The Shining Girls

by Lauren Beukes

  ‘I’m sorry, Kirby. It’s wrong,’ he says, as gently as he can.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she demands.

  Dan sighs. ‘Do you know what a ghost ballplayer is?’

  ‘I’m guessing it’s not the obvious. No horror-movie hauntings of the dugout. The skull-faced fielder, the devil who pitched the flaming hell-ball—’

  ‘Correct,’ he cuts her off.

  ‘I don’t think I want to hear what you have to say.’

  ‘You probably don’t, and that’s too bad. The most famous one is a guy called Lou Proctor. He was a Cleveland telegraph operator who inserted his own name into the Indians’ box score in 1912.’

  ‘But he didn’t exist.’

  ‘As a real person, but not as a ballplayer. It was a hoax. They picked it up in ’87 and expunged it from the records. Seventy-five years’ worth of his fifteen minutes. There’ve been others that weren’t premeditated. Sloppy record-keeping, somebody gets a name wrong, makes a typing error.’

  ‘This is not a fucking typo, Dan.’

  ‘It’s a mistake. She’s wrong. You said it yourself, the poor woman has Alzheimer’s, for God’s sake. Listen to me. Jackie Robinson only started playing in the major leagues in ’47. First black player to do so. Had a shitty time of it. His own team tried to sabotage him. The other teams used to try to gouge his legs with their shoes as they slid into base. I’ll look it up, but I promise you, no one had even heard of him in ’43. He didn’t even exist as a ballplayer yet.’

  ‘You’re so damn sure of your statistics.’

  ‘It’s baseball.’

  ‘She might have got it mixed up with another card.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. Maybe the cops did. Maybe it was sitting in somebody’s attic for years. Didn’t she say she was raised in foster care? And it got thrown together with a bunch of other junk up there.’

  ‘You’re saying there was no card.’

  ‘I don’t know. Was it in the police report?’

  ‘They weren’t great at keeping records in 1943.’

  ‘Then I’d say you’ve got your hopes pinned on something that doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Crap.’ She throws it off, lightly.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Whatever. No big deal. Back to the drawing-board. Give me a shout when you get home. I’ll see what new looney-tunes idea I can come up with to entertain you.’

  ‘Kirby—’

  ‘You think I don’t know you’re just indulging me?’

  ‘Someone fucking has to,’ he says, losing his temper right back at her. ‘At least I’m not trying to exploit you for my third-rate film project.’

  ‘I can do this on my own.’

  ‘Yeah, but then who would listen to your crazy theories?’

  ‘The librarians. They love crazy theories.’ He can hear the smile in her voice. It makes him grin back.

  ‘They love donuts! There’s a difference. And there aren’t enough day-old baked goods in the world to put up with your crap, trust me.’

  ‘Not even glazed?’

  ‘Or cream-filled or double-dipped in chocolate with rainbow sprinkles!’ he shouts into the phone, waving his arms, as if she could see him.

  ‘I’m sorry for being a jerk.’

  ‘You can’t help it. You’re in your twenties. It comes with the territory.’

  ‘Nice. An age diss.’

  ‘I don’t even know what that means,’ he grumps.

  ‘You think there might have been another baseball card?’

  ‘I think you should take it as interesting, but not helpful. Start a wild-card box where you can keep your crazy theories, and don’t let them get in the way of what’s real.’ Like this, he thinks.

  ‘Okay, you’re right. Thank you. I owe you a donut.’

  ‘Or a dozen.’

  ‘Good night, Dan.’

  ‘G’night, whippersnapper.’

  Harper

  NO TIME

  There was a bantam cockerel on the farm that used to have seizures. You could bring them on by flashing a light in its eyes. Harper would lie on his stomach in the long grass that made his head feel ripe in summer, and use a bit of broken mirror to stun the rooster. (The same shard he used to cut the legs off one of the chicks, pressing down on the back of the silvered glass with his hand wrapped in an old shirt.)

  The cock would be scratching in the dirt and twitching its head in that stupid way chickens have, then suddenly it would go blank and stand frozen and glassy eyed: a vacant thing. A second later it would be back, wholly oblivious. A stutter in its brain.

  That’s what the Room feels like: stuttering.

  He can sit in here for hours, perched on the edge of the bed looking at his assembled gallery. The objects are always here, even when he takes them away.

  The names of the girls have been traced over again and again until the letters have started to fray. He remembers doing it. He has no recollection of doing it. One of these things must be true. It tightens something in his chest, like a gear in a watch that’s been wound up too far.

  He rubs his fingertips together and finds them silky with chalk dust. It doesn’t seem clear any more. It feels like doom. It makes him feel defiant, like doing something just to see what will happen. Like with Everett and the truck.

  His brother caught him with the little chick. Harper was crouched on his haunches over it as it flapped its stubby wings and dragged itself forward, peeping-peeping-peeping. Its stumps left thick snail-trails of blood in the dust. He heard Everett coming, the slap-slap of shoes that would get passed down to him, the heel already peeling off. He squinted up at the older boy, who stood watching him without saying anything, the morning sun behind his head so he couldn’t make out his expression. The chick squeaked and fluttered, making broken passage across the yard. Everett disappeared. He came back with a shovel and smashed the bird to a pulp with one blow.

  He tossed the crush of feathers and gluey innards over-arm into the long grass behind the coop, then cuffed Harper hard enough to knock him on his ass. ‘Don’t you know where our eggs come from? Stupid.’ He bent to pull him up, dusted off his front. His brother never stayed angry with him. ‘Don’t tell Da,’ Everett said.

  The thought hadn’t occurred to Harper. The same way it didn’t occur to him to pull up the handbrake the day of the accident.

  Harper and Everett Curtis drove into town to pick up feed. Like the start of a nursery rhyme. Everett let him drive. But Harper, maybe eleven years old, took a corner too hard in the Red Baby and clipped the edge of the ditch. His brother grabbed the wheel and yanked the truck back into the road. But even Harper could tell the tire was punctured, by the flap of rubber and the way the steering went flabby in his hands.

  ‘Brake!’ Everett yelled. ‘Harder!’ He braced himself against the steering wheel and Harper rammed his foot down on the pedal. Everett’s head bounced off the side window, splintering the glass. The truck slewed sideways, the trees spinning and blurring together, before it came to a juddering stop across the middle of the road. Harper turned off the ignition. The engine clicked and tutted.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Everett said, holding the side of his head, where a knot was already swelling. ‘It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let you drive.’ He swung the door open into the hazy morning, already humid. ‘Stay here.’

  Harper turned in the cab to see Everett digging around in the back for the spare. A breeze rippled through the cornfields, too slight to do anything but move the heat around.

  His brother walked round to the front with the jack and the wheel spanner. He grunted as he levered it under the truck and cranked it up. The first nut came off easy, but the second one was stuck fast. His scrawny shoulders strained with the effort. ‘Just stay there, I can do it,’ he shouted to Harper, who wasn’t planning to move.

  He started kicking at the handle of the spanner. And that’s when the truck slipped off the jack. It started rolling slowly forward towards the ditch again.


  ‘Harper!’ Everett yelled, irritated. And then, higher-pitched, panicky as the truck kept coming, ‘Pull the handbrake, Harper!’

  But he didn’t. He sat tight as Everett tried to push the truck back, his hands on the bonnet. The weight of it knocked him off his feet before it went over him. His pelvis made a sharp snapping sound, like a pinecone in the fireplace. It was hard to hear anything else over Everett screaming. It went on and on. Eventually, Harper got out to see.

  His brother was the color of old meat, his face a purple-gray, the white of his eyes shot with blood. A shard of bone stuck out his thigh, shockingly white. There was a thick pool of grease around the tire where it was resting on his hip. Not grease, Harper realized. Everything looks the same when you turn it inside out.

  ‘Run,’ Everett croaked. ‘Go get help. Run, dammit!’

  Harper stared. He started walking, looking back over his shoulder. Fascinated.

  ‘Run!’

  It took two hours to fetch someone from the Crombie farm up the way. Too late for Everett to be able to walk again. Their father tanned Harper raw. He would have beat Everett too, if he weren’t a goddam cripple. The accident meant they had to hire a man. Harper had to do extra chores, which made him mad.

  Everett refused to acknowledge him. He went sour like potato mash left too long in the still, lying in bed, staring out the window. A year after that, they had to sell the truck. Three years later, the farm. Don’t let anyone tell you the Depression was the beginning of farmers’ troubles.

  The windows and doors got boarded up. They loaded everything onto a truck they borrowed from a neighbor to go and sell whatever they could. Everett was so much luggage.

  Harper jumped off at the first town. He went to war, but he never went back to where he came from.

  That’s a possibility, he supposes. To leave the House and never come back. Take the money and run. Set up with a nice girl. No more killing. No more feeling the knife twist and the hot slip of a girl’s insides spilling out, watching the fire die in her eyes.

  He looks at the wall, at the stuttering objects. The cassette tape leaps out at him, urgent, demanding. There are five names left. He doesn’t know what happens after that, but he does know that hunting them through time is no longer enough for him.

  He thinks he would like to switch it up a bit. To play within the loops he’s already discovered, courtesy of Mr Bartek and the good doctor.

  He would like to try to kill them first and then go back and find them before, when they are innocent of what is going to befall them. That way he’ll be able to converse politely with their younger and sweeter selves, setting them up for what he has already done to them, with the images of their deaths playing in his head. A reverse hunt, to make things more interesting.

  And the House seems willing. The object that shines most brightly now, willing him to take it, is a pin-on button, red and white and blue with a flying pig.

  Margot

  5 DECEMBER 1972

  Natch, Margot has spotted the guy following them. All the way from the 103rd Street station, five blocks away. That’s one block too far to be a coincidence, if you ask her. And okay, maybe she’s over-cautious because she’s Jane-ing today. Or maybe it’s being in Roseland at this time of night that sets her nerves twanging like a banjo. But there’s no way she’s going to let Jemmie go home alone in her condition. They try to make it easy on the women. But it still hurts and it’s still scary and it’s still illegal.

  She supposes that it’s possible that the guy could, perfectly reasonably, just happen to be strolling along the exact same route at this exact same time of the evening in the pouring rain, tra-la-la-la-la.

  Gangster-Pervert-Undercover-Gangster-Pervert-Undercover she sings in her head, running through the options in time to Jemmie’s steps. Shuffle-shuffle like an old lady, leaning heavily on her arm and holding her stomach. Long sportscoat could mean cop. Or pervert. But he’s been in a fight, which probably means pervert or mobster. The Outfit seem to have finally cottoned on that Jane don’t make money. Not like the ‘respectable’ doctors who charge $500 and more to have someone pick you up on the street corner and blindfold you so you can’t identify them, and scrape your womb out and dump you back after it’s done without so much as a how-do-you-do-ma’am-have-a-nice-day. Or maybe he’s just some guy. Some pie-in-the-sky kinda guy.

  ‘Say again?’ Jemmie’s breath catches from the pain.

  ‘Oh jeez, sorry, thinking out loud. Don’t pay me any mind, Jemmie. Oh, hey, see, we’re nearly home.’

  ‘He wasn’t, you know.’

  ‘Wasn’t what?’ Margot is only half-listening. The man has picked up his pace, skip-running across the street against the light to keep up with them. He steps ankle-deep into a puddle, curses and shakes out his shoes, then shoots her a goofy smile that’s meant to be disarming.

  Jemmie is angry with her. ‘Some pie-in-the-sky, like you was suggestin’. We engaged. Gonna get married when he gets back. Soon as I turn sixteen.’

  ‘That’s swell,’ Margot says. She is not on top form. Normally she would have called Jemmie on this, a grown man shacking up with a minor before he ships off to Vietnam, promising her the world when he can’t even manage to put on a rubber. Fourteen years old. Only slightly bigger than the kids she subs at Thurgood Marshall Middle School. It makes her heart hurt, man. But she is distracted from going into full lecture mode, because she is turning the uncomfortable thought over in her head that this guy dogging their steps looks familiar. Which brings her back to her litany. Gangster-pervert-undercover-cop. Or worse. Her stomach flip-flops. A disgruntled partner. They’ve had them before. Isabel Sterritt’s husband who bust up her face and broke her arm when he found out what she’d done. Which was exactly the reason she didn’t want to have another baby with him.

  Oh please, let it not be a maniac partner.

  ‘Can we … can we stop for a moment?’ Jemmie has gone the color of stale chocolate that’s melted in your purse. Sweat and rain shine on her forehead through the acne. Broken-down car. No umbrella. Could this day get worse?

  ‘We’re nearly there, okay? You’re doing so well. Keep it up. Just one more block. Can you do that?’

  Jemmie reluctantly lets her tug her along. ‘Are you going to come in with me?’

  ‘Won’t your mom think it’s weird? A white girl bringing you home with stomach cramps?’

  Margot is memorable. It’s her height. Six foot tall with strawberry-blonde hair parted down the middle. She played basketball in high school, but she was too laid back to take it seriously.

  ‘But can’t you come in anyway?’

  ‘If you want me to, I will,’ she says, trying to find some enthusiasm. Explaining to family members doesn’t always go down well. ‘Let’s see how we do, okay?’

  She wishes Jemmie had found them earlier. The service is listed in the phone book, under ‘Jane How’, but how would you know if you didn’t? Ditto the ads in the alternative newspapers or pasted up at the laundromat. There’s no way for a girl like Jemmie to find them except by personal referral, and that took three and a half months and a replacement social worker who was sympathetic to the cause. Sometimes she thinks it’s the substitutes who make the real difference. Substitute teachers and social workers and doctors. Fresh eyes. Big picture. Stepping up. Even if it’s only temporary. Sometimes temporary is all you need.

  Fifteen weeks is borderline. You just can’t take a chance. Twenty women a day and they haven’t lost one yet. Unless you count the girl they turned away because she had a terrible infection, telling her to go see a doctor, to come back when it cleared up. They found out later she died in the hospital. If only they’d seen her sooner. Like Jemmie.

  Jemmie’s was one of the last cards to get claimed. The easy cases go fast, all the volunteers sitting in Big Jane’s cozy living room in Hyde Park with the photographs of her kids on the bookshelf and ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ on the record player, drinking tea and haggling over which patie
nts to take, like they’re trading horses.

  Twenty-year-old co-ed, five weeks along, lives in Lake Bluff burbs? That 3×5 card is snapped up in the first go-around. But the forty-eight-year-old housewife worn down by seven kids who just can’t go through it again? The farm manager whose twenty-two-week old baby is so deformed the doctor says he (or she) won’t live more than an hour after birth, but insists she carry it to term? The fourteen-year-old from the West Side who rocks up with a jar full of pennies because that’s all she has and begs you not to tell her ma? Those cards come up again and again until Big Jane growls in exasperation, ‘Well somebody has to take it.’ And in the meantime, the messages are still coming in on the answering machine, still being transcribed onto new cards for tomorrow and the day after. Leave your name and a number we can reach you on. We can help you. We’ll call you back.

  How many has Margot facilitated now? Sixty? A hundred? She doesn’t do the actual D&C. She’s clumsy at the best of times. It’s her size. The world wasn’t built to fit her, and she doesn’t trust herself with a dainty curette. But she’s real good at holding hands and explaining what’s happening. Knowing helps. What’s being done to you and why. Name that pain, she jokes. She gives the women a scale of reference. Is it better or worse than stubbing your toe? And compared to finding out that your crush is unrequited? A paper cut? Breaking up with your best friend? How about realizing you’re turning into your mother? She gets actual laughs.

  Most of the women cry afterwards, though. Sometimes because they’re sorry or guilty or scared. Even the most certain ones have doubts. Inhuman not to. But mainly it’s out of sheer relief. Because it’s hard and terrible, but now it’s over and now they can get on with their lives.

  It’s getting tougher. Not just the mafia goons muscling in or the cops who’ve been coming down heavy since Yvette Coulis’s self-righteous sister was so outraged that they dared give her an abortion, that she’s been writing letters to the city council and generally sticking a bee up everyone’s butt. The worst part was that she started hanging around at the Front, harassing the friends or husbands or boyfriends or moms and sometimes dads who the women brought along to support them. They had to move the Front to another apartment to get rid of her. The cops started sniffing around after that. The tallest men you ever saw, like that was a qualification to get into the homicide unit, in matchy-match trenchcoats and grumpy expressions that said this was a waste of their time.