‘I’d really better be going, Al. It’s getting late. But thanks, goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ said Alice forlornly to the door as he stepped out into the night. ‘Oh, Joe …’
But Joe had already gone, the orange of the streetlight making a strange, garish figure of him as he moved rapidly down the street.
‘Goodnight,’ said Alice lamely; she couldn’t remember what she had wanted to say to him anyway. She turned, and there was Ginny, waiting politely beside the stairs, that little, knowing smile on her face, her eyes in a band of shadow so dark that it might have been a mask. Alice tried to smile back, shook her heavy head, took two steps towards the kitchen.
‘Ginny, would you like a drink?’ she offered, with an effort.
‘That’s very kind,’ Ginny said. Her voice was soft but clear, with an undertone of mockery, her accent light and untraceable. ‘But do you mind if I go upstairs and change? I’ll feel much more comfortable.’
‘Of course!’ Alice’s smile felt better now, more sincere. Maybe it was Joe’s absence which did it. ‘I’m afraid it’s a bit makeshift upstairs, but it was the best I could do at short notice. You can put your clothes in the wardrobe, if you like, and if there’s anything you need, just give me a shout.’
‘Thank you. I’ll be fine.’
‘OK. Take your time.’
Ginny did not reply, but Alice heard her going upstairs.
It occurred to her then, with a sudden jolt, that the girl was shy and a long way from home, and she felt ashamed of the extent of her antipathy. It was probably her fault that Ginny had been unresponsive; she supposed she had been rude. She should have tried to include the girl and make her talk.
Mentally berating herself for the failure of her good intentions, she determined to give Ginny a chance, to be friends with her, and felt better at once, having made the decision. She put the kettle on, set out two cups, smiled, and brought out a tin of biscuits as well. As she began to set the biscuits out on a dish, she even began to hum.
One
I DREAMED OF her again tonight; why mention it, I wonder, when it happens every night, every night without failing, each time in some new and monstrous clothing, my dreams bloated like poison fruit? Why write it, when her face looks out from the page at me, when her delicate hands close on mine as I hold the pen? Oh, Rosemary.
Her presence is like a perfume in the air, her voice, a whistle to the winds. Last night I dreamed of her. All in grey, she was, with flowers in her hands and her long red hair loose to the winds, singing to herself as she walked along the riverside where the hemlock was growing tall, and I thought to myself: here is a lady lost, in danger. So I stood up and walked through the graveyard towards her; I stumbled over a stone in my haste and she turned and saw me. I don’t think she spoke, but, as she turned, I saw that she was holding something in one hand, a little round glass something, like a marble, and she held it out towards me, and smiled. The wind whistled through the little round thing as she held it, a strange, mournful sound, and as I stretched out my hand to receive it, I saw my own face staring out at me, long and distorted in the glass surface, mouth open in an impossibly wide, moaning scream. As I looked, the marble seemed to grow bigger and bigger, until I could see trees and houses through its convex surface, houses and bushes and a road, and a railway line winding its way through a wood … Suddenly, I was afraid. I looked around. Nothing.
Nothing but the rails, the trees, the whistle of the engine far away. I looked up at the sky. And then I understood. She was there, had been there all the time, looking down, her hair drifting out, her eyes great tunnels of death, bigger than the world. And outside the world, in the strange fisheye she inhabited, there was nothing but darkness. No sky but the blue painted inside of the spinning-top, no sun but her eyes, no moon but the round pink imprints of her thumbs against the glass. And I knew that sometime or other, she would remember the handle, the red wooden handle which turns the world … and where would I be then? Spinning, spinning, there in the dark for ever, at her pleasure, beneath her watchful eyes? My blessed Damozel.
