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Storyteller
By Josephine Henley-Einion
"Heather’s telling porky-pies again," came the sneering remark from Carol Chimer, the class cow. Heather hadn’t actually been lying. No – more like embellishing the truth about her latest escapade to make it more juicy. Ok, so there hadn’t been a ten-ton truck hurtling down the High Street – it was a mini – and, ok, so there hadn’t been a small child in the middle of the road. But she had dashed out into the road to save a cat. Well, it kind of saved itself when it saw her running towards it. But in any case, had there been a truck and a child, Heather was sure that she would have done the heroic thing and saved it.
Mrs Buxton, however, was not interested in this logic. "Stop telling stories, Heather," she sighed wearily, as if this kind of thing happened every day.
To tell the truth, it had been happening a lot more lately. Heather had always been a ‘storyteller’ – the polite phrase for liar, she realised – since she was a small child herself. She often wondered why she did it. It wasn’t as if her life was uninteresting, what with all the different places she’d lived and different ‘Dad’s she’d had. It was one of those things that she just couldn’t help, like an addiction. As soon as she started talking about something that had happened, the words coming out of her mouth would get twisted and exaggerated until the tale was almost unrecognisable from the original true story.
People didn’t believe anything Heather said any more. Her friends would just look at her with raised eyebrows and say, "Yeah, yeah. We know." Her mother had warned her about children who ‘cry wolf’ and told her she was getting too old for this kind of thing now that she was a teenager. And yet this did nothing to abate the stream of make-believe that poured forth from Heather’s lips.
Lunch-time brought another corker. She was talking about her mother’s latest boyfriend, Mark, who had a revolting patch of scar tissue on his arm from a motorbike accident years before. "So I walked in on him in the bathroom – he thought no-one was home, see – and he had all these leeches on his scar, sucking out the infection."
"Oh yuk!" Sandra exclaimed.
"Do you have to, while we’re eating?" asked Liz.
"Is that really true?" asked Emma, Sandra’s gullible little sister.
"One of these days your tongue is going to fall out from all these stories you tell," said Sandra, ignoring her sister.
"If you don’t trip over your nose first," laughed Liz.
Heather shrugged. She wasn’t even bothered that they didn’t believe her. That afternoon she picked up her own little sister from nursery school. Annie was in the habit of asking for stories on the way home. Not Heather’s usual stories, but fairy tales like Goldilocks and Red Riding Hood. Heather was good at these and would add little details like giving Red a mobile phone or turning the wolf into a poodle to make Annie laugh.
They arrived home and Annie was desperate for the toilet so Heather rushed her upstairs, leaving the front door ajar. As the two girls opened the bathroom door the sight that greeted them made both scream and poor Annie wet herself. Mark was sat on the edge of the bath with a large jar of leeches and his sleeve rolled up. Fat, blood-filled leeches were attached to his skin all around the livid scar. Several had dropped to the floor at his feet.
He looked up as the girls screamed, surprise nearly causing him to drop the jar. The shock of seeing Heather and Annie had made him forget that he was holding a leech and, reaching to push his lank, greasy hair out of his eyes he somehow managed to attached the bloodsucker to his cheek. Then all three of them were screaming. Heather suddenly felt sick. Turning to see Annie running downstairs away from the bathroom, she remembered the open front door.
As Heather was chasing Annie down the stairs, her mind was a whirl. She had made up that story, hadn’t she? How could she have known that this was going to happen? Had her story come true, was it a premonition or was it just coincidence? Something like that was surely a bit too way out to be a coincidence.
Annie reached the front door still screaming and ran out of the house, Heather calling after her. Running down the road, Heather had nearly caught up with her sister when Annie darted into the traffic.
"Aaaaannniiiiiieeee!!!" Heather screamed, knowing before she looked that the vehicle charging towards her sister was an articulated lorry, the driver lost on the way out of town and looking at his map rather than the road.