Creepy and Maud (13 page)

I think I know what has happened to her. It is probably not what happened. She was probably just hit by a car. But I have my suspicions. Snea-ky-sus-pi-cions. I have never told Nancy I like fives. My methods of
self-soothing, as she calls them, have caused everyone enough worry. And I have to keep something for myself. Meth-ods-of-self-soo-thing. That is a six. When she says it three times, I think to myself: six-six-six. The number of the beast. She has crossed over. She does not say it three times out loud, but I know she says it in her head. I can tell by the way she looks at me.

I hope Sylvia gets comfortable over there. That her allegiance changes and she forgets all about us.

And I hope Mum never finds out. It would hurt her if she discovered Sylvia could survive, and survive well, away from her. I think she is so upset because she has already decided Sylvia is dead somewhere, and dead is good. Dead settles things neatly and Mum can grieve. If she thought for a second Sylvia was alive and well somewhere else, she would start pulling her own hair out. Rather dead than happy without me. I am assuming Sylvia is alive, of course. He could have buried her in the backyard by now, for all I know.

Suspension from school is boring. It sounds good but it is not. Not when there is nothing to do. I am miss-ing-in-ac-tion, like Sylv-
yah.
I think they think that if I do not have anything to do, I will be forced to be introspective. I am not sure about the whole inner life thing. Things get stuck in there. Like my curdled words. I can think and think something and all it does is
turn off my ability to make decisions. The thinking itself becomes the thing, you see, not the called-for outcome that began the thinking in the first place. So I sit here, bored stiff, and there is no ending, no result to this prescribed thinking. Sort of self-defeating.

Maybe it is called bored stiff because you dry up inside. You are here. Your goal is there. Now put little legs on your brain and walk it. It is a long walk, but we are all here to help you by keeping you without distraction. If it even appears that you are attempting to divert yourself, we will take away your fingers and your charcoal. If you stop on the way to accepted wisdom, we will give you a pill and it will dry you up inside and your brain will creak for want of moisture, but only with true stiff boredom will you get better. Get better at life.

When Kyle Sully came back to school after being suspended, he was a bit of a legend. Crowds parted for him, his mates shook his hand and girls hung around him like he was a rock star. He was suspended for setting fire to Owen Liddell’s lunchbox. Made Owen cry. I do not think Kyle got any real big flames going; it was just a stinky smoulder. His mum and dad defended him with a fierceness that disturbed everyone, even his fans, considering he had set fire to a hibiscus tree in their front yard the year before. Mr and Mrs Sully came to the school for a meeting that I heard about
because Bec was in the front office waiting for her own intervention after stealing every whiteboard marker she could get her hands on. That is what they call it—an intervention. Anyway, Bec heard Mrs Sully yelling you-have-no-proof-sir, you-have-no-proof-sir, over and over again, as if it was a hex that would just ‘poof ’ them all out of there, far away from her humiliation. Kyle was spotted surfing during his suspension.

If anyone needed the school chaplain present during intervention, it was Kyle. That boy needs a priest. But it was me who got him. My mum and dad just sat there, intimidated, mortified, while Mike (the chaplain gets us all to call him by his first name because he thinks it makes him one of us) talked in a kind of sick-room whisper about get-ting-help-for-her. I felt myself floating up towards the ceiling, my suspension begun, just perched like a fat bird at the edge of nothing. I could look down on myself and the air tasted salty. I could see Mum and Dad being comforted (Mike had his fingers resting lightly on Mum’s wrist) and the school counsellor nodding sympathetically when I knew she was really thinking: I hope this thing does not run into lunchtime. I do not know how I knew she was thinking that, but all of a sudden I could see inside everyone’s heads, even my own, and inside my head was a blurry image of Mrs Sully come to defend me, come
to slap Mike’s hand away from my mother’s and shriek ‘you-have-no-proof-sir’. Then maybe they would let me leave and I would learn to surf.

