And the winner is……
*cough*
This is a bit embarrassing.
I was slightly hesitant to give away the only print copy of my book, so I had CJ enter the contest to win a copy. And, um, he won. We really did spend out $3 to buy the book, and this contest result really was random.
You may deride my methods in the comments. Who knows? Maybe I’ll give it away again another day.
Top Twenty-Five Photos of my Louisette 365 Project
I like this shot because it’s so simple and so complicated. It was most definitely planned, and planned to be public – I blogged and tweeted throughout the labour, and every blogger knows “pics or it didn’t happen”. I didn’t really like the idea of having a shirtless photo (most people give birth naked just because labour is a bit like that, and then immediately breastfeed because motherhood is a bit like that – skin on skin contact is great for the baby if you can get it) so I carefully instructed my sister to help me get a shirt on, take the, “Hey look! Baby! Tired mum!” photo, and then take the shirt away again. I also remembered at the time to ask for a shirt immediately after Louisette was born.
My sister took the photo – a few actually – and I thought to myself, “Honest facial expression! No gooey stuff!” because that’s how I roll.
Those photos are rubbish, and have long since been deleted.
Once that job was done, and I’d stated for the record that I was definitely going to have another child (about thirty seconds later) I was free to adore my astonishing miracle. Technically, the birth wasn’t even fully over (the baby was out, but not the afterbirth – which, incidentally, I’m told was a particularly fine specimen). That’s when my sister took the above photo.
I love it because there’s nothing but us in the photo, and you can clearly see both our faces, and exactly how impressed/unimpressed we are. I love it because I’m not aware of getting my photo taken – just of Louisette. I like that I don’t just have the usual makeup-free flushed face and sweat-tangled hair of all these type of photos, but there is a cut on my lip – the kind of small detail in a bigger story that is the most memorable part (I don’t know if my lips just dried out and cracked, or if I bit it and didn’t notice). And I love that you can see her tiny hand.
This photo was taken when Louisette was four days old, and we took her back to the hospital (we had stayed in hospital overnight and left in the morning – less than a day after Louisette was born) for standard hearing tests. Since it was her first outing, I decided to dress her in all her best finery for the occasion. This photo and the next (taken on the same day) show just how tiny she was.
CJ was soothing Louisette while we were at the hospital, and I caught that moment – wedding ring, tiny exasperated face, and that tightly-clenching hand of a girl already familiar with her dad’s voice and smell. This photo is my absolute favourite. In a way, it is our family photo – we are all represented.
This was the first time I deliberately set up a pose for Louisette – in the washing basket. That is our actual washing, hastily shoved about for a few seconds as I realised the excellent balance of colours.
Louisette used to fall asleep on my lap during every feed, and the cuteness was heartbreaking. It’s not particularly easy to take a photo of something in one’s own lap (something who’s over half a metre long when she isn’t scrunched up). The key is having good long arms. . .
I like this shot for its simplicity, and for the directness of her gaze. She was only a couple of months old at the time.
My mum loves to give presents, and went overboard over Louisette before CJ and I were even trying to conceive. When I was pregnant I was so sick the gifts barely registered, but this giraffe mobile arrived at just the right moment as the nausea hormones lessened and some of the happy hormones were able to get through. I was obsessed with it throughout the pregnancy. Louisette likes it too 🙂
That jacket was the first item of clothing we bought for her (with a voucher) after she was born, and she wore it a LOT because it was so beautiful. Sidebar: she was actually born with genuine furry ears, like a cat or an elf woman.
I just love images with sand, water, and mountains – all together (like here in Hong Kong) is particularly good. I like CJ and Louisette too. This photo almost didn’t make the shortlist, because of the haze. Sadly, that’s Hong Kong for you.
I’m constitutionally incapable of leaving out China’s Great Wall in any list of personal favourite visuals. It’s a stunning monument in a grand setting. I also don’t mind this picture of me.
It takes a rare piece of luck to get such a portrait-like photo of a baby. I’m grateful for the simple background keeping the focus on her adorable face. This list would be incomplete without at least one shot that makes me fall into her big blue eyes.
As you can imagine, this photo is also the result of luck, and a LOT of it. All awake? None feeding or crying? And Louisette cleverly making herself stand out amongst the crowd? Perfection!
Louisette still plays with several members of this crowd, and I hope she always does.
Louisette with both her girl cousins. The cuteness here is off the scale (hugging Louisette was the 2-year old’s idea, and Louisette was delighted); all three are happy and in focus (believe me, that’s not easy!) and the colours work nicely together.
The hardest part of this photo was the speed at which I needed to get the shots in between pulling grass, leaves, and twigs (she always prefers choking hazards to mere dirt) out of her mouth. She’d just started sometimes looking at items briefly before tasting them, so the idea of taking her photo in the ivy happened not a moment too soon. It was actually just a nature strip at a playground (with slovenly youths wandering by lighting fires on picnic tables), but it looks fantastical and lush here.
The colours of autumn in Canberra make it worth braving the cold. I like that we’re both in furry hoods here. This was taken beside Lake Burley Griffin, near Questacon. It’s been called “The Drop Bear Picture” ever since.
The colours happened by accident. It all just came together (although I realised the shot could be great, and flung off the couch cover and moved CJ’s arm to make it just right). I love that we caught the brief period when she was doing that sweet little hand gesture, too.
This shot genuinely just happened. I love the way Louisette lights up in or around water, but I’m rarely able to use a camera at the same time. This is her having a bath in our plastic paddle-pool shell on the balcony.
Ever since she learned to roll over, Louisette has preferred to sleep on her tummy, but this time she was so tired that she passed out without even grabbing Eeyore off her chest first. I guessed – correctly – that she’d stay asleep even if I removed her dummy. Since you can see her whole face, this is a favourite among all her sleeping photos.
This photo was taken on Christmas Eve, when we introduced Lousiette to the concept of presents for the first time. At first she was intrigued, then bewildered, then she got it. I was taking about a million photos, and this one caught the mess, the obsessive photo-taking (CJ took a million photos too, using his phone), and – most importantly – her smile.
I must confess that although I took many photos almost exactly like this one, my camera was sorely outdone by the camera (and photography know-how) of a friend. I’m just glad he passed this on! I love the circles of the tunnel – all the more so with the hat-circles echoing the theme. You can see she’s a tiny bit overwhelmed by the newness, but she’s not going to let it stop her having fun.
I was annoyed that the last photo in this list wasn’t even technically one of mine so, realising that Louisette loved her new chair and that the foam and bricks made a nice geometric background, I took eighty photos in very quick succession. Once I had them down to a (very respectable) top ten, I saw that (despite my conscious efforts) this was the only one in which the photo was actually straight. Arg!
The expression is a classic, so I don’t mind leaving out the ones of her laughing.
Ah, who am I kidding? I love this one too.
PS Thank you to Jolyon for rotating this photo so it was straight!
The ball pit is a brilliant background. . . if you can get a child to stay still (and not weirded out) long enough. This was not a first attempt at this shot. I love her dress (if I’d dressed her specifically for the ball pit I would have chosen a plain colour, and I think that wouldn’t have worked as well – she’d have disappeared into the mass) and her long legs.
Usually for this list, I leave out the blurry ones (which cuts out a large proportion of even the good photos). But this perfectly captures a moment when Louisette is industriously emptying the ball pit (apologies to the Hellenic Club, incidentally) and her two-year-old cousin (borrowed specifically to thrill Louisette on her birthday – she was out of her mind with delight to have her cousin, both parents AND a playground all in one hour) doing backstroke. Because it’s a ball pit, and that’s what you do.
I wanted a really excellent birthday portrait to end the 365 project. To cut a long story short, I took over three hundred photos and used up six batteries – but I expanded this blog entry from a top twenty to a top twenty-five in a single day. The balcony in the morning has really excellent natural light, and so when I saw Louisette playing with the ball in front of her decorated box, I thought, “Man, if only this whole scene was happening outside where I could get a nice photo of all the colours and smiling together.” So I picked everything up and moved it – and it worked.
The other birthday photo I really wanted to finish off the 365 Project was a mother-daughter moment to echo the first photo in this set. I dressed in dark pink to complement her (then trimmed it out of the final shot but whatever) and picked a plain background – in this case, our carport – still using morning light. I chose this one out of the final four because Louisette is facing the camera and I’m facing her – just like in that first photo we had together.
