Queen of the Night (4 page)

Although Lupe complains, I

insist on walking her to her van. Grey Street is as quiet as it ever gets. The trail of blue people has disappeared.

We don’t talk much as we walk. Lupe has a calm, pleasant look on her face, as if we’re walking through a lovely garden, rather than the decaying street. The supermarket on the Panwood side throws a determined patch of light over the border, but its glow doesn’t brighten my mood. I trust Lupe’s opinion. If she’s this worried about Paul, then I should be too.

Old Jim, one of the Diabetic regulars, shambles past us on Saturnalia Avenue. Jim survived lung cancer five years ago, but I’m not surprised to see him with a cigarette
clutched in his clawed hand.

Lupe’s van, when it comes into sight, rocks back and forth as if the ground is moving underneath it. But it’s not an earthquake causing the commotion.

‘Those little shits!’ I break into a sprint, leaving Lupe behind. The hazy circle that always envelops her van is gone. She won’t be able to see them yet, but there are people-shaped silhouettes standing on the van roof, jumping up and down. Kidds.

Even though I haven’t needed to run in months, my legs and arms oblige immediately. My feet whip the ground. As I get closer to the old petrol station where Lupe’s van is permanently stationed, I see more Kidds at the base of the van, pushing on the sides. They’re trying to topple it off its brick foundations.

I let rip a battle cry that’s half-howl, half-swear word. A Kidd on the roof hurls a spray can at my head. I duck, and retrieve it without breaking my stride. I throw it back, hitting the Kidd square in the shoulder.

I’m pleased to see that the Kidds on top of the van look scared and slide to the ground to join the others. What I’m not prepared for is that one or two faces are streaky with tears. The tears almost derail my anger, but then I see the van. The awning droops and there are huge dints in the walls. Spray paint drips over the scarred metal.

‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’ Lupe’s van has
always been off-limits. While almost everything else in Shyness gets tagged and raided, Lupe has always been safe.

There are nine Kidds in total. The strange thing about this group is they all seem the same age, around ten, and no one steps forward as their leader. They haven’t moved into fighting formation. It dawns on me that they’re not a unit that usually works together. Eventually a snivelling girl in a flannelette shirt speaks up.

‘She’s a witch,’ she says, pointing behind me.

I turn to see Lupe, a smear of colour in the darkness. She’s too far away to hear, even though I’m sure she’s heard it all before.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘She cursed us. She cursed all of us.’

Her friends nod their agreement.

‘Have you guys been on the post-mix this arvo?’ They must be delusional on syrup. I try to imagine Blake in this state, when she was with the Kidds, but I can’t. ‘Don’t give me this curse shit. What’s really going on?’

‘Look,’ says the girl. And she pulls one of the other Kidds forwards. He cradles a still tarsier in his hands. I stifle my surprise at seeing another dead one. It smells ripe, as if it’s already been hoarded for a few days.

‘It’s not asleep,’ says the girl, unnecessarily.

‘What has this got to do with Lupe?’

She wipes her nose. Her fingernails are ripped and dirty.
‘It’s not just the furries. All the big Kidds left Orphanville and they wouldn’t tell us why. Someone stole all our bikes. There’s no food, and the sugar stash is all gone. Building Six caught on fire. No one tells us what to do.’

Lupe has reached us now and stands beside me.

‘It’s a curse,’ says the girl. ‘It has to be. And she’s what done it.’ The Kidds all nod again in unison.

Lupe draws herself up to her full height. She seems to pull power from the shadows surrounding her, becoming clearer and sharper than before. Her accent is thick when she speaks, but her voice is controlled. ‘It is not a curse. I am not the person who has done this. But you need to leave now, or I will curse you.’

The Kidds hesitate, unsure whether they’re attackers or trying to persuade us of something, or asking for our help. A short Kidd in the unlikely combination of a bike helmet and wetsuit backs away a few steps, but then hesitates, waiting to see if the others are going to follow.

‘Maybe you can find out who killed the tarsier, and then you can curse them,’ says the flannelette girl in a hopeful voice.

It’s all too much for Lupe, who points her finger with the force and conviction of a deity. She hisses a long string of Polish words. ‘Leave!’

The Kidds start as if electrocuted, and melt off into the night with eyes as big as satellite dishes.

‘What did you say to them?’ I’m impressed.

Lupe smiles grimly. ‘I tell them they need bath.’

I can see only her back as she steps into her van, but no doubt her smile slips right off her face. She lets fly with another flurry of Polish.

I swear again when I see the inside of the van.

