The Lost Girls by Wendy James

Author:Wendy James
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781921901058
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2014-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

Jane

That night I dream about Angie again. I’ve had so many variations of this particular dream throughout my life that it’s become an old familiar. It follows a well-worn pattern: usually in the dream I can’t actually see my cousin, I just know that I’m chasing Angie, trying to catch up to her, that if I can catch her and stop her, everything will be okay. But something always prevents me. Sometimes I trip and fall, and am somehow both immobilised and muted – stuck and dumb – as if I’ve fallen face-first into wet concrete. In other versions, someone’s physically holding me back, though I can never see who it is.

This time, though, Angie is visible – I’m viewing her from behind, dressed as she’s described in the articles and posters: a girl with shiny, long blonde hair, straight out of a Pantene commercial, wearing a crocheted singlet top, shaggy cut-off jeans and a pretty silk scarf. Initially, she’s walking ahead of me at a steady pace, but as I get closer, she moves faster, and then faster, and then I realise it’s deliberate: that Angie’s running away from me, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t keep up, she just keeps getting faster. And as she moves away, she’s changing: the colour leaching from her, her body changing shape, her clothes falling from her frame, then rotting and fraying, her hair darkening and disappearing until what I’m chasing is not a girl at all but an image of death, a skeletal figure from some appalling horror movie. Somehow the B-grade horror film effects don’t stop this from being utterly terrifying. When I wake, I manage to stop myself from calling out, but I can’t help clutching at Rob, who is sleeping soundly beside me. He stirs and murmurs ‘yawright?’, then rolls over and resumes his gentle snoring.

I’m not all right. I feel sick in my stomach and my heart is hurting. And I am sobbing – quietly, but desperately, and with no way to stop myself; I have to bury my head in the pillow to muffle the sound. I’m crying in a way that I haven’t since I was a very small child. I sob as if my heart is breaking, sob myself back to sleep.

When I wake up the next morning my head is foggy. A strange lump – somewhere between heartburn and heartbreak – sits heavily on my chest. I look a wreck. I’m prone to bags under my eyes even when I sleep well, but tears and lack of sleep have swollen my eyelids, making me look as if I’ve been stung by bees. It isn’t pretty. Rob does a double-take when I bring him his morning espresso.

‘Jesus Christ, you look awful.’

I have to work hard to stop myself from pouring the coffee over his head.

‘Thank you for pointing that out, my darling.’

‘What happened? Are you okay?’

‘I had a bad dream.’

‘But your eyes?’

I shrug. ‘I must’ve been crying in my sleep.’

‘Haven’t you had a few bad dreams lately? What was it?’

I shrug again, not wanting to discuss it.

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