Dreaming of Amelia Read online

  Jaclyn Moriarty spent four years working as a media and entertainment lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. She grew up in Sydney, lived in the US, England and Canada, and now lives in Sydney again.

  Also by Jaclyn Moriarty

  Feeling Sorry for Celia

  Finding Cassie Crazy

  I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes

  The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie

  The Spell Book of Listen Taylor

  JACLYN MORIARTY

  Dreaming of Amelia

  To Liane

  First published 2009 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Jaclyn Moriarty 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Moriarty, Jaclyn.

  Dreaming of Amelia / Jaclyn Moriarty.

  ISBN 978 0 330 42527 8 (pbk.)

  A823.3

  Typeset in 11/14 pt Minion Regular by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  These electronic editions published in 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Dreaming of Amelia

  Jaclyn Moriarty

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  978-1-74198-779-9

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  978-1-74198-723-2

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  978-1-74198-611-2

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Liane, Natalie, Erin, Elizabeth, and, of course, Charlie, for making my days so bright while I was writing this book.

  Thank you, also, to: Claire Craig, Anna McFarlane, Julia Stiles, Louise Bourke and everybody else at Pan Macmillan for superb and delightful editing and publishing; to Tara Wynne, for being a wonderful agent and friend; to Liane Moriarty, Nicola Moriarty, and Rachel Cohn, for generous reading of early drafts; to John Wright for the leads on Irish convict history; to Erin Shields for answering questions and keeping Charlie laughing; to Tom Reichel for Distressed Weasel Records; to Andrew Broughton for black holes; to Maisy’s Café in Neutral Bay, and Avenue Road Café in Mosman, for the chocolate; to Rachel Cohn (again) for more chocolate; to Michael McCabe for the emails; to Corrie, Kristin and Clara for the music; and to all the others who have brightened my days, especially the readers who write such lovely letters.

  Note

  Most of the following story takes place in an HSC English exam on the topic of gothic fiction.

  The HSC (or Higher School Certificate) is a series of exams taken by students in New South Wales at the end of their final year of school. During that final year, students also complete ‘projects’ and ‘assessment tasks’, the results of which are combined with the HSC exam results to determine which university course the student can take.

  Gothic fiction includes novels like Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein. In a gothic novel, you will often find: mad people locked in attics, secret passageways, monsters, murderers, ghosts and family curses. A beautiful young woman is likely to ride in a carriage through a bleak landscape, hear the toll of a distant bell, see a black crow, hear a rumble of ominous thunder, see drops of blood, hear haunting music, see a figure shrouded in mist, hear a blood-curdling scream — and it will all make her prone to fainting several times a day.

  PART ONE

  1.

  BOARD OF STUDIES

  NEW SOUTH WALES

  HIGHER SCHOOL CERTIFICATE

  EXAMINATION

  English Extension 3

  General Instructions

  • Reading Time — 5 minutes

  • Writing Time — 4 hours

  • Write using black or blue pen

  Elective — Gothic Fiction

  QUESTION 1

  Write a personal memoir which explores the dynamics of first impressions. In your response, draw on your knowledge of gothic fiction.

  Riley T Smith

  Student No: 8233569

  My first look at her was her name.

  It was inky dark blue. On a note they’d left stuck to my backpack.

  KNOCK ON THE SECOND RED DOOR, said the note. ASK FOR AMELIA.

  ‘Amelia, eh?’ said I.

  There’s a lot you can do with a name like Amelia.

  You can play with it, sure, is what you think I’m going to say. Make it cute (Amy), or cuter (Millie), complaining (Meelie), or French, I guess, like the movie (Amelie).

  You can step right into that name, is what I mean, and walk around. Swim with it or spill it on your shirt. Whisper it over like a sad, soft ache, or bark it out aloud like a mad, manic message: camellia, come heee-re, a-million, ah murder you, ye-eah.

  You can peel it off your backpack, fold it up safe, walk right past that second red door, or you can not.

  This was a few years back. I was 14 then.

  I was still looking down at the name on the note, while I headed to the second red door and I stopped with a fist in the air.

  And there she was.

  You think you know what I’m about to say, don’t you?

  You think I’m going to say: Amelia was just like her name.

  No. Amelia was a girl in a cute T-shirt nightie with a retro Ms Pacman on the front, and the sexiest thigh-high boots I ever saw. If Jesus were a bootmaker. And she looks at me with her eyes open wide and a face that says: Oh my god, I’m muckin’ around in my sexy Jesus-boots, in my crazy dreamworld, and I’ve opened the door and let you in on my crazy dreamworld and that’s so embarrassing but, actually, who cares? because it’s funny.

  And then we’re both laughing. There’s this rope-length of laughter between us.

  Funny thing is, even while I’m laughing, and falling in her eyes, a part of me knew she was a ghost.

  The first time I saw her I knew my Amelia was a ghost.

  Emily Melissa-Anne Thompson

  Student No: 8233521

  Lightning struck! There was a howling of wind, as if wolves roamed about, howlingly. Thunder crashed! Lightning struck again!

  It was the first day of Year 12.

  I had set out that morning with trepidation. I did not, in all honesty, see a crow, a raven or any other black bird on the way to school that
day.

  And yet! I was trepidatious.

  In part, of course, it was the Higher School Certificate looming like a monstrous entity at the end of the year. Not to forget the likewise looming of my future career in the law. (Or, anyway, the degree in law that awaited me at the wrought-iron gates of my future. A degree that could be locked in an attic like a crazed ex-wife if I did not do well in my HSC exams!!! But, by the by.)

  But no, it was more than that! Something about the impending day struck me as ill. Perhaps it was the gathering dark clouds? (I don’t think I actually noticed them because my dad’s car has tinted windows and I always think there’s a cloudy sky but it turns out to be the tint. So I’ve stopped bothering to look.)

  But maybe my subconscious noticed!

  At any rate, now it was recess — and the storm had come!

  And there I was on the green velveteen couch in the Year 12 common room at Ashbury High, which is in Castle Hill, 40 minutes drive north-west of Sydney if you take the M2, while the thunder howled! And the lightning struck! And generally the weather rattled around, as if it had to carry gothic chains behind it!

  I chatted with my friends, Lydia and Cassie.

  ‘There is a deep foreboding within me,’ I said (or words like that, not exactly that), ‘that my new shampoo doesn’t actually bring out the honey highlights in my hair like it says it does!’

  Lydia shook her head at me, slowly, cryptically.

  It could be that she meant: ‘No, Em, don’t worry. I see plenty of honey highlights.’

  But I doubt it.

  Cass reassured me that the shampoo worked. But she wasn’t really looking at my hair!! She changed the subject, saying that there’d been a snake in the doorway of the music rooms that morning. (A snake! Gothic.)

  Lyd said she’d heard Ms Wexford killed the snake with a saxophone.

  ‘Seriously?’ I cried.

  Lyd gazed at me. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘It was already dead,’ Cass explained. ‘A kookaburra probably dropped it there.’

  Then Lyd spoke over my mild hysteria to say this: ‘Hey, did you hear there’s two new people this year? A girl and a guy?’

  TWO NEW PEOPLE THIS YEAR??!!

  Strange time to be changing schools. Year 12!! The final year? Why now?!

  In all honesty I think my skin crawled a little. But it might have been the scratchiness of the velveteen couch.

  ‘Seriously?’ Cassie said. ‘Where from?’

  ‘They’re in my home room,’ Lyd commented (ignoring Cassie’s question — why? Why?! Perhaps she did not know.) ‘They’re together.’

  ‘Together, you mean, like, together?’

  ‘Yeah. Since they were 14 or something.’

  Strange! Most highly strange.

  Lydia told us several facts about the couple. She must have chatted with them at rollcall! Unlike her! She is not shy, but she is suspicious and therefore a bit of a reservoir with strangers.

  And yet, something was missing. What was it?

  Of course.

  ‘What’s their names?’ I said.

  ‘Amelia and Riley,’ was my friend’s reply.

  (Did she tremble a little as she said that? I know not. Probably not.)

  ‘Riley and Amelia.’ I swapped their names around. It seemed wrong, the order Lyd had chosen. There is always a correct order when you say a couple’s names.

  And yet — was my order right?

  I think it was.

  Riley and Amelia.

  The names quivered before us.

  At that moment, three things happened:

  There was a roaring sound. (The rain was suddenly heavier, as if someone had held the volume down on the remote so that the room was now aghast with sound.)

  There was a clanging of bells. (Our school bell ringing for the end of recess.)

  There was the creeeeeeaaaaking of a door. (The door to the common room opening.)

  We turned as one, the three us.

  And I think that we felt chilled to the bones. (In all honesty, I myself did because the open door was letting in a draught.)

  For there, in the doorway, they stood:

  Riley and Amelia.

  I knew, at once, that it was they.

  Lydia Jaackson-Oberman

  Student No: 8233410

  There was the first time I saw this exam question.

  It happened just now.

  ‘The dynamics of first impressions’, said the question.

  ‘Are you serious?’ I replied. (The supervisor frowned at me for talking out loud.)

