Chapter 2
I’m at the Inner West Youth Refuge. They brought me here after the accident. Not right after the accident – I spent a month in hospital, floating in a painkiller haze while surgeons put me back together again – but when the doctors said I was ‘well’ enough to go home.
I don’t know where my home is, if I even have one. That’s why they sent me here.
At least I know my name, my nickname, anyway. When they found me, I was wearing a jumper with ‘Len’ stitched over the heart. Would that mean my proper Christian name is Leni? Helen? Elaine? And my surname is anybody’s guess. They put it down as ‘Russell’ on my papers, because I was wearing a Russell Athletics T-shirt. Pretty stupid, if you ask me. What if I’d been wearing Tommy Hilfiger?
On my first night here, Karen asked me why I couldn’t remember anything. I told her I’d taken a bump on the head in a car wreck, because Karen didn’t look smart enough to understand the truth.
There’s no such thing as ‘bump on the head’ amnesia – that’s something that only happens on TV. Dr Mengers explained it to me when I was still in hospital. If I’d taken a knock on the head severe enough to cause memory loss, there would be evident brain damage. I don’t have any brain damage, and the test results prove it. They’ve taken squillions of CATs and MRIs and other assorted tests with fancy names. Sometimes I had my head hooked up to electrodes, sometimes I had to drink a whole glass of chalky-tasting glop, sometimes I had to lie still for an hour inside some scanner that reminded me of a tube-shaped coffin. All of those tests said the same thing: my brain survived the accident unharmed.
It’s my soul that got knocked around.
Hysterical amnesia was the official diagnosis. That’s why Dr Mengers referred me to Lyyssa. I have an appointment with Lyyssa in a few minutes, and I’m looking forward to it like I’d look forward to having a tooth pulled or getting a tetanus injection.
Lyyssa is a psychologist and a social worker. She lives at the Youth Refuge with us, and I’m supposed to see her privately for an hour once a week. I know Lyyssa means well, but our sessions seem kind of pointless. Dr Mengers is good at taking complicated ideas, like ‘synaptic transmissions’ and ‘declarative memory’ and ‘consolidation in cortical networks’ and explaining them in simple terms. Lyyssa is just the opposite. She takes simple ideas, and explains them in the most complicated words possible. Instead of ‘acting out’, Lyyssa talks about ‘maladaptive coping responses’. Instead of ‘praise’, Lyyssa talks about ‘positive reinforcement’. I bet Lyyssa wishes she was a neurologist, so she could have an excuse for using multi-syllable words all day.
I leave my room, walk down the hall and pass through the common area where Karen is sitting in front of the TV like an obese toad, staring at the screen with her mouth slightly open. Karen is about ten years old with frizzy red hair sprouting from a huge, pumpkin-shaped head that’s attached directly to her neckless blob of a body.
‘An insect’s exoskeleton serves as a protective covering,’ someone on the TV is saying. ‘The exoskeleton also functions as a surface for muscle attachment, and as a sensory interface with the insect’s environment.’
What the person on the TV means is that the exoskeleton is for the bug what a normal skeleton is for us, and that the bug can feel things through its exoskeleton, like we feel and see and hear. But Karen doesn’t understand any of this. That person talking on TV could be saying that a bug’s exoskeleton is made of the same stuff as the chocolate coating on a Magnum ice-cream, and Karen wouldn’t know any different. She’s just watching the TV for something to watch. She might as well be watching a goldfish swimming around in its bowl.
Ignoring Karen, I go down another hall, past the so-called library with its dog-eared books and broken computers. Next is the supplies room where Sky Morningstar, a Non-Resident Counsellor, is showing Jo, a new Non-Resident Counsellor, where to find stuff. Lyyssa’s office is the room on the end. I hesitate a moment, then knock.
‘Hello, Len.’ Lyyssa opens the door to her office. ‘Come in and have a seat. I’ll be with you in a moment.’ Today, Lyyssa’s wearing jeans and a Big Day Out T-shirt. I can’t believe that Lyyssa really went to Big Day Out. Dressing like a kid just out of high school is one of her transparent techniques to make her more ‘accessible’, and so all the better to ‘relate to’ juvenile clients like me.
