Only Ever Always

by Penni Russon

You no longer know how to look at these items. All at once they seem more important than ever – the evidence of you, the earthly traces that will outlive you, that will stand in for you when the body of you and with it the spirit or soul or whatever it is that is encased inside has slipped away, as Charlie could slip away.

  And yet the one-eyed, loose-wigged dolls, the threadbare teddies, the irreconcilably separated wooden ducks suddenly chill you with their staring lifelessness. These are husks only, empty vessels, your child’s imagination has departed them and they no longer live. It is the objects that are dead, horrifyingly empty. You sweep them to the floor in sudden anger, and it is the rage of the child you once were, powerful in your disappointment, filling the room.

  You pick up the music box and with blinding white hot rage you hold it above your head. You imagine it wrecked, the glass globe cracked open, the world inside dashed to pieces. The picture of it gives you a ghastly satisfaction. But rushing up to meet this appetite for destruction is grief and shame. Grief tempers rage and all you are left with is hollow shame.

  And you are sorry. You gently place the music box on your bedside table with trembling hands. You pick up the closest doll – Martha – and smooth the cotton cap her hair is woven into back over her exposed, plastic, glue-stained scalp. You place her carefully on a shelf. You do the same for the next doll and the poor brown teddy who landed face down, the metal cars, the family of felt-eared bunnies. You lean the wooden ducks against each other, carefully balancing them so the cracks don’t show.

  The street outside is quiet.

  A moth taps lightly against the window. You watch it, imagining its flight path through the city as a dotted line, a glistening thread trailing through the darkness – looping, spooling, entangling space, from one house to the next, around letterboxes, over the road, spinning through the air. And now here it is, stuttering against the glass, romancing the warm light inside. The yellow light remains perfectly indifferent. From far above its twin – the moon – looks on. As you watch the moth, a feeling bubbles up from a deep forgotten past, an ancient self, someone you were before you were Claire: a memory is triggered, but instantly forgotten again. It is a feeling from a dream, breathless and fizzing, and with it comes a familiar sense of music about to begin, as though, if you concentrate hard enough, you could snatch the passing notes out of the air.

  ‘Not asleep yet?’ Dad asks from the door.

  ‘Has Mum called?’

  Dad shakes his head.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ you say, though you haven’t tried.

  Dad picks up the music box from the bedside table, where you placed it earlier. You are struck by an image you never saw, or that you witnessed but couldn’t retain except as a story you have been told over and over since before you can remember, an image of Charlie bringing this box to the hospital when you were only a few hours old, arriving with it under his arm, in a rush of outside air and panic and love.

  Dad winds the box and places it down beside you. He lifts the covers of your bed, and you shimmy down under the blankets. The music is so familiar that you remember the notes as much as hear them. It is not just the music you hear, it is also the mechanism, the faint metallic grind. You close your eyes and the music soaks into your skin. As the music box winds down, the spaces between the notes grow longer, and your heart aches, waiting for each note to fall. Finally you can’t bear it. You sit up and wind the box again, and the music cascades once more in a silvery rush.

  This time you roll over on your side to watch. Inside the globe dances a girl and her partner, a mouse in top hat and tails. The girl and the mouse spin together, circling the interior of their enclosed world. At their feet flowers grow, bespeckled by tiny insects and if you shake their world, more flowers rain down on the mouse and his bride. In the back of the globe there is a piece of stiff card, a little faded now, with an intricately painted setting that looks like a wedding: a feast laid on a long table surrounded by a small party of guests watching the solemn mouse and the laughing, twirling girl.

  As a child you were fascinated with the miniature, wishing you were small enough to drink from an acorn cup or to sleep suspended in a moss bird’s nest. You watched this very scene on countless nights before you drifted off to sleep, wishing you could enter their world in your dreams, taking your place in the painted background among the gentlemanly hedgehogs and the frocked bunnies, the moulded jellies and layered cakes. But try as you might, you cannot make your own dreams.

