Whole Wild World (5 page)

Mama went with Å ime in an ambulance. He could walk. I'd been hiding in a stormwater pipe down the street, crouched low and silent. I could see the activity out the front of our house, as neighbours came to view the crime scene. When the coast was clear, I edged home, checking for signs of the law.

Teta was in the backyard in her apron.

‘Šime is in hospital,' she said in a grave voice. ‘Wait till your father gets home from work, he's very angry. You will have to go to the
popravni dom
.'

Reform school. The mythical children's prison/boarding school of our childhood that was invoked whenever we'd gone too far. I hadn't even started big school and I was going to be taken away.
I began to panic and cry.

‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' I whimpered, breathing quickly and shallowly through my mouth.

‘Sorry! Sorry! Kill me, tell me sorry,' she said repeating a line my parents would use to describe the abject disrepair of a one-word apology in Australian society due to over-use. ‘And stop crying and carrying on. You're only crying for yourself, when you should be crying for Šime.'

It was close to my bedtime when a taxi brought Mama and Å ime home. I knew it was serious. His head was wrapped in a bandage, like an injured footy player, and he seemed groggy. Å ime missed a few days of school. When the bandage came off, there were black stitches in the middle of his forehead, like he'd been sewn up, but not by someone very good at it, like Teta. Would he be like that forever? He usually had a kind face but now he looked cranky, like a monster on TV. After a while, the stitches came out. The oval-shaped scar stayed, just below his crooked fringe, always cut so high.

Not long after, Å ime had a birthday party. He turned six on a Sunday and after Mass we went back to our place for lunch and a party. Å ime and I had exactly the same outfit, as we did in those days, in the same size. In the party picture his gear looks too small and my clothes look too big. Hidden in the garage was a blue Cyclops tricycle, much bigger than a dinky; you could take a passenger in a seat at the back and there were coloured streamers at the end of the handlebars. Now we could race each other on the paths and yard. Peace in our time.

I dodged reform school but there were other closed institutions ahead for me. I got a serious bacterial infection (that first appeared as food poisoning), which spread to my blood system; commonly called ‘blood poisoning' in those days, it's known now as sepsis. I was admitted to the Children's Hospital in the city and stayed for ten days. There were long stretches of time alone
in a room. I wasn't allowed to eat anything but got an injection in the arm several times a day from a nurse; the needle was stuck into me and held in place by tape. A bottle hung over the bed. I wasn't allowed to wriggle around.

I was moved to a general ward with dozens of other kids. The place was a noisy zoo. A fuzzy-haired girl screamed all the time, while a boy threw his food; they were in beds with high bars and it seemed to me they were in jail. When Tata came to see me during the day I begged him to get me out of there, promising to be really good. I hadn't eaten for days and began dreaming about food (okay, lollies and biscuits) during naps; it was hard to think about anything else. I pleaded with my parents for food.

One night I had a large number of visitors. Then came time for them to leave. There were no nurses or doctors around and my mother was the last one to kiss me goodnight. I knew she wasn't able to stay because I'd asked her many times.

‘Please, please just bring me some biscuits,' I whispered, keeping an eye out for the needle squad.

‘But you know I'm not allowed to,' she replied. ‘I'll get both of us into trouble.'

‘Nobody has to know.'

‘How will I get food past the nurses? They check our bags.'

‘You can hide it in your bra.'

It was so obvious to me. What kind of smuggler was she? The day I came off the drip I ate everything in a gluttonous frenzy, lest it be a temporary reprieve. Bras, useless, let them burn.

I'm in Bankstown Hospital, the year before starting school, and about to go into surgery. I'd had two eye operations before but the terror has not faded. My bed has become a trolley and a man is pushing me through the hospital. We go past people on
trolleys in corridors, push through doors in a whoosh, and reach a wide door to a lift. Inside, I stare at the ceiling, noticing a trapdoor. Just in case. The lift doesn't feel like it's moving.

I close my eyes and when I open them again I'm in a white room with bright lights, brighter than I'd thought possible, yet familiar. There are several people here, different voices, men's and women's and they are calm, which helps. Because they're all wearing masks and green smocks I can't tell them apart but assume the taller ones are men. One of the men leans over and says he's going to give me something to make me relaxed and then I'll go to sleep. I won't feel anything.

‘I want you to breathe from this mask and count backwards from 100.'

He must think I'm at school. I've never ventured that far with numbers. When he places the mask over my nose I can taste a strange chemical, a mix of medicine and cleaning products, the sorts of smells I've sampled under the sink in our kitchen when my parents were outside. One or two heads move in and out of view.

‘Do I say 100?'

The numbers come, slowly, logically, 99, 98. Like a game or puzzle, you first say 90 and make the second number smaller by one … 97, 96, 95.

I wake.

How much time has passed? I feel something has changed. I open my eyes but I can't see. I don't know if it is day or night. That's not good. My head is wrapped in a blanket of some kind, my arms can't move – pinned or tied down? I can't tell. I hear noises, things moving about and muffled voices. I drift back to sleep.

‘Tomislav, Tomislav.' It's a gentle voice, like Mama's, but it's not her. It's familiar, Croatian, so I don't fret.

She asks if I can hear her voice. I can. She holds my hand, her
touch is warm and soft like Mama's. Do you still feel sleepy? Are you hungry? Are you sore anywhere? After a few more questions I realise it's Dr Bosnić. I was scared when we saw her in her surgery days before this operation. She promised to come to check up on me. And she had, before and after the procedure. Her husband is also a doctor and they've always looked after our family.

I'm still afraid, but by now used to the machine rhythm and clatter of hospitals. I drift off again and try to remember the order of how things went so I can report to Mama, Tata and Å ime everything that went on. I especially want to tell Å ime how I can count backwards from 100. When I get the chance I'll try to count back to one. With everything dark, I can think clearly, feel my breathing. If I try really hard I can make the colours in my head change by moving my eyeballs. It's a great trick.

Later, when I'm better – the turn in my eye won't be as noticeable, I won't ever have to wear glasses because there's one eye good for distance, the other for close up – I sometimes see colours and patterns before sleep. It feels as if I'm going back, far back, a long time ago, before I was even born, just a shape or air bubble, floating through water. On sunny days, I lie on the grass and cover my eyes with an arm, fingers or eyelid. The sun is baking me. I can make colours dance, go deep into space or swim in a sea of light. Pressing on my eyelids I create a kaleidoscope. I command a whole world in my head. These eyes are okay.

My favourite part of the house is the bay window, its patterned leadlight glass stretched across six panels: red, blue and green circles and squares. Parts of the glass are bevelled, so depending at which angle you looked through, the shape of things outside changes. Rain made it dazzling. Something might look this way to me, but maybe someone else saw things in a different way. Was
I seeing the same things that other people saw? I had taken lots of eye tests so I knew there was a right and a wrong way to see things, but what if your own head actually made them different? I had time to think about such things.

In the morning, the sun would come through the bay window, leaving brilliant patterns on the wall and kitchen. You could lift up the seat and underneath it were blankets and boxes where we had our toys and junk. I'd often sit here and look at picture books or get on my knees, raise the blind, and watch what was going on in Adelaide Street – usually not much, given we were tucked into suburbia.

One rainy morning I saw people loading things into a car at the front of the house next door, where Mr and Mrs Corless lived. Their kids were grown-ups and Mr Corless was a journalist at the
Sun
. On Saturdays he'd head off to work late morning, wearing a hat, binoculars in a brown pouch around his neck. I knew he wrote about horse-racing, but I didn't know until writing this book that he once picked all the winners on a program, at Warwick Farm in fact, a feat as rare for turf scribes as winning the lottery.

A few days later Mrs Corless came to our door. She was warm and kind, what I imagined grandmas to be like, slightly more fancy than the other people in our neighbourhood. She spoke very slowly to my parents in English, asking them if they'd noticed anything strange the other day because their house had been burgled.

‘I saw people and a car,' I volunteered, but was hushed by Tata, instructed not to make up stories.

‘
Vidio sam
.' I saw.

‘What did you see, darling?' Mrs Corless asked when it became clear to her what I was trying to say.

At this point Tata relented, nodding, I could tell them what I'd seen.

‘I saw a man and a lady putting things in a car. It was raining and they had raincoats on.'

What kind of car was it?

‘It was white, a station wagon, like Tata's car, but not the same.'

One morning two tall, stern men came to our house to speak to me. They were detectives and wore different hats from the normal police. I was wracked with nerves, given they must have known all the things I'd been up to. It would be written down somewhere. Teta and my parents often said they'd ring the police after I'd done something naughty. I was praying they had forgotten to do it after I hit Å ime with the glass tube.

The detectives had come to ask about the people and the car in front of the Corless home. Did I see the number plate? I remembered it was different from the one on Tata's car, which was yellow with black numbers.

Maybe it was white, I said. I wanted to make them happy, especially as one of them was writing it all down. It was either white or the writing was white. I closed my eyes, tried to remember the day, the people, the car. But I didn't want to make it up because you could get in big trouble if you made things up to the police, Tata said. So I left it at that.

One day Mrs Corless came to the door with a box of Red Tulip chocolates and a board game for me. She said the police had caught the bad people and that I was a very a good boy.

‘Imagine how clever you'll be when you go to school!'

When the toy was broken and the chocolates were gone, I thought about the robbers. Would they come back to get me because I had told on them? It was a worry I kept to myself. I felt good that I had helped nice people but there could be a cost for speaking up, too.

I started school just after my fifth birthday and had been counting down the sleeps with Mama. Not from 100, maybe ten. Fair, sweet Ineska would not be part of this new world of
uniforms and rules and lots of new kids to play with. I'd imagined us walking to school hand in hand, sitting next to one another in class.

‘She'll be with you next year,' Mama said. But I knew we wouldn't be in the same class and I was sad for her more than me.

3

Lost in space

St Joseph's is running a January fever, the distemper of first days. Kindergarten kids wail and hold onto mothers. I feel a boost in confidence. Triage teams of Brown Joeys' nuns and teachers begin prising away girls and boys from parents. Soon, the spectacle is offputting, even for a gawker like me. Some kids are terrified, worse than in the hospital.