Creepy and Maud Read Online Free PDF Page A

Creepy and I are both protected by the window but we have to be careful: our security is diluted by the space between. Sometimes I long to shut the curtains on Creepy to defend myself, or him, or both of us. Sometimes I watch him and wish he would turn to stone.
     
    He is always reading and he writes on the pages of his books. I wonder what marks he leaves on the pages. I imagine him to be succinct. Yes and no and why, and perhaps he cross-references, too, because I have seen him throw down the book he is reading and grabanother and rifle through it in a keyed-up sort of way. He is most graceful with his books. It is when he is most present: the light hits him differently and he is suddenly all gangling elegance.
     
    His reading excludes me. I do not like to read. Reading confuses me. I think I am the kind of person who would really enjoy reading, if I were capable of it. It must be like living in your head with other people there as well. Like company you can turn on and off at will. Like real friends, maybe.
     
    I am not stupid. I can see the words and I can read them, and the sentences go by and the paragraphs build up, layer after layer, but then something weird happens. It is as if I get saturated. I get to a point where all the words and sentences and paragraphs that made perfect sense going in start to bang into one another and get muddled, and then it just lodges there in a headachy mess. A fat wad of unsolvable words that might as well be a foreign language. I drank a glass of milk once and then had to be sick. When I vomited it up, even though the milk had only been inside me a little while, it came out all lumpy and sour. That is what happens when I read: words go in and sit and curdle.
     
    So when I watch him read, I am sort of jealous. I like that he wrote me a quote from a book and put it in the window. Yesterday he wrote another one: ‘Myinstincts are all against a woman being too frank and at her ease with me,’ and then he told me it was by someone called Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I smiled because I knew he was saying how much he liked me. I smiled because it was funny, too, given the situation.
     
    I am not frank or at ease. People think I am frank but what they mistake for frankness is just uncertainty. Nanna once said that uncertainty looks a lot like frankness to the untrained eye. ‘Watch out for anyone who begins a sentence with “I have to be honest...”, or “I must be frank...”, because you’re about to take a bullet!’ She was right. Nancy says ‘I have to be honest’ a lot.
     
    My mum and dad are very frank with each other. You would be frank if you were a disappointed person. You would have to be. You would hold on tight to all that disappointment and use it to gouge your way through the day—gloom a weapon and a friend. And you would be honest with everyone but yourself, and any hesitation you felt about impaling people with opinion and candour would be turned to stone by the little Gorgon inside.
     
    Drawing is a different kind of honesty. I think I am good at it. The drawing, not the honesty. When I draw, it is like that dark glass I see through clears just a little bit, and then some more, and then some more. The lines Iput on the paper are like knives that cut through the bog in my head. All the little pieces of me come together, as if I am drawing a net and gathering myself into it. The net is not a trap, it is good; it puts me together in one place. I draw myself sometimes and when I look at the drawings it is not bad or ugly or scary that I see. It is not the Gorgon. But then, when the drawing is done, the glass darkens and I hardly recognise myself.
     
    Like I said, sometimes I draw myself, but mostly I draw other people. No one knows that. I have the drawings folded small and hidden under a bit of lino in my doll’s house. It is like the people I draw live in there—my little restricted environment. Maybe I have caught little pieces of them, the people I draw, the