Joined at the Hip

by Natasha West

  ‘I don’t need your help! Get the fuck out of here! You’re just making everything worse’ she said angrily.

  ‘Yeah’ Jamie agreed. ‘I can’t think of many situations that have been improved by fire. So don’t be a twat and get off home. Your Mum’s probably waiting to change your nappy’ she added with a short, nasty laugh.

  Henry looked from Molly to Max to Jamie. Then back to Molly and back to Jamie. It was a nightmare come true. The robber was like the horrible girls at school, the pretty ones with the perfect blonde hair, the ones who ripped the piss out of him. And Molly was on her side, so it seemed. She didn’t think he was a hero. She thought he was a dickhead.

  Jamie and Molly watched as Henry’s face began to go red and blotchy. And then his eyes became wet as he tried to blink back large, angry tears.

  Jamie started to feel bad. The kid actually had a lot of nerve confronting ostensibly armed robbers with nothing but hairspray. And she’d obviously hurt his feelings. Boys, she thought. It’s way too easy to emasculate them. Just as she was considering taking back what she’d said, Henry threw the hairspray angrily on the floor. It bounced away with a tinny clatter.

  ‘You two are both just, just, just…’ he stuttered. Everyone waited patiently. ‘You’re both…’ Henry tried again.

  Molly had tried to be patient with this crying boy, but she didn’t like the idea that he was about to lump her in with the person who’d tried to rob her.

  ‘We’re not both anything, as a matter of fact. I’m nothing like this thief’ she said with a nod at Jamie. ‘I work for a living!’

  Jamie, despite the fact that Molly’s description was essentially accurate, was suddenly and oddly outraged.

  ‘Oh, that’s all I am, is it? Just some dumb little thief?’

  Molly turned to Jamie and blinked at her, incredulous.

  ‘I’m very sorry, would you like me to describe you some other way? Perhaps you collect stamps as well as robbing mini-marts? Should I have said thief slash philatelist?’ Molly asked sarcastically.

  ‘MEAN!’ Henry interrupted, finally finding the word. ‘You’re both mean. And you’re the same.’

  ‘WE ARE NOT THE SAME’ Molly and Jamie cried in unison.

  ‘Yes you are! You’re exactly the same! Horrid and nasty and selfish! And it would serve you right to be stuck with each other, having your pointless argument forever!’ Henry said, surprised at his own outburst. It wasn’t only the fact that he’d spoken to Molly like that, which he felt bad about immediately. It was more the way he’d felt when he said those words. A weird feeling behind his eyeballs. He didn’t like it.

  And it wasn’t just a feeling in his head. It seemed to spill out into the world. Because on that final word, ‘Forever’, a rumble began beneath everyone’s feet. At first it was merely a low growling sound, but then the floor began to shake. The shelves began to rattle. A tin of peas fell from a nearby display and rolled across the floor.

  Jamie, Molly, Max and Henry had no idea what was happening. Biddlesworth wasn’t really known for its earthquakes. Perhaps some colossal articulated lorry was passing by? But as they all looked around the shop and out of its windows, nobody could find a visible source of the vibration.

  Jamie, who’d been standing behind the counter with Molly, suddenly lost her footing on the shuddering floor and reached out to steady herself on the counter. She grabbed its edge, feeling something stick out underneath it that seemed to push in with her grip. It didn’t take her long to figure out that she’d just pressed a button. Or what that button did.

  WEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAWWEEEEEEEAAAAA!

  The shaking seemed to have finished but it had been replaced with a screaming security alarm. Everyone clapped their hands to their ears as the sound flooded the small space.

  For Henry, the audio assault was the last straw. He ran from the shop, as fast as his legs could carry him, away from the noise and his own shock and embarrassment. The weird feeling in his head was beginning to pass, thankfully. But still, he wanted to go home.

  Max watched him go and thought the kid was probably onto something. He turned to his sister, crying out ‘Jamie! We’re going! Now!’ and followed Henry’s lead out of the door.

  Jamie made no attempt to argue. Not only had she started this stupid situation, now she’d set the alarm off. It was a fuck up too far. She began to follow Max out of the shop door, twenty feet away from the counter.

  Molly watched her start to run, relieved that everyone was finally leaving. It was all over. She stepped out from behind the counter, ready to lock the door once Jamie was gone.

  But as Jamie got halfway to the door, something peculiar happened. She felt a sort of pull at her waist, as though someone had crept in when she wasn’t looking and attached a bungee cord to her belt. It yanked her back with a shocking force, causing her to fall backwards and slip back along the tiled floor with the sheer power of the jerk. She sat up and looked around, trying to understand what had just happened. There was nothing. There was no reason she should have just pinged across the shop floor like a rubber band.

  But as she looked back, trying to see what had caused this weird occurrence, she noticed something. Molly the Till Girl. She was lying on the floor too, wearing a look that Jamie knew mirrored her own. She looked stumped.

  But Jamie didn’t have time for any of this. The alarm was still blaring. The cops would be here any minute. She stood and tried to move forward again. And this time, it wasn’t a yank, it was a drag, like she was pulling a heavy weight.

