Afterlight

by Lim, Rebecca

  ‘Hi,’ I said, sitting up and edging away from her, remembering what she was capable of, my knees drawn up under my chin for extra protection. ‘You were right, the kid needed your, my, uh, our help. He’s got no dad—ran off with his PA last year. Mum works two jobs and can’t drive him. They’re going to be a lot more careful next time.’

  Eve straightened, shimmering beside the bed in her usual get up, her face all straight lines. No joy, no anger, no sorrow. Just business.

  As though she’d said it, I thought: Next.

  And she’d laid it all in front of me like a map—in pictures, not words, because like I said, she doesn’t speak like we do because she’s got nothing to speak with, has she?

  I didn’t need to close my eyes to see a T-intersection, a white-haired white guy in a dark-blue blazer, gold buttons, white shirt, beige trousers, grey loafers. About to step out in front of a speeding car. A black ute, tricked up with mirror-image naked girl decals, in disco-ball silver, on the back window. For good measure, Eve showed me the same thing, five times. It was like a Visions for Beginners tutorial, but on her terms, and hers alone.

  Like it was projected across the walls, I saw:

  Kemal’s Kebab Shop, 100% Halal, on one corner, a charcoal chicken shop, Henny Penny on the other.

  Across the street, two banks, a KFC, and a TAB. Colours dull in the daylight. Piece of cake. Clear as crystal. Sorted.

  ‘It’s not going to stop, is it?’ I said out loud. She didn’t need to nod because she’s got a better trick than that. She just vanished.

  As soon as I fell out of bed the next morning, I called Eric, the twenty-eight-year-old part-time DJ, part-time uni student, dreadlocked dish pig, and told him to swap Sunday kitchen duties with me. Even knowing what I was in for when I returned to The Star didn’t dampen my enthusiasm.

  Someone needed help. I could almost hear triumphal music as I boarded the tram, bending to get under the dangling fluorescent green handholds while negotiating the mohair-wearing uni students who smelt of bong smoke, the seniors with faces like cats’ bums, the God-awful smell of years of trapped BO in the air.

  Storkie’s come to save the day! my inner voice sang. It felt good, doing something. It took my mind off the panicky feeling of loss that followed me every moment I was awake. I would be their daughter and do this thing, and maybe that feeling would one day recede.

  Only, when I got to the pedestrian crossing in front of Kemal’s Kebab Shop, there was no one there. In my excitement I hadn’t registered what time of day the man in the suit jacket would arrive. Daytime sure, but morning? Afternoon? While the sun was still in the sky, he could come any time.

  It was 10.43am and nothing was happening at that icy intersection except two people stumbling into the KFC for a Sunday morning grease fix. An all-day stake out was not an option. Not with Eric due to clock off at 12pm and Gran liable to blow a gasket if I failed to show. I loved Gran, don’t get me wrong, and she loved me back with all her heart, but she wasn’t the most even-tempered lady.

  I heard him before I saw him. At least, I heard the ripples that follow everywhere in his wake because he was the type of guy, I learned later, that can’t resist calling a passing Vietnamese girl a chink or telling a North African taxi driver to go home, if you know how to get there, you dirty kaffir. He was a prick, and this was one of the biggest immigrant suburbs in the inner city, so it was a spark and tinder situation. But I didn’t know that when I was loitering with intent outside Kemal’s Kebabery. All I knew was that an old guy in old guy clothes that matched Eve’s description exactly was coming my way and I had to save him.

  Problem was: where was the car? There was nothing to save him from. I scanned the T-intersection quickly as the old man strode towards the pedestrian crossing, talking to himself and looking red in the face, like he was about to have a giant heart attack right there on the spot. Maybe Eve had been wrong. Maybe it wasn’t going to be a car. Maybe he was destined to drop dead at my size 11 feet. I didn’t fancy giving this guy mouth-to-mouth at all.

  Please, please, I thought to myself as he came up beside me. Please let it not be that.

  He punched the button five times quickly, like that would make the lights change any faster, while I twitched around nervily on the spot and debated what to do. Behind us, someone leant out of Kemal’s and shouted something to the effect of ‘Hey, fuckhead!’ while the man beside me swung around pretty niftily for an old fart and gave him a big, visual fuck you right back. Nice.

  The lights changed. Still no car. But something told me I had to keep the old man from stepping off the kerb.

  ‘You can’t cross now,’ I said desperately, moving to stand right in front of him. Meanwhile, the pedestrian light continued its demented pinging, about to click over to red.

  Eve had been wrong. A red flush whooshed up my neck into my head, which I was pretty certain would soon blow off with embarrassment.

  The old guy reared back, then muscled forward. ‘You with them, you little slut?’ He jerked his head at the shops behind us, moving in so close I could smell strong eau de armpit and something that reminded me of wet socks and braised cabbage all rolled up together and boiled some more. I had a bird’s eye view of the dandruff that lay along his shoulders like a thick drift of snow.

  ‘Just trust me,’ I said, looking over the old man’s pink and flaky bald patch for that bloody, bloody car, which existed nowhere at present except inside my head. ‘You don’t want to do that.’

  Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be today. Maybe I had to go home and come back tomorrow and hope he’d be right here for me to accost again. I punched the pedestrian crossing button on autopilot. Old sewer-breath didn’t bother to reply. I thought we were safe.

  When the lights changed for a second time, I was still facing his way, with my back to the crossing. Without warning, the man whose life I supposedly held in my hands just shoved me into the street so hard I almost fell on my bony arse.

  As I struggled to keep from going down on the wet bitumen, I saw it, I saw the car, about to run a red into the T and mow the old bastard down. He was halfway across, so busy still mouthing off at me over his shoulder that he didn’t see death coming for him with matching naked-girl decals gleaming in the thin sunshine.

  You won’t catch me saying this most of the time, but sometimes being a freak can be useful, an unexpected gift. All that Goal Defence I’d been forced to do all my life was finally good for something. I don’t remember doing it, but people say I pulled off a feat no one should have been able to pull off that quickly. It was split second stuff. The guy was already too far ahead. It was already too late. They said it was superhuman.

  They also say that I broke his nose, but based on what I found out about him later—how much everyone on the street feared and detested him—he deserved that much.

  It made the evening news, the next day’s papers. All the locals they interviewed said it was a nice thing I did, but I should have let him die.

  4

  The slow clapping and foot stomping began when I entered our form room on Monday morning. Most faces were friendly or coolly indifferent, which was fine by me. Simon Pandeli drawled, ‘Nice work!’ and Biddy Cole yelled out, ‘Way to go, Stork. On ya.’

 
But some were openly hostile. Like Claudia P. and her posse of skinny-jeans wearing, Napoleon Perdis-abusing, ghd-wielding super clones; the very bitches I’d been told to avoid.

  I could see that they couldn’t believe how I’d gone from zero to hero overnight. I’d been everywhere—on TV, on talkback radio, all positive about the youth of today, for a change. They were calling me inspirational and enigmatic, heaven sent. That last one gave me a laugh; if only they knew.

  A trio of comedians on a commercial radio station had even started a campaign to get me knighted, they’d written to the Queen and everything. A reporter for Today Tonight had doorstepped me before school when I was still wearing my nightgown and Uggs, my bad case of bed head a sculpture-unto-itself as I picked up the morning papers out the front of The Star. Now the whole country knew what I wore to bed and what I looked like after I got out of it, and I’d been trying to block that thought out of my mind ever since.

  Today Tonight had taken matters into their own hands because I hadn’t made myself ‘available’ to answer any questions. When the reporter had thrust the microphone under my nose and said urgently, ‘So give us an insight into exactly how it was that you happened to be in the right place at the right time?’ I’d muttered, ‘Must be psychic, mate,’ and shut the door in his face.

  But I was like wallpaper. Like grass. No one at Ivy Street could ever remember a word I’d said after I said it. And any half-clever thing that came out of my mouth was invariably attributed to the person standing next to me. I was kind of invisible, which is as mad as it sounds.

  Once, I’d overheard my maths teacher say: If there’s oxygen up where she is, none of us are breathing it. But she would say that. We had a love-hate relationship, me and Mrs McKendry.

  So by second period, what I’d been up to was so ancient history that everyone was hanging out for recess and news about the latest hook-ups, two-way, three-way, whatever. As usual, every girl who wasn’t an out-and-out lesbo was waiting to get a look at Jordan Haig, the most seriously beautiful guy in Year 12 and so off limits that even Claudia P. and her chain-smoking fembots couldn’t touch him. The way he gave people the brush-off was an art form and just one more thing to love about him.

  I had one class with Jordan—Biology—but that wasn’t enough to get me by, and like everyone else, I was waiting to eyeball him and his two closest mates as they did their aloof rebel thing in the corner of the quadrangle that made up the centre of the school universe. Darwinian stuff went on at Ivy Street High. Every day, there was at least someone punching on someone else, or getting their extended family involved so that Asian-Maori, Skippy-Greek, girl-on-girl all-ins were always erupting outside the school gates—knives, nunchuks and everything—soon as the bell went.

  But even the die-hard jocks, the death-metal freaks, the tech-heads, the skateboarders, the self-starting entrepreneurs and the dorks-who-ran-in-packs-for-safety thought Jordan Haig was untouchably cool. No one except his two besties knew anything about him, and they never spilled their guts. There was a mystery at the core of him that everyone could see, but nobody could fathom.

  He had dark hair, with eyes as grey as rain-washed skies, and he always dressed like a druggy rock star god, all jangly silver and onyx around his wrists and around his neck. Some days, he wore cut-off tees that highlighted his incredible tatts. One of his arms sported a full sleeve of crazy words and symbols, all intertwined and tricked out in blues, greens, reds and blacks. The other arm was only half-done, from wrist to elbow. But the guy could clearly stand pain and that was enough to make him object of lust and/or envy No. 1.

