Vamp

vamp A NOVEL

TRACY RYAN Sam arrives in Tracy’s life at just the right moment — she has hit the bottom. She’s attempted suicide, her marriage is dead and her days are spent in the battle zone of the psychiatric wards. Sam is different. She doesn’t give up, she’s strong, streetsmart and she does have answers. Tracy is drawn to her — a friend, supporter and lover to help give her the strength she needs to put her life back on track. And to learn how to strike back. But things aren’t what they seem ... in fact, they are beginning to look positively bloody ... Vamp is a powerful and thrilling tale which challenges the stories told about women by mythology, religion, literature and psychoanalysis. It is about anger, family and the long-term effects of childhood trauma. But it is also a compelling exploration of the potential of love and responsibility. Finally, Vamp is a very old and dark story, told in a new and compelling manner.

Cover photograph by Denis Collins.

Tracy Ryan was born and grew up in Western Australia. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Literature, and has also studied European languages at The University of Western Australia. She has worked in libraries, taught at Curtin University of Technology, and edited poetry and fiction for magazines. She has published two collections of poetry with Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Killing Delilah (1994) which was shortlisted for the 1994 Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the John Bray Poetry Award, Adelaide Festival, 1996, and Bluebeard in Drag (1996). She was joint winner of the 1996 Times Literary Supplement/Poems on the Underground short poem competition. Vamp is her first novel.

Photograph by W J Kinsella.

va am mp p v A NOVEL

TRACY RYAN

FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS

First published 1997 by

FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS 193 South Terrace (PO Box 320), South Fremantle Western Australia 6162. Copyright © Tracy Ryan, 1997. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Consultant Editor Wendy Jenkins. Designed by John Douglass. Production Manager Linda Martin. Typeset by Fremantle Arts Centre Press and printed by Australian Print Group, Victoria. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data Ryan, Tracy, 1964– . Vamp. ISBN 1 86368 172 8.. I. Title. pA821.3

The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through the Department for the Arts.

Australia

Council for the Arts

Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the relevant copyright, designs and patents acts, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher. eBooks Corporation

for John

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Vamp is a work of fiction. Acknowledgements are due to the following poets: John Donne, RD FitzGerald, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare, Rupert Brooke, Judith Wright, Lewis Carroll, TS Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the liturgists of the Roman Catholic Church for those veins of their poetry and songs which have been vampirised in this story. Grateful acknowledgement also to Varuna (The Eleanor Dark Foundation) and the Literature Board of the Australia Council for Fellowships during which parts of this novel were written. Chapter One of this work, ‘Like gold to aery thinnesse beat’, was first published in Summer Shorts 2 (eds. Peter and Barbara Holland, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994).

The self that night undrowns when I’m asleep travels beneath the dumb days that I give, within the limits set that I may live, and beats in anger on the things I love. I am the cross it bears, and it the tears I weep. ‘The Other Half’, Judith Wright.

I hope by God’s blessing, to accomplish a pious sacrilege here, which will relieve our earth of certain monsters ... The General, Carmilla, J Sheridan LeFanu.

From: Dr

, Registrar, Western Australia

Hospital,

RELEASED UNDER THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT

8

1 L IKE GOLD TO AERY THINNESSE BEAT

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The moment I met Sam I knew it would be fatal. It was just after the third attempt, and three has always been a lucky number for me. Good luck, bad luck, who can say? Sometimes they turn out to be the same thing. Sam, who had no shadow, would be there forever, like the shape that shadows this page as I write, no matter which way I turn. Like the blood on Bluebeard’s key. Five pm, in the canteen. At Dinner, as they like to call it here, though it’s early, as if we were children, or animals that need to be fed and watered and locked in their stalls. Again somebody has filled out a meal card on my behalf and ordered the works: a glowering steak softened with half-thawed slabs of vegetable matter. ‘I don’t eat meat,’ I say dully, for the thousandth time. ‘Well, there’s a bit of vegetarian spaghetti bolognese,’ the cook says, indifferent. I nod, then see

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her spoon limp ersatz gristle onto glistening noodles. ‘Hey, I can’t eat that shit, it’s just fake meat.’ ‘All right,’ she says, and scrapes off the would-be flesh, handing me a plate of bare pasta. ‘Next.’ Sam is next. I don’t know her name yet, only notice the little ankh that hangs from one ear; the lobe, round and soft. The rest of her is hard, spiky — her cropped hair a reddish purple. She wears dark glasses, the sort that reflect. She smiles at me. She takes a full tray, all that is on offer, and follows me to my table. The nurse is watching. I wish I wore dark glasses too; then I could do the watching and not be seen. The nurse will approach me soon; he will interrupt our conversation, if we are having one, and try to tempt me with fruit, ice-cream, bowls of chopped jelly. ‘They think I’m anorexic,’ I tell Sam. Sam lifts her shades, peers at me. Her eyes are a shocking blue, a blue that burns, a flint. ‘You could do with a bit more meat on you,’ she says. She lights a cigarette under the table while the nurse isn’t looking. The nurse is helping Shani, who is shaking and yelling and spilling her dinner over him. ‘She has Tourette’s,’ Sam says. ‘So you’re not new then.’ I haven’t seen Sam here before today, but she is too familiar with the place to be a first-timer. ‘Neither are you,’ she nods, looking at my wrists. I pull my sleeves down, put my hands under the table. ‘Obvious,’ she goes on. ‘You cut them the wrong way.

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If you slice along the vein, you bleed a lot faster — and it’s much harder to sew up.’ She blows a smoke ring, a perfect zero. ‘But perhaps you knew that. Perhaps you didn’t actually want to die.’ ‘I didn’t want to be here,’ I say. ‘Nobody wants to be here,’ she says. I want to ask her, Why are you here then?, but that is the one taboo — here where we have let go all our taboos. It doesn’t matter, you find out eventually. Like the guilty on Perry Mason, we all break down and tell in the end. Bless me Father for I have sinned; it is three days since my last Confession ... Yes it’s painful, especially when the head comes through, you feel like you are going to split open, your skin is so stretched like gold to aery thinnesse beat like like like a mouth opened for something it can’t take in or spit out, gagging, gagging. Nobody told me I would vomit like that. That was the worst bit. The rest of it was ... well, it’s not like a disease is it I mean, your body’s made for it. Well, our bodies are made for it. That’s what they don’t like, it makes them afraid of our power, that’s why they want to drug us and flatten us out and slash us open. Slashers, that’s what they are. They? You know who I mean.

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But are you including me? You say ‘they’ all the time. I’m a doctor, and a man. You? No. No. You’re not a man. You’re ... not real, you’re a wall. Like banging my head against a. The walls have ears, and so on. And bloody well true in this place. You’re my wailing wall, I guess; except women aren’t allowed to pray there, are they? Getting back to the birth. How did you feel after Tess was born? After? After ... great. It was good. Oh: you mean, postnatal depression, stuff like that. No, sorry — not at all. Sorry. No textbook case here. Before the birth Victor and I were hooked on Perry Mason. I still had time for telly then; every afternoon, when I was pregnant, and too tired for anything else. And he was out of work, home all the time. It was hot weather, so we’d put the ceiling fan on, draw the curtains; he’d pour a beer and I’d put my feet up. I had a varicose vein starting. And with only the first. Mum didn’t get any varicose veins until her sixth. Every afternoon those familiar faces, cartoon-clear. Perry’s warm eyes full of mercy like Jesus, but righteous as God the Father. Only to take to a wheelchair years later in another incarnation: the crippled God, dispensing justice from the sidelines. I hated to think of Raymond Burr greyed and going to fat like

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that. I wanted him to stay forever Perry, always depending on Della; never laying a finger on her, yet possessing her wholly. His Martha, his Mary. Sometimes I sat to watch on the sofa next to him — Victor, I mean — but he’d say, ‘It’s too hot. Can’t you leave me alone? Stop pawing me. God, I’ll be so glad when you’ve got your baby to maul and drool over so you lay off me.’ My life as a dog. Della had a baby once, miraculous as Mary. Somebody left it on Perry’s doorstep, so she had to care for it until the real mother, the Bad Mother, could be found. Mother of mysteries mother of misery mother of mercy mater misericordiae vita dulcedo et spes nostra salve ... To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. My mother was a Protestant, my father a Catholic. The more Catholic he was, the more Protestant she became. When he went on his frequent country jaunts, she’d turn the chipped plaster statue of Our Lady till it faced the wall, till nothing remained of the snake that gasped from under her feet. I always thought if you stood on a snake like that it would surely bite you and have the last laugh; yet she lived on, at least in plaster. And then the Little Flower of Jesus, who usually surveyed our parents’ bed, crudely sweet-faced in her gold frame, was pushed ignobly into a crack between two cupboards. But we children still

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felt her eyes follow us. She was so real in her garish colours, we marvelled no blood dripped from those hands cradling thorns and roses. Thing was, we had to remember to put the saints back in place before He returned. As he always did, when he’d sold enough cutlery or vacuum cleaners or used cars or life insurance policies to show his face. And then the war was on again. Our house was Northern Ireland in miniature. A house divided against itself ... And I was a double agent — no, worse — a deserter from both armies. Sister Mary made us march every morning to a taped whistling version of The Bridge Over the River Kwai — or whatever that music is called. I will always hear the echo of fifty little pairs of feet, in or out of step, around the school and into class even on frosty mornings. Then there were prayers: for school, home, Pope and country. I thought the Pope was like the Phantom: even when he died, he still walked. It never took them long to find the next man to don the costume. There were glitches, though. Once, just as we were hanging paper chains in the schoolroom to fête the new incumbent, he died on us, and those in Rome had quickly to vote for another. The mask of God had slipped for a minute. We didn’t celebrate that second election. Two dead Popes in as many months were as much as Sister Mary could stomach. It looked bad. It looked like a joke. Lord forbid.

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The rumours never ended. Infidels said the shortlived Papa had been bumped off for being too liberal. Others insisted he wasn’t dead at all, but had been sighted like Elvis, whom only the faithful could perceive. But the Church: the Church would never die, Sister Mary consoled us. I thought it must be like those animals who could sprout a new limb when one was cut off. Like a starfish. But what if the severed limb sprouted a whole new body? If thy hand offend thee ... I thought I could be a good soldier and keep all my limbs. A body within The Body, cell within cell within cell ... A kind of immortality transcending the particular. Sister Mary said some of the saints — the very purest ones — remained incorrupt after death. She showed us a postcard of Saint Bernadette — favourite of Our Lady — laid out in her glass coffin, miraculously preserved. It made me think of Snow White — but where was the handsome Prince to wake her? ‘It is a sign of holiness,’ Sister Mary said. But holiness did not always mean you were intact: what about the other signs, the stigmata — blood dripping or even rushing from the hands, the feet, of the living? And then there was the mark of Cain, whatever that might be. It seemed God, no respecter of persons, branded the good and the wicked alike.

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Cain the vegetarian had dark thoughts in his head: envy and evil of the ill-fed. It is midnight, and I am hungry. I grope my way down dark humming hospital corridors to the TV room where there is a communal fridge. This excursion is not really permitted, but the night nurse is used to my insomnia and permits me to ease it with hot Milo. As I reach the fridge I hear a gushing noise from the nearest bathroom. Someone’s forgotten to turn off a tap. I barge in and find Sam, still half-clothed, under the shower. The room is foggy with steam, the floors are ice; a trickle of rich blood leaks away to the little drain. ‘’S okay,’ she says. ‘Period pains. Couldn’t sleep. Warm water helps. What are you doing up?’ She has a way of turning questions around on you, questions she really ought to answer. ‘Hungry,’ I say, puzzled by her wet shirt, collar up, clinging unnervingly to shoulders and breasts. But you see all sorts of queer things in here, and you don’t ask for explanations. ‘I’ve got some food,’ she says. ‘You can have it if you like. ’S in my room.’ ‘Won’t the others wake up?’ She turns, and her teeth glint in the steam. ‘I have a room to myself.’ My curiosity is at its peak. You only get a private room in here if you are considered a risk, physical or

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psychological, to the other patients. ‘It’s not the video room?’ I ask. Kim, the nurse, has assured me the camera is only ever used with the patients’ permission, and only for twenty-four hours at a time. I can’t imagine who would consent to that sort of surveillance. ‘Would I be that silly?’ she smiles, and her smile melts me. The weirdness of a minute ago has dissipated, like the steam, and I am a schoolgirl on camp again, planning a midnight feast. I make two mugs of Milo and when I get to room number three Sam is spreading her bounty across the bed, which has not been slept in. She folds her legs neat as some insect, rubs dry her hair, her scarlet feathers, till she has spikes again. We can’t turn on the light or we will be caught, but Sam pulls a small candle from her bedside drawer and lights it with her Zippo. ‘A votive candle,’ I say. We used to light them in front of Saint Therese; candles for the dead, perhaps still in purgatory, relying on our strength, our virtue, for their progress to heaven. Say a prayer for Nana Mary. Say a prayer for Sean. Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us. Saint Therese Little Flower of Jesus, pray for us. Beat your breast at each invocation. ‘Are you religious?’ Sam says.

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I consider. ‘Not anymore. But it stays in your blood, somehow.’ Sam laughs, and begins to roll a joint. ‘This’ll flush it out,’ she whispers. ‘They’ll smell it in the air-conditioning,’ I say, but she only shakes her head and offers me a Cadbury animal cookie. She is ruddy and glowing in the dim light, and it strikes me suddenly how beautiful she is. She smiles, as if reading my thoughts. I crunch on a chocolate horse, an elephant, a lion, a rabbit. She feeds me cashew nuts, camembert, cherries in liqueur. She watches me but does not eat. ‘Gifts?’ I ask. She shrugs. ‘Don’t your family come and visit you?’ Sam shakes her head again, and the small ankh gleams, catching the candle flame. ‘What about yours?’ she asks. ‘No.’ My parents more or less cut me off when I moved in with Victor. It was bad enough to fall pregnant to a man like that; but then to marry him? They said I always did things backwards. ‘No. But I have a little girl.’ ‘How old?’ ‘Two.’ ‘Where does she go while you’re in here?’ Sam guesses from my face that she has touched a sore spot. ‘Sorry, I’m being nosy?’

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‘No, no, it’s okay. She lives with her father. He took custody.’ ‘On account of you ... coming in here?’ I nod, ‘More or less.’ ‘Bastards,’ she says, and hands me the joint like it was a weapon. ‘You could fight it.’ ‘Ever been in court?’ I ask, almost rhetorically, and our eyes meet. The room is filling with the smooth sweet smell of the smoke, and my head swims. Sam tries to open the window, but it is deadlocked. It seems we are engulfed in a warm mist. ‘If I stay much longer I’ll fall asleep here,’ I say, standing up abruptly. ‘And then what would people think?’ Sam grins. I oversleep next morning. The sleep of the dead, my roommates say. They do not know what to make of my history of attempts, so the matter has become something of a joke between us. They are what you would probably call Normal. One has lost a baby and needs time-out to recover; another has been raped and is not managing to ‘get her act together’, according to the doctors. The third burned her mother’s house down and has no recollection of doing so. She is so blasé about it that we sometimes suspect she has made the story up. She is an English teacher and very talkative; she calls me Lady Lazarus, which the others take for some kind of aristocratic nickname. Not one of them has ever tried taking her own life or, it seems, even considered it. So they treat the subject lightly, at a distance, in case it’s contagious. Not something to get worked up

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about. Until this morning. The English teacher bursts in, crying. ‘Kim,’ she chokes. ‘He’s done it.’ ‘What?’ We are used to reports of Kim’s misdeeds; he is a rogue nurse who upsets at least one patient per day. It’s part of his philosophy, a kind of reverse psychology or something, whereby if you treat the patients harshly enough, they’ll respond by curing themselves. It almost worked on me, the first time I was here. He whisked me into one of the little cubicles, my papers in hand, and listed aloud all the reasons I ought to be dead — why I was worthless, stupid, and my suicide should have succeeded. I was stunned into defending myself, and began to crawl inch by inch out of the pit it had taken me twenty-eight years to dig. I began to imagine level ground again. At least until the next attempt. He didn’t talk to me much after that; but he watched me all the time. ‘Kim’s dead,’ the English teacher wails. ‘He killed himself. Down at the jetty. On the night shift.’ While I was eating animal cookies and drinking Milo. My stomach turns. Everyone cries for days, even the patients who had hated him. We are not supposed to know about it, of course, but it can’t be hidden. It is like a nun breaking vows and leaving the convent. His abandonment throws all our truths into confusion.

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Some of the patients avoid me now as if, by association, my dabbles with death had rubbed off on Kim. Others question me, as if I could provide clues, motives, for someone else’s suicide. Only Sam is removed and rational about the situation. ‘If you’re going to do it, you do it so it works,’ she says, shooting me a reproving glance. ‘Anyway, he was no saint. I saw him hit a patient once, just because she threw up her dinner.’ My mother came to visit me, just once, after the last time I was in here, you know? It was Mothers’ Day; well, that was her excuse, I think it was more ghoulish, really. Two whole years she doesn’t bother with me and now, because I’m a freak show, she has to come and look. I don’t know how she found out I’d been in here again. Is that how you feel? Like a freak show? Look, I’m proud to be. I don’t think you understand. I consider myself perfectly sane — it’s the world out there that’s fucked. The fact that I’ve been in here so many times is probably ... an index of my sanity. The mad ones are the ones who don’t realise the world is fucked. Like your mother? Like my mother, yeah. When you think about it, the things she believes — the Resurrection, the Rapture, whatnot else — that’s pretty crazy stuff.

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But because there’s an institution behind it, because others will agree to believe it too, they get away with this garbage. They’re not only considered sane, they’re the respectable ones, for god’s sake. It seems you feel quite a lot of resentment about that. Mmm. Maybe. Do you think there are any parallels to this situation? You always ask me that. Whatever I tell you, you always do that. Perhaps, but you’re avoiding my question. It seems to me that when you comment on institutions, you’re inviting comparisons to your experiences here. You think I’m implying you people are the mad ones and I’m sane? I don’t believe for a minute you’re insane, Tracy. I think that should be clarified right now. Nobody could go through this process unless they were at least a little bit well. Mother turns up at my place, curious and ghoulish. Ghoul 1 a malevolent spirit or ghost 2 a person interested in morbid or disgusting things 3 a person who robs graves 4 (in Muslim legend) an evil demon thought to eat human bodies, either stolen corpses or children. 24

In other words, not my kind of person. But blood, they say, is thicker than water. So here we are, three generations of women and an oddly brooding Victor, who meant only to drop Tess for a visit, but finds himself fixed to the spot, as in a fairytale. ‘Not much light in here,’ Mother says. ‘It’s like a tomb. You couldn’t have a child in here even if ...’ She looks askance at Victor, trying to make him feel guilty for having Tess, and sips her tea. Victor, who drinks neither tea nor coffee, and resents the fact that I do not keep beer in my fridge for him, forbears as only the powerful can. Tess is niggling at him, thumping him, pulling his hair. She is normally good-natured, but when she gets us in the same room she cannot resist playing up. Victor keeps looking at his watch. Tess grabs a biscuit from the table. ‘That’s four she’s had now,’ Mother begins, and before I know it I am on my feet, screaming at her to leave my house or I will call the police. Next moment she is gone. Victor is looking at the floor. He gathers up his coat and keys. ‘Obviously not a good time for you,’ he says. He snatches up Tess and bolts for the door. My little damp, dark house is empty. Something has entered me like a demon, shaken out my insides and departed. I sit on the stone step, which gives right onto the busy street, and try to recall what I said to Mother. But my mind is a blank, as if the wind has

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stolen my words and carried them out to sea. A horn sounds from the harbour, and the stench of the sheep ships drifts up to my door. When I first moved in here, after Victor left, I thought that stench meant someone had left a dead animal on my porch. But the living can smell of death too, so pervasively that we cease even to notice it. ‘G’day.’ I look up, into Sam’s mirror lenses. ‘How did you get here?’ I say. ‘You gave me your address, remember?’ I did, too. Every time you leave that hospital, you do the name and number swap with fellow patients, but no one ever actually looks you up. It’s a kind of forced intimacy, an us-against-them arrangement that crumbles once you’re out in the real world again. Yet here is Sam, and what can I do but ask her in? She strolls up to the step even before I speak, pulls the squeaky gate shut behind her. Her eyes seem to take in my four small rooms at a glance. ‘It could be really nice if they did it up,’ I apologise. ‘But the rent’s cheap. Bit cold — I need to get a grate for the fire. Too gloomy; but I love stone.’ ‘So do I,’ she says, and removes her glasses. I gesture toward the leftovers from tea. ‘No thanks, I’ve eaten,’ she says. ‘You had visitors?’ ‘Let’s not talk about it, okay?’ ‘You’d rather be alone?’ ‘Oh no, no.’ I’m oddly glad she’s here; suddenly I

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realise how much I’ve missed her over these last months. ‘You living nearby?’ ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ve got nowhere to go at the moment. I was in a refuge before the hospital, and they wouldn’t take me back. Overstayed my welcome, you know.’ I have never been in a refuge, so I don’t know. Even when things were at their worst with Victor, I stayed put. If only, that last night, the night of the broken mirror the door swinging on one hinge the pillow held over my mouth the shouting the kicking the baby’s awake the crying she makes the screaming, if only I’d known there were such places you could run to, I’d have scooped up Tess and fled, as he did just now. Instead he walked out the next day, dignity intact, leaving his things for me to pack, returning only later to claim his daughter when he decided I was incompetent. I tell this, in tears now, to Sam. She sits on the sofa beside me, cradles my head in her lap, rocks me, rocks me till I sleep. When I awake I am covered with a rug, by candlelight, and Sam brings me hot soup. The tea things have been cleared away, the house is in order. This is how Sam comes to stay.

