Monster (2 page)

A dark cloud descended across my vision. I covered my accelerating heartbeat and shortness of breath by combing down my honey bob until my hair looked like the two sides of a golden apple. ‘Sorry?’

‘He’s quite fit, isn’t he?’ she continued, turning to look at me. She had so much mascara on she could barely lift her eyelids.

Don’t give her the oxygen of attention,
came the voice in my head.
She wants you to respond.
I checked the pleats of my raspberry tunic and plucked a lint ball from my navy cardigan, ensuring my netball, hockey, tennis and athletics badges were all equidistant down the side of the V; my prefect’s badge in alignment with the base of my tie. One space remained on the V—the one right on my heart. Head Girl.

Clarice didn’t like my lack of reaction. ‘What will you do if he’s dead?’

‘Clarice Hoon, you’re on your way to Prep, not the Oscars.’ Mrs Scott had returned from helping Matron, complete with reddened cheeks, blown pupils and a torn shell-suit sleeve. ‘Enough with the make-up.’

Clarice waited for Mrs Scott to move away before she leaned in to me. I felt her hot breath on my ear. ‘I think he is dead.’ She slung her kitbag over one shoulder, smiled at
our teacher, and slunk out of the room like a pedigree Persian who’d won Best in Show.

I had tried to keep the thought from my mind for the past two days but hearing it from someone else—hearing it from
her
—was too much to bear. I thought the room was empty when I collapsed against the cold porcelain basin, my forehead in my hands, my sobs echoing around the white walls. But, moments later, she appeared, standing over me.

Regan Matsumoto helped me to my feet.

S
ebastian, my good-looking big brother with the shaggy blond hair. At twenty-two, he was six years older than me and he was good at it too. He’d taught me how to ride a bike, defend myself, drive a car and tie my shoelaces. Seb had tried to make me unafraid of life. Now, the only thing that made me afraid was not knowing where he was. If he was still alive.

Was.
Is
, I meant to say. He
is
still alive. His heart
is
still beating. I couldn’t begin to think of him in the past tense.

Saturday came, Saturday went. Sunday came with a screaming headache, and went with more crying, this time into the Che Guevara t-shirt that I’d nicked from his room at exeat.

Sunday lunchtime, Mum called—still no word.

I found myself volunteering to do things away from everyone so I wouldn’t have to look at the pitying faces, deal with the questions, talk to anyone about anything. I offered to clean the storage sheds in the Pig Yard at the back of the tennis courts, pull up weeds in the formal gardens, salt the drive, walk to Bathory village for provisions, just so I could sob without some infuriating arm coming round my shoulder. I wanted to work and walk until I was too tired to think. But it was impossible not to think.

I had looked up Colombia in the Reference Library. It had over 1.14 million square miles of land. Two thousand miles of coastline. Rainforests. Deserts. I found encyclopedia entries about tribal tales: mythical beasts that ate backpackers whole. Drug cartels who hacked off human heads with swords. Tourists going missing and never being found. Paranoia set in like bacteria and mutated over everything. I clung on to the one thing I knew—that I didn’t know anything.

I’m all right. Stop worrying. Worrying gets you nowhere.
I heard him in my mind. I wanted to believe it.

I was in the field at the top of the drive, walking the school Newfoundland, Brody, when I saw it again. And again, all was silent. The birds had stopped.

The monster.

It was three fields away, a large black shape stalking through the long grass. Definitely too big to be a farm cat. I waited. In a couple of blinks, it had disappeared into a thicket of trees.

No one alive had seen this thing for decades. There had been sightings, scratch marks on tree trunks. Blood on the odd rocky outcrop on the moor. The odd fruit-loop venturing
onto the moors, trying to track it, to no avail. I had seen it twice inside of a week. Why me?

Each night since my netball meltdown, I dreamed about my brother. I’d call for him and hear nothing but growls in the distance. A burning shack in a thick forest. Running up an endless staircase, feeling my skin burn as I screamed for him. A jungle of trees. An endless landscape of greenery and strange noises and dark places. In one dream, I parted some leaves and saw the monster, the huge black Beast, its head bent over Seb’s body. It looked up at me, orange eyes gleaming, my brother’s beating heart clamped between its jaws.

Regan Matsumoto wasn’t helping. She kept appearing silently in doorways, right in front of me. Never saying anything, just looking at me with black eyes like a ghost. One night I swore I saw her on the landing by the toilet. But the next moment she was gone.

