Skeletal (12 page)

‘I didn’t think Vila had a boyfriend,’ Melanie said.

‘She doesn’t,’ Tracy answered. ‘But I think I know who she’d like to have.’

‘Tell, tell, tell,’ I joined in the chant and we tugged at Tracy until Vila looked back over her shoulder to see what was happening. To avoid suspicion we all immediately fell silent.

‘
Come on
. Do I have to drag you there myself?’

‘Tell us later,’ Melanie whispered, and ran to join Vila at the door. ‘You couldn’t drag me if you tried, love. You may be Samoan, but you’re not a bloody rugby player.’

Vila swiped at the side of her head, but in play. She seemed to be relaxing now we were starting to move according to her timetable.

‘Thanks for the food,’ I called through to Vila’s mother. She was standing in the kitchen looking down at the kitchen counter. She started, and turned and gave me a vague wave then resumed.

I wondered how awful it’d been for Vila in this household for the past couple of weeks. And, good friend that I was, I’d known nothing of it. I really should pay more attention to other people.

I ran to join my friends at the door, and Susie rolled her eyes at me as Vila complained loudly once again about how slow we all were. I took her shoes out of her hands – they weighed a ton – and rolled my eyes back at her as we set off, laughing.

***

There were some kids in the park already. There was one boy smoking near the poplar trees. He pinched the cigarette between two fingers, and his eye was in a long wink against the smoke. He inhaled, then exhaled with speed. He spat to one side, and then repeated.

A small gaggle of girls were kneeling in rapt attention in front of him. No matter how many health campaigns were run there was no changing the irrefutable fact that smoking was cool when you were a teenager. Not to mention the sign of someone who could lie successfully about their age, and had money to burn. Literally.

I saw Vila give a narrow look in their direction, and then she turned back to us and clapped her hands together. ‘Where do you want to sit?’

Her voice was brittle and loud, and I wasn’t surprised to see Tracy giving Melanie a subtle nod in the boy’s direction.

‘On the swingset,’ Susie announced, ‘I want to sit down.’

She picked her way through the loose bark and sat down with a sigh. Her shoes dropped to her side.

‘That’s better,’ she said and swung her feet up so they weren’t touching the ground.

I sat down on the short wooden wall that surrounded the playground area. It was too narrow and the rough wood started to insert its presence into the underside of my buttocks within a minute, but I stretched my legs to splay my weight a bit further and placed my hands on either side so I could lean on them and it felt a bit better.

The merry-go-round, with its flat disc surface and cold iron railings, was a popular spot, and as more kids drifted into the park its space was quickly filled. More took my example and perched awkwardly on the fence; others stood and lurched above us like giants in comparison.

‘Well, here’s my contribution to the party,’ Melanie said and pulled out a hip-flask of clear liquid. Vila’s eyes lit up, and she pulled out one to match, pale golden in the twilight.

‘What’s in it?’ Susie asked. I thought for a moment she was being incredibly naïve, but then Melanie listed the ingredients and I realised the need.

‘Vodka, gin, tequila. I tried to get the little worm, but it always floats to the side of the bottle.’

‘They’d notice that missing in any case,’ Vila stated with authority, and there were nods of agreement. ‘Mine’s vodka, brandy and whisky.’

My mouth filled with rancid spit at the thought. I’d long given up harvesting the dregs of the various glasses left strewn around after one of mum’s parties. The taste still lingered on in my imagination however, and my stomach lining.

The bottles were passed around in a tight circle. Tiny sips and attempts to hide grimaces of distaste behind forced smiles of enjoyment.

When it got to me I handed it straight back to Vila.

‘Not fair, Harrow. We’re all meant to have a drink.’

‘Sounds lovely, Vila. But I’ll pass this time.’

She handed the bottle back to me with a frown creasing its way down her forehead.

‘No skipsies. Take a drink.’

I left her with her hand outstretched. ‘No. I don’t want one.’ I kept my voice quiet, but there were still a few looks from around the park. Sideways under lashes, then snapping back into previous positions to hide the gesture.

