by Penni Russon
Claire steps over the thread-worn blanket and half-cakes of soap covered in grime, and sits beside Mudda Meggsy. Mudda Meggsy lowers her voice, ‘I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you should not be coming here.’
Claire peers around for the dog. Mudda Meggsy has obviously mistaken her for Clara, thinking she’s skedaddled from Boedica.
‘You aint Clara,’ Mudda Meggsy says, smiling her unlovely smile at passing customers. ‘I got two eyes. You be getting back where you from, quicksmart. Or you get lost here, and that aint good for no one, not for you, nor Clara, nor the balancing up of this and that. When things tip, they slide.’
That rumble passes through the air again, but this time it’s closer, like the plane has dropped altitude.
‘What do I care what happens to Clara? She stole something of mine. She made the world unstuck.’
‘Works the same bothways. You can’t come here ’cept by the very deepness of your wanting. You wanted yourself here, sure as mud. And you can want yourself back again, quicksmart.’
Claire isn’t sure that wanting is something she can control. It’s like appetite. The only way to control it is to feed it. And she can’t have the only thing she really wants, Charlie alive again. Though, she muses, if she can’t have that, she wants her music box back. Is that the desire that’s brought her here? But she knows where the box is, doesn’t she? She knows it sits an arm’s reach – a world away – from her own bedroom door.
Claire walks around the market. Most of the market-goers regard her as neither here nor there, not worth glancing at twice. There are some who confuse her for Clara and make fun of her smoothed hair and tidy manner or – if they know Clara as Lady Boedica’s – watch from a distance and puzzle at the Lady’s new pet being let loose to wander, glancing about to see if someone has it tamed.
But still there are others who, like Mudda Meggsy, recognise Claire. A surprising number of them, she notices, who recoil with disgust and fear, or frown with anger at her carelessness, as if it is where she hails from that is the bad place and Sedge that is all innocence and safety. Whenever one of the rumbles come – so loud now they seem to clatter the teeth – it is Claire these ones look to, as though she is dragging that rumbling in her wake, though she has no idea what it could be.
Finally Claire spies the dirty matted rump of the dog ahead. Finding a gap in the crowds she shoves her way towards it. But again it slithers away.
There are the two sisters – sweet and sour – clutching each other as they basket their wares, selling and swapping the stitchings they’ve made. They see Claire and their faces diverge. The pretty one thinks, clear as day, you are Clara escaped. She smiles widely, as if her lips can’t help but stretch, though Claire can see she is furious beneath. The other recognises, sees right through Claire’s skin, and she frowns, but is more curious than anything else.
‘Clara!’ says Aily.
‘That’s never Clara,’ Greya assures. ‘Didn’t you leave her with Fat Aitch not an hour before this one? As if he would ever let her slipper away. No this is,’ she eyes Claire, as if to read her identity in her face, ‘someone else.’
‘Claire,’ Claire says, for isn’t that her name? Isn’t it? She finds she can only just capture the shape of it. It seems all of a sudden unfinished, ending in air.
Aily’s smile widens, all spleen. ‘You must be sisters then,’ she says, ‘for you are alike as eggs, though not so differently named as sisters mostly are.’
‘Here,’ says Greya, pushing her own basket into Aily’s hands. ‘You do the offering and milktongue, you’re always better at it than I.’
Aily smiles and smiles, her eyebrows raised, staring her sister down, then takes the basket and walks a little ahead, fluttering and flirting with women and men, old and young, but her eyes flicker constantly to check Greya is close.
‘You should not be here,’ Greya hisses.
‘I didn’t choose to come. The dog brought me,’ Claire protests, but she thinks of Mudda Meggsy, who said she had wished herself here. ‘At least, I think it was the dog.’
‘A dog, is it?’ says Greya. ‘A stray? That’d be right. This smells ripe of dog.’