  ‘Will you draw on my back?’ you ask your father, the way he used to when you were small. He sits down next to you and his finger swirls across your back, making rivers and mountains and oceans, criss-crossing latitudes and longitudes. But before you are quite asleep, he stands up and walks over to the window. You watch him through half-open eyes. He looks out, over the darkening rooftop of the house next door, to the next rooftop and the next, all tight lids on other people’s lives.

  And you wonder. Is loving someone too big a risk? Is it better to seal yourself up, to not let love in or out? Mum is careful who she loves. This is why you have little experience of dogs. She has never let you have a pet, you are sure, in order to set an example about loving sparingly. If Charlie is lost, is everyone who loves Charlie lost too? How will you face Pia? How will you be able to bear her sadness? How will she bear yours?

  Dad sighs and pulls the curtain sharply closed.

  Outside, the moth – its enchantment broken –- spirals upwards, away into the night. Rising, spinning, a hopeless tattered thing, of dust. You rise with it, into the night sky. The night is tense with musical possibility as if, between the notes from the music box that you can still hear ascending, there is the shadow of other notes, a song not yet sung. A song from a dream perhaps. And here in the half-light between waking and sleep, you remember that this afternoon, before the Jarvises, before Charlie, you were dreaming, a far away dream about a far away girl, a girl who looked just like you, but was living another life. The music carries you. You rise. You rise up. And, spread out among the frozen stars, finally, you sleep . . .

  What have I got?

  This city’s crumbling to nothing, to rubble round me. I walk and walk and scour and sift and quarry. I find what’s left. Crumbles what might mean something to someone. Crumbles of plastic or painted wood, sometimes with glass eyes or yellow hair, or some have wheels or buttons or strings. Crumbles with moving parts, what once used to make their own sounds or flash their spinning lights, but now just sit there and say nothing. Like me, Andrew tells. Some days I don’t say nothing to no one, but my hair aint yellow, it’s brown as dust. Some days all Andrew does is talk and talk, talking about what used to be afore, but I don’t remember afore. Far as I know there’s only been this, nothing piled on nothing, there’s only been crumbles and quarrying. I don’t remember things whole. Everything’s always been broke.

  Andrew tells that once I would have had a mother and a father, right back when I was begun, but I don’t remember that neither. He said they might have been whole or they might have been broke but that’s not what matters. What matters, Andrew tells, is that they was mine, they joined themselves up together and started me. By the time Andrew came along I didn’t have them anymore, I was a thing alone, and, he tells, I didn’t speak for days. I was quiet as a bug and as low to the ground. I scuttled, and he makes me laugh doing it, scrabbling on his hands and feet till he collapses. He thought I couldn’t walk up on my two feet, but he was wrong. He thought I couldn’t talk neither, but then one night he woke up to find me standing by the bed, wide-eyed, with a jumbling of words coming out of my mouth. Real words, but not put together in any way that made sense. Just words they were. Carrot and moon and dirt and picture and dog dog dog. He thought I might be broke too, somewhere inside me, but I weren’t, I was just dreaming and after that night, he tells, I spoke proper to him, like all I needed was my springs loosened – I seen that wit
h the crumbles.

  Andrew tells this. He found me and the house at the same time and liked us enough to stay. But even being found was afore my memory began. I don’t know what I remember first. Just this I suppose. The empty broke-down houses, the rummaging, market, Andrew, his Doctor. Nothing much changes, ’cept some of the faces at market and that every year I get a bit taller. Not Andrew though, he’s done with his growing and it aint done him any good but got his head closer to the ceiling and one day that’s gonna fall in on us. He reckons if I listen to him I ought to stop with it too, but there’s not much I can do about growing, though being grown don’t interest me none. Besides, it aint like I’m ever gonna be real tall like Andrew, I’m slowed down already and I aint even up to his armpits.

  Anyway, as usual the day ends and I head for home with my haul. Some tins without wrappers, but heavy with food still inside, some broken bits – aint none of ’em good, but maybe I can make something of ’em – this one’s got wheels, this one’s got some kind of motor and one’s got one real good eye. No batteries tonight. Batteries is best for swapping. I don’t find batteries much anymore. Some say things are getting harder. But they was always hard. I got one more thing too, tucked real careful under my arm and I’m twittering inside, I can’t wait to give it to Andrew. It aint worth much to nobody but us, but I look after it real careful just the same.

