Quiet room, dark room, black. Black eye-liner smudged already like night’s end. Black spaces between stars out the window, which normally we astronomers revel in searching but tonight the absent body is him and he fails to emerge from the dark driveway nor the shadows along the path. He does not light up my phone, and the waiting spaces feel only black.

My Little Black Dress rides up despite so many times modelled and smoothed and nipped in the mirror behind the door he did not knock on.

Well, rock on.

The world hasn’t stopped because he didn’t come. Out my bedroom window a satellite merely blinks and cruises on. Earth holds its orbit. Orion holds aim.

Pretty little stars: fiery balls of superheated gas and chaos. A fire churns in my stomach that wish I could burp away.

I shouldn’t have taken the night off. I made it too easy for him. I kick my thoughts aside with the other black dress (unspeakably fattening) and the blue shirt tossed across the desk near stockings with ladders and socks on the bed head…

Feet on floor?… Feet at my door?

Halted breath.

Salted wet streaks left on my face. Cool air not blinked away.

Blink. Breathe. 6.30, 7.30, 8 o’clock, nine.

“6 o’clock”, he said. Red in my eyes, he tells lies.

 Red words on my skin—

“Kat, I’m coming in.” My little sister’s voice is at my door; a cool green voice like swaying willow, dipping her toes in the dark water.

I haven’t thought or haven’t wanted in three hours of waiting to switch on the light, and a line of light from Sal’s bright safe hallway bends under my closed door like Oppenheimer’s event horizon. Poor Sal is about to be dragged into my black hole where I have no control: It’s all too dark too heavy too deep under my skin because tonight at least I didn’t cut, didn’t let blood, didn’t dig for pain. Tonight I just used the pen.   

As soon as the light from out there spreads in, Sal will see the protest of crooked black and red words marching across my bare arms and thighs in capitals and cursive curses with red corrections chanting the thing I might have yelled if I didn’t care he heard.

Any moment darling Sal will turn on the lights and hand me tea I do not want and tell me the dress looks great though it isn’t really my style and a better lipstick would have been plum. She will pull me onto the balcony under the lamp where the fresh air will do me good and where life is lit by a peachy glow but where every one will see my stains.

“Isn’t that the point, Katrina?” says my sister’s friend’s workmate’s therapist’s voice in my head. Better hers than mine.

“In aminute! Just… give me a minute, Sal.” A minute more in the dark where the script is blank and the end isn’t written. Yet I’m standing in the middle of my room with a pen in my hand, looking like a child caught scribbling crayon on the walls.

“But only Sal sees it, Katrina.”

Sal wanted me to move in for company and comfort but I’m a better substitute for the cat than for her dead husband. I never remember to cook the dinner early enough for the kids and I’m always at work when she needs a babysitter. Still, there’s always a plate left out for Mittens and me.

“Kat?”

I rub at the marks with spit-dampened fingers but my skin just goes red, worse, brighter, blushing with guilt and I look even more pathetic. I give up on the bits she might not find on the backs of my knees and under my feet where I’ve discovered that the ballpoint tickles and shoots nervy not-nice-not-pain-but-at-least-something tingles all the way to the back of my neck so that I have to fight myself to keep still or keep marking.

I need warm water and a face-cloth but I can’t get across the hall to the bathroom without going through Sal.

“Mummy!?”

For three hours I’ve listened to the kids in the next-door bedroom holding their breath, holding back blinks, listening to me like they used to listen to their dad rustle about in his study.

To my niece and nephew I am the thing that goes bump in the night. I leave for work at 9.00pm and come home in the dark at 5.40am—timed so I don’t have to see the disappointment in my sister’s eyes when it’s me who comes through the door in the morning and not her husband.

Sal lets her children distract her but it’s too soon before Fireman Ted has saved the day in his yellow helmet and his one, two, three (very good darling) ginger cats have gone to sleep on his boots and Sal has kissed her children’s foreheads and freed herself to deal with me.

I’ve made it to the bathroom. The bits in black pen are succumbing to the sponge but the black Texta screams won’t be silenced.

I used to feel bad that Sal slept on the couch to wait for me. I am so stupid it took me so long to work out that she slept on the couch to avoid the bed. GOD you’re self-involved. Depressed people are always self-involved. But a new bed wouldn’t change anything. Just like the new car didn’t after the thing with The Merc and The Bridge. It’s never called The Accident, that’s too close, or When Dirk Did a Dumb Thing. The Bridge and The Merc are inanimate, blameless things that have nothing in particular to say about it all.

The new car makes Sal cry when she gets in. It’s not that she cared for The Merc, it’s just that moment when you get in that you notice it’s so clean and unmarked and has new-car smell, and Sal’s brain is forced to register that this is a new car and so there’s that nanosecond—even just while she works through the sequence from one thought to the next to get the hell out of there—that she is forced to think of why she’s not in The Merc.

I should have thought of Sal hours ago, before I began this.

“But only Sal sees it, Katrina.”

That’s the point.

Fuck off.

You’re a shit sister.

Don’t.

But…

Don’t.

“Mark yourself if you must, for now, but with something that does no harm,” said the therapist. I’m not sure the point, but black ink has some appeal. It’ll go with the dress.