Mum is still putting food out for Sylvia, even though she thinks she is dead, and Sylvia does not come for it. Dad has checked under bushes and walked around the block a couple of times because Mum says cats will go away to die. Like elephants. Do they just know when it is time to die and take off? Do they take off to spare the herd distress? Or is dying just private? Most comforting things are private. Beyond discussion and beyond division. If I die in front of you and you watch, then we go halves in this, my private thing. And that gives you some ownership of me. Then I am divided too much.

Coda: Rather dead than happy without me. I am divided too much.

I am not supposed to open my new blinds. I am on an honour system with this; there is no alarm attached or anything to alert Mum and Dad (or Nancy) that I have moved them. I never pull them up because they have these little clips at the base that lock them into the down position—they fit in there pretty snug, and I think it might be time-consuming (and noisy) to adjust them. But I can open the slats with a little rod that twists. The little rod is a clear plastic octagon, ever so thin, and when the sun comes through and catches in the rod it lights up like Excalibur. It is beautiful. I do not notice Sylvia at first because I am looking at the rod, twirling it in my fingers, and the blind slats are going open-close-open-close as if I am sending Morse
code or something. Then I look out (which is the reason I opened the blinds in the first place) and there he is, binoculars in one hand and Sylvia in the other.

He has her lying along his inside forearm, her head cupped gently in his palm. Her legs are drooping down either side of his arm and his arm is slightly extended towards me as if he is offering her to me. John the Baptist’s head on a platter. I do not know why I think of that but it is the first thing that pops into my head. A macabre but loving offering because I have stopped dancing for him.

Nanna had a painting of Salome that I loved, even before I knew the story behind it. I would stand in front of that picture for ages, studying not the flamboyant girl but all the shadowy things going on in the background. It was not until you got really close to that picture that you realised how dark it was, deep-deep-in-side-it; all the garish flush of Salome and her sweaty audience of lusty boys just a distraction from the important things going on behind them. Tiny figures heaved onto the canvas in a couple of careless strokes that have just as much life as Salome herself. Servants and cooks and wayward dogs and wine wenches all with dark lives of their own, all overlooked. Lives-in-sus-pen-sion. Nanna told me that when the dance ended, Salome would ask for the head of John and if she did not get it she would
never dance again. Small price to pay.

And so it is with Sylvia, or at least that is how it looks to me. At first I think she is dead, but then she rolls her head into his hand, marking him the way cats do, claiming him the way he has claimed her. I know I should tell. I know I should go straight downstairs and tell Mum that the creepy boy next door has stolen our cat. But I do not.

Being suspended from school means I get to go and see Nancy every day. My dad calls them ‘Trips to Nancy’, as if they are a reward or a holiday. He even says it with a little lilt in his voice and his step. But his hopefulness lacks confidence. I know he is silently begging me to raise my status from disappointing to tolerable. No one has mentioned the vampire throwing Stephanie Morcombe off the balcony. No one has asked me anything about it at all. Their-minds-are-made-up. Like a bed with hospital corners, or a pretty girl’s face. Nothing to be done. Do not touch it because it is already made up. I get so cross about this that I start answering Nancy in French and she looks deeply disappointed and a little bit on the verge herself. So I withdraw again. And I pull until my fingers get bloody. I dab at my wounds with my mittens, and Mum finds them stiffened and rust-coloured. Like a pocket torn from an artist’s smock. I am like a little dark brushstroke
in the background now. Like a bruise on a canvas.

I wonder how Mr Thornton is handling his suspension? Is he bored stiff, too? Is he sitting in some darkened psychiatrist’s office, talking about his methods of self-soothing? I doubt it. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe his indifference went over the balcony with Stephanie that day and he suddenly found sensation creeping back into him after living thousands of years in a bloodless stupor. What must it be like to wake like that, in the sunshine, to find your first real feeling is skin-tingling horror? Surely you would die from that.

Nancy’s office is not darkened, the way these places should be. It is lousy with sunlight, eyeball-drying sunlight. Sunlight to disgrace us, I think, and our disappointed mothers.

