Dreaming of Amelia (36 page)

He raises his eyebrows for humorous effect.

It's not like him: to talk about Amelia. Make clumsy jokes. Be afraid.

I want to say:
Strange? Are you kidding? Here it is, what I've known all along. Some mysterious friend she's gotta visit all the time? The mental institution is a nice twist, sure, but she's cheatin' on you, buddy. Open your eyes.

But what I say is: ‘Could be strange. Could be she's got a
friend in a mental institution who doesn't want to say her own name.'

Riley's smile is sudden and brief. He's still watching the window. Amelia's close to the edge.

It makes me sad, his smile.

He's drumming softly on the window ledge. Left hand swerving back and forth, right hand resting but its forefinger taps, quick and steady.

I look down at his hands and he stops.

We both look up and Amelia's gone.

So I ask about his drumming. How he got started.

As long as he remembers, he says, he's liked finding the sounds in surfaces. Tables, bowls, garage doors, his dad's bald head.

His earliest memory is sitting in a high chair, thunking a banana with a spoon. He remembers loving the deep, warm sound it made.

‘Just never grew up, I guess,' he says.

But you are grown up.
His hands are big, brown, sinewed, veined, scarred.

It comes to me that all his other talents are just roleplaying — but the music, this is who he is.

But he's changed the subject. He's talking about his little sister. The banana story reminded him. She put a handful of mashed banana in his hair this morning. Concentrating fiercely as she did it, like that was her job.

The baby makes him real too, makes his face light up.

‘She likes it when I blow up a balloon and then release the air against her cheek,' he says. ‘She gets so tense, waiting, and then, when I let go, it's like I'm releasing a burst of giggles along with the burst of air.'

Telling pointless baby stories, proud, and he can't help his smile and nor can I.

We're sitting on top of desks now, just by the window. Still watching the empty oval, but not seeing it. I want to ask more about the drumming. I want to see them play again.

But I feel shy. It's not like me. I try a different angle.

‘The night we heard you guys in the music rooms,' I say, ‘we were looking at a tree, looking for Em's ghost.'

‘The falling girl,' he says, then glances back towards the door. ‘This is Room 27B. Where the ghost lives. Where Em gets cold.'

He does that a lot: remembers details.

I watch his face. He's looking around.

‘Not here now,' he says.

‘Nope.'

‘Em gets a twitch in her lip, doesn't she?' he says. More details.

He looks directly at my mouth as if the answer's there. In my own lips. He's playing — but you know, come on.

So I say, challenging: ‘Do you believe in ghosts?'

‘Don't know if there's a ghost in this building,' he says. ‘But ghosts? Why not?'

‘There's an explanation,' I say, ‘for every single sighting of a ghost.'

‘Could be,' he says, ‘that some experiences are so emotionally charged — something like murder or betrayal — they get imprinted on the air. We see glimpses in the air years later.'

‘Not that kind of explanation.' I shake my head. ‘Something physical, I mean, like earth tremors. Or shadows. Or someone left the TV on in another room. Or something in the person who sees the ghost, some psychological flaw.'

‘Could be that there's a kind of collective memory,' he says, as if I haven't spoken — but his smile knows that I have and I smile back — ‘like the collective consciousness. And a ghost is just a fragment from the collective memory.'

‘There's no such thing as a collective memory,' I say, ‘or consciousness either.' I'm still smiling, and my voice feels oddly free. ‘It's hallucination. Or a seizure. It makes you think you see a ghost.'

‘Or could be,' he says, ‘a dead person come back.'

‘Now we're getting somewhere,' I say.

He laughs.

Turns to the window again.

‘Em does have a photo of her ghost,' I say, playing along with ghostboy here.

‘The crazed red face in the window,' he agrees.

We're both smiling again. We're quiet a few moments.

Then he raises a hand, points towards the window. ‘See that?' he says.

I look, but the oval's empty.

‘The gap in the brick wall,' he says.

I stand up, find the gap. He stands too.

‘See the cross-street through the gap,' he says. ‘The stop sign there?'

I can't see it.

He moves closer to me, points. ‘There,' he says. Puts an arm around my shoulder, leans his face close to mine so he can see my line of vision. Lifts my hand, his arm along mine, presses my finger to the glass. Waits.

‘Okay,' I say.

He shifts away again.

‘There's your ghost,' he says.

I squint at the stop sign.

‘You're saying that's the red face in the photo?' I say, and laugh. ‘That stop sign? It's too far away.'

‘It's a trick of the light,' he says. ‘Stop signs are designed to be super-reflective. Right time of the day, the sun shines on it, it'll light up and jump right into frame.'

I'm staring, silent, still not sure. I remember that he's a photographer.

The bell is ringing. We both look back towards the open door. Sounds of footsteps, talking.

‘You'll see what I mean if you look at the photo again,' he says. ‘The flash makes the blurs for the features on the face. The face is the stop sign.'

‘You knew that all along?'

He smiles, raises his eyebrows, turns to go.

 

Riley T Smith
Student No: 8233569

It's called pareidolia.

A pattern, a shape, in an unexpected place, and your brain turns it into something real. Makes it familiar. Animals in clouds or in a cliff face. Jesus in a tortilla shell; the Virgin Mary etched into your soap. A face in a photograph of smoke or of a stop sign through a window.

Your brain wants the world to be familiar so it sees familiar things like faces. At the same time,
you
want things to be remarkable, so you grab onto that familiar image: yes, I'm not mistaken, that
is
a giraffe etched in the cliff face! A miracle!

But it's just the way that things are arranged.

The school was alight — how could Amelia and I be so multitalented?!

Let me set it out for you. Watch.

We're okay at acting. Had a lot of practice in police interviews, courtrooms, detention, with youth workers — practice being the people they wanted us to be.

We're okay at essays and art. We both like to read and sketch. Write letters to each other — and Amelia writes poetry and songs. Living on the streets, we spent a lot of time in libraries. They're warm, and people trust readers — wallets in coat pockets hanging on the backs of chairs.

Music, we love. We connect through it. Okay, we've got some basic musical talent, but so does every second other person. Amelia's voice is sweet to me, but I'm biased.

Anyhow, noticing something here?

Our ‘talents' are all in the arts.

No Maths or Science. Nothing you can judge with precision or accurately grade. (For the record, we couldn't do Maths or Science to save our lives.)

Okay, there's swimming. That's precise enough. You can't fake that. And it's true: Amelia can swim. But whenever she reaches higher levels — the nationals, even the states — she starts to fall behind. She won't be coached, that's why.

As for my own swimming: swim every day and you get faster. Give it a shot.

So, take away Amelia's swimming and think about what's left.

Drama, essays, music: it's all about how you frame them. Tell someone they're about to see the greatest actor of all time, or read a prize-winning novel, or hear a critically acclaimed musician, they'll see, read and hear in a whole different way. They'll transform something good into genius.

So. This is how we arranged it.

We started with mystery. Stayed behind the scenes. Made them wonder. Made them think that we were nobody. Then we swam fast. Got their attention, but now they think we're scholarship kids who know nothing except sport. Stayed silent in classes. Didn't do any work.

Then chose the right moment, and surprise!

We could act! Write an essay! The crowd goes wild.

Might not have worked at a different school. But these rich people are bored and like a show. They like to be surprised.

It's all tricks. It's all in the way things are arranged.

Then a pause. New aura of mystery: refuse invitations then suddenly accept. Drift in and out at unexpected times. It was Amelia's idea to sometimes leave a party after just three minutes — no explanation, no attitude, just turn, say goodbye and go. The hardest part was keeping a straight face.

Be friendly, listen but never let the conversation touch us. Stay unknown. Keep them guessing. At the same time, make them our friends. Share something intimate, so they'd feel close to us. A fine balance. And then, when the time was right, the music.

