Things We Say in the Dark Read online

  Describe the position in which you were sleeping, what you did just before going to bed, and any other of your behaviours that might be to blame for the experience.

  When the worst incident happened, did you experience any of the following: No physical injuries?

  Minor physical injuries (bruises and cuts that did not require stitches)?

  Serious physical injuries (stitches, broken nose, broken bones, or hospitalisation)?

  When the best incident happened, did you experience any of the following: No physical injuries?

  Minor physical injuries (bruises and cuts that did not require stitches)?

  Serious physical injuries (stitches, broken nose, broken bones, or hospitalisation)?

  How much did you like it?

  Do you know any ways of preventing this experience? If so, please give them.

  Why do you never do the things that prevent the experience?

  Why do you like the experience?

  How many would be your preferred number to be hiding inside the home?

  What would you most like them to do to you?

  Were you asleep the last time they came?

  Were you only pretending to be asleep?

  Do you wish for the experience again?

  Are you sure it was a dream?

  Are you sure it was a stranger?

  Please leave your completed questionnaire in the appropriate box. You may then go home and wait.

  Something happened on the way back from the pool today. By the time I did my laps and walked back to my cabin, it was dark. The black sky, the black road, everything merging. I was in outer space, I was at the bottom of the sea.

  And then, far off to my right, in what I thought I remembered was an empty field: a light. At first I thought it was a car driving towards me with only one headlight working. But the light was too low, and it wasn’t moving. Half blind in the dark, shuffling so I wouldn’t trip on the scrubby grass, I moved off the path and onto the field. As I got closer to the light my brain turned possibilities over, seeing which would fit. A fallen street light. An enormous eye. A sudden floodlight set, for some reason, into the bare earth.

  It was a torch. Still lit, dropped to the ground. It’s ridiculous, I know, but I didn’t dare call out. I couldn’t help feeling like it was a trap. I kicked the torch and watched the swoop of light. I picked up the torch and trained it over the field. Nothing but bare ground.

  I clicked off the torch and put it back where I found it. I don’t know why I did that; I just didn’t want to be in my cabin and still be able to see that tiny lighthouse in the middle of nothing.

  Exquisite Corpse

  She reclines, lascivious, motionless, on velvet and satin cushions. Her back is caught in a slight arch, as if she’s pressing her breasts into a hand that reaches for her. Her pink nipples point to the ceiling. Her breasts are full and round. Her waist is tiny, narrow enough for a man’s hands to circle.

  Her skin is ivory, poreless. Her eyes are tilted half open. Her eyelashes are soft and black and real. Her hair is warm honey, flowing over the cushions, curling to perfection at the tips, all real. On top of it is nestled a pearl tiara.

  Her underarms and legs are smooth, her pubic hair small and soft like a pad of moss, neatly trimmed but still thick enough to be a hiding place, and that is real too. She wears nothing, clothed only her own post-orgasmic bliss.

  *

  When the dwarfs came home that evening they found Snow White lying on the ground.

  That night in her bedroom, Stokeley arranges her pillows carefully then reclines lasciviously. She waits. She tries to be motionless but the brushes and Delilah’s breath tickle.

  ‘Don’t smile! It makes your eyelids crinkle.’

  Stokeley purses her lips hard so her face doesn’t move. Delilah smells of cake and cherry and watermelon and coconut and dulce de leche; on the way home from the museum they tested all the body sprays until the pharmacist made them leave.

  ‘Hello and welcome to my make-up tutorial. Follow every step or you are a moron and ugly.’

  Through Stokeley’s eyelids, the light is pink. Delilah strokes a brush across Stokeley’s eyelid and the light dims.

  ‘First I apply a base colour for an even look. I am using a beige but you can use whatever colour suits your model’s skin tone.’

  Ugh, beige. Why not ivory? Stokeley wills her pores to shrink.

  Delilah goes away then comes back with the brush again, which she presses a little too hard on Stokeley’s eyelids. The light flashes in orange and purple zigzags. She’d pull back but there’s nowhere to go, and Delilah’s breath smells like candyfloss.

