Mum used to go out to her meetings, Bubba disappeared with his pizza-faced mates, and I stayed home with Gram and her Persecution Complex. I was home on my own with her the night I first talked to him.
She yelled out, and I pretended not to hear, humming to myself, getting revenge for my mother. I waited just long enough for her to yell again, then I came in mid-bellow, and she huffed impotently, glaring at me.
‘Mother, I’m sure she doesn’t dawdle deliberately. You’re being silly. You know what she’s like – in a dream half the time,’ my mother would say the next day when Gram reported me.
That night I had drawn the curtain, wading through the soupy yellow air in a room where the windows were always closed. She told me to pull the blind as well so no one could see in. Her teeth grinned wolfishly at me from a glass beside the bed. Flapping her lips together, she watched to make sure I closed it completely, shutting out the peeping toms and rapists and axe murderers panting to look in her bedroom.
I was about to leave when she started on my mother, started raving about how wonderful Alex was, and how he’d come for her soon, take her away.
Sometimes you can take it and sometimes you can’t.
I turned around and told her the facts: that dear Alex, her only begotten son, couldn’t stand her, had gone to the other side of the world to get away from her. ‘No one wanted you. My mother took you because there was no one else. Like a stray cat you find on the doorstep.’ Then I closed the door on her white face.
I was shaking and I couldn’t bear to be in the house with her. I went out to the woodshed, hoping she would have a fit and die while I was out of earshot. I had sat there so often, waiting to be let inside after fights with my mother, that I started to feel a sense of belonging. I had a store of candles, and I used to sit for hours, dripping hot wax onto my hand until I could no longer feel the slight burns, and the hand became a lumpy lurid paw in the flamelight.
My anger would ebb slowly, as the layers of wax built up, and finally I would sigh, looking at my leper claw with tired satisfaction. That night I lit the candle and started to drip away without thinking.
The shed was backed up to the fence and the Geddings’ shed on the other side was a mirror image of ours. The fence formed the back wall of both sheds, and was a rickety barrier with feeble nails holding brittle grey boards together. Neither family could afford a new fence so it lived propped up on both sides by dozens of extra bits of wood. Clinging by its fingernails.
I was staring at the wax claw critically, trying to decide where to put the next drop, when I heard a scratching noise from the other side of the fence. I froze, imagining rats. Suddenly one of the fence boards rattled and slid aside. A green eye looked through the crack.
It looked at me, then it looked at the wax claw. I looked down, feeling embarrassed and weird, even though the eye had to belong to a Gedding.
If he had laughed or sneered, that would have finished the thing. Strange how so much can hang on one tiny action, or reaction. He looked up from the hand to my face. ‘Got a scratch?’
I blinked, not understanding.
The green eye frowned half-impatiently. ‘Match?’
Wordless, I held the candle out. The board jerked again then slid further aside revealing a mouth, a nose and another eye. A dirty, bony hand put a cigarette between the lips and I held the flame to the tip. He puffed deeply with his eyes closed, then looked back at the claw. ‘Does it burn?’
‘A bit,’ I said. I let the little reservoir of wax that had built up fall onto a gap.
There was quietness for a minute, then he held the cigarette out. ‘Smoke?’
I set the candle down and he passed the cigarette carefully through the gap. It was awkward smoking with the wrong hand. The cigarette was moist against my lips and I shivered and pressed my knees together, thinking of it being between his lips.
I drew in a mouthful of smoke very carefully, then eased it down my throat so I wouldn’t cough. It tasted like I had licked out an ashtray. Cancer, my mind thought in a dazzling little flare of fright.
I exhaled then, and was mortified to see nothing come out. I knew the smoke had gone in, so where was it now? Coating my lungs with its cancerous poisons? I swallowed, at the same time thinking it probably looked like I had faked a drawback. Humiliated, I passed the cigarette back.
‘It’s a bad habit,’ he said kindly.
