Approaching Zero (6 page)

“You did it?”

“Of course I did it.” She struggled to get her breath back. “And now we wait.”

And so they waited… and waited… and waited. Brady had got her breath back ages ago and was starting to get fidgety, but still nothing happened. The sun was less attention seeking than it had been just moments before and was taking the first steps toward its evening regime, getting ready to retire for the night. Kathy was suddenly glad that her mum had made her take her coat.

“What shall we do?” she asked Brady.

“Just wait.”

They had been doing that for a while now to no avail, but Kathy didn’t feel it was the right time to challenge Brady. She was still in military mode and was eyeing the target with a competent intensity while looking down at her watch.

“Fifteen minutes,” she told Kathy but suddenly she didn’t look quite as in control. Fifteen minutes was far longer than she thought it would be before the paedo came running out, gasping for air, disorientated, when they would decide whether or not to execute phase two: shouting ‘Paedo’ and running away so he knew exactly why he was being smoked out of his own home.

“Okay,” she said seriously, regrouping. “Stay there.” And she was off again. This time Kathy watched as she ducked behind the hedge and then reemerged at the living room window. But she was there just seconds before darting away again. Instead of running back to Kathy, she was running down the road shouting, “Leg it!”

Kathy got up and ran as quickly as her painted black school shoes would allow. “Wait, Brady! Wait! What is it? Wait!”

“Just run!” Brady screamed back and they were two streets away before Brady finally stopped. “In here,” she directed Kathy and they both squeezed into a phone box.

“What’s happened?”

Still Brady didn’t answer her. The military precision was gone and she was desperately trying to make her fingers dial 999. She dropped the receiver as she tried to bring it up to her ear and finally managed to gather her words.

“Ambulance!” she cried. “Yes… no… no! Look, I don’t know what’s happened. Just get an ambulance to Forty-two Byron Gardens!” And then she hung up and they were off again.

“Wait!” Kathy screamed, but she couldn’t get her friend to answer her or stop.

Eventually they came to a closed bus shelter covered with marker pen graffiti and scratched initials.

“What is it?” Kathy asked again. “Please tell me. What happened?”

“He wasn’t… alone!” was all Brady could say for a few moments as the breath chugged in and out of her. As fit as she was, the body isn’t designed to cope with this kind of panicked running. “It was like something… from a film.”

“What happened? Tell me?”

Just then the bus pulled up beside them and they jumped on board, two extremely different characters to the young girls who had taken the bus not more than an hour before. Again they climbed the stairs to the upper deck and again it was completely empty so they charged along the aisle and collapsed onto the back seat. When the bus was in motion once again, Brady was finally able to share what she had seen.

“Didn’t you know that he had a family?”

“Hang on. You were on reconnaissance. How would I know that?”

“They were all just lying on the floor and over the sofa,” Brady continued, staring out in front of herself, but seeing nothing. “Maybe three kids, a wife and
him
. Blood oozing out of their mouths.”

“Oh my God! What the hell was in that envelope?”

“I told you. It was just supposed to smoke the place up a bit.”

“What have we done? My God, we–” The sentence was cut short by the sound of an ambulance outside the window, racing to the scene of the crime they had just committed. “My God!”

Neither said anything until the sound of the siren had disappeared behind them and it was easier to imagine that the family were now receiving medical attention and may even survive.

“Okay, we say nothing. We tell nobody,” Brady suddenly said, regaining something of the familiar composure that always helped Kathy feel better about whatever trouble they were getting into.

“Okay?”

“It might just blow over. We’ll check the news, see if we can find out if…” She paused. “So we can find out that they’re okay and then we keep our mouths shut. There’s nothing to put us up this end of town, we’ve never been in trouble before. We just carry on as normal, okay?”

Kathy was staring out of the window and thought she might throw up.

“Okay?”

“Okay, Brady. Whatever you say.”

