I’m writing this down as a recount of the past two weeks. Right now, I’m uncertain as to what will happen with this; it may just sit gathering dust in my OneDrive. In any case, I’ll decide on that later once I’ve had the chance to get everything down, make everything concrete, a quick snapshot of a sandcastle before the tides claw it back out to sea.
The visions first came on the evening my older brother was supposed to return from the correctional halfway house up in the city. Bec and I perched ourselves on the verandah, where the slope upon which the family home sat offered an unencumbered view of the main road and the highway out of Liverpool Valley, a single ebbing tear in the ridges that enclosed us and kept us apart from the noisier suburbs up north. It was 35 degrees out and the afternoon sun was on life-support. Everything looked like a mirage, so we had to squint to see if my parents’ red Land Rover was coming back into town at the time they had promised.
Bec had high-tailed it home after the Year 7 sports carnival and hadn’t changed out of her half-cotton, half-mud uniform, and I was still in my hospitality blacks, smelling like vinegar and mould from my 1990 Corolla shit-box. We were both eager, but I couldn’t help but feel stuck to the porch floorboards, whirling in place, as my parents’ SUV came hurtling down the main road, half an hour earlier than they’d said they’d be in the morning.
“Already here! I’ll get the goodies out of the fridge.” Bec was practically bouncing. She ran inside without closing the door behind her. I scolded her with a shout.
We moved to the edge of the driveway. I had a hand on my hip and the other shielding my eyes from the sunset’s glare. Bec had William’s favourite treat—Ben and Jerry’s ice cream—nestled in an elbow-carried esky. As my parents’ car pulled in, I frantically searched for the third figure somewhere in the backseat. My focus was darting past my mother and father at that point, but from the brief glimpse I caught of their faces, all I remember seeing was blankness. Like they were staring through me, through the house, glazing over in the last orange breaths of daylight in the far distance.
“Sorry, my sweeties,” my father said, stepping out of the car and making his way onto the verandah, “something happened with Will. He’s not coming home tonight.”
There it was. My gut feel was right. I looked over at Bec and she was frozen over, distraught. She held the ice cream still and mother came over, patting Bec’s shoulder. “You went to quite the effort there, sweetie.”
My father sighed and snatched the small tub of ice cream as he ascended back to the front door. “Heaven’s sake Rebecca, that’s going to spoil now. How long have you had that out here?”
The routine. Make us sweet so that we know with clarity when things are bitter, and they were bitter always. In joined hands mother and father will give you a tiara only so they can have the pleasure of removing it when you least expect. I was already souring, wilting, knowing that the one member of my family who had left home and tried (poorly, admittedly) to do something for themselves was no longer returning. And now, a pointless putdown around ice cream.
“How was Bec supposed to know you weren’t bringing Will home?” I asked, staying put next to the driveway. A risk.
The air grew heavier, and father wheeled around. “Would it be so hard to keep that shit in the freezer? Aren’t you the culinary whiz, always poking around and nagging whenever we try to cook you kids a meal? You’re the one that has to teach her common sense. We’ve been out in the city all day, and you’ve been here, doing what?”
“Dad, I think you’re over—”
He stepped back out into the sun, towering from the top step of the verandah. “A worthless remote Diploma in Arts from a university in another state, plus a dodgy cook’s apprenticeship from up the road. Completely unable to guide our youngest while we’re away. Add that on top of Will getting into a fight in pre-release, sending him back into deep lock-up. And you lot want to criticise.”
Mother piled on, eyes never meeting mine, before following my father as he stomped back into the house. “You know how he gets. Get sorted out here and get ready for dinner. We’ll just eat the leftovers you brought home yesterday.”
She left, and it was just Bec and I out the front once again. If you’re on my regular email bitching-session pen-pal list, you’ll recognise this kind of reactionary, atomic parenting as being a constant in my life.
I stood there for a bit, regarding the front of our regular home, wedged between a dozen other regular homes on our block and tried to comfort my sister as I continued to melt in the heat. “I’m not mad at you, and I don’t think you did anything wrong, Bec.”