There’s broken glass on the floor, pictures hanging askew, books knocked to the ground, a pile of records lying in shards. The fairy lights have been torn down, the remains of the beaded curtain crunch underfoot. It smells suspiciously like a urinal.

I thump the wall with my fist, again and again, until my knuckles ache. ‘We shouldn’t have let them go. We should make them fix this up.’ I try to leave the caravan, fuelled by the buzz of anger, but Lupe stands in my way. For a millisecond I think about pushing her aside, but then good sense kicks in.

Lupe grips me. ‘Jethro. Be still now.’

‘Why would they think you’re to blame?’

‘I do not know. I have always fed them, never turned them away. Not like others. But they were full of pain. People do not think clearly in this state.’

‘How can you forgive them? Look at this place.’

‘What good does angry do?’

Lupe lets my arms go, and pulls several small brown paper bags from her handbag, the takings of her errands.
The bags are printed with an elaborate
W&S
, just like Blake’s books.

‘First things. I will make tea and I will use your mobile telephone. Then I will clean this shemozzle up. You will help me.’

Lupe takes the packages into the galley kitchen and tosses me a garbage bag. I put everything that’s broken beyond repair in the bag and make a pile of things that might be fixed on the table. The gargoyle paperweight I gave Lupe a few years ago for her birthday cowers under the sideboard. One of its horns has broken off.

In the kitchen Lupe murmurs into my phone. When she returns she places a silver tea tray on the table and pours us both cups. She gestures for me to stop cleaning.

‘The kitchen is not touched.’ She smiles. ‘Maybe they still want kebab.’

I squeeze into the bench seat, and sip on the sour-hot liquid. My muscles start to melt. Lupe’s tea is working in the usual way.

‘Is that what you were doing on Dreamer’s Row? Buying tea?’

I always assumed Lupe made her tea herself, but now I realise that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no room in the van to grow or dry herbs.

‘I bought tea from special place, on other side of Shyness.’ Lupe looks over her wrecked home without
flinching. ‘Do you remember your beautiful friend, the wild girl, what she said about this van? She said it was full of crap.’

I smile at the memory. It seems to be getting more difficult to forget Wildgirl the more time passes by. That’s the opposite of what’s supposed to happen.

‘She was right,’ Lupe continues. ‘It was too busy in here. Time for clearing out.’ She puts her cup down and stares at me through the rising steam. ‘Tell me again why you do not call her?’

‘Lupe, I’ve told you a dozen times I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t know why.’

I do know why. Even Lupe doesn’t know about the one time I called, and the result.

‘You were supposed to battle great evil together.’

‘That was just a game, Lupe.’

Except it wasn’t. We did battle great evil together, in a way. I only met Doctor Gregory for a few minutes up on that roof, but even in that short amount of time, he managed to say exactly the right things to unsettle me.

‘No excuse. I see sparks between you.’

‘You sound like you’ve been talking to Thom. He thinks I need to get laid.’

I regret the words as soon as I say them, but Lupe slaps her knee emphatically. ‘Exactly! A young man needs to—’

‘Stop!’ My face is red. ‘Enough. Okay?’

Lupe holds her hands up. ‘It’s natural, but you don’t want to talk about it.’

‘I’m less worried about my love life and more concerned about you. What will you do if the Kidds come back?’

The Kidds are desperate enough to act on any stupid suggestion. They seemed to accept that Lupe wasn’t to blame, but someone put that idea in their heads in the first place. Someone persuasive. Maybe the same person who’s responsible for abandoning them—Doctor Gregory. We realised that night that he set the Kidds up in Orphanville. Gave them bikes, sugar, tarsier. And what he gave he could easily take away. I wouldn’t be surprised.

‘I thought of this myself. I have called my friend, and I will live at his house.’

‘What? Who’s that?’

‘Janek was the best man at my wedding. He was my husband’s best friend.’ Lupe leans heavily on the table to get to her feet. She pulls a purple suitcase from a hatch in the floor.

‘Oh.’ I didn’t even know Lupe was married. I never thought to ask, and she never said anything.

‘Janek picks me up in his car. I am tired of this van.’

Lupe opens drawers and begins packing a rainbow’s worth of dresses into the suitcase.

‘How can you leave your home behind?’ Panic wells in my chest.

‘Time is up for my little caravan kingdom. It’s time for a window that does not look onto concrete.’

Lupe hears the betrayal in my voice because she leaves her packing to come over and squeeze my cheeks. How many more things don’t I know about Lupe that I never thought to ask? And now she’s going away and I won’t be able to ask them so easily.

