Guardian of the Dead

by Karen Healey

  KAREN HEALEY

  GUARDIAN

  OF THE

  DEAD

  First published in 2010

  Copyright © Karen Healey, 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email info@allenandunwin.com

  Web www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia — www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

  Cover and text design by Bruno Herfst

  Cover photos: Getty Images

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Robyn,

  who has supported this story from infancy,

  and for my parents,

  who have done the same for me.

  Contents

  Part One

  Southern Lights

  Suddenly Strange

  Sitting Inside My Head

  For What You Burn

  Lament for the Numb

  Love in the Air

  Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!

  Violent

  All Ready Now

  Together Alone

  Part Two

  Pink Frost

  Body-Shaped Box

  Not Given Lightly

  Home, Land and Sea

  Unity

  Why Does Love Do This To Me?

  The Day I Went Under

  Won’t Give In

  Epilogue Maybe Tomorrow

  Afterword

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  PART ONE

  SOUTHERN LIGHTS

  I OPENED MY EYES.

  My legs were bound and my head ached. There was one dark moment of disorientation before the bad-dream fog abruptly lifted and I woke up all the way and rolled to smack the shrilling alarm. I was exactly where I was supposed to be: in my tiny room, lumpy pillow over my head and thick maroon duvet wrapped around my legs. I disentangled myself and kicked the duvet away. The muffled tinkling as it slithered off the foot of the bed reminded me that Kevin and I had stored the empty beer cans there.

  Well, that explained the headache.

  I could hear voices in the living room, where the other girls in our little dorm-cum-flat were gathering. I huddled farther under the pillow, willing myself ten minutes more sleep and hangover recovery time. The wisp of a thought was drifting somewhere in the bottom of my mind, refusing to rise to the level of consciousness. Something I’d forgotten.

  A truly incredible snore resounded from the boy sleeping on the floor.

  I rolled out of bed so fast that I lost my balance and fell right on top of him, my full weight thumping against his impressive chest. He wheezed, his dark eyes popping open.

  ‘Shut up!’ I hissed, jamming my hands over his mouth. ‘It’s morning!’

  Kevin’s eyes went from huge to enormous. The lounge was horribly silent. I tensed as someone knocked on the door.

  ‘Ellie? Are you okay?’ Samia asked.

  ‘I’m fine! I just fell!’

  ‘Did you hurt yourself?’ The doorknob rattled.

  ‘I’m naked!’ I yelped. Samia wore headscarves and long sleeves in public, but she often walked through our girls-only flat in nothing but her underwear, and for a moment I entertained the horrible vision of her ignoring my fictional nudity and coming in anyway. She’d find a boy and alcohol in my room, she’d tell Mrs Chappell, I’d get expelled from boarding school, my parents would have to leave their once-in-a-lifetime dream trip around the world, and then, they would kill me.

  On the other hand, being discovered lying on top of Kevin Waldgrave would definitely improve my reputation at Mansfield for the few days I’d have remaining. I might even become someone vaguely acknowledged by the other students.

  Tricky.

  The doorknob stopped moving. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘See you in Geography.’

  ‘See you!’ I cried weakly, and let out a sigh of relief as the noise from the living room became a shuffle of departure.

  ‘Your breath smells like an alcoholic’s arse,’ Kevin remarked. I got to my feet, hauled him to his, and punched him on the shoulder, not nearly as hard as I could have. ‘You fell asleep!’

  ‘So did you.’

  ‘It’s my bedroom. And you have to get out of it before someone sees.’ I gave him a quick inspection, and made him zip his tracksuit up over the beer stain on his long-sleeved shirt. The light-brown carpet lint I picked from the side of his face was almost the same shade as his skin, so I was lucky to catch it. His dense black hair was also a mess, but that was normal. ‘Okay. If you can make it to the road, you can say you went for a jog before breakfast.’

  ‘You’re a genius.’ He grinned, then shot me an uncharacteristically shy look. ‘Um. And a real mate. I think I said some stuff?’

  I couldn’t face that conversation feeling this sick. ‘You have to go,’ I said, hating myself a little for the way he stiffened. ‘We’ll talk later, though?’

  Dark eyes looked down into mine. At six foot four, Kevin was one of the few people I knew who was taller than me. He was gratifyingly wider too, though in his case it was mostly muscle. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We can talk on the way to rehearsal. Meet you at six?’

  ‘Rehearsal for what?’ I asked, and then that dream-foggy memory caught up with me. ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘You promised,’ Kevin said.

  ‘Because you got me drunk! I can’t believe you!’

  ‘Ellie, you get permission to get away from this place for a while, and all you have to do is teach the cast how to pretend to smack each other without actually smacking each other.’ He spread his hands, looking very reasonable.

  I wasn’t fooled. ‘I have a black belt in tae kwon do, not in . . . stagy fake fighting.’

  ‘You promised,’ he insisted. ‘And we really, really need you. Iris is getting pretty desperate.’

