ANTIHERO
Quotes about me:
“Far too angry for a pretty teenage girl” - my computer science teacher Mr. Forman, said to me after my fist very lightly hammered upon the intermittently working screen of a school laptop so ancient my grandmother would have tossed it in a fire along with her transistor radio, had she indeed been in the habit of burning her stuff and also still alive. Additionally punchable points awarded for calling me “a pretty teenage girl” and believing it a compliment. The angry part was more flattering.
“Venom to my Spiderman” - my brother Lucas, said to me when he was fifteen and twelve year-old me hatched a foolproof plan for him to circumvent my mother’s monstrously early curfew that, at the time, massively interfered with his plans of attending a highfalutin’ friend’s late night birthday party and therefore crossing paths with his highfalutin friend’s Uptown Girl-style sister, who had a penchant for roughing it, if you catch my drift. (The plan involved borrowing the spare mannequin from our school’s biology lab, a motion sensor-activated recording of Lucas snoring, two kitkat chunkies on ice and the Gilmore Girls queued up on the living room TV, but I can’t go into details here.)
I think you’re getting the picture. I’m the troublemaker in the family, the big mouth, the back chatter, the upside down cross-inking, nefarious plan-hatching black sheep. I am coriander. Many people are genetically pre-disposed to despising my taste.
Lucas was the golden boy, the high flyer, the achiever, the on-to-the-bigger-and-better, the Oxbridger, Mister Charming, the one all the boys wanted to be and all the girls - plus two boys, memorably - wanted to do.
But he’s dead, and I’m not. Ain’t life unfair?
INTO THE WOODS
It’s one of those days.
Torpid, grey, listless and thick. Air’s too heavy to allow for hopes or dreams.
I call them weeba days. ’It’s a weeba day,’ I say to anyone who dares attempt communication, those four words the absolute maximum amount I can muster. Those closest to me, such as they are, they know what a weeba day is, even if they don’t know exactly what weeba the word means. But I’ll tell you, since we’re becoming such good friends now - weeba stands for W.E.B.A., as in Why Even Be Alive.
On weeba days, a child’s gleeful shriek is an attack, like throwing a javelin into my ear canal. The din of conversation in the local cafe shreds every last tenuous nerve, a mindless, maddening buzzsaw grinding my soul into chaff. I’d shoot every dog bark right through the yap. If you can get a full sentence out of me I must want to bone you.
Essentially, weeba days are days I really shouldn’t be around people, because it’s not their fault that I suddenly want them all to crumble into dust, it’s mine all mine. So a weeba day is a good day to take myself off to the woods.
This was supposed to be Turning Point Summer for me. The summer before college, the great next step in my life, and until last year I was all on track to go be some kind of bohemian artist, another great Alecto counterpoint to my brother’s rather more practical choice of Nutrition and Sports Medicine. But his recent high dive off the board of life hasn’t so much as derailed my college plans as caused a ten-passenger car pile-up, so here I am, place deferred until next year while I tread water, trying to get my muddled head in order enough to figure out what I want to do with my life.
As I leave the house, I catch sight of Jeanette Trebar down the way, with her sagging pink jodhpur bottoms and bird’s nest hair and her sweeping broom out as always, moving its stiff bristles in seemingly random patterns across the concrete. Jeanette sweeps the pavement outside and a few feet of extension from her front door. She does this every day. No-one knows why. No-one ever asks. Her husband died ten years ago, apparently there wasn’t much sweeping before that. Now sweeping’s all she’s got, that and reality shows. Her immediate neighbour Mrs. Handsforth says she plays her reality shows so loud they come right through the wall, as if the stepford wives and blandly sexed up younglets and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fame-hungry social media stars are standing in her own living room, laughing shrilly over her shoulder like anxious ghosts.
This is Fring. My town. Coastal oasis/backwater of seven thousand and forty six at the last census. Three thousand of us are trying to leave before it’s too late, with the rest as the example of what happens when you don’t.
We have a sweeping beach made of soft buttermilk sand, gorgeous when it isn’t choked with washed-up trash and the violent roving gangs of criminal anarchists known as seagulls. Inland boasts one of many dead mines scattered around the area, holes poked into the hills and left to gape darkly at the sky when the mining industry went the way of dial-up internet.
My gaze drifts across the peeling boats moored up at the rusting iron posts of the quay that the council has spent at least the entire time I’ve been alive promising everyone they would renovate. On the warmest summer days the whole town is double assaulted by the piercing bloom of seaweed on one side and the thicker throat assault of cabbage fields on the other, our only export these days for a modest profit.
I reach the hill that marks the inland end of town and pass gratefully into the cool rustling green of the woods beyond.
It doesn’t take long to find the place.
