Good Girl, Bad Girl(6)
“They’re for breakfast,” says a server.
“I didn’t have breakfast.”
“Whose fault is that?” She takes back the muesli.
I look for a place to sit down. Whenever I spy an empty seat, someone moves quickly to deny me the place. They’re all in on the game. Eventually, one of the girls doesn’t react swiftly enough and I get to a chair first.
“Freak!” she mutters.
“Thank you.”
“Dyke!”
“You’re too kind.”
“Retard.”
“You’re welcome.”
I peel the top from a tub of yogurt and spoon it into my mouth, turning the spoon upside down and pushing my tongue into the hollow. I’m aware of people moving behind me, so I keep one arm braced across my tray, preventing anyone from flipping it over.
I can’t stop them spitting or putting boogers in my food, but it doesn’t happen so much these days because most of them are frightened of me. Most of the staff keeps their distance, especially Mrs. Porter, who calls me “that devil child.”
I don’t mind the name-calling because I’m harder on myself than any member of staff. Nobody can hate like I can. I hate my body. I hate my thoughts. I am ugly, stupid, and dirty. Damaged goods. Nobody will ever want me.
The bully barks. The bully laughs. The bully wins.
4
* * *
CYRUS
* * *
Sun sinking. Autumn cold. I run along Parkside, zigzagging through the entrance into Wollaton Park, where a sign warns me that I’m entering a deer calving area and that no unleashed dogs are allowed. The sky is streaked from edge to edge with pale trails of jets that have passed in the stratosphere.
I have spent my entire life in Nottingham apart from six years studying in Oxford and Stanford. When I lived overseas, people would ask me where I came from and immediately mention Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest and the Merry Men. They’d seen the movies or watched The Simpsons, although some didn’t realize that Nottingham was a real place. They thought it was like Camelot or Hogwarts. “It’s in the geographical heart of the UK,” I’d explain. “And yes, there is a Sherwood Forest and a Nottingham Castle.” Sometimes I’d say that my mother’s maiden name was Locksley and I had outlaw blood in my veins, which was complete bollocks but a great chat-up line.
I jog through a tunnel of bare trees as the asphalt path moves like a conveyer belt beneath my feet. Things come and go—park benches, garden beds, walkers, and cyclists. I run twice around the lake before climbing a rise towards the Elizabethan country house that gives the park its name. Wollaton Hall once took my breath away, but I’ve grown tired of its grandeur because it seems to be showing off.
Deer raise their heads, pausing from their grazing, as I ghost past them along an avenue of lime trees towards the eastern entrance to the park. My right hip twinges, but I like the pain because it helps me focus. Wearing jogging shorts, a quilted red windbreaker, woolen hat, and lightweight runners, I move in an easy rhythm, turning back at Middleton Boulevard and retracing my route through the park.
Running is many things to me. Calmness. Solitude. Punishment. Survival. In a world beset by problems that I cannot control, I can tell my body what to do and it will obey for as long as it can. When I run, my thoughts become clearer. When I run, I imagine that I’m keeping pace with a planet that turns too quickly for me.
I think about Evie Cormac. More of the details have come back to me. She was discovered hiding in a secret room behind a false wall at the back of a walk-in wardrobe in an upstairs bedroom. The house, in north London, had been rented by a low-level crim called Terry Boland. It was his body police had found in the same bedroom six weeks earlier. He had been strapped to a chair with belts around his neck and forehead before being tortured to death. The killer or killers had used an eyedropper to put acid into Boland’s ears, slowly burning through his eardrums, destroying his cochlea and auditory nerves. Once he was deaf, they heated a metal poker with a blowtorch and used it to burn through his eyelids and his corneas, until his pupils boiled in their sockets. I remember this because the tabloids seemed to revel in every prurient detail.
The murder was still under investigation when Angel Face emerged from her hiding place. Having cleaned off the muck and washed her hair, the nurses discovered a pale, pixie-faced thing with freckles and dirty-brown eyes, a child too small to hold her own history.
In the days that followed, she dominated the news cycle. The entire nation seemed to adopt her, discussing her fate over dinner tables, in hotel bars, across backyard fences, and in supermarket queues. There were public appeals, newspaper rewards, and offers to adopt her.
I know what it’s like to be at the center of a media storm. I was once the survivor—the lost little boy, whose parents and sisters were murdered. I have been there, done that, seen the movie, and stayed for the closing credits. Is that another reason Guthrie turned to me?
Speeding up over the last mile, I check my watch as I reach the front gate, holding my wrist steady because I’m breathing so hard. I’m forty seconds outside my best time. I’m happy with that.
Lifting the latch on the gate, I walk up the front path to a tall narrow house. My ancestral home. It once belonged to my grandparents who retired some years ago to the south coast, preferring a modest bungalow in Weymouth to a seven-bedroom period house that looks like it should be haunted, or at least have a madwoman in the attic. It was crumbling then; it’s falling down now—a masterpiece of urban decay.