Tunnel Vision

  Tunnel Vision

  Andrew Christie

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  For my father

  who taught me the value of having a go

  and the creativity of an ordinary life

  Chapter 1

  Stunt

  Billy was desperate to get into the hall. All this waiting around outside while the parents went in was killing him. He didn’t want to miss any part of what was coming.

  When Mr. Hill opened the doors at the back of the hall, Billy banged his fists up and down on Leroy’s back. “Come on. Let’s go man.”

  “Shut up, Sheehan. What’s your rush?”

  The mob of students waiting outside the school hall shuffled towards the doors.

  “Stay in line, year tens,” Mr. Hill yelled from where he was standing beside the door. “You’re in the back five rows. Fill them up from the far side.” His tatts and gym muscles were poking out from under his crisp white shirt.

  Billy’s shirt was showing signs of having been worn for three days straight. He and Rashmi had been flat out getting everything ready, and now the bastards were going to stick him in the back of the hall. Shit, he thought, I won’t see anything. He grabbed Leroy and shoved him forward. “Come on.”

  “Where do you think you’re going, Sheehan?” Mr. Hill was looking straight at him.

  Billy pushed the tangle of dark-brown curls out of his face and shrugged. “I just thought…”

  Mr. Hill shook his head. “Why start now, Billy? Do us all a favour and just do what you’re told for a change.” Mr. Hill taught maths, played rugby, and didn’t take shit.

  “Why’re you in such a hurry?” Leroy said as they pushed back into the line.

  Billy just grunted.

  When they eventually got to their seats, Billy was stuck behind the pimply dude from the basketball team, the one everyone called Flame. All he could see was the guy’s neck, covered in zits and tight orange curls. He grabbed Leroy by the shoulder and said, “Quick, swap places.”

  “What? No. Piss off, will you?”

  “Come on. I need to see Rash.”

  “Ooh, have to see Rashmi. Why do I care? What’s it worth?”

  Leroy was always such a tool. Billy didn’t have anything that Leroy didn’t already own a bigger and better version of. But he was shit at gaming. “Dragon Lance. I’ll show you how to get past the Time Ogre.”

  “And get the medallion?”

  “Yeah. All right.”

  Billy slid across to where he could see over the head of the short-arsed Watson.

  The show got started with all the usual boring welcomes and speeches. Mr. Baxter seemed to be in charge of wrangling all the students who were going to go up onstage, moving along the front row, every now and again squatting to talk to someone. Finally it got to be Rashmi’s turn. She stood up, crossed to the steps at the side, and slowly made her way up on her crutches, one step at a time. Mr. Baxter shadowed her, holding out a hand, not actually touching her, knowing she wouldn’t welcome it, but showing everyone in the hall he was there to help if necessary.

  Mrs. Dunphy, the deputy head, was running things, standing at the microphone. “This year the Clive Preston Award for Year Ten Mathematics goes to one of our rising stars, Rashmi McPhedran. And again this year we’re extremely pleased to be able to welcome back our local member, the Minister for Immigration, the Right Honourable Henry Woodward, who has managed to get away from the work of running the country down in Canberra, to come and join us in Sydney to present this award.”

  Rashmi’s hair, cropped off at chin level and dyed bright blue, glowed under the stage lights. She looked fantastic, dressed all in black except for her best oxblood-red Doc Martens boots. Dark eyes shining in her brown face, she headed across the stage in a series of lurches, poking her crutches forward and swinging her polio legs through. Baxter was still following her, doing his just-in-case thing.

  Woodward rose to greet her, his right hand ready to be shaken, a framed award in his left. Rashmi had her back to the audience so Billy couldn’t see her face as she stood in front of him, but he did see Woodward’s smile as he bent slightly, his hand out ready for Rashmi to shake. But Rash didn’t take her hands off the handles of her crutches. There was an awkward pause as the Minister waited, his smile slowly losing its enthusiasm, becoming stiff and forced. Although he was obviously annoyed that she was ignoring his offered hand, he didn’t want to show it. Then, just as he realised something was going on, the rigid smile collapsed as he looked down at his shirtfront in horror. The Minister pushed Rashmi, and she staggered away from him, trying to keep her balance. That was when Billy saw what he’d been waiting for.

