I would say, concretely, that I am not a killer, I am scared of true crime documentaries and I don’t know how to handle a knife, but she made me animalistic without sense or empathy. When I was younger, I had been entranced by the scene in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan in which Nina is having sex with Lily, only to look down and realise that she’s having sex with herself. When I watched this scene on YouTube, where someone had illegally uploaded it, I felt my cotton underwear damp. I looked up and saw her face laughing at me in my childhood bedroom mirror adorned with polaroids of my family. Now, I relished the scene where Nina, dressed as the seductive black swan, impales the docile, meek white swan version of herself with a mirror shard, sighing with pleasure until she feels the hole in her stomach. I imagined myself goading my double out from an attic which I’d sealed off with duct tape, with memories, sprained with ego and avoidance. I imagined her crawling from the top of the house, angry and dirty, defiling my clean furniture where the light felt comfortable and warm to bask.
In 2020, while everyone was shut in their homes with their demons, I spent most of my time outside, running along the River Torrens, feeling my hair flap in the wind and seeing nothing but my own reflection in the murky brown water. The world was frozen, but for me, life was perfect clarity. I wrote down the beginnings of a story in spare moments between work, where I was being underpaid but enjoying every second of it. I had become everything that I had ever wanted. And though there was darkness, my fracturing from Mum and Dad, death and the foreign minefield that was becoming my body, I was solid, in a sense. But then, the ghosts. I thought of all my dead relatives – Big G, Gong Gong, Taai Poh – stalking the hallways as I slept. In my dreams, Big G pleaded with me to pray, be aware of death and not to betray God. She was afraid of everything and clutched her book of memories to her hollow chest. And the ghosts of my childhood, unwanted and uncontrollable as a typhoon. She, the part of me I couldn’t avoid, encapsulated this mess and agony, reminding me that there was no progress without remembering. The unwanted warmth of someone else’s body in the darkness, the arrogant smell of cologne, the eyes of God which could see through walls. If I hid from her, I would see these memories in the corners of my eyes when I was brushing my teeth or making dinner.
In 2021, I believed I was being haunted and consulted Poh Poh on FaceTime from Hong Kong. Poh Poh said that ghosts swam alongside her when she crossed the sea from Hong Kong to China. She felt guilty as their bodies drowned in the current and hers made it across to dry land. Since then, they had lived inside of her. Mum always said that she wasn’t a superstitious person, that these beliefs were for uneducated people. In Australia, people didn’t believe in ghosts even though they were living all around us on Stolen Land. Mum hated how Poh Poh believed tea leaves could tell the future and that stinky ointments would cure her early-onset baldness. She told Poh Poh to stop telling me to shower to wash myself free of spirits. The curse in our stomachs was the one superstition that Mum truly believed. It was something she held on to because she needed something to blame her misfortune on. I thought of Dad’s purple and how it bruised us. Did she not believe in that too?
‘But Poh Poh, is there any way to rid ourselves of ghosts?’ I asked, the line faltering because of my grandmother’s terrible internet.
She watched me stoically, pixelated on the other side of the screen. She didn’t say anything for a few moments, and I thought she was frozen, until she eventually answered, ‘No.’
I would say, concretely, that I am not a killer, I am scared of true crime documentaries.
In our culture, there was no understanding or acknowledgement of trauma, not really, unless it was in a Chinese opera where the swan princess escaped the ugly frog. Her sadness was painted in white make-up with red blushed cheeks. A single tear drop would roll down her cheek when she reached the final crescendo. I could never understand why Mum and Poh Poh would cry for this swan woman when her story was all her own doing – following a strange man into the woods and leaving her family behind even though they loved her. They both would sob at these operas, but never about their own troubles. Complaining was only for people who had the privilege of having nothing else to think about. Mum kept her troubles in the walk-in wardrobe with old shoes and the clothes we saved for holidays. Poh Poh, in her cooking, and at the prayer altar which blazed at sunset. I let the other version of me carry the load, but as the memories started to emerge in the present, I could feel her legs buckling. The ghosts of my family became angry and visited me in dreams where they were not welcome, as if they were a warning sign for things to come. I flipped the photo of Gong Gong on my bedside table to stare at the wall.
When I sat in front of my computer at a different office, in a new role, where my body had become more bloated and hostile, I spent hours on Reddit, laughing at the absurdity of men who couldn’t keep girlfriends or cats that looked like humans. On Reddit, the only place where you could ask any question, I scrolled r/Ghosts, where believers of the paranormal congregated to talk about the scary faces they found in the back of photos or the invisible friends they had as children who were actually demonic spirits. I waited until my manager went on her coffee break and typed out the question into the gaping white text box:
u/usernameredacted: question… is it possible for another version of urself from another dimension or realm to haunt u? since I was young, i felt her presence behind me and could c her in the flesh… is this normal? or do i have a carbon monoxide leak or something? Don’t tell me im crazy or anything, coz i’m definitely not! Just want real advice. Thanx!
The range of answers I got were twofold: that I had serious mental health issues, or that many people were frightened of themselves. A woman in Idaho said that her reflection refused to stare back at her and a man in Tromsø shared that in order to get rid of the double, you must kill it. Someone recommended watching the Christopher Nolan movie Interstellar. It wasn’t on Netflix, so I streamed it on 123movies at 480px where the buffer was disrupted with ads for free iPhones and a million dollars. I watched it balancing my laptop on my knees. The Reddit commenter said that sometimes, in a space-time continuum, you can find yourself in another dimension. I didn’t understand the science behind it all, but seeing Cooper the astronaut watch himself through another dimension was disarming. Cooper’s present self, the one floating in space in a wormhole that resembled a bookcase, was stuck, unable to scream or alert the past self to return home. I felt my abdomen wail, imagining a gaping mirror shard pierced straight through.
When I first met A, I didn’t tell him about the double. On our first date, when we shared a plate of salty noodles and beef brisket at BBQ City on Gouger Street, she sat in the corner, desperately waiting to be part of our moment. But I would never share my love, especially when that love was with someone who was so pure and unbroken. A belonged to me, and for the first time, I felt someone protect me from her. I would often forget about her altogether.
I deleted my browsing history with any mentions of ghosts and curses. When I called my grandmother, we only spoke about the boats cruising through Hong Kong harbour and the collection of porcelain birds she had begun to collect in her tiny shoebox apartment with no fresh air. The manuscript sat on my desk, growing in pages, perfectly contained in this moment of time when someone slept softly next to me, their chest rising and falling as if nothing was trying to get out.
This is an extract from Plastic Budgie by Olivia De Zilva (Pink Shorts Press), available now at your local independent bookseller.