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2 C USTODY OF THE EYES

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Tess has a new pair of shoes. Expensive sneakers my mother bought for her. They came in the mail one day. I would be grateful except it’s probably a hint — even as an ‘access parent’, I am not taking care of my daughter properly. Victor dresses Tess in socks and sandals and odd, unmatching summer clothes with tights in winter. Mother, I know, would like to give her a complete makeover — cover her from head to toe. Protection against the Elements, she always says. Oh, that was a lie, surely. She is simply a generous grandmother, no wicked witch. Whenever I see Mother, which isn’t often, there is a sense of deflation, the figure so mean and monstrous in my head brought down to size again. Everything is ordinary, harmless. These are no glass slippers she sends, no dancing pumps inexorably red. They are merely shoes, better shoes than I could afford. Tess stomps in them now, delighted. They are white with velcro straps, so she can undo them herself. On

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the side is appliquéd: Ariel — The Little Mermaid. Pure Disney, this mermaid, with an hourglass body and a mass of red hair. Tess says, ‘What a mermaid, Mummy?’

Once there was a little girl who lived under the sea,

like the sea we see when we come over the hill in Beaconsfield, driving to Mummy’s house. When you were in my tummy I used to go swimming in the sea, and you could hear it banging and crashing. ‘I can see the see the sea!’ says Tess. That’s right, darling. That little girl, she was a mermaid. Can you say Mermaid? ‘Mermaid,’ says Tess. Mermaids are like you and me, but they’ve got no legs, they’ve got fishtails, so they can swim, because they live in the water. See the fishtail there, on your shoes? This little mermaid had lots of sisters, they were bigger than her and they used to swim up to the top of the water and look at the sky, and the ships, and the land — that’s where we live. But the little mermaid couldn’t go up there, her mummy and daddy said she was too small. One day, when it was her birthday, and she was fifteen — ‘Me two,’ says Tess. ‘My birthday gone.’ Yes, darling. On her birthday, the little mermaid was allowed to go up to the top of the water. The sisters dressed her up really pretty and stuck shells on

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her tail, which hurt — but they said she looked pretty. ‘Shells hurt,’ says Tess. ‘On fishtail.’ She swam up to the top of the water, and there was a big storm, with lots of thunder and rain. There was a ship on top of the water, and it got tipped over, and all the people fell out. One of them was a man, he fell in the water and that made him very sick. ‘My was sick one time,’ Tess says. ‘Daddy too.’ That’s right, you were. Well, the little mermaid helped the man get out of the water; she took him to the land and gave him a big hug. But she had to go back in the water, because she only had a fishtail, so she couldn’t walk on the land. ‘Got no legs,’ says Tess. The little mermaid went back to her house under the sea, but she wanted to see that man again because she loved him. So she went to the old sea witch, a bad woman. The sea witch said, ‘I can give you legs, but first I will cut out your tongue.’ Tess clamps her mouth shut; her face crumples. Oh my God, what am I saying; I can’t tell her this fucking story, she’s only two years old. How much damage have I done already without thinking? But she climbs up onto my lap and says, ‘What happen?’ I have lost the nerve. I falsify, lie, revamp the tale. The sea witch gave the little mermaid some legs, and she walked on the land, and her tongue grew back so she could talk again. Tess looks satisfied. ‘Went to see man,’ she says.

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Yes, I guess she did. ‘Big cuddle, Mum,’ says Tess. ‘You’re very good with her,’ Kim says, releasing the air and jotting down my blood pressure. ‘Who?’ ‘Your daughter.’ He unwinds the strap, bound many times over on account of my scrawny arms. ‘I’ve been watching you each time she comes to visit. I’ve never seen you so lively. I think you do each other good.’ ‘Well, I’m not a monster,’ I say, testily. He laughs. ‘I never said you were ... It seems to me — if I may be so bold — it seems to me that Victor is the problem.’ My arms relax, but my legs stiffen, charged with adrenalin. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Why don’t you let go of him?’ I lower my eyes. ‘We have to remain friends. I mean, for Tess’s sake. It’s not her fault we messed up.’ ‘There are less messy ways of staying friends. As it is, you’re going to go on fucking him — what is it, once a month? — well, as long as it suits him — and each time you’ll fight a little more badly, and then you’ll be sorry again, until the next time.’ ‘What makes you think I’m still fucking him?’ ‘Well, perhaps you’re not. Perhaps I’m wrong.’ I shift uncomfortably on the bed. Kim speaks in a low murmur, but I am sure the English teacher, who

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sits peeling mandarins on her bed in the far corner, is straining to listen. There is no privacy in this place. ‘I’d rather talk to the shrink, anyway,’ I mutter, and roll over onto the pillow, burying my face. ‘Your choice ... Though if I had your problems, a psychiatrist is the last person I’d be seeing.’ He sniffs at me. ‘You’re wearing perfume? You must be feeling better.’ ‘I always wear it. You’re just not very observant.’ I can’t refrain from wanting to be rude back to this nurse, but it is pointless. ‘I’m very observant. I’ve just never been this close to you before,’ he says. ‘Just as well,’ I say, and push him away; his hand is creeping unpleasantly along the side of my leg. I hear the English teacher draw in her breath. ‘Oh ho,’ the nurse grins when I push him. ‘Well, I’ve got other patients to see; can’t waste any more time on you. You’re not the only person in need here. Take my advice: sweeten up a bit. What you need is — to fall in love. Forget all about him.’ He disappears. ‘Am I hearing right?’ says the English teacher. I roll my eyes at her, and bury my face again. No, I am here in my bed in Fremantle, face to pillow. That all seems a world away now, and Kim is dead. Dead. Did I dream that episode, make it all up? I avoided him afterwards. I kept custody of the eyes. Suddenly, a noise in the kitchen. I strain to see.

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That same adrenalin surge in the legs. The ghost of Kim? ‘Sam?’ No answer. ‘Sam, are you there?’ Then her dark shape fills the doorway. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,’ she says. My eyes adjust; I watch her perch on the end of my futon, huddled in her duffle coat. ‘S’okay, I just went for a walk — couldn’t sleep. It’s the way I am. Go through phases.’ ‘Well, I’ll get a key cut for you,’ I say. I don’t like the thought of the door being unlocked if she has a habit of going out at night. Vulnerable in my own house. I feel the walls of this house like a porous skin. ‘But it’s not really safe, you know, walking around this late.’ Sam laughs, and I wonder if there isn’t anything she is afraid of. I tell her my dream, and she nods, lighting a cigarette. She is not surprised at Kim’s behaviour. The cigarette moves in the dark as if of its own accord, firefly, familiar, scribbling its red light in the gloom and filling my room with smoke. ‘And do you?’ she says. ‘What?’ ‘Still screw the asshole. Victor.’ She is frowning. I don’t answer. ‘Fuck that,’ she says. ‘We’re going to have to straighten out a few things around here, that’s clear.’ ‘What things?’ ‘All the shit. You don’t need it. You don’t need anything but yourself. No man, no shrink, no hospital

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— nothing.’ ‘Oh, come on. Everybody needs some thing. Cigarettes, for instance,’ I tease, clearing my throat. She stubs her cigarette out. ‘And you were in the hospital too, remember?’ ‘Not exactly by choice,’ Sam says. ‘What was it, then?’ She sighs. ‘Let’s just say, I have ... something other people consider a problem. It all depends on how you look at it. If people like me were in the majority, we’d be considered normal, and then the rest would be put away.’ I sit up, squint at her. She is almost luminous, all by herself. ‘What do you mean, people like you?’ ‘Oh, Tracy, are you so blind?’ she laughs, and pats me on the head. Her hand lingers, cups my cheek, my chin, my neck. ‘Look — go back to sleep. And in the morning, we’re going to see about getting you a job. For starters.’ She shuffles off to her makeshift bed, and within an instant I sleep, and I dream. I dream I am on a long train journey, but the train is going the wrong way. Sam arrives, and we jump off the train together, rolling down a green hill. In a ditch at the bottom of the hill is a dead body, face down. I turn it over, and look into my own decomposed features, my own eyes eaten away. I am unperturbed, and sleep soundly.

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TOP ACHIEVERS required by vibrant businessman now expanding W.A. ‘Sounds like he’s putting on weight,’ Sam snorts. ‘Or shifting the State border.’ ‘Stop,’ I say. ‘You’re wasting your breath. I’m below

WINNERS ONLY Excellent opportunity to get in at ground-floor level ground-floor, lower than basement. I’m as good as ... six feet under. Even if this stuff appealed to me, which it doesn’t, there’s no way they’d take me on.’ Sam looks me up and down with those ravening blue eyes. ‘What’s wrong with you then. Missing an arm or a leg?’ ‘I don’t believe that sort of crap, and they’d pick up on my unbelief from miles away. Anyway, sales jobs are out. Salesmen are leeches. I should know, my father was one. I don’t like what they stand for. They’re so ... capitalist.’ Sam snorts again. ‘Oh, so we want to be a real

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worker, do we? Ideologically correct and all that. Well,’ and she folds up the paper, ‘there’s a few jobs going at the oyster supply down the road.’ I wince. Living near that smell is bad enough, let alone working with it. Toying with corpses. I imagine myself in white cap, like some bizarre mad surgeon, and rubber boots, squelching like the molluscs themselves, dead or alive, reeking of death and the sea, and unable to wash it out of my hair each night. Alive, alive-o-oh, alive, alive-o-oh ... ‘Talk about fussy,’ Sam says. Her toast has gone cold. Much as she makes me wonderful breakfasts, insisting I build up muscle, she always seems to forget herself when it comes to eating. ‘I just can’t take part in anything against my conscience,’ I say defensively. ‘Well, then, you’ll be permanently unemployed,’ Sam says, lighting up a cigarette, downing her coffee. ‘Maybe your conscience is overtuned or something.’ My conscience or my pride. I remember my first job, in a legal office in St Georges Terrace. Outside girl, they called it — sexist terms were still in vogue here then, and all the outside clerks were girls — running up and down the city streets with a briefcase, delivering documents and enormous sums of money to courts and other law firms, all for under a hundred a week. There were no Perry Masons among the partners here, and no secretary motherly enough to be Della.

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I was sixteen, dressed in clothes my mother had bought me. It took an hour by bus to get there, and an hour after dark to come home, and I spent most of my fifteen-minute lunchbreak collecting pork rolls from Miss Maud’s for the partners. This was just bearable until one day a senior partner yelled at me for forgetting the apple sauce. After a month, I quit. ‘That’s the problem,’ I tell Sam now. ‘I’ve never been able to stick at anything. A month here, three months there. I’ve never held a job for more than a year at a time. How’re you going to make a decent résumé out of that?’ ‘You’re always so ready to blame yourself,’ she muses, ‘to call things weaknesses when they might be strengths.’ She pauses. ‘Got it. You’ll be a temp.’ ‘A what?’ ‘A temp. Join an agency — or I’ll set one up. You see, that’s what you do — you exploit your own nature, your own resources. You just told me you’re a temp par excellence, only you chose to call it “not sticking at things”. It all depends how you look at it.’ ‘Sounds like pop psychology,’ I groan. ‘It may be. But it’s just using your head — it’s survival.’ ‘But skills,’ I say. ‘And presentation.’ ‘These things can be arranged,’ Sam smiles. So here I am about to start my first assignment, a four-week stint at a small theatre on the foreshore in

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South Perth. Cashier-cum-receptionist-cum-bookkeeper. Their regular assistant quit without notice, and they wanted someone to fill in for a month while they review the job before advertising. I have never done anything like this before — but Sam is an excellent forger. Now I can be qualified in whatever the market requires. ‘Where on earth did you learn to do these?’ I say, guiltily fingering my new certificates, diplomas, references, all in a new name. ‘Well, let’s just say, I’ve had practice,’ Sam says. She is sweeping my hair up into a kind of chignon; I hardly recognise myself. ‘I don’t feel right about it.’ ‘Why not? That conscience of yours again?’ ‘I’m ... basically honest. This is lying.’ She throws down the comb. ‘So this is the thanks I get. That’s the main difference between you and me, isn’t it? You’re into absolutes. You think things can be definitively, unalterably right or wrong. This is never going to work.’ ‘What’s never going to work?’ ‘You and me.’ ‘You make it sound like a love affair,’ I say, and she spits. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ She pulls on her overcoat and those ever-present shades, and heads for the door. ‘Have a good first day on the job. If your conscience will allow it.’

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I won’t be coming for four weeks. I’ve got a job. Temporary. Well ... Well, that’s good news, isn’t it? How do you feel about that? Pretty ambivalent, I guess. It’ll be nice to have money, but ... I feel like a fraud. Why? Uh — I don’t know, exactly. I think everyone will see through me, they’ll see what I really am. And what are you, really? Not what I say I am. Meaning? Meaning ... Look, I don’t feel like I can talk to you today. I just can’t — you just can’t understand what’s going on in my world at the moment. Try me. Uh — it must be nearly the end of the session, surely? Another ten minutes. You look like you want to be any place but here. I’m sorry. Why are you sorry? Do you think you have offended me? No. Maybe I wish I had. Is there something you’re not telling me?

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There’s always something I’m not telling you. How could I tell you everything? Are you thinking about not coming back, when the four weeks are up? I try not to. I can’t imagine never coming here again. I’d feel like — god, like an oyster out of the shell, you know, raw and vulnerable. Like I would just go splat. Like this has been holding me together for so long and I don’t know what it will be like when it ends one day. Because I know it will end. Maybe these four weeks will be a testing time. A safe one, because you know you can come back. Maybe ... Is it time now? The first day on the job goes smoothly — it’s as if the lines, the moves, come naturally to me. The till is primitive and I am terrified of giving somebody the wrong change; but if I have, nobody has noticed. There’s a lot that needs doing because the last woman left so suddenly. I have to clean the toilets and make the coffee and empty the rubbish bins, none of which was in the job description, but it is done quickly and easily, and daunts me far less than the mathematics. I haven’t used maths since high school, and even then I didn’t feel I knew what it was on about. In first year high that didn’t matter. We had a teacher called Mrs Worth who was the sort that could

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make anything intelligible. She was twenty-four, wore seamed stockings, and all the boys said she looked like Lynda Carter of Wonder Woman. She had an endearing habit of reaching down backwards to straighten those seams while writing on the blackboard. But best of all, she was a super brain, and could explain things like Pascal’s triangle or what was the use of the golden mean, so that you never forgot. Like all the other kids I worshipped Mrs Worth, and decided I wanted to be a maths teacher. I even managed to make the State Maths Camp, on scholarship, because Mother said we couldn’t afford the thirty dollars. So I got to spend a week by the sea in the company of all the other little math-heads, and the Wondrous Mrs Worth. It couldn’t last. On returning to school she broke to us, beaming, that she was pregnant and would give up teaching. My maths grades took a predictable dive after that. She was replaced by a Mr Harding, nicknamed HardOn, who rapped on your desk and shouted if you couldn’t do mental calculations fast enough; who called the boys by surname but the girls Love and Sweetie; and who let Sally Moon paint her nails in class. I grew rapidly innumerate, which earned me more shouting and rapping from Mr Harding, but also more popularity with the boys. Which was just as well, as I

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was beginning to get a ‘reputation’. You couldn’t win in those days. You got a reputation for ‘doing it’, and a reputation for not ‘doing it’. Doing it meant you were a slag slut dog bitch mole when you were discarded. Not doing it meant only two things: you were a goody-goody teacher’s pet — or you were a ‘lezzo’. I was eight when I first heard that word. A boy yelled it at Sally Moon and Fiona Fox because they held hands in the quadrangle. I didn’t know what it meant. But I have never forgotten the note of terror behind the scorn in that boy’s voice. ‘Sylvia.’ I jump, unaccustomed to the fake name. It’s not often you get to choose such things, so when Sam said she could forge me a set of papers (‘safer if you don’t use your real name’) I opted for this, after Plath, and Worth as a surname, after the Wonder Woman. Takes some getting used to, though. Like wearing in someone else’s pair of jeans or shoes that have already acquired their own character. ‘Sylvia, when it’s quiet out front I’d like you to come in and learn the lights. Some days we don’t have anyone to do it, so it’s best if everyone knows how.’ It’s Bo, the director/handyman/actor who runs this place. He’s one of those odd people who lock eyes with you as they speak, till you have to look away. Something about him makes me feel uncomfortable, but I brush it off — I want the job. Daytimes here they

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do cheap melodramas and pantomimes, bread-andbutter stuff to recoup costs for their more ‘serious’ productions. I lock the till and follow Bo up a shaky ladder, into a maze of switches and wires. It’s a very simple procedure for the melodramas — just knowing when to put the lights up and down. Today they are doing Varney the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood. ‘It’s a very old piece,’ Bo whispers, ‘which I’ve rewritten to give it a contemporary feel, something different from the same old monstrosity.’ I nod in the dark, trying not to smile. The Vampyre is on stage now, and he looks very ordinary Hollywood to me: cape, fangs and widow’s peak. He is raising his arms behind the heroine, and each time she turns he retreats, so she is left blissfully unaware of the danger she is in. Schoolkids in the audience yell, ‘He’s there, look behind you!’ but the heroine is always just slow enough not to notice, in spite of their cries. And now the Vampyre has her, and she swoons. It is uncomfortably hot in the little box, and Bo lives up to the staff joke about his name: he has terrible BO. The room seems to be shrinking; Bo turns to look at me in the dark, moving just that little bit too close. I move away but still he seems to come closer, his teeth a fluorescent strip. I find myself unable to breathe; hear my own blood thumping in my ears. I pass out.

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3 T HE ODOUR OF SANCTITY

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I am Samantha, but here they call me Soeur Céline — of the ciel, as if I had dropped from the sky — and to them it seems I have. My russet hair and olive skin, my prominent features, all stand out like the embankment that insists over these dreary green flats of Lefoyer. Not that I saw much of this town before I was hidden away. And after a while any landscape becomes just so much background when you are displaced, rootless, marked like Cain and straining to disguise your lineaments. For fear of your life. ‘C’est impossible,’ says the Prioress. ‘We cannot break the enclosure for her. For a — for one of them. They crucified Our Lord.’ She crosses herself, and I wince. The novice mistress is gentler, pleading, siding with Father Louis who has believed my story and brought me here, like a foundling on the doorstep of these women who thought never to have a child in their

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midst. For that is how they see me, though I feel years older than my body. ‘Then take her as an extern,’ Father Louis says. ‘She must be kept from the authorities. We are all God’s children,’ and he reminds her that Christ may come knocking under any guise. The Prioress closes her eyes, in meditation or in weariness. ‘Very well — for a time,’ she says, and my new life begins. My head is shaved by the novice mistress, and I look suddenly gaunt, starved — a prisoner — though there are no mirrors here to confirm this. She fits the toque, then the white veil of those before vows. I have passed through years of initiation in a moment. ‘You will have to learn to say the Rosary,’ she says, and as she loops it through my belt I feel a burning sensation: there is the crucifix, which I cannot look at. It is a sharp light in my pupils, a blade in my heart. I will have to take it off when she is not looking, or thrust it into the deep folds of my pocket where it cannot touch my skin. But they are everywhere, these nailed corpses, arms spread out like batwings. They remind me of the soldiers impaled around our castle, a warning to my father’s enemies. But wait, where does that come from; that is another land and this is France, and from the cars I saw and the clothes of the women in the public chapel, this must be the nineteen-forties. ‘Soeur Céline,’ the novice mistress whispers, and I

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warm to the new name. She takes me to the other extern, the real one, who is to teach me how to pass for a Catholic, who thinks she knows what I really am and how it might cost me my life. ‘If they knew the whole truth ...’ I say under my breath; but I am not sure I know it myself. It is something I must forget for the time being. The extern hears my whisper but only says, ‘Praised be Jesus Christ’, and I must answer, ‘Now and forever’. This is our sole exchange of words. We rise at five every morning, wash in ice-cold water, go to prayers, which I can only pretend to mouth, but nobody notices. We clean the parlours, fetch the mail, make coffee for Father Louis when he has said Mass. In the afternoons we do errands: veiling our faces, we take the back streets of Lefoyer to get rations; coming back, we pass them through the turn to a voice on the other side of the enclosure. The ‘papal enclosure’, they call it, for it is Our Holy Father the Pope who approves this way of life. We swallow our meatless supper alone while the other Sisters are in the refectory; then we join them for an hour’s recreation in the parlour. I wonder how many of them know about me, and my supposed story. Their talk, as they sit stitching soutanes and sorting altar breads, is of family — but no one asks about my parents, my brothers or sisters. Perhaps they have been warned not to. They have heard stories, perhaps, of disappearances, of yellow stars, of people suddenly non-existent. It is difficult to

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guess what they can know of the outside world in a place like this. Each of them seems frozen in the time when she entered, living layers of archaeology. They talk of a sister convent which has been closed down, and of the bodies exhumed from its private graveyard, to be transferred to another convent grounds. ‘Her skin and features were of a perfect hue,’ reads Mother Prioress from a letter, ‘and she still smiled as if on the day she saw Our Lady coming to welcome her. When we lifted her body it was light, for Soeur Marguerite was a small woman. She rested in the parlour alongside the other corpses, and we could hardly believe it had been twenty years since she went to meet Our Lord. There was no odour about her, unless it be the odour of sanctity.’ The Sisters nod and murmur in satisfaction, and I feel faint, but not from the weak stomach they suspect. Even here in the parlour I am surrounded by objects that seem to draw the strength from me — painted statues, icons, Our Lady Of Mount Carmel with the Child Jesus on her knee. When they close at night with the Salve Regina, my head swims. Ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Father Louis says next morning, when I bring his coffee, and he suggests that I spend more time gardening. I am grateful to escape

