What Isn't And Came To Be
Chapter 10: When White is Blue
Johnny Chadwick woke with the sun. He lay still in the bed, which felt too big and hard, with the thick white starchy sheets and blankets that smelled funny; and the sinky pillow with the tag that read "100% Goose Down."
'Down where?' He'd asked Mum, when he read the tag and she had explained, that what it really meant was that there were goose feathers inside the pillow.
It was a stupid pillow; and he wondered lots, since they came here to the big white apartment-house high up in the glass tower, if there were a whole bunch of butt naked geese wandering around somewhere. And if those naked geese were angry because some idiot had stolen all their feathers to make pillows. It was dumb, cos they weren't even nice pillows, like his one back home, they were stupid, sinky, tickely sounding pillows.
Johnny wiggled his toes and turned over, trying hard to make himself go back to sleep, but it was no good, he couldn't, the pillow was making tickely sounds and he needed to pee.
He looked over at the other bed, the one closest to the door, next to Jack's cot where Mum slept.
He hoped Mum would be awake, so she could go to the bathroom with him.
But Mum was still asleep.
He considered waking her up, and asking her to come with him, but his Mother didn't seem to have slept much in the last few days. Not since the day he ran away from school and ran home to find the man in black in their house and Mum laying on the floor covered in blood.
He didn't know what to think about the man in black.
Mum called him Crowley, but he told the people who bought the baby stuff for Jack, to call him Thomas Katz.
Johnny thought the man in black was probably a doctor, one of the ones trying to stop Mum's nosebleeds, and that probably explained why he took off Mum's bloody clothes, and why he had a big needle in her neck full of glowy stuff. But, Johnny didn't like that the man seemed to have two different names, people who used different names were liars.
Johnny didn't like liars, Mum didn't like liars, and Jesus didn't like liars; neither did God, that's what the Bible said.
Mostly Johnny thought of the man, as 'the man in black', that way he wouldn't be wrong, thinking of him using the wrong name. Because he was, a man in black.
Mostly he tried not to think about the man at all.
The man in black was a stranger, and Johnny didn't like strangers, he never knew what they would do, or the rules they worked by.
Strangers were chaos and Johnny liked order, and only the few people he knew the rules for.
Johnny sat up, and looked across the room at his mother again.
Mum was still asleep, in her white bed with it's matching starchy sheets, blankets and pillow stuffed full of stupid goose butt feathers. Goose butt feathers, that ought to be covering a gooses butt, and keeping it warm, not filling up some stupid, sinky pillow that rustled whenever you moved or breathed too loud on it.
He was busting! If he didn't go to the loo soon, he'd pee the bed.
He was too old to pee the bed, so he got up, and padded across the thick white carpet, toes sinking into it like it was grass; and slowly pulled open the bedroom door, trying not to let it make noise.
After opening the door he looked back at his mother for another long moment trying to gather courage to go out without her.
Finally, because he was busting big time, and he wasn't a baby, he snuck out of the room.
The two doors opposite their room were closed. The man in black- Crowley-Mr Katz, had pointed to one and said it was the master bedroom and to the other and called it his office when they first arrived.
Mum stayed away from both, so he did too.
He thought that Mum was mad at the man in black, or that the man in black was mad at her. Cos the man in black had yelled at her, after she woke up, but he got things like that wrong sometimes.
People yelled when they weren't mad, like when they did Maori hakas at school. And Mum said Dad yelled at him sometimes when he was scared, and it just sounded like he was angry, but he was really just scared.
Maybe, the man in black had been scared by all the blood.
Johnny had been scared by the blood, and the bang and the bright light… and when the man in black fell over too… and when Mum's eyes went red…. and when her voice sounded all funny, like a man's. And then when she had squeezed his arm, hard, and it hurt really bad… but Mum wouldn't hurt him on purpose… even if she never said sorry for it after.
Johnny tried, hard, to stop thinking about all of that. Because if he thought too much about that he'd started crying, and rocking in his hedgehog ball again, and he'd wake Mum up and make her sad, and he hated it when he made Mum sad.
He'd just think about how bad he needed to pee instead….
