included.
“Gated” was a word that had soon become part of Vaseline’s vocabulary at the children’s home. “If you are gated, it means you’re not allowed to go out, even if you feel you could steer your trolley over a cliff yourself,” Killer had informed her during her first week. “Housebound” meant you were allowed to move around inside the house, but you weren’t allowed to step outside. “Roombound” meant you had to stay in your room, and “bedbound” meant you weren’t allowed to move even a toe off your bed. All punishment was recorded in your file, and you had to sign for it.
“Take her away!” Mrs Claerhout pointed at the orangehead, looking upset. She seemed too agitated by the head’s behaviour to pay attention to the girl, who was still lying in the passage.
None of the bigger girls were willing to assist, so Vaseline and the younger ones helped the knife wielder to her bed in Room 2, Vaseline’s new room. The girl was crying and Vaseline felt queasy when she saw the dark stickiness in her hair and teeth.
Mrs Claerhout watched, her hands on her hips. “If you want to wipe each other out, go ahead, by all means. You little sluts will go down long before you bring me to a fall. I’m not your playmate and I wasn’t born yesterday, believe you me,” she declared, and Vaseline imagined that she was looking straight at her. “You won’t see me again before tomorrow morning. I’m going to lock the door of my flat behind me now, and I won’t be coming out, no matter what I hear. You can bet your slut asses on it, come hell or high water. And when I open the door tomorrow morning I expect this mess to be cleaned up. You’re not the only ones with human rights, you know. Is that clear?”
With these words she slammed the door to her flat behind her. Dismayed, Vaseline heard the sound of a key turning in a lock for the second time that day.
Like a petrified mouse she shuffled back to the sitting room where she had left her suitcase. Who would be killing whom tonight? She planned to use her case as a shield.
But nothing happened. The fight was seemingly already forgotten. Everyone got busy with her own affairs. The bigger girls shouted across the passage, staking their claim for a bath as if nothing had happened. No one took notice of Vaseline. She dragged her case to Room 2 and headed for the only unoccupied bed.
“What are you looking at, hey? Have you got a smoke?” One of the big girls who had been a ringleader in the fight entered with the bread knife in her hand. She was wearing shortie pyjamas and she was very pretty, except for an unsightly scar that started at the corner of her mouth and ran all the way across her chin. Vaseline kept her eyes on her suitcase and shook her head.
The girl walked to the corner of the room, where Orangehead lay stretched out on her bed, groaning. “Eat me, Pizzaface!” she taunted, inserting the bread knife through the elastic of Pizzaface’s panties at an angle.
Outside the butch girl laughed raucously. She was walking down the passage, striking the wall of each room with her belt. All the doors had been removed.
“That bitch who thinks she’s Miss Universe is Tara Papadopoulos,” a soft voice whispered. For the first time Vaseline noticed that someone was hiding on the floor between Pizzaface’s bed and the next one.
“Tara never opens her mouth unless her butch roomie is with her, and Denise Toolo tries to suck up to the whiteys, and we all know what that means,” the voice continued to whisper. “If you’re going to be in this room, you’d better not sleep in your bed tonight. Those freaky bitches might come back for Pizzaface and then they’ll get us too.”
In the dim light Vaseline was able to make out that the whispering voice belonged to a girl with short black hair and lively dark eyes. “My name is Lolita, but everyone calls me Puck. It’s because I was in a Shakespeare play once. One day when I have a son I’m going to call him Puck too. You must have heard my name on the intercom at school. I’m the only one from the home who gets asked to carry messages. Have you heard them call me?”
“No,” Vaseline whispered back. She was afraid to switch on the light, so she unpacked in the dark.
Puck was talking like a lab rat on tik, without stopping to breathe between sentences. “I used to be on Ritalin, but the matrons complained I talked too hectic, which wasn’t like true of course,” she added, as if reading Vaseline’s thoughts. Her voice was so soft, though, that Vaseline struggled to hear.
“Pizzaface, yo?” Puck shook the orangehead. “Get off this bed, hear? Come, roll under my bed, it’s safer, okay?”
But Pizzaface just buried her face in her blood-stained pillow. Puck shrugged her narrow shoulders and motioned for the two of them to sneak down the passage to the sitting room, where all the lights had been switched off.
“The best place to spend the night is under the study tables, close to the curtains, where it’s darkest,” Puck said. Vaseline saw her take a can of Doom from the cupboard underneath the kitchen sink and tuck it into the front of her shirt.
“It’s to spray in their faces when they come for us. It can make you blind. Permanently.”
Long after Puck had fallen asleep Vaseline was still staring at the legs of the chairs. The yellow security lights were shining through spaces in the thin curtains, making streaks of light on the dining room floor. She lay listening to the sounds in her new unit. Someone went to the toilet without flushing it afterwards.
She could hear music coming from the very last room at the end of the passage. It was the only room with a door and she had heard the other kids call it the Holiday Inn, because of the luxury of privacy it offered. Only the prefects and the head girl got to stay in the Holiday Inn. Not only did they have a door, they also had a plug to use electricity for hair dryers and CD players. Tara was the head girl. Denise Toolo was her bodyguard.
Sometime during the night Vaseline woke, sat up and bumped her head on the edge of the table. At first she had no idea where she was, but then she recognised Puck’s shiny black hair in the dim light. Puck was muttering in her sleep: “No, please Mommy, no!”
Two days later Vaseline was in the TV room when she heard Pizzaface being called to the phonebooth on the intercom. She recognised Tara Papadopoulos’s voice. Prefects were allowed to use the intercom to make announcements when the matron wasn’t available.
Vaseline instantly smelled trouble. It’s a trap, she thought, some kind of ambush. Mrs Claerhout looked up from the magazine she was reading. Her expression revealed that she had exactly the same thought, but that she wasn’t going to do anything about it. She got up and went into her flat, closing the door behind her.
“Hee-hah, it’s for me, it’s my cousin!” Pizzaface stormed through the back door and charged past Vaseline like a giraffe at full speed. Someone had told Vaseline that Pizzaface’s cousin was also her boyfriend, but surely that couldn’t be true. Yuck!
Vaseline looked round anxiously for Puck. There was no one in the passage she could trust. She raced past the secretary to Mr Hefner’s office. But his door was closed.
Before Vaseline could reach the offices of the social workers, she heard the faint thumps that she knew so well by now. Though she was expecting the worst, her stomach still heaved when she turned the corner.
Tara’s sidekicks had cornered Pizzaface at the phone booth in the passage. While they held her, Tara was laying into her with her fists. Pizzaface gasped, groaning. With all her strength Tara brought her knee up between Pizzaface’s legs. Denise Toolo’s hand was covering Pizzaface’s face and mouth so that all
