Dead Girls

by Abigail Tarttelin

  “What? When?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause I’ll get into trouble. With the police. And Mum’ll be angry.”

  “Is it…” I frown. “Is it about Billie?”

  “I can’t…” he says miserably. “You’ll…you’ll hate me.”

  “I won’t hate you.”

  “I really like you, Thera,” Nathan whispers. He comes close to me and hugs me again, but this time he hugs me from the side, and puts his head on my shoulder. “I think I’m in love with you.”

  I hesitate. I can feel need pouring out of him. The only person Nathan has in the world is his mum. I feel hot and pressured. I chew nervously on my bottom lip. “I can’t think about that right now, Nathan. My best friend is haunting me and I have to find out why.”

  “Sorry.” He stands up straight and roughly brushes his hand across his face, but it’s so dirty, probably because his mum doesn’t make him wash it, that I can see the tracks tears have left on his grubby cheeks. I don’t blame him. I don’t like washing either, and I probably wouldn’t do it if Mum and Dad didn’t make me.

  “Come on, don’t be sad,” I say. It’s sort of scary. I feel like, if I say anything bad to him, even that I don’t know if I love him yet, he’ll be really upset. And yet he can tell me he doesn’t want to be naked with me and I’m supposed to just not talk about it. I feel confused and annoyed.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbles again, his lip trembling. “So,” I say, “what did you do?”

  He shakes his head. His eyes are squished together and his whole body is stiff.

  “Nathan?” He’s not looking at me. I put my hand to his chin and then the other to the side of his face and pull it upward, forcing him to look in my eyes. “What did you do?”

  “Get off, Thera!” he shouts, his voice breaking, and pushes my hands away. I almost fall over. He’s strong, for just being thirteen. He starts to run again, across the field, toward the hole in the hedge. Why is he so upset? Does he know something about Billie?

  I race after him and jump through the hole a few seconds after he does. But then I slow down, because I see his mum. She’s next to the trailer, putting out laundry on a line. “What is it?” she snaps sharply.

  As he nears her, he almost stumbles backward, but then he shakes his head and goes for the trailer door. She grabs him by the neck of his T-shirt and looks at him, then me, then back at him. “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing!” I hear Nathan cry, and then his mum shoves him in the trailer and shuts the door behind them both, leaving the laundry basket out on the grass.

  As soon as I wake up at Nanny and Granddad’s, I normally run downstairs for toast and tea and then read the papers, but today I get to the mirror near the door to my room, and stop. My pajama bottoms are shorts, and now that I’ve grown a bit they are really quite short, and almost show my bottom, and I am starting to get very small boobs so they look like bumps under my top. Looking at my body and thinking about what a pervert would think of me makes me feel sick. I don’t want Nanny and Granddad to think of me as someone who a pervert would have sex with, so I get dressed. I put on my long denim shorts with the pockets (they are actually Sam’s but he’s not big enough for them yet) and a vest top, and then a T-shirt over the top. I am now too hot but you can’t see the bumps anymore. It’s eight by the time I pull on my socks, sit on the top stair, and bump my bum down all three flights.

  “Good morning!” I sing, poking my head around the door of the back living room, on the ground floor. The entire room looks dark with the books, but there is a ray of sun from the window and small pools of yellow light created by Granddad’s many reading lamps. Nan is sat under one at the dining table, and Granddad is beneath another, in his armchair. As he does every day, he reads the Telegraph in his blue silky pajamas and dressing gown. Granddad likes to read about history, culture, and politics, and Nanny likes to read the gossip stories about street fights and people raising money for palliative care at the hospital.

  Granddad taught me that word. He teaches me to spell five words every time I come to see him. This weekend they are: “uncharacteristically,” “monotony,” “post-prandial,” “liturgy,” and “enigmatic.” I have to recite the spellings on Sunday, before I go home. He says I might be a writer too, one day. “Oh, you’re up!” Nan says, turning around and reaching for me to squeeze my hand. Her hands are soft. I think it’s because she always does the washing-up.

