50. Giselle
The night I left home and moved to the city, a cluster of mould began to sprout in the corner of my suitcase. By the time I spotted it, weeks later, all my clothes were covered in a blue film. I stood in the drizzle in a car park and threw a lifetime of sundresses and sandals and ribbons into a skip. Perhaps I could have salvaged them, but I did not want to.
I never told my parents I was leaving. I did not know it myself until I was sitting on the train seat, hurtling through the rain towards Sydney. I had finished a late shift at the service station, and a luminescent noticeboard said the night train was leaving in forty minutes. Nobody was around. I drove home, slipped through the back door, packed my suitcase, and left.
I turned up on my friend Julio’s doorstep at six in the morning. A wheel in my suitcase had twisted itself in a manhole, and it was spinning feebly as he opened the door. He did not ask questions. We walked inside. He fished two mugs from the pile of dishes in the sink, washed them, and made us coffee. He told me one of our schoolfriends was on a reality show, and I told him I was thinking of going to university after all. His housemates would not let me sleep on the couch, but Julio said I could sleep on his bedroom floor until I found myself a job. He was a very tolerant person.
The first day, I lay on Julio’s floor and watched the mould on the ceiling grow. There was a thin, elegant strip of black fungus on the cornicing above his window. Around it was a splattering of grey dots, like dermatitis. I watched the fug of leaden rainclouds empty themselves over the city, and imagined a colony of orange mushrooms growing behind the plaster. I imagined sticking a finger into the soft, black centre of a rotten joist. Every few hours, my phone would buzz. My manager at the service station asked why I had not clocked in. My mum, and later my dad, asked where I was. I replied to my parents. I did not reply to my manager. I stayed on the floor, listening to the rain on the tiles and staring at the mould.
Julio’s boyfriend, Luca, worked at a wine bar in Paddington. One night, we decided to head there to annoy him. I suspect Julio only suggested this because he was concerned about my mood.
Julio put on a salmon-coloured button-up, and I put on a dress that did not fit and a pair of lurid stilettos belonging to his housemate. We sat at the bar, drinking the cheapest wine on the menu and eating something with an Italian name that turned out to be olives. Around us, clean-shaven men and women with blonde highlights murmured softly. Pendant lights cast strange shadows on the archways of whitewashed brick. I listened to a man complain about his coworker while Julio spat olive pits at my ear. I spat one back and caught a glare from Luca, who was polishing glasses behind the bar. I spat another. In a corner, a huddle of businesspeople in their forties were chatting lightly around a copper table lamp. One woman stood at the edge of the circle, glancing occasionally up at the ceiling and then back down to her glass. She wore a white linen dress and a small gold watch that caught the light.
I turned back to Julio and my elbow knocked into the bowl of olives. The bowl tumbled over and shattered on the floor.
“I’ll get it,” I said, as Julio started to get off his stool. I fumbled around in the dark for the pieces of china. I was aware of my stiletto heels sliding in the slick of tarragon-scented oil that had pooled on the floor.
I stood up with the broken pieces, and collided with the woman in white linen, who was walking over to the bar.
“Maybe those shoes aren’t a good idea,” she said, laughing.
“I guess not,” I said, and slipped them off. She smiled, then turned to Luca and ordered a glass of white wine. I could see she thought I was drunker than I was.
“Your friend doesn’t look very happy,” the woman said, once Luca had turned to retrieve the bottle.
“I wonder why,” I said.
I put the pieces of china on the countertop. Luca’s manager frowned.
“Is someone driving you home?” she asked.
“We’re waiting until he gets off,” I said. Luca handed the woman her glass, and she smiled and slipped back to the table in the corner.
Twenty minutes later, Luca came up and asked us to leave. I reached for my wallet, and he told me the woman in white had already paid.
She was there when I stepped out into the cold night air. The darkness was a relief. I felt light-headed and tired and ready to cry. I could feel olive oil slipping between my toes.
“Thank you,” I said, or perhaps I said, “I’m sorry.” A streetlight above seemed to be burning a white patch on my forehead. I felt too tall.
“Do you need a lift home?” she asked. “I’m parked around the corner.”
“That’s okay, we’re going to walk,” I said. Julio was not coming out of the door.
“Let me drop you home,” she said.
The night was very dark. I let her.
Looking back, I can see her restraint. She could have taken me anywhere and I would have submitted, but she let me come to her.
