Skeletal (22 page)

‘In the end he’d had to threaten to call the police to get her to leave. He was so angry,’ She shook her head in recollection. ‘So angry. He had a lot of stuff going on with work and everything. We thought at that stage we might have to move to another city. And then I get in trouble, and my friend turns up and starts threatening him and yelling. He was not happy.’

Vila smiles at the memory. I sit there seething with resentment. There I was trying to do him a favour, and instead he made me out to look like a gibbering fool. Some people, eh?

The Grey Man enters the makeshift courtroom. I can feel his presence before I even notice he’s there. He turns in a slow circle, in that way he has, surveying everything. You can see him noting every last detail. Remembering it all for later reference.

And then he comes over and sits in the back bench. He sits in the back bench where I sit too.

‘Hey Daina. How’s it going?’

I look him over from top to toe. His face is still the youthful mask that the Grey Man sported when he pushed a gun into my five-year old face. Time won’t ravage him any more than it can now ravage me.

‘Have they started to talk rubbish about you yet?’

‘They started with the rubbish. Now they’re onto the complete make-believe.’

He takes my hand in his. I didn’t even realise I still had appendages until I feel the warmth. He gives a low chuckle.

Watch this. See this now. A dead girl in a courtroom being comforted by her imaginary friend.

At least someone’s still got my back.

***

I follow my mother when she moves into a back room. Her new friend Christine comes with her. There’s a sheaf of papers in her hand. I know what that is. As part of the pathologist’s recommendation, there was a forensic psychiatry assessment done. Trying to piece together my mental state at the end. Trying to pull together half-remembered incidents from half a dozen witnesses all recalling events through a filter of their actions, being seen in their best light.

And if you think that Bones has a hard job, trying to work out what killed someone from the evidence of their physical bodies, you ought to think again. These people, because no one does this job alone, these people had to work things out with no body, no physical evidence, nothing but words from unreliable sources. Conjuring up a mental state that it can take years to diagnose when you have an actual patient in front of you. Pity them.

Still, at least they weren’t under the gun on this one. You should see them try this game when someone’s been in their care. That’s a graceful dance if ever I saw one. Don’t step there, that’s blame. Don’t step here, that’s an oversight.

And now my mother needs some help to understand. Because there she’s been, blaming herself for all of my downfall, and there I actually was, a victim of her genetics.

Christine pulls her into a side room and they sit down on a bench to look over everything. A break in proceedings after Vila’s testimony. My mother expected to be here the whole day, so she’s using this time. Christine assigned as well. At least this one will come easy to her. She trained in psychiatry. She knows what all these words mean.

There won’t be a witness for this one. The coroner will read the report and enter it into evidence that way. There’ll be people in the courtroom who will never know what’s written down here. They could ask, but they don’t know enough to. There’ll be conclusions made that they’ll be completely in the dark about.

My Grey Man stays close by. He’s my protector and my challenger. My friend and my enemy. The person who is best for me, and my worst influence.

He is the kindest person that I know, modelled on a man who threatened me a little girl. His guise is just that. Not a clue to his internal makeup. Not a pathway to enlightenment. A mask that he wears because he has to wear something, and looking in the mirror is a hard task for a teenage girl to master.

I listen as Christine explains my symptoms. She doesn’t know about the flashes of colour, and how I could taste them and smell them. She doesn’t know that my Grey Man told me my friends were giving me hallucinogens, so I could explain them away.

She doesn’t know why I stopped eating. The fear I had of being poisoned. She only knows that I did stop. That I did stop and I lost weight and I started fainting and my body hair grew thick and lush to try to shelter me from the cold.

She knows these things because other people saw. Other people reported these symptoms. And none of them did anything about them. They just stood back and watched me fade away. Watched as my speech turned to gibberish, and my actions turned erratic, and my responses became unhinged.

They watched in so much detail that they managed to fill up twenty pages of a psychiatric report.
Twenty pages
. And at no time did anyone reach out a hand to me in help.

My Grey Man enfolds me in his arm as my mother listens to a report into my mental state that means absolutely nothing, a decade too late. Its only usefulness in knowing how to treat someone, to bring them back from the brink of insanity.

You can’t bring back a dead girl.

Daina 2004

I spent the next day avoiding my mother. Not as hard as it might seem. She was passed out when I slipped down the stairs in the morning, fully intending on going to school. When I ducked back home a few hours later she was in her room – with company. When I headed out again she was asleep on the living room floor. That was the only worrisome one.

Her gear was still by her body, the tourniquet still in place, though loose. I stepped as close as I dared to make sure she was breathing. Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell. It was slow. I had nothing to time it with but my own breath. She was expending only half the effort I was. But there were no hitches, no stop-starts.

She’d collapsed onto one side. It was close enough to the recovery position that I felt free to leave her there. As I walked out the front door again I could feel a mean-spirited child in the back of my head shouting –
I hope you die. I hope you overdose and die.

