Creepy and Maud (7 page)

Eventually, Maud pushes herself away from the window, letting her question skid down the pane and behind her little desk. That’s when she goes to the portable CD player on the floor next to her bed and starts playing Disturbed. And I give in to her. I hold the binoculars in one hand, write my answer with the other, and flatten it against the glass. The binoculars have never felt heavier. My wrist is shaking. Maud comes back to the window and puts her glasses on.

She just stands there, looking. Then she draws her curtains across and shuts me out.

I didn’t even know she had curtains. And they are hung the wrong way around. You know how the pattern on the curtain is supposed to face into the room? Hers face out. So when she pulls them across, she must be looking at the wrong side of the fabric. Maybe that’s why she never draws them. They are bright yellow, headachy yellow, with little blue Thomas the Tank Engines all over them. Come to think of it, maybe that’s
why they’re hung the wrong way around.

Initially a tiny bubble of sad begins to rise in me—worry sad, deep sad. That doesn’t last long. Know where it goes? It rises to my throat, tasting of tripe, and falls back into my guts as solid anger. It occurs to me then that there’s no way to win the tripe issue—eat it, don’t eat it, it’s the hesitation that damns you from the get-go. I had written:

—Yes I want to touch it

We had a cat named Fluffy a while ago. Doomed from the start with a name like that. I believe the names we give our pets are an unequivocal indication of our level of commitment to them. That poor bald thing next door is called Sylvia. That cat is obviously loved. There’s a dog up the street called Antoine. That name’s got substitute child written all over it. And of course there’s our own
Dobie Squires (naming accolades to previous owner). The best my mum could come up with for our cat was Fluffy. Not a lot of thought went into that one. Fluffy is the name you give to a disposable cat. A cat that, should it end up tyre gravy, is replaced by the time the kids get home from school, with nothing said. Half the cats in the street are named Fluffy. When Mum called our Fluffy in for tea, they all came. It was like a feline version of
The Birds.

Fluffy got old and thin and blind. Started walking in tight circles and howling in the middle of the night. Got to the point where I just wanted to hit her with a rock to put her out of her misery. She must have intuited that, because she started staying away from me. Then one day we found her under the lounge, stiff and twitching. Mum let out a pretty fraught wail, which was odd, considering this was only a Fluffy. Dobie Squires lunged at Mum, taking as his cue the raised volume (he’d started improvising). Dad grabbed Dobie by the hind leg and dragged him towards the kitchen, which caused more screaming because Mum was trying to get in there for a wee nip. And I pulled Fluffy out to watch the death throes.

It’s called post-mortem spasm. I read about it. It’s all about calcium ions and motor proteins. Fluffy might have been in the middle of one of those fidgety dreams
of hers, had it not been for the milky pupils and voided bladder. Merrill eventually got a towel and wrapped her up. Mum was having some kind of post-mortem spasm of her own, howling and hiccuping her way through instructions to Dad. She was adamant. Fluffy was not to be buried in the yard. Fluffy was to be taken to the nearest vet and handed in for cremation. Dad started making some noise about the expense of this when he had a perfectly good shovel out back, but Mum was near hysterical by this time. I think that’s when it occurred to me. This wasn’t grief. This was fear. Fear turning into anger. Mum didn’t give a shit about Fluffy. She was just terrified and furious at having a dead thing in her house. She didn’t even want a dead thing in her yard. Dad took Fluffy to the car and drove off. I saw him pop the shovel in the boot first, though.

The curtains at Maud’s window stayed drawn for about a week. Sometimes, if the light was right, I could see her moving around behind them. I could hear her music. I sometimes saw her at school. I spent a lot of time thinking about tripe and humming the theme from
Thomas the Tank Engine.
I discovered just how closely love, grief and anger are connected. I started reading
Far from the Madding Crowd
and switched to Aesop when I couldn’t concentrate. Then this morning I get up and the curtains are open. Just like that. I consider ignoring her
but realise the binoculars are already in my hand. There is a message in the window. We are on actual text pages of
Alice
now. Maud has written:

—MY NANNA IS DEAD

The only thing that comes to my mind is Fluffy. I can’t help it. All I can think about is post-mortem spasm and I feel like laughing. Maud’s nanna under a couch, rigid and twitchy and peeing on herself. Psychologists would say that my discomfort with the demise of a relative of the person I love has contributed to my mind choosing to default to a position that removes me from the possibility of having to confront pain in my loved one and empathy within myself in order to reduce my vulnerability. I know they would say that because I’ve read it. I was once interested in the phenomenon of funeral laughter, you see. There’s always one, isn’t there? And at Mrs Green’s funeral, that one was my mum.

Mrs Green ran the local deli. Shocking little place that was never clean and you always had to check the dates on the milk and cheese. Everyone knew her. One day she slipped over while wrapping a tongue. Hit her head on the side of the meat slicer on the way down. That didn’t kill her, though. Apparently, she had a heart attack. Some kids found her on the floor behind the counter with the tongue tucked under her chin.

Most of the street went to the funeral. Mrs Green
didn’t have a lot of family, you see. I remember thinking the person who ordered the tongue should have sprung for at least half the cost. I was thinking about that tongue when I felt my mum shaking. I thought she might be crying, at first. Her shoulders were bouncing a little and her breaths were short and fast. Then I heard the giggle.

