by Tom Avery
“Mum,” I whispered.
The body groaned again.
I crouched, carefully avoiding the vomit.
“Mum,” I whispered again, closer this time.
She turned her head and peered up at me through her waterfall of hair, matted with muck. She pushed herself up to her knees. I put my arms under her armpits—no avoiding the sick now—and heaved her into a sitting position against the wall.
She mumbled wordlessly, then breathed out, “Water.”
I fetched her water. I made her drink. After she’d sat awhile, I led her into the bathroom. I gently undressed her and washed her down, then led her to her bed.
She spoke once more before sleep overcame her.
“My Kaia,” she said, “it’s just me and you now.”
I stood above her, looking down at the wreck that had been my mum. I stood a long time in the dark.
At last I spoke. “It’s just me, Mum, not me and you. You’re not here. You’re even more frozen than I am.”
I don’t know where it all came from, probably the same place where I’d buried my pain, somewhere between my heart and my stomach, but it kept on coming.
“Things have got to change, Mum. We’ve got to change and grow and … and … live.”
I turned. I left my snoring mum. I cleaned up her mess.
When I finally clambered into my bed, I found that tears covered my face and I knew that I had to say those words to my mum again, next time when she was awake.
I awoke to the smell of pancakes and my mother’s guilt wafting under the door. I followed that smell. I love pancakes.
“Morning, darling,” my mum said, her eyes still bleary but a smile hiding her shame.
I didn’t smile back.
“I’ve made pancakes,” my mum continued.
I still didn’t smile.
She stopped smiling and sat down next to me.
“I’m sorry, Kai.”
I rolled my eyes back and glanced at the short stack of pancakes. I love pancakes.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
I picked at the tablecloth. I flicked a few bread crumbs onto the floor.
“Come on, darling, talk to me.”
I looked at my mum.
I didn’t speak.
Timing is everything. Spring buds appear, new growth, ready for the approaching summer sun. Chicks are born, high in their lofty homes, and squirrels leave their winter beds once the last frost has departed.
Timing is everything. The day before, Mr. Wills had handed out a really special letter. The first people to reply would do bike training: a whole week out of class, cycling.
Timing is everything, and I had a chance this day.
I spoke.
“OK, Mum,” I said with the slightest hint of a smile.
“OK?”
“OK.”
“Pancakes?”
“Pancakes,” I replied with a nod. “Mum, I’ve got a letter needs signing.”
“Of course, of course,” she said, piling warm pancakes onto my plate, then glugging syrup all over them.
I love pancakes.
DAYDREAM
“Have you got a bike?” Mr. Wills asked.
I had rushed into school before the other kids arrived, stuffed with pancakes. Mr. Wills was in the classroom, staring at his computer screen.
“Yes,” I said. I did have a bike. Mum had bought it over a year ago, before it happened, for my birthday. Moses had bought me a big, heavy book, Trees of Britain: An Illustrated Guide. I loved both presents.
The bike wasn’t new, but that didn’t matter. Moses had painted it, pink like cherry blossoms, fixed up the broken parts, greased it, made it run. “Better than new,” he said. “Special, just like you, Tiny.”
I know I smiled then.
“OK,” Mr. Wills went on. “Well, I’d better just check with Harry.” I stared away from him. “You know he likes to work with you sometimes.”
When I “worked” with Harry we made pictures, or folded paper into all sorts of shapes like birds and flowers, or wrote poems, and he asked me questions, lots of questions. I told him I was fine.
Mr. Wills said I should go back outside. I didn’t. I went to the library.
I can hear the bell ringing outside as I write this. Time for school to start.
At lunch, while the boy snarls at passing children, I have a daydream.
I’m sitting on my favorite bench, Moses to my left, the boy to my right. We watch as the school starts to crumble away like a sand castle in the wind.
It starts with a deep whine, a primal squeal; the hyenas stop their laughing and chatting and pointless ball games and stare up at the red building. The screech turns to a sigh, as if the walls have finally, exhaustedly given up. Then pieces of brick, chunks large and chunks small, trickle and tumble down the walls along with gritty white mortar. Next come the roof tiles: discolored, coated with furry green moss, they fall, landing with a shattering smash. Panes of glass along with rotted wooden frames fall forwards, disappearing in the pile of debris.
I catch sight of Mr. Wills, still inside his classroom, deep in conversation with Harry. He’s shaking his head. “No, Kaia can’t do cycling.” Papers, tests, books, plastic calculators come streaming out of the gaping holes where windows once were.
Around me, the kids, frozen amidst the chaos, begin to turn to dust one by one. I see Poppy go, Dev, Hanaiya, Shadid. I add Luzie to the bench, next to the boy.
Finally, with a second wail, despair in its voice, the building falls in on itself. A great cloud of dust rises into the air. We shield our eyes.
When it settles we’re all that’s left: us and the tree against our backs.
I laugh, not at the destruction, at the freedom.
PROPER ARTIST
Today, the day of the pancakes and handing in the all-important letter, Harry asked Mr. Wills if some pupils could come out and help with a “special” project.
“Who would like to go and work with Harry?” Mr. Wills asked.
