Maddie

Don’t you dare ask me any questions about that raccoon, got it? One question about it, and this ends. I’m not messing about. I’m not secretly hoping that you’ll bring up the subject of that horrible little furry thing. It’s off-limits. Right off. Ask me about anything else, anything else you want.

Did you really kill...

Ah, ah, no, not that, you’re not asking that.

But you said...

Not yet. You can ask that later. If you don’t mention the raccoon, then I’ll let you ask that. Alright? Alright. You recording?

Good to go.

Bumping into Morgan in the corridor was where all the misery really started. All she had to do was say sorry and move along. but she looked at me like I’d just farted in her soup. I mean, yeah, that’s something I did eventually do, but I hadn’t done it then and I might not have done it at all. Well, I probably would have still done it no matter what, but right then it wasn’t a definite eventuality, at least until she looked at me like that. Pupils like bullets, seriously. It felt like she was firing at my brain.

This isn’t the beginning.

It was the first shot of the war.

I meant the beginning of it all. I want the whole story.

I’m giving you what you want, and you’re still not happy? This is already a pain in my left buttock. I knew it would be. It’ll be a fun way to spend an evening, you whined. Status update: not fun. I’ll tell you what fun is. Fun is replacing the vicar’s tea with Doo-Lally-Tap Juice and convincing him that God is a chicken and sending him out to spread the word.

If Mum finds out it was you that did that...

Why would I care what she thinks? And she won’t find out anyway, will she? Remember, I know where you sleep.

Yeah, next door to you and your snoring. Start at the start. This is meant to be the whole story, not just bits from the middle.

I was born. That happened. Then you were born. That happened as well. Between the two of us we filled a lot of nappies, so there’s a whole lot of happenings. Then we got taller and you got fatter, and that thing we call Dad decided we weren’t important enough to stay with and mother dearest thought it would be fun to turn into a witch and the age of misery began.

This is a serious thing. Why have you got to be a proper tool about it?

I’m being serious. This is my serious face. You must recognise it. It’s the one I wear when you won’t tell me where you’ve hidden my balaclava collection. Its the one I’ve got on when I’m forced to remember my first years on this stink ball of a planet, stuck in a house with you and her and thinking of all the things I wanted to do but couldn’t because of you two. Don’t bother whinging that I’m being horrible to you again. Wah, so mean, wah, feelings hurt. Heard it all. Sick of it. Shut up. Move along.

I knew this wasn’t going to work. You’re going to ruin it.

Put your pouting lip away, it only makes you look more ridiculous. I said I would do it, and I was doing it. My way, not yours. Keep your trap shut for once and you might actually get what you want.

So, yeah, Dad decided that all we needed was a Christmas card every other year while the witch wailed in wine bottles about how cruel the world was and I decided that I might as well do whatever I want. It wouldn’t make a difference. She’d throw things at me whatever I did.

Movies were a big help. I’d say that ‘The Man With Two Brains’ was a bigger influence on my life than both parents put together. And ‘The Fly’ taught me that if you want to do something then you’ve got to go for it, even if everyone thinks you’re mental and they’re probably right. And in ‘Forbidden Planet’ the guy’s mind was the monster! Think about what you could do with a monster like that. Nobody could mess with you. All you’d have to do was think what you wanted it to do and off it would go to eat someone’s fridge and properly mess up their day. The one that really got me going was ‘Attack of the 50ft Woman’. Watched that at Grandma’s when she was still knocking about, cross-legged on the floor, scoffing cheese on toast, punching her cat in the face when it got too near. You remember that cat? He was such a low-life, like a rug if the rug was alive and hated everyone. That was the first film to amaze me. It stuck in my head, like those kites stuck to your bare arms when we put them on you with superglue. And you didn’t even glide. You just landed on your stupid head, which probably didn’t help your brain.

