The Facts of Life and Death (31 page)

Daddy didn’t slow down to pick Mummy up. Instead he went faster – the car skidding in sudden protest as he changed down a gear and forced it to pick up speed up the hill.

Mummy turned and squinted.

Ruby squealed and covered her eyes.

There was no bump, no thud. No screech of brakes.

Ruby opened her eyes and twisted in her seat. By the red glow of the tail lights, she could see Mummy. Still upright and pressed against the hedge. And then she was lost on a bend in the road.

Ruby looked at Daddy, but Daddy didn’t look at her.

Ruby slept badly.

She got up in the dark to go to the toilet. She didn’t need the light because she knew the house so well she could do this in her sleep.

As she padded back across the dark room to her bed, she stepped on something hard and sharp that made her hop about and bite her lip.

When the pain had subsided, she turned on the lamp.

Lucky’s sled was on the floor, the plastic shafts snapped off.

Under the bed she found the little donkey, all squashed and bent.

‘Oh no,’ she whispered.

She picked up Lucky and tried to bend him back into shape. She got the dent out of his belly, and three of his legs reasonably straight, but his dear little head was still squashed, and the fourth leg had been twisted so badly that when she tried to make it right, it broke off in her hand.

Ruby bit her lip to keep from letting out a sob.

The potato was still on her bedside table, letting her know that this was no accident.

MUMMY OPENED THE
curtains before the alarm went off, and Ruby woke with a hard rock of anxiety in her belly.

The bed went all wonky as Mummy sat down on the edge of it. She didn’t say anything for a minute, then she picked the potato off the chest of drawers.

‘Where’s your little donkey?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ruby quickly. Lucky was in the bottom drawer. She didn’t know what to do with him. She didn’t want Mummy to see what had happened to him; didn’t want her to start asking questions. Ruby didn’t have answers – not ones she understood.

But Mummy only stroked the potato with her thumb. There was a little bit of white root crawling out at one end, seeking the light like a worm.

‘Ruby, do you know what a whore is?’

Ruby picked at the bed cover.

‘Ruby?’

‘What?’

‘Do you know what—’

‘No
,’ said Ruby rudely.

Mummy nodded. ‘You use some bad words in your diary, Rubes.’

Ruby didn’t look at Mummy, but she felt her ears going red. When had Mummy read her diary? Had
she
taken the nose ring?

‘I don’t know if you understand them, but they’re all bad words about women.’

‘I
know
,’ said Ruby, although she didn’t. Why couldn’t Mummy just leave it? It wasn’t even her fault. It was Daddy’s fault for using bad words.

‘It’s OK if you
don’t
know, Rubes. Life’s all about learning. I just don’t want you learning the wrong things, you see, because then you might end up
doing
the wrong things. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

Go away
, thought Ruby.
Go away.

Mummy nodded and sighed and put the potato back, and Ruby thought she was going to go, but she didn’t.

‘How’s your chest, Rubes?’

She shrugged.

‘You know when it hurts sometimes?’

Ruby nodded cautiously.

‘Well,’ said Mummy slowly, ‘there’s nothing wrong with you, sweetheart, it’s because you’re starting to develop.’

‘What’s
develop
?’

‘It just means you’re getting little boobies.’

Ruby sat upright in shock. ‘No, I’m not!’

‘It’s nothing to worry about. It’s natural.’

Ruby barely heard the words. A seed of panic germinated rapidly inside her. She’d assumed that the aching in her chest would go away, but boobs were for ever. They
never
went away. They just got bigger and bigger and more and more in the way. Already she could hardly lie flat on the spider rug.

‘I can’t get boobs!’ she burst out. ‘How will I even
read?’

Mummy smiled as if she’d made a joke, but she hadn’t. She hoped
Mummy
was joking.

But Mummy wasn’t joking. Instead Mummy said, ‘If you’re starting to develop them you’ll probably start your periods soon too. Do you know what periods are, Rubes?’

‘Are they like lessons?’ frowned Ruby. There were periods at school. PE was the worst. The last thing she needed was more lessons; she was rubbish at the ones she already had. Although she couldn’t think of anything worse than growing boobs!

And then Mummy told her the facts of life …

Ruby sat in stunned silence.

The facts of life. The
facts
of life? That couldn’t be true. She’d never heard of them! Were they even
real
? Surely nobody could keep that a secret – something so disgusting, so scary? Who else knew about this? Did Miss Sharpe know? Did Adam? How
could
people know, and still walk around all day as if nothing was wrong?

The boobies and the blood and the boys and the babies.

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said with a trembling lip.

Mummy smiled sympathetically. ‘It’s true, Ruby, but don’t worry about it. These things happen to all girls when they become women, so you have to know about them.’

‘But I don’t
want
to know about them!’

‘But Ruby,’ said Mummy gently, ‘if girls don’t know the facts of life then they won’t understand about boys and sex and they can get into all kind of trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘All sorts of things. Things that can ruin their lives.’