Vila stepped close into my space, and leaned down. She pressed the bottle into the middle of my chest, but I was having none of it. ‘Sod off, Vila. You’ve seen my mum; you know why I don’t want one.’

‘You’re hardly gonna turn into an alkie overnight, Daina. You’re spoiling the party.’

‘I’m not the one ruining everything lately, Vila,’ I said, my voice even lower. I tried not to notice the winces from the girls around me as the import of that one landed. ‘If you don’t want me to stay then you can ask me to leave, but I’m not having a drink just because you say I am.’

I wanted to jump to my feet for this stand-off. I felt the disadvantage of height at the wrong end of the scale for the first time in a long time, but to stand now would be to give in, and I wasn’t about to go there either.

I’d had enough of bullies for the time being. I wasn’t going to have it from my supposed friend.

Vila’s teeth gritted together, the muscles at her jawline working, grinding. Then she stood back to her full height and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Whatever. More for the rest of us.’

She took another swig of her horrible liquid, a big one, and blinked to hide the tears forced to her eyes from the burn in her throat. She smiled widely and passed the bottle to her right, to Melanie who took it from her and then awkwardly sipped at it, and then held it a moment longer. She still had her own bottle in her hand, and looked like the world’s youngest tramp for a second in her torn jeans clutching handfuls of booze. Then she put her own down, working it into the bark so it wouldn’t tip, and handed Vila’s onto Susie.

‘We’ve got all night to go,’ she said as Susie stared uncertainly into the mixture. ‘Take it slow if you want.’

Vila sat down on a swing. Her hands formed tight fists around the chain-links on each side.

I looked over at the boy who’d been smoking earlier and saw that he now had one of the girls from his fanbase up against the fence, and was working his tongue hard inside her mouth. Revolting.

I stared at the bark in front of me, felt the imprint of the fence on my butt, started hoping that the evening would soon be over.

***

The tension started to leave our group as the alcohol took effect. It departed entirely when a group turned up with an old-style boom-box radio with gratuitously large speakers, and laid down a few beats.

Susie pulled me to my feet with the firm instruction ‘You’re the man,’ and then started gyrating around me. I fulfilled my role as the man by dancing with awkward abandon.

Even Vila let me give her a twirl before the batteries started to run down and the party moved down a notch again. But the ice was broken, people formed and re-formed into little groups of gossip. I moved from one group to another. For the first time not self-conscious that I barely knew anybody, because I knew some, and that was enough.

Being teenagers, there were a lot of groupings which reduced down to just two and sank into the deepening pockets of shadows around the park; getting down to the true purpose of their evening.

And then a hand grabbed me out of the twilight, and someone pulled back my arms.

For a moment I laughed. Someone was playing a game. And then I realised I couldn’t move. My arms were twisted up behind my back until my left shoulder started to scream. I tried to shake free. I tried to twist free. I tried to drop to my knees and out of the grip, but that caused more pain in my shoulder.

I lunged forward. Panic tapped a beat in my throat. Red bled into my vision. Pulsed in my eyeballs. Blue dripped through it like tears in blood. The ground swarmed into an army of green soldiers and marched away.

I screamed in fear, pain, panic. I could see the sound leaving my mouth, but it dropped flat on the ground in front of me. Dead and alone.

Michelle stood in front of me with a knife. The Cheshire cat grin was back.  A metre wide. A mile wide.

I pushed back hard into my captor, and then tried to lunge forward again. The arms continued to hold mine back. I couldn’t free myself.

Michelle leaned in close to me, her breath stroked my cheek then darted needles into my flesh. Bright needles that imprinted on my eyeballs and turned into a dance of fire. They tasted like barbeque sauce and bitter almonds.

‘I think you need to learn a lesson about privacy,’ she whispered, and then grabbed my silk blouse, my mother’s silk blouse, into a bunch in front of me, and slit it through with the knife.

For a moment I thought she’d cut me. Every physical sensation in my torso changed at once. But it was the cool night air hitting my exposed body.

