Only Ever Always

By Penni Russon

Have you ever woken from a dream feeling it was more real than your world? Could there be someone exactly like you living another life? Claire lives in an ordinary world where everything is whole. But now she feels broken into pieces as her world is suddenly shattered with grief. The silvery notes of her music box help her escape from her pain into a dream world, into Clara's world. Clara's world has always been broken. Her fragmented life revolves around scavenging and swapping objects to survive. She is determined to face the sinister side of her cracked reality to save the only family she has ever known. But the cost may be more than she bargained for. Though Claire and Clara live in different worlds, their paths are set to collide when the people they love most are faced with death. But which world is the dream? Who is the dreamer? Penni Russon has written a spellbinding tale that stretches the imagination about what is possible.

“I had a dream,” Groom tells. “It was you and me. We was travelin to make somethin new. A beginnin.” He lays his hand on mine, and I twitch with the warmth of it. “Would you?”
I pull my hand away. “This now?”
“Some day. Some night or other.”
“And where would we be going? Where is there to go where there’s beginnings?”
Groom’s still dreaming, looking past what is, into his imaginings. “In my dream we crossed the river.”
Crossing the river is the kind of mad thing Groom would say. Groom, who can’t always tell the difference between folly and sense. I think about the dank sickly greenness, the greasy things that hunt in the river’s shadow.
“What about dogs? What about trick currents and sinkholes and ending up with a stomach full of mud? Them’s the stories what happen when you try and cross the river.”
“Them’s the stories we know, Clara, ones what tried and couldn’t. There’s others.”
“Who drowned to the bottom,” I scoff.
“Or didn’t.”
“Aint no one who’s been across the river returned.”
“Maybe they found somethin better.”
“What’s the point,” I say, and I won’t look at the spark-ling hope in his eyes the same rich murk as the river, “of going nowhere? We aint like Andrew. We aint got an afore. Or an after. This is what we know.”
“Andrew,” spits Groom. “Across the river might be adventure, across the river might be freedom.”
In the deep of me I wouldn’t mind an adventure, but I aint laying myself bare to Groom, not when he’s in a mood for calling folly sense. And I aint giving myself over to hoping. Hoping is what unstitches you, leaving you open for other things to waft in, like fear. Like hopelessness. “And aint I free?” I grump. “Nobody tells me what to do.”
“Funny sort of freedom. You got more Bosses than you can imagine, lordin over us, waitin for us to step out of the shadow so they can make their sport of us, or use us to do their work. All right then. Not for adventure, if you aint got the gut for it. But say you’ll come with me anyway. For the dreamin o’ it. Just for dreamin.”
“Dreams are nothing, not even air. You wake up and pop, like a greasy soap bubble, they’re gone. Dreams don’t matter none. They don’t last.”
“Sometimes they matter,” tells Groom, but fadingly. He sounds distant, uncertain. “Sometimes they last.”
Claire!” Mum calls from the bottom of the stairs, and the dream dissolves.
You sit up and blink. The dream took you by surprise, clear and resounding as a bell, as though it were waiting for you all along. Littered on your bed are oddments, junk, bric-a-brac, the assorted miscellanea of your life, one-eyed dolls and threadbare teddy bears, two wooden ducks on wheels once joined now split, metal cars, wooden tops. Most of indeterminate value, things without history, but for the fact that they have lived here so long they have become part of you, and you couldn’t bear to excise any of them.
You are supposed to be sorting through the cacophony of things that clutter your bedroom, the things you call treasures. (You, who never throw anything away, who have held everything dear that has come into your possession from babyhood.) Tonight Uncle Charlie and his wife, Pia, are coming to dinner. Soon their first baby will be born, and Mum thinks it would be nice if you pass on some of the toys you’ve outgrown. But you are not sure it is possible to outgrow the things that have built you from nothing into something. For who are you before you own anything? A naked grub, a nothing.
There is a weight in your arms. You have slept holding the music box to your chest. In fact, it was the rise and fall of the music box tune that made you drift off in the first place. It isn’t truly a box, but a glass globe, containing a miniature world, which slowly revolves as the music plays. A few stray notes spring free as you place the music box on your bedside table and for a moment you catch a strong odor wafting out of your dream: a smell of dampness and forgetting.
The music box was your first treasure. Charlie bought it for you when you were just new. You know that there would be a certain poetry in passing it on to his baby, like a family heirloom that may perhaps one day wend its way back to your baby. But it is yours, so very yours, a part of the being of you. How can you relinquish it? How can you let any of these precious things go? They are all you.