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the crucifixes. Father Louis is kind to me — he brings me meat on the quiet, which he must have got on the black market; he thinks my weakness is due to the ascetic meals. ‘After all, you are not really one of them, but merely in hiding,’ he says. ‘It is no sin for you to eat meat. The flesh after all is weak.’ He tries discreetly to find news of the people I call my family, but we both know they did not make it over the border. I bring him coffee every morning now, in the vestry, and he tells me how the war is going. Only the Mother Prioress sees the newspapers here, and my ventures outside are brief and unenlightening. He tells me of France before the war, and asks me about my own country. I tell him I remember nothing. Time passes, passes; it all feels like one long day. I feel I am Gerda in the witch’s garden, this is a lethargic summer-in-winter I cannot escape, and I am growing feeble. ‘But you are safe here,’ says Father Louis, and I wish I could believe him. It is myself I fear most, the nature I cannot shrug off. But he knows nothing of that. And then there is the Mother Prioress who makes no secret of her discomfort about me. Apart from Father Louis I have no real ally, or none that I can talk to, since the Sisters must all keep silence, and no one is to form ‘particular friendships’. ‘Particular friendships,’ Father Louis says bitterly. When he was younger, he tells me, before he was

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ordained, he loved a girl — ‘a girl like you, a Jewish girl,’ he adds, and I squirm in my hemp sandals at the untruth because I know, whoever she was, she was not like me. ‘You couldn’t marry her?’ I ask. ‘Once, priests could marry, but the Church has decided to forget that fact. It would have meant leaving the seminary. Bad enough to leave for a Catholic girl — but for a Jew?’ ‘She could have converted.’ ‘You don’t understand. You young people think all things are amenable — life is there to be moulded to your will. It does not work that way. Some things are simply not meant to be. She is probably dead by now; not lucky like you. You have a charmed life, Soeur Céline. There is something ... uncanny about you.’ I stand up abruptly. ‘I can’t stay here, Father Louis.’ ‘I know, ma soeur. As soon as we can find you safe passage, you will be on your way. But for my own selfish sake, I hardly wish you to go.’ He puts his hand inside the toque and strokes my neck, his hand warm against my coldness; I pull back the toque and unpin the white veil. Already there is a fine stubble reappearing on my scalp. He runs his fingers through it, laughing sadly. ‘You see what the Church does to women,’ he says, and he locks the door, one hand still at my neck. I am not surprised at what he does; it would be more surprising if he didn’t, since they all seem to behave this

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way. And I don’t really mind him touching me. I crave warmth even more than the words I have so missed and he has given me. I feel starved of bodily things — I want my hair and fingernails to grow again, want to wear soft fabrics again, eat rich food, feel the blood pulsing through my veins. Even a greying ascetic like Father Louis seems opulent in this dank place. I let his hands uncover and find me; he is urgent as an adolescent, so there is no need for pretence of effort on my part. My mind is elsewhere, straying to Mother Prioress and novice mistress and extern who must be wondering where I am. I don’t really care. At this moment I am outside my body, looking on. Until he enters me, without warning, and I cry NO. This is not what I meant, this is not what I meant. It makes no difference to him, he continues as if he doesn’t hear my screams, he puts a hand across my mouth. I struggle, but Father Louis is stronger than he looks. His bones bruise my thighs, his fingers bruise my stomach and flanks, he crushes me, and the pain is so great I think I will cleave apart. I am completely invaded. ‘Father,’ I plead, but he will not finish. I sink my teeth into his neck and he cries out, withdraws at last, hand to throat. I taste blood. I grab his shirt and pants and pull them on, run from the vestry, out through the gates that say CONVENT OF THE HOLY FAMILY and into the streets of the city. Like this, I am a walking alarm;

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everyone will see me with my close-cropped head and bare feet, I must steal cap and shoes, turn boy until my hair grows back again. Perhaps I am even safer that way. I will change my name. ‘Tracy. Tracy.’ I am on the sofa at home, and Sam is stroking my forehead, my hair, which is not shaved after all, but loose. ‘You fainted,’ she says, ‘and you’ve been in and out of things most of the afternoon. I brought you home.’ I narrow my eyes as if to see through her, but something has changed, she is too close for me to distinguish her features. ‘I ... was dreaming,’ I say. ‘I can’t remember what. I think you were in it, Sam.’ ‘I didn’t think people had dreams when they were unconscious.’ I consider. ‘Well, maybe I was delirious, hallucinating or something.’ She laughs. ‘Don’t tell anyone that, or you’ll end up back on the ward.’ ‘But what happened at work then? Last I remember I was up in the switchbox with Bo.’ ‘Oh, him,’ Sam rolls her eyes. ‘He seemed more worried about losing half a day’s work than about you. Anyway, I think he’s a woman hater.’ ‘That’s not what the others say. Rather the opposite, it seems.’ ‘Same thing. That’s what’s at the bottom of it; that’s

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why they call them lady-killers, after all. It’s predatory behaviour.’ I consider. ‘Did he make a pass at you or something?’ ‘Oh no,’ Sam laughs. ‘He just got angry when I insisted I’d take you home.’ ‘What did he say?’ ‘ “Fucking dykes.” ’ ‘He thought we were ...’ ‘Mmm. Silly, eh?’ and she holds my gaze fast, I can’t look away, for what seems an age, or almost outside time. It strikes me as I stare that I cannot see myself in her pupils — they are blank. Am I hallucinating? I want to speak, but my lips won’t move. Sam cups my chin in both hands and kisses my mouth, opening it. ‘Sam, I’ve never ... I don’t ...’ ‘You don’t want to? That’s okay. You don’t have to.’ I am shaking, but not with fear. ‘No. No, I do want to.’ ‘You mean, yes.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You always were so bloody articulate,’ and she kisses me again, and this time I am kissing her back. Set me as a seal upon your heart as a seal upon your arm for love is stronger than death ... Sam, I find, is covered in tattoos. A spider in its web

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nestles above her left breast, a wolf snarls across her back, a snake curls around her navel. I embrace the whole animal kingdom in her, devour the surface of her skin which she renews like a reptile, I drink the oceans and all the sea creatures from her as she does from me. Afterwards I rest my cheek on the small mound of her stomach, wipe from her mouth the traces of my blood, the monthly blood which is not blood after all but a sign of potential life. ‘Does it hurt?’ ‘The tattoos? No more than, say, getting your ears or your nose pierced, or giving blood.’ ‘I want one.’ It will fix me, I believe, in my body, so my soul will never leave again. It feels like breaking a taboo, the sacredness of the flesh undone in a moment. I remember now my music teacher in high school, a gentle ageing man the boys called a wimp until they saw his tattoos, relics from his navy days, crawling from under his sleeves and onto his knuckles. Surely it must be painful, close to the bone like that. But I want one at any cost. We go to a tattooist in Hilton, wedged between a pawnbroker and a pizza store. I choose the right arm, for the heart seems still too vulnerable to me, and the tattooist stitches the words into me Stronger than Death — only those three, because the full text would be expensive and sounds too obviously Biblical.

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Afterwards Sam takes me to the Hair Barn, where a woman my mother’s age reluctantly shaves off my hair, leaving only a fringe to fall across and veil my face. I had a weird dream. Uh-huh. I was in France, during the war. I was someone else. I was hiding in a convent. And? I can’t remember it all. I was on the run from the authorities and the convent took me in, I let them think I was a Jewish ... refugee. But I wasn’t really. What were you, really? I don’t know. Something ... too horrible to contemplate. Something evil, something I mustn’t think about. They shaved my head, they put me in a ... habit, I had to pretend to be a Catholic, which is strange because of course I am, in real life. But I wasn’t me, in the dream. I think I was ... Sam. Sam? A — friend of mine. Afterwards on the train back to Fremantle, I open the paper and see a bleary photograph: a pasty-faced, nondescript sort of man, no hint of the monstrous.

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Ivan Not Guilty the headline says. I flit over the main points of the story. The man is Demjanjuk, on trial for supposed Nazi war crimes, and now cleared of accusations. Many survivors swore they recognised their torturer in him, but the court finds their memories mistaken. ‘I know he is the one, the one we called IVAN THE TERRIBLE,’ a witness insists; and the newspaper leaves it at that, leaves it for us to make up our own minds. When is a criminal not a criminal When he’s out of his mind When is a woman not all there When she’s beside herself Not the full quid. A brick short of the load. Heavy metaphors. I sit beside myself, watching my belly rise with its protruding navel and then subside again. The midwife’s voice bobs above; I am laid flat on the gritty bottom of the ocean. Victor, too, speaks to me, but the words glance off. I see him through the wrong end of a telescope, through green coke-bottle glass. He kneads my shoulders, my back, he mouths like a guppy You’re doing so well I am so proud of you and I wonder what there is to be proud of, this is no agony no labour, this is an almost sexual pleasure until suddenly I rise to the

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surface and the waves are monstrous they dump me again and again I crash headfirst in the shallows mouth open crash into pain I retch as if choking on salt water the waves are faster and surer each time and I realise the only way through is to go with them like bodysurfing with each breath I am a little closer to shore then dragged out again but the end is in sight. I clutch at the midwife thinking I can’t I can’t but say only Is it always this long she smiles she says this is short compared to some and I say to the woman apparently in my body YOU ARE NEVER EVER EVER GOING TO GO THROUGH THIS AGAIN REMEMBER THIS IF YOU THINK YOU EVER WANT TO MAKE THIS MISTAKE AGAIN and then we are beached and I am back inside my skin collapsed like a harpooned whale and what is this groping on my chest this red-curded edible-looking grub I have expelled it sucks and I breathe at last. Well what have you got says the midwife and Victor pokes and looks but can’t tell for the life of him, so she checks and she squeals A girl a girl. Next morning I find myself in the bed instead of on the floor and I don’t know how I got there, it is amnesia, as in a drunken stupor; how many brain cells have I lost? The baby sleeps all day beside me, but though I am parched nauseous sweaty I can’t leave the bed, something has cleft me, I am Frida Kahlo with her open torso her column I am the

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Little Mermaid walking on knives. All morning I hear the tap, tap of Victor hammering, trying to fix the damned front gate again. Occasionally he hits his thumb and curses. All morning I hear the snap of the answering machine, buffer against the outside world, and Victor’s recorded voice saying It’s a girl to every caller. All morning I hope for someone to bring me a cup of tea or a glass of water, or even to talk to me, but the midwife has gone on to another birth, and Victor is nailing the gate. That night he moves into the living room to make his bed on the sofa, and there he stays. Sam is always going to the movies — practically every night. She doesn’t drive, so she is stuck with what’s showing locally. You can’t get a train after 11.30 at night, it’s like an unofficial curfew. I wonder what they think people get up to, that we should all be in our beds by then. But Sam is fearless on foot and no harm befalls her, however late she stays out. ‘You should come along some time,’ she says, arriving home one night and slipping in beside me, death-cold against my drowsy body. She no longer takes the sofa but shares my big futon: a wordless transaction, a logical progression. I have no trouble sleeping now, though the strange dreams still bother me, and sometimes jolt me awake. When I was a child I thought my mother never

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slept. Any time I woke in fright she answered immediately, or was at my bedside in a moment. Sam is like that now: I never see her shut her eyes. Even after hours of touching, when I can’t stay awake a minute longer, and she blows out the little candles, I know she still stares at the ceiling. I can feel her alertness even through the dark. It comes of her seeing too many movies, I’m sure. ‘It’s such commercial crap,’ I say. ‘You have no respect for popular culture,’ she sniffs. Eventually I succumb, and go once a week with her to Queensgate or the Essex. We see The Crying Game three times, wait for the moment when the audience gasps at what is obvious — to Sam because she sees through all appearances, to me because she’d already told me the plot. Sam can’t resist predicting plots to me. ‘You spoil everything,’ I say. She laughs. ‘It’s in my nature.’ We see A French Vampire in America; we see Sommersby. Sam says Sommersby is a lift from a much better French film, and is a schmaltzy romance, but Jodie Foster is in it, so we see it anyway. ‘She’s something of a dyke icon,’ Sam says. ‘You mean a dykon,’ I say. We play at punning and remaking words, we revamp book titles and the lyrics of old songs, striving to outdo each other in silliness. ‘But how do you know? I mean, why Jodie?’ Sommersby seems to me about heterosex, about a return to good

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old-fashioned fucking, about the end of the Sensitive New Age Man. Because all that talking and tenderness and foreplay will see you hanged in the end. ‘Well, she was outed in Hollywood,’ Sam remarks. ‘You know: “2 4 6 8 Jodie Foster isn’t straight” ...’ ‘But it might not be true,’ I say. ‘Since when has truth had anything to do with icons?’ I dwell on Jodie, on the way her eyebrow lifts, the way her top lip curls and quivers, the way her hair falls over one eye. She is really very small, but you would never guess it on screen. Jodie of the French-lycée adolescence and the Yale degree, of the face that supposedly launched an assassin, of the ambitious mother whom she won’t criticise. I remember Freaky Friday, where she swaps bodies with her mother for a day. I cut a glossy photo of her from Cosmopolitan, and pin it on my fridge. Victor always lusted after Jodie Foster. ‘She’s my kind of woman,’ he’d say, and it seemed he meant me to understand, ‘not like you’. It will give me a bitter kind of pleasure now, when Victor sees that photo on my fridge — for he looks at everything in my house — to tell him she’s a lesbian. Even if she’s not. It’s the thought that counts.

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4 S OUNDS LIKE SERIAL MURDER

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This is one of those pretentious boutique brewery pubs, with a restaurant and café on the upper floor, a balcony overlooking the seedier buildings of Northbridge. That kind of view is essential to this kind of place, delineating the us and them. It reminds me of the long drives Victor and I used to take to get Tess off to sleep, up through the John Forrest National Park in the hills. Every lookout, every stopping point, was a cutaway view down to the city. Where we are, defined by where we are not. ‘You look miles away,’ Sam says, shoving up next to me on the chesterfield, with two huge expensive beers. Today, she insists, is her shout, because I will not let her pay rent — she has no job for a start, and is always cooking and cleaning the house — but still she feels this is not enough. Sam sinks deep into the opulent leather, and peruses the menu. I wanted to sit here rather than at the tables, because I have never sat on a chesterfield

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before and probably never will again. I remember seeing them in the liquor ads in the men’s magazines from America. Cigars, cut glass, bookshelves all the way to the ceiling. An old boyfriend told me that if you looked close enough you could see words and images airbrushed into the whisky, the tumblers, the ice-cubes. Skull and crossbones, the word SEX, the word DEATH. I could never spot these things, but he assured me they were there, working subliminally to lure you into spending. When he went to the States on holiday, he brought back a packet of ‘Death Cigarettes’. I liked that better, it was more upfront. You knew what you were buying, no bullshit: a spit-inyour-eye for the Surgeon-General. ‘We should be wearing tweeds and hunting caps and drinking Johnny Walker,’ Sam laughs, folding her feet up under her, the squeak of leather on leather. Once I went out with a boy who was a vegan, who would never sit on a leather sofa like this, nor let my woollen blankets touch his skin. He made love like a woman, I think now: no end to it and no beginning, like one constant fusion. He could go on for days and days, he wore me out, I could never make it to work in the mornings. I wondered if there wasn’t something reassuring about the fifteen-minute boys who did what they had to and then rolled over, or smoked a cigarette and left. But the Vegan would have none of that. ‘There is more to life than physical pleasure,’ he would say. He thought that sex was about ‘getting your

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soul’. When I really couldn’t take any more intensity, and went to the bathroom to escape for a moment, he’d light up matches and let them burn down till they melted his fingernails and skin, or stick live cigarettes into the palm of his hand. He was the first, perhaps the only man, I ever loved. ‘Well, I’m having the antipasto,’ Sam says, and passes me the menu. There is nothing vegetarian in sight. Maybe she chose this place on purpose, to challenge me? It’s not our usual style, we look incongruous in our dyke uniform of flannel and boots. It’s a bit of a joke. But we wanted to get out of Fremantle for a change, and afterwards there is a Sunday double at the Lumière: The Fisher King and Coppola’s Dracula. I take the plunge. ‘Fremantle sardines with a Caesar salad.’ I figure I can eat the salad if nothing else. But when my plate arrives I see it is a huge bed of greens laced with bacon, anchovies, eggs. I look at Sam with her platter of coppa and prosciutto, salami and olives, and all at once I am terribly, horrifyingly hungry, as if years of abstinence are catching up with me. I eat the whole thing, and finish off Sam’s leftovers. After the movies, which are incredibly long, Sam says she wants to stay in town and check out the Arcane and a few other bookshops. I plead tiredness and say I’ll see her back in Fremantle. The train is just sliding along platform 7, the doors

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grinding shut, but I manage to squeeze on. The carriage is empty except for a girl who sits next to me and says, ‘Sister, can you spare me two dollars, hey?’ I give her five because I have no change. She sits opposite me. I close my eyes, I don’t like to see my reflection in the night windows, and I feel too shaky to make conversation. I doze as if in a trance, I can ride all the way like this, since my stop is at the end of the line. I dream of Winona Ryder, or Mina, or Elisabeta, drinking blood from the breast of her Count, consenting with all her soul. ‘I want to be what you are.’ ‘Stop,’ he says. ‘I cannot let this happen. You know not what you do,’ and I see at once that he is not Vlad Dracul at all, but Christ speared in the side, and Mina a hungry saint. soul of my saviour sanctify my breast body of Christ be thou my saving guest blood of my saviour bathe me in thy tide wash me with water flowing from thy side strength and protection may thy passion be o blessed Jesus hear and answer me deep in thy wounds Lord hide and shelter me so shall I never never part from thee

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I wake sobbing, it is a flood I cannot stop, and I cry all the way to Fremantle, and the girl opposite offers me tissues. When I get off the train she lights me a cigarette, calls me ‘Sister’ again, and vanishes. I draw in deep, savour the hot assault on my lungs, sending the nicotine down through my body like a control burn. I turn down High Street and into the West End, heading for Frank’s. Frank is home, I can see the subtle glow of his upstairs floor lamp. I throw sticks at the second storey window, and Frank is at the door in a moment. ‘Since when have you smoked?’ he says, and I look at the cigarette, and I stub it out in my palm. ‘What are you doing?’ he says, and pulls me into the kitchen, thrusting my hand under cold water. His name isn’t really Frank, but that’s what I call him. He calls me a few names too. We met at a party when I was still living with Victor. Frank is a librarian who specialises in nineteenth-century literature; that’s how we got talking. And indeed when you walk through mist on cold nights through the West End to Frank’s house, you feel you are in Victorian London. His house even has a basement from which he sometimes emerges with a bottle of wine, trying to educate my tastes. But most often he leads me up to the soft glow of the floor lamp, onto the big futon. In bed Frank is silent; he grew up in boarding schools and learnt not to make any noise. But he doesn’t like the fact that I am silent. He says,

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‘Obviously you feel nothing.’ He wades into me straightaway and I whimper at the pain, he is too big, I am not ready; he tightens his grip so that I whimper more, his fingernails slice at my skin and I feel blood welling, he licks it from my hips and stomach. ‘What do you feel?’ ‘Nothing. I feel nothing,’ I say, and he belts me across the jaw. ‘You want more?’ he says, his voice becoming highpitched. I clench my teeth, he raises his hand, measures it against my other cheek, hovering, so I don’t know precisely when he will strike. And then he strikes, and strokes my cheek where it smarts, and murmurs, ‘Poor baby.’ ‘No more on the face,’ I say. I am frightened now, I can’t hear anything except the ringing in my ears. I never stay overnight at Frank’s; I leave straight after. I’m worried now that Sam will get home before me, but she doesn’t reappear until the next morning. I am so obsessed with covering my own tracks that it doesn’t occur to me to ask where she has been, or even to wonder. I can’t decide what to tell her about last night. It’s not as if we had any real agreement on fidelity. She needn’t feel threatened, that’s for sure. I’d forgotten how rough, hairy, hard a man is, I have no preference for that. Sam and Frank are two different propositions altogether. But she would be hurt on my account, she wouldn’t understand why I did this. I don’t understand it myself.

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We talk sparsely over the breakfast table; I can hardly swallow the coffee she makes, my throat is so sore. Luckily my face rarely bruises, no matter how hard the blow, so I can get away with this for a while — but the rest of me will be obvious when I’m naked. Now I’m wearing a loose high-necked sweater and shirt — even the pressure of clothes against my skin is too much — and I can hardly walk. And I am still half deaf. ‘We’ve got to get onto this agent,’ Sam says, wiping beads of damp from the wall. Lately we’ve had clumps of fungus spotting the insides of the cupboards, and my asthma is getting worse. ‘I told you, he won’t do anything,’ I murmur. ‘Then we’ll go to Consumer Protection, or REIWA, or the Health Department.’ ‘Been there,’ I say wearily. I don’t want this conversation; I am still transfixed in last night, my body plays itself over like a script. I shudder. ‘Maybe I should speak to him.’ ‘Who?’ ‘The agent.’ ‘Oh, it’s a lost cause. You don’t know him.’ The agent is a young American businessman who is also the owner of this house. He lives on a big property somewhere in the South-West and commutes up and down to take care of his interests. Which don’t really seem to include my house. His wife told me he’s waiting for it to fall down so he can redevelop, because the land in the middle of the city is worth so much.

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‘His wife’s okay,’ I tell Sam. ‘She does most of the work in the office, but she has no say in anything. She was horrified when I told her about the mould. If she had her way, we’d be right. But he doesn’t listen to her, of course. Treats her abominably.’ ‘I wonder why anyone would put up with that,’ Sam says, and her gaze holds mine. I am uneasy. ‘Well, people have all sorts of reasons for the things they do.’ ‘Even the things that hurt them?’ I stand up and grab my bag. ‘I’ve got to go to work,’ I say. There’s something I didn’t mention before, I want to tell you. I don’t quite know how to put it. Yes? I feel like she’s in my mind. Sam. You mean you feel very close, you have a lot of empathy. No, I mean quite literally. Like she’s moving around in there, in my head, in my dreams. I ... see. When did you first begin to feel this? Uh, over the last few weeks. Have you noticed anything else — I mean, to do with your health? Any other unusual ... symptoms? Hey, wait a minute, don’t start diagnosing me.

