‘Your mum called me,’ Minah said. ‘Said you were back.’
We made awkward small talk. Minah told me about her latest art project – something involving dismembered plastic dolls in apothecary jars – and updated me on school gossip. I nodded and made appropriate noises. It seemed bizarre to me that school was still happening – that every day people got out of bed and went and sat in a classroom, taking notes and learning about dates and numbers and words. Minah’s world seemed so … small. So insignificant. We’d always talked about big ideas, but now I realised that her life was shallow, only skimming the surface of reality. There was no profundity. No depth. She couldn’t see the world for what it truly was.
Like Daddy can.
Like Fox could.
Minah must have noticed the flash of pain that passed over my face as I thought about Fox. She looked down at her hands and picked a flake of paint off her fingernail. ‘Um,’ she said. ‘So … are you okay?’
Of course I wasn’t. I was dying inside. Rotting away like the toxicant piece of meat that I was. I’d given up my chance at sublimation. Given up happiness and purpose and strength, for weakness and doubt and aphotic water.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Your mum went crazy, you know,’ she said. ‘When she got your note.’
I felt a sickening pang of guilt.
‘She came over to my place and grilled me on where you’d been going and what you’d been doing. She … she was pretty wild. All skinny and pale, like a ghost. But she was full of fire – desperate to find you. I told her about the guy you’d been seeing – Fox – and how he lived in a commune in that big red house on the hill. She went over there, but the people in the red house said they didn’t know you. She knocked on every door in the neighbourhood, but nobody knew anything. She called the police, but still nothing. There were announcements about it at school. I put up a Facebook page.’
I remembered talking to Mum on the phone the first time. She had been so worried. ‘I didn’t know,’ I said at last. ‘That she was looking for me. I didn’t think she would.’
‘She’s your mum. Of course she’d look for you.’
Minah’s face was wrinkled in disbelief and disapproval. Minah. Rebellious, devil-may-care Minah thought that I was a bad daughter. That I didn’t care.
Was she right?
‘Then she called me again, said you’d been in touch. She said she’d spoken to you twice, and that you were okay. She wanted me to take down the Facebook page, because you weren’t missing anymore. She seemed so calm. That was a few months ago.’
Daddy said I had persuaded her with my enhanced powers of communication. Could that be true? I could barely remember the phone conversation, I’d been so wrapped up in my own guilt and what I’d believed were Daddy’s powers of healing. Could he have faked the call? I tried to remember how the voice on the other end had sounded. In my memory, it had sounded like Mum, but could I trust my own recollections?
Minah leaned forward. ‘What was it like? The cult?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It was …’
Transformative. Soul-destroying. The greatest thing that had ever happened to me, and the worst.
‘Rituals? Drugs? Sex stuff?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing like that,’ I lied.
‘So what did you do all day?’
‘Just … stuff. Gardening. Cleaning. Preparing meals.’
Getting beaten and locked away for weeks. Playing blackjack. Cutting off an innocent girl’s finger. Uncovering possible evidence of murder.
Minah looked disappointed. ‘Right. So why did you leave?’
The people in the cults I’d read about online had made a clean break. They realised that they’d been living a lie, and then left. One man described it as like being in a fairground haunted house and seeing the lights come on – once you’d seen the mechanics of it all, it was impossible to be scared again.
I knew what Daddy had done. I knew he was a liar. After seeing the website Maggie’s parents had set up, I knew she hadn’t left the Institute. Daddy had killed her. Fox too. He was a murderer and a liar, and I knew I should hate him.
But I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Quintus Septum. About the possibilities of sublimation. About the friends I’d left behind. I’d seen the haunted house with the lights on, but I was still terrified.
Minah was watching me, waiting for a response.
I shrugged. ‘I guess … I wanted answers. About things.’
‘Was it because of him?’ asked Minah. ‘Because of Fox?’
Hearing his name brought a fresh stab of grief. I hesitated. Could I trust Minah? I had to trust someone.
