by C. J. Skuse
Clink clink.
When I looked up, Zoe was standing before the store cupboard. She had slid the top bolt across. Chaney’s muffled shouts were coming from inside.
‘Gather around, everyone. I want to show you something,’ she announced.
‘Zoe, you open this door right now!’ Chaney’s cries from the cupboard again.
‘Mr Chaney!’ Tamsin Double-Barrelled screamed, lunging for the door.
Zoe stood in her way. ‘I think we’ll leave things as they are, for now,’ she said, slowly producing from nowhere one of the syringes, three-quarters full of blue liquid. Tamsin Double-Barrelled backed away, before darting towards the main door and out of the room. Two other girls followed and all three of them ran crying past outside the window. Everyone else from the Three Joshes to Oliver Big Hair stayed put.
Duff duff duff. ‘Help! Someone get help!’
‘Now, as I said, gather round,’ said Zoe again, smiling. ‘And bring your hamsters, whatever stage of dissection they are at.’
We all did as she said, like she had cast some spell on us. My hamster looked pretty gunky but I scraped it off my dissection pan and brought it to her.
On the desk, Zoe had placed two leads with crocodile clips at the ends, a small black bag and a block of wood with knobs on. She took her hamster and laid it in front of her. She circled over its heart with her fingertip.
Duff duff duff duff duff.
‘He wouldn’t appreciate this. But I know you will.’ She smiled, and for a second I thought I saw a glint on one of her teeth. She took a pair of thin rubber gloves from a box on the desk. ‘Now, this hamster is dead, do you all agree?’
Silence.
‘Your hamster is dead.’ She pointed to Laura Yellow Boots. ‘And your hamster is dead.’ She pointed to William Pratt. ‘And your hamster is dead.’ She pointed to me. ‘You all saw me open this hamster up and put it back together, yes?’
I nodded again. My hamster was probably deader than anybody’s. Chaney was still going ballistic in the cupboard. Duff duff duff bang!
Zoe looked at all of us in turn. ‘You will all look back on this day and say, “I was there.” You won’t believe you are seeing this. But you will see it.’ She was laughing. I thought someone had told a joke I’d missed.
I started laughing too, because mad laughter is kind of infectious. No one else did though. Another girl stepped quietly out of the room.
Holding up the syringe, she announced, ‘I have injected this hamster with some of what is in this syringe. I administered it to its lower extremities and directly to the heart, which I checked was healthy when I opened it up.’
‘What’s the blue stuff?’ I asked, then put my hand over my mouth, thinking maybe it wasn’t the time to ask questions.
I could have sworn she smiled at me before saying, ‘Good question. Inside the syringe is Ambystoma zoexanthe serum 651. This serum has the power to not only regenerate damaged tissue, but also repair wounds, fissures and abrasions. It is also a magnificent electrical conductor and it is the glue that is starting to put this little hamster together again.’
‘Woah, sweet,’ Hindu Josh With The Headphones muttered.
‘And now . . .’ Zoe announced, brandishing the two leads. She clipped one end of each lead on to the hamster’s front paws, attaching the other ends to the battery in the middle of the wooden block. ‘We apply electrical pulses to prompt muscle contraction. This is galvanism. Electricity, you see, holds the very key to life.’
‘But that hamster’s dead,’ said Skinny Josh On Crutches. ‘It’s so dead.’
Watching the wall clock, Zoe flicked the battery switch up to five.
‘Oh. My. God,’ breathed William Pratt.
We watched the hamster’s body. It was still as a stone. After a second, it twitched. Sparks crackled from the metal clips on its paws. The paws fluttered, then flopped. Zoe took the clips off. The paws fluttered again. The eyes opened.
‘Oh my God!’ It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my entire life. I know judges on talent shows said this kind of thing every time someone sang in tune, but this actually especially was amazing. The amazingest.
The long cut on the hamster’s stomach had disappeared. I hadn’t noticed when, it had just gone. The hamster moved. Stretched out. There were gasps. Within seconds, its body was squirming to right itself. Scratchy Max ran out. Josie With The Humungous Handbag started crying and Emma With The Nose Ring slapped both her hands over her mouth. Within a minute, the hamster was sniffing around the desk, finding a peanut Zoe had put there for it.
