BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS

What I like is to give myself distractions each week. Something knows I won’t be here next week. Then I can wonder, how did the days go by so quick? Hurtling around a no-future future, like the red circle of salt around my birthday, yet that calendar has aged two years. Perhaps it’s all the blue-stone and pepper and sulphur and God knows. I sink lower onto my double-edged sword. Quiet, unnoticed, pathetic, but asleep.

There was hurried scribbling out, remembering the fear that was being sectioned and how much she really didn’t need that right now. Small arrows to the words that were being suffocated by shiny mauve-reflecting biro ink.

Sorry I started rambling. I don’t like the way it sounds. Should I write in present tense instead? Would that be better? OK.

Well, a boy just came out of one of the clinic doors and sometimes I wonder … I wonder what would happen if I knew how to talk to people.

He’s very tall. If I asked, conversationally, offhand, maybe, just maybe, he’d reply.

He’d tell me his height.

He’d say he’s six foot two.

I’d say, that’s funny since I’m just under six feet, too. Going under, soft and pretty, like Ophelia in the water.

I’ll breed my death out of the hollows of these awkward spindly limbs.

She went to scribble over the confession, but stopped with the sudden wave of callousness.

In a week, maybe? A month? Soon I hope. Isn’t that funny. I’m funny, so funny, watch me. Please let me make you laugh some more. At least it makes me worth being around. Get another kick, go show your colleagues. I want hair around my head to float like a tiara, but instead I layer mascara and swallow pills.

“Can you do me a solid?”

Cathy sat up, her wrist jerking in a nervous spasm that sent a scrawl of ink across the angry flurry on her page. She looked up like a scared fawn staring down the barrel of a gun, making a noise somewhere between “Yeah” and “Huh, what!”

He sat down. An outsider would have thought he’d kicked in her spine.

“Wow! That’s so deep and artistic. What’s it for?” smirked the figure that had just slid out of one of the office doors to sit right next to her. In a room. Full of chairs. Right next to her.

Cathy immediately sensed the clear sarcasm and felt the oncoming mental breakdown she’d have over it later. Choking out all questions about his supernatural reading skill.

“Oh-oh no. It’s so stupid. I have to do this, you know, for my psychologist. It’s a joke. It’s not serious. My brother wrote it. I …“

He cut her off. Bored. Slumping downwards in the seat, his heavy boots sliding across the crisp white lino. “D’you go to Mira Lopez?”

She took him in shyly for the first time. A taller boy with skin the colour of maple syrup, steely grey eyes and tangled black hair around his ears and jaw. It inched threateningly close to his right eye and she sensed it as an endearing trait, that it often blinded him.It made him less intimidating.

“I uh yeah ... You’re in my year,” she said, recognising his fur-trim parka. She always saw him wearing that black parka. Their private school wouldn’t allow his oversized jacket. It was like he was a cartoon character, or must have always been perpetually cold.

“You’re?”

“Lyall,” he answered, rolling the word around his snake-bitten mouth.

“U-uh, I’m Cathy,” she said, even though he hadn’t asked.

“Cathy.” He tried the word out, raising his eyebrows “Ca-thy, Cathy Cathy, Ca …” The door he’d come through was being unlocked from the inside. He hurriedly demanded:

“Cathy, d’y’really wanna go to school?”

“No, not particularly.”

He grabbed her arm and started walking towards the door. She froze. A lady wearing a lanyard stepped out from the unlocked door and Lyall jerked a thumb in Cathy’s direction “My foster-sister.”

The woman raised her thin eyebrows but retreated back inside the door. Cathy’s eyes roamed to the sign above the door as Lyall guided her closer to the exit.

Methadone, Violence and Suicidality clinic.

Dear Doctor, Loneliness does strange things to a person. For example, as I walked to Lyall Thrope’s car I found swallowing a panic attack had never been this serene.

