Sam yells, “Close the lid!” but Mum says he’ll suffocate. I tried to stay calm with her, but she is being hysterical.
I say, “Mum, obviously if Sam is suffocating, he’ll tell me and I’ll unlock it again.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “It’s perfectly safe.” He trusts me. He should. I’d die for him just like I would for Billie.
At three in the morning one night, I’m doing the automatic writing when Billie finally writes to me. The mere fact it is Billie means I know I am on the right track: she is talking to me because she has faith in my new plan. But the words she writes make me certain I know how she died:
I THOUGHT (S)HE LIKED ME
BUT IT WASN’T TRUE
I write brackets around the “s” on my drawing pad after the session is over. Maybe “s” is the automatic writing equivalent of a typo.
Her statement isn’t about the walker. I know that as soon as I take my pencil off the paper and read back what I’ve written. The walker is the pervert, but even though she could have told someone what he did and he could have gone to prison, he couldn’t have killed Billie. He liked her too much. It was true, in fact, that the walker liked her, even though he showed it in a weird way. I could feel that he liked little girls too much to kill them from the way he interacted with me. I knew it instinctively.
But after the walker went away, Billie was alone, possibly disoriented, in pain. Someone she trusted found her in the woods. Someone who she thought might like her (for example, a boy who fancies girls), but who turned out not to at all. And for some reason I don’t know yet, he…
Think about it: How come Nathan was so certain I didn’t kill Billie? How did he know for sure the killer was a man? How did he know his dad hadn’t murdered her? He acts weird, his home is strange, and the vibe I get from him isn’t normal. He keeps saying he is bad. When he talks to me he often blushes, and he seems like he has something to hide. And then there is what his mother said the last time I saw her at her trailer: “Don’t want to end up like her, do you?” She wasn’t threatening me. She was warning me.
I’m now convinced: the killer is Nathan Nolan.
Shortly after Billie automatic-writes to me, and a few days before we go on holiday, Mum finally lifts the grounding. I ask to go to the shop, so I can track down Nathan.
I am worried she will say no, but because there are still police around, Mum lets me go. She says they’ll watch me the entire time. The first thing I do is buy a 10p bag of sweets, so I can show her the bag when I get home to prove I went to the shop. Then I head for the trailer park. I’m looking, as I walk along the pavement, for a big branch that might have fallen off a tree, as all my weapons have been confiscated. I am poking the hedgerows and sucking on a cola bottle when I become aware of a footfall in time with mine. It’s a little heavier, and just behind me. I walk for a bit, then I whirl around, my fists ready.
Nathan jumps back. “Don’t! It’s just me!”
I keep my fists up to protect myself. “Hello, ‘Just Me.’ What are you doing following me?”
“N-nothing,” he stutters.
“Oh,” I say coldly. “Okay, then.” I turn and keep walking. This is called playing chicken. I make an effort to keep my breathing steady, but I am listening intently for the sound of a weapon swooshing through the air toward my head, and I keep my eyeballs swiveled to the side so I can make sure he isn’t right behind me (without looking like that’s what I’m doing).
“Hey,” Nathan says. “Hey! Wait up! Thera! I’m sorry ’bout my mum the other week. She wouldn’t let me out the bedroom. I was grounded. She doesn’t like trouble. She said with the police around, if I messed about with you I’d be banged up.”
“She hit me with a wooden spoon,” I murmur dryly.
“She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“I guess you think hitting people with a wooden spoon is okay. I guess your dad does worse. And what about you, Nathan?”
He stops walking. I keep going for a few paces, then turn around. His expression is troubled. His shoulders are rounded and he chews his lip. He can’t look at me.
“Were you following me the other day?” I say.
“Um,” he says, almost in a whisper. “When you were dressed in a pretty dress and stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“How did you find my bag?”
“What bag?”
“The bag you brought to my house, dummy.”
“Oh…I only wanted to play with you. That’s why I was following you. I want us to be friends.” He hesitates. “Maybe I could be your best friend. Your new one.”
“Is that why you did it?”
“Why…” Nathan scratches the skin on the back of his hand like he’s nervous. “Why I did what?”
“Look at me,” I command. He looks up slowly. “I thought you were going to say you were finally going to stop being a wuss and help me with my plan. But you’re not going to, are you? Because you’re afraid of what I’d find.” I take a step toward him. I lower my head, like a hunting polar bear on the programs Dad watches. It’s a universal sign of threatening, and Nathan looks appropriately worried.
