C.J. Skuse - Monster

Eventually, Mrs Scott and Matron grabbed Maggie’s arms and led her bodily up the corridor towards the Head’s office, a string of expletives dancing along the air behind her.

‘Margaret, the more you struggle the harder you’re going to make this for yourself.’

‘I didn’t take them! Am I speaking another language? Have I woken up Chinese like that woman in the science video? I’m not responsible for your stupid turkey theft, capiche ?’

‘You’re a liar,’ said Matron, teeth gritted, a huge bunch of keys jangling violently against her hip and strands of her black hair coming loose from her tight bun. ‘This has got your name written all over it, Maggie.’

‘Where? Where’s my name? Where? Tell me. Where’s the proof? I haven’t done anything. Nash, tell them I didn’t take them!’

I said nothing as they came past me, just did that very British thing of averting my eyes, cleaning a smudge on a nearby door frame. I made my way into the changing rooms and got washed and dressed for Prep.

I couldn’t associate with Maggie Zappa this week. Not this week of all weeks. I’d already blotted my clean copybook in netball by going into some kind of trance and walking off court. I couldn’t defend Public School Enemy Number 1 as well. Maggie had earned over twenty Blue Tickets for Plantagenet House this month alone. This week was just too important to even be seen talking to her. That badge was too important.

All I’d wanted since I’d arrived at Bathory was the Head Girl badge. The previous Head Girl had left the school suddenly at the start of the autumn term and ever since then Mrs Saul-Hudson had been vetting potential prefects. I was the front runner, there was no doubt. I’d made sure of it. I only had one more week to wait for the announcement and then all my deportment badges, my 349 Gold Tickets, my academic awards, my staying up late to help the Headmistress with the diary, all my sycophancy would be rewarded. Just one more week.

After changing, I did my hair in the sink mirrors and found myself standing next to Clarice Hoon. ‘They found your brother yet?’ she said, applying a thick layer of concealer to her under-eyes.

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.

Sebastian, 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.’