Wise creatures, p.7
Wise Creatures, page 7
Something is eating her.
Something is feasting.
When I was little, after the accident, she would let me be Cinderella when we played pretend. She would give me some of her ice cream if I finished mine first. Nina is kind. When she decides to love you, she always looks for ways to love you more.
She listens to Susan telling her there’s nothing wrong with the house, and says, ‘I knew that though. You should believe me.’
‘Nina.’ Susan rubs her eyes with her hands, and then raises her head to meet her gaze directly. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts. And none of those people found anything. You have to be doing this.’ She gestures to me. ‘Daisy surely isn’t.’
‘No,’ Nina tells her. ‘No.’
Susan’s face is stoic; she gets like that before she’s going to cry though, but if you didn’t know her, you’d think that’s cold. ‘Nina,’ she says, ‘I don’t know what I did to make you like this. Is it because of what happened with Caroline? The move?’
‘No. Look, it’s not your fault … It wasn’t anything.… ’ Nina starts. Then tears come to her eyes. ‘Sometimes bad things just happen, Mom. Bad things are happening. To me. To us. I wish you could believe that.’
‘I do believe that. Look at where we are. And what we’ve been through,’ Susan says. ‘But that doesn’t mean we stop trying.’
‘I am trying.’ Nina gets a square of kitchen roll and dabs her eyes with it.
Susan sighs. ‘I’ve looked up some of the counsellors on the list – there’s one I think you’ll like. I could make an appointment?’
And Nina rolls her eyes. ‘You think counselling sorts everything. How about you just parent me? How about you just fix this? If it’s all in my head –’
Susan’s voice sends shivers down my spine. The desperation in it. Her hands tap on the surface of the wood. Once. Twice. Three times.
‘Nina. I. Am. Trying. Too.’
I make a sound and the two of them look at me as though I’d walked into a home that wasn’t mine. As though I was intruding. Which I suppose I am in some ways. I mean, Susan’s not my mam, Nina’s not my sister.
Except that Susan is and Nina is.
I don’t have other people.
I need this family to be okay.
Since everything, I’ve never wanted to be able to read between the lines of people the way I used to. To know the things that they don’t even know about themselves. But in this moment I wish I could read minds, contact something that could tell me why all this is happening. It would make things so much easier. I’ve thought about telling Susan about Oz. But I can’t. I can’t do it to Nina. Not with her so taut. Stretched tight and twisted up.
‘Try harder, Mom,’ she says.
And Susan reaches out and holds her hand. ‘Okay. Okay, my darling. I believe you.’ Her voice is kind, but there’s a flatness too.
Nina starts to cry. I slink away.
the pressure of her hands on my shoulders
We’re visiting Dad. He’s helping out at the garden centre twenty hours a week, and everything seems to be going well for him. Which is nice. He has been through enough.
So have I.
And he won’t look at me.
My fault.
My fault.
The cup of tea in my hand is almost boiling. He barely puts a drop of milk in. That’s how Mam took it apparently. So hot it’s dangerous. It’s cold in the room though, so I’m grateful for the warmth of it. I thank him.
He grunts. Eyes flit to Susan, asking how I’m getting on at school.
He’s making an effort.
Not for me, for her.
I smile at him, tell him it’s going fine, it’s all small talk. No one mentions ghosts.
He asks where Nina is, we say she’s with a friend.
She’s still in bed. She didn’t sleep much last night.
‘You’d think,’ Susan said to me in the car, ‘that she’d only be dying to get out of the house, if it’s so haunted.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. Beyond, ‘I’m not sure it’s the house.’
There was salt in the sugar bowl this morning. Cheerios stacked in little vertical piles on the floor. When I touched them with my finger, the structure collapsed right away.
Seaweed in the plughole when I showered.
It’s escalating.
But still, none of it scares me.
It isn’t them.
I ask Dad about work.
He asks where Nina is again.
His voice changes and he meets my eye.
‘Have you done something to her?’
Susan tells him to Calm down, Fiachra, but he won’t be calm and I can hear all of the hate that he was holding back spilling out.
‘There’s something going on and you won’t tell me.’ He holds his head and closes his eyes tight and shouts:
‘You. You leave her ALONE. You’ve done enough.’
I know that he means me. My stomach curls up inside my body.
Susan looks at me and I see a flash of something – sorrow, blame? I keep my mouth shut tight. I sip the tea. It burns my tongue and I feel the loose skin on it against the roof of my mouth the whole drive home and after.
The girl’s make-up is running. She pulls off an eyelash and rubs her eyes, making it much worse.
‘They left me alone in the house.’
A banging from the wall.
‘It targets me the most when I’m alone.’
A blur as something flies across the room and hits the side of her head.
She rubs it.
‘OW. Okay, let’s see what that was. Great. My nicest eyeshadow. And it’s all fallen on the carpet and everything.’
She grimaces.
‘Better get the hoover, I guess. That’s something they don’t tell you about ghosts. All the cleaning up you have to do.’