I shrugged. ‘I always think of cancer and it makes me nervous.’
‘I’m not afraid of dying,’ he said. ‘It’s living that’s hard.’ He looked at me abruptly. ‘Are you locked out?’
I shook my head. ‘You?’
He gave me a hard suspicious look, then he sighed and smiled. ‘I guess you can hear if I can.’ There was a silence, then he said, ‘Your mother sounds pretty fussy. I hear her yelling at you to clean up all the time. Even on Saturdays.’
I nodded. ‘She’s mad on cleaning and I mean mad. It’s all she cares about. It’s a sickness.’ I looked at him. He was staring at the tip of his cigarette. ‘I hear you sometimes. I hear your mother—’ I began, then stopped because there was no way to say the rest. To say I heard her holding their heads down the toilet as a punishment, flushing them, heard the choking and begging, heard the screaming and swearing, heard her say she would kill them, chop them into bits, burn them; didn’t say: I hear the witch.
He shifted the board to make the gap wider and propped his knee against it.
Paul was the second eldest. Luke with his flat expressionless face and eyes like Morlock holes was the eldest, and after Paul came Lily and Bo. The father had left years before. Fathers were a touchy subject in our house, but my mother once said Frank Gedding had done the right thing.
It was Lily who attracted me most. She looked like something out of The Great Gatsby. Dreamy green eyes, pale wavy blonde hair and a soft husky voice. I wanted to be friends with her the first time I saw her, but I didn’t know how. I was too shy and dull to get anyone’s attention, and Lily walked around listening to music no one else could hear. All the Geddings wore op-shop clothes. Not just the odd overcoat or jumper, but everything. Socks, pilled jumpers, old-fashioned skirts, maybe even underpants. But Lily still managed to look beautiful in them, like a princess in rags. That was how I thought of her too. A princess held captive by a witch mother. Only instead of just one captive, this witch had four.
‘She’s mad, you know. It’s in our blood,’ Paul said suddenly, as if he had read my mind.
We met often after that. Sometimes I had been locked out, but more often him. And sometimes we went there because we wanted to. The Doghouse, he called it, and I adopted the name. We talked and laughed and were silent in the Doghouse, but if I saw him at school or in the street, he would ignore me, or even walk the other way.
‘Why don’t you talk to me at school?’ I asked once. ‘Because it might be catching,’ he said.
I stared at him, wondering if that was the why of the Geddings. Maybe they had some terrible disease.
Paul started to laugh at the look on my face. ‘I mean people might think you’re like me. Us. The Geddings.’
‘It wouldn’t matter.’
He shook his head.
At Christmas I gave him a present. He blushed.
‘I haven’t got one for you.’
‘Open it,’ I said, excited.
He turned the carefully wrapped and ribboned parcel round in his big fingers as if it were a kind of animal that might bite. ‘The present is inside,’ I said pointedly.
He laughed shamefacedly and plucked at the string.
‘Give us it here,’ I said, and ripped the paper and ribbon off.
It was a lighter. I had bought it from a shop selling estate jewellery for the family of someone who had died. It had meant skimping on everyone else. I sent my father a card. He wouldn’t care about not getting socks. He probably had a whole drawer of socks and ties and handkerchiefs still in their Christmas wrapping.
Paul held up the light
er with a kind of astonished wonder. ‘Gold.’
I never dared ask him openly about anything, but I heard a lot of it anyway. Paul was a storyteller. He made up stories to tell me. Some were gruesome mysteries in which dozens of people were violently murdered, and others were funny gentle stories about make-believe creatures. Some of the real stories came through in both. Maybe a person can’t stop the real things leaking in. There were often witches in his stories.
When Lily’s head was shaved, he told me a story of an invincible magician whose power source was his long hair. One day a witch, wanting the power, shaved his head, leaving him helpless, an easy target for the robbers who killed him. And I wondered if there had been some power in Lily that her mother had wanted to possess.