  “Good morning, Thera,” Granddad says. “Help yourself to breakfast. I believe there’s toast, jam, and fruit on the counter.” He says the same thing every time I’m here.

  “Okey dokey!” I say, and skip into the kitchen. I fill the kettle and put it on to boil, and then dump out the old teabags, rinse the pot, and put in fresh ones. “Do you guys want tea?” I shout through.

  “We’ll both have another cup, dear!” Nan calls back.

  Granddad tuts. “My, my, Thera, you appear to have inherited your grandmother’s lungs.”

  I get the milk out of the fridge, then put some toast on. I prefer white toast, but brown toast is healthier, so today I’m having brown. The kettle boils so I fill the teapot and close the lid, and then the toast pops so I spread Lurpak butter and Robertson’s black currant jam on it.

  I cut it into triangles. That’s how Nan does it, but Dad cuts it into squares. I don’t do that today, because I’m not talking to him. He’s a bully, yelling at me. He’s like a killer anyway, even if he didn’t kill Billie, because he yells at me and Mum, so maybe he is evil. Maybe there are loads of men that are evil, only not Granddad. Or Sam. Or (hopefully) Nathan. I sigh sadly. Life is so complicated now. For a moment, I wish I could forget about finding Billie’s killer, but then I remind myself that I promised her and the other dead girls. How could I live with myself, anyway, if I didn’t find him? I would be a terrible friend.

  I carry my plate through to the table and open my latest book, taken from Granddad’s study, on historical ghost stories.

  “Do you want to go to the seaside on the bus today?” Nan asks.

  “Yeah, that sounds great. Um, could I go shopping on my own tomorrow?” I say nonchalantly, so she doesn’t think it’s suspicious.

  Nan sticks her nose up in the air and pretends to be snooty. “Does madam not want her nan with her?”

  I giggle. “No…I just wanted to be independent.”

  “Ah, I understand.” She jerks her thumb toward Granddad. “I often think I want to be independent of him.”

  Nan giggles and Granddad huffs. “Be my guest!” he says.

  “Are we looking for anything special?” Nanny asks.

  “Just a dress.” I can’t say “Nothing,” because that would be weird. “Maybe from Tammy or Internacionale?” I say. “Are those shops?” Granddad chuckles.

  I turn in my seat, eager to change the conversation topic. “Are you going to write today, Granddad?”

  “I might have a bash at it, yes, my dear.”

  “Cool! What are you going to work on?”

  Granddad’s books are for grown-ups, mainly, but I’ve read the seventh one, which is for children. It is called Dark Zoid, and the main characters were based on Sam and me. It’s an adventure story about two kids who meet an alien robot over a beta version of an expanded, futuristic Internet. Granddad’s stories are often about how technology will affect our humanity in the future.

  I take a bite of jammy toast and wonder if, one day, technology will make human beings able to live forever. Could technology be fused with a biological body, like in The Terminator? Could someone who was dead be brought back to life? How much rotting would they have to do to be too rotten to be brought back? Nathan Nolan sort of looks like Edward Furlong, who I’ve fancied since I saw Terminator 2 for the first time. Suddenly I realize Granddad has been talking and I haven’t been l
istening.

  “Wait!” I stop him. “Could you say that again? I wasn’t listening.”

  Granddad shakes his head and opens his paper up again. “The aged are invisible.”

  “Sorry, Granddad. I was just thinking about The Terminator.”

  “I was saying—I’m sorry if it bored your none-too-literary sensibilities—that I’m going to take a bash at a first draft of the chapter introducing Tashi Sangpo today.”

  “Is this the Chinese thing?”

