by Deborah Bee
The police interviewed her and Wino and the rest of the gang separately at the police station all afternoon, until Wino’s dad, who is not known for turning up to anything much at all since he’s usually inside himself, arrived just after teatime and got them all out. They each said they’d been in the locker rooms and in the town and there was no way they could’ve done it and the police said that until the roof was safe, they couldn’t even look for any evidence. So we were all holding our breath hoping that Kathryn Cowell had left her fingerprints all over the can of petrol or something. But the way Kathryn Cowell was behaving, with her big old jaw stuck out and a fat smile on her face, we knew she hadn’t.
It was dark by the time I had finished telling Sarah the whole thing. She said Kathryn would never get away with it. And I said I bet even James Arney doesn’t think that. She had got a bottle of nail-varnish remover out while I talked, from the cupboard beside the sink where she keeps Paracetamols and plasters and she got some cottonwool balls from a big jar upstairs in the bathroom. She sat opposite me at the table in the lounge that Adam calls a sitting room and while I told her all about the petrol and the fire and James and Kathryn Cowell and everything, she wiped off all the crackle nail varnish and filed down my nails and put on a like plain beige nail varnish instead. I had sensible old lady’s hands. I said what’s wrong with my crackle nail varnish and she just shook her head and laughed and said she didn’t realise it was supposed to look like that. Then she said, ‘Trouble is, it takes a thief to catch a thief.’ That’s exactly what she said. And I was like, ‘Isn’t that the name of a film or something?’ Cos my mum has these old video boxes on the bottom shelf in our front room and I’m sure there’s one called that. And she said it was a film, yes, but also it was a kind of expression and it meant that you only really get a chance to catch bad people if you’re gonna be bad yourself. And I said that was LOL coming from her, cos she never does anything wrong. And she said that it was just an idea. Afterwards, much later, she said she was only joking when she first said it but I thought it was fucking genius. It’s got a fucking ring to it, right? It sounded like the sort of thing a person with plenty of fucking self-esteem would do.
27
Sarah
Day Five – 9 a.m.
‘She’s always so negative.’
‘She’s just upset, June. Like we are.’
My parents are whispering.
‘I’d rather she hadn’t come if she’s just going to upset everyone. Going on and on at the police about that man in Sarah’s room. I mean, it could have just been a mistake. Perhaps he thought he was visiting someone else. I mean, Sarah doesn’t exactly look herself, does she? And I sincerely hope she doesn’t start talking to the doctors again. Do you remember last time, when your mother had her bypass and Carol kept complaining that the food wasn’t good enough? Went on and on at everyone. I bet she’s going to go on and on.’
‘How about I get you some tea?’
The door clicks open suddenly.
‘Mum. Dad. This is Dr Donne. She’s an expert on comas.’
My sister. Bright and breezy. There is a confusion of chair scraping. My mother is making odd sighs.
‘Oh, don’t get up,’ says Dr Donne – American accent. I imagine her small and dark but wide across the beam. Do you think you can tell if someone is fat by their voice? ‘No, really, there’s no need.’
‘Dr Donne is running a study on comas. It’s a five-year study. She’s getting data from all around the world.’
Wonders never cease – my sister appears to be impressed by someone.
‘Um, nice to meet you, Dr Donne. I’m Brian, this is June and you’ve met Carol.’
‘So,’ Carol, keen to get to the point, ‘can you explain to me what’s going on? I know all about this intra-axial haemorrhage thing – is that what you call it? What I want to know is, what needs to happen now?’
When they had all gone, a bit later, I thought about Dr Donne’s response over and over again. I didn’t like what she had to say, that’s true. Carol didn’t like what she had to say either. But although what she said was obviously upsetting and everything, and my mother was sobbing, which didn’t help, it was the way she said it that really got to me. It was simply too dramatic. She sounded too self-aware, as though she was on a stage doing Lady Macbeth or something. Maybe it’s an American thing. They always seem pretty pleased with themselves, don’t they? ‘Have a nice day’ always gets on my nerves. She seemed so impressed with herself and her knowledge, as though she knew something that we couldn’t ever possibly know. She was showing off. I imagined she wore too much make-up.
