The Last House on Needless Street Read online

  I follow the marching trail of ants back to the main entrances to their nest. They’re almost translucent in the sunlight, harmless-looking little things. You’d never think they could cause such pain. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. I pour the pyrethrin over the nest, into the holes, and into the trash bag containing the groundsheet.

  I didn’t know whether the fire ant nest would still be here, in the north-west corner. But I thought it probably would. They’re territorial creatures. It was difficult for me to listen to Lauren’s cries, to hear her pain as they stung her. But it was necessary – she has to learn.

  I have to admit that Lauren is much better, these days. There have been no repeats of that time at the mall.

  I stand in the centre of the glade, which is also the centre of the pattern. A pool of sunlight falls there. I greet the gods and feel their power. They reach out from where they lie beneath the forest floor. It’s like being tugged in different directions by slender threads. Mommy is right. As soon as my arm is better I have to find them a new home. People are beginning to feel them. That family got way too close.

  As I climb my front steps I notice that they’re bare. The wind has blown them clear of leaves and such. That won’t do. If people come up to the house I need to hear it. What I do is, I crush a couple of Christmas ornaments and sprinkle them over the steps. This produces a crisp high tinkle that gives me plenty of warning of approaching visitors. It’s not dangerous. People wear shoes. I mean, I know I went out in my bare feet the other day but most people don’t. That’s just a fact.

  As I’m scattering the broken shards of fibreglass I catch movement at the corner of my eye. I turn to look, hoping I’m wrong. But I’m not. The newspaper is gone from one of the downstairs windows in the abandoned house next door. As I watch, a pale hand pulls more yellowing newsprint away, leaving the window unlidded like a dark deep eye. The sash is pushed up and a business-like hand dumps a panful of dust out of the window. Then there comes the sound of vigorous sweeping.

  I go into my house and lock the front door behind me. I put my eye to the peephole that faces east, towards the vacant house. Overgrown timothy grass nods against the glass, but I still have a good enough view. I watch as a white truck pulls up. It says EZ Moving in orange letters on the side. A woman comes out the front door, lopes down the steps in easy strides and unhooks the gate at the back of the truck. She has a fixed look around her mouth. It makes her seem older than she probably is. She doesn’t look like she sleeps much. A man in a brown uniform gets out of the driver’s side of the truck. Together they begin to unload. Boxes, lamps, a toaster. An easy chair. Not much stuff.

  The woman looks towards me, where I lie in wait. Her eyes seem to pierce through the screen of timothy into the dark room where I sit. I duck even though there is no way she can see me. This is very bad. People have eyes to look and ears to listen, and women look and listen more carefully than men.

  I am so upset I have to go to the kitchen and make bullshots. I’m sad to say I didn’t invent these. You can probably find the recipe but I’ve made some little changes of my own so I’ll record this.

  After a long hunt I find the machine under the bed. I kicked it there by accident I guess.

  Recipe for Bannerman’s bullshots. Boil up a little beef bouillon and season it with pepper and Tabasco. You can add a teaspoon of mustard. I like to add celery salt too. Then put in a shot of bourbon. Or two, maybe. You are supposed to add lemon juice but people who like lemon juice are the same kind of people who love salad. I won’t have it in the house.

  I have three before I feel any better. I follow it up with my pill, and before I know it I’m nodding pleasantly. Like Mommy used to say, if you have pain you take medicine. If you have a cut you get stitches. Everyone knows that.

  Mommy used to tell me the story of the ankou, the god with many faces who lives in the graveyards of her home. It’s so frightening to have more than one face. How can you know who you really are? When I was little I sometimes thought I saw the ankou in my room at night, hanging in the dark; an old man with a long knife, the blade reflected in his eyes. Then he was a horned stag, sharp prongs anointed with blood. Then a gazing owl, still as stone. He was my monster. I can’t even remember exactly what Mommy told me about him – or which parts my mind added in the night. The thought of him still makes me tremble. But these days I have Olivia. When I stroke her fur or even just hear her little annoyed scufflings around the house, I remember that I am safe and the ankou is far away.

  As I drift, the bug man’s words go round and round in my head like ticker tape. It can be lonely, keeping secrets. It’s weird because in one way I am very lonely, and in another I’ve got more company than I can handle.

