by Kirstyn McDermott
Christ, not again. Hard enough to sleep with the afternoon sun sleazing through the venetian blinds, the dull ache in each and every joint of her sweatsick body, and Faith groans as she rolls over to grab the bottle of water beside her bed. Blister pack of tablets beside that, antibiotics of some kind, and RelaxaTabs as well because the doctor refused to prescribe her any sort of decent sleeping pill; she takes two of each.
Natural rest, my arse.
Hard enough to sleep with the near constant vertigo and the quilt pulled right up to her chin, sweating and itching beneath it because otherwise she’ll only wake up with chattering teeth and her fingernails a disturbing shade of blue.
Hard enough without this: the sobs and muffled shouts pressing through the shoddy townhouse wall, the nameless thumps and yesterday even the sound of smashing glass.
Faith pulls the pillow over her head but it’s too hot, too close; she can’t breathe properly even when she’s not trying to smother herself. Stretches her legs instead, trying to kick the cramps from her knees, and when the shouting from next door starts up again she raises a fist for the umpteenth time to pound against the wall.
And, for the umpteenth time, stops herself at the very last second.
It might only make things worse.
No idea who her neighbours are, after all. A single woman, the agent’s assurance during inspection, quiet and tidy, you’ll have no trouble there—and with that now so obviously a lie, who the hell knows what she’s moved in next door to on a fucking twelve-month lease?
The shouting ceases, gives way to sobbing. Soft, feminine cries that Faith almost can’t hear and somehow that only makes it worse. So: two more RelaxaTabs before curling tight beneath the blanket with her chin tucked close to her chest and no matter that it’s harder to breathe through her congestion like that.
Harder still to sleep with what she can hear—and imagine—beyond that wall.
Between the opening screech of her neighbour’s security door and the brash metallic clatter as it slams shut again, Faith shrugs into her dressing gown. Cinches the faded terrycloth belt around her waist and hop-foots it down the hall wearing just the single Ugg boot slipper because god only knows where the other one’s hiding and there sure isn’t any time to mount a search party. White-trash Cinderella half-tripping out her own front door and, “Hey,” she calls to the woman already turning away from the letterboxes. “Hey, wait up.”
Whatever she might have expected, it isn’t this. Tall, much taller than Faith herself but certainly not much older, early thirties at most and even that would be pushing it. A sundress of faded sky-blue cloth, the sort of slim-hipped androgyny Faith might once have killed to possess, and something so . . . solid in the way she pauses, tiger-in-the-grass motionless with her face half-turned away and hidden beneath a wave of blood-bright hair.
“Can I help you?” the woman asks, blade-sharp voice with an accent too vague to place.
Faith blinks in the morning glare, one hand raised to shield her eyes. “Sorry, just wanted a word. About the . . . um, the . . . look, I’m feeling pretty crap right now and I really need to get some sleep, so . . .”
“I’m making too much noise.”
“Well, yeah. I mean, normally—”
“Normally you wouldn’t be here.” The woman looks up then, looks right at her with dark eyes surrounded by even darker flesh, fist-sized bruises and a scabby-swollen cut on her lower lip, and Faith swallows, tries to find some words, any words, but the woman waves them away. “My apologies. I assumed you worked during the day. I didn’t realise you were ill.”
Forget about it, Faith wants to tells her, wants to ask if there is anything she needs like maybe a hospital or several shots of morphine maybe, but all at once it’s so damn hot out here and the sunlight really is too bright, searing-white-bright like the unmarred skin on the woman’s face, what little there is of it, and, how rude, when she doesn’t even know me from Adam.
So: “I’m Faith.” Right hand stuck out and trembling, and the woman regards it like a dead thing for a moment, dead or near enough. Looks at her that way too with oil-slick eyes impossibly black and shot with colours like Faith has never seen before, colours she can’t even name. “Mara,” the woman says.
Mara, a bassline thrumming through the sparks that jump and scratch behind her eyelids and Faith holds onto it, clutches it tighter than she clutches the frost-cold hand now closed around her own. Do you hear that, she says or maybe she doesn’t after all.
The birds, do you hear their wings?
If ice could boil, and still stay frozen, this is how it might burn:
The seething shiver of skin on skin, on cloth, on the bare bathroom floor as she lies spread-eagled in an effort to touch absolutely nothing, or as much of it as she can. The water that ebbs around her chattering teeth, slips into her mouth despite the cool strong hands that hold up her head, long fingers curved firm around her chin when all she wants to do is slip beneath the surface and sink, sink, sink. The light that swells her skull, her bones, her guts; seeking to split her wide and spill itself into the world.
blood-fever
Barely a whisper from no one she cares to know.
Here, drink this.
Can’t, I’ll throw up.
You won’t. Drink it.
The taste too strange, ginger and chamomile and something else that just doesn’t belong, and—oh god, oh christ— the red plastic bucket still smelling of vomit from last time and this only makes her puke more, spasms so violent it hurts, until finally she rolls back onto the couch with a groan.
Told you I’d throw up.
The woman’s smile so subtle it’s almost not there at all.
Yes, and don’t you feel much better for it?
Three days, Mara tells her, perched stray cat cautious on the edge of the bed. Three days since that morning when she’d passed out by the mailbox, and Faith feels nauseous all over again. Three days, which would make today what then, Saturday?
“Sunday,” Mara says. “Your work called on Friday. I told them it was highly doubtful you’d be in next week but you would let them know once you were conscious again. Frankly, they didn’t sound too concerned.”
Unsurprising. Newbie telemarketers being more dispensable than used Kleenex, especially newbie telemarketers who were barely scratching at the lowest rung of their daily quota levels; if EzyEzcape bothered to even keep her shifts alive it would be no minor miracle. Never mind that, after almost a week without pay, if she manages to scrape together next month’s rent in time, it will be the loaves and fucking fishes all over again.
“Shit.” Faith tries to sit up, fails. There isn’t a part of her that doesn’t ache.
“I don’t think you’re ready for vertical,” Mara observes.
“I have to go back to work tomorrow. I can’t afford to be sick anymore.”
