Free Solo by Alyssa Brugman Page B

the top of the driveway. Once I was on the road, I stopped. I could already see the flames flickering between the palings of the shed. There must have been plenty of flammable things in that garage. I could hear it too, whomping and crackling. Big fires are noisy. I never realised.
    I yelled out, ‘You pair of old fuckers!’ as loud as I could. Then I sprinted away from there until I thought my chest was going to explode.
    Afterwards I slept under one of the upturned tinny boats in the park near the water. I could hear the sirens. I stuffed my fingers in my ears and sang something other than Billie Holiday.
    I wondered if burning down Nan and Pop’s garage made me a pyromaniac, but I’ve heard that pyros stay around and watch what they burn. Besides, I did think about other things first. I thought about trashing their letterbox or sinking their boat. I thought about spray-painting ‘STUPID, MEAN OLD FUCKERS’ on the front of their house. But they could just buy a new boat, or paint over the wall.
    There was something more intimidating about a fire. A warning. This could have been your dining-room curtains. It wasn’t about the fire. It was about Nan and Pop. I had nothing and I needed them. They should have taken me.
    Besides, they had insurance.

5

S PLINTER
    When that nice nurse left the room crying, I called her back. I dobbed. I told her that it wasn’t a splinter. Itsy had tried to inject stuff between her toes, but it hadn’t worked. It festered there for days. It blew up and went red, and then it popped and smelt really bad. Itsy screamed and punched the walls. She screamed all night, and kicked and shook, partly because she had a disgusting foot, but mostly because she had run out of stuff. She got the bone-ache.
    Itsy went to hospital partly for the disgusting foot, but mostly because she knew they would give her morphine. This had happened before. She always brought me with her and I would have to find a place to sleep in armchairs in waiting rooms, or spare beds if they had one, because there was nowhere else for me to go.
    I told the nurse and the nurse told me that they already knew that, but a hospital is not a jail. I cried because this time I had dobbed and nothing happened. I don’t know if it’s worse when something happens or when nothing does.
    I lay in the spare hospital bed and had my dream that’s way better than lying on a tropical beach with the sand under my back and the waves folding over each other. I had my dream where I’m adopted by Angelina Jolie.

6

B ASKETS
    Nan and Pop weren’t actually my grandparents. Everybody called them Nan and Pop. They owned the corner shop. Itsy used to send me down there to buy milk and cigarettes. They sold smokes to me as long as Itsy had written a note, even though it was illegal.
    After they sold the shop they made their house into a bed-and-breakfast. My mum left me there. She said it was overnight, but she didn’t come back for a week. The time I stayed with Nan and Pop it was just like the Oldbergers, except at least I had met them before.
    My counsellor would say that setting fire to their garage definitely tipped me out of the simple oppositional defiance disorder basket into some more overtly aggressive conduct disorder. I haven’t told her.
    I shouldn’t have burned down their garage, but I still think they could have taken me.

7

I NCIDENT AT THE B AKERY
    Attendance at the wilderness therapy camp wasn’t voluntary. The court had ordered me there for intensive intervention after the incident at the bakery. Apparently my escalating aggressive and dissocial behaviours were well outside the normal range for my age and socio-cultural context.
    There was a French bakery run by a Vietnamese family in the strip of shops near our school. It was the type of bakery with the counter across the front, with sample loaves and a tasting plate on the top, and the customers waited on the footpath to be served.
    I was truanting, but it was lunchtime so