D

'It's a D Good Yarn'

Gibson is an accomplished poet and his chapters and literary allusions add some meat for the more erudite readers. Hence, this well written 'pulp' novel could readily catch the eye of your more 'serious' readers. Both groups should enjoy...

— Newsagent & Stationer, Dec 1995/Jan 1996, p18

'Marcus' mind over madness'

Gibson... describes (the novel) as 'hopelessly mainstream' and which is selling in numbers to confirm the claim... The mainstream and the realms of madness seem to fit will in Gibson's prose... it's an atypical first novel.

— Caroline Chisolm, Telegraph-Mirror, 16 Dec 1995, Weekend Extra p99-100

'First-time author on a fast track to fame'

The manuscript was presented to the award panel and was quickly snapped up by HarperCollins publishers after the awards were announced. ...an ingeniously simple title chosen for its easy recall value... Inspired by childhood fears, D was written at night while Gibson was labouring last year...

— Andrew Banks, The Australian, 6 Dec 1995, p5

'New Paperbacks'

Don't even try this book if you don't have a strong stomach... Thriller, it says on the back. Rather it is like being pulled through a nightmare... like a nightmare, it has a compelling quality and there is a talent shining through.

— Anne Susskind, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Dec 1995, Spectrum p11

'D'

"HarperCollins' second horror novel of the year, D , is vastly superior... and would have rated well in the Aurealis Awards had it been published in time to be considered. ...the writing is controlled and real suspense is generated... there are enough genuine surprises to keep any reader happy."

— Bill Congreve, Aurealis #17, April 1996, p78-79

'D for Daniel and danger'

"There is much to like about Marcus Gibson's debut novel, simply titled D.

"The tale, about a gifted young man trapped in an asylum, is full of tension and pathos, which steadily builds in suspense until it is almost impossible to put down...

The story takes many twists and turns as Daniel struggles desperately to avoid the fate planned for him by his manipulative doctor.

— Paula Weston, Southern Star, Edition 1, 24 Feb 1996, p42

livejournal.com

We've had odd authors jump up and disappear and leave interesting things behind, like Marcus Gibson...

— Ashamel

Blurb

A forgotten town high in the Blue Mountains... an asylum with malevolent secrets hidden in its walls and corridors... a lonely, dimly lit cell with a single occupant who's been there for eleven years.

D is Daniel Seaton, lonely and mysterious asylum inmate. D is not insane, but he lives in a terrible world of noises - noises he can hear from other people's ears. The doctors won't let him sleep, they want to keep him awake until he can stand it no more - all for the sake of their dream research.

And now someone wants to kill D. Stalking him is a creature who can hear the noises in his head, and wants to stop them, to kill the sound.

A nurse is brutally murdered, keys to the asylum go missing, and a terrifying figure in a white hood stalks the corridors. Beautiful intern Dianne Reicher is D's only hope. With her help he must fight to hold on to his sanity, his freedom... and his life.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The year they were born, was the year they began to die.

It was 1994. Most of us were going about the business of taping the first episodes of Friends on the living room VHS recorder, wearing chunky shoes and denim overalls, and listening on our Walkmans as Ace of Base declared they'd seen ‘the sign’. Apple’s PowerPC Macintosh began to appear in shops with an impressive 5MB hard drive, and faraway scientists at CERN were deliberating whether to make the ‘world wide web’ free.

Fresh out of high school, I was working in construction shoveling concrete. At night, I'd return to my dim downstairs bedroom and hand-write this novel, in pencil - a hexagonal indent in one finger, flecked in gold. When finished, I transcribed those small scribblings onto a clunky Amstrad CPC6128 and waited two days for a busy tractor-feed printer to noisily eke out the first copy. After 4 hours tearing perforated edges off 986 double-spaced sheets of tractor-feed I set up a typewriter on an upright piano, and fed each pregnant page through the roller, manually typing in page numbers.

So it was, in the same year those numbers were born, the first ebooks were being shared over a fledgling world wide web.

In 1994 a commissioning editor at HarperCollins read the boxed up twin-ream manuscript and offered me a deal. The paperback hit shelves at Christmas 1995, three weeks after my 21st birthday. We'd broken the Guinness World Record for the 'youngest novelist writing adult-themed work'. And I was able to buy a new printer.