  My first impression of this question is that it sucks.

  Nothing has happened so far to change my mind.

  There was also the first time I saw them.

  It happened in rollcall, the first day of the year.

  He had a pair of swimming goggles slung over his shoulder. She had bloodshot eyes. He sat on the window ledge, facing the room. She turned and pressed her forehead to the glass to look out.

  They were talking to each other.

  I remember he called her Ame. Like aim. Like a command. And I thought that her bloodshot eyes were looking out the window for a target.

  I remember she called him Riley, like his name could not be touched.

  They both had wet hair, only hers was brushed back into a long ponytail. From behind, I could see that the ponytail was leaking: thin watershadows formed on her school shirt.

  As I watched, he rubbed his hands over his head. He was friendly and rough with his head, as if it was a dog. Now his hair stood up in spikes.

  And then something happened.

  She reached a hand towards him and he reached his hand towards her, but his eyes found the eyes of strangers in the room. Their hands almost touched but did not.

  I saw cobwebs in the slender, empty space between those hands.

  Later, at recess, I told my friends about them.

  ‘There’s two new people,’ I said — and a storm rattled the windows of the room.

  I said they’d been together for years. I said they were swimmers. I said they trained every day, and that swimming was her passion but he went along just to swim beside her. I said she had a secret that was breaking his heart.

  Everything I said was based on my impression of Amelia and Riley at the window in the classroom.

  But nothing has happened so far to change my mind.

  Tobias George Mazzerati

  Student No: 8233555

  A blast of rain like a sudden loss of temper. Thunderclaps that feel personal. Hailstones the size of sheep.

  Or practically that size.

  It’s a mad kind of weather that they have in this country, to be sure. I’m an Irish lad, been here in Castle Hill these past two years — and today, as the storm rages around me, I can feel a darkness looming.

  Night terrors have haunted me lately. Strange, dreadful visions of Maggie’s face: she laughs and then her smile contorts into a scream.

  Och, my Maggie, the sweetest, hottest girl you ever saw, and I left her behind.

  When I said goodbye, I promised that I’d write once a day. Maggie said she’d write every hour.

  Her eyes, I couldn’t see them for the tears, as she swore she’d find a way to come here too. She’d find a leprechaun, she said, but she’d not take his gold coin, for it’d only turn to ashes in her hand.

  ‘Ah well, then,’ I agreed. ‘Don’t be taking that.’

  ‘I’ll take his silver shilling instead,’ says she. ‘It’s magic, the silver one, and returns to your purse each time you pay it.’

  Eventually, she’d have a stockpile of silver, and then she’d buy a ticket and come.

  ‘Why go to the trouble,’ says I, ‘of finding the leprechaun? Just grow yourself a pair of wings and fly.’

  ‘Tom Kincaid,’ she says, and flicks my wrist, but it was good to see the spark behind her tears.

  She’s not written to me for almost a year now, but I keep writing.

  I wrot
e about the snakes in Castle Hill the other day. You can’t walk anywhere, I wrote, but you’ll fall over a snake. (That was an exaggeration.) They’re not venomous, I added next, so she wouldn’t worry. (But the black or brown ones, they’ll likely kill you.)

  Do you remember, I wrote last week, the day we lay side by side on the grass, and you told me your wee brother was learning to count? The little one would say, ‘one, two,’ and then ‘six, seven’ and ‘nine, twelve’, for he hadn’t yet put it all together.

  ‘Imagine the world of numbers that way,’ you said. ‘A great unfolding mystery is what they are, with chasms of wonder between.’

  I laughed at you, but I knew what you meant, and I held your hand, and we looked at the sky and our thoughts flew together, the way that they do. ‘Those clouds,’ we thought, ‘are a great unfolding mystery, with chasms of wonder between. And the same,’ we thought, ‘is our future.’

  And our hands tightened like to something fierce.

  Today, I wrote, Dear Maggie — and the thunder roared — there are heatwaves here so powerful that birds fall dead from the air. Days when the sky turns black with bats, driven in swarms by hot winds. They swoop down, these bats, crowd onto trees, and a constant, rhythmic thudding begins as they drop dead or dying to the ground.

  I tore that letter to shreds, and there it is now in the mud. For louder even than the crashing rain is the constant, rhythmic thudding of my heart. I know what is coming, and it’s darkness.

  I know that the future is gone.

  Och, and when I think of how they shaved my head, clapped irons on my ankles, and sent me away to the ends of the earth for the rest of my God-given life — they got me for stealing a sheep — and when I think —

  Not to mention, I have just noticed that the exam question asks for a personal memoir.