Poking Seaweed with a Stick and Running Away from the Smell (11 page)

25
My new best pal

Mum said I shouldn't worry about starting high school with no best pals to hang about with on my first day, but it's hard when you're standing there in the playground wishing there was somebody you could talk to, and then you start raking in your bag pretending you're trying to find something and there's only so many times you can do that before people start to notice and think there's something wrong with you. Mum said making good pals is something that takes time but then I thought, well me and Maggie didn't take any time at all 'cause we were best pals on that first day we met at school.

So I just sat in the schoolyard at break times on my own and tried to look like I didn't care. Mum had given me another home perm and my hair had gone yellow again and everybody sniggered at me in the corridor as I walked past them between classes. And sometimes I'd hide in the toilets at break time so that nobody could see me and I'd pass the time thinking about my old best pal Maggie and how she never used to laugh at any of my perms and the more I thought about Maggie, the more I missed her and the more I missed her, the more I knew I'd never get another best pal just like her.

When I was in the schoolyard I'd watch the groups of girls all huddled together in their own private circles and I wished I could have huddled in their private circles too, but nobody asked me. And sometimes I'd go to the tuck shop to give myself something to do and I'd get myself a Cadbury's Crème Egg and I'd peel off the shiny paper from around it and I'd bite the top off and then I'd lick out the creamy stuff inside like they do on the telly and then when I was finished, I'd pick the skin from around my finger­nails till they bled and wait for the next class to start.

And then one day, Morag Black came up to me in the schoolyard and she said I was only hanging around by myself 'cause I thought I was too good for everybody there. And how could I tell her that that wasn't true, that I wanted to be in one of their private circles hanging around in the schoolyard talking about boys and lipstick and God alone knows what. Then she put me up against the wall and told me I was a fucking snob and that I was lucky she didn't kick my fucking arse and take my dinner money off me and when she let me go I ran straight to the toilets and locked myself in a cubicle and thought about my old best pal Maggie again.

As if it wasn't bad enough that nobody wanted to know me in the schoolyard, the teachers in the English department didn't want to know me either 'cause I kept failing their stupid exams. One day Miss Clarke the English teacher asked me what it was about interpreting the works of the great writers and poets of our time that I didn't get. And that's when I told her I wished we could just read the great writers and poets of our time and enjoy them without having to pull them apart and answer questions on what they were thinking about at the time they wrote the stuff and she didn't seem to like that answer very much. And then she said if I wanted to keep on studying English I had to try harder, and while she was at it she said as if my interpretation skills weren't bad enough my handwriting was shite too, and that she'd never seen handwriting as bad as mine in her entire life and that was saying something 'cause her da was a doctor. And I told her my da's no' a doctor and his handwriting's shite too and that's when she told me one more word like that from you my lady and you'll find yourself outside the headmaster's door.

And so I thought I was trying harder but still I kept failing the exams and on the last exam I failed Miss Clarke wrote at the bottom of the page in red ink, ‘Ask your mother to contact the English department in the first instance.' I didn't know what ‘the first instance' meant but Mum seemed to know.

So Mum went up to the school the next day and knocked on the door of the English department and Miss Clarke opened the door and told Mum to come in and sit down and she went to the filing cabinet and brought out copies of my past exam papers and showed them to Mum. Mum looked through the papers with the red crosses, and then she looked up at Miss Clarke and said, ‘So what's the problem?' And Miss Clarke said the problem was that I didn't have a clue about what was required of me to complete the English course and that they were going to have to give my place to another child with more ability who wouldn't drag down the morale of the brighter students. Mum asked Miss Clarke what I would do in place of English and Miss Clarke said there were still some places left in the chemistry class and then Mum said, do you think if Ali can't understand a poem, she'll be able to understand what's going on in chemistry? And that's when Miss Clarke stood up and said that wasn't her problem, and closed my file and stamped something on the front with a big rubber stamp and showed Mum the door.

When Mum came home that night she told me I couldn't take the English class anymore 'cause they had to give my place to another child with more ability. And then I said to Mum, ‘First it was long division I couldn't do in the arithmetic class and now it's English. What's left, Mum? What am I good at?' And Mum said I was good at plenty of things.

