Creepy and Maud by Dianne Touchell Read Free Book Online Page A

since the drawing, I feel really different. My love has become painful. All of a sudden I have a new understanding of, and sympathy for, Owen Liddell. His belief was overrun by his expectations. Poor bastard.
     
    They teach belief at my school. They teach belief as if it’s a reality. Not a bad class, actually. It’s not academically challenging; you don’t have to think inthere. In fact, thinking is actively discouraged. It’s called Religious Studies, but of course it’s not a study of religion at all. I don’t care. I quite like it. Maud gets in trouble in that class a lot. Her one hundred words describing her experience of God, for example.
     
    We all had to do it. Easiest hundred words we ever had to write. We all knew exactly what was expected of us. Maud handed in an almost blank page. She’d written ‘My Experience of God’ at the top of the page. The rest was blank. Everyone thought she was taking the piss. I thought it was the most creative and honest thing I’d ever seen. That was her mistake. You don’t get creative or, worse, honest in Religious Studies. She’s been punished, of course. They don’t call it punishment at our school, though. They call it ‘an opportunity for reflection’. Maud has been made to stand at the front of chapel every day for a week and deliver the reading. She has a small voice and a couple of times has had to start again because the teachers at the back couldn’t hear her. It’s like something out of a Brontë novel. I don’t know how she feels about it. Her face is inscrutable.
     
    Our chapel is very modern. No high arches of echoic stone, no polished floorboards or frescoes on flaky rendering. I don’t know about anyone else, but if I’m going to have a good experience in chapel, I at least want a frigging stained-glass window. We have brightwhite painted walls with felt wall hangings depicting scenes from the Bible. Felt. They’re not even stitched; they’re glued. All these little pieces of garish felt glued onto a garish felt background, some lifting in places like a junior-school collage. One of Paul’s legs has peeled right away: an amputee on the road to Damascus. Jesus and Lazarus look like characters from South Park. There are no shadows or dark colours for God to hide in.
     
    Of course, we have a chaplain. Only member of staff allowed to touch the students. Which is somewhat ironic, if you ask me. He’s never touched me. But I’ve seen him holding someone’s hand, saying a prayer. The chaplain works very closely with the school counsellor. I wonder if he’s ever touched Maud. Maud doesn’t like to be touched. Maud prefers being smacked to being touched.
     
    I don’t know many people who do like being touched, but most people will tolerate it. I don’t like it but something inside me tells me to endure it. Good manners? The feeling that objecting to the touching will draw even more attention? Something worse than attention, even—scrutiny, perhaps? Mum touches me sometimes. Her hand caressing the back of my hair as she walks by me feels like a mugging. I have to grit my teeth. I want to shout, ‘Too late!’ I want to put Dobie Squires on her. I wonder if I will feel this anger whenother people touch me. It’s an anger that makes me tired. She touches me to make sure I’m still real and to tell me she is real, too. There’s no belief in it.
     
    I watch Limo-Lionel stroke Maud’s cheek and she screams. He puts his hand out very slowly and touches the side of her face with his fingertips. Gently, tenderly, even. She screams so fucking loud that I drop the binoculars. By the time I recover, she is standing in the same position with her eyes shut tight and her face screwed into a rigid fist. Limo-Li has left the room. It’s as if her scream has made him evaporate, or shattered him into pieces too small to see. Maud is a burning bush, an oracle. I think: That’s my anger. Over there in her room, raising the pressure in my eyeballs,