In a recent project we were encouraged by our teacher Mr Lavelle to choose an artefact that we felt represented us, an emblem. I chose the skull and. . .
The words were stopping and starting as I tried to write. For some reason I found it hard to remember what Mr Lavelle had been teaching us over the past months. His words came back and they seemed almost meaningless, nothing connecting with anything else.
Beauty, truth, arouse, enthral, lustrous, taut, indecipherable, the void.
I could mouth the words but on paper they dissolved.
There were random phrases too and the feelings they had created in me as he spoke.
The artist can abuse us; the union of the pure and the vulgar; the exploration of the unconscious.
They returned, but little else. I searched in the cupboard beside my bed and dug out my art-history book; it hadn’t been opened since I started in school. The pages shiny and unmarked.
I sat back in the hard chair and looked out the window. The sky was grey and it was getting dark. A wind was blowing the tall trees of the forest beyond the walled garden, the last of their brown leaves drifting to earth. The room was cold and in the corner of the window the small growth of moss at the edge of the frame looked damp and slimy. I picked at it aimlessly.
I wondered what they spent the school fees on. Everything was decrepit but no one ever mentioned it. Helen and the others talked of the school as if it were some majestic palace. I wondered could they not see it, was it just me? Like the boy observing the naked emperor. Even Victoria never spoke of it. The cold, the dust, and the patched-togetherness of everything. You could hear it, though, at night. The neglect. Someone was always coughing, the damp settling on their chest after dark and the sound of their struggle for air keeping you awake.
I breathed deeply on to my hands to warm them up and looked at myself in the mirror. My face was in shadow, the low lamp on my desk not reaching this far across the room; only my body was caught in the light. The Cartesian. Despite the cold I took off my jumper and started to unbutton my blouse. My body was pale, white and narrow. I was thinner than before, the tasteless, watery food pushed from one side of the plate to the other most nights. I turned to my side, my breasts a bare curve in the shadows, my stomach almost concave; it explained the way my uniform skirt had started to swivel on me. The label invariably found at the front now, rather than the back. I liked it, the sense of bones, angular and sharp. Hollow.
I remembered briefly the boy, hot and insistent last year, and how he had whispered into my neck, so quietly I had almost not heard it, where did you buy your body? It had struck me after as being the strangest thing to say. But then I thought maybe I had never heard it and had imagined everything about that unfamiliar night.
I looked different now, anyway, to that girl. I was disappearing. And it was a strangely enchanting idea, like something from a fairy tale. A metamorphosis that defied the short time I had been here. Victoria could put me in her pocket, carry me away. The old me was literally no more, unrecognizable.
There was a knock at the door.
I quickly pulled my shirt back on.
Mr Lavelle was smiling, his arms crossed. The hall light made his hair shine and it seemed like he glowed again. We said nothing for a second. Girls were shouting down the corridor and he watched them for a moment.
‘Your essay,’ he said, turning back to look at me, ‘for the book, I will need it tomorrow, Friday.’
I saw him glance into the room behind me as he spoke, squinting almost into the dusk of it. I was curious to know if he had been in one of the students’ rooms before and, if not, did they represent the forbidden to him. The off limits. The painting of Helen came into my mind.
I nodded to him.
His eyes were back to mine, then. And I wondered what it was he wanted to say to me? Why he, Victoria and I spent so much time theorizing about truth and yet never spoke a word of it? Irony cloaking everything. Yet there was always this feeling that each of us had something to say, if only we could find the words.
‘Mr Lavelle.’
It was Victoria.
She had emerged up the stairs and from the Maiden’s Chamber.
She stopped for a second at the top. Her eyes looked large, hunted, and they stared not at him, but me. Her gaze filled me up.
Mr Lavelle didn’t move but he sighed quietly.
She walked over to my door.
He turned to her only as she reached his side.
‘Yes, Victoria,’ he said. ‘What really can be so urgent?’
He put his hands behind his neck as he spoke, as if to stretch.
‘I am leaving, my parents are here, we are leaving tonight and they wanted to ask you something. They are outside.’ She sounded breathless, like she had run up the stairs.
Something I knew she would never do; it was part of our philosophy for living to move slowly. As though everyone would wait for us.
‘And you know they can’t be left waiting; I mean, what would be the outcome?’ she said, trying to laugh, looking at us both.
She spoke fast, nervously. She fiddled with the strap of her watch, a kind of earnest desperation in her voice.
He didn’t answer her but watched me and smiled. The wistful, melancholic smile, the one that hinted he had discovered the hidden mysteries of the world, solved them and been left wanting by it all. Jaded.
I could feel Victoria looking at him and then at me.
‘Don’t disappoint,’ he said, his voice low, ‘or Helen will be on your case. And me too possibly. Tomorrow.’
I nodded again.
He turned and walked to the stairs. Victoria hesitated for a second, her gaze briefly travelling up and down my body, distant, as if she had never seen me before. Like I was an intruder.
She was about to follow him, so I moved and took her arm as she started to walk away. Her eyes were very bright.
‘I can’t right now,’ she said, shaking my hand off.
