Status: hiatus
Marrow
THREE
By the following Thursday, Jamie’s presence is starting to make my mother uneasy. She begs and begs Dad to call the police – but something in my face stays his hand every time it reaches for the phone. I’m not well enough to be denied any small pleasures, not yet. They know it. They stay quiet in the day, and save their arguments for the four-walled fortress of night.
Every day I take another step in to Jamie’s little sphere, and I can feel his gravity swirling me in to orbit. There is something very whole in his presence, and he resolutely denies me the ability to live any kind of half-life. Sometimes we walk and walk for miles until I am wheezing and shaking and raw, and then we stop on the overpass and watch the cars speed by on the freeway. The white noise stops me from thinking too much about what it would be like to just-
“- jump off?”
“What? Sorry, J. I wasn’t listening.”
“I said, have you ever thought of what it would be like to just jump off?”
“What a stupid question,” I say, taking his arm in my shaking hand and pulling him away from the railing, “c’mon. I’m ok now.”
But I’m lying, because I’m not, and because I have, and because it’s not a stupid question, it’s the most important of all. He just doesn’t need to know that.
When we go back we do it in silence. It’s partially because I can’t really talk and keep up with him at once, and partially because he prefers to watch my arms swing between us anyway. He says I have nice skin, pretty arms. When I look at them, all I see is yellow skin and scabs and bones. Remember when there was muscle and blood there, working together, and one of them wasn’t trying to kill the other. When we reach the fence Jamie stops abruptly beside me, before jumping up butt-on-brick and motioning to the empty space at his side. It takes me a minute to climb up on to the flat wall and I feel like a spider with too many limbs and no cable tie to hold me firm.
“Why do you sit here?” I ask, not because I really care, but because I knew it had to be asked eventually.
Jamie nods across at the strange house two down to the right. The place is partially obscured by pine trees, but from our front garden the angle is just right to watch the front verandah.
“Mrs Q,” he says, “in the bowler-hat house.”
Mrs Q is one of those women who was old when I was born. When we were little, we used to dream up all her past lives in the imaginary worlds of our play.
“I heard she killed her son.”
“Nah,” Jamie says, picking a gum leaf from the sapling in the yard and patting his pockets for a match, “she’s just really in to slasher movies.”
I laugh, but something in his expression is unsettlingly sincere. The corner of the leaf catches the flame and goes up instantly, Jamie only dropping it at the last second, just as I reach over to push his hand away. This time he laughs, louder than me, and I cough as the thin trail of cremated eucalyptus reaches my throat.
Every day I take another step in to Jamie’s little sphere, and I can feel his gravity swirling me in to orbit. There is something very whole in his presence, and he resolutely denies me the ability to live any kind of half-life. Sometimes we walk and walk for miles until I am wheezing and shaking and raw, and then we stop on the overpass and watch the cars speed by on the freeway. The white noise stops me from thinking too much about what it would be like to just-
“- jump off?”
“What? Sorry, J. I wasn’t listening.”
“I said, have you ever thought of what it would be like to just jump off?”
“What a stupid question,” I say, taking his arm in my shaking hand and pulling him away from the railing, “c’mon. I’m ok now.”
But I’m lying, because I’m not, and because I have, and because it’s not a stupid question, it’s the most important of all. He just doesn’t need to know that.
When we go back we do it in silence. It’s partially because I can’t really talk and keep up with him at once, and partially because he prefers to watch my arms swing between us anyway. He says I have nice skin, pretty arms. When I look at them, all I see is yellow skin and scabs and bones. Remember when there was muscle and blood there, working together, and one of them wasn’t trying to kill the other. When we reach the fence Jamie stops abruptly beside me, before jumping up butt-on-brick and motioning to the empty space at his side. It takes me a minute to climb up on to the flat wall and I feel like a spider with too many limbs and no cable tie to hold me firm.
“Why do you sit here?” I ask, not because I really care, but because I knew it had to be asked eventually.
Jamie nods across at the strange house two down to the right. The place is partially obscured by pine trees, but from our front garden the angle is just right to watch the front verandah.
“Mrs Q,” he says, “in the bowler-hat house.”
Mrs Q is one of those women who was old when I was born. When we were little, we used to dream up all her past lives in the imaginary worlds of our play.
“I heard she killed her son.”
“Nah,” Jamie says, picking a gum leaf from the sapling in the yard and patting his pockets for a match, “she’s just really in to slasher movies.”
I laugh, but something in his expression is unsettlingly sincere. The corner of the leaf catches the flame and goes up instantly, Jamie only dropping it at the last second, just as I reach over to push his hand away. This time he laughs, louder than me, and I cough as the thin trail of cremated eucalyptus reaches my throat.