Nerine Dorman
I like the big house better than when Mom and I used to stay in the flat. There are lots more rooms where I can play hide-and-seek, and the furniture has dragon feet holding balls. At night I’m sure the tables and chairs go for walks. Mom says I’m silly but if I lie awake after the lights go out then I hear feet marching along the passage outside my room. Up and down they go all night. Sometimes someone calls a name, over and over again. It’s a woman, and she says Lilium, Lilium … Lilium. So sad it makes my chest tight and my eyes burn.
I asked Uncle Rory about the people in the passages but he just looked at me funny. Mom told me to stop talking nonsense, but I know I hear footsteps. I hear them every night but I don’t get out to look because then the shadow thing under the bed will grab my feet.
Sometimes I want to call out “Here I am!” when the woman asks for Lilium, but I’m scared I’m going to get into trouble for waking Mom and Uncle Rory.
We live by the sea now but Mom hasn’t taken me to the beach yet. It’s walking distance, she says, and we’re right by the big lagoon where the flamingos visit. I like the flamingos and I want to go look at them, and also go on the swings by the play park, but I’m not allowed outside the gate without Mom or Auntie Stella. Uncle Rory is always too busy in his studio so I mustn’t bother him but I don’t like Auntie Stella. She comes to look after me every day and she stinks like cigarettes and her perfume is too sweet. I can taste it when she hugs me or picks me up. I don’t like it when she hugs me. The skin on her neck looks like wrinkly rubber and I think it’s a mask. Underneath her skin is scaly, like in that TV show I’m not allowed to watch where the bad people are green and swallow rats.
Mom says I must be very quiet during the day because Uncle Rory works from home. He takes photos of the nice ladies who have bright red lips and wear panties. I know this because they come outside to smoke cigarettes when they have their tea break. They are always nice to me. Once they put some lipstick on me but Auntie Stella got very cross and made me wipe my mouth clean before Mom got home or Uncle Rory saw. She says they are bad ladies but how can they be bad when they are so nice to me?
Uncle Rory often has parties at the house. I’m supposed to be in bed then but I wear my blanket like a wizard’s cloak and sneak around. The adults are always so busy talking and laughing and dancing. They listen to music so loudly they have to yell to hear each other. Sometimes the nice ladies with the bright red lips are there, like Sindy and Desiré. I want to talk to them but they are busy—pouring drinks and chopping white powder on plates with their bank cards. Chop. Chop. Chop.
Then they roll up money and stick the tubes in their nose and sniff loudly.
I tried the same the other day. I didn’t have money so I drew paper money and rolled it up. I got some flour from the kitchen and Auntie Stella found me trying to make those lines. Chop. Chop. Chop. But I didn’t have a bank card so I was using my fingers and I got flour all over the tiles in the hallway.
Auntie Stella was very cross and smacked my bum.
I’ll be a good girl. I won’t stick things in my nose again.
Not long after we move in I see the green lady. She stays in the room under the stairs that go to the basement. She has long black fingernails like claws and eyes like a cat. I’m scared of her but she’s nice to me and whispers at me to come downstairs to talk to her.
“Look, little girl, I have a present for you,” she says, and holds out her hand.
Her eyes gleam in the low light, but I’m scared of going down the stairs because of the shadows. I don’t look too closely at her gift.
But I’ll sit at the top, and the green lady will sing and tell me stories about a city under the ground called Midian, where all the monsters go.
“Will you take me there?” I ask her.
The green lady smiles and shakes her head. “I can’t.”
Auntie Stella doesn’t like it that I sit by the basement’s stairs so much. I hear her tell my mom, “Jennifer needs to go to play school to be with other children her age. It’s not right that the child be inside all day. She’s making imaginary friends.”
“What is your name?” I ask the green lady one day.
“Lakrimay,” says the green lady.
“Are you an imaginary friend?” I ask.
Lakrimay smiles and shakes her head sadly. Then she reaches into the pocket of her black dress and offers me a little bone. It nestles in her palm and makes me think of a long, thin finger. “I’ve got a present for you. Will you come downstairs and get it?”
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s an albatross bone,” says Lakrimay. Then she tells me how the giant birds spend months at sea and never touch the land, always wandering, wandering in the wind. Yet every year they go back and meet their mates at the same place.
I want to go down into the basement but I can’t. The shadows will pour down my throat and choke me. As it is, my heart is racing so much I’m scared it’s going to end up in my mouth. Maybe that’s why I sit at the top of the stairs—to see how long I can be at the edge where the day melts into night.