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I’m not hallucinating or anything. I’m telling you what is really happening. I don’t believe in weird things like this, d’you understand? I’m as sane as you are. Don’t — don’t shift on me like this. I knew it, yeah, I knew it, you’d pull out on me like anyone else if you had to. Be fair, Tracy. It’s part of my responsibility as a doctor, I have to cover all the possibilities. It would be negligence if I didn’t. Yeah, sure, I know all that. But it makes me angry. For god’s sake, I need you of all people to believe in my sanity. No, that’s not true, I know I’m sane, I don’t need you to verify it. My brain’s every bit as good as yours. I don’t doubt that. But I feel like I’ve been set up. What else could I be expected to say? It would be negligence ... Ah, the shrink actually says what he feels for once. He feels ‘set up’. Well now he knows what it’s like to be in my chair instead of in the doctor’s. Look, I told you about this because I wanted to trust you, for godsake. Yeah, or maybe I was setting you up. I don’t know what’s true anymore, I don’t know which is more real, the things that go on in here, or my life out there. Go on, get out your notebook and write it down: PATIENT HAS DIFFICULTY DISTINGUISHING FANTASY FROM REALITY. PATIENT HAS DELUSIONS THERE’S SOMEONE IN HER HEAD.

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Sarcasm will get you nowhere, Mother used to say. It was my only effective weapon, and she felt its sting often enough, so she had to try to disarm me. Sarcasm doesn’t become you. I’ll wash your mouth out with soap. It is not what goes into a man’s mouth that makes him unclean, but what comes out of it and I am Peter that most steadfast of puritans believer in absolutes and I see a vision: a canopy which descends from the sky like a giant tablecloth filled with all manner of fowl and cloven-footed beasts things which are forbidden me and a voice says Eat and I say But Lord no unclean thing shall touch my lips and the voice says What I have called clean let no man call unclean and I eat the whole thing, and finish off Sam’s leftovers. and so betwixt the both of them they licked the platter clean and the vision dissipates, illusory I have swallowed a dead thing, and the dead thing looks out from my eyes The woman gave it to me and I did eat ... There’s starving children in India Finish your plate You’ll eat that if I have to MAKE you ... and I want it out I want to retch it out, slash it out, bleed the dead thing out of my flesh Once upon a time, Mother says, there was a little girl who couldn’t stop eating, and her mother said to her IF YOU GO ON LIKE THAT YOU’LL BURST

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and then the elastic broke on her knickers and she thought she had burst and she howled and no one could comfort her and she wouldn’t eat another thing. A cautionary tale Mother says remember when Troy was little once he ate so much I had to undo his buttons and he groaned OH NANA I WISH YOU COULD UNDO MY BELLY BUTTON. Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup Augustus was a chubby lad Fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had And everybody saw with joy The plump and hearty healthy boy He ate and drank as he was told And never let his soup get cold ... yeah but he ended up anorexic; what went wrong? O take the nasty soup away, I will not eat my soup today ... And on the fifth day he was dead. I remember that dour engraving in the Coles Funny Picture Book, its woeful tales. Boy Who Was Stunted From Foul Habit Of Smoking Cigarettes. Boy Who Lost Head From Playing With Father’s Shotgun. Those nineteenth-century kids had life sorted out all right. No gilding the lily for them. Eat and drink as you are told. Sam has dinner ready when I get home from work.

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This new assignment is more interesting and better paid. I’m now a research assistant for an academic at Murdoch University, and I get to choose my own hours. The academic is planning a book on women’s bodies in Hollywood. ‘Sounds like serial murder,’ Sam says, but it’s really about representation, voyeurism, the reworking of meanings. The academic needs me to search the databases and track down material in magazines and newspapers. At the moment I’m collecting stuff on Demi Moore, her pregnancy photos, her breast augmentations, her body-painted suit. I wonder what he’s going to do with all this, why the publishers don’t get a woman to write it. ‘Because a woman does all the research, and then a man writes it,’ Sam says wryly. ‘But you’ll probably get a mention in the acknowledgements.’ Miles, the academic, has done some earlier books which are in the library, so I look them up to get some idea of what I’m in for. Chamber of Horrors — an account of the murder of psychiatric patients during World War II. It seems the shrinks were given bonus pay and free beer by the Nazis for simply bumping off their patients. No nut cases in the Vaterland, thank you. No Jews, no gypsies, no homosexuals. I shudder. This is not what I need to read right now. The other sounds more light-hearted. Vamp: The Female As Monster In Popular Culture. But I can’t find it

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on the shelves, though the computer screen reads AVAILABLE. I wish he was writing this one now, it looks more interesting to research: Demi Moore is okay to look at but as soon as she opens her mouth she’s pretty boring. Miles is not worried about what she says but about how she is presented, the way she is read as an icon. ‘What about a chapter on Jodie Foster?’ I hint, but he says she’s not really suitable. He calls her ‘thinking man’s crumpet’, and says she is known for her brain rather than her body. ‘What about The Accused?’ I say. ‘Oh, that’s not even about her character. It’s about the middle-class one, Kelly McGillis. Jodie’s just a foil in that movie.’ A body, I think, but he doesn’t see it that way, and in any case it’s not me writing the book. After dinner Sam takes me to a gay club in Northbridge. I have never been here before. It’s women only tonight, and Sam seems to know an awful lot of these people; they hug her and yell into her ear against the loud music. She buys me a beer and goes off to play pool with a tall blonde. I am getting jealous. Is this where she comes at night, when she says she is at the movies? But how would she get back? Is this why she doesn’t come home sometimes? We can’t go on together With suspicious minds

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the music blares and thumps, changes beat, and suddenly it’s ‘Constant Craving’, and Sam reappears and drags me out onto the floor. ‘I can’t dance,’ I hiss at her. ‘Shut your eyes,’ she says, and I do, and she holds me and dances with me, for me, I give myself over completely, the control is hers, and I want never to let go of her, never to open my eyes again, the trust is absolute, this is the most wonderful dancing there is. But why must I close my eyes to dance freely, as people close their eyes when kissing or when making love? Wine comes in at the mouth/And love comes in at the eye, says Yeats, but I think the reverse is also true: love is entirely oral, and the eyes a means of intoxication, I close them as in a swoon. The more intensely I love, the more I close my eyes. The music stops, and the women disperse to get drinks and gossip. I join a queue in the Ladies’ Room, though Ladies seems an inappropriate word here. Most of these women are in their twenties and sport boyish crops and baggy pants. Could pass for Oxford undergrads — an odd version of butch. They are freshfaced and move about in matching pairs, like angels. Only a few shaved heads and leather dykes, this is Perth after all; only a few self-styled ‘lipsticks’, generally older. Each in the queue surreptitiously checks out the others. I wonder where I fit. This is no more my culture than the so-called ‘straight’ world.

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And I feel nauseous from the combination of beer and dancing. I crouch over the toilet bowl retching. ‘Hi.’ It’s Sandy, one of my nurses from the loony bin. I stand open-mouthed. ‘You.’ ‘Yes,’ she smiles. ‘And you. Small world, eh.’ It’s not the fact of her being gay that nonplusses me. It’s the sudden removal of the wall — the power structure undone in a moment. In the hospital Sandy automatically has the upper hand, by virtue of her role. Not that she’s ever been expressly nasty to me. But it’s peculiar to meet her on this ground, where those roles don’t apply. Her smile says with full confidence, I won’t tell if you won’t. And of course we won’t. I have a brief moment of resentment: Sandy is like me, not like them, she should have stuck up for me, looked out for me, protected me in there. But this is nonsense, we have no particular bond, no blood in common any more than so-called straight people do. Sandy moves off, and the young woman beside me in the queue whispers, ‘Be careful of that one, she sleeps with men as well.’ When I get back to Sam, the stage curtains open, and all the drinkers crowd forward. It’s time for the ‘show’. Two women in leather and suspenders, in capes and slicked hair, arch their bodies and lip-sync to ‘The Vampire Song’. Something feels wrong about it: these women must be straight really, they are professional dancers, I have seen them elsewhere around

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town. One has a cat-o’-nine tails, the other bends and cowers beneath her. It is not erotic, it is mockery, parody. They are too glamorous, too smiling, their welts are rouge, their bruises merely greasepaint. ‘Sam?’ I say, and wordlessly she takes my hand and we go off into the night.

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5 B ODIES &

THEIR RELATIVE MERITS

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Body Found In Swan

The body of a man thought to be in his late thirties was found by joggers near the South Perth foreshore around 5pm yesterday. Although no positive identification has yet been made, police believe the body may be that of Beauregard Lewis, a local theatre manager reported missing several weeks ago. Lewis was known to be in financial difficulty, and police have not ruled out the possibility of suicide or foul play. Anyone with information is urged to contact Police Headquarters.

‘Oh my God.’ ‘What is it?’ Miles says, flicking through issues of film magazines from the library shelves. ‘See?’ I show him the article. ‘It’s my old boss, the last one I worked for.’ Miles looks at me as if about to make a joke but then seems to think better of it.

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‘Did you know him well?’ ‘Oh, no, not at all really. I was only there for a month. And he underpaid me.’ ‘Not surprising, I guess, if he was in such bad debt.’ I don’t know how to go on working. It feels crass to be scanning these papers for movie snippets, for gossip about bodies and their relative merits, when a real one, one I have known albeit briefly, has washed up so grossly like this. And it’s not as if it’s the only horror I see — there’s more violence in this material than glamour. ‘Don’t read, just search,’ says Miles; but I haven’t yet learnt the skill of blocking things out, of keeping knowledge in useful compartments. Newspapers make me cry where weepy movies never could. Other people’s pain leaches into me. I wish I felt their joys in the same way. ‘Some souls are made for pain — it is a special gift,’ Sister Mary used to say. This didn’t go down too well of course with the students who tasted her cane — the new piece of equipment, she used to call it, upon replacing the old leather strap — but it was standard theology, not her invention. It was a whole attitude to life, and in some ways it made sense. Every moral or religious system seemed to come down to this — what to do with pain — and the Catholics had it particularly well worked out. You sought pain out, in order to offer up your sufferings on behalf of humankind. The evil, become good.

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Nothing could touch you then. It was All for Jesus. Even our schoolwork fitted into this scheme, down to the JMJ we signed on each page, mystifying the State school kids when they wanted to borrow our essays or copy our sums. If you hated maths you could at least feel you were suffering for the Holy Family. If you loved it and did well at it you could offer it up like a trophy. The system covered everything. Even at sport, which was my own peculiar penance since I was a slow and heavy child, we were clothed with grace in our little tunics — blue for Our Lady, brown for St Joseph, and white for Our Lord. Thus I could console myself, whenever I hit my shins on the hurdles, or fell facefirst into sand at the high-jump bar, that it was all for profit in the heavenly economy of pain. Unfortunately my government high-school teachers didn’t understand this — they were for success or nothing — and my sense of righteousness plummeted along with my end-of-term marks. Problem was, the skill — the knack — for pain the nuns had brought out in me was still there, only now it had no apparent object. So I examined my fellow students, and found that the girls were generally more like me than the boys. There were two main goals the girls chose, and they had nothing to do with Jesus Mary Joseph, though they sounded almost theological. The first was to make your body a display of suffering, almost an artwork in itself. This was called

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Beauty. Its instruments were readily available, if not always cheap — tweezers, razors, platform soles. Sally Moon’s hairless calves shone like the skin of a saint; and even when Stan Merriam in fourth year called her a slut, she held steadfast and would not cry, on account of her mascara. The girls looked up to her for this. The peak achievement in the name of Beauty, though, was not to eat. We all observed this rite to a greater or lesser degree. Some simply avoided eating in front of boys, others swung on and off the latest diets, trying to work around birthdays and dates that couldn’t be avoided. Others compensated by stuffing their faces when no one was watching. And every year there were one or two who went over the edge — who wore their thinning scalps, their bluish fingernails, their loss of periods, like a new kind of stigmata. Everyone knew this was too much, and everyone outwardly disapproved, but there were many who somehow secretly admired these girls. The other admirable means to pain was Love. This one found me more susceptible, though my arrogance rarely found an object worthy enough. Some girls followed both paths, Beauty and Love, at once, since they were quite compatible — like yoga and meditation. These girls didn’t really mind which boy they chose; it was the process that mattered. Unrequited was the best of all, since it allowed you to be in Love but still reserve all your energies for Beauty, which was narcissistically more satisfying, and more fun.

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It was the time and cost that ruled out Beauty for me — and the remonstrances of a Sensible Mother. What little pocket-money she gave me went on books, and these sat more easily with the calling to Love. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were both instruction and inspiration — if Cranberry High could only have yielded one Heathcliff, one Rochester, how magnificent my oblation! But the suburbs knew nothing of such passions — and it wasn’t till third year that I discovered a name for my ignoble male companions. They were all Buddy Willards. That was the year of the first attempt. ... I meant To last it out and not come back at all I’m curled up in the dark now beside Sam, unable to sleep for thinking of all these pasts, of Bo’s body washed up on the foreshore, of the rapid and extreme swings that take place in my life. ‘You’re restless,’ Sam says. I don’t reply. For some reason I don’t want to tell her about the newspaper article; I fear some put-down, some cynical comment about Bo deserving it. Not that I even particularly cared for Bo. But it’s a last stand, as if there’s some soft, naive centre to me that I don’t want even Sam to touch. ‘Didn’t you ever love a man?’ I ask her, suddenly.

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Sam stiffens, and for a moment I fear I’ve asked the unpardonable question. ‘Well, that depends on what you mean by love, of course,’ she says. ‘Oh, maybe I don’t even mean love. But have you always been a ... a —’ ‘The dirty L word? You can’t bring yourself to use the word?’ ‘That’s not true. And you’re avoiding my question.’ ‘I haven’t always been anything. No one has. People live a hundred different lives in a lifetime. At least a hundred.’ We fall silent, and Sam’s hand dawdles over my hair, my forehead, down to the jawline and neck, and as she strokes and circles I am lulled into sleep. he first snow this year has fallen so heavily that no one may leave the castle. Even the river that entwines forest and tower has frozen over. This morning Gerhard the groundsman dug me a path down below so I might attempt my usual walk, but even the path was treacherous. And that first snow always a shock, silently overnight, upon you before you know it, like a wily enemy. And in the moat a fish, belly up, caught in the ice, horribly alive in death. I have seen a fish like that before but bigger, doubling over and back, flapping insanely to get free of its barb, and I wondered what changed, what overcame the creature at its inevitable moment of surrender.

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No lying in state for a fish, unless it be on the platter at my father’s table the same night, regaling the Count von Sarnin. That same Count due today or tomorrow, meant to be my husband before the week is out. Surely this snow gives me at least a few days’ reprieve. The thought of the Count von Sarnin, with his bulbous nose and swollen middle, makes me nauseous. For weeks now I have eaten almost nothing. ‘She is pining for love,’ the kitchen girls say, ‘and now she must wait even longer. If he doesn’t come soon there will be nothing left of her.’ As my father and I sit in the great hall, silent over our meal, a messenger announces a guest. ‘So he is come, in spite of all,’ my father says. ‘A miracle! Show him in.’ But the man who enters is not my dreaded Count. Behold a tall, exceedingly thin young man with cheeks like hollows in snow, flesh like a winter moon, and eyes of blue ice. He is dressed like a minstrel, but his speech is that of a nobleman. ‘I seek shelter, Sir. I can go no further in such terrain, and in my present weakness.’ Ensuring he bears no arms, which is nonetheless surprising in this region, my father offers a seat and bids him take food. ‘No, thank you. I am too exhausted to eat. If I might simply have a bed — even in the servants’ quarters?’

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As the young man says this he raises his eyes to me, and I am fixed in them like the fish in the ice I saw this morning. But something inside me cracks, slides, turns to liquid; my heart resumes its beat. No one in the household can understand how this strange troubadour should have reached us through the snow; nor can anyone find out the young man’s name. When next day my father sends for him, he looks much refreshed, though still somewhat pallid, still gaunt as if all the flesh in our larders could not sate him. He has, he says, nothing to repay our kindness but his music, songs of his own land to which he longs to return. He sings apparently in our language but the words refuse to make any sense, however hard I listen. His voice is too pure, too deadly, like the wolves’ cries we hear some nights, or the sound of owls. Again he holds my eyes as he plucks at the strings. I am oblivious to all else until he leaves the room. My father rises towards me. ‘Remember, you are promised.’ ‘What — what do you mean?’ I say. ‘What have I done?’ ‘I see your eyes — your eyes,’ he reproves. ‘Keep your mind pure, your heart for the Count alone. It is not good to think otherwise.’ ‘But ... I don’t know what you are talking about,’ I say, and blush, for this is the first time I have lied to my father.

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‘Perhaps,’ he says grimly. ‘All the same, we shall take steps to ensure it remains so.’ Thus I am locked in my room when night comes, as if for my safety. What does my father know that I but sense so dimly, as if feeling an object only by its edges? I cannot sleep. I go to the shutter and gaze at the moon, though it is full and this is said to bring madness. Indeed, I had rather go mad than face my planned future. The shutter is not barred, being high above ground. I throw it wide open and let the full moon caress the answering round of my cheek; I taste the mist on my tongue. ‘You’ll catch your death,’ says a sweet, low voice, and the young man closes the casement. I should wonder how he came there — was he lurking in the shadows before I entered? or under the curtains of the bed? — but I am motionless, my brain only conscious of blood beating. ‘What is it you sing?’ I say, at last. ‘You want to know?’ he asks. ‘Look at me. No, stand by the moonlight, I can’t get your eyes.’ And again I enter that blue wasteland, feel the flint that ignites, and the whole room seems a conflagration, and we are standing in the fire untouched, as I have read in the prophets. The young man speaks — or sings, I cannot tell which — and each word is a history, a world that plays itself out in front of my eyes, even if I close them. This is the knowledge I have waited for, what lies outside these castle walls, what lies inside

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this flesh and bone. He drinks now at my mouth and I at his, his lips cold torn metal, the whole soul seems to go out of me and be replaced by ... I know not what. ‘We must leave,’ I say. ‘I cannot stay here any longer. But the snow ...’ ‘No obstacle,’ murmurs the singer, and in an instant his body is transformed into a bird, a great black bird of prey whose talons snatch me up and carry me out through the window into the moonlight. So this is flight. This is liberation from the weight of earth. It is too much freedom for me to bear, but my love says, ‘Trust. Trust. Look at me,’ and as I am completely absorbed into the bird’s nature, I feel its hunger; its keen eye, sure musculature. For the first time my soul is completely fearless. When we touch ground it is in a land I have never seen before, though we cannot have flown many miles. Here there is no snow, but vegetation is sparse and there is no sign of human habitation. My singer has once again taken human form, but looks weak and tired. ‘I must rest,’ he says, and avoids my gaze. Day is breaking, and although he has shown no sign of flagging in the dark, he seems unable to continue now. I make him a bed of pine needles and cover him with my night cloak. I lie beside him but cannot sleep. After some hours my belly squirms with hunger but the plants here are unfamiliar and what small winter berries I can find might be poisonous.

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And he sleeps on, a strange sleep, with eyelids not quite shut, so that even as he lies motionless those blue circles still hold me. At dusk he wakes, stands to full height, becomes wolf, bigger than any I have heard of. I marvel at the glint of his pupils, run my fingers through his shaggy fur. This is what I have been taught to fear, the shadow on the snow that haunted my every step if I ventured out too late, the jaws in which so many people from the burg have been gripped even in the short years of my lifetime. I do not fear him. ‘Stay here,’ he whispers, and is gone through the forest, returning with a slain creature — a deer perhaps, though of a kind I do not know, or cannot discern, for it is so bloodless and torn that it seems without form. He bids me eat, but I cannot bear to touch raw flesh; he tells me how to build a fire, but will not come near it. ‘You don’t eat,’ I say. He shakes his head. ‘I have taken what I need. The rest is yours.’ Each night we move on and by day we rest, but still he seems progressively weaker. ‘Where are we going?’ I ask, but he will only say, ‘To my homeland.’ Home. I have lost all thought for it; he is my home now.

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‘How much longer?’ ‘Only a few days. If I can make it.’ ‘What do you mean? Something ails you.’ He lowers his eyes. ‘Tell me what it is, so I can help you.’ ‘You would help me?’ ‘I would do anything for you.’ He leans close to me now, lies across me so that I feel a heartbeat reverberate between our two chests and cannot say whose it is. My belly glows with need for him, my whole being opens, like the ice I saw one year that thawed early and unexpectedly, swallowing a man into the lake beneath. There was nothing anyone could do to retrieve him. ‘Anything. You would do anything?’ His breath is hot and questioning at my heart, my throat, and I can barely nod. And he sinks his teeth into my flesh, sucking, as a baby at the breast does. At once I know, as new mothers know from the burning that runs through their bodies when the child cries for milk, what he is and what he has done to me. ‘You are cruel,’ I say, extricating myself from his grasp. ‘No.’ He wipes his mouth, gathers in every last drop, his tongue reptilian. ‘You have condemned me to this.’ ‘You said you would do anything. I must have human blood to live, and there is nobody for miles around.

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Animals, as you may guess, do not suffice for long. I would have expired but for your gift — which you offered freely. And in return I have made you like me.’ ‘I did not understand what I was doing.’ ‘So now you will understand everything. Now nothing will be kept from you. Now the whole world is yours, and all times, and all creatures. All yours.’ ‘Mine to murder, as you do?’ I am backing away from him, casting about for a weapon to defend myself, but he freezes my hand. ‘Like cannot destroy like,’ he says. ‘I know what you are thinking; I am in your head. There are ways they can overpower us, but we cannot murder each other.’ ‘They,’ I say bitterly. ‘I was one of them.’ ‘And now you are mine, and my loneliness is gone.’ ‘Your loneliness,’ I spit at him, and I become snake, metamorphose, wake to another time, another land, where the young man will never find me. With my pay from Murdoch I hire a car and drive down to Serpentine cemetery. It’s a long way out, an odd little place on the South-West Highway; you can shoot straight past if you’re not careful. Most people know this place for its picnic spot and waterfall, though there’s also a prison nearby, and even the falls have their dark secret: the swimming hole is said to be bottomless, and still harbours the bones of a tourist who drowned there and was never recovered.