‘Like what?'

‘Well, I mean, there's … oh, I mean, let me think … there must be a hundred things you're good at.'

And I said, ‘Name one, Mum,' and she said, ‘Well, needle­work. There. You're good at needlework.'

‘I am not, Mum. I'm shite at needlework. You saw that skirt I tried to make that time and even you said it was shite.'

‘Aye, well that's true. Now look, I know, you're good at P.E.! See, I told you you were good at something!'

‘You did not, Mum, you told me I was good at
plenty
of things—P.E.'s only
one
thing.'

And so I ended up in chemistry. Nobody asked me if I even wanted to join that class and next I know, I'm having to show up at Room E11 in the Science Block on Monday mornings at ten o'clock for an hour of drudgery and it may as well have been in Chinese for all I understood. I sat by myself 'cause nobody wanted to know me in the chemistry class either and I made friends with the Bunsen burners and the test tubes and the things to stand the test tubes in. I hated chemistry and while Mrs Berry the chemistry teacher was going on about electrons and ­neutrons and hydrogen and carbon, my mind turned to Maggie in the English class probably writing poems and stories and reading Macbeth aloud in front of the class with her new best pal Linda with the shiny chestnut hair and the big tits while I sat in Room E11 with the Bunsen burners and the test tubes and the things to stand the test tubes in, writing out lines of x's and y's and talking about the periodic table of elements and who gives a fuck.

Then one Monday morning as I sat at my desk waiting for Mrs Berry to explain the difference between single bonds and double bonds somebody came and sat beside me. She took her books out of her bag and turned to me and smiled and said hello and I couldn't believe it and so I smiled and said hello back. She told me her name was Leanne and she offered me one of her sweeties and I told her you weren't allowed to eat sweeties in the class and that's when she said ‘Who gives a fuck?' and so I smiled and took a sweetie from her and I hid it under my tongue and the two of us smiled some more.

26
A fine Johnny

Leanne was a brilliant new best pal. She had long golden hair and legs like two sticks of dry spaghetti that poked out of short pink skirts and the boys buzzed around Leanne just like they'd buzzed around Maggie, like flies 'round shite, at least that's what Mum used to say. And just like before, the boys never buzzed around me, and when they started to gather around Leanne I'd walk away to leave them alone together and nobody even noticed I wasn't there.

When four o'clock came I'd take a short cut home from school across the grass you weren't meant to walk on and I'd squeeze myself through the railings of the fence that lead onto Camper Street. Brian Stewart's da's pet shop was just across from the railings on Camper Street and as I passed I'd look in the window at the black fan-tailed fish with the googly eyes. Mr Stewart would be standing behind his counter and he'd smile through the window and mouth a big ‘hello!' to me and I'd smile back and mouth a big ‘hello!' to him, and we did that every afternoon at four o'clock.

I'd wanted to go into the pet shop that day and tell Mr Stewart about the article I'd read in
Fish Weekly
about what to do when your fantail's under the weather and how you should feed it a frozen pea, defrosted, when out of nowhere this good-looking boy appeared and asked if he could carry my bag. I didn't know where to look, so I stared at my shoes and said, ‘Aye, if you like.' He said he did like and gently took my bag and slung it over his shoulder on top of his own. He told me his name was Johnny, and what a fine Johnny he was too, and I let him carry my bag all the way to my street, though not to my house, for who wants to be caught by their da standing in the street with a boy in broad daylight. I took my bag from him and thanked him very much and all the while my face was purple with the embarrassment of it all like the beetroots Mum got at the markets and sometimes boiled whole. He asked me if he could carry my bag again the next day at four o'clock and I said, Aye all right, if you like, and he said he did like and I felt so happy I thought my heart would explode.

The phone was ringing when I walked into the house and I raced to answer it. It was Laughlin from the building site my da was working on. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and I shouted to Mum that Laughlin was on the phone and he needed to speak to her.

‘Hello, Laughlin, it's Betty here,' Mum said, bending down and holding the phone away from her ear so's I could listen in.

