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barely
see the unmade double bed, like a lonely ship under cover of a knitted afghan blanket,
bobbing in the midst of that sea of crap.
    I didn’t want to touch her, I thought she was long gone, that her cats were keeping
her cold body company and I should just make my anonymous call to 000 and beat it.
But as I got closer, the cats reared and spat as one, like a living wave, and I realised
it was worse than that, they were beginning to eat her to stay alive: there was fresh,
bright blood all over the back of the woman’s legs where they’d begun to gnaw.
    I am not ashamed to say that I untied the jumper from around my face and vomited.

    Time sped up after that. I beat the cats off, screaming like a hysterical banshee,
and turned the woman over before calling an ambulance and wrenching the front door
open for some air, any air—anything to replace the stinking fug inside the house.
And I propped her up a bit, and talked to her, and covered her with that disgusting,
hair-covered afghan blanket, all the while thinking she was already dead, and what
was I doing here, what had Eve been thinking? Would the police think I’d done it?
And before I knew it, a pair of them charged up the footpath towards me, fingers
pointing, shouting, Hold it right there, young lady, we want a word with you , and
even though I hadn’t done anything, the thought that I would go to jail froze me
on the spot.
    Somehow, she was still alive. They told me later it was a cocktail of port and medication,
old age and malnutrition, and if I’d waited even half an hour more the cats could’ve
had her. It was that close.
    Turned out, the neighbours really had called the police when they’d spotted me skulking
around the old lady’s place and I’d called emergency services, which equalled one
big, fat circus when everyone arrived, sirens screaming. Hatherlea Street had never
seen anything like it.
    Imagine Gran’s surprise when she turned on the Tuesday evening news. Some hard-nosed
journo had even managed to dig up the Crime Stoppers call I’d made with that kid’s
mum, which made me —for that day at least—bigger than, I dunno, Brangelina .

6
    While I’d been wagging school to save the old woman—who turned out to be a reclusive,
cat-collecting miser, with a fortune in gold bars buried in her back garden—word
of the miracle that had happened in the girls’ toilets had filtered everywhere.
    Of course, even if I’d been at school I would have had no idea what people were saying
about me because I never really know what’s going on. Like how skirts were suddenly
short again this year and knee-highs were back, whereas last year all the girls I
knew had been wearing long skirts and anklets, thin black Alice bands and yellow
nail polish. When the wind changed and brought the scent of distant danger to the
herd, I just never felt it.
    Anyway, Linda Jelly may have been the weakest link in the Ivy Street food chain,
but even she had friends. In my absence, her friends had told their friends who told
their friends that psychic Storkie Teague had somehow done it again—right on school
grounds this time. She’d made spooky-arse writing appear on the wall and it’d scared
the living crap out of the toughest bitches at Ivy Street High. Which meant that
Claudia P. and her best mates were gunning for me, and the three of them grabbed
me the moment I stepped back onto school property the morning after the Hatherlea incident and locked me in the gymnasium storeroom for a personal touch-up.
    The teachers at Ivy Street were deaf, dumb and blind, or they liked to see scientific
principles, the law of the jungle, in action. Despite the fact I was screaming my
head off, no one heard, saw or remembered me being bundled through the gym by the
Gang of Three just before the bell rang. I was doomed.
    ‘How’d you do that?’ Claudia said pleasantly, referring to the message Eve had helpfully
posted on the mirror. Like no time at all had passed, Sharys