by Linda Green
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, as she pulls on her rucksack. ‘I’m going to start a petition.’
‘Good,’ I reply. ‘I’ll sign it.’
*
Mum is waiting outside the playground. She has that pretending smile on again. She doesn’t even ask me how my day has been because she was there in assembly and you don’t have to be a genius to work it out. She gives my shoulder a little squeeze and I try hard not to cry. I manage to hold it in all the way home but as soon as we get inside the door, it bursts out.
‘Hey, come here,’ says Mum, holding her arms out wide. I step towards her and let her hug me. My face is pressing against her green cardigan and it is soft and feels like a giant sponge for my tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mum says. She doesn’t say what she’s sorry for and I wonder if it’s the divorce, me being different, buying me the George Formby songbook or simply because of them laughing at me in assembly. Maybe it’s for all of them. I wish I never had to go back to school – any school. But I do. I have to go back on Monday for the stupid breakfast club.
‘We’ve got to go in early every day next week for extra SATs revision,’ I blurt out, when I eventually manage to stop crying.
‘Who told you that?’ Mum says, pulling away and looking down at me.
‘Mrs Kerrigan. There’s a letter in my book bag. They’re calling it a breakfast club but really it’s just extra revision.’
‘You don’t have to go.’
‘She says I do.’
‘Well, you don’t. I’ll email Mrs Ratcliffe now and tell her. I’m not having you put under any more pressure than you already are.’
It’s like my whole life is turning into a series of big scenes when what I really want is to tiptoe around unnoticed by anyone.
‘Lottie’s going to start a petition,’ I say.
‘Good for her,’ says Mum with a smile. Mum loves Lottie. She always tells me having one good friend like her is worth a million rubbish ones. She’s probably right, it just doesn’t feel like that when everyone apart from Lottie is laughing at you in assembly.
‘I’m going to my room,’ I say. Mum looks disappointed. I wonder if she was going to suggest we do something ‘fun’ together.
‘OK,’ she says. ‘I’ll go and write that email.’
*
I am still in my room when Dad comes home later. I hear Mum’s voice coming up from the hallway. I can’t hear exactly what she is saying, but it doesn’t matter because I know that in a few moments, I will hear Dad’s angry voice and they will be having the ‘I know what’s best for him’ argument. Normally I would start playing my ukulele, but I don’t feel like it right now, so I pick up my copy of Alan Titchmarsh’s Growing Roses book and start looking through it. I know lots of things about growing roses. If there was a Top Trumps game about roses, I would be very good at it and if you could talk to other boys about the best varieties to grow, I would be very good at that too, but there’s not and you can’t. When I met Alan Titchmarsh, I wanted to have a long conversation with him about roses but there was a massive queue and the lady from the garden centre said we had to move on once I had got my copy of Love Your Garden signed and had my photo taken with him, which was a shame, as I think the smile he gave me meant he would have liked to have that conversation about roses too.
I try very hard to concentrate on the best ways to train climbing roses but the ‘I know what’s best for him’ argument is getting very loud, so I decide to go downstairs, as sometimes it’s the only way to get them to stop.
I walk into the kitchen just as Mum is saying, ‘You didn’t hear them, Martin, you didn’t see his face—’ They both stop and look down at me.
‘Hi,’ says Dad. He opens his mouth to say something else but shuts it without saying anything.
‘Tea will be ready soon,’ says Mum. ‘We’re having tofu vegetable stir-fry.’
I don’t tell her that no one else in my class has tofu vegetable stir-fry for tea. I nod and smile like she wants me to and secretly wish I was having tea with Alan Titchmarsh instead. I wouldn’t care what we ate, as long as we talked about roses.
*
I get up the next morning just as Dad is leaving for his bike ride. I stand at my bedroom window and watch him ride off. When I was very little, he had a special trailer on the back of his bike that I went in. Mum says I used to like it; that I would get excited about going in it and that sometimes she would run behind us just to watch me laughing. Later, when I got too big for it, he tried to get me to ride my own bike, but I wasn’t very good and kept falling off. Dad thought maybe I had dyspraxia, but I had the test for that, and I didn’t, so when he realised it was just because I didn’t like riding a bike and was rubbish at it, he kind of gave up asking. At first, he went out for a bike ride on his own on Sunday mornings, while me and Mum did some baking. But then he started going on Saturday mornings too. And now his bike rides seem to have got much longer.
I usually have my ukulele lesson on a Saturday morning, but my teacher Julian is away today because his daughter is getting married. He said I could practise extra hard, but I don’t feel like practising this morning. My ukulele is still in its case after yesterday and I know if I unzip it, all the laughter will come out as well, so I am not going anywhere near it.
Mum looks up from her newspaper as I walk into the kitchen. She has her ‘pretending to be happy’ smile on again.
‘Morning, lovely,’ she says. How about some Millet Bran?’
Millet Bran is an organic cereal nobody else at school has even heard of, but I am not allowed the cereals they have because of all the sugar and rubbish in them. I open my mouth to say ‘OK,’ but nothing comes out and I can feel the tears coming again.