  And he was tall, taller than me (Yes, there was a God), and when he chose to speak—which wasn’t too often—they could never catch him out, the teachers, because he always knew the answer, even though he looked like a hood-on-the-make. He was whip-smart and nothing ever fazed him, which said heaps about Jordan Haig because when you’re eighteen, awkwardness goes with the terrain, and he was never that.

  So I saw him, finally, that morning I was almost notorious, huddled beside Biddy Cole and her marginally friendly BFFs. For me, the day had really only started, was only really bearable, because I’d seen him. As I stared over at Jordan, I wondered whether my being a household name might somehow make him aware I was even alive, until I reminded myself what had happened when looking turned to touching in the case of Floyd Parker and my face suddenly flamed up so red that Biddy asked me if I was choking on my apple.

  But maybe all the coverage had helped because, weirdly, as I binned my morning tea—some horrible pub-menu experiment wrapped in filo pastry that had gone wrong—Jordan actually looked up as I passed him by, on my way to Art.

  As our eyes met for the first time in recorded history, and I suddenly stopped remembering how to breathe, the blood drained out of his face.

  Should be the other way around, I thought, startled. Then Jordan turned his back on me, quite deliberately, and walked away.

  A locked bathroom door usually signalled trouble and kept the punters away, just grateful it wasn’t them inside, begging for mercy. But I was stupid, and I was busting, and just before the final class of the day I tried the door handle on the third floor girls’ toilets once too often.

  Sharys F.—Claudia P.’s chief goon—suddenly opened the door and yanked me inside, where I fell into a scene out of Mean Girls redux. Only, this being here and not Hollywood, no one was good looking and everyone was dressed badly.

  Turned out Claudia had her nemesis—Linda Jelly—in a chokehold, up against the wall of the last cubicle. Sharys frogmarched me right up to the action, making certain I couldn’t look away. Linda Jelly, with her mild scoliosis, Coke-bottle glasses, dumpy figure and inexplicable chin-length perm, had always been an easy target, Biddy had once confided. ‘I never join in the general Linda-bashing that goes on,’ she’d chattered, pointing out the back of Linda’s head over her open textbook, ‘but I’ve never tried to defend her either, I’m sorry to say, because I like to pretend I’m Switzerland.’

  Claudia didn’t miss a beat—not acknowledging me exactly, but still somehow making me feel included. ‘Got your period today, Jelly Belly?’ she said conversationally as Sharys and Goon Two—a girl whose parents had named her after a musical term like Cadence or Rhapsody, I forgot what—crowded around to watch.

  Even if Linda had been able to answer, she didn’t have to. A huge patch of blood had leaked through the back of her school uniform and whenever Claudia gave her a shake, I could see the leading edge of it. Poor thing, it was a bad one, like something cooked up between Mobil and the Exxon Valdez. It didn’t help that Linda was already a walking offence in Claudia’s book, whose other specialities included throwing Year 7 kids into lockers and slamming the door.

  Anyway, Linda began to cry, and I shifted uneasily as she wailed, ‘Why won’t you guys ever leave me alone?’ It was a good question. Shame there would never be an answer.

  Linda snivelled harder. ‘Was g-gunna w-wash it off, if you let me…’

  Claudia showed her teeth, light glinting off her super-stay-on lip gloss. ‘So now’s your chance.’

  She set Linda down, almost gently. Linda hesitated, then tried to push past the wedge of girls blocking the door. Neither of them, built like a pack of perfectly coiffed frost-free refrigerators, gave an inch. Standing
just behind Sharys, her French manicure still digging into my arm, I realised with a sinking heart what Claudia had in mind. She was so predictable.

  ‘Uh, excuse me,’ Linda added, gesturing helplessly at the sinks beyond us.

  Claudia laughed, moving forward so the backs of Linda’s legs pressed against the toilet bowl. ‘Excuse you is right, Jelly Belly. Where you going? Water’s right there. So start washing.’

  Linda gaped, finally comprehending. Seeing no way out, she began to scoop and cry, scoop and cry, while Claudia, Sharys and Cadence? Rhapsody? Prelude? almost wet themselves laughing. All the while, the sound Linda was making as she scrubbed at her bloody skirt with toilet water made my skin crawl. I tried to pull out of Sharys’ grasp. In reply, she just dug her nails in harder.

  But then something really strange happened.

  Linda was still sobbing and scooping water out of the dunny with her bare hands when a message appeared on the mirror opposite the stall. I saw it first out of the corner of my eye, then Sharys—who’d felt the shock run up the muscles of my arm—turned. Suddenly, everyone went quiet.

  She is You, the message said.

  They looked like words you write in the fog that appears on a mirror after a scalding shower. They were clear and distinct for a moment, then they faded. But we’d all read the message, which had got to Claudia’s two goons, who’d gone white.

  ‘You do that?’ Claudia said sharply, looking at me. I shook my head, pointing numbly at Sharys’ big hand, still curled around my arm, like a claw.

  Confused, Linda started crying again, and the sound infuriated Claudia so much that she backhanded her across the face to shut her up. The sound of flesh on flesh shocked everyone motionless once more, including Linda, who was standing in a puddle of bloodstained water, her wet skirt and white socks stained pink, her mouth a round O.