by T. Traynor
When we’ve exhausted the park – and the park has exhausted us – we head for home. I tell my mum Lemur’s parents have had to go out and is it all right if he has dinner with us?
“Of course,” she says. “Come on in, Lemur.” And my dad grins at him and says, like he always does, “Anytime – it’s just a few more potatoes in the pot.”
Lemur sits in Kit’s place because of course she’s not here.
***
We’re just about to leave my house and go and find the others. I’m showing Lemur the postcards I got at the art gallery.
He says, “Here.” And he presses into my hand a pink slip of paper. Joe Murphy’s ticket. “So you don’t forget.”
“We’ll never forget you, Lemur! How could we? You’ve been a totally memorable pain in the arse.”
That makes him laugh. Luckily. “And so have you,” he says, giving me a thump. “Don’t let Kit get her hands on it. She’s always taking your stuff.”
“I won’t.”
***
Though it’s evening, it’s still really hot. “D’you know what I’m thinking?” says Bru. “That this is perfect weather for a water fight.”
We use old washing-up liquid bottles. You can squirt a long way with them. “Not in the eyes,” my mum always says firmly. “I’ve washed them out but if you get a bit of Fairy in your eye it’ll really hurt.” We don’t listen. It does nip a bit, but if you’re stupid enough to get caught full in the face, then that’s your lookout.
It’s Bru and me against Hector and Lemur. Skooshie’s a free agent, floating between the teams, sometimes on our side and sometimes against us. It mainly results in him getting soaked by us all.
We refill the bottles using the tap down by the lock-ups that’s meant for people washing their cars. Hector considers whether we should have rules on how many times you’re allowed to refill and whether you’re allowed to defend the tap to stop the other team refilling. He stops talking when we all squirt him at once. “OK. A free-for-all it is,” he says.
And then the water fight begins. And we take some hits but we give as good as we get. Whoever planned these flats was dead clever. So many walls to duck behind and nooks to dive into and opportunities for ambush – obviously someone who had enjoyed a water fight or two in his childhood.
“Ready?” mouths Bru.
“Ready,” I mouth back.
Lemur, Hector and Skooshie are pressed against the lock-up wall, planning to sneak up to the corner, then leap out and get us. What they don’t know is that Bru and I aren’t around the corner. We’ve climbed onto the lock-up roof. We’ve crept to the edge on our bellies. We are right above them.
“Now!” I yell.
That makes them look up. And we get all three of them right in the face.
It is without doubt our most glorious moment.
***
We’re lying in the long grass, exhausted and soaking wet. Skooshie is wringing the front of his t-shirt and we’re laughing at the long stream of water that runs out. The front door of the flats trundles open, announcing my dad on his way to work. Time’s almost up. He struggles to pick us out in the fading light. I wave down to him. “We’re just walking them up the road, then I’ll go up.”
“OK, son. See you in the morning.”
We get up to go, reluctant to let the evening slip away from our grasp. We must all be tired because we make slow progress going up the hill.
“Great fight,” says Lemur.
“Pure dead brilliant,” says Hector.
“A shame you lost,” says Bru.
“We didn’t lose!” says Skooshie.
“Oh, I think you did!” I say.
Skooshie grins. “Next time,” he says. “Just wait till next time.”
It’s Bru who starts to sing first. We all join in. We sing it as we walk, not loudly like we usually do, like we’re François challenging the Spanish, but quietly, like we’re determined and deadly serious. And we walk even more slowly so that we’ve time to finish it before we get to the road.
“Let’s always take whatever comes
And never try to hide.
Face everything and anyone
Together side by side.”
Hector and Skooshie stay on our side while Lemur crosses Prospecthill Road. It’s the last we see of him. Lemur, walking backwards and waving. Just before he’s lost in the trees and the dark, he cups his hands to his mouth and yells. “See youse later. See youse.”
29
We’re in the den, the four of us. We know it will be the last time. Outside it’s hot, but the den is cool and shady.
I’ve managed to sneak four mugs out of the house, plus some Irn-Bru that my dad had planked in a cupboard for the next time he has a bottle of whisky. I was nearly caught red-handed (or ginger-handed, even) but Kit had worked out what I was up to and distracted him long enough for me to get it out of the house. So now I owe her. I wonder what her price will be?
