Cinnamon Twigs (3 page)

             
My mother sat on the chamois leather sofa and beckoned me towards her, her eyes fixed on the shiny surface of the hard oak coffin - the brass handles glimmering under the pale light. Finally, I put my arm around my mother’s trembling shoulders.

             
‘She won’t have to wait too long to see us again,’ she whispered.

             
‘What do you mean?’

             
‘Well, heaven has no time…’

             
I sat in my front garden afterwards as the sun beat down on me. The street buzzed with life as children laughed in the distance and neighbors mowed their lawns, watered their prized plants. I didn’t hear Lisa open my garden gate. She sat beside me and asked if I were thinking about my grandmother. I nodded and told her how strange it felt to see her body. Lisa gave me a
cwtch
and kissed my cheek. We were just kids, waiting for time to transcend that moment of pensive silence, waiting to grow up. I would soon move to another part of Cardiff, too far away from Canton to see much of Lisa and Elliott. Elliott and I would reach the pinnacle of our friendship and then grow apart, with only rivalry in common. I wouldn’t be reunited with my two friends for a long time.

             
Funerals are grave events, but my grandmother’s turned out to be a comedy of errors. The priest had a bad lisp, which raised the occasional snigger despite the circumstances, and even had my aunties and mother suppressing smiles throughout the service.

             
My grandfather had passed away, due to a long illness, when I was very young. So it was just my two aunties, my mother and me sitting in the front row of the church, and then shortly afterwards in the crematorium.

             
On the way to the crematorium, my aunties talked about how - despite the sad weight of the time - they’d found it difficult not to laugh at the priest’s lisp. My mother believed my grandmother would have struggled not to laugh as well, if only she’d been there at her own funeral service.

             
Laughing during funerals isn’t something you’d even think of doing. But my aunties had drawn my attention to the comedic side of the service. I feel sorry for the poor priest who couldn’t pronounce the letter S. Had I talked to him on a less grievous occasion, I’m sure I wouldn’t have found his lisp remotely funny.

             
Sinews of cloud passed over the sun and tawny leaves danced in a faint breeze as everybody entered the crematorium. I stood in the front row and gazed at the coffin. When everybody had to sing the first hymn, my mother picked up the Welsh version of the hymnbook. She couldn’t speak Welsh. It didn’t help that she tried reading the book upside down either. I let out a whispered snigger. The danger of laughter suddenly weighed down on me. I wondered how sick it would seem of me to get the giggles during such an occasion. And then the hymns ended. And the priest started reading again. And he couldn’t pronounce the letter S.

             
I trembled as laughter crept up my spine. My mother noticed this and got the giggles as well. She turned away from me and stared at the white wall, running her fingers through her hair to distract herself. I bit my tongue and stared at the ground. Everyone behind me must have felt such pity for the poor boy shaking with grief. My aunties became wise to the awkwardness of the situation and covered their mouths to stifle their laughter. The priest kept reading. And he still couldn’t pronounce the letter S. I tried everything to stop myself from breaking into a fit, from multiplication to counting Carmarthen sheep, but I couldn’t help counting how many times I heard the letter S, which wasn’t often at all.

             
The giggles left me when a beam of sunlight broke through a window, illuming the coffin. I still feel very guilty for getting the giggles. Nothing could have been less humorous, but I think that’s why we laughed. We smiled despite the constraints of mourning.

             
I wiped my damp brow as I stepped outside. Wasps cleaved the air and speckled butterflies wandered among the delphiniums. I couldn’t look at the people congregating around the striking memorial flowers. My mother touched my shoulder and smiled.

             
‘I’m sure your grandmother wouldn’t have been bothered,’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t have wanted everybody to cry at her funeral. She would have called us sissies.’

             
‘But she wouldn’t want us to laugh, surely?’

             
‘She would have understood. She was a terrible giggler herself!’

             
I examined the flowers, the lilies and wreaths of lavender. The sweet scents of the florid tributes filled my nostrils, as the clouds parted and the sun painted the turf a leonine yellow. There would be more funerals, more times of mourning. Inevitable good times and bad times. But all that would come later. I took in everything that bloomed in that current scene, as the image of sunlight breaking through the window and touching the coffin lingered in my mind.

CHAPTER FOUR

High School

And then I came to the cocoon phase, those metamorphosing years of acne and pubic hair. St Joseph’s Catholic High School cast an ominous shadow over each weekday morning. The headmaster ran the place like a concentration camp, mimicking
Monty Python’s
Ministry of Silly Walks while he twisted his mustache and peered through classroom windows. The place was drab, save for the colorful graffiti on the walls and the radioactive green beef burgers in the canteen.

             
‘Don’t worry. First years never really have their heads stuck down the toilet in high school. That’s just a myth!’ Mrs Parker’s final words to me resounded in my ears.

             
They resounded in my ears at the very moment I had my head stuck down the shitter by a sixth former, just two hours into high school life.

             
Bang, your head’s shoved down the bog and you realize that hey, you’re growing up now. You’re a teenager and adolescent life can be crappy.

             
I took a giant leap backwards in the school popularity hierarchy. Older kids bullied me until I was fully ingratiated with the toilet seat, badly bruised and looking flushed. School life became a haze of fist head-butting and atomic wedgies - that’s a really, really big wedgie. Even the teachers disliked me. Mrs Bach, my Geography teacher, could send any insomniac to sleep, but if I closed my eyes for a moment’s kip she’d have me in detention faster than I could name the capital of Thailand. Most of my lunchtimes consisted of doing lines and listening to her talk about such varied subjects as pancakes and salt corrosion.

