Queen of the Night

by Leanne Hall

But Paul has flown off again. Into space, into orbit, looking at the ceiling.

  ‘I want to forget,’ he says.

  I sigh. This is almost impossible. Paul brushes his hands over his sleeping bag, making it whisper. I can’t think of another way to get through to him so I start talking, hoping that somehow a few of my words will sink in.

  ‘Paul, you’re obviously going through a tough time. But you have friends who care about you. So, whatever you’ve been doing recently, it doesn’t matter. You could tell them. Or me, if you want. If you talked about how you were feeling it might make you feel better. You shouldn’t be spending time with people who don’t know you. Like these blue people, how do you know they…’

  I trail off. Paul has stopped smoothing the sleeping bag. Have I said too much?

  ‘Do you want to see a photo of her?’ He fumbles to find his phone in the folds of his bed.

  ‘Sure,’ I say, surprised.

  Paul presses something on his phone and then hands it to me. He’s having another moment of clarity. ‘I deleted them all. But I had to keep one. Just one.’ Paul shuts his eyes as if he’s praying. ‘No one tells you how much it hurts. The insides of my body are bleeding. I’m being ripped apart. I can feel it. It’s not in my head. My whole body hurts.’

  Ingrid and Paul are sitting together at a party in someone’s backyard. They look like they’re anything but hurting. Paul smiles at the camera, his arm draped over her shoulders. Ingrid looks off to the side, laughing at something or someone out of view. She’s elfin and pretty, with short dark hair and a sparkle about her.

  ‘She’s gorgeous.’ I touch the screen to zoom in on her. A weird menu flashes up over the top of the photo. Paul’s phone is heaps fancier than mine. I tap the menu irritably. Go away, bossy menu. The screen goes black and then a photo comes up again. But it’s not the same one.

  I get a sick feeling in the very bottom of my stomach.

  I press arrows back and forth, trying to find the photo of Paul and Ingrid. But it’s gone. There are other photos clearly taken at the same party, of other people, but not that one. I’ve deleted it.

  The sick feeling grows. ‘Um, Paul, I think there’s a problem with your phone?’

  He snatches it from my hands and scrolls frantically. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Your phone is so confusing, I think I might have accidentally—’

  Paul throws himself at me, knocking me flat on the carpeted floor. I attempt to sit up, but Paul is above me, trying to pin my arms by the side of my head. I can’t believe he has any strength at all in his twiggy arms.

  ‘Cow.’ His eyes are wild, his face an avalanche.

  I get scared. Not for myself, but for him. He lets go of my arms to slap my face, and I use the opportunity to pull his hair. He yelps and gets hold of my fingers, bends them backwards. I scream.

  I half-sit up and kick my legs, hoping that I’ll manage to kick him in the nads, but we’ve reached a stalemate: I can’t throw him off, and he won’t let me up. I’m out of breath. I’m the worst fighter in the world and Paul is not much better.

  I give up and fall backwards, not caring anymore if Paul wants to hit me. Somewhere during this the electric guitar upstairs has stopped. Paul notices it too, because he pushes away from me and runs from the room.

  I look backwards, arching my neck to see an upsidedown Blake in the doorway, flapping her arms and saying ‘Oh, oh, oh’ like a demented bird, over and over again. There’s the sound of boots in the hallway, then Wolfboy replaces her.

  A rush of cold air from the open front door sweeps up the hallway.

  ‘I’ll kill him,’ he says. But instead of chasing Paul out the door, he sinks to his knees and helps me up.

  eighteen

  Diana sits in her bedroom

  nook, basking in the sunlight pouring through the bay window. Heart-shaped sunglasses cover half her face, and her crayons spill over her lap. A sheet cut from Ortolan’s giant roll of paper carpets the floor.

  ‘I can’t draw when you’re looking,’ she complains. The corners of her mouth are green where she’s nibbled on a crayon. ‘You’re not supposed to look until it’s finished.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ I move the folding Chinese screen so she’s hidden from sight. After the drama with Blake the other night Ortolan wanted us to stay in today. I thought it was a sensible idea, but I’m already restless. All Diana wants to do is draw.

  ‘I’m going to sit over here in Mummy’s chair and read.’

  ‘You don’t read,’ Diana says, with absolute certainty from behind the screen.

  ‘I do now.’

  Before I can open Delilah’s book, my phone vibrates in my pocket.

  ‘Back in a minute, Flopsy,’ I tell Diana, then start down the stairs.

  ‘Hello?’ A smile is already spreading across my face. I stop halfway down the stairs.

  ‘Wolfie.’

  ‘How are you? Are you feeling okay? Did you sleep all right?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Stop worrying about me. Everyone at school thinks I got in a scrag fight, and now no one will mess with me for the rest of the year. That’s a good thing.’

  I want to apologise a hundred times over for yesterday, but I kill the words. Nia told me last night that I needed to stop saying sorry before I became really annoying.

  I can’t help wondering where Paul is, even though I want to pretend I don’t care. I’ve pictured all the places he might be. The cottage? The creek? Little Death? Maybe I should have chased after him, but I didn’t want to leave Nia after I’d basically fed her to the lions.

  ‘You’re at school now?’ I ask.

  Even though I hated school before I dropped out, I have a momentary flash of envy. There’s something simple about showing up on time and doing what you’re told. I wouldn’t mind someone bossing me through the average day in Shyness, telling me what to do.

  ‘Yeah.’ I hope I’m not imagining that her voice holds a smile to match mine. ‘I snuck out of sixth period Maths. I’m in the loo.’

  ‘Classy.’

  She laughs. ‘Listen, I’m going to go to work after school tomorrow night and pick up what we need. Then I’ll go home, hopefully having cleverly avoided my mum, then come to you.’

  There’s nothing I want more than to spend more time with her, but not like this.

  ‘Wolfie? You’ve gone quiet. Are you having second thoughts?’ Wildgirl asks. Her voice is hesitant. ‘Because I want you to know, I’m not.’

  I think she means Paul, and not me and her. I don’t have second thoughts about her, other than mild terror at setting myself up for a huge fall when she decides she’s not interested after all.

  ‘I’m causing trouble between you and your mum again.’

  She snorts. ‘You’re not causing the trouble. She is.’

  ‘But…should we even help Paul?’ I sit down on the stairs.

  ‘How long have you known him?’

  ‘Since…forever. Since kindergarten.’

  For as long as I can remember, Paul has been there. All through primary school and high school and Gram dying and my parents leaving, he’s been there. If you’d asked me a few days ago I would have said that he was the least likely person I know to hit a girl. And while I’m still mad at him, I’m also mad at myself for not realising he was hurting so bad from breaking up with Ingrid.

  ‘He’s your oldest friend. And from the sounds of it this is the first time he’s been a real idiot. So if you do the sums, that’s fifteen years of being an awesome friend, minus a few weeks of being a knob.’

  ‘You’re right.’ I think I can hear the sound of doors banging shut and hand dryers blasting.

  Her voice drops to a whisper. ‘Hey, listen, I think class just ended. Call me later and we’ll work out the exact details.’

  Diana hasn’t kicked up a fuss yet, so I stay sitting on the stairs and pull out Delilah’s book. I thumb through it, looking for something that might hint that she’s relat
ed to Doctor Gregory. Looking for anything, really.

  I find a section peppered with sepia photographs of Shyness. A photo of a bluestone building topped with soaring spires is captioned: St Paul’s Cathedral, Shyness.

  ‘That’s strange.’ There’s no cathedral in Shyness. We had a chapel at my high school, but it was built in the seventies. There might be one or two brick churches, now filled with squatters, but there’s no cathedral.

  This is the last known photograph of the cathedral in Daylight. In the last period of Eternal Night (1857—1864), more than twenty people jumped from the main spire of St Paul’s. In December of 1863 the spire was demolished and the cathedral decommissioned. The decision was criticised after Daylight returned in March the following year, ending what had been the Third Night.

  I examine the edges of the photo for evidence of the cathedral’s location, but there’s nothing to give it away. The last period of Eternal Night. Third Night.

  I look up blankly. I paid too much attention to the photo of the furry girl the other day, and not enough attention to the words.

  There’s been Darkness in Shyness before.

  I’m glad I’m already sitting down, because I feel as if the world just shifted on its axis.

  If what Delilah wrote is true, there’s been three other periods of Darkness. I never paid much attention when I was at school, but I’m certain we never covered this particular part of Shyness history. Why don’t people talk about it?

  I hear Diana’s footsteps overhead.

  I look back at the page. The image of people jumping from a cathedral spire is awful.

  Could Delilah have been crazy, or making this up? She does have the last name Gregory, after all. Maybe the whole clan are chronic liars.

  ‘Jet-ro,’ Diana calls from the top of the stairs.

  She’s finished her picture and laid it out on the floor of the main room. The paper is at least a metre wide and covered in coloured scribbles and shapes. Diana’s drawings normally huddle in the corners, as if obeying a tilting gravity, but this one covers the paper evenly. I help her pin the edges down with tins of paint and the sticky tape dispenser. Diana regards her masterpiece with a pleased sigh. It takes some effort to push aside what I’ve just read and focus on her drawing.

  ‘You want to tell me about it, Flopsy?’

  I squat to have a closer look. A woolly purple cloud takes up almost the whole top half of the paper. A girl with wings flies below it, a big semi-circle smile taking up half of her head. Beneath that there’s a patch of spiky trees. On the right there’s a house with three people standing next to it. And a teapot, a cat, and a giant flower coming out of the ground.

  I point to the flying girl. She likes me to guess what’s what. ‘Is that you?’

  Diana nods.

  I point to the purple cloud next. It’s large, but there’s still a lot of white paper left around it. ‘Is that the Darkness?’

  ‘No.’ Diana squats too, folding her stumpy legs up with far greater ease than me. ‘That’s a dream. I flew out of the dream.’ She puts a hand down on the cloud and turns to look at me with her big blues. Her fingers are psychedelic with crayon wax. ‘I didn’t get born, I ran out of a dream. They tried to chase me back, but I hid from them.’

  I screw my face up in the exaggerated way that makes her laugh. ‘That’s crazy, Di-Di.’

  She sets her mouth stubbornly. ‘It’s what happened. I remember it.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ I ask, pointing to a pair of disembodied eyes hiding among the clump of trees.

  ‘It’s the Queen.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the Queen of the Night?’ I keep my voice casual. I haven’t tried to ask about the other night. I was saving that line of questioning for later, when I’m stuffing her full of pancakes. Diana claps a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide above it.

  ‘Blake told you not to tell anyone, right?’

  She keeps her hand in place.

  ‘What does the Queen of the Night do? Why is she hiding?’ I try again, but there’s no point. Diana has clammed up. I move on to the three people next to the house.

  ‘That’s Mummy, and me, and you?’ I guess.

  ‘That’s me. I am here two times. And Mummy.’ She points to the person I thought was me dressed all in black. It’s true he doesn’t look anything like me, but sometimes that’s no barrier in Diana’s drawings. ‘And the man.’

  ‘What’s wrong with his face?’ I squint. The man has a pink scribble over his head. ‘Splotchy,’ says Diana.

  I remember the man standing outside a few days ago, looking up at the window, and the red birthmark near his eye. The darkitect.

  ‘This is the man we saw the other day out front, isn’t it, Diana? Did you see him again? Have you ever talked to him?’

  ‘Don’t talk so fast, Jethro!’ Diana bites her finger. ‘You’re confusing me!’

  ‘I’m just curious,’ I say, slower and quieter. ‘Why is that man in the picture?’

  Diana stands up and looks at me, mulish and resentful. ‘I want pancakes,’ she says. ‘I want them NOW.’

  On the way home, thinking about Diana’s scribbly darkitect, and the night coming and going like the seasons, I find something strange huddled on the doorstep of a shop. A collection of teacups, with plants growing inside.

  The plants are translucent, a colourless white. Stems like zombie fingers emerging from the dirt. Their bowed heads are laden with paper-thin petals. It’s dark all round, but the tiny plants emit a determined glow. They’re completely different to the ones I saw near the Green Lantern Lounge, but it has to be the same person, or group of people, leaving them.

