The Last House on Needless Street

by Catriona Ward

  Night Olivia

  Hello, everyone. Welcome to the first episode of CATching up with Night Olivia. We’ve got a great show ahead. We’re going to be talking about light – types of sunshine, kinds of darkness – what’s best for naps, what will illuminate your eyes like unearthly lamps in the dusk, and so on, plus: what shadows work best for concealing you, as you stalk your prey like a black bolt of death in the night.

  But first, let’s address the elephant in the room. We need to talk about the upstairs world, the so-called real world. I think we can all agree that it is not as good as the one inside. It is grey and everything smells bad. I don’t like the colour of the rug, which up here is not a beautiful shout of orange, but the shade of dead teds. Anyway I do come up here sometimes, despite my reservations, because one should always know what one is dealing with. Sometimes I even go outside. I am not an indoor cat any more. I see and feel the world, where once I just smelled and heard it, from downstairs in the inside place. Now, if I want, I can come upstairs and be with Ted as he walks in the fall leaves, feel the chilly bite of first frost in the shortening days.

  But yes, outside is quite disappointing. It is no big deal, I would say. There is a tabby cat up here, but she is not the one I love. When I first saw her I thought, You poor thing. Her eyes are dull brown – when I look into them I see only a hungry animal. She is small and thin, has no claws and walks with a staggering limp. She does not shine. The orange-headed ted insists on feeding her. That ted looks like a lumberjack but he is actually very sentimental. Also he smells very strongly of his big brouhaha, which is disgusting. Ted keeps telling me the brouhaha scented the blood and found us in the woods but I refuse to believe that I was saved in such a fashion. Anyway, I was wondering how Ted would cope without Olivia. He seems to be doing fine.

  I love to go down to the weekend place and watch the other one, the beautiful one, through the window as she grooms and preens. She stares like a snake with her apple-yellow eyes. She is one of us, of course. Another part. Maybe I should have guessed that earlier. She chooses not to talk. But I hope that one day she will speak to me. In the meantime I will worship her and wait. I will do that for ever, if necessary. I can always keep an eye on what is happening upstairs through the TV.

  Sometimes the LORD comes walking through the kitchen wall or floating up the stairs towards the roof light on the landing. He turns to look down at me with his round fish eyes, or the mirrored gaze of a fly. He’s a fragment of Ted’s imagination. Mommy talked so much about the ankou that the ankou came. Mommy’s god found his way from her faraway village in Brittany, through Ted, into Olivia’s world. That’s how gods travel, through minds.

  The LORD never made Olivia help Ted or Lauren. She just wanted to be kind. She was a nice cat. I am nice, but I am other things too.

  There is no cord any more, binding me to Ted. I kind of miss it, now it’s gone. He and I are bound to one another and the cord was a reflection of that. It was honest and showed how things truly are. I find that the upper world holds few such helpful signs. It is a cold bleak place. Our big fleshy body lumbers through it, with us inside like badly nested Russian dolls. Disgusting, in my opinion.

  However, we can all be together upstairs, now – Ted, Lauren and me, and some of the others whose names I don’t know yet. They are just beginning to come up into the light. We can talk or fight or whatever just as well as we can downstairs in my place. Sometimes I forget to go back down for days at a time. So I guess in some ways the upstairs is now my home too.

  Ted

  The path winds up into the fall day. The air has mushrooms and red leaves in it. The trees are thin-fingered against the sky. Rob is warm at my side, hair escaping from his hat like tufts of flame. It has been three months since that morning in the forest, but it could be a lifetime ago.

  The stories all fit inside each other. They echo through. It started with her, Little Girl With Popsicle. And she deserves a witness, so that’s why we’re here.

  It is only a quarter-mile or so from the parking lot to the water, but it takes us a while. I shuffle rather than walk, mindful of my healing wound. You can really damage yourself, if you can’t feel pain. ‘Put your scarf on,’ I tell Rob. I wanted a friend to look after us. The weird thing is, now that I have one, all I want to do is to look after him.