I met Giselle two days later. By then I knew her name, and her age, and that she lived alone in a large house in Balmain. She pulled up to Julio’s apartment in a small European car, and we wound slowly west through the dense city streets. Outside, I glimpsed the glitter of water and a high white cloud through the veil of the morning sun. Giselle let one hand trail to the armrest as she glided through the traffic. Her fingernails were pale pink and translucent, the half-moons of her nailbeds just visible under a clear glaze. The buildings thinned, and high-rises gave way to rows of terraced houses set on thick slabs of honeycombed sandstone, still wet and glistening from the rain. The hairs on my thighs singed as the sun beat through the glass.
As we drove, Giselle asked small questions about my life – who my parents were, how I met Julio, the name of my hometown. I gave her my biography in these fragments, and felt each answer rise and dissolve like bubbles into air. The huge, numb cloud of my past and future faded from view. I was here. The sun was hot. With each bend in the road, I felt another layer of myself detach, and I saw briefly, but with certainty, that beneath these layers was an unformed thing, like a sugar cube at the base of a cup, slowly melting away.
We parked outside a white weatherboard house on the tip of the peninsula. Behind the filigree railings, a sleek glass box jutted out over the sea.
“We’re here,” Giselle said.
We walked up the steep front steps and into her home. Everything inside was immaculately white. Off the hallway were two symmetrical parlours, each with a cast-iron fireplace and a lofty ceiling inlaid with plaster flowers and ferns.
“This is the Victorian part of the house,” Giselle said.
She led me past a series of closed doors and into a cavernous space lit by a single pane of glass. Beyond it, a lush green lawn sloped down to a small beach. A ghostly wattle tree swayed upside-down in the polished concrete floor.
“This is the kitchen,” Giselle said. “And this is the garden.”
Like sleepwalkers, we passed through the glass and into the garden. The wattle tree was gnarled and impossibly bright in the midday sun. As we lay back on a white sofa, puffs of golden blossoms floated down onto my hair. The sky was a deep, fan-flower blue. I curled up on a cushion and listened as Giselle told me about her boathouse. The hot weight of the canvas seared against my cheek, and a fleeting memory of a slater bug curled up on a white tea towel surfaced in my mind, then sank again.
“You’re sleepy,” Giselle said.
“I’m happy,” I said.
I felt Giselle’s hands begin to stroke my hair. I was conscious of each place where her fingers touched my scalp. Through the curtain of my hair, I saw her other hand resting on the sofa. Its faint lines and creases were haloed in the sun.
She kissed my forehead. I felt her lips linger in place. I turned to gaze up at her.
“Do you mind?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
I pulled her down towards me, and kissed her back.
Our days fell into a pattern. Each Friday after work, Giselle would pick me up from Julio’s apartment and I would spend the weekend with her. On the grey days between, I often thought about getting a job. A cafe down the road was hiring and I sent in my details, but when the owner rang back, I did not pick up the phone. Once, I went to the university and spoke to their careers advisor. I picked up a brochure for art history, and a brochure for software engineering, and even a brochure for medicine, although I had failed my biology exams. The brochures stayed in my suitcase, accumulating mould, and I found myself lying on the floor all day, listening for the sound of Giselle’s car.
The first time I met Giselle’s friends was at an ocean pool in Tamarama.
“I don’t have anything to wear,” I had said when she asked if I wanted to come. Everything in my suitcase had been decimated.
“There are some clothes in the wardrobes upstairs,” Giselle said. “It’s the first door on your right.”
It was a small spare room with candy-striped wallpaper and a single bed. The dormer window was open, and a fine yellow dust from the wattle tree had settled on the quilt. When I opened the wardrobe and ran my fingers through the clothes, I was surprised to find that many of them fit. The jeans were too short, but pants were usually short on me. I pulled on a pink gauze dress with a row of silk buttons.
“Perfect,” Giselle said, when I came downstairs. “Make sure you bring some swimmers too.”
Drifting through the seawater that afternoon, I could feel men and women staring intently at my body. It was a strange sensation. When I clambered out of the water and stood uncertainly beside Giselle, she introduced me with a laugh, and I was conscious then that she did not respect me. The men and women glanced at my face, then down to my hips, and up again. My fingers and wrists felt hyper-visible as I held out my hand. There was a line of acne down my backbone, and I wondered if they were appraising it.
One man in his late forties stood beside me for some time. He had lived briefly in my hometown when he was young and used to kill time in the arcade.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty,” I said.
“I guess the arcade was before your time,” he said.
Later that night, back at Giselle’s house, she told me the man was her ex-husband.
“Mark and I were very young when we met,” she said.
“Older than me?” I asked.
“Older than you,” she said, smiling, “but it’s still too young to marry. You wouldn’t do it these days. The separation was very amicable. I’m friends with his wife, and he’s met some of my girlfriends over the years.”
“Would you ever remarry?” I asked her.
“I don’t think so,” Giselle said. “It’s nice to be free.”
Sometimes, I would lie in bed on Monday mornings after she had gone to work and wonder what would happen if I never left. If I whiled out my life cleaning, and cooking, and perfecting an alchemy of moisturisers to freeze time in place, perhaps then I could stay in her house forever, like a favourite doll.
I loved it best when Giselle would come home from work and pull me onto her lap, and her hands would travel over my body. I would leave rows of kisses on her throat and her clavicle, as outside, through the black window, lights from boats drifted by. I learned the particular scent that lay concealed under her jaw – a soft, dark smell of vetiver and acacia and sweat. On the rare days I left the house, the scent lingered in my hair and my clothes, a perpetual companion I could not dislodge.
I next saw Mark at a golf club on the other side of the Bridge. It was a hot, still afternoon. The grass had a green, gasoline smell. A lone bee buzzed in a single clover flower.
A light smattering of people were milling under an awning. I saw Mark walk up to Giselle and pull her aside.
“I have a conference in the Gold Coast next weekend,” I heard him say. “Will you be free to visit Chloé?”
“Of course,” Giselle said.
“I know it’s late notice,” Mark said.
“It’s fine,” Giselle said. “I’ll ring her tonight and let her know.”
The road was empty that night as we twisted down the crook of the coast. A pale slit of moon rippled in the sea. The sky was heavy with clouds.
“Who’s Chloé?” I asked.
“She’s my daughter,” Giselle said.
It was suddenly very quiet. We were the only car on the road. It was not usually this empty.
“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” I said eventually. “Does she live with Mark?”
“She’s in hospital. She’s been unwell for some time.”
“Oh.” I did not know what to say. It felt rude to ask why she was there. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
We could be characters in a foreign-language textbook, I thought, as Giselle switched on her high beams.
“How old is she?” I asked.
“She will be twenty-one in February,” Giselle said.
“My birthday is in February too,” I said.
“What a coincidence.”
We drove down the road in silence. After a while, Giselle stopped at an intersection and switched on her right indicator.
“Are you carsick?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I feel fine.”
I spent a long time in the shower that evening. I turned the taps as high as they could go and let a jet of scalding water pummel the line of acne on my spine. The lights were off and the room was black. A crack of yellow germinated under the door, like a row of milk-cap mushrooms in a cave.
Giselle was talking on the phone when I came out.
“Of course, angel. I’ll tell your dad,” I heard her saying. “Can I bring you anything? How about a jumper? Are your jumpers warm enough?”
I crept back into the hallway and shut the door. I did not want to eavesdrop.
That night, we lay in bed and Giselle’s hands wandered over my body. As her fingers traced the inside of my thigh, I stared at the ceiling and thought about the small single room with its wardrobe of clothes that fit me perfectly. That room was directly above our heads. I wondered what layers of detritus were hidden between the plaster and Chloé’s floorboards – scraps of rockwool, dusty joists, termite mounds. Giselle moved the sheets back, and I saw my nipples were hard and gleaming in the moonlight. I saw wet kiss-marks of saliva shine on my navel and hips. But I kept looking at the ceiling and thinking about the empty room.
The dreams began that night. I remember only a thin handful. I dreamed I was lying with Giselle under the wattle tree, my head resting on her shoulder. Pollen lay thick and golden on the grass and on the distant, unmoving sea. I was either very small or the tree was very large.
“Can you make me a drink?” Giselle asked.
I lifted a bevelled martini glass filled with a clear liquid. The glass was heavy and hard to hold. Giselle tipped the liquid onto the grass, then picked the glass up like an apple and bit into the side. She began to crunch the rim, and then the bowl, and then the stem, until only the foot was left. As she swallowed, shards of glass pierced her oesophagus and poked through her neck.
“Good girl,” Giselle murmured.
It was a very bad dream.
We drove to visit Chloé the following Saturday. Giselle had invited me to come with her. Chloé would love to meet me, she had said. I was not so sure.
We pulled up outside a private psychiatric hospital on the shore of Blackwattle Bay. It was an angular white building with glassy, antiseptic eyes. Giselle parked and got out of the car. Suddenly, I did not want to follow her.
“I might just wait in the car,” I said.
Giselle frowned. “If you like,” she said. “But you’ll get very hot with the windows up. Are you sure you don’t want to come in? You could sit in the cafe.”
“I’d rather stay here,” I said.
“If you change your mind, remember to lock the car behind you,” Giselle said. “I’ll leave you the keys.”