Kathy didn’t really want to go back to Brady’s after that, but she had no choice. She could hardly call her mum and tell her that she wanted to go home. Her mum would have to know what had happened, why she was upset, and then the world would crumble around her ears. So they got back to Brady’s, barely talking to each other and sat in the bright, cluttered living room with Brady’s mum, looking for all who cared to notice that the world had come to an end. Kathy liked Brady’s house more than her own; it always seemed so vivid and full of life, with art on the walls from exotic parts of the world that she couldn’t name and features that her own mum wouldn’t begin to entertain—throws and beanbags, wall hangings, and a nude figure with an ashtray part of her head, although no one in the family ever smoked. Brady’s mum fit into the room perfectly with her wild Afro hair, larger-than-life personality and lounging stance on the chair. Relaxation was central to this house. But all of this failed to charm Kathy today and after more than an hour of tense silence, finally, in the interval of Coronation Street, Brady’s mum looked over to her miserable, silent guests and said, “Boobies!”

Both girls were snapped from their reverie and looked over to Clara, who was grinning widely. She was a large woman who looked like she was smiling whether she was happy or sad and she always wore bright, colourful dresses. Kathy imagined that Brady had a dad somewhere who walked around with a belt of grenades and grease paint on his face because Brady was definitely nothing like her mother.

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘boobies’!”

The girls looked at each other then back at Clara and to each other again, at first locked into their seriousness, but eventually they could do nothing but crack and both of them collapsed into fits of giggles. The tension in the room lifted as if it were made of spaghetti and Clara had sucked it out of the air.

“That’s more like it!” she told them, giggling along with them. “You can’t be serious when there are boobies in the world.”

The girls looked at each other again and now just couldn’t stop laughing. Kathy couldn’t imagine her mum saying ‘Boobies’ to cheer her up, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted her to.

“Why don’t you girls go upstairs and watch a film. I’ll bring you some toast in a bit. Maybe you could have a chat, clear the air. I don’t need to know what’s going on between you but you need to sort it out.”

She was right. And when they got upstairs—to the only room not covered in bright colours, flowers, and ornate hangings—they both started talking at the same time, both wanting to say that they needed to stick together and pretend that nothing happened rather than stewing and looking so weird and stressed that grownups were starting to get suspicious.

“It’s just that–” Kathy started to say, the worry evident on her face, but Brady stopped her.

“No!” she said and held her hand up to Kathy’s face. “This ends here. There’s nothing more to talk about, Kathy. We spent most of the night here apart from when we went for a walk earlier. That’s the bottom line. Right!”

Kathy tried to relax her face and put it to the side in the way that Brady seemed to find so easy. If only she were more like her.

“Right, Rambo?” Brady then asked—although they both knew that Kathy didn’t have a choice—and they spent the rest of the evening watching a film that Kathy hated but had somehow had to sit through about six times.

***

It wasn’t until the following day that they were updated on the smoke package situation. Clara had made ham sandwiches for breakfast, which was weird enough for Kathy to question whether everybody’s parents really were just nuts and this was an insane world in which to be growing up. They ate in the living room in front of breakfast television, which was a peaceful experience until Clara sat down on the armchair and disappeared behind the local paper. The girls could hear her tutting occasionally at all the bad things she found inside of it. But what was more worrying was the headline:

Chemical Attack Terrorises Family in their Own Home.

The sandwiches didn’t taste half as appetising after that and both girls were stricken into an almost robotic lack of motion, stopping deadly still between poses as if remaining stationary would somehow make it all go away. They were only reawakened when it was almost leaving-for-school o’clock and Clara folded the paper up and dropped it on the coffee table.

“Right, five minutes, girls!” she said, even gleeful at this time of the morning.

Without thinking, Brady snatched the paper and threw it into her backpack. “She won’t miss it,” she told Kathy’s concerned face. “Come on! Bye, Mum.” She shouted and the girls were on their feet and out of the door before Clara could respond. When they were far enough down the road to be unseen, Brady took the paper out of her bag and began to read. “Shit!” she said, and then, “Shiiiiiit!”

“What?”

“Shiiiit!” But there was a lightness to her voice, as if she were reading the plot of a really gripping and unbelievable movie rather than the fallout of the night before.

“Tell me!”

“Well, they’re all okay. Thank God! They’re in hospital and should make a full recovery. They would have died if it hadn’t been for the anonymous phone call. We saved their lives.”

“Died? What the hell was in that envelope?”

“Dunno! It’s still being tested, but they keep using the words ‘chemical weaponry.’”

“Oh my God, we’re terrorists!”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Kathy. They’re all right. We’re in the clear.”

