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16 May 2008

62. A Rat Loose in the Corridors

I’m an accident. Lord, how I blunder around! I wonder sometimes what drives me. What is it that drives me into the disasters that populate my life?

There must be something in me that’s – what’s the right word? – lateral? angular? skewed? bevelled? lurching? Something that kinks every decision I make as it turns from thought to reality, so everything I try to shape comes out all crooked and bashed and basically unusable. Sometimes just subtly so. Other times my disasters feel grotesque in size, unwieldy obelisks in my arms.

As I walked towards the café, I was taken with all the movements of life around me, all unpredictable and surging, and all just that little bit ahead in time, compared with how I sensed time in my own head. So many different directions, so many speeds and inclinations, so many attitudes and stances – the look and feel of people can be so overwhelming when you’ve spent times away from them; they can seem so trapped in patterns, yet so forceful as they commit to those trapped little patterns. A woman pushed a buggy while her baby tried to throw things out onto the pavement, a boy looked at me and smiled as he floated across the road in a slow-mo manner, an old man paced the kerb waiting for something and when he saw me he pointed up at the sky and winked. Yep, they had some strange patterns in this town, and some strange inclinations! But what was my pattern? To me, it stuttered. It was a broken line, something of disparate colours, something started but without clear direction. To others? Who knows! Perhaps something lateral, angular, skewed, bevelled or lurching? Yeah, any of those would be just about right!

Maybe this had happened before, but when I entered the café I was momentarily the centre of attention. The café wasn’t very busy, so perhaps that was why I was conspicuous when I entered. One of the seats had Mrs Ormsley there with an older man and a small girl. I didn’t see her notice me, but what I did see was that her face looked downward and she looked slightly embarrassed. Was that something to do with me? Well, no reason for me to think that it was. Unless, of course, she knew about my night spent with James? Could she know? Surely he wouldn’t tell her? Why, in fact, would he tell anyone? I ordered from the counter and the waitress behind it – one I had seen several times before – seemed to be sniggering, and when not sniggering she seemed to have a rueful smile on her face. Yes, when other people moved, time seemed one step ahead of me. In this instance, there was a joke that I wasn’t aware of. “A nice pot of tea, is it?” the waitress said. “That should stop you from feeling spaced out!” Spaced out? Odd choice of words! But this is an odd town, odd customs prevail. Maybe this was just one of those things that they say around here!

I took a seat and waited for the tea to arrive. When it arrived, the woman still looked wry and said: “Shuttled it over as quickly as I could.” I thanked her but with a suspicious tone in my voice. At one point I momentarily caught Mrs Ormsley’s eye. I smiled; she smiled and then quickly averted her gaze, again looking uncomfortable. I found that I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that this had something to do with James. Maybe they all knew! Maybe someone had seen me go into his car!

But so what? What did it matter? Was that really any big deal? Even for a small town? I remember sighing, convinced that this was the reason and knowing that it was preposterous of them to be so childish about it! I didn’t feel affected by it in any other way other than to think them all to be small-minded.

“Oops!” The voice was loud across the café and came from the waitress. “I forgot to bring you milk! I’m such a space cadet!”

Her words were directed at me and had a kind of affected tone as if they were for everyone to hear. I glanced around at the others in the café. A man was clearly laughing and the man sitting with Mrs Ormsley looked round at me and smiled. Mrs Ormsley, however, looked even more uncertain.

Then I remembered the boy floating across the main street of the town: he was pretending to be an astronaut! The old man who pointed to the sky and winked: astronaut reference again! Spaced out! Space cadet! Shuttle!

That was why that bitch Ormsley looked so sheepish! She’d told people what I’d said that morning when I left her house – or else she’d told someone – and it had spread through the town! What had I said? Something about being fine in Mordan House if it wasn’t for the ghost of a dead astronaut? Now everyone in the town knew about the ghost of the dead astronaut and everyone would know it to be a delusion of mine – they would all know I was one of those people who have a stray rat in the corridors of their head and that they can’t seem to catch. Someone in need of medication to get rid of it. Rat poison. That’s what they’d say: “That Mordan House girl. Got a rat loose in her corridors. Needs rat poison from a rat doctor, if you ask me.”

Being known as the woman who shagged James after a drunken night-out I could deal with! This? I wasn’t so sure.

I decided to leave straightaway. The pattern of this town was laid-out around me and boxing me in with its judgments. Yes, they now knew my pattern also! The pattern of a mentally unstable woman. An astronaut shape. A dead astronaut at that! And what of James? Did he know before he slept with me? Did he think that it would be easy to sleep with the mentally unstable woman who would be looking for a floating astronaut above the bed as he got it on with her? Is that why he disappeared? Job done?

As I drove back to Mordan House, I felt the accident of me so starkly. I felt it in my fingertips, across my face and every part of me. I was so brittle and flawed, and every accident that comprised me, and that hovered - ready to break things just below the surface of me - filled my head as if every cell was adulterated and I could sense the crack within every one of them. It was then that I took a bend too wide and the car went over the grass verge at the side of the road and clipped a tree before I finally managed to bring it to a stop. All I did was get out, glance quickly at the scrunched headlight and bashed bumper at the front, lock the car doors and start to walk the rest of the way to Mordan House. My head empty of everything but the rat that I could see far off in the distance and that had left evidence of its scurrying practically everywhere inside of me.

Want to read more? Read the whole story by clicking on the first blog called Prelude and start clicking forwards using the tabs above the title.

13:40 Posted in Part Two: Getting Some Answers | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal