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I was waiting for my mum. That’s what I was doing.
I was pressing patterns into a piece of old chewing gum with the bottom of my shoe. There were more than nineteen pieces of gum on the square of pavement outside the bar. I was counting them.
I wasn’t allowed in cos I’m underage. That’s why I was waiting outside in the black doorway in the freezing cold. She was in there for ages. Mr Thing and her weren’t friends any more, which meant she’d also lost her job and we had to leave the flat. Things happen that way a lot because Mum’s good at putting all of her eggs in one boyfriend.
We went so she could collect her wages and they had one more massive row while I stood outside counting spat out gum, trying not to listen. When she stormed out her mascara had slipped and the end of her nose was red, and she was halfway through a sentence about what a something he was.
When she saw me she rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and cracked a smile. She’s got nice teeth, my mum, all straight and small. Not like my mouth, which is still full of holes and frilly edges, even though I’m ten already. I hope I get teeth like her when I’m finished. I hope I hurry up.
“Let’s go,” Mum’s pretty teeth said. “Let’s spend some of his money, quick.”
She got me by the hand and we walked really fast across the road, and I thought she was saying stuff to me that I couldn’t hear.
“What?” I said, and she turned to me and I saw she had her mobile out already.
We packed before we went to see Mr Thing cos Mum’d been expecting it and she’d helped herself to a few extras out of his house, like towels and wine and stuff. We’d stashed our bags in a pub.
She phoned around and found a place, quick as a flash. She’s clever like that.
“Small apparently,” she said, and then licked her lips. “Like we could afford anything else”.
We lugged everything from the pub and stood outside the house with our suitcases. I looked at Mum, her big black glasses reflecting the sun, a little smudge of lipstick on her teeth when she smiled. I didn’t have time to point it out cos she rang a couple of bells and this lizard man in a pair of faded jeans appeared in the basement.
He stood there talking to her. I swear he was trying to see up her skirt. I tried to tell her, to pull her a bit out of the way, but she just said, “Not now!” sort of through her grin, so I glared at him instead. He was the landlord and I didn’t like him at first, smarmy old scale-face called Steve.
The corridor smelled funny, of cabbage and pot noodle and then something else like bleach with flowers in it. There was a big stack of old letters so the door couldn’t open all the way. Steve kicked it to one side with his cowboy boot and it fanned out over the floor. The carpet was the colour of a camel and looked like a camel had been eating it. He said it needed to be “refurbished” and when he said the word, he flowered his arms around like we might see it change before our very eyes, but we didn’t. There was a bike against the wall, with no front tyre and no saddle. It made me think of dinosaur bones in the desert. It was locked to the radiator with a big big chain.
“That’s Mick’s,” he said. “He lives below you. The rest of it is in his kitchen.”
We were on our way upstairs when an old lady came through the front door. It was only me that turned round to see. Her little dog started sniffing around all the envelopes and lifted its leg for a pee. It made me laugh, the sound of it landing. I didn’t tell. The old lady winked at me and tickled the dog and jingled her keys and went into her flat.
Our house was at the top. Steve carried one of Mum’s bags and she took one of mine. I dragged the other one up with two hands cos it was easier than lifting and it made this sound, scratch-thump, scratch-thump, on every step.
There was a loo, straight ahead, like as soon as you walked in, actually a bathroom, a kitchen to the left and a room with a sofa bed in it. I like sofa beds cos they’re a secret and you can have a bedroom any time you want, night or day. This one was a weird peachy colour that wasn’t so nice, but I didn’t mind cos it was bigger than our old one and it didn’t have such sharp corners.
“What do you think, Mum?” I said. “It’s all right, isn’t it?”
She frowned at me for calling her Mum in public and then she said to Steve, “We’ll take it.”
They shook hands and she did that laugh she does for boys only, which sounds like tiny stones landing on the high bit of a piano.
After she handed over the money and Steve handed over the key and left, she did a bit of ranting. That’s what I call it when she’s angry and she talks like she’s forgotten I’m there or I could be anyone, or something.
She said that maybe this was what Steve meant by “furnished” – one crap sofa, rubbish in the bins, not even a table, a couple of plates – but she could think of another name for it. She couldn’t believe how low she’d sunk. She said the place was filthy. She said, how did we know he wasn’t just re-letting to us while the people who really lived there were out at work?
