Mark didn’t appear round the corner. The bus came and I got on it, dragging my suitcase after me. I stood there with these bond things what were worth a fortune strapped all over me, scrambling for change from my pockets to pay the driver. It made you laugh.
‘Where to, duck?’ he said.
I put my coins in the machine. ‘The Amazon basin, please,’ I said. And I grinned at him.
He joined in with my joke. ‘I can tek yer as far as town be-Radford,’ he said. ‘Maybes you can get yer connection from there?’
I nodded and we both laughed a bit. My ticket chugged out the machine.
‘You really going ter the rainforest?’ he asked me.
‘Maybes,’ I said.
‘Good fer you, duck. Better-n hanging round here yer whole life waiting for summat interesting ter happen,’ he told me.
I went and sat on a seat near the front, one with plenty of legroom so’s I could keep my bag with me. I hugged the case. I thought how funny it were, what the bus driver’d said. It definitely wasn’t for lack of stuff happening that I was off.
It were getting light. I watched the sky round my fingers as I leaned against the window. The edge of my skin glowed blue. I’d seen dawn happen a shitload of times, you do when you’re a pillhead. The sun splitting open and leaking all over the sky. Laser beams of light what pierce through bits of cloud. I reckon if you showed me any sunrise, I could tell you the exact time of year it’d happened. It were the first winter dawn I’d seen that year and it were special. Not everso dramatic or owt like that. Not brazen and bloody like a summer’s morning when you’re due a baking day. But bright and clear, the sky hanging high and open way above me. The light felt like cool water on my eyelids, bathing them and taking away the soreness from not having much sleep.
The bus wasn’t moving yet, sat still cause the stop was a timing point. Every now and then the engine shuddered, like the way a kid lets out the odd sob when they’ve finished bawling their eyes out. I’d forgot about the idea Mark might come for me. The pale clean sky’d soothed away all that shit.
Then I turned to the window and he was there, his face inches from mine. He banged on the glass. My stomach jerked right up into my chest and I jolted in my seat. The driver did summat what changed the noise of the engine and I knew we’d be moving any minute. I stared at Mark. The first thing I looked for was his hammer, where it were usually hung, against his chest. But it wasn’t there. I looked for it in his hands.
If you’d asked me what Mark’d do if he caught me up, I’d of said mashed me up with his hammer, or had a go at stabbing me or grabbed me by the hair and dragged me all the way back to the close. But there wasn’t no sign of his hammer or a knife, and he didn’t try to get on the bus. He looked me right in the eyes and mouthed some words at me. I didn’t get it at first, couldn’t read his lips.
The bus began to pull off and I shrugged at Mark. He screwed up his eyes, frustrated. He jogged beside the bus as it moved, exaggerating the movement of his lips until I got it. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’
They reckon you feel love in your heart but that’s bollocks. True love, the type what strikes you down and makes you change for ever, you feel that kind of love in every fucking organ inside you. Liver, kidneys, heart and spleen. Every tiny cell what makes up your brain and your spine, your bones and blood and muscles. It keens through you.
I wanted to smash the window and jump off the bus, even if I’d die by doing it. I sat, paralysed, as if a car was coming straight at me and I didn’t know which way to run. Mark stood with his hands held out to me, staring at the back of the bus as the distance grew between us. I looked away from him, had to.
I lay back in my seat and closed my eyes. And I saw the butterfly I’d stole from Mrs Ivanovich all them years back. Morpho Pelaides. It spread its wings and set off over our estate, heading up and away. Round it sparks flecked and bent and bust and flew. It didn’t matter that Bek’d gone and broke Morph. In fact, she’d done me a favour. When I’d had the solid framed butterfly to hold and stare at, it hadn’t been free to fly round my head. It were like everything, it all came down to caterpillars. Eat, sleep, break out the cocoon and fly off into the sunset. Like Mrs Ivanovich too. It’d took me ages but at last I knew why she’d asked me to set her up a personal killing jar. Poor old cow, trapped in a twisted up old body wrapping it-sen in coils.
And thinking about that made sense of what were going off now. That were the same an-all. I’d been trapped inside my life with Mark, and twisted up with the pain of it all. It were a physical shock to be wrenched free of all that. It hit me in the stomach and armpits and legs. I had to squeeze my hands hard into each other to stop them from shaking. But I couldn’t be no martyr for my Romeo the way he’d asked me to, not when he took the poison over and over again cause he liked it, and didn’t give a shit what I thought about it. Not when he expected me to ‘deal with that side of the business’ and it fucked with my head.
I had no clue how I’d cope without him. Life after Mark? It wasn’t imaginable. But it were on its way to happening now and as much as it made me shit scared, the thought of getting off the bus and going back was more frightening. And so I squeezed my hands together tighter and bent me-sen double to stop from calling out. And I closed my eyes and spread out my wings. Underneath me stretched miles and miles of rainforest. Or Australian outback. Or Sahara desert. Anywhere I fucking well wanted.
And I stayed on the bus.
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Title
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Killing Jar Page 25