‘You see what has happened?’ said Zoe, switching off the battery. ‘The serum, or Ambystoma zoexanthe serum 651 as it is properly known, has worked its way through this creature’s body and repaired the dead tissue. The electric impulses have reanimated its musculature and restarted its heart.’
‘That’s . . . incredible!’ I said.
‘That’s science,’ she said.
‘But, it was definitely dead, wasn’t it?’ said Blonde Josh In The Liverpool Shirt.
‘Yes, it was,’ said Zoe, her face alive with excitement.
Duff duff duff duff. ‘ZOE LUTWYCHE, OPEN THIS DOOR IMMEDIATELY!’
‘As you can see, this hamster is alive when moments ago we had all taken it to be deceased. With the help of this,’ she said, picking up the empty syringe, ‘we have achieved the unthinkable. Stroke it. Feel its warmth!’
It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen since I’d been alive. It beat all the magic tricks I’d ever seen and all the cartwheels I’d ever done and finding a dead woman. Anyway, it was truly awesies.
‘Aaaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!’ William Pratt’s delayed scream set several girls off screaming and this set off Chaney’s banging again. Duff duff duff duff duff.
In his haste to get out, Oliver Big Hair fell backwards over a stool. Josie With The Humungous Handbag crashed straight into Laura Yellow Boots, who’d already pushed over Hindu Josh With The Headphones in her hurry to get out of the room. Hindu Josh now looked like he was going to throw up in the fish tank. All the commotion must have frightened the poor hamster because he scuttled to the edge of the desk and took a running jump.
Everyone not puking or fainting hurtled around the classroom, searching for the tiny fur-ball as it darted along the skirting boards. Stools clattered to the floor, tables scraped back, brooms brushed, glass smashed, feet stamped, arms flapped.
‘It’s there, quick, get it!’
‘Stamp on it!’
‘There it is, there, there, there!’
‘Aaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh!’
‘Kill it!’
‘Get it!’
I stayed beside the teacher’s table with Zoe, watching the madness unfold. She looked at me. ‘You must really think I’m crazy now, don’t you?’
‘Huh?’ I said. ‘I think it’s amazing. I think . . . you’re amazing.’
A shadow of a smile appeared on Zoe’s face. She held out her hand.
‘Camille Mabb,’ I smiled back and shook it.
‘No,’ she said, frowning. ‘I want your hamster. I’m going to do all of them.’
Pier Pressure
So Zoe was put on ‘indefinite suspension’ for the hamster shenanigans, and for locking a teacher in the store cupboard and because the hamsters she had brought back to life turned out to be mad. Like, proper mad. Chewing through concrete kind of mad.
Holes were appearing in pillars around college two days later and there was talk of college closing so they could get pest control in. Unfortunately, talk was all it was. I still had to go in for classes, which all sucked when there was no promise of seeing Zoe before, during or after them. I missed her a lot. It’s not very cool to admit you’re lonely, but I’m not very cool, I know that, and I was very lonely. Like that man in that film who’s stranded on a desert island and his only friend is this ball he’s drawn a face on. And all the way through the film you’re thinking, That’s just a ball he’s drawn a face
on, but it’s all he’s got to talk to and then he goes and shouts at it and the ball floats off on the sea and he’s so upset. I tried drawing a face on the dry chewing gum ball I’d parked on the edge of my desk during History but it wasn’t the same. It was just a lump of chewing gum; it wasn’t my friend.
Anyway, Poppy did eventually send me a pity text asking me to meet them all at the pier that Friday night and because I didn’t want to stay at home watching Gardener’s World with Mum and Dad, I decided to go. I showered, Impulsed my knickers and put on my lemon bridesmaid dress, yellow leggings, black Mary Janes and second-best lemon Alice band. It was my I’m On My Own But I’m So Confident I Don’t Care outfit. It made me feel good, like I’d made a real effort.
When I got to the pier entrance, I wished I hadn’t made so much effort. It was cold and everyone was in jeans and hoodies so I immediately looked weird. All except Louis Burnett, I noticed, who was still wearing his Scottish-chimney-sweep-with-cardigan combo, with a scruffy black leather jacket on top. Splodge and Poppy were holding hands and feeding each other green candy-floss, and Lynx was batting her eyelashes at Damian and touching his chest.
‘All right?’ said Damian, looking me up and down again. ‘You scrub up well.’
‘All right?’ said Louis Burnett and Splodge together.
