Swallowing Grandma (19 page)

I felt a pang of jealousy, hearing him talk about his mum like that. That kind of support must make a difference.

‘Well, my Grandma took me out of school because I was being bullied,’ I said. It was true; Poll had saved me from God knows what. Ritual burning, probably.

‘Girls can be bitches,’ said Callum, his eyes scanning the lyric sheet. ‘They all have to dress the same, like the same music, that sort of thing. There’s a girl at college, Lizzo, really funky, bit Goth, and she said she’d had a terrible time in Year 9 because she stood out and wouldn’t join in with all the trends.’

‘They thought I was a witch.’

‘What?’ Callum put the album down and blinked at me.

‘The other kids in my class. First they thought I was weird because of living with my grandma and having no mum or dad. And because I, because I didn’t look like they did.’ (
Oi, Pavarotti, Fatty-bum-bum. Look, she’s got tits already!
) ‘Then something happened. They thought I’d caused it, so I became a witch.’

There was a split second where I thought, Christ, I shouldn’t have told him. Why did I have to fuck everything up by telling him what a crap person I really was?

‘Oh my God,’ said Callum. ‘How cool is that?’

‘Not cool at all, actually. A right pain.’

‘No, no it is cool. Wow. A witch.’ He leaned forward, encouragingly. ‘So what was it exactly that you did?’

I thought of Donna’s aniseed balls. ‘Hell. I wish I’d never said. Look, you’ve got to promise not to make fun of me after, if I tell you.’

Callum offered up his palms. High above his head, a long furry cobweb wagged in the breeze. ‘As if,’ he said.

How could I not believe him? He’d come here, to this room from last century, with Vince’s pictures of warplanes still up and dead people stashed away in corners, and he’d never flinched. He must have seen other girls’ bedrooms, normal bedrooms, but he hadn’t scoffed or made smart comments. Dad’s jar was on the windowsill behind his head. I knew Callum was OK.

‘Right, then, are you sitting comfortably? Because it’s a long story, if you include all the build-up.’

‘You have to have the build-up.’ Callum grinned.

‘You do, don’t you? OK, well, there was this boy. I mean, a lot of them used to hassle me and muck about with my books, my coat and stuff, but there was this one boy, Jason Roper, who was a year old for our class. I suppose they kept him back so he’d catch up or something. He was big and mouthy and he’d shout things from the climbing frame, and spit as you walked past.’ (
You big fat cow, you’re mental, you are, you still wear nappies and your grandma gets your clothes off the tip.
) ‘So one day he was really having a go, about me not having a dad and my mum running off, and he was so into it all he overbalanced and fell right off, head-first. I was just standing there while he was writhing about and spitting blood; some moron had left their skateboard on the ground and he’d smashed his mouth against the edge of it. Then one of the girls suddenly screamed, “It was her, she did it. Katherine Millar hexed him.” He pulled some strange faces, then looked at me and splurted, “Where’s my tooth?” The dickhead had swallowed it. But I heard myself say, in this spooky voice, “I’ve made it disappear. You’ll never get it back.” ’ (
You fucking evil witch. I’ll have you, you’re dead.
) ‘I thought he’d try to hit me, but he ran off to the toilets, trailing blood down his shirt front.’

‘Do it again, that spooky voice, it was really good. Really witchy.’

‘Get away, you’re putting me off. Where was I, oh yeah; I don’t know why I came out with something like that, you know, against myself, because after that the other kids wouldn’t leave me alone. I was Witchy-poo all afternoon and the next day too.

‘Before, I’d been teased about my family and – stuff – but suddenly it got more serious. A friend of Jason’s, Christopher Horton, wouldn’t stop making evil-eyes at me, and he tried to throw salt at me in the dinner queue because he reckoned that it killed a witch’s powers. That could’ve been the end of it, a two-day wonder, because within forty-eight hours Jason had passed the tooth and seen it go down the toilet. But then Christopher had an Accident.’

Callum’s mouth hung open. ‘Shit, what happened?’

‘He got clipped by a bus, playing chicken. He wasn’t badly hurt, just shaken up and bruised. But everyone blamed it on me, they said it was a curse I’d put on him.’

‘Hang on, what’s chicken?’

‘You know, where you run out in front of a moving vehicle at the very last minute. Did they not play that round your way?’

‘No, they didn’t. So, let me get this straight, he blamed you for nearly getting run over while he was playing a game where the object is to nearly get run over? Durr. Was he as thick as his friend?’

