The Girls by Chloe Higgins

Author:Chloe Higgins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2019-08-15T05:22:01+00:00

In the year after leaving the psychiatric ward, I fall into a routine where there are things to distract me and take up time, but if I am unable to get out of bed on any particular day things won’t fall apart.

A couple of days a week, my mother and I drive all over Sydney and western Sydney going to galleries and theatre shows and arthouse films. Most of them are sad, or indecipherable, or both at once and in no small measure. We spend hours in libraries and museums and bookstores, desperate for a way out of what is happening inside us. But I am so wrapped up in my own grief, I cannot see my mother’s.

Again I don’t remember much of these visits, just flashes of exhibitions and her driving me around. My mother remembers more; it is she who tells me these outings were frequent.

A couple of afternoons a week, telling my mother I’m going to the library to study, I drive out to Tilda’s house. I have my own car, and so am free to move around as I wish. But what begins as an exciting adventure, a window into some fantasies I’ve been harbouring since high school, quickly turns cold, gross and mundane. The emptiness of the house begins to induce a mirrored hollowness inside me whenever I enter it. But Tilda has opened my eyes to a world I’ve not considered before, and I’m not ready to give it up.

I spend the rest of the days each week at home, sleeping in, watching DVDs borrowed from local video stores, trying to study. On the weekends, I hang out in carparks and city clubs and raves with various people, hardly more than strangers, and we take pills and snort cocaine, and drive home from the city at four or five or six in the morning. Although my good intentions from the ward dissolve once I am back living with my parents, I don’t see Charlotte again after the time we injected heroin in the city. Thankfully, the mix of heroin and speed we took was too intense, even for me, and so I don’t take it again. But I am still hungry for escape, unable to imagine other ways of coping. I no longer see Anna, Kris or my other high school friends regularly; I want nothing to do with my old worlds.

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