White Petals

by Maria Grace

  I walked from the taxi to the smoking area where Bett was kicking a football at the wall while Karra smoked a cigarette.

  I had travelled the last half of the journey with the window open; hanging my head out of it like a Jack Russell, trying to get some air on my face to cool me down. But the red rash still spread across my forehead and my nose was still twice its average size. Why is crying so unflattering? I remembered watching one of Grandma Coalman’s films when I was little, and there was a woman on it crying. She had this elegant, little white handkerchief, and she dabbed her eyes with it, real feminine-like. She was just perfect. Like a fallen flower. And I remember thinking that when I was older, that’s how I would look when I cried.

  Fat chance. When I cried now, I looked like a tomato-faced reject, with black streaks running down my blotchy face. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  Poor Bett just stood there in her pink tracksuit, clutching her football with tears in her eyes. I’d learned, since I’d settled into the children’s home, that Bett had the gentlest of hearts. She wasn’t one to mess with, mind. Even the boys were scared of her. But she was as sensitive as she was solid.

  ‘I’m OK, Bett.’ I tried to smile to reassure her. ‘Just a weird first day back at school, that’s all.’

  Bett nodded her head, agreeing with me, even though she wasn’t really sure what I meant.

  Karra flicked her cigarette across the garden with her middle finger and thumb. ‘What happened?’ she asked, blowing the last bit of smoke from her mouth.

  ‘It was just really intrusive,’ I replied.

  ‘Speak English.’ Karra frowned.

  ‘The rumours were rampant around the place.’ I cringed. ‘They even thought that my mother had petrol-bombed the street!’

  Karra giggled.

  ‘IT’S NOT FUNNY, KARRA!’ I shouted at her, and she burst out laughing.

  ‘I’M SORRY!’ she shouted back. ‘But petrol bombs, Em… That’s class! I mean, if you’re going to make up a rumour, you may as well be inventive with it!’

  Bett started chuckling, her sea-lion laugh echoing under the smoking shelter as she grinned at me. That sent Karra off again. She was laughing so much now that she was tuttying down on the floor, squatting, holding her belly and shouting, ‘I’m gonna piss myself! I’m gonna piss myself!’

  She ran to the toilet, because she really had started to wet herself a little bit and was worried that you could see it through her jeans. Bett and I followed her inside, ready for tea.

  ‘Cabbage! Oh, I hate cabbage!’ Tyler slumped into his chair at the dinner table.

  ‘It’s good for you, Tyler,’ said Gladys Friday. She put a big tray of veg in the middle of the table.

  ‘Yeah, Tyler!’ Quinn shouted across the tables to him. ‘It’s good for you! It helps you to see in the dark.’

  ‘That’s carrots, you pleb.’ Karra rolled her eyes at Quinn, and scooped some potatoes onto her plate.

  ‘Yeah, Quinn!’ Tyler shouted from his table. ‘Even I know that! And I’m only seven. Cabbage makes you grow big and strong, carrots make you see in the dark, and swede makes you brainy.’

  ‘Who told you swede makes you brainy?’ asked Quinn.

  ‘It’s obvious, innit?’ Tyler tapped his head. ‘Swede is good for your swede!’

  ‘I eat lots of swede and I’m brainy,’ said Bett, scooping a load of it onto her plate.

  ‘Who asked you?’ Quinn scowled at Bett.

  ‘SHUT UP, QUINN DAVIES!’ Bett shouted from the middle table.

  ‘YOU SHUT UP, BETTY MORRIS!’ Quinn bellowed back.

  Karra held up her fork – which had a potato stuck to the top of it – and glared at the pair of them. ‘I’m not being funny, girls… But if you two don’t give it a rest, I’m going to shove this potato so far up your bum, there’ll be fries coming out of your mouth! I mean it. I’ve had enough of you. It’s cooking my swede!’

  Tyler chuckled again at the metaphor as he put some orange swede into his mouth.

  The girls started talking about some boy that Karra had met. His name was Lucas. He was from the next town over, but bothered around here because the parks were better.

  ‘Is he a good snogger?’ Little Charlie leaned across the table to Karra.

