Skeletal (5 page)

Some dick in the back row, coughed into his hand. ‘Bor-cough-ing.’

Miss Jenner colours, the blush running up from her cheeks to her temples. It makes her look so pretty. I bet she doesn’t even know.

The coroner frowns at the back of the room, but Miss Jenner’s already got the message loud and clear.

‘Someone in the class had added a slide into the file. We’re not allowed to password protect the computers in case we have to swap them out, so anyone could’ve done it if they had the opportunity.’ She looked pointedly at Michelle who met her gaze full-on, eyebrows raised.

‘The slide was of Daina Harrow. She was standing next to a fence, her skirt was up around her head and her underpants were down. I didn’t notice for a minute, I was reading the text for the photos from a sheet so it was only when the class started laughing that I realised something was wrong.

‘When I looked up I was horrified. I turned it off immediately, and got the class under control. But that poor girl,’ she swallowed hard: once, twice, staring fixedly at the floor, ‘She was embarrassed in front of the whole class. It was an awful trick. Real bullying. I reported it to the headmaster straight after class, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do anything about it without definitive proof of who was responsible.’

She trails off, and swallows hard again. I am quite touched. And quite relieved. It didn’t sound nearly as bad as it had been to live through. In fact, it sounded like a small thing. A trivial thing.

‘I left teaching at the end of that year. I was asked to reapply for my contract, but I couldn’t face it. That poor girl.’ Miss Jenner wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. Another trivial thing. Crying in a courtroom.

The coroner clears his throat. ‘I realise this is an emotional event to recount, but would you be able to tell us what happened to Daina after that class?’

Miss Jenner looks up startled, and considers. ‘She ran out,’ she says after a while. ‘I went after her once the class had settled, and found her in the cloakroom at the end of the hall. She looked really scared.’

‘Scared?’

Miss Jenner nods. ‘She looked scared. I tapped her on the shoulder and when she turned around her face was white and she was shaking. It was awful. I’d thought I’d be able to comfort her, or something like that. Tell her it wasn’t as bad as it looked. But her expression…’

She looks back down at the floor again, as though the memory was hidden in the grooves and channels of the boards. As though if she looks hard enough she would see through the years to where it was all still happening.

‘I couldn’t think of what to say. All my words just dried up in my mouth. She looked… she looked
terrified
.’ She turns to look at the coroner, shaking her head. ‘I just told her it was okay if she left for the day. She didn’t need to come back into class. I couldn’t…’

Her throat works as she blinks hard, and then she coughs into her hand. ‘She turned back up at the next class, and I just pretended that everything was normal. I didn’t really know what to do. I’d hoped that the headmaster would come through and
do
something that would send a message, but he didn’t.

‘She attended my class each time until the end of term, and then I never saw her again.’

The coroner rubs a finger along the side of his nose, pushing his glasses up and down, up and down. The papers in front of him must be going in and out of focus, but he doesn’t care or he wouldn’t do it, would he?

‘And how did she seem after that incident? In herself?’

In herself. How I loathe that phrase.

‘I don’t know, really,’ she answers. ‘After that day I tried not to look at her. I’d failed her, you see.’

She looks at Michelle again, seated in the room as though she belongs there. As though she’d earned her place.

Miss Jenner, my newfound protector, my secret admirer, the failed heroine of my sad story, stares at her and this time Michelle has to turn away.

***

Daina 2004

Michelle turned around and smirked at me for the third time this period. I mugged back at her, but I was starting to think that something was up, something more serious than her usual hatred.

Miss Jenner was droning on endlessly about the history of our fair lands, accompanied by some seriously dull portraits and still-lifes which managed to capture none of the supposed excitement of the time. Why did Victorian people always look as though the camera was about to kill them rather than just take their picture? Did that sometimes happen?

I sketched out a quick pencil scene of the amazing exploding camera causing mayhem in Victorian Canterbury. It wasn’t enough to be in black and white. I pulled my battered pencil case towards me and hunted through for a red felt tip. Success! But it was dried to uselessness. I touched my tongue to the tip and managed to coax a little bit of colour into the scene.

Vila had just passed me a note under the table, when I heard the first muffled laugh. I looked towards Alicia who was already looking at me, and felt my mind shift into another gear. Her face ran wider, wider, until her mouth looked like a giant void and her eyes were stretched into deformity.

I closed my eyes, opened them, and saw with dismay that instead of correcting my vision it had made it worse. Colours bled into her face: neon pink and orange, Kelly Green and khaki. I turned back to my desk and saw it transform into a wide expanse of wood. A plank a metre by a metre. Then two metres by two metres.

I looked down at my hands holding the note. They looked gigantic. Like the Kenny Everett preacher who used to scare the shit out of me when I was a kid and snuck downstairs to watch the TV that my mother had passed out in front of, drunk. The nails grew and curled and reached up towards the ceiling.

There was the long echo of a laugh. I turned to my side and saw a Cheshire cat smile, snidely stretching. And then another. Another. And then they all closed in. Mouths gaping, teeth glinting, throats reverberating with laugh after laugh after laugh.

I looked towards the front of the class. Or where the front of the class had been. There was a tiny light shining. I squinted my eyes trying to make out the shadow outlines inside it. And then it blew up to the size of a movie theatre. Gorgeous Technicolor. Deep and wide 3D. My bare ass the size of the whole world on the monitor.

My stupidly large hands covered my eyes, but I could still see the image. The laughter grew and grew and grew until I couldn’t handle the noise of it without bursting. Without busting. I closed my eyes to gather my bearings and ran from the room.

