Charlie puts the first scream down to a nightmare. She waits for it to evaporate, for the soft edge of sleep to come back, but a second scream rips her in two and, oh. Then she’s awake. After the second scream they’re real. Screams, not dreams, from the street below at some colorless hour between bedtime and dawn.
*
In the morning, when she is barefoot at the kitchen counter, working her way through three slices of toast with peanut butter and sweating into a clean school shirt, she asks if Mum heard the screams in the night.
“Is that your third slice of toast?” Mum is in her cotton nightie at just-gone- eight in the morning, eating yoghurt that sits on her tongue while she talks. “Can’t even think about food!”
Charlie doesn’t bother saying that yoghurt counts as food. Mum peels the lid of a second pot.
“You’re sure you didn’t hear anything? Nothing at all?” says Charlie.
“Heat like this? Old people will die, god help them. It’ll be on the news.”
On the way to school, Charlie stops in the alleyway that cuts behind the allotments and studies the ground. It’s cool and moist and smells of rotting banana skins. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, and she’s famished. It’s only a matter of time before she’s fat. Apparently, some kid at another school had a tapeworm. He had to have it twisted out of his gullet at the doctor’s surgery. When she pictures it, it’s coiled around a wooden tongue depressor, half in and half out while the kid cries and retches, straining to keep his mouth open as wide as possible in case he bites the thing in half. She wonders if the tapeworm made him hungry. She wonders if it made him thin.
Nettles stand erect in a line against the splintered fence. Trees overhang into the alleyway and sway like they’re too hot to move. Charlie thinks, there’s nothing to see here.
*
With the volume turned all the way up, her headphones crackle. Dad says she’s going to go deaf, but it feels good.
Lying awake last night, she was convinced it was a murder, or worse. But now its daylight and perhaps it was a game—a silliness.
On the dual carriageway, petrol fumes cake a layer onto her face and she can feel it turning into blackheads.
Or the yells of climax and nothing to do with fear, or murder, at all.
By the next song she’s in a corridor and her throat is coated with sickly boys’ body spray that hangs in the air, only slightly better than BO. The bell goes before she makes it to registration. It could have been a tight kind of pleasure, she thinks—how should she know what weirdos do for fun?—and while she clings to the possibility of innocence, she’s marked down as late.
*
“Anything in the paper?”
“Like what?” Mum is lying on the sofa in her work skirt with her tights ripped off, fanning herself with the free local Observer.
“Dunno, just . . . dunno.” Charlie inspected the alleyway again on the way home and nothing had changed.
“Is this about those screams?” The TV is on, but Mum’s not watching it.
“What about in the street, down the end, by the alleyway. Police or anything?”
“What were you doing awake in the middle of the night? Why weren’t you asleep?”
Charlie wishes she hadn’t said anything.
Mum says, in a voice that makes Charlie want to slap her, “Hello Mum, how was your day? Fine thank you, daughter. How was yours?”
Charlie breaks wind silently, and leaves the room, hoping it will smell.
“Oh charming!”
Success.
*
The small hours again, and Charlie climbs onto the dressing table to stick her head out the skylight and gaze at where life is taking place. Past the end of the street, over the playing field and beyond. Elbows on warm roof tiles, the smell of ozone and the chatter of distant trains. Head to the allotments and dip down the alleyway where her mum said she wasn’t to go because, ten years ago, a man followed the neighbor’s babysitter down there, shoved her against the fence and felt her up, “In broad daylight!”
A menthol cigarette out of a crumpled pack at the bottom of a drawer. Blowing minty smoke at the maze of dead ends and closed front doors and the thousands of neat front lawns that make her want to run downstairs into the street and scream until someone calls the police.
*
“Something weird happened,” Michelle says.
Charlie and her two friends are sitting on the wall around the playing field at lunch. They’re eating Feast lollies, tanning their legs with their socks rolled down. Behind them on the road, the traffic is pungent and hot. A month ago, the field smelled of cut grass. Now it’s dried to yellow, and the dirt has turned to dust. Sweat rolls down the backs of their stubbly calves.
“Actually no, forget it. Forget I said anything.”
