While I Have Pedro. John Chesterman
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you this may all sound dumb, which is not a very nice thing to think. But it’s my choice whether I want salt or not, and I’ll decide if and when I’ll have any, thank you very much. It’s not up to anyone else, not even Pedro. There was trouble the last time things were not done the right way. At least there was trouble with me. It was two years ago. I got very cross. It wasn’t Johnny’s fault that he touched the salt. And it wasn’t Phil’s fault that he didn’t touch it. But Alfie told me to ‘snap out of it’ or something, and he forced me to hold the salt and made me pour it on my food. I can’t remember exactly what I did, but I think I chucked my plate on the floor and probably screamed a bit. I probably lost control of my bottom, too. Sometimes Pedro says I give him the shits, and he says he’s sure it happens the other way around also. Which it actually never does. But I certainly gave Alfie the shits that day. All I remember is the BIST people coming in and treating me like a child. I don’t know what BIST means, but these people come in when you get really cross and the people you live with can’t calm you down. I’m not always cross when they come in, because usually they come in for Rav when he starts doing his dirty thing. They talk to you like you’re an idiot. When they came in that day for me they kept saying things like ‘We know you don’t want to hurt Alfie, do you Redmond. We know you like Alfie. Alfie is nice.’
Of course I didn’t mean to hurt Alfie. He is very nice. Not as nice as Pedro, but he is a good man. ‘A gentleman and a scholar,’ someone once said of him, though he’s sometimes not that gentle, and sometimes not that smart. But anyone who looks after the four of us must be a good person. We can be bloody hard work. Sometimes Alfie says it’s like a lunatic asylum here, which is not really so much of a joke because we all used to live in a lunatic asylum in Kew. But now that’s closed and we are living here ‘in the community’, as the nice woman from the Department of Human Services said when she paid us a visit. I remember her because she gave me a big smile even though I knew she was a bit cross about breaking one of her high heel shoes on our front doorstep. She said, through her smile, ‘You must be very happy, Redmond, now that you are living in the community.’ I nodded, even though I had no idea what she meant. Now I know she meant ‘You must be very happy, Redmond, now that you are not living in a lunatic asylum.’ I don’t know why she didn’t just say that. But she was right. We are much better off here, that’s for sure. And we all like Pedro and Alfie. None of us tells them as much as we should. Well, I’m the only one who really can tell them, because I’m the only one who can get close to talking. None of the others can talk at all. Johnny and Rav have never said a word. And Phil can say ‘chocolate’ and ‘milk bar’, but that’s all. That’s all Phil ever wants: to go to the milk bar and get chocolate. He tends to say those two things about a hundred times a day. ‘Milk bar, chocolate’. ‘Milk bar, chocolate’. So I should take it upon myself to say thanks more often to Pedro and Alfie, not just for helping me, but for helping the others. And I will. Note to me: thank P and A.
OK, how then did I end up in jail? By putting two and two together, basically. Unfortunately for me, I came up with the answer before the police did. I was out of order. How’s that for luck.
Two
Before I tell you what happened, you need to know what a regular day looks like. Well, a regular day for me, not you.
In the mornings I get up, feed Mandy, have breakfast on my own, and I walk down to the shop with my coins and I buy the newspaper. A light just went on in my head then. Ding. You don’t know about Mandy, do you. Mandy is our beautiful golden retriever dog that Mum bought for us. I usually pat Mandy for thirty minutes every day, usually at the end of the day. And I’m the one responsible for her food. Pedro cleans up after her, but I feed her every morning and night. I give her one cup of dog food that I get out of the big old plastic garbage bin that we keep in the garage. I only messed up the feeding once, and that was when Mandy was a pup. I left the garage door open and I left the lid off the bin. Mandy tipped the bin over and ate half of what was there. Then she spewed it up and ate half of her spew. I thought she was going to spew again a little bit less and eat half of that, and so on and so on. But she ignored the pattern and slept for about a day and a half. Her belly was enormous and I patted her for a long time. I even thought for a while that she was pregnant, but no one would want to keep the babies that she was producing. It wasn’t her fault, just like it’s not Phil’s fault that he’s obsessed with chocolate and that he’s only able to say two things. If you knew someone could only say two things, you might guess that they’d be words like cat or dog. I think he could say those words if he wanted to, but I’ve only ever heard him say two things: ‘chocolate’ and ‘milk bar’. Pedro says Phil has a problem that means he never looks at you if you’re looking at him, and he never wants to hug anyone. But sometimes he says those words all the time. As you would have guessed, he likes chocolate. But if he has too much - more than a few bits a day of it, says Pedro - then he goes a bit loopy. Loopier, I guess it’s fair to say. Some people think Phil’s not smart. But I actually think he’s very clever. All the kitchen cupboards are kept locked, because otherwise Phil would eat all the chocolate he could find. In fact, he’d eat it without worrying about taking the wrapper off. He’d also eat anything else in there, even plastic lids. One morning one of the cupboard doors was missing and everything inside had been taken out. Phil had all the food in his room and was slowing making his way through it. He’d managed to unscrew the door with a knife.
But back to my routine. After I go to the shop to buy my newspaper I come home and read it until I have to go to day placement, where I sometimes do woodwork. Sometimes I swim. If I had my way I’d stay at home reading the newspaper, but I don’t often have my way. When I come home from my placement, I go back to the newspaper. I find TV and the radio pretty boring. I think I would really like to use the computer, but I can’t hit the right keys, like I already told you. Pedro says they’re working on some new controls that I could use, but he says I have to wait. Anyway, I’m not fussed. There’s so much information in the newspaper. I read every page, even the business section. That is my least favourite part of the paper, but I prefer reading that to doing other things, like tidying my room. I know all sorts of information about the day’s events, and about patterns that occur that are reported in the newspaper that I bet most people don’t know about. Did you know that tree vandals are killing trees near the beach and that more and more syringes are being found on the beaches in the mornings?
And, yes, I love relays, but we’re not dealing with that just now. As Pedro says, let’s just park that problem over on one side for a while and we’ll come back to it later. He said that once when Rav was caught pinching a piece of my easter egg from the fridge. That problem has been parked for about two years now, and I reckon it might have a few parking tickets cos it’s been parked there too long. But there’s not much I can do about it.
What we are dealing with just now is how I managed to get arrested for doing nothing. This is how.
Late last year, on November the 30th to be exact, there was a fire not far from here, at a church called St Andrew’s. I remember that name for two reasons. First, my father’s middle name was Andrew. Michael Andrew Coltrane was his name before he died. He probably still is Michael Andrew Coltrane. I don’t know if people lose their names once they die. Do they? It’s not like a footballer’s number, which they have to stop using once they stop playing so that someone else can have it. Names are different. You can have lots of people with the same name. I don’t think we need to retire names when people die. So my dad’s middle name is still Andrew.
The second reason why I remember the name St Andrew’s is because I’ve read it more times that you could imagine. Why? Because I’ve always found fires pretty fascinating. Mum used to let me light the fire in our fireplace at home. We had one every Sunday, and although it took me a few goes to light the match, I could always do it. Mum called me her little helper when I did that, though I was already taller than her back then. Whenever there’s any mention of a fire in the paper, I’ll rip that article out and put it in my scrapbook. At that stage I had forty fires mentioned in my scrapbook. Most of them are house fires or factory fires, and some are about bushfires. But that was my first church fire.
The day after the fire the big newspaper said that the fire had been lit at the