Sorry Isn’t Good Enough, page 14
‘Like wimberries.’
‘Not unlike them, only blacker and shinier. It’s very poisonous. It can make you dizzy, make you hallucinate – that means imagine things that aren’t real – and make your lungs stop working. It’s lethal. It’s also called belladonna, which means “beautiful woman”. Beautiful, but the fruit is deadly.’ I think he’s going to go all biblical with me, and start talking about the Garden of Eden, but he says, ‘It makes your pupils dilate, which is meant to look attractive, so women used to take it in small doses.’
‘I see.’
‘But don’t you ever try it, Stephanie. You don’t need to look any more beautiful.’
I try to bank this compliment to unwrap and savour later. He is being far too serious about my safety for me to enjoy it now. You don’t need to look any more beautiful.
‘Ah, look at this!’ He holds up another stem. ‘Well, this is a bit early. A ripe berry! And another one! There are quite a few already. See how black they are.’
They are the blackest, shiniest berries I have ever seen. I can see why children want to eat them. I won’t tell Dawn about them. She’ll just want to poison Hilary again. At least her new plan doesn’t involve that.
‘What do they taste like?’
‘I’ve never eaten one, but they are supposed to be quite sweet.’ He drops the stem and it folds back into the bush, hidden from view. ‘Well, there we are. Warning over. You’ll know now: one berry never to pick.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, and follow him back to the path.
I have to go now, as it’s teatime soon, and I don’t want Mum asking me where I’ve been. But I don’t really want to say goodbye to Mr Man and Goldie as they head off to the Dingle. I badly want to go with them. I want to warn him about Dawn and her wretched plan, because she’s going to get him involved.
‘I have to go now,’ I say, back on the main woodland path.
‘Okay,’ he smiles. ‘It was good seeing you. And the magical roe deer.’
‘Yes. The magical roe deer.’
I feel corny, just repeating what he’s said. I don’t move. I open my mouth to speak, to tell him about Dawn’s plot, but nothing comes out. Nothing that will lead to an adequate explanation.
‘Is everything okay, Stephanie?’
I find my breathing speeding up. ‘I … if you … if Dawn …’
His look says, Go on … but he says nothing. He looks shy, and a little anxious.
‘Um. Nothing. I’ve got to go.’
And that is the chance I miss. I could just say to him what I said to Hilary, but he would want to know why. If only I could share this terrible secret with him. Then, maybe … But how can I ever tell him such things? I would die of shame. He is Mr Man and I love him, and he may just love me too. You don’t need to look any more beautiful. And he wants me to be safe.
When Dawn is late, she traps me. By not being at the Dingle when I expect her, she knows I’m thinking about her, wondering what’s happened. She knows I’m picturing her leaving her house, walking at a certain pace, maybe stopping to tie her shoe or talk to someone. She knows that all the time she has made me wait, she has successfully made me fill the time with wondering about her. And it’s always just at that point when anxiety for her could turn to anger that she appears. I can hear how needy my voice is at that point. She is an arch manipulator.
It’s the day of the World Cup final: the day allocated to put an end to Hilary Gibson.
I’m intrigued to see how Dawn behaves when someone keeps her waiting for a change. She has no patience at all. ‘Where is Hilary? She’d better come soon, or he will be here, and then it’ll seem like we’ve arranged it.’ She paces around irritably, kicking at stones. ‘He’s going to arrive before she’s taken her clothes off.’
‘Maybe she’s been held up by tea – maybe her dad was late coming home and she’s not allowed to leave the table until he has.’
‘That’s not helping.’ She sighs and looks at her watch. ‘Let’s strip off now. Come on.’ She pulls her dress over her head and slips off her shoes and socks. ‘Come on, Stephanie. Let’s at least look like we’re doing it, so she’ll get a move on when she arrives.’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘For God’s sake, Stephanie! What are you afraid of? No one’s going to be interested in your naked body, not with your gammy leg, for crying out loud. No one’s going to be looking at you! Can’t you get that into your thick head?’