‘What things?’

‘Just . . . horrible things.’

Ruby’s mind boggled. How could anything be more horrible than the things Mummy had just promised were going to happen to her?

And soon!

It seemed her body had played a mean trick on her. It had started out as one thing and now it was going to change into another thing without even asking.

In the back of her mind, Ruby knew that girls grew up to be women. But for some reason she’d always assumed that
she
’d grow up to be a cowboy.

Daddy had warned her. He’d warned her about growing up and she hadn’t understood.

Tears pricked at the backs of Ruby’s eyes. She understood now.

She understood that she was never going to ride a bucking bronco, or hitch her pony up outside school, or keep wolves at bay with a fire and a six-gun. Instead she understood that she was going to get boobs and have to sit in a chair to read a book, and paint her nails and kiss boys, and have babies and blood come out of her front bottom.

‘No!’ she said firmly.
No!
’

Mummy tried to put her arms around her, but Ruby pushed her away.

She didn’t want it. She didn’t want
any
of it. She didn’t want to be a slut and a slag and a whore. She
hated
women and she hated Mummy for telling her about it.

No wonder Daddy didn’t love her any more.

Ruby burst into tears.

Alison Trick was stunned.

She’d been nervous about ‘the talk’ for a while now. Her own mother had left it far too late, and she hadn’t wanted to repeat that mistake.

She’d expected Ruby to be embarrassed. Confused. Maybe a bit apprehensive.

But she hadn’t expected hysteria.

She tried to console Ruby, but she wouldn’t stop crying. The little girl wept with every bit of her being, doubling over, holding her tummy in her fists, while tears ran off her face and on to the bed, like rain off old gutters.

Alison felt her own throat ache. ‘Ruby, what’s wrong?’ She rubbed her back and stroked her hair, and bent down so she could peer up into her daughter’s hot little face.

‘Tell me what’s wrong, sweetheart.
Please.
You’re starting to scare me.’

Ruby shook her head. A couple of times she tried to speak, but she couldn’t. She cried and cried and cried in her mother’s arms, and when she finally got words out, they were so tiny and feeble, and so clotted with snot, that Alison Trick had to put her ear close to Ruby’s lips, to hear what it was that her little girl was trying to say.

‘Don’t tell Daddy.’

ON THURSDAY, RUBY
rode the bus to school, deaf to the yells and the insults and the dirty names and the hair-pulling. The bus no longer registered on the scale of turmoil that her life had become.

As they passed through Fairy Cross, she thought of Miss Sharpe.

A bigger boy stamped on her foot and ran the sole of his other shoe down her leg, pushing the white sock down her shin and leaving a long scrape of mud and red skin behind it.

Ruby stared at him with unseeing eyes until he got up and moved to the back of the bus.

You can always come and tell me things, Ruby. Even secret things.

It was time to ask a grown-up for help.

Miss Sharpe was off sick.

The supply teacher’s name was Mr Brains and he didn’t want any jokes about his name because he’d
HEARD THEM ALL BEFORE.

Still, 5B tested him on that claim from nine thirty when he introduced himself until the final bell rang at three thirty. Mr Brains couldn’t win. If he knew a fact the children laughed because his name was Mr Brains, and if he didn’t know a fact, or a face, or what happened after the next bell, or where the staffroom was, the children laughed because his name was Mr Brains.

Ruby didn’t laugh. Ruby nearly cried. She had to
tell
someone. She wasn’t sure
what
to tell them, but now that she’d decided to tell, she just had to tell
somebody something
and let a grown-up decide what to do.

But who
was
there?

She couldn’t tell Mummy because she’d lied to her about the posses. Adam was just a kid like her – and if he told his father then Mr Braund might come round and there’d be a fight.

Who else could she trust?

There was nobody.

Ruby went through the school day in a haze of anxiety and on the way home on the bus she leaned her head against the glass and felt every bump through her temple as she worried about what to do.

Before she was really aware of it, Ruby had got off the bus in the wrong place. She got off in Fairy Cross, along with three children she hardly knew. They all looked at her funny, and then walked away, giggling.

She walked in the other direction – towards the pub.

It had been dark when she and Daddy had been here before, and raining then too, and she took a couple of wrong turns. But Fairy Cross was so small that even if you took
every
turn wrong, you’d find the right one quite soon, and it wasn’t long before Ruby found herself outside Miss Sharpe’s house.

She opened the little wooden gate and closed it behind her, then went up the path and knocked on the door.

She was nervous. But the longer Miss Sharpe took to answer the door, the less nervous she got, until she realized Miss Sharpe wasn’t home, so she didn’t need to be nervous at all.

When she stopped being nervous, she got a bit annoyed, and also worried. She’d got off the bus and now she wasn’t sure how to get on another one. She’d only ever caught that one school bus from the stop at the top of the Limeburn road. She didn’t even have any money, she realized, and got even
more
annoyed with Miss Sharpe for not being at school, even if she
was
sick.