by Paul Collins
There wasn't a doorbell, so I knocked. The dense wooden door seemed to eat the rapping noise, and I wondered if anyone inside could have heard. I waited.
Finally, I heard the patter of little feet on floorboards. They came right up to the door, then there was a pause.
The door opened.
Two little girls stood before me. They were maybe four and six. They wore plain, old-fashioned dresses, with no shoes. Both had long yellow hair that hung down around their shoulders. They stared at me.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Is your mum home? I'm your new babysitter.’
The two little girls looked at each other.
‘You're late,’ said the older one. Her voice was husky and soft. ‘Mummy's already gone. She says you're to look after us until she gets back.’
The younger one nodded.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘My name's Kumuda.’
‘I'm Jenny,’ said the older girl. ‘And this is Nell.’
The younger girl opened her mouth. Her teeth had a greenish tinge, and I wondered if they'd been eating lollies.
‘Kumuda is a funny name,’ she said, her voice high and reedy.
‘It's Indian,’ I said. ‘It means “lotus flower”.’
The two girls were quiet again and stared at me.
‘May I come in?’ I asked.
They both nodded, and stood aside. Jenny pointed to a hatstand.
‘You can hang your bag there,’ she said.
The house seemed much larger inside than it did from outside, although it felt warm and cosy. The floorboards were golden brown, like honey. The walls were painted a rich burgundy, but the dark colour didn't feel oppressive. As I followed the girls down the hallway, I peered through doors that led into large, well-furnished rooms. Everything looked old-fashioned and expensive. An iron staircase wound up out of sight, and I looked up, puzzled. I didn't remember seeing a second storey from the outside.
‘When's your mum coming back?’ I asked the girls, but they didn't answer.
Jenny opened a door and led me into a bright, open kitchen with a slate floor and huge windows looking out onto the back garden. I stopped, astonished. The garden was full of sunlight and colour. Trees hung low with fruit and bright green foliage. Flowers exploded from their beds, and clambered up the high stone wall at the back of the garden. I could see the doves perched around a large stone birdbath, cooing happily.
In the very centre of the garden was a large pond, with a weeping willow leaning over it so the tips of its fronds brushed the surface of the water. The pond had strange green gunk floating on the top. I wondered if it was a sort of algae or something. The pond was the only part of the garden that didn't look perfectly manicured and bright. There was something wild about it, although I supposed it must have been man-made.
‘What an amazing garden,’ I said. ‘The front of the house is so bare.’
‘We never go to the front garden,’ said Nell.
I turned to the girls. ‘Well? What do you guys want to do?’
Nell glanced at Jenny.
‘We want to play a game,’ Jenny said.
I smiled at them. ‘What sort of game?’ I asked. ‘Do you have any board games?’
Nell shook her head. ‘Hide and seek,’ she said.
‘Great!’ I said. ‘Shall I be It?’
Jenny shook her head. ‘It will be too hard for you,’ she said. ‘Because you don't know the house yet. You should hide, and we'll find you.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Can you count to a hundred?’
‘We can count forever,’ she said. I wondered if they ever smiled, and realised they must be shy in front of new people.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Close your eyes, and no peeking.’ They turned to face each other, and covered their eyes with their hands.
‘One … two … three …’
I turned and went back into the hallway. I wanted to climb that little iron staircase. The treads were very narrow, so I had to climb on my tiptoes. The banister was cool under my hands, but after climbing past a few turns, I grew dizzy. By the time I reached the top I was out of breath, and feeling a little ill.
I could hear the girls counting back in the kitchen.
‘Seven … eight … nine …’
There was a long corridor at the top of the stairs, with doors leading off on both sides. I followed it for a while, trying the doors, but they were all locked. The house was so enormous – it made sense to close off some of the rooms.
The walls felt very thin, because I could still hear Jenny and Nell.
I finally found an unlocked door. It opened into a bedroom that I thought might belong to the girls. A large bed sat in the middle of the room, neatly made with a floral bedspread. I couldn't see any soft toys or dolls anywhere, or even any books. I would have thought it was an adult's room, except I saw two pairs of little black shoes lined up neatly beside the bed.
‘Twenty-two … twenty-three … twenty-four …’
There was another door in the room. I thought it must be a walk-in wardrobe, and opened it, looking for a good hiding place. As a seasoned babysitter, I knew I needed somewhere that was not too easy, not too hard. A delicate balance.
It wasn't a wardrobe. It was another room – I would have called it a playroom if there'd been anything to play with in it. There was a large mirror leaning against one wall, and an enormous chest in the corner. The chest was easily big enough for me to fit into, so I walked over to it.
‘Thirty-seven … thirty-eight … thirty-nine …’
As I passed the mirror, I caught a glimpse of my reflection. The light in the room was unflattering, and I winced. I looked terrible. My hair was flat and limp, my skin looked sallow. I peered closer and noticed crow's feet forming in the corners of my eyes. I didn't realise wrinkles started so early.
The lid of the chest was heavy and I struggled to open it.
The first thing that struck me was a strong smell of leather. I looked into the chest and frowned.
‘Fifty … fifty-one … fifty-two …’
It was full of handbags. There were probably about fifty in there, all different styles and shapes. It seemed like an odd thing to collect, and an odder thing to store in a children's bedroom. Surely collectors like to have their items on display in glass cases?
I picked up one of the handbags – brown leather with a bronze buckle – and heard a jingling. I undid the buckle and lifted the flap.
It looked like a normal handbag. Keys, a leather purse, a handkerchief, a lipstick. But what was it doing in this chest?
‘Sixty-five … sixty-six … sixty-seven …’
I opened the purse, and found old paper banknotes that I'd never seen before. I pulled out one of the cards. It was a driver's licence belonging to someone called Belinda Simm. The date on it was 1965.
I dropped the bag and the wallet and fished out another – black patent leather, gold clasp.
The purse inside belonged to a Katy Gibson, 1983.
I pulled out a pale green bag. The leather felt like it was about to fall apart. There was a matching purse inside which contained a few old-fashioned coins, but no driver's licence or credit card or anything. I dug through the bag. It smelled like dust. I found a scrap of yellow newspaper. The edges crumbled away when I touched them, and I held it carefully.
It was an advertisement.
Babysitter required two nights a week. Excellent pay. References essential. Contact Mrs Green by telephone, number Green-342.
I shivered. The ad was almost identical to the one I'd answered. Only the telephone number was different. I looked at the date in the corner of the page.
‘Eighty-nine … ninety … ninety-one …’
It said 1914.
I stared at the handbags, and thought suddenly of my own bag, hanging on the hatstand in the hallway. I turned and ran from the room.
I stumbled down the staircase, which made a horrific clanging noise.
My handbag was gone. My heart was hammering
so hard I could barely breathe. I looked back towards the kitchen, but the girls weren't there any more. The glass door that led to the back garden was open, and there was a strong smell of mud, and something sort of fishy and rotten. I could still hear the girls counting, even though I couldn't see them.
‘Ninety-eight … ninety-nine …’
I pulled on the heavy front door, but it wouldn't open. I tried the handle. Nothing. I pushed, pulled, shoved. It wouldn't budge.
‘One hundred.’
I spun around. Jenny and Nell were right behind me. They grinned, their teeth a dark, glistening green, like the green gunk on the surface of the pond. I noticed their bare feet were wet, and that they'd both left a trail of muddy footprints up the hallway.
I backed away from them, until I was flat up against the door.
‘Found you,’ said Jenny.
When my great-aunt died, I inherited her red shoes. Red shoes in a box with tissue paper so worn and creased it resembled the skin on my greataunt's hands in the years before her death.
Red shoes in a box with a note:
Ruby red, pretty to view
On her feet a dancer grew
But should these shoes stray from her care
Naught but trouble will find her there.
At first I had not been able to look at the shoes. I had loved my great-aunt with all my heart and now that she was gone I couldn't bear to look upon what was once hers. The shoes remained in the box and the box stayed under my bed, collecting dust for what might have been years had I not lost my earring in that space that exists between my bed and the wall.
Now the box sat in my hands, furry with dust and yellowed with age. As I sat there, I looked at the photograph of my great-aunt in its oval brass frame on my dresser. She gazed back at me, not as a withered old woman with skin as creased as autumn leaves, but as a fifteen-year-old girl, a dancer, in a white embroidered dress and bright red shoes.
People say I look like my great-aunt when she was young, which is why I kept the photograph of her as a girl on display rather than her face as an old woman. She had often told me that age had crept up on her like a stalker. One day she looked in the mirror and the bright face of a young girl smiled back at her, the next day, an old woman. ‘But life is like that, my dear,’ she had cautioned. ‘You spend so much of your life looking to the future that before you know it your future has become your past.’
I had no idea what she could possibly mean. For me, life seemed impossibly slow. Plant a seed and you could be waiting weeks, even months before a green sprout unfurled its tiny head. A painting could take days to dry and a birthday was saturated with the sorrow of knowing that when the day was over, you would have to wait what could seem like a whole lifetime for another. I wanted to live a life that could be counted in minutes. Seconds even. A blink of an eye. I wanted tomorrow today and to be able to skip through all of the parts of my life which were simply a waste of time. I wanted to be able to fast forward my life; skip school, stamp out sleep, and dance, spinning, into the future. For the future was always there, beckoning me with brighter days to come.
As I looked down at the worn, red shoes of my dear great-aunt, a terrible restlessness overcame me. Worse than any I've ever had to bear. It crept up through me from the soles of my feet like mercury, quivering through my veins and seizing hold of my heart until it was almost an effort to breathe. With a jolt, I flung the red shoes into the far corner of the room and ran down the stairs two by two into the back garden. There I stood, trembling and gulping great gasps of the crisp autumn air.
Gradually my heart began to slow its frantic pace and I was able to calm my trembling hands. With great effort, I walked back into the house, controlling my every step to resemble that of a normal pace.
At dinnertime, my father threw down his cloth serviette in exasperation.
‘Would you please stop that jiggling, Emily! You're driving us all crazy!’
I glanced at my father, alarmed, because I hadn't been aware that I was jiggling at all. But, sure enough, when I looked down at my tightly crossed legs, my knee was twitching of its own accord. I pressed my hand down on it firmly and tried to eat with the other.
‘Emily, don't gulp your dinner, darling,’ my mother said. ‘You'll get indigestion.’
I looked down at my plate, and, to my horror, I saw that while my parents had only just begun to sever their steaks, my plate was already completely empty. I closed my eyes for what seemed like an eternity to fathom these strange experiences. When I opened them again my father was still chewing on the same mouthful of meat.
Terror clamped my heart as the evening stretched on, seemingly slower and slower. Even the clock in the hall seemed to drag its morbid tick-tocking until between each sound I could count a dozen of my own heartbeats. I tried to tune in to the conversation between my parents but it sounded as incoherent as a record on slow speed. Finally, I could stand it no longer and pushed back from the table to seek sanctuary in my own room. The shouts of my puzzled parents thudded into the back of my head.
Even before I turned my light on, I saw them there. The red shoes. They seemed to glow and pulse in the dark like severed organs. The spinning in my head became faster and faster as I approached them. Were they calling me? It was hard to tell.
Downstairs I could hear the faint voices of my parents, but their sounds were muffled by the vertigo. In one swift move, I grabbed the wretched shoes and flung them back into their box. It was only when the box was firmly shut that the terrible pounding in my head began to cease. Exhausted, I slid the box under my bed and crawled beneath my doona.
As I drifted into a dazed slumber, I felt my mother's cool palm on my forehead and her gentle murmurings. Occasionally I would open my eyes and it would be light, other times it would be dark, but every time I peered through my sticky lashes I would glimpse my mother's form, ever present; sewing, reading, dozing, staring. Then I would drift back into a fitful sleep.