Sixteen years later – much like the tractor-feed – your ebook device won't decide how many pages you're holding till you’re into it, and even then you can still change its mind. An author can publish a novel without the words ever touching a sheet of paper. So, it is with parental fondness that I recall those sweet sorry page numbers, pressed together, bound on shelves, and kiss them goodbye. Here's to the gadgets. They've freed up this version to include some original sketches and handwriting that didn't make it into the paperback. You're saving trees. And with the right cover you don't have to worry about your book falling apart when you read in the bath.

So, on to the reading.

I hope you enjoy this story as desperately as that curious, wide-eyed boy enjoyed putting the words down – in pencil, on Amstrad, by typewriter, and tractor feed.

Marcus

July 2011

PS: Look out for two new titles coming soon to ebook stores!

CALENDAR

- Blurb

- Reviews

- Author's Note

- Prologue: Antenatal, Birth, Childhood - 11-15 November, 1973 - Sunday morning to Thursday

Birth Certificate

- Chapter 1: Desire - 29 January, 1993 - Friday night

Diagram: Devil Siding

- Chapter 2: Deuteronomy - Friday night

- Chapter 3: Dedication - 30 January, 1993 - Saturday night

- Chapter 4: The Dream (I) - 31 January, 1993 - Sunday morning

- Chapter 5: Daedal - Sunday night

- Chapter 6: Dianne - 1 February, 1993 - Monday morning

- Chapter 7: Dysphemia - Monday night to 2 February, 1993 - Tuesday

- Chapter 8: The Dream (II) - Tuesday night to 3 February, 1993 - Wednesday

- Chapter 9: Desperation - Wednesday night to 4 February, 1993 - Thursday

- Chapter 10: Diplacusis - 5 February, 1993 - Friday, Full moon

- Chapter 11: The Damned - 6-7 February, 1993 - Saturday night to Sunday

- Chapter 12: Deliverance - Sunday night to 8 February, 1993 - Monday

- Chapter 13: Doctors - Monday evening

- Chapter 14: The Dossier - Monday night

Dossier Depiction of D

- Chapter 15: Daedalus - Tuesday morning

- Chapter 16: Debris - 9 February, 1993 - Tuesday

- Chapter 17: Dauntless - Tuesday night to 10 February, 1993 - Wednesday morning

- Chapter 18: Diligence - Wednesday night to Sunday, Valentine's Day

Drawing (Dianne)

- Chapter 19: Distraction

- Chapter 20: Defendant - 15 February, 1993 - Monday

- Chapter 21: The Dock - Monday night to16 February, 1993 - Tuesday

- Chapter 22: Deterioration - 17-18 February, 1993 - Wednesday to Thursday night

- Chapter 23: Deadlock - 19 February, 1993 - Friday

- Chapter 24: Deliberation - Friday night to 20 February, 1993 - Saturday morning

- Chapter 25: Defiance - Saturday

- Chapter 26: Discovery - Saturday night

- Chapter 27: Duologue - Saturday night

- Chapter 28: Discipleship - Saturday night to 22 February, 1993 - Monday morning

- Chapter 29: Decision - Monday morning

- Chapter 30: Dreamtime - Monday morning

- Chapter 31: Deceived - Monday

- Chapter 32: Denouement - Monday afternoon

- Chapter 33: Escape - Monday afternoon

- Chapter 34: Freedom, An Epilogue - 28 January, 1994 - Saturday

- About the Author

- Sample Chapter - The Peace Bomb

- Sample Chapter - The Dead See

A Prologue ANTENATAL, BIRTH, CHILDHOOD

Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Growth of a Poet's Mind, (I) Childhood

Antenatal

Sunday morning, 11 November 1973

They were kicked to death on the side of the road.

Jack Burgess ploughed east along a dusty stock route, his green Holden pulling up clouds of red ochre in its wake.

Beyond the rotted fence posts on either side of the road the spinifex shivered in the heat. Scattered gum trees cast patches of shade over the dry remains of their ancestors. The blazing summer sun wearied and nourished everything but for a busy flock of currawongs, their caws echoing across the faded landscape. Jack gripped the wheel with liver-spotted hands.

On the radio, voices thick with static talked about the Queen opening the new Opera House in Sydney. The planned 1963 opening date had passed ten years since and now the government had gone ninety-three million dollars over budget.

Ellie Burgess slept soundly as Jack peered at the road with weary eyes, oblivious to the radio. You could tell he’d once been handsome. In a brown, weathered sort of way. Now he looked tired, ill.

