Tattletale

by Sarah J. Naughton

  For a while Emily had boasted that her family were moving to a bigger house in a nicer town and the little girl’s heart had swelled with hope, but Emily had stopped talking about it now.

  Even if Emily does leave, there is still Zoe and Melissa and Stevie Daniels. Stevie Daniels hit her because he said she was laughing when he was talking about his mum’s operation. She wasn’t. She was just smiling because she wanted to be friends. He got into a little bit of trouble, but not too much, because of the operation. The hit didn’t hurt, but now he jumps out at her when she’s walking past, slamming his foot down to make her jump and scowling as if he wants to murder her.

  Sometimes she wishes he just would.

  With a sense of panic she realises she needs the toilet. For the past few days it has been hurting so much to wee and she has noticed the yellow in the bowl has streaks of pink in it. Perhaps she is properly sick and will die.

  ‘Now,’ says Miss Jarvis. ‘Adjectives. Who can tell me what an adjective is?’

  ‘A describing word,’ says Jamie.

  ‘Correct. Now, I’m going to go around the class and we’re going to come up with some words to describe a person. Jamie, you begin.’

  ‘Strong,’ says Jamie.

  ‘Good. Imran?’

  ‘Clever.’

  The list went on: tall, hairy, blond, nice (disallowed), friendly, naughty, noisy, brave.

  It came to the little girl’s turn. ‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘Kind.’

  ‘You’re supposed to say one, der,’ hisses Stevie beside her.

  ‘Good,’ says Miss Jarvis. ‘Stevie?’

  ‘Stupid.’

  ‘Ugly,’ says Emily, and she can feel her former friend’s eyes boring into her back.

  ‘Smelly,’ Melissa says, and the whole class laughs.

  Then Jason Hicks cries out, ‘The police are here!’ and everyone rushes to the window.

  ‘I didn’t know we were having a visit today,’ Miss Jarvis says, joining them. ‘Perhaps it’s an Internet safety thing for year six.’

  Both police officers are women. One is young and pretty, the other older and grey-haired; neither is smiling at the faces pressed to the windows. They cross the playground with silent purposefulnes, and disappear through the door that leads to the headmistress’s office.

  ‘Has Mrs Harrison committed a crime, Miss Jarvis?’ says Zoe.

  ‘Is it because her car’s too dirty to read the number plate?’

  ‘Has she been murdering children?’

  Laughter.

  ‘Quiet!’ Miss Jarvis snaps. Her face has gone white. She, like the children, is watching the police officers come back out of the door, accompanied by a grim-faced Mrs Harrison. The headteacher glances up in the direction of Mrs Jarvis’s classroom and for a moment a look passes between them.

  ‘Back to your desks,’ Mrs Jarvis says quietly, and the children, subdued, do as they are told.

  The little girl can barely put one foot in front of the other, she is so scared.

  They know what she did last night.

  And so many nights before that.

  She knows it’s illegal. Her parents told her. They said if anyone ever found out the things she had done she would go to prison, forever. She would be in prison with the same men she did the illegal things with, but her parents wouldn’t be there to stop them if they tried to really hurt her. They could do anything they wanted to her.

  And now the police are here. They will take her to prison and the men will be waiting for her.

  Footsteps thud down the corridor. There are no voices. The children around her look at one another. Excitement has turned to trepidation. Is one of them in trouble? Has something bad happened to someone they love?

  The footsteps draw closer.

  She leaps up, making the desk legs screech, and flies for the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ exclaims Miss Jarvis, but she is already running down the corridor, in the opposite direction from the three adults who have stopped in surprise.

  She bursts through the emergency exit and the alarm starts up, an ear-splitting ringing that makes her teeth vibrate. There are shouts behind her, running footsteps.

  She runs through the playground, dimly aware of faces pressed to windows and hands banging on glass. As she skids around the corner of the building the main gates come into view.

  She is just tall enough, now, to hit the green button that releases them.

  Someone is calling her name but she doesn’t turn, just squeezes through the widening gap with a moan of pain as the metal bars cause pressure on her bladder and scrape the welts on her back.

  The belt buckle was square and brass. When she saw him taking it off her heart had sunk, but it lifted again when he didn’t undo his trousers. She hadn’t understood because she had never met him before. She didn’t know it was her pain that gave him his pleasure. He wanted to see her cry and beg him to stop. Her dad stopped it in the end, saying he would break her and then where would he get his fun next time? Heh heh.

  She is out of the gates and running down the pavement in the direction of the park. If she can get there she will be able to hide in the bushes. Unless they send dogs out for her. Or heat-seeking helicopters like she’s seen on the TV.

  If she jumps into the lake perhaps they will not be able to see her, or smell her. But then she might drown.

  Footsteps behind her.

  She manages to speed up a little. She has the body of an athlete, the PE teacher always says. He can’t understand why she is so slow, why she tires so easily. He says she is unfit, eating the wrong things, staying up too late.