Also, she’s adorable.
Glitterbug: The First Birthday
Louisette turned one ages ago, but I delayed her birthday so that I could wrangle every single one of Louisette’s cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents into one place at one time – not an easy task when Bil and Bonnie live in Beijing!
So other than that Herculean task (it took literally months to coordinate), I had one goal: As little stress to myself as possible. And, ideally, the same for Louisette (it’s so sad when one-year olds cry through their entire party – Louisette is very social, so I knew I had a fair bit of wiggle room there, but I still made sure her actual birth day was genuinely all about her – we borrowed one of her cousins and met Dad at a playground, and Louisette was thrilled). Every parent knows the first birthday isn’t about the kid – it’s about the parents, friends, and family.
So, the family (with the bonus of my godparents, who visited specially from Sydney):
Yes, that huge crowd is fundamentally just the immediate family of CJ and myself, plus the immediate family our brothers and sisters have married or created themselves. And there’s plenty more in Louisette’s generation to come.
We had the party outside (at Weston Park, where parking, toilets, and a playground are all located close together) because our house was too small, and both our parental units have a LOT of people staying with them. Also, I didn’t want to have a big tidy up at a parental home.
The disadvantages were that I needed to personally stake out the one good bit of shelter (it was very hot and there was scattered rain with stormclouds threatening), which meant leaving CJ at home to simultaneously mind Louisette and prepare food. Poor CJ, and poor me (attempting to remember everything from afar, while pointedly putting up balloons so other people would leave Our Spot).
I cunningly had my brilliant sister make the cake (a huge stress averted, including the transportation of said cake):
Louisette was allowed a sizeable piece, AND she got to feed herself.
I found Louisette’s dress online (gorgeous! And fully washable) and simply waited until Bil and Bonnie asked us what we wanted as a gift (I have awesome friends who understand my ways so well 🙂 ). I also took two changes of clothes for her. She rode a miniature train, played on a playground and had fun with a kids around her own age (all of whom were carefully photographed so if they’re BFFs in future they can prove the friendship started super early):
And of course there were presents, yay! Check out Louisette’s intense concentration.
Financial cost: $0 (those who could brought a plate to share, and there was a huge pile of leftovers)
Stress cost: Could have been so much worse.
Summary: Full family achieved; awesome cake made and devoured; pile of toys received; fun had.
Next year I think we’ll stay at home, though 🙂
Ten Questions for Feminist Mums
Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of feminist blog blue milk*. She likes to read the responses of other feminist mums to the following ten questions, and since I’m currently promoting my ebook SEE THROUGH, she’ll be posting extracts of this on her blog.
How would you describe your feminism in one sentence? When did you become a feminist? Was it before or after you became a mother?
Duh. Of COURSE women are as good as men, as smart as men, and deserve to be paid as well as men – in money, in respect, and in equal shares of the annoying/gross/stressful/responsible household jobs. It took me many years to realise not everyone thought that way – and that very few people truly act that way, including myself.
What has surprised you most about motherhood?
My experience is, I think, unique – having a baby did something to my body chemistry (and my heart) and I recovered from seven years of mental illness. Early in my marriage I wasn’t sure if I should have children, because it looked quite likely I’d be unable to care for a child. But after talking to family members (mainly to check I could rely on a lot of emergency babysitting if I had to) I took the chance.
Before I was a mother, I could work a maximum of twelve hours a week. Now, in addition to looking after my own baby, I also babysit other young children for up to ten hours a day, thirty-five hours a week, on a regular basis. I think it’s possible there was some kind of chemical reboot during pregnancy (and all the pro-baby hormones helped), but it’s also because I desperately needed a grand, all-encompassing purpose in life – and for me, being a mother is that meaningful and satisfying. (Although doing paid work is also vital to me to feel like a human – a belief that is fundamentally flawed, but too close to my centre for me to cast aside.) I still have panic attacks and times when I can barely get dressed, but ultimately I’m pretty functional. Most women’s sanity goes in the opposite direction with motherhood.
How has your feminism changed over time? What is the impact of motherhood on your feminism?
Getting married turned gender roles into an obsession long before I had a baby. When little Louisette arrived, the spotlight on my marriage grew even more intense.
For me, the weakest point of my marriage is the risk of falling into a mother-child relationship with my husband. Anyone who can’t be trusted to do their share of household chores is not an adult.
I knew it was the weakest point of our relationship before we married, and have carefully (often tearfully) explained it to my husband over and over. He simply doesn’t understand what I’m saying. The more powerful members of society never do understand what it’s like to be the less powerful member. That’s one of the perks of power – everything seems fair from where you’re standing.
It’s not all his fault, however. Organising things and making household decisions (from groceries to what kind of house to buy) makes me feel powerful, so I have a tendency to jump in before he has a chance to do his part. It’s not like he’s the only one sending us in that fatal mother-child direction. (And yes, it’s definitely fatal. How can I be in love with someone I see as a child? How can he be in love with his mother?)
Having a daughter also gives me a highly convenient litmus test for feminism. All I have to do is think, “How would I want my daughter treated in this situation?” and I know when someone is treating me badly. I hope that by the time Louisette grows up she’ll have enough self-worth to figure out her rights without needing a prop.
What makes your mothering feminist? How does your approach differ from a non-feminist mother’s? How does feminism impact upon your parenting?
I tread a compromised path, like all mothers. To survive in our society, I think a woman must be able to believe in her own attractiveness, and I choose not to fight that particular battle, because I know Louisette would suffer for it. My prettifying efforts started from her birth, when I dressed her in attractive and usually pink clothing. I believe a girl who is constantly told how pretty she is as a child will be better able to handle the sudden awareness of societal messages saying, “Shouldn’t you be thinner? Shouldn’t you have bigger breasts? Shouldn’t you have blonder hair?” as she grows up. I will teach her to use make-up, to shave her legs, to do her hair. She can stop doing any of those things if she wants to, but she’ll have the skills to fit in if she chooses the more comfortable path.
At the same time I already try to steer her away from the stories that equate goodness and worth with beauty, and that tell the reader the purpose of life is to get married – like Cinderella. Beauty is nice, and everyone has a little bit – but there must be more to you than that.
The correct response to this photo is, “Awwww!”
As a writer, I believe stories tell us who we are and what matters. When I write my own novels, my protagonists are almost always female. They have problems, and they solve them – actively. When they like a boy, they generally tell him, and if a boy treats them badly they don’t stick around. Why would they? But generally they’re too busy saving the day to care too much what boys think. Isn’t that true of all the world’s most interesting women?
Most of all I try to be aware of the contradictions in both society and myself, so that when my little one is old enough she can sort truth from lies, and choose what compromises to make in her own life.
Mental illness runs in my family, so I try to teach Louisette resilience as both a preventative and a cure. I watched a psychology video once that presented toddlers with a problem. Both started off by crying for help, but when no help arrived in a few moments the boys stopped crying and attempted to solve the problem themselves. The girls continued crying.
I try so hard to sit on my hands when my own baby has a frustrating problem to solve – so she learns that waiting to be rescued isn’t the solution to everything. You can’t learn resilience without frustration, and you can’t learn it without pain. Sometimes I have to let her fall down. I remind myself constantly that we all unconsciously let little girls fall down less often than little boys – and that’s not a good thing. (We also shush little girls more than little boys, but that’s another story.)
Do you ever feel compromised as a feminist mother? Do you ever feel you’ve failed as a feminist mother?
Of course, always! I could lie awake every night thinking about the mistakes I’ve made – or I could be transparent and let my daughter see the cogs working. “Mummy usually takes care of remembering birthdays, because Daddy doesn’t like to organise things. Daddy usually drives the car because Mummy likes looking out the window.” I have a lot of faith in thoughtfulness and questions.
Has identifying as a feminist mother ever been difficult? Why?
LOL! I literally got up from the desk before answering this question, and moved some large-but-light toys onto the couch. Why? Because my husband is vacuuming right now and I’m aware that he won’t move the toys himself – and our daughter has a habit of attempting to eat cat hair that she will most certainly find beneath her own toys. While our marriage is probably the envy of many readers (he vacuums? Every week?!) it has its weaknesses – and Louisette will echo our relationship patterns for the rest of her life.
