The Geranium Girls by Alison Preston Page B

she was remembering a picture of her or creating one.

Chapter 21
     
    He likes packing the eye holes with dirt, but not as much as doing the mouth. He doesn’t like the part where he has to cut the eyes out, but they seem to be the logical next hole. He’s glad he brought the Ziploc bags; they’re good for eyes, as well as for his gloves and miniature cultivator. That’s what his Aunt Hortense used to call it. He calls it his gouger. His cargo pants have lots of pockets, the kind with flaps and fasteners, so he puts one item in each of his pockets.
    The trouble is, one of the eyes collapses when his leg presses against a hefty woman on the bus on his way home. It’s rush hour and they’re packed together like sardines. She smells like a sardine too; she grosses him out. Luckily it’s a short ride to his home stop. He worries on the bus with the eyes in his pockets; he feels conspicuous, hopes nothing leaks or shows in other ways.
    He can’t save the wrecked one. It’s a slippery mess, as though he’s been carrying a raw egg around all day. Well, not that bad, but not good enough to keep. He flushes it down the toilet. The good one, the firm one, he places in a jar and sets on the mantel.
    Another day he catches a different bus. This one takes him to Brookside Cemetery, where he places the jar on the grave of his Auntie Cunt who’s been dead for sixteen years. He places her miniature cultivator there too, to let her know she had a part in it.
    On a bench in the graveyard he sits and smokes cigarettes as night falls. Even when he’s inhaling the smoke, it’s not enough. He wants another one, at the same time.
    It reminds him of how he used to feel when he tried to be with girls. Even when they cooperated with his tying-up games, it wasn’t enough. And he didn’t like the look in their eyes when he told them what he wanted them to do, what he needed them for. Too often he saw pity there, sometimes fear. He preferred the fear.
    A picture of the tall woman with no eyes rests inside his head. No one saw him in the park. No one has found her yet. She is still alone.
    He wonders if anyone saw him in the back yards. Maybe the white-haired bitch. He loved doing Mail Girl’s flowers. Beryl Kyte’s flowers. It was the most fun he could remember having in a long time. The cat collar wasn’t that great. The animal didn’t like him at all. Boyo still has a scratch on his hand from the cat. That makes him angry.

Chapter 22
     
    A week and two days had gone by since Beryl found the pink collar around Jude’s neck.
    She stared at the front page of the Saturday Free Press . Another dead woman had been found, this time in Whittier Park. According to the paper, there were “similarities between this case and the one involving the woman found in St. Vital Park.” One of the similarities was that both victims were very tall, approaching six feet. They published this as a warning to tall women, just in case it was a pattern.
    Beryl wondered what the other similarities were and knew that one of them would be connected to the dirt — the dirt that had been packed into Beatrice Fontaine’s mouth — that had welcomed the mushroom spores and encouraged their growth.
    As she sat on her deck drinking coffee, pondering all this, she realized she was shaking. It was true. When she was too dopey to realize that something was upsetting her, her body let her know about it in one way or another. Someone had told her once that we can’t have a single solitary thought in our heads without our bodies reacting in some way. It was comforting in a way, kind of like having a really helpful and clever friend. Beryl remembered shaking when her dad died, shaking when her mum died, but crying on neither occasion.
    A tall, slouching figure shuffled slowly down the sidewalk towards her. It was Wally. It was the first time she had seen him since the folk festival.
    “Hi, Wally,” she said, as he cut across her bumpy lawn. “This is a surprise.