No response.
I looked down at her, tugged at her shoulder and she turned to me and that’s when it started. Bec faced me with pallid skin, grey from the cold even though our entire street was blanketed in amber, what looked like rain drops slowly tracing down the contours of her face, her ponytail sharpened and black as though drenched in water. Just like those times when she’s been late walking home on a rainy day and mother and father pretended not to hear her shouts over the telly, just to teach her a lesson in being on time. Dripping, grey, spluttering in terror. “Belle,” she whispered, arms outstretched.
I blinked and turned away, trying to reorient myself into the reality I hoped still existed around me on the street, the warm remains of the day. It was mostly there. But right in the middle of the road, I saw my Corolla, bleached white as though painted by headlights, floating, crumpling like a paper bag being pressed against an invisible wall. I was in the driver’s seat, shrieking, the engine block and windshield breaking into a constellation of white-hot shards peeling my face inwards and sending my jaw folding backwards into my throat and I turned back to Bec and she stared at me, with gaping holes for eyes and a mouth. Not even sockets—just pits that dropped into blackness. “Belle, Belle, Belle…”
“Belle!” Bec was shaking my upper thigh. “Why’d you turn away from me?”
I blinked again, and I was back to feeling the remnants of the sun on my skin—no more water, no more blinding lights, just the soft glow of the afternoon. I could see Bec’s eyes, her mouth; dry, untouched. I glanced behind me to the street and it was empty—nothing but the neighbours across the way in their neat little bungalows.
“I’m sorry, Bec. Not feeling crash hot. You did nothing wrong, in any case.” She went inside, and I remained on the verandah for a few minutes, trembling, even in the heat.
I remember skipping dinner that night. I laid in my room, curtains drawn and air-con on full blast with an icy flannel draped over my forehead. Light sounds of splashing as Bec and mother hopped into the pool (a mandated hour after dinner, at least) ticked the one window I had. Like a cell.
Probably not too different from the one I had envisaged Will in; the furnishings were certainly more homely, but the concept was all the same. Little hamlets like Liverpool Valley became their own Colorbond gulag archipelagos stretched across well-paved streets, run by little feudal lords in little houses, gifting shelter, community, home, with a warmth so heavy it was humid and you had to swim through it, all in exchange for your unending gratitude and loyalty—to hell with the fact there were as many opportunities for the Valley’s ten-thousand or so high-school leavers as there were fingers on my left hand. And the kids around here pay in kind, mostly, albeit with the all too frequent case of a disappearance, “sudden” passing deemed “not suspicious” by the cops, or the psychotic episode ending in jail time. Dime a dozen here, as it would be in many small Australian towns, but a bit more-so than the average.
I don’t know how long it was that my father was staring at me from a crack in the door, one eye peering in. But I eventually turned and spotted him. He entered.
“Sorry about earlier, my sweet. You know you’re always our little buttercup.” He leaned in quickly, before I could move, and kissed me wetly on the forehead. “I just…” He started fiddling with one of the soft toys on my shelf—one that he had put there himself out of nostalgia, as I’d hated that unicorn from about the time I started wearing pads—and set it on my laptop keyboard. “I just need you to know how much it helps when we’re all in this together, to help your little sister grow up.”
“Yes, Dad.”
He smiled. Patted my bare foot. “Heatstroke got you down?”
I decided to test the waters, just slightly, “I think I was seeing things.”
What father did then was in theme with all the other ways he’s dealt with me in the last 22 years of my life, but this time I felt he was stowing something away. He did the stare again; like his pupils were drilling into something beyond me, far away, through my skull, and bedsheets, and carpet, and deep into nothingness. He came to after a moment. “You don’t need to worry, sweet. It’s not real.”
I blinked again. “I didn’t even tell you what I saw.”
“It’s not real. It’s the heat.”
“We’ve had weather like this before, and I haven’t seen things before. This was different. Almost lucid.”
