Disappearing Home (19 page)

Johnny's face crumples; he holds out his arms to Bernie. The man puts him back in the pram, opens his bag. He pulls out a huge truck and gives it to Johnny, a leather football for Ged and a pair of red boxing gloves for Bernie. He gives us all a penny from his pocket, fluffs up Johnny's hair. ‘See you in a minute,' he says, then climbs the stairs two at a time. Ged takes Johnny's penny off him in case he swallows it.

Ged looks at Bernie. ‘Who's that?'

‘That's our dad,' Bernie says. ‘Home from sea.'

‘Liar,' Ged says.

‘Am not,' Bernie says, tossing up his penny and catching it. ‘Race you to Dolly's.'

We run the pram around to Dolly's shop to buy sweets. When we get there Dolly has a For Sale sign up. She tells the woman in front of us she's moving to Jersey, as soon as she gets a buyer, to live with her sister.

‘Where'll we get our sweets from then?' Ged says.

The school hall is huge, and packed and scary. It smells of old sweets. Somebody puts a record on the record player and we all stand. A lady with blue hair walks down the centre of the hall, eyes straight ahead. She looks like the Queen, lilac dress and coat to match. The wooden floor is even shinier than her black patent leather shoes and bag. ‘Good morning,' she says. She even talks like the Queen. ‘For the benefit of our new pupils, my name
is Mrs Bullock. You may sit.' We sit. She stands for the whole assembly in the same position. She tells us to count from the front row of chairs to find the number of our row. ‘Look either side of you and behind you because every morning you will sit in the same place for assembly.' I have already counted, row six, eight seats in. The girl in front of me turns her face around to look at me. She has high, sticky-out bunches and sticky-out nostrils to match. She tosses her face away from me. Her back parting is wonky.

Mrs Bullock stands on a stage, red velvet curtains either side of her. All of the teachers dotted around the hall are women. When she has finished talking, somebody puts the record on again and she steps down from the stage and walks back down the centre of the hall, eyes straight ahead like she's in a trance. Once Mrs Bullock has gone, the music is switched off. The girls on the front row lead out. I follow them towards the door. A teacher stands in front of us, says we have to follow her.

From our classroom on the ground floor, we can see the playground. Our teacher is called Mrs O'Connor. ‘I'm your form teacher and your English teacher,' she tells us. She has short feathery hair, soft brown eyes and wears a bottle green cardigan draped around her shoulders. She sits down, flicks her slingbacks off under her desk. Takes the register, looks up as she reads, trying to match the face to the name. ‘Bear with me,' she says.

I look around the room. Plenty of faces I don't know, some I do. Trisha Fisher is in my class and so is Angela, the girl from the hall with the wonky parting, and Tina Egan from my old school. When the register is finished a bell rings and Mrs O'Connor stands.

‘After play, make your way back to this room; you're staying with me all day. Tomorrow you'll begin school properly with a timetable.'

I don't know what a timetable is.

On the playground behind a wall big girls smoke one cigarette between them. One, two, three pulls each and pass it on. ‘For fuck's sake, Mandy, you've soaked the tip. I'm first on at lunch.' Mandy has a big chest with a badge pinned to it that says
MONITOR
. She has the feather cut. She catches me watching. ‘Piss off, you. You'll get us caught.'

I watch the teacher patrol the playground, but she doesn't go near the wall. She stops and talks to the little kids, points the way to here and there. She doesn't look at the wall, not once. Our classroom window opens and two girls sell drinks and sweets out of it. There's a long queue and the bell goes before everyone is served.

Back inside the classroom, Mrs O'Connor hands us a book each:
Anne of Green Gables.
We spend the rest of the morning reading aloud around the room, one paragraph each. Mrs O'Connor listens to us all read and writes things down in a big book. Sometimes she stops a reader and says, speak up, or slow down, but most of the time she writes.

Next day we are given a timetable. It has names, times and classroom numbers on it. Mrs O'Connor explains how, if we get lost, we are to ask a monitor to show us the way. You can easily spot them, she says. They wear a badge that says monitor. ‘Watch how the monitors behave, and you can't go wrong.' Mrs O'Connor leads us to our first maths lesson with Mrs Much. ‘Don't want you being late for that,' she says.

Mrs Much has red hair and cat glasses. She's the deputy head, she tells us, and homework is compulsory in her class. She fires times tables questions at us; a squeeze on the shoulder means it's your turn to answer. As the weeks go by the questions get harder and so do the squeezes.

Mrs Jones teaches
RE
. She's a big woman with thick ankles and a thin smile. We sit in alphabetical order, which means I always end up sitting next to sticky-out bunches and nostrils, Rose Mooney. Mrs Jones tells us to copy passages from books into our exercise books. Rose Mooney rolls the pages of her exercise book around her pencil. ‘I'm going to be a hairdresser when I leave school like our Rita,' she whispers. ‘What are you going to be?'

I carry on copying the story of Lazarus and say nothing.

‘Where did you get that feather cut done?'

‘Great Homer Street.'

‘Our Rita says it's too dear there. You should go to her shop next time; it's dead cheap.'

Mrs Jones looks up. ‘Something wrong, Mooney?'

I carry on copying and Rose finds a new page to roll her pencil around. ‘Big bones Jones, our Rita calls her; locked our Rita in that cupboard once for talking.'

I look over at the brown cupboard door near the window.

‘She found big bones Jones's lunch box in there and scoffed it.'

‘She never.'

She dabs the tip of her finger on her tongue, crosses her heart.

‘Honest to God,' she says. ‘Cheese and pickle sandwich on brown bread, an apple, a KitKat and a bottle of lemonade.'

‘What did Mrs Jones say?'

‘Sent her to Bullock for the cane; six of the best she got. Big bones Jones had to go the chippy.'

‘Rose Mooney, one more peep out of you and you can stand outside for the rest of the morning.'

Rose cocks her head down to the side, pretends to write in her exercise book. ‘She hates me,' she says, hardly moving her lips. ‘She knows Rita's my sister.'

On the playground I walk around with Rose. We watch the girls smoke behind the wall. I queue up for a carton of orange juice while Rose talks about hairdressing and things her Rita told her about the teachers. Mrs Much once hit her Rita over the head with a text book and called her a dunce. Her mum came up to the school and dragged Mrs Much out of the classroom and gave her a good kicking in the corridor. She didn't pick on Rita again after that. ‘Mrs O'Connor's the best,' Rose says. ‘Our Rita says she's kind and we're lucky to have her.'

Rita is right. English is my favourite lesson. Not just because Mrs O'Connor is kind to all of us. We get to read books and stories and poems. On Friday, Mrs O'Connor says that we can take
Anne of Green Gables
home with us to read if we promise to bring it back on Monday in one piece. She asks those who want to take it home to show hands. Half of the class show hands and Mrs O'Connor smiles. ‘That's great,' she says. ‘If you don't bring it back on Monday though, you have to pay for it.'

On Sunday morning while Mum and Dad are still asleep, I race down to my nan's with
Anne of Green Gables.
‘What's it about?' Nan asks.

‘I'll tell you a bit about it in an hour when I know more,' I say, curling up on the settee with my book.

When she's in her flat, Nan listens to the news on her radio on the hour of every hour.

‘We've read some of it around the class, but I'll start again from the beginning because some of the girls who read out loud stumbled over words and mumbled them so it didn't make sense. The main character is a twelve-year-old girl, Anne-Shirley. She is an orphan sent to work on a farm for a brother and sister, Matthew
and Marilla. They asked for a boy, but the orphanage sent a girl by mistake.'

‘They're not going to send the poor beggar back, are they?' Nan says.

‘Dunno.'

Nan goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on. ‘They want shooting if they do.' She waves her hand at me. ‘You read on and find out.'

After an hour, Nan points at the clock. ‘Well?' she says.

‘They're going to give her a chance. Marilla didn't want her but Matthew said it's only fair to give her a chance.'

‘He's a smart man.'

‘She's got to stay out of trouble and help them around the farm.'

‘That's not hard. Do you think she can?'

I shrug.

‘Well, read on and find out,' she says.

Every time I read a chapter I have to tell Nan what's happened. When it's time for me to go, Nan says I'm to bring the book back on Sunday, so she can find out what happens next.

‘It's better than the bloody news. The news has done nothing but depress me lately.'

