by Dai Smith
(Interruptions! There are always people poking their noses in here. I’ll start my story again when I can. But with all the commotion going on I don’t know when.)
I opened them and we were on the slip road overtaking a lorry. Sparky was yelping and laughing his head off at me.
‘I cun smell summin, Gaz, an’ it int the engine burnin’!’
‘Now what? The cops are bound to find out an’ I’ll be for it. My dad’ll murder me!’
‘Right! Jes round Asda’s roundabout, through McDonald’s fer a burger an ‘en ram-raid a gypo camp.’
‘No way, Sparky, there’ll be a huge great security barrier.’
‘I ’ate em!’
‘What? Security barriers?’
‘Na, gyppos! Worse ’an the English! No offence like.’
He sped round Blaenmorlais top and back downhill again. I saw a white car along the Heads of the Valleys which could’ve been the police.
‘Spark! Look! I’m sure I saw the cops!’
‘I’ll go up Bogey Road. We’ll lose em tha way.’
He took a sharp left and I had to admire his skill. It was a Grand Prix to him.
‘Better ’an shaggin, eh? Even with Siân!’
Suddenly, it was all ugly. I noticed the glint in his eyes when he mentioned her. I wondered what the hell I was doing in a stolen car with a boy whose gang had only recently jumped me. I didn’t belong here either. He drove frantically towards the unofficial gypsy camp with its wooden fence. My dad had driven past once and my mam told me about it.
He swerved into the entrance and I instantly made a grab for the wheel. He jammed on the brakes, skidded and we hit the fence and a man standing just behind it. He fell with the impact as the car stopped.
Sparky reversed and accelerated up the hill, yelling a series of curses at me. Now he was truly mad and veered off the road onto the moors, our headlights picking out fleeing sheep and small ponies trying to gallop away.
‘’Orsemeat f’ supper, Gary? Yew ’aven ’ad Siân ’en, I take it? Yew mus’ be the on’y one!’
The Escort rose, then dipped wildly into a pit. My body jerked like a fit. I couldn’t see! Sparky shouted so loudly and painfully it razored my nerves. The car was motionless. I could feel damp spreading. I daren’t open my eyes this time. I wanted to wake up somewhere else: at home, in comfort, by the telly. I wanted to rewind the tape and delete what had happened since I met Sparky.
Everything was frighteningly quiet. I kept on seeing that man we’d knocked over like a wooden pole, maybe lying dead.
If only I hadn’t touched the wheel. Then I imagined Sparky and Siân Jones at it in the back of a car like this, and dared open my eyes again.
My jeans were blood-soaked. It was on my hands. I wasn’t cut. Where was the blood…? Sparky embraced the steering wheel. His head was deeply cut. I whispered ‘Sparky’ and shook him. No reply. His face was deathly white. I panicked. Releasing the belt, I staggered out. I stumbled back along the direction I thought we’d come, tripping over clumps of reed. Surely the road wasn’t far? Luckily, it was a clear night. I swore and swore at Mark Rees, for every step a different word. I nearly crossed the road without realising it. A pile of tipped rubbish told me it was there. I followed it downwards and heard ahead another voice of panic, echoing mine.
I’d have to pass that camp and they could kill me, but it was my only chance of getting help. Maybe Sparky could be saved. I didn’t know if I wanted him to be, but I’d have to try.
What could I tell them? What convincing story? I groped in the dark for one.
In the end, I didn’t have a chance to explain. As I trudged towards the ramshackle camp among what looked like old waste-heaps, all I could hear was—‘Look yer’s one! Quick, grab ’im!’
Before I knew it a horde of youths and children were coming for me. I went on, shouting ‘’Elp, ’elp! I need an ambulance, quick!’
There must’ve been blood on my face as well, cos they held back from attacking me. The young men grabbed my arms, the children my jeans, as if making a citizen’s arrest and marched me towards a battered old van, parked over our skid marks. Among cries of revenge like ‘Give ’im a boot in the goolies!’ I noticed how one man, who was holding open the back doors of the van, managed to pacify them.
‘Sure he’s hurt. Leave him be!’
His voice was authority. I was chucked like a sack of coal into the back alongside the old man we’d knocked over, who lay groaning between two rolls of carpet. My head hit a sharp jutting edge of metal and began to bleed. I welcomed the pain. I deserved it. Absurdly, I began to wish I’d been injured more seriously.