  I am almost asleep when the doorbell cuts through the air like a jackhammer.

  Olivia

  The gd doorbell is ringing, and Ted won’t get up. He always sleeps late after he has been to the woods. I can hear him snoring like a snare drum. There it goes again. BRRRRRRRRRR. No, not like a snare drum. More like a saw or a nail gun to the head. Come on, the ted with opposable thumbs has to wake up and answer the doorbell. I can’t, can I? I’m a cat. I mean, what the eff.

  I race upstairs and walk on his face until he wakes up. He groans with the effort of dragging clothes onto his body. I tread the outline of his warm body in the sheets, as his steps retreat like thunderclaps down the stairs. There go the locks, thunk, thunk, thunk. He opens the door. Another voice says something pleading. I think it’s a female ted. I wait confidently. Ted will tell this other ted where to go! He hates people ringing the doorbell. After all, other teds are dangerous. He has told me often enough.

  But instead, to my horror, he lets the other ted in. The door closes and the thunder comes. The whole house shakes. The carpet slides under me. I am rowing and scrabbling for clawholds. The timbers in the roof groan and scream, the walls judder. The fabric of everything threatens to spring apart.

  Slowly the world settles. But I can’t move from my place under the bed. I am frozen with horror, heart pounding. The new stink of her fills the house, fills my nostrils. It’s like burning and black pepper. This ted is making me feel too much – who or what is she?

  Below, the teds are talking like nothing’s wrong. I think they’re in the kitchen. I don’t want to listen to them, of course I don’t, but I can’t help hearing. This lady ted is going to live next door. Then she says something about putting a cat in a washing machine. Oh my lord. She’s a gd psycho, like on the TV.

  Ted’s voice takes on a strange note. It is – interest? Happiness? Awful, anyway. What if he asks her back? What if this starts happening all the time? The conversation seems to go on for ever and I think, Wow he should just ask her to move in here, the way he’s going on. At long, long last their voices move into the hall again. He shows her out.

  As the lady ted leaves, she says, ‘If you ever need help with anything,’ and something about a broken arm that I don’t really understand.

  Finally he closes the door behind her.

  Wow. That was not right. Bad, bad, bad. The whining reaches a pitch which makes me feel like my head will explode. That was a violation of all the trust between us – what do we have if we don’t have trust? What if that lady ted is a murderer? What if she decides to come back? unacceptable.

  Ted comes upstairs and the bed creaks companionably above my head. Back to his nap, of course. He calls for me but I am completely upset and I run out of the bedroom. Obviously he has no feelings because a few minutes later he is snoring again.

  I pace the living room. The peepholes peer crazily at me, like eyes. Nothing feels safe. I knead the nice rug but even that can’t comfort me like usual. I am so upset that even my eyes aren’t working properly. Everything looks the wrong colour, the walls look green, the rug blue.

  He has to be taught a lesson. Breaking stuff isn’t enough, this time.

  I leap crazily from the counter, aiming for the refrigerator door. Eventually I hook the handl
e with a paw and it swings open. I give a little prrp of satisfaction. Cold billows out. In this weather it will soon melt all over the floor. The beer will get warm. The milk and meat will spoil. Good. Look at my bowl! Empty! Let him see how it feels.

  I feel better after that. When I go back in the living room I am relieved to see that my eyes are back to normal. I am able to curl up on the orange rug and have a little nap which to be honest I gd deserve, after all I’ve been through.

  Dee

  Something gives under her feet with a crack. There are bright shards among the leaves and dirt that cover the steps. It’s as if a whole box of Christmas tree ornaments has shattered everywhere. It adds a hectic edge of unreality.

  Dee wonders if she’ll know, right away, when she sees him. Surely the truth will come off his flesh like a scent.

  She rings the doorbell thirty or forty times. She sees movement at the window but there’s no answer, and she wonders if she should leave. Part of her sags with relief at the thought. But she doesn’t think she can put herself through all this again. Get it done, Dee Dee. Her father’s voice in her head. Their grim credo during that long half-year when it was just them, alone. Get through it, get it done; no matter how unpleasant, however hard your heart pounds in the night, whatever dreams may come. Get it done. She straightens her spine a little, and that moment she hears a shuffling within the house. A small high noise – a cat, maybe? Then heavier sounds, a large body making impressions on stairs, walls, boards.