‘He— he’s dead,’ I said. Saying it out loud made it real, and something broke inside me. ‘He died. Because of something I did. Something we did.’
Minah raised her eyebrows, but didn’t press me.
‘I just …’ I swallowed. ‘I want to know who he really was.’
I pulled the creased photo of baby Fox and his mother from my desk drawer. ‘This is him, and his mother. I want to find her. Tell her about him.’
Minah took the photo and frowned, rubbing the paper between her fingers. ‘You … you think this is Fox and his mother?’
I nodded. Minah bit her lip and glanced at me with what looked like … pity?
‘Ruby, this isn’t Fox. Look at it. It’s black and white, a film print, not digital.’ She turned the photo over and read the scribbled pencil words on the back. ‘This isn’t even real photo paper. It’s been cut out of a book.’
‘It’s real,’ I said. ‘I know it is. I know Fox.’
Minah pulled out her phone and pointed it at the photo. I heard the artificial sound of a shutter click. Then she tapped at her phone for a moment. ‘I’m pretty sure I know who the photo is of,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’
She handed me the phone.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. A line of text jumped out at me from the Google page. About 5026 results. ‘What am I looking at?’
Minah reached over my shoulder and tapped the first result. The photo of Fox and his mother popped into view. ‘The woman is Audrey Hepburn,’ she said. ‘The baby is her son. It was taken in 1960.’
I frowned. ‘No,’ I said. ‘That can’t be right.’
‘I’m really sorry.’
I stared at the crumpled photo in my hand. My last link to Fox. Except it wasn’t. It wasn’t anything. Just a photo cut from a book. A photo of a stranger. I turned it over and looked at Fox’s scrawled words.
plane crash
starvation
gamma radiation pulse
contaminated water supply
nuclear fallout
suffocated by rubbish
Were these the things he imagined had happened to his mother? Or were they nightmares about how his own life might end? He’d always feared Daddy, even before we were punished. Perhaps a part of him had always known that one day he’d be betrayed by the man he thought was his father, a man who had spun a web of lies so intricate that maybe he even believed them himself.
I’d never know. Fox was now totally, utterly lost to me. I didn’t even have a picture to remember him by. How long would it be until I forgot his face? His voice? The way he pushed his golden hair away from his eyes?
A chasm of grief opened up underneath me. There was no dark tide to support me or carry me in its wake. The Institute had stripped me of all my coping mechanisms. It’d broken down all my barriers and now I was alone, falling into the yawning, gaping abyss.
Fox was gone.
‘You look like you want to be alone,’ said Minah, and awkwardly backed out of my bedroom. She couldn’t get away fast enough.
I sat on my bed for a while, staring into nothing. Then I pulled on some shoes and a coat and went out, not bothering to tell Mum where I was going.
Every step was treacherous, as if I were balancing on a high wire
and could plummet to my death at any moment. I walked slowly, carefully, to the park where Fox and I had spent so many hours.
The blossom and life that we’d watched emerge from the trees had gone. Everything was shrivelled and cold, a last few tattered autumn leaves clinging to the branches. I shivered, even though I was wearing the biggest, puffiest coat I could find in my wardrobe. I was always cold, now. I’d been cold since I left the Institute.
The ducks were gone. Empty chip packets and plastic bags were trodden into the mud around the pond. Everything was cold, and empty, and ugly.
I remembered lying on the grass here with Fox. I remembered him telling me how beautiful the world was. How in love with it he was. How in love with me.
The world wasn’t beautiful anymore. Fox was gone from the world, and without him everything was tarnished, as limp and lifeless as a dishrag.
I turned away from the park to go home, and I saw Stan.
He was standing at the edge of the park, handing out water bottles, bouncing on his heels the way he always did.
I remembered seeing Fox the first time. The memory of that first glimpse slammed into me like a wave, and I felt my knees buckle.
His face turned up to the sun. His eyes closed. His lips parted as if he was kissing the sunshine.
Fox was gone. But Stan was still there. My feet dragged me towards him, and I ached for recognition. Understanding. Family.
‘Stan,’ I said as I drew close.
He looked up and saw me, and his face became a mask of blank politeness.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Do I know you?’
‘Of course you know me,’ I said. I reached out and touched his arm, and he pulled away. ‘It’s me. It’s Hera. Heracleitus.’ The name felt right in my mouth, like coming home. It’d be so easy to slip back into her. Back into a world with no doubts. No unanswered questions or difficult choices. Back into that certainty of knowing what you were doing was right.
Stan smiled, the polite, cautious smile of someone placating a crazy person. ‘I think you must have me confused with someone else.’
I stared at him. There was not the faintest flicker of recognition on his face. Nothing. For a moment I doubted myself. My own memory. Maybe it had all been a dream – Daddy, the Institute, everything. Maybe I was crazy.
But I wasn’t. I had the scars and bruises to prove it.
Stan’s expression was tinged with pity. ‘I don’t know what happened to you, Miss,’ he said. ‘To make you like this. But I hope you find what you’re looking for. Here.’
And he handed me a bottle of water.
I took it automatically, and stared blankly at the label.
BOUNDLESS BODY BOUNDLESS MIND
‘I have to go,’ said Stan, shouldering the box of water bottles.
Longing and grief slashed me open, and I was afraid I’d collapse in a mound of oozing flesh, right there on the footpath.
My footsteps turned unthinkingly, and I broke into a run. Past the pond, up the hill. My breath rasped in my chest, raw and wheezing. Only a few days back in the real world and my body was crumbling. Where was the strength I’d had before? I could feel poisons seeping through my pores, spreading fingers of death into my heart, my eyes, my brain. It was already getting harder to think, to reason, to remember.
But I could get it back. All wasn’t lost. I could go back to them.
To Daddy.
I tripped on the pavement as I came out the other side of the park and went sprawling, my bones juddering at the impact. A jogger crossed the road to avoid me, looking askance at my stringy hair, my red face, my clothes damp with sweated toxins. I dragged myself upright and headed down the leafy street towards the Red House.
It was time to go home.
20
ELEGANT VICTORIAN BEAUTY BRIMMING WITH POTENTIAL.
The SOLD sticker was bright and angry and mocking. I ignored it, pushing through the iron gate and up the overgrown pathway to the front door. I rang the bell and knocked until my knuckles were red and raw. Then I went round to every window, peering in to see nothing but empty rooms. No furniture. Nothing.
The house was as empty and lifeless as I was.
I felt the last threads of myself unravel and drift away on the breeze. It was all gone. Everything. I didn’t exist anymore.
When I got home, Mum didn’t ask where I’d been. She just smiled a thin, tight smile, and gently suggested a shopping expedition for new clothes – everything I had hung off my bony frame as if I were no more than a wire coathanger. I didn’t have the energy to refuse her, so I let her drag me around the shopping centre, the bright lights and tinny music hypnotising me into a trance. I felt eyes upon me – the shop assistants, the other shoppers. Everyone was watching me. Did they know?
Maybe they are spies. The Quintus Septum is everywhere.
I hoped they were. Then I’d know there was some truth in it all. Some point in being alive.
Mum bundled me in and out of change rooms, and I mechanically put clothes on and took them off again. Each new garment was like sandpaper, rubbing my skin red and raw. What was the point of clothes? What was the point of anything?
‘Ruby,’ said Mum, as we clambered out of the car at home, laden with shopping bags. ‘I think maybe you should see someone. A counsellor. After you left I started talking to someone. It really helped.’
I’d seen a counsellor before. Helena. She’d given me amber beads and told me that they had magic powers. I told Mum I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, but I’d let her know when I was. The words came automatically, without me having to think about them. Mum crept away and busied herself in the kitchen, leaving me alone.
