At certain points in our lives, we are offered opportunities to discover secrets.
Your older sister may have left her diary open in her room, and you can’t help but sneak a look inside. Or you’re at work late after everyone else has gone home, and your boss has left his laptop unlocked, an email with your name as the subject line sitting in his sent items.
When these things happen, a complex tug-of-war begins within us. One part of our psyche insists that it will surely do no harm just to look. Another, more moral voice inside knows it’s a breach of trust, of privacy, and that it’s still wrong, even if we are never caught.
And so most of us look, because most of us are not paragons of virtue. We are curious, stupid and selfish primates, and our burning desire to know incinerates our moral compunction in that heady moment.
Your sister, it turns out, is a lesbian, and has been hiding it from your conservative Christian family. Aghast, you reel back from her diary, primed to run off and tell your parents.
That email your boss sent to his boss includes a plan to let you go if your attitude and performance don’t improve – and both need to improve markedly. Shocked and scared, you pull extra shifts all week, trying to avoid losing your livelihood.
But not all secrets should be exposed to the light.
Some, like the ones in this story, are better left well alone.
My parents had always told me the move from New Zealand to England was prompted by a work opportunity for my father. He’d been in the printing business, and was always looking to improve himself, my mother often said.
I thought I’d always retain my memories of my birth country, of the golden beaches of the east coast and their endless summers. But I think such a huge move across the globe in childhood does something to a young mind. By the start of my teens, I found my memories of New Zealand had lost their colours and become patchy and unreliable, and I’d need to refer to the battered old family photo album for clues and details.
It wasn’t really a big deal to me – and by the time I left home for university, my accent was as British as the next girl’s, not even the faintest twang of Kiwi vowels betraying my origins. The sheep jokes were no more, and I had all but forgotten the country of my birth. Only a few fragmented childhood memories remained, vague and pleasant mental flotsam.
Dad often said that the move to the UK was the best thing that ever happened to us, and mum would nod in agreement, just as she did with everything he said.
But sometimes when he said it, his voice would catch a little, and it stirred an eddy of strangeness inside me, accompanied by a feeling I couldn’t name.
Like the ghost of a buried memory.
To say that dad’s death came as a shock is a gross understatement. He’d complained about his ‘gut pains’ for years, but we never thought much of it; and he was always the stubborn sort who refused to see the doctor. One day he’d been screen-printing some shirts in his shed, and the next he was in hospital, an IV line in his arm and an oxygen mask over his face.
The prognosis wasn’t good.
The tumours riddled his bowel and his bones; the images of his insides looked like a cluster of balloon animals from a fairground. The specialist said that they’d been small and slow-growing for a long time, but now they were multiplying through his system and overwhelming his vital organs.
After five surgeries, he was gone. Even modern medical science simply couldn’t keep up with that level of corruption – and neither could his middle-aged body.
As it happens with some couples, my mother faded fast without him. She would babble to herself while doing household chores all day and all night, until the house was a pristine antonym to the chaos inside her mind. In the end, she had to be put into psychiatric care, her mental faculties so shot that she could no longer form coherent sentences, nor discern bleach from orange juice. I’d sit with her as often as I could, in the bright day-room on the ward, and listen to the endless jumble of nonsense words spilling from her lips while she stared at me earnestly, expecting me to understand her.
But no one could understand her anymore, not even the other poor, mad old souls.
Packing up their house wasn’t as challenging as I thought. Everything was so neatly ordered, so tidy, that it was almost as if mum had anticipated this chain of events. I didn’t even have to hire cleaners – if there was a spot of grime anywhere in that house, I would have been very surprised.
I sat in the pristine living room and leafed through old photo albums, moving backward through time. There was me in a horrible formal dress with my first, awkward boyfriend, Mark; here was me collecting an award for first in art class, aged fifteen. Back through the years I travelled, until New Zealand lay open in my lap, the images on those first two pages still sharp and colourful, thanks to dad’s skill with all things print.
It struck me as odd that there weren’t any photos of us at the beach. My hazy, near-forgotten childhood memories all had a warm background wash of sun and yellow sand, even if the details were smeared and uncertain from twenty-five years of English winters and holidays in France.
So when I eventually found the unfamiliar, much older photo album, thinner than a bread board, I couldn’t help but open it up, fuelled by that ancient primate curiosity. Why had my father locked this one away in the cupboard in his shed? And why was the key hidden in an old box of paints?
