Yellow (18 page)

Quickly, I race to the phone on the sideboard and call triple zero. As it's ringing I bend over McGinty and try to remember the CPR lesson we learnt in physical education class. I cradle the phone between my ear and my shoulder and I press my two hands on his chest, at the space on top of his breastbone, pushing down on him to the rhythm of the Bee Gees ‘Stayin' Alive'. It's an apt song to try to save someone's life with.

‘Hello, emergency,' says the woman on the line.

I keep pushing on McGinty's chest, and my voice is jagged.

‘I think a man's had a heart attack. I need help. I need an ambulance.'

I give the address and the woman tells me that the paramedics are on their way. I tell her that I'm doing CPR and she instructs me as I go. About eight minutes have past. The longest eight minutes of my life. I'm drenched in sweat and I don't know how much longer I can push for, when I hear a knocking on the door.

It's the paramedics. I let them in.

One of the paramedics takes over CPR, while another is setting up the defibrillator to try to jump-start his heart.

A third one asked me what happened and I don't know what to say to him. That I was doing what a ghost told me to do and looking for clues to prove he'd killed a second teenage runamok who'd uncovered his murderous secret? I stare down at McGinty's glazed-over eyes, and the words come to me, from I don't know where.

‘I was looking for scrap wood, out the back there,' I gesture to the window, ‘and I heard a crash. I think it must have been that plate.' The plate sits cracked in half by our feet. ‘I looked through the window to see what the sound was, and, ummm, he was lying here, so I jumped through the window and called you guys.'

I've never lied so easily in my life. The paramedic is looking at me like I'm the bravest person in the world. He doesn't know me at all. He doesn't know how badly my own heart is racing.

‘It's a bloody miracle you were here. A bloody miracle,' he tells me, and we watch as the defibrillator is switched on.

McGinty convulses.

His heart doesn't start.

They try again.

He convulses again.

And this time, it works.

It works.

The paramedics bundle him into the ambulance, and all I can do is stand there, watching the man who could have killed me as he's wheeled off to be fixed. To be saved. I curl down into a ball and I wonder what I've done.

I walk the long way home, along the road instead of through the bush, along past the hobby farms and the hand-painted signs on the side of the road selling bananas and avocados. There aren't any people manning the stalls, it's based on an honesty system, and people driving past stop to slip money in a rusted locked box and take the fruit from where it sits, rotting in open wooden crates. I need to walk off this tightness in my chest, walk off the panic, and I need time to figure out how I feel. Walking's good for unknotting all the thoughts that get tangled up inside my head. I don't even really notice the way the sun claws at my shoulderblades and scratches them red, and how my hair is like a waterfall of sweat cascading down my back. I ignore the catcalls coming from rattly panel vans full of teenage boys, and from older guys who should know better, and I follow my footsteps home. McGinty's heart had been shocked into starting up again on his living-room floor, but who knows if it stayed beating? Do I want McGinty to survive? What if he knows I was snooping through his house? He'd know for sure then that I suspected him. Would I be next? Did I just sign my own death warrant, right then and there, as I was pressing all my body weight onto McGinty's silent chest? These thoughts are bigger than the swollen sun, they're big enough to make me break out into goosebumps. The questions lie unanswered, though, trailing off like the long, dusty road that unfurls in front of me.

Three days later I can't stand the suspense anymore. I so badly want to talk to Willow about it, I want to tell her that I do trust her, but she's not answering the phone. When her dad or her brother pick up I can hear her in the background telling them to say she isn't home. She doesn't even bother to whisper it. It's me who's having the nightmares now, and I wake up in sweats, slippery as a fish, and it's Mum who answers me when I call out for Lark in my sleep. My nightmares are stained with purple and I keep dreaming that McGinty is alive, that he's going to come back to silence me.

It's the last day of the detox and Mum's only getting two drinks today. She's waiting the day out patiently, but I don't know what she's going to be like when I set her free, whether she'll start drinking as soon as a bottle is in reach. The future is filled with imagined terrors, and I try to bat those thoughts away. The present is scary enough, and I need to know whether McGinty is going to come looking for me.

I need to know if he's alive.

