Friday Brown (14 page)

I still felt alone. I still fended off grief every day, but it didn’t take me by surprise anymore. It was a dull ache all over, not an acute physical hit every time I thought of her.

If it wasn’t for the fact that the others saw him too, that he was made of flesh and bone, I would have suspected Silence was my invisible guardian angel. Since the attack on Joe, he’d started sleeping in the room I shared with Carrie and Bree. The first night he crept in, I was unnerved. The second, I was resigned. By the third I was comforted by his presence and I missed him if he wasn’t there. We found peace in each other and nobody else seemed to think it was strange that he watched me all the time.

I thought he was waiting to see when I’d leave. Without him. That was what he expected—to be left behind.

Sometimes he knew what I was thinking before I knew it myself. He left me food when I was busking. Offerings, like a cat might leave on your doorstep—a cinnamon doughnut, a bunch of grapes, a bag of nuts, a fresh bread roll.

On the day I met Alison Dunne, it was a large pretzel, still warm. I looked around but Silence had been and gone.

Intense morning sunshine had beckoned more people outside than usual. They were stunned and blinking, as if years had passed and they were waking from a long sleep.

Days like that brought out the best in people; in a little under an hour I’d made thirty-eight dollars. But by midday the sun was overhead and I’d fallen into shade. There was too much foot traffic outside a gallery, squeezed between a couple of cafés, too many shoes scuffing through
my words, leaving them smeared and unreadable. I started packing away my chalk and prepared to move to another spot.

I lingered a few minutes too long, mesmerised by a painting in the gallery window—a woman, standing still in a city street while people jostled past. She was rendered in black and white as if she hadn’t been finished. The rest of the streetscape was in vivid colour. Her face was expressionless and her feet were anchored in concrete. The brushstrokes were thick and glossy as butter; it was the kind of painting you itch to touch.

The artist had so perfectly captured my feeling of isolation—of being different, motionless, while everyone around me was moving—I reached out. I pressed my hand to the window. My palm left a faint, chalky imprint on the glass, like it had been dusted for fingerprints. I saw the reflection of someone just behind me, a young woman. She was staring at the painting too.

I gave her a quick smile and made room.

‘It’s pretty,’ she said.

I nodded.

‘Makes you want to touch it.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Do you paint?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

‘Do you do anything?’

It was a pointed question from someone I had never met. I frowned and looked at her more closely.

She was in her early twenties, dressed smartly in
suit pants and a matching jacket. Her hair was cut blunt, dyed a colour too red to be real. She held a briefcase-style handbag that looked heavy enough to be carrying bricks, and her shoes were plain black, flat and scuffed. Cheap shoes. There was a newspaper tucked under her arm.

‘Are you living on the street?’

‘What?’

That was like asking if you’d ever wet the bed. I took it as personal and offensive, even though it was just a straight-up question with a straight-up answer. I was wary and I backed away.

She reached out and touched my arm. ‘Don’t go. I want to ask you some questions. If that’s okay?’

‘I’m in a hurry,’ I said.

There was something about her that made me squirm. Her eyes were too blue and direct. She was looking at me as if I was something she wanted to unravel.

‘Look, I’m sorry…maybe I should explain who I am?’ She sighed like I should have known who she was, and handed me a business card. ‘I’m Alison Dunne. I’m a journalist.’

‘That’s not what the card says.’ It only had her name and a picture of a typewriter. ‘You look a bit young to be a journalist.’

‘Actually, I’m an intern,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m writing a profile piece on some of the city’s homeless.’

‘Do they let interns do that?’

She blushed and seemed uncomfortable.

I held out her card. ‘I can’t help you.’

‘Keep it. Maybe I can help
you
.’

‘I don’t think so.’ I picked up a stray piece of chalk that was too worn to use again and flicked it into a rubbish bin. ‘You have a good day.’

‘Wait. Why won’t you talk to me? I want to know why you would choose to live on the street. Tell your side of the story.’ She fell into step behind me.

‘Stop following me.’

‘If you tell me your story.’

‘What story?’ I said over my shoulder. ‘I don’t have a story. What makes you think I’m even living on the street? And what makes you think it’s a choice for some people?’

‘Some people,’ she said. ‘But not you.’

Something in her tone made me stop.

She opened the newspaper and snapped out the crease. She licked her finger between pages. It reminded me of Vivienne, thumbing through a book of maps, singing
eeny-meeny-miney-mo.

‘This is you. You’ve cut your hair, but it’s you.’

She showed me a smaller version of the train station photo, next to a précis of the saved-baby story. Relegated to page fourteen, but still there, weeks later. It was accompanied by an article about the dangers of sloping platforms.

‘That’s not me,’ I said.

The sly look came back. Her red fringe hung so perfectly straight I wanted to hack a big V in it with a pair of sharp scissors.

‘So, if that’s not you…’ she opened the paper to another page, ‘…and this isn’t you, then tell me why there are two people who look exactly like you taking up space in the paper this week. Look.’

I felt the sudden ache of shock. My hands were instantly clammy.

MISSING,
it said in black, fat letters. Smaller:
Liliane Brown, 17 years, 157cm, dark brown hair, grey eyes.

The print underneath was too small to read without leaning over the bloodhound’s shoulder, but there was no mistake. The girl was me. The photo was taken two years before, when I still had some idea of who I was and where I was going and who I was going there with. My hair was so long it ended out of the shot. My gaze was steady and knowing, which was weird, because back then I didn’t know anything. Not about death or about losing everything I had that defined
me,
about love—nothing at all.

‘Do you realise how much it costs to put a half-page ad in a newspaper?’

I shrugged.

‘So, who’s trying to find you?’

I smiled at her. She seemed caught off-guard and took a step back.

It wasn’t exactly a revelation; I knew who was looking for me. I knew exactly who could afford a halfpage ad, who was rattling around in an empty mansion, who thought he owed a debt to his dead daughter and runaway granddaughter. I figured he had too much time
and money and guilt. In a city where it should have been easy to disappear, I’d turned into a billboard.

The bloodhound’s cogs were turning. She was stuck between digging deeper and letting me speak, trying to figure out whether her best strategy was attack or retreat.

‘What would you say if I called this number and told the police I’d found you?’ She tapped the bottom of the ad.

‘I’d say that the whole point of disappearing is not to be found.’

‘Okay, so what if I don’t tell anyone. Instead, you tell me your story?’

‘I’d say what I said before.’ I leaned close and breathed in her ear.
‘I don’t have a story
.’

I gave her credit for persistence. She chased me for a few blocks, but eventually gave up. Following Silence around had given me a crash-course in jaywalking, slip-streaming and evading capture. I outran her in no time.

When I finally stopped running, I realised I still had her homemade card clenched in my hand.

I tore it in half and tossed it. The breeze caught one half, the half with her number, and blew it back. It stuck to my shoe, but I shook it off.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I dreamed about water.

I was the clueless girl who opened the door that she shouldn’t, who ignored all the signs telling me to leave it closed. There was the cinematic suspenseful music, the close-up of my hand turning the handle, the sound of my heartbeat in my ears. My hair was long again, whisper-soft against my bare back, and I was naked. The door beckoned, yet repelled.

I opened it, stepped through, let it slam behind me.

I was standing in a long, grey corridor with another closed door at the far end. There were five people, like wax mannequins, lined up along the corridor, arms outstretched. Their faces were blank, no eyes, noses or mouths. Four held objects, offerings: a bundle of clothing, a pair of scissors, a key and a pair of boots. The
fifth held out an empty hand.

I knew instinctively that I could choose only three and that I had to use them in the correct order, like a game of strategy. I heard a steady
drip, drip, drip
and felt bulldust under my feet even though the floor was cold, cold concrete. A chilled draft wound itself around my legs. There was a hand in the small of my back, pushing me towards the other end of the corridor. When I turned around, there was nobody there.

I chose the key, of course. I chose the clothes, because I was cold. And I chose my boots.

There were four skirts, seven blouses, three pairs of stockings and one Sunday hat—I put them all on and immediately felt a weight, not just physical, as if all the good had been sucked out of me. I put my boots on and laced them tightly to mid-calf. The key was in my fist, solid and certain, but when I tried to fit it into the lock it shattered into four rusted, metal screws.

I felt no fear. Only fury.

I kicked the door as hard as I could but it was impenetrable. I beat it until my hands were bleeding and I realised that I was alone. Creeping vines had grown over both doors and the ends were coiling around my ankles. The mannequins were gone, the pressure on my back released.

In the silence, I heard a
click.
A latch being released. I went back to the first door but as I got there it locked again.
Click.
The other door unlocked itself. I ran to it but the same thing happened—
click.

I positioned myself in the middle of the corridor and took off my boots. I stripped off the clothes and left them in a pile. Lighter. Nothing to weigh me down. But it made no difference, I was still too slow. The doors locked themselves just as I grasped the handle, every time.

Bawling, I collapsed, choking in bulldust I could feel but couldn’t see. Dust that then began turning to mud—water was seeping like dark blood through the cracks beneath the doors, rising, up, up, to my chest, to my chin, to my face. But I couldn’t breathe because I had no eyes no nose no mouth…

I woke. That’s when you’re supposed to feel relief that it’s just a dream and even though the dread lingers, you can savour it because it isn’t real. And I could have stayed safe in that realisation if I hadn’t sat up and turned around.

My pillow was damp. It might have been the sweat of fear, but there were several long hairs on my pillow that I could have sworn weren’t there before. They were mine. I reached up and touched the stalks on my head—still short.

It was as if a hole had been punched between worlds.

The others were still sleeping. I knew I had woken myself with a noise—a gasp or a moan—but nobody had stirred. I staggered upstairs to the bathroom, dry-mouthed and panicky. I glanced sideways at my reflection and found nothing familiar—cropped hair, dilated pupils, pale as death. I splashed freezing water on my skin and the
pipes rattled all through the house.

I tiptoed down to the kitchen. I wanted some time to myself to shake off the disorientation, but Arden joined me after a few minutes.

‘Hey,’ she said, eyes still puffy with sleep. ‘You’re up early.’

‘Bad dream,’ I said and cupped my hands around my steaming mug.

‘Wish asked about you,’ she said, out of the blue. She cocked her head, as if she was trying to decide whether she cared about that, or not. She reboiled the penguin kettle and held a flattened hand over the steam. ‘Looks like he’s finally getting on with his life.’

‘I didn’t know you were…’ I stopped. I let her talk. I’d made up some smooth explanations in my mind, like they were neighbours, he was just an old boyfriend, a relationship that didn’t work out. Funny, the spin you can put on something to avoid the truth. The last thing I wanted to suspect was that they were connected by something that couldn’t be broken.

‘It’s hard, seeing him again,’ she admitted. It sounded flippant, but there was an edge of emotion. ‘When I left home the first time, he wanted to take care of me, make sure I stayed out of trouble.’

‘Why did you leave home?’

She gave me a sharp look. ‘It was leave, or suffocate. The old man’s a cop. The worst kind. A control freak. Used to lock me up whenever I got out of line, you know, slap me around a bit.’

‘I’ve never had a father,’ I confessed. ‘It was just me and my mum.’

‘Well, you’re lucky,’ she said. ‘I think I could have been close to my mum if he hadn’t kept getting in the way. She only ever stood up for me once and he made sure it was the last time. Knocked her silly. That was the first time I left, when I was fifteen. He’s dragged me back a few times, but I think he’s given up now.’

‘Hence the tattoo?’ I asked. ‘No more tears?’

Arden smiled. ‘It sounds like a shampoo ad when you say it like that.’ She tossed her hair. ‘There comes a time when you decide you’re done playing the victim. It just came a bit sooner for me.’ She sipped and winced. ‘Ouch. Too hot.’ She looked relaxed and happy. Softer, as if sleep had rubbed away her sharp edges.

‘So, what did he say?’ I ventured. I had to ask.

‘Who?’

‘Wish,’ I said, stumbling over that single syllable.

She sat across from me and rested her chin on her hands. Stabbed me with her stare. ‘Nothing Wish wouldn’t say about anyone else. He was worried that I took advantage of you. He said you looked lost.’