Death in the Family - Carolyn Smith (books to read in a lifetime TXT) 📗

behind all number of bottles in all shapes and sizes containing a large variety of prescription medications. It occurred to me that old people are being medicated for just about everything under the sun. Just imagine therefore how many medicines Nana would have stashed away in her bathroom cabinet. I could easily create a deadly concoction which she would then unwittingly feed to herself. Sheer brilliance.
This would of course mean that I would have to wait until I could get in to her bathroom to her medicine cabinet, which I wouldn’t be able to do for at least another week or so yet because of Nana’s twisted ankle.

As it happened I wouldn’t have been going to Nana’s this weekend anyway. Mum had been given the weekend off from work and so, as I anticipated, we were all called upon to spend some time together as a family. It actually wasn’t so bad this time. We played ‘Space Crusaders’ which is an old board game Karl had received for his 7th Birthday from Aunty Margery, not long before she passed away. Seeing as how Karl was 7 and I was only 6, we were too young to play it. It was put away in a cupboard in Mum and Dad’s room where it gathered dust and hadn’t been brought out since. Dad found it when clearing out the cupboard during spring cleaning on Saturday.
One of the other reasons Karl and I usually try to find reasons to get out of family time is because, apart from chats and board games, it also involves a ‘good tidy up’. I hate tidying up and cleaning. It’s a woman’s job. I know men who say such things are held in rather poor disregard, but it’s true. Women are better at it. Men fix things and invent things and women clean things and cook things. That’s the way of the world. I could never say this to my mum of course. I would be put on chore duties for the rest of my life, even when I’ve grown up and got married, Mum would be around my house all the time making sure my wife wasn’t lifting a finger to help me with the house work. Anyway, this particular Saturday there was no getting away from it. We were each designated a room and we were not allowed to leave it until it was pristine. I opted for the bathroom. It is true that I would have to clean the dreaded toilet, but it was worth it t o be left alone for a few hours with the medicine cabinet.

Our cabinet consisted of Paracetamol, Claratyn (for hay fever), Zantac (for indigestion and heart burn) and something with an unpronounceable name which were sleeping tablets. Mum would take the occasional sleeping tablet when she had a migraine, which was not very often. I wondered how lethal a small dose of each of those all mixed together would be. I had no way of finding out of course. I could hardly test it out on anybody. If I went down this route with Nana I would just have to hope for the best. I did notice however that all the tablets looked different. They were different colours, shapes and sizes. Putting the wrong pills in the wrong bottles wouldn’t work. It would take a very long time for an overdose to occur and what about the side effects? The doctor who is so quick to respond to Nana’s every whim would identify the problem immediately and then fix it. Nana would certainly know that someone had been messing with her pills. For Plan C to work I would need to mix the pills in with her food or something. I’d have to work on this later.
“James are you finished?” Mum called up from downstairs. Finished? I’d hardly started.
“Nearly,” I shouted back picking up the cloth and beginning to give the sink a wipe. It only took me 40 minutes in the end to leave the bathroom at a standard which would meet Mum’s expectations. Once we were all finished we sat around our newly polished dining table and set up the game. It took almost 3 hours to set up, what with all the tiny pieces which needed to be popped out of their plastic holders and placed in various places around the board. There were also tiny cards which needed to be distributed to various sections of the massive game board. After we had set it up we were all a bit tired so we sat in front of the telly and put an a DVD. Mum and Dad let me and Karl pick one so we chose one with Bruce Willis. He always makes films which are guaranteed to have you on the edge of your seat and are action packed.

We played the board game on Sunday and it really did take the whole day to play, but wasn’t the least bit boring. At least I didn’t think so. Karl has a low attention span (probably due to all the television he watches) and so he struggled a bit. Apart from cleaning the toilet, it was a very pleasant way to spend the weekend I thought. However, then we had to pack the game away. That took almost as long as it did to set the damn thing up in the first place. Clearly this isn’t the kind of game you play on a whim like Ludo, you have to be prepared in order to play this game, bring in food supplies and stuff.

