Dreaming of Amelia

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  There’s a terrible silence in absence. The absence of a person. All the noise around you, all the clanging, words, rules, an elbow in your windpipe, manic laughter, flushing toilets, heavy feet on staircases, chairs scraping vinyl, all the noise is shadowed with a silence.

  That’s what a ghost is.

  The silence of the one you want—

  sounds clash with the silence—

  there’s your ghost.

  One night, Term 2, a party at the home of a girl called Lydia.

  Trapped inside a closet, people talking shadows.

  Lydia says that shadows are the dark side of your soul.

  A girl named Emily talks about the shadow games her parents played on walls when she was little. Peter Pan sewing his shadow to his feet. Chasing friends’ shadows. I wonder when she’ll stop. (Talking, I mean.)

  A boy named Toby talks about approaching a black hole.

  These people.

  Sitting in a network of closets. In a house with a master suite that spans a single floor. Masterpieces hanging on the marble walls of bathrooms. A guest suite, home theatre, library, billiards room, gym. Kitchens and swimming pools in pyramids of star-spangled glass. A tennis court, topiary gardens, swimming pool—plus a lap pool and spa on the terrace.

  These people talking shadows.

  They’ve never even seen one.

  Later, Amelia says to me: I think the topiary gardens used to have shadows but the family got them steam-cleaned.

  What they don’t know about Amelia:

  She grew up fighting with her mother,

  ran away from home the day she turned 13,

  long hair flying as she ran

  ran to a room behind a red door

  in a hostel where she

  still lives today. The same red door.

  Also in Term 2 at the private school—there’s birthday cake for someone.

  The girl, Astrid—cold as the Danish Alps—blows out the candles on someone else’s cake, and her hair catches alight.

  ‘I got burned,’ she tells us, walking out of Drama later that day. Shows us the singed ends of her hair. Her hair still has that acrid smell. Amelia blinks, once.

  We’re passing the room where they had the party. Glance through the glass.

  ‘I got burned,’ Astrid repeats, like maybe we didn’t hear.

  I make my face react and Astrid’s happy.

  But I’m thinking of the cleaner’s face. Later tonight when he opens that door. Sees the torn streamers,

  cake crumbs,

  deflating balloons.

  What they don’t know about Amelia:

  She closes her eyes at cinnamon.

  Lights up at blueberries and gingerbread.

  Loves fairytales so much she sinks beneath their spell.

  Tells stories from her own imagination that are wilder than wolves.

  Covers her face with her hands when pleasure’s too much — long, fine fingers; small, scarred knuckles; the tiny opal on her wrist.

  The first time we met, when I knocked on her red door, we were both fourteen.

  She introduced me to her giant stuffed cow. The stuffed cow and I had a long conversation about the height of the moon, and the taste of low fat milk, while Amelia tried to change the subject. She jumped up and down on the bed in this cute T-shirt nightie and these sexy, thigh-high boots. Then she stopped, sat down and strummed her guitar. We mixed drinks from the bottles she’d stolen when she ran away from home. She leaned out the window and knocked in a strange, blurred rhythm.

  She said: That’s the sound the bandicoots make when they run along the roof.

  She knocked again—that rhythm, her concentrating face—turned away from me to get it right, turned back to check my reaction.

  I said, How do you know they’re bandicoots and not rats?

  She leaned even further out the window, ignoring me, her eyes in the breeze.

  Then she said: Now we’ll go to sleep for half an hour and when we wake we’ll tell each other our dreams.

  She said, Wait. No. Let’s wear these.

  Her stepfather’s gardening gloves. Her mother’s silk scarf.

  She stole these, too, when she ran.

  And we’ll see how they affect our dreams.

  We fell asleep on the single bed. Her boots against my jeans. Gardening gloves enormous on her hands. The silk scarf reached across my chest, across her hair, and kissed her cheek.

  Her T-shirt was a soft, soft cotton.

  We woke at the exact same moment, eyes in one another’s eyes. The leather of her boots.

  I couldn’t remember my dreams.

