Only Ever Always

by Penni Russon

  ‘Let’s see if it works?’ I tell dog. Dog is too busy running all over, sniffing every little thing to answer. I give the music box one small wind. The key turns real easy, real nice in my finger and thumb. Dog barks as visible blobs of music squeeze out of the box and float up. Fat leaky bubbles, dripping silver oil. One brushes my skin. ‘Ouch!’ I say, and shake my hand, but the stinging doesn’t stop.

  When I look straight through the bubbles, I can see fairyland, though this time me and dog stay in this world. All the bubbles are drawn up to the second floor and in their wake a way up ripples into being, flickering against the air. ‘That’s called a staircase, that is,’ I tell dog. ‘You coming up? We better be quick. It don’t look too solid.’

  I run up the stairs that the music bubbles have left glimmering in their trail. The bubbles pop against the internal wall, the music is fading and the magic with it. Dog stands at the bottom of the staircase and whines. ‘Come on, dog, you heard Dolores. She said we had to stay together.’ Dog steps onto the staircase, but the staircase is already wavering as the bubbles drift away. ‘Come on, quick,’ I call. I remember Ole John and his shep. I whistle, long and loud. Dog runs up towards me. Stair by stair, the staircase vanishes behind dog as it runs up. But the staircase is vanishing from the top too, at my feet. ‘Jump!’ I shout when it’s near the top. Only three steps remain, hanging in the middle of space. It leaps over darkness and lands on its front legs, nearly slipping. It scrabbles up and I heave it, just as the music stops.

  We peer down at the candle we’ve left flickering downstairs. ‘Well, hopefully that trick’ll work again,’ I say. ‘It’s a long way down.’ I rub my arm. It’s raw and stinging from where the bubble grazed me.

  The floorboards at my feet is spongy, so I feel across with my feet and make sure to walk only where supporting beams are. ‘You follow right along behind me, dog,’ I say. ‘I aint nursing two patients.’ Dog’s good company. Even if it don’t talk back, the sound of my own voice makes me brave.

  We make our way like this, edging along, in the almost dark (morning’s closer, darkness is speckling, like it’s separating into dust), to the door of a locked upstairs room. I jiggle the handle and it won’t budge. I look round for something to bash against it, but I don’t know how I’m gonna do that when I have to balance where the stupid beams are.

  ‘Well I got the key. And I got a door. Now what?’ Dog looks at me as if my head’s stuffed with feathers. ‘I use the key to open the door? Now why didn’t I think of that?’ I turn the key in the music box, winding it round and round this time. There’s bubbles and bubbles this time, the music glides out of the box and sticks to the door, and the door shimmers toxic silver. Behind me is still rubble and dust. I try the handle again, and it burns at my skin. I pull my hand away. I breathe and try a third time. It feels like my skin is blistering with that poisonous music, but I clench my teeth. The handle slips round easy enough.

  ‘Come on, dog, you’re with me, right?’ I reach down and gently squeeze its neck scruff. ‘Well yeah, it’s gonna hurt. Course it is. Gonna hurt worse than any of them greasy bubbles. But we gotta do this. We aint got no choices now.’

  And I push open that silver door, my eyes squeezed tight, and step inside.

  Claire feels the breach like the opening of a wound: flesh separating to let the air in (and with it the poisons and scents of the world), and to let the insides leak out (bad blood and good, mingled, indivisible).

  Clara enters and the dream enters. Claire’s dream expands so she is also dreaming herself. She is dreaming a shadow of herself, who is dreaming.

  The music that Clara carries, that stepped her from one world into another, threatens the borders of Claire, oozing both in and out of the dream – two musics, rising with violence to meet each other. Clara steps towards Claire and almost touches her hair. And Claire could wake now, could rise with violence or hope or love, to meet herself, her other. Could wake, couldn’t she? And meet Clara in the eye. If she chose.

  The dog is also there. The dog is the reallest thing in the room. It is the dog that stops Claire leaking into Clara, or Clara drifting into Claire.

