Afterlight

by Lim, Rebecca

  If you didn’t count Eve—and I didn’t, because talking to her was like talking to a stone—it actually felt pretty great being out on my own. Everything I’d done lately had seemed to come complete with a rent-a-crowd, or an emotionally damaging brush-off from Jordan Haig.

  Eve disappeared and reappeared in the dark between the streetlights ahead of me, first on this side of the road, then the other. She knew the streets like a local, taking a shortcut through Edinburgh Gardens—which are seriously scary after dark—and hot-footing it, if you could call it that, right through the Holden Street Reserve and up the Park Street Trail. I swear, if you’d seen the back of her moving along, you’d have thought she was a person like you and me, just on a mission. I’d never seen her so, well, animated.

  We’d soon crossed over into Carlton North, staying well clear of the General Cemetery and Princes Park, and entered the fringes of Brunswick East. Even at this hour, traffic along Sydney Road was steady and I put my hoodie up and my head down, hoping no one would try to approach me. I wrapped one hand around the torch in my pocket for good measure. People had contract hits taken out on them around here. They made TV dramas about people who lived in this area that no one in this area could actually watch until a judge cleared it first. A disembodied woman like Eve wasn’t going to offer me much protection.

  After the first few blocks, it began to rain heavily and I started to lose all feeling in my hands and face. As we ducked left up a side street, I knew we’d long since crossed over into Brunswick and were moving in the direction of Coburg, maybe Pascoe Vale South, but the street signs had begun to blur and I was getting really tired. I don’t know where Eve goes when she’s not with me, but she never seemed to need any rest. And the rain didn’t trouble her much either.

  The street that we finally came to looked like any other street in the area: narrow Victorian terraces built right up against Mediterranean-inspired 1950s places bursting with concrete, columns and fruit trees, or houses that were a curious combination of both, as if one era had begun steadily cannibalising the other.

  The house Eve stopped across the road from was one of the latter: a single-fronted Victorian that had had every trace of its Victorian-ness painstakingly ripped out and replaced with something modern and jarring. Roller guards instead of shutters, sliding windows with aluminium frames instead of graceful bay ones, plaster columns instead of iron lacework, all flanked by potted citrus trees. It was sensationally ugly, but well kept. The concrete driveway was weed-free and everything in the yard—from the rolled-up extension hose to the box hedging—was immaculate. A single light was on in the front room; otherwise the house was in darkness.

  I looked sideways at Eve enquiringly. As the rain finally thinned, then stopped, she stood still for a long time, just facing the house, like she was thinking. When I crossed the street to get a better look, she didn’t follow me. I’d done several passes of the front of the house on my own before I realised, stupid from the cold and the long walk, that Eve either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come any closer. I crossed back to where she was, the dim light from an overhead streetlamp passing just faintly through her.

  ‘So what’s the deal?’ I said, unable to keep the weariness out of my voice. ‘What do you want me to do this time?’

  Would it be crazy cat lady all over again? I wondered. Or something even worse?

  Eve continued to stare at the house with a strange expression that I hadn’t seen before. There was something almost vulnerable in her usually unreadable features. She turned to me finally, looking as if she would at last actually speak, but instead she held out her hand to me, which made me hold out mine.

  Into my palm fell something almost weightless and icy. Beautiful, but unusual, too. It was a wide, beaten gold ring, with the outline of a sleeping woman’s face on it, the band carved to resemble the tresses of her long hair.

  And then Eve just vanished.

  I stared at the thing for a while, turning it over and over in my hand.

  It was almost three in the morning and I knew that Eve’s stuff could never wait. She always did things for a reason—admittedly, one only she knew about—but there was never time built in to muck around. She was all business, and I knew, without a doubt, that she wanted me to give this ring to the person inside that house. The light was still on, almost as if they were waiting for me. There was no coming back and doing it later. I might never be able to find this place again on my own. There was never a later with Eve. It had to be now, because now was all she had.

  So I took a deep breath and crossed back over, vaulting the low, iron gate and walking quickly and quietly up the slick front footpath. Concrete was good that way. I’d made my way up the path and onto the speckled verandah and I still hadn’t made a sound. Eve couldn’t have done better than me in approaching that house. But still I hesitated, studying the tiny orange light beneath the electronic doorbell. There was no name written on the nameplate. How would I address whoever opened the door? This was loony.

  But it was all loony, and what was the worst the person could do? I asked myself. Call the police? I’d just drop the ring at their feet and run. Mission accomplished. It wasn’t as if you could be arrested for giving someone pretty jewellery. Still, as I pressed the doorbell, the adrenaline that suddenly flooded into my brain made me see stars and my heartbeat kick up. There could be guns. I still didn’t know what I was going to say or do, and it was too late to figure it out now.

  I was just about to press the buzzer a second time when the door opened wide enough to reveal a single dark-brown eye above a low-slung security chain.

  ‘What you want?’ the eye addressed me suspiciously.

  There was no going back.

  ‘Someone wanted me to give this to you,’ I said, holding the ring up to the gap in the door. The eye moved closer, squinted, opened wide. The door slammed shut.

  I was debating whether to leave the gold band on the doormat when I heard the sound of running footsteps, the security chain rattling. Then the door flew open. And, I swear, the woman’s anguish and turmoil hit me like a wave. I could feel it and I actually fell back.

  The eye belonged to a tiny woman in a dressing gown and slippers. Italian? Greek? Long, dark hair unbound, silver winding through it at the temples. Deep lines down her face. But she wasn’t old old. Maybe a few years younger than Gran. But she looked like she’d been sick or something. She wore every year of her age on her face, and then some.

  She had one hand jammed into her mouth and the other one gripped tightly around a large silver crucifix that she was shaking at me like you would shake water off an umbrella. As she forced me back off the verandah with it, she cried out in some language I couldn’t understand, short, sharp sentences ringing out in the biting air.

  ‘Look,’ I said, when she drew breath to begin her incantations all over again, ‘I just wanted to give it to you. I’ll leave it right here, okay?’

  I raised both my hands high over my head to show her that I meant no harm, then proceeded to place the ring down on the footpath, exaggerating my movements.

  The woman began to lower her crucifix. I was just glad she’d stopped screaming, afraid she’d wake the neighbours and land me right back on Today Tonight.

  The woman stared down at the ring like it was a coil
ed snake on the footpath, something sent to test her. She looked almost too afraid to touch it—faint with fear—but as I watched, she passed the crucifix over it shakily, prodded the ring with her slippered foot as if it had the power to burn her flesh.

  ‘It’s quite real,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’ I backed slowly away from her towards the gate; glad I’d got the job done. I was really tired. I wanted to be home in my room with my doona right up over my nose—even if it meant that I had to have Eve watch me sleep.

  ‘And you?’ the woman suddenly croaked, looking up at me, the crucifix like some weird extension of her right hand. ‘You real?’

  The question caught me by surprise and I nodded.

  ‘Of course I am.’

  Too real, I thought. Boringly real. As real as. Too real for all this.

  The woman frowned, studying me so intently her head was tilted to one side. ‘The one she give this to you, she real, too?’

  I didn’t know how to answer that. As I hesitated, the tiny woman bent and snatched the ring up off the footpath.

  As she closed her fingers around that slender band, she burst into noisy tears, hugging the thing to her chest and rocking on her heels, back and forth, as she wailed and beat herself with it.

  I got the hell out of there as fast as my legs would carry me. I’m no good with grief, just ask Gran.

  The next day, no surprises, I had a cold.

  I was still in bed at noon when Biddy Cole rang me again on my mobile to tell me the astonishing news that Jordan Haig had officially been given a week off school as well. Effective immediately.

  The news made me sit up right away. ‘Why?’ I asked, wondering at the sudden, weird symmetries in our lives; why his name kept cropping up when before I couldn’t have bribed anyone to say it in my hearing.

  ‘Because everywhere he is today totally becomes a walking disaster zone about five seconds later!’ Biddy said with relish. ‘People are saying either you’re doing it by remote control or he’s the one behind the weird stuff that’s been going on and you’re just the patsy.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything that doesn’t involve a box of tissues,’ I said with a tissue stuffed firmly up one nostril. ‘You can quote me on that.’ And I knew Biddy would, too, being the fastest mouth in the Western world. ‘What do you mean, disaster zone?’

  Biddy proceeded to list everything that had gone wrong around Jordan Haig since I’d been banned from school yesterday. ‘He set off the automatic sprinkler system in the science wing for starters,’ she breathed. ‘Fire engines came. Three.’

  ‘That would be his personal magnetism at work,’ I giggled. ‘Too hot to handle. What else?’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ Biddy exclaimed, ‘he then proceeded to set fire to his art class after the engines had left! Most of the Year 12 sculptures in the next room went up in flames. You can imagine they aren’t too happy about that. Stav Heliotis is threatening physical retribution, tatts or no tatts. Plus, mice invaded the staffroom. People standing on chairs, you name it.’

  You could hear the wonder in Biddy’s voice. I sincerely hoped that Mrs McKendry and her pastel cashmere twin set had been present for that one.

  ‘And it doesn’t stop there!’ Biddy breathed. ‘Two of the bookshelves in the library collapsed as he walked by, almost taking out Mr Moore and 7A who were doing a research project around the other side. The second floor boys’ toilets flooded after Jordan went in to wash his hands. Stuff like that! Reporters, cops, everything have been crawling all over. Biggest thing to happen since you pulled that locker stunt.’