The knife again and my bra was hanging from my shoulders, cut through the front. I could feel where she’d poked too far forward and the knife had pierced my skin and drawn blood.

A thump shook my eardrums with furious memory. My whole body stiffened. My mind went blank with terror.
Not that. No – not that again.

No one else reacted. My clothing continued to be cut from my body. I tried to twist. What I’d thought was panic before was now all encompassing dread and fear. I screeched, a wordless morass of sounds that fled to all corners of the park and hid.

The forms around me twisted, turned, disembodied then embodied again. There was a flash of light, lightning, bolts of dazzling white that split my vision and rendered me blind.

And then I was pushed to the ground. The clothing that still fastened at wrist, at neck, at waist, was torn and cut away. I could feel something pulling me over. Flashes again.

I felt the thump this time. It ate into my body like cancer. My consciousness paled, and then disappeared altogether.

Coroner’s Court 2014

The sad little progression of people from my past stopped today as the pathologist took the stand. She’s quite young. Compared to the many other adults in the courtroom she looks fresh. Still, she must be in her mid-thirties at least.

‘Mrs Harrow, as you’ve already received the information that this witness will present to the court, you may be excused if you want. I understand this could be painful for you to hear in detail.’

My mother furrows her brow and sets her lip. Her head is shaking even as she stands up in the courtroom.

The coroner must have expected that she was about to take his invitation and leave. Instead she announces, ‘I’ve never received any of this information.’

There’s a noticeable pause in the room, and then the coroner makes a swipe motion to a clerk at the back.

‘We’ll take a break here then, for a few minutes. We’ll reconvene at two-thirty.’

There is a hum of low whispers in the room, and the coroner makes his way round to where my mother still stands.

He talks to her in quiet tones, and then she follows him out of the room.

Somebody’s in trouble
my mind sings, delighted. This is far more interesting than the entertainment on offer so far.

It is less than ten minutes and then everyone is back in the room. The coroner looks flustered. It’s weird, as he still remains completely calm and in control, but something has thrown him for a loop. There he’d been, all polite and stuff, and police incompetence now means he has a grieving mother in his courtroom hearing every detail of her daughter’s death for the first time.

Nice one, guys. A sterling job.

My mother is made of strong stuff but I doubt this is going to be easy. In the room the coroner’d pulled her into he’d offered her the chance to go through the materials on her own. That way she could learn about them at the same time as the court room, but in a private setting where she could express her grief freely.

My mother declined.

I understand her decision. If someone’s going over the nitty-gritty of your daughter’s death, and there’s the chance to ask questions, you take that over a private room with some official documentation. To do anything else would be to do a poor job, and mother never was one for half-measures. If a question didn’t get asked here, it would stick in the back of her head for the rest of her life. Along with the knowledge that she could’ve asked it, if only she’d been brave.

The coroner opens proceedings again.

‘I was called to the scene by Detective Senior Sergeant Erik Smith of the Papanui Police Station. They had found the remains of a body at a building site in Redwood. I arrived at the scene just after ten o’clock.’

‘Could you explain what your role is?’

‘I’m a forensic pathologist. My role is to perform post-mortems on patients who have died unexpectedly, or in unknown circumstances. My findings can be used to determine whether a case is criminal in nature, and if so provide evidence to the court.’

‘And what were your findings in this case?’

‘When I arrived on scene, I recognised that the deceased had been in the position she was found for a long time. Her clothing had rotted from her body. The natural fibres were completely gone. Some remnants of man-made fabrics remained.

‘Most of the flesh had decomposed to an advanced state. Many of the bones of the deceased’s limbs were clearly visible. She was lying on a plastic binder full of files, and there was a vial inside the bones of her right hand.’

‘Inside?’

‘I think she had been holding it, or had her hand placed on it when she died,’ she said, her hand curling around an invisible object. ‘There were no apparent signs of injury, but there was so little flesh left that it would’ve had to be an obvious trauma to show. I examined the area around her, and determined that she had died at the scene.’