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Or is that just a local myth? It never stopped us swimming there in our teens. And earlier, when I was in primary school, our playground abutted the church cemetery, but that never stopped us jumping the fence to retrieve lost balls, elastics and marbles. The names on the headstones meant nothing to us, we never imagined there were real people under there. Or if there were, they were surely as old and grey as their headstones, and had nothing to do with us. We played among those slabs in the same way we skipped and hopscotched on the school’s septic tanks. The teachers, however, were aghast if they caught us on the wrong side of the fence. A sin worse than running into the boys’ toilets on a dare. You never cared about things like that, Sean. You were the one who committed the wrongs for all of us: the stolen peanuts from Rocky’s corner store, the furtive Winfield Blues in the alley beside our house. The first swigs of alcohol and the first love affair. The firstborn son and the first dead son. And here I am pulling weeds out of your cheap and grubby grave, as if you’d care about such things, you were never tidy in life. If the shrink heard me talking like this he’d put me in hospital again. But if the nuns can talk to God who doesn’t talk back — and his existence has never been sure — why can’t I talk to you? You’d laugh at all of this, at the bow tie and satin they buried you in, the purple blossoms we tossed into the gaping earth-mouth, as if to appease it, keep it quiet. You’d laugh at the catalogues we got in the mail from stonemasons, offering

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Discount Graves From $6000. At your polished box with the same finish as Mum’s rosewood piano. At the silver crucifix on top of it, at the inscription HE IS RISEN, as if you were a loaf of bread. Take, eat, this is my body which will be given up for you. You didn’t believe in any of it. You said to me, ‘If I die first, and there is an afterlife, I will come back to you and prove it. Nothing will stop me.’ It’s thirteen years and I’m still waiting. Or have you reappeared, like Elijah, and I have simply failed to recognise you?

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6 D EATH WARMED UP

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I’m still having weird dreams. Weird? Weird. Funny word. Comes from the three Fates, you know. The goddesses who spin, measure and cut the thread of life. I guess the dreams are weird in that sense too — only I don’t know whose life it is they’ve got. But ... your dreams? That’s what I’m talking about. The dreams always seem to be ... someone else’s life story. Maybe — projections of myself? I don’t know. If I believed in reincarnation I’d say they were past lives. What about the content? Is there a common thread? The thread the Fates cut, maybe? Kaput. The end. Oh, you want me to talk straight. You get nervous if I’m cryptic or elliptical, or in the least bit poetic.

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It bothers you if I’m nervous. Aren’t you? I have taken the afternoon off to go to the shrink, so I might as well do all those fiddly little things we all have to do, the ones no one writes about, the mundane duties that add nothing to a story yet can nonetheless catalyse life’s silly dramas. Like: going to the bank to get a print-out of your transactions because the handy little teller card leads you astray and you don’t know what’s gone in and what’s gone out, and you overspend and get cautioned by the manager. Those teller machines. A fantasy of endless supply, mother’s milk permanently on tap, as long as you remember your PIN. And how distressed everyone gets when the little red slot window says CLOSED. ‘The machine is cleaning itself,’ the woman at the counter explains, and I picture a huge fat mother cat licking its paws and rubbing behind its ears. When the machine has finished its ablutions I take out two hundred dollars and go to pay the rent. But there is a sign in the window: CLOSED DUE TO BEREAVEMENT I do not wonder who has died, I stand there considering the derivation of the word bereavement. Vaguely I think it has something to do with robbing, ripping

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apart, rifts. Isn’t it the column in Saturday’s West where they print all those dreadful rhymes? — not the Deaths column, which shows the recent losses, but the ones where, year after year, people replay their grief like a stuck record on anniversaries. Or is that In Memoriam, all the little would-be Tennysons. I remember hearing about a local woman who compiled a sort of Best of The Bereavements anthology and got it published. I wonder about the readership. Then I think of Victor’s friend Eddie who was longterm unemployed, as they say, before he set himself up as a grave cleaner. For $50 a pop he’d pull out the weeds, replace the gravel, polish the headstone, and relieve the family guilt at neglecting the site. He soon amassed a small fortune. Sean’s grave is unchanged from the day we sank him into it. ‘A beautiful cemetery,’ Auntie Myrtle says. ‘If you can call a cemetery beautiful, mind.’ ‘A lovely funeral,’ cousin Julia says. ‘I mean, if you can say a funeral is lovely.’ And will a’not come again? And will a’not come again? No, no, he is dead: Go to thy death-bed He never will come again The front doorbell sounds. It’s after midnight, and

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I’m used to Sam coming back at all hours, but why ring the bell? ‘Hang on,’ I call, wrapping her bathrobe around me. I have taken to sleeping naked now, but I’m not about to answer the door that way, even to Sam. Now she’s banging at the door as if it’s an emergency. I open. It’s not Sam. It’s the Vegan. The first, perhaps the only man, I ever loved. ‘Yo, Tracy how are you.’ He says it like a statement, not a question. He lets himself in and sits on the mat. For a moment I wonder if I am dreaming, but the cold night air, and the mist that seeps in with him, convince me I am awake. I shut the door but the mist seems to have filled the room. The Vegan looks like a walking corpse. Like death warmed up, my father used to say. You look like death warmed up. Mother was in bed with glandular fever for a whole year when I was fourteen. I could hear Father at night going in there — her weak protests, his reply: But you’re not sick down there. Like the husband of a woman opposite me once in a hospital ward, visiting her after a hysterectomy. The first thing he asked was: How soon will you be able to have sex? Like death warmed up. The Vegan is looking rather thin these days, even for a vegan. His hair is a lot greyer and his blue eyes have faded to a slatey kind of colour. Eyes of stone. ‘I thought you were Sam,’ I say. ‘I don’t usually

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answer the door in the middle of the night.’ ‘Sam your boyfriend?’ ‘Not ... exactly. She should be home fairly soon, so you’ll meet her.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.’ ‘You’ll always see me again. If you want to, that is.’ ‘How did you find out where I live?’ The Vegan just laughs and says, ‘Could you dim the light a bit, please?’ ‘Do you realise what time it is?’ ‘If you want me to go, just say so.’ He pulls out a syringe and a bottle of belladonna. Deadly nightshade. The midwife gave it to me when Tess was born. Homeopathic stuff: a little bit of the same thing you suffer from. The poison that cures. But I have never heard of anyone injecting it. He says it’s just because he’s broke and can’t get anything better. He just wants to use needles. ‘Do you mind?’ I shrug. I wonder how long he’s been using needles. His breast pocket is full of them, and they shower out onto the carpet as he leans forward. ‘Sorry.’ He is a weird melange of manners and recklessness. His needle gleams. I can’t look at the thing, it brings up tears, bile in my throat. I never could look. Even when Tess was tiny and I took her for vaccination, I had to turn away as I held her towards the clinic sister. ‘Do you mind holding the cord?’

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I refuse. ‘Don’t you want to watch? Some people love it. Some even want to put it in for me.’ I shake my head. ‘But if you don’t help, I might miss.’ I relent, pull the cord taut, eyes averted. I don’t know how long I should wait, what he will do next. After a minute I realise I am holding my breath. ‘Hey, it’s all right.’ He takes my chin in his hand. ‘Come on, look at me. I can’t get your eyes. It’s okay to look.’ I look at him, his face perfectly normal, even beautiful, revivified. He kneels in front of me and kisses me. I go limp, as I always do. I am not here, I am merely watching this happen. He makes a big stain on my neck, it is pulsating. Suçon, the French call it. Reminds me of soupçon, a suspicion, a hint. I wonder what the Germans call it. I wonder about the derivation of the English word. The Vegan is good with words. He strokes the dark imprint on my neck. I show him my tattoo, Stronger Than Death , and he laughs again. ‘It’s from the Song of Songs,’ I say. ‘The Song of Solomon,’ he says. He used to study theology; that’s how I met him. I had a cleaning job at the college. He was a brilliant student, but he never finished the course. That was years ago. ‘But you forgot the rest of the quote: And jealousy as cruel as the grave.’ Sam walks in. The Vegan grins at her, baring his

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fine white teeth. ‘Have we met?’ she asks coolly. Her gaze falls on the needle, then on me. ‘Is that a bruise on your neck?’ ‘I bruise easily,’ I mumble. ‘I’ve noticed.’ Sam removes her coat and goes into the kitchen to make some tea. The Vegan follows her but she says nothing. He picks up a breadknife from the dish rack and says he is going to cut off his penis. ‘What for?’ Sam asks. ‘Because I don’t like being a man.’ ‘That’s not what makes you a man,’ she sniffs. He considers a moment, and puts the knife down. ‘I’m still going to do it one day,’ he adds. They carry in the tea. We sit and chat about films — The Hunger, Thelma and Louise. He can’t stand Susan Sarandon, but he thinks Catherine Deneuve and Geena Davis are beautiful. ‘Predictable,’ Sam says. He hits up some more belladonna, says it stings. He says it will probably kill him, but Sam shakes her head, says, ‘You’re unkillable.’ He goes out for a piss in the back garden. I think Sam is going to lecture me but she is silent, musing. She leans on my shoulder, kisses the sore spot on my neck. ‘Do you want him to stay?’ ‘I thought you’d hate him.’ ‘Well, I do. Sort of. But I understand him.’ Sam moves back to the sofa for the night, an oddly resigned expression on her face. She doesn’t want to

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know what goes on. ‘No offense, but you have to draw the line somewhere. I’m not interested in men.’ ‘But I’m not a man,’ he says. ‘That’s what they all say.’ The bedroom door won’t shut properly, it’s warped from the damp. The Vegan fumbles around in my messy heaps of clothes and finds one of my old skirts, a gold velour thing. ‘I liked you better in your days of skirts and long hair,’ he says to me wistfully, but quite seriously, and he puts on the skirt. It stretches oddly across his square, flat hips. I lift the front of it and go down on him: the strangest sensation. ‘Shame to cut it off,’ I say. The Vegan laughs, says only, ‘Snip.’ He jokes all the time about hurting himself, and sometimes he does, but he won’t hurt even a cockroach or a spider. He doesn’t play the man. I wince, thinking of Frank. When I think of Frank I am filled with self-loathing. The Vegan senses this and says, ‘What’s wrong? Have I upset you?’ In the morning when I get up there is only Sam. She is making me breakfast again. I stagger from the bed, have been awake for so many hours that I feel quite bloodless, as if I’ve been knocked out. ‘God, you look like death warmed up,’ Sam says, lighting a cigarette. I want to ask her if last night really happened. But she says, ‘We need milk and the paper.’ I go to my purse. It’s empty. Not even the small

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change is there. The two hundred has vanished. ‘Sam — the rent money.’ She drops the toast, burning her fingers. ‘I thought you’d paid the rent.’ ‘No, they were closed. I was going to try again today.’ ‘Are you sure it was in your purse?’ ‘As sure as I am of anything.’ She hacks the toast into strips with the breadknife. ‘Bastard. Bastard.’ Then she lets out a laugh. ‘It’s just like Thelma and Louise. You know, where that cowboy guy takes off with all their money. Ha, life imitates art. Maybe we gave him the idea, talking about it. I hope he was worth it?’ She sets the plate down with a clatter. She is almost inscrutable — annoyed? Amused? I can’t tell. I decide I’d better eat. Thelma and Louise. We saw it on a Sunday double at the Lumière, with Harold and Maude. Harold, who kept staging his suicides but nobody was interested. He met Maude at a funeral. They went to funerals for fun, the way Sam and I go to the movies. I’ve only ever been to two funerals. One was Nana’s. She was an atheist, so they couldn’t really do much with her service. She was cremated. They read from a Rupert Brooke poem: If I should die, think only this of me That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be

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In that rich earth a richer dust concealed ... Death as colonisation. Or fertilisation. She wasn’t thinking of her own death. She only really liked the poem because her fiancé was killed in the trenches. Then she married an AIF man who wasn’t killed, and came out here to start the New Life. Death took her by surprise. As it did Sean. ‘A lovely funeral, if you can say a funeral is lovely.’ Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is stronger than death, and jealousy as cruel as the grave ... BUSINESSMAN FOUND DEAD ‘It’s the American,’ I say in disbelief. ‘What American?’ ‘The owner. The guy we rent from. The guy who owns this house.’ I point to his photo in the newspaper. ‘So that’s why the office was shut.’ Sam looks uncomfortable. ‘You sure do know a lot of dead people,’ she says. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, I mean him, and then there was old what’shis-face from the theatre ...’ ‘How did you know about Bo?’ ‘I do read the papers too, you know,’ she smiles. I’m not sure where she’s leading; is it malice I see in that smile? She blows smoke a little too close to my

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face and murmurs, ‘And then there was Kim.’ ‘The nurse?’ ‘The psycho psych nurse. Maybe you really do have the Evil Touch. Like all the patients seemed to think.’ ‘Sam, that’s not funny. Anyway, you knew them too. I could just as easily point the finger at you.’ She laughs, won’t look at me. ‘It’s just coincidence, then,’ I say. ‘Tell that to the police,’ she jokes. ‘Bit convenient, eh, you’ve even got a motive.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I ask. ‘Well, you can probably get the mould problem fixed now. I mean, give his wife a bit of mourning time and then go in for the kill, if you’ll pardon the expression,’ she says. I am starting to get really annoyed now. ‘You have a sick sense of humour.’ ‘Okay, okay. But you have to admit, it is weird.’ Weird. That’s what she said. That word again. It’s like a curse. And she said like death warmed up. As if the phrase is following me. Are you superstitious? No, far less than most people I know. Maybe just paranoid. Paranoid? I feel like she’s inside my head. I told you that before. And then these words. You know, how

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words seem to crop up again and again? I feel they’re trying to tell me something. And no, I don’t want you to think I’m hearing voices. You of all people should understand the power of words. I mean, what’s a ‘talking cure’? Pretty airyfairy stuff, if you ask me — unless you believe words can actually do things. Yours is a pretty weird sort of practice, you know. It’s more like poetry than science. And you can’t bear silence, you must have someone filling it up for you with words. It’s a bloodletting, and you drink from it. Parasite. Are you trying to turn the tables and analyse me? To shift the power? You don’t have any more power than I give you. ‘When are you going to finish with that guy?’ Sam asks impatiently, looking up from a movie magazine. ‘What? Who are you talking about?’ ‘You know who I mean. The psycho. The shrink.’ ‘You make it sound like an affair.’ ‘Well, maybe it is. Have you fucked him on the couch yet?’ ‘Sam.’ ‘Well, have you?’ I stare blankly. ‘There isn’t a couch.’ ‘I see.’ She drops the magazine to the floor. She knows these sloppy habits are starting to get to me. ‘You’re quite wrong,’ I say. ‘It isn’t like that. In fact,

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this is the one time in my life when it isn’t like that.’ ‘Uh huh.’ ‘Oh, it’s no use talking to you, is it? You’ve just decided to be jealous of whatever. The shrink isn’t even the real issue.’ ‘Sounds like you’re analysing me now,’ says Sam. I ignore this. ‘If you didn’t want the Vegan here you only had to say so.’ ‘Then you just would have met him somewhere behind my back.’ ‘Oh, I thought you had eyes in the back of your head.’ ‘You think I want to watch you debasing yourself?’ Ouch. ‘Anyway, I think you should do it. With the shrink. Complete the cycle of abuse, so to speak. You seem bent on destroying yourself.’ ‘Whereas you’re simply bent. You have a filthy, suspicious mind.’ ‘Good. Fine. Well, it’s nice to know you don’t love me for my mind.’ ‘I don’t love you at all,’ I say, and as soon as it is said I wish it unsaid. Sam kicks the magazine across the floor, kicks the kitchen door, throws an ashtray at the window. I run to the bathroom and lock myself in. It’s the only room in the house that locks. There is nowhere to sit except on the damp floor. I gaze at the mildewed ceiling. I wonder about the etymology of the word

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mildew. I think of the large packet of antidepressants unused in the bathroom cupboard — not with any great interest, but simply as a habit. It’s as if my thoughts run permanently in that groove. When I first came out of the hospital I got all the repeat prescriptions made up at once so I could have a huge stash of them. I don’t even know if they would really kill me, and that is why I have never taken them. I don’t want one more failed attempt. I’m not even going to touch them, it’s just a thought, a response to panic. I think Sam is going to wreck everything the way Victor used to, but soon the house is quiet, and after a few minutes I hear the front door slam and her footsteps leaving. When it feels safe I unlock the door. Across the kitchen floor in giant red lettering it says YOU ARE A DIRTY SLUT. ALWAYS HAVE BEEN, ALWAYS WILL BE. At first I think it’s blood, but it’s too bright and thick, like stage blood. I run my fingers through it and sniff: it’s chilli sauce. The empty bottle is on the table. I scoop up all the mess and mop the floor. Sam stays out overnight, the whole night again. I have given up trying to guess where she goes, it’s too painful. I have perfected the technique of re-routing my thoughts when it comes to such matters. The pain is still there, and doubtlessly doing its damage, but you must simply order your thoughts elsewhere each time they approach it.

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Your head is a maze of roads, and you are setting up detours. Some ways are one-way streets, some cul-de-sacs. Some are soft at the edges and you cannot stop there or you will get bogged. Stick to the ways you know, or you’ll end up sitting in the dark, locked in your car like the terrified woman in the television ad, who didn’t belong to the RAC. You are alone tonight, and you know what that means, so prepare yourself. Remember how to breathe. Yes, you will stay up as late as you can to avoid this visitation, but after the last late movie, the tenth tasteless cup of coffee, you will succumb to weariness and stretch out on the bed or the sofa. The body twitches and sets hard as rigor mortis. You command your fingers to move, your feet to lift, but it seems you have left your body like someone jumping ship. There’s a loud rushing in your ears like a plane at take-off, a train in a tunnel, a trapped bird flapping desperately. Blood pounds in your head. In the background, an erratic soundtrack. Sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, telling you things you will forget later. Your own voice, small and high, spitting at them though your lips don’t move. Your body is small, it is lifted onto someone’s shoulder. You feel hands on your body, objects and fingers in your mouth, your cunt, your anus, a huge heavy weight on top of you, you think he is going to kill you, he is so heavy. His breath smells of beer. Sometimes you see a flash of light: three concrete

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steps in a backyard, a brightly coloured floral carpet. But they are fleeting, the blackness covers everything. You strain to open your eyes but these muscles too are paralysed, and anyway your eyes are already open. It’s the monster, the black cloud, the spreading ink, that prevents you seeing. It fills the room like a dank gas. It’s like the bison in the Perth Museum, massive dark shoulders hunched above you. The thing is taken out and you want to vomit the salty, viscous stuff. Suddenly the weight vanishes, your body is free, you can breathe again. Legion has left you, Legion runs down the hill with the Gadarene swine. O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. But Legion will always return. The shrink says, ‘I think you are suffering from a sleep disorder. We could put you in hospital to monitor this.’ How to begin, even begin to speak to him. You sit hunched in the chair, feet up, your field of vision restricted to about five inches in each direction. Custody of the eyes. You forget your watch and you ask him the time. He says, ‘Tracy, there’s a clock on the wall. Has been for years, since the first day you came.’ If I don’t see it, it isn’t there. I refuse his offer of hospital. Every time you go in there, even for a sleep disorder, it’s another nail driven into your self-respect, and whatever respect others still have for you. People talk about ‘removing the stigma’ from mental illness, as if the term

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mental illness were not itself the stigma. If you have a name for it, you can see it even when it isn’t there. If you don’t have a name for it, you can’t see it. It was Fifi who told me about custody of the eyes. Fifi was a regular on the ward. Maybe she lived there permanently; she was around whenever I was admitted, quietly moving about folding linen, picking the rotten heads off flowers and revitalising half-dead bouquets. Fifi’s real name was Vivian, but her shrink was German and couldn’t get the consonants right, so the nickname stuck. She wasn’t at all like a Fifi really. She was solemn, meditative. She had a broken heart, she told me, because she’d wanted to be a Carmelite all her life but they wouldn’t let her in. ‘You know, mental problems,’ she said. Jilted by God, and at the very altar. So she practised her vocation in the outside world, keeping the Grand Silence, referring to all her possessions with ‘our’ instead of ‘my’, and reciting the full Office. She dressed only in dark brown — ‘gabardine’, she explained, ‘the rule actually says serge, but that’s because it used to be a cheap fabric. Now it’s too dear, so we use gabardine. The spirit of the law, you know.’ Under the gabardine she wore a tiny scapular which nothing could induce her to remove. Nurses complained that it smelled and was practically glued to her. But Fifi insisted, ‘If you die wearing this, Our Lady lifts you straight to heaven, and you avoid purgatory.’ They tried to get Fifi interested in the occupational

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therapy program, but she preferred menial chores on the ward as more conducive to contemplation. Our friendship was forged through a common refusal of meat. She only talked for an hour after meals. Sometimes I sat with her as she went through the Rosary; it had a soothing sound, especially as Fifi could say it in Latin. Latin was out of use in the church by the time I was old enough to go to Mass. I remember dimly a Midnight Mass in Latin — the same familiar carols rendered unintelligible. But it was exciting to be out in the middle of the night and somehow part of this strange club with its ancient gobbledy-gook. Years later, travelling alone, I went to a Midnight Mass in Zürich, expecting to understand nothing with my poor German, but found it was a Latin Mass, and everyone in the room was united in this same warm paradox of incomprehension. Babel and Pentecost in one. A bit like the loony bin, really. Problem is, I can’t see the difference between Fifi, supposedly crazy, and the ‘sane’ nuns who make the grade. One woman’s vocation is another woman’s Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Where you end up is almost arbitrary. Order of Carmelites Discalced. Sister Fifi of the Broken Heart, OCD. If the Little Flower of Jesus had been plucked by a German shrink instead of an indulgent Italian pope, she’d be labelled megalomaniac and grandiose. Ad te clamamus, exsules Filii Hevae. 120

7 T OO GREEDY FOR WORDS

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So beautiful was she, even in death, the dwarfs could not find it in their hearts to bury her. Tess is listening to one of those Disney tapes, the sort that come with a book so the child can learn to read along. She has it almost by heart, even though she doesn’t understand all the words. I bought it for her when she turned three. It was a compromise between the literary and the popular on my part. She loves fairytales; that much she must have got from me, although she looks like her father and has his turns of speech. Victor has bought a video recorder and now Tess overdoses on cartoons, mostly Disney. This means her fairytales are quite different from the ones I know, even where the titles are the same. When I tell her stories now she says, ‘But on Daddy’s video ...’ My versions are spiked with genuine moments of horror, passed down through centuries, and the heroine doesn’t always end up with the hero,

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although there are usually happy endings. Sam always says, ‘You’re being a literary snob. Let the poor kid have her Disney. You’ll frighten her.’ I say, ‘Why shouldn’t she have both versions?’ I never saw a Disney cartoon when I was a kid. We didn’t have videos then, so your only chance was at the cinema, and all the cinemas were in the city. There were too many of us children to drag along there, especially as Mother didn’t drive. So I’d listen to the tales secondhand from the girls at school. I knew the names of most of the characters, and swapped cards and stickers like the others, but it seemed to me that Disney was all one long film. I had no idea how the narratives were pieced together. Somehow I managed to feel superior while deprived; I believed mine were the true versions of the stories, and I had books to prove it. Sometimes I saw glimpses of Disney films, saccharine dramas with Hayley Mills or the handsome Prince of Donegal, on television on Sunday evenings. But they never showed the full-length animated features. At the beginning there was Mr Walt Disney himself, introducing the action. I was frightened of him, partly because he looked like my uncle Steve who had a glass eye, and partly because Sean said he was really dead and had paid to have his body frozen in case one day they could revive him. ‘Cryonics,’ Sean said. Sean was good at science. ‘If I die I’ll do the same thing. But it costs a lot of money.’

