Ballad for a Mad Girl

by Vikki Wakefield

  I roll over. I want to be closer to Dad and his snores. I know he’ll only shoo me away and tell me I’m too old to behave like this, if he even wakes at all. I want to call for Diesel but he’ll only come as far as the third-to-bottom step now.

  The tank filter stutters and stops working. The sudden quiet is unnerving.

  I get up and reach for the power cord. It’s still connected, switched on at the wall. Waldorf appears to be sleeping. Statler has crawled between the side of the tank and the filter, possibly blocking the airflow. I remove the lid and slide my hand along the glass to dislodge him. He resists, moving deeper into the space behind the filter. I plunge my arm into the water, up to the elbow, and my finger brushes Statler’s cold skin. A jarring pulse surges up to my shoulder and into my jawbone. I clench my teeth and yank my arm away, sloshing water over the floor.

  I look down. I’m standing in a puddle.

  In the corner, the lamp flickers and fades, only to burn again with a hot brightness—too bright for a forty-watt globe. I launch myself across the room and onto the bed, shuddering and panting. I clutch my pillow for protection and watch as the puddle grows, creeping in a perfect circle, as if the water is being drawn from beneath the floorboards. It’s bottomless as a well and inky, like old blood. The patch of light on the floor begins to move, as if time is in fast motion; the reflection travels metres in seconds, coming to rest in the centre of the puddle. Time stops. The water is no longer black but illuminated, with the rippling image of a white-painted window.

  I swing my legs over the side of the bed, keeping my toes away from the water. I have to fight the urge to run downstairs. There’s a snuffling, scraping sound. I muffle my breathing with the pillow and try to pinpoint where it’s coming from.

  The hallway. Near the stairs. Diesel? It can’t be Diesel.

  The light from the lamp takes the edge off the darkness, but not enough to carry to the top of the stairwell. I press up against the headboard. Whatever it is, its breathing is deep and laboured, and it’s getting closer. Now I can see a pixelated shadow, low, crawling, and when it reaches the half-light I make out the shape of an arm flung wide, slapping down with a thud, fingers grasping at the carpet. Then the other arm, stroking like a swimmer’s—clutch, pull, drag, clutch, pull, drag.

  I let out a hysterical shriek. The thing stops moving. Downstairs, Diesel barks, and the thing lifts its head. In the darkness it looks at me; faceless, it looks right at me.

  Her. It. She?

  I keep still, holding tight to the hope that she can’t hurt me—willing her to stop, trying to force her out of my head. I squeeze my eyes shut and hold my breath until my heartbeat slows and I grow dizzy. I tip sideways and curl into a ball.

  Let me sleep. Please, let me sleep.

  I hear the reply, clear as a loud whisper: You’re not listening.

  And she waits.

  My skin crawls and itches all over; my fear smells like sour sweat and rusty blades. I open my eyes. The sheets are twisted into knots and I’ve left muddied marks on my pillow. But over the screeching in my ears and the drumbeat in my chest, I’m struck by the strangely calm realisation that I’ve been going about this the wrong way: ignoring her will only feed her hate, make her stronger, stretch my skin thinner, keep me awake until I can’t function well enough to remember to breathe.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  The lamplight fades to a gentle glow. The well has shrunk to a puddle, my wet footprints next to it. Statler drifts to the bottom of the tank and the filter begins to hum like a lullaby; the hallway is empty, bathed in grey light. When I look out the window, Diesel is doing his morning business on the council strip, and the sky to the east is streaked with pink.

  On Thursday, I leave the house after Dad and Cody have gone, just before eight.

  I slip on my sunglasses and set off in the direction of Davey Street with a litre bottle of frozen water and a packed lunch strapped to the back of my bike. It might be a long wait for the catalogue girl. I have fear, curiosity and the usual hateful thoughts, but no plan.

  Last night, Diesel started howling. He howled for a solid minute, on the hour, every hour, and Dad and Cody took turns getting up to yell at him. They tried to drag him outside, but he wouldn’t budge from the stairs. Dad said he could probably hear sirens, but I know an old dog who’s never howled in his life doesn’t teach himself a new trick like this. He still won’t come all the way upstairs, but he’s made it to the sixth step. He lies with his chin on his paws and watches the space above, like it’s the entrance to a tunnel and a fox is holed up inside.

