Num8ers - By Rachel Ward Page 0,1

“Listen, Jem.” The words came spitting out of her face. “I don’t know what you’re going on about, but I want you to stop. It’s doing my head in. I don’t need it today. OK? I don’t need it, so just…bloody…shut…up.” Syllables stinging like angry wasps, her venom fizzing all around me. And all the time, as we sat there eye-to-eye, her number was there, stamped on the inside of my skull: 10102001.

Four years later, I watched a man in a scruffy suit write it down on a piece of paper: Date of Death: 10.10.2001. I’d found her in the morning. I’d got up, like normal, put my school things on, helped myself to some cereal. No milk, because it stank when I got it out of the fridge. I left the carton on the side, put the kettle on, and ate my Coco Pops while it boiled. Then I made Mum a black coffee and carried it carefully into her room. She was still in bed, kind of leaning over. Her eyes were open, and there was stuff, sick, down her front and on the covers. I put the coffee down on the floor, next to the needle.

“Mum?” I said, even though I knew she wouldn’t reply. There was no one there. She was gone. And her number was gone, too. I could remember it, but I couldn’t see it anymore when I looked into her dull, empty eyes.

I stood there for a few minutes, a few hours — I don’t know — then I went downstairs and told the lady in the flat below us. She came up to look. Made me wait outside the flat, like I hadn’t already seen it, silly cow. She was only gone about thirty seconds, and then she rushed out past me and was sick in the hallway. When she’d finished, she wiped her mouth on her hankie, took me back to her flat, and rang for an ambulance. Then all these people came: people in uniform — police, ambulance men; people in suits — like that man with the clipboard and paper; and a lady, who spoke to me like I was stupid and took me away from there, just like that, the only place I’d ever known.

In her car, on the way to God knows where, I kept going over and over it in my mind. Not numbers this time, words. Three words. Date of Death. Date of Death. If only I’d known that was what it was, I could have told her, stopped her, I don’t know. Would it have made a difference? If she’d known that we only had six years together? Would it? Hell — she would still have been a junkie. There was nothing on this earth that could have stopped her. She was hooked.

I didn’t like being there under the bridge with Spider. I know it was outside, but I felt closed in, trapped there with him. He filled the space with his gangly arms and legs, constantly moving — twitching, almost — and that smell. I ducked past him and out onto the towpath.

“Where you going?” he shouted behind me, his voice booming off the concrete walls.

“Just walking,” I mumbled.

“Right,” he said, catching up with me. “Walk and talk,” he said, “walk and talk.” Drawing level, too close to my shoulder, brushing against me. I carried on, head down, hood up, a blinkered patch of gravel and trash moving under my sneakers. He loped along beside me. We must have looked so stupid, me being small for fifteen and him like a black giraffe on speed. He tried to chat a bit, and I just ignored him. Hoped he’d give up and go away. No chance. Guess you’d have to tell him to piss off to get rid of him, and even then he probably wouldn’t.

“So you’re new around here, yeah?” I shrugged. “Got kicked out your old school? Been a bad girl, have ya?”

Kicked out of school, kicked out of my last “home,” and the one before that and the one before that. People just don’t seem to get me. Don’t understand that I need my space. Always telling me what to do. They think rules and routine and clean hands and minding your p’s and q’s will make everything all right. They haven’t got a clue.

He reached into his pocket. “D’you wanna smoke? I’ve got some, look.”

I stopped, and watched as he extracted a crumpled packet. “Go on, then.”

He handed me a