Dreaming of Amelia (29 page)

The friend told Amelia she'd been attacked by a crowd of little people carrying a corpse.

‘Turns out you were right,' Amelia tries to laugh. ‘My new friend's nuts.'

It's her broken laugh.

She'd wanted her new friend to be real. One real friend amongst these Ashbury half-people. These Ashbury shadows and ghosts.

Her friend also saw a ‘little person' falling down the chimney.

‘There's a chimney in the home?' I say.

‘I guess. I don't know. I guess it could be part of the story. Anyway, the little person scalded himself. In a pot of boiling water that was standing at the fire.'

And now Amelia's eyes and voice are drifting. She tells the story like it's her own. ‘He let out a terrible squeal,' she says, ‘and within minutes, the place was full of other little creatures, pulling him out of the pot.

‘And they pointed to me—' here Amelia points to herself. ‘And they said,
Was it her? Did she scald you
? And the little one said,
No, no, it was me that did it, not her
, and the other
creatures said,
Ah well, if it was yourself that scalded yourself, we'll say nothing
.'

Amelia pauses, looks at me, then continues in a deep and creeping voice: ‘
But if SHE had scalded you, we'd have made her pay
.'

She looks into my eyes. A beat goes by.

I say: ‘You mean they pointed to your friend.'

Amelia, sassy again: ‘I'm quoting. I'm telling it like she did.' She grins and puts her goggles on. Then she repeats, in a weird little whisper: ‘
But if she had scalded you, we'd have made her pay
.'

I say, ‘Let's get in the pool.'

Another day, Amelia tells me that the crazy friend has invited her to see her vegetable garden.

I say, ‘Why don't you just keep chatting at the bus stop?'

Amelia says, ‘It's just a—I guess it's an assisted-living place.'

She's said that before.

‘Sometimes,' Amelia adds, ‘she seems perfectly sane.'

Now I'll tell you something that you don't know about me.

If you lock me up, if you padlock doors, if you close me in, I think of fire. I think my own brain is burning its way through my skull. I think about corpses collapsing into charcoal.

That's one thing. Another thing.

If you hurt Amelia—

If you keep me from Amelia—

What they don't know about Amelia:

She's light as a cloud to pick up.

Gather her into your arms when she's passed out on the floor and she's light as a leaf.

But the strength in her grip when she wants to stay out longer and I'm trying to take her home—the strength in her body when she's angry.

The strength in her shoulders when she swims—

I love that strength. I think that what I feel when I think about her strength is called elation.

Term 2: a lot of talk about ghosts around Ashbury.

They have a photo that they think is the ghost: image of a face as bright as fire.

A ghost is trapped. Can't get back to the past where it was somebody, can't get forward to the future on the other side. Trapped, locked up in the now.

‘Or it just doesn't
want
to leave,' Amelia points out.

She starts meeting her new friend near the home.

There's a vegetable garden, Amelia says. The friend turns the soil with a trowel, while Amelia sits on a cold stone wall and listens to her stories.

There are stories about roasting babies alive on griddles. Burning babies' noses off with red-hot tongs.

‘So the medication's working,' I say.

Amelia laughs. But she keeps visiting.

In Term 2, I fall asleep in daylight.

There's a drama rehearsal, late afternoon.

I'm watching from up high, and then I'm not.

It's one of those tricky dreams where everything's in shadow. Like a hat pulled low over my forehead—if I could tip the hat back I'd pool the dream with light.

In the dream, I'm talking to Amelia, trying to see her face.

‘What would we want with castanets?' she says, and we both laugh hard.

Then she says she has to go do something. She gets her distracted expression, and we move to a new scene.

We're outside, by a highway, and I can see Amelia across a stretch of lanes. She's watching traffic, her head tilted, a tiny smile. The dream's shadow trick is getting worse—now it's a beekeeper's net over my face.

I keep losing Amelia, then there she is again.

I watch as the shadows billow around her.

I think,
Wait
.
That's not shadows, that's smoke
.

So then I'm shouting: Amelia, Amelia

but her name gets tangled in the shadows and the smoke. It twists into ugly shapes.

Aymeelia. Armenia. A meal of you
.

I'm hitting my own face, hard, trying to make it say her name, but my mouth is shouting:

A maze of you. Oh mania. Ah murder you—

The shadows shove against her now. I see her frown, push her hair behind her ears, her hands form fists—

And then her face assumes its lost and vacant look. The look that means she's heading to her past, searching, disappearing.

Not now

Not with the shadows—the smoke coming to get you—

Then the shadows are so thick they turn to blackness and a new horror bursts at me—that's not shadows, that's not smoke,
that's a black hole—

If the black hole gets you, Amelia,
you're more than dead
.

I'm shouting and shouting, but her name—

And all I can do is stand and watch as she moves in her trance towards the darkness.

I make myself wake from that dream.

Breathing hard.

Look around the auditorium, and the beautiful relief—there she is, safe, alive. She's by the stage, listening to Garcia. He's holding up some object—it's a table lamp, I think—he's holding it high as he talks.

It's while I'm watching her, breathing in her safe, sweet body, her concentrating head, she's listening so hard, that it comes to me.

Those stories the crazy friend is telling her?

They're fairy stories.

Flutes and fiddles, silver buckles, little people, fireplaces—those are fairy stories.

Just like her stepfather told her.

His were stories of horseshoes, four-leaf clovers, fairy songs.

But it's all the same weird, spooky Irish folklore.

That boy Toby, he connected Irish stories to black holes. I can't remember how.

But now I see, now it's clear: no wonder Amelia loves her crazy friend.

The day after that dream—the very next day—three male residents of a local assisted-living facility for the mentally ill are out on a therapeutic exercise. One hacks the other to pieces with an axe and then heads home.

