Prologue
OF COURSE, I’VE ALWAYS known there’s something wrong with me.
As far back as I can remember, there has been this wall, this two-inch-thick pane of glass that no one else seems to have.
When I’m behind the glass, I see the world, I interact with it in a vague sort of way, but I never really come close to touching it.
Except occasionally, when I get these bursts of feeling, where something takes over, some madness descends, and for a moment everything appears in vivid technicolour.
It’s in those moments that I’m afraid, those moments when I don’t know what I might do.
One time I killed a bird. The neighbour’s cat had got to it first. Its wing was hanging on by a single sinewy thread.
My parents were late back from work. I was hungry and tired.
My uniform stank. I hadn’t yet worked out how to ask my mum for deodorant, too embarrassed to alert her to her little girl’s leaking, pubescent body.
Kids picked on me for the smell. One boy worse than others.
That afternoon I’d been forced to sit next to him.
I was always being asked to sit next to the naughty kids, as if my ‘goodness’ might rub off on them.
Whenever the teacher’s back was turned, the boy would lean in and whisper obscenities in my ear, informing me of all the ways he’d like to defile me, the stinky weirdo bitch.
These aren’t excuses. I don’t know why I even mention them at all.
But that day, standing alone in the garden, seeing the bird’s oily feathers, its pleading bead of an eye, something inside me cracked.
I took a brick, lifted it high in the air, and bashed the bird’s skull in . . .
But then the feeling goes.
Punctured by shame, the madness drains away.
Life flattens into 2D. It becomes a movie reel, something everyone else takes part in while I just watch.
I follow the plot, laughing and crying at all the right moments; I eat my popcorn, but really, it doesn’t matter who lives or dies.
When the credits roll, it’s still just me, sitting alone inside a dark theatre.
I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t absolve me of what comes next.
Victoria died twelve years ago, and even now I think about her every single day.
Forgive me. I’m getting ahead of myself.
These things have an order. A beginning, a middle and an end.
But you know that. You’ve had stories bred into you since your mother first peered into your crib and whispered songs of grizzly picnics and twinkling stars, blind mice and carving knives. I’ll return to our beginning. Act One.
Lights.