“Almost real, but not real. Not in the slightest.” He squeezed my shoulder, unblinking. Still towering over my incapacitated, clammy self. He kissed my forehead again and withdrew to the hallway. “You’re a smart cookie, diploma and all—these things happen. If it happens again, just remember it’s nothing but your imagination. Your mother and I love having you around and we couldn’t imagine losing you. I know how much you’ve supported us over the past few years, Mum being unable to work, and all. And now we need to make sure Rebecca grows up strong. So, you’ve got to stay strong for us. For her.”
I must have fallen asleep as soon as he left, because everything went black and my body woke up in a call of nature just past midnight, forcing me to stumble my way through the house towards the bathroom. The family wasn’t a fan of nightlights, the Valley was devoid of human activity beyond nine in the evening, and the sky had become overcast, blotting out the moonlight.
Once I felt the bathroom doorframe I stepped in and switched on the light. That was the second time it happened. The hairs on my neck straightened, breaking the prisons of dried sweat that had enclosed them hours since and standing erect under the fluorescent lighting. I was face-to-face in the mirror with myself, but it wasn’t me; not just yet.
“Wait. Wait. Wait.”
The jaw I had in my reflection was hanging by a thread, barely visible, struck back into the blotted shadows of my hair. Across my eyelids, nose, cheekbone, was a forest of red dashes, like a storm surge pushing tracts of bloody poplars and pines across the soil of my skin, streaked in charred crimson. Blizzards of glass and metal weaving right into me. That thing—that version of me—was my reflection. And all it said was “Wait. Wait. Wait.”
***
The weather passed more temperamentally over the following week, moving from the mid-thirties down to chilling nights with the occasional rain, as it is known to do nowadays. Dress for two different seasons in a day, depending on when you needed to be out and about. Liverpool Valley did that to its residents. It’s probably not a surprise that handfuls of its residents went loopy each year when the weather rocks the town on its axis and has you running port to starboard and back again. Everything settles into a mirage, like that first day I had those visions.
This time though, it was a chance encounter at work that set my innards off-kilter. He was a bearded guy, dressed in Target tradesperson gear with tattoos down his neck and at the far edges of his cheekbones. A friend of Will’s. He approached me as I was staffing the till.
He nodded, and I returned the gesture. He was nice enough in school. Eventually ended up staying in the Valley with cement around his ankles though, after doing a stint in lock-up thanks to a botched ram raid borne out of testosterone and youthful stupidity. After that, no one except the local cement terminal would take him, ironically.
“Sorry to hear about Will.” He said.
“Shit happens.”
“Thought he wanted out of this town. Didn’t know he wanted it that much.”
“’Institutionalised’, I guess. Like that old Shawshank movie.”
A smirk. Will’s friend tapped his card to pay for a coffee. “That’s one way to put it, mate.” He paused, walked towards the door, but came back again, clearly struggling to lay out plain something that was on his mind. “Look, I know us blokes never really get too close to each other, and I want to respect whatever you and the folks want to do. But if you do have a funeral or something like that, I’d like to be there. For old times’ sake.”
I was hammering my forehead with the palm of my hand the first chance I had, reading my phone in the storage room out back. How could I have not seen this? I just took my father’s word for it and went on with my day, supine in the darkness of my room, unquestioning of his truth. I read it again when I got home that afternoon, just sitting in my car with the air-con on blast on the front lawn.
I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror. My eyelids were shredded and dangling, deep red on the undersides like paperbark. A pressing sensation came upon my lower face, and I felt my sinuses clear in a jet-like flush, and then everything started to sting. I whirled around in my seat, looking to see if Bec was anywhere in sight, but she was not. Probably inside doing homework. I looked back in the mirror, and it was just my light brown eyes staring back. My phone finished loading.
Only the city papers reported it, not venturing beyond a handful of paragraphs. Buried deep in the state-specific filters of the website. Death in custody. Will didn’t even make it to the pre-release halfway house in the city, judging by the date. Took his own life with his sheets. Police and Corrections enquiries continuing.
