Only Ever Always

by Penni Russon

  ‘Are you gonna eat that apple?’ Aily hungrily gobbles down her grain.

  That was the life I was living. Saying no all the time to Groom and his fancy futures, spun from dreams. If I were a dream I’d just sit here. I’d staunch the blood-river forever and sit in the dim and the quiet, feeling nothing at all, fading into grey, until, forgotten, I slipped from the world altogether.

  Outside, the morning is progressing. The sun creeps across your bed. Your parents mutter on the other side of the closed door.

  ‘I’m going to wake her,’ Dad says.

  Not yet. You squeeze your eyes shut. It’s too soon.

  ‘No,’ Mum urges. ‘Let her sleep.’

  Climbing the stairs are the steady, dogged tones of an arpeggio. There is no magic in the relentless rise and fall of these broken chords. This is earth music, hard music, the most grounded music there is. It marches into your dreaming, and though you try to hold onto the dream, you can’t.

  You are awake.

  It is Pia at the piano. It is Pia’s sadness that has woken you.

  You reach out for your music box, to wind it up and hold it to your chest and feel it strum inside you. And your fingers meet the jagged edge of glass. The dream comes back in a rush and, your eyes still closed, you see: in place of your music box, the dream interloper has left this one, a changeling of a music box, ugly and twisted, deformed and fragmented.

  You sit up and take it in your arms. The bride and her mouse groom have broken apart, the groom is gone. The bride’s arms hold emptiness, and her face is – to you – perceptibly sadder without him. It is made of all the wrongness of the world, this music box, every harm and sorrow. It fills you with deep shame, why you do not know, for it is not your fault it is here, it is not you who has made this. Or perhaps it is – your dream, your phantom other. The idea that you have somehow brought this on yourself is unbearable. You bury the music box under the bedclothes where it will not be seen and you bury your shame there, too, and concentrate on the sluggishness of your own blood, dragging through your veins.

  Dad comes in and sits on your bed, his broad hand smoothing the hair back from your forehead, and tells you gently that Charlie passed away during the night. You are astonished that you need to be told, because of course you already know, the knowledge thuds at the heart of you.

  ‘Come downstairs and have some breakfast,’ Dad says. ‘You’ve slept and slept.’

  You pull on track pants and a T-shirt and pad downstairs. To the left of the stairs is the lounge room, where the piano is now silent, but you can feel Pia is still there, her wretchedness seeps from the room, infiltrating every corner of the house and you shrink from it, but you are drawn to it too, to the power of her sorrow. Dad steers you to the right, into the kitchen.

  ‘Pia’s staying for a while,’ Mum tells you, as she butters your toast. ‘With everything that happened last night there was a little scare with the pregnancy. It’s all fine now —’ The word fine resounds untruthfully in the air. Mum cuts your toast in three soldiers. ‘We have to be brave, Claire. We have to be strong for Pia. We can’t come apart at the seams.’

  Pia. You stand just inside the kitchen door and listen to her silence grow. This is no longer your house, it is Despair’s house. And yet the arrangement of objects in the kitchen – cups, plates and bowls laid out in their sets, the ancient, fat brown teapot in the middle of the table next to uniform triangles of toast stacked in the toast rack – is the same as any other morning, and this gives you just enough courage to sit down at the table.

  The doorbell rings. Mum and Dad exchange a glance. Dad shuffles out of the kitchen to answer it. It is Mrs Jarvis. You can’t hear what they are saying, only the rise and fall of voices at the door. Dad brings her back with him into the kitchen.

  ‘I am so sorry to intrude,’ Mrs Jarvis says, fretfully. ‘I don’t want to add to your worries.’

  ‘They had a break-in,’ Dad says. ‘Last night.’

  Mum glances over at you. ‘Why don’t you go outside and play, darling? It’s a lovely day. Take your skipping rope, or draw a hopscotch if you like.’ As if you are a freckly six with pigtails, instead of thirteen, almost fourteen.

  But you don’t argue. Your toast is the texture of cardboard. You’ve grown weary of chewing.