Mara shrugs, do-what-you-have-to-do sort of shrug, and rises to her feet in a motion that is at once elegant and utterly final. Jaundice-faint shadow of a bruise on her cheekbone as she tucks her hair behind her ear, and only now does Faith remember.
“Hey, you said three days? That’s how long I was out of it?” Frowning as the other woman nods because that can’t be right, can it? Faith has had coffee table bumps take longer to fade than that and, sorry, she insists, but that can’t that be right.
Not three days, not only three.
“Why would I lie?” Mara seems amused, as though this is all some elaborate game, a prank or maybe some sick-day surprise. Like maybe everyone Faith knows is huddled out in the loungeroom with party hats and sparklers and a huge hand-painted banner strung across the window: welcome back to the world.
“But your face . . .”
Words failing as Mara lifts a hand to her own cheek, fingers falling across model-smooth lips that look as though they’ve never even been chapped let alone left split and bleeding. “I heal fast. It has been three days.” Said as though that were an eternity in itself, and her eyes are equally desolate.
Leave it alone, girl; you have no business with it.
Faith swallows, throat too dry for more than a muttered apology, and the smile Mara returns is only tooth-deep. “You seem compos mentis now. I’ll be home all day if you need something.” The square set of her jaw an unspoken challenge—but you won’t need anything—holding Faith’s gaze for a full three seconds before walking away, three long paces to the bedroom door.
Only three days.
“Wait.” The woman pauses but doesn’t turn round, only angles her head a little and Faith takes this acknowledgement as all she’s going to get. “Thanks, okay? Thanks for taking care of me.”
“There’s multivitamin juice in the fridge,” Mara says. “You’re dehydrated and you’re probably ravenous, but I wouldn’t recommend solid food until tomorrow. Otherwise, you know.”
A curt nod toward the red bucket in the corner, then the bedroom door closes and Mara is gone.
Friday night, and Faith sits at the kitchen table with a bottle of red wine, unopened. The same kind she left on Mara’s front step a few days ago with a thank-you note scribbled in haste after her knocks went unheeded, the kind she’d once again planned to present in person, with more thanks, tonight. She’d hoped her neighbour would invite her in, that they’d crack open the bottle and drown whatever collective sorrows they managed to scrape together—which had to be quite a few—and maybe lay the foundations of something that might one day be called a friendship.
New city, new job, and Faith is lonely. Not that she would ever admit as much with a clear head, a clean bloodstream; hence the wine.
That had been the plan, anyway.
But mice and men and smothered, broken blondes, Mara isn’t alone.
Faith can’t hear the sounds all the way out here in the kitchen. Those same whimpers and thumps she remembers from when she was ill, sounds she’d later decided—hoped?—had been amplified by delirium, fever-swollen and exaggerated beyond all measure of reality. Until now. She picks up the cordless phone for the second time that night, index finger hovering above the 0 on the keypad.
What if Mara hates her for calling the police?
What if the boyfriend? lover? (rapist?) takes it out on Mara herself?
What if the police don’t arrive in time, or even at all?
Damn it. She places the undialled phone on the table, creeps instead down the hall to the bedroom and listens by the door. Nothing, no sound at all from beyond the wall and is that a good thing or does it mean that something much worse is happening next door? Or has happened?
Bitch!
The jagged masculine snarl so loud it might be in the next room and Faith near jumps out of her skin, hands quickly at her mouth to stop the cry that rises in her throat.
But it’s what comes after that finally kicks her indecisive arse into gear. The muffled sobs for him to stop, to please just stop, echoing in her head as she races back through the townhouse. Grabbing the wine bottle on her way—weapon? appeasement? excuse?—and then straight outside, bare feet smarting on the gravel path that joins her place with Mara’s, running so fast that by the time she’s pounding on the woman’s front door, Faith is breathless.
A small eternity until, just as she thinks no one is ever going to answer and she’s going to need that phone after all, there’s a flicker of shadow over the peephole and the door opens a couple guarded inches.
“What do you want, Faith?”
Mara’s eye is near-shut swollen, she’s bleeding from two nasty cuts on her cheek that seem in dire need of stitches, and that’s just the side of her face that Faith can see. “Are you . . . are you okay?”
Only the most stupid question she could have possibly asked but Mara actually smiles, thin icicle smirk accompanied by a shake of her head, that glossy red hair rippling over her face and Faith wonders how much of that colour tastes like iron right now. “I’m fine. Go home.”
“You don’t look fine. You look like you need help.”
Mara closes her eyes and sighs, a blood-smeared hand rubbing hard against her forehead. “Faith,” she says, and “listen,” and then there is some scuffling behind her and the door is jerked all the way open.
He’s shorter than Mara, shorter even than Faith whose eye he refuses to meet as he pushes narrow-shouldered between them, shrugging into a grey suit jacket with a peacock blue tie hanging from its pocket. Faith can see the red wedged beneath his manicured nails, the flecks of crimson on his creased white shirt.
“Phillip, wait,” Mara calls out but the man doesn’t even pause. Just half turns his head to mutter something which might have been forget it or fuck it or something else entirely before scuttling through the little front gate like a cockroach surprised at midnight. The hazard lights on a silver Audi flash twice as he crosses the road towards it, and within seconds the man is inside and speeding away.
“Great,” Mara says. “That’s just great.” Sounding more resigned than angry, even though she’s standing there with both hands on her hips and eyebrows drawn together in a frown that just about freezes Faith’s heart. As does the blood runnelling down both her cheeks, and the sticky-wet way that black satin robe wrinkles against her ribs.
Faith swallows. “He won’t be back tonight, will he?”
“God no,” Mara snorts, “He won’t be back.” Then her gaze drops to the bottle of wine hanging uselessly at Faith’s side and she sighs once again. Bitterdeep breath that holds all the cares of the world and then some.
“Come inside,” she says, stepping back from the door. “You and me, we need to talk.”
Of course she’s going to look around. Mara having excused herself for a quick shower, leaving Faith to open the wine and wander through to the loungeroom, glasses in hand and bottle tucked awkward beneath her arm, and surely it doesn’t hurt to look. Not that there’s much to see; Spartans lived larger than this.
