Dreaming of Amelia (19 page)

But what I wanted to tell Seb was that I lied to him on the first day of Term 2.

Here's my final story:

First day of Term 2, early morning, Blue Danish Café.

An all-night party at my place the night before.

A group of us have stopped for coffee on the way to school.

We're sitting by the window and the white light hurts my eyes. I close them. But a voice across the table hurts my brain. Pick up my latte with both hands, open my eyes and study it. Such gentle twists and peaks in the foam. Such subtle swirls of caramel — and it's so creamy — so creamy. I put the coffee down and push it hard away, so it begins to tip.

Riley is beside me. He's talking to someone, but his hand reaches out and rights my coffee. He keeps on talking, doesn't look at me.

I close my eyes again but that voice across the table.

It's the same pitch as a fire alarm. She should take a vow of silence.

It's Astrid from our school. Em made friends with her last year. They're leaning close together now, their hair is entangled, and Astrid's telling a story that goes like this:
And he's like and I'm like and it's like like like so cold!

I think suddenly of Christmas pudding so crowded with raisins that you can't find any cake.

I look at Em. How can she sit so close to Astrid and not throw up?

I can't even be in the same room.

I push back my chair and get out of the café. As I leave I notice Riley's hand reach out again — this time he's stopped my chair from toppling backwards. Once again, he doesn't even look around to do it.

Nearly trip over Toby from my school on the way out — he's sitting near the door with some woman. Maybe his mum. He looks sad.

See myself reflected in the café door as I walk out.

I look sad too.

I think this childish thought:
What's to be sad about, Toby? You've got your mum. Where's mine?

And then, just outside the door, lost inside my mind, there's suddenly a sense of something right.

A sense of something falling into place.

It's so soothing. I can't figure out — and then I can.

It's Seb. Standing in front of me. He's so close I can't see his face. It's the smell of him, the closeness, that's what's right. He's arriving at the café just as I'm leaving and his hand is reaching out toward the door. His arm has crossed right over my shoulder.

He stops, we step back, and I look into his face. The surprise of the meeting, the physical closeness, makes our eyes honest for a moment.

Then someone else is trying to get past us, and we step away, get shy again.

This is the first time I've seen Seb since I ran into him at a petrol station first term, the night he warned me to stay away from Riley and Amelia. This is before the drama rehearsals and all the parties in Term 2.

Now we step away from the door, stand together in the cold — talk about the cold. Talk about the fact that my parents are away in their Tuscan retreat. Seb's art and soccer;
the computer course he's been taking in graphic design, how he's getting into programming. Our words are smooth as latte foam. They're tangling like hair. He's listening to every word I say, and then I see he's listening to more than that. Trying to hear the air between us, trying to hear my thoughts.

There's a shine in his eye as I tell a stupid-funny story about the party last night, but the shine outlasts the story and he says, ‘Lyd, I miss you bad.'

He says, ‘Can we —?' Keeps looking into my eyes.

He means he's ready to end the break.

I turn cold as shadows.

I'm still smiling but I'm cold: ‘We can be friends, but that's all I want, okay?'

‘If that's all I can get,' he says, fast. He's still smiling too, and the shine's still there but fading.

‘That's all you can get,' I nod, and reach out to punch his shoulder like a pal.

I want to touch him and hurt him both at once.

I don't expect to see him again, but he surprises me by signing up for the Ashbury-Brookfield drama. He tells me he isn't stalking me; he just got invited to supervise set design. And when they all start coming to parties at my place, it makes sense for him to come too.

So Seb's my friend all term.

And then, on that last night, I tried to find him in the gallery to tell him that I lied. That I've been pretending all term.

It's not all I want. It's never all I wanted.

Just to be friends. I want more than that.

And you still haven't told him?!

Well, my child, you must!

Call him now!

Ha ha.

I could tell him at rehearsals now that school's going back.

Or he can call me now if he wants.

‘Ha ha'? Whatever do you mean? You sure can be exasperating, Lydia! Call him at once and let him know!

We'll wrap up this assessment task so you can.

If I may be so bold, I shall now retell your story of last term. Here it is. Last term:

You were abandoned by your parents during the most stressful academic year of your life.

You felt abandoned by Seb at a time when you needed him most.

You were anxious about whether your parents' marriage would return in pieces or not.

You punished your parents by letting the house get trashed, and by siphoning money from their online bank accounts.

You punished Seb by pretending you no longer cared for him.

You punished yourself by pretending you no longer cared for Seb.

You distracted yourself from the sound of your own thoughts by holding party after party after party after party — and when the thoughts were still louder than the backbeat of the parties, you buried them with Riley-and-Amelia obsessing!

You did (I concede) consume enormous quantities of coffee, almonds, Magnums and pecan cookies.

Ever yours,

The Ghost

Okay, now you're just weird and annoying.

Drop the ghost thing. Get out of my head. And call me.

Drop the ghost thing. Hmm. How exactly?

As to getting out of your head, why, I've only just got started! Are you not delighted with my insights?!

Your obsession with secrets and shadows! While all the time you're hiding from the truth! Now there's a rich seam to mine! Which brings me to something that we haven't even mentioned! The secret that your mother told you just before she left!!!