“Claire!”
You pull yourself off the bed and slump downstairs, your black school shoes resounding on the wooden staircase.
“I thought you were going to change,” Mum scolds. “Did you finish sorting through those things?” She frowns clairvoyantly at your bird’s-nest hair. “Have you been asleep? Oh, Claire, I hope you weren’t wearing your shoes in bed.”
You shrug.
“I was just about to head next door. I picked up some pills for Mrs. Jarvis when I was down the street and I thought maybe you could go instead. They’re always asking after you, and now you’re in high school you never see them.”
“But Mu-um--!” The Jarvises are old. Their oldness wafts from them, a stale odor, and clings to everything.
You are formulating an excuse about homework when the phone in the hallway shrilly interrupts. Mum picks it up, holding you in place with a gesture. “Hello?” She frowns. “Hello? Pia, is that you? This is a terrible line, I can hardly hear you.” Mum motions to you and thrusts the pills at you, jabbing her finger in the direction of next door.
“Are Pia and Charlie still coming to dinner?” you ask. Your mother shoos you away. You want them to come, the days and weeks drag by without them when Pia is away playing piano with orchestras all over the world, and Charlie travels with her. You do love them so. But you are not ready to give up the music box, or any of your things. “Hang up,” she is saying. “And I’ll call you back. You’re where?” She covers the mouthpiece and hisses, “Straight there and back, Claire. No hanging around on the street.”
Outside the afternoon air is thin with the last of the winter sun. You hesitate at the dividing strip of garden that separates your driveway from the Jarvises’. You glance at the street and see a smudge of yellow, barely painted onto the winter street.
It is a dog, alone and unleashed. You stiffen. You have little experience of dogs except to know they are unpredictable. Especially dogs that look as unloved as this one, with its protruding rib cage and patchy yellow coat, and pale scarred belly.
The dog sees you and barks. You glimpse the slippery gleam of long tooth. You don’t have enough of the language of dogs to guess whether it intends friendliness or harm. You breathe for a few beats, eye to eye. Then the dog is gone. Not vanished, for you can see it trotting down the street, nose down, sniffing its path. Just gone.
You turn to the Jarvises’ door and knock. Yellow bottle glass frames the door, distorting the hallway within. A blurred figure approaches, swimming in the pool of golden light. Young Mrs. Jarvis answers the door. Young Mrs. Jarvis has starchy gray curls that sit up around her face. She wears her usual slightly surprised expression, as if this isn’t quite the life she expected having. Young Mrs. Jarvis is only young in comparison to her elderly mother-in-law, who, for as far back as you can remember, has always been impossibly old.
“Oh, hello, Claire!” Instead of taking the proffered pills, she ushers you inside, the very thing you hoped to avoid.
You follow Mrs. Jarvis down the hall, dragging your feet. You are not interested in lingering in the Jarvises’ house with its sharp laundered scent that fails to overpower the underlying musty human smell of the aged, unwashed in their creases.
You are led into the small dim wallpapered living room. Old Mrs. Jarvis sits at a tea tray with metal legs. On it is a carefully folded newspaper that she does not appear to be reading and a cup of thin black coffee, daintily set on a saucer. One corner of her mouth droops a little, and so does her left eye. Her hair is sparse and white.
“Look. We have a visitor.”
Old Mrs. Jarvis does not move. You fold your hands in front of you and knot your fingers tightly together.
“Cup of tea, dear?” Young Mrs. Jarvis asks. “Kettle’s just boiled.” She is out of the room before you find your voice to say no.
You are frozen, breathing shadows deep into your lungs; all the air in here was used up long ago. You step gingerly forward and place the pills on the tea tray. As you do, a rusted, unpracticed noise emerges from the old woman’s throat and you bend closer to make out the words.
“Teatime tattle,” the old lady creaks. She looks up at you.
The old lady is so frail a puff of wind could blow her away, yet her gaze is steady and alert. Her hands grip the arms of her chair, and a stream of words pours from her mouth. “Looks genuine improver. Hidden strings. Chance in harder event. Must come into contention. Will appreciate rise in distance.”
You step back, almost knocking over a set of nested tables.
Young Mrs. Jarvis appears at the doorway. “Don’t mind her. She’s bedeviled by those damn racehorses. Now, how do you take your tea?”
“No, thank you!” you finally gasp. “My mother’s expecting me home.”
Even with your back turned, you know the older woman’s eyes are still fixed on you. “Go well,” rasps Old Mrs. Jarvis as you stumble up the hallway toward the sweet air of release. “Go well.” Words which seem intended to comfort but have the exact opposite effect on you. “Go well. Keep safe. Go well.”

