Pigeon

by Alys Conran

  I’d been hiding in this alley between the houses when the men came up the road to take Pigeon away, the men and the woman. So, when the men were at Pigeon’s door, all in their uniforms, I could see Pigeon looking from the window, and I knew they wouldn’t let him stay there, not in that dirty house on his own with his mam who’d got lost somehow, especially not after what he’d done. And the men were going in, pushing through the broken door, through all the rubbish in the hall. From behind the hedge I was scared about Pigeon, and where he’d go now. It was a deep, settling fear, like swallowing a cube of ice that never melts. And then a bit after, Pigeon came out and got into the car between two men, and the car went off down the hill and away, and then there was just me and the house and the hill.

  All weekend it was I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Then it was Monday with rain and tall teachers and school, and name-calling like knives as usual. Except now people were saying things about Pigeon. He’d killed his dad, they said. I wanted to scream at them for it. For that. Because it was a lie. He wasn’t Pigeon’s dad.

  At school, in the new classroom out the back, in a kind of a caravan, with Ms Thomas blaring her screechy voice at the kids all day, I kept my head down. I said nothing. I kept my promise to him and I said nothing. I held my pencil tight in my hand. When the blunt nib of the pencil moved across the paper it was like the sound of ironing white sheets. It was a good sound. Regular.

  And that was how it began. This writing and reading. It was Pigeon going, that was how my schoolbooks filled up with neat writing. Ticks and exclamation marks abracadabra’d at the bottom of homework. Efa got a shock at parent-teacher evening, seeing my writing filing away down the pages, like a good girl’s, like Cher’s before the accident.

  I sat in class all quiet, the laughs and mutters, the sounds of all the other kids making a blur around me, and playing at the edges of me as if I was going to disappear. The teacher talking was like a TV you’re not listening to. At break-time I sat in the corner, on the step, my knees pulled up to my chin, my pale hair falling onto them and round my face. With one hand I picked pebbles off the yard floor and scraped at the concrete with them, looking through my hair, drawing birds and hearts and houses.

  After the funeral, Cher comes back. She comes back into my class instead of the class above, and she has that stupid hat, black and padded, to protect her head.

  “Hi,” says Cher, coming to sit next to me. Her face is empty.

  “Hi,” I say, moving up a bit to give her space. We don’t smile. It’s like new people meeting.

  “Iola,” says Ms Thomas, “Show Cher where we’re up to.”

  So I take the book she’s given Cher, the one we’re all reading together, and I find her the page. Twenty-three. And Cher says “Thank you,” slowly and then Ms Thomas keeps right on reading as if nothing is different.

  The girls keep turning round to look at Cher in her stupid hat and, turning back, they laugh into their hands. Cher doesn’t notice. She’s pretending to read. I watch her. Her finger moves across the page but her eyes don’t follow it. She’s goes on like that right the way until lunchtime. When the bell goes, I don’t wait for her to speak to me, I just leave the class straight away.

  I’m sitting on my step, scratching with my stone on the concrete slab when Cher plonks herself down next to me. My whole body turns into concrete. She’ll ask me. She’ll ask me about Pigeon. Her dad.

  But she doesn’t. She just says, “Hi,” and nothing else. And then she sits there. Staring straight ahead. Efa’s right. Cher’s not the same since the accident.

  All we say is “Hi”, most days. She doesn’t speak much. And since then, this is the way we’ve been. One month after the other, until the summer, and the one month after the other all through the year. Time passes. Time passes by like watching fields through the window of a train.

  21

  “You’re a big reader aren’t you, lad?” Allan says to Pigeon.

  Pigeon just stares at him and says nothing. Allan looks at him in that way. But Pigeon doesn’t care; he just puts his book under his arm and walks out of Education Block into the centre.

  “What d’you get?” asks Neil as he goes past Pigeon, “Fairytale?”

  Pigeon ignores him, keeps on walking along the corridor to his room.

  In their room Salim’s asleep as usual. Pigeon lies on his bed and opens the book. There’s a lot of pictures of space that look like photographs but aren’t. They’re done with a computer. They’re pretty, the pictures of space. There are super nova and nebulae, and the most awesome thing about them is that they’re far away. Pigeon likes that word, ‘awesome’. Not the way the kids here use it, not with an exclamation mark after it. ‘Awesome!’ No. But ‘awesome’, said quietly and full of fear. Big and almost frightening, but beautiful. Awesome. Like the nebulae in this book. So far away that you can’t even imagine it, the distance, and so big that you’re not important at all. In the books about space you can find so many things which you couldn’t see or understand with your own eyes and mind.

  Pigeon turns the pages, and it’s as if there isn’t the centre all around him, as if he isn’t somewhere between concrete and walls and roofing, not hours away from the hill, and his town, not in England. It’s as if the sky is open above him and full to the brim with stars, with shimmering lights, galaxies that whir like cogs, and super nova which burst full of every colour he can imagine.

  When he wakes his face is against the sleek page of the book. There’s the sound of the bell, the sound that’s for lessons and learning and seeing the others.

  “Salim,” says Pigeon. “Wake up.”

  Salim groans and turns over too. Salim’s older than Pigeon is, and bigger. But he’s gentle and quiet, and he doesn’t mind that Pigeon doesn’t much like to talk. He’s given up on that, Pigeon, given up on lining up the words and setting them in patterns that make sense. It’s a lie. And anyway, if he were to talk here, for real, no one would understand. Salim’s the same. Pigeon’s heard him, on the phone, talking to his mam. They speak in an up and down and fast way. It’s Urdu, Salim says. Urdu. So maybe Salim feels like Pigeon. Like his mouth’s been shut up same as his body has.

  “Hey Taffy!” Big Neil calls after Pigeon as Pigeon and Salim are walking towards Education Block. It’s because he’s Welsh, although Pigeon’s never heard the word before, Taffy, and he doesn’t feel anything. He doesn’t feel Welsh. He’s just Pigeon, just Pigeon.

  It’s important here, where you’re from. It’s funny how it’s so important, considering everyone here lives the same life, eats the same food, gets up at the same time, and has lights out just at the same moment.

  “Fucking Taffy,” says Big Neil again as they’re going into Education Block “I heard your lot’re all related. Mum and dad brother and sister are they? You can tell by the look on you. Ugh. And that language’s so ugly it makes me want to puke. Say that sound again. The one that sounds like you’re going to be sick.”

  Pigeon looks at Neil, and says it: “CH”.

  “Say a word with it in.”

  “Cachwr,” says Pigeon.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Arsehole,” says Pigeon bracing for the kick that lands in his gut.

  Salim’s pulled Neil off him within seconds, and the warden’s squaring up, wading in.

  “Alright S,” says Neil to Salim backing off. “Keep your knickers on.”

  It’s good having Salim on side.

  Pigeon nods to the warden that it’s alright and the warden backs off. He doesn’t want trouble either.

  They go through to where Allan’s stood waiting. You go in and the closer to the back of the room you are, the harder you are. Where Pigeon and Salim sit, near the front, the desk has been scratched full of names. So many names that Pigeon can’t read them. What’s the point in the letters? The desk is just noise.

  Neil barges past Pigeon and wipes something sticky on his face as he goes. It’s the oil they put
on the hinges of the doors here, black and dirty; it always gets on your hands. Pigeon wipes it off his cheek. He looks down at the names, the other names, of all the kids who’ve sat at this desk. All the kids who were too soft, like him, to sit at the back. Danny. Mark. And there it is, the name Pigeon likes to look at. Neil.

  Still, Pigeon’s looking forward to this. Geography. Geography is massive forces and being part of a bigger picture.

  But Neil talks all the way through at the back of the class so he can’t listen or think. Sometimes Neil throws things at Pigeon, even when the teacher’s watching. A rubber, a pencil, an old piece of chewed gum.

  “Neil,” says Allan. And then “Neil,” again.

  Pigeon doesn’t care. Allan gives them all a worksheet, and on the worksheet there are the tectonic plates moving back and forth and making whole countries afraid. At the end of the class Allan asks for the worksheets back. Pigeon carefully folds his under the table, to take back to his room. The stories have stopped, what’s got Pigeon interested now is FACTS.

  Take the first FACT. That Iola killed Him. Even that takes some working out. Did she or didn’t she? Wasn’t it Pigeon got the gun, and wasn’t it Pigeon anyway who made it happen? And isn’t it Pigeon that is proud and happy about it, and she that’s carrying on with her life? There’s a difference between facts and what is real isn’t there? Which is why he can’t imagine some of the things in the space books. All that isn’t real for him. You can’t really know those facts. You can’t really know that space is curved, or that the light you see in the sky when this star shines has disappeared: the star is really gone and the light is thousands of years old. It was thousands of years old. The star isn’t. It was. It’s like saying that she’d done it. You can’t prove it with your own eyes and ears, so does it matter? Somewhere he still knows it. She’d done it, not him. But looking at his life, it makes sense if it was Pigeon pulling the catch away on the gun and getting ready to fire it. Enough people think it for it just to be that way. And anyway, hasn’t he finally changed things? It wasn’t her. It was him. It was him, and so everything here is worth it. You need to get the facts straight, so you can know what to do.

  Pigeon tries to think what to do, sitting in his room with Salim, the centre around them and a fence around that. He tries to think. But however he thinks about it it doesn’t make any difference to the fact that Big Neil, Salim and all of the others are stuck here together. All of them closed up in the Centre together. Crammed in like too many teeth in a shut mouth.

  22

  If I close the door I can put the radio on loud and Efa won’t hear, or, she might hear but she won’t complain and shout up the stairs about the music she calls rubbish and trash and all that. It’s Atlantic 252 and Wet Wet Wet, again, and I’m swaying round the room thinking of Llion, and last night.

  Llion, with his black hair and his white skin, kissed me round the back of the wall after the disco. He’d not danced with me for the slow dances, but it was after, when we were all out on the street and fooling around laughing and joking and some of the boys with cans of beer and some of them smoking. It was then he gave me the signal. He did it with his head, motioning it from one side to the other, a kind of nod towards the wall. Then you had to go behind the wall and kiss him, and his tongue was wet like an eel, but his lips were soft and it was good to be close to him. His hands were up my skirt, and I didn’t stop him until he was inside my knickers. His hands were dry and fidgety.

  “Stopia wan,” I said then, and I laughed, and for a few seconds he didn’t stop and then he did.

  The music on the radio swells again, all full of love and happy endings and I sway in the room with that feeling of spring coming. Perhaps Llion will ask me out properly now I’ve kissed him. Or perhaps he won’t. The music changes on the radio, and it’s a rap song, American, angry and about love. To this song I think about how I’ll feel if he doesn’t ask me out. Angry, and sad at the same time. Rejected. It’s a sore feeling, but almost delicious too, and you know you’ll have to come back to it, like picking a scab.

  I know Cher’s coming up the stairs before Efa shouts to tell me. I hear the familiar thump of Cher’s slow, heavy feet. Then Efa calls.

  “Iola. Cher’s coming up! Efa’s voice is thin and bare, like an old, frayed guitar string. I can always hear Cher coming up the stairs anyway, Efa doesn’t need to announce it, but I’m glad she has, Efa, because it’s speaking to each other, and we don’t do much of that now, and Efa’d said my name. Iola. And that’s speaking to me. Directly.

  Cher knocks on the door of my bedroom. You always have to knock. Everyone needs ‘privacy’.

  When I open the door Cher’s stood in the doorway, panting from coming up the stairs, from carrying her own body, which is awkward and big. Cher’s stood there, with the same slow expression she always has ever since then.

  “Come in. Listen!” I tell her.

  The song that’s on the radio’s full of drums and a high voice that’s like a computer, it’s good and it makes your heart thump to hear it.

  Cher listens without moving for a bit. She’s like a dog now sometimes, Cher. Does what she’s told.

  “Yes,” she says, “that’s good that is,” and stands listening until the song peters into a man and a woman talking and telling jokes on the radio. I turn them down.

