Guardian of the Dead

by Karen Healey

  Mark leaned forward. ‘They didn’t really like anyone with magic.’

  ‘Orpheus is a magician as well as a musician,’ I pointed out. We were twisted in our seats, now, facing each other. The rest of the class was watching with interest. ‘But he’s a good guy. When he goes into the underworld to rescue his dead wife, we’re supposed to cheer for him, and sympathise when he turns to look at her before he’s fully completed the walk back out. You’re never supposed to cheer for women who use their magic to actually do anything. Naiads and dryads are allowed to be sympathetic, because they’re pretty and passive, but we’re never allowed to like enchantresses or witches.’

  Mark frowned and looked about to respond, but La Gribaldi cut him off with another wave. ‘Interesting points both, and I look forward to seeing them explored in your Odyssey assignments, due on Monday. No exceptions.’ She glanced at the clock. ‘For now, sadly, our time is up. Mr Nolan, a brief word.’

  The rest of us escaped gratefully into the hall. Usually any mention of assignments came with one of La Gribaldi’s famous spiels on how New Zealand students were lazy and underachieving compared to the competitive Advanced Placement students of her adopted country. I couldn’t see the appeal of working yourself ragged and doing ten thousand extra-curriculars. So New Zealand only had seven universities, and most entrance courses required entrants to meet a bare minimum of standards. So what? How were you supposed to know what you were going to do for the rest of your life when you were only seventeen, anyway? Medicine and Engineering were restricted-entry courses, and there were students at Mansfield killing themselves to make the grade. One student had killed herself a couple of years ago, a horrible event that was now a whispered cautionary tale. One of the science scholarships was named after her, which seemed a peculiar memorial to me.

  With a start, I realised I was still hanging outside the classroom door, leaning against the cream-painted walls. Geography was in five minutes, and I hadn’t done the homework. Why was I standing here noodling about poor suicidal Kathy someone? What was I — I’d wanted to talk to Mark. Or had he wanted to talk to me? I peered through the door’s glass inset, rubbing at my aching temples. The wire mesh in the little rectangle made everything look fuzzy and undefined, but I could see La Gribaldi shaking her crowned head at Mark, big arms folded over her breasts again. Mark seemed to be pleading for something. An extension? La Gribaldi looked unconvinced. Abruptly, she moved toward the door, and I sprang back to lean against the corridor’s far wall as she came out of the classroom, stiffening as she paused to stare at me. She surveyed me from toe to top, much as Reka had done in the mists, but her dark eyes met mine, a little puzzled, a little wary.

  ‘Interesting,’ she murmured, and walked on.

  Mark tried to scoot out after her, but I made my move, lurching to block his path like a transportable human wall. ‘Didn’t you want to talk to me about something?’ I asked. As conversational gambits go, it probably lacked a certain something.

  He stopped, but didn’t look at me. ‘No?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, confused all over again. Maybe I had wanted to talk to him? There had been something, damn it. I improvised: ‘Um, I was wondering. Do you want to study for the Classics midterm exam with me?’

  Mark hesitated, pale face guarded. Something silver glinted at the wrist of his ragged sleeve. ‘When?’

  ‘After school sometime? In the library?’

  ‘I have a job after school. And on the weekends.’

  I didn’t ask, Then why do all your uniform pants have holes? ‘Just an idea,’ I said, trying not to sound huffy about the rejection. What had I expected? That after crashing into him at the gates we were going to be best buds?

  The headache eased and he nodded, smiling slightly. ‘It’s not a bad idea. I’ll think about it and let you know?’

  I brightened. ‘Sure!’

  ‘See you later.’

  I frowned after him. His final sentence was a perfectly normal farewell. Why did it sound so tantalisingly familiar?

  FOR WHAT YOU BURN

  FINAL PERIOD ENGLISH was my only class with Kevin, science nerd that he was, and it was, to the joy of nearly everyone, a movie screening day. We’d had the option of Heavenly Creatures, Once Were Warriors or Rain for the film section. Given the choice between teenage matricide, teenage suicide, and possible paedophilia, the class had voted over whelmingly for matricide. I hadn’t; I remembered the horrible months last year when my mother had struggled against the cancer and the chemo, and resented my classmates’ enthusiasm for what was, after all, a true story about a nasty murder. When they caught the Eyeslasher, would Peter Jackson want the rights to that too?

