I have had this dream before. On awakening, I sit straight up in bed, a stiff, bent nail. The room is dark yet dancing with lights; stars in my eyes, my eyes burning.
I dreamt my eyes were pierced by tiny thorns, thorns which rained down in sparkles, but when I tilted my head to look at the sparkles I felt the burning in my eyes and I was blinded.
I was not involved. I was an innocent bystander at the gates of hell. I looked through the bars and saw blood, saw flesh and blood, and a great man laughing, his head tilted back like mine in the dream. He laughed as the girl died. I, watching, giggled. I was not heard, and I stayed to watch as he separated her limbs, a doll poorly made.
He did not imagine anyone would be there to witness. I myself was surprised at the appearance of the house. I did not imagine anyone living out there. I was there to be quiet, to think, but I saw a demon kill a girl.
I carried on with my meditations. Then I returned to my home, where I have kept my silence until now. Each time a girl is missing I dream my dream of thorns. I feel like a wax dummy, but I am suffering still. I feel like the thorns are thrust into my eyes to the sound of imprecation, someone thinking to injure me, to cause me pain or misfortune.
#
Marvo nodded at the man and turned to go away.
"You're leaving?" said the man. "Can't you help me?" He had seen murder; had smelt it. Marvo remembered the lesson of the cats and dogs lady, that all things cost. He gave the man dreamless sleep, cool eyes and a deep abhorrence of violence. Later, he wondered if perhaps he should have helped the man to reveal the murderer.
Marvo sought magic in odd places, slept in stranger. He added names to his list of magicians, crossed them off.
He found a wonderful place to watch TV – in a home of old people, where they all sat, dwarfed in fake leather chairs, beige to show the dirt and remind them who's boss. They sat with their knees together, every one of them, like it was the last control they had over their bodies. Their chairs were lined up and spaced apart so they could not talk and drown out the TV. The TV made Marvo think of home, because it had no knobs. They couldn't change the channel or raise the sound; they had to watch what was there.
And the attendants found the TV annoying so they kept it down low, and the people who watched had to concentrate very hard to hear a word.
Marvo watched show after show, sitting in an armchair, his cape over his knees, with others who could not hear. And he grew to care about his fellows, and could not but help them. They were starved for attention, excitement and conversation. They would do anything, perform anything, for an indulgence. Marvo never asked more than a story – something so small, he was at times distrusted.
"You'll steal it from me. I'll lose my pride," one old man said.
"I'll take nothing from you. I only give."
"All right then. You remember who told you this story."
Kitten
All I've got is me memory of war. I was brave then, and I was someone. They knew me as a lucky token, the boy to have on board for a good journey. Not like that, don't think it. Not like the barrel boys of olden days. I had the reputation of being lucky, of warding off shipwrecks. But you know all it was? A hint handed down by my grandfather, a man who stuck to his ways and didn't like much else.
He told me to carry a caul on board, at any cost. Now that was a nasty thing to tell a child; even at eighteen, I was inexperienced with the ways of women and the body. I found it hard to take. He told me it was a piece of luck highly prized by sailors; he had heard of them being for sale, in the paper, back in the nineteenth century. In the paper, can you believe it, like it was a bit of carpet or rug. I didn't find mine in the paper. I had to walk the streets, and they didn't like me there, I can tell you. The things those women would do, and they thought I was the one who was sick. I don't know what they thought I'd do with it; eat it, I suppose. And the ones whose babies were born with it felt blessed by it, anyway, and loath to part. Finally, a week before my first trip at sea, a poor young girl gave birth to a baby which made her faint.
"It's a kitten! I've birthed a cat!" people heard her scream. The poor mite of a baby was protected by a caul, and the poor mite of a mother had only seen cats born before. I took the caul from her; she didn't want it. Paid all I had for it; can't say I'm anything but fair. It was worth it, because every ship I sailed on was safe, and the crew were good to me. I miss those days. I miss the days when I was good, and they wanted me. Now I'm not needed.
#
Marvo reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny silver grey kitten.
"Newborn," he said, "and its mother killed by a car. Will you take it?" The old man gently took the cat; more gently than any woman he'd held in his life.
"Poor little puss," he said. "Bit of bacon for you? Bit of old bacon sandwich?"
The kitten clawed its way out of the man's arms and ran up Marvo's leg. Marvo held it in his palm.
"I can give you another," he said.
"Just give me another bacon sandwich."
Marvo loved bacon sandwiches when they were hot from the pan. There was so much to try, so much to taste, Marvo rarely thought of his grandmother, but sometimes he would be reminded. After a solitary dinner in a quiet restaurant, an after-dinner mint was placed before him. He dined alone every night, either in a restaurant or, as he preferred, with a huge plate of bought food in front of a silent television. He could never quite get used to noisy TV.