  “No, it’s the Tibetan thing. One is not engaged in a ‘Chinese thing.’” Granddad doesn’t normally say “one,” but he is being uppity because I was accidentally ignoring him. Granddad’s vocabulary is enormous, though, and his books are very imaginative. He is also the wisest and most intelligent person I know. I think I take after him. “Tashi Sangpo is an impoverished Tibetan monk who wins a competition. The prize is to have his brain wired into ‘the cloud,’ a futuristic form of the Internet whereby he can control everything in his home and around him via brainwaves, but the price is his soul.”

  “Like he can order Chinese food and stuff?”

  “I’m not sure a Tibetan would feel the need to order Chinese food, but technically, yes.”

  “Granddad?” I say quickly. Nan has left the room to get dressed. I figure Nan won’t like this question, so I have a limited amount of time to ask it, but I need to, because Granddad is so smart and knows everything.

  “Yes, Thera?”

  “Um…” I go and lean on his armchair, and whisper, “I know Billie was raped and then strangled, but do you know exactly why the man killed her? Did he hate her?”

  Granddad clears his throat and speaks without looking at me, folding the paper up noisily. “I would suggest that a man who committed sexual assault on a child would have no scruples in doing away with his victim to avoid being identified by her and subsequently imprisoned. Now, I think I shall get dressed.”

  I pick at the threads on his chair without responding, then ask another question. “Why was she a bit burnt?”

  Granddad, now on his way to the door, turns and narrows his eyes. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I found her.”

  “She was wrapped in a sheet.”

  I dip my head so I am hiding behind my hair. “I had a quick look.”

  Granddad doesn’t say anything for a while.

  “Never mind,” I singsong in a high voice. Sometimes when I can tell people feel uncomfortable around me I do a baby voice, or a prettier, high voice. I’ve been doing it a lot lately. “I’ll go get ready for the seaside.” I walk past him, but Granddad calls after me.

  “Thera!”

  I turn back at the door.

  Granddad pushes his glasses farther up his nose. “Burning eliminates DNA evidence.”

  “Eliminates” was one of my words from a few weekends ago. It means “destroys.”

  In the morning, I make a list. I sit on my bed, with all my money from my piggy bank (£111), and a piece of Granddad’s paper in front of me. The bed next to me is empty. Sam is at home. I miss him. I take the lid off Granddad’s fountain pen that I borrowed from his study and I write my name and the date, and then I start thinking.

  Shopping list

  Sealed plastic freezer bags like the sort Mum buys for lasagne

  Nylon cable ties like on police show

  Wonderbra like Hattie’s

  Lip gloss

  Pretty dress

  Heels?

  Big rings? (to put on fingers so when I punch someone it really hurts)

  Mini tapes for Mum’s mini tape recorder

  Batteries for mini tape recorder

  Small sharp knife

  I sit back when I’m done writing and look at my list. I’m nervous, but I know I have to do this. I think some more, and then I hunch over the paper again and write:

  Why do I have to do this?

  I dip into my Tooty Frooties. I’ll just have one more before tea and cookies at elevenses. A purple one.

  Because Billie and the dead girls want me to do it

  So more girls won’t get killed

  So the dead girls will be at peace and stop freaking me out

  Because it’s my fault Billie was killed

  Which is true even if it’s not the walker; even if I just left her alone in the field and didn’t keep my eyes peeled for someone that might kill her.

  I guess I’ll also have a green Tooty Frootie. I munch on the candy.

  Like Granddad and Hattie said, ghosts only haunt you when they have unfinished business. They also only appear to people who can help them. My plan is already in motion, but so far I haven’t decided on the final aim. Does Billie want me to find her murderer to enact revenge, or does she want him to be killed so he doesn’t get anyone again? Or does it matter? It reminds me of a conversation Billie and I had a long time ago.

  We were at Billie’s house, having a sleepover, and we were about eight. We had spent all day playing Sylvanian Families, and we were in sleeping bags together on the floor, eating marshmallows and watching our imaginary fairies dance across the room, commenting on what they were doing. We decided they were best, true, forever friends, just like us.

