Jill Jackson - 04 - Watch the World Burn (11 page)

Jill perched at the edge of the freshly made single bed. It had been fifteen years since she’d slept in a single bed. Well, except for Gabriel’s fold-out that one night last year. Bloody Gabriel. Why had she listened to him? What the fuck was she going to do here? She reached over and slid out the top drawer of a nightstand next to the bed. Empty. She wiped her forefinger across the bottom of the drawer. Clean. Huh. Jill stood and moved to the large framed window that took up most of the back wall. Well, that’s pretty spectacular, I have to admit, she thought.

She had been guided by a nurse in civvies from the luxurious reception area through high-ceilinged meeting rooms, past closed office doors, and through a large, sunny dining room. Jill had gasped when they’d exited the building into a glass-enclosed outdoor corridor, which stretched through the sky to another building opposite. To the right, one floor down, was a cobblestone courtyard. Sandstone benches squatted around a gently playing fountain. Three tiny potbellied birds with iridescent blue chests chirruped and washed in the water. To her left, an impeccably tended emerald lawn rolled down the hill to the forest.

The nurse had smiled. ‘Not bad, huh?’ she’d said.

‘Mmm,’ said Jill.

‘That’s you over there.’ The nurse pointed with her chin. ‘You’re in Lyrebird.’

‘I’m in Lyrebird,’ said Jill. Whatever that means.

‘Yep,’ said the nurse. ‘Lyrebird Unit. For the worried well. We just came through Platypus – that’s for people suffering a psychotic mental illness. Up closer to the gatehouse you’ve got Kingfisher – D&A. Then we’ve got Rainbow Bridge right behind us – Palliative Care.’

Jill followed the nurse over the walkway, wheeling her bag. ‘So, I’m the worried well?’

‘Yeah. Look, Lyrebird is for people with depression or anxiety. Or both. We’ve had quite a few cops come stay with us. It’s nice over here.’

The corridor led them into an open foyer. The floorboards beneath them extended straight out to a huge timber balcony. The balcony perched in the forest. The trees extended right up to the wooden railings, and colourful birds flitted from the branches to the two huge hanging birdfeeders suspended from the balcony’s roof.

Along with some mismatched fabric armchairs and cushions, the birds were the only occupants of the spacious balcony.

‘Wow,’ said Jill, walking over to the railing. The forest floor below was only around a two-metre jump down, but the leafy ground dropped away sharply, leading into a deep tangle of inky greenness.

Now, at the window in her bedroom, Jill stared out into the forest. Scotty stood behind her. She leaned her head into his chest and closed her eyes to heighten the illusion. He trailed his hands lightly over her hair and she stiffened. Shh, he told her. It’s okay. He smoothed his fingers over her forehead, smudged his thumbs across her eyes and out to her temples, her earlobes. No one had ever touched her like that. Scotty wrapped his huge arms around her chest, trapping her to him; his heart was beating against her spine.

‘Um, are you okay?’

Jill spun towards the voice, flattening her back against the window.

‘Hi. I mean, hang on a sec, I’ll get you a tissue.’ The young woman in the doorway moved over to the other bed in the room and grabbed a box from the nightstand. ‘We go through a lot of these here,’ she said. She moved towards Jill with the box.

Jill took a tissue.

‘Hi, roomie,’ the dark-haired girl said. ‘I’m Layla. I’ve got bipolar disorder. I’m coming out of a manic phase right now, so if I talk your ears off you’re gonna have to forgive me.’ She turned her back on Jill and opened her top drawer. ‘Raspberries or frogs?’ she said, turning back with a bag of lollies in each hand.

Jill wiped her nose.

‘You’re right – chocolate, of course,’ said Layla, dropping the lollies back in, and pulling from the drawer a family-sized block of Caramello.

‘Quite a stash,’ said Jill.

‘I just stocked up – you’re lucky,’ said Layla, snapping off two rows of the chocolate and offering them to Jill.

‘No, thanks,’ Jill said.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Layla, around a mouthful of chocolate.

‘Jill.’

‘What’s wrong with you, then?’

