Smack

by Melvin Burgess

  I turned round and glared at the other girl, who blushed furiously and tried to hide behind the saucers. I expect she thought I’d been holding one-woman orgies in the kitchen while the kettle boiled.

  The humiliation was unbelievable.

  “See if I want to work in an establishment where the strawberry jam tastes of FISH!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, and I stormed out. That made her wince. In a moment of badly judged intimacy, she admitted to me that she made her homemade jams in the same pan that she used to boil up fish scraps for the cat. All Minely would know about that before the day was out.

  I walked down to the sea and wept and wept and raged and wept. My life, such as it was, was in tatters. As for that old bag Mrs. Auntie Joan—she’d loved every minute of it. There was a myth amongst the local traders that all the trouble in Minely was caused by the local kids. If someone bent a car aerial or turned over a wastebin on the seafront, they’d all gather together like gulls and mutter darkly about youths and no discipline and how the young people were ruining Minely. Of course they were quite happy to welcome any number of out-of-town thugs. They could run around the town vomiting, screeching and kicking wastebins over as long as they liked, and it was just youthful high spirits.

  Basically anyone who had a fiver in their pocket was Mother Teresa of Calcutta as far as the local traders were concerned.

  Minely was all geared up for tourists. If the local traders had their way, the place would have been closed down in the winter and the native population sent to Scarborough or Siberia or somewhere like that. But that’s another story.

  Furious as I was at Mrs. Auntie Joan, it was like a mild spring day compared with the soul-deep rage burning for my loving parents.

  I didn’t go back that day. In fact, I stayed away all weekend as a protest.

  Response: banned from going out of the house at weekends.

  My next plot was to stay out until ten each night during the week. They couldn’t keep me off school in the name of discipline, surely? They got round that by my dad picking me up from school. My God! Everyone knew what was going on. He actually came into the class to get me! I thought I was going to die of humiliation.

  This was getting really out of hand. I could see my mother was having second thoughts, but by this time Dad was going on all burners. I heard them arguing one night and I like to think she was trying to get him to slow down, but by that time his authority was at stake and you might as well have tried to stop the Pope blessing babies. Of course Mum didn’t have a leg to stand on because she’d started the whole thing off.

  My mum is the philosopher in the family.

  “The love is there, Gemma,” she explained to me. “The generosity is there. The compromise. I don’t like treating you like a child. All you have to do is show us you can follow a few simple rules and we can resume a proper family life. You can get a new job and stay out at weekends again. We just need to see some responsibility. That’s all we ask.”

  My parents needed to be taught a lesson.

  Don’t tell me. You’ve had this horrendous argument with your parents. Life is abominable. Why should you put up with this? you think. Why indeed? Why not leave home instead? It’s easy, it’s cheap. And it gets your point across beautifully.

  Only it’s not easy, is it? That is to say, it might be easy and it might be hard, but how do you know? You’re only a kid, you’ve got things to learn. It isn’t as though you can walk into a shop and ask for a handbook.

  Well, here it is—what you’ve all been waiting for:

  Gemma Brogan’s

  Practical Handbook to Running Away

  from Home

  A Step-by-step Guide for Radical Malcontents

  You will need: Clothes—woolly vest, long underwear, plenty of keep-warm stuff. Plenty of underwear and other personal items. A waterproof coat. A sleeping bag. A pencil and paper. Money. Your father’s bank card and PIN number.

  Your wits. You’ll need ’em.

  Think about it. What are your mum and dad going to do? Try to get you back, of course. It’ll be police. It’ll be, Oh, my god, my little girl has been abducted. It’ll be, Maybe some dreadful pervert is at her right now. Maybe she’s lying murdered in a binliner in the town rubbish tip THIS VERY SECOND! It never occurs to them that little Lucinda got so fed up with Mumsy and Dadsy that she actually left of her own accord. So…if you don’t want every copper in the land on your tail and pictures of little you shining out of all the national newspapers, you tell your mum and dad exactly what you’re doing. (Of course, maybe you want your piccy in the local rag. Not me. I was leaving home.)

  This is where the pencil and paper comes in. You write them a note explaining that you’re going away so that they can expect to see very little of you in the immediate future. Wish them luck, tell them no hard feelings and that you hope they will understand. Alternatively you can ask them how they can bear to live with themselves after they’ve made your young life so unbearable that you’ve had to go away into the hard world, etc. etc. But beware! This will undermine your credibility.

  Book your coach ticket using your father’s Visa card.

  Take the money and run.

  If you want to make really sure, you write or telephone and tell them how well fed you are and how many woolly vests you’re wearing. (This is where the warm underwear comes in.) That way, when they ask the police to help them get their property back, the police say, “Two woolly vests she’s got on, has she? Took a sleeping bag, hmm?” Because, you see, while the police might care a whole load about you while you’re dead, they ain’t going to spend a penny more than they have to on you while you’re still alive.

  Actually—this is a secret—I’m only going away for a bit. I’ll know when I get there. Couple of weeks. A month, maybe.

  Mum and Dad don’t know that, though.