I laughed. ‘It wasn’t a class full of geniuses, no. I started getting pictures of pentangles left in my desk, or I assume they were meant to be pentangles, a lot of them were those Jewish six-pointed stars because they’re not so tricky to draw. One girl, Julie Berry, used to ask where my broomstick was every bloody playtime, it became a major nuisance. Then one day, while the teacher was round the other side of the building breaking up a fight, this Julie announced to her friends that witches should be stoned and she threw a pebble at me.’ (
Next time it’ll be a brick, Witchy-poo. You better watch your back.
) ‘So I lost my temper, ’cause it was just going on and on, and I shouted that Something Terrible would happen to her within fourteen days.’

Callum looked impressed. ‘I bet that put the wind up them.’

‘Yeah. They all went dead quiet. It’s quite funny now, looking back, but it wasn’t at the time.’

‘Do you know, I’m seeing a whole new side to you. So go on, did she die horribly?’

‘I wish. She had a rotten fortnight, though. I took in a doll I’d made out of bits of cloth, with some hair attached, and let her friend catch a glimpse of it. You know, like it was by mistake. I made sure she saw there was a big darning needle stuck through its middle.’

‘And was it Julie’s hair?’

‘God, no, how would I have got hold of that? She never came within six feet of me. No, it was off Dogman’s spaniel, Kylie. She had ears more or less the same colour as Julie’s plait. And so there was a great debate raging amongst the girls, about how Julie should tell a teacher or her mum, or whether that would make the curse more potent, and whether it was worth looking up counter-curses on the Internet, and I had two of her mates come to me and plead with me to take the spell off. But I said that once a spell had been cast, there was no way of cancelling it out. It had its own momentum, I told them, like the laws of physics. I remember saying to them, “This isn’t Mildred bloody Hubble you know, this is for real.” They nearly wet themselves. If Julie herself had come and apologized for being such a cow, I might have pretended to sort it for her, but she hated me too much.’ My heart was thudding as I thought myself back to that time. It was strange how fresh the feelings still were after eight years. ‘The sad thing was, I was beginning to think I actually was a witch.’

Callum laid himself back on the bed with his feet hanging over the end. ‘You and about a million others.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How many people carry lucky charms round with them, or touch wood to ward off evil? Or have a special rhyme they use if they spot a hearse? Or walk round, instead of under, ladders? Personally speaking, I get spooked by magpies; never pass a magpie without greeting it politely, or you’re asking for trouble, Mum taught me that. Everybody believes in witchcraft, to a degree.’

‘You don’t think I was being – abnormal?’

‘I think you sound like the most normal person in your class,’ said Callum calmly. I flushed with pleasure. ‘Yeah, I really do. I thought my school was bad. What a bunch of fuckwits. What happened to Julie in the end?’

‘Nothing much. It got to day thirteen and she was really wound up, and then day fourteen arrived and she was like, “Ha ha, I knew it was a con, let’s get Witchy-poo Weirdo.” When I realized how truly pissed off she was I scarpered, left the premises even though we hadn’t even had morning assembly yet, and ran home. I told Poll I was ill, and she fed me cake and let me watch TV for a while before handing me the mop and telling me to wash the flags. She’s always thought education’s overrated. I thought what I’d do was, I’d stay off the rest of the week, then go back on the Monday when maybe Julie would have cooled down. Only, that very evening, her chinchilla died.’

‘Dah-dah-daaaah.’ Callum put his hands to his face and rolled his head about, imitating extreme horror. ‘Oh, Christ, not her chinchilla.’

‘No, stop laughing, it was a tragedy as far as she was concerned. She’d had it for years and she loved it more than her granny, she always said. She was way too distressed to come to school. I heard she made her family hold a funeral for him in the garden. And the fact that he was ten had nothing to do with his death, it was clearly my evil spell that had stopped his little heart beating. You can imagine how welcome I was at school, come the Monday.’

‘Katherine Millar, chinchilla-killer?’

‘Got it in one.’

‘Jesus. And so you left school.’

‘No, not then. No, you haven’t heard the worst of it yet.’

Callum hauled himself up on one elbow. ‘Bloody hell, what did you do? Set the place on fire?’

‘Credit me with a bit more imagination,’ I said, waving my hands at him in a witchy way.

He put his index fingers into a cross-shape and raised them in front of his brow. ‘Oh no, you don’t get me like that, you fiend. I am immune to your supernatural powers.’

‘That’s what you think. Listen, I only got the entire school banned from Chester Zoo.
And
they had to draft in an educational psychologist to deal with the fall-out.’

‘I’ll sit up for this,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, I got the idea from Dogman, he was my mate in those days. I used to go for walks with him and his dogs, he had three then. One of them was an ex-rescue greyhound bitch, Mollie, very nervy, she never stopped barking. He said the neighbours were getting sick of her and he was going to have to do something before they contacted Environmental Health. So he bought a dog-dazer.’ I held up my hand. ‘Before you ask, it’s a little electronic device about the size of a matchbox that you use to subdue troublesome mutts. Press a button and it emits an ultra-high-pitched sound that only doggies can hear. They hate it, it must be like nails down a blackboard, and you use it to train them out of bad habits. You know, woof – zap. Or chew – zap.’

‘Or hump – zap.’

‘Dunno, probably. I had charge of the dog-dazer and I trained Mollie myself, although she had to be put down in the end because she kept attacking men in uniform. Afterwards Dogman let me borrow it so I could stop Winston eating the fence, and that’s when I decided it would be a laugh to take it on a school trip.

‘The girls at school were being totally horrible now and they were particularly shitty that day. I wanted to go round on my own but the teacher reckoned we had to stay in groups. All the bitchiest kids were in with me, Julie, Clare, Christopher, Jason, the whole brigade. I’m sure the teacher did it deliberately. Because she could hear them going on at me but she never stopped them. So we did the elephants and giraffes, the boring stuff, then we all trooped over to the Bat Zone. It’s a huge mock cave containing the largest collection of bats in Britain, and you had to push your way into it through some heavy plastic bat-proof strips hanging down like creepers, which kind of slithered over your neck and shoulders. That alone was freaking some of the girls out, that and the darkness inside.

‘Jason said to me as we walked through the entrance, “This should be right up your street, Witchy-poo.” So I said, “Yeah, I love bats, actually.” And he said, “Yeah, well, you are a bat. Fat bat,” and I said, “I can control these bats. I can make these bats do whatever I command.” Just as I was speaking, a bat flew low over him and he didn’t half jump. Clare, who was standing next to him, gave a little scream and we all began to realize just how many bats were in there; you can’t make them out at first till your eyes adjust to the gloom, then they’re everywhere. I took the dog-dazer out of my pocket but slyly, so no one saw, then I turned to Jason and said, “Right, are you watching? I’m going to say a magic spell and
all the bats will take flight simultaneously
.” Jason goes, “Like fuck they will. Who do you think you are, Vampira?” but he sounded worried. Clare said, “Oh, don’t, Katherine, wait till I get out, please.” I laughed in her face like a madwoman and she screamed again, then she tried to make a dash for the exit but you couldn’t run because there were so many people there and the pathways were too narrow. That’s when I pressed the dog-dazer.

‘Maybe it was coincidence, I don’t know; maybe the bats picked up the scent of human hysteria, but suddenly it was like a black storm. Every bat in that cave left its perch and began swooping round. The air was thick with bats in an instant, I swear there must have been two hundred, and some of the tropical ones were the size of briefcases. All the kids and most of the adults were totally spooked; a lot of them were standing still with their heads bowed, but a lot were struggling to get out of the cave. I spotted Julie cowering in a rock crevice, her eyes closed, so I went up and ruffled her hair, shouting, “Oh my God, there’s a giant bat on your head. Look out, it’s biting your neck.” She went ballistic and started hyperventilating. After a minute, an alarm sounded and some extra doors were opened to one side, and zoo staff rushed in to try to get everyone out and calm the bats.

‘When we got outside everyone was in a state. Christopher was squirting Ventolin down his throat and Clare had wet her nice turned-up jeans. But Jason was a burning flame of indignation because, for once, it wasn’t him in trouble. He was literally jumping up and down and pointing at me, shouting, “It was
her
.
She
did it. It’s her fault.” Some of the other kids joined in, those that weren’t weeping or traumatized into silence. Mrs Kirtlan hauled me off to the side and looked me straight in the eye; I mean, I was smirking from ear to ear while everybody else was in shock. She said, “Are you in some way responsible for this mayhem?” And I said, “Yes,” because at that moment I felt really proud of myself. “How?” she asked. So I showed her the dog-dazer.