I felt discarded.
‘See you after Halloween. . .’ I said to her back.
She didn’t answer. I could hear their footsteps on the stairs.
I closed the door of my room and leaned against it. As I did so I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I had buttoned my shirt wrong in the haste and it was uneven and gaping. I touched my neck and it was hot.
I should have felt embarrassed but I didn’t.
Chapter Seventeen
I called Victoria once over the Halloween holiday but she had been distracted on the phone. Happy, laughing people in the background.
I was staying with my mother and her boyfriend. We did a day trip to a wet, deserted pier. The ice-cream and sweet shops closed for the season. Bad jokes repeated over dinner in the pub near their house, as if I hadn’t got it the first time. Disagreements overheard downstairs after we got back. I woke to the sound of glass bottles being dropped in bins in the dark, early mornings.
I felt restless. Sullen. As if my life was improvised. Time, which accelerated when I was at the school, slowed again. I wrote a lot in my diary, copying out quotes from famous writers and then repeating them, but in my own words. I was trying to capture something. To tell of a feeling. But it never came out right. I thought perhaps when I had lived more it would be better. I would be better.
I could tell of everything then.
My father was at the window when they dropped me home. Waiting. He waved at the car. No one responded. He asked me how it had gone. There was nothing to say.
I was relieved to be back at school.
November. All Souls.
The dead among us.
The afternoons were dark by four now. The lights low over desks, hallways gloomy, wet leaves on the front steps. Exams looming. Judgements to be made. An air of purpose in the voices of the teachers.
The names of long-dead nuns were placed on gold and purple cards around the altar of the church. Candles lit.
Eternal rest grant to them, O Lord.
We pr
ayed for them all, with words that promised salvation. Forgave them their sins.
An essay I wrote about Advent was read out at assembly one morning by Sister Ignatius.
‘Advent is the season of being alert inside. The season of waiting. The soul patient, ready for the birth of its saviour.’
Her voice was reverential. She held my arm afterwards. She sensed the pilgrim in me. The quest. Helen was stern and white at her side.
They all watched my progress. Especially Mr Lavelle. He pursued my half-formed ideas in the summer house, chasing them down as the light died and the stove blazed. He knew I was searching but that I was too afraid to even name what it was I sought. Something was calling me, devouring me. It lay with me every night. It made this world as illusory as the next.
Victoria was mostly dreamy and idle. She didn’t speak of Helen and Mr Lavelle or the anniversary celebrations to me again. In the evenings when I was doing my homework, she would sometimes put notes under my door, inviting me to meet her in the summer house, or at the back of the stage in the Hall.
My room-mate, Alice, was unimpressed.
‘She was like this with the other girl, the one who had to leave,’ she said one evening.
I shivered as I always did when she was mentioned, the enigmatic girl from before.
‘Who was she?’ I asked.
‘No one knew, really. Her father was an ambassador, I think. Always moving around. She and Victoria were like this,’ she said, crossing her fingers.
I didn’t want to ask any more.
I went to the door and picked up the note.
Come this time. You’re becoming very dull. I will be in the Hall.
Victoria
I made my way down the stairs. One of the cleaning staff, head down, stood on the last step with a mop. Someone had been sick. I could smell it.
The Hall was lit only by moonlight. The large windows facing out to the coast. I walked quietly to the stage, climbed the steps and pulled back the heavy, velvet curtains. I thought about Ouija boards and flickering ghost lights. I called Victoria’s name softly but there was no reply.
‘She couldn’t come.’
I jumped at his voice. Mr Lavelle.
I walked back to the steps and pulled the curtain aside. He was standing below me in the Hall, a shaft of light at his feet.
‘She asked me to let you know,’ he said, walking over to the steps.
She had sent him.
I descended slowly.
‘I am leaving now, finished for the day,’ he said and he brushed his hands on his trousers, as if cleaning them of dirt.
‘Is she all right?’ I asked.
I had stopped on the last step.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said.
We were at eye level. But there was no light to see his expression.
‘She just had something to do,’ he answered quietly; his voice was made of silver and shadows.
‘You better go too,’ he said, moving closer to me, ‘lights out.’
I thought he might touch me. It seemed something that might happen, like in a dream.
‘The nuns will be looking for you. I won’t tell.’ He laughed then.
It echoed around the Hall.
He turned and headed for the door, the lesson he had come to teach me, untaught.
I ran to Victoria’s room on the second floor.
She opened, torch in hand, yawning. She was wearing her yellow dressing gown; it had small daisies embroidered on it.
‘Why weren’t you there?’ I said.
My throat was dry. I could hear my heart. Awkward and out of time.
She just smiled and put her finger to her lips.
It reminded me of my pre-school teacher. She would make us line up and put our fingers on our lips before break time. The girl who sat beside me was a bit slow and could never seem to do it, and she would get into trouble for it every day and had to stand facing the wall on which the pictures we had drawn were hanging. The pictures were never hers because only the best got hung up on the wall. And one day, she just never came back to school and we all forgot that she had ever been there.