“Your eyes are fucking massive,” he said coolly from beside Cathy. “Sorry,” she sighed. Then she cleared her throat. “I drifted off. I’m ... tired.” He smiled, yet it did not thaw the cold slate in his eyes. “Lucky you.”

He nodded to the open can of Red Bull she clasped, as if in prayer. She nodded shyly and drank, desperate to be polite to the absent boy who’d given it to her.

On analysis, the case of Catherine Geist and Lyall Thrope was blurry. The motivations for action were almost comedic. The notes were easy to misconstrue. Quickly, the question – Why did Cathy follow a boy to a car he wasn’t even old enough to drive? – led to: Why did she take a drink from an open can with unknown contents? Assuredly, these were the simpler of the questions, but the first nonetheless. The first.

They reached a dented taupe-coloured car. Once they did, Cathy couldn’t remember where the dream started and ended. She felt nauseous getting into the car, stumbled, everything shifted and was violently duplicated. She said something that came to her mind and heard Lyall swear and laugh nervously in response. She smiled giddily as he turned the key. The drumbeat to ‘Where did you sleep last night?’ was disconnected, like watching a video that was five seconds behind, or remembering that cartoons aren’t actually speaking. She turned to look out the window but her rocking vision pinned the focus to the handle.

There was no handle.

The Red Bull can, his abrupt proposal, the fact that he wasn’t old enough to drive. As she faded from consciousness her smile did not falter.

“Thank you.”

For the first time, Cathy saw a rare sight. Genuine shock in Lyall Thrope’s eyes.

A car passed. The white headlights sliding under a lifeless girl’s sleep-glued eyelashes. The cold snake of light possessed her awkward bones; they twitched violently awake. The fear that held these limbs together at their joints whirred back to life. She sat up in the carseat. Shaking fingers like sewing pickers pulling apart the mascara bonds between spider legs. She coughed. Coughed harder. Coughed until her shiny pink stomach contracted and warmth rose higher in her plastic doll entrails.

Lyall silently rolled down the window. Reluctantly obedient, she stuck her head out the open car window, she leant her weight and spat out the contents of her mouth. Warm rusty blood. It swam through the rushing wind of the motorway. From the side of the road a fox watched her small body’s grotesque dry heaving. Illuminated with the romantic flashes of a ghostly roadside glow, her chest rose and fell, her bones rattled like dice, breathing, juddering like there was a spanner in the works of her body. She looked up at the large McDonald’s billboard but the tv glow didn’t feel soft and warm; it felt empty.

“Oh my God.” It started as a whisper. She gripped the car door. “Oh God!” she sobbed hysterically into the dark. The tremors convected from her chest to her shoulders and culminated in sharp repetitive hair tugging, frustration and despair she couldn’t bring herself to inflict upon the driver.

“Cathy, sit. Cathy! You’ll get us arrested.”

She did not comply. Her right hand grasped at the hollow where the door handle should have been. She bordered on climbing free from the window. The dizzy red needles in her body rushed to her limbs again and the drive was to run. Run from what? She wasn’t angry at her captor. She was afraid of something nonetheless. Only when Lyall resorted to clicking the window’s up switch and glass pressed into Cathy’s stomach did she struggle free and flop back into the leather seat.

“Breathe. Jesus Christ!”

Intent not to be a nuisance to her potential murderer. She counted to seven and focused on the lights of the dash and radio.

“He hit me so hard I saw stars, he hit me so hard I saw God,” the stereo sang.

“H-how long have I been out?” she asked, instead of Why is my system full of Rohypnol?

“Since 2pm. It’s 11pm.”

“Our curfew is 10pm. It’s a Wednesday.” The reply was a sad fun fact, not a scolding. He didn’t answer but as Courtney Love stopped singing and the whispers of ‘Lullaby’ by The Cure replaced them, he pursed his red-tinted mouth to hold back a smirk.

Cathy surveyed him with eyes that were freshly hollow yet terrified. Lyall Thrope, a stoic Baudelaire-quoting gothic entity in an oversized coat. It would be impolite to say so, and