APRIL 15 Once, when I was seven years old, I stole the teacher’s chalk. I needed it, for a game I was playing. A girl in my class, her name was Susanna, told on me, and I was kept in all lunchtime. That afternoon I wagged school for the first time. I looked up Susanna’s address and walked twenty minutes to her house. Having checked there was nobody home, I strangled both her pet rabbits. I can’t tell you how much better that made me feel.
I was sent to see a child psychologist who, according to my parents, diagnosed an overdeveloped revenge instinct. I remember there was a lot of talking, and I was made to draw pictures. At some stage he pronounced me cured. He was wrong.
Last night I saw the Doctor and immediately knew what I have to do. I have no choice. I will kill him. I only caught a glimpse of him, across the ward, acting like any doctor acts, as if the cracks the earthquake opened up are deep enough to swallow his past. I wish I could have kept staring, so he might have turned and caught my eye and seen the murder there. Then he might have felt some of the fear that he deserves. But this is his territory and I am not stupid. Surprise is the only weapon I have. I understand this and so I survive.
Twelve days ago, if you’d asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to say what surviving was, not really. I know it has been twelve days because I heard the newsreader say it, on Lewis’s little plastic radio. He has the bed across from me, although he is almost never in it. He is a wanderer, padding up and down the ward all day, his bare feet quiet on the sticky floor. Cleaning comes last, in times like these. His radio is always with him, pressed close to his ear while his free hand fumbles with the opening of his hospital pyjamas, as if he is showing the world how little he has left. Or perhaps he is just pretending, the same way I am. Perhaps he has his own reasons.
Twelve days since the earthquake. The looting is finally under control, if the radio is telling the truth. The road north has reopened, but only to official traffic, and they’re saying the airport might never be rebuilt. So people couldn’t visit me, even if anyone knew I was here. The power is still out, apart from emergency generators. The official death toll stands at seven hundred and twenty-three.
Then Lewis’s instincts took him out into the corridor, beyond hearing range, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
Twelve days. There were definitely five days in the bush, I remember that much. And this is the second day in here, since I stopped taking the pills they bring around on the silver trolley with its deranged wheel. So five days are missing. Days spent lying out in the paddock, before I was found, or out cold in here, with lines of forgetting feeding my wrist. Plenty of time for the Doctor to make his plans, to invent excuses for the drugs he thinks he is giving me. Well I have plans of my own now, plans I will not let him see. Plans of rabbits, plans of revenge. Plans to turn surviving into living again.