Because We Are Bad

by Lily Bailey

  “But humans are animals.”

  “Well . . . Striko says only animal animals. Imaginary humans can’t exist in the animal kingdom. Striko says if you want Victoria to live, you need to send her to the imaginary human kingdom, which isn’t somewhere we play, so you won’t see her again. But you get a third animal to replace her.”

  “I’ll take a cat as my third animal.”

  The bad thing is that we are bottom of the class. We were never stupid before. Mum says it’s not our fault. She says it’s because classes here are smaller, so the kids get ahead, but if we work hard we can catch up.

  We are in the bottom groups for everything, even English, and have extra lessons with Mrs. Martin and Francesca and Holly. Today Mrs. Martin tells us we do our Ks the wrong way.

  “Lily, stop curling your Ks like that. That’s the state school way. We do kicking Ks here.”

  Francesca and Holly giggle, and we know they will tell the other kids, who already think we’re common. Actually, they think lots of things. “My mummy says your parents are too young,” Maddie had said yesterday.

  “They said you were an ‘accident.’ Yuck!”

  We are lying in our bunk bed, trying very hard to sleep because it is the first day of Year 4 tomorrow. Some things are okay. Mum has promised she will switch off the taps in the bathroom every night, so we don’t have to worry about that.

  But we still can’t sleep. We sort of need the loo, but we don’t want to go, because then we will have to turn the taps on, and that’s too risky because Mum has gone to bed now, so she can’t check that they are off. Every time we look at our watch, we feel even more worried, because morning is getting closer and we are still awake.

  At about 11:15 p.m. we heard our parents turn off the telly, put the chain on the door, and switch off the lights. We heard them pattering around upstairs for ten minutes, and we thought about them brushing their teeth and putting their pajamas on. But then that stopped too, and now the house is silent.

  Everyone is asleep apart from us.

  What if Ella stops breathing?

  What if she is dying upstairs right now, gasping for her last breaths, and no one knows because they aren’t there to hear? It’s nearly midnight. Mum and Dad are definitely asleep.

  If we don’t check on Ella, who will?

  Slowly we climb down our ladder, trying to tread like a mouse. Years of creeping round our room after bedtime have made us a pro. We know which floorboards creak and which don’t, but it’s still hard, because sometimes unexpected bits make noises. We tiptoe across from our bed to the door, which squeaks when it’s opened.

  If it only squeaks three times or less, tomorrow will be a good day.

  Eeeeeeek, eeee, eeeee.

  Our heart catches in our mouth. We stand still for a minute. If Dad hears us, he will be cross and come and tell us off, because he has to work tomorrow.

  The hallway and the stairs are better, because they’re carpeted. We crawl up them—it’s quieter that way.

  Thankfully, Ella’s door is open, because she is scared of the dark. We creep to the side of her bed. She is curled up on her side, her thick mop of brown curls covering her face. We brush them aside. We can hear her breathing, but to be sure, we hold our hand an inch from her mouth. We can feel her breath on our palm, so she must be alive.

  We count nine of her breaths. Then we lower her duvet till it is just above her tummy. We place our hand on her chest. Her heart is beating. We count nine beats, but we’re still not sure, so we count another nine beats, which takes us to eighteen. Leaving it like that would be bad luck—there have to be three sets—so we do another nine. Twenty-seven beats.

  We think we must be done. It doesn’t feel quite right, but if we stay here she might wake up. We pull up the duvet under her chin. We repeat the words:

  Best sister ever.

  Best sister ever.

  Best sister ever.

  We say it in our head three times so she doesn’t wake up, but we focus hard on meaning it so she will be protected from bad things.

  We make our way back to our room and check it’s safe for us to go to sleep. We open our drawers, feeling around the insides with our hands. We worry that there might be someone, or something, hiding inside. We check our wardrobe and under the bunk bed. The plug switches must be off so there isn’t a fire in the night. We fumble around in the dark, checking they all point the right way. We creep up the ladder, and then we hang over the edge of the bunk bed to make sure there aren’t any people lurking underneath in the shadows. We look:

  Left, right.

  Left, right.

  Left, right.

  Under the covers, we need to say the prayer. It is the last thing that has to be said before we can sleep. It is the best protection against everything going wrong. We have already done the prayer, but since then we left the room to check on Ella, so we need to start again:

  Dear God,

  Please protect our family.

  Please do not let Ella die in her sleep.

  Please do not let us wake up in the morning and our parents have left.

  Please do not let the whole world turn to ice, so that we’re the only ones who aren’t frozen and we have to exist forever by ourselves.

  Please make our parents happy and stop them not getting on.

  Please make Scarlett always like us and be our best friend. Let the other girls in our class like us too and not think we’re a bad person.

  Please let this not be a game, let us not be the only person who really exists because everyone else is controlled by computers.

  Please look after everyone in the world and make it better for the people who don’t have homes, food, and water.

  Please let us sleep now and remember that lying in bed is just as good as sleeping.

  If our body needed sleep, it would put us to sleep.

  And if we can’t sleep tonight, it’s probably because we had enough sleep the night before.