“I will,” he says quickly. “I will if that’s what I have to do to be your friend.”
“Forget it. I don’t need anyone to help me anymore.” I wonder about accusing him now, but then decide against it. I want to get him talking, find out why he did it before I enact the revenge Billie and the dead girls need to rest in peace. “You thought it was stupid anyway,” I add, pretending I’m a little sad.
“It wasn’t stupid,” Nathan says quietly.
“You haven’t spoken to me in ages, and you told your mum about what we did. Why would you want to be friends?”
“Because I…” His voice is sad and awkward. “I like you. And I owe you, for telling on you.”
I toss my head and scoff scornfully. “If you do want to do stuff with me just because you owe me, then I don’t want it. Any of it.”
He stands there in silence for a bit, and then he says, “I really am sorry about my mum. She made me tell her, ’cause she saw I was…”
“Crying like a baby?”
“Crying,” he says.
“Did you tell her I was ‘leading you astray’?” I say, quoting her. I start walking away from him. I’m going to take him somewhere I know the police won’t be watching.
“No,” Nathan says, following me, as I knew he would. “She made that up. She’s just pissed off these days. Dad keeps calling her and coming ’round and…she’s angry with me too. I’m bad.”
“How are you bad?” I snap impatiently, turning around to glare at him. “Why do you keep saying that? What did you do?”
He stops abruptly, surprised. His lips are parted and his hair is tousled. He has a red mark on his cheekbone. Despite what I know I have to do for Billie, I find myself studying him in a fancying way. His neck is lovely, dipping into his T-shirt. His arms are golden brown, and I know his skin is soft. I know his chest is hard beneath that dirty fake Adidas logo. His combat pants are baggy, but I know his legs are nice, like a footballer’s. Suddenly, stupidly, because I’m sure he’s the killer and I know I’m risking the whole plan by getting close, I walk toward him. He pulls back a little, but I grab his T-shirt and plant my lips on his.
I kiss Nathan Nolan. As I lean in, his lips part. I touch my lips on his like he did on my cheek on the first day we hung out, very gently. We kiss once, twice, three, four, and then five times. They are very soft kisses. Nathan leans in again and I pout my lips, but then he goes past them and he puts his lips on my neck, and I feel his cold nose on my shoulder, and he hugs me. I put my arms around him and he hugs me tighter, and then so tightly I panic for a second that this is how he suffocated Billie, and I go, “Nathan, I can’t breathe.”
He pulls away quickly and loo
ks down. “Sorry.”
I frown and try to peek under his floppy hair. “So, um…” I begin. I am about to ask him what he did to her. But then he interrupts me.
“Meet me tomorrow at two.” Nathan sniffs, once, sort of firmly, and then he looks up. “At the trailer park.”
“Why? You’re leaving now?” I say quickly. Damn it. I shouldn’t have kissed him. I lost control of the situation.
“Yeah. I’m going to tell you…I’m going to show you…why I’m bad.” He looks suddenly resolute, but nervous at the same time.
“Okay,” I say, nodding. Now I’ll find out what happened to Billie. “I’ll be there.”
“Don’t come up to my trailer. Wait at the entrance to the field. Don’t let my mum see you.”
“Okay.”
“Come on, I’ll walk you home.”
“I don’t need anyone to walk me home. Go on, you head off.”
He hesitates, then starts to walk away in the opposite direction.
I set off. All the way home I see no one. Not even a police officer. Just Nathan Nolan, about fifty feet behind me, sticking to the shadows, following me every step of the way.
The next day, when I get to the trailer park, Nathan is waiting for me. He looks at me miserably, as if he wishes I hadn’t shown up, and then he turns and starts walking. “Come on,” he says. “You deserve to know.”
He walks with his hands in his pockets. He is wearing those sports pants in that silky material with the poppers down the sides, and a dark blue T-shirt. We walk in single file, Nathan in front, and don’t speak for a while. I’m still on alert for what he might do to me, and for what I have to do later, but he doesn’t seem like he’s going to attack me. It’s a hot day, and as we walk we see a heat haze constantly ahead of us, now in the crops, now along a muddy road. Suddenly we are on a little raised footpath, coming up on the other side of the wheat field where I last saw Billie.
“I bumped into Billie here,” Nathan says, gesturing casually. “I was on this track between the two wheat fields. I was going to the woods and she jumped out at me and said “Boo!” It frightened the life out of me, but she laughed her head off. I kind of didn’t know what to say. She kept laughing like a maniac. Billie was always really loud and funny, but I liked you better.”
“Billie was perfect,” I say firmly, although this is nice to hear.
“You would say that, though, wouldn’t you?” Nathan points out. “She was your best friend.”
“Is my best friend.”
“Oh.” Nathan looks disappointed, then turns away from me and starts walking again, toward the copse. “She asked me where I was going, and I said to the den. I know you guys thought nobody knew about it, but it’s just behind my home and I kept seeing you all going in there, so I went in and found it. That day Mum was being a…well, anyway, I went for a walk in the village. I like to pet Mr. Childer’s dog. She’s called Sally. She likes me. She always wags her tail when I’m coming. After I played with her for a while I was tired, but I didn’t want to go home, so I decided to go to the den.” He is picking the dirt out of his nails, tramping along and not looking at me. “So Billie said cool, and she would come with me. I said something like she’d better go home before dark and she was like, ‘There’s half an hour before sundown, poophead!’ And there was, and she had already started walking toward the den anyway, so I just went along with it. She was pretty pushy, Billie, wasn’t she? You couldn’t really say no. She would just bounce along, doing what she wanted.”
“I guess so,” I say, unsure, because I’m not certain he means this in a good way.
“So we walked toward the trees along the path here, like we’re doing. I don’t think I said much. Billie was talking lots. There were headlights. They were driving past in a big car as we went in the copse, so Billie yelled, ‘Duck and cover!’ and ran into the copse. I ran after her because she was a girl and the woods were dark, and anyway it was fun. Most of the trailer kids are older than me and we don’t hang out much. They just smoke up and talk crap anyway, they don’t do anything fun. And at school…”
I hate smoking. Yuck.
Nathan snaps a stalk of corn and swipes the floor in front of us with it, back and forth. “…At school, some of the girls talk to me, but mostly people avoid the gypsies and snotty kids and they say all the time the things I have are dirty and broken and they say I don’t do my homework and I’m not organized and I’m…I’m…” We’ve reached the entrance to the copse. He looks at me. We turn to the trees together and walk in between them, through the gate. The policeman isn’t here anymore. Must be long enough after she’s dead that all the evidence is gone.
Nathan is silent in the woods.
I ask him, “What did you do when you got in here?” but he doesn’t say anything, just gestures to the entrance to the den, and I crawl through it. He crawls through after me and stands up. Like Hattie, it seems like he has become an adult over the summer. He feels tall, but also his face is heavier and there are shadows under his eyes. He looks into the middle of the den, right where I found Billie.
“We crawled really fast into the den. When we were here, Billie was laughing loads. I can’t remember what she was saying. She danced about and threw herself down on the ground. Here.” He points to the center of the den. “She kind of patted the ground like she wanted me to come to her, so I sat down next to her and she sat up and was like, ‘What are we going to do here? Alooooone?’ like it was spooky, but also like…flirty. I dunno. I shrugged. She shrugged. She said…” He stops and he licks his lips. His cheeks are pink. “She said did I want to kiss? She laughed, like it was a big joke. I don’t know if she was really serious or not.” He turns to me. “I told her, ‘I don’t know. I like someone else.’ I meant you, but I didn’t say.” His face crinkles up, like he’s confused or upset. He sits down on the ground, and looks at where he said Billie was sat. “I didn’t tell her I liked you more, because I thought then she wouldn’t kiss me. And I’d…” He blushes and looks up at me. “I’d never been kissed before by someone I liked. Just Hattie’s sister, and that was because everyone was shit to me about living in the trailer park, and she bossed me into kissing her, and I thought it would make me more popular, and she said if I didn’t things would be worse. So I wanted to kiss Billie. I thought it would be more…nicer.” He looks down again and his hair covers his face. “She was like, ‘Okay, let’s just kiss for practice.’ I don’t think she fancied me or anything. She wasn’t being serious. She said something about finding her Prince Charming one day and she wanted to know how to kiss and he wouldn’t be a snot-nosed badger. I don’t know why she said that.”
I laugh. “I do.”
“Why?” he asks.
I hesitate. “Friendship secret,” I say. “What did you say after?”
“Well, she said I could practice on her so I wouldn’t mess up with whoever I liked. It was just swapping practice. She said you and her kiss your hands. I said, ‘I dunno, do you want your first kiss to be with me?’ and she was like, ‘Practice kisses don’t count! Silly bum,’ and then she laughed more. She was making a racket. Neither of us noticed…Anyway”—he scratches his head—“I closed my eyes and I imagined you. I pouted my lips, like you’re supposed to do. I felt her lips mush against mine for two seconds, and then she took them off and we both took a breath. I opened my eyes. ‘What do you think?’ I said, and she said, ‘Well, it was okay.’ She said maybe it was better when you fancied the person.
“I nodded. I said I was imagining who I fancied. She said something like, ‘Okay, do it again and I’ll imagine Leo.’ So I closed my eyes and pouted again, and she kissed me. She went ‘Hmm,’ so I said, ‘Was that okay?’ And she said I wasn’t bad and that imagining Leo definitely helped. Then I was like…I was like, ‘Do you want me to tell you who I fancy?’ She said something weird like, ‘Wait a minute, lie down here next to me, I always imagine Leo i
n the back of that steamed-up car,’ and I was like, ‘What steamed-up car?’ and she said, ‘In Titanic,’ and I said, ‘I haven’t seen it,’ and she yelled, ‘You haven’t seen Titanic?’ and I said, ‘I don’t think I should lie down with you anyway,’ and she asked why not and I said, ‘Because.’”
“‘Because’ what?”
Nathan is still sat on the dirt, with his knees up to his chest and his arms around them. He puts his chin down on his knees. “Well.”
“Well what? What did you say?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t say anything, ’cause. Well, there was this man in the den suddenly. I didn’t see where he came from, but he must have climbed through the back of the den from the field behind the fence. He was just there. We didn’t hear anything ’cause Billie’s voice is so loud. Was. So loud.” Nathan is staring into the air in front of him, like he is seeing the whole thing playing out in miniature before his eyes. “The man said, ‘I’ll lie down next to you,’ and then laughed, like it was a big joke. He seemed friendly when he said it. Lots of blokes say stuff like that and it’s just a joke. My football teacher and my dad. Dad’s a dick, but when he says stuff like that to girls in pubs he doesn’t really mean it, he’s just joking. Billie laughed too, and then so did I. Then the man looked at me and he said, ‘What’s a pikey like you doing with a beautiful young girl like this in the woods?’ I stopped laughing then. I said, ‘Nothing.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, sure, nothing. Liars, thieves, and scum, pikeys are.’ Then he went on, kept calling me a pikey.”
“What’s a pikey?” I ask.
Nathan looks at me witheringly. “Like a traveler. He said I was a Romany Gypsy, and I said I’m not, I’m Irish, and he laughed and said, ‘That’s even worse!’ and then he said to Billie, ‘What’s the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish funeral? There’s one less drunk.’ Billie laughed. The man still sounded like he was really nice and cheerful, but I realized he wasn’t. I know blokes like that. My dad’s like that. Really nice and then bam! He just gets mad or drunk and smacks other people about. Fucking pride dented. Something makes him angry and then he totally turns…” Nathan’s thoughts seem to drift. He shakes his head. “Anyway, I was annoyed Billie laughed. I said, ‘Do you know him?’ and she said, ‘Yeah, he’s—’ Then the man interrupted her and said, ‘Hey, Billie, did you hear the joke about the Irishman who was found dead on the roadside in the middle of summer?’ Billie said no. ‘His friend told him that, in the heat, you should just imagine you’re cold.’ He turned to me and was like, ‘D’you know what he died of?’ I didn’t say anything, but then he grinned and said, ‘Ask me, mick, or you’ll be in for it,’ so I said, ‘No, what?’ and he said, ‘He died of frostbite.’ Billie laughed again. Then he said, ‘What’s the difference between a smart Irishman and a unicorn? Nothing, they’re both fictional characters!’ I’ve heard them all before, they’re all stupid jokes, but Billie was howling by then and I stood up. He came at me quickly and was like, ‘Now don’t try anything, you, I know what you lot are like, causing trouble. Get out of here. God knows what you’re doing with her, but I won’t call the police if you go now!’” Nathan does an impression of him. He makes him sound like he’s pretending to be nice, like he’s being responsible and making a bad boy go away.
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