  The trees open out and we are at the water’s edge. It is cool today; the sand looks dirty and dull under the grey sky. There are some hikers, some dogs. Not many. The lake gleams, black glass. The water is too still, like a painting or a trick. It’s smaller than I remember. But of course it’s me who’s changed.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say to Rob. What can the living say to the dead? Little Girl With Popsicle is gone and we don’t know where. Mommy isn’t really under the sink, and Daddy isn’t in the tool shed.

  ‘Maybe we don’t do anything,’ he says.

  So I just try to focus really hard on the little girl, and remember that she was here once and she isn’t any more. Rob’s hand is on my back. I send my best thoughts for her out into the water and the sky and the dry fall leaves and the sand and the pebbles under us. I hold you in my heart, I think at Little Girl With Popsicle, because it feels like someone should.

  I take my shoes off, even though it’s raining. Rob does the same. We bury our feet in the damp sand. We watch the lake, where the drops strike circles on the glossy black skin of the water, which grow, move out and out into infinity.

  At last Rob says, ‘It’s really cold.’ He is a practical person.

  I shake my head. I don’t know what I expected. There’s nothing here.

  We walk back towards the car in silence. The path winds downhill, back towards the parking lot. There is something bright on the rain-spattered trail. I bend to pick it up. A long, oval shape, rounded and smooth to the touch. It is green as moss, shot through with veins of white. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘what a pretty pebble.’ I turn to show Rob. As I do the ground suddenly gives way beneath my foot with a graceful slide. Loose earth and stones skid away from my feet and the world is upturned. I fall, striking the earth hard.

  Something tears inside me. It is like being killed again. But this time I feel the shockwave, deep and purple and black. Sharp notes are played hard and raw on my nerves. The feeling bursts through, fills each living cell of me.

  Rob leans over me, mouth twisted with distress. He says things about the hospital.

  ‘In a minute,’ I say. ‘Let me feel it.’ I would laugh, but it hurts too much.

  It is the pain that lets him through, I think. The barriers between us are coming down.

  I put it in our pocket, he says to me, clear and young.

  Little Teddy?

  In our POCKET but you THREW it in the TRASH.

  I get a hand into my pants pocket. There is blood coming from somewhere. It has made a mess of this shirt.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Rob says. Cold grey threads of fear run through his voice. ‘You’re bleeding.’ He takes out his phone.

  ‘Stop.’ I am almost yelling at him and that hurts a lot. ‘Wait!’

  My fingers meet paper. I take it out. The Murderer. My list has been taped back together. The last name stares at me. Mommy.

  Little Teddy does not mean the murderer of the birds. He probably doesn’t even know about that. He is talking about another murder.

  I been TRYING to show you, Little Teddy says. But you didn’t want to know.

  His memory hurtles towards me, carried on the pain. A rush of feeling, colour, wet earth, moonlight on empty streets. It’s like watching a movie with scent and touch.

  Little Teddy

  We share it out between us – the time and hurt. Big Ted took Mommy to the woods so she could become a god. But I saw what happened the night before.

  I am in the living room. Daddy has been gone some years now. Little Girl With Popsicle vanished from the lake the other day. Everyone is very upset.

  There is a paper on the table in front of me. I
t is a job application. I draw a picture of myself on it in yellow crayon, humming. The smells of cigarette smoke and burnt coffee creep under the kitchen door. The terrier lady is talking.

  ‘Half a can in the mornings, dry food at night,’ she is saying to Mommy. ‘But only after his walk. Heavens, I nearly forgot. The potted ferns need water three times a week. No more, no less. Some people would say that’s too much but the soil should always be a little damp, I think, for ferns.’

  ‘You can depend on me,’ Mommy says gently.

  ‘I know I can,’ the terrier lady says. There is the sound of keys chinking. ‘The one with the green ribbon is for the front door; this is for the back door, down to the storm cellar. I don’t open it, in general. Oof, Meheeco. I’m going to have a cocktail with breakfast every day. One with an umbrella. I’m going to swim and lay in the sun and I’m not going to think about work once. Nope.’

