Dreaming of Amelia

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  There are rumours that it was an Ashbury student who did this: either jealous of Seb’s talent or because we just don’t like Brookfielders.

  What?! No! No! No! We LOVE Brookfielders. (They’re sexy.)

  And anyway, an Ashbury student would NEVER do such a thing!!

  Yet, that is the rumour. Let me say now. For once and for all. With no arguments accepted.

  THIS WAS NOT AN ASHBURY STUDENT.

  How can I be sure?

  Because I know who it was.

  It was the ghost.

  Think about it. The ghost lives down the hall from the gallery. The incident happened at night when the Art Rooms are locked. The incident was angry! The ghost is angry.

  Why is it my fault?

  I woke the angry ghost.

  And so, it’s all my fault.

  (But please note that you began this blog by forgiving me.)

  I felt very depressed all day, and also on my whole journey home. Now I can’t stop eating chocolate.

  The universe has lost something beautiful (Seb’s artwork).

  And I, personally, need more cho— oh. It’s all gone. I ate it all. Can life get any worse?

  6 comments

  Yowta772 said . . . No.

  DainaB said . . . That totally sux. Did you find anything good online about remembering things for exams? I SO need a better memory. LLOL

  Em said . . . Well, I read that it’s important to sleep. While you sleep, the hippopotamus in your brain replays things that happened during the day, eg what you studied. So therefore it remembers it for you.

  BeannaG said . . . lol, Em, I doubt there’s a hippopotamus in my brain

  CalypsoAngel said . . . I think it’s a hippocampus cos we did it in biology, and I also think it’s disrespectful to talk about the brain while Seb’s beautiful art is being destroyed.

  Em said . . . It’s not BEING destroyed, it WAS destroyed. It’s happened. Get on top of the concept of TIME, CalypsoAngel. Also, I am sure that, even though Seb’s artistic career is effectively over, he would not want us to mope around. He would want us to get on with our lives.

  4.

  Lydia Jaackson-Oberman

  Student No: 8233410

  Just like that, Amelia became our friend.

  It started after rehearsal one day. A few of us had stayed back, talking.

  Night was painting the windows fast. The auditorium was dark — seats heading up, up, up into the black — warm glow of light around the stage.

  I was sitting on the edge of the stage between Riley and Seb. A group of people circled us. We were talking about Seb’s artwork, vandalised the night before.

  ‘I am so, so sorry,’ Em kept saying.

  Seb was shrugging. ‘It needed work anyway.’ But he was also pale — something vicious in the vandalism. ‘I guess if someone hated it that much, it needed work,’ he joked. People laughed.

  ‘I’m just so sorry,’ Em murmured.

  ‘It won’t take long to fix,’ Seb said. ‘Or I keep it how it is and change the name to Slash and Burn.’ They laughed again.

  ‘Yes, but Seb,’ said Em. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Okay.’ Riley spoke up, his voice mild and interested beside me. ‘Em, did you attack Seb’s art or am I missing something?’

  ‘The ghost did it,’ Em explained.

  People turned to see Riley’s reaction to this. His eyes squinted ever so slightly, then squinted more. He seemed to be rolling Em’s words around in his mouth. People giggled, then laughed, the laughter faded into quiet — and a strange thing happened.

  Into the quiet came distant sounds: a voice calling — someone laughing — footsteps — keys doing their beep! beep! thing — car doors — engines — then brrrrrrm (my impression of cars leaving the carpark all at once).

  Then, nothing.

  Silence.

  A powerful sense that we were the last ones in the building.

  And the strangest sensation that the building didn’t know we were still here.

  Okay, it sounds weird, but that’s exactly what it was.

  The sensation seemed to grow all around us. Like the building was stretching, reaching its arms into the empty night, letting down its guard. I had this sudden, mad urge to call, ‘Wait! Don’t do that yet. We’re still here!’

  I didn’t.

  But I won’t lie to you. It was spooky.

