The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange

by Anna Ferrara

  I frowned. No matter how I looked at her, she wouldn’t stop looking like my mother. “Hey,” I replied.

  The man I was on stopped walking in that moment. I turned back to the front and realised it was because the woman in front of him had stopped walking as well.

  It was Paul. Or Paula. Just up ahead. In black galoshes too, wearing an outfit I didn’t recognise, with a new backpack on her back, holding a torch. She had her back to us and didn’t bother turning fully around. All she did was glance at me briefly from the corner of her eye before she resumed her march forward like a woman in a hurry.

  She looked just as capable as she did the first time I saw her move through the sewers, way before I realised she had no qualms killing people, but was a tad tired and glum this time. She moved the way a person who had been through a life full of shit would move. Irritably. There was no gun in her hands. Not anymore.

  Both the man I was on and the woman who resembled my mother resumed following her, as if there was an unspoken rule that they should.

  “What happened?” I asked. I had to know.

  “Paul offered us a chance at freedom and fun,” the man I was on said breathlessly. “She dragged you out too. I don’t know how.”

  “It was pretty chaotic,” ‘my mother’ added.

  Why get me out when I had screwed up her plans big time? What was this? Entrapment? Was I a prisoner of war now? “Where’s your dad and everybody else?” I asked the man I was on.

  “He didn’t make it. None of the others did.” I felt him sigh under me and push me higher up on his back again.

  “What day is it? What year?”

  The shoulders under my arms shrugged and ‘my mother’ made the same gesture.

  I stared at her and couldn’t peel my eyes away.

  She really did look like my mother. Just, maybe, a more child-like version of her. What my mother might have looked like before she had me.

  “What’s your name?” I had to ask. My mother’s name had been Leona.

  “Dustin,” the man I was on said. “Are you ready to walk? I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

  I laughed, politely, but stayed right where I was. I had touched enough of that greenish-brownish water to know I was better off never touching it again. Not if I had a choice. “Sorry, still a little dizzy,” I said, even though I wasn’t in the least dizzy at all.

  ‘My mother’ laughed along, in a sweet-and-shy-little-girl way. “I’m Gemma,” she said and looked away like she was embarrassed by her own name.

  Gemma. Not Leona. “Do you have any children?”

  My question startled her. “No. Of course not,” she replied. “I… I’ve never even been in love, to be honest. I’ve been sick my whole life, since I was a baby, so I never actually left the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre at all.”

  I blinked hard and tried to remind myself we were likely not related but no matter how I tried, her face—innocent and fresh like some sweet young thing—remained exactly like a young version of the blonde woman I knew to be my mother.

  “Hey, hold up!” the man I was on suddenly shouted.

  He jerked me upwards and began to run and I soon realised it was because Paul was no longer in front of us.

  She had run off, deep into the darkness—

  —and left the three of us to fend for ourselves.

  Chapter 25

  Date Unknown

  Hours later, when light appeared through the holes in the sewers’ ventilation grates, I caught up with Paul. At last.

  I found her next to a moss-covered ladder, with her back against a damp brick wall and a cigarette between her lips. She had been deep in thought—wearing an expression that spoke volumes of ennui—until she noticed me.

  The moment our eyes met, I kicked my heels up in the slush and ran towards her. When I could reach her cigarette, I snatched it out of her mouth and tossed it into the slime that came up to my knees and left my jeans soggy. The half-smoked cigarette bobbed on the surface for two seconds before vanishing from sight, likely never to be seen ever again.

  “What the hell do you want of us?” I shouted as I stared right into her eyes. Dustin said Paul’s gun—empty of bullets—had gone into a dumpster along with her old backpack and old clothes so I was no longer afraid of her killing me with it. I even dared let the fear, apprehension and uncertainty that had been brewing within me the whole time in the sewers explode in the form of rage. “Why in fuck’s name do you keep dragging me away from medical care?! What the fuck do you want of me?”

  Paul stared back for a moment but averted her eyes and crossed her arms shortly after. “Wonderdrug is not medical care. I’ve told you a thousand times, why won’t you just get it?”

  “Because it sounds ridiculous, Paul! Because your words don’t match the Wonderdrug documents you showed me!”

  Paul didn’t argue. She simply turned her eyes onto the brick walls all around us and exhaled an unnaturally long, tired sigh. “What did you do in Cola’s room? Did you talk to her?”

  “Is that why you dragged me out? Because I talked to Cola? Because I didn’t open the rest of your doors?”

  She sniggered but didn’t look at me. “No, it’s not, believe it or not.” She sighed again. “What did Cola say?”

  “She told me I’m not a murderer, believe it or not. I’m not like you.”

  “So CRO got it wrong?” Paul began nodding like one of those noddy table-top dolls. “CRO gets things wrong, I should have known.” She laughed to herself, rolled her eyes and shook her head. Then she turned back to me.

  “Let me guess, you think I’m a monster?”

  I frowned. Yes, I did think of her as a monster, but I didn’t get the look she now wore on her face. There was a twinge of sourness all over her downturned mouth and she wouldn’t meet my eyes. I had no idea what that look meant.

  “I made a mistake, okay? I thought if I actually did something incredible you would just…” She sighed. “I didn’t think it would do the exact opposite and make you... just…”

  What? “Just spit it, Paul. What is it you want? What are we doing, really?”

  She inhaled a deep breath of air and said, “I don’t know.”

  I couldn’t stop my mouth from falling open. “You don’t—? After all that we did—you did—you don’t... know?”

  “My plan was to get a bunch of curiosities out so we could all collectively share the benefits of our different advantages. I never expected to end up with two normal human beings so excuse me if I don’t know what to do with them just yet!”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Those two made it out only because they were low priority! The guards were aiming for the ones with advantages first. You, me, Cola, all the other women. Those two?” She laughed dismissively. “Men don’t ever have advantages and that blonde girl…” She raised her palms towards the ceiling, shook her head and sighed like a woman disappointed. “I failed, okay? I failed and I suck and I’ve since realised I’m just like everyone else in that I’ve no clue what I’m really doing. At all!”

  I didn’t get it. “Gemma told me she’s been sick her whole life so she can’t be all that normal.”

  “She is normal. Her grandmother, Dustin’s grandmother, they were the ones who had advantages. They were the real curiosities! Get it? No, you probably don’t get it! I could tell you all the secrets of the universe and you’d still just think I was crazy, wouldn’t you? All because a doctor told you I was.”

  I noticed the flicker of pain in Paul’s eyes as she spoke with her jaw clenched but didn’t know how to reply because she wasn’t wrong. I did still think she was crazy. Hell, I believed I was crazy too. I really thought all of us—Dustin and Gemma included—needed medical attention urgently.

  “Everything okay?”

  Paul looked up and behind me right away. I turned and saw Dustin and Gemma standing in the distance, staring at us.

&nb
sp; Neither of them looked like they dared come any closer.

  “Yeah,” Paul said and took five steps away from me as if we had been doing something we shouldn’t have. Her face changed; the hurt on her face turned into that look of confidence and nonchalance she always wore.

  “Why did you run?” Dustin added.

  “I needed the exercise,” Paul said. She shrugged. “Besides, the tunnel was straight the whole way through. I knew you guys would catch up with me. Eventually.”

  Both Dustin and Gemma nodded but didn’t look entirely convinced.

  “Anyway, the safe house is just up this ladder,” Paul said to them. She then turned to me. “Everyone coming?” Her eyes were hard and she looked like she didn’t care either way.

  “Yeah,” I said, after a bout of quick thinking. I had no idea how else I was going to get out of the sewers and the long walk we had just done had tired me out thoroughly. I would go with Paul and friends to get some rest and food first, I decided, since I didn’t have any money on me. Once I felt better, I would walk and find my way back to the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre. That was the plan. My plan.

  I was so done following other people’s plans.

  Paul’s mouth smiled but her eyes didn’t. She refused to look at me for a long time after that.

  The ‘safe house’ was right in front of the manhole we emerged from, on an isolated street, behind a large padlocked metal gate with the words, ‘No Trespassing’, ‘Danger!’, ‘Caution!’, ‘Safety Equipment Required Beyond This Point’ plastered, on metal boards, all over it.

  “A construction site?” Dustin said as if disappointed. He gazed up at the possibly thirty-storey cement skeleton behind the gates and frowned. His hand went over his eyes so I couldn’t tell if blinding sunlight or displeasure was the real reason he kept on frowning.

  Gemma, on the other hand, gaped like she had just entered an amusement park. Her eyes grew large with interest and she looked happiest of us all.

  “This would have been a state-of-the-art condominium with one of the best views in New York had its owners not committed fraud,” Paul said as she unlocked the padlock of the metal gate with a key she removed from the pocket of her jeans—the key she had stolen from a workman at a subway station during rush hour, I realised. “Their bank accounts are frozen so construction can only resume when their trial ends—next year. You won’t find another home in Manhattan with as much space and privacy as this one, I’m telling you.”

  The large metal gate squeaked open without any issues. Dustin kept his mouth shut when Paul invited us all to step in and watched sullenly as Paul closed and locked the gate behind us. We then followed her into the bellows of the skeletal structure that was a mix of brick, cement and steel set upon a vast patch of grassless, muddy sand.

  I felt tiny and insignificant in contrast to the structure’s massive stature as we went down a flight of cement stairs into the basement and I worried, many times, about the warnings on the gate. We were ‘Trespassing’! The place was Dangerous and required ‘Caution’! We didn’t have ‘Safety Equipment’ or know the first thing about keeping safe at a construction site! We could easily step on all the wrong surfaces or touch all the wrong pillars and die, I suspected. I didn’t feel at all safe whilst at Paul’s ‘safe house’ this time.

  There was almost no light down in the basement. Paul was the only one of us with a torch and her torch’s light only covered the area right in front of her. I could see the clutter of dust particles it illuminated—and could feel them entering my nostrils, smelling a lot like plaster—but not much else. The spaces next to us and behind us remained impossible to see. The darkness made my skin tingle. I got the feeling it might be hiding ghosts and humans, all with bad intentions.

  The deeper we went, the darker the basement became. Paul was right about the building being private alright. The complex layout of walls was perfect for a long game of hide-and-seek. I lit the plastic lighter I found in the pocket of my jeans but its light didn’t make the room any brighter. If anything, my plastic lighter’s light made the room more creepy than before. Its flickering orange flame cast moving shadows across the walls and heightened all my worries regarding the presence of malevolent spirits.

  “So much for a view,” Dustin said, the displeasure on his face apparent, even in the darkness.

  I got what he meant. The basement we were at had nothing on the clean and cosy Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre, that was for sure.

  “The view is upstairs. Stunning but deadly,” Paul said. “I don’t recommend sleeping there but it’s really your choice. That’s what freedom’s all about, isn’t it?”

  Dustin said nothing in response.

  Paul took a piece of white chalk out from the pocket of her backpack and drew a long line down a wall sitting in the middle of nowhere. “We’ll sleep behind this wall tonight. Dustin, you’re coming with me. We need to get candles, food, water and bedding for tonight. Lane, I need you to comb the whole site with Gemma, make sure no stragglers are with us. We’ll meet at this very spot in three hours.”

  “Whatever,” Dustin mumbled.

  My stomach growled and felt as if it were dissolving under the acidity of the fluids that churned within it so I didn’t say no either.

  “What are stragglers?” Gemma asked, shortly after we split from the other two and made our way through the rest of the unfinished basement with Paul’s torch in my hand.

  “They’re like homeless people,” I replied as I shined the torch from left to right then back again.

