INTRODUCTION CONTRIBUTORS ABOUT

Vertigo

Marnie Jordon

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen her. Nonetheless, Susanna remains just the same—perched on the wall, looking down at me, face youthful and flushed. There’s something about sitting in a gallery looking at a portrait that makes me feel like I’m in a Hitchcock film. There’s something haunting about the idea that you’re looking at a painting, because there’s something about it that reflects back on you. It’s just as quiet in the room as it was last time, the silence only broken by echoes of footsteps on the polished floorboards. Susanna almost blends in with the furniture—the ornate chairs and the wooden table, even the fireplace, all staged as if someone would inhabit the space.

In a way, she does. Her and the man on the other side of the table. 

Susanna looked at the man on the

other side of the table.

She had remained in place—

opposite him—for so long, too long, 

and she didn’t know any different.

She had never gotten to know him,

never dared to question who had been

sitting at the other end of her dinner

table, who had been coming to

breakfast?

The first time I saw her, my friend and I were transfixed by portraiture. We dreamed up stories and talked of star-crossed lovers. We dreamed up a life for her and the portrait of the man beside her. Two people painted at different points in their lives. Their portraits left to hang side by side, wholly by coincidence, in a gallery, decades after they had taken their last breaths. The girl depicted before the two had even met. The man, after he had moved on and found another life without her—one of grandeur—left reminiscing over what they had lost. Perhaps a secret love, a past buried along with all the little moments they shared.  In reality they had never met, but in our heads they had. 

It was unusually hot for a spring day, but the warm breeze in the garden was a welcome one. Susanna’s dress left a curtain of pink satin sprawled across the grass, reflecting sunlight in waves. Her head laid on his lap, book in hand and too engrossed in the story to notice much how he threaded his fingers through the strands of her hair. She had grown it out since she was but a teenager, taking the time to put all the little ties in her hair before bed to replicate the kind of ringlet curls that had become popular. It seemed like a lot of work, but he always complimented her and admired them the next day, making her efforts just the slightest bit more worthwhile.

In the meantime, before the illusion was shattered, I had dreams of pink ribbons and white organza. I imagined new tales for her—swashbuckling adventures and tea parties and fairweather friends.

The ship was quiet at that midnight hour, gas lamps providing the only light and the lull of waves the only sound besides the faint snores of one of the crew. Jimmy—a stout man with pronounced crow’s feet that, like his cheery mood, never really faded—had claimed with unwavering surety that he had never snored in his life, though everyone was in silent agreement that he was the culprit. 

Susanna stood by the small window in her quarters, watching the twinkle of stars that paint the sky, lost in thought. She had yet to change into sleepwear, still dressed in her daytime ensemble: the top layer of her dress replaced with a fitted coat, her corset peeking out over the neckline and her layered underskirts tied at the sides with pink satin ribbons to lessen their volume. She wondered what would happen if she fell into the waters outside the porthole window still foggy from the spritz of saltwater. If she just tumbled under the waves, how much would her skirts have weighed her down?

Now I’m here to see Susanna, two years later, in the same room and the same place—the same people sharing her wall space. This time however, I pay more attention to the details. Soon enough I come to find that what I originally concocted to be some star-crossed-lovers, eclipse-of-fate tale in my head isn’t that at all. I suppose that happens when you think the two central characters in your daydream were born the same year, only to find they were in fact only painted the same year but retain something like a thirty eight-year age gap.  This time, when I dream up her story it’s a little different—I get this eerie feeling, unnerved.

Who is sitting at the other end 

of the table?

She had thought it was a man 

she knew, admired, trusted.

Now she’s not so sure,

not so sure at all.

So she shares her meal with a 

stranger.

A stranger who lives in her 

house, shares her belongings,

eats at her table.

Susanna was only a teenager when she was immortalised in frame, with wide eyes and a youthful flush to her cheeks. How can you expect to capture a whole picture of a person at only fourteen? 

I remember what that felt like, being fourteen. Figuring out what you like and where you fit in the world. I remember reading Lolita at that age—I picked it up because it kept being referenced in Pretty Little Liars—but once I started it, I couldn’t stop until I found out how it would end. It gave me the same feeling as when you cannot pull your eyes away from a car crash. That’s how I remember fourteen: like something out of a Sofia Coppola film, with that same dreamy nostalgic feeling, soft warm lighting and hazy iridescent quality; that age where you aren’t a child anymore but you’re not an adult either; getting cat-called for the first time on a street I hadn’t walked since I was little—that used to remind me of sunny afternoons and gobstoppers but now meant something different. And the little pink dress I couldn’t look at anymore, its neckline all of a sudden too low, is reminiscent of how Susanna’s dress sits in the painting. Fourteen is the perfect, plump, pink roses Susanna’s holding, which I imagine just days later would have been crushed and wilting, as fleeting as the time to our next birthday.

