Jenny Downham - Before I Die aka Now is Good

He frowns at me, gets out his pager and asks for assistance. Two little kids sitting in a trolley stare at me as they’re wheeled past. A girl my age saunters by, saunters back again smirking.

The woman who scurries up is wearing a name badge. Her name’s Shirley and she frowns at me. ‘I’ll take it from here,’ she says to the man and waves him away. ‘Come on.’

Behind the fish counter is a secret office. You wouldn’t know it was there if you were ordinary. Shirley shuts the door behind us. It’s the kind of room you get in police dramas on TV – small and airless, with a table and two chairs, lit by a fluorescent strip that flickers from the ceiling.

‘Sit down,’ Shirley says. ‘Empty your pockets.’

I do as she tells me. The things I stole look shabby and cheap on the table between us.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘I’d call that evidence, wouldn’t you?’

I try crying, but she doesn’t fall for it. She passes me a tissue, though she can barely be bothered. She waits for me to blow my nose and points out the bin when I’ve finished.

‘I need to ask you some questions,’ she says. ‘Starting with your name.’

It takes ages. She wants all the details – age, address, Dad’s phone number. She even wants to know Mum’s name, though I don’t see why that’s of any importance.

‘You have a choice,’ she says. ‘We can call your father, or we can call the police.’

I decide to do something desperate. I take off Adam’s jacket and begin to undo my shirt. Shirley merely blinks. ‘I’m not very well,’ I tell her. I slip my shirt off one shoulder and raise my arm to show her the metal disc under my armpit. ‘It’s a portacath, an access disc for medical treatments.’

‘Please put your shirt back on.’

‘I want you to believe me.’

‘I do believe you.’

‘I’ve got acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. You can phone up the hospital and ask them.’

‘Please put your shirt back on.’

‘Do you even know what acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘It’s cancer.’

But the c-word doesn’t scare her and she calls my dad anyway.

There’s a place under our fridge at home where there’s always a puddle of fetid water. Every morning Dad wipes it up with antiseptic household cleaning wipes. Over the course of the day, the water creeps back. The wooden boards are beginning to buckle with damp. One night, when I couldn’t sleep, I saw three cockroaches scuttle for cover as I flicked on the light. The next day Dad bought glue traps and baited them with banana. We’ve never caught a single cockroach though. Dad says I’m seeing things.

Even when I was a really little kid, I recognized the signs – the butterflies that crisped up in jam jars, Cal’s rabbit eating its own babies.

There was a girl at my school who was crushed falling off her pony. Then the boy from the fruit shop collided with a taxi. Then my uncle Bill got a brain tumour. At his funeral, all the sandwiches curled at the edges. For days afterwards, the grave earth wouldn’t come off my shoes.

When I noticed the bruises on my spine, Dad took me to a doctor. The doctor said I shouldn’t be this tired. The doctor said lots of things. At night, the trees bang on my window like they’re trying to get in. I’m surrounded. I know it.

When Dad turns up, he crouches next to my chair, cups my chin in his hands and makes me look right at him. He looks sadder than I’ve ever seen him.

‘Are you all right?’

He means medically, so I nod. I don’t tell him about the spiders blooming on the window ledge.

He stands up then and eyes Shirley behind her desk. ‘My daughter’s not well.’

‘She mentioned it.’

‘And doesn’t that make any difference? Are you people so insensitive?’

Shirley sighs. ‘Your daughter was found to be concealing items with the intention of leaving the shop without paying.’

‘How do you know she wasn’t going to pay?’

‘The items were hidden about her person.’

‘But she didn’t leave.’

‘Intention to steal is a crime. At this stage we have the option of giving your daughter a warning. We’ve had no dealings with her before, and I’m not obliged to call the police if I hand her back into your care. I do need to be very certain, however, that you will deal with the matter most seriously.’

Dad looks at her as if he’s been asked a very difficult question and needs to think about the answer.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’ll do that.’ Then he helps me to stand up.

Shirley stands up too. ‘Do we have an understanding then?’

He looks confused. ‘I’m sorry. Do I need to give you money or something?’

‘Money?’

‘For the things she took?’

‘No, no, you don’t.’

‘So I can take her home?’

‘You will relay to her the seriousness of this matter?’

Dad turns to me. He speaks slowly, as if I’m suddenly stupid. ‘Put your coat on, Tessa. It’s cold outside.’

He hardly even waits for me to get out of the car before shoving me up the path and through the front door. He pushes me into the lounge. ‘Sit down,’ he says. ‘Go on.’

I sit on the sofa and he sits opposite me in the armchair. The journey home seems to have wound him up. He looks mad and breathless, as if he hasn’t slept for weeks and is capable of anything.

‘What the hell are you doing, Tessa?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You call shoplifting nothing? You disappear all afternoon, you don’t leave me a note or anything, and you think it doesn’t matter?’

He wraps his arms about himself as if he’s cold and we sit like this for a bit. I can hear the clock ticking. On the coffee table next to me is one of Dad’s car magazines. I fiddle with one corner, folding and unfolding it into a triangle as I wait for what’s going to happen next.

When he speaks, he does it very carefully, as if he wants to get the words just right. ‘There are some things you’re entitled to,’ he says. ‘There are some rules we can stretch for you, but there are some things that you can want all you like and you’re still not having.’

When I laugh, it sounds like glass falling from somewhere very high. It surprises me. It’s also surprising to find myself folding Dad’s magazine in half and tearing out the front page – the red car, the pretty girl with white teeth. I scrunch it up and throw it on the floor. I rip page after page, slamming them onto the coffee table one after the other, until the whole magazine is spread out between us.

We stare at the torn pages together, and I’m heaving for breath and I want so much for something to happen, something huge like a volcano exploding in the garden. But all that happens is that Dad hugs himself closer, which is what he always does when he gets upset: you just get this kind of blank from him, as if he turns into some kind of nothing.

And then he says, ‘What happens if anger takes you over, Tessa? Who will you be then? What will be left of you?’

And I say nothing, just look at the lamplight slanting across the sofa and splashing the carpet to congeal at my feet.

There’s a dead bird on the lawn, its legs thin as cocktail sticks. I’m sitting in the deck chair under the apple tree watching it.

‘It definitely moved,’ I tell Cal.

He stops juggling and comes over to look. ‘Maggots,’ he says. ‘It can get so hot inside a dead body that the ones in the middle have to move to the edges to cool down.’

‘How the hell do you know that?’

He shrugs. ‘Internet.’

He nudges the bird with his shoe until its stomach splits. Hundreds of maggots spill onto the grass and writhe there, stunned by sunlight.