Ellie had noticed the tumour when it was still only a slight bulge on the left of his forehead. It wasn’t cancer, they’d said, and it probably wasn’t going away.

But he wouldn’t lie down quietly. No. Let them look, and offer their early condolences and their advice. He was determined to keep driving, keep farming, keep showing up at church until the very end. At any rate, the end was nigh.

A good way down the road Theresa carried his first grandchild. Two and a half months left now before the child would be born. And he mightn’t be around in two and a half months.

Jack smiled feebly. Theresa, his little girl, was carrying his legacy. The family he and Ellie had started forty years ago would continue for as long as the good Lord saw fit.

It was nearly noon, and two hours on the road already had Jack feeling numb all over but for his back. They’d set out almost as soon as they’d arrived home from church. Twenty-seven miles south to Gongolgon where the sealed road ended and eighteen miles further south-west.

Not a soul for a dozen miles in any direction.

Jack thought he saw a large dust cloud in the heat ahead of them.

Something felt wrong.

He glanced at his wife. She continued to sleep despite all the noise and the corrugated road. It was funny how people became used to things. Looking at her Jack’s lips trembled. They were both so old. They were already so alone. She wouldn’t make it.

Jack felt something creep over him as the gleaming yellow sign edged towards them, something like being alert. Already riddled with the pea holes of a kid’s .22, and the larger holes of a trapper’s .303, it showed a stylised silhouette of a kangaroo and, underneath, new black letters proclaiming NEXT 25kms. It was a warning. Australia’s largest marsupial, the largest marsupial in the world, frequented the road ahead.

How blumin’far is twen’y-five kilometres!Jack grumbled.

Then suddenly, a nine-foot long, pale grey form materialised over the nose of the sedan, easily clearing Jack’s home-welded roo catcher.

Jack’s heart burst in his chest as he tore at the wheel, throwing the vehicle sideways onto the grassy verge. Dust rushed forward from the rear of the car, enveloping all, and the immense boomer, with shoulders and biceps the size of a man’s, slammed through the windscreen. Ellie didn’t even have time to scream.

There was an incredible silence as adrenalin filled Jack’s ears. Then everything passed in slow motion until…

…they hammered to a halt, slamming into a fence post.

But it was far from over.

Jack threw his arms up as his eyes met the animal’s.Wide with pain and terror, lids peeled back and all the white exposed to the dust. The terrible stare made the grey, elongated face of the boomer seem somehow human. Scared, like a person. Pained.

Then there were dull and distant thumps and everything became a confusion of shadows.

The boomer’s lower torso was jammed securely into the cabin and it kicked madly, with all five limbs, to be free, raising a whirlwind of glass, dust and cloth. Its long, powerful legs smashed the headrests off the seats while Jack and Ellie, dazed, cowered against the door pillars. Its claws tore open upholstery and skin alike and, with an almighty crack, snapped the steering wheel down into Jack’s lap. The broad, whitened sheet of the laminated windscreen bounced between the roo’s feet, tail and the two cringing passengers, cutting and shaving at their skin.

Red. Suddenly everywhere, livid red spraying and rushing and pulsing. And then Jack’s left shoulder was torn away. A singular kick, with all the impulse of a gunshot, threw Jack’s head sideways to an impossible angle.

Ringing silence.

Finally the kangaroo convulsed free, thrashing momentarily in the grass before dragging itself away on all fives through the busted barbed-wire fence.

The sound of the radio was jarring.

The engine idled impatiently.

Steam rushed out of the radiator where it had been impaled on the fence post. So much noise.

Jonathan Burgess, Anzac, veteran of the world’s worst years of poverty and conflict, a mortal library of battered memories, lay still at the end of a long and often wearisome life, the tossed and ragged remains of a man. A pall of dust settled where the sun shone on his chest and face.

He felt cold despite the sun. Thoughts weren’t coming to him, he was going to them.

Across the car from him lay Ellie, her face lacerated and broken and her blood already scabbing in the throbbing heat.

Jack heard the ringing throb of agony coming towards him like a freight train, behind the close echo of the radio. Waves of dizziness pulled at his head. He was alone.

He felt himself being drawn up. The sun filled the sky. Ellie was already there, waiting. They would never see their only grandson.

Birth

Sunday night, 11 November 1973

The pain hits again as undiluted agony in the small of Theresa’s back. She glances sharply, coldly, through tear-streaked eyes at the luminous dial of her bedside clock. 11:54 p.m.

