Ghosts and Other Lovers (22 page)

The first thing I noticed was that the music had changed. It was no longer anything at all like Craithe's last symphony. It was completely different in style, tone, everything. I was sure I had never heard it before, and yet there was also something faintly, teasingly familiar about it. I loved it at once. It was beautiful, strong, emotional -- "What is it?" I asked, and only then did I realize that I was alone in the room.

Flora had probably gone to the loo; I sat down to wait, entranced by the music.

I must have sat there for twenty minutes or more, rapt in the music, before it changed to something I found less compelling and at about the same time Flora's continued absence started to worry me. I went to check on her -- but she wasn't in the loo, or in her tiny nun-like bedroom, or in the kitchen. Back in the sitting room again I went over to look at the computer screen. I think on some level I already knew where she was.

Now, instead of the musical notation which went with the sound, there were words I could read on the screen, words which were meant for me. As I read them the music from the speakers changed again, this time to something which not simply seemed but actually was very familiar. It was a song everybody knows; it was "Auld Lang Syne." And blinking at me from the screen, in time to the music, was my final message from Flora:

Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Until we meet again.

Mornings, it was easy to rush out of the house without eating; when it wasn't, when her mother made an issue of it, she'd eat an orange or half a grapefruit. At lunchtime she was either at school or out so there was no one to pressure her eating anything she didn't want. But dinner was a problem. She had to sit there, surrounded by her family, and eat whatever her mother had prepared, and no matter how she pushed it around her plate it was obvious how little she was eating. She experimented with dropping bits on the floor and secreting other bits in her sleeves or in her pockets, but it wasn't easy, her mother's eyes were so sharp, and she'd rather eat than suffer a big embarrassing scene.

Her brother, the creep, provided the solution. He was always looking at her, staring at her, mimicking her, teasing, and while she didn't like it at any time, at mealtimes it was truly unbearable. She honestly could not bear to put a bite in her mouth with him staring at her in that disgusting way. Her parents warned him to leave her alone, and shifted their places so they weren't directly facing each other, but still it wasn't enough. He said she was paranoid. She knew that even paranoids have enemies. Even if he wasn't staring at her right now, he had stared before, and the prospect that he might stare again clogged her throat with fear. How could she be expected to eat under such circumstances? How could anyone? If she could have dinner on a tray in her room alone, she would be fine.

Her mother, relieved by the prospect of solving two family problems at once, agreed to this suggestion. "But only for as long as you eat. If I don't see a clean plate coming out of your room you'll have to come back and sit with the rest of us."

It was easy to send clean plates out of her room. After she'd eaten what she could stomach she simply shoved the rest of the food under her bed. Suspecting that the sound of a toilet flushing immediately after a meal would arouse her mother's suspicions, she planned to get rid of the food in the morning. Only by morning she'd forgotten, and by the time she remembered it was dinnertime again.

It went on like that. Of course the food began to smell, rotting away down there under her bed, but no one else was allowed into her bedroom, and she knew the smell didn't carry beyond her closed door. It was kind of disgusting, when she was lying in bed, because then there was no avoiding it, the odor simply rose up, pushed its way through the mattress and forced itself upon her. Yet even that had its good side; she thought of it as her penance for being so fat, and was grateful for the bad smell because it made her even more adamantly opposed to the whole idea of food. How could other people bear the constant, living stink of it? The cooking, the eating, the excreting, the rotting?

When she could no longer bear the enforced, nightly intimacy with the food she refused to eat, she decided it was time to get rid of it. Before looking at it, she decided she'd better arm herself with some heavy-duty cleaning tools, paper towels, rubber gloves, maybe even a small shovel. But when she opened the door of her room to go out, there was her mother, looking as if she'd been waiting awhile.

"Where are you going?"

"What is this, a police state?" Hastily, afraid the smell would get out, she pulled her door shut behind her. "I want a glass of water."

"From the bathroom?"

"No, I thought I'd go down to the kitchen and get a glass. Why, aren't I allowed to go to the bathroom?"

"Of course you are. I was just worried -- Oh, darling, you're so thin!"

"Thin is good."

"Within limits. But you're too thin, and you're getting thinner. It's not healthy. If you really are eating--"

"Of course I'm eating. You've seen my plates. I thought they'd be clean enough even for you."

"If you've been flushing your good dinners down the toilet--"

"Oh, Mother, honestly! Of course I haven't! Is that why you're lurking around up here? Trying to catch me in the act?" She realized, with considerable irritation at herself, that she could've been flushing her dinner neatly and odorlessly away for a couple of weeks before arousing suspicion, but that it had now become impossible.

"Or throwing up after you eat--"

"Oh, yuck, you'll make me sick if you talk about it! Yuck! I hate vomiting; I'm not some weirdo who likes to do it! Really!"

"I'm sorry. But I'm worried about you. If you can eat regular meals and still lose weight there must be something wrong. I think you should see a doctor."

She sighed wearily. "All right. If it will make you happy, I'll see a doctor."

She was just beginning to feel good about her body again. She didn't care what the doctor said, and when he insisted she look at herself in a full-length mirror, wearing only her underwear -- something she had not dared to do for months -- she was not grossed-out. The pendulous breasts, the thunder-thighs, all the fat, all the jiggling flesh, had gone, leaving someone lean, clean, and pristine. She felt proud of herself. The way the doctor looked at her was just right, too: with a certain distance, with respect. Not a trace of that horrible, furtive greed she'd seen in the eyes of her brother's friends just six months ago. The look of lust mixed with disgust which men had started giving her after her body had swelled into womanhood was something she hoped she'd never see again.

"How long since you had a period?" the doctor wanted to know.