A funny thing in my class—maybe it’s the same in all classes—but whatever the task, no matter how dull, if a teacher offers a job, most of us would bite his hand off to do it.
So my finger was not the only one pointing to the heavens, but it was certainly the first.
“Go on then, Kaia,” my teacher said. “And … and …” He glanced from eager face to eager face. “And Shadid.”
I leapt to my feet, almost like the boy would have, and saw Shadid, an ex-friend, smiling across the room. We headed for the door, where gray eyes in the boy’s wild face waited to greet us.
The “special” project, it turned out, was more fun than I could have guessed. Harry wasn’t just a man who worked with wild boys and sometimes-frozen girls like me. When school ended, Harry was an artist, a graffiti artist. I know, that’s almost too cool, isn’t it?
The head teacher asked Harry, with the help of some pupils—the boy, me and Shadid—to paint a small wall in the playground. I told you, far more fun than I could have guessed.
We started by thinking of ideas. What did school mean to us?
HARRY
1. Fun
2. Learning
3. Possibility
SHADID
1. Friends
2. Football
3. Making us better at stuff
Harry asked if he could change that last one to learning too. Shadid wasn’t so sure.
THE BOY
…
KAIA
1. Trying to move on
2. Trying to change
3. Trying to escape
Harry wanted us to draw some images that showed what we meant so he could take them away and design the wall based on our pictures. He rolled out a long sheet of paper like wallpaper—maybe it was wallpaper—and we drew all over it.
Shadid, obviously, drew footballs and footballers, standing and running and kicking. Harry drew a big brain with things like sums and words and paintbrushes going int
o it, and things like money and people doing jobs and medals coming out of it. The boy, with a little help from me, drew trains and trees and children sitting.
I thought for a while, after I’d got the boy started. Harry let me think as long as I needed. I needed a long time. I wished Mr. Wills would just let me think sometimes. Then I drew a building falling down, collapsing, bricks everywhere. I drew children turning into birds, free. I drew bird-children flying high in the sky. I drew wild birds swooping and gliding. I drew baby birds being sheltered under a bigger bird’s wing. I drew and drew and drew.
When we finished and the wallpaper was covered with our scribbling, we walked round it, looking down at all the pictures.
Shadid stood by my drawings, staring. I knew what was coming. I knew they were rubbish. I knew Shadid would be telling everyone about the stupid pictures I’d drawn.
“Harry,” he began. I waited for the stinging words. “These are brilliant, aren’t they?”
I nearly choked. I could feel my face burning, my heart beating.
Harry was next to him now. “You know, Shadid,” he replied, “they really are.”
Shadid looked up at me. In his eyes there was no laughter, cruel and cold, no shades of an insult, nothing but friendship. “You’re like a proper artist, Kaia.”
I looked down at my own pictures. I looked at the boy’s. He was still scribbling. I looked at Shadid’s.
“They mean so much, Kaia. That’s what makes them special,” Harry said. “I can see that they mean so much to you.”
I was smiling now, though my heart still beat at my chest and my face must have been a bright red.
“That’s what makes great art, Kaia,” Harry went on. “When it means something, when you know that it means something important and deep to the artist.”
Then Shadid did something that I don’t think anyone had done for a very long time. He touched me. I didn’t touch him, like picking up my mum and getting her to bed. It wasn’t an accident, fingertips brushing against my hand as a pen is passed. It wasn’t just a bustled queue, lining up for lunch, or a push, or kick, or tug of my hair from Poppy or her friends.
He reached up and clapped his hand to my shoulder.
“I’ll have to tell everyone about our secret artist,” he said.
I want to tell Mum all about the art, my art. I want to tell her how fun it was. I want to tell her and I want her to be proud.
But I can’t. We don’t talk. So I write it here, in my room. I write it and it seems even more real, but somehow even more unbelievable too.
Today is Thursday. Thursday is Special Achievement Day. Special Achievement Day is when one child from every class gets called out in assembly and their teacher tells everyone why they’ve been special. I haven’t been Special Achiever since before, before I found my brother. Sorry, that should be I hadn’t.
I sat with my class, lined up on benches. We sit in register order. I’m last, at the very end of the bench.
All the other classes go before us, because we’re the oldest. Then the head teacher said, “I think we have a very special achiever from Year Six. Mr. Wills?”
And then Mr. Wills started speaking: “I’m giving the award this week to someone very special, someone who’s been making a lot of effort to make new friends recently, and now, to try new things. Yesterday this person impressed Harry so much”—Harry smiled at this—“that he rushed into my classroom at the end of the day telling me that this artist”—and he said that word really long and loud—“must be Special Achiever today, and I agree. All this pupil needs to do is concentrate a little more, focus, be a bit more involved, and I’m sure she’ll be Special Achiever again soon.” Then Mr. Wills looked at the class and said, “Our Special Achiever this week is …”
“KAIA!” my whole class screamed together. I could hear Shadid screaming loudest and I knew he must have told everyone, like he said.