  Clara has breached the divide, the borders of dreaming, and deep inside her dream Claire hopes that whatever happens in the dream happens here too. If Clara saves Andrew, then Charlie might also be saved. So Claire plays her small part, and stays steadfastly asleep, however tempting it is to wake herself, to step out of the dream and into one world or another or both, straddling the gap, like Clara.

  It’s unnatural how deeply she sleeps. I aint never seen anyone sleep like that, so still and wax, like a crumble with glass eyes – only I can’t see her eyes, can I, cause she’s sleeping. Is this how they sleep in fairyland? Up high off the floor, atop a soft thing only made for sleeping in. All rumpled in pillows and blankets, all buried, except for her nose to breathe through, except for her streaming hair. I want to touch her hair, but when I reach towards her the dog wuffles. She don’t wake or nothing, but I pull away all the same.

  I press my finger to my lips.

  ‘Shut-mouthed,’ I whisper.

  I look round the room. What a lot of surfaces she’s got, what a lot of things. Everything laid out as if it were precious, as if it were treasure. My eyes can’t stick to any of it, it’s like market when it’s all laid out, but there aint nothing you want. None of it aint worth looking at, not properly. Everything is treasure and nothing is, that’s what Andrew tells times he’s joined me at market.

  There aint medicine here. She’s sleeping, but look at her, she’s pink-mouthed and damp-lashed, soft-cheeked and gentle-breathed. She aint sick. In fact she’s so healthy it seems she’s got her own light hazing off her, and I marvel at this till I see it’s from the window behind her that light enters the room.

  I push back the window hangings. There’s baubles of light threaded all up and down the world, like giant twinkly candles, warm and yellow. I could stand here forever, glassed in, watching the bluish night spreading out. My bones are turning to liquid. But I can’t stop.

  ‘I can’t stop,’ I say to dog. It’s glad about that. It wants to go out. It’s an outside dog, it is. It don’t belong in no queenly room, with all this crowding of things. It whines and pads back to the doorway, now just a dark hole, the silver music all dried up.

  ‘That way?’ I ask it. ‘How do we know it won’t just take us back?’ Dog walks through the hole and stands on the other side. I clear a space on one of them surfaces and put the music crumble onto it. ‘It’s safer here,’ I tell dog. My arms float free without it, I been hugging that thing so tight.

  Dog leads me down a hallway, made of long lines. Rooms – whole rooms, nothing broken – come off one side and the other. I stop at one of them. The door is half open so one space tiptoes into another. I tremble. There is someone deep and musky breathing sleep in there. Someone powerful and gentle just the same.

  Dog barks again.

  ‘Shut it,’ I hiss, but I follow. Oh the stairs, how substantial they feel beneath our feet, how whole and good. Each one is its own territory stepping down to become another and then another. How neatly they lock together, like mechanical insides, as though they are the workings for the house.

  Dog seems to know where it’s going. It’ll sniff ’em out, Dolores said. So I follow it, and when it scratches at the front door I open it wide.

  Out. The night is airy blue and there’s those yellow globes of light and high high high in the stretched out sky there’s pricks of white. The air is wet with chill. Dog is running round sniffing and weeing and having itself a fine time.

  ‘Where do we go now, dog?’ I hiss.

  Dog takes one last sniff, then trots off. I jump over a groomed strip of vegetable, from one place to the next, and follow him. It’s snuffling its nose deep into some pot of something, it scrapes with its paw, until I take over and I uncover
it. A key glints in the black soil. I scrape the dirt from its ridges and ease it into the silver lock and turn it.

  Dog sits on the threshold. I grab its scruff. ‘Come on.’ But it won’t budge. I step in alone. I’ll have to sniff ’em out myself. I follow my nose, past one open door, to another.

  Wafting out of this room is two smells at once, one on top of the other. One is high and sharp, a clean smell what Andrew brings back with him from Doctor’s. The other is flat and soiled and I can taste it in my throat. It’s the smell of a body gone bad. It’s the smell of Andrew as he is now, the smell of sickness and oozings and death.

  I creep in.

  Under the heavy pile of blankets is a human lump, living and dying at the same time.