The next morning, when I wake up, the albatross bone is on my bedside table. The surface is creamy and smooth, and so very light. I think of the bird with the big wings flying forever, never resting, never walking, and I wonder what it must be like to soar like that.
“What is that ugly thing you got there?” Auntie Stella asks me when she comes to get me dressed for breakfast.
“It’s an albatross bone,” I tell her.
“Sies, that dirty thing? Give it here.” She reaches out for it but I’m faster than her, and I run away to one of the rooms upstairs on the second floor where I’m not supposed to go.
“Jennifer!” Auntie Stella screeches. “Come back here this instant!”
I pretend I don’t hear her and I go hide my albatross bone in the room Mom calls the spare room, where an orange quilt covers a big bed. This room scares me sometimes because I can hear a clock ticking and the air is always very thick. Sometimes I think there is a monster hiding in the cupboard, and if I keep my back to the doors, it’s going to jump out with long, spider hands and snatch me into the darkness.
But no one goes here except for the time when there was one of the parties, and I saw the man and the woman wrestling on the bed. There’s a little table with a drawer on the side by the window, and I hide the bone in the drawer where I put the marble I found in the garden. This is my treasure chest where I’m going to put all my special things, I decide. Magic things, like when I was grubbing in the flower bed and my fingers closed around the cat’s-eye marble.
I don’t like Uncle Rory. And it’s not just because he is always telling me to stay out of his studio, but it’s because he makes Mom cry. They think I don’t know, that because I’m just a little girl I don’t understand that he’s horrible to her. Mom works so hard at the hotel and she doesn’t like it when Uncle Rory’s friends come have a party and she’s not there. She doesn’t like that the nice ladies visit when she’s not here either. They always close the door and lock it and I can hear them giggling.
“Go play with your toys!” Uncle Rory growls.
It’s summer, and the wind blows terribly. It rattles the gutter so it goes brrrrrrrrr, and Mom says we can’t go to the beach when the wind blows but she’s at work so much. I ask Auntie Stella but says she doesn’t like getting sand in her shoes, so we don’t go. Not even to the play park. The nice ladies are busy putting on pretty panties for Uncle Rory, so they can’t take me.
So I sit by the big window in the lounge sometimes with my face pressed against the glass so I can watch the flamingos shivering in the wind walking on their stilt legs. The lagoon’s water is a nasty bruised color, and the clouds are ripped on the mountain. People hold on to their hats. I once saw a man lose his newspaper. It flew away like a bird. I don’t like going outside when the wind blows because it steals my breath and drives sand into my mouth. So I look at Uncle Rory’s picture books and am careful not to tear the pages. He always says That Child will tear the pages.
“Tell me about outside,” Lakrimay asks me when I see her again.
So I tell her about the wind ripping the trees, and the way the dust circles and gets up my nose. We sit and listen to the moaning in the roof, and I tell Lakrimay about the other monsters in the house.
She laughs softly. “Those are not the monsters you must be afraid of, dear.”
I ask her if she can take me down to the beach but she shakes her head. “Not during the day.”
“Why?”
Lakrimay won’t say. Instead she tells me about Lilium, who is also a little girl.
“Where is Lilium now?” I ask.
Lakrimay turns her face into the shadows and won’t talk to me.
The next morning a white mussel shell rests on my bedside table. Two perfect halves, the inside still moist with sticky grains of sand. They look like butterfly wings and I remember going to the beach with Mom where I filled my bucket with these shells. Sea butterflies that live underwater, I told Mom. She laughed and said the animals in the shells lived under the sand.
“But how can they breathe there?” I asked. “Aren’t they scared of the dark?”
Mom couldn’t explain it to me so I prefer to think of the sea butterflies and how their shell wings go from a bony white to inky purple where the two points meet. This time I don’t wait for Auntie Stella to come yell at me for the shell. I get up and go hide the gift in the spare room, with my albatross bone and marble.
Uncle Rory makes Mom cry a lot more than when we first came to live here. I hide when they start shouting and when I tell Auntie Stella some of the words, like “slut” and “bitch,” she slaps me hard through the face and says I must never use those words again. They are bad words. Dirty words. Go wash your mouth out with soap.
One day Uncle Rory gets so mad he slaps Mom like I’ve seen on TV. She starts packing up our things but then Uncle Rory comes and says sorry, he didn’t mean it, and the next thing they’re hugging and kissing and I must go outside the room.
I can hardly see because I’m so scared and my eyes are full of tears, and I go to the basement stairs.
“What’s wrong, Jennikin?” Lakrimay asks me.
And I tell her as I wipe at my face and taste the salt of my own tears.
“Come here, and I will sing you stories,” Lakrimay tells me.
I want to. She’s holding her arms out to me and her eyes shine there in the shadows. I could go down to her. She’ll keep me safe from the dark, and she’s not an imaginary friend anymore, is she? So I get up and take that first step, but then the darkness creeps up the stairs to me and I remember what it feels like to wake in the night and have the shadow man press his tongue in my eyes.
“I can’t,” I say, and whimper.
Larkimay reaches up. She has something in her hands. It is orange and white, and curled like a giant snail.
“You must come down a little. I have something for you.”
My fingers tight around the banister, I take a few steps, but not so many that I can’t quickly turn around and fly back up.
This is the closest I’ve ever been to Lakrimay. Her skin looks like milk in a green glass bottle, all shiny. Her eyes are large and slitted, and her hair flexes and coils like the octopus I saw at the aquarium, only it’s blacker than the shadows. It smells of fish down here, and like the sea.
Lakrimay hisses when her hand creeps out of the shadow, as if the light makes her sore, and her movement is quick, feather-light as she puts a shell on the step below my feet. Then she withdraws, her hand clasped to her belly.
Quick as a cat, I snatch up the shell and run back up the stairs with my gift pressed against my chest.
“Thank you, Lakrimay,” I say.
“Every time you are sad, I want you to press the shell to your ear and listen to the sound. That’s the sea in there.”
I press the open end of the shell to my ear, just like she said, and it’s true. There, faintly, the hiss-hiss-hiss of waves on the sand.
“Do you like it?” she asks.
“Very much!”
The shell goes into the little treasure chest with the albatross bone, marble, and white mussel wings. But almost every other day Lakrimay brings me another gift. Small cowries with little teeth; a mermaid’s purse, all slick and black; delicate sea urchins like buttons; blue, brown, and green sea glass; and bits of polished driftwood.
Whenever Mom and Uncle Rory fight, I go hide in the spare room and pack out my sea treasures. I listen to the sea whisper in my nautilus shell—Lakrimay taught me the words for all the shells—and sometimes I can even hear my friend sing. She always sounds sad, like she lost someone. Lilium, Lilium, Lilium. When I’m playing with my treasures, I don’t hear the slamming doors, the screaming or stuff being broken. I have the sea here, inside, and I make up my own stories about adventures Lakrimay and I have in the other place, in Midian where the monsters go.
“Take me to the sea, take me to Midian,” I ask Lakrimay.
“Not in the day,” she answers. “But if you come to me after the sun sets, and your mom’s gone to bed…” Her white teeth flash, and hope burns fierce and bright in her gaze.
But at night I’m too scared of the shadow man and the thing under the bed, and I sleep with the covers pulled tight over my head so the skeletons can’t stuff their bony wrists down my throat. If I open my eyes just a crack I will see the shadow man dance at the foot of my bed. I don’t care if the air is stuffy under the duvet. It’s better than the things waiting to get me, waiting for that one moment when I’m not careful and stick an arm or a foot out by mistake.
I want to keep Lakrimay’s shell by my bed so I can press it to my ear when I’m scared but I worry that Mom or Auntie Stella will want to know where I got it and then they’ll make me throw it away.
Mom and Uncle Rory have a terrible fight one day during lunch and it’s all my fault. We sit at the kitchen table and I ask why big people like to wrestle without their clothes on. A sudden, terrible silence drops into the air, and Uncle Rory and Mom both stop cutting at the food on their plates.
I’ve got my bowl and my spoon in front of me but I’m not very hungry. I don’t like the way Mom cooks when it’s her turn, and it is her turn today. Auntie Stella is off, as Mom says, which means I don’t have to see her.
“Where did you see them wrestling?” Mom asks, her voice very quiet.
“In the…”
Uncle Rory has gone ice-white and his stare is enough to make me want to shrivel up like a snail covered in salt.
“Studio…” I finish, that last word a whisper.
Mom’s shriek makes me slip under the table, where I hide while plates and glasses go flying.
“Bastard!” Mom screams.
Uncle Rory says terrible things about Mom, about how she’s a user, and he roars at her like an angry lion like on TV. But that’s when I scamper out of the kitchen, tear-blinded. I run straight to the spare room. I would go sit at the top of the stairs by Lakrimay but it’s too close to the kitchen. Once I have my treasures packed out across the orange quilt I can no longer hear the yelling. Or maybe it’s because the yelling doesn’t matter anymore.
I’m the princess who drinks tears. The albatross carries me across the moon to the land of Midian. We live in a chamber of mirrors with mother-of-pearl floors, and Lakrimay brushes my hair with a comb carved from bone. When the bad man tries to hurt us, the monsters rise up out of the shadows and they tear him into little scraps. Rip, rip, rip.
