Phantasm - Wattys 2017

-3-

She is twelve now, and she wanders her playground alone. Tucked under her arm are her books; her safe spaces in the islands of her school. Look out, don't touch the water.

I watch her, all the time. In her classes, with her mother, in bed, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She doesn't see my shifting mass, but she feels it, I know. I am a voice in her head, the right one, the most powerful. The one she listens to, the one she can trust.

She crosses the concrete, settles down on that wooden bench, right now she has Harper Lee open, searching the words for meaning, for relevance. I sit beside her on the bench, cold wood cutting into her thigh, wind whipping at her school plait and she turns the pages. This may be her favourite part of the day; where there are no boys who kick her chair in maths, where she doesn't have to do the dishes while her Mum is at her appointments, where she doesn't lie awake at night, that awful, yawning, savage hunger in her, the hunger for something she can't have, that she won't let herself have. When it's so quiet that it tears her heart right open, splitting her veins, pulling at the tendons in her brain, but all she can do is sit in the dark, silent and catatonic.

Because what else can she do?

She mustn't interfere with things, the other kids probably won't like that, they'll think she's weird, they'll make fun of her. She shouldn't set herself up for that. No, better to keep quiet, maybe if she's silent, this will go away. She won't have to make an effort to do the things other people find easy, small talk, weather jokes, awkward silence where there should be laughter.

It'll be easier this way. It'll be less painful.

I go forward a month or so, to when she calls for her mother from the bathroom, but she can't hear her daughter, she must have been taking a nap, knocked out by the pills the doctor gave her, blissed serenity for an hour or so. All the while she is in the bathroom, I wish I could touch her, comfort her. Tears are streaming down her face, her throat raw from shouting, shouting as red trickles down her thighs, red red red red. Streaming and she can't stop it, she has no control.

It's rushing and painful, as if her insides are being wrung out like a wet dishcloth. She's run out of toilet paper but she can't open the door because rivers are flowing, scarlet, bloody rivers, seeping and swaying. Stars, she is screaming, please calm down, please. Her head is fuzzy and hot, something triggered in her bloodstream. She thinks this might be what they call a panic attack.

Later she will cry herself to sleep. I watch from the corner, my darkness camouflaged into the night, save the pale ribbon of moonlight that dusts its way from the crack between the curtains to the carpet. In the morning, things will be better, I think.

But another part of her doesn't agree.

Another part is desperate. Another part is mourning.

Because why should tomorrow be any different? Why should tomorrow be any better?

I want to heal her.

But maybe I am only opening the wound more.