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Father is at work.
Mother sleeps. She took too much valium again.
Accidentally, of course. Not as if anybody had mashed it into her food…
Alone in the house, Molly rearranges everything in the kitchen. Spoons where the knifes go, tins where the biscuits go, milk where the cake goes. There is something soothing about arranging everything. Neither of her parents have any idea how to really organise. She does, though, and takes quiet delight in putting everything exactly where it should be. According to her. Already Molly has an innate sense of place, a rigid internal order.
Some would call her a perfectionist.
In a few hours her mother wakes. The clock shows 11.23 pm and she doesn’t question it. Why question your own clock? Realising it’s too late to be awake, she goes back to sleep.
Molly loves changing the clocks. She can’t do it around father because he’d notice, he’d realise she was why he was always too early or late for work. Once he’s gone, however, Molly has free reign.
To pause time, she puts old batteries in the clock. Sometimes she puts gritty sand around the hinge that works the second hand. A second starts to last an eternity. Minutes leak like a dripping tap; time flushed down the sink. It makes her mother exhausted.
‘This is the longest ten minutes of my life.’
‘It’s the medication, has to be, I feel like I’m moving in slow motion.’
‘Life’s too short? Oh Molly, it feels like forever to me sometimes.’
‘I’m spending too much time indoors. It’s making me see things.’
Usually Molly just alters the time by half an hour, forward or back. By the time her father arrives back from work, she is up to date, and her mother disorientated by passage of time.
It’s quite harmless, really.
At first, it’s butterflies.
She goes out to the back yard, coarse grass scratchy under her soft feet. A few yellow flowers sit, flat faces up toward the sun. There is no shade, no veranda or trees. When it rains there is no shelter and when the sun burns there is no protection, but Molly does’t mind.
She has a net with her (gift from her aunty) and she stands, poised to spring. Sometimes the butterflies come right up to her, oblivious to her net. Most of them are more wary, and she has to chase them across the tiny garden before netting them.
Thrill of the chase, she realises.
Like the predators in nature documentaries, hunting prey.
She always wanted the lions and cheetahs to win; she’d never once rooted for the prey. Why would she?
Once the butterfly is caught (pressing its powdery wings against the mesh in panic) she puts it in a jar. These jars are almost made of strong clear glass, and Molly likes them. Soon she has over twenty jars, each filled with a different butterfly.
Some are large and blue, with intricate networks of colour on their wings. Others are more like moths, purple-grey in colour and tiny. Most people like the flashy ones the best, the ones with bright colours and big wings.
Molly likes them all equally, and soon runs out of space for her jars.
She won’t throw them out. The idea of destroying her collection is awful, not to be considered. If she had a larger house, a bigger bedroom, it wouldn’t be such a problem…
Solution.
She buys pins. Long metal pins, sharp enough to stab through the butterfly without damage to it. In all honesty, she likes the pins almost as much as she likes the butterflies.
Her mother tells her not to prick herself with them, but she can’t help it. Watching her skin bend and bend under pressure, only to brake and bleed, is somehow hypnotising for her. She experiments on various parts of her body, working out which areas of skin give the most resistance.
Then, she pins the butterflies to her walls. Her collection expands, until opening the door and stepping into her room is almost unpleasent. Hundreds of butterflies and moths, dead and pinned, decorate her walls. It is an overlapping mass of death, texture and colour.
Sometimes the wings fall off, or a tiny bug-eyed head rolls across the floor.
School is a strange experience.
Molly is called Mouldy by the other students, but when they realise she finds the nickname flattering they leave her alone. All her reports are good, she has no friends but she is a polite girl, who always hands work in on time.
There are a few incidents, though…
The girl called Sandy has long blonde hair. She sits in the row ahead of Molly, and Molly sits in the back row. All the good kids are allowed to sit in the back row, because they are trusted. However this only works to Mollys advantage.
Over the months, Sandy realises her hair is getting slowly shorter.
Little bit by little bit.
Henry drinks lemonade mixed with apple juice. The resulting flavour is strange, and slightly alarming. Nobody else wants to drink from Henrys bottle. Over time, the taste begins to change. He knows it does, but can’t exactly explain how. He asks his mother, but she insists she still buys the same brands.
Somehow, the taste is changing. He gets a new bottle, but the change persists, until eventually he becomes used to it. After a while he likes it, and in fact drinks more often because of the change.
When his teacher realises he’s drunk, from a subtle blend of ‘lolly drinks’ containing sugar and artificial flavouring to mask the small amount of vodka, the outrage is on the first page of the newspaper for a week.
Molly sits next to Henry, and his bag is often left unattended whilst he plays sport with the other boys during lunch.
Mrs Cooper is a large woman, but despite her girth she always seems frail. Wispy white hair, a voice like feathers and watery eyes. For a reason Molly can’t quite work out, she hates Mrs Cooper with a burning passion.