Underneath the canopy of a particularly ancient ash tree, top layer of leaf mould turned crispy from the dry summer, crunching and crumbling under my feet as I squat, rubbing my bare hand over the woodsy floor, breathing in that thick earth smell. From out of my bag I draw a black church candle and a lighter, and I set the candle down in front of me, nestling its base into the dirt.
When I was younger, I used to fantasise that I was a hare. I’d leap in my hare body from tree root to tree root tangle, feeling those thick gnarled roots scratching reassuringly against the soft pads of my feet. Fleet of foot and free of homework. Maybe all I’m doing today is trying to conjure that escape again. Examining my brother’s ultimate escape, the Last Escape any of us ever do. I come here to sink into it, turn it over, try to understand it.
This is the spot his body was found. Right here under this tree, wearing a nondescript hoodie and his battered converse with the hand-sharpied wings on the side.
‘Who are you trying to be, Hermes?’ I’d asked as I’d watched him inexpertly but painstakingly draw those black wings on, copying from an image he’d found on a favoured tattoo artist’s instagram.
‘Icarus,’ he’d replied, and given me his trademark lazy-charming grin.
Only Lucas could get away with something so hammy.
When he was found, he was curled on his side around an empty bottle of Old Navy and a pill bottle with the label torn off. Old Navy, for christ’s sake. Couldn’t even muster up enough to go out with a classy liquor. We’re not exactly a Cristal family, but he had more than enough of his own money working private tutoring jobs for local lagging kiddies to afford something a lot less “paper bag hobo” than that.
There’s a proper grave, of course, in a nice and tidy cemetery, with landscaped hedgerows and everything. But he isn’t there. I mean, he isn’t anywhere, or at least not as the entity that I grew up with, encased in the body shell that I knew. The shell is rotting away in the grand tradition of all organic matter, and the human it housed, my brother, my brother Lucas, is gone. And I might have been raised Catholic, but I don’t believe in an afterlife. He isn’t hanging out invisibly and watching me re-watch Brick for the nineteenth time, repeating Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s dialogue into a mirror until I get the accent just right. If nothing else, he’d show up as a ghost just to laugh at me.
In any case, I’m not going to find anything of him where the dead shell got buried as a worm’s all-you-can-eat buffet. This very spot is the last place he was alive. It has more of him than some turfed over hole in a cemetery ever will.
Here’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking nihilism is the atheist’s version of religious epiphany in times of crisis. In both cases you’re left wondering what the hell the plan is, and you either go all in on believing there is one and you just don’t get it because you’re not God, or you end up facing the cold empty void of no plan, no reason, no rhyme. And neither option sounds all that appealing to me, so where does that leave one?
As I’m absently swirling my hand in dirt mould and thinking Nietzsche thoughts, I hear the snap of a twig. Standing there a few feet away is a girl, looking down at me currently crouched on the ground like a mouse.
For a moment we just stare at each other, caught in the hypnosis of a sudden encounter.
‘I’m sorry,’ says the girl, ‘I didn’t mean to disturb your black magic ritual.’
I look down. ‘Ah. After a swift assessment of the visual, I can see how you might go that way. But this isn’t what it looks like, as the murderer says to the soon-to-be-victim.’
The girl’s eyes go wide and round. ‘Er… what?’
At least I always know when I’ve gone too Alec. I get those eyes a lot. Normally it’s hard for me to scrape up any craps to give, but this time I am annoyingly embarrassed.
It’s because she’s pretty. Like a human Bambi crossed with Ghostworld-era Scarlett Johansson.
‘Sorry,’ I say hastily. ‘It’s not anything as fun as Satan worship. I’m just saying a prayer. Or maybe screaming into the void. Black candles help in this regard, you know?’
‘Absolutely,’ Bambi Scarlett dubiously replies. ‘I do it all the time.’
Weak smiles are exchanged, both of us uncertain on how to proceed. I cast around for something to say that will restore my coolness ratio.
‘Your t-shirt is bad,’ venture I.
A crushing silence.
‘Gosh,’ says Bambi Scarlett.
‘I mean, bad as in good.’ I fumble. Me! Fumbling! ‘Do the kids still say that, bad as in good? I think I’m behind on my fresh vernacular. Good. It’s good. I like that band.’
It’s a lurid red shirt, the front splashed with a jagged Boy Harsher.
She looks down at herself. ‘You can see that? I believe the lapels of my oversized blazer only allow for ‘Bo Arsh’ to shine through.’
‘I’m confident I know where it’s going.’
Bambi Scarlett laughs and eyes me. ‘Are you?’
Am I even more of a fantasist than my mother claims, or was that a tiny flirt?
‘So who were you praying to?’ Bambi Scarlett asks me. ‘God or the trees?’
‘Whoever’s listening.’
‘Does anyone ever answer?’
‘Too soon to tell,’ I say. ‘It’s only been six months.’
‘Wow.’ I can tell she’s enjoying my alluring air of mystique. ‘You’ve been coming out here to pray for six months? That’s some dedication. Most people just do it the once and hope it’s enough.’