  Heavenly Creatures began with the patchy film of Christchurch in the 50s, looking even whiter and duller than now, and got progressively creepier. ‘There are New Zealand comedies,’ I whispered to Kevin, reasonably safe from Mr Aarons0n in the dimmed light. Back seats by the radiators were even more in demand on film days, but Kevin had got there early, and saved one for me.

  ‘Comedies aren’t art, darling,’ he replied, in a fair posh English accent.

  ‘I’d love to watch you tell that to Iris,’ I muttered, and was rewarded with a muffled laugh. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He thought about it. ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Well, she needs you for the play, so she can’t get too shirty.’ I was trying to be reassuring, but I caught the flash of white as he rolled his eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘She is actually my friend, Ellie. My friend who likes me, regardless of . . . stuff.’

  ‘Well, sure, I’m just saying —’

  ‘If you lot are going to talk all through this —’ Mr Aaron son began, but the door opened before he could finish the threat. It was Mark Nolan, holding a strip of paper. I couldn’t help straightening in my seat. Outlined in the light coming through the doorframe, he shone like a grubby angel, green eyes gleaming in his white face. He came in, and I began to breathe again. After a brief discussion with Mr Aaronson, he folded his long legs under a desk at the front and stared impassively at the screen.

  I was expecting Kevin to give me hell for the obviousness of my crush, but he apparently had something else on his mind.

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘I swear he’s stalking me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nolan’s transferred into all my classes today – well, except Physics.’

  ‘Seriously?

  ’ ‘God knows how he did it, but he did.’ He shrugged the mystery away and gave me his most irritating smirk. ‘This one worked out well for you, didn’t it?’

  I ignored him, leaned behind his wide shoulder and stole another look at Mark, who appeared totally oblivious to everything but the movie. In the white glare of the projector screen, his face was like a classical Greek sculpture, bleached of colour after long years in the sun.

  It didn’t make any sense. Mark, I had pathetically worked out through careful deduction, took Classics, English, History, Latin, and Art History. How could he just transfer into Kevin’s Chem and Calc classes, much less Mori? ‘You have Physics second period today, right? Fourth period Thursdays?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s when I have—’

  Mr Aaronson was rising in a clatter of remote controls. ‘Ms Spencer! Are you the director of this film?’

  I tried to shrink into my seat. ‘No, Mr Aaronson.’

  ‘Then why do you insist on adding commentary?’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Aaronson,’ I said, staring at the floor so I wouldn’t have to put faces to the people laughing at me.

  Kevin gave me a comforting poke in the ribs when everyone went back to the movie, but I was not in the mood to be consoled. I sulked in the warm darkness of the classroom until I went to sleep on my desk, and had to be hastily shaken awake before the lights went on. It wasn’t an auspicious start to the weekend.

  I was fully prepared to defend Kevin to Iris at rehearsal that night, but she foiled all my noble in
tentions by being typically warm and friendly to everyone, Kevin included. Reka was as warm and friendly as a glacier to everyone but Kevin, for whom she melted, chatting with him between their scenes as if he were an old friend. I didn’t like the way she looked at him – sort of hungry and grasping – but it was hardly my business to protect Kevin’s virtue, even if he had been inclined to give it away.

  To make matters worse, Reka looked even more beautiful. She was wearing another anachronistic outfit, this one a crisp 40s-style dark-grey skirt suit over a creamy, high-collared blouse. The fitted skirt cut off at the back of her knees, and she wore sheer black pantyhose underneath. In the crowds of students in jeans and layers of jerseys, she should have looked like an overdressed schoolmarm, but with her startling hair arranged in looped braids all over her skull, she resembled a barbarian princess in business drag. In that company, Iris’s pristine grey wool dress and black stockings warranted barely a glance.

  I ran the fights through for Iris’s approval. The boys were still too enthusiastic about their proposed punch-up, and I was worried they’d get hurt. The last thing this show needed was injured lovers. Maybe I could tell them some of my grislier training stories, like the one where I’d taken a sparring pad to the throat, and been unable to swallow solid food for a day. Or the one about the sidekick to the collarbone that had stopped me raising my right arm for weeks.