  Iris Tsang was a year older than us, stunningly pretty, permanently enthusiastic, and so nice it made my teeth itch. As far as I could tell, she’d also been in love with Kevin since kindergarten, completely undaunted by his lack of reciprocation. It was no wonder that she’d dragged him into her play when the original cast members had started deserting, even though all natural laws stated that first-year uni students should forget all about people still at their old high schools.

  This was what happened when I drank. It all seemed great at the time, and then it resulted in bad dreams and being dragged into situations where I’d have to talk to perverted egomaniacs who liked to prance around in tights, led by a woman who made me want to crawl into a total-body paper bag after ten minutes in her perfect presence.

  ‘Fine,’ I growled. ‘But I’m never drinking again. Get the hell out.’

  ‘You’re a real mate,’ he said again, and hugged me before he went out the window, which was fortunately large. The building backed onto Sheppard’s celebrated gardens, and from there it was just a quick climb over the fence. I wat
ched him jog cautiously between the trees, and then turned to the concerns of the morning.

  Samia could walk around in her underwear because she was slender and had actual boobs and smooth coppery-brown skin that never got pimples. I, burdened by skin that was less ‘creamy’ and more ‘skim milk’, and not at all blemish-free, avoided the mirror and peeled off my pyjamas. I replaced them with my last clean long-sleeved blouse and the hideous maroon pleated skirt that stopped at mid-calf and made my legs look like tree stumps. My mustard-coloured blazer was lying crumpled over my desk chair, so I grabbed the jersey instead. The scratchy wool cut into my upper arms and stretched awkwardly over my belly, leaving a bulging strip of white cotton exposed between skirt waist and jersey hem. I’d always been big, but after half a year with no exercise, living on the dining hall’s stodgy vegetarian option, I’d gone up two sizes to something that I was afraid approached outright fat, without even the consolation of finally developing a decent rack. I put on knee-high grey socks – the girls were supposed to wear pantyhose, but no one ever did, just as we never wore the maroon trousers in winter instead of the stupid skirt – and slipped my feet into scuffed black shoes without untying the laces.

  There. A proud representative of Mansfield College, New Zealand’s third-ranked coeducational high school, at her dubious best.

  I hid the beer cans in the empty drawer under the bed and hit the communal bathroom to brush my teeth, throw freezing water on my face, and brush my hair back into a sleek ponytail. Then I hoisted my ragged backpack, pinched the bridge of my nose against the hangover headache, and stepped out into the morning mists.

  The Anglican settlers, in their inspired wisdom, had established the city of Christchurch, jewel of New Zealand’s South Island, in the middle of a swamp. Every leaden day of this winter I had longed for my hometown in the North Island, for the clean lines of Napier’s Art Deco buildings and the scattered sunlight on the sea, much brighter in my memory than it really was. In my head, I knew that I hadn’t liked winter in Napier either, and that Christchurch had its fair share of crisp, bright days where the smog kept to a decent altitude. But on bad days, the musty-smelling fog seemed to rise out of the sodden ground and ooze along it, seeping into streets and buildings and my skin.

  Every time I went past the drab stone mass of Sheppard Hall, I was glad I didn’t have to live there with the younger girls. Sheppard had central heating and an impressively weighty tradition, but it also had lights-out times, hall patrols, and ground-floor windows that didn’t open all the way. The Year Thirteen buildings were brand new, meant to prepare us for independence at university next year, and conveniently free of most obstacles to rule-breaking late-night visits.

  When Mansfield had first gone coed, the board of trustees had spent some time debating where exactly the new boys’ hall should go on the undeveloped land. Eventually, they’d paved Behn Street beside the girls’ hall, and plunked down brand-new and well-lit rugby fields on the far side of the new road. Pomare Hall, all steel and glass, and much nicer than Sheppard’s draughty tower, sat smug and distant at the edge of the fields, as far from the girls’ side of the boarding area as possible. The trustees hadn’t been very trusting.

  There were plenty of boys trudging along the path beside the fields, but no one tall enough to be Kevin. If he’d been caught, he wouldn’t give me away. But if he was suspended or expelled, I’d suffer all the same. He was all I had here.

  I wasn’t quite sure how this had happened. I hadn’t been really popular in Napier, but I’d had friends, even if I’d drifted from most of them during what I thought of as Mum’s Cancer Year. When she’d recovered, she and Dad had decided to spend the remainder of the inheritance from my Granny Spencer on their lengthy trip around the world. Still suffused with relief at the recovery, I hadn’t minded being left behind. I had minded Dad’s response to my suggestion that I spend the year with my older sister in Melbourne. He was worried about her ‘influence’, which neatly translated to: ‘But, Ellie, what if you also catch the gay?’ And none of my remaining friends’ parents had the room for me to stay.

  ‘Boarding school,’ Mum had decreed. Sulking at losing my Melbourne dreams, and angry on Magda’s behalf, I’d arbitrarily applied to Mansfield instead of to any of the North Island Catholic high schools Dad would have preferred. To my own shock, I’d been accepted – at least, by the selection committee. The students had been less welcoming. They weren’t really mean; just unwilling to open their tight social circles to a new girl. And, as I privately admitted when I wasn’t too busy feeling really sorry for myself, I hadn’t made much of an effort. Kevin had been a fortunate fluke – most of his friends had been in the year above. While plenty of people wanted to know him better, including most of the girls in our year, he’d settled on newcomer me.

