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Murdoc Niccals likes his space.
In your mind, that’s always been a very basic stipulation. Unobjectionable, even-which is saying something, as objection is, upon reflection, one of your very favourite hobbies.
Space creates distance, see. And distance is another thing you’ve always been a fan of. Gives you a vantage point, to help see what’s coming, and keep any kind of…things from getting in where they shouldn’t.
Quieter, too. Much quieter. Not silent, because nothing ever is, but the murmur. The whisper. The woven hissing of a conversation feels manageable, when wires aren’t being crossed all cat’s cradle, inside and out, and tangling, tautening, tugging every string until you can’t even speak for the loudness.
Not to say you would have been averse to scrawling your singular request onto the deed in giant, flaming letters (Block capitals, naturally, for Extra Emphasis), but with Kong’s sum total of eleventy billion rooms, and the fact you’ve promptly ignored every single one of them in favour of sequestering yourself in the car park…well, you were under the impression that your efforts in nonverbal signposting were being seen, and heard, and understood by everybody involved. And considering the fact that one of those aforementioned people involved is one Stuart Harold Pot, surely that must be worth celebrating?
But your proverbial party poppers have stayed resolutely in a drawer over the past couple of weeks. Locked tight, and out of reach of…small hands. Fingers can get trapped in drawers and doors, or burnt on stoves, or bent back and broken, and you…you just can’t be dealing with it. No reason, of course. No reason at all.
Anyway. 2D and Russel said something to you this morning, a pair of heads framed by the flickering white garage light that they’d clearly tactically chosen to pour into the Winne so that you had no choice but to give up your undoubtedly Oscar-winning façade of being asleep, and feign interest in whatever the fuck it was that they were doing today. Something about clothes? Maybe? Buying new clothes?
And okay, fine, right, whatever, you had the luxury of thinking for a blissful morning moment when you were still fuzzy, and perhaps not quite in the patented Super-Sharp and Hyper-Aware Headspace that you are absolutely, definitely in 99.999 percent of the time, make no mistake. Just a glitch. Happens to everyone, here and there, doesn’t it?
But then Russel broke the news, his voice slow, and ringing out as bells would to herald the imminent apocalypse.
He and 2D would be going.
And that would leave two of you in Kong Studios.
You.
And her.
The girl.
Noodle.
Watch Noodle, they said, and then vanished, before you could even rouse yourself from stunned silence enough to shout back about the vital clause proclaiming to all and sundry that Murdoc Niccals requires-no, is entitled to-a wide berth, and that such a clause applies to all creatures great and small, but most especially, and most importantly, children.
Full of sourness and spite, and a particularly huge slug of nightstand Strongbow for good measure, you heave your bones out of bed, where admittedly very little sleeping has been occurring anyway, and pause only briefly to glance at yesterday’s sink vomit.
At least, you think it’s yesterday’s.
Can’t really trust your nose to tell you all that much anymore, but your head is kind enough to let you know that kids don’t tend to like it when there’s puke all over the place, and so you make the executive decision to slam the Winne’s door shut, and not tell anyone.
There’s plenty that you haven’t told anyone, so it’s just second nature, really. The simplest thing to do.
You haven’t told anyone about how things have been…slipping. Out of kilter. A beat out of time. A good enough performance, until a critic peers close, and notices the stumbling on the fretboard, the eyes that glaze in front of the audience.
Drugs, they’ll say. And you’ll let them think that. A piece of you that you don’t mind trading away in this game, this ever-so complicated and complex game that you’ve taught yourself the hard way. No cheating. Not like Stuart, and his easy, baby rules that you never even got the chance to look at, for fuck’s sake!
The urge seizes you, and you ram your knuckles into something that ends up being a wall. A very solid wall, if the crunching sound your fingers made is anything to go by.
You curl them. Flex them. Your veins flush. You see a twitch in your bare right arm. A muscle memory.
No dent in the corridor’s quiet. A soundproof box for you to have your little slip, and then be on your way.
Up the stairs, towards the light.
Your feet feel loud. Loud in your head. In your house. Booming steps, like thunder, and you think.
You think of…of her. You wonder.
Can she hear?
Has she stiffened, hidden herself away? Is she pleading with herself not to cry, not to make a single sound as she listens for your snarling breath and smells your putrid scent in the air?
Your body twists. Coils around itself. You groan gutturally, ears full of sobs. Trapped by nothing, and by knots of self and muscle memory.
She is alone.
She is afraid.
She is terrified.
Muscle memory. You stand in the foyer, immobile, and feel yourself fade. Grey slips through grey fingers. Grey fingers fade and slip again. Like ash. Like smoke. Like nothing.
You hear nothing. You see nothing. Your feet fade from the floor, and then, you feel nothing.
You’ve trapped yourself. Made yourself invisible.
But someone. Someone needs to watch the girl. Somone needs to see her. Hear her.
You are not someone. You can’t watch. You can’t see or hear. You can only be stuck. Only be invisible.
Someone will bump into you. Someone will shout, why aren’t you watching her? Why aren’t you?
And if you were someone, you could maybe say. But you are not someone.
And you aren’t.
You don’t know why you aren’t. But you Aren’t.
