by Emmy Ellis
Life hurt.
* * * *
In a corner where two outer classroom walls met one another, I huddled away from the blasts of wind that jostled and shunted other children playing unshielded on the playground. A whoosh of wind sought me out and found my hiding place. It blew me spitefully, whipped at my scraggy hair, and I marvelled at how even the wind was a bully, just like Mam. I shoved my bare hands into the sleeves of my cardigan, but the sharpness of the breeze froze me to the core.
Furtive glances to my far right showed me the coast was clear enough to sort through the lost property box without anyone taking much notice. The big red plastic box, situated beneath an awning, displayed an overflowing jumble of material. I prayed a coat or at least another cardigan would be there for the taking. Everyone seemed busy running away from the gale, keeping themselves warm with exercise, just like Mrs Draper had advised prior to our departure from the classroom. I hunched my shoulders and jaywalked across the playground.
The box stood waist-high. Like a professional, I sorted through the clothing. Sweaters, skirts, T-shirts—all manner of things lost but not my size, either very small or much too big. Some too distinctive to steal; someone would undoubtedly recognise their things. But, wonder of wonders, I found a coat, one that most girls wore—a parka with a fluffy trim around the hood—just like I’d prayed would be there. Only it wasn’t pink or purple, but baby blue. No nametag inside. My size. A quick glance behind me to check no one watched, and I slipped that coat on. The coldness of it soon dissipated with the heat of my body. I zipped it, yanked the hood over my head, and secured it with the Velcro tabs beneath my chin. I felt so posh. So posh, you know? I smiled and looked around at the other girls who wore something similar. I belonged.
Back in my corner space the wind didn’t seem quite so vindictive, the grey cloudy sky not so threatening, and my inner peace not so aggrieved. Hands in fleece-lined pockets, I imagined myself an Eskimo. The playground became a vast landscape of snow, the children penguins. I’d brave the wintry storm knowing if the snowdrifts blasted me, I’d be warm enough. A huge polar bear walked towards me, its cream fur bristling in the strong breeze. It snorted a puff of white air.
“Why’re you standing in the corner?” asked the bear.
Large, inquisitive marble eyes stared at me, and I reckoned they tried to pierce my soul.
“To keep out of the wind.”
“Don’t you like the wind?” Without waiting for an answer, the bear went on, “Wonder if it’s cold and windy in Heaven?”
The bear stuck out the tip of its tongue to catch a dangle of mucous.
“Don’t know,” I said.
“D’you reckon it’s true what Gary said? Imagine having a bleeding head.” The bear’s eyes widened, and its lips pursed, its muzzle elongated and strange.
“Don’t know if it’s true.”
I want a cuddle, Carmel.
Nelson? Confusion stole over me, as did goose bumps. Nelson was wrapped up in my blanket at home on my bed. How could she speak to me when she wasn’t with me?
The bear sniffed, cuffed another drip from its nose, and ambled off into the white wilderness to frolic with the penguins. I told myself everything would be okay. Told myself it was an accident. Told myself, told myself…
* * * *
“I heard about your friend today, kid.” Mam’s lips retracted from her rotten teeth, showing pale pink gums. “What you going to do now? Where you going to hide out? Doubt anyone else will want to play with you.”
I’d come in from school, thankful to shut the front door on the hateful wind that had relentlessly shunted me all the way home, only to be presented with another bully. I didn’t answer, just stood in the living room doorway facing the dragon with smoke chundering from her nose. The wind had chapped my legs, my sock tops having lost their elastic, exposing my bare skin to the elements. Mam gazed at me with half-lidded eyes. I placed my legs together and shuddered at the utter chill of my skin.
“Reckon she got killed, so Bob said. Some nutter going round bumping off little kiddies. You’d better take more care of yourself when you go out at night. See you got yourself a coat, then?”
I nodded.
“Warm is it?”
“Yes.”