  ‘You deserve it,’ Mommy says warmly. ‘The strain you’ve been under.’

  ‘You said it.’

  There is silence and rustling, the sound of a cheek being kissed. The terrier lady is hugging Mommy. I press my ear harder against the door. I’m jealous, I am filled with vinegar.

  I am at my window watching when Mommy leaves the house after dark. She has a big suitcase and I am afraid that she is going to Meheeeeeco to join the terrier lady. I don’t want to be left behind. But the suitcase is empty, she swings it at arm’s length as she goes. I stare because I’ve never seen her like this. Mommy is NOT playful. I know she would not want me or anyone to see it. The street-lights are all out, tonight. It’s lucky for Mommy that those kids threw the stones and broke them, I guess.

  Mommy goes to the woods. She is gone a long time and I almost start crying, because she is really gone, this time.

  I wait, and wait.

  It seems like many hours, but it’s probably one or two. Mommy comes out of the forest. She walks through the long dark shadows of branches where they stretch across the sidewalk. When she goes through the breaks of silver moonlight, I see that the suitcase is heavy now. She pulls it slowly along the sidewalk on its little wheels. She goes right past our house without looking or stopping! I am surprised. Where can she be going?

  The green trim on the terrier lady’s house looks grey in the moonlight. Mommy goes around the back of the house. I get into my bed and hide under my covers but I do not sleep. She comes in quietly, a long while later. I hear running water in the bathroom, the sound of her brushing her teeth. Then there comes another tiny sound. Mommy is humming.

  In the morning she is as usual. She gives me a small jar of applesauce for breakfast, and a piece of bread. Her hands smell like damp cellar earth. I never see the big suitcase again, so I guess she sent it on to Meheeco without her. I hear her ask Big Ted to go to the store for ice cream.

  I kept trying to tell Big Ted. I took him back to the yellow house with the green trim again and again but he still didn’t get it. I think he always knew somewhere deep down that it was Mommy. But he hoped so hard it wasn’t. Now he can’t avoid the truth any more. Bam, pow, like being hit with a punch.

  I can hear Big Ted crying.

  Ted

  ‘Don’t move. You’ll make it worse.’ Rob’s face is hung above me in the sky. It is even paler than usual.

  ‘We have to tell someone.’ My beard is wet with tears. ‘I know where she is. Please, please, we have to go now.’ Another good thing about Rob is that he does not waste time on questions.

  Everything happens both quickly and slowly. We stagger back to the car, and Rob drives us to a police station. We have to wait there for a long time. I am still bleeding a little but I won’t let Rob take me to a hospital. No, I say, no, no, no, no, NO. As the ‘NO’s get louder Rob backs away, startled. At last a tired man with pouches under his eyes comes out. I tell him what Little Teddy saw. He makes some phone calls.

  We wait for someone else to arrive. It is her day off. She hurries in, wearing fishing waders. She has been on her boat. The detective looks very tired and kind of like a possum. I recognise her from when they searched my house, eleven years ago. I am pleased by this. Brain is really coming through for me today! But the possum detective looks less and less tired the longer I talk.

  I wait on another plastic chair. Still the police station? No, this is full of hurt people. Hospital. In the end it is my turn, and they staple me up, which is weird. I refuse the painkiller. I want to feel it. So short, this life.

  By the time Rob drives me home, it is dawn. As we turn into my street I see a van stopped outside her house. Cars with beautiful red and blue lights, which play on the green trim and the yellow clapboard. The lady is crying and she holds her Chihuahua tight, for comfort. The dog licks her nose. I feel bad for her. She was always nice. Mommy never hurt the Chihuahua lady’s body, but she hurt her all the same.

  They put up big white screens around the Chihuahua lady’s house, so that no one can see anything. I stay at the living-room window, watching, even though there is nothing to see. It takes some hours. I guess they have to dig deep. Mommy was thorough. We all stay there, awake and alert in the body, watching the white screens. Little Teddy cries silently.

  We know when they bring her out, Little Girl With Popsicle. We feel her as she passes. She is in the air like the scent of rain.

