No matter how hard I try, I’m still fooled by appearances. I know it’s wrong but I still fall for them. Whether it’s a good-looking boy who I think must be really nice, or a drunk who I cross the street to avoid, or an old lady who I take for granted must be conservative and old-fashioned . . .
I thought Esther was crazy, the way she hums to herself and walks in patterns, the way she collects bits of string and ties them together in a long rope, her endless questions to the kitchen staff about the food they’re serving. Well, she may be crazy but at least she’s interesting and intelligent. I realise that now, after talking to her for hours tonight. We started talking in the bathroom. When I went to wash my hands, standing next to her, I realised she was trying to slip a piece of paper under a silverfish that was scurrying around in the handbasin.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked. It was the first time I’ve ever spoken directly to her. I don’t talk to anyone here much, except Oliver.
‘Saving its life,’ she said. And laughed.
‘Saving its life? Why bother?’
‘Why would I want it to die?’
I just looked at her and she laughed again. Laughter’s not a sound we hear a lot in this place, and Esther’s laugh is quite nice.
‘It’s such a complex little creature,’ she said. ‘So delicate. Imagine how long it’d take to make one, if you were a human insect-maker. You could spend your whole life working on it and still not get even one finished. And we kill them so casually. A quick squish of the finger and a moment later we’ve forgotten that we did it.’
I started to feel guilty. ‘Is that why you’re so fussy about what you eat?’
‘Mmm.’
We got talking about everything then. I leant against the wall for a while, then gradually slid down till I was sitting on the cold white tiled floor. Opposite me, Esther did the same. When we got too cold we moved out to the corridor and went down past the staircase, where there’s a little dead end with a dried-out palm in a pot. We settled there quite comfortably. Esther did most of the talking. She was very interesting. She lives in Sanford but she doesn’t go to school, never has. She is a ‘home schooler’, something I’d never heard of before. It means she does school by correspondence, with her parents helping. They live on a half-hectare block and grow their own vegetables organically and keep chooks and make their own bread and annoy the neighbours. I guess they would, in Sanford. It’s not exactly a suburb filled with hippies—which is what they are, in some ways.
Then everything went wrong. Her mother got sick, really sick, with cancer of the uterus, and she had to spend long periods in hospital. When she wasn’t in hospital she was away in the mountains, or even interstate, trying different cures, natural therapies and stuff. For about fifteen months she wasn’t around much, and Esther’s father couldn’t cope with that, because he depended on her pretty heavily. So he spent most of his time at his mum’s place in the country, having a nervous breakdown.
He wanted Esther to come with him but she wouldn’t. For one thing she wanted to be able to visit her mum in hospital; for another, she felt she had to look after the chooks and the garden; for a third, she doesn’t like her grandmother.
So, for weeks on end, Esther was there alone. ‘I liked it,’ she said, ‘but I think I did go a bit crazy.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked. I was fascinated. There was no-one at my school who lived like this.
‘Oh well.’ She looked at me for a minute, as if working out what she should say. She’s very beautiful, Esther, like a gypsy, with long ringlets framing her dark face, and deep eyes. She always wears orangey-browny-earthy things, and lots of silver jewellery. I’ve never actually met or seen a gypsy, but I imagine that’s how they look.
Finally she decided. ‘I think I have an animal in my head,’ she confessed.
‘An animal?’ I was shocked, but I wanted to laugh.
‘Yes. I know it’s crazy—at least, I think I do—but that’s why I’m in here.’
‘What kind of animal?’
‘Well . . . I’m not sure exactly. A little warm furry one, like a possum or a feather-tail glider.’
‘Um, that does sound pretty weird,’ I said, immediately trying to bite the end off my tongue for saying something so dumb. I was scared that Esther would go into a frenzied fit, foaming at the mouth and trying to kill me.
But she just smiled and said, ‘Exactly!’
‘What’s it like?’ I asked. ‘Having it in there, I mean.’
‘It’s quite nice, really. It probably sounds terrible. But I just feel that it’s there, curled up all warm and nice.’
I didn’t say anything. I was trying to imagine how it would be.
