Twenty-Four Hours

by Margaret Mahy

  “He hasn’t had any yet, so he can’t have more,” said Fox, and then both sisters spoke together in a ragged chorus.

  “It’s very easy to have more than nothing,” they cried, and then they laughed together.

  Ellis did not know what to say to any of this. It sounded familiar, almost Shakespearian. He was sure, however, that the words weren’t from any of the plays that he had studied. As he tried to remember where he had heard them before, he met the eyes of the youngest sister, and found them alight with unexpected expression – with recognition. She was staring at him as if they were old friends meeting again after a long separation. But then, before Ellis had time to be disconcerted by this strange, knowing regard, the door through which Fox had come into the kitchen flew open once more, and three men staggered through, all laughing. A strong smell of alcohol blew in around them.

  “Oh, no! Not you lot!” said Ursa with amused disgust. “Hey, listen! Somebody pinched my computer last night. It wasn’t one of you, was it?” A dark, middle-aged man with tattooed hands, toppled towards her, flinging his arms around her shoulders in an embrace.

  “Strange, dear, but true, dear …” he sang in a husky, melodious voice, and they danced a few steps together, still laughing, while one of the other men sank down in a corner saying, “Somebody pinched your computer. Your computer? He’ll probably get accident compensation.”

  “Everyone slags off my computer,” said Ursa protestingly. “But I knew how to use it. It had a lot of my stuff on it.”

  “Whoever took it was sure as hell one dude who didn’t know his microsoft from his hard drive,” cried the man in the corner.

  “Where’s this party?” the third man interrupted. “Oh, God – is that coffee?” he added, and made for the plunger.

  “No! No!” cried Fox, defending the plunger as she waved vaguely at Ellis who had first rights to the coffee. The man in the corner held up a bottle towards Ellis which he accepted, lifted it halfway to his mouth, then hesitated.

  “Drink away! We haven’t got AIDS,” said the tattooed man. “Not yet!” he added, and began to laugh. Terrified at the thought of seeming stand-offish, Ellis drank without even looking at the label.

  “Danny, Prince and Harley,” Ursa was shouting. “Meet Ellis … Ellis Someone.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said the man in the corner. “One of the famous Someone family. Me, too! We’re related, bro!”

  Next door the music was suddenly blotted out by human voices yelling, not singing. The sound came towards the kitchen like the grumble of an approaching earthquake, bursting out from under and around the door. It must have vibrated in the wall as well, for the calendar trembled and then fell to the floor. Ellis took a step back, ready to make for the second door and to run off, if necessary. But nobody else seemed to be paying much attention. The voices began to subside and the music took over once more. Kitchen conversations began again. Ursa, noting Ellis’s alarm, shook her head at him.

  “Don’t ask!” she shouted, having to raise her voice to be heard. “And anyhow, everything that can be broken out there has already been broken.” Ellis tried to force himself to relax, smiling what he hoped was a worldly smile. Then the door to the yard swung wide again, and a young woman with curly, red hair looked in at them, smiling, as if she knew she would be welcome. Behind her stood Jackie, tall on his roller blades, and beaming triumphantly. Kitchen light caressed the rubbish bags beyond him.

  “Told you I’d hitch a ride!” he said clearly enough, although his voice now had a decided edge of incoherence. “Catherine saw me skating along the edge of the motorway, deserted by my so-called friends.” He looked around him with pleasure. “Did you know someone had stuck up an open invitation to a party here up at the top of Moncrieff Street?” And he flourished a plastic bag holding half-a-dozen cold sausages in his right hand while his left waved an unopened bottle that Ellis recognised as Kilmer wine. But, from that moment on, Ellis himself began to lose his grip on the world.

  Time Stops

  He drank his second glass of wine rather more quickly than he had drunk the first, and then someone passed him an unidentified drink which, recklessly, he tossed down.

  Time stopped.

  Entrenched in some timeless inner space, he watched the two doors open, close, open again – and, finally, remain open. Suddenly, there were people everywhere, talking, shouting gesturing. He saw Ursa taking Fox by the shoulders to push her, protesting, towards bed.

