Trick of the Light

by Fiona McCallum

  Erica had just sent her tenth application when hunger pangs bit inside her stomach. She’d lost several hours. And then her phone beside her began to ring. She leapt to get the call – anything to get away from all this – so much so she fumbled and struggled to flip it over. Finally getting the object under control, she brightened at seeing Renee’s name on the screen, though she’d have probably picked up a private number too she was so desperate to be distracted from herself. Though she’d have to answer any call now, wouldn’t she, while on the job hunt?

  ‘Hey, Renee, how’s things?’

  ‘Good. How are you? I just wanted to check on you. That you’re okay.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s lovely. I’m okay. Job hunting. What fun.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s demoralising.’

  ‘I’ve only just sent a heap of applications so haven’t had the humiliation of rejection yet. I can’t believe how long it takes.’

  ‘Yeah. And it’s so bloody intrusive. The stuff they want to know up front before even doing an online interview.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Erica wandered out into the hall and then her bedroom looking around for Boris. Unable to find him she went down to the kitchen to check his crate. Nothing. ‘Oh. Can you just hold on a sec? I want to check where Boris is. Steph’s cat I’m looking after. I’m paranoid about something happening to him.’

  ‘Fair enough. No worries. I’ll wait.’

  Erica moved around the house and finding him nowhere got down on the floor to peer under her bed again. ‘Oh, there you are. What are you doing under here?’ She reached a hand in to pat him but recoiled when he hissed and lunged at her. ‘Oh, shit. God, Boris. It’s okay. It’s just me,’ she cooed, feeling dreadful that the cat might be unhappy.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she heard Renee’s muffled voice ask beside her.

  ‘Sorry, Renee, not you. He’s hiding under the bed and looks terrified.’

  ‘They do that in a new place.’

  ‘He was fine last night and earlier. Well, mostly.’

  ‘Oh well, he’s probably caught his reflection in the mirror or something – thinks he’s seen another cat – a rival, a predator. It wigs them out.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. Maybe you’re right,’ Erica said, standing back up and sitting on the bed. It made sense; there was a full-length mirror just inside the walk-in robe doorway.

  ‘He’ll come out when he’s ready.’

  ‘I hope so. I think there might be a possum or something in the roof too.’

  ‘Ah, well, that’ll get his hunting instincts going.’

  ‘Tell me about it. He growled before when I distracted him. God, if he’s lost a heap of weight or is a nervous wreck when Steph picks him up, I’ll be in trouble.’

  ‘Perhaps just give him space. Let him come to you when he’s ready. How is everything otherwise?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Hey, just a thought. A friend of mine is selling Wonder Berry Juice Capsules and seems to be doing well with it. She’s having one of those parties to sell products, so I just thought I’d see if you’d be interested. I could introduce you.’

  ‘Multi-level marketing? No thanks. You’re too young to remember the heady days of that caper before everyone realised what it was really all about. Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude and ungrateful. Thanks, but it’s not for me.’

  ‘It’s okay. I don’t know much about it. She just seems to be doing well. But then who would know, really. That could just be how she makes it look on the socials. I haven’t seen her in real life for a few years – before she got into it.’

  ‘Thanks for thinking of me. Anyway, I think for those sorts of things to work at all you have to know heaps of people, and I don’t, really. Well, not well enough to entice them to buy stuff from me.’ Erica’s mind went to the networking involved – the time and effort. If you could get past the fact most of these types of enterprises were pretty much a scam. The second decade of the two-thousands was the perfect era for them to thrive. A whole new generation was swallowing them up since the revelations of the early nineties and the new name, ‘multi-level marketing’, disguised its resemblance to pyramid selling. The world and its workforce were multi-level – upper-management at the top, workers down below – so it didn’t pose the same warning. Erica had had to ditch a few friends on Facebook because all they did was sell, sell, sell – both the merits of the products and the benefits of joining what was little more than a cult, as far as Erica could see.