‘I’m the worried well.’

Layla laughed. ‘It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? You signed up for groups yet?’

‘I don’t like groups.’

Layla studied her with green eyes, her head askance. ‘Well, you got no choice here. The groups are compulsory. Mornings and arvos, two hours each. And you gotta have one-to-one twice a week.’

‘One-to-one?’

‘Yeah, you know, see your counsellor.’

‘What if I don’t?’ said Jill.

‘Well, you’d hafta leave,’ said Layla.

That’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard all day.

‘It’s a voluntary hospital – you know that, don’t you?’ said Layla. ‘Anyone can leave whenever they want, or they can make you leave whenever they want. They don’t let any really high-risk patients stay here.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Well, we gotta get you signed up into groups right now, Jill, on account of if you wait much longer, you’re gonna get stuck in John Jamison’s group.’

‘And that would be bad?’ asked Jill.

‘John Jamison is the most boring motherfucker you ever had to listen to in your life, I swear to God,’ said Layla. ‘Only way you wanna go to one of his groups is if you got insomnia real bad and you got no Valium PRN.’

Jill glanced at her luggage bag near her bed.

‘I’ll help you unpack later,’ said Layla, walking over to the door. ‘Come on.’ ‘You see what I said, Jill?’ said Layla, reaching up with a pen to the list pinned to the noticeboard. ‘I just saved your arse from a fate worse than death. One spot left in Clarissa’s group.’

‘Who’s Clarissa?’

‘This witchy, hippy counsellor. She’s pretty cool. You get to do a lot of meditation, tai chi and shit with her, and she don’t go on and on about praying all the time, like John Jamison does. What’s your last name?’ Layla turned, pen still in hand. Her lime-green hoodie had ridden up, and a bellybutton ring dangling a smiley charm jiggled above her low-rider jeans. That wasn’t the only thing jiggling above her jeans, Jill couldn’t help but think. She mentally bitch-slapped herself.

‘Jackson,’ she said. ‘Jill Jackson. Thanks, Layla.’

‘Cool. Come on. There’s still an hour before group – I’ll show you around.’

Layla led Jill around the hospital grounds, chattering all the way, seemingly unconcerned that Jill barely spoke a word in return. Jill was surprised to find that the beautiful grounds, the constant babble of language from the girl next to her and the aimless dawdling was loosening the fist that had been squeezing her insides for the past few days. She tuned in and out of Layla’s conversation. She learned that Layla had recently been transferred from the Platypus Unit. ‘I thought I was the Virgin Mary when I got in here,’ she’d said. ‘Only problem with that is the virgin part, on account of when I’m manic, I’m randy as hell.’ Also that she’d done a stint in Kingfisher too: ‘Tell you what, Jill Jackson. You need extra meds, some pot or booze, you pay a visit to Kingfisher. Those rehab motherfuckers got so many stashes around the hospital grounds it’s a wonder all the wildlife ain’t poisoned.’

Layla told Jill that when she wasn’t a resident here, she was an apprentice hairdresser, twenty-five years old, who lived with her parents. ‘It’s lucky they got me on their health-insurance plan,’ she said. ‘You ever been on a state-run psych ward, Jill? Damn! This hospital is paradise, I’m telling you, compared to a real psych unit.’ Jill also learned who the ‘cool’ nurses and counsellors were, and who to avoid; who was doing whom at the moment amongst the inpatients and staff, and that she definitely had to stay away from ‘Fast Fingers’ Anthony.

‘Now, Fast Fingers Anthony is gonna get up real close as soon as he sees you, Jill,’ Layla said. ‘What you gotta do is keep your back to the wall when you’re in the same room as him, and if he approaches, you gotta tell him to step the fuck back. Either way, though, get used to the fact that you’re gonna get goosed at some stage by Fast Fingers.’

‘Goosed?’ Jill said.

‘Yeah, you know – he tries to get his fingers up your crack.’

Jill blinked. Fast Fingers would have some broken fingers if he got within a metre of her.