‘What evidence led to that determination?’

‘There was evidence of bodily fluids in the wider area surrounding the body from samples taken from the scene. There was also physical evidence…’ She trails off and looks nervously at the coroner. He glances at my mother, who is staring at a fixed point in the middle of the room, her features still and set. He turns back to the witness and nods.

‘There were signs showing that she’d attempted to escape from the area under the house. There were scratches and dents which appear to have been made by the deceased prior to her death.’

‘And what was the cause of death?’

‘Judging from the evidence that the deceased was alive at the time she became trapped in the area underneath the house, and the lack of any other results from our toxicology and tissue samples, I determined that the most likely cause of death was by terminal hypohydration,’ she glanced sideways at the room, ‘Sorry, that’s dehydration. It would’ve led to organ failure and death.’

‘Are there other possibilities?’

She nods. ‘Due to the advanced state of decay, I’m unable to find a confirmed cause. There may well have been soft tissue injuries, for example, in the decedent which we have lost the chance to determine. There’s no evidence from the post mortem of any significant trauma affecting bone structure, there was no residue to indicate excessive blood loss at the scene. The form of her body as found also leads me to the conclusion that it’s unlikely the deceased suffered from extreme bodily injury at the time of death.’

The coroner nods, and pauses for a moment. He turns back to the room, his gaze lingering on my mother before passing over the remaining attendees.

She’s still staring straight ahead, her eyes fixed on an invisible point. A dampening at the side of her right eye gathers enough moisture to form a tear that rolls down the side of her nose and then trembles on her upper lip. She licks it away, and swallows, her jaw clenched, the muscles forming tight little lumps on either side.

‘You mentioned that Daina was found with documents and a vial of some type. Would you be able to tell us some more about those?’

Her eyes widen in surprise and she shakes her head. ‘I didn’t examine them at the scene as they weren’t relevant to the post mortem. I suppose they are held in police custody.’

The coroner nods and announces a recess.

My mother continues to sit still as the court empties. Once the last of the attendees had gone, and it is only her and one clerk, tidying up the room, she puts her face into her hands. She is silent, but her shoulders shake, and after a few moments she has to pull a tissue out of her bag.

Watch her now. Watch closely. She’s crying over the death of her little girl.

Would’ve been nice if she’d spared me a second thought while I was alive.

***

Daina 2004

I tried to roll over in bed. I had a thumping headache and it felt like my shoulder was three times larger than normal. Three times larger, and three times hotter. For some reason my bed was hard and cold. Hard, and cold.

I’ve fallen out of bed
. I felt around me for the trailing edge of a blanket to pull down. I felt too sore to try to get back up. I must be getting a fever I felt so cold. Coming down with the flu, I hope Mummy looks after me, I don’t feel well at all.

There wasn’t any blanket within reach. I’d have to move, but I dreaded it. My head was pounding so much it seemed like my skull must have shrunk, and my brain would soon be spilling out my ears. Maybe that was why my left one was blocked. Blocked and dribbling something onto the ground.
Onto the ground?

My head jerked up. But the clanging that erupted inside it as a result left me breathless, and I rested it back down on the ground.

I was naked. I could feel the cold night air sweeping across my body; across the swatches of bare skin that should always be covered in public.

My eyes wouldn’t open first time. They were gummed shut and felt as though they extended a full foot in front of my face. That would stop me running into anything now, wouldn’t it?

I touched my right forefinger against the side of my right eye and swiped it with care across the lashes. I presumed the gloop I could feel was blood and I tried to open my eye again. It worked, a little. I used my forefinger to pry my eye open, and then stroked across the left and did the same. My vision still pulsed with colour. I closed my eyes. The colours remained but went dancing around the screen inside my head. I opened them again and the colours continued, then faded away.

There was the sound of traffic from a road somewhere. With only one ear working I couldn’t place the direction. I could pick out another sound as well. Like a slap, then a grunt. Then nothing. Then a moan.