  The next-door-neighbour lady has not come back. She was calling the little girl’s name as she ran from me into the woods. That made me think. I told the possum detective about her. When they looked through her house and all her things I felt bad for her – even after everything. It was her turn to have all those eyes on her stuff. Then they found out she was the sister of Little Girl With Popsicle. When I heard, I thought, Now they’re both dead. I felt sure. I don’t know why.

  They found Mommy’s yellow cassette tape in the sister’s house. It had her notes on Little Girl With Popsicle. The possum detective says it sounds like she was already dead when Mommy got her. Still, I can’t think about it.

  I’m sure Mommy mistook the Little Girl for a boy. Mommy never messed with girls. So Mommy took her because of all those chances coming together. A haircut, a trip to the lake, a wrong turn. It makes my heart hurt and that feeling will never go away, I don’t think. Like a cut that never heals.

  The possum detective and I are drinking sodas in my back yard. Our fingers ache after yanking out so many nails. Plywood lies in broken stacks all around us. The house is so strange with its windows uncovered. I keep expecting it to blink. It’s still warm in the sunshine, but cold in the shade. The leaves are thick on the ground, red and orange and brown, all the shades of Rob’s hair. Soon it will be winter. I love winter.

  I like the possum detective but I’m not ready to let her in the house. Other people’s eyes make it a place I don’t recognise. She seems to understand that.

  ‘Do you know where your mother is?’ The possum detective asks the question suddenly, in the middle of another conversation about sea otters (she actually knows a fair amount about them). I smile because I can see that she is enjoying the conversation about sea otters, but also using it to be a detective and try to surprise me into telling her the truth. I like it; that she’s so good at her job. ‘Should I still be looking for her?’ she says. ‘You have to tell me, Ted.’

  I think about what to say. She waits, watching.

  I don’t know much about the world but I know what would happen if they find the bones. The excavation, the pictures in the newspaper, the TV. Mommy, resurrected. Kids will go to the waterfall at night to scare each other, they’ll tell stories of the murder nurse. Mommy will remain a god.

  No. She has to really die this time. And that means be forgotten.

  ‘She’s gone,’ I say. ‘She’s dead. I promise. That’s all.’

  The possum woman looks at me for a long time. ‘Well then,’ she says. ‘We never had this talk.’

  I walk the possum detective to her car. As I’m going back to the house, I notice that the last ‘s’ on the st
reet sign is wearing away. If you squint it might not be there at all. Needles Street. I shiver and go inside quickly.

  The bug man is gone. His office is cleared out. I went to see. Now I talk to the bug woman. The young doctor from the hospital fixed me up with her. The bug woman comes to the house sometimes and sometimes I go to her office, which is like the inside of an iceberg, cool and white. It contains a normal amount of chairs. She is very nice and doesn’t look like a bug at all. But I still have trouble with names. And so much has changed. Maybe I need one tiny thing to stay the same.

  She suggested that I play back my recordings to see what I have forgotten. I’m surprised to find I’ve used up twelve cassettes. I really didn’t think I recorded that much but that’s why I need the tapes, isn’t it? Because my memory’s so bad.

  They’re numbered so I start with 1. The first twenty minutes or so is what I expected. There are a couple recipes, and some stuff about the glade, the lake. Then there’s a pause. I think maybe it’s finished, so I’m reaching over to switch off the recorder, when someone starts breathing into the silence of the tape. In and out. Cold walks up my arms and legs. That’s not my breath.

  Then a hesitant, prim voice starts to speak.

  I’m busy with my tongue, she says, doing the itchy part of my leg when Ted calls for me. Darn it, this is not a good time.

  My heart leaps up into my mouth. It can’t be – oh, but it is. Olivia, my beautiful lost kitten. I never knew she could speak. No wonder I could never find the tape recorder. She sounds sweet, worried and teacher-like. Hearing her is wonderful and sad, like seeing a picture of yourself as a baby. I wish we could have talked. It’s too late now. I listen on and on. I don’t know why I’m crying.