The Shadow Girl

by John Larkin

  I’M SORRY, BUT I HAVE TO ASK. ALL THOSE TIMES THAT YOU SLEPT together, did Cinderella ever . . .

  Did she what?

  Did she, you know, ever behave inappropriately?

  Behave inappropriately? What is this, a church sewing circle? Do you mean did she ever try to bonk me?

  Well, yes?

  Don’t be disgusting. I was fourteen years old. She was my protector. My fairy godmother. Do you think the original Cinderella’s godmother ever tried to get it on with her?

  Well . . . no. At least not in the versions I’ve read.

  How do you think that one might have played out? ‘You shall go to the ball, Cinderella; but only after we duck into the pantry for a quickie.’

  All right, I get it!

  If anything, I was the one who was in love with her. But that was probably abandonment issues. Missing mother-figure and all that. You know, Oprah 101.

  So you stayed in the hotel?

  About five days leading up to and past Christmas. We were going to stay longer but the hotel was booked solid on New Year’s Eve and Cinderella had promised to spend it with her uni friends, and I had Miss Taylor’s to get ready for.

  What do you mean ‘get ready’? Weren’t you just minding the place for her?

  Yeah, but I wanted to do it right. I had about a week to go before she went on holidays so I decided to live rough. Really rough. It was as if I felt I had to earn it. The comfort, I mean. I can’t really explain it. I headed up to my weekender. I’d only ever stayed there a couple of nights at a time max. This time I was there for six. And trust me, six nights living under a door in the sand dunes is enough to make anyone wilt. No showers and a mostly potato scallop diet and I needed a serious scrub and detox by the time I set off for Miss Taylor’s.

  Did you see her off or anything?

  No. She told me to come and stay with her the night before she left but I didn’t want to risk it. I mean, she wanted someone there to water her plants and keep an eye on the place, but the official line was that if anyone sprung me, I was a street kid who’d broken in and . . .

  Watered the plants and kept an eye on the place?

  Something like that.

  What was it like after all that time living in the dunes?

  Even Heaven couldn’t beat it, especially because I was on my own and didn’t have to go around praising my creator every five minutes.

  Where did she live?

  In the ivy belt, not far from the school with the pink dresses and blue socks. One stop up the line actually.

  And is that where she went to school?

  No. She went to some exclusive straw hat and blazer private girls’ college up towards the junction station, remember? But where she lived is actually a small village – bakery, bookshop, cafés, and about three real estate agents because it’s an expens- ive suburb. Not a shattered bus shelter in sight. There are a couple of blocks of low-rise flats near the train station and she rented one of those.

  As soon as I got off at the station I went to the little grocery store in the village and stocked up on supplies. I got myself some herbal bath oils and candles to put around the bath. When I got in and unpacked I ran myself a bath and then stripped off. After six nights in the dunes I had sand everywhere. Sand in my hair. Sand in my clothes. Sand in my pockets. Sand in my sand. I ended up having a shower first to try to get rid of the bulk of it. I decided to listen to some music while I was in the bath. Talk about indulgent. But seriously, do you know what it’s like to live the way I’d been living then suddenly have a home and be able to walk out to Miss Taylor’s kitchen in the nude to get her CD player?

  Not exactly. Not at Miss Taylor’s place anyway . . .

  Oh, shut up! You know what I mean. It was heavenly. To have a place of my own, even temporarily, where it was safe, warm and dry and where I could lock the door and keep out the world. Miss Taylor had her radio set to ABC Classic FM and so I relaxed in the bath with my herbal bubbles and absorbed. This one piece was so perfect that I actually climbed out of the bath and wrote down its name, which sort of defeated the purpose of relaxing in the bath to classical music, I suppose.

  Do you remember it?

  It was by Satie . . .

  Gymnopédie Number One?

  Smart arse. How did you know that?

  It’s an almost perfect lie-in-the-bath-while-it’s-pouring-outside-day piece.

  Almost perfect?

  You should hear his Gnossienne Number One. It’s even more haunting.

  Trust me. After my nights in the rail yards with the ghost guard, I’d been haunted enough.

