While I Have Pedro. John Chesterman
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and someone died. Oh, and another fire, at another church. Someone’s been having too many candles in their services have they? Still, everything will be all right now, I’m sure.’ He slipped the clippings in the cover of my Diary of Important Dates and gave it back to me.
I kept jabbing at the diary. I was trying to say ‘St Mark’s day’, which is not very easy for me. It’s hard enough for me to say ‘day’. He just said ‘Mate, I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. Where are you from?’
Ah, that one I could answer. There’s one card that I always carry around with me, in case I ever get into trouble. I considered myself now to be in trouble. Pedro had typed the card out and laminated it. This is what it says:
Hello, my name is Redmond (Red) Coltrane. I live at 15 Bayview Crescent, Highett. My phone number is 9553 1104. I have a lot of trouble speaking and walking and I can become anxious and frustrated very quickly. If you are reading this it probably means I need some assistance. Please give it to me.
The policeman read the card. ‘Good oh, Red, I’m Constable Hartman and I’m happy to help. Why don’t you jump in the back.’
At that moment I was, again, very grateful to Pedro. That means I owe Pedro 957, he owes me two. One of the two that he owes me was the time I stopped Rav smearing Pedro with his poo. It’s not Rav’s fault, it just happens when he gets really upset. He starts poking at his bottom. It’s really yucky, but Pedro just says it’s something we have to try and work with Rav and his psychiatrist to stop happening. I’ll tell you later about the other one that Pedro owes me, but it would jump ahead too far if I told you now. It wouldn’t make sense without you knowing the other parts that come first. Everything in order.
I thought Constable Hartman was driving me to the station, where he’d be able to work out all about the fires. I thought I’d meet some clever inspector who would see all the threads that I’d give him. Or her, maybe. They’d be able to say something like ‘Aha, problem solved’ and ‘all over Red rover’, as Alfie often says to me. But I realised after a few minutes that I was being driven home. Worse than that. While he was driving, Constable Hartman was tapping away at his computer and then he started embarrassing me, saying ‘I see, Red, we’ve picked you up before. I hope you’ve been keeping the little man in his house and not showing him around the place.’
All I could think was cross thoughts. I hadn’t come all this way by myself just to be teased and taken home again. I started to hum to try and calm myself but I was getting crosser. I kept pointing to the clippings and my Diary of Important Dates. I tried to put them in front of the face of the policeman. But that was a mistake, because then he couldn’t see the road. I know that was dangerous, but so is letting an arsonist go around lighting fires when we could stop him. The policeman told me to sit back or he’d have to handcuff me. I don’t like being handcuffed. Well, I’ve never been handcuffed by a policeman. But I have been restrained with straps. In our old place in Kew they used to restrain people a lot. It only ever happened to me once. But I remember Denise, who lived there, she was restrained almost the whole time. Whenever she could get her hands out she used to just start bashing her own face. It was terrible. She had swollen cheeks the whole time from beating herself. So they used to restrain her whenever she even looked like she would start hitting. The only time I was restrained was when I had an anxiety attack. I didn’t know that’s what it was, but I’d been sitting down watching TV with about ten other people and I was always in charge of the remote control. I like to think that’s because I was the smartest. It may not have been true, of course. It was hard to know how smart a lot of those people were because most of them couldn’t talk or write. It’s pretty hard to tell how smart someone is when they can’t do either of those things. Anyway, I was in charge of the remote. Whenever a program ended I would start at channel one on the remote and go through all the channels up to 28. Of course there were only five that showed pictures: channels 2, 7, 9, 10 and 28. Whenever I got to one with a picture I’d look around and judge whether people wanted to watch that show. I got to know the signals people living there would use. There were sometimes twenty people living in my section at Kew. Some of them weren’t able to give me a sign whether they liked something. But a lot of them could. Ruth, I remember, was one who always clapped her hands when she was excited. You wouldn’t know that just from seeing her. You’d just think she was a bit crazy. But I knew that clapping her hands meant she liked something. The more she liked it, the more she clapped. So it was pretty easy for me to know what she wanted. Same with Peter. If he liked something on the telly he’d look at it. If he didn’t, he’d turn his head in the other direction. So his vote was easy too. Once he’d seen what was on, he wanted to watch it if he kept looking.
So each time a new program was on, I’d work out what most people wanted to watch. But on the day I was restrained, one of the helpers just grabbed the remote from me and put on the football. I actually didn’t mind the football being on, and it had my vote. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’d recorded people’s votes in my head, and the clear preference was for the afternoon game show. I had put that on.
As Pedro would say, it wasn’t the helper’s fault. He was new. And he probably thought we were zombies who didn’t care what was on. That may even have been right for some of us there that day. There were quite a few people watching TV and I could only tell which stations about half of them wanted. That’s not to say the others aren’t smart. How can you tell whether someone’s smart without being able to get inside their head?
When the helper grabbed the remote, I got very angry. I tried to grab it off him, and I think he thought I was trying to hit him or something. So he pushed me really hard and I fell on my arm. That was break number three, if you want to keep score. I started screaming in pain, and also because I was so cross. And I think I was swinging my good arm and a few other helpers came running and put me in a room. I was punching things then, and one big guy came in and tied a band around both my arms and my chest so I couldn’t move either arm. My broken arm - not that anyone knew it was broken at the time - was very sore. I eventually squatted down and cried, and they took it off after about an hour. But I haven’t really enjoyed watching TV since then. I still have memories of that day.
The threat of being handcuffed was enough to make me sit back in the police car. There wasn’t much left for me to do except cry. So I did. All I could think about then was Denise trying to hit herself all day, and being restrained. It was like I was in a trap. If they restrained me, I’d probably want to start hitting myself, which would mean they’d need to restrain me more. Just like had happened with Denise. Then I tried to do what Pedro always tells us to do, think of happy things. So I thought of Mandy, who is always happy, or at least is never sad. But then I thought of the day Yvonne came over with a special collar for Mandy. Yvonne comes to help at the house sometimes, and she said she knew how she could fix Mandy and stop her ripping clothes off the clothesline, which was a new game Mandy played with Pedro, only Pedro didn’t really want to be playing it. Yvonne put this special collar on Mandy and let her go outside. Then Yvonne put these clothes on the line and sat inside and waited and watched. After about half an hour Mandy went up to the clothes on the line. I don’t think she knew we were watching her. Just when she started standing up on her back legs to grab the clothes, Yvonne pushed this little button on a black box she was holding. Mandy let out this huge yelp and fell to the ground. Then Yvonne waited another half an hour until Mandy went to try and grab the clothes once more. Again Yvonne pushed the button and Mandy cried out and fell to the ground. ‘Cured’ is all Yvonne said, and she was right, because Mandy never touched the clothes on the line again. I didn’t worry too much about Mandy being hurt, she was OK I could see. But I was worried Yvonne might put the collar on Phil next to stop him pinching food. But she didn’t. Not that I know of, anyway.
When we got home I shuffled inside without saying thank you. That was rude, I know, but I was trying to stop a fire lighter and nobody knew.
I went to my room and threw something at the wall. Then I put the newspaper tearings back into my scrapbook in their right places, and I put my Diary of Important Dates on my bookshelf. I sat on the floor until dinner time. I knew Pedro wouldn’t be happy with me, and I knew the police weren’t happy.
You can imagine what happened