The Girl Who Cried Wolf(27)

He stands up and I keep my eyes closed as his strong little voice is carried away on the heightened buzzing. ‘With you, Anna. All they want is for it to begin with you.’

***

When I open my eyes Benji has gone and I feel lost. Where was my sense of peace? That boundless joy I had felt only moments ago. It was slipping away and I was ever more conscious of a pulling deep inside my stomach.

I began to realise that I had lost the life I knew. I wouldn’t see Michael for a very long time; he would be waiting now outside the operating theatre with my parents, in one of those awful rooms reserved for relatives. A doctor would open the door and they would all look up expectantly, eyes red with tears of fear; fears that would soon be justified.

‘We did everything we could for Anna, but I’m sorry, she didn’t survive the procedure.’

I imagine my mother putting her hand to her mouth, making a strangled sound.

I hear the noise of something large moving through the long grass behind us. I don’t feel fear, exactly, but I am certainly unnerved as I see two magnificent beasts, similar to wolves but much larger, and made up again of those dazzling lights. I spin around so my eyes can follow their movements as they continue to the shore of the lake, less than fifteen feet between us.

I sense vibrations channelling between them, and know it is their communication I am feeling. I have lost my voice, acknowledging there is no choice but to remain silent.

One wolf is dark, a shimmering blackened grey. I do not have a bad feeling from him, but when his shining eyes focus on me I look quickly and respectfully away. I know I am inferior to this being, that he is much more powerful than me in every sense.

He turns his head away and they drink from the cool waters till their actions create ripples in the water. I am totally transfixed and as I stare into the lake, its surface becomes glass-like and I am shocked to make out the scene of a classroom. As the ripples begin to settle, I see that it is my old classroom and three rows from the back, there I am. Anna Winters, aged fourteen and a half.

At first I am fascinated by the images until a slow, sweeping feeling of dread overcomes me as I recognise the day that the scene is playing out. This was a time in my life I had desperately, desperately tried to forget and I fought to tear my eyes away, to beg the wolves to make it stop, but I was alone. There was darkness surrounding me and I was not being permitted to take my eyes from the images, forced to relive each moment.

***

I was very popular at school before sixth form, before I outgrew most of my peers. My parents were incredibly wealthy and I always had the most fashionable clothes and the latest accessories to go with them. Amongst our elite and competitive group of peers, we were far more into our looks and our possessions than our class work and studies. High school for us was simply our stage, our catwalk, and our own soap opera.

I suppose there were about twelve of us who had clicked since middle school. Tina Westwood was my best friend, and of the twelve there were five boys who we deemed fit to interchangeably date and break up with. Daniel was my preferred choice and I revolved most of my time around flirting with him then being very cross at him moments later. At that time, nothing ever went beyond the occasional kiss, but it was all great fun and we thought we were the epitome of cool walking down the corridors hand in hand.

As the more popular girls in school are, there were times when we could be more than a little cruel, especially when we were all together. We just felt invincible. I had a particularly mean streak and don’t know where it came from, but I carried around a lot of aggression. I wish I had some excusable reason for my behaviour, like I had been beaten by my parents or bullied as a younger child, but there is nothing I can remember. At times I was just inexcusably nasty.

Maria Stapleton was not a popular girl. She was almost completely blind, and when she spoke to you her slightly cloudy eyes focused somewhere beyond where you were standing. Maria had a school assistant who went everywhere with her, and this was where a lot of the problems started. Her assistant was huge. She clambered behind Maria, bumping into our tables and chairs with her colossal hips. I suppose she was quite young and sweet, probably mid-twenties with a quiet disposition that contradicted her size. In a dreary lesson, with a bored-looking teacher droning on about algebra, Maria and her helper were our favoured source of entertainment. I used to pretend to struggle with a sum and ask the assistant for help while one of our crew swapped her chair for a broken one. She would sit back down and go crashing to the floor, skirt billowing around her ample thighs and Maria would get the fright of her life at the clattering noise. We would convulse in hysterics while the hurt-looking woman would try to compose herself.

I use to stick Post-its on the back of Maria’s school jumper and wrote words I shouldn’t repeat. Daniel and I liked to sneak up behind her when she was sitting alone outside at lunchtimes and suddenly shout things in her ear. She would give out a little scream and we’d shove her roughly and say we were only messing. I once spent a lesson flicking bits of screwed up paper at her and as the boys around me laughed, the paper was flicked harder till she was literally jumping out of her seat.

Her parents knew she was being bullied because one day, Maria did not attend school and our registration period was interrupted by the Headmaster. Mr Langley could strike a pang of fear in even the boldest of teenage hearts, and we all fell silent as he ranted at the front of the classroom about our intolerable behaviour. He mentioned unacceptable conduct and told us if he had received specific names then the offenders would be punished.