by Lyz Russo
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I couldn’t sleep that night. Worries about Suzie started creeping into my mind within half an hour of getting back to work. It didn’t help telling myself that she’d been walking home alone for months, possibly even years. I had broken my commitment.
At lunchtime the next day I was faithfully back at Finch Park. I couldn’t see Suzie anywhere; so I took out my camera while waiting for her, and shot more photos of children on the playground. There was a nippy wind, and grey clouds hung above; none of the lyrical late-summer sunshine we’d been having the past few weeks, by sheer luck.
Suzie didn’t come.
This bothered me; had something happened to her? Once again logic tried to call me, that she’d been walking alone for a long time, but it didn’t convince me. I walked down the roads towards where she stayed, determined to check on her. Was she sick? Did her mother perhaps need help with that? That woman didn’t sound like the most competent kind. Psychiatric help, the thought crossed my mind, and I toyed with the thought of calling social services about the whole effect. I couldn’t, after all, put my own life on hold indefinitely for someone else’s child. I should probably have done that a while back.
As I walked, a miserable drizzle started sifting down. The dilapidated neighbourhood looked even more desolate in the rain. And with a niggle of bad conscience, as though I were betraying Suzie’s trust, I crossed over the invisible demarcation she had drawn for me, telling me “you cannot pass here”, in her Tolkienish little voice.
It was only fifty metres on to the run-down old house that was her home. I lifted the old door knocker – a once-brass lion’s head that came off in my hand. I instantly felt guilty about this, and put it to one side, determined to fix it for her mother, and I lifted my hand and rapped on the solid wooden door.
It wasn’t latched and swung slightly open as I knocked, so I entered cautiously – and gaped in astonishment.
The hallway was empty. No furniture anywhere; just dust. Some of the floorboards had been eaten by insects; there was damp in the corners, and cobwebs everywhere.
I shook my head, wondering just how destitute this family had to be to live in a ramshackle ruin like this. Vagrants perhaps? It occurred to me that Suzie only ever wore that one red dress. She probably had no other!
I walked through the rooms, one by one, the camera coming up reflexively and taking photos for a later case report. The place was deserted. Perhaps upstairs? I gave the creaky old staircase a doubtful look. And then I felt that familiar stare in the back of my neck, and turned.
She was glaring at me, arms folded; disappointed, cross. She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t have to. I had dropped her; and now I was breaking her rule and trespassing into her home.
And then she turned and walked off.
“Suzie!”
She marched on determinedly. I followed her down the deserted passage, feeling very guilty, still clicking away with the camera at the rooms though, and out through the kitchen that featured no fridge, no stove even, just old-fashioned cupboards and badly chipped tiles on the floor – out the back door.
The backyard was overgrown with weeds; it was a wet jungle in the rain and my trouser legs got thoroughly soaked as I followed her to where she stopped, under an old willow tree. She stood staring at the ground, at something. I looked too, and a chill went through me when I saw a grave. A smallish one, child-sized. It looked as though it had been there for a while. It had been planted carefully with dandelions and morning glory, and there was no headstone.
I looked up at Suzie in shock; she was on the move again, half-transparent by now. Back into the house I followed her, and then she rounded a corner and – as I followed her – was gone.
The sense of loss was sudden and final. The little ghost had left. I stared at my lonely set of footprints in the dust, and took photos; for myself, for later, to assure myself that I hadn’t been hallucinating – at least, not all of it. I had clicked away even outside in the yard, and taken shots of the grave, but never of Suzie... remembering how she had warded me from taking photos of her, I understood now. I trailed slowly through the broken old house.
There was a sound behind me. I turned. A huge man towered over me with an axe. I dodged and ran for my life; fleeing through rooms and slamming doors, only to hear him crashing them open and following. I found myself in an old cloakroom, and mercifully, I found something to grab. It was a large shard of a mirror that had cracked from age.
As the man came through the door, I stabbed wildly at him with the shard. To my surprise I hit a critical spot – the carotid artery in his throat. He collapsed, staring disbelievingly at me. The axe fell out of his hand as he breathed his last on the floor.
I snapped photos of the whole scene, battling to hold the camera steady against the adrenaline charging through my system. I had killed? Murdered? It had been self-defence – there was blood on his axe, and – I went down for a close-up – a bit of wispy, blond hair...
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Later, when I downloaded the photos, they showed an old house with empty rooms, marred only with my own tracks, which churned a bit in that old cloakroom. Photos of nothing at all.
And the only piece of evidence I could give the police, was the real picture of a small, overgrown grave at the back of an abandoned house...
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Thank you for reading “Suzie”.
More stories by Lyz Russo can be found at
A series of full-length pirate novels is available at this link:
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