  I edge along the bed. This aint a room of things. There’s one table with a smattering of what’s needed by someone too gone to want, a glass of water for sipping and . . . my hand reaches forwards and grabs a squatting white bottle. Medicine. I knock the glass of water to the floor.

  The human thing sits up. She grips my wrist in a bony claw. She looks right at me, but she doesn’t see me. She aint awake, or sleeping. She’s dreaming, but I’m her dream. She’s reached out to take dreaming by the wrist, to rattle a dream’s bones.

  ‘Scratched!’ she shrieks. ‘Scratched! Scratched! Scratched!’

  I pull my wrist free and run. The medicine rattles in its bottle. I run like there’s Raiders chasing me, and Doctor’s gang and screws and all, like they’re all on my tail.

  ‘Dog!’ I hiss into the garden air, as loud as I can let, but dog’s gone. ‘Dog! Dog!’

  I whirl round. I grieve after it, cold air howls in the hollowness of me, but dog’s gone. A sudden yellow light opens out into the night. I aint got time. I say it. ‘I aint got time for this, dog.’ But it don’t come bounding out of the shadows. Dog’s gone.

  I run up them stairs: I don’t care how neatly put together they are, how they is made of straight lines like the insides of the music box. I got what I wanted, didn’t I? Dog’s better off here, than scrounging after me, and I shut my heart to the grief of losing it. There is noises downstairs, a flurry of rush in the night, a voice like Dolores, but soft and frightened, questioning the darkness.

  ‘Hello? Are you there? Who’s there? Who’s there?’ Who who, like a nightwing hunting in the river’s overgrowth.

  As I pause outside the half-open door, I hear something stir. Whatever breathed deep in there is awake now, and about to rise and discover me. I want to be discovered – half – I want my knees to give in and collapse beneath me. I want whatever gentle, powerful thing dwells in that darkness to carry me down. But Andrew. Andrew.

  I scuttle back to the girl’s room, and gently click the latch into place, and lean against her door, air scraping my lungs.

  I pick up the music box. It’s heavier’n afore. I take it over to the windowlight and look deep into the box and, by some hexery, it’s fixed. The girl in there, in that world of glass, she aint alone no more. She’s still dancing, but she’s got a partner – a gentleman mouse, if you please! I seen such things in the treasures: stories Andrew makes for me. He is dressed up nice and she is smiling. He looks fine and straight in his suit. There’s a piece of card with paintings on it, and it’s of tables laid with food and animals dressed up like people.

  Christmas is here, I tell Andrew.

  Andrew doesn’t like the treasures with animals in them dressed up foolish to look like people, but I do. I think I know what it feels like to be a mouse, small and creeping, belly to the ground.

  It aint a hex. This is the thing what belongs here, in this world. The same as mine, but whole, and mine is still where I left it. I am torn into pieces by wanting. I want to slip this whole one down my throat and fill myself with it, fill myself rounder and rounder and keep it for always. For ever always.

  I wind the key and the music pours out, invisible pinpricks of sound. Downstairs, is Andrew stirring? I can hear music, Clara.

  I put it back, gently so as not to wake her. I look at her again and this time I see. I recognise. For everything what’s broken in my world there’s one what’s whole here. Even girls. Even me. She is me, in this world, soaped glossy clean, sweet-scented and cream-skinned.

  I pick up my own globe, the one what’s broke. I turn the key. My tears are silver and they sting. And then wanting girdles me, I can’t breathe for it. The only thing that will set my breath to rights is thieving – just this one thing, this one small thing in all her world of things. Surely that won’t cost me extra. The medicine’s for Andrew, so isn’t it fair that I take something for me? When the silver door appears, I scoop up her music box, so I have what’s whole and she has what’s broke, and I push myself gasping through the poisonous film that separates one world from the next, and I don’t feel a thing. I am glutted full.

  Claire stirs and opens her eyes.

