Sarah Dee Was Here

by Steve Galloway

  Sarah Dee Was Here

  By Steven F. Galloway

  -For all the real Sarah Dees-

  Copyright: Steven Francis Geoffrey Galloway 2012

  Published by Circle Line Books

  www.stevenfgalloway.co.uk

  Twitter: @stevenfgalloway

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/stevenfgalloway

  Also available: The Lake

  www.amazon.co.uk/The-Lake-ebook/dp/B005LPSZM4/

  One

  She had red hair; that was probably what started it all off. And it wasn’t just a subtle ginger but a violent, burning red: like flames. It made her stand out, and standing out is the worst thing you can do at school…

  *

  (Two years ago...)

  The blonde-haired girl sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her full-length mirror and ran a brush through her long, soft hair. It was a still, muggy summer night, and she had the window propped open to let what little air there was outside into her room.

  “66, 67” she said to herself. When she got to one hundred strokes of the brush she could climb into bed and sleep, safe in the knowledge that in the morning she would still be the girl with the softest, blondest hair in the town.

  Maggie Dickens: the blondest, the prettiest, the cleverest.

  The girl all the other girls wanted to be like, and all the boys wanted to be with.

  She heard the back door shut downstairs. Her Dad, she assumed; coming back in from the garden after a sneaky cigarette, whilst her Mum was out working at the nursing home.

  The familiar creak of someone coming up the stairs was the next thing Maggie heard.

  Was Dad going to bed already?

  Normally her father would fall asleep later in front of the TV.

  Maybe he was feeling ill or something?

  “78, 79.”

  She carried on brushing. The creaking now sounded like it was coming from the landing.

  Maggie gazed into her own eyes in the mirror. She had lovely eyes: wide and blue like lagoons. Not that Maggie was vain or anything: it was just a fact.

  Over the shoulder of her perfect reflection she saw her bedroom door start to open and a shaft of light creep into her room.

  What did Dad want?

  “99.”

  She turned around to ask him. But she didn’t see her Dad. She saw a figure in black: hooded, with staring eyes.

  The black shape strode quickly across the room towards her. Maggie barely had time to get up from the floor. She was barely able to scream. She was barely able to do anything but throw her hands in front of her face as the dark figure swung an arm at her.

  The hammer caught her right on the temple and sent her reeling onto her bed, the room spinning and swaying. Blow after blow followed, the black figure lashing the hammer up and down in a silent frenzy.

  Even when Maggie had long stopped moving, the blows kept coming:

  “98, 99...”

  Maggie Dickens, the blondest, the prettiest, the cleverest, lay dead on her bed in a sticky mess of her own blood.

  “100...”

  The figure stood up straight, pushed a strand of hair back behind an ear, picked up Maggie’s eyeliner from the dressing table and wrote in thick black kohl on the blood-splattered mirror:

  Sarah Dee was here.

  And then it was gone.

  Two

  (Anna)

  My earliest memories of Sarah Dee were of a sullen, pale girl with bright-red hair and moody, blank eyes. She always looked as if someone had just poked her in the back or run off with her favourite toy. Even before she was bullied, she had the air of a victim.

  That's probably what attracted the teasing in the first place; it was mild teasing at first, which soon became infused with proper spite. This quickly mutated into petty but routine violence, and ended up with the day Maggie Dickens set fire to Sarah’s clothes, while Millie Blunden and Callie Cox held her down, and half the school gathered round and pointed their camera-phones at the scene.

  I'm ashamed to say that I was part of the ugly mob that swarmed around Sarah that day, absorbing her humiliation with morbid interest. And I’m even more ashamed to say I did absolutely nothing to stop it.

  It had started with something pretty minor; a silly mistake that anyone could have made, but it was Sarah Dee who made it. It was always Sarah Dee who did things like that.

  I remember the scene well. It was a hot Friday afternoon in the changing rooms, and the girls were excited: gym had just finished and the weekend was looming with the heady promise of hot, sunny freedom.

  And boys…

  The boys who spent Monday to Friday in a separate school across the field but at weekends became a fleeting part of our lives.

  The girls were chatting, laughing and messing about, except for Sarah Dee. Sarah was in her corner as usual; silent and impenetrable.

  “Silence!” Mrs Connell yelled. The noise level dropped slightly, but pockets of chatter and giggling continued.

  “I’m warning you, girls, I’m speaking now, so shut up…”

  It wasn’t working; laughter, chatter and the rustling of bags continued. Mrs Connell cranked her voice up to nuclear level:

  “If I hear one more sound when I finish talking – just one - then the whole lot of you will spend this afternoon in detention!”

  This threat got through the hubbub, and finally the girls fell silent. Then, from a corner of the changing rooms came the buzz of a bag being zipped shut.

  ‘Zzzzzzz…’

  Sarah Dee looked up, her bag on her lap and a faraway look in her eyes as ever.

  The whole of the changing room rang with silence, a silence made heavier with the awareness of Sarah’s interruption of it.

  “Congratulations Sarah,” said Mrs Connell, “you’ve just earned the whole class a detention tonight. Report back here after classes finish. All of you.”

