Special, p.1
Special, page 1
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Monday
. . . Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
. . . Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
. . . Friday
Early Saturday
Saturday
Sunday
. . . Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
. . . Friday
Saturday
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2002 by Beila Bathurst
First published in 2002 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Bathurst, Bella.
Special / Bella Bathurst,
p. cm.
“A Mariner original.”
ISBN 0-618-26327-6
I. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Dean, Forest of (England)—Fiction. 4. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6102.A785S6 2003
823'.92—dc21 2002191263
eISBN 978-0-358-04914-2
v1.0818
For Lordy, with love
One day when we [Johnny Rotten and Bob Geldof] were both in Cork, he on holiday visiting his relatives and me picking up an Irish pop music award, we met in a pub. A man came over and put his hand on Johnny’s arm and began asking him a question. Johnny interrupted him halfway, turning around with those laser eyes and said, ‘Don’t touch me. I’m special.’
+
Bob Geldof, Is That It?
Monday
It was quite late when they saw the accident. They’d been driving for almost three hours, ambling down the M4 at a humiliating 55mph. The minibus—a rented Ford with a broken wing mirror—had been making shrieking noises for a while now. When Jaws changed gears or accelerated the shriek crept upwards, close to hysteria, choking Hen’s thoughts. On the level, moving along the slow lane as they were now, the noise subsided a little but the sudden switches of volume had prevented any of them from dozing off.
The minibus was arranged like a coach with seats running parallel down its length and an aisle in the middle, but this was not like any coach Hen had seen before. Normal coaches were designed with some token understanding of the human body. They had seats covered in carpet and armrests one could lever up in order to sleep. This thing had seats covered in gaffer-taped plastic, a floor speckled with old chewing-gum spots and a smell of sweat and fried rubber.
Jules leaned over the gap between the front seats and glared at the speedometer. ‘Doesn’t it go any faster?’
‘Play something,’ said Miss Naylor. ‘I spy with my little eye.’
Jules mouthed ‘Wanker’ at the back of Miss Naylor’s head and turned to see if anyone had been watching her. She caught Hen’s eye, grinned, and began picking at her cuticles.
The heat and the finicky driving were beginning to make all of them restless. It was one of those tight flat summer days without sun, and the heat rising up from the road seemed to get thicker with every mile they moved. It was making Miss Naylor’s foundation leak. Hen watched a trickle of sweat creep down the side of her cheek and disappear into her shirt. Miss Naylor had a broad, bland face, small eyes which bulged a little when she was angry and dyed ginger hair. She usually wore yellowy make-up slapped on thick as fish batter. The make-up clashed with the ginger and the result was so compellingly unattractive that Hen often had to suppress the urge to ask Miss Naylor if she’d ever considered surgery.
There were ten of them crammed into the minibus, eight girls in the back and two teachers up at the front. Things had started well enough. They had stood by the school gates waiting for the other two groups of girls to leave. Mel and Mina had been arguing, but as the last van turned the corner, they stopped and gazed after it. In the silence, Hen had glanced upwards and noticed that someone had left the porch light on even though it was now bright day. The light shone without anything to shine for, and there was something about its wasted usefulness which made her feel sorry for it. She felt empty for a second, a feeling almost like homesickness.
She wondered if she ought to feel jealous of the others. One lot was supposed to be going to Warwickshire and the other to Norfolk. She had no idea what either of these places was like, except that they involved countryside and undignified exercises, but it was possible that the countryside and the undignified exercises would be more interesting in Warwickshire and Norfolk than they would be in Gloucestershire.
Two minutes later, Jaws came round the side of the science block in the minibus. She was smiling. The smile dwindled as she drove closer.
Jules jeered. ‘We can’t go in that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’—poking an accusatory finger at the tyres,—‘it’s embarrassing.’
‘So how else are we going to get there?’
‘Maybe we . . .’
‘It’s either this or walking.’
‘. . . could just stay . . .’
‘No. Definitely not.’
Caz picked up her bags. ‘Come on. It’s bad, but it’s not as bad as here.’
And so far, she seemed to be right. Just to turn out of the school drive and onto the main road had given them all a flip of exhilaration. The minibus might be old, but it worked and the day was warm and every inch they drove was an inch further away from school. Izzy had brought along several tapes and taken control of the stereo, overriding Miss Naylor’s desultory protests. Hen had leaned back against the open window and felt the beat going right down deep into the back of her skull.
They’d chattered for the first hour or so, and then, as the temperature rose, had slowly fallen silent. Just after they passed the Swindon junction, the traffic slowed and then stopped.
Hen leaned back in her seat, shifting from thigh to thigh to stop her bones from aching. As they crawled round a curve in the road, she could see blue lights and the stripes of police vehicles ahead. An accident. The minibus screamed as Jaws tried to put it back into gear. The traffic was squeezing into the slow lane; once in a while a sunburned arm poked out of a car window, waving at Jaws to make space. Hen saw a carhil of small children making faces out of the window. One of them stuck his tongue out and rolled his eyes at her. Next to him, a little girl in pigtails raised a single obscene finger and giggled, her mouth shaping insults silently through the glass.
For the next half a mile, they stopped and stalled and started and then stalled again every few yards. A van which had been blocking their view moved over and Hen felt the blue light slam against the back of her eyes. The scene assembled itself into a recognizable disorder—three cars, one upside down with its back axle resting against the twisted central barrier, and another two crumpled beyond sense. Fragments of windscreen glass spangled prettily from the fast lane, and a fireman sprayed the bonnet of each car in a shining grey-green arc. Someone had scattered sawdust over something on the tarmac. There were two fire engines parked by the verge, an ambulance with its back doors swinging open, and three police Range Rovers. One of the policemen was standing near the flow of the traffic trying to direct the cars past the scene. Most drivers seemed too diverted by the possibility of gore to pay him any attention.
Hen was not sure where the figure came from. She only knew that she turned and saw someone running from the hard shoulder towards her. The person ran without purpose or direction, with no regard for where it was going or how it got there. It blundered into a shrub on the verge, pulled free and then ran on, almost as if it couldn’t see the line of cars, the motorway, the ambulance doors swinging open. There seemed no sense or reason in the figure’s trajectory, only this mad stumbling rush straight into the path of the traffic.
At the last minute, just before the figure whacked headlong into the side of the minibus, it stopped. Perhaps it had finally seen the white metal looming up in front of it; perhaps it had simply exhausted itself. It stood with its shoulder to the window, crowding up against Hen’s vision. In the stillness the figure reassembled itself. It was a woman, dressed smartly, as if for a wedding. She was wearing a tight, livid pink suit with a miniskirt that barely covered the tops of her thighs and a pair of vicious-looking black stilettos. Underneath the skirt, she had on a pair of scarlet tights which had ripped as she’d run. Her legs seemed absurdly thin and stringy, as if they shouldn’t have been able to support the person on top. The woman’s face was obscured by a huge cartwheel hat on which she’d fixed what looked like Valentine’s Day decorations—huge papier mache hearts, a plastic red rose.
Hen could hear the woman singing, repeating something over and over. And then she turned and the huge hat knocked against the window of the bus. It spun off, tripping over the road onto the verge. Hen saw, all at once, the woman’s face. The face was hideous: a huge sick purple moon, a chunk of rotting meat painted to look like a woman. On her cheeks there were pits and lines like the marks on something diseased. Her lips were slashed with scarlet lipstick and her gaze was high and hectic, as if nothing of the scene in front
One of the policemen had seen the woman and was weaving through the ticking vans and people carriers towards her. As he got to the side of the van, he extended a hand. ‘Come on,’ he was saying. ‘Come on. We’ve been looking for you. Over here, love.’
The woman turned towards him. Hen saw the policeman stop. She saw the look on his face shift from hurried concern to incomprehension to a kind of blank-eyed terror. She saw his hand hesitate and his body go still. Then he gathered himself and touched the woman’s arm. ‘Over here,’ he said unhappily. ‘Come on.’
The woman stopped singing and looked down at his hand on the sleeve of her pink jacket. The silence stretched out. All the noises from the other cars seemed to have stopped; all the sirens and the racket of the crash dwindled away. There was just this policeman, and Hen, and the woman, standing there, watching the policeman’s hand.
Then the woman giggled coquettishly and began to walk away from the minibus, allowing herself to be led over to the police cars. As she moved, Hen looked down at her legs. And saw that her ripped scarlet tights were not tights at all. The woman’s legs were slathered in blood.
At the same moment, the minibus lurched forward. The policeman who had been directing the traffic appeared at the opposite window and then vanished behind them. Hen heard the crunching of the gears and the sound of the engine accelerating. She looked out of the window at the verge and saw the woman’s pink hat with its hearts and roses lifting and falling in the breeze. The motion of the hat made it look as if it was breathing, as if it too was alive, and just waiting there. She watched the hat until they were past, past the ambulances and the crash and the policemen and the hurting blue lights. She felt the wind against her face as the landscape changed and the green verge began to flick past as it had before. She shifted in her seat and found that she was shaking uncontrollably.
The rest of the bus seemed unconcerned. Jules had begun to say something and Miss Naylor was trying to reassemble the broken mirror so Jaws could see out of it. Ali, who was in the seat two spaces in front of her, sat up. She had been resting her head on the window and gone into a trance, staring fixedly at a spot somewhere up in the clouds. She didn’t seem to have noticed the window rattling against her head.
‘Hen.’
No reply.
‘Hen.’
