by Jean Ure
Not that I was; not any more. People like me don’t get to be doctors. Still, it didn’t stop me being interested, and I’d been looking forward all afternoon to drawing my picture of the human digestive tract, which was what Mrs Winslow had set us. I sat down at the kitchen table with my felt-tip pens and began carefully to copy out the picture from the sheet she’d given us.
First there was the stomach, looking like a set of bagpipes. I did the stomach in yellow, cos I knew it was full of acid and yellow seemed like the right colour. Then a wiggly bit, which was the duodenum, which became the jejunum, which became the ileum, which all together made up the small intestine. I did those in green, as I thought that all the food that had been churned up by the acid might probably turn a bit greenish as it slurped on its way.
Next there came the large intestine, looping up one side and down the other, with a band across the middle. I made the large intestine big and bulgy, and I used a brown felt-tip pen for filling it in.
By now, my drawing was looking quite colourful; I just needed to say what everything was. I found a spider-tip pen and began to draw arrows and print duodenum and jejunum in tiny neat letters, being sure to check that I had the spelling right.
I’d just drawn an arrow pointing to the up bit of the large intestine and was about to write ascending colon when the kitchen door crashed open and Sammy burst through, shrieking, followed by Lisa and Kez. You’ll never guess what! He went slamming straight into me, so that my pen scraped across the page, tearing up the paper and leaving a great furrow right through the middle of my beautiful drawing that I’d taken such care over. Oh, I was so angry! I bellowed at him.
“You stupid blithering idiot! Look what you’ve done!”
Sammy stopped and put his thumb in his mouth. “Look!” I snatched up the page and thrust it in his face. “See that? See what you’ve done? You’ve gone and ruined it! You stupid, thoughtless —”
“What’s the matter?” said Mum, appearing at the door. Sammy at once ran to her, sobbing. “What have you done to him?”
I said, “It’s not what I’ve done, it’s what he’s done!”
“She yelled at him,” said Lisa.
“Poor little mite! You’ve scared the life out of him.”
“But he’s ruined it! He’s ruined my homework!” I was almost sobbing myself. My lovely intestines! I’d worked so hard at them. “It’s taken me ages!”
“I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose,” said Mum.
“They shouldn’t be allowed out here when I’m doing my homework! Why can’t they stay in the other room and watch television?”
“Don’t want to watch television!” screeched Lisa.
“We’ve already watched it,” said Kez.
Mum was peering over my shoulder at my poor mangled drawing. “Oh, dear! What a shame. Can’t you do it again?”
“No! I haven’t got time, I’ve still got my French to do.”
“Why not use that one?” Mum nodded at the sheet Mrs Winslow had given us. “Why not just cut it out and stick in on the page, and then colour it?”
“Cos we’re supposed to copy it!”
“That’s a bit daft,” said Mum. “That’s a proper drawing, that is. Better than anything you could do. What’s the point wasting your time trying to copy it?”
I said, “Why ask me?” And I crumpled up my spoilt drawing and hurled it across the room.
I knew that Mum was right, the drawing on the printed sheet was oceans better than the one I’d done, even with all my lovely bright colours and my little arrows. How should I know why Mrs Winslow wanted us to copy it? All I knew was that I’d enjoyed doing it and I’d been really pleased with the result and secretly hoping that perhaps I might get an A, or even an A+, and now it was totally ruined and I just felt sick.
“I’ll take him away,” said Mum. “Come on, Sammy! You come with your mum. Leave Ruth to get on with her studies.”
I said, “It doesn’t matter now, I’ve given up. I’m not going to bother any more.”
“Well, I must say,” said Mum, “I’ve never really seen why they have to give you all this extra work. You’re at school seven hours a day. Isn’t that enough?”