The buses don't come very often in my town. Every two hours, according to the timetable, but really they come whenever they damned feel like and there's not much you can do about it. When one finally arrives I pay the driver, and the torn, plastic seat burns my thigh. I read the scrawled graffiti as the rickety thing rattles down the road, jolting to a stop every now and again to pick up somebody, or spit others out. The bus winds down the road that leads to the next town, through farmland, where tall, thin sugarcane stalks sway softly in the breeze, and the road cutting through is like a crooked part in a scalp of thick, green hair. The hospital's about half an hour away, and when I reach the entrance the air-conditioning blows out in small gusts as the automatic door opens and closes. It's a small, regional hospital, but it still has that cold, antiseptic feel about it that reminds me of needles. The waiting room is full of bloodied people, sneezing, shivering people, and sad people, bracing themselves for bad news. You can tell those sad people by their hands. If they're next to somebody, they'll be holding hands so tightly their knuckles are white, or if they're by themselves, they'll be gripping their own hands, just as tightly, as though hands were somehow life rafts. I gulp in some air and I try to swat away my nerves enough to walk up to the counter.

‘I'm here to see about Donald McGinty. He was brought in three days ago,' I tell the lady behind the desk. She's middle-aged and bespectacled, with brown hair that's pulled back and pinned.

‘Are you a relative?' she asks, without even looking up at me.

‘Umm, no, but the thing is, I found him having a heart attack, or something, and I was just wondering whether –'

My sentence is cut off by a big, booming voice. ‘So you're the little hero?'

I look up to see a man dressed in scrubs, a doctor. He's a tree of a man, tall and solid, even though he'd be in his late fifties, with the kind of dark-grey hair that looks like smudged ink. He looks over to the front-desk lady.

‘She's all right, Julie, she's the one who saved Don's life,' and with that he swoops his bough-like arm around me, and ushers me up the corridor. ‘I'm Dr Morrison by the way. Don's woken up from a coma, if you want to see him,' he tells me as we pass other people in scrubs, and frail old people hooked up to drips. ‘He's awake, and sitting up and talking. The odds of him surviving were only about eight per cent, and the odds of him surviving without brain damage, well . . .' He stops for a moment and he looks down at me, squarely into my eyes. ‘It's what we call a miracle. You saved his life.'

I try to look pleased, but the panic is ripping away at my insides. He's awake. He remembers. He's going to come back to get me.

Shit.

The doctor keeps walking, and I have to run a little bit to keep up. ‘I've respected Don for years, and when Margery came in and we couldn't save her, that was one of the worst days of my life.'

Dr Morrison tried to save Margery? All I can think of is McGinty's stubby hands wrapped around the folds of her neck flesh.

‘Are you sure she had a heart attack, and wasn't, you know, strangled . . .' I blurt out. Dr Morrison looks surprised at me for a moment, and then bursts out laughing.

‘Is that rumour still doing the rounds amongst the kids? I thought that one had died down years ago. Look, I'm sorry, I forgot to ask for your name?'

I bite my lip.

‘Kirra.'

‘Kirra, kids will always want a monster to whisper about, and when someone looks different on the outside, then it's easy to think they're not like everyone else on the inside. Don's definitely taken advantage of that to scare some troublemakers into being good.' He chuckles to himself.

‘But Don's no more of a monster than I am. He's probably better than me, because he's had to prove himself from the inside out. Don didn't strangle Margery, she was running for a bus when it happened, there were plenty of witnesses. Besides which, if she had been strangled there'd be horizontal ligature marks across the neck, at the lower end of the thyroid cartilage, and petechial haemorrhages to the face and conjunctiva, along with the usual signs of asphyxia in the lungs and heart. Margery died as a result of cardiac arrest, and so would have Don, if you hadn't done what you did.'

Shame flames about my cheeks, and I'm so confused. I can feel the doctor's gaze piercing me.

‘You did a very brave thing, Kirra, and I'm sure Don would like to thank you himself, if you'd like to see him?'

He gestures through an open door to the room where McGinty sits, surrounded by machines that beep, and metal poles holding up clear bags which look like dangling jellyfish.

‘This here is the mystery girl who performed CPR and called the ambulance,' announces Dr Morrison. McGinty blinks. I don't really notice his birthmark anymore; I'm just staring at his eyes, which are soft like the earth, and kind. I pad over to him and he doesn't say anything, he just looks at me in wonder, and then before I can react he reaches across and pulls me towards him into a hug. He doesn't let me go. He just hugs me and hugs me and it feels so warm, and he's holding me so close that I can feel his heartbeat.

I'm so glad that I can feel it thumping.

I'm so glad.

As we're walking back, Dr Morrison is greeted by a pretty lady with shoulder-length dark hair and the pleasant, direct manner of someone who doesn't truck with nonsense.