  And outside it is a lovely day, it really is. The sun blooms in a cornflower sky, the houses in the street bounce red at each other. You perch on the edge of the garden wall.

  You say to yourself, Charlie is dead, but only in your head. The words drop like grey stones. You don’t feel anything. You think you should cry, but you can’t. You think you should see how blue the sky is and be grateful for it in the face of things, but it may as well be grey, or white, or stale, sickly yellow. Nothing matters. Nothing sticks.

  You feel the dog’s wildness before you see it, a slinking presence on the edge of things. You feel it in the pricking of that vulnerable patch of skin on the back of your neck, you feel it pounding in your ribcage, singing in your bloodstream. You peer over your shoulder. The dog sits upright, ears erect, watching you.

  You pretend to ignore it, kicking at the dirt. But the back of your neck stays up in prickles. The dog murmurs a low rumbling growl, and your heart hammers.

  But the dog isn’t growling at you. In the Jarvises’ backyard, just in your line of sight, a woman, heavy and overdressed, with an old-fashioned hat perched on the top of her head, wide brim pressed down over her eyes, beetles from the large plum tree to another hiding spot behind the house. You almost forget the dog then.

  You stand and edge over to the median strip, peering down the long wooden fence line that separates the two backyards. You can hear the murmur of adult voices in your own kitchen – Mum, Dad, Mrs Jarvis. Not Pia, of course not Pia, whose silence billows in black cloud, drifting out of the windows and rising on the cool, crisp air, hanging over the house like a thundercloud.

  The piano begins again, now playing the music box song (it was always Charlie’s favourite), and into the black clouds leaks a liquid silver, strange and familiar. The dog barks twice. You look down and at your feet there is a curling scrap of torn paper, trapped in the thick stems of a clump of native grass. The paper flutters indecisively between the two houses. You bend over and retrieve it. On one side it says in careful crouching print: antibiotics. On the other is written this:

  I.O.U.

  a reciprocal kindness

  to be redeemed by the bearer

  when need arises

  according to their own purpose

  The dog barks again, echoing distantly in your ears, distorting into a heavy metallic sound. When you look up your house is all but gone, though the fog of Pia’s sadness remains, clinging darkly to the newly white sky.

  Claire stares at the place where her house used to be. The brick is crumbling to rubble, the colour leaching out of it, from red to brown, now orange, or is it scorched grey, or is there no colour left in the world to call it by? The flowers are gone. There is vegetation, but it is rank and slimy, thick growth gone wild, as though it never rained but instead a stinking mud sometimes slithered from the sky. It is the wrong shade to be called green.

  The dog crosses the territory that used to be called road, and slinks to Claire’s side. It nudges her, and she forgets to be afraid. In fact she is calmed by the solid fact of the dog’s head under her hand: the oily bristles of its hairs, the flatness of its skull.

  The fence is gone now, and so is the plum tree. The absence of everything is not sharp or wounding. They have not simply vanished, they have become implausible. Claire no longer believes in plum trees or fences.

  There is an eye, a mess of grey, wiry hair, and a ridiculous hat peering round the corner of the wreck which had once been the Jarvises’ house.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Claire says.

  The eye dis
appears.

  Claire waits. It seems she has endless patience. The eye returns.

  ‘Go away, go away,’ the owner of the eye shrieks. ‘You’re trouble, you are, Clara girl, you’ll bring Her all over again and then I’ll be trussed up and tied. Besides, this aint your place no more. I’m here now. Possession and all that. But, oh, wait.’ Her voice changes, and she croons softly to herself. ‘Now wait a minute, Dolores. Look close at what you’re seeing. Look at the spectacle. Isn’t it interesting?’

  Dolores steps out, smoothing her hair, readjusting her hat. Her face is in a terrible condition, bruised and bloody, but she retains a certain dignity.

  ‘Very pleased to meet you, I’m sure. This is a turn up, this is. Door never swung both ways before, not as far as I’ve been knowing. We can go to you, but once, mebbe twice, only when we’re small enough to slip through, and only when the gap is close. Aint never known a dreamer to dream herself in. And why would you indeed? Why would you?’ The woman’s lips twitch with merriment at Claire’s expense.