  Amen.

  One round of the prayer takes a few minutes, and we repeat it twice to make three.

  Often we get it wrong, and we have to do all three rounds again. Sometimes we don’t get it wrong, but it sort of feels wrong. Then we have to start again too. That would make six rounds, so then we have to do another three to make nine. It’s best to get all three rounds right first time.

  The good thing is that this time we get all three rounds right on our first attempt. We lie back and shut our eyes tight. It must be time to sleep now.

  But by now it’s been about thirty minutes since we checked on Ella. How long does it take to die? Seconds. Imagine how many times she could have died by now. And there is no one to check on her but us. We’ll go and see if she’s still alive.

  Just one more time.

  · 5 ·

  Mum and Dad

  We and Scarlett have just finished our swimming lesson. It is the worst part of the week, because the pool is freezing, and no matter what the teacher says, it’s never okay once you’re in.

  Mum knows we hate the cold, so she is waiting with a towel for each of us at the changing-room door. The two of us wobble over, all plucked chicken skin and white webbed feet and hands, grabbing for the towels and chattering our teeth. Although we’ve started to feel that it’s getting a bit babyish, the Disney print doesn’t bother us right now. We wrap ourselves up in the soft faded blue of 101 Dalmations having fun in a soapy bathtub; Scarlett has her own green towel from home.

  Mum has got our stuff out of the locker; it’s waiting for us in a pile on the low wooden bench that runs down the center of the room. We dry our body, and then drop the towel on the floor and reach for our knickers.

  “Don’t drop your towel on the floor,” says Mum.

  “Why?” we say.

  “Because it’s dirty.”

  “But you’re going to wash it when we get home.”

  “Yes, but some things like floors are really dirty, and the washing machine doesn’t get rid of all the
germs.”

  (This reminds us of something Dad said a few weeks ago: “Always wash your hands when you get home after taking the Tube, because there’s lots of invisible dirt on the poles from other people’s hands; it’s there even though you can’t see it.”)

  “What if you wash it lots of times?” we ask. “Does it go eventually?”

  “Yes, probably eventually.” Mum’s not paying attention anymore; she has turned to give Scarlett her socks. “Sit on the bench when you put them on so you don’t get your feet wet . . .”

  Our towel is curled on the tiled floor. The lines between the tiles are filled with a spongy green slime we hadn’t noticed before. Is this the super dirt Mum is talking about? No: Dad said it’s invisible. We look at our hands, which are now less waterlogged and starting to look normal again. What about the lines on our palm? Are they filled with spongy green slime too tiny to see?

  “How many times would you have to wash it to make it go away?”

  “Oh . . . a few . . . Here, put your sweatshirt on.”

  “Okay,” we say.

  We resolve to wash our hands more often and more carefully.

  Our special way of finishing our thoughts changes every few months. There’s never a specific moment where the change is noticeable. At the moment, we tap each side of the chair we are sitting on three times. Then we triple it to make nine.

  We smell our fingers one by one, carefully.

  We look left, right, up, and down, three times.

  We uncross and cross our legs three times and tap our feet up and down together three times.

  Dad wishes we would stop.

  He tells us he will get us a guinea pig if we promise to stop fidgeting so much, because it is unbearable to watch. We would like a guinea pig. We reason that we can move in a way that’s less noticeable, or perhaps find another way to close our thoughts.

  We make the deal with him.

  Mum and Dad take Ella and us to a house outside London to get the guinea pig. We pull into the gravel drive of a large red-brick house. We open the car door to get out, and a little gray dog runs past. As we look at it, a thought pops into our head:

  I hate that dog.

  We clutch our head.

  What a horrible thought, says my friend. Why did you think that?

  I don’t know, I say. I love dogs. That dog looks friendly and nice.

  Ella is shrieking “Where are the guinea pigs? I want to see the guinea pigs!” and the man and woman who come out of the house give us a strange look.

  “We don’t have any—”

  “They’re in the basement!” interrupts Dad, winking.

  Inside the house, there’s a cage with lots of tiny fluffy gray puppies in it.

  “We’re getting a puppy!” says Dad.

  We feel elated. A puppy! How amazing!

  “Can we call him Tuffy?”

  And then a pang. The older gray dog we saw on the drive must have been the mum. How can we take one of her children when I had such a horrible thought about her? And how will we look the puppy in the eye, knowing what I thought about his mum?

  Our parents are rich now and have bought a wooden ski chalet in Chamonix in France. Everything about the chalet is great, and we are learning to ski, but the problem is, we have to drive to get there.

  Mum and Dad have always argued, but it’s getting worse. They argue about the most ridiculous things, and it’s worse when we’re in the car.

  We don’t want to take sides, but Dad is always shouting at Mum. According to him, everything she does is wrong. She doesn’t want to fight, and cries, but it doesn’t help, so she gets mad and shouts back. If he repeatedly runs his hands through his hair, you know he is really mad. Then you should keep quiet.

  They are fighting before we even get to the end of our road.

