someone and hang up? Over the course of the evening, you try to reassure each other that the constable’s call was an insignificant event. But you both go to bed that night feeling slightly nauseous.

12

You are in the doctor’s office again, trying to distract yourself by reading your medical details on the computer screen while the doctor takes your blood pressure. He’s just weighed you to discover you’ve put on a kilo since your last visit, less than a week ago, and ten kilos in the five weeks since the accident. You tell him you haven’t been eating much and he explains that the radical change to your exercise regime may well blah blah blah blah.

You do not want to be here.

He has asked you back because he wants to discuss your blood test results. And because last time he ‘wasn’t happy’ with your blood pressure. You hate the feeling of the black armband as it inflates and constricts the blood flow around your left biceps. You are aware of your pulse beating in your temple and you’re pretty sure that all this circulatory self-consciousness is pushing your high blood pressure even higher.

Finally the good doctor exhales a long breath through his nose, removes the stethoscope from his ears and rips the black nylon band from your arm.

‘How is it?’ you ask.

‘Let’s try you lying down,’ he says, indicating the examination table behind you. You know that this means your blood pressure is high and if you were in any doubt, Doctor Wilson smiles his winning smile at you and adds, ‘Try to think of something calming.’

As he takes your blood pressure while you’re lying down, you attempt to make a shamanic journey. Once, years ago, when you were on a junket for some movie—a post-modern western—you participated in a workshop with a Native American shaman who taught you how to visualise a safe place and journey towards it until you arrived at a deep sense of peace and tranquillity.

You imagine yourself walking down a beach towards a warm rock pool filled with tropical fish. When you reach the rock pool, you discover a set of stairs leading to a mysterious underground grotto. Light refracts from the clear blue water and plays around the pale stone walls. You begin to descend. You’re about half way down when Doctor Wilson suddenly says, ‘Okey dokey,’ and packs up his equipment.

The good doctor scratches his thatch of hair and looks at you, unsmiling. This is bad because he is always smiling. He tells you that if your blood pressure remains at this level you will require medication. You’re busy processing this when he drops another bomb.

The blood tests have not revealed any specific physical reasons for your bouts of depression but there are other areas for concern. You have appeared before this man with half a leg hanging off and he hasn’t been worried so it is with some measure of alarm that you ask him what he means by ‘areas for concern’.

Your blood sugars are ‘all over the shop’ which may indicate your pancreas is producing insulin erratically which might explain your weight gain. He shows you a series of red figures on the pathology report that indicate your liver function is not within acceptable norms. He hypothesises you have had internal bleeding—causing damage to your pancreas and liver—that went undetected by the X-rays taken at the hospital.

He talks about further investigation and more tests and you know you should be asking a million questions but all you want to do is curl into a ball and disappear. You shift your attention between the three white hairs growing out of his left nostril and the uncommonly large pores in the skin on the end of his nose. You force yourself to find the pores so compelling that his words wash over you until your time is up.

Wendy is in the waiting room. She looks up from an ancient
Vanity Fair
with such dread that you decide to spare her the news. In the car on the way home you tell her some of the truth: the blood test revealed nothing about your depression. Wendy says she doubted it would anyway and tentatively suggests seeing a psychologist. You surprise her by instantly agreeing and then mercifully her phone rings and she’s busy dealing with a work matter until she drops you home. She kisses you on the cheek, still talking on the phone, and heads on to her office. You hobble into the house on your crutches to be greeted by Egg as if you’ve been curing cancer and negotiating world peace.

You know you should be working on your book but you’d rather stick needles in your eyes so you construct a More Pressing and Important Task. Suddenly it becomes imperative that this very afternoon you learn to walk without your crutches.

You decide to practise walking up and down the hallway where the walls are less than a metre apart which means you can stretch out your hands to steady yourself. You discard your crutches at the entrance to the kitchen and shuffle-clomp towards the bedrooms with your arms pushing against the walls, a perambulating crucifixion.

You make it all the way to Declan’s bedroom without incident. You put your hand on his closed bedroom door. The metal tongue of the lock has not fully engaged with the doorjamb, so that when you lean on it, it swings open. You try to steady yourself, clutching at the retreating doorknob, but you plummet to the floor of Declan’s room, landing on your swollen left thigh. You roll over, groaning, as the pain buffets your body.

Eventually you formulate a plan to get yourself upright. You muster the will to turn yourself onto your side and that’s when you see it: a small length of green garden hose protruding from the brown cotton valance surrounding the underworld of Declan’s bed. You flip back the valance to discover the garden hose is inserted at a forty-five degree angle into a large empty soft-drink bottle. You reach out and grab the makeshift bong and sniff the telltale perfume of marijuana. Your heart sinks: your son, at the tender age of seventeen, has a history with this drug.

On his sixteenth birthday, Wendy found Declan sitting on a white plastic chair in the back garden with tears streaming down his face. She asked what was wrong and he said he didn’t know. He’d been smoking the occasional joint but you’d both viewed this as a rite-of-passage activity, nothing to be overly concerned about, until experimentation had become habit and you were dealing with a weeping son.