The following Sunday, from St George's church, I run down the grass hill until I reach Netherfield Road. The sideways rain pelts through my duffel coat giving off a horrible nail-varnish smell. My socks and shoes are soaked. I pull up my hood but it falls back down, too big for my head. My ears sting with the cold. I take
Anne of Green Gables
out of my pocket and slip it inside the coat. I cross the road, run down another grass hill until I reach Great Homer Street. It's Sunday. There's no market today. It looks bigger when the stalls are here.

I walk up to Scotland Road. The sign above the Throstle's Nest pub creaks over my head. I walk up to Limekiln Lane, across the caged tarmac where the lads play football. Her front door is open. Nan sits in her straight-backed chair by the radio. I sit down on the settee. I'm soaked through. She gets me a towel, hangs my coat up in the bathroom.

She's back in the living room. ‘I've been thinking, if you read it out loud, then I won't have to wait to find things out. I could find things out when you do.'

I don't want to share it, have it taken over. Nan shuffles back in her chair, pats her hair into shape, eases the hem of her pinny down.

‘Sorry, love,' she says. ‘I'm ready now.' Gives me the nod to begin. I open the book and start to read. I take her through fields, schools, classrooms, bedrooms, markets and ministries, forwards, backwards, up and down stairs, into stables. She sits and listens and laughs and sighs. I watch her listen to the words, let my eyes read on a little faster, find out something new seconds before she does, and wonder how she'll react, even guess how she'll react, watch how she takes the news and, bit by bit, I begin to enjoy it.

When each character speaks I give them their own special voice; deep and kind for Matthew, sharp and brisk for Marilla, bright and funny for Anne. These characters take over my mind and I can see and hear them live and breathe in the room. It's as if they are living next door and we get to see right inside their lives, without ever having to reveal anything about ourselves.

Every couple of chapters Nan rushes around the kitchen and makes tea, brings out a box of Family Favourites, says wait, so she can settle herself back into the chair before a new chapter begins. Sometimes, she asks me to go back and read chapters all over
again. Especially the ones that describe the countryside. ‘Makes me feel like I've been on a day out,' she says.

When it's time for me to go I close the book. Nan's eyes are glittery. ‘One more chapter?'

‘Can't, I've got school tomorrow. Next Sunday?'

Nan nods. ‘Next Sunday.'

When I get to the front door I can hear Nan's voice.

‘She's a real livewire that Anne-Shirley, isn't she?'

BLACK LACE-UP SHOES, SIZE
9

I BOX OF FAIRY SNOW

I JAR OF COFFEE

I BOTTLE OF LOXENE SHAMPOO

ROBINSONS LEMON & LIME JUICE

‘D
o me a favour?' Sylvia hands me a shopping list. ‘Big Bernie's not going back to sea. He misses me and the kids too much. We're down to our last few bob.' She opens her purse, gives me three pence. ‘Buy yourself a Curly Wurly or something.' She roots in her purse again, gives me an extra two pence for my bus fare. ‘See what you can do. He needs shoes to go looking for work, eight and a half, even if there's no nines.' She hands me a blue shopping bag; the handles are attached with gold rings. It makes me think of Mr Wainwright's pen. It costs one pence there on the bus to County Road and one pence back. ‘You'll have to be quick. The shops close in an hour.'

I look up St Domingo Road but there's no bus in sight. I start to walk, look back when I reach the next stop to check for a
bus. There's no sign of one so I run all the way, bet myself I can get there before it. By the time I get to County Road, no bus has passed me. Inside Timpson's shoe shop it's busy. The shoes are in boxes stacked up against the wall. Every box has the shoe size printed on the front. I look for size nine. Open a box and look inside: brown slip-on shoes. I take the note out of my duffel coat pocket and check:
black lace-up.
I lift up lids on loads of size nine boxes before I find a pair of black lace-up shoes.

I take a walk around the shop. Pretend to look at a pair of shoes for myself. I try one on, walk about in it. Check to see what the staff are doing. Two ladies and one man, all serving. My heart starts to flip in my chest. I unzip the bag. Look around to see who still needs serving. A lady holding a little girl's hand waits by the handbag rail. One of the staff is behind the counter taking money. I have to be quick while they're all busy. I slip my own shoe back on.