I felt skittish and delicate, like blown glass that could shatter at any moment. I remembered once writing an essay on some eighteenth-century German poet who attributed emotional characteristics to musical keys. He’d said that if ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate D sharp minor. That was me. A ghost in D sharp minor.
I floated around the house aimlessly, drifting from one room to the other, picking things up and then putting them down again. Mum tried to engage me in conversation, but I could barely manage more than a syllable. Everything was fake, as though I’d been lured into a TV show and any minute now a curtain would open to reveal the studio audience watching me, laughing and pointing. I couldn’t remember how to behave in the real world. I couldn’t believe this was it, this was all there was. Before Anton died, everything had been golden. Then afterwards there had been the intensity of grief, the rise of the black tide. In the Institute there had been hope, and possibility, and fear. But now everything was bland and faded, like flat lemonade and brittle plastic.
Every night, I had flashbacks to being locked in the dark, cold room at the Institute. The memory came over and over, and it didn’t feel like washing a wound clean. It felt like picking at a scab and making it worse. I oozed swollen, sticky memories of pain and hollow, aching hunger.
One day, when Mum had gone to see her counsellor, I sat down at the piano. I was afraid I’d forgotten how to play. And I was afraid that if I started, if I let my fingers trace their patterns of sorrow and loss on the keys, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I was afraid that it would all pour out of me until there was nothing left but skin and hair and fingernails.
I lifted the lid of the piano, and stroked the keys with gentle fingertips. I pressed down on one note, and then another. My fingers stretched to make a chord – B flat minor. B flat minor was discontented. Shrouded in darkness and mocking God and the living world as it grew inevitably closer to death.
I played a few bars of Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata No II, then stopped.
My fingers hadn’t forgotten, but my heart had. Music had once filled me with emotion, made me overflow with feelings. But I felt nothing. The notes buzzed in my ears like a swarm of mosquitos – annoying and utterly meaningless. I stared at the keys for a few minutes, then let my hands sink down into them wherever they fell, making a disc
ordant drone. Once the noise had faded, I shut the lid of the piano and went back to my bedroom.
On the bad nights, when I couldn’t shut out thoughts of Fox and Daddy and the endless days I’d spent locked away, I would break. My trips to the kitchen weren’t merely observational missions. I dug past the almonds and tofu and apple cider vinegar to find forgotten treasures. I scooped peanut butter from the jar and shovelled it into my mouth. I squeezed mayonnaise direct from the bottle, took long slugs of maple syrup. I gnawed chocolate from the block and slurped flavoured yoghurt straight from the tub.
Afterwards, I’d clean myself up as best I could and climb back into bed, curling up as spasms and cramps wracked my body.
Mum didn’t say anything about my fridge raids, although she must have noticed. Instead she patiently prepared nutritious meals for me, and then sat opposite me at the dining table and made timid attempts at conversation while I pushed grilled pumpkin and avocado around my plate and tried not to throw up.
‘You’ll tell me, won’t you, darling?’ Mum asked. ‘If there’s anything I can do to help?’
I nodded, my eyes filling with tears.
Mum gave me a supportive little nod, and passed me the salt.
Aunty Cath called to check up on us. Mum held the phone out to me and I took it, listening as Aunty Cath prattled on about the weather in Cairns, and how bananas were expensive this year. She asked after Mum, and I replied robotically that Mum seemed good.
‘I think she’s met someone,’ said Aunty Cath, lowering her voice so it hissed and buzzed in the receiver. ‘She’s keeping it to herself for now, and I respect that, but I’m so pleased for her. She’s been through so much.’
I put down the phone without saying goodbye. Was it true? Had Mum met someone? Was that where she was going, when she said she was going to her counsellor? What about Dad? What about me? We were both locked away, and Mum was shiny-eyed and happy? Mum, who had been so broken and weak?
The doorbell rang, but I made no move to answer it. Whoever it was, I didn’t want to speak to them. I didn’t want to speak to anyone. Mum came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a tea towel and glancing sideways at me.
The Boundless Sublime Page 25