And when you Aren’t, you can’t.
You can’t.
From the window, you watch, and see the grey swirl around the house. Fog sinks down. Covers you like a blanket. Heavy. Pins you to the floorboards.
Eyes in the fog. Sounds in the fog.
A low growl, swirling round and round.
Can’t reach it. Can’t catch it, when this you is stuck and still as well.
There is no someone. There is no anyone.
And you are alone.
You…you are afraid.
You are…you are terrified.
You Aren’t here. And you know that you mustn’t, because here is where you Are. Here has to be where you Are. Now. Now, for her. You need to be, or…
Or Else.
Else whistles on the wind. Streaks across the sky in Might and Could. Closer to the house. Closer to you.
Closer to her.
The stuck and still you inside the house closes its eyes.
Slowly, the growling gets louder, and louder for the faded grey thing that used to be you. Used to be a man called Murdoc Niccals.
He isn’t anymore. Perhaps he never was.
The grey thing can’t remember. The grey thing doesn’t know anything, except that it is stuck.
And then, the you inside the house hears…something.
It hears a knock at the door.
It can’t reach the door from where it’s stuck in the fog, but it starts to see. It starts to see a small someone, peering in through the window.
“Oh.” says the small someone’s voice outside, and this time, the grey thing hears.
The small someone starts to talk quickly, with words that the grey thing doesn’t understand.
Murdoc Niccals doesn’t understand either. The grey thing remembers that. He doesn’t understand these words.
But then, there’s a hand being held out. And another hand, a bigger hand, being held.
And Murdoc Niccals feels it. He, and you, and the you inside, all feel themselves get woven back together. Unknotted, and smoothed out.
You feel yourself sink back into your body. You feel every blink of your eyes. Every breath in your lungs.
The small someone still holds on.
Noodle. Noodle still holds on. She pulls you along with small and gentle tugs, filling up the quiet of the hallway with a flurry of Japanese.
You don’t reply. Words feel beyond you, flung far out into space, and floating in some distant galaxy. Even picking out the letters to spell your own name leaves you feeling drained and drowsy. You dimly wonder to yourself how old children have to be before they stop getting put down for a nap.
She may have just barely lived here for a couple of weeks, but Noodle seems to know exactly where she’s going, passing by rows of identical doors without once stopping to get her bearings, whilst you’re still in the process of shaking off the foggy fugue.
You stare down at your hand. At Noodle’s fingers, not quite big enough to reach all the way around your wrist.
And then quite suddenly, something sharp stabs through the haze. A hot and stinging feeling that stops you in your tracks and floods your face with warmth. A Too Much feeling. Much Too Much.
You pull away from her, sweat prickling on the back of your neck, and scrutinize the floor to avoid the look you can still see from the corner of your eye. Confusion. Worry. The sorts of things that have always made you feel sick to your stomach.
Can she read that in your face, you wonder? Can she see all the way behind your eyes, into where things have always been locked up tight?
A shudder escapes before you can stifle it. You’re very aware of yourself as you take a step backwards. More space. More distance.
“Ah!” Noodle exclaims, and then follows up with another rapid burst of Japanese, no more comprehensible than the last.
You feel your forehead crease beneath your hair. “You ever tried speaking slower?” You pause at the sight of her frowning “Uh…adagio?”
Her eyes light up at once. “Adagio!”
“Yeah.” You nod curtly. “Go slower. Or people ent gonna understand you.”
Noodle giggles. “Ent gonna!”
You scowl. “It en—isn’t funny.”
“Ent gonna!” she shouts, beaming from ear to ear.
“Stop.” You mutter. A familiar feeling starts to wiggle its way up your windpipe.
“Ent gonna stop!” she cackles.
“Noodle, stop it.” You tell her. Louder, to disguise the tingling, frothing pins and needles that foam against the roof of your mouth.
You’re breathing. You’re breathing. You’re thinking of breathing. Nothing else. Just breathing—Oh, that was a good breath. Very good breathing. Very good breathing, Murdoc. Well done. Good breathing-
“Ent gonna!” Noodle roars in your face. You flinch, and the tight hold you had falters, fumbles, and finally slips.
You tic in front of her. Once. Twice. Three times. And each staccato utterance feels like a gunshot. Like an explosion.
Noodle stands.
Noodle stares.
In the silence, you can hear your heartbeat. Feel it throb in your temple.
In the silence, she takes hold of your hand again, and squeezes it tight.
And for a while, you can’t seem to let go.
The Wrongness starts to set in. The murmur grows louder as she leads you, palm pressed close to yours. Heart lines. Life lines. Fate lines, intertwined.
Load of bollocks, you’d say, if anyone asked you. But still, you wonder. About fate. Whether Murdoc Niccals was inevitable, with a deck so stacked with Death and Devils, Towers and Hanged Men.
Your head feels full of whispers. Whispers you can’t name. Not feeling like people. Presences, like the kind Russel can coax out when he’s feeling up to it.
But not. Not the same. A presence snorts and spits at you for being such a fool. For thinking you’re the same. You are not the same.
You are not the same as anyone.
You are alone.
