Looking at Elaine

Looking at Elaine

I am alone now. I'm used to it. I have been this way for over thirty years. If you were to ask me I'd say that I can no longer properly remember the time before Elaine. I have to imagine what life was like.

Just before I met Elaine and the universe flipped and became something I could never properly understand or find again I had heard a song by Jackson Browne. Browne was a popular singer, not that I was a fan. I was more into traditional rock and roll, raging guitars and heavy drum beats, whereas Browne was said to be sensitive. His lyrics full of meaning. The song that I heard was called Shape of a Heart. It was a ruby that she wore on a chain around her neck in the shape of a heart. I have never forgotten the words. I wake everyday hoping that I might have, that somehow they may have faded, that they were some foolish reminisce I had of times gone by with an old love.

But Elaine Orensen was never an old love. She was something else and always will be. It was as if she didn't really exist, but I still have a photo of her. She was real. The older sister of my best friend Wayne, she was an enigma. She smoked imported cigarettes and drank wine. She drove an old car barefoot at the age of nineteen. Although I didn't have a crush on her I did find her intriguing. Tall, slender, dark haired she was not my idea of beauty. I thought her like Yvonne de Carlo from the TV show The Munsters. One of my faults was that I always referenced my life and everyone in it to a TV show or a song on the radio. But after Elaine I found that my world of referencing had stopped. My world frozen. I had entered an altered version of Princess Charlotte Bay, the town where I lived. The place where I met Elaine.

Our meeting had been unusual to say the least. Wayne and I had gone one night to a coffee place called the Blue Jazz on the seedy side of town. About to finish our final year of high school we were up for an adventure and the Blue Jazz had a reputation. However it was dull and quiet much like Wayne and me. Wayne had prearranged for Elaine to pick him up and drive him home and she offered me a lift. It was a rainy, windy night and I accepted her offer. She had insisted on dropping Wayne off first, there'd been no argument. Wayne for some reason was anxious to get home, some late homework to finish or something similar but a reason was never given.

When we arrived at my house she had lent back in the seat on her side of the car and without looking at me asked if I had ever been to the old Fonseca Palisades. The Palisades as they were known locally was a deserted resort complex about ten miles out of town. They had been abandoned after the Second World War and gradually fallen into disrepair. I had never been there, never thought about them really. Why ask me? Mainly I thought about leaving Princess Charlotte Bay and going to university up in the city. The 'Bay, as we referred to the town, had nothing that would hold me until I met Elaine.

Sitting there in her old Chev I felt there was something familiar about Elaine but to this day I've never known what it was.

"No I've never been to the Palisades..."

I didn't know what else to say. She sat there staring straight ahead.

"Do you want to come with me?"

No, I might have answered, it would have been simple. I was mainly a no man.

"When?"

"Next weekend huh? I'll pick you up. OK?"

"Yes."

I sat there thinking she was going to say more but she put the car back in gear and turned to check her rear view mirror.

"You can get out now. This is your house isn't it?"

I didn't tell anyone, not even Wayne about the planned trip. I'd crossed some invisible line with his sister...

Elaine parked on the side of the entrance road to the Palisades. It was rarely used, only wide enough for one car, it was hemmed in by trees and overgrown hedges. When we got out of the car we could hear the surf crashing on the cliff face at the coast further away. It wasn't until then that I questioned the reason for our visit, why I'd easily said yes to Elaine. Why I now had no apparent ability to say no. It was dark and still, the road littered in leaves and small branches. We picked our way slowly until our eyes became accustomed to the light and even when they did, there seemed no cause to hurry. I fell to thinking if we did run into trouble what she would be like in a fight. I couldn't fight I would have to run. A shiver ran up my back and made my neck hair bristle.

When we came to the stone and iron gates, someone had chained them shut. A sign hung there. In the dull light it suggested we shouldn't trespass. But someone must have found a way in because there was a small gap in the mesh fence at the side of the gates. Elaine wriggled through and I followed her. We had no torch, nothing to light our way. After the gates we climbed a small but steep rise before a gigantic house came into view. It suddenly seemed darker as if the lights of the stars above had been switched off. I looked up at a large black cloud bank. It was quieter too, the sound of the surf had become a soft thud. If I could have turned and gone back to town then I would have.

On that night as Elaine and I stared up at the two storey magnificence of the Palisades, I was riddled with shivers. It was like something was waiting. Out here, we were alone and I wished I was at home watching television. And then I saw a wild and tangled orchard away to our right. I supposed there might be fruit there.

"Would you like an orange Elaine?"

"Yes." We stood there peeling and discarding the skin. Sweet juices sticking between our fingers, trickling down our chins.

"I'm going inside."

I wasn't going to ask how. Elaine was leaning against the railing on the main steps that led up to the ground floor verandah.

"Give me a leg up."

Like a monkey she shimmied up a carved post to the first floor. I shouldn't have been surprised. When I joined her on the balcony she reached out and touched me. I remembered the moment, locked it away unknowingly. With a simple turn of a door handle we found ourselves inside. My heart thumped away in my chest. What were we doing? Our descent of a broad set of steps that led to the ground floor coincided with the appearance of the moon spilling through the windows bathing an enormous room in milky light. The room empty except for a large piano covered in a blanket of dust. I smiled internally thinking I could write a description in my English class, something to please my English teacher.

We walked around the room trying to imagine what might have been there before, not a word spoken. I'd gone to the piano and lifted the lid. There was a time when I had piano lessons and I tried a couple of notes, the off key sounds echoed in the emptiness. There seemed little else to do but as we returned to the stairs to leave we noticed a large mirror that went from floor to ceiling. We stood there gazing at our reflections and saw a fine line, a crack, that ran the length of the mirror. I on one side, Elaine on the other. And as we remained captured by our images another couple, so much older than us met our gaze. The room grew cold then. The milky light that had shone just a moment before had been exchanged for an intense darkness. The moon no longer penetrated the windows.

An old woman was reaching towards Elaine, a locket of some sort in her hand and then suddenly the world was flying apart. A tearing and ripping sound as the mirror cracked from top to bottom. A horrid and inhuman shriek, a fantastic apparition and the choking dust and heaviness that did its best to prevent us running back up the steps from where we'd come. My legs felt like lead, my arms barely able to move as I staggered through a sour yellow mist. I didn't know where Elaine was, I thought I could hear her breathing. My eyes were stinging, full of a searing whiteness that blocked my way. My throat was starting to burn. A paralysis invaded me. I felt a hand on my arm. It grabbed me and hauled me out on to the balcony. I heard a few notes played on the piano.

"Jump" Elaine Orensen's calm and measured voice guiding me to safety insisting that we leap from the first floor.

Halfway back to her car we felt a gust of wind and observed a pink halo over the Palisades, but neither of us wanted to go back. Even in the safety of Elaine's car as we travelled towards Princess Charlotte Bay I felt that something or someone had followed us, but there had been no other cars on the road either coming or going. Tears pushed down my face as I saw the lights of town. And then we were at the Orensen's house, the place where Wayne and Elaine lived. And then we were in Elaine's bedroom, the place where she slept. And then we were in Elaine's bed.

I wanted time to stop. I wanted it to hold still so I could spend more time with Elaine. Her legs like a ballerina's, slender, muscular, she was not so much skinny as designed. We would lay in her bed in the months to come while the world spun outside, our love making sometimes like an orchestra soaring higher and higher, at other times like a violin lesson full of error. Often as I lay there I would look at the love heart that hung from the chain around her neck, the one that she had been given by the woman in the mirror, her older self at the Palisades. I knew that once she returned that love heart I would never see her again.