If you’re at a funeral, a giggle, to other people, is as shocking as a fart. The unfortunate thing was that Mum just couldn’t get a hold of herself. She sat there, trying to suppress these giggles, which only ended up producing giggle-suppression snorts. When people started to look, Dad leaned over and hissed, ‘Shut the hell up,’ which sort of made her worse. I was fascinated by the whole thing because it remains, to this day, one of the only times I have ever seen my mother laugh. Our family were not invited to the annual Christmas party at Antoine’s house that year. I think I was the only one who had some compassion for my mum that day. Death is a little bit funny, after all. Isn’t it?

So there she is, Maud, standing in the window. Telling me her nanna is dead. Exposing herself. Coming out from behind Thomas the Tank Engine to share something. Something I assume is painful. And what do I do? I default to Fluffy and post-mortem spasm and tongue and before I know what’s happening I
feel my shoulders bouncing and my face shaking and I am laughing. I am laughing big. Not just a titter. Not a simple chuckle that with distance could be misinterpreted as the facial contortions of shared sorrow. I’m laughing my fucking head off and I can’t stop. Maud’s just watching me, expressionless, pulling out her hair.

All the girls at school have Pandora bracelets. Or the cheaper imitations. It has become the newest obsession, replacing things like violence and eating disorders at the top of the list. You see the girls sitting in little groups at lunchtime, all bent over each other, wrists extended, heads tweaked coquettishly to the side, stroking each other’s bracelets and making sexy noises at one another. I know about all this because I watch them. I was walking along the school verandah behind Caitlin Cooper (good name for a loved pet there) when her Pandora bracelet broke. There was no warning before
a dozen or so charms and beads hit the concrete, ping, ping, ping; they skidded everywhere. Caitlin actually wailed and her entire pack dropped to the ground as if responding to a volley of gunfire. The girls crawled along on their hands and knees, rescuing the trinkets, barking at the approaching foot traffic to stay back. It was as if little pieces of Caitlin herself had broken off and rolled away. A tiny solid gold apple charm, complete with minuscule stem and leaf, ended up resting against my foot. I picked it up and pocketed it before walking away.

Here’s the thing—it
was
little pieces of Caitlin herself breaking off. Apparently, these charms are symbolic. The little apple? Caitlin wants to be a teacher one day. Get it? Apple for the teacher? Isn’t that so precious you just want to vomit? By the way, those girls are back there again today, still looking for that little gold apple.

Carl Jung reckons that symbols are signs of things that can’t be made clear. If we are so consumed with protecting the bits of us that could break off and roll away at any given moment, then it makes sense that we have symbols to represent us. Symbols for others and symbols for ourselves. Do we, therefore, symbolically display our agendas? Like a monkey presenting its red arse when it’s ready for a date? Of course, that raises an even more interesting question. If something can’t
be made clear, how do you assign it a symbol? Isn’t its essential obscurity a symbol in and of itself?

I think about this while rolling the little gold apple around in my palm. I also think there is every possibility that Carl Jung was just full of shit. However, there can be no denying we humans are a phlegmatic lot. Introspection being actively discouraged since birth, it makes perfect sense that we should eventually choose tattoos or loud cars with big exhaust pipes or boob jobs or Pandora bracelets to define ourselves. And why not? All honesty is relative.

I expected a whooshing slam of Thomas the Tank Engine curtains after our last interaction. I do feel bad about laughing at Maud. Or was I laughing at Maud’s nanna? Or Fluffy, or Mrs Green’s tongue? Or, even more disturbingly, are they all the same thing? When Maud comes back to the window, at first I can’t tell what’s different about her, even with the binoculars. She looks sort of folded in on herself, and unclean. As if she hasn’t showered in days. (Probably been consoling herself behind the doll’s house in the middle of the night.) It’s her hair that is different. Sort of plastered down and matted. I’m not sure what I am looking at until she takes a tissue, dabs it at her temple, and then holds it up to the window.

The tissue is bloody. There is blood in her hair.
She has the tissue tented around the tip of her index finger. She looks like a pilgrim at an execution, one of the inspired masses who dip their kerchief in the spilt blood of a beheaded saint. Now, there’s a symbol for you. She looks positively peaceful. I’m a bit disgusted at first; I feel as though she is showing me a tissue she’s picked her nose with. But only at first. Because then it occurs to me: I did this. My laughing has triggered this in her. I have made her tear out so much hair that she’s made herself bleed. And given that trichotillomania is a pleasurable act, I can only conclude that my laughing, or her interpretation of it, has given her this pleasure. I suddenly feel an irresistible craving for the tripe question. I want to answer it again so badly, my skin is prickling. I want Maud to crawl under the little table in front of her window and retrieve that page from
Alice in Wonderland
and press it against the cool pane just one more time, and I want to whisper:
Yes, I want to touch it!

That night I make two decisions. The first decision is to try hair pulling myself. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t want to end up with bald or bleeding patches, and I have no intention of putting a hand in my jocks. At least, not for that. I want to know what it feels like. I want to know what Maud feels like when she does it. It’s the closest I can get to touching her.

I sit on the end of my bed and wind a few strands
of my hair around one index finger. I have never really contemplated just how strong a hair follicle is. Given the right pressure, it bites like wire into skin. I tug very gently. My scalp itches a bit at first and then, as I pull harder, begins to sting. It is unsettling but not unpleasant. I try releasing and increasing the torque at various intervals and find that a small nervous current tweaks at the sensors in my neck and upper spine. My eyes begin to tear involuntarily. If I continue even pressure, will the roots slide from the scalp or will the hairs just break off? Break off, probably. Breaking off doesn’t seem like the real deal. Better go in for the grand tug. I take a deep breath and, during the exhalation, yank what turns out to be about ten strands of hair from my head. What a fucking idiot.