With her usual thoroughness, Wendy researched the effects of heavy dope smoking and the dangers of hydroponically grown marijuana (up to twenty-five times stronger than naturally grown crops) and you both presented her findings to Declan. He agreed not to touch it again. You watched him carefully for a while and a marked improvement in mood and behaviour seemed to indicate that he had, indeed, given up.

And now this.

You drag yourself onto Declan’s bed and sit there feeling extremely pissed off; pissed off with yourself because you haven’t been more vigilant; pissed off with Declan for not taking care of himself; pissed off with Declan because you have your hands full with Rosie and Constable Johnstone and your own failing body; pissed off with yourself for being pissed off with Declan because he has as much right to your attention as any of those other calamities.

You look around the room and try to think what a normal, high-functioning father would do in these circumstances. You decide not to decide what to do until you have armed yourself with as much information about Declanworld as you possibly can. You institute an intelligence-gathering search, limp-hopping from desk to drawers to cupboards, rifling through hidden secret places in pursuit of you’re not sure what exactly. As you do this, you reflect upon how radically your attitude towards your children’s privacy has changed.

In their early teens you would never have dreamed of prying in their rooms without their knowledge or consent. You believed that raising trustworthy adults required you to trust them. Their rooms were sanctuaries; private places in which they might reflect and grow. Those were the days when they attended school without monitoring, when they went where they said they were going, when they returned at the time they said they would.

Somewhere, somehow, things have gone awry. A critical shift has occurred: what was once spirited, courageous behaviour—climbing to the highest branch of the tree, swimming out past the breakers—has become unstable and dangerous. And you didn’t notice until Rosie was spewing alco-pops in the back of the Volvo and Declan was wriggling through the doggie-door at 3am with pupils dilated to the size of saucers.
On your watch. And you didn’t notice until it was too late.

Is it too late?

At the bottom of Declan’s cupboard, you find a shoe-box of memorabilia: frayed blue ribbons from primary school athletics, pale green plastic rosary beads, letters and notes, and a couple of poems penned in Declan’s more adult hand.

You read the poems. They are about death and the pointlessness of life.
Does he really feel like this? Or are these usual expressions of adolescent angst?
Your mouth goes dry and you feel slightly nauseous. You set them aside for Wendy to read later because she is more finely tuned to such subtextual subtleties. A strange collision of dread and pain fells you, and you roll onto Declan’s bed.

As you lie there staring at his desk, something odd strikes you about the pencil case sitting on the desktop. The zippered pillow of tartan fabric has a line of clear plastic sleeves across its side. Each sleeve holds a black letter printed on a gold card. The letters spell out a name. But they don’t spell DECLAN; they spell JAMES B.

James Brentwood is a schoolmate of Declan’s and while there’s nothing outlandish about the appearance of his pencil case on your son’s desk, you can’t help wondering why it’s there. So you sit up and unzip the case.

It’s filled with plastic zip-lock bags, each containing a dozen or so small white pills. You have no idea what kind of drugs these are but you have no doubt they’re illegal. And clearly they’re not just for personal consumption. You are confronted with unequivocal evidence that your son is a drug dealer. You beat off panic and rage with the stick of a desperate belief: it’s not Declan, it’s James B.

You are vaguely aware that James B has already had some altercation with the police—something about joyriding in a neighbour’s sports car—and so you decide to analyse the evidence before you.

Exhibit A: James B has a history of illegal behaviour and is therefore more likely to be a criminal.

Exhibit B: The pencil case containing the drugs has James’s name on it; therefore the drugs most likely belong to him.

Exhibit C: There is no cash in Declan’s room and he is always asking to borrow money. If he were a drug dealer, he’d be cashed up.

Exhibit D: It can’t be your little bubba boy, the one who still gives you hugs and sometimes calls you Pa with such affection that you can feel your heart expanding.

You decide to embrace the best-case scenario that Declan is, for some idiotic reason, minding the drugs for James.

And then a red mist descends
. Well fuck him. Fuck the both of them. How dare he? How dare they? This is your house and you’re not having this shit in your house one second longer. You do not give a rat’s about the consequences, you’re getting rid of them right now.

But how? Flush them down the toilet? If you empty all those little plastic bags, you can dispose of the pills but you still have to deal with the bags. Bury them? Yeah, brilliant idea. Plant hard evidence of drug dealing in your own garden. Moron.

And then you remember it’s garbage night. In a few short hours, a municipal council truck will extend its mechanical arm and embrace your grey wheelie-bin from the kerb. Emptying the incriminating contents into its vast belly, the truck will speed off, eventually spewing an anonymous jumble of household refuse into a giant dump far, far way.

You’re so angry, you don’t even notice that you’re not using your crutches as you limp outside and down the perilous sandstone steps to the side of the house where you keep the bins. You hurl the pencil case into the trash and slam the lid.

Three hours later, you are in the study with your left leg elevated because your thigh has swollen to twice its normal size again and is aching like buggery. You curse yourself for attempting to abandon your crutches too soon and interpret your incapacity as a sign that you should try to focus on some writing. That’s what you are pretending to yourself that you’re doing when you hear Declan come home. He calls out, ‘Hey,’ and goes to his room.