We sped from the city. The road spun out beneath the wheels and the tall silvery trees on either side seemed to shrink away from our path. Scattered stars blinked cool down from behind a torn and ragged screen of cloud. I remember there was no moon. The breeze feathered my hair and my hand instinctively went to the bare patches on my temples. I cast a nervous glance at the driver but she didn’t seem to notice, absorbed in the road unlike any woman I had ever seen. I watched her hand tease the knob of the gearstick. I can’t think of that now without feeling the same sensation of hypnotic arousal, a kind of drugged lust I’d never felt before. I couldn’t take my eyes off that strong yet childish hand—bereft of rings or varnish—wrapped around the gear stick. You could say I was beginning to enjoy the ride.

It was over all too soon. She turned into the long narrow street that carved through the reserve and there I was—hard and sleepy and far away from the hated city and I almost didn’t tell her when to stop.

“Is this it?” she asked, slowing.

I didn’t remember giving her the street name before we left, but I must have. She peered through the windscreen with her hair lashed around her face from the drive. I felt a sudden surge of irritation with her for being so plain. Her crooked teeth and wide gash of a mouth made her plainer than a girl had a right to be. Her friends had been so pretty. The very thought of them, of what I could have had, made me almost hate her, to somehow blame her for the way they turned me down one by one. I had tried to stay calm, in control. It was my job to know that life was a numbers game, and it was just a matter of time before my number came up.

“Soon,” I said, in what I hoped were my most seductive tones. She shivered at the sound of my voice, shivered in anticipation. She probably didn’t get seduced all that often. I let my irritation—at her, at myself—wash away in a wave of pity. Pity for her or for me? It was hard to say.

Her friends had left her alone at the bar. She hadn’t tried to get along with them. I’d been watching. Women should try and get along together like flowers in a garden. But she didn’t seem interested in that or in anything except for the Sex in the City reruns playing on a monitor over the bar. Eventually she’d volunteered her name.

“Hi, I’m Amanda.”

Scrawny little thing with her lipstick on wrong and those close-set eyes burning into me. They were too round or something. I couldn’t work it out. I wondered hopefully how drunk she was. I hadn’t been with a woman in a while, and, numbers game or not, the desperation was getting to me. Maybe it was that that led me—unbelievably—to invite her back to my place? Not my place in the city, where people know me, but my parents house in the suburbs. No one would see us there.

“Are you inviting me?” she’d asked.

Well, I’d wanted to say, if it wasn’t an invitation, I didn’t know what it was. But instead I’d answered with a kind of grotesque leer:

“Only if you drive.”

I’d never let a woman—and once upon a time there had been plenty—near the wheel of my car before. But there I was, roguishly waving the keys to the Porsche at her. Pathetically flirting like some desperate letch with hair transplants instead of a six-figure numbers cruncher who’d once had women lined up like flowers in a row. Ready for the picking. Flowers that would never wilt or die.

Now I may be an over-paid accountant, but by the way she actually had to think about my invitation—to think about it! —you’d think she was Jaylo instead of a runty little skank alone on a Saturday night.

I remembered how her round dark eyes had widened and she’d licked her chapped too-wide mouth as she thought about it. Her teeth looked as though some joker had thrown them at her mouth. I wanted to turn away, as I wanted to turn away from her now, disgusted at what had become of me.

I pointed her toward a steep driveway approaching on the right. Amanda’s crooked teeth gleamed softly between lips parted in a half smile and there was a faraway look in her eyes as she manoeuvred the purring Boxster up the driveway. I was becoming mesmerised by this girl.

My legs felt heavy as I got out of the car and led her up the steps to my parent’s house: an ugly brick Victorian. She stood back to let me unlock the door and there was a rapt expression on her face.

“It’s lovely,” she said.

I shrugged. I was suddenly aware of how terribly young she was—standing there in the porch light with her eyes wide and messy mouth hanging open. How naked she looked. How far away from home.

“Come in,” I said gently, no longer caring to seduce her but not wanting her to leave either.

She took a step forward and suddenly her body was up against mine with a force that took my breath away. I sought her mouth. My hands moved along her body—her ribcage, her breasts, cool buttocks beneath the cheap dress. She met my probing tongue with her own: rough and sweet. The tip raked the roof of my mouth. She pulled away and I gasped for breath, and again at the wrongness of her features and the way something surfaced suddenly in her eyes and peered at me as if it had come from a great distance.