Father was sitting at the TV at the time, the curtains half drawn in the living room despite the gentle offerings of afternoon light dancing around outside. He sat in shadowed darkness, the contours of his work shirt highlighted by the white glow of a Master Chef re-run. It flickered when I looked at it, old static-like, even though it was digital. An ad for a Corolla flashed on the screen. It jittered, again and again. I looked back at my father. He didn’t blink.
“How’s it going buttercup?”
Rubbing my temples, I tried not to focus on the TV. I pushed my smartphone to his face, with the news article loaded. “Why did you lie?”
Father put his drink down at the foot of the sofa and increased the volume on the TV. Mother sat in the far corner—I didn’t see her at first—blowing her nose into a handkerchief. “I told you what happened,” he said.
“What happened in the city, and why did you lie to Bec and I the other night?”
“You wouldn’t have understood—we’ve kept you and your siblings safe for so many years. You always make this about you and your needs, Belle. Do you ever stop to think that sometimes the adults just need room to breathe?” He didn’t turn from the TV. The Corolla was still stuck in a freeze-frame field of white noise, unmoving. Both of my parents didn’t peel from the screen, their gaze darting about its face. Surely they weren’t just looking at this old car ad?
“I’m fucking 22; almost 23.” I retorted.
He turned to me, and mother looked down, silent as ever. “And you better watch your language. I can make things hard for you; that’ll be something to be angry about.”
“Can you just step out of your recliner for just one second, and answer my questions? Why did you hide his death from us? From Bec, maybe I can figure that out. But you haven’t said a thing to me since.”
Nothing.
I pressed. “Are you guilty that you stopped letting him see Dr. Wang down at the clinic?”
“Dr. Wang was a quack, and you know it.” He was standing now, and he moved to draw the blinds completely closed. “Couldn’t keep her own house in order. And you want her to treat the ‘mental health’ of my son when she should’ve focused on keeping her own kids alive, and probably should’ve also focused on another specialisation as well. We need good backs and knees out here. Not her kind of skillset. Everything else, a real Aussie can deal with in his own time.”
“You stack pallets at a warehouse. You’re not feeding the nation.”
“I feed you; isn’t that enough?” He stepped towards me, and I withdrew slowly to the hallway that funnelled towards my bedroom. “All of this is because of you. How could we afford any sort of appointment with Dr. Wang, even if we wanted to, while you’re sticking around here? You think your little cash register gig pays the bills? I’ve broken my back here supporting you and your mother for years, and all you care about is what your deadshit brother got up to.”
“That’s your son—”
“And he’s not here because he wasn’t a man. He couldn’t focus on what was real and what wasn’t—” he grabbed my wrist.
A short, sharp gasp from somewhere in the TV-bathed shadows. Bec, from the doorway of her own bedroom, observing the way father had clutched me, disciplined me. Was she crying? I couldn’t tell from where I stood. Her eyes looked like shadows from where I stood, no pupils, no whites. None of the lights were on and the curtains had been drawn shut. My breath must have quickened, because father picked up on it.
“Look what you’ve done to your sister.” He loosened his grip. “Always hunting for the drama, you are. I don’t care if you’re having one of your visions or divine visitations again because I’ll tell you right now, that shit isn’t real.”
I looked into his eye. Bloodshot, and pleading. Like the eyes of a bull terrier biting, but out of fear. I was used to the gaslighting; but whenever it reached the topic of hallucinating, seeing things, my brain, and all that, I had noticed my father start to trickle out of his shell and glaze over. I hadn’t even mentioned the visions this time.
Father let go completely and I pulled away from him. I slinked down the hallway and drew Bec into her room, dragging the door closed behind us.
“Are you okay, Belle? He’s in one of those moods again.”
I nodded. “Sorry you had to see that. I reckon we’ll lay low today, maybe tomorrow. Day after he should be back to normal.” We were both used to the merry-go-round, navigating the swings and roundabouts of his ill temper.
“He said you were seeing things?”
It was hard for me to reply—I must’ve just stared at Bec with my mouth slightly open. She looked normal now, but all I could remember was the way she looked that afternoon the week prior, dripping wet and sunken.