He ate the after-dinner mint in one mouthful, not realising what it was until it was melting over his tongue. He remembered seeing these squares once or twice on TV, being passed around the tables of well-dressed people.
He closed his eyes to savour the taste and was disappointed. He never forgot after that how worship can be blinding to reality, and how one person's obsession is another's take-or-leave. He remembered the time he took chocolate to his grandmother. How much she loved him that day.
The stories began to lose meaning for Marvo and he realised that he was lonely with only his cat for company. He was lonely for the nurse from the hospital, Andra, who would never give him a story.
He called her number from memory, though he had never dialled it before.
Marvo said, "I'm just about to go and look at a dead body on the beach. Meet me there."
"We all have such strong memories of the beach as children," Andra said.
Marvo did not. He said, "With the sun burning hot, time was nothing on the beach. The sun's role was to heat, not to pass the day. I was just a little boy. I played running games with the waves, and built monuments in the sand. I ate lunch with another family and played cricket with a group of older boys.
"Some girls bought me an ice cream and let me rub sun cream into their flesh. I rubbed cream into my own flesh. I ran up and down the hot sand, each step too short for my feet to cool. I felt the pain was good. I felt the heat of the sand made me run faster, make me speed as fast as the big boys chasing each other with balls and wet towels.
"When the sun began to sink, I went to where my grandmother sat waiting. She gave me a scraping of food and settled a large cardboard box over me, for me to sit and wait in darkness until the sun called me again."
Andra nodded.
They watched as the girl was lifted out, her long red hair sodden, darkened, threaded through with scraps of the sea.
"Marvellous hair," Andra said. Her own head was shaven.
Marvo reached into the water where the body had been. He pulled out a small piece of coral, which he gave to Andra.
"To protect you from enchantment," he said.
"I have always been enchanted," she said. She passed the coral to a young girl who was watching them.
"You take it," she said. The coral went pale in the child's hands.
"Come on," said Marvo. "That child is ill. I don't like to be near sickness or death."
"That's a shame," said Andra. "I surround myself with sickness and help to heal it. There is always some form of disease in my life."
"That's acceptable," said Marvo. He was startled by the truth in this woman.
"Do you know anything else about coral?" she said. "Anything at all? Tell me, because you seen to know a lot."
Marvo knew what she meant by this. "Tell me what you know," he countered. "How do you heal with coral?"
"It can be used to replace human bone in some circumstances. A broken jaw, congenital abnormalities. Its physical configuration is like that of bone, and, when it is cleaned to kill its organisms and transplanted into the human body, in time blood vessels and bone will fill the channels. It will join with the bone and the blood and become bone itself."
"People can do that too," said Marvo. He took her hand, desperate for her story. "They seem to be completely different, opposites, yet when they spend enough time together, they merge and become the same organism. That's what intimacy brings, it brings strange birth. Strange birth."
Andra had not had her hand held so passionately before. He did not try to kiss her, touch her, bend her back into the sand. He waited, his mouth open, his lips moving as if to start her mouth with mimicry.
"I had a strange birth," she said.
Climbing up in the Attic
My mother was in the attic, finding clothes, sorting though boxes. It was a late pregnancy. She was forty-two. I was to be her first baby. Twenty years earlier she had been pregnant; clothes were bought then, the boxes of toys. But the baby had died, strangled, they said, by the cord. My mother had seen the child, the tiny baby, and seen its neck. They allowed her to hold her daughter for a minute, to say goodbye. It was a good hospital in that way. But around the child's neck were two small hand marks, as if another child had strangled the life from the baby.
"Where's the other one?" she said. She did not fall pregnant again for twenty years.
She was in the attic to look through the clothes she had kept to remind her of that dear dead daughter, kept out of love and fear and as a talisman.
She felt the first pains. She stumbled back, knocked a large chair as she grasped for support. It fell over the trap door, sealing her in. She screamed for help through the small window, but they could not get to her.
A young boy was sent through the window to push away the chair, but it was too late to get her down the stairs. He watched my birth in fascinated horror.
He moved the chair and the rest of the family climbed up into the attic, crowding her.
She carried me down the ladder and down the stairs to the kitchen. She passed me to my father. My grandmother looked in horror.
"What is it? What is it?" my grandfather said.
"The child was carried down before it was carried up," my grandmother said. "She will not have an easy life. You should have stepped on a chair or something. You should have climbed on a box, onto the windowsill. This child will never support you in your old age; it will not have money. It will never rise to distinction."
"What are you, the wicked grandmother who didn't get invited to the christening? Leave her alone, with your gloom and doom," said my grandfather, I'm told.
My mother saw me gaze at her. Saw my tiny hands clench with a strength unusual. She was a modern woman, a nonbeliever in superstition and refused to wish a bad life on me.