Ken! She stiffens. Ken! Call the doctor. Sleepily, Huh?!

The gynae-ugh-cologist.

Ken jolts upright, snatches the sleeping receiver from its cradle and stabs in the number.

Theresa’s pain settles like debris after a bomb.

Dr Noeland recommends she take two aspirin and go back to sleep. She almost does. Then the pain returns twenty minutes later. Then sixteen, ten minutes… two…

12:41. They ring Noeland again.

Get her to maternity immediately, he snaps.

Ken and Theresa bundle themselves urgently into the car. In twenty minutes Theresa has been given her first dose of Valium, almost as soon as the nurses have the plastic name-bracelet on her wrist. The contractions stop, for now, and she rests under stale-smelling linen monogrammed in blue. NDH. Nepean District Hospital.

A new doctor, Dr Levi, with a one-nurse entourage, sweeps into the bright ward and snatches the masonite clipboard from the foot of the bed. He peers over Ben Franklin bifocals, focusing on the absence of a name-card above her head. Theresa Seaton?

Yes.

I’m Doctor Solomon Levi. His voice is kind. I believe your child’s not due for another eleven weeks…

Almost three months, mumbles Ken, seated beside the bed, wringing Theresa’s pale hand.

Have you been under undue stress in the last few days Theresa? He speaks quickly.

Theresa’s eyes are swollen red. She’s been crying all day. Undue stress? Her voice is quiet but strong.

Theresa’s mother was killed yesterday, obliges Ken softly. He is a large man. And her father. They hit a roo… His voice trails off and he gently strokes his wife’s dull hair, wondering who else is going to die. Death always comes in threes.

I’m really very sorry Mrs Seaton. The trauma has accelerated your pregnancy. Levi does sound sorry, but for who or what, Ken isn’t sure. There are two things that we can do, and neither of them is Valium. In the kind of doses you would require, over a lengthy period of time, well, Valium wouldn’t be healthy… He refers briefly to his clipboard. There is intravenous alcohol.

Doctor, interrupts Theresa, abruptly lucid. I am a Christian.

As if that said it all.

Yes? The doctor looks puzzled.

I don’t drink alcohol.

The young nurse’s eyes bug out conspicuously, until she realises Ken is watching her.

Levi smiles softly. You don’t have to drink it, Mrs Seaton.

I don’t care.

I assure you Mrs Seaton, in this situation many people—

There is a second option? Ken interjects. The doctor is never going to dissuade Theresa, her blood slow with Valium or not.

Levi is perturbed, but still polite. I understand perfectly Mrs Seaton. He pauses and shifts the clipboard to his side. The other alternative is a… He catches himself before he says the word drug. A substance called salbutamol. It is also known as ventolin.

The couple nod. Ken is asthmatic.

Asthmaticism is more acute when the endocrine glands are especially active, as in pregnancy. Recently a doctor administered ventolin to a woman suffering a bronchial attack during childbirth and discovered that salbutamol delays contractions.

We’ll have the ventolin. Ken looks up from Theresa’s white hand.

Levi smiles briefly at the idea of Ken lying in stirrups beside his wife. I should warn you Mrs Seaton, salbutamol does have side effects.

Ken pales.

"It will affect your blood pressure – but only temporarily."

Theresa shows no concern as Ken mumbles, God will protect her and our little girl.

Levi smiles again and shifts uncomfortably. Couples often speculate on the gender of their forthcoming child. We’ll keep you on Valium for a while longer Mrs Seaton, and you can… ‘pray’ about the salbutamol. I’ll check in on you a little later. Good evening Mr Seaton.

He leaves, whispering something to the nurse.

The large doses of Valium give way to a needle taped into Theresa’s arm. A slender tube runs down from an IV bag suspended overhead. It is 12 November 1973. It isn’t until the following year that flow regulators will be made for intravenous tubes in general hospital use. Till then fluids flow often at their own pace.

The following year ultrasound will also come to Sydney. The machine will be the size of a Volkswagen and a pregnant mother will stand against a bag of jelly for a solid half hour as one picture develops line by tedious line. For now, there is no tangible reason for Ken and Theresa to believe that the child will be a girl. But they do.

If the child lives, and they are sure she will, they have settled upon the name Deborah, after the biblical prophetess. For now God is just testing their faith.

For an entire day, and throughout the ensuing night, Theresa lies in a regular ward with six other women.