Later Paul told me his mother had chopped off a bit of Lily’s ear, in her rage to get all the hair. ‘There were buckets of blood,’ he said.
One time, not long before the end, I heard him calling while I was hanging out the washing. His voice sounded strange and croaky.
‘Are you sick?’ I asked over the fence.
He shook his head and put his hands around his throat as if he meant to strangle himself. ‘My mother,’ he said in a whispery voice.
He told me she had tried to hang him, pulling his jumper down to show the raw ribbed ring around his neck. She had made the noose from an extension cord, and tried to hang him from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. The nails had given way.
‘But she wouldn’t really,’ I said. ‘She was trying to scare you.’
Paul stared at me and I thought of a story my father had once told about a man who had taken his children into a dark wood where a cannibal witch had waited in a gingerbread house to eat them.
‘What will you do?’ I asked.
He shrugged wearily. ‘She’ll forget by tonight. It doesn’t matter anyway.’ He pointed to a spider web we had watched evolve over the last weeks in the gap between the boards. A strange spider had bumbled accidentally into the web, and was waving its other legs frantically. I reached a finger forward to free it, but Paul caught my wrist.
‘You can’t interfere with nature,’ he said fiercely. The spider which owned the web raced forward and began to saw off one of the waving legs. Revolted, I stared back. ‘That’s probably one of the old babies from the last lot. They have hundreds, you know,’ Paul added coldly.
A few days later I found him shaking the board, wrecking the web. The fat spider was frantically eating the pouch full of its eggs.
‘See,’ Paul said. ‘It’s not women and children first. It’s survival of the fittest. All that building and planning and one day God makes an earthquake and it’s all gone. I suppose that spider thinks I’m God.’
The Geddings were Catholics. Paul said Catholics drank blood and ate flesh as part of the appeasing of their violent God. I thought that maybe Paul’s God was mad too.
I had never been to church except to be baptised. My mother was an atheist. I didn’t know what I was yet. Sometimes I walked past the Catholic church and wondered if the police knew the place was run by cannibals.
The last time was like the first time. I was sitting on my own in the shed making a monumental wax paw. When I looked up, his green eyes were in the crack.
‘Hi,’ I said, preoccupied. It took me a minute to realise he hadn’t answered. I looked up. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I have to go,’ he told me in a low voice. ‘If I don’t, maybe I’ll end up mad too. Maybe I’m already mad.’ He was shaking from head to toe.
‘What is it?’ I asked. I reached my human hand through the gap and touched his arm.
It was like touching a live wire. A current ran shockingly between us, as if some energy in him was being earthed into me. He looked up with a strange expression of recognition in his eyes. My hands itched but I only understood later that another skin was waiting to be shed, that I was growing. That was how I saw growing, a process that happened in short violent bursts triggered by some catalyst.
He used my hand to pull me to the gap and leaned through it. I knew he was going to kiss me and my whole body felt light. I felt sick too, like the first time I had ridden a two wheeler, or the first time I had told a lie and been believed.
His lips were softer than I had imagined, brushing mine lightly as if he was testing the temperature, as if he thought my lips might burn him. Then he kissed me hard and it was nothing like the passionate movie-star kisses I had practised on my pillow. It was wetter, clumsier and more slippery than I had imagined. My heart juddered wildly in my chest. I could see that the wax claw had begun to crack and crumble away. There was a rushing noise in my ears like the sound made by the miniature ocean inside a seashell.
The fingers of my other hand were curled against his chest. His heart was pounding too.
He let go of me suddenly and shook his head. ‘I have to go,’ he said, as if I had argued against it.
‘I hate her,’ I said, and burst into tears. The tears leaking out of my eyes had tasted as warm and salty as blood. Dimly it occurred to me that tears were a kind of bleeding.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said with finality. ‘It’s not just her.’
I was filled with anger that he could become so suddenly adult and lofty.
