Night Watchers
Whitney Chen


 
The new girl has black hair and paper thin bones and skin the colour of snowflakes. She appears in our town one day and does not leave. She arrives with her mother on an unusually sweaty night, moves into the abandoned weatherboard home at the bottom of the valley, which is haunted by ghosts and spirits and now, her.

From the hill, we can see the entire sprawl of town: a spiderweb of houses, meandering roads, the school oval fading on into the horizon. We come here in the quiet hours of the night, scanning the skies for stars, the streets for secrets.

We have not watched the bottom of the valley in months, but after the new girl arrives, our eyes have patience for little else. That first night, we wait for lights to turn on, for silhouettes to appear. Our senses are acute, refined from thousands of hours on the hill. We can anticipate even the slightest rustle of movement.

But tonight, there is nothing. Only stillness.

The new girl turns up at school the following Monday, stitches herself into the fray as though she has always been there. Her uniform is old and matted, musty and stale. It swallows her small frame like a parachute. We titter and stare, but never dare to approach. 

She comes into classes and sits at the front, a single figure in an empty ravine. At recess, she is always on the kid’s swing, absently kicking a billowing skirt around her ankles, closing her eyes. A white-limbed tide, receding.

The new girl’s mother starts to work at the local library stacking shelves. We see her one time, a diminutive woman oblivious to the shrieks of small children bubbling around her. She has grey veins and sunken eyes and a flat nose like her daughter’s. Her movements are uncertain. She has not learned to exist in these peculiar glades of light. 

In the spring we hike up our skirts and unbutton our shirts, discover push-up bras and velvet chokers. We parade next to the basketball courts, soaking up the curious, pubescent gazes that envelop us. The heat comes rolling into town in gauzy, sleepy waves. We spray ourselves with water until our shirts are translucent.

The season is carnal. The promise of colour clings to pollen and dust.

We choose this season’s target in silence - a persistent, ambitious reaching: a teacher, Mr. Peters. He was a famous newscaster in a distant town before his ex-wife drained his accounts and disappeared into the countryside. His hair is streaked with grey lace, his voice soaked in gravel. 

We have a dance. We cover ourselves in a cocktail of Impulse Tease and Thierry Mugler and unbutton still more buttons, sit in the back row and pretend not to listen. He steals glances, inhales deeply as he walks past.

But when the new girl arrives, his attention splinters. He asks her questions. Her replies are so impossibly quiet, indiscernible to the rest of us. We watch them speak after class, smile passing from face to face like a virus. We watch as, over the spring, his eyes drift from our collarbones to her black hair, glazed with honeyed longing. 

That summer, when school wraps up and our days fill with the smell of backyard pools and greasy sunscreen, we discover the new girl’s mother is sleeping with Mayor King. On one of our stakeouts, we see the Mayor’s pale blue Toyota Corolla wind down the main road and turn off into the bottom of the valley with the lights off. He gets out, goes inside. We watch for hours with bated breath and binoculars, listening to the second hand hiss on our half-broken watches. We are passing around a pack of cookies and a spliff when suddenly, he emerges, slips back into his car, and drives away. It is four in the morning. The excitement is thick, etched into our sunburnt faces. For seconds, the secret blooms, sugary on our tongues, then the torrent unleashes. We whisper furiously about what we’ve witnessed for the rest of the night.

Thunder rolls across the horizon, but we do not notice.

Then for weeks after, we do not speak about it. The memory begins to trickle through our minds like a sickness.

We see Mayor King at the store, the cafe, buying chrysanthemums for his home. He smiles at us and asks after our mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers. He plays cricket with his son, plants bursting petunias with his wife.

At the end of December, we go to a New Year’s party at the Mayor’s home. We are invited by his son, a heavy boy, an ugly one, his face speckled with pimples and pock marks, his voice lumbering and slow. He stares down our shirts when he speaks.

Our hours there are loaded with the burden of his father’s secret. We consider saying something. In a dark corner outside, away from the glitter and sultry jazz, we share a cigarette and quietly discuss the ethics of the situation. But we cannot decide what to do, so we do nothing.

Through the night, we steal Pringles and Tim Tams from the cupboard, stuff them down our candied throats. Voluptuous laughter and screams fill the rooms, people dance and move with clear-eyed abandon. The countdown comes. This year folds into the next, just like that. We watch the vacant faces around us, their uncompromising bliss. We see the mayor’s wife embracing her ham of a son, nuzzling her painted face into his.

We think: if only you knew.

And then somehow, one day, a month into the turn of the year, they do. The whole town does. We wake on the Sunday before school starts and our street is alight with thoughts and opinions. The town bursts with something febrile.

We drive to the bottom of the valley that afternoon to see it ourselves. We turn off into the narrowed street, making the trip we had seen Mayor King make so many nights before.

And there it is: the speckled driveway, the weatherboard home, the rotting carcass verandah. Streaks of blood red paint stippled across a jaundice-coloured wall: CHINK SLUT.
After, bathed in vicious excitement, we enter school for another year. The start of term bubbles with energy. The sleepiness of the holidays has collapsed, giving way to something more carnal, more somatic.

The new girl is yelled at in the playground. It begins with a chorus of hisses and glances then crescendos into a hurricane. Each day, she sits on the swing at recess with her strange-smelling lunch and does not look anyone in the eye. The kids surround her, hurl  words at her, but she goes on staring into the distance, a thin frame floating in the failing breeze.

Mr. Peters glistens with an olive tan. The summer has filled out his arms and chest, injected a new kind of animation in his face. He talks in staccatos now, no longer averts his gaze. Before long we find ourselves rising early to steal our mothers’ foundations and blushes and lipsticks, painting our faces in long strokes. We wear lace to class, first ribbons then chokers then bras that hang empty against our ribs.

His gaze clings to thin membranes of sweat on our clavicles, our chests, ravenous.

We hear fragments of the story from grown-ups, piece them together like a jigsaw. Last year, Mayor King left for a business conference overseas. He was supposed to stay for a week, but he extended it further and further. At the end of July he stopped answering calls and emails. His wife and son reported a missing persons case. Embassy officials were dispatched to find him. And suddenly, it was October, and Mayor King came home, walked through the front door to his distraught wife and son, unfurled himself back into the town like satin, the new girl and her mother in tow.

​The mayor’s wife loses weight. The flesh melts off her bones like hot wax, cheeks carving new angles in her skin. The first time she emerges from the house, she goes to the grocery store and buys a bottle of Russian vodka, three boxes of Girl Scout cookies, and a pack of blue pens. The second time, a week later, she stumbles into the front yard screaming and sobbing violently. She writhes on the lawn, flattens desiccated petunias. Her voice disappears into the fog. Nobody helps her. She cries, shrieking against a starless night.

The mayor’s son is filled with fury. He comes to us and asks after the new girl, calling her names, biting, enunciating, flinging words into us like whips. He wants to know our timetable, the rooms we are in. Only later do we realise what we have done.

The following day, the new girl comes into class limping with bruises the colour of dark mallows blotting her left cheek and leg. We look at them, as though we are reading tea leaves.

Mr. Peters asks her to stay after class to discuss her paper. People file out of the room but we linger. He moves close to her, breathes into her neck, plays with her shirt, caresses the slight slope of her chest. He fingers the buttons on her shirt with calloused fingers, smiles, a sly curve that reaches his eyes. We hear him whisper if you make a sound i’ll tell everyone what a stupid slut your mother is and the new girl looks at us as we slip into the current outside, looks at us with a noiseless pleading we do not understand.

The mayor goes about his business as though nothing is unusual. From our hill, we see his Toyota Corolla zipping into the store to buy Marlboro Reds, smiling all the way. In the night, he goes on into the new girl’s house, ignoring the red letters screaming his name outside, and emerges hours later, when the whole town is asleep except for us.

On a Friday afternoon, the mayor is summoned to the school. We watch as he leaves with an arm draped around his large sobbing son. 

Over the weekend, we think of Mr. Peters’ hot breath rolling against the new girl’s neck in waves. The memory consumes us in silence.

Come Monday, charged with uncertainty, we step into his classroom. He regards the new girl with a cruel sneer in his eyes, an unforgiving watchfulness. The bruises on her pallid skin have blossomed and darkened, like ink in water. We look at our feet, steal curious glances, realize she is shivering.

It is the end of summer.

Whispers trickle through the corridors until they reach us. We discover the mayor’s son has been suspended for two weeks. From our hill we watch his brutish figure climb out of the window at midnight, slip into a car and disappear down a smoky street. We grow tired. Our imaginations are flushed with scenes of him bumping into his father, both heavy with unspoken secrets.

In the fall, we find the new girl’s mother in the library each day. We see the swell of her belly, inflated like a helium balloon. She walks through the aisles, between bodies, invisible to the world.

The night it happens, the cold air at the cleft of the hill bites our fingertips. We see the car roll through the main road and turn off down the valley. It stops outside the house and three shadowy figures emerge, moving, pressing themselves against the edges of the weatherboard corners. There is torrid silence, flattened by our bated breaths. Then, the sound of crowbars smashing glass fills the air, piercing the haze, ringing like an aria into the night.

We shudder and flinch, unsure of what to do, paralyzed by doubt for too long. The three figures are gone, have slipped away like shadows soaked in heavy cloud.

Moments later, the new girl and her mother come out of the house with brooms and dustpans. They sweep the broken glass off the driveway, against a backdrop of blood red and paled yellow, until spangled sunlight throws them into the unforgiving dawn for another day. 









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About the Author: 
​Whitney is an emerging writer from Australia, currently working in events marketing in New York. She sporadically tweets @whitneychn

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