‘It wasn’t me! I wasn’t drivin’!’ I explained pathetically to the man who drove the van, who’d saved me from the mob.
(I can hear someone coming. I’m going to tell those kids to ‘Bog off or I’ll kick your ’eads in!’)
It’s later now and I’ll tell you what happened. Bri, my Care Assistant came in. He saw me writing.
‘Good news, Gar… Oh, sorry! Wha’s this then? Yew doin’ ’omework? I don’ believe it!’
I rolled up this paper hurriedly, holding it tight, in case he decided to investigate. I’ve got a lot of time for him, but he does want to know everything.
‘It’s nothin’, Bri. Jus’ letters, tha’s all.’
‘OK! Anyway,’ he says, eyeing me suspiciously, ‘yewer parents want yew back an’ I think there’s a really good chance of it ’appenin… everyone knows yew’ve done yewer time in yer. T’ be ’onest, it woz an’ ’ard deal in the first place.’
Brian put his hand on my shoulder and I had to swallow hard to keep down the tears. I squinted into the mirror and observed myself, thin and puny, for the first time genuine. Perhaps I should change my story? I wanted to hug him and tell him I’d never do anything like it again, but I couldn’t be so soft even in my own room with no one watching.
‘Thanks, Bri,’ I said, thinking of Sparky half dead in hospital and with a chair-bound future ahead of him, and of others like him who’d go from probation, to fines, to prison. I thought of that old gypsy in his grimy, cast-off suit rattling agony in the van, each moan my guilt. I thought of his family who forgave me while I sat with them all night, willing the monitor to keep on bleeping his life.
I’ll end it now, though I’m sure there are bits I’ve left out. Do I belong more in Cwmtaff? Well, I know where I don’t belong that’s for sure.
MAMA’S BABY (PAPA’S MAYBE)
Leonora Brito
Two summers ago, just after I’d turned fifteen, my mother got ill. One night in our flat on the twelfth floor, she held her face in both hands and said, ‘Leisha, I’m sure I got cancer!’
‘Just so long as you haven’t got AIDS,’ I said, and carried on munching my tacos and watching the telly. The tacos were chilli beef’n jalapeño. Hot. Very hot. With a glistening oily red sauce that ran down my chin as I spoke.
‘AIDS?’ I remember her voice sounded bewildered. ‘What’re you talking about, AIDS? How the hell could I have AIDS?’ She grabbed at my shoulder. ‘I’m an agoraphobic, I don’t hardly go out…’
I took my eyes away from the television set and stared at her face. Then I just busted out laughing. I couldn’t help myself. I was almost choking. Loretta looked at me as if she didn’t know me. As if I belonged to somebody else. ‘J-O-K-E,’ I said, catching my breath and wiping my chin. ‘Laugh, Muvver!’ But she couldn’t do that, laugh. Even when I spelt it out for her. ‘Like, AIDS’n agoraphobia – they’re mutually exclusive, right? So you haven’t got it Lol, have you?’ She still didn’t laugh. She couldn’t laugh or be brave or anything like that, my mother Loretta.
All she could do was hit me with a slipper and call me stupid. ‘Orr, Mama!’ I rubbed at my arm, pretending to be hurt. ‘You can’t take a joke, you can’t.’
‘No, it’s no jokin’ with you.’ Loretta got angry as she looked at me. ‘You’re gunna bring bad luck on people you are,’ she said. ‘With your lau
ghin’ an jokin’!’
Bring bad luck by laughing? Such stupidness, I thought, in my own mother. Then I noticed how her body kept shivering as she sat there, squashed into the corner of our plush red settee. And how she couldn’t keep her hands still, even though they were clamped together tight. So tight, that the knuckle bones shone through. ‘Cancer’s a bad thing, Aleisha.’ My mother shook her head from side to side, and started to cry. ‘A bad thing!’
‘Orr Mama, you talks rubbish, you do.’ She looked at me through streaming eyes. ‘How do I?’ she said. ‘How do I talk rubbish?’
I shrugged. ‘You just do.’
I remembered what she’d said about tampons. Loretta said tampons travelled twice round the body at night, then lodged in your brain. Fact. Even the nuns in school laughed at that one. They said what my mother told me was unproven, unscientific and an old wives’ tale. Stupidness!
Now Loretta was sitting there, crying and talking about cancer. I wished she’d stop. The crying made her dark eyes shine like windows, when the rain falls on them at night. There was light there, but you couldn’t see in. Not really. It was like staring into the blackness of outer space. And it made me mad.
‘Look, why don’t you just stop crying,’ I said, adopting a stern voice, a mother’s voice. A sensible voice. ‘And get to the doctor’s first thing tomorrow morning and see about yourself?’
Loretta looked at me and hiccuped. Then she started crying again. Louder than before. ‘Just phone Joe,’ she said through her sobs. ‘Phone that boy for me, Leish. I want that boy with me.’
‘Okey-dokey.’ I took another big mouthful of taco and chewed callously. It was out of my hands now. Now Loretta had asked for Joe. Let Joe deal with it. I stood up. ‘Where’s your twenty pence pieces then?’
I went off to the call box with the taste of Mexican takeaway still in my mouth. Joe was out with the boys, so I left a message with Donna, who was full of concern. ‘Is it serious?’ she said.
‘Nah.’ I burped silently into the night as the tacos came back to haunt me. ‘It’s not serious,’ I said. ‘But you know Loretta.’ My nostrils burned and my eyes filled up with water. ‘You knows my mother, once she gets an idea into her head…’
Donna laughed brightly and said not to worry. She’d tell Joe as soon as he came in. ‘Yeah, tell him,’ I said. Raising my voice as the time ran out and the pips began to bleep. ‘Though it’s probably nothing. Something an’ nothing. Knowin’ her.’
I was wrong of course. I was wrong about everything under the sun and under the moon. But what did I know? I was fifteen years old that summer, and mostly, I thought like a child.
Like when I was six, nearly seven, I found a big blue ball hidden in the cupboard of the wall unit. I brought the ball out and placed it on the floor. Then I tried to step up and stand on it. I fell off, but I kept on trying. Again and again and again. All I wanted to do was to stand on the big blue ball that had misty swirls of white around it. Like the swirls I’d seen on satellite pictures of planet earth.
When I finally managed it – arms outstretched and my feet successfully planted, I felt like a conqueror. A six-year-old conqueror. ‘Orr look at this!’ I yelled at Joe. ‘Look Joe, look!’ I stayed upright for another dazzling moment. Then the ball rolled under me and I fell backwards, screaming as my head hit the floor. Loretta came out of the bathroom with a face pack on. She silenced me with a slap. Then she took the comic Joe was reading and threw it in the bin. ‘Naw, Ma,’ said Joe. ‘That’s my Desperate Dan that is.’
‘Too bad,’ said Loretta. ‘Maybe it’ll teach you to look after this kid when I tell you!’
Joe laid his head down on the pine-top table, sulking, while I sat on the edge of our scrubby, rust-red carpet and hugged my knees. I wasn’t worried about Joe getting into trouble on account of me. All I was worried about was the ball. The beautiful blue ball. More than anything in the world I wanted it back.
But Loretta had snatched the ball away from me and was holding it up to the light. Palming it over and over in her hands. As if she was searching for something. But what? What magical thing could she be searching for? I watched the ball turn blue under the light bulb. Then not so blue, then bluer again. And it came to me in flash – that what my mother was doing was remembering.
But remembering what? Her creamy face was cracking into brown, spidery lines as she looked at the ball. And I got up on my knees, wanting to see more.
‘Bug-eyes!’ Joe leaned down from the corner of the table and hissed at me. ‘Fathead,’ he said. ‘You boogalooga bug-eyed fathead!’ Joe’s words put a picture inside my head that made me cry. I opened my mouth and bawled until Loretta turned round. Her face had stopped cracking, and she looked ordinary. ‘Joe!’ she said, ‘how old are you for god’s sake? Tormentin’ that kid. She’s younger than you.’
‘She’s a alien,’ said Joe.
‘Oh don’t be so bloody simple!’ Loretta looked across the room at me. ‘She’s your sister.’ Joe shook his head. ‘She’s not my sister.’ He kicked at the leg of the table with his big brown chukka boot. ‘She’s my half-sister,’ he said.
I remember the words were hardly out of Joe’s mouth before Loretta had reached him. ‘Half?’ she said. ‘Half?’ She started bouncing the big blue ball upside his head. ‘Who taught you half? I didn’t give birth to no halves!’
Loretta was mad at Joe. So mad she kept banging the ball against his head. As if she was determined to knock some sense in. Until Joe (who was twelve, and big for his age) lifted his big chubby arms in front of his face and yelled at her. ‘Get off’ve me! Fuckin’ get off’ve me. Right!’
I was scared then. I thought Joe was in for a hiding. The mother and father of a hiding. But something strange happened, Loretta suddenly upped and threw the ball away from her – just threw it, as if she was the one who was hurt. And as soon as she let the ball go, wonder of wonders, Joe burst into tears and pushed his head against her belly. Sobbing out loud like a baby, saying, ‘It’s not fair! It’s not fair!’ And asking her over and over again as she cwtched him, ‘How come my father never brought me no presents, Ma? How come?’
Poor Joe! I sat in the middle of our scrubby red carpet happily hugging the big blue ball to myself. I realised now that I was luckier than Joe. My half-brother Joe. And quicker than Joe and cleverer than Joe – even though I looked like a alien. Joe was like Loretta. I looked across the room at them, across the scrubby, rust-red carpet, which suddenly stretched out vast and empty as the red planet Mars.
‘You takes after my family,’ Loretta was telling Joe. ‘You takes after me.’ I felt a pang, but it didn’t matter. I had the blue ball – which was big enough to stand on, like planet earth. A special ball, bought for me specially, by a strange and wonderful person called my dad!
Of course, my dad was always more of an idea than anything else. I never saw my real dad when I was a kid. But I clung to the idea of him. In the same way that I clung to an image of myself at six, triumphantly balancing on a blue, rolling ball. They were secret reminders of who I really was. I held on to those reminders even more when Loretta was diagnosed as having cancer. They helped me keep my distance. And I needed to keep my distance, because once the hospital people dropped the big C on her for definite – cancer of the womb (Intermediary Stage) things got scary. And while Joe tried to pretend that nothing terrible was happening, or would happen, I knew better. And I made sure I kept my distance from the start.
Like when Loretta had to travel back and forth to the Cancer Clinic for treatment. Joe asked if I’d go with her. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘just to keep her company?’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got tests coming up in school.’
‘Tests?’ Joe looked at me gone off. ‘Tha’ Mama’s sick,’ he said. ‘She needs someone with her. I can’t go myself cuz I’m in work.’ His jaw tightened.
‘I’ve got a biology test coming up, I said. And maths and history…’
‘Oh leave it Joe,’ said
Loretta. ‘I’m all right!’ She laughed, ‘I’ll manage.’ Joe umm’d and ah’d a bit, then he gave in.
‘If you’re sure, Ma,’ he said. Hiding a little smile, I picked up my biology textbook, The Language of the Genes, and began taking seriously detailed notes.
I never did go with Loretta to the Cancer Clinic. Though I could have made time, if I’d wanted. Academic work was easy for me, I enjoyed reading books and doing essays. And tests were almost a doddle. But at home I began making a big thing of it. Hiding behind the high wall of ‘my schoolwork’ and ‘my classes’ and my sacrosanct GCSEs, which I wasn’t due to sit until the following year anyway.
I also let it be known that I had to go out, nights. Most nights, otherwise I’d turn into a complete mental brainiac.
So when Loretta arrived home weak and vomiting from the radium treatment, I’d already be standing in front of the mirror, tonging my hair, or putting on eye make-up. No need to ask where I was going. I was off out, to enjoy myself. Even though enjoying myself meant drinking (alcopops) and smoking, and hanging with the crowd. All the stuff I used to describe as ‘too boring and predictable’ for anyone with half a brain. Now though, it was different. Now I became best mates with a hard-faced, loud-mouthed girl called Cookie, who Loretta said was ‘wild’.
The euphemism made me smile as I rushed around the kitchen filling the kettle and making the tea to go in the flask. I was happy and focused on what I had to do, knowing that the sooner Loretta was settled, the sooner I’d be out through the door.
Luckily, there was no need to bother with food. Loretta couldn’t swallow any food. Only Complan. And Complan made her vomit. So she stuck to tea. Weak tea, and sometimes, a couple of mouthfuls of tinned soup. Which I did think was sad, because my mother was a big woman who’d always enjoyed her food.
Now, she hardly ever went in the kitchen, and it wasn’t worth bothering to try and tempt her with anything. But I brought her a cup of tea, and handed it over. And I put the flask on the little table next to the couch.
Taking a couple of sips of tea seemed to exhaust her. And she laid her head back on the cushions, tired, but not too tired to speak. ‘This girl Cookie…’ she said.