Mum went off, taking Sammy and the Terrible Two with her. I pulled my French book out of my bag and looked at it and put it back again. I’d given up! I wasn’t bothering any more. Other people didn’t bother; why should I? Nobody ever got into trouble. Now and again the teachers would mutter about “staying after school”, but nothing ever came of it. I thought probably they preferred it if they didn’t have too much homework to mark. I wasn’t ever going to bother with homework again! What was the point, if I was just going to end up in Tesco’s? I bet they’d never asked Mum if she’d got any GCSEs, and she was allowed to work on the checkout. I could do that! No problem. In any case, as Brett Thomas had said, only geeks did homework. I was through with being a geek!
Next day I told Karina that I wasn’t bothering with homework any more. Karina said that she was glad. She said it was a great relief.
“It’s not good if you keep getting things read out and teachers saying all the time how you’ve written loads more than anyone else and how you’re just so brilliant and wonderful and —”
“No one’s ever said I’m brilliant and wonderful!”
“No, but they keep going on about you…listen to what Ruth’s written, look what Ruth’s done. It’s not good,” said Karina. “It just puts everyone’s back up.”
“Well, look at this,” I said, and I showed her what I’d written for Mr Kirk. Karina read it and giggled.
“Hey!” She turned and grabbed at someone. It was a girl called Dulcie Tucker who was in Millie’s gang. “Listen to what Ruth’s written for Mr Kirk…My family is so boring that I can’t think of anything to say about them!”
“Yeah. Right on,” said Dulcie, like she couldn’t have cared less.
I snatched the page back from Karina. “You don’t have to go telling everyone,” I said.
“Why not? It’s funny! I hope he reads it out.”
“So anyway, what about you?” I said. “Are you still going to do homework?”
Karina pulled a face. “I’ve got to. My dad’d bash me if I didn’t.”
“How would he know?” The teachers never sent notes home, or asked to speak to your parents. Not that I’d ever heard.
“He checks on me,” said Karina. “He says he pays all these huge amounts of tax so that I can get an education and he’s going to make sure that I get one.”
“Some hope at this school,” I muttered.
“Yeah, well, I don’t want one anyhow,” said Karina. “Soon as I can, I’m getting out.”
I asked her what she was going to do, but she said she didn’t know.
“Don’t know, don’t care. Just so long as I can leave this dump.”
I wondered what I’d do if my dad were like Karina’s. Well, or my mum, since my dad doesn’t pay any tax. He’s on disability allowance. Mum pays! She’s always going on about it. “All this money they take off me.” Didn’t she realise it was for me to get an education?
“Besides,” said Karina, “it doesn’t matter about me, cos I don’t get up people’s noses like you do.”
“I don’t mean to,” I said.
“I know you don’t mean to, but that’s how it comes across. Always getting things right and knowing all the answers and sticking your hand up and doing your homework and – just everything!”
Humbly, I said, “I’ll try and stop.”
“Well, it’d be good,” said Karina. “Cos then people wouldn’t hate you quite so much and we might be able to join Amie Phillips and her lot. I could probably join them right now, if I wanted, but I wouldn’t do it without you. It’d be nicer if we were together, wouldn’t it?”
I said that it would, but really and truly I wasn’t sure that I wanted to join Amie Phillips’ lot. They were all remnants: all the leftovers that no one else wanted.
I didn’t want t
o be a remnant! At the beginning of term I might have been desperate enough, but now there was Shay, as well as Karina, and I didn’t feel quite so alone. I wasn’t sure whether I could actually call Shay my friend, but she always chose to sit next to me, and sometimes she hung out with us in the playground (much to Karina’s disgust). I don’t know if she was jealous, or what, but she really didn’t like Shay.
She used to hiss at me, like an angry snake. “Look at her! She’s coming over – she’s going to tag on to us. Get rid of her! Tell her to go away, we don’t want her!”
I might have said, “Tell her yourself,” but I didn’t, just in case she took me up on it. I didn’t want Shay to go away, I liked having her around – it made me feel safe and protected. I knew that all the time Shay was there, nobody would pick on me. Maybe after a bit, if I stopped showing off and sticking my hand up and being too much of a smart mouth, school might almost become bearable. Well, that’s what I liked to think.