  ‘Stonking.’ Karra grinned, happy that she was the only one getting snogged at all.

  ‘The chip-shop girls reckon he’s been messing around with that Sticky Vicky,’ said Quinn. ‘They said that she’s met his mother and everything. Just be careful, Karra. Don’t let him mug you off.’

  ‘He has not been messing around with Sticky Vicky,’ Karra argued. ‘He told me last night. He got with her one time, that’s all. And he was hammered, so it don’t count. But now she won’t leave him alone – she’s a stalker. She only met his mother because she turned up at his house without him knowing.’

  ‘Nooo!’ The girls echoed together.

  ‘Yeah!’ Karra nodded dramatically and ate some Yorkshire pudding. ‘He’s deleted her from his friends list and blocked her from his followers, but she’s even got her mates to add him so she can keep an eye on what he’s up to!’

  ‘I reckon most girls do that.’ Quinn picked at some carrots. ‘They only look at their boyfriends’ profiles so they can look for pictures of their ex-girlfriends and see if they’re prettier than them.’

  ‘Yeah, but he’s not even her boyfriend, though.’ Karra waved her fork around. ‘So she’s got no right!’

  Beano looked across the tables at Karra, straining to hear what was going on. ‘What are you girls chatting about?’ he called out.

  Quinn swallowed her food and spoke. ‘We were just talking about Karra’s new boyfriend.’

  Karra looked embarrassed.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Beano tried to look like he didn’t care.

  Quinn and Little Charlie both spoke at the same time, excited at the opportunity for more gossip.

  ‘Lucas. You might know him – he used to bother with Peter-One-Ball,’ Little Charlie shouted down to the bottom table.

  ‘But now he bothers with the gyppos up the caravan site,’ Quinn joined in.

  Bett looked over from her table. ‘It’s against the law to say “gyppos”. They’re called Travellers. Have some respect, Quinn Davies!’

  ‘Shut up, Betty Morris.’ Quinn looked back to Beano.

  Beano leaned back in his chair, nonchalantly. ‘I know Lucas,’ he said. ‘He’s been boffing Sticky Vicky for the past month. Peter-One-Ball was talking about it the other day.’

  ‘He is not boffing Sticky Vicky!’ Karra shouted at him.

  ‘That’s not what I heard.’ Beano looked smug. ‘The chip-shop girls reckon she’s met his mother.’

  Quinn jumped up triumphantly. ‘TOLD YOU!’ She looked at Karra like she’d just beaten her in a competition.

  ‘The chip-shop girls are liars!’ Karra stabbed her meat and started cutting it aggressively with her knife and fork. ‘She met his mother because she’s a psycho who turned up at his house uninvited. If he’s been going out with her, then why has he blocked her from all of his profiles and deleted her from his Facebook friends?’

  ‘Good point.’ Beano nodded. ‘What about you? Is he in a relationship with you on Facebook?’

  ‘Not yet, but we’ve only just started seeing each other,’ replied Karra.

  ‘Well, I’m not being funny or anything,’ said Beano, ‘but if it’s not on Facebook, then it’s not a real relationship. Everyone knows that.’

  Karra sulked as she rammed a piece of broccoli into her mouth and gave Beano stinkers across the tables.

  Little Charlie looked thoughtful. ‘I wonder why they call him Peter-One-Ball,’ she said.

  Beano chuckled. ‘He broke into an old man’s garden a few years ago, and let’s just say that the owner had a very good guard dog!’

  Little Charlie’s mouth fell open when she realised what Beano meant.

  ‘That’s karma for you!’ Beano laughed out loud from his ta
ble. ‘It’ll teach him to have a bit more respect for his elders in the future!’

  The girls finished their food and left the table to go and watch telly. I stayed to eat the last of my vegetables.

  The middle table played ‘I-spy.’ Tyler and Bett made the perfect team. Because Tyler was so young, anything he spied was usually easy for Bett to guess. And Bett took everything in the world literally, so anything she spied would be something that she had directly looked at. Tyler would only have to follow her eyes to guess the answer. She would look straight at the cabbage, and say, ‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with C.’

  It was a win-win situation, really.

