Guardian of the Dead

by Karen Healey

  The bus doors opened onto the foggy afternoon, and the smell of wet earth and rotting leaves rushed in. My head hurt. ‘You’ve got the . . . book,’ I said. ‘The . . . people, the faceless smiles.’

  ‘I’ll catch you later, Spencer. We’ll work out a time to study.’ He was hanging his coat over his arm. I caught a glimpse of something tucked against his side before it was shrouded.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Weird weather.’

  Mark’s eyes were strong with some unrecognisable emotion. ‘That it is. Gotta go.’

  He leapt down the steps and into the night. I slumped back into my seat, staring out the window. The view was totally obscured by fog droplets, and I smeared my coat sleeve across the glass, straightening as the cold shock of contact cleared my mind.

  ‘The Bible!’ I exclaimed, to the disapproving stare of the elderly woman in the seat opposite. I sank back, rubbing at my temples, and nearly missed my own stop. Getting off the bus, I paced down the damp street in time to the pounding in my skull. I couldn’t work out why Mark had taken the book. Maybe he’d forgotten he had it. No, I’d reminded him. And he’d hidden it, under his coat.

  Little sparks exploded, hanging in the air an inch before my eyes. I gasped and leaned against the stone sign at the entrance to Sheppard Hall. Even with my eyes closed, light flared in my skull.

  ‘Hey,’ someone said sharply behind me. It was Kevin, full laundry basket on his hip. He must have been collecting clothes from the dryers. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘My head. Mark Nolan—’ The wind shifted to bring the scent of the dining hall to my nose, the rich smell of grease cloying in my throat. I leaned over the sign and threw up into the flowerbed.

  For some little time, all I could do was retch and cry and shake with the pain. I gradually became aware of Kevin’s hands smoothing back my hair and his low, calm voice. ‘Did you eat something bad?’ he was asking. ‘Is it the flu?’

  ‘My head hurts,’ I said. My own voice sounded fuzzy in my ears. I spat, and spat again, and rubbed at my wet chin.

  ‘Migraine?’

  ‘Dunno. Never had one.’

  ‘Okay. Bed for you. And up we go.’

  I had never wanted so badly to be dainty and delicate. I could lean on Kevin, but I couldn’t ask him to carry me, and each step through the Sheppard grounds reverberated, a jarring blow to the skull. When we finally made it, and he knocked on my building’s door, I groaned at the noise. Samia opened the door, scarf wrapped hastily around her hair.

  ‘What happened?’ She peered at me. ‘Is she drunk?’ ‘Migraine,’ Kevin said. ‘Can I help her in?’

  ‘Uh, sure,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some codeine if it’s really bad.’

  I managed a half laugh at the conditional. If anything got worse than this, I didn’t want to be alive while it happened. I collapsed upon my bed amid the piles of folded laundry. Kevin and Samia held a low-voiced conversation outside the door and then he came back in to tug my shoes off and persuaded me to crawl under the covers.

  Samia handed me a small white pill and a glass of water, then hovered in the doorway. ‘Thank you,’ I managed.

  Kevin tucked the covers up over me and drew the curtains, then turned out the light. ‘Go to sleep, you sad sack.’

  He closed the door softly behind him.

  I gave it a slow ten count and stood up, staggering against the sharp white pain.

  Mark had done something to me. He’d stolen the Bible, and made me forget, given me this agony as a deterrent against memory. And it wasn’t the first time, I thought – there was something about standing by the bathrooms in the music centre, trying to resist his quiet order . . . his order to . . . More pain, and I bit my lip against a scream.

  Hypnotism or enchantment or drugs; I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. This time I would not forget. I would not.

  ‘Write it down,’ I muttered, and scrabbled on my desk. Kevin had thoughtfully piled my folded laundry onto the desk, on top of the scattered class notes and my battered laptop, a hand-me-down from Magda. The throbbing increased. I was going to vomit again. I was going to faint. My brains were going to explode and dribble out of my eyes.

  I found a golf pencil I’d stolen from my mother and the back of a returned Geography assignment. There was an odd tension in the way the pencil left grey marks on the wrinkled paper, as if the paper itself was resisting.

  MARK! I wrote. BIBLE! DON’T FORGET!