But when she had draped a silk scarf over her shoulders, kissed my forehead and left, I realised she had taken the keys with her.
We did not speak about the visit. I did not ask many questions. Somehow, I did not want to hear anything about Chloé. I already knew the size of her shoes, the exact circumference of her waist, the length of her legs, the way she used the middle hooks when she clasped her bra. I could not bear more intimacy.
That evening, I wore Chloé’s lightest, sheerest pearl-white dress as I poured Giselle a drink. She was lying on the sofa, one arm draped over her face. It had been a hard day for her, I knew, and I felt a sudden twang of love as I sliced a thin half-moon of lemon and let it tumble, with a flurry of ice cubes, into the glass. I could have put anything in her drink and she would not have known. Her face was turned to the window, where a gibbous moon hung in a subterranean sky. There was a bottle of drain cleaner under the sink. There was a can of insecticide. It was frightening how many deadly liquids lay hidden in our home.
I brought Giselle her drink. I knelt to give it to her.
“You’re so sweet,” she said. “You didn’t have to.”
I remember little from the weeks that followed. In my mind, it was gloam-like and dim, with mycelium-grey clouds looming over the sea. Perhaps I am wrong.
Julio had stopped texting me. He had asked to meet me in the city, a few weeks after I picked up my suitcase, but I had not replied to his message and he did not try again. He had learned long ago that I could be erratic. I was alone in Giselle’s house most of the time. Sometimes I sat on our immaculately made bed and did not move all day. Once, when I was unstacking the dishwasher, a glass slipped out of my hands and smashed on the concrete. The noise was shocking. In the quiet aftermath, I stared at the glittering pieces. You should sweep it up, said a voice that sounded like my mother’s. It’s dangerous to leave broken glass on the floor. I had not thought about my mother in a long time.
In the laundry, next to the brush and pan, a rubber mallet was hanging on a hook. I picked it up. I walked over to the broken glass and knelt over the largest shard. I beat it with the mallet several times until all that remained was a fine clear powder. I scooped it into a tiny jar and slotted it beside the gin in Giselle’s pantry. She would not notice it there. I swept up the rest of the glass and threw it in the bin.
Giselle arrived home late that night. She did not tell me where she had been and I did not ask. The table was already laid out, and steam was rising from a cast iron pot. As I sliced fennel and fioretto into tissue-thin sheets, I felt the jar of crushed glass watching me from the pantry. All I had to do was take it from the cupboard and scatter it into the pot. It would be as easy as tossing in a handful of chive blossoms or butterbeans or dill. It would disappear into the clear liquid as silently as salt. Perhaps I could say I had already eaten. Perhaps we could eat it together. I imagined Giselle drifting off to sleep on the sofa in a pool of moonlight, innocent as a girl. I wondered what she would dream of.
I felt a sudden streak of pain in my finger. I looked down and saw that the knife had slipped. My hands must have been trembling.
“Are you okay, angel?” Giselle said. A bead of blood had fallen on the marble benchtop. “Do you need a Band-Aid?”
“I think I need to sit down,” I said.
“Rest on the sofa,” Giselle said. “I’ll finish dinner.”
It was beautiful when she ladled it out – bright and pollen-coloured with a murmur of white wine and saffron. It was better than I could have made it.
“Thank you,” I said.
That night, I dreamed that Giselle and I were under the wattle tree again. She was naked and warm beneath the stars. I lay with my head between her thighs, running my tongue slowly and lazily over her clitoris while she whispered something gentle. Then my nails began to grow long and sharp and insanely red. I pushed two fingers deep into her vagina and kept pushing. I felt no wall where her cervix should be. My fingers, with their long red nails, passed through her body and out the top of her head.
“You’re such a sweet girl,” Giselle whispered. She was smiling at me. She had not felt a thing.
I woke in the darkness, sobbing, with my underwear full of blood.
It was still dark when I slipped outside and made my way down to the beach. At the edge of the sand, beneath a wispy silver sky, I pulled off Chloé’s white nightdress and plunged into the water. There was not a single light anywhere.
I floated on my back, staring up at the black drizzle. Soon, a pink wound would begin to open in the sky.
It had been easy to slip out of the house. Giselle had not woken. Perhaps tomorrow I could leave again and catch the first train to my hometown, where I was not afraid of hurting anyone.
Orana Loren is a writer and editor who lives and works on Dharug Country. She holds a BA (Hons I) in English from the University of Sydney. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in Island, The Foundationalist, Azure,The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Domain. She was awarded the Beauchamp Prize (2022) and the Living Stories Prize (2026, Parramatta).