by Olivia Levez
She’s worse ’cause she pretends to care; she prised open my soul and she saw what was inside.
I take a long gulp of vodka.
It’s her fault, all of it. That Johnny’s gone –
his little hands reaching out like stars.
And if she knew – if she only knew – what her interfering, double-crossing actions would lead to.
Looking after Johnny made me me.
So who am I now?
I am nothing and no one
without him.
Keep waking up and he’s not there. The sound of his breathing is missing; the warm huff on my cheek.
Slosh.
Vodka doesn’t burn. It’s not enough.
I know what will be enough.
Shiver
The science labs are below the English rooms and now I know how to make the pain go away.
I start to float, right out of my body, right above myself. I drift, bumping against the ceiling, and watch myself turn all the Bunsen burners on and close all the windows except one.
A fly is trapped inside one of the strip-light fittings. As it crawls, it feels everything gently.
Patpatpat, checking, checking.
Other Fran walks out of the lab and closes the door. I know she is walking around the side of the building, reaching into her bag.
Everyone is outside, on the field. Teachers are chatting in the sun. All the students are stretching and racing and lazing.
Other Fran slides the matchbox, takes a match.
Whirr, goes the fly.
The flame shivers a little.
Then it is flung through the half-open window.
WWWHHHHUUUMMMPPPPP, goes the science lab.
And the girl that is me feels nothing.
Where the Rocks Weep
The walls weep.
I have changed to a crawling creature; I lick the cave walls with my fat shining tongue. My shoes are gone, drowned in the water. My rucksack too, lost in the swell when I tried to get out my drinks bottle. I have only my Hello Kitty bag, which I clutch dog-like in my teeth.
About me is only darkness now; these breathing, weeping walls.
Time trickles and drips; for centuries I climb, hand over hand.
And the dark creeps behind me on slithering elbows.
Water Like Diamonds
My throat has a thousand flies buzzing in it, waiting for me to unhinge my jaw and let them out, a swarm to block out the
whitelightwhitelightwhitelight.
And always that insect sound of endless hissing: churra-churra.
There’s a break in the rocks. And a slimy ledge, and the rocks are different here; they’re smooth and wet and furred. They’re covered in moss and that means, that means –
Water.
And behind the moss is splintering light, endlessly patterning.
Moaning, I break out of my cave and there’s a curtain, a tower: endless, deafening, hurling, hissing water, bright as diamonds, fast as bullets.
Churra-churra churra-churra.
It could be insects but I don’t think it’s insects.
I’m behind a waterfall.
I try to touch it and it’s hard as stone; they’ll snap my fingers off, those water-swords.
I crawl, slither, fall over the mossy rocks, downdowndown, and I’m aware of the endless roaring beside me and the terrible glare of sun that blinds me, strips me raw.
I fall, into water burning-cold; into sun that unpeels my eyes.
Falling Light
The water’s hailing down now, stabbing the darkness away. I drink and drink like a dog, and all the time water tumbles over me, cuts me like shards of glass.
When I’m done, I collapse into the pool, lie back with my face staring at the sky.
I could die now, in this sun, in this burning water.
As I sink lower, the water weeds stroke me and I drown.
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
Lie back, lie back, give in to all this brightness.
Turn my face up to the sun and let it melt me. Blister my stony flesh in slow splashes around me.
I didn’t mean to do it, didn’t mean to hurt anyone.
Let the waterweeds stroke my hair.
There’s nothing for me now, there’s only the sun that unpeels and the water that burns.
So let it end here, in this moment. The last thing that I will see is that leaf with its diamond beads of water. And behind the leaf, that pile of stones. Stone placed over stone with perfect precision. Five stones in total, all carefully balanced, neat as you like –
I blink my gritty eyes. Think.
Stones don’t balance themselves.
Something about the neatness, the precision, reminds me of
reminds me of
tiny cramped numbers scratched in sharp pencil.
I have time to register that the mountain’s spat me out on the other side of the island; I’ve been spat out right where Whoever lives –
the bird hunter, the smoke-maker, the dog-catcher, the –
Be careful what you wish for.
And then there’s a splashing noise, and movement, and two hands grasp me under the arms.
A voice, hoarse and panting.
‘Oh fuck,’ it says.
Feet
The voice is not what I expected in heaven. And it’s too posh for hell.
There’s splashing and gasping and someone pulling at me, dragging me out, but I’m too busy dying.
I don’t come easy. It’s nice, being dead. I try to beat them away.
‘Getoffgetoffgetoff,’ I say, but my voice comes out all wrong. That can’t be me, that ragged howling. Sounds like a beast that’s been dragged from the shadows.
When I’m out of the pool –
can’t be Poison Pool ’cause it’s far too clean and there’s no waterfall there, ’course there isn’t –
there’s that voice again.
‘Christ, oh shit. I can’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’
A hoarse voice that’s not been used in a long, long time. Cracked, but posh as plums.
Through drowned hair I see:
Two perfectly plaited flip-flops containing
Two peeling freckled feet.
Then my stomach twists with pain and I cough and gasp and retch up water all over them.
Face
A face, hovering.
Disappears and appears again.
Is it an angel? Do angels have matted red hair and ginger beards?
‘Go away,’ I tell the face. ‘Leave me alone. I want to die.’
I curl up tight as pain.
The face comes back again and again. The face says things like ‘Who are you?’ and ‘I think you need to drink this’ and ‘Were you on the plane?’
It’s a face that’s blistered and peeling and hollow-eyed.
I close my eyes and ignore it till it goes away.
But it keeps coming back. It gives me water in a tin cup. It tries to feed me.
I’m hollowed out.
Someone has taken a spoon and scooped out all of my flesh, the stone, and left me just this tired old skin.
I sleep. I try to watch, to grasp on to the face that hovers.
It comes a lot, mostly just to stare.
I wish it would go away.
I wish it would come back.
Breathing
‘You can go in now.’
The nurse is nodding and smiling. Her voice is happy-jolly, like it’s the best thing in the world to be lying in bed surrounded by sucking machines.
I take a deep breath and step inside.
It’s the sound that gets me first of all, then the smell.
The noise is a mechanical clamping and sucking; regular, monotonous, like wind being forced through a tube.
I hate it.
I see a bed and curtains pulled back and a cabinet full of bottles and boxes and tubes. The air is antiseptic, sharp and bitter. The breathing machine sucks and resucks.
/> I feel hot in my mask.
I need to get out of this room of sickness.
But I look at her face.
At first I’m relieved. Miss is sitting up in bed, putting on make-up. She’s smiling into a mirror, outlining her eyes in purple shimmer. When she sees me, she waves to me with a bandaged hand.
‘How’s your magnum opus?’ she asks, and I see that she’s dropped her eyeshadow pencil.
Because she only has stumps in those bandages. There are no fingers to hold it.
‘Oops, silly me,’ she says.
Something is happening to her voice. It’s getting higher and higher and now it’s ringing.
Now I’m close, I realise that a plastic mask presses her poor molten flesh back to keep it in place. As I watch, her face starts to melt like a wax crayon, like a Barbie doll.
Hot fat.
It’s splashing on to the bed sheets.
Drip drip.
‘Let’s do an ink waster,’ says Miss, and her voice is high and jarring; it’s turned into a fire bell.
Her bandaged hand reaches out to touch me.
Feathers
‘It’s only a dream. You’re dreaming.’
That voice again.
It’s buzzing round me like a fly. I want to bat it away and sink into darkness.
I’m lying on something that crackles, but can’t make myself care enough to look.
I feel the space where Dog used to sleep, like an ache. Dog will be drowned now, swirled away or trapped for ever in those hell-caves. I curl up, tight on my side.
I lose everything I touch. I’m cursed. I destroy all those who look at me.
I think of Dog, those treacle eyes.
A hand, reaching out like stars.
A face pressed behind its plastic mask.
And I think of Cassie, rising from the settee.
Love you more than the sun and stars and planets.
A feathered headdress floats in front of my eyes. I squeeze them shut. A bird hunter, I think. But I can’t make myself care and I can’t make it go away.
‘Um, I really think you should eat something now.’
Something cold and wet is pressed against my lips. I lick it. Sweet and cold.
Turn away to my pain.
A sigh.
‘Well, I’ll leave it here and you can take some when you’re ready.’
The voice goes away.
Good.
I lie alone, sweet juice still cold on my lips.
After
They told me afterwards that the caretaker had saved both their lives.
Turns out she was still in the classroom. She was mentoring a kid in her room; she wasn’t at Sports Day with the rest.
She won’t need to spend time doing her hair in those pretty styles again because most of it’s crisped off. It’ll be quite a while before she puts purple shimmery eyeshadow on again.
Miss and her student didn’t know anything was wrong till the fire bell went off, but that classroom door had always stuck – it never locked properly – and they panicked and couldn’t get out.
The caretaker dragged them out; risked his life to get them both out of English Block before the fire service took over.
Miss made the student get out first so she ended up with burns over most of her body. Lost the skin on both hands.
‘They’ve brought her out of her coma now,’ Angela says. ‘Do you want to go inside?’
We’re standing in the hospital corridor. There’s a glass window into Miss’s room.
‘Ant-bac,’ says a nurse. In silence we squirt gel on to our hands, rub it in till it vanishes in a whiff of ice.
‘She wants to see you,’ says Angela. ‘She’s been asking for you, once she knew what happened.’
‘Wear this,’ says the nurse.
She passes a protective gown to me. It rustles as I put it on.
I don’t want to go inside that room.
When I was a little girl, I was taken to see my grandad before he died.
I was eight or nine and he was almost unrecognisable, lying under the hospital sheets.
His hands weren’t the ones I remembered, lighting his fags with the blue glass lighter that was always on the sideboard, holding my hand tightly to cross the road to the sweetie shop.
These hands were fluttering birds, nipping and un-nipping at the sheets.
Grandad was fretful. At one point he tried to climb out of bed to go and find my nanna. I remember I was shocked ’cause they hadn’t dressed him properly; his pyjamas were too big and they gaped.
My mum tried to push him back into bed but it was no good; we had to call the nurse in the end. My grandad died soon after, followed by my nanna, who wasn’t interested in a world without her beloved Frank.
Cassie always liked a drink, but she started drinking a lot more after that. It was good in a way though, ’cause that’s when we had lots of TV and movie cuddles. Sometimes all day.
I force myself to move closer and look through the glass at the person that lies at the centre of all the tangle of tubes and wires.
Miss’s body seems tiny, a small mound below the spotless sheets.
She’s bundled in bandages: her head and arms and hands.
‘She was lucky,’ says the nurse. ‘They’re only second-degree burns. She’ll need skin grafts of course, but…’ She smiles at me. ‘Is she your teacher? How lovely, to have one of her pupils come to visit her.’
My face hovers in the glass.
If I stare long enough, my snake hair will wake and coil into S shapes, ready to strike and hiss. My fang teeth will lengthen. My eyes will shrink into empty pockets of hellfire, tiny white-hot pebbles, ready to petrify. Ready to burn.
I tear off my gown. Angela hurries after me.
‘I really think you should go and see her, Frances.’
‘No.’
‘It’ll help you with the sleeplessness, with the dreams.’
‘No.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Keep away from me ’cause I bite, I freeze, I burn.
‘Frances?’
Fat as Moons
There’s that smell again. It’s fruity, wet and sweet. It’s killing me.
At first I think I’m in Grandad’s allotment, up on the park. I imagine I see his tomatoes, fat as moons, hanging above me. There’s even the unmistakable green smell of them, like when I’d help him pick them and that scent would be on my fingers. It’s the smell of being seven.
But there’s a face like a green football, bobbing and nodding with its zigzag teeth and wet pink smiles. I rub my eyes and blink. It’s a melon on a post, carved like a pumpkin. Its grass skirt rustles.
I shift around and wonder why I’m lying under a neatly-plaited palm canopy on a sturdy bed laced with fresh leaves. The mattress is squeaky. I reach down and realise it’s been made with plastic bottles.
But there it is again. A waft in the warm air. I turn round.
Placed next to me on an upturned tin drum is a clam shell. And on the clam shell, sliced into fat chunks, are pieces of watermelon, fat and pink and spitting pips.
I grab a piece and cram it whole into my mouth.
OhmyGod ohmyGod sugarsweet sugarfizz tastes like sugar on my tongue.
I slurp and suck and burp till I’ve cleared the plate and juice drips down my face and neck.
‘Good. I’m glad you’re eating.’
I spin round, chin dripping.
Boy
A boy.
Tall, skinny-but-not-too-skinny, he’s wearing what seems to be a cloth over his head and shoulders, Arab style. There are feathers poking out of the headband of different sizes and shapes – I recognise pelican and gull and the oh-dear-me bird. Freckles peep through a scrubby beard. Behind all the feathers and freckles, a pair of sharp blue eyes.
The boy is holding a home-made machete in one hand and a melon in the other. The melon is as fat as a football and I can’t take my eyes off it.
‘We�
��ve got a real glut. This rain seems to have swollen them into beach balls.’ His voice is all rusty, like he hasn’t used it in a long, long time.
I stare at him, juice still dripping from my chin. Become aware of my lack of clothes, my filthy bikini, and shrink back into bed, under the palm-leaf blanket. Where is my red T-shirt? My shoulder stings; I have bandages on it.
‘You cut yourself on the rocks by the waterfall. You were in a real state. I cleaned your wounds. The top you were wearing is drying – I washed it for you.’
I can’t speak, can’t say thank you. I cringe back on this boy’s bed, just staring.
I don’t know how to feel, how to react. I’ve not spoken to another human for a million years – since I’ve been on this rock, and for another million years before that.
‘Here.’
His voice is cracked like it needs oiling. He throws me something that once upon a time used to be yellow.
A TeamSkill polo, bleached by the sun.
‘Hi, I’m Rufus,’ he says, and the boy holds out his hand.
Pleased to Meet You
I have a wild urge to laugh and laugh.
Hi I’m Rufus! It’s Hi I’m frickin Rufus!
His hand is still out and I take it as if in a dream. It’s hot and sticky and real.
I want to let it go. I do not want to let it go.
‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ he says.
He scratches at a nasty outcrop of sandfly bites on his neck.
‘I mean, you just appeared, from behind the waterfall.’ He gives a shaky laugh. ‘Thought you were some sort of demon or something. All matted and wild and filthy. It was like something out of one of those Japanese horror films. You know, like The Ring.’
His voice is still posh but much huskier than I remember.
‘I mean, you’re that girl from the plane, aren’t you? Not Coral. The other one.’
He leans forward eagerly. ‘Are there any more? Survivors, I mean?’
When I shake my head, I see the flicker of disappointment.