Big navy-blue sofa along the far wall, bare-topped coffee table and two mismatched chairs—one with a grey pinstripe fabric, and the other the kind of patchy brownish velvet you only find in the most desperate op shops or the trendiest of retro-funk café bars. Small television in one corner and a lamp standing sentry opposite, its shade almost—but not quite—the same deep blue as the sofa. But no DVDs, no CDs, no books. No little knick-knacks or photos in frames, no junk mail or shoes or shopping lists left lying around.
The only remotely personal touch, the only hint that a human being might actually inhabit this space, is the large unframed canvas hanging adjacent to the window. A stemless, scarlet rose blooming against a near black background, petals open and weeping viscous red tears onto the once-white feather floating below it. Blood tears, bloodflowers; how did that song go again, that Cure song she’d left behind in Sydney along with her night-cast wardrobe and the rest of her angst-ridden trappings? Bittersad lyrics about trust, about never really knowing who you can. The feather is soaked, bedraggled, but still curves resiliently upwards, its tip pure and unsullied, so bright against the darkness that it almost glows.
Faith runs a finger across one of the glistening droplets, and is almost surprised to find the canvas rough and dry, her skin unstained.
“A friend painted that for me. Do you like it?”
The question quietly asked, but Faith still jumps, fights the urge to hide her hand behind her back like a schoolgirl caught with cigarettes or something much worse. Yeah, she tells Mara, who has reappeared with showerdamp hair and a flock of bright-white butterfly stitches on both cheeks, black satin robe swapped for jeans and a sleek grey jumper. “Yeah, I like it a lot. Might have wanted to arm-wrestle you for it once upon a time.”
Once upon a time, not so long ago.
“Not now?” Mara smiles, or almost smiles, as she crosses the room to claim her glass of wine from the coffee table. She sits down carefully, right in the middle of the sofa, one leg curled beneath her.
“I’m sort of starting over. You know, leaving the past behind me.”
“Hmm, mysterious.”
“It really isn’t,” Faith explains. “It’s just that the people I used to hang with, my friends or whatever you want to call them, the whole goth scene”—bobbing air quotes with both hands around that word—“they got to be a little . . . poisonous.”
“Goth scene?” Mara arches an exquisitely plucked eyebrow.
“You know: black clothes, eyeliner, swanning around like they invented depression. Like it’s fucking profound or something.”
“I know. There are goths in Melbourne too, you realise.”
“Yeah, but it’s not my scene down here. And anyway, I’m . . .”
“Over it?”
“I’m over me.” Faith slumps into the brown velvet chair, licks the resulting splash of wine from her wrist. “I’m over who I was back there. I’m over feeling shitty every damn day, and liking the fact that I’m feeling shitty, and then really hating the fact that I like it, if any of that makes any fucking sense at all.”
“Perfect sense.”
Mara is good, Faith will give her that. Sitting there sipping wine and encouraging Faith to babble on about nothing like this is just some cozy girls’ night in after all, like she hasn’t been cut to pieces by her arsehole boyfriend or whatever variety of pondscum he happens to be.
“Listen, Mara, are you okay? Really?”
“I’m fine.”
“Maybe I should drive you to hospital. Get someone to check you over, just to make sure there isn’t—”
“I’m fine.”
Her tone icier now, a note of warning clearly sounded, but Faith plunges ahead nevertheless. “You don’t have to put up with that shit, Mara. You don’t have to be scared of getting help either, and if you need someone to be here with you when that arsehole comes back—”
“He won’t be coming back,” Mara snaps. “Believe me.”
“How can you be so sure? Guys like that—”
“Do you take me for an imbecile? A victim?”
Faith swallows, searching for the right words. “I’m just . . . concerned. I can hear stuff through the walls, you know. Stuff that doesn’t sound too good.”
“What you do think is happening here? Do you think that man is my lover? That I need to be rescued from him?”
The sneer in her voice unmistakable despite the peculiar accent, perhaps even because of it, and all at once Faith has had enough, has had more than enough. Feels a little like she’s being kicked in the guts herself once too many times tonight and, “Oh, fuck off. I’m not the one sitting there with my face looking like it got pushed through a plate-glass window.”
Incredibly, Mara laughs.
“This is funny? Some sad prick beats you up a couple times a week, and it’s meant to be funny?”
“He’s not a prick,” Mara says, still smiling. “Well, he may be that, but he’s also a client. Or at least he was—tonight was his first visit and I doubt he left with a good impression. Lasting perhaps, but not good.”
“What sort of a client?” Asking even as the pennies start to tumble.
“The kind who pays for services rendered.”
It’s not like Mara is the first prostitute Faith has ever encountered. Hell, half her former friends could be considered whores in kind, blow jobs and sleights of hand casually swapped for half a tab of speedspun bliss almost any night of the week, a gram or two of pot any given morning after.
Faith takes another mouthful of wine, its flavour grown acidic and sharp.
“Look,” she says. “That doesn’t matter. Just because a guy pays you, doesn’t mean he gets to hurt you.”
Mara shakes her head. “Sweet girl, that’s what they pay me for.”
Except that they don’t.
Pay her, definitely. Pay her enough to mean she only has to work when she wants, and can afford to be choosy about who she sees, and how often.
But they never actually hurt her.
The disorder has a complicated name and even more complicated diagnosis, but what it boils down to is her nervous system is defective, has been all her life. What it boils down to is she can’t feel any kind of pain, can’t feel extremes of hot or cold either for that matter, can’t feel much more than pressure and touch.
What it boils down to is this:
Mara can be slapped and bruised and cut and burned and left broken in more ways than any human being should ever have cause to know, and none of it will hurt. All of it will heal, and most of it will heal very fast.
This makes her special.
This makes her expensive.
Faith hasn’t bothered setting up an internet connection at home yet—no one she cares to email and too many who’ll be wanting to email her—so she’s McSurfing through her thirty-minute lunchbreak instead. Greasy hamburger in one hand, fritzy trackball mouse in the other, and nothing but frustration on the screen in front of her. Loads of words, masses of infocrap—googling can’t feel pain gets her more than sixteen million results just to start with—but nothing really useful. Sensory neuropathy and congenital insensitivity and Riley-Day syndrome and every time a piece seems to fit, it turns out she’s just been holding it upside down.