A trail of smoke spiralled from Mam’s cigarette. My mind transported me to a hilltop where Indians sat around a blaze. Tobacco pipes rested against bottom lips, and sounds of hummed tunes swirling in the darkness. A gust of wind blew acrid bonfire smoke into my face, and my eyes watered. I blinked, and the hilltop scene faded, replaced by Mam’s face inches from mine. She looked strange bent over like that, her head suspended on air, seemingly unattached to her neck and body.
“Run to the shop for me, will you?” Her breath whispered on my nose; I bit back a retch. “Need some fags. Hemmings will serve you—knows what’ll happen if he doesn’t. Besides, you gotta give him his usual.”
Mam trudged to the kitchen, returning with a large brown envelope. She slapped it and a ten pound note in my hand, and I left the house. I would have loved to have taken Nelson but thought it best I go right away.
The shop enveloped me in its warmth once more. Mr Hemmings sat on the stool behind the counter, his beaming smile like a balm on my young soul. I walked to the counter and held out the money and the envelope.
“Mam would like some fags.”
Mr Hemmings glanced round the shop before sliding the envelope under the counter. Turning to the shelf behind him, he selected a multipack of Mam’s cigarette brand. He placed them in a carrier bag, handed them to me, and said, “Tell your mam she doesn’t need to pay for these ones.”
Mr Hemmings did that sometimes. Especially when I gave him the brown envelope.
I shoved the money in my coat pocket. “Okay.”
“How are you feeling today, Carmel?”
“All right.”
“Sad about your little friend?”
“Yes.”
Hurry up and come home, Carmel. I haven’t seen you all day.
“I gotta go.” I dashed out of the shop, ran home, and pelted up the stairs, not caring that Mam shouted at me for her cigarettes. Nelson’s cheek cold against mine, I squeezed my dolly to me tightly. So tightly. I wished that no one else would ask me how I was, or how I felt about Belinda.
CHAPTER TEN
She’s been my only true friend, has Nelson. She saw everything: sitting on the chair in the posh back room, taking it all in with her glassy stare; perched on my bed when I cried until I thought my eyeballs would burst; placed her arm in my hand when we hid together in the smelly cupboard under the stairs. Hugged me on Thursdays after Bob left.
Bob seemed different the Thursday after the accident. He looked at me oddly, tilted his head like a garden bird, and said, “Pictures went down well, Carmel. Everyone thinks you’re a star.”
I smiled, uncertainty hurting my insides. Something wasn’t right. The air bristled with static, and the roots of my hair stood up.
Mam giggled. “Same again tonight, Bob?”
Bob hawked phlegm, swallowed it. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a brown paper bag. “Similar, though I’ve got a little something here that will make it different. Can’t expect people to pay for the same kind of thing again and again, can I? Also, got to keep these ones under my hat, know what I mean? Dangerous territory. The pretty dress ones, well, they could be anyone’s niece, see? This new venture—got to make sure I sell to who I can trust.”
I think that was the first time I’d heard Bob say so much in one go. He usually spoke one or two sentences at a time, but mainly one-word commands.
“I’ll have to reprint last week’s pictures again—high demand. If they like those then I’ll show a sample from this week. Charge a higher price, too.” Bob handed the small bag to Mam, and she took it, opened it, and peeked inside.
She squealed. “Bob. You’re so crazy!” She hugged the bag to her chest. Her face became animated, her lips opening as laughter s
pilled out, and she bent over double. Her hilarity stung my eardrums, my eyes, made my bottom lip wobble.
Bob tapped the top of her head, and Mam straightened again, wiping tears from her ruddy cheeks.
“Stop messing about,” Bob said. “I’ve only got an hour.”
We trooped into the back room.
That hour seemed like ten.
* * * *
Belinda was the talk of the school for such a long time. Too long. Gary said she’d been buried in the Catholic cemetery a month after she’d died.
“My dad said she was cut open and all her guts fell out on the table at the hospital. He reckons her tummy had a big X on it, all sewed up like Frankenstein’s monster’s face. He said no one could go and look at her in the coffin because she had a massive scratch on her face that made her skin flap open. I think it must have really hurt to fall on that spike. D’you reckon she screamed and stuff?”
I didn’t answer him, just dumbly stared at the mole on his right cheek. Big and round like a one pence piece—slightly fuzzy with hair. I wondered if it hurt or itched.
“I reckon the worms will eat her for their supper. The spiders and stuff will get in the coffin with her and scoff her up.”
I thought about that. Wondered how long it would take and how many creatures it would need to eat a whole body for their tea. I imagined big worms, the size of snakes, spiders growing from ant-size to tarantula after feasting on Belinda’s chubby arms and legs.
Gary’s face lit up during our conversation. He’d always liked gore and scary things, confessing once that his dad let him stay up and watch horror movies. Belinda’s death obviously brought his imagination to the fore, and he gorged on tales of her demise for months afterwards. I felt a little proud inside, that something I’d done had caused so much pleasure to Gary. That everyone spoke of the accident with such awe-tinged sorrow.
I had made that happen. Me.
But it was an accident.
Gary puffed out his cheeks. He pursed his lips, a chicken’s arsehole as Mam would have put it, and bowed his arms out by his sides. He took large stompy steps up and down before me, his eyes wide.
He said, “I am a worm and I’ve eaten some Belinda for my dinner.” He dramatically collapsed onto the home room carpet, on his back, laughing. He kicked his legs and waved his arms. “That Belinda, her meat was out of date. Given me a belly ache.”
I giggled, really giggled for the first time in ages. My tummy muscles hurt from the unaccustomed exercise. I joined him on the carpet, adopting the same pose, and we both kicked our legs like bugs.
“Hello, Bug-girl,” he hollered, and I laughed again.
“Hello, Bug-boy.”
“You come down this way to eat some Belinda? Be careful now, she’s out of date. My belly hurts so bad that I reckon if I fart I’m gonna poo my pants,” he shouted, bringing us to the attention of Mrs Draper. She clapped—two sharp cracks—and strode in our direction.
“Oh, bloody hell,” he said. “Bug killer’s on the way. Her breath is made of Raid. One whiff of that and we’re goners.”
This may have been said to sober me, but it had the reverse effect. I laughed harder. Mrs Draper’s breath did smell like Raid, faintly perfumed, like she constantly ate Parma Violets.
She loomed over us, a spider casting her gaze over two flies in her web. “What do you two think you’re doing?”
She looked misty, like I viewed her through a mottled glass bathroom window. Fisting my eyes to clear them, I laughed, the sound resembling a pigeon I’d once heard in town. It pecked at cake crumbs on the ground, tossed down by generous shoppers, and cooed as it ate. With hands on her hips, Mrs Draper reminded me of that pigeon. Her arms created a triangular shape—pigeon’s wings—and her nose became a beak.
Laughter bubbled inside me again, and Mrs Draper warbled on. I didn’t hear what she said, just knew she spoke. I chanced a glimpse at Bug-boy. His face had contorted, morphed into something resembling him but not. His bunched-up eyes and rounded cheeks, his reddened skin and skewed lips, all told me he was about to burst.
“Gary. Ga-ry,” I managed. “St-op laugh-ing.”
He turned to me and opened his eyes wider. “I ca… I ca-n’t help it.”
He kicked his arms and legs faster—a bug sprayed with Raid—and that thought set me off even more. My tears, though of laughter, must have been from pain too; my ribs and stomach shouted their protest.
Mrs Draper’s strident voice cut through our wailing. “That is enough! Whatever has got into you two?”
The thought of Belinda being what had ‘got into us’, her raw flesh gone bad inside our guts, had Gary and me so far down the road of hysterics it would take a huge fallen tree trunk across our path to stop us going farther.
Or the threat of being sent to sit outside Mr Kendry’s office.
We silenced immediately, let our legs and arms flop to the carpet, dragging in ragged gulps of air to steady our breathing. My stomach muscles throbbed, and my arms were leaden—trying to lift them from the carpet to sit myself up left me defeated.
“Right,” snapped Mrs. Draper. “Both of you, get up.”
She looked a fierce pigeon while glaring down at us. Her beady black eyes glowed with malice. We’d ruffled her feathers, all right, although I did wonder why our laughter made her so angry. Shouldn’t she have been happy to see her students carefree?
We stood before her, side by side. I looked at my feet—Belinda’s plimsolls had become mine—and concentrated on their gaping sides as if they were the most fascinating thing I’d seen. To look sideways at Gary would have been my undoing, and I’d have found my bottom firmly placed on the hard wooden bench outside Mr Kendry’s office.
The pigeon stooped to our level—her arthritic knees clicked. Her wings became arms once more, and she placed her hands in her lap.
“Now, let me tell you both something. It isn’t nice to pretend you’re bugs that are eating Belinda.”
Gary let out a strangled protest, cut short by the pigeon raising her hand, palm towards us. He sniffed, and his foot punted the carpet.
“I heard you both from right across the room. And if I heard you, the other children probably did too. This is not appropriate behaviour. I do not wish to see it repeated. Do you both understand?”
I nodded.
Gary said, “Yeah.”
“Good.”
Mrs Draper stood—more clicks, crickets on a summer’s evening—and moved away from us. I lifted my head and turned to face Gary.
“My belly hurts from that meat,” he whispered.
“Mine too!” I whispered back.
That must have been about the time our friendship was cemented.
* * * *
Gary sought me out most break times. We zoomed across the playground pretending to be the flies that feasted on Belinda’s hand that poked out of the earth, the only part of her that, in our fantasy, hadn’t become encased in her coffin. We loped from one side of the playground to the other, worms that tunnelled through the earth and coffin wood to devour Belinda’s head. Once, Gary said he was a rat. He mimicked gnawing at the coffin until he succeeded in making a hole wide enough to fit through (which reminded me of the mouse in our kitchen cupboard), and went in search of Belinda’s elusive eye. I became his rat friend, who stood guard outside the coffin hole in case a dog or fox dug into the ground to claim us for its supper.
“Did you find the eye?” I said through the coffin hole.
“No. Not the real deal, Rat-girl. But I did find a glass one. We’ll use it to play marbles with.” Gary emerged from the hole and held up the eye.
The thought of rolling Belinda’s wet glass eye on the playground where it would gather dirt had our imaginations running. We scurried, rodent-like, across the playground to our lair (the space behind the lost property box), and hunkered down next to one another to marvel at our find.
“I’d say we should snatch out her teeth next,” Gary said. “Rip them out one by on
e. After that, I’ll saw off her nose, cheek, and forehead bones. Once we’ve collected every bit of her skeleton, we’ll put it back together, piece by piece. A jigsaw puzzle.” Gary leaned to his left, closer to me, and lowered his voice. “My dad reckons her skin will be like leather in a few months, all dried and stuck to her skull. I’ll have to peel the skin away before I can saw off the bones.”
The image Gary presented didn’t turn my stomach—if anything it piqued my interest.
“How did your dad get to know so much about dead people?” I asked.
“Aw, he knows lots of things. Like it takes a while before a body starts decomposing.”
“Decom what? What’s that mean?” I asked. Gary sometimes used big words.
“Decomposing. Rotting. Dad said something about this liquid stuff they put in the bodies before they get buried. That’s what stops them from turning to mush.”
I stared across the playground. Belinda stood right over the other side. She looked exactly the same as she had before the accident—podgy and well-fed, clean and wholesome. She smiled, and her teeth fell out one by one. The sound of them as they met the playground asphalt reminded me of the twang of Mrs Draper’s guitar strings at music time.
One eye socket changed into a red cavernous void and widened, eventually obliterating her features until her whole face became that eye socket. It looked sore, like if I dashed a pinch of salt at her she’d release a wailing sound so awful that I’d never forget it as long as I lived. A little like the noise she’d made when she’d met with that metal spike.
“She’s standing over there, Gary.” I nudged him in the ribs and I pointed to where she stood. “Her teeth have all fallen out. Shall we go and collect them?”
