The two girls enter the attic. They both seem at first glance to be about the same age; both straggly blonde and leggy, it’s impossible to make out much more than that in the gloom, and even less possible considering the one in front has just swung a massive torch around the room, shining it into all four corners of the spacious, cardboard-box-filled attic (there’s not much else in here apart from cardboard boxes, as it happens.) The girl behind her carries no torch; she seems, instead, in fact, to shine almost with some kind of inner light: something that’s not quite visible, as such, as light, but it’s as if your eyes are drawn to her as soon as you notice her, like some kind of magnet – a reversed perception filter from Doctor Who would be a fairly-close-to-perfect example. Wherever she is, you notice her. But it’s not she who is doing most of the noticeable stuff at the moment – she is just standing, slightly limply, in the attic doorway, obscuring the half-lit view of the yawning wooden spiral stairs, grey in the relative darkness, standing there and staring sort of dreamily into space. The one moving around the attic, opening boxes, now, that’s the other one, the one with the torch.
“Hey, Connie, look what I’ve found,” comes a voice, and you realise you’ve been captivated by the girl still standing in the doorway. Only now, at the sound of her – sister’s? Can they be sisters? They seem so – different, somehow – yet so similar – anyway, at the sound of her for-the-sake-of-argument-let’s-say-sister’s voice, she finally stirs out of her reverie and takes a slightly clumsy half-step forwards into the attic, looking at the left far corner, where the darker girl – illumination-wise, that is – is rooting around in the third of the cardboard boxes she has unpacked and whose contents she has roughly piled into categories on the attic floorboards, in what must have been at least three or four minutes since the girls came in, judging by how neat and numerous the piles are, and by the darker girl’s attitude. The darker girl straightens up, and you can see, if you crane your neck slightly to the right – but wait not too far you don’t want to be seen – a sad half-smile on her face as she turns round and beholds her [sister], who – somehow – how didn’t you see that? Weren’t you watching her as she crossed the room, entranced by whatever it is in her that entrances you? – has crossed most of the room and now is standing right before her – screw it, saying “sister” from now on till evidence suggests otherwise – and I don’t think it will – watching as the less remarkable sister (who is still pretty hot, when you can focus your mind on appraising her) rummages gently in the top layers of the box again and holds out something to the other one. Struggling not to watch her face, its every contour, detail, mole, tooth point, skin flake – as she receives it, you focus hard instead on the object being passed , and you see that it’s a small sheaf of A5 papers, around twenty in all, bound together by something you can’t see.
All of a sudden, the light sister chokes back something of a sob – and now it’s all you can do not to echo in howling sympathy; your whole body is convulsing in an ecstasy of wracking grief and you don’t know why but it’s terrible horrible oh god everyone is dead everyone you ever love is gone forever oh – and then, suddenly, it’s over, and instead you are flooded with a sentiment you don’t feel properly, can’t understand – it’s quite a bit more peaceful, easier to tolerate, and you almost relax until you realise that your previous convulsion has left the very end of your right plimsoll sticking out from behind the biggest pile of corner cardboard boxes, and you pull it back in – quick but not too quick, as quickly as you dare – and you squint again from behind the box at your eye-level, and the terrible girl’s face now bears her sister’s former half-smile, radiant and yet awe-inspiring in its controlled sadness: would that your own grief could progress that far.
She speaks, then, and you are so engrossed in her emotion – in both of their emotions, though with the darker girl it’s just another case of commonorgarden empathy – so prized until five minutes ago, until you were faced with her sister’s mirror emotion, like a lifelong Platonic scholar coming face to face with the True Form of his beloved in heaven – the epitome of grief long-held, of regret, of that oh-so-elusive quality, acceptance. Where were you? So engrossed in her emotion – so engrossed in the lighter girl’s emotion, that it is a few moments – time enough for you to have gone through the whole confusing diatribe of thoughts through which you’ve gone in the half-second since she started speaking – before you realise that she is saying words – beautifully, rhythmically enunciated but eventually-undeniably plain old English words – and you can hear what they are.
“I’d forgotten about this. What is it – Mum’s party speech?”
Every syllable she speaks seems to last a beautiful eternity, hanging in the air like a thousand rainbows of a thousand and seven hitherto undiscovered colours – and then the darker girl, a hottie to be sure, but one who only reminds you, in her sister’s presence, that the phrase “take-your-breath-away” is usually only meant as a metaphor, replies:
“Yeah.” She too sounds wistful – human wistful. “From my thirteenth, you remember? With the Earth cake?”
The lighter girl is nodding. It makes you feel a little dizzy, watching the rhythm of her head, up and down, up and down, up – she is speaking again. “Just like Mum,” she says, and tosses her hair back – only a few inches, but enough for you to imagine being caressed by all the gentle waves and horse manes in the world – “always make the most epic deal possible out of everything.”
With a daughter like you, you think, I’m not really surprised.