But that was foolish and shortsighted. The little child didn’t know half the trouble it’d be in if that truly happened. It was bad enough trying to work the system around a parent who was incapable. Try to do it with a dead body in your lounge, and you’d find out what difficulty really was. And there was no way I was going into some nasty CYPF family or home this late in the game, and no chance that Dad’d suddenly find room in his heart and his home for me.

The day was overcast. As I walked out of the house for the second time that day it started to drizzle. At least it cleared the footpaths of people, though the traffic on the road increased.

I’d fully intended to walk into class this morning; I even had the forged note in my hand. But there was a car sitting on Langdon’s Road opposite the entrance. A large black car that raised the hairs on the back of my neck, and dropped my body temperature another five degrees.

I didn’t get close enough to tell if there was really anything odd about the vehicle or its occupants. I wasn’t into taking any more chances. My close encounter the day before was still fresh in my mind, along with the frustration caused by Vila’s dad’s refusal to listen to me.

As the Grey Man had stated though, he was old enough…

I was still fighting with myself as I walked away from the school gates. Surely someone who was seriously into disguising themselves wouldn’t use a car that stood out so much from the standard school traffic. If they were trying to hide, then wouldn’t they use a silver vehicle, some standard import model that would just get lost in the crowd?

But the thought that they wanted to stand out brought its own horrible conclusions to mind.

I headed over to Vila’s house. There were half-formed thoughts about maybe meeting her on the way and telling her to watch her back. Not a likely scenario considering I could hear the bell go before I’d reached the end of the road, but it gave me some direction.

Maybe she’d taken the day off anyway. Maybe her dad had taken my warning seriously and the whole family was now packing up ready to make a run for it.

There was no one at home. Even Vila’s mother was nowhere in sight. I knew she worked part-time, but I still hadn’t clocked the exact timetable, so I couldn’t judge if her absence was standard or not.

I sat in the park for a while and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. My head was stuffed full of thoughts, but none of them connected, and none of them required any input from me apart from anxiety. And that I could give in spades.

Back home. No relief from the panic.

There was pressure building in my stomach. I kept expecting something to happen. Something bad.

The thought of the files hiding under the floorboards struck me. I didn’t even know if they were still there. What if the men yesterday had found them?

I checked on Mum and walked out of the house. My insides twisted in two directions. I wanted to go as far away from the half-finished house as I could. There was only danger in going out there again. Either the papers were there or they weren’t. Me getting caught by some very nasty people on site wasn’t going to change that.

But, but. I wanted to read through them. Commit the contents to memory. Then, if they were taken, at least I would know what they contained. At least I would be sure that all of this trouble and turmoil was worth it.

In the end it felt as though my mind would split apart if I didn’t take some action. And since one option was inaction, I took the other.

The drizzle had stopped, but the day was still overcast and gloomy, even though the sun was high overhead. I was still wearing my school uniform, but at least it being midday there were less curious glances. It was perfectly reasonable that a schoolgirl might be out on her lunchbreak. I could start cursing my choice of clothing when I made the return journey.
If
I made the return journey.

There was going to be no hiding in the grass today. The blades were sodden and drooping. If I dived into them now there’d be an obvious Daina-shaped patch.

But no one came.

I crawled under the house. At one point my knee came down hard on a stone and I swore aloud, before hushing myself. The files were where I’d left them. I tried to sweep as much debris out of the path as I could, but I still found a few sharp edges as I stretched out to retrieve them.

So whatever the two men had been up to, they hadn’t found them.

The glass tube was unbroken, the light amber liquid still sloshing around inside. I unzipped the front pocket and put some hankies around it so it wouldn’t accidentally break in my backpack, and then placed it by the side of the house, far enough in so it wasn’t sitting in collected rainwater.

Then I spread out the files. I left the manhole cover up so that if needed I could plunge back under the building. The thought of letting that cover fall into place with no one above to lift it up if I couldn’t made my blood run cold. But so did the thought of being caught. Need be, I could probably kick out a grate and get out that way.

For a moment as I stared at the papers in front of me I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. There were formulas, there were sketches, there was the diagram that I’d recreated for the Grey Man earlier – this week? Surely it was longer ago? No – this week. It was a chromosome. Showing a genetic marker. There was an SNP number out the side, but it didn’t mean anything to me. It wasn’t like I could call up a catalogue and check it out.

But the longer I stared at them the more I could read their patterns. It was like looking at a complicated algebraic formula. You started off with the part you could most easily understand, and then worked forward or back or both until the whole relationship became clear.

The first part was an isolation test. The fabric of the sample was reduced down and reduced down until only one part remained. And then there was a check to see whether the sequence of the material matched the standard sequencing formulas already recorded.

A genetic test: Isolating and then comparing a specific gene on a specific chromosome, looking for a match, or looking for a known mutation.

I could follow it up to there. I could understand the sequencing and the patterns, even if I couldn’t have replicated them or known how to get this out in the first place. I could see the overall structures even though the details would take me months, years even, to understand.

But then it all changed. I could see that it was something to do with the sample I now held. I could understand that this was in some way connected with one of the mutations, rather than the expected results. I couldn’t see how it fit together.