I scratch my fingers on the rough fabric of the bedspread and I imagine that they have little sharp claws hooking into Uncle Rory’s flesh that scratch him like the time I hooked my leg on a rusty nail.
The door bashes open and Mom stands there. Her face is very red and she’s breathing hard.
“Why don’t you answer when I call you?”
“I—”
She notices my precious things, all lined up on the bed, and her face turns all ugly. “What the fuck is this? We’ve got enough shit without having to deal with you carting this rubbish up here.” Mom strides forward, pulls me up, and delivers a hard smack on my bum.
I scream at the pain. She hasn’t hit me in a very long time and the shock of it makes me blank for a moment.
“Go to your room, and stay there!” Mom yells. Then she mutters to herself as she scoops my treasures into the wastebasket next to the bed.
“No!” I yell, and try to stop her. “You’re break—”
The albatross bone drops to the wooden floor and shatters into two smaller pieces and many splinters, and something inside me breaks too.
“Go!” Mom shouts. “We don’t need more trouble from that man if he finds out you’ve been messing in the upstairs where you’re not wanted.”
I follow her to the dustbin down in the kitchen, screaming and screaming about my treasures, until she smacks me again, hard. This time through the face.
… where you’re not wanted …
We stand, both of us still, and the house echoingly quiet. I touch my cheek that’s so sore, and my eyes blur with tears. Only then do I run to my room—my bedroom this time—but I’m a big enough girl that I know how to lock the door from the inside. No one’s coming in, not even Mom.
The house is very quiet later. I think I hear the front door a few times. A car leaving. Someone tries the door to my room but I’m not sure who; I’m too tired and sad to go find out. I don’t have any more tears. The person stands outside the door, as if waiting for me to let them in; then the footsteps grow distant in the passage.
My pretty nautilus, my little cowries like baby toes, and the albatross bone—all the little treasures—they are in the dustbin outside now where it stinks, and their magic is gone because they are broken.
I lie on my bed and fold my hands over my chest like the pictures of the Egyptian mummy I saw in one of the books in the lounge. If someone could wrap me in bandages I would be hidden too, locked away in a room forever. I try to imagine what this must feel like. Perhaps waking up and being completely muffled in bandages, alone in the dark. I cry again, but this time the tears are an endless, slow stream that soaks my pillow.
The house is full of sighs and a pigeon is calling from the roof. I stare up at the ceiling, at how the room grows darker and darker, and still I can’t move. Outside cars rumble past. Dogs bark. But the house is so empty, just like one of the pharaohs’ tombs.
Tap-tap-tap at my window.
Immediately I sit up. It’s dark now and I’m freezing. The orange of the streetlights spills into my room and outlines a figure looking into my room. How did they get up here? I’m on the second floor.
A small squeak escapes me. Maybe it’s one of the monsters.
Tap-tap-tap.
Long fingers tipped with tickety nails against glass. Writhy snake hair.
Lakrimay.
It’s not a monster. I know her name and she gave me treasures.
I slide off the bed and run over to the window. Lakrimay is perched on the windowsill, where there’s only just enough space for her to kneel.
“Hurry, Jennikin. We don’t have much time,” she says. Tap-tap-tap.
The brass fastenings are difficult for me to reach, and I have to pull up the bedside table so I can manage. Mom always says I’ll be in so much trouble if I ever open the window or climb on the sill, but if Lakrimay can do it then it must be fine.
The window pops open and Lakrimay half climbs into the room.
“What are you doing out there?” I ask her.
“You are crying,” she says, and reaches out.
Her gaze is warm but her fingers as they trace down my cheek are so cold, and my skin goes numb where she touches me. A small shiver runs through me but Lakrimay is so gentle, so kind, and I go to her and let her arms slip around me so she can hold me. Her smell is like the sea, and when she whispers in my ear I can hear the wind brush the albatross’s feathers and taste salt on my tongue.
“Come with me, little one.” She presses chilled lips to my forehead then slowly kisses the tears from my eyes. With each kiss, my sadness grows lighter. I’m with Lakrimay. Everything is going to be all right.
“Are we going to Midian?” I ask her.
“We can’t go to Midian, but I can take you down to the beach and show you the sea.”
“What about my mom? She’s so sad and angry. I don’t think she’ll like me going to the beach without asking first.”
“Your mom’s broken, and there’s only one thing to do when someone’s broken,” says Lakrimay. Her arms tighten around me as I look up.
“Fix her?”
Lakrimay smiles, and her teeth are sharp little fishes’ teeth.