Girl 38

by Eva Jozefkowicz

  We were in her conservatory which faced the back garden, a beautiful room, compared to the jungle. There were two elegant armchairs, printed in swirly patterns. Between them, a tiny coffee table stood, its top painted in a chessboard pattern. She motioned for me to sit down. I noticed that there wasn’t a TV in sight. Instead, in the corner of the room, I spotted an easel covered with a sheet.

  She brought the tea in mismatched mugs – one was chipped and had a pattern of red frogs on it, and the other was shaped a bit like a tiny vase and had a fancy gold handle. I loved that she handed me this one and took the frogs for herself. Her hands shook ever so slightly and I could see the concentration on her face as she placed the mugs on the table.

  ‘Have you been painting?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, no. Well, I was many years ago. Not recently.’ She waved the idea away, as if it wasn’t even worth talking about.

  ‘Could I see?’ I love art and although I’m only good at comics myself, I enjoy looking at paintings – from stormy landscapes to close-up portraits of strangers I’ll never meet. I’ve always thought that you could find out so much about an artist from what they painted.

  Mrs Jankowski hesitated. Then she cocked her head, to indicate that I could take off the sheet.

  I leaped up quickly before she changed her mind and pulled it off to reveal a beautiful pencil sketch of a girl. She looked as though she might be my age, maybe slightly older. She had a thick plait, snaking its way round her neck, and long eyelashes that flicked out at the edges. She seemed to be looking straight at me, but in a friendly way. Her eyes had been coloured a brilliant blue, but the rest of the portrait was unfinished, as if the artist had abandoned it halfway through.

  ‘It’s awesome, Mrs Jankowski,’ I told her honestly. ‘Is it somebody you know?’

  ‘Call me Ania. I am old, but not that old,’ she said. ‘And this is Mila. She’s a friend from when I was thirteen years old. We had a lot of adventures together.’ She was still smiling, but I could see that her smile didn’t quite stretch all the way to her eyes. She covered up the portrait again with the sheet, as if she didn’t want to look at it for too long.

  ‘Really? What kind of adventures?’ I wondered whether Mila ever made her do the sort of stuff that Gem made me do.

  ‘Oh, she once sent me on a search for her across the whole country.’ She lowered her voice and whispered, ‘I jumped from a moving train, trying to find her.’

  I looked at her to see whether she was joking, but she seemed serious.

  ‘You jumped from a train? What sort of train?’ I was imagining the types of trains that I’d taken to see Uncle Pete down in Devon, but she must have meant something entirely different. You couldn’t jump from a moving train – that would be madness.

  ‘It is a long story, Katherine – a long and winding story. I think you do not have time to hear it,’ she said. ‘I am sure you were doing something important before I disturbed you with my fall.’

  ‘I was drawing,’ I said. I was amazed that she’d remembered my name from when Dad had introduced us all, months ago.

  ‘Will you show me?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing – just me doodling. It’s not exactly art.’ Even so, I felt compelled to go back to my garden and return with my exercise book.

  Even Gem hadn’t seen this much. I’d sort of given up showing her these days. Ania was the first person that I’d ever shown the whole thing. It was as if I knew that she would understand it.

  ‘You have a talent,’ she said. ‘Girl 38? I can see that she is bold and she tries to overcome her fears. I suppose you turn bold if there is something that you feel strongly about. I would be very interested to read more when you finish it. That is, if you allow me, of course.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘I’ll show you the finished Girl 38, if you tell me about your and Mila’s adventure.’

  Her eyes narrowed as she considered my proposal.

  ‘I think it is a good deal,’ she said. ‘But I wonder if you will be interested. I can see that you live in the present and the future,’ she said, tapping my exercise book, ‘and my story – it is in the past.’

  ‘I like hearing about the past,’ I told her truthfully, and she raised her grey eyebrows in surprise.

  ‘Well, when would you like to hear the first part? You see, it’s not a story that can be told all at once.’

  ‘Tomorrow, here at the same time? Or maybe half an hour later?’ I was sure that Lena wouldn’t even notice that I was gone.

  ‘It’s a “date”, as they say,’ she told me, and her face once again creased up with happiness.

  THREE

  Julius couldn’t have been more different from the image that I’d built in my head if he’d tried. I felt immediately guilty that I’d thought of him as a Vilk.

  But when he appeared at the front of our class next morning, I wished I’d caught a photo of him, so that I could use it as a basis for future drawings. He had very light, white-blond hair and incredibly long legs. He stood as if poised to leap into the air.

  Weirdly, he didn’t seem bothered about standing in front of a class of people he didn’t know. ‘Hi, I’m Julius,’ he said simply, smiling at all of us.

  ‘Welcome, Julius,’ said Mr Kim, springing into action. ‘Everyone, this is, well… this is Julius. He’s joining us from Shetland. Anyone know where that is?’

  Julius seemed to like the question and looked around, his left eyebrow raised. I got the impression that he found a lot of things amusing.

  ‘It’s an island in Scotland,’ said Gem in a bored voice, without raising her hand or even looking up from her homework diary. Her black fringe covered her eyes so that I couldn’t tell what her expression was. I guessed that she was secretly intrigued, but pretending not to be.

  ‘Yes, very good, Gemma. Welcome to our…’ said Mr Kim, but Julius interrupted, ‘Aye, you’re close, but not quite. It’s an archipelago, a wee group of islands. I come from one of ’em called Yell. It’s only got nine hundred and seventy-one inhabitants at the last count, and there were thirty-three of us in my school. We have a huge otter population, though. Apparently there are ten times as many otters on the island as there are people. It’s mad, eh?’

  He sounded friendly, as if he wanted to sit down and have a chat about his life, but I could feel Gem spiking up, like an angry hedgehog. She grabbed a strand of her hair and began to furiously twirl it around her finger. Julius didn’t realise it, but he’d just done the worst thing possible – he’d made Gem look stupid in front of the whole class.

  ‘Oh, yes, of course – Yell,’ said Mr Kim. ‘You’re going to have to tell us more about it. Maybe in our next form period. For the moment, could you sit here?’ He pointed to a seat at the front of the class, next to Arun, who gave him a thumbs-up. Arun has loads of friends, but likes his own space. That’s why, wherever possible, he tries to avoid sitting next to anyone. I wondered if he would be bothered by Julius being thrust upon him, but he grinned and moved his books along to make space for his new desk mate.

  Although Julius’s entrance had been awkward, I thought things might improve as the day went on. But, as it turned out, his trouble was that he just didn’t have any sense of danger – in fact, he seemed to plough straight into the riskiest situations. He should have kept his head down for a few days, at least until he’d sussed who in the class he should watch out for. If he’d read Girl 38, he would have seen Gem as Hawk Eye, complete with exclamation marks around her head and a floating ‘STOP’ sign, to ward off anyone who thought that they could cross her. But he hadn’t, so I suppose he had no real way of knowing how bad she could get.

  We had hockey first thing and Julius’s sports kit was nothing like the rest of ours. He was wearing high-top basketball-style trainers, like the kind that you see in old films, and instead of the red sweatshirt with the school logo, he had a huge one in deep crimson that said, ‘Angus’s Fish Bar’ in swirly writing. His parents hadn’t got round to buying th
e proper kit yet. His jogging bottoms were too short and he’d hitched them even higher to reveal his shins. He paraded around the courts swirling his hockey stick like a Victorian gentleman.

  Dilly, Ruby and I cracked up because he was being so ridiculous, and Gem looked daggers at us. She was in the middle of telling us about her latest time in the swimming try-outs, and we clearly hadn’t been concentrating. Julius was already beginning to steal attention away from her.

  But then we had biology and that was where the turning point came. Biology is Gem’s best subject and she’s far and away the top of the class. We’d been learning the major organs of the body and had been given a project for homework – we had to choose an organ to make out of household stuff, complete with labels for the various elements. I’d made a heart out of blue tack and pipe cleaners, showing the different arteries. It wasn’t my best effort, but I’d got a bit carried away with Girl 38 and run out of time to do anything better. Dilly made a stomach out of jelly and Ruby had a miniature model of a kidney with veins drawn on to a kidney bean using a silver pen. I thought that was cheating as she hadn’t actually created anything new, but she went on and on about how she’d had to use a magnifying glass to make sure that everything was precise.

  Gem had gone above and beyond anything that anyone else had come up with. She’d created a human torso out of two kitchen aprons, one on top of the other. The top one was cut in half down the middle and formed the ‘skin’ layer of the body. When you pulled it apart, you could see all of the main organs beneath. The heart was made of carefully cut up red foil tops, the lungs were pink balloons, the stomach was spray-painted cotton wool, and there were even old bicycle tyres that formed the small and large intestines.

  ‘That’s incredible, Gemma,’ said Mrs Henley as we gathered round. ‘I’ve never seen this level of detail before. It must have taken you ages.’

  ‘Oh, I enjoyed it,’ said Gem, shrugging her shoulders. ‘When you know what you’re doing, it takes no time at all.’

  ‘It’s grand,’ Julius agreed, leaning over the model, a bit too close for Gem’s liking. ‘But can you actually blow up the lungs?’

  ‘How do you mean? They’re balloons, and I’ve already blown them up so they’re to scale.’

  ‘Ah, it’s a shame that you can’t blow ’em up further,’ said Julius, sounding genuinely regretful. ‘My uncle got me and my brother to help out on his farm in the school holidays. He slaughtered sheep for meat and would have to remove the organs. I saw heaps of sheep lungs and he once let me blow into one of ’em so that we could see how the air moved in and out through the different valves.’

  ‘Ugh, that’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard,’ said Gem. She was right – it was gross, but at the same time fascinating. I looked around and could see everyone staring at Julius, probably thinking exactly the same as me.

  ‘You actually blew into one of the lungs?’ asked Arun. ‘Are you mental?’

  ‘Aye, I was interested. It rose and fell, as if the sheep was still alive,’ said Julius.

  ‘What did it look like?’ somebody asked. ‘Did it smell?’

  And then there was a whole flurry of questions about Julius’s uncle’s sheep’s lungs, and nobody paid any attention to Gem’s model. It took Mrs Henley ages to calm us down and get us to sit in our seats.

  ‘He just won’t shut up,’ Gem whispered in my ear. I could tell she was furious.

  At the end of the lesson, the four of us got together and I already knew what was coming.

  ‘He’s going to have to pay,’ she said. ‘I’m going to make sure that he pays.’

  ‘What will you do?’ I asked. I followed her gaze. She was staring straight at the aquarium in the corner of the lab. I knew it well, because I’d helped to clean it one lunchtime as part of detention for being late three mornings running. It was filled with possibly the most disgusting creatures in the world ever – maggots. They were there as part of a Year Eleven project into how species multiply under different conditions. The aquarium was divided into four sections. One of them had the heat turned up higher, one was pitch black, one was filled with UV lights and the final one had a layer of water at the base.

  ‘Meet me here at lunch,’ Gem told us. ‘We have work to do.’

  *

  I could still see the look on Julius’s face as I walked out of school that day. It was as if it was imprinted on the inside of my eyelids. The thing that had surprised me most was that he thought it had been an accident – that it was actually possible for those maggots to have crawled into his battered rucksack by pure chance. He must have lived a very different life on his little island.

  It took a good few seconds for it to sink in that somebody had done it deliberately. It was only his first day at school and somebody already hated him enough to put horrible little slimy creatures in among his books and pens.

  When that dawned on him, he looked around the classroom again and his eyes met mine. I could feel the heat rise in my face (I’ve never been good at hiding anything) and I could have sworn that he knew I’d done it. I had no idea how he’d worked it out, but he had.

  It wasn’t me! I wanted to shout at him. Don’t make me feel guilty!

  It had been me, though. I’d hated doing it, but Gem never did her own dirty work. Dilly and Ruby gathered the maggots from the dark corner of the aquarium. Gem figured that if we took it from this section, it would take everyone longer to realise that they were missing. It was revolting – they had to scoop them out using a sheet of paper and put them in Dilly’s lunchbox, as they couldn’t find any other containers in the lab. Despite all this, I would have much preferred to do that than the task that Gem had allocated to me – to empty them into Julius’s bag.

  ‘You’ll do a better job than either of them,’ she whispered to me. ‘You’re more secretive and that’s why you’d make a much better detective. I can trust you.’

  I knew that I couldn’t say no when she’d said that, so I took the box and crept up to Julius’s desk before the others had come back from the canteen. I opened it, and scooped them out into his navy rucksack with Dilly’s yoghurt spoon. It was done in an instant, but I spent most of the next ten minutes thinking that one of them must have escaped and was crawling up my arm.

  We sat at our desks as if nothing had happened, and watched Julius as he opened his bag to put his lunchbox back in. We waited for the scream. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Gem’s satisfied smirk, but then something happened which I don’t think any of us had expected. Julius grabbed a metal tin from his desk, opened it, and emptied out the pens and pencils inside. Then he picked up all the maggots with his bare fingers and put them in the tin. He did it so quickly that only a couple of people noticed what was going on. What was most incredible was that he didn’t even squirm once.

  ‘Do you know where these might have come from?’ I heard him ask Arun, who was peering into Julius’s bag with a mix of disgust and fascination.

  ‘Erm, probably the biology lab, mate. That’s grim, though – I can’t believe someone did that. D’you want me to come with you to put them back?’

  ‘Cheers, but I’ll be OK.’

  Within moments he’d disappeared with the tin. Just like that. No fuss, no drama. A part of me wanted to shout with delight that he hadn’t caused a huge scene and hadn’t let Gem win, but then I caught the look on his face when he came back into the classroom. It was as if something inside him had changed, as though somebody had turned out the light from behind his eyes. It was horrible to see.

  FOUR

  I was still thinking about that look when I reached home and I suddenly felt I couldn’t bear to sit in my room on my own until Mum and Dad came back. I quickly reversed, before Lena saw me through the window. Then I sent her a text saying that I was visiting our neighbour and I turned towards Ania’s door instead.

  But when I’d walked halfway down her garden path, I hesitated. What if she didn’t want to see me? Maybe she’d just offered to tell
me her story yesterday because I’d pestered her so much? Then again, we had arranged a ‘date’, so not coming would be rude of me. I decided to knock, but to be careful that I didn’t outstay my welcome.

  When the door swung open, any doubt that I had about her wanting to see me disappeared. Ania smiled and beckoned me in. She was wearing a dress in an unusual design that made it look as if it was splattered with paint, and there was a string of pearls around her neck. She was holding a walking stick, which had a colourful head in the shape of a parrot.

  ‘He helps me out on bad-knee days,’ said Ania, motioning to the parrot. ‘These days sometimes creep up with no warning.’ Then she looked up at me and I saw that her eyebrows were furrowed with worry.

  ‘Am I interrupting you?’ I asked her. ‘Maybe you need to rest? I can come back another time.’

  ‘No, not at all. I just think to myself that you look sad. Am I right?’ Her tiny hand squeezed my shoulder.

  ‘Oh, erm… yes, I suppose. Sort of. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  I made a point of looking around the room instead. Yesterday, from the conservatory, I hadn’t got a sense of what her house was like, and I was surprised that the other rooms were much less tidy. In the living room, every nook and cranny was rammed with stuff. There were huge rickety bookcases on every wall, even in the corridor outside. As I looked closely, I could see that all the books were arranged alphabetically. There was order in the mess.

  In the few spaces where there were no books, people in black-and-white photos stared at me, some serious, others smiling. A dark green velvet sofa stood at one end of the room filled with cushions shaped like animals – an elephant, a dog and a giraffe. Next to the giraffe, a familiar ginger hairball was curled up.

  ‘Polish tea?’ Ania asked, smiling. ‘Oh, yes, it is Chester,’ she said, following my gaze. ‘I know his name from his tag,’ she explained. ‘Before I read it, I was calling him “Albert”, after my grandfather. He also had ginger hair and a grumpy personality. Chester sometimes comes here during the day. I hope you don’t mind. I once left my top window in the kitchen open and he climbed through it. Then I think he decided he liked spending a little time with me, so he comes to visit every now and then. I usually make sure that I send him back out so he’ll be with you when you come home from school. I don’t keep him for too long, I promise.’