Dreaming of Amelia

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  But the strength in her grip when she wants to stay out longer and I’m trying to take her home—the strength in her body when she’s angry.

  The strength in her shoulders when she swims—

  I love that strength. I think that what I feel when I think about her strength is called elation.

  Term 2: a lot of talk about ghosts around Ashbury.

  They have a photo that they think is the ghost: image of a face as bright as fire.

  A ghost is trapped. Can’t get back to the past where it was somebody, can’t get forward to the future on the other side. Trapped, locked up in the now.

  ‘Or it just doesn’t want to leave,’ Amelia points out.

  She starts meeting her new friend near the home.

  There’s a vegetable garden, Amelia says. The friend turns the soil with a trowel, while Amelia sits on a cold stone wall and listens to her stories.

  There are stories about roasting babies alive on griddles. Burning babies’ noses off with red-hot tongs.

  ‘So the medication’s working,’ I say.

  Amelia laughs. But she keeps visiting.

  In Term 2, I fall asleep in daylight.

  There’s a drama rehearsal, late afternoon.

  I’m watching from up high, and then I’m not.

  It’s one of those tricky dreams where everything’s in shadow. Like a hat pulled low over my forehead—if I could tip the hat back I’d pool the dream with light.

  In the dream, I’m talking to Amelia, trying to see her face.

  ‘What would we want with castanets?’ she says, and we both laugh hard.

  Then she says she has to go do something. She gets her distracted expression, and we move to a new scene.

  We’re outside, by a highway, and I can see Amelia across a stretch of lanes. She’s watching traffic, her head tilted, a tiny smile. The dream’s shadow trick is getting worse—now it’s a beekeeper’s net over my face.

  I keep losing Amelia, then there she is again.

  I watch as the shadows billow around her.

  I think, Wait. That’s not shadows, that’s smoke.

  So then I’m shouting: Amelia, Amelia

  but her name gets tangled in the shadows and the smoke. It twists into ugly shapes.

  Aymeelia. Armenia. A meal of you.

  I’m hitting my own face, hard, trying to make it say her name, but my mouth is shouting:

  A maze of you. Oh mania. Ah murder you—

  The shadows shove against her now. I see her frown, push her hair behind her ears, her hands form fists—

  And then her face assumes its lost and vacant look. The look that means she’s heading to her past, searching, disappearing.

  Not now

  Not with the shadows—the smoke coming to get you—

  Then the shadows are so thick they turn to blackness and a new horror bursts at me—that’s not shadows, that’s not smoke, that’s a black hole—

  If the black hole gets you, Amelia, you’re more than dead.

  I’m shouting and shouting, but her name—

  And all I can do is stand and watch as she moves in her trance towards the darkness.

  I make myself wake from that dream.

  Breathing hard.

  Look around the auditorium, and the beautiful relief—there she is, safe, alive. She’s by the stage, listening to Garcia. He’s holding up some object—it’s a table lamp, I think—he’s holding it high as he talks.

  It’s while I’m watching her, breathing in her safe, sweet body, her concentrating head, she’s listening so hard, that it comes to me.

  Those stories the crazy friend is telling her?

  They’re fairy stories.

  Flutes and fiddles, silver buckles, little people, fireplaces—those are fairy stories.

  Just like her stepfather told her.

  His were stories of horseshoes, four-leaf clovers, fairy songs.

  But it’s all the same weird, spooky Irish folklore.

  That boy Toby, he connected Irish stories to black holes. I can’t remember how.

  But now I see, now it’s clear: no wonder Amelia loves her crazy friend.

  The day after that dream—the very next day—three male residents of a local assisted-living facility for the mentally ill are out on a therapeutic exercise. One hacks the other to pieces with an axe and then heads home.

  Amelia misses swimming that morning.

  I’m waiting for her, sitting on the edge of the pool. She never misses swimming. My eyes are on the entrance gate.

  She turns up at the time that we normally leave. Her face has its distracted look. She comes right up and says there’s been an axe murder.

