Creepy and Maud by Dianne Touchell Read Free Book Online

is okay. I want to please her. I have already started grafting. Nancy has pretty hair and teeth. Sometimes I do not listen to her at all; I just look at her hair and teeth. This works because when you look at someone’s head, they think you are paying attention.
     
    The thing Nancy most wants to talk about is my hair and teeth. I cannot. It is too private. She knows I am eating my hair, too. The day she saw some hair stuck between my teeth, she put the mittens on me. I cannot draw with mittens on. Do they not know that? Do they not care? I am Tom Kitten now, banished upstairs with imaginary measles whenever we have company. I wear the mittens dutifully because it pleases Nancy. It pleases Mum and Dad, too. Sometimes, though, I take the mittens off and it feels good, like a forbidden thing. Like prohibition, or going down there on a boy.
     
    Nancy already talks about what can be done about the patches that will not grow back. Sometimes I see a little frown on her (a little frown that reaches her hair and teeth) when she sees a patch that must look freshly pulled. I think she knows I am slipping the mittens off in private and going at it with a furtiveness that gives renewed pleasure to what was dangerously close to becoming plain habit. But she does not say anything. Just that tweaky frown and talk of restyling and hairpieces and hats and scarves, as if I am a cancer patient. Perhaps I am. Perhaps the cancer is that little bit of me still in here. I pull to comfort her, that little me. They put mittens on me to stop me pull. Without comfort, the little cancer that is me will shrivel up and pass away like one of those failure-to-thrive babies, and then the work will be done.
     
    I am not indifferent to all this. Dad had a rosebush in the front yard he tried to graft several times. The grafts just kept dying (Mum said it was just dormant). The lady at Bunnings said it had a genetic predisposition to die back if clipped with a pruner. Or by a pruner, one of the two. I feel sad about being clipped back but I suppose it is necessary. I just worry that by the time they cut back the brambles and get to the castle, Rapunzel will be gone. Not rescued, but shrivelled up and passed away.
     
    Coda: There is no going back, no rubbing out.
     

TEN

    Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
    —Philip K. Dick, ‘How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’ (1978)

    A wise man once said he never let his schooling interfere with his education. Hang on, that wasn’t a wise man, it was Mark Twain. So a boring man said it. I always believed schooling was for the gleaning of knowledge. I stopped believing in that a long time ago. But school hasn’t gone away. Ergo, school is just a reality. And reality is highly overrated.
     
    I’ve also stopped believing in love, my parents, God, heart-tick approved meals at McDonald’s and democracy, and they haven’t gone away, either. Simplerealities. Simple tortuous realities. They don’t go away; my only hope is to get as far away from them myself as I can. You’d think that if you stopped believing in something, it would just evaporate, dissolve into the atmosphere. I don’t mean physically, I mean all your expectations about it. If you can bring a fairy back to life by clapping your hands, for fuck’s sake, surely you can destroy expectations by turning your back on the thing that caused them. But I’ve found that when belief in something is removed, it leaves a big hole where that thing once was, like having a tooth pulled. You know how you can never stop worrying the wound with your tongue, even though it tastes like metal and aches like a belly blow? That’s how I feel about love, and God, and all the biggies.
     
    Maud is my metallic-tasting belly blow. I thought I loved her with as much love as I had in me before she drew me the picture (and that’s a lot of love—it’s not like I’m busy loving anyone or anything else). But