Incidentally, I also pointed out to my husband a few moments ago that now was his last chance to vacuum this weekend (baby asleep; no guests; not late at night). He appears incapable of figuring this out himself – which makes all the household chores my responsibility, regardless of who physically does them. That’s not right.
My husband will be the image of “normal man” for my daughter – most potently, the way he treats me (the image of “normal woman”). If I don’t pursue equality in my marriage, how can I expect my daughter to pursue it in her life?
Motherhood involves sacrifice, how do you reconcile that with being a feminist?
From the age of twelve to twenty-four I planned to move to Indonesia to teach in slum schools for free. . . . so Australian motherhood seems easy in comparison. The important thing for me is the ratio of meaningfulness to sacrifice. Given that motherhood more or less cured me from mental illness, giving me my life back – I’m still gaining a lot more than I’m losing.
It’s interesting that it was only after having a baby that I finally published a novel for the first time. Parenthood is sufficiently daunting that, in comparison, almost nothing is scary.
This was the best picture of Louisette and I that was taken on my first Mothers’ Day – and yes, I’m wiping up her spew.
If you have a partner, how does your partner feel about your feminist motherhood? What is the impact of your feminism on your partner?
My husband spends a lot of time observing other people’s female children from birth to young adulthood, and thinking about the kind of girl and woman he wants our daughter to be. If nothing else, his hopes for her make him a feminist. He wants her to know her strength, to be respected, to be herself.
When he’s at home, he doesn’t “help” me look after her – he just looks after her.
Feminism has given him a more interesting wife.
If you’re an attachment parenting mother, what challenges if any does this pose for your feminism and how have you resolved them?
Mother Nature is definitely sexist – just look at the female reproductive process as compared to the male contribution. On the other hand, while I’m furious that women are still often forced to abandon their career to be a mum, I think all of the horror show of pregnancy and birth is worth it for women to get first dibs on the opportunity to be the stay at home parent. Because I imagine it’s easier for a woman to choose this life than a man.
I love being around my daughter all day, every day (with certain much-needed breaks) and I have a unique solution to my own attachment to her, as opposed to my longing to work. My job is writing novels and babysitting – and in both jobs I have my daughter with me. The pressure is enormous sometimes, but I have everything I need.
Do you feel feminism has failed mothers and if so how? Personally, what do you think feminism has given mothers?
It has definitely failed mothers, because pretty much every woman I know feels she has to do paid work, whether that is her preferred choice or not. The cliché that motherhood is the most important job in the world? I actually believe it. That belief cured my mental illness and gave me my life back. Apart from anything else, it’s parents that teach the next generation how society should be – so if we want the world to change, motherhood is where it’s at. Being a mother doesn’t take away any of my ability to think, read, write novels, work for money, or be an interesting person. It is tragic that so few women have the choice to stay at home.
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*This is not a child-safe blog, FYI.
Ebook contest
My sweet innocent* ebook is now just over a week old and ready to get properly to work. Yep, it’s giveaway time!
I happen to have something entirely unique: the one and only print copy of this book. It’s all the more unique because it’s not actually the finished version – it’s the third draft (long story). Even the title is different – “Justice is Blind” instead of “See Through”.
So this is the prize (not the child – she’s strictly there as an uncredited and unpaid model although it’s possible that you could clone her if you take a very close look at one of the corners of the book):
How to enter:
First, buy the ebook here (if you don’t have an ereader, don’t worry – it’s available in a wide range of formats including versions you can read on your computer) by February 24 2013. That will cost you all of $2.99.
Second, email fellissimo at hotmail dot com and tell me that you bought it. You will be entered in the random draw, which will happen on the 25th of February. You’ll be emailed if you are the winner, and if you have a blog or etsy or other website you’d like me to link to, I’ll do that from here.
Your prize will be the physical book – signed of course.
YES if you’ve already bought the book of course you can enter.
If you’re interested in the process of publishing an ebook, I wrote a guest post all about it here.
*Well, it’s a bit violent at times but what young child isn’t?
Monthly Photos: Lady in Red
PS The rather brilliant Australian fantasy author Rowena Cory Daniells let me start my ebook blog tour at her place, where I talk about how the book that I wasn’t meant to write came to be.
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When Louisette was four days old, I put her in a red dress and took the photo below. I liked it so much I tried it again exactly two month later – and a (mostly) monthly tradition was born. Here are twelve photos taken over one year, on roughly the same day of each month (as you can tell, I forgot a few):
Cry, Wolf (free contemporary fantasy short story, PG for violence)
I howled for the joy of night and the hunt. The rain and the darkness fell as one, and I licked them up. I leapt and streaked through the trees, and the rabbits knew my name. They knew my name was death. Their name was dinner.
I smelled the wet earth, and the rot of pine needles thick under my paws. The taste of the air was river-fresh and water-wet. I opened my mouth to lap at the rabbits’ sweat as it steamed in the chill air. My dinner smelled of panic. I ran, they ran; the rain ran down the trees.
Howls broke out beside me, and I couldn’t name whose howls they were.
It wasn’t the song of Bristle-Fur, my pack’s alpha male, or of Broken-Teeth, his mate. Long-Tail was a long way behind, and his yaps were faint as footfalls. He never could keep up.
I didn’t recognise the howls at all, and put on a burst of speed. The rabbits appeared and disappeared as they bounded up and down. “My food,” I snapped to the strange she-wolf beside me. “Go hunt with your own pack.”
The bitch burst from a screen of bushes and locked her teeth around my shoulder. It burned.
I couldn’t drag both her and her wet coat no matter how I ached for fresh meat. We two wolves tumbled over and over, off balance and angry.
I felt a warm fluid oozing from my shoulder. The she-wolf had let go and I was bleeding. I struggled upright.
My fur stood to attention when she dared to face me, her back to a broken tree. The colours of her coat mirrored the night sky, where clouds scattered to hunt the full moon.
I didn’t like the way she looked. The mottling of her fur shaded her body in the wrong places, making her shape waver and bulge. I growled, and she lowered her belly against the ground, suddenly submissive. She pointed her muzzle up at me and whined. I quivered with the wrongness of it all: “What are you playing at?”
“I’ve changed you,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”
“Of you? Your pack?” I barked short and sharp, and she tipped herself onto the ground, drawing her front paws in toward her chest.
Her belly was paler than the rest of her, and her teats grew out of shape. They were larger toward her neck. I turned away in disgust.
“Forgive me,” she said, and her voice screeched like a human in my ears. I turned back to see how she made that sound. My ears flattened against my head. She was writhing on the ground, whimpering, knocking her back paws against the dead tree. I crouched into the prickly sweetness of the pine needles and watched.
She changed in front of my eyes. Her body stretched out, and her fur turned pinkish white. It vanished against her skin. The fur on top of her head grew long, yellow and curling. Her claws turned stubby and wide, the same off-pink as the rest of her. Suddenly she stood over me, balanced on elongated hind legs that were thick with fat. She smelled of control and death. She was human.
“Forgive me,” she said again in her high voice. “I didn’t want to be alone.”
My bitten shoulder seared me with new pain. I squealed with it. But the human wasn’t touching me.
She watched silently as the bite she made tortured me. I twisted my body into the ground, itching so badly I wanted to scrape my fur right off. Desperate, I bit into my own flesh to ease its pain. My fur filled my mouth – and then it shrank under my teeth.
All I had left was a mouthful of blood, stuck through with pine needles. Beyond that was my naked skin, smooth as a snake. I sat bare and shivering on the ground, with my hind legs poking out in front of me. Big fat legs, good for nothing but eating.
There was a root sticking into the back of my knees. I could feel every knobble of the bark. No fur. . . My shoulder settled into a pulsing, but normal, wound, and I lifted my hands to press on it. I had hands, two of them, and my claws were gone. Lifting my hairless chin, I tried to howl. I screamed.
“It’s all right,” said the other girl. “The first change is always a shock.”
“What have you – am I –” I stopped and snarled at her.
“Oh, you can talk. That’s good.”
I swore.
“You’re adapting well,” she said.
