Solo (3 page)
‘Unless it was Ivan Milat,’ I said.
‘Have you ever read a book on psychos?’ she asked. ‘I mean, have you ever looked up a book to see if . . . you know. It’s just those books only say stuff from the outside. They say things like, “experiences acute depression” or “exhibits irrational behaviour”. So how much is acute? How do you know if you’re being irrational? They don’t say what that feels like from the inside.’
‘Hey, do you want to hear a joke?’ I whispered. ‘It’s not my joke. I heard it somewhere.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘There’s this guy and this serial killer walking through the bush, and the guy says, “I’m really scared,” and the serial killer says, “
You’re
scared? I have to walk back by myself!”’
Bethany laughed. Then we lay quietly for a long time.
‘Hey, Mackenzie, are you asleep yet?’ she whispered.
‘Mmm.’
She said, ‘I reckon the worst monsters are the ones you know.’
I lay in the dark with prickles up the back of my neck. In the patterns on the underside of Bethany’s mattress I saw faces – red faces, choking and purple. I closed my eyes and did my breathing.
There’s a girl at the camp who has big bones without much flesh on them, and thin lips, and she looks forty already. She wore one of those Cancer Council pastel cloth sunhats the first day, and then the next day – no hat.
Her hair is a short, wispy mouse-brown, but dotted randomly over her head there are tufts of hair missing in perfect circles about the size of a twenty-cent piece.
She caught me staring.
‘It’s called alopecia,’ she said.
‘What’s it from?’ I asked.
‘It’s usually stress-related.’ She blinked. There was even hair missing from her eyelashes.
Later that day I saw her in the bathroom. She was sitting in the corner with her back to the tiles, stuffing pills in her mouth.
I could feel the edges of an anxiety attack – the ringing in my ears and the mouth full of saliva – but instead of letting it wash over me, I lunged. We wrestled for the packet. Her fingers were white with the strain. The foil crushed in my hands.
Her grip loosened and I tugged the packet away, holding her by the shoulder.
‘How many have you taken?’ I asked her while I folded out the foil wrapper.
‘Give it back! It’s none of your business!’
It was Vermox.
I looked at her scalp again, at the patches there so pink and naked. ‘Do these make you bald?’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘Do they make you feel good?’ I asked her.
Her thin lips turned down at the sides. The white residue from the tablets congealed in the corner of her mouth. She looked three and eighty at the same time.
‘If they don’t make you feel good, and they make you bald, why do you take them?’ I asked her.
She whispered. ‘For the worms in my head.’
‘And does it help? Does it fix it?’
She looked wretched – damned. ‘Shut up. I have learned helplessness. You can dob if you want, but they can’t take them from me. It’s over-the-counter. They can’t do nothing.’
I threw the foil wrapper at her and it landed in her lap. I knew what learned helplessness was. My counsellor told me about this experiment they did where these scientists put dogs in cages and electrified the cage. Then, after a while, they only electrified half the cage and the dog wouldn’t try to escape to the un-electrified half because it had learned helplessness. It sounded like a crock of shit to me. Besides, what sort of bastard wakes up in the morning with an experiment like that in his head?
We had to do compulsory trust-building activities every day before lunch. On the first day my partner was the albino video-shop boy. He wrapped a blindfold around my eyes. The last thing I saw were his eyelashes, sparse and white, and his pale grey eyes that tilted upwards, making him look mean and piggy.
He grabbed my hand and took me on a winding path to a tree to feel its surface.
My tree was cool and unyielding, with pockmarks and divots. I ran my hand all the way around it and discovered a cicada shell clinging to the far side.
Something stung me and I pulled my hand away. ‘There are ants,’ he told me. ‘Where your hand is now.’
‘Yeah, thanks,’ I said.
He led me back to the starting point. Those who had been blindfolded then had to pick their trees by sight.
I looked across the lawn to where the trunks huddled together, stripped bare and pink and with a texture that looked like marzipan. Their old discarded bark draped around their roots in strips and sheets.
