Stranger Danger
Never accept sweets from a stranger, Mum and Dad and Stuart had told her. Remember, good girls don’t get into a stranger’s car; they don’t talk to anyone they don’t know. Remember, they said, ‘Stranger Danger’ and you’ll be safe.
That morning Mum had one of those nasty headaches, she said. One of those headaches with the flashing lights, where she had to lie down in a dark room and wait for it to go away. Mum said that Dot didn’t have to stay in the farmhouse; she could sit out in the garden, and that she could go through the gate to the sheep field if she wanted to collect some of the wool caught on the wall, the hedge or the wire. Provided she was careful. And provided she didn’t go out of the field to where the cars and the lorries and the loud bikes were. Dot had to promise, cross her heart; which she did. She was a good girl.
At first, Dot had thought that the weird sound was a lamb caught somewhere between hedge and wall. It had happened once, she remembered; Dad and Stuart had had to push and pull and say the rude words that Dot had been told to forget. But she didn’t forget. She didn’t ever say them out loud, because she knew that they were rude and not for good girls to say. But they still went around and around in her head, like a poem: “Fuck, bugger, piss, shit; fuck, bugger, piss, shit; fuck, bugger…” She liked to skip along with that snatch of rhythm in her head, an ear-worm as comforting as a sweetie held in her cheek.
As she stomped her way up the hill, plucking the tufts of fibres from the field boundary, the sound grew steadily louder until (at the very furthest corner, where the field abruptly dipped towards the road) she suddenly spotted the source. There was a shiny black and chrome motorbike straddling the wall, its wheels still lazily spinning, the engine making a ‘plink’ sound from time to time as it cooled. But that wasn’t the source of noise. A good few yards from the motorbike there was a man lying on his back, shouting for somebody, anybody to help him.
Dot hated the sight of blood, not just her own but anyone’s. When Dad cut himself shaving, he would put a little torn-off piece of toilet paper onto it. Dot would feel hot and dizzy when she saw those little paper scabs on his face — though it was better than Stuart’s habit of leaving the cuts to weep little drops of red that soaked into his shirt collar on a Sunday morning before they went to mass. The blood coming out of this man was well beyond little paper scabs; it was running down into his eyes, so that he had to keep wiping at them. There was blood coming from his nose; it was filling his mouth, making him cough and splutter in between calling out. Dot felt a little sick looking at him; he was all red, and his legs looked like they were on back to front.
“Help me, please?” he asked, looking across to where Dot was standing and watching, a comforting thumb now stuck in her mouth. He was twisting around to face her, and Dot didn’t know what she should do.
“What’s your name?” the man asked. His voice sounded wobbly and strange to her. “I’m Dave. I’ve had a bit of accident.” He waved a shaking hand vaguely in the direction of the broken bike. “Was going maybe a little too fast! What’s your name?” he asked again.
Dot was a good girl. She knew what she shouldn’t do. She shouldn’t get in a stranger’s car. Well, this man didn’t have a car, so that was okay. She shouldn’t accept sweeties from a stranger. Well, so far he hadn’t said anything about sweeties one way or another. So that was okay as well. And she shouldn’t talk to anyone she didn’t know. Well, she didn’t know this man and so she wouldn’t talk. There, that was what she should do: not talk to him. So instead, she sat down cross-legged on the grass, tucked her skirt over her knees and began to roll the tufts of collected lambswool into a ball while her little chant swam around and around in her head (“Fuck, bugger, piss, shit…”).
She sat that way for maybe ten minutes, rolling the lambswool, watching a red kite lazily circling high above them, and listening to the man groaning and crying. She wanted to talk to him, of course. She wanted to say that she was Dot; Dorothy really, but everyone called her Dot. She was twenty-two years old but had something called a learning disability, which meant she was still really like a little girl. So she still had to do what her Mum and her Dad and Stuart (who was really her baby brother!) told her to do. And they had told her not to talk to strangers. But just sitting with him was okay, though it wasn’t so nice listening to him coughing and spitting; it wasn’t nice to see him all covered with blood and broken looking.
“Can you help me?” the man (Dave, she remembered) eventually asked again. Dot shrugged her shoulders; that wasn’t talking, so that was okay. “Please go and get help. Go and tell somebody I’m hurt really bad and I need an ambulance. It’s urgent. Please?”
She could do that, she knew. Yes, she could do that. And so she jumped to her feet and nodded happily. She would go and tell somebody. Silently chanting (“Fuck, bugger, piss, shit…”), she set off running back down the hill to the farmhouse. Obviously, though, she had to be as quiet as a mouse when she got back home, because Mum’s nasty headaches hurt her even more if Dot was noisy. And so Dot sat patiently at the kitchen table all through the afternoon, playing with the lambswool and waiting for Dad and Stuart to come back from the market so she could tell them about Mum’s nasty headache (“Hush!” she would say to them and wag her finger!) and about the man covered with blood, with the broken motorbike at the top of the field.
When they got home it would probably be dark, but she’d still be waiting. And she’d tell them to be as quick (and as quiet) as they could be. And she’d tell them (“Fuck, bugger, piss, shit…”) that she had been a good girl all day!
