The Life and Death Parade

by Eliza Wass

  I realized that I had to tread carefully so as not to scare him off, but also because ever since Nikki died we all had to be careful with each other. We all had an arsenal of raw nerves to exploit. If Macklin wanted to, he could recite a litany of perfectly good reasons why what had happened was more my fault than anyone else’s. And I could do the same to him.

  “You went back,” I said. “But why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “Nothing.” He scratched his nose. “We drove back to the canal. Nikki went to the boat and got his cane.”

  “Did you go with him?”

  “No. I waited in the car.”

  “How long was he gone?”

  “Ugh, ages. You know Nikki.” He rubbed his eyes. “He was gone for actual hours.”

  My heart rate spiked. “And you never thought to go get him?”

  He tossed his shoulders. “You know what he was like. There was no point trying to drag him away—he’d just drag you in and then you’d never leave.” His words had a ring of truth. “I fell asleep at one point.”

  He started to move up the stairs, but I caught him by the elbow. “Do you think he was with the psychic that whole time? Did he say anything? What did they talk about?”

  “I have no idea,” he said, taking back his elbow. “I wasn’t there.”

  “But he was different after that. He was obsessed with curses and magic and…She must have taught him. She must have filled his head with all that rubbish.”

  “What does it matter?” That was one question I hadn’t considered.

  “What do you mean, what does it matter?”

  “Well, it’s not going to solve anything, is it, Kitty? It’s not going to bring Nikki back.” He had a point; I knew that. I half believed that if I could figure out what happened to Nikki, I could reverse it. That it wasn’t too late. And I knew that wasn’t true. I knew it. But I still needed to believe it.

  “But what if something happened on that boat?” I pressed.

  “So what?” he said, and my bones went cold. “Does that answer your question, Kitty? So bloody what? It’s too late.”

  One afternoon, when we were young, Nikki and I went out to the archery range. Nikki had been barred from using guns because he too often seemed to forget that they were real. I had thought that he would be safer with a bow, but I had thought wrong.

  He got distracted on the third arrow and overshot. We both startled at the high-pitched scream. A tuft of fur jumped up, and Nikki’s face dropped.

  I disarmed Nikki before I went out to inspect the damage. He had shot a rabbit, right through the heart. The arrow threaded through so perfectly that the rabbit didn’t even twitch.

  Nikki locked himself in his room.

  “If it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t be dead! If it weren’t for me, he would live forever!”

  I said it was an accident. Macklin said we should eat it. Lady Bramley was very sweet, but Nikki only opened the door for his nanny, my mum. I snuck in behind her.

  Nikki flung himself across his bed. Mum climbed up with him and Nikki crawled over her like a wounded soldier. He bawled into her lap. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident.”

  “There, there,” Mum said. “It wasn’t an accident to God. It was meant to happen. It was his time.” I thought that was a dangerous thing to say. What was to stop me from picking up a gun and shooting them both, then saying it was meant to happen? But Nikki’s despair subsided, so I kept my thoughts to myself.

  “It isn’t fair,” Nikki said. “I would die right now if I could bring him back!” Nikki was serious about animals. If anyone spotted a spider, he would make a huge production of escorting it outside, and there were a lot of spiders in a castle.

  “There are no accidents,” Mum said.

  “I mean, there have to be some.” They both looked at me, Nikki with his tear-stained face, Mum with her holy calm.

  “Everything happens for a reason,” Mum said. “The danger, my pet, is in thinking you know what that reason is.” She reached into her apron pockets. You could find all sorts in Mum’s apron. She kept crystals, matches, candles, blessed oils in glass bottles.

  Mum was a real blend of religious fervor. Every morning she prayed to the Seven African Powers, every afternoon she practiced meditation. She always referred to some friend who’d taught her—Anaya who taught her how to pray; Amala who taught her to chant. I had never met any of these people, and yet, in a way, they had raised me. They were the pieces that put together my mum.

