Ladykiller

I'm a murderer. Proper bad one, me. Destroyed a whole family once. Didn't even have to try - I did it in one quick, sharp, move, so skilled and secretive and laissez faire that not a single person in that packed out cafe managed to witness it.

Fuck knows how old I was, but it was the Summer right before puberty hit. Right before I ballooned up like the prize heifer at a pig farm, right before hormones restricted all the oxygen to my brain and made me stupid enough to think particular boys had any interest in me, right before heartbreak, right before responsibility, right before Nickelodeon and MTV started their downward descent to shitsville, right before the awful, stinking, bleeding and the once budding, then blossomed tits which outcasted me from all my male friends.

Puberty, I'd worked out, was a vile, horrific penance for a vile, horrific act I'd recently committed.

We were in Blackpool on holiday - the working class' Paris, tower and all - and sat in a greasy spoon by the beach. That Summer what could only be described as a plague of Ladybirds had swamped the town like an outbreak of acne over every building, window, grain of sand, paving stone, fairground ride and tram. They were everywhere.

At any one time you would find at least four of the insects crawling about on your tee.

We'd just eaten and I was sipping on a coke, my brother playing on a Game Boy beside me, my parents opposite, when I leaned myself on the windowsill behind me and felt a damp, minor crunch beneath my elbow.

I froze. I tried to imagine every vile, frightening scenario as to what the squidgy crunch could have been - a shrunken head, a mouth full of teeth left abandoned on the side with gums like off fruit, a tiny egg of a miniature being, a bubble full of blood and the contorted legs of daddy long legs, and then I turned around and saw it. THE MASSACRE.

There, bleeding out on the windowsill like a smashed grape, was the ladybird I'd just savagely destroyed. It was practically broken in half - it's innards pooling about it, sticky like a candy gone bad in the sun.

I felt pretty shitty about that, in itself.

I grabbed a napkin, and stared at my parents - they hadn't witnessed the tragedy - I checked the rest of the cafe - they hadn't witnessed it either, I was safe.

I wiped the death from my elbow.

I sat shifting about uncomfortably. I waited for my parents to suddenly become aware of the situation, to get manic, angry, sickened.

YOU KILLED SOMETHING!! They'd say - YOU KILLED A LIVING THING!! WE DON'T WANT YOU ANYMORE. Stay here in Blackpool when we leave. You're no daughter of ours.

But they hadn't noticed.

Thing was, I'd killed loads of ants and spiders in my time, but this was different. Ladybirds weren't evil. Killing one was like taking a hammer to the sun.

I turned back around, and noticed at the other end of the windowsill which stretched out past about five other tables, two other ladybirds approaching, practically holding hands.

One was tiny - a baby, the other was around the same size as the one I'd just killed, and it was obvious to my child brain that it was the mother. They quickened pace when they saw the murder scene behind me.

The mother approached the corpse whilst the baby, obviously in a large amount of trauma stared frozen at who was probably the ladybird baby's papa.

The mother was crawling all over the corpse, frantically. Then the baby joined and both of them looked as though they were screaming, standing on their hind legs and thrashing about.

I wanted to apologise. I wanted to scream, IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!!, but they wouldn't have cared. No-one cares that anything's an accident, you only care that something bad has happened and it can't be undone.

Then they picked up what was left of the corpse and carried it away with them. I shit you not. They left a couple of legs behind, and part of what I guess was a piece of ladybird skull.

I stared at my parents. They smiled at me. I imagined what would happen if something bigger than us just clumsily whammed it's elbow down on my father in the same way. He'd be gone. And we'd need to carry his body out. As much of it as we could find anyway. And then I wouldn't have a dad.

I started to panic. The World seemed so unsafe, suddenly. Anything was possible.

I burst into tears, my parents came over to comfort me, console me, they couldn't get any explanation out of me apart from deep, sorrowful gasps which resembled vowels and sharp letters.

We went to the Pleasure Beach fairground that same day and went on the ride with the swings that fly out in a circle. We got engulfed by ladybirds - hundreds of them, everywhere. They got in our ears, up our noses, down our t-shirts, they got caught in our hair, and eyelashes.

They knew who I was, I thought, and they were getting their revenge.