The pain returns whenever the flow of salbutamol from the IV slows or stops. And it does, several times – pointedly, excruciatingly – and Theresa can do nothing but scream her overwhelming desire for the pain to cease. Someone comes running, remedies the problem and the pain subsides.

A dim light falls into the room from an administration desk down the hall. Theresa lies awake, staring at the liquid and its imperceptible fall. Imagining she is able to see the level of the salbutamol dropping. Anticipating the pain. And sleeplessly anticipating the pain becomes worse than the pain itself.

Wednesday, 14 November 1973

Then on the third day everything falls apart.

The salbutamol sets upon Theresa like a demon. She feels flushed and hot and her head throbs distantly. She watches. The salbutamol is falling faster, and harder, and thicker through the tube into her arm and her bloodstream, through her breasts and her heart, her head, her womb and the child.

The throbbing increases.

Theresa’s skull feels like some invisible tormentor is slamming her ears with cupped hands. Her scalp bulges reluctantly like a stale football bladder all cracked and crusty, then shrinks again squeezing all her thoughts together. Swelling and contracting, again and again with every drop. She can hear nothing over the deafening drumbeats of her heart echoing off the walls of her skull.

Theresa grabs at the emergency buzzer. It swings just out of her reach. Stretching with the salbutamol-skewered arm thickly wrapped in bulging veins, she rolls half onto her side in the narrow bed. The cold, hard floor swims beneath her. In the panic, exertion and fear she can’t hear her own screaming voice or feel her bald, raw throat exposed to the rest of the ward.

Why aren’t they coming? I’m dying!

She reaches again for the buzzer, the tips of her fingers clawing at the mockingly neat plastic case.

Teetering on the edge of the bed she sees herself falling, falling, then striking the stone-cold lino, arms and legs slapping the floor and her precious, fragile abdomen being crushed. Her daughter dying before she is born!

The buzzer swings back into her palm. She squeezes hard, cracking the plastic.

Two nurses and a matron bolt into Theresa’s view, all sound lost in the beat. One nurse fumbles awkwardly with the IV reservoir and it tips on its stainless steel mast, crashing to the floor. The matron pushes through and pinches the tube between calloused fingers, then gradually… gradually… a ringing silence.

Ken and Dr Levi come running. Ken’s voice is blurred, slow, like a dying record-player: Daarrr—eeshaa… Daaarrreeeshaa…

Dr Levi transfers Theresa back to the labour ward she was in on the first night.

And that is the end of the salbutamol.

Observing the aftermath and exchanging secret glances with the matron and Dr Noeland, Levi elects not to tell the couple that with the rise in blood pressure associated with the salbutamol overdose, their child has very likely suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. The problem will reveal itself later as a complication of such a premature birth.

The ward is crowded. There are two or three births taking place in each delivery room. Theresa’s contractions begin in earnest as the last of the salbutamol diffuses through her bloodstream. It is the third night. Across the room beyond a filmy curtain, shadows bustle and overlap eerily around the screams of a Greek woman giving birth.

Theresa wrestles silently with her child for two hours, two and a half hours, three hours. Ken falls into an emotional coma in the lobby. Dr Noeland consoles him quietly between looking in on Theresa.

The last thing Theresa remembers are the urgent words of the anaesthetist, Spinal block! We’re doing a spinal block! Then hurried nurses and the stabbing sensation of an epidural needle in her spine. The pain is too much.

She comes to around midnight, still on the table, groggy, legs bracketed apart. Everything looks fuzzy. They’ve left her. They’ve left her here in the most vulnerable and undignified of positions and forgotten her. What is going on? Their backs are all turned. Narrowly she catches a glimpse of her child being rushed away.

Her chest aches terribly. She feels groggy, naked, alone.

Thursday, 15 November 1973

It’s a boy. Theresa croaks noncommittally. He’s in intensive care.

I know. I already went and saw him, responds Ken. He is uncomfortable. Theresa isn’t herself. He looks around for a chair. The room stinks. The curtains are trying too hard to be homey – they’re bright orange. You did?

Yes. Through a window. We can’t go near him. After a long silence: Ken, I’m terrified. Ken can’t respond. His wife lies fractured and crumbling before his very eyes. They are still for almost five minutes, observing each other in thought. Dr Levi comes into the room. This time he comes alone, slowly.

Excuse me, Mr Seaton, may I see you outside for a moment. It isn’t a request.

