“Why?” asks Catrina, who’s sitting next to Ez. “There’s loads of kids worse than you at math. Me, for instance.”
“My mother wouldn’t think so,” replies Ez.
“Oh,” says Catrina. There’s a little silence while she thinks this over. “Geez, Ez, I hope my mother never gets that interested in my school work.” And she gives a kind of shiver that makes her knees dig into my back.
I clear my throat and turn around to Esmerelda.
“You can come over to my place if you want, and I’ll help you,” I say. I raise my eyebrows at Asim, who is sitting next to me, to see if this is okay with him.
He smiles, and nods. He likes Esmerelda, too. He likes the way she can mimic anybody’s accent perfectly, even his, and make him laugh, and how she looks in her stretchy black gym pants.
Esmerelda groans again. “Thanks, but I have to report home first. I’m under surveillance, it feels like. Some nerdy cousin I’ve never met is coming over to coach me. He’s some kind of math genius. Still, maybe later, if I say I’m going to study with you guys…”
“Why don’t you come and study my firecrackers?” Badman calls to Esmerelda from across the aisle. “I got some new fireworks, too. There’s one called Great Flaming Balls and it shoots fire thirteen feet high. It’s the best!” He nudges Joe sitting next to him. “Come and see my balls, get it?” and the two of them laugh their heads off.
Ez just stares at him as if he’s speaking Transylvanian.
“But fireworks are illegal, aren’t they?” Asim says suddenly.
“Ooh, cry about it why don’t you,” sneers Badman.
Asim looks out the window.
Badman’s a bastard. He makes that remark about crying all the time. Especially to Asim, who does cry a lot. He can’t help it, after what he’s been through. Badman wouldn’t have lasted a minute, I think, in a real war.
Asim and I get off early, at the next stop, because we want to go to the mall. We wave to Ez and make our way to the front. When we’re standing on the sidewalk, waiting to cross the road, I see Badman doing this girly wave back as he moves into my seat.
It’s strange, I’m thinking, how Esmerelda acts around Badman. She couldn’t like him, and she’s so—well, queenly—the way she looks down her nose at him and narrows her eyes as if he’s made a bad smell. But she never really lets fly with him the way I’ve seen her do with other boys who annoy her. It’s as if she doesn’t want to totally demolish him. There’s something about him she likes, I’m thinking. Something she wants.
“Have you ever wondered why girls seem to like the bad boys?” I ask Asim.
He frowns at me. “That is not my experience. Are you talking about Badman? It could not be true! Ez likes the Badman?”
“Mmm.” I kick an empty can of Coke along as we walk. I’d really love one now, the sun is beating down like a hammer on my back.
“But he shows no respect to her. And he is cruel.”
“Yeah.”
Badman is a racist bastard. He makes fun of Asim’s accent—not in a well-meaning way, like Ez—but spitefully, watching to see him break. Kids say that once, he shoved a firecracker up a cat’s butt and lit it. Just to see what would happen. “Cry about it,” he said when Asim protested.
And once, Asim told me, Badman walked out of school, just like that, and rang a neighbor’s doorbell. The neighbor was this old guy, Mr. Wall. Everyone at school knew Mr. Wall had lost it—he was always out roaming the streets, looking for his wife who’d died twenty years ago. Kids often had to bring him back home. He was the type whose short-term memory had grown so bad he wore five shirts, one on top of the other. So when Badman rings the doorbell and Mr. Wall appears, Badman goes like this: Are you Mr. Wall?
“Yes, I think so,” says the old man.
“Are there any other walls here?”
“No,” says Mr. Wall, looking about in a confused way.
“Well, you’d better get out before the roof caves in! Ha ha!” And Badman shoots off, with poor old Mr. Wall running after him, into the traffic. Four cars piled up and the police came and everything.
Badman got suspended for that. And he already had a red card for blowing up the school garbage cans.
“But Ez has never been to the Badman house, has she?” Asim asked.
“No, I don’t think so. She told me about his dad going away to New Zealand, but never about his mom or what his house was like.”
“Yet she has been to your house,” Asim reminds me, smiling.
“Yeah,” and I smile back at him. “Three times. If she comes today it’ll be four. Hope so, then it’ll be an even number.”
We buy a Coke each and some doughnuts. The ones with jelly and cream inside are delicious. We finish them by the time we reach home. I have to say that a really good bakery only five minutes walk from home is one of the better things about living on Valerie Avenue. The best thing, though, is eating the cakes with a friend. See, Asim lives just two doors down from Esmerelda, at number sixty-four. How lucky is he? A double whammy of luck. I told him that if he was anyone else, I’d be too mad to even speak to him. As it is, I’m just glad.