But when I opened the brittle leather cover and looked inside, I found no answers. Only more mystery.
Carnival Cove, said the huge, rivetted sign in the first picture. Its warped tin was painted with vibrant reds, yellows and blues, a cartoony, primary colour study in 70’s signwriting. The font was so jolly I half expected the letters to start bouncing around, like children on an inflatable castle.
But I still didn’t remember the place.
There were only two pages of pictures, and they were all holiday snaps – of myself, mum and dad, all swimming, sunning and playing on a sandy curve of colourful beach, somewhere on the east coast of New Zealand. It looked like a summer paradise for children; there was a hotdog van, and a candyfloss-maker dressed as a clown. The prices were all displayed in cents on more brightly-painted signs, which I recognised as my father’s work. There were a couple of fairground rides, streaked with rust from the salt air despite the thick layers of paint on their struts, people queueing for them despite the probable safety risk.
None of it really seemed familiar, but one particular picture tickled something right at the back of my mind. It wasn’t the picture itself, it was the people in it. In the foreground I recognised a seven-year-old me, making lumpy sandcastles near a white-and-red striped tent and a folding chair. But just inside frame, on the left, was an unkempt man with a wild, tangled beard and wiry hair. He stared directly into the camera with mismatched eyes of blue and hazel, their particolour startling and intense in his teak-brown face.
And for some reason, I knew him.
The therapist was kind, and we had several sessions trying to tease out the memories before she suggested that some trauma was blocking them out. We’d been over the photographs again and again, hoping some element in them would spark a cascade of unlocked experiences, which might lead to an explanation as to why this album had been hidden from me.
I knew her theory was that the wild man in the photo had done something to me, but I wasn’t so sure. The emotion that stirred when looking into his odd eyes wasn’t fear or revulsion – it was more like the ghost of pity and regret.
“Why don’t you go back there?” she eventually suggested, “Being at Carnival Cove itself might spark a sort of synaesthesia – the actual sights and smells may help you more than sitting in this office, staring at old photos.”
But while the idea seemed like a good one – and I immediately took it to heart – no matter how hard I searched on google maps, I couldn’t find a place called Carnival Cove anywhere in New Zealand, and most certainly not on the sunny east coast.
That wasn’t going to stop me, though. I knew I’d grown up north of Gisborne, where the coast meandered upward in a line of half-moon bays, each more beautiful and wild than the last. I’d visit every beach if I had to.
I booked my plane tickets, and started packing my bags as soon as I got home.
In less than 48 hours I would be on my way to solve the mystery of Carnival Cove.
The flight seemed endless. Long before the plane touched down in Auckland, I felt a huge pang of guilt, thinking about just how awful I must have been on a twenty-hour flight when I was a fractious and unruly eight-year-old. The connecting flight to my internal destination was not due until several hours after arrival, and by the time I dragged my trundling suitcase into a room at the salt-bleached coastal motel, I was utterly exhausted.
The keys to the rental car were hot from hanging in the broiling office; the sun wasn’t disappointing anyone this summer, and water shortages had already been declared for the region. With all four windows down, I drove the winding inland roads, the richness of parched grass and fresh manure in my nostrils, turning east for the sea whenever an opportunity presented itself.
I found nothing at first. I stood squinting on several hot, gritty beaches, superheated sand burning my feet, but no memories surfaced. Cooling my toes in the frothy surf brought a rush of physical relief, but no recollections of carnival colours and strange old men with mismatched eyes.
Whenever I stopped in one of the little rural towns I’d ask about Carnival Cove, but the name only produced blank looks and silent head shakes – the awkwardness quickly smoothed by the usual Kiwi pleasantries and enquiries about my holiday plans.
That all changed when I reached my parents’ home town of Tokomaru Bay.
The first actual memories began to stir when I recognised landmarks from my parents’ photos. Here was the old petrol station, there was the rickety relic of the Blue Marlin motels. As I parked the rental on the weedy concrete outside the local corner store, I felt a strange frisson, as though I’d stepped across some uncrossable boundary and into a world that should have been left in memory.
I lingered in front of the drink refrigerators, letting the cool air wash over me as I opened the door. How I’d ever tolerated this heat as a child, I had no idea; my English constitution was crumbling beneath the relentless beating of the clear, harsh sunlight.
“Gunna buy somethin’ or are ya just gunna nick all the cold air?” groused a voice from behind the store counter.