  On the bottom table, Beano was telling Big Jim that a girl at his work placement had been giving him the glad-eye for the past couple of weeks, and he was wondering whether to ask her out for a McDonald’s or not. Play hard to get, Big Jim told him. You don’t go buying a Big Mac for just anyone.

  I smiled at the bizarre conversations going on around me. I was glad that after a difficult first day at school, I could come back to an environment where nobody cared whether or not my mother had petrol-bombed the street. And I realised that even if school was a little stressful, I could come here to a place of refuge. The children’s home was fast becoming more of a home to me than my actual home.

  I joined the others at the sofa. It was Tyler’s turn to pick, and everyone moaned as they sat watching cartoons. I never admitted it, but I quite liked cartoons. Me and Freya would sit for hours watching them. Even as I got older and wanted to watch my own programmes, we usually ended up watching hers. Mum said it was the only way to keep her quiet. She said that when you have kids, you spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk. And then you spend the rest of their life telling them to shut up and sit down. She said that cartoons were the tiny bit of respite in between. I just thought that they were cool.

  I still hadn’t visited Mum. Freya and I weren’t allowed to go until the doctors thought she was ready to see us. That made me laugh – until she was ready to see us. The cheek of it. Mel said that she would let me know when it was OK. It upset me a bit when I thought about her stuck in hospital, with nobody to talk to. But I knew that she needed to get well again. And she needed to stay well this time.

  I didn’t like to think of it because if I did, I had to think about what would happen when she got out. I knew in my heart that I’d had enough. I didn’t want to go back now. But if I didn’t go home, she would be there by herself, unless Grandma Coalman moved in with her. But poor Grandma Coalman was in her seventies; how was she supposed to take care of a mental patient like Mum? She didn’t need that at her age. She needed peace and quiet, an easy life. It’s what we all needed.

  I could hear a familiar song playing in the background. I looked up, and realised that we were watching the same cartoon as I usually watched at home with Freya and Mum. I wondered if there was any chance they might be watching it at the same time as me. I hoped that, even though we were in different buildings, in different areas, maybe there was some kind of connection between us, sizzling between the energy waves of the televisions we were watching.

  And like in the cartoons, maybe one day there would be a happy ending.

  FIFTEEN

  Me, Megan and Ollie were sitting on the steps round the back of C-block, enjoying what was left of lunchtime.

  We had a maths test after dinner, so we were trying to keep our minds off it by playing the Virgin-Waddle game.

  ‘I’m not doing it!’ I protested.

  ‘Oh, come on, Em!’ Megan whined. ‘I just did it, so now you have to do it. Otherwise it’s not fair!’

  The Virgin-Waddle game is the most embarrassing game ever invented. You have to walk up and down in front of everyone, and they can tell by the way you walk – the way your bum wiggles – whether you’re a virgin or not.

  Megan did the walk and apparently she definitely wasn’t a virgin. This game was invented by Year Elevens, so it must be true. I was a bit annoyed, because Megan hadn’t even told me that she had lost her virginity, and I was supposed to be her best friend. She was a bit of a sly-off like that sometimes.

  ‘She’s a chicken!’ Ollie laughed. ‘Take-the-shame, Em! Take-the-shame!’

  ‘Shut up, Ollie!’ I snapped, and got up from the steps. I did a red-faced walk down the path, wiggling my bum in a way which I hoped resembled that of a sophisticated woman.

  The vote was unanimous: inconclusive. They just couldn’t tell. And I, of course, was keeping my mouth firmly shut because I didn’t want to be known as a fridge.

  The bell went and maths class came. We all spread ourselves out around the classroom – we had to sit at arm’s length away from everyone, so we couldn’t cheat. Megan moved closer to me until the teacher came back.

  ‘Have you really done it?’ she asked.

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ she replied. ‘Have you done IT?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I shrugged my shoulders. It’s important to stay cool and aloof in these situations.

  ‘Well, if you have, why didn’t you tell me about it?’ She seemed hurt. ‘You’re a bit of a sly-off like that sometimes, Em.’

  ‘Me?’ I was really offended. ‘You’re the sly-off, Megan! Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I haven’t done anything yet, that’s why!’ She looked annoyed.

  ‘Well, neither have I!’

  ‘So you’re still a virgin?’ she whispered, checking that nobody could hear.

  ‘Yes, of course I am!’ I whispered back.

  ‘But…’ She was confused. ‘But your bum waddled, Em.’

  ‘So did yours,’ I replied.

  ‘That means … the game doesn’t work,’ said Megan.

  We stared at each other, taking in this new revelation.

  The Year Elevens had lied.

  ‘Alright, SMELLMELINE!’ Stacey Lock shouted across the class to me. She sat a couple of seats down from Ollie. The Clones followed and took their seats at her side.

  ‘Just ignore her,’ said Megan.

  I turned away, glad to see that the teacher had come back.

  Stacey was laughing, pleased with her little victory because I hadn’t answered her back. She now called me Smellmeline each time she saw me. It really annoyed me because I knew how clean I was, but I worried that everyone else might think I was dirty.

  I did my maths test. I was furiously working out mathematical equations, frustrated with myself for not being quicker, smarter and braver. Have you ever heard of ‘The Wit of The Staircase’? There’s a French saying for it. I think you say it as ‘esprit de l’escalier’. It’s the perfect witty response that you think of after the conversation or argument has ended. Well, that’s basically the story of my life. I have an argument with someone, and afterwards I spend all my time thinking about what I should have said. Just once, I wish I could kick someone’s ass with my verbal karate and know exactly the right thing to say at exactly the right time to say it. But when I try this in real life, I’m rubbish. I just end up making a complete tit of myself.

  So I spent the whole maths test scribbling answers and going over all the things in my head that would have sounded awesome if I had said them back to Stacey Lock. She was really starting to wind me up.

  When I got home, Karra was outside, pacing up and down.

  Big Jim was standing under the smoking shelter.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked, looking at her anxious face.

  ‘Oh! Don’t ASK!’ Big Jim shouted and threw his hands in the air. ‘The boyfriend hasn’t phoned her for two days, and she’s having a panic attack over it!’

  Karra was still seeing Lucas. So far, he had turned out to be a right tool. Quinn and Little Charlie reckoned that everyone knew he was going with Sticky Vicky behind Karra’s back, but Karra wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘Shut your face, Jim!’ Karra was clearly aggravated. ‘I just want a missed call, tha
t’s all. Just one missed call!’

  ‘Why do you want a missed call?’ I asked.

  She gave me an irritated look.

  Jim’s voice boomed from under the shelter as he laughed at her again. She threw her leg out to kick him as he lit up a cigarette for himself.

  ‘After you, Jim?’ She nodded towards the cigarette.

  ‘You know I can’t give you any smokes, Karra. It’s against the law. You’re under age – you shouldn’t be smoking in the first place.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Jim! You always give me smokes!’ she snapped at him, and he hushed her manically, looking around to make sure nobody had heard, in case he got into trouble with Auntie Sue.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Why would you want a missed call? Why don’t you want a real call?’

  ‘Because then I’d have to answer it,’ she replied.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to answer it, Em. I just want to know that he’s phoned, that’s all. I like getting a missed call from a boy. It makes me feel in control.’

  Big Jim laughed out loud. ‘You kids!’ He ruffled Karra’s hair. ‘You make my day! Honestly, you do! The nonsense you come out with! It’s buuuriful to see, it really is.’

  He nodded towards Karra as he threw half his cigarette on the bench. Looking around to make sure nobody saw, she picked it up.

  He walked off and then turned back around, as if he’d remembered something. ‘Emmeline, love!’

  I looked over to him.

  ‘Your social worker phoned earlier,’ he said. ‘Mel, is it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied.

  ‘She rang just before you got home. She wanted me to let you know that your mother is ready for visitors.’

  My throat went dry. ‘My mum?’ I asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘You mean your mam.’ Karra scowled at me.

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  Big Jim went back inside the building.

  ‘No, Em…’ Karra spoke as if she was talking to a child. ‘Now, come on. We’ve been through this, haven’t we? English people say “Mum” and Welsh people say…’ She waited for me to finish the sentence.