The Last House on Needless Street(86)

‘Well,’ he says, surprised. ‘I guess that’s right.’ We look at each other briefly. Then we sit in silence.

He goes home as evening is sneaking in. The sun falls low, purple shadow wraps around things, readying for night. As I pick up the beer cans I catch a flash of yellow overhead, in my beech tree. Goldfinch song fills the dusk. The birds are coming back.





Night Olivia





Hello, everyone. Welcome to the first episode of CATching up with Night Olivia. We’ve got a great show ahead. We’re going to be talking about light – types of sunshine, kinds of darkness – what’s best for naps, what will illuminate your eyes like unearthly lamps in the dusk, and so on, plus: what shadows work best for concealing you, as you stalk your prey like a black bolt of death in the night.

But first, let’s address the elephant in the room. We need to talk about the upstairs world, the so-called real world. I think we can all agree that it is not as good as the one inside. It is grey and everything smells bad. I don’t like the colour of the rug, which up here is not a beautiful shout of orange, but the shade of dead teds. Anyway I do come up here sometimes, despite my reservations, because one should always know what one is dealing with. Sometimes I even go outside. I am not an indoor cat any more. I see and feel the world, where once I just smelled and heard it, from downstairs in the inside place. Now, if I want, I can come upstairs and be with Ted as he walks in the fall leaves, feel the chilly bite of first frost in the shortening days.

But yes, outside is quite disappointing. It is no big deal, I would say. There is a tabby cat up here, but she is not the one I love. When I first saw her I thought, You poor thing. Her eyes are dull brown – when I look into them I see only a hungry animal. She is small and thin, has no claws and walks with a staggering limp. She does not shine. The orange-headed ted insists on feeding her. That ted looks like a lumberjack but he is actually very sentimental. Also he smells very strongly of his big brouhaha, which is disgusting. Ted keeps telling me the brouhaha scented the blood and found us in the woods but I refuse to believe that I was saved in such a fashion. Anyway, I was wondering how Ted would cope without Olivia. He seems to be doing fine.

I love to go down to the weekend place and watch the other one, the beautiful one, through the window as she grooms and preens. She stares like a snake with her apple-yellow eyes. She is one of us, of course. Another part. Maybe I should have guessed that earlier. She chooses not to talk. But I hope that one day she will speak to me. In the meantime I will worship her and wait. I will do that for ever, if necessary. I can always keep an eye on what is happening upstairs through the TV.

Sometimes the LORD comes walking through the kitchen wall or floating up the stairs towards the roof light on the landing. He turns to look down at me with his round fish eyes, or the mirrored gaze of a fly. He’s a fragment of Ted’s imagination. Mommy talked so much about the ankou that the ankou came. Mommy’s god found his way from her faraway village in Brittany, through Ted, into Olivia’s world. That’s how gods travel, through minds.

The LORD never made Olivia help Ted or Lauren. She just wanted to be kind. She was a nice cat. I am nice, but I am other things too.

There is no cord any more, binding me to Ted. I kind of miss it, now it’s gone. He and I are bound to one another and the cord was a reflection of that. It was honest and showed how things truly are. I find that the upper world holds few such helpful signs. It is a cold bleak place. Our big fleshy body lumbers through it, with us inside like badly nested Russian dolls. Disgusting, in my opinion.

However, we can all be together upstairs, now – Ted, Lauren and me, and some of the others whose names I don’t know yet. They are just beginning to come up into the light. We can talk or fight or whatever just as well as we can downstairs in my place. Sometimes I forget to go back down for days at a time. So I guess in some ways the upstairs is now my home too.





Ted





The path winds up into the fall day. The air has mushrooms and red leaves in it. The trees are thin-fingered against the sky. Rob is warm at my side, hair escaping from his hat like tufts of flame. It has been three months since that morning in the forest, but it could be a lifetime ago.

The stories all fit inside each other. They echo through. It started with her, Little Girl With Popsicle. And she deserves a witness, so that’s why we’re here.

It is only a quarter-mile or so from the parking lot to the water, but it takes us a while. I shuffle rather than walk, mindful of my healing wound. You can really damage yourself, if you can’t feel pain. ‘Put your scarf on,’ I tell Rob. I wanted a friend to look after us. The weird thing is, now that I have one, all I want to do is to look after him.

The trees open out and we are at the water’s edge. It is cool today; the sand looks dirty and dull under the grey sky. There are some hikers, some dogs. Not many. The lake gleams, black glass. The water is too still, like a painting or a trick. It’s smaller than I remember. But of course it’s me who’s changed.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say to Rob. What can the living say to the dead? Little Girl With Popsicle is gone and we don’t know where. Mommy isn’t really under the sink, and Daddy isn’t in the tool shed.

‘Maybe we don’t do anything,’ he says.

So I just try to focus really hard on the little girl, and remember that she was here once and she isn’t any more. Rob’s hand is on my back. I send my best thoughts for her out into the water and the sky and the dry fall leaves and the sand and the pebbles under us. I hold you in my heart, I think at Little Girl With Popsicle, because it feels like someone should.