by Nina Allan
Other worlds than these, Selena thinks. She has a feeling this is a quote from something but she can’t remember where from. This is Susheela Raman, says the DJ. ‘Nagumomo’. The music glistens, the woman’s voice standing out against its shimmery textures like a wavy golden thread in a swatch of dark silk.
Selena imagines a hot, dust-blown street, music like the music on the radio playing loudly through an open window, a battered flatbed truck honking its horn. Without knowing why, she finds herself thinking of Cally, the mapmaker, the single-storey house with the wooden rafters she shares with her brother Noah in a place called Gren-Noor. Selena wonders where they have come from exactly, these stories of Julie’s, so deeply and closely imagined they could almost be real. She stacks clean dishes in the drainer, then runs another bowl of hot water for the glassware and cutlery. She briefly considers leaving, heading for the station without saying a word to anyone. She wonders how long it would be before her mother and sister realised she was gone.
She finishes the washing-up, puts the coffee things on a tray and goes through to the lounge. Julie is seated on the sofa, their mother is sitting in the armchair that abuts it. She is holding Julie’s right hand in both of hers. The gas fire is lit. Bluish flames jerk nervously from its fake coals. They are like pictures of flames, Selena thinks, as she thinks every time she is here. An image of what a fire should be like, without really being one.
Seeing Julie and Margery together is a little bit the same.
“Julie’s just been telling me about what happened with that ghastly Jimson man,” Margery says. She angles her head slightly to glance at Selena then turns back to Julie. “She doesn’t want to go to the police and I agree with her. She’s suffered enough trauma already. And seeing as that murderer’s already behind bars it can hardly matter. The only thing that matters is that Julie is home.”
To hear her mother speaking of trauma is like gazing into the artificially generated, perfectly flame-shaped flames of the gas fire. Margery hates what she invariably refers to as psychobabble, the newfangled language of empathy and identity and universal compassion. Normally she would say upset, or business, as in she’s had enough of this business already. Julie remains silent, her head bent, staring at her hand between their mother’s hands as if it were an artefact, a scientific specimen. For the first time, Selena wonders if Julie is acting illegally by failing to notify the police of her return and she wonders why this question has not yet occurred to her. A lot of time and energy has been expended in trying to find her, after all. Multiple resources, if you prefer cop-speak.
It could be that they know already, or could know, if they could be bothered to find out. Julie presumably has a bank account, a tax record, a national insurance number. A paper trail so long and so detailed that by rights it should have been the police informing them that Julie had turned up again, rather than the other way around.
Sod them, then, Selena thinks. “It’s up to Julie who she tells,” she says. She sits down in the other armchair, helps herself to coffee and an almond slice. She should feel angry, she supposes – angry for being relegated, angry for being sidelined so completely that their mother hasn’t even thought to ask her about her own part in Julie’s resurrection, even though it was Selena Julie turned to first, and not Margery. She should feel furious, and yet she doesn’t, she feels uneasy. There is something unreal about what is happening. She could almost be watching it on TV, a scene from one of those treacly afternoon mini-series that were so popular in the nineties: prodigal sons, stolen children, twins separated at birth – high dramas so full of corn, as Laurie would say, there would be enough to feed the five thousand and still have a sack left over.
It is as if Julie and Margery are both acting, playing out the roles that are expected of them and not a single cue missed. Selena finds it strange, just being in the room with them. She tries to imagine what might happen if she were to ask her mother if Julie has told her about the aliens yet, then abandons the idea. The way things are at the moment, she would be the one who ended up looking stupid. Stupid or treacherous or just plain crazy.
Let them get on with it, why don’t you? She closes her eyes. The cloying heat from the gas fire is making her drowsy. Margery is asking Julie if she’d like to stay over.
“I won’t, if you don’t mind, Mum,” Julie says. “The flat’s easier for work, you see. I’ll come over at the weekend though, if you like.”
They make plans. Selena can’t work out if she’s being included or not, and doesn’t much care. She tries to imagine a Saturday that is not, in one way or another, bound up with Julie, and cannot do it. Julie has come to dominate her thoughts to such an extent she is stuck on one track, she realises, like someone who has been diagnosed with a fatal illness. It is all but impossible for her to think about anything else.
Half an hour later she and Julie are in the car, heading back into Manchester.
“Thanks,” Julie says. She has been silent up till now, so silent that her voice, in the darkness beside Selena, seems disembodied, the word Julie has spoken shorn of its meaning, more a sound than a word.
“What for?” she replies.
“You know.”
“For not telling Mum your alien abduction story, you mean? I don’t get you, Julie.” Selena feels a jolt of the anger she should have felt earlier, a shot of adrenalin straight into her bloodstream. “Why invent all that junk in the first place? What was the point?”
“Because it’s true.” Julie’s eyes are fixed on the road, her face reduced to planes of light and darkness in the wavering yellow beams of the oncoming headlights. It is cold inside the car still, even though the engine has been running for at least ten minutes. There will be a frost tonight, probably.
Selena shivers. “I can’t tell Mum, can I?” Julie says. “I couldn’t tell Lisa either, when it came down to it. I told you because I had to. I had to know that at least one other person knew the truth about what really happened to me. I can’t stand feeling so alone, Selena. Not any more.”
They drive on in silence. There is less traffic on the road than when they drove out. The orange lights, the shadows of signposts thrown on to the tarmac, make the dual carriageway resemble a fairground ride. Dodgems for real, Selena thinks. There is something wrong with Julie, she knows that, something bigger than she can cope with, maybe, but whatever it is, she finds it less awful than the idea that Julie has been stringing her along. Stuffing her head full of lies and nonsense and then pulling the rug out.
“It went OK, didn’t it?” Julie says. “With Mum, I mean. At least that’s over.”
“I told you you’d be fine.” Selena wishes she could say something more, something reassuring – we’ll work this out, maybe, or I believe you – but she finds she cannot. To promise Julie that she can help her, that she can accept her story, would be like somebody promising to save someone from drowning when they know they can’t swim. She can sit beside her in the car though, she can at least do that. The inside of the car is warmer now, a bit, anyway. She tries to picture it from above: a tiny tin vehicle moving at speed along a rubber roadway, the sewn-together moorland beyond, a billion stars above, probably more.
* * *
Five minutes after she gets in, the phone rings. The caller is Margery. Selena knows this even before she picks up. Julie won’t be home yet, not quite, and who else could it be? Now she’ll quiz me, she thinks. The idea that her mother has been waiting to do this all evening after all is simultaneously satisfying and dismaying.
“I’m just checking to make sure you got home safely,” Margery says.
“Hi, Mum.” She is too tired to take the initiative, she finds. She waits in silence for the onslaught, the teasing out of secrets, of answers. She’ll give it five minutes, she decides. Say mostly nothing then plead exhaustion.
“Selena,” Margery says. She can hear her mother breathing, Selena realises, the breaths rasping in and out so harshly she can almost see them, fluttering in the dim light of
her hallway like panicked moths.
“What’s wrong, Mum?” She feels afraid suddenly. This is the opposite of what she’s been expecting.
Margery is silent for a moment, then her words pour forth in a rush, a stack of small change spilling from a broken money bag. “I don’t know who that woman is, but she isn’t Julie.” She pauses, still breathing hard, as if she’s been running. “I don’t want to see her again.”
“What are you talking about, Mum?” There is a blankness inside her head, the vast concavity of a phantom sea, trapped inside a whelk shell, pressed hard to her ear.
“That woman,” Margery repeats. “I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to talk to her. I don’t want her near me. I can’t tell you what to do, Selena, you’re an adult, but you should be careful. I think she could be dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“Yes. These people are, you know, once they get a hold of you. They take over your life. I’ve read about it on the Internet.”
“Of course she’s not dangerous, Mum. She’s Julie. I’ve spent time with her. She knows things no one else could know. She remembered Mr Rustbucket.” Tears spring into her eyes. “Why would she pretend? What could she want from us? It’s not as if we’re millionaires.”
“You think I wouldn’t know my own daughter? I don’t want to talk about this any more, Selena. Not ever.” She falls silent and tugs in her breath. Selena knows for certain that she is crying.
“Mum—”
“I mean it. Keep her away from me.”
“But you invited her over yourself. Saturday, remember?”
“I won’t be here. I’m going to Auntie Janice’s. It’s already arranged.”
There is a long pause and then a click. Her mother has put the phone down. I’m too tired for this, she thinks. All of it. She replaces the receiver in its cradle and goes upstairs to her bedroom. She leans on the windowsill for a moment before drawing the curtains. There is frost on the privy roof, glistening like shards of glass from a shattered mirror.
Jack Frost, Selena thinks. Frost the Magician, Uncle Jack. We’re not supposed to believe in him either, but we all know he’s real.
* * *
Selena telephones Julie the following morning. She tells her they won’t be able to visit their mother at the weekend, after all.
“Mum’s had to go to Auntie Janice’s. She’s not well, or something. Auntie Janice, I mean. Mum says to tell you she’ll see you when she gets back. She realised she didn’t have your number to call you herself.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Wrong with who?”
“Auntie Janice?”
“Oh.” The upsurge of panic subsides. “I’m not sure. Mum didn’t say.” Selena draws in her breath. “Come over here instead, if you like.”
“I’m not sure what I’m doing yet. I’ll let you know.”
Julie sounds guarded, cagey, as if she knows there’s something Selena isn’t telling her but is choosing, just for the moment, to ignore the fact.
Wise move, Selena thinks. “Bye then,” she says. She puts down the phone, briefly considers calling Janice to check whether her mother is really there or not, then decides against it. Let Janice handle it, she thinks. I am not my mother’s keeper. It comes to her that in all the years since Julie disappeared, she cannot recall having a single proper conversation with Margery about Julie, not since she left home, anyway. Their conversations, when they occurred, had centred around Dad: Dad and his illness, Dad and his inability to let go of the past, Dad and the multitude of problems that seemed to surround him.
Since Dad’s death it’s been mostly their jobs. That, and the weather.
Could it be that at some point they stopped believing that Julie had ever existed?