You burst into the stillness of your own house. The hallway is empty, the phone replaced on its cradle. The kitchen, where you expect to find your mother and the smell of roasting meat perhaps or hear the friendly sizzle of sausages, is cold and vacant, all gleaming surfaces. Finally you discover Mum in the family room, sitting on a chair, staring at the television, which isn’t on. Its big blank eye stares back at her.
“Mum?”
Her head turns in the direction of your voice, but she doesn’t seem to see you, not right away. Finally her eyes focus on your face.
“Oh, Claire,” Mum says, sounding broken and far away. “Oh, Claire.”
“What? Is it Dad? Is it Pia? Something’s wrong with the baby!”
“No. Not the baby. It’s Charlie.”

You trail after your mother from room to room as she gathers the things Charlie might need in the hospital. Freshly washed pajamas (Dad’s, but they would fit) from the laundry. A cake of Pears soap that smells of the distinctive blend of cola drinks and apples, reminding you in some vague way of Christmases at your grandmother’s house near the beach. A toothbrush, still in its packet, from the bathroom cabinet, a towel from the linen cupboard, warm socks from Dad’s drawer.
“Can I come?” you ask.
“No, sweetie.”
“Please! I want to see Charlie.”
“If you were there, I would have to take care of you. And it’s Pia who needs me.”
“I can look after Pia too. I’m old enough.”
“No,” Mum says.
“I can comfort you. Charlie’s your brother.”
“He was so little when our mother died, I’ve always taken responsibility for him. He’s more like--” Mum gulps in a mouthful of air. She presses her lips together until they go white. “Claire, I said no. Just leave it at that.”
You follow your mother into the master bedroom and perch on the edge of your parents’ bed, watching your mother make up her face. You are not allowed to wear makeup, though lots of the girls at school have lip gloss and even eyeliner or glittery stuff for their cheeks.
“You think Charlie drives too fast,” you say.
“He does drive too fast. Zipping in and out of lanes.”
“You think he’s reckless.”
“He could be safer. He could take precautions; drop back instead of charging ahead.” Mum looks at herself in the mirror, dabbing eye shadow aggressively onto her eyelids. There is a connection there, you think hazily. A connection between Charlie driving too fast and the fact that you aren’t allowed eye shadow and lipstick, but you are too addled to follow that thought.
Instead you say: “You think it’s his fault.”
“I don’t know, Claire. Pia said he was between two trucks on the freeway and one of them changed lanes without seeing him. He had nowhere to go.”
“You say motorbikes are invisible on the road.”
Mum turns and looks at you. “Me saying those things didn’t make this happen.”
“Charlie didn’t make it happen either. It was the truck. If anyone’s to blame it’s the truck driver who didn’t look properly. Nothing’s invisible. Not really. Everything real can be seen.” And no one is more real than Charlie. He smells of petrol and ink. He has big flat hands, with rough broken skin and thick stubbed nails.
“Charlie’s about to be a daddy. He shouldn’t be riding motor-bikes anymore. He has responsibilities. The world isn’t safe. He has to learn that. He has to learn to take care!”
Suddenly a strange tearing sob comes out of your mother, one and then another. For a moment she can’t breathe. You stare at her in horror. When she was all business, easing the toothbrush out of its wrapping, finding a plastic case for the soap, you had been quite sure that this was just an ordinary sort of accident, two broken legs perhaps, even a broken neck. But to see your mother overcome . . . now you are frightened. Now you realize just how serious things are.

You sit, together and apart, on the stairs--Mum on the bottom step, you about halfway up--waiting for Dad. Mum zips and unzips the overnight bag next to her on the step and from behind she looks like a teenager going to school camp.
The back of her neck looks lonely. Perhaps it is the way her head tilts down, and her dark hair falling into her face.
Dad’s key scrapes in the lock. He sits on the step next to Mum. They wrap their arms around each other and Mum lets herself be held without saying anything. Longing creeps over you; you also want to be enclosed. At the same time your skin prickles with resistance and you shift one step farther up.