  There.

  I dropped the paper, not caring where it landed, and released the memory, stumbling back to bed.

  The codeine lifted my head off my shoulders, and wrapped me in clouds of cotton wool. I curled around my pillow and let them carry me away.

  LOVE IN THE AIR

  ISAT UP AND groped for the bedside lamp, alarmed awake by a half-familiar tune and wondering why I was so uncomfortable.

  Blinking in the sudden light, I realised that I was still in my jersey and jeans, and the irritating beeps were coming from my mobile phone, muffled in the depths of my backpack. I stumbled to my feet and fished it out.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi!’

  ‘Iris. Hi.’

  ‘Did you forget about the rehearsal this evening? Kevin said he thought you might come by later.’

  ‘No, I’ll come.’ I jerked the curtain open one-handed and stared, appalled, into the black sky. ‘Wait, what time is it?’

  ‘Five-thirty.’

  I’d slept almost twenty-four hours. ‘Oh, God! Iris, I’m so sorry. I had this massive migraine last night, and I’ve just woken up.’ My stomach chose that moment to rumble.

  ‘If you’re sick—’

  ‘No, I’m fine now.’ Though there was something, trembling at the corner of my memories. My head hurt.

  ‘Okay, then! We’ll see you soon?’

  I grimaced at the foggy night. The fifteen-minute walk alone seemed suddenly dangerous. I ignored the little voice that protested I’d crossed the fields at night at least a dozen times. ‘Could someone give me a ride?’ My voice sounded weak, even to myself.

  ‘Sure,’ Iris said, sounding surprised, and there was a muffled consultation before her voice returned. ‘We’re taking a break. Kevin will be around in ten minutes or so. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, vastly relieved, and dropped the phone, sprinting for the bathroom. Wearing my jeans to bed had worn a red ridge into my belly that didn’t fade in the hot water, and there was something pale and smelly encrusted in a strand of hair. Shuddering, I rubbed in shampoo until my scalp tingled. I was out of conditioner, but Gemma wasn’t. I mentally promised to replace it.

  Wrapped in a towel, my hair a wet mass down my back, I hurried back to my room. Clean clothes, fortunately, I had. I ducked under my desk to fetch my shoes.

  My hand closed on a scrap of paper.

  The tingle went up my arm like a spark of static electricity. The headache abruptly disappeared. I pulled the scrap free and stared at it.

  In the untidy capitals of my own writing, pressed so deeply into the paper that it was torn in a couple of places, were the words Mark! Bible! Don’t forget!

  I closed my hand around the paper and stood, shaking with fury and fear, as my memories returned. Mark had asked me if I knew what I could be in the music centre. He’d made me promise not to go out at night alone. And last night, somehow, he’d stolen the Bible, and the very thoughts out of my mind.

  No wonder I’d had that head-stuffed feeling.

  Someone knocked on my door.

  ‘Just a second!’ I yelled, and sought a good hiding place for my precious piece of paper. In the end I dropped the note on the keyboard of my battered laptop, and closed the screen onto it.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, yanking the door open. ‘I can’t believe I slept that long.’

  Kevin handed me a muesli bar. ‘How awesome am I?’

  ‘You are God on Earth,’ I said, tearing the wrapper off and taking a huge bite.

  He lowered hi
s eyes modestly. ‘Maybe a lesser saint. Hey, you look a lot better. Now that you’re not puking all over the flowers.’

  ‘Don’t remind me.’ The words tugged at something I should be recalling, and I frowned.

  ‘No worries; puke is probably good for flowers.’

  ‘You’re so disgusting.’

  ‘Oh no, did I vomit into my hair?’ he asked, eyes wide in pretended dismay, and dodged backward. ‘No punching! Are you really okay?’

  I lowered my fist. ‘I feel fine.’ I didn’t; I had that nagging suspicion I was forgetting something, and my head was beginning to ache. But both suspicion and headache cleared as we left Mansfield behind.

  The cast was still on break when we got there, Iris holed up in the lighting booth with the technical producer. Greens and reds flickered over the stage while the fairies practised their weird dance and Lysander and Demetrius scuffled good-naturedly in the wings. Iris had decreed it would add interest for them to fight hand to hand before they pulled out knives and Puck intervened to lead them astray, so I took them aside to practise the routine, with a few horror stories beforehand to stop them getting out of hand.