With Dr Mengers, I feel like a patient. With Lyyssa, I feel like a laboratory experiment.
I sit down at the table and study the only poster on Lyyssa’s wall that interests me: the illegal drug chart. Most of Lyyssa’s posters are illustrated with cute animals, hot air balloons, or rainbows, and feature vaguely inspirational quotations. But the drug poster just lays things out and lets you decide what to think. Drug: cannabis, also known as marijuana, mull, pot, grass, weed. Usually smoked in a hand-rolled cigarette (joint, reefer) or a water pipe (bong). Active ingredient: THC. Effects: relaxation, euphoria, increased appetite, reduced inhibitions. Causes paranoia in some individuals. Long-term side-effects: decreased fertility in males after prolonged heavy usage. To the right of the chart is a picture of a cannabis leaf, some dried marijuana, and a fat joint.
‘So,’ Lyyssa says, taking the seat opposite me, ‘why don’t we start with you telling me about your week.’
I can’t see the point of this, as Lyyssa knows everything I’ve done this week, but I tell her anyway. ‘Um, on Monday I went with you to a school and I took some tests.’
Lyyssa nods encouragingly. ‘And what else?’
‘Well, on Sunday you drove us to the Westgardens Metro.’ Every other week, Lyyssa drives us to a shopping centre so we can spend our pocket money.
‘Did you have a good time?’ Lyyssa asks.
That’s difficult to answer. I was having a good time, in spite of Bindi and Cinnamon sticking together and making rude comments about everyone, but then Karen pissed her pants and we had to cut short our trip. Karen has some weird form of diabetes that makes her wee every five minutes if she forgets to take her medicine. It wasn’t much fun riding home in the van sitting next to Karen, who smelled like a dirty nappy.
‘Yeah, it was all right.’
‘And what else happened to you this week?’ Lyyssa prods.
I got up. I went to bed. In between, I ate and watched television. I worried that they’ll make me go to the same school as Bindi and Cinnamon. Yesterday, I walked around the neighbourhood and looked at all the old houses. This morning, Bindi told me not to touch her skateboard or she’d kill me, even though I was only looking at it.
‘Nothing, really,’ I say to Lyyssa.
A few more minutes of this and I’m allowed to leave. As I close the door to Lyyssa’s office behind me, I see Sky Morningstar and Jo leave the storeroom. I hang back until they disappear around the corner of the hallway, chatting about paperwork and house rules. I’m not sure what Sky Morningstar or Jo do, exactly. They help Lyyssa somehow. They’re both vegetarians. Sky Morningstar is small and pretty, with curly brown hair and brown eyes. She wears skinny jeans and black Converse All-Stars. She’s here four days a week. Jo is taking over from somebody who recently left. Jo will be here one day during the week and on the weekends. She is tall and pale, and wears long plain dresses that come to her ankles, long strings of wooden beads, and thick sandals. She brings her laptop with her to the Refuge and works on it in the dining room.
I wonder what to do with myself for the rest of the day. This morning, I got some paper towels and spray cleaner and cleaned the grime off the blinds in my room, then I got a knife and scraped off all the stupid Lila-Rose & LeeLee stickers that the previous occupant of my room had pasted all over the desk. Lila-Rose & LeeLee Nelson, the tanned, blonde, skinny Malibu Twins. They have their own TV show, their own line of clothing, and starred in four straight-to-video movies. LeeLee went solo for a while and recorded her own CD before she went into treatment for anorexia. Then Lila-Rose went into rehab for alcohol and drug dependence. Tweens all over the world have girl-crushes on both of them. How vomitous.
Karen told me that a girl named Kim used to have this room, but Karen didn’t know what happened to her. Probably, Kim got sent to the Planet for Dorks Who Like Lila-Rose & LeeLee.
In the Refuge, there are safe and unsafe places, safe and unsafe times. I feel safe in my own room with the door shut. When Bindi is gone, I feel safe.
