Nate said, “Did the coppers ever find out what happened to Lyle?”
John shook his head.
“Bummer,” Nate said, and winked. “Know what? I reckon he’s overseas.”
“You mean in hiding?”
“Nah, man, just kicking back: taking it easy. He was an odd bastard, the sort that marched to his own drumbeat, or however the saying goes. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was in Bali with a couple of wives and a whole tribe of kids.”
John felt his eyes warm with unshed tears. “I like the sound of that.”
“Can’t you just picture him? Eating turtle every day, surfing, running some halfway house for travellers, speaking fluent fucken Balinese: don’t you reckon?”
“Yeah,” John said, and laughed. “That’d suit him down to the ground.”
“Big boss on campus.”
“Yep.”
“That was Lyle: always showing off his stuff. Did you hear about the freaky shit that happened to his twin sister, Meredith?”
The breath caught in John’s throat, cut off as if from a pair of determined thumbs. Nate, too hammered to notice, clattered the whisky bottle against each of their glasses to slop out a generous measure.
John shouldn’t have come here. He should never have come here.
Nate continued, “After Lyle disappeared? Meredith lost her mind.”
“I thought she had a nervous breakdown.”
“Same thing.”
John raised a finger. “Actually, no, it’s not.”
“Ah, split hairs if you want,” Nate said, “but the fact is that once her brother disappeared, Meredith went fruit-loops and got sent to a psych ward. Rumour has it she’d tried to kill herself. Some say razor blades, others say a noose. I dunno.”
John rested his elbows on the table and stared at the whisky. “Can I smoke?”
“Sure, why not? Spare a durry?”
John offered the pack.
Nate lit up, blew a stream of blue smoke, and said, “Anyhow, Meredith got bounced from one hospital to another. Nobody could help her. She just kept on wanting to die. And then this one day, something fucken weird happened to her.”
John clenched his teeth. “Something weird…like what?”
“Screaming, and lots of carry-on,” Nate said, tapping the ash from his smoke onto the floor. “It sounded like murder. The nurses burst into Meredith’s room. This particular ward didn’t have locks on the doors. What do you reckon they saw?”
John felt sick. “I don’t know. What?”
“Bite marks.”
John couldn’t respond. A long and freezing shiver ran through his body.
Nate’s eyes were wide and staring. “She was covered in blood. The nurses checked her. She had bite marks on both arms and both legs. Thirteen bites apiece.”
John rubbed his hands over his temples, thinking of Merry’s scars, her waxing and waning moon crescents. “Thirteen?” he said.
“Thirteen on each limb: four limbs by thirteen bites. You know what that comes to? Fifty-two. You see how freaky that is? Thirteen is a witch’s number. Fifty-two is the weeks in a year. See the connection? It’s some kind of supernatural shit. Meredith was making a pact with the devil.”
“Did she bite herself?” John said. “Is that the theory? Meredith did it?”
Nate drank off the shot. “Yeah, she bit herself.”
“How the hell do you know all of this?”
“My brother’s girlfriend’s cousin lived with a chick who was one of the psych nurses on the ward, that’s how I know.”
“A friend of a friend of a friend?” John sneered. “Chinese whispers. Bullshit.”
“Hah, says you. Come on, you don’t know shit either way.”
The caravan felt hot and stuffy, airless. John said, voice rising, “Where’s the proof? How could she bite the insides of her own elbows? That’s a physical impossibility. You can’t bite the insides of your own elbows.”
“Who the fuck reckons she did that? Not me. I didn’t say that.”
Dizzy, John stood up, swaying a little. “I’ve got to go.”
“Already? Come on, have another drink, one more.”
John leaned against the door and it opened. His boots hit the mud and then he was running, running, running, dodging around trailers, heading back to the service road where his car was parked, tears blurring his vision.
“Hey, come back,” Nate called, his slurred voice becoming fainter. “Hey, Little Johnny Butt-Rose, what’s your fucken hurry, man? Come back. I can get us free popcorn and hot dogs. Come on back here. Penrose?”
6
As soon as he got home, John drank three stubbies, one after the other, and took the fourth to the kitchen table where he sat and nursed it, sipping, looking but not seeing out of the window. Beyond lay his vegie patch filled with rich, dark earth. He had protected each of his seedlings from the wind, cold nights and rodents with a home-made greenhouse: a plastic-wrapped cylinder of chicken wire pushed a few centimetres into the soil. The spindly trunks and tiny leaves would be safe.
But despite John’s concentration on his vegie patch and its fragile life, the image of Nate’s bloated and ruddy face kept leering.
Stop, that’s not me, John thought, no, I’m not like him.
You’re an alky when you drink hard liquor. And John didn’t drink hard liquor. Just beer, only beer… And he had a good job, and he never missed a day, and he never went to work drunk. Not once, not ever.
He passed a trembling hand over his eyes.
Thirteen is a witch’s number. Fifty-two is the weeks in a year… It’s some kind of supernatural shit. Meredith was making a pact with the devil.