  Iris called a break, and most of the cast scattered to get food somewhere where it wouldn’t offend Reka’s delicate constitution, sulking out loud about missing out on their Friday night. The vending machines downstairs were definitely calling to me – my dinner had been mashed potatoes and limp broccoli, and not much of either – but Kevin sat down beside me, and Reka with him. Iris slumped, then flicked open a newspaper to cover for her reaction.

  In the nearly empty theatre, the silence was very obvious.

  ‘So,’ I said, striving to make my tone light. ‘You’re allergic to cooked food, is that right?’

  Reka didn’t bother to make eye contact with me, preferring to lean her arm on the armrest, beside Kevin’s. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I guess that must make a social life pretty hard.’

  ‘Lay off, Ellie,’ Kevin ordered.

  I blinked at him. ‘What do you—’ He put his hand over Reka’s as if to comfort her. ‘Don’t make fun of people’s disabilities!’

  My teeth snapped together so hard they clicked. ‘Sorry,’ I managed, after a moment. Kevin had never used that voice with me.

  ‘I accept your apology,’ Reka said, and squeezed Kevin’s hand.

  ‘What do you think about these Eyeslasher murders, Ellie?’ Iris asked, tapping the newspaper’s front page.

  Even knowing she was trying to help couldn’t stop my reply from being curt. ‘I think they’re gross.’

  The headline read Mori Elder Murdered! and the story described the latest Eyeslasher victim as a pillar of the community; a general practitioner with a family practice, he had also been a respected kaumtua. There was a colour photograph with the article, deliberately discordant against the description of the dead man’s beaten and mutilated body. Looking steadily at the camera, a solid, grizzled man with a feathered cloak over his dark business suit stood in the middle of a crowd of kids on a marae, all of them with bare feet, dark eyes, and huge grins.

  ‘He just went out to buy milk,’ Iris read. ‘That’s so sad.’

  ‘It can’t be that bad,’ I said sourly. ‘There’s still room on the front page for the sheep that ran away and lived in a cave for six years.’ There was a picture of the sheep, too. It was very woolly.

  Reka leaned over and took the paper from Iris without asking, her looped braids nearly smacking me in the face. I caught a whiff of something that smelled like expensive fruit.

  ‘Let’s talk about something cheerful,’ Kevin suggested.

  ‘Such as exams.’

  I groaned.

  ‘It’s only two weeks until our midyears!’ Iris said. ‘And they’re right in the middle of the production run, which is why we keep losing everyone. Sometimes I think I’d like to just run away.’

  Kevin nodded. ‘Like Great-Uncle Robert.’

  ‘Oh, here we go,’ I said.

  Reka went very still, and then, apparently realising her cue, cocked her head at him. ‘Your great-uncle ran away from exams?’

  ‘Nope. World War II, according to Grandad. Robert was a pacifist, and he vanished in his first year of uni, a couple of days after war was declared on Germany. Grandad signed up, did manly, non-pacifist things in North Africa, and came back expecting his younger brother to turn up when the fighting was over.’

  ‘And he never did,’ Iris said, far too sad about something that wasn’t her family tragedy.

  ‘Nope. So Grandad named his son after his brother in case he wasn’t a coward. Hedging his bets.’ He pointed at me. ‘But the relevant part is that Grandad blamed the drama club.’

  ‘Do tell,’ Reka said.

  ‘It was only after Robert joined that he got all those weird ideas about how it might be nice not to shoot people.’

  ‘How enlightened,’ Reka said, nudging his hand with hers.

  ‘A better life through theatre,’ I said flippantly, and stood up, before things got any worse. ‘Well, there’s a Snickers bar with my name on it.’

  ‘You need protein,’ Kevin said, but he didn’t stand to join me.

  ‘Snickers are packed with peanuts,’ I said, and loped up the stairs.

  I ignored Iris’s desperate look as Reka edged closer to Kevin. It was harder to ignore my own guilt. Iris and I weren’t actually friends, I reminded myself. I wasn’t obliged to deflect her imagined competition. And whether or not he came out to Reka was up to him, but if Kevin couldn’t read the signals of interested persons and let them know he didn’t reciprocate, it wasn’t my job to fix the fallout.

