Chapter four - Ramming old hags should be an Olympic sport
As the year progressed, I grew depressed (Gah! I'm rhyming!). Demons would haunt my thoughts, terrorizing me into a paranoid state. I don't think anybody actually realized this, not even Greg. The world started slowly to be cut off from me. I knew I was becoming more like my father every day. My father was extremely anti-social. He hated going shopping, so he usually just wrote a list and gave me money. I usually caught a taxi home, much to his racist displeasure for most of the taxi drivers were Indian. The only thing he ever went and bought himself was his beer for I was obviously too young.
On this particular day, which was a Sunday, he gave me three hundred dollars. I looked at him quizzically. "Go buy a computer" was all he said. I don't really know why he decided to buy a computer purely because of his anti-social behavior, but I went out anyway. I found an old 98 computer from a pawn dealer in the town's CBD. The computer itself only got eighty dollars, while the monitor was thirty. With the some of the money left over, I bought some floppy discs from them as well. I nearly walked out of the store without buying a mouse, a pad and a keyboard. I walked back into the shop, pushing the trolley with my "new" computer in it. I asked the shop assistant about them. He said he didn't have any, and that my best bet was too go to Kmart or Target in the Mall. When I walked into the Mall, it was packed. I had to keep moving the trolley out of the way on incoming pedestrians.
Kmart was the same. I got the shits with this old lady who was walking extremely slowly in my thinking just to piss me off. I rammed her with the trolley and she fell over. I stormed past her pushing the trolley. The old woman started screaming at me, calling me a "retarded idiot" and that my "kind should be shot when we were born" I ignored the old lady's rant and moved toward the technology section. I found the prices over the top, well for my budget, but I still bought the items I required. When I was making my way back to the register, I saw the old lady was talking to two security guards. I swore. I didn't usually swear, because whenever I did, my father hit me if he ever heard. I heard the lady telling the officers my description, when I heard her say "He was pushing around this shit computer around in a trolley" I lost my temper when she said this. I pushed the trolley right up to her and started to yell at her "This is NOT a shit computer you stupid old hag! What would you know about computers! You're fucking ancient!" One of the officers grabbed hold of my arm, and asked the old hag whether I was the person who hit her. She said I was. The officer pulled me, with me still holding onto my trolley out of Kmart. For some reason the alarm barriers didn't go off when the unpaid items went through them. They dragged me into the Mall's head security office. They started yelling at me. Every adult must think that yelling at a kid actually works. It doesn't. Sitting them down and telling them what they did while having an atmosphere of guilt hovering in the air works much better. There was this teacher at school who had it perfected and I really disliked him. I ignored the guards. They called the police on me.
When the police finally came even though their station was only around a five minute walk from the Mall, they started to tell me the seriousness of the actions I did. The old lady didn't want to press charges for some reason, which was lucky on my part I guess. The police asked my home number. I gave it to them unwillingly. My father wasn't drunk enough yet to forget how to pick up the phone, so he picked it up (obviously). I started shaking in complete fear. When my father found the security officers main office, he talked to the police officers for a bit, then grabbed my arm and pushed the trolley out of the office. I could see the annoyed look on his face. I walked to the car in a daze. When we got to the car, I could see nobody in my range of vision. And I think it was the same case for my father. I unloaded the computer into the boot of our car and started to pull the boot door close when my father grabbed my arm again. He spun me around and kneed me in the stomach. It was so forceful that I hit my head on the boot door as it sprung back upwards. I fell to the ground in pain. My father closed the boot door himself and started kicking me out of the way. Each kick was extremely painful. I was on the verge of tears, when he stopped kicking me. He got into the car and ignited the ignition. He reversed out of the car space and drove away from me. I started crying for around ten minutes before the pain had started to subside. I got up and started making my way home.
Just as I walked past the football fields, it started to rain on me. I didn't have an umbrella, so I was forced to walk home in the rain. I knew that if I waited for the storm to pass, which would be a while, I wouldn't have sufficient time to make my father his dinner, which would mean another beating. The rain cleaned the now seeping wound on my head. It took me nearly an hour to walk home because of my stomach hurting so badly. When I finally did get home, my father, as per usual was on the couch drinking. He didn't say anything when I walked past the living room into the bathroom, were I stripped down and inspected my new wounds. The gash on my head was deep and it looked like it would need stitches. My stomach was completely covered in bruises, one I could even see my father's boot imprint in my skin. I had a shower and got dressed. I walked (well it was really a limp) into the kitchen and started to make dinner, something simple; Chicken and chips. I was halfway through deep frying the chips when I suddenly felt dizzy. I don't remember anything from that moment except for the crashing of the deep fryer on the floor.
I woke up in hospital the next day. My head was stitched up and my stomach was covered in bandages. A male nurse came around soon after and started to examine my body's functions. Are my public dilated and etc. He was in his mid-thirties and going bald. My father, to my surprise was asleep next to me in an arm chair. I don't know why I didn't see him before this, maybe I just wasn't looking. I watched his chest rise and fall with the pattern of his breathing. The doctor said I had extensive burns to my chest from the hot oil and that they had to cut open the nerves for the skin to heal. I nearly fainted there and then. Doctors seem to have that effect on me I guess. I believe the burns camouflaged the bruises my father gave me yesterday, and I guess I just must have hit my head again because he didn't say anything about it. I asked the doctor what the time was and he said it was near 11:30am. He also said that my father was up most of the night completely stressing about me and that he only fell asleep a few hours ago. It surprised me that my father stayed up worrying about me. Maybe he was just annoyed that he might have to start cooking his own meals. Or maybe, just maybe, he does love me.