  She pulled out a ribbon. “This is a black ribbon. It’s how you keep the dead with you. We’ll take that rabbit’s foot—”

  “Mum,” I said, but Nikki was enraptured. He was obsessed with everything Mum said or did, wanted to practice every tradition, learn every superstition. He was raised Catholic, but when his parents weren’t listening, he called himself spirited.

  “—and tie it off with the ribbon, and you can always keep him with you. And then he’ll never die, because you’ll always remember him.”

  They stuffed the rabbit’s foot, blessed it with oils and incense, and Nikki kept it with him. It was the one thing he never lost, until he gave it to me.

  When Mum died a few years later, I was going through my things, trying to work out what I could take with me. I was a minor living with a family that wasn’t my own. I would have to go somewhere. I thought it would be better to run, before the somewhere was decided for me. I was interrupted by a soft knock on the door, followed by a swift pounding in my rib cage. I was sure it was Lord Bramley; I was sure he’d come to tell me it was my time to go.

  Nikki entered, and my heart swelled. He bowed his head, climbed onto the bed. It was clear he’d been crying. He watched me for a while before he said, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m just trying to think what I might need.”

  “For what?”

  I bit my lip. “For when I have to leave.”

  His face paled. “Kitty.” He stretched out his hand, beckoned me. “Come here.”

  There was a photograph in my hand, of all of us on the seaside: Mum, Nikki, Macklin, Holly, and me. It felt glued to me, and I struggled to put it down. It shuddered on the dresser when I finally stepped away.

  I slunk toward the bed, climbed up beside him. He put his arm around me, stroked my hair. The affection made me uncomfortable; I felt prickly, untouchable. He spoke into my temple. “Do you remember that day with the rabbit?”

  I shoved him away. “You think this was meant to happen?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed. He took a deep breath, then turned out the silk lining of his coat and unpinned the rabbit’s foot. “I want you to have this.”

  I knew it was important to him; I knew it was the most important thing he owned, and that was why he wanted me to have it.

  I took it dumbly. It seemed to upset him more than it did me.

  He wrapped his arms around me and he said, like he knew exactly what I needed to hear, “I’ve told Dad you have to stay here. I’ve told Dad, whatever happens, you have to stay with us.”

  I didn’t cry, but I felt pierced. Pierced and threaded to Nikki, who was somehow the only one left pinned to me, the only one to tether me to this cursed and rotting earth.

  FIVE

  After the catastrophe with Holiday, Lady Bramley stopped coming to supper. She stayed up in her room, all day and all night. I felt partly responsible—and God knows I didn’t need anything else to feel responsible for—so one night I went up to her room.

  She was watching Come Dine with Me, which was funny, seeing as she wouldn’t come dine with anyone. “Oh, hello, Kitty.” She floated in a cloud of comforters and tissues.

  “Hello.” I sat down beside her dressing table.

  She turned to me during the adverts. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, darling, but I can’t seem to see the point of getting out of bed.” She drew in her tissue subjects.
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  “You haven’t upset me.”

  She blew her nose. “It’s quite nice when it’s dark and I pull the covers over my head. Sometimes I dream of Nikki—I suppose I always dream of Nikki—but sometimes I have nice dreams, and I wake up with my head under the covers and think, in that small moment, that he might still be out there. Does that ever happen to you?” she said. I didn’t know what to say. “You were always so nice,” she said, like I was dead, too. “Nikki loved you so much.”

  A lump rose. No one ever said things like that to me. I put my head in my hands. My heartbeat pounded in my ears.

  “It’s so hard as a mother,” she said. “I wish I could know he was all right, that’s all. He’s my son and it’s my job to look after him. Sometimes I think—I know it sounds mad—but sometimes I think I should kill myself, to make sure. What if he’s over there and he’s scared or alone? What if they’re not taking care of him?” Her words, contained in their terror, prickled along my neck. “I sometimes think it makes it harder. Not knowing why it happened. It was such a surprise, wasn’t it?” She plucked tissue petals to dab her eyes. “There are so many questions. There are so many things we’ll never know. I wonder if we did, would it make things better…or worse?” She sighed, shredded the tissues with her fingers. “It’s mad to think that it was almost one year ago that we were at the Hartfords’ garden party, with not a care in the world….”

