Loop (2 page)

The old woman reaches out to place a thin hand on his. The clock in the hall strikes midnight, and they sit listening to it until the final chime echoes into silence.

Finally, he speaks. It is an attempt to drive away the crowding memories.

‘So, why didn't you put me in?'

The old woman smiles. ‘Because you said you were sorry,' she replies. ‘And Alicia believed you. She has a way with these things.'

Remy frowns.

‘Alicia? But I thought you were …'

‘Alone? Remy, we are never truly alone. Even when we think there is no one watching us … Remember that. How old are you, boy?'

‘Seventeen. Almost.'

‘Do you have anywhere to sleep?'

‘I make do.'

Another smile. ‘I didn't think so. You can take Ellery's old room. It's up the stairs, second on the right. I think there are some pyjamas in the chest of drawers, and there's an extra blanket in the wardrobe if you're feeling cold.'

For a moment his reflex is to refuse the offer, but only for a moment.

‘Thank you, Miss Forbes,' he says.

‘If you're going to hang around for a while, you'd better call me Lavinia.' Her expression is suddenly one of a much younger person. ‘Miss Forbes makes me sound like an old spinster. Which I am. But there's no point in reminding myself of the fact.'

‘Would you like me to help you upstairs?' Remy offers, but she shakes her head.

‘I think I'll sit down here for a while. When you reach my age, you don't need as much sleep.'

‘But you're not that old, surely?'

‘In years, maybe.' She sighs a little but without any self-pity. ‘It's all relative. Drag your legs around like an afterthought for fifty-odd years and it takes its toll. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Some people get much less time.'

‘Like my sister?' The words emerge uninvited.

Lavinia Forbes nods.

‘And mine.'

Her voice follows him up the stairs. ‘By the way, Remy, if you feel like making breakfast in the morning, say about eight, I like my eggs boiled for five minutes. Can't stand them runny.'

‘Yes, Ma'am. Five minutes.'

As the boy's voice drifts in from the hallway, Lavinia closes her eyes and pats the arm of the empty chair beside her.

‘He's a good boy, Allie. He'll do …'

Seven-thirty.

He fills the pan with cold water from the kitchen tap, places four eggs carefully into it, slides the pan onto the gas stove and watches the blue flame licking around the base. Holding out his hands, he warms them in the heat that radiates from the warming metal.

Outside, the early sun shines through a gap between the houses in a thin shaft that lights up a small corner of the flower garden, and in his peripheral vision he catches a slight movement.

Lavinia is asleep where he left her, in the chair in the parlour, so it can't be …

He watches the corner more carefully. The ancient wisteria on its trellis is blocking his view, and he cranes his neck to look around it. Another movement.

He heads for the back door.

‘What are you doing in the garden?' he demands, as he rounds the arbour.

The girl straightens and turns to face him. She is pretty, perhaps seventeen, and wearing a strange, full-skirted dress with a high, frilled collar.

‘I might ask you the same question,' she replies. Then she smiles, a somehow familiar smile.

‘The impatiens needs pruning. If you don't keep up to it, it can easily get out of control. A bit like people.'

Mock-formally, she reaches out a delicate hand.

‘I'm Alicia.'

Christian

18 July 2006

The local paper lies open on the coffee-table in the solicitor's waiting-room. Someone has been reading about Remy.

OBITUARY

Remington (Remy) Lennox (1919-2006)

A crowd of over a hundred and fifty people attended Friday's funeral for local identity Remy Lennox.

A local resident for over eighty years, Remy was a former Councillor and a leader during the 1970s of the ‘green bans', which stopped the indiscriminate destruction of some of the inner-city's most historical precincts. His three-storey 1870s terrace house in Beaconsfield Street has been called by the National Trust ‘one of the best-preserved and most original examples of its period in New South Wales'.

Born into poor circumstances, Remy Lennox was a shining example to the youth of the area, working tirelessly for the local PCYC and coaching the local football teams until well into his seventies.

His life was not without its tragedies, however. He lost his young wife in a freak boating accident in 1946 and his only son at the battle of Long Tan during the Vietnam War.

But Remy will be remembered for his love of life and his irrepressible sense of humour.

