People Pleaser
Prologue
Olivia Greenwood is focusing on the lollipop.
She is being torn alive from the inside, but she is mostly focusing on the lollipop.
The pale pink plastic over the cola-flavoured sweet, which her mother will lovingly unwrap as a reward for Olivia not making a fuss.
The smile as dazzling as the stars that Olivia will be shown for not ruining things, for not making it all about her.
Lollipop. Smile. Good girl.
Even so, it is getting increasingly hard for Olivia to ignore the fact that there is something living in her stomach, and it is trying to get out.
The teacher is talking about photosynthesis, and how plants use the sun to create life, and as Olivia shifts uncomfortably in her flimsy plastic chair, she wishes that she could pull off this trick too, and turn the milky grey light streaming in through the classroom window into some sort of life support machine that might sustain her through whatever terrible thing is happening inside her body.
But no. She is human, and she has something alien in her, and because of that alien thing, she is about to die.
She’s sure of it. In forty-eight days, she is supposed to turn nine.
Just yesterday she had spent hours trying to work out how she could subtly mention this to her parents, in the hope that they might plan a birthday party a little ahead of time, as opposed to twenty-four hours before, as normal.
How cruel it seems to Olivia then that she is now battling a pain in her abdomen so sharp she is sure she won’t make it to break time, let alone her next birthday.
She twists in her seat, tries to stretch out her middle.
‘Olivia!’ snaps Ms Smith, who makes the class pronounce it Mizz, so they know for sure she is a serious teacher, and not a silly little Miss. ‘You are to sit still and concentrate. Your parents don’t pay all this money for your education for you to throw it all away by spending lessons fidgeting.’
Olivia feels a hot stab of shame, though it could also be the talons of the creature currently trying to disembowel her.
The pain is unbearable, but then so is the alternative: interrupting the class to tell the teacher she feels unwell, that a monster is about to burst out of her chest, the ensuing eye rolls and huffs, the long, silent walk as she’s escorted to the school office, where phone calls will be made to her parents, and important work meetings will have to be abandoned, and Olivia will prove yet again that she is an attention-seeker and a drama queen, all of which feels impossible to manage when she has this animal clawing at her … bladder?
Oh god.
‘Sorry, Mizz,’ Olivia says meekly to the teacher, clenching her body so the monster will stay inside it, at least until break time.
Olivia’s brain tries another tack, which is usually quite successful at keeping things inside: shame.
She lands on the conversation she had with her mum that morning, over the breakfast table.
Olivia pictures her little sister Lily, adorable and easy, eating neatly, quietly, smiling broadly at their mother.
Then she pictures herself, pain glowing in her stomach, unable to contemplate the bowl of cornflakes her mum had placed in front of her.
‘What’s wrong?’ asks her mother, juggling a steaming cup of black coffee with a stack of important work papers.
‘Nothing,’ says Olivia. She is already so good at lying that she genuinely believes it to be the truth.
‘So why aren’t you eating?’ Her mother places her mug down on the table.
It says WORLD’S BEST DAD in cutesy baby-blue writing.
Her mum growls at the mug, a gift to Olivia’s father that the sisters had given him before he took off on yet another business trip a few days ago.
Olivia has no idea what her dad does, other than that it involves being away from home an awful lot of the time, and when she spotted the mug on a weekend shopping trip, she had begged her mother to let her get it.
‘Maybe then Daddy would be happier?’ she had reasoned, not adding that maybe this would have the knock-on effect of Mummy being happier as well.
But now the mug sat on the table, forgotten by her dad, a source of annoyance for her mum, and Olivia could see that this was her fault too.
‘Can we not just have one morning where everything goes smoothly?’ Her mum points her manicured nails at the pitifully empty wall chart on the fridge, the one that is supposed to be filled with a gold star every time Olivia and Lily manage to get out of the house and to school without causing any trouble.
‘Sorry, Mum.’ Olivia attempts to spoon some cornflakes into her mouth, and visibly winces at the discomfort this produces.
‘Jesus, Olivia, they’re cornflakes, not a bowl of nails.’
‘I’ve just got a bit of a stomach ache, that’s all.’ Olivia forces herself to swallow the soggy cornflakes which do, actually, feel like nails.
‘Of course you have.’ Her mother sighs, sips her coffee while gathering her purse, keys, a corner of toast. ‘Listen, Olivia, let me get something straight: you are not faking a stomach ache to get the day off school, OK? Not today. It’s an important day at work, one that I cannot afford to miss.’
‘Could Dad come home?’ It seems both entirely reasonable and absurd, all at the same time.
‘Ha!’ Her mother spills some coffee on her shirt, swears. ‘Right, upstairs, get dressed. If you go to school and get through the day without a fuss, I will give you a medal for your troubles.’
‘I don’t want a medal.’ She wants a cuddle.
Her mum sighs, rolls her eyes. ‘OK, a lollipop. You can have a lollipop, Olivia. Ah, I thought that would make you smile. Now chop-chop!’ She claps her hands together, then scoops Lily into her arms and kisses her head. ‘Come on, angel, let’s go brush your teeth.’
Oh, that does it. That gives Olivia the motivation to get through the next seventeen minutes of the science class. If she can just hold everything inside for a little bit longer, if she can just hang on … lollipop, smile, good g—
‘Ohhhh,’ groans Olivia, as a wave of pain floods her body, and her body floods her thighs, which in turn floods the floor below her desk.
Many things are happening at once. The other children are looking at Olivia, and half of them seem to be laughing, while the other half seem to be squealing in horror.
Ms Smith is turning and stabbing a piece of chalk in the air in Olivia’s general direction.
Olivia is trying to stand up, to get out of the classroom and to the nearest bathroom, where she can hopefully flush herself and the monster down the toilet.
‘Olivia Greenwood!’ shouts Ms Smith. ‘Will you SIT DOWN?’
Olivia tries to do as she is told. She wants to do as she is told. She wishes she could be the kind of child for whom it is easy to follow instructions, like her little sister, instead of the kind of child she actually is.
Olivia attempts to sit back down, but she misses the chair. She lands hard on the floor, into the puddle she’s just created, her damp school uniform riding up to reveal the knickers she’s just wet.
She passes out.
Olivia Greenwood doesn’t get a lollipop, or a smile, for her troubles. She just gets peritonitis and two weeks in hospital, as her appendix bursts and infects the abdomen around it.
‘I came as quickly as I could,’ Olivia hears her father say to her mother, as the general anaesthetic wears off and she groggily comes round on the children’s ward.
‘Aren’t you a hero?’ her mother mutters. Olivia opens her eyes and sees her mum’s giant red shoulder pads rise up and down in one almighty sigh.
‘Really, Tina?’ her father replies, loosening his tie. ‘Even now? Can’t you have a day off, especially when our firstborn is lying in a hospital bed after a major operation?’
‘No, I can’t have a day off,’ she hisses, ‘because we have a mortgage to pay and not all of us get to spend our time wining and dining people for a living.’
‘I didn’t mean from work,’ snaps her father. ‘I meant from the bitchiness.’
‘I might be a bit more inclined to be nice to you if you were less of a self-centred arsehole.’
Olivia senses her parents turning back towards her.
She quickly flickers her eyes closed, wills herself to drift into a beautiful, dream-free sleep.
One where she is not in hospital, or the object of her mother’s ire, but back at home, enjoying a lollipop with her sister, a reward for being a good girl, an easy child, a delightful one.
A world where she has made everyone around her feel so … pleased.