“Mum said the same thing to me after I got home yesterday. Grabbed my arm as well, super serious.”
“She what?”
“Yeah, I think I tripped on the verandah steps coming up, according to her at least.”
I leaned in closer, sweat building at my temples. “What happened? Did you hit your head?”
Bec shook her head. “Don’t think so. It was like I was watching myself, like I was suddenly floating above my body and the front yard. Mum had to shake me out of it. And there was this sound of a train, just getting louder and louder, like when the coal trains come through the station. Loud enough to burst my eardrums, probably. I looked down at the version of me on the verandah steps and I was just covered in white light. It also wasn’t the verandah anymore. It looked like rail tracks.”
***
I stopped staring into mirrors over the days following that conversation and tried to remain focused on whatever I was doing at the time. No daydreaming. No leaning when I could have been cleaning. I didn’t want to give an opening for the hallucinations to come spilling out again, although as hard as I tried there would always be a glimmer of my white car in the distance, folding in upon itself. My sister, half-girl, half-shadow like a baroque painting.
But it was never too constricting, I found. So I kept on, told Bec to keep her nose down and ignore these things that weren’t really there, and pushed through the week without much trouble. I don’t know how she was going with her visions.
The day came around. Bec finished early at her class excursion to the local tip, so we had a couple of hours to kill before the parental curfew came into effect. We buckled into my car—I think I triple checked her seatbelts and my brakes while pulling out onto the road—and bee-lined for Dr. Wang’s house.
From when I was younger, I remembered that she took Thursdays off in exchange for working over the weekend, and prayed that was still the case. Nothing changes much here anyway, although Dr. Wang has probably seen her patient numbers drop precipitously after most of the Valley’s general practitioners—her included—stopped offering bulk-billed services. Also stopped doing mental health work and instead started referring people up to the city, after her kids passed. So, I guess things do change, but mostly under the cover of night.
Everything looked grey when we pulled onto the grass in front of Dr. Wang’s house—a squat, fibro square with security shutters and ADT stickers on every corner. And whoever wasn’t deterred by that would have probably been scared off by the thought of brown snakes in her unkempt yard. The Valley was apparently leaning into the coldest, wettest summer on record, so the sky was overcast and suffocating. Thunder rolled lightly, far beyond the Valley ridges.
We found her waiting for us through the screen door, leaning on the wall. She didn’t unlock it. I think she might have recognised us.
“You have my condolences. But I’m sorry, I’m off work at the moment.”
I pulled Bec closer to my side. She was still partly confused as to why we’d come to this side of town just to see Will’s old GP. “Sorry, Dr. Wang. Can appreciate that. Just had a few questions though… we can’t really afford the appointments, and even if we could you’re booked out until March.”
Dr. Wang crossed her arms.
“We’re having some sort of mental health episode, the two of us. Seeing things that aren’t there.”
“Fluids?”
“Always.”
“Sleep? Head injuries?”
“Regular as ever. None.”
The doctor scanned us both up and down. “What do you see in these episodes?”
I looked down at Bec. Sent her back to wait in the car. She stomped around a little, claiming that she was fine to deal with grown-up talk since mother and father did it so often, but I raised my voice a little, causing her to recoil.
It was just Dr. Wang and I now.
“My own death, I guess. What looks like a car crash. I feel things too—sharp jolts of pain, tingling, as though I was experiencing it first-hand. I think Bec is the same. Out of body experience. Like she’s watching herself get hit by a train.”
Dr. Wang tapped at a loose floorboard, head down. The socks she was wearing looked browned with dirt, unchanged, wrapped in dust bunnies. “Shouldn’t have sent her away. Best to be honest with the kids.”
“I didn’t come here for a lecture on how to raise a sister.”
“I didn’t open my door to give you an hour-long appointment and a mental health plan.” She was pissed now. “You people are always up in my shit. Run around calling me the childless widow but the moment you realise you’re not coping with life, for whatever reason, you come running. And better yet, you never admit it to anyone, because you’re too ashamed to. And what’s more? When I give you advice, you can’t hack it.”
