Just Another Kid

by Torey Hayden

  Shamie suddenly shook his head, as if still in conversation with someone. Then he looked at me. “I’m glad I’m here. It was no good there. All it was, was fighting.”

  “There’s got to be fighting,” Geraldine replied.

  “Why? What good does it do? It just kills people.”

  “You’ve got to fight, Shamie. You’ve got to take revenge. People do you wrong, people take away what’s yours, you’ve got to take revenge,” Geraldine said, her voice quiet, as if she were stating a known fact.

  “Revenge is for God to take. Not us.”

  Geraldine shook her head. “God’s too slow.”

  Shamie didn’t respond. Instead, he grew pensive. Clasping his hands together in an almost prayerful attitude, he brought them up and rested them against his lips. He stared, unseeing, ahead of him. I studied him as he sat. He was a good-looking kid, more beautiful than handsome, with his long lashes and his full, sensual lips. He had an artist’s face. It was in keeping with his soul.

  “You know what the worst part of it was, over there?” he asked, turning to look at me.

  “What was that?”

  “You’re not free. You walk around free, but you’re still not free. I remember once, last summer, when Mammy and Daddy took us for a picnic. We went to County Down, down to the lough, and my mammy had made a lunch and put it in the picnic basket with a blue cloth on it. And we put it on the ground and we had sandwiches and crisps and lemonade. I was watching the swans on the lough. The car radio was on, and we heard on the one o’clock news that the Provies had blown up a Land Rover with soldiers in it near Ballynahinch. We’d come through Ballynahinch. Brid gets travel sick, so we’d stopped in a lay-by there, and Mammy’d taken her over to sick up on the verge. And after we’d heard the news, I was looking out across the water, across the lough, at the swans. I was watching them, but I was seeing these soldiers, these dead soldiers in the Land Rover, with blood on them. Like this dog I saw once. After the riots when Bobby Sands had died. There was a dead dog. I don’t know if he got run down or what, but he was dead in the street, lying in his own blood. It was dark, the blood was. Almost black, not red like what comes out of you when you cut yourself. It was blacky-red and soaked into the pavement. Except there were footprints made with his blood, where people had walked over him. Blacky-red footprints going down the street.” Shamie shook his head. “I was looking at swans on the water and I was seeing this dead dog’s blood.”

  Then, jarringly, we were interrupted by the noisy arrival of Ladbrooke and Leslie. The classroom door went bang and there they were, red cheeked and cheerful, clumping across the room in heavy boots, leaving a trail of melting snow in their wake. Lad was full of their adventure. They’d been involved in a minor traffic accident on the way to school. While no one had been hurt or even shaken up, it had necessitated two trucks and police and a lengthy wait at the Mercedes garage. Ladbrooke and Leslie had walked to school from there and arrived, very excited by their experiences.

  I regretted their intrusion. The three children almost never directly mentioned the Troubles or spoke of their former life in Belfast. There were odd, fragmented references shot back and forth amongst them, like coded messages, but they seldom included me when talking. And I was uncomfortable raising the topic when it did not come up naturally, partly because I was at a disadvantage as a foreigner, and partly because there had been so many traumatic consequences for these children, that I feared I would lumber in, inadvertently hurting more than I helped. But Ladbrooke and Leslie were there, wet and noisy and excited, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. Within moments the other children had caught their high spirits. We went back to talking about snowstorms, and my quiet interlude in Ulster was gone.

  I alone seemed unable to pull myself away from Northern Ireland. Throughout the day, the conversation kept coming back to me in snips and snatches.

  Out on the playground that afternoon, the children were going mad in the deep snow. Carolyn and Joyce had come out too. They had only four children in their class, so the day had taken on a holiday mood. Carolyn got a game of Fox-and-Geese going with her children in which Leslie and Shemona happily joined. Geraldine and Shamie, feeling themselves above playing with preschoolers, kept apart. After constructing a crude snow fort, Shamie began lofting snowballs at Ladbrooke, who returned fire with unrestrained precision. Geraldine joined in, in a halfhearted way, but after getting hit in the cross fire, she withdrew and came over to stand next to me.

  “Shamie likes her,” Geraldine said in a rather disgruntled voice. She seldom referred to Ladbrooke by name.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You know what else? He keeps that picture she drew, that one she made on his spelling paper when he got 100 percent. He keeps it in his bedroom drawer. By his bed. And then he takes it out and looks at it. Sometimes he kisses it.” Geraldine made a distasteful grimace. “He’s in love with her.”

  I smiled down at her.

  “I think he’s silly. She’s a grown-up woman.”

  “Well, it’s all right for him to feel that way.”

  “He thinks she’s beautiful. He thinks she’s beautifuller than you are.”

  “I suspect he’s right.”

  “I don’t think so,” Geraldine said. “I think you’re beautiful, Miss. I think you’re beautifuller than she is. You’re nicer.”

  “Thank you, Geraldine. That’s kind of you to say.”

  We stood together in affable silence, watching the others play. Geraldine took one hand out of her pocket and put it through the crook of my arm. She leaned her head against me.

  “You know what we were talking about this morning,” I said, “when we were talking about Ulster?”

  Geraldine nodded.

  “Shamie was saying how it was no good, all that fighting, how it wasn’t getting anywhere. What do you think? Does the fighting there seem good to you?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. Then slowly, she shook her head. “No, Miss, it doesn’t seem good.”

  “Does it seem right?”

  Another thoughtful pause, then she shrugged. “I don’t know. I think maybe it’s right. Just because some things aren’t good, doesn’t mean they aren’t right. You have to fight back. When somebody fights you, you have to fight back. You have to take revenge.”

  “You have to take revenge?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you think revenge is a good thing, Geraldine?”

  She nodded again with no hesitation.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s justice.”

  I looked down at her. She was bareheaded, in spite of the cold weather. She was still watching the other children, still holding on to me, still leaning her head against my arm. I regarded her dark, shiny hair.

  “What is justice, do you think?” I asked.

  No answer. She just stood.

  “Do you know what justice is, Geraldine?”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “What?”

  “What you take revenge for.”

  Taking my hand from my jacket pocket, I put my arm around her, drawing her closer to me. She put her arm around my waist. I was silent a moment, watching Shamie and Ladbrooke. They had grown exuberant in their game, and snowballs were zinging back and forth at a remarkable rate. Ladbrooke had a childlike quality about her that allowed her to enter into the kids’ games as an equal, and the children always accepted her as such. On such occasions, she could become very free spirited, but it made her noisy. I tried to catch her eye and signal her to move away from Geraldine and me a little, but she was too absorbed to notice.

  “I’m not so sure revenge is a good thing,” I said to Geraldine. “I think maybe it’s just an excuse to hurt someone else and not feel guilty for having done it.”

  “No,” she replied.

  “Someone hurts us and it makes us angry, so we want to hurt them back. But then, after we’ve done it, afterwards, what’s been accomplished? Nothing. It’s just anothe
r name for violence. And it’s a particularly wicked kind of violence, to my mind, because it’s been thought through first and not just done in the heat of the moment. In taking revenge, one’s set out only to destroy, and that seems evil to me.”

  “But the soldiers kill children,” Geraldine replied. “My daddy showed me pictures of children who were shot by rubber bullets. He said the soldiers didn’t care if they killed women or babies or little girls. So he said it was right to kill them in revenge.”

  I pondered what to say.

  “He said that because he’s my daddy. He didn’t want them to kill me.”

  “But do you think it’s right to kill in revenge?”

  “It’s what my daddy said.”

  “But you, what do you think?”

  Geraldine sighed. She pressed closer to me, sighed again. There was a small silence, cluttered with the noise of the others playing.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t used to think it was right. I used to think like Shamie did—you know—that they shouldn’t keep doing all those things, all that hurting.” A pause. It grew lengthy. “Then Mammy and Matthew got killed.”

  “Did that change your mind?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It just made it seem more wrong.”

  I watched Shamie running and laughing.

  “Then my daddy died.”

  “And that changed your mind?”

  She nodded. “Revenge is what my daddy wanted. It’s what you do when you’re a grown-up. You see, you understand everything then. It’s what you do. And I’m the oldest now, so I must do it.”

  Shemona’s birthday was at the end of March. In other years, I’d always made a big fuss of the children’s birthdays and usually my own as well, just to give us the excuse for celebration. Our special classes were often excluded from participating in the activities that regular classes enjoyed, such as fun fairs, school plays, music programs and the like, and this went a ways towards assuaging the deficit. More importantly, I wanted to celebrate the sheer existence of my children, to give them tangible evidence of their worth. However, with this group, the calendar worked against us. Shamie and Geraldine had early autumn birthdays, which had already passed by the time they joined the class. Mariana’s birthday was Christmas Eve. Leslie’s was on Easter Sunday. Ladbrooke’s was in late July. That left only Shemona and me with birthdays falling on school days, and since mine was in May, Shemona had the honor of having the first birthday we encountered.

  Because of the unusual number of out-of-school birthdays, I was uncertain whether or not to make a big event of Shemona’s. On one hand, it didn’t seem fair to the others if we had a special party just for her. I was also concerned that Shemona might not want all that attention focused so conspicuously on herself. She was a self-conscious child, and I would have been sorry if something meant to please her had been overshadowed by uncomfortable embarrassment. On the other hand, it seemed a nice way to make her feel special, as being the smallest, quietest member of the group, she was often overlooked or excluded from the other children’s activities. Plus, we needed some merry-making. In the peculiar constraints of being one of only two classes in the administration building, not only had we no chance to participate in the assemblies, plays and programs that provided variety in a normal school, we couldn’t even watch them. Thus there had been no break in routine since the Nativity play.

  I broached the subject on Monday. Shemona’s birthday was on the following Friday. The children were thrilled with the idea of a party, any kind of party, and assured me they wouldn’t mind if Shemona was guest of honor. Shemona, however, as I had feared, seemed overwhelmed by the sudden attention. She ducked her head when I first mentioned her birthday. As the conversation progressed, she brought an arm up to hide her face, looking very much like a small bird, trying to tuck its head under its wing.

  Watching her, I decided to ease off the idea of making it a birthday party and concentrate more on its being a bit of a celebration for us all. Shemona remained withdrawn throughout the entire discussion, and I couldn’t see the point of embarrassing her further. So we talked instead of food and games, and the other things we had to celebrate. The children left morning discussion in high spirits, and the prospect of the upcoming party remained a favorite topic of conversation for the remainder of the week.

  That afternoon, when Lad and I were leaving the teachers’ lounge after our recess break, we found Shemona outside the door. There were still three or four minutes left before the children were due back inside, so it came as a surprise to find her there, especially as she was not supposed to be in the building unsupervised.

  “Hey,” I said, when I saw her, “what are you doing here?”

  She looked up, a rather bewildered expression on her face. She still didn’t talk easily to me. Since she was standing outside the teachers’ lounge, I could only assume she was waiting for us; however, now that she had found us, she seemed rather unsure what to do. I nudged Lad.

  Ladbrooke knelt down to Shemona’s level. “Did you want something from us, Shemona?”

  Shemona shook her head.

  “You aren’t really supposed to be here, you know. It’s recess time,” Lad said. Then she rose and put her hand behind Shemona’s head. “Well, come on, let’s go back upstairs to the room.”

  Whatever it was Shemona wanted, we didn’t find out then. She walked back to the classroom with us but never said a word.

  It wasn’t until the following afternoon, when I again found her lurking, this time after school. Ladbrooke was still down on the playground, seeing the children to their rides, and I’d stayed upstairs to put things away. I was in among the stacks in the library where I stored work for the students. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement. I turned my head to see what it was and saw nothing. Back again to what I was doing, I started taking down the papers from the high shelf. Movement again. And once more I paused and looked. And once more, nothing. This time I feigned involvement.

  Shemona appeared at the end of the aisle. Lunch box in hand, coat disheveled, knees scabbed, socks fallen, hair straggly, stringy and the washed-out color of wax beans, she regarded me. She never looked any different, no matter how new her clothes were or how clean Mrs. Lonrho had scrubbed her before she came to school. She persisted in being one of the grubbiest-looking children I had ever had, sort of a leprechaun version of Peanuts’ Pigpen. But there was something poignant about it.

  “Did you want something?” I asked.

  She came down the aisle until she was standing very near to me. She looked up, her head cocked slightly to the side, like a sparrow’s.

  We regarded one another silently.

  “Will there be a birthday cake for me, Miss?” she asked at last.

  “If you want one.”

  “I want a birthday party, Miss.”

  I smiled. Coming down to her level, I touched her arm. “Did you think it wasn’t going to be for you, our party? It is. It’s your birthday, isn’t it?”

  “With a birthday cake?”

  “Yes, with a birthday cake.”

  “With candles on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Six candles?”

  “Yes, with six candles.”

  “Will you sing ‘Happy Birthday, dear Shemona’ to me?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded then, and a very small smile came to her face. “Okay, Miss,” she said and turned, went back down the aisle and disappeared out the classroom door.

  I felt obliged then to have a real, proper birthday party. Over the lunch hour on Friday, I hung streamers and balloons. It was hard to do with the high ceilings and the metal shelving, but by the time the forty-five minute period had passed, I’d transformed the room into something that, if not designer perfect, was at least festive.

  Ladbrooke was providing the cake. I’d hoped she would stay at lunchtime and give me the benefit of her height, putting up the decorations, which would have m
ade the job a lot easier, but she insisted on going home because she hadn’t wanted to bring the cake in the morning.

  She returned about fifteen minutes before the afternoon session resumed. Setting down the cardboard box she was carrying, Ladbrooke removed the cake. I came over from where I’d been arranging paper cups and plates.

  This was no ordinary cake. Indeed, it was quite unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was more-or-less round, covered with bumpy yellow icing and had a very definite angle to it—sort of a cake version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Happy Birthday Shemona was spelled out across the top with M&M’s.

  Ladbrooke regarded it after setting it out on the table. “I made it myself,” she said, her voice uncertain.

  This was nothing you would mistake for a bakery cake, but I didn’t say that.

  Ladbrooke continued to study it. She rotated the plate so that the angle of the top layer was not quite so apparent. “I should have bought it.” She rotated the plate again. “This looks terrible.”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “It isn’t, Torey. It looks like a yellow cow pat.”

  Indeed, it did rather.

  “I’m sure it tastes just fine. That’s all that matters.”

  “Do you think she’ll mind?” Ladbrooke looked over at me. “I could go out at recess and buy something better.”

  “No. Shemona’s not going to mind. She won’t even notice. All she’ll see is that you’ve made a birthday cake for her, and it has six candles on it. That’s all that matters.”

  And it was all that mattered. Cake on the table, juice in the cups. Care Bear plates and napkins, all the trappings were there. We lit the candles and sang “Happy Birthday” to Shemona with loving gusto. She hid her face with her hands and peeked out through her fingers. And she loved every minute of it.

  Afterward, we played games, sang songs, dressed each other up with clothes from the dressing-up box, toasted one another and ourselves with orange juice. No one seemed to mind at all that this party was for Shemona and that no one else would have the chance that year to be the center of attention.