There is a girl in the waiting room who cries while she is waiting and cries when she comes out—I suppose she is crying while she is in there, too. Apart from the crying, you would not think there is anything wrong with her. She wears nice clothes and her fingernails and toenails are painted to match and she is thin and pretty. Her mum sits with her in the waiting room every time and reads a magazine. She doesn’t really read it; she just sort of flicks the pages in a snippy way. I always want to talk to the sad girl. Once I caught her eye and smiled carefully, one of those ones you can
pull back in a hurry if it is unreciprocated. She smiled back, but then I looked at her mum. Sad-girl’s-snip-pymum curled her lip at me. Upper lip left corner lifted just a little bit. And I got a funny feeling in my chest, a big rolling sick feeling, so I had to open my mouth to get more air into me. It was disgust on snippy mum’s lip. Disgust that crawled from her lip to her nostril and right up into her eyes. So I said:
Vôtre fille a des beaux cheveux. Je me demande comment ça goûte.
And my mum, sitting next to me, probably wishing that the sad girl with all the lovely hair was actually hers, pinched my hand hard and said, ‘Shut up.’

Coda: Your daughter has lovely hair. I wonder what it tastes like.

A prickle of current that starts at the root of the hair and shoots like cold fingertips into your brain. Like someone walking on your grave. Like getting out of bed so fast, your low blood pressure throws black fireworks in front of your eyes. Like butterfly kisses. Like nothing can ever bother you again. This is what I feel like first day back at school, sitting in the facilities, pulling my eyelashes out.

My hands are wet inside these mittens. It is not a cold day, so people look at me and the mittens are my Star of David. Are people walking past me more carefully? Their tread sounds different, shallower. So I walk louder, I tramp, I stomp, I dare them with my footfall. I suddenly feel embarrassed, awkward, and
wish I had one of those glamorous girly frailties like alcoholism or diet pill addiction. I get angry. And so here I am, sitting in the toilet, and I cannot even wee, so I pull.

I walk into class late and get sent to the office for a late note. In the office, they ask me why I am late and I say I had to go to the toilet and they ask me if I want to see the nurse. I say no. I get the late note and walk across the quad towards class and get distracted by the gum trees because they look taller than usual and their trunks are whiter than my skin. When I get to class, the teacher asks what took me so long and I say I had to go to the toilet and she asks me if I want to see the nurse. I say no.

I do not remember getting from one class to another. I count my steps in fives: one-two-three-four-five-one-two-three-four-five. My skin is crawling hot from the niacin tablets they are making me take, so I rip off my mittens and tear at my skin and run to the toilets between classes to run water on my arms. I’ve never spent so much time in the toilets during a school day before. In Maths I lick the palms of my hands and press them to my face. The teacher asks if I want to see the nurse. I don’t even answer.

No one ever told me panic is so much like elation. The Science teacher tells me to put my mittens back
on and I laugh at him. Everyone else laughs, too. He stands over me and says it again, and it is on. We have a contest. Right here, right now, with everyone watching and him looking first-year-out unyielding and me looking, looking, looking everywhere because I cannot keep my eyes still. He says it again, ‘Put the mittens back on,’ but there is a new element now. He sounds concerned. And I hate him for it, so I twirl some hair around my index finger and breathe through my mouth. I am not even pulling, just twirling, but I can see I am winning. Then he just walks away. He just turns from me and walks away, talking about some experiment, and I hear the word
pipette
before feeling a fury I have never known before. And it is a clean, clean anger that feels like one of my dad’s backhanders.

I am late to my next class in the library. We are supposed to be looking up renewable energy on the internet, but I look up pipettes and draw them in my notebook and put little heads inside the bulb. My pencil digs in hard and my nail beds are white with effort. A blob of saliva falls on my page and I realise I have a mouth full of it, so I swallow. I close my eyes and can see my own pulse flashing like hazard lights on the inside of my lids.