I closed the door after us and took her by the hand. We went into my mother’s living room. I suddenly pictured bringing Amanda coffee in the morning, hot black coffee brewed in my mother’s pot. I would show her the tree I planted for Sissy. I’d never shown anyone before.

“Oh, it’s lovely,” she said again, admiring my mother’s collection of boxes arranged on the Jacobean sideboard. I switched on a lamp, and the soft light fell on boxes—filigree and cloisonné, and Japanese lacquer and Javanese fruitwood and an old kauri toolbox and a tiny ebony snuffbox with ivory inlay and a 19th century mahogany gun box. After my parents died, I’d had the collection valued at a small fortune, enough to go off and start a new life anywhere. But I still hadn’t sold it, or anything else in the house. I remembered my mother dusting those boxes with a look of concentration on her face not unlike Amanda’s now as she lightly touched the gun box with a blunt seeking finger, a finger probably greasy and sweaty from the drive. I ushered her toward a long mirrored cabinet that held my trophies. I’d earned my fair share of Rugby and cricket prizes over the years and my mother had put them in the cabinet beside my stepfather’s rowing medals. I’d always liked the way that the mirrored walls of the cabinet made it look like there were more trophies than there actually were. But they didn’t impress Amanda. I could barely get her near the damn things. She pulled away and went back to the boxes. Her indifference to my trophies offended me more than it should. Why should I care what this ugly little bitch thought? I watched her skulking in the shadows of the living room, looking like a broken doll that had been thrown away. She licked her lips again and her tongue flashed between those somehow alluringly crooked teeth. I needed a drink.

The long hallway stretched out before me like a vein. Once I had turned away from the lamp-lit living room, the darkness was almost total, but I didn’t need light to guide me. Halfway down I reached out my hand to let my fingers brush the locked door of Sissy’s room. My own room was further down on the right. I kept going, opened the door and ducked my head in to make sure that it was tidy: king sized bed, candelabra, gilt-framed mirror on the wall behind the pillows. I carefully shut the door again and went through the kitchen and outside to the cellar beneath the house. I wiped the dust off a bottle of my stepfather’s Cloudy Bay Merlot and stepped out into the garden. I stood there for a moment breathing in the dear, damp smell of the night—a smell I had always associated with this place. It would never let me go. The soft breeze ruffled the leaves of an usually tall gardenia growing by itself on the lawns that ran beside the house. It was not yet in flower and its leaves were a lovely ink in the starlight. I had planted it for Sissy all those years ago. It had been her eleventh birthday. I’d mowed lawns through a summer and delivered papers one whole winter to be able to afford a shrub mature enough to be beautiful for her right away. It was in flower when I planted it. It gave her something wonderful to look at from her wheelchair: all those blue-green leaves and crimson petals. I remembered how beautiful she looked as she watched me dig the soil—how her hair caught the sunlight and her skin seemed translucent: unreal. But what I will never forget is the look on my mother’s face as I lowered the ball of spidery roots into the hole I’d sweated over, the slow look of terror that surfaced in her eyes before she squeezed them shut, refusing to believe. My mother never forgave me for planting that tree. But I couldn’t chop it down because it belonged to Sissy whose ashes, at her own request, would be buried beside it before the year was out. She waits for me there now, as beautiful as ever. Never wilting. Never dead.

I blinked the spreading stars back into place and forced myself to bound manfully up the steps back into the kitchen. I tried to hum and then gave up. I grabbed a couple of glasses and an opener, panting a little. I could barely stand up straight. The hallway was still in darkness and I shuffled past my closed door trying to concentrate on making it the thirty feet to the light at the end of the hallway where Amanda waited. But as I approached Sissy’s door I felt a slow chill creep up my spine and throb at my temples. The door was open. That ugly little snoop with her animal eyes and coiled little body must have found my keys. Starlight shone through the net curtains onto the quilt and the shuttered doll-house beside the bed. My mother had insisted on a vase of silk flowers on Sissy’s dresser. I’d always hated them: their false perpetuity. I looked down at Sissy’s worn plush giraffe and her favourite doll—a vile little Barbie spin-off also called Sissy—staring back at me from a heart-shaped pillow. The room was utterly silent but my ears were ringing.

Sissy’s room was the only one in the house that I always kept locked.

Rage scratched at my throat. I pulled the door closed with a free finger and started toward the yellow rectangle of light coming from the living room. I pushed inside and turned to face Amanda. She was gone. The room was empty. The mirrored walls of the cabinet winked at me mockingly. My keys gleamed from the mantle piece.