Amelia misses swimming that morning.

I'm waiting for her, sitting on the edge of the pool. She never misses swimming. My eyes are on the entrance gate.

She turns up at the time that we normally leave. Her face has its distracted look. She comes right up and says there's been an axe murder.

Early that morning, she says. She stopped by to see her friend on the way here, and the friend told her about it.

I say, ‘It's one of her hallucinations.'

Amelia shakes her head. ‘This was different.'

Here's something else you don't know about me:

I never once told Amelia what to do.

Except for now. By the pool. The axe, the blood, the brains.

I said: I want you to stop going there.

She looked startled.

She said: It's okay, it's just—it's not an institution or anything, it's just some kind of assisted—

I said: Amelia, there are axe murders.

She looked over my shoulder, eyes getting vacant. I thought I'd lost her again, but her eyes flickered back.

She said: Only the one axe murder. What if I take you there?

We could skip the athletics carnival, she said. She could introduce me to her friend. Then I would see the friend's sane and that she needs Amelia.

So that was the deal.

You might already know this about Amelia: moods flicker across her face like fast animation. Like cloud shadows moving in hurricane winds.

She breaks the deal.

The day of the athletics carnival and we're walking. She's chatting, happy. We're walking through the heritage park. She's telling me I'll love her friend. She's always alone in the vegetable garden, Amelia says so Amelia's never met any of the other residents. We'll be able to see the institution from the outside, she says—a beautiful, stone building—but we can't go in. The friend tells Amelia it's a dump: rats, fleas, bugs, lice, cracks in the stonework, mould on the floors. Not enough bed linen, and what there is, worn, filthy, ripped. Not enough clothes either, and everybody stinks.

Amelia wants to write a letter to the Department of Health.

‘But you've never met anybody else, or seen it. How can you know she's not making all this up?'

Amelia walks in silence for a while, flicks something out of the corner of her eye.

‘You're going to love her,' she repeats, as if I hadn't spoken. ‘She's got this — this musical voice. The way she speaks is so — And wait till you hear her fairy stories.'

‘Maybe she'll tell me her name,' I say.

Then Amelia stops. I watch her.

Moods flicker across her face — she's startled, angry, dreamy. She's solemn, anxious, and something else.

She looks at me, defiant, smiling, and says, ‘I've changed my mind.'

And there's nothing I can do to change it back.

We stand at the side of the path in that park and I talk and talk at her.

I keep saying her name. It feels good to me. Being able to say it. It feels like control.

But it's not. She's staring at her feet; staring at nothing.

I was thinking.

A ghost is a person who is there but not there. They look like they're there, but they're not.

Amelia staring at her past — there's your ghost.

Not much else to say about Term 2.

Amelia's an actor but she cannot lie to me. She's still going to meet the friend, but she doesn't always tell me. She doesn't want to see me mad. The last few weeks of term, she goes to the library, the supermarket, to buy a Coke.

All the time she's lying. She's going back to see her crazy friend.

The second-last night of term, we're at another party at Lydia's. There's talk about a ghost. We end up at the school, in the auditorium.

I see the Brookfield boy, Seb, I see him leave. I see Astrid —
cold as the Danish Alps, burned by birthday candles
— I watch her leave too.

I think about Astrid. How she locked us in that night.

I think about the story that Amelia's crazy friend told — a little person scalded in a boiling pot of water. And the other angry little people:
If she'd scalded you, she would have had to pay
.

I'm thinking: Astrid locked me in a closet.

If she'd locked us someplace separate, she would have had to —

But Astrid glances back as she reaches the door. She's got her determined look. It gives her lines. She's 17 years old, but in this light, with that frown, she could be seventy.

It was just a closet. She's just a stupid kid. They're all just stupid kids.

I'm thinking this, so I don't hear what Amelia's saying.

Then I hear. She's saying she wants to go look at the gallery. We've both got pieces in the exhibition the next day. She wants to go see what else is there.

I look at her. She's lying.

And it's after ten at night.

She knows I know that she's lying.

I say, I'll come with you.

No, she says, they need you here.

We both smile.

She leaves the room.

I wait a beat. Follow her. I know where she's going but I hope maybe I'm wrong. So I check the gallery first.

The girl, Lydia, turns up beside me.

We hear somebody screaming. I make myself joke with her, this half-person rich kid named Lydia. I push open the gallery door.

Amelia's not there.

Not much else to say about Term 2, like I said.

Except, I guess, something else they don't know about Amelia.

She was in juvenile detention last year. So was I.

We had to include it in our scholarship application. Brook-field knows we were there and would have passed it on.

Here's what happened: after we met behind the red door, Amelia and I went to Brookfield for maybe a couple of weeks. Then we ran away together. Lived on beaches, on the streets. That's why the kids at Brookfield don't know who we are.

They caught us stealing from a petrol station, and put us away for a year.

Locked up, apart from Amelia. Red hot tongs pushing things around inside my chest.

Scholarship committee believed us when we said we plan to change.

I saw her through the windows of the gallery, watched her disappear.

Small talk with the girl named Lydia while I watched. She's got a good smile, Lydia. Wealthy parents must have picked it out for her. Or maybe Lydia herself is from a catalogue. We'll take the pretty one, the pretty smile. A soul? Now, why would she need that?

Small talk was cut through: the sound of something cutting wood. Woodwork down the hall.

Kids in the auditorium thought it was the ghost. We heard them run.

I laughed hard.

Because there was Amelia fading behind glass, my Amelia, my ghost, heading to a madhouse, and here were the private school kids in a madhouse frenzy over an imaginary ghost.

Lydia laughed too. Who knows why. Wealthy people laugh all the time.

I didn't sleep that night. Went home, stared at the ceiling.

But in the morning, last day of term, there she was again.