I could feel, inside me, the sticky plastic way that it tried to hold on, like a strip of pure muscle. I leaned over, as far as I could, reached out my left hand and turned on the bath’s hot tap, the one with the red dot in the centre, and I let it run. The water ran for three, four minutes out of the tap and down the plughole before it began to steam.
When the water was steaming, I extended my foot and my right arm, maintaining pressure on the tweezers and on the inch of the creature that I had wound out of my body. Then I put the place where the tweezers were under the hot tap. The water splashed my foot, but my soles were barefoot-hardened, and I scarcely minded. The water that touched my fingers scalded them, but I was prepared for the heat. The worm wasn’t. I felt it flex inside me, trying to pull back from the scalding water, felt it loosen its grip on the inside of my foot. I turned the tweezers, triumphantly, like picking the best scab in the world, as the creature began to come out of me, putting up less and less resistance.
I pulled at it, steadily, and as it went under the hot water it slackened, until it was almost all out of me. But I was too confident, too triumphant, and impatient, and I tugged too quickly, too hard, and the worm came off in my hand. The end of it that came out of me was oozing and broken, as if it had snapped off.
Still, if the creature had left anything in my foot, it was tiny.
I examined the worm. It was dark grey and light grey, streaked with pink, and segmented, like a normal earthworm. Now it was out of the hot water, it seemed to be recovering. The body that had been wrapped around the tweezers now dangled, writhing, hanging from the head (was it its head? How could I tell?) where I had pinched it.
I did not want to kill it – I did not kill animals, not if I could help it – but I had to get rid of it. It was dangerous. I had no doubt of that.
I held the worm above the bath’s plughole, where it wriggled under the scalding water. Then I let it go, and watched it vanish down the drain. I let the water run for a while, and I washed off the tweezers. Then I put a small sticking plaster over the hole in the sole of my foot, and put the plug in the bath, to prevent the worm from climbing back up the open plughole, before I turned off the tap. I did not know if it was dead, but I did not think you came back from the drain.
I put the tweezers back where I had got them from, behind the bathroom mirror, then I closed the mirror and stared at myself.
I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn’t me, and I knew it wasn’t, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?
I went back to the bedroom. It was my night to have the door to the hallway open, and I waited until my sister was asleep, and wouldn’t tell on me, and then, in the dim light from the hall, I read a Secret Seven mystery until I fell asleep.
Chapter 6
An admission about myself: as a very small boy, perhaps three or four years old, I could be a monster. ‘You were a little momzer,’ several aunts told me, on different occasions, once I had safely reached adulthood and my dreadful infant deeds could be recalled with wry amusement. But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way.
Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
But I was no longer a small boy. I was seven. I had been fearless, but now I was such a frightened child.
The incident of the worm in my foot did not scare me. I did not talk about it. I wondered, though, the next day, whether people often got foot-worms, or whether it was something that had only ever happened to me, in the orange-sky place on the edge of the Hempstocks’ farm.
I peeled off the plaster on the sole of my foot when I awoke, and was relieved to see that the hole had begun to close up. There was a pink place where it had been, like a blood blister, but nothing more.
I went down to breakfast. My mother looked happy. She said, ‘Good news, darling. I’ve got a job. They need an optometrist at Dicksons Opticians, and they want me to start this afternoon. I’ll be working four days a week.’
I did not mind. I would be fine on my own.
‘And I’ve got more good news. We have someone coming to look after you children while I’m away. Her name is Ursula. She’ll be sleeping in your old bedroom, at the top of the stairs. She’ll be a sort of housekeeper. She’ll make sure you children are fed, and she’ll clean the house – Mrs Wollery is having trouble with her hip, and she says it will be a few weeks before she can come back. It will be such a load off my mind to have someone here, if Daddy and I are both working.’
‘You don’t have the money,’ I said. ‘You said you didn’t have any money.’
‘That’s why I’m taking the optometrist job,’ she said. ‘And Ursula’s looking after you for room and board. She needs to live locally for a few months. She phoned this morning. Her references are excellent.’
I hoped that she would be nice. The previous housekeeper, Gertruda, six months earlier, had not been nice: she had enjoyed playing practical jokes on my sister and me, of the apple-pie-bed variety, which left us baffled. Eventually we had marched outside the house with placards saying ‘We hate Gertruda’ and ‘We do not like Gertruda’s cooking’, and put tiny frogs in her bed, and she had gone back to Sweden.
I took a book and went out into the garden.