They hold out the mugs and I pour the ginger into each one.
“To Lemur. Who we will never forget.” We clatter the mugs together in a toast, then drink.
“And to us,” says Hector. “Who will never part.” A second clattering.
We pull back the vegetation growing over the hollow at the back of the tree. We don’t break it off, just prop it back so we can get to the trunk.
And beneath the carved writing that’s already there, Hector uses his dad’s penknife to add:
Lemur
missed by
Midge, Bru, Hector, Skooshie
“Add Together side by side,” says Skooshie. “He was a big Flashing Blade fan.”
“Yeah?” asks Hector.
“Yeah.” We all think it’s a good idea.
It takes a while. Skooshie offers to help out, but to be honest his spelling can be a bit dodgy.
And before letting the green stuff spring back into place, we tuck into the hollow: an empty washing-up bottle we used in the water fight, a piece of souvenir concrete from Cathkin, and Bru’s football – the one we’d used at the recs.
“Are you sure, Bru?” Hector asks.
Bru nods and Skooshie takes his foot away from the branches he’s been holding back. The hollow disappears from sight once again.
Then it’s time to leave. We pile up sticks and leaves and stones behind us, to block the entrance to the den. It’s not that we think it’s unsafe – it’s just that we don’t want anybody else to go there because it was ours.
***
We go and sit in the grass at the top of the hill. It must be nearly time for them to cut it again. When you lie down, it’s so long it tickles your nose.
We’re quiet for a while. I guess we’re all thinking about Lemur and how we’re going to miss him. Then Skooshie’s belly makes a noise a bit like a cat singing along to a badly played violin. And, weirdly, that helps.
Bru’s playing with a ladybird, moving it from stalk to stalk in his hands. “It’s funny,” he says, “how your interests change as you get older.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for example, we haven’t talked about the bins in ages.”
“Aw, the bins,” says Hector.
It’s true. It started as a conversation about stuff we were afraid of. Places you can’t just walk by – you have to run. You don’t know for definite that there’s anything scary there but you have your suspicions… And I was telling them that for Kit, it’s the place where the bins are.
When you live in flats like ours, you don’t take your rubbish outside. Each floor has a rubbish chute. You pull open the heavy metal front – it opens in a V. You up-end your kitchen bin into it (taking care not to put in anything too bulky), then close the front. The whole load of rubbish is tipped into nothingness, falling floors and floors into the huge bins down on the ground. It’s worth lingering to hear the noise it makes as it plunges down, especially from six floors up. It’s also worth sorting through a bin a bit (avoiding the muckier stuff) and
selecting items to send down on their own, just to hear what they sound like. An empty bean can is a favourite of mine (you flip the flap closed quickly to try and make it bounce off the chute walls as it goes down – it makes a brilliant plingy noise) or something heavy, like a pair of old shoes (you wait, wait, wait, and then there’s a dull but very satisfying thud that echoes up from the bottom).
Sometimes I used to hang about holding the chute flap open a crack, to watch for stuff from floor 7 shooting by. A draft of cold air hits you in the face, a distant pong of rubbish, always with a waft of old bananas. But I’ve never managed to see any. Bru and I worked out that I was unlikely to, as I was depending on only six families emptying their bins while I was waiting. Whereas, if we waited further down, there were six families using the chute on each of the floors above us, so more chance of catching sight of their rubbish. So we took to hanging about on floors where we’d no business to be, checking out the chute. When this didn’t work, we decided we needed to take a more scientifically active role. If a bin needed emptying, one of us stood ready, while the other raced downstairs a few floors to glimpse the contents shooting by. It could have developed into a brilliant game, with the glimpser trying to identify and remember all the items falling past him. We took it in turns to chuck and to observe, but it was a short-lived experiment. People objected to us hanging about their chutes, with or without bins, and chased us with a threat to tell our mothers.
Now I come to think about it, I might have been the one who started Kit’s bin worries. Yeah, it might have been me. Though I was only joking when I used to threaten to put her down the chute. I only did it when she really annoyed me. “Head first, Kit. But don’t worry – the rubbish will be nice and soft for landing on. A bit smelly, but nice and soft.”
She’d squeal, “No, no no no – don’t let him, Mum, don’t let him!” That’s when she was really wee. Later on she just looked at me as if she’d like to see me try. Sadly, she’s too big now. She’d only block it. And that wouldn’t be fair on the neighbours.
You can’t see the bins at the bottom of the chute. They’re under the ground-floor flats, shut away behind a brown double door with vents high up. The lift machinery’s in there too.
“Well, it might be the lift that makes the strange noises,” Skooshie said. “Or it might be something else…”
No one ever goes in there – except the caretaker, I suppose, to check the level of rubbish in the bin and move a new one into place. And the bin men, of course, to empty the bins. The topic of the bins used to keep us busy. There was a lot to think about.
Questions we asked: Why do we never see the caretaker going in there? Why does the bin motor come so early in the morning that we miss it too? Why have we never seen the door open, never seen inside?
“For all we know,” said Bru, “it isn’t bins in there at all – there is in fact a huge, rubbish-devouring monster lurking in the dark.”
Hector nodded his agreement. “So whenever somebody opens the chute, it sees the light and opens its mouth to eat what comes down.”
“Yeah. And as long as we keep feeding it by chucking stuff down the chutes, it stays there.”
“If we stopped,” said Lemur, “it would burst through the brown double door with a single flick of its long scaly tail and go on the rampage.”
“THONK, THONK, THONK!” Skooshie’s imitation of the monster, crushing all in its path, was pretty impressive, as I remember. “It would go for the oldsters first. They’re slow-moving and easy to catch.”
I could see that happening. “Yeah, it would knock them out by belching deadly rubbish fumes in their faces.”
So I was an oldster, the prey of the rubbish monster, and as Skooshie breathed noisily on me, I went rigid, then keeled over.
“We’ll have to try and trick it back into the bin place!” shouted Hector, coming to the rescue.
“What about a trail of really tasty rubbish?” Bru called to him.
“Good one!”
“Or we could offer ourselves as bait,” said Lemur, “then nip out once we’d got it back inside.”
“That’s a plan! Let’s do it!”
And that’s what we did. And I was saved – and the flats were saved! And probably the rest of the world as well. Not that anybody round here’s ever expressed their gratitude either in words or in small presents.
“I suppose every block of flats has its own rubbish monster, Midge?” said Bru, when the monster was once again in captivity and order was restored. As Bru and I are the ones that actually live in the flats, above the rubbish monster’s lair, it was accepted that we were the experts on rubbish monster behaviour.
“I would think so.”
And Bru puffed the air out of his cheeks, thinking the unthinkable. “Wow. Better hope they never plan an outbreak together.”
We laugh. It’s still funny, even now, though we’re older and we’ve moved on.
“It doesn’t matter about the bins,” I say.
“I wasn’t saying it did,” says Bru. “I don’t need to keep talking about the bins.”
“No, I mean it doesn’t matter that we don’t talk about the bins any more. What matters is that we used to talk about the bins. That there was a time when you and me and Skooshie and Hector and Lemur shared a conversation about the bins. D’you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” says Bru. “Of course I do.”
And as we sit in the grass, I realise I’m not worried about school. I’m not scared of losing them – Skoosh, Hector and Bru and even Lemur – and I’m not scared of changing. Because there will always always be the bins, and the den, and Cathkin, and Wibfipper, and the water fight, and a million other things we’ve done together. Nobody can ever take that from us. Because that’s ours, for all time.
Copyright
Kelpies is an imprint of Floris Books
First published in 2013 by Floris Books
© 2013 T. Traynor
T. Traynor has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this work
Cover illustration by Steve Wood
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the prior permission of Floris Books, 15 Harrison Gardens, Edinburgh www.florisbooks.co.uk
The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland towards the publication of this volume
British Library CIP data available
ISBN 978–086315–976–3
References to IRN-BRU® and “Made in Scotland From Girders” are used with kind permission of A.G. BARR plc