One night she appeared on my bedroom ceiling, sleeping with her back against it as if it had sprung from her spine. She sat curled in the chair next to my TV with a forlorn expression on her face. She planted herself in the big copper pot growing my cactus, sitting in the soil and openly absorbing its sustenance as if for a resurrection. Plucking the plant’s bristles, she waited to throw them in my path. She surfaced in miniature form in Marpessa’s lens. Coming up for air with blue hands and things she’d fished from Marpessa: a damaged, old crown, a thick masculine neck with markings, torn bits of traditional cloth, a worn copper key. She pressed her eyes to the lens when it hardened into glass again, pressed her tinted gaze against mine.
On Tuesday, I bought a six-piece chalk set from the pound shop down the road. They also sold egg timers with hands and feet and colourful imitation Arabian carpets. I hunted for other random things since I didn’t have a photo shoot until evening; a musician called La La Love wanted photos taken on the gleaming, split Tate Modern Bridge for an album cover. Strangely, I’d found a blackboard at The Salvation Army store, perched next to an oval magic distortion mirror that scrunched your face up when you looked into it.
At home I leaned the blackboard against a wall in the kitchen beside my radiator that was covered in splatters of purple paint. Occasionally, it made a knocking sound from a metal heart that beat inside it. I decided it was fate since I’d spotted chalk and a blackboard on the same day. With assured fingers, chalk in hand I drew a table documenting recent sightings of my intruder on the board.
Date
When
Where
10th April
8pm
In the car left side mirror walking forward.
10th April
1am
Hanging from the bedroom ceiling and swallowing the light bulb.
12th April
6am
On top of the TV set cross-legged, playing with static.
16th April
11pm
In Marpessa’s lens becoming a flash
16th April
2am
In the bedroom placing her pink bracelet back in the bottom drawer.
In my head I marked the areas she’d appeared with white chalk, they blended into the whites of my eyes. I began to set traps around the flat. I couldn’t decide whether they were for her or me. I left the bath full hoping she’d fall in, and that I’d find her submerged under water, unplug the plughole’s mouth of dead skin and watch her get sucked under. I opened the loft entrance, wishing she’d rummage through the old clothes, photos, paintings, roller skates, and maybe slip. I doodled on sketchpads, drawing trap doors and a slim woman falling through. I breathed over these drawings willing them to come to life.
On Sunday I resorted to attending an the evangelical church I used to visit in New Cross. I hadn’t set foot in Guiding Light for years. I sat through extortionate requests for tithes, the week’s miracles, people being filled with the Holy Spirit convulsing at the touch of the pastor and a story of a jealous colleague becoming a one-eyed goat. Throughout proceedings, the smell of meat pies filled the room from a small kitchen at the back. Pastor Matthew wore snakeskin shoes, a crisp black suit and punctuated each anecdote with, “If you need a revelation say Amen!” I left the service with some holy water in an Evian bottle.
At home I kicked off my suede shoes and began. I sprinkled holy water on the sofa, in the kitchen, at my bedroom ceiling and wherever else I’d spotted her. I felt like a hypocrite since I wasn’t even particularly religious. But I was ready to clutch at any potential solution. Any life raft I could heave myself on to. All the while I was aware of the medication in my bathroom cabinet, suffocating inside the sickly brown glaze of its round-headed container. I was like a musical conductor; flinging holy water everywhere at a one-woman orchestra who’d brought her strange music into my home. I waited to see if it worked, convincing myself I could go back to the church and tell them about my miracle. So the congregation could chorus, “God doesn’t work on miracles part time! He delivers, Amen!” followed by drumming of feet and deafening handclaps.
I believed it would work, the Holy water, that it covered cracks on the walls, protected the depths of wardrobes, the small holes in the circular hobs on the cooker, pores on my skin. Gaps I’d left around shaped like me. Any holes an unexpected guest could slither through, gently tugging the lines of your body till she held them in one hand.
For two days it was bliss, I felt some semblance of normality. I printed pictures from the La La Love shoot, tried a yoga class before a swimming hangout with Mrs Harris and realised how stiff my body was, visited the Tate on a research trip about art installations without enough context. I helped Mrs Harris repaint her bathroom while we listened to the soundtrack of The Harder They Come.
The following night I woke up to feel someone’s breath on my neck. I padded into the kitchen, the metal heart inside the radiator throbbed. I drained half a glass of exotic fruit juice. In my sleep-coated blur of movements the blackboard caught my eye. Written at the bottom in an unsteady scrawl was the line why don’t you remember?
Holy water evaporated in my chest. It hadn’t done shit.
I walked back but couldn’t feel my steps. In the bedroom my guest sat on the pile of books laying on the dresser. She was covered in chalky white ash, thumbing through a book with blank pages.
Queenie London 1970: Gift Mouth
Queenie got the job at Gift! During the interview, she had the impression Ella would have given her the position even if she’d had no experience and could only speak pigeon English. For whatever reason, Ella had taken to her and the interview seemed to be a formality. She worked Mondays to Wednesdays so she could shadow Ella who was warm, pragmatic and efficient. Queenie began her training in the stock room, sorting piles of items into baskets.
After her first week she could identify the different areas and items from the clothes racks to the bookshelves to the clusters of china with her eyes closed. The new display window had two female mannequins at opposite ends dressed in Forties fashion. Sometimes, Queenie thought she saw the footsteps of passers-by rotate in the mannequins’ plastic eyes. Sometimes she envied their stillness and wanted to join them in that window, complete with braided hair and flared black trousers. She would be on display just in case he ever wandered by and discovered his little girl all grown up in a shop window.
One evening after a tiring shift, she came home to her lonely hostel room and the echoes of other people’s lives in the building. They had become familiar to her; the skinny Pakistani student whose room smelled of cardamom spice, the white lady with rhinestones for eyes who always snuck her scruffy, gap-toothed junkie boyfriend in and the strange girl blessed with fine features and close cropped hair that reminded Queenie of a helmet. The girl claimed she’d escaped from a cult and that mice in the building had stolen her voice. The receptionist called her “Jeanie the habitual liar.” They were all misfits in one place with lives intertwining in tiny steps. It wasn’t like back home where people living in such close quarters would know much more about each other.
On her bed, Queenie heard doors shutting, the wide yawning of windows opening. And broken conversations gathering like the breeze between fan blades. She rummaged through one big travel bag she kept under the bed, fished out a brass head and some pictures, things she’d borrowed from her mother without asking. The brass artefact, a warrior’s head, stared back at her with an intensely calm expression. In one photo, her parents posed next to a white Volkswagen car, filled with youth and laughter. Her father wore a green army uniform; her mother was dressed in a pretty dress the colour of a purple seashell. She was laughing at something in the distance; he was looking at her mid-chuckle, as though seeing her for the first time again. A memory fell through the ceiling and her parents were there in the middle of her room, dancing to Fela Kuti. Their bodies threw robust moves and they were staying in love. They danced in an invisible, movable frame. Queenie silently asked the memory to stay the night. The weight of the brass head sank into her left hand.