  ‘Next I apply an accent colour to really make the model’s eye colour pop. And I don’t mean like Stan in Geography’s eyes, which just pop anyway, especially when one of the girls bends over to pick up the big atlas.’

  Stokeley purses her lips to hold in her smile and keep her face uncreased.

  ‘Lie still. I have to do the highlight now.’

  Delilah has put her favourite playlist on and Stokeley wants to mouth the verses to her, the parts the boy sings before the girl comes in for the chorus. The light is pink and then dark and then pink and then dark. She can feel the heat of Delilah close to her, examining her work. Stokeley doesn’t know if she can open her eyes yet. She doesn’t want to.

  ‘You’re so pretty like that.’

  For a second Stokeley thinks Delilah is still doing her fake video narration. She does a stupid duck-face pout and flutters her eyelashes, but through her blinking eyes she sees that Delilah is pulling away from her, lips closing, eyes turning away.

  *

  Lie still. You’re so pretty like that.

  *

  Stokeley wanted to do Delilah’s make-up in return – to be so close her breath would stir Delilah’s eyelashes, to see the peachy fuzz along her jaw and top lip; to trace the contours of her, even if only with a brush; to have a good reason to look at her face, and not have the burning scrutiny of her looking back.

  But when she reaches for the brushes, Delilah takes them and clicks open the palettes. She turns to the mirror and does her own make-up and it is quick, functional, unnarrated. Stokeley pretends to read a magazine and not watch Delilah. She glances up after every sentence.

  ‘Which quiz do you want? You can have Which Celebrity is Older, What Kind of Flirt Are You, What Should You Dress Up As For Halloween, What’s Your Girl Power Anthem, or Does Your Crush Secretly Love You?’

  ‘Last one,’ murmurs Delilah to her reflection. She smears on base that’s the same colour as her skin but flatter.

  ‘Question one. Your crush shows up unexpectedly, and you’re halfway through your beauty routine and not looking the way you’d like. Do you hide away so he doesn’t see you in disarray, or see him anyway as he’ll still fancy you?’

  Delilah opens a shadow palette, the colours pink and yellow and red. She wields brushes. She glares at her own face like she’s angry with it.

  ‘Question two. When you tell your crush that you think a rock star is hot, does he agree or sulk or fire back that he fancies a sexy actress?’

  Delilah blends in some things along her cheeks that are darker than her skin, then some other things that are lighter. When she has finished she looks unspeakably more beautiful than Stokeley, who now feels like a drag queen in her smoky eye and purple lip, the harsh line of her blush. She feels sick with envy. She won’t be that beautiful until she’s dead.

  ‘Question three. If you had a problem, would you go to your crush first? Does your crush come to you first? Who reveals the most?’

  Delilah finishes with a slick of pink gloss, and Stokeley waits for her to blow an air-kiss – it doesn’t even have to be to Stokeley, it can be to Delilah’s own reflection. Instead Delilah sits still and examines her own face in the mirror, assessing, judging. She sighs and turns away from it.

  Stokeley prepares the words: you’re so beautiful, the most beautiful one, they’d take
your hair and put it on the models, I’d take your hair, I’d climb inside you, I’d put your skin on and walk around, let me, let me. Thankfully the doorbell rings and she pounds downstairs to let in Marybeth and Casey and Zeke before her dad gets to the door.

  The downstairs hall smells of shit and she holds her breath and dashes into the bathroom and pushes the window wide open. Please let it all go before they notice it. Please.

  *

  They were going to bury her, but she still looked as fresh as a living person.

  *

  The models in the museum are called anatomical Venuses or slashed beauties. But Delilah likes their other name, dissected graces, better. It feels more intentional.

  ‘All the hair is real,’ says the tour guide. ‘Both on the head and, uh, and elsewhere. It was taken from corpses.’

  ‘Oh my actual God,’ whispers Delilah into Stokeley’s ear. ‘Corpse pubes.’

  Stokeley snorts a laugh and goes to comment back into Delilah’s ear, but she’s ducked down to look more closely at the case, leaning right over like she wants to whisper something to the dissected grace and doesn’t want anyone else to hear.

  ‘Who did it?’ Stokeley says out loud, which is what she meant to say into Delilah’s ear.

  Everyone, including the tour guide, turns to look at Stokeley.

  ‘Who did what?’ asks the tour guide, with the suspicious manner of someone who isn’t sure if this is a kid about to do a fart joke.

  ‘The, uh, the hair. Who cut it? Seems like a, uh—’ Stokeley is aware her voice is trembling; she talks louder and lighter to fight it, tries to be a cute girl making a cute joke. ‘Seems like a funny sort of job to get. Short straw, sort of thing. The head hair, I mean, I’m asking about the head hair, not the … other.’

  And now everyone is thinking about corpse pubes, is visualising someone approaching a dead body with a little plastic bag and a comb and a pair of scissors and a creepy look on their face, hungry almost, snick-snacking the scissors with every step, looming like Edward Scissorhands, and because Stokeley brought up the subject of course they’re all picturing her doing it.

  ‘Ugh,’ mutters Casey, ‘grossness,’ and she’s looking at Stokeley.

  And Stokeley can’t bear to look back at Casey, so she looks at Delilah, who’s still gazing down at the dissected grace – long black hair, body blooming from an open cavity of petal-like organs, the colours of autumn leaves and antique lace.

  ‘Well,’ says the tour guide, calm and smoothing, ‘I imagine an anatomy student would have dealt with the corpses. That’s who these models were for, you see: anatomy students. They were all men in those days. Not like today with our gender equality and everything.’

  The tour goes on, the boys snickering, the girls pretending to ignore them.

  ‘You’ll notice,’ continues the tour guide, ‘that the models are all female, so there was a good gender balance in the anatomy rooms. Some people think that the male anatomy students found it easier to confront death in the opposite sex. Or perhaps they just liked to look at pretty girls.’

  Don’t we all, hangs the obvious reply, like a fart in the air, but no one says it.

  *

  Who reveals the most?

  Delilah and Marybeth and Casey and Zeke are all in Stokeley’s room, arrayed across her bed, limbs cocked, long hair spread and fluttering.

  Stokeley is in the downstairs bathroom, and she can hear them all laughing and singing along to the music. She went in the bathroom to try to make the smell of her dad’s shit go out faster, because she doesn’t want them to think it’s her shit and also because she doesn’t want them to think she lives in a house that smells like shit.

  She sits on the toilet, not shitting, just because it’s the only place to sit. As she sits she picks at everything she can see. The hair on her legs is growing back, tiny black dots at her ankles like they’ve been stippled with pen.

  She has a new spot coming in at her temple; it’s still beneath the skin so she can’t pop it, but she can feel the swell and pull of it. Her fringe won’t lie flat and there’s a stupid kink at her crown. She rubs her legs together and the stubble rasps. Well, while she’s here.

  She gets the razor and soap and rests her left foot up on the sink. Maybe she could waft the shit smell out with a towel? She doesn’t even know if it smells any more or she’s only imagining it.

  When she first tried shaving her legs, aged ten, her mum noticed the missing razor and asked her what she was shaving. Stokeley had been confused by that, unsure what other body parts on a woman would need shaving.

  She’d expected a lecture about how she was too young to be doing things like that, but her mum hadn’t been annoyed or finger-wagging; she had left a long thoughtful pause and then said to always use shaving gel or hair conditioner so she wouldn’t get a rash.

  Her mum had died the next year, before Stokeley had a need to shave any other parts of herself. She was in a coma for two months before they switched the machines off, long enough for her leg hair to grow in so long it wasn’t stubbly any more, but soft and strokeable, which Stokeley discovered in after-school visiting hours, perched on the edge of the bed in intensive care, trying to find a part of her mum that wasn’t attached to wires, settling for the few inches of leg visible between her socks and her pyjama bottoms.

