Smashed (8 page)

There’s a couple of nursing staff sitting with their back to me, monitoring a stack of computer screens with beeping lights and mesmerising heartbeat lines. It’s not a
ward like I expected, but one big room partitioned off in curtained segments, with the staff right in the middle so they can see all the patients. There’s a whiteboard full of patients’ names, and I can see Don’s name scrawled up there — Cubicle Two. The trouble is, if I just go in they’re bound to see me and tell me to piss off. So I hang back, wondering what the hell to do.

A terrible alarm bell starts up in the nurses’ station, nearly giving me a heart attack, and the nurses rush to one of the cubicles, pulling around curtains to shield what they are doing from view. The tension’s so high I reckon I can almost see it shimmering around the room, but I also know this is my chance to sneak inside. I have to block out the thought of whatever’s happening in that cubicle and make my move.

The first bed I pass contains a massive whale of a guy, and there are awful sucking noises coming from him. He’s so huge his body smothers the whole bed and drips off the sides. Just lying there, on his back, must squeeze his internal organs half to death. I figure it’s his heart that’s failing, cos he’s strung up in a high-tech spider’s web of respirators, tubes and monitors.

The two nurses murmur and move around in that blocked-off cubicle. I figure time is short, so hurry on. If the whale guy’s in Cubicle One, then logic says the next
cubicle is number two, and that means Don.

Oh man. My hand instinctively shoots up to my mouth to hold in this great wailing moan that’s threatening to erupt from me. A sign above his bed confirms that this deformed, bandaged mummy on the bed is Don, but I never would have recognised him otherwise. His head is monstrous, damn near twice its normal size; his eyes dark pools of angry bruising, stark against the bandages. From what I can see under the respirator mask, his nose is mashed, and there’s this tube going down his throat, between swollen, cracked lips, to help him breathe.

A rush of nauseating heat sweeps over me, and my knees start to buckle. It’s all I can do to make it safely to the floor and stick my head between my knees to stop myself from passing out. Whooshing white static blocks out every other sound as blood hydroslides around the bony spirals in my ears. But as my brain slowly starts to clear, I know absolutely that I just couldn’t have done this to him —
it wasn’t me
. I’m so relieved I start to cry, pathetic big-girl’s-blousey tears dripping down onto the floor like leaking taps.

‘Who the hell are you?’ The voice comes out of nowhere, and I scramble back to my feet before my eyes have cleared enough to see.

The person who takes shape in front of me is not a
nurse. She’s a girl — my age, maybe a little younger, it’s hard to tell. She’s scruffy haired, with sunken shadows underneath dark brown eyes. Eyes that seem incredibly familiar, like I’ve seen them lots of times before … eyes like Don’s.

‘You’re Danica!’

Don’s sister must’ve been about eleven when I saw her last — a scrawny kid so withdrawn and grumpy that I’m sure I never heard her speak. There was something going down between his parents and the grandmother who Danica went to live with, and I know Don had almost given up on seeing her again. The fact that she’s been recognised seems to freak her out, and her frown draws angry lines between her mouth and chin. She crosses her arms and sets her feet apart to staunch me out, and speaks real slow, as if she’s talking to a halfwit.

‘Who … are … you?’

Now, I gotta say this is potentially quite tricky. How much does she know, and what, exactly, does she think? ‘I’m a friend of Don’s …’ Even as I say this, I get a flash of Rita’s accusing eyes. Did I say
friend
? ‘We were at school … Toby … that’s my name. I think we’ve met.’ I put my hand out, all formal, and she eyeballs me as she shakes it. Her hand is even smaller than my own, her fingers long and brown and thin. ‘Are you okay?’ I ask. It must be
pretty weird for her to see Don for the first time in years when he’s in this state.

She doesn’t have time to answer. Behind her, the curtains of the cubicle opposite are swept apart by one of the nurses. ‘Oh. Hello?’ She looks rattled. There’s a young woman lying in the cubicle, moaning and struggling as the other nurse straightens up her bed. Compared to the whale of a man in Cubicle One, the poor thing hardly raises a blip beneath the sheets. There’s an older woman snoring softly in a recliner chair next to the bed, and I’m guessing she’s the mother. She must be zonked, cos despite the alarm bells and curtain-pulling it looks as though she hasn’t stirred.

‘Is … he okay?’ I jerk my head towards Don, trying not to look at him too closely. It’s just so gross.

‘If you’re not family, you’re not supposed to be in here.’ The nurse stifles a yawn behind her hand and edges past me, into the cubicle, to check on Don. She fiddles with a drip that’s pumping clear fluid into his arm. Checks the monitor above his bed. Now she gently opens up his eyelid and shines in a beam from a tiny torch. The white of his eye is horror-movie bloodshot, like the fake eyeballs we used to buy at toy shops around Halloween: one large fully dilated pupil set in red jelly. It’s disgusting. Terrible. And my knees are going to give way again if
I don’t get the hell out of this cubicle right now.