  In light of last night’s confession, picking the one girl his age who wasn’t eager to make kissy-face with him took on a more sinister dimension. But it had worked out well for both of us.

  Unless, of course, he was expelled.

  I waited at the pedestrian crossing with a cluster of younger Pomare boys, all of whom were happy to ignore me in favour of talking about the latest Eyeslasher murder.

  ‘—heard that he keeps them around his waist like a belt.’

  ‘Yeah? My cousin said it’s this cult, and the cops know who it is, but the Prime Minister’s son is mixed up—’ ‘She doesn’t have any kids, you munter!’

  ‘—secret kids—’

  I rolled my eyes and outpaced them when the light blinked green.

  Busy mentally snorting at the appetites of fifteen-year-old boys for grisly conspiracy fantasies, I was going way too fast to stop when the girl in front of me halted abruptly at the gate. I tried to dodge sideways and ran straight into Mark Nolan, day student, loner, and focus of more than a few of my Classics-period daydreams. Everyone but me had got used to him and his enigmas; as a newbie, I still had some curiosity left.

  Embarrassing, then, to crash into him outside the school gates.

  ‘Oof,’ he grunted, and tried to sidestep around me while I wobbled a few steps and bounced into the rough wall. He about-faced and grabbed my elbow. It was presumably to prop me up, but he didn’t have the weight to support me. Caught off-balance, I staggered into him again, threatening to send us both to the ground. Giggles bubbled out of my throat, dancing on the dangerous edge between amusement and mild hysteria.

  ‘This is no good,’ he said decisively, and braced himself against the wall while I put myself back on even keel. ‘Okay, I’m letting you go on three. One, two, three.’

  ‘Ow!’ I protested, my head jerking down.

  And a tingling shock ran down my spine and through my veins. It reverberated in my head, like a thunderclap exploding behind my eyes. It wasn’t static electricity; it was nothing I’d ever felt before. Startled, I met Mark’s eyes, and found no comfort there. The perfect planes of his pale face had rearranged themselves into something frightening. It was the same face – same high cheekbones, same arched, feathery eyebrows, same thatch of shaggy red hair – but frozen into unnatural and shocking stillness. He stared at me, inhaled sharply, and then, as I blinked and stuttered, made himself look almost ordinary again.

  Mark lifted his hand, easing the sting in my scalp, and I saw the cause – a strand of my hair had come loose and wrapped itself around something silver shining on his wrist. In defiance of the uniform code, it wasn’t a watch, but a bracelet made of links of hammered silver, small charms hanging off the heavy loops. The charms weren’t like my childhood jewellery – no tiny ballerinas or rearing ponies – but a jumble of more ordinary things: a small key; a bottle cap; a broken sea shell; a tuft of white wool; a grey pebble with a hole in the centre; a stick figure bent out of No. 8 wire. My hair was twisted around the bracelet itself, caught between a stylised plastic lightning bolt and a rusty screw.

  I’d never seen the bracelet before, and that was odd because I’d shamelessly memorised every visible
inch of Mark, right down to the greasy tips of his hair, which he didn’t wash very often, and the way his maroon trousers were worn shiny at the knees. And those weird, compelling eyes; not blue-green or grey-green or brown-flecked hazel, but a uniform dark green, a colour so pure and strong that it could (and often did) stop me dead from halfway across a room.

  No one knew why anyone so good-looking seemed to make such an effort to disguise it. Rumour had it that he was super religious or a scholarship student, but the really religious kids tended to turn up well scrubbed, and the scholarships included uniforms. He took part in no school clubs, never had parents come for family days, and barely talked except in class. The only thing anyone knew for sure was that he’d been awarded the English and Latin cups every year at prize-giving, and never turned up to claim them. Samia thought he might be a communist. Kevin thought he had social anxiety. I thought he was far too pretty to be entirely real.

  I’d never thought he could be scary.

  He picked at the hair for a second, then met my eyes, now looking rueful and adorable. ‘Sorry, Spencer. Either I cut this loose, or we’re stuck together forever.’ I hoped I didn’t look too awestruck. Was I a giggling idiot, to be struck by lightning at my first physical contact? But then, he’d felt something too. And he knew my name.

  ‘Option two is tempting, but . . .’ I yanked at the wayward hair. It resisted, then snapped raggedly, leaving a blondish strand knotted in the bracelet. ‘Yuck. Sorry.’

  ‘No worries.’ He rubbed thoughtfully at the knot and smiled at me, a sudden flash of white, even teeth. My breath caught in my throat and I felt the blush burn in my cheeks.

  ‘I like your laugh,’ he said.

  Apparently, that was a goodbye. He turned and strode through the school gate, head extended and fists clenched in his pockets to make bony wings, a heron stalking along a bank.

  I stooped, fiddling with my shoelace until I felt my treacherous complexion was under control. That peculiar tingling sensation was still there, but it wasn’t as strong as the rising wave of glee. Mark Nolan had noticed my laugh.