Mara doesn’t fit anywhere. Not precisely.
Unless it’s on one of the forbidden pages, the family-friendly blockerbots insisting she maintain a minimum safe distance.
Yet another click to bring up congenital analgia and maybe this is it at last: a syndrome characterized by a global insensitivity to physical pain. Following the links to find not a perfect fit but the best one so far, even with the short life expectancy, the high rates of undiagnosed infection, the frequency of scratched corneas, amputated fingers and tongue-tips bitten clean off in infancy. List after list of predictable injuries, obliviously accidental wounds without pain to give notice, but so what?
Maybe Mara just knows how to take care of herself.
Rattle of ice from the boy behind her who’s slurping the dregs of his drink right in her ear, and Faith takes the hint. Five minutes late already and they’ll dock her for that, dock her but still demand that she make up the sales, push her quota of crappy holiday deposits onto pensioners who only leave their homes every second Thursday to punch the pokies and dream of rolling over those three magic bars.
Mara has brought fruitcake. A large, moist lump of a thing that crumbles when Faith tries to cut too thin a wedge, her butter knife clearly not up to the job.
“Don’t feel obliged to eat it. I didn’t.”
The cake left by one of Mara’s clients last Christmas and Faith wonders at the type of men who take pleasure in first reducing a woman to tears and bruises and bloody wounds, and then in bringing her gifts.
“It’s good, I like fruitcake. You sure you don’t want a piece?”
Mara wrinkles her nose. “Thank you, no.” She’s only come to say there’ll be company at her place tonight, from eight until ten give or take half an hour depending on how things develop. In case Faith would rather not be here.
“Thanks for the warning.”
“I don’t mind if you play loud music. That’s what Matthew used to do.”
“Who?”
“The tenant who lived here before.” That midnight gaze sliding over the kitchen where the two of them sit at the wonky little table Faith picked up for twenty dollars at St Vinnies, along with three matching wooden chairs. “Not as neat as you, but better furniture.”
“Right.” Faith wonders just what sort of man he had really been. The bury-your-head-in-the-stereo kind, or the kind who angled for a free sample. She breaks off a sizeable corner of cake and pops it into her mouth, chews very slowly and tries to ignore the thought that emerges yet again from some sick little hollow of her mind.
Sneaking up on Mara with a needle, just to see what would happen.
Just to see if she could make her flinch.
“Come on, then,” Mara says and Faith almost chokes on a chunk of maraschino cherry. “You obviously have questions. Ask away.”
The cake now dry as unbuttered toast on her tongue, too much of it to swallow quickly so Faith chews and chews, but Mara is already flicking a dismissive hand in the air. Never mind the questions, those cautious-curious inquiries posed by so many others in not so many ways. She knows them all by rote anyway, so how about they just skip straight to the answers?
The clients, these men who come to see her, they each have their reasons: sadistic power trip or erotic wish fulfillment, extreme role playing or morbid curiosity plain and unadorned. In some, the reason dwells deep below the surface, inscrutable even to themselves, and there is only the need, a desire pure and compulsive and absolute, that draws them to her. Some she only sees the once before they retreat ashen-faced from her door, the experience not quite what they’d expected, or else, too much more. Some are regular as the new moon. All of them want to hurt her; an uncommon few wish the favour returned. The clients, they’re complicated.
As for Mara, it’s simple. She does it for the money. And for the record, there is no sex involved; she’s not that kind of whore. On occasion, for a certain kind of client, she’ll use her hands to finish things off. But that service costs extra, quite a bit extra, and in any case, most of those who need it prefer to relieve themselves.
What she does, it’s not about sex.
And never mind the soundtrack; every good girl knows how to fake it.
“So you don’t get hurt?” No matter how many websites she looks at, Faith can’t really get her head around this. Pain doesn’t cause damage, it heralds it, and if someone can’t feel pain, then how can they judge if they’re hurt, or how badly?
“I see a specialist,” Mara says. “Regular check ups.”
“Does he know? How they happen, I mean, all your . . . injuries?”
That greyhound smile again, swift and lean and borderline dangerous. “He should do. He causes his fair share.”
“Okay.” Faith swallows, hard. Pushes the rest of her fruitcake away. “I’m not even gonna pretend that I understand—”
“I don’t need you to understand,” Mara cuts in sharply. “I don’t even need you to care. I’m not a puzzle, I’m not something you need to solve. Or rescue. I’ve told you this so you know what’s happening and you won’t come hammering at my door again in the middle of a session and cost me a client.”
“I already said I was sorry—”
“I don’t need that, either.”
The two of them glaring at each other until at last Mara pushes back her chair and gets to her feet. “I realise you’re lonely, Faith. But I don’t do friendship.”
“Even if I paid you for it?”
A cheap shot instantly regretted, but Mara only laughs. “Even then, Faith. Especially then.”
She doesn’t leave. Doesn’t turn on any music or even the lights. Just sits on her bed in the dark with her cheek pressed against the wall, and listens.
To nothing very much, in the end. Random sounds of movement and the occasional murmur of voices, low-key and indecipherable. Not every psycho likes his girl to scream, apparently, and Faiths wonders why she doesn’t feel more relieved.
(Or less disappointed?)
Awkwardly crossed, her left leg has fallen so deeply asleep that she needs both hands to straightens it out. Heavy-numb lump of flesh below her knee, and only the vaguest sensation of pressure as she digs a fingernail into the muscle of her calf, digs hard enough to leave a little red smiley behind.
Is that what Mara feels or, rather, what she doesn’t? Ever?
Faith tries to imagine what it would be like to have your whole body cocooned in this way, to have never known even the incidental pain of stubbed toes, torn fingernails and paper cuts, never mind anything more profound. Might it be so bad, if you were careful? Thinking of the reasons she left Sydney, left the people in Sydney, what was left of them, Faith grimaces.
Painlessness, on both sides of her skin: she could wish for worse.
