Skeletal (17 page)

The Grey Man tapped me on the arm. ‘You’ve got a knack for this. Even if you don’t feel right about doing it.’

The sun was getting low in the sky. It hurt my eyes to keep trying to look up at him, so I stared down at the alley floor again instead. There was lichen: khaki, yellow, and grey. It grew on the rough concrete where the fences either side stopped the sun from shining. Life was so frivolous it would grow anywhere, whether it was wanted or not.

‘I don’t understand why you want me to do this. Why can’t you get someone else?’

‘There is no one else Daina. Only you. We wouldn’t,’ He paused, ‘
I
wouldn’t put you through this if it wasn’t necessary. It is necessary.’

‘Why me?’

His shadow in the alleyway showed him staring at me. I kept looking down. ‘Daina, you know why.’

I shook my head, and felt tears welling up. My throat constricted and my eyes burned. I closed them and kept shaking my head.

‘You know you’ve seen me before Daina. You remember, don’t you?’

A thump sounded that reverberated through the soles of my feet, and I reached out with my eyes still closed to grab hold of the corrugated iron fence to my right. The metal dug into my palm.
This is not happening. I am not remembering. I have never seen this man before.

‘Daina, you need to get hold of those papers. You need to get a sample of whatever he’s carrying in his briefcase.’

I swallowed past the lump in my throat, and opened up my eyes. Colours flashed and burned and solidified in front of my eyes. The schematics changed; the road shrank and the pavement grew. A sparrow flew by, its tail elongating to a metre long, two metres long. The length of a rugby field.

That’s not fair – I didn’t eat anything she gave me.

But that wasn’t true. I’d eaten a biscuit from a sealed packet. Vila must have caught on that I wouldn’t eat anything open so she’d injected the drug into a sealed packet. A tear slipped from my eye. And I’d thought she would tell me the truth.

‘Daina. Do you understand me? It’s vital that we get those papers.’

I shook my head. ‘I can’t. He’ll catch me.’

‘You have to think of something. Kill him if you have to.’

I jerked my head up, and caught his grin. Arsehole. ‘I can’t do it,’ I repeated and turned out of the alleyway into my road. ‘You’ll have to find someone else.’

‘There is no one else Daina, I’ve told you. You’re the only one who can do this.’

I shook my head and carried on walking. He stood still at the mouth of the alleyway.

‘You’ve got the wrong girl,’ I whispered. ‘I’ve never seen you before.’

Daina 1994

For a time it seemed like she was going to faint. There were spots in front of her eyes just like there had been the previous summer when she’d refused to wear a hat outside to the A & P show and ended up in the St John’s tent with little memory of the day. She’d been looking forward to seeing the sheep, too. And maybe a lamb as little as she was.

Daina sat down, her bottom falling straight into the warm wet patch that she’d created beneath her. The gun barrel still faced her, but now it was above her head.

Her mother would be along soon. She’d sort this out. Whatever this was.

She began to cry. The smell from the dead man was still in her nose. The taste of bile still strong and acid in her mouth. She’d been promised a nice picnic. A nice lunch in a nice place. As a treat!

This wasn’t a treat. She wanted to go home. Right now.

‘Stop that,’ the man said above her. But it was too hard to stop. Daina’s shoulders shook with the sobs. Her face streamed with tears and then her nose started to swell up and block. She sniffled to try to clear it, but another wave of bile caught her as a result and she started to cry harder. Opened her mouth to let out a wail.

‘Now then, little girl. There’s no need to make a fuss. Where’s you mommy and daddy then?’

That just made Daina cry harder. Her daddy was long gone, she was no longer even sure if she remembered him. And her mum was probably still asleep in the car.

Earlier this had seemed like an added treat. She would be able to sneak away and do what she wanted to do. But the lake water had long since dried off her feet, and now she wanted her mother, and her mother wasn’t here.

‘Come on, there’s a good girl. You can’t be out here all on your own, can you? Where’s your mommy?’

His voice had a thick American twang. Some of the words sounded so strange that it took Daina a moment or two to sort them out in her head. He was like the actors in the show on telly that she liked. The one where they got to go swimming all the time in little red bathing suits.

Daina’s tears started to dry up. She knelt and then stood up again. Her mouth and nose screwed up as she registered the warm cling of fabric. She’d wet herself and it had been years since she’d done that. She’d been three years old and in a mall and her mother had yelled at her. She’d yell at her again today.

If she was still here.

The thought made Daina’s throat close up again.

Her mother had been in the car. The man must have come past the car to get here. If he didn’t know where her mummy was then either she wasn’t in the car, or the car wasn’t there either.

What if her mother had left?

What if she’d gone home and forgotten about Daina? It wouldn’t be the first time. Daina remembered her mother taking her to a friend’s house and making her go into Emma’s room to play. She didn’t like Emma, and she certainly didn’t want to
play
with her.

When she went out of Emma’s room later, her mum’s friend was surprised to see her there. Apparently her mother had left – some time ago – and had forgotten that she’d brought her daughter over.

She was driven home by a tight-lipped woman, and Daina was well aware that somehow this was all her fault. After that Daina hadn’t seen the woman again, and Daina’s mum didn’t ever seem to go out to meet any friends anymore.

At least in that situation there’d been a woman, however angry she’d been, to drive Daina home. Who would take her home this time if her mother had left? The man who was still pointing a gun at her?

She shook her head. She didn’t know. The gun wavered and then dropped to the man’s side. Daina felt better about that. She’d seen guns on television a lot, but never in real life before. She knew that when they made a bang sound the person facing them fell down and sometimes they didn’t get back up. It didn’t seem like they were nice things to point at people, and that meant that this was not a nice man.

The man knelt down so that he was looking her straight in the eye. Daina didn’t like that at all. She tried to look away, look back to the lake which had the pretty sun glinting off the surface of the water, but he grabbed her upper arm – hard – and she turned back to him.

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said, but Daina thought that was a lie. His smile was tight, like Bruno in her kindergarten. He always told the teacher’s aide that he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Once he’d told her that after taking Daina’s forearm in both of his hands and twisting them in opposite directions. The Chinese burn had been done with such force that a trail of blood blisters popped to the surface, and there had been glee on Bruno’s face.

‘I don’t want to hurt you, but you need to tell me where your mommy and daddy are.’

Daina started to cry again. Big gulps of air were needed to keep up the momentum. She wasn’t really sad. Usually she only cried when she was sad. But right now she was scared. Very scared. That helped.

She knew in the back of her mind that tears usually caused a reaction in adults. They’d either get all concerned and start treating her nicely – maybe give her a hug – or, they’d get all concerned and look for someone else to take over.

But the man in the grey suit did neither.

He levelled his gun at her face again, and jerked the barrel back towards where the car had been parked earlier. Daina stopped crying. He jerked the gun again and Daina started to walk in the direction he indicated. She walked down into the dip where the gravel took over from the asphalt.

She could still see the indentation where she’d jumped from the car, lost her balance, and fallen down. Her hands had scraped away the gravel from the hard soil beneath. Her worst fear was true then. This was where the car had been. And wasn’t now.

The man was staring in all directions. His head turned from the treeline, to the lake, to the picnic tables, to the treeline on the other side. His head jerked from position to position just like the chicken at the farm that Daina’s class visited early in the year. She giggled at the memory. The head jerked to look at her again and the giggle went away.

‘Where are they? No one leaves a little girl all alone in a park by the roadside. Where are they?’

Daina just shook her head, and the man bent down and grabbed her upper arm again. He jerked it up, and twisted it, and Daina cried out with the pain. It felt he was twisting it right off.

‘Tell me where they are, right now!’

There was a rustle, and then the thud as a wooden bat hit hair, skin, and bone. The grey man crumpled to his knees. His eyes no longer focused on Daina’s. One pupil slid out to the far edge of his right eye, while the left stayed in the middle. Then he fell face forward.

Daina’s mum stood behind him with a cricket bat. The force of the blow had split the bat along an old crack secured with red electric tape. One big splinter hung separate from the main bat, the tape the only thing holding it together.

Her mum was breathing hard. The little curls in front of her ears were tight with sweat. She was shaking.

‘Mum,’ Daina yelled. She ran to her and hugged her legs. She was sure glad to see her. Of course her mum would never go off and leave her, she was daft to think it. She’d just gone so she could surprise the bad man, and make sure Daina would be safe.

‘Come on, honey,’ her mum said. There was a shake in her voice, like there was some mornings when there’d been a party while Daina was falling asleep. ‘I’ve just moved the car into the shade.’

She pointed, and Daina saw it almost hidden behind a thicket of bushes. No wonder the man hadn’t been able to see it. That made sense too. If Daina’s mum slept in the sun for too long in the afternoon she always woke up cranky.

‘Go and get in the car, that’s a good girl,’ she said and pointed again.

‘Are you coming?’

‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ she replied, kneeling down beside the man in the grey suit. His skin colour had changed with the blow. It was now almost as grey as his suit, and his hair.

Daina leaned her weight on one foot, and curled the other up the back of her leg. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure honey. Go and wait in the car and I’ll be right with you.’

There was an edge to her voice this time. An edge that said, do what I say right now or there’ll be trouble. Daina started to back away slowly.

Her mum bent over the man and put her fingers on his neck. It was strange. That was nowhere near where she’d hit him. Daina could see the spot even as she edged further away. There was blood pumping out of it and shading his hair and the ground around his head. His neck hadn’t been hurt at all.

Daina came to a stop and just stared. Her mother caught on within a second and gave her a look. Daina started to step backwards toward the car again.

That was when there was a whining sound above. It grew louder and louder. Louder and louder. And then there was a wrench of twisted metal. A boosh of water being displaced. The ground shook again beneath Daina’s feet. She watched twisted metal skip on the surface of the water just as she couldn’t get stones to do. A large wave wet the stones on the beach well above the waterline, and then went back out.

And a plane was sticking out of the water. Mangled wreckage. Heat shimmers above it.

Daina ran back to the safety of her mother. She forgot about the car.

***

Daina 2004

Mum threw another party that night. I fell asleep to the domph, domph, domph of a bass beat and woke in the night to silence. I ran my hand up over my rib cage. I could feel the individual ribs sticking out through my thin flesh. Skeletal. After the biscuits early today I hadn’t had anything else to eat.

Tiptoeing downstairs, I clung to the left-hand wall to balance. I paused at the bottom, my head tilted as I tried to make out any sounds in the stillness. A faint growl of a snore, a rustle as someone turned over. The sounds of unconscious souls who’d fallen asleep in position after a night of hard-drinking.

Reassured, I crept through into the lounge, and then further into the kitchen. There was a half-empty greasy package of cold chips, and a couple of slices of pizza with the hated anchovies coating the surface. Mum loved these little fish in theory, but tended to spit them out with dismay when the reality arrived.

My stomach leapt and turned with excitement at the sight. I bundled them together and sat down at the table. From this vantage point I could make out three bodies lying in the dimness of the lounge. There was a sharp tang of stomach acid in the air; someone had thrown up during the night and it hadn’t been cleared away. Let’s hope
that
disappeared before I got home from school.

I stuffed a couple of the chips into my mouth and chewed. There was something wrong. The sound of my jaw working carried into my brain in amplified fashion. I tried to ignore it, to continue eating, but the compulsion to get the food out of my mouth grew too overwhelming and I spat the sodden mess back out.

My stomach turned over, and growled with low fury. It demanded to be fed. Even the sight of the half-eaten food wasn’t enough to stem my hunger.

I picked up a piece of pizza and tried a small bite. Once again the sound filled my head. Swelled. I opened my mouth and let the food drop back onto the plain wrapping.

It was the sound of poison. That was the thought that arrived full-blown in my head. The noise of chewing was the noise of the drugs that laced the food entering my bloodstream. It was the sound of hallucination being manufactured in my brain. Somehow, someone had been at the food. It was adulterated.

I tried to force another chip into my mouth. Tried to chew. Tried to ignore the sounds and the compulsion to spit it out. Tried to swallow.

The slow progress of the mouthful down my epiglottis caused a wave of violent nausea, reversed trajectory and came straight back up. I walked to the sink and grabbed a handful of water from the tap. The normally sweet taste of Christchurch’s pure spring water was tainted with acid. Smelt like death.

I threw the water back up as well, and then clung to the side of the bench as my head forgot where my body was and span in circles. I retched again, and again, until at last my mouth and stomach felt clean. My hunger had gone.

Slowly, my dizziness left. Once I could trust myself to balance without the aid of the bench I walked through back into the lounge. One of the occupants was sitting up with a lamp shining on a work in progress. A spoon, cotton wool, a lighter flame.

Great. Now my mum’s friends are shooting up.

The door opened and my mother walked through into the room. She saw me standing in the corner and gave a faint wave, then sat cross-legged on the floor next to the cook.

***

The mall was packed. The constant crush of people in motion made me feel dizzy after a while. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would suggest this as a form of entertainment. Vendors occasionally leapt out from the middle of the level to thrust various creams and concoctions in my face. I felt I needed to keep my hand up at all times, like a boxer in the ring.

Vila moved from window to window, examining and exclaiming over the displays as though they held some meaning. When I saw an empty bench to one side I took the opportunity and plonked myself down. She didn’t notice for a whole shop window, so I yelled out, ‘Vila!’