there she was, a thirty-nine year old virgin, surrounded constantly by the fruits of other people's sexual encounters.
A quick wave to Mum and Dad (even though they thought she couldn't see them) and she was off. A ten minute drive into the centre of Rowley and she'd be there.
Juliet always seemed to be the first one to arrive at work. She was always there ages before anyone else. At the time she arrived at the nursery each morning there were usually only one or two other people around ? usually just Jackson the caretaker and Ken Andrews, the deputy head of the infant school to which the nursery was attached.
`Morning, Joanne,' smiled Andrews, waving across the playground. Bloody man, she thought. In all the years she'd been working in and around the school he'd never got her name right. Occasionally she thought he did it on purpose to try and wind her up, other times she decided he was just plain ignorant. But the fact of the matter was he continually got her name wrong because he rarely had any reason to speak to her about anything of importance and also because she'd left it too long to correct him without there being more embarrassment on her part than his. To say that Juliet melted into the background was something of an understatement. Years of her overbearing parents had virtually destroyed her self-esteem. Juliet had reached the point where she preferred it if no-one noticed her.
As usual the caretaker had opened up the prefabricated hut they used for the nursery class. The classroom was always cold first thing in the morning, even in summer, and this September morning was no exception. Her breath condensed in billowing clouds around her mouth and nose and the low temperature made the tips of her fingers feel slightly numb. She glanced up at the clock on the wall. Half an hour until the children were due. Probably twenty-five minutes before any of the other classroom assistants and nursery teachers would grace her with their presence. As low, depressed and dejected as she could ever remember feeling, she began to prepare the room for the morning's activities.
What the hell was that? Juliet stopped what she was doing and looked up. Fifteen minutes now to the start of class and she'd just heard an almighty crashing noise just outside the door. It sounded like kids messing around on the concrete steps which led up to the classroom. It sounded like they'd thrown something against the door. Juliet didn't like confrontation. She kept her head down, hoping that whoever it was would go away as quickly as they'd arrived. Maybe they'd just miss-kicked a football or something...
Suddenly another sound, this one very different to the first. It sounded like someone coughing and choking, but it couldn't have been, could it? Juliet crept cautiously towards the window and looked outside. The playground was empty and still with the only movement coming from the birds flying between the roof of the school building and the rubbish bins and back again. She was about to turn round and go back to what she'd been doing when she noticed it. She had to stand on tip-toe and crane her neck to see properly, but she could definitely see a foot sticking out over the edge of the steps. So there were kids messing around after all, she thought. With her pulse racing (she didn't like it when she didn't know what was happening) she walked over to the classroom door and pressed her ear against it. She couldn't hear anything outside. Very slowly she pushed the door open. Lying on the steps in front of her was the dead body of Sam Peters, one of the boys who had been in the nursery class last year. Panicking, she immediately slammed the door shut again and leant against it. Not knowing what she was going to do, and overcome with sudden nervousness and disorientation, she slid down to the floor and held her head in her hands. There was no question that the boy was dead. She'd never seen a body before but she knew he was dead. His frozen face was all twisted and contorted with pain and there were dribbles of blood on the front of his yellow school sweatshirt.
No-one's coming. Christ, no-one's coming.
Twenty minutes later and still no-one else had arrived at the school. Juliet had been counting on someone else finding Sam's body on the steps. She'd planned to act dumb and pretend she hadn't known he was there.
Someone else should have been here by now. Where were the other children?
Marie and Dorian, two of the other nursery helpers (who travelled to work together), should have arrived at least five minutes ago. So where were they? Were they outside? Had they found the body and had she just not heard them? Unlikely. She crept towards the window and peered outside again. She could still see Sam's foot. He was still there.
As the minutes ticked by her conscience finally got the better of her fear. She had to do something. She couldn't just sit there knowing that the poor boy was out there on the steps.
The main school office was directly across the playground from the nursery hut. Juliet decided she'd have to make a run for it. She'd open the door, run down the steps and then find the headteacher or the deputy head and tell them what had happened, despite the fact that she didn't know what the hell was going on herself.
She had to do it now.
Juliet put on her coat and, taking a deep breath, opened the classroom door and burst out into the open. Forcing herself to look anywhere but down at the body on the steps she half-jumped, half-tripped over the boy's corpse, landing awkwardly, twisting her foot and almost falling over. Managing to keep her balance she ran across the playground with the sounds of her footsteps, her heavy, frightened breathing and the thumping of her heart ringing in her ears.
The headmaster of the school was dead. She found him in the corner of his office, buried under a pile of papers that he seemed to have knocked off his desk when he'd fallen to the ground. She found the school secretary dead in the short corridor which ran between the office and the staff room, and in the staff room she found three dead teachers.
In a vacant, disorientated daze Juliet roamed round the silent school and then the surrounding streets looking for someone to explain to her what had happened.
Quarter past five.
After what had happened at the school Juliet returned home before midday and had found both of her elderly parents dead. Mum was in the bathroom, sprawled across the floor with her knickers round her ankles, and Dad was (as always) in his armchair, staring up at the ceiling. Dribbles of blood had run down his chin and trickled down the front of his shirt. She'd wept for them both of course (especially Mum), and had felt a real sense of devastation and loss. But after a while the hurting feeling had, unexpectedly, started to fade. In the strangest, perverse kind of way, she began to enjoy the freedom that the dark day had unexpectedly given her. She'd never had the house to herself like this. She hadn't had to eat at any particular time (not that she felt like eating anything anyway) and she hadn't had to sit through Dad's choice of television programmes (not that the television had been working). She hadn't had to explain her movements every time she got up out of her chair. For the first time in a very long time she felt free.
Juliet's small, quiet and fairly insignificant world had been turned upside down. She'd seen hundreds upon hundreds of bodies littering the streets and hadn't known the reason why any one of them had died. She'd tried to make contact with her few friends, her neighbours, the local police and pretty much everyone else she knew in the local vicinity but she hadn't been able to reach anyone. Her telephone didn't work. There were no answers when she knocked on the front doors of the houses of friends and family. Frightened and bewildered, but also feeling strangely empowered and stronger than she had done for a long, long time, she sat alone in her bedroom and waited for something to happen or someone to come and help, not that anyone knew she was there. At the end of the first day she moved Mum and Dad into the back room. When she woke up on the second day she dug two deep holes in the garden and buried them both. Dad had always wanted them to be buried together. She knew that Mum would have preferred them to be close but slightly apart. She'd still loved Dad but, like Juliet, she'd had enough of him too. KAREN CHASE
`What the hell do you call that?'
I looked at him for a second. Trick question? What did he expect me to say?
`I call it your order,' I answered. `Full English breakfast. Bacon, sausage, scrambled egg, mushrooms, hash browns and baked beans.'
`Doesn't look like the picture in the menu.'
He opened the menu up, laid it out on the table in front of him and jabbed his finger angrily at the photograph at the bottom of the breakfast section.