There was something about that voice; something at once disturbingly familiar and wrong, like it was an ugly parody of someone I knew intimately. Snatching a coke, I closed the glass door and turned towards the counter, where a sour-faced woman of about my own age stood, idly chewing gum.
I didn’t even feel the coke bottle leave my suddenly numb fingers, but thankfully it just bounced and rolled, not shattering on the worn lino floor.
Despite her short, practical haircut and less-than-sunny expression, the woman behind the counter was, to all intents and purposes, my identical twin.
We both gaped for a long moment, then started talking at the same time, our voices like distorted recordings of each other, poorly overlaid,
“Who are you?”
“I’m Jess. Jessica Thomas,” she replied first, her east-coast burr squashing and sliding all the syllables together.
“Jessica Thompson,” I shot back, my own accent suddenly pompous and irritating by comparison.
“Yer a Brit.”
“I am. Moved there when I was eight, from here.”
“Nah,” she said, “not possible. No Thompsons here, only Thomases.”
I needed a moment. Retrieving the coke, I placed it upright on the stained counter. We avoided each other’s eyes, both of us focusing on the utterly normal bottle standing amongst boxes of half-familiar sweets and piles of newspapers.
“What in living hell is going on?” I murmured eventually.
“Oh, shiiit,” she whispered, “I think you’re from Carnival Cove.”
Her house was familiar; and it should have been. I’d lived there until I was eight.
“Mum and dad died a few years back,” she said as she hooked open the ragged fly screen with a foot and pushed open the unlocked front door, “so the place is all mine.”
“What did they die of?”
“Dad was cancer. Blew up inside him like a bunch of grapes. Mum went doolally real quick after that – they stuck her in the loony bin down south. Used to visit on her birthday, but before she carked it all she said was rubbish, none of it made any sense at the end.”
She dropped her bag on the kitchen bench, and snatched up a battered kettle.
“Wanna cuppa?” She laughed, the sound strained and unmusical. “Dumb question, you’re a Pom, ‘course ya do.”
“You mentioned Carnival Cove?”
“Let’s siddown.”
The dining room was small, with the same oval table I remembered. Mum had always been meticulous about covering it and cleaning it, and it still smelled of linseed. The warm ghost of that scent plunged me backwards in time. As the kettle simmered and fussed in the kitchen, my twin began to talk.
“Didja find the photos, too? The ones that dad hid away?”
“Yes! But I don’t understand what’s going on. Are you my twin?”
She shook her head.
“Nup, not really.”
“Were… were our parents twins, then?”
“No.”
“Then what the hell are we?”
“Look luv, I reckon you should just go home. Go back to England. The secrets here aren’t ones ya want in your head, trust me. What happened at Carnival Cove is best left sealed up tight in that godforsaken place and forgotten forever, y’hear me?”
“Please,” I said quietly, “please. I have to know.”
“Nah. Better ya don’t. You can stay in your old room for the night, then I want ya gone in the morning, OK?”
The kettle boiled suddenly, its scream shrill and human, startling us.
Our nervous laughter was eerily synchronised.
Breakfast was a huge, greasy plate of fried eggs, shoulder bacon, paddock mushrooms and thick chunks of homemade bread to mop up the mess. That my twin wasn’t the size of a house seemed impossible, and appetite certainly wasn’t the doppelganger of hers.
“Nup. Not taking y’there,” she mumbled with her mouth full, even as I drew breath to ask.
“I’ll find it anyway,” I shot back, “you can’t be the only local who knows where it is.”
“Look luv, I’m telling ya, OK? Leave it alone. You don’t want that shit in your head. Trust me.”
“Jesus Christ, Jessica,” her name felt wrong on my tongue, “how the fuck can I leave this alone?”
“Just gotta,” she said, shaking her head sadly, “somehow you just gotta.”
“Well I can’t.”
Her sigh was heavy, a single long exhale that contained everything we hadn’t said. “Alright then, fine. I’ll take ya as far as the road – but there’s no way in hell I’m going any further; and if y’had half the bloody sense I do, you wouldn’t neither.”
Noisily scraping my mostly uneaten breakfast into a slops bucket, she jerked a thumb at the door.
“I’ll take the ute. You follow along behind in that plastic Jap shitbox of yours – but be careful, cuz the roads out to the cove aren’t sealed. And they don’t get used anymore, just like they bloody shouldn’t.”
