This is what we’re made of. This is who we are - 2

School Hall

Skirt

Goal posts dismantled, balls back in the PE cupboard

Making way for impromptu assembly.

I’m cross because we're winning

But the teacher says this is important

So I sit on the third row from the front

Still in my netball skirt.

I notice my knees sprouting new, fine hairs.

I trace my name sewn in chain stitch,

Inexpert and woollen, on the front of my skirt.

“Be careful”, says the teacher.  “No-one knows when or where he’ll attack next.”

“Walk in pairs, always let someone know where you are.  Report suspicious-looking men.”

That morning on the school bus, I changed my school skirt for one stolen from my mother –

Frumpy pleats for a rolled-waistband tightness

My friend’s ruck-sack providing make-shift modesty,

Back when a boy’s grope felt like love.

Red sauce

In the dining hall, ketchup drips thinly onto cardboard burgers,

Resurrects a zombie bun.

It disgusts me, it excites me -

With a Jane Eyre gothic girlishness -

This thinking of the victims.

Naming them from the papers –

Wilma, Irene, Jane, Vera, Barbara, Jacqueline.

The assembly makes it more real

More likely he is closer.

Silly, little girls we were,

No sense of what men could do

In car-parks and back alleys,

With axes and with knives.

In the dining hall, the back of my mother’s skirt is wet.

I wipe it and my hand is red.

Space dust

In my bedroom, the roof of my mouth crackles and fizzes with space dust.

I open my mouth so I can hear it better,

Thinking about galaxies and black holes.

Downstairs, my mother is shouting and I tune in over the crackling.

My dad’s voice – hurt, denying. “No, it wasn’t like that.”

“It was” my mother says.  “When you were fucking her in the back of our car.”

“Ok”, my dad says.  Then silence, the space dust the crackle of radio waves from a distant star.

Later, he comes to talk to me about my mother’s stolen skirt.

To talk to me about dishonesty, to tell me everything is going to be fine.

“Don’t talk to me about dishonesty”, I say.  “Don’t you dare tell me what to do.”

He leaves me and goes downstairs.  I can hear my mother crying.

I want to go and apologise for taking her skirt, but I don’t know how.

My dad is speaking to her softly, telling her everything will be ok.

And this much I know –

The sound of a lie in my ear will always taste like space dust.