  She has never seen music before, only heard it. Now, still thick with sleep, in a waking dream, she wonders at the music-box music shimmering against her open door. And she is surprised that it looks exactly as she would expect music to look. This music anyway. Some music would look more like insects and some like clockwork and some would be deep and brown like a wood full of trees. But this music looks exactly as it should, liquid silver and iridescent, beautiful and menacing.

  She sits up. The dream is fading, she remembers so little, but she knows something important has been lost, has been taken behind the silver curtain. She is seized by the knowledge that she must follow, to retrieve it. As the last note fades she stands suddenly and thrusts herself through the fading film of music, only to find herself, disappointingly, merely on the other side of her own doorway, not transported at all. She feels a sharp wrench of loss. At first she thinks it is the half-forgotten dream she mourns, but then she remembers, Charlie. Her eyes thick with sleep and salt, she pads down the blurred hallway, sliding her hand along the wall.

  From the landing she looks down on her parents. Her mother is sitting on the floor, leaning against the front door, her head in her hands. Claire’s father sits on the middle step, hunched. She can’t see his face, nor hear a sound, but his shoulders jerk as they rise and fall.

  She turns and runs on tiptoe back to her room. She throws herself onto the bed, burying herself under the covers, leaving only a crack through which to breathe. She squeezes her eyes closed. And: this is the dream, she wills desperately. The dream girl. She is real and she has made phantoms of us all – me, Mum, Dad, Pia, Charlie.

  Suddenly the dream floods back, and she remembers it all – Clara, Andrew, Groom, Doctor, the Velvet Lady. If Claire can dream herself back there, and if Andrew can be made to live, then surely, her dream-addled brain tells her, Charlie can also live. The twin worlds will steady on their joint axis, sharing the same dream. Peacefulness will be restored.

  Charlie, she thinks.

  She plunges back into sleep.

  The last of the music drains away. Fairyland is gone and I’m back in the broken house in the broken city, and there’s a colourless sky curving over me like a great glass globe, holding the dark in. Fairyland’s what’s real, I think. Fairyland is real, and here is what’s made up.

  I peer into the wholeness of the box. As the fairyland behind me fades, it feels like this box has schemed itself into being, into wholeness. Has built itself up out of dust, from my wishes and wants. And now it’s the music box what’s wanting: it wants to be feasted upon. It demands me to look and look and look forever. It wants to fix me in its gaze, until I starve for everything but it. It’s not gentle with its wanting. It’s sharp and painful and hot, tearing at me like a rusted nail shreds at skin.

  And the cruellest thing is I will have to leave it behind. I will have to leave it here, at the edge of my world, right in the place where the door opened, because it cannot come any further on the journey with me.


  I peer down through the spaces in the floor into the murky dark. There’s no solid staircase here, all fit together, all smart and clean. I have to jump, or climb, or fall – and without breaking my neck. I can’t do it with a music box in my arms. What is the point of its wholeness if I break it into bits or crush it with my own self? I hover over it, then turn, hardening myself against the pain of longing. I ignore a tear that streaks down my cheek. I am cheated, rooked all over again. I want the music box. My want for it fills me to the very ends of my self. But I hate it too, I hate it with blinding white. And I am sorry for it because of how much I hate it, how much I love it.

  The door to fairyland is shut fast. I place the music box careful just outside. As I place it down, a few stray notes of music tinkles out, but there aint no bubbles now, just the plinks and groans of the mechanism winding down. I hover over it for a beating of my heart, or two, then I turn away. I can have the music box and nothing. Stay up here, having the music box to the end of days. Or I can take these pills and go and save Andrew. Isn’t that what the music box were for?

  My arms are aching and empty, my heart a whirl. I tiptoe along the joists again; the house’s skeleton cricks and cracks under the weight of me. Beneath me is darkness and shadow and gloom.

  ‘There she is,’ a voice from below floats up. ‘About time too. Well, Salvador. Catch her. Use your girth. That’s what you’re for.’

  I peer down. It’s Dolores. From up here I can see a glittering bald spot on the top of Salvador’s greased up head. His head is small but the rest of him is giant.

  ‘Come on, Salvador. This one thing and your debt is paid in full. You can have your name back, fair and square. Consider yourself lucky.’