Noodle holds the hand of a person she thinks she sees. Thinks she knows. But she is not there with you. She mustn’t be there with you.
Mustn’t see the constant raised hackles.
Mustn’t hear the growling from inside the house. The growling loud enough to split your skull, you’re sure. The endless, endless vibration, ever since she arrived in a sudden sneeze of slime and body bits.
Noodle feels like a something. Like a something pressing against walls. Against foundations. She feels like an itch. Like a tickly cough. Something to be built around. So easily, for 2D, and for Russ, but for you…for you it isn’t that simple. Nothing’s that simple with you. Nothing can be set down nicely in your house, and welcomed in. It needs to be looked at. Colour-matched, and pruned into a shape that slots between so many, many other things in this wobbly, precarious place wherein you have no choice but to exist.
This is the you that there is now.
The you who is also so many other yous, sliding in and out of skin. In and out of focus.
And Noodle doesn’t know those yous yet. Doesn’t understand those many yous that are both you and not. The slivers of bright sea glass, and oil-leaking plastic pieces that are all you at once, in a way that nobody can understand.
Things might not be in focus now, you think. Things are maybe…maybe not good. Maybe not…safe.
Maybe Noodle isn’t safe. Or maybe you aren’t safe.
Murdoc Niccals does not feel like a safe person. He doesn’t feel like a safe person to watch Noodle. He can’t watch Noodle.
He can’t.
His eyes already feel very off the ball. Very sort of maybe not watching, and not thinking about what they should be doing, which is watching.
You drag your eyes back over to Noodle again, and you realize whilst you’re dragging that you’re in a different room than the one before. A different place, with different sounds, and feelings.
The living room. Where people are ostensibly meant to be alive. Meant to feel comfortable, just existing and not doing much else.
But you feel like you’re doing so much already. Projecting this…this self. Existing feels different today. Harder to do, with the itch. The tickly cough, in the corner of the house. Always dragging your eyes over to have a look.
You feel like you should be sitting, in a room that’s also designated for that, and so, you sit, and you land on the sofa with a crinkle, feeling the weight of yourself in the noise, for perhaps the first time since you woke up this morning.
Noodle is across the room. You hold her, only in your gaze, and it’s close enough for you. Cross-legged on the carpet, eyes fixed to the loud and bright square of the telly, bloated fragments of neon, acidic sugar that you feel the need to rip your eyes away from. Soothe yourself with some dark.
You put your head in your hands and breathe a slow breath. Space. Distance.
This is okay. Noodle is here. You are here. Not the very same here, but close enough. Keep Noodle in your line of sight.
You are capable. You are more than capable. Murdoc Niccals, the most capable self, can manage this itch. Can navigate this tickly cough.
You train your eyes on the back of Noodle’s head, and slowly, silently, you lift your legs up to rest beneath your chin. Feet off the floor. Just in case.
Two weeks, it’s been. She already sticks to Russel like glue. 2D, like chewing gum, for reasons that you just can’t seem to get your head around. How they can be so comfortable opening up their space to this…this stranger. This strange child. How she can grab onto them. Attach herself in an instant.
Attachment is…
You pause. Gnaw your lip.
Attachment is...difficult.
Something strange, and foreign. Something that happens to other people.
Other children.
And you’ve poked around in dim and dusty corners, but nothing of the sort ever springs forth. Only too sharp, too bright, too hot feelings that are messy, and jumbled, and rip right through you. Fill you with holes.
Noodle doesn’t look to be filled with holes. She looks whole. A white pad of paper lies in her lap. Unsullied.
In your stark silence, you hear her gently chatter to herself. Head bent. Perhaps in thought, or prayer, you can’t be certain. Hair falls in sleek black curtains away from the pale nape of her neck.
She’s a little thing. Littler still to you, who feels so oversized. Feels himself hunch over, and rock to suppress a low growl building in his throat. A growl that doesn’t belong to you.
Noodle is eight years old. You knew that, before anyone else was able to find it out. Not that you told. Not that you explained why the symmetry and cleanliness of the number eight felt so right to give to her. The safest number. You couldn’t explain that. Not to anyone.
A scratching sound. Not a scratch that soothes the itch, but one that burrows deep into your ears.
Safely out of sight, you roll your shoulders. Toss your head.
You want to run away and cry and scream.
But you’re trapped. Swallowed up by sofa cushions, and still, the scratching carries on. Deeper, deeper. You feel it. A finger, prodding, probing against your skull.
You watch Noodle’s bones move up and down, delicate as a thousand tiny matchsticks. Too small for you and your heaviness.
But still, you hold them. Those supple bones sit in your cupped hands now. Lie in the folds of leviathan palms. Porcelain white.
Her breath hangs in your ears in chalk-dust clouds. Breath you can’t breathe in.
Your veins burn. Heat and blood surge through in jagged streams.
The scratching gets louder. Faster. Picks you like a scab. Picks, and picks. Worms its way in through the wound, until you feel nothing else. Nothing but the feeling of hands around bones, and the thought. The thought that chokes you.
You curl your fingers.
Matchsticks bend.
Break.
Noodle cries out.
Your eyes shoot open.
No bones. No blood. Not even a bruise.
She holds up a wax crayon, snapped in half.
“Careful.” chides a voice you barely recognise. A voice that feels so much stronger than the one sitting in your throat right now, only able to growl and groan and grunt and grumble.
She gives you a solemn nod, setting the pieces aside.
You sink back into the sofa, pulse rumbling in your ears as loud as a storm. Silent lightning forks beyond rain-lashed windows.
No covers to hide under. Your body’s stripped bare.
In front of Noodle.
Your stomach churns, and quite suddenly, you’re standing, and almost tripping over the coffee table in your haste. Noodle turns at the commotion, but you don’t-or rather, can’t-say anything to her. You don’t think you can even say anything to yourself.
You just…You just need to be somewhere else, for a moment. Somewhere that isn’t here. Where you won’t see a blithely smiling face in the midst of the maelstrom that’ll tear her apart
But none of that comes out. Instead, you can only lick your dry lips, and dart for the door before the thick and stifling air turns suffocating.
It hits you in the hall. The shaking. The creep of a cold sweat, all over you. Every bead a fine and glittering needle slid beneath your skin in piercing play.
You claw for…something. Something to hold onto. Something to drag it all out and bring you back to Capability Murdoc again.
You feel the empty space in your house where he used to be. Watch it ooze and fester as an ugly gash through the wallpaper behind your eyelids.
Capability Murdoc would know what to do. He’d be the one to manage. To get out his little doctor’s kit of itch cream and cough drops, and sew you back into a shape that feels like something approaching a person. Where everything else can be hidden. Neatly tidied away.
You are not Capability Murdoc. You are Inevitability Murdoc. The helpless twin. The ouroboros that encircles the house. That makes leaving impossible.
Inevitability Murdoc’s path takes him, inevitably, to the kitchen.
You let muscle memory play out its same little ritual. The same tug at the fridge door. The same wrinkled nose and pushing aside of 2D’s favoured cans of Stella. Football drink, thinks the same thought.
Muscle memory is easy, for Inevitability Murdoc, who feels safeness surround him as he clasps the neck of the Heineken bottle and lets it sweat into his hand.
With Capability Murdoc and his numbing cream gone, this is all he has.
You down half the bottle before the fridge even closes.
Better. Feels less…
Feels less.
Safer to be here.
Safer for you.
Safer for her.
You loosen your hold and start to tic. Loud, long, lewd tics that leave your thighs sore, and your eyes rolling. Back against the worktop, you moan into the gaping silence. Nobody here for you.
Alone. Of course. Pushed ever further apart by each violent bodily spasm.
You catch sight of a Murdoc you don’t quite recognise sneering smug from the polished metal of the kitchen taps, a bristling smile splitting his face open as your dishevelled self reaches for another swig.
Proved right. As always.
You turn away, fingers clenching tighter around the bottle, and your free hand in a fist. The kitchen looms large. Crowds around. All you can see is lino glare and splashback tiles.
Inevitability Murdoc, with his cyclical, circular thoughts that whirl around your head in a hypnotic spell, of bones, and blood. Screams, and sobs, and Noodle’s blood, and your bones, and her sobs, and your screams.
You hear a scream outside the house. Outside of you. A scream that carries on and on, and on.
Inevitability Murdoc sees a stack of washed, and clean, and perfect pottery plates, and he picks them up, and hurls them, one by one.
Porcelain sails across the room. Embeds itself in the wall, the doorframe. Spills out in a mosaic wave across the floor.
The screaming doesn’t stop.
You don’t hear her footsteps.
You don’t hear her voice.
You don’t hear until she’s right next to you and tugging on your wrist.
“Mud?” comes a tiny and uncertain whisper.
“Don’t!” you shove her back with a roar, only seeing ragged, jagged, razor-sharp shards all over the place, and everywhere, and smelling blood.
Nowhere is safe for her. Nowhere is safe.
Especially not here.
But you can still hear footsteps. Her footsteps, in front and behind and beside you, padding round, and round.
You can’t reach for her. Can’t push her away. She’s moving too fast for you to see. You only glimpse a smudge of red that you’re sure, you’re sure must be blood. Must be trailing blood. Her blood trailing from where she’s been sliced open.
You groan, and bury your head in your arms, forehead pressed to your knees where you’re somehow squatting, not standing. Your voice feels hoarse. Almost gone. You don’t know where. Or why.
More tinkly noises. You grind your teeth until you can’t bear it any longer, and force yourself to look up.
A be-gloved Noodle trundles this way and that, pushing pieces of broken plate aside to clear a path for you and your bare feet.
“I’ll do it.” You croak, already willing yourself to stand up. But try as you might, your body just doesn’t go. Instead, it stays very, very still.
Noodle doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss. She carries on, until there’s a multicoloured mound parked by the bin.
“Let me.” You plead.
She takes no notice, hefting a whole armful of the stuff into the liner as you remain useless on the ground, and your back starts to twinge and ache.
“Secret.” She declares once the last of it’s been disposed of, peeling off her gloves and chucking them towards the sink.
You tap your nose; She giggles, mimicking the movement flawlessly.