‘Hi, Mills,’ said Lynx, laughing at something Damian had said before I arrived.
‘All right?’ I said, fidgeting and generally being seven sorts of awks.
My blushing cheeks and lemon dress turned me into rhubarb and custard.
Lynx and Damian started strolling up the boardwalk with their shared box of chips. My heart pulsed. They were kissing, barely watching where they were walking. Oh to be that happy and in love, I thought. To be so hung up about someone all you want to do all day is hold hands and kiss.
‘Look what Splodge got me, Mills,’ squealed Poppy, running over with a brand-new touch screen phone. ‘Well, I bought it but his dad runs Fone Frenzy in the High Street and he got me a really good deal. Isn’t it awesome? We can Skype on it.’
‘I don’t have Skype,’ I told her.
‘No, me and Splodge, I meant,’ she giggled. She’d always been happy with her old phone with the crappy Snake game on it until now.
‘Wow,’ I said, about as un-wow as I could get away with.
The little land train that took tourists along the board-walk pulled in, and Splodge took Poppy by the hand to run for it.
‘See you up there, Mills!’ she called, and ran with him. A fist clenched in my chest. Everyone had someone except me. I was as spiky as a hedgehog.
Louis Burnett was ordering a Hoydon’s Hug from The Bracht Shack. A Hug was made up of two blobs of vanilla ice cream, drenched in melted caramel then wrapped up in a thick buttermilk pancake. They were truly scrumbleshanks but I didn’t have them often cos of the fat, especially with all the free toppings you could get. Louis was adding all of them – cream, chocolate sauce, sprinkles and hot jam.
He turned to me, a long dribble of ice cream down the centre of his Dracula T-shirt. ‘Guess you must be the spare girl,’ he said, spooning up the ice cream dribble with a fish fork. ‘Nice to meet you. I’m the spare boy.’
This was the most words I’d ever heard Louis utter. I didn’t even think he could speak. Damian usually did all the talking for him and Splodge. We started walking towards the end of the pier, which was all lit up red and blue for the night and looked so beautiful. I wanted to cry. I wished I hadn’t come.
‘History this morning was boring, wasn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Always is. I don’t know why I chose it really.’
‘Me either,’ he said, as his boots went clomp clomp on the boardwalk. Then he talked about the weather for a bit and I talked about how I wished I’d brought a coat but pretty soon our conversation ground to a halt.
‘Do you like fish?’ he said suddenly.
‘Um. They’re all right in batter. Not keen on tinned.’
Louis held up his phone and showed me his screen saver. It was a picture of a large fish tank. I recognised it as the big one from inside the Chinese fish restaurant in town. ‘That’s the main tank at Fat Pang’s,’ he told me. ‘I’m trying to convince my dad to get a bigger one for the reception area of our place.’
‘Yeah, I’ve seen it in there before. It’s got sharks in, hasn’t it?’
‘Yeah, tinker sharks,’ he said as his boots clonked in time with my Mary Jane heels along the boardwalk. ‘They’re vegetarian ones.’
‘Oh right,’ I nodded, trying so hard to be interested my brain was hurting.
‘They’ve just got in the most amazing shoal of samurai carp in it too.’ He held out the phone to show me another picture. ‘Damian thinks I’m sad. I love it. I’d love to, like, live underwater or something. I’d love it if humans could do that.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, looking at a picture of some little blue and yellow fish nosing about in a clump of rocks. ‘It’s really . . . full of fish, isn’t it?’
There was nowhere to go with the conversation. I wasn’t interested in fish. I’d had a couple of guppies once upon a time. We used to keep them in a tank in our kitchen. They weren’t very friendly and the tank was such a pain to clean out. One of them flung itself into our waste disposal unit and got mangled to death.
‘Do you want some?’ he said, nodding towards his plate. ‘I got another fork.’
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m watching my weight.’
‘I’ll never understand girls and weight,’ he laughed. ‘In the water, we’re all the same weight anyway. Whales can eat up to a tonne of fish every single day. They don’t care how much they weigh.’
‘Are you saying I’m a whale?’ I asked flatly.
‘No, no,’ he said and our conversation came to another halt.
I sighed. ‘I was a chubby little girl and I don’t want to go back there. I have to be strong about what I eat.’
‘Why?’ said Louis. ‘You were quite happy as a kid. I remember.’
‘How do you remember?’ I snipped.
‘Cos I was at the same primary school as you, wasn’t I? For a bit.’
I couldn’t remember much about him from school. Quiet. Scruffy shoes. Peed his pants at Harvest Festival. They were the only memories I had. ‘Didn’t you leave?’
‘Yeah. I had to in the end,’ he said, but he didn’t say why.
‘And we didn’t hang out, did we? So you can’t remember me that well.’
He scooped up a forkful of pancake and ice cream and golloped it. ‘You always used to hang out by yourself, eating sweets and collecting insects and stuff.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, slightly cringing at the memory of my evil school enemy Jessica Runnybum throwing my favourite snail shell over the garden wall. And her friend Lucy Eggybreath crushing my ladybird under her stupid flat foot.
‘I remember that day you found me in the boys’ toilets,’ said Louis.
I stopped walking. ‘I’ve never been in a boys’ toilets in my life.’
‘You did,’ he said, chewing. ‘I was in the toilet, hiding . . .’
‘Why?’
‘Just playing hide-and-seek,’ he said. ‘And I was sitting up on a toilet seat and all of a sudden this thing came whizzing under the cubicle door. Do you remember what it was?’ I shook my head. ‘It was a sweet. A peppermint. You came racing in, looking for it. And that’s when you found me.’
The penny dropped. I did have another memory of him. It burst into my mind like a firework. ‘Oh I remember now!’ I said. ‘I used to love those peppermints. Pee Wee’s they were called. They were really hot and then all chewy.’ Then I remembered something else about that particular peppermint. ‘You were crying.’
He snorted. ‘Yeah, I thought you’d remember that. These boys were picking on me. One of them’s at our college now – Will Pratt, do you know him?’
‘Yeah. He’s in my Human Biology.’
‘Anyway, I ra
n in there to hide and then you broke the door down to find your peppermint and when you saw I’d been crying, you gave it to me to cheer me up. I think. Either that or you decided you didn’t want it cos it had been on the floor.’
‘This girl called Lucy had kicked it into the boys’ toilets,’ I told him. ‘She and her friends used to bully me. What happened after? Did we play together?’
‘No. You went and got a teacher, then you left.’
‘If only I’d known you were being bullied. We could have been friends.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, with a laugh.
Lynx’s shrill laughter interrupted us and my eyes fixed on her and Damian again. He had his hand on her bottom, and then he moved it up to her waist and kept it there, and she didn’t mind. She wasn’t worried he’d grab a handful of fat or twang her knicker elastic or anything, not that Lynx had any fat to grab and was probably not wearing any knickers. The land train beep beeped behind us and we moved out of its way so it could rumble past. Splodge and Poppy were sitting at the back, chewing each other’s lips off.
I caught Louis looking at my dress. ‘What?’ I snapped.
‘Nothing, sorry. Just . . . your dress. It’s nice.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, as he tripped over his trailing bootlace. I realised then that he had been drinking and I could smell it on his breath.
‘I’m freezing,’ I said. I thought he might offer me his coat or at least drape his manky cardigan around my shoulders in a gesture of gentlemanliness. But he didn’t.
We caught up with Lynx and Damian and I could hear what they were saying.
‘. . . I could take you to Fat Pang’s. They do an All You Can Eat Bottom Dwellers Buffet on Saturdays. It’s so they can clean the crap out of the tank.’
‘Yeah, that would be lovely,’ said Lynx, not even trying a hard-to-get act.
Damian draped an arm around her shoulders like a rope. ‘I can see we’re going to have fun together, my little morsel.’ Lynx giggled.
We passed an old couple, holding hands. Two dogs sniffing each other’s bottoms. Love was all around me and it blowed. There was no one holding my hand. No one sniffing my butt. It made me cross, the unfairness of it all. I noticed some graffiti on a bench. It said ‘I Love Minge.’ I wished I was Minge. I wished someone loved me enough to scrawl on a bench for me. I wanted that squizzy feeling people talked about. I wanted to walk around a garden centre at Christmas, holding hands with a boyfriend and listening to carols. I wanted to watch DVDs and eat ice cream and have marathon cuddle sessions in our matching onesies. I wanted what Jack and Rose found on that boat – pure, wonderful, romantic, I-would-die-for-you kind of love. Even though Rose didn’t die for Jack – actually she let him freeze to death cos there wasn’t room for him on her raft thing, but before that they were totes in love.
