by Clare Fisher
Before this, teachers had said I had potential, especially where words were concerned. Her reading age is unusually high, given her circumstances. She has a vivid imagination. Her academic progress is hampered by her disruptive behaviour and short concentration span. She also reacts very badly to criticism and is reluctant to engage with her learning targets. But when a teacher marked a piece of work, all I saw were the question marks, the red lines. I didn’t see the comments in green, and I didn’t see the red pen as a way to get better. I handed in my Guide to Stockwell without hope of anything different.
Miss Hanley began the next lesson with a big grin on her face. ‘8b, I’ve got something very exciting to read to you. Not only is it the best Guide to Stockwell in the whole class, it’s one of the best pieces of student creative writing I’ve read for a long, long time. Now, sit back, listen and enjoy.’
A few words in, and everyone stopped talking and looking around to see if they could guess who’d written the best story. They stared at Miss Hanley’s mouth as if the words tumbling out of it were important. It wasn’t until they burst out laughing at a description of an old man trying to explain to his dog why rolling in a puddle of Red Stripe was a bad idea, that I realized the words were mine.
Mine.
Yes, I’d written them. They’d started life in my body but now, as they zinged around the classroom, making people laugh, they had their own power. Their own character. Kind of like you.
‘Can anyone guess who wrote that?’ the teacher asked, when she’d finished.
Silence. Several girls were still chewing on their gel pens, staring at something outside the room, maybe their own personal aliens.
‘No. No one?’ Her eyes fixed on me. ‘It was Bethany.’
‘Who?’ said one of the gel pen girls. The popular girls.
Everyone laughed. I wished I’d die. Annoyingly, I didn’t.
‘Bethany’s that new girl!’ someone shouted.
Necks stretched and shoulders twisted as everyone tried to get a good look at the strange new girl, i.e. me. Of all the faces, it was Cal’s I noticed: it was plastered with anger. Real anger. The sort of anger that bubbled away inside of me, all the time. I’d never have guessed it lurked in her, too.
‘It didn’t even have any long words,’ she said loudly, as I passed her table at the end of the lesson. ‘It was like a baby story.’
‘It was funny, though,’ said her friend.
‘Yes, but we don’t come to school to be funny. We come to learn. My dad says . . .’
I followed them without meaning to. I followed them all the way to the canteen, the gap between us narrowing until someone shoved me from behind and I toppled forward, on to Cal.
When she turned to see who’d pushed her, her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed, as if she couldn’t decide whether this moment was exciting or dangerous.
‘You got a problem with my story?’ I said.
‘What?’ she said, her voice way smaller than the one she used in class.
‘You heard me.’
‘Cal.’ Her friend tried to tug her away by the shoulder of her blazer but Cal shrugged her off.
‘You reckon it’s a baby story?’
‘I –’
‘I heard you.’ I stepped towards her; she walked backwards into a table. A few of the cool guys from the year above stopped munching their chicken burgers to watch. ‘What you said. And don’t worry. I’m not gonna steal your place as teacher’s pet or nothing. I can’t help it if I wrote something better than you.’
I started to walk away, towards the cool guys, imagining this to be my first step towards getting in with them.
But Cal shouted: ‘I’m not anyone’s pet.’
I wasn’t going to let that slide, no way. I swaggered back. Waited a few beats, then shoved her into the ketchup stands. To my surprise, she shoved back. She shoved hard. There was a spark in her eyes like she wanted to hurt me, and I was glad. I yanked her ponytail until she screeched. Let go, let go, she yelled, but I gripped harder, until somehow, she flipped her whole body around and kicked me in the shin. I howled.
FIGHT! GIRL FIGHT! Someone shouted. There was a rustle of blazers and crisp packets as kids crowded in. They knew as well as we did that it was only a matter of minutes before some teacher came and ruined it. FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT! So we proper went for it, her as much as me, and even as she was biting and pulling and scratching, I had to admit: I was impressed.
When the teachers dragged us apart, I tried to catch her eye. I wanted her to admit she’d enjoyed it, too. But she looked the other way and even later, when we were friends, if I brought it up, she’d get fidgety and quiet before whisking the conversation into some more comfortable spot.
