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This is a story about me, that’s all.
OK, first thing – my name is Dawn Bundy. Second thing – I’m fifteen years (and seven days) old. Third thing – I live with my mum in an ordinary house on an ordinary street in an ordinary town in England. Fourth thing – I’m totally unattractive and I don’t give a shit. Fifth thing – I also tend to exaggerate sometimes, and this is probably one of those times. Which probably means that I am unattractive, but I’m not totally unattractive (i.e. I’m not eye-burstingly hideous or anything). I’m just kind of non-delectable, if you know what I mean. I have no discernible shape. No womanly, curvy, magazine-girly shape. Basically, I’m just kind of round and plain and lumpyish. So, yes, of course, I do give a shit that I’m not delectable. I’d love to be delectable – Little Miss Pretty, Little Miss Hot, Little Miss Look-At-Me-And-I’ll-Make-You-Quiver. Who wouldn’t want to be like that? I mean, beauty isn’t just skin deep, is it? Beauty (and non-beauty) is belly deep, heart deep . . . it’s life-definingly deep. Anyway, all I’m trying to say is that I know I’m not beautiful, and that’s all there is to it. Sixth thing – my mum’s name is Sara and she’s forty-nine years old. Seventh thing – my dad’s name is John and he disappeared two years ago. And last thing – today is the first day of January, the start of a brand-new year. And tomorrow I’m going to start killing God.
It doesn’t mean anything, OK? Killing God – it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a thing, that’s all. Just an idea, something to do, something to keep me occupied. (And, no, it’s not a New Year’s Resolution either.) I just like doing things that keep my mind off the things I don’t want to think about (or, to be more specific, the thing I don’t want to think about). Last year, for example, towards the end of summer, I did this thing with painted snails. What it was, I was out in the back garden one night, picking up some dog poos (I’ll tell you about my dogs later on), and it’d been raining all day, so everything was all wet and horrible, and I happened to notice that the garden path was covered in snails. There were loads of them – all sliming around on the rain-soaked concrete, snailing here and snailing there . . . and it got me thinking. I had no idea what I was thinking about, but I didn’t really mind. I was happy enough just standing there in the rainy summer night, with a dog-poo bag in my hand, watching the slow-motion dance of the snails, just thinking, thinking, thinking . . . thinking about nothing in particular.Letters, words, messages. What would happen, I wondered, if I collected a load of snails, painted letters on their shells, and then released them back into the garden? I mean, what would I find when I went out into the garden the next night? Would the snails know they had letters on their backs? Would they arrange themselves so that the letters spelled out snaily messages to me? HULLO DAWN. WE LUV U (I imagine that snails are very poor spellers). Or maybe the painted snails would slope off into the gardens next door and spell out messages to my neighbours. U BAD. WE KIL U. And so, with that in mind (and smiling to myself), I dropped the dog-poo bag into the bin, called my dogs, and went back inside to start working it all out. It didn’t take long. All I needed was some fluorescent paint, a fine paintbrush, a cardboard box and some snails. The only tricky bit was trying to decide how many letters I should use to make it work – i.e. how many As, how many Bs, how many Cs, and so on. Like in Scrabble, you know? I mean, you don’t just have equal numbers of every letter, do you? Because some letters get used a lot more than others. Anyway, after a lot of thinking, and a lot of counting up letters in books and stuff, I eventually realized (kind of dumbly) that it was just like Scrabble, so why not just copy the Scrabble letters (i.e. twelve Es, nine As, nine Is, 8 Ns, etc)? So that’s what I did. (Except there are one hundred letters in a Scrabble set, which would have meant collecting one hundred snails. Which is a lot of snails. So I just more or less halved the Scrabble numbers instead.) Over the next two nights, I collected about fifty snails and painted fluorescent letters on their shells (which took me most of another night), and then I released them all back into the garden. And, yes, I know this all sounds pretty dull, but it was actually quite exciting – waiting for the next night to come round, wondering what was going to happen when I went out into the garden with my torch, wondering if the snails had anything to say . . . Unfortunately, nothing much happened at all. And the reason that nothing much happened at all was mainly that the fluorescent paint I’d used turned out to be poisonous (Harmful if swallowed, inhaled, etc. May be fatal to aquatic organisms). I have no idea how the poisonousness got through the snails’ shells into the snails themselves, but it did. And the end result of my snail-communication experiment was: a) four dead snails, their (still intact) shells spelling out – MNEH b) twelve dead snails, their slimily crushed shells unreadable c) thirty-four missing/presumed dead snails and d) two dead thrushes. Q. What’s all this got to do with anything? Like I said, I’m just trying to explain the kinds of things I do, that’s all. The kinds of things I’ve been doing for the past two years to keep my mind off the other Dawn, the thirteen-year-old Dawn . . . the Dawn who lives in a cave inside my head. (The cave is small and cold and it has no sound and I try to make it soft like a pillow but most of the time it’s hard like stone. It has to be hard to keep out the monsters.)
4:50 PM
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