  Amelia said she’d dreamed about a girl with snail-shell eyes.

  Term 2, we walk through dreams.

  Ghost of a backbeat deep in our ears. Chlorine rimming our eyes.

  Walking each other through drama lines. Essays at the kitchen table while my baby sister reaches up to taste the paper. Making art. Rubbing our eyes. Rubbing our eyes. Falling into bed together, slipping into one another’s bodies, into sleep. (I spend a lot of time behind Amelia’s red door.)

  She has her own room in the hostel. Shares a bathroom with old men and schizophrenic women.

  Her mother sends money to help her pay the rent. Social workers used to show up now and then, but Amelia and her mum always told the same story: it’s an arrangement they’ve agreed on; they’ll patch it up soon and she’ll go home.

  Social workers leave her alone now. So does her mum.

  Parties at the home of the girl called Lydia. Some nights the music was surprisingly good.

  You hear more with drowsy ears, see more with sleepy eyes.

  We hear a girl say this: You got me hooked, by the way, on vanilla lattes.

  (The friend says: But have you tried a caramel macchiato? and they both gasp.)

  We hear a boy say this: I told my dad, I said, look, get me a heavy-duty sleeping bag, and I’ll sleep on the streets of Byron Bay. You’ll save yourself five grand on accommodation.

  (He means the trip to Byron Bay for Schoolies Week.)

  And we see that the girl called Astrid (burned by birthday candles)—we see she is hot for a Brookfield boy named Seb.

  (A lot of girls want Seb. But Astrid’s making plans. We see that in her eyes.)

  Term 2, Emily finds an old book in the Art Rooms. It’s inscribed to an ex student.

  Weeks go by before they realise who the ex student is. Even then they have to scour through yearbooks. But it was there all along.

  On a polished coffee table, front office of the school: The Illustrated History of Ashbury High.

  Chapter 4, page 57: ‘A Tragic Accident’.

  She fell from a window in the Arts Rooms and died.

  You only have to flick the pages once.

  Who cares, right? These private school kids and their hunt for a ghost, who cares?

  But, you know, it’s just. It was there all along.

  You only have to flick the pages once.

  All I’m trying to say is—

  They’re a simple people, Amelia shrugs—and gives me her wicked grin.

  Parties at the home of the girl called Lydia.

  We hear a girl say this: She prefers pencil eyeliner over liquid, but, you know what? She doesn’t explain why.

  We hear a boy say this: I’m in peak physical condition at the moment. It’s amazing.

  And we see that the Brookfield boy named Seb is in love with Lydia. Lydia loves him back, but she pretends to herself and to him and to the world that she does not.

  What they don’t know about Amelia:

  She prefers the shadows. Try to paint her and she’ll disappear in shadows. Photograph her and she’ll slip out of the frame.

  I call her my Shadowgirl. She smiles like this is soothing.

  The night of the shadow conversation, we’re touring closets of designer clothes and jewellery, and there’s Astrid (cold as the Danish Alps, burned by birthday candles) she’s with us but she’s si
lent. When we reach the inner closet—just for shoes and bigger than Amelia’s room at the hostel—Astrid slips back into a shadow, watches us go in. She doesn’t know I see her. The door slides closed; she’s gone.

  She’s locked us in—locked Lydia in. She wants some time alone with the boy named Seb.

  She comes back three hours later to set us free. Her eyes are gleaming victory.

  The dark side of the soul.

  In the shadow closet, Lydia says the dark side of the soul. She doesn’t mention the Jungian shadow, the secrets we keep from ourselves. Passions stored in interlocking closets. Anger kicking the side of a chair. Monsters hanging in picture frames that we turn to face the wall.

  All that Lydia says is: A shadow is the dark side of the soul.

  In her mother’s designer closet in the dark. While outside another girl moves in on the boy she loves. Her fingers know this. The way they play with the buckles on her mother’s shoes. But her eyes don’t know a thing.

  Playing shadow games.

  Em talks of Peter Pan and shadow games. She doesn’t want to grow up and her eyes sparkle with cupcakes, party hats, white clouds.

  She’s talking of taking a needle and thread to your heels.

  Your shadow follows, watches, judges, knows you. If you could tear it off, why sew it back?

  Approaching a black hole.

  The boy named Toby says a shadow is a black hole. He’s making connections between black holes, Irish history, Irish folklore. It almost makes sense. He’s pissed out of his brain, but he’s smarter than he knows.

  I look at him and remember—he once drove Amelia home. He shows up at the Goose and Thistle some nights. And earlier this year, he drove Amelia home.

  So he knows that she lives in a hostel, but he hasn’t said a word to the others. If he had, we’d have heard them talk about it.

  The boy named Toby.

  He’s the only one in this mansion, this school, this mad, mad world of wealth, of games—he’s the only one that I respect.

  In a Music class, also in Term 2, Amelia tells me she’s made a new friend.

  Amelia never makes friends.

  ‘Here?’ I say.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not here.’ And we both laugh.

  The teacher, Mrs Wexford, is saying: composition—third fret—violin—first fret.

  I don’t know what she’s saying. I never listen to her.

  Amelia says she met this girl at a bus stop. ‘Her hair is the same colour as mine,’ she says.

  As if that’s what she’s been waiting for all along—a girl with the same colour hair.

  The girl is a few years older than us.

  ‘She lives in some kind of a home,’ Amelia says, ‘for the mentally ill.’

  Oh.

  ‘But I think it’s just depression, not psychosis.’

  As if those are the only options.

  ‘And she says she’s only pretending to be mad.’

  ‘That’s a psychosis.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  Amelia’s watching Mrs Wexford’s face as she speaks.

  Mrs Wexford is saying: the long arm of the law.

  ‘She’s funny. She’s kind of ironic. She says crazy things, but ironically. Like she wants to meet King Louis of France. And she dresses really wild. Kind of unique, but simple. And she’s allowed to—I see her at the bus stop. So, she’s kind of free—I guess it’s a kind of an assisted-living place.’

  I’m thinking: Why is the music teacher talking about the long arm of the law?

  ‘It’s just depression,’ Amelia repeats. ‘She’s waiting for her boyfriend. He broke her heart but she’s waiting for him to come get her. He’s not coming.’

  ‘Delusional,’ I say.

  Amelia shakes her head.

  Mrs Wexford is saying: If you think that the school is wealthy enough to do without a set of castanets.

  A set of castanets is missing.

  Amelia says, ‘She has this lovely lyrical way of talking.’

  She means her new friend. She means the new friend’s mad. ‘It’s musical,’ she says.

  The music teacher says, again: the long arm of the law.

  The castanet thief.

  Amelia, beside me, kicks the side of my chair. The beat of her kick is a good one. I let it thrum right through me.

  One night at a party: Amelia standing alone. She’s on the terrace, staring at the lap pool. I know what she’s doing. She’s staring back in time.

  There are jets in the lap pool. You swim against the jets. Swim hard and you stay here in the now; do nothing and they’ll swim you back in time.

  What they don’t know about Amelia:

  When she was ten, she and her mother moved in with her mother’s new boyfriend, Irish guy named Patrick O’Doherty.

  Let’s call him her stepfather (although they didn’t marry). The first few weeks he was friendly but reserved. Then one day he pointed out the horseshoe hanging on the door. Told her stories about lucky horseshoes. Moved on to four-leaf clovers. Had her listen out for fairy songs with him.

  He’s full of Irish fairytales: direct route to her heart.

  She fell in love with him, head over heels.

  When she turned 11, he made her a moonlight surprise. Paper lanterns in the back garden.

  He took her swimming at the local pool one day and noticed she had talent. Started coaching her himself because he used to be a swimmer.

  He was the first father she ever had, and he was lovely.

  But she kept right on fighting with her mother.

  And one fight—over nothing, something burning in a pan—she got so mad, she ran away.

  I know what she wanted when she ran.

