Anticipation

It was 3:33 Friday

As it always was when I checked my phone.

I don’t know why.

I’d finished school for the term and was walking on my way to find my father’s car among the corduroy of parent’s cars along the street where parents were allowed to park.

3:45. Was when I flung my bag into the car and hunted for the cable to hook my music up to the car.

Dad asked me the perfunctory questions about how my day was, what was good and bad about it.

I’d grown tired of this. After all I was thirteen

I told him how terrible maths was, how unjust the teachers were and how I missed ten minutes of lunch because I had a piano lesson.

He was in his world. He always was.

I told him I wished COVID would hit here again so I could stay at home and Zoom in to school again.

He said. “is that what you really want?”

I said “yes” and then fell silent listening to the music and watching the same old scenery pass me by.

The same turns, the same traffic lights, the same cursing of drivers by dad.

I do love dad but I was changing, the world was starting to feel small. There must be more to every day than this.

During holidays normally some of my friends went overseas to skiing holidays, some went mountain bike riding, some had boats others had pools.

Most had brothers or sisters.

I have a brother. He’s older. He lives with his fiancé and his newborn son.

They live in a different state and are at loggerheads with mum and dad. Something to do with a cult they’re involved in.

My best friend is older than me and now has a boyfriend so I don’t see her as much. I hang out with a couple of other friends my age who live nearby, we make TikToks and cook and chat.

I went to my friend’s place on Saturday and we took our dogs for a walk, before deciding we were going to cook an amazing cake.

We hadn’t decided what to make but after Googling ideas we found a recipe for an enticing sounding cake called a Bombe Alaska. We walked to the supermarket to get the ingredients.

We wandered the supermarket looking for the ingredients. It always seemed much quicker with mum or dad. After thirty minutes we were checking out and walking home.

It was while we were walking that my friend noticed something in the bag that we didn’t remember buying.

It was wrapped like a present but with string instead of ribbon and wrapped in brown paper.

At the time we were talking about the teachers and boys at our schools as well as her old friends. She’d left my school two years prior because she wasn’t fitting in.

We stopped in the street near a small bridge. It was a quiet street where we stopped. It was the last flat area before the journey up Nanny Goat lane which was a steep alley of a hundred odd-sized steps.

Both of us put down our grocery bags and stared at the package for a moment, not fully registering the item.

After a moment or two I fished the package out of the bag and held it. It was about the size of a phone box.

We looked at each other wondering what to do. Laughing about it, joking about how come we had it and what should we do with it.

After a few minutes I decided to open it. I opened it. Carefully pulling the string bows and ripping the paper off.

There was nothing inside but an empty box that simply read “Anticipation”.

We looked at each other wondering what it meant.

We waited.

Nothing.

Putting the opened box back in the bag we continued walking still wondering what it meant.

We were thinking about the stairs we had to navigate. Thinking about how we had to carry our bags up the steep hill.

We got to the base of the steps and a lady was standing there looking into the sky behind our heads. She had a strange sheen to her skin, as if someone had covered her in silver paint. Her eyes were reflecting our faces.

She simply pointed at us and then at the steps behind her.

My friend and I exchanged nervous glances. Our thoughts kept turning back to the cake we were going to make.

We started up the steps. The woman smiled. Creepy.

As soon as we started up the steps we knew something was wrong.

The end of the stairs seemed to converge until they vanished into the sky. There was no longer houses, parked cars and telegraph poles demarcating the end of the flight of stairs and the street where they normally terminated.

The travel up the stairs was weird. Not seeing a teacher in the supermarket weird but more like sleeping so long that when you wake up you can’t understand it’s evening the following day weird.

We tried our phones to call home but the only responses were strange texts that said things that were like texts but not really. Like when you mistype but not not one word - the whole message.

They made no sense so wr kept climbing.

To one side was a boy who kept talking numbers to his cat. 3.14159265….On and on. The cat looked bored yet stayed listening to the recital of numbers, probably in the hope of food.

My friend said to him that he should probably feed his cat. The cat looked with perplexed understanding.

The boy faltered. “8481117…”

We climbed.

The end of the steps we’re getting closer.

The hand rail seemed to undulate with every step, like holding a snake. Soft skinned yet rough in appearance. The snake seemed to have no beginning or end. Where it’s head ought be it’s tail disappeared and vice versa.

The hand rail vibrated in a secret chord. A hum or vibration that could only be felt not heard.

We recoiled. Grossness and familiarity in the same sensation.

Still we climbed.

The next oddity was a woman pegging sheets to her clothes line. The clothes line seemed never ending the basket always appeared full after she’d pulled a sheet from the basket. Perfectly white against the blue mesh of the plastic basket.

She seemed oblivious to the eternity of washing. Neither caring nor considering her seemingly endless task. A perpetual grimace masked her face.

I said to my friend that surely she’d run out of pegs but my thoughts seemed as long as the distance of her clothes line.

My memories of our cooking project seemed as distant as the pegs on the woman’s clothesline.

A line of ants contoured the steps in a perfect line in the opposite direction.

A faint stab of memory occurred to me.

Weren’t we meant to be doing something other than whatever we were doing at the moment?

As if reading my mind a small person of indeterminate race and sex appeared on the post of a fence.

Appeared is not quite right.

It seemed as if they had been there forever yet we had never noticed.

The person was holding his hand above his head like a spider. Slowly descending it in a controlled wriggling motion. It was as if he was going to tickle someone yet making them wait for the tickle.

His focus lasered in on us and smiled. Mouthing words something like “glad you’re here” or “good, you’re here”

We had no idea just then the steps gave was and we fell. Initially we were screaming and screaming as we fell. After a while stopped as we were still falling.

The fall was more like being suspended in the air. The only sensation we had of moving was the slowly progressing colours of the space we were falling through. Black, indigo, deep blue, blue, purple, reds and on. We sensed it was a rainbow and patiently waited, expecting some resolution when we passed the end of the pattern of colours. Still nothing.

We were holding our breaths.

We fell and fell and still nothing

Eventually we simply started talking to each other about what was happening.

Almost like that as soon as our thoughts had changed we landed back on the steps.

This time the steps had stopped converging into the sky but seemed to now end at two round holes in the sky or rather the sky was in the two round holes.

As we got closer and closer we could see more and more of the sky as the holes became bigger. They weren’t quite round - more almond shaped and as we came closer I could see it wasn’t sky but rather the ceiling of a room I could see the light fitting I could see the cornice I could even see people milling about just off to the edges of the ever enlarging holes.

My friend, I realised was no longer beside me.

Just like that, as if the last piece of a puzzle is placed down to finish a puzzle I realised I was looking outside of my own eyes at a white room with machines and dad and mum and nan and pop all standing around me.

I was lying in a bed, not mine.

There was a steady beeping noise and snippets of unfamiliar sounds

I panicked.

Dad grabbed my hand and said “don’t worry you’re safe now, we were so worried about you”

I croaked “whAAAt happened..where am i ?”

A short pause that seemed to last forever as everyone looked at each other.

“You we’re in an accident. A car hit you and Ellie while you were walking back from the supermarket”

“Whaaat?”

“You’ve been in a coma for the past 2 weeks”

“What? I don’t remember…all I remember is walking up the weirdest steps with Ellie. Where’s Ellie ? Is she ok?”

Another pause and quiet murmuring as everyone talked among themselves.

The anticipation was killing me

“Ummmm. She died this morning. She never woke up”.