The Killing Jar

by Nicola Monaghan

  ‘This neighbour-a yourn sure had some treasure,’ he said.

  Our job was also better than a paper round cause we got paid a lot better. The packets we delivered looked like 10p mixes or lucky bags, but inside they were full of stuff what looked like sherbet kayli. It wasn’t sweet though, I once put some on my finger and licked it. The stuff tingled in my mouth but didn’t taste very nice at all, and I felt dizzy after. I asked Mam what was in the packages and she laughed and said it were happiness. She said Uncle Frank’s business was selling happiness and I’d understand when I was bigger. The happiness was sometimes brown and sometimes white and the people we delivered it to certainly looked happy to see us, and sometimes gave us a couple a quid for our trouble. We thought that was dead good. Mam was happy too. We’d done about words for happiness at school, types of happy. Joyful, elated, ecstatic, thrilled, blissful. All slightly different, like felt tip pens in a fifty pack. It were good we’d learned them words, cause I needed them to describe all the different types of happy what came over my mam from time to time.

  It were Mark started using the stuff his-sen first. He opened up one of the packets of white powder and dipped in his finger, rubbed it in his gum. He held it out for me and Jason to do the same and he called us babies when we said no. He said he’d seen his dad do this at a party a couple of weeks before and’d tried his-sen after. Then he was talking loads all of a sudden, but not normal at all, dead fast, and it were hard to get a word in. He was talking so fast he kept tripping over his words and stuttering, then laughing like there was some secret joke only he knew about. His eyes looked frightening.

  My first pay packet was twenty quid for a week’s fetching and carrying – more money than a ten-year-old can cope with. Enough to buy a whole load of fresh cream cakes and as many bars of Galaxy as I wanted, which I did. I also bought a big shiny book about the rainforest. It had bright glossy photos of insects and snakes, orchids you could almost smell. Lianas, them things what Tarzan swings on. I didn’t read it much cause it were too full of long words and stuff I’d never heard of. It were good enough to look at the pictures and imagine me-sen in them. Touching the waxy leaves, swinging on the vines. Canoeing down the Rio Negro. The name meant black river but the water wasn’t really black, the book said. It looked like tea.

  I bought a Barbie doll too, I don’t know why, it just caught my fancy. It meant Uncle Frank got this idea I specially liked the things and he bought them for me all the time. After five or six of these presents I hated Barbie, her nylon hair and plastic tits. I remember one day I was sat on the landing pulling off dolls’ heads and bouncing them like balls, throwing them down the stairs. I heard Jon whinge one’d hit him on the head. I stopped, not cause of his moaning, but cause all the dolls were headless. I was bored, and crawled across the floor, pressing my ear to Mam’s bedroom door. Her and Uncle Frank had been in there ages and I’d had a little listen before, and heard frightening noises, like Mam was in pain or summat. I knew better than to interfere though. I’d had a clip round the ear-ole for that before and one time Frank’d made me stay in the room and watch what they were doing. Education, he’d said it were. I’d rather of had the belting and that’s for sure. I had to look at Morph for a long time after that, to rub out all the pictures from my head.

  This time though, I heard them talking.

  ‘I’m not sure, Frank,’ my mam said. ‘What if she got caught?’

  ‘They won’t catch her,’ he said. ‘And even if they did, she’s too young for them to do her for it. It’s perfect like that or’s I wun’t be suggesting it. I need Jason or Kez cause they could get Mark if he’s carrying the stuff.’

  ‘But she’s me baby.’

  ‘She’s hardly a baby, love. She’s a little sod most-a the time. Bout time she brought some decent money in, earned her keep.’

  My mam didn’t say owt for a bit, then she said, ‘And yer sure they cun’t do her if they catch her?’

  ‘Too young,’ he said. ‘Not hat the hage of criminal responsibility.’ He added h’s all over, dropped from other places, and put on that voice like him and my mam did when they were trying to sound posh. He called it their ‘telephone manner’ but I’m not sure why cause we never had a phone back then.

  ‘We just have to mek sure she knows not to land us in it,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to her, mek certain-a-it.’

  I heard my mam breathing. Then Uncle Frank said, ‘Come here duck, this’ll help yer think about it.’

