In a thousand different.., p.24
In a Thousand Different Ways, page 24
Our fight had been about him going out with them.
Her response is that she’s glad he has friends, seeing as me and Hugh left him, as if she’s forgetting I didn’t go away by choice.
‘Hey, freak.’
I turn around and there he is, Ollie, walking in my direction. I’ve tried to find as many hiding places as possible every day so I’m not home with her or near him and his loser friends who walk around in gangs wearing coats they shouldn’t be able to afford, not afraid to show off how much they’re earning at doing nothing good. Ollie must have followed me. I’m at the local park. I started walking this morning and kept going, got lost on nature trails I’d never been on before, anything to avoid being at home. I find a quiet place and sit down to eat a handful of the leftover Quality Street chocolates. Strawberry Delight and Orange Crème are my least favourite but I keep going, trying to make myself like them. Ollie steps on an enormous branch, leans back and forth, back and forth, bouncing, until it snaps.
‘Why did you follow me?’ I ask.
‘Nothing else to do.’
‘I’m surprised you and your mates aren’t somewhere nicking stuff.’ He’s been in so much trouble with the police, another stunt and he’ll be landed in a detention centre, and I’m suspicious he’s responsible for the Gangulys’ car that was taken for a joyride, as is everybody else in the neighbourhood. It’s humiliating, living with him.
He glares at me. A dark look, but it doesn’t intimidate me. He steps towards the edge of a deep ditch. Water, mud, beer bottles, who knows what else is in there. I can see he’s trying to work out how to get across to the training pitches.
‘Seriously Ollie, you have to stop hanging out with that gang. You can’t afford to get into more trouble right now.’
‘From what I hear, juvie is better than where you and your freak friends go.’
‘Nice. Maybe I’ll get my freak friends to come and kick your ass. Maybe that’s exactly what you need.’
‘It wasn’t me driving the car,’ he says with an easy shrug, eyes searching my face for a reaction.
I get goosebumps as his colour flashes, like the flashbulb of an old-fashioned camera and then it goes back to normal as if nothing happened. He admitted he was in the car, I’m pretty sure his colour flash admitted something else too.
But why is he here? Maybe he’s hiding too. Maybe he’s scared. Maybe he’s spending time with me because he needs his big sister and for once I need to be on his side like Hugh always is, no matter what he does.
He bounces on another branch, looking across, surveying the gap between and the branches above. He couldn’t possibly be thinking about jumping. It’s too wide.
He takes a few steps away from the ditch, then prepares to run.
‘You won’t make it,’ I say.
‘I will. I can do it.’
He must have a death wish, or a misguided belief that he can do anything he wants, because he’ll never make that jump. I look at the determination on his face, seeing the little boy I know so well, and I let out a loud, surprising even to myself, genuine laugh.
‘What?’ he looks at me in surprise, a grin crawling onto his face.
‘Who do you think you are? Tarzan? You can’t make that jump,’ I say, standing.
I take my sunglasses off and he stares at me. Maybe he sees his sister, the version of me he doesn’t despise. We laugh as he makes a few running attempts before stalling abruptly, stopping just in time before going over the edge. On his next attempt he pulls me to the edge with him, pretends to pull me into the ditch but stops just in time.
My heart pounds as I look down into the mud. It rained every day this week, who knows how far we’d sink. I don’t like to be touched but I don’t stop him. I feel dangerous. Alive. Sparking like fire. Golden. A brother and sister having fun for once.
‘You won’t be able to,’ I say, hearing the teasing in my voice. Do I want him to try?
‘I will.’
He looks around, assesses everything. Calculates.
‘What if you make it, what will you do on the other side?’
‘I’ll worry about that when I get there.’
I laugh.
‘What?’
‘That’s the difference between you and me. Seriously though, don’t, Ollie. You won’t get away with it.’
He winks. ‘I can get away with anything.’
And in the way a person would know something from a tone of voice or a look on a face, I know, I just know instantly that he was the driver of the car.