“I never called you—”
“You know what I mean.” She grabbed the edge of the door, threatening to close me out fully. “Do you even know what happened to your brother? Did Will ever tell you anything? Every second day he said his bedsheets would spiral into a snake and yell at him with the gruff voice of a prison warden. It would coil at his throat, pulling, and he’d come to in a dripping mess of pain. Yelling in his head, all the time.”
I thought about it and felt that whirling-in-place sensation again. My feet were planted, but my guts were peeling outwards and in again like a tangled pendulum. Mother and father had always said that communications with Will were strict, out in prison. Give them the letters, and they’ll take them over when they visit. And the prison rarely does visits. And only one person, when the visit does happen, thus says the father. I hadn’t spoken to my brother since he was taken in two years ago, but mother and father have. They say they have.
“I won’t say much in the interest of privacy, even though he’s dead now, but you need to get your issues checked out, or just find a way to get out of this bloody town. It suffocates you. Will knew it, and he found ways to get out but I guess he never succeeded.
“The police operation he was ‘arrested’ in? He tried throwing himself on the tracks down at the station. Technically a police operation, and technically he was taken into custody. But he was admitted to a hospital up closer to the city, not a jail, at first. Released after a few evaluations, and I guess when he was trying to find some money to get by—not sure if he wanted to come back down here—that’s when he got properly pinched. He was in jail for just over half a year, not two.
“And yes, I know how you’re feeling right now, but you need to hear it. This town is no good. You all know how it took my kids, my husband. It’ll gaslight you into a sense of security, with all the quiet roads, its warm blanket of halcyon dreams this country hasn’t seen since the 50s. But it eats you quietly, and blossoms when you, either by your own actions or some haunted mystery, end up never leaving.”
I turned around. Bec was motionless in my car’s backseat. My legs started to withdraw from Dr. Wang’s front door, but something in my mind was searching for more.
“Dr. Wang, what are you talking about? You think this town has feelings, arms, hands? I’m seeing these bloody things in my head, I thought this whole mental health thing was your speciality?”
“But you feel it still, don’t you? You’re not just seeing things. Will knew. I know.”
I couldn’t respond. My hand traced the front of my face, where I had felt the piercing burn of glass daggers just days ago.
“Just get out of here, out of this town.” She pulled closer to her screen door, almost whispering. “Get out of here. I know what it’s like, and I survived it. But for you, you just need to get out of here before it takes its toll. It takes its toll. It takes its toll.”
Crazy. Absolutely crazy, was what I thought as I backed away even more. No wonder she had stopped taking these kinds of appointments. And how the hell would she have helped Will? If what she said was true, I can’t see how any of this widowed, lonely ramble would have helped Will more than it would have pushed him onto those train tracks two years ago.
But she wasn’t closing her door. Still staring at me, she was, mumbling those last few words. It takes its toll. I don’t know why I did this. Maybe I was on autopilot from the adrenaline of having multiple realities shattered into splinters before my eyes. I went back to her screen door and asked her, leaning right in.
“Then how did you get through it all? How did you survive?”
A laugh. Never a good sign when someone starts laughing in a situation like this. “I noticed I could put the visions at bay,” she said. “Just keep telling yourself it’s not real. Better yet, tell your mothers, fathers, sisters, it’s not real. None of it is real. I told my kids and my husband, oh my dear husband. It’s not real. None of it. And they believed me. And I survived.”
***
The sun was starting to set, the day dipping into a more sombre, steely blue, and I was going above the speed limit to get Bec closer to home.
“Belle, I don’t like how you didn’t let me listen.”
“That conversation was getting rough. No point having you listen to that old doctor ramble like that.”
“Well did she give you any medicine?”
The lights turned red and a convoy of trucks shipping in goods from the city’s port rushed past. I looked back down at Bec, her ponytail folded against the seat, face that of an exhausted puppy. “Doesn’t work like that. But she’s given us some things to try.”
“I’m going to be late home. Dad might make me stand out in the rain again, if it does start pouring.”
