The cute little social worker looked more intimidating and official than she had at the house. Suit jacket, gold hoop earrings, ramrod straight behind an enormous desk in an overcrowded office. Still cute, though. She reminded him of the girls he hung out with at college. If things were different he might even ask her out. If there wasn’t an ongoing family crisis under her supervision. If his body wasn’t yearning for Mercy and his heart for the kids. If eighty-eight per cent of his attention wasn’t taken up by the excruciating pain in his mouth. If that percentage wasn’t going up by the minute.
‘We knew there was a risk that making the home physically safe for Nicole would cause distress,’ Ada said.
‘Yeah,’ Will agreed. ‘I think my sister might have gone overboard. She does that. Sorry.’
‘Your sister has done her best to deal with a very challenging situation. Hoarding disorder is tough. The danger of not intervening can be high, but the fallout of intervening is, well …’ She gestured down the hall where his aunty was, presumably, having bandages put over her bandages, stitches over her stitches.
Ada told him that she’d referred Aunty Nic to a service which ran group cognitive behaviour therapy sessions. The success rate was, she said, very good ‘for this condition’.
His phone pinged in his pocket. Could be Mercy. Or Nic, of course. Lena. He apologised for the interruption, pulled it out and saw Anton, which meant nothing to him. He slid it back into his pocket, picked up the thread with Ada: ‘What’s “very good” for this condition?’
She smiled, pretty and sad and sorry. ‘Traditionally we see under fifteen per cent of people treated for hoarding disorder make any substantial change in behaviour. This group has been reporting over thirty per cent.’
‘So even with the best treatment, chances are it’s not going to be fixed.’ Creepy to hear himself saying such similar words to those he’d said before, in a hospital across the city, his mum and sister with him then, his dad rather than aunty down the hallway. On that day, he’d wondered if it was all just a scam, medical science. These big buildings and well-dressed, expensively trained staff and million-dollar equipment, and still they couldn’t do fuck-all to save the life of a father of two in his mid-thirties. Now he thought: psychology, psychiatry, all that’s bullshit, too. Nobody knows how to fix anything. It’s all just bandaging up and calming down, pills and action plans to make you feel in control of the random and unfixable horror. And for him, not even that. Not even some decent fucking drugs to make him forget his mouth was rotting from the inside out.
‘Realistically, we’re not trying to fix it,’ Ada was saying. ‘We’re just trying to find a way for Nicole to live safely with her condition.’ ‘What if we found out what caused it? I read it can start with a trauma. If we knew what the trigger was, would that help?’
‘If that’s something your aunt wants to explore in therapy she can. I wouldn’t speculate. Sometimes there’s an obvious trigger, sometimes hoarding behaviour is situational, like in times of scarcity. And sometimes it creeps up over years and it’s impossible to say when a tendency to overbuy or under-discard becomes full-blown hoarding disorder. There’s diagnostic criteria for the condition once it’s active, but not to identify its potential cause or causes.’
At his local up in Mackay the old-timers would sometimes see fit to educate the younger drinkers about the way things used to be and the changes they’d seen. Some were obvious—technology and all that. But sometimes one of them would sniff and wrinkle his nose, say the rain doesn’t smell like it used to, and two or three others would nod solemnly, agree that there was something off about the smell this year. Sometimes the thing they’d talk about was the feel of the wind, drier and fiercer. Can’t measure it, but it’s different all right. The bugs and snakes, they talked about, too. The former down to city levels, the latter slinking up into everyone’s houses. No one was counting, understand. But you heard much more often these days about some poor bugger meeting one when he got up in the night for a piss or a kid finding one of them coiled up in their toy box, that was for sure.
The heat, now that you could measure, could see the changes on a weather map. The eggheads at BOM had even come up with new colours to accurately show it to those who demanded proof. The deep crimson and purple of imminent death, as Mercy said (cheerfully). The old men didn’t need any new colours, any time-lapse maps. They knew there was a time when you could walk on the road without shoes and not scald your soles. At least in bloody August!
What they couldn’t tell you, these old men, was when these changes happened. Not like the new Centrelink system which meant you got your pension straight into your bank account every Thursday instead of passed to you over a counter in a yellow envelope. There was a specific date that happened, even if you didn’t care to remember it. And not like the internet or satellite TV, which got more common as time went on, but whose introduction you could pinpoint to a particular week in a specific month in a verifiable year. No, the smell and wind and heat snuck up on them all. Which was the day it became definitely bad, no one could say, but bad it definitely was.
Was it like that for Aunty Nic? Day after day after day of one more towel or ornament or pillow or hand cream or book, until she couldn’t use the bath because it was full, found herself walking from the bedroom door to her bed without her feet touching the ground, and she genuinely didn’t know how it had happened? It wasn’t like she was having shipping containers emptied out into her hallway. Just ordinary items carried in one at a time. One thing cannot make such a difference, can it? A single towel or ornament or pillow or hand cream or book cannot instantly transform a house full of belongings into a hoard.
