by Nina Allan
“Where would you get meteorite silver?” Selena said. She found the idea entrancing, though improbable. She hoped it was true.
“My friend Nadine. Nadine Akoujan, she’s a xenometallurgist. She lives in London. Sometimes, you know, people offer her things for sale, and then she offers them to me and I offer them to Rina. Good business all round.”
“A xenometallurgist?”
Vanja nodded. “She has a specialist knowledge of minerals and metals that are not from Earth. You would like Nadine, you should meet her sometime. She has a little daughter.” She paused. “She has always been a good friend to me. She knows what it is like, to live in exile. Sometimes, you know, I think this is what makes her so interested in the space metals. The thought that this silver, too, is in exile from its home.” She tapped the silver teardrop, making it swing. “Don’t you think that’s sad?”
Selena snapped the casket closed, embarrassed. The bracelet’s value was equal to three full months of her salary or thereabouts.
“I can’t accept this,” she said.
“You have to,” Vanja replied. “I wrote it off against tax. A charity donation. If you don’t take it that will mean I’ve made a false declaration, which could mean deep scheisse. Deep, deep scheisse with the tax apparatchiki. Do you want to land me in jail?”
“Vanja,” Selena said. “Thank you.” She felt close to tears, not just because of the gift, but because of the ways in which Julie’s return had made her feel more alone even than she had before. She watched Vanja as she went to the bar: the way she walked – something between assured and casually contemptuous – always filled her with delight and a mild stripe of envy. She knew Vanja had suffered trauma – the exact nature of which she did not like to guess at – and yet here she was. Here I am, people, so fuck you hard. Her walk insisted upon it.
When Vanja came back with the drinks, Selena told her it wasn’t a friend she’d been meeting from work the other week, but her sister.
“Sister?” Vanja said. Her eyes opened wide in comic-book surprise. “I never knew you had a sister, why didn’t you tell me?”
“She’s been away,” Selena said. “I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Fuck,” Vanja said. She swirled the ice in her Stolichnaya, making it clink. “If my sister bitched off like that I’d want to kill her, not go for a drink with her.”
“Is your sister still in Russia, then?”
“I don’t have a sister. But if I did.”
“She didn’t go off, exactly. She’s been ill.”
“Oh,” Vanja said. She was thinking loony bin, Selena could tell, the words so clear in her mind they might as well have been printed on her forehead. No, my dad was the mad one, Selena thought. She felt like laughing, though it wasn’t funny, how could it be. It was the relief, she supposed, the relief of telling someone at least a part of the truth.
Admitting to someone out loud that Julie existed.
“She’s much better now,” she said. “I had a postcard from Johnny the other day,” she added, as a kind of reward. Vanja’s attention was captured immediately, as Selena had known it would be.
“Yeah? What did it say?”
Selena closed her eyes, trying to imagine the illusory postcard: the blue glare of its skies, like they’d been spray-painted, its glittering high-rises, the sugary-white, perfect contours of its spotless beaches.
What might Johnny say? That he was fine, that he was missing her?
“He has a new sponsor,” she said. “He seems excited.”
“Bastard,” Vanja said. “You should send the fucking thing back, pretend you’ve moved.”
7
Their father’s death had been sudden, but no one could pretend it was exactly a surprise, either. Raymond Rouane died of a heart attack, but everyone knew this had simply been the defining moment, something official you could put on a death certificate. What Dad died of was burnout: ten years labouring under the obsession that had defined his grief, that had usurped grief to become an end in itself, both the product of his nervous collapse and the cause of it.
Julie’s disappearance had revealed their father as a different person. The Dad of the Before had been faintly boring, so predictable and so dependable it was more or less impossible not to take him for granted. A straight-home-from-work dad whose past had become obliterated by his daddish present and could not now be excavated. He brought no friends with him into his marriage. The only clue to what he had been before he became their father resided in a single black-and-white snapshot, a twenty-year-old Ray Rouane with his hair slicked back and sitting astride a motorcycle.
To his daughters, this image had been equally an object of wonder and of secret ridicule.
As a child, Selena always felt closer to Ray than to Margery, the kind of closeness that remained unspoken because it was so obvious.
Margery was spiky and closed and inclined to moods – more like Julie, Selena realised now, than either of them would have cared to admit. Some years after the divorce, Margery confided in Selena that the main reason she’d had to leave Ray, finally, was that he was no longer the man she’d married. Her admission made Selena feel sad, not because of the divorce – she knew by then that for her mother at least, any other option had become untenable – but because of her increasing realisation that her father had probably been trapped in the wrong life all along.
After Julie went missing, Ray became increasingly solitary, reticent in a way that was quite unlike his old reticence, prone to flights of the imagination that somehow reminded Selena of the man on the motorbike, the boy in the photograph, the teenage tearaway who had somehow morphed into her father.
Selena remembered the day he died, her mother telephoning her at Leggett’s, something she would never do unless it was an emergency.
“It’s Ray,” she said, as soon as Selena came on the line. She never called Dad Dad any more, though occasionally she would refer to him as your father. “He’s had a heart attack. I’m sorry, Selena. If you want to see him you’d better come now.”
Neither of them used the word dead, Selena remembered, though it hung unspoken in the air between them, suspended in the telephone wires. Margery asked if Selena would be all right getting a taxi, and Selena said yes.
They were keeping Dad in a side room. One of the nurses, or it might have been a ward assistant, asked Selena if she would like a cup of tea. Selena said no, she wanted to see her father. When Selena asked her mother why Dad was on a trolley and not lying in a proper bed, Mum said it was because he hadn’t actually died in the hospital.
“He was dead when they brought him in,” she said. “There was nothing they could do for him.”
DOA. Dead on Arrival – that’s what they call it, what they write in the notes. Dad’s eyes were closed, and there was stubble on his cheeks. Selena thought of those stories you hear, about how a person’s hair and fingernails keep on growing after their death. She wondered if they were true or just urban myths. Dad’s arms lay still by his sides, and Selena noticed he wasn’t wearing his watch, a detail she found strange, because he never took it off usually.
The top button of his shirt was missing. Perhaps it had sprung free when they tried to resuscitate him.
She could hear a loud humming sound. She couldn’t work out where it was coming from, then realised it was the air conditioning. They must have turned it up high, she thought, to keep the room fresh.
It came to her that this was the last time she would see her father’s face, ever.
“Can I touch his hand?” she said to Mum, then touched it anyway. Ray didn’t feel cold, or warm, or anything, really. Selena thought of those scenes you always see in TV hospital dramas – Casualty and ER and Holby City – the relatives standing around, holding hands and weeping over the body. She realised with a kind of amazed relief that there was no point in such scenes, that they were completely wrong, because the person on the trolley was already gone, so gone it was impossible to get your head around. You
might as well be crying over a life-size plastic model of your father, for all the sense it made. Or one of the styrofoam cups the nurses brought you coffee in.
* * *
Raymond Rouane died in woodland close to Hatchmere Lake. His body was discovered, ironically, by a man out walking his dog. It was late October. The forest pathways were less frequented during the colder months, especially during the week. The pathologist’s report said that Dad had probably been lying there for several hours. There were no signs of what the police liked to call foul play, it was just a heart attack. It had been raining, and for Selena this was the most upsetting detail of all: the thought of her father lying there dead while the rain fell on him, the moisture seeping through his clothes and no one there to even lay a blanket over him.
* * *
She and Mum cleared out Dad’s flat together. Margery decided the only sensible solution was to hire a skip.
“There’s so much rubbish here,” she said, which was probably Mum’s way of apologising for suggesting they chuck the bulk of Dad’s possessions straight into landfill. Selena couldn’t think of a reason to argue with her – not a good one, anyway. Looking at Dad’s stuff brought it home to her, how inanimate it all was, how useless, how it needed Dad’s presence to make sense of it. How the things you own become trash from the moment you die.
In Dad’s case this was doubly true. All the furniture in the flat belonged to the landlord, and Ray’s actual possessions – clothes, TV, kitchen equipment, the few bits and bobs he still had from his sister Miriam – could have been fitted into the corner of one room, and yet the space was full nonetheless, stuffed to bursting with the books, magazines, newspaper clippings and computer printouts he had accumulated during his ten-year search for Julie and the truth of what had happened to her. The printouts and clippings alone filled three large filing cabinets.
An ocean of information, and only a fraction of it directly related to Julie, or to her disappearance.
Dad had books on real-life missing persons cases, alien abduction and UFOs, unsolved murders, true lives of the serial killers, astrology, spiritualism, Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn, animal spirit guides, Madame Blavatsky, ley lines and haunted houses, biographies of famous detectives, forensic science and toxicology, criminal psychology, the underground subcultures of Manchester and Glasgow, genealogy and something called false identity syndrome. Selena couldn’t help noticing that the books Dad acquired became more and more obscure as time went on, and that there were always more of them than there had been on her previous visit.
From time to time, Ray Rouane had become involved with various fringe societies – UFO clubs and spiritualists, mainly – but these liaisons never lasted for very long. Dad always fell out with someone, sooner or later, and generally made his presence unwelcome.
Selena had once heard one of Ray’s drinking buddies from The George call her father a cussed old bastard, which she supposed he was, or at least had become. The Ray Rouane from the Before had usually been the last person in the room to express a contrary opinion.
* * *
During his final years, Ray and Selena had become close again. Selena ate lunch with him in The George most Sundays, and they had taken to sharing an Indian takeaway at least one night of the week, usually in front of one of the cop shows Ray liked. At such times it was possible to believe he was normal, that he was Dad again.
Selena had always been careful never to involve herself in his fantasies, his unshakeable belief that Julie was alive somewhere, that there was a definite truth to discover. That did not stop her envying him the strength of his faith, the fact that he had something he believed in, full stop.
She could never have explained it to Margery and nor did she try, but Selena always secretly preferred the new Ray to the old.
* * *
They ended up throwing most of Dad’s stuff on the skip. Unlike Julie’s, Dad’s clothes weren’t good enough to donate to Oxfam. Selena rescued Miriam’s china dog, the partner to the horse with the golden shoes that had once been Julie’s. At the last minute she decided to keep the two books on false identity syndrome as well as another that claimed to be a comprehensive study of alien abduction testimonies. She filled a large cardboard box with assorted correspondence and press clippings, as well as Julie’s old diaries and photo albums. Margery raised her eyebrows but said nothing. Once the skip had been hauled away they cleaned the inside of the fridge and the oven and hoovered. Mum said she’d drop the keys off with the landlord on her way home.
The flat was let again in less than a month – the landlord had a waiting list, probably. Selena wasn’t entirely sure why she’d saved the books and letters, only that it seemed important – for Dad’s sake – to keep something. She shoved the box as far back in the understairs cupboard as she could, then mostly forgot about it. The idea of going through its contents appalled her, as if in doing so she might stumble upon more layers of Dad’s madness, deeper layers she hadn’t known existed.
* * *
Perhaps it’s all rotted away in there, Selena thought. Crumbled into dust. Her mind filled with images of scuttling silverfish, the desiccated carcases of house spiders. She dragged everything out of the understairs cupboard – the vacuum cleaner, an ancient amp she was storing for Johnny, other junk she didn’t even want to know about – and uncovered the box, fuzzy with dust and cobwebs, BRILLO stamped on its side in capital letters approximately the same shade of purple as the soapy, foamy stuff that came out of Brillo pads themselves. Did Brillo pads even exist still? They were probably illegal now, banned on grounds of health and safety by EU officials. Alien artefacts. Selena grinned to herself, knowing how much Julie-then would have loved a box like this. She remembered how she’d gone on and on about that time capsule thing they’d made on Blue Peter, insisting that she and Selena make one too, using one of those giant family-size ice cream tubs as a container. Can I put in my maths homework? Selena had pleaded. Stop it, Julie had said. This is serious.
They never made the capsule in the end. Selena couldn’t recall why not – Julie had most likely run out of enthusiasm. Only here was Julie’s own time capsule, untouched for nearly a decade, a small section of the past, undoctored by the passage of passing years. Selena reached forward, inserting her upper body into the cupboard, tugging the box forward on the gritty floor and into the light.
Seeing it again made her think of Dad suddenly, the day they’d cleaned out his flat, and she felt like crying.
The Refuge
Warner Road
Sittingbourne
Kent
Dear Mr and Mrs Rowan,
You won’t know me, and I thank you for taking even the time to read this letter. My whole existence has been a lesson in learning to accept the hurt and injustice that comes with the affliction of being routinely disbelieved, of having my words twisted against me, of being pursued, both verbally and physically, as a servant of Satan. As one privileged with the guardianship of a specific gift, I have, I hope, learned to accept such misinterpretations and misrepresentations as a part of being chosen, as the Christian martyrs have been forced to endure before me. It is in this spirit of acceptance and open-heartedness that I write to you now, offering my services and guidance as a child of spirit parents, who through their patience and benign watchfulness have initiated me into the domain of the unseen.
I have seen your daughter Julia. I have seen her crying out for you in the mist, holding out her hands for succour, her aching feet seeking the right path home to you, and failing. I have spoken with Julia and I know she is sincerely sorry for the missteps that have led her away from our world and into the meantime. I feel certain that if I can only win your trust, as her Earth-parents and good guardians for the duration of her Earthly childhood, we can, by working and seeking together, lead her back to our domain, and to the light.
You will find my telephone number here below. If you cannot as yet find the security in your hearts to speak to me in person, pl
ease feel confident in writing to me at the above address, and together we will find the right way to proceed.
With blessings and sincere hopes for your wellbeing,
Sister Maria, of the comradeship of Girda,
dame goddess of death’s armies.
* * *
3 Clelland Avenue
Bondi
NSW
To my former mother and father,
This is to let you know that I am well, and alive, and in full possession of my mental faculties. I am writing to inform you that I shall not be returning to what you call home, the place I have come to think of as a prison, and that this is the last time you will hear from me. I no longer think of myself as your daughter. I am living contentedly here in Australia, as far away as I could travel from my past unhappiness, among people who know me properly. You don’t need to worry – I have not informed anyone of the crimes you committed against me, and do not intend to do so. I have no wish to bring the old unpleasantness and bitter memories into my new life, and in time I hope to forget they ever happened.
I wish you well, insofar as I am able to do so, given the circumstances, and insofar as people like yourselves are able to understand the term. I hope that in time you will be able to see the reasons for your suffering, and make new lives for yourselves without me to hinder you.
Yours sincerely,
Julie Matherson (Mrs)
* * *
You don’t need to know my name, though you can call me Saviour if you are of the kind that needs a name to know a person. Your daughter was not a virgin before she died. Neither was she a virgin before she came into my comfort, which makes her a fruit rotten on the vine, and best disposed of, lest more of the common herd be thus contaminated. One bad apple, or so they say, though when the world is riddled with rotten apples, plentiful as maggots seething in a barrel, the situation is pointless anyway, and there is no solution, save the stamping out of individual vermin for the momentary pleasure of seeing them, trampled and squirming, die underfoot. I plugged her mouth with rags and then I skewered her, first with my rod, then with the poker, hot from the fire, for does it not say in the Bible that fire is refining? For he is like a refiner’s fire and he shall purify the sons of Levi, shame though they be Jews, and your daughter Julie-Ann, whose name must surely count as an anagram of Judas, did scream loudly and, we can only hope, loudly enough to cast out her demons, as Christ cast out the demons from the leprous man on the road to Galilee. Her remains are scattered. You will never see her again. You would not know her now, even if you could find her, which you cannot.