And it wasn’t like I could ask anyone. I didn’t even have a GP; there was no chance I’d meet a geneticist.

I pulled the papers back together. There’d been the frisson of discovery, but the flat feeling of non-comprehension wore it back down to nothing.

I swung my head back down through the hole. I swerved my eyes back and forth, back and forth, looking for the natural patterns that caught attention. There was a slight raise in the earth on the far right-hand side. If I put the folder behind there it would be more hidden from view than it had been on the left. There, it had been inconvenient to retrieve, but not impossible to see. The slope of the ground in the new position however, would form a natural hiding place. Forcing the eye to scan straight over it.

When I tried to lever myself back down into the hole, I felt a wave of nausea overtake me, and then my head spun. I sat down on the cold earth, my strength gone, my body crumpled in on itself.

My awareness didn’t fade. I could feel every muscle and every inch of my skin as it collapsed on itself. I could feel the cold chill of the ground where the temperature dipped by a couple of degrees from the air above it. I could see the dim shapes of the beams and the rough foundation walls. I felt as my left leg caught and twisted under the weight of my body. The sharp hammer of pain in my head as it clanged against the floorboard on the way down. I could feel a trickle of blood at my temple, and see how the light changed as the sun came out of hiding behind a cloud.

I could see it all, feel it all, smell it all. But I couldn’t move my body. I couldn’t move a single muscle. And then my senses shut down one, by one, by one.

***

Coroner’s Court 2014

‘Are you okay to pick up where you left off yesterday?’ the coroner asks Vila. She nods her head but her face is tight. She thought she’d be done with this yesterday. The pause in proceedings has spun it out too long. She wants to be home. She wants to be done with it.

The air in the courtroom is leaden today. There’s no sun peering in through the windows, and the wood panelling that looks so deep and rich in warm sunlight looks heavy and dark in its absence.

‘As I said, I didn’t see Daina for a few days. She wasn’t at school, and then my Dad had that run-in. When she wasn’t at school the next day either I went by her house.’ She rubs above her right eyebrow and sneaks a quick look at my mother. Judging the reception. My mother meets her gaze and inclines her head. Permission granted.

‘Mrs Harrow was passed out in the living room. We’d known that she was an alkie – it doesn’t take more than a visit or two to pick that up – but there was other stuff on the table,’ she pauses while she feels different words in her mouth, ‘Drug paraphernalia,’ she chooses.

‘I was scared. I’d never met anyone who did drugs, or even knew someone who did drugs. You say things and pretend things at school, but nobody
does
it. Or, if they do it’s just weed or pills or something. She was
injecting.’

My mother doesn’t bow her head. She keeps her chin up and gives a short nod at Vila. Acknowledging her actions. She’s come a long way. I’m so
proud
of her.

‘I couldn’t talk to Mum or Dad about it. They wouldn’t hear her name in the house. If I’d tried to bring her up they probably would’ve been more likely to call the police, than to help me find her. And you don’t want to do that sort of thing, not to your friend.’

She shifts her weight on the seat, and moves one shoulder in a circle to ease her back. It’s stalling. There’s no way she’s uncomfortable – physically uncomfortable – after only ten minutes up there. If that. But the next part, she’s already trying to pull away from it.

The coroner picks it up too. He has some idea of what’s about to come. There were talks in hushed tones, before they made the decision to let Vila go up there and talk about this. After all, the probability is it’s not relevant. And it’s certainly going to be distressing.

But warts and all. That’s how the coroner likes to run his courtroom. Better to have too much information than to have too little. He’s already noted down a few names that he’ll be calling back in here. Information that should’ve been provided but is mysteriously absent.

He doesn’t like mysteries, our coroner. He’s worked his whole life to pull all the little disparate pieces together until they make a pattern that fits. And having one loose piece left over, a large and obnoxious piece at that? It’s not the way he runs things.

Vila presses her fingertips briefly to her cheekbone. The pressure leaves pale marks on her skin that quickly fill back in with colour.

‘The next day was when my dad died, so I lost track of her after that.’

The bald statement hangs in the air for a moment, swaying this way and that, looking for a place to fall.

And then Vila’s emotional control shatters and she bursts into violent tears. Her statement crashes to the floor.

***

When I came to, it took a few minutes to work out where I was. In the darkness my first thought was I was home, it was night. The cool hard earth registered, and I thought I’d fallen out of bed.

When I sat up, I hit my head on the floorboards above me. Flashes of light and a band of pain. But it tripped my other senses, and I realised where I was.

Panic gripped me as I tried to get up through the manhole again. I could see that the cover was still off. I could see that there was a clear exit to jump out of. But panic insisted that I was trapped. That I would never get out. That I would die here, in this wide abandoned grave.

The adrenalin rush gave me enough strength to lever my body through the hole. I pushed the cover back into place as quickly as I could. I couldn’t relax while that open mouth was there waiting to swallow me again. I caught my fingers underneath the closing lid, and stuck them in my mouth to calm them. I pushed myself into the centre of the room, and sat breathing hard for a minute before standing and backing further away.