John smoked too many cigarettes in a row, until his lungs wheezed and he couldn’t stomach any more. Now or not at all, he thought, and stood up, steadying himself against the table. His knees shook. At the closed door of the hobby room, he stood and listened. He could hear brittle clattering as Meredith sorted through her collection. The hairs rose on the back of his neck. He tapped on the door. The clattering noises stopped.
“Merry?” he said. “Can you come out here for a minute?”
“What for?”
“I need to talk to you.”
He heard the soft closing of cardboard lids, the sliding of boxes along the hardwood floor. Meredith opened the door a crack and regarded him with one eye.
“Not here,” John said. “Let’s talk in the kitchen.”
She nodded. He walked back along the hallway. Only then did she come out of the hobby room, closing the door behind her.
They sat opposite each other at the table. John wasn’t sure how to start. He guzzled his beer. Meredith sat perfectly still, her blank gaze staring at nothing, back straight as a rod, immobile in a manner that always brought to mind the stillness of a reptile. Sometimes, when Meredith was unnaturally still like this, John’s heart would race, for he imagined she might behave as a reptile and attack without warning.
“I saw Nate Rossi today,” he said.
She didn’t respond.
“Remember? He went to high school with us, in our year level, in fact.”
“You saw him. So what?”
“He’s an alky. He works in some shitty circus. He juggles stuff, like knives.”
“I never cared about him. Neither did you.”
“Well, as it turned out, we got chatting. Nate told me about something that happened to you in one of the hospitals.”
Meredith was so still it appeared she had stopped breathing. John wanted to sip his beer, but her stillness had somehow paralysed him, pinned him in the chair.
Finally, she whispered, “Oh? And what did Nate tell you?”
“How you got your scars.”
“And how did I get them?”
“He reckons
you bit yourself on the arms and legs.”
In the dead silence of the kitchen, faraway noises came to John’s attention: the drone of a lawnmower, the honk of a car horn, a barking dog. As the seconds ticked on, it became so quiet in the room that he could hear the blood moving through his body, the pulse surging like a tide within his ears.
Then, by just an increment, Meredith cocked her head.
Her gaze slid to the wall behind him. Jolted, he had an awful feeling that somebody was standing there. He resisted the urge to turn and check. They were alone. The front and back doors were locked. Nonetheless, he half-expected to feel a pair of hands settle gently upon his shoulders.
Meredith said, “When he told you I’d bitten myself, what did you say?”
“That it was impossible to bite the inside of your own elbows.”
Brightening, she locked eyes with him. For a moment, he glimpsed the young and sassy Meredith, and his paralysis loosened enough so that he could lift his beer and take a long, grateful drink. She rolled up her sleeves and lay her forearms on the table, palms up, so that the silvery half-moon scars were visible. He couldn’t look at them. She smiled, but it seemed mirthless and sly.
“Who bit you, Merry?” he said.
In reply, she rolled one wrist, her hand making a dismissive gesture.
“Please,” he said. “You must tell me.”
“You’ve never asked before. Why now?”
He didn’t know the answer.
No, wait, that wasn’t true; he knew why, but in a formless, fathomless kind of way that couldn’t be put into words. He needed to know because of three faces that wouldn’t leave his mind: those of Donna, the teenage Meredith, and Lyle as he lay dying. Oh Jesus, he thought, I’m so fucking sorry for everything I’ve done. Against a flood of strong emotion, John clamped his jaw shut with an audible click of his teeth.
“Poor baby,” Meredith said with a chuckle. “You look like you want to cry.”
“Tell me. Please. Tell me what happened.”
Her contemptuous expression melted away. She sat back in the chair and let out a long, weary sigh. John’s guts clenched involuntarily.
“It was the nicest hospital,” she began in a sing-song voice, as if reciting from a children’s storybook. “It had bright yellow walls, and grounds with flowers and brick walkways, shady trees, benches where you could sit if you liked, with a nurse standing nearby, of course. There were always nurses standing nearby, with hypodermic syringes in their pockets, in case any one of us happened to flip their lid.”
John froze.
Holy Christ…
How was she being so articulate?
As a rule, Meredith hardly talked. Some days, catatonic, she would not—could not—talk at all. Occasionally, she fell mute for weeks. And yet, here she was, having an actual conversation. In fact, she had just given the longest speech since they had begun living together, since he had found her sleeping in a suburban park, homeless and filthy, about eight years ago. Uncanny. And blood was colouring her cheeks. If he touched her face, the skin would be warm. She seemed to be coming back to life. John experienced a detached sensation throughout his body, a chill that felt more and more like fear the longer he looked at her.
“This hospital was keen on group therapy,” she continued. “Every day, they made us sit in a circle and yabber about our problems, our preoccupations. I used to mention whatever came to mind at the time. That seemed to satisfy the shrinks.”
A lighter and cigarettes lay on the table. She reached out, took a smoke from the pack and, pausing momentarily with the Bic flaring high, she lit it.
Transfixed, John could not tear his eyes away.
The last time he had seen her smoke they had both been eighteen, naked under a blanket, flushed and sweaty from lovemaking. They had shared the cigarette, passing it between them, tasting each other’s lips on the filter, giggling, nervous and shy, embarrassed yet pleased. It had been the first and only time they had made love.