How bad he needed to pee, and how, if he peed on the white carpet it would look like yellow snow, and how Dad always joked that you shouldn't eat yellow snow, because it was pee flavoured.
That was why he always chose the blue frozen drink at Mc Donald's because blue food colouring was always fake colour, so it couldn't ever be pee … but no, he'd read that news story, last week about the group of scientists from Auckland trying to make a natural food colouring from some native blue mushroom... Yuck! Who'd want to drink mushroom flavoured stuff, mushrooms were fungi, and fungi was rot… and rot was bad and could make you sick …and was just really gross.
…Except for penicillin, which Alexander Fleming invented to kill bacteria… No, discovered, God invented penicillin, Mr Fleming had just discovered it! Because he was a scientist, like Mum, and that's what they did, they learned stuff that helped make the world better.
Finally creeping silently, and thinking about ways to make sure he wasn't drinking mushroom-blueberry slushy; Johnny made it into the room with the giant flatscreen T.V. It took up a whole side wall, and there was a sofa and two big white leather arm chairs opposite it. The arm chairs had handles that made foot rests pop up when you pulled them. The chairs were cool, but the sofa was better, because it fitted him and Mum and Jack all at once…
With a nervous look over his shoulder towards the two closed doors, Johnny crept through the T.V room and into the bathroom.
The bathroom was also white, on white, on white, like nearly everything else in the skyscraper house.
Mum said white was an impractical colour, but he kind of liked it, everything was the same, so it was less distracting. And white was clean, you could tell if it got dirty.
And besides, white wasn't a colour, it was a shade. If you thought of it like that, the skyscraper house could be any colour!
Johnny liked to imagine everything was actually blue, with the saturation turned right down, and the brightness turned all the way up.
He liked blue. (Well, except if it came from a mushroom! Mushrooms were yucky and gross, like potatoes. So he didn't like mushroom blue.)
Johnny edged the door of the bathroom closed behind him and lifted the toilet seat like Dad taught him to, and finally, finally peed; very yellow pee, into the very white toilet.
Then he shut the lid, and sat on it to flush it, (because his body was denser than air so the sound waves would find it harder to travel through him) so the sound wouldn't wake up Mum or make the man in black come out of his room.
He didn't want to wake up Mum, there were dark shadows under her eyes, and she'd been crying last night after she thought he was asleep.
…Probably because she missed Dad, Chris and the sisters.
Johnny knew he should probably miss them too. But he didn't, not really.
They were loud, and they said dumb stuff, things that weren't actually what they meant.
Okay, Chris didn't say dumb stuff… Chris couldn't really talk, but he was always sticking his fingers in his mouth and wiping spit and food on things, spreading germs, and he fell over lots. Chris was his little brother, and Johnny had prayed for him, but Chris was kind of a pain, Mum said that's what little siblings were for, and the sisters said he was a pain too, so now it was his turn to learn to just suck it up. (Which meant deal with it, not actually sucking up anything.)
Speaking of sucking things and milk. He was a bit confused about Baby Jack, the man in black had called Jack his milk brother. He wasn't sure he wanted another little brother and he definitely hadn't prayed for one.
Mum said you could find stuff about people you loved annoying, and that was okay, you could love them and not always like them, and that needing space was okay.
Was that why they were here? Because Mum needed space?
He was glad Mum hadn't needed space from him.
It had only been a couple of days, so maybe not missing the rest of his family yet was okay? He told himself if he and Mum stayed away for a whole month and he didn't miss them, then he should probably start feeling guilty for not missing them. But not yet.
Getting up off the toilet seat lid he looked at the bathroom door nervously, maybe he did miss the sisters and Dad a little bit after all. They were brave, and if they were here now, he could of hidden behind them if the man in black came.
"Johnny!" He was just drying his hands on the white towel after washing them properly, using soap and hot water, and scrubbing every finger, for at least 30 seconds, like the poster in the bathroom at the hospital said you should; when he heard his Mum's call.
She sounded scared.
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Authors note: Hi! This chapter was a bit different, but it was fun to write.
The mind of a high functioning autistic kid, it's a bit like a shoal of tiny silvery fish darting this way and that in a very deep, very clear pool.