Page 17 of The Sirens

16

JESS’S DIARY

1998

10 July

I never thought I’d love Sunday evenings.

I used to spend them curled up in bed, the fan brushing my hair over my face, the muscles in my jaw tightening at the thought of school the next day.

Now, the week is like this:

Tuesday feels like grief. Like I’ve lost something I’ll never have again. That feeling stretches into Wednesday, Thursday. I sit in class looking out of the window at nothing, the chatter around me inconsequential as the buzz of flies. Not even Max can get through. At the greenhouse, he offers me a puff of his joint, his new AFI CD, but nothing works. I can’t think how to explain it. It’s like I’m trapped behind a pane of glass, the world and everyone in it blurred and fading away from me.

And then I wake up on Friday morning with a tiny golden seed in my belly.

In English, I pay attention to Mrs Clark, about what Ariel signifies in The Tempest. I even take notes. I laugh at Max’s jokes, tell him I think the lead singer of AFI sounds like he has a fence post up his bum. Walking home from school, I look up at the huge sky and feel like the world’s been cracked open just for me.

At dinner I smile as I eat whatever Mum’s concocted – chicken laksa, lamb tagine or pork larb – without complaint.

‘Can you help me feed the ewes tomorrow?’ Dad asks, and I say, ‘Sure!’

My parents grin at each other across the table.

I’m a changed girl, an angel sent to replace the old Jess.

The golden seed grows and grows over the weekend, a plant curling and quivering inside of me.

I feed the sheep and notice their strange beauty. I want to draw their weirdly human faces, their dark wet eyes. I read somewhere once that sheep can recognise people and I feel a rush of affection when I reach out and pat their soft, sweet-smelling wool. Afterwards I find Mum doing the washing-up, iridescent soap bubbles clinging to her hair. I come up behind her and put my arms around her and at first, she stiffens with shock at my foreign touch but then she smiles, leaning into me. In those moments I almost think I can forgive her for all the things she doesn’t say.

On Sunday night I dream.

But it’s not like the other dreams. He’s there with me, his hand on mine, and it’s like he’s followed me there, into that world of darkness, and shone a way out. Last Monday, we were focusing on narrative art – how pictures can tell a story. He showed me a painting of Orpheus and Eurydice, by Carl Goos. Eurydice is looking at Orpheus, her body wreathed in shadows. She’s falling backwards, into a world of nightmares. But he’s reaching out his hand – his body gold and good and strong – and he’s going to save her. He won’t stop until he does, you can see it in his face.

That’s us, I thought, when he showed it to me.

‘How does it make you feel?’ he asked, and I kept my eyes on his hands when I answered. Strong hands, those little moons of colour under his nails.

‘Hopeful,’ I said, not daring to look up. He chuckled, moved his hands away.

‘You know she dies, right? He doesn’t save her.’

‘Oh.’ I felt the blood rise to my cheeks. I looked at the painting again and couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it: the backwards lean, the fear in her eyes. She was falling out of his grasp, back into the underworld.

I lifted my chin.

‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘I like my version better.’

He laughed again, a proper laugh this time, rich and throaty, the wrinkles round his eyes creasing. I wanted to take the sound with me, to keep it with me always.

This morning when I woke up, the seed that had been growing inside me had burst. I was fluttering inside, made up of a million writhing things.

The day stretched on like a drought, moving sluggishly from English to History to lunch to Maths. Finally, the bell rang and my heart jolted, my palms cracking with sweat.

Today, the large table in the art room was bare when I came in, but for a sheaf of paper and a stack of charcoal. Every other time there has been some sort of clue as to what I’ll be learning. Once, he had me draw a sheep’s skull, practising until I got the curves of bone and shadow just so.

He was standing at the window, gazing out at the quad. The last stragglers formed little clusters; two girls skipping, a bunch of guys kicking a battered football. A couple kissing against a brick wall, thinking they wouldn’t be seen.

The light was silky on his face, making him look softer, younger. He’s only in his mid-twenties, I think, but in that moment, he could have been a little boy, staring out into a world he didn’t understand. I wanted to put my hands on his face, ask him what he had lost and how. But then he turned and saw me, his body straightening and his mouth settling into adult lines again.

‘Jess,’ he said, nodding at me. ‘Sit down. We’re going to try something different today.’

I sat at my usual stool, feeling clumsy and exposed in my school uniform. I had an undershirt on, as always, but the Flakes had crept down my wrist, licking at my palms. I put my hands flat on the table so that he’d only see the rough silver of my knuckles.

The blank paper in front of me was so intimidating that my mind emptied.

‘I want you to close your eyes,’ he said, ‘and then draw whatever it is that you see.’

It was him that I saw when I closed my eyes, the way he’d looked when I came into the room. The mystery and vulnerability of him.

But when I pushed the image of him away, she was there, waiting.

She’s always with me. Even when I’m awake. Like she’s my own shadow, my own Eurydice.

I bent over the desk, pressing the charcoal hard onto the page so that my hand ached. She emerged in feathery black strokes. The grim set of her mouth, the gaunt cheeks. The thin lines of her wrists. Her eyes, empty in the darkness.