  A bright-red bloodstain covered the front of Woodward’s white shirt and his grey trousers. As Rashmi staggered towards the front of the stage, the twin streams of pig’s blood were still squirting from the nozzles Billy had installed in the handles of her crutches. As the blood arced through the air and splashed onto the stage, Billy was pretty impressed by how much was still pumping out.

  Mr. Baxter was the first to react. Rushing towards Rashmi, he slipped in the pooling blood then went airborne for a moment, arms windmilling as he flew off the stage. The loud crack as the back of his head caught the edge of the stage reverberated through the hall. Billy felt sick at the sound.

  The shouting and laughing that had been building in the hall stopped. Violet Chu, who’d been sitting in the front row, waiting to be called up for her language award, stood up, her voice thin and clear. “Someone call an ambulance.”

  Everyone in the hall was standing now. Billy climbed onto his seat and saw Rashmi standing alone in the bright lights at the front of the stage, propped on her crutches in the middle of the shining pool of pig’s blood. She was looking down to where Mr. Baxter lay on the floor. When she raised her head, her eyes were wide, her mouth open.

  Woodward’s staff helped him off the stage. Mrs. Dunphy had her mobile phone out. Some of the teachers ran to the stairs at the side of the stage to help Baxter, while others stood looking at one another, wondering what the fuck to do next. Then the shouting started up again, with Mr. Hill bellowing over the top of it all, ordering the students out. Telling them to put their phones away. To have some bloody respect.

  It hadn’t looked like that much blood when they had filled up the crutches the night before. Billy had been worried that it wouldn’t be enough, that it wouldn’t make an impact.

  It had been his idea at the start. He’d come up with it one afternoon, when he and Rash had bludged off school. They had an assignment to pick an old movie from the 1970s and write a report for their media class. That was the only class they had together. Rash was much smarter than Billy, in all the top classes for maths and English. Science too, but there was only one media class, so they were together in that. Billy only chose it because it sounded like it would be easy, but Rash was pretty into it. Always got the best marks. For this assignment they had to look at old movies and see how they were different from modern ones. Rash had gotten hold of a movie called Carrie, a horror flick she reckoned was a classic. It looked old enough, with all the clothes and hairstyles, and the music was really harsh and loud.

  It was a pretty weird movie and awkward at the start. All about a girl getting her period in the showers at some school. There were lots of shots of girls flashing their tits. Billy felt pretty uncomfortable, especially when Rash elbowed him in the ribs and yelled, “Nipple alert!” When he went red in the face, she laughed so hard that she nearly fell off the sofa.

  Towards the end of the movie, the main girl, Carrie, got soaked in pig’s blood while she was up onstage at a
school dance. That’s how Billy got the idea. “You could do that,” he said. They talked about how Rash would have to shake hands with the Minister for Immigration when she got her big-deal maths prize on Speech Day. He was their local member and was always getting invited to stuff at the school. He also happened to be Rash’s mortal enemy.

  That’s what she called him, her mortal enemy. Not like in a game or anything, though; Rash was serious about it. She blamed Woodward for the death of her cousin, Visu. He had drowned at the beginning of the year, when his refugee boat had sunk, heading from Sri Lanka to Australia. Some fishermen had picked up a few survivors, but Visu wasn’t one of them. Rashmi said the government could have saved them all—the navy knew where they were. Woodward had blood on his hands, she said. Billy didn’t know what Woodward could have done really, but he didn’t care; he just wanted to show the bastards up.

  When he saw Carrie getting soaked in blood, he grabbed one of Rashmi’s crutches and showed her how he thought it could work. “We’d need a pump and tubes.” That was all it took to get her going.

  “Batteries too. What sort of pump?” Rashmi asked. “And where can we get the tubes?”

  They had cleared off the coffee table and started drawing how to make it work, in the back of Rashmi’s history book. On the TV screen behind them, Carrie kept playing and all the people at the school formal were busy getting burned to death because Carrie wouldn’t let them out of the building, just by using her mind. It was that sort of movie.

  But they had fucked up. No one was supposed to get hurt.

  Mr. Baxter was in hospital. In a coma, according to the news—a fractured skull. They didn’t know if he’d ever come round and, if he did, how much damage there would be to his brain. Billy kept thinking about that famous cricketer who had died after getting hit in the head by a bouncer. And he’d been wearing a helmet.

  How must Rash be feeling right now. Billy had tried to contact her over the weekend, but she wasn’t answering her phone, wasn’t responding to his text messages. The police had taken her away from the hall, but now she was back home. Before, when they were planning it, Rash had said she would take all the blame, said it would make a better narrative for the media that way. He’d said that wasn’t fair, her taking all the blame, but she said his helping her would just confuse the story. The simpler the story was, the more they would concentrate on why she had done it. Billy was supposed to stay away from her till it was all over with. He wondered if she still felt like that, after what happened to Baxter.

  The story was big news for a couple of days, but no one cared why Rashmi had done it. It was all over the Internet, on television, and the radio. Some of the news people were even talking about terrorism. There was lots of outrage; everyone had an opinion and wanted it heard. Lots of crap about what was happening to our young people, too.

  People wanted to know who the hell she was. What kind of name was Rashmi McPhedran anyway? She had dark skin and weird blue hair. Was it a Muslim thing? Was it actually terrorism?

  It was all stupid, but because Baxter had been hurt, no one cared why Rash had done it. Even the people who hated Woodward and the government’s policies on refugees were against her.

  Woodward got over his embarrassment and anger pretty quickly. By the time he was on television the night of the incident, in clean clothes, he was Mr. Ice. Not like the images of him onstage, which showed him scared and angry. From those photos, Billy could see how much he had wanted to hit Rashmi. In the television studio, he was calm and cold, talking about the lack of respect for institutions and the consequences when law and order break down. He was full of sympathy for Mr. Baxter and his family of course, but he couldn’t give a shit about the people drowning on boats or rotting in camps. What a hypocrite, Billy thought.

  Rash’s manifesto on her blog clearly said why she had done it. But because of what had happened to Baxter, no one cared about her cousin, Visu, or about Sri Lanka and the refugees. She had written about how he had drowned, how the boat had sunk and no one cared, how the Australian government didn’t even send the navy to find out what had happened. She wrote about how it was Woodward’s fault, how he’d rather let people drown than risk having Sri Lankans come to Australia. But the Internet didn’t care; Billy watched it all unfold on his computer and on TV. Rash had planned out this whole media campaign, but it went bad before it even got started.

  Everyone turned on her; everyone had an opinion about her. No one supported her, not even the refugee rights groups. They used the incident to get on the radio, not supporting Rashmi, just trying to bash the Australian government. The shock jocks and all the other nutjobs wanted her locked up; they wanted to know what was happening to our schools and blamed the teachers. Some wanted to know why there wasn’t better security and where her parents had been. Others wanted her deported, sent back to where she’d come from. People asked, “Is she crazy?” and “What’s wrong with her legs anyway?” They called her a freak. No one liked Woodward much, but Mr. Baxter was a family man. Some really awful shit went out on social media; “I Hate Rashmi McPhedran” sites popped up, and people wrote some real hard-core stuff, raving about the death penalty if Mr. Baxter died. Billy hoped Rash wasn’t reading any of it.

