The Song House by Trezza Azzopardi

Author:Trezza Azzopardi
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2009-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

Oh Nelly you’re a funny one got a face like a pickled onion, got a nose like a squashed tomato and –

Onward Christian shoulders, marching off to war. With the cross of Jesus, going on before!

She sang her way through the songs she knew, hymns she could remember from Sunday school, leaning against the sweating brick, legs pulled up under her pyjama top. She really wanted to pee, but there were things moving about on the floor: mice, or could be big mice. The boy had put his chewing gum in the bowl; that would make it a bin, not a potty. But she really wanted to go.

♦

Maggie looks back to her last entry, flipping the pages of the notebook. It seems appropriate that she’s working from back to front, as if the end will simply emerge as the beginning; the final page will become the first. She checks again, reading through what she’d written about how William took her away and put her in the trunk room. She’s sure it was a trunk room; she’s sure of the location. But it wasn’t where she thought it was. Fine, she tells herself, That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen that way. A child of four, what could she know about geography? But something is still wrong with the entry. Reading her words again, it takes Maggie a moment to see what is different: she’s removed herself from the memory; there’s no I.

She’s managed, without thinking, to displace herself from the centre, and put William there instead. She has imagined what she thought would be impossible: what it would be like to be him. Maggie looks up to the stained-glass lady for guidance, sees the rain clouds beyond the window, their bellies laced with purple and black.

That’s okay, she says, That’s classic.

Maggie knows from the counselling she’s had how she copes.

She separates; she’s very good at splitting and dividing: black and white, then and now, sound and silence. The first time she started to modify her body, it was random and awkward. She pulled her hair out, one strand at a time, then a few, then in the end, whole clumps. The feeling was delicious to start with, and painful; the waiting moment, the tugging, the release as it fell away through her fingers. She did it when she was bored, when her mind was racing, before she went to sleep. Like all habits, it was new and real and something in the beginning, and then after a while it just became the thing she did. She ate the evidence, crushing the fine filaments of hair under her teeth, rolling the strands around her tongue; a gritty swallow. When the bald patches became noticeable, she had to think of another way. She couldn’t bear the thought of burning herself, although she knew girls who did it, with matches or lighters or more often the red tip of a cigarette. It was the smell she most disliked.

They had a coven at school, the girls who branded and cut and etched.

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