Our punishment was a whole week in the Head Teacher’s Corridor. Students were only allowed there when they’d done something good, like winning a prize, or something bad, like making another student bleed. We sat on knobbly exam tables and answered questions from textbooks, or, in my case, pretended to. The point of the Head Teacher’s Corridor wasn’t work, though; it was for teachers to walk past and shake their heads, so there was no way we could forget we were 100% bad. Sometimes, they stopped by Cal’s table (which was a few metres behind mine) and muttered Serious Words, such as ‘disappointing’ and ‘grades’ and ‘permanent record’. When they saw me, they sped up and looked ahead. I didn’t mind; I was used to adults acting like I was already somewhere else.
At the end of the second day, just as I was wondering whether I’d be dead from boredom by the end of the week, a small, hard thing hit the back of my head. I turned to see Cal smirking. She wiggled her eyebrows at a balled-up piece of paper by my foot. I opened it.
Mostly, the locals do stuff that’s POINTLESS. As an alien, pointlessness is hard to bear.
This is still the best apology I’ve ever received. Not only did it not contain the word ‘sorry’; it made me laugh. There were no teachers about, so I quickly scribbled a reply on the back of the paper and threw it back to her.
It’s a relief to find out you’re not the only alien. Even if those aliens sometimes disguise themselves as humans who hate you . . . ;)
She took so long to reply that I answered a few more questions from the textbook to distract myself from imagining why she wasn’t. As I was running seriously low on hope, a ball of thick purple paper landed on my desk. This wasn’t any paper; it was a page from the pretty notebook I’d seen her sneak out of her backpack at the end of lessons.
Yeah, the locals get jealous when the aliens say it better than they do. Don’t worry, they get over it though. Because everyone’s an alien underneath.
It was a strange feeling to know that Cal, with her grades and her friends and her pretty notebook, was jealous of me. Me with my words. Anyway, it wasn’t like I’d written anything clever; I’d just written what was obvious.
When the Head Teacher gave us his little end-of-day pep talk – ‘Well, girls, how are you doing? Have you had a chance to reflect on your actions?’ – I found it ridiculously hard not to laugh. All I could do was suck my lips together and nod.
‘Oh yes,’ said Cal. ‘Lots of reflection, yes. I can’t wait to get back into lessons.’
The Head Teacher looked from her to me and back to her again. ‘Good. I’m sure we won’t see this sort of behaviour from either of you again.’
We left his office together, walked down the corridor together, and as soon as we were out in the playground, we were stumbling about in the electric hysterics you get when you’ve been holding them in for way too long.
‘I don’t know how you stayed so serious,’ I said, when I was able to speak again.
‘Dying. I was thinking about dying. Most of the time, at school, I have to think about dying, I want to laugh so much.’
‘But the teachers love you.’
‘Only because I get good grades. And because of the dying.’
We stopped for the main road that sliced between the school and the estate. I thought she was going t
o say goodbye; instead, she linked her arm into mine and pulled me across the road, saying, ‘Let’s play a game! Let’s look at people and guess which ones are aliens.’
I’d never been friends with anyone who’d suggest something like this. The friends I’d had were the sort you had to impress or they’d stop being friends with you. The friends I’d had before weren’t proper friends, but I hadn’t realized it until then.
We walked across the grass between the estate towers, nodding and whispering and pointing and giggling. Alien. Not an alien. Not an alien but wants to be. Is an alien but wants to not be. It was like we shared the same head. It was fun.
When we were halfway down one of the posh, quiet streets, she stopped.
‘This where you live?’
She wriggled her arm out of my elbow. ‘Yeah.’
The bricks of her house were so white it hurt. Like all the other houses on the street, hers had no net curtains, and through the windows I saw a canvas painting with weird shapes on, a piano, and lots and lots of bookshelves. Was this a house, a library or a museum?
‘Wow. It’s massive.’
‘It’s not that big,’ she said. ‘On the inside.’
What would she think if she saw Brenda’s house? It was only around the corner but it was half the size of hers, and you couldn’t see its inside from the outside; it had tiny windows and two layers of curtains. I hadn’t asked Brenda whether I could have friends round; I didn’t want to.