‘Clara left this behind. In my . . . place.’ Claire tugs the backpack off and opens it, showing Greya the hated box. ‘And instead she took mine and I want it. I want it back.’
Greya groans and pushes the backpack away. ‘Put it away, you galumph. I wish I’d never seen it. I aint getting involved, this is nothing to me. I can see the wrongness of you, it makes me sick to look at you, like a broken leg all twisted the wrong way.’
‘Well, I can’t help it! I need the dog to get me home, and even then I don’t know if it’s the dog alone that makes it work.’
The ground groans and shudders. Marketeers gather their goods closer and customers hurry to finish their transactions.
Aily marches over. ‘We gotta go back. You got watching work to do this night.’ She takes Greya’s arm jealously.
‘In a minute,’ says Greya, shrugging her lightly away. ‘We’re all but finished here, my Aily. Go on. Find a one more wants buying, or ten.’
Aily stalks off, sunshine and light on her face, a storm brewing beneath.
Greya turns on Claire. ‘You find that dog, you get yourself back. You buy that dog a meatstick and a collar and give that dog a name to call it by. Own that dog and make it stay.’
‘I’m not going,’ Claire says. She crosses her arms. ‘Not until I get my music box back.’
‘Course you’re going. There aint no way in life you can stop here. It’ll pull you all to pieces.’ Greya laughs suddenly, still scowling. ‘You look just like your other one, all chin.’
‘She’s not me. I’m not her. She is nothing to me.’
‘You cannot put yourself to rights without her,’ Greya muses. ‘But don’t be thinking to rescue her, Lady would only add you to her set.’
‘Why would I do that?’ Claire snaps. ‘She’s just a thing I’ve dreamed, and so are you, so is it all! Sedge is a dream, it was invented in my head, and grew from me, every bit of it.’ She wants to wound Greya, but Greya shrugs. Despite Dolores’s warning, she doesn’t seem to care about being called a dream.
‘Then it is you what dreamed your music box broke.’
And then bouncing off the tops of the heads of the marketeers, a name echoes, originating from here, the market place, but echoing all around the great city of Sedge: Claire! Claire! A name all would hear: Boedica, Dolores and her mother, Groom, the cowardly Ketch. Even Clara, distant, indifferent Clara, princess of the keep, would hear it, bouncing around the sheltering stone walls.
Each call is a terrible cymbal crash in the sky and the whole market flinches at the unearthly sound. The name is strange even to Claire’s own ear, it sounds unfinished in this place. She doesn’t want to own it yet, but she knows it is trying to claim her. Metal ghosts with headlight eyes flicker briefly into space and then vanish.
Greya holds Claire’s eyes, despite the rush of wind around them, despite the fact that the world is caving in. ‘I don’t think you wanted yourself here for the music box at all,’ Greya accuses. ‘I think this is what you wanted.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘A broken world for a broken girl.’
Aily comes back and presses her fingernails into Greya’s arm, grinning with fear. ‘Come on, sister.’
Claire grabs Greya’s other arm trying to hold herself in Sedge and Aily tugs back, wrenching Greya free. The sisters are lost in the quickening crowd, but not so hopelessly lost as Claire.
Claire can feel the pull Greya spoke of (she’s felt it all along), only now it’s a huge physical yank, like the market place is contracting around her to propel her out. She goes down on all fours, because it hurts, and because Greya is right, she is broken.
The place settles to rights around you, the car park, the cars, the supermarket, the pearly blue winter sky, the cold seeping out of the ground, and high above a flock of black birds making shapes out of themselves. Kneeling between parked cars, you bury your face in the dog, which smells of Sedge. The music box is lost, and Charlie is lost, and you are lost.
But the dog is real against you, and you feel something for the dog. You want it, is what you feel. You want to have it and keep it. You want it to be your dog, and you want it to own you back.
You hear your mother calling desperately, ‘Claire Claire Claire!’
