The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“Keep it moving, keep it moving! Whatchou want, huh?” someone barks on my left.

My eyes wide with terror, I spin again, hunting for the speaker.

“Who said that?” I raise my voice. “I can hear you!”

Nobody answers me, but still I hear the voices, talking amongst themselves, little snippets of conversation that I can almost understand, but not quite.

Another whiff of air brushes past my other cheek, and I close my eyes, feeling whatever it is pass through me as though it were a summer breeze.

“What is this?” I ask myself. “What is this?”

When I open my eyes again, I’m standing in the middle of the drawing room, but it’s not the drawing room. It’s overlit with glaring white lights that hum overhead. Most confusingly of all, it’s packed to the gills with total strangers.

They’re gathered around small tables I’ve never seen before. All Mother’s carefully chosen fixtures are gone, the horsehair sofas and the occasional chairs and the hulking marble mantelpiece with the gilt-framed mirror. Or rather, there’s a mirror where the gilt-framed one used to be, but it’s spotted and chipped, and someone has written on it, what looks like a long list, with words that don’t make any sense to me. Like Latin, but not Latin.

Calzone. Pepperoni. Mortadella.

The oil chandelier is gone, and instead it’s as though the whole ceiling were lit from within by white light that flickers, but not the way a candle flickers. The smell of food is mouthwatering.

But who are all these people?

I stare at them, and none of them pay any attention to me. They’re all different ages, dressed in the most bizarre way. Some of them look like they aren’t even dressed at all. Girls in camisoles lean over tables, their bodies loose, their hair flowing down their backs. They’re with boys, most of them, and they’re all eating with their hands. It’s like a kind of savory pie, only without a crust. They all act like it’s completely normal that they’re there, eating breakfast in my mother’s drawing room.

Panicking, I grip my skirts in my fists.

Where did these people come from? Who said they could be in our house?

“Who ARE YOU?” I scream.

Nobody answers me!

“Tell me who you ARE!” I bellow, rushing up to one of the tables.

There’s a girl sitting there, one of the ones who’s left the house in her nightdress as far as I can tell, and she’s bending forward and laughing, and I can see all the way down her bodice. She’s completely unlaced, and if Mother knew this prostitute was in her drawing room, I don’t know what she’d do. She’d call Papa, and she’d call Winston, and if they didn’t come she’d beat the girl bloody with a fireplace poker herself.

“You can’t be here!” I shout in her ear.

The girl just keeps laughing and talking, chewing with her mouth open.

I put my hands on the table between them, leaning into their conversation. The boy is just as bad. He reeks like a French waterfront whore, and his hair is so short it looks like he’s been lately shaved for lice. Neither of them takes the slightest notice of me.

“Get out of my HOUSE!” I scream at the top of my lungs, and I take hold of the table where they’re sitting, grab it with both my hands and make ready to hurl it away, crashing it across the room in a righteous fury.

“Annatje?” someone says softly.

I look up, my eyes crazed with violence.

Mother is standing by the sliding door of the drawing room, her hand resting on the burled walnut that she chose for the wainscoting. She is giving me a curious look.

Panting, I look down at my hands, and find that they are resting on the card table that Mother left out from Papa’s whist game last week. No one has been in the drawing room since then. There’s a round stain where one of the corporation men left his sherry glass without a coaster. It looks dried and gray in the morning light.

“Is everything all right?” she asks me lightly.