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If I die. If I die, I’ll ... If I should die before I wake. It seemed to me that Walt wasn’t dead at all: I mean, there he was, on Channel Seven every week, looking as if he were alive. Some people are just too greedy for words. I am a fat child and I am greedy for words. I don’t look like a Disney princess. My hair is dark and cut like a pudding bowl. In all the school photos I wear a scowl. I am six, seven, eight, nine. I get put up two grades, only for reading, sitting among all the big kids who have more interesting books, but in maths and sport I am slow. Tess Charles goes up two grades for reading too. Tess is clever and looks like a princess. I wish she was my friend, but she’s already got a best friend. Tess gets to be Prefect because she is so good. She gets the most silver and gold stars on the class chart. My friend is called Josephine Smithers. I make friends with her because she’s got the same name as my mum. Josephine is a bit sad like me. I’m allowed to go to her place sometimes because my mum thinks she is a good girl. At lunchtime Glenys Rich does bad things to Josephine and me behind the pepper tree at school. She gives us Chinese burns and camel bites. She is a bully. We don’t tell anyone what she does. I want to go to the beach with Josephine, but Dad says bad things will happen if you go to the beach, because bad men go there. Sometimes Mum lets us

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go when Dad is not around. When Dad is not around Mum takes down the statue of Mary and hides it. There is a picture of Saint Therese and we are scared of it, Sean and me. We think the eyes are following us. Mum hides that picture too. We don’t tell Dad. When Dad is home he makes us say our prayers at night, we have to kneel next to our bed or his bed and say Saint Therese Little Flower of Jesus pray for us, O Sacred Heart of Jesus have mercy on us, and thump our heart with our fist. I am very scared. I am in bed. Something bad happens now, there is a stranger, an alien invader coming into my room. I can feel my neck, it’s all prickly and it means there are foxes and snakes under the bed and in a minute somebody will grab me from behind. I can’t see them but I can feel them coming. If I lie very still maybe they won’t see me. If I can stop breathing then they can’t see my chest moving up and down. Maybe they’ll think I’m dead already and leave me alone. I whisper the prayer Mum taught me, it’s a Church of England prayer: Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take Gentle Jesus meek and mild Look upon a little child Maybe they’ll dump my body. Maybe they are kidnappers. Dad says if I tell, somebody will take me away through the window. Like the Lindbergh baby. Like little Eloise in Victoria. Like the Beaumont children.

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DO YOU WANT TO DISAPPEAR LIKE THE BEAUMONT CHILDREN? The eyes of Saint Therese are always watching me. There is ABC wallpaper on the wall next to my bed. I spell the letters over and over, that is how I become a good reader. I learn to sign my name. I sign my name on the ABC wallpaper and get in trouble. I read my favourite book, Sleepy Time Stories. There’s a story in it called ‘Dandy’s Dream Bubbles’, which is about bubbles you can put under your pillow to give you a special dream. I wish I could have those bubbles. I have bad dreams about being a sinner. Dad says that’s because I told lies in Confession on Saturday. Mum’s not a Catholic, she says that’s rubbish. Dad says Mum will go to Hell. If I tell, I will go to Hell. If I tell, I will go to Hell. Telltale tit, your tongue will split, and you’ll tell two different stories. A lifetime’s habit of lying learned lying down. Which story is true? How does Dad know what I say in Confession, is the priest on his side? Bless me Father for I have sinned, I am evil by name and by nature, all evils dwell with me, their name is Legion. Mum says this is ridiculous. Mum is a Protestant. I know lots of Protestant kids, and Anglican kids, they have CEBS and CEGS instead of Confession. I don’t know what CEGS is but the boys laugh at it because it sounds like sex. One day I am honoured because when my Dad is away Tess Charles invites me to

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Protestant Sunday School with her. At Sunday School you do art and you get bright stickers that say GOD IS LOVE. I know these stickers because we swap our holy cards to get them from the Protestants. Holy cards are dark, they have paintings of saints rolling their eyes and Jesus pointing to his wounds. They have Catherine of Siena, her head is in a church in Italy, you can visit it, it hasn’t rotted but it has shrunk a lot. They have Teresa of Avila with a spear through her heart. They have the other Catherine too, spiked on a wheel. They named fireworks after her. When I learn to say the Salve Regina I get a holy card as reward. It’s Saint Maria Goretti, a modern saint. When she was twelve she was killed because she wouldn’t let a man take her virginity. I ask the nuns what virginity means and they say, ‘Consider Our Lady.’ When I turn thirteen I breathe easily, because I have outlived Maria Goretti. I ask the Protestant Sunday School man, ‘If God is love why did he make Hell?’ He says, ‘Because he is a just God.’ I think he says ‘adjust God’. I think ‘Thy will be done’ means ‘you will be done’. I think ‘fruit of thy womb’ is something you can eat. Nevertheless, the nuns believe I may have a vocation. One of my aunties became a nun. The other was committed to a mental institution for life. It’s never talked of openly, but we know all about it, in that

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utterly certain way only family secrets can be known. It’s as if you swallow them with your food and drink, or inherit them, like terrain. I know less about the nun than about the schizophrenic — paranoid and catatonic, she carries more shame than any nun. She’s still alive somewhere, but Mother says you can’t visit her. Mother enjoys the madness of her in-laws, it makes her own genes automatically superior. Whenever there’s a fight with Father she can toss in ‘you’re a schizophrenic like your sister’. That certainly shuts him up. Dad says I look like Vera, that’s the mad sister. A sister driven into desperate terms ... I stare at her picture, scrutinise for clues. Pure blue eyes, gleaming hair pulled back in a thirties bow, though it’s a forties photo. Five years later she was locked away. Vera, what were your voices? Were they Legion? If you tell, you’ll go to Hell. You’ll disappear like the Pyjama Girl. The Grehan women were a tough mob, Dad says, hard-working, hard-drinking Irish stock. They fought the men with their fists and rode bareback in the Western District. One of them, Colleen, took off without warning and didn’t come home, they thought she was the Pyjama Girl, that anonymous body, but she turned up again years later, not in the least bit murdered, and never explained where she’d been. ‘They were thickset and strong, and my mother was one of them,’ Dad says, and tells of how his mother used to beat Vera with an electric cord when she ‘gave lip’.

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Vera was pretty and studying on a scholarship. Vera outstripped her mother. So her mother stripped Vera down. But Vera’s voices grew louder, so Mother kept Vera home for a year, no more hoity-toity, no more school for Vera. Her figure shrank and flattened, her hair grew lank, she had fits of violence. Mother sent Vera to an institution. Dad says he went there once and saw her in chains, sitting in her own filth. I think of Jane Eyre, of the mad woman locked in the top of the house. ‘Shall I tell you of what it reminded me? ... Of the foul German spectre — the Vampyre.’ It’s a fine Sunday morning, so early that even a busy place like Fremantle is almost still, and for once there’s no animal smell from the docks. Sam didn’t come home again last night. I woke with an urge to go to Mass, so I got dressed quickly, but out on the street I changed my mind and turned the other way. Standard Catholics feel guilty if they don’t go to Mass; I feel guilty if I do. Secretive, hoping nobody sees me, nobody I know. It’s mostly elderly ladies there anyway, so this is a kind of paranoia. But I can’t deal with it today. As I walk towards Bathers’ Beach a bell strikes as if to reprimand me, but I press on. The sunlight in the West End is a pinkish yellow; you’d swear you were in some old Italian town, crumbling and somehow pure in its decadence. But when you get to the beachfront, instead of some Christ or Blessed Virgin there’s Ronald

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McDonald gazing benevolently out to sea. At the bottom of High Street the gates under the Round House are open, drawing me like any doorway. This tunnel was bored in the cliff face last century when there was whaling here, to make it easier to move things from sea to street. Whale oil, body parts, things like that. Nowadays they send out whole live sheep, stacked in floors one atop the other; the tunnel isn’t needed any more. Sometimes the gates are locked and you can just catch a glimpse of the ocean, a blue mirage. I pass through the darkness and out onto the gleaming sands. The Round House is behind me now. It was the first permanent building in the old colony — an ironic commentary on their priorities. Perth wasn’t settled by convicts, but they soon brought some in for labour. In the Round House the white men chained Aboriginal prisoners neck-to-neck, on their way to Rottnest Island. Both places are tourist spots now. In a couple of hours people will be up there on the green lawns around the House, taking photos of each other against the backdrop of this wonderfully blue and indifferent sea. They’ll crawl in and out of the Round House’s crypt-like cells, each barely big enough for a single person but crammed in colonial days with more than twenty. Once when I was younger a man bought me coffee late at night and asked me to fuck him in there. I was horrified and spilled my coffee over both of us. That was the last we saw of each other. I move down the beach to escape the McDonald’s

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stench. I am keeping to the base of the cliffs for shade when I notice a strange statue in an alcove. A man in a little cave in the limestone cliff, but he looks like rock. It is, in fact, the Vegan. He seems to be asleep but he’s sitting upright, coated so thickly with crumbs of limestone that you can barely see the fabric of his shirt. His hair and unshaven face are crusted with sand, and his skin feels very cold as I shake his hand. ‘Hey.’ He doesn’t wake, but lurches forward a little. I start to brush the sand from his face, but he puts up a hand to stop me. ‘What are you doing here?’ he says. ‘I could ask you that.’ ‘This is where I live.’ At first I think he’s annoyed, but then he smiles. His eyes are still closed. ‘You can’t live here. You don’t mean you slept the night here?’ ‘I often sleep here.’ ‘I thought you had a flat or something.’ He smiles again. ‘Less said on that the better.’ His body shudders every so often, and grains of sand spray off him. ‘Look, you seem pretty unwell. Why don’t I call a cab and get you back to your place?’ He shrugs, ‘If that’s what you want.’ The taxi drops us at one of the cheap high-rises on the lower side of town. The sort of flats that have solid painted doors with just a number, and almost no

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windows. The Vegan has lost his key. I go down to a flat below where an elderly woman lives, and she gives me a wire coat-hanger, no questions asked, so we can break in. Inside is well-furnished but shrouded with several weeks’ worth of dust, dirt and refuse. There are newspapers and books everywhere, and what must have been lentil curry decomposes in a pot on the kitchen bench. There’s a twisted antenna on the floor, and some videos, but no telly or VCR. The Vegan seems pretty awake now. ‘Welcome to the hellhole,’ he says. ‘I’m going to have a shower. Make yourself at home.’ If this were home I’d start cleaning up, but it strikes me as pretty bad manners under the circumstances, so I just clear a space in one of the armchairs and sit down. From the small window there’s a view of the sea — it looks brilliantly clean now, the sun almost overhead, and I wish I could plunge into it and disappear. The first time I saw snow it was like that: a mesmerising force. I wanted to jump from the night train and into its dark white mass, a cell returning to the body. Surely it wouldn’t be cold at all, but warm as a mother. Like the hot pain that shoots through your head and spine when the ocean dumps you face-first into its grainy bed. The Vegan reappears; he has shed the layer of grit and his dark body hair is glistening. It forms a cross on his chest and down his stomach. Close-up it undulates like the seaweed over the the reef’s stony flesh. But he is soft to touch, and his skin smoother than I have noticed

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before. He seems revivified. He crouches in front of my chair and buries his face in my jeans, feeling for the zip. ‘I’m bleeding,’ I say. He just shrugs. ‘I don’t mind if you don’t mind.’ He covers my cunt with his large warm mouth and tongue. I am dreaming, and I’m aware that I’m dreaming. I am lying at the bottom of the ocean, looking up through a glassy roof. The sun is directly overhead. I am something submarine, a mermaid; down here I can breathe. I swim without effort through a dark tunnel, and rise to the surface of a still lake among mountains. Like I imagine heaven. Like when I was little and used to read Heidi, the part where the grandmother talked of her beautiful, imagined garden. A secret pasture, a sunny Alpine patch. When I wake it’s already very dark and I’m alone on the bed, lying in patches of blood. For a moment I panic, thinking it’s another dream. As a child I often dreamt I was a murderer: long agonising dreams in which I tried madly to clean blood off my night gown, my clothes. Tried to stuff the clothes into bins and baskets but they wouldn’t fit. Someone was coming to get me and I had to hide. But this is no dream: I remember where I am. I’m in the flat, and the Vegan is cooking in the kitchen. ‘Sleep well?’ he says as I step out, kissing me on the forehead. He’s made an elaborate Indian meal that smells heavenly, as if it too came out of my dream. ‘I didn’t know you could cook like that,’ I say.

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‘I can’t be bothered when it’s just me.’ He sweeps papers off the table and lays out the food. While we eat he explains what the dishes are and how he used to eat — and not eat — when he was in India. He looks alive now, radiant; from one extreme to the other. When we have finished eating he says, ‘Won’t your girlfriend be wondering where you are?’ ‘I don’t know where she is,’ I say. ‘She disappears sometimes.’ ‘You had a fight?’ ‘No. Yes. Yes. It’s just jealousy.’ ‘Not over me being there I hope.’ ‘No, no — the shrink.’ ‘She sees a shrink?’ ‘No. I do.’ I am more than faintly embarrassed to tell him this. ‘Cannibals,’ he says. ‘Why feed them?’ I am in the depths of the university library; it’s like the bowels of the earth. It’s a basement room. Not quite as cold as Dante’s core of ice, but not much better. I was late for work this morning but at least I made it. I am supposed to be researching for Miles but have at last stumbled upon that earlier book of his, Vamp. It was completely out of place on the shelves, nowhere near its rightful home. Bizarre that I found it. It has lots of pictures and even a few colour plates. This is like his latest project in a way: a good intellectual excuse to look at images of women you already liked

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looking at anyway. A rationalisation, like: I only read Playboy for the articles. It’s amazing how often I go to find something in one of these library books — say, a still from a movie, a shot of Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn, and some student or teacher has simply sliced it out with a razor blade and kept it for themselves. Excised from the ‘history’ books, so to speak. Makes me think of Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell, doctoring library books with their quirky cut and paste. They went to prison for it, too. Thinking of Orton reminds me of the Vegan and his gold velour skirt. My gold velour skirt. What the butler saw? I blot out the distraction and try to refocus on this book. Monsters in literature and film have often evinced a certain sexual ambiguity even when their supposed designation was male. See Musselwhite28 on the femininity of Frankenstein’s creature, for example. Dracula and others of his persuasion rely for their effect on this same ambiguity: they are pale, sinuous, associated with all that is not-male in the dominant (patriarchal) culture: shadow, intuition, body, blood, and the fluid in general. Some writers 29 have suggested that the vampire story is a kind of reconstructed menstrual myth, feminine to its very roots, and that the vampire, with his or her fatal gaze, is intrinsically related to the Medusa figure.

I am excited. Something is coming together here,

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something I cannot quite give voice to. I want to read the rest but I don’t want to check the book out and take it home; I don’t want Sam to see it. I write down the names of the films he mentions in the book. Carmilla. Blood and Roses. The Vampire Lovers. It seems there is a whole tradition, a subgenre, of lesbian vampirism. My eyes are dazzlingly opened, I feel I am seeing for the first time. When I drop some work in at Miles’s office he’s in an extra-good mood: he’s just officially got his PhD, and they’re changing the nameplate on his door. ‘So — Dr Miles Van Helsing,’ I say. He laughs. ‘You haven’t been reading my Vamp, by any chance?’ I nod. ‘How did you get interested in that sort of thing?’ ‘The movies, I suppose. I was a bit of a horror addict in my teens, and the book is ... well, probably an intellectual rationalisation of that. But how did you come across it; not in the library?’ ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It was shelved in the wrong place: under anthropology. I saw it sticking out; the red lettering caught my eye.’ ‘Anthropology! Maybe that’s where it should be,’ Miles laughs again. ‘You know, the weird thing is, all these stories of witches and the supernatural — I mean for instance the medieval ones — they come from supposedly reliable sources.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

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‘Well, the same sources that we take on trust for medical and scientific information about the period. It’s as if, in making history, we pick and choose what’s “authentic”.’ ‘You think witches and monsters and those things might really exist?’ ‘Well, “exist” is a funny word, isn’t it? They certainly “exist” as genuinely as anything else in history. A whole village once testified to finding a vampire floating in a coffin of blood when they disinterred a suspect. Some people confessed to being witches, you know. And werewolves.’ I ponder this. ‘But people say all sorts of things under pressure.’ ‘Sure. Still, there’s a sense in which, if you believe you are a werewolf, somehow you are.’ I pause. ‘And if you believe someone else is?’ Miles chuckles. ‘Fortunately I’ve never been in that position. My life’s been pretty dull. That’s why I write books.’ ‘Virtual reality?’ ‘But all reality is sort of virtual, isn’t it?’ Miles says. ‘Speaking of which, my boyfriend has organised a costume party tonight to celebrate my new “doctoral” identity, if you’d like to come.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. I might have something else on,’ I lie. ‘But thanks anyway — and congratulations.’ I am expecting to come home to an empty house again but Sam is there, sprawled out on the sofa and

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smoking as if her life depended on it. ‘Sorry about the chilli sauce,’ she says. ‘Doesn’t matter, I cleaned it up.’ She beckons for me to sit beside her, folds her arms around me, rests her chin on my shoulder. A mist of smoke hangs about our faces. ‘I’ve forgotten what I wrote,’ Sam says. ‘I’m not repeating it for you,’ I say. ‘Please don’t be grumpy, I didn’t mean it,’ she says. ‘Anyway you know I love you.’ She kisses me on the neck and says suddenly, ‘You’ve been with the Vegan, I can smell him.’ ‘What do you mean, smell him?’ ‘I can. I’m very sensitive with things like that. I know where you’ve been.’ ‘I don’t ask where you’ve been,’ I point out. ‘Okay, it doesn’t matter.’ She stubs out her cigarette and strokes my face; her hands are very cold. I make small talk, try to mask my thoughts. I want, for once, to be a step ahead of her. It takes all my mental effort to put up this wall; surely Sam can feel it. But she just lights up another cigarette. I can see it’s going to be a night of awkward silences. ‘There’s a party on,’ I try. ‘My boss just got his PhD. It’s a costume party.’ ‘I don’t want to go in costume,’ Sam says. ‘You can just go as you are.’ ‘Do I detect sarcasm?’ I am hurt. ‘Do you want to go or not?’

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I never went to parties and nightclubs and that sort of thing in my teens. I tried a couple of times but I never knew what to say to people. Being in big groups of people has always been, for me, like Jane Eyre’s Red Room: an overwhelming panic, a sound like the beating of wings. Not angels’ wings, but the wings of some great bird after carrion. Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee ... We are the only ones at the party not in costume, though people ask, on account of my shaven head, whether I’m meant to be Sinéad O’Connor. Stale joke, if they only knew it. Miles is dressed as Doctor Jekyll, and his boyfriend, wearing an artificial hump and ghastly make-up, is Edward Hyde. There’s a Madonna who is dancing so fast in a corner that she’s losing her false breasts and her wig is slipping; you can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman underneath. There’s a Frida Kahlo complete with monobrow, and a very drunk Jimi Hendrix who asks her, loudly, ‘So what’s it like screwing Trotsky?’ There is a young man dressed as Dracula who has brought his pet rat with him. He’s a full bottle on Deleuze and Guattari and becoming animal. The rat’s name is Ben, after the rat from the movie Willard, the Ben that Michael Jackson sang about. It sits on his shoulder while he chats and drinks and every so often it scuttles around his body under his wing-collar shirt. When he calls it by name, it pokes out its nose again. ‘Rats are very intelligent,’ he tries to convince me,

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but I can’t help a shudder. When Sam calls the rat, it leaps onto her shoulder, and its teeth chatter violently. The young man is surprised. ‘He’s never gone to anyone else before,’ he says, sounding disappointed. All I can think of is the Plague. Though this of course is a retrospective association; at the time of the Black Death they didn’t know what we know now about how it was being spread. Just as in early surgery they had no idea about sepsis — that an act as simple as washing your hands could make all the difference to a patient’s survival. Evil, it seems, is always one step ahead of us. Sam has disappeared outside for a cigarette with the rat man. I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, one I am beginning to learn to recognise. But I go on talking to Miles and the small handful of people I know at the party, and try to block it out. I am not responsible for what Sam does. I am not responsible. I tell myself, what I think I know is not true. I tell myself, paranoia runs in the family. Fatal to give in to it. And yet ... Much later, Sam comes back in alone, as I expected. My heart is pounding. Am I complicit, because I say nothing? ‘I’d like to go now,’ I say. ‘If you’re ready, let’s call a cab.’ In the back of the cab, with Sam’s arm around me, her lips nuzzling and butting at my neck and chest, I

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feel something slithering. It’s the rat. I scream, and the cab driver slams on the brake. ‘What’s going on there?’ ‘There’s a rat in the car.’ ‘A what?’ ‘A rat.’ He stops the car and turns on the interior light. Sam squints and yells, ‘Turn it off, will you?’ ‘Okay, you want to keep the rat, I turn it off. Now where are you going again?’ I tell him the address. I glare at Sam in the dark, but she just shrugs. ‘He gave it to me,’ she whispers. ‘Oh?’ ‘The rat. When he went home.’ I find this hard to believe. I imagine the rat man’s body in someone’s suburban backyard, bled dry. ‘Well, you can’t keep it at home,’ I say. ‘And where is it now?’ Sam opens her shirt, and there’s the rat on her left arm. The cab driver is muttering something about unnatural women. Sam says, ‘So — who did you chat up at the party?’ I’m tired of this jealousy; it’s gone past the point where I even feel stung now. At this very moment I know, as you always know at a certain moment before a break-up actually happens, that I will finish with her. I have no idea how I will do it. I just know it is inevitable.