  Tar rang me on Tuesday. My parents had gone to play squash. I started telling him and suddenly I was smiling all over my face. That’s when I knew I was really going to do it. Before…you know, I meant to but there was this thought that maybe I was just kidding myself. But when I began grinning, I knew. He was smiling too. I could hear his face stretching even over the phone.

  I felt a bit guilty too because…he wants me so much and…People are always talking about love like it’s something everyday. People say they love their parents, but what does that mean? Not exactly intoxicating, is it? I hate mine sometimes but I don’t suppose I feel any less for them than anyone else. All I know is this: if there is such a thing as being in love, I may not be there yet but when I do I’m going to be INFATUATED. All over the place. I’ll do anything for him. You name it. Whatever.

  But in the meantime, I intend to make the most of my freedom.

  Tar’s so sweet. He’s the sort of person who makes you want to be close to him. And he’s had such a hard time, and no one deserves a hard time less than Tar. He’s the sort of person you’d pick to be in love with. Knowing me I’ll fall for some real shit with earrings and a loud voice. Just my luck.

  So it was…maybe a bit unfair on him. On the other hand, I liked him more than anyone and I fancied him something rotten. After the phone call I started to think about spending days with him with no one to say do this, do that…and I just felt SOOOO good about it. Holding his hand in the dark. Sleeping with him, talking to him when there was no one else there. Looking after him because, poor Tar, he needs someone. He wants someone. He wants me.

  Sometimes when we were hiding behind the breakers with the crowd, he’d hold me so tight, I’d think he’s not just holding me, he’s holding on to me, like I’m stopping him from falling off. I’d see him looking at me and his eyes were so full of…I dunno. Like he was about to cry. And, it’s stupid, I know, but I think maybe he’s hurting because he loves me and I don’t love him, and this great lump used to come up into my throat and I’d hold him tight and try and squeeze him as tight as I could and try as hard as I could to fall in love with him the way he loved me.
/>
  And then other times I’d think, it’s just the way his face is that makes him look like that.

  Tar

  Me and Gemma.

  You’d never have believed it. I didn’t to start off. When she first turned up on the beach I thought I wasn’t going to like her. It was Saturday night. We’d built a big fire opposite the old factory sheds about half a mile out of town. It was a good big fire. We’d found a huge lump of wood, part of an old boat. Me and Kenny dragged it up the beach. It was tarred and it had copper nails in it. The copper turned the fire green. It was magic.

  Gemma was wild about it. She gets so excited by things—that’s one of the things I like about her. She was excited by the fire, by meeting us for the first time, by the sound of the sea in the dark, by the night…

  Minely’s the most awful dump. No one’s got any time for the locals. You wander round in your own town feeling like an outsider and then…you find this bunch of people your own age sitting half a mile out of town by this magic fire drinking and smoking and doing their own thing. I remember when I discovered the beach life. It’s great.

  She was beautiful but she was going on and on, rattling away about how wonderful this was, and how wonderful that was. She was getting drunk and stoned, and I thought, Doesn’t she ever get tired of her own voice?

  But I stayed and she stayed and in the end there were only about five or six of us left.

  That’s the time I usually went home. The later it got, the more people got paired off until in the end, if you were sitting there on your own, you turned into a gooseberry. I usually tried to leave before that happened, but that night, I was there and Gemma was there and all the others were paired off, and I thought, Oh, no…

  Because in that situation I always feel as though I ought to try and make a move but I didn’t dare. And I didn’t want to just go and leave because everyone would know I was scared to talk to her. You’d have to be a lot more sure of yourself than I am to pull a girl like her.

  She came and sat next to me and started talking…

  There were these long silences. I was anxious she’d be fed up but she didn’t seem to mind. Then she started asking me about myself…and I told her about home and Mum and Dad. I felt like…stupid, you know? Because everyone knows about my problems and here I was talking about them to this beautiful girl. I thought she must just be dead bored by it. But she kept asking me about things in a quiet voice, not like the voice she used when she was hooting and yelling earlier. I told her everything. Everything—too much. I kept looking at her, thinking, Why are you asking all these questions? What have you got to do with me?

  Then she started talking to someone else and I thought, Oh well…and the next thing I knew I could feel her fingers tickling my hand. I couldn’t believe it, I thought it was some mistake. We held hands. Then I picked up all my courage and put my arm around her waist and she leaned into me. And I just smiled. I was so pleased. I couldn’t kiss her, I was smiling so much.

  “Ow!” she said, when I banged her mouth with my teeth.

  I told her, “I’m so happy.”

  “Good,” she said. “Good.”

  When I rang her up that Tuesday after I left home and she told me she was coming to see me, my face went like it did that first night. I was grinning like an idiot. People were smiling at me as I walked away from the telephone box. It was great.

  I’d been feeling pretty down—being away from home, being on my own. Now I felt great. I wanted to make that moment last as long as I could. Like in a film—you know how they play a song or some music and a particular feeling stretches out—like that. I should have been in a boat floating down the river or in a hot-air balloon with someone playing a guitar, but there I was in the middle of this tatty old Bristol street and I knew that any second something’d happen and I’d be feeling dreadful again. I had to do something.

  Then I thought, I’ll go for a walk in the park…Yeah. There’d be toddlers on the roundabouts, people walking their dogs. It was late spring. The daffodils were still out, there were trees in bloom. People would be feeding the ducks and the pigeons. I could have an ice cream. I had my Walkman with me so I could even have some music if I wanted.

  I could feel that moment lifting up, ready to jump into the air…

  I put my hand in my pocket. I don’t know why. I had a quid. And I thought, Shit! because I’d already left it too late and I could feel that good feeling going down the drain already.

  The thing was, if I spent my money on ice cream I’d have to go into town and beg in the pedestrian precinct—the Dust Bowl, they call it—so I could get something to eat that night. And begging is so grim. There’s no way you can do it nicely. You just put your head down between your knees and you hold your hand out and try to pretend it’s not happening.

  It was so stupid. As if I had to have money to feel good about Gemma coming to see me! I knew it was going to happen, I knew there was just too much shit about to let me feel good for more than a second. The moment gathered itself up and jumped up into the air…and I was left on the ground watching it go….

  And then I noticed the dandelions.

  They were on the grass verges along the road. It was a solid mass of yellow, bright, golden yellow. I’d been standing there thinking about daffodils somewhere else and all the time here were the dandelions—wild dandelions, not put there for me to look at but there because they wanted to be there. All along the grubby street it was ablaze with yellow and everyone was walking up and down without even noticing them.

  I must have walked past them a dozen times. I walk about without seeing, sometimes.

  I know it sounds stupid, but it was like the flowers had come out for Gemma.

  I stood there for a bit and I felt like I was soaking up that colour. I love yellow. It’s the colour of sunlight. When all this is over and I get myself sorted out, I want to go to art college. I want to be a painter or a designer. I really think I’m good enough.

  I stood there staring at it, and I had an idea for a painting. A dandelion—just one huge bright dandelion. The background was all black and the dandelion was all the bright yellows and oranges, every petal a long yellow triangle. It would be a big painting. I was going to do it and put it on the wall of the squat for Gemma when she came.

  And that big happy moment came swooping down, and I reached up a hand and caught hold of it and off I went. I picked a big bunch of dandelions and went off back to the squat. I felt great again.

  I say squat. It was more of a derry really, but I’d been trying to clear it out a bit the past day or two.

  The first couple of nights I slept out in doorways. The very first night I tried to go to sleep in my bag in the doorway of a small supermarket but it was too cold. I ended up wandering about all night. Towards morning I saw people crowded together in a subway, all wrapped up in cardboard boxes, and I thought, That’s how you do it! And I wandered about some more till I found some cardboard in stacks outside a shop waiting for the binmen. I wrapped myself up in that, and that was better. But you still keep waking up all night. You never seem to get a decent night’s sleep on the street.

  I slept like that for a couple of nights, but I didn’t like it on the street. The thing is, you’re in public. People can see you all the time, even when you’re asleep. Sometimes at night you wake up and the police are shining a torch into your face. I hated that—the thought of people examining you while you’re asleep, all those strangers. I began to feel like something in a zoo. So when I found this row of derry houses, I thought, Right. This is gonna be home.

  I found a little room with a door still on it. The first night I kept getting woken up by people banging in. It was pitch black so they couldn’t see me till I called out. It happened about five times that night. I was really scared the first few times, but after a bit I realised it was just people looking for a place to sleep. I shouted out, “It’s taken,” and they left.

  The next day I made up a little sign: “Do Not Disturb.”
And I wrote, “Property of Hotel d’Erelict” in little letters underneath.

  Everyone had to find their way about with matches or a torch, so they all saw my sign and I never got bothered after that. Just a couple of times some drunks came charging in without seeing my notice. Sometimes they thought it was so funny they’d wake me up.

  “Will you leave your boots outside for cleaning?” someone yelled. And, “Will Sir be requiring his breakfast in bed?” That sort of thing. That was okay.

  It was out of the open but it was a right mess in there. People had dumped binbags full of rubbish, waste paper, old clothes, even rubble. I slept on top of it for a few nights. I suppose I was feeling depressed. I was thinking a lot about my mum.

  Then I thought, Get on with it.

  First of all I scooped all the rubbish into binbags and carried it out round the back. I pinched the binbags from someone’s dustbin. I found a broken broom in a skip and gave it a good brush down. It was still a tip, but at least it was a brushed tip.

  Since then I’d been collecting bits and pieces—a few wooden crates, a bit of carpet someone chucked out. I couldn’t make it too nice because someone would have nicked stuff or wrecked it. But I’d tried to make it mine. That’s why I was so pleased when I had this idea for a picture. I’d wanted to do a picture. I’d brought my pencils with me but I hadn’t got round to it yet, and now I had this great idea for Gemma.

  It was about two miles back to the squat. On the way I had to go past Joe Scholl’s tobacconist. I thought I’d go in and have a Twix. Have a treat. I completely forgot about the begging. You do. You just forget, you buy a bar of chocolate and then you think, Oh, no…

  Joe Scholl’s a nice man. He’d given me a few quid a couple of times in the past few days. I think he gave quite a bit of money to the people on the street.