by AA Bell
Too dark inside for her to see without tripping. She switched on the light to help her in future and rolled the controls on her sunshades back through time until she found enough slow light from yester-weeks to see the mats and facilities.
The ghostly door blinked shut, while the invisible door creaked under her hand as if complaining that she should want to close and lock it again.
Sink to her left — toilet ahead, and a large shower cubicle in the corner, full of ghostly steam — and Ben! Through the yester-haze, she saw him. Naked, he was shampooing his hair in the shower. Suds foamed and clung in spongy rivulets down his well-toned body. He turned with his eyes closed to rinse most of it down his back, and her gaze slid down his chest, following the path of the waywardest rivulet ever lower.
‘Mira,’ he called from the other side of the door. ‘Is that you?’
Startled, she slipped against the sink.
‘Are you okay?’ He knocked twice as she scrambled to regain her feet.
‘I was fine until you scared me. Hang ten.’
Adjusting her sunshades, she fast-forwarded the ghostly Ben until he was clothed in jeans and a black shirt, and heading out for the day.
‘Picking up the surfing lingo already, hey? There’s time for your first lesson before breakfast, if you’d like?’
She opened the door only halfway, holding her silk sarong modestly high against her chest. ‘I thought you’d be keen to find Chloe’s killer?’
‘It’s barely 5am, and I never saw Chloe venture out before seven. Besides, that kind of time can be rewound if we miss it the first time.’ He leaned closer, and the alluring scent of his skin warned Mira that he’d spent at least some of the night sweating. ‘Is that what you wore for pyjamas?’
She nodded, twisting the thin material between her breasts, and hoping it wasn’t so thin he could see through it. ‘The surf shop had nothing with teddy bears.’
He chuckled, and the sound made her want to spread her fingers against his chest, feel the air moving inside him, and exhale softly against her cheek as his breath. But he moved unexpectedly, and she heard the quiet thudding of bare feet taking him away.
‘We’d better fix that later today,’ he said and then padded down the stairs.
Was he dressed already?
Braving the pain of catching up to him through time, she adjusted her sunshades, turning purple haze into deeper violet until she rediscovered yesterday, and saw herself climbing the stairs behind him as he led her to his bedroom for the first time. She saw his mother peeking out from her own room after they’d passed — and saw her creeping out to follow them.
Hours closer. Minutes. Until the increasing speeds of light pierced her retinas like hot needles. Straining to keep her eyes open, she glimpsed Ben. Bare-chested. No sling. Long pyjama pants, headed towards her. He paused at her door, his ghostly face drawing closer to hers.
Mira, she read from his lips. Is that you? Are you okay?
‘Argh!’ She cried out and clamped her eyes shut. Glasses off. Fists into eye sockets. She rubbed and rubbed, collapsing on the floor and still rubbing until the agony had dulled to a bearable ache.
Shrugging a sudden weight off her shoulders, she realised it was Ben’s arm.
‘Hey, I’ve got you.’ He lifted her to her feet.
‘How did you …? You were downstairs!’
‘I didn’t know I could run that fast either.’ He hugged her against his bare chest. ‘What happened?’
‘I think, ah …’ Shaking as he set her back on her feet, she could feel the length of his firm body through her thin sarong, and imagined him naked again, sudsing, rinsing. She couldn’t get the images out of her head, even with her eyes clamped shut as tightly now as she could manage.
‘Don’t laugh,’ he said, rubbing her arm. ‘I had a nightmare you fell off a cliff.’
She blushed and pushed away from him. ‘Just the bed. It wasn’t there a hundred years ago.’ Her hand trembled as she handed him the sunshades. ‘Could you change them for me, please? Brownish-blue, or maybe a nice greenish-lavender?’ With luck, he wouldn’t have the same knack of homing in on his naked yester-ghost.
‘That’s years ago, or months. Am I right?’
She nodded, keeping her eyes closed. ‘It’s more confusing if I can’t see all the furniture as it is now, but the slower light does help my headache to leave faster.’
‘Painkiller?’
‘I’d need to be dying first.’
‘Slow light, huh?’ Ben scratched his stubbly cheek. ‘So why not leave off the shades for a while? Last century isn’t such a bad place to be stuck, now that you know what you’re seeing.’
‘Not until I’m on the ground floor. It’s still a dark night there anyway — and too blurry, as if being blinded by the past isn’t curse enough.’
‘Oh, yeah. Myopia too. Sorry, I forgot. Blind and short sighted don’t usually go together.’
‘Neither does blind and lip-reading. Hang on, I only noticed it myself just now, but these new glasses make things clearer as well as changing the days. Not perfectly clear, but much better.’
‘Prescription?’ Ben suggested. ‘That makes sense. They look blurry to me and I’ve got twenty-twenty — and the docs also had access to details of all the glasses we tried with them, and some of them were prescription shades.’
‘Seems like years ago,’ she sighed.
‘Okay, here’s lavender.’ He pushed the sunshades gently but firmly into place.
Suspended by the invisible floor, she glanced down to see the foundations of the house pouring out of a concrete truck below her. ‘Woah!’ She teetered, dizzy from the height. ‘That’s too pale.’
Ben’s arm caught her yet again. ‘You need training wheels.’
‘Yeah, big ones.’ She pulled away and steadied herself. ‘It would be easier if these things came with pre-set time settings like one day ago, one week, a year and so on. But I guess I’m the only one who can figure out which colour is when.’ She frowned, knowing how tedious the process would be to work through every shade and colour in the spectrum. The current shade seemed frustrating enough, because she could see a man down there, the spitting image of Ben. Watching the same scene in history replay more than once required her to go back with a slightly different shade as time kept moving. ‘The house is gone but I’m hovering over the foundations.’ She could see a large concrete truck reversing down the track with its slide extended, preparing to expel its contents. ‘When was this place built?’
‘January, thirty-two years ago — with barely a month to spare before I was born, so my father once told me. He’d been branching from ferries into sand mining, but then I came along and changed everything — for the worse, I dare say. My mother was nineteen when she had me, and all they had for a home before that was the old sand miner’s shed they demolished to make way for this place.’
‘You look just like him.’ She saw no sign of his mother yet, though.
Mira toggled forward through the years, using the tiny rolling mouse controls and watching walls form, his parents move in and hustle about the house, up and down the stairs as their baby became a boy; soon joined by another small swaddle which sprouted pigtails.
‘You had a sister?’
‘Cousin,’ Ben replied sadly. ‘My aunt and uncle drowned in a ferry accident, and my parents took in Tina as a baby.’
In moments she was a toddler, a teenager and gone.
‘She died on her fifteenth birthday,’ he said. ‘Broke her neck water skiing.’
‘Oh! Ben, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—’
‘Don’t,’ he said, rubbing her arm more slowly. ‘Don’t apologise. I’d give anything to see her alive again — to see what you see. She was so full of energy. We’re not the kind of family that bothered much with photographs. Just a few baby pics and if you come forward enough in time, you’ll see all of them on the wall behind me. There’s only six.’
Mira shivered. She’d already no
ticed them: six happy snaps which froze their ghostly faces forever in time. Yet rolling back through the years again, she could plainly see the slow light still emitting and reflecting off Tina’s living body; a slim, bikini-clad teenager jogging into the bathroom to brush her hair and scrub her braces.
‘She’s still here, Ben. The light of her life is still as real as it ever was. Maybe I can show you?’ She laid open her palm as an invitation for him to hold her hand, and when he did, she led him into the bathroom and stopped him adjacent to the sink and mirror.
‘Should I pinch myself first?’ Ben said playfully. ‘Next time we see the docs, we need to ask how the slow light can keep up with the rotation of the Earth as it moves through space. Maybe it’s anchored somehow within the atmosphere by magnetic or gravitational fields.’
‘Why don’t you ask how to work out their string theory formula while you’re at it? Quit fretting over details. Just close your eyes, and relax.’ The irony of her telling him to temper his nerves made her smile as she raised his hand to Tina’s ghostly face. ‘Palm out, fingers spread, and let yourself become aware of all the subtle energy in the air.’