  ‘That wasn’t me,’ I replied, distracted by what I’d heard and forgetting how no one was supposed to know about that. ‘Jordan was there, too.’

  Armed with that added bit of dirt, Biddy rang off. I couldn’t begin to imagine what people were saying about me, about him, about us. The new wonder twins of Ivy Street.

  Shivering, I rolled out of bed in slow motion and shrugged into another jumper before climbing back under the covers with my mobile phone. I couldn’t seem to get warm. Hearing news of the mayhem that had struck at school hadn’t helped me feel any better. What was Eve up to?

  I switched the tissue to the other nostril and started composing a text message to Jordan Haig. We’d all had his number for ages, someone got it from someone who got it from someone else, and we’d all hugged it to ourselves like a fantasy safety blanket, but no one had ever been brave enough to use it. Until now. The time for helpless drooling was over. He was mixed up in this as much as I was.

  So I wrote: What gives? Storkie

  Resisting the urge to add x because what right did I have?

  Jordan was a smart guy; his take on things had to be worth at least twice whatever Today Tonight had to say about it. Not that I wouldn’t be glued to the set by 6.30pm to hear the latest. After a long moment of hesitation, I sent it.

  Almost immediately, Jordan replied: Got my own problems. Her name’s Monica but it seems you call her Eve

  Well, that was enough to get me straight out of bed and into my clothes, cold or no cold. Jordan would know what to do. If Eve really was on his case, then he was somehow part of the solution, and it was time to lay a certain ghost to rest.

  8

  I zipped myself into a mangy velour hoodie and waited. I’d sent him another text, almost immediately, that had said, simply: I need you to help me end this

  He didn’t reply. After an hour, I gave up pacing around my bedroom and headed down to the poky broom cupboard behind the Public Bar that Gran calls ‘The Office’. No one would see me in there, least of all Dirty Neil—who’d practically set up house in our fine establishment since I’d been sent home from school, spilling his guts about me to anyone who would buy him a drink. I could pretend to do something useful for Gran while I waited for Jordan to get back to me, if he ever did.

  After precisely seventeen minutes of bookkeeping, I gave up and moped back upstairs to my bedroom to check my mobile. Still no message. So that was it then.

  Putting the phone in my pocket, I opened my door to Jordan Haig just standing there, on the threshold. He looked so good. Angry, but good.

  Part of me—the mad part—wanted to throw my arms around him the same way I’d done to Floyd Parker. But the rest of me just blushed horribly; hot blood racing up into my neck and my face, beating its familiar path right up into my hairline. I was sure he could feel the heat from where he was standing because he took a step back, like I was a malfunctioning blast furnace.

  ‘How’d y-you get in?’ I stammered, shoving loose hair out of my shiny, red-nosed face. In no one’s wildest imagination could Jordan be classed as a regular at this pub. If he were, I would only ever leave the premises in cases of dire national emergency.

  Jordan just stepped inside and shut the door. I’d like to say I was equally cool. But instead—like some demented game show hostess—I gestured wildly at him to sit down, only to remember that the only place to sit was on my unmade bed and that it was currently festooned in dirty tissues. My inner thermostat kicked up another couple of notches and my skin tone inched towards magenta crush.

  Wisely, Jordan chose to remain standing. Though what he said next made me sit down.

/>   ‘I just said I was your boyfriend,’ he shrugged. ‘They let me in, no problems.’

  I felt all the blood in my head flow the other way and maybe the room wobbled for a second. If only it were true. That he was here, just for me. I could die then. Die happy.

  Ghost, I reminded myself sluggishly. That’s why we’re here, remember? Focus.

  Jordan looked like a rock god from head to toe in his bashed-up black leather jacket, worn out tee and denim shirt, skin-tight black jeans and black creepers. He had what looked like two kilograms of silver and onyx strung on narrow leather bands around his wrists. Focus? I could hardly think in a straight line.

  I finally croaked, ‘She always comes to me at night, Eve. She makes me do things.’ My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else who was standing really, really far away. ‘How am I able to see her? How is it you can see her, too, when no one else can?’

  Jordan shrugged. ‘Been asking myself the same questions. No answers presenting themselves.’

  He glanced around my room, taking in every dog-eared band poster and unwashed pair of undies lying on the floor before returning his cool gaze to me. ‘Maybe it’s extra muscle she needs,’ he said. ‘Or you’re not doing the job properly and she’s decided to call in a professional.’ His laugh was like a bark. ‘She’s showing me this city place. Some kind of bar. Wants me to go there. She’s quite…insistent.’

  I felt strangely hurt that Eve had somehow traded up. I mean, I would, if it was a choice between me and him, but it still rankled. ‘It can never wait you know,’ I heard myself say in that thin, unhappy stranger’s voice, not sure why he’d come all this way to tell me himself personally. ‘Better hop to it.’