With these assessments complete, the psychiatrist opened a drawer and produced a small packet of medication.
‘Try a sample pack of Protazen,’ he said, passing the box to me. ‘Just to settle Jackson down a bit. If you notice a difference, I’ll write you a prescription.’
With no diagnosis and no treatment plan.
‘But why would I… medicate Jackson, when we don’t know what’s wrong?’
The doctor leaned back in his chair, smiling as if we were old friends.
‘In my experience, Mrs Curtis, children like Jackson often respond well to low-level medication. Until hopefully, they grow out of… whatever it is they’re going through. If they’re not over it by the time they’re teenagers, then typically we look at something stronger.’
We kept clear of the mental health profession for a long time after that, despite the fact that Jackson’s second year at school was marked by a decline in verbal communication and an increase in physical risk-taking. By the third grade, Jackson had endured two broken arms, a shattered femur and a dislocated collarbone, mostly incurred in our own back yard.
When my parents died in the early months of Jackson’s fourth grade, a trauma I could barely process myself, a sympathetic hospital social worker suggested that family therapy might serve to help us all. And that was how we met Dr Louisa Kelleher, a paediatric psychologist.
‘The complexity of Jackson’s issues goes beyond a single, unifying diagnosis,’ she announced, after our first session together. ‘Jackson’s inner thoughts are probably more developed than his outer expression allows. We’ll work on some practical strategies for better communication across the family system.’
Dr Kelleher has been a critical support for our family ever since.
I place the photoframe on the bedside table again and collapse onto the bed, gazing at the empty side of the mattress.
Over the years, Andy’s travel has increased in tandem with the complexity of Jackson’s issues. Not by design, I realise, but enough that I’ve sometimes felt abandoned by Andy. It’s seemed indulgent and unfair, with Andy busy breadwinning overseas, so I’ve always tried to suppress it.
But it can’t continue, I recognise now, this unrelenting toll on me.
On us as a couple.
Never quite attending to the steady corrosion of unresolved resentments between us.
My gaze lingers on the faded bedsheet strung up as a makeshift curtain across the window, where the Venetians once were. Beyond it, the sunrise is touching the world with its galvanising colours of gold, orange and pink.
I’m not nearly ready to face my Monday morning, so I close my eyes instead.
Just like Jackson, I want to start the day over again.
6
It’s the day after Mother’s Day, and the sixty-fourth day of school this year. That number reminds me of Dead Granny, because she was only sixty-four when she went to the Otherworld, about twenty years too early.
I’m on my way to school in the Red Rocket with Ruby, she’s listening to her music and shimmying in her seat. She’s always dancing and humming wherever she goes. Sometimes Ruby’s words even come out like a song because she’s ‘got the family music gene’, Mum says.
Mum’s driving the Red Rocket, she’s got her smart work clothes on and loads of makeup. I didn’t get to talk to Dead Granny much in Nanna Pam’s car last night, so I decide to try again now. I slide my school-shoe off and press the invisible buttons that usually connect us, but she doesn’t pick up.
If Granny’s not home in the Otherworld, where else can she be?
Mum steers the Red Rocket into the left lane, then reaches forward and turns up the radio. Her eyes are a bit sad this morning, so maybe she’s thinking about Granny and Grandpa again, or about Dad in New York. Even though we videocall with him almost every day, it’s not the same as hugging him in his pyjamas and sniffing his morning-Dad smell and watching him fix broken stuff with the toolbox that his dad made.
There’s a loud ad-man yelling out of the radio about ‘limited stock’ and ‘prices can’t last’ and ‘terms and conditions may vary’ and the sound is so ugly, I close my eyes. When I do that, suddenly Dead Granny appears right in front of me, pointing down at my shoe-phone.
‘Hello, Granny!’ I open my eyes and pull my foot over my knee. ‘I thought you weren’t home.’
Ruby’s so focused on her music, she doesn’t even notice my shoe-phone.
‘I was just taking a bath,’ says Granny. I didn’t think dead people had bodies to wash, but maybe they give you a new one in the Otherworld? ‘How are you, Jack-Jack?’
I decide to tell Granny all about what happened this morning, when the top-knot pigeons were making weird noises outside my attic window. How I turned on my music to drown out the alien-bird sounds, then I hung upside down from my bunk to stop the intruder-thoughts. I dangled there for a long time, looking at my treasures spread across the floor. My fingers could just reach the black marker under my bed, so I started drawing on my stomach until suddenly Mum was in the room, all topsy-turvy and telling me I could hurt myself hanging like that and my room was a big mess and didn’t I realise how early it was?
‘She wasn’t happy, Granny,’ I say. ‘I had to start the day over.’
‘Well.’ Granny sighs. ‘You just need to get your beans out in the morning, don’t you?’
Granny really gets me. She understands that every morning when I wake up, my beans are flying around inside me like popcorn in a pot. They bounce me out of bed and make me want to jump and dance and do a hundred push-ups, even when the rest of the world is sleeping. When I do, Mum gets cranky. And she’d be even crankier if she knew what I did at Digby’s house yesterday afternoon in Alt-World.
‘I’m itchy,’ Ruby whispers, so close to my ear that my shoe-phone screen flickers and Dead Granny vanishes.
Suddenly my shoe-phone is just a shoe, and it’s 8.37 on an ordinary Monday morning again.
I turn and look at Ruby. She’s knotting up her hair with both hands, scratching. Mum notices this in the rear-vision mirror and brakes so hard, my head almost hits the seat in front.
‘You were itchy yesterday too, weren’t you?’ says Mum. ‘I guess we’d better go back and get you something for it. Have we got any antihistamine at home?’
Mum’s talking about medicine, but she sounds like she wants to murder someone.
I close my eyes and scan the first aid cupboard with my memory download. I see capsules for headache and syrup for chesty coughs, spray for sinusitis, chocolate tablets for worms and stretchy tape for sore muscles. But there’s definitely no antihistamine, only those pills the Bad Brain Doctor gave me when I saw him a few years ago.
I really liked that Bad Brain Doctor, but Mum didn’t. He looked a bit like a movie star with bright blue eyes and a black beard and he asked me cool questions like, ‘If your dad was an animal, what would he be?’ I told him ‘A frog,’ because I’m learning Mandarin and frogs mean money and hard work in China, and our dad works hard all the time.
The Bad Brain Doctor liked my answers so much he gave me a packet of blue Smarties and Mum a tiny packet of pills. Afterwards, Mum got into an argument with the lady at the front desk about those pills, then she marched me out of the waiting room and said, ‘We’re never going back to that doctor again.’