Suddenly, I was jolted from my thoughts by a sound: a slow, deep, groaning and creaking sound, impossibly huge, from the very engines of the earth, as if some ancient underground forge had been opened anew. A scraping music accompanied it, like the world’s oldest and most decrepit roundabout. The music’s pace quickened, became a fairground tune, loud and brash, laboriously out of key. The light had changed; shadows lay over most of the land, hiding the trees and bushes from sight, except in a few cases, where a sudden spray of light (green, pink, electric blue) outlined a stump here, a protruding branch there, into lurid, swaying relief. Branches? Why had I thought of branches? As the top began to spin faster, the music to play more rhythmically, I held on to the first solid object I could grasp. In the semi-darkness, I could feel a hard, rippled surface, a jingle of bells, the harshness of a horsehair mane … What could be more natural, on a fairground roundabout, than a roundabout horse? I closed my eyes (the roundabout was spinning very quickly now, the horse leaping up and down), but there was no way I could let go of the only solid object in my world, and I held on with my eyes closed until I began to feel a little better, a little more steady, and I dared to open them a crack.
It was light again, not the brightness and clarity of daylight, but a garish kind of fairground light, vulgar, and spectral at the same time. And in the brightness, I could see that I was not the only rider on Rosemary’s carousel. There were other horses, red and white and black and blue, bells at their saddles, long manes flying in the wind, glass eyes wild and red nostrils flaring. Robert was there too, knuckles white against the reins, coat flapping behind him like wings. I called his name, hoping that he would hear me against the deafening music … and he turned his face towards me.
He was dead, poor Robert. His face was pale, clown-coloured, and his lips were faintly blue. His eyes were turned upwards to the whites. As I cried out in horror and pity, the roundabout lurched, and his head lolled away from me on its broken neck. Then, I saw that all the horses had a rider; a dead rider. Men, women, some I recognized, some total strangers. Some grinned at me as we rode alongside each other; a masked woman blew me a kiss which smelt of carrion. Others slumped over slit throats and broken backs; one rode backwards, head bent completely round, like a doll’s. Then a thought overtook me with cold terror as I rode. I had seen all my roundabout companions save one. One.
A coldness at my back, like a sudden draught. A sudden, gassy reek, like putrid vegetables. A kind of touch, horribly intimate, at my shoulder. Turning was an unbearable effort, like walking underwater. Another touch, at my face.
Cold.
I began to struggle, vainly trying to avert the predestined. I believe I thrashed my legs, as if in a pointless attempt to outride my pursuer. I tried to turn again. And this time, I succeeded.
My scream was lost in a redoubled burst of the music; my terror ripe as fermented plums. She was masked, only the mouth and the tip of her nose visible from beneath the velvet, but I knew who it was. Ophelia, ten days after her drowning, the stench of the river still on her, mixed with another stench, darker. The slime of the Cam in her hair, her limbs hunched and misshapen, bloated beneath her white dress. I had once owned a Japanese print, showing the six stages of decomposition of the corpse of a young girl left out on a mountainside; I had found it gruesome, but fascinating, to see how the corpse, in her jewellery, her white burial-robes, had changed, had swollen, then shrunk …
‘I am a maid at your window …’ she croaked at me, and I screamed again, scrabbling at the flanks of my horse, pushing myself backwards with my fingernails, burning the palms of my hands, leaving shreds of my skin on the polished wood, my sanity leaving me in great, sparkling bursts of light, like fireworks (and for a moment, I could see them, brighter than any fairground illuminations) as she began to creep towards me.
‘A maid at your window …’ she went on, relentlessly, ‘to be your Valen
tine …’ Then her hands met around my neck, soft and cold, her mouth opened, sending a great cloud of that dark, graveyard reek towards me, and I fell towards her open mouth, all will gone, all feeling gone, into the tunnel of blackness which was Rosemary, where even screams become meaningless.
Two
‘HOW DO YOU take your coffee, Ginny?’ Alice broke off in mid-sentence. The cup she was carrying wobbled, but did not fall.
‘Thank you,’ said Ginny softly, ‘but I don’t think I’ll have coffee after all. I think I’m going out for a while.’
‘Oh …? Oh yes, of course.’
