Lil-bit Learns

They named her Lil-bit. The name on her birth certificate was Charlotte, but Lil-bit was what they said, day after day. Her mother and her father. As they stroked her grazed knees, played with toys, made her food, tucked her bed covers around her. Lil-bit, Lil-bit, how we love our tiny Lil-bit of baby love.

A quiet child. Thoughtful, sweet, with dark curls and a pleasant disposition. She looked about the world with unfettered fascination. Studying everyone and everything with an intensity unmatched by other children. When she was four, people said how serious she looked. Her parents began to frown. So she developed an easy smile, exercised the sweetness of her rosy cheeks. The frowns lifted.

Lil-bit’s mind was unlike most others. Her ferocity of thought led to a surprising development at the age of seven years. When her parents slept. When the house was quiet and still. With the doors locked, alarms set and with the dog in guard position in the centre of the stairs. When all was still, and as it should be, in the darkness of the night, that was when seven-year-old Lil-bit slipped from her bed, and her body, for the first time.

With a hand tucked under her pillow, one arm around her best teddy, Lil-bit was ruminating on something that had happened earlier in the day. There had been a man in the hot house gardens, wandering around as Lil-bit and her mother took a stroll between the flowers and ferns. He’d been wearing a shiny suit, aftershave oozing from his skin with a smell so strong that Lil-bit wrinkled her nose and had to try hard to keep from coughing. Her mother and her had continued their meandering and when her mother wanted to use the bathroom Lil-bit stayed by the orchids, gazing at their fragile beauty.

The man reappeared, further down the walkway, to the side of the ferns where the light grew dim and spiders occasionally made cobwebs. He waved a hand at her and gestured for her to come over. Lil-bit, being an obedient child, walked over to where he was. Lil-bit had watched people her whole life and, while this man was behaving mostly like the adults she had met, something woke inside her and made her feel like everything was more colourful and sharper than it had been only moments before. He smiled as she approached, fidgeting with his trousers and breathing in a funny way. A bit like her PE teacher when he was jogging around the quad. She stopped two feet away, meaning to get closer but her feet becoming still without her asking them to. He reached his hand out, beckoning her closer.

‘I have something to show you.’ He said, his voice cracking at the last words.

Lil-bit said nothing, tilting her head and wondering if it was going to be a daft magic trick like the ones her Uncle Mikey did that Lil-bit still laughed at, but only because she liked the way he grinned when she did.

‘Come closer.’

The shadows looked a lot darker than they usually did and Lil-bit didn’t like it, but an adult had asked her to do something, so she did.

His other hand was inside his trousers now. She thought that was strange. Were adults allowed to do that? Kids weren’t. Billy at school did that once and Mrs. Martin had told him off. Here, in the hothouse gardens and far from school, the hand that beckoned found her skin. First it laid on her shoulder, then began sliding down her arm and over her fingertips, down and along her leg to her knee. When it got to bottom of her skirt his fingertips slid under it. His skin was hot and damp, there were rough bits on his hand that felt sharp against her leg. The hand got higher and his breathing got faster. Partly Lil-bit was fascinated, she’d never seen behaviour like this before. But when his hand reached her upper thigh a feeling sprang up in Lil-bit’s mind. It was not one that she knew. It was like fear, but not the same as when she had had to go down the big slide for the first time or when she had to go up to bat in PE. This more like when she’d snuck into the kitchen late at night and the shadows had made her scared. Except that was a jumpy kind of scared. This one felt like a bad, sicky kind of scared. Like sad puppy, quivering inside her mind, like the adverts on television, tied up to lampposts ad left behind. His fingertips made it all the way up to her underwear and began to touch. Lil-bit felt the puppy begin to howl.

Her mother called out.

‘Lil-bit!’

The hand went away. Lil-bit turned and ran toward the voice. The puppy running too. She ran right up to her and wrapped her arms around her mothers’ legs.

‘Are you okay?’

Lil-bit squeezed her eyes tight shut. Breathed in her mothers’ light, clean smell. Her mother pulled away and crouched down, big brown eyes looking into Lil-bit. The eyes looked worried and Lil-bit didn’t want her mother to worry, she just wanted to be held so that the puppy would feel better. So, in her mind she put a blanket over the puppy and on her face, she put a nice big smile and tried to think of something to say.

‘Can we get ice cream?’

The worry left her mother’s eyes and she laughed. It was a beautiful sound.

‘Yes of course. What’s a hot house visit without ice cream to cool down? What flavor would you like?’

Lil-bit kept her chatting about flavors all the way to the café, not seeing the man again but for a moment, as they passed the cacti, she could smell that horrible sickly smell and had to concentrate hard not to throw up.

Later, tucked into bed, homemade quilt covering her, Lil-bits thoughts returned to the man in the gardens. He wouldn’t seem to get out of her head, and it was annoying. It kept replaying over and over and while she couldn’t quite articulate what was so wrong, Lil-bit sensed that something had been very wrong and that somehow, something had been taken from her. Something she needed for peace of mind. Anger grew, bigger than she had felt before. Bigger, even, than when Billy at school had pushed her over and broken her lunchbox. It burned her flesh and banged against her ribs. Lil-bit didn’t like it. It was too hot and too much, so she tried to blow it out like her Mum had taught her to do when other children had called her names or taken her pencils at school, but it was too big and it wouldn’t go. She tried to wrap it in a quilt and that worked a bit, but not enough. It was still trying to spread. She imagined her hands pushing it back together, dragging wisps of red and pink and purple and black into the shape of a cloud. She kept pushing, folding and pressing. After thinking and imagining very hard for a long, long time, Lil-bit felt like it might be under control. Inside her head she opened her hands and there, laying on one palm was a scarlet red marble. She peered at it, at the smooth glass surface. Closing her eyes tight, she looked out into the world for the man.

She found him. Laughing, talking to big women in a noisy place with lots of tables, music playing and stains on the floor. She squeezed the marble tight in her hand and watched him. He left the woman and walked into a bathroom, like the ones at the restaurant they sometimes go to but not as clean. There were funny looking basins low down on the wall. The man went to the mirror and stared at himself. He poked at a flake of skin by his nose. Lil-bit tried to look into his eyes and, with a lurch that rocked the marble in her mind, she found herself looking out of the mirror and into his face. The man’s hand went still. He peered into the glass, Lil-bit worried for a second that he could see her too but then he turned to look behind him. Nothing was there and he turned back. He frowned and leaned in closer. Lil-bit could see red veins running along his nose and up to his eyes. She does not like him. The red marble was getting hotter and hotter. She did not want it anymore. He leaned closer, pulling down his eyelid with one hand and staring at the skin, tilting his head one way then the other. She waited for him to lean in and when he did, when his face was almost pressed against the mirror, she lifted her hand, the red marble held between her fingertips. She pushed it forward and with a pop, it crossed over from her head to the other side of the mirror. To the room that the man is in. Her fingers did not follow, and the marble hovered in the air. Lil-bit continued to think hard and realised that she could move the marble just by thinking about it. It wobbled at first. The man saw it and his mouth dropped open. He started to back away. Lil-bit did not want to be left with this marble. She didn’t want it to float alone in the bathroom. She did not want anyone else to find it and get burnt like her fingers. She blew out and the marble got closer to him. She blew out fast, a jet of air that carried the marble forward like a slingshot. She took a huge, giant breath and blew out as hard as she could and closed her eyes quickly.

It is very good that she closed her eyes. The bright red marble shot across the distance in within a second and pushed itself all the way into his eye socket, squashing his eyeball flat and replacing it with hard glass ball of bright red burning anger. The man began to scream. Lil-bit heard it ringing in her ears and pulled away quickly, severing the link between them. She opened her eyes and took in the nightlight, the posters of bunnies and kittens on the walls, her stuffed toys and rows and rows of books in the bookcase. She was home. She is safe.

That was the first time Lil-bit left her mind. it wasn’t the last.