The girl shrugs. She is wearing a slouchy black top and you can see the strap of her bra. It is burgundy-coloured and matches her lipstick.
She runs a hand through her hair and rubs the side of her head where the eyeshadow hit.
hate and who you come from
The visit with Dad unsettles me for the rest of the evening. I can’t focus, and I keep … I just keep wondering why the thing he clings to is hatred for me, anger.
What I deserve.
Nina sits on the sofa, barefoot, like nothing has happened. Susan watches her like a hawk. I scroll through ghosts. Sometimes they’re just recordings. Residual hauntings, it’s called. Like, you’ll be walking in a historic location and see a woman running down a hall, or hear the wheels of a carriage rolling by. Or footsteps.
Someone might walk past you through a wall, and then you find out there used to be a door there. Those ghosts don’t really have anything to do with anyone. They’re just like memories that are so intense or something that they outlast the time in which they happened.
I read something once about how you only really die when the last person who remembers you dies. And it sickened me. I want there to be an ending. For it to be over when it’s over. The idea of lingering makes me very uncomfortable. The threads that connect us to each other are so strong, and of course you don’t want the people you love to be gone entirely, butyou don’t want them not to be either. And we don’t get to choose what’s left behind. This thing of Nina’s, whether it’s real or a hoax or imagined, it’s angry. Small handprints on the shower door this evening when Susan was in there.
‘I don’t see how she could be doing that, Daisy,’ she tells me.
I thought of the yellow fly swatter we have shaped like a slapping hand. Or even paper cut-outs, somehow, maybe. It wouldn’t be that hard. None of it would. But if it is her, doing this all by herself, that’s not much better. Pain, and sorrow.
Rage.
‘Like, there’s some of it that she could do on her own, but other things … I’m not sure any more. And I thought that if we got those people in, the engineer and everyone, that there might be a reason for it all. Some explanation. Carbon monoxide. Mould. I mean, it’s good the house isn’t damaged or anything, I suppose, but …’
I make Susan a cup of tea and she sits at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. When I place it in front of her she reaches up and gives me a little hug.
‘We’ll get through this,’ Susan says.
I nod.
We won’t.
She takes a sip of tea and motions me to sit beside her. Plonks her tea back down on the table. Some of it spills. She makes a little face and gets a cloth. I think of her arms around Nina that night that she was screaming. She doesn’t touch me that way. She’s learned not to. ‘Laura, Conchur’s mother, told me,’ Susan says, ‘that one of the teachers is a paranormal investigator.’
‘Who, Mr Quigley?’ I ask, my voice rising at the ridiculousness of becoming one of the stories he tells in class to make himself seem important or interesting or whatever it is he wants from thirty kids.
‘The debate guy?’ Her voice is rising, grasping for some hope. ‘Would we be mad to ask him to come in?’
Oz’s dad, I think.
I start to wonder.
the smell of her
Susan held a sort of family meeting with us this evening, about calling Mr Quigley. It was oddly formal. I could see her scanning Nina’s face the whole time, trying to read between the lines, to see if this was the right thing to do. I looked between them both, the tension tight in my stomach, waiting for something awful to happen. It felt too calm. Nina politely telling her it was a good idea, her voice so even, as though she had prepared for this. There were biscuits but no one ate them. There was moss inside the cutlery drawer, under the forks. This couldn’t all be just for Oz. To get him to the house. To, what, confront him?
Teachers coming into students’ homes to hunt ghosts doesn’t feel like the sort of thing the school should allow. Or that Susan should go for. It feels blurry. I know intellectually that teachers are people, but I don’t think they should be the sort of people who intersect with our personal lives. I hate the thought of him going through our stuff. This house where we’re all broken in different ways and can’t seem to fit together the way we did before. But apparently I’m the only one who sees how weird this is, because when I said it to Susan, she pointed out that half of them do grinds outside school anyway.
‘That’s different,’ I said. ‘It’s still teaching. This is something else.’
Susan said, ‘At least we know who he is. I’d rather not have a complete stranger in the house. Coming in here, poking through our things.’
Our pain.
Our grief.
Our secrets.
‘But of course he’s your teacher, and if you don’t feel comfortable …’
I wanted to say something, but Nina put her hand on my wrist, and even though her skin was warm, a coldness filtered through me. She knew, she knows, I don’t like being touched.
She doesn’t mean it.
She just needs my help.
She needs this.
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s fine. I mean, better the devil you know, right?’
Susan smiles at me, and so does Nina.
‘Laura said he helped a friend of hers. With something similar.’
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Conchur’s mom is one of these people who always has some bit of advice for you. When she gives me lifts, I get this vibe like she is being extra nice to me and I absolutely loathe it. I didn’t think that Susan and her got on that well.
None of Susan’s friends have been over recently, I realise. She might not want to have them in this weird space where anything can happen. Scratches long as fingers, stark against Nina’s skin, and missiles through the air. I’ve yet to see one fly all by itself though. It’s always just out of the corner of my eye. And what must it be like for Susan? I mean, I’m worried about Nina, but she’s her mother. And she can’t protect her from whatever this is.