  By the time we get to France, they’ve argued about a million things. The main problem is that Dad has decided he doesn’t like Mum’s voice. He tells her it is high and piercing, and he hates it. Mum has put her Gucci sunglasses on. Since it’s not sunny, she must be crying.

  “And those huge glasses! Those fucking glasses!” screams Dad. “They make you look fucking ridiculous!” He grabs them off her face and snaps them in half.

  This is too much for Mum, who sat crying and not saying much through most of the last hour. She grabs a Scotch egg and smushes it in his face. She throws another at the windscreen. Dad swerves the car.

  “Fuck!”

  “STOP!” we scream. “Dad, stop shouting at Mum. You’re making her cry, and she hasn’t done anything wrong.

  “And Mum, put the Scotch eggs down.”

  “You shut up, Lily!” says Dad. “We are having an adult argument, and you bloody well stay out of it.”

  In the car we used to calm ourselves down by doing our moving-around routines, but we promised Dad we would sit still. So now we either fidget very slowly so Dad won’t notice, or we say our special sentences:

  Everything is under control.

  Their relationship is on the mend.

  They love each other really.

  Lately, we’ve found a better thing to do. We’ve realized Dad and Mum are probably bad, because otherwise he wouldn’t treat her like that—and she wouldn’t make him so unhappy. We don’t want to end up bad like them, so we focus on counting up all the things we’ve done that day that could possibly be bad. We make a long list of them and think about whether what we did really was that bad.

  Sometimes it turns out it wasn’t bad, and we can excuse it.

  Other times it was genuinely bad, and we have to think about it very hard to make sure we don’t do it again. To be certain, we go through the list three times. Sometimes that goes wrong, and we have to go through it six more times to make nine. If that still goes wrong, we start again.

  Of course, it’s worrying that we’ve done bad things at all, but my friend reassures me:

  The fact that you’re thinking about it and trying to sort it out shows that you won’t end up bad like them. The problem with them is that they don’t care about it. You’re going to grow up to be a good person, I know it.

  It’s so relieving to hear this—so thrilling and exciting to know that because She is here to help me, I have potential.

  Knowing this makes their argument seem quieter, and though I’m still in the car, I’m not here really.

  I’m in the future, ten years from now, living in a stylish flat by the Thames and working in a very cool office with glass walls, a watercooler, and unlimited stationery. I don’t have housemates, because I don’t need them—I have my friend. And by this time we’ve worked it all out, and everyone loves us.

  Thank you, I say, thanks for everything.

  We’re driving in the car through Chamonix. Mum and Dad are in the front, and we’re in the back with Dad’s sister, Auntie Sam. Dad is screaming at Mum about the fact that she doesn’t even try to be good at skiing and he’s sick of wasting money on her lessons. Mum is saying she does try. What happens next happens so quickly, we don’t take it all in.

  Mum unbuckles her seat belt, opens the passenger door, and jumps out of the car. We look to see where she will land. There is a patch of grass by the barrier, and she throws herself at it.

  Her body curls in a ball, like a gymnast. Will she make it?

  She has made it. She lands, bounces a few times, and rolls away from the impact. Then she is gone from view.

  “Ian!” screams Auntie Sam. “Ian!!!”

  Dad keeps driving. Auntie Sam clutches our hand.

  Please let her be okay.

  Let her be okay.

  Let her be okay.

  Mum walks into the chalet hours later. We look her up and down. She looks okay. But what if she is hurting somewhere we can’t see? We wrap our arms round her.

  “Are you okay?”

  Mum nods. She feels cold.

  She has walked back.

  She says everything will be fine between her and Dad. “Sorry I did such a
stupid thing.”

  Then she buries her face in our hair, and our scalp starts to feel like it’s raining.

  At night, it doesn’t matter what time we go to bed: our prayers and checks take hours before we can sleep. We share a bunk bed with Ella, and at first we wonder how we can do our checks with her there.

  While we don’t think there’s anything wrong with checking things to be sure, we haven’t seen anyone else do it and suspect it should be private.

  By now, we’ve perfected the routine. We wait for Ella to be in the bottom bunk, and tell her we are going to the bathroom. Once there, we wash our hands three times, because otherwise we’ll be kept up imagining all the things we can’t see on our hands. We check the cupboard under the sink to make sure there is no one in it. We run our hand across the unsanded shelf, getting splinters in our palms. Then we check with our eyes:

  Left, right.

  Left, right.

  Left, right.

  Up, down.

  Up, down.

  Up, down.

  We do the same on the bottom shelf.

  We check the bath and sink taps, passing our hand under them nine times and saying:

  They’re off.

  They’re off.

  They’re off.

  We take the loo roll out of the holder and check there is nothing underneath, three times.

  Then we go back into our bedroom. We check behind the curtains three times, or nine if that doesn’t feel right.

  Ella always asks “What are you dooooing?” and we always say “I’m looking at the moon.” She asks why we couldn’t see it the first time and we tell her to be quiet and go to sleep. Then we go over to her.

  We feel that she is breathing in the special way and check her pulse.

  It’s harder to keep this secret. So we’ve decided to be half honest. We tell her we are just checking to see she is alive and well, like when you go to the doctor. In our head we repeat: