Preloved

by Shirley Marr

“And this definitely wasn’t playing at my ball,” said Logan.

  “Are we out of touch or out of time?” I asked.

  “Maybe both.” Logan smiled. “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To finish your fairytale, of course. That’s what you have to do. To see if there’s a happy ending waiting at the end.”

  “Please don’t make me go with you!”

  But Logan was already gone, taking a short cut by cutting through the dance floor and making people scream as if they’d just had cold water tossed on them.

  He pulled me along like we were bound unwittingly together with an invisible red string, like cousin Audrey and Uncle Adrian.

  Like the dragonfly that Mum, as a young girl, tied a piece of thread around to keep it as a pet, I was taken.

  Chapter 13

  “Can’t we, like, teleport?” I asked as I picked up my bicycle.

  “It’s much more romantic this way. You can dinky me.”

  “Yeah, totally romantic. The girl riding the bike and the boy sitting demurely on the handlebars … where are we going?”

  “First stop, Mrs Lee’s house, to lay yourself to rest.”

  I pulled up my dress, got on my bike and pushed off into the night.

  Mum told me never to ride a bicycle at night. She said a ghost might fly out from the shadows and land gently on the back. And since ghosts didn’t weigh anything, you wouldn’t turn around to look, so you might end up carrying a ghost all the way home.

  The cooling air, now being whipped into a powerful wind that only existed in this city, made my hair stand on end. Including all the hair on the back of my neck.

  I turned around. Logan was sitting sideways on the back of my bike, with one leg propped up as if flaunting the fact that nothing in this world had an effect on him.

  I could see Blueberry Street up ahead. The house with the big jacaranda out the front. Soon the jacaranda would be filled with purple flowers, signalling that Christmas, and the end of my high school days forever, was near.

  Mum would disapprove. She always told me never to plant a tree in the middle of your lawn, or that the tree would become your tombstone and your house the grave.

  “I bet I can scare you,” I said to Logan.

  “Sure thing. Considering I’m a ghost, hit me with your best shot.”

  “Here goes.”

  I braked suddenly. Logan pitched sideways, fell off the bike and let out a scream.

  “Told you.”

  I stood above him and held out my hand. He picked himself up.

  “I’m scared,” I said. “I don’t think I have the guts to find out.”

  “Nonsense.” Logan grinned at me and mouthed, “You remind me of the babe.”

  “What babe?” I said softly back.

  “The babe with the power.”

  I took one last breath and went to knock. Above my head, a red sash hung over the front door. Maybe there was enough left of today for it to be an auspicious day.

  “Yes?” Grace answered the door. “Oh, it’s you again.”

  “I’m sorry, can I please come in?”

  “I don’t think this is a good idea–”

  “Please, I need to talk to both you and your mother. Seriously, this time. And I promise I won’t run away.”

  Grace looked unsure, but she unlocked the door for me anyway.

  She led me to the dining room and we stood in front of the family photos. She picked up a photo and handed it to me.

  It wasn’t the school photo I had looked at last time.

  It was a photo of Amy and Stacey with their arms around each other, squinting into the camera. They had beach bags on their shoulders and were eating rainbow Paddle Pops. Stacey wore the locket around her neck.

  “She’s been missing for the past twenty-four years.”

  “Did you ever find out what happened?” I held my breath.

  “I wish the police would tell us that much,” replied Grace, and her mouth became a straight line. “All I know is that Amy went to the beach that day, to that spot they call ‘Lovers Cove’, and she never came back.”

  “She was following her best friend, wasn’t she?” I whispered. “And her best friend’s boyfriend.”

  “How come you know?” Grace looked at me, suspicion working itself into the lines on her face.

  “Amy loved him, didn’t she?” I couldn’t bear to look at Grace.

  “All the years I’ve lain awake trying to find the answers, and all I can be sure is that there’s a channel right under Lovers Cove. If anyone was to fall in, the current would take them out to the ocean. No trace of them would ever be found.”

  I saw it then. Like I was looking into a red kaleidoscope where the scenes ran and jammed up against each other in my mind.

  I saw Amy pressed up against the rocks, looking at Stacey and Logan.

  I saw Stacey come over with a face full of rage.

  Logan followed. Chose the wrong side.

  Stacey shoved Logan and suddenly Amy – no, I – was falling and I grabbed for Stacey. It’s nice to know that when friends get into trouble they go in together.

  I hit the water with my hand still tightly around Stacey’s. Under the water I looked madly around and I reached out for Logan, but he was already gone. I touched the gash on his head and the blood swirled under the water like a fantailed goldfish.

  Stacey was still alive and so was I, but soon I would be taking in a lungful of the salty water that was pressing against my lips.

  The last thing I saw was the locket around Stacey’s neck. I’m so sorry, I whispered inside, I never meant for this to happen.

  I thought of my mother’s beliefs and I made a promise of a blood debt on the rainbow. The colours became too bright for me to take, so I closed my eyes.

  We were carried away by the red and then the black.

  Grace’s face loomed in front of me and sucked me back into reality.

  “If you had the chance, would you want to know what happened?” I asked, my throat tight.

  “No.” Grace shook her head. “I don’t care what happened. I’m not interested in knowing who was guilty of what. That was the past. It should be let go.”

  I felt my heart move. I knew it was telling me that I should let go of my own past.

  In my previous lifetime. In this lifetime.

  “If Amy is no longer with us, if an accident happened that day, I just wish we could know that she has moved on.”

  There was a shuffling by the doorway, and a guarded but friendly face appeared.

  I wondered if all Chinese people hit a certain age and then decided to start wearing tangzhuang instead of Western clothing, as if they were waiting for death to take them back to the motherland.

  Looking at both of them, I wished I could help. I wish I had the magic answers.

  I felt a little tap on my shoulder. The one that bore my inky birthmark.

  Mrs Lee was next to me and she beckoned for me to bend a little closer.

  “This is her mark,” she whispered to me in Chinese. “The mark she has always had because she is an old soul and has been here many times before. I finally can die happy, knowing what has happened to her. Thank you, Amy.”

  Grace froze. I thought she was going to yell at me to leave immediately.

  “That’s the first time my mother has ever said she’s happy to die,” Grace finally said.

  “Is that a good thing?” I asked.

  “Yes, it is,” said Grace. And as if it was something she wasn’t used to doing, something she hadn’t done in a long time, her lips turned upwards and she smiled.

  “Thank you for coming back.”

  Something inside me felt incredibly lifted and I hoped that Grace and her mother could feel it too. That they could move on. Maybe all they ever needed was my permission.

  “Amy,” whispered Grace, calling me by my real name as she gently took my hand. “I want you to know that it doesn’t matter what happened. Appreci
ate your mother and take care of your friends. That is not just a Chinese principle; it is a universal one. Live your life and live it well. Don’t waste it, you hear me?”

  And maybe all I needed was theirs.

  “Thank you,” I whispered back as she let me go.

  I waved to Grace as she slowly closed the door, her face lingering in the space behind. “Bye,” I said, instead of “see ya”, because I wasn’t sure if I would see her again in this lifetime.

  But I knew I didn’t need to.

  We were both free to go our own ways.

  I turned around and walked down the cracked brick path.

  Logan was waiting for me.

  I grabbed the bike off the ground and jumped back on. I looked up at the sky at the Milky Way, which Mum had told me was made of birds who, in their pity, formed a bridge for two separated lovers to cross upon.

  “You, Rebecca, me. It’s all real, after all?” I asked Logan.

  “I never said that,” Logan replied. “What is reality anyway? Just a bunch of synapses exploding in your brain. What is real is up to you, Miss Matey, and what you make of it.”

  He was so uncomfortably close to me. I wanted to turn around and touch his scar and say I was sorry.

  “It’s okay, little matey,” whispered Logan. “I’ll forgive and forget so I can move on too.”

  I thought he was going to lean his face on my shoulder, but he didn’t.

  I peddalled quietly in the night.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To your father’s house,” replied Logan.

  “No! I don’t–”

  I stopped. He had called it my father’s house. It wasn’t his house. It was our home. Just like it wasn’t his bracelets he had taken back. They were Mum’s bracelets.

  I could feel the anger pump through my heart and into my feet, forcing the bike into the night.

  “Hey, BMX Bandit, slow down.”

  “No.”

  I arched up high on the bike. If I could have, I would have howled. I skidded wide around a corner, half-hoping I would go flying off. I wanted the satisfaction of getting bloody knees and then getting back on.

  “Fair dinkum! You got some aggro there, Miss Matey.”

  “Good.”

  I was aiming for the letterbox, but at the last minute decided it looked too big and too marble, so I swerved and stacked it on the front lawn instead. My passenger had cleverly decided to disembark before my crash-landing.

  I stood up and brushed down my dress.

  We had arrived at my old home. I looked up at it and felt …

  Nothing.

  I had grown up in this house, so it was special to me, but looking at it as I did tonight, without all those sentimental emotions tied up tightly in my throat, it didn’t choke me up at all. It looked arrogant and pompous and plastic. From the scroll on the gate to the fake grass to its mock-mansion facade.

  For the first time, I felt glad that Mum left, because it was her choice. I believe that you make your home with the people you love. So home to me was a ratty little apartment above a store and having Weet-Bix for dinner on a table that could only seat two.

  Not this. This was just an empty shell.

  “Are we going to get eaten by blood-hungry Rottweilers?” I asked Logan, wrapping my hands around the bars of the gate. I wondered if Dad had upgraded the security, since he was convinced Mum was desperate to come crawling back to him any day now.

  Logan walked through the gate and up the front path, and disappeared inside the front door.

  “Logan!” I hissed.

  The gate came alive in front of me and I dropped my hands.

  “Coast is clear for the Homecoming Queen,” Logan’s voice crackled over the intercom.

  I hid my bike in the bushes. I walked up to the front door, where Logan was waiting, dangling a pair of keys in the air. He stepped aside and let me through.

  I stuck my head in tentatively. I wondered if things had changed. I wondered if the house had degenerated into a bachelor pad with pizza boxes everywhere. Was Dad sitting around in the evenings having a midlife crisis, weeping into his Lean Cuisine and wishing he wasn’t so alone?

  Fat chance.

  The house was sparkling and every status symbol – from the oversized TV to the wanky pieces of modern art – was all in its rightful place.

  This wasn’t the part where I gained a bit of empathy and became well-rounded and self-reflective. Screw that.

  I was going to keep disliking Dad because he was not a good man, and that was it.

  “Let it all out, Miss Matey,” said Logan. “Let it out for the last time.”

  Last time? I didn’t think so. While we were at it, how about this one: I didn’t care that he had the house and all the possessions because he had a good lawyer. Why didn’t he hire a life coach so he could learn to be a better person?

  “So, what do you want to do?” Logan threw his arms out. “You’re only limited by your imagination, Amy, so you’ll have no trouble at all.”

  I’d forgotten how big our house was. You didn’t have to put a couch sideways because your lounge room was too small. You had to order special furniture made extra huge, ’cos normal couches looked like doll’s house furniture.

  “You want to take stuff? Come on, there must be something you miss.”

  I wanted to steal a fancy duck-feather pillow, the cheap Big W one I currently had was such a pain in the–

  “Or on the other hand, maybe you just want to trash the joint.”

  Hell yeah, I did. There was a vase right in front of me I wanted to punch in. Except it was made of thick Ming pottery. And it would hurt.

  “The floor is yours,” said Logan.

  I examined everything in the lounge room. Then I headed up the stairs.

  The first room to the left of the landing used to be my room. The door was shut. I stood in front of it, wondering if I should look inside.

  Why should it be a big deal? Why would I care if it was still exactly how I had left it or if it had since been converted into a home gym?

  But it did matter, because the last time I left it, I knew that I could never come back. And standing there, I knew that was still true. I turned around.

  My parents’ room, or what was left of it, was the last room at the end. I switched on a lamp and dimmed it to the lowest setting. I pulled open a drawer.

  It was weird that in among all the things that belonged to Dad, there was also what used to be Mum’s stuff. I thought it would be like the movies, where the abandoned person would do something like throw all the other person’s clothes out the window. But I guess real life was a lot more complicated.

  Where would Dad keep Mum’s jewellery?

  I pushed shut the drawer and went over to Mum’s dresser. I sat down and tried not to look into the mirror, in case I saw the life that Mum had tried to make for herself here, once upon a time.

  I found Mum’s old jewellery box tucked up the back. It was a cheap metal Christmas tin, of all things. Mum said she liked the kittens on the lid. It used to house butter biscuits, but now it held …

  In the semi-darkness, the faceted gold surface of Mum’s wedding bracelets winked at me. I could see a phoenix engraved on one bracelet, a dragon on the other.

  “I don’t want anything from Dad,” I finally said to Logan. “And I don’t want to trash the house, thank you.”

  It was true. I was happy with what me and Mum had. It was only small, but it meant the world to me. What would I get from ruining the house? It would only prove that I hated myself. And I would feel sorry for the poor cleaners who would have to deal with the mess.

  “What about those?” asked Logan, looking down at the bracelets I had cupped in my hand.

  “This is taking back what is mine. I am bringing them home. Where they rightfully belong.”

  There was a photo of Dad and his new girlfriend sitting on the bedside table.

  This was the first time I had set eyes on her.


  I had always dreamed that our first meeting would be face to face, on her turf. She would yell something like, “You have no right to be here,” to which I would furiously reply, “Yes I do; I was here first!”

  The smiling woman in the photo didn’t look like some sour model or slimy gold-digger. That surprised me. It disarmed some of the anger inside me. She was smiling in the photo. She looked friendly. She looked like someone that I might even like.

  Maybe.

  In a different time – in a different lifetime – it could be true.

  “Let’s go,” I said. I headed towards the door, but I was so tempted to turn around. So tempted to look back and change my mind on what I was feeling.

  “You know it’s time for you to go.”

  I slipped the bracelets over my wrists and went out the back door, my anger slipping away.

  Logan under moonlight was lovely. Somehow, there was blue in the atmosphere of the night and it reflected off him. His whole body took on the clear, luminous quality of his eyes.

  He beckoned for me to join him on the patch of fake lawn next to the swimming pool, but I shook my head, because I had become shy. I slipped down the side of the house.

  Passing the recycling bin, I opened the lid, more out of habit more than anything else. Dad was a crap recycler and it was up to either me or Mum to pull out the plastics and put them into the regular bin.

  The bin was full to the brim with beer bottles. It made me sad to know that although Dad had moved on, he hadn’t changed.

  And I thought about the rut I’d been sitting in since Mum and I had left here.

  “Well, Miss Matey, you’ve taken back what you want. Are you going to leave something behind to balance out the universe?” Logan asked, beside me again.

  Wow. One week on this planet and he already sounded like Mum.

  “I leave behind only good feelings towards my dad,” I said, surprising myself. “I wish him good luck with his new life.”

  And with those simple words, I felt my heart release itself.

  I stared up at the sky and scanned the stars for the Big Dipper or what Mum called the Big Basket. She tells me it is home to the Scholar of the Heavens. He writes all the stories of the universe and right then, I could feel him turn a new page for me.

  I found myself pulling the bottles out of the bin. I arranged them into an amber heart shape on the brick paving. That was what I would leave him with.