Susanna had her whole life to find her place in the world. To change her mind one time, two times, a hundred times over. To grow into herself and to become a woman. To be taken off the pedestal she was painted on. 

This time she’s looking back at me. But she’s no longer fourteen and wide-eyed, her face is flushed for another reason. I’m hanging from the edge of a roof and she’s the one trying to push me off. It must be a nightmare, or maybe it’s hers. Maybe she’s sleepwalking. Except that her eyes are wide open.

Regardless of the details, my palms are too sweaty to retain a grip on the scrape-y metal of the gutter and my fingers struggle to find purchase. 

And down, 

down

 the rabbit hole, I go …

We all have stories that make up our past; childhood memories and people of significance, both of which have an impact on who we come to be. I imagine hers much like I remember mine.  

When I was only very young my grandfather gave me two copies of Alice in Wonderland, by accident I think. He had picked them up, as he often did most things, from a garage sale or a market. Around that time I had seen a movie. I can’t remember the name of it now, but I do recall a woman had been given an inscribed copy of Jane Eyre by someone she loved before they passed away. 

In the film, she accidentally donated the book in a box of other things, and consequently spent years looking in every second-hand bookstore for the one with the inscription. Of course, as it was a rom-com, she told the love interest that story when asked about the extensive collection of Jane Eyre copies she’d amassed, perfectly setting up the ending where he managed to find the book and give it to her in the inevitable end-of-movie, dramatic, confessing-their-undying-love scene.

So I started to collect Alice in Wonderland books, picking up pretty, illustrated editions from bookstores and worn-in, aged copies from markets until I had more than anyone logically should. My grandfather has passed away now, and every year there’s to be another Alice in Wonderland under my Christmas tree ‘from Grandpa’. Another present from a person who’s not here. Another anecdote. Another story weaved into my life, with a synthesised, third-act, perfect movie pay-off. If you don’t take the opportunity to tie things up in perfect ribbons, no-one’s going to do it for you. I wonder if that’s what I’m doing now? Imagining ribbons that aren’t there to tie up Susanna’s life with a bow.

Susanna Gale let out an awful wail.

For an heiress she was awful careless.

When her foot hit that stump,

She went down with an awful

 thump.

When I’m stuck for ideas in the stories I write, I often look to the old movies I grew up watching. Imitating the imagery, analysing the dynamics, considering the plot structure. The order isn’t always the same and the circumstances and the details differ, but it still seems to come out a jumbled mess of some movie or some book or myth—something I’ve heard and seen and loved. 

Vertigo, for instance—I haven’t seen the film in a while but I still remember all the key moments: Kim Novak falling in the river; Jimmy Stewart hanging off a roof; a graveyard with an open grave and a church tower beside it, the one people keep falling off of. And then there’s the classic poster: the spiral and the man caught in it, falling to his doom. Central to it all, in my mind, is the woman staring at a portrait of her grandmother, who was just as mad as she is. Except that she’s not mad and it’s not really her grandmother. In fact—spoiler alert: it’s all a lie. A part of a husband’s plot to get away with killing his real wife. And that moment, sitting in the quiet, open space of a gallery looking at a portrait, is what strikes me now. It strikes me that I’m living that moment, staring at a portrait of a girl I never knew, imagining my own version of her life events. My own story for her to star in.

 Hemingway said, “the only kind of writing is rewriting”, and sometimes I wonder where the stories I consume—like an ever-hungry caterpillar, stuffed full and still greedy for more—end, and the stories I create start. Sometimes I even wonder where my stories start and where I begin.

The longer I look at the portrait on the wall, the more I start to wonder if it’s the girl in the painting that stars in the stories I write or if it’s me. So I stare on and I watch her, like she’s Carlotta Valdez and I’m living a Hitchcock film.

But the twist always comes—it’s all lies, made-up and fabricated for a narrative. All dreamt up in my mind and interwoven with my own truths and fears: fear of missing out, of not having stories of my own—anecdotes to crank out in twenty, forty, sixty years’ time about the ‘good old days; fear that all my stories are not my own at all, that my skin will remain polished, absent of the scrapes and marks that litter my friends' skin as they tell stories of their own. I’m left feeling something akin to an emotional vertigo. I’m not sure I really know up from down. But it doesn’t change anything. Everything still ends the same. It’s still just a portrait in a gallery. Susanna’s still dead and gone. And I’m still a liar.

Here lies

Here hangs

 Susanna Gale

 and beside her, chest torn open, is the writer.

A reflection of your hopes and dreams and a manifestation of your nightmares.

It’s awfully final when I leave this time, seeing something in a new light tends to feel that way. I wonder who else thinks about her, makes up stories about her. I wonder who else is looking. I wonder who else has been here with me the whole time. 

As I move to leave, I bump into someone I don’t know and wonder if they see her too.