‘Aye, hello, Betty,' Laughlin said, ‘I'm sorry to trouble you, hen, but it's about your man, big Joe.'

‘Aye, go on,' Mum said.

‘Well, I'm afraid it's bad news, Betty. There's been a ­terrible accident.'

‘What do you mean,
terrible
accident? How terrible are we talking here?' Mum asked and I watched her eyes widen and a smile appear on the corners of her lips.

‘Well, I don't want you to go worrying yourself half to death, but it's terrible enough.'

‘Go on,' Mum said.

‘Well, hen, big Gavyn, the crane driver, was working the crane, moving railway sleepers from one pile to another. Anyway, he only went and took his eyes off the job for a split second to unwrap his corned-beef sandwiches when he accidentally knocked the button that released the brake and the railway sleeper went hurtlin' through the air and landed slap bang on big Joe's leg!'

‘You don't say! So what kind of state's Joe in? Will he live?'

‘Och aye, hen. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was a close call, but it's just his thigh bone that's broken and believe it if you like, the thigh bone's the strongest bone in the body, so the ambulance man was saying. They call it the femur.'

‘You don't say,' Mum said, somewhat disinterested in this detail.

‘Yes indeed, hen, you'll be glad to know that apart from that he's absolutely fine.'

‘So just to recap then,' Mum said, ‘what you're
sayin'
is, he's going to live?'

‘Aye, hen, that's right.'

‘So you're
sure
it's not fatal?'

‘Come come, there's no need for that, hen, don't you worry yourself one wee bit with silly thoughts like that. It would take a lot more than a railway sleeper to get rid of a man like big Joe. He's as strong as an ox that man!'

Laughlin gave Mum the details of the hospital and Mum thanked him for his trouble and hung up the phone and her disappointment was visible for all the world to see.

Somewhat deflated myself, I picked up my bag from the couch and dragged it behind me on my way to my room. Once I was there, thoughts of my fine Johnny crept into my mind again and it wasn't long before I'd forgotten the disappointment of my da's narrow escape with death. I touched my bag, the same bag my fine Johnny had touched that very afternoon, and I closed my eyes and could see us there together in our very own French chateau at Fontainebleau, if you don't mind, and I'm wearing my wedding gown of antique lace a hundred seamstresses have stitched by hand and just for me, and the crystal buttons are glinting in the afternoon sun and the scent of French lavender fills the air and I never want this moment to end.

Mum made us a mince and onion curry for our tea that night—well it's not every day your da narrowly escapes death and gets kept in the hospital. And my how we laughed. We told jokes all night long and had the singsongs we could never have when he was there. We put on his Neil Diamond LPs and Andrew sang into the hairbrush and we rustled bags of crisps and crunched out loud and no one told us to ‘make less fuckin' noise!'

I went to bed happy that night, but I couldn't sleep. Not even thoughts of my da agonising in his hospital bed with his femur mashed to a pulp could distract me from the pangs of love that Cupid's arrow had been firing at my heart since four o'clock that afternoon. I tossed and turned for hours on end until finally, in the wee small hours, I drifted into a velvety slumber on a bed of soft, red, rose petals, my fine Johnny by my side.

I did my hair the next morning using Mum's curling tongs and added a dab of rouge to my cheeks from her make-up box. When I got to school Leanne noticed all right and told me I looked pretty and what was I looking so pretty for? And my face went bright purple again like those beetroots and Leanne guessed straightaway it must have been about a boy.

The bell rang at five to four. I ran to the toilet and checked how I looked. I don't know who I expected to see but all I got was myself and I looked like I always looked, like shite, and there was nothing I could do. I ran away from the mirror and out into the playground and across the grass you're not supposed to walk on and I squeezed myself through the hole in the railings onto Camper Street and I waited and waited, then I looked up and down the street and I waited some more. Then the darkness came and I knew it was five o'clock 'cause Mr Stewart came out to the front of his shop to close the shutters and turn the key in the door and when he saw me standing at the railings he smiled and called out ‘hello!' from across the street and I raised my hand and called ‘hello!' back but I didn't feel much like smiling. I looked up and down the street one last time and then I picked up my bag and headed for home.