“To make this easy,” says Mrs Liotta, peering over the top of her red-rimmed glasses, “let’s just create groups of three based on the tables you’re currently sitting at.”
It’s almost comical how Rachael and I shoot each other a panicked look at exactly the same time.
“No interpretation is wrong,” Mrs Liotta continues, “and I encourage you to seek out different media. Most importantly, the three of you in each group must agree on a vision for your work. Each person’s ideas need to be represented as part of a cohesive collaboration.”
Rachael’s hand is in the air before our teacher has even finished speaking.
“Yes, Miss Tan?”
“I’d like to request a change of partner,” Rachael says quickly. “I think there will be a conflict of interest working with Tash.”
Mrs Liotta tips her head to one side, her bright fuchsia lips twisting. “And by that I take it to mean there will be conflict because of your shared interest in our new student?”
The class erupts into sniggers. I can’t bring myself to look at Morgan or Rachael, although I sense Morgan shifting uncomfortably on his stool. Rachael attempts a weak protest and Mrs Liotta cuts her off.
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to work through any differences you have,” she tells us.
“But I–”
“Enough, Miss Tan. I think you forget I taught your Year Seven class when you and Miss Carmody were good friends. You’ll just have to dig deep and find your common ground again. No switching groups.”
Rachael and I exchange another look that tells me we’re both one hundred per cent sure any common ground we once had has been torched and decimated. She turns away from us and buries her nose in her journal.
Morgan taps a pen against his project sheet. “Sooo, got any ideas about this?”
“Not yet. Maybe we can brainstorm?”
We spend the next twenty minutes talking about Inception, lucid dreaming and even A Nightmare on Elm Street, although Morgan has to explain the plot to me because I’m not into horror films.
“How’d things go with your mum on Sunday after the whole Watergardens thing?” Morgan asks. “Was she still mad at you when you got home?”
I glance at Rachael on Morgan’s other side. She’s still hunched over her notebook, but I keep my voice down just in case.
“She’s barely said two words to me since then. I think it’s safe to say I won’t be winning Daughter of the Year.”
“Seriously? That’s harsh.” Morgan musters a sympathetic smile. “I still feel kinda bad I got you in trouble.”
“You didn’t,” I assure him. “It was my own fault. Truth is, I wasn’t in that sushi line the whole time like I told my mum.”
Why I’m admitting this is anybody’s guess, considering how badly it reflects upon me as a big sister.
“Well, that much I know,” Morgan says. “I figure you must have a good reason for keeping it from her.”
At this, Rachael’s head turns slightly. Without looking at us she mutters, “Tash has never got along with her mum.”
She doesn’t really say it in a mean way, and it reminds me I used to confide in Rachael once upon a time. She used to listen back then, and even when she grew impatient with my ramblings she still offered helpful suggestions. These days she uses those confessions as weapons. I narrow my eyes now and wait for whatever she’ll brandish to wound me.
“What?” Rachael says, when she catches my look. “It’s true, isn’t it? You told me she never had time for you and Tim’s her favourite. No wonder you got all screwed up in the head.”
Gripping the edge of my wooden stool, I strain to keep my voice level. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Rachael huffs impatiently as though I’m ruining her point. She turns her attention to Morgan. “Did she mention she hears voices?”
Morgan throws us both an uneasy look. “I don’t know what–”
“I don’t hear voices, Rachael,” I say, a bit too loudly. A few classmates at the table in front glance over their shoulders. “I wish you’d stop feeding that bull to anyone who shows the slightest interest in being my friend.”
“Really?” Rachael straightens. “So what do you call talking to imaginary friends?”
Go to hell is on the tip of my tongue and I’m tempted to have it out with her here and now. However, I need to diffuse this quickly if I want any chance of hanging onto my pride.
“It’s called being an immature little kid,” I say. “A bit like you bringing this up over and over again even though no one cares.”
Two guys on the next table snigger and Rachael’s smug expression dissolves. She actually looks stung. It makes me regret biting back, even if it did feel powerful for a second, even though I know Sadie would be proud of me. I wish I’d just ignored Rachael and said nothing at all.
“Whatever,” she mumbles, returning to her notebook. She freezes us out for the rest of the lesson and storms from the classroom as soon as the last bell rings.
Morgan and I pack up slowly as the classroom clears out, gathering up our scribbled notes and drawings. I fiddle with my bag longer than I need to, reluctant to head home.
“Hey, I’m sorry things got weird with Rachael,” I say. “I’ll make peace with her so our project doesn’t suffer. She just gets to me sometimes.”
Morgan spins on his stool to face me and his knee brushes my thigh again. I don’t move my leg and neither does he. “You shouldn’t be embarrassed about something that happened when you were a kid.”
“I know.”
“You can’t let it define who you are now. I mean, you think I’m proud of what happened to Mallory? Why didn’t I wait for her outside that toilet block until she’d been in and come out again? I regret it every day, but it was years ago, you know?”
I’m caught off guard by Morgan bringing up the carnival.
“How could anyone know what would happen to Mallory?” I say.
“Yeah, well, I’ll never forget that look in my mum’s eyes when I came back from the toilets without her. Disbelief, I s’pose. She just couldn’t believe I’d been so careless.”
“A bit like my mum with me at Watergardens,” I admit. “Although I’m nine years older than you were. I have no excuse.”
Morgan picks at a loose thread on his shorts. I can tell there’s something he wants to broach. The question he asks is not one I’m expecting at all. “Do you have a boyfriend your mum doesn’t know about?”
“What?” Heat blossoms from the neckline of my uniform.
“Did you sneak off to see him at Watergardens? Is that why you lied to your mum about where you were?”
I almost snort at the absurdity of it – me having a secret boyfriend! – and then feel flattered that Morgan doesn’t think the idea is absurd at all.
“No,” I say quietly. “No boyfriend.”
“Okay, so who’s Sparrow?”
I fumble with my pencil case and two Sharpies clatter to the floor. I focus all my attention on retrieving them. “Uh, sorry, what?”
“At my parents’ party, your friend Sadie asked you about Sparrow after you were trapped in the laundry with me.” Morgan ducks his head, coaxing me to look at him. “Did he hurt you? Is that why you were afraid of me?”
I reach out and touch his arm. “I wasn’t afraid of you! It wasn’t that at all.”
Morgan’s shoulders relax, his gaze falling on my hand. I remove it quickly and instantly wish I could put it back again.
“Sparrow is–” I try to think of how best to word this, “–that imaginary friend Rachael was talking about.”
“Oh. Okay …”
“He sort of appeared in my life around the time my brother was born. My shrink says it was because I was jealous and craved attention. Oh, yeah – I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist on and off for nine years. Are you ready to run yet?”
Morgan smiles. “Not at all. My sister and I both went to therapy after her disappearance. No judgement h
ere.”
I nod. “I invented this creepy character to keep me company because I felt lonely at my aunt’s house. My parents dumped me there for two weeks when Tim was born so they could settle in at home without the added complication of me to look after. To eight-year-old me, it felt like they didn’t want me around.”
Morgan chuckles. “Why did you make this character so creepy? Why not a big cuddly teddy bear or something?”
“See, that’s the thing – I don’t remember deciding to create him at all. He just turned up in my bedroom one night wanting to play a game. He just existed all on his own. My psychiatrist reckons my subconscious made him gruesome to gain more comfort from my parents. Like, the worse I made him, the more concerned they’d be and the more they’d regret sending me away.”
“Wow, you were quite the little schemer!” Morgan jokes.
“Apparently,” I say, with a shrug. “Although Dr Ingrid put it in much nicer terms with a big side order of psychobabble.”
Morgan shakes his head, smiling. “What did he look like? A messed-up clown or something?”
