AbCat

School becomes a hell of a lot easier if you have the biggest and hardest person there as your best friend, walking next to you. The girl who had punched me in the nose came up to me a few days after she saw me with Christine and shook my hand and apologised. ‘I’m Melanie,’ she said, really sincerely. ‘I’m sorry about the other day. If you need anything doing, just let me know.’ I stuck to Christine like glue. This is what happens when you’re a social outcast and someone shows you the slightest morsel of friendship. You’ll follow them to the end of the world. I hung off her every word, and followed her around like some pathetic lapdog. The size difference between us must have been comedic to anyone seeing us together – she was over a foot taller than me. She never once looked embarrassed to be around me though. She smoked a lot, and we’d congregate with the other smokers around the back of the gym, where the leylandii protected us from being seen by teachers. She never had to buy

Did I mention that Kent House is terrifying? Picture this: a skinny, pale, timid, middle-class fifteen-year-old girl, arriving at this place, with grey walls and small windows and rumours of violent, crazed girls running around with axes and knives. I was so tiny – tiny in every way, and I wanted to be smaller still. I wanted to disappear, and not be seen. The girls were all a head taller than me, and wider too. Most of them looked properly strong, as if they’d worked in a factory or on a farm, and they often walked around in gangs of four or five, scowling and sneering at the teachers, and me it seemed, as I tried to find my way around. There was this one black girl, who was nearly six foot tall already. She shaved her hair at the sides so it looked like a Mohican, and walked across the yard in a fast, straight line, which caused any girl inattentive enough to be in her way to bounce off her thick shoulders and fall to the ground. She walked straight up to me between lessons. ‘Oi

‘I didn’t mean to kill our bassist – it just panned out that way.’ The journalist smiles and writes a note in shorthand. I get up and pour myself a drink while she packs her bags up. She looks a bit like her, and has some of the same mannerisms. My God, she haunts me still. ‘Same time tomorrow?’ She asks. ‘No, no, leave it until Monday now, please. Thanks.’ I need time to map things out in my mind. Say this story the right way. Plus I have a stinging headache, the kind that feels like there’s a triangular object jammed into my temple, with the pointy end against my eyeball. The kind that drinking gin doesn’t help with in the least. I try to remember the events of it without distorting them, and without becoming emotional. When I remember the music, the parties, the mayhem, and the love, it makes me sad more than happy, because I’ll never have it any more, and it feels like I kind of missed it somehow. These were wonderful times, for sure, but whatever the opposite of punk might be,

Snowball head bops the door ajar to flood my room with pink light and the noise of kitchen and late evening television themes muffling through plasterboard walls soothes the lonely insomnia from the anxiety of schoolwork unfinished essays on the physics of spaceflight and if writing about using the sun as a slingshot to throw ourselves between stars not even flying just falling through vacuums for decades to CRASH whammo my body jars awake again not tumbling just holding onto the bed for no reason to stop me drifting down a black hole while a voice from the tv show talks about the power of vacuum cleaners and I wonder how my mind rewrote that story in the time it took my muscles to twitch but not resolve a simple thought into a readable paragraph