‘Then why do I have to?’ I can feel my throat swelling up, hard and painful. I pick up her discarded socks and fold them together nervously.
‘It’s for Hilary, you dumbo. So that she’ll join in. She’s hardly going to undress on her own, is she?’
I disappear into the bushes as if I intend to strip off, but I delay. When I come out still dressed she gets mean, grabbing at the bag round my shoulder. I try to distract her.
‘Maybe I should go and get her,’ I say at last, treacherously, for she doesn’t know what I said to Hilary yesterday, when Dawn had gone in after playing in the street. I enjoy watching Dawn being kept waiting herself for once, I enjoy knowing that Hilary won’t come. Hilary won’t come because I told her not to. I warned her that it was a trick.
‘Stay here! Take your dress off!’
I don’t know it at the time, but these are the last words she will ever speak to me. Even as I head to the bushes again at the side of the clearing, too shy to take my dress off in such an open space, I hear a familiar sound. Dawn doesn’t hear the snap of a twig on the path, or see the golden head of a Labrador emerge into the clearing, because she has turned her back on me and is angrily sploshing through the stream. By the time she sees Goldie I have retreated behind a curtain of ivy hanging from an elder bush, and her pants are wet and see-through.
I will remember her wet pants, her mouth open, the way she climbs out of the stream in slow motion. I will remember every moment of what happens next, when the kitten pokes its head out of the bag. I will remember it for the rest of my life.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Item: Psychology textbook circa 1975. Chuck.
There is evidence to suggest that our brains don’t develop fully until our mid-twenties. Even teenagers have a poorly developed sense of consequences, and children less so.
The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that deals with planning and thinking things through, the part that can predict consequences to certain actions, develops last of all. Most children’s decisions are influenced mainly by their amygdala, that part of the brain associated with instinctive behaviour: emotions, aggression, impulses. This is why so many of us working in psychology are hostile to the British law that still says a child as young as ten can be convicted of a crime. We would argue that a child may well be old enough to know the difference between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but not necessarily developed enough in the frontal cortex to control impulses.
I think Dawn had almost no control over hers. She was all impulse.
I find myself trailing back to those woods over and over, and back, back along the paths that led me there. If only I hadn’t agreed to Dawn’s stupid plan, vainly convinced that I could scupper it all by myself; if only we hadn’t befriended Mr Man at all, if I had never been for that special walk with him because Mum had thrown out my bear; if only I’d been allowed to go to ballet lessons, I wouldn’t have been alone and wandering the street; if only I hadn’t met Hilary, if only she hadn’t won all the prizes, won the boys’ admiration, won my friendship. You could go on for ever, if-only-ing, and it would all lead back to one tiny decision, one tiny event like the opening of a butterfly’s wings.
I remember the day as if it were yesterday.
‘I know how we can really kill her,’ she’d said. ‘We could drown her.’
I had let her elaborate with fancy ideas about pushing poor Hilary in the stream at the Dingle, tripping her into it with invisible wire, taking her to a nearby ornamental lake in a park, all sorts of rubbish. Then I said, ‘Hilary can swim.’
She sighed heavily, kicking back at the wall we were sitting on in front of her house and digging out bits of mortar from the bricks with a stick. ‘We could kidnap her!’
‘Right.’
‘We lure her down to the Dingle and we tie her up, then leave her.’ I said nothing, but watched her face as she came up with more details and pitched them to me excitedly. I raised my eyebrows. It was meant to be sarcastic, but I probably looked earnest.
‘Until Mr Man finds her dead and wasted body, out walking Goldie.’ She was pleased with herself.
‘Oh, oh, oh, wait! Wait a minute,’ I said, pretending to enter into the idea, hoping to smash it to pieces, ‘we get Mr Man to kidnap her.’
‘And how are we going to do that?’
I knew for certain that Mr Man was not going to be coming out at his usual time because of the World Cup. I had seen the World Cup Willie sticker on Goldie’s collar. So, I felt on safe territory with this one.
‘Did you see the way he looked at you in your pants? When you took your dress off?’
It had been like offering a banana to a monkey. She’d snatched it up greedily.
‘Yes. Yes, that’s good. We get her to come and play in the stream with us, and—’
‘We get Mr Man to bring his kittens to show us. We tell her there will be kittens.’
‘He wouldn’t bring them.’ I knew she was right. Why would he? But again, this felt like safe territory. He wouldn’t bring them, he’d be watching the World Cup. ‘Although …’ She looked sly. ‘He will if I ask him nicely.’ She pulled a scarily seductive face. I had to reel this idea back in quickly.
‘I don’t think we can get Hilary to take her clothes off. And anyway—’
‘That’s easy,’ she said, leaping off the wall. ‘We all take them off. We take off all our clothes, together, and as soon as he arrives, we run away.’
‘What about Hilary? She’d run away too.’
She was literally skipping on the spot then. I remember that. ‘We take her clothes, stupid! We run away with her clothes, and she is left naked with Mr Man, and bingo! He just won’t be able to resist!’
Dawn’s pleasure at such a horror was sickening. I would have to remind myself of that later, the next day and the next. Maybe she really did, finally, mean to do some harm. Maybe after all—
I must’ve looked pretty hangdog as I trudged back from Dawn’s front wall to our house. Gareth was kicking a ball in the crescent, in the road between his house and ours. He was skilful, launching the ball in the air with one foot and catching it with the other, like the players in the England team. I should’ve told him he was good, but I couldn’t think of anything but Dawn. To my surprise he stopped as I approached and came towards me, holding the ball.
‘You shouldn’t let her bully you, Steph.’
‘Who?’
He raised his eyebrows as if to say, We both know who. His eyes were so blue and his skin so brown under his floppy dark fringe that I wanted to throw my arms around him. I wanted to kiss him and smell his cheeks and his chin and his neck.
‘Dawn.’
‘She doesn’t bully me.’ For some reason I saw a bully as a hefty older boy who kicks smaller kids and duffs them up.
‘She bullies everyone. Especially you.’
I swallowed. Did he mean I was weak? He must have seen me staring at the stitching on his football, because he put his hand on my arm.
‘You’re too nice. She picks on you because she knows she can trust you.’
I was reeling from being nice and trustworthy in Gareth’s eyes; I was reeling from his hand on my skin, his nails so pink against his tanned fingers. It was almost as if he was looking after me, as if we were back in our den in the Forest of Dean and he was protecting me from danger. Only this time it was for real. It wasn’t wild boar or wolves we needed to watch out for. It was Dawn Webster.
He removed his hand but put it on our gate, as if he wasn’t finished with his role as my guardian. He looked me steadily in the eye. Briefly, I imagined licking his skin. ‘Seriously, Stephanie. Stay away from her. She’s bad news.’
I half expected him to say, ‘If you ever want anyone to stand up for you, I’m your man’, but he threw his ball into the air and started to kick it again. The rapid, rhythmic sound of his canvas shoes against the leather matched my beating heart.
I should never have pretended to go along with her plan. I should’ve tried to talk her down, make her see sense. I was good at waiting out her anger. She was always angry about something. She could work herself up into a violent frenzy, but it would fizzle out eventually. I didn’t see that this time was different: this time she had felt provoked once too often. She was out of control. Whichever way you look at it, it was my fault.
I should never have run away like I did.
Chapter Thirty-Three
A Girl is Missing
When the police come to the house the next day, Dad is out. Mum offers to make them tea, but the burly man with a bloated face says, ‘No, thank you, Mrs Townsend,’ and a slim policewoman with short brown hair, who is with him, smiles at my mother and doesn’t get a say in the matter. The four of us sit down in the front room, Mum on the settee with me.
‘Now,’ says the policeman, ‘you’ve done nothing wrong, Stephanie’ (that’s what he thinks), ‘but you were one of the last people to see Dawn, and we need to gather as much information as we can about what happened. Okay?’