  I heard him clattering about with stuff, then the click of a Zippo lighter. My mam sighed really hard. Then silence.

  I went downstairs for a bit. Then Uncle Frank came out of my mam’s room to find me. I heard him trip over one of the decapitated dolls I’d left on the landing and swear. He bounced down the stairs, making each one beat like a bass drum under his heavy flat feet.

  ‘Kerrie, duck, there’s summat I want yer to do fer me,’ he said. I stared straight at the telly, wouldn’t look him in the eye. He said, ‘It’ll pay even better than your paper round.’ He always used that name for our deliveries, even though we all knew it were nowt to do with paper.

  ‘We’re stepping up the operation,’ he said, like he was a real businessman or summat. ‘I want yer outside Player and Crane every night a-the week flogging ter the kids as they come out,’ he said. ‘All right?’

  I nodded. He meant John Player and William Crane, the two local comps down the road. I’d be going to Player me-sen from the next September. I stared at the TV as if Uncle Frank wasn’t there. It sang to me, stretching the syllables to fit the rhythm. Paint. The. Whole. World. With. A. Rainbow. That was what Uncle Frank wanted me to do, selling his happiness outside school. The kind of happiness what makes people talk too fast and their eyes look scary.

  ‘Is this an okay thing to do?’ I asked him.

  He gave me his standard answer. ‘Owt’s an okay thing to do, Kez me duck. So long as yer know what yer on wi’. So long as yer don’t tell nobody owt to get other people in trouble.’

  ‘Will I get in trouble?’

  ‘No. Like I say, yer just have ter be careful and mek sure we don’t neither. You wun’t get me in trouble, would yer Kez?’

  I shook my head, but didn’t move my eyes from the TV, from the man dressed as a bear explaining to the pink hippo and the big orange grin how to share a cake.

  I did what Uncle Frank’d said. It were the middle of winter, so he bought me a huge Parka coat with loads of pockets for me to put the packets in. Jason’s mam’d said he couldn’t come, so it ended up being just me and Mark. We stood outside school and some of the kids just walked by. You could tell what ones’d do this. They had straight, thick ties done up in huge knots over clean, tucked in shirts. Shiny black shoes. The kids what stopped looked more like Mark. Trainers, and ties knotted at the wrong end so’s they were dead thin. They whispered with Mark and gave him money, then I handed over the packets. It were always the same, Mark did the money. I was the only one allowed to touch the stuff cause if Mark got caught for possession he’d end up in Glen Parva.

  We’d been doing the job about nine weeks when I found out how things really worked. We were standing on Beechdale Road and it were well cold, it’d chucked it down with snow the night before. I dug my hands in my pockets and stamped my feet so much Mark was laughing at me and called me nesh. We were all early developers in my family and, underneath my Parka coat, I’d been growing up some. I’d seen Mark noticing that, and I was sussed enough, even then, to realise this was why he was teasing me. A tall lad with glasses walked over, and the two of them went off down the road, deep in negotiation. I tried to collapse into my coat. I saw another tall boy, clocked him as a fourth year who’d bought from us before. I looked into the road, assuming he’d go and talk to Mark an-all. The houses were glowing like coals and I wished I was inside one of them, sitting behind drawn curtains drinking hot chocolate or eating soup, giving me-sen chilblains hogging the fan heater. I turned back towards the school and it w
ere like hitting concrete. Like when you’re not looking where you’re going and slam into a lamppost.

  I woke up on the floor, my teeth feeling loose inside my mouth. My face was pleasantly warm, but wet. I lifted my head a bit and saw my own blood, vivid and red and gorgeous as it soaked into the snow, spreading out further, pink, like when you put down salt on red wine. Red was my favourite colour, specially bright red. The same colour as blood from an artery. I pulled me-sen up onto my hands and knees, then fell back into a sitting position. As I landed, pain shot through my bones and joints. My neck was killing me, and the side of my face stung like wanno. The glowing houses didn’t look so welcoming now. I knew it were going to hurt worse when I walked into the warm again. I saw Mark laying into the four-eyed lad halfway down towards the shops at Strelley. He was really going for it, arms and legs spinning round like that devil thing they have in the cartoons. He wasn’t big, but he was doing the other kid a load of damage cause he didn’t let up. I sat on the pavement feeling sore. My face felt like I’d been to the dentist, swollen up and numb. The blood worked like sticky red sweat, evaporating and making me colder. I could hear my breathing was funny, all rasping and nasty.