  No rooms, no doors, no locks; just raw, incomplete walls and absolute quiet; nothing to protect you from being seen or touched by the unknown. My skin pickled and unease rippled through my muscles. It reminded me of the way I sometimes felt when lying on Aunt Mary’s couch back when Uncle Tim was still alive and home.

  “Why would anyone be homeless?”

  Why? I stopped walking forward and turned the torch onto Gemma instead. She looked calm. Way calmer than me. As if we were simply walking through a sunny, climate-controlled museum and not a filthy, stuffy, hazardous incomplete building.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty.”

  Just three years younger than me? She didn’t look it; she looked way younger. More like a teenager who just hit puberty than anything else. Was it her colouring or the wide-eyed innocent stare she always had on that made her look that way? Or was it the high-pitched angelic tone of her voice or the fact that she was half a head shorter than I was? I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “You’re thirty and you don’t understand why homelessness happens?”

  She shook her head and made her fluffy blonde hair flap around like maize in the wind. The serious look in those babyish eyes of hers convinced me, once again, that she wasn’t just putting on a dumb blonde act of sorts.

  I regarded her with narrowed eyes. “What did you use to do at Wonderdrug then? If you were there all your life you must have done… something?”

  “Oh yeah, of course. I did tests all the time. Different tests. All over my body.”

  “You mean doctors did tests on you?”

  “Yes, well, doctor actually. I only have one. Dr James.” She smiled shyly then shrugged. “I have a rare brain disease which makes me mutilate myself in my sleep. There’s no cure for it right now so Dr James has been working on coming up with one, just for me. That’s why he does all those tests. Just the way things are for me.”

  Wait a minute... Coincidence? Or family? “Where are your parents?”

  “Dead. My father died in a traffic accident and my mother died of the brain disease I inherited. That’s why I have to live in a hospital. I would die like her if I didn’t get meds regularly.”

  “So being out here could kill you?”

  “Yeah, but I really wanted a taste of life on the outside, you know? All those movies and games made it seem like so much fun. I know I’ll end up back in hospital once I start self-mutilating a
gain, but for now, while there’re still traces of meds in my body, why not?”

  “Wait, so you’re saying you mutilate yourself and… your wounds heal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Very quickly?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I took a deep breath to calm myself as excitement shot through my whole being. My mother’s face, self-mutilation in sleep and also quick healing wounds? What were the odds of all that happening if we weren’t related in any way? Next to impossible. I realised Gemma could just be a... sister I had never known of? Or a relative? A relative my other relatives never talked about? “Can I see?” I asked. “The parts of your body that have healed?”

  “Sure.” Gemma pulled up her sleeve and showed me her arm. “They’re everywhere. I spare only my neck and face for some reason.”

  I frowned when I saw her arm and had to lift it towards my eyes to be sure I was really seeing what I thought I was.

  It seemed real alright; the raised brown patches, in all sorts of shapes and sizes all over her arm, never changed or vanished no matter how I blinked and tried to see otherwise. Some patches were shinier than others, some were darker, but none of them looked like anything I had ever seen in my life. From afar, Gemma’s arm looked more like that of a spotted animal’s than that of a human being’s.

  “Were you born with these?”

  “No, these are the parts that healed. Scars, from wounds I inflicted on myself.”

  Scars? I shined the torch right at them for a better look and decided I didn’t have any scars on my body. Not on my palm where I had once made two large, deep strokes, not where I had ever seen broken bones, torn flesh or bullet holes. “Do you mind showing me the rest of your body?”

  “No, I don’t mind at all.” She unbuttoned the lower buttons of her black shirt and showed me her stomach. “Dr James makes me show him my body all the time. I’m kinda used to it.”

  It was me who wasn’t used to the way her stomach looked. There were strange brown holes and raised bits of flesh everywhere, like Play Doh that had been kneaded carelessly in an uncontrolled manner and hadn’t been smoothed out. On top of that, some parts were coarse in texture while others were inhumanly smooth. It all looked very odd, like one big confusing mess of abnormal flesh. I felt myself gulping but kept my face straight out of politeness. “Does it hurt?”