  But by then Ellis himself was talking to Harley, the man gloved with tattoos, who was directing him on to yet another tattooed man, the man he had seen earlier … the man with the Maori patterns on his cheeks, blue lines spiralling tightly across planes so hard and unyielding that the lines seemed part of a graffitied wall rather than the decoration of a live, human face. The words Drugs! Booze! Sex! marched across his forehead. Thick grey hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. Looking with wonder at this man, Ellis encountered an inexplicably calculating stare. He thought he detected resentment in it, as if, simply by being there, he had somehow issued a challenge.

  “Phipps!” said the man, holding out a hand inscribed with words and pictures. “Put it there!” And Ellis did put it there, aware of the way his own plain thumb stood out against the intricately decorated skin below it. He glanced up at Phipps whose skin beneath the web of spiralling Polynesian lines seemed European, and found he was looking at a man who had somehow turned himself into a member of an entirely new race. There was no looking beneath his surface to see what he might really be, or what he had once been. The spirals – the words and spirals – the disconnected pictures of monsters, owls, spitting cats and roses crawling down his arms from below his short sleeves, the skulls and mermaids peering over his collar, grey hairs growing out of their eyes, somehow stopped Ellis from seeing him properly, for Phipps had concealed himself in the heart of his own illustration and was looking out at the world through a confusing veil. And Ellis knew that he himself was the subject of scrutiny, rather as if he were a challenging canvas filled with spaces that the tattooed man longed to colour in.

  “I’ve thought of getting a tattoo myself,” he heard himself saying cheerfully.

  “Can do!” said Phipps. “No sweat!” He held out an arm, pulled up a sleeve and flexed his muscles. Naked women wrapped in vines writhed obediently. “You ever seen that film, Alien?” asked Phipps. “We can do aliens, even aliens like you, mate. And we use clean needles every time.”

  “Phipps likes to put his mark on us all,” said Harley. “Don’t let him near you!”

  “But he does use clean needles,” someone said over Ellis’s shoulder, moving on before Ellis had time to turn his head to focus on the speaker.

  “I’ve had a room here for eighteen months,” Harley was saying. “Are you looking for somewhere to crash? They’ve still got a bit of space.” Across Harley’s shoulder, Ellis could see Ursa arguing with a young woman whose frizzy black hair was streaked with violent purple.

  “You watch out for Winston,” Ursa was saying. “He’s a hard man.”

  “I like them hard,” the woman replied, raising her glass in an apparent toast to Winston.

  Then later – but was it really later? – the evening fast turning into a series of brief, simultaneous stage scenes – Ellis found himself squatting beside the pile of tables in the dining room and shouting over the background babble to a tall woman with a bony face, half-veiled by bright red, waving hair. She was sitting cross-legged beside him and shouting back in a warm but curiously hoarse voice. Ellis knew there were walls around him, but every time he looked steadily at either walls or floor or ceiling, the room changed. He knew the familiar city – his mother’s car, his home – were out there somewhere on the other side, but at this moment he felt he was suspended in another dimension.

  “Oh, yes, Monty was quite the guru back then,” the woman was saying. “Always being interviewed on TV and National Radio … giving his views … telling everyone about the Orono India
ns. Then, wow! He really blotted his copybook. Even his own kids slagged him off, besides being rather sarcastic about the Orono Indians, I must say. And, of course, Social Services just whipped his foster children away from him. Well, I mean, he’d been caught screwing one of them. Oh, the drama! But a few years later this lot honed in on him again. Leo and Ursa were independent enough by then, and Foxie came as part of the package. I think Social Services decided to turn a blind eye. I mean, Leona and Ursa are just so capable, and anyway, it’s against their policy to split up families.”

  “Shouldn’t think social workers would be very happy to see Fox at a party like this,” said Ellis trying to sound worldly. But his ears seemed to be filled with water, and he was hearing his own words from a distance.