Alice was so stunned by Ginny’s transformation that she was unable to say anything, but her mind raced uselessly on. Was that really Ginny there? She would hardly have recognized her, she thought, and it was not only her clothes which had changed, but her whole self, sloughed off to reveal something closer to the bone. She had taken off the powder-blue dress which had given her such a medieval look. She had aerosol-sprayed a band of black lacquer across her eyes, like a mask, and her red hair had been made to stand up around her face like quills. She was wearing faded jeans (a long tear positioned high on each leg to reveal white skin), and a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off which sported the picture of a grinning skull and a flowery DEATH logo. Her boots were of purple suede, laced up to mid-thigh, and the spiked heels had left little indentations in the pile of Alice’s living-room carpet, little gaps, like airholes for something which might be living under there. She looked even younger than before, vulnerable, somehow, in that lurid adolescent’s garb, still wrenchingly beautiful, but wiser somehow. Older.
Her eyes danced, a roller-coaster of troubling, multicoloured lights.
‘There’s a fair,’ she said, brightly. Even the voice had changed, adopting, instead of the whisper of a shy child, the slightly nasal, ungrateful intonations of the adolescent girl.
‘Yes?’ said Alice.
‘On Parker’s Piece. It’s only eleven. It won’t be shutting down till midnight. It won’t take me long to get there.’
Her eyes were a band of fractured light behind the spray-paint, glimmering dangerously. She seemed entirely unconscious of the effect she had created.
‘So when will you be back?’ said Alice rather coldly.
Ginny shrugged.
‘Not very long. I’m meeting some friends … don’t bother to wait up, will you?’
‘I’ll leave the door open.’
‘Thank you.’
Her hand was on the door-handle. Suddenly, Alice felt an abrupt rushing of emotion; anger, anxiety and reaction against all the things she had been made to feel during the evening. She reached impulsively for the girl’s arm; held it. The skin felt cool and smooth.
‘Ginny?’
‘Yes, what is it?’ The note of mockery was there again, almost … almost as if she knew what was in Alice’s thoughts better than she did herself.
‘Joe … You like him, don’t you?’
Ginny faced her for a second, then she ticked her head to one side, like a doll. Behind the grey of her eyes, the fairground lights cavorted.
‘Joe?’ she said in a birdlike voice. ‘Who’s Joe?’
Then the door opened, and she walked off into the night.
Alice paused at the door for a moment, her emotions a mixture of anger, shame, and an odd feeling of not fear, precisely, but unease.
She could not resist the temptation to peep through the slats of the blinds out into the street. Not a brief, casual look, such as she might have taken by accident, but a good, long, calculating stare. She knew what she was looking for, and that thought made her really uneasy; it was hard to admit, but she was looking for a glimpse of those friends; some shred of proof to justify her feeling that Ginny would be bad for Joe, that she would be somehow wrong. She turned away from the window in disgust, but not before she had seen what she expected, what she had hoped for. The man was standing beneath a lamp-post, face turned away from the house, but his silhouette was outlined sharply in the bright orange light, and Alice saw him well enough. He was tall, long hair drawn back in a pony-tail, long greatcoat with a turned-up collar, motorcycle boots with chains on the back which winked at Alice from the shadows. As she watched, Alice saw Ginny half-run towards him, her steps light as a dancer’s despite those preposterous boots, and tuck her hand confidingly under his arm. He half-turned towards her, spoke, touched her shoulder with a strangely intimate gesture, laughed. Alice heard the faint echo of Ginny’s answering laugh, ringing tinnily in the deserted street. She clenched her teeth. No, she didn’t like Joe’s Ginny, or her friends either; there was something disturbing about that man in the greatcoat, something more than arrogant about the set of his shoulders, the gaudy winking of the metal on the instep of his boots, the protective way his arm went around Ginny’s shoulders, almost hiding her from sight. For an instant, Alice wondered if the girl would be safe with him.
And then, she turned away from the window, her cheeks flushing, for impossible though she knew it to be, it had seemed to her during that instant that the man had turned, too far away for her to see his face, and had stared at the house. Only for a moment, mind you, and there was no way, thought Alice, no way at all that he could have seen her, let alone known that she was watching him, but all the same … she was sure he had known she was there, that his eyes had sought her out as she hid behind the blinds … that he had seen her and, seeing her, had smiled.