  The big lad with the glasses ran off towards Aspley. Mark pulled his shirt sleeves down and walked back to me, taking big strides what reminded me of his dad. He didn’t stop and pick up his coat. He wiped my face with a mucky tissue he found in one of my pockets.

  ‘You all right?’ he said.

  I opened my mouth to tell him yes but more blood seeped out, muffling my voice. I nodded but it hurt my neck.

  ‘They tek the lot?’ he asked.

  I’d forgot about my packages. I pulled at my pockets and tried to find them but there was only a couple left. I tried to tell him Uncle Frank’d kill me but all what came out was a gargled mess. And more blood.

  Mark tucked some of my hair behind my left ear. He wiped the blood from round my mouth. He looked into my eyes and I tried to focus on his.

  ‘I like you, Kerrie,’ he said. Then everything went black.

  When I woke up I was in bed at home. Uncle Frank hadn’t killed me, and him and my mam were sitting there smoking. Mam stubbed out a fag and lit another.

  ‘It in’tyour fault,’ Frank told me. He had another Barbie doll for me, still in its packet. Horse-riding Barbie. I hated horses worse than Barbie dolls but I smiled as he handed it to me.

  ‘How bad’s the pain, duck?’ he asked me.

  I couldn’t speak so I didn’t answer. My tongue felt like a huge sponge full of water, swelling and filling up my mouth. I wanted to go and find Morph, stare at him hard till it stopped hurting. But I couldn’t move, and Morph was my secret what I wasn’t letting Mam or Frank ruin for owt.

  ‘We can’t tek yer to hospital,’ my mam said. ‘They’d tek yer off me.’

  I managed to speak then. ‘It hurts,’ I said. I closed my eyes.

  ‘We’ll get yer summat to help wi-that,’ Uncle Frank told me. But I didn’t see how he could cause I couldn’t hardly swallow my own saliva, never mind water and a tablet. My tonsils were swollen and I wondered how that’d happened, like the lad’d stuck his hand down my throat and squeezed.

  I slept for a bit, but kept waking up with pain in different bits of me. I only remembered being hit in the face, but the kid’d done a right job on me once I was down on the ground. My left leg was killing me and it felt like there was an iron bar sticking right through my chest every time I breathed out. I kept dropping off, but my breathing was so bad I snored like someone was trying to throttle me, and this woke me up. When I tried to turn onto my front it felt like I was being stabbed in the bottom of my back.

  Uncle Frank came back in a bit. My mam came in with him. I tried to wake up proper, forcing my eyes open as wide as I could before they slipped closed again, no matter what I did. I heard Frank’s Zippo lighter, then a sound like a very quiet sigh.

  ‘This might tickle a bit,’ Frank told me, running his fingers up and down the bottom of my arm. I felt him stab me with summat small and very sharp. Then a tiny thread of ice snaked up the inside of my arm. I felt like I’d been hit again, punched in the face. No, it were the opposite of that, like someone’d took the punch right back, and all the other hits and scratches ever, and gave me back the wellness I’d had before but times three hundred and twenty-four. My leg and chest stopped hurting. I didn’t care about getting hit, or about losing the packets and what Frank might think about it. I opened my eyes and my mam and Frank were there, lovely smiley angels. I didn’t need Morph now. I was Morph. Had wings. Could fly.

  ‘Feel better, duck?’ my mam asked me.

  I smiled and nodded and it didn’t hurt no more. Uncle Frank threw his head back and laughed. He was holding a needle in his hand, like the ones they use to take blood at the doctor’s. He jabbed it into his-sen. Then my mam took it off him and did the same.

  FIVE

  One night Uncle Frank didn’t come home. He wasn’t back by three the next afternoon and Jon and me’d wrote him off as being like the other uncles we’d had. Mam paced up and down the kitchen like she was trying to get the lino to settle. I thought the poor cow must really love him. I was so thick when it came to my mam back then.

  This loud banging came on the door and I was expecting someone to shout ‘police’, the way they do in films. But they didn’t. Mam ignored the noise, even when I shouted that there was someone at the door. She kept pacing up and down and smoking so I went and answered it. It were Mark Scotland.

  ‘Pigs got me dad-n-Frank holed up at our house,’ he told me. I opened the door and made him come in and tell Mam. She stopped pacing, stubbing out her fag and lighting a next one, then she was off again.

  ‘Mam,’ I said. ‘D’yer not hear what Mark’s saying?’

  She turned, looked at Mark dead on and said, ‘I need me skag, Mark. Can yer gerrit fer me?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said.

  It were the first time I’d heard anyone admit what we’d been handling was drugs. Course I knew, but hearing it out loud made my hands shake as I held onto the door.

  ‘Don’t look at me all gormless, Kez,’ Mam said. ‘Yer not that stupid.’

  ‘Can you help me Sue?’ Mark said to my mam.

  She shook her head. ‘Can’t even see straight wi-out me skag,’ she said.

  ‘Kez?’ Mark turned to me. I was scared, I don’t mind admitting it. And I wasn’t sure about Uncle Frank. Part of me would of liked to see him in prison. But I liked Mark. His big grey eyes were wide open, his mouth held in a tight little ball like he was trying to stop from crying.

  ‘Dad’s not bin out of prison five minutes. Mam sez they’ll throw the book at him,’ he said.

  ‘Mek-aste,’ Mam said, hurrying us both out the door.

  Mark and me walked through the slush down Lindfield Road where Mark’s dad lived. His mam lived the other side of the estate, on Bradfield. The melting snow under our feet was rank, full of dog’s piss and crap from people’s exhaust pipes. It were trendy them days to break the exhaust on your car so’s it sounded sporty.

  ‘Must be nice to have a dad round,’ I said. Mark’s parents’d never lived together, but they’d been friends since school. He was way better off than a lot of the kids I knew, whose parents lived together but argued all the time. Or like me, with uncles what came in and out of their lives. He shrugged at me.

  ‘He belts me when I deserve it. Gets me stuff though. Videos and shit, before they come out,’ Mark said.

  I took all this in and walked quiet for a minute. Mark looked at me and smiled, grabbed my hand.

  ‘I’ve never met my dad, or my brother’s,’ I said.

  ‘Your mam’s fucked up, Kez,’ he told me. He’d said this before, a load of times, and I used to argue. I didn’t this time.

  ‘I’ll never do brown, will you?’ I said. But Mark just shrugged.

  Lindfield was crawling with police. Outside Mark’s house, specially, and his back garden, but also
prowling round the whole terraced row, watching people come and go. In case they go through the attic, I thought, try and escape through one of the other houses. It only came into my head cause of this book I’d read, one of them Narnia ones. The story I remembered got my brain ticking. I waited to tell Mark till we’d walked some way off. My old mate Jaqui from school lived next door but one to Mark’s dad. I knew she’d let us in without no fuss, and then we could try getting into Mark’s place through the attics. We wouldn’t be able to get the blokes out that way, cause there was police outside Jaqui’s too, but we could take stuff in. More important, take stuff out. Mark stared at me as I told him all this. When I’d finished he looked different from before. Summat raw set in on his face, animal. It were a look I’d get used to. He told me to take him to Jaqui’s.

  When we walked back, this policeman asked where we were going. Inside I was shitting it, but I held it together and looked the man in the gun, then in his face.

  ‘Me mate’s house,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah? Who’s that then?’ he said.

  I told him Jaqui’s name, and how old she was, and that she was in my class at school. He radioed someone, sierra oscar from this and that and all the rest of that shit the police say. He eyed Mark as he did all this. Mark looked like trouble, even back then with his flicked blond hair. It were summat about the angle of his cheekbones. If he hadn’t of been a villain, people would of assumed it about him anyway. I took hold of his hand again, and this seemed to reassure the policeman a bit. When he came off the radio, he let us past.

  Jaqui poked her head round the door. She hadn’t brushed her hair, and I could see a nit crawling through the lugs while we stood there, but I didn’t say. Her brown mouse eyes twitched as I asked to come in. She paused, but Mark pushed past her and I followed.

  ‘We can’t have no messing,’ he said. He looked at Jaqui. ‘You can’t be the same year as Kerrie,’ he said.