That weekend I helped Mum round the flat and played with Sammy and watched some television and didn’t do any homework at all. Mum never said anything, like, “Don’t you have any homework to do?” She never asked me about school; she was too busy working and looking after Dad. Dad sometimes asked me. He’d say, “How’s school, then?” but I don’t think he really wanted me to tell him. I usually just said, “’s OK,” and left it at that.
I never saw Karina out of school. I could have done, cos she didn’t live all that far away, but we weren’t real proper friends. Not like me and Millie had been, or me and Mariam. I bumped into Mariam that weekend, when I went up the corner shop to get Dad’s paper. We almost never spoke at school, but if we met outside we’d stop and chat. Mariam told me that her mum and dad were sending her away to live with her auntie. I said, “Oh, that’s awful! Why are they doing that?” I mean, I love my aunties, all three of them, but I couldn’t bear not to be with my mum and dad. I’d even miss Sammy and the Terrible Two!
I was all ready to sympathise, when Mariam said she was glad she was going to live with her auntie because it meant she wouldn’t have to go to Parkfield any more. She said she’d be going to a much nicer school where there weren’t any gangs and she wouldn’t be bullied. I hadn’t realised that she’d been bullied. I told her about Brett Thomas chucking my lunch across the playground, and the two Js calling me names, and she said that she hadn’t realised that, either.
“If we’d all stuck together,” I said, “it would’ve been all right.”
Mariam told me that she’d only joined a gang because they’d threatened her.
“They said if I didn’t join them I’d be one of the enemy…they said bad things would happen to me.”
She promised that she’d call round when she came home for the half-term break, and we wished each other good luck. I went on my way feeling really depressed, even though I was happy for Mariam that she was going to a nicer school. She was such a sweet, gentle person.
Not like me, always muttering cross things and frightening my poor little brother and yelling at my sisters. I’d never heard Mariam yell, and I really hated the thought of her being bullied all this time and me knowing nothing about it. I did envy her, though, getting away from Krapfilled High.
On Monday, we had some of our homework back from the week before. I don’t think Mr Abrahams even noticed that I hadn’t done my French, but Mrs Winslow seemed a bit upset about not having any biology from me. She said, “I’m surprised at you. Ruth! What happened?” I mumbled something about my brother going and ruining my picture of the intestines and she said that was a pity but she really would like me to try and do it.
“It seems such a shame when your work is so good!”
Karina jabbed me with her elbow and pulled down the corners of her mouth. She herself had stuck the printed drawing into her biology book, like Mum had suggested I should do.
At the bottom Mrs Winslow had written, “This is not what I asked for.” But she didn’t suggest that Karina should do it again.
Next day, Mr Kirk handed back our essays on “My Family”. I waited with bated breath to hear whether he’d read out what I’d written. I wanted him to read it out, to show people that I wasn’t being a goody-goody any more. But he didn’t! He didn’t even comment. Not out loud. He commented on all the other essays that people had written. (Some people. A few people. There were only about ten.)
“Karina, I do think it would be rather nice if you were to consult a dictionary occasionally. All this fancy spelling makes it rather difficult to interpret. Or were you attempting a foreign language?”
“English,” said Karina. (She has no sense of humour.)
“Really? Well, you had me fooled!” said Mr Kirk. “Shayanne…Your mother is a vampire and your father is the Invisible Man. Yes! Well. What can one say?” He tossed a wodge of pages on to Shay’s desk. I stared at them in amazement. Shay’s writing was very big and black and angry-looking. It was so big she hardly got more than about six words on a page. “Next time, perhaps, you might try using up a few less trees.”
Shay said, “It all comes from sustainable sources.”
“That may be, but the school still has to pay for the paper, so just concentrate on being a bit more economical. Ruth.” He held out my one page; I took it. “This is disappointing. Please don’t do it again.”