It happens so quickly. He runs, once at the edge he leaps up, a huge spring in his legs, to grab the branch of the tree on the other side that’s suspended over the ditch. Two hands grab the branch, the muscles in his arms swell, ripple in his back and shoulders as he swings back, his T-shirt rises to reveal his skinny white stomach. He looks in control. He looks at me and grins.
‘Me, Tarzan. You—’
There’s a crack. The branch can’t take his weight, it falls away from the tree and he goes straight down. He disappears below. A mighty thump of his dead weight and a sound from him as though he’s been punched in the stomach and lost all the air from his body.
I feel sick instantly, then I rush to the edge. I look down at his body and the positioning is all wrong. He looks like a rag doll, limbs splayed out in all the wrong directions.
‘Ollie,’ I say, hearing the tremor in my voice.
He doesn’t move.
The woods are silent, the breeze blows, the leaves rustle. I shudder.
I look around. There’s no point in shouting, no one will hear me. I could run back and get help but he could die while he waits, he could be dead already. I don’t have a phone; he has one but it’s in his pocket. I need to get down there.
All of a sudden a light swoops out of the top of his head, like he’s a tube of toothpaste being squeezed. The light – bright white, like I’ve never seen it before – remains in the air, hovering over Ollie’s body. I can’t move. I feel frozen, terrified by this light that’s like a living, breathing organism.
‘Oh God,’ I finally come to my senses and clamber down the side of the ditch, ignoring the blob of white in the air. I slip and slide down. Branches scrape my face. I land with a splash up to my shins in bog and water and mud. ‘Ollie!’
He’s dead. I know he is just by looking at him. I can feel it. I’ve never seen a dead body before, and that’s exactly how I know.
I shake him. Tap him. My body is trembling from head to toe. I look up at the white light that’s just there, hovering. I’m annoyed with it, as if I expect it to help me. It moves closer to me and I freeze, afraid to breathe it in, afraid it will touch me, trembling by its very existence.
‘Go back in,’ I whisper. ‘Go back in. Please.’
What the hell am I doing? I need to get help. I search in his pockets for his phone, it’s smashed to pieces. I swipe the screen, but the broken glass slices my finger. Both sides of the ditch tower above me, I start climbing, clinging on to roots and weeds that are pulled out from the soil as soon as I climb. I slide down time and time again, splashing into the mud. It’s in my eyes and mouth and all over my face. The white light moves again. It moves towards Ollie’s head. Then it goes straight in the crown of his head and disappears.
His eyes open. He looks at me.
Then he grins and sits up with a pained grimace.
‘I saw you,’ he says. ‘I saw me. I was up there, just around there, looking down. I saw you. You saw me, didn’t you?’
I shake my head. ‘No, no. I didn’t. I want to get out of here. I want to get out of here now.’
‘You did. You did. You looked right at me, freak, you said to go back in. You saw me. Jesus Christ, what the … I saw myself.’
He’s on a high, trying to scramble to his feet, but his shoulder looks limp, as do his legs. He’s like a scarecrow that’s lost its straw trying to stand up.
‘You’re terrified of me now,’ he says. A flash of silver, a flash of gold, both of them tarnished.
He’s not wrong. I look for somewhere to place my foot. I kick it into the mud wall, lodging it, and climb, but I slide back down as the wall falls away. He stands behind me thumping his chest like he’s King Kong, thinking he’s unstoppable, unbeatable. I know that from this moment on his appetite will be insatiable. Meanwhile, all I can do is desperately try to climb my way out of there. I feel like I’m buried alive in a grave with him, smelling rank, mud dripping from my clothes.
It’s the first but not the last time that I witness somebody die.
It’s the only time I see them come back to life.
Lily rings me just as I’m getting ready to go out with Andy. I’m happy, I’ve the music blaring. It’s a Saturday evening, I’ve the day off tomorrow. I’m in my new underwear, dancing around and singing aloud when the phone rings. I see her name and want to ignore it but I can’t.
I shut off the music, stand in the kitchen in my bra and thong.