  I wonder if he can see her. I trust him to let me know when she’s near. I still don’t trust him not to bite.

  I pedal south. It’s overcast and a warm northerly carries clouds of topsoil from the plains, raining it down onto houses and parked cars like a dusting of cinnamon sugar. Dad says things are starting to go bad: it’ll be a cold, dry winter. Mum used to call him the canary in the coal mine—if Dad predicted a bad season, that meant the whole of Swanston would soon be in a rotten mood. If she could see us now she would know that Dad’s bad mood has hung around since she’s been gone. It has nothing to do with the weather.

  I pass junk food alley—McDonald’s, KFC, Subway and Pizza Hut on opposite corners of the Murray Street intersection—and shoot through the laneway behind the BP service station at the last second to avoid a group of Hearts hanging around in the car park. When we lived on the farm, I could go the whole holidays without seeing anyone from school except my friends. Here, every exit is guarded, and every route requires a detour to avoid passing the shrine.

  When I think about Mum, I remember her failings. Her cooking was terrible: she’d ruin a hundred different recipes rather than perfect one; we’d choke on charcoal or raw fish and have to order takeaway. Dad said she made us kids tough by trying to kill us, regularly, either through her cooking, her lapses in concentration (like driving Cody around in an unstrapped baby capsule for the first two months of his life) or her homemade homework experiments, including the volcanic eruption that permanently damaged my left eye. She had the kind of manic energy that made people feel guilty for sitting still—she ran like a demon every night after dinner, refusing to believe anything bad could happen to her on a deserted road late at night. She went out of her way to break the rules: serving roast beef on Good Friday, granting Cody and me four free-choice days off school each term, and marrying my dad, a Swampie, when she was a Heart. She talked to strangers, made everyone’s business her own, and lived like there were no consequences.

  It’s as if she travelled through life trying to be the opposite of who she was born to be.

  I think that’s what hurts most: she was minding her own business, standing on the corner, a shopping bag in each hand, waiting for the pedestrian lights to turn green. The trailer cut across the footpath when the truck driver misjudged his turn.

  Dad read us the findings: the judge stopped short of calling it an accident, but that’s what he meant. The driver had his licence revoked and received a two-year suspended jail term. Negligence. Driver error. A human tragedy. No mention of mother-slaughter. Dad says he understands and he forgives; he’s a truck driver himself and it could have happened to anyone. Cody doesn’t say anything in case it upsets Dad.

  The driver’s name was Dominic Aloisi. He came to her funeral. Apparently he cried. He is and she was and I don’t know him, but he’s alive and he’s free and I hate him more right this minute than I did the day it happened. I didn’t think that was possible, but since the night on the pipe I seem to have tapped a fresh vein.

  This time I take a more direct route to the hill where the Holt house stands, dodging the intersection and the shrine by a single block. I’m pedalling so hard my hands are cramping. My calves are tight balls of pain. It’s as if there’s a storm building inside my skull, threatening to break.

  At the bottom of Davey Street, I can’t stop. I won’t wait for the catalogue girl.

&
nbsp; I crank the pedals until the bike hits the top of the crest and let it freefall down the other side. The handlebars wobble crazily, the wheels spin so fast that the squeak in the chain becomes one long screech. A branch whips my cheek. I savour the sting, the rush of wind, the inevitability, as the tyres hit a patch of gravel and lose traction. The bike skids and flips, sending me soaring. I land hard on my elbow and wrist and feel the skin sanded from my hip and anklebone, but I don’t feel the pain yet—only the pure satisfaction of staging a spectacular, bullseye crash-landing in Susannah Holt’s front yard.

  The wheels stop spinning. It’s quiet. Stunned, I sit up and run an inventory on the damage. My lunch is scattered; the water bottle has burst. The bike has hit the concrete and died, its frame buckled, and I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t end up like it. I hold out my hands: they’re shaking so hard, drops of blood spatter like paint onto my thigh. I’ve progressed from stupid thoughts to stupid acts.

  Hannah Holt’s mother takes a long time to come out of the house. She keeps her distance, as if I might attack her. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Brakes failed,’ I wheeze, staring at the pieces of gravel embedded in my forearm. Now I hurt, and not only from the parts that bleed.

