The Terrible

by Yrsa Daley-Ward

  and we can be brown things together.

  My friends say I should like you. And I do.

  Lots of like!

  Let’s see where this goes!

  It was the worst thing in the world. These people had me cornered.

  On the dining room table, my grandparents slammed down the screwed-up letter that I lost the nerve to send

  and tried to throw away.

  “You love that boy, do you? Do you?” Granddad was shouting.

  “Hear me, and hear me well. Don’t you ever. In this life.

  Push yourself up on a boy.

  Don’t you ever write a note like that again . . . to anyone! You hear me?”

  Grandma was softer, but only a little.

  “If a boy sees you and likes you, he will tell you. Don’t you ever. In this life. Approach men.

  It is not nice, it is not good,

  and they will not thank you for it.

  A man gets to see what he likes and asks for it. That’s the way it goes.”

  The following week, my PE teacher was joking with me when Granddad came

  to collect me.

  “It’s a leap year this year!” he said with a broad teacher smile. “That’s when the girls ask the boys out, eh?”

  Mr. Tyrell was a jolly Englishman

  and could not know that this was terrible timing

  after the blizzard in our living room one week prior.

  I said nothing. Granddad said less.

  9.5

  It wasn’t fair. Mum always said we couldn’t afford anything. Unless it was a book. Or something to do with school or education. Mum always said, “I’m doing everything on my own. Have some understanding. I have to give money to Grandma to pay for things, so SHOW SOME RESPECT.”

  Marcia was stressed too about all the time we were spending at the hospital these days. The X-ray showed my bones were growing too fast for my muscles, and I had to wear ugly knee supports. My knees and shins ached after I walked up the hill to school and back home. Even with knees that hurt, I had been excited about Junior School Sports Day for weeks. But on the day itself it rained, which meant it had to be postponed. Nobody told the parents, though. At one o’clock a small number of parents were gathering in the rain and I could see my mum, alone, toward the back. From the classroom, I watched our head teacher run out with his umbrella to tell them all that it was not going to happen because of the weather. What an awful waste of time.

  Mum looked so tired. She was in the middle of a solid two and a half weeks of night shifts at Chorley hospital during the weekdays and Manchester hospital at the weekends. She didn’t see me watch her walking slowly back to the car on the grass. Her pink shell suit was inside out. I was praying to God that no one noticed. She passed by my class window but I didn’t wave. I felt a flurry of pity and sadness. She’d dragged herself all that way to school for nothing.

  My best friends were Ellen and Annika, two sisters a year apart from each other. Every so often, Grandma would allow me to go to their house for tea now that I was almost ten. Their house was sunny and large and they had a Packard Bell computer in their home office and pink wallpaper in the twin bedroom they shared with matching princess nets over the bed.

  At dinnertime we had alphabet spaghetti and cheese on toast instead of awful things—like yam and rice and beef—that I had to eat at home.

  One night, over dinner, Ellen and Annika’s mum placed a bejeweled hand on mine, right there at the table, and leaned toward me, her brow furrowed.

  Perhaps, when you change, lovie, you’d like to get dressed for PE in the girls’ bathroom, or perhaps you’d like to leave your vest on, she said in a low, conspiratorial whisper.

  You are a little more developed than the others,

  she said,

  with an odd smile. Would you like me to speak with your teacher?

  It was so annoying. I wanted to die, right there at the table.

  Adults everywhere were always saying horrible things with smiles. I longed for smallness; to be petite. To have small hands and feet and no growing pains; no angry lion dreams and definitely no boobs. On my eighth birthday I had wished hard to look like everyone else and I was already nine and could not see it happening yet. I felt my eyes begin to fill and held the tears back. I looked across at Ellen and Annika, who hadn’t heard a thing, and were busy playing with each other’s hair. Right at the dinner table.

  Grandma and Granddad would not have stood for that for a minute. This evening, the sun hit their blond ponytails and they each looked exactly like spun gold.

  That night I dreamed I had a large, sun-filled house with a computer and pink walls.

  Mum was still my mum, of course, but my dad was a white man and called me the most beautiful girl in the world.

  9.6

  Our family doctor is peering at me.

  “I don’t really know what she’s talking about, Doctor,” says Grandma,

  “but every so often the child comes out with the same thing, over and over again. It’s causing me worry.”

  Dr. Melling has the softest, whitest hands you have ever seen, and his office is chock-full of toys. A yellow teapot filled with miniature people, a Rubik’s Cube, jigsaws. He must be a wonderful dad, I think. I feel my stomach get all funny.

  “What do you mean, you don’t feel real? Try and put it a different way for me,”

  he says with a kind chuckle.

  But there is no word to describe the feeling of disappearing and being there at the same time.

  I want him to place his hands on my head again, as though I’m his girl or something, and I don’t know why. Must concentrate. Grandma is frowning at me.

  “Is it true that you’re seeing patterns?”

  he says. “Cartoons? Flickering lights too, you say, like snow?”

  “Only at night,” I say,

  “only at night.”

  “And your knees are still hurting you once you’ve walked home from school?”

  “Yes, quite a lot.”

  Dr. Melling prescribes some painkillers.

  “And you’re still getting a sick stomach each Saturday before church?”

  “Talk up, child,” says Grandma, suddenly irritated.

  “Yes, stomachache.”

  Dr. Melling prescribes a laxative.

  It doesn’t really work; any of it. My heart is in my teeth when we pull up each Saturday outside the church building to go into Sabbath School. The girls my age laugh at my clothes and ask me why my hair is so bad. They tell me my shoes look old and the hair tie is babyish. They ask me if the damp smell in the room is me. It could be.

  Their ringleader, Alyssa, makes me dread Saturdays. It is easily the longest day of the week. When I walk into a room they stop talking and stare. I am surprised, because I look just like these girls, so why am I lonelier here than at school? Also, it is not Christian to be mean to someone and make them feel bad. Some weeks they sit a row behind me, talk, laugh, point. “We don’t like you,” they say. “Your clothes are so sad and you look as though you were just dragged through a bush. Your hair needs straightening or extensions or something.”

  “Don’t you have an iron between you?”

  “Why do you live with your grandparents? Don’t you have a mum and dad?”

  “Does your grandma make your clothes? It looks like it.”

  “Why do you and your brother walk funny?”

  I sit by myself and pretend not to hear and talk to the elders who are always telling me to smile.

  The weeks go by, though, as weeks do. You can always rely on time.

  Also, I learn what not to feel.

  a weekend at Mum’s

  We get to miss church on Mum’s birthday because she says we need to spend more time together!

  Mum, Little Roo and I are so happy to be together
we lie down watching Disney films, and looking at each other and touching each other’s hands, noses and eyelashes. Mum combs out my hair and oils my scalp with the green Dax Wax. It hurts but you grit your teeth. You think of something else. Or you swallow a painkiller and take another for Good Measure. That’s what I do for the knee pain. I love my knee tablets. They’re tiny and sweet, like mints, and kind of fizz on your tongue. Mum tells us how much she loves having us home. Her eyes are shining. I hug Little Roo in front of me. I can get my arms all the way round him. We drink cream soda (YES!!) and eat sausage and chips at lunchtime,

  even though sausage is bad

  (because, in the Bible, one day all the pigs got possessed by demons and drowned themselves). If you are a God-fearing Christian you can definitely not eat disgusting swine

  but the sausage tastes amazing, sweet and juicy. I swallow them quickly and promise God I’ll never sin again. We want to stay here forever. Mum even lets us have sweets before dinner

  but

  there is red on the landscape.

  Linford comes to visit.

  I am swallowing some hot tea and Linford walks into the house, just like that. We haven’t seen him since we told him what we knew. Mum regards us nervously.

  “Linford misses you,” she says. “Come, we’re going out for Chinese.”

  I go hot

  and the wrong kind of tingly.

  Linford nods in our direction but does not smile.

  “Get your coats on, kids,” he growls.

  our day out

  mum has won at bingo cos she’s back with maccy d’s

  she smells a bit of smoke

  but no one really minds

  it feels just like a holiday

  the very best kind

  she lets us stay up late. She got two nights off work.

  She smiles at Linford/Halfling Dad

  she smiles at me

  our halfdad smiles back and we look like a family

  mum is feeling good and we do too.

  She asks us where we want to go the very next day

  and we choose Blackpool Pleasure Beach the world’s best place

  for pink and blue candy floss and popcorn that’s gone soft. Our halfdad’s in a mood again but mum says just ignore him run along enjoy yourselves but don’t get lost

  and do not speak to strangers

  unless they look like us

  haha

  she laughs to herself, she’s tired but amused

  she carries all the bags, she needs new shoes

  she smiles at our halfdad

  and Linford looks away

  and I just really hope that she’s having a nice day.

  10.0

  Since Linford appeared at the window on the ladder,

  since the night our unicorn came and left,

  something is happening with my brother and windows at night. He no longer reads stars,

  not at all,

  and has lost all interest in the moon and its cycles. He will not even approach a window, let alone peer out of one. Neither Grandma nor Granddad have noticed, but I see something come over Little Roo at a certain time around sunset,

  some inward tremble, when his face appears to shrink against the softening light.

  Something is also happening concerning how I feel about mirrors, at precisely the same time. I know what I look like, secondhand. Adults say pretty. I cannot fathom this. My reflection looks to me like lines and circles that I can’t work out. Large eyes and too much limb and thickness and black black skin and there are several contradictions in the dark. I do not look in the mirror for fear of several things. I sleep in the large back room with the lumpy paper and woodchip ceiling. I am old, I know, too old to be afraid of mirrors at night, but mirror land is unpredictable at the best of times. Perhaps the daytime reflection may be late traveling back and I might catch a glimpse of the thing in its place, staring back at me.

  Yes, mirror land is unreliable. All that separates the two worlds is a thin pane of glass, and that’s no comfort. Who knows where one ends and one begins? Glass won’t keep the dark out. Ask Little Roo.

  Worse— Maybe I’m the danger. Perhaps the black shape in the dark is me.

  Evidence 1

  (the looking glass)

  The girl is perhaps too young for this. She stands, tall for her age, in the large window in the room with the woodchip and lumpy wallpaper.

  It overlooks her grandparents’ garden with the cabbage patch and the turnips

  and Granddad’s shed

  and the next-door neighbor’s garden and greenhouse.

  The neighbors are standing in the garden, drinking cups of black coffee.

  She angles her naked body so they would be able to see . . .

  if they stopped talking and

  looked up right now

  if one of them just flicked up their eyes

  if . . .

  her breathing is changing

  she feels it warm, rumbling

  building, below the belly

  down through to her toes

  her legs start to tremble

  and

  there it goes

  she shudders

  rests two hands on the cool glass. Her toes cling to the

  carpet.

  The mirror sees all, misses nothing.

  Evidence 2

  (the window)

  A boy is sitting on the floor,

  playing with his toy cars,

  when he feels his throat close up. He realizes that the room is growing dim. His chest is thick, anxious. The Night, he understands, is a wild, wild time. He knows that as a boy, he must be tough. Granddad would kill him if he knew he was scared . . . of a window? How very silly.

  Come on. Got to be tough.

  They have this song at church about Daniel in the Bible, and how brave he was. How he stood in the lion’s den and nothing happened to him, because of COURAGE and PURPOSE.

  Dare to be a Daniel, says the song.

  Dare to be a Daniel.

  And all the men stand up, singing, thumping the little boys enthusiastically on the backs as they do. But Daniel was living in old times, before there were gunmen and tanks and serial killers on the ITV news. Plus

  there is the thing his sister told him once,

  this thing she said could

  would

  might happen

  if/when he was naughty. This thought that he can’t ever seem to shake.

  “If you are bad . . .

  only IF you are bad,

  the back wall behind your headboard opens up as you sleep

  and you sink back into the wall on a conveyor-belt thing (your bed and all)

  to the underworld,

  to hell, where there is the devil himself and imps, goblins and wailing things, too horrible to imagine.

  You will be cremated alive

  while the goblins laugh and play in the distance.” If all this is true, he thinks,

  and it must be

  because his big sister told him and his big sister would never lie,

  so

  if the Bible and these horrible tales are true . . . you can’t take chances with windows. Who knows what you might find scaling the brickwork

  to find you cowering, smaller than ever. Whether you are in a high-rise block or a basement flat, you’d be a fool to look out. Who knows what could be waiting? Snakes on the ground

  or the devil on a ladder.

  pink / yellow

  At first, it looked like a dream.

  Little Roo and I were standing in Grandma’s pink pink bathroom.

  It was a Friday night/Saturday morning,

  a holy day. The Sabbath.

  He was clutching at his bedsheet in horror. He’d had anothe
r accident.

  It was happening every night, without fail. “I don’t want to get beaten,” he said, crying.

  Grandma and Granddad were mad as anything about it

  and said they would knock him into next week each time it happened

  but he couldn’t stop.

  It was early in the morning and they were still asleep.

  We were fear-filled, and rightly so.

  We got the salt water and the Disinfectant

  and we sponged all of the piss from the plastic sheets.

  But Grandma woke

  Grandma got up

  Grandma walked across the hallway

  and said, “Stop locking this door, you hear? What are you people doing?”

  “Nothing,” we said, pushing the plastic sheeting in the wash basket.

  “Nothing,” we said, bunching the bedsheet under the rug, in panic. Roo’s little hands were sweating.

  I opened the door. By then, the plastic sheeting was hidden, out of sight;

  the wet bedsheet was forced into the Fourth Dimension. The bathroom, still very, very pink.

  Were we dreaming? No.

  “Better be nothing,” said Grandma’s figure in the doorway.

  10.1

  Beauty makes people stay, I thought. Beauty makes people listen to you. Beauty makes people fall in love with you and not know what to do with themselves. It was in all the songs and it was in the Disney films. It was even in the Bible. Song of Solomon, my favorite book of the Bible so far, was all about beauty and lovers and love. I couldn’t wait till my life changed and I looked more like a thing that people liked. The boys at school made a list of the most beautiful girls in the class from 1 to 15. I did not make the list but that’s because they all agreed that I didn’t need to

  because I was more of a Cool Black Friend,