Sister Ignatius called by with a present for me. Rosaleen offered to pass it on but Sister wouldn’t give it to her. The longer I ignore her, the worse I’m making it. Now I’ve so much more to apologise for. I think she’s been the best friend I’ve ever had but I just feel like hiding from the world. I can’t bear being seen.

After dinner, Rosaleen emerged from the pantry with a chocolate cake with candles singing ‘Happy Birthday’. That must have been what I almost caught her doing in the pantry this morning. It’s probably too late to check that apron pocket now.

I’ll write again tomorrow.

I must admit I hadn’t thought much about my birthday during the past couple of weeks and the times I had thought about it, it was with a heavy feeling for poor Marcus. If only we’d just waited. If only I’d just told him. I hadn’t thought about what kind of celebrations I could have or would have had in my previous life or what kind of presents I would have been adorned with from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep. But after reading today and yesterday’s entry, I was fired up. I was excited.

It was as though I’d spent the past days wandering through a misty glen and I couldn’t see past my own nose. But now the fog had lifted. My mind had just been so busy mulling over something in all that time that it couldn’t concentrate on anything else. It seemed to have come to the end of its wander because I was sitting up in bed, fully alert, my heart racing, feeling breathless as though I’d run for miles. I was intent on figuring out what on earth Rosaleen had been doing, or was about to do in the pantry tomorrow morning.

As I was working out a plan, I heard Mum’s door open. I quickly lay down and closed my eyes. She closed the door behind her ever so quietly, aware that she needed to be silent. She sat on the edge of my bed and I waited for her hand on my shoulder. There it was. The urgent squeeze.

I opened my eyes, not feeling the panic I’d written about, but instead feeling totally prepared.

‘Where did you get it?’ she whispered, her face close to mine.

I sat up.

‘Across the road. In the bungalow,’ I whispered back.

‘Rosaleen’s house,’ she whispered, and immediately looked out the window. ‘The light,’ she said, and I noticed a kind of a light flashing on my bedroom wall opposite the window. It had the same effect of trees swishing from side to side across the moonlight causing the light to appear and disappear in the room. Only it wasn’t the trees because it seemed to sparkle more, like glass, releasing prisms of colour. It reflected against Mum’s pale face and she seemed caught in its field, entranced. I immediately looked out my window and across to the bungalow. Hanging in the front window a glass mobile caught the light, sending beams flashing outward, almost like a lighthouse.

‘There are hundreds more of them over there,’ I whispered. ‘I wasn’t supposed to be there, it’s just that, she…’ we both looked to the wall as we heard the springs in Rosaleen and Arthur’s bed, ‘she was being so secretive. I just wanted to say hello to her mother, that’s all. I brought her over some breakfast a couple of weeks ago and I saw someone in the shed in the back garden. It wasn’t her mother.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. A woman. An old woman, with long hair. She was working in there. Making them. She must blow the glass herself. Do you think she’s allowed to do that? Legally?’ I looked at the tear drop in her hand. ‘There were hundreds of them. All hanging on lines. I’ll show you them. When I went back to collect the tray, it was sitting on the wall outside. This was in it.’

We both looked at the tear drop.

‘What does it mean?’ I broke the silence.

‘Does she know?’ Mum asked, not answering my question.

I took the ‘she’ to mean Rosaleen. ‘No. What’s going on?’

She squeezed her eyes shut and covered them with her hands. She rubbed her eyes fiercely, then ran her hands through her hair as though trying to wake herself up.

‘I’m sorry. I feel so fuzzy. I just can’t seem to…wake up,’ she said, rubbing her eyes again. Then she looked at me directly, her eyes shining. She leaned in and kissed me on the forehead. ‘I love you, sweetie. I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry for what?’

But I was asking her back view as she rose and quietly left my bedroom. I looked outside again at the light, the jagged glass twirling around as though being blown from inside. Then, as I was concentrating on that, the curtain moved and I realised someone had been watching me. Or had been watching us.

Then I heard Rosaleen’s door open, footsteps down the hall and my door opened. There she stood in her vision of white.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said, following the diary.

‘I heard a door close.’

‘Nothing’s wrong.’

After a long stare, she left me alone to ponder what I had achieved by telling Mum the truth. Something good had to come of it surely, and I was sure I was about to find out. I opened the diary again to see if the entry had changed. I held my breath.

As I opened the front page, the pages started to slowly curl inward at the edges, becoming browned and charcoaled, as though they were burning before my very eyes. Eventually they stopped retreating and the burned stained pages stared back, hiding tomorrow’s world from me.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Housewife in the Pantry with the Cocoa Powder

I hardly slept after the incident in the early hours of the morning. I lay with my covers up to my chin, rigid with a cold fear that had me hopping in my bed every time I heard the slightest noise. I was pretty sure that the woman in the bungalow was the person who’d followed me to the graveyard the week before last, and as the morning moved on and the sun shed light on the shadows, I became less frightened of her. Perhaps she wasn’t dangerous, perhaps just a little odd. By the look of her hair and clothing at the studio, she wasn’t somebody that saw people regularly. Besides, she’d given me a gift of the small tear-shaped glass. She was obviously reaching out.

But the burned diary gave me a sense of impending doom.

When I did sleep I dreamed of fire: of castles on fire, and books on fire. I dreamed of glass being made, blobs of molten hot glass being shaped and dripping. After waking up to a dark room, with my heart beating wildly in my chest, I tried hard to stay awake. I watched the pages of the diary for the rest of the morning, waiting for the burned pages to uncurl themselves, for the writing to magically appear in its neat loops and crosses. But they remained the same.

I was up early the next morning determined to catch Rosaleen do whatever she was doing. Catching the Housewife in the Pantry with the Cocoa Powder wasn’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world, but I had realised that the diary was leading me somewhere, was trying to show me something, pointing to the way out just as I had been trying to show the bluebottle. I would be a fool to ignore the miracle of what was occurring. Every word was a clue, every sentence an arrow, a signpost for me to get out of here.

The radio was blaring in the kitchen, Arthur was having a shower and Rosaleen thought she had the morning entirely to herself. She turned and headed to the pantry, and I ducked out of sight behind the hall door just in time. I could see her in the pantry through the crack in the door.

She had Mum’s breakfast tray on the counter and she reached into a box, hidden behind another box and took out a container of pills. My heart hammered. I had to block my mouth to make sure I didn’t scream. I watched her tip two capsules into the palm of her hand, open them and sprinkle the powder into the porridge and mix it around. I fought with whether to jump out then and confront her. I had her. I’d known she was up to something but now I had to stop myself. They could merely be headache pills and my pouncing on her would backfire, again, or else they were something more serious, which were making Mum sicker. I leaned in closer to the crack in the door but as I did so, the floorboard under my foot creaked. Rosaleen immediately dropped the container into her apron, picked up the tray and swivelled around as though nothing had happened. I quickly stepped out from behind the door.


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