‘It’s Ollie,’ she says. ‘He’s dead. There was a fight at the prison. They just called me. Oh God, Alice, they killed him. He’s gone, he’s gone.’
When I end the call I don’t know what to do. There is much to be done, to organise, people to contact, arrangements to be made, Lily can’t do it on her own – but I can’t move. I feel so sad.
For a time he thought he was invincible, but Ollie ran out of lives.
rose gold
ONE MORNING I WAKE up and the colours aren’t there; for the first time in twenty-two years, nothing has a colour. Andy is sleeping, his aura is still colourless, but the plants around us are emanating nothing. I walk around our small flat looking at all the plants; it’s like they’re dead on the inside but with a lush and healthy facade. I look out the window and watch people walking by, no colours, as if the dimmer switch on Earth has been turned down. I feel so odd, discombobulated, dizzy and unbalanced, as if I’ve lost my stabilisers. I have to feel around in the dullness for a moment to settle myself. I try to think back over everything I did differently over the past few days.
Then my heart pounds as I have a sudden thought. If the source of this light is Lily, as I believe it to be, then what if the source is no longer around. I ring Lily. It rings and rings.
‘Hello?’ Michelle answers, my cousin who moved in with Lily when Ollie was sent to prison again, and she ended up staying.
It’s a long wait while she goes to check on Lily, who isn’t up yet. She won’t appreciate being woken but I need her to be able to wake. I feel sick.
‘She’s all right,’ Michelle says. ‘The same as normal. Told me to get lost.’
‘Oh, thank God.’
I hang up and run to the kitchen sink to vomit.
I lose my aura-seeing for exactly nine months.
In pregnancy I am so consumed by myself, by the life that’s growing inside me and how my body is adapting to assist the life, that I don’t see, can’t see what’s happening in the others around me. It is only afterwards that I discover what people were going through: a colleague secretly going through a marriage break-up, a friend in a dark place. The colours have always taught me that there is a hive of activity beneath people, that no one can ever see or know, but it is only when I lose the colours that I realise how well people bury it, how they conceal it, how they continue to put one foot in front of the other so seemingly effortlessly and gracefully that I realise how truly phenomenal we are. They all managed to fool me. When the colours return, I tell myself to be kinder, more compassionate. It is not enough to just see these things in a person and quietly understand, I need to actively understand too.
Despite the practice I’ve had, thanks to not seeing colours in Andy, I’m like an alien that has dropped down to Earth from another planet. For the whole time I’m pregnant I have to learn to navigate life and human relationships without seeing colours. I misjudge moods and moments. I mistime my comments. I’m not successful at work, I’m not successful at home. I’m sure everyone around me is quietly counting down the days until I have my baby.
Nine months later, arriving in an avalanche of gold from between my thighs, is my daughter. It is a moment of absolute euphoria, the delivery room lights up in brilliant gold as though the gates to another world have opened and shone upon us. I know I’m in the presence of someone precious who has passed through the gateway of some other realm to grace us with her presence here.
We name her Joy.
Her name is Joy but I call her Nugget because she is a rose-golden nugget in colour and nature. I drink her up, breathe her in, I fill my lungs with her marshmallow-and-powder-scented wonder. She smells of sweet urine and bacon in the morning; a sweet and salty roly-poly package of smiles that makes my exhaustion fade to nothing on first sight. Her wrists are lost in folds, every inch of her a ticklish doughy delight. She is medicine, she is light, she needs me, and she is everything I never knew I needed.
I’m not a nervous mother but I have a problem with people holding the baby. The pass-the-parcel culture of a newborn brings the mama bear out in me. Especially when I’m around Lily.
‘Let me hold her,’ Lily says, reaching out, when Andy and I visit for the first time.
I grip Joy tighter. I don’t want Joy’s golden beam to be swallowed up by the purple-tentacled monster.
‘Go on,’ Andy quietly assures me.
I slowly hand her over, not wanting to look at the transfer of colours, but not wanting to look away in case I miss something important, some lingering colour on my child that she’ll keep forever in her core colours.
‘Hello there,’ Lily says in a voice I’ve never heard before. ‘Hello, beautiful girl.’
I feel Andy’s supportive hand on my back.
I expected the worst, but what I see is a dance that brings tears to my eyes. An ethereal display of shimmering colourful lights being shared by grandmother and granddaughter.
When Joy is eighteen months old I stop seeing colours again and I instantly know that I’m pregnant with our second child. We celebrate before taking the test that eventually proves my theory. I’m planting strawberry trees in the nursery at 11.30 one morning when all of a sudden I start seeing colours again. It takes me a moment to process what has happened, and then to notice the warm sticky wet between my thighs, to realise that my sudden gain is also my loss. The baby was fourteen weeks old.
The time in my life where I wished and prayed I’d stop seeing colours is now a distant hazy memory. Now there is joy in seeing the colours of my children, in getting to know them inside and out. What a delight to watch their shades change as they learn and grow, as they develop and form their prominent colours. I watch the colours change from one end of the rainbow to the next, until the right colour finds the right fit. Two girls and one boy, the pinks of puberty, the metallic flashes of teenage life, I examine them, study them hard, while they’re not looking. While they’re watching television, I watch them. While they’re playing on the street with friends, I watch them. Who are they, how do they cope, how do they adapt, how can I help them, what can I teach them? I watch how they interact with each other. Will they be okay? They fascinate me, they teach me.
Joy’s head never stops. Something is always stirring, in the best way. Colours slowly spin above her, moving round and round like an imaginary wooden spoon is stirring her thoughts. A sprinkling of orange appears, as if it’s been thrown into the pot, added to the mix like a spice, and then it starts to bubble, as if in a cauldron. Stirring and bubbling, my little one concocts dreams of the people she wants to be, the places she wants to visit, the adventures she wants to have.
Billy, the baby, is sensitive, kind and understanding, more of the empathy of his father, and not like mine. He prefers animals to people, prefers singing to talking, reading to speaking, he stops eating meat at the age of twelve, finding it all too cruel, debating with Andy during barbecues, can be feisty when he wants to be, when life is unfair, where there is injustice, when he feels he must represent those who don’t have a voice. But despite the love for animals, can be the coldest with people and the hardest to win over. Funny really, from the most silent one of my three.
‘What colour am I?’ he asks during one dinner conversation.
‘The colour of hummus,’ I say to everybody’s laughter, and thankfully his own.
Izzy is the middle child. I see something of Ollie in her: the neediness. I do a lot of work on her so that I stop seeing Ollie. I smother her with love and affection, hold her hand so that she knows she’s not alone, that she’s loved. I don’t want her to go a single moment without feeling like someone has her back. She’s the type to sit in a room filled with people and still feel lonely, to have sudden feelings of homesickness even though she’s still at home, the type to forget, you see, that she’s not alone, that there’s a circle of love and healing around her if she’d just look up from herself.
‘You’re mollycoddling her,’ Andy tells me. ‘She won’t know how to do anything on her own.’
He’s right of course. Perhaps I do this too much.
The sun is shining. Andy has set up a paddling pool in the back garden for the kids. They run around in their bathing suits, Billy is nude, jumping in and out of the water to annoy the girls with his boy bits.
‘Eww, drippy penis!’ Izzy yells, and Joy laughs hysterically as Billy shakes his little bum.
Andy’s top is off, bronzed from the past few days of the heatwave. I watch him working around the garden, doing the bits and pieces we never have time to do, sanding and varnishing the furniture, sorting the weeds from the plants, cleaning the barbecue, gathering the scattered bits of toys. I sit back in my sun chair, with a glass of ice water and a fresh squeeze of lime, listening to their shrieks and watching their colours shoot across at each other like water from water pistols, feeling like I’m a queen on her throne and I’m so very lucky to be so very happy. To have people to give love to, to be in love, to feel loved, to be surrounded by love. I love life, I love my family, I love me. I love, I love, I love.