I’ve been expecting this, because yesterday evening, after the World Cup match, there were a lot of people down the end of Napier Road. At first Mum thought it was a celebration, but there was an ambulance and a police car parked outside Dawn’s house. After a while the ambulance drove away. I asked Mum what had happened, as if I didn’t know. I couldn’t sleep because there was a three-quarter moon and it filled my room with white light, and even though I rocked my head from side to side, I couldn’t empty it of what I’d seen. I didn’t know how to fill that trembling nowhere time between Dawn’s last words and the rest of the world knowing they were her last-ever words. I also couldn’t forget what I’d put under my bed.
After about an hour there was a ring on the doorbell. No one comes to our house at night. I heard low voices rumbling in the hallway. There was a gentle knocking on my door, and Mum came in. She sat by my bed and explained that she just needed to ask me a question. Dawn hadn’t come home. When did I last see her? I pretended to be surprised – and horrified. I didn’t have to pretend to be shaken. Mum stroked my hair and told me not to worry. It should have been wonderful, that moment; I had only ever dreamt of Mum stroking my hair like that. But all I could feel was the pounding in my chest. She told me again not to worry. Mrs Webster was downstairs and she was quite sure Dawn would turn up soon, but they just needed to know when and where I last saw her. I said it was some time during the match and it was down near the railway cutting.
‘Do you know why she didn’t come home?’
‘No.’ I tried to sound really sleepy. Then I realised I needed to say something true, otherwise I’d be a suspect. ‘I think she was waiting for someone.’
‘Who?’
‘Hilary, I think.’ Hilary’s mum would know she was at home yesterday.
‘Okay.’
‘Mum?’ I looked distraught. ‘Is she going to be all right?’ I hated myself for my treachery, but my shaking voice was genuine.
‘I’m sure she will be. You get back to sleep now. You can tell us more in the morning.’
The policeman stinks of cigarette smoke, and I know Mum can smell it too, and she won’t like it. Neither do I. It’s just after breakfast, and they are here already, in our living room. I fix my eyes on the arm of the settee. Its dark green piping is starting to fray. Mum has been measuring up the three-piece suite so that she can cover it herself, and she let me look at the swatches. I liked the velvet but she said it wouldn’t wear. She favoured a coarse nylon-cotton mix, which I thought was horrible. I nod.
‘Yesterday, you and Dawn arranged to play after tea, is that right?’
I freeze. I don’t know what to say. I want to say I didn’t see Dawn after all, that I changed my mind, but someone might have seen us go down Napier Road together. Even though the road was empty yesterday, with everyone watching the footy, someone might have seen us from a bedroom window or something. Have they spoken to Hilary? What if Hilary told them that I had warned her not to come? And if they haven’t spoken to Hilary, they might, and I can’t make her lie for me. I take a breath, but nothing comes out.
‘It’s all right, sweetheart,’ says the lady. ‘We know this is difficult for you. Take your time.’
I can sense my mother looking at me in expectation. She is bewildered that I don’t speak, bewildered in the same way she always is about me generally. ‘Stephanie?’
I nod. ‘Yes.’
‘And where did you go, when you met?’ asks the policeman.
‘We went down Napier Road.’
‘To the railway cutting?’
I chew the inside of my lip. ‘Yes.’
‘And did you cross the bridge further down the track?’
‘She’s not allowed that far,’ says Mum. ‘She only goes as far as the Hadleys’ house in one direction and the Drews’ in the other. She’s not allowed to lose sight of Napier Road.’
The policeman looks at Mum and smiles. The sort of smile you give to a child who says they’re going to be an astronaut when they grow up. ‘I think we’ll have that cup of tea now, if that’s okay, Mrs Townsend? I’m feeling a bit parched.’
As soon as she’s gone, he looks at me. ‘So, you crossed the bridge and went through the woods and down to the stream?’
I look round at the door to check Mum has gone. I nod.
‘And what did you do?’
I can hear the metallic sound of the kettle being parked on the stove. I have minutes to tell my story, and seconds to decide what it will be. I stroke the piping on the armrest, feeling my heart gallop. It misses a beat – or adds a beat – catung! And then again. Catung-tung-tung-catung-catung-catung-tung.