  “Yes, but she loves it here,” the woman said, “and she’s doing well at school … well, she sounds as if she is. The principal is one of those educational heroines, and the school gets extra funding because of being multiracial. And most of us here – well – we’re all right, in spite of everything. I mean, a lot of us are kind.” As she stretched out her hand for her glass, Ellis saw that her inner wrist was scored with three bluish lines, parallel indentations slightly puckered at the edges. He must have reacted, for she was aware that her scars had been noticed and turned her wrist towards him with a kind of sad, amused defiance. “Of course, none of us are normal,” she said. “But then, what’s normal? Do you think you’re normal, dear?”

  Ellis quickly looked away, searching the crowd for Leona yet again.

  “Isn’t it a bit … dangerous?” he asked, hearing his voice sound over-careful. He was struggling to separate his words and finish them off properly. “Living here, I mean!”

  “Oh, well, you’ve got to be careful. But Monty’s got some heavy backing,” said the woman. “There’d be reprisals. Top you up? By the way, my name’s Pandora. I work at Kurl-Up & Dye, just around the corner in Moncrieff Street. I mean, I’m the sole proprietor. I spell that s-o-u-l,” she added, laughing and looking at him expectantly, but Ellis did not know quite what sort of expression to assume in responding to this declaration. “I do hair,” she explained. “I was looking at your hair earlier. You’ve got wonderful curls. I’m utterly jealous. But you need a really good cut … do you know that? Top you up?” she asked again.

  Ellis looked down at his glass and found with astonishment that though it had only just been filled it was already half empty.

  “I must have done a Jackie!” he said uncertainly, remembering how Jackie had drunk so indiscriminately earlier in the … but the word ‘evening’ suggested time, and time had stopped. And then …

  Later, when he tried to remember what had happened next, he found himself recalling a time of great happiness – of true light-heartedness. He remembered singing, remembered dancing with Leona, sliding his hand down her back and pulling her against him as they revolved in a tiny space in the crowded kitchen – a space they seemed to have invented for themselves. He remembered thinking, At last! At last! This is real life. It’s a genuine, drunken party, with booze just taken for granted. Not a school thing where people were self-conscious about drink, and getting drunk was something to boast about. Not his parents’ civilised evenings where people discussed wine in the way that Jackie had parodied … a pinôt noir that tastes of peaches, but is somehow floral as well. But in the Land-of-Smiles, Ellis was surrounded by people both funny and savage. This was an adventure: he was dancing with a beautiful woman.

  Later (he was to remember very vaguely), Jackie took his car keys from him, staring at him owlishly and saying, “No way, mate! Just forget it!” Ursa’s voice, speaking from a great distance was suggesting a taxi, while Pandora advised fresh air. Ellis had tried to tell them what a good time he was having, tried to explain that he wanted to live a dangerous life. But he must have forgotten a great deal more than he remembered, because, when he struggled back into true consciousness, he did not know where he was or even, for a few dazed moments, who he was. He was just someone somewhere, feeling something under his cheek and the palms of his hands. Then feet moved slowly past him out there, followed almost at once by other, heavier feet, clumping by.

  Ellis did not open his eyes. It seemed safer to linger in the darkness behind his lids, for his head felt as if it had split from side to side, and he was consumed by seething illness. Mixed in with this was the memory of great happiness, the feeling of having been set free. And, vivid beyond all other memories, the image of – the name came back to him – Leona. Dreams! He must be remembering … a dream. No! He had danced with Leona. He had pulled her close to him. They had circled together as one person, while an endless party milled around them.

  Then the bed seemed to spin again and realign itself. Ellis understood, at last, that the bed was not one he had slept in before, and neither did he recognise the room, or its muddy, green carpet. Light from an uncurtained window fell across his face. So far, so good: his eyes still worked! He looked wildly around the room. Smears on the mirror, dust on the chest of drawers beside him, cobwebs high in every corner! There, through a partly-open door, the end of a bath and a yellowing, plastic shower-curtain. His right arm was curled protectively over his head, almost as if he had been fearful that blows might fall on him while he slept.

