‘Did you just tell her it was her fault he went away?’
‘No! She asked me. It must be in a book she’s reading.’
Flushed from running, Helen brings a pebble back. It’s definitely not the one I threw for her.
‘Did Lizzie just tell you something?’
Helen nods. ‘But it wasn’t my fault, was it?’
I throw the rock, but my sister isn’t looking in the right direction. She’s gazing at the couple with their dog.
‘It’s her birthday. Her special day.’ Rebecca always takes Helen’s side.
‘I was only joking.’
When we get back to number eleven, Rebecca won’t let me go up to the shop with Helen. She says I must leave my sister alone and stop harassing her.
‘I don’t believe the things you’re capable of sometimes,’ she snarls every time she looks in my direction.
In fact, Rebecca makes me feel so bad about my little joke at the beach that I feel duty-bound to make an effort with my sister this afternoon. So I help put icing and decorations on the birthday cake. The icing is delicious, with a squeeze of lemon juice to counteract the tooth-numbing sweetness of the sugar, and a circle of chocolate buttons around the outside edge. In the end, however, there aren’t enough Smarties for a circle around the candles, so I scatter the remaining ones randomly over the top.
Helen comes back from the shop carrying a pink fluorescent water pistol. She stands in the kitchen. The pistol dangles listlessly by her side.
‘Come on! Let’s play Police and Thieves,’ I say, pretending to be excited. ‘I’ll be the thief! Fill it up with water while I run into the garden and hide.’
‘I don’t want to play.’
My sister seemed quite happy in the car on the way back from the beach. She kept talking about the dog called Tripod, and the number of lugworms she rescued from the jaws of fate. She didn’t seem to mind about my little joke. Now she looks miserable. I start to suspect that she’s putting on an act in order to make me feel really bad in front of Rebecca. She knows I’m in trouble for my comments about dad. She can be cunning like that around grownups.
‘Give it to me. I’ll show you.’ Given that it’s cold weather, and that I’m allowing myself to be the thief on this occasion, I fill the barrel from the hot tap. ‘Race you out there! Can’t catch me!’
I run into the garden and wait expectantly by the shed.
Finally she pokes her nose out of the back door.
I’m starting to get bored with this game.
‘Shoot me!’ I shout.
‘Why is ten too old?’ she asks, not bothering to shoot.
‘What do you mean? Of course it’s not too old. Come on, shoot me!’
She gives a half-hearted squirt with the pistol, then turns and goes back indoors.
****
Sat 5th November
Every year, the bone factory throws its gates open for:
The Annual Bonfire Night Party!
Free to All Residents of The Village!!
Children Welcome!!!
No Dogs!!!!
A fortnight before the party, the official invitation always comes through our letterbox, embossed with a frame of stars and accompanied by an information leaflet, signed by the manager, about the benefits of British bone processing. It’s the same leaflet every year.
Heaps of branches bounce around precariously on top of the bone trucks as they trundle towards the village and turn onto the flat road. Out of my bedroom window, as I put the finishing touches to the voodoo doll I’ve been making, I watch the trucks disappear around the bend into the factory yard.
British Bone Processing is beneficial because it ensures that every part of a British Farm Animal is put to productive use. Processed bones are a central component in fertilisers for use on British Farms and glue for British Schools. Rendered bones have been used for centuries in the manufacture of essential items such as tallow and soap. Few of us know that the lard in our favourite cakes is made using Bone Rendering Processes (BRPs). The distinctive odorous emissions associated with bone processing contain no harmful toxins and do not affect children or animals. Fugitive emissions are tightly regulated and ambient odour levels are maintained throughout the year. The managers of the plant take Good Housekeeping very seriously!
Every year when our invitation comes through the letterbox, Rebecca gives her annual Bonfire Night speech. I call it her Bone-Fire Speech. The party, she says, is a cheap and shameless publicity stunt on the part of factory management. It’s designed to bribe residents into tolerating the stench that permeates their homes for the other 364 days of the year.