Theresa’s eyes widen, bald like marbles.

Relax Mrs Seaton. Your son is al— Levi hesitates, —ive.

Ken moves away from the bed. Had he not seen Theresa’s strong facade broken down the instant before, he might have told Levi to say whatever it was to the both of them.

Outside in the hall.

Mr Seaton, I’m afraid your son has suffered a cerebral haemorrhage—

Inside the infant’s tiny softball-sized skull, the internal bleeding has done its damage; deep in the stem of the cerebrum his pontine tegmentum is leaking infinitesimal amounts of electrolytic fluid. Messages like hot sparks shoot down through the eighth nerve, the vestibulocochlear. He hears the people around him moving and bustling and breathing noise. It is happening all over again. He’s come out of another dark, comfortable womb – one of silence – and this time the cold brilliant light that shocked him before is replaced by sound.

He hears all the people beyond the clear wall of glass speaking, their lungs filling and flattening. Every groan in everybody’s ears echoing back into his own. Everything repeats itself and distorts, bending and lilting each time around, to the beat of a dozen different heartdrums. Reverberating. Everything reverberates. He hears his own little drum thumping the way he heard his mother’s heartbeat before, shaking the whole world. It hurts his raw tiny ears in their eggshell skull.

The haemorrhage has left him permanently afflicted.

Had he the air in his underdeveloped lungs to cry, he wouldn’t. He already hates noise. All of it. But he opens his mouth and he screams within.

—during the birth.

Ken looks blank.

A vein burst in the vicinity of his brain.

What? Vicinity? Will he live?

A cerebral haemorrhage can be brought on by anything. It may be as simple as unusual exertion or emotional excitement. In an adult it often has little effect other than a short period of unconsciousness, temporary and partial paralysis—

And in a baby? Ken interrupts.

Dr Levi looks at Ken with a gaze that would steady flames. We won’t know the extent of the damage done by the internal bleeding until he’s at least twelve months old. He may be deaf, even blind, we can’t tell yet. Learning disabilities don’t normally manifest themselves until a child starts school. But he may not make it that far…

Levi pauses, waiting for Ken’s whole attention. Mr Seaton, if you’re Catholic you might want to call your priest… Then he adds, too quickly, We just don’t know.

Ken leans away. No… I don’t believe you.

Levi’s eyes follow him, evaluating his reaction, the success of his own exposition. Whether you believe or not… His voice trails off.

How did something so straightforward go so terribly wrong? What was God saying to them? Ken’s eyes go to the ceiling. If the boy even lived they’d still be waiting to see if he could…

No. He shakes his head. We’re Protestants.

Okay… Your wife may come to the window.

Ken starts off slowly down the corridor. Oh. Alright. Good.

And Mr Seaton. There is something strange in the doctor’s tone. If he does make it, the scarring will heal. But don’t get your wife’s hopes up.

It is pitiful, sickening, embittering. To look at the frail little child; to see him, curled up, struggling to breathe in the atmosphere of the humidicrib. Ken finds he can put a finger to the window and block the boy out entirely. Two pounds and four ounces.

Theresa stands pale and distant at the glass wearing a filmy maternity gown and slippers. She presses a handkerchief to her trembling lips.

It’s a plastic manger, whispers Ken.

A single tube as thin as string runs through one of four Perspex portholes in the box, and through the boy’s tiny left nostril. His chest heaves with every breath, and when the tiny lungs fill with air his stomach sinks revealing under the umbilical knot a corrugated ridge that can only be his spinal cord. A horrible lane of scar tissue runs along the centre of the child’s belly where the spine is wearing its way through.

Theresa feels the horrified glances of other parents pretending not to look at her baby boy.

Ken keeps smiling as best he can. As if he is proud that their child is so rare. So special. That he has even made it this far. But he can’t puff up his chest or stand tall because he is collapsing beneath his clothes.

Dr Levi approaches. In soft careful words, he explains to the solemn mother and father that their son’s lungs have not yet fully developed and so he has great difficulty breathing normal air.

With a look of lassitude and a skin yellowed by jaundice, he isn’t even a pretty face. Veins stand out magenta against his cranium in proportions too large for his fragile torso. But there is one thing.

His grey-blue eyes. They are large and sharp and piercing and they survey, one by one, the faces at the glass with a terrifying understanding. The other children sleep or gaze at the ceiling or focus on the fist sticking out of their mouth, but his grey-blue eyes look directly at the people through the observation window and say ‘I’m not going to die. I’m getting out. I’m coming out there with you.’

