Perfections (19 page)

‘Hey, you there?’ Ryan asks. ‘Look, I got some people rocking up here, we’re heading into the Valley.’

‘Sounds like fun,’ she tells him. ‘But tomorrow, can you do something for me?’

‘Ask and you shall receive.’

‘Call Dante. Tell him you’re looking forward to the show. And that you’re happy to work with
anyone
from Seventh Circle.’

‘I’m not crawling on my knees to that prick.’

‘He’s not a prick. He’s funding your damn show and you’re acting like some spoiled five-year-old who’s been told he can’t have ice cream for dinner.’

Silence, pierced only by a faint shriek of laughter that sounds suspiciously like Zane. Jacqueline cringes. How quickly the girl has managed to make amends. Then Ryan’s familiar chuckle fills the line. Fills her head. ‘You’re good for my ego,’ he says. ‘Good for kicking it up the arse as needs be.’

‘Ryan–’

‘No, look, I’m not gonna call him. But if he rings again, I’ll answer.’

‘Don’t mention me. Honestly, it won’t help anyone.’

‘Sure, whatever you say. But our deal stands, yeah?

‘Our deal?’

‘Dinner, just you and me. After all this shit has blown over.’ That chuckle again, throaty and rough with self-confidence. ‘No ice cream till I’ve eaten all my vegies, that’s a promise, girl.’

Her smile this time is genuine. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

More muffled shouts. Another shriek. And Ryan, his voice low and apologetic, threading like silk through her ear. ‘Gotta go, the natives are restless. But we’ll talk soon, yeah?’ He ends the call without waiting for goodbyes.

Jacqueline switches off the phone and heads to the kitchen for a glass of water. She should get one for Ant as well. Perhaps make them both a mug of warm milk. Stir in some honey and cinnamon – her sister would like that. But as her fingers search for the lightswitch, a large shadow moves across the kitchen window. Moves towards her, silent and swift, and a startled cry lodges in her throat.

‘Shhh,’ Loki whispers. His eyes glimmer in the darkness, cold as distant stars.

— 14 —

‘I’m sorry I scar
ed you,’ Loki says again. He’s still staring out of the kitchen window, fixated on the backyard and the looming bushland that surrounds the house. Jacqueline stirs the milk on the stove. With the pantry bereft of cinnamon, she’s had to use nutmeg with extra honey instead. Three mugs wait on the counter top.

‘We should go for a walk,’ Loki says.

‘Why on earth would we do that?’

‘To see what’s out there.’

‘This place backs right onto National Park land. There’s nothing out there but trees.’ Her mother has let the yard go in recent years. Small shrubs and saplings now invade well within the perimeter. The grass is overgrown, clumped and heavy with seed. Jacqueline shivers. ‘Snakes and spiders are about all you’re likely to run into.’

‘Where does the parkland begin?’ Loki asks.

‘Quite a way back. This house is built on a fairly large lot.’

‘It must have been fantastic when you were kids.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All that bush to muck about in. Like having your own private kingdom up here on the mountain.’

‘Not really,’ Sweet-scented steam begins to rise from the saucepan and Jacqueline turns down the heat. ‘It wasn’t . . . we didn’t play out there very often. Our mother used to worry about us getting lost or hurt or . . .’ A flash of memory. Shadows and sunlight. Her sister’s tearful face. She pushes it aside. ‘We didn’t much like it out there anyway. I think Ant was afraid.’

Loki turns around, visibly curious. ‘Afraid? Of what?’

‘Who knows? We were only little girls.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Little girls with a chronically paranoid mother.’

‘It can’t be easy for you, finding out about her health like this.’

‘It’s especially bad for Ant. She’s always been closer to our mother than me, always . . . well, she’s the youngest after all. Isn’t that the natural way of things? The youngest is always the favourite?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’ Loki stares at her. An odd, oblique cast to his face.

Jacqueline meets his gaze. ‘What does it feel like?’

‘What does
what
feel like?’

‘Being . . . what you are.’

He folds his arms over his chest. Leans back against the sink. ‘Disconnected,’ he replies at last. ‘I feel like I’m floating on top of things, like I could slip off the edge at any second. Take the wrong step, be the wrong step. I’m not really part of this world, I know that. I feel it. There’s this . . . pressure? I don’t know, something like pressure, around me all the time.’