Alice turned on to her left side and tried to blank out her mind. Tried to sleep. Images filled the darkness of her closed eyelids, images, faces, voices, glimpses of her paintings and unformed ideas for others. A snatch of music throbbed somewhere on the fringes of sleep, a rhythm and a lyric:
One day you see a strange little girl look at you
One day you see a strange little girl feeling blue
She’d run to the town one day
leaving home and her country fair
Just beware when you’re there Strange little girl …
Alice shook her head on the hot pillow, shifted position again.
Damn.
She flicked on the bedside lamp with abrupt impatience, reached for a book. Maybe half an hour’s reading would do it. Her hand paused on the paperback’s cover, reached out again, paused. Froze. There it was again, a sound, like whispering. Voices. Alice sat up in bed, alert to any sound, then relaxed. It’s nothing, she thought. It’s just Ginny back from the fair. For an instant, there was nothing; then the whispering began again, soft and unpleasantly intimate, coming from Ginny’s room.
Ginny’s friends of that evening?
The thought appalled Alice; the memory of Ginny’s appearance, her dreamlike conversation, the way she and her unknown friend had disappeared into the dark without a sound … these things all convinced Alice that there was something wrong going on, and, knowing that, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, she repeated inwardly, which was going to persuade her to get out of bed and interfere. Who Ginny invited back was none of her business. She certainly wasn’t going to make a fool of herself by going to find out. After all, it might even be Joe. She would make sure Ginny and her belongings were out of the house by the end of that week, without fail, and then she would be free of her. The voices came again, more than two, maybe three or four. Alice knew she would have recognized Joe’s voice if she had heard it.
Almost angrily, she turned her head on the pillow and tried to ignore the whispering. A snatch of music, half imagined:
One day you see a strange little girl look at you
One day you see a strange little girl feeling blue
Strange little girl …
Dammit. Why couldn’t she leave it alone? It wasn’t any of her business. She wasn’t going to interfere.
Her train of thought stopped abruptly as she realized that, despite everything, she had thrown back the covers and had got up. Worse still, she recognized within herself a feeling that she was going to interfere, that she was not going to be happy unti
l she had left the safety of her bedroom and had sneaked a look into Ginny’s room, just to know, she told herself, just to see. She pulled on her jeans and a T-shirt, careful of the occasionally creaking boards, padded to the door in her bare feet. Still the stealthy, almost mocking undertone of the voices, at the edge of sound, elusive and tantalizing. A soft Shhhhhhhh as the door opened over the thick pile of the carpet, then the steps, each one an endless held-breath-long over the landing, muscles aching and the carpet sinking into the soles of her feet like pine-needles as Alice edged her way along the impossible distance of the landing towards Ginny’s room. Under Ginny’s door, a spray of light. As she came closer, the voices blossomed in the darkness, huge and formless as flowers of smoke. Their sense eluded her, the sounds amplified by the straining of her ears into booming, giddying syllables. Here and there, a word found its way into her comprehension, menacing and full of secret meanings.
A man’s voice: ‘She… when she sleeps … the picture … know … think she … the picture …’
Another: ‘Some quiet place …’
Ginny’s voice, above the rest and more audible, its vagueness gone. With her friends, Ginny’s voice was clear and commanding:
‘Be quiet. I don’t want to run the risk of him suspecting. It was a mistake …’ (The voice blurred again as she turned away from the door.) ‘Give me time. I remember everything now.’
Alice felt her head spinning with the strain of standing there, channels of blackness all around her. A sudden, idiotic desire to laugh seized her, and she chuckled nervously to herself in the shadows.
What had she expected? Black magic? Green men from Mars? Nervous laughter choked her, and she began to feel ridiculous as well as afraid. So what if Ginny was entertaining? Most likely all they were doing was smoking joints or something, where they knew they wouldn’t be interrupted. It was really no business of hers. Joe could and would look after himself. Alice didn’t want to know. Footsteps on the other side of the door, a voice, clear with proximity.