My burgeoning dislike for my twin was probably undisguisable as I gestured brusquely to the door.
“Lead the way then, Jess.”
True to her word, the road was rough gravel and weeds, and by the time she pulled over to the side of the track, my arms were nearly numb from the constant bouncing of the vehicle.
“This is it, kiddo,” she said, pointing to a steep hill, “yer gonna have to climb the rest of the way.”
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a dark hole in the side of the hill.
“Old tunnel. Got bricked up, so there’s no way through now.”
The door of her truck squealed as she yanked it open without looking at me,
“When yer done, get out of town. Other people see you, there’s gonna be trouble.”
The engine of the truck roared into life, killing any further conversation, so I guessed that was all the goodbye or good luck I was going to get. She turned a sharp half circle, spraying gravel, and drove away.
In the overgrown weeds on the side of the track were the rusted remains of the sign I’d seen in that first photo. The paint had long ago faded into pastel ghosts, but I could still make out the two large Cs, just a hint of their once-brilliant red remaining. This was the right place.
Locking the car behind me, I followed the path until it petered out at the bricked-up tunnel mouth, then started climbing up the steep, gorse-choked side of the hill. As I pulled myself up on handfuls of tough weeds, I could smell the tangy salt air gusting over the top and I tried to force myself to remember, to give myself some clue as to what I would find. Near the crest, taking a rest to pick prickles from my palms, I looked back and could still see the dusty plume in the distance, left behind by Jessica’s truck.
If only she’d just told me. Why didn’t she tell me?
The cove was big, much bigger than I thought it would be.
Sliding and scrambling down the other side of the hill, I felt familiarity tugging at me as I viewed the golden crescent of the bay, and the high enclosing cliffs. At first, I thought there was nothing there, but as I kicked through the dunes and approached the undulating impossible blue of the sea, I realised I was mistaken. What I’d first taken for rocks and logs and flotsam were twisted pieces of rusted iron and pocked aluminium. Submerged in the surf, I could make out the warped hulk of the hotdog van – and further up along the beach, the broken, mangled arms of a carnival ride pushed from the sand like the spokes of a huge wheel.
Closer to the water I could see even more; it was as though everything from the beach had been tossed into the sea, where it rotted and rusted in the surf, slowly breaking down.
But there was too much stuff.
I could make out a second hotdog van, further out, identical to the first, but the roof completely rusted through, the sea churning in its dark guts. Then a third and fourth, intersecting each other at right-angles, as though one had melted through the other, then somehow reformed.
Bile rose in my throat, and I sat heavily on the damp sand.
Something sharp was digging into my bare foot – I’d abandoned my shoes at the base of the hill where the beach began – and I pushed it with my toes, forcing it to the surface.
Long and white, a rib revealed itself, then another, as I pulled it from the sand like carrion driftwood. Digging around them, I found more bones of all kinds, pitted knobs of spines, delicate finger bones, the great flat fan of a scapula – and finally, unmistakeably, a human skull.
The eye socket revealed itself first. I tried to tug it free, but it wouldn’t come. Hooking my fingers into the thing, I hauled at it, slowly dragging it out of the reluctant sand. I should have stopped when I saw the second skull fused so perfectly with it. I should have, but I didn’t. When the third, fourth and fifth perfectly melded sections revealed themselves, it finally slithered out, a hideously impossible and macabre thing.
And with it, the memories that I’d repressed for all those years finally broke free.
He was always at Carnival Cove, the old man. Always shouting at the adults and kids to get away, that it was a bad place and that they should all leave. His ancestor had been a Maori elder, the story said, who had drowned himself in the Cove long, long ago.
But nobody paid him any mind; he was a sort of permanent fixture, and in a strange way he added to the exciting atmosphere of Carnival Cove, a wild old clown for the children to laugh at, to pelt with handfuls of sand.
Everything at the Cove had seemed overly bright that day, and the laughter and shrieking of the children felt sharp, as though the sounds were slicing holes in the hot fabric of the air. The multi-armed fairground ride spun in jolly asymmetric circles, people whooping and screaming, deliriously giddy as it dipped and rose, the chugging engine that powered it drowned out by their voices.
I was making a sandcastle and carefully sticking shells into it when the old man stumbled up to me.
“Too thin,” he said, foam flecking the corners of his mouth, “the machines have made it too thin!”