  She risks a glance behind and her bladder loosens with a vicious burning sensation. It is the policewomen who are pursuing her – and they are fast. The older one, surprisingly, is in the lead, her cap wedged on her head, her arms and legs pumping.

  The little girl whimpers and tries to increase her pace as she runs past the row of houses. But she is so tired, and her back hurts, and her bladder hurts, and there is no strength left in her legs. She is not strong, or clever, or brave. She is just tired. She just wants it all to stop.

  There is a lorry coming. She feels its rumble through her feet before she hears its roar behind her, drowning out the sounds of her pursuit. Suddenly she knows what she must do.

  The lorry is at her back, so huge and loud, shaking the trees and rattling the windows of the houses.

  It won’t hurt at all; it will be so quick.

  She stops and turns. The robot face of the cab stares at her impassively, the driver no more than a shadow behind glass that reflects the trees of the park. They would have found her in the park. They would find her anywhere. Find her and take her back to the men, and it would be so much worse than before, though she cannot imagine how.

  She bends her knees, ready to leap.

  The lorry is so close she can smell its dirty, gusty breath.

  It is a metre away, half a metre; she launches herself upwards, into the air, closing her eyes, waiting for the huge, shocking impact.

  Her feet leave the edge of the pavement. The lorry screams, the whole world shakes.

  But just in time she is being yanked back. There is an impact, a painful one, as she lands on her back on the pavement, but the lorry thunders past and she screams in an agony of despair.

  The grey-haired policewoman is kneeling beside her, holding her down as she tries to scramble up and throw herself into the path of the next vehicle, or the next, or the next.

  Eventually she gives up, collapses on her torn back on the pavement and sobs.

  Running footsteps skid to a halt and the other policewoman is beside her, but they make no attempt to drag her to her feet or handcuff her. Instead they lift her gently and, like doting parents with a new baby, gather her into their arms, not caring that bloody, acid wee is soaking through her threadbare school skirt.

  They rock her like that, until she starts to calm down, and can make sense of the words they are repeatin
g over and over, their voices merging together, as if they are singing a round.

  ‘You’re all right, now. You’re all right. Nothing bad is going to happen to you again. Not ever. I promise. I promise.’

  The little girl raises her head and looks from face to face. She is surprised to see that both women are crying.

  Saturday 12 November

  20. Mags

  Spending the night with Daniel makes me feel so much better.

  Though in fact, as the morning progresses and I’m still floating on a bubble, I wonder if it isn’t the sex – which was fairly clumsy and unrewarding due to the fact that we were both drunk – and rather simply waking up with a nice warm human being beside me. I didn’t realise how much being alone in this dark flat, in this shitty neighbourhood, in this freezing city, was getting to me. Plus there’s no denying I felt safer with a big strong man in the house.

  To make up for the last morning we spent together, where I basically told him to fuck off, I leave him sleeping and head out to get breakfast from the local bakery.

  I won’t go to the hospital today in case I bump into Jody. I still haven’t had a chance to gather my thoughts about the stuff I saw on Abe’s computer last night. It wasn’t just photographs. I opened his history and logged onto a chat room he seemed to have spent a lot of time on. There was a thread from this Redhorse. Predictable enough stuff initially: Can’t stop thinking about the taste of your cock, I want to feel you inside me, that sort of thing. Porn talk. But the later ones are more intimate. From Abe: I’ve been thinking about you all day. From Redhorse: Not long before I see you. Abe: I’m counting the seconds. x

  My first thought was: did Jody find out he was screwing around on her? He’d set the computer to remember all his passwords so it wouldn’t have been hard for her. But that just brings me back to the idea that she pushed him, and I just don’t buy it. Say she confronted him about it and there was a struggle, she isn’t physically strong enough to overpower him. Plus, would you really confront a cheater on your way home from a night out? Wouldn’t you do it in the privacy of your flat?

  On my return from the bakery with my bag of croissants Jodie is coming out of St Jerome’s. When she sees me she stops dead on the path. I’m wearing Abe’s parka – it’s far warmer than the rain jacket – and maybe I look a bit intimidating. I pull the hood down and force myself to smile.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  She blinks rapidly, then finds her voice. ‘The hospital.’

  ‘Oh.’ My smile falters. Guiltily I screw the croissant bag up until it’s as unobtrusive as possible. While you’re enjoying a nice slow morning screw she’ll be conducting her bedside vigil for your brother. I’m the bad guy yet again.

  I could get rid of Daniel and go with her, but I’m not sure I can sit there beside her and pretend nothing’s happened.

  ‘Tell him I’ll try and pop by later.’

  She nods quickly, tucking her hair behind her ear in that coy way she has. I don’t think she even realises it looks flirtatious. The ring on her engagement finger has twisted around and now I can see the whole phrase that has been engraved into the stainless steel (as I now know it must be – not silver).

  True love waits.

  My eyes widen. Seriously, Abe? I know you didn’t have much money but was this all you could manage for an engagement ring?