  I pick up two cups, one for Nia, one for Diana, and continue home.

  nineteen

  The alleyway is barely wide

  enough for one person. The buildings on either side rise high into the air. A bare ribbon of sky is visible overhead. The brick expanse to my right is graffitied from gravel to sky. I look for my favourite piece: six-foot-high white letters spelling out the word AMOEBA. Paul did it during his brief rebellious phase, around the time we all dropped out of school. But when I get to that section of wall, all that’s visible under newer graffiti is EBA. Someone has defaced my favourite defacement.

  Paul, Thom and I always used to sneak in the back way to Umbra, to avoid the long queues, and because we were too cheap to pay the cover charge.

  Nia follows me with her hand on my shoulder, and Blake brings up the rear. We walk in silence. The service entrance finally appears. I usher Nia and Blake across an empty concrete cavern. Even in here, the floor vibrates with bass.

  I stop in front of a truck-sized doorway curtained with thick strips of opaque plastic. There’s light on the other side, leaking through. The thump-thump-thump of the music gets stronger. I turn to Nia and Blake, ready to deliver a serious speech about our aims for the evening, only to find them both standing there with equally inane grins on their faces.

  ‘I forgot how stupid you look,’ Blake says.

  I look at my pale blue shirt and navy pants, then at Nia and Blake. They’re dressed similarly to me, in outfits borrowed from Nia’s work. Blake’s clothes are too big and mine are too small. Nia’s are just right.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ I say to Blake.

  Nia smiles and taps the bridge of her nose, until I remember I’m wearing Blake’s nerd glasses and a baseball cap. Oh, right. I do look stupider than them.

  ‘Lighten up.’ She pinches my cheeks. ‘Look at you. Your face is all frowny.’

  ‘I don’t want to be recognised.’

  ‘We’re just having a night out. So what if we’re dressed strange? We find out what we can. It’s acting. We can do that.’

  I nod, trying to let her convince me. I’m pleased she’s here, but I’m too wound-up to show it. She seems to be suffering no ill effects from Paul’s attack, and she’s not pissed off at him, or me. And she’s ready to throw herself into the fray as an imposter blue person.

  ‘Wil
l you call me Wildgirl?’ she asks. ‘It’s my stage name.’

  ‘Sure. Can we discuss some rules, though?’ I fold my arms and address them both. ‘Do not leave the club for any reason. Do not tell anyone your real name. And we meet in an hour outside the toilets. Have your phones on vibrate and call in an emergency.’

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ says Nia. She knows she looks cute in her blue pyjamas, and she’s taking advantage of it. She puts her hand forward. ‘Come on, let’s do a yay team!’

  Blake immediately puts her hand on top of Nia’s.

  ‘I’m not doing that,’ I say.

  ‘Wolfie, do not deny us this simple pleasure. C’mon.’

  I roll my eyes and put my hand on top of theirs.

  ‘Yay team!’ squeals Blake. And she’s supposed to be the sensible one.

  Umbra is a tsunami of intense surgical light and earsplitting beats. The bass frequency thumps in my chest, tightening my throat. The room is a mess of sweaty dancing people. I didn’t expect it to be this crowded. I thought that Umbra wasn’t as popular as it used to be. I was completely wrong.

  ‘Why the hell is it so light in here?’ Nia clutches my arm.

  ‘It’s always like this!’ I shout. Behind Nia, Blake is frozen like a very small scientist in car headlights. She clutches her notebook to her chest.

  ‘You right?’ I ask her. ‘Remember the Kidds have gone.’

  Blake puts on a brave face. I use my finger to indicate we should do laps. Between Nia and Blake we might not even last the hour in here. I grab Nia’s hand and drag her through the crowd.

  Umbra is painted stark white all over, floors, walls, ceiling. There are lethal metal hooks running on tracks that cover the length of the ceiling, left over from the meatworks, and heavy chains hanging down from above. Dancers wearing little more than leather swimwear climb the chains. The sound system is so extreme it feels as if I’m going to be pushed over by its sheer volume.

  Nia gets used to the light and sound remarkably swiftly, because by the time we find a step to sit on, she’s moving her feet and starting to sway a little.