No Heroes

Anna Seidl

Description

Miriam is an ordinary schoolgirl with a carefree bunch of friends, and she's just embarked on her first relationship with her sweet and loving boyfriend Toby. She lives with her dad and she has a good relationship with her grandparents. All this ordinary happiness is shattered when one of Miriam's schoolmates goes berserk one day at school with a handgun and kills several pupils and teachers. Miriam's beloved Toby is shot right in front of her. Miriam and her surviving friends are distraught. Shock, grief, bereavement, terror - Miriam and her friends run the gamut of emotions in the days, weeks and months following the shooting. But the worst emotion of all is guilt. 'Is it our fault?' is the haunting question that tortures Miriam as she tries to piece her life together again. The story of a school shooting and its awful aftermath; a psychologically convincing study of grief, loss and guilt and their effects on young lives

Sujets

• Bereavement
• Social Themes
• Young Adult Fiction
• Grief
• YA
• Violence
• Death

Informations

• Publié par: Little Island Books
• Date de parution: 17 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910411810
• Langue: English

Extrait

NO HEROES
NO HEROES
Anna Seidl
Translated by Siobhán Parkinson
 
NO HEROES
First published in English in 2016 by
Little Island Books
7 Kenilworth Park
Dublin 6W
Ireland
Originally published in 2014
by Verlag Friedrich Oetinger GmbH, Hamburg, Germany
under the title Es wird keine Helden geben
Original text © Verlag Friedrich Oetinger 2014
Translation © Siobhán Parkinson 2016
The author has asserted her moral rights.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means (including electronic/digital, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, by means now known or hereinafter invented) without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-910411-32-2
A British Library Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover illustration and design by Mick Minogue
Insides designed and typeset by redrattledesign.com
Printed in Poland by Drukarnia Skleniarz
Little Island receives financial assistance from The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Little Island is also grateful for the support of Ireland Literature Exchange.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents because you always believed in me even when I didn’t
It all starts with me sleeping in. If my boyfriend hadn’t texted me, I’d have been late for school. But as it turns out, I made it to school on time. Which is how come I was there when it happened.
I wish now that I’d been anywhere else, as far away as humanly possible. And to think I used to be of the opinion that Latin homework was the worst thing in the world!
Then everything changed.
But the thing is, you can’t know it all before it happens. It’s not like a movie, where you know what’s going to happen because you’ve seen the trailer. And there are no heroes either, because in the real world, everyone just thinks of themselves. You don’t even think, what if …? Because it all just happens. And you can’t do a thing about it, can you?
Could it be a fair punishment for what we’ve done? Everything – the whole day, the past week, the past year, my whole life – it all starts playing again in my head. I kind of wonder if my whole life has been one big lie.
Fear is my constant companion now, loneliness my best friend. That’s why I’m going to tell you the story. Because I want to make something clear to you. I want you to understand.
CHAPTER 1
You can smell fear. You can get hold of it. But nobody dares to touch it. We all hold our breath.
It’s under us. We can hear the shots. They’re loud. Way too loud for my world of school and fun. And I don’t know who it is. My best friend Joanne and I had just been told to go down to the ground floor by the teacher, and suddenly everyone is running. And then: boom . And again: boom .
Of course I know what gunshot sounds like. I am just as addicted to watching telly as the rest of the school. But it’s different in real life. It’s the same sound, only ten thousand times louder.
First, we just stop, Joanne and I. Then we start running too. Everyone upstairs is running. The teachers, the caretaker, the students. I can see Philip Schwarz, who is a year ahead of me. I used to fancy him a bit a few years back. He made an impression on me, always so perfect. I can see Lisa Schmidt too. I don’t know anything about her. They’re running as well.
I see all this, but I don’t take it in. Nobody has really taken anything in. How could we? We’re just kids, after all, whether we’re thirteen or thirty years old. Because we’ve never experienced anything like this. I’ll tell you a secret. My first thought was just, Shit, I have to get out of here. I thought only of myself. Not of my teachers or schoolmates. Not even of Joanne. My first thought was for myself. And to be honest, I know it was exactly the same for everyone else. There are no heroes here. Because it’s not a movie. It’s reality, pure and simple. Joanne, Philip and I hide in the boys’ toilet. Philip doesn’t seem all that great now. He’s just a bundle of nerves, cowering on the floor, breathing rapidly.
Joanne and I are bundles of nerves too. My hands are wet with sweat. My whole body is shaking. And there is pure fear strangling me, bearing down on my heart as if to stop it beating. That’s how I know it’s real. I’m not ready to die. I’m only fifteen, I’ve only had my first boyfriend for five months, I’m only in ninth grade. There are so many things that I want to do. And dying is not one of them!
