The Testament of Jessie Lamb
Read The Testament of Jessie Lamb Online
Authors: Jane Rogers
Tags: #Contemporary, #Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Young Adult
TESTAMENT
OF
JESSIE LAMB
A N
OVEL
J
ANE
R
OGERS
For Wendy
âAnother kind of light and life
Are to be mineâ¦'
Iphigenia at Aulis
, Euripides
  Â
About the Author
  Â
About the Book
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Read On
The house is very quiet now he's gone. I get up carefully without falling over and shuffle to the window. The light is partly blocked by gigantic leylandii in next door's garden. No one lives in this row anymore. I lean my forehead against the window and peer down into the overgrown garden. The cold pane mists up straightaway with my breath, but I know it's too far to jump. Anyway, there are window locks and no key. I shuffle around the room, keeping my left hand on the wall for balance, until I reach the door. I try it again, just in case.
He's left me cheese sandwiches and a plastic bottle of orange juice in the corner. He must be planning to be out all day. Well at least I don't have to listen to him saying the same things over and over, or see him crying, or hear him pacing around the house in a restless fit. At least there's space for my own thoughts now, and I have nothing to worry about but myself.
I test the bike locks again. They are the clear blue plastic coated type, inside the plastic you can see silvery wire. He's wound one three times around each ankle and locked it, like bangles. And threaded the third through the other two then looped it round and locked it. The circlets round each leg are too tight to slide over my ankles. I can only move my feet six inches apart. It makes me shuffle like a prisoner in a chain gang. I have to keep adjusting the circlets otherwise the one the joining-lock is fixed to pulls wider and the others get tighter and bite into me.
He's left me a bucket with a lid and toilet roll, but it's hard to use because I can't get my feet wide enough apart to squat properly. He has left me a pad and pencil for entertainment. And my sleeping bag and pillow are scrumpled against the wall. The wonky heating's come on at last and I'm not so cold anymore.
My brain has finally stopped behaving like a rat in a trap. It's stopped hurling itself in all directions and chasing its own tail. After all, he can't keep me here forever. All I have to do is sit it out.
I have that strangely pleasant ache above the bridge of my nose from all the crying and now I don't feel as if I shall ever cry again. I'm a bit stiff from sleeping on the floor, but all in all it's not so bad. It could be worse. I shuffle all round the walls again, then over to the picnic table and chair he has placed in the middle of the room. I shuffle into position and sit on the chair. I write my name on the first page of the pad: Jessie Lamb.
He wants me to think about what I am doing. Not that I am doing anything, now. I am suspended; stopped in my tracks. It almost feels like I'm not here anymoreâI'm not that Jessie Lamb who was busily rushing towards her goal. If I spotted the bike-lock keys, dropped there, say, on the floorboardsâwould I pick them up and unlock my ankles? Would I figure out a way to get free? Maybe I'd just pretend I hadn't noticed, and stay captive. In a way it's a relief to be prisoner and to not have to think. To be passive, instead of active.
He's trying to give me a way out. So that I can blame
him
if I don't do it, instead of facing up to being a coward.
Is that what you want?
What else could explain me so stupidly jumping in the car with him when he suggested going to check Nanna's house?
You thought he was making a friendly gesture; you wanted to make up.
Yes. But he had already threatened to do âwhatever it takes to stop you'. So, did you get into the car
knowing
you would be imprisoned? Is that secretly, what you wanted?
Oh, I can't be bothered with all this. Isn't it bad enough to have him going on at you, without doing it yourself when he's not here?
The logical thing is to do as he's asked; to
think
about it. Indeed. Write it down. Remember it, re-imagine it, gather it together.
Because it'll be proofâwon't it?âproof that you really are doing what you want. Proof that I, Jessie Lamb, being of sound mind and good health, take full responsibility for my decision, and intend to pursue it to its rightful end.
I underline my name on the pad. The question is, where to begin? Where does my story begin? With my own beginning, I suppose; the day I was born.
No way am I writing 16 years!
No, but it needs to begin at the beginning. Before that terrible feeling of pressure came into my head insisting that I must do something, I must do something, I must do
something
or else explode. That I must find the thing I was destined to do.