“Huh!” she said, like a cross sort of laughing. “Imagine them coming home to you and me.”
While she ranted I did our Mary Poppins trick. I call it that cos there’s a bit I really like in the film where Mary has a bag made out of carpet and it’s full of stuff you’d never fit in a bag in real life, lamps and flowerpots and everything. My bag is a bit like that. Unpacking it never seems to end and there’s all sorts of stuff you can fling about until it feels more like home. Me and Mum’s favourite thing in that bag was a fold-up cardboard star with holes cut out. It was white when we got it and I painted it ages ago, when I was like six, and even though I didn’t do such a great job of it I never let her throw it away. It goes over the light bulb in your ceiling and makes everything look like a disco at Christmas. Except there wasn’t a light bulb, just an empty socket hanging, so I said I’d go to the shop and get one.
Mum was in the bathroom by then. I know what she does in there.
The street was way nicer than where Mr Thing lived, which was just flats and more flats and dark places I didn’t like being in by myself. For a start it was quiet, except for the cars whizzing across at the end. There was a garden on the other side of the road and a pub halfway down. The pub was covered in green tiles, like a bathroom. The houses were all the same and sort of elegant. I walked slowly, looking into all the windows. You can learn a lot about a place that way, about who lives there and the kind of stuff they keep. Like in some places there’s always books, more than you need really, and some houses look like they’re actually in a magazine, with the right flowers and everything. And some have net curtains older than me and Mum put together, and you can’t see in at all, but you can see they need washing and that nobody who lives in them ever goes out.
In our new street it was harder to see cos the bottom windows were under the pavement and the next windows up were too high. The basements mostly had leaves and bicycles and dustbins and broken chairs in, apart from one that had little trees cut to look like squirrels, but you couldn’t swing a cat down there.
Each house was cut up into so many flats you wondered where they put them. I read the little lit-up cards by the door on my way back in to ours and tried to work them out.
Basement was S Robbins, which was lizard-face Steve.
Flat one said Davy, the old lady with the peeing dog.
Flat two was water damaged, all brown and cloudy so I couldn’t read it.
Flat three said Flat three, which seemed pointless and was where the rest of the bike was.
Four was ours now, but it still said Fatnani.
The first thing I did, before the light bulb even, was cut a little piece of paper the right size off an envelope. I wrote CHERRY & BOHEMIA, drew some stars and fireworks, to put downstairs at the button for number four.
Cherry’s my mum’s name. I’m supposed to call it her now I’m ten cos the word MUM makes her feel old. Cherry loves it the times someone asks if we’re sisters. She knows they don’t mean it and they know she doesn’t believe them, but everyone plays along anyway. That’s what she told me. She said, “The men I hang out with are suckers.”
The time I like her best is some Sunday afternoons. We stay in our pyjamas, watch TV if we’ve got one, and eat what we want under a duvet. Some Sundays, she looks at me like she hasn’t seen me all week.
Steve the landlord lent us a broom and some bin bags and we cleaned up. Mum sprayed some perfume about so the whole flat smelled of her. When he came to get his stuff back, he asked Mum if she wanted to come out for a drink, just down the road at the pub that looked like a bathroom.
“You can come if you want, little lady,” he said to me. “Have a lemonade and a packet of crisps.”
Mum said I was all right here. She said, “You don’t mind do you, Bo, if I pop out?”
It was fine with me. I like being in a new place because there’s loads to do and look at and think about, and it takes longer than normal to mind being on your own. Mum gave me a pound for some chips if I got hungry and she said she wouldn’t be long. I put the money in my pocket and I made the sofa into a bed for later. I unpacked my clothes and made two really neat piles of them under the window. Then I played snake on Mum’s phone and made a few calls – not real ones because if she ran out of money I’d be in for it, and anyway, who would I speak to? I pretended to be like her when she’s on it, talking really quiet and biting her nails and saying things like “No way” and “ten minutes” and “you out tonight or what?”
Before she left I showed her the card I made for the front door. She liked it. She said she’d take it with her and put it by our bell. Maybe nobody would notice. But at least it showed we were alive in there.
