Quick Deportation From Reality

• Melanie Pokorny
• Short Story
• 2005

The hallway was silent. The kitchen, with its half-empty refrigerator and sink overflowing with dishes, was empty. The lounge room, the dining room and both bedrooms all looked upon her rather forlornly, drained of human life. In her desperation, Lisa even checked the laundry. But he wasn’t there.

Lisa wandered back into his bedroom, and just like in the movies, the window was wide open, leaving the wind billowing at the pulled-back curtains. Yes, he was gone, all right. Jerry had run away, just like he said he would.

***

Jerry had no intentions on fulfilling his threats to run away, made to his mother that morning, at least, not until he got to school three-quarters of an hour later. It was a bad day. Every single teacher kept picking on him and the mountain of homework sitting in front of him on his desk, from Miss Solomon and English that morning, to Mr Williams and Biology in the afternoon. Normally, Jerry wouldn’t care. He was a bright student and normally made good grades, even if he didn’t do much in the way of homework. But lately, he had been in an unstable frame of mind.

Jerry wasn’t even sure when his sudden notion of insecurity began, which made it even more difficult to pinpoint exactly why it had begun anyway. To make himself feel slightly better, he blamed it on his mother’s new job, car and boyfriend. The new job was in the city, half-an-hour from their home in the comatose suburb they had lived in all their lives. It was some sort of secretarial position and, although Lisa loved it, it worked ridiculously long hours. Jerry felt his special relationship with his mother was partly taken away when she developed a special relationship with her job.

The new car was a sapphire-hued Ford Astra hatchback. Lisa bought it at a used car yard, and the previous owners were reportedly pensioners, whose sole purpose for an automobile was for shopping and Sunday mass. Jerry detested it. After all, it was hardly a V8, and it also stunk of rat poison. But Lisa even drove it to her best friend’s place, which was half a street away, just to show it off its sleek aerodynamic lines and glossy paint job.

The new boyfriend was an older, lanky man named Cash. That was just his nickname, because Jerry couldn’t even bring himself to find out what his real name was. Everyone called him Cash, because he had lots of it. To the best of Jerry’s knowledge, he was some sort of tycoon businessman, the type you find in feature articles of money magazines, with glasses and a shiny hairstyle that never seemed to move, no matter the wind. Cash had the personality of a brick. Lisa had met him at work, and so infatuated was she that she failed to hear Jerry’s sarcastic “Ka-ching!” when she introduced him to Cash.

Jerry had tried, so hard, to accept him for Lisa’s sake – Cash seemed to make her happy. But every time she spoke of him, Jerry only saw dollar signs in her eyes. He hated it. He hated it all. He hated Lisa for being so superficial, he hated Cash for being so rich, he hated the Astra for being so smelly and he hated his mother’s job for being so time-consuming.

All this resulted in Jerry feeling like his opinions and feelings weren’t of any use to anyone anymore, especially to his own mother. To make sure his opinions were still known, he started picking fights with Lisa, first at home, but then – anywhere. While cruising in the rat-poisoned Astra, in the toiletry aisle of the supermarket, at the movies amid hushing and other people’s interjections of “Shut up!” It got especially worse whenever Cash reared his oil-slicked brick-head into a previously family-only excursion. Hence, Jerry would turn on Cash and Lisa, Lisa would turn on Jerry, then Cash felt obliged to change the subject completely (“Oh look, isn’t that a honeybird over there, on that shrub?”). It made Cash look like a bigger idiot than Jerry thought he was already, but it also made Lisa apologise for Jerry’s behaviour, or say something endearing to make Cash feel better, like “Oh, is that a honeybird? I wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t had told me so.”

That morning at breakfast, Jerry had had his fill of Weetbix, not to mention of Cash-talk. So when Lisa started to pour more milk in his bowl, while describing, in detail, the lovely time she and Cash spent at a musical last night, Jerry suddenly slammed his fist on the edge of the bowl, sending the milk hurtling towards Lisa, while the bowl sped to the floor and loudly split into hundreds of ceramic chips.

“What has gotten into you, Jerry?” Lisa cried, trying to extract the milk from her best skirt. “Don’t you want me to be happy? I thought that’s what you said to me when I applied for this job – ‘Mum, you know I just want you to be happy, and nothing else matters.’ And you said it again when I bought the car, and then again when I brought Cash home! But obviously you were lying! You don’t care!”

“Mum,” said Jerry through gritted teeth, “if happy is this-“ here he pointed, in turn, to the framed picture of Cash on the mantelpiece, the Ford Astra parked in the driveway through the window and Lisa’s milk-splattered work outfit “-then I don’t want you to have it! I don’t want us to have it! It’s not right!”

The argument continued until Jerry was about to miss his bus. He thought his mood would subside a little during school, but when he got home, he took one look at the messy kitchen and took off through his bedroom window.

Slipping through the side-fence and through the neighbour’s front lawn, Jerry started to jog, then run, along the kerbing of the road. He wanted to get far away from this comatose suburb as he could. Far away from his mother who couldn’t understand that the happiness she was seeking wasn’t the one that was going to make her happy. Far from that stinking hatchback and Cash’s fat bank account. Far from honeybirds of any variety or homework or Weetbix or –

The truck hit Jerry’s body with such force that as he flew into the air and hit the asphalt again in a crumpled heap, he had already departed from the harsh reality of the world.