Free Creepy and Maud by Dianne Touchell Page A

pointing and yelling before Dad has even opened the front door. So is Dad. They don’t realise immediately that they’re yelling about different things. Dad’s going off about damage to his verge grass (he’d never been much into his verge grass until someone else wanted to use it) but stops short when he catches ‘that creepy kid of yours again’ in the middle of Li’s tirade. That’s when Mum gets involved, gesticulating wildly with her tumbler of red gripped in one hand and a fag in the other. It gets really rowdy when Li calls Mum a ‘soak’ and Dad calls Li a ‘poofter’. (A poofter? Merrill is obviously panicked if that’s the best he can come up with.) Mum is hissing, ‘Just punch him, Merrill,’ when I start my retreat. The actual fisticuffs begin when Dad says: ‘My kid creepy? If you don’t rein that girl of yours in, she’s going to end up as bald as that fucking cat.’
     
    I had humiliated Lionel. This is how it started.
     
    Mum downstairs ashing into the kitchen sink. Dad writing notes in his best printing to slip under windscreen wipers. Me upstairs talking to Maud:
     
    —Why you not at wake?
     
    —IT IS NOT A WAKE IT IS A PARTY
     
    That’s when I turned my attention to Li’s backyard and had a really good look. I suppose it was a party: a couple of people had already taken their shoes off. The mourners were all sitting on plastic chairs in the sun, drinking beer and wine out of plastic cups. There was a trestle table set up near the back steps of the house, covered with dishes of food. Someone (Li?) had twisted crepe paper into long streamers and stuck them around the edges of the table. There was music playing. Only thing missing was the keg. Yup. Party.
     
    I think the guest of honour should always attend the party. Might stop gaffes like the crepe paper streamers. That’s what they used to do, you know. You’d get your sandwich and booze for attending the funeral but you’d have to eat and drink in front of the corpse. Corpse-watching, they called it. Lykwake. I read a book once about people accidentally buried alive. One of the solutions to the problem was to watch the corpse for a few days, just to make sure it didn’t wake up. Now, that would be a party.
     
    Maud was sitting at her little table, pulling at her eyelashes. I sat, too, resting my elbows on my desk, pressing the binoculars hard into my forehead, as if that could bring her closer. When Limo-Li opened her bedroom door, I stood up so quickly, my chair fell over backwards. I positioned myself off to one side, my shoulder squared against the window sash, my neck craned just enough to see without being seen. Li was talking quietly to Maud, or I should say to the back of Maud’s head. She hadn’t moved at all. Then suddenly she laughed. I could tell she was laughing, not only from the contortion of her own face but from the expression on Lionel’s. He was angry. He grabbed Maud’s wrist and yanked her out of the chair, forcing her to stand in front of him. She wasn’t laughing now.
     
    The thing about binoculars is that although they make objects appear closer than they really are, they also have a strange distancing effect. Li had Maud’s head between both his hands. His knuckles were white and his lips were pulled back in a growl. He was twisting her head from side to side. I knew what he was looking at. He was closer than I’d ever got. He could probably smell the blood. I had surprisingly little reaction to all this manhandling. I didn’t feel particularly protective. I wasn’t even overly interested beyond the normal curiosity one feels when involuntarily confronted with aprivate melee. I really just wanted them to get on with it so I could have Maud back to myself. I put all this down to the binoculars.
     
    Don’t get me wrong. I was concerned about Maud. I do love her, after all. I suppose I felt the same way I feel when Dobie Squires has Mum cornered. And although I wouldn’t have enjoyed