Jenny Downham Before I Die

Seventeen

I start with assault, shove my elbow hard into a woman’s back as I get on the bus. She spins round, crazy-eyed.

‘Ow!’ she yelps. ‘Watch where you’re going!’

‘It was him!’ I tell her, pointing to the man behind me. He doesn’t hear, is too busy carrying a screaming child and yelling into his phone to know I just slandered him. The woman sidesteps me. ‘Arsehole!’ she tells him.

He hears that.

In the commotion, I dodge the fare and find myself a seat at the back. Three crimes in under one minute. Not bad.

I rifled through the pockets of Adam’s motorbike jacket on the way down the hill, but all I found was a cigarette lighter and a bent old rollie, so I couldn’t have paid for the bus anyway. I decide to go for crime number four and light it up. An old bloke turns round and jabs a finger at me. ‘Put that out!’ he says.

‘Piss off,’ I tell him, which I believe might count as violent behaviour in a court of law.

I’m good at this. Time for a little murder now, with a round of the Dying Game.

The man three seats in front is feeding takeaway noodles to the small boy on his lap. I give myself three points for the food colouring creeping along the child’s veins.

In the opposite aisle, a woman ties a scarf about her throat. One point for the lump on her neck, raw and pink as a crab’s claw.

Another point for the bus exploding as it brakes at the lights. Two for the great globs of melting plastic from the seats splitting the air.

A counsellor I saw at the hospital said it’s not my fault. She reckoned there must be loads of sick people secretly wishing malevolence upon the healthy.

I told her my dad says cancer is a sign of treachery, since the body’s doing something without the knowledge or consent of the mind. I asked if she thought the game might be a way for my mind to get its own back.

‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘Do you play it a lot?’

The bus sweeps past the cemetery, the iron gates open. Three points for the dead slowly prising open the lids of their coffins. They want to hurt the living. They can’t stop. Their throats have turned to liquid and their fingers glint under the weak autumn sun.

Maybe that’s enough. There are too many people on the bus now. Down the aisles, they blink and shift. ‘I’m on the bus,’ they say as their mobiles chirrup. It’ll just depress me if I kill them all off.

I force myself to look out of the window. We’re in Willis Avenue already. I used to go to school along here. There’s the mini mart! I’d forgotten it even existed, though it was the first place in town to sell Slush Puppies. Zoey and me used to get one every day in the summer on the way home from school. They sell other stuff too – fresh dates and figs, halva, sesame bread and Turkish delight. I can’t believe I let the mini mart slip my mind.

Left at the video shop, and a man wearing a white apron stands in the doorway of the Barbecue Café sharpening his knife. A rack of lamb slowly rotates in the window behind him. Dinner money bought a kebab and chips there two years ago or, if you’re Zoey, it bought a kebab and chips plus a cigarette from under the counter.

I miss her. I get off the bus in the market square and phone her. She sounds like she’s underwater.

‘Are you in a swimming pool?’

‘I’m in the bath.’

‘On your own?’

‘Of course I’m on my own!’