I clenched my teeth against more screams and waited until my heart stopped thumping out of my bent ribs.
“What is going on? Tell me, or I’ll snap your skinny neck.”
She folded her legs beneath her, with her bald belly exposed so I knew she meant no harm. Other than what she’d already done to me. “You’re a human.” Her shoulders lifted and fell.
I stiffened at the movement, but didn’t attack.
“Just for tonight,” she said, “and whenever the moon is full it’ll happen again.” She examined me through narrow eyes, and finally sighed. “My human name is Juliet. What’s your name?”
I stood upright, pleased to find how tall I was, and that I could dominate on two legs. Perhaps the big legs were good for something after all.
“My name is Howler.”
“Okay. For tonight, we’ll call you Helen.”
“Why?”
“You and I are a new pack. A human pack, for the night. The other humans will give us food like you’ve never tasted.”
My stomach growled on my behalf. “Where?”
First she made me dress with her in human clothes she’d hidden away for her own use. I learnt to use buttons and zippers, and to resist the urge to bite off the constraints wrapping my chest and arms and legs. The clothing wasn’t dead and wasn’t alive, and it itched. Fabric flapped against my skin as I walked.
I was still unsteady on my hind legs. My jaw ached with longing to have something struggling for its final breath between my teeth. “Soon,” I muttered. “It had better happen soon.”
Juliet and I trotted down the highway, walking into the realm of humans. My wolf heart told me it was a trap.
I wanted to crouch, to run away, but I grimaced and settled for wrapping my arms around me. The rain slowed and stopped.
Every stone of the road pressed its claw into my soles. It didn’t smell like it should. The metallic road-stink remained, in a smaller dose, but it didn’t smell of danger. That was worst of all. Even my nose told lies to me.
Then we found Blood-Mouth, my mate. I tasted him on the air, and lifted my head. My nose told me the truth: Pain. Danger. Death.
Juliet bared her teeth. “Someone’s body is here.”
We walked on without speaking, and found Blood-Mouth on his side in the bushes. His corpse was packed with maggots expanding their territory outward from his belly. The gravel around him was black with his blood. His mouth was frozen open in his last howl.
Instead of noting his passing and calculating the new social order, I felt tears running down my cheeks.
“What are you doing?” asked Juliet.
I sniffed, and scrubbed my cheeks with the palm of my hand. “Crying. Why aren’t you? You’re as human as I am.”
“He wasn’t my pack, Helen. I’m sorry, but can we go? I feel like there’s maggots in my stomach, just from looking at him.” She sighed. “Being human makes me so weak, I can hardly stand it.”
“Who killed him?” I asked. “It’s. . . important. Was it you?”
She shook her head, and walked to the other side of the road. Her hand over her mouth muffled her words. “It would have been a car, controlled by a human.”
“Then it was humans that killed him.”
“Yes.”
“Which ones?” My fragile hands curled up and became fists. “So that’s what they’re for,” I said quietly.“Why are you asking so many questions?”
“This is what it is to be human,” I said, sniffing out the truth of my words as I spoke. “I care. My mate was murdered. It’s. . .”
“Wrong,” she said softly.
“Yes.”
“Let’s make it right,” she said. Her eyes gleamed in the darkness.
We ran along the road until we found a house. It was neat and square, and made up of smaller red squares, with a rectangular door. Juliet showed me the human way to knock on the door. A human man answered, yawning and blinking. His top half was unclothed, and his chest and head had orange fur.
“Did you kill the wolf?” I asked. “The one on the road?”
He scratched his head. “Are you from the animal society? It’s late.”
“The wolf was killed some days ago,” said Juliet. I could hear the growl in her voice. “Do you know who did it? Was it you? Your car?”
“Listen, there are far too many wolves around here anyway,” he said. “I had no idea you people needed a report for that sort of thing.”
Deep within myself, I noted the moment when I became fully human. It was hate. I lifted both my fists and hit that murderer in the throat.
He stumbled backward, but gripped onto a table and kept his feet, gasping for air. I could see his skin changing colour, because he didn’t have the fur to cover it. The colour was good. Juliet was one step behind me, and she clawed at his face with her clawless fingers. The table tipped and fell, smashing a vase and sending water and jonquils across the floor. I jumped at the man’s chest and ripped at his throat. My teeth didn’t work properly and I got barely a mouthful of flesh; bald and wrinkled. I spat it out in revulsion. Juliet and I stood to watch the man bleed into the flowers and broken glass. Loosened strands of our hair lay across his chest. Juliet’s hair was yellow. Mine was black. Black is better. It’s always better.
“That was easy,” Juliet said doubtfully.
“Haven’t you killed a human before?” I asked.
She shrugged, admitting it. “They’re just like us except naked. And slow.”
I picked up the table and put it back in its spot. “I’m hungry, but I don’t want to eat him. His blood smells – odd.”
“Humans eat the strangest things. I ate cow once.”
“What, a whole one all to yourself?” I asked.
“Pieces so small I had to ask what it was. Cooked, too. That’s why the blood smells wrong. All blood will smell wrong to you tonight. Us humans have to cook our meat before we eat it. It’s part of being civilised. Come on, we have to find the kitchen.”
Juliet was showing me how to eat fruit when we heard a human scream from the front entrance. We took our apples and went to look.
An adolescent female stood in the doorway, framed by the night sky. The skin of her face was red instead of pink like ours, and her short hair stuck up around her head. I liked her for her hair at once. If it had been grey instead of that same orange colour, she would have looked more like a wolf than Juliet.
“Good evening,” said Juliet, and introduced us both.
The teenager screamed again and ran away. I watched as she grabbed for the hallway phone and sent the plastic base crashing to the floor. “Do you think we should chase her?”
“We can’t eat her – not raw – and I don’t think she’s playing,” said Juliet. “Something’s wrong.”
She sniffed the air, and I knew she was truly worried. “Maybe we should explain to the pup who we are.”
“That seems very human,” I said, and found my head nodding a yes.
We walked up the hall to the girl’s room, automatically stepping lightly so we didn’t make a sound. The carpet was soft as pine needles, and perfectly flat.
It was easy to tell which room belonged to the girl, because we could hear her saying her own address, loudly and clearly.
“She’s on the phone,” whispered Juliet. “Talking to someone who’s not here.”
I lay flat on the carpet and held my mouth to the crack under the door. “Good evening,” I said, copying Juliet’s level manner. The girl stopped breathing. I didn’t need a fully developed sense of smell to scent her sour waves of fear, even through the door.
“I’m Helen. What’s your name?”
“Marie,” she whispered. Juliet nodded encouragingly at me.
“Was that your dad, by the door?”
Marie whimpered, and I exchanged a pleased grin with Juliet.
“Marie?” I said.
She began to cry.
“Answer me in words, little human. Was it your dad I killed?”
“Please go away.”
“You’re doing so well,” I said. My voice was smooth as the sighing wind. Juliet was nodding at me, impressed.
“I’m sorry we had to destroy one of your pack, but we had a reason.”
“You – of course you did.”
I sniffed loudly at the air beneath her bedroom door. “Marie, your dad was a bad human. He killed my mate. Do you understand?”
Before she could reply we heard a splintering of wood from the front door. Marie screamed, and kept on screaming. Juliet and I turned and found ourselves staring right into a new pack. They were all men, bigger than us. Each one was dressed the same, in blue, and they were on the hunt. I could smell it in their sweat.
We gaped at them; at their short hair and at their guns. I could tell without looking at her that Juliet felt the tiny stirring of air on the back of her legs at the same moment I did. We were a pack, and the men were against us. If there was air behind us, there was a way out. I rose into a crouch. The hunters took a step forward and Juliet and I broke for the back door. We toppled two more hunters on the way out.
The air was as sweet as the first breath of a winter morning. Under my naked feet the grass was wet with dew. We ran so fast the wind couldn’t have run faster. The highway was flat and there were no tree branches dragging on our backs.
We scented cars behind us as they bellowed rage at our escape. They roared the hunt to one another, and we remembered my dead mate. Fear-maggots crawled in my own stomach. Juliet and I were smaller than the cars, and slower. We both knew we’d be eaten before the sun rose. I remembered the taste of human skin, and how soft it was in my mouth.
“Cars stay on the road,” Juliet yelled to me. I howled in reply, and understood what hope was. Juliet and I were a pack. We’d stay alive. She ran to the far side of the road, and I cut away into the trees. My legs itched and bled.
I heard her howl out a human song note that flitted through the trees to let me know she was near. It was as familiar as my own voice, and as alien as my hairless, itching hands. I shrieked like a human girl when my body clawed at me from within. There was no time to hide, and no strength to run. I collapsed without another sound. The pine needles cushioned my fall.
Juliet screamed out to me through the trees, and I understood the howl in her voice. My pack member was caught; she was hurt, she was dying. I tried to stand, to go to her, and fell face first into a bush. My fur pushed out of my skin while I shuddered. Juliet’s clothes broke and I ripped them off me. I bit my own lip straight through, but I didn’t cry out. I didn’t want to be dinner.
When I had my own body back, I stood silently to listen for Juliet. The stink of human was already fading from the air. My stink. Sweet-smelling pine needles filled the forest in every direction, and I knew who I was again.
I howled my joy to the morning. The rabbits would feel my teeth in their necks before the sun was high.
Broken-Teeth howled out a reply, calling me to come. But I ran for the road, cursing my bleeding shoulder. There was something I had to do before I ran to him. I had to know.
Juliet was easy to find. The humans had driven off the road in pursuit of her, and all I had to do was follow their car tracks. I could hear them hunting not far from me, but they were as clumsy as giant pups wading through the undergrowth. The forest was mine, and they no longer concerned me.
Juliet was slumped at the base of a tree, almost invisible in mottled grey death. Her body hid the artificial brightness of her human clothes as they lay beneath her. No wonder the men had passed her without stopping. I licked her rough fur, searching for a wound. She was shot. All that killed her was a tiny bite between her ears. It smelled of civilisation; of fire, iron, and blood. I cocked my head, wondering what to make of her, the one who bit me.
She never told me her real name.
Don’t Panic
Okay, you can panic if you like.
Yep, I changed the theme. Mostly to celebrate the fact that after all these years I’ve finally caved in and published an ebook (the decision wasn’t unrelated to my recent purchase of a Kindle).
It’s contemporary fantasy (that means it’s set in the modern day, apparently) set in Canberra. You can buy it here for the lofty sum of $2.99. It comes in a bunch of formats, so you can read it on your computer if you don’t have a reader (you DO have a computer, I assume).
And you know what? Here’s the beginning:
SEE THROUGH
by Louise Curtis
PROLOGUE
I felt cold, and knew someone in the room was afraid. Dad leant over me to see through the window of our flat. Before I knew whether the fear was his or Mum’s, my own hands shook and the rainbow I was drawing turned to yucky scribbles.
“They’re here,” he said.
Mum dropped our best salad bowl and it smashed on the kitchen tiles. “No! It’s not her birthday until tomorrow.”
I began to cry.
Mum ran to me and gripped both my shoulders. Her hands were small, as small as mine, but her touch forced me to See into her mind. I stared at her cold terror and stopped crying. “Good girl,” she whispered. “Do you remember what to do?”
“After my party?” I said.
“Before the party. Now. Go, quickly.”
“But you said –”
“Now!”
I scowled at her but turned obediently to the sliding glass balcony door, which was shaded with gauze curtains. The law said I had to be raised by my fellow empaths once I was five years old, even though both my parents were Normal. I’d seen from Dad’s mind what it was like when empaths were still allowed in Normal schools. Another boy, an empath, had waited until Dad liked a girl, and then manipulated him so that he had kissed her sister instead. Dad remembered that boy whenever he was angry at me, which was often.
“Don’t go out yet,” said Mum, clutching her brown hands together to stop them fluttering like frightened sparrows. “They’re still in the carpark, looking up. We don’t want them to see you.”
“Can they See?” I asked, fascinated despite myself.
“They see like you do,” said Dad, combing his thick fingers through his blond moustache. “Too much. They see thoughts and feelings that aren’t meant to be seen. They see inside you, and your bad thoughts.”
I stepped back, realising the other empaths were in the carpark. They could be speaking to the cars, or the trees, or even the old brown bricks of the walls. All of the nearby objects knew who I was. As an empath, I was the only person around who talked to them.
Worst of all, the other empaths would be able to See me by my feelings, straight through the simpler feelings of the glass and gauze. Didn’t Mum and Dad know they could already See us?
“When I say, ‘Go’, you go, and quickly,” said Mum.
“I’m scared.”
“I know, sweetheart. It’ll be okay.”
“But you’re scared too.” Fear came off her like smoke – a clear sign to the empaths below that my Normal parents didn’t want to let me go. “You’re more scared than me.”
Mum didn’t answer, but peered out at the watchers through the gauze curtains. I looked at the carpet. Dad said I shouldn’t look straight at people. He said showing my eyes was rude. His eyes were green and Mum’s were brown. Mine were black, like all empaths, so I looked down.
I liked the carpet, so I tried desperately to think about our carpet instead of the empaths. The parts that weren’t too worn were the same blue as the sky. It was a quiet carpet, and I knew it didn’t mind me. A lot of carpets don’t like kids.
“There’s still three of them there.” Mum’s horror stabbed into me and I shivered again, like a dog. “They’re looking right at this window.”
“We can’t escape them, you know,” said Dad.Dad was big, much bigger than Mum, and his long blond hair tangled like string on his head, and grew wild on his chest. Next to him, Mum looked like a shadow. I stopped shivering.
He wasn’t afraid of them – not in the same way as me or Mum. I crept closer to his feet for confidence, even though there was an edge of darkness that made me feel sick near him. He was thinking of that boy again, the empath boy who played with his mind.
Mum’s breath turned ragged. “I’ll shield her!” she said. “My feelings are loud enough to cover hers. Will it work, Amy? What do you think?”
I nodded yes, pulling down the stretchy edges of my white dress as if it could hide me. As if anything could hide me from empathic Sight.
“Where are they now?” Mum asked.
“The big lady’s on the stairs,” I said, Seeing her through the cheap inner wall. To me she walked like a sea creature swimming closer, dripping slime along the way. “She’s wrinkling her nose at the smell of dog wee.”
Mum nodded quickly. For a second I Saw her change into someone tall, as tall as Dad, and her brown skin made a wall strong enough to keep me safe. “Outside, Amy. Go. Now. Hide your feelings behind me, okay? Like you did when there was an empath in the park with us, remember?”
She opened the glass door too fast and it squeaked. I felt the watchers in the carpark jerk up their heads. Mum walked outside. Her panic blazed like fire. I was scared to follow, but I didn’t want to stay with Dad.
There was something joining his thoughts to the big lady. To my Sight it looked like a dirty string, and that’s what was making me ill. It frightened me more than the empaths, because I knew it came from Dad and not from them. He hit me sometimes, and Mum too, but this was different. This was on purpose.
So I crept out, holding onto Mum’s fire in my mind so I was one flame with her, hidden behind both her body and her mind. I didn’t like making myself so frightened.
The balcony creaked and tipped sideways. Mum wasn’t meant to go outside. That wasn’t what we practised. The balcony was too old to hold anyone except me. But she stood at the broken iron railing with her feet far apart like she was starting a fight.
I pulled at the concrete lid we’d made in the balcony floor, but it was too heavy now my hands were shaking. Mum crouched to help, shielding me from the empaths with her body. Concrete is good for hiding behind. It’s too thick for thoughts to pass through.
Inside, the doorbell rang – three times. The big lady knew I was trying to get away – how could she not? Mum’s fire was too big. Any empath would see it from kilometres away. They didn’t need to See me directly any more.
The lid came up and I crawled inside our hollowed-out air conditioner, long since broken but still bolted onto the underside of the tired balcony so it didn’t fall down. It was spiky with metal and twisted wires. I’d talked to it often, making sure it would hide me as well as it could.
Mum stood on the lid on top of me, pushing the concrete down onto the arch of my back. I didn’t complain, even though it pressed into my bones.
Dad opened the front door. Mum didn’t see him turn and silently point to me, because she only saw with her eyes, and her eyes were looking down at the carpark. But I Saw everything. He wanted me to go away. Dad didn’t want me Looking at him ever again. That was why he’d made the string between him and the big lady. So I wouldn’t be his any more. I wanted to cry, but my tears were used up.
Physically, the big lady was shorter than Dad, and slender, but her mind reached out all around her like questing tentacles, black and dripping with power. Her mind made her big; bigger than anyone I’d ever seen. I wished yet again that I couldn’t see the secret shapes and colours and words of other people’s minds and hearts. She felt me right away, even trapped as I was in the heart of Mum’s flame-fear. The flames hurt me more than the concrete.
“Hello Mrs Preston,” she said. “It’s time for your little girl to come to school.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” Mum said. “Amy’s gone now. We sent her away.”
“Come inside,” said the big lady, patting at the perfect bun of her black hair, “or my associates will make you come in. You know we’re capable.”
Dad’s mind flashed back to that boy, and to me, and for a second he didn’t look big to me at all.
I Saw one of the big lady’s tentacles playing with Mum’s fear. It wasn’t hurt by the flames at all. Not like me.
She could control Mum if she wanted to, like a doll. A tiny whisper told me I could control Mum too, if I wanted to. I imagined the surprise in her wide brown eyes if she ever realised the truth.
Dad already knew. He’d known for years.
“No,” I whispered out loud. “Not the bad thoughts.”
Mum took a deep breath. Her fear turned sharp and cold. She charged through the open balcony door and threw her small dark body at the big lady. Both of them fell to the kitchen floor, and I gasped in pain as the broken glass dug into their skin.
“Get off!” Dad yelled. But he wasn’t yelling at the big lady. I Saw his mind clearly for the first time. He pulled Mum off the big lady, and he didn’t even care that she was bleeding.
The balcony tried to warn me to get out of the air conditioning box. It told me it was too old, too tired, and it was going to fall. The balcony was smarter than most of my friends. It knew I’d be killed, and that dying would make me stop being friends with it. But I couldn’t open the lid anyway.
So we fell – balcony, concrete, air conditioning box and little empath girl.
The box tried to get less sharp for me, but it was just a box. I pushed and pushed at the concrete lid, but I was falling too fast to get out.
Suddenly I wasn’t falling too fast. The balcony pressed against the air, and made it softer. We all drifted like a leaf and settled gently on the dirty asphalt of the shared carpark.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
I felt the balcony smiling back at me. But then I opened my eyes.
Three empaths looked down on me with empty black irises. “Hello, Amy,” they said together. “We’ve come to take you home.”
Mum barrelled out of the ground floor stairs clutching a piece of salad-bowl glass in her hand. Her feet were bloody, and her knees, and the hand holding the glass was dripping blood down her wrist. “Leave my daughter alone! She’s mine!”
Dad ran down the stairs after her. He grabbed her bloody wrist in one big hand and squeezed until she dropped the glass, hurting my hand as the glass cut her. “Enough! Don’t you know when to give up?”
Mum stared at him, and I Saw her hope shrivel up.
The big lady appeared out of empty space, standing over me like Dad loved to do. Her head was covered in black bobby pins. I felt them digging into her scalp, keeping her hair in order. “Now, Amy,” she said. “You want to be with your own kind, don’t you?”
“How did you just appear like that?” I asked, reaching up to touch the stiff stocking of her leg, and check she was really there. The hairs beneath the fabric made the stocking bumpy. “Why didn’t I See you?”
“I learnt to shield my emotions a long time ago. Wouldn’t you like to learn to do the same thing?”
“Mum?”
“Amy?” she whispered. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”
Dad didn’t let go of her wrist.
“They know I’m here, Mum.”
Mum collapsed onto the asphalt, leaving her bloody arm awkwardly held up by Dad’s grip. “I love you Amy – remember that. Remember! No matter what they make you feel. Remember me! I’ll see you again!”
The big lady smiled hard. She had very thin lips, matching the thin tentacles already coming out of her head and arching down to touch my face. “Shh, Amy. Stay still. I’m going to make you feel better now. Try not to resist, or it might hurt.”
That’s when I saw something else, just inside her mind where I wasn’t meant to Look. I Saw how to shield myself from the Sight. All I had to do was think like whatever I was next to, and I’d vanish from her Sight like she’d vanished from mine. Physical sight meant so little to us.
I became asphalt. Everything in my head turned to rockish thoughts, crunched and trampled and mixed with tar. Slow, thick thoughts about hot weather and stiff white paint.
The empaths gasped – even the big lady. I knew I’d done it – vanished right in front of her.
“Grab her!” she shrieked.
I dived away from their arms, burning my knees on myself. On the asphalt. No! On myself. And I didn’t have knees.
Then I made my mind stay slow and thick and stiff while my body walked away, fleeing carefully across the asphalt where the empaths could search all day while I moved between their outstretched hands, invisible as air.
Dad was right: we Saw too much. We Saw so much we could learn to become invisible to one another – for a moment. I felt myself become almost visible as he came into my mind, so I quickly stopped thinking of him, and his fist-hands, and his fear that I was secretly bigger and stronger than him. Asphalt doesn’t have a Dad.
“Oh, good girl!” Mum called. She was looking right at me, and quickly looked away, up at the sky, so no-one could see me through her Normal thoughts.
Dad finally let go of her arm. He combed his moustache with his fingers before he realised there was blood on his hands. He hacked and spat at the ground. Since I was asphalt, I didn’t mind. Asphalt gets a lot of things on it.
The big lady lifted her head and sniffed the air. “I can still see you, Amy. I know exactly where you are.”
She was lying, and we both knew it. But then a bright glow of joy filled her aura. I cringed by accident, then quickly thought of tar and paint and a childhood as a mountain.
“Mr Preston!” she said. “Find your daughter. Bring her to me.”
“Can’t you see her?” Dad asked. “She’s right in front of you.”
The big lady’s tentacles quested out in front of her, while her physical body remained dignified. She Saw nothing.
I was gravel, and stone, and recycled concrete. But Dad walked right over to me and took my arm.
When I shook my head at him, he just tightened his grip. The empaths closed in.
“No,” whispered Mum. “She’s ours.” But she didn’t move from her place.
The old air conditioning box wanted me to crawl back inside. It didn’t understand.
I understood perfectly. Dad was giving me away. He must have called the big lady and told her everything. I bet he told her to come early, so I didn’t get a birthday party, either. So none of us were ready.
Clever Dad, to hide it even from me. I should have known sooner. Of course he was afraid of me – everyone was, even Mum – but I thought he loved me, too. Sometimes I even made him laugh. He liked the pictures I drew, where he was so big and everyone else was so small. It was how he always looked to me, because I Saw the truth of things.
But he pulled me to my feet and when I refused to walk he lifted me up by the armpits and held me out in front of him like a wet bedsheet. Even then, he kept my back to him, so he didn’t see my eyes.
The big lady’s tentacles outlined my body. I wasn’t asphalt any more. “Did you really think you could hide from me? The instant you opened those blank black eyes, you belonged to me by law.” She reached out her hands to take me.
Dad smelled of sweat, the sour kind that isn’t because of the sun. He was either angry or afraid now. I couldn’t tell which.
But I knew what I was: angry. Angry enough that nothing anyone else felt could hurt me. Not any more.
I pushed back on Dad’s chest and kicked out with my legs. My foot hit the big lady’s hands with a satisfying smack. Dad’s grip loosened as he lost his balance. Taking my chance, I wriggled to the ground and fled.
I wasn’t asphalt – I was a scared girl, and I wanted to get far away from all Mum’s blood and Dad’s sweat and the empaths’ black-coloured eyes. So I fled.
Mum struggled to her feet, gasping in pain as shards of glass dug deeper into her. She grabbed at Dad as he ran after me. He flung her aside and she slid on the ground, scraping open the skin on her arms and knees.
I jumped into the Lantana bushes and wriggled through. Dad tried to follow but his foot caught and he tripped. He jumped back up and pounded after me, ripping out the flowers by their roots.
“Mr Preston!” called the big lady. “Mr Preston, wait!”
He didn’t listen to her. “I’ll get you, Amy. Don’t you dare run from me.”
I ran down the cracked concrete toward the shops. Dad’s footsteps pounded after me. He was catching up.
