Chapter 1
I wake up with the sun shining through the cracks in the dusty, crooked blinds. Down the hall, other girls are using the showers and toilets. I need to go, but I close my eyes and hold it in. I usually wait until everyone’s been gone a while before I go to the bathroom, because fat Karen always leaves the place smelling like a sewerage treatment plant. Considering how much she eats, she probably drops a huge elephant turd every morning. Wouldn’t that be the definition of a home, a place where you don’t mind the smell of the other people who’ve gone to the toilet before you? Where there are proper curtains on the windows, not dingy blinds? No matter how homely they try to make this place, it looks, smells and feels like what it is: an institution.
I hear Bindi and Cinnamon laughing about something as they head off to the kitchen. A minute later, I hear Karen slam the toilet door behind her, then go clomping down the hallway on her camel feet, each huge paddle sending reverberations through the whole house. Stomp clomp stomp clomp stomp clomp. Fat moron.
I look at the clock radio. Eight-twenty. I roll over onto my side and draw one knee up toward my chest, which for some reason makes my full bladder less uncomfortable. I close my eyes and try to remember what the bathroom was like where I lived before the accident, but end up falling back to sleep.
It’s just after sunrise on a winter morning and I don’t want to get out of bed, but I’m busting for a wee. I put on my shoes and coat and walk through the cold house. When I open the door to the lounge room, a blast of warmth hits me in the face. Someone left the kerosene heater on. I tiptoe through the lounge room, past a woman sleeping on the couch under a leather jacket. The ashtray on the coffee table is full of cigarette butts and there’s a plastic juice bottle with a piece of garden hose coming out the side and dirty water in the bottom. A man with a beard is snoring in an armchair. I step on a beer can and it makes a crunching sound. The woman shifts and pulls the jacket over her head, the man mumbles something in his sleep. I cross the room, walk through the kitchen, and go out the back. Twenty paces through long grass and I’m there. The smell is bad. I leave the door open even though my teeth are chattering, partly to let in some air and partly because I’m afraid of spiders. No one can see me – the dunny faces away from the house. In front of me, across the canyon, is endless forest and sky and mist. We are on the edge of the escarpment that drops to the river below. The Nymboida River.
‘Len? Are you awake?’
Nymboida. Escarpment.
The vision fades and the words fly away as Lyyssa, the Resident Counsellor, pounds on my door and I remember how badly I have to go to the toilet.