How do you know about that secret?

Well, DUH! I haunt this house. You haven't noticed how much I've noticed? I was there when she told you the secret.

Seb, what the f— are you talking about?

Okay, setting aside the curious fact that you just called me ‘Seb' — a few nights before your parents flew away, your mother was getting ready for a reception at Distressed Weasel Records, that ‘hot, new independent label' she recently acquired (oh, your mother is transparent! Longs to be hot, new and independent herself!) (or does she wish to be a distressed weasel? Hmm. But why?). As I recall it, she had wandered into the living room to ‘take a break' from getting ready. She was wearing her white bathrobe but had already set her hair and donned her jewellery, so her bangles slid up and down her arm as she mixed herself a cocktail. She was chatting to you about the olive grove she would see from the window of her Tuscan villa, when you both heard the sound of your father's car in the driveway. And suddenly — in a warm, smiling, confiding voice — she told you her secret.

[At this point, I stopped typing and picked up my phone. Here is probably the appropriate time for me to point out — if you have not already guessed this yourself — that I had believed, for almost the entire correspondence, that the ‘ghost' was in fact my friend Seb. I assumed it was Seb because I recalled that, following a course in computer graphics, he had developed an unexpected interest in programming. I thought he must have hacked into my computer. The ghost's praise of Seb — his soccer abilities, etc — seemed to confirm my assumption. I had revealed the truth about my feelings for Seb, thinking I was telling Seb himself.

However, I had not told a single person the ‘secret' that my mother revealed to me in the living room before she went to Tuscany. (Nor do I think it necessary, for the purposes of this narrative, to reveal that secret now — it's a family thing.) In fact, until this moment, I have not mentioned to anyone that she so much as told me a secret. Yet the details set out in the letter above are accurate: the robe, the bangles, and so on.

The only way anybody could know this was if they were spying on the room.

I picked up the phone and called Seb.

He did not answer. (The time was now close to 4 am, so this is not surprising.)

I left a fairly garbled and angry message. (He called me back eventually, and left a message of his own — he seemed genuinely confused. In my experience with Seb, he has never, or rarely, been deceptive. I believe that, if the ‘ghost' HAD been Seb he would have admitted it in the course of the correspondence — or at the very least confessed when I challenged him on the phone. But he insisted that he had not been talking with me online all night. He asked if I was all right. He sounded concerned.)

Getting back to last night: once I had left the message on Seb's phone I sat back in my desk chair, breathless for a few moments, and then, hesitantly, I typed:]

Seb, you are seriously scaring me. You've been in the house? You've been watching us? What the f— is going on? This isn't funny at all. I just left you a message. Call me back.

And most people think I'm the loony tune! Oh Ly-y-y-d-i-i-i-aaa (singing tone)! Yoohoo! Earth to crazy one!

Why are you calling me Seb? Don't tell me you think I'm Seb! He's not dead! Nowhere near the haunting phase!

And I'm much prettier than he is! Or I was. In my day. Less so now with my head under my arm, the blood gushing from the fish-hooked eye, the crumbling bones etc, etc.

If only I could show myself to you! But I can't. Invisibility. It can be a drag. Siggggggh.

The main thing that you need to get clear is that

I

Am

Not

Seb.

I'm not Seb

I'm not Seb

I'm not Seb

This is not Seb. This Is Not Seb.

I

Am

Not

Seb.

Anyhow, are we done now? Need any more ghostliness from me? Oh! Those icky parents of yours are home! That's their car, isn't it? (They do keep late hours for people of their age. I mean, they only got back from Tuscany a couple of weeks ago. May as well still be there!)

Yours,

The Ghost

[Now I was both angry and frightened. The ghost was right — my parents had just arrived home. I ran downstairs to meet them and told them that someone had hacked into my computer and was talking to me. They were both drunk (and shouldn't have been driving). They found it wildly hilarious that I was frightened by the fact that someone was talking to me online. They could not seem to get their heads around the difference between an online conversation and one that occurs in a Word document. They did not find it at all disturbing that my correspondent must have been in my house. (I could not tell them that the ‘ghost' knew my mother's secret.) They made ‘joke' after ‘joke' to each other about the situation, got themselves more drinks, went downstairs to play billiards . . . They were in fine spirits.

Feeling exhausted, I came back to my computer and saw this on the screen:]

Dear Lydia,

Signing off now. It's been a pleasure and treat to talk to you at last. All the years I've been haunting you — that day when a relative visited and told you she'd seen a little chick being eaten by a fox, and you (such a feisty six year old!) pretended you had to get something from your room, so you could run up here and cry for the chick; the winter when you were eight and secretly wore your sneakers to bed each night because you thought you had ‘foot and mouth disease' (strange child!); the time you hid that Easter egg for months and when you found it again it had gone mottled and stale so you gave it to your father for Easter the following year! — oh, so many sweet, pointless memories! — I never guessed we might get to chat!

We will never chat again, you know.

This is, after all, some kind of glitch in reality. Henceforward, little one, I will merely be a presence in your home. That odd chill you feel in the large games room, the chill that makes you
look for open windows. The creak in the floorboards of the library. The strange, unsettled feeling you always get in the wine cellar.