One morning I awoke to see my mother's hopeful face above me. In her hand was a cup of steaming tea. My stomach lurched with hunger and I sat up groggily in bed.
‘Oh, I'm starving,’ I mumbled. ‘Have I been asleep long?’
‘Three days, my sweet. You've had quite a fever.’
‘Three days? I've been in bed for three days?’
My mother nodded. ‘I've been at my wit's end. Your friends called past too, but I told them to come back later. They've left a card for you, see? Get well soon – it says – We miss you. They asked me if you would be away from school for much longer and I told them you can't rush an illness. It takes the time it takes.’
‘So you've been sitting here for three days?’ I asked, incredulously.
My mother shrugged.
‘Weren't you bored?’
‘I have plenty of thoughts to keep me occupied.’ My mother smiled. ‘Now you just rest there, dear, and I'll fetch you something to eat. There's no sense in pushing things.’
I ate a hearty breakfast then lay back to try to sleep again, but it seemed I'd slept enough for a lifetime already and my body wouldn't succumb. I tried reading a little, but the words danced across the page.
My mother brought the radio up, but the songs were boring and the chatter tedious. I tried a crossword puzzle, but I couldn't keep my attention focused on the page. Outside the sun shone, beckoningly.
‘Can I get up now?’ I groaned, when my mother appeared with yet another cup of tea.
‘I don't think so,’ she said. ‘You've been quite ill. I think it would be best if you took it easy for today. Just try to relax, dear. Enjoy your time off.’
But I couldn't enjoy it. In fact the day stretched past excruciatingly. My legs stung with pins and needles and my skin itched with boredom. When my mother called upstairs to say that she was popping out for fresh bread, I threw off my doona and swung my legs irritably to the floor. To try to rid them of their inertia, I jogged up and down a little on the spot.
In the mirror, I pulle
d faces and scraped my hair back off my scalp. Then, flopping down on my carpet, I rolled around a little to stretch out my back. That was when I saw it.
Without thinking, I pulled the old shoe box out from under my bed. I would just take a peep, I thought. Check that I had wrapped them up properly after the other night.
The shoes lay in their crumpled paper, scuffed and demure. There was no shine coming from them the way I had imagined seeing the other night. I held one up. It was solid but worn. The faded red leather felt soft in my hands. Size five-and-a-half. I looked inside. My great-aunt must have had very small feet too. How strange. I traced my finger inside the leather sole where I could see the grey smudges of her toe-prints.
I looked up at her photo and she gazed back down at me. We were alike. I could see that now. My father had always complained that I was as restless as my Great-auntie Bo had been.
But she had travelled the world, I thought. She had seen things and been to places that my parents had probably never even dreamt about. I would be like her, I swore. Perhaps even a great dancer, too.
Dreamily, I slipped one of the red shoes onto my bare foot. It fit perfectly. I pulled on the other shoe and stood up and stretched and pointed my toes. The shoes seemed to glow at the end of my feet. They were beautiful.
I looked into my dressing-table mirror and saw that I was beautiful too. I saw an adoring audience throwing flowers at me and cheering with tears in their eyes. I bowed low, and then, ever so slowly I began to dance.
Slowly, slowly, I spun, catching a glimpse of my shining face at each turn. Then my feet began to speed up. Tippity-tapping, spinning and pointing. Tip, tap, spin, point. The crowd in the mirror roared. I smiled at them and spun faster. Faster and faster, my room becoming a blur, until it seemed the crowd was all around me.
In the crowd, I saw the faces changing. They flicked from man to woman, child to adult and back again, but always they were smiling. Cheering me as I spun faster. I had never felt so alive. I turned back to my mirror to see if my face reflected how I felt, but I could no longer find my image there. Curiously, I glimpsed the face in front of me as I spun. It was the face of a woman, an older version of myself. She had the same green eyes as me, the same long sharp nose and wide, full mouth.