‘Tell you what,’ says Mum, quickly folding the newspaper and standing up, ‘let’s go out for breakfast this morning. It’s a lovely day and it would be nice to go for a walk first. I’m not that hungry either.’
I nod. I can’t remember the last time we went out for breakfast, apart from when we were on holiday, but anything has to be better than sitting here and feeling sad. Even sitting somewhere else and feeling sad.
‘Right, better go and get dressed then,’ she says. ‘Unless you’re planning to go out in your PJs’.
I look down at my PJs, which have stars on, even though I told Mum on my tenth birthday that I didn’t want to wear anything with stars or rockets on from now on. Mum tried to get bee pyjamas, but she couldn’t find any for my age and the only flower pyjamas she could find were pink and although Mum said it didn’t matter and pink wasn’t just for girls and no one would see them, I said no thank you. If there was a fire in the middle of the night, or a terrorist bomb in our road, and we all had to be evacuated, people would come and take photos and film it and I could end up on the news in my pink flower pyjamas and I would never hear the end of it at school.
I go upstairs and put on a pair of jeans that are the wrong sort and a T-shirt that is probably the wrong sort too. I don’t suit clothes. I look wrong in everything I put on.
When I come back downstairs, Mum is ready and standing by the back door.
‘Are we going far?’ I ask, looking at her walking boots.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I just thought I’d be prepared. You’ll be fine in your trainers.’
She opens the back door and the smell of outside rushes in. I pull on my trainers (which are also the wrong sort) without undoing the laces, which usually annoys Mum but she either doesn’t notice or, if she does, decides not to say anything.
The first thing I see as I step outside is the ‘For Sale’ sign. It has been there for months now and it never lets me forget. When it went up, some of the other parents and kids at school asked where we were moving to. Even Mrs Kerrigan saw it, because she drives past our house on her way to school and asked if I was off to ‘pastures new’. I had to t
ell her my mum and dad were splitting up and I started to cry, and everyone saw, so that was another big scene. The good thing is that only three people have been to view it and one was a time-waster (I don’t really know what this means, but I would quite like to be one because I am good at day-dreaming, which I think is similar), one didn’t like it and the other one did but their house sale fell through, so I keep hoping that if no one ever buys it, Mum and Dad might have to find their happy voices and real smiles again and not actually split up.
The sun hits my face as I get to the front gate. My face doesn’t really suit the sun because my skin is pale and I have freckles and, like Mum, burn very easily.
‘You’ll be fine,’ says Mum, presumably guessing that I am about to ask if she’s got any sun cream.
‘But what if I burn?’
‘You won’t. It’s only nine o’clock and we’ll keep under the trees as much as we can.’
She gives me what is supposed to be her reassuring smile, but it doesn’t stop me worrying. Dad says I worry too much but that’s easy for him to say because he doesn’t have to go to school or have red hair or skin that burns easily and his parents, Grandma and Grandad, are still together, even though they have retired to Devon and we hardly ever see them. It must be easy not to worry when you don’t have anything to worry about. I think the only thing he worries about is me not being normal, which is a bit stupid because I do enough worrying about that without everyone else having to join in.
We walk along the road that leads down to the park. It is nice, this bit of Halifax. In early spring there are loads of daffodils along the wide verge. They have died down now and been mown over, but I like knowing that the bulbs are still there, underneath, and the flowers will be back next year. We have lots of bulbs in our garden too. We planted loads the autumn I started school. Mum made holes with a dibber for me to put them in. The next spring, Mum used to help me count how many were out when I came home from school and when Dad came home from work, I used to run out and tell him how many daffodils and tulips there were. He seemed excited when I told him, I remember that much. What I can’t remember is when I stopped counting daffodils.
‘What will happen to the bulbs in our garden when you sell the house?’ I ask Mum.
Mum doesn’t answer straight away, even though I know she heard me. This means she is thinking very carefully about her answer.
‘Well,’ she says after a while, ‘we’ll leave them for the next people to enjoy.’
‘But they’re ours. I planted them. Can’t we dig them up and take them with us?’
‘No, love, it doesn’t work like that.’
‘Why not? I could replant them in our new garden.’
It is only as I say it that I realise we will have two new gardens, not one. ‘I could divide them equally between the gardens at your house and Dad’s house. It would all be done fairly; you wouldn’t need to tell the solicitor about them.’
I see Mum bite her bottom lip and look away. She doesn’t like talking about what will happen after the divorce, but I need to know about important things like this.
‘The thing is,’ she says quietly, still not looking at me, ‘I can’t guarantee that we’ll both have gardens.’
‘But we’ve always had a garden.’
‘I know, love. But everything’s going to be different. We’ll only have half as much money each and we might not be able to find places with gardens.’
I look up at her, unable to believe what I have just heard.
‘Where will I grow flowers then?’
‘Maybe we can sort out some patio containers or window boxes. There are a lot of houses without gardens in Hebden Bridge, but people still manage to grow things.’