‘Right.’
The air between us went stiff.
I opened my mouth, intending to say bye, but instead I said, ‘My feet are frozen.’ My eyes wandered back to those bookshelves. I hadn’t seen that many books for ages. Not since Paul’s.
‘Would . . . would you like to come in?’
‘Oh.’ Ever since she’d written that first note, I’d been hoping she’d ask this. But now that she did, my belly wriggled with embarrassment. And fear. ‘You’re probably too busy . . .’
‘No,’ she said, stepping towards me. ‘I’m not.’
‘OK. Thanks.’
Cal showed me into her front room, then left me there while she leaped upstairs to the toilet. The room was terrifyingly tidy. Even the tissue box – which was an ordinary pack of Kleenex: I checked – was hidden inside a pretty woven box-glove thing. When Cal came back, she laughed. ‘Don’t look so scared! Go on, sit down.’
The room was about twice the size of Brenda’s, but it felt about four times as big, given how neat it was and the size of Brenda’s porcelain dog collection, which spilled on to every flat surface.
‘Where?’
There was a small wicker chair and two sofas with the cushions laid out symmetrically. At Brenda’s, there was a chair and a foot pouf that I was no way allowed to sit on because it was the only thing she’d inherited from her mum. The only place I could sit was the sofa, which was so saggy that when you sat on it, you had to rock back and forth if you wanted to get up.
‘It’s like a museum.’
‘A museum?’
My stomach clenched. Maybe I’d gone too far. Maybe she was already sick of me.
She laughed. ‘I can just about imagine what you mean. But that’s only because Celia comes on Tuesdays. Come on a Friday and we’ll have messed it up.’
‘Who’s Celia?’ I asked, as I followed her down a sanded corridor and into the kind of kitchen that until then, I’d only seen on TV.
‘Oh,’ said Cal, standing in the too-bright light of a huge silver-doored fridge, ‘she’s our cleaner. She’s actually trained as an engineer but she’s got to work as a cleaner because she’s from the Congo. She’s really good. Look! We’ve got Ben & Jerry’s. Want some?’
‘Yes!’
We were in an advert kitchen eating advert food in an opposite-of-an-advert way, i.e. standing up, digging into the tub with our spoons, licking them, digging them in again. It was brilliant.
‘Hello.’
A woman was throwing a briefcase on to the kitchen table. She wore glasses, a stiff grey dress hugged to her waist by a thick leather belt and the same I’m-watching-you eyes as Cal.
Cal, who’d stuffed the Ben & Jerry’s in the fridge the moment we heard her mum, grabbed my ice-creamy spoon out of my hand and chucked it in the sink. ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘this is Beth.’
‘Beth?’ Her mum raised one eyebrow. ‘As in . . .’
‘Yes.’
Her lips quivered with the possibility of a smile. ‘You’ve certainly made up quick. Now tell me,’ she leaned across the tiles and laid her hand on my arm, ‘did my daughter apologize?’
‘Mu-um!’
‘Don’t say “Mu-um” like that, it’s very irritating,’ she snapped. Then she turned to me. ‘Now tell me, did she?’
‘Well . . . Yes. Yes, she did.’
‘You deserve all the Ben & Jerry’s in the world, in that case.’
Cal was hunched by the spice rack, her face hardened into the same angry mask I’d seen in the canteen.
‘God knows her father and I have been trying to get her to apologize for years. But she just won’t. She thinks everything she does is right.’
Cal’s chest heaved in and out, in and out, and she was sucking in her lips, which is exactly what I did when I was trying not to explode. I shot her a look to say, it’s all right. She looked back like, thanks.
‘Of course,’ Cal’s mum picked up a wooden spoon, ‘most of what she does is right.’ She poked Cal with the spoon.
‘No.’
‘But not everything.’ She poked Cal again, this time in the side. Cal sprang out of her corner. She yelped and grabbed another spoon and poked her mum back. Pretty soon they were laughing.
‘Oh, you’re a maker of miracles,’ said Cal’s mum, pulling away from her daughter and putting the spoon back in the pot with all the other spoons, as if she’d suddenly remembered me. ‘Wait until Geoff hears about this.’