I lurch out into the corridor, and cool my forehead against the wall. If I can just force my mind back to what happened at the waterfront that night … somehow it must hold the key. The image I have of Don’s face that night is that it’s smashed alright — blood dripping from his nose and mouth. But it’s nothing like this. Nothing. What on earth happened?

‘Have you any idea who the bastard was who did this?’ Danica has followed me out.

‘Not a clue.’ I’m amazed she isn’t pointing the finger at me or Dad, like everyone else so far.

She studies me through lowered lids. ‘I remember you now, come to think of it. You’re the young one — the nerdy kid.’ She must see the colour flush back into my face, because she grins. ‘Sorry.’

All of a sudden she slithers down the corridor wall until she’s sitting on the floor.

‘His brain’s all swollen and they’re going to cut a dirty big hole in his skull to release the pressure of the blood.’ She hiccups back a sob. ‘I couldn’t bear it if he died.’ Her gaze meets mine, then scoots away.

But for all my shock at Don’s appearance, her words leave me strangely unmoved. All I can think about is Rita, and
her
pain. If it was Rita lying there in hospital I’d give
anything to save her. What Don didn’t think about, before he forced himself on her, was how it would affect her life — her whole life — from that moment on. He may die in here, or end up like a vegetable, but Rita’s just as hurt as he is.

The ugly little reptile part of my brain starts pumping angry hormones back into my system and I feel them start to wind me up. It’s like the caveman and the civilised part of me are having this bloody great tug-of-war inside my head. The cave man’s all for smashing skulls; the civilised little nerd’s all for swallowing the anger down and making peace. And I’m so stupidly caught up in this I don’t realise Danica is crying till she takes a sodden tissue from her sleeve and blows her nose. She gets up then, dismisses me with one sharp look. ‘You’d better go.’

‘Hey, I’m sorry … you know, about Don.’

She’s already disappearing through the door back to intensive care. She stops, but doesn’t turn around. ‘Yeah,’ she says, without a backward glance, then goes back in.

I
t’s still dark as I walk home from the hospital, though there are signs of a new day stirring. A
street-cleaning
truck rumbles along, its flashing yellow light reflecting as bright streaks of colour in the shop windows, and there’s a light on in the bakery beside the bus stop, where someone must be mixing up the doughnuts and sweet pastries the local school kids flock to buy.

Seeing Don has changed everything. For a start, the gnawing fear that I could’ve been the one who did this to him has dispersed. There’s just no way in hell I could have, and the fact that someone else has just makes me sick. Not that I forgive Don, though — that’s the other thing I realise now. I had thought that seeing him might take the sting out of what he did to Rita but, if anything, it’s made it worse. How is Rita s’posed to deal with her anger now he’s lying there like some Egyptian mummy? How am I? To confront him now is useless. It’s just not fair.

This fairness thing’s a funny one. When you’re a kid you’re programmed into thinking that everything should be fair — but I don’t know exactly where this thinking comes from. Because there certainly isn’t any evidence of it once you’re old enough to stop and think. I mean, when we’re young we’re told to be fair to everyone — share our sandpit, playdough, potato chips and favourite toy — and our parents spend our childhoods telling us what’s right or wrong. I don’t know how it happens, but right and wrong somehow come to mean that if you do things right you’ll get rewarded and if you don’t you’ll go to hell … Maybe that’s where it all comes from — religion and the fires of hell, or being reincarnated as a dung beetle, or your next life being total shit because karma’s paying you back for being such a bastard in your former life … I guess it’s just another way of keeping us in line — waving the big black stick of punishment above our heads.

But that notion of fairness really talks about
reward
— that something good will happen if we toe the line. Like good old reciprocal altruism — you do something good for me and I’ll do something good for you. A
pay-off.
Yet, in Darwin’s eyes, the pay-off probably meant the success of your gene pool, while today’s big winners lust for squillions in the bank, a giant plasma TV and a
big-boobed
supermodel wife. Not so different from cavemen
after all, I guess — everyone’s still fighting for the biggest, prettiest and best.

Only, here’s the thing … life
isn’t
fair. If it was, Rita wouldn’t be tossing and turning in her bed right now, and Don would be … Don would be … Don would be what? Sitting in a prison cell? Before a firing squad? Writing out one hundred million times
No means no?

I’m kind of buzzing from everything that’s happened, and the thought of going back to bed is crazy now. Instead, I decide to drop past Carl’s place — he’ll think nothing of me dragging him away from sleep. And now I’m convinced in my own mind that I’m innocent of smashing Don up like that, I figure I can face Carl’s questions and help put him straight.

