Wrong Number
It was the end of November 1995 that things got out of hand for me.
I'd received an anonymous death threat at work, and later I was
stalked on teh way home from my StarTrek club.
I no noger had any faith in the management to support and or protect
me, and Perth just didn't seem safe any more, so I decided to do a
"geographical".
I took three months sick leave I'd accrued and went to Sydney for
a visit.
I was staying in a sort of hostel in an inner suburb of Sydney... ...a
really weird place.
There were several of us staying there, not just me.
One was a real schemer, always manipulating us.
Call that food -- you couldn't make food if it was home delivered.
Once (though I didn't know this at the time) she faked her own
suicide, just so we'd all run around for her.
Laura, Madge, come quick, Rikky's gassed herself!
But there was more -- she organised us against each other, by subtle
and less subtle means.
How come my underwear's missing? And what about that Terry -- I
could have sworn I saw him looking at me through the bathroom window!
Geez Ricky, just as well you're about to spot all this.
What would we do without you?
She organised a house meeting where the counsellors in charge of the
hostel turned up. It was tense and I found out how little support I
had there.
What's this about you reading other people's diaries.
This will teach her.
Hey, what's going on here? I didn't do half this stuff...
We can't have only you breaking the rules and upsetting everyone
else, can we?
But it was just no good -- they didn't believe me. I was convicted
on hearsay from Rikki and those she had to back her stories up.
After supper that night I went to my room and cried myself to sleep.
I tried cheering myself up by watching an episode of StarTrek:
Next Generation. It was called "Skin of Evil".
A big mistake! That was the episode that tasha yar is killed
senselessly by an alien creature on some nameless planet. The creature
is what's left of an alien race that discarded it as something
evil and disgusting. At the end of the episode Picard orders
them to abandon the alien forever,
I felt like that creature, evil, disgusting and abandoned by the
otehrs around me. At the end of the episode I cried not for
Tasha, but for it. I was not in a good way
that night.
I kept to my room, curled up in a ball, with the issues and problems
of the day going around in my head like an endless loop.
I left the hostel as early as I could next morning. I was in no mood
to talk to anyone there.
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