  As we filed out of the changing rooms - with the cloud of an hour’s detention hanging over our sunny Friday evening – everybody’s eyes were fixed on Sarah. Once we were out of Mrs Connell’s earshot the abuse started:

  “Silly bitch.”

  “You really are special, aren’t you Sarah?”

  “Thanks for fucking up our day, ginger cow.”

  “You’re going to get killed after school. Killed.”

  The last threat was uttered by Maggie Dickens. It was always Maggie Dickens who would take it a step further. Her hatred of Sarah was both irrational and entrenched; a habit she couldn’t and wouldn’t shake. It had burned on for years, consuming the other girls like oxygen and raging stronger as it grew. In fact, I often wondered whether Sarah would have been the school whipping-girl she turned into had it not been for Maggie singling her out as her victim.

  Maybe she would have had the chance to be normal.

  There were times when I put my psychology class to use and tried to analyse quite why Maggie hated Sarah so much, and one day it just clicked; it was so obvious, it had literally been staring me in the face…

  Maggie was the prettiest girl in the school.

  Everybody knew that: she was tall, slim, with long blonde hair, blue eyes and soft skin. She got the best boyfriends, top grades and starring roles in the school shows. But in reality, Maggie wasn’t the prettiest girl in the school at all.

  Someone else was.

  Underneath the red curls and her pallour, beneath her silence and passivity, when you looked, when you really looked, Sarah Dee was infinitely more beautiful than Maggie Dickens. And it was only by ruining her - by reducing her to the status of a toxic social leper - that Maggie was able to win.

  But her victory was only temporary.

  The mob of girls was acting almost as one organism that afternoon; mo
ving around the action in its centre like an animal with the smell of blood in its nostrils. Some, like me, were watching in horror and grim fascination. Others were actively encouraging the participants.

  “Hit her!”

  “Spit on her!”

  “Burn her fucking hair!”

  Humanity often had the capacity to disgust me; I knew that even then. But, rather than making me run away and get help, there was a magnetic quality to the scene that drew me in. Girls held up their phones and cameras; capturing it for grainy posterity. Boys from across the field had come running to see what was happening.

  In the middle of the crowd lay Sarah Dee; bare-legged and open-shirted. Her white underwear was barely distinguishable from her milky skin. Callie Cox and Millie Blunden were holding down an arm and a leg each, but Sarah wasn’t struggling. Her face was blank and her eyes had their familiar emptiness about them, but also a strange, alien look.

  To her left was a bundle of clothes: her skirt and blazer. Maggie Dickens was crouched over the pile like some savage tribeswoman, her blonde hair hanging in her face, her hands shaking lighter fuel all over Sarah’s uniform. She beckoned for Ricky James to pass her his zippo lighter. Her boyfriend obliged. Maggie made a few attempts to light the clothes before the first few flames started to rise. There was a mixture of gasps and cheers from the crowd.

  Suddenly some kids on the outside were shouting 'run', and when the rest of us looked around we saw a group of teachers marching up from the girls' school in the distance. The stout, perm-haired figure of Mrs Connell was visible at the head of the party. From the opposite direction - the boys' school - another huddle of figures approached.

  “It’s Baggot!”

  Mr Baggot was the head teacher.

  The crowd realised the game was up and fanned out in various directions across the field, eager to avoid the pincer movement of teachers. I looked over my shoulder as I ran and saw that Maggie Dickens was the last remaining member of the mob which had surrounded Sarah.

  In one last act of malice, Maggie picked up Sarah's shoes and hurled them at her pathetic, prone figure. There was still no reaction from Sarah. She lay there, passive and pale; her white skin glistening in the afternoon sun and her school uniform burning in a sorry pile next to her.

  It was the last I ever saw of her.

  It was the last anyone ever saw of her.

  Although the act had an air of finality about it: a big, brutal peak of bullying which was unlikely to be exceeded, I think we all still expected Sarah Dee to be back in class on Monday; as emotionless as ever, but finally and fully broken.

  But she wasn't.

  Her desk stood empty and mysterious; a gaping reminder that Maggie Dickens might have finally gone too far.

  She had.

  But nobody realised quite how far...

  *

  It was in the brightness of morning when I learned the news. I had just hauled myself out of bed and made my way down to the kitchen. My Mum was frying some eggs and the sun was shining. The smell was of normality and peace. But what Mum said shattered all that normality forever:

  “Morning Anna.”

  “Morning Mum.”

  “You know a Maggie Dickens, honey?”

  “Er, yeah…”

  “Is she a friend of yours?”

  “No, not really”

  I would have explained that Maggie didn’t have friends – just sheep-like followers and sworn enemies. And people like me who tried their best to avoid having anything to do with her – but these questions seemed to be going somewhere intriguing…

  “Why Mum?”

  “So, you aren’t close?” she went on.

  “No, she’s in my year, that’s all.”

  “She was in your year dear. She was found dead yesterday night. Murdered, it sounds like.”