  She looks down at me, arms folded. ‘You’d better come inside,’ she says, offering her hand. The palm is red and creased—did she keep it clenched most of the time? It’s shaking as badly as mine.

  For a moment, I contemplate not taking it. The ghost of her child is with me. There’s a fresh cut on the ball of her thumb, exactly where Diesel’s fang punctured mine. I can’t help thinking our blood might mingle—until now the freakiness has been contained inside my head, but together we could complete some sort of circuit that might set it free.

  ‘Come on. Stop you bleeding all over the place.’ She snaps her fingers.

  I give her my other hand instead, forcing her to switch. She hauls me up, shoves the bike out of the way with her slippered foot and leads me by my elbow to the door.

  If the outside of 26 Davey Street is overgrown and forgotten, the interior is a tidy, polished shrine of remembrance. I expect the same creeping familiarity I felt when I first saw the house, but it’s foreign to me. There’s not much furniture, only two plush armchairs, a wall unit and a coffee table in the lounge room, a two-person dining setting, no television. Hannah Holt’s framed face is everywhere: on the entrance wall, the top of an old piano, the mantelpiece, the sideboard—even the peach-coloured bathroom where her mother takes me. A black-and-white photo in a silver frame sits on the vanity unit, next to an unused tea-light candle and a vase holding a plastic daffodil. In this one, Hannah is probably only two or three years old.

  Susannah Holt carefully moves the vase, the candle and the frame to a narrow wooden shelf under the window. She fills the sink with scalding water. ‘You’ll want to clean yourself up.’

  When I look at the rising steam, my skin shrinks and stings.

  ‘Shouldn’t you call somebody?’ she asks.

  ‘I will as soon as I’ve cleaned up.’

  Shrugging, she reaches under the sink to pull out a white box. ‘Here. You can put it all in the waste bin. It’ll sting but it won’t kill you.’ She passes me a few packets of gauze, tweezers, a handful of bandaids and a bottle of Betadine. ‘Grace,’ she mutters, as if to remind herself that the girl with a death wish, bleeding all over her peach bathroom, has a name.

  ‘Thank you.’ I put my phone and purse on the windowsill and roll up my sleeves.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ She shuffles out. Drawers slam and china clinks in another room.

  I peer in the mirror, checking my face and scalp for injuries: there’s a vertical slash of blood on my left cheek, but when I clean it away there is no cut underneath. The blood must have come from somewhere else. Peeling away the waistband of my shorts, I discover a weeping graze the size of my palm, and from my elbow to wrist the skin is shredded. My ankle throbs, but it’s only scraped. It takes twenty minutes or more to tweeze out the pieces of gravel, clean the wounds, and stick on layers of bandaids—twelve in all. The water in the sink is bright pink, a sediment of dirt and gravel lying on the bottom. I’ve left muddy tracks on the floor.

  Even after cleaning up, I look like one of the walking dead. My eyes are sunken and bruised from lack of sleep, and my hair is stringy and dull.

  I pull the plug and the bloody water gurgles down the drain. Susannah Holt returns. I’m sitting on the edge of the bathtub, leaning over, my hair falling around my face, when I hear her sharp intake of breath. I tuck my hair behind my ears and look up. She seems panicked.

  ‘All done then?’ She collects herself and gets busy: removing the bag from the bin, wiping the counter and sink, replacing the photo, candle and vase in the same position.

  ‘I think so. Sorry about the mess.’

  She pauses. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve had to clean up after anybody but myself.’ She continues wiping and points with her free hand. ‘There’s a cup of tea in the kitchen. I don’t know if you like tea but…’

  ‘Tea is fine. Thank you.’

  I leave her, still scrubbing, and head down the hallway.

  It’s a bare, cramped kitchen, nothing on the counter except a basket of greasy-looking fruit and one mug of black tea. The fridge is covered with rusty scratches and several old Polaroid-style photos, all showing Hannah when she was younger—on a bike, with a friend, in front of a birthday cake with six candles—except for one class photo with about twenty others dressed in the distinctive Heart uniform. It’s hardly changed in two decades: long, chequered navy and green dresses for the girls; white shirts, navy pants and a diagonally striped green tie for the boys.