‘You have to prepare yourselves,’ she’d said. ‘In my experience of many situations similar to this one, the prognosis is very hard to come to terms with,’ she’d said. ‘You’ll need to prepare yourselves for the fact that this may be all that’s left of your sister.’ That’s what she said. ‘This may be all that’s left of your sister.’ But there was a swagger in her voice. Posh, clever people get that swagger sometimes. Have you noticed? And then she said, ‘You may have some difficult decisions ahead of you.’ Which means flicking a switch, presumably. Thanks. I don’t get a choice in this. I don’t get to say how I feel. My life isn’t mine. In a coma you are capable of hating someone you’ve never even met. I’ll bet, with all her coma research, she doesn’t know that.
28
Kelly
Day Five – 10 a.m.
I’m back in the hospital. I keep thinking that Sarah is just pretending to be asleep and that she’s gonna suddenly sit up in bed and laugh at me and go, ha, fooled you. Once, when no one else was in here, I waved my hand in front of her face and pinched her arm to see if she would wake up. Not too hard. I didn’t want to leave a fucking bruise or nothing. She didn’t wake up.
They took her bandages off. She looks more normal. Well, she looks less fucking scary. The swelling on her face has gone down and although her cheeks are kind of green with bruises, and she still looks totally weird with no hair, she’s actually starting to look more like her. The nurses have asked me to bring a picture in so they can see what she looks like pretty, but I haven’t got any really. They’ve seen the wedding ones on TV. She looked really pretty there. When she had long hair. Sarah’s not big on being photographed. She says she’s not pretty any more. She says she doesn’t mind, though.
Sarah’s not the sort of person to do like random things. I mean, dangerous things. She’s careful. You know, like, she wouldn’t wanna go on a zip wire like we did on the Year 6 trip to that activity centre in Wales last year. And she definitely wouldn’t, like, climb a rope ladder or go up one of them rock-climbing walls. Well, not for fun. But going for tea every evening before Adam got home, I got to know her quite a bit. Like I wasn’t her best friend yet or nothing, but she used to tell me stuff about work and all that and although she was like totally quiet and shy and everything, she wasn’t weak or stupid, even though sometimes people thought she was and treated her like she was. She’d started to play baseball with the copyediting team from her publishing company. They had team T-shirts that had printed on them ‘QUIETLY JUDGING YOU’, which she said was hilarious cos everyone else had things like ‘THE LEGAL EAGLES’ or ‘THE HR FOXES’. She said she’d never felt intimidating before. She’d never played baseball before either. She said she was rubbish. It was on Wednesday lunchtimes. She got new running shoes. She made some new friends. Well, not friends exactly.
After I told her about the whole Kathryn Cowell thing, we used to talk nearly every day. I’d go round her house after she got back and we’d talk about my homework or Clare, or how my dad was like rubbish, stuff like that. But mostly we talked about Kathryn Cowell. Sarah said that Kathryn Cowell was secretly not really like the person she pretended to be. Sarah said that she was overcompensating. I don’t know what she meant by that. And she’d tell me to blend in as much as I could, like the whole not-being-noticed thing. And I stopped with the ponytail and the make-up. And I s
topped with the fucking up my uniform thing. And I got used to the old-lady nails. She said I could stop being Blondie now and start being Kelly again. And she told me she’d seen me a couple of months before, from her window, and how I yanked Billy and she said that behaving like that was like turning into Wino. And she said we didn’t need to be bullies, we just needed to sort out how to deal with the bullies. She said that just cos they’re bigger don’t mean they have to win.