Sometimes, Mara leaves a note. Little scraps of powder blue paper wedged into the screen door at eye level with a handwritten date and time, three or four days’ notice for Faith to make other plans if she feels the need.
(Mostly she doesn’t.)
But more often lately, it’s a personal appearance, a handful words or perhaps a whole cryptic, fractured conversation about spoiled milk, lost languages, or the tribe of magpies that wander along the street each morning, spotting grubs in the nature strip and marking each passerby with a polished-marble glare.
“Friend of the crows,” Faith murmurs.
“Pardon me?”
“I used to know someone who said that whenever she saw a magpie: friend of the crows, and she’d point two fingers at it and then back at herself. So they wouldn’t dive-bomb her come spring.”
“And was she?”
“What?”
“A friend of the crows.”
Mara sounding so serious that Faith has to laugh. “Geez, I don’t know, maybe. Never did get swooped on, not that I remember.” And Mara nods, once, and turns on her heel, and that’s the end of that yet again. Two steps forward, three steps back, like someone braving herself to jump from the high-dive board, and Faith wonders what it is that Mara is after. Why she can’t come out and say straight up that maybe she is just as lonely as Faith, that a friend might actually be what she needs.
And yet.
There is definitely something not quite right about the woman. Not drugs or drink or any other kind of mundane madness—and Faith has known enough of these in recent times to tell—but something else she can’t quite identify.
Mara is just . . . not right.
Middle of the night phone calls never a good thing and Faith swears loudly as she lurches from her bed, tripping on a boot and bumping her knee on the corner of the dresser on her way to the door. Three months in the townhouse and she still can’t find her way in the dark, so it’s a speedy zombie shuffle down the hall with arms outstretched to fumble for the loungeroom light switch while she tries to pinpoint the handset’s location from its shrill, persistent ring.
Who the fuck could be calling at this hour?
No one has this number except work and her mum, and she’s sworn, she’s sworn, that no matter who turns up on her doorstep or what they say or plead or promise, she won’t let them know where Faith has gone.
Of all people, she knows the importance of this.
The phone is under a couch cushion. Faith’s stomach tightens as she presses the talk button, lifts the thing cautiously to her ear. “Hello?”
Someone breathing, or just static on a crappy line? Hey babygirl, when you gonna come back to us? She can almost hear Livia crooning those words, and she swallows hard. Please not her, not Liv—the one person in the whole damn world she can refuse nothing, even when those brilliant green eyes are cracked and scattered and ice-locked, or perhaps especially then—and hello, she says again. “Hello?”
“Faith? Faith, it’s me.”
“Mara?” The voice so scratchy-faint that for a second she thinks she’s guessed wrong. Thinks she should hang up right now before it’s too late, because she really doesn’t have the strength to do this all over again, but please the voice whispers, please come get me, and her heart falls back from her mouth just a little.
“Mara, what’s wrong? Where are you?”
She must have misheard, or miswritten, because Grafton Avenue only goes up to number 119 and then it’s nothing but parkland. Close-huddled shrubs and knee-high grasses, with a wan yellow streetlight illuminating the sign that tries to pass this place off as Urban Forest. Yeah right, and Faith checks the envelope where she scribbled down the address. Definitely 141, but maybe it should be 114? Or perhaps not Grafton Avenue, but Street or Crescent or Road, if such a beast exists?
Unclipping her seatbelt, she reaches across for the Melways on the passenger seat and flips to the index. The interior light in the old Toyota hasn’t worked for two years, so she’s squinting her way through the G’s when something taps at the driver side window. Little scared-mouse tap still sudden enough to startle: Mara standing out there in the night with a half-curled fist and a face bleached whiter than Faith has ever seen on someone still living, pointing at the locked rear door with her other hand, her mouth moving soundlessly beyond the glass.
Three frozen seconds before Faith finally gets her arse up and out of the car. Mara is wrapped in something that looks like a sheet, low-budget toga costume hanging in thick folds from her shoulders, the dull-dark fabric even darker in patches, and Faith doesn’t want to think too much about those just yet. More concerned with getting Mara into the car, Mara who shakes her head when Faith tries to lead her around to the passenger side, who wants to lie down instead, who says she needs to lie down, and so Faith opens the back door and helps her crawl inside.
Even with legs loosely curled, Mara takes up almost the whole length of the seat. This tall, lean woman not so solid now, and the way she shivers in her goose-pimpled skin almost breaks Faith’s heart. One bare foot sticks out from beneath the sheet with toes clenched tight, pallid little piggies turning their backs to the world, and Faith tugs a corner of the fabric over them.
“Mara, don’t go to sleep on me, okay?” Leaning in and over the woman, pushing damp-matted hair from her face. “Listen, I don’t know this area. Where do I go, where’s the nearest hospital?”
A cobra could not have struck as quickly.
“No hospitals!” Hand closing rat-trap tight around Faith’s wrist, pupils so dilated they make her whole eyes glow black, and no, she hisses again. No hospitals.
“Fuck that, Mara. You need—”
“No! If you even drive past a hospital, I swear to—” Turning her head aside as she starts to cough, brutal as broken glass, and when it’s over her chin is smeared with blood. “I swear I will get out of this car. I’ll get out right now, if that’s what you’re planning.” And she almost does, pushing herself up off the seat and sliding towards the door until Faith wrestles her back down, or tries to, tells her not to be so fucking stupid but she already knows the battle is lost. No way she can take this woman anywhere against her will, and she’d bet both tits that Mara really would throw herself from a moving vehicle if she so much as smelled an Emergency Room sign.
“All right. All right, fuck!”
A long, tense moment before Mara nods and finally releases her grip. “Just get me out of here. Please.”
“Where to?” Faith asks bitterly. Fresh handprint of blood on her arm and she wipes it on her shirt, navy blue fabric none the worse for such a stain. “Home to warm milk and jim-jams?”
“No, not home.” Mara closes her eyes, sinks back against the cheap vinyl upholstery. “Get us onto the highway and drive south. There’s a motel about twenty minutes from here.”
Faith is done arguing. So when she spots the bright-lit storefront of a twenty-four hour pharmacy—Because Your Health Shouldn’t Have To Wait!—after only a few kilometers, she doesn’t even ask. Just flicks on the indicator and pulls into the near-deserted carpark. “Don’t even start,” she tells the rearview mirror, Mara’s instantly suspicious gaze catching her own within the glass. “Unless you reckon you can put yourself back together with whatever this cruddy motel of yours has in its minibar, then I’m picking up some stuff here. That okay with you?”
Not really a question, and Mara doesn’t answer it, doesn’t say another word until Faith returns to the car. Two small plastic bags rustling with bandages and Dettol and surgical tape and anything else she thought might come in handy. Paracetamol too, for the headache that looms at her temples and she presses a couple of these into her palm straight away. Dry swallows and turns to flash the box at the woman in the back seat, “Don’t suppose you want some . . .”
Mara’s laughter splinters to a wet and ragged cough.
“Rainbows End.”
“What?”
“The motel, it’s called Rainbows End. Keep driving, you’ll see it.”
She almost didn’t. Almost sped right past the place, with its tall pine trees half hiding the vacancy sign out front, and now that she’s standing in the cramped reception area, she wishes she’d done just that. The night manager pushes a form across the counter and Faith hesitates for a second, pen in hand. She doesn’t know Mara’s last name and is reluctant to use her own because . . . well, just because, and so: Courtney Love, the first words that pop into her head and now nothing else will, but the man doesn’t even blink when she slides the form back.
Made up name, made up address, the tariff paid with cash. Two nights in advance because otherwise they’ll have to be out by ten this morning and it’s already almost four, and Faith feels sick.
Sick and scared and royally pissed off.
Their twin-share room right at the end of the complex, no neighbours if the absence of cars is any indication, so thank fuck for small mercies. Faith parks at the front and gets out to open the car door for Mara, chauffeur duties never grimmer than this as her passenger extends an arm for support, stares up at her with eyes deeply shadowed but still burning bright. Tiger eyes, savage and regal, and how it must sting for Mara to have to lean against Faith like this.
Beneath the pine-sharp patina of disinfectant, the room smells of strangers and stale cigarettes. Faith helps Mara over to one of the beds, dumps the pharmacy bags beside her and then goes back to sling the Shhh! Guest Sleeping! sign onto the doorknob. Flimsy chain latch on the inside and she pulls that across too.
“I want some water,” Mara says.
“Let’s have a look at you first.”
Mara shakes her head, clutches her toga-sheet with both hands. “I can look after myself.” Weighty blue-green cotton like you’d find in an operating theatre, far too much of it soaked magenta by now, and Faith has well and truly had enough of this shit.
“Fuck you, then.”
Four long strides to the door of the room, fishing the car keys from her pocket with one hand while the other reaches for the security chain, because this isn’t her problem and never was and—
“Wait,” Mara whispers. “Please.” Little-girl-lost voice Faith has never heard before, little girl lost forever, and somehow that’s more frightening than all the blood. A voice to stop her dead, and she turns to see Mara rising carefully to her feet. “Look then,” Mara says, “Look if it matters so much to you.” And she lets the sheet fall.
Bride of Fucking Frankenstein the first thing that comes to mind, but it’s so much worse than that.
Black-bristled sutures winding their jagged way from clavicles to pelvis, vaguely Y-shaped like an autopsy incision and crowded by an ugly patchwork of cuts that could only in these circumstances be thought lesser wounds. Ribs and belly and the almost non-existent swell of her breasts all bearing the mark of knife or scalpel, some stitches torn apart and bleeding fresh, crimson rivulets to join the dark and clotted mess that cakes her body from the waist down.
“Christ.”
The word little more than appalled, astonished breath, but Mara just grins. “Nothing to do with him,” she says, as a thin trickle of blood slides down her calf and around her ankle, pools on grotty grey carpet that has seen better days—though surely not worse ones.
For an entire precarious minute, Faith just stares, car keys digging sharply into her palm. She can still leave, can still turn her back on this whole fucked-up mess and just walk away, drive away and try very hard to pretend that she never even heard the phone ring tonight, because this is not her problem. This is Mara’s nightmare but if Faith doesn’t leave right now, if she doesn’t open the motel door right this second, then it will become her nightmare as well and god only knows when—or if—either of them will wake up.
Mara wobbles a little, unsteady on her feet, then half-sinks, half-falls back onto the bed. “Can I have that water now?”
And even as Faith closes her eyes, even before she takes her first resigned step towards the ensuite, a shored-up space within her cracks and splits and breaks wide open, and something far too familiar worms its way out, uncurls its long and greedy limbs, and laughs.
The scant, thin hour before dawn and Mara seems to have fallen asleep at last. Her shallow breathing has deepened, become more regular, and there’s not the slightest response when Faith calls her name. No movement, no murmur, not even the semi-conscious flutter of an eyelid, but Faith thinks she’ll wait little while longer just to be sure.
Wet, bloody-pink wads of cotton wool litter the floor, and a stained towel huddles at the end of the bed where Faith left it once Mara finally pushed her away. Enough, enough for now, after Faith finished washing the dried and crusted blood from her chest, her stomach, her ribs. Pale fists bunched in the sheet around her hips, clenching tighter when Faith tried to pull that down as well, tried to see the damage lurking below but there’s nothing, Mara said. Just blood from everything else, and clean or dirty, what she really needed was rest.
The smell of antiseptic fills the room and Faith worries what Mara might look like beneath her sutured skin.
Or even just beneath the sheet.
Finally, careful to make not the smallest telltale sound, Faith slips from her bed and pads over to Mara’s. She takes hold of the stained and crumpled fabric and peels it slowly back, wincing at the whispersoft crackle of dried blood as she draws it all the way to Mara’s parted knees, morbid magician flourish to reveal—
Just what, it takes Faith a second or two to fathom.
Nothing left of what should be found between a woman’s legs. Only several deep cuts cleaving flesh right down to the glisten of bone, vicious wounds like someone put a fucking axe to work, and filled with so much dried and crusted blood that Faith tastes bile rising fresh to her throat. So much blood that maybe it seems worse than it is—nothing band-aids are gonna fix, sure, but still maybe not as horrendous as she thinks either—and she forces herself to lean forward, to look closer.
Too close: not enough time to withdraw as Mara suddenly twists sideways and draws up her legs. Kicks out and catches Faith full in the chest with enough force to send her spinning across the room, winded and gasping like she’s been kicked by a frightened horse. Tacky carpet beneath her hands as she lands and scuttles backwards on her arse, more than a little frightened herself now with Mara getting up from the bed and stalking naked towards her. Amazon tall and stitched together like a broken doll, a piece of her too large—too chunky—to be simply skin flapping open between her legs, slapping against her thigh with each determined step.
Faith barely makes it to the toilet before she throws up.
“Hey.” Hands on her back, her shoulders, reaching around to pull the hair from her face. “You shouldn’t have seen that, you should have trusted me. You should have listened when I said I was fine.”
“You’re not fine.” Turning to find Mara with a motel towel wrapped close around her waist, greyish-white and already spotted scarlet. “Can you even see yourself, can you see what he’s . . . done to you? What he’s . . .” The image of torn, bloodied flesh still stark behind her eyes, blinding, and Faith stuffs a fist into her mouth. Mara, she whispers, and oh christ, and then Mara again.
They’re all the words she can summon.
Mara sighs and sinks heavily to the floor, knees pressed tight together. “You don’t understand, Faith. You don’t even know the half of it.”
The story is, last night was a game of Doctors & Nurses. More precisely, Doctors & Doctors—Mara’s specialist friend with some friends of his own along for the ride, medical degrees decidedly optional. A room in a house done up as an operating theatre, and Mara the star attraction.
A patient who would remain fully conscious while you sliced and prodded and poked around inside her. A patient who would speak on command, who would weep or gasp or not speak at all if that’s what you preferred. Eyes wide and bright and completely aware, even as you curved a hand around her heart to feel its rhythms against your awestruck palm.
Even as you stitched her closed again, your fingers sweating, trembling, inside their surgical gloves.
The story is, even this was not enough. Sex never in the contract but one of them had pulled down her bikini briefs anyway, the others circling close like leering wolves with the scent of blood thick in their nostrils. Until they forced apart her legs and saw what wasn’t there.
As for what was, well. Nothing any of them could ever have seen before.
Simply, nothing.
Mara thinks they used a cleaver. They’d brought all sorts of tools, all kinds of implements to play with. A cleaver, or some other heavy-bladed knife.
But the story is: Mara gave far better than she ever might have gotten and by the end, not all of the blood spilled had been hers.
Not even most of it.
Faith doesn’t want to know exactly what that means. What any of it means. Is only too grateful to be sent in search of the small, combination-locked suitcase Mara has left in care of the management for precisely such an occasion.
“Should have told us you was with her, love.” A different man from the previous night, tall and hollow-cheeked, leaning towards Faith with both forearms flat on the counter. “She stays as long she needs, tell her. No charge.”
Then, with genuine concern, “She okay, you reckon?”
And Faith, who knows nothing about anything anymore and is trying very hard to feel just the same, merely nods. “I think so. She says so.”
Back in the room, Mara thanks her for the suitcase and disappears with it into the ensuite. There is the sound of the door locking and, after a few minutes, the rhythmic patter of the shower. Faith flops onto the bed—her bed, not the other one—and throws an elbow over her eyes to block out the morning sun now squeezing slantways through the not-so-vertical blinds.
Thoughts of Sydney crowd forward and, for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t push them automatically away. Livia and Ben and all the others she left behind, one thousand kilometres worth of behind, because who knew how wide that particular vortex yawned. We’re, like, exploring Antarctica here, someone had mused late one night. Russ, or maybe Corin, she can’t recall. Wedged in her memory instead, the wired exultation in Liv’s reply: Baby, no, there’s dirt and rocks and shit under there. This is the fucking Arctic circle: nothing but ice all the way down.
Livia, raccoon eyes now perpetually smudged with day-old eyeliner, her dyed black hair overgrown with greasy blonde.
Livia, finding veins in her ankles so she can still go sleeveless in summer.
Livia, scratching herself to ruin in the search for subcutaneous life.
Faith had fled. No dramatic watershed moment, no death or overdose or even accidental injury to propel her into the harsh light of day, just waking up one winter morning with frozen toes and the even colder realisation that if she dragged herself off to Livia’s that night she might never, ever find her way back home.
Four weeks at her mum’s instead. Best mother in the whole damn world to keep her under lock and key like that, self-imposed house arrest in suburbia while she cleaned up, thawed out, thankful that she hadn’t really even begun to plumb the sort of depths that Livia and the rest had so eagerly dived to. Surfacing from that level might have—almost certainly would have—been impossible. Would have been impossible regardless if she hadn’t then picked up and moved to Melbourne with barely a pause for breath or the burning of all her address books. Faith had proved herself stronger than she’d thought, but no way would she ever be strong enough to close a door in Livia’s face if that girl decided to come knocking.
Only now there’s Mara, and Faith wonders if she doesn’t have some sort of subconscious freak-compass guiding her every movement.
The ensuite door swings open, spilling forth steam, fluorescent light and someone Faith almost doesn’t recognise. Mara has cut her hair, close-cropped schoolboy style slicked back from her forehead with gel or maybe just water from the shower. Dressed in black jeans and a baggy black t-shirt, she even seems to move differently. Loose-hipped, almost a swagger, with pale arms swinging by her sides as though buffeted by a careless breeze.
“Still here?” The surprise in her voice, no matter how mild, is just too much. This is impossible, Mara is impossible. Pain or no pain, no one gets cut open like that and walks around so effortlessly the very next day; no one gets butchered the way this woman has been and walks around at all, never mind in fucking jeans. Faith realises that if she wasn’t so furious, so well and truly fed up, then she’d most likely be terrified out of her wits right now.
