Creepy and Maud (16 page)

Mum: you cannot see my daughter, she is resting (
and a disappointment),
you are not her friend or mine
(
you are obviously Lionel’s),
I do not want to talk to you, yes this is difficult and none of your business, I do not need a referral to another specialist (
they might judge me the way you have),
I am taking care of my daughter myself (
I have terrified her into submission by leading her to believe I might shave her in her sleep),
and once again you cannot see my daughter, good day.

I have never heard Mum say ‘good day’ before. Is this her grief language? Unhappiness has given her a rigid face and a brand new formality. Good day is very formal. In this situation, it is also a lot like saying ‘Please get the hell away from my front door before I drag you inside and gouge your eyes out with a butter knife.’ I understand why Mum hates Nancy. I remain ambivalent. Poor Mum.

That is when I go upstairs and pull my blinds up. Not just open them but unclip them at the bottom and yank them all the way up to the top of the window. A couple of broken slats pop out. A flurry of dust swells and settles in the flare of sunshine that crashes through the window. Creepy looks so shocked to suddenly see me there, you would have thought I had flashed my boobs. I press my hands against the windowpane. It is warmer than beach sand.

Coda: One-two-three-four-five.

She looks like hell. Even the cat took off.

I haven’t seen her clearly for weeks. There’s something wicked in the obscurity of partially opened venetian blinds. Angles change, light cuts like a blade, life behind them becomes a flicker book. Then suddenly the blinds fly up with the same ferocity with which they were originally snapped shut, and it scares me to death. Well, it doesn’t scare me as much as shock me. She could have toadied me along for a bit first.

She looks like hell. I know I’ve said that already but I think it bears repeating. The hair is gone, of course. I
knew about that, but the severity of the change is much more apparent now I’m on wide screen again. She’s losing weight, too, and she’s paler than usual. What the hell is going on in that house that something isn’t being done about this? I feel angry: cool, lucid angry. Maud stands in front of the window leaning forward, her hands pressed flat against the glass, eyes closed, lips moving. Lips moving? I grab the binoculars to check. Yes, lips moving. Is she talking to herself now? Her eyebrows are gone, those moving lips are chapped, that little protrusion of belly is now a pasty hollow. Is she eating anything? I know my mum took sandwiches over there!

Mum got the bread out as soon as it became obvious Limo-Li had left. It became obvious when one of the other neighbours told her. Personally, I couldn’t be sure. I mean, I saw him leave, with bags, but he kept coming back. He’s gone now, for sure, though. I think my dad’s going to miss him. Mum asked Dad what she should put in the sandwiches, to which he replied, ‘What the hell does it matter? You’re only going over there for a look.’ I was pretty sure Mum was going over there to say ‘We know,’ as only a plate of sandwiches and a shrewd smile can.

Sylvia sidles up against me and jumps up onto my lap again. She’s getting fat. All those empty rolls of soft
skin have filled out. I think cats are supposed to have a waist, a little dip in at the sides, leading back to the protrusion of the hips. Sylvia’s looking more like a little bald barrel. Have I created a Dorian Gray situation here? Has the fat I’ve put on the cat been siphoned off the bones of my love?

My dad knows about Sylvia. I’m not pleased with the fact that my dad and I now have something in common, but so be it. His discovery came as a result of Dobie Squires paying uncharacteristic and relentless attention to my bedroom door. He was barking and scratching at the door so much that one day Dad actually banged on it and hollered, ‘Is your mother in there with you?’ I said no and Dad dragged Dobie Squires downstairs with the promise of a liver treat. Thing is, I had quite a few liver treats in my room, as well. This poor cat was living on the stuff; no wonder she was looking like foie gras. So as soon as Dobie had eaten all that was forthcoming in the kitchen, he was straight back up the stairs to my door. It was when Dobie Squires had scored off a three inch swathe of the Taubmans high-gloss my dad was so proud of that Dad was suspicious enough to come into the room itself. And there we were: me and Sylvia in bed. Dad said, ‘Stinks in here,’ but he looked quietly pleased. I don’t think I’m imagining that. I know he recognised Sylvia
at once. Maybe he thought she was a fair trade for the casserole dish. Maybe he thought about the pleasure he was denying Limo-Li by refusing to surrender the beast. Who knows?

Maud sits at her desk, her handprints still ghosting the pane, little greasy marks like those first smudges of lipstick. Her sweat, the oils from her palms, a few statically charged hairs; this is a smear of who she essentially is, right where her words used to be. We haven’t spoken in a while. She didn’t read my last message; she wouldn’t turn round.

—Are you okay?

She doesn’t answer immediately. She doesn’t look like she’s going to, at all. She is moving slower than she used to. Her face doesn’t budge, except for that peculiar lip twitch thing, which makes her face look like it belongs to someone else. I mean, obviously it’s the same face, but it’s as if she’s moved out of it. Or retreated so far back inside that she can no longer control her own muscles and membranes. Once, when I was really little, I remember being shut in a room and being so scared and thinking if I could only reach the light switch, and flick it on, I would be all right. That’s how Maud comes across: like there’s a little girl inside her somewhere who just can’t reach the light switch, even though she stretches till her joints pop.

Of course, this is not my immediate problem, and it is starting to piss me off. I’m seriously considering putting up blinds of my own when she finally comes through with an answer:

—I COUNT TO MYSELF

—You count to me too

—NO LITERALLY

—You mean like sheep?

Okay, not altogether happy with where this is going.

I am not insensitive to the fact that romance necessitates some sharing. Not just good sharing but broad, dreary, it’s-my-turn-to-listen sharing. In fact, isn’t that what love is? The toleration of someone else’s crap in anticipation of sharing your own? So she counts. Not as interesting as the hair pulling thing, and if she does it out loud for long periods of time it could become tedious, but not as embarrassing as Tourette’s or rhinotillexomania. Don’t you just love that word? Rhinotillexomania. I came upon it purely by accident when I was researching obsessive-compulsive disorders. It’s not even in my
Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM).
This surprised and disappointed me. I suppose it’s not a word common in everyday usage; in fact, it is a medical term. I wonder if there is a Medical Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM). I must look into that.

—NOT SHEEP JUST NUMBERS

She counts numbers. This is not what she means, so I correct her, just to be clear:

—You mean you recite numbers?

—YES

—One two three...?

—ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE

Isn’t that what I just said?

As far as revelations go, this isn’t such a biggie. It’s strange, what we choose to reveal about ourselves. I, naturally, choose to reveal nothing. This is why I can be in love with Maud. She also chooses to reveal nothing. Trouble is, I suspect she’s got stuff she should reveal and it kind of backs up on her and comes out in other ways. Involuntary revelation jumping like a pulse under her skin. A little fasciculation—she feels it, I see it.

At least, with the blinds pulled up, she’ll get some sun. By mid-afternoon the sun will hit her window in such a way that I’ll hardly be able to see her. She’ll disappear inside refraction and glare. Every now and then, as she moves about her room, she’ll materialise briefly, like a hallucination, a retinal negative. As the sun shifts in the sky, its interference will glide down the bricks of her house and her window will darken slowly, slowly, until I can see her again. Until she reveals herself again. Like she’s moving the sun across the window herself.

In medieval times, the magistrates would shave the heads of women suspected of witchcraft, looking for the mark of the devil on their scalp. This girl whom I love can move the sun and banish her father and draw her own soul on scrap paper with a stub of lipstick. There was no need to shave her head.

The worst thing about being expelled is it puts you right out there. It makes you visible.

When Mr Lowe pulled Maud out of her chair in the library that day, it was as uncontrolled and violent an act as pulling the blackout curtains from the windows during an air raid. No one was interested in this analogy during the aftermath, however. Which is a shame, because I really worked on it and thought it was pretty good.

Physical violence is never the answer. I know this and am deeply disappointed in myself. Despite the
fact that some people are begging for a good smack, to indulge them is to alter the universe. Both smacker and smackee are changed forever. Their pre-smack status can never be recovered. When you hit someone, you change who they are. You change who you are. I am deeply disappointed in myself. It felt great, though. For the first time ever, I wasn’t watching, I was viscerally involved in Maud’s life.

There was a meeting at the school (sans flyer), which we all went to. My parents attended in what can only be described as church clothes. They looked nice. We must have looked like a family unit. I almost wanted a photograph. Mum got a bit teary and Merrill patted her hand at one point, which I thought was a really nice touch. The principal, the chaplain, the school psychologist and Mr Lowe looked like a bit of a family unit themselves. Mr Lowe seemed edgy, though; he kept shifting in his seat, as if worried I might jump the table between us and have another go. I smiled at him as best I could, which only made him look more uncomfortable. Got to work on that smile. It feels okay but when I practise it in the mirror I never seem to be able to pull it off without squinting a bit.

I didn’t speak. I was given the opportunity to. I was asked questions that none of them wanted real answers to, and thought the best option was to revert to expected
behaviour and take refuge in the grunt and shrug. This is very effective, as it creates the illusion of acceptance of culpability along with an appropriate amount of shame. There was a lot of sighing and head shaking on their part, which indicated to me the success of my grunt and shrug. Mr Lowe agreed not to press charges (got to admit to a little prickle of sweat then, because I hadn’t even considered that possibility) as long as I didn’t return to the school. So basically I was rewarded.

When we got home, I was banished to my room (rewarded again).

I read
The Man in the Iron Mask.

I worry about Maud. I am not comfortable with this feeling. I watch for her leaving for school and she never does. Has she been expelled, too? Is she even in there? Has she been taken away while I was sleeping? I imagine a night-time stealth mission, during which medical strangers in starched coveralls breach the fortress of her, dragging her down the stairs and into the back of an ambulance, no, an unmarked white van with blackout tinting, driving her away to be medically straitjacketed until her hair is long enough for the curlers her mum bought her last Christmas. I dream about Limo-Li returning in broad daylight, sneaking up on Maud as she suns herself on the fence capping, throwing a stinking hessian sack over her head and
dragging her away to ride shotgun for weddings and parties. I wonder if she has been locked in, the blinds nailed into position, those belly-aching post-scream hiccups in the library the last sound she is ever to make. I think about these things and I worry.

She is put away where no one will hear her insanity. And I am fed by deaf-mutes.

Speaking of being fed, Mum’s sandwich plate is taking forever to come back. She has plenty of plastic and paper plates but chose to trot over there with ham and salad on china. After only a few days, Mum was enjoying the loss. Dad’s got into it a little bit. He’s said a few things like ‘Not good enough’ and ‘Who does she think she is?’, as if Maud’s mum is sneaking in during the night and pinching flatware straight out of the cupboard. Despite all this, given the opportunity, I imagine Mum will present another offering in a dish she imagines she doesn’t want to lose so she can mourn it. I reckon it would be less hassle to just take the good china out back and smash it against the fence. But where’s the fun in that?