The nice one, Beth, she just came in and told me how to watch for signs of brain function. She says when I talk to Sarah I should see if she blinks. I should watch her fingers to see if they twitch. So I’m sitting right next to the bed on the squishy chair that Sarah’s dad always falls asleep in, staring at her left hand. There’s a tube going into her hand and if you look really carefully you can see the vein it’s pumping into. There’s blue tape and white tape holding it in place. I’m blowing on her fingers and the tiny blond hairs and the corner of the tape that isn’t sticking any more move in the breeze. But her fingers don’t twitch and neither do her eyes.
I realise I’m about to cry, which would be totally lame, so I go on talking to Sarah about the fire and all that shit. It was the same day that we were booked up to go to the self-defence part of our empowerment module at the community centre. The park was ribboned off by the police, but the community centre was open and although I hadn’t even started my homework cos I was so fucking wired, I agreed to go just cos I thought at least it won’t be all about the fire, which was all everyone else was talking about. And Sarah said she didn’t have that much to do either. We hadn’t told my mum about the classes. We’d been saying that occasionally we just went up to get some chips from the chip shop on Green Lanes cos Sarah said that was probably best. And my mum believed her cos she’s a grown-up and grown-ups think grown-ups don’t lie.
That empowerment module was one of the funniest bits of the whole class. Module! Like we were sitting fucking GCSEs. Most of the group, to be honest, were a bit do-goody and frankly fucking hopeless. Some of them were way beyond fucking help. It was all too gushy, if you ask me. It sounded more like AA than empowerment. My dad, when I thought I had a dad, went to AA twice a week cos my mum said she’d leave him if he didn’t. I overheard that while tracing spirals on the wallpaper in the hall. And he went for like two years and it was all totally fine. And then he got shit-faced one night and stole all the money out of my mum’s bank account. She got the locks changed there and then, and that was the absolute end. She actually said, ‘This is the absolute end.’ And it was.
Empowerment apparently involves understanding how to not behave like a victim. Believe it or not, when approached by a potential mugger, the immediate response that you give sends out signals to the attacker of how empowered you are. Sarah said that next time I got cornered by Wino again, or Kathryn Cowell for that matter, for my dinner money or my mobile, well I would DEFINITELY stand more of a chance if I sent out empowered signals. She was joking, but the instructor wasn’t. And how do you send out empowered signals? Karate. And during the entire hour we laughed just about the whole fucking time. I’m not even lying. I didn’t even think about the fire once, it was just too funny.
The guy was totally useless. I think he used to be one of the homeless people getting a free lunch and he saw a sign looking for a self-defence teacher. He was Moroccan. Do they even have karate in Morocco? He had a life-size plastic man mannequin with kind of big plastic wavy orange hair and red plastic trunks and a great big smile on his face, and he hung on a chain from his hair on a metal stand. Erol – that was the instructor’s name, not the mannequin’s – demonstrated his moves on it. And when he chopped him, the mannequin would start to swing on his chain, and his smile and his big red bum turned round and round – smile–bum–smile–bum – and it just killed us. Sarah said she had actually almost wet herself. Erol didn’t appear to be able to see as far as the back of the class so was totally fucking unaware that we were bent double. LOL or what? Even Lucy with the long red hair started to shriek with laughter. He said you were supposed to yell really loud if you were jumped on, so you could draw attention to yourself to get help, plus you could unsettle your attacker. ‘Arrrggghh,’ he shouted. ‘UNSETTLE YOUR ATTACKER,’ he yelled. Then you were meant to go for these like weak areas of the body. ‘STRIKE THE VITAL POINTS,’ the little man screamed as he jabbed his fingers into the mannequin’s eyes and Adam’s apple. At which point we literally fell over. I nearly peed myself as well.
The other ladies in the class, Lucy, Shirley, other Lucy, Elisabeth and Belinda, as well as Fleur, were there, and all of them, including Fleur, which can’t be fucking right since she’s sposed to be in charge of the fucking group, seemed to be totally paranoid about being attacked. Every time he asked a question like ‘Have you ever felt you were being followed home?’ or ‘Have you ever been stared at on the tube?’ they shot their arms up in the air. On the back row we were wide-eyed. We wondered where all the middle-aged-women attackers had suddenly come from. Sarah said they all took life far too seriously.