I'll set it down exactly, everything that happened, I'll set it down perfectly honestly, so there can be no doubt in anybody's mind, least of all mine, about what I want to do and why.
The testament of Jessie Lamb.
I used to be as aimless as a feather in the wind. I thought stuff on the news and in the papers was for grownups. It was part of their stupid miserable complicated world, it didn't touch me. I remember sitting on the fence at the level crossing above Roaches one evening, with Sal and Danny and some of the others. It was dark, especially either side of the railway, because of the steep banks of burnt black heather. We looked down at the bright windows of the pub in the valley bottom, and the small yellow eyes of cars running along the road. Everyone except us was indoors and we were up there in the windy darkness, facing the black mass of the moors rising up on the other side of the valley.
A train roared past, going to Huddersfield, and the hot draught of it almost blew us off the fence. Danny said we should try walking along one of the rails, like balancing on a tightrope, and see who could get the furthest. âJust jump off if a train comes,' he said, âthere's only one an hour.' Sal climbed down from the fence and began to teeter along the rail, arms outstretched. I could barely make her out, she blobbed into darkness as she moved and I couldn't tell if she was really overbalancing or if my eyes were just joining her up to the rest of the dark. She swore so I knew she'd fallen off, and then each of the others tried, and we were counting loudly in a chant. âOne
and
two
and
three
and
OUT!', seeing who could be the first to make it up to ten.
When it was my go I realised I couldn't even see the rail, only feel it through my soles, and I got my balance and looked up at the green signal light far ahead along the track. There was a kind of roaring filling up my ears. I don't know if it was the wind up there or my own blood, or the way the others were yelling and laughing. But I felt as if I could do anything, anything at all, and nothing would have the power to hurt me. I told myself if I could do twenty steps that would prove it. On twenty-one I jumped down from the rail and as I climbed onto the fence a train came hurtling out of the darkness behind me and gave a deafening blast on its whistle. And the thought just popped into my head: I could fix it, MDS. I could make everything in the world OK again. But because no-one asked me to, I simply wouldn't bother.
That's almost like the daft things you believe when you're really little, like I used to believe I could fly. I believed it for years, but it had to be kept secret. I knew if I ever told anyone or showed it off to anyone, I'd lose the power. And if I doubted it, and tried it out just to see, I'd lose the powerâso I didn't. I believed in it. I knew I would be able to fly when there really was a need. Which, fortunately for me, there never was.
I remember things that make me ashamed now, like driving home from the caravan at Scarborough with Mum and Dad, and all the roads around York being clogged up because of a mass funeral at the Minster. Dad had forgotten to check online. And I was impatient to get home and call for Sal. We were stuck behind the traffic for two hours. I remember staring at all the miserable people in their cars and saying âWhy can't they just stay at home to mourn? The women who're dead won't care!'
I thought it was normal, that's the thing. When you're little you think everything is normal. If your mother had a pointed head and green ears you'd think it's normal. Only when you grow up do you realise that not everybody is like that. Gradually you can even come to learn that the time you are living in is strange too, that it hasn't always been like this. The more you feel uncomfortable and unconfident and want to find a way to be like everyone else and fit in, the more normality runs away from you because there isn't any such thing. Or if there is, you have to find someone else who'll agree with you what it is. Which I seem singularly unable to do.
Back then, before, Sal agreed with me. Together we knew all the answers. And we thought it was normal for women to die. Or, even worse than that, almost that they might have deserved it, because they'd done something shameful. I thought that if you died it must be at least a tiny bit your fault. There must be something bad in you, to attract such a fateâand especially with MDS, because you had to have had sex.
The first person we knew who died fitted that exactly. Caitlin McDonagh in year ten. I'm not counting teachers from primary school or women Mum and Dad knew, because they were adults, and adults (to me then) were all old and liable to die. But Caitlin started crying her eyes out in History, and they took her to the office and she never came back. Her best friend told us she was pregnant, and we imagined her with her sleazebag boyfriend who was about 20 years old, and it seemed like just desserts. Except they came into school and gave us all Implanon implants a few weeks later, even though most of us hadn't even got boyfriends, so that no matter what bad thing we did, none of us would get punished like Caitlin.