You have just spoken to this girl. In your mind, but you imagined yourself speaking to her, this wonder of humanity and delicacy-in-every-sense. You feel the red flush crawling up your neck and cheeks, it makes the memory of asking Mary Sandhurst out behind the bikesheds and stammering and almost crying even before she gave her answer and then falling on the ground trying to pick up the books you didn’t even feel fall from your arms when she let you down gently, feel like a pissing contest at grammar with Jake and Ogilvy, crude and coarse and nearly meaningless – and then you realise she can’t see you – you think – and you relax a little again, the hairs on your neck and back bristling in the caramel of her breeze, listening as her little? sister says, “That was life for her, you know?” More nodding from the other. You try to concentrate – and manage it, for now. The one you can look at – be turned on by, if the circumstances were different – continues. “Everything’s a celebration, and celebrations are everything.” She smiles, you see it out of the corner of your eyes. The lighter one reciprocates, and then, coming from out of nowhere a sound which hammers piledriving into you as if you are being smashed, pounded against the breakwater in the screaming, keening wind of a storm which makes Hurricane Jill look like the steaming heat haze of ’13. A brief escaping choking sob, completely without control, for just a second, like peeling away the long-fixed mask of a person imprisoned long decades in the dark, only to be freed by some traumatic accident and realise, looking down on the blasted outside surface, that all they had is gone forever lost. All humans can do it. You wish you could. The prison has been cloying now, suffocating now, for too long. Even to think about J – to think about her the way this uber-girl is thinking of her mother – oh, it would be an inordinate blessing, a blessing among blessings, to be free, to face down the screaming pain with dignity and epic middle fucking finger, but it hasn’t happened, but this girl is experiencing her own equivalent, and it is a knife, a knife in the gut and the heart, but a knife made of butter, a salve for all the wounds and not forgottens of the ages.
As you watch, the dark girl starts towards her sister, who puts a hand up to her mouth, shakes her head once, takes her hand away, and smiles. Tears are storming rivers across the smoothed-out barrens of her cheeks. The smile is an embrace, a strong embrace, of everything that is beyond you and everything you still have to cry with joy about, to throw your head back so far it cricks your neck, to toss your hair and shriek. It’s like when you’ve been fumbling around in the dark for so long you can’t remember when you weren’t, praying even, as times get more and more desperate and the fleeting memories of not-dark further and further away, to the unholiest and cruellest of probably-not-there gods, to set you free – and suddenly you find the light-switch, and you remember what living is, and why it’s worth it.
The darker girl is hugging her sister, whose light is mostly now obscured, but still: the strange not-light blazes nuclear out from the light girl, so much so that you see an image of a mere evolved ape falling inexorably towards the sun, so close now she’s barely a dot against a giant flaming screen of furious some-colour, and you think: why doesn’t she burn?
The dark girl is whispering something in the light girl’s ear. The light girl nods again; you feel your stomach tremble. Then she smiles (you close your eyes in ever-precious pain), and the two of them turn around, their embrace breaks (why why why in the name of god why must all the people of the world bump against each other and truly touch so seldom): the sheaf of papers still clutched in the light girl’s silken glorious hand, and head away and to your left. They are sitting down on the floor, and your breath quickens: you try to hide it, slow it down, but it is hard to focus: at any rate, five seconds or so have passed and they haven’t seemed to notice you. They sit cross-legged, as ordinary girls at a sleepover, facing each other, and the light girl tosses her hair (your eyes moisten), clears her throat (the sound hits you like a lozenge grasped for and ingested in delirium) and begins to read.
Her voice is strident, wavering, proud, a rough ocean demanding fealty from those sailors daring to traverse her. Every swell is a breath of life’s freshest air, and every dip is a submergence in all the uterine glory of the creation of the world: alive, alive and brimming with completely harsh but beautiful reality:
“Hi! You can call me Lib, but my full name is technically Libertas Afrincula Jemileh Gasaver Homnelatuk. I suppose the end’s like those Mordor names in LOTR, isn’t it! Funny, that, what with my being a demon and all – I never really thought of that before. Hah. Anyway, obviously, don’t get scared, I’m a very nice person, and a very nice mum, too, as I’m sure Connie and Calista will tell you – I hope, heh – and, anyway, you know there’s a lot of different types of demons. Why do you think these drama writers keep coming up with so many different kinds? It depends which ones they’ve happened to run into. Demons have been around for 212,259 years, after all, ever since you lot started to notice stuff. Anyway, don’t let me get off on a tangent – my point is that I’m one of the ones who have powers – I can set fire to things with my eyes and hands, and shift dimensions, and be camouflaged – but I have my mind, my soul, and I can control it so I only use it for good reasons. I intend to make good on a lot of those good reasons, btw – I’m only 732, and I could have the rest of eternity if I don’t fall into a volcano or piss some vicar off or something. I was an active demon for around 500 years, then I got kind of bored. We’re always born on Earth, no matter what kind we are, did you know that? Hell is so impersonal – and I’ll tell you another thing, you can never get the bloody temperature right. Connie there – Conores Etrigronde Libra, to give her her full name, she’s a slow-ager: she’ll turn 203 in a couple months’ time: it’s what you get when you cross demons with humans, you know – immortality and mortality have to find a balance, so I can still pass her off as a sixteen-year-old, though I have to keep reinventing her camouflage every couple years. Yes, honey, I know you can do it yourself, but I’m still your mum – you’ll have to wait for total independence till it looks like you’ve turned 18 – don’t pout, you know full well it’ll only be another 25 years or so – her father was a firebrand too, you know, he was the first human in like five tries or so who gave me an orgasm – we were together most of the 1790s and he used to say I gave him the energy to bash the British - and then, of course, there’s the girl you’re all here for, the girl who makes me sorry I’ll live forever - well, you know what I mean – my human-ager daughter, the birthday girl, celebrating her real live not-pretend-at-all thirteenth birthday – Calista! That’s what you get for getting wasted and shagging an angel. I’ll never do it again – no offence hon, – at least not without protection.”