  He tested his arm cautiously. The fingers of his right hand tightened and found themselves tracing an alien surface – rounded and faintly bristling. At the same time he felt a hand touch his own head. Horror seized him. His exploratory touch was being affectionately returned. He was in bed with a stranger.

  But, after all, both hand and head were his own. Ellis sat up sharply. His stomach heaved, and heaved again, as if it were trying to tear itself out of him and set up a separate life in another part of the room. He leaped out of bed, terrified that he was going to be sick all over himself, but standing up only made things worse. Staggering towards the bathroom, he realised he wasn’t going to get as far as the lavatory and fell on his knees beside the bath, vomiting into it with relief. Even when his stomach was completely empty, the violent heaving did not stop. Pain shot from one side of his head to the other. When the violent retching subsided, a regular drum continued to beat between his ears. Ellis took one shuddering breath and then another. Turning on the hot-water tap and cleaning the bath seemed an impossible job, but all the same he did it, moving like a dazed puppet.

  And then, quite suddenly, he felt a little better. He might just live, after all. Given time, he might even become human again. Cautiously, he moved towards the bathroom door, locating a light switch where he had expected it to be. Blinking, he looked around the newly-bright room and found himself staring into a mirror.

  He recognised himself by yesterday’s clothes. They were almost the only thing about him that was familiar. For what he saw in the glass was a scientific experiment, part living man and part machine. There was his face imposed on an alien head – a head which was set squarely on his shoulders, with his shirt tumbling beneath it. Yet it wasn’t – it couldn’t be – his head. It was the head of a robot. It was industrial. It was smooth, rounded, symmetrical and hairless – not a curl in sight. Hesitantly, he touched the bare crown, and felt the touch on his own skin. Somehow, during a single night, Ellis had changed from a school prefect into an automaton, or some kind of skinhead. Within a few hours he had become a true inhabitant of Moncrieff Street.

  PART TWO

  9.00 am – Saturday

  Ellis – a man transplanted and transformed – stepped through the door and found himself standing between two piles of rubbish bags and facing a line of garage doors. To the right and left of him ran other doors – the same numbered doors he vaguely remembered glimpsing the night before – interspersed with long windows, veiled for the most part with faded, green curtains.

  Turning, he studied the door through which he had just come. The single chrome number dangled loosely from a screw, and he could not tell, at first, if he had slept in Number 9 or Number 6. He looked at th
e next door along. Number 10! So he had slept in Number 9. This certainty, small though it was, gave Ellis the feeling that he was taking control of his life once more.

  Then a faint breeze ran caressingly across his newly-naked scalp, and his stubbled skull responded by prickling all over. Ellis felt himself become, once more, a confused life form, squeezed through a wormhole in space from some other dimension.

  To his right, one of two green doors opened sharply. Suddenly, Leona was advancing towards him, carefully dressed in a navy jacket and a long, straight, blue skirt. Strands of hair, curling like tiny serpents around her face, made a gentle Medusa of her – a Medusa pressed for time, Ellis realised, for she looked at her watch before glancing at the rubbish bags, the closed doors and, finally, at Ellis.

  “Have you seen Shelley?” she asked him. “I can’t find her and I’m running late.”

  “Shelley?” Ellis replied stupidly, trying to remember names and faces from the night before. At last, Leona seemed to see him properly. She smiled. Her smile was both knowing and mischievous.

  “Ellis! How are you feeling this morning?”

  “I’m still working that one out!” Ellis said, smiling as well as he could. His voice sounded, in his own ears at least, thin and insubstantial.

  “No Shelley?” she asked. Ellis, still unable to remember who Shelley might be, shook his head, then felt as if he’d been stabbed from left temple to right

  “Just remind me where I am,” he begged her, as the dagger twisted behind his eyes, shorting out his vision for microseconds of time. “Who’s Shelley? And by the way who am I?” he added, pleased to find himself able to make a joke of his own confusion.

  Leona laughed.