  My mind rocked and I saw that night, the poster in the window reading, Come in! We’re expecting you. I had been back to the canal after Nikki died, in the dead of winter. The psychic’s boat was gone. I had continued along the towpath, searching for it, until all the boats looked the same, until all the boats were my boat, in false names and disguises, until the flat water repeated, You have no future, no future, no future. Nikki’s future was my future.

  But boaters followed seasonal paths. Of course the psychic wouldn’t be moored there in the winter. She would be there now.

  “Isn’t the party tonight?”

  “Yes. Of course I told Ellie we wouldn’t make it. I can’t stand to be around other people. They just don’t understand—Are you going somewhere?”

  I was on my feet. “Yes, well, I—I think I left a candle burning. I’d better go make sure.”

  She crinkled her nose. “You’re not going to the party, are you?”

  “Me? Of course not. You know how I feel about parties.”

  Mum used to believe that dates had a power. She used to say that if you wanted something, you should wait until a birthday or an anniversary to ask for it. And she didn’t mean presents. She meant mystical things—good luck, de-hexing, love.

  I tried to avoid Mum’s superstitions, but sometimes they got to me. Almost one year ago I was with Nikki at the Hartfords’ party with no idea things were going to end so spectacularly, so quickly. In one way that was the first last day, in a series of lasts spiraling smaller and smaller, until the very last day I saw Nikki alive.

  In one version of one possible world, that psychic was the hinge his life turned on—or off. What had happened on that boat? Only two people knew, and one was past asking. I needed to ask the psychic what happened. I might not trust her to see Nikki’s future, but only she could see his past.

  I hurried down Lady Bramley’s hallway, toward the entryway. I paused for a moment at the top of the stairs. Beyond the tall glass windows the sky was actually black—not gray or clouded, not a starry, starry night—but black, like a pupil, like a ribbon, like deoxygenated blood.

  I didn’t believe in magic, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel it.

  I crossed the darkened grounds, heading toward the low hump of the garage. It stank of gasoline. The cars were lined, deeper and deeper, along the garage. The Silver Cloud was at the far end, glimmering as if lit from within. My fingertips brushed its auto flesh. I broke a sweat.

  I didn’t have to take Macklin’s car. It wasn’t any easier to drive than the others—if anything it was harder, and the consequences would be greater if things went wrong. I knew I was being superstitious, but they had driven Macklin’s car that night. Nikki would have wanted me to take it. And sometimes doing the things Nikki would want me to do was the only thing that made me feel like he was still there—like he had ever been there at all.

  I took the spare keys off the hook, squeezed tight the silver key chain. I stopped shaking the moment I put the key in the ignition. It was like the car was an extension of me—a bigger, stronger extension of me.

  It slipped silvery under the night sky. I felt the ground drop from under me. Felt the past rise up, in medieval villages and castles on curling hills. I didn’t even have to remember where to turn; it was seamless. It was like the wheels had caught on life’s secret track.

  If I believed in the afterlife, I would have believed it was Nikki or Mum guiding me there. But I didn’t, so I thought it was probably some unconscious part of my brain, some hidden autopilot, and it filled me with this tremendous peace. Almost like being under a spell.

  Looking down on the party from the grassy hill where I’d parked, it seemed entirely possible that it had never stopped, that it had been going steadily since last year. A party for the rest of the world that was bewitched to forever stay the same. The same fairy lights crossed overhead. The same ponies made their dull circuits round the lawn. The same guns fired, followed by the same whoops and cheers.

  I traced the edge, hoping to avoid people, but because I never got what I wanted, people didn’t avoid me.