I hadn’t realised that movies could have good ideas in them. I thought they were all dumb with ridiculous happy endings. The bit that kept me up at night was how did the alien make her fifty feet tall? Did I have the necessary ingredients in my chemistry set to replicate the effect? There was a lot of funny-looking stuff in it, so I thought it was worth a shot. The best thing I’d made up until then was the only thing I’d made up until then. I’d chucked a few ingredients together in a test tube which formed this weird black gunk that started expanding and filling up the tube. In a panic I ran to the bathroom and chucked it down the toilet. The gunk got properly agitated then and went into overdrive, filling up the bowl. So I flushed, and wow, that was a mess. It was like the toilet was being sick, that kind of sick where if it doesn’t stop soon you think you’re going to see the insides of your own feet. It splattered everywhere, up the walls, across the ceiling. Mother dearest refused to see the possibilities for such an amazing substance, and went mental instead. Seriously, she got so steamed that I could hear her brain whistling. So, rather than recreating the experiment, I was forced to spend close to forever cleaning the bathroom while the witch confiscated my science kit. Took me weeks to find it. She stashed it in a box that said ‘Fairy Princess Castle PlaySet’. Pretty clever for her.

Anyway, I got myself into the mindset of an alien, which was the only way I could possibly work out how an alien would giantize a woman. Takes some serious concentration to become an alien, you know. Got to think green. Or grey. Depends on which type you want to be. And while I was tapping into minds immeasurably superior to ours, I put together some suitable looking ingredients and came up with a thin liquid, blue like a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. With that done, I needed a subject, and SlobberChops came in at just that moment.

That’s right, I tested it on the dog, and it went horribly wrong. Yes, horribly.

I dunked one of those chew sticks into the test tube and gave it to SlobberChops. He gobbled it up, and his tail stopped wagging. He went completely rigid. Rock solid. I waited for him to grow fifty feet tall. Imagine! A fifty foot SlobberChops. But he didn’t grow. He didn’t move. He didn’t budge. I prodded him with a finger. He tilted and fell, still completely rigid. After ten minutes of wondering whether or not to give SlobberChops mouth-to-mouth - can you even think about that without wanting to chuck up? - I realised I was in it deep. If the witch found out about this then I’d never see daylight again. I stashed the chemistry set back where I’d found it and I stuck SlobberChops out in the shed.

I can’t believe you did that. To my dog. My dog. That’s how he ended up in the shed.

Yeah, so you remember that it all worked out well! He came round two days later and barked until he got let out.

He never ate chew sticks again. Because of you.

Shush. My time.

My first proper plan, Scheme Number 1: Attack of the 50ft SlobberChops, was a bit of a fail. Lack of available research material was the problem, obviously. I left myself wide open to randomisation. Basically I’d made it up as I went along. It was a plan without a plan. Dumb. The idea behind it was solid, I mean seriously, think about it! An enormous dog who’d follow me anywhere for a piece of ham. That old bag who lives at the bottom of the street, the one who dropped me in it about that whole raising the dead episode? I could sling a bone through her letterbox and let SlobberChops go nuts. He’d end up wearing her house like a hat! Ha ha! With her hanging out of it!

I’ll manage it one day. It’s got to be do-able.

I watched that film a load of times, and every single time the ending annoyed me. She dies. Sorry if I ruined it for you. Should have flagged that up, right? The great big monster-woman dies at the end, so all the little people are safe and can carry on with their happy little boring lives, woo hoo, woopedy doo, another victory for misery over excitement. In books and movies it happens again and again, it’s totally unbelievable! It all goes wrong for the Invisible Man. Dr. Moreau makes a mess of it. Frankenstein’s monster does a runner to the North Pole or something. Morbius out of Forbidden Planet, he basically tops himself. Seeing the pattern? I’m not even finished. You’ve got The Fly. A guy, with the head off a fly? Didn’t end well. You ever heard about Faust? Bad times. John Hammond tried to make the best theme park ever, Dr. Steinman made an amazing city under the sea for all the greatest minds alive, Miles Dyson did some amazing work on microprocessors, Rotwang made the best robot ever, and all of these poor people suffered. They were hated and hunted and murdered or driven to do themselves in and all because they were trying to liven things up a little. Incredible individuals, each and every one of them, striking out towards the very edges of human knowledge, reaching beyond the boundaries, making life so much more interesting. But every single time, the forces of boredom swarm over them and crush their opportunity for success. Think about it. These movies represent the war. It’s the joy of actually living versus the misery of mere existence. What amazes me is that misery is actually winning. You know what that says to me? People are sick. Wanting to live that way? It really is sick. Look at the witch. All she does is drink coffee and moan about the job she hates and argues with whoever’s nearby and tells us to do things we don’t want to do and tells us we’ll never be much of anything because the world’s unfair and there’s nothing we can do about it. And then she watches people arguing and being horrible to each other on television and reads magazines about these people who do nothing of any interest whatsoever as far as I can tell, and these people are famous for being famous and that seems to be all that anyone’s interested in. It’s all so pointless. There’s no... no wow.

