Perfections

by Kirstyn McDermott

  ‘Lina, stop.’ Loki seizes her around the shoulders, holds Jacqueline to him in that same careful way Antoinette remembers him holding her about a billion-zillion years ago, that first night as she fled from him through the apartment. Holding Jacqueline like she might break, like she might break herself, he lowers his mouth to her ear, speaks low and soft until finally she stops struggling. But her eyes are still murderous, and they don’t leave Sally Paige’s face for a second.

  ‘What did you do to him?’ she demands again.

  ‘Why were you down there in the first place?’ Sally Paige retorts. ‘You hate the bush, you both hate the bush.’ Her gazes switches between her daughters, suspicious and cold. ‘He was safe from you there.’

  ‘You weren’t ever going to tell us about him, were you?’

  ‘That’s because it doesn’t concern you.’

  ‘Okay, enough,’ Antoinette breaks in. ‘Can someone please let me know what the bloody hell’s going on?’

  ‘It’s Charles,’ Jacqueline says. ‘She has our brother locked up in that old shed down the back. And she did something to him, he’s not . . . he’s not right.’

  ‘That isn’t your brother,’ Sally Paige says.

  Jacqueline shakes her head, turns to her sister. ‘Ant, you should see this for yourself.’

  Antoinette barely gets three steps outside the shed before she throws up. Bent double with hands braced on knees, purging herself of mostly vodka and bile, but also some abrasive lumps that must have been lingering from the toast and eggs she had for breakfast. She couldn’t stay in there, couldn’t look at him for another second–

  runstopbadrunstopbad

  –bad enough they made her walk all the way down here, practically having to frogmarch her through the damn trees she was shaking so much, and then coaxing her into that shed of which she had no clear memory of ever seeing before and yet, and yet, something inside her was beating its wings in panic–

  runstopbadrunstopbad

  –because she knew with an absolute and terrified certainty that it was the worst place in the world, a place she didn’t ever want to visit again – again? – but she let them lead her inside anyway, and there he was – the charliedoll – with his grotesque, lollipop head and round, toothless mouth and, oh god, the sound that came out of that mouth when he rolled those huge and hazy eyes around to find her standing by the crib, that toneless pan-pipe whistle, the backing track to every childhood nightmare–

  runstopbadrunstopbad

  –and the memories don’t come flooding back so much as they seep in, drop by torturous drop. Disconnected flashes linked by evocations of terror and dread: abhorrence shadowed in her mother’s face; cicada song and the flicker of sunlight through leaves; a little girl screaming, a little girl that might be Antoinette-that-was; and the charliedoll, the charliedoll, the charliedoll–

  runstopbadrunstopbad

  –not the whole story, not by a long shot, but enough to realise that somehow this whole sorry, sickening mess can be laid squarely at her own vomit-spattered feet.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Jacqueline sounds hurt, or maybe just offended.

  Antoinette spits and straightens, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, then wipes her hand on her shirt. ‘I think Mum might be right.’

  ‘About what?’ her sister asks warily.

  ‘That’s . . . that’s not Charlie in there. Not our Charlie, not yours.’

  ‘Antoinette?’ Loki steps into the doorway of the shed. ‘What is it?’ There’s a baby’s bottle in his hand, filled with what must be the fruit juice he brought with them from the house. She pictures the charliedoll’s mouth sealing itself tight around that rubbery latex teat and sucking, can imagine the wet, fleshy sounds of his lips and tongue greedily at work, and her stomach rolls.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Antoinette slurs queasily, then she bends forward and vomits more vodka onto the grass.

  ‘He is not your brother,’ Sally Paige tells them. ‘He never was your brother, the same as that pretty boy out there was never Paul. Your brother is dead.’

  Lina watches her face for any signs of deceit. The woman has been lying to them their entire lives, and Lina trusts her like she would a scorpion. She glances at Ant, hoping again to catch her eye. But her sister is still hunched over in the chair beside the bed. Head in hands, elbows on knees. She’s said very little since Lina and Loki dragged her back to the house and forced half a litre of water down her throat.

