Afterlight (6 page)

I got off the bus someplace that had to be the farthest I’d ever travelled from home
before on my own. Usually, I lived my whole life within walking distance of The Star.
It was a real eye opener.

Hatherlea Street was the absolute heart of darkness, the outer, outer north-eastern
’burbs, practically a different universe. It ran off a street that ran off the poor
excuse for a main road I was standing on. I stopped into a milk bar for a fried dimmie
to fortify my nerves, then I started properly looking.

In the end, it was pretty easy to find. Almost like Eve had pre-planned the entire
operation, which, in a sense, she had.
Hatherlea
—more an old homestead than
a house—was
on a massive block at least the size of three ordinary gardens knocked together.
Turned out the street was named
after
the house, not the other way around, and if
that house wasn’t already haunted up the wazoo before I set foot in it, I’d be laughing.

In real life, in the harsh autumnal light, the house looked even worse than Eve had
made out, if that was possible. Half the trees in the frontyard were actually dead
and parts of the guttering hung down like a rusting sort of exotic creeper, a decorative
feature that dovetailed nicely with the missing wooden floorboards in the return
verandah. The roof was missing a few slate tiles and the cement walkways were badly
buckled and overgrown with weeds. There were bedsheets hanging in most of the windows
in place of curtains. Good housekeeping did not figure highly in the life of whoever
owned this joint.

No one could possibly be living here
, I told myself, the last bit of the dimmie sticking
in my throat.

Trying to get a better handle on the problem, I walked up and down the street a couple
of times. I swore a curtain twitched here and there but no one bailed me up to ask
me what I was doing. Save for
Hatherlea
itself, it was a pretty ordinary street.
Nineteen-seventies brown brick places mostly. Neat, neat gardens. Lace netting in
the windows. Lots of roller guards. Probably all built on
Hatherlea
’s old grounds.

It was almost 1pm. I’d been procrastinating for at least half an hour. The pointing
finger of God had not appeared to tell me what to do. So I went in, finally, even
though the house had
trouble
written all over it. I jumped the rusty front gate and
walked up the buckling footpath to the front door.

Of course there would be no doorbell. Just a heavy lion’s head doorknocker that had
half rusted shut. I tapped that a couple of times, waited a polite interval, then
started bashing the crap out of it. Still nothing. I was not going to get into
Hatherlea
by the official entrance, that much was obvious.

I rounded the side of the house, skirting fallen tree branches, abandoned pet-food
bowls, cracked coils of garden hose, a marble birdbath filled with evil smelling
water—a muddy, browny-green, kind of like my eyes.

At the back, the Victorian sash windows looked solid and impenetrable and welded
shut. I didn’t fancy breaking in through one of those, figuring that the point of
this exercise couldn’t possibly involve me and a stint in a juvenile detention centre.
Eve couldn’t want that, I wouldn’t be any use to her in the lock-up. Still, really
starting to sweat now, I told myself to just take a peek inside then call for backup.
There was something about the whole set-up that had my skin crawling.

Heading up a set of cement stairs, I noticed a screen
door ajar and a pet flap built
into the back door. Kneeling down, I pushed the flap in cautiously and
the most disgusting
odour I have ever detected in my life
wafted back out of the darkness through the
gap.

It was piss and shit and worse, all rolled up. Like the toilets at the footy, or
The Star after an international soccer final, except left to stew for days on end—no,
years
. I let the flap fall back and sat down hard on the top step, gasping for air.

‘What do you want me to
do
, Eve?’ I gagged. ‘Clean up?
Jesus
.’

Part of me argued, pretty persuasively, that I should just call for backup now and
get the hell out of there. And then what? It was never that simple. I wasn’t supposed
to be there just to observe. That was Eve’s job. I was her hands, her body, her go-to
girl.

Shuddering, I stood up and tried the back door. And, bloody hell, it
opened
.

I took a deep breath and entered what must have been the kitchen, where the smell
was so bad that I had to take my jumper off and tie it around my face. There were
plates of rotten food piled up high on the kitchen table, around the sink, cups full
of swampy liquid, mould climbing the
ends of the kitchen curtains, the fruit in the
fruit bowl, piles of actual
shit
everywhere.

As I tiptoed through to the hallway, trying hard not to touch anything, there was
a sudden loud sound of scattering and I rocked back in fear until I figured it must
be animals of some kind. Rats? Cats? I relaxed. They didn’t bother me so much—I’d
encountered them often enough in the cellar at home. Maybe meeting Eve had toughened
me up more than I knew.

Weak sunlight filtered in through the bedsheets over the windows in the rooms that
led off the hall. I could see some of the old furniture looked really beautiful,
but the effect was spoilt by that overwhelming smell of shit and rot and worse that
was cut through with a top note of…
maybe something dead
?

A chill flashed across my skin. Maybe that was why I was here. I reached into my
pack and gripped my mobile phone, ready to do the deed—whatever the hell it was—and
run, run away.

As I crossed into the front part of the house I saw it. The body of an old woman,
surrounded by cats, more than a dozen of them, like a furry guard of honour. She
was lying facedown on the carpet in the doorway of a front bedroom. It was piled
high with old newspapers, magazines, boxed-up records, folded paper shopping bags
in their thousands, an army of lined-up shoes and hatboxes,
rolls of unused toilet
paper in baskets. If there was a reason for it all, it escaped me. You could barely
see the unmade double bed, like a lonely ship under cover of a knitted afghan blanket,
bobbing in the midst of that sea of crap.

I didn’t want to touch her, I thought she was long gone, that her cats were keeping
her cold body company and I should just make my anonymous call to 000 and beat it.
But as I got closer, the cats reared and spat as one, like a living wave, and I realised
it was worse than that, they were beginning to
eat
her to stay alive: there was fresh,
bright blood all over the back of the woman’s legs where they’d begun to gnaw.

I am not ashamed to say that I untied the jumper from around my face and vomited.

Time sped up after that. I beat the cats off, screaming like a hysterical banshee,
and turned the woman over before calling an ambulance and wrenching the front door
open for some air, any air—anything to replace the stinking fug inside the house.
And I propped her up a bit, and talked to her, and covered her with that disgusting,
hair-covered afghan blanket, all the while thinking she was already dead, and what
was I doing here, what had Eve been thinking? Would the police think I’d done it?
And
before I knew it, a pair of them charged up the footpath towards me, fingers
pointing, shouting,
Hold it right there, young lady, we want a word with you
, and
even though I hadn’t done anything, the thought that I would go to jail froze me
on the spot.

Somehow, she was still alive. They told me later it was a cocktail of port and medication,
old age and malnutrition, and if I’d waited even half an hour more the cats could’ve
had her. It was
that
close.

Turned out, the neighbours really
had
called the police when they’d spotted me skulking
around the old lady’s place and I’d called emergency services, which equalled one
big, fat circus when everyone arrived, sirens screaming. Hatherlea Street had never
seen anything like it.

Imagine Gran’s surprise when she turned on the Tuesday evening news. Some hard-nosed
journo had even managed to dig up the Crime Stoppers call I’d made with that kid’s
mum, which made
me
—for that day at least—bigger than, I dunno,
Brangelina
.

6

While I’d been wagging school to save the old woman—who turned out to be a reclusive,
cat-collecting miser, with a fortune in gold bars buried in her back garden—word
of the miracle that had happened in the girls’ toilets had filtered everywhere.

Of course, even if I’d been at school I would have had no idea what people were saying
about me because I never really know what’s going on. Like how skirts were suddenly
short again this year and knee-highs were back, whereas last year all the girls I
knew had been wearing long skirts and anklets, thin black Alice bands and yellow
nail polish. When the wind changed and brought the scent of distant danger to the
herd, I just never felt it.

Anyway, Linda Jelly may have been the weakest link in the Ivy Street food chain,
but even
she
had friends. In my absence, her friends had told their friends who told
their friends that psychic Storkie Teague had somehow done it again—right on school
grounds this time. She’d made spooky-arse writing appear on the wall and it’d scared
the living crap out of the toughest bitches at Ivy Street High. Which meant that
Claudia P. and her best mates were gunning for me, and the three of them grabbed
me the moment I stepped back onto school property the morning after the
Hatherlea
incident and locked me in the gymnasium storeroom for a personal touch-up.

The teachers at Ivy Street were deaf, dumb and blind, or they liked to see scientific
principles, the law of the jungle, in action. Despite the fact I was screaming my
head off, no one heard, saw or remembered me being bundled through the gym by the
Gang of Three just before the bell rang. I was doomed.

‘How’d you do that?’ Claudia said pleasantly, referring to the message Eve had helpfully
posted on the mirror. Like no time at all had passed, Sharys reattached herself to
the nerves of my left elbow, and fear began to take wing through my body again like
a trapped bird.

Harmonica, or whatever she was called, moved into guard position in front of the
door as Claudia commenced massaging a balled-up fist like a professional prizefighter
readying to defend the heavyweight crown. I knew I’d be lucky if I left school today
with the same face. But Claudia was smarter than that; she’d monstered more people
than I’d had hot dinners. So she didn’t aim high, she just punched me in the guts,
a quick one, two. I went down on all fours and rolled over, seeing purple and retching.

So that was to be the
modus operandi
. No visible bruising. I’d just be unable to
sit, stand or eat for a while.

There were to be no miracles from me today; that was clear. Claudia administered
a painful nipple cripple while I was down and that was the signal for everyone to
pile on, kicking me in the ribs, the guts, the chest, the pelvis.

‘She’s got a lower pain threshold,’ I heard someone snort, ‘than even Linda Jelly.’
I think I blacked out in record time.

And before I knew it, I’d woken in a puddle of my own mucus to the sight of Jordan
Haig looking down on me. As I stared at him through a fog of hot tears, it occurred
to me that maybe I’d died and what I was seeing was the last crazed imaginings of
my almost lifeless brain. But then he crouched down and touched me, and I flinched.
Instantly, pain began to sing again through my body.

The three stooges were long gone. It was just him and me among the gym mats and it
was like my deepest nightmare had come to pass.
Jordan Haig
, the most beautiful
guy this side of Floyd Parker, here in the gymnasium
storeroom. Alone, too, as if
guided by satellite, a strange look on his face. What was he doing here?