  ‘But I saw you,’ Claire says. ‘In my place. Just now.’

  Dolores taps her swollen eye with a pudged up finger. ‘You see, you saw, doesn’t mean I was there. You peeked through the gap, that’s all. You peeked through, then stepped through, and that’s how it works.’

  ‘So I’m the dreamer? And you’re the dream?’

  Dolores stares haughtily and Claire sees that underneath that nest of hair, inside that swollen mess of contusion and gore, it is young Mrs Jarvis’s exact eye staring out. ‘There’s no one in this great grey city we call Sedge who wants to be called a dream.’ Sedge. It sounds to Claire like half a name; a broken name for a broken place. ‘We’re real enough.’ Dolores goes on, ‘Realler than you are, I’ll be bound.’

  Claire can’t argue with that. Claire is of fence and plum tree, from the shadow world. This world, made of broken things and dust, is as real as anything she’s ever seen. The dog – Claire looks down at the dog – is real too. The reallest thing. Itself and the shadow of itself, like Pia’s sadness, which continues to bleed blackly into the sky. Claire is only shadow.

  ‘Feller belongs to both places,’ Dolores says, nodding at the dog. ‘That’s true of all strays, aint it, feller? Dogs only get fixed,’ she leers, ‘one place or the other, once they’re owned. You now . . .’ She eyes Claire all over, like she’s considering a purchase. Claire wants to crawl out from under her gaze, but where would she go? ‘You on the other hand is a singular specimen. I wonder now, if it’s the swapping of them jingle-jangles what’s brought you through.’

  ‘Jingle-jangles?’ Claire blinks. Dolores seems to dwell only just inside language, she makes sentences the way a potter works clay, squashing them any which way into shapes that please her. A liquid tiredness threatens to overwhelm Claire as she works to understand. ‘Oh. You mean the music boxes? My music box?’

  ‘Yours, yes, as much as one thing can own another, as much as a thing wants to be owned. And the other. Broken it were, and terrible cracked, but along came a girl who saw something in it, like I knew she would. And so she signed her name and bought it. Carried her some of the way, that broken box, and what did she find on the other side, but the same one only plump with wholeness, all lovely, and didn’t that girl want it? So you ended up with the first one, the sorry broken mess. And your precious one she took. But she left it to rot up there, in the damp and the dark where her guilt wouldn’t be arrested by the sight of it.’

  Claire curls the paper in her hand. She looks up at the rubble where Dolores is pointing, where her house once was. Her music box, taken and lost, abandoned. So close up there, but beyond her reach . . .

  Claire thinks of Clara and feels rage at her, fury at what she has taken: Claire’s living memory of Charlie, and with it her ability to grieve. For that must be why this numbness has clasped her heart, this blankness in the face of Charlie’s death.

  ‘What’s this? What do we have here? Let me look, let me feast my eyes . . .’ Dolores snatches at the paper in Claire’s hand before Claire finds the wits to hold it away from her or hide it. The old woman reads it greedily. ‘Reciprocal kindness?’ she laughs. Then: ‘Redeemed by the bearer?’ she muses. ‘According to their own purpose? Hum.’

  She moves to poke it down her cleavage, collector of names that she is, but Claire snatches it back.

  Dolores pins her good eye on Claire. ‘You fixing to save that wicked child? She’s beyond saving, that one, that one what stole from you the very piece of your heart. Why should you pity her when she has shown no pity to you?’

  Claire stares at Dolores. Why would she pity Clara? Trespasser, enemy, thief. Clara who is now the safe one, kept from harm, kept from grief, with every meal provided for. Claire can still taste the dream of sweet on the tip of her tongue. Why should Claire feel for Clara when Clara felt nothing for Claire – not pity, not even scorn. Nothing.