Was there someone else there? Someone else hurt? I tried to move again. I kept my head low and rolled onto my stomach. My shoulder and head swelled with pain again, but this time I stayed still, in place, and waited for it to subside. I heard the snick of a buckle behind me; the small rasp of a shirt being tucked into jeans. The pain receded and I moved again, hitching my body up to my knees, paused again, and then to my feet.

Pinpoints of light spotted my vision, but I could make out where I was with the light from the growing moon above. The play area was in front of me, empty. I turned, careful to make the motion as slow and smooth as I could.

There was motion in the corner of my eye and I jerked around, triggering a light flash and further pain. When the lightshow subsided, I saw a man standing next to a park bench.

Fear crept down my body; raising hairs on my head, my arms, my stomach, my legs.

‘You okay?’ the figure asked.

I recognised the voice, and in the relief I felt like crying.

‘Paul? Is that you?’

‘Yeah. They all left. I left too, but then I thought I’d better see that you were okay. You were out cold.’

‘Thanks,’ I said and realised again that I was naked. I tried to hide my breasts with one hand, my bush with the other.

‘You can borrow my jacket if you like. To walk back home.’

‘That’d be great,’ I said and moved towards him. He didn’t take his jacket off, just continued to stand there, looking at me. Some of my fear returned. ‘Thanks Paul, can I take it now?’

Paul swept one foot in front of him, leaving a line of concrete exposed under the bark. ‘It’s really expensive,’ he said. ‘It’s real leather. I’ll never be able to afford another one.’

The relief tried to come back, but I wouldn’t let it. ‘I’ll give it straight back to you after, Paul. You know I will. Or, you could walk me home and I’ll give it to you when we get there.’

He nodded, his face hidden under a lock of his long, scruffy brown hair. ‘Yeah, I could do that.’ Instead of moving to take the jacket off he swept his toe through the bark to expose another line of concrete. ‘The thing is...’

His voice shrilled upwards on the last word and he shut his mouth, tight. Vila and I’d mocked his breaking voice a few weeks back. It seemed innocent enough fun.

‘What’s the problem?’

If I hadn’t been exposed I would leave, now. My fear levels were climbing again, and I looked down at my feet and swallowed hard to keep control. There were scraps of my mother’s blouse still encircling my wrists. The small pearl buttons that held the cuffs together were still fastened in place. The fabric above them gone. Cut. Torn.

I was still wearing my socks and shoes.

‘The thing is, I think you owe me something, you know. For the jacket. I came back to check on you…’ he gestured vaguely around the park so I could see the monstrosities his kindness had saved me from. The trees. The empty park. The darkness.

My fear climbed a notch into horror.

‘They kicked you in the head when you were unconscious, you know. I wanted to make sure you were safe. I was the only one who cared.’

‘I can pay you, if you want. If you take me home you can have all the money I…’ I broke off as he reached out and tugged at my arm. The arm crossed in front of my breasts.

‘You don’t need to pay me. But, you know, you’ve been lying out here all night naked. I think you know what that does.’

Horror into cold terror.

‘Don’t worry about it Paul. I’ll just wait here for a while then make my own way home. Thanks for looking out for me, but I’ll be right now.’

‘No, no. Don’t be like that. You don’t have to do that,’ He tugged at my arm again.

There was a hot buzz in my head. My left ear cleared all at once, and I could hear the sounds of the night in full stereo.

And like a light the terror flicked into resignation. I could barely stand. I was naked except for scraps and the victim’s war-paint of my own blood. I was injured, maybe badly, and I was in no fit state to fight or negotiate my way out of here. If I didn’t submit he would hurt me. Or worse.

I lay back down. My head protested with a low pulse, and my shoulder squealed two octaves higher in harmony.

With me eyes closed I felt his weight on me, and stared at the colours that danced on the inside of my eyelids. Where the swelling was bad the colours were more vibrant. They flowed into each other and glowed into merging shades. Doughnuts of light pink swallowed up with bubbles of deep violet then glaring into white.