  Three different locks click and the door opens a crack. A bleary brown eye presents itself, framed by a pale face which sprouts hair. His beard is red, much brighter than the lank brown strand that falls over his brow – the shade is attractive, it gives him a piratical, almost jaunty air.

  ‘Hi,’ she says.

  ‘What is it?’ His voice is higher than she expected.

  ‘I’m your new neighbour. Dee. I wanted to say – well, hi, and I brought you some pie.’ She winces and resists the urge to mention that she’s a poet, but doesn’t know it. Instead she holds out the box containing the out-of-season pumpkin pie she bought at the drugstore. The box has dust on it, she now sees.

  ‘Pie,’ he says. A pale hand snakes out and takes the pie. For a moment Dee expects his skin to sizzle in the sunlight. She doesn’t let go of the moist cardboard, and for a moment they are caught in a gentle tug of war.

  ‘I’m so sorry to bother you with this,’ she says. ‘But my water doesn’t get switched on until this afternoon. Could I possibly use your bathroom? It was a long drive.’

  The eye blinks. ‘It’s not convenient right now.’

  ‘I know,’ Dee says, smiling. ‘The new neighbour only just got here, and she’s already being a pain. Sorry. I already tried a couple houses on the street but I think everyone’s out at work.’

  The door swings wide. The man says stiffly, ‘I guess, if you’re quick.’

  Dee steps into an underworld; a deep cave where lonely shafts of light fall on strange mounds, jagged broken things. Plywood is nailed over all the windows, with round circles cut out to let in light.

  She peers to her left, into the living room. As her eyes adjust to the gloom she sees that piles of books and old rugs litter the wooden boards. There are bare patches on the yellowed walls, where pictures or mirrors once hung. The walls are a deep green, like a forest. She sees a beat-up lounger, a TV. There’s a dirty blue rug on the floor that looks like it’s made of little pills. The whole place smells of death; not of rot or blood but dry bone and dust; like an old grave, long forgotten. Everything is decaying. Even the latch on one of the back windows is rusted through. Flakes of dark red litter the sill. The tired detective Karen’s voice is in Dee’s head. A chaotic home environment. Unmarried. Socially marginal.

  Behind her the front door closes. She hears the three locks click into place. Each hair on the back of her neck stands slowly, individually on end.

  ‘Kids?’ she asks, nodding at the pink bicycle, which lies on its side.

  He says, ‘Lauren. I don’t get to see her as often as I’d like.’

  ‘That’s rough,’ Dee says. He is younger than she had first thought, early thirties, maybe. Eleven years ago, he would have been just in his twenties.

  ‘The bathroom is down the hall,’ he says. ‘This way.’

  ‘Great music,’ she says, following. The song that’s playing somewhere in the house is another surprise, heartfelt country music, sung in a lovely voice. She sees that Ted has bare patches on the back of his head, as though handfuls of hair have been pulled out by small fists. For some reason this brings the light, airy graze of terror.

  In the bathroom, Dee turns on both the taps. She can hear him waiting for her behind the door. His distress, his animal breathing. She’s aware, in great detail, of her own body; her skin, so strong in some places, like on her heels and her callused fingertips, so thin in others, like her eyelids. She feels the delicate hair that stands up on her forearms, the soft globes of her eyes; her long tongue and throat, her purpled organs and muscled heart, which pumps the red blood through her. It is pumping fast, now. All these vulnerable things, which can be broken or punctured: the blood can spill; bone can become a cracked white edge; eyeballs can be burst by the pressure of two thumbs. She looks for a mirror, to reassure herself that she is whole, unharmed. But there isn’t one above the basin or anywhere else in the dim, dirty bathroom.

  She flushes the toilet, washes her hands and opens the door.

  ‘Could I have a drink of water?’ she asks. ‘I’m parched. Is it always so warm around here? I thought this place was known for the rain!’ He turns without a word and lumbers into the kitchen.

  She looks about her as she drinks. ‘Do you hunt? Fish?’

  ‘No.’ After a moment he asks, ‘Why?’

  ‘You must freeze a lot of stuff,’ she says, ‘to need two freezers.’ Only the small combination fridge-freezer appears to be in use. The other – an old, industrial chest freezer – lies empty and open, lid resting against the wall.

