Creepy and Maud

by Dianne Touchell

  I read that Catherine the Great had a room full of dirty furniture she didn’t bother to dress. Nothing ambiguous about her coffee table—she had the naughty bits carved right on there. I guess she wasn’t into the slow reveal.

  Maud takes her mittens off for me today. She is sitting at that little table in front of her window and pulls them off, one at a time, slowly, and yes I feel like I’m peeking under a table skirt. I know she is doing it for me. She pulls them off from the top so the cuff slips uneasily over the heel of her hand, first revealing that knobbly little bone on the inside of her wrist, then that fat pad of taut muscle at the base of her thumb. The mittens slither over the rest of her hand fast. They aren’t those big woollen mittens you see people wearing when it’s really cold. They are made of thin grey cotton—the sort of material they use to make the gloves people in library archives wear. They probably make a breathy sound as she removes them. Like a shhhh. I’ve worn those library archive gloves and they feel quite nice. And they do breathe a bit when you slide them off.

  When the mittens are off, she flutters her fingers a bit. Then she quickly ties her hair into a ponytail. I’ve never seen her hair tied up before and I am disappointed. It’s not even as if she’s used a brush to smooth the hair back; she’s just bunched it at the nape of her neck and snapped a lacky band around it. It’s lumpy as cornrows against her scalp, and a couple of large bald spots are clearly visible. For some reason, I feel thwarted. We’ve been off to such a fine start and then this ponytail comes into play. It’s like I can’t see her anymore. Or, more likely, she isn’t allowing me to see her anymore.

  I think she is writing me a note, but when nothing appears in the window I realise she must be drawing. So the drawing materials are back, are they? Reward for mittens and ponytails? The drawing is a bit irritating, too. I’ve been pretty fucking supportive so far and feel like I should be getting some sort of reward for mittens and ponytails myself. I want to ask her when she’ll be back at school. I want to ask her to pull.

  When do we stop recognising each other? Watching Maud draw with her hair pulled back is like watching her through some sort of fortification. It isn’t her fault; she’s been dragged up the scarp against her will. But I still find myself feeling impatient with her. She isn’t herself. If this continues, the little bits of her that are still visible will start to be absorbed by the ponytail-mitten creature. My love won’t tolerate that. I do the only thing that makes any sense. I put the binoculars down and start pulling my own hair.

  She stops drawing as soon as she sees me. I can’t see her eyes really clearly, so I pick up the binoculars with one hand and keep pulling with the other. (If this relationship is to continue, I’m going to have to invest in lighter binoculars.) Now I can see her properly and I suddenly feel very sad. She looks different. How long has it been? A week of suspension so far? A week of full-time therapeutic intervention now that school isn’t a factor? She looks extinguished. I can’t think of any other word, and I know a lot of words. Extinguish (transitive verb): to put out something that is burning or giving off light. You know how if you stare at something long enough, your eyes crawl? I find myself staring at the top of her head because her face is too horrible. The good thing is that in letting myself go somewhere else in my head like that, the pain of pulling is somewhat diminished.

  I’m not crazy. I’m not going to take up pulling to facilitate our intimacy. This was an impulsive move on my part and I am already starting to regret it. And it’s actually hard to pull short hair. Can’t get enough purchase. I’ve always wanted long hair but maintain the regulation school length. Conformity is invisibility. Doesn’t Maud realise that? If she conforms, she will become invisible. Too small to see. She is shrinking already.

  I think she is going back to her drawing but then I get a response:

  —WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT?

  I had already decided on my reply:

  —Why do you do it?

  I have to admit I don’t really care why she does it. Asking someone why they do something is a waste of time. People don’t have reasons. We think we do, but we don’t. How many times have I sat in class watching a teacher ask someone why they’ve done something? As if cracking that one mystery will change something, or everything. The problem lies in the assumption of a reason in the first place. Even if they come up with a reason, it’s a lie. But that’s okay, because the lie is accepted and everyone can get on with things under the auspices of mutual delusion.

  I know Maud will come up with a reason, though. She’s probably been asked to come up with a lot of reasons in therapy. They don’t have to be real ones, just real enough ones. Ones that give other people a good grip, a place to start, a choice of extinguisher. Our Religious Studies teacher insists that identifying reasons is the short and narrow to instilling accountability. And they’re such a comfort to everyone. Maud is probably being forced to comfort all the people who should be comforting her. My poor Maud.

  She is taking a long time to answer. Is she on medication, too? Bloody hell. Maybe that horrible face she is wearing these days has less to do with a ponytail and more to do with valium. Do they give kids valium? She seems sluggish. Like Mr Thornton after morning tea. When she does respond, it isn’t a reason but a statement:

  —I DO NOT DO IT ANYMORE

  Good for her. Of course, it isn’t true but that’s okay. I decide I’d better help her out:

  —It makes you feel alive

  And right now you don’t even look alive, so I’m assuming you’re not feeling very lively, either. In fact, you look a bit dodgy to me. The longer fingernails are nice but you’ve already got one of those between your teeth! All that capricious loveliness of yours is going to give way to rehabilitated trite if you’re not careful. You are being diluted, reduced, shorn. Integrity is dependent upon duplicity. Are you chewing your cuticles now?

