The City Girl [Aaaand its a wrap!]

My dreams followed the same pattern lately.

Adobeee-a, Adobeee-a, what happened to you in the Tent of Incense Fire?

Always in the mocking, childlike tones of the black butterfly.

What happened in that one night that was ten days long? What did the greys show you, what exactly did they do to you? Shall I guess?

*

So this is what the city looks like up close. Crowded streets, crowded alleys, crowded marketplaces, crowded air heavy with voices and perfume and less pleasant odours, the odours and sounds of too many people with lives piled on top of one another. No goodtrees. Constant movement. No cabins, but buildings of adobe, stone, concrete, glazed brick and glass. Brightly lit pavilions. Quaint summer huts.

The city, when it met you for the first time, picked you off your feet, spun you around and threw you down dazed and dizzy. It laughed in your face and dared you to dance to its music.

But the new Garnet did not let herself be bullied by the unfamiliar. She took it all in, like one willing to throw herself into the heart of a fire (but not an incense fire, never that, never again).

Instead of cowering, she danced.

There was music pounding down from a party on the floor just overhead, so she didn’t think it was inappropriate when she paused halfway up the stairwell and started to sway like her life, her new life depended on it. Sway left, sway right, head toss left, head toss right, braids whipping her face, but she didn’t care, it felt good, it numbed the gnawing anxiety that she had done something terrible and there was no going back.

Jasper, cleaned up and uncaged, stopped and looked back at her. He didn’t ask what she was doing. He had talked very little since they had left the goodforest. He would have to learn to talk to her like a sibling, and soon. She was his sister after all. She was Garnet.

*

My (new) mother’s apartment in Hibiscus House is intense with colour. Mainly blue, purple and gold. My eyes, unused to such vibrancy, stare and stare and stare some more. My new mother herself is intense, but not with colour, with something else. She wears her makeup like a mask, but behind it there are cracks and gullies, a whole scarred landscape.

The Old Bat did warn me that she was insane. Which woman in her right mind would barter her son for the illusion of her dead daughter? Because that is what I have become. An illusion. The illusion of Garnet. I wear Garnet’s clothes, I sleep in Garnet’s bed, and all the while Garnet is dead, but not dead enough to leave me alone. I’m not even an illusion that fools anyone, for I look nothing like the Garnet that once was; I don’t have her sharp cheekbones or her sharp chin. But Madam Constance has decided that I am her daughter, come home from a long journey, and no one bothers to contradict her. It would be impolite and unnecessarily incendiary to do so.

Do they wonder where I came from?

Would Prince know me if he saw me? I’ve seen her somewhere, I’m sure of it, but where-?

In order to avoid disappointment, I’ll assume that he won’t. He will see me as a stranger at first, there will be no flicker of recognition. Instead there will be a blank space for me to write upon.

Perhaps one day I will give him back his ring.

*

Madam Constance was sitting up in the light of a single flickering candle, waiting. Garnet would come tonight, if the Old bat’s emissary, that sweet-voiced butterfly, had spoken true. O joy, her daughter would be home this very night!

And your son? Madam Constance, what about your son?

Son? What son? WHOSE son? That unfortunate boy was no son of hers. The Old Bat would put him to much better use than he could have ever been to her. No, no don’t think about him and his ugly black eyes. Think of Garnet instead, safe at home once more, alive and well, lovely as ever. Any moment now!

In the meantime, she snapped her fingers. A bulky, obliging form, barely discernible in the shadows behind Madam Constance’s chair stirred briskly and refilled her madam’s empty glass with a bright pink, pungent liquid.

Madam Constance sipped her drink and stared in the direction of the front door with flaming eyes.

‘Do you hear something, Mamafoot?’ she asked at length, setting down the glass and leaping to her feet.

‘A knock, Madam,’ Mamafoot replied softly.

‘Why are you still standing there then?’ Madam Constance’s whisper was like a whip that struck Mamafoot into action. With a swiftness unexpected of her hefty build, she had flown to the door and was now applying her eye, dark, bright, eager and wary all at the same time, to the peephole.

‘WHO GOES THERE?’ she intoned in her stage voice. For Mamafoot had once been a theater actress, mostly playing the part of ill-omened apparitions and comically violent stepmothers.

Enhancing the breathless drama of the moment: a beautiful voice, unearthly in its loveliness-

(Garnet had never sounded better, for it was Garnet, without a doubt, without a doubt)

seemed to fill the apartment’s hall from beyond its front door, flowing in like a wisp of enchanted smoke-

‘It is I, Garnet. Mother, it is I.’