“Uh, no.” It feels weird talking openly about Sparrow, yet there’s still so much I’m withholding. “He looked like a person, I suppose. A sick one. Really skinny, with these deep hollows in his face right here.” I place my hands underneath my cheekbones, pressing my cheeks into the void of my mouth. “He had these rotten teeth and his skin was really pale. His arms and face were covered in weeping sores.”
“Jesus,” Morgan says, with a mixture of amusement and horror. “He’s like a bogeyman. No wonder you don’t like getting trapped in a dark room with an image like that in the back of your mind.”
It’s not worth explaining the things Sparrow did; how it runs much deeper than being afraid of his appearance. What’s the point? He was only imaginary.
“My mum sure grew tired of the nightmares about Sparrow for months afterwards. She and Dr Ingrid think that was part of my ongoing attention-seeking, but I was genuinely terrified he was going to come back. I’d sometimes imagine seeing him out of the corner of my eye.”
I still do.
Morgan’s eyes narrow and I feel my pulse stutter. For a split second it seems like he’s assessing me, weighing things up. Before I can interpret it properly he’s on his feet.
“Well,” he says, stretching, “gotta say, you seem pretty well adjusted for someone with that grisly little nugget from your childhood. It’s so weird the way kids’ minds work. Thank god we grow out of these things, right?”
Returning his smile with a weak one of my own, I battle that ever-present voice inside my head.
Tell him. Tell him everything. Now.
Morgan slings his backpack over one shoulder and I fuss with the zipper on my bag, wondering if I can possibly explain how intrinsically Sparrow is woven into my psyche. Even inside my head the words seem complicated and disturbing, so I revert to my usual script: telling people what they want to hear.
“Yeah,” I agree with Morgan. “Thank god we grow out of these things.”
14
THEN
“Do you want to play a game?”
I look up from my colouring book at the sound of his voice, and one of my pencils rolls onto the floor. He’s leaning around the doorway, his fingers gripping the doorframe like a scrawny bird claw. I haven’t seen him for two days and he’s never come to me in daytime. Maybe that’s a good thing. If I’d met him in daylight I might’ve been too scared to talk to him at all.
Sometimes people look different, Mum would say. It’s rude to stare.
I can’t help it, though. I’ve never seen anyone that looks like him before.
He’s not wearing his hood today and he has no hair. His eyes are pressed deep into his face making his forehead look all big and bony. There are red sores on his chin and bumpy scabs on his ears like he’s been picking them instead of leaving them alone. And his skin is weird. Sort of dull. The colour is all faded, like that time I accidentally left my Wonder Woman comic in the sun.
Maybe he’s sick. Except he doesn’t move like somebody who isn’t feeling well. He jerks and jitters like he’s excited, like he’s trying to wriggle out of his own body. He rushes into the room now, glancing over his shoulder at the staircase and the sound of Aunty Ally’s shower upstairs.
“I’ve hidden something,” he says. “You go down into the cellar and see if you can find it.”
I place my blue pencil on the coffee table and uncross my legs. “Find what?”
“The door to my secret room.”
“I don’t like the cellar,” I tell him. “I don’t like the sound the water heater makes.”
Even with the cellar door closed I can hear it – a thump and a shudder and a high-pitched wheeze like an animal in pain. It makes me think of the story Gran told me about this house, about some fancy doctor who built it for his family two hundred years ago. They had a Scottish convict working for them as a servant and the cellar was where he slept. They locked the cellar door every night. They trapped him down there in the dark.
“You’ll have to hide it somewhere else,” I say, “if you want me to play.”
He glances at the stairs again and makes a growly noise in the back of his throat. “Just come now. It won’t work if any grown-ups find out.”
He moves in front of the window and I see he has dark purple shadows under each eye. The sunlight shows up the lines across his forehead and creases around his mouth. I’ve tried to guess his age but it’s impossible. He’s like a pixie or a goblin from a fairytale book, one that looks old and young at the same time.