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On Monday after school I was the first person home so I went to the medicine cabinet and brought two of each tablet back to the kitchen. I was experimenting to see which, if any, could be smashed up into a powder easily. As it happens, none of them were easy to smash up. I used the flat side of a knife (as I have seen people do on television countless times) placed over the top side of a tablet and then I pressed down with all my might. Some broke up in to smaller pieces which then needed to be ground down with the same amount of force on each in turn; others pinged out from under the knife and ended up halfway across the kitchen. It took a few attempts but I learned that the knife needed not to be square on top of the tablet, but actually at a diagonal angle with part of the knife touching the counter top. Once I had this figured out I was able to crush up the tablets quite quickly and effectively. I decided everything would run much more smoothly next weekend if I took the tablets with me pre-crushed. Then there was no chance of me getting caught crushing them at Nana’s. As good a liar as I had now become, I don’t think that even I would be able to lie my way out of that one.

To avoid detection at home I made sure I got the early bus home every day that week and spent the first 15 minutes, before anyone else came home crushing up tablets and collecting the powder in a little measuring cup (the kind for administering medicine) before transferring it into a plastic sandwich bag with a ziplock top. By the end of the fourth day I had quite a sizable amount. But would it be enough? There was only one way I was going to find out. Dad came home early on the fifth day (Friday) when I was just making a little extra to be on the safe side. I had actually just finished transferring the powder into my ziplock bag when he walked through the door. I shoved the bag quickly into my pocket and made a poor attempt at covering up the mess I’d made on the counter with a tea towel. Dad looked at me suspiciously, probably because I looked like I had been doing something…questionable.
“What are you doing?” He asked his eyes flicking between the tea towel and me.
“Nothing,” I snapped a little too quickly.
“Really?” Dad said his left eyebrow raising, a clear sign that he did not like being spoken to like that.
“Sorry,” I said, again too quick to be natural. I tried to have a word with myself to calm myself down and take it easy. Say the right thing and he’ll walk away I was thinking when he said, “Ok. My hands are sweaty; pass me that tea towel will you?”
My fingers involuntarily clenched around the tea towel. “What? This one?”
“Yes please, if it isn’t too much trouble. I can come and get it from right there next to you if it is going to put you out,” Ah father! Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.
“No. Here you go,” and I threw it at him, deliberately missing by a mile so that he would have to bend down and pick it up from the floor. As soon as he moved my hand was on a sponge in the sink which I brought up swiftly to the counter top and in one swipe wiped off the remaining powder before dropping the sponge back in to the sink, all in the blink of an eye before Dad had returned from the floor with the tea towel. I wiped a trickle of sweat from my brow as it threatened to run directly in to my eye. This murder lark is not easy. I do not know how serial killers manage to do it over and over again without getting caught. I have had two unsuccessful attempts on a person’s life and I think I’m going to go mad with nerves.
“Thanks. Next time why don’t you just drop it at your feet and I’ll come and kiss them for you while I pick it up,” he said before throwing the tea towel on the table and storming out in a huff. I nonchalantly walked out after him and walked up the stairs slowly, covering my pocket with one hand so that the bag of powder wouldn’t fall out. I hid the bag under my mattress and got changed out of my school uniform and into something infinitely more comfortable, namely jeans and a baggy t-shirt. Then I went downstairs to join Dad in front of the television. This is where I stayed until I could no longer keep my eyes open, so I took myself off to bed.
After all that planning and preparation I almost forgot my bag of powder the next morning. Dad and Karl had to wait in the car while I ran upstairs to get ‘my book to read at Nana’s.’ I shoved it into by bag and shouted “Bye” to Mum before racing back out of the house again. Once in the car Dad had a little talk with Karl and I.
“Nana still isn’t too good on her feet,” he explained. “I’m relying on the pair of you to look after her this weekend. Don’t let he go running around after you, alright?”
“Ok, Dad. I never do anyway,” I said defensively.
“I know you’ve been helping her out a lot more around the house James and that’s great. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. She can’t stand up for too long. Ok?”
“Yeah I know,” Karl said. He was quite defensive too. I don’t think he liked being told what to do, especially when it