Giselle was beginning to understand stories. She was beginning to create links in the fabric of existence, to connect the material world with the world in her head and make meanings out of everything she witnessed. She was starting to see that this led to that, that a kiss might be evil or enchanted. If she closed her eyes tight, almost closing them, leaving a tiny strip open, she could see her trembling eyelashes and, beyond them, tiny dust motes or very, very small dots that joined up to make the colours of the world. There were millions and millions of dots joining up, millions and millions of people and stories, millions of moments that did not yet make sense.
She left fairy traps in the garden. Her fairy trap was a bower of leaves and frangipani flowers, a bouquet for them, scented botanicals so loved by fairies. She found a bright blue egg in the fairy trap, which she carried carefully inside and placed inside a plastic takeaway container, covering it with a cloud of cotton wool balls she found in a drawer in the bathroom. She let Dan hold the egg and she made him lie at eye level on the ground next to the fairy trap, dancing above him, casting a spell. Dan was an only child like her, with only a mother, no father, no brothers or sisters.
The blue egg floated in its spun cloud; the spell was cast.
Giselle was watching her blue egg when she saw the mother and the babies come home. Her mother was asleep again, on the couch in front of the TV, a half-drunk cup of coffee beside her on the floor and a pile of butts in an ashtray. Giselle’s egg had a tracery of fine black lines running across the blue surface. Any moment she expected the egg to crack, revealing not a bird, but a fairy.
She lifted her eyes from the egg and saw the mother. Scooping up the container, careful not to shake it, she opened the front door and moved swiftly across the grass.
‘Do you want to see my fairy egg?’
‘Sorry, Giselle,’ said the mother. ‘Now’s not a good time.’
One of the babies was crying. Giselle moved across to show him the egg and he stopped crying.
‘He likes it,’ she said.
The mother didn’t answer; opening the door, she pushed the stroller inside.
‘I have to get dinner now,’ she said.
‘I can help,’ Giselle said.
And so she found herself inside. She liked being somewhere else, pretending to be a girl in a different life. Now, when the mother took the smallest baby from the stroller, she tenderly placed her fairy egg on the bench and lifted him up.
‘Careful,’ said the mother. ‘He’s heavy.’ And he was, a giant head, as big as her own, rocking on a fat neck. His neck had rings of dirt around it. The baby smiled and pulled her hair. His breath smelled nice, of nothing, but also of something she could not quite name or remember.
She was still there when the father came home. The mother ran towards him and started to cry and no-one noticed Giselle. She watched closely: the crying mother, the crying baby, the father sh-shing and patting her on the back. She was used to crying, it was the background noise of her life. Tears burst from you, an internal font, perpetually full. Tears lived in your body, like blood, waiting to spill. The other baby started to cry; the mother, the two babies and Giselle, sitting there, half hidden under the bench, picking her scab.
She heard the word ‘pregnant’. She listened to them talking, crying; she watched the father open a bottle of wine. She could see her blue fairy egg f loating on the bench and she knew something exciting was happening. A fairy might appear, a blue fairy, matching the blue of the bluest sky, the blue eyes of the baby with the enormous head. She longed for it, for the fairy to appear, for the cupboard to open into a forest.
It was growing dark and Giselle hated the dark, the long, endless hours, the moving shadows, the scratching of trees like fingernails against the windows rattling in the wind. Every night distorted faces gathered around her bed; the breath of something foul upon her. She could not get up and run from her bedroom into her mother’s room because there was something, or someone, beneath the bed and the minute she stood up, her feet would be sliced off at the ankles.
Every night she wanted her mother, every night she wanted to sleep with her mother, please, Mum, I won’t wake you up. I promise. Oh please, Mum, please, and every night her mother said no. ‘You’re too old to sleep in my bed. You’re a big girl.’ But she wasn’t, she was a girl shivering beneath blankets, her whole head covered, the tiniest hole for her nose. Even then, the finger coming towards the hole, the nail, the spike, the gleam of an eye. She was suffocating, boiling, imprisoned by her senses, her ears like a bat’s, picking up sounds from the room, from the house, from the yard outside, from the road, the village, from space. She heard every sound in existence, every hideous yelp, every cry, every whimper, her nose inhaled every possible smell. Her burning eyes saw light through the hole, or rather not light but a lighter shade of dark, a paler shade of blackness. She tried not to look, she tried to close her alarmed eyes, but every time they sprang open, as if someone prodded her with a stick.
She was so tired, she was so scared, night after night after night. She hated night, the way everything fell in, collapsing, the everyday bright world of school and little lunch and big lunch and drawing with chalk, the way everything hidden awoke, coming alive. If she wasn’t so frightened, she would leap out of bed, but she couldn’t, she couldn’t, she was condemned to lie there, suffocating, deafened by the roar, until she awoke and found darkness turned to light.