  She looked back to see what was pulling her and saw that as she slowly trudged forward, Molly was sliding across the floor on her back, legs kicking in the air, dragged by an invisible force, screaming ‘What the fuck IS this!’

  Jamie stopped walking. Molly stopped moving. Jamie looked down at her, annoyed.

  ‘Points for this. As tricks go, it’s surreal. Now will you get whatever see-through Spiderman webbing you’ve attached off of me and just let me go?’

  Molly didn’t really hear her. She was too confused. She stood up from the floor and dusted herself off, saying ‘Is this another part of the robbery? It’s not enough put a gun in my face? You’ve got to drive me out of my mind as well?’

  Max popped his head around the door.

  ‘Sis! What’s the delay? There’s blue lights on the horizon, figuratively speaking. We gotta go!’

  Jamie glanced back at Molly and said ‘I’m going now, alright?’

  Molly shrugged and said ‘Please, do!’ and Jamie took that to mean that whatever weird thing she’d just done was finished with. She turned and began to run.

  Molly watched her go and just as she got about twenty feet away, it happened again.

  SNAP!

  This time, Molly and Jamie, stayed on their feet but that was even worse because they slammed into each other, their heads bumping against one another, sounding like coconuts cracking together.

  ‘Stop it!’ Molly shouted, rubbing her forehead.

  ‘You stop it!’ Jamie yelled back.

  Max watched this strangeness and whatever questions he might have had were obliterated by the distant sound of sirens. He didn’t think any further about what was going on or why. He didn’t even try to figure out if it was real. It was just another problem and he decided quickly how to solve it. He ran into the shop and said to Molly, with bottomless sincerity, ‘I am so, so sorry about this’ and grabbed her by the waist, throwing her over his shoulder.

  Molly was livid at being tossed over the Clown’s shoulder and immediately began to beat her hands on his back, shouting to the world ‘I’m being abducted! The Clown and the Pig! The Clown and the Pig!’ But angry as she was, she couldn’t fight Max’s size.

  Max took the painful hits with small whimpers as he ran past his astonished sister and out of the shop. But she didn’t have long to gawk. Her body quickly followed the pair, pulled by the waist against her will.

  As she got out of the shop, she heard the police sir
ens. They were close. But there was no time to scan the horizon. She had to keep going. There was no choice in it. She was being pulled down the street, following Max and his furious hostage. He was explaining ‘I’m not going to hurt you’ as she smashed her palms into his back, clearly not employing the same policy.

  Jamie didn’t understand what was going on with the weird force that was compelling her to follow Molly but there was no time to think about it. They had to get away. She decided to simply allow the force to do what it was doing and go with it, at least for the time being.

  Max managed to get Molly into the back of the car, snapping the seat belt over her and saying ‘See? I don’t even want you to get whiplash. And as soon as we disconnect you and my sister, I’ll drop you off. Cool?’

  Molly made a lunge for Max’s face but he jumped quickly back and shut the door on Molly, locking it. Molly went straight for the lock on the door but she couldn’t get it to release.

  ‘Child safety lock. Save your energy for ripping my throat out later on, when we’re out of this mess, alright?’ Max explained, as he got in the driver’s seat, joined on the passenger side by Jamie.

  Jamie looked into the back at Molly and immediately wished she hadn’t. She was beside herself with fury. It was scary.

  ‘You two are in so much fucking trouble’ Molly screamed at her captors. ‘I’m gonna make sure you both get hanged for this. I don’t care if we don’t have it in this country anymore. I’m going to get it reinstated!’

  Jamie sighed deeply and turned to her window to keep an eye out, glad of the chance for a breath, as Max started the engine and sped away from the Quick-Snack.

  Ten seconds after they were out of sight, a police car came around the corner, its lights and sirens at full pelt. Someone had called in an alarm and the two officers in the car were ready to take on whatever robbery might be in progress.

  But all they found was an empty Mini-Mart with a cacophonous alarm bleating away. On the floor of the mart was a tin of peas, a broken toy gun and a can of hairspray.

  Sargent Archie Skipple, the older of the two, turned to his young protégé, PC Joey Compton and said ‘Well. I’m fucked if I know what this all means.’

  Four

  About twenty-five minutes later, Jamie and Max were standing on the hard shoulder of a motorway, looking into the back of their car. Molly was staring right back at them. She looked unnervingly serene.

  The first twenty minutes of their journey out to the quietest road they could think of had been laden with verbal abuse from Molly, as she listed the various consequences of this abduction, legal or otherwise, from the back of the car.

  Jamie and Max had decided not to engage with any of it. There was no need. This wasn’t a kidnap. Or if it was, it was a temporary one. More of a ‘Borrowing’, Max decided.

  But then Molly had gone quiet. Somehow, that had been more disconcerting than the threats.

  And now Max and Jamie were looking at Molly, sitting calmly in the back of the car, watching them watching her, deciding whether it was a good idea to let her out. Max’s back still hurt from the pounding it had taken earlier.

