Texts for Translation 2010:
  Penny Pepper

Stars

by Penny Pepper

Nicky's pink bear was propped at the bottom of her bed, fraying along the seams. Posters of her favourite pop-stars smiled down from a side wall.

She absorbed the familiarity of these objects but as the secure real world reclaimed her from a leaden sleep, so did the pain.

Both her knees were alive with a deep red-glow of agony. Once her mind flicked the switch to wake up, every other feeling was void. It was an ingrained pain that held each of her knees in a hot merciless fist, grinding into her curdled stomach with awful sickness.

A hot wave ran up her back as she opened her caked lips to yelp.

‘Please, I feel sick.’

She grated the words, hooking an observant nurse with pleading eyes.

Nicky was relieved. It was Mrs Busby, one of her favourites. The urge rose with a sense of its own panic, confronting her guts. She would never make it, no, it would not hold back until the sick bowl arrived.

‘Alright Nicky, alright.’ Mrs Busby deftly lifted her head and the sick bowl was there tucked under her chin.

I don't want to be sick-I don't-I don't, she thought, as her stomach juddered and her mouth rung out a tiny glob of pale saliva. They, them, the medical staff always say you won't be sick - it's not that bad - just be a good girl. Do as you're told, we know best, bloody blah blah blah.

And They were always wrong, always lying in this place, this stupid Special hospital, for special disabled kids, where she was thrown into for ages and ages, to be twisted and chopped.

But Mrs Busby at least soothed a hand across her forehead, just like mum, just like home. The sickness eased and she was aware of a sharp thirst, her knees huge throbbing bonfires that wanted to burst flames from her freshly cut skin.

‘Woke up then?’ a querulous young voice cut across her pain.

Angie Rose, bloody Angie Rose, the most snobby, spiteful, big-headed cow-bag on the ward. Everyone knew it. Except the stupid staff.

‘You know what you've got a chance to do now, don't you?’ Angie's large mouth stretched into a hard grin.

Nicky had a gloomy feeling that Angie had been talking at her for ages, droning on regardless of her anaesthetic stupor. Nicky had no idea what Angie was talking about but knew she'd soon be told.

‘With those just done,’ Angie jabbed her finger dangerously near Nicky's freshly scalpelled knees. On purpose, yes, Nicky knew, just to make her wince.

‘Leave her alone. Don’t be such a shit. She’s still not awake properly.’

Nicky heard her best friend Joanie, her low strong voice a good sound in her sore head.

‘Whatever,’ Angie continued with loud sarcasm. ‘With them nicely sorted out she’ll have to exercise like mad. There'll be no excuse. And maybe at last, lazy slut Nicky will win a gold star.’

Angie's grin split an inch wider, her sharp blue eyes disappearing into dark glinting slits.

‘I got another one today. So I might get another treat out with the physios.’

Bloody bully for you, Nicky thought too tired to respond gamely, drifting back to the effects of the anaesthetic.

But how she loathed those stars and the torture of that stupid damn chart.

Three weeks ago when she had arrived at the hospital for more planned treatments, Joan had shown her the chart pinned up in the physiotherapy room.

Her heart went angry cold. She knew she would never get a gold star. Probably not even a green one - and that was the lowest of the low. A sort of ‘not trying hard enough’ star that was meant to make you ashamed of your poor efforts.

Nicky was not ashamed and the staff knew it. Since her recent arrival, for the latest surgical assault upon her crooked limbs, she had been cajoled, coaxed, bullied and screamed at to work harder. There were always new muscles to strengthen, fresh tendons to stretch, different joints to crack.

Her arguments against the effort for what was always so little result, always fell on ears that were welded shut against teenage reasoning. They were unable to accept her view, which did not involve normalising a deformed child. Nicky felt aggrieved that her clever ripostes never dented the iron indifference of adult logic.

On and on it went – even if you go through agonies, we will cut out your embarrassing parts. Even if, after years of difficult, painful surgery it is clear you will never find a world to accept your body, you will at least stand Up-Right like Us, be a near approximation of Us, acceptable in Our eyes, made good in Our image.

Nicky knew how they thought without needing the long words they relied on. She knew that their logic was based on one hard little rock of horrible truth. They had power over them. They could tell them what to do.

The medical staff shoved their truth, their absolute power hard, by telling them that every bossy task was for their own good. So if you were called lazy or uncooperative, it was you who suffered in the end. Not getting better was then your fault.

And oh, how they wanted you to know it.

*

Nicky was almost her usual self by teatime. Joan combed out her hair for her with a usual deft skill while she put on some peach matt eye shadow and black mascara to perk up her spirits.

Angie was prowling around, whispering to her friend Carmel, a tall stick pin girl with severely parted hair and a mean look in her eyes. Nicky knew they were talking about her but didn't care. She was harder than Angie. Once she'd made her cry, telling her she had a really fat bum.

Nicky was allowed to sit at the table with the rest of the girls as they ate but was rationed to cold water. Her legs were stuck out in front on wide planks of wood, jutting from the wobbly wheelchair she was wrestled into.

Angie brayed about her gold star.

‘Miss Bacon says I got it for working so hard on my wrist.’ She waggled the appropriate joint in demonstration. ‘It's almost normal now’.

‘Big whoopee for you,’ murmured Nicky. ‘I bet you've been boring everyone with that pathetic gold star stuff all day. Stupid childish crap. Winning a star for being a good girlie?’ Why should I damn well care about a stupid gold star? It’s for kids. Little ickle baby stuff. I don't care if I never win one off the-the bastards.’

The table hushed at her sudden swearing. She said it with bravado and she meant it. Angie withdrew her eyes.

And in some outraged gap of her growing, unsettled mind, Nicky’s hatred for the chart brewed deeper. She would show them, she would get them all back somehow.

*

Nicky stared at the square chart, her eyes boring into the paper. She knew it, another bloody sickly-green thing. Khaki her mum called it. More like cacky she thought.

She had tried because she wanted to go home. Her knees were owning up to having a few muscles, but she could not produce the necessary low obedience, the simpering and creeping around the staff. This was what they did not like. And this was the thing would never change within her.

She got through that day by remaining silent, stubborn in her determination to ignore Angie's taunts.

There had to be a way to get back. There had to be.

‘I pretty sure I'm going to the burger bar as my treat,’ Angie smirked, pointing at her newly won star on the chart in the Physio room.

Nicky wanted to stuff the chart up Angie's large bottom.

She looked up to see where Joan was and grinned suddenly when she saw her.

‘Joan, come here a minute, something really important I want to ask you.’

Angie’s eyes flipped to them immediately.

Nicky gestured Joan to the corridor, a sly smile on her face as an idea pushed out thoughts of Angie’s gloating expression.

*

The corridors of the hospital stretched out before Nicky and Joan, dark shadowy catacombs. Every tiny noise was magnified by the power of darkness, and they crept along terrified of unknown things lurking in every dusty doorway.

‘I wish the physio room wasn't at the other end of the hospital.’ Nicky's words shook with a suppressed tremble.

‘What do you expect in an old dump like this? Anyway, they probably put it as far away from our ward as possible, just to make us walk further.’

Joan's voice wavered with fragile bluster, as she kept up her steady push of Nicky's uncooperative wheelchair.

At last the outer physio doors came into view, a ghostly grey-green. Around them the noises of night time murmured and clicked and scraped. Nicky's heart was a panicking bird inside her chest. She knew they were doing wrong - but she also knew she was glad to do wrong.

As Joan heaved open one door a huge noise screeched, making Nicky jump so hard she fretted that her surgery stitches had burst.

‘Joanie!’

‘It’s just the door hinge sounding louder in the dark.’

Joan eased Nicky’s chair through the doorway, stifling a giggle.

For every minute that passed they expected to be caught, and both anticipated punishment, ready to take it but nothing as remotely fearsome as the night matron appeared.

They went straight to the chart, pinned up outside the head physio's locked office.

‘Wish we could get in there.’ Joan raised her hand towards the closed room. ‘Bet they've got some interesting stuff written about us.’

‘Yeah, but I wouldn't want to know,’ Nicky muttered as she stared at captured enemy - the stars, the chart.

For a moment they merely scrutinised it, breathing quickly.

The Star Reward Chart was an amateur affair of roughly drawn rows and columns, a brazen announcement of who fitted the mould of expected behaviour; and of which crippled girl had kicked her inadmissible limbs against the tight strictures of the staff's unmoving ideals.

Nicky bored holes of fire into it, instincts grabbing her hate and forming into a muted half-realisation that the medics were wrong, very wrong to keep trying to change her - her as she was that could never be as They were. She was normal to herself. Why did they want her to be different, to strive painfully for the impossibility of being like them?

‘Are you ready?’ Joan shone a borrowed torch forward to illuminate the wall.

‘Let's scribble on it first.’ Nicky rushed to deface Angie's gold stars with her thick marker pen. One happy day she knew Angie would realise that no normal existence lurked around the corner of a hundred more operations and a million more tedious exercises. And on that momentous day a crestfallen Angela Rose would perhaps remember Nicola Cook.

‘Oh dear, look Joan, you naughty disobedient girl, you've only got blue stars. That's only one up from my spewy green level.’

‘Aw, shame. I'll have to do something about that.’ Joan gleefully demolished her own line with a few deft strokes.

Nicky scrubbed out her own set and all that was left was a total scrawled mess. Joan pulled down the chart with relish.

‘Right, let's finally kill this-this bastard.’

The words bolted from her lips, with the savoured feeling. No one was allowed to swear, not even a stupid bloody was permitted.

They left the physio room, suppressing giggles as they closed the creaking door behind them. And still no one came.

They positioned themselves in a shielding doorway, and as Joan held the chart gingerly by one corner, Nicky fumbled with a packet of matches she had conned out of her older brother. She struck three times before her nervous, stiff fingers steadied enough to light the match. The chart protested briefly in a leap of flame before surrendering itself into falling burnt flakes that crumbled into the tin rubbish bin that they had stolen from the ward.

Nicky stared at Joan. They both laughed aloud, uncaring as to who heard them.

*

Next morning Angie was preening herself at the breakfast table. Nicky's knees had died and gone to hell taking her with them to a pitiless furnace of pain.

‘I think I shall count up my stars for the month,’ Angie remarked towards.

Lifting a drooping drowsy head, Nicky smiled at Joan, saying nothing.

They both knew she would not be smugly counting up any damn bastard gold stars today.

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