You were the girl wearing the dress embroidered with honeybees and pōhutukawa blooms, those blood-red flowers whose stamens smash open upon the trees in time for Christmas. You were the girl with the marmite and mushroom still on your tongue, the sticky trace of golden mānuka honey on the corner of your red lips, on your fingertip. Over that dress you wore a brown cape made of possum fur. It matched your warm brown eyes. Your chestnut hair was curled carefully several hours earlier; a small purple burn still hot on the back of your neck. You were coming home from a friend’s engagement party, and as you walked you were pulling out the barrettes and bobby pins from behind your ears and letting your hair relax, relieving your aching scalp. The boy you liked, who wore the blue-tinted spectacles, had walked you half-way home, figured you’d be fine since you lived just on the other side of the tunnel. Or maybe he did take you through to the other side; maybe he took you most of the way home but stopped for some reason. You don’t remember.
Or just like in my dream, maybe a man who seemed to have no legs approached you on some chair with oversized wheels, a wool blanket across his lap, and he took your hands and begged you for help; his ears were pink with cold, his blue eyes were watery, and his hands were sore; and so you wheeled him through the newly built tunnel that still smelled of freshly mixed concrete. The only sound at this hour was his heavy breathing, the strange creaking and squeaking of his mechanical chair made of brass and leather, and the clicking of your high heels echoing as you moved from downtown towards the bay, where light was scarce. The man seemed so infantile, helpless. And there on the other side, he told you to turn down a trail, through the pine forest, along the mountain, and in the darkness he pulled you onto his lap, a grip stronger than you expected upon your armsand waist, and though you said no, and you said stop, he did not release you. You felt his knees move beneath the blanket, you felt his legs grow from stubs to full length, you felt him stand up and throw you down. His scratchy hot hand over your mouth smelled of salt and alcohol and sweat and dirt. You kicked with your heels and scratched and threw dirt and made muffled guttural screams, as he tore at the tulle and silk on your dress and reached and grabbed at you. The forest swirled green-black above you; you felt his spit and tears upon your neck, and you fought back until all you saw in front of you was red, after something hard was struck against your head. You don’t know that maybe he carried you to an open pit where the tunnel was still unfinished; you don’t know that he threw you in there, with piles of dirt and pine needles, and the next day the men got towork filling the rest of the pit with rocks and concrete. You don’t remember trying to crawl out and failing. Nobody knew the man was recently let out of the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum.
You had told your boyfriend that you were with child a few days before the party, and you explained that’s why you had been moody and eating so much, and you laughed, saying you knew this was all so unromantic and uncouth, but you’d have to be married, wouldn’t you now? But he did not smile, and he did not laugh. He said that God wouldn’t be happy about this, but he trusted in the Lord and together you would find the right path. You couldn’t see his eyes through those spectacles he wore. And maybe you couldn’t see his eyes once again as he cracked an iron pipe against your head and knocked you out and said to himself over and over, she killed herself, she did it to herself, I can’t believe it. No one could believe it. It couldn’t have been her boyfriend, the one who walked her most of the way home that night; the one who had seemed to love her.
She was only 17.
Today, the people in cars driving through the tunnel want to scare you away, so they honk their horns as they drive through your tomb. You don’t seem bothered by it; your ears are full of other sounds already, the white noise and crying of a dirt-filled womb. The pedestrians and cyclists are always quite startled by the honking and beeping. They move quickly along the inner path, not wanting to spend any extra time breathing in exhaust fumes, breathing in you. According to the logic of ghosts, your spirit will remain in the tunnel forever, always seeking a way out and never finding it. The tunnel is your haunt, but the humans don’t want to see you, hear you, smell you, feel you, nor the other little ghost inside of you. Do you want anything from the living who pass through? The people imagine you might chase them in their cars, bang against the windows, invisibly but violently, begging for help, saying, look how sore my hands are, how cold I am, I can’t get out. Do you try to enter cars through their air vents? Maybe you could be a passenger. Or are you just a fossil in the rock, like an ancient flightless bird? A pressed flower that would crumble in the air and sun? If you could, would you hitch a ride and escape? In the form of a white plastic bag stuck in a tyre, or as a bee smashed against a windshield, stuck on the wiper blade with flower petals and pollen, wings torn, but still rushing towards freedom?