  Just, I need to talk to Mum. And, I have to know.

  She won’t even look at Lina. Wouldn’t look at Loki, either. Didn’t even protest when her mother rasped at him to leave, to get the hell out of her bedroom. He wasn’t wanted there. He wasn’t wanted anywhere. Ant simply stared at the floor. Lina was having none of it – Sally Paige had no right to talk to him like that – but he quickly shushed her.

  It’s okay. I’ll go and keep Charlie company.

  Lina swallows. The sounds the boy made when they tried to bring him up to the house still echo in her ears. Those high-pitched squeals of distress as he flopped and writhed in Loki’s arms, growing louder and more piercing the further he was carried away from the shed. The situation only made worse by Ant who, with flattened palms pressed to the sides of her head, kept screaming at Loki to turn around. To turn around and take him back right the fuck now.

  Can’t you see he’s terrified? That shed is his whole world.

  Even returned to his crib, it took a while to settle him. That great head rocked from side to side as Lina stroked his hair. His tiny, skinny body hitched and shook. She found his toy frog tangled in the sheet. Placed it into his hand. He hooted softly, stuffed a fluffy green foot into his mouth and began to suck.

  Lina pushes the image aside.

  ‘You shouldn’t have been able to do it,’ Sally Paige is saying to Ant. ‘Whimsies, yes, but not a perfection – not even a broken shambles such as what’s out in that shed. Good grief, you weren’t even two years old. That you could manifest anything . . .’

  Ant mumbles something that Lina, standing against the wall on the opposite side of the room, can’t quite catch.

  ‘Yes, well.’ Sally Paige says. ‘That’s all so much spilled milk now.’

  ‘Why does he look like that?’ Lina asks.

  ‘Do you remember that Baby Alive doll you had? You stuck a bottle of water or what-have-you in its mouth and the damn thing would start suckling it down. Peed it right out through a hole between its legs, so you could change its nappy.’ She shakes her head. ‘Horrible thing gave me the creeps. But my mother thought you would like it, Jacqueline, since you were so obsessed with playing mummies-and-babies.’

  Lina frowns. ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You didn’t much care for the doll anyway. But your sister was fascinated.’

  ‘I don’t remember it,’ Ant murmurs.

  That doesn’t matter either, according to Sally Paige. The fact is, she loved the damn doll. Would drag it around with her everywhere. Charles liked it as well, funnily enough. The two of them would play with it together, with Jacqueline watching doubtfully from the sidelines. They’d shove the bottle into its mouth and hold it up in the air, giggling as the liquid trickled out its nethers. But if Antoinette loved the doll, then she adored her older brother. And when Charles died, when he was no longer around to play dollies and blow raspberries on her tummy and . . . well, she was only two years old, not even. How do you explain death to a toddler? How do explain gone and forever and never ever coming back?

  All Antoinette understood was that she missed him.

  And, missing him, she made him come back.

  But it’s hardly straightforward, the creation of a perfection. It requires focus and concentration and attention to detail. Not skills at which two-year-old girls tend to excel, and hence, Sally
Paige conjectures, the charliedoll. Some freakish, stick-figure amalgam of favourite toy and faulty memory. Not at all what Antoinette wanted. Not her brother, not Charlie, and so she stumbled sobbing and horrified from her bedroom to find Mummy. Because Mummy would fix it. Mummy would make it better. Mummy would make the charliedoll go bye-de-bye-bye.

  Because that’s what a good Mummy does.

  Ant lifts her head. ‘You took him from me.’

  ‘You were more than willing to give him up. He terrified you.’

  ‘Do you remember any of this?’ Lina asks.

  Her sister looks ill. ‘Just . . . flashes. Bits and pieces.’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t remember,’ Sally Paige snaps. ‘Do you think I would let her carry that horror her entire life?’

  One lesson she learned from all those parenting books: the mind of a young child is plastic. Impressionable. It fixates and fears. And it can be made to forget.

  Aversion therapy. Hypnosis. Sally Paige playing amateur psychologist. Making sure that Antoinette would from then on associate terror and dread with any whimsical evocation. However transitory, however accidental. A relapse bringing with it threats to take her to the charliedoll, to leave her with the charliedoll forever, and after a while those threats were all that was needed. Threats and tears and crude hypnotic sessions that helped her youngest daughter to – quite literally – put it out of her mind. To stuff all the scary-bad away inside a box. To hide the box inside her heart. To lock the box with a super-secret key. To take that key and–

  ‘Swallow it,’ Ant whispers. ‘Oh god, I remember that.’

  ‘It was hard work,’ Sally Paige says. As another parent might talk of potty training, or teaching their child to read.

  But still, in the end, seven or eight months was all it took. Plus a few more years of careful vigilance, so that by the time Antoinette was in primary school, it seemed to have stuck for good. No more whimsies, no more talk of whimsies even. Just a normal little girl, like all the other normal little girls in her year. If somewhat more prone to anxiety and odd, irrational fears. Like baby dolls with glassy blue eyes or the bushland out back of the house. Like being asked to make up stories in class or join in playground games of Let’s Pretend.

  ‘Some of it rubbed off on you as well,’ Sally Paige tells Lina. ‘Fear is more contagious than chicken pox and children are very susceptible to the beliefs of those around them. Especially their siblings, or so the books reckon. It kept the both of you away from him, anyway.’

  Lina is clenching her fists so tightly, it feels as though her fingernails are shearing straight through her palms. She opens her hands. A series of deep, savage crescents grin up at her. ‘This is monstrous,’ she hisses, and the hateful woman in the bed has the audacity to laugh.

  ‘Yes,’ Sally Paige says, contempt glinting in her eyes. ‘Monstrous is exactly what we are.’

  Lina stalks towards her. No clear thought in her mind beyond inflicting some kind of hurt. She reaches for the plastic tubing that runs from the medication machine into the woman’s scrawny-sallow chest, delivering her a painlessness so ill-deserved it’s obscene, and–

  ‘Jacqueline, don’t.’ Ant rises unsteadily from her chair.

  ‘Why are you protecting her? She tortured you.’

  ‘It’s not her I’m protecting.’ Eyes red-laced and bleary, her sister looks dead on her feet. Her voice trembles as much as the hand she now lifts. Fragile, pleading. ‘This isn’t who you are, Jacqueline–Lina. You’re better than this. You’re better than her.’

  ‘Am I?’ She shakes her head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Please. I need you to be better.’

  Lina hesitates. Half-hoping Sally Paige will pipe in with some gloating, goading remark. Final straw, permission slip, mitigating fucking circumstance. But she says nothing. Does nothing. Is nothing, Lina realises. Is merely the hollow, stiff-faced husk of a mother who never was. And Lina smiles, and folds her hands over her middle, and moves away from the woman cowering in the bed. One day, soon perhaps, she will bring a child of her own into the world. A child who will never know the poison that is Sally Paige. Who will never even know her name.

  ‘Come on,’ Lina says, walking around to her sister. ‘You’re exhausted, you should rest.’ She takes Ant’s hand. ‘We don’t need her anymore. We never needed her.’

  At the door, her sister stops and glances back towards the bed. ‘What did I lose?’ she whispers. ‘When I made . . . Charlie, what did I give up?’

  Sally Paige shakes her head. ‘I don’t know, dear. Whatever it was, I doubt you’ll have missed it. That poor creature is so simple, so ill-conceived, you could have put him together from doll parts and spit.’

  ‘Ant, leave it. Let’s go.’

  ‘Yes, go,’ Sally Paige says. ‘I’m tired. I want to sleep.’

  Lina puts an arm around her sister’s waist. ‘Come on.’