“So this is all right for you?”

Brady folded the newspaper back into her bag and stopped to look at her friend. Kathy looked as if she might cry and as hard as Brady tried, she really couldn’t understand why. It had gone better than they had expected. The bastard ended up in hospital. He had to know that it was a warning because he’s such a pervert. She shrugged and this seemed to upset Kathy even more so she turned away and started to walk again, perhaps hoping that the physical act of walking would somehow help them to leave the night before behind.

“We’re never doing anything like that again,” Kathy called to her. She hadn’t started walking again.

Brady turned back and said, “Don’t overreact. No one was seriously hurt. We can still do a lot of good.”

“Can’t you see? Do you think it’s all right to go around hurting innocent people? He had a family. Maybe I wasn’t even right about him. I didn’t think they had families.” She swept her hand through her greasy hair. “This is too confusing. Do you think it’s possible that some men have dark thoughts but never act on them? Maybe that’s what I was getting from him.”

“Don’t backtrack, Kathy. He’s a perv and you know it.”

“Well I don’t care. From now on I’m just going to use the vapour rub and… and… we’re not doing it again, ever. It’s not safe. Promise me, Brady.”

Brady looked searchingly into her friend’s eyes and could see the pain and urgency there. “I promise,” she said. And it was a promise she kept for the best part of twenty years, until the day Kathy started writing her list.

Chapter 6

Kathy hadn’t been on the bus for years. She was proud to have passed her driving test a few months after her seventeenth birthday and had saved up and bought a car not long after, helped by her nan of course. Nan was far from a soft touch, but when she moved into the house she felt she could breathe for the first time in her life. As she sat on the bus now, on her way back from the hospital, she really wished that her nan would be in the house waiting for her when she got back. There was nothing she craved more than her arms wrapped around her, telling her that it will all be okay, Kitty Cat. She always called her Kitty Cat. But it had been years since she passed now.

The bus turned into Kathy’s road and she pushed the button. It was another hot day and simply making it down the stairs in time to get off at her stop left her breathless. Although she hadn’t actually broken any bones in the collision, it was clear that it would take her body a while to return to full strength.

“Thanks,” she told the driver after slowly stepping off the bus and he pulled away without an answer. His was the only profession in the world where a person could actually become sick and tired of being thanked. Thankfully Kathy’s nan’s house—
her
house since her nan passed away—was just across the road. But rather than rushing over, she stopped to take in the view of it. She didn’t do this often as she normally just pulled her Mini up in front of it and burst through the door. However, at this distance, she could see that she hadn’t been looking after it. She knew that she hadn’t been looking after it—this fact was inescapable—but the sight of the overgrown patch of grass in the little front garden and the unruly hedge actually surprised her. Her grandmother would be turning in her grave.

It was a beautiful, narrow, Victorian terrace house, three bedrooms, and Kathy understood it to have considerable value in the current market, but the dirty windows, broken guttering, and litter by the front door made it look as if squatters had moved in and wouldn’t be moving on any time soon.

Kathy dragged herself across the road, up the short path and opened the front door. She left the key hanging to face the inevitable moment that she had been dreading since leaving the hospital—the full view of her battered face; she hadn’t dared look earlier. The enormous mirror in the hallway wouldn’t lie, but she approached it with the same reluctance that her thirteen-year-old self had done every single morning before school. The view that she found there, however, was so incredibly captivating that she couldn’t move. It may only have been superficial bruising, but the swelling gave her face a completely different shape and the purples and reds gave her an unreal, painted look as if a child had attacked her overnight with the kind of face paints that could make beautiful butterflies and elegant princesses but had clearly fallen into the wrong hands. She tried to pat her hair down but it pinged back defiantly. And she had been on the bus like this? She would have taken her car but she had no one to bring it to her and she wasn’t supposed to drive until her face healed a bit anyway. She would have got a lift back but there really was no one to ask. Her mother—who, if she had changed at all, had become even more fearful for Kathy’s safety as she grew away from her grasp—would probably have had a heart attack if she had called her from a hospital. By contrast, her dad was currently sunning himself in Australia. She had no money on her when she rode the bike into the paedo, so she would have been walking home if it hadn’t been for yet another kindly nurse who took pity on her with a few quid for the bus.