Here’s a thing. The word awesome. Do you know the definition of the word awesome? It means ‘extremely impressive or daunting, inspiring awe’. The word awe, it’s a mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread and wonder inspired by authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity, or might. Yeah, I looked it up. Knowing all that, would you say that ‘awesome’ is a tad overused in our modern society of weakness and misery? Here’s an example for you. A new drink came out in a shiny can, and I overheard one kid offering another a taste. After the taste, the other kid claimed that the drink in the shiny new can was ‘awesome’. Really? Was this drink extremely impressive and daunting, inspiring awe? Did this kid feel a mixture of reverence, respect, dread and wonder? Was it an overwhelmingly religious experience? I suspect not. I suspect, furthermore, that the kid was, and still is, an idiot. At best that drink was probably quite tasty. You want awesome? A fifty foot SlobberChops taking a ten ton dump on top of the school, now you’re starting to get into the realm of awesome.

That’s what existence is for most people. Day-to-day life is so dull that things that are slightly less dull than usual become, like, totally amazing instead of just slightly less dull. I can’t live my life like that. It makes me want to tear my own head open, pull my own skull out and use it to smash stuff up. Doesn’t it bust your chops? Doesn’t it boil your pee to hear the witch moan on and on and do nothing to change anything? It doesn’t even register with you, does it? You just sit in your room doing all this writing rubbish, like that ever got anyone anywhere.

What about Shakespeare? Dickens? Hardy? Elliot? Whoever wrote Attack of the 50ft Turkey or any of that other rubbish you watch? You’re saying that those movies set you off, and without writers...

Shut your hole. My time.

So, I’ve got movies to inspire me, and I’ve got a very strong urge to do everything possible to avoid being a ‘normal’. Yak. Disgusting word, normal. You know what the definition for normal is? Sad, waste of space, should be taken out back and shot. I knew fairly early on that I wanted more, much more. Every hour of every day I dreamed of making things much bigger or way smaller, of being invisible, of my own gang of manimals, of owning an island full of dinosaurs, of leading my own army of scientists, of nanobots which could rebuild me, of sending out my own mind-monster. The only one I didn’t dream about was giving myself a fly head, because that would be completely stupid. The rest, though, awesome. I had inspiration and an urge and all kinds of dreams and a whole world of normals dragging me down.

School was a significant problem. A ridiculous amount of hours wasted in the place five days a week. By the time I started at Spring Hill High I knew exactly what I wanted to be, and here was a building full of lowlifes prepared to get right in the way, and I was going to be there for years. Sick. That first miserable day, oh man, I felt like I’d been eating lead for every meal for a week. None of the lessons were any use. I already knew English. I could teach myself whatever maths I needed. There wasn’t a single explosion in chemistry, and I was told very clearly that there never would be. History, well, that was just upsetting. Learning about all those great figures got in the way of me being a great figure myself. And P.E. was simply an excuse for the bigger mares in the class to whack me with hockey sticks. Hockey. Who plays that? Who cares?

My only hope was to meet a like-minded soul at lunch or during a break. I might as well have ripped that hope right out of my misery-beaten heart, slapped it down on a table, got one of those stupid hockey sticks and given it the kind of smashing my shins took, smash and smash and smash until the stick was nothing but splinters. Couldn’t do that, though, had to put up with meeting my fellow pupils and realising that each one I talked to was dumb as concrete. Concrete-dumb. That’s really dumb. Wood’s thick. Concrete’s thicker. Yeah?

Here’s the thing. I can’t help being weird. It happens. It happens constantly. Twenty four hours a day. You think my daydreams are out there, you should climb in my skull and see what happens at night. Gets cer-razy up in there. What I’m trying to say is, I’m a weird-magnet. I got talking to this kid in the lunch line, he’d already got himself the nickname Clump. Minutes into the first day and his fate was sealed. The horror of it. Within a week it had got worse. Some cement-head got the urge to call him Clump McClumpy, and an unhappy legend was born. Can you imagine it? Clump McClumpy. Oh my God. Oh my GOD! I never get bored of saying it. Clump McClumpy. If you’re feeling really down one day, and I know what a miserable hound you are so that should happen often, try saying that name to yourself, it’ll sort you right out. Don’t say it five times in front of a mirror, though, you might actually summon the oaf.

