She leaves him and his place and his people, a sick community of weak-minded individuals – the biggest mistake of all her lives – and flees south towards London, reaching the city a few weeks later and losing herself in its chaotic, smog-laden atmosphere. She never expects to see him again, and for a while she doesn’t. Not until she dies.
The horse and cart come out of nowhere and strikes her down. Darkness hauls her into its cold embrace. Nothingness. An absence. No experience, sensation or memory, and then she is lying in a hospital bed in a place and body she does not know.
You will never die, she hears, and she sees a memory of that wizened old man shadowed beside her, perpetuating the curse he has laid upon her. Then a family of surprised faces appears around her bed and she begins a second, confused life.
The confusion soon ends, and endings and beginnings become a part of her existence.
The old man was right in what he said. Down through the years, Jodi has striven to change his words from a curse to something else.
It still troubles her that he could have been amazing, but chose to be bad.
* * *
There seemed to be no rule dictating how soon after her death she would find herself alive once again. Sometimes it was almost instantaneous, other times she was gone for years. Sometimes she took a while to find her way back to Eveline, partly because of where she might have been reborn – the farthest from home had been Australia in the mid-seventies almost seven years after she died, the closest just a mile from where she had passed away three days before – but also because sometimes, the situation she was reborn into made an instant return difficult. Once, she was hauled back to life in the body of a recently deceased drug addict. Huddled in the fetid dampness of a stinking squat, surrounded by aimless, vacant souls who hadn’t even known the woman in the body before her, she smashed into the burning agony of craving like a car hitting a wall. It took her breath away and gripped her in a filthy fist; that was the time when she had most regarded the old man’s curse as true to its name.
This new resurrection might have been the strangest yet.
She felt pressure, coldness, an all-encompassing embrace, and something nudging insistently at her face. Opening her mouth to gasp in her first new breath, Jodi realised with a jolt that it would likely be her last. It was not quite dark, not quite still, and there was no air around her.
Something struck her shoulder, and when she turned to look – slowly, pushing herself against the water holding her deep – it nudged again at her face, shoving her head to one side, but gently, almost affectionately.
A sound reverberated through her head, like the distant buzzing of a phone. She felt across her body in a ridiculous gesture. It might be Eveline, I’m back and maybe she’s calling—
She coughed water from her lungs, expelling as much as she could in one heaving expulsion, and with it went whatever dregs were left of her last breath.
Not mine, she thought. Someone else’s.
The porpoise pushed against her again, then slid its nose beneath her left arm and pulled her towards the light.
Jodi looked up. The water’s surface gleamed and waved, like a solid sheet of light dancing somewhere above her. It might have been six feet or sixty, and if it was the latter then this would be her shortest life yet.
Everything around her blurred. She did not panic, because moments before she had been nothing and now there was something, and she grasped onto the miracle of that.
More nudging from the porpoise, and the pressure of its nose beneath her arm was almost painful. Then she broke surface and everything hit her at once: the fresh air; the heat of the sun, blinding her already blurred eyes; the pain.
She coughed again, and again, and vomited sea water, and then rolled over and floated on her back. She was aware of the porpoise swimming around and beneath her, and she sent her thanks. Lulled by a gentle swell. Staring at the sky. Hearing the sound of waves gently shushing onto a nearby beach.
Did I jump, was I pushed, was I swimming, is there someone on the beach looking for me, was I happy to be alive or desperate to die?
For a few minutes she asked these questions but saw no urgency in discovering the answer. She was alive. For a while, that was all that mattered.
* * *
“At first I thought I was somewhere in the Bahamas. The sun was so warm, and there was the porpoise, and it seemed so... exotic. But then I finally reached the shore. There was a small pile of clothes folded neatly on the sand. Just a small beach, a hundred feet from side to side, with no one else there. I figured it was somewhere only the woman I’d once been knew about, and it made me sad. She’d wanted to go there to kill herself. Such a waste. So I dressed in her clothes, and climbed the steep cliff path, and as I started walking inland I saw a road sign and realised I was in Cornwall.”
“Ahh,” Eveline sighed. They’d been to Cornwall together for a weekend about forty years before, when Jodi lived in a tall, thin, one-armed woman’s body. She’d not known the previous owner’s story. She never tried to find out, because that would make breaking away from her life that much more difficult. And she always did break away. She could never pretend, to loved ones or children.
That, she always told Eveline, was the real curse. The potential heartbreak her resurrection caused others. She did her best to move on quickly, but it was not always possible. Confused, sad faces haunted her sleep. Tears followed her from one life to the next.
“And as soon as I saw the date, I came straight back to you.”
They were sitting in Eveline’s cottage garden. It was not quite so well kept now, with overgrown borders, rose arches hanging heavy with beautiful fat blooms, shrubs that needed trimming. It had gone wild, and Eveline said she liked it that way. It buzzed with countless bees, and Jodi thought back to that time in the village with a small pet dog gnawing at her bloody hand and a mad woman talking her down into death. Birds frolicked in the apple tree. Butterflies fluttered here and there, rainbows dancing in the sun.
“I... might have found a way for you to... escape,” Eveline said. It was the most Jodi had heard her say since she’d returned two days before. She was a very old woman now, pushing a century, and her body was slowly winding down. Not her mind, though. Her mind was still fresh, as if experiencing its own strange renewal at Jodi’s reappearance.
“What do you mean?” Jodi asked. She shivered. The idea of escaping her existence had troubled her for a time, when it all first began. But for the past half-century she’d given it very little thought.
“I researched him,” Eveline said. “All my life. All your lives. And there might be a way. All you have to do is go back to that place, his library’s still there in the old mansion, look for—”
“No,” Jodi said, and Eveline fell silent, breathing heavily as if she’d just returned from a long run. She settled back into the reclined chair, as if pleased she didn’t have to go on. “Catch your breath,” Jodi said.
“But I can... help you.”
“You’ve always helped me. Always.” A blackbird sang in the tree at the bottom of the garden, its varied song delighting the air. She remembered Eveline calling it the jazz of nature. “And I don’t want to change. He thought he cursed me, and for a time he had. There are still moments when…” She shook her head, trying to blink away the sad faces and tears of family members she did not know.
Eveline reached out and squeezed her hand. She was not strong, but still it was tight.
“You want to lose me?” Eveline asked.
“I’ll lose you anyway.” Jodi felt tears on her cheeks. “But I’ve been the luckiest person alive, in every life, to have known you for so long. And I’ve beaten his curse. I’ve experienced so much that he never did. Just think of everything I’ve seen and done, all the experiences I’ve had, both good and bad. He missed all that. My lives have cancelled out his short, foul existence.”
“But you keep dying. The pain, the suffering—”
“Are inevi
table. Love isn’t.” She lifted Eveline’s hand and kissed it, then they sat back together and watched the sun dappling down through leaves stirred by a breeze, and listened to bees going about their business.
“I wonder how many bees you need to save the world,” Jodi said.
“Silly,” Eveline said. And she laughed.
THE GIRL FROM THE HELL
MARGO LANAGAN
Rhododendron invades areas both vegetatively and via seed…
A single plant may eventually end up covering many metres of ground with thickly interlaced, impenetrable branches…
[S]eedlings cannot become established under the lightless canopy.*
Moonlit near-midnight. The house looks even more collapse-y. The yard is blocks and battlements of rubbish, frozen explosions of bedsprings, the cracked shed weeping newspapers, bottles and jars in a glinting fall from rain-sagged boxes, more old fridges and stoves than one old woman could ever have gone through.
Young Agnes stands catching her breath in the dappled shadow of this kind tree. The rage that propelled her here has slowed and chilled; all that running has put a fine edge on it. The cold air feels good on her face and hands. Her trousers and shirt-ends are icy, still heavy damp.
She puts her sack on the ground and takes out the bag of ash and earth.
* * *
That other house, broad and clean and the gardens neatly kept, shrubberies moon-carved out front, vegetable garden a wintry straggle behind. The dog that will run right up to her now, all wriggling and friendly. Will lead her to the cupboard, huff and wag as she takes the bread and cheese. Will stand at her shoulder as she digs in the ash pit.
* * *
She blocks the ward at the gate and goes through. The old woman – her grandmother, what a shock – will be in the kitchen, scheming and stirring. Her busyness is an insect, high at the back of Agnes’s brain.
Agnes begins on what’s left of the path, by the warped veranda stairs. She lays the ash by feel, keeping the line unbroken. It is delicate work through the weeds between the rubbish and over the bed-springier piles, but she will do what’s necessary. Her runners brush grass, her sleeve whispers along a stove-edge, the breeze breathes now and then at her ear. They all conspire with her. They’re in on the secret.
Aah, sighs something else. I thought I heard a mouse creeping.
The cat is at its window. Its face is even more like a skull in the moonlight. Its one good eye looks down at her, wide and black.
You are lucky I am old and lazy.
It watches her pass, the ash and sometimes the earth trickling from her fingers.
You are lucky I care for nothing. And am amused by everything.
* * *
Its teeth catching her hand. The eye rolling up at her, the mouth a grin. Cat laughter, cat mutter. Cat bum-hole preceding her around the wreckscape of the garden, a crinkled pink star beneath an upheld tail.
* * *
The back garden is wilder, weedier. Herb-scents gust up from her passing. The old lady’s feet shuffle and stop on the kitchen floorboards. Vessels clink and clank. The house itself is a pot, her spell-making bubbling at one edge. The ash is drawing a line around it, making it her last. Soon enough she’ll wake up to that; soon enough she’ll see what she’s brought on herself.
* * *
That was when I realised, says Mum. Walking up the creek and hitting the sleep. Walking down the other way, and there it was again. Swimming out, scrambling out over the plants, every which way. I could only ever go so far; then his mother faded me out.
* * *
Halfway around, Agnes pauses to look up and to breathe. This will take everything she has – she mustn’t hurry it. The felted frizz of the old woman’s hair moves a little left, then more to the right, like some small mangy beast on the windowsill. Yellow light from the bare kitchen bulb stains the piles pressing up under the window. Above the skillion roof, the pocked moon washes out the icy sky. Its strings and its fingers are in everything. They are what Agnes is gathering to make this happen.
* * *
Don’t do anything crazy…
Mum’s voice tailing off as she steps too far and hits the sleep. But how could she tell Agnes all that and expect her to stay? To sit there in the hell with her, trapped and strangled?
Crazy is all there is. Crazy is the only sensible thing left to do.
* * *
Get back to it. Sometimes crazy has to be methodical, if it’s to work. It takes silence, concentration, the right ingredients and the correct tangling and funnelling of the moon to set a boundary like this. The disaster must be built from the ground up. Agnes is feeling her way forward through the newness and the rightness, keeping it right, handful by soft cool handful, inch by dribbled inch.
When the ring completes, she feels the shiver in her spine, up the back of her head and over, tickling her eyebrows as she hurries out to the tree, to the bag. She takes out the silky dark plait, the rougher beard, unties the ends of the one, unknots the other. She spreads them on the flattened bag and mingles them, ties them again by one end. The wire must first be straightened, then curled into a cone. She drapes the hair over it with the bound ends at the top.
* * *
Mum’s hair is like black water poured past her face and shoulders, down her back. In the sunlight, caught strands show all through the hell, wafting wherever she’s scrambled or swum. Cut it off, she says, when Agnes brings home the scissors. Cut it all off. It’s just another trap, another binding.
And then they can’t burn or bury it, or cast it to the wind or water. It’s too strange, too much Mum. There’s a power in it, just as there’s a power in Agnes, voiceless, unwoken.
Agnes puts it away with the scissors and the other treasures. Mum watches, stroking her new hair, which is short and soft all over like a bird’s breast feathers.