  ‘Hopefully something will come from this morning’s efforts,’ she now said to Renee. ‘Anyway, enough about my dreary life. How’s things with you?’

  ‘Don’t say that. I called to check on you. Anyway, nothing new with me. All good, but same old.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Erica went to bed exhausted from staring at the computer screen all day doing job searches and applications and forcing herself to carefully write tailored cover letters for each position and not just flood people’s email inboxes. She’d even signed up with a couple of agencies for temporary office work. She wasn’t sure what her typing speed was but could at least touch type at a reasonable rate. She was also exhausted from worrying about Boris’s behaviour and going to and fro in her mind as to whether to message Steph and ask her. It was the last thing she wanted to do and she really hoped Renee’s advice was right – that as long as the cat was eating and weeing and pooing there was nothing too serious going on. Even throwing up wasn’t anything to be too concerned about, apparently, because once or twice would be most likely a furball coming up. God. Erica didn’t want him puking and having to clean it up. Dealing with the litter tray was bad enough. Though as she was cleaning her teeth, she reminded herself she’d dealt with nappies and occasional bouts of throwing up from two kids without puking once. Stuart on the other hand … Anyway, so far so good. Boris hadn’t gagged or looked poorly health-wise yet. It was his behaviour of roaming around the house looking about, darting under beds as if playing hide and seek, that was the problem.

  She peered out. At the moment he was curled up on the end of her bed staring at her. No, actually not at her: past her into the walk-in robe. For a brief moment Erica wondered how hard it would be to take down the full-length mirror bolted to the wall in there. But she didn’t want to touch it. The last thing she needed was seven years’ bad luck resulting from a cracked mirror. She should go in there and try to tape something over it, but was suddenly gripped by apprehension. She didn’t want to go into the room at all. She tried to laugh it off but still couldn’t make herself go in there – not even stretch her arm in and flick on the light switch. As she sat there staring, telling herself she was being ridiculous, she realised she was actually really scared. And frozen to the spot. All the clothes were now hiding monsters or serial killers. She cursed herself for having left the door open. There was no way she could close it now – reach into the abyss where anything could be lurking to grab her and pull her in and do goodness knew what. Erica shuddered. She looked at Boris again for reassurance. He wasn’t afraid. Well, he didn’t seem to be. He wasn’t all fluffed up with his hair on end. And his eyes, while big, didn’t seem wild like they had earlier. Maybe it really was just being in a different environment that was bothering him. If there was something scary going on – like an actual proper threat, not just her over-active imagination playing tricks – then he’d be under a bed or in another room. Or in his crate. And if he was watching for a large spider or cockroach that had gone in there, then she definitely didn’t want to go in and encounter such a thing. Glad there was a chest of drawers containing some clothes, including pyjamas, in her room itself, she got changed and into bed and turned the TV on.

  ***

  Erica woke with the knowledge she’d tossed and turned for most of the night as she tried to tell from the light around the curtains what time it might be. But there was no light. She reached her hand across to the bedside table and patted it all over, searching for the shape of her mobile. Where the bloody
hell was it? She remembered unplugging it from the charger in the kitchen and bringing it in with her. It was probably on the floor. It was still early. And anyway, what was there to get up for even if it was morning?

  She suddenly remembered Boris and slowly and gently moved her leg across the bed to see if she could feel his weight. Nothing. Perhaps him jumping off and roaming around the house was what had woken her up. She rubbed her eyes and then lay still listening for the sounds of the house. Again, nothing. The longer she lay there concentrating the more she thought she heard and the more she wondered if what she heard was real or just her imagination or phantom noises in her ears. She was sure she could hear movement above her, which didn’t frighten her now she was sure it was a possum. But just like imagining monsters among the clothes in the walk-in robe, she could hear an intruder walking around her house. She knew she was being absurd; it was just her mind and the darkness conspiring against her. But her heart raced and under her pyjamas she began to sweat. Proper sweat, not menopausal hormonal sweating.

  And then she began wondering if she was awake at all or actually asleep and having a dream. Stuart had often said she’d slept more than she thought she had when she complained about a poor night’s sleep. Now she desperately wanted to ask if he’d said that to make her feel better – some kind of psychological manipulation to get her through the day. She knew she’d managed most of the time to go quickly back to sleep after getting up and tending to the girls when they were small, sometimes having little recollection of having done their bottles or going in there and turning on lights or sitting with them after a nightmare. Stuart had said he’d witnessed her doing all sort of things. Autopilot. Muscle memory, she figured. If parents didn’t learn the art of getting up and doing whatever and then falling back to sleep quickly afterwards, how was the world still functioning? Perhaps all this was in response to her nest being suddenly empty. No doubt Renee would say her brain was processing heavy shit and that was causing her disturbances. Erica hoped so. Otherwise she was losing her mind like her parents had theirs. The thought of that, combined with her exhaustion, saw several tears sneak out of her eyes and roll down her cheeks. She blinked them away and rolled over and hugged what had been Stuart’s pillow to her and told herself she was allowed to cry. Life was shit right now. But while a few more tears trickled down across her nose and pooled in her left ear, her chest and throat didn’t contract. The ache that always seemed to be there didn’t begin to crush her soul further.

  Just as she thought she might be drifting off, Erica’s heart flipped at hearing a clatter of something metallic. Well, that’s what she thought she’d heard. Where? She lifted her head to listen. Nothing. And now she wasn’t sure she’d even heard anything at all. Had she just been on the verge of sleep, almost in a dream and dreaming something about something metallic being put down or dropped – her makeup tools on the counter at work, maybe? Then she remembered Boris. Maybe he was up on the shelves having a nocturnal prowl. Though Steph has said he was too old to climb anything any more. Should she go and check?

  Her heart leapt into her mouth. Another, different sound – something scraping? She shivered. She should go out and check, but she was frozen. She was sure she could hear noises coming from the kitchen but then couldn’t be certain it wasn’t her mind and her ears playing with her again. Still. Maybe Boris was eating and pushing his bowl around on the tiles. He hadn’t before, but there was nothing to stop him. She tried to force herself to relax, but failed. She tried convincing herself it was just Boris knocking something off the sideboard, but couldn’t think of anything beyond horrible scenarios about intruders and what they might want with her. No amount of telling herself they were things that happened very rarely in real life helped.

  Go back to sleep. Erica wanted to laugh out loud at the way her brain was blowing everything out of proportion because of the dark, but couldn’t. She was afraid. And all the telling herself to get a grip – that she was there alone and had been fine months after Stuart’s death and since the girls had gone – didn’t seem to help. She desperately wanted the bedroom door to be closed, but couldn’t make herself leave her bed. Even remonstrating at herself that she was being a wuss didn’t help. She shuffled down, pulled the quilt right over her, clutched Stuart’s pillow to her stomach and curled into a ball around it.

  ***

  Erica’s room was light when she woke with a start to find Boris’s wet nose on her face. She stretched out a hand to him and when he moved away reached over to get her phone from the cupboard. As she was about to key in her code, something snagged in her mind. She frowned. Wasn’t there something about me not being able to find my phone last night? Unable to remember, she shook it aside. Must have been a dream or one of the groggy half-awake sleeping pill–induced twilights. It doesn’t matter, because here it is.

  ‘Hello there,’ she said, looking back at the cat now sitting beside her. And then fragments of her being disturbed and afraid last night returned. God, how could I have forgotten that?

  ‘Hey, were you a naughty puss last night?’ she said, slowly reaching her hand out from under the covers to brave patting him. ‘Aww, but you’re too lovely for me to be annoyed, no matter what you’ve done. Aren’t you a darling?’ she said as he lifted up his chin for her to scratch underneath and then let out a deep rumbling purr. She was beginning to sort of see the appeal of having a cat. Although, she was yet to see what he’d been up to during the night …

  ‘Okay, come on, then, let’s see your damage, mister,’ she said, when the cat had hopped off the bed and seemed to be beckoning her to follow him – walking a few steps and stopping and turning and letting out a meow. ‘Yes, all right, breakfast time. I get it.’

  Erica poured out the right amount of dry food and watched, a little mesmerised, thanks to her slightly sleep-addled, woozy state, while Boris ate, and then, remembering the commotion during the night, turned slowly to take the whole space in. Or had she imagined the noises? Nothing seemed out of place.

  Her gaze stopped on the butter knife in the sink. Peering closer she realised it seemed to have the remnants of peanut paste smeared across it. She frowned, trying to remember having a late-night snack. Oh god. Am I sleep-walking and eating peanut paste out of the jar now? Part of that scenario wouldn’t surprise her – she bloody loved the stuff. And did eat it in great heaps straight off the knife right out of the jar. But getting up in the middle of the night and eating it without any knowledge of having done so? She’d heard plenty of stories of people doing all sorts of things in their sleep. Or …. Oh, god, was it worse; was it time to see her GP to ask about being assessed for dementia? She’d been through that with her parents. No. She didn’t want to even think about it. And what she was experiencing didn’t fit exactly with the symptoms they’d displayed. What was going on with her was irritating, but it wasn’t as if she suddenly didn’t know where she was or couldn’t find her way home after heading out for a walk. Yes, early diagnosis was important. And, yes, she shouldn’t be putting finances before her health, but she didn’t want to spend money going to see her GP when she really did think there was another explanation. If only she could find it …

  So, did I take an antihistamine sleeping tablet too last night? Her memory around that was patchy as well. Was it last night or several nights ago that she’d resorted to assistance sleeping? She couldn’t remember having done so, but then her brain was the right sort of fuzzy – she could well have taken something. Maybe she’d got up to do that unawares and had dived into the peanut paste while she was at it. She rubbed her face and went over to put the kettle on.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Erica fought the urge to go back to bed and won. The best antidote to her tiredness was always a brisk walk in the fresh air, though this morning she found it hard to leave Boris. The poor cat, who was meant to sleep for most of his time and, when he wasn’t doing that, eat, sat – not snoozing, but alert – either in his carry box, on Erica’s bed or the couch, or in
his bed on the floor. Occasionally it seemed as if he’d finally go to sleep properly – was snuggled up on his side with his plush tail curled around him – only to then jerk awake again, look around and sit up. Perhaps he’d relax when she left the house. Perhaps he had a problem with her. She stroked his sleek back and gave him a scratch under his chin.

  ‘Don’t worry, Boris, darling, your mum isn’t going to be away long and then you can go home. And I’ll be back soon.’

  As she left the house, Erica thought how nice it was to have a living being to come back to when she returned – even if he didn’t seem to appreciate her or like her. Though he did want to be near her, so that was at least something.

  Thinking about him possibly being sad made her heart ache. She could see why pet people were pet people – these furry creatures really did get under your skin. And so much like babies because it was such an intuitive experience – you didn’t speak the same language.

  Erica decided that when things got better for her financially, she’d get a pet – cat or a dog, she wasn’t sure which. She’d need to try having a dog first. That thought caused her step to lighten. But barely for a couple of beats. When would her situation be better? And how could it be if she couldn’t get a job? Telling herself it had only been a couple of days that she’d been out of work didn’t help. If she was remotely religious, she might have prayed. She didn’t have time to be patient. Her steps were heavy and her body anchor-like. She began running through all of Renee’s, Steph’s and Michelle’s encouraging words and mantras she’d heard over the years in an effort to keep going – walking and not turning around and going home and then when there not getting back into bed, pulling the covers up and giving in to her despondency. But the best she could come up with was one foot in front of the other and having a strict routine. Yes, when she got back, she’d apply for ten more jobs and then as a reward go out, put petrol in the car – eek – money she didn’t have to spend – and visit her dad.