I wanted to tell her that the miracle wasn’t me; the miracle was the love that could chase away anger with one wooden spoon. But then Cal’s mum said it had been lovely to have me but I’d have to go, Cal would soon have to get ready for her tap dancing lesson.
‘You do tap dancing?’ I asked Cal, on the way out.
‘Don’t tell anyone.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I won’t.’
I glanced in at the living room on my way to the door but it no longer looked like a museum; it looked like a home. Or maybe the difference was that after only an hour, it was starting to feel like one.
I went to Cal’s the next night, and the night after that. We did normal things, like laugh and do impressions of teachers and watch TV, but we also did other things, things you’d never admit to at school, like brainstorming ideas for a magazine on this amazingly thick wavy paper, which still smelt like trees. The magazine would be called What’s Down? Instead of What’s Up? It would include articles on whether being a bitch made you more likely to buy gel pens or whether drawing all over your hands with gel pens poisoned you with bitchiness. (We both hated the gel pen girls.) A study of the brain to show that the older you got, the more your brain came to resemble a stone; ‘Which is why adults never change their minds,’ said Cal, ‘and also why they get so obsessed with houses.’ I suggested something about why you can feel when someone is looking at you from behind. ‘You worry they’re going to attack you or take something from you, but usually they’re just nosy, or they want you to move out of their way, or they can’t find any other thing to look at.’ It was the best thing ever, just being able to scoop out the weirdest stuff from the bottom of your mind, and know that it wouldn’t make the person you were with hate or turn away from you; it would make them love you more.
We’d share our ideas in Cal’s room, which was stuffed with cushions, bean bags, mobiles, posters, books, boxes, clothes, and other random things, like a wonky pencil pot she’d made at a pottery party (whatever that was). ‘I’m sorry it’s such a mess,’ she said. ‘Celia won’t even come i
n here.’ I didn’t mind.
What I didn’t tell her was that even though my room at Brenda’s was bigger than at my previous foster mum’s, even though it was clean and warm, it wasn’t mine. I wasn’t allowed to put things on the wall or leave my bed unmade or leave stuff on the floor. Aside from my clothes, which I had to fold neatly in drawers, the only things I had were books. There was one from Paul and one from each foster family after that. A lot of them were little kid books and some were boring grown-up ones, like a Reader’s Digest, that I’d nicked. I kept them in a pile, in my holdall, in the bottom of the wardrobe in my room. Most nights, before bed, I’d unzip the holdall and stare at them. I’d stare until I could see back to the me I’d been when I read them and through those old mes to the world on the other side of those pages that was still there, still waiting. I hadn’t found any good books at Brenda’s and this I told her. ‘You’ve got so many books,’ I said. ‘And even more downstairs. My foster mum doesn’t even read magazines.’
Cal always went stiff and quiet when I mentioned my foster mum.
‘She says it’s because of her eyes,’ I said. ‘I think it’s because she’s old. She listens to all these audio books from the library, they’re romantic ones, always some dumb story about a rich doctor falling in love with a poor maid when she swoons into the swimming pool and he has to dive in and rescue her. There’s always a swimming pool and there’s always swooning. Other things there are, are trembling bosoms and . . . quivering members.’
She laughed, and just like that, the awkwardness was gone.
On the third night, Cal’s mum said those magic words: ‘Would you like to stay for dinner?’
Brenda was expecting me back by six, but I didn’t care; I didn’t even stop the happiness leaking all over my face as I nodded yes to that question.
‘Lovely.’ Cal’s mum handed me a courgette. ‘An extra pair of hands.’
‘Mu-um,’ said Cal. ‘Beth wants to eat dinner, not make it.’
Cal’s mum raised an eyebrow. ‘Dice it, please, Beth, if you don’t mind.’ She handed me a sharp knife. Then she began rushing around, somehow taking things out of the fridge and opening tins and boiling the kettle at the same time. Soon, the kitchen was all bubbles, steam, and carrot peelings. I stared at my courgette, which was still whole. What did it mean, to dice it? How did you do it? All I could think of were board games and how I never won.