‘There’s something else you might like,’ she said. ‘Some guys must have left it here.’
She fumbled through the secret cache and revealed a crumpled old magazine. On the cover was a woman, all coconuts and pouting lips. I recoiled. The image wasn’t that confronting, I’d seen stuff like that before, but it was the look in Eliza’s eyes that made me nervous. She was a cold person, I understood that, but this was something else. It was an accusation.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘This is why you’re here, isn’t it?’
Sure, I desired her, who wouldn’t? But those kind of thoughts, for me at least, were always thin and far away. The real temptation was to think about the middle times, like the simple act of walking past her house, or hanging out with her behind someone’s back fence, or sitting with her in a train tunnel. That was the real joy. I threw it on the fire.
I caught her smile in the gloom. Whatever was going on with her, I knew I’d just passed some kind of test. Clearly I was not, under any circumstances, to picture her on the front cover of such a magazine. I’d leave that to our science teacher.
‘What do we do if a train comes?’ I asked.
‘Why? You scared?’ she teased.
‘No.’
‘Liar.’
‘I just want to know, that’s all.’
Eliza gave an exasperated sigh and I caught her roll her eyes in the firelight. She suddenly pulled me close to her. A sudden heat surged through me. Eliza pressed me flat against the brickwork of the tunnel, and inside a small cavity. It was an old safety refuge, made by the original tunnel makers. They must have had delinquent kids of their own back then. Either that or they could foresee far into the future when a stupid boy would follow a beautiful girl to his demise. The refuge was small and only made to accommodate one person. We squeezed in together, wedged so tight that I could feel her breath against mine. My heartbeat soared. I could feel hers racing too. We were suddenly warm and protected in our little brick bubble.
‘See? We’re perfectly safe,’ she said.
‘Yeah. Safe.’
Then she pushed me away.
Our street was empty, expect for the two of us returning together. It was getting late. Still, the sun shone well into the night at this time of year. We had spent most of the day underground and our eyes were still getting accustomed to the daylight. We were like two sleepy bats emerging from their cave to scowl at the world. Middleford was like a desert mirage, it pained us to look at it. I wanted to run back to that cave and hide in its darkest reaches with her forever.
‘Don’t tell anyone about this. Okay?’ she asked.
‘Eliza, if you haven’t noticed, you’re the only person who talks to me,’ I told her.
‘That’s not true. And you know it.’
The screen door to the kitchen announced my arrival with its usual dull thud. My mother was in the front room of the house, clouded in a blue screen of cigarette haze. I found her behind the couch, gripping a tennis racquet in defence. She looked scared.
‘Someone’s been in here!’
‘Did he steal anything?’ I asked.
‘What? No!’
‘Nothing? Not the scissors? Or the knob to the washing machine? Don’t tell me, not yesterday’s newspaper?’
Belligerence was unlike me. Honestly, I don’t know what came over me. Until that moment, I’d been happy to play along with her inventions but there I was, openly mocking her. It was cruel yet something in me wanted to see her feel pain. I wanted to dispel her somehow. She looked confused. I could see she was genuinely fearful. While I watched, my mother became a child, full of doubt, fearing the unknown.
‘It’s not that. It’s something else,’ she hissed.
She tentatively pointed with her cigarette up the hallway, towards my bedroom. I nodded and crept along the rickety floorboards. Slowly, I pushed open the door to my room.
‘Hello,’ said the dog.
‘You scared my mother,’ I said.
‘Did she like the rose?’
‘Eliza? No. No, she didn’t.’
The dog nodded in agreement. It knew all along, I thought. We looked at each other for a long time, waiting for the other to speak first, both unwilling to give the other the satisfaction. The dog finally tired of this game.
‘You like her, don’t you?’
‘Everyone likes Eliza,’ I said in defence.
‘It’s fine to admit it. It will make everything easier.’