  ‘Do you think she’s calmed down a bit?’ he asked out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘I don’t know’ Jamie replied out of the side of hers.

  Molly suddenly rapped on the window and they both jumped a little.

  ‘Look’ she said evenly, through the glass ‘if you’re looking to get some ransom money, my Mum could give you something. But she’s really, really tight so keep the amount reasonable. Otherwise you’ll find yourself haggling and you might as well give up once that gets going. Also, don’t bother about posting her any of my fingers. She comes from the Eastern Bloc so that sort of thing probably won’t rattle her-’

  ‘No, no, don’t say stuff like that’ Max protested, thoroughly ruffled. ‘Nobody’s getting ransomed!’ he finished and opened the door.

  ‘Max!’ Jamie cried out in warning. But it was too late. Molly was out of the car and running.

  ‘You’re damn straight no one’s getting ransomed’ Molly cried over her shoulder as she began to run away from the car, down the road, looking for any approaching headlights.

  But of course, she didn’t get very far. No more than twenty feet, in fact. And then the force put a hasty halt to her progress. ‘Aagghh’ she cried as she was yanked back toward Jamie, falling down in the mud.

  Unfortunately for Jamie, she didn’t think to ready herself for the impact, so she was also snapped forward, running and then falling over headlong, right on top of Molly. Molly let out a surprised grunt as she felt Jamie’s weight land directly on her solar plexus. She began to wheeze, the breath knocked from her. Jamie rolled off Molly quickly and sat her up as she tried to take a breath. But Molly couldn’t seem to catch hold of one and she started to panic, desperately trying to drag air into her lungs.

  ‘You’ve had the wind knocked out of you. That feeling, that’s your nerves spasming. Don’t try to fight it. It’ll pass’ Jamie explained patiently. ‘I’ve done it enough times to Max to know.’

  Max nodded sympathetically, saying ‘She learned it from wrestling on TV. It’s her go-to move.’

  Molly heard them through the panic and found a little assurance. She tried to slow her inhalation and eventually, the pressure began to ease. At last, came a full, deep breath. Once Molly felt alright, she turned to Jamie.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ she asked, angrily. ‘You could have broken my ribs.’

  ‘I didn’t do it! If anything, it was your fault. You tried to run and that… thing kicked in. I couldn’t help it! I was pulled off my feet.’

  ‘What thing?’ Molly asked, playing dumb. But she wasn’t dumb at all. She knew what was happening here. She was attached to the Pig. Or Jamie, as she’d heard her brother, Max, call her. She was connected to Jamie by some invisible force. That much was obvious. The problem was that she couldn’t make sense of it.

  Molly liked to read and she didn’t restrict herself to any genre, so there was a healthy dose of fantasy in her literary diet. And in those books, these sorts of things could happen. An invisible force attaching two people was par for the course within the fictional realm. But this was no book. This was shitty reality, a place devoid of even the merest smidgen of the mystical. Molly would have loved some magic in her life, like most people. But believing it could really ever happen? That was for kids. And she wasn’t a kid anymore.

  Consequently, Molly could not absorb the idea of this. It fucked with her entire worldview. If this could be true, then what were the rules of the world? Were there dragons? Did little green men come down to Earth to abduct country bumpkins? Were there witches in the woods, waiting to lure her into their gingerbread houses? It was ludicrous.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ Molly stated calmly, trying to keep her head amidst this craziness. If she could hold onto reality, there was chance that it might stay in place, unchallenged.

  ‘Yes you do’ Jamie replied. She’d had the same adverse reaction to all this that Molly had had. But Jamie was a practical girl, in the truest sense. She believed what she saw, even if the thing she saw was sheer lunacy. And she’d had the car ride to come to grips with it. So she’d sped past the ‘Grappling with large philosophical questions about the nature of reality’ stage. And now she was at ‘How the fuck do we fix it?’ But that was as far as she’d gotten.

  ‘Look, I don’t pretend to know what this is and how it happened-’ Jamie began.

  ‘That bit’s easy’ Max interrupted. ‘It was that kid.’

  Jamie and Molly looked up at him from the dusty ditch they were still sitting in.

  ‘What?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘You know, the kid. He… what do they call it? Curse! He definitely cursed you.’

  Jamie stood up and Molly followed suit.

  ‘How would a teenage boy be able to do that? Isn’t it more ‘Wizened old crone’ territory?’ Jamie asked Max.

>   ‘I don’t want to get ‘Mansplain-y’ or anything but that kid said something about you two being stuck together forever, then there was that rumbling and then…’ he gestured at Jamie and Molly.

  ‘You’re both nuts’ Molly interjected. ‘Stark staring barmy.’

  Jamie turned to Molly, tired of her scepticism. There wasn’t time for it.

  ‘OK, tell you what. I’m going to stand here and you walk away from me. And then we’ll see what happens. And if it’s what I think, this debate is over. Agreed?’

  Molly wasn’t sure she did want to make that agreement. But her doubt was still matched by her incredulity. She had to believe she could walk away from Jamie if she wanted to. She needed to believe it.