  She wanted the stepfather to come for her. She wanted him to bring her home.

  When she stares into the nothing, when she looks for the past, she’s looking for her stepfather.

  When’s he coming for me? is what her shoulders say.

  It’s been four years.

  The castanets turn up the following day, caught in the back of a tambourine.

  Amelia’s crazy new friend turns up too; at the bus stop, Amelia tells me.

  The next few weeks, they keep meeting at the bus stop.

  The girl never catches the bus, Amelia says. She presses her hands into fists, presses her tongue into her cheek, frowns at the wind.

  Everyone else ignores the girl, Amelia says.

  ‘Like you do with crazy people,’ I suggest.

  But Amelia asks the girl questions.

  ‘So far, she won’t tell me anything,’ Amelia says, ‘except her stories.’

  Not even her name.

  Amelia’s new friend is crazy, and she won’t even share her name.

  My heart hurts for Amelia.

  The girl at the bus stop keeps the ex-boyfriend’s letters in a secret pocket that she’s sewn into a fold of her dress. She showed Amelia the pocket, tightly folded papers, but won’t let her see any of the words.

  She also has hallucinations. Amelia calls them stories. The girl hallucinates: elfin people, flutes and fiddles, silvery voices, windows ablaze with light, a little man with buckles on his shoes.

  So big these buckles, these silver buckles, it’s a wonder the little man can lift his feet at all.

  ‘Your friend has a way with words,’ I say.

  Amelia writes the hallucinations down in her diary.

  Maybe the letters are hallucinations too. Tightly folded blank pieces of paper.

  One morning, Term 2, Amelia arrives late at the pool and her face looks washed-over pale.

  She says she just saw her friend at the bus stop.

  The friend told Amelia she’d been attacked by a crowd of little people carrying a corpse.

  ‘Turns out you were right,’ Amelia tries to laugh. ‘My new friend’s nuts.’

  It’s her broken laugh.

  She’d wanted her new friend to be real. One real friend amongst these Ashbury half-people. These Ash
bury shadows and ghosts.

  Her friend also saw a ‘little person’ falling down the chimney.

  ‘There’s a chimney in the home?’ I say.

  ‘I guess. I don’t know. I guess it could be part of the story. Anyway, the little person scalded himself. In a pot of boiling water that was standing at the fire.’

  And now Amelia’s eyes and voice are drifting. She tells the story like it’s her own. ‘He let out a terrible squeal,’ she says, ‘and within minutes, the place was full of other little creatures, pulling him out of the pot.

  ‘And they pointed to me—’ here Amelia points to herself. ‘And they said, Was it her? Did she scald you? And the little one said, No, no, it was me that did it, not her, and the other creatures said, Ah well, if it was yourself that scalded yourself, we’ll say nothing.’

  Amelia pauses, looks at me, then continues in a deep and creeping voice: ‘But if SHE had scalded you, we’d have made her pay.’

  She looks into my eyes. A beat goes by.

  I say: ‘You mean they pointed to your friend.’

  Amelia, sassy again: ‘I’m quoting. I’m telling it like she did.’ She grins and puts her goggles on. Then she repeats, in a weird little whisper: ‘But if she had scalded you, we’d have made her pay.’

  I say, ‘Let’s get in the pool.’

  Another day, Amelia tells me that the crazy friend has invited her to see her vegetable garden.

  I say, ‘Why don’t you just keep chatting at the bus stop?’

  Amelia says, ‘It’s just a—I guess it’s an assisted-living place.’

  She’s said that before.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Amelia adds, ‘she seems perfectly sane.’

  Now I’ll tell you something that you don’t know about me.

  If you lock me up, if you padlock doors, if you close me in, I think of fire. I think my own brain is burning its way through my skull. I think about corpses collapsing into charcoal.

  That’s one thing. Another thing.

  If you hurt Amelia—

  If you keep me from Amelia—

  What they don’t know about Amelia:

  She’s light as a cloud to pick up.

  Gather her into your arms when she’s passed out on the floor and she’s light as a leaf.