Three (Sam) (#ulink_9f736e10-717a-5b44-8f28-0e3409da8e4e)
It happened faster than I’d thought, my new life getting started. First I found a job, stacking shelves in an all night sort of supermarket. I only went in for a carton of milk. From the shelves I stacked most, I’d say most people went in for SuperTenants and five-litre bottles of cider. The hours were strange and peopled with drunks. I kept my head down. Nobody asked me any awkward questions and they didn’t need any paperwork, and they were as content as I was not to bother being friends.
And I found somewhere to live.
My place at number 33 Georgiana Street was the third bell of five. All the other bells had a name on apart from mine, and no name suited me fine. I found it outside a newsagent’s on a notice board. A guy came out while I was standing there and stuck a postcard on with a pin. I watched him walk back in the shop before I read it.
I’d been throwing my money away at the hotel for nearly a week. I couldn’t afford it and I couldn’t go home. I didn’t want to be one of those people who moves to London and then ends up sleeping on the streets before they know it. The postcard said STUDIO FLAT. NICE VIEWS. CHEAP RENT. NO DSS. 2 MINS TUBE. DEPOSIT.
I phoned the number from a call box that stank so hard I had to keep the door open with my leg. I was standing at the end of my new road.
The landlord’s name was Steve. He lived in the basement. His skin was the exact dead texture of his leather jacket. He did the welcome tour, meaning the communal bathroom and the under-stairs cupboard where my meter was, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the folds and creases in his cheeks.
The electricity was pay as you go, same as the rent, which Steve kept telling me was way below the going rate, and which had to be cash in a brown envelope, I’m guessing so he could stuff it under his mattress and not tell anybody. I handed over half of everything I’d ever saved for the first month’s rent. The whole place was pretty trashed, but it felt so good to shut the door to my own room and stand with my back against it. It could have been exactly what I’d dreamed of doing with the money all along.
The place had a little kitchen and a bigger room for everything else, like eating and reading and sitting and thinking and sleeping. The floorboards were painted in thick black gloss with stuff trapped in it, hairs and fluff and sharper lumps, like bugs in amber. There were two massive windows, floor to ceiling, that flooded the place with streetlight all night long and let in the sounds of outside. You are never alone with noise and light, not completely.
From my windows I could see straight into other windows, then across the pattern of rooftops and into the tower of a Greek Orthodox church, and down on to the street below. I spent a long time looking.
It took me about a week to remember where I was when I woke up.
On the first day I cleaned the flat. I found a folded-up note between the floorboards that said please let me stay in this house forever, please let me, please. The handwriting was small and spiky and distinctive, all the words joined together like one long word. I closed it up and put it back where I found it, and I felt sorry that whoever wrote it didn’t get what they wanted. I felt sorry for them that I was there instead.
When everything was clean I unpacked my bag, which took all of ten seconds. Two T-shirts, three pairs of socks, a spare pair of jeans, toothbrush, toothpaste and soap, a spare jumper, the school uniform I’d taken off, the shell of my phone and two unreadable books which belonged to Max and should have been given back a long time ago.
On the second day I hung blankets on the windows, but they kept falling down so I gave up and learned how to live in a goldfish bowl without caring, like everyone else.
On the third I worked out how to use the little oven. Someone else’s cooking burned off the red elements and filled the room with hot, damp smoke.
On the fourth someone upstairs had a domestic in the darker hours of morning. Things kept falling past my windows on to the road below. Clothes float with grace and land silently, while cutlery is more chaotic.
On the fifth the electricity kicked out halfway through my shower because I’d forgotten to charge my top-up key.
On the sixth I walked in on somebody in the communal bathroom. They were just a shadow behind a curtain, but they were shouting.
On the seventh I ate toast and cream of tomato soup for the fourth time that week, and I thought about home and how I could never go back there.
On the eighth day it was raining. I watched the puddles growing on the road. Why did it make me think about me and Max, staying late at school? I didn’t want it to. It was the rain and the books by my bed that did it.
Max was chess club and I was football. I can’t play chess and he’s rubbish at football. Mum drove him home across the wind battered common which was bedraggled with sheep and rotting bracken. The house stood at a bend in the road, an L-shaped farmhouse with geese and dogs and mud in the yard. It had rained and the road was streaming down the hill towards us, and the windscreen was blind with puddle water.