‘I’ll miss you.’ I don’t feel ashamed saying this to Lupe. It’s the truth. I can’t imagine saying it to anyone else but I’ve told so many truths in Lupe’s van it hardly seems to matter.

‘Yes, you will,’ Lupe says. ‘And that is why you will call the wild girl. You need someone.’

‘I have Diana and Ortolan,’ I reply. Then, because that sounds pathetic, I add, ‘And Blake and Thom.’

‘Not the same. Ortolan and Diana are your world, but you are not theirs. Same for the others.’

‘Gee, thanks Lupe.’ I can’t keep the hurt out of my voice.

‘This is not unkind, this is the truth.’ Lupe snaps her suitcase shut.

‘I don’t need anyone.’

‘Not true. You need me and I’m going away.’

Lupe comes over to me at the table. She pulls my head into her stomach and pats my hair. I feel numb. This is what it feels like when people leave. I close my eyes and a memory plays across my lids.

The car is laden to the roof as if we’re going on a family camping holiday. My dad slams the car boot, shutting the door on their old life. It’s the day my parents left Shyness. The sun has been stuck at half-mast for weeks, but everyone accepts it’s only going to get darker. But for now, every day burns with a dim orange haze, like there’s a bushfire coming. When the car pulls away, I’m left standing on the front doorstep, watching it go. That night Paul comes over to the house and cooks me dinner, wearing my mum’s apron, and talking in a falsetto to cheer me up.

The less I sleep, the less I dream, the more vivid daydreams seem to get.

I flick my eyes open and pull away from Lupe.

‘You must promise me that you will call the wild one, and that together you will watch over Paul. I do not trust those blue people.’

‘How far away will you be? How will I contact you?’

‘Henny Penny,’ says Lupe. ‘Do you know this story?’

I shake my head. Conversations with her can turn cryptic in the blink of an eye.

‘She thinks the sky is falling. Do you see my meaning?’

‘Not really.’

‘Sometimes you have to let the world end, so you can build a new one.’

I think about the last time Paul and I really laughed together. I get a flash as well of Wildgirl’s green-glittered
eyelids, and the dead tarsier curled up like a comma on my kitchen bench. Purple in parts of the sky where there should be black. Signs of the world ending.

Lupe pushes me away so she can look at me properly.

‘This blackness inside,’ she says, thumping my chest. ‘You think you are trying to get rid of it, but you hold on more than ever.’

‘The sky
is
falling if you’re leaving.’

‘My boy.’ She clutches me close once more, so much that the breath is squeezed out of me. ‘I will miss you the most.’

Birds In Winter is dark,

except for a faint glow on the first floor. Behind the building the last shreds of a Panwood sunset are scattered low in the sky. Sometimes I like being in other parts of the city at night, to see that they look almost the same as Shyness for at least half of a twenty-four-hour cycle. It makes the way we live seem more normal. But it doesn’t work tonight.

I was meant to be here at six-thirty to babysit, but now it’s after eight. I insisted on waiting with Lupe until Janek came to pick her up. And then I stayed to board up the caravan and make it secure.

Every instinct tells me to go home or go out all night, run away, but I don’t. I turn my key in the lock and drag
my feet up the stairs to my execution. The gargoyle I salvaged swings heavily in my jacket pocket.

Ortolan must have heard me come in because she’s leaning against her big work table, arms crossed, waiting. I stop once I reach the landing. I see from her face that I was wrong about how pissed off she would be.

‘You ruined my night,’ she says in a flat voice. She’s worse than angry, she’s disappointed.

‘Yes.’ I did ruin her night. Ortolan’s wearing an old jumper and slippers but she still has eye make-up on, and her hair is shiny. I look past her to the corner, where Diana’s sitting on her bed, jamming her toy giraffe in her mouth. Her eyes are puffy and her nose is running everywhere.

‘What’s wrong?’ It’s not like Diana to cry. ‘What happened?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It doesn’t look that way.’

I go to walk over to Diana’s bed and comfort her, but Ortolan blocks my way.

‘It’s under control, Jethro.’

‘I’m sorry, Flopsy,’ I call out. ‘We can make pizza another time.’

Diana barely hears me. She’s got that blank look she gets when she’s up past her bedtime.

‘That’s not it,’ Ortolan says.

‘Well, what is it then?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Ortolan chews on a strand of hair.

I know it won’t mean anything but I say it anyway. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know I’ve stuffed up.’

‘I hope you’ve been having fun, whatever it is that you’ve been doing.’

