AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘He thought you might have seen it, after we gave her that necklace, when she got him to stay behind. He thought you might have seen her trying to kiss him.’
Lydia looks into her hands and shakes her head.
Mina scowls at her. ‘I didn’t, but I’ll say I did,’ she says. ‘And so will you, Lydia. Along with everything else. You saw her eat his apple, didn’t you? You said you saw her take it off his tray and stare right into his eyes as she took a bite.’
Lydia shrugs. ‘I didn’t really see that.’
Mina rolls her eyes. ‘But all the rumours – I know we started them, but we didn’t make them up out of nothing, and we didn’t make up all of them.’
‘Why would she have stopped him from starting the camera?’ I ask.
Lydia tugs at some grass.
‘It was self-defence,’ I say.
She shrugs again.
‘It’s just, I don’t want my brother to go to prison. And what if the police don’t believe him?’
‘Don’t be shitty, Lydia,’ says Mina. ‘Tristan is our friend. He doesn’t deserve to go to prison.’
‘Unless it wasn’t self-defence.’
‘But it was,’ Mina says.
Lydia rubs her face. ‘Miss Smith tried to rape Tristan?’
I nod.
She picks up a stone and throws it. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Okay.’
56
BEFORE
Bleach, coffee, latex and, underneath it all, the delicate hint of human shit. But when you spend long enough breathing in even the most intoxicating perfume, you kind of get used to it.
The nurses get me an extra cot so I can sleep next to Mum. I hold her hand through the nights. Her other hand is cuffed to the bed.
Mum, Miss Smith. Miss Smith, Mum. She said it was important I call her what all the other students did so as not to mark out our special relationship. When I was in year seven I remember it physically hurt me.
Was she ashamed of me? Did she not want anyone knowing she was my mother?
I was so hurt, I started calling her Miss Smith in my head. If she wanted space, she’d get space. And it just stuck. That’s when I started keeping things from her. That long ago. Little things, and then everything.
It was also, I guess, because I hated that that was her name. That we were both Smiths, rather than Hewitts, like my dad. That she was still a Miss. And being me, rather than avoiding it, I forced myself to look at it every day.
I take sip of the weak orange squash one of the nurses brought me. I know what must be happening while I watch the numbers and lines on her monitor. The police are gathering statements from all the children at school, and all of them are saying they’ve seen her flirting with the older boys, that they’ve heard she slept with past students, that she has a thing for Tristan.
No one really believes it. But what a thrill to make it real, to be able to look back one day and share a story about a paedophile teacher you once had. A woman, no less.
She died back in that classroom. Tristan killed her. The paramedics brought her back to life. And no one thinks she’ll wake up.
The windows in here don’t open properly, just a two-inch crack. There’s a vent in the middle one and I watch its pink blades twirl in the sunshine. A fly whines about then batters itself against the glass.
We’ve been here four days and Dad has been to visit two times. He hasn’t touched her. When I asked if he’d brought any of the stuff I’d asked him to bring, he winced and said sorry. He’d remembered only my mother’s dressing gown with the herons on it, the one he’d got her last Christmas.
I told him that the doctors said she might be able to hear us, but he had sat with his head in his hands and then turned to chat to the woman in the other bed. In moments he charmed her, getting her to laugh till she told him off for the damage being done to her stitches.
