The Girl Who Pissed Off the Wrong Psychopath

There is a reason I don’t like or trust tall, thin, older women with very blue eyes.
Actually, there are two reasons.
The White Walker and The Queen of Thorns both fitted this physical description. They were all other mothers, mothers of girls who were friends of mine until their respective mothers had altercations with mine and they were no longer allowed to see me. I was the problem, as all the Other Mothers put it.
I wasn’t normal.

The White Walker was a god, of sorts.
According to George Martin, all White Walkers are gods.
Amongst her powers, she had the ability to kill people and then raise them from the dead. Presumably, she was very good at this.
Her house was always impeccable, despite the fact that she never spent time there. When she wasn’t working overtime on her corpses or cleaning the kitchen, she was at the gym. Image was very important to the White Walker.

Interpersonal skills were not her forte. She would talk over people, talk about them as if they weren’t present. Occasionally, she would talk at people, never to them. Her voice was always raised and shrill. She never once looked me in the eye. She was always stressed, always cold. I often wondered if her veins ran with blood or liquid nitrogen.

A few weeks ago, more than 20 years after I first met the Walker, I got my answer. She came into the shop I work and had a loud argument with my manager about a turkey that the Walker wanted for Christmas. Both my manager and the White Walker are very pale people, and both were getting quite flustered. Their faces both turned very red and I could see a large vein pulsing in the White Walker’s temple. That was when I realized that the White Walker had blood, just like the rest of us.

The Walker was convinced that I wasn’t normal. I ran too much, asked too many questions and got in the way. I had a fairy wand which I waved around too much. Countless stars were lost in the Walker’s garden. She never understood why they kept coming off. It was because they were used to do magic, I told her. But she didn’t understand and suggested that maybe my wands could be for display only?

I often failed to detect sarcasm coming from the White Walker. My own mother never used it so it was unfamiliar to me. Perhaps if she had talked to me more, I would have learned it from the Walker. Sarcasm came later, from the Queen of Thorns. Nevertheless, I learned at least two crucial things from the White Walker. The first one was that you should always be kind to children, no matter how much they annoy you. The second thing was about the Arrow Frogs.

Like most of our conversations, the Arrow Frog one began as me trying to get her to explain something genuinely interesting and ended with her getting immensely fed up as she didn’t think I was bright enough to understand her. Only this time, there were no other adults around so she couldn’t deflect and disregard me as she normally did. For some reason, her daughter and I were talking about rainforest animals as we ate our fairy bread. I was five years old. The White Walker piped in something about arrow frogs.

“What are arrow frogs?” I asked.
She smiled.
Her smiles were as rare as blue snow.
She explained how the tribes of the amazon would swipe their arrows against the back of a Poison Arrow Frog. These arrows could then be shot from a blowdart gun and used to paralyse an animal, such as a monkey, which could them be eaten, as curare was broken down in the digestive tract and was only lethal if injected.
“What is curare?” I asked.
It was a paralytic, she explained.
What was a paralytic? I asked.

I can see now how this type of questioning got tiresome. The smile froze on the Walker’s face. She raised her eyebrows.
“A paralytic is a drug that inhibits movement,” she said in a tone that I would later recognize as sarcastic.
Was it different to the darts they shot the elephants with on the nature documentary we had just watched?

I thought it was a good question. I still do. Most adults can’t answer these sorts of questions. I wanted to know the answer and I figured the Walker could probably answer better than my mother or any other adult for that matter. It was appropriate. I wanted to talk to to her, and as I had discovered, she didn’t like talking about fairies or magic or anything that didn’t really exist.
The White Walker, however, didn’t see it this way.

“No,” she said, exasperated. “Its not the same. Those were tranquillizer darts. That documentary was made, like, 300 years later…”

She looked around. There was no adult to defer to, but she had the next best thing. Her daughter was now eating the butter off my fairy bread.

“I wrote a paper on it,” she explained. “You should read it, when you learn to read. Charlotte, take Thea. You two can go play fairies upstairs.”

*

On the face of it, my mother and the Queen of Thorns could have been friends. They seemed to have a bit in common. Both had recently come through messy divorces. Both had children the same age, at the same school. For about four years, Annelise and I declared ourselves best friends. We may never have become friends, however, if my mother hadn’t invited the Queen and her two daughters over for scones and jam. It was the most awkward afternoon tea as I was convinced that Annelise hated me. Eventually, we started throwing a ball around and the next day at school we played together. The rest is history.

Unfortunately, my mother’s friendship with the Queen of Thorns ended when the Queen started sleeping with my father, my mother’s soon-to-be-ex-husband.