  Ever since the incident, Billy had stayed away from John’s place. John would be pissed off at him for lying about what he’d used his tools and workshop for. He’d told him they’d been working on a science project when they were really weaponising Rashmi’s crutches. John would have lots of questions that Billy wasn’t ready to answer.

  He didn’t want to stay at his mum’s house either. She’d either be off her face, or she’d want money from him, and anyway, it kind of seemed disloyal to John. It didn’t make sense, but it was how Billy felt.

  He’d been living at John’s place for a couple of years. The house used to belong to Billy’s grandmother, before she’d died and left it to the hospital. It had been empty for a long while when John had bought it and started fixing it up. Billy used to hang out there because it was better than being at home, waiting for someone to hit him. His brother Tom, and even his mum weren’t so bad, but if one of her boyfriends decided he didn’t like the look of you, well it was better not to be there when that happened.

  After a while, John started paying Billy to help with the renovation work. They’d pulled out the old rotten plaster together then built new walls and stuff. It was hard work but fun.

  He and John had kept working on the old place till it was liveable, and then John said Billy could have one of the rooms if he wanted. Said he’d earned it, and anyway it had been Billy’s grandmother’s house. Now he lived there most of the time and just checked in on his mother once in a while, making sure she was still alive.

  There were four of them at John’s house in Camperdown, now that he had rented out the other two bedrooms. One to a guy named Tony who worked at the university; the other to Shasta, who was a personal trainer most of the time. Since she had moved in, she’d become John’s girlfriend too, which had been weird. Still was.

  Billy spent most of that weekend after Speech Day on the streets, wandering between Leichhardt, Newtown, and Marrickville. He liked Newtown best. There was always stuff happening on the street, musicians to listen to, and street people to watch and talk to. Mostly they were friendly. The library had computers he could use too, and after Speech Day he checked the online papers as often as he could. Sometimes he walked over to Rash’s house, to her street, hoping he’d see her out front, or maybe just at the window, but he never did. He also tried to get in to see Mr. Baxter at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital but found out he was in intensive care, no visitors allowed. Billy didn’t know what he would have said to him anyway. Sorry, he supposed.

  Billy had never liked Mr. Baxter, but he didn’t want to see him hurt. He was angry that it had all gone wrong. Angry that Rashmi was in so much trouble too.

  He spent his nights in Newtown, in the park by the cemetery. Now that it was summer, the park was
usually full of people, sitting about on the grass in groups, talking and drinking. Someone was nearly always there with a guitar, and people did fire twirling and juggling. Billy would sit in the shadows at the top of the hill, his back to the sandstone wall that separated the living from the dead, and watch the show, wondering what would happen next.

  Sleeping in the park was okay as long as it didn’t rain. When the crowds drifted away, he’d climb the wall and find somewhere to sleep in the cemetery. This time of year it was warm enough, and the nights were short.

  On Monday night, after waiting till it was late enough that his mother would be too out of it to give him a hard time, he went over to her place for a shower. He was starting to stink.

  That was how John found him. He was sitting in his white Toyota ute, across the road from Billy’s mum’s place. The middle of the night, staking the place out. Billy spotted him as soon as he came around the corner, just sitting there in the dark, his head silhouetted against the windscreen. Billy glanced from the ute to his mother’s house and back. He was going to have to talk to John sometime, he supposed, so he might as well get it over with. He walked slowly up to the back of the ute, his foot automatically flipping a stick off the footpath and into the gutter as he went.

  John leaned across the front seat and pushed the door open. “Get in.”

  Billy slid onto the seat, stowing his backpack on the floor between his feet. He wondered whether to shut the door and decided it was best. If there was going to be shouting, it was probably better not to wake the whole street. He sat looking straight ahead, waiting. He wasn’t going to say anything; John could start.

  It didn’t take long. “What the fuck, Billy? Why have you been hiding?” Not quite shouting but close enough.

  Lots of moths were flying around the streetlamps, big ones. Flittering about in the hard white light. Billy didn’t know what to say to John.