My name is Alice.

Writing this last year under a cloud of Covid19 and assorted lockdowns and world defining events hasn’t been easy. In fact it’s been overwhelmingly unproductive. A long time ago I started a writing project set in an urban fantasy world. It’s gone through so many iterations and versions it may as well be its own multiverse. But the history has continually evolved and every now and then I make an effort to complete some section of that timeline and put it out into the big wide world. It’s a confusing, inconsistent mess, in part by design but also because continuity in an unpublished work isn’t really a priority. The piece below is from one of my favourite POV protagonists, Alice. It’s here because I release things to keep myself motivated, even if hardly anyone sees them, but also because I just spent weeks fixing the damn website and getting it all nice and transferred to one consolidated service so I really want to make use of that.

Alice…as you can see, has some trouble remembering things. At best she’s as lost as the reader and at worst she’s an unreliable narrator. I rather like her.

Remember, remember…

*****

My name is Alice.

There aren’t many things in this world I know to be true, but that much is. It’s the first thing written in my journal. The first line, on the first page.

I have this…fog, in my head. It makes remembering some things hard. Where I live, who certain people are. That feeling when you walk into a room and forget what you were going to do? My whole life is like that. Things from a few weeks ago can be as vague as childhood memories and as hard to hold onto as the dream you wake up from. Sometimes I can’t tell if my memories are things I dreamed or lived or was just told.

Writing things down in my journal is cheating, but it lets me remember. I read the words and if it’s a true memory it’s sharp and vivid. It has colour and smell and I can taste it. So I cheat, a lot.

Kassidy likes to joke that my whole life is in that book. He’s not wrong.

‘What happens if you lose it?’ He asks.

Kassidy with the bright blue eyes. The messy hair and the dirty face. Living rough will do that to a person. There’s running water in the loft where we both sometimes crash, like when the shelter isn’t taking in people. Cold running water and torn mattresses. No sheets and rusted springs but it’s safe. We don’t let older people in, homeless or homed. I have a page about why but sometimes Kassidy will remind me there are reasons. It’s just us. Kids who aren’t kids. We all have secrets.

This was my secret, the leather bound journal and stylus. They used to be called leaves; pages. Or papers did, I wasn't clear. Made from the smashed bodies of trees. Recycling goal or a macabre practice, depending on how much of tree hugger you were. But when I looked at the journal I saw myself, my whole life.

That wasn't a metaphor, my whole life was contained within those pages. The problem was...the problem was me. My memory doesn't work like other people. You ask another person what they had for dinner, every night, for the last week, they probably couldn't tell you. A month ago, impossible. A year? You've got to be kidding. My whole life was like that, I had trouble remembering things. I knew where I lived but I forget how to find my way home. I remember people the way you know what roast chicken smells like or how you tie you shoes. But I forgot most of what they say to me. Not immediately, not soon, but within a few days. Always. Every time. It's like a ghost, an echo, a frustrating word on the tip of my tongue. Lyrics you think you know but have been singing wrong your whole life.

I need a primer, the same way you know the next words to a song when you hear the first line. You don't know the verse or the chorus but every word is a clue to the one that comes next.

I love words for that reason, to me they're magical. To me they're secrets and mysteries and answers all wrapped up inside themselves. I want to hold them and cradle them the way you might snuggle a puppy and then someone tells you it's yours. That's how I remember my life, by looking back through the trail of breadcrumbs I left for myself.

It's funny though.

I don't remember who gave me my journal.

I don’t need it to remember clichés though. Like how a picture is worth a thousand words. There’s one picture in my journal, right at the end, the part you should never skip to. It doesn’t tell the whole story because you can see it used to be bigger, that there’s missing pieces to it. Jagged tears either side where part of the story was ripped away. It’s glued to the back cover. Two people who might be related, a boy and a girl. She’s younger, he’s older. He’s smiling, she’s not. But there’s swathes of pink dye through her hair. They’re both blonde, but really they don’t look related. She could be ten? Twelve? Eight? And he could be that much again.

I sometimes wonder if it’s me in the photo. The girl with the pink hair. I don’t have a very good sense of self, I walk past windows and mirror and don’t recognise her. It could be me. When I was younger. But who is he? A brother, cousin, uncle? A friend? Even a father? Somebody that I used to know? Maybe it’s not me. It’s a puzzle piece in a jigsaw of blue sky. But it’s mine.

If only I could remember. I wrote it down on the photo once, remember. You could only see the half the word now, scrawled in black marker. M-B-E-R. Remember. It was the word I found myself repeating in a singsong voice when I was alone or confused. My mantra, my motto, my safe-word.

Remember, Remember. 

I just never could.

‘What if you left it on the bus?’ Kassidy asked again, sliding down next to me, back against the wall. He was wearing his big jacket again, the suede and fur one. It was two sizes too big for him but the temperature dropped sharply after the sun went down. And it had pockets.

He produced dinner from those pockets; chocolate bars and packets of chips. Raided from a vandalised vending machine.