This year she says ‘bribe.’ Last year she used the more succulent word, ‘seduce.’ Bribe floats. Seduce drips and cuts.
Rebecca is a hypocrite, though, because every year she happily goes along to this shameless publicity stunt, eats at least six of the free baked potatoes filled with melted butter and cheese, drinks copious beakers of the free, piping hot punch, then stands in the crowd craning her neck, cooing ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ at the fireworks, even the miserable ones that fail to explode properly.
I always try to stand as far away from her as possible.
We wrap up in our warmest old coats and walk through the village together. I give my voodoo doll a little squeeze in my pocket, trying to avoid the pins sticking out of its torso. The thud of music coming from the other side of the creek pulses in my stomach with a soft boom.
Rebecca’s wellington boots are covered with creek mud from my last bottle-hunting trip a few weeks ago. The wellies slap against her legs as she strides along the road.
‘Come on, girls, hurry up!’ she keeps saying.
Parents push wide-eyed toddlers down the hill in prams, or drag them along in harnesses. Everybody except us stops at the Mr Whippy van in the pub’s empty car-park to buy ice-cream and toffee apples. Whenever cars try to get past, a reluctant channel opens up in this thick, sticky, licking human lava.
As we pass the pub, I fire a quick question at Rebecca in order to catch her full attention. ‘Have you discovered any more interesting Edwardian poets recently?’
‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I have.’ Her face takes on a contented, far-away look as she starts to describe the work of a man called John Moray Stuart-Young, eighteen-eighty-one to nineteen-thirty-nine. I need to keep her talking because if the landlord of the pub chooses this moment to come outside and comment on all my trips to the bar with lists in Rebecca’s handwriting giving me permission to obtain half-bottles of this and half-bottles of that on her behalf, then I will be under a great deal of pressure to come up with a believable story. I run through the options in my mind:
1. The poor disabled man with the walking frame gives me money from his pension to buy alcohol for him because he can’t walk to the pub.
2. Mrs Nelson sends me down for cocktail ingredients.
None of this explains the signed notes in Rebecca’s handwriting. I would be hard-pressed to explain myself if I get caught on this occasion.
Safely past the pub, at the bottom of the hill we merge with the families who flow out of the council estate and walk, shouting and laughing, towards the party.
An orange glow flickers on the other side of the creek. Violet and blue beams of light stream up from the factory, crossing over, dancing complex patterns in the sky.
‘I hope nobody burgles us while we’re out,’ Rebecca comments in a loud voice, looking around suspiciously at members of the crowd we’ve just joined. ‘Tonight would be a perfect night for it, with the whole family away from home.’
‘But we haven’t got anything to steal. Not even a telly worth nicking.’ Helen matches Rebecca’s pitch decibel-for-decibel. ‘You can’t beagle a house that hasn’t got anything inside it!’
‘Burgle!’ I say.
‘Actually, my collection of Edwardian poetry has become rather valuable over the years,’ our mother says. ‘As I’ve been telling Lizzie, my personal library takes
a lot of effort and resources to maintain.’ She describes the newest addition to her collection, a Stuart-Young book called Minor Melodies which cost £80 and took more than three years to locate.
Helen snorts.
My ears prick up. ‘So how much are they worth exactly?’ I ask.
‘On a specialist market, rather a lot.’ She smiles proudly at me.
‘What do you mean by specialist? Where exactly would you sell them? Does specialist mean only one person is interested in the books, and that’s you?’ I can be quite droll at times.
‘Oh, I’d never sell them! I don’t know exactly how much they’re worth. Thousands, probably. You can both find out when I die.’
The Nelsons navigate through the crowd in their white Cortina. I wave, but Mrs Nelson is too busy applying lipstick to see me. Katie looks like a nodding dog in the back seat, looking out of the rear window, paws up in begging position, head swimming from side to side, hypnotised by the swell of people.
We turn onto the flat road and walk past the hidden entrance to my bottle-hunting territory. Helen keeps dragging her feet, looking over her shoulder back down the road, then scouring the crowd ahead of us. She’s hardly said a word since yesterday.