I put my arms around Victoria suddenly, and buried my head in her neck. She smelled like lemon, sharp and fresh. I thought she might pull away. But she didn’t, she was still.
I wanted to stay there.
Unseen, buried in her.
I imagined she felt the same. That her inert body was complicit. And it wasn’t a game we were playing but something real and alive between us.
A nun clapped her hands somewhere down the hall and lights turned off.
Chapter Eighteen
Victoria didn’t send me any more notes after that night.
She was quieter, a part of her elsewhere. I sat on the floor of her room reading in the afternoons before study. She lay on her side in the bed. I would ask her things about her life. I wanted to know everything about the past, how it had made her. Sometimes she answered, and a glimpse of her childhood darted across the shadows. Sometimes not. I didn’t mind. There was peace in just being near her, the lights on low.
And I didn’t ask her about Mr Lavelle.
I was probably at my happiest in those dark December afternoons. A drowsy, dreamlike sense of complacency. I felt like there was time. That there was nothing to fear about myself or doubt. She accepted me at some essential level. I just needed to be brave. Her silence was an understanding.
Was I thinking of myself or her on those afternoons?
Myself, of course. Lovers are selfish. Obsessed not really with their love, but with themselves. It was what I wanted that kept me happy and awake. It haunted me and the phantoms were seductive. And I forgot to notice things. I saw the world through my own, unique reference points. All signs and symbols were pointed at me. I was happy.
I didn’t recognize the melancholy that hung over her. I took it for contentment.
I was proud too. My academic results were still stellar. The nuns were watchful but they were giving me a chance in their own way. I was on the path to fulfilling my promise. The thing everyone had talked about in corridors and at parent–teacher meetings. The gift that I had been given. That would not allow my life to be like everyone else’s.
I began to understand that things would work out. How could they not? I had Victoria.
I was wrong, of course. About almost everything.
A sad, stunted-looking Christmas tree was put up in the entrance hallway of the school. It was too short for the high ceilings. Thin silver streamers hung precariously off each branch. They would sway and blow every time the front door opened, some of them drifting to the floor. An empty crib sat on the ledge behind, a purple candle lit beside it.
There was going to be a Christmas concert and vintage fair as part of the anniversary celebrations. There were auditions and rehearsals in the Hall after class. A tone of ruthless ambition and mock humility characterized most conversations. Helen was in drill mode, surrounded by girls, looking concerned and saying she had taken on too much. We stayed out of her way.
Mr Lavelle was busy and distracted. A man in perpetual motion, always on the edge of our vision. Faint laughter on the front steps with the French teacher, cigarettes in hand. Framed in stained glass, dashing to his car as the moon rose and we climbed the stairs to bed.
We watched him. The show that never got boring.
Towards the middle of December, the weekend before school was to finish, Victoria invited me to a party at her house. It felt significant.
A man, possibly Victoria’s father, opened the door; he displayed an air of vague indifference and called up the stairs before leaving me alone among the grandeur.
Somewhere at the back of the house came the sound of that Frank Sinatra song, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’.
And people were laughing. The kind of laughs reserved for cocktail parties, light and hollow. Not that I would know. We had barbecues.
Her home was just as I expected. It stood on a quiet, treelin
ed street of large red-brick houses. The hallway where I was standing, waiting for her, had shiny black-and-white tiles on the floor and a marble fireplace with a fire burning. A towering Christmas tree, gold and green, flickered in the corner. Presents, the gift-wrapped kind, were piled up underneath.
Over the fireplace was a large painting of a woman and two young girls. The lady wore a white lace dress and a hat with a veil over her face. Something about her stare reminded me vaguely of Victoria. Like they both might have sipped iced tea and ruled colonies from a veranda. I wondered if I had worn the right dress. My coat was hanging over my arm and I didn’t know what to do with it. The man who opened the door hadn’t offered to take it from me. It did not seem the kind of place where you dumped it on a chair.
‘It’s going to be ghastly. I’m warning you,’ Victoria said.
I looked up and she was standing at the top of the stairs. She was wearing jeans. I felt self-conscious in my dress. Then I thought, fuck it, I never get to go anywhere or dress up. This might be my only chance to shine at a cocktail party. She bounded down the stairs two at a time, grabbed my coat and threw it on the end of the banister. I gave her my present, a book of poetry. She left it under the tree.
‘Come on, we need to show our face,’ she said. ‘You look nice.’
That made me happy.
‘Do you ever slide down those?’ I asked, gesturing to the banisters.
‘I used to,’ she said, ‘before.’
She turned to me as she spoke, then took a deep breath, before opening the double doors into the room where the party was on.
Elegance, I thought, that’s what’s been missing from my life. And ease. For a second as I stood at the doorway, I was the scholarship girl with ambition again. But the good version of me. The one who had drive and worked hard. The one who was on a journey upwards. The one who was sure there was no Godgiven right to wealth and success; there was no plan laid down that said some people are eligible and some aren’t. There was no fate, nothing divinely laid out. There were seats at the table for everyone. When you had talent. And were perhaps naive.
The Temple House Vanishing Page 11