“Christ!” they said. “Bloody hell! Look at that.”
The little children, who up till then had only been crying, started to scream.
I can hardly bear to remember what happened, next. I suppose it reminds me too painfully of the past. You see, after the accident, after my face healed, my mother decided that it would be best for me to have plastic surgery to put things right. So I went back into hospital where they broke my cheekbones again and tried to rearrange my eye socket. But something went wrong. It does sometimes. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Maybe I rejected my own tissue.
My mother had begun hopefully but after the failure it became harder and harder for the doctors to comfort her. In the end, she took my little sister and went north to Scotland and I never saw her again. It was a relief in a way. Because as she became unable to stand the sight of my face, I became unable to stand the sight of hers. Well, not her face, exactly, more the expression on it. I don’t have to look at myself, but I do have to look at the people who are looking at me. I know I am a fright, and when people look at me they become ugly too.
The last line in the movie King Kong is: “ ’Twas beauty killed the beast.” Well, in my experience, it’s the other way round. When even the prettiest people look at me they become horrible, so the beast kills beauty.
The little kiddies screamed.
The lad with the clear blue eyes said, “God! No wonder it wears a monkey suit.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here before I throw up.”
I got up. I couldn’t find my mask. I took off my gauntlets. I hit him on the side of his handsome head, and when he was down I dropped on his throat with all my weight.
You know, sometimes you find a piece of backbone in a tin of salmon, and when you get it between your teeth it breaks with a soft crunching sound. It was as easy as that.
I shouldn’t have done it. I was bigger than him. He was only a kid really — not a child anymore but not grown-up either. But at the time it seemed to me he had taken away everything that was mine. All I had was an illusion anyway — the illusion of being a monster. You can’t kill someone for that. It just isn’t enough.
The funny thing is how nice everyone was about it — even the police. “I understand,” everyone kept saying. They look at my face and they say, “I understand,” as if my face tells them everything, as if a disfigured face clearly explains an ugly action. Even the doctors, who are educated men and should know better, think it was years of taunts and rejection that drove me to murder. My solicitor tells me he’s sure the court will accept a plea of self-defence. “They’ll understand,” he says confidently.
What if I tell the court I just lost my temper? Suppose I tell them, as I’m telling you, that my face doesn’t represent me any more than yours does you? My face is an accident, but I am responsible for my actions. A sad life and an ugly face do not make me any less responsible for losing my temper, do they?
Perhaps they really think I’m King Kong, that I’m not quite human. Just as they feel sorry for King Kong, because although he’s a monster he seems to feel human emotions, so they feel sorry for me. If they really thought I was human they’d deal with me the same way they dealt with that man who murdered his girlfriend last month because she threw a plate of baked beans in his face. They don’t tell him they understand.
But look on the bright side. Fantasyland has a new regulation now and teenagers are not allowed in unless accompanied by a little child. Apart from that, Cherry says it’s business as usual. She says it’s not the same without me though, and she doesn’t think the man who took over my job will last the summer.
“He complains like anything on sunny days,” she told me last time she visited. “He’s got eczema and the itching drives him crazy.”
Cherry should know. Life can be hell for a hot dog, too, on a sunny day. You don’t have to be King Kong to suffer.
Carlotta Green
by Alan K. Young
Evelyn Lying There
by Anne Wingate
The authenticity of Anne Wingate’s police stories is a legacy of the seven years she herself spent in law enforcement before taking a PhD. in English literature and pursuing her dual career as professor and writer. The author now lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and four children...
When you see an FBI agent and two detectives coming in the door of the police station, you figure they’re working on something.
At least, I did, and I said, “Hi, Steve.”
For a minute he looked as if he didn’t even recognize me — no wonder, in this dumb uniform, and after all, I knew he was here but he didn’t know I was here. He’d had no reason to know. But it had only been seven months, and after a moment his eyes focused on me and he said, “Lorene?”
Then he stopped, so suddenly one of the detectives bumped into him, and said, “Are you working here now?”
I started to say yes, but before I quite got the words out one of the detectives growled, “Come on, Hallett,” which didn’t sound too friendly to me, and Steve and the detectives went on.
I headed for the master room to sort out my paperwork, angry tears stinging the back of my eyes. Seven months ago I could have said, “What’ve you got?” and he’d have told me and we’d have talked it over. Or, more likely, he’d have said, “Lorene, come help me with this, would you?”
It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, and no use reminding myself that life isn’t usually. Then I’d been a detective myself, four hundred miles away, but Allen had been transferred, and after all, I was Allen’s wife even if I was beginning, off and on, to wonder if I really wanted to be. So I’d come here, too, and started over as a rookie in this two-bit department, doing routine door-shaking and writing parking tickets, because I was the first female officer this small town had had and they didn’t know what to do with me, never mind that it had been eight years since I’d written a parking ticket or shaken a door.