It’s a bit of a detour to his house, up around the old folks’ home they’ve built on the old rugby park and through the belt of pine trees that runs up the hill. It’s starting to get lighter now, and there’s nothing even distantly creepy about the place this time of day. The strong, minty scent of pine rises from beneath my feet, and I jog up the last part of the hill, even though my lungs start screaming from the strain.

Carl’s place still lies in darkness, so I quietly work my way around the side of the house and across the garden to his sleep-out. His parents built it specially
when he totally refused to leave home. That’s Carl all over. He rampages around like a psycho — drinking, drugging, playing up — but he’s way too scared to leave the safe protection of his parents’ place. He’d deny this if you asked him, but I’ve seen the panic in his eyes whenever the topic comes up. I reckon it’s because the ADHD affects the way his brain is wired: he has trouble remembering the simplest of instructions, has the time sense of a flea, and ‘hopeless’ isn’t a strong enough word to describe the way he handles anything to do with money. Not that he ever has any — he has a knack for getting jobs, but losing them in record time. He says the bosses don’t appreciate his unique wit; I reckon his hyperactive craziness just drives them mad. The chef at one café he worked in got so sick of Carl’s constant yodelling that he taped his mouth shut, tied his hands behind his back with apron strings and hung him from the coat rack just to shut him up!

Besides, it’s just as well he still lives at home — he’s on two years’ probation, and if he screws up one more time he’ll probably be sent to jail. I don’t know how his parents managed to get him off with just probation for the last offence — the silly bugger got caught selling his Ritalin to kids at school. It probably wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t started working on his criminal record at the
age of six, filling all his classmates’ lunchboxes with mud, then threatening the teacher who discovered him with scissors he had nicked from class. His list of crimes just spread from there … the time he smuggled home an otter from the zoo; stole the fancy Mercedes badge off his neighbour’s car; set fire to a derelict house; scared an old lady half to death by falling through her skylight while tap-dancing across the rooftops of the old folks’ home last Halloween … the list goes on. Most of them start out as pranks — he thinks they’ll be a damn good laugh — but, as the list grows bigger and he’s old enough to cop the blame, he’s running out of chances and what seemed kind of funny for a little kid looks plain irresponsible now he’s nineteen.

I lightly tap on the closed door of the sleep-out and slip inside. It smells like a thousand socks have died and decomposed in here, and I have to pick my way through a tide of dirty plates and cups to reach his bed.

Carl’s squinting through the gloom, half asleep. ‘What’s the time?’

‘Dunno,’ I say. ‘Maybe four.’

He groans. ‘Are you out of your freaking mind?’ He switches on his bedside light, and both of us shield our eyes from the glare until our pupils adjust. ‘S’up?’

‘I’ve just seen Don.’

‘Again?’ He’s looking at me with an edgy stare I can’t quite read. Then it hits me: he hasn’t heard about the assault. He inhabits such a tangled world sometimes he doesn’t even keep up with what week it is, let alone what’s happened in the last few days.

‘He got beaten up the other night. Seriously munted. He’s coma’d out in intensive care.’

‘Intensive care?’
His eyes pop fully open now and he scratches his tangled blond hair, big scaly patches of dry scalp raining down around him. ‘So it
was
you, you bastard.’

‘What d’you mean?’ I bark. ‘I didn’t do it!’

‘Pull the other one,’ he sneers. His face is puckered in disgust, and his mouth starts twitching like he’s holding back more words.

‘I didn’t, man. How can you even think that? I swear, it wasn’t me.’

‘Bullshit.’ Carl flops back in the bed, his hands over his eyes. ‘How bad is he?’

His voice sounds low and mechanical, like he can’t quite take it all in, while mine wobbles all over the place as I describe the state Don’s in — his swollen head, his smashed-up eyes. Carl’s face morphs from shocked to disbelieving when I try to convince him I was far too drunk and wimpy to have done the deed.

‘Messy.’ His gaze drops from mine, and I can’t decide if he believes me. He stares off into space, picking at a scaly patch of eczema on his neck. ‘Who d’you reckon did it then?’

‘Dunno.’ No point telling him about the cops’ visit and their stupid suspicions about Dad — that’ll only make things worse. Carl’s screwing up the duvet cover, tugging at it, rolling it, and it’s so intense I try a diversionary tactic to break the mood. ‘His sister Danica was there — at the hospital — just now.’

‘Yeah?’
Thank god.
In typical airhead-Carl fashion, he moves right on. He shoots out of bed and drags his jeans on over his frayed Bart Simpson boxer shorts. ‘Is she a babe?’

