Afterlight (8 page)

Eve had been lying low since that afternoon’s fireworks at school but at 1.27am she
appeared in my bedroom. Gran had just gone to bed for the night, the place was dark,
and only two of the major networks still had a news van parked outside. It was as
good a time as any to talk, if that’s what you could call it.

I had to try to remember to keep my voice down. ‘You go
away
,’ I hissed, ticking
off on my fingers. ‘The kid, the old guy and the cat woman: third time’s supposed
to be a charm, according to the Book of Joss. I’ve done enough. All this attention
is the exact opposite of what I am about.’ My reputation had taken a real hammering
at Ivy Street since the locker Armageddon had occurred. After I’d regained the safety
of my bedroom, Biddy Cole had called me to relay breathlessly that the Christian
Students Group—that holds prayer meetings every Tuesday lunchtime—was putting together
a petition to have me expelled for being a practising witch. She usually only called
me when there was no one else left to spread gossip to. It had an extra dimension
of weirdness to have it be about
me
.

Eve listened to me rant, stony-faced, then did something she’s never done before.
She turned her back on me, mid-sentence, and walked straight through my bedroom door.

Despite everything, I was impressed.

I sat and stared at the door after that for ages. She didn’t reappear.
Okay,
I thought,
that’s it then
. And I thought it was. I actually breathed out. So she’d come to say
Goodbye
. Job done.

But something still made me get up and open the door. I got the shock of my life
when I saw her standing at the end of the upstairs hallway, gleaming. She’d been
waiting for me.

She’d never moved much in my presence before now. Maybe she was getting stronger.
I liked to think of her as more passive-aggressive than direct action, but here she
was, practically jiggling on the spot.

While I continued to stand there, paralysed, she began to wink in and out with an
almost urgent rhythm. As I watched, she reappeared on the lower landing, just beside
the jukebox where the stairs turned and went down into the corridor near the public
washrooms. Then she flickered back into sight at the end of the hallway, doing that
twice more until I realised she was asking me to follow her. Every hair on my body
must have risen in horror. It was
dark
outside.

Eve flickered back into sight on the jukebox landing
then reappeared at the end of
the hall.
Flick
then back.
Flick
then back, the movements growing so fast she was
almost a blur. I inhaled shakily, suddenly getting it. She was pleading with me the
only way she knew how. How often had I been voiceless myself? How often had I needed
someone just to stop and take notice and ask me what it was that I really wanted?

For a fleeting second, I also grasped the message Eve had been trying to convey to
Claudia P. in the upper girls’ toilets. Eve was my mother. She was me. Eve’s story
could be my own:
Girl goes missing, nobody gives
. It wasn’t really about what Eve
wanted me to
do
. It was about me working out what had happened to her to make her
this way. Light bulb moment. Nobody could do the job but me, dark or no dark, because
nobody was looking for her now; I’d made sure of that.

‘Wait! Wait!’ I called out softly, grabbing a hoodie, jamming on my socks and runners
and sticking a flashlight into the pocket of my trackies because I don’t glow or
see in the dark the way Eve can.

7

Sensibly, Eve did her next disappearing trick right through the back door of The
Star, which leads to a narrow, cobbled laneway that runs up the back of the pub and
the six rundown, double-storey Victorian terrace houses next door. We were out of
Sancerre Lane and turning out of Sancerre Street before any of the overweight newsmen
in the parked media vans would have had any idea we were gone.

If you didn’t count Eve—and I didn’t, because talking to her was like talking to
a stone—it actually felt pretty great being out on my own. Everything I’d done lately
had seemed to come complete with a rent-a-crowd, or an emotionally damaging brush-off
from Jordan Haig.

Eve disappeared and reappeared in the dark between
the streetlights ahead of me,
first on this side of the road, then the other. She knew the streets like a local,
taking a shortcut through Edinburgh Gardens—which are seriously scary after dark—and
hot-footing it, if you could call it that, right through the Holden Street Reserve
and up the Park Street Trail. I swear, if you’d seen the back of her moving along,
you’d have thought she was a person like you and me, just on a mission. I’d never
seen her so, well, animated.

We’d soon crossed over into Carlton North, staying well clear of the General Cemetery
and Princes Park, and entered the fringes of Brunswick East. Even at this hour, traffic
along Sydney Road was steady and I put my hoodie up and my head down, hoping no one
would try to approach me. I wrapped one hand around the torch in my pocket for good
measure. People had contract hits taken out on them around here. They made TV dramas
about people who lived in this area that no one in this area could actually watch
until a judge cleared it first. A disembodied woman like Eve wasn’t going to offer
me much protection.

After the first few blocks, it began to rain heavily and I started to lose all feeling
in my hands and face. As we ducked left up a side street, I knew we’d long since
crossed over into Brunswick and were moving in the direction of
Coburg, maybe Pascoe
Vale South, but the street signs had begun to blur and I was getting really tired.
I don’t know where Eve goes when she’s not with me, but she never seemed to need
any rest. And the rain didn’t trouble her much either.

The street that we finally came to looked like any other street in the area: narrow
Victorian terraces built right up against Mediterranean-inspired 1950s places bursting
with concrete, columns and fruit trees, or houses that were a curious combination
of both, as if one era had begun steadily cannibalising the other.

The house Eve stopped across the road from was one of the latter: a single-fronted
Victorian that had had every trace of its Victorian-ness painstakingly ripped out
and replaced with something modern and jarring. Roller guards instead of shutters,
sliding windows with aluminium frames instead of graceful bay ones, plaster columns
instead of iron lacework, all flanked by potted citrus trees. It was sensationally
ugly, but well kept. The concrete driveway was weed-free and everything in the yard—from
the rolled-up extension hose to the box hedging—was immaculate. A single light was
on in the front room; otherwise the house was in darkness.

I looked sideways at Eve enquiringly. As the rain finally thinned, then stopped,
she stood still for a long time, just facing the house, like she was thinking. When
I crossed
the street to get a better look, she didn’t follow me. I’d done several
passes of the front of the house on my own before I realised, stupid from the cold
and the long walk, that Eve either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come any closer. I crossed
back to where she was, the dim light from an overhead streetlamp passing just faintly
through
her.

‘So what’s the deal?’ I said, unable to keep the weariness out of my voice. ‘What
do you want me to do this time?’

Would it be crazy cat lady all over again? I wondered. Or something even worse?

Eve continued to stare at the house with a strange expression that I hadn’t seen
before. There was something almost vulnerable in her usually unreadable features.
She turned to me finally, looking as if she would at last actually
speak
, but instead
she held out her hand to me, which made me hold out mine.

Into my palm fell something almost weightless and icy. Beautiful, but unusual, too.
It was a wide, beaten gold ring, with the outline of a sleeping woman’s face on it,
the band carved to resemble the tresses of her long hair.

And then Eve just vanished.

I stared at the thing for a while, turning it over and over in my hand.

It was almost three in the morning and I knew that Eve’s stuff could never wait.
She always did things for a reason—admittedly, one only
she
knew about—but there
was never time built in to muck around. She was all business, and I knew, without
a doubt, that she wanted me to give this ring to the person inside that house. The
light was still on, almost as if they were waiting for me. There was no coming back
and doing it later. I might never be able to find this place again on my own. There
was never a later with Eve. It had to be now, because now was all she had.

So I took a deep breath and crossed back over, vaulting the low, iron gate and walking
quickly and quietly up the slick front footpath. Concrete was good that way. I’d
made my way up the path and onto the speckled verandah and I still hadn’t made a
sound. Eve couldn’t have done better than me in approaching that house. But still
I hesitated, studying the tiny orange light beneath the electronic doorbell. There
was no name written on the nameplate. How would I address whoever opened the door?
This was loony.

But it was
all
loony, and what was the worst the person could do? I asked myself.
Call the police? I’d just drop the ring at their feet and run. Mission accomplished.
It wasn’t as if you could be arrested for giving someone pretty jewellery. Still,
as I pressed the doorbell, the adrenaline that suddenly flooded into my brain made
me see stars and my heartbeat kick up. There could be guns. I still didn’t
know what
I was going to say or do, and it was too late to figure it out now.

I was just about to press the buzzer a second time when the door opened wide enough
to reveal a single dark-brown eye above a low-slung security chain.

‘What you want?’ the eye addressed me suspiciously.

There was no going back.

‘Someone wanted me to give this to you,’ I said, holding the ring up to the gap in
the door. The eye moved closer, squinted, opened wide. The door slammed shut.

I was debating whether to leave the gold band on the doormat when I heard the sound
of running footsteps, the security chain rattling. Then the door flew open. And,
I swear, the woman’s anguish and turmoil hit me like a
wave
. I could feel it and
I actually fell back.

The eye belonged to a tiny woman in a dressing gown and slippers. Italian? Greek?
Long, dark hair unbound, silver winding through it at the temples. Deep lines down
her face. But she wasn’t
old
old. Maybe a few years younger than Gran. But she looked
like she’d been sick or something. She wore every year of her age on her face, and
then some.

She had one hand jammed into her mouth and the other one gripped tightly around a
large silver crucifix that she was shaking at me like you would shake water off an
umbrella. As she forced me back off the verandah with
it, she cried out in some language
I couldn’t understand, short, sharp sentences ringing out in the biting air.

‘Look,’ I said, when she drew breath to begin her incantations all over again, ‘I
just wanted to give it to you. I’ll leave it right here, okay?’

I raised both my hands high over my head to show her that I meant no harm, then proceeded
to place the ring down on the footpath, exaggerating my movements.

The woman began to lower her crucifix. I was just glad she’d stopped screaming, afraid
she’d wake the neighbours and land me right back on
Today Tonight
.

The woman stared down at the ring like it was a coiled snake on the footpath, something
sent to test her. She looked almost too afraid to touch it—faint with fear—but as
I watched, she passed the crucifix over it shakily, prodded the ring with her slippered
foot as if it had the power to burn her flesh.