TWENTY

Smelly Cathy Howard. Smelly Cathy Howard. Dopted. Dopted.

The children at the new school could read her mind. That’s how they knew the chant from her previous school.

That day in the upper playground the hot pressure of humiliation had blurred her vision. She tried to hide her face from the crowd, but the children would keep appearing wherever her vision settled. The eyes of the children were wild and red. All of their mouths were open. She’d never seen them so excited.

Until something else caught her eye, in the distance. A raggedy boy stood behind the painted metal fence that bordered the top playground. When she noticed him, he raised one small hand into the wavy air above his head.

A skipping rope lashed the back of Catherine’s thighs and the burning sting brought her close to fainting. The rope wound between her legs and bit the back of one knee. She cried out and fell down to the gritty tarmac. The forced laughter of the children in the playground seemed to thin the air so she couldn’t breathe.

Through hot, watery eyes she saw the blurred shapes of the girls attacking her. One of their arms was raised as if to crack a whip upon a horse. She suddenly feared the wooden handle of the skipping rope and clamped her hands across her skull and shut her eyes tight, expelling a stream of salty tears down her cheeks and into her mouth as she did so. But the rope never fell.

Instead, silence came to the playground. Not a voice or slap of foot upon the tarmac could be heard outside of her personal darkness. Even the birds stopped their incessant twittering in the treeline behind the concrete domes she had once been forced inside to nearly suffocate from panic.

When she opened her eyes she found herself looking at the backs of the children closest to her, and saw creased blue cardigans and checked pinafores. Beyond them, the others in the playground faced forward, all stood still as if the headmistress had just walked into assembly. And she saw that all of their noses were bleeding in two bright rivulets that reached their chins.

In the distance, close to the staffroom windows, Miss Quan was the only thing moving in a scene of perfect stillness, and in such a strange way Catherine wondered why none of the children were looking at the teacher as she jerked her white face up and down, and gulped at the air like a fish, while raking her hair out at the sides of her head, tugging it loose from the hair clips with her bony fingers. The iron bell that called an end to dinnertime rolled back and forth close to her feet.

Around the scuffed shoes of the children, leaves began to blow in dusty circles, caught in the current made by the sound of the ice-cream van playing ‘Greensleeves’, but like it was playing the music too quickly through a big metal trumpet.

None of the children were looking at the playground fence beside the main gates either, where the van played the discordant summons. And when Catherine looked up there she saw no van, nor the raggedy boy looking through the fence. That was because the boy wasn’t up there any more. He was now stood between the faded white lines that formed the old hopscotch grid on the top playground.

It was the raggedy boy that all of the children were staring at, because they could also see him now, as he showed them the tiny rounded teeth of ivory in his black mouth, and his wide white eyes in what looked like a painted wooden face.

And in the sudden stampede of white socks and grey shorts and blue cardigans and pleated skirts and school shoes, that followed the arrival of the boy, and in the terrible screams that forced Catherine to clamp her dirty hands against her ears, the raggedy boy with the lopsided black wig upon his round head vanished as the rout of hysterical children formed a din in the air filled with leaves and stinging grit.

The chaos stopped as soon as it started. Stopped when Catherine stood up. And when she was standing, she realized her pants were wet through and her bottom was going cold. The back of her thighs still burned from the lash of the skipping rope.

But of more interest was the flock of children in the distance that ran towards the lower playground, even though the ice-cream van had stopped playing its tune and even though the raggedy boy had gone. The children sounded like a flock of hungry seagulls, little screeching voices bouncing off brick and concrete. Perhaps he was amongst the fleeing children, pumping his thin legs in the woollen trousers, up and down, trousers that were too short with frayed hems on legs supported by black iron callipers that were screwed into his lace-up boots. Maybe he was down there with them, still showing those white eyes that looked excited, but in the wrong way, in the stampede of dishevelled shirts and pullovers, and wild faces and wet red mouths that the other children had collectively become in their haste to escape him.

A group of teachers came out of the staffroom with their cigarettes and coffee mugs. Two women knelt beside Miss Quan who lay on her side. The other teachers stared across the playground at Catherine, until one of them picked up the handbell and began ringing it hard and fast while she strode towards her.

Catherine awoke from the trance on the floor of her living room beside a bottle of lemon vodka. What was left of it had run out of the bottle and soaked the rug. Blood from her nose had stuck her face to the laminate floor. She thought she might be sick, but didn’t move because she knew she would be if she tried to get to the bathroom.

Her eyes were swollen, dry and sore, like she’d been swimming in the sea. Saliva was drying on her cheeks and her mouth and throat were hot. Her underwear was sopping and had gone cold.

On her hands and knees she waited for her vision to settle. She remembered seeing Mike with Tara during the afternoon before she’d been consumed by the trance. She also thought of her impending residency at the Red House. And she felt more miserable than she could ever remember feeling.

It was dark outside and the curtains were open. There was no traffic. Somewhere a metal roller door on a truck was pulled down. A dog’s claws skittered past her street-facing window accompanied by the clink of the chain the dog was attached to. A far off ice-cream van’s tune passed out of her hearing.