  I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in haunting, if you get what I mean, and this building was haunted — by a girl named Sandra Wilkinson, who had fallen to her death; and now by an anger so profound it had attacked a major work.

  ‘Somebody’s got a lot of anger,’ said Amelia, speaking calmly into the moment, ‘to do that to something as beautiful as Seb’s art.’ She was plaiting her long hair as she spoke. ‘That’s what’s scary,’ she said.

  I liked her. She was speaking my thoughts aloud.

  I had some anger of my own, actually. Seb was on my left and my left side felt like ice. He had asked Em to let me know he wasn’t interested. As if we were in primary school, passing around notes.

  It pissed me off. I’d told him a few times I wasn’t into him myself. He didn’t need to do this childish, ‘Guess what, I’m not into you any more either! Ha ha ha.’ (Especially not via Em.)

  I guess it was his pride made him do it.

  Well, I’ve got some pride myself, and the funny thing is, I’d been about to say to Seb, ‘Okay, I want you back.’

  So that was something. I’d been saved from that moment: saying those words while his face fell with pity.

  I’d missed out, by seconds, from stepping off a cliff.

  But now, in the big, empty, stretching building, our conversation changed. Faster, slower, louder, softer, and more intense all at once. Different ways of dealing with the spookiness, I guess. A kind of rush to fix it.

  Our words wanted to fix things too. We have to find out who did this to Seb. We have to find the true story about Sandra Wilkinson. Did she fall or did she jump or was she pushed? Who would hate Seb that much? And so on.

  Toby talked about time travel, and Cass talked about CCTV, but somehow they were talking about the same thing. Seb’s art and the falling girl, braiding together like Amelia’s hair.

  I felt as if a shift was taking place.

  We seemed to be falling together — but falling where? Into the silence. Into love. Out of love. Into the future. Take your pick.

  It felt like: something’s going to happen.

  ‘There’s a section on Sandra Wilkinson in The Illustrated History of Ashbury High,’ Riley said.

  Seb said: ‘Ashbury has an illustrated history?’

  ‘In the front reception,’ Riley answered.

  Seb on my left, Riley on my right, talking across me. Left side, cold; right side, warm. I looked from one to the other and saw that they look alike — Seb is lean and Riley’s broad, but same height, same dark hair, same smooth, strong profiles.

  Em was excited. She was saying we should find The Illustrated History of Ashbury right now. Would the front office be open? She looked at her watch — and then she panicked. It was after nine. The Trials were next week, and Em, Cass and I had planned to study at my place tonight.

  ‘Should we still come back to your place?’ Cass wondered.

  ‘For sure we should,’ said Em, ‘there’s time to get an entire subject done,’ and then she turned to Amelia, now unbraiding all her work, and said, ‘Do you want to come too?’

  Amelia looked surprised, pale, pleased. It seemed real, the pleasure.

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ She didn’t look at Riley. The way some girlfriends do. I noticed that.

  It was a few moments later, as we were packing up to go, that the building gave one of its distant cracking sounds. This one was short and sharp, almost like a cry.

  Riley’s voice rose easily, somewhere just behind me.

  ‘That’ll be Sandra Wilkinson,’ he said, ‘letting us know she needs our help.’ And then he added, in t
he same easy tone: ‘Somebody has to catch her before she hits the ground.’

  It was the way he talked in present tense — not Sandra come back to tell us she had fallen, but Sandra, falling, now — a slip in time.

  It scared me and I liked it both at once.

  Emily Melissa-Anne Thompson

  Student No: 8233521

  Ah, Seb! Poor Seb!

  We stayed back after rehearsal and gathered around him, beating our chests. The night was a deep and gloomy one, and there we were — alone! in the great, gothic castle called the Art Rooms!

  Seb sat on the edge of the stage alongside Lydia (his lost love — oh, Seb! why Astrid? you fool! etc — but that is a separate issue).

  He was so distraught about his major work that now and then he had to fall senseless to the floor.

