Me (an extract)
Shrugging off the lingering gloom, the sun set the dew alight that morning in connivance with me.
I’m going to have to get better at this housekeeping, gardening, everyday stuff now. I hadn’t realized how much of it I just didn’t do! Where do you start? Build shelves or buy new curtains, or carpets? Do the minimum amount and focus on just getting everything into some sort of order, then I can start writing applications, sending off emails, following whatever small hint of an opportunity I can… and leave this place to fend for itself a while longer… Witch! I’d had those long silver tips atop each blade of disheveled grass crafted - pun most sincerely intended - to make a point. That excitement of independence that had been sloshing all too refreshingly over her feet, I will suck it back out to sea.
A change in texture underfoot catapulted her back out of her thoughts, fears, worries, (that constant dialogue!) and back into the present, into me. Wood underfoot. She was still clutching her morning coffee to her chest, but it was now only luke warm; and she had one foot on the rickety ladder leading up through the gaping black oblong in the bedroom ceiling: the entrance to the attic.
Strangely enough, this exact same thing happened to me a few days ago she thought her head in the clouds but found it instead protruding through the attic hatch, the long wooden pole with brass hook mounted on the end in hand having already drawn the ladder. It was as if my body had been following another’s command in the absence of my mind. But I was suddenly overcome with a childish fear of gloomy attics and their ghoulish reputations and so I- THREE: jumped off the ladder to land with the heavy thud of an adult body on creaky floorboard. –TWO: hurriedly shoved the ladder back up into the darkness (from whence it came!) – ONE: yanked the trap door closed. This countdown was a ‘trick’ she’d developed as a child: if you took any longer than 3 seconds to vacate the room in question the monster would notice you (although in some situations you had from 10 = goes to show kids are as inconsistent as adults) and once it had noticed you, it had you.
The brightness of the room had soon exiled all her fears to the shadows; still with heart hammering, gasping for breath she had laughed at herself - equal parts relief to glee at her irrational adrenalin rush – before going back downstairs, snatching up her car keys and taking herself off into town. To the cinema to be exact, to watch the latest horror movie; one from Ti West, she loved those. Assuring herself that such fears were fiction… I call it ‘evading the Medusa affect’, i.e. fiction is the mirror, look at her directly and you’ll turn to stone.
Funny that the hatch is open again now, and the ladder extended… God knows, I probably did it myself last night, in a state of distraction no doubt (red curtains, or best to stick with creams?) Anyway, I’m here now, maybe my subconscious is telling me to start at the top of the house and work down. Or get the worst part out of the way first.
She stood on the ladder, waist deep in the attic – that is, her top half was through that gaping mouth surveying the work to be done like some sort of tiny dentist inspecting the painful molars of a huge, sedated beast. I hung my jaw open lazily for her. Her bottom half remained on the ladder awaiting further instruction from the top, her right foot idly scratching the back of her left leg. She scanned the boxes that were haphazardly shoved and piled around and on top of each other. They were striped with light and shadow projected by my two skylights with cobweb cataracts – would you believe the state she’s let me get into. There were a few boxes she instinctively knew the contents of: that one with the big watermark around the bottom has my dad’s log books in it. And that mustard yellow one with rounded red typeface… (advertising something that probably doesn’t even exist anymore) holds all my grandparents old photographs. In there too were three or so postcards showing the hanging body of Mussolini. Her grandpa must have picked them up on his travels during the Second World War. A dead body in place of a sunny beach in caustic celebration of the end of a dark era, no ‘wish you were here’ in a cheerful “handwritten” font along the bottom. In fact there was no writing on it all, no note on the back in her grandpa’s beautiful spidery script - just blank. That small black shape hanging high up against a whitewashed sky was etched in her mind’s eye.
If I start with that box I’ll be here all day. What about the trunk? A huge trunk, though only just large enough to sheath that bloated collection of soft toys. A collection rained down upon a strange little girl by doting relations. A dirty white paw reached tragically out to her from under the lid. She’d have loved to take it in her hands, be pulled into that soft fluffy mass of childhood fantasy and memory. She always had such renewed love and empathy for those toys whenever she met their glittering black eyes with hers… I used to imagine I could feel a soft responsive squeeze from those bears as a child. Of course the mice had made nests of their innards now, the pink, pulsing bodies of their young like a grotesque digestive system animating the toys like she’d always wished for. What’s that phrase? “Be careful what you…” There is no time for that now. So that box didn’t grab her either.
Clatter. Thud. A long, drawn-out roll. Her stomach did summersaults as her heart leapt in her chest. She spun around to face whatever was coming towards her
88.8..8…8….8…..8……8…….8
Out of the shadows I’d rolled her an old billiard ball.
I reveled in my perfect aim as the little ball came to a slow stop just out of reach. Her feet stepped tentatively up to the next rung of the ladder and she leaned as far as she could. But she was still a good half a meter off. Now she was on the tiptoe of one foot, the other extended out behind her; with one palm planted firmly in the dust of the musty floorboards. Her fingers stretched as far as they could go and waggled desperately within millimeters of the ivory-like surface of the ball. (As I said, perfect!) The air was unnaturally still, I was holding my breath expectantly, like the tension just before a kiss you’ve been darkly engineering. You know the ones, where you see their minds turn away from the inevitable wrong-doing their bodies are about to commit. And as their lips finally push against yours, the seal complete, your tongues crossing the threshold of each other; they too cross over as if into a boundless dream.
No good, I can’t reach it. She let her hand drop noisily to the floor, sending a large plume of dust up into to air to dance wickedly ahead of her in the shafts of sunlight. She lay half in and half out of the attic, arm outstretched with cheek leaning on it - just staring at the billiard ball. The circle framing the black figure of eight was tarnished as yellow as nicotine-stained teeth and the rest of it was a dirty slate grey. She knew it. I remember that ball. A visitor to the house when I was 11, she was 15 but immature for her age had backed her car into the dry stone wall to one side of the driveway, busting it wide open and spilling rubble infill all over the road. Out rolled this little eight ball. Amidst the chaos of mortified apologies exchanged between adults she’d spotted it and scurried back inside with it. She’d then spent the rest of the evening washing away the dirt and polishing it with as many different products as she could lift from the kitchen. At the time there had been I remember a craze going around my school for these odd, oversized, plastic, magic eight ball things with a little window in the back that revealed an inky black, liquid-filled centre. Loads of kids had them. You’d ask it a question, roll it around, and then an answer would float up against the window. I’d fancied that this one I’d found was a real magic eight ball so I used to ask it questions instructing it on the different signs it could give to signify different answers. She’d wished on it too, and in return for its wisdom had given it pride of place on her dresser until she left for I guess with me gone to University it was relegated to the attic.
Sod it, I’ll just give it a wipe over. Lifting herself up, she swung her right knee up into the attic and propelled herself forward. Now fully in the monsters jaws, she snatched up the ball.
At that same moment came the hollow shifting sound of a drawer being opened somewhere back there in the shadows. The seal almost complete.