She is like a smear, something infected and ineffectual. Worse, she is a teacher who likes to coddle. Mrs Cooper squeezes hands, pats heads, strokes hair and sometimes hugs. Molly hates the invasion, hates the soft simpering voice praising her neat handwriting.
One day, the class finds out Mrs Cooper is deadly afraid of spiders. She mentions it casually, but Molly sees her hands shake. Just a small aversion? Hardly. Molly knows without doubt Mrs Cooper is a phobic, and there is nobody alive so easy to scare as a phobic.
Molly has no problem with spiders.
She fills Mrs Coopers desk with them.
Nobody ever works out who did it, and it’s the best day of Mollys life.
Mrs Cooper resigns.
Molly had never once cared about how she looked, but as puberty sets in she begins to consider it with all due seriousness.
The expanding thicket of hair between her legs doesn’t trouble her. Periods are no shock when they arrive, and despite the mild inconvenience they cause she doesn’t really care about them. If anything, she likes having a semi-constant supply of blood. You never know when it could come in handy.
Breasts bother her a little more, because they are more obvious. Boys laugh at them for being small, or for being big. Just for being. As far as she can tell, their size is perfectly normal. Either way, the attention puts her on guard.
‘Why don’t you wear any make up?’
‘Get something done to your hair, it’s so long and boring.’
‘What’s your cup size? Go on I won’t laugh.’
‘Bet you never get a boyfriend with a face like that.’
She (along with almost every other female with a developing chest) is asked a variation of those questions. For some reason, the first two bother her most of all. Make up is oily on her face, it smudges and conceals. The texture is wrong on her, makes her flesh creep.
Her hair is boring?
As far as Molly can tell, her hair is long, shiny, and the same dark brown as her eyes. Boring? She doesn’t think so, not at all.
Sex isn’t boring either.
Blossoming from pubescent child to a half-woman in her teens, Molly realises for the first time the importance of sex, love and relationships. Devotion is essential, cheating a vile and unforgivable act. Sex is desirable, and many people want it so much they’ll fuck people whom they don’t find attractive in order to get it. Love is elusive, defined by something beyond her comprehension. Unlike bodies, you cannot touch it.
She looses her virginity at sixteen with a boy who likes to smoke pot. His name is Travis and she hate every moment of it. Interested by her own reaction (so unexpected, so far from the perceived norm) she fucks him over and over, trying to see where the enjoyment is.
Other girls must enjoy being thrusted into. Being squeezed, opened and wet by others. She hates it, hates it. Eventually she dumps him, and for good measure laces his pot with something far more illegal and potent.
Perhaps she is a lesbian?
Deciding not to rule it out, she finds a willing girl named Belinda and they sleep together. This is somewhat better, though still not the big deal she’d expected it to be. Too much touching, and the expectation of emotional attachment (or at least emotional something) revolts her.
Besides, Belinda PMS’s like a bitch, and Molly doesn’t want to date someone whose period coincides with her own. Recipe for disaster.
So Molly pretends to cheat on Belinda and they brake up.
Sex? Not fun, and not something she needs in her life. Important for other people, and like other people, utterly predictable. There are only so many holes in the human body, and so many things you can stick in them. Not really worth the time and effort, she decides.
Working with dead bodies is the obvious choice.
They don’t want to have sex with her, and they don’t ask her personal questions. A young female working with dead bodies is often considered ‘morbid’ and Molly hates explaining why she likes it so much. Furthermore, the bodies won’t demand to know why she’s still single.
Molly loves the ribs and the spine. Both are curved and graceful, and finding them within the flesh is always a delight. She feels like she is digging up fossils. White columns smooth to the touch, surrounded by the colourful gore of the human interior.
The ribs, a case for the heart and lungs.
The spine, the literal backbone of human mobility.
Skulls are nice too, Molly supposes, but a little too unfinished. The best kind of human face is one where the flesh is opened in layers. Skin, taught and dead. Muscle, drying and rippled, veins mapping through it. And lastly white flashes of bone, the skull exposed in subtle glances beneath the varied layers of flesh, fat and skin.
A skull by itself was too bare, somehow.
Molly knows that words are lacking in her life. Dialogue is limited, and the interior of her world is made up of description and observation. Often she feels talking is a distraction, something else the living do that she isn’t very invested in.
Dead people can’t talk, but their insides can be arranged to her liking. Just as the kitchen was vulnerable to her desire to organise, so are the dead. Defenceless, they let her put them back together in ways she likes.
Silence prevails.
This changes when Sherlock Holmes arrives.
Despite his abrupt, rude ways, he is a talker.
‘Doctor Hooper? Don’t curl your hair anymore it makes your cheeks look fat. I need a human foot right now if you can. And I know you can. A matter of importance, it will help me solve a crime. All in the name of science, or justice, or… Is it empathy? No. I’ll return the foot.’