             
I became a regular pizza face, no longer complimented for my blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. I experimented with acne treatment but one cream made the skin on my chin go hard and dry. I still persevered with it and during the winter my skin became chapped. A bully cut my face during a confrontation and the chapped skin turned into painful scabs, which stretched and cracked whenever I spoke.

             
I spent the next two years with an angry red scar on my face. Kids called me ‘Scarface’ and ‘vagina chin,’ staring at me as I walked down the corridors and assuming I had a skin disease. My mother laughed when I told her about the nicknames. But she reassured me that the scar would fade and I wouldn’t be an ugly duckling for much longer. To add to these calamitous trivialities, I had braces. Regardless of what anyone says, they’re not cool; they hurt and food gets stuck in them. Plus I kept breaking them every time I bit into an apple or chewed gum. The orthodontist hated my guts. She was always complaining about my lack of care when it came to brushing. She loved to scrape my gums until they bled, claiming this was due to insufficient care. But I’m guessing even Superman’s gums would bleed if you scratched them with a scalpel for long enough.

             
When I wasn’t with Mrs Bach, talking about terracettes and cupcakes, I spent my lunchtimes in the library, reading about Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas. This extra reading meant my literary terminology exceeded my classmates’. My English teacher Mrs Harper asked me to stay behind after one of her lessons.

             
‘You’re very quiet in class.’ She placed a pen on her desk and smiled broadly at me.

             
‘Well, I don’t have anybody to talk to.’

             
‘You never answer any questions during lessons. But you’re the brightest student of your age I’ve ever come across.’

             
‘Really?’

             
‘You mention intertextuality, feminist theories and deconstruction in your essays.’

             
‘Yeah, well I don’t really know what I’m talking about.’

             
‘These are theories you’ll come across at university. You shouldn’t know anything about them in high school!’ She laughed.

             
‘I read a lot,’ I said. ‘There were some books in the library.’

             
‘About deconstruction?’

             
‘Well, one textbook mentioned the word and I looked it up. I read something by this guy named Jacques Derrida.’

             
‘You read something by Derrida!’

             
‘Yeah, but it was confusing. And then I came across this other guy. Fuckster or Foucault, I think his name was.’

             
‘You’re fourteen!’

             
‘Have I done something wrong?’ I asked.

             
‘You have a special gift. I want you to start answering questions in class. If you like, I could recommend some books for you?’

             
‘I’d like that.’

             
‘Good. Daniel, you should make the most of your talent. You need to harness it. You’re years ahead of your classmates. I think you could go very, very far.’

             
Mrs Harper was my only source of light in high school. She introduced me to the likes of Dostoyevsky and Dickens, Wordsworth and Donne. And she taught me a Latin phrase I’ll never forget: ‘
Ars longa, vita brevis
’, which meant, ‘Life is short, but art is long’. I had it tattooed on my right shoulder on my nineteenth birthday.

             
I wrote poetry under Mrs Harper’s guidance. She taught me terms like anapaest and spondee. I soon had a poem published in a children’s anthology, which was passed around the class so everyone could have a read. It felt great to see my name in print, and I wanted to experience that feeling again. I remember having tears in my eyes and a swelling tingly feeling in my chest when people complimented it. I’d never felt like that before. So I entered another poem into a competition, which was also published. I realized then that I wanted to be a writer.

CHAPTER FIVE

Butterfly

My mother
had an issue with rubbish bags. Only one bag could be sent out for the garbage man each week. One wasn’t enough, I tell you! So I’d put any additional rubbish in extra bags and hide them among the bushes in our garden. I had to do it very early before school, while she slept. If she heard the rustle of a plastic bag she’d make me pull the other bags out of the bushes and empty their contents. I’d contend with the slugs and maggots feasting on the stale bread and expired milk. Then I’d go to school, smelling of trash.

             
At least school life became easier. I came out of my shell, climbed up the greasy pole and made friends. The scar on my chin faded and my teeth straightened. I wasn’t an ugly duckling anymore.

             
I wanted to perform on stage again, but Morning Mass was about as theatrical as it got at St Joseph’s. I missed the stage, spent most of my time dreaming about becoming a Hollywood hero. Those dreams had kept me going during Mrs Bach’s lessons about pesticides, and the times I’d gargled toilet water.

             
I also dreamt about my first crush, Olivia. To my adolescent eyes, her mouse-like features and tangled brown hair made her wonderful. Heaven smiled at me if she glanced my way, but that didn’t happen very often. I finally had my chance to tell her how I felt at the school prom, the most Americanized event I’d ever attended in Cardiff (bear in mind this was in the good old days, before bratty teenage girls were broadcast on television for their sweet sixteenths or school proms). School had ended, and the trials of teenage life would soon be over.

             
I gazed at the mirror, adjusting my turnback cuffs and bow tie. I looked like a man in that hired tuxedo, my blue eyes sparkling under the semi-flush lighting in the tailors. My thick black hair was slicked back. I’d developed broad shoulders and my voice had broken before any of my friends’ had. Not many kids would have felt inclined to shove my head down the bog during my last year at St Joseph’s.

             
Olivia floated across the hotel’s marble floor on prom night, her scarlet dress hugging her body. She sparkled under the crystal chandeliers. People arrived in limousines and pimpmobiles, some looking awkward in their attire, others enjoying the occasion. The teachers smiled, teary-eyed and pissed, sipping their champagne and denying us kids so much as a sip. At mealtime, salt found its way into drinks, and drinks onto food, while cheesy music bounced off the midnight blue walls.