Your bad case of Stuck on the Floor shows no signs of being cured, but luckily for you, Noodle takes notice. She holds your hands for only a fleeting moment, pulling you back up until you can manage the rest of the way on your own.
You don’t say anything.
She doesn’t say anything.
Then, your legs give a warning quake, and you have to lunge for a chair before you’re unceremoniously dumped again.
Noodle chews her nail, glancing between you, and the kettle as you cough and splutter your way through a customary assortment of tics.
“Cuppa?”
You blink, and then shake your head, reaching for the beer again.
Noodle furrows her brow. “Cuppa.” She repeats, loud and insistent. Not a question this time.
You sigh, and deflate, watching her shove another chair across the floor with an almighty screech that has you hissing, and crumpling your sore body. You’re not quite sure how this soreness came about, but here it is, regardless. Taking up living space that’s already so limited, with all of the many, many Murdocs rampaging their way through, dragging half a dozen houseguests in tow.
Perhaps tea would be nice after all. Something smooth and soothing. Chamomile would do you nicely. And a biscuit or seven.
Kettle on, Noodle marches over to present you with an entire artisan tearoom’s worth of herby, fruity options that have nothing to do with you, and everything to do with 2D and Russel’s combined fascination with things like ‘cleansing’ and ‘wellness’ that have already managed to drive you up the wall. If Russel wants to feel better, then he should just do drugs like a normal person, instead of singing the praises of pretend things like ‘rooibos’ and ‘valerian’. Fucking nonsense.
You dutifully point to the chamomile sachet, while Noodle plumps for something that proclaims to be ‘gingerbread chai.’ Sounds far too sophisticated to you, who drank tea black by the time he was seven. Although, that was more out of necessity than anything else. Good milk wasn’t exactly easy for you to come by. Especially after your brother got booked slinging stones at the bottles on the neighbour’s wall one too many times.
As the kettle rumbles on, Noodle rattles around in the overhead cupboard for suitable mugs, depositing the industrial-sized Sports Direct one in front of you, rather than the far more preferable Clash one that you and 2D fight over all the time. It is yours, for the record. So what, you happened to come across it at his house, but he barely even remembers half of the old junk he had before anyway, so for all he knows, it’s just an identical one that you happened to acquire around the time his went missing.
Noodle’s own choice has Columbo emblazoned on the front. Whether she knows that is a mystery. , but she seems content with it , at the very least. Peter Falk just has the sort of face that comforts people, you suppose.
Rather unlike your face, supplies a particularly unhelpful interloper, before you can slam all of those doors shut. That slug-sized feeling still slithers in, and gives you pause. Makes you stiffen up at the table.
Noodle doesn’t seem to notice, absorbed as she is in her mission for biscuits.
But you notice. Of course you do.
How could you not? How could you let yourself become this…this?
This is pedestrian. This is comfortable.
And you hate it.
Or…or someone hates it.
Someone has to remind you that this isn’t how it is. This isn’t how you are. What you deserve.
What you deserve is…not this.
Anything but this.
The pedestrian, and the comfortable, they were never meant for you. Bad things happen, when you get too comfortable. Bad things happen when your eye’s not on the ball, when you’re not looking out from all angles. Not seeing from all sides.
You twitch and itch in your seat, feeling huge, and unwieldy at the table, with dainty teacups, and a dainty sugar bowl, and a dainty little girl, sitting across from you and smiling the bright and hopeful smile of a life that doesn’t know darkness.
But now she knows you.
Eight is safe. But it is also the precipice.
What will have happened to her, this time next year?
What will be Noodle’s nine?
You push your chair out, and it feels loud. Attention-grabbing. Attention-seeking.
You don’t want that. Not now.
You want to be silent. Invisible.
So many things wouldn’t have happened, if you had just been invisible.
You stand, without seeing. Without thinking about it.
Noodle says something you don’t understand. Still holding biscuits.
She’s worried about the biscuits.
The only thing that matters to her is the biscuits.
You wish that could have been you.
You wish.
You stare at the biscuits.
And hear a sob. A tight, and hoarse-voiced sob.
“Mud,” says Noodle, and she’s close to you again. “Mud. Have tea?”
“No.” comes a crackling, watery voice. Your face, your whole body feels flushed, and hot. Your hair sticks to your forehead, curling at the ends from damp skin.
She reaches up, and takes hold of the top of your arm-the highest point she can get to. Her touch is gentle, but it feels ice cold.
“No!” you cry, but your body is frozen, and you can’t shrink away. You can only let it happen.
Only let her pull you down. Back down, into your seat, and—
And…
Nothing.
Nothing happens.
You shudder. You do a lot of shuddering. A lot of gasping. Gulping. A lot of sitting and feeling wetness dribble down your cheeks, and from your nose.
Noodle pushes your mug closer to you.
And then she backs away to her own chair.
There is space, and there is distance.
Beneath your gasps, your gulps, you can hear her sipping her tea. Munching her biscuits.
You didn’t even see what biscuits they were.
It didn’t feel important. Only that the biscuits were there, and she had them in her hands.
You fumble for the heavy weight of your oversized cup. The one that makes your hands feel smaller. Makes your everything feel smaller. Seeing is hard, but the feeling of steam gently wafts to warm your face in a calming way. In a soothing way. No flash fire feeling in an instant.
In this space, you chance a small sip of your own. A sip, that turns into a slurp, that turns into a deep, deep drink. Deeper than you can ever go with beer, or vodka, or rum. You let it pass through you in a languid wave.
“Tea is good?” asks Noodle, as you place the mug back down again.
“Tea is good.” You reply, with a nod that feels gentle. Soft enough not to break her.
She smiles.
You don’t smile. But you feel your mouth twitch a tiny bit, in a way that doesn’t feel like a tic.
She’s set some biscuits out for you as well. A pair of Bourbons, stacked like bricks. You nod your approval, and she smiles wider.
“Oh.” she says, and then points towards the one you’ve taken in your hand.
“What?”
“Um. You...” She pauses, eyes flicking upwards for a moment. “You…” she struggles for a few moments more, and then finally mimes dunking something into her cup.
“Do I dip, you mean?”
“Mm-hm.”
“No fear.” You wrinkle your nose. “2D’s your man, if you want to do that, not me. Just makes it all soggy. Blech!” You punctuate, and she squeaks with horrified delight as your tongue comes out.
You crunch through both biscuits, and have a couple more mouthfuls of your tea, swiping around your mouth for Bourbon crumbs before she speaks again.
“You are…good?”
“Hm?”
“Now. Now you are good?”
Through the gentle chamomile mist, your thoughts come slowly. Nothing feels the need to race. Your heart stays put. Lets you shake your head, and not be seized by the urge to beat its way right out of you.
“Oh.” She says.
But she doesn’t say anything more.
You wonder what she’s thinking. You wonder, but it doesn’t feel rabid and urgent and all-consuming. Just a calm sort of wonder that you don’t need to hear.
She drains her cup with a cheerfully loud slurp, and hops down from the table, evidently no worse for wear, whatever’s in her head.
The contents of yours feels…perhaps a bit wobbly, still. Breathy, and delicate. But easier to gloss over, with tea that casts clouds around the edges. Hides the holes from the littlest of prying eyes.
That’s all you need, right now. And you’re glad for it.
Noodle turns to look at where you’ve eased back into your chair, into a shape that’s familiar to her. “You will come?”
“If you want.” You shrug.
“Yes.” She replies, so quickly that it catches you off-guard. Your fingers clench around the handle of your mug, but you hold on.
You’re still holding on.
“Right.” You say, to fill the silence.
“Hai” she says, to do the same.
You watch her trot through the doorway without looking back. At ease, and confident. At home.
At home with you.
You just don’t understand. Perhaps you never will.
You try to leave that irksome feeling behind in the kitchen, but you feel it creeping along the hallway as you follow her. Clinging to your shadow. The monkey on your back.
You look at her and feel lost. Feel so lost and uncertain, and you don’t like it.
You…you don’t even know if you like her.
If you’re able to like her.
Russel likes her.
2D likes her.
But all the things that happen to you, when you look at Noodle…do they happen to her, too? Can she feel them coming off you? Can she feel how ill at ease this makes you?
She should be wary. Warier than she is. Inviting herself into this space to share with you, so freely. So easily…
You can feel your thoughts start to chase each other. Start to snake around. The inevitable ouroboros stirs. Twitches in its sleep.
You sip more tea. Fill yourself up with those chamomile clouds. Gentler than a beer bottle, but less potent.
More room, more space for thoughts to swirl and spiral. More control, but less, at once.
A strange, and impossible attic web of contradictions, of knots you can feel yourself fuss and fret over. Too hard to see each strand for all the clouds pouring in through the window.
Your brow furrows. You stare down at your hands and start to pick at a loose thread. Start to unravel.
When you look up again, Noodle has stopped.
You blink.
You have stopped. Stock still and tugging on a flyaway string on your jeans.
You sip your tea again.
Bite the thread off.
And breathe.
Noodle doesn’t ask questions. She stands and waits for you to reach her.
Keep her in your line of sight. That’s all you need to do.
Watch her. Seclude yourself in the undergrowth, the dark and damp, and observe from a shadowy place. Not just the sight. But the sound and smell. All of the new things she’s brought into your house, by being herself. By being a small girl.
You don’t know small girl things. You only know small boy things. Small boy things that were so trapped, and stuck and pretending to be small girl things. That tried and failed to be small girl things when they were deeply, deeply small boy things.
Noodle wouldn’t know that. Wouldn’t understand, you tell yourself.
The small boy things that you know, they feel ill-fitting. Inadequate for this, for Noodle, who is such a small girl. So completely a small girl. A whole, entire small girl, next to your bigger, man-sized self, who is still, still full of holes you don’t understand.
Holes you don’t want to understand.
Pushing a hole away isn’t something that even Murdoc Niccals, with all of his Capability, can do. He cannot move mountains, after all, no matter how hard he tries.
But he can fill the holes in.
He fills them with more tea and counts himself lucky that Noodle chose the biggest mug, on a day where he feels like he probably needs it more than most.
His holes are bigger than most. And today, he can feel them more than anything.
He can feel the growling again, coming from inside the holes, when he stares down into the dark, and hears it echoing back up at him.
He closes his eyes for a moment. Pulls himself away from the edge and follows the scent of chamomile. The trail that’s sprung up in the garden, between all the crushed pansies, and grinning flytraps.
When you open them again, you find an unchanged scene. Noodle, with her drawing pad and pens. Space, and distance left, and then you, perched on the edge. Watching from afar, that still somehow feels too near.
The warm weight of the cup in your hands is what tells you that you weren’t in a dream. That time has passed, outside.
That Noodle has seen things now.
Already, Noodle has seen things that are so, so far beyond what she should see.
Your breath catches.
Even disguised by the mindless blare of the telly, it’s noise enough for Noodle to hear.
She turns. You drop your eyes quickly to the contents of your mug. Half empty now, but still mercifully enough to get lost in.
Get lost, Murdoc. Just get fucking lost.
You weren’t supposed to slip this much. To tumble so far down this hole to where the light can’t reach you. Where Noodle can’t reach you.
If Noodle can’t reach for anyone, then how can she be safe?
Danger with you. Danger without you.
Impossible. Impossible.
You slip a hand down, and sharply tug on a nipple ring until you feel it. Until it hurts to feel, and you can’t think of anything but that.
You whine, without thinking.
“Mud?” says Noodle’s small, and unsure voice again, and that hurts, too.
You groan out a wordless response, but it doesn’t seem to do any good, because she comes over anyway, smelling of cheap wax and felt-tip pens, popping the pad of paper down on the coffee table in favour of clambering onto the sofa.
Beside you. Lingering and loitering, her light creeping ever closer.
You put down your mug. Feel your hands shaking without something to hold. Something to grip onto.
You feel that light press and push against the walls again. The new pressure of bowing, buckling, old, old wood. Not strong enough. Twisted and rotten.
She stays. Smiles serenely up at you as your neck jerks. Your head flails.
She gets closer to that. She chooses to. You feel the warmth of her eyes roving across your body. Breathing all of you in, and not recoiling at the stench.
She doesn’t hear the noise. The knocking in your skull. The creaking floorboards you can feel in your jaw, in your teeth.
The growling, prowling circles round. The shape of a man who isn’t a man, with wide, wild animal eyes and an arching spine. Lip curled back, it feasts its eyes on Noodle. Wants to see her bones. Her blood.
You hold yourself closer together and shift away. Away. Try to lose sight of it. Try not to let it use your eyes and see her so close.
It doesn’t like closeness. It doesn’t like anything.
You don’t like anything.
You hate it.
You hate you.
Noodle laughs softly, and points closer to your skin, and at St. Peter’s cross sitting there.
You shift before she touches you, and scowl, and glare, and feel thick, black hatred running down your spine.
She points to the tattoo again. “You draw!”
“No.” your voice feels deep, and dark, and not quite yours.
Noodle purses her lips and takes hold of her paper and pens again. You take a sip of lukewarm tea, and close your eyes against the scratching noise.
She presents it to you moments later, with a firm and final flourish! “See? Draw!” she points to the inverted cross that now stains her page, and then back to your shoulder. “I draw. You draw. See?”
“Oh.” You say. Not happy. Not sad. Not really anything.
“…Good?” she tilts her head to peer at you, where you’re hiding behind your hair, and your arms.
“Mm.”
“Good.” She agrees, gaze flicking back up to whatever loud thing is on the telly for a few disinterested moments. “Um. Mud?”
“What?”
“Uh…you draw?”
You pause. Stare at the paper. The leaking, bleeding black ink.
“You draw please?”
“…Why?”
“Draw is good.” She shrugs, and then thrusts the pad in your direction.
You don’t take it straight away. Instead, you sit back on your haunches, and you think. You cast your mind back. Feel the line fly, fly over the top of many many fish you’re desperate not to reel back in. And when you think it’s safe, you let the bobber land.
In childhood. In the wide-open lake of Childhood. Not the small and pungent stream of Murdoc’s Childhood, where the only fish that grow are weak and ragged little things.
You bob up and down in the lake, and you wonder whether drawing was good then. Like Noodle said. Was drawing good for you?
Did you ever draw?
The water is murky. Full of weeds. The shapes below are indistinct as you tread water.
You just can’t seem to remember.
You can’t picture a little boy at a dining room table, with a tin of coloured pencils at his side.
Can’t picture anyone watching from over his shoulder.
Can’t picture anything put on a fridge with pride.
No.
Something from someone else’s life.
Stealing from Stuart again, perhaps.
A long sigh ripples the surface of the lake. When you look back down, you see Noodle staring up at you. Hands clasped, and on tiptoes.
“Give it here.” You beckon for the paper, snatching up the nearest satisfactory pen-a red one.
She grins, dropping it promptly into your lap.
“What d’you want me to draw, then?” you unscrew the pen lid, skimming through the pages to find a clean one.
Not much on there. Just some multi-coloured scribbles to begin with. Testing the waters.
But something slows you down. Drags your eyes back to the pages
You watch Noodle’s drawings take shape, day by day, growing with each passing leaf.
Spirals and stars, in every colour. Some in neat and uniform rows. Others scattered wildly, tiny next to huge.