Jacqueline swallows. His words scrape along bone. ‘You have to be careful,’ she says. ‘You have to think about everything you do, everything you say, in case it might be wrong. In case it won’t fit.’

‘In case
I
won’t fit. And I need to fit. I need to know that . . .’

‘That you belong,’ she finishes. ‘That you are accepted.’

‘Accept
able
.’ Loki tilts his head to the side. Regards her with new and narrowed eyes. ‘This world, being part of this world? It’s like I’ve been given an instruction manual, written in Chinese, translated into French. With all the diagrams printed backwards. I can
see
how I’m supposed to act, the person I’m
meant
to be, but . . .’ He spreads his hands before him, palms out. A helpless gesture. Lost and flailing.

Too easily, Jacqueline finds the words to throw to him. ‘But you have no idea if you’re doing it right. If there will ever come a time when you won’t have to wonder if you’re doing it right.’

He stares at her for several heartbeats. Then nods, a gesture closer to acknowledgement than affirmation. ‘How long has it been?’

On the stove, the milk boils over with a hiss. Jacqueline swears and lifts the saucepan from the element. Turns off the heat. Loki is at her side almost immediately, a damp cloth in hand as he wipes at the spillage, catches the drips from the bottom of the pan. The smell of scorched milk stains the air.

‘When did she make you?’ he asks.

‘She didn’t,’ Jacqueline says brusquely. Because, really, what was she thinking? No sense in such ridiculous suspicions. Merely paranoia, which she now pushes aside.

‘But you just said–’

‘Just because I can understand how you feel, doesn’t mean I’m
like
you.’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘I’m her sister, Loki. Her
older
sister.’

She moves across to the waiting mugs and begins to pour. The milk-skin sloughs off into the last. Sits wrinkled and yellowed on the surface. She pinches it between finger and thumb, intending to drop it back into the saucepan, but Loki grabs her wrist. Lowers his mouth and sucks the milk from her fingers. His tongue is warm, almost rough. Cat tongue, cat eyes, holding her gaze with his own as he licks his lips.

‘I’m older than her as well,’ he says. ‘Objectively speaking.’

‘Stop it.’ She pulls away. Dumps the saucepan into the sink and fills it with water. ‘It’s impossible.’

‘
Impossible
seems to be in flux these days.’

Her hands are trembling as she turns off the tap, dries them with one of her mother’s jumble sale tea towels. The green crocheted edge is fraying at one corner. She picks at a loose thread. Watches it unravel. ‘I’m her sister, Loki. I have a whole lifetime of memories of being her sister.’

‘Yeah.’ His smile is bitter. Cold. ‘You don’t need to tell me about memories.’

‘Stop it,’ she says again. Her voice is barely a whisper now and it’s not just her stomach that seems hollow. Her entire body feels scraped out. She is a shell, a girl-shaped husk. Perhaps she always has been.

‘I’m sorry,’ Loki says. ‘This wasn’t the best time to–’

‘You’re wrong.’ Jacqueline straightens her shoulders. ‘I’m not like you, I’m not some cheap, pirated copy Ant conjured up to make her feel better. I’m real. I’ve always been real.’

His jaw clenches and he turns back to the window. Back to the night beyond. She takes a mug in each hand, leaves the third behind for him to do with what he chooses. She’s already in the hall when Loki calls her name. ‘We don’t belong in this world,’ he says. ‘Tell me I’m wrong about that.’

Jacqueline says nothing. Endeavours to
think
nothing as she makes her way carefully back through the house to her old room. The light is still on but Ant has fallen asleep. Curled on her side with fists tucked up beneath her chin. Jacqueline places one of the mugs on the small student desk at which she had spent so many long, arduous hours. First high school, then university. Countless projects and essays, not to mention revision for exams. Those memories are real. They are hers. Hers
alone
. She takes a sip of warm milk and wrinkles her nose, regretting the nutmeg. Two more mouthfuls before her mug joins its mate on the desktop, and she switches off the bedroom light.

Ant grumbles but doesn’t wake as Jacqueline wedges herself between her sister and the wall. Pulls the doona over them both and presses her face to the warm, solid curve of her sister’s back. Pushes away thoughts of Loki and his ridiculous ideas. If she was home, if she was alone, she could banish it all. Two, three strokes of a blade would be enough to release her.

If she was home. If she was alone.