  “We should write a convent of friendship,” I said. (When we had finally written it and I took it to Granddad, he corrected my spelling to “covenant,” but I was eight so I was really little and didn’t know better, when we were talking, than to say convent.)

  “Whazzat?” Billie said.

  “It’s basically what best, true, forever friends do.”

  “That’s a SPECTACULAR idea!”

  “Shush, Billie!” Her mum’s whisper came through the wall from her parents’ bedroom.

  We made the covenant of friendship up in our heads first, then wrote it down the next day, and Billie added illustrations. We made ten sentences that made up a BTF friendship. Number one was total honesty. Number two, I’m pretty sure, was that you would die for them. Number seven was that you could scream for them and they would come running immediately.

  Billie chortled. “Ahhhhh, Thera!” She let out a bloodcurdling cry.

  “Billie!” Billie’s mum hissed again.

  “I’ll always protect you,” I said to Billie.

  “With your kung fu fighting, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-daaaaa?” Billie sang, and karate-chopped the air. Then she pretended to stroke her chin beard. “Or with your big old brain?”

  “My brain, Pinky. Innnndubitably!” I said. (Thinking about it, this is kind of what I am doing now.)

  We started to chant the theme tune from Pinky and the Brain, which is on Nickelodeon. “Pinky and the Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain!”

  And then we added number eight, which was that, if we did get murdered, we would avenge each other’s deaths.

  “Thera!” Nanny’s voice yells up the stairs. She really has some lungs on her for being seventy. “Elevenses!”

  I race to the landing and lean over the bannister. “Coming!” I shout back as loudly as possible.

  Then I go quickly back to the mission notes and write down one last thing on the list of whys:

  Because I promised her I would

  I underline it. Twice.

  In the afternoon, I went on my shopping trip, and got everything I needed. I spent half my savings: fifty-four pounds and thirty-six pence.

  The Wonderbra was the most difficult thing to get on my list. The knife was hard enough. The man in the first shop was old and grizzly looking, and it was a small shop. He didn’t have a lot to do, and thinking back I’m pretty sure it was a mistake to just walk in there, test the points on the knives, then say, “Ouch! That’s perfect,” and put the sharpest, longest one on the counter to buy.

  He frowned at me. I looked u
p from counting out my pounds and knew he was onto me immediately. I smiled to make him feel comfortable (earlier Nan said I was starting to get an intense look about me, and I needed to flex the corners of my mouth a little bit), but he came around the counter anyway. My smile dropped away as he came toward me. I looked at the counter. I wanted the knife, but he was a bit scary and he had knives in his shop. I gulped and clutched my money tight, ready to run. “Come here, dearie,” he said, and he frowned more, like he was about to do something horrible to me, and I screamed and ran out of the shop, my backpack making a fah-lump, fah-lump noise on my back. My scream was so high-pitched I’m surprised it didn’t break all the glass in the shop windows. He didn’t run after me. I flew across the pink and blue tiles into the heart of the shopping center, the sound of my sneakers slapping against the tiles startling everybody I ran past.

  Next I decided to try and get the bra, so I went into BHS and poked their boob-holders. They didn’t really have anything like I wanted, and then the saleslady came over and made me jump.

  “Do you need some help?” she said.

  I thought about it. My cheeks were bright red. I could feel them. I didn’t know it would be this embarrassing to look at bras. I guess it’s because they are about sex. Anyway, I said, “Nope” really quickly and laughed, and got on the downward escalator.

  Next I went to Marks & Sparks. They had a much bigger selection. No one was around, so I put one on my head in front of the mirror. It looked like a flying helmet. I tied it under my chin with the bits that go over your shoulders. Now I looked like a pilot. I made pilot goggles by putting my thumbs and pointing fingers together on both hands and tilting them back so my palms were on my face.

  “Hello,” a little lady said suddenly.

  I guess I was still geed up from the knife man, because I jumped.

  “Oh my goodness, you look terrified!”