  Early that morning, she says. She stopped by to see her friend on the way here, and the friend told her about it.

  I say, ‘It’s one of her hallucinations.’

  Amelia shakes her head. ‘This was different.’

  Here’s something else you don’t know about me:

  I never once told Amelia what to do.

  Except for now. By the pool. The axe, the blood, the brains.

  I said: I want you to stop going there.

  She looked startled.

  She said: It’s okay, it’s just—it’s not an institution or anything, it’s just some kind of assisted—

  I said: Amelia, there are axe murders.

  She looked over my shoulder, eyes getting vacant. I thought I’d lost her again, but her eyes flickered back.

  She said: Only the one axe murder. What if I take you there?

  We could skip the athletics carnival, she said. She could introduce me to her friend. Then I would see the friend’s sane and that she needs Amelia.

  So that was the deal.

  You might already know this about Amelia: moods flicker across her face like fast animation. Like cloud shadows moving in hurricane winds.

  She breaks the deal.

  The day of the athletics carnival and we’re walking. She’s chatting, happy. We’re walking through the heritage park. She’s telling me I’ll love her friend. She’s always alone in the vegetable garden, Amelia says so Amelia’s never met any of the other residents. We’ll be able to see the institution from the outside, she says—a beautiful, stone building—but we can’t go in. The friend tells Amelia it’s a dump: rats, fleas, bugs, lice, cracks in the stonework, mould on the floors. Not enough bed linen, and what there is, worn, filthy, ripped. Not enough clothes either, and everybody stinks.

  Amelia wants to write a letter to the Department of Health.

  ‘But you’ve never met anybody else, or seen it. How can you know she’s not making all this up?’

  Amelia walks in silence for a while, flicks something out of the corner of her eye.

  ‘You’re going to love her,’ she repeats, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘She’s got this — this musical voice. The way she speaks is so — And wait till you hear her fairy stories.’

  ‘Maybe she’ll tell me her name,’ I say.

  Then Amelia stops. I watch her.

  Moods flicker across her face — she’s startled, angry, dreamy. She’s solemn, anxious, and something else.

  She looks at me, defiant, smiling, and says, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  And there’s nothing I can do to change it back.

  We stand at the side of the path in that park and I talk and talk at her.

  I keep saying her name. It feels good to me. Being able to say it. It feels like control.

  But it’s not. She’s staring at her feet; staring at nothing.

  I was thinking.

  A ghost is a person who is there but not there. They look like they’re there, but they’re not.

  Amelia staring at her past — there’s your ghost.

  Not much else to say about Term 2.

  Amelia’s an actor but she cannot lie to me. She’s still going to meet the friend, but she doesn’t always tell me. She doesn’t want to see me mad. The last few weeks of term, she goes to the library, th
e supermarket, to buy a Coke.

  All the time she’s lying. She’s going back to see her crazy friend.

  The second-last night of term, we’re at another party at Lydia’s. There’s talk about a ghost. We end up at the school, in the auditorium.

  I see the Brookfield boy, Seb, I see him leave. I see Astrid — cold as the Danish Alps, burned by birthday candles — I watch her leave too.

  I think about Astrid. How she locked us in that night.

  I think about the story that Amelia’s crazy friend told — a little person scalded in a boiling pot of water. And the other angry little people: If she’d scalded you, she would have had to pay.

  I’m thinking: Astrid locked me in a closet.

  If she’d locked us someplace separate, she would have had to —

  But Astrid glances back as she reaches the door. She’s got her determined look. It gives her lines. She’s 17 years old, but in this light, with that frown, she could be seventy.

  It was just a closet. She’s just a stupid kid. They’re all just stupid kids.

  I’m thinking this, so I don’t hear what Amelia’s saying.

  Then I hear. She’s saying she wants to go look at the gallery. We’ve both got pieces in the exhibition the next day. She wants to go see what else is there.

  I look at her. She’s lying.

  And it’s after ten at night.

  She knows I know that she’s lying.

  I say, I’ll come with you.

  No, she says, they need you here.

  We both smile.

  She leaves the room.

  I wait a beat. Follow her. I know where she’s going but I hope maybe I’m wrong. So I check the gallery first.

  The girl, Lydia, turns up beside me.

  We hear somebody screaming. I make myself joke with her, this half-person rich kid named Lydia. I push open the gallery door.

  Amelia’s not there.

  Not much else to say about Term 2, like I said.

  Except, I guess, something else they don’t know about Amelia.

  She was in juvenile detention last year. So was I.

  We had to include it in our scholarship application. Brook-field knows we were there and would have passed it on.

  Here’s what happened: after we met behind the red door, Amelia and I went to Brookfield for maybe a couple of weeks. Then we ran away together. Lived on beaches, on the streets. That’s why the kids at Brookfield don’t know who we are.

  They caught us stealing from a petrol station, and put us away for a year.

  Locked up, apart from Amelia. Red hot tongs pushing things around inside my chest.

  Scholarship committee believed us when we said we plan to change.

  I saw her through the windows of the gallery, watched her disappear.

  Small talk with the girl named Lydia while I watched. She’s got a good smile, Lydia. Wealthy parents must have picked it out for her. Or maybe Lydia herself is from a catalogue. We’ll take the pretty one, the pretty smile. A soul? Now, why would she need that?

  Small talk was cut through: the sound of something cutting wood. Woodwork down the hall.

  Kids in the auditorium thought it was the ghost. We heard them run.

  I laughed hard.

  Because there was Amelia fading behind glass, my Amelia, my ghost, heading to a madhouse, and here were the private school kids in a madhouse frenzy over an imaginary ghost.

  Lydia laughed too. Who knows why. Wealthy people laugh all the time.

  I didn’t sleep that night. Went home, stared at the ceiling.

  But in the morning, last day of term, there she was again.

  Amelia, by the side of the pool. I couldn’t touch her.

  Later that day, I’m walking with Amelia.

  We don’t say a word about the night before: how she disappeared into the dark.

  We pass classrooms. At each desk, a flat-panel computer. Chairs are ergonomically designed. Lighting is curved so it won’t distract the eyes. A smartboard at the front of every room. We pass the library: a flat-screen TV huge against the wall. World news all day. I once heard a librarian say, ‘You see, they’re not cloistered here. At any point, they can pull up a cushion, watch the news, be part of the real world.’

  The real world.

  And now I realise this: I’ve never once heard these people talk about the axe murder. It happened just down the road. A crazy person kills another crazy person with an axe, and they don’t care. These shadow people sitting on their cushions and their ergonomic chairs.

  I reach out and take Amelia’s hand.

  One last thing.

  Juvenile records are sealed.

  Ashbury knows what we put on the scholarship application — that we stole from a petrol station, got caught and put away.

  The truth is sealed, bricked up.

  You never know what ugly things decay behind brick walls.

  PART THREE

  1.

  Progress Meeting — The Committee for the Administration of the KL Mason Patterson Trust Fund — Minutes

  6.00 pm — 10.35 pm, Wednesday 16 July

  Conference Room 2B, the KL Mason Patterson Centre for the Arts

  Chair:

  Roberto Garcia (History Coordinator, Drama Teacher, Ashbury)

  Secretary:

  Christopher Botherit (English Coordinator, Ashbury)

  Participants

  Constance Milligan (Ashbury Alumni Association)

  Patricia Aganovic (Parent Representative 1)

  Jacob Mazzerati (Parent Representative 2)

  Lucy Wexford (Music Coordinator, Ashbury)

  Apologies

  Bill Ludovico (Ashbury School Principal/Economics Teacher)

  AGENDA ITEMS

  Agenda Item 1: Preliminaries

  Welcome Back, Constance

  Once again, the group welcomed back Constance Milligan (Ashbury Alumni Association).