Dianna Pfaff was shadowing everything I did like a very persistent blonde stain—offering to wake up the Pups for me, insisting on monitoring Prep with me, catching the post before I could get there, giving teachers messages I was supposed to give them. All to ‘give me a break’. All in the name of ‘help’. I didn’t need her help. I especially didn’t need the kind of help she wanted to give me. I could have screamed the roof tiles down. But I simply said, ‘Thanks,’ every time. Because Head Girl doesn’t scream the roof tiles down. Or rather,
wannabe
Head Girl doesn’t. The rumours from the village weren’t helping either. More and more began to swirl around: Mr Pellett had been attacked on his own doorstep in the middle of the night. There was blood spray on his hallway ceiling. A large shape had been seen stalking across his garden. Mrs Saul-Hudson told me to ‘play down the
rumours’ and ‘say it was a burglary that had gone wrong’. I wanted to say no, say,
You don’t know that for sure and neither do the police. It could be the monster.
But I did the same as I always did. I said, ‘Yes, Mrs Saul-Hudson.’

The more I tried to clear my mind, the more it would fog till it felt like Head Girl was a rope dangling off a cliff face and I was barely clinging on. But cling on I did. I bottled and I clung. Everything I wanted to say, I kept to myself. Everything I wanted to answer her back about—the comments about my ‘scrawny wrists’ as I wrote in the diary, my ‘distinctly miserable face of late’ that might put off prospective parents at the Christmas Fayre—I held back. I swallowed it all down with a glass of tepid tap water and left it at that.

By Monday morning, Seb had been missing for exactly five days and I was losing it rapidly. I felt like a fish on the end of an unending reel.

French:

‘Natasha, est ce qu’il ya une piscine près d’ici?’

Something about swimming pools.
‘Er, non.’

‘Non?’

‘Non, Madame.’

‘Ah oui. Maintenant, nous sommes aimerons aller au la plage.’

Plage
was beach. I think. Or plague.
‘Oui, la plage.’

‘Pouvez-vous me donner des directives à la plage, s’il vous plaît?’

Something about medicines to take when you had the plague? Or was she asking for cafés near the beach? My mind was a blank page. I had nothing.
‘Uh, non?’

‘Non?’

‘Oui. Er, non.’

Le grand
sigh.

Maths:

‘With that in mind, Natasha, what is the value of n?’

‘The value of n?’

‘Yes, on the board. See where it says n? What is the value of n, if we know that x = 40 and y is 203?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘No. What was y again?’

English Lit :

‘So, studying these passages in
Jane Eyre
and
A Tale of Two Cities,
how do we begin to compare and contrast some of the ways in which Victorian novelists use landscape to lend resonance to their work? Natasha?’

‘What?’

‘Didn’t you hear what I just said?’

‘Uh, no, sorry, miss.’

Big sigh. ‘The landscape in these two books. How does it lend resonance?’

‘I have no idea.’ Sniggers from the back.

It’s not like you, Natasha. It’s not like you. It’s not like you, not like you, not like you.

The only light that shone onto that day was when I saw the little white Bathory Basics van coming up the drive just before sunset. It pulled up on the gravel driveway just to the left of the front entrance, near the side door to the kitchens. I passed Mrs Saul-Hudson in the front porch.

‘It’s all right, ma’am. It’s just Bathory Basics with the turkeys for Christmas lunch.’

‘Oh wonderful, Natasha. I’ll leave you to deal with it. I’ve got the police on their way. Do you know where Dianna is?’

I stopped in my tracks. ‘The police? Is everything all right, ma’am?’

‘Yes yes yes,’ she said, all flustered and hair-flicky, looking all about her for something. ‘They come every year around this time. Just checking on who is staying over Christmas. Making sure we’ve done our safety checks, that’s all. All quite routine. Have you seen my handbag? Oh, I must have left it upstairs.’

‘Do you need me to talk to the police with you, ma’am?’

‘No, I need Dianna. You’ve got enough to deal with.’

‘Is it about the man in the village who was killed, ma’am?’

‘Yes,’ she said and minced off upstairs without another word.

Bloody Dianna, I thought. Bloody bloody bloody Dianna. Why was
she
the one to help her talk to the police about it? What about me?

I tried to shake the image of the blonde assassin from my mind as I stepped out onto the front mosaic to greet Charlie Gossard from the shop and try to be happy. I’d had a substantial crush on Charlie for a while now. His dad ran Bathory Basics and he worked there, serving customers and ‘out the back’ though I never really knew what went on ‘out the back’. It had started with the odd flirty comment about what I was buying whenever I walked there on a Saturday morning for provisions, then it progressed to long looks across the freezer in the summer. Now, we were into conversations and every now and again he’d give me some sell-by pies or sweets if there were any due for chucking out. I hadn’t told him about Seb being missing or anything serious like that—our conversations mostly ran to school or what Xbox game he’d recently bought and what his top score was.

He caught sight of me as he got out the driver’s door. ‘Hi, Nash.’

‘Hi, Charlie,’ I said.

‘How are you?’

‘Yeah, fine thanks.’

