by Kim Slater
‘Just leave it,’ she said in her quiet voice.
‘I miss her,’ I said.
She started to look mad but then her face went soft again.
‘Me too,’ she whispered. Her eyes were all shiny.
She turned round to the cooker as if she was busy but she wasn’t really doing anything. She was trying to stop her eyes being so shiny that tears would fall out and never stop.
We had shepherd’s pie for tea. It was delish. You can say just half of some words and people still know what you mean.
My French teacher, Miss Boucher, is very pleased with the way I say the foreign words.
‘Pronunciation’, Miss Crane calls it.
French people only pronounce half of nearly every single word. If you don’t know how to say a French word properly, you just have to leave the end letters off and you get it right.
Miss Boucher wrote ‘petit chat’ on the whiteboard. It means ‘little cat’. You had to put your hand up in class if you thought you knew how to say it. Liam Thornton said ‘petit chat’ exactly like that with all the letters in it. He got it wrong. Other people put their hands up, but I didn’t.
‘Kieran,’ said Miss Boucher. ‘Why don’t you have a go?’
I crossed off the last letter of each word in my mind.
‘Peti cha,’ I said. Miss Crane didn’t even help me.
Now people think I’m good at French, but I prefer English because you don’t have to waste any letters. I can’t understand why French people write the extra letters at the end, if they’re not going to say them.
You can be good at anything you want, like pronouncing words or other stuff that’s supposed to be hard. All you have to do is find a way. It’s like a secret. But it works.
Sometimes, I try and make my mind work in a different way to how it wants to. Then I feel like I’m getting closer to solving how to do something.
Albert Einstein was good at thinking in a different way. It helped him discover a really important scientific thing about light.
‘The theory of relativity,’ said Miss Crane when we looked at it in class.
He didn’t get the answers the way that normal scientists do. They sit down and work out really hard sums and stuff, until they understand an idea. What Albert did was imagine he was riding by the side of a light beam, which is mint. It helped him understand about how fast light travels and stuff, and he found out the answer. He did it by thinking in a different way.
I didn’t know Grandma’s address. The normal way of thinking told me to ask my mum, who wouldn’t tell me.
When I went back upstairs to my room, I closed my eyes and imagined I was Albert Einstein. It felt funny thinking that I had a grey moustache and crazy, wild hair. Albert didn’t care what he looked like – he was only bothered about his brain.
I imagined walking by the side of Grandma. I remembered how her tweed coat felt when I touched it. In my mind, I looked up at her brightly patterned headscarf that she always wore when we went shopping. I heard our feet walking on the pavement. I tasted the blackcurrant cream tarts that Grandma always bought from Gents bakers. The cream was piped around the edge so you could still see the blackcurrants through the little circle gap left in the middle.
Grandma had false teeth. When she was in the house, she took them out. I liked her face best without them; it looked more like the real her. When we went out, even just down to the corner shop, she put her teeth in and she looked stricter, even though she was just the same with me.
I opened my eyes and blinked them to get rid of the pictures in my head. I was supposed to be thinking like Albert Einstein, not Kieran Woods.
When I closed my eyes again, I remembered that when I was at primary school my asthma was really bad. It would come on in the yard at break sometimes and I’d feel really unwell, even after using my inhaler. The ladies in the office would ring for my mum to come and get me. If she didn’t answer the phone, Grandma came. Even if she had to get a taxi and it cost loads, she didn’t care because she wanted me to be safe.
The school didn’t have to ask my mum for Grandma’s address – they already had it on their computer.
‘Thank you, Albert Einstein,’ I said out loud in my bedroom.
He had helped me to figure out a different way.
On the weekends, Mum doesn’t have to go to her cleaning job but she still works at the Spar shop on the till until late.
We sat together at the kitchen table after breakfast and went through my English Language book. Ryan wasn’t up and Tony was watching sport.
I showed her my work on nouns, verbs and adjectives. I saw her hide a yawn behind her hand.