  Constance did not attend the progress interviews of our scholarship winners, which took place at the end of Term 1, and was absent due to illness from the progress meeting at the end of Term 2. It is now Term 3, so we have not seen Constance for some time!

  ‘Ahoy there, folks!’ Constance beamed.

  Minutes of the previous meeting

  The minutes of the previous meeting were circulated for comment.

  • Constance Milligan declared that we were a ‘pack of fools’ who had all been ‘damned to hell’ for we had ‘struck a deal with the devil — no, no, worse, with a pair of demons’. She ‘bid adieu’ to our souls.

  • There was a startled silence.

  • Eventually, Roberto Garcia (Chair) spoke: ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘She means the agreement we made with Amelia and Riley. To overlook their absenteeism if they signed up for the Ashbury-Brookfield Drama Production.’

  • Everybody laughed with relief.

  • No, no, we explained (laughingly) to Constance. That was in no way a deal with the devil! Nor was it blackmail . . . bribery . . . corruption (nor various other words that Constance threw at us). It was just a tactic. By getting Amelia and Riley to join in a school activity like the drama, we would help them to integrate. And that would make them less likely to skip classes! It was pure genius (we explained).

  • ‘I might point out that I was opposed to the idea,’ Lucy Wexford (Music Coordinator) told Constance, ‘but they shouted me down.’

  • ‘You should have shouted louder then,’ Constance said tartly.

  Agenda Item 2: Financial Report

  Roberto Garcia circulated the latest Financial and Audit Reports.

  • Everybody looked at the reports for a while.

  • Jacob Mazzerati (Parent Rep 2) wondered why Bill Ludovico (Ashbury School Principal/Economics Teacher) never comes to any meetings.

  Action points

  • We will stop looking at the Financial Reports until Bill starts coming to meetings again.

  Agenda Item 3: The KL Mason Patterson Centre for the Arts: Progress
Report

  Chris Botherit (English Coordinator/Secretary/me) circulated the Structural Engineer’s Report on the KL Mason Patterson Centre for the Arts.

  • Everyone was delighted to read that the building is ‘safe’. It turns out that the distant cracking/creaking sounds are temperature changes affecting the wood. The cracks in the brickwork, meanwhile, are most likely a result of the foundations settling under the weight of the new additions.

  • Chris Botherit said that the students would be disappointed. ‘They like to think that the sounds mean there’s a ghost in the building,’ he said.

  • Much laughter about the sweet simplicity of youth.

  • Discussion of the fact that it seems to be mostly Year 12 students who believe in the ghost. They are not so sweet nor youthful as they once were. Aren’t they practically grown-ups? Shouldn’t they have moved beyond childish fears?

  • Roberto Garcia shook his head slowly. ‘Year 12s? They are the most hysterical of them all,’ he said. ‘Blind with panic about the future, they run like the devil to the past.’

  • A thoughtful pause.

  • Then, Lucy Wexford joked that if the fund were ever running short on cash we could hold ‘ghost walking tours’ of the building!

  • Patricia Aganovic (Parent Rep 1) said she’d heard (from her daughter Cassie) that ‘word on the street is the ghost is a former student who fell to her death from a window back in the 1950s’. Did we think this was true? Could that be the ghost?

  • ‘I’ve heard it was a tennis player,’ Jacob Mazzerati said, ‘looking for a lost tennis ball.’ Patricia raised a single eyebrow at Jacob. He raised both eyebrows back. A dimple flashed in his cheek.

  • ‘Oh, piffle,’ said Constance. ‘The ghost is undoubtedly Sir Kendall. He is distressed by the way we are spending his money on all these joint activities with that dreadful Brookfield school. He loathes poor people. And he rather suspects that the word joint has direct associations with the underworld.’

  • Everybody looked at Constance. ‘I said to him, I said, “Kendall, do you know you are right? I believe it’s something to do with that marijuana?” And Kendall said, “Not forgetting, Connie, it’s another word for prison.”’