God speed, Remy. We'll miss you.

Christian smiles as he closes the paper.

The lawyer pauses and pushes his glasses back up his nose.

‘That concludes the charity bequests,' he says.

‘There is only one more clause: “All the rest of my worldly possessions – including my house at Number 18 Beaconsfield Street – I leave to my young friend and companion, Christian Mackey, in the secure belief that he will love the house as I have loved it these past seventy years and care for it as it deserves. Look after the garden, Christian. You will get the hang of it, as I did, and if you need advice there will always be someone close at hand to provide it”.'

The lawyer pauses.

‘Well, that's it. Congratulations, young man. He loved you, you know. Like a son. If it's not too personal a question, how did you get to know him?'

For a moment the boy remains silent. Then he smiles.

‘He found me sleeping in his garden,' he says, a tear welling in his eye.

‘Yes, well …' The lawyer looks a little uncomfortable. ‘Take your time, Mr Mackey. I have some work to take care of, so I'll leave you alone.'

‘Thank you, Mr Cotter.'

After the lawyer has left the conference-room, Christian sits for a moment gathering his thoughts. Then he stands and picks up the will from the table and reads the words again.

‘Come on, Allie,' he says at last, to the empty air beside him. ‘Let's go home.'

1:40

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

Plato

Julie

If I have to sit through another stupid music video I'm going to throw up.

Julie Harrington reaches for the remote and punches the channel selector imperiously, abruptly cutting off the reggae rhythms of yet another suitably dreadlocked but totally forgettable Rastafarian.

The clock on the DVD player in the cabinet below the TV counts off another minute. 1:38. Two of the channels have reached the mindless depths of screening late-night infomercials, and the third had resorted to an ancient black and white effort about some ruggedly heroic halfwit who has joined the French Foreign Legion.

Probably because he couldn't make it as a B-grade movie actor.

She speaks the thought aloud to herself, wondering vaguely if there shouldn't be some law against showing movies over sixty years old, even at this time of the morning.

Try-hard musicians on one channel, porcelain smiles or superannuated silent-movie actors on the others. It's enough to send you to bed.

Unless you have bloody insomnia …

Defying logic, the optimist in her goes for one more trip around the channels, like an alcoholic searching the bottoms of empty glasses for just a small taste.

Nothing.

She depresses the ‘Off' button.

And finds herself staring at a face, which seemed to be staring right back at her.

‘And now, Julie, here is tomorrow's news.' The girl looks too young to be a newsreader; she's no more than fifteen, surely. And whoever heard of them reading the news at 1:39 in the …

Julie … The newsreader said ‘Julie'.

The face on the screen is composed, patient, waiting. Something is … wrong.

‘It's alright, I've got nothing better to do. Just tell me when you're ready. I can wait all night. It makes no difference to me.' The girl's voice sounds quite emotionless, bored almost.

Julie's mouth opens and closes twice before she can force the words out.

‘Are you talking to me?'

Jeez, Jules. It's finally happened. You're cracking up.

The girl on the screen makes a pretence of looking past her into the room.

‘Do you see anyone else around? Of course I'm talking to you, stupid!'

‘But, how? What channel are you —?'

‘No channel you've ever tuned into, dummy. You switched the TV off, remember?'

Julie looks at the set's control-panel. Sure enough, the power light and the illumination behind the channel-selector are both off. And the colon between the numbers on the video's digital clock has stopped pulsing. The time is stuck on 1:40.

Funny what you notice when you're going out of your tree …

‘Look, I don't mean to be rude, but would you mind not staring with your mouth open. They don't pay me for this, and I've got to stay here until I've finished reading the news, so I'd really appreciate not having to count your fillings while I'm doing it.'

Obediently, Julie clamps her mouth shut, but she continues to stare at the screen in bemused fascination.

‘That's better.' The girl shuffles a couple of papers on her desk, assumes a very professional newsreader's pose and begins to read.

‘Unemployment figures released today showed another rise in the number of people looking for work. Worst affected, again, were the young unemployed, especially in the metropolitan south-west, whose numbers have been boosted by recent school-leavers …'

Julie's mind wanders, trying to make sense of the whole bizarre situation.

Bloody TV's off. It's off. How the hell can I be …?

‘Would you mind paying attention? I don't read this crap for the good of my health, you know.' A faint frown ghosts across the girl's face. ‘Well, maybe I do. But anyway, you could at least do me the courtesy of listening. Even if you're not interested.'

‘Sorry.' The apology is instinctive.

Oh, great! Now you're apologising to a figment of your own imagination.

‘Accepted.' The girl smiles, almost. ‘Tell you what. I'll skip the boring stuff and get on with the really good bits.

‘I've got a train smash in Italy. No one killed, but lots of twisted metal and a ton of blood. Or there's a soccer riot in England. A whole lot of people get trampled in that one.' For a moment a spark of interest glows in her eyes. ‘There's a close-up of this guy with his face pressed up against the cyclone fencing by the crowd. He's got his mouth open but he can't scream. Can't breathe, you see. Or —'

‘Don't you have any
good
news?' Julie cuts in, anxious to stop the flow.

‘They
are
the good bits. No censorship on our news. What you see is what they got. I reckon he'll have diamond-shaped bruises on his face for weeks. If he survives, that is. You want to see it?'

‘No! No, I mean
good
news. A nice story.'

‘Nice?
Hell, I don't know. We don't get much call for
nice.
I do have a story about a farmer from Jackson Peaks, Mississippi, who claims to have a super-intelligent chicken. He reckons the bird talks to him using a ouija board; spells out the words by pushing the pointer around with its beak. I don't know about the chicken being super-intelligent, but it's probably got more brains than the farmer. Apart from that, it's mostly politics, wars and disasters – the usual.'

Slowly Julie settles back into the cracked imitation leather of the old recliner-rocker.

What the hell! It beats video hits. And who knows, it might be interesting. A girl's got to watch something.

‘Go ahead. Give me the works.'

Now the girl smiles. ‘You asked for it …'

‘Julie, wake up.' Gradually her mother's voice breaks through the fog of sleep. The nightmares evaporate and the room swims into focus. Before her eyes the TV screen is blank and the digits on the clock read 7:45. ‘Did you fall asleep in front of the box again? I don't know what I'm going to do with you.'

Like you care! You wouldn't know if I was even home last night. When was the last time you actually told me to go to bed?

The same old recriminations. It isn't worth voicing them any more. Nothing makes any difference. Since Dad left, her mother has retreated further and further into her own affairs. You can't get through to her. Maybe she'd been that way even before he left. It's hard to remember. Dad had always been the centre of Julie's world, with Mum more like a … satellite; only lately the orbit has been getting wider and wider.

After issuing the mandatory ‘I don't know what I'm going to do with you', her mother has apparently lost interest and drifted off into the kitchen. Julie works some feeling back into her legs for a few seconds, then follows.

Her mother is heating a cup of instant coffee in the microwave, and she speaks without looking as Julie enters.

‘Jim's taking me to Katoomba for the weekend. You'll be okay on your own, won't you?'

So, what's new?

Never
‘Would you like to come?'
or
‘Is there anything
you'd
like to do?'

Different planets …

‘I'm fifteen, Mum. I'm not going to die of cot-death or anything. Go right ahead.'

And it's settled. Of course, it was settled before her mother brought it up, but maybe she still has enough maternal instinct left to need her daughter's formal approval.

What would you do if, just once, I said, ‘No!'? No, I won't be damned well okay! What would you do? What would darling Jim do?

The coffee disappears and her mother is out of the door and halfway down the path, briefcase in hand, mind already on the day's organisation.

‘Goodbye, Mum.' Julie speaks the words quietly to the closing door. ‘Have a good day.'

She finds herself consciously refusing to think about last night … this morning. She has almost succeeded in writing it off as a dream.

Except it was too real, too clear.

Giving in to the urge, she picks up the remaining slice of toast and makes her way back into the lounge-room, where she turns on the TV and waits for it to warm up.

When the normal, boring, weekday-morning cartoons light the screen, she feels a strange mixture of relief and disappointment. She switches it off.

And the screen remains blank.

Reluctantly she makes her way up to her bedroom to get ready for school.