  My head began to spin with something strange; a feeling which was neither grief nor sadness. There was shock, obviously, but also a sense that something really significant had happened; a sinister significance which my muddled mind couldn’t quite grasp.

  It took several cups of sugary tea before my hands stopped shaking.

  Three

  (Two years ago...)

  God, she was beautiful.

  So beautiful it made him feel a bit sick.

  Sick in a good way.

  The very fact that someone so perfect could exist; and live in the same small town as him; made his stomach lurch like a swarm of butterflies was having a party in there. Just looking at her made him feel faint.

  God, what would he be like when he had to speak to this girl?

  Terrified, no doubt...

  But he'd already made up his mind he was going to do it. He owed it to love.

  Love was a funny thing, CJ often thought: there were countless songs, books and films made about it, people lived for it and fought for it and even died for it, but very few people could actually say what it was.

  To him though, love was like a comforting balm which took his hurts and soothed them till they no longer troubled him.

  During the bad days, he knew - for sure - that if he could only one day look into her eyes and see them gazing back at him with an equal, reflected love, then everything would always be OK.

  Him and Sarah Dee.

  Forever.

  That’s why he’d had the tattoo done…

  It was on his ribcage, directly above his heart: it showed the letters C and S entwined. Simple enough; but shit, had it hurt! It was a sensitive area of the body, but that was necessary for it to be hidden from public view.

  Nobody knew CJ as the kind of boy to have a tattoo.

  But then again, there were a lot of things that people didn’t know about CJ.

  Four

  (Anna)

  Getting out of Tarnsey was probably the best thing I could have done at that point in my life. I hadn't particularly enjoyed my school days at the time, but it was only once I got away, to Selchester, to college, that I could finally see Tarnsey High School it for what it had been: a strange, uptight, violent place.

  Selchester was only ten miles up the road, but in many ways it was a different world to Tarnsey. Maybe it was because Tarnsey was a small-town, a one road in-and-out seaside resort which sulked in boredom through the winter and throbbed with heat and tension in the summer.

  There was nothing much for teenagers to do in Tarnsey but drink and fight and seek out trouble. That and bullying. And Sarah Dee had long been singled out as everybody's favourite victim.

  She suffered years of abuse with no more than a resigned, faraway gaze. It was no surprise really that one day she cracked, and beat Maggie Dickens to death with a hammer. And then disappeared.

  Completely and inexplicably.

  From that day on Sarah Dee stopped being a person and became a story; a legend that would be passed on through generations of Tarnsey kids, always ending with the words "what became of Sarah Dee?"

  Nobody knew.

  Nobody knew whether she had been planning it carefully for years: intending all along to murder her tormentor -in-chief before vanishing into the sunset, or whether she had been tipped over the edge by the incident on the field. I didn't know for sure, but deep down I thought that it had probably been planned. There always looked like there'd been a plot brewing behind Sarah's eyes. And for her to disappear so successfully was surely the sign of an intelligent, level-headed schemer, not a manic, vengeful hammer killer.

  In the days after Maggie Dickens’ murder I was obsessed with it. But only once it had sunk in, of course. That first night, as I lay in bed, it had seemed terrifying thinking about someone being hammered to death in our own town. The next night it just seemed fascinating.

  I read every newspaper article on the case I could find, and spent my days hanging around Maggie’s street watching the policemen and TV news crews going in and out of the house she had shared with her mother and father. I remember seeing them emerge tearfully from the house to inspect the flowers wh
ich had been left behind by Maggie’s contemporaries; and seeing her few friends and many admirers holding hands and crying.

  I couldn’t join in with the outpouring of grief though. I felt sorry for Maggie’s parents, of course, but not for Maggie herself. In my opinion, Maggie deserved every blow that Sarah had delivered to her pretty little head.

  Maggie was as mean as a snake.

  For me though, it had all quite quickly become a distant memory. I had made my escape.

  I was taking my ‘A’ levels in a college in a different town, and living in halls. Despite not yet being eighteen, it was virtually as if I’d gone away to university, just two years early. I was in a different place – emotionally and geographically - and studying with the intention of becoming a doctor.

  Doctor Anna Keating: that would be me one day; a proper grown-up, not the silly girl I had been when I was at school.

  But that particular summer my ‘A’ Levels were over, and I was heading back to Tarnsey for three long months, and the little place was about to draw me in one more time…

  Five

  Derek Smith had a morning routine, and he was following it to the letter on this particularly sunny day.

  It always involved tea and toast, followed by a brisk walk with Humphrey along the length of Tarnsey’s promenade until it gave way to the craggy feet of the chalk cliffs that lined the western end of the seafront.

  Humphrey was pleased to be out in the crisp morning air and barked enthusiastically when Derek took him off his lead. The big Alsatian bounded across the shingle and right up to the frothy, lapping waves. He then turned and headed back to his owner, panting keenly.

  Derek took the well-chewed tennis ball out of his coat pocket and hurled it in the direction of the steep cliff-face. The ball bounced off the cliffs and came to a rest by some rocks, before being swiftly picked up in Humphrey's slobbery mouth and returned to Derek's hands.