So the kids’ colouring books and Textas were moved from this desk where they could share grown-up space with Dirk, their daddy, their god, to the bureau in the lounge and I keep toxic black permanent markers and ballpoint pens, which are better for tearing into the skin…

…just like it was always best to go for the dull serrated knife, not the sharp new steel one in the top drawer—you can hardly feel that cutting. Better the serrated one in the third drawer with the black handle that’s so blunt you have to dig at the skin just to feel it. Just to feel. Just to hear a squeal from a few teensy cells; a little squeak from somewhere in the universe in protest.

You can’t do this to her! Stop hurting her!

Go back to your work where you belong and where people listen to you. Go back to observing in your observatory. Stop feeling and go back to watching, in the lab on the hill: planets, moons, suns, supernovae, quark matter, dark matter, “Stop”.

His hand was on my forearm on the observatory desk. He smiled. “I can’t write that fast!” He said.

Light blue eyes.

He came to write an article about the observatory’s work; a jazzed-up aren’t-they-great for the Chancellor’s newsletter.

“Come on lady astronomer; let’s finish this over a night cap.”

“But my shift doesn’t finish ‘til 5.30am.”

So he came back again the next night. And again. He came to the lab after drinks with other friends. He brought dessert and hazelnut organic Peruvian coffee and a gleaming new stainless steel two-cup plunger.

“6 o’clock,” he said. “That’ll fit around your shifts. I know a great place to watch the sun—for a change. You’ll like it.”

“6.00” I scratch into the white velum on the inside of my wrist: the source of the bleed. The unfilled need.

“See you at 6” up my arm, inside and out, on my thigh, behind my knee.

“6 o’clock” scrawled high and low: the thing he should know.

Sal pushes open the bathroom door and her eyes go straight to my arms and legs: Green eyes under blonde fringe over loose, pink and yellow shirt. She bites her bottom lip. She comes close, like the big-hand at 5-minutes to. Her aura wraps round me but her arms hang loose.

“I see he really upset you.” She speaks too neatly, using the practiced phrase the therapist gave her and I hate that it makes me feel a bit better.

She’s holding in her other hand the baby-pink flannelette pyjamas with the green turtles, which she picked up for $12 at Woolworths because they made her think of me, god knows why.

The pink makes me cry; baby-pink tears that trickle gently, not big enough for sound.

She sets down the pyjamas, and douses cotton pads with cool Gentle Make-Up Remover and wipes my skin, the other hand over mine, until a whole bag of stained cotton pads litters the floor. Perhaps I do replace Dirk ok after all – another big kid for her to nurture.

Patting my arms with a duckling-yellow towel, Sal looks at me with her “there: all gone” eyes.

“Forget it, sweetie,” Sal talks without looking at me, busying herself with the towel and the black dress on the floor. “It’s just how it is on this planet. You will lose everything you ever had, you have to realise. And the world will one day lose you. Accepting it doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.”

Her hands move quickly, leaving no pauses for me to fill with a rebuke so I bite down on any protest, which she sees of course and I’m sure she hears my voice inside her head, like I hear hers.

“How can you be so pragmatic about an entire universe—”

“Multiverse.”

“—yet be completely thrown by the simplest mysteries down here? Did you even call him to see if he’s ok?”

Don’t be daft. If he heard my voice he’d know how I felt.

She means to say my marks make her unhappy and she wishes I didn’t do it. I’m supposed to understand that if I’m happy she’s happy and I want that but I don’t know where that place is and that’s maybe partly sometimes why I have to cut open—to find the happiness which must be somewhere underneath but I can’t dig deep enough to uncover it and I have to dig because there’s still this stupid ugly black part of me that won’t let it up to the surface.

Sal has warmed the pink pyjamas over the column heater.

She puts lots of honey in the tea. I follow her to the kitchen for no apparent reason but that I want to follow her and she hands me a jar of peanut butter with a spoon in it and makes a show of putting a tub of ice cream on the bench for next. She coaxes a proper grin from me by holding up, by way of offer, a DVD of “Mutant eight-legged monsters” to which I nod and counter with the cover of “I know what you did last summer”.

Quiet room, light room, bright. Finally, the bright areas of morning tug at me. White liquid ice-cream oozes from the night’s end. Outside, cars zoom someplace away.

“Kat! Someone’s here to see you!”

Sal steps aside and light floods through the entry and into my eyes and there he is smiling at me sunny and bright and blue.

“I see I’ve over-dressed for the occasion,” he says, raising eyebrows at my attire. I pull down the sleeves of the pink pyjamas, scars hidden.

“Did I get the time wrong?”

He’s speaking another language.

“I thought we said six. I was hoping you wouldn’t be too tired after your shift but—”

I took the night off for you, anyway. I glare.

“… well, perhaps a bad idea…”

“Six A-m!” My sister gushes, staring at my date as though he’s the archangel Michael come to save us. Sal links her arm in mine.

He grins at me, not her, bemused. “The sun… remember?”

Sal fluffs over my attempt at words with something about us having a long night, her fault, we got the time wrong. The green willow voice is back, swaying happily.

“Try again tomorrow? Here—” Sal thrusts into his hand one of my niece’s green Textas from the sideboard. “6AM Tuesday. Write it on her hand.”

by Victoria Collins