  Our house aint got no front. It’s just rooms bared to the world, and a big staircase going up. You can see right inside it from the street, upstairs and down. Inside the rooms is piles of rubble, broken pieces of front and ceiling and glass; the inside walls coming down in pieces and broken bits of furniture and just picked through junk. Everything good is gone. The dogs have done a job on it, they’ve marked it all over and it stinks. Dogs live there for times, then they move on. There’s more dogs than people in the city, that’s facts. Andrew’s been out of the city, that’s where he come from, where there’s more people than dogs, and he says that’s worse.

  Me and Andrew live in two rooms at the back. It was a big house afore it got broke and there were lots of rooms. Our two rooms are still pretty good, the back of the house is stuck on tight. There’s a room upstairs too that is still whole, though all closed up, windows blacked. We can’t get into it through the rubble in the front or climbing from outside – like we haven’t tried enough times! – so it just sits up there, closed and quiet, thinking its own thoughts, hoarding secrets and ghosts and insect shells and crumbles and bones. There could be batteries or anything up there, but I can’t see in. Andrew won’t force it. He’s feared that if we start banging things round, maybe the house will fall in, and probably that room is full of nothing but stale air. We like it here, Andrew and me, enough to leave that room be, but he can’t stop me thinking about it, and in my mind there’s more up there than old empty air.

  ‘Andrew!’ I call out as I round the back of the house. But I know he aint home yet. I hate that Doctor. He wants Andrew to go and live with him all the time, he don’t care nothing about me. But we can’t count both our fortunes on the street and that’s why Andrew goes there. Doctor gives him things we need, like fruit and veg and candles and matches and stuff. Bits here and bits there, but sometimes Andrew comes home with a real haul. He calls it Christmas. I don’t know what that means, but that’s how he calls it: ‘Christmas is here.’

  I leave the crumbles outside, Andrew don’t like them in the house, especially the ones what have eyes. He minds that there’s enough rubbish out there without bringing it in with us. I take the tins in though and pile them in with the others. I put the other thing on the table so Andrew will see it first when he gets home, he won’t mind that. I stroke it down flat, there’s a few little folds and wrinkles, but apart from that it’s real fine. Hopefully there’ll be light enough for it when Andrew gets home.

  I open a tin. It’s fruit. The juice is thick sweet and trickles down my throat and sloshes up into the back of my nose.

  By the time Andrew gets home it’s dark outside. He picks up the treasure and turns it over, a faint smile on his lips. Candlelight jumps and twitches.

  ‘Have we had it afore?’ I ask.

  Andrew shakes his head. I can see that he’s tired, more tired than usual tonight. He’s quiet. Andrew’s not regularly quiet.

  ‘Good,’ I say.

  Andrew puts the thing down. ‘Not tonight, Clara,’ he tells though I aint asked yet.

  I don’t say nothing. But I kick the leg of his chair. I open him a tin. More fruit. But he puts his head down at the table and starts to snore, right there, still sitting, like some of them leftovers you see in the houses, what aint got skin no more.

  I kick his chair again, but he don’t wake. I kick his leg, hard enough to bruise. I bang the tins round. I slurp his fruit. He don’t stir. It’s lonely being awake by myself. But I don’t want to sleep. Sleeping is lonely too. The house creaks. Dogs call to each other in the falling night.

  For company, I take the treasure off the table, where Andrew left it, and I smooth back the first page. I sound out the flickering words and though I know the letters, I can’t always tell what they mean all put together.

  ‘Once,’ I say out loud, my finger dragging my eyes across the page. Something moves in the stalks outside, weeds rustle their tips together. ‘Upon a.’ Somewhere in the broke-down city a dog barks. ‘Time.’