In the lunch line. He’s in front of me. He reaches for the mashed potato. And he clumps. Instead of picking up the spoon, he smacked down on the end of it and launched a super-sized serving of mash up into the air and it soared, oh man did it soar, a swooping arc, and it landed with a splat on top of a hat, a hat sat on a lunch lady’s head. She didn’t notice. Carried on like it was part of her uniform. From that point on she got known as SpudHead. Only behind her back, though.

‘Nice shot,’ I told Clump. ‘You should take up archery or something.’

‘Nuh-uh, don’t think so. I’d end up shooting myself in the bowels.’ An interesting fact here. Months later, he told me that before the first day of Spring Hill High he had no tendency towards clumsiness. None. It was nervousness that made him attempt to open a door with his face, nerves that helped him get to the top of a flight of stairs and try to throw himself straight back down, nerves that drew his foot to stomp on Miss Farrah’s, nerves that guided him to an abandoned banana skin in a corridor, and who slips on banana skins outside of cartoons? After he’d been re-christened Clump McClumpy, every single day was one accident after another. How about that? That’s the kind of thing that gets minds like mine thinking.

Clump offered me some mash. I snatched the spoon off him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I want to eat it, not wear it. And move along, Clump, I don’t want people thinking we’re together.’ Which should have been an end to it, right? That’s nothing like the way life works. Life’s got a sense of humour, and it gets its yuks from stuff that’s really not funny. I waited for Clump to pick a table and I picked a different one, and he moved to sit opposite me, this dopey smile smeared across his face. In his mind, I was his friend. And what had I done to deserve this honour? Still not sure about that. He also wanted to have a conversation. So frustrating. I wanted to pull my own lungs out, but I’ve learned that we don’t always get what we want.

‘Isn’t it great here?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No it’s not.’

‘I didn’t think it was. Just checking really.’ He pushed his food around the plate. I think the morning’s events left him a bit worried about what he might do next. I was a little worried myself. Some random nugget passing behind him delivered a perfect flat-handed smack to the back of his head.

‘Clump’s got a girlfriend,’ bellowed the random. Mucho gusto laughter. It was a great image for me; Clump’s girl. Truly great. Luckily I’d already written the whole school experience off as a waste of a huge portion of my lifespan, otherwise I might have been totally and utterly and irreversibly devastated, the kind of devastated where you spend your evenings screaming into your pillow and then wondering if you can hold your breath until you’re, you know, dead.

He went red. Like a strawberry with hair. There was stuff going on in that wood-head of his that needed stamping out. ‘I’m nobody’s girlfriend. No-one in this school has a chance. No-one.’ That just made the colour stronger. Subject change. ‘Survival. That’s what this place is going to be about. You know that, right? I’ve got to find a way though the mind-numbing boredom and misery. You need to either get a much lower profile or find strength in numbers. The bullies need to make the most of all this because real life will eat them alive. If you’ve got some distant, dim thought that eventually this will all turn into some musical movie type-of-thing in which, actually, everything ends up absolutely lovely for everyone, then you need to get to the doctor because you might have a massive tumour on your brain. Massive. Like a satsuma.’ That did a good job of draining him, and getting rid of his dumb smile, at least for a minute or two. I love control. Love it. It’s not necessarily making people miserable, it’s seeing how easily I can snap people out of the humdrum, the mundane, the dull drudgery, and get a response out of them. But, yeah, actually a lot of times it is about the misery. ‘Look around, Clump. Look at these idiots that you’ve been forced to send a slice of your future with. Remember, whatever these kids do to you, they’re all as miserable as you.’

He just shrugged. ‘Most of the time I’m pretty happy,’ he said, and I don’t think he bothered to look around, but I did, and that’s when I got the very, very beginnings of what would become known as Scheme Number 112. There were a lot of kids in that food hall. There were even more kids who weren’t in the food hall. Many, many idiots. Plenty of unformed minds with no idea what they wanted to do yet, and with no idea that they might not be getting all possible options.

A real mad scientist keeps an eye out for possibilities, see?

And that’s it. I’ve had enough for one night. Go away. Go. Away.

What? Hang on, we were just…

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah, go awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay