Something is happening to the air between us where we sit. Time seems to stretch out somewhat. I can’t stop looking at his forearm, where it rests on the rusty chair. Pale skin, covered in fine hair that glows in the sun like burning wire.
Fear ripples through me. ‘I’m not like a regular person,’ I say. ‘It’s hard being me. Maybe even harder being around me.’
‘What’s a regular person?’ he says. ‘We do what we can.’
I think of Mommy’s narrowed mouth and her disgust. I thinkof the bug man, who wants to write a book about how messed up I am. ‘Right now,’ I say, ‘what you can do is go.’
I reach the car, limping, as he puts on his seatbelt.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ I say. ‘Sorry. It’s been a bad month. Year. Life, even.’
He raises his eyebrows.
‘Please, come back. Have another beer,’ I say. ‘Let’s talk about you, now.’
‘You just got out of hospital. Probably need to rest.’
‘Don’t make me chase your car down the street,’ I say. ‘I just got out of hospital.’
He thinks and then he turns off the engine. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘I got some weird stories, too.’
His name is Rob and he has a twin brother. Growing up, they did all the usual twin stuff. They confused their mother and pretended to be one another, even went to each other’s classes in high school sometimes. Rob was better at sciences and Eddie was better at artsy stuff, English Lit and so forth. So they both got good grades. They stopped swapping around on their parents, though, when they got older, and they never did it to girlfriends. It was a mean trick, they agreed, not to be practised on those you love. Then Rob stopped having girlfriends. He didn’t tell Eddie, even when he met a man who worked in a restaurant in town who made his heart beat fast. They started seeing one another.
One evening the man from the restaurant saw Rob across the street. He was filled with love so he crossed the street and took Rob in his arms. As soon as he touched him, he knew it wasn’t Rob. But it was too late. Eddie beat him until he couldn’t see out of either eye.
The man from the restaurant moved away. His brother won’tspeak to him, and Rob says he wouldn’t want him to, anyway. ‘Even so,’ he says, ‘it’s like a missing leg. I had to learn how to walk again without him. I stopped seeing people for a time. Only wanted my dog and the woods. I like early mornings best, when no one is around.’
I think about the story for a time.
I say, ‘If all that hadn’t happened to you, I would be dead.’
‘Well,’ he says, surprised. ‘I guess that’s right.’ We look at each other briefly. Then we sit in silence.
He goes home as evening is sneaking in. The sun falls low, purple shadow wraps around things, readying for night. As I pick up the beer cans I catch a flash of yellow overhead, in my beech tree. Goldfinch song fills the dusk. The birds are coming back.
Night Olivia
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the first episode ofCATching up with Night Olivia.We’ve got a great show ahead. We’re going to be talking about light – types of sunshine, kinds of darkness – what’s best for naps, what will illuminate your eyes like unearthly lamps in the dusk, and so on, plus: what shadows work best for concealing you, as you stalk your prey like a black bolt of death in the night.
But first, let’s address the elephant in the room. We need to talk about the upstairs world, the so-called real world. I think we can all agree that it is not as good as the one inside. It is grey and everything smells bad. I don’t like the colour of the rug, which up here is not a beautiful shout of orange, but the shade of dead teds. Anyway I do come up here sometimes, despite my reservations, because one should always know what one is dealing with. Sometimes I even go outside. I am not an indoor cat any more. I see and feel the world, where once I just smelled and heard it, from downstairs in the inside place. Now, if I want, I can come upstairs and be with Ted as he walks in the fall leaves, feel the chilly bite of first frost in the shortening days.
But yes, outside is quite disappointing. It is no big deal, I would say. There is a tabby cat up here, but she is not the one I love. When I first saw her I thought, You poor thing.Her eyes are dull brown – when I look into them I see only a hungry animal. She is small and thin, has no claws and walks with a staggering limp. She does not shine. The orange-headedted insists on feeding her. That ted looks like a lumberjack but he is actually very sentimental. Also he smells very strongly of his big brouhaha, which is disgusting. Ted keeps telling me the brouhaha scented the blood and found us in the woods but I refuse to believe that I was saved in such a fashion. Anyway, I was wondering how Ted would cope without Olivia. He seems to be doing fine.
I love to go down to the weekend place and watch the other one, the beautiful one, through the window as she grooms and preens. She stares like a snake with her apple-yellow eyes. She is one of us, of course. Another part. Maybe I should have guessed that earlier. She chooses not to talk. But I hope that one day she will speak to me. In the meantime I will worship her and wait. I will do that for ever, if necessary. I can always keep an eye on what is happening upstairs through the TV.
Sometimes theLORDcomes walking through the kitchen wall or floating up the stairs towards the roof light on the landing. He turns to look down at me with his round fish eyes, or the mirrored gaze of a fly. He’s a fragment of Ted’s imagination. Mommy talked so much about the ankou that the ankou came. Mommy’s god found his way from her faraway village in Brittany, through Ted, into Olivia’s world. That’s how gods travel, through minds.
TheLORDnever made Olivia help Ted or Lauren. She just wanted to be kind. She was a nice cat. I am nice, but I am other things too.
There is no cord any more, binding me to Ted. I kind of miss it, now it’s gone. He and I are bound to one another and the cord was a reflection of that. It was honest and showed how things truly are. I find that the upper world holds few such helpful signs. It is a cold bleak place. Our big fleshy body lumbers through it, with us inside like badly nested Russian dolls. Disgusting, in my opinion.
However, we can all be together upstairs, now – Ted, Lauren and me, and some of the others whose names I don’t know yet. They are just beginning to come up into the light. We can talk or fight or whatever just as well as we can downstairs in my place. Sometimes I forget to go back down for days at a time. So I guess in some ways the upstairs is now my home too.
Ted
The path winds up into the fall day. The air has mushrooms and red leaves in it. The trees are thin-fingered against the sky. Rob is warm at my side, hair escaping from his hat like tufts of flame. It has been three months since that morning in the forest, but it could be a lifetime ago.
The stories all fit inside each other. They echo through. It started with her, Little Girl With Popsicle. And she deserves a witness, so that’s why we’re here.