  Stokeley runs the tap for ages but it doesn’t get warm, so she shaves with cold water. She wishes she could take a pill that would make all her body hair fall out except for on her head and her eyebrows. Though there’s always wigs and eyebrow pencils.

  She catches her ankle bone with the razor and blood beads. She swipes it with her fingertip and lifts it to her mouth, sucking the blood off.

  Her pubes, though – is it better to have no pubes at all? The models at the museum had pubes, but they were from olden times and things were different then. She knows waxing and shaving is the correct thing to do to pubes but she doesn’t know how much.

  She wants to ask Delilah.

  She won’t ask Delilah.

  *

  The dwarfs had a glass coffin made, so she could be seen from all sides. They laid her inside, and with golden letters wrote on it her name, and that she was a princess.

  When Stokeley gets home from the trip to the anatomy museum, her dad is just back from work. Friday night means sports and chicken while sitting in his chair. Stokeley hates his chair. It has grease marks on the armrests because he doesn’t use a napkin when he eats. Every week Stokeley washes the cloth that hangs over the chair back and absorbs the grease from his hair. She always picks it up by the corners so she doesn’t have the touch the part that he touched.

  ‘Did you bring it?’

  Stokeley doesn’t reply, just holds out the clear bag, still warm in her hand. The roast chicken inside is pressing its stubby wings against the sides of the bag as if trying to get out. Caught up in the smell of it is the beginning of the smell of the shit her dad will do after he’s eaten it.

  ‘You’re such a good girl. Will you have some too?’

  Stokeley shakes her head; she never has some, and they both know it.

  ‘I love to treat you to this. You know I love you.’

  Stokeley doesn’t really think it’s a treat for her if she doesn’t have any, but she doesn’t reply. She brings her dad a plate and cutlery, but there’s no point. He rips the body apart with his hands, lifting each part delicately to his grease-smeared mouth, selecting strips with his front teeth.

  Stokeley thinks about her mum, and how she’d looked beautiful lying there in her hospital bed, even with all the wires and beeps and the thing on her face to make her breathe. Her mum was always moving, always talking on the phone or saying to Stokeley put your shoes on or have you brushed your teeth? or once upon a time or not now, darling. Maybe she’d always been beautiful but Stokeley hadn’t had a chance to look. Never in her life had Stokeley been able to just sit and look at her mum’s face. Before, if she’d had to draw it from memory, or p
rovide a police photofit image, she couldn’t have done it. But in stillness, she saw clearly every bit of her mum’s beauty.

  Later, after the chicken has caused her dad to do some loud and stinking shit, he will sit in his chair and call her over, and say:

  ‘You’re a good girl, Stokeley, you’re a good daughter, I love you, do you know I love you? It’s just me and you, you’re the only thing that keeps me going. I love you, do you love me too, do you know how much I love you? You’re a good girl and you deserve a good man. Daughters marry men like their fathers and you’ll make a man like me happy one day, so very happy.’

  The chicken is down to the bones. Her dad sucks each bone into his mouth, lustfully, goatishly, a slight moan in his throat. As Stokeley watches him, her gore rises; she vomits into her mouth and swallows it, keeping her face expressionless.

  *

  You’re a good girl.

  *

  Between their perfect, up-tipped breasts is a Y-incision, the skin is spread open like an exotic flower, pink and yellow petals specked with red. Peeping out from inside, the gleam of the intact breastbone, a row of pearls stitched onto red velvet.

  There is no odour, no fluid. Nothing leaks or sags or gets misshapen. They were perfect when they were cast in wax, and they are still perfect now.

  The organs inside can be removed and then handled, examined, replaced. In one uterus, a tiny wax foetus. In some the skin is shown peeled back, revealing the striations of muscle and fat inside, the twine of blood vessels. In some an arm or leg is severed partway, showing the penny-sized circle of bone centred in the meat. There are redheads and blondes and brunettes.

  Every head is tipped back. Every limb is flatteringly bent. Every mouth is red.