  To get to market I used to walk by river and through the park, but Groom tells there’s dogs now. River dogs are wild, wilder than street dogs, they’re solitary and sulphur-breathed, eyes flicker through the trees, they watch. I say I aint feared of dogs. But Groom and Andrew make me promise to walk streetways when I’m alone. There’s dogs on streets too I sniff, but I give Groom a hair when I promise and he wraps it round his finger. Andrew don’t need a hair, just words is enough for him, cause he’s got a look and can see when I’m making lies.

  Andrew tells that river and city used to be all the same, one running through, and the other growing round. But not no more. River is a dark territory, it keeps the city apart, it makes two cities. City crumbles. River grows.

  Market runs day and into night, people come, people go, sometimes there’s plenty, sometimes not. I never been at night, but Groom has. Groom lives on the edge of the park, in the Zone. He makes pleadings that I should live there too, safety in numbers, he tells. But me and Andrew got a number already, even if it is only two. That’s what works and I know you don’t fix nothing that aint broke.

  But I’d like to see a night market. They’re different, Groom tells, but when I ask different how his mouth closes tight and he don’t tell. Jus’ different. Different good or different bad? His mouth’s so tight his seams are fit to bursting, like an overstuffed crumble. Jus’ different.

  Andrew is feared that I got an adventuring spirit, and he don’t. But I love Andrew and I would never go adventuring without him, even if sometimes I look after Groom with moons in my eyes, wishing for something I don’t have.

  My bag’s knobbly, filled with insides, and it bangs my legs till I feel bruised all over. Metal things: magnets, springs, cogs and wheels. There’s ones what will use ’em, ones what make, ones what fix, ones what like to spring-load their traps. And you can use the bolt ends to shoot dogs. Andrew don’t let me make nothing like that. Clara, knowing you you’ll shoot your own ear right off and trap your thumbs for measure, he tells. Don’t mean I aint tried. But I trapped something once that weren’t my thumb, a small thing, grey and greasy, and it lay there staring and pulsing and I didn’t like it, the way it looked at me and then died. So I buried it under stones, trap and all, I kicked it there then buried it. I didn’t want to touch it. But burying it didn’t forget it. I could still see it dying, its glass eyes open, like windows of a house left open with no one, nothing, no walls inside.

  I turn up the main street. The sun is a white hole in the white sky. Down the ends of the streets t
hat come off the main road I see flashes of river. I hear a distant dog’s bark. From the river’s glooming another calls back.

  I walk past the big houses. Round here’s where Andrew’s Doctor lives. The houses aint whole, but Andrew tells that sometimes there’s one perfect room with carpet and trickly glass things that hang down from the ceiling and coloured paper on the walls and that’s where they live – the folk like Andrew’s Doctor who live better than what we do, though I don’t see how things can be that much better in one place than another.

  You don’t see much people on the streets. When Andrew was a kid everyone went out in the morning at the same time. I seen cars afore, but Andrew tells the roads were full of ’em all at once driving and bipping. I can’t imagine that. Now you don’t see much people, but there’s people all the same. A man looks out a window at me.

  There’s kids in a garden throwing stones into a tree, they stop and stare as I walk past then start again. One of them skitters a rock along behind me, it hits the back of my leg and stings. I keep walking with my fists clenched. There’s more of them than there is of me and I know my numbers good enough to know to stay shut-mouthed, though if they come after me I’ll swing the bag of bolts, I’ll crack their heads.

  Round the corner, there’s a mank dog. He’s lying on the road, mud-streaked, wet-furred, slithery, like he’s come from somewhere deep and damp. He stinks. My heart races along the road, but my feet stop, my throat closes, my breath holds. He’s closed eyes. He don’t see, but he knows I’m there. Black lip curls: bleeding gum, long tooth, mank breath. He snarls long and low. I step back lightly, and he’s up and fierce, his eyes rolling mad. I raise the bolts, throw ’em and they scatter fly. I take off. Behind me, river dog runs, hard claws clattering, snarling throat.

  I run. Dog runs faster.

  The road beats upwards against my feet. The world jerks. Colours I don’t recognise flash past me. I can’t run no more. I stumble, arms out. I fall, and it takes an unnatural long time – too long – the falling. That’s it. I’m dead. I wait for torn flesh. I lie down flat and wait to lose my neck.