  He looks embarrassed. ‘Olivia likes to sleep in there,’ he says. ‘My cat. I should have got rid of it when it broke, but the thing makes her happy, you know? She purrs and purrs. So I keep it. Dumb, I guess.’

  She looks inside. The box is lined with soft things – blankets and pillows. On a cushion she can see a hair – it is brown, or reddish-brown. It doesn’t look like a cat hair. ‘Does Olivia live outside?’ Dee asks. She can’t see cat bowls for food or water anywhere in the kitchen.

  ‘No,’ he says, offended. ‘Of course not, that would be dangerous. She’s an indoor cat.’

  ‘I love cats,’ Dee says, smiling. ‘But they’re such assholes. Especially as they get older.’

  He laughs, a startled stutter. ‘I guess she is getting older,’ he says. ‘I’ve had her a long time. All I wanted, when I was a kid, was a cat.’

  ‘Ours used to sleep in the dryer,’ she says. ‘It gave my dad nightmares. He was so scared he’d mistake her for a sweater and …’ She mimes spinning, makes the face of a horrified cat, staring out through glass.

  He gives another little choked laugh and she adds a kind of dance, like the cat paddling in the swirling laundry.

  ‘You’re funny,’ he says. His smile looks lopsided, creaky, like it hasn’t been used in some time. ‘I was always afraid Olivia was going to get herself shut in. At least she can’t suffocate, now.’ He shows Dee the holes that are drilled in the lid.

  ‘Pretty,’ she says, running her finger across one of the blankets. It is yellow, with a pattern of blue butterflies on it, and it is like a duckling’s back to the touch.

  He closes the lid of the freezer slowly but steadily, so that she has to remove her hand. As he does, she notices the fading bruising on his forearm, his swollen hand.

  ‘Hey, you’re hurt,’ she says. ‘How’d that happen?’

  ‘The car door closes on my arm,’ he says. ‘Closed, I mean. I was parked on a hill. At least it’s not broken,
I guess.’

  She makes a wincing face. ‘Still hurts, I bet. I broke my arm once. It was so awkward, you know, opening jars and stuff like that. Are you right-handed? If you need help, let me know.’

  ‘Uh,’ he says. She lets the ensuing silence stretch. ‘What do you do?’ he asks eventually.

  ‘I wanted to be a dancer once,’ Dee says. ‘I’m nothing, now.’ Strange that this is the first time she has allowed herself to admit it out loud.

  He nods. ‘I wanted to be a cook. Life.’

  ‘Life,’ she says.

  At the door, she shakes his hand. ‘Bye, Ted.’

  ‘Did I tell you my name?’ he asks. ‘I don’t remember doing that.’

  ‘It’s on your shirt.’

  ‘I used to work at an auto shop,’ he says. ‘I guess I got used to the shirt.’ Manual labour or unemployed.

  ‘Anyway, thanks,’ Dee says. ‘You’ve been very neighbourly. I won’t bother you again, I promise.’

  ‘Any time.’ Then he looks alarmed. He locks the door quickly behind her.

  Thunk, thunk, thunk.

  She walks back slowly across the parched yard. He’s watching her as she goes, of course. She feels the weight of his eyes on her back. It takes all her restraint not to run. The encounter has shaken her more than she expected. She had been sure he wouldn’t let her in.

  Dee closes her front door behind her with trembling hands and sits down on the dusty floor with her back against it. She tries to breathe, to calm herself, but she seems to have handed her body over to someone else. Her hands clench and unclench. Hot tides crawl across her skull. A sawing gasp comes from her throat. Her heart thumps in her ears. A panic attack, she thinks vaguely. Got to get it together. But it’s like sinking deeper and deeper into a sand dune; she can’t just climb out.

  At length it subsides. Dee coughs and breathes. She becomes aware of an acrid scent in the house, a mingling of dry grass and pepper trees, wattle and stinkbugs. The outdoors is coming inside where it doesn’t belong. She gets up, weak as a kitten, and follows the scent to its source. In the dusty living room a pane of glass is missing from the window. Dry leaves have blown across the scarred boards. Something has been sleeping in here. Not a skunk, she doesn’t think, but something. Possum or raccoon.