The Worst of Me (16 page)

‘Oh, that’s brave,’ says Michael Jackson loudly to his friends. ‘It’s really brave. I wonder why they didn’t attack any Muslim figures, given that they seem to have such a problem with Islam.’

The nun breaks away from Marilyn. ‘Why do you think?’ he says, talking directly to Michael Jackson now.

Michael Jackson raises one eyebrow. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’

The priest has been to the bathroom, and taken his time getting back to his friends, because he had nothing to say to them and didn’t want to hear anything they said either. He’s been hanging around downstairs for a while, leaning against the wall by the dance floor with his eyes closed, feeling the thrum thrum of the music, like a motorbike revving up somewhere down his spine. He doesn’t notice how many girls are staring at him, particularly the younger ones, or realise how moody and beautiful he is, with his angsty fine-boned face. He’s just thinking about the girl, one girl. His girl. But she’s not his any more. He’s hot and his collar is tight and he needs some air. He walks through to the entrance hall, looks up at the staircase that’s messy with snogging couples smearing their waxy make-up on to each other’s faces, and he spots his friends,
still on the balcony, not joining the real party. They look stupid. And he looks stupid for agreeing to dress like them. It’s pathetic. No one is shocked, they’re just stuck telling the same bad joke all night.

Then he notices they’re squaring up to the dead rock stars. The nun is getting in Michael Jackson’s face, pointing at him with an aggressive finger. The priest wants to just leave them to it, but he knows he has to stop them. He thinks about the girl, and how she’d want him to stop them. As he pictures her face he forgets to breathe, and his brain starts chattering with excitement and sadness and love that’s so fierce it frightens him. He runs up the stairs as fast as he can, accidentally kicking a snogging person in the leg and treading on another one’s cape.

The Joker is watching the boys on the balcony, too – he’s waiting for Catwoman to finish chatting with her friends. He’s the level of drunk that makes him feel good about himself now, and he thinks it’d be a good idea if he stepped in and told all the guys arguing upstairs to chill out. So he heads towards the stairs too, making the kissers even angrier, so that some of them stop kissing and press themselves against the edges of the staircase to let him through, while swearing at him.

Finding themselves together, they stop at the top, the priest and the Joker, and look at each other. They are very close.

‘You’re on your own this evening, Father?’ the Joker says, and he can’t keep the smile off his face or out of his voice. The last time he met the priest, he was scared, although he didn’t admit that to anyone. This evening he’s not scared at all. He’s even angry that he was ever scared. The priest looks pathetic, smaller and stranger, as if he hasn’t slept in a month and he’ll scream like a girl if you shout at him.

‘You’re a bit too interested in my love life, aren’t you?’ says the priest. ‘Oh, but I forgot – you’re still a bit obsessed with my girlfriend.’

‘Wow, is this what they call denial?’ says the Joker. ‘From what I heard she doesn’t want anything to do with you. She thinks you’re scum.’

The priest reddens and bites the inside of his cheek. He has nothing, he can’t even be sure of being able to talk right now.

‘And of course I’m not obsessed with her,’ the Joker says. ‘Because, unlike you, I’ve got a girlfriend. But yeah, I think it’s fair to say your ex is still very interested . . . in my
advice
.’

The Joker’s head snaps back when the priest punches him. The girls on the stairs who are closest to them scream, while a ghost near the top of the stairs swears at the Joker for standing on his girlfriend’s hand and kneeing her in the face as he stumbles. When he regains his footing, the Joker grabs hold of the priest’s
throat, and his dog-collar scrunches and flicks out of the shirt. The snoggers on the stairs start getting up and trying to squeeze past them up to the balcony. The priest’s friends and the dead rock stars start to head over in case they’re needed, as the priest and the Joker start gripping and hitting each other.

The nun shouts at the priest to stop. The Devil and Michael Jackson reach the staircase at the same time, elbowing each other to be first to help. The Joker’s spine curls back horribly over the banister with the priest’s hand under his chin. Eve screams for them to stop. Michael Jackson grabs the priest’s arm and he topples backwards so they both fall over. The Joker stands heavily on the priest’s leg as he tries to steady himself, but as the priest fights to stand again, shoving him back, the Joker is unbalanced, the banister clunks out of position, and the Joker falls over the staircase. They watch helplessly as he drops like a pile of clothes, there is a sickening smothered crack, and the side of his head hits the floor below.

When Alice arrives at the bag check area, she sees the last of the teachers running in a panic into the main hall. For a moment she’s frozen by confusion, but she can tell something very bad is happening. She runs after him.

The first time I saw a film version of
Alice in Wonderland
I was very young and off school with German measles and I kept falling asleep, and after I’d seen it I wondered how much of it had been a dream. Years later I saw it again, the same one, and it made me tingly inside, as if part of my childhood had been imprisoned inside it and I could glimpse it while the film was on. I used to read the book over and over, and I thought it was amazing, but it was that strange film of it that seemed magical to me, the real
Alice in Wonderland
.

So it had to be Alice. But I could hardly go to a Halloween party looking that cute. The Alice outfit was easy to make – I already had a full-skirted blue summer dress that had felt a bit too girly for me to wear normally. I put it over a short-sleeved white school
shirt, and got some net underskirts from the market to puff it out, and customised a white apron and sewed it in place. Then I smeared the apron with fake blood and daubed the blood all over a white furry toy rabbit and cut it into two pieces.

I’d started straightening my hair almost as soon as I got home from school and I finished it off with a black Alice band. I picked up the hacked-apart rabbit and my big plastic bowie knife. I did look cute, I thought. But funny, too. For a moment, the pleasure of wearing clothes I liked myself in and feeling pretty allowed me to shut out reality. I had half lost my friends – I hadn’t told them I’d bought a ticket and planned to go. My boyfriend had dumped me. For some reason I’d honestly believed I could just turn up alone, snap on the fake confidence force field, and . . . And then what? Get the boyfriend back? The friends? There was no way I could walk into a party of mostly sixth-formers in my little girl dress. You know how you wake up from a dream in which you’ve had a brilliant idea – like you’ve written a song or solved a problem – and you start trying to piece together the idea from what you remember, and suddenly you realise it’s rubbish, and it falls apart like a handful of sand.

I put the bunny down gently as if he was real and hurt, and stroked his decapitated head. I got my hand smeared in the fake blood on my apron, and wiped it off lower
down. I looked ridiculous. I took a big bag of crisps out of the cupboard and sat down in front of
EastEnders
.

Paul walked in. ‘What time are you going?’ he said. He stared at me too long, then said, ‘There’s a very old non-cartoon version of
Alice
with an actress called Fiona Fullerton as Alice, and with your hair straight, you look like her.’

I stared at him open-mouthed. ‘That’s the version I like.’

‘Really?’ Paul said. It felt like there was more to say, a real conversation ready to go, but we were trapped by the fact that we’d always been enemies. ‘What time are your friends coming?’

‘Er . . .’ I was embarrassed. ‘They’re not. I was going to walk round by myself.’ I braced myself for him asking why.

‘Oh, okay,’ Paul said. ‘I can walk round with you, if you like. I mean, ’cause it’s dark and that. Don’t worry, I’ll come back before anyone sees me.’

‘It’s only two minutes away,’ I said. ‘You’d be coming back by the end of our street.’

‘That’s okay, though . . .’ He tapped his pockets a bit nervously. ‘Anyway, let me know.’ He went through to the kitchen. I ate some crisps. He came back in. ‘You are going, aren’t you?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe not, dunno if I feel like it.’

‘Well, be a waste of your outfit.’ Paul turned to go
again, and then stopped and turned back. ‘When are you going to get a chance to be Alice again?’

He went back into the kitchen. I was worried he was going to tell my mum that I wasn’t going and she was going to come in straight away and make a big deal about everything, and I sighed and decided to just go to bed. Then I heard Paul asking my mum if we had any garlic, then they were talking about spaghetti, and that was that.

I went to my bedroom and looked at myself in the mirror again, with my straight hair and thick black eyeliner. I didn’t look anything like me. I looked the way I always hoped I’d look when I looked in a mirror, before seeing the disappointing reality. I didn’t know what would happen if I went, but I knew what would happen if I didn’t go.

‘I’m going to go now,’ I said, looking into the kitchen, where my mum and Paul were reading a newspaper together, my mum standing behind Paul and resting her head on his shoulder.

‘You’ve got your phone?’ said my mum.

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ll just pop out with you, eh?’ said Paul, reaching out for his shoes with his toes.

‘Um. Sure,’ I said.

I could hear the music from the party before we reached the gates.

‘Obviously if you’re walking home with a friend, that’s fine,’ Paul said. ‘But don’t walk home alone, you know your mum worries.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Listen,’ Paul went on. ‘I know I’m not a member of the family. I don’t expect to be. It’s you and your mum and I’m the weirdo bloke who hangs around annoying you . . .’

I wondered why he was talking this way. I guessed that my mum had had a word with him, since our weird needy hug on the night I didn’t really sleep with Jonah. ‘It’s really not like that . . .’ I hoped he wouldn’t keep talking. It was me and my mum who needed to sort things out, not me and Paul.

‘I know that, and I don’t mind. I don’t mind being a guest of the O’Neills and not one of them. It may look like she’s not on your side, but it’s because she’s embarrassed about being so much on your side that she has to stick up for me sometimes.’

‘But she should be on my side,’ I said, like a five year old.

Paul smiled. ‘She would kick my ass if she thought it amused you,’ he said.

We couldn’t really see things so differently, could we? I knew her better, I knew best, but if he believed that – really believed it – maybe I didn’t know everything.

‘Okay, Alice, I’m going to make like the Cheshire
Cat before any of your friends see me. Have a good time.’

It was a freezing cold night, but I didn’t feel cold. I couldn’t really feel anything, except that it was a bit unreal walking into the part of school where I’m not allowed, wearing a funny little dress, holding two halves of a toy rabbit. I was holding the ticket in my hand so I didn’t lose it.

As I pushed open the double doors the sudden warmth prickled my cheeks. There was a really loud clang that made me jump as a chair got pushed over, and I could see Mr Travis, my history teacher from Year 9, running through into the main hall. There was no one around to check my ticket or tell me where to leave my coat, and it gave me a weird feeling. I started to run.

There was a crowd, getting bigger all the time, and people shouting. The first person I saw was Nashriq halfway down the main stairs, dressed as Michael Jackson. In the middle of the crowd I could see Isobel, in her zombie Dorothy costume, and she was crying, in a way I’d never seen her crying before, maybe never seen anyone crying before. Really screaming, as if she was in pain. Sophie was next to her, with her arm around Isobel. I reacted slowly, confused, and I remember I even had time to look Sophie up and down and feel stupidly jealous of her beautiful body in the shiny catsuit, before I saw Ian. He was lying flat in front of
them and one of the teachers was carefully pressing rolled-up jackets and jumpers around his neck to try to keep him still. But he wasn’t moving. His face was ghost white, covered in Joker make-up. His shirt was bloody. One of his legs was twisted in a way that seemed impossible, like a trick leg with nothing in the trousers. It made me want to throw up.

I shouted, ‘IAN!’ trying to make my way through the people, and Jonah heard me and looked up. We were staring at each other, frozen to the spot, while around us kids jostled and pushed and shouted, and then there were sirens and an ambulance and police and they took Ian and Jonah away. Isobel and Sophie went with Ian. I didn’t go with anyone, and I felt that people could see how useless and disconnected I was, and would laugh at me.

I saw Finian and a nun talking to a policeman. I’d known she was going as Marilyn Monroe but it took me a while to realise the nun was Steve. The only person I could get to was Josette, who was sitting on the floor in a flesh-coloured body stocking covered with sewn-on leaves, crying into her mobile. I asked her what had happened but she didn’t seem to hear me. I could hear people asking if Ian was dead and saying he was definitely not dead and saying he was definitely dead. Under the strip lighting everyone’s streaked make-up and badly made costumes looked horrible. I
guess mine did too. Lewis was sitting on his own, scared and close to tears in a long white robe and Jesus sandals.

I called home. Paul was there in minutes.

I heard that Isobel’s dad was suing the school but I don’t know if it’s true. I didn’t ask Ian about it, anyway, when he finally let me come and visit him, a few days after Christmas.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he said. One of his legs was hooked up in traction, with pulleys and strings and weights tied to it. His arms were in plaster, and around his head there was a big collar thing with fat metal rods sticking from it into blood-crusted holes in his forehead and shoulders.