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.’
The more I tried to clear my mind, the more it would fog till it felt like Head Girl was a rope dangling off a cliff face and I was barely clinging on. But cling on I did. I bottled and I clung. Everything I wanted to say, I kept to myself. Everything I wanted to answer her back about—the comments about my ‘scrawny wrists’ as I wrote in the diary, my ‘distinctly miserable face of late’ that might put off prospective parents at the Christmas Fayre—I held back. I swallowed it all down with a glass of tepid tap water and left it at that.
By Monday morning, Seb had been missing for exactly five days and I was losing it rapidly. I felt like a fish on the end of an unending reel.
French:
‘Natasha, est ce qu’il ya une piscine près d’ici?’
Something about swimming pools. ‘Er, non.’
‘Non?’
‘Non, Madame.’
‘Ah oui. Maintenant, nous sommes aimerons aller au la plage.’
Plage was beach. I think. Or plague. ‘Oui, la plage.’
‘Pouvez-vous me donner des directives à la plage, s’il vous plaît?’
Something about medicines to take when you had the plague? Or was she asking for cafés near the beach? My mind was a blank page. I had nothing. ‘Uh, non?’
‘Non?’
‘Oui. Er, non.’
Le grand sigh.
Maths:
‘With that in mind, Natasha, what is the value of n?’
‘The value of n?’
‘Yes, on the board. See where it says n? What is the value of n, if we know that x = 40 and y is 203?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No. What was y again?’
English Lit :
‘So, studying these passages in Jane Eyre and A Tale of Two Cities, how do we begin to compare and contrast some of the ways in which Victorian novelists use landscape to lend resonance to their work? Natasha?’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you hear what I just said?’
‘Uh, no, sorry, miss.’
Big sigh. ‘The landscape in these two books. How does it lend resonance?’
‘I have no idea.’ Sniggers from the back.
It’s not like you, Natasha. It’s not like you. It’s not like you, not like you, not like you.
The only light that shone onto that day was when I saw the little white Bathory Basics van coming up the drive just before sunset. It pulled up on the gravel driveway just to the left of the front entrance, near the side door to the kitchens. I passed Mrs Saul-Hudson in the front porch.
‘It’s all right, ma’am. It’s just Bathory Basics with the turkeys for Christmas lunch.’
‘Oh wonderful, Natasha. I’ll leave you to deal with it. I’ve got the police on their way. Do you know where Dianna is?’
I stopped in my tracks. ‘The police? Is everything all right, ma’am?’
‘Yes yes yes,’ she said, all flustered and hair-flicky, looking all about her for something. ‘They come every year around this time. Just checking on who is staying over Christmas. Making sure we’ve done our safety checks, that’s all. All quite routine. Have you seen my handbag? Oh, I must have left it upstairs.’
‘Do