Christine's story

Julie's a good kid. She took it pretty hard when her father left. But then, she didn't understand. To her, he was always like … the moon. He only ever showed her his bright face; he kept his dark side hidden.

She never knew the hell I was going through. Maybe I should have told her. But she probably wouldn't have believed me. Besides, he loved her – in his fashion. You couldn't deny that.

It's been hard on Jim. He's so sensitive. He has tried to get close to her, but she puts up ‘the barrier' and shuts him out. She's acting just like a character out of one of those soaps she's always watching.

So we decided to give her some space, treat her like an adult. It was Jim's idea. Don't force the issue. Let her work things out for herself.

But it's hard. There's so much about her that I don't understand. And she's watching far too much television …

Julie

Suddenly it clicks. She knows exactly what's going on.

It is lunchtime Saturday and her mother is still away on her ‘dirty weekend'. Maryanne's phrase, of course.

Sometimes Julie wonders why she tells Maryanne anything. But she is a good friend.

She smiles slightly as she fixes herself a gourmet meal of vegemite on toast and a whole bowl of ‘No Frills' baked beans, freshly ‘nuked' in the microwave.

She is thinking about Heidi. That's her name, the girl on the ‘late news'. A snippet of information that Julie managed to wring out of her somewhere between one-forty and the time she drifted off to sleep.

It's strange how the impossible becomes quite normal if it happens more than a couple of times.

It has been three or four days since she first appeared, and Julie finds herself looking forward to watching her. Because it isn't really like
watching
at all.

She moves across to the table, preparing to eat herself into a stupor, feeling satisfyingly sorry for herself, and wondering vaguely why she can only get the ‘Off Channel' after one in the morning, when the forty-minute music marathon on the radio is interrupted with a ‘news-flash'.

Another major disaster!

The thought surfaces idly. It's funny how the station announcers only ever resort to a ‘news-flash' when something devastating is happening. It doesn't matter how old and boring the ‘golden oldie' is, they never interrupt it to tell you something wonderful.

This is no exception.

Some pea-brain with a semi-automatic gun is holding three or four people – they aren't sure exactly how many – hostage in a scout-hall in one of the suburbs of Newcastle. The ‘on-the-spot reporter' reports all she knows, which is nothing. The ‘drama' started half an hour earlier. They don't know the gunman's identity or why he decided to play Rambo instead of doing the weekly grocery shopping. They don't know if anyone has been hurt. They don't even know what the police intend doing. In fact, they could easily have let Elvis finish murdering ‘Love Me Tender' and saved the expense of crossing to the scene of the crime at all. They don't have a clue what's going on.

They
don't, but Julie does.

Because she saw the whole thing somewhere around two that morning, almost twelve hours before it began!

The music starts again – an old Stones' song – but the announcer has promised to keep the listeners informed ‘as events unfold'. Julie switches the radio off.

Suddenly she is not hungry.

At three o'clock that gunman is going to blow his brains out. She knows it. He's a miner who lost his job and his wife in the same week.

Hell, she
knows
it!

‘Here is tomorrow's news.' That's what Heidi says every time. But how …?

That night, Julie asks her.

‘What d'you mean
… how?'

‘How the hell can you show me things on your news that haven't happened yet?'

‘Of course they've happened. If they hadn't happened, how could we show you?' There is, Julie has to admit, a disturbing logic to Heidi's argument. ‘It just depends on your perspective.'

Julie's brain is reeling.

‘But …' Her mouth opens and closes without purpose.

‘But
what
? Look, if you're going to sit there doing your famous guppy-imitations, d'you mind if I get on with this?' She holds up a sheaf of papers. There's a lot to get through, and —'

‘But how could you show me the story at two in the morning —'

‘One forty actually.'

‘Okay, one forty. How could you do that if the guy didn't go berserk for another ten hours?'

‘How the hell do
I
know? I'm just the front, the ‘anchor-person', the talking-bloody-head. D'you think I research all the stories myself? They type the crap up, I read it. Simple. You don't think
I
give a damn about where it comes from, do you? It's depressing enough having to read the stuff, without having to think about it too. Get a life!'

‘The news reports … they're
all
tomorrow's news?' The words come slowly.

‘That's what I
tell
you every night, isn't it? You got some sort of hearing problem?'