He was big into gaming, and even though I wasn’t at all, I enjoyed listening to him talk. He could have been reciting the phone book and I’d listen to him. Charlie had short blond hair, blue eyes and always wore tight t-shirts, even in winter, which you could see his nipples through. Maggie said he was a ‘
un renard chaud
’, which meant a hot fox, but I just thought he was lovely. There was always a long white apron tied around his waist, usually smeared with grubby fingermarks.

‘Do you need any help?’

‘Yeah, if you don’t mind. Thanks.’

His smile cut a diamond into the early evening light and he went to the back doors of the refrigerated van to unlock them, then reached in to get one of three humungous turkeys out for me to carry.

‘She’s a heavy one, mind. You got it?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, straining to hold it in both hands and making my way towards the kitchen door. He grasped the other two, one in each hand.

‘Dad said make sure your cook knows they’re premium birds. KellyBronze. Free range, the lot.’

‘Oh, great,’ I said, struggling a little with the weight of mine as he edged past me and opened the side door to allow me inside. Cook was delighted and, as she and Charlie settled the invoice, I hung around, even though I knew I had no business being there. I was just waiting. For anything. For some little shred of Charlie that I could think about for
the rest of the day. Something to send me to sleep smiling tonight instead of crying.

When the invoice was settled and he and Cook had talked about cooking times and types of stuffing and ‘succulence’, he walked back out with me to the annoyingly nearby van.

‘So,’ he said. ‘I guess you go home for the holidays tomorrow then?’

‘Yeah. I guess so.’

‘Not looking forward to it?’

I shrugged. ‘It’ll be nice to see my parents. Yeah. Yeah, it’ll be nice. Presents and Midnight Mass and everything.’

‘Oh, we went one year. Pretty boring really.’

‘It’s tradition though, isn’t it? My mum and dad enjoy it.’

‘Yeah, it is. Gotta keep the old folks happy.’

‘Yeah.’

We both laughed, a nervous sort of laugh that went on as long as it could because it was obvious neither of us knew what to say next. We’d run out of conversation so quickly, I hadn’t seen it coming. I had nothing in reserve to impress him with. I did a bit of subtle eye-batting and leaning in the hope of … What was I hoping for? For him to take me in his arms and ravish me right there in the school driveway? I didn’t know. I just knew I needed something from him. Something more.

‘What are you getting for Christmas then?’ I asked, hopelessly. Desperately.

He laughed. ‘Probably some Boxing Day overtime and a thick ear.’ He smiled, wringing his hands like they were cold. I did the same, mirroring his movements.

‘Are yours freezing too?’ he asked, reaching for them and taking them in his. They were warmer than mine, but at that moment I didn’t care if he’d been lying about having
cold hands just so he could hold mine. I didn’t want him to let go. ‘Yeah, they are.’ That tiny moment, with him holding my hands in his, made the day seem finally worth getting up for.

‘I’m all right now,’ I said, regrettably pulling them away and looking down to hide the flames in my cheeks.

‘Listen, you better get in and warm up before they fall off. I’ve got another twelve of these to deliver before the end of the day. Have a great Christmas, all right? And I’ll see you next term.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, as I watched him make his way back to the van. ‘Charlie?’ I called, when he was almost in.

‘Yeah?’ He looked back.

‘You have a great Christmas too.’ And we both smiled at each other. For now, that would have to be enough.

Monday night after Prep and monitoring the Pups’ bedtime, I bathed and wrapped myself in my school-approved navy dressing gown and raspberry slippers with the school crest on and went down to Mrs Saul-Hudson’s office for our usual routine of cocoa and diary. She was sitting at her desk when I knocked and went in, closing the door behind me.

‘Oh, Natasha, is it that time already?’ she said, already in her pyjamas and dressing gown herself and looking more flustered than normal. ‘Sorry, I’ve got
such
a lot to do before tomorrow.’

‘Good evening, ma’am.’ I placed her cocoa mug down in front of her, my tap water down in front of me, and opened the diary to tomorrow’s page so she could see it. ‘It’s all done for you to check.’

‘Wonderful. Before we go through tomorrow’s notes, have a seat. I wanted to talk to you about something.’

‘Yes, ma’am?’

She took a sip of her cocoa and I took a sip of my water. Then she settled down the mug. ‘Lovely. Just right as usual. Right, last day of term tomorrow, we’ve got lots of visitors coming. Who is supervising Pups all day?’

I opened my notebook and clicked on my pen. ‘The usual staff, ma’am, plus I’ve allocated three prefects from Tudor, Hanover and Windsor House to the three groups as well. No lessons means lots of extra hands on deck, which is great.’

‘Excellent. And how about the Tenderfoots?’

I checked my notes. ‘Two prefects, three members of staff and two TAs. That should be quite enough, ma’am. A lot of the Tenderfoots have gone home early.’