A ringing silence, broken suddenly by a wave of crystal pounding on a desert shore:
“God, Mum sure knew how to talk, didn’t she.”
“Hah, that’s nothing – remember how she breathed fire. Even you never wanted to piss her off, I’m telling you.”
By this time, you have turned your face away in contemplation, and are thoroughly engaged in it, staring silently into the phenomenally mundane dark recesses of the attic’s upper corners: the rosewood beams that backslash themselves upwards from the rosewood floor towards the rosewood ceiling; the cobwebs, one large and one small by comparison, which gently and silently adorn the left and right corners of the section in your view respectively; the small grey-brown spider apparently asleep in the centre of the smaller one; the vague sensation of light making a mostly forlorn assault on the scene from the triangular quarter-inch-wide crack in the wall at the bottom left corner. All this observation comes so easily, when the alternative is thinking: thinking about where you are, and what you’re dealing with. Not a new observation, of course (of course!), but one which has suddenly been given a new context so otherworldly as to be almost terrifying, and which would be, were it not for the girls’ relatable conversation topic. As such, it is easier, when you are not looking, to comprehend the earthliness of the sigh – like plunging into a heated swimming pool – of the otherly girl, and the (sisters’?) conversation as it turns to going back downstairs and (as they do actually start to go back downstairs) getting ready for work. Just before the last, a few seconds before the door closes downstairs – a vague and distant thud like a bored nuke exploding listlessly a thousand miles away – there is a normal-sounding sniffle, a nose being blown, and a voice – the normal sister’s voice, the weak smile evident in every syllable.
“Connie, your ephemera is still down. Get it up now – I’m not in the mood for the masses prostrating and crapping themselves in the street.”
The second voice comes again. “Oh God! Sorry! It’s just that” – now comes a very strange thing, clear in its strangeness even though distantly heard (though not as distantly as was the door slam; in the time that has passed since that, you have crept out from your hiding place behind the boxes and gone to stand silently beside (and slightly behind – don’t want to be discovered, especially by her) the attic door, listening carefully to the events two floors below). The strangeness of it is this: the otherly girl’s voice changes, changes as though suddenly bent by the force of some irresistible Doppler-style effect, only one that deals not in frequency but in supernaturalness. The first six words of this latter exclamation are suffused with the same sweet, dizzying otherness that your balance wavers for a second before righting itself; then she continues: “what with talking about Mum, and everything, I...”, and these last words are normal, normal as anything, normal as her sister, normal as you...normal as Mary. You stand in such wonder that it eclipses the normal (first normal) girl’s response, interrupting her sister: “It’s alright. Just be careful, OK?”
“Yeah.” Newly normal – for the otherly girl – but still a sigh of regret and sad content, like listening to the first leaves blow down from the trees in the first gustings of wind to tread the gap between autumn and winter.
That’s when the door shuts. You scuttle to one side of the door, near the corner directly opposite the larger of the two visible spiderwebs, and, within a few minutes, during which the only sounds are the vague and humdrum sounds of a young woman readying herself to go out for a day’s work (the click of a toaster, the thrum of a hairdryer, the scrape of a shoe, the brush of a jacket) – with the occasional exception, two or three times in a breathlessly monitored ten minutes, of another, half-concealed sniffle into a probable tissue, the door closes for a second time.
You wait five minutes more, strung wires and nervous hammerings be damned, and then, when you are sure, you cross – still quietly! – to the cardboard boxes again, and begin the work you came here to do.
Whatever is going on with those girls’ nature, Mary’s – what Mary’s was – is more important. And maybe – just maybe – she hid her “mysterious gift” in a cardboard box in her best friend’s attic (Callie, you know, Si, the note had said, and you’d thought “Oh right, the shy girl down the block with the recluse or something sister”) because of who it has apparently turned out her best friend is. What, rather. Not who – or at least maybe not entirely who – but, at least partly, what.
It’ll be a long journey to understanding this one. There are a lot of dusty boxes to be opened, revealing whatever awful or terribly beautiful treasures they may have to yield. And you don’t know when the search for – for whatever it is you’re searching for – is going to end. But you start anyway. Because something important about Mary – and a whole new and terrifying world into the bargain, it looks like – is waiting.
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