Nobody has spoken this many words to her in one go for months. Naturally, she stutters her reply and forgets her own name. Amused, Sherlock assumes she is attracted to him.
He thinks, in short, that he can manipulate her.
Without doubt, he is much smarter than her. Yet not smart enough to realise that even the quiet, mumbling ones are important. They only talk for fifteen minutes and he spends the whole time ignoring her, looking right past her in the hope for something more interesting. They are the same age, in their early twenties, and yet Sherlock seems oddly naive.
‘I’m bored. So bored, all the time.’
‘You should get a hobby, then. Maybe.’
He sneers at her, full lips distorting into a grimace of true contempt.
‘What would you suggest? Bowling?’
‘No. Never mind, bad idea. Did you want the saliva in needles or in a bag or what?’
‘Needles. I’ll need to inject it.’
‘Into yourself?’
‘For a case.’
Brilliant. Molly knows that Geoff (a skinny man with bleached hair) is a drug addict, and keeps his 10% solution of cocaine in the needles he is meant to use for work. His constant access to clean needles, and the fact that he doesn’t need to report any missing ones, makes him the perfect addict. Smart, safe, and utterly dependant.
Geoff likes to grab her arse at lunch, and call her sweetie.
Two birds with one stone?
Sherlock will inject the cocaine, and will never be bored again. Afterwards he will ask Molly who gave her the needle, and as a result Geoff will be fired.
Molly smiles in an innocent kind of way as she hands Sherlock the needle. He’ll never know the whole thing was premeditated. Never suspect her, because all her life she has been subtle and quiet, moving the world around her in bits and not wholes. She likes detail, not grandeur.
Geoff is fired within the month, and Sherlock Holmes begins a six year long cocaine addiction that almost kills him. He never has a dull moment.
For a long time, Molly doesn’t bother messing with Sherlock Holmes.
It requires too much effort, because he’s smart enough to realise whats happening in the world around him. Why waste time on him when so many other, easier targets surround her?
Her mother overdoses on the valium. A tragic accident, one bound to happen after years of addiction. Despite the depressing tedium of the funeral she is ultimately pleased by the whole thing; no longer will she be bothered by her mothers prying phone calls and personal questions.
A year later, her father died. Suicide, consumed with grief after the death of his wife.
Molly can’t help but agree with Sherlock.
The police really are stupid.
Jim Moriarty isn’t stupid. Not at all.
He pretends to be, just like he pretends to be gay. They go on three dates, and he kisses her (awkward, rubbery) and watch Glee together in her flat. Obviously, he wants Sherlock, and anyone who wants Sherlock wants trouble.
What kind?
His eyes are dark brown, and blacker than hers. Sometimes he lets them twinkle with a warmth so obviously fake she wonders how stupid he thinks she is. Other times she sees something true, something dark. It reminds her of the cocaine-haunted and emancipated face of Sherlock whilst he was in the depths of his addiction. Jim, she realises, wants to be set on fire. And he’s hoping Sherlock Holmes will light the match.
This presents Molly with a problem: does she help Sherlock or help Jim?
She has no doubt that she could help them, one of them, if she felt like it. Maybe even both of them? That could be more fun, actually…
‘Do you love me?’ Jim asks, on their final date.
‘I know you don’t love me, because you’re gay,’ she states, blunt. ‘But I do care about you. We’re like the opposite Sherlock and John, in a way.’
‘How do you mean?’
She shrugs, knowing Jim is fascinated now.
‘Well, you know. They are totally different but they need each other. We’re totally different but we don’t need each other.’
Jim nods, his eyes igniting.
Now he knows John means something to Sherlock, there is no way he can’t strap bombs to him. Yes, John would always be at risk because of Sherlock… but Molly had made sure he’d be the star of the show.
However.
Molly liked to keep things even.
She’d helped Jim at the pool, given him the final pip, the final victim in his game of explosives. Now she felt it would only be fair for her to help Sherlock, to give him the silent aid of Molly Hooper.
But how?
So she watched, and when the time came, she knew it.
‘You look sad, when you think nobody can see you.’
‘You can see me.’
‘I don’t count.’
Sherlock freezes, and turns to look at her as his ice-grey eyes widen in realisation. Clearly, for the first time in his life, Sherlock can imagine Molly Hooper as somebody useful.
‘He won’t remember to threaten you,’ he whispers, and she smiles widely.
No. Jim won’t remember her, will overlook her just like Sherlock used to. And now, at last, just in time, Sherlock will not overlook her.
He needs her.
On the rooftop, Jim will threaten to kill John, and Mrs Hudson, and Lestrade. He will make Sherlock die for them. In the lab at Barts, she shares a secret smile with Sherlock. Conspirators at last, ready to take on death and win.
Achievements of Molly Hooper so far?
Dated Moriarty and saved a Holmes.
It wasn’t bad, not bad at all.