I picked the telegraph pole a little to the right. Videoshop boy’s disappointment was not in keeping with the spirit of the exercise, I thought. He doesn’t know how many hours I’ve spent wearing eyeshades.
On the second day we made a human machine. Bethany and I started because we were hungry, and no one else was going to do it. We stood face-to-face and put our palms together and pushed them back and forth. The boy they call Rumpelstiltskin joined in by bending at the waist and lifting Bethany’s ankle in time with our pushing. The Vermox girl then did air punches over his head, and so on until everyone made a part in the machine.
I can imagine that if we were all wearing silver costumes and there was some funky industrial music playing and strobe lighting it would look really cool.
Callum was last. He stood at the edge and tilted his head from side to side, which I thought was a bit passive, and he’d only done it for a few seconds when Wendy said we could stop.
On the third day we did the Trust Fall with Simon. We were told to stand on one of the tables in the mess room and fall off it backwards into the arms of the others.
Callum was excused. He sat out in the sun reading a magazine and sweating.
It made me cross. Trust was hard for all of us. But more than that, I knew that I would do an exercise that made me feel uncomfortable just to be close to him.
When you pike out, I feel invisible.
On the morning before my Solo we had another affirmation-dressed-up-as-creative-writing task to do. Bethany had gone on her Solo, so when I was deciding where to sit I sauntered towards Callum as though I was picking a spot at random.
Callum was wearing what looked like suit pants cut off at the knees, a singlet, boots and a bowler hat. He also had a string of carved wooden beads around his neck.
He smiled one of those brief closed-mouth smiles that you give to people when you are reaching across in front of them in a lift to press the button for your floor, or picking up the magazine they just put down in a doctor’s waiting room.
Simon said we had to choose an object from our childhood and talk about it with our neighbour. He gave us a piece of paper so that we could ‘workshop our ideas’.
I sighed. I’ve been workshopped before. Simon wasn’t going to fool me into some kind of personal revelation.
I picked up my pen and scribbled the first thing that came into my head.
When I was about seven, a friend of the family gave
me a pair of eyeshades – the ones you wear on a
plane to shut the light out.
I would wear them around the house and
pretend I was blind, trying to sense objects without
seeing them. I wanted to learn how to use sonar like
dolphins.
Sometimes you can feel things, for example, wind
across your skin, or your hair lifting off your face
when you are near a door or a window. If you listen,
you can tell the shape or vastness of a space by the
quality of the sound. I experimented by talking into
one of the kitchen cupboards and then in the lounge
room – the biggest room in that house.
Other times I would lie on the floor on my
back and let the eyeshades take me places. I saw the
most extraordinary things. I’d open my eyes in the
blackness and feel my eyelashes flutter against the
silky material.
There is an old man with tiny strands of hair on
his head, as though he’s walked through a spider web.
He’s shuffling along the street wearing nothing but
baggy green underwear. I can see his sloping shoulders
and his potbelly. His nipples sag. He has wispy white
hair rolling across his chest like a cumulus cloud.
I wonder if I’m simulating dreams when I’m
wearing the eyeshades, or maybe I am actually
dreaming, or maybe somewhere in the world there
is an old man shuffling down the street in green
underwear.
Callum and I swapped sheets. Callum had written:
A long time ago some kid threw a rock over a bridge
and it killed a lady driving underneath. They built
fences – nets above the bridge – to stop people
throwing rocks at cars. You’d think people would
know not to throw rocks.
There was an overpass near our old house.
The fence is about a metre and a half high.
You could still throw a rock if you were determined
to do that.
If they really wanted to stop people throwing
rocks they’d need to build a fence to eternity, or
take away all the rocks. Where does that end?
Does everyone walk around with a bulletproof vest
and a crash helmet in case someone decides to do
them harm?
Wouldn’t you think people should know not
to throw rocks at cars? At some point people have
to decide not to throw rocks.