Bindi has hated me since the moment I got here. I don’t know why. Bindi is about fifteen. She’s not what I’d call pretty, but she’s dark and thin and striking, like one of those models in fashion magazines who’s made up to look sick and heroin-addicted. Bindi has papered her walls with pictures of those blank-eyed models that she’s torn from magazines. Whoever decides what goes in those stupid magazines needs to have a look at the methadone clinic a few blocks up the street from here. Then they’d get a clue as to what heroin-addicted really looks like. Real junkies don’t wear ropes of gold necklaces or shoes that cost five hundred dollars.
Bindi has decided that she’s bound for better things than this boring Refuge, like being a dickhead fashion model or a ‘high-class hooker’ (that’s another look that the fashion mags love), so she’s trying to be as troublesome as she can so they’ll let her go. She breaks the house rules, is rude to Lyyssa, bullies Karen, and is working out what she can do to intimidate me. She hasn’t really done anything to me yet except stare at me in a mean way and make a few threats, like the one about her skateboard. I keep quiet when she’s around and pretend I’m not afraid of her. If I don’t show her anything, if she doesn’t know what I want or what I care about or what I’m afraid of, she won’t know how to get at me.
Cinnamon is Bindi’s little hanger-on. Cinnamon is more conventionally pretty than Bindi, with thick brown hair that falls to her waist, a straight nose, and a bee-stung mouth. She’s a bit heavy, but I’ve seen guys turn and stare at her boobs and butt. It’s her eyes that ruin her looks. They’re big, brown, and empty. In one of the old magazines in the library, there’s an interview with a dog breeder who talks about Irish setters, which have been bred for their looks for so many generations that they no longer have any brain to speak of. ‘Those dogs are so dumb, they get lost on the end of their leads,’ the breeder said. That dog breeder could have been talking about Cinnamon.
Cinnamon’s lack of intelligence is probably why she follows Bindi around. I don’t have to worry about Cinnamon unless Bindi is here.
Anyway, both of them will be at school until around four. I decide to have another look in the library, even though my first look in there didn’t exactly thrill me. I open the door and look at the books, some of them lined up neatly, some just piled on top of each other. There are all the standard-issue kids’ books, from Winnie the Pooh to Little House on the Prairie. Nothing new there for me. I move on to the next shelf. Sweet Valley High, The Baby-sitters Club, The Saddle Club, and, wouldn’t you know it, A Twinning Team, by druggy Lila-Rose and skinny LeeLee. Modern trash for tweens.
Tweens. Nobody who is a tween would want to be called a tween. Anyway, I’m older than a tween.
I move on to the next shelf. Issues of Christian magazines probably sent to us by the Foundation, the group of church people who started the Refuge and who are still partly in charge of it. A stupid-looking kids’ book called Bessie Bunton Joins the Circus, with a picture of a fat girl in a tutu on the cover. A dozen or so yellowed and dusty volumes of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. God knows where those came from. And why would anybody want a condensed book? Then there are the brightly coloured paperbacks, obviously bought by Lyyssa, stuff about self-esteem and life choices and mapping your own destiny. These are all in mint condition.
There are a few Mills & Boon novels and a few historical romances. When I came in here the other day, I opened one written by a lady named Serena Delacroix because it had a picture on the cover of a dark-haired man pashing a girl who looked like Cinnamon, but it was so embarrassing I had to stop reading. The story was about Riana, a young English noblewoman who’s kidnapped by a pirate named Cade. The beginning was kind of boring, so I skipped some pages and ended up reading the part where Cade forcibly takes Riana to his bed. She sobs and says she hates him, but secretly realises that she loves him and desperately hopes that she has conceived his son. I closed the book feeling embarrassed to be female. Before I put the book back on the shelf, I wiped the cover with my shirt so that no one can ever find my fingerprints on it and prove that I touched such a stupid book. I have to wonder, who owned that book to begin with, and why the hell did they give it to us?
There are rows of old school textbooks: algebra and trigonometry and history and grammar. A few books seem utterly pointless: Advanced Machine Quilting, Colour Schemes for Australian Homes, and Birthday Cakes for Children.
As I come to the end of the third bookshelf, I see three huge boxes of books stacked on top of one another in the corner. Probably, no one has got around to sorting them yet. The boxes are too heavy for me to lift, so I open the flaps of the top box, pull the books out a few at a time, and set them on the table.
I have hit the jackpot.
I tiptoe to the door and close it very carefully, so that the latch doesn’t even click. Then, working as quietly as possible, I sort the books into three piles.
OKAY
These are the ones I’m too old for, or too young for, or that just don’t interest me. I also put schoolbooks and cookbooks into this pile.
CRAP
All the Mills & Boon-type books go into this pile, along with condensed books, religious stuff, and stupid girl books. Just when I think I’ve got the CRAP sorted, I find So Rich, So Famous by June Collins and two Star Trek books. Three more for the CRAP pile.
MINE
These are the good ones. Or at least they look good. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but what choice do you have? There’s a book on Chinese astrology and a smaller paperback on regular astrology. The dust jacket of the Chinese astrology book is blood red, with black lettering and a gold stencilled picture of a dragon. There are a couple of biographies that look interesting. The biography of Georges Sand is perfectly new – I can tell by the stiffness of the pages that no one has ever opened it.
I’m going to take these books up to my room now and hide them. After all, I’m the one who went to the trouble of sorting them.
A few of the books are just so weird as to defy classification. There’s a very old blue paperback called Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare. There’s an even older blue hardback called The Story of a Piece of Coal: What it is, Whence it Comes, Whither it Goes. I open it – the paper lining the front cover has a pretty floral pattern. It was published in London in 1896, written by Edward A Martin, FGS. I wonder what FGS means. It doesn’t seem very interesting, but there are some nice illustrations of the prehistoric plants that became coal, and of the machines that cleaned and refined the coal.
Before I can stop myself, I’ve constructed one of those impossible dilemmas that I hate but can’t stop making up. What if I’d read every single book in the library and had nothing left except Memoirs of a Midget, The Story of a Piece of Coal, or So Rich, So Famous? And I wasn’t allowed to have any new books until I’d read at least one of them? Which one would I read?
Before I’ve solved that dilemma, I remember the time and glance at my watch. A quarter to four. I’d better get the books up to my room in a hurry. Only one problem: there are too many to carry in one trip. I put the OKAY and CRAP ones back into the boxes, hide half of the MINE pile behind the shelves, and sprint out of the library and up the stairs with the others, which I hide under my bed. I can get the rest of them tomorrow.
I make it to my room just in time. Five minutes later, Bindi and Cinnamon come back from school, slamming the front door behind them. At six we have dinner. Lyyssa or Sky cooks for us four nights a week; on the other three days it’s our own responsibility to look after our meals.
Lyyssa is a good cook, which is surprising, considering how bad she is at everything else. Tonight, she’s cooked a lamb roast so tender it falls off the bone, with mashed potatoes, roast vegetables and gravy. Despite the food always being nice, I don’t enjoy mealtimes. Lyyssa sits at the head of the table, trying to start a conversation that includes everyone. Cinnamon and Bindi ignore everyone else, talking to each other about how much they hate all the teachers at school. Karen pours tomato sauce on everything on her plate, takes huge mouthfuls, and makes disgusting smacking noises as she chews.
I sit at the table eating quietly, trying to tune out Karen’s chewing and Bindi and Cinnamon’s bitchy chattering. I wonder which of the books I’ll start to read first. Maybe I’ll start with one of the astrology books, then . . .
‘You haven’t said much this evening, Len,’ Lyyssa says, breaking my concentration.
I think for a moment. ‘The roast was really nice. You did a really good job cooking.’
Lyyssa beams. ‘Thank you, Len.’
When we’re finished eating, we carry our dishes to the kitchen. Bindi comes up behind me. ‘Suck-arse,’ she hisses into my ear.