In Selena’s case, her unbelief has made no difference. She has asked Julie questions, made up little tests – the stuff about Mr Rustbucket, for instance – but she has known in her bones that Julie is Julie, right from the start. Not just from the tone and timbre of her sister’s voice, but from the things she says and the way she phrases them. Her pronounced and annoying tendency to disagree, to contradict everything, to pick up on irrelevant detail and use it against her.
Her tendency to be Julie, in other words. Something you couldn’t mistake, not even with your eyes closed.
If their mother does not feel it, what does that mean?
Is Margery going crazy, or is she?
* * *
Selena goes online and looks up creef. There are no results, of course: just listings for people with Creef as their surname, the suggestion that she meant to search for Crieff, which is either a small market town in Scotland or a slang term she has never heard of for the fold of skin at the base of the penis.
She looks up woodlouse instead, then trilobite, and after half an hour’s random surfing she comes across a YouTube video featuring half a dozen sea crustaceans called isopods, rapaciously stripping the meat from the carcase of a tuna fish. The isopods are each around a foot long, pinkish-white in colour and with ovular, segmented bodies. The video commentary informs her that isopods are scavengers, usually found on the sea bed at depths of up to three thousand metres. They are exceptionally sensitive to sunlight and to sound.
The creature’s Latin name is Bathynomus giganteus.
They look like giant pale woodlice. Selena had no idea such a creature existed. She watches the tuna fish video several times and then searches for others. There turn out to be plenty, including a bizarre home-produced rock video entitled ‘Giant Isopods Ate My Well-Known Brand of Corn Chip’, in which a man with long straggly hair in a coloured bandana runs along a beach beating an electric guitar and screaming about a kraken. Selena is pretty sure that a kraken is some kind of sea monster, which the isopods aren’t, not really, because they aren’t big enough. A monster should at least have the power to destroy a reasonably sized galleon, Selena decides, although a woodlouse the size of a cat, as one of the nature videos describes it, is pretty unnerving.
* * *
Selena lies in bed, wondering if it is possible that Julie has become infected with the creef.
Could it be that this is what their mother has picked up on, some subtle alteration in Julie’s behaviour – her smell, even – something you couldn’t easily describe or even see but that if you knew the person well enough you’d notice anyway? Some kind of psychic aroma?
Psychic aroma my arse, Selena scoffs. I’m getting as bad as Johnny.
Linus Quinn had known that Elina Farsett was changing. He knew even before Eduard did.
Was Julie still Julie, as she had insisted to Margery, or was she turning into a monster? Selena felt light-headed, not so much with tiredness as with unreality. Could unreality be transmitted from person to person like a virus, like a cold germ?
Perhaps that’s what happened to Dad. Maybe people would find madness easier to understand, if it were something you could pick up from standing next to the wrong person at the supermarket checkout, or in a crowded train carriage.
Was Julie’s madness catching?
But if being around Julie had made her susceptible, then so had trying to pretend since she was a child that those years of Julie’s absence had not left their mark on her, that she was really OK.
Selena had been defined by her sister’s disappearance, almost as much as Julie had herself.
I’m a cast-off, Selena thinks. Cast off like knitting, like a fishing line, like a pile of old clothes, like a mooring tether. She pictures herself as she has never been: a small girl standing in the round, rocking belly of a rowing boat and freeing herself from the rope that binds her to shore. The boat bobs slowly away across the water. Shoe Lake – the Shuubseet – spreads out around her and for once the sky above it is a cloudless blue.
Selena can see these things clearly. She can feel the alien air, tart as bracken, cool on her face, and suddenly it is as if she has known this landscape all her life: the rocky wastelands that surround the city
, the cold vastness of the mountains beyond. It is the life she is living now that is the dream, the deception. A droplet of airborne madness she has inhaled by mistake, the legacy of a stranger she will never know the name of or see again.
4
“What was that film we saw?” Selena said to Johnny. “The one where that Scottish guy’s stepdad murdered his sister?”
“The Shoe,” Johnny said immediately. “It was set in Glasgow.”
“That’s the one,” Selena said. “I knew you’d remember. You’re brilliant at remembering films.”
“Why did you want to know, anyway?”
“No reason, really. I was thinking about it the other day, that’s all. I couldn’t remember the title and it was driving me mad. Anyway,” she said, “how are things with you?”
It was strange getting another phone call from Johnny so soon after the last one. For the first three months he was in Kuala Lumpur she’d barely heard from him. Now, two phone calls in less than two weeks. She couldn’t imagine Johnny feeling homesick – travelling was what he lived for. An affair that had gone wrong, then? The idea of Johnny dating someone else made Selena feel like punching him, or at least slamming the phone down. Maybe in time they’d evolve into the kind of relationship where he could call her up and cry on her shoulder about his latest love catastrophe, but that time wasn’t yet.
“I’ve been thinking of coming home,” Johnny said.
“What?”
“I miss Manchester. Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not.” She felt relieved he’d said Manchester and not her, although she was bound to admit they were probably one and the same. She felt a rush of gladness at the thought of seeing him – at the thought of their being together again, even for a day – followed almost immediately by the desire to shut the situation down before it got out of hand.