  Fair point. So what did you do with yourself for the two weeks that you were there?

  Nothing. I just repaired. All I did was sleep, eat, read, have long bubble baths and watch DVDs. Miss Taylor was a bit of a buff so I just kicked back on her lounge and watched movies. Got myself some microwavable popcorn from the village grocery store to help. After being on the streets, I knew I’d never take that sort of freedom for granted ever again. Still don’t. I actually swung back towards spirituality again while I was staying at Miss Taylor’s: there is a heaven, and it’s right here on earth. It’s being safe. It’s being warm. It’s being able to read and watch movies with microwavable popcorn and have long soapy herbal bubble baths while listening to classical music while the rain hammers down outside. It’s being able to curl up in fresh sheets, knowing that you’re not going to be subjected to any unwanted visitors in the night. I don’t care what anyone says, that’s heaven. No amount of wings, harp lessons, fluffy clouds and praising can beat that.

  I didn’t even have to worry about getting into high school either because Miss Taylor said that she had it all under control – she’d taken my reports and results from school – and she would finish organising it all when she got home from trekking. Though I did stress about whether I’d fit in. Would the other girls see through me? Spot that I was a fraud. It was the ivy-belt after all. But Miss Taylor convinced me that I would be fine. Said that the school would be better for having me there. So I had two angels watching over me.

  Alistair?

  More a big brother.

  The only problem was that time went so quickly. It felt as though I’d only just moved in and then it was all over and I had to slump my way back to the rail yards.

  Where you there when she got back?

  Yeah. I hadn’t planned to but I just couldn’t bring myself to leave. I helped her unpack and she showed me how to download her holiday photos onto her laptop and then we went through the enrolment procedure together. I would be using her address as a base and for reports and everything. She had it all worked out. She knew the loopholes. And because I was getting more and more stuff than I could cart around all the time, she let me start leaving some of it at her place. Like Cinderella, she asked me to move in permanently. You don’t know how tempting it was to say yes. I was thinking it, but I told her that it was too risky and I would rather die than see her forced to stop teaching. I knew she loved it more than anything.

  Where did she think you were living when you weren’t with her?

  I told her about the squat and Cinderella. I also told her that I had another place up north but that I mostly stayed with Cinderella.

  But she knew about the rail yards?

  Yeah, but she was horrified so I told her that I’d stopped staying there. I think she would have even preferred to call the police or social services rather than let me stay there any longer. And that was the thing: after staying at Miss Taylor’s, the thought of going back to the rail yards horrified me too. I’d experienced heaven and now I was sliding back down to purgatory. On my first night back, when I strung up my sleeping bag across the seats so that I could read, I actually cried. Blubbed like a two-year-old. When I’d first got into the rail yards I was so exc
ited and proud of myself, but at that moment I saw how pathetic it was. Even Cinderella’s squat was a mansion compared to the trains. The hard, vinyl, vandal- ised seats, the cold metal bars, the dirty, grimy floors, the bone-chilling cold, the disgruntled ghost slamming doors at all hours. I knew that I had to find somewhere else. I wanted to be a doctor, for God’s sake. I couldn’t study for my HSC in the rail yards.

  That was still a few years away.

  Yeah, but I had to start planning.

  But you got into school okay?

  Yeah. Just like she promised, Miss Taylor organised everything and even bought my uniform, both summer and winter, as well as a jumper. She was also going to buy me some new school shoes but Cinderella beat her to it when she took me shopping at the mega-mall one Saturday morning. Even Alistair McAlister insisted buying me a new backpack. I couldn’t believe how blessed I was to have those three in my life. They were so unselfish. So giving. There was nothing in it for them, but everything in it for me.

  How was your first day at school?

  It was okay. I didn’t know anyone but I was buddied up with a couple of other newbies and that became our group, for the first couple of weeks, anyway. You know how everyone has a photo taken on their first day of the school year?

  Yeah, I’ve still got my ones somewhere.

