The Nurse(3)

The day I decided I needed to kill Jemma, my father was away, and I was in the indulgence phase of my mother’s care. After dinner we sat together on the sofa, my head resting against her shoulder, one of my hands clasped in hers.

In this phase of the cycle, my mother often listened to me, and I could voice my concerns without fear of them being dismissed. Only some of them: the bogeyman under the bed, the giant outside my bedroom window, the dragon in the wardrobe. I didn’t bring up ones that might upset her: the constant bullying, my fear of not only being unloved but of being unlovable.

I waited till Coronation Street finished before turning to her. ‘Am I ugly?’

She took her time, tilting her head while she looked at my face. It was the worry that my classmates were correct in their assessment of me that had forced the question. It was hanging between me and my mother, waiting to be dispelled by her as other fears had been in the past.

When her gaze lingered, the heat of her eyes boring through my meagre defences and turning my anxiety to horror, I wondered if my classmates were correct, and I was deserving of the awful names they called me. Perhaps I was the monster from under the bed, the bogeyman from the cupboard.

Finally, her expression softened, and she reached forward with one long slim finger to caress my cheek and tap my nose. ‘You get your features from your father. He’s a handsome man, you’ll be beautiful when you’re older.’

But in this, she was wrong. The large nose, appropriate to my father’s square face, wasn’t suitable for my thin heart-shaped one, and whereas the proportions improved as the years passed, my mouth remained unusually wide. Although ugly was possibly too strong a word, I was certainly closer to it than I was to its polar opposite.





Any reference to my big mouth… Jaws, Hippo, Crocodile… caused me to suck in my lower lip in a vain effort to make the aperture smaller. This too failed miserably when the lip became red and swollen. Nor did the application of ointment to cure this do me any favours.

They were careful, as bullies tended to be, and around teachers or anyone in authority their expressions were angelic butter-wouldn’t-melt. They were careful, but not very clever, whereas I eventually became both. I’d inherited my short stature and slight physique from my mother, my intelligence, my craftiness, from my father.

Just how crafty he was, I didn’t discover for years.

The expression delayed gratification was unknown to my ten-year-old self, but it perfectly encompassed my determination to wait till I was ready to put a carefully conceived plan into action. Putting up with their torment was easier when I knew a glorious end was in sight.

My plan was simple… I was going to cut off the head of the monster.

In the six months since Jemma’s arrival, nobody had challenged the new status quo. The five members of that elite gang at the top were convinced they were invincible. They never expected any of us to hit back, and with all the noise they made trumpeting their superiority, they didn’t hear the quiet mouse roaring from the cheap seats.

When I decided the time was right, it added to my satisfaction to adopt their means to get my end. Less than two weeks after I’d begun, I had Jemma isolated from her friends. My campaign was slow, quiet, and deliciously effective with a pointed word here, a nasty whisper there.

I sidled up to one. ‘I heard Jemma call you fat, that’s so unfair.’ To another, I said, ‘It’s mean of Jemma to call you stupid.’

To yet another, ‘Is it true you wet your bed sometimes?’

Her mouth fell open, then she looked around to see who was within hearing distance. ‘Who told you that?’

Stupid girl, didn’t she understand that by asking, she’d confirmed what I’d said? Not that I needed confirmation, I’d overheard her mother speaking to mine and had squirrelled the knowledge away for future use. ‘I heard Jemma laughing about it to someone. Poor you, that’s tough.’

And to the fourth member of the group, I went back to the insult that always worried girls of our age. ‘I heard Jemma refer to you as the tubby one. She can be so mean, can’t she?’

I saw the worry in their eyes. The words I said were bad enough, but what must have cut them to the quick was my fake expression of sympathy. How the mighty have fallen when their victim dares to pity them.

Of course, they shouldn’t have listened to me. I was from the despised group, so far from the sun as to be in the dark but, catching them away from Jemma, they changed back to the girls they were before she arrived. Ordinary girls, with ordinary fears. It proved more than anything to me that Jemma had to go.

Their friendship, only wafer thin, quickly shattered under my deft whispering campaign. It was a good start to see Jemma without her satellites, to see her confused by their withdrawal. It wouldn’t last though. I had no doubt she’d manage to lure them back or bring others from the outer group into her orbit. She was already showing a hint of the manipulative nasty woman she’d become. Really, the world would be better off without her, wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t it?

I’d be doing the world a service if I stopped her from hurting anyone else. As she’d hurt me. It seemed I wasn’t the forgiving sort.

There was a huge advantage to being small and slight, to being the kind of person eyes looked through as if I weren’t there, nobody had any expectations or even noticed me. They didn’t notice me in our local library, or comment on the hours I spent poring over books. The ones about serial killers. Looking for inspiration. Fascinating as they were to read, most of their methods were beyond me. I’d need to be cleverer. And careful. Much as I wanted to get rid of Jemma, I didn’t want to pay for it by being locked away for years.