Occasional gulls flash over our heads, their wings brief blades of light making incisions in the sky.
We pass the spot where Katie lost her handbag and purse, and I try not to look at the place where I hid the bag. I should have made more of an effort to retrieve it and dispose of it, but other projects took priority. I picture it lying half-buried in the sodden ground.
We turn the corner and arrive at the factory gates. A large banner, drizzled with fairy-lights, bawls ‘welcome!’ in enormous letters.
The factory yard echoes with laughter and chattering voices. Flames lick and spit through the base of a giant bonfire at the far end of the site, well away from the warehouses. A giant man is strapped to the top of the pyre in a chair. He sits, gazing out over the crowds. Laser-lights dance frantically along the grey corrugated length of the warehouse. A bouncy castle nearly the size of our house hums and wobbles, dwarfing the terraced row of Portaloos wafting disinfected signals through the crowd.
Up by the main gates, Katie Nelson’s pit has been fenced off and covered with tarpaulin. Men in fluorescent jackets stand at each corner to ward off the children.
‘It should be an especially impressive fireworks display this year,’ our mother says, ‘to compensate for what happened to Katie.’
‘Hello Rebecca,’ Mrs Nelson walks with tiny footsteps over to where our mother stands. Mr Nelson follows in her wake. His arm is slung casually around Katie’s shoulders. Katie smiles contentedly. She’s wearing a turquoise winter coat with a fluffy collar, and her head bobs out of the top like a buoy on the creek.
Mrs Nelson is wearing a beautiful coat the colour of fire which shimmers and flashes under the lights in the factory yard. I stroke the coat admiringly. She feels like a giant teddybear. I want to rub my cheek along her upper arm. Even in the darkness, the fur shines as if expensive hair conditioner has been massaged into its roots.
Helen mutters something about murdered animals and moves away to stand on the far side of our group. She can be extremely rude. That’s why our dad held Polite Parties, in an attempt to nip attitudes like this in the blossom before they flowered. I try to cover up for my sister’s antisocial behaviour by wrapping a tight string of compliments around Mrs Nelson’s lovely coat. Beaming at me, she explains that she’s painted her fingernails a matching colour, and her boots are the same shade of fox-fur red. She holds out a row of trembling fingers, and a pointed toe peeps out beneath the hem of her coat. But the bone yard is too dark to see how carefully she’s coordinated her footwear this evening. I pretend I can see it. I tell her she looks like Barbara Streisand.
Examining her own fingers, Rebecca wonders how Mrs Nelson manages to keep her nails in such good condition without chipping them.
In spite of her coat, you can tell Mrs Nelson’s still cold because her hands are trembling and she keeps rubbing them together.
While Mrs Nelson tells Rebecca to eat two cubes of raw jelly every day, to avoid gardening, and to have a regular cuticle routine, Katie detaches from her father and drifts over to Helen. I move towards them. We stand huddled for a moment and then move purposefully away from our parents.
‘Be careful!’ Mr Nelson calls. ‘You three stick together.’
When we get over to the bouncy castle, Katie immediately starts to kick off her Nikes, but I’ve spotted two of Those Three Girls from my class deliberately using the other children as landing pads. They haven’t spotted me yet. I know they’ll be delighted at the arrival of my softflesh body.
Backing away as slowly and discreetly as possible, I explain to my sister that Katie and I are far too mature for children’s fairground games. She will have to go on the bouncy castle alone if she wants to play with all the kids.
‘I will then.’ She stares out into the crowd for a fraction of a second, then her shoes join the heap of footwear at the entrance to the castle and she leaps into the spaghetti bolognese of arms and legs.
Helen has lost a great deal of respect for others since her birthday last Thursday. Her old quiet demeanour has been replaced by a brand new attitude. I’m suspicious.
Katie gazes at the bouncy castle.
‘You stay there and watch until I get back,’ I instruct her, wrapping my fingers around the voodoo doll.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the toilet. Won’t be long.’
I leave her fidgeting with her shoes and start to stride purposefully towards the Portaloos, then I veer away and walk through the crowd towards the fire.
The guy waits patiently for the flames to reach him at the top, but the rest of the fire is burning so fiercely that onlookers have been forced to move back several yards. Their faces flash orange and white.
As I approach the base of the fire, a man with a fluorescent yellow jacket and Steward written on his arm rushes forward and says, ‘Woe there, young lady! Back you go, love, for your own safety.’
I act as if I’m searching for something on the ground. ‘I lost my pocket money somewhere down here.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t of been up here in the first place,’ he says.
I stare at his face. What an insolent man.
‘Just let me look,’ I plead. Simultaneously, at top speed I grab the voodoo doll out of my pocket, throw it in the flames and run off.
‘What you got there? A firework?’ the man bawls. ‘Get away from here right now!’
Heart racing in panic but safely back in the crowd, I chant my curse, trying to activate it: make her leave him and him love me.
Using jetsam and flotsam thrown up by the tide, I tried to create an accurate version of Mrs Phillips. The head was an old ping-pong ball I found on the seawall, cracked and stained yellow. The body and legs were easy: I simply snapped some wedges off a sodden piece of driftwood, took them home, dried them on my radiator and then bound them together using string and glue. I laughed when I did this because Mrs Phillips has got tree-trunk legs in real life. For her frizzy orange hair I used fine copper wire from the cupboard under the stairs, piercing the ping-pong ball with a pin and carefully sliding each length of wire into the hole before fixing it in place with a dollop of Uhu. The head had quite a lot of bald patches in the end because Rebecca’s wire ran out. For the eyes, I stuck on two rusty discs I found in the boatyard. One was larger than the other, but that also added to the authenticity of my creation because she has got misshapen eyes in real life. The freckles were easy. I sat at my table and jabbed the ping-pong ball with one of the Magic Markers Rebecca uses to cross-out her book plans. For the stomach, I wrapped the doll’s body with cotton wool and bound the misshapen padding into place with a frayed bandage from the first-aid kit under the sink. A quick swipe of Uhu, and my creation was complete. For good measure, I stuck pins through the padding at the front and back, an
d chanted my curse over and over and over again.
But this aggressive Steward man and all these noisy people haven’t provided the serious environment I imagined for my ceremony. While they burnt Guy Fawkes on top of the fire, I was supposed to compose myself, summon my powers and chant the incantation to activate my own figure at the bottom of the pyre.
I hurry back towards the Portaloos. Katie will be looking for me by now, and I want her to see me return from the right direction. I walk sideways in jerks, like a crab on the mudflats so none of Those Three Girls can sneak up on me from behind.
Half-way along the warehouse wall, I catch a glimpse of my sister disappearing into the crowd, and I halt. She reappears with a handful of somebody’s coat in her fist, pulling it towards her with all her strength, as if she’s in a tug of war.
When the coat emerges from the crowd, I see that it belongs to him. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but his mouth is moving and he’s shaking his arm violently up and down, then side to side. Finally he dislodges her and she falls back against the wall. He points his forefinger in my sister’s face, and wags it directly at her nose for about ten seconds, then he stretches out his entire hand like the stop sign they showed us in Cycling Proficiency lessons. Helen bolts away, mouth wide open. He walks back into the crowd.
I can’t move. He never gets angry. My sister must’ve done something really terrible to cause this terrifying reaction. When I find my sister’s Real Diary, I’ll discover exactly what happened tonight and learn from it, so that when I’m with him, I can make sure there are no incidents like this. When he’s married to me, he’ll smile all the time. I’ll make sure of that.
Heart pounding, I return to the bouncy castle.
Katie isn’t standing where I left her. Mr and Mrs Nelson will be furious with me if she’s wandered off. I scan the crowd for her turquoise coat. Everything has gone wrong tonight. It has been a disaster for me.
The Third Person Page 11