Theresa turns her back, walks away down the cold, silent, fluorescent-lit corridor.

Theresa does not return to the nursery window after that first time. Instead she insists on being released from hospital after three days, rather than the standard five.

He’s not my child, she scowls. I had a little girl… Deborah. More tears. More sobs. And they took her away before I could see her properly.

When the nurse asks Ken to fill out the birth registration form he cracks. In a hoarse voice he tells her there is no point. Their son is going to die.

You’ll have to fill it out anyway, Mr Seaton.

Ken stares blankly into the nurse’s face for an uncomfortably long time. Then he registers his son’s name simply as D. D Seaton.

D's Birth Certificate

D lies in his plastic manger for eight and a half weeks, fists balled like small, stale walnuts. He’s a fighter, Dr Levi concedes.

A fighter. D struggles every second of every day for air and food and in an obscure, infantile way, for a corner of sanity to grab a hold of so he can begin crawling towards sentience.

It is Ken who comes to take his son home after months of waiting. Waiting, going about his life, anxious.

At home D understands nothing, yet he feels everything. He feels his father going away, two hundred and forty miles away, to the Snowy Mountain Hydroelectric Scheme where he services earth-moving machinery.

He feels Theresa turning to the alcohol she’d once refused. He smells her rancid breath.

He feels hunger. He feels neglect. But most of all he feels alone.

Ken is killed a few years later.

Childhood

I feel no will to cast the sky of black and bitter wind

That pressed the wet and leaf-filled ground

In every ode that doth prescind,

For I have sinned,

And loved their earthy sound:

My own immortality found.

The intimate immortal set me on this lucid course

With words of childhood said just so

And ridden of this rampant horse,

Of unknown source,

I find that I cannot let go

Of the memories that I know.

And when my friends do recollect their days of youth in here,

In places strange to my child me,

I hear a rustling in my ear.

And I am here, And here is all I see:

An area sacred to me.

For wont to know I softly read the rules of rule and thumb

Where men of science would prescribe

From where and whence I’ve come,

And there are some,

Whose intimations I imbibe.

For I am D.

D

1 DESIRE

We live in our desires rather than in our achievement.

George Moore (1852-1933)

Ave

Diagram of Devil Siding

Friday night, 29 January 1993

Moonlight sank through the dirty pane at the end of the corridor, spreading across the calcite walls and eel-skin linoleum. The tiny window, its warped glass splattered with mud, remained unwashed where the knots and tangles of vegetation beyond had become impenetrable. Outside not a creature stirred. Not a possum shifted in the roof, or scrub, or trees. Not an owl fog-horned its flight across the lawn. No bats sensed their ultrasonic way high through the dark. There were none of the sounds of night. No colour. Nothing but greys escaped the tiny window.

The end wall of the corridor, a ragged crowd of dark, chipped bricks and pale mortar, contrasted starkly with the barren plaster of the other walls, the new tiles and linoleum.

Everything else shone – white, bright, clean. Dr Baumgart had wanted the handymen out of that part of the house as quickly as possible. He couldn’t stand them working near the door any more. If they listened closely they might hear…

Not voices. There were no voices in the room. Only the soft, barely audible, scratching of a pencil, or breathing, or even the shift and squeal of a chair.

Behind the door lay a crowded little cell with another small dirty window not unlike that in the hall outside. Similar, that is, but for a row of rusting wrought-iron bands carving up the feeble light. Inside the end room all four walls were raw and old with dark, chipped bricks and chalk-white, chalk-soft mortar.

Five rudimentary items of furniture occupied the cell – a warped steel locker, an aluminium-framed bed, a metal desk, a lamp and a chair – with barely walking space between. Lying on the bed was a young man holding a pencil. He got up and stood briefly at the locker, then sat at the desk.

The soft scratching of pencil was not so insignificant a sound that it mightn’t whisper out into the hollow corridors of the house and the moonlit garden beyond, echoing in the absence of chirps and rustling and wind.

The pencil paused in its close movements and silence returned. For a moment the young man bent over the desktop, the pale, patterned sleeves of his pyjamas looking ethereal in the grey air and wan yellow light of the lamp. His wild brown clock-springs of hair and sharp features moved closer to the page so that they were more clearly illuminated. His deep-set eyes were a sombre grey-blue, and the shadows punctuated the set of his