Like the White Walker, the Queen thought I was not normal and told my dad this on multiple occasions. Unlike the Walker, who was a woman of few words, the Queen used them a lot. Words were her weapon of choice, not Poison Arrow Frogs.

I credit the Queen with teaching me sarcasm. It was a foreign language to me at first. But six year olds pick up foreign languages quickly. The Queen only ever spoke in irony, so if you wanted to speak to her, you had to speak her dialect.

Whatever the Queen thought, I still think I intuitively got irony back then. I just didn’t know the word for it. This was further complicated by the Alanis Morissette song Ironic, which was released in 1995.

After the Arrow Frog conversation, The White Walker had rung my mother. I’d been pestering her again, she said. I wasn’t normal. She wanted both my parents to meet her and her husband at their house. I sat there, outside, with my parents. The Walker did most of the talking. I don’t remember much of what was said as I filtered it out. All I remember was the way the sunlight caught her hair, how blue their eyes were and how identical their facial expressions. I sat there, drawing fairies and butterflies. At one point, the Walker glanced at my drawings.
“She’s a good drawer.” She seemed surprised.
“Wow!” The Walker’s husband chipped in. “Thats really good. Can you draw an eye for me?”
I drew him an eye. He explained that the black dot in the middle was the pupil, which was really a hole of sorts to let the light in. The coloured part around the pupil was the iris, which was really a muscle, which expanded and contracted so that people could see in both bright sunlight and darkness. He was about to explain more, but his wife cut him off.
Her eyes were as blue as marbles. She appeared to be carved out of ice. How was it that she didn’t melt in the sun?

They gave my parents the name of a paediatrician who was a friend of his. The Walker deemed it necessary that my parents have me formally assessed.
As I walked home with them, I said “She hates me.”
“She’s just not used to talking about people who can hear her,” my mother muttered under her breath. I could tell that she was angry, but I didn’t know if it was on me or the Walker.
*
It wasn’t until two years later that my parents decided to get me assessed by the paediatrician. By that time, my mother and the Walker no longer spoke. The nanny my mum stole had been the final straw and this meant that I could no longer see the Walker’s daughter, which made me sad. It was July 1997. My parents were divorced and The Queen lived with my dad.

I didn’t want to see the ped. I knew that whatever reason I had to see him had to do with me being bad, not normal, or, as the Queen put it, “weird”.

It was a horrible day. In the Southern Hemisphere, July is more or less the middle of winter and the further south you live, the closer to Antarctica you are. Rain was not exactly unexpected at this time of year, it had rained for most of the week.

“Good afternoon!” The paediatrician said to me. I responded with a “Hi”
“Its a lovely day, isn’t it?” He asked.
I was pissed. I didn’t want to be there.
“Yeah”, I said, “Its a really lovely day today. Just like yesterday.”
“Aha!” He said. “She gets irony.”
This was good news. It meant that I did not have Asperger’s syndrome as both the Walker and the Queen had suggested. I left with a diagnosis of ADD and severe anxiety and a recommendation that my parents put me on a drug called Ritalin.

The next morning at breakfast, The Queen was pissed at being overruled.
“Apparently you understand irony,” she said bitterly
“What is irony?” I asked. I didn’t know what the word meant. She rolled her eyes.
“I dunno Thea. You tell me. Apparently you understand it.”

This was a test, I needed to think of something to say or else the Queen would call me stupid as the White Walker had.

“Its like, rain on your wedding day,” I said.

As I said it, I knew it was a stupid thing to say. The Alanis song had never made sense to me. I thought rain on a wedding day was quite different to the good advice that one hadn’t taken. One was bad luck. The other was kind of your fault.

“Yeah,” Svetlana, the Queen’s older daughter piped in. “Thats, like, really ironic.”
“Is it?” This was news to me.
“REALLY ironic,” the Queen repeated. I nodded. The Queen turned to my dad.
“She OBVIOUSLY doesn’t understand irony James! Rain on a wedding day is a co-incidence, not irony. AND she didn’t get my irony just now!”
“But that wasn’t irony,” he shot back in my defence. “that was sarcasm.”

And so, that morning, my crash course in sarcasm began.

Alanis has a lot to answer for.
*

For most people, memories fade over time. As neural pathways are not activated, they degrade. Eventually, its as if the memory was never there and it is lost forever. Its normal. It seems to happen to most people.