We walked through his yard to the front door while Mum turned the car around. He didn’t knock. We just walked in and left our shoes inside the door. The house was warm and smelt of cinnamon, gold and orange against the grey of outside. I followed him into the kitchen and his mum was there, warming herself like a cat against the Aga.
Max’s mum didn’t think much of me. “Hello,” she said, and Max pretty much ignored her, but I looked at her and smiled because she wasn’t my family to ignore. Her hair was wet, bleeding water into the fabric of her shirt like blotting paper.
Max grabbed two apples from the fruit bowl and offered one to me across the table. I shook my head, so he offered it to her and she took it and bit hard. It was quiet between the three of us, and awkward.
“Wait there,” Max said suddenly without looking at me. “I’ll just get that thing.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
I stayed where I was while he climbed the stairs and walked across the room over our heads. I listened to the wall clock and the hum of the fridge. There was a hole in my sock.
Max’s mum didn’t talk to me. She finished the apple. She arched her back and stretched her arms above her head. I saw the skin at her hips, above her jeans, below the lift of her shirt. Then she turned her back and filled a saucepan at the sink, started chopping carrots. I wasn’t there to her. I might have been a ghost in the room.
I was glad when Max came back with the thing – a book he’d been talking about in the car, something complicated about life on other planets. According to this book, there were so many galaxies and universes out there, even if the odds against life were a billion to one, there’d still be a billion planets teeming with it. As he gave it to me his mum looked at us and laughed quickly to herself. She knew I was never going to read it. I could tell just by the cover that I’d get bogged down on the first page and never pick it up again.
But Max wanted me to leave with something, if not an apple then a book, so I took it. I held its spine and flicked through the pages with my thumb. Mum beeped outside in the yard and I said I should be going, and Max’s mum left the room.
“See you mate,” I said, and Max said, “Bye,” and she said nothing.
I was putting my shoes back on at the door when he came running out of the kitchen. His socks made a shushing noise on the floorboards.
“Take this one as well,” he said. He was out of breath.
“Another book,” I said.
“The Ant Colony,” he said, in a voice like you hear at the cinema. “By Dr Bernard O Hopkins.”
I laughed. “Thanks Max.”
“It’s brilliant,” he said, looking at the book and not at me. “A real page turner.”
It was so like Max to talk about an ant book like that, like it was a thriller or something.
I said, “I won’t be able to put it down.”
He nodded, like that was the right answer, and he stood in the orange light of the doorway and watched me walk to the car.
On the drive home Mum and I talked about the books Max had given me. “Ants?” she said. “What a surprise.” Because Max was obsessed with them, how organised they were, how many of them there might be, how they all worked together like one animal. Max told me a long time ago that looking down at them made him think he was a giant towering over the earth.
Ants were what we did when we were seven and eight and nine. It was all Max wanted to do. I was like the genius professor’s assistant or something. We dug and photographed and measured. We tracked and timed and watched. We collected them in bottles. Max pickled specimens in vinegar and kept them in the garden shed. He’d forget where we were and who I was even, and everything was just about the ants.
When we got older, and everyone wanted to play football and drive cars on the common and get wrecked and show off down the river to girls, Max was still into ants. There wasn’t a cure for his ant thing.
I showed Mum the other book. I said, “Do you think the life on other planets idea comes from watching ants?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, ants are kind of weird, like from outer space, and Max has told me before he thinks humans are just like ants, even less if you put them in the context of the universe,”
“Very scientific.” Mum was smiling at me. “Some of his brain cells are rubbing off.”
“Leave it out, Mum,” I said.
She said, “I get vertigo just thinking about life on this planet, never mind scouting around somewhere else for more.”
We started inventing intergalactic package holidays, imagining a time when everybody had got bored of space travel because it was too easy, because everyone was doing it, because it was just not cool. I said Max might find someone nearer his IQ on planet Zargon.
Mum said, “What planet is he going to find his people skills on?”
She said this because Max is one of those clever people who are also about the shyest, most awkward you could meet. Often this can be mistaken for just rude.
“He was talking to you,” I said to Mum. “That’s a start isn’t it?”
“When was he talking to me?” she said.
“Today, in the car, about the book.”
“No,” she said, “he was talking to you.”
I smiled at Mum. “He was talking to you. He was looking at me.”
“See?” she said. “People skills. How do you know that anyway?”