Hen looked up. Jules was leaning over her, prodding her arm. The breeze from the windows had ruffled her hair out of its clip and it swung loose over her face. As she bent over Hen her eyes seemed larger than normal.
‘Space chicken.’
‘What?’
‘Hel-lo. Hel-looo. Earth to Planet Hen. Hel-lo.’
Hen looked down at Jules’s finger. ‘What?’
‘Fit policeman.’
‘What?’
‘Fit police. Didn’t you see?’
‘Where?’
‘The policeman. The policeman directing the traffic.’
‘What policeman?’
‘Back there. With the accident. Oh, never mind.’ Jules sighed and sat down in the seat next to Hen. ‘You look weird. You OK?’
‘The woman. The woman with the blood.’
‘Woman? Woman with blood?’
‘On the road. Out there. The woman with the hat.’
Jules bent down and peered past Hen out of the window. ‘Where? Can’t see.’
‘She was there. Right there, by the window. She had on this hat . . .’ She swivelled round to look out of the rear window, knowing that the woman was far behind them now but wondering if she might not appear again, smiling crazily through the glass.
‘Amazing crash,’ said Jules cheerfully. ‘Really heavy.’
Hen realized that she had probably been the only one to see the woman properly. All of the rest of them had been looking out of the opposite windows at the crash. Perhaps she’d imagined it. Had she seen the woman? And if she hadn’t, if she’d just daydreamed her, boiled her up from old sick bits of imagination, then how had it seemed so real? She turned away and stared out at the verge again. She was still shaking; she couldn’t stop.
Jules touched her arm again. ‘You OK?’
Hen yanked her sleeve away. ‘Yes. Fine.’
And then, a couple of minutes later, pawing at her stomach, ‘No. Going to be sick.’
+
By the time they’d stopped the bus, watched Hen as she vomited weakly into a hank of shrub, clucked around for a bit, asked Hen fourteen times how she was, got back in the bus, stalled, driven a few more miles, stopped for petrol, let Hen off the bus to clean herself up, let Jules go with her because she insisted, waited, torn Jules away from one of the arcade machines, stalled again, and pulled back to the road at a scorching 45 mph, they were late. By now, it felt to everyone as if they’d been on this stinking bus for most of their lives. Up ahead, Hen watched the immense H-shaped struts of the old Severn Bridge creep closer. The red lights on the top shone placidly at her. She felt woozy and light-headed, although the shaking had stopped about an hour ago.
‘Very dangerous, the Severn.’ Miss Naylor didn’t seem to be talking to anyone in particular. ‘Quicksand. They say you can walk across the whole river in some places at low tide, if you know where the sand is. In most places, it’s very shallow. The channel where the water really moves is quite small, considering.’
‘Weird.’ Jules swivelled round in her seat and looked down. Hen saw a silvery glimmer of water and a toy-sized tug boat far away in the estuary. The water moved in thick slow circles, over and under itself. Only the width of the estuary told Hen in which direction it flowed. Out in the mouth of the river the currents crept round each other, meeting and parting without rhythm or direction. Something about the water seemed misleading to Hen. Over there in the distance the river looked harmless. Only when she looked down through the railings of the bridge could she see how fast it was going. You’d never know until you were dead that it might kill you, she thought.
‘Doesn’t look like it’s dangerous. Just looks like a river.’
‘I wouldn’t expect you to think anything different.’
Jules glowered at her. ‘Cow.’
Hen kept on watching the road ticking past. A flicker of scarlet caught her eye; just a shop sign. When she closed her eyes the woman came back. When she opened them again the woman stayed there, just at the corner of her vision. She wouldn’t go away.
. . . Monday
Ali could see everything from her place in the tree. If she stood with her back against the trunk and turned a little to the right, the struts of the Severn Bridge beamed back at her through the heavy afternoon light. When she turned on the branch, feeling the bark catch against her fingers, there was the river. Most of it was obscured by industrial clutter: warehouses, sheds, the detritus of old cars and farms, the kind of stuff that silted up over the years without anyone really noticing. Maybe it had once been possible to see an unbroken stretch of water from here, but now the only sign that it existed at all was in the gaps between the buildings. Somewhere over on the opposite bank a cooling tower exhaled clouds.
She had been sitting here with one leg dangling languidly over the side of the branch for about half an hour now. The discovery of the tree had been an accident. She had been following one of the paths behind the Manor and come across a branch sagging over the shrubs. At first it hadn’t seemed connected to a tree at all; the branch was so long and swung so low that she assumed it had fallen and been left uncleared. The tree itself was a London plane hunched with age. Half its branches had already died and the rest had swivelled themselves into impossible knots and twists. The bark was covered in small ochre scabs falling away like sunburned skin. Ali found the sight of the peeling tree with its strange snakey limbs both comforting and a little bit sinister. In climbing terms it did not seem much of a challenge, but she found something about its age and its indifference to standard tree decorum interesting.