Holding him by the wrist, she guided his palm around Tina’s face, and further around the shape of her ghost. ‘This is her cheek. The back of her head. Her neck … shoulder …’
‘Yes!’ he cried. Taking control, he found his way back to her cheek by himself, where Mira let go of him. ‘I can feel her! I can … I can … hug her! She’s right here at the sink! I think she’s … I think she’s brushing her teeth!’
‘She is.’
Mira watched Tina’s reflection in the mirror. Their eyes met briefly and Tina startled, staring right back at her briefly, then shook her head and went back to brushing her teeth.
‘I know this!’ Ben said, still excited. ‘This energy. I’ve always felt it — all around me! I just never knew what it was.’ He chuckled and stepped away from Mira. ‘I can feel it everywhere now. Like a blur. This house is so full of her!’
‘Your father, too. Would you like to touch him?’
‘No.’
Mira heard a thud, as if Ben had slumped against the wall.
‘I don’t. I … I’d rather not. I mean, not now. Later maybe, when I’m in the right headspace.’
‘If not now, then when?’
‘Maybe never. Not for him, Mira. He was too much of a womaniser. I used to think the laundry window was left broken so I’d never be locked out after school if I lost my key, but Ma told me … I shudder to think how many strange women he brought up those stairs. How many “strange energies” still lurk here.’
‘How does none sound?’
‘Say again?’
‘None. Aside from your mother, obviously. I just watched your whole life fly past on those stairs … Aside from your mother, the only woman I saw alone with your dad was a lady who was fitting new drapes and your mother was upstairs, ahead of them. Unless I missed something?’
‘But she told me …’
‘A lie, Ben. It had to be, unless he was meeting them somewhere else.’
The stairs creaked in the hallway.
‘Meeting who?’ Mel called from the doorway.
‘Ma! You’re home early?’
‘On time, actually. No deaths or emergency surgeries through the night means no overtime for paperwork this morning. So what’s your excuse? What are you both doing up so early — in there — and you without your sling? Are you crazy?’
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘It was too itchy.’
‘Oh, really? And you took it off him?’
‘I’m up, thanks to the curry. Too hot for me.’ Mira said.
‘It was a little spicier than usual,’ Ben agreed, diplomatically. ‘It made my eyeballs sweat.’
‘Oh, pardon me for spicing life up a bit. I thought you’d both be sick to death of bland meals. Next time, cook your own damn homecoming meal! Oh, and if you must use the toothpaste, Mira, don’t squeeze the damn tube in the middle!’ She stormed off down the hall and stairs and threw something into the kitchen sink that sounded like cutlery.
‘Donning hat of diplomat,’ Ben said with a chuckle to Mira. ‘If you hear me scream like a baby send in the army.’
Mira frowned, and the bathroom door creaked as he drew it closed on his way out.
‘Sorry,’ he said, pausing mid-creak. ‘When I opened that spare toothbrush for you last night, I neglected to mention we had spare pastes in the top drawer too; different flavours. Spare everything, really. Islanders tend to stock up on bargains every month on the mainland, so sniff around for the spearmint. It’s usually best for defeating curry breath — unless you’d like me to find it for you?’
She scowled, until she realised he must be joking. After ten years of having other people clean her teeth, hair and fingernails, she resented any kind of help with her personal care, and he knew that better than anybody. The more she’d argued and refused to cooperate at Serenity, the more sedation she’d been given and the more they’d done for her when her body was powerless to fight them. Thankfully, Ben had put an end to all that and now she could be grateful that he’d never been involved in any of her sponge-bathing. She’d die of embarrassment. ‘Go see to your mum,’ she replied flatly. ‘And straighten your diplomacy hat. Sounds like it’s on crooked.’
‘Fine, but leave my tube out when you’re done, please. I’ll need it myself this morning.’
She doubted that. He smelled delicious, sweaty or not. She listened to him go after the door closed fully and opened the top drawer of the three-drawer vanity unit to find it. Plenty of tubes inside, but none that felt like the right shape or size for toothpaste, except one which smelled lemony, like the floors at Serenity. Adjusting her ‘hues’ until she found yester-violet, she also found the reason.