  The stories made them cautious for a few minutes, but it didn’t take long before they were careless and sloppy again. When long-limbed Demetrius clipped Lysander on the side of the head and sent him staggering, I’d had enough.

  ‘Stop,’ I hissed, fists on hips. ‘Pay attention to what you’re doing!’

  Lysander, still rubbing his ear, looked inclined to take me seriously, but Demetrius shrugged. ‘Whatever, man. Sorry.’

  I clamped down hard on my temper. ‘No. Not whatever. I have an ethical responsibility to my art. Either you do it the way I showed you, with care, or I stop coaching you. Understand?’

  Demetrius opened his mouth, caught my eye, and abandoned whatever he’d been about to say. He straightend his spine and nodded.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ Iris asked, popping up behind me.

  ‘No problem,’ I said, wishing I’d had a mirror so I could reproduce whatever expression had made Demetrius shut it. It could come in handy in all sorts of situations. ‘We’ll run this one more time and then I think it’ll be good to go.’

  The boys behaved perfectly, and Iris assured me that I’d only have to come to the next rehearsal, when they were doing a full run with set and props. I was almost sorry. Annoying actors and rude prima donnas aside, working on the play had been fun. It felt good to do something.

  ‘But of course you should come see it for free,’ she said. ‘Come on opening and closing night and stick around! Those are the best parties.’

  ‘I haven’t been to a party for a while,’ I said, trying to work out how long a while. Before the diagnosis? No, surely not, that was over eighteen months ago. ‘That’d be great.’

  Iris gave me the brightest of her many bright smiles, and turned back to the action on stage.

  I had to wait for Kevin, so I wandered backstage again. I explained to the short, sturdy stage manager that the chances of my climbing up rickety scaffolding to help her erect lights were exactly nil, evaded Carla’s attempt to enlist me in the ranks of her sewing assistants, and escaped to sit on the stairs outside before anyone else could ask me to do anything.

  I took a deep breath of frozen air, which burned all the way down, and huddled into my coat.

  ‘Pandora! I’ve been looking for you!’ curly-haired Blake said from the door. He descended to sit on the step behind me and I twisted to keep him in view, flattered at the spark in his eyes. ‘What do you think of the set?’

  The backdrop had been painted with a wide frame that I guessed was meant to represent a doorway, pointed at the top. Half of it was in a style influenced by Mori art, curling koru and triangles and squat figures in red, white, and black. The other half resembled an old-fashioned European-style villa, with cream-coloured wooden posts and some clumsy fretwork under the eaves. The space through the doorway was filled with a wild tangle of badly traced native forest. I wasn’t really crazy about Iris’s weird New Zealand-centred vision for the play, and I thought that even the forty-foot rule couldn’t make the backdrop look anything more than amateur work.

  But Blake had paint all over his hands. Clearly honesty wasn’t called for.

  ‘It’s very symbolic,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘You think it’s crap.’

  ‘No, no! It’s just not exactly my style.’

  ‘We could discuss your style,’ he said. ‘After rehearsal. Over coffee.’

  I blinked at him. ‘Uh . . . would that be okay with Carrie?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said easily. ‘I can make new friends, can’t I?’

  ‘Oh,’ I stammered. ‘I would love to. But I can’t tonight.’

  He tilted his head at me, then nodded.

  ‘I’m not brushing you off. I really can’t; I have an essay due tomorrow and I haven’t started it yet.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Another time?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said, like a polite kid to a friend’s mother. New friends, of course, I told myself, even if Blake’s interest didn’t seem merely friendly. This was university – we could be adults.

  ‘We’re up, Blake,’ Carrie said loudly from the doorway, and I leaned back, feeling my cheeks heat. She wasn’t glaring – her face was carefully blank – but I got the impression that she wasn’t happy.

  Blake looked mildly exasperated, then shrugged.

  ‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said and got up.

  I concentrated on tying my hair back, taking much longer than necessary. The padded door swished shut.

  I took a deep breath of frigid air and stood up, preparing to go back in, when a gangly, flame-haired figure appeared on the path from the bridge over the creek.