I’d never drawn her until today. I think I’d felt afraid to. As if giving her a physical form might conjure her into being, draw her out of the dream world and into this one. Those eyes staring into my soul, tethering me to her side.

But with Mr Hennessey there, I felt brave.

By the time I’d finished, my hands gleamed with charcoal, a mark I’d chosen for myself. I felt exhausted, but satisfied.

There she was on the page. Exactly as she is in my dreams. The dreams that have haunted me now, for months and months.

Mr Hennessey got up from the other side of the table, putting down the stack of essays he’d been marking. As he walked around the table, I felt each of his footsteps in my body. Finally, he was standing behind me, his long shadow falling over the paper.

For a while he said nothing, and fear and excitement raced through my veins.

‘I like it,’ he said at last. ‘Who is she?’

I paused for a moment, my mouth dry. I haven’t told anyone where I go, when I close my eyes at night; where my dreams take me. I have barely been able to bring myself to write about it here, in my diary. Like I was scared that doing so would make it real.

But it is happening, it is real. Ignoring it hasn’t made it go away.

I used to have night terrors when I was little. Sometimes, I’d sleepwalk. Once, when I was in kindergarten, Mum found me in the bath with the taps at full blast, water spilling onto the tiles. My skin wasn’t right for weeks afterwards, hardened into a blue-grey crust. It was so bad that I couldn’t go to school.

As I got older, the sleepwalking stopped, and the night terrors faded.

But now they’re back, and they’re much, much worse. Now, I dream I’m someone else; wake to find myself wading into the dam, dark water rippling all around me, my skin shrinking and cracking. A little further out, a little deeper, each time. I thought about asking Dad to put a lock on my bedroom door, but then he’d just ask questions. Instead, I’ve been tying my wrist to my headboard with an old dressing-gown cord. In the morning, my skin is a raw, shiny pink as if I’ve been struggling, as if the water has been calling me.

But that’s impossible, isn’t it?

I could feel Mr Hennessey’s breath, warm on the back of my neck. I didn’t want him to move away and was afraid that if I told him this truth about me, this wrongness, that he would. That all of it – the companionable scratch of his pen on paper, the way he hums to himself sometimes under his breath, the new ease with which we greet each other – would end.

Then I’d lose it, the tiny seed of hope that drives me through the days and sees me through the nights. For a moment, my throat closed, and I thought that I wouldn’t be able to get the words out, anyway.

But it was the way he looked at me. Like he really wanted to know something about me.

‘I think her name’s Eliza,’ I said slowly, my tongue fumbling the words. ‘I – I dream about her. She’s on a ship, a convict ship, with her sister – in the dream I’m her sister, I think, but it’s Eliza that I can see. I dream that the ship is sinking. The water’s rushing in, and it’s so cold that it’s like it’s cutting my skin open. The other women around us are screaming, crying. Some of them are singing …’

My voice thickened with tears and I stopped, horrified.

He didn’t say anything at first, just let me recover. I wiped my eyes and they burned with charcoal dust.

‘The surrealists believed that our dreams could help us find our true creative selves,’ he said. I felt the hairs on the nape of my neck move in time with his breath. ‘Maybe you should make more art about these dreams, these nightmares. It might feel … cathartic.’

I nodded. ‘Like an exorcism?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and though I didn’t turn around to look at him, I heard the smile in his voice. ‘Exactly like that.’

I wondered if he’d ever had a nightmare he’d needed to exorcise. I was going to ask, but then I felt his gaze on my hand like heat, and when I heard his mouth open I knew what was coming next.

‘I’ve been meaning to say – your skin …’

I scrunched my hand into a fist, hot shame spreading through me.

I’ve lost track of the number of teachers who’ve asked me about my skin. Who’ve made appointments with the school nurse, phoned Mum and Dad, sent letters home. They leave it alone eventually, once they realise the truth. That it can’t be cured, only managed.

But I still hate that that’s what they see when they look at me. Something that needs to be fixed.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just – I find it so interesting. Do you ever feel that impulse – when you see something that you want to paint, to capture?’

I thought of how he’d looked when I came into the art room. My heart squeezed.

‘It reminds me of something, the colour.’ He put his hand on the table, his fingers edging closer to my curled fist. He traced my knuckles with his index finger and then spoke so softly I had to strain to hear him. ‘That pinkish blue, the way it looks silver in the light. It’s like the inside of a shell.’

But the inside of a shell is beautiful, I wanted to say. Does he – he can’t possibly – think I’m beautiful?

We stayed like that for a moment, his finger resting on my knuckles. My heart was hammering so hard it was like a wild animal in my chest.

Then he cleared his throat, moved his hand away.

‘What happens to her – this Eliza – in your dream?’ he asked.

I kept my hand still on the table. Maybe if I stayed still long enough he’d touch me again.

‘Oh,’ I said, reluctant to be pulled back into that world of slimy darkness, of hissing waves. ‘I don’t really know. I normally wake up before the ship sinks completely.’

I didn’t tell him the truth.

That each time I have the dream, I wake up later and later. I feel the water course down my throat, feel it curl around my limbs. Dragging me under. A brightness dazzling ahead.

That I’m worried that one day, my improvised restraint won’t be able to hold me. That caught in the dream, I’ll sleepwalk into the dam.

And I’ll drown with them.