‘Most people don’t have the tenacity required,’ I say. ‘The really big requests take time.’
‘So you’re asking for something big?’
‘Apparently so, because I haven’t gotten it yet.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Bambi Scarlett muses.
‘Care to venture further down the rabbit hole with me, Alice?’
She smiles. Her teeth are gently crooked. It’s like a perfect slice of lemon to cut the sweet creamy perfection of her looks. (I know, I know. Witness the poetic verbosity of the intellectual with an insta crush on a stranger.)
‘Well,’ she says with a faint smile, ‘when you put it like that. What happened six months ago to prompt all this praying?’
Here we go. ‘My brother’s untimely demise,’ I say.
And just as her face changes and the template sorrowful murmurs begin to spill from her mouth, as happens with everyone I tell, I cut in.
‘My name’s Alec, by the way. Alec Landry.’
There it is.
Landry, the Curséd Name. Lethally suicidal brother to a coolly rebellious sister. Alcoholic absentee father. Small time but upstanding lawyer mother whose prayers could not prevent her family from abandoning her in various embarrassingly public ways. Who’ll be next to crack? Popcorn’s right here, do you want sweet or salted? Can I supersize that for you? Might as well, it’s only a pound sterling more, and there’s always something to see on the Landry show.
‘My family’s reputation precedes me,’ I say. ‘I’m jazzed, I’ve always wanted to be notorious by proxy.’
Bambi Scarlett gives me an uneasy look. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be, you didn’t kill him.’ I am all nonchalance until I catch the vibes. ‘My turn to be sorry. I’ve been told my breeziness is a defence mechanism.’
The green around us whispers and rustles, as if the woods are shifting closer to listen in.
‘It’s okay,’ she replies with an awkward, “what does one even say in these situations” shrug.
‘You never went to my school, did you? Fring High.’ I shoot for the blandest subject opener to keep her talking to me. Of course she never went to my school, I’d recognise someone like her amongst its meagre two hundred and something strong student body.
She shakes her head. ‘I’m in second year at Sutherland Hollow.’
A college girl! Darn, the older woman thing makes her even more attractive. Same age as Lucas, too.
‘You didn’t know my brother, then?’
‘Just of him,’ she says. ‘I never met him.’
That tracks. Sutherland Hollow is the artsy bohemian college in our local area, and it’s a good hour’s drive from here down the coast. Lucas went to the rather more science-y Brodeman Tech, further inland. They would never have crossed paths.
A new question strikes me.
‘What’s your name, by the way?’ I ask.
‘Jesus!’ Bambi Scarlett exclaims, pressing a hand to her heart.
I blink. ‘No way. Father O’Hallaghan’s never going to believe me when I tell him. Can I get your autograph?’
‘No,’ she murmurs, then points. ‘Jesus, I thought that was just a tree, but then it moved.’ Her voice lowers further. ‘There’s someone watching us. Behind you.’
Shoulders a-creep, I crane my head over my shoulder.
In the distance, I can make out a faint rectangular shape, like a small house or a cabin. Next to it, details just as obscured, stands a slender figure wearing a baseball cap and giant sunglasses.
I squint. ‘It’s not moving. Are you sure it’s not some kind of art installation - oh!’
The figure, having been dead still, suddenly jerks into life and hares off into the trees, away from us.
‘Hey!’ Bambi Scarlett shouts - a sharp, angry sound that takes me aback - and then she takes a few steps forward.
‘Wait - what are you planning to do, give chase?’ I say.
‘They were spying on us,’ Bambi Scarlett says, glaring after them.
‘Who knows what they were doing? Maybe it’s their cabin, over there.’
Bambi Scarlett gives me a startled look. ‘What?’
I point. ‘Cabin. Over there. I’ve never noticed it before. I wonder who it belongs to.’
‘You’re pretty interesting, Alec Landry,’ says Bambi Scarlett, holding my gaze.
I savagely fight the blush threatening. I don’t even stammer out a thank you, that’s how bamboozled I am.
Bambi Scarlett shakes her head. ‘God, I’m sorry. I forgot my manners in all the black magic and stalking excitement. My name’s Megan. Megan Lugner.’
‘An entirely forgivable lapse,’ I say, and take her hand to shake.
As soon as our fingers touch, I hear a tiny crack. My skin buzzes with a quick sizz of pain. We both flinch back.
‘Static electricity,’ I say, wringing my hand. ‘Ouch. Boy, this is turning into an all time best “how did you first meet” anecdote, am I wrong?’
‘I actually have to go,’ Megan says, rubbing her hand on her jeans. ‘Sorry. Nice to meet you, Alec.’
She scrambles out of the leaf mould without a pause, and then lopes away from me with admirable speed.
‘Bye,’ I say to the empty air.
I can’t really blame her. That was, all things considered, one of the weirder scenes of my life.