Читать книгу While I Have Pedro - John Chesterman - Страница 7

Going to the police is not as easy as it sounds. It may be for you, but it’s definitely not for me. I decided I had to make an early break for it. I thought, I’ll go down to get my newspaper and just keep going. That wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all I had.

I quickly fed Mandy in the dark - she’s normally asleep then but she was happy to eat her food even at that early time. I took my coins to the newsagent. I didn’t want anyone to know what was happening. Mr Chong always says, ‘Hello, Red, how are you today?’ I never answer him, of course, I just hand over the coins and he gives me the paper. I walked out of the shop and pretended to be going back to my home, but I turned down one street that takes you to a tram stop if you walk for ages and ages, which I did. I didn’t know where the police station was, but I knew that the tram would take me near a police station. It had to, eventually.

I’ve caught the tram before, so it was not a totally new experience. But it was my first time alone. Pedro always buys our tickets for us, and I hadn’t really thought about getting a ticket. That’s a bit unlike me, because I’m normally very cautious. But on this day I had pressing things on my mind, and I was prepared to take some risks. So I travelled without a ticket. What were they going to do anyway, throw me off ? Sometimes you have to take risks when you try new things. That’s what Pedro often says. He says it about new foods and about new clothes. He said it one time when we took the house car out to the zoo. I was scared of the lizards, but Pedro helped me pat one and I’m not at all scared of them now.

I waited for a tram. It was very early, but I knew it would come. I was very cold, too. Normally I’m only outside for nine minutes. That’s how long it takes me to shuffle to and from the milk bar. This day was going to take a lot longer than nine minutes. Again, I was probably under prepared. But I was taking risks, so I hoped Pedro might be proud, at least in the long run.

When the tram pulled up I began to get on. Began is the right word, because they’ve made the steps so high that even fit young kids sometimes have difficulty getting on. I grabbed the side rail with both hands and yanked my useless right leg and my even uselesser left leg up the three steps and hobbled to find a seat. A woman yelled across the aisle to a young kid who was sitting on one of the seats reserved for disabled people.

‘Get up, mate, give the bloke a seat.’

I tried to say it’s OK, but it just sounded like ‘oooooday’. Pedro would have understood what I was saying. The young guy just pointed down the aisle and said, ‘He can sit down there, keep your hair on, grandma.’ I shuffled down and sat where he was pointing. I didn’t care. The woman next to me got up and sat somewhere else. I was probably dribbling a little bit, which doesn’t look very nice if you’re not used to it. A lot of people think I’m drunk when they hear me or look at me. But I’m not. I only ever once tried alcohol. I had a sip of some beer fifteen years ago, when I was twenty. I hated it, it was too bitter.

I sat on the tram until we started passing some big shops. I reckoned we had to be in the city, so I stood up to get off. I couldn’t grab the chord to pull it, but the driver saw me and knew I wanted to get off. So he stopped even though I hadn’t done everything in the right order. He wasn’t worried about it, and neither was I. I was more worried about getting off.

I had to push past people to get to the door. Someone told me to watch the hell where I was going. Someone called me a retard, which I don’t particularly like. Stretch called me that twice. The first time was when I was ten and he must have been five or six. He was complaining that I always had to be there when he was playing with his friends. The other time was when we were much older and he wanted to go to the footy with some friends. He said he was sick of hanging around with a retard of a brother and he wanted me to stay at home. Which I did. But that day I stopped barracking for Stretch’s team, North Melbourne. I decided I needed my own team, so now I barrack for the mighty saints, St Kilda. I guess Stretch was just embarrassed, I don’t think he was cross with me. I forgave him, even though he didn’t say sorry. I didn’t ask to be a retard, and I haven’t apologised to myself about that, but I’ve forgiven myself. And Mum.

One of the people waiting to get on the tram must have been an AFL footballer or something. All I know is he was a great catch. Because as I started to go down the stairs I grabbed the handrails, but I couldn’t hold my weight. It’s very different going up to going down. You have far more weight to control going down the stairs. If that footballer hadn’t been there it would have been broken arm number eight. No, I’m not an octopus, I mean it would have been the eighth time I’d broken an arm. That occasion will have to wait.

I swear to god that footballer, in catching me, gave me one of the nicest hugs anyone’s ever given me. Even though it was just an instinct for him, I didn’t want to let him go. He was so safe. But he set me straight on the pavement and in a flash was gone. I still think about that moment now. It was one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me. Not counting all the stuff that Pedro’s done, I mean.

I looked around but couldn’t see a police station anywhere. So I just stood there for a while. I did see a homeless man with a long beard who looked as though his clothes had just been oiled. He was searching in a rubbish bin for food. He’d find a bit of hamburger and eat it. He looked inside cups and bottles. If they had something in them, he’d drink it.

He must pick up a lot of germs. I felt very sorry for him. He needed a Pedro in his life. Maybe I could bring him home with me. Pedro wouldn’t mind. I started to go over to him, but he just sort of ran away. He was very quick on his feet.

So I went back to the job I’d come to do. There was no police station in sight, but I was sure I’d see a policeman or woman if I looked hard enough. For quite a while, though, I didn’t see any police. I just watched all the people going past. Someone put a dollar in my pocket, even though I didn’t need any money.

