The Nurse(4)

I went from books about serial killers to books on anatomy and physiology and found myself fascinated by what I read. Three books later, I knew two things… how to get rid of my nemesis and what I wanted to do when I finished school.

It seemed justice to use what had been done to me to get rid of the main instigator. Thanks to Jemma and her friends, I was considered by my teachers and my mother to be clumsy. Always tripping over my feet. My knees, and sometimes my elbows, continually scabbed.

Nobody would be surprised if I fell. It was sensible to use what I knew to put an end to being bullied and tormented.

To put an end to the vile Jemma, once and for all.





4





The concrete surface of the school playground was perfect for playing, and we passed our lunch breaks at hopscotch or skipping. I say we… but that’s a lie. Girls like me were always excluded from these games. I wasn’t the only one. The victims of Jemma’s bullying sorority, we poor mishmash of rejects, hovered singly at the edges, looking in, never belonging.

After the success of my whispering campaign, Jemma no longer held pride of place in the middle of her group, but she hadn’t dropped so low as to have joined our sad ranks.

The first part of my plan successfully completed, I needed to proceed with the second final one. With the certainty of my ten years, I never considered anything would go wrong.

The six-foot railing surrounding the playground was effective at keeping us curtailed within its boundaries, but its design allowed us to look out and others to look in. On the far side, a low, densely planted shrubbery lay between it and the footpath. The bushes were a magnet for rubbish blown along the street, and a dumping ground for empty cans and bottles.

Glass bottles: easily acquired, cheap, ubiquitous. It was my weapon of choice. The day before – one of those days when my mother was desperately missing my father, and barely noticed where I was or what I was doing – I went to our local supermarket’s bottle recycling bins. I wanted to choose a bottle that could have been classified as pretty… or at least pretty enough to have appealed to a child. Nobody challenged me as I rummaged through the wine and beer bottles in my search for something suitable. It didn’t take long to find the ideal candidate – a gin bottle, it had a nice shape, the glass attractively ridged. It was perfect. I wrapped it in my jacket, walked the mile to the school and planted it in the shrubbery. A few branches pulled around it hid it from passers-by.

There would be no opportunity for a second chance. If my plan failed, Jemma would soon gather her satellites close, and I would have to start again from the beginning. But I had no intention of failing.





When we were released into the playground that lunchtime, I sauntered across to the railing and hung around, at the same time keeping Jemma under observation. She was with one other girl and standing not too far from me. Alone would have been better, but I couldn’t delay. The following day she might have lured two into her net, the day after, three or more.

I turned to stare through the railing, then with a double-take I’d practised several times in front of the mirror, I stared at the bottle, tilting my head from side to side as I admired it. I waited for several seconds before reaching through the bars to pick it up.

I raised it, looking at it with fake admiration, holding it up to the sun and letting it be seen by anyone who may have been staring in my direction. It was also allowing myself to be caught on the CCTV that covered this part of the schoolyard. The one they’d no doubt check through later to see exactly the progress of the disaster that was going to occur any moment.

Glass wasn’t allowed in the playground, and the bottle would have been taken from me had the playground monitors been doing their job. They weren’t, they rarely did, both women standing on the far side, heads together, gossiping.

‘Isn’t this pretty?’ I said to nobody in particular as I walked in Jemma’s direction. My words were loud enough to catch her attention and she turned to look at me.

I smiled at her and held the bottle out when I was within a few feet of where she stood. ‘Look!’ I said, waving it to show her. Then, in a carefully choreographed accident, I deliberately tripped and came down heavily. The neck of the bottle hit the concrete first and shattered into several pieces around me. I lay for a few seconds, winded from the fall despite the purposeful intention of it. A broken shard lay next to me. I moved my arm along it, not too deeply, but enough for blood to bubble along its length before getting to my feet, the heavy base of the bottle with its jagged ridge still held tightly in my hand.

Blood was trickling down my injured arm. I wondered, much later, if Jemma had rushed to help me… if she’d shown even a modicum of sympathy… would I have changed my mind? I’ll never know because she didn’t. Instead, she pointed at me, put her head back and howled, a long exaggerated laugh as if I was the funniest thing she’d ever seen.

The blood was dripping from my arm to the dirty white concrete of the playground. My face was a picture of misery. The cut to my arm stung causing genuine tears to leak from my eyes, snot from my big nose, the corners of my too-large mouth drooping downward.

I held my bloody limb out and moved towards Jemma with a wail of anguish that stopped her laughter. She stood her ground and didn’t back away as I was worried she might. There was no sympathy on her face and when the other girl made a move to come to my aid, Jemma glared at her, stopping her in her tracks. Luckily for me. It would have wrecked my plan.