Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

It would be nice to say that all the hate and anger I – apparently – still feel for Tim Manor was purged away, all into that little lead jar where I know he can never hurt me again.

It’s not true.

I had let it go. I thought I had, but there it is, infecting my brain now as strongly as it ever did, even though all the charms have been removed. I hate feeling like this. All the memories of helplessness, of humiliating myself by letting him win all the time, by lashing out stupidly instead of just ignoring him like people said I should, like it was easy to do that. People can be so stupid.

When I left secondary school I put Tim Manor in a little box and locked it tight and hid it away. Now I’ve opened it again. All the shit he made me feel about myself, all the hate I learned how to feel, and I never once understood why he did it. As far as I can tell it was just malice. It’s incomprehensible. I’ve never experienced anything like it since getting out of that school, giving the lie to all those stupid fuckers who say school (read: ‘bullies’) ‘prepare you for the real world.’ My experience has been that in the real world you don’t find malice like that. Even if abuse and cruelty can be called preparation and training, instead of doing the damage from which the morons say it inoculates you, it would be superfluous.

I want to put him away again, in that little lead jar. I want to melt it down into slag with all the bloody charms still in it, and drop it in the deepest ocean trench. But he’s not in that jar. That was just a fiction, to get the charms out of my flesh, a way to tap the wellspring of hate he opened in me. He’s still here, in my head. I have to put him away again, somehow. I’m not going to let him poison me here.

I’m not.

I’m a child.

The ship dips and rises in the water. In the harbour the movement is so gentle you might miss it, but it’s there. I remember that the last charm came out about an hour after the first, I think. I fainted afterwards and I woke up here, back in my cot, in between clean muslin sheets and wearing a clean long light tunic.

I’m a child.

Restless, I sit up and look at my bandaged hands. I can move my fingers inside the bandage slightly, and I have the use of my left thumb. There’s some pain, but it’s an ordinary sort of pain, as wounds are flexed and bandage-material tugs against flesh. I’d have complained about it before, but in comparison to the searing, nerve-spiking pain when the charms were embedded there it’s actually a relief. These are ordinary wounds.

I figure out where the catch is and open the side of the cot so I can swing my legs out and stand up. I can open the cupboard with my clothes in. I catch sight of my face in the tall mirror on the inside of the door.

Mirrors are rare in Jeodin; not because they’re magical, like in certain books I’ve read; simply because they’re expensive and difficult to make well. Even this one has slight concentric arcs of distortion, cut as it was from a large disc of blown glass, and a slight golden tint. That information just bubbles up at random. This is the first time I’ve really had a chance to use a full-length mirror.

I stand for a full minute, studying my face. It’s a little chubby, like a teenager’s. The proportions are just off the human norm. Just a little anime, I decide. The eyes are weird, looking at them close-up, like the eyeballs are slightly magnified behind my eyelids. A small triangular chin and a faintly forward-jutting face. Not unpleasant, but ever so slightly not quite human, and definitely a little childlike. ‘Chibi,’ Kerilas said once. I can kind of see his point. I turn my head and push my hair back behind my ear so I can see it. The little point towards the top and back. When I see it I still irrationally expect it to be latex and have to touch it to be sure, to feel the edge of my fingernail right to the sensitive tip.

I take a step back and grab the back of my tunic with my better hand, between the thumb and the bandage, and bend over to pull the tunic off over my head. I stand up straight to look at myself, naked in the mirror. Now I can see it. If it was human I would say it was the body of a slightly underweight girl of thirteen or fourteen at the most. Hairless, lean, narrow-hipped, small-breasted, but still an unmistakeably developing female figure. I look with a curious dual awareness: I don’t know if this is voyeuristic of me, or if this is my body and I have every right to be familiar with it. I don’t know which point of view is mine any more.