  It’s a purity ring, given to Abe and me by our parents when the first wisps of pubic hair appeared. I took mine to university with me, determined to be wearing it as I lost my virginity. Friends at King’s came up with the nickname when they found it in my stuff. The name on my birth certificate is Mary Martha, but they thought that was inappropriate, so I became Mary Magdalene, the whore with the seven demons inside her.

  But my friends didn’t know their scriptures. The Magdalene may not have been the Virgin Mother, but she was by Jesus’s side when he was crucified. Not a whore but a saint. Either way I played along and the name stuck. Magdalene. Mags.

  At the end of the first term I laid my ring carefully down on the railway line and the fast train to London obliterated it. I can understand why Abe kept his – to laugh at, or hurl across the room when he thought of our parents – but why give a chastity ring to his lover? Ironically? Somehow Jody doesn’t seem the type to get the joke.

  As I watch her hurry away to be by his side, my wave of pity is accompanied by anger. How could he do this to her?

  Piles of post sit on the table in the foyer. A pile for everyone who lives here. The bountiful friendship of the takeaway. Even the junkie in Flat Seven has a generous handful and she doesn’t look as if she’s eaten in years.

  Abe’s is held in an elastic band. A white corner is just visible between the menus of Bengal Kitchen and Pronto Pizza.

  Sliding it out I open the blank envelope.

  She was there

  I pass my fingertips over the indentations from the biro, as if they will tell me something my eyes can’t. I know for certain now that this note is meant for me.

  And I’m pretty sure what they mean by there; they mean when he fell.

  ‘Who was there?’ I call up the stairwell, and the echoes of my voice seem to go on for long moments.

  Then my door opens high above.

  ‘Mags? You OK?’

  ‘Fine. Be up in a minute.’

  Tucking the paper into my pocket, I start climbing the stairs. On the second floor I pause, wondering whether to knock on the junkie’s door. Clearly Abe was bisexual: could she have been one of his lovers too? She’s probably capable of anything to get the money for her next hit, but I’m not sure Abe was that desperate, not with Redhorse on the scene. Unless she was before Redhorse, before Jody and now resentful of the love that she had with my brother? Resentful enough to try and set Jody up?

  No. She said she was out that night and stuck with her story even when she thought there might be a reward for saying she’d seen something.

  I pass the grumpy queen’s door. Potentially another jealous lover?

  I realise, suddenly, how desperate I am to try and prove that someone is jealous of Jody and is trying to drive a wedge between us, because the alternative – that this letter writer is telling the truth – is unthinkable.

  Jody’s lying to me.

  She was there when Abe fell.

  Daniel is standing by the window drinking coffee when I get back in. The flat always gets the morning sun and his blond hair is lit up with all the colours of the apostles’ cloaks. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt of Abe’s – I said he could – which is a bit too tight because his muscles are just starting to turn to fat. He turns and smiles at me, and for a moment I feel a rush of emotion, like the release of some narcotic into my bloodstream. I bustle around the kitchen until it has passed, then lay out the croissants and the paper.

  ‘Well, this is nice,’ he says, sitting down at the table. ‘You’d make someone a lovely wife.’

  ‘Piss off,’ I say half-heartedly and pick up the money section, though my eyes skim across the page, unseeing.

  I know he’s got to go. He’s promised to take his sons to the Warner Brothers Studio, but when he glances at his watch and sighs, I feel a sudden stab of desolation, and when I kiss him goodbye he says, ‘Careful.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Almost let some feelings show, there.’

  ‘Yeah, the feeling of wanting you to piss off so I can get on with some work.’

  He grins, his teeth Vegas-white.

  I hear his footsteps all the way down the stairwell and then the creak of the door opening, and then silence. I’m alone again, and the oppressive atmosphere of the church returns, as if the lead roof is pushing down on me.

  21. Jody

  It was a beautiful evening because of the volcano. On the news they said it was something to do with the layers of ash in the atmosphere. As the afternoon wore on the sky became streaked with a million different shades of red. I tried to think of all the different names as I gazed out of t
he clear patch of window in my flat. Crimson and scarlet, vermillion, fuschia, cherry, burgundy, ruby, baby-pink, pillarbox, blood.

  But it seemed as if this wonderful gift was all for me: the people scurrying down Gordon Terrace kept their heads bent, and the high road was as noisy as ever, with roaring bus engines, horns and sirens and the occasional shouting match. No one else had noticed what was spread out above them.

  There was a tap at my door; it sounded hesitant, as if the person had come to ask a favour. I thought of my silent neighbours. Perhaps the woman next door wanted to borrow something. I decided not to answer. To become friends with her would mean having to have contact with her partner, and he frightened me. On the few occasions I’d actually seen him in the flesh he seemed to me, like most men who choose to look that way, more like an animal than a person.

  The tap came again.

  I sat still and silent by the window. Then I saw Mira walking across the waste ground in the direction of the high road.

  If it wasn’t her at my door, then who? What if it was her partner? He knew I lived alone. What if he—

  ‘Jody?’

  I sprang to my feet with a gasp and raced to the door.