I’m not sure what had changed between us but I suddenly felt wary of that dog. When I’d first met it, I found it strange, but comforting. The creature talked to me. It understood me. I think I liked that dog. Yes, I liked it. But the rose? I sensed the dog knew more about me than it was letting on. It had some purpose of its own, I swear, but what? The dog sat, watching me watch it. It was on to me. It could see through me. It could hear me.
‘Yes, I can,’ it replied.
I baulked. I wondered if I had said this out loud or just in my mind. My concept of what was real and what wasn’t spun. Everything merged. Outside was inside. Inside was out. I was a confused mess. The dog simply looked amused.
‘Just be yourself, Monty. She wants you to be yourself,’ it said.
‘It was just an open window,’ I told my mother. ‘A bird must have flown in. It’s gone now. I chased it out.’
‘A bird? No, this was bigger.’
‘Like I said, Mum, it was just a bird.’
Doubt flooded through her. Her understanding of the world had been undermined. She fumbled for another cigarette. She couldn’t light it and kept dropping it to the floor. I picked it up for her, calmly lit it, and passed it to her lips. She suckled on it greedily.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
A mournful self-pity washed through her eyes. Anger suddenly filled me. She wanted my help? I was stung. I couldn’t recall the last time she’d moved a finger to help me in any way. Someone must have changed my nappies as a baby, fed me, kept me alive until the time came that I could fend for myself. All this was far away in the past. I’d been on my own for so long, forging my own way through life. Yet there she was. Dependent. I didn’t want her to make it a habit.
‘You should quit. Those things will kill you,’ I said.
Her face contracted into a tight ball of agony and she began to shake all over. Her head nodded in agreement as the sentence I passed down struck home. She was guilty. She knew it. I knew it. She sucked that cigarette down in one breath.
*
I was back in the cave. Eliza smiled at me over the firelight. We huddled over the tracks, eager for its warmth. Flames reflected in her eyes, redolent with promise. We moved closer. Suddenly, a deep rumbling sound walloped my internal organs. The sound was so low it penetrated my bones. My skull split and began to sing in time. A high-pitched squeal rang out in warped harmony. Metal wheels screeched the kind of sound feral cats fear. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, like listening to a thousand fingernails run down a blackboard. Eliza quickly kicked out the fire. Darkness reclaimed the tunnel. The fire was reduced to a small pile of glowing embers, sending up little flares of distress. Eliza instantly disappeared and merged into the darkness. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know where she went. I was lost.
‘Hurry up!’
Her voice seemed far off, calling from the shadows. I realised where she’d gone. The refuge! I followed the sound of her voice and found her pressed into that tiny gap in the wall. I hurried in to meet her. We flattened ourselves against each other until our breath fell in time. I wanted to grab hold of her, but my hands were paralysed. She grabbed mine instead.
‘It’s coming,’ she said. ‘Go on, look! Put your head out!’
I dutifully followed and looked out to see daylight disappear, replaced by the front of the train. The headlight burned white hot, tossing the darkness aside. The driver must have spotted the remains of the fire and sounded the horn. The noise blared through the tunnel, so
loud it threatened to make my ears bleed.
Instinct kicked in. Survival is a stubborn force. My body involuntarily took over and tried to go back into the refuge. I fought the urge and stayed with her. Her hand gripped mine and we calmly stared our mortality down. We were impassive. We were unafraid. We had control.
We dived back into the refuge as the train passed us by. It was a tight fit for two and there was only just enough room. We flattened ourselves against each other and held our breath. The rail cars flashed by. The sound was mortifying. I thought I was going to lose my mind. The banshee squeal of those steel wheels admonished our presence. I lost my grip on the world and was swept away. The train sucked me under its wheels. My body was destroyed. Blood and gore. Poor dismembered Monty. Gone. The last image I saw was her face, smiling.
Alias: @The Full Monty
Date: Saturday March 22, 12.12AM
Wow. This is freaky! I just had a dream that I died.
@Gutentag
Can you be assured this is a dream?
@The Full Monty
Good point. Maybe I should pinch myself to see if I’m awake?
@Gutentag
I am of agreement. Pain means you are having this life.