I looked at the time. Heaven’s sake. The lights were still red, so I looked far down the road on our left—the usual route—and saw that the city trucks were causing gridlock the whole length of the way. Didn’t help that it coincided with the one hour of traffic in the afternoon where everyone started their trips home.
When the lights turned green I moved a block ahead and then took a weaving route to the lowest point of the main road. Just a light jog to the top of the hill and Bec would be home on time. That way, I could easily make my way to where I needed to go next.
“Belle, it’s starting to drizzle! And you’re stopping here? You want me to run up the hill?”
“You’ll be right. Harden up. I need to get some things, because I want to take us on a trip tomorrow. Just you and I.”
Her eyes lit up. “Where to? What will Mum and Dad think?”
“The city maybe. Not sure what they’ll do.”
“Is it to get medicine? I can hear the trains again. They’re very loud.”
Shit. I looked at her. Dark circles were starting to form in her eyes and the pitter patter of rain began to drum on the bonnet. “Harden up, like I said before. Just stop thinking about it for tonight. Don’t tell Mum when she asks.”
The cloud-cover moving at speed overhead afforded some sunlight to creep in. Her eyes lightened, but without obscuring a wrinkled, almost wincing look she had on her face. She mumbled something and got out of the car.
“Excuse me, Bec?”
“It takes its toll.”
“What?” It was hard not to shout that. My eyes shot open, window shutters gaping to let in breeze, new air, anything. From what I remembered at the time, she had been locked inside my car for most of the encounter with Dr. Wang.
Bec turned around, brow furrowed and hands rubbing her temples. “I didn’t say anything, stupid.”
I was shaken by that point. Still jittering, I put the car back into drive. But I didn’t want to end it there, not just yet. I didn’t want to tell her what she was feeling wasn’t real. “You’ll be alright, Bec. I know what you’re feeling. I’ll be back soon—you just have to get through Mum and Dad while I’m out for a bit.”
She didn’t turn, and started shuffling up the hill. I didn’t waste time. I sped off in the opposite direction to the Woolworths grocer on the edge of town, which tended to be bigger, brighter, and better stocked that the food-marts scattered elsewhere for the locals.
It takes its toll. I heard it again, as though Bec herself was saying it. I looked around me and she hadn’t snuck back into the back seat, and all of my windows were up. The radio wasn’t on. It takes its toll. Like she was right in my ear.
I turned the radio on and pumped the volume.
By the time I reached the grocer the rain and had started to fall in earnest, a million bullet-shaped waves crashing on shores of concrete, tin roofing, and brown grass. I was probably one of five people in the car park, and I ran like a drowned cat towards the store, dipped in the day’s decaying light. In the reflections of the Woolworths windows I was a hooded figure, with my hair wet and collapsed like fallow dirt upon the bedrock of my face, which was mostly a silhouette at this distance.
Far behind me, in the reflection, my Corolla was hovering again, slowly brightening in a baptism of headlight fire, flattening against some invisible wall. I felt the pain again in my face, and everything below my nose became riven by jolts, waves of pain. I collapsed to my knees in a parking lot puddle. It took me a minute to come around, and I looked about just to make sure none of the cashiers had witnessed anything.
Supplies for a weekend in the city. Maybe more? Who knows. Someone outside of this town would have to help with an urgent appointment. There was nothing within two hours’ worth of travel that could provide an urgent appointment, other than a couple of clinics in the city.
And even then, it made me wonder—would it be so bad to find somewhere to stay up there? Use what little savings I was hoping to use on a new car to ride through a motel for a few weeks while I found a job and a cheap rental, and then maybe another job on top.
Pre-cooked canned food, beans, all the cheap stuff, and not an overpriced green veggie in sight. Pads, toiletries. I could probably stretch the budget to get a rice cooker too. Only person I knew who had one was the exchange student from a decade ago, and I saw him cook a whole chicken in there once, right on his bedroom floor.
“Are there any sales on these?” I asked one of the shelf stockers.