Another shot sends me reeling. A thud on the floor, a shout, footsteps. He’s getting closer.
It’s weird. You’d think he’d be running, in a hurry. But it’s not like that. You can hear his shoes, soft and rhythmic on the floor. Almost as if he were on his way to the gym, not shooting open the gates of heaven for terrified people. Or the gates of hell. Or the gates of nothingness.
Maybe you can imagine what it’s like to cower on the cold floor of a stinking toilet. Maybe you can feel the way the cold grips your body, making it shiver uncontrollably. Maybe you can hear the silence, the deathly silence, when everyone just holds their breath and hopes it’s someone else who gets it and that they themselves are safe. Maybe you really can. Or maybe not.
I thought I could. But I was wrong. Unfortunately, I was going to find out how things really are. I used to think you couldn’t smell fear.
‘Miriam,’ Joanne whispers. Just my name. She gestures towards one of the cubicles with her head. She wants us to hide in there. The footsteps are getting louder. He’s quite close.
I surprise myself by nodding. I didn’t think I was capable of nodding. I touch Philip’s arm, but his whole body is shuddering and he shakes my hand off. Joanne and I stare at each other for a moment.
Her eyes reflect my feelings: shock, incomprehension, fear. And I realise it is not going to end well. Not for all of us. That he’s already shot that gun at some people, maybe killed them. And that he’s going to do that to more people.
My eyes fill with tears of panic. I dig my fingernail as hard as I can into my arm, but the pain is nothing. It’s more a relief, because it chases away the bad thoughts, even if only for a moment.
A strange noise startles me and Joanne. Philip is crying, screeching. Horrified, we gesture to him to shut up. But it’s too late. The footsteps start towards our door.
We don’t hesitate. Believe me, you wouldn’t either. Quickly and noiselessly, we run into a cubicle. We climb up on the loo and then hunker down so that he can’t see any bit of us. Or so I hope anyway. Then we angle the door like all the other doors. And we stop breathing.
Yes, we just leave Philip behind. And yes, I know the consequences. I know this could mean death for him. Heartless as it may seem – if I stayed, I’d be writing my own death sentence. Everyone thinks of themselves first here. There are no heroes. Heroes are an invention of the film industry.
The seconds seem to stretch. Coward that I am, I close my eyes, tightly, even though it doesn’t make anything any better. Joanne grabs my hand and squeezes it so hard that the bones shift. I’m listening to the steps. They are getting louder, coming nearer. When the door is kicked open, we huddle together. Philip is still lying on the floor. We can’t see him now. But we can hear him. He seems not even to notice that we’ve gone. He seems not to notice anything.
Time is dragging. I’d never have believed that a second could seem like an eternity. Then the shot comes. A roar. The smell of gunshot in the air. Like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Only different. More intense, more biting. Joanne and I are shaking. But neither of us makes a sound.
First survive, then grieve.
Another shot. Not a squeak out of us. Silence. And then a snuffle. The sound of the murderer running up and down. He’s crying. Crying! As if he were a victim!
We are still holding our breath. He could still find us. And I don’t want to end up like Philip. Lying on the floor with schoolmates behind me who daren’t make a sound.
He leaves. I can hardly believe it. I was about to kiss life goodbye, but he’s gone. Disappeared. Maybe we’ll get out of this. Alive.
We wait for a bit. Maybe a minute. Hard to say. I’ve lost my sense of time. Now I pull away from Joanne and realise that I have absolutely no feeling in my right hand. Joanne has made some impression on my hand. I move it carefully. Then I move my feet. Joanne opens the door of the cubicle very softly.
And there he lies. White in the face. In a pool of his own blood. His brown hair looks lank. His eyes glassy. His mouth too pale.
I read in a book that dead people look peaceful. You would think they were only asleep. Philip looks like what he actually is: violently murdered, victim of a psycho.
I feel sick. Tears prick my eyes. But they don’t flow. I’m too numb for that. Too shocked. Almost like a dead person myself.
Beside me, Joanne is sobbing softly. I put my hand over her mouth. I can feel her spittle on my palm. I take her in my arms and rock her gently back and forth, the way you rock a baby to sleep. The only thing that crosses my lips is a single little shush. It echoes around the tiled walls of the room and seems way too loud. When silence saves your life you redefine what’s loud and what’s soft.
I sit on the floor, hugging Joanne. What else could I do? I lay my head back and pretend I’m in a forest. The trees are rustling and I can hear the animals. Everything is the way it should be.
That calms me down a bit.
Until the next shot. That startles the hell out of me. It was just outside in the corridor and it echoes through all the walls.
It would probably have been smarter to stay sitting there. But I get up and go softly to the door. Joanne doesn’t f