My breath caught in my throat, hurting me. I heard the big lady yelling again, but I couldn’t hear what she said. The brown bricks of our flats were in the way. Bricks are quiet, and they’re good to hide behind. But I couldn’t hide from Dad. Dad had Normal eyes.
He caught me, wrenching my shoulder so I faced him. “Enough!”
“Stop it, you’re hurting me. Daddy!”
He shook me until I stopped pleading. I looked at my feet, like he taught me. His feelings made me ill. I shook with rage – a mix of his and mine.
“You disobeyed me,” he said. “I should beat you ragged before I feed you to them. No-one can see us here, you know. So much for seeing through walls, you cheat.”
I pushed at him and writhed in his grip, but he was ready for me.
“You’re a bad girl. Remember that when the empaths lock you in a concrete cave where you belong. You’re a bad girl. Say it!”
“I’m. . . a bad girl.”
“That’s right. Say it again.”
“I hate you!”
He shook me. My head flopped around. It hurt my neck. “Now say it right.”
“I’m a bad girl.”
“Again.”
“I’m a bad girl.”
“That’s right. That’s what you’ll always be, because you’re an empath, not a Normal. Time you realised what you are. Now walk back with me or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
I remembered Mum sliding across the asphalt, bleeding from her face and hands and feet. Dad had hated me all along, and I’d been too stupid to admit what I’d Seen every day.
Already I could see the big lady’s tentacles questing around the corner of the house. But she couldn’t See me, and she couldn’t See Dad’s sudden explosion of hate – not yet.
But did I have tentacles too? I squeezed shut my eyes and hated Dad with all my heart. He said I was a freak. He said I was a bad girl. He knew how to hurt me, and I’d learnt plenty from Seeing inside his head every day of my life. Normals feared me for a reason.
He screamed and let go of my arm. “What are you doing to me?”
I kept my eyes shut, so I could See him more clearly. He thought he was in pain. His body didn’t think so, but his mind was mine. I concentrated harder, clenching the empty air in my fists as I imagined his heart in my fingers. Dad fell to the ground. He tried to speak, but he couldn’t.
I stared at him, getting frightened. No-one had taught me how to make it stop. Something new was happening, and I couldn’t control it. It was happening in his body – really happening this time.
Dad clutched at his chest. “No,” he wheezed. The fear made him shrink to a tiny boy before my eyes. A tiny boy with messy blond hair and a big, crying mouth. “You little murderer.”
My own chest hurt like someone was squeezing me too tightly. I couldn’t breathe. My legs gave way and I lay on the ground at Dad’s side. Suddenly I saw the whole world through his eyes: saw my dark-skinned daughter and her black curly hair and shiny black irises staring back at me. I screamed in agony, and then suddenly it didn’t hurt any more. My vision was my own again, and Dad lay facing me with frozen eyes.
I stared at him; stared and stared and stared but I couldn’t See him any more. He was gone, leaving just the shape of him on the ground – exactly like the shape of wooden furniture, because it used to be a living thing and now it’s not. I touched his body, still warm and sticky with sweat. He wasn’t inside. I shook him, carefully, not wanting him to grab me again. “Dad?”
“Enough,” said the big lady. “He’s dead.”
One of the others walked along the path. She knelt down and touched his neck and mouth. “He’s cooling,” she said, and her voice shook. She reached out a hand for me, and I knew she wanted me to cry, so she could comfort me. The shape of her was soft, and her eyes were crinkled in concern. She wore a long skirt with daisies wound all around it, and I wondered if maybe not every empath was bad like me.
“It’s over,” interrupted the big lady, and the other lady guiltily snapped back her hand. “Call someone to fetch him. That Indonesian woman, perhaps.”
“Mum,” I whispered. “She’s my Mum.”
One of them picked me up. I didn’t fight as she carried me back the way I’d come. Mum lay on the asphalt, surrounded by dirt and dead leaves. She wrapped her bloody arms around her bloody knees and cried. Her pain sapped my strength, and I was too weak to call out to her.
One of the empaths said to me, “You’re one of us. You always have been, and you always will be.”
They put me in a black BMW. One sat on either side of me, and the big lady drove. I twisted around in the too-tight seatbelt, but Mum didn’t get up.
As we turned the corner I tried to glimpse Dad’s empty body on the broken path. But I couldn’t see him anymore.
CHAPTER ONE
TWENTY YEARS LATER
I lined my students up against our practice wall – a stone slab. Jenny pinched Eric and Eric pulled her hair. They both giggled.
I pretended not to notice, but turned my back and carefully kept my Sight ahead of me, where our courtyard of bright grass filled in the gap between the girls’ dorms on one side and the boys’ dorms on the other – all built of stone so we couldn’t See through the walls. “All right kids – whenever you’re ready. Remember, disguising yourself by feel only works on empaths. Normals rely on their physical sight, since they can’t See like we can.”
I counted to five in my head, knowing all of them could hear me. The physical world was quiet except for the low sound of other classes happening in their rooms behind the twin rows of dorms. Beyond the dorms and classrooms, birds trilled to one another in our acres of bushland.
When I reached the count of five I turned around and opened my mind. I saw the practice wall. Nothing else. Then a twitch on the right hand side. A shimmer of ponytail. “Jenny!”
“You can’t!” she said. Her voice seemed to come from the wall – but the wall grew freckles as she spoke. Then a nose.
I pointed directly at her. She laughed and appeared. Eric appeared only one step closer to me than her, with his finger stuck up his nose and his hair hanging in his black-irised eyes. He was grinning – Eric was always grinning, giving the impression his teeth were simply too big to fit inside his mouth.
“Very funny, Eric. Okay, everyone else has done very well. I can’t see you at all. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Half the class was less than a metre from my face, grabbing blindly onto one another’s shirts and stepping on each other’s shoes. As they stopped thinking like a wall they tumbled to the ground together.
“Did you see me?”
“How about me?”
“Udita almost touched your shirt!”
“I didn’t see you at all.” I was genuinely impressed, and let them see it in my mind. “If you keep improving at this rate we’ll have a try at the brick wall next week.”
“Brick, no!” said Jenny. “It’s got so many different bits!”
I raised my hand for quiet but Eric plunged ahead. “Jenny’s just mad because it doesn’t like her.”
“Is that true, Jenny?”
Jenny twisted her shoe in the dirt until we all felt the dirt asking her to stop. “I ran into it by accident once.”
“Really?” Clumsiness was unusual in empaths – we learned from infancy to be respectful to inanimate objects. Even my Normal early upbringing hadn’t taught me otherwise. If anything, I was even more respectful. Back then, I’d had no-one else to talk to. “Was it really an accident?”
“I didn’t See it,” said Jenny.
For a moment I was worried. Some empaths weren’t very good at Seeing. I’d once met a man who said he couldn’t hear pavement at all.
Eric flipped a cartwheel. “It was sleeping.”
I sagged with relief. That particular wall slept especially quietly. It was a reasonable mistake for a young child to make, relying on her Sight instead of her physical vision. We all did. “That’s enough now. Be off with you.”
They turned to go.
“Except you, Eric. I saw you pulling Jenny’s hair before, and you know it. If you’re not careful, I’ll tell your aunty you’ve been misbehaving.”
To my empathic eyes he shrank at once, turning into a mop of hair the size of a toy dog. But as soon as he saw my sympathy he knew it wasn’t a real threat. Hidden deep in our minds – hopefully better hidden in my case – we both called her the big lady. Out loud, Eric called her Aunty Beth and I called her Miss Nowan. To me she looked like an octopus, inky black and forever reaching tentacles into other people’s hearts. To Eric she was a spider weaving webs for the unwary. I was constantly tempted to admit I agreed with his sentiments. But then I’d remember she was my boss. She could still limit Mum’s access to the empath compound if she wanted. Most Normals weren’t allowed in at all. Not that they wanted to come.
At that instant Eric’s grown-up brother rounded the wall. I could tell by Danny’s grin he’d heard every word and felt every feeling of our conversation. Especially mine. He glowed with contentment, and as always I felt drawn to him like a moth to flame. Every move he made was made with such certainty. When he spoke, he simply assumed people were listening – and they always were. When he smiled, it was as sunny and open as a summer day, and I basked in it. Without that certainty, he was merely pretty, with smooth skin and high cheekbones. With it, he took my breath away.
