towards the burning point, waiting until exactly the white-hot moment when the antlion and the ant connected . . .
And then she’d zap them both.
Beyond the drip-line of the thorny elm, as the slope rolled sideways, the soil became more crumbly, and a downpour could wet the earth sodden. Puddles burped up and deepened to shallow ponds, belching out earthworms.
Not ordinary wrigglers, but nearly as long as Halley is tall. Examining a giant earthworm as it surfaces, she sees a fat blind tip, single pollex thumbing through drenched soil. It is a tunnel come alive, nudging the red-brown earth aside like a muscular liquid.
When you lie still, at night, waiting and waiting for sleep to come, you can hear the workings. The grunts and explosive squirting. Then it’s easy to believe that something’s in you, working overtime.
What’s got into you? her mother asks then, fed up with the child’s endless worries.
Outside, the tongueless, toothless worms swallow soil and vegetable matter, passing it backwards, over and out. But the castings seem much too neat to be droppings, and the little mounds she disturbs with her fingers look deliberately crafted.
Halley has paid attention in class; she understands that the earthworms help to pocket the soil with precious air, and she knows that the worms are nocturnal. But she never thinks that then she ought not to be seeing them. She completely misunderstands. Imagines that the giant worms, like Halley Murphy, have come out for the pleasure of the wet, to feel the moisture upon their thirsty skin, to shrug off the confines of familiar family and fusty indoors.
The worms cannot tell her how the rain floods their tunnels and cuts off their underground air supply; that unless they leave their homes, they will drown. That there is limited happiness for them in this saturation she loves, forced out into the light from the dark depths of which children, alone, are so fearful.
Though down there, too, the worms would report if they could, in the netherworld that brooks no refusal, are hidden engines working into the lightless earth, pipelines of gas, oil, sewage; barrelling cables with convoluted connection to the life that she’s learning to live on the surface.
It’s common knowledge that if you pick your nose, you get worms. A filthy habit. On that score, nobody seems to disagree. If grown-ups catch you picking, they get sarky. Had any luck there with the gold-digging, hm? Or, Care to share? Basically they make you appreciate how gross you’ve been, forcing other people to watch your revolting excavations.
So Halley is wise enough to pick secretly, though no one would take her for any kind of poekie-picker at all. And bingo, she gets worms. Which seems proof of the prevailing popular truth.
Out of the nose, into the mouth. Something like the predictable life-cycle of the bilharzia parasite.
When Halley gets worms, or worms get her, she has what’s called suffering the consequences, by which time it’s too late to promise, to swear, that on my oath I won’t do it again.
They are fine threadworms that veer and swerve like millesimal cobras on the wadded toilet paper, and she’s petrified, fearing that she’s charmed them out of the darkness. The worms are so insubstantial that in order to see them properly she must bring the paper right up to her eyes, which makes the worms enormous. She stares at them closely, their tortuous writhings. She feels hypnotised. And then suddenly she’s terrified that she’s doing exactly what the wily wrigglers want, which is to get close enough to her face to worm their way inside her nostrils!
When she gets worms, she also gets ashamed, so tells her mother only when she can’t bear her bottom itching any longer, since having worms makes known your secret dirtiness. Worms and dirt go hand in hand.
The other reason she holds back is because the medicine for worms is possibly worse than having worms in the first place. In a mug of Five Roses, her mother dissolves the granular, sandy contents of a tiny metal phial, stirring until the blend resembles a strong brew of ordinary black tea. And then Halley must drink it, even though she knows it’s an awful compotion.
Swallow! her mother instructs. Just drink it!
For Halley, it’s the smell. Like the unflushed public toilets where she and Jen are forbidden to sit on the wooden seat; they must first put a layer of toilet paper, the long strip eased and neatly folded into an almost oval, and even then perch, tinkling quickly. It’s hard, that, letting go while you’re also holding your breath and balancing.
So as she raises the cup, in the worm mixture she smells the lavatories across from the main post office in town. Not even the Ladies Dames, but the men’s urinals. You can smell them coming a mile off.
Halley tastes the sourness in the reservoir of her nose and sobs, her shoulders hunched at the thought of what she must do. She tries to do it. Sips a little in slow motion while Nora looks on, increasingly testy.
The messy texture of the granules, the suggestion of dank soilings . . . Halley thinks of the medication as a nauseating kind of sympathetic magic. Could it be that the worms originate in the phial, meaning that it’s the medicine she gets the worms from? Kooky logic, perhaps, but there it is.
Defiantly, she bangs the mug on the table.
Which is when Nora loses her rag and grabs her daughter’s head and finally forces her. As she tries to crush the girl’s squirming, grim-lipped refusal – Yorrkilllllingmemommmmy! – Nora is conscious of this as one of the rare moments when she could swear it’s Jennie she’s dealing with, not Halley. But right now there’s No Damn Difference and the child is provoking her to violence! Aahgod for a capsule that could just be shoved between locked teeth, stuck wherever, and it would be done!
Halley will not easily open her mouth, and even then closes her throat, so that the brew rinses grittily against her teeth, puddling in the pockets of her cheeks. She gags and retches. Her mother squeezes her face, pinching her mouth shut. And eventually Halley can do nothing except swallow, because if she has to hold the taste any longer then she’ll kotch, and have to do it all over.
Both Halley and Nora hate it when the girl gets worms. So does Jen, because although she’s never seen a worm near her body, which maybe is because she’s not looking, she’s obliged to endure the same sick treatment.
With the first bout of Halley’s affliction, Nora consulted Mr Cordial, The Chemist, who maintained you could not do one, it had to be both. So both of them it was. And that was over and done with, till the next time. Which there always was, because Halley played in the sand and didn’t wash her hands and, secretly, picked her nose.
But then, oh Holy Mary Mother of God, broeks asunder over the toilet, Halley discovered she had another kind of worm, much much more terrible than the others.
Big. An awful monster which stuck there, even though she’d bent herself double trying to see, and when she saw, straightened up smartly, gasping. It seemed impossible.
Halley pushed and strained, which only sent the worm into a clenched paroxysm, flickering against her cheeks. She was trapped. She felt it licking her. She screamed for help.
Halley could see that while her mother came at once to offer comfort, she really wanted to get the hell out of there, she was that revolted. But Nora overcame her squeamishness because she had no choice, really. The girl couldn’t deal with this by herself. She needed her mother.
Pulling, looping the long worm into a few sheets of loo paper, Nora wrapped it loosely into several thicknesses and concealed