I walked to the front as they clapped. Not everyone clapped. I could see Poppy and some of her friends, arms crossed in the back row. Dev made a stupid face like he was clapping as a joke. But the boy’s eyes were bright, secret-smile bright, and Luzie was beaming and Shadid was kneeling up on his bench.
I felt sick. I don’t know why. But I felt sick. And as the head teacher handed me my certificate and shook my hand, I felt even sicker and I shook all over.
So I turned and ran out of assembly, straight into the toilets, and was sick.
PANGRAMS AND ALGEBRA
I’m trying to concentrate.
It’s been days since I handed in my bike-training letter and Mr. Wills has told us nothing. Lots of the others keep asking who gets to do it. I haven’t asked.
I’m trying to concentrate on what we’re learning. I’m trying to be involved again. So to show I’ve been concentrating:
A pangram is a sentence which contains all the letters of the alphabet. A perfect pangram wouldn’t repeat any of the letters either, but that’s almost impossible. There’s a famous one, the one Mr. Wills told us about first. Here it is: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
It’s nice. Mr. Wills says we’re not to use the word nice. He says there’s always a better word. But he’s wrong. Sometimes nice is the best word. Sometimes it’s exactly the right word. Sometimes the thing you want to describe is nice; it’s not more or less than that. It’s nice. That pangram is nice. It’s not funny, or clever, or interesting. But it is nice.
Mr. Wills wanted us to make one of our own. It’s much more difficult than you imagine.
We’ve been learning about algebra too.
Algebra is a kind of maths where unknown numbers are represented by letters. They’re called variables. Like when you have to work out the area of a rectangle, a = l × w, where a = the area, l = length and w = width. The width and the length can change, they’re the variables, and then you get a different area, a different outcome.
Is it hurting your brain? It hurts mine.
Here’s my other way of explaining it: B = x + y + z.
B = the boy; x, y and z are all the things that have happened to him, all the things that have made him who he is; a boy without words, a boy without a home, a wild boy.
Here’s my attempt to sum up everything we’ve been learning.
Kaia White lives in a hazy, jagged dream because of x, p and q.
Where x is what Moses did, p is how my mum has changed and q is everyone else.
TEARS AND LAUGHTER
We found out the all-important news. We found out today. We found out who gets to cycle.
Nothing else really matters from the day. We did maths, sequences, not too hard. We did literacy, writing reports; we had to write fictional reports on a pretend really cool new trainer—I don’t care about trainers, especially not really cool imaginary ones. But I’m trying. I’m still trying. We did some science—upthrust is a force that makes objects lighter in water. I’m still concentrating.
Then at the end of the day Mr. Wills said, “I’ve just got a few letters to hand out.” The class all started whispering at once. Like cows that lie down, knowing it’s going to rain, we knew what was coming. We just knew.
Mr. Wills walked between the tables, making his way to each person in turn, calling out their name.
“Shadid,” he said first of all, handing a beaming Shadid his letter. Everyone at his table craned to read it at once.
“Deon” next.
“Yes!” Deon squealed, then grinned across the room at Shadid. Everyone else’s groans were ignored.
“Luzie.” That made me smile; in my book she deserved it.
When Mr. Wills was halfway round the class he looked up, peering from table to table. “Where’s Angelica?” he asked with a huff.
“You sent her to ask the office something, sir.”
“Oh, yes, I did.”
Mr. Wills had nearly completed his circuit of the classroom, a classroom mostly full of disappointed faces. Just our table left. I felt sick. Again. I could feel eyes, jealous e
yes, creeping all over me.
“Last but not least,” the teacher said, “here you go.” Then he smiled at me and the boy. “You deserve it,” he said, and handed us a letter of our own.
“Oi, freak,” a voice called as we walked across the playground, leaving school.
I glanced backwards. Poppy was following. My feet stumbled as my brain decided whether to stop or not. The boy steadied me with an arm.
“That should be me cycling,” Poppy growled as her friends poured in behind her.
My feet continued forwards while my eyes continued to look behind. I felt her step round me, but I did not know what she planned.
“Hi, Poppy,” Luzie said, her voice high and jolly, like a warbling bird. She stood in front of me.
“Move,” Poppy spat, trying to step around my ex-friend.
“Hi, Poppy,” Angelica sang, running up beside Luzie.
“I said move.”
Luzie turned and smiled at me.
The boy’s hand was on my arm. He pulled me towards the gate. As we jogged away I glanced back once more—Poppy glared at me past a wall of my friends.
I floated home. I didn’t really float, but I felt like it, my feet meters above the ground. I was so excited to be picked, so excited that Luzie and the boy were doing it too. And, I guess, Shadid as well.
Then I got home. Then I got home.
Usually when I get home the flat is empty, empty and cold. I put my stuff away. I watch some TV. Mum stumbles in. We have some food. I go to bed. Mum drinks.
Today Mum was sitting in the living room, TV off, not a bottle in sight. I could hear her in there as soon as I got in. She was crying.
I hung up my bag quietly, took off my shoes and listened as she blew her nose and tried to end her tears. I didn’t know whether to go in or not, to check if she was OK, to comfort her. Like I said, we don’t really talk, me and Mum. She decided for me.