“Eric, you naughty thing,” he said. “What have you been doing to the boarding school’s best teacher today?”
Eric ran straight at his big brother and veered off at the last moment to run for the oval. Danny swatted his backside as he passed, then came and clasped my hand. The warmth of him was welcome even on such a hot day, and he knew it. He kissed my cheek and we walked hand in hand back to the dorms. I rested my head on his arm, since he was too tall for me to lean on his shoulder.
Most empaths transmitted a self-image gained from other people’s view of them, tweaking it to make themselves a little taller or better looking. I’d touched every centimetre of Danny’s face and he fit his self-image exactly. He even knew his nose was a tiny bit crooked, and let that stay in his image of himself for anyone to See. I loved Seeing it, knowing it was real.
“Why are you still scared of Aunty Beth?” he asked.
I didn’t bother lying. There was no point. But I could avoid the truth, boxing it away in the back of my mind as she’d taught me. “That’s just the way I am with her.”
“And why is she scared of you?”
I shut my mind hard, and he took the hint.
At that moment I saw a mind-tentacle snaking around the wall. “Danny – she’s here.”
He took one look at Miss Nowan’s psychic call and pulled me into a run toward her. “It’s something to do with the police – and it looks like something’s wrong. We might need you.”
“But –”
He didn’t let go. I yanked my hand out of his grip, and he apologised without slowing down. He knew exactly why no-one ever pulled me around. Not since the day I met Miss Nowan.
After a moment of watching his thoughts, I decided to follow. Not for his aunt – for him. But a part of me liked the idea of being crucial on a police call-out. The big lady would have to respect me after that.
So I ran, and kept the most altruistic of my thoughts highest in my mind.
“Amy,” said Miss Nowan, already getting into her latest black car – a four-wheel drive this time. “Good. Get in.”
“Where’s Yolanda?”
“Sick. Someone’s got hostages at a school. You’ll have to do.”
She lifted her arm to shove me into the SUV, but I moved fast enough to avoid her touch. Miss Nowan always had cold hands. Danny slid into the driver’s seat. He switched on the SUV and revved as Miss Nowan sat in the passenger seat and I threw myself in the back. Yolanda was an obvious first choice. These days she taught the combined Kindergarten and Year One class, but she’d originally studied forensics, and worked with a lot of other police consultants.
I’d seen Danny drive above the speed limit before –it was expected when he was assisting the police. But I’d never been in the car at the time. The seatbelt sliced into my neck as he raced around corners, and my shoulder jammed against the door. Miss Nowan kept in radio contact with the police and told Danny when to switch off our siren and slow down.
We all listened to the radio in grim silence, trying to prepare for what we’d soon face. There was a man with a gun – no, not a man, a kid. It was his school. We all heard Danny suck in his breath. “Pain,” he said. “Normals always call us when someone’s in pain.”
“Keep your feelings in check,” warned Miss Nowan. “Your mother thinks we need to stay friendly with them, and I don’t like it either – but she’s right.”
“Why don’t you just marry one then,” he muttered. “She did.”
One of her mental tentacles snapped out and slapped him across the face. I caught the usual glimpse of Danny’s father in his mind – a sucking blackness, and radiating hate – and turned my Sight away.
As Danny parked in the school carpark, Miss Nowan pulled her hair over her earpiece and pretended to check her makeup in the mirror like a Person. We empaths didn’t believe in outer disguises. Not physical ones, anyway.
As soon as the car was still she pulled three pairs of sunglasses out of the glovebox and passed a pair each to Danny and I.
“These probably won’t fit you, Amy. They belong to Yolanda.”
I murmured something back.
We stepped out of the car and Danny quickly took my hand. “Don’t talk,” he whispered. “The Normals recognise us because we don’t use as much vocal expression as they do.”
I nodded.
“Yes, nodding is good. They think we can’t see properly, since that’s easier than admitting they’re the blind ones.” He squeezed my hand. “Kissing is good, too. It makes them look away.”
I smiled, but only on my face. He didn’t push it.
The school itself was built of budget-brown weatherboard two storeys high, with a tall sign at the entrance saying enrollments were open. There was a row of brightly-coloured schoolbags hung on hooks next to the first classroom door. I hoped their owners had run away. One of the bags had fallen down, and was leaking orange cordial.
We strolled into a crowd of angry parents. Their distress washed over me, and I caught my breath. I focused on Danny’s island of peace, and found time to be impressed at how calm he was.
A plainclothes police officer spotted us and took Miss Nowan’s elbow to steer us into the cordoned-off parking area. “We have line of sight – more or less.” He stopped and looked at me for the first time. “You’re not Yolanda. She’s Caucasian, and not so thin.”
“Yolanda’s sick,” said Miss Nowan. “Amy’s another teacher at the empath centre. She knows kids.”
We all heard him thinking, “Empath kids, maybe,” but chose not to correct him. In his self-image, he had a scar across his cheek. His real cheek was clean-shaven and unmarked. Odd for someone to make themselves look more flawed than they were. But he was a Normal, and didn’t know he was doing it.
“I’m Senior Constable Rothchild. Our target’s in the second classroom, holding twenty-two kids aged thirteen to fifteen. We’ll patch your radio into negotiations. If this goes badly, you weren’t here.”
“As usual,” said Danny.
The officer flashed him a cynical smile and left us.
Danny and I watched Miss Nowan, and as soon as she was linked in it was obvious negotiations were deteriorating before they could begin. I held Danny’s hand more tightly, until my fingers hurt. Even just looking at Miss Nowan as she eavesdropped made me feel the despair of a teenager willing to kill his own classmates.
The same three words came into my head over and over again: “I’ll show them. I’ll show them. I’ll show them.”
“He’s easily embarrassed,” Danny whispered. “We can use that to control him without actually manipulating him. Why aren’t there any cameras here yet?”
“They’re behind the police van,” I said, catching a hint of a camera skulking behind the tinted windows. “I’ll tell them to film, so we can have Trevor’s embarrassment on our side.”
Miss Nowan nodded, and touched the tight black bun on her head with one hand.
I walked over to the huddle of disgruntled cameramen and the even more disgruntled policeman keeping them switched off in order to prevent a gory Youtube leak. His eyes widened as he saw my black-irised eyes through the sunglasses.
“We need the cameras on,” I said.
He scowled, but ruined the effect by trying very hard not to think about what I’d look like with my top off. I kept my face steady as he blushed. The reporter next to him was reciting a well-worn diatribe about freedom of speech.
“Right,” said the cop to the reporter. “You’re perfectly right. Go ahead and film.”
The reporter almost swallowed his tongue. “We can film? Here? At a school? Where there are kids and a gun?”
“That is what you wanted, yes.”
He paused halfway through motioning to his cameramen. I walked faster. “You!” he called out. “Black-haired girl with the beanpole legs. What are you?”
I didn’t know what to say, but Miss Nowan did. Her voice in my head told me what to say. “A consultant.”
“Yeah?” said the reporter, and pointed at me to help his cameraman get just the right angle. “Take off your sunnies then.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I turned on my heel and tried to look offended, but it was too late.
“Empath!” someone shrieked.
Suddenly the crowd had a focus to their anger. They screamed and pushed at one another, and in seconds they poured over the cordon into the police area.
Rothchild grabbed a loudspeaker and the shriek of it cut through the crowd, making them look at him. “Your children are in there. Let us do our job – by the best available means!”
The crowd hushed, standing on the knife-edge between hope and fury. It could go either way.
But I saw a pale face at the window, and I recognised him. The one with the gun, who wore death in every cell of him. He looked straight at me, and he knew what I was. He’d hoped we would come.
“Hello,” he said, right into my mind. I heard him perfectly. For a Normal, he was very focused. He knew exactly what he wanted – pain. For everyone.
Miss Nowan and Danny appeared next to me. They’d meant to take my arm and run from the rumbling hate of the crowd, but with one look they knew I wasn’t leaving.
The gunman spoke again, mouthing the words because he was trying so hard to concentrate his thoughts on us. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“We understand you!” Miss Nowan shouted in his mind. “No-one else but us. We know!”
“Now everyone will understand,” he said, and reached down. He pulled a teenage girl to stand beside him. She was too frightened to cry. My throat blocked up as I felt it.
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