‘Sometimes it moves,’ Esther added, ‘and I feel that, feel it wriggling around, squirming into a new position, to get more comfortable. And sometimes it makes noises.’
‘Noises?’
‘Mmm. Sort of whimpery noises. Little yelps and cries. I guess it’s the noises that put me in here.’
‘They did?’
I gulped. I was scared I was getting in too deep.
‘Mmm. The neighbours heard the noises and they called the cops. You see, I guess the noises must have been coming out of my mouth.’
‘Uh-huh.’
She laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I know I sound like I’m totally out of my tree, and I probably am, but you look like you’re expecting me to jump up at any moment and attack you with a pair of scissors.’
It was exactly what I had been thinking.
‘What happened with your mother and the cancer?’ I asked.
‘She’s fine. She’s in remission, has been for a while now. But Dad’s still living with his mum. I don’t know when he’ll be coming back. I don’t know if he’ll be coming back at all.’
We sat there talking till Hanna came along and shooed us off to our rooms so she could turn the lights out. This place is so hung up on routine—meals, medication, Group, bedtime—everything’s got to be at the exact time or the world will fall off its axis and we’ll all be thrown into space.
So now I’m lying awake thinking about Esther. It was good to talk to her; easier than talking to almost anyone I can name, except maybe Oliver. I don’t know why I was so relaxed. You wouldn’t usually choose to have a conversation with someone who thinks she’s got an animal in her head. I still didn’t say much when I was with her but I felt comfortable.
I think it’s because she didn’t seem like she was ready to criticise, to judge me and find me guilty every chance she got. That’s the way a lot of people have always seemed to me, including some of my so-called friends from school. Girls like Shon. The day I said Kylie Becker was my favourite singer—and I still do like her—God, it was like I’d committed social suicide. Shon didn’t let me forget that for a month. Just because I didn’t choose someone they’d decided was cool . . . It made me wonder if I was allowed to have my own opinion on anything.
I’ve always been like that—afraid of doing the wrong thing, of making a fool of myself—but it’s been a thousand per cent worse since everything happened with Rider Group. I’ve written about some of that already, of course. The first things that went wrong weren’t my fault, nothing to do with me. That company in the Bahamas, that was the first problem. And Mrs O’Shea, the Opposition backbencher asking questions in Parliament: she made her reputation out of Rider Group. She’s a shadow minister now.
But again, that wasn’t me. How could it be? I didn’t know what was going on.
In fact after the TV show things quietened down again. I’d almost forgotten about it by the time the next wave came. It was a monster wave though, a dumper. I opened the paper one morning to get the TV guide. Dad had gone to work early again, Mark was having breakfast with me, Mum wasn’t up yet. And all across the front page was Rider Group. We were bigger than royal divorces. I choked on my Coco Pops and suddenly couldn’t eat any more. I had a horrible feeling that things were getting out of control. I read the front page and the continuation of the story on pages six and seven, trying to hide it from Mark. There were three main points. One was that over the last four months the company in the Bahamas had sent two million dollars to a company in London. And among the directors of that company were Mum, and Jack’s wife Rosie.
The second point came from a document supposedly leaked from the Commission. It was a handwritten note that the newspaper said was in the Deputy Chairman’s writing. It said: ‘Rudi rang again, insisted it must be R., said P. was “waiting impatiently” on our decision.’
This wouldn’t have meant anything to me, but the newspaper helpfully translated it. They said Rudi was Rudi Koneckny, a researcher on the Premier’s personal staff. They suggested P. was the Premier himself, and R. was Rider Group. And they made it pretty clear that if they were right about that, there would be shit flying round in a big way. The Premier had always been so definite that he wouldn’t be involved in the selection process, that it had to be totally impartial, independent, honest.
The third point was that the other two main bidders for the contract were claiming that their bids were higher than Rider Group’s but, as the Commission, the Government and Jack were all refusing to say how much the winning bid was, it was hard to tell whether that story was true or not.
I took the paper into Mum. Her head was somewhere under the pillows. I threw the paper at her and said, ‘There’s some nice news to wake up to,’ and stormed off to the bus. I felt like my life was going to become complicated and bad, and I was right on both counts.