They'd get us in. They were the richgirls. Sexy, beautiful, gleams in their eyes. They'd unfurl a path for us right to the door of Distressed Weasel Records, and they'd make the producers believe.

Like I said, we're average musicians. But guess what. So are half the rockstars making millions today. They got lucky or they played the game right.

The key for us: make the richgirls think our music was extraordinary.

So, a cold and darkening night. Edge of woods, an ancient tree, our music.

It was perfect. It worked. They were transfixed. Em was so stunned she was silenced.

We forgot the new security cameras, though. Now the music teacher was in raptures. That was an unplanned illusion, but you can see how it worked. She hates us, thinks we're musically retarded criminals, then catches us unexpectedly on grainy security footage and we're not bad.

Imagine the effect.

But we didn't want her praise. A high school teacher raving. Only dilutes things. School concert would have been disastrous. Comparisons with other students, for a start — and there are talented kids at this school.

Cass herself is a better singer than Amelia.

That scared us for a while, the first time we heard her sing at Lyd's place. But it didn't seem to matter. They saw our music
as a kind of phenomenon — a team — Riley-and-Amelia, the-drummer-and-the-singer.

My point is, it was working.

I saw Lyd in a classroom one day, near the end of the term. She can be disarming. Her voice has this sexy combination of dryness and spark. Rake up some autumn leaves, throw in a match, it's just about to catch — there's her voice. She's smart, too, but I've never seen her patronise. She's passionate but shrugs and stays indifferent. She's hurting, you can glimpse it in her eyes sometimes, but she hides it fast.

I see all this and, like I said, she can be disarming.

That day in the classroom, I told her about Amelia's mystery mad friend — that friendship was scaring me. The axe murders. The madness. Amelia, so small.

It was a betrayal of Amelia, sharing this with Lyd, but it also felt good. Lydia has this calm confidence: nothing to be scared of, Amelia is safe.

Also, I told Lyd something about my drumming — how I've always loved it.

Didn't think that could hurt.

One other thing I told Lydia? That the photo of Em's ghost was an illusion — pareidolia. Stop sign in the distance.

It was nothing, but somehow it felt dangerous — another betrayal, even to hint at the concept of illusions. That concept is our secret, Amelia's and mine.

Something about Lydia though.

The way she arranges her face when she listens, the way she arranges her words.

 

Tobias George Mazzerati
Student No: 8233555

25 February 1804

They've moved the garrison of soldiers back to Sydney Town, the fools, and there's nobody here to watch us but a handful of constables. Messages have flown around the colony. Not on paper but in flying words, and the words they fly direct from Phillip's head.

Four lines only has he written down — the fine bones of the plan — and sent with a trusted man to trusted men.

It's to happen, then, on a signal a week from today.

www.myglasshouse.com/emthompson

FRIDAY 19 SEPTEMBER

My Journey Home

You will not believe it but I finally have a journey home worth writing home about. (Ha ha.)

It happened just now. Here I am. Just home.

This is what happened.

Okay, I'm driving along IN MY NEW CAR!!!

(It's new in the sense that it's new to me. Don't think that my parents saw sense and bought it for me. No. Auntie June's car got stolen so she bought herself a new one, but the stolen one turned up, so she gave that to me. Which was nice of her, although not
that
nice cos it's been battered by the thieves.)

Let me go on.

I was driving along, feeling emotional. The Final Week is next week! After that, nothing but the HSC will stand between me and the real world!

So, anyway, I had a manila folder on the passenger seat beside me. The folder was entitled,
Student Records, 1952, Vol 3
.

Why? Because I was recently informed, by a tree, that SW loved KP.

Was SW Sandra Wilkinson? Who was KP?

Perhaps the answer was in the file beside me? And so I flicked through it as I drove.

Which reminds me. Why are car horns so limited? All they do is BEEP BEEP. They should have different sounds depending on what you want to say to other cars.