Mel was in her nurse’s uniform, preparing for work when she’d swapped drawers, bottom for top, which put all her make-up at the top and toothpastes at the bottom. She used a peppermint paste herself, then stashed it and the spearmint in the very back of the middle drawer, which was otherwise filled with soaps, razors and skin lotions. The only tube in the top drawer that seemed to fit the shape in Mira’s hand was labelled moisturiser.
Nasty witch, Mira thought. After squeezing it in the middle and wasting a large glob into the sink, Mira replaced it in the drawer and found the spearmint — but the tube didn’t feel like thin metal, like the peroxide paste or moisturiser. It felt softer, like plastic. She wondered how hard she should squeeze it, since all the paste at Serenity and other institutions had always been metal tubes which could be rolled up from the bottom to deliver a reliable measure, or else pump dispensers. Either way, any sight-impaired clients could dispense their own, if allowed, without making a mess.
The spearmint tube also felt too light, almost empty in her hand, and it squeezed too easily. An air bubble burst out ahead of a blockage and squirted all over her hand.
‘Oh, perfect,’ she muttered, discovering with her thumb that she’d missed her brush completely. She turned on the tap and swished water around the sink to wash away all her mess. ‘Let’s try that again.’
Success came with the third attempt, and when she’d finished, she returned the tube to its hiding place, but she couldn’t leave. Not yet. A wicked grin creased her lips. She retrieved Mel’s peppermint paste, opened it and scraped the open mouth across a soft bar of pine soap. Then she hid her little surprise in the back of the drawer for his mother to find later.
‘Taste that,’ she said and headed out for her first whole day of freedom.
Halfway downstairs, though, she heard heated whispers in the kitchen.
‘Get her out of that bedroom,’ Mel whispered angrily. ‘Your father built that mezzanine for me. If you’re not going to use it for yourself or any real girlfriends, leave it empty!’
‘You’re dodging the subject,’ Ben replied in strained tones. ‘If Dad wasn’t two-timing you here at the house, then where? And who were all the wom
en? This is Straddie, Ma. Fixed population.’
‘Transient tourist trade,’ Mel said, struggling to keep her voice down too. ‘You can’t trowel up the past without getting dirt on your own hands. You’ve got enough to worry about out there with that millstone of a gaol sentence around your neck, now you want to drag Blind Bertha around every step — and with that shoulder?’
‘It’s healed well enough, and I told you; Mira’s not completely blind, just “legally blind”. She can see some things — shadows I guess you’d call them — if the light’s just right.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s very reassuring! Look, I don’t care if she can see footprints on the moon, Bennet. If you’re going to put anyone in your bed, it should be the perfect girl for you — or at least someone who can support you without being a burden.’
‘She won’t be a burden for long, Ma. She’s changing.’
‘The only thing she’s changing any day soon are her clothes!’
‘Care to make a bet? In a month, she’ll be coming and going with her own key. You have my word on it.’
‘Her own key?’ Mel coughed as if she’d choked on the idea. ‘Why don’t you train her how to sneak in the laundry window while you’re at it? You still haven’t fixed that damn thing.’ Then she sighed, as if she knew she’d gone too far. ‘Look, I know you’re not a womaniser like your father, but if you’re ready to settle down, why not start with some of the tender-hearts who wrote to you in gaol? Remember how many rich ones wanted to meet you?’
‘I don’t give a shit about any of them! I don’t need their pity. I’m hollow, not shallow. Gaol and the justice system stripped the guts out of me, and now I’ve got nothing left to offer any woman who’s fit enough to make your “perfect list”. Helping Mira to grow and mature into a woman helps me to feel like a man again. We’ve been through this time and again at the hospital!’
‘Oh, have we? And when precisely, did you mention that you’d be keeping her in your bed? Platonic, my ass! You can’t pump up the man in you by pumping it into her!’
‘You should talk; sneaking cops into my house to screw!’