I stared at the wine in my crooked arm and the glasses in my shaking hand, feeling suddenly defeated: like the loser I surely was. What did a guy have to do to get laid around here? I was done in. The numbers unreeled in my head: how many rejections could I take before, before what? I couldn’t finish the thought, thinking only of Sissy waiting for me in her wheelchair. Getting closer.

A noise at the other end of the hallway shook me from what must have been a kind of daze. The sound was familiar but it took me a moment to realise that it was a door opening. I stepped back into the dark hallway, hearing the breath rasp in my throat.

“Amanda?” I called. The wine-glasses precariously clinked as I peered into the darkness. I started toward my sister’s room but even from here I could see that here door was still shut. I stood beside it and squinted blindly into the black passage. Suddenly a blaze of light bloomed from the doorway ahead and to my right. From my own room.

I started heavily toward it, feeling my eyes narrow. I came to the open, blazing doorway and stood for a moment outside the wash of flickering light. My fingers clutched the greasy stems of the glasses. My mouth went dry.

I stepped through the doorway. There is nothing like a shock to clear the mind the shock of what I saw instantly sharpened my senses to a knife-edge. I quickly counted twenty-three candles flickering from every possible surface. She must have raided the sideboard and the pantry while I’d been in the cellar, although how she lit them all so quickly confounded my accountant’s brain. Two fat pillar candles and five thin milky household tapers blazed from my dresser. Three tea-lights danced in saucers from one bedside table. Four gold floating candles bobbed in soup bowls from the other. She’d stuck my mother’s red Christmas candles into the Florentine silver candelabra on my desk. Crimson drops had begun to ooze down the melting pink faces of seven waxy Santas. Two aromatherapy burners glowed from the bookshelf. I should have worried about the safety of the books, and I would have, but all I could think about was the girl on my bed.

Amanda nestled against the pillows in her bra and panties with her legs curled girlishly beneath her buttocks. Twenty-three candle flames licked the perfectly formed little body. Her tight belly shone creamy in the light and the little chain at the navel flashed like a star. Her high round breasts were cupped in a black bra and I felt my knees buckle as I stared at her nipples straining against the lace. The wine-glasses slipped out of my hand onto the carpet. One smashed into three jagged pieces, but I didn’t care. She’d untied her dark hair and it brushed her shoulders in rough tendrils. Those strange round eyes smiled at me ravenously.

“Come here,” she said.

I saw my lonely reflection in the gilt mirror as I approached the bed: pale and a little stooped with receding blond hair and in need of a shave. I’d let myself go but that would all change. Tomorrow I’d be a new person: it was clear to me now that Amanda was my lucky number. I could feel her animal energy from here. I reached down for the unbroken wine-glass and poured some wine. I passed it to her. She took a sip and put it down beside a sputtering candle. She wiped a dark droplet from her lips and, as they parted, I saw those teeth again—crooked and slightly yellow. But I was way beyond caring about teeth. I pulled off my clothes and let them drop to the floor with nothing like my usual tidiness. I climbed onto the bed, hot from the twenty-three flames, burning with lust for this ugly little doll. I moved unsteadily toward her on all fours, feeling a little light-headed from the clashing, molten scents. I sank down beside her and we kissed and her tongue probed and her teeth gnashed against mine and I tasted metal. I pushed her away and held her unsteadily at arms length.

“Amanda?” I said and again heard my breath hitch in my chest.

“You invited me,” she said.

Her eyes slowly widened. The irises were burning black holes in a two oceans of blood. She grinned at me and her mouth was a red gash and I saw again how yellow her teeth were and how barbed and I knew then that the blood that spilled over her lips was mine. Then she took me to her and all I knew was surrender. Surrender to Amanda. To the claws shredding my skin and the limbs breaking my bones one my one. I saw rocks at the bottom of the wet red world. I fell into warm liquid that seeped into my nose and eyes and stung my shrivelling flesh. Amanda wrapped me in pain and the pain held me even as I fell. The pain was my blood now and in my shattered bones and soon would be my will and the bridge I would use to climb back into the world, yes, but on my own footing. I surrendered to the shuddering spasms even as I saw Sissy waving to me from her chair, but with what was left of my human strength I shook my head:

“No!”

I then lay still, consumed, and let my sister slip slowly away from me as if on a vast ice floe.