  ‘You got to wonder, don’t you, girl?’ Dolores sings out as Claire turns away, even as the place around her dissolves into colours, and the dreamworld, Sedge, drains away. Piano notes fall one by one from the white sky, clattering to the world below, like tin forks and spoons. ‘Who owes who owes who? Seems to me now Clara owes you.’

  ‘I’m going to the shops,’ Mum says, standing at the front door, jangling her keys. ‘Want to come?’

  You do, but you don’t. You consider the alternatives.

  ‘I’ll be leaving in five minutes,’ she says.

  You move yourself up the stairs to your room. The music box is an unsightly bulge under the bedcovers. What if Dad finds it? What if Pia does? What would they think? That you had broken it on purpose? You stuff it into a backpack, shrug the bag on, and slink downstairs to find your mother.

  ‘Where’s Pia?’ you ask.

  ‘Sleeping, finally. The doctor gave her something to help her rest, something that won’t hurt the baby.’

  You wonder what black dreams scribble themselves around Pia’s head.

  ‘What’s in the bag?’ Mum asks.

  You look at her. You almost don’t answer but then you say, ‘Charlie’s music box.’

  ‘Oh, sweetie,’ she says. Her eyes brim, but you cannot feel anything for yourself or for her.

  As the car glides down the main road, you catch glimpses up the side streets of the wild green growth along the riverbanks.

  Your mum looks at the backpack on your lap. ‘You know, what I said about being brave for Pia. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s okay to grieve Charlie. It’s okay to cry if you want.’

  You hear a catch in her throat. You look sideways at your mother and see her own eyes are leaking. It’s not that you don’t want to. But you can’t cry. You just can’t.

  ‘Charlie knew that we loved him,’ Mum says. ‘We have that.’

  In the supermarket car park you hang back. Mum leads the way, but you don’t exactly follow, making your own path through the hatchbacks and sedans and four-wheel-drives, lined up like sentries, with their dulled yet watchful eyes. There is a roaring in your ears so as to deafen you, and you can no longer hear Mum hurrying you along. The straps of your backpack dig into your shoulders. You catch a glimpse of dog between the cars and you whistle softly. The whistle seems to unstick the air that sways grey and steely over the rows and rows of parked cars and they ripple, as if they are not present at all, merely projections of colour and light.

  You whistle again, and then, without meaning to, you hum. You tra-la-la. You sing the notes of the music box, and it seems to you that the box trembles ever so slightly inside the bag on your back, as though it is recognising the song of itself. You are not even sure if it is you that is making the song or if the song is passing through you, using you as its instrument.

  The world alters, with shudders and creaks. You feel your own place peel away to reveal Sedge, which was there all al
ong. You are awake and you are dreaming again.

  The market is hum and jostle, bustle and quarrel, thick with folk.

  Claire cannot take it in all at once, she has to elbow her way through the crowds, catching snatches of sights between. It calls itself a market, but it is more like a rubbish tip, with broken and half-used-up things spread around, and all the people selling and buying look broken or used up themselves. Claire can sketch in her mind the car park, minus the cars, and not so cleanly made as the place she just stepped from. Claire feels suddenly conspicuous, with her clean fingernails and tidy clothes and combed hair.

  Claire is vaguely aware of a distant rumbling, a familiar noise, like a plane passing high in the sky. It doesn’t seem alarming, but people go from staring at her to glancing uncomfortably towards the sky. Is there a quickening in the air, an undercurrent of unease brewing?

  ‘Here,’ says one old hag, catching Claire by surprise, long yellow fingers grasping Claire’s hair sharply and pulling at the roots. ‘Look at you, Clara, all cleaned up. I heard you been kept by Our Lady and now I see with my own eyes, large as life, dolly and priss.’

  ‘Hush up, Trinka,’ says another, older than the first and mucky too, but not so hook-nosed. ‘Leave her be.’ The first old filth, Trinka, drops Claire’s hair. The second scowls Trinka away, then says to Claire with a pat of the ground: ‘You come here to Mudda Meggsy and wile and tattle the time, like we always done.’ Her words are friendly, if her countenance isn’t, and Claire cannot find her tongue to say no.