Red suns. A lot of red suns. No yellow suns to be found.
Boxes. Stacks of boxes reaching right up and off the page. Walls of boxes stretching in straight lines.
A few more scribble pages, dotted here and there.
And then, you stop dead in your tracks.
You stare.
Noodle’s drawn three figures. More meticulous than anything she’s done yet.
A smiley-faced and towering 2D.
A smiley-faced and very circular Russel.
And…
And a Murdoc. A Murdoc with angry eyebrows sticking out from underneath his hair. A Murdoc with a sad, sad mouth, almost dragged off his face.
The rest of the page is covered in hearts. Hearts she’s drawn. Hearts she’s stuck on.
You tense.
You tic.
Your fingers curl around the paper. Hold it tightly.
You…
You don’t…
You don’t understand.
You stare harder, and start to trace the lines of your felt-tip self, and you still don’t understand.
The pad lands back on the coffee table with a thump.
Noodle looks up at you. And you can’t look at her.
You look…somewhere. You look anywhere.
Your eyes dart over to the telly. A way out. You stare harder still, and will yourself to get sucked in, and not caught by…by whatever. Whatever is happening. This…this…thing.
Noodle shuffles closer. Closer still, until her hair is tickling your shoulder. Your skin crawls with it. The feeling of insects, scuttling over you. All over you.
You can hear them. Rustling around. In your ears. In your nose. In your mouth. You don’t cry. You don’t scream. You sit in silence as itching, burning takes over everything, and Noodle slips into your lap with ease.
You don’t know what’s happening. You can’t think what’s happening. Your skin is on fire, and you can’t move. Can’t escape. Noodle’s warm weight pins you to the sofa.
Your face is stiff, and frozen, caught in a mute grimace. Noodle watches you with mild interest, reaching out with a looming hand. She draws a finger across the line of your tense jaw. Weaves around pockmarks and pimples, and pores. Crosses the bridge of your nose. Reaches down, down to run her fingertip along the jagged shapes on your chest.
And smiles.
She says something in Japanese. The words escape you, but the sound is soft. Gentle.
But gentle and soft things aren’t for you. You know that. Only fire, and itching, and the frenzied drum of your heartbeat, screaming out from your chest that this is too much. This is far too much.
“Stop.” You finally grit out, through clenched teeth. Your head tosses, and you bark out a deafening tic.
And Noodle stops. Slides down, and edges her way across the sofa.
You lean your head back, and stare at the cracks in the ceiling for a long, and silent moment that you spend, checking the house. Padding through rooms, one by one, where the space grows, and grows, and grows again.
“Mud?” comes Noodle’s voice, through the phoneline between in and out.
“Mm?” you respond, eyes closed as you venture into the garden, and grass crunches underfoot.
“You…you hurt?” you hear her pause, and then try again. “…I hurt?”
You feel something push its way into your throat. Sticky burrs, or a smooth pebble, lodged tight. Quickly, quickly, you swallow that all down.
“No.” you shake your head “You didn’t hurt.”
In the quiet that follows, you trundle around the garden. Aimless, perhaps, but there’s something to be said for this. For just having space.
Birds start to flutter down, hopping to and fro at your feet.
“Um. Mud?”
“What?”
“We do pink?”
Your brow knots, and you have no choice but to leave your house and come all the way back to her. “Pink?”
“Mm.” she nods. “Uh. 2D…he does pink.”
You turn to her, a tiny sigh escaping. Trust 2D to confuse the girl with his nonsense. “Show me?”
But what Noodle does next surprises you. She raises her little finger and reaches her arm all the way across the sofa to where your hand sits, still balled into an agitated fist beside you.
Oh.
You think you understand.
Your finger inches out to meet hers.
And with a deep breath in, you link the two together.
From the corner of your eye, you watch Noodle smile down at your joined hands. She lifts it up, and you feel a gentle pull. Nothing else.
Bearable. Breathable. Space to break away.
You chew your lip. Wait for the burning to come back.
It will. Any moment now, you’re sure.
You’re sure.
Inevitability Murdoc is so, so sure of this. He knows the circular, the cyclical, and he feels the wheels in your mind start to turn.
Noodle resumes her soft chatter. You listen, not to the words, but to the sounds. To the feelings it gives you. The feeling of cicadas. The feeling of birdsong.
No feelings of fire or ice to be found. No hurry to get away.
Deep inside the house, Inevitability Murdoc feels a feeling that he isn’t sure about. Something that makes him feel strange. Makes him feel lost, like he’s straying from his singular, circular path. And without that…without that, what is he?
You feel Inevitability Murdoc coil around himself. Start to work himself into knots. Your neck twists, and your shoulders roll.
Your body tightens, but your mind feels loose.
Noodle’s eyes drift towards the television, barely even flinching when your tics get loud, and her finger, still woven together with yours, gets tugged in arrhythmic time.
When your body is too much to hold, she doesn’t let go.
Murdoc Niccals likes his space.
But perhaps…perhaps a space can be made for Noodle.
Perhaps she can get used to the growling.
And perhaps you can get used to her.
Perhaps you are capable.
Capable of that, at the very least.