There are changes that creep up on you slowly, and then there are sudden changes that rip you apart, so that you don’t know who you are anymore. When I first visited Lupe, I had been ripped apart. I was so scared I thought my legs wouldn’t carry me there. I was fourteen and no one knew the Darkness was on its way. Cars still drove down Saturnalia Avenue, and Orphanville was just an abandoned housing development.
That was back when the petrol station was still open and there were canvas flags strung around the forecourt, bags of ice in the big freezer out the front and gas bottles for hire. Lupe’s van was newly painted. I’d heard all the ten stories about Lupe at school: that she was a witch, that she could see the future, that she could make bad things happen to people who’d done you wrong, that she could talk to the dead.
My parents warned me about her. I think they were scared of her because she was different. Fat women horrify my mum. She says they’ve let themselves go. My mum can’t let anything go.
I find it difficult to remember now. Remembering involves being able to picture myself a few years ago, and that’s almost impossible. I had a scrawny body and barely a hint of facial hair. For weeks I went to Lupe’s van and barely spoke to her. I walked there full of purpose, but when I got there I froze and wound up eating my kebab under her canopy, miserable that I didn’t have the guts to say anything.
Eventually, on maybe my fifth visit, Lupe handed me my change and asked, ‘Is there anything else you want, my boy?’
The question stopped me dead. What did I want? I wanted things to be like before. No. Before was too long ago. Before I stopped talking to my parents, before Gram moved out and we hardly ever saw him, before Gram and Ortie split up. Before was when I was ten and we all lived in the one house, like a family. Before was impossible.
Really, I didn’t know what I wanted. I stood there opening and closing my mouth like the dumb kid I was. Maybe I wanted to know why bad things happened. Or when the pain would stop.
In the end I didn’t have to say anything. Lupe disappeared from her window and unlatched the door. I sat at her table, my arm laid out flat across the plain orange laminex. Lupe’s van was a lot emptier back then. She read my arm in a trance. She said a lot of things, some of which I don’t remember. Every now and then I’ll have a flashback, and I’ll be reminded of something she said. Things that meant nothing then have grown to mean something over the years.
‘You must be careful not to get cut off,’ she said. ‘Don’t go too far inside yourself.’
Maybe it’s too late for that. She probably meant don’t live on your own in a big house, rattling around the empty rooms. She probably meant talk to your friends about things that matter instead of filling in time drinking and listening to music.
There were other things. She said there was a black spot inside me, a blind spot. She said it worried her that I was keeping things hidden inside this spot, things that should really be let out.
It was Lupe who mentioned Gram first.
‘Your brother has gone, but not too far. He left this world, but there are other places very close by. He can still see you. He smiles.’
I could have asked: Why did he do it? How could he leave me? Why would he be smiling now when he was so unhappy before?
I don’t believe in heaven so it’s hard to believe in those other places Lupe talks about. But maybe it wasn’t heaven she meant.
I sit on the tail of the caravan, using the spare tyre as a cushion. The fairy lights strung across Lupe’s awning lift the gloom more than you’d expect; the light they give off forms a perfect circle around the van. Beyond that are dark patches where the petrol bowsers have been torn out, leaving holes in the concrete. I exhale, trying to blow away the heavy cloud of memories.
I was another person then.
I wonder what Lupe is saying to Wildgirl now.
You’ll find yourself telling the truth in Lupe’s van. That’s what I should have told Wildgirl before we even stepped inside.