  ‘Oh God!’ he muttered (from the floor, when we roused him with drops of peppermint oil). ‘Why am I thus afflicted?’ And then the voice tore from his throat: ‘Be calm, be calm, my soul!’

  Or anyway, that is not exactly how it happened, but, gothically speaking, it could have.

  In fact, we did gather around Seb after rehearsal, but he was quite easygoing about the art attack thing (ha ha, that sounds like heart attack), and he was already talking about ideas for a new major work.

  But it was a strangely agitating night for me. I could hardly concentrate on the conversation. However, I do remember some of it.

  Cass said she’d seen people installing security cameras in the music rooms that morning. ‘If they’re doing secret surveillance,’ she said, ‘they should do it in the gallery. You can always buy a new trombone or whatever but you can’t replace art.’

  ‘They need retrospective cameras,’ Amelia said. ‘To see back in time. To see who did it.’

  Toby glanced at Amelia. She stood up on her toes, in this way she has, like a ballet dancer, or like she wants to be taller for a moment, and then her feet fell back to the floor. As soon as her feet hit the floor, Toby spoke. He said that time travel was possible.

  He is an honest boy, Toby, but I know for a fact that time travel is not possible. (It would have been on the news if it was.) So I looked pointedly at him — however, it turned out to be true! Not exactly travel, but listen:

  ‘You put a mirror on a planet way across the universe,’ Toby explained, ‘and make sure the mirror’s facing you. Then you get a superpowerful telescope and point it at the mirror. You know what you’ll see?’

  ‘What?’ said Amelia.

  ‘The past. Not yourself looking into the telescope, but the past.’

  ‘When in the past?’

  ‘It depends how far away the mirror is. The further away, the further back in time.’

  People started talking about distance and time in a confusing way. I did not pay too much heed because it somehow reminded me of Economics. HOWEVER, it turned out that scientifically speaking, what Toby said was absolutely true!

  So then I went a bit mad. I was, like, ‘Okay, already! Let’s get the mirror set up!’

  Because I wanted to see!

  To see who had destroyed Seb’s painting!

  To look further back and see what happened when Sandra Wilkinson fell from that window! To see if she really is the ghost!!

  (I knew that Toby would want to go even further back, to convict times, to see his friend Tom, but I myself can live without Tom.)

  Then Lydia, who was sitting between Seb and Riley, and slowly kicking her heels against the side of the stage, spoke up. ‘Em,’ she said, ‘there might be a few technical hitches.’

  ‘Like how to get the mirror far enough away,’ Riley said.

  ‘And I don’t think there’s a powerful enough telescope yet,’ Cass told me.

  ‘Even if there was, I think there’d be too much space noise or interference in between. You couldn’t get a clear picture,’ Toby apologised.

  ‘And does Ashbury have an observatory?’ Seb smiled.

  Why do other people have to be so knowledgeable sometimes?

  And why use their knowledge to stamp all over sparks of hope?

  To be honest, the whole thing agitated me beyond belief.

  I was tired of not knowing, you see.

  We left the building soon after this, and as we did there was a distant cracking sound — and I trembled violently. But I did not feel like trembling! Always with the trembling. The HSC! The future! The ghost!

  If I was tired of not knowing, I was even more tired of being scared!

  Those two issues are related, I think. The not knowing and the being scared? You’re scared of the things that you don’t know. That’s my wisdom for today.

  And now, a final confession. A terrible secret.

  That night? I felt annoyed with Riley and Amelia.

  Sacrilege, I know! But suddenly, out of nowhere, I’d had enough of my own fascination. Enough of yearning to see them and feeling excited when I did. Enough of pondering: Why are they so amazing? When will they ever notice me?

  It was exhausting.

  All year they’d been twitching out of my reach. They came to parties — great! But they arrived at strange hours. Mysterious. They came to coffee with us — great! But they didn’t talk about themselves. Mysterious. They told us about their past — great! But look at that past! The streets! Juvenile detention! A whole new can of mysteries!

