She relocked the door.
The girl left that night for Sydney. It was back when there were no border closures, when you could move across the country with your new Irish boyfriend and not think about it.
She hadn’t expected to be gone as long as she was. She got busy! Life! Her relationship didn’t work out but she met new people and visited old friends and acquaintances. She tied up some loose ends. She had a few cash windfalls. She even did some charity work. She ‘reached out’， as the Americans said, to her famously successful brother, and he was kind, and they agreed they would get together once this crazy world returned to normal. He said he never wanted to see either of their psychotic, fucked-up parents again, and she understood. Neither did she, really, but she was a devoted daughter just like her mother had been a devoted mother.
She kept the key on a chain around her neck. It seemed important, essential even, to keep it close. It demonstrated her love.
‘Going back home?’ asked her muscle-bound seatmate as the plane began to taxi towards the runway. It was a time when people everywhere were going back home. The man had gentle dog-like eyes over the top of his mask.
The flight attendant demonstrated what to do if an oxygen mask fell from the ceiling. First remove your mask. The virus will no longer be your main concern!
‘I’m visiting my mother,’ said the girl.
There were many ways a resourceful senior citizen could have, should have, may have, probably had freed herself from a locked bedroom. Kicked down a door. Banged on the window. Called out to a neighbour. Shouted to a neighbour – the bedroom was on the second floor and faced a brick wall, but still, it was possible. A child could study a window made of thick glass effectively locked by layers of ancient impenetrable paint between the sash and the frame and find no way to break or open it, but a grown-up could find a clever solution. If I was a grown-up I could get myself out of here: that’s what the little girl had once thought. She had longed to be a grown-up, with money and food and agency, but she was a kid, just a kid who dreamed of a beanstalk she could climb to get out of that room and into the sky. She didn’t want the giant’s gold. She wanted the giant’s dinner.
She still felt helpless and trapped, no matter what actions she took in her increasingly desperate attempts to make the pain stop. She knew her memories did not fade like other people’s seemed to fade and she accepted that, but she didn’t get why the pain intensified the older she got and the further away she got from those times.
‘Me too,’ said the guy next to her. ‘Is your mother on her own?’
‘Yes,’ said the girl. She knew what he meant, but she thought, We’re all on our own. Even when you’re surrounded by people or sharing a bed with a loving lover, you’re alone.
A friendly neighbour might have called in to check on her mother after a week or two or three had passed, although if you required the concern of friendly neighbours, it helped to be a friendly neighbour yourself.
So maybe not.
Or perhaps her mother was in bed right now, peacefully unwrapping her last delicious nutritious protein bar, sipping from her last bottle of water, floating away on a choppy endless sea of television, just as her spoiled daughter once did when she slipped free of the cruel hunger pains and into other realities and other lives.
Perhaps her mother had created a sitcom version of herself.
The girl imagined a plump, smiling version of her mother bustling to greet her, wiping her hands on her apron, pulling her close. ‘I woke up that morning and had a good old laugh! You locked me in, you little minx!’
Perhaps the house would smell of sugar and butter and love.
Perhaps it would not.
‘My mother and I are going to isolate together,’ said the guy. ‘She has autoimmune issues, so she has to be careful. It’s scary.’
‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘So scary.’ She touched the key around her neck. ‘We have to keep our parents locked up right now.’
A demented laugh rose in her chest and caught in the air between her mouth and her mask. She breathed fabric in and out and thought of a plastic bag pulled tight around her head. Her seatmate didn’t notice. He didn’t know the truth about the girl seated next to him, sharing his exit row responsibilities. Masks were so great. So useful and protective. Nobody knew what went on behind them. She could be any type of person she chose to be, any type of person he needed her to be.
The pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom. ‘Cabin crew, please prepare for take-off.’