My grandmother cleaned the attic of childbirth. She climbed onto a chair holding the placenta, already dry and discoloured around the edges. Then she descended the stairs.
They gave the placenta a funeral, named it and buried it and mourned its death. The placenta is considered brother or sister in some parts of the world. Much later, I found the place of burial and mourned my sibling.
For a while I called myself Sissy, thinking of sister, my sister who had died twenty years earlier. I soon realised how ridiculous that was. I was always surrounded by things, then. My grandmother would bring little things home, things she'd found on the road, in a bin. Little lucky charms, things to save me.
Strangely, my grandmother's prophecy was right. My mother died when I was eighteen, of a cancer even my grandmother could not cure. My father found great support in the small town we lived in. He was a widower with a crazy daughter. I had a strange relationship with everyone: my teacher, my father, my classmates.
I have no need for great wealth. I only want to eat and enjoy my life, and my main enjoyment comes from found objects, from things no one else wants to touch. Nobody will go with me to trash and treasure markets, because I spend hours delving in the boxes of things available for a small coin each.
Only last Sunday I reached in and found a grater, food still clinging to its serrated edges. A comb, greasy to the touch. Some nail clippers, hinge smooth with use. The stall-holders were embarrassed to think they had put these things up for sale; this junk, personal junk with clearly imprinted memories:
The grater was used for nutmeg when romance was still in the marriage and Brandy Alexanders were considered worth the effort.
The comb was a memento of lost youth, a time when hair was strong and black and muscles were not dystrophic.
The nail clippers used to disgust an unloved wife; used to make her leave.
The stall-holders watched me disappear with my prizes and they wondered at me, a person who would buy another's debris.
#
Marvo sighed. It was a beautiful story. The police tried to move everyone off the beach, but with the mist Marvo and Andra looked like sandcastles.
"Are you still working at the clinic?" he asked.
"I felt lost after you were released," Andra said. "They sacked me not long after that. I guess I lost my motivation. I didn't think I'd ever find another good job. But now I work at the Body Shop and I love it."
"What is it? Lotions and potions?
"Not that kind of body shop. This one is very different. I'll take you one day to show you what we collect." She scraped her fingernails along his arm and showed him the collection of sweat and sand.
"You should have found me."
"I did track you down but did not approach you. I didn't think you'd like to be reminded of the clinic. When you called me I marvelled that our thoughts were alike, that we felt the same. How did you know I would like to see a drowned girl being taken from the water?"
He took her hand.
"What about you, Marvo? Where do you work? Or does a man like you not work?"
"I am not a man like me! I'm a lift operator."
They stood watching the dead redhead on the beach. "Her hair is so beautiful," Andra said.
"What's your hair story? Last time I saw you your hair was to your waist."
"My hair was set alight at work. I get compensation payments which barely allow me to pay the bills. I have expenses."
"Tell me another story," Marvo said. He knew he would eventually hear every story she had to tell. "Why did you leave the clinic?"
"It's not a story, it's an event. After you left the clinic I found I was no longer interested in the work. I was sloppy. Remember Mr Hollyoak? The gardener? I gave him something by mistake and he died. But it was OK – he was happy about it.
"'No more weeding', he said at the end. He felt responsible for all the weeds in the world and was glad to pass it on.
"I did him a favour, really, but they didn't think so at the clinic."
Marvo shook his head at her mistreatment. "I wish you could get a job where I am, but you might find it boring. I like it, taking people up and down in the lift all day. They talk to me, tell me secrets. They like me. I take my cat with me and he purrs on my shoulder. People love him."
Marvo changed his job so often he could never get bored. He took Andra to sit in the lift with him, and when it was empty he asked to hear the story of her birth again.
From the moment they met on the beach they were only apart when Andra went to her job at the Body Shop, or Marvo to his lift.
Whenever Andra told the story of her birth – and she told it often; Marvo could not hear it enough times – she would clench and unclench her hands, as if testing their strength a
nd trying to remember killing her sister. She would tell it as they lay together, on the bed or on the floor. Andra did not mind Marvo sleeping on the floor; often she joined him, pulled down the doona and slept amongst the dust, smelling the under-the-bed smell. He kept jars of water there; he had never lost the fear of the room, the fear that water would run out, that there would not be enough.
Andra went to work each day because she loved her job. The exclusive advertisements, mailed only to those who would not laugh aloud, said,
DID YOU KNOW THAT IF A NEST MAKING MAGPIE STEALS THE HAIR YOU SO CARELESSLY THROW AWAY, YOU WILL DIE WITHIN A YEAR AND A DAY?
DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU SHOULD NEVER CUT YOUR NAILS ON FRIDAY OR SATURDAY UNLESS YOU WANT BAD LUCK? THAT IN ROMAN TIMES IT WAS SINFUL TO CUT YOUR NAILS ON THE NUNDINAE (EVERY NINTH DAY)?
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