  Well, Miss Taylor wasn’t going to let me get away with not having one. The night before the first day of term, she insisted that I stay with her because she didn’t go back until the following day. She got me up early, made us both poached eggs on toast, and while I was getting changed into my new uniform, she dug out her camera and insisted on a Kodak moment. Well, the digital version. I acted all teenager, like it was all so uncool, but when I was standing there in my pink dress and blue socks, I’d never felt so happy. Miss Taylor insisted on walking me to school. I didn’t want her to, in case we got busted, but she wouldn’t listen. She took me to the gates and gave me a hug and told me to make her proud. She held on to me for a while and I knew that she was crying.

  When she finally let me go and I walked in with all the other girls I almost had to pinch myself. I wasn’t just going to a school in the ivy belt, I was going to the school of my dreams. I was one of those pink-dressed girls, happy and carefree. The only bummer, the wake-up call, was remembering that I would be sleeping in the rail yards that night. And on that first day, when the hooter sounded and we poured out of the school in all our pinkness, I caught the train with all the other happy and carefree girls heading home. The only difference between them and me was that they were going home, whereas I was home.

  What did you do?

  I went househunting.

  If you spend a day travelling the length and breadth of the city you will notice a huge discrepancy between that haves and have-nots. The mansions of the bay and harbour areas would swallow, in one gulp, entire streets of desolation from the troubled zones of the outer suburbs, where disappointment hangs in the air like a wet blanket.

  Although governments announce schemes to make life more tolerable for those occupying Struggle Street, it really is nothing more than a bandaid solution. And if the bandaid is removed too soon it leaves an open wound that is vulnerable to infection and disease like a dead cat on the side of the road.

  The solution for this desperate disparity isn’t to be found in politics but foliage. The stretch of dense, old-growth greenery between the mega-mall and the north-west junction station is locally and affectionately known as the ivy belt. Although lacking the merchant banker/arms’ dealer ostentations of the houses that mark our foreshore, the ivy belt’s wealth is more consistent and stretches further.

  The answer is glaringly obvious. Ivy. In suburbs where ivy flourishes, there seems to be a disproportionate number of old stone houses and well-kept gardens. In fact, apart from the odd abandoned place slowly being sucked back into the earth, there isn’t a single sheet of fibro to be found, while asbestos roofing is an alien concept. Surely this cannot be a coincidence.

  There is relatively little crime in ivy-cloaked areas. Armed robbery is virtually non-existent. And the only known case of car-jacking involved a tardy parishioner who, in sheer desperation, commandeered a Porsche at the traffic lights because he was running late for church. Apart from that one car-jacking, the only crime of note occurred earlier this year when a shopping trolley was left on the lawn of the Hills District Croquet Club, slightly damaging the playing service, and even then there are those who consider it an inside job.

  Domestic violence decreases dramatically in areas where ivy manages to take hold, while year twelve retention rates are running at practically one hundred per cent.

  This phenomenon needs to be investigated at both an economic and foliage level. Forget work-for-the-dole schemes and other public works drafted for the troubled zones; what is required is the immediate and mass planting of ivy.

  Left unchecked, ivy has been known to crawl up the outer wall of small, single-storey, three-bedroom dwellings, turning them into four-storey, double-brick monoliths complete with atrium, vestibule, sun room, ducted air-conditioning, clay surface tennis court, and detached servant quarters.

  To neglect the economic advantages of ivy any longer is not just socio-political oversight but crimin- ally irresponsible.

  There are empty houses spread out across the city. The main item of a deceased estate whose disgruntled beneficiaries refuse to accept the will of the deceased and take the corpse to court. These battles can drag on for years. Meanwhile the house sits forlorn and forgotten.

  There was one near Creepo and Serena’s. An old weather- board place which, for some reason had a broken down phone box half-buried in the weeds and overgrown grass of the front garden.

  Everyone said that an elderly couple had been murdered in the house. Battered beyond recognition by their deadbeat son who’d incurred some serious gambling debts and didn’t have the patience to wait for his inheritance.

  From front on it looked as though the house was frowning. The local kids used to throw stones at it, perhaps hoping that it would pick up and chase them down the street. And when there wasn’t a single window pane left in either the house or the phone box, even the stone throwers admitted defeat and went away. It might not have been haunted, but after what had happened in there no one went near the place on Halloween. It was just too spooky.

  I’m hoping for a place with a slightly less alarming history. I decide to start at school and work my way out in ever-increasing circles. Cinderella said that in the older, wealthier suburbs like the one my school was in, there were bound to be at least two or three abandoned houses. Squatters didn’t usually bother with them as they didn’t like to commute. They preferred the vibrancy, the alleys, the shadows of the inner suburbs and the city itself. What was the point of fleeing the domestic humdrum of suburban life, if you went and squatted down near the local hardware store? You couldn’t reject western consumerism and embrace anarchy if you lived near a shopping mall. It just didn’t sit right. Or that was Cinderella’s take on it anyway. It sounded great to me.

  The fields and courts shrill with the early morning whistles of vexed referees as I start my quest. Saturday is national sports’ day so apart from a couple of geriatrics taking their fossilised pooches for their morning drag, I pretty much have the streets to myself.

  I feel full of confidence as I stride past them. No one is going to mess with me. Not any more. I can take care of myself now. As the oldies pass me, their nervous glances seem to tag me as a serious sports girl or a lunatic street kid who’s best avoided. I’m happy either way.

  There’s a reason they might think I’m sporty. If Cinderella hadn’t stepped in when I’d been cornered by those trainee thugs on the train, God only knows what might have happened. I could have been beaten, raped, even murdered. Those scumbags might just have thought it was all a big joke, a bit of fun, but I coul
dn’t know how it would end. I was totally vulnerable, outnumbered. Simply hoping that they wouldn’t hurt me was a pretty pathetic defence strategy. And in future I can’t rely on Cinderella to miraculously appear and turn into Emo Girl whenever I find myself in trouble. I have to be more self-reliant. So the afternoon it happened and I fetched up at the mega-mall to lick my wounds, I bought myself a baseball bat. I’d ditched the gun in the river by then, but now everywhere I go the bat goes too. Sticking out of my backpack like a samurai sword.

  I trek the streets for over two hours without any luck. One house near the tennis courts seems promising so I scope it for a while from across the road. It’s an old wooden place, probably dating back to colonial times. The wraparound verandah sags with the weight of time, the wood itself weathered back to resemble the logs from which it had been cut. I’m about to approach it when an old lady emerges from the front door and stares at me with her arms folded. Her skin’s so pale she’s practically transparent and even from where I’m standing her hands appear as gnarled as the roots of ivy that’s tearing down rather than supporting the house. I suppose even ivy has its limits. I’ve already been standing there for quite some time, but the poor old woman seems so decrepit that it might be worth waiting a bit longer. The use-by date on her birth certificate must be getting close.

  I give her a little wave and move on. After more wandering, I give up for the day and make my way over to Miss Taylor’s place to recharge. For some reason it seems okay to see her outside school hours, as if she no longer reports to the education department and can meet up with whoever she liked.

  While she makes me a hot chocolate I tell her what I was up to. She isn’t impressed. We have our usual merry-go-round argument about my moving in with her or going to the police if my uncle is as bad as I say he was. I’d told her a little of what happened to me, she doesn’t know everything. She knows about Creepo grooming me to be his private plaything. She doesn’t know about my parents’ bodies out there in the forest. As far as she’s concerned I’ve just run away from my psycho uncle and I’d rather live in the squat with Cinderella than take my chances in foster care. I manage to prey on her innocence by telling some totally bogus stories about what had happened to other girls in foster care, and so we eventually come to an agreement. She won’t tell anyone about me living rough provided that I stay in school, allow her to tutor me, and maintain an A-grade average on my reports. (Except sport. She would happily take a C for PDHPE.) I agree to the deal because I know two things. One: with my hard work and her help, I should be able to blitz all the assessments. Two: if I do get less than an A, I’ll leave before she finds out. She won’t see me for dust because no way in hell was I going to risk exposing me or her to Creepo.