  Still, warned by some impulse, I turned to look at them just before I got to the exit. Reka was explaining something to Kevin, her hand on his arm, but she tilted her head to look me full in the face.

  My skin prickled. It was probably a trick of the distance and the dim light, but for that brief moment, her eyes were dark from corner to corner, with no pupils or irises at all.

  Even after a chocolate hit, I was in no mood to watch Reka be stunning and brilliant for the rest of the rehearsal, but it was full dark outside and I couldn’t leave until Kevin did. Instead, I went to the greenroom and sulked in perfect privacy, picking holes in the collapsing couch instead of working on my Odyssey essay like a good Mansfield girl ought. This became less exciting after a while, especially when the tips of my fingers went numb with the cold. I shoved my hands into my jeans pockets and began poking around the little dressing rooms. The first two held Carla’s sewing machine, the clothes they’d rented, and the costumes she’d been making herself, neatly hung on wheeled racks or folded onto rickety steel chairs.

  In the last one, there was a bench built across two sides of the room. It was stained with make-up spills from the decades of actors who had sat in front of the four smeared mirrors to put on their faces. The box of costume jewellery sat open on the bench beside a toolbox filled with half-used make-up.

  I sat down and pulled a strand of beads out of the box. It was only plastic, but the beads were a nice deep sapphire, and polished into irregular bobbles. I pulled the necklace over my head, pulled my hair out of its ponytail, and tossed it, smiling coquettishly into the mirror.

  ‘Ellie?’ someone said, and I jumped to my feet, turning guiltily towards the door.

  It was Puck, whose real name I still hadn’t learned. He was staring, with an expression I didn’t recognise at first, because it was so seldom directed at me. I was used to being invisible to guys. At best, I was a friend, a funny girl, a good laugh. But he was looking at me the way people sometimes looked at Kevin or Iris, the way I feared I looked at Mark.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, and put the necklace back. ‘I know I shouldn’t m
ess with—’

  He grinned and shook brown curls out of his eyes. ‘Don’t pay any attention to Carrie,’ he said. ‘It’d set a terrible precedent.’ He stepped closer to me. My skin prickled. ‘I like your hair, Pandora.’

  ‘I washed it last night,’ I said, and then wanted to die.

  He laughed. ‘Well, it looks good. Iris wants you there for notes.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied, and followed him back out to the stage, where everyone was pointedly waiting for us. Kevin raised an eyebrow at me, and I glared back. If Iris had notes for me, I didn’t hear them, but I did catch Puck’s name. It was Blake.

  Carrie tried to catch my eye, but I decided staring at the floor was the better part of valour.

  I didn’t tie my hair back, though.

  LAMENT FOR THE NUMB

  ‘GO DO YOUR ESSAY,’ Kevin said on Saturday morning, trying to glare at me from his position in the Year Thirteen boarder–lounge beanbag.

  ‘I can’t do my essay,’ I told him. ‘I’m doing my laundry.’

  ‘Not right at this moment.’

  ‘No, right at this moment I’m waiting for the midday news while the dryer does its thing.’ I eyed the beanbag enviously. The lounge was nearly full of students avoiding the dining hall’s attempts at a hot lunch; Kevin must have been in here since the morning cartoons to have snagged it.

  ‘You could do your essay while the dryer does its thing,’ he suggested.

  ‘Kevin! It is vital that I keep myself up to date on current affairs.’

  ‘Is it vital that you watch Ellen?’

  I scooped another forkful of two-minute noodles into my mouth and slurped defiantly. ‘Maybe. Besides, I’ve got all tomorrow to write it.’

  ‘We have rehearsal tomorrow night.’

  ‘About that. Does Iris really need me for—’ ‘Hang on, shut up,’ Kevin said, and turned up the TV. The lounge conversation died into silence as the solemn-voiced news reporter made her announcement.

  Two more murders had been discovered. The victims had been a fifth-generation slaughterhouse worker from Lower Hutt and a Canadian journalist in Wellington, only recently emigrated. They’d both not come home last night, and were discovered dead this morning. And their eyes were gone.