It was only when I ran full-tilt into a wall that I stopped. My eyes still tightly closed, I put my hands out and felt the cool wood of a bench. When I moved my head to one side the cold hard metal of a coat hook scratched against my cheek. If I’d run into that a second ago it would’ve spiked me dead.

I opened my eyes a tiny bit. The world still swam with colour and I closed them again. I felt for the bench and sat down on it, the cool wood immediately wrapping itself around my legs and encircling my waist in a wooden hug. I brushed at my waist in a rising panic, but my hands met only the cloth of my uniform. The hug of the wood receded and my lungs opened up a little bit more.

It’ll only last a few minutes
I thought to myself in desperation.
Like last time, just a few minutes.

I gripped the bench tight as though if I didn’t I could go flying off. Perhaps I really could. I tried to open my eyes again, and saw the room morphing and changing. Colours running and pooling. I closed them again, but now I could see the random evil shapes on the backs of my eyelids. And after another minute it felt as though I had my eyes wide open despite also knowing they were closed and squeezed shut.

I heard the sound of running, thumping, heading straight towards me down the corridor and I turned and forced my eyes open to meet this new threat.

Miss Jenner’s face twisted into the garbled beauty of a Picasso painting. Her mouth was moving, and a minute later words appeared in a steady flow in the air.

By the time I finished reading them she was gone. There was a whisper and gargle from the corner of the room. I needed to get out before I saw what belonged to that far more than I needed the comfort of a steady seat.

I ran my hand along the wall and made my way out into the bright sunshine. Great cubes of yellow spun and danced around me, amid globs of bright, bright blue. I’m going insane, I thought, as I made it across to the science wing, to the safe guidance of a brick wall. My mind has broken and I’ve gone spinning off into madness.

I turned my face into the brick wall to give my eyes a rest. They felt too hot, too far out of their sockets. My forehead against the rough Summerhill stone felt too cold in comparison. My brain felt like it was leaking out from my ears. Maybe it was. Maybe that was why my world had turned into a Terry Gilliam horror.

In the end I had to leave, otherwise I would still be there when everyone left class, and I couldn’t handle that. The world was an awesomely scary place all at once, but an empty one except for me. Other people? I didn’t want to imagine what they would bring.

My feet walked home by rote. I could see, but what I saw made no sense and couldn’t be relied on for any sort of navigation. There was another moment of panic when I tried to unlock the door and my key didn’t seem to fit. Had I turned up at the wrong house? If I had, I would just have to collapse on a stranger’s front door and weep until they carted me away. There was nothing left in me that could find my way home if I wasn’t already there.

And then I pulled at the ranch-slider door and realised my key wouldn’t turn because the door was already unlocked.

‘Mum?’ I called out as I closed it behind me. The living room pulsed and swayed, a bewildering hue of brown, ochre, green. ‘Are you home?’

There was no answer, and when I made the endless trek into the lounge then the kitchen then the bathroom then her bedroom there was no one there.

She’d gone out leaving the front door unlocked. Open for anyone who wanted to pay a visit. That was a new one.

The taste of the purple colours in my room was soothing, like caramel, honey, and whipped cream. I lay on my bed and watched a slideshow of insanity on the ceiling. Watched the ceiling and walls watching me.

I needed to get to a doctor. I needed to find out what on earth was going on. I was so scared. I didn’t know what to do until mum got home. I didn’t have the money to go on my own, and I doubted that she would either. Even at the reduced rates that her community services card would command I doubted there was much money in the house at all now. And if there was it wouldn’t be spent on me. Not when my mother already had a prescription lined up at the bottle shop.

The sound of waves crashing on a beach filtered through the walls. Calm, peaceful. Perhaps whatever episode I’d had was now fading enough that I could go back to being normal. I’d never be able to go to school again, obviously. But maybe a bit of my brain would be left intact and I could start again.

Maybe I could get a nice job at the supermarket. Stacking shelves, serving little old ladies who wanted to have a chat. Maybe I’d be good at it. Maybe I’d be so good at it I’d be able to get a raise. Move on altogether. Move not only out of this school, but out of this house, and maybe even out of this life.

Perhaps there was something out there waiting for me, and this was the sign from God that I needed to move on and reach up.

Or maybe my brain was sick, the random senses a final swan song, and in the morning I just wouldn’t wake up.

That was the comfort that sent me to sleep.

***

I woke up to the front door being slid open. I listened for a few moments, and then when I heard footsteps followed by the thump of someone sitting down hard on the couch I let my breath out and sat up.

The world was a very different place than I’d left it. All of the objects were the same size as they appeared. All of the colour appeared to be stayfast. All of the things that were visible, were just visible. I couldn’t hear, smell, or taste the pattern or colour of anything.

When I got to my feet my stomach growled a complaint. After having scoffed another of Susie’s offcast sandwiches at lunch I hadn’t given it a thought. Of course, I’d had other things on my mind - and my eyesight, and my body.

‘Daina, you in?’ came a call from downstairs.

I ran down the stairs with ease, liking the way they stayed exactly where they should be, and exactly the same size they should be, and didn’t have teeth. ‘I’m here. Is there anything for tea?’

‘Nice to see you too, daughter,’ she teased back at me. The fading twilight of the day caught her auburn curls, shooting them through with fire. A thousand times prettier than the sunset. ‘There’s some stuff on the table. I couldn’t be bothered cooking.’

I laughed at that. My mum’s idea of cooking at its best was heating something up in the oven. That was posh, after all. Not like sticking it in the microwave.

There was ham, tomatoes, lettuce, potato salad and crunchy fresh bread from the supermarket bakery. I cut an inch-wide slice and spread it thick with butter, and then draped an assortment of tomato and ham on top before biting in.