‘Johanna!' he says. He turns to me. ‘This is my daughter, we're having coffee today. She's a journalist at the
Daily News
.' He turns to the lady. ‘This is Kirra, she's the girl I told you about, the one who found Don and performed CPR until the paramedics got to him.'

The woman beams at me and takes out a notepad. ‘Lots of people are talking about the mysterious saviour. Nice to finally meet you, Kirra! I know this might be a bit abrupt, but since I've run into you, would you mind if I did a story about you for tomorrow's paper?'

I want to say no, but her face is so kind, it's the sort of face you just want to please. I chew on my lip and consider it.

‘Only if you can tell me something – that kid, Josh Hohol, who went missing the other day. Have they found him?'

She beams again. ‘Little ratbag. He turned up yesterday – he'd gone to a music festival that his parents had banned him from going to.' She rolls her eyes. ‘Some kids, huh?'

Relief washes over me, and I'm not even really listening as Johanna rattles on about McGinty's miracle recovery. Bit by bit, without looking her in the eye, I tell her what I'd told the paramedics, how I was searching through scrap wood and heard the crash. I know I'm going to get grief about this at school, but school is the last thing on my mind right now.

I'm leaning my head against the window as I catch the bus home. Nothing is making sense anymore. Boogie told me that McGinty had strangled Margery. He
showed
me. And yet, it couldn't have been true. There were witnesses who watched Margery die, and if it was murder, then the doctors would have noticed it straight away. It makes me wonder what else he lied to me about. Who
is
Boogie?

It's late by the time I get home, and I crack the last beer open and hand it to Mum. She doesn't drink from it, she just stares at me really intently, and places it on the floor next to the bed. She pats the mattress beside her.

‘Kirra, you're shaking, what's the matter? And where the hell have you been?'

The dam of feelings bursts inside of me and the water gushes from my eyes.

‘I'm going to be in the paper tomorrow, Mum,' I tell her. ‘They took my picture and everything.' Then in a huge torrent of words, I tell her about how I was at McGinty's, and that he went into cardiac arrest, and how I called the ambulance and saved his life. I'm crying so hard that snot is smeared above my lip. Mum hugs me, and I can feel her bones against my cheek.

‘Babygirl, what on earth were you doing over at McGinty's house?'

I wipe my face against the back of my forearm.

‘I thought he'd killed a kid who'd gone missing. My friend Boogie told me he'd murder again, and he begged me to make sure he was caught, except Boogie said that McGinty had strangled his wife and I talked to the doctor when I was at the hospital, and it isn't true, and I don't know what's true anymore. I don't know anything anymore . . .'

Mum's eyes are wide in horror, and they're darting around my face. She's pulled me back from her chest and holds me by my shoulders, her fingers digging into my flesh.

‘What did you say?' she asks me, her voice sounds so tight it's like a wire that's about to snap. I hiccup.

‘I thought he'd killed a . . .'

Mum cuts me off.

‘What was the name of your friend?'

‘Boogie.'

Mum's fingers claw my shoulders deeper.

‘Who is Boogie, Kirra?'

I'm afraid now. Mum has never stared so hard at me in my life, it's like her gaze has reached out and grabbed on to me with both hands.

‘You won't believe me . . .' I stutter. She claws me so hard that I know I'll have bruises tomorrow.

‘Who is Boogie, Kirra?' she repeats in that same, strained voice. I don't know what to say. She'll think I'm crazy, or a liar, which is worse, because she's only just started to listen to me for the first time in my life. I want to lie, except her gaze has me locked, and I can never lie when I'm looking somebody straight in the eyes.

‘Boogie is a ghost, Mum. He's just a kid, like me, and he talks to me from the phone booth down near South Beach. He said that McGinty killed him, and I've been trying to prove it, but I almost died twice helping him . . .'

Mum is just staring at me, it's like all the blood has been sucked right out of her veins. I study her face.

‘Please don't say I'm a liar, Mum . . .'

She's staring at me, then she screams and clutches me to her so tightly, as though someone's going to snatch me away from her arms. I'm surprised the neighbours don't come running.

‘What did I say, Mum? Please stop it! Please!' I beg, and I struggle free from her grip. ‘Who's Boogie? Tell me!'

Her face is like a crumpled tissue.

‘Boogie was my friend . . .' she whispers, but she can't say any more. I think she wants to, because she opens and closes her mouth like a fish does, but no sound comes out.

‘Did he speak to you through the phone booth too?' I ask, but she still can't answer, she just slowly shakes her head, no, and she lies there shivering even as the evening heat slithers into the room. I crawl into her arms, and we both watch the fan as the blades chase each other in circles. Finally, her words come back.

‘There's an old diary at the top of the wardrobe, love . . .' she says faintly. I follow where she's pointing to and I have to climb up the built-in shelves to reach it. It's wedged up the very back, behind some shoeboxes filled with old photos. I jump down with it. It's black leather and old and it leaves dust on my fingers.

‘Was this yours?'

She shakes her head again. No.

I lie back down next to her and I open it up and read the first words out loud. Mum joins in, but she's not reading them. She knows the words off by heart.

This diary belongs to the loneliest boy in the world. I think I'm going to move to the moon (rocket ship salesmen, enquire within).

When I turn my head to face her, Mum looks like she's straining to see something that I can't see, like her breath is fogging up the glass window of her memories.

‘It was Boogie's. His real name was Robert Granger,' she begins, ‘but the adults called him Bobby. The kids called him Booger . . .' her voice cracks with emotion, ‘but not in a nice way, and I felt sorry for him.'

‘Why did they tease him? Wasn't he popular and handsome, with black hair and green eyes . . .' I ask, confused.

‘No, not Boogie. Jesus, he was picked on and awkward, and he had red hair and brown eyes, but he was interesting, and that's more important than any of the other stuff, being interesting. But nobody else noticed that about him, 'cos no one around was the type to be interested in much.'

‘Why would he lie to me about it?'

‘I don't know, Kirra. I think he pretended he was someone else because he never learnt to be proud of who he really was.'

I think of Mum when she was young, how she was the girl who charmed all the town, according to Mrs Darnell.

‘Were you doing him a favour by being friends with him?'

‘No, don't say that. I didn't do him any favours.'

She says that bitterly.

I take the diary and I open it at about halfway in. The handwriting isn't neat, it looks like scratches on the page. It's boy's handwriting.

May 12, 1979

I don't know why Judy talks to me, but I don't know why the sky burns that colour orange when it sets and I don't know why ice-cream tastes so good, and maybe it doesn't help to question good things too much. You might startle the good things away by asking questions, I mean, God knows good things are skittish enough. They never stay. Ray says I should quit with my asking things all the time. He says that a lot. No, my mother hasn't left the bastard yet.

Mum's eyes are leaking now, but she doesn't say anything. She just watches the fan go around and around. I flip back to the beginning of the book and skim through until I see an entry with my mum's name in it. I begin to read it out loud.

February 23, 1979

I talked to her today! Yes that's an exclamation mark. It's an exclamation mark sort of day, most days don't even deserve punctuation. But I talked to Judy! I've wanted to talk to her forever. I've wanted to give her a bouquet of pretty words whenever I've seen her, but I could never speak. She sucks the air out of me and I have none left for words to form. I was sitting in the library and she was trailing her fingers through the spines of the books and I tried not to stare, everyone says I'm creepy when I stare, but if it's Lark or someone staring it's not creepy. Just when I do it. So she pulled out a couple of books and she saw me, and she held the books high against her chest and rested her chin on the top of the pile, and she said, you're in a couple of my classes, aren't you? And I couldn't speak, I just nodded, and she said, you're Booger, right? And I said no, I was Bobby, and she apologised. Someone like her saying sorry to someone like me! Another exclamation mark. I lost my words again, and she knew I felt awkward, so she asked what I was reading, and I told her I wasn't reading, I was writing, and she asked what I was writing, and then the pretty words came. I told her how I was writing all sorts of stuff, how I saw the world, like how colours have smells, like how green smelt heavy like mulch, with just the tang of eucalyptus, and the high, thin notes of cicada shells, and that yellow smelt like bed sheets, when they've been dried out in the sun. And then I got embarrassed because nobody says weird stuff like that, but she just nodded, and said that my words were beautiful, and she acted like I'd given her a bouquet of flowers. She had that look like you have when you hear a song for the first time that you know is going to be your favourite, the one that makes your eyes focus really hard on a nothing space in the middle of the room, then she looked at me, properly, and she said, Bobby, you can really see the world, can't you? And I nodded because I didn't know what else to do and she smiled at me and the whole world lit up and then she left. I think, for those few minutes, I was happy.

I rest the diary on my lap for a moment and look across at Mum, she's been transported to somewhere else, and her face is so soft right now, I can imagine what she looked like as a teenager. I want to touch the lines on her face to wipe them away and make her fourteen and happy again. I have to bite my fingernails to stop myself. She returns to the present with a jolt and clocks me staring at her.

‘Don't look at me like that. Yes, I was at the library, your mum wasn't always a dummy.'

‘I wasn't looking at you like anything.'

Mum smooths her open hand over the wrinkles in the buttercup-patterned bedspread, and it's just like how I want to smooth back her face.

‘Keep going, love.'

I keep going.

March 9, 1979

I don't know what I was thinking, going to the social. You have to be a social person for it to not be hell, the name says it all, I should have taken the warning. I wanted to see Judy. She smiles at me sometimes in the hallway. I know she's only being nice, but it's the only light I've got. So I went to the social, got all dressed up and everything. She didn't notice me, I am invisible, and she had too many other people trying to distract her. I was going to go home, but then Tommy Buckley stole my glasses, and I can't see without them, and I tried to get them back but he pushed me and threw them to someone else, and then that person threw them to someone else, and there was a circle around me, and everyone was shouting Booger, Booger, and I thought being invisible was bad but being this visible was worse, so much worse, and I wanted to die. I'm not being dramatic, I wanted to die. But then Judy was there. And she yelled at Tommy Buckley and she snatched the glasses back, and she knelt down to where I'd been pushed to the floor and I flinched, even though I knew she wouldn't hurt me, but she gave the glasses back and she stood up straight and in this loud, clear voice, so loud that everyone could hear, she asked me to dance and she reached out her hand. Everyone wanted to dance with her, everyone, but I was the one she asked. This disco song, ‘I'm your Boogie man', was playing, and I knew this was my moment, and I closed my eyes and I pretended I wasn't me, and I pretended I was dancing in the dark where no one could see me, where I couldn't be laughed at, and when it was over, everyone was cheering, and Judy leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and said that I could really dance, and I should be called Boogie not Booger. Then she walked away and the crowd swallowed her up, but I couldn't stop looking at the space where she'd been. I know she doesn't like me in that way, she couldn't, but at the very least she looked at me like I'm a human. Nobody looks at me like I'm human. I'm never going to answer to anything but Boogie ever again.

Mum closes her eyes for a little while, and softly, she hums. Her voice is rough and beautiful.

‘I'm your Boogie Man, that's what I am,' she sings.

I remember that song. It's the one that started playing on the radio the night of the social, before she got drunk and embarrassed me. It was the song that pried open the box of memories in her heart, and made her pull the radio cord from the socket.

‘KC and the Sunshine Band,' I whisper. She nods at me.

‘I was dressed in that jumpsuit, that Prussian blue one you wore a little while ago. You looked so lovely in it, did I tell you that? No? I'm bloody useless, aren't I? I thought Boogie would maybe shuffle side to side, you know. He didn't look like the kind of kid who could move so well. But sweet Jesus, could he move . . . if you've ever seen the movie
Saturday Night Fever
, you'd understand.'

I think of John Travolta in that movie.

‘Your generation had a really strange idea of what cool dancing was.'

Mum smiles at me for the first time tonight. A tiny one, like a weed growing through a crack in a broken pavement.

‘Ratbag.'

I keep reading, flicking through to the entries where I can see Mum's name.

March 12, 1979

Judy was teased at school today for dancing with me, but she didn't care. It was before first period, and they said, what, you're Booger's best friend now, are you? They said this like she should be ashamed, but she wasn't ashamed. She just rolled her eyes at them and said, I'd rather be friends with him than you, and she sat next to me. You could tell they wanted her to sit next to them but she sat next to me. Me! Another exclamation mark! I mean, I know she just sat there to make a point to Tommy Buckley, but I didn't care. Because I got to talk to her again. I was reading
The Outsider
and she asked about it, and I forgot to be shy because Camus is my favourite writer and I told her about his other writing and
The Myth of Sisyphus
and she'd never really heard much about philosophy before and it was so good to just talk. Not just because it was Judy, but it was good to talk to anybody. I didn't realise how cramped and lonely my words had been all the time, stuck inside of me, getting pins and needles. And when the bell rang, Judy said, you're not like everyone else are you? And I was embarrassed, because I'm not. But then she said, I think that's the first real conversation I've had in my life. Can I sit with you tomorrow? And I nodded. Even Mum and Ray couldn't make me unhappy today.