My father, taking a photo at the time, yelled at him to get away from me.
“You need to get the girl out! The tamariki need to leave!” the man snarled, grabbing my arm, “the walls have grown too thin!”
I think then that my father let the camera fall free on its strap around his neck and ran over. The old man was yelling incoherently now, no longer English or Maori, just a wild string of babbling and broken sounds, pointing towards the fairground rides.
When we turned to look at what had agitated him so, the whole Cove upended.
Green and orange light tinted the beach, coming from no sun we could see. Waves froze out in the bay, limned by the strange actinic light. Everything and everyone seemed to be moving at one third speed; a dog kicked up sand as it dug, but the pawsful of golden grains hung in the air in a shining spray, spreading too slowly. Something was happening around the rides, something terrible and unnatural. The air seemed to thicken, to double, then triple, then explode in a syrupy welter of sound and light.
I stared at myself, sitting across from me in the same goldfish-print bathing suit, holding the same primary red, plastic bucket. Then she screamed in a horrible, deep and slow voice as another me appeared, somehow inside her, like a cartoon character being smeared across a page and redrawn.
Extra people swelled and bubbled up all over the beach. My father was a tangle of five men, all intersecting like a human spider, blood gushing from their identical mouths as the jumbled knot flopped and writhed on the sand. Some people ran for the tunnel, others ran for the sea. My mother collided with another version of herself, then they clawed at each other like cats, one ripping the other’s eyes out. The tears left on her cheeks were thick and tinted pink, glistening in the painful glare as she howled wordlessly.
My father’s strong hands picked me up and I felt him carrying me through the chaos, then he fell, bludgeoned by another version of my father, who picked me up and carried on for the tunnel, fighting his way through the fleeing people, lurching and tripping as the impossible limbs of the fallen snapped underfoot like so much driftwood.
In the crush and the hot darkness of the brick cave, bodies pressed too tight – too many, and I felt the air grow stuffy and too thin to breathe. Sickly red flashed as something happened on the beach behind us, then the tunnel was blessedly clear, leaving us a straight run for the road.
I had to stop several times on the drive back to Jessica’s house, the first time to vomit up what little breakfast I’d eaten, and the other times to retch foul-tasting froth weakly into the weeds on the side of the road while I sobbed myself hoarse.
She was waiting when I pulled up beside dad’s shed, a hot cup of tea in one hand and a blanket draped over the other arm. Inside the house, she held me and soothed me as I cried it out, stroking my hair and telling me it was all going to be OK.
“After it all happened, there were too many survivors,” she told me, “too many versions of each person that got away from all that bloody chaos. Our dads drew straws, to see who would get to stay here. And the rest promised to change their names, and piss off and move far, far away.”
She smiled then, the golden light of the sunset making her tanned features glow,
“We didn’t know who belonged to who. Cos we all had the same memories, the same bodies. For all I know, your dad was my real dad. Shit, you and me probably played right here in this house while all the grownups went down to the Cove and chucked everything into the sea, to hide what happened.”
I felt a sickening lurch as another realisation hit me.
“Jess? How many of us are there?”
She shrugged, tucking the blanket around me with the same care our mother would have,
“I dunno. But you’re the first to make it back.”
“But I won’t be the last.”
She shook her head,
“Nope.”
I looked into that tanned version of my own face, into my own eyes, and I truly understood why she hadn’t told me.
“Well, whatever happens, we need to make sure that they don’t go down to Carnival Cove.”
And so there you have it, the story of a secret that was best left unearthed. How I managed to forget all that horror the first time around, I don’t know, but I do know that you don’t get a second chance. I can’t ever look at the world the same way. No matter how hard I drink, no matter what pills I take, those awakened events play out in my mind like a squeaky old fairground carousel, horrible horses lurching up and down and round and round and round.
Jess and I haven’t yet come up with a plan, but we’re going to stay in touch. Maybe there’s a Jessica in Scotland or Ireland who might need my help, who might need someone to talk to when she eventually returns from Carnival Cove.
Next time you find something that you shouldn’t, that you know should probably be left well alone, then I urge you to forget about it. Distract yourself with sitcoms, play video games or go for a long walk with your spouse.
Some secrets should be left buried.
Submitted June 05, 2017 at 08:13AM by Cymoril_Melnibone http://ift.tt/2qR4cs9 nosleep
No comments:
Post a Comment