  “What happened to you last night anyway?” I ask. I hadn’t seen Cher after going round the wall with Llion. I’d had to walk back by myself, up the path from town, and it’d been sad and lonely and dark, so I couldn’t help thinking about things.

  Cher frowns.

  “I saw you with Llion, so I went.” Cher’s voice is flat. She’s jealous. You can tell she’s jealous.

  I laugh a bit. Perhaps Cher will ask me now, about Llion? But she doesn’t. Cher doesn’t. It’s like it’s nothing, what happened with Llion. Like it doesn’t mean anything. But this feeling, of Llion in those few moments when he didn’t stop, even when I’d asked him to. And it was uncomfortable. And what if it didn’t mean anything?

  Meaningless. The big empty word comes into my head. Meaningless.

  Cher and me head out to go downtown to try on clothes. As we walk down we have to go past Cher’s house, Pigeon’s house, where there’s still his mam inside. Whenever I look into the house there’s his mam, still sewing, and around the window are all the dresses she’s made, hanging. It’s always dark in the house, and it’s like an old memory. I never go in anymore. Pigeon’s shed’s like a crumpled photograph, fading there in the garden, and when you look through the windows, you can see nothing’s moved and there’s still one of Pigeon’s magazines open at the page he was reading before he went. The magazine’s covered in dust. Cher says Pigeon’s mam doesn’t like her moving anything.

  Today I don’t look, but I know she’s inside. I see Cher throw a nervous glance towards her as we pass the house, but I know not to say anything. We had that conversation, a few weeks ago, and it didn’t go so well.

  We’d been sitting on the wall by the park. I was scratching my name into the wall with a stone. Cher was just sitting.

  “Pigeon’s mam said you were there,” Cher’d said. “She said she saw you outside, you were there when it happened.”

  Pigeon’s mam’s called Mari Davies, but no one calls her that. ‘Mari’ sounds like she must’ve been part of the town once, and she never was. Pigeon’s mam, Mari Davies, was someone people had to ignore. It was a shame, people said, about Mari Davies.

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  I felt cross, I kept scratching with the stone. I was on the O. The I had gone slightly skewed, off to one side, in italics, as if it was a pretend I, not one I really meant.

  “She says you were.” Cher turned to face me.

  “She’s confused. His mam’s just confused.”

  Cher starts walking again. Two steps or three, and then.

  “Why would she say it, if it wasn’t true?”

  “I dunno, Cher. She’s crazy.”

/>   “I dunno,” says Cher, looking at me funny. Cher and Pigeon’s mam are close. Cher talks about her all the time. It was Pigeon’s mam who got Cher better. Going to see her every day. It’s as if she’s Cher’s mam, not Pigeon’s.

  “What’re you saying?” I snap. I can feel my whole body buzzing, and that sound in my ears, that killing sound.

  I started to cry and that ended it. I started to cry and then I pushed Cher over, toppled the big body onto the tarmac. I turned at the corner, and Cher was still sitting there, looking down at herself in her pink dress. She’d never been the same, Cher, since the accident. That’s what everyone says here “Di ’rioed ’di bod cystal. Rioed ’di bod ’run un.” They shake their heads as they say it. Shake their heads.

  After that conversation, Cher stayed off the subject. But whenever I walk past Pigeon’s house it’s there. It’s all there, and you can’t ignore it. It’s like an itch inside your head, and around your ribs there’s that feeling again, even all these days past, and almost years, there’s still a feeling, like a held breath, like the chicken meat Dad used to package at the factory, all held in and without air.

  It’ll go. It’s a feeling that will go one day, like bad weather always does. It’ll go. Because when you do something bad and you’re a kid, the punishment doesn’t last. And anyway, it was Pigeon.

  I’ve got that straight now. It was Pigeon. He’d done it. And that is true. Because he’d got it all set up and got the gun and it was his anger that’d done it, nothing much to do with me. And that’s why my life’s got to go on, and his has to stop for now. Because he’d done it. Everything except kill Him.

  But that’s such a heavy thing to carry with me past his house, and past his mam who’s alone and crazy these days in that house. It’s heavy. However much I think it, that it’s him, this heavy feeling’s mine and I’m on my own with it.