Authors: Sharon Sant
Roger pulls her into a hug. ‘Don’t worry about him, love. He’ll turn up; he’s probably just sulking somewhere.’
‘All night? Where would he have been all night?’ Mum turns her swollen face to him. ‘I’ve phoned every one of his friends and nobody has seen him.’
‘Someone could be covering for him. I’ll bet you his year’s pocket money that he’s holed up in Matthew Spencer’s bedroom without his parents knowing. It wouldn’t be the first time.’
Tit. What would he know about it?
‘I phoned there,’ Mum says. ‘They hadn’t seen David at all.’
‘That doesn’t mean he’s not there. Matthew’s mum is so dopey she could have Elton John in concert in her son’s room and she wouldn’t notice.’
Mum tries to smile. ‘I suppose,’ she says. He thinks she’s agreeing but he doesn’t know her like I do. I’ve seen that look before, a hundred times with my dad – she doesn’t think that Roger is right at all, she just doesn’t know how to say it. And I don’t want her to agree, I want them to come and look for me.
In my frustration, I shout at Roger. ‘Don’t tell her that! Don’t you want me to be found?’ It’s pointless, of course, I worked out pretty quickly that neither of them can hear me, no matter how loud I shout.
Mum sniffs and wipes her nose on the tissue Roger has given her. ‘I’d better go and see what’s missing from his room.’
‘A quick check in the wardrobe should be enough,’ Roger says, ‘You should take it easy, especially now. Maybe I could go and see.’
‘I’ll know his clothes better than you, I do iron them after all…’ she gives him a tiny, strained smile. ‘Besides, I want to see if anything else is missing.’
Roger’s eyes go wide. ‘You think he’s run away?’
I don’t like the way Roger looks as he says this, there’s something a bit too close to hope in his expression.
Mum shrugs. ‘It’s possible, I suppose.’
‘Do you really think he would, though?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘I don’t feel like I know him at all anymore. But I should check because the police will probably ask us that.’
‘Want me to come and help?’ Roger asks.
She shakes her head. ‘Wait by the phone. Somebody might call.’
Roger looks like he might argue for a moment. Then he gives her a short nod and flops down on the sofa. I swear I just heard a spring bust.
I follow Mum upstairs. She’s walking in this really wobbly way, gripping the handrail like she can’t quite remember what her legs are for.
She opens the door to my room. Now that I look at it, I’m a bit ashamed. She spends, like, hours every day telling me to clean it and I ignore her. The curtains are closed but hanging off the rail at one end where I pulled it down and couldn’t be bothered to fix it. There’s a strange damp, sweaty smell like there are wild animals being kept in there. My Radiohead t-shirt is screwed up on my unmade bed. I nearly put it on when I got in from school last night, but it didn’t smell that good when I pulled it from the drawer. Dad bought it for me, the last time he went to see them in concert. I wanted to go with him, but Mum said I was too young. When he gave me the t-shirt, I pretended I didn’t like it because I wanted to go and see them so bad. Mum told me I was an ungrateful brat but Dad just smiled; he knew that I did really. It was way too big, of course, when I first got it because they only had adult sizes. Three years on and it fits ok.
Mum almost trips on my school shoes as she walks in, but she doesn’t say a word, she just moves them out of the way. The rest of my uniform is on the floor and strewn over the bookcase, which does not house books as they’re all on the floor in a pile next to my bed. I keep all the ones I’m reading out and I seem to be reading all the ones I own at once. The TV has greasy marks on the screen and there are chocolate wrappers on top of it. Mum doesn’t seem to care today though. I suppose she’ll care even less when she finds out I’m dead. She goes to the wardrobe and rifles through. Half my clothes are missing, though, mostly stuffed into various crevices around the room, and I can’t imagine how she’s going to figure out what I’m wearing. Come to think of it, I can’t even remember what I’m wearing. I look down at myself. Jeans, blue checked shirt, one of the really soft, fleecy ones, with the sweatshirt underneath to keep me warm that Mum nags me to wear every time I go out to do the papers, and my battered trainers. When I look up again Mum is sitting on the bed with her head in her hands and her shoulders sort of heaving.