He relented and told me a story. ‘When she was young, there was a princess and she married the handsome prince. She thought it would be all happily ever after. Everyone told princesses that was how it was. But she found out it was all a lie. There was only getting old and dying and having babies who would get old and die without ever knowing what it was all for. So she became a witch. The questions made her a witch.’
He was right. I didn’t understand and I stared at him dumbly, seeing that he could love her in spite of everything.
‘Will you ever come back?’ I asked, trying not to cry again.
He only reached through the gap to squeeze my hand. A few days later my mother told me Bo had been killed. He had fallen under a train, almost dragging his mother with him. It had happened the same day Paul left.
Paul had told me Bo often stood on the edge of the platform as if daring the train to sweep him under. I had even seen him once, teetering on the brink with his wild hurt grin making the other commuters nervous.
And so he had fallen, or jumped, or been pushed.
Last night Gram died, finally losing her tenacious hold on life. My mother had fallen asleep in the chair beside the bed, her mouth open slightly, snoring. I felt a rush of love for her sprawled so weary and sad.
I looked up and found Gram watching me. ‘I’m dying,’ she said softly, suddenly normal after days of raving. ‘Nothing stops it coming. I wouldn’t mind if I could have known why.’
‘Why?’ I echoed.
‘What it was all for. The pain, the loving and losing. Living,’ she said. Then she smiled, a sad, oddly beautiful smile.
Not long after, she died, life going out of her with a curious little regretful sigh.
Her words made me think of what Paul had said, about madness coming because there were no answers. I felt a sudden coldness, knowing the seeds of madness were in me too: the hunger for answers.
I thought of Paul, and finally understood what he had tried to tell me: that it was me as much as his mother that made him run away. He had recognised the potential for transformation in me, the witch vying with the princess. He did not understand that there were other choices, that I was evolving into something quite different with my third eye; something harder and colder than princesses, something braver than witches.
‘Paul?’ his mother echoed, sitting upright on the porch sofa. ‘Paul?’
I had often wondered what became of him. Had he been too much of a Gedding to escape? Had he found his own platform to jump from? Or had he found a place to belong where witches and princesses would not torment and tear at him?
My skin itched suddenly, as if another was waiting to be sloughed away. I closed my eyes and let the third eye open, and understood
that I would never know, and was content with not knowing.
I looked down at his mother, the witch queen. She was staring at me hungrily, questioning.
I turned and walked back to the bus stop.
SEEK NO MORE
‘There he is!’
Noah bolted, cutting between two stone angels and grazing his knee. He dropped into a crouch, heart thundering. If he could get away from Buddha and his gang, he might just get back in time. There would be hell to pay if anyone discovered he had gone out today of all days.
Looking down at the fine black dirt, he was glad he had worn dark clothes, although Mrs Belfrey always tried to discourage him from wearing black. ‘It makes you look anaemic, dear.’
He knew the darkness accentuated his pale skin and bone-white hair. Buddha and his bully boys had nicknamed him Spook because he was so pale. Noah told Mrs Belfrey dark colours hid the dirt but that wasn’t the real reason he liked black; it wasn’t the main reason.
The man in the dream was the main reason. He had white hair like Noah’s, but it was long and flowing around his shoulders like a lion’s mane. Pale skin too, but where Noah’s eyes were grey, the dream man’s were silver. He wore black, but he didn’t look anaemic. He looked shining and somehow magical. Noah wore dark clothes because he wanted to look like the man who appeared in his dream the same night Buddha first beat him up.
He and another boy chased Noah from the bus stop, cornering him not far from Glastenbury.
‘Look at ’im. He’s got no blood,’ said the other boy. Tall and bony, he had prodded Noah hard in the chest as he spoke.
‘He’s got blood all right,’ big Buddha sneered, out of breath and red in the face from the chase. Then he’d punched Noah in the nose. The pain had been awful and Noah thought he must die from something that could cause so much hurt.