I could offer an explanation, but I don’t. All the words are piled up in my mouth and won’t come out. I was so focused on trying to make things right for Lupe, I clean forgot about Ortie and Diana. There must be something wrong with me if I can’t keep more than two things in my head at the same time. It’s not that difficult.

‘There’s no point telling you how important tonight was to me’—Ortie’s voice wobbles only slightly—’because I don’t have the right to ask you to do anything. You don’t have to do any of this.’

She’s wrong. How can I tell her that I do have to do this, I do want her and Diana to depend on me, after I let her down?

‘I don’t mind if you don’t want to help out, but if you say you are going to do something, then I expect you to do it.’ The last sentence has exhausted Ortie. Her shoulders droop inside her oversized jumper. ‘You should go home, Jethro.’

Diana is sucking her thumb. She’s almost outgrown the habit and only does it when she’s really upset.

‘Okay,’ I say. Looking at Ortie again is not an option. I wait a few seconds to see if I miraculously have something useful to say, but I don’t.

I’m halfway down the stairs when Ortolan calls out. ‘Are we still on for dinner tomorrow?’

Ortolan doesn’t take up much space in the frame of the doorway. Sometimes she doesn’t look much older than me, even though there’s six years between us. But she’s light years ahead of me in knowing how to live properly.

‘I have a gig. Is early okay?’

‘Early is fine.’ Ortolan is unsmiling. ‘Go home, Jethro. I know you won’t, but I have to say it anyway: go home.’

She’s right, I don’t go home. The night in my veins keeps me awake, keeps me moving. I’m full of the things I should have said, all the things I couldn’t say without feeling like I was making excuses. How can I be sure I won’t keep letting her and Diana down? I didn’t mean to ruin her night but it didn’t stop it from happening.

I cross Grey Street, straight back into Shyness, looking skywards as I walk. The roofs are clear and the lampposts are empty too, so maybe all the tarsier are dying. I think about Ortie standing at the stop of the stairs. This is what I’m scared of. If you don’t promise anyone anything then you can’t disappoint them. I don’t know how many things I can juggle and not fuck up.

I keep walking past my house. It’s only a short distance
to the cemetery. The cemetery is one of the few places in Shyness that hasn’t been vandalised. Even delinquents have their limits. I never see anyone else here. I don’t know why. There’s nothing scary about it. It’s no darker than anywhere else. In here there are only narrow paths and headstones, tinder-dry pine trees, barely standing, and monuments to the past. There’s no life in this place. I’m only scared of the living.

Gram’s ashes are stored in a wall, stacked together with the ashes of hundreds of other people. A filing cabinet for the dead. I close my eyes. My other hand goes to my chest, where his lighter rests at the end of a chain. Ortie soldered it for me after I told her how close I came to losing it.

In movies people always crouch by graves and have conversations with their dead loved ones. I don’t do that. I cough instead, feeling a howl rise in my throat. I didn’t keep trying to call Wildgirl. Thom is too busy for me. Lupe has left. Ortolan is angry. And if Lupe is right, Paul is as lost as I am.

I swallow against the howl, forcing it down, and distract myself by running through my promises to Gram and myself in my head. I’m fooling myself, but the plaque feels warm under my fingers. I promise to take care of Diana, I promise to look out for Ortie, I promise not to make the same mistakes he did. I promise not to let life beat me the way it did him. The whole time I make these promises I
wonder if I’ll be able to keep them.

The rickety sound of wheels on tarmac jolts me out of my reverie. I follow the sound to the edge of the cemetery, leaning over the low stone fence. A long procession of Kidds travels down the road, maybe fifty of them, with stolen shopping trolleys. The older Kidds push the trolleys and the younger Kidds ride inside, sitting on cardboard boxes holding clothes and toys and games consoles, all their worldly possessions. There are no tarsier to be seen, and the Kidds don’t even look at me as they pass, so bleak is their mood. I want to chase after them, but I suddenly feel exhausted. My eyes are sluggish, as if I’m trying to open them under water. I should go home.

I look back into the graveyard. The headstones and obelisks and crypts make an irregular city skyline in miniature. An empty city for the dead, with me the only living person in it. I’m sick of being on my own.

The very act of pulling my phone out of my pocket makes my heart pump so hard I’m surprised Gram’s lighter doesn’t jump off my chest. My fingers call up her number easily. I’ve had enough practice.

I let my finger hover above the green call button. This is usually where I chicken out. My finger drops.

The phone rings for a long time with no answer. I’m about to hang up when voicemail clicks on, and the sound of Wildgirl’s recorded voice fills my ear.