The pale girl in front of you (you vaguely remember, through the haze of hours of her mad ramblings dimmed by the drink in your hand, her introducing herself as Kookaburra) cups your cheeks in her hands - her skin is cool, but not clammy, and it's evident from the stillness of her body that she has no heartbeat. Her cloudy-grey eyes wander distantly for a few moments before they focus on yours, then they seem to sharpen. Images slither unbidden into your mind on the very edge of consciousness before you're swept away...
---
The first - this one has a feel like an old, loved photograph, wobbling in and out of focus at the edges. A pretty young girl - she can't be older than fourteen - is smiling down at you, her freckly face and bright green eyes a sharp contrast to the wimple covering the rest of her head. She's cradling you in her arms, and you burble faintly and reach towards her with one hand, wanting to touch. She holds you up a little higher, the movement dislodging a few red curls from inside the headdress, as she begins to sing in a heavy London accent: "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, merry merry king of the bush is he..."
You're running with your friends in the streets, all of you clad in patchy rags, scabby-kneed and barefoot and bruised from playing, as unashamed of your poverty as only children could be. One of the boys shoves a girl into the muddy gutter, and you run over and return the favor. Soon everyone is pushing everyone else, hardly able to walk from laughing - until the orphanage door opens and the mother superior sees you all covered in filth, stopped in your tracks and gawping at her. You know you won't be able to squirm out of getting a bath tonight.
It's far past lights-out, but most of you are still awake, clustered in a tight circle between the beds. Tonight, you're sharing ghost stories of the asylum up the road - made all the scarier by the pitch-black room, voices sliding from the darkness to bring you nightmares. One says they kill the inmates there; another says awful things live in the shadows at the corners of the brick rooms; a third scoffs at both of these, then tells his own tale of the mad warden who tries to shock the inmates' brains to sanity. You stay quiet the whole time, so quiet your friends don't even know you're there, as the stories run rampant through your head.
The redheaded nun, now in her twenties and even prettier, tells you your body is changing, but you already know that; now things jiggle unpleasantly when you run, and you can't sleep properly on your stomach anymore, and strangest of all you've been thinking about her, about the redhead, a lot more. For your twelfth birthday she gave you a silver bracelet, a broad band with an inscription on the inside: "To Annabelle Rood. Walk with God. Love always, Hannah." The silver tarnishes easily, but you know it's the best thing she could afford and it's beautiful anyway, so you've worn it every day since you got it... but as you slowly make your way out of your memory and into reality again, you see she's clearly uncomfortable with what she's talking about, and she's noticed you're hardly listening. You sit in awkward silence for a few moments before something - the changes she was talking about, perhaps - spurs you to lean across the table and press your lips to her cheek.
The snow sprinkles down outside, turning the muddy streets to slush, but inside the blaze roaring in the fireplace warms the two of you nicely. She's supposed to be teaching you Bible verses, but every time she reaches across the table to fetch the book your hands brush together and she gives you that wonderful shy smile that makes you go all trembly inside. Your eyes meet hers, just briefly, before your left and her right hands meet, and stay that way. Bible study, indeed.
It's almost Christmas. You've saved every penny you could find, doing odd jobs for any poor soul you clapped eyes on. You slip out of the house in the middle of the night to wake your pawnbroker friend from his sleep, passing by a man in whitish rags stumbling down the street - you give him a wide berth. The night is cold but clear, and the thrill of being out late, mixed with something you can't quite place, makes your heart pound. When you reach the pawnbroker's house, you bang furiously on the door until he lets you in, still dressed in his nightgown and cap, small eyes bleary. The two of you quibble over prices and items (his sleepiness makes him easy to outsmart, but, with a guilty conscience, you steer him back towards a fair price) for a while, until you finally settle on a small, beautifully-carved wooden box, inlaid with a bit of silver. You hand over your paltry bit of money and take the box, holding the present close to your chest as you run home, the moon pale yellow and hanging with pregnant promise in the sky. When you pull open the heavy door and tiptoe back into the orphanage, the heavy stench of blood slams your sense of smell like a mugger's fist. The normally-busy passages are utterly silent.
You run through the house, searching frantically for what's gone wrong; you find it in the bedroom. A huge trough has been set up in the middle of the room, running perpendicular to the beds. From a beam directly above hangs - everyone you know; your friends, the mother superior, Hannah, everyone. The rope is wrapped around their ankles, their throats and wrists are cut. Now you see the trough is brimming with blood, and, indeed, the fluid is still dripping from some of the fresher bodies. Bodies. It all hits you in a rush, and you lurch over, your dinner splattering all over the floor. As you wipe your mouth and straighten, shaking, you hear footsteps behind you - someone alive? Before you get a chance to turn around, a pair of arms in grubby white sleeves that dangle past the hand are around your waist, and chilly words come to your ear. "Oh, God, oh, no, I never meant to hurt you, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry..."
...then, something pricks your neck, followed by a wash of pleasure, and the world turns black. Your last thought is of the box falling to the stained floorboards.
---
The memories are torn from your consciousness like the remnants of a bad dream, and your life is your own again, complete with nausea bubbling in your gut. The girl whose past you just shared rocks back on her heels, bloody tear tracks all over her face, and sings: "Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra, gay your life must be!"