“Why are you here?” I ask him. “Are you allowed to be in the house?”
He picks at a scratch on his arm, his eyes looking towards the upstairs landing. “I’m here to play with you.”
“Who invited you?”
“You did.” He folds his arms. “You need to come now or we’re going to run out of time.”
Upstairs the shower stops and some floorboards creak. A door is opened and closed. I stand up and back away from the coffee table just as Sparrow lunges forwards. He grabs hold of my arm.
“I don’t want to play down there!” I try to pull myself away. His grip is tight and his fingers are pinching. He might look small and sick, but he’s also strong. “It’s too dark. I don’t want to. It’s too dark!”
His face changes as though something has grabbed it and twisted, like that time Dad accidentally hit his thumb with the hammer. His eyebrows scrunch together and his jaw tightens like he’s holding in a roar. I shrink away from him, my legs going weak. He drags me halfway across the living room, towards the hall.
“I don’t want to!” I try to dig my heels in but my socks slide over the floorboards. “Please. Don’t!”
“You have to, or else I’ll sneak into your bedroom while you’re sleeping,” he says, “and I’ll lock you in a box. No one will find you and you’ll starve to death. Is that what you want?”
The thought of something so horrible makes me quiet. Is visiting the cellar worse than that? I didn’t ask him to come here, so why do I have to choose?
“I–I don’t want to play.”
Just as we reach the cellar door, there’s a growling streak of golden fur on the upstairs landing. Benny bounds for the staircase, his collar tinkling like a tiny bell. Sparrow’s hand opens and he shoves me so hard I fall onto my knees. When I look behind me, Sparrow is gone.
Benny leaps off the bottom step and skids sideways on the floorboards, his claws tippy-tapping as he flies past. His barking is like an explosion as he scratches and growls at the cellar door.
Aunty Ally dashes down the staircase in a faded green bathrobe.
“Tash?” She glances up and down the hallway. “Who are you talking to?”
“Sparrow.” I rub the tender spot on my arm and hold it up as evidence. There aren’t any red marks though. “He was here again. This time Benny saw him too.”
“Sparrow …?”
My ch
eeks get hot. “I just call him that. He hasn’t told me his name so I made one up.”
Aunty Ally doesn’t say anything else. She stands on the bottom step watching me, her forehead all frowny.
“I swear,” I tell her, pointing at the cellar door. “He was standing right there and Benny growled at him.”
“Honey,” Aunty Ally says gently. “Benny’s just growling at the water heater again. Listen, you can hear it filling up now after my shower.”
She brings a finger to her lips and nods her head at the cellar door. Behind it comes the hiss and squeal from the horrible dark room below. Benny growls and paces in front of the door.
“I hate that noise,” I say, putting my hands over my ears. “Make it stop!”
Aunty Ally steps across the hallway and slips her arm around my shoulders. “Come on,” she says. “Come away from there. Let’s fix you some breakfast. I think you must be light-headed.”
She leads me towards the kitchen and whistles for Benny to follow us. I glance up at her face. “You believe me, don’t you? About Sparrow?”
Giving my shoulder a squeeze, she says, “I believe that you believe it. But your parents won’t understand, honey. They might think something is wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“They might think something’s a little glitchy inside your head.” She steers me over to the kitchen table and slides a chair out for me. “They might think you’re seeing things that aren’t really there.”
As I sit down, my aunty reaches for an old tin on the windowsill. I think she might be giving me a biscuit until she pulls out a cigarette packet and a plastic lighter.
“When I was growing up,” she says, “I was convinced there were fairies at the bottom of the garden. See those ferns there? At the edge of the bush?” She lights her cigarette and waves it at the large window overlooking the backyard.
Straightening in my chair, I peer over the sink and through the grubby glass at the lawn full of bindies, past the washing line to the rusty back gate.
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