by Lari Don
I’d bought a book for myself. Something I’d never normally read, a book with dragons and swords and elves. I wasn’t sure whether my family would recognise me if I was lost in a story, but it might be useful to find out. It wasn’t an experiment though.
I’d bought Lucy a couple more books, to last her all the way to Scotland. But she wasn’t reading, she was sitting still, wrapped in her hoodie and her hate.
I balanced down the bus and leant over her seat.
“Read,” I whispered. “Please. They might be driving up to Edinburgh too, or they might be waiting by the motorway to check all the buses going north.” I offered her another book.
She shoved it away. “I’m not taking advice from you. Especially untested experimental advice. If they’re going to Edinburgh, they’re already miles ahead of us. And if they’ve guessed we’re taking a bus, then as this bus has “Edinburgh” in bright orange letters on the front, I don’t think reading a book is going to save me. So don’t you try to protect me with your nasty little theories.”
I staggered back up the bus. Two old ladies showed me their bright plastic teeth as I passed. Sympathy for the nice boy with the grumpy girlfriend. Aye, right.
I read anyway. Not just to protect myself, but also because it was too frustrating to think about the mess I’d got myself into when I couldn’t do anything to solve it for hours.
I read a page, then checked inside and outside the bus for problems, then read again, then checked again. Except during battle scenes, when I occasionally forgot to check for a few pages.
There were no problems though. No one was following the bus. No one was searching up ahead. The only person on the bus who wasn’t either asleep or bored or chatting about trivia was the one-girl vendetta down at the front.
Then she stepped up the aisle. “Did you buy water?”
“Do you want a bottle?”
“Do I have to ask nicely? I don’t think I can be polite to you.”
“Here. No please or thanks required.” She grabbed the bottle and the chocolate I held out. She turned to go. Then she turned back and sat down beside me.
I moved my leg and shoulder so we weren’t touching.
She gulped a mouthful of water. She was grateful, but didn’t say thanks. She glared at me, because she knew I could sense her gratitude. It was quite fun reading someone who knew they were being read. She knew she couldn’t hide anything from me and she really resented it.
Her hatred of me was building and sharpening, then I sensed her make a decision. With a flash of fear I wondered if she had a weapon.
But she wasn’t focussed on anything about her body apart from her hands holding the bottle. She wasn’t concentrating on a weapon. I was safe.
Then she shifted. Away from the aisle, right up against me. Shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh.
And I saw a picture of Vivien. Alive. Laughing.
Lucy was remembering her sister.
I jerked away, pushed myself against the window.
So that’s what she had decided on. A bus journey full of punishment, of guilt, grief, pain. Like in her grampa’s flat, but for a whole day.
She put her warm hand on my cheek.
Her parents crying, gulping and snottering.
I shoved her hand away.
Should I fight her off? But we couldn’t spend the whole day wrestling at the back of a bus. Someone would notice.
She grabbed my wrist and wrapped both hands round it.
Her parents telling her that Viv was dead.
Her shock.
Her disbelief.
Her frustration…
“Fight me, Bain. Don’t just sit there, fight me.” She let go. “Wimp. I know it hurts, so fight back.”
She was sitting so close. The seams of our jeans were touching. I had no space to move.
I could feel her breath, her heat, her hate, her anger at me, at herself, at her sister, at her parents. She really wanted a fight.
“Fight me, Bain!”
“You want me to fight you? I could break your neck right now.” I lifted my hands.
I sensed her sudden shocked terror. How could she keep accusing me of murder and forget that I could easily kill her?
I lowered my hands. “I don’t want to fight.”
“Well I do!”
With all the confidence of someone who’d just seen their enemy surrender, she ripped off my left glove, held my hand tightly and…
And I realised she had stronger weapons now than in the flat last night, weapons too strong for me to bear.
Lucy Shaw, 30th October
Wimp.
Wilting sodding pathetic wimp!
He’d just given up. Wimp.
So I hit him with everything I knew about him, everything that hurts him most.
I locked him in a bright white room, and added equipment from my dad’s clinic. Opthalmoscopes and retinoscopes on a shelf. The huge many-eyed refractor head hanging from the ceiling. The black leather chair with its motor and levers, and extra straps and buckles.
I mixed in a dentist’s surgery, with probes, needles, tubes, sinks and the smell of disinfectant. Then the science lab at school with Bunsen burners, goggles and glass containers.
He was shaking, gritting his teeth. Trying not to move, trying not to make a noise.
He’d be screaming when I was done with him.
I thought the word experiment.
Experimenting…
Proving…
Testing…
Theories…
Facts…
Science…
I thought of wires, stopwatches, pulses, temperatures, doctors, consultants, researchers and professors.
Then I had a better idea.
An MRI scanner. Lying flat in a metal tube, trapped, unable to move while doctors, nurses, researchers, professors, scientists studied his brain. Read it, scanned it, printed it, stored it on a computer.
I pinned scans of brains, all the colours of the rainbow, on the white walls inside my head.