Then, randomly out of nowhere, the fat blond woman Belinda shut us up. Sarah said she had a really big house, although I don’t know how she knew that, and she always came to the lessons fully made up with false eyelashes and everything. For a karate lesson! Who’d do that? She slurred her words too. Sarah said she kept a bottle of vodka wrapped up in a towel in her bag. Sarah said she probably only came to get away from an overly possessive husband. I didn’t really know what that meant, not at the time. Anyway, it was right at the end of the session, and all of a sudden Belinda asked from the front row, ‘Excuse me,’ in her slurred posh voice, she was quite posh, ‘excuse me, can you tell me how to do a temple blow?’ Well, Erol nearly crapped his pants. He was suddenly like sweating all over the place. He said that the temple blow was not something to be taken lightly. No. He said that he shouldn’t even talk about it. NO, he COULDN’T talk about it AT ALL. He mumbled and pushed the mannequin a bit so he swung some more and flashed its smile and its pants. He said it was a potentially fatal blow and not something for a self-defence class. He said, ‘It’s not because the skull is a bit thin at the temple – that’s what most people think and they’re quite, quite wrong – it’s because it’s flat and if you get a good enough bit of a swing at it, you could really cause some damage, if you hit it flat on.’ And then he said that he’d said too much. FAR TOO MUCH. And he got even sweatier and changed the subject. Sarah said my eyebrows looked like they were going to shoot off my head. Belinda had a notepad out. I’m not even lying.
We were still laughing as we walked home past the entrance to the Rec. In the orange streetlight we could see the ribbons of plastic police tape stopping people going in the park until the police had figured out who had done the petrol. I said to Sarah that a bit of plastic tape wasn’t gonna keep anyone out. And Sarah said they had CCTV in the road so if anyone went in they would get caught on film. And then when we went past the grey camera halfway up the lamp post, we saw it was hanging down on its wires and that someone had stuck a big gob of gum in the middle of the lens.
One of Kathryn’s homies, no doubt. Sarah said it could have been anyone. And I said that everyone knows it’s Kathryn’s gang – they make a game of knocking out the camera. They stand on the back of a bike and like whack it as they go past. They keep a baseball bat stashed on the roof of the bus shelter. Just for that. The gum is their calling card. And the police don’t do a thing. Fucking useless fucking police bastards.
We were just getting into the last stretch of road when Sarah asked me if I was really certain who had burnt down the languages block. And I said like, ‘duh’, and she said did I think Kathryn Cowell would get caught and I was like, ‘as if’. And she goes maybe there would be some evidence that would put Kathryn or maybe one of her gang at the scene, and I was like, ‘No way, unless she chucked her own fucking lighter over the wall.’ And Sarah said, ‘Maybe that’s the plan then. Remember, it takes a fucking thie
f to catch a fucking thief?’ She was really funny sometimes. Cos she never said ‘fucking’ so it was like really, really LOL when she did. So it was her idea you see, all along.
I said that to the nurses. That Sarah was LOL funny. Beth, she says she will be again. She keeps asking me all the time about Sarah. And now that the swelling has gone I think they feel really sorry for her. They can see she’s not the type who’d ask to get her face smashed in. Not normal for Tottenham.
Beth has uncovered her toes to show me how to tickle them. Sarah’s purple nail polish is starting to grow out. There are bits of bare nail where the polish has chipped off. She would totally die if she saw that. I think about trying the tickling thing when Beth has gone. I stare at her fingers. It feels like she’s not there any more. She’s just a body.
29
Sarah
Day Five – 11 a.m.
The man who is trying to kill me has been arrested!
That’s what Lisa told Lucinda. She thinks he was trying to kill me too.
She didn’t know what they charged him with.
I don’t suppose it’s a punishable offence to sit next to someone’s bed in Critical Care. He’s being questioned. They’ve put two men on the ward door. Policemen. I feel safe. Safer.