‘I was reading in the Evening Post about the body in the river,’ she said.
‘He was Jean’s friend,’ I said. ‘It looked like rags in the water but his head was in the middle.’
‘I’ve told you not to go near that old tramp woman,’ Mum said. ‘You’ll catch fleas, or worse.’
‘Jean hasn’t got many friends.’
‘I’m not surprised. What happened?’
‘He was murdered. The police are trying to find the man. They want me to help them like on CSI, because I was first on the scene.’
Mum sighed and looked at the clock. I was worried she was going to say, ‘That’s it for today,’ which always means the end of our time together.
She turned the pages of the workbook, looking at my pencilled answers.
‘I don’t know how you remember the difference between a simile and a metaphor,’ she said, ruffling my hair.
It’s great when me and Mum can sit on our own for a bit. It’s like it used to be.
‘A simile is when you say something is like something else,’ I said. ‘Kieran’s mum is LIKE a beautiful rose. That’s a simile.’
Mum laughed.
‘You charmer,’ she said.
‘A metaphor is when you say something actually is something else. Like saying Tony IS a lazy pig.’
I laughed and looked up at Mum. But her face was all drooping down. She looked like she was going to be sick.
I hadn’t heard Tony come into the kitchen.
Tony hit me hard on the side of my head. I fell off my chair and banged the back of my head.
‘No!’ screamed Mum. ‘Leave him alone!’
Tony stood over me. His face was red, like a beetroot. That is a simile.
‘You little bleep,’ he said.
Tony normally shouts but instead he was talking quietly, through his teeth. It meant he was really, really mad.
‘Don’t hit him,’ said Mum, twisting her hands.
‘I’ll do what the hell I like. Don’t tell me what to do in my own home, woman.’
I sat up and rubbed my sore head.
‘It was a metaphor,’ I explained.
‘Don’t push me,’ said Tony, kicking the chair.
Ryan came to the doorway.
‘Can’t he go in a retards’ home or something?’ he asked.
‘This is my home,’ I said.
Tony crouched down right next to me. He came into the private space that Miss Crane taught me you have to respect with other people. She said it was very important and it’s OK to tell people if you feel uncomfortable.
‘This is MY home, daft lad. Mine. So don’t you forget it.’ He looked up at Mum and then back to me. ‘I say who lives here, so watch your bleeping mouth.’
I could smell his sweaty skin. When he spoke, his breath touched my cheek.
‘You’re too close,’ I said, looking at the floor. ‘This is my private space.’
Tony knocked me sideways and I hit my forehead on the cooker.
‘No!’ screamed Mum, and rushed forward to pull Tony away.
‘Stay out of it,’ he snarled.
My mum was crying. I was crying. I buried my head between my knees. When you’re scared, it’s hard to know how to do the right thing.
Ryan came up to me and kicked me hard on both shins. I didn’t make a sound.
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I closed my eyes and pretended I was riding away on a beam of light.
When Tony and Ryan had gone back into the living room, Mum helped me up and bathed the cut on my head.
‘Are you OK?’ Her voice was hoarse, like when she’s done karaoke at the pub.
I said I was all right, but really I felt a bit sick and dizzy.
When Mum went to work, she said I should go down to the embankment. She said it was best for me to stay out of their way until she got home.
It was drizzly rain, so I put my anorak on. Me and Mum walked down the road together until she had to turn off for the Spar.
We didn’t talk much. Mum didn’t even put her umbrella up. The rain made all the curls fall out of her hair. It looked darker, now it was wet. I told her it reminded me of the gerbils’ tails at school.
She said nothing. It was as if she couldn’t hear me.
She wouldn’t laugh, or anything. Even when I told her a Doctor, Doctor joke.
She just did her lips in a little tight, straight line and she usually loves it.
I tried another one.
‘Doctor, Doctor—’
‘Kieran,’ said Mum. ‘Just leave it.’
It’s tricky to know the difference between when to make people laugh and when to stay quiet.
I kissed Mum on the cheek before she turned left on to Queen’s Walk.
The embankment was quiet. All the people from yesterday were in their houses with the heating on, watching the telly and eating snacks.
I walked down to the river. The flowers were still in the wrong place. I looked around to check nobody was watching. Then I picked them up and took them a bit further down towards the bridge, to the real water grave.
When I looked up from the water, I saw two people coming.
It was the police.
‘How’s our young sleuth?’
The policeman grinned, like he’d told a good joke.
‘When are the divers coming back?’ I said.
The policewoman said, They’re not coming back, love. They’ve finished their work here now.’
They both had name badges on. The man’s said PC Sandeep Malik, and the woman’s said PC Emma Bennett.
‘Hasn’t a young lad like you got anything better to do than be hanging around here, in the rain?’ asked PC Malik.
‘You forgot to put the police tape up,’ I said. There might still be clues here about the killer.’
PC Bennett sighed. ‘Let’s not get carried away. He probably just fell in.’
‘He was old,’ I said. ‘He could have been pushed in.’
PC Malik looked annoyed. ‘Speculation is a dangerous thing, young man,’ he said. There’s no evidence to suggest that. We’ll see what the post-mortem results say.’
‘Post-mortem’ means ‘after death’. In America, they say ‘autopsy’ instead.
A special doctor called a pathologist carries out the post-mortem, to find clues about how a person died. They do a Y-incision on your chest so they can take your organs out and weigh them. They even have to take your brain out, which is gross.
If they think someone died suspiciously, the coroner has to make a decision about what happened. They write the reason on the death certificate.
I learned it from watching CSI. I told a Year Seven boy all about it at break one day. I did it so he knew what would happen to his granddad, who had just died.
After that, Miss Crane said she wanted a ‘quick word’. They say that at school when you are going to get told off.
She explained that people get upset about that sort of thing, especially when a loved one has died, and that I should stop dwelling on it.
‘It’s morbid,’ she said.
Jean came out from under the bridge. She waved to me and started shuffling towards us with all her blankets and bin bags in the old shopping trolley.
‘Not that daft old bat again,’ muttered PC Bennett.
When she got near us, Jean said, ‘If he’d been a copper, would you be doing more?’
‘We haven’t got time for this,’ said PC Malik. ‘Have a nice day, you two.’
‘They don’t give a toss,’ Jean said, when they’d gone. ‘Colin was just a useless old tramp in their eyes.’
She looked at the flowers on the concrete and a tear slid from her eye. I watched it run down her cheek and into the deep wrinkled crease that went from the corner of her mouth, right down to her chin.
‘Colin Kirk, bless his soul,’ she said. ‘He was kind to me. Even gave me one of his blankets last winter, when we couldn’t get a bed in the hostel.’
‘If it was just me and my mum, you could come and live with us, Jean.’
She smiled but she still looked sad. She reached over and touched the cut on my forehead.
‘I did it on the cooker,’ I said.
‘Like your mammy. She’s always banging into things, isn’t she?’
I looked down at my feet. There were little pebbles there, all shapes and sizes. I wondered how they got there, where they were from.
‘There used to be a big chain ferry here before the bridge was built. It took food and people and animals over the river,’ I said. ‘It was in the seventeenth century.’
‘Did there, lad?’ Her voice was soft.
A line of ducks swam past us. Three boys with coloured feathers and a girl with brown feathers. They didn’t even look our way.
‘I wish the ducks could speak,’ I said. ‘They see everything that goes off on the river.’
‘And the Canada geese,’ said Jean. ‘They gabble on all the time. They’d have a story or two to tell us if we could understand them, eh, Kieran?’
If someone asks you something but it doesn’t need an answer, it’s called a ‘rhetorical question’. Jean asked a lot of rhetorical questions. I didn’t mind because she was my friend.