  “Oh, look!” Lady Hartford called out, lifting a hand at me. “It’s the Bramleys’ girl.” Not the Bramley girl, mind, but the one belonging to the Bramleys.

  “Lady Hartford,” I said, because what I wanted to say wasn’t very nice.

  She crossed the lawn toward me, her expression dropping as she got closer. I was pierced, bald, and barefoot. I wanted to inform her that she was lucky I had put on jeans that day, because normally I wandered around in pajamas, but I thought that might qualify as an overshare. “It’s so nice of you to come. Are Oscar and Olivia here?”

  “No. In fact, I’m not actually here. I just stopped by to…” Speak to the psychic in your backyard. “There was a slight problem with Macklin’s car, so I just thought I would pull up and, um, make sure it’s sorted.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “It’s a lovely car, but I told him those old Rollers are a nightmare to keep running, especially when you’re as reckless as he is.” She took my arm with the air of comforting me, but her grip was a little firm. “We’re all very sorry about you-know-what. We can’t quite figure out how it happened?” When someone died, people always needed to know how. Possibly they wanted to rule out their own chances. Possibly they were a bunch of rude, invasive sickos.

  I jerked my arm away. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take that up with God, my dear,” I said, quoting Nikki and rushing down the hill toward the canal before anyone else could stop me.

  The dried leaves crunched beneath my bare feet as I walked along the towpath. A long, narrow boat decorated with blue spirit bottles was settled into the basin, exactly where the psychic’s boat had been last year. Was it the same boat? I recognized the spirit bottles, but I had a funny feeling, a heavy sense that something wasn’t right.

  The name of the boat was painted in big red letters: LOVE. I didn’t remember that, and wouldn’t I have? It glowed there, like it was written just for me. But that was stupid; this couldn’t be the same boat. I would have remembered that word. We had inscribed it at the top of Nikki’s headstone.

  Music spooled out from inside the boat: “Dead Flowers” by the Rolling Stones. It was a song Nikki used to play, over and over, on the record player he kept in his bedroom.

  I struggled to catch my breath. Something like an electric shock jiggled my brain. It was too much of a coincidence. I couldn’t be hearing it; it couldn’t be playing. It had to be some sort of auditory hallucination. I gazed back toward the party, but it was lost behind t
he swell of the hill. A rush of wind jingled the spirit bottles. The wood creaked as a body moved through the boat. I breathed in so deep that I felt the sky sticking to the back of my throat.

  There were decks on either side of the boat for boarding, and thin doors with traditional diamond-shaped windows that glowed yellow. I thought I remembered them, but I needed to see inside.

  I rested my hand lightly on the railing. I slid forward. The boat slid back. The canal stretched black under me. And then I crashed into the water.

  I kicked toward the surface. My head hit first. Hard. In wild bursts I saw exploding stars. My bare feet waded through the mulch. I thought, randomly, of that open book at the bottom of the canal. Saw myself lined up beside it, with the bits of silver, the corroded chair—forever trapped beneath the surface. My lungs screamed. My nostrils stung. I sensed the boat above me, although I couldn’t see it. I swam for what felt like miles away from it, before I broke through the water gasping for breath.

  The boat was only a few feet away, which didn’t say much for my general fitness. A boy was standing on the deck. Smoke swept bewitchingly from the open door behind him.

  I spat lake water, paddling in place. “Are you going to rescue me?”

  “Do you need to be rescued?” He waited and when I didn’t answer, he sighed and stretched out his hand. I took it, and he pulled me smoothly onto the deck.

  I stood shaking in front of him, soaking wet. “Are you here for the party?”

  “What party?” He had eyes like pale fish caught in the net of his face. His chest was a jungle of chains: silver stars and crosses and a big golden locket at his throat. A William Blake engraving was tattooed down one side of his bare torso, of a figure slip-sliding through fire. “Do you want dry clothes?” He spoke with an American accent, slightly singed around the edges.