He was gasping for air now, his eyes were tight shut. The left hand, the one I was holding, was hot and shaking. His right hand was clenching, gripping, loosening.
Why wouldn’t he fight, the coward?
Ciaran Bain, 30th October
I tried to build a wall against her. I really did try.
The wall that had worked at the hospital:
solid
smooth
high
silver
hate.
She was forcing pictures and noises, words and ideas into my head. Clinical cold flat voices speaking my name, then lists of theories and experiments and conclusions.
I had to hate someone.
Hate Vivien for dying?
Hate Mum for protecting her family?
Hate Malcolm for doing his job?
Hate Daniel for being better than me?
Hate Lucy for seeking justice?
I couldn’t.
Faces peering at me, bright white lights.
I was shaking too much to hold onto the hate.
Cold metal touching me, white coats around me.
I tried harder. I hated myself, for being cowardly and cruel and selfish and useless. I could hate myself easily enough. But I hated myself for the same reasons Lucy hated me. So my sweet silver hate just built a ramp for her crusading hate to storm up and attack me.
Wires on my chest.
Needles in the backs of my hands.
Lights burning my closed eyes.
I couldn’t build a wall.
I wouldn’t fight her off.
I just had to bear it.
Lucy Shaw, 30th October
Coward. Wimp. Loser.
I’d been imagining cartoon scientists wearing big glasses and white coats, in expensively equipped labs, for half an hour.
And he still hadn’t lifted a finger.
I needed a rest. But if I stopped, could I start again?
I pulled my vision o
ut into a wide shot. Not just Bain in a chair, but his whole family, in a long line, like butterflies pinned onto a collector’s table. All being experimented on.
He groaned and whimpered. It was the first noise he’d made apart from stuttering breathing since he’d threatened to break my neck.
Then his arm went limp. He’d fainted. Wimp.
I let go. Now I could take a rest. I shifted away, nearer the aisle, and grabbed the water and chocolate.
I checked the time on the clock at the front of the bus. We weren’t due in until late afternoon, so I could re-run that experiment horror film a dozen more times. That still wouldn’t pay him back one millionth of the pain he’d caused Mum and Dad and me.
I tried to take another bite of chocolate, but I was holding an empty wrapper. I’d eaten a whole Wispa in two bites. I was shaking.
Could I do it again?
I looked at him under the blue-ish bus light. He’d bitten his lip. He was bleeding.
Viv hadn’t bled when she died. But her blood would have drained out at the autopsy.
I wondered how he’d enjoy a post-mortem scene. Or the dissection of a living brain.
He moaned and stirred.
Could I do it again?
I thought about him wrapping himself in my sister’s death, and thought, hell yeah, I can do this all day!
I grabbed his hand again.
CHAPTER 26
Ciaran Bain, 30th October
She dragged me up out of unconsciousness and started again.
Steel tables. Blood-pressure cuffs. The sound of taps dripping and the smell of sharp chemicals.
I realised I was holding her hand as tightly as she was holding mine, like I couldn’t let go of my punishment. But I wasn’t going to pull away. I wasn’t going to fight or run. I was going to take it, all day if I had to.
Then, past the experiments she was placing carefully into my head, I sensed a hunter, a searcher.
Waiting. Watching.
I forced my eyes open. Through a blur of tears, I saw the bus was moving slowly, caught between lorries.
A traffic jam.
Past the nausea and shaking, past the wires and test tubes, I sensed them again.
Hunters, ahead of us. Stuck on this road or waiting just off the motorway? Checking all the buses as they went past?
She was pressing against me. Clinging to my hand. Taking her time. Building elaborate experiments, her scientists using Latin words I couldn’t understand, chanting scientific magic over my head.
I had to escape from this imaginary laboratory, or when we got closer, the hunters would recognise my overreactions.
I didn’t want to fight her, but I had to.
I couldn’t move. My body really believed I was strapped down, immobile in a lab.
I tried to move my fingers, to break her grip.
But she just had the scientists move nearer, talk louder, wave more equipment. Sensors on my forehead, lights in my eyes, thermometer in my mouth.
“No!” I spat. “No! Stop!”
“Yes! At last, you’re fighting!”
She leant over me, pushing at my chest.
My brain lit up on a screen. Cells under a microscope. Slices of me, magnified in her eyes.
“No!”
The bus lurched forward.
I lurched too. Shoved at her. Pushed her off me.
I gulped a clean breath of reality while I could.
She pounced and grabbed me again.
I fended her off with my elbows, safely jacketed in leather.
“Lucy!” I croaked, “No, not now. My family –”
“Oh yes,” she hissed, “your family too, all of you, in a laboratory.”
She had my hand again.
“No!” I tried to say that my family were nearby, but I couldn’t get the words out. She was pushing me through the swinging door of a lab, blinding me with science.
I couldn’t go under again. Not now. I had to protect us.
I dragged the picture of the lab from her head. Through her neck, her arm, her hand, I dragged the picture right into me and −
Blew it up.
All those Bunsen burners and test tubes and computers. I took the gas, the electricity, the sparks, the chemicals and I blew it all up.
One massive white-hot explosion in my head.
The explosion blew me out of the black chair and blew the scientists out of windows and doors.
It blew Lucy into the aisle of the bus.
It blew me out of the bus seat.
Suddenly I was crouched on the floor, hard up against the seat in front.
She was on her arse in the aisle.
Just as our hands were torn apart by the force of the explosion, I saw it happen in her head too. We both heard screaming scientists, and saw cables dropping from the ceiling, ruptured pipes squirting water, a storm of flames and blood and broken glass.
I pulled myself back into the seat. She stood up. We stared at each other.
Our minds were surrounded by shattered glass, singed white coats and the smell of burning paper. But our bodies were surrounded by a dozen passengers, listening to music and reading magazines, not even looking up.
The bus seats were tatty, but not ripped; the air was stale, but not smoky; the floor was sticky, but not with blood or ash. The lab had exploded in our heads, but the bus was fine.
“What was that? What did you do?” She looked dazed and sick.
“I have no idea, but my family are up ahead, scanning the traffic jam. So lose your vindictive little mind in this book. Now!”
She sat down and we both read, the books shaking in our hands. She travelled to a distant war and I went to a land where boys fly on dragons. As we lost ourselves in the stories, the stink of blood and smoke in our nostrils faded.
Lucy Shaw, 30th October
He whispered in my ear, “You can stop reading now. We’re past them, so you’re safe.”
“Safe? With you? I doubt it!”
He was grinning at me. A cheeky, pleased-with-himself sort of grin.
He bounced back so fast. I’d seen him fainting, vomiting and weeping, as well as exploding his own mind, but he always recovered so fast!
He held out both bare hands towards me. “Ready for round two?”
He laughed as I scooted away across the seat towards the aisle.
“Surely your imagination hasn’t run out of experiments and scientists? Don’t you want to punish me again?”
He reached out to grab my hand and I snatched it away. “No!”
“Are you finished then? Have you had your revenge? Am I a free man?”
“I’m done, for now. But I’m not sorry. You deserved it. You’d deserve it if you really were locked in a lab for the rest of your life. Because Viv is dead and it’s your fault, and you use her death and it’s disgusting.” I was hissing at him, almost spitting in his face, and still no one in the half-empty bus had noticed. “You deserve everything bad that could ever happen to you.”
“Yeah.” His grin had faded since I refused his challenge. He was slouched in the seat, staring out of the window. “I always deserve everything. Every time Daniel kicks the shit out of me. Every time Malcolm humiliates me…” He whispered so low I almost didn’t hear. “I deserve it all.”
I wasn’t going to let him feel sorry for himself. That was too easy. “Why didn’t you fight? Are you a complete coward?”
“I didn’t fight because I didn’t want to scare the old ladies.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I didn’t fight because I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“I don’t believe that either.”
“Have it your way then. I didn’t fight because I deserved it.”
“No. If you thought that, you’d give yourself up to the police. Why didn’t you fight?”
He turned and looked at me, with those ridiculous pale eyes. “I wanted to see if I was strong enough. Strong enough to stand you, anyone, anything and everything i
n the world outside.
“And I was strong enough, wasn’t I? I didn’t beg you to stop, not like I did when Mum and Malcolm… I didn’t beg or whimper. I didn’t even fight you, not until I sensed them up ahead, and that wasn’t a whimper that was a…”
“Yes, ok, I get it.”
Shit. It wasn’t just my sister’s death that was making him stronger, it was my revenge too. He was like a sponge, absorbing poison, feeding on his crimes, getting stronger on the pain he caused others.
If hating him wasn’t breaking him, maybe sympathy would. “What did your mum and Malcolm do, that you begged them to stop?”
“They…” He bit his lip, wincing when his tooth touched the cut he’d made earlier. He wiped the blood with a fingertip.
Then I saw that look. The look from the back seat of the double-decker, when he was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.
“They questioned me. About Vivien. They read everything in my mind, with Mum’s hand on my shoulder, Malcolm looking me in the eyes and my uncles listening to my voice.
“They dug inside me for every moment I’d spent with Vivien. They dragged out what we yelled at each other when I grabbed her, what she was worrying about, like her maths test and her phone and you and how scared she was. They ripped me apart to get my memory, until I was screaming and crying, begging them to stop.”
He was speaking in a controlled quiet voice, watching me for my reaction. But his fists were clenched and if it was true, if his own mother had held his shoulder to force answers from him, it must have been unbearable.
“Did you tell them everything or did you try to protect Viv?”
“Oh Lucy!” He laughed, as if this was a joke. “You don’t know what it’s like. Of course I gave them everything.”
“So you betrayed her. You did kill her.”
“Not by telling them everything. She was already dead by then. They were only questioning me because they couldn’t question her any more.”
“They questioned her? Your mum tortured my sister?”
He looked away.
“Your mother is a monster. You’re all monsters!”
He whirled round. “You’re calling us monsters? What about you, Lucy? Perfect law-abiding Lucy? What have you just been doing?