Eglantine (8 page)

They left a note on the kitchen table, thanking Mum for her patience and promising to ring soon because their results looked
very promising
.

As it turned out, they didn’t call for another three days. When they did, it was to inform us that they had captured something on film. One of the cameras had picked up an image of four black words appearing on a stretch of white wall. It was incredible. Remarkable. But it did raise a question.

‘The words weren’t written out one by one, across the wall,’ Sylvia explained to Mum. (I was listening on the extension.) ‘They seemed to emerge from it slowly. They all started off very faint and became darker and darker, as if they were soaking through the paint. That’s why,’ she added, ‘we can’t yet rule out some kind of chemical reaction.’

‘But the lines are appearing
in order,
’ Mum objected. ‘They’re telling a
story
. How can they be part of a chemical reaction if they’re telling a story?’

‘That’s what we have to find out. That’s why we’re going to consult a chemical engineer and get back to you. The film has created quite a stir, though. It’s already excited some international interest.’

‘Oh?’ Mum sounded dazed and confused.

‘So far, the film is all we’ve got,’ Sylvia finished. ‘None of the other cameras recorded anything of interest, and we didn’t pick up anything on audio, either. But we’ll keep looking. Have there been any further developments, Judy?’

‘Well – no,’ Mum replied. ‘Not as such.’

‘Yes, there have,’ I interrupted. ‘The story’s started again.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Sylvia. ‘Is that you, Judy?’

‘It’s Alethea,’ Mum growled. ‘Alethea, get off the phone. You know what I’ve told you about eavesdropping.’

‘But I have to tell her, Mum. It’s probably important.’

‘Tell me what?’ asked Sylvia, and I explained. For the past few days, I had been finding it more and more difficult to read the writing on the bedroom walls. Once again, white space was running out, and lines were being written over. But I had pieced together just enough to know that Princess Emilie had arrived at the sea-cliff just as Count Osric was sailing towards it. The wind howled. The waves heaved. The ship was making for a headland
hardly
ever navigated, where treacherous shoals and breakers were
illumined by the refulgent beam of no friendly lighthouse
.

What would happen? Would the ship founder? I was desperate to find out – I’d had a hard time getting to sleep, just thinking about it, perhaps because I was expecting that the end of the story might somehow solve our own problem with Eglantine. But when I checked the walls that morning, I had discovered a very curious thing. There, scribbled on one of the few remaining strips of white wall, were the words,
Once there lived in a
bleak clime a white-bearded king
.

‘The story is starting again,’ I told Sylvia. ‘Eglantine’s gone back to the beginning, and she didn’t even finish it the first time. What do you think that means?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Sylvia replied. ‘But perhaps you’ve simply mixed things up a little, do you think? All those lines of text – they must get very confusing.’

‘I haven’t mixed up
anything
,’ was my stubborn reply. But Sylvia wasn’t interested. She told me to keep up the good work, and started talking about the British chapter of the Society for Psychical Research, and how she might consider contacting its president.

So I went away and tackled the question by myself. Why hadn’t Eglantine finished the fairytale? Why had she started it again? Didn’t she
know
what had happened to Count Osric and Princess Emilie? The walls of Bethan’s bedroom were turning black once more; looking up at them, I wondered if Eglantine was fated to keep writing the same story over and over again, without ever reaching an end. It was a horrible idea. It made me feel sick in my stomach.

Suddenly I thought: what if I
gave
her an end to the story? Would that make her stop?

As soon as this notion occurred to me, I began to get all hot and excited. I rushed back into my bedroom, grabbed my journal, and hid myself away in Ray’s studio. At first I couldn’t concentrate. I was too thrilled by my own brilliance. But after a while I began to calm down, and turned my attention to the text of Eglantine’s fairytale.

It had reached the point where Princess Emilie was watching Count Osric’s ship lurch and roll towards her through the stormy darkness.
A red
light gleamed
. But how was she supposed to get from the cliff to the ship? If Count Osric had ever explained his plan to her, the words had been lost in a dense thicket of scribble.

I had to work it out for myself.

From high above the sea,
I wrote,
Emilie could see a boat
being launched from the ship.
(Then I realised that it was the middle of a stormy night; how could anyone see anything if it was pitch black?)
There
were lanterns on the boat
, I added,
which glittered as it
approached her across the waves. Finally the boat reached the
cliff. She could see Count Osric. He threw a rope, and she
caught it. She tied it to a tree. Then he climbed up the rope,
and she threw herself into his arms. “Oh my love!” she cried.
“How long I have waited!”
(That was pretty good, don’t you think?)
After kissing her, he carried her back to
the boat, and sailed away.

And they lived happily ever after
.

It took me about half an hour to write this, and even then I wasn’t happy. No matter how much I fiddled with it, I couldn’t seem to make it any better. What’s more, I had homework to do. So at last I gave up, and copied out my ending, and stuck it to the wall of Bethan’s bedroom. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I wanted to surprise Mum if anything good
did
happen.

The next morning (Tuesday), I got up early. I was really excited. I went into Bethan’s room and looked around, half-expecting the writing on the walls to have vanished during the night.

It hadn’t, though. Things were worse – much worse. With dismay, I saw that Eglantine had even scrawled over the piece of paper with my ending on it. She had written,
his domain was almost entirely
surrounded by the sea
.

Obviously, she still wasn’t satisfied.

CHAPTER
# nine

A lot of things happened on Tuesday.

To begin with, Bethan’s photo appeared in the local newspaper. I discovered this at lunchtime, when I spoke to Mrs Procter, the librarian. I had brought a copy of Eglantine’s fairytale to school, because it had occurred to me: what if the story was a genuine fairytale? What if it was in a book somewhere? What if Eglantine had been reading the book before she died, and had never finished it?

Clearly, the ending that I’d tacked onto the story hadn’t been the right one. But there was a good chance that I might be able to
find
the right ending – with Mrs Procter’s help.

So I went to her, and showed her the fairytale, and asked her if she recognised it.

She looked at it for a moment before remarking, ‘Is this something you got off your bedroom wall?’

I stared at her in astonishment. How had she heard about our bedroom wall? Seeing my expression, she hurried to explain.

‘It was in the paper, this morning,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you see it? Look – I was reading it on the bus.’ She poked around behind her desk and produced a copy of the
News
. On the fourth page was a picture of Bethan in his bedroom, under the words
Local haunting investigated
.

‘Oh – I’m sorry, it’s your
brother
’s bedroom,’ she added, peering at the caption under Bethan’s black-and-white feet. Behind him, the writing on the walls was faint and blurry.

The story mentioned PRISM, and the possibility that a chemical reaction was responsible for our ‘mysterious trouble’. Mum was quoted, but nobody else. I wasn’t even named.

‘It must be very difficult for you,’ said Mrs Procter, studying me closely, and I flushed. I didn’t want her to think that we were a family of weirdos.

‘Well, it is strange,’ I mumbled. ‘But there’s probably a logical explanation.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘The writing was there before we moved in. It just came back after the room was painted, that’s all.’

‘But it is some kind of text? Some kind of story? That’s the impression I got.’

In reply, I pointed to my copy of the fairytale, which filled twenty-two pages of an exercise book.

‘That’s as much as I’ve been able to collect,’ I said. ‘But it isn’t finished. I wanted to know if you’d seen it anywhere else. In a book of some kind.’

‘I see.’ Mrs Procter flicked through the pages, frowning. ‘Of course I’ll read it, Alethea. Maybe it will ring a bell.’

‘I think it’s a fairytale. Mum thinks it’s Victorian.’

‘I see.’

‘It would be good if we could – well – work out the ending.’

I didn’t want to tell her why. In fact I left the library, then, and went to join Michelle under the staffroom windows. It’s the only safe part of the playground at lunchtime, because of all the rowdy boys and flying tennis balls that make the rest of the playground such a miserable place. I felt too embarrassed to hang around Mrs Procter. I knew what she must have been thinking. And I also knew that things could only get worse, because most people read the local paper on Tuesday afternoon, not Tuesday morning. Just about every teacher at school would have read or heard about Eglantine by the time Wednesday rolled around. My own teacher, Mr Lee, might start to wonder if I was as sensible as he’d always thought.

When I got home, I saw the local paper on the kitchen table (opened at Bethan’s picture) and almost cried. Bethan, of course, was thrilled. Mum also seemed strangely pleased. But before I could point out that the stupid story had practically
ruined
my
life
, Mum drew my attention to a large, yellow envelope that was sitting near the newspaper, under her car keys.

‘It’s from the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages,’ she said. ‘I think your certificate must have come.’

She was right. When I tore open the envelope, I found inside it a copy of Eglantine May Higgins’s death certificate. It told me that she had been seventeen years old at the time of her death; that she had been born in Glebe, New South Wales; that she had been buried at Rookwood Cemetery on the fifth of June, 1907; that her mother (whose maiden name had been Henrietta Botts) had belonged to the Church of England, and that her father had worked for the Bank of New South Wales.

It also told me that Eglantine Higgins had died from ‘heart failure, deriving from a severe case of anorexia hysterica’.

‘What’s anorexia hysterica?’ I asked Mum, after glancing over the certificate. She looked up from Bethan’s photograph, and frowned.

‘Beg your pardon?’ she said.

‘Eglantine died of heart failure deriving from a severe case of anorexia hysterica. Do you know what that means?’

‘Let me see.’ Mum took the certificate. She studied it carefully. Then she said, ‘I’m not sure. I suppose anorexia hysterica is something like anorexia nervosa.’

‘What’s anorexia nervosa?’

‘Well, it’s . . . well,
you
know, Allie. It’s that thing that teenage girls get, where they starve themselves.’

‘Oh,
that
.’ Of course I knew about that. Tilly Smith’s sister had it. ‘But I thought it was a new thing, because of all the skinny models in advertising. Did they really have it back in 1907?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe anorexia hysterica was different. Maybe you should check the dictionary.’

So I did. And I didn’t find anorexia hysterica. Under ‘anorexy’ I found ‘want of appetite’. Under ‘anorexia nervosa’ I found ‘a condition in which loss of appetite due to severe emotional disturbance results in emaciation’. Under ‘emaciated’ I found ‘lean or wasted in flesh’. Skinny, in other words.
Very
skinny.

But what about anorexia hysterica?

‘Maybe it’s another term for anorexia nervosa,’ Ray said that night at the dinner table. ‘It sounds like it might be.’

‘I’ll look up the dictionary at school tomorrow,’ I remarked. ‘That dictionary’s a
big
dictionary. Not like ours.’

‘So Eglantine wasn’t strangled after all?’ Bethan inquired, sounding almost disappointed.

‘No, sweetie.’ Mum reached for the salt. ‘She died of heart failure, poor thing – probably because she was starving herself.’

‘Why was she starving herself?’ asked Bethan, and Mum replied that she didn’t know. Some girls did that, for some reason. It was a strange kind of sickness. But she hadn’t realised that girls used to do it in Edwardian times.

‘Of course, anorexia hysterica might be a slightly different thing from anorexia nervosa,’ Mum went on. Suddenly her eyes widened. ‘You know,’ she said, turning to Ray, ‘I remember reading about the suffragettes. When they went on their hunger strikes, they were force-fed. With a tube.’

‘What are suffragettes?’ I wanted to know.

‘What’s force-fed?’ asked Bethan.

‘So what’s your point?’ said Ray, and Mum exclaimed, ‘The
dream
, Ray! Bethan’s dream!’

‘Oh.’

‘Maybe the poor girl had a tube stuck down her throat. So they could pour milk down it, or something.’

‘What’s a suffragette?’ I repeated doggedly. Mum explained that suffragettes were women who had fought for ‘universal suffrage’ – that is, for a woman’s right to vote in political elections. In England, many women had been gaoled for doing things like chaining themselves to fences and shouting in parliament. In prison, they had often refused to eat – in protest – and had been force-fed as a result.

‘Yuk,’ I said. ‘That’s terrible.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did it happen in Australia, too?’

‘I don’t know.’ Mum thought for a minute. ‘I don’t think so. I think women already had the vote in Australia, by then.’

That pleased me. And the next day I felt even more pleased when I went to the school library, at lunchtime, and found a book on anorexia nervosa. Finding that book gave me a real sense of achievement – until I opened it up.