Alyzon Whitestarr (5 page)

The memory had taken me away from listening for a few seconds, and the music had faded, but as I listened again, it grew louder and more brutal and vicious until I began to feel sick.

I put my hands over my ears, but the music came through, earwigs of sound devouring my brain.

Abruptly, the song ended. I was sweating and half slumped against the wall, a headache bashing around inside my skull and my jaw hurting from clenching. My upper lip felt wet. I reached up and touched a finger to it and was shocked to see that it was red. The music had made my nose bleed.

“What the hell is going on?” I whispered.

I washed my hands and face in the sink. When I was sure my nose was no longer bleeding, I put the pot of risotto in the fridge. I sat down to think through what was happening to me. Because being hypersensitive didn’t explain how music could affect me so strongly. Or why I kept smelling things that were not there, or why I associated those smells with certain people. I had been telling myself the smells were coming from some sort of scent bank in my brain that had been damaged and was randomly spilling its contents. But I suddenly felt absolutely certain that the smells were real, even if they were not coming from real things. Maybe whatever had happened to
my brain had made my sense of smell so acute it could detect things that people normally couldn’t smell—intangible things.

I thought of Dr. Reed’s dirt-and-roses smell and her air of distracted sadness, wondering if I was smelling whatever it was that she was thinking of that made her sad—or the sadness itself. The coffee-grounds smell I experienced when I was close to Da seemed to be permanent, so maybe it came from something in his essence that didn’t change. But his pine-needle scent came and went, as did the smells of ammonia and caramelized sugar, so they might come from things he was thinking or feeling at certain moments.

It was wild to imagine that thoughts and feelings could give off scents, let alone that a person’s essential self might have a definite odor, but the more I thought of it, the less crazy it seemed. Dogs always seemed to know when you were sad, and how could they know? It had to be that they could smell your sadness because their sense of smell was much better than a human’s.

I began to feel excited, because if I could come up with a scent dictionary that connected feelings and thoughts with smells, it would almost be like having the means to read people’s minds. But my elation faded when I remembered that overload from my extended senses had put me back into a coma. And look how a bit of bad music had affected me.

Obviously, I was going to have to find some way to protect myself or at least to control what I was taking in, and not just from my sense of smell. I had been able to use Luke as a buffer, and I figured he affected me differently because he
hadn’t grown into judging things yet. But I couldn’t carry Luke around with me all the time, and even if I could, he was going to grow up and change.

I got up to make myself a cup of tea, being careful not to concentrate on the scent. The rich, sweet steam plumed up into my face, and as I blew and sipped, I debated ringing Dr. Reed to tell her what I had figured out. But I was pretty sure I would just sound like someone who sees martians and has this whole rational-seeming theory about why no one else can see them. Because if there was something going on in my brain that a test would show, she would already have found it.

Anyway, I wasn’t sick, so why talk to a doctor? I was positive that the accident had done something to the part of my brain connected to my five senses, extending them in some way. All I had to do was to find some efficient way of controlling input before I blew a fuse.

By the time anyone came home, I had discovered that I could use one sense to distract another. For instance, I had forced myself to listen to more earwig music on the radio, and used mouthfuls of apple to shift my attention from hearing to taste just when it was getting unbearable. But it was a bit of a balancing act, because the minute I started focusing on the apple, I started to swoon into
that.

More useful was the accidental discovery that if I imagined Luke, I could induce a milder version of the calmness I felt when I gazed into his face in reality. The only problem was that I ended up pretty well cut off from all other input. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see or hear, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I needed a more selective technique.

When I heard the car pull up, I was pretty weary. I didn’t want to face anyone, so I went back upstairs and climbed into bed. Fatigue rolled over me.

* * *

I woke again when Serenity came to bed. It was dark, and from the silence of the house I guessed it must be late. She switched
on the bedside lamp, draping her black scarf over the side of the lamp nearest to me to cut the glare. She undressed in the reflected glow from the white lily, and before she pulled on her nightdress I noticed how skinny she looked. I could see all the knobs of bone along her spine and the delicate lines of her ribs. She seemed suddenly to feel my gaze and turned to look at me.

“Are you OK?” She stepped toward me and brought the scent of fresh, wet violets with her. I was a bit surprised, because I couldn’t smell the licorice that I had decided was her essence smell.

“I’m fine,” I said. “How was school?”

She shrugged and climbed into bed.

“What do they say about me?” I persisted, wanting to stop her switching off the light.

She rolled over so she could face me, like she used to do when we would talk into the night. “There are a lot of rumors. Some of the girls are saying you’ve forgotten everything. Sylvia Yarrow claims you’ve lost your marbles.”

“She would. What about the boys?”

“Anyone in particular?” Serenity asked.

I shook my head, deciding I wasn’t ready to share my daydreams about Harlen Sanderson. We lay there looking at one another for a while.

“What was it like being in a coma?” she asked at last.

I had the strange feeling that this was not the question she wanted to ask. But I answered her anyway. “Like … nothing. I was awake, then I was asleep, and then I was awake. Bang-bang-bang, like that.”

“Did you dream?” she asked in a queer, too-casual voice and, just like that, I felt the darkness shift and quiver about her, and the violet smell faded into licorice and a sort of burnt-oil smell.

“I don’t remember any dreams,” I managed to say, wondering what she could be thinking or feeling that would so radically change her smell.

Serenity reached over to switch her light off. I wanted to ask her not to, but I couldn’t think of a good enough reason. Instead I lay in the dark, listening to her breathe more and more slowly until she slept.

I was on the verge of sleep, too, when I heard a door slam. I guessed that Mum was going for a walk. Or maybe she was going to the all-night supermarket. I pictured her walking along the street, hands pushed deep in Da’s big coat, her hair a wild reddish tangle in the streetlights, spangled with little spits of rain. I wished I had the energy to get up and go after her, because I loved those surreal night trips where nothing was required of you but to wander along in Mum’s dreamy wake.

* * *

I woke, this time to daylight flooding into the room and to Jesse playing his guitar in the shower. Serenity’s bed was empty, and my clock said it was just after nine. I got up and went downstairs. Da was washing the dishes and talking, with the phone cradled between his head and shoulder.

“Two vans would be better,” he said. He hadn’t yet noticed me, so I allowed myself to focus warily on him. I smelled
his coffee smell and also the smell of molasses and new rope. I could also smell the real smells he was giving off: sweat from his morning run and dishwashing detergent.

I reached out and got an apple from the fruit bowl in case I needed a distracter, and I jumped when Da suddenly gave a great burst of laughter. I glanced at him, his back still to me. I smelled fresh-stewed plums, tart enough to make my mouth water.

It was funny, but before I had figured out what had happened to me, I had felt no fear about dealing with anyone; now that I knew what I was going to face, my palms were sweating at the thought of Da turning around to talk to me. It was like being in some horrible experiment where you never knew where or when they were going to give you an electric shock.

I tipped some muesli into a bowl and poured in the milk, keeping my eyes on the food because the movement was sure to catch Da’s attention. As I felt him turn my way, I flashed him a quick, unfocused smile and spooned up my muesli. When I looked up again, he had turned to the window, still talking.

There was a rusty squeak, and I turned to see Wombat ooze through the cat flap. I crooned to him, and he glided over and started to weave circles around my legs. When he brushed against me, I distinctly smelled tuna, and to my amazement I understood that he was producing the smell to let me know he was hungry. I laughed aloud and knelt down to pat him, fascinated to find that when he looked at me, I
wasn’t overwhelmed by his curiosity or feelings or thoughts. I felt quite simply his insistence that he needed feeding, clear as a statement and absolutely connected to the smell of tuna.

I got out a box of crunchies, wondering if the focused attention of humans overwhelmed me because they were unwittingly sending everything they thought in a loud unfocused jumble, whereas Wombat used his scent with the same precision as humans used words. He had probably always given off his specific scent statement when he wanted food, but we humans had only responded either to our knowledge that he had not been fed for a time, or to the insistent meow he had come up with to get our attention. No doubt he thought we were totally dim.

This whole idea of animals using scents to communicate in the same way humans used words seemed tremendously exciting, because it suggested that maybe what had happened to me wasn’t a damaging of my senses, but the jolting to life of a section of my mind that humans had used at some point in their evolution but had stopped using when they started to rely on language.

I set down Wombat’s food and stroked his head, noting the rich salty smell he was now giving off and understanding that it communicated affection for me—or maybe for his food.

“Why not?” Da was saying as I went back to sit at the table. “It’s nothing to us how many guests come as long as the Urban crew don’t set some sort of limit.”

I realized then that he was talking to one of the band
members about the upcoming gig. He started to give off the ammonia smell, and I saw that he was frowning. “I’m just saying we shouldn’t expect too much.” A listening pause. “Yeah … OK then.” Da put the phone down, but to my relief, he went back to the dishes as he asked how I was feeling.

I said tensely that I felt good. He flashed a smile over his shoulder, then started drying knives and putting them into the cutlery drawer. He seemed distracted. I got up, deciding I had been brave enough for the morning. But before I could take a step, Da gave a soft exclamation and reached into his pocket to pull out a long envelope. He tore it open, and as he read, the ammonia smell grew so strong that it almost blotted out the coffee smell.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Just a bill,” Da said lightly. Pushing the letter into his pocket, he went back to drying the silverware. But the ammonia smell stayed strong. I crossed to the fridge and made a big business of putting the milk away, getting out orange juice, and pouring myself a glass.

“School rang this morning,” Da said. “How do you feel about going back? You don’t have to until you feel up to it.” Now there was a pine scent winding through the coffee grounds, but the ammonia persisted.

I took a sip of juice, trying to ignore the flavor, then I turned and looked at a spot on the wall just left of Da’s ear, telling him that maybe it was time to go back. I felt afraid of facing all those kids and teachers, but at the same time I wanted to get my life back to normal.

“Why don’t you wait until next week? Start out fresh on a Monday,” Da said.

I drank some more juice. Then I said, “I guess I could call the school and ask them to give me some work to help me catch up.” Da had gone back to the sink, and I went on more easily without him looking at me. “Mirandah or Serenity could bring it home.”

“Sybl,” Da corrected, obviously wanting to make me laugh, except I no longer felt like laughing at Serenity’s desire to become Sybl.

“I don’t like that name much,” I said.

Da frowned a little. “Me neither, but we have to respect her wishes.”

Do we?
I thought. Even if I felt that there was something weird about her being so determined to change her name?

Da’s frown deepened as if I’d spoken out loud, but he didn’t say anything and neither did I.