Nina woke last night screaming and sweating, and saying she could hear a scratching in the pipes.
‘Something took my headphones.’
Nina listens to music going to sleep, and Susan’s always giving out to her about it. She thinks we look at our phones too much, but I think she’s projecting, she looks at her phone way more than we do and actually drives home if she forgets it, which she says is ‘in case something happens’ to one of us, but I think it’s like a security blanket for her.
Susan was not best pleased to be woken up.
‘Jesus Christ. They probably fell under the bed or got tangled somewhere, Nina.’
You’d think at this stage she’d be used to it, but no. I shrugged and started searching.
‘Something took them.’ Nina’s face looked pale and drained of everything but sadness.
‘Mom, can I sleep in with you?’
‘Again?’
‘Please.’
Susan sighed, and off they went to bed. I padded back to my room. I’ve never slept beside Susan. She’s like a mother to me, but she’s not my mother. And sometimes there are little differences, things we do not share, that kind of slap me in the face or something.
I lie in bed, waiting for the shrill of Nina’s voice, the pad of her feet going downstairs to rearrange whatever it is ‘the ghost’ will have done in the morning. There’s a sort of sick anticipation. And if it is her, all her, she’s hurting herself, and hurting us … and hurting in general, I suppose.
And I don’t understand why.
I mean, I’ve never had my heart broken.
Romantically.
But it doesn’t seem like enough, you know? For this much pain.
But then, it’s hard to gauge what people feel.
wise creatures
Sometimes I almost wish I could remember more about my life before Nina and Susan. Maybe it would help. With Dad. With now.
It’s like my memory is a braid of hair and one strand is the stories I’ve been told, and one strand is the impact of what happened.
And the third strand is cobbled together from memories, from dreams where I can’t move, from something in me that I can’t let out.
I don’t even know if there was more than one of Them. Of it. When you’re dealing with something amorphous, that can shift and alter, it’s hard to know. I used to tell people I heard Them, but it wasn’t like hearing with your ears, if that makes sense.
What They told me just appeared in me.
Because that was Their base.
In me.
They were bigger and hungrier than I was but They could still fit right inside my brain, my body.
Take root.
I say I can’t remember, even to myself, but the truth is that I don’t want to. Why would I want to think about those two red hands. The mirror. The adults that I spoke to day after day. When I started school I worked so hard to fit in, because I hadn’t been around other children much. I didn’t go to playschool, Montessori. It was just me and Mam at home. The visitors.
And Them.
Hot chocolate burning my tongue, and her eyes on me, asking what else I knew, jotting little notes down. Rubbing my back and giving me a bath. Telling me I was her precious girl. It wasn’t all bad. There were moments when we were a family. It’s not one thing or another. You can’t always tell, with people. What it would take, to turn from good to bad. And it’s in all of us, that capability, but with Mam there was something about me that made it easier for her to follow her worst impulses. I wish I knew exactly what it was that called out to that side of her.
To Them.
Skin prickling at the thought. It’s dangerous to even bring Them up inside myself. Like someone or something running long, thin fingers right across that wall. Forcing me to grasp at the fragments left behind. When They were there, I could sense Them, feel Them, but I could never get a handle on what exactly They had been before They were this presence in my life.
Maybe a ghost too old and too cold to remember being human. Maybe They never were alive at all, in the way we think about it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.
I think she would have kept me home forever if she could have. Close beside her, close enough to touch. And I am glad she didn’t get the chance. Once I started going into the world I noticed more and more my differences, the bits that weren’t right.
I don’t know why she didn’t just homeschool me. Maybe Dad said something. He always liked me to have friends my own age. He’d take me over to Susan’s, or to houses where his friends had kids, and I would watch them playing and try my best to join in where I could. I remember usually an adult would have to tell me that it was okay, because I was so used to waiting for permission.
Of course, now I know the creatures were just a sort of tool, a way to get me through what my mother did to me.
Like an imaginary friend.
But not my friend.
When people hear my mother is dead, they always feel sorry for me. And sometimes I feel sorry for myself. I mean, she was my mam after all. And maybe if we could have sorted out the creature thing, this thing she called my gift but really was just her need for me to make her money, things could have gone a different way entirely. We could have gotten on. I never went beside her into bed though, when I was scared. Because she was a big part of what scared me.
Looking at a woman’s face and not wanting to say the things I saw.
She loved me though. She’d tell me that she was doing this because she loved me. And I loved her. I wanted her to smile and say good job and take me in her arms and stroke my hair.
My head under the cold tap in the sink, so cold it burned the back of my scalp the nape of my neck, promising that next time I’d do better.
There was a comfort in it, and she could be nice. She was so nice to my dad. We both did our best to keep him happy. And by the time he got home from work, it was dinner, cartoons, bed. He visited our world but he wasn’t immersed in it. He could get out whenever he wanted.
Her hands.
Her hands on me.
Ghosts are easier than other monsters.
‘I don’t know why I’m still doing this,’ the girl says. ‘I mean, it’s not like anybody cares. Not really.’