"About four months." She was pleased about that, too. You weren't supposed to be able to turn the clock back and reject the nasty parts of growing up, but she had done it. She was in control of herself.

In reality, of course, the control was in the hands of others. As a minor, she was totally dominated by adults, chief among them her parents. After the doctor's diagnosis that she was deliberately starving herself, she was forced to return to the dinner table.

Resentful and humiliated, she pushed food around on her plate and refused to eat it. Threats of punishment only strengthened her resolve.

"That's right," she snarled. "Make me a prisoner. Let everybody know. Keep me locked up, away from my friends, with no phone and no fun -- that's really going to make me psychologically healthy. That's really going to make me eat!"

Bribes were more successful, but her parents either weren't willing or could not afford to come up with a decent bribe at every single mealtime, and she simply laughed to scorn the notion that she'd let someone else control every bit of food that passed her lips for an entire week just for a pair of shoes or the use of the car on Saturday. She didn't need new clothes, CDs, the car, or anything her parents could give her, and she wanted them to know it.

Now that the battle zone was marked out and war had been openly declared, food was a constant, oppressive preoccupation. She was reminded of food by everything she saw, by everything around her. Hunger, which had once been the pleasurably sharp edge that told her she was achieving something, was now a constant, miserable state. She no longer even controlled the amounts she ate; she ate even less than she wanted because she couldn't bear to let her mother feel that she was winning, that anything she put in her mouth was a concession to her. She couldn't back down now, she couldn't even appear to be backing down. If she did, she would never recover; her whole life would be lived out meekly under her mother's heavy thumb.

Lying in bed one night, trying to get her mind away from food, she realized that the smell which permeated her mattress and pillow and all her bedclothes had changed. A subtle change, yet distinctive. What had been a foul stench was now . . . not so foul. There was something
interesting
about it. She sniffed a little harder, savoring it. It was still far from being something you could describe as a
good
smell -- it was a nasty smell, not something she'd want anyone else to suspect she could like, and yet there was something about it which made her want more. It was both deeply unpleasant and curiously exciting. She couldn't explain even to herself why the bad smell had become so pleasurable to her. It made her think of sex, which sounded so awful when it was described. No matter how they tried to make it glamorous in the movies, the act itself was clearly awkward and nasty. And yet it was obvious that the participants found that embarrassing, awkward nastiness deeply wonderful and were desperate for a chance to do it again. It was one of the great mysteries of life.

She wondered what the food under her bed looked like now. All the different foods, cooked and uncooked, pushed together into one great mass, breaking down, rotting, flowing together. . . . Had it undergone a change into something rich and strange? Or would the sight of it make her puke? She had decided she was never going to clean under her bed -- her refusal, although unknown by her mother, was another blow against her -- but now, all of a sudden, she wished she could see it.

There was a movement under her bed.

Was it her imagination? She held very still, even holding her breath, and it came again, stronger and more certain. This time she felt as well as heard it. The bed was rocked by something moving underneath. Whatever was moving under there was coming out.

Although she'd turned out her lamp before going to bed, her room was not totally dark; it never was. The curtains were unlined and let in light from the street, so there was always a pale, yellowish glow. By this dim, constant light she saw the man who emerged from under her bed.

Her heart beat harder at the sight of him, but she was not frightened. There might not be light enough to read by, but there was enough to show her this man was no ordinary serial killer, burglar, or rapist from off the street. For one thing, he wore no clothes. For another, he was clearly not a normal human being. The smell of him was indescribable. It was the smell of rotting food; it was the smell of her own bed. And, she did not forget, she had wished to see what her food had become.

He made no menacing or seductive or self-willed motions but simply stood there, showing himself to her. When she had looked her fill she invited him into her bed, and he gave himself to her just as she wanted.

What took place in her bed thereafter was indescribable. She could not herself remember it very clearly the next day -- certainly not the details of who did what to whom with what when and where. What she would never forget was the intense, sensory experience of it all: his smell, that dreadful stench with its subtle, enticing undercurrent, that addictive, arousing odor which he exuded in great gusts with every motion, and which, ultimately, seemed to wrap around her and absorb her like the great cloak of sleep; the exciting pressure of his body on hers, intimate and demanding and satisfying in a way she could never have imagined; and her own orgasms, more powerful than anything she'd previously experienced on her own.

She understood about sex now. To an outsider it looked ridiculous or even horrible, but it wasn't for looking at, and certainly not by outsiders -- it was for feeling. It was about nothing but feeling, feeling things you'd never felt before, having feelings you couldn't have by yourself, being felt. It was wonderful.

In the morning she woke to daylight, alone in her deliciously smelly bed, and she felt transformed. She suspected she had not, in the technical sense, lost her virginity; far from losing anything, she had gained something. She felt different; she felt expanded and enriched; she felt powerful; she felt hungry. She went downstairs and, ignoring as usual her mother's pitiful breakfast offering, went to the counter and put two slices of bread in the toaster.

Wisely, her mother did not comment. Her brother did, when she sat down at the table with two slices of toast thickly spread with peanut butter.

"What's this, your new diet?"

"Shut up, pig-face," she said calmly, and, yes, her mother let her get away with that, too. Oh, she was untouchable today; she had her secret, a new source of power.

At lunchtime the apple she'd intended to eat wasn't enough, and she consumed the cheese sandwich her mother had made for her, and the carrot sticks, a bag of potato chips, and a pot of strawberry yogurt. Sex, she realized, took a lot of energy, burned a lot of calories. She had to replace them, and she had to build herself up. Now that she had a reason for wanting to be fit and strong she recognized how weak she had become by not eating. She wouldn't have to worry about getting fat, not for a long time, not as long as the nightly exercise continued.