Callum whispered, ‘Wow, yours is really good.’
I said to him, ‘I come from a long line of rock-throwers. You can’t stop people throwing rocks.’
‘I come from rock-throwers too. Well, one rock-thrower, and one who just cowers in the corner waiting for it to stop.’ His chin jutted out and he stared me right in the eye.
‘If you could be the thrower, or the thrown-at, I know which one I’d pick,’ I countered. ‘But I don’t even think you get to choose.’
‘Of course you choose!’ He was angry, but tired at the same time, as though I was a new enemy in an old war. ‘You think that’s the solution? You’re going to be a rock-thrower?’
My cheeks burned crimson. My mouth filled with saliva. I had a feeling that if I stood up I would find that I’d wet myself. My counsellor tells me that during periods of extreme apprehension my mind manufactures physical symptoms of distress. I twisted in my seat. Now I couldn’t get up even if I wanted to. I let my hair hang across my face.
Sometimes I can’t bear to be in my own skin. It’s like being embarrassed but ten times worse. I want to run until I have left myself behind, but I can’t run that fast.
I feel stupid and childish, as if I am watching myself from the outside and I don’t want to spend time with me. That’s when I think about it. It’s not because I’m sad or depressed the way you see it in the movies. It’s as though I am so embarrassed that I have to leave. There’s only one way to truly leave.
Sometimes it feels better if I drink. Sometimes it feels worse. I had cocaine once, and I’m sure that would do the trick, but I can’t do that because once I start I won’t be able to stop. Ever. I loved it.
That feeling comes over me in waves. My counsellor calls it anxiety. She says most people have minds like ponds. They’re still most of the time, and they only ripple when something bad happens outside the pond.
She says my mind is like the sea – it rocks and rolls, and if something bad happens it roars. Then I am trapped inside the waves, tumbling over and over and sure that I can’t breathe, wondering if it will ever end. When the waves in my mind are like that, I sometimes wonder if it would be easier just to give in. I could breathe the water. I read somewhere that drowning is a gentle way to die.
I’ve researched these things, not because I am sad or morbid, but in case of an emergency – just in case one day it gets so bad that I have to find a quick way out.
I’d been told to meet the counsellors in the courtyard straight after lunch to catch the bus to the Solo campsite. The first two people had already come back, and the second pair was waiting to be picked up.
I was going out on my own. Even though I knew that the whole point was to be separated from civilised people by kilometres of National Park, I still would have preferred to go out on my own with someone else, the way the others had.
Callum loped past from the direction of the mess hall. I looked away. I paced the stone pavers, pretending I was interested in the sparrows skipping on the sleepers edging the garden. I plucked a leaf from the tree above me and smelled it, crushing it between my fingers. It was grey and waxy. Eucalypt.
‘Don’t look so nervous.’ He grinned, slowing and heading my way.
I’d watched him at lunch. He had muscles in his neck, and the suggestion of stubble, but I couldn’t see properly, because I was too far away. I was imagining the way he would smell if I rested my head on his shoulder.
‘I’m not nervous.’ I shrugged. Then I wished I hadn’t said that because I was obviously nervous. My hands were sweaty, my voice was shaky, and I could feel the perspiration on my upper lip. At least if I pretended it was because of the Solo he wouldn’t know. At the same time I wanted him to know, because he might say that he liked me too. But then I would go away and he might find that he liked someone else more – for example, Bethany. She had said some vague things about him, and neither of us had bagsed him.
‘You must know the Bogeyman rules, then.’
I tilted my head to the side. Too slow. He thinks I’m slow in the head. He’s just being nice to me the way you’re nice to the Year 7s at school. It’s a mercy thing.
He started to tick off on his fingers. ‘No walking backwards and whimpering – especially not in a nightie. No saying, “Is somebody there?” when you hear heavy breathing from the bushes. And never, never fall down if you are being pursued. You can get up but you’ll only make three strides before he gets you.’