Meredith drew back on the cigarette and hesitated, as if unsure. Then, apparently satisfied, she relaxed and exhaled a thin stream of smoke through puckered lips, just like she used to do some thirty years ago. John’s heart thudded.
“One day,” she said, “we got a new patient. His name was Sebastian. He had scars on his arms and legs, like I do now. Such black hair and white skin, and the palest blue eyes you ever saw. As pale as pale could be; like the sun had been shining so hard and so long on his eyes that the colour had bleached out of them. He kept to himself. He never talked. At group therapy, he’d stare at the floor, or out the window. He liked to stare out of windows for hours and hours.”
The same as you, John thought, and shivered.
“And he never ate,” she said, showing her teeth.
“No food at all?”
“Not a single bite.”
The same as you. “How come he didn’t starve?” John said.
“Sebastian gave everybody the creeps, even the staff.” Meredith took a drag of her cigarette. “Not me. I used to sit and talk to him.”
“About what?”
“Dying. That if he wanted to die, we should figure out a way to do it together.”
John nodded. “Did he ever answer you?”
“No. At least, not in words.” She crushed the cigarette into the ashtray. “After group therapy one morning, he came to my room, held me down, and bit me, over and over, my left arm and then my right arm. At first, it was sexual, you know? I kept saying, oh yeah, keep going. When I’d had enough, I told him to stop, but he kept on biting along my right leg and then my left leg. You want to know the funny thing?”
A cold sensation sat in John’s stomach, heavy as a lump of clay. He licked his dry lips and said, “Okay. What was the funny thing?”
“It didn’t hurt until the very last bite: the fifty-second bite. Then all the bites hurt at once, and they hurt like hell. I screamed. Sebastian fled the room. The nurses freaked out at the sight of so much blood.” She shrugged. “That’s it. The nurses took me to the infirmary and patched me up.”
John drank from the stubby, aware that his hand was shaking, and that perspiration dotted his hairline. “Why did Sebastian attack you?”
“I don’t know.”
“To murder you?”
She contemplated the ceiling. “To change me.”
“Into what?”
“This.” She smiled and pointed at herself. “Him.”
“I don’t understand.”
She sighed. “After my wounds healed, I got discharged.”
“To another hospital?”
“No, altogether, because I was cured: I didn’t want to kill myself anymore.” She regarded him, blinking her lashless eyes. “Instead, I wanted to kill other things. The doctors and nurses didn’t know that, of course. I chose not to tell them.”
“Other things? Like what? Animals? Like Mrs Dwight’s cat, Angel?”
A faint smile crossed her lips. “I hated that fucking little fur-ball.”
“Merry, what do you do to the animals after you kill them?”
The colour began to leave her face. “With nowhere else to go, I went back home. My parents didn’t know what to do with me. Mother invited priests to visit with holy water. Dad kept locking me up, chaining me to the bed. So I ran away.”
“How old were you?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long were you on the streets before I found you?”
“Oh, I can’t remember.” Her voice sounded weak. “What does it matter?”
John leaned over the table and took both of her hands in his.
Meredith looked faint, exhausted, as if the act of talking had drained the life out of her. The slackening of the muscles around her mouth and the glazing of her eyes told him that a catatonic state was coming. She might not talk
again for days. But there was one more thing he had to know. His breathing came so fast he felt dizzy.
“Listen, Merry,” he said. “Nate told me something else: that you had your first nervous breakdown because your brother disappeared.”
“My brother?” she murmured.
John had always blamed himself for destroying not only Lyle, but Meredith too, the only woman he had ever loved. Oh Christ…but he had to know for sure. After years of suffocating guilt and remorse, he had to hear it from Meredith, just in case…just in case… “It’s not true,” he insisted. “Is it? Tell me. Did you miss your brother so much you wanted to die?”
Her gaze went out of focus.
Damn, he’d lost her. She was gone for God knew how long, her mind adrift.
Then, as if swimming briefly to the surface, she said, “I died along with him.”
John let go of her hands, fast, as if they burned, and drew back in the chair. “Who says he’s dead? Nate reckons Lyle could be living in Bali.”
Stiffly, Meredith stood from her chair and went over to the kitchen window. John watched her, barely able to breathe. After a while, she held her hands over the bench and began to draw her long, manicured nails in circles upon the laminate. The sound droned in and out, in and out, making John think of a stricken biplane whirling down, down, down in a death spiral.
“Stop that,” he said. “Stop that right now.”
She didn’t react.
He leapt from the table, intent on dragging her from the bench to cease that terrible noise. Instead, he found himself putting his arms about her, and sobbing.
“God, I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m trying to make up for it, I really am. I’ll take care of you forever, okay? I swear. Merry, I swear on your brother’s name I’ll always take care of you, and you’ll never be locked up or homeless again, for as long as I live.”
As he wept into her neck, her fingernails trailed on and on in monotonous revolutions over the laminate bench, around and around and around.
The knocking sounds wouldn’t stop.
John opened his gummy eyes. Disoriented, he looked about. He was in his room, fully clothed and lying on his bed. Darkness had crept through the windows. Everything seemed grey and hazy. The digital clock read 6.22 p.m.
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