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8 F OR CRYING OUT LOUD

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The Vegan opens the door just a crack. ‘Who are you?’ ‘Tracy. It’s just Tracy.’ ‘Oh, I though you were the ...’ he mumbles, and pulls the door back, shivering. I go in. ‘I’ve got to find two hundred dollars,’ he says. ‘What for?’ ‘I shouldn’t actually tell you. But I will.’ He looks at his feet, which are bare. ‘The video rental people ... It’s overdue rent.’ ‘I didn’t know you had a video.’ ‘I don’t. I hocked it a few weeks ago.’ ‘You hocked a rental machine?’ He nods. ‘A telly and video in one piece.’ ‘How much to get it out again?’ ‘Fifty.’ ‘And two hundred rental?’ ‘One-fifty.’ ‘I see.’ ‘Can you cover it?’

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I hesitate, and this offends him. ‘You either can or you can’t,’ he says rapidly. ‘It’s just money: filthy stuff. I’d do it for you if you needed it and I had the money. You know I would.’ So we walk downtown to the teller machine. ‘Actually,’ he whispers in my ear, ‘can you go twofifty?’ ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I just wrote a cheque for the video people?’ I ask. ‘Don’t you trust me?’ he says. ‘Anyway I can’t remember their name. Look, don’t bother if it’s such a hassle.’ ‘It’s not a hassle.’ I hate pawnshops; for me they have the smell of bad blood. Once I knew a woman who bought all her jewellery from them, because her taste for glamour outstripped her husband’s income. She felt proud of her economising. She considered it like budget cuts of meat or meal stretchers, necessary to her survival. Now, however, we waste no time looking around. We cover the video, once redeemed, in a rug, and carry it back to the flat. ‘While you’ve still got it,’ I say, ‘there’s a few films I’d like to see,’ and I tell him about my new-found vampire interest. ‘Go for it,’ the Vegan says. So we spend the afternoon and the evening watching every bloodsucking video we can get hold of. I soak them up. I get out the girlie vampires — Ingrid Pitt with her impossible,

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dark Barbie-doll looks — the male vampires, Nosferatu in both versions, and various revisions of Dracula. There are sci-fi vampires, cowboy vampires, psychiatrist vampires, even child vampires. Too many to absorb in one sitting. It’s as if the genre has penetrated other genres, colonised them all. Some of the films are crude and obvious, floating along on a tide of blood. Others are subtle as infection itself, their vampirism abstracted almost to metaphor. Some are queerly prosthetic, relying on machines, devices, implements to do the piercing and sucking that drives the almost superfluous plot. The Vegan likes these the best, but I love them all. I have found my culture, and it is speaking to me. By about three in the morning my mind gives up, a collapsed vein, and I fall asleep in the Vegan’s lap. I dream of that teller machine, the red sign telling me it is CLOSED, the machine cleaning itself and refusing to yield any money. To tell is also to count, and to recount. Telling your beads when you say the Rosary. Telling your faults. Tell me the old old story. That’s a Protestant hymn I learned from Mother. Um-ah, I’m telling on you. What we said when we saw something naughty. Some things we couldn’t tell about, because we didn’t know what to call them, or the words were forbidden words. Mother said, I’ll wash your mouth out with soap. So we learned to tell two stories at once, everything we said was metaphor or allegory. Mother, for love of

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grace/Lay not that flattering unction to your soul/That not your trespass, but my madness speaks. Read my lips. Vera got hit for giving lip. You watch your tongue girl, sarcasm doesn’t become you. Have you seen the film Blue Velvet? ... Aren’t you going to answer my question? Didn’t you hear me? Tracy, it’s considered detrimental to therapy if ... there is too much intrusion of the therapist’s background. The therapist should be non-intrusive. Ah, you mean if I know too much about you. You always do that, you say, ‘there is’ this or that — there is anger ... As if these states could float about in the room without somebody doing them. Why not talk real language, for god’s sake? Why not say ‘you are angry’? It seems there’s ... that makes you — feel angry? I would like to know if you’ve seen Blue Velvet. Hmm. Yes, I have. Okay. Thank you. All I wanted to say was, you remind me of Jeffrey Beaumont. I think you are Jeffrey Beaumont. Figuratively speaking ... What do you think, literally? Come on. But you

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are, nonetheless. You’re Jeffrey hiding in the closet, watching, watching everything, and you’re afraid to come out of the cupboard because you might get drawn in. I’m afraid? You’re a voyeur. You want to see and not be seen. That’s what this whole process is about, that’s why you’ve stuck by me for so long. You just want to see what happens next, and at my expense ... Safe in your armchair, making your little private judgements about me. Do you feel unassailable? Don’t you feel guilty? Aren’t you afraid I might drag you out of the cupboard and make you pay? You keep using the word ‘afraid’. Perhaps there’s some ... perhaps you feel some fear yourself and are attributing it to me? Well, I must say it’s nice to hear some personal pronouns at last. Maybe we can have a conversation one of these days. Sarcasm is like biting, only you don’t need teeth. Sarkazein, to tear the flesh. Once bitten, twice bitten, never shy. My mother covered in lesions. I shall take no bite of your body,/Bottle in which I live ... Her children obsessed with secret messages. We wrote to each other in code. When Mother said, ‘I learned that one as a child,’ we invented our own. Lemon juice invisible on paper, appearing like a bruise when heated. Sign

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language, learned from Coles Funny Picture Book, after reading the life of Helen Keller. Mother went on and on about Helen Keller. But it was Anne Sullivan I loved, the orphan and teacher who rescued her. She must have believed it was a world worth coming into. I try to be Helen Keller, before and after. I walk around the house with my eyes closed, trying to sharpen my intuition, but I still bump into things. I rely too much on my eyes, they are getting strained, I can’t read the blackboard at school. I begin to bump into things even with my eyes open. It’s as if the outlines of objects, the boundaries between things, have all become blurred. One day there is a total solar eclipse, and all the kids beg the teacher to pull the blinds down in the classroom, as if the sun would lean down and seek them out to burn their eyes. The teacher says, ‘The sun won’t hurt you unless you actually look at it,’ but the kids insist nonetheless. So we have an unofficial holiday, lights out, blinds down, we play Haunted House and Murder in the Dark instead of doing schoolwork. We watch the image of the eclipse on television as previous generations made pinhole cameras. Some kids won’t even look at the screen; they need this superstition. I watch entranced as the two spheres merge a fraction at a time, like a cell dividing in reverse. What I want back is what I was ... I have finished the research project for Miles now, but

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he wants to keep me on as a sort of technical and clerical assistant, more or less permanently. I wonder what it will feel like to be in the same job for maybe a whole year. Then maybe two years, and so on. I can almost imagine it, but I have to conjure up a new picture of myself. ‘What do you do for a living?’ ‘Oh, I work at Murdoch University.’ It doesn’t seem real, but maybe if I act as if, it will become possible. Sam says, ‘But I think you can do better. You don’t want to be an assistant for the rest of your life.’ I remain calm now where once I would have felt attacked. ‘I know I can do better, but this is a good start. If I can support myself like this, there are all sorts of things I can do. Not least of which is to show evidence of the stability I could offer my daughter.’ ‘Stability,’ she says. ‘You don’t know whether you’re Arthur or Martha. No one’s going to let a kid stay with someone who’s in two relationships at once. Make up your mind, for crying out loud.’ I dream I am mother to a vast household of children, crawling and walking and crying children. One of them, a little boy, is mutant-like; he has some disease and is gradually infecting the other children. He has become so ugly that he covers himself with a shroud. He is growing bigger and bigger inside the shroud and I am struggling to hold him, keep him small. He grows to adult size, he is a huge and heavy

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man lying on top of me and I am wrestling to get him off and get rid of him. When I wake up my muscles ache from virtual wrestling, I am shivering and sweaty. Each time Tess has a day with me, she spends the first few hours calling me ‘Dad’ by mistake. Today she brings me a calendar she made at her toddlers’ group: a collage of pink crepe paper and silver foil on a red heart. It says ‘For Mummy and Daddy’, but of course the handwriting isn’t hers. She can only form a few letters. Once a card like this would have made me wince, but now I just see it as thoughtlessly generic. It’s not as if every other kid has both parents; there are many in Tess’s situation. I take her down to the Esplanade: there’s a playground there which she loves. Tess bends down to the sand and picks up something bright. ‘Look, what is it?’ she says excitedly. It’s the cap off a fit. Thank God there’s no needle. She’s been told so many times not to touch or pick up things off the ground; how do you teach kids not to trust? ‘Come and we’ll wash your hands,’ I say, and then we head for the mini-fair. Tess likes to pop balls into the clown’s mouth and win a prize — the same prize every time, too, no matter how high or low she scores. She must have a huge collection of baby trolls by now, but she doesn’t seem to mind, she likes the ritual aspect of it. Then there’s the big castle you can bounce on — really just a glorified

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air mattress. When I was a kid, because it was the days of the space race I suppose, we had a similar thing called a Moon Walk, only it was dome-shaped and you had to climb inside to bounce. A sort of artificial amusement-womb. I only went in it once — Mother considered that sort of thing a real waste of time and money. But it was my birthday, and Show Day, so she relented. She sat at the pavilion, from which she could watch, and had tea and lamingtons while I climbed in. After about a minute the roof of the Moon Walk began to sink, and the sideshow man yelled at us to get out fast. The gas was running out, and the Moon Walk was deflating. I imagined being trapped and smothered in there; and on my birthday too. Most of the other kids were angry because we had paid for five minutes and couldn’t get our money back. I was just glad to escape. Tess is bouncing now, knocking heads and limbs with the too many other kids on the open Castle, calling ‘Da-Mum! Look!’ It’s hard to imagine this child was once curled inside me, kicking, punching, rebounding even as she does now. Was that the last real connection I had with anyone? I know I love her, and she loves me — it’s like bedrock — but the upper ground is always shifting. When she leaps from the Castle, sweaty and excited, and sits in my lap to get her shoes back on, I see the same eye looking up at me that I saw when I used to breastfeed her — lifted every so often, as if to check that

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my attention was still there. I squeeze her close to me and she says, ‘Don’t be sad, Mum. Why are you sad?’ I am not sad, I am angry — enraged — but this always comes out as sadness in me, like a garbled message. I can’t tell Tess that, so I just kiss her. I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand ... ‘Come on, we don’t want to miss the bus,’ I say. The bus back from Victor’s place always seems empty; I feel her absence beside me, as when she was a baby I swayed and rocked even without her on my hip or shoulder; she was a phantom limb that still ached. Still does ache. When I let myself in at home Sam is there, in the lounge room, with the Vegan. Only he’s on the floor, not moving. ‘What is he doing here?’ ‘Overdose,’ she says. ‘He’s gone.’ My legs buckle and I crouch beside him. ‘Are you sure? He’s not just out of it? What happened?’ ‘Injected into his neck.’ ‘What?!’ ‘Well, he said he knew what he was doing ... but then he just keeled over, and I haven’t been able to wake him. I thought first he was in a coma. But he’s dead, isn’t he?’

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‘Isn’t he? Isn’t he? What do you mean, isn’t he?’ All the blood seems to drain from the top to the bottom of my body. ‘Ssh, not so loud. Let me think. I can’t think.’ I almost hate her for her calmness. ‘There’s no use taking him to the hospital,’ Sam says. ‘Nothing they can do now.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I am chafing the Vegan’s thin yet heavy hand; it is cold, but then it was always cold, even when he was very much alive. My heart is thumping; how can there still be blood in me? For a moment I have the sensation of being in two places at once, lying down there and standing here. I bite my lip but can’t feel it. After some time I say, ‘Shouldn’t we call the police? I mean, we have to tell someone.’ Sam shakes her head, ruffling her crimson hair. ‘You’ll have to do it,’ she says. ‘You tell them he overdosed, you didn’t know he was using. You came home and found him.’ ‘Why? Why lie?’ She looks flustered, which is unusual for Sam. ‘They want me for — something else. I don’t want to have to talk to them.’ ‘What is it?’ ‘Look, it doesn’t matter now ... It’s better you don’t know. I just don’t want them taking down my details, you know.’ She pauses, then says, ‘Or if you want, we could just dispose of the body.’ I stare at her. An icy feeling seeps through my veins.

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‘Sam.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You didn’t kill him?’ She looks at the ground. She says slowly, ‘What in hell do you think I am?’ I have a fair idea by now, but I say nothing. I try to shut the Vegan’s eyelids, but they stick fast. He looks like an uncanny wax model of himself, like a house you used to live in but now barely recognise. Suddenly I recall seeing Sean in his coffin, it was just like this. But I can’t feel anything. All I can do is make correspondences: this reminds me of that, that word derives from this word. Derive, to spring from, like water from a river, like tears. The tears won’t come. I lie beside the Vegan for ages, my cheek to his breast; I wish I might never rise from there. Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes As one incapable of her own distress Finally Sam says, ‘Look, we can’t leave him where he is.’ I don’t move. I mutter, ‘I should turn you in.’ ‘What?’ ‘You know what I’m talking about.’ A long silence, during which she lights a cigarette, and I remember Meursault who smoked and drank coffee beside his mother’s dead body. As one incapable ... ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ Sam says. ‘You love me.’ My

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eyes meet hers, and for a split second I think she is going to look away, she can’t hold my gaze. But she keeps looking. ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’ I am dull, ineffectual. ‘But I think you should go. Go, and let me deal with this.’ ‘You won’t mention me.’ ‘It’s not you I’m worried about right now.’ She steps toward the door, then turns and says, ‘You hate me?’ I look away. ‘I don’t know. Now go. Please. Just keep away till everything blows over.’ ‘Where will I go?’ I glare at her. ‘I’m sure you found somewhere to hang out before you ever turned up here.’ The police, when they come, find nothing unusual or suspicious in my statement. Such deaths are apparently only too common, and it turns out the Vegan is a ‘registered addict’. Was. ‘How well did you know him?’ ‘Not really that well, I guess. We were sort of ... on and off.’ ‘Uh-huh.’ The police officer shows distaste. Suddenly I realise that for him I am tainted with the junkie stigma. I am then subhuman, not one of his kind, like a prostitute or a schizophrenic, the sort of people he uses a different tone for. Briefly I wonder what it is like to live without that stigma. But maybe everyone has their variation on it. Ever since childhood I felt marked, dirtied. The mark of Cain. I

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can’t imagine what it means to be unmarked. ‘Family?’ I’m unsure whether they mean me or the Vegan. ‘Not that I know of,’ I say. ‘But there could be.’ ‘Use anything yourself?’ ‘I’m sorry?’ ‘Illegal substances?’ I shake my head. I know they will search the house; they won’t find even pot. I have clean arms, clear eyes, nothing to fear. I know they will check for a record. Something to explain my connection, satisfy their files. Then I remember my pills, the antidepressants. Which are legal and logical. The police will say to themselves, ‘Ah, she’s one of those neurotic women,’ and they will think they understand. By two am they are gone, and the house feels cavernous. No Vegan, no Sam. A mild panic. There is no one I can call at this hour — even Victor, who once would have come to me in trouble, would have to wake Tess. Not possible. I will have to spend this night, the worst of nights, alone. There is always Frank, and the soft glow of his upstairs lamp. The thought profoundly sickens me. What haunts me most is the image of the Vegan’s unclosed eyes. I stumble to the bathroom and vomit. I want it out I want to retch it out, slash it out, bleed the dead thing out of my flesh ... What my heart can’t feel, my body can let out. All through Tess’s birth I vomited like this. When I have finished I swallow some water. I

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know I should sleep, but I can’t imagine sleep. I get the largest glass I can find and fill it with water. I unpack my stash of antidepressants. I don’t want to live if he is gone. The universe would turn to a mighty stranger ... I am afraid, though, of passing out before I can get enough tablets down — how many can you cram in at once? I count them, and then count them again. I multiply the milligrams in each capsule by the number of capsules in a packet. I wonder about brain damage. I only want to die if I can kill consciousness. I don’t want an afterlife. It’s not just hell or purgatory I fear: I don’t want heaven either. Eternal numbness grant unto them O Lord. And may they rest in numbness. Amen. I pop each capsule from its little bubble. Dandy’s dream bubbles. I make clusters of them on the bedside table. All of this is stalling, this is part of the wrestle with fear and it irritates me. I lie back on my bed in the yoga corpse posture. I used to do yoga to prepare for Tess’s birth. I am annoyed that I remembered Tess again, it breaks the thought pattern, makes it harder to go through with this. I try to think of the dead body on my lounge room floor, the mute stone of the eyes. And I begin to cry, a small cry at first, but then a long-voiced howl, like the keening that carried me through labour pains. The dogs on the verandah began to howl when I was giving birth. They heard me singing the baby out

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and joined their animal voices to mine. All my excuses are gone, and I am left with myself. I lie watching the rise and fall of my chest as I cry. The wrestling. It’s not because I’m unsure of the dosage. It’s not fear of brain damage. It’s not even the thought of Tess. I actually want to live. I am alive, and I want to be. I fall asleep. I dream the Vegan comes to my door and says, ‘It was all a mistake. It was the wrong body,’ and I am flooded with joy in my wonderful sleep, and for the duration of that night, I am spared, mercifully, any inkling of waking truths.

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9 T HE SELF THAT NIGHT UNDROWNS

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I am sitting at a corner table in Gino’s, waiting for Victor. I am on my second short black and feeling guilty about the caffeine — doctors always tell me I have an erratic heartbeat — when Victor appears, nose to window. Typical: he’s been sitting outside on the terrace all this time — each of us fuming that the other was late. I suggested Gino’s as neutral ground. I want to talk to him about me seeing Tess more often. It strikes me as we greet each other, trying to smile warmly, just how deceptive family appearances can be. Any of those couples you see strolling down South Terrace or Market Street on weekends, with perfect toddlers in tow, could be meeting as we are to discuss access and custody. Each of them thinking the others are real families, and wanting to look that way themselves. Cafés here are popular hand-over spots, the pleasantly pretentious sites at which you get shunted from Mum to Dad and back when you are four or five and have only ever known two homes. Still, it’s surely

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better than living all your childhood out with two people who seem to hate each other yet won’t separate. I would feel more secure with a third party here, but Sam hasn’t shown her face again since the Vegan died, and there isn’t really anybody else I know well enough. Victor’s brought Tess, too, which means we will have to watch what we say in front of her. I haven’t told Victor anything about the Vegan. It was always like this anyway: I had a whole life, or lives, going on, that I never shared with him, even when we shared a home. I couldn’t help it then, wasn’t trying to distance him. But I’ve been scrupulous not to let him know there’s anything more between Sam and me than ordinary friendship. Nor that she was ever in the hospital with me. That’s the kind of detail he might one day use against me if we ever went to court. So I just let him think she moved in to cover the rent. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks. ‘You look deadly pale.’ It’s fear, I think, I am afraid of you. Why should I be afraid of him? But I just shake my head. I have cleaned myself up and am wearing a respectable black hat to cover my gradually lengthening stubble. I want to look trustworthy; instead I look deadly pale. He touches the edge of my face gently as he speaks, and I give a small shudder. ‘There’s nothing the matter,’ I begin. ‘I’d like us to talk about whether I could have Tess overnight, say just once or twice a week.’ ‘Can I get a beer?’ he interrupts, and heads for the

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counter. I nod and try to slow my breathing. It’s ridiculous to be so fearful; this is just a man like any other man leaning at the counter here, or bringing steaming cups to tables. This is the man who sat with me through labour pains and yelled out, ‘I can see the face!’ as Tess was crowning. But he is also more, he is like the self that night undrowns, the stranger I’ve met and recognised in the darkest possible places, learnt the fear of death by; the eyes I’ve looked too deeply into and been too deeply seen by. How can we sit in Gino’s looking for all the world like two civilised beings? After all that we have done to each other? Tess has finished her milkshake and is sitting on the floor, putting disembodied bits into a Disney sticker book: Snow White again. She doesn’t want to do the colouring-in, just matches the odd body parts with the dotted shapes on the drawings. Sometimes she puts the wrong head on the wrong body, so we have the Wicked Queen with Snow White’s face, or the Prince with the huntsman’s knife-wielding hand. This doesn’t seem to bother Tess, and she gets quite upset when Victor suggests unpeeling them and starting again. ‘So.’ He’s back at the table. ‘Why, all of a sudden?’ ‘It’s not sudden, really,’ I start defending, and then, remembering the assertiveness classes they gave us in the hospital, I tell myself not to take on that red herring. Even if it were a sudden request, that’s not

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the issue. ‘But I am her mother, and she likes being with me. I think I can be good for her.’ ‘What about that ... girlfriend of yours? You think I want Tess to grow up in that sort of environment?’ He sees the surprise on my face. ‘Don’t you think I can tell by looking? You’re not that good at covering up. Everyone talks about it. Everyone knows.’ He has surprised me, but again, it’s not the issue. ‘Look, Victor, regardless of that, I can provide a good environment for her.’ It would be so easy just to say, Sam’s gone, okay? I fucked up again. Then Victor would relax, and might even come round. It’s not the lesbian thing that bothers him — he’s never been particularly anti-gay. It’s me having someone else. Jealousy as cruel as the grave. ‘Tracy, I really don’t think you’re well enough. That is, I’d have to see a hell of a lot of changes before I could even consider letting her stay with you.’ He rests his hand on my leg and starts to stroke it almost absent-mindedly. Suddenly I think: this is the part where I’m supposed to start crying, to rest my head on his shoulder and apologise, though not even sure what for. And then comes the bit where we go home and fuck and we’re all tangled up again. I realise now, Victor and I have never made love, we’ve only ever fucked. And to think that’s what I’ve liked about the relationship. I say loudly, ‘Would you mind taking your hand off my leg?’ Victor is stunned but smooth. ‘Would you mind 166

not speaking so loudly? This is a public place.’ ‘That’s why I suggested we meet here.’ ‘Mum! Mum!’ It’s Tess, waving a chocolate-chip cookie. She’s cuddling Sam, who stands there with her dark glasses tucked back on her head. My stomach lurches with a mixture of relief and disgust. I’m so glad to see her; I wish I’d seen the last of her. You’ve never finished with a vampire. Victor stands up. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Sam grins at him, won’t look me in the eye. ‘A sangria would be nice.’ I wince. Does she think that is some sort of a joke? ‘What are you doing here?’ I hiss at her, when he’s gone to get it. She shrugs. ‘It’s a public place. Aren’t you glad to see me?’ ‘I guess so.’ I can’t forgive her, somehow, for the Vegan’s death. I will never know the truth about it. Only she can know, and for that it’s hard to forgive ... ‘Look, Sam, it’s a bad moment.’ ‘Oh, did I interrupt something personal between you two?’ she says. ‘Why are you being like this? You never used to be like this.’ It’s as if, underneath all her insistence on love, she actually loathes me. ‘Because you don’t trust me,’ Sam says. Victor is back. ‘Oh, thank you.’ She sips at the sangria. ‘Well, I might get moving anyway,’ Victor says. I am irritated. ‘But we haven’t settled anything.’

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‘Like I said, we’ll talk about it when you’re really well enough.’ ‘And who will decide that?’ I say, but he’s gone already. I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury said cunning old Fury I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to DEATH Where’s that from? Oh, Alice in Wonderland. The Mouse’s Tale. Quite appropriate really. I’ve always been mousy round Victor. But you made an effort. I guess I did. The problem is, he’s right. Not necessarily for the reasons he thinks. But I can’t really have Tess staying there with Sam around. You don’t trust Sam with her? I think Sam’s a vampire. Meaning? Meaning just what I said. A metaphor: she drains you? A sense that you are being victimised. No. No. I mean quite literally, truly, real-worldout-there sort of stuff. She’s a vampire. I see. When did you first start to think like this? Well, somehow I’ve known it all along. Like it’s

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been shadowing me. But it wasn’t ... fully conscious. Uh-huh. Have you noticed — any other changes? How are your sleeping patterns? Oh god, you’re doing it to me again. You medicalise everything. Why do you never believe me? It matters that I believe you? What do you think? How does it feel to tell me this, about Sam? ‘DO YOU KNOW NOTHING? DO YOU SEE NOTHING? DO YOU REMEMBER NOTHING?’ I’m sorry? Not as sorry as I am. I read the newspaper, as usual, on the way home. The train trip from the loony bin to Fremantle is exactly twenty minutes long, and reading helps me cope with the aftermath of the sessions. Not that the newspaper helps ground me in the ‘real world’ — quite the opposite. But it shows me what’s out there is madder than I’ll ever be. There was a report on a court case years ago I remember in the Daily News — four girls who charged their uncle with severe and shocking sexual abuse that occurred, they said, during their childhood, and was forgotten by them until they began therapy. The lawyer for the man’s defence says, ‘Either this man truly is a monster as they say, or these women, in

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imagining such monstrosities, are indeed profoundly sick. Either/or. There can be no inbetweens.’ Either/or. That’s not how I understood the legal system to work. I thought there was a bit in there about ‘reasonable doubt’. This lawyer makes it sound as though the girls were on trial themselves, rather than their uncle. How would Perry Mason handle this one? But then on Perry Mason, the guilty all break down and tell in the end. Telltale tit, your tongue will split. I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury, said cunning old Fury. But the Furies were women, and there were three of them, like the three Fates. They had snake hair like Medusa, and their job was to chase up people who went unpunished for doing wrong. On Perry Mason, nobody goes unpunished for doing wrong. Victor and victim are clearly signalled and confirmed. The bad woman is usually dark, and she sleeps around, or is a divorcee. I like that word, it’s one of those words Mother finds it hard to use. A word from the fifties, said in hushed tones. Sometimes they fool you on Perry Mason by making the villainess a blonde, but she’s always too sexual or too loudly spoken, so if you’ve watched it often enough you can pick her. Sometimes the real villain is a man, and she was just in love with him and covering up for him. Sometimes there are men disguised as women and

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women disguised as men. Or did I dream that? Reading too much Joe Orton again. What The Butler Saw. Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing? I remember Jane Eyre when the minister asks her how she can avoid hell: ‘I must keep in good health, and not die.’ I remember her terror in the Red Room: the shaft of light, the blood beating in her ears, and it reminds me of the stranger-who-is-not-a-stranger, who comes into my room at night when I am six and tells me I will disappear like the Beaumont children. I will not disappear. I will keep in good health, and I will not die. Our old bath, newly scrubbed, is filling almost to the brim. We never use it, see it as a luxury hard to justify. But tonight, while Sam is out, I have bought myself some rose bath salts and am running the hot water over them, stamping one foot after the other on the icy concrete. When we were kids we all had to share the same bath — first together, when very small, and later one after the other, the water progressively more tepid, cloudy with dirt. Sean always claimed the deep end, which suited me fine as I was mortally afraid of that plughole. This was because of my Auntie Wendy who lived with us, and who, when she bathed me, would sing

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My Tracy has gone down the plughole My Tracy has gone out to sea My Tracy has gone down the plughole O bring back my Tracy to me Bring back, bring back ... I still sit, as an adult, at the other end of the bath. I have brought with me a book and some hot tea, meaning to be totally self-indulgent, but once in the water I forget all about them. A few daddy-long-legs spiders creep further back into their corners, not used to sharing the bath. Otherwise, no movement. I lie there for about an hour, only stirring to let in more hot water when the bath gets lukewarm. As I kneel upright at the tap, my period comes, dropping with unusual force into the clearer liquid, spreading and diluting. I think, What the hell, and lie back again. Just glad to see the blood: it’s overdue. I couldn’t have been pregnant, though the secret stupid romantic side of me imagines it would love to have the Vegan’s baby, preserve some part of him that way. But the real me knows it would be a disaster. And what would Sam say? It’s just a reaction to shock, this lateness, because of the Vegan’s death. When Sean died my period stopped for a year; a kind of enforced physical grieving. As if I had shut down to basal metabolic rate. So maybe this returning blood is a token of acceptance, a good sign: my body will persist.

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The front door slams. Sam is home, and as if she can smell me, she walks straight to the bathroom and looks in. ‘What’s this,’ she says, ‘bathing in the blood of virgins, eh?’ That’s more your style, I think, but I say, ‘My own blood’s quite enough for me, thanks.’ She grins. ‘Want to go out and see a movie?’ ‘It’s a bit late for that,’ I say. ‘You mean contextually, or ontologically?’ ‘Give me a break.’ I step out of the pink water and wrap myself in a towel. I let out the water; it makes an enormous noise going down, the plughole a greedy, guzzling mouth. ‘You’ll wake the dead,’ Sam says. She hovers about while I get dressed — big, baggy clothes — I like to feel swaddled and hidden when I am bleeding. Sam slips a cold hand under my jumper, but I say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m not in the mood.’ She pulls back. ‘Suit yourself. There’s no need to bite my head off.’ And after splashing her face and running some gel through her spiky hair, she goes out again. On the prowl, I know. She gets a certain hard, tarty look about her when she’s off for a kill. She knows I know, but we never discuss it. It’s like someone with a secret junk habit who has promised not to use in the house and kids themselves that it doesn’t affect anything. I am not responsible for what Sam does. I tell myself, what I think I know is not true. I dream the Vegan comes to my door and says,

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‘It was all a mistake ...’ But I do know. I do know. I will not pretend anymore. Tonight, though Sam doesn’t realise it, she’s stalking her last quarry. I have made my decision, and will act. She can’t get into my head anymore, because I’ve recognised her for what she is. But I can get into hers. She’s so familiar to me, I know her like my own soul. What kind of pick-up tactics she’ll use. How she’ll smile. No aggression: she’ll come across all passive, every inch the feminine female. So they think they’re going in for the kill. They won’t believe their luck: a woman this easy. And her slightly butch look makes it even better — they’ve managed to snag a feminist. Not an ugly one, mind you, but they love to make feminists recant, especially on their knees, paying homage to Lord Phallus. Itís much more of a challenge to do this to the ones who use words like phallogocentric. Iím walking around Fremantle in my Blundstones, making no noise so the men donít hear me coming. Not that I have to go after them ó Iím like Bella in Dirty Weekend, they just fall across my path like the dead sparrows they are. Iím no hunter, Iím a gatherer, like all good traditional women. I look in at the Sail & Anchor, but thereís nothing appetising in there tonight: all anaemic yuppies with short hairdos and clean shirts, girlfriends and fiancÈes nodding and smiling vacuously. I head instead for the port and find a nice seedy

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blokesí pub. There are no women here except for the barmaid and some skimpy dancers. I go in and order a sangria but they donít have any. This draws the necessary attention, and some of the blokes start needling me. Iíll be needling them soon, after another fashion. I let them buy me drinks and then, one by one, I sample the men outside. The first two are foul ó too much alcohol and whatnot else pickling the blood. The third is more palatable ó heís heftier and has obviously had a meal tonight, I can smell the meat in his digestive system, so his blood is less affected. Probably got a nice wifey at home to cook dinner for him while he ogles the skimpies. I take him outside. He starts unzipping himself but has to pee against the wall first. ëWhatís your name, girlie?í He wants a name, like they want names for girlies in girlie magazines, so they can tell all those blonde bunny faces apart, give them a semblance of humanity. Just a semblance, mind. Hi, my name’s Candi and I like cocks. I work as a waitress and I just love to serve you whatever you want. One day I’m going to be in the movies. ëHey, sweetheart?í Now heís groping me, thatís better because Iím near the jugular. ëWhatís your name, hey?í ëHothead Paisan Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist,í I say, and slice into his neck. I drink deep. Heís good,

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he doesnít even make a sound; but heís messy. Something has burst, heís spouting like a main water pipe hit when digging, and thereís blood all over the doorway. Terrible waste, but Iíd better move on. and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the Lord will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come into your houses to smite you I donít often go into peopleís houses, but while Iím down this end of town and hitting my stride I might as well pay a little visit. This oneíll be tricky, Iím not his type, he likes them ... submissive, so thereís no point luring him. Could just as well scale the wall and crash through the bedroom window. But Iíve never liked that stagey stuff, itís not efficient. And there has to be, after all, some degree of ... consent. I throw a stick at the upstairs window, at the soft glow of the floor lamp, and he answers the front door straightaway. I smile softly. ëHello, Frank. Iím a friend of Tracyís,í I murmur, and the stupid dickhead lets me in. He wants me to go upstairs with him, but I insist, and reach for his zip. He grabs my hand, outraged. ëYou need a little instruction in manners,í he says, and bends my arm up behind my back. Thinking he has me. I can smell the pulse in his neck. He stares in amazement when I bite. Sinking him takes longer than I counted on, thereís a fair whack of blood in him. I donít want to leave any

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chance of him reviving. No leftovers. Iíll try to drain him out. Oh fuck, thereís a noise upstairs, some woman calling. Better shoot through. Sheís gonna love this, eh. Streets again. Find somewhere to clean myself up a bit. Donít like wearing my dinner all down my front. The toilets at the back of Ginoís are good, not too well lit, and thereís no mirror. A bit cramped though. But the terrace is usually good for scoring. On the way out I spot the asshole, Victor, having a drink with his friends. Now thereís a thought. I sidle over and join them. Victor looks pleased somehow, perhaps pleased that I am not being as aggressive as he expects a lesbian to be. I size up his friends but none of them really appeals. Unfortunately Iíve blunted my hunger: too big an entrÈe. I feel a great urge to transform a Victor into a victim. Itís a logical step, a dÈnouement to do the story proud. Tracy could have her daughter back and no more hassles from the ex. But then she seems to want the hassles. I donít understand her anymore. She blocks me now when I try to get inside her; and she doesnít want sex. But she still hangs on. I donít like the feeling: itís as if thereís someone waiting for me or following me, around every corner, and I donít know who it is, whether theyíre before or behind, or when theyíll get me. I mustnít think that

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way. Iíve kept at least one step ahead all the way. Iíve looked after myself ó no one else will. Did you think I’d crumble, did you think I’d lay down and die, oh no not I, I will survive, oh as long as I get lots of blood I know I’ll stay alive. Silly song, needs revamping. She thinks poetry, I think pop. If you put us together thereíd be no stopping us. What is she thinking now? I just canít tune in. I tune in to Victor and his friends. Theyíre talking about that new movie, Interview With The Vampire, which hasnít opened here yet. One of the women says, ëHe just doesnít look like Lestat. He just isnít what a vampire is like,í and I have to laugh at that; she canít recognise one right under her nose. She says sheís read all the Rice books but sheís lying. She got partway through but she was too scared. One of the men is wondering if Tom Cruise is really gay. Victor is puzzling over why I am out late without Tracy, and feeling guilty for being out late himself ó his mother is babysitting Tess. Heís considering going home. I move in. ëI need a lift. I donít sípose youíd be heading out Kardinya way, would you? I have to see someone there.í Heís surprised but receptive. ëSure, are you ready to go? I was just thinking of leaving.í ëMe too.í ëWell, Iím parked down by the Round House, if you donít mind the walk.í

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Itís really windy, and his words are carried away as we walk, but I hang on inside his mind. ëLook, I know Tracy thinks Iím a bastard, but Iím only trying to do the right thing by Tess. I do try. And I admit, Iíve found it very hard to let go. I wanted our marriage to work. I was a bastard in many ways, thatís why I left. So it wouldnít go on getting worse.í Oh Beelzebub, he thinks Iím a chuck-bucket. All his woes and regrets are going to come out. Worst of all, he really thinks he is telling the truth. We get to the bottom end of High Street and I suggest a walk on the beach. I scour every corner of his mind: yes, he is unsuspecting. He doesnít even imagine Iím here to seduce him. The tunnel gates under the Round House are wide open. Victor is puzzled; theyíre usually bolted by this time of night, but the bolt is missing from the hasp. ëIím cold,í I say. ëDo you mind if I share your coat?í Victor goes to take off his coat, and I lunge for him ó but hereís Tracy: what? how did you get here? Tracy? What? No. No, please.

I will take the bolt I slid from the gate and thrust it into her heart. She will be released, at last, from her wretched loneliness, her explosive rage. She will be free. Or it will happen like this: I will remove her little pots of dirt from the bedroom

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and around the house, the ones she says are for holding incense sticks, though I never see her burning any incense. No, they are smatterings of her native soil, the earth that vampires must carry with them if they leave their homeland. Without it they cannot go on. I finger the dirt and wonder where it has come from — Eastern Europe somewhere, or Germany. Her grave must be far from here, otherwise I could search it out by daylight, as they did in Carmilla. To undo her in her very coffin, where she lies in inches of blood. Ophelia suspended forever in the water. Removing the jars of earth will not destroy her, but will weaken her considerably, as kryptonite weakens Superman. I will come home one night, having worked late. Sam won’t hear my key in the door. She’s in bed with her latest victim — wasn’t expecting me so soon — and feels unaccountably sleepy. ‘Oh, hello,’ she drawls, pulling the sheet up over the corpse of the young man beside her. She’s done a neat job this time, no blood to be seen. ‘Sorry, you caught me out. I fell asleep straight after dinner. Think I might be coming down with something.’ She holds out her arms hopefully, and I glide towards her. In my coat pocket is the breadknife the Vegan wanted to lop himself with. I run my finger along it inside my pocket. The edge is blunt, but the point is sharp enough. I take her hands and gaze at her. Think of the Little

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Mermaid: not Tess’s Disney heroine, who ends up marrying her prince, but the nameless one of Andersen’s tale, who stands on board ship the night the prince marries someone else, knowing that by dawn she will turn to foam on the ocean. Her sisters appear from beneath the waves with a knife from the Sea Witch. Before the sun rises you must plunge it into the Prince’s heart ... But the Mermaid, out of love, flings the knife into the waves, and the water turns to blood where it falls. Silly girl, I think. Sam pulls me to her, kisses me, undoes my buttons. I am hesitant. ‘What’s the matter?’ she says. ‘You never want me nowadays.’ ‘Ah, it’s just — him,’ I say, gesturing toward the corpse. ‘Puts me off a bit.’ ‘I’m sorry. I just got tired of eating out, wanted a quiet night at home. I’ll get rid of him later. But come with me.’ She scoops me up and carries me out to the sofa, pulls off my clothes piece by piece. Her body is unusually warm, the afterglow of the blood she’s just had. I wonder how to get the knife from my coat pocket. I don’t want to make love to her — or do I? She draws me in, I am enveloped in those wide blue eyes, mesmerised by the spider on her breast, the wolf, the snake. This is not what I meant to happen. I have to stop it somehow but I can’t stop. She’s easing her fingers into

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me and I feel my body relaxing, trusting, in spite of me. Wilfully separate from me, as it was when I gave birth. This is birth in reverse. Now her whole hand is in there, she is fisting me gently and kissing me all over. I am pinned and can’t get away. I don’t want to get away. ‘I thought you’d never come to me again,’ she says. ‘I’m so lonely. And I’ll always be lonely; there is no one like me. Everybody leaves me in the end. Nobody can tolerate what I am. Even you will leave me. You can’t know what it’s like. I wish you could. I wish we were one person. Imagine being one person, no barriers between us.’ I am so intensely aroused I think I will explode but she keeps me there, in suspense, her small warm breaths on my skin like tiny infusions of her soul. How can she have a soul? I want all of her soul, I want to be one with her, like her, to live forever and never leave her lonely again. She holds my gaze and whispers, ‘Do you want me?’ ‘Yes.’ Her fist plunges deep into me and at that moment her sharp teeth meet my breast. I grope for my coat, for the knife. She sucks sweetly, resting her cheek on my chest, the one eye I can see still holding my gaze, as Tess used to when she suckled. I raise my arms to full height and drive the breadknife into her. She moans, and falls back. Her eyes are open, but I can see she is gone. I lie across her, cheek to cheek,

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palm to palm, breast to breast, a bloodied mirror. When I awake in the morning her body is gone, and instead of a wound I wear her tattoo on my breast, the spider secure in its web. Or this: She follows me to the shrink, I am aware of her presence even though I can’t spot where she is. She’s like a shadow that changes size and direction depending where the sun is. I cast my eyes up and down the train carriage, I am suspicious of everybody. She could be a lizard or a rodent, or even several rodents. She could be anywhere. I get off and walk the long stretch to the hospital, past army barracks and the alternative school. There are children playing in the yard and I sense her thoughts linger there, perhaps she thinks they will be easy victims. But she decides against it. The hospital grounds are full of trees and the magpies are swooping. As a child I was terrified of them. They only do it to protect their young, it’s a kind of paranoia; they too draw blood. But now I am not afraid of birds: they are good spirits. The soul of the Vegan is among them. Sean always said if he died he would travel among the stars. The Vegan, I think, would enter the bodies of waterbirds, those that live between two elements: ibises, or herons. After death there are no divisions.

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I go through the security gate and set the bleeper off. ‘Could you please give us your handbag and empty your pockets, Ma’am.’ It must be picking up on Sam, whom I can’t see: I have no metal on me. But they don’t believe me, can’t let me through. ‘It’s not that we don’t trust you. It’s just regulations. Have to wait while we get someone out to check the mechanism. I’m sure Doctor won’t mind you being a few minutes late.’ By the time I get in there I know Sam will have already arrived. Sure enough, she’s sitting in the chair pretending to be me. He doesn’t seem to notice the difference, doesn’t realise what danger he is in. Any moment now she will attack. She sees me but goes on talking to him, blocking me out so he can’t perceive me. Can’t he see who is there right in front of his eyes? Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing? He says, ‘Sure .... Ah ... Uh-huh ...’ There is a paperknife on his desk, one he uses for opening letters. It has a handle entwined with snakes, like the sword of Asclepius. I walk over to Sam, plunge it into her heart. Sam disintegrates. The shrink says, ‘Uh-huh. I see.’ I take her place in the chair, and for the first time in two years, I look him in the eye as I begin my tale.

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10 A DDENDUM

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Dr

, Registrar, Western Australia

Hospital,

P5 & END

PSYCHIATRIC REPORT: SUMMARY While there is evidence that the defendant suffers behavioural problems (tendency to self-harm and social withdrawal) and displays eccentric ideation (for example, frequently avoiding communication through quoting of poetries and philosophies), there is nothing in her case history to suggest a predisposition towards any kind of violence to other people, least of all murder. It is my professional opinion that the manuscript in question is a work of fantasy and has no bearing on proceedings in this case.

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