  And kind of scary mysteries too. I’m very sorry, but crime scares me. I try hard to be ‘modern’ — compassionate like Cass, or cynical like Lyd — but I can’t be.

  Therefore, I was scared. Scared of Amelia and Riley.

  I invited Amelia to come and study with us at Lyd’s place. And she did. And the next few weeks, she spent a lot of time with Lyd, Cass and me, especially Lyd.

  But do you know why I invited her to study?

  Because I was scared of her. And I didn’t want to be. It made me mad.

  Riley T Smith

  Student No: 8233569

  Different ways of being absent, Amelia collects them.

  Dreaming of her stepfather — she’s gone.

  Slipping away to spend time with a madwoman who speaks in fairytales.

  And now, check it out, she’s hangin’ with the richgirls.

  It’s a trick, she says, but I taste something like fear.

  Tobias George Mazzerati

  Student No: 8233555

  1 February 1804

  A blast of rain like a sudden loss of temper. Thunderclaps that feel personal. Hailstones the size of sheep.

  I feel the darkness looming, and taste fear.

  My final letter to Maggie is shredded in the mud. I’ll not write again. I’ve not heard from her for almost a year; she’s forgotten me.

  So she should have, for I am doomed.

  It’s true there are nights when I talk to Phillip, look at the grand stone barracks that he built, and the stars light up my heart and make me think his plans will succeed.

  But mostly I think they will shoot us down like dogs.

  The signs are everywhere. Here’s three that come to mind:

  1: Not a single uprising has ever succeeded here. There was one planned a couple of years back now. They captured two men, thinking they might know who the ringleaders were. Three hundred lashes each, just to make them say.

  ‘You’ll not get any music from me,’ said one, ‘for other men to dance on air.’

  The floggers shook their cat-o’-nine-tails, so that the blood, skin and flesh flew fast in the wind, and carried on counting the strokes.

  2: Not long ago, some men escaped from the barracks, visited a nearby farm, made themselves hot dumplings, and headed back out into the night to sleep under stars. They were captured. We assembled to watch the execution. Then the sound of galloping hooves and a soldier, breathless, announced that straws were to be drawn.

  The first man drew the long straw, and the noose was lifted up off his head. The other two got short straws and were hanged. One kept laughing ’til the pain twisted his smile int
o a shriek.

  3: They’ve swept the natives away like so many dying bats before a hot wind. Because the natives fight back, the governor has issued a proclamation: any native west of Parramatta must be shot on sight.

  The signs are clear. Failure and death are everywhere. We will fail.

  Knowing this, a secret terror stirs in me each night, and it is this: what if Maggie has not forgotten me? What if the reason she’s not writing is that she’s carried out her foolish plan to steal something? And she’s on her way here, a convict too?

  Do you know what happens to female convicts when they arrive? As soon as the ship’s in anchor, the decks are crowded with gentleman settlers and male convicts, come to choose servants or wives. They look about them, rub their chins, squint at women’s waistlines. Take wrists between their hands and turn them to the light.

  In my nightmares, I see Maggie’s wrist in the light. She laughs and then her laugh becomes a shriek. Then Maggie’s own voice speaks to me: ‘Never look at a cat that’s washing its face,’ she says, and my blood turns cold. ‘The first to look at such a cat will die.’

  I remember her telling me this years ago at home, and I laughed. But here, in this place, I fear it may be true.

  Eat hot dumplings. Draw a short straw. Look a cat in the face. Or just be seen west of Parramatta.

  This place is a vortex with death at every curve.

  Sure, and I never knew that fear could be this vast.

  5.

  Riley T Smith

  Student No: 8233569

  We overhear them talking in the courtyard.

  This is August, the coldest month. Amelia and I walking a balcony, voices drifting up from below.

  ‘There’s a whole section on her, like Riley said. Photos and everything.’

  ‘Have you got the book?’

  ‘They wouldn’t let me take it away from the front office. But it was nothing new anyway — just, she fell out of a window and, you know, died. Tragedy, tragedy, blah blah.’