Swallowing Grandma by Kate Long Page A

without looking at me.
    I turned back to my rolling.
    ‘Katherine?’ she said in a tight voice. ‘How do you get these bloody things off?’
    When I looked again she’d turned round and was holding her arm away from her body, and it was all stripy red round her cuff with scratching. A black cable tie bit into the skin just below the bone of her wrist and you could see the purple flush as the blood built up.
    ‘I can’t get it off ,’ she hissed. ‘ Fucking thing. The more I try, the tighter I make it. It’s agony. How do you undo it?’
    ‘I’ll ask those girls.’ I glanced over. Still writing.
    ‘No, don’t! I feel such a div.’
    ‘Well, you can’t undo them once they’re on, they’ve these little notches, can you see—’
    ‘My hand’s about to drop off—’
    ‘Hang about.’ I felt around in my purse and drew out my nail clippers between two fingers. ‘You might be able to use these to shear through the plastic.’
    She took them off me and I saw her hands were trembling. She squeezed them experimentally near the flesh but she couldn’t get the angle. ‘Oh! Shit.’ The clippers flirted onto the crash mat, then bounced onto my shoe. I scooped them up and handed them back. She had another go and this time nicked herself properly. ‘Ow, fuck, look at that. Hey,’ she said with an effort, ‘can you do it?’
    Putting my skin on hers, even though it was only fingertips on a wrist, made me want to die. I concentrated totally on the cable tie, and she might even have closed her eyes. Any moment now, I thought, Mrs Law’s going to glide over and ask us what we’re playing at. I wondered what the observation team were putting in their notes: Subjects went into what at first appeared to be a consultation huddle but within minutes had developed into lesbian-style groping. They made very little progress with their polyhedra.
    The tie pinged off and Donna yelped with relief. ‘Christ. Thanks,’ she said, rubbing the dark line where the notches had dug right in. ‘God, I’m so stupid. What a bloody bloody stupid thing to do. I’m always doing stupid things. Mum calls me Little Miss Dizzy. I just dive in, I never stop to think—’
    ‘Have you got any struts made yet?’ I asked quickly.
    ‘Too busy mutilating myself. Sorry. What can I be doing?’
    ‘Well, I’m nearly ready to make the pyramid. I might need you to hold some pieces in place while I tape the others together.’
    We got into a kind of rhythm: peel, roll, stick, bend-bend, and I sneaked glances at her while we worked. Her hair was so sleek; different shades of blonde fell across each other, then back into place when she moved her head. Her thighs were so slender that even when she sat on her haunches, they hardly spread at all. There were light freckles on her heart-shaped face. I watched her till it hurt.
    Donna had started talking like a radio DJ, rattling off questions and laughing a lot. ‘That’s such a neat pair of clippers, where d’you get them? I’ve never seen ones with a violin on the front. Cute. Hey, look at Lissa’s group, they’re making hexagons. Should we be making hexagons? Don’t you need hexagons for the dodecawhatsit? No? Shall I tell them? Won’t it be funny when they realize they’ve done it wrong. Hey, you could use those tie things if you were a criminal, bind your hostages up, they’d never escape. Shall I tear off some pieces of tape for speed? Oh, ow, ow . My God, look at that, I’ve taken all the hairs off my forearm. I bet you could use this stuff instead of waxing, bloody painful though. Mind you, so’s waxing. Can you believe there’s women who pull their own hair out, for kicks? I mean, on their heads, so they go bald? Mental.’
    We got two shapes completed before the bell went for dinner, so technically we beat everyone, although none of the Lower Sixth said that. They didn’t even tell us what they’d been observing.
    As we filed out of the gym, Donna was saying, ‘We won, didn’t