  Of course, I don’t write all this. I don’t have to. Maud pulls the lacky from her hair and shakes her hair out. Then she resumes her drawing. Within a few minutes, she is pursing her lips and blowing pulled hair off her page. Her face is starting to come back.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘Do you know,’ Peter asked, ‘why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories.’

  —J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904)

  Maud’s mum supervises the installation of pink venetian blinds at Maud’s window soon after it becomes obvious that Maud has been slipping out of her hobbles and is still pulling. Anyone would think they suspected me of having something to do with it. She pulls the Thomas the Tank Engine curtains off the curtain rod, then rolls them into a ball and stuffs them into a green rubbish bag. She rolls them up with that roly-poly arm action most commonly seen in old-person dancing, one forearm spinning around the other. Maud’s mum doesn’t look like she’s dancing, though. She moves with an angry economy, all sharp edges, actions that are probably making the air snap around her like a whip crack.

  It’s probably fair to assume Maud’s mum is irritated.

  I never see much of Maud’s mum. The last time I saw her, she was sobbing on her front steps. I certainly never see her in Maud’s bedroom, so I am surprised and apprehensive about this curtain thing. Maud sits on her bed, mittened and ponytailed, looking fidgety but resigned. I watch from further back in my room, where it’s darker. Don’t want Maud’s mum to see me and startle—she might scatter the herd. As it is, she keeps flicking her eyes towards my window. She’s on to us, of course. Either that or she has a tic I’ve never heard about. And why are venetian blinds called Venetian when they were invented by the Japanese?

  Once the blinds are up, they are pulled shut. That’s strange. Even with the Thomas the Tank Engine curtains closed, I could see something: the edges didn’t meet properly and Maud-shadow squeezed through the thin bits. These blinds snap shut like they are spring-loaded and I suddenly find myself brazening it out with a solid expanse of pink as formidable as an ice field. I check for chinks. By this time,
I am pressed against my own window: I keep bumping into the pane with the binoculars and hurting the bridge of my nose. I’m thinking that if the blinds are fitted into the window recess, there will have to be a little gap at the edges to allow for operating the damn things, but they aren’t; they are obviously fitted against Maud’s bedroom wall. They might as well have bricked her in.

  They’ve done studies on sensory deprivation. Interestingly, the results go two ways. It’s supposed to be relaxing for a time, but if you withdraw stimuli for too long you kick a person over into anxiety and depression. It’s only a hop, skip and jump from there to antisocial behaviour and hallucinations. I am finding it intolerable after five minutes. It isn’t that the immediate effect is unbearable; it’s the anticipation of the effect continuing indefinitely. My chest is trilling and my toes are clenching (I do that sometimes when I’m nervous) and I can feel myself getting angrier and angrier. All the things I detest about other people are weaving my insides into a fat knot. Love turning to anger. And I didn’t even see it coming. In that moment, I hate Maud as much as I love her. All of this because of pink venetian blinds. (They are quite an orangey pink, too, which may have something to do with it.)

  It crosses my mind that the venetian blinds might be part of a larger scale redecorating project. I check out the other windows, but there’s no sign of new treatments. No empty paint cans appear when the bins are taken up. I can’t see any activity suggestive of change in there. I can’t see anything at all. I’ve read that when people lose their sight, their other senses gain function in order to compensate. That isn’t happening to me. I can’t see. I can’t hear. I can’t speak. I decide to compensate in another way.

  I’m not sure how I make the leap from love-Maud-hate-Maud to bag-the-cat. But love is not rational or reasonable or logical. It is a bird’s nest made of capillary and nerve and dubious judgement. This isn’t about hurting Maud. I don’t want to hurt her, no matter how much she hurts me. Besides, I don’t think Sylvia means that much to her. But Sylvia means a lot to Maud’s mum and dad. For completely different reasons, of course. Maud’s mum feeds the cat, ergo she loves the cat. Limo-Li kicks the cat, ergo he hates the cat. I have a one-stone-two-birds situation here. It’s easy enough grabbing her. She likes to walk along the fence capping, back and forth, back and forth, gazing up at this little nest in the eaves above Maud’s bedroom. There’s a bird in the nest, just a little one, so I assume there are eggs, as well. Can you eat eggs like that? I know you can eat chook eggs and duck eggs and quail eggs. What about swallow eggs? Starling eggs? I think you can actually bird-proof your roof these days. Birds carry lice, you know. You’d want some sort of proof against that, I suppose.

  I watch Sylvia slink across the top of the fence for ages, planning my move. I don’t know much about cats but I have an inkling that one that is kicked on a regular basis is not going to be people friendly. Food is probably the best incentive. Will dog food prove a big enough temptation compared to the bird’s nest? I’m not going to go out and buy cat food. Dog food it is.

  I put a couple of spoonfuls of Tucker Time onto a saucer and realise my first mistake. Dobie Squires comes tearing into the kitchen, alerted by the fridge door opening, or the smell, or both. He starts whinnying and cavorting laps around my legs and all my shooshing and bugger-offs just seem to excite him more. Only a matter of time before I draw attention, at this rate. I have a deer-in-the-headlights moment until I remember the liver.

  Dad buys whole livers, bakes them, and cuts them into chunks as treats for Dobie Squires. He says it’s cheaper and better for him. My biggest fear has always been that Mum will work out that livers are even cheaper than sausages and we’ll all end up eating liver. A cat is sure to like liver better than dog food. I get a couple of chunks out of the fridge and put the saucer of dog food on the kitchen floor. Dobie Squires skids face first into the saucer, giving me just enough distraction time to bolt out the back door.

  I hadn’t realised just how ugly this cat is until I get up close. She is all bony angles in loose skin that drapes and sags like wet origami. There is something translucent about her. I can almost see her pulse. I approach with stealth. That’s a great word: stealth. Sly, furtive, covert. I decide to look it up in my Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM) when I get back to my room. Check out the origins of stealth. Sylvia is sitting on the fence capping, her tail perpendicular, her arse skin wilting over the side. I hold out a piece of liver pinched between two fingers. She stands up and arches, then rubbernecks towards my fingers. Licks. Licks again. I take a step forward. Another. Then I grab her.

  It occurs to me straight away that having had two pieces of liver in my hand, I should have given her the first piece to gain her trust, then used the second piece to lure her into my arms. I know immediately upon seizing her that the gung-ho approach I’ve favoured is probably a mistake. Suddenly Sylvia is all tooth, claw and bawl. I fist a swag of loose skin just below her nape (do hairless cats even have scruffs?), which leaves her legs free to spin like a fanbelt. Her claws shoot out like Stanley blades—I am so high on adrenalin by this stage that I don’t register the extent of my injuries. It’s the noise that scares me the most. Someone is bound to hear, but there is absolutely nothing I can do about it so I decide to run. Arms extended, marathon panting, I tear into the house and hit the stairs, Dobie Squires hightailing it right behind me in a hysteria usually reserved for Dad’s gitah. When I get to my room, I slam the door and pitch Sylvia across the room, actually thinking that if I kill her in the process I’ll simply bury her in the backyard with no regrets whatsoever. Bag the cat. What a stupid fucking idea.

  I haven’t killed her. She bolts under my bed and backs up into the corner by the wall. I have to get on all fours to see her. Her eyes are wide and she is breathing with her mouth open. I’ve never seen a cat breathing with its mouth open before. It is beyond fear. This is post-traumatic stress. I try talking to her (‘Sylvia, puss puss’) but she doesn’t know her name anymore. Now that my own fight – flight response is diminishing, I start to become aware of the scratches and bites blooming on my forearms. Blood is pooling in a pretty way. I tent a tissue over one finger and dab at one of the wounds. Can you get diseases from cats? What if it has eaten one of the lice-ridden birds in the eaves? I feel sort of stupid. And angry. Best leave her under the bed for now. It’ll be Savlon and long sleeves for me for the foreseeable future. All I can hope is that cats get Stockholm Syndrome.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Miss-ing-in-Ac-tion

  Mum has been looking everywhere for her. She has called and called and called. The name spits in my head for hours after Mum has gone to bed: Sylv- yah. Sylv- yah. Dad tries to comfort Mum because even though he does not like the cat that much, he does not like Mum to be upset, and I think Sylvia cost a lot of money. I like the cat. I like the smoothness of her. Not just her skin but the way she moves and hums and grooms herself. But mostly I like her skin. It looks like leather but feels like a fist full of talc.

  I think I know what has happened to her. It is probably not what happened. She was probably just hit by a car. But I have my suspicions. Snea-ky-sus-pi-cions. I have never told Nancy I like fives. My methods of self-soothing, as she calls them, have caused everyone enough worry. And I have to keep something for myself. Meth-ods-of-self-soo-thing. That is a six. When she says it three times, I think to myself: six-six-six. The number of the beast. She has crossed over. She does not say it three times out loud, but I know she says it in her head. I can tell by the way she looks at me.

  I hope Sylvia gets comfortable over there. That her allegiance changes and she forgets all about us.

  And I hope Mum never finds out. It would hurt her if she discovered Sylvia could survive, and survive well, away from her. I think she is so upset because she has already decided Sylvia is dead somewhere, and dead is good. Dead settles things neatly and Mum can grieve. If she thought for a second Sylvia was alive and well somewhere else, she would start
pulling her own hair out. Rather dead than happy without me. I am assuming Sylvia is alive, of course. He could have buried her in the backyard by now, for all I know.

  Suspension from school is boring. It sounds good but it is not. Not when there is nothing to do. I am miss-ing-in-ac-tion, like Sylv- yah. I think they think that if I do not have anything to do, I will be forced to be introspective. I am not sure about the whole inner life thing. Things get stuck in there. Like my curdled words. I can think and think something and all it does is turn off my ability to make decisions. The thinking itself becomes the thing, you see, not the called-for outcome that began the thinking in the first place. So I sit here, bored stiff, and there is no ending, no result to this prescribed thinking. Sort of self-defeating.