You call back, ‘I’m here!’ because the sound of her voice cracking apart with terror is unbearable. She calls again, you call back, and she follows the sound of your voice to find you.
‘For god’s sake, I’ve been calling and calling, why didn’t you answer me before?’
‘I’ve found a dog.’
‘Well, don’t touch it, you don’t know where it’s been.’
‘I want it.’
‘Claire, somebody must own it.’
‘No, they don’t. It’s a stray. Look no collar.’
‘Then we’ll call the Pound.’
‘They’ll lock it up! They’ll put it down! Please, can’t we take it home?’
‘Claire. When things have settled, when everything’s over and done with . . .’
‘Settled?’ you ask, without expression. You are curious to know. ‘When will it be settled? When will it be done with?’
‘Claire, you’re asking too much. This isn’t the right time . . . this isn’t the day for —’
‘This is the time. This is the only time. This is the right dog.’
Mum sighs. ‘That creature is not getting into our car. We’ll never get rid of the smell.’
‘Fine. I’ll walk home.’
Mum hugs herself and, surprising you, she nods. You think she looks small and far away.
‘I’ll get a tin of dogfood,’ Mum says.
‘And a collar? And its own bowl?’
‘Don’t push your luck, Claire. I haven’t said we can keep it.’
‘I know.’ But you allow yourself a small victorious smile, just the same.
You walk home through the forgiving pale light of the winter afternoon, taking your time about it, because it is the first time you have walked a dog, and you only wish you had waited for Mum to buy a collar and a lead, because you are nervous that at any point it will take off, towards the river, or slip through a dog-sized loopway into Sedge and be lost.
You lock the dog in the backyard, and watch it run twitching from shrub to tree to fence post and feast on the smells. It lies down on the grass, rolls over, rubs the smell of your place onto itself. It comes to you and you wrap your arms around it and whisper into its neck.
‘Sandy? Jim? A plain name, you aren’t a fancy dog. But you have a little music in you, so not too plain. Not Rover. No, not Jim. It has to be perfect.’
You know Mum will not have it in the house, but you sneak it inside to find Dad and show him your dog. He is sitting on the piano stool and Pia on the couch. You want to nestle beside her, under the crook of her arm, and press your head to her belly to listen to the rippling waterdance of the baby. But you see Dad has the phone in his hands, and Pia is fingering through an address book. She closes her eyes for a minute.
‘Do you want a break?’ Dad asks.
Pia shakes her head. She puts her finger on another number, and passes it to Dad, who makes the call. To tell everyone the world has been remade. Broken and put together again, but put together badly, because there is no Charlie in it.
You back out of the room before the person on the other end can answer. Before they can all agree to call this a world, regardless, before life begins the dull machinery of getting on with things, after the event, after Charlie, ex post facto.
The dog baulks at the bottom of the stairs, sitting on its rump. Softly you cajole, beg, entreat, wishing you had a name to call it by. Eventually you give it a gentle shove from behind and up it goes, following the residual scent trail of its own pungency, into your bedroom. You take out the broken music box and hold it, and once again you hum that creaking tune.
The dog paces wildly in your room, knocking things from the shelf with its great, worried, beating tail. It whimpers. You keep humming, staring at the door, behind – or within – which is another door, a door that leads back to Sedge.
You can’t help the longing that assails you, for the music box that was yours. For Charlie. Oh, you know Charlie is gone. You know nothing will restore him. But you want to hold on tight to the idea of Charlie, you want to conjure him every night in your dreams.
You thought you knew the rules of passage from this world to the next. You thought you had it all worked out: the dog, the music box, the tune. You thought you could bend Sedge to your will too, but you can’t. You can’t.
Try as you might, you cannot make your own dreams.
Suddenly the dog growls at you, showing the whites of its eyes, curling a lip to bare a broken tooth. You recoil, alarmed. You realise, all at once, what you have done, bringing something wild, something untamed into your room, something with viciousness in its heart as well as faithfulness. And who is it faithful to?
The dog barks, and the sound, rich and guttural, threatens to tear apart the quiet house. You edge past the dog and open your bedroom door. It follows you back downstairs. You cannot help thinking of those yellow teeth snapping at your ankles, but the dog is docile and obedient, as if the growl never happened. When it gets outside it breaks into a hopeful, lopsided gallop, caught short by the borders of the fence. Quivering it sniffs the boundaries of the garden and you watch it go round and round, trampling plants, threading its way through the winter-flowering creeper, with its tremulous purple flowers.
Finally it lays itself down at the back gate, its nose wedged into the gap underneath, its body still quivering, as if it is inhaling the tantalising scents of delicious, sweet freedom and suddenly, with sharp almost unbearable remorse you think of Clara, the stale air she breathes, trapped in the stony chambers of Boedica’s wanting heart.
Remember. The music box always had an eccentric habit: a slight change in the atmosphere, or perhaps the faintest breath of wind, a sharp step in the hall outside, or even the breeze of a mouse brushing past the bookshelf . . . and a surge of music will pour out, as if it has been wound anew.
Sometimes, when you were little and you couldn’t sleep, your mother would lie beside you on hot summer nights and together you would listen to the music box, and feel haunted by it, the eerie music tumbling across the room and along the hallway in the dark, quiet house. She would tell you of that moment in the hospital bed, holding you, her baby girl, for the very first time, gazing down at you with a fierce, devotional hunger, and how her little brother Charlie, your uncle – Charlie, who could charm his way past any midwife or obstetrician, despite the fact that you hadn’t even left the labour room yet – burst into the room, breathing heavily, shocked into silence at the sight of you, the music box tucked under his arm suddenly coming to life, to everyone’s surprise but yours, for in this world everything was new, all colour and light and agitation, and what use had you yet for astonishment?
Night is fallen. Sedge is far away. But as you fall towards sleep, a burst of music lifts you from yourself. You are Claire and you are not Claire, a pale ghost of yourself, adrift. You look down and see the empty body you have left behind, weighted to the bed. This is the music of Charlie, carrying you, bearing you upwards. It is almost as though you are carried by Charlie, h
e is holding on to the very lightness of you.
You drift through the rooms of your own house, over the bodies of your sleeping parents, the shape of them, each alone in their dreaming, but entwined on the island of their shared bed, as if carrying each other.
You are propelled over the darkness of Pia. She sprawls on the bed, her nightie stretched tight over her belly, her leg on a pillow, her arm stretched out into empty space. The music wants you to linger here, to watch her sleep, but it is too intimate. You urge yourself onwards, dreaming yourself outside, pushing against the music’s tidal surge.
The dog is asleep and dreaming too, whimpering and twitching. You rise up, over the house and look down on the roof that holds them all in, those dreamers.
And you see Sedge and your own place hastily pinned together, one on top of the other, like a skirt waiting to be sewn, raw unfinished ends and loose threads, turned inside out to reveal only the drab underside of the vivid print.
You long for the music box – your very own thing – and with a ghost’s long-wanting arms you reach down towards it, but there is too much momentum, you are whisked and whirled, swept, eddied. You see broken buildings, teeming with wild cats and Raiders and dogs in the streets, and you swear you see Dolores, beetling under her hat from one shadow to the next. You drift over Doctor’s and see Ketch on the doorstep, mucking out a bucket of black slime. You see the night markets, the thin curls of smoke, hear the quickening tempo of drums, and you hover, darkly curious about bursting time. But the music knows it’s not for you, and hurries you along on a warm current of air.
You lift higher and from far above you see Groom, a small figure in the laneways between old factories and warehouses, waiting, his shoulders hunched over, kicking up the last dregs of hope with every dragging step. You are half in love with Groom yourself, and you want to breeze right through the flesh of him, but you can’t linger, for you know where you’re heading now.