She says it in the sort of cheery voice grown-ups use to children when they are trying to pretend things are not as bad as they sound. But things are really bad if we are only going to have a patio container for a garden. I wonder, if I write to Alan Titchmarsh at Love Your Garden, whether he and his team could somehow turn our patio containers into a proper garden, but I know that not even he is that clever. Besides, all the people who get to be on Love Your Garden have a disease or are in a wheelchair or have had something horrible happen to them. And even though Mum and Dad divorcing and making me leave all my plants and bulbs behind is pretty horrible, I don’t think it is bad enough for them to make us a new garden.
I look up at Mum. I am about to say I don’t think it’s fair when I see that she has tears at the corners of her eyes and it is not windy or cold enough for the weather to have made them, so I don’t say anything, and we walk on in silence for a bit.
‘Mrs Ratcliffe got back to me about the breakfast club next week,’ Mum says as we reach the park.
‘Oh,’ I reply.
‘We’re going to have a meeting with her before school on Monday.’
‘But that’s when I’m supposed to be in breakfast club.’
‘I know. I told her you’re not going to be there, so she asked us to come in before school to explain.’
‘But I don’t want to explain. Why can’t you have a meeting with her on your own?’
‘Because the only way we could do that is if you went to breakfast club.’
‘I could just sit outside her office and read.’
‘She said she wants to see us both together, Finn, so that’s what we’re going to do.’
‘Is there going to be a big argument?’
‘No, love,’ she says. ‘But I am going to tell her that we don’t like the school putting this much pressure on you over the SATs.’
When she says ‘we’ I am not sure who she is talking about because I don’t think Dad minds it at all. Sometimes it’s like she forgets that they are getting divorced and that he doesn’t seem to agree with anything she says or does.
‘What if I get a detention for not going to the breakfast club?’
‘You won’t.’
‘But they’re going to be mad at me. I’ll be the only one who doesn’t go.’
‘I thought you said Lottie was starting a petition?’
‘She is but no one apart from me will sign it and she’ll probably have to go anyway because it will help her mum get to work on time for a change.’
Mum gives a little smile. Rachel is her friend and she knows how busy she is. ‘Well, that doesn’t stop us taking a stand. You know what I always tell you, I don’t care about what everyone else does, all I care about is what’s best for you.’
Grown-ups say this when they want you to stop arguing with them. Mum says it, Dad says it, Mrs Ratcliffe will probably say it and the thing is they can’t all be right because they all think different things are best for me.
We walk on through the park. There are little kids in the playground, and I can see Mum looking at me out of the corner of her eye and can almost hear her wondering whether to ask if I want to go on anything, but she guesses right and says nothing. I am getting a bit too old for playgrounds now and even if I wasn’t, I do not feel in a playground kind of mood. I do not feel in the mood for anything really, apart from hibernating like a hedgehog until all this is over, and I can’t even do that because it’s May, and everyone knows it is the wrong season for hibernating.
We go out of the park and carry on towards the not-so-nice bit of Halifax where most of the other kids in my class live.
‘Look, Teapots and Teacakes, that sounds nice,’ Mum says, pointing to a café at the end of the road. I shrug because it is easier than arguing with her and I am getting a bit hungry now.
We have never been to this place before and when we arrive outside, I can see that it does not look like the sort of café we usually go to. There are checked plastic tablecloths, red and brown sauce bottles and lots of sachets of sugar on the tables and there is a grey-haired man sitting at the table nearest us in the window eating bacon and eggs and reading
one of the small newspapers Mum doesn’t like.
Mum smiles down at me even though I suspect she can see it’s not our sort of café either. She opens the door and I follow her inside. I smell the bacon straight away and screw up my nose, but Mum is not looking. She has gone straight up to the counter and is reading the menu on the wall behind it, which is chalked on the board in fancy writing with little pictures of teapots and teacakes in each corner. I walk over to join her. I am not feeling hungry at all now.
‘You can have beans on toast, Finn,’ she says brightly, ‘or scrambled eggs on toast.’
I shake my head. Normally either of them would be fine but I still have the bacon smell up my nose and I don’t really fancy anything now. The lady behind the counter is smiling at me. She has a yellow and grey sheep apron on. They are fat, jolly sheep with funny faces, not normal-looking sheep. Her long hair is in plaits, but she is way older than Mum. I have never seen an older lady with plaits before.
Mum is still staring hard at the menu, like she is trying to magic something else we can have onto it. There is another lady standing behind us now. She is tall and smells of smoke and she does a big sigh like she is fed up waiting.
‘Could you do a veggie version of the cooked breakfast?’ Mum asks. ‘Without the bacon and sausage, I mean.’
‘We can do that for you,’ replies sheep apron lady. ‘Would you like fried bread or toast with it?’
Mum looks down at me. I don’t think I have ever had fried bread, so I don’t know if I will like it. I also wonder if the reason we’ve never had it before is because Mum doesn’t approve of it, in which case she won’t want me to have it now. I shift from one foot to the other, trying to decide.
‘Toast please but I don’t want the mushrooms, thank you,’ I say. ‘I don’t like mushrooms.’
‘Right you are,’ says sheep apron lady, writing on her little notepad. ‘No bacon, sausage or mushrooms. Would you like summat else instead? I can do you some hash browns if you like?’
I don’t know what hash browns are, but I don’t want to admit this.