Jill followed Layla into the dining room. Jill guessed that whoever had designed this hospital had reasoned that a lot of light would be therapeutic. The dining hall was like an atrium – huge French windows and doors let in the garden views, and, from above, sunlight and blue sky shone through two room-length skylights. The designers may have been onto something, Jill thought. Depression felt like being in the deepest, darkest tunnel in the world, and to be constantly confronted by sunshine definitely seemed to counteract the illusion a smidge.

‘You want a juice?’ asked Layla.

Suddenly starving, Jill nodded, and Layla handed her a glass from a gleaming stack next to four water and juice dispensers. She filled her glass with apple juice and grabbed an apple and a couple of packets of cellophane-sealed cream biscuits from bowls next to the juice.

‘Eat on the way,’ said Layla. ‘We gotta get to group.’

Troy closed the door behind Delahunt and Elvis. He slid down the wall and sat on the floor in the hall with his knees up. What the fuck is going on?

He had no reason at all to trust the Fed, but he hadn’t seen any other way to play it than what Delahunt had suggested, and he’d had no time to plan otherwise. When Delahunt told him he was suspect number one in two murders, he’d simultaneously wanted to laugh, vomit and kick someone’s arse. But then Elvis had returned and he’d decided to play it out, to see where the questions went.

Elvis had clarified every point in his Incendie statement, unpacked each detail, asked for fuller perspectives on what he’d seen, heard and thought throughout the incident. A civilian would have thought that Elvis was just being thorough. But even without Delahunt’s heads-up, Troy knew that Elvis was trying to set him up in a lie. He knew that when a perp bullshitted about a crime scene, he’d get deeper and deeper into his fabrications until eventually the inconsistencies began to show. The more lies you tell, the harder it is to remember all the shit you’ve spun. In subsequent interviews, the questioner would twist small, incidental parts of what you’d said and selectively feed it back to you as though they were the facts. Troy had seen guilty suspects get so confused going over and over the bullshit that they’d have sworn day was night and that they walked with their arsehole pointing at the ceiling. Eventually, they’d blurt out a confession just to stop the brain pain.

So did this fat fuck really think he’d done it? Or was this all the federal agent’s game plan? An elaborate good cop/bad cop routine, to make him think he had a friend on the inside? He’d never heard of a fellow officer deliberately sabotaging another’s case, aligning himself with a suspect. How could he trust this Delahunt fucker? Maybe they didn’t have enough evidence to execute a search warrant and Delahunt was trying to rattle him, scare him enough to do something stupid – maybe to try to dump evidence.

If that was the case, they’d have a tail on him at all times. Fuck, even if Delahunt was playing it straight, they’d still be watching him.

Troy leaned his head back against the wall. Why the hell did they think he would be capable of killing a cop? Or an old woman, for that matter? It was just fucking ridiculous. But when Delahunt had laid out the bullshit profile, Troy realised he’d have suspected himself if he’d woken up with amnesia for memories of the past week.

But he remembered everything.

And he knew that he was in this shit because he’d been too close to Miriam Caine. Troy was starting to believe that being too close to a Caine was bad for your health.

He crossed his legs and thought carefully. Took it back to the beginning. Most murders are crimes of passion, committed by someone who knows the vic. Troy had no idea why Caine might have done it, and no inkling of how, but he was really starting to believe that the man had murdered his mother.

And if he’d murdered his mother, then maybe he’d murdered his wife too.

If the cops were going to waste their time looking up Troy’s arse, then he was going to try to find out some more about David Caine.

There had to be twenty people in the group room. Jill checked for the exits first, then did a quick headcount. Eighteen, including her and Layla. Too many people. The fist in her belly squeezed tighter.

A wild-haired woman in multicoloured tights and a tie-dyed, oversized T-shirt stood in front of the whiteboard at the head of the large room. The room appeared to be some type of gymnasium, but there was no equipment around.

‘We got a couple of minutes,’ Layla whispered. ‘I’ll give you a run-down on who’s here.’

‘Clarissa, the counsellor,’ Jill interrupted, pointing with her chin to the woman by the whiteboard. ‘Fast Fingers Anthony,’ she said, nodding backwards at the man who’d just walked in the door behind them.

‘Right and right – how’d you know?’ asked Layla.

‘Fuck off,’ Jill said loudly to the balding new entrant to the room. He stopped midstride on his way over to introduce himself.

Layla laughed. ‘You heard the girl, Anthony. Get.’

Jill dropped into the seat nearest the door at the back, next to a heavy-set woman in sunglasses and a zipped-up khaki bomber jacket. She had to be boiling.

‘Nah, Jill, we sit over there,’ said Layla, putting a hand onto Jill’s arm. Although Jill made no perceptible movement or sound, Layla pulled her hand back quickly. ‘Or we can sit here,’ she said.

With a fifteen-minute break halfway through, Jill and Layla spent the next two hours learning about the ‘Seven Deadly Sins of Thinking’: Catastrophising – making mountains out of molehills; Selective Attention – only noticing things that fit your negative view of the world, and ignoring anything that didn’t; Black and White Thinking – everything had to be one hundred per cent perfect or it was a total failure; Personalising – feeling that everything bad that happened had to have something to do with you; Fortune-Telling – imagining the worst possible outcome in a situation, even when you had no idea what would happen; Hindsight Bias – judging yourself negatively for past behaviour based upon knowledge that you have now but didn’t have then; and Should-ing – constantly berating yourself for not doing enough, and ceaselessly telling yourself you
should
do more. Jill reckoned that every one of these ‘flaws’ of thinking had kept her alive in her job for the past decade. But she also recognised that they kept her miserable as well.

Better miserable than dead? Sometimes she wondered. After the group, Layla didn’t wait with her for the queue to die down in the lunchroom, but Jill made her way over to Layla’s table when she’d selected her meal. It was hard not to – Layla was waving and calling loud enough to be heard back on the ward.

‘Oh my God, Jill, you took
forever!’
said Layla. ‘I’m going to have to teach you the way things work around here. Look, everyone in Lyrebird’s gone back already. They’re gonna get the best chairs on the veranda. Good thing I wanted some more of that apple crumble, or I’d have left you here to eat with the Kingfishers, and they’re some noisy fuckers.’

The warm fish and salad was actually pretty great. Jill had started on her apple crumble before she remembered that Scotty had once told her it was one of his favourites. She pushed the plate away.

Layla cocked an eyebrow. ‘Now, that’s just wasteful, that is,’ she said, and swapped Jill’s spoon with her own. She waded in.

Back on the unit, Jill told Layla that she wanted to unpack and lie down for a while.

‘Don’t you want to come out on the veranda to meet everyone first?’ asked her roommate.

Actually, I’d rather stick a fork in my eye. ‘Later, Layla. I don’t feel like it right now.’

Curled on her bed, Jill reasoned that the hardest thing she was going to have to get used to in here was the lack of a bedroom door.

‘All psych units are like that, Jill,’ the nurse had told her that morning.

‘But where am I supposed to get changed?’

The nurse had walked over to the handle-free door at the side of the room and pushed it open. ‘Bathroom.’

‘If someone was going to off themselves behind closed doors, they could just do it in there then,’ Jill grumbled.

‘You gonna off yourself, Jill?’ the nurse had wanted to know.

‘No.’ Exactly what Jill would do after a couple of days with no sleep in here, she couldn’t determine. No way she’d be able to go to sleep without a door. She pictured the specially constructed metal front door – with multiple locks – in her flat in Maroubra.

‘There are no doors because we nurses have to do the rounds five times a night – to check you guys are okay,’ the nurse continued. It sounded as though she’d given this explanation a couple of dozen times. ‘Opening and closing doors all night wakes everyone up.’

Birdsong as perfect as any new-age CD fluted in from the open window behind her, along with soft green light and fresh air. Jill uncurled her knees and rolled over onto her back, her eyes on the ceiling. Scotty smiled down at her. When the tears had made the back of her hair wet, she got up off the bed and started to unpack.

The tension in her stomach was back, as full-force as ever. She had to get rid of some of this adrenaline. She’d take a run as soon as she put her stuff away.

Layla appeared in the doorway.

‘Hey, I’ll give you a hand,’ she said.

‘That’s okay, I got it,’ said Jill, voice thick.

‘No, you don’t get it. I want to see all your shit.’ Layla sat down at the base of Jill’s bed and peered up under the sheet of hair hiding Jill’s face.

‘Hey. You need some more chocolate, Jill Jackson,’ Layla said, jumping up from the bed and dashing across the room. ‘Goddamn it!’

‘What?’ said Jill.

‘Someone’s been in my lollies again!’

‘It wasn’t me.’

‘I know,’ said Layla, her arse in the air as she rummaged through her drawer. ‘It’s that fucking Justin Cuthbert. Every time some of my stash goes missing, I see him eating lollies. Fucker’s even offered me some.’

Jill tucked her ironed T-shirts into her bottom drawer. ‘So, if you know he’s taking them,’ she said, ‘why don’t you just tell him off? Tell him you’ll report him for stealing if he does it again?’

‘Because every time they go missing, the bastard’s been accounted for. He’s been in group with me, or on the veranda.’

‘So it can’t be him, then,’ said Jill.

‘That’s right,’ said Layla. ‘Except it is.’

Jill shook her head. ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’ Layla snapped her head around.

‘I mean, I’ve got to go for a run.’

‘Now that is something I’ll never understand,’ said Layla, reclining back on her bed, one arm behind her head. ‘Why in hell someone would want to go for a run. Best day of my life was when I left school and realised I’d never have to do a cross-country again.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s how I stop myself completely going mad,’ said Jill, and then realised what she’d said. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s okay. You use running, I use Lithium.’

Jill smiled.

‘You’re out of luck though, Jill,’ said Layla. ‘It’s why I came back in the first place. I forgot to tell you – you got a one-to-one with Sam Barnard.’

‘Look, no offence, Sam,’ said Jill sitting in a big green armchair opposite the young man in a matching chair. ‘It’s just that me and counselling don’t work so well.’

‘Have you had some bad experiences?’ asked the psychologist.

Jill studied him, wondering how to answer. Well, we could start with the ten or so therapists I saw to try to get me to stop carving my thighs up as a kid, she thought. Or maybe we could talk about Mercy Mellas, probably the best counsellor I’ve ever seen, who also turned out to be a serial killer of paedophiles. Or maybe my last psych – paid for by the service, but only there to ensure she was covering her own arse. Jill sighed and decided he didn’t need to hear all that. He looked about four years younger than her, and his hairline was already working its way backwards fast.

‘Look, I just need to run right now,’ she said.

‘We all feel like that sometimes, Jill,’ he said. ‘Especially in times of pain, but it’s important to stay with the pain. To work through it.’

‘No, Sam,’ she said, the vice of tension working its way up her spine. A spasm in her shoulder felt like it was pulling her head down to her neck. ‘I mean I need to go for a
run.’
She made a walking motion in the air with two fingers.

‘Oh,’ said the counsellor, blushing. ‘I understand. It’s just that it would be better if you could do that afterwards, because we’re scheduled to talk right now. You haven’t been properly admitted until we’ve had our first meeting. I need to make sure you’re–’

‘I’m not suicidal,’ she said. And if I was I wouldn’t tell you.

‘Well that’s one part of it, but–’

‘Look, you don’t get it,’ said Jill, the adrenaline making her stand. ‘When I feel like this I’ve got to do something physical. Running is how I cope when I feel this way.’

‘There are other methods you can learn.’

Her voice completely flat now, Jill said, ‘Have you read my file?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, you know about what happened to me when I was a kid? Did they write in there what they did to me?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. It was terrible–’

‘Yes, it was terrible,’ she said. ‘And most people would be completely fucked after living through that. I’m only partially fucked. I have been all the way there, but I got myself back again on my own. The way I keep my shit together when I feel out of control is to run. I don’t do out of control. So we can talk later.’ She moved to the door, ‘Or not. You can do what you gotta do.’

‘Well, can I at least run with you?’ he asked.

Jill flicked a glance up from his shoes to his eyes. ‘You can try,’ she said.