In the silence that followed, the new Garnet glanced uncertainly at Jasper’s impassive face. She had said the words exactly as the Old Bat had told her to. What next? Supposing something went wrong? Garnet wasn’t sure what, but she had a sickening vision- a mere flash really, but even more frightening for its fleetingness- of a grey figure peering at her through the peephole, a falcon perched on its shoulder, a bone-hilt knife in its hand, a new horrible raspiness in its voice-

See Adobea? I found you.

Not that she had anything to do with the name Adobea. Not that she knew any grey figure that would have a falcon perched on its shoulder. Not that she even recognized the strange voice, or felt slightly faint at the sound of it. She shook her head vigorously and proceeded to knock once again, but by then the door was already being pulled open.

Suddenly Jasper placed a hand on her arm to stall her. It was dreadfully cold, and although she flinched he didn’t seem to notice. ‘Let me,’ he whispered and stepped in front of her.

*

Mamafoot stood there frozen.

Exasperated Madam Constance leapt forth in a flurry of peach silk. ‘Move aside, move aside-’ And was cut short when she saw the person that filled the doorway, dark and expressionless as death itself. She let loose a terrible scream that seemed to pierce the party music from upstairs and leave it bewildered, deflated.

Mamafoot caught her in as she fell in a swoon.

Jasper blinked. ‘I’m back,’ he stated by way of explanation. ‘Mother is shocked.’

‘Madam!’ Mamafoot cried, cradling her mistress in her arms as she would a waiflike child, but Constance remained insensible.

Meanwhile Jasper stepped aside to present the new Garnet, the star of this obscene farce. He thought this, vehemently and bitterly, but he would never say it out loud. Furthermore his eyes were cautious and betrayed nothing. That was the way, he had discovered, to keep oneself out of old witches’ cages. To betray nothing, not even to the so-called sister who stood next to him and looked at him as though she expected him to unfurl like a flower, as though she deserved such, on account of having rescued him from a bleak fate.

He wasn’t grateful though. What was the point of gratitude in a situation like this? What was he even doing back in this cursed place?

And meanwhile the new Garnet watched the great black-shawled woman carry the much smaller peach-silk-dressing-gowned woman (Mother, she supposed) to the sort of chair that one would never set eyes upon in the goodforest. It was not sturdy and wooden, but was rather like a pearly pink fat lady on daintily curved silver legs. It invited one to caress it. Mother lay on it as though dead, drowned in her peach silk.

And Mamafoot turned on Jasper.

‘What are YOU doing here?!’ she all but growled, advancing threateningly. She was tall, but not as tall as Jasper and hence had to draw herself a little higher on her toes so as to stand nose-to-nose with him. So as to glare directly into the inscrutable coal of his eyes.

‘I brought him,’ Garnet spoke up confidently. ‘He’s my brother. Is he not my brother?’

Jasper’s eyes betrayed nothing of course, but his lips allowed a small smile.

‘Of course I’m your brother,’ he said smoothly.

Mamafoot drew back, looking a little lost. Garnet noted that she had a rather oily face. However this was irrelevant and so she turned instead to Madam Constance who was stirring. Sitting up now, blinking confusedly about her, shrinking from Jasper as though from an evil spirit.

This is my mother now, thought the new Garnet. I should greet her. Hold her hands.

Which was what she did, coming forward in the white dress that the Old Bat had told her she must wear, the dress the old Garnet had worn for her coming-of-age rites. A ghost dress, sparkling and diaphanous, whispering softly on the skin. ‘Mother; she murmured, holding out her hands to Madam Constance. ‘Mother, I’ve come home.’

*

I am not insane. I have not truly forgotten and I know full well that I am Adobea and not Garnet. I am most aware of this in night, lying awake in my bed, listening for any hint of Garnet’s ghost. Waiting morbidly for a pair of greyhealer hands to close around my neck and squeeze. Waiting for the black butterfly to light on the tip of my nose and laugh at me.

You poor poor foolish girl…are you happy now?

Sometimes when I feel dangerously close to screaming into the darkness I tiptoe to the balcony where I find Jasper leaning against the railing and staring out over the city. He doesn’t say anything to me, only goes on smoking a strange, delicately carved pipe.

Silence, serenity. At least for a little while, false at it may be, and fragile in its falseness.