Boys are playing football with their ties off. Their faces are the color of raw pepperoni.
“Just get on with it!” Becky sits in the middle and teeters in her usual emotional range, somewhere between fury and hysteria.
Unfazed by the looney among them Michelle still can’t spit it out—whatever it is she’s thinking of saying but won’t.
Charlie waits for her to say something about the screams. She knows it’s coming.
“You can’t build it up and then not say,” she says.
Michelle’s head goes red now, as red as blood. “Fine. I dreamt I was fingering myself and when I woke up, I was.” She stares at her lolly. The tarmac around the school field has started to melt.
“Is that it?” Becky screeches what is most likely a laugh. Her mouth gapes open and they can see melted chocolate ice cream swilling about. “That’s nothing. Last time that happened to me I was on. I woke up with bloody fingers.”
“You’re sick.” Michelle throws her lolly onto the floor as if she can’t possibly eat it now, not after that. As if the Feast lolly itself is covered in Becky’s period. It’s like, if she isn’t disgusted, then she is disgusting.
“Everyone’s done it,” Becky bites the cheap chocolate lump on her lolly stick.
“Yeah,” Charlie says, although she never has. “I got woken up by some dozy cow screaming a couple of nights ago. She was probably at it too.” She wishes there was a fourth girl. The other two have known each other since they were babies. Their mums were best friends at the same school twenty years ago.
“Nah, that was your mum getting bummed by your dad,” Becky says.
Michelle laughs. Charlie doesn’t know if it’s at her expense. She changes the subject just in case.
*
On the way home the millions of yellow bricks and their white plastic window frames are incandescent. The pavement too.
If a body hasn’t shown up maybe he still has her. Kidnapped? She might be alive. Or maybe someone is at home waiting for her and they don’t know that she’s never coming back.
In the alleyway, Charlie studies the ground again. Old bottle caps, cigarette butts at different stages of disintegration. A cloud of midges hangs in the air with nothing better to do. A man enters at the opposite end. He’s looking at his shoes as he gets closer and she stops what she’s doing and tenses her whole body. Oasis is playing on a car stereo. He clears his throat and she expects him to talk. It’s a song she knows but she can’t remember the words. As he passes the movement sucks cool air past her. She recognises him but she can’t remember where from.
The skin on her clammy, fat fingers has gone tight and white across the knuckles. She has to get out of this uniform. There’s a wet strip under the strap of her rucksack and her nylon skirt twists itself into the wrong position, tugged about by the weight of the books in her bag all the bloody time bringing her to the brink of rage! She twists the skirt back into place again and again and again like it’s a nervous tic. She’s going straight home, and then she’ll come back later. Maybe with a torch. Maybe with a knife.
She hopes that at the very least Mum has remembered to buy bread. If she let the tapeworm go hungry, would it crawl up her throat looking for food? Best not to risk ever finding out.
*
“Which way do you walk home these days?” Mum’s at the kitchen table with the cordless phone wedged under her chin, hand over the mouthpiece.
“Why are you asking?” Charlie knows why. And even though she hasn’t done anything wrong, because it’s been a million years since she was told to steer clear of the alleyway, she doesn’t want to say which way she walks home. She will either be told off or told not to use the alley, and she doesn’t want to have it taken away.
“Can I have money for batteries?” The batteries in her Discman are dead, current favorite CD scratched. She hasn’t got a job, so she hasn’t got any money for new ones. Not batteries, and especially not CDs.
She doesn’t even put her rucksack down before opening the fridge to find something, anything, to eat. And with her head in the fridge, Mum can’t see her face. She doesn’t want to be looked at. Doesn’t want to be studied for evidence.
Mum starts talking into the phone and skulks off. Hot summer pace. Charlie finds some stale digestives. They’re a bit wet, bit cakey, but not too bad with cream cheese spread on them.
She visualises the pale, eyeless tapeworm writhing in her stomach acid. If she pukes it up, she’ll have to look at it, splashing about on the floor. Apparently, the other kid was given his and he kept it in a jar on the windowsill.
As soon as the phone’s free she’s going to ring Michelle.
*
She can’t sleep again. She stares at the ceiling, listens to the water tank hissing and imagines her future self—waits for the sound of a train to carry her away to where tall houses are jammed up against each other, sliced up into flats with yellow glow in the windows and no net curtains. She does this until the blank space of air shimmering with heat, empty and ready to be filled with a scream comes back. Screams, not dreams. In a minute she’s going to get out of bed, sneak downstairs and wait in the alleyway with a knife. If not today, tomorrow.
She wakes with a jolt from a nightmare about blood streaming down her inner thighs, and the PE teachers whispering about her in a dark corner while two nobodies, boys from the year below whose names she doesn’t know, finger her noisily in assembly. She’s wide awake now, ashamed and covered in sweat.
*
The girls are summoned to an assembly while the boys stay in class. There’s a male police officer at the front of the hall in uniform, short-sleeved shirt and black epaulets.
They file in and sit down. No one is bothering with a tie anymore. Some of them are wearing sandals which are against school rules, but a blind eye is turned because of the “exceptional circumstances” (by which they mean it’s hot). If they’ve found a body she’ll have to come forward. The thought raises her pulse.
Why didn’t you say anything a week ago? they’ll say.
I thought it was a dream.
A dream?
I meant to say nightmare. I thought it was a nightmare.
Well, make up your mind, which one was it?
She can’t imagine Mum visiting her in prison. Dad definitely won’t.
When the head teacher introduces the officer, he thanks her and tries to sound friendly. “Good morning, ladies.” It’s the same policeman that came to primary school to talk about Yes Touches and No Touches. Wide body and square head with blond hair and a peaked police hat tucked under his arm. The windows are open, but it doesn’t make any difference.
“Thank you for giving up some of your time today to talk about safety.”
Charlie looks over her shoulder. She can hear Michelle whispering. Her and Becky are two rows behind laughing at something. They’ll stop laughing when he says what he has to say, Charlie feels sure of it.
“We all like to have a good time. No one is saying you shouldn’t have fun.” As he talks, he pulls down on his index finger as if he’s counting.
Her stomach gurgles. The tapeworm wants feeding, but it’s another three hours before lunch. Any minute now he’s going to tell them that she’s dead. The woman is dead.
“Stay alert. Pay attention and avoid making yourselves vulnerable.”
Worse than dead, ripped to bits and left to die slowly. Things inserted into all the wrong places. Or right places, wrong things.
The teachers are at it now. Two of them gossiping behind cupped hands, bracelets jangling. One of them looks shocked and then disgusted.
Bits cut off with blunt knives.
The other one is shaking her head and covering her mouth. “Let someone know where you’re going.”
The alley, the mud.
“Put your own safety first. Pre-book a cab.”
The alley, the mud, the nettles, and a dead woman.
“Don’t get yourself into a situation where you’re alone in the dark.”
Charlie thinks she might stand up and knock her chair over, put her hands on her face and shriek until she turns blue.
“If you’re out late, stick together. Stay in groups or pairs.”
She’s ready to scream until the worm appears, its flat pointy head creeping down her top lip from one of her nostrils.
“Think about your hair. Can it be grabbed? And shoes—could you run if you needed to?”
Vomit. Blood. Snot. She thinks she might pass out. “And as a final thought, I wanted to let you know. . .”
Say it, say it, say it, say it, say it!
“ . . . that self-defense classes are on all summer at the rec center and as you’re all eighteen or under, you can sign up for half price.” He nods and puts on his hat.
Charlie grips her knees while around her the girls stand and stretch like cats. She blinks, astonished, and is dismissed. She files back in a neat line with the others. She stays in her lane. Back to class, back towards teachers delivering lessons to rooms half-filled with boys. Back to boys and their smells, slumped over desks, half-an-hour ahead of her in maths or French or whatever subject it is that she usually learns at this time on a Friday.
That’s it then, she thinks. Nothing to see here.
Odette Lester Brady is a writer and arts organizer whose work has appeared in the Popshot Quarterly, MIR Online, the Forge, and Thin Air. Odette was born in London, UK, but now lives in Catalonia. She has a website odettebrady.com.