@The Full Monty
Yeah. Got it. That kinda sucks though, huh?
*
Chapter Five
Alias: @The Full Monty
Date: Friday April 11, 5.23AM
Hey, what do you think’s on the other side?
@Gutentag
Nothing and something give to cancel.
@The Full Monty
You mean it’s just like here, but the opposite?
@Gutentag
No. Not like here but the same :)
*
I’d often wondered why my parents never had another child. Of course I assumed it was my fault. Somehow I’d been such a bothersome baby that my parents were sworn off bringing another one into this world. I imagined myself, needy and crying in the middle of the night. In my version I’d be pathetically small, weirdly no larger than an eggcup. My father would grunt in his sleep leaving my mother to tend me, swearing hot curses under her breath. Her nerves were so shot after giving birth to such a horrific creature, that she reached for her first cigarette. I was the cause of her anxiety, I was sure.
I’d once seen some old pictures of my mother, young and fresh looking. What struck me wasn’t her youthful face, without the wrinkles and dark rings that stained her eyes now. It was the fact that she always appeared without a cigarette. In one picture she was laughing at a fair ground, in another she was holding a pet rabbit she once had, in another she was sitting on a beach in her bikini. In none of these images did she hold a cigarette. This compulsion came later, after I was born. It was all the proof I needed.
‘You ever been to Germany?’ I asked the dog.
‘If you haven’t noticed, I’m a dog,’ it said.
‘Yeah, but you’re not a normal dog, are you? Who knows where you’ve been?’
It sat there watching me pull on yesterday’s shirt. There was a long stain down the front. It had been there for a few days now, some glue from school or something I guess. I tried to wipe it off by licking a handkerchief and dabbing at it, like a mother does a child’s dirty face. That only made things worse, so I gave up.
‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Have you ever been to Germany?’
The dog suddenly bared its teeth, and its hackles went up. All the hairs on its back stood on end like sharp bristles.
‘You think he’s your friend?’ snarled the dog. ‘You don’t even understand what he says. And he doesn’t understand you. Don’t waste your time with him.’
I grimaced stubbornly down at the dog. Talking to Gutentag was like reading a cryptic fortune cookie. Nothing ever quite made sense but you always had the feeling he knew more than what he was letting on. Surely there was meaning there before the translation mucked it all up? Or was the dog right? Was Gutentag just spouting incomprehensible babble, even in German? Was he locked up in some mental hospital in Berlin, his arms pinned in a straight jacket, writing to me by punching a keyboard with his nose?
No. I refused to think of him like this. He was the only friend I’d ever had.
‘Forget about him. She’s what you want,’ said the dog. ‘I’m here to help you.’
Its demeanour softened. The hairs on its back relaxed and it tilted its head to one side. It almost looked cute enough to pat. Still, I didn’t dare.
It was unusual for our family to do anything together. Most weekends were spent apart. Even if we were all home at the same time, we’d all find separate rooms in the house to do whatever. But on the odd occasion, duty won out and we’d visit Dolly.
Dolly was my grandmother, my mother’s mother, and a gregarious extrovert. She liked to wear bright purple everything. From her hair to her frilly blouses to the fluffy slippers on her feet, everything was a lurid purple. She’d been a nurse in her working life and had seen her fair share of pain and suffering, so I guess that was her way of coping.
‘Why are you so purple?’ I had asked when I was little.
‘Oh. I just like to brighten things up a bit,’ Dolly would say. ‘How about we go ride a unicorn?’
Dolly liked the unicorns at the Royal Show. She used to take me there when I was little and we’d go round and round on the carousel. She’d always pick the unicorn, so I could hold onto the horn while we ate fairy floss. Those days were long gone. A few years ago Dolly had a fall and broke her hip. Now this once proud and independent woman couldn’t get herself to the toilet on time. She tried her best to cope, but after a while she couldn’t manage her house. That’s when the trouble started. She blamed my father.
‘Is he out in the car?’ asked Dolly.
‘Yes,’ said my mother.
‘You shouldn’t have let him come. He’s not welcome.’