Jacqueline closes her eyes. Concentrates instead on keeping still. On matching the slow, comforting rhythms of her sister’s breath.

‘I love you,’ she whispers. The truth of that is a comfort as well.

Antoinette follows Loki and her sister up the stairs to Jacqueline’s apartment, balancing the foil-wrapped plate of pancakes on one hand as she reaches into her pocket for her mobile with the other. A text from Greta, the first for the day; she doesn’t even bother to open it, makes a mental note to figure out how to block the girl’s number. As if there isn’t enough for her to worry about now. The look on her mother’s face as they left the house still burns cold in her memory, that hard veneer of abandonment, like she expected never to see them again, like that’s all she has ever expected. The way she thrust the plate into Antoinette’s hands, warm and weighty with leftover pancakes, the bottle of maple syrup close behind.

Waste not, want not. I didn’t make them to be thrown away.

Sally Paige, up with the birds as usual, up before either of her daughters managed to drag themselves, stiff-limbed and poorly slept, into the kitchen to find her stirring an industrial-sized bowl of batter beside a warming frypan. Way too much for any of them to finish, even with Loki showing up to shovel half a dozen syrup-soaked slabs into his belly. The breakfast table a tense and lockjawed arena, with Jacqueline and Loki swapping the occasional frostbitten glare – how Antoinette longs for a moment alone with her sister to get the
story behind
that
development – and Sally Paige hunkered taciturn over her plate, cutting her single, unladen pancake into bite-sized shapes which would, like her dinner the night before, remain largely uneaten.

Not that Antoinette had much of an appetite herself. Not with her mother sitting right there, skin-and-bone shadow of the woman Antoinette knew, the morning light scalpel sharp and granting no favours to sunken eyes and hollow, wrinkle-hung cheeks. But still as stubborn as she is sick, quick to scuttle any suggestion that there might be possible avenues of treatment yet to be explored.

It’s my time, Antoinette. You need to accept that.

Her face set against further argument as, beneath the table, Jacqueline kicked Antoinette’s shin.
Leave it
, both clear command and silent appeal,
please leave it for now
, and so Antoinette did.

But she can’t just accept it – they need to do
something
. Maybe hunt down Dr Chiang and give him a call, find out all the gory details their mother insists on keeping from them: how bad the situation is, exactly; what options there might be for them to consider – because there
have
to be options. This is the twenty-first century, for godsake, there has to be something modern medicine can offer Sally Paige beyond packing her off to die like some gangrenous, gut-shot beast. Maybe–

Up ahead, Jacqueline cries out. A soft, breathless
oh
, half-moan, half-sigh, and Antoinette looks up in time to see her sister falling, face-down, that too-slight body folding like a puppet whose strings have been abruptly severed.

Antoinette runs. Pancakes and mobile clattering to the ground as she reaches out her arms, too late, way too late, but it doesn’t matter – Loki is already there, lithe catlike crouch as he spins on his heels to catch Jacqueline one heart-stopping moment before her head hits the edge of a step.

‘What happened?’ Antoinette scoots down beside her sister as Loki turns her over, cradles her limp body into his lap. Jacqueline’s eyes are closed, her lips quiver soundlessly. ‘Did she trip?’

Loki shakes his head. ‘She just fell.’

‘What do you mean? How did she fall?’ Antoinette can hear the pitch of her own voice ascending, an unbearable waspy-whiny buzz, and she forces herself to breathe. ‘Loki, what happened?’

He doesn’t answer, just slides his arms beneath her sister’s body and lifts, rising to his feet in one graceful motion as if she is something empty and weightless, a Jacqueline doll made of plastic and air. ‘Get the door,’ he says.

Rummaging in her bag for the keys, Antoinette stumbles up the remaining steps to the apartment. She swings the door open then moves aside to let Loki through, wincing at the mess left in his wake – scattered pancakes and shards of broken plate, her Nokia in pieces down on the landing – before following him inside to the living room. Gently, he lays Jacqueline down onto the couch and brushes the tangle of hair away from her face, folds those small, white hands carefully over her belly.

Jacqueline moans, a slurred mouthful of speech that Antoinette isn’t able to decipher beyond one word which might have been
blind
, or might have been
blood
, or might have been nothing meaningful at all.

‘What happened?’ Antoinette asks again. ‘Is she hurt?’

‘She’ll be okay, she’ll come out of it soon.’