  My skin tingled. I hesitated, wondering whether to play it cool and pretend I hadn’t seen him, but by then Mark was at the foot of the steps, looking up at me.

  ‘Hey, Spencer,’ he said. ‘What are you doing out here by yourself?’ His voice was light and friendly, but he was not smiling.

  I pointed at the noisy theatre. ‘I’m not exactly alone.’

  ‘Still,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not one of those guys who thinks a girl needs an escort everywhere she goes, are you?’ I asked. ‘Little bit sexist, Nolan.’

  His feathery eyebrows knit together and then smoothly relaxed. ‘Got me there,’ he said, and sat down, uninvited, at the bottom of the steps.

  I was still standing, but there wasn’t any question of going back inside now. I took a few steps down and sat behind him, politely tucking in my knees. ‘What about you? What are you doing here?’

  He waved at the university buildings across the creek. ‘Oh . . . studying. For the Odyssey essay.’

  I made a face. ‘Yeah, I haven’t started it yet. La Gribaldi’s gonna kick my ass.’ Something was tugging at the corner of my mind, demanding attention, making me vaguely uneasy. This was how yesterday’s conversation on the bus had started. But there was nothing about that conversation that could make me feel like this – we’d talked about procrastination and comics and it had gone really, really well.

  ‘What?’ I said, suddenly aware he’d asked me something.

  Mark smiled and repeated: ‘So you’re a theatre girl?’

  ‘Oh, no. No way. I’m a tae kwon do girl. They needed someone to choreograph the fights, and I guess I was the only sucker to say yes.’

  ‘Whoa, martial arts?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m a black belt, first dan.’

  ‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘You really are a superhero.’

  I grinned. ‘It’s not that impressive. But I like teaching. I used to assist Master Rosenberg-Katz at home.’

  He tucked his hair behind his ears. Something silver gleamed on his bony wrist, catching my eye, but he tugged the coat sleeve back down.

  ‘Tae kwon do,’ I said, and stopped. Did I really want to start talking about this?

  Mark’s eyes opened wide, inviting.


  ‘Well, the thing is,’ I said, hugging my knees, ‘my mum had cancer last year.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, looking blank. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘She’s fine now,’ I said hastily. ‘Or, you know, she’s in remission, you can never be sure, but for a while it looked as if she wasn’t going to be fine at all. The mastectomy surgery was really painful and the chemo took a lot out of her and – anyway, it was all pretty bad. And I sort of stopped. I didn’t – I had friends, and a guy who was sort of my boyfriend, but I didn’t really go out much because Mum needed help and stuff had to get done and after a while I stopped going out at all. The only thing I really did – outside school – was tae kwon do. My dad started going back to church, and he wanted me to come with him, but I couldn’t do that. I didn’t have any faith in it. I didn’t—’ I stuttered to a halt, suddenly realising that I was painting an entirely accurate picture of myself as a pathetic no-mates who’d lost her boyfriend and her entire social life.

  But Mark didn’t seem to notice that I was confessing to being a loser. ‘So you’re an atheist?’

  This was a much better direction for the conversation.

  ‘I’m agnostic, I guess. I’d believe if I had proof.’

  ‘Some people find faith comforting,’ he said.

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. ‘I know. It must be nice for them.’

  ‘You don’t believe in anything out of the ordinary? Ghosts?’

  I began to shake my head, then hesitated. ‘Well, I’ve never seen any. My grandmother said she saw ghosts all the time when she was a girl, but then she got married and had my dad, and they stopped showing themselves to her. But she believed in God too, so, I don’t know.’

  ‘What would you do?’ he asked. ‘If you found out the Greek gods or fauns or harpies or dryads were real?’

  I laughed. ‘Stay the hell out of their way, jeez. You know the stories. Nothing good ever happens to humans who get mixed up in that stuff.’

  ‘That’s sensible,’ he noted, the corner of his mouth twisting. ‘Anyway, sorry, go on. I didn’t mean to start an interrogation.’

  I hesitated, but he nodded encouragingly. ‘Well, actually, it’s kind of related. Master Rosenberg-Katz – she’s amazing, she’s a fourth dan – could see that I wasn’t doing well, so she invited me to assist with teaching, and she’d talk to me after classes about eum-yang.’