  I’ve felt nothing but surface pain since I walked through the front door and I’m not prepared for the violent surge of emotion that hits me deep in my belly. My nose burns with threatening tears. I feel seasick, as if the floor is rolling under my feet, and the pain behind my eye is back, worse than before.

  I step closer to the photo.

  Hannah is easy to spot, right in the middle of the back row, wearing a tight smile, her blonde hair loose. I can see the glint of braces between her lips. She seems gawky and less defined, as if she hadn’t quite shed her baby skin. She must have been about fourteen or fifteen.

  But the seasickness backs off when I look at Hannah. The room rights itself. It’s not her this time. I don’t feel anything for her baby face, apart from mild curiosity. She isn’t here, with me—she’s not in her house, in her mother’s kitchen, or breaststroking along the carpet, or looking at me without a face.

  You’re not listening.

  I don’t want to listen to the sly, sing-song voice.

  Susannah Holt bustles into the kitchen swinging a tied-off plastic bag full of gauze and gore. She takes in my glazed expression. ‘Are you all right? Are you feeling faint?’ She takes me by the shoulders.

  I nod and hold her gaze because I don’t want to look.

  ‘Come on.’ She frowns. She’s had enough of my weirdness. ‘I’ll put your bike in the back of my car. Where do you live?’

  Hannah is still smiling that rigid smile, and I still feel nothing for her. I glance over my shoulder at the photo as Susannah Holt leads me out of her house; I obey the sickening urge to drag my gaze to the bottom left of the picture. Though I’m moving away, her face is as clear and familiar to me as my own reflection used to be.

  No, it’s not Hannah. It’s Erin Grady. The girl in the front row—dark-haired, slim, with a direct gaze that burns—she looks just like me because she’s my mother.

  I lied about where I lived and asked Susannah Holt to drop me outside Reilly’s Auto. I thanked her, but she didn’t speak to me—she seemed as dazed as I felt. I dragged my aching body and my wrecked bike home, and hid the bike in the gap between the shed and the side fence.

  It’s six o’clock. I’ve showered, changed into long pyjamas. I stink like eucalyptus oil from trying to remove th
e cheap bandaids and replacing them with decent ones. I walk downstairs, stiff-legged like a zombie, to find Dad sitting on the couch with a plate of beans and toast.

  Dad’s shoulders tense but he doesn’t look away from the television. ‘Have you eaten? Want some beans?’

  ‘No, thanks. Where’s Cody?’

  He glances at his watch. ‘Should be home soon.’

  Diesel barges through the dog-door and skids to a halt in the lounge-room doorway. A ridge of hackles rises along his back like porcupine quills. I back away from him and perch on the end of the couch.

  ‘What’d you do to him?’ Dad says, his mouth full. ‘Did you clobber him or something? Pinch his bone?’

  I shake my head. ‘Nothing.’

  Dad eyeballs Diesel. ‘Dog doesn’t turn for no good reason.’

  ‘Maybe he has a good reason.’

  He looks at me then, picking food from his teeth with his fingernail, thinking. ‘You eating? You feeling right in the head?’

  He won’t say it, neither of us will. Some words roll easily from our lips, but we struggle to say the ones that count. We won’t recall the before-times when Mum ran like a demon or the days when she couldn’t get out of bed; we don’t speak of the dark days or the reasons why, sometimes, it seemed as if she hated us. We sure as hell don’t mention the statistics: of two children born of a mother whose mechanics weren’t working, one is likely to have a faulty carburettor, too. We just say, ‘Are you feeling right in the head?’

  ‘Dad, I need to tell you something. And I don’t want to, but I have to, because it’s eating me up inside.’

  He angles his body towards me, crosses his legs, and throws his arm along the back of the couch. ‘Shoot,’ he says, but his eyes are dark and fearful.

  Cody’s right, none of us is equipped for tragedy. Dad least of all. I want to prepare him—to assure him it isn’t me this time, it’s something else—before I tell him why Diesel has his reasons. But as I think about where to start, I imagine a giant blank canvas; I start throwing ideas and happenings and recollections at it like paint, and I know it doesn’t matter where I begin, the finished picture will look like a Pollock—twisted, maybe compelling, but ultimately, completely, absolutely batshit crazy.