“Mate, that thing is so off-brand and cheap for what it is. It’s probably already three sales deep, when you think about it.”
I laughed. He had a point. It felt like it was just us in the store, him doing a slow dance with the plastic cutlery he was stacking to some Triple-J rendition of a Frank Ocean song. Late Thursday nights. I guess the young guys on shift would switch away from the generic pop station. Anything to get over the extended hump day, as the rain started to enclose the grocer from outside, swallowing it and its lonely floodlights whole.
He turned back to me. “Those things can let you cook anything, anywhere, I hear.”
“It’s why I’m getting it.”
“Should’ve bought one when I was back living on campus. Would’ve been a step up from my cup noodles. Living like that. It takes its toll on you.”
“Excuse me?” The rice cooker tumbled out of my hands and I had to catch it between my hip and the shelving.
Like holes in a bowling ball, his face was. Pits where his eyes and mouth should have been. A noiseless air raid siren looking right back at me, skeletal, but not human. I was transported to that first time weeks ago, seeing those blackened bowls, valleys hewn into Bec’s dripping portrait. Again, I felt the sting of thousands of wasps on my eyelids and cheeks and I fell onto the lino, clutching my jaw as it collapsed into itself.
“It takes its toll, you know, not having a properly cooked meal each night.” The shelf stocker scratched his head. “You okay there?”
I filled my shopping bags at the self-checkout and hurried out of the store, the green cotton holding together my rice cooker and canned goods almost tearing at the seams. Dumping the bags in the boot of the car, I peeked through the windows to check it was empty. No ghosts, no hallucinations.
I escaped the rain, hopping into the driver’s seat. The sun, sheathed in clouds, was definitively set behind Liverpool Valley’s enclosing walls, leaving everything in front of me illuminated only by the grocery’s parking lot lighting.
My phone began to ring. Bec. She rarely used the outdated smartphone that father had given her—it sounded like an emergency.
“Belle.” the voice was faint, whispering, perturbed by static; rain falling onto her phone, perhaps.
“Bec! Are you alright?”
“Dad locked me outside. I was late. I can see them in the living room watching the telly.” She sniffled. Crying. “I’m so cold.”
“Bec, I’m coming back right now, wait there.”
“He yells at me if I hide too far inside the verandah.” More rain. Where I was sitting at least, I could see it darting downwards at an angle, so Bec wouldn’t have much dry space to hide in. “Everything hurts. It’s like a bad headache all over.”
“Wait. Wait. Wait. What? Is it the cold? Did Dad hit you?”
“No, I don’t know what it is. I can hear the trains again. I told Dad before he locked me out and he yelled at me. He says it’s not real, but I can feel it and hear it all over.”
And here I am, just finishing writing this up, trying to put everything down on a page and make this real. Sculpt it. Fossilise it. So that if anyone digs this up some time in the future there’s a record of all of this happening. My smartphone is heating up, having just got off the phone with Bec, and now churning what single-digit percentage of battery I have left into hot-spotting internet for my laptop, all so I can make this upload.
It’s hard to finish a sentence now. The way I ended the call with Bec. She wanted to know desperately that this haunting was not real, that all the pain she had shooting through her nerves was just a ghost. And all I said to her was to stay put, because I was coming. She just wanted to know, and I left her hanging, alone on those railroad tracks. It doesn’t help either that my jaw is numb, and that the rain is becoming torrential, and that my headlights are only doing so much in this weather where in every dark blot I can see a spectre of myself floating in mid-air, folded inwards like unearthly origami, flattening into a jungle of steel behind my steering wheel.
I just want it to be over, but I need to get back to Bec. I can’t call her back—my phone probably won’t handle it—so I’ll have to drive, and on top of that, I don’t know what I’d say to her. If all of this is real, if it’s not, or if we just need to get out of here.
All I can think of right now is getting back to her and pulling her out of the freezing rain. I’m her big sister, damnit. I’ll cut across the service track by the reserve, risking the mud, and then gun it up the main road. At this time the traffic would have cleared, and I can go twenty above the limit. I’m coming home, Bec.