Unconfirmed – by Emma Ashmere
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
She’s never been a dress wearer but says all right I will, if you promise to buy me a new dress. And shoes. Not hand-me-downs. Or home-made. The dress I mean. And I hate white. And it has to be dye-able.
She’s dyed things before. Overalls. Her (half)brother’s old singlet. Her mother’s glory-days fake pearl-buttoned gloves. Tried and failed to paint brown shoes black. Left stains on the laundry lino in the shape of something haloed according to her mother. A money-spinner her (step)father said. No a miracle said her mother so we can’t mop or sweep the floor again.
She has never been an instructions follower. She added new stains when she impaled her hand bam through rubber gloves trying to pierce the dye packet with a knitting needle. Look stigmata her mother said. Except they weren’t Catholic.
She isn’t a sin fearer. More palm-reader than psalm-mumbler. Who could she ask about her faux stigmata-tattoo if it changed the course of her life(line) and heart(line). Years later at Central Market she’ll ask a woman at a wonky pink-draped desk with the sign Palm Reader. Ten bucks later the reader says she can’t read it. Why. The woman gestures for her to go away. Off into the wilting cabbage leaves and pan pipes and dried tomatoes and slabs of Polish cheesecake.
She’d dallied with palmistry and other arcane pursuits as a teenager. After taking too many period pain tablets, she spied secular angels huddling at the crumbling low ceilings of her mother’s new flat.
The angels follow her up the hill as she scrapes through her friend T’s fence with a make-shift Ouija board formerly a tea-tray she’s nicked from the kitchen, the alphabet and Yes and No sticky-taped onto its underparts.
She stands for a moment in the dark inky loud summer night. Silver tassels of sea glistening behind the oil refineries. This view from the tall suburb with a lofty name where T lives. The wealthier windier cooler more ethereal cerebral realms than hers fraying on the edge of the city grid. Red brick flat. Hot. Dream-puncturing. Her room a melting sugar cube. Waking crying digging your way out. Grass dead whispering. Her (step)father mowing straight lines through the tangle of everything.
She’d never seen a woman gardening until she visited T’s. Mrs T kneeling in rich trousers floral gloves scarf wound around hair so short it reminded her of her dead (half)brother’s hair, last sighting of. She’d never seen a woman drinking/swearing/smoking so much in front of an impassive husband.
She and T climb through another fence into an empty lot empty except for a watching horse. T’s mother’s crystal glass glints in the unmoonlit night. T closes her eyes like someone on daytime TV and swigs from a flask of Kahlua pinched from her mother’s Kahlua cupboard.
So does she. Feels flaming swords. Slithering fires. Joan of Arc.
Who’s there says T and puts her finger on the glass. Yours too she says or they won’t come.
Off it whirs in crazy zigzags before she can.
T says look look they’re spelling out my name.
Why would they. We all already know your name.
Ask if I’ll get a new boyfriend T says.
She asks and unleashes a mighty battle between Yes and No. A gale force wind from north and south pummeling like on the jetty when her (half)brother accidentally on purpose jumped into the greasy dark yelling don’t worry I know what I’m doing. Did he know what he was doing she asks the glass silently and pressed so hard towards No the crystal glass cracks and
And Mum will kill me T says. The horse looks on knowingly as T climbs through the fence followed by a window and shuts the curtains.
She taps on T’s window. The Ouija board is missing all its letters now. Except for the T. She’s found all the pieces of the crystal glass. Sets them on the sill. Look stars she says. T shrugs open the curtains. She climbs in. T sulks by the lovebird cage. They can’t be real the lovebirds. They can’t be so beautiful. So big-eyed and sad. Stuffed with life.
She’s thinking about Sunday school tomorrow. Still drunk slumped over an infant school-sized desk. Her clever neighbour will be there who’ll go far while she’ll go either nowhere or too far and become one of those neighbours who drop off the world. Church bells. End of class.
Last week she didn’t fill out the form: Why do you wish to take the sacrament and be confirmed. She’ll write Yes No. Close her eyes. Make a pencil-stab. Run away past the rectory into the along the main road in T’s borrowed gym shoes the kind she can’t afford. Past the butcher’s yard where the brown-patched goat escaped and ate her mother’s washing pegged on the line. Past the fish shop with the kind couple who slip in an extra piece of fish whenever her mother sends her there emptying her pockets of change that should go into the collection plate. Past the mechanics where her dog was run over but nobody’s told her that but she already knows a road is a grave is a road is the sea is a grave. Past Wonderland Dancing with its neon lights her mother wants to go to but her (step)father won’t be seen dead in. Past the doctors with the lino floors the colour and feel of baked toffee she made at T’s once and nobody yelled or said what a waste it’ll rot your teeth or you’ll get fat and burn down the world. Past the pizza bar where a cousin took her before roaring off into Family Silence on the back of a motorbike.
She runs to T’s house. Climbs in T’s window. The lovebirds watching. Opens the cage. Will it free them or the opposite. She closes it again. Long walk home via the back streets to the creek smoking T’s cigarettes. Sneaking back to the flat waiting until it comes. The phone call. From the Reverend. She hates he’s called Father something. She already has several. He’ll ask to see her. Tomorrow. After school.
Tomorrow she’ll scuff through brown paper bag leaves to the rectory. A yellow-stone house like the one they lived in on the farm. Rooms full of old sun on the slant. Four full chairs at the table. Night shadows murmuring over dried books. The hum of space and possibility.
Church-scented roses roar through the rectory gate. Gravel underfoot. Red yellow and blue tiles pitch and swirl on the porch. She balances on the door mat. Pulls a bell. Mrs Reverend answers. Looks at her. You’re already lost her eyes say.
Inside. Silence. Her white shadow moves along the oak paneling. Boredom and curiosity brought her here and the feeling there might be more to herself, a thought she mustn’t have. The new dress still fluttering in the wings.
There the Reverend is with his squirrel beard long black dress white band at his neck over his up-and-downing adams apple. He gestures to a chair so they can get to the crux of the matter. Why she’s answered the question Why are you taking the sacrament question Because I’ll get a new dress a shirt dress etc.
So many unendable sentences rise in her. What if she says if the bible is just a novel a really old book and all this time people have been thinking it was true and what if it was just like
The phone rings in the flat. She’ll hear it from the creek. She’s carving You Are Not Here into a spindly tree. Her soul is lost apparently. Body minus animus. There’s only this bit of her hand-knife carving I exist in the smell of damp and cut sap. She’ll ring T from a phone box and say they’re making her go on a religious camp in the foothills in an old convent but she’ll climb out the window on the first night via knotted bedsheets like in the movies and run down the road and stay at T’s place. She mustn’t use all her coins for the phone box but at the fish shop they’ll say don’t worry so she’ll divvy up the fish and chips here under the bridge in piss-smelling water-rush for how many days.
Her mother calls for her down the street. Her brother yells I can’t I can’t you can’t stay here
In the green of evening or is it morning or next week she’ll slip back to the flat. A girl will be in her bedroom window reading a newspaper. The girl looks like her. Smiles and says There You Are and holds up the paper and points to the photograph on the front page beneath the words Have You Seen Unconfirmed Sighting Of ▼
Image: Psychic2Tarot - Wikimedia Commons
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