I think back to our meeting, to Danica’s sad brown eyes. She looks so much like Don it freaks me out. But, now that Carl’s suggested it, I guess she is. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘She’s a babe.’

He lights up a cigarette and blows the smoke straight at me. ‘
She got de gold mine, I got de shaft
,’ he squawks, clutching his crotch. He laughs maniacally then, and scrabbles over the littered floor towards the door. ‘Come on,’ he orders, ‘the old lady’s got some cold roast beef.’

It never ceases to amaze me how his stomach goes from sleep-mode to starving in no time flat. He’s out the
door and traipsing bare-chested across the lawn before I’ve even stood up. Still, now that he’s mentioned it, food sure does sound good.

I follow after him, thinking of Danica, and the way her eyes lit up for that one second when she grinned.

The sun is just lighting the eastern hills as I finally make it back home. All the walking, and a stomach full of
slab-like
sandwiches, has worn me out, and I can hardly keep my eyes open as I sneak back down the hallway towards my bed. A gentle, purring snore drifts out from Mum and Dad’s room and it’s hard to tell who’s making it, though Mum would probably blame Dad.

I’m just creeping past Rita’s room when I hit a squeaking floorboard and she whispers, ‘That you, Tobe?’

‘Yeah.’

I slip in through her door to find her sitting up in bed, fully awake. She looks completely wired, her eyes like bright, burning coals.

‘Where’ve you been?’

I make my way across her untidy floor — the only quirk she shares with Carl — and sit down on the end of her bed. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I say. 

She nods, like she knows how I feel, but continues to watch and wait for me to say more.

There’s a little voice inside me yelling
coward
, and not just because I’m afraid to tell her I’ve seen Don. I’m also scared what she’ll think when she finds out I didn’t have the guts to front up to him after all … that someone other than her loyal, self-sacrificing ant-brother made him pay.

‘I went to Carl’s.’

Rita nods and rests back slightly on her pillows. She sighs — the kind of world-weary, disappointed way adults sigh. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve got you in trouble, Tobe.’ Her face screws up and she’s crying so suddenly, and so hard-out, it breaks my heart.

I hug her, patting her awkwardly on the back as great heaving sobs rock through her. Everything’s so incredibly screwed up it’s hard to think, hard to know what to say. ‘It’s not your fault, okay? It’s not,’ I try. I think of Don lying there, blissfully unaware of what he’s done, while we’re all trying to deal with it. If I knew a way to turn off
my
brain right now I’d do it too.

‘Don’t worry about the cops,’ I say. I have to reassure her that it’s not her fault. ‘I really didn’t do it, Rits. I’d arranged to go and meet him there — thought I’d give him a good bollocking — but I got too pissed.’
Jesus, I’m 
pathetic
. ‘I saw him, kind of beaten up … but not
too
bad.’ It’s funny as I say this now, it all floods back. ‘Someone had punched him in the gob, had broken his nose maybe, at worst … but he was still talking — raving really — and I just felt so sick, so damn disgusted with him, that I left him there … lying on the ground like that, pleading up at me for help … and the next thing I remember I was waking up back on Mount Vic …’

Rita swivels around, so she can see my face. ‘You didn’t even punch him once?’ She hiccups, dislodging another overflow of tears.

‘I wanted to.’ I feel like a failed hit-man, up before the big boss-man to plead my case. Where on earth’s the sense in this? I understand her need to see Don punished, but I’m not sure she appreciates the awful cost. ‘I’ve seen him, Rits. That’s where I’ve been. He’s every bit as munted as those cops said. He’s smashed to hell. He could well die.’

Next thing she up and punches me so hard on the arm she almost knocks me off the bed. ‘Thanks a bunch,’ she spits out. ‘Now I feel
really
great.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make it sound —’

A howl erupts from deep inside her, like a wild animal that’s cornered by a hunter and knows it’s doomed. ‘You don’t understand! None of you understand!’ She pushes
me away from her, slapping at me frantically. ‘Go away. Leave me alone.’ She turns her back on me and pulls the covers up over her head. I’m left sitting here staring at this angry lump without a clue what to do. Everything I try is wrong.

I turn to find Dad, naked but for undies, standing at the door. I’ve no idea how long he’s been there, but he holds my gaze as if he’s downloading everything that’s taken place out through my eyes. I shrug.

He stands aside and follows me through to my room. ‘You saw Don then?’

Snapped.

Dad’s head is cocked slightly to one side. ‘You alright, mate?’

‘Dunno.’ It’s all I can manage to get out. My chin has another awkward wobble on.

Dad comes over and musses up my hair before he plants a kiss on my head. ‘Get some sleep, eh? I’ll deal with Rits.’