You can tell a lot from a person’s body language, before they even say anything. Some police experts in America can even tell if someone is guilty or not, by seeing which way their eyes look when they’re being questioned.
‘If I was twenty years younger, I’d find out what happened myself,’ said Jean, looking down into the water. ‘If it’s left to the police, someone is going to get away with murdering poor Colin.’
And that’s what gave me the idea.
On Sunday, Mum told me to stay out of Tony’s way before she went to work. It was too rainy to go out, so I stayed in my room all day thinking about Grandma and about Colin’s murder. By the time I went to bed my brain was so full of scheming that it was even trying to plan during the night and woke me up. I actually wished it was morning but my clock said 4:40 and that is too early for breakfast.
I’d already got my underpants on when Mum tapped on my door in the morning, so I put on my socks and school shirt.
Mum says it’s important to keep clean but I don’t have a shower every day. For one thing, hardly any water comes out of the shower head. It stops sometimes, then a big bit of water comes out and nearly drowns you. Another thing is, it is freezing cold because the immersion heater never gets put on. Money doesn’t grow on trees.
When Mum came into my room, I was nearly dressed.
‘Kieran’s an early bird this morning,’ she said, and sat down next to me on the bed.
Normally, I like it when she talks like that, but this morning I didn’t like it because she had a big bruise on her jaw and another on her arm. There were red marks on her neck.
Sometimes, if you pretend you don’t notice things, you can forget about them. It’s like you never saw them in the first place. I couldn’t do that because the bruises were too big.
‘He hurt you again,’ I said.
The words cracked in my throat and came out higher than my normal voice.
‘I’m fine,’ she said in her happy voice, but it didn’t sound real. ‘How about scrambled eggs for breakfast?’
Scrambled eggs with grated cheese on top is my favourite breakfast of all time.
‘I’m not hungry.’
Mum rubbed the back of my head, where the lump was.
‘Grandma tried to stop him hurting you,’ I said.
Mum put her head in her hands.
‘Kieran, will you please stop mentioning Grandma,’ she said.
‘I want to see her,’ I said. ‘Tony hurts you, but you still do as he says.’
The words sounded strange, like I was the boss.
‘It’s my own fault,’ Mum said. When she moved her hands away, tears were there. ‘I wind him up. I should learn to keep my mouth shut.’
My guts felt like when I needed a poo, except I didn’t want one.
If it was just me and Mum, I could look after her better. When I’m grown up, the fat will turn into hard, bulging muscles like on the World’s Strongest Man. Then nobody will hurt my mum.
‘Grandma said he’s nothing but a bully,’ I said quietly in Mum’s ear.
Grandma also said Tony was a violent, stinking pig who needed castrating, but I didn’t say that in case he was near the door again. Grandma didn’t care. She said it in front of Tony’s face. She is the bravest grandma ever.
‘He’s been good to us, Kieran. He took us into his home.’
Mum put her arm round me and held me tight. It felt like a metal band across my shoulders. It felt like I couldn’t move and Tony was winning.
I stood up and her arm fell away.
‘I have to put my school trousers on,’ I said.
Mum’s face went all crumply and she looked really sad. Miss Crane’s face looked like that when Rex, her dog, died last Christmas. She said she loved Rex like he was one of the family. It was hard to know how she felt.
‘Sometimes, it helps to put yourself in the place of the other person,’ Miss Crane said. ‘It helps you to understand, Kieran.’
I put myself in Miss Crane’s place. I imagined that Rex was my dog. Then, I thought about Tony’s dog, Tyson. He’s not like one of the family. When we moved in, Tyson bit Mum. Tony said he was only playing but after he bit Ryan too, he had to go and live in the shed, at the top of the garden.
I looked at the matchstick dogs in my Lowry book. He painted them running and jumping or just standing still next to their masters. Lowry loved dogs; he always painted them next to people. They were full of life and never dead. He never shut them up so they were all alone.