Then something good happened. I saw a police car coming. As it came up the road I started to yell, but that just scared the people around me so I stopped. I knew that this was my only chance, and I remembered reading somewhere about the advanced driving courses that police drivers need to undertake.

I thought I might put their advanced driving skills to the test, to see if they were getting value for their training dollar. Bang for their buck. I stepped out onto the road right in front of the police car, which screeched to a halt. As Pedro says, a little faith can take you a long way. My faith had been rewarded. There was one policeman in the car, and he was very angry. He got out and walked straight up to me.

‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’

I grunted and showed him the Diary of Important Dates, which had the newspaper clippings inside the pages where St Andrew’s day and St Mark’s day were listed. I tried to point to what I knew.

‘Sorry, mate, can’t understand you.’

I was getting frustrated. I kept grunting and jabbing at the clippings in my Diary of Important Dates.

Then he did the worst thing he could have done, and slipped the clippings out of the Diary of Important Dates and looked at them.

All he said was ‘Sure, yes, OK, there was a big fire and someone died. Oh, and another fire, at another church. Someone’s been having too many candles in their services have they? Still, everything will be all right now, I’m sure.’ He slipped the clippings in the cover of my Diary of Important Dates and gave it back to me.

I kept jabbing at the diary. I was trying to say ‘St Mark’s day’, which is not very easy for me. It’s hard enough for me to say ‘day’. He just said ‘Mate, I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. Where are you from?’

Ah, that one I could answer. There’s one card that I always carry around with me, in case I ever get into trouble. I considered myself now to be in trouble. Pedro had typed the card out and laminated it. This is what it says:

Hello, my name is Redmond (Red) Coltrane. I live at 15 Bayview Crescent, Highett. My phone number is 9553 1104. I have a lot of trouble speaking and walking and I can become anxious and frustrated very quickly. If you are reading this it probably means I need some assistance. Please give it to me.

The policeman read the card. ‘Good oh, Red, I’m Constable Hartman and I’m happy to help. Why don’t you jump in the back.’

At that moment I was, again, very grateful to Pedro. That means I owe Pedro 957, he owes me two. One of the two that he owes me was the time I stopped Rav smearing Pedro with his poo. It’s not Rav’s fault, it just happens when he gets really upset. He starts poking at his bottom. It’s really yucky, but Pedro just says it’s something we have to try and work with Rav and his psychiatrist to stop happening. I’ll tell you later about the other one that Pedro owes me, but it would jump ahead too far if I told you now. It wouldn’t make sense without you knowing the other parts that come first. Everything in order.

I thought Constable Hartman was driving me to the station, where he’d be able to work out all about the fires. I thought I’d meet some clever inspector who would see all the threads that I’d give him. Or her, maybe. They’d be able to say something like ‘Aha, problem solved’ and ‘all over Red rover’, as Alfie often says to me. But I realised after a few minutes that I was being driven home. Worse than that. While he was driving, Constable Hartman was tapping away at his computer and then he started embarrassing me, saying ‘I see, Red, we’ve picked you up before. I hope you’ve been keeping the little man in his house and not showing him around the place.’

All I could think was cross thoughts. I hadn’t come all this way by myself just to be teased and taken home again. I started to hum to try and calm myself but I was getting crosser. I kept pointing to the clippings and my Diary of Important Dates. I tried to put them in front of the face of the policeman. But that was a mistake, because then he couldn’t see the road. I know that was dangerous, but so is letting an arsonist go around lighting fires when we could stop him. The policeman told me to sit back or he’d have to handcuff me. I don’t like being handcuffed. Well, I’ve never been handcuffed by a policeman. But I have been restrained with straps. In our old place in Kew they used to restrain people a lot. It only ever happened to me once. But I remember Denise, who lived there, she was restrained almost the whole time. Whenever she could get her hands out she used to just start bashing her own face. It was terrible. She had swollen cheeks the whole time from beating herself. So they used to restrain her whenever she even looked like she would start hitting. The only time I was restrained was when I had an anxiety attack. I didn’t know that’s what it was, but I’d been sitting down watching TV with about ten other people and I was always in charge of the remote control. I like to think that’s because I was the smartest. It may not have been true, of course. It was hard to know how smart a lot of those people were because most of them couldn’t talk or write. It’s pretty hard to tell how smart someone is when they can’t do either of those things. Anyway, I was in charge of the remote. Whenever a program ended I would start at channel one on the remote and go through all the channels up to 28. Of course there were only five that showed pictures: channels 2, 7, 9, 10 and 28. Whenever I got to one with a picture I’d look around and judge whether people wanted to watch that show. I got to know the signals people living there would use. There were sometimes twenty people living in my section at Kew. Some of them weren’t able to give me a sign whether they liked something. But a lot of them could. Ruth, I remember, was one who always clapped her hands when she was excited. You wouldn’t know that just from seeing her. You’d just think she was a bit crazy. But I knew that clapping her hands meant she liked something. The more she liked it, the more she clapped. So it was pretty easy for me to know what she wanted. Same with Peter. If he liked something on the telly he’d look at it. If he didn’t, he’d turn his head in the other direction. So his vote was easy too. Once he’d seen what was on, he wanted to watch it if he kept looking.

So each time a new program was on, I’d work out what most people wanted to watch. But on the day I was restrained, one of the helpers just grabbed the remote from me and put on the football. I actually didn’t mind the football being on, and it had my vote. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’d recorded people’s votes in my head, and the clear preference was for the afternoon game show. I had put that on.

As Pedro would say, it wasn’t the helper’s fault. He was new. And he probably thought we were zombies who didn’t care what was on. That may even have been right for some of us there that day. There were quite a few people watching TV and I could only tell which stations about half of them wanted. That’s not to say the others aren’t smart. How can you tell whether someone’s smart without being able to get inside their head?

When the helper grabbed the remote, I got very angry. I tried to grab it off him, and I think he thought I was trying to hit him or something. So he pushed me really hard and I fell on my arm. That was break number three, if you want to keep score. I started screaming in pain, and also because I was so cross. And I think I was swinging my good arm and a few other helpers came running and put me in a room. I was punching things then, and one big guy came in and tied a band around both my arms and my chest so I couldn’t move either arm. My broken arm - not that anyone knew it was broken at the time - was very sore. I eventually squatted down and cried, and they took it off after about an hour. But I haven’t really enjoyed watching TV since then. I still have memories of that day.

The threat of being handcuffed was enough to make me sit back in the police car. There wasn’t much left for me to do except cry. So I did. All I could think about then was Denise trying to hit herself all day, and being restrained. It was like I was in a trap. If they restrained me, I’d probably want to start hitting myself, which would mean they’d need to restrain me more. Just like had happened with Denise. Then I tried to do what Pedro always tells us to do, think of happy things. So I thought of Mandy, who is always happy, or at least is never sad. But then I thought of the day Yvonne came over with a special collar for Mandy. Yvonne comes to help at the house sometimes, and she said she knew how she could fix Mandy and stop her ripping clothes off the clothesline, which was a new game Mandy played with Pedro, only Pedro didn’t really want to be playing it. Yvonne put this special collar on Mandy and let her go outside. Then Yvonne put these clothes on the line and sat inside and waited and watched. After about half an hour Mandy went up to the clothes on the line. I don’t think she knew we were watching her. Just when she started standing up on her back legs to grab the clothes, Yvonne pushed this little button on a black box she was holding. Mandy let out this huge yelp and fell to the ground. Then Yvonne waited another half an hour until Mandy went to try and grab the clothes once more. Again Yvonne pushed the button and Mandy cried out and fell to the ground. ‘Cured’ is all Yvonne said, and she was right, because Mandy never touched the clothes on the line again. I didn’t worry too much about Mandy being hurt, she was OK I could see. But I was worried Yvonne might put the collar on Phil next to stop him pinching food. But she didn’t. Not that I know of, anyway.

When we got home I shuffled inside without saying thank you. That was rude, I know, but I was trying to stop a fire lighter and nobody knew.

I went to my room and threw something at the wall. Then I put the newspaper tearings back into my scrapbook in their right places, and I put my Diary of Important Dates on my bookshelf. I sat on the floor until dinner time. I knew Pedro wouldn’t be happy with me, and I knew the police weren’t happy.

You can imagine what happened at dinner that night. It was a Thursday and we had beautiful big chips. But of course Johnny had some salt after Rav and Phil. So I couldn’t have any. What a day.

Before I got into bed I looked at the photo of Pedro and me that I keep on my wall. We are standing on the beach in silly hats and we’re both smiling. It was taken about three years ago. His skin is a bit darker than mine. His parents came from Spain. I lay in bed that night and did an exercise that Pedro told me about. He says think of how bad something’s been, and then think of the good things. He calls this drinking half a glass.

OK, I thought, today I wanted to go and see the police by myself, and I did. I mightn’t have been able to tell them what I wanted them to know, but I was sure that wouldn’t be the last time I needed to find the police. And it wasn’t.

As I lay there I suddenly had a thought. What if tomorrow was a special day for a church? Another one would be lit. I turned on my light and grabbed my Diary of Important Dates off the shelf and opened it to June 17. Thankfully, that day wasn’t a special religious day, according to my diary. Then I flicked through other days. I didn’t know there were so many saints and so many religious days. For instance, I’d never heard of St Bartholomew, but he had his special day on August 24th. I went through each day of the year in my Diary of Important Dates and found all these religious holidays. There were 33 saints’ days listed. The list went on and on. Some days even had two saints’ days on the one day, which is probably a bad thing for the saints. Like if you’re a twin and you have to share your birthday. For instance, St Philip and St James both share May 1st. I also realised something else that was important. There had been six special days that had come and gone between April 25th and June 16th. So my fire lighter wasn’t lighting fires on every holy day. Only some. That’s if my newspapers could be trusted. Which I believed they could.

That night I went to sleep knowing at least that the next day would not be a day when the fire lighter would be switched on. But I also made a note to find out whether there was a St John’s church nearby, since June 24th was the next special day according to my Diary of Important Dates.