  But Ant pulls away. ‘You shouldn’t have taken him, Mum. He wasn’t your mistake, he was mine.’

  ‘You were just a child.’

  ‘Yes, but not anymore. And now I want him back.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sally Paige scoffs. ‘You couldn’t possibly cope, not with three of them. You just wait, my girl. Those two you have, they’ll drag you down soon enough.’

  ‘What’s she talking about?’ Lina asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ Ant says. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Oh, it matters, dear. Don’t you kid yourself about that.’

  ‘Ant?’

  Her sister shrugs her off. ‘This isn’t the end of it, Mum.’

  ‘No,’ Sally Paige replies. ‘I don’t suppose it is.’

  Antoinette wakes, dry-mouthed and disoriented, a crick in her neck from where she’s been curled against the arm of the couch. The dull, grey light of early evening seeps through the living room windows and someone has draped one of Sally Paige’s crocheted throw rugs over her while she slept. She pushes herself upright, wincing at the pain throbbing behind her right eye. There’s a glass of water on the coffee table, two small white tablets nudging its base, and Antoinette washes them down gratefully. Out in the kitchen, the kettle begins to shriek.

  It’s the only sound in the whole house.

  With some effort, she gets to her feet. Shuffles into the kitchen with the throw still wrapped around her shoulders, motley caped crusader somewhat worse for wear, and finds her mother spooning tea leaves into a pot. ‘You want a cup?’

  Antoinette shakes her head. ‘Where is everyone?’

  ‘I heard them go outside earlier. I assume they’re with him.’

  ‘I meant what I said before.’

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘I’m not just going to let you take him with you.’

  Her mother picks up the kettle, bracing her elbow with her other hand, and starts to fill the teapot. But her aim isn’t the best and hot water splashes off the porcelain rim, splattering her wrist with scalding drops.

  ‘Mum, here, let me.’ Antoinette takes it from her. ‘I don’t know why you bother with a whole pot. You never finish the first cup half the time, and even if you do get to the second, the tea’s gone cold.’

  ‘It’s better made in a pot. Tea bags are vile.’

  ‘Whatever. You want to have this in the living room?’

  ‘I’d rather not.’ She glances towards the window, the backyard yawning empty in the diminishing light. ‘They’ll probably be in again soon.’

  ‘You don’t have to hide, Mum. It’s your house.’

  ‘Not while they’re here, it isn’t.’

  Antoinette settles her mother back into bed and pours her a cup of tea. Sally Paige takes a small sip, makes a face like she’s been tricked into drinking tepid swamp-water, and promptly passes it back. ‘It tastes off.’r />
  ‘I don’t think tea can go off, Mum.’ But she takes the cup anyway, puts it on the bedside table beside the pot. ‘Do you want something else instead?’

  Sally Paige makes no reply, just sits propped in her nest of pillows, frowning as she fiddles with her medication tube.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Your sister hates me.’

  ‘Yes. I think she does.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘I guess . . . I can see your side of it. I mean, okay, you made the twins because you thought you couldn’t have a baby of your own, but I created Loki because my stupid boyfriend dumped me. You can’t get much more pathetic than that, really.’

  ‘You didn’t know what you were doing.’

  ‘Yeah, but what you said, how we all want to believe that we’ll be the one lucky woman who gets it right?’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I’m no different. Maybe it wouldn’t have been Loki, but sooner or later I would’ve perfected someone, regardless of what you had or hadn’t told me. So there’s no use blaming you for that, and as for the rest . . . I don’t agree with most of it – I don’t like any of it – but you did it for us, Jacqueline and me both. You tried to give us normal lives, and I can’t hate you for that either.’

  Her mother is silent for a moment. Then she nods, seemingly more to herself than to Antoinette, and pats the bed beside her. ‘Come here. Sit down.’

  Antoinette sinks into the mattress.

  ‘You need to give me that boy,’ her mother tells her.

  ‘If I do that, it’ll be the same as killing him.’

  ‘Nevertheless.’