Most of my clothes didn’t have pockets. I made do with a backpack I’d found that was like one giant pocket, with bonus smaller pockets, one of which my journal lived in. It helped that it was both waterproof and lacking holes. I thought these were neat features.

‘That would be bad,’ I told him, accepting one of the packs. ‘Thanks.’

‘Saw the motorbike lady again today,’ Kassidy crunched through a mouthful of chips. ‘Over at Tasties.’

I scowled. Tasties was a grocery chain a few blocks away. A lot of kids went dumpster diving there. A lot got chased away there. Popular theory was that the motorbike lady who’d been showing up the last week was there to do just that. Or she had been sent to take kids back to the system. There weren’t any good theories about why she skulking around. No one I knew had seen her face.

Or I just hadn’t bothered to write that down.

‘What do you want to do tonight?’ Kassidy ruffled my hair. I ducked my head away him, stuff felt like a bird’s nest without him doing that.

‘The same thing we do every night,’ I told him.

He looked at me. I looked at him. We both grinned.

‘The arena,’ we said in unison.

‘Hold my hand,’ I held it out for him. ‘I don’t wanna lose you on the way.’

*****

Dear Diary.

You know what’s worse than not being able to remember things? Things like not knowing what I went to the store to pick-up. Why I walked into a room or if I went to the store the day before yesterday.

It’s not knowing where the store is. I know there’s a store but I don’t know how to get to it. It’s somewhere over that a way but I have to walk down three streets and back up two of them to find it.

And then I have to get home. I know where here is and I know where there is. It’s the bit in between here and there that’s all murky.

Essentially I have the spatial awareness of a one-eyed goldfish.

The arena is half club, half stadium. It’s outdoors but covered, surrounded by fences meant to keep people getting in for free. We still managed to get in. There’s a spot in the fence where the wire has come loose from the lower cross beam. It would be obvious if someone hadn’t padlocked it back into place. I don’t know why no one had fixed it but maybe they didn’t care. You couldn’t get through there unless you had a key to that padlock.

Or you knew how to open locks without a key, like Kassidy did. Weirdly all it takes is a couple of paperclips or bobby pins. It only ever took him a few minutes. A few tense, nervous minutes waiting in the dark in case someone caught us but what would they do? Anyway we always put the lock back and if they wanted it fixed so bad they could actually fix it.

Tonight at the arena; the rock show.

I didn’t know the band, wouldn’t remember their name the next day. But I’d remember the way it made me feel.

At the rock show. When the lights go down and the noise goes up. You can’t see the crowd anymore. Not the wide-eyed kids who probably snuck out of home and snuck in under fake IDs while trying to play it cool. Nor the aging diehards with grey down to their shoulders and bald patches the size of dinner plates up top, wearing ragged t-shirts from tours that ended decades ago. The women in glitzy, bedazzled dresses with the tired eyes. From the back you might not see the caked on makeup as they try to look half their age. Not until you see them next to the ones trying to pass themselves off as older than they really are. It all disappears when the lights go down and the crowd becomes one voice, as the silhouettes of the band walk onto stage. The kick drum starts to pound and your eardrums start to ring. Everyone morphs into flash-lit fans, jumping and fist pumping, making horns in the air.

That’s where I feel alive, faceless in the crowd, not alone but in an experience that’s all my own. I feel the bass pumping in my chest. The music starts and the crowd roars but they’re drowned out by the beat coming from the stage. People either side of me, voices screaming and hands to the sky. It’s good to see Kassidy smiling, how he lights up in the dark. I can still see the blue of his eyes in the flashing lights and shadows. I imagine him when he’s older, in forty years maybe, still enjoying the show and not giving a damn what anyone else thinks. The same eyes and the same smile, living forever in the echoes that music makes.

I lost my voice by the fourth song, the power cords where you sing their line, the crowd a hot mess of bodies writhing and grinding sweat all over each other. And I loved it. But my throat was parched, bone dry from screaming my lungs out to songs I knew by heart. I left Kassidy to flash my cards at the bar staff, I was one of those underage wannabes trying to fake it til I made it. The server on the other side flashed me the usual grin as I shouted my order, nodding like she could hear me when we both knew she couldn’t before taking her best guess at it. I handed over the money, whose money I won’t say, and she handed me a plastic cup filled with who knew what.

I saw her when I turned around. Silhouette. Dark hair, dark face. Red jacket. Why was I so fixated on it? Did I see it on sale in a store one time and want it for my own? Did I get bowled over by someone power walking and emotionally scarred?

It didn’t fit with her, I realised. Not in the sense that it was too big or too small, she wore it well, but in the sense it belonged on someone else. Not me and not Kassidy and not her and that was everyone I knew right then.

Her eyes found me then, through the crowd and cut through the noise. People crossed in front of us but she never broke that eye contact. She saw me, she knew me, and she started coming for me.

Foam covered my hand, I’d squeezed my plastic cup into a crumpled mess and spilled all over myself. It made me curse and shake my hand and look down and that broke the contact. My head came up again, stiff and shocked and panicky. I could see her pushing through the crowd and none too gently. So I turned and ran.

*****