I am not normal. And I am not most people. Provided I was paying attention at the time, the memory is there forever. time does not lesson it. Other memories never override it. Somewhere, buried among all the other scraps of useless information in my frontal cortex, those connections are there.
Some don’t make any sense at the time. For example, the paper the White Walker wrote was on a drug called vencuronium. I remembered the word forever, even thought I had no idea what it was. How did someone write a paper? Paper was an object. Writing was a verb. Maybe she meant she had written the word ON paper?

I had a tendency to take things a little too literally. Language was confusing.

It was also possible that she wrote the paper under the influence of vencuronium, in much the same way that The Queen wrote her columns late at night, on caffeine. But vencuronium was a paralytic. Paralytics are not generally conducive to writing.

If anyone had explained the dual meaning of “paper”, I would have understood. But no one did. So I spent years focusing on the meaning of the word I didn’t know (vencuronium) rather than the word I could have understood (paper). And I didn’t learn to read till I was eight. Coz school was boring and I never paid attention. I could see why they thought I was stupid. I wasn’t. My parents were just to wrapped up in their own issues to educate me.
*
Ritalin. Methylphenidate. The drug the paediatrician recommended my parents put me on. Its a psychostimulant, chemically related to cocaine. Pharmacologically, it inhibits the reuptake of dopamine. In people with ADHD, the dopamine system is under active. In the frontal cortex, there are lots of neural pathways. Between them, there are lots of inhibitory inter-neurones that use dopamine as a transmitter. Dopamine inhibits the activation of these pathways. The result? Less activation, resulting in increased attention and decreased hyperactivity.

Or at least, that is the theory.

The Queen of Thorns loved the idea. My mother hated it. So they took me to a paediatric psychiatrist, who said the same thing. Along with a behaviour modification regime, the drug could fix me. It might not make me normal, but it could help.

I only saw the paediatrician once. His mentioning the R-word was enough to scare my mother away. When the paediatric psychiatrist said the same thing, I was whisked away again, never to return.

Undeterred, the Queen had her sister prescribe the drug. She took the script to the pharmacy and she and my dad tried to get me to take it. I said I couldn’t swallow pills. The package said “do not crush or chew.”

That morning, seven-year-old me and my three-year-old sister were running around our Dad’s house, wreaking havoc and acting like the children that we were. The Queen complained loudly. Then she left, apparently to go to the gym, although she packed up all her stuff as if she were leaving my dad forever.

“Well, thanks a lot girls,” Dad told us. “You have just ruined my day. Totally ruined my day!”

Of course, the Queen returned that night and pretended the whole situation had never happened.

She never tried to get me to take Ritalin again. She just carried the box around in her bag until my dad left her three years later, a perpetual threat.
*

The White Walker comes into my work. I don’t freak out. She comes in at least once a week and buys lots of meat and cheese and a few vegetables. Her family have obviously gone paleolithic or ketogenic or some other very low carb fad diet. You can tell a lot about people by their grocery cart.

She still looks the same, her eyes like distant blue stars. Her hair is untameable, she must have given up trying to control it years ago. She is still just as icy. Her eyebrows still raise. I’m surprised she never got into botox, it would seem fitting if she had.

She is still a woman of few words. I don’t take it personally anymore. She never speaks to anyone in the shop, except Tash. She always scans her loyalty card first to avoid the first question, which is “Do you have a loyalty card?”
I still have to ask the second question, which is “Do you want your meat packed separately?” Even though I know the answer will be “Just chuck it all in together.” Because it is protocol. And she might have changed her mind.

Its 7am, the day before Christmas Eve. There are three checkout operators on. She goes to Tash. They must be friends. They toss the ball that I now know as sarcasm between themselves. Linda, the HR manager, tells me to you pack for Tash.

I don’t want to, but I have to. So I ask her: “Do you want your meat packed separately?”

“Just chuck it all in together.” Each word has a drop of venom on it. Not a very big drop. She measures her venom out carefully, injecting just enough into each word to make you realise you have annoyed her and not a drop more. This is a skill she has perfected over the years.

I want to ask her how her daughter is. I hope she is happy. She was such an amazing child, so intelligent, articulate and creative. And yet she had a gentle heart. I wish we were still friends. They say all women turn out like their mothers. I hope they are wrong. She has the potential to become someone much better.

I want to ask how her son; whom she once referred to as “antisocial” to my mother in front of him; is. I hope he survived her.

More than anything, I want to tell her that I am not the complete and utter failure that she predicted I would become. Not quite, anyway. But I can’t. Because I don’t believe it myself.

As she picks up her bags and leaves, the mood lifts. It is as if the room temperature suddenly raised 10 degrees.

Despite everything I have said, I don’t hate either one of them. At some level, I still want them to like me.

They say leopards don’t change their spots. I’m guessing snow leopards don’t either.