‘He’ll only come in if you say so.’
‘Well, I won’t say so!’ she spat. ‘Did you bring any biscuits?’
Dolly’s own mother lived through World War Two and had instilled in her a pathological fear of throwing anything away. Back then people had to make do with what they had. When something broke, they mended it. There simply wasn’t the option of buying a replacement. Dolly kept everything. Her house was a mad collection of refuse. There was probably a lot of valuable stuff in there, hidden under piles of yellow newspapers. Collectors paid top dollar for old gear like that. But when Dolly was put in the retirement village, Dad just backed a truck in and took the lot down the dump. Dolly was furious. She never forgave him. He had thrown her life away. She had no idea it was all my mother’s idea. Dolly needed full-time care so, forced to choose between caring for Dolly and sending her to a home, my mother chose the home. Dad took all this on the chin. He never once tried to explain that it wasn’t his decision. Whenever we visited Dolly, he’d just sit outside in the car and read the paper.
Dolly’s retirement village was a small collection of units, all lined up next to one another. It had tended gardens and nurses on call. Each unit held someone’s grandmother, or grandfather, and they’d all sit in their little houses and wait for someone to visit. They waved hello to each other in the morning and sometimes played cards in the evening. There was a dog there too.
It was a greyhound, an ex-racing dog, purchased to give the elderly residents some company, I guess. Normally dogs like this were put down once they were too old to race, given some sort of lethal injection. But this one was saved. This geriatric dog lived with all the geriatric people. But it hadn’t spent much time with humans, so it had no idea how to behave like a pet. It didn’t care for a pat or a game of fetch. All it did was sniff the old people. And when one of them was about to die, it sat next to them and watched. It was never wrong. If that dog sat with you you’d die, guaranteed. Maybe it could smell cancer cells, or pheromones given off when your body shuts down, or maybe it could just smell death? Needless to say, none of them liked it.
/> The greyhound crossed the yard in front of Dolly’s unit and she nearly choked on her biscuit. A look of terror crossed her face. We all watched out the window as the greyhound paused a moment, sniffed the air, and then moved on to another unit. Dolly breathed a sigh of relief. Her hands trembled as she sipped her tea.
Dolly never let you pity her though. When you’d been there for about an hour, she’d abruptly tell you it was time to go. She was almost rude about it.
‘Go on then. Off you go!’ she’d say. ‘I’m a busy person. I’ve got much better things to do than sit around and have tea and biscuits all day!’
She’d see us off at the door and scowl at my dad waiting in the car. That was just a ruse though. We all knew that as soon as we drove off, Dolly would just sit there and wait until our next visit, surrounded in purple. Waiting is always the hardest part.
Alias: @The Full Monty
Date: Monday April 14, 6.45AM
Hey, what’s your favourite food?
@Gutentag
I prefer sustenance for good thought.
@The Full Monty
I get it. You like a good idea? Food for thought, you mean?
@Gutentag
Unless your thoughts are to punish.
@The Full Monty
Why would I do that?
@Gutentag
When don’t you?
*
I was determined to try and cooked a boiled egg for breakfast. I wasn’t sure I could eat it without puking.
About a year ago, I’d found a block of chocolate dropped outside a supermarket; the owner must have let it slip from their shopping bag, or something. It lay there on the bitumen, still in its shiny red wrapper, promising delight. It was a momentary weakness in my otherwise successful campaign of self-sacrifice. I hid behind a bush and ate the whole thing in one go. The taste was extraordinary. I hadn’t eaten anything remotely that wonderful in years. But it was too much, too soon. I was horrendously ill and puked all over the gutter. Chocolate-flavoured goo flew all over the place. People came out to watch and point at me. I was sure they thought I was drunk or something. I stumbled around like a hobo, trying to hold myself up on a parked car. The sugar rush gave me an instant headache and my skull throbbed in agony. My brain decided it wasn’t going to hang around to be punished like that and took off who knows where. I woke up an hour later two streets away inside a bin.
The Hounded Page 4