He’d missed the end of Ada’s spiel, but it was obviously finished because she was standing and placing a stack of brochures—the same ones Lena hadn’t bothered to read, he supposed—in his hands. She said she’d take him down to the area where he was supposed to wait for Aunty Nic, and as they wound through corridors and down some stairs and across a courtyard, then through a large echoey foyer, he was trying to think of a non-addict-sounding way to ask Ada whether a random GP could see when he’d last been to a different GP and that he’d asked for codeine. It was only when she squeezed his hand and said stay in touch with a questioning lilt that it twigged she might have thought he was working up the nerve to ask her out, that she wanted him to.
He sank into a squeaky orange chair, mouth hinged open to minimise the pain. He pulled out his phone and it took a couple of seconds to match the name Anton with the idea of a person he once knew. Before prison and Queensland, he and Anton had been mates. Last year Anton had messaged him on Facebook and, after the predictable back and forth about jobs, marriage, kids etc., they’d exchanged numbers on the off chance Anton would follow through on his plan to head north for a bit. Weird that he knew Will was back in town. He’d told no one, been nowhere except this damn hospital.
The message was long and confusing. He needed to stop and reread every few words.
hey mate long time no see still planning to come up and see you in qld just need to sort stuff out here first i feel shit about this and didnt know if i shld tell you but asked around and fellas said you should know pretty sure its your sister sorry mate but id wanna know if it was my sister take care
He read the whole thing through twice again before he realised there was another message beneath it, this one a link.
Back at the house he got Nic into bed, helped her take some painkillers, said he’d check in on her in a bit. His own pain was so bad he wanted to die. First, though, he would murder Anton for sending him that link. Then that smug pubeless fucker in the clip. If he could even find him. Cowardly shithead hiding his face while Lena was easily identifiable to anyone who’d ever seen her in a t-shirt.
That scar. Bane of his cursed fucking life. She was nine and he thirteen, and they were fighting over something. It didn’t matter what. That year she’d had a growth spurt and he hadn’t and it felt like a personal attack. Four years between them, but her suddenly so tall that people just had to comment. Look out, Will, your little sister’s catching up on you! He felt mocked by her height. Like she was growing to humiliate him. He found any excuse to make her cry.
This day he’d been yelling at her in the yard and she turned and ran for the front door. He thought she was going to dob or maybe he just felt enraged at her leaving before he was done. He streaked after her, could have caught her easy but didn’t want to wrestle. She might have been slower but she was strong and not afraid to bite. He ran past her—it was a matter of seconds, the yard was not large—and reached the front door of the apartment block, open as it always was during the day. Cackling he slipped inside and slammed it closed.
He hadn’t taken more than three fast steps when something hard slapped the top of his back. The sound of glass hitting timber and the realisation he was surrounded by jagged shards of the door’s thick yellow glass. One near his bare left foot was as long as his arm. Feet frozen he reached behind him to touch the place he’d been hit. Tender but dry. His shirt was unripped. Must have been struck by a flat edge.
Lena screamed and he turned as fast as he could without lifting his feet off the ground. Swivel, swivel, swivel. She stood with her hands clamped together over her chest. He couldn’t see why she was screaming, told her to calm down, but then the blood started running through the cracks in her fingers and he saw the dark patch spreading fast over the centre of her pale pink t-shirt.
It was her left arm, cut deep and ugly when it went right through the slamming door she was trying to stop. It was her arm and it was bad, but just her arm. Still, when he remembers that afternoon he feels the panic, the certainty that she was clutching her heart, that the blood in her hands, on her shirt, was heart blood. It was only her arm, he told himself, told others—the letdown at the end of the dramatic story—just her arm. Only that. Only that.
For over a decade he’d hoped that one day he’d be able to see the scar and not re-experience the five seconds in which he was sure he’d killed her. Hoped and wished and tried and ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Good joke, universe! Now when he saw her arm he would think instead of her grinding on top of a waxed and spray-tanned college fuckboy. And so would everyone else she knew and lots of people she didn’t.
What the actual living fuck was he supposed to do?
The blister pack in his hand offered a suggestion. Yes. Good. That’d be a start. He swallowed two of Aunty Nic’s Endones with a handful of water straight from the tap. Crawled under the blankets on the lounge. Scrolled through Facebook, clicked on a link about a species of antelope nearly wiped out in a month. Bacteria living in their guts ever since the species existed, got too warm and killed the lot of them. Almost the lot of them. It could happen to us. Who knew what lurked inside us waiting for activation. He texted Lena, fast, without thinking, before he faded out to blissful nothing.