This was a lie. Gaby was a minor. No-one could publish her name and her father must remain anonymous.
Next Monday morning Gaby went to school as normal. I most definitely, Celine told the tape, I most definitely encouraged her to “see someone.” Please don’t think I didn’t. I knew she had to be in therapy, but I could not force her. I could not make her change a shoe if she didn’t want to.
Meanwhile Sandy seemed protected by a carapace of blame. Fair enough, she thought. He was giving himself hives working for Bob Hawke’s re-election. She was an awful wife, but she made him a healthy breakfast and watched him leave for the electoral office in the rain.
How could I have left him then, even if I had the money?
It was only three or four days later she had a telephone call from a woman who introduced herself as “your daughter’s bookkeeping teacher.” Her name was “Miss Aisen” and she said she had just received some visitors and she hoped Mrs. Quinn would receive them too.
Who are they?
They are on their way to see you now.
They turned out to be two young men with “depressing zip-front track jackets” in “dead” colours, sad maroon, gloomy green. One or both of them were from the Parkville youth detention centre.
The young men placed a worn tennis ball upon her scrubbed hardwood table and showed her how it had been slit. They invited her to squeeze the ball and look inside where she discovered a note, written in her daughter’s hand.
Her daughter had been throwing balls into the Parkville centre in the middle of the night. Balls like this, the young men told Celine, normally contained marijuana but in this case they held letters addressed to a boy who had only stayed in Turana on a single night. He had been discharged from the facility before the balls arrived but the staff had been disturbed, they said, to recognise the “ink.”
Actually Miss Baillieux, it’s blood.
Whose blood?
They looked at her with pity.
Celine read: Hullo BFF.
She pointed out: Frederic’s initials were FM, not BFF.
She was informed that BFF meant Best Friend Forever and was normally reserved by teenage girls for members of their own sex. Hullo BFF, I will die without you, please let me in, please let me be with you. I am all alone in Aisen’s class at Bullshit High. I cannot stand myself. I cannot bear life without you. We can get married. Ask me again I will get high just breathing the air coming out your nose. XXXXXXXXXX
Celine paid no attention to the blood business. Her first thought was, he isn’t gay at all. She told the social workers it was romantic. Had they never done the same themselves?
Oh no, this was not romantic. This was self-damage. Her daughter was under severe mental stress.
Meaning what exactly?
She has been cutting herself.
Celine said, I thought they were ridiculous, but they left their business cards and a pamphlet about girls who cut themselves. I was such an idiot I let them take away her love letter.
Then Miss Aisen called again, basically ordering her to present herself at the school.
So, once more, she said, I was reminded Bell Street High was a dump. Also: I would never have sent my daughter here if I had known how huge the boys were, how they occupied all space, how smug and certain in their expensive sneakers and M. C. Hammer pants. No wonder her grades were so depressing.
I arrived in a sort of lumber room to discover Miss Aisen and a single Apple computer which turned out to be her own. She was less than middle-aged, wiry, a swimmer surely, with short grey hair, intense brown eyes, no makeup and a cotton frock she may have made herself. She had an unnerving gaze, a sort of uninhibited curiosity.
She said, I know you must get this all the time.
I thought, how have I fucked up now?
But she and her father used to see me at the collective. She could list the productions. She had been really upset to read I had been kicked out. Oh God, she was a fan. She asked me did I know who Solosolo was.
Yes.
Did I know they had had a fight, then she corrected me before I answered. It had been a physical fight. In the park, she said.
I see.
No, she meant the car park, the public park, the lane leading to the old man pub, where the big tree was, with the basalt boulders underneath. This was where the boys fought, and she said how much it disturbed her. What they fought about you could not tell, perhaps a wrong look yesterday, or a massacre centuries before. You would know there was to be a fight when you heard the audience gathering. Then, if you looked, you would most likely see the weaker boy, the one who knew he would be beaten.
Celine thought, too much information.
A boy would turn up first and stand beneath the tree. His pride did not allow him to be saved. Then his assailant would arrive and he would cuff and punch the first boy until he was on the ground where he was punched and kicked in the head and the girls would call out, You guys are animals, you guys are sick. Then the boy would go away. Then the girls would go inside.
And the point was?
The point was that Celine’s daughter was the first girl to stand and wait in the shade beneath that tree, beside those jagged rocks. It was no secret: Gaby wished to fight with Solosolo, and each afternoon the staff had been pleased to see Solosolo walk straight past Gaby.
When Solosolo put aside her crutches Gaby spat at her, she whose family were now obliged to bury her brother Fa’a Samoa, and pay for airfares for their grand family, and feed them when they could barely afford to feed themselves. Solosolo slapped Gaby so violently you could hear it in the staffroom like a sound effect. Gaby was smaller, but always dense and solid. She ducked inside the tall girl’s reach. She hit her at the balance point and brought her down, bare limbs on the gravel, and the boys were ugly as hyenas, dancing, loose-mouthed, and it took the shop teacher Mr. Junor and Miss Aisen between them to pull the scratching girls apart.
I was gutted, Celine said. I pretended I had seen the wounds. I explained Gaby would not see a shrink, not anyone.
No, listen, Miss Aisen told me. She was kind to me. Listen, she told me. She laid her hand on my wrist and said my daughter was way brighter than her grades. She was attracted to the most difficult and interesting computer issues. She had a burning sense of right and wrong, of course I must know all that.
Of course, I thought, you are a socialist. Shut up, I thought. Don’t tell me who my daughter is.
If I was lucky enough to have a daughter like this, Miss Aisen said, I would want to know she spent most of her day hiding in a drain beneath Pentridge Prison. A teacher at the primary had seen her come and go. Stop. Swap. Play.
After Peli died, said Gaby.
Rewind play.
After Peli died I was spied on. Everything I did was significant. If a boy fights a boy no-one cares, but if a girl fights a girl she must be psychologically disturbed. My teachers were so clever. They knew without a doubt that I was imprisoning myself as punishment for Peli’s death. I was torturing myself by burying my body below Frederic’s father’s cell. I imagined Frederic was in prison so I had to be locked up too. If no-one would punish me, I would do it to myself.
I’m skinny, so I must be anorexic.
I’m a girl who eats lunch, so I must be fat.
I wear black, so I must be a goth or death punk.
I’m a death punk, so I must cut myself for thrills.
If they had taken the trouble to ask me I might have even told them I started sneaking down into the drain because of little Troy, my sole surviving friend. When the Samoans turned on us, Troy lost his protection. Now he was exposed e.g. to Jasim, a vast Lebanese kid who said he would execute him as a drug dealer.