‘Mum…’ I sit down beside her. I never hug her or anything anymore, but right now I really want to. But when I try to put my hand on hers, I can’t, it goes straight through, just like it did before. ‘I’m ok, Mum, please don’t be upset.’ Of course, I’m really not ok, but I suppose this is as good as it’s going to get now.
‘Oh, David… where the hell are you?’ Her breaths are hitching and she can’t speak without stammering. I wish I could put my arms around her and tell her I’m still with her. But maybe that would freak her out anyway. It probably would have freaked me out if it had been the other way around.
So I sit and watch her. I want to cry myself now, I feel so bad for her. I don’t think I can stay here after all. If she’s like this now, imagine what she’ll be like when
the police come and tell her that they’ve found me, imagine what she’ll do when she has to go and see me at the place where dead bodies are kept, imagine what the funeral will be like. I’ll be like a wreck seeing all that crying. But I don’t know where else I can go. I feel like an empty crisp bag on the wind, blown around, useless and unwanted. So I sit next to her on the bed; I listen to her cry quietly and stare at the mess in my room and wonder what is happening to my body now. Your joints go stiff; how long does that take? Do you turn a funny colour? When do you start to smell bad? We saw a film once in biology, a speeded up film of a dead rabbit rotting. I can’t stop thinking about that film now, only it’s me with all the flies and stuff coming out of me.
There’s a knock at the front door. I can hear Roger talking to someone in the hallway and then the door clicks shut.
‘Lisa…’ Roger calls up the stairs. ‘The police are here.’
She’s only just phoned them so I’m guessing this visit can only mean that they’ve already found me. Mum takes a huge breath and wipes her face. I wonder if she’s thinking that too. She stands up, takes a last look at my room, her eyes skimming over me as I sit on the bed, and goes downstairs.
‘You might want to sit down, Mrs Smith.’ The policeman has a nice voice, gentle, that bad news voice that they have on detective dramas. But I don’t like the way he says her name, because her name shouldn’t be Smith, it should be Cottle like mine, like it used to be before bucket-faced Roger arrived in our lives. Hearing her called Mrs Smith doesn’t stop making me angry, just because I’m dead.
She glances at Roger and then sits on the sofa. Roger joins her and takes her hand.
‘I haven’t figured out what he’s wearing yet…’ Mum begins. ‘But if you give me a few more minutes I should be able to.’
The second policeman glances at the first one and then hands her a wallet. ‘Is this David’s?’
Mum takes it from him and turns it over in her hands as though she doesn’t quite believe it exists. ‘Yes,’ she says in small voice.
‘I’m sorry, but we found this on a boy matching David’s description at the scene of a road traffic accident. He had a bag on him from Village News, we checked with the proprietor and he said David never returned after his round yesterday, although he hadn’t been unduly concerned as, apparently, he often goes straight home when he’s finished –’
‘Oh God, we didn’t ring the shop,’ Mum says. ‘We thought he was sulking at a friend’s house – he’s done it before – we’d had an argument and…’ she can’t finish
and I can tell she feels gutted now that she didn’t ring the paper shop when I didn’t come home.
We did have a massive row and I suppose she thought I was staying out of her way. I was pissed off alright but I wouldn’t have done that to her, I wouldn’t have given Roger the satisfaction. Maybe she was sulking more than me. The thing is, if she had looked for me straight away I’d probably still be alive; it took me ages to die. I hope the police don’t tell her that.
‘Is he alright?’ mum says in a panicked voice. ‘What’s happened to him?’
The first policeman just looks at her with his most well-trained sympathetic face. ‘I’m sorry, Mr and Mrs Smith, but we’re going to need a formal identification on the body. We need you to come and confirm whether it is or is not David.’
I think Mum might faint – her skin suddenly turns grey and her eyes look like they can’t focus. She already knows, I can tell. Roger puts an arm around her.
To continue reading
The Memory Game
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Sharon Sant was born in Dorset but now lives in Stoke-on-Trent. She graduated from Staffordshire University in 2009 with a degree in English and creative writing and is now pretending to research a PhD in literary studies. She currently works part time as a freelance editor and continues to write her own stories. She is an avid reader with eclectic tastes across many genres, and when not busy trying in vain to be a domestic goddess, can often be found lurking in local coffee shops with her head in a book. To find out more you can follow her on
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Sky Song
(book one of the
Sky Song
trilogy)
The Young Moon
(book two of the
Sky Song
trilogy)