No Room for Ghosts

‘So, you don’t eat, ever?’

‘No.’ Leanna back-pedalled on her immediate response. ‘I mean, I eat sometimes…’ Her answer sounded like an embarrassing confession. ‘Everybody has to eat a bit, otherwise you die,’ she lamented, flushing.

‘I see.’

Strangely, I didn’t feel hungry either. I supposed it was something to do with the awkwardness of the whole situation.

In the neon-bright of the cafe, she looked even more translucent than usual. She had dawdled most of the way here, dogging my footsteps like a chained shadow, and had slid into a plastic chair as soon as we arrived. Her posture suggested both that the furniture was caustic to her, and that she needed it to hide from her uncomfortable surroundings. I had ordered two cups of black, unsweetened coffee, one of which she accepted with funeral silence.

Having progressed past her evident denial, Leanna now studied her temporary prison. She regarded the kitchen with suspicion, as though uncertain what it was for, and glared at the polished linoleum like it might assault her. Between scowling and drumming her fingers agitatedly on the table top, she sniffed at her drink. It hovered just under her nose, like a ward against miasma, clutched to keep other scents away.

‘What do you eat, if you don’t mind me asking?’ I only intended to get a gauge of where I could take her in future. Innocent enough, I thought.

All the colour drained from her face, leaving it ashen white, and then flooded back in angry purple rosettes. ‘Soup, mostly,’ she managed.

I dared not question her further.

Behind the service counter, the female barista vanished into the back room, and an older man shuffled out to replace her. He eyed Leanna curiously, under the pretext of wiping down surfaces. His scrubbing made little impact on the stains.

Across the table, Leanna herself shivered a little, looking shaken. ‘Harvey?’ she asked tentatively.

‘Yes?’ I felt bad about upsetting her, and was eager to oblige in any way possible. However, I sensed that her question was a personal one, and had been a long time coming.

‘You never told me where you were going that night.’

I swallowed the final, lukewarm mouthful of my coffee and felt it sink much deeper into my stomach than it should have done. This was the moment I had been dreading. The truth was simultaneously the burden I most wanted to share, and the secret I was trying best to hide. Regardless of how close we were –and I didn’t know if it was possible for me to trust anyone more than I trusted Leanna now– I wasn’t sure that I would ever be okay with telling her.

‘I wasn’t going anywhere,’ I said. She raised an eyebrow sceptically. As I had predicted, she detected a lie, when in actuality, it was only a half-truth. Nevertheless, it warranted an explanation. ‘I didn’t intend to come back,’ I continued, hoping that I wouldn’t have to make it any clearer.

‘Oh, Harvey!’

I couldn’t tell whether she was disappointed or devastated. Relief and self-loathing mingled in my sigh. Tutting softly, Leanna shifted her chair around, grating the tiles with its steel legs until she was close enough to cradle me ineffectively in her much smaller, weaker arms. I took this to be a sign that it was safe to speak further. I didn’t have much choice.

‘I don’t remember how I meant to do it,’ I said, ‘but I must have had a plan. I packed a jacket –this jacket, actually,’ I tugged demonstratively at the leather, ‘with something, but I can’t think what…’ I trailed off as the memory escaped me. ‘I just didn’t want to make it home.’

Kindly, Leanna ran her fingers through my hair. ‘But you did make it home,’ she insisted. I felt my skin heat up, but was too shy to say anything. Instead, I stared at the speckled pattern on the table top.

‘What about you?’ I asked, as though we were merely exchanging accounts of our days. ‘Where were you going?’

Well,’ Leanna began thoughtfully, pursing her lips to signal that this was going to be the beginning of another saga. ‘I did have somewhere to go, but I didn’t want to go there. I remember standing on that platform for ages, watching all the buses pulling in, stopping for a bit and then driving away again. I kept wishing that mine wouldn’t come, or that if it did, it would leave me behind. More than anything, I wanted to be left behind.’

‘Why couldn’t you just choose to not get on it?’ I asked.

‘Because I didn’t want that to be my decision,’ she said simply. ‘See, I have family interstate.’

I wanted to say, ‘That’s good,’ but realised that I was thinking of my own family, whom I missed. Leanna’s might be completely different.

Glancing sidelong to escape my awkwardness, I saw that the old barista was still looking at us, and was now smiling in an affectionate but incredibly intrusive way. I wished he would stop.

‘They’ve been concerned about me,’ Leanna continued, hinting heavily, as I had done. ‘They wanted to send me to this place. It’s not a hospital exactly. It’s not a mad house, either, but it’s somewhere you have to elect to go. Nobody can make you, even if they really love you and want you to. I know what everyone says, that it’s an illness, but I don’t believe them, Harvey.’ Her wide eyes were entreating. Her voice quavered, and her cup shook perilously in her hands.

‘Maybe a part of me was also just scared. Even though I wanted them to stop worrying, and all their ranting might even have made me stop trusting myself, I didn’t want to make that choice.’

‘Ah.’ It was a lot all at once. ‘At least you didn’t try to off yourself, though. Right?’ I smiled in an attempt to cheer her up, but failed.

Silence settled between us, and I cursed my ineptitude.

‘So,’ with an apologetic look, Leanna endeavoured to change the topic. ‘How are the cops? Have they been bothering you?’

I racked my mind for an answer, and, bafflingly, came up blank. My mouth, which had expected the words, gaped soundlessly. ‘Erm,’ I began. ‘You know, I’m not actually sure.’

I knew I had been a bit fuzzy since the shooting, but I hadn’t realised the extent of my amnesia. Frankly, it scared me. It was as though the bullets had torn ragged holes through my brain, and I was fumbling pointlessly for the pieces that had long since blown away.
Leanna seemed to understand. Her overlarge eyes were full of fear for me, but when she spoke, her tone was much less shocked than I had expected. She sounded almost resigned.

‘You can’t remember.’ It was a statement, not a question.

I shook my head. ‘Nothing,’ I affirmed. ‘I’m thinking back as far as I can, but it’s like I’m hitting a brick wall. We gave the police our numbers... I think?’ I turned sharply to her for reassurance. ‘I don’t know what happened after that.’

‘I’m sorry, Harvey, but I don’t know either.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Nothing.’

For a moment, we both seemed to look everywhere except at each other. Then, our eyes met and locked desperately. Leanna looked so tired. Maybe it hadn’t been right of me to help her stay awake.

As she composed her next sentence, she seemed to be struggling to stay focused long enough to put the ideas together. Effort strained her fragile features. Her fingers crept up to her forehead to support her whirring thoughts.

‘I’ve had the weirdest feeling lately.’ She was still shivering slightly, as though enraged, or maybe terrified. The fingers splayed and pointed away from her temple like knives, or antennae to project her stammering. ‘It’s like, I don’t know, maybe this is just paranoia, but it feels like people are looking at me. Everywhere I go. They’re staring.’

I was about to say something about her appearance, and wondering how to phrase it, when her palm cut across the air between us, anticipating my point and wiping it away.

‘It’s not to do with what a freak I am,’ she said. ‘This is different. People look at me like they’ve seen something that shouldn’t exist.’

Thinking back on the past twenty-four hours, I realised that she had a point. That boy at the carnival. Had he been ashamed of his bullying, or was he frightened? Were his friends laughing at him, perhaps, because they couldn’t see who he was mocking? Lots of other people had seemed oblivious to us, too. I didn’t remember paying for anything.

From the look of horror slowly growing on her face, I guessed that Leanna had reached a similar conclusion.

‘Harvey.’ She froze, forcing her frantic eyes to train themselves on me, so that the effect was more severe. ‘What happened to us?’