That was all he said. I felt my cheeks burn just as fiercely as they had last week when he’d read out about the moon being a banana and the flocks of sheep. I felt so ashamed! Karina instantly slewed round in her desk and hissed, “Did you see what she wrote? My family is so boring I can’t think of anything to write about them!”
She didn’t impress anyone; the two Js just stared, stonily. And Shay was frowning. She was looking really ferocious. What was she so angry about? Who was she so angry with? I thought at first it was with Mr Kirk, because of what he’d said about using up less trees, but Shay never cared a fig what anyone said, least of all teachers. It was me! I was the one she was angry with! She was glaring at me like daggers might suddenly come shooting out of her eyes and make straight for me.
I said, “W-what’s the matter?”
“You,” said Shay. “You’re what’s the matter!”
I said, “W-why? What have I done?”
“You know what you’ve done!”
I said, “What, what?”
Shay said that we’d “talk later”. She said, “You’ve gotta get a hold of yourself…you can’t carry on like this.”
I just hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about.
As soon as we got into the playground at break, Shay grabbed hold of me.
“OK! Time to talk.”
“Bout what?” said Karina.
“Nothing to do with you! This is between me an’ Ruth.”
Karina tossed her head. “So what are you waiting for? Talk!”
“Excuse me,” said Shay, “it happens to be private.”
“Why?” I could see that Karina was working herself up into a fit of jealousy. I could sort of understand it. Shay was a bit…well! In your face, I suppose. “What’s private about it?”
“None of your business,” said Shay.
Karina stuck out her lower lip.
She could be really stubborn! Also, she’s quite thick-skinned, like she was obviously determined to stay even though Shay had made it as plain as could be that she wasn’t wanted. I’d rush off immediately if I thought I wasn’t wanted; I’d be too ashamed to hang around. But Karina wouldn’t budge for anyone.
“It’s rude to have secrets,” she said.
“Yeah? Well, it’s rude to pry into other people’s business. Just go away!”
“Won’t!”
“You’d better,” said Shay.
Karina gave a little swagger. “Or what?”
“You’ll regret it, is what!”
Karina said, “Huh!” but I could tell she was starting to have second thoughts. “I could go and join Amie’s lot,” she said, “if I wan
ted.”
“So join!” snapped Shay.
“I will, if you’re not careful.” Karina looked at me as she said it. “Is that what you want? You want me to go and join Amie’s lot?”
I was beginning to feel a bit desperate. I didn’t know what all this was about! “I’m sure we won’t be long,” I said. “Will we?” I turned, hopefully, to Shay, who still had hold of me. “We won’t be long?”
“Dunno,” said Shay. “Depends.” She glared at Karina. “If some people would just let us get on with it —”
“Oh, don’t worry! I’m going,” said Karina. “I wouldn’t stay here if you went on your bended knees and begged me!” And she flounced off across the playground to where Amie Phillips and her cronies were standing in a little huddle.
I wondered whether I’d mind if Karina joined them. I couldn’t decide. I was too busy worrying about Shay and what she wanted to talk to me about. Why was she being so fierce? And what was so private?
“Right!” She gave me a little push. “What was all that with your homework?”
Stupidly, I said, “W-what homework?”
“Yeah, well, this is it,” said Shay. “What homework? You never did any, did you?”
“I d-did my English,” I said.
“One line! Call that an essay?”
“I couldn’t think what else to write!”
Shay snorted. “Expect me to believe that? After all that you wrote last week? Moon’s a banana and all that stuff?”
I hung my head, ashamed. “That was just stupid.”
“It wasn’t stupid, you mongo! It was clever. That’s why he read it out.”
“But I don’t want him to read things out!”
“Why not?”
I mumbled, “Cos it makes people hate me.”
“What people?” Shay’s voice was full of scorn. “These people?” She waved a contemptuous hand at all the various groups and huddles in the playground. “Call that lot people? They’re just mindless blobs!”