* * *
She unscrews the jar of river water, takes up the bread and cheese from the good house. A crust of bread will do. She drops it in. A corner of cheese. She eats the rest quickly, for strength, when usually she lingers over it, brooding on its flavours, its cost, its possible meaning.
* * *
Hiding inside the clipped shrub, watching the woman walk out to the cupboard – her grandmother, another one! Who surely knows Agnes is here, the way she looks about, the way she calls her – Kitten? Kitten? Knows but doesn’t know, as she leaves the food, goes back up the path, searching the night. Tomorrow she’ll know. Tomorrow, Mum and Agnes will go straight up the front path, no sneaking.
Oh, and Dad, she thinks with a start. She’ll have a dad then, too. She marvels at that idea, there among the leaves.
* * *
She takes her knife and the torn hell-piece, cuts it back to where it will hold its balance in the jar. Two of the spare leaves she weaves into the cone of hair and beard. All around her, through and beyond the tree’s shade, the moon is shedding its stuff; a shaft of it is moving on her arm like a pain, and she must breathe, breathe, readying herself to go out in it again. She’s so close. It’s so soon. It’s coming at her, fast and dramatic.
Up she stands, hair-cone in one hand, jar in the other. She walks in through the gate-gap, up the path. The house has been silenced by the ash, but as soon as she steps across the line she feels the pot bubbling, the old woman caught up in her rituals, the cat watching from the sill, through all the walls and the hoard packed between them.
She sets the jar down, takes from her pocket a plastic cigarette lighter, flicks it alight, fixes the catch open with a rubber band. Stands it carefully on the flattest veranda board, centred on the front door. Brings the cone down over it.
Immediate stink. The bunched hair at the top catches and flames briefly, writhes and disappears. The pain and stench catch in Agnes’s throat. She recoils, speeds coughing around the house with the jar.
The cat regards her. The cat has always known. The cat has told her nothing, only waited for it all to come home to her. This cat is old, studde
d with tiny cancers and brindle besides. Its black eye and its white can see her equally well.
What a pong, it says. She will smell that, any moment. The game will be up.
Agnes crosses the line, steps up onto the side of the old copper. Steadying herself against the peeling-painted wall, on tiptoes she places the jar on the sill next to the cat, where it might fall either way. It’s up to the cat to do what it says it doesn’t. To care one way or another. To decide how much it owes the grandmother.
From the kitchen, an exclamation. Witch-attention, like lightning. The game is up.
Agnes jumps down. Just inside the line, she stops and looks back.
The cat yawns, its tongue a curled wet moonlit leaf. The jar gleams too, and the rhododendron spray. Framed together, they’re clearly part of the same family of magic.
The grandmother’s voice is belling spells down the hall. Agnes has something at her fingertips for that, at her lips, something to muffle and stifle. She is well acquainted with strangulation.
The skull-cat keeps watching. Footsteps in the hall.
But the hall is as cluttered as every other room in that house. It must be wound through, weaved through, clutches of leaning spoil pushed aside. The burning leaves and hair flare and wail from the front veranda. Witch fear smells like a fire that boys have peed on. It flows through the walls like a wind. Agnes whispers into the blast. The cat watches like a stone cat.
And just as the grandmother reaches the door, wrestles the lock, the cat’s skinny paw comes leisurely out from under its chest, and knocks the jar from the sill.
Into the house.
Water and growth are at Agnes’s knees. She throws herself over the line, out of the ring. Black shot with moon-flash, surging with stems that leaf and thicken and flower, the water rumbles upward, a rippling shining cylinder bounded by the good ash, the good earth. High above, it whooshes and washes and rattles the leaves.
Agnes crawls and runs around the wall of her creation, to the path where she has the tree and its shadow at her back, a friend nearby. Exhaustion is headed for her, riding in on the waves of the wonder before her. Inside it somewhere the old woman struggles and spells, but her incantations are garbling, breaking up, her limbs locked among the stems, the spell-water forcing down her throat towards her lungs.
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