“What are you, Mara?” Anger definitely the preferred option, and she lets it all the way loose. “What the fuck are you?” Launching herself from the bed, reaching for Mara with no clear intention beyond doing some sort of violence of her own, but it hardly matters. Mara catches her wrists in hands too strong to be human, crosses them over and then pushes her away. Hard.
Faith lands on the corner of the mattress and topples straight to the floor, terror now sliding into prominence as she rubs her wrists together, so sore the bones themselves seem bruised.
Mara regards her in silence for a few seconds, then nods, as though arriving at some kind of decision. She sits down on the bed opposite, legs apart and elbows resting on her knees. “I’m not sure what I am,” she says quietly, staring at a point between her bare, blue-veined feet. “You have so many stories, it becomes difficult—confusing—to hold onto the truth.”
Faith swallows, not daring to move.
“I did not fall.” Mara glances up, her tear-glazed eyes still sharply focused. “But neither did I choose a side. And more than that, I can’t remember.”
She winces, hand moving swiftly to her waist where it rubs in smooth, slow circles just below her ribs. “Not all of them doctors, then.” And to Faith’s wordless, uncomprehending shake of the head, “The liver, I think. Re-arranging itself to the proper position.”
“But you . . . it looked like that hurt. Did that hurt?”
Mara shrugs.
“You told me you didn’t . . . that you couldn’t . . .” Not finishing, not wanting to finish. Not wanting to say the words to make it real, so Mara says them for her.
“I feel pain, Faith. I feel everything that’s ever been done to me, while it lasts.” Half a smile, half a grimace curving her thin, pale lips. “But think, would you really feel a mosquito bite if your leg had just been severed? Or would you want to feel it even more? Would you long for that bite, that almost insignificant sting, because the other pain—the loss, the absence—was just too unbearable?”
Faith gets to her knees, gets oh so slowly to her feet. “Mara . . .”
“No.” Even with half a room between them, the raised hand snaps her frozen to the spot. “It’s too late for Mara now. Whatever she had, you can have. Or not. I won’t be returning to that place.”
Run. Run. Run. Each beat of her heart imploring escape, but Faith can’t seem to move. Finds her mouth opening instead, asking if there is something she can do, because if there is anything at all that might help—
“What can you do?” The woman that was Mara snaps. “You and your kind who know nothing but selfishness and cruelty.” Rising from the bed, one hand lifting her shirt as if to illustrate the point. Jagged central incision that actually does look markedly better, even after these few brief hours—until two long fingers dig their way beneath the stitches and tug, pulling out half a dozen with a sickening wet pop. Gaping, bleeding wound in her belly big enough for a hand to slip into, and it does, emerging again scarlet and dripping and offered to Faith like a promise. “Tell me, what can any of you do?”
Faith feels the motel room door against her shoulder blades, even though she can’t recall backing into it.
And the woman, the creature that was Mara stalks towards her, taller than ever with bitter-black eyes darker than the despair of stolen souls. “Cruel. Selfish. Arrogant beyond sufferance.” But that hand, those blood-soaked fingers, are unexpectedly gentle as they caress Faith’s cheek, slide down to cup her chin.
“Yet you are loved,” the creature that was Mara whispers. “You are all loved.”
Faith can only hope the taste of salt on her lips comes from her own tears.
“Leave.” The hand loosens, those terrible eyes close. “Leave now.”
And for once, Faith does not need to be told a second time.
The door to Mara’s townhouse stands slightly ajar, slightly crooked. Half off its hinges, Faith sees when she approaches, and inside the place the damage is worse. Furniture broken, upholstery torn. Smashed crockery and glassware turning the kitchen into a glittering minefield, and the bedroom reeking from the dozens of bottles of perfume that have been spilled onto the stripped and blood-stained mattress. In the wreck of a home still devoid of intimate possessions and personal touches, the saddest thing is the painting of the floating red rose. The canvas now cut to pieces, palm-sized scraps scattered over the loungeroom floor, and the wooden frame upon which it had been stretched cowering in a corner like some skeletal, broken-backed beast.
By her foot, a bit of canvas lies face down. arest Mar scrawled on its back in a small but confident hand, and Faith gets down on her knees to find the rest of the inscription. Oversized, paint-stiff jigsaw with too many blank pieces, but finally she has all the ones she needs.
For My Timeless Love, My Dearest Marguerette, who waits for no man. Arthur. New Orleans, July 1928.
And Marguerette may not be Mara. And Mara may have lied about the artwork being done for her by a friend. And Arthur, whoever he was, may have painted this canvas for a woman who did decide to wait for him after all, a woman with whom he grew old and lined, a woman who was mortal and human and who did not look up at the stars at night and remember what it was like to walk above them.
But Faith doesn’t think so.
Especially when she turns the pieces of canvas over to see they show the curved, blood-draggled feather. Long and thin and silverwhite, the feather of eagle or albatross, or some other creature equally glorious and skybound and doomed.
Arthur, whoever he was, he had known.
Faiths curls up on the carpet, knees drawn close to her chest, and wonders when she’ll stop crying. Don’t you ever forget how strong you are, sweetheart, her mum had said. You got yourself through this, you can get yourself through anything.
But right now, all she wants is to feel Livia’s arms around her, Livia murmuring meaningless shit into her ear. All she wants is not to feel the weight of a new day, the weight of new knowledge too frightening to consider except from the most oblique of angles. Never mind how she gets there.
Never mind if she never, ever finds her way out again.
You are loved, it had said, blood running down its slender wrist.
Right now, the scraps of canvas clutched in her desperate, desolate fists, Faith thinks love never burned colder than this.
Kirstyn McDermott has been working in the darker alleyways of speculative fiction for much of her career. Her two novels, Madigan Mine and Perfections, each won an Aurealis Award and her most recent book is Caution: Contains Small Parts, a collection of short fiction published by Twelfth Planet Press. She produced and co-hosted a literary discussion podcast, The Writer and the Critic, for several years and now lives in Ballarat, Australia, with fellow writer Jason Nahrung and their two cats. Kirstyn is currently completing a creative writing PhD at Federation University with a research focus on re-visioned fairy tales. “Painlessness” won the Aurealis Award and the Ditmar Award. Find her at www.kirstynmcdermott.com