I let Asim and myself in with my key. Mom isn’t home yet; she’s got lunch shift at the pub three days a week, and dinner on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Lunch shift means cleaning up afterward and driving Polly home—an older waitress whose bad knees, Mom says, can’t cope with public transport.
First thing, we go to the fridge and get another drink. We take apple juice and some rolls and cheese and lettuce outside and sit on the wicker chairs, looking out on the lawn. Mom bought the chairs at a sale last week, and we’ve covered them with some nice Indian cushions with little mirrors like cats’ eyes. Plus there’s an awning over the porch, which we’ve decorated with tie-dyed sarongs, so we have shade and atmosphere. Sometimes at night we eat out here, with candles and tall citronella flares stuck in the plant pots to keep away the mosquitoes. Mom says when she’s saved a bit we can have a party for Christmas.
This is what Asim and I have been doing for two weeks now, sitting out here, watching the grass grow. When we finish eating, we kick a soccer ball, trying for a goal between the mango tree and the maple. Every day we look at the mangoes, and ask ourselves if those right at the top might be ripe. Neither of us has ever climbed a mango tree. I’ve got a feeling that today we might find out what it’s like.
We go into the kitchen and find a big blue plastic bowl.
“You climb first,” says Asim. “I’ll hold the bowl.”
I step up into the hollow near the base of the trunk where it splits off into three thick branches. The wood is smooth and cool under my bare feet but harder than I’d imagined. Hard as steel. Grabbing a thin shoot I lever my other foot onto a higher branch. Up close, I can see wrinkles where the branches bend. There are scars on the smooth gray skin, battle wounds. A green light wraps all around me, the sun filtered through the forest of lime leaves brushing my face.
“Can you reach the mangoes?” Asim calls up.
“Almost.”
Where smaller branches have been cut off there are growths like eyes, ringed one circle inside another. I stare, mesmerized. It’s like seeing into the eye of the tree, into its soul. As I look, I get the feeling some wizened creature, something wise like an owl or an ancient reptile, is holding its breath, looking out at me.
“Jackson?”
“You should come up!” I swing my other leg over and sit for a moment in the heart of the tree. I’ve found a perfect seat. I could sit here forever; the silence is like a secret and I’m right inside it.
But when I stand, everything is different. My heart starts to hammer. I’m up too high. I can see over the neighbor’s fence (the one who sneezes), right into her window. She’s on the telephone, talking about the new driveway she’s going to put in. Her voice is harsh like a red line. I hold on tight to the branch above me. Two, three, four mangoes are hanging near, but higher than my hand can reach. I go fu
rther, pulling myself up onto the next branch. Now my heart feels like it’s going to jump out of my chest. My feet must be almost ten feet above the ground!
I’ve never been this high—well, only in the city, looking out from my window on Trenches Road, or an office block or something. But that’s so different, another world, with that firm floor under your feet fooling you into thinking it’s the ground. Here my toes can bend over the branch, into nothingness.
I fix my eyes on the mangoes and count them out loud, equal-spaced, in common 4/4 time. If you chant numbers long enough they turn into pure rhythm, a song. I lean against the solid branch at my back. It feels rough but strong as a man’s arm. It doesn’t sway with my weight. I like that. I know it can hold me and suddenly I feel incredibly safe with the hard living wood under my feet and the naturally occurring set of four swinging above me and the common time spreading through my body like warm milk.
The leaves rustle below me and I see Asim’s face poking up.
“Hi! Put your foot here and then swing over to that branch,” I say, pointing to my left. “You can sit there and we’ll be on the same level.” I finish the count at eight sets of four. Beautiful.
He’s still clutching the bowl in the crook of his arm. I reach out and take it from him and he makes for the branch. When he straightens himself he breathes out in a long swoop.
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
We look together out across the street. I can see the roofs of houses, all lined up neatly like dominoes. I can even see the bird crap and cracks in the tiles. Some have little attic windows with geraniums potted on the sills. The TV antennae stand loyally at attention on every roof. Suddenly I feel a pang of gladness to be here—I think of each family caring for their home, planting their gardens and painting their fences, and for some reason they seem like brave warriors, pushing ahead in the face of death and disaster. They’re all making the best of things in the suburbs, being positive, as Mom would say.
“I got one!” Asim cries and holds up a fat golden mango. He reaches for a second, twisting the stem with one hand and pulling at the fruit with the other. He looks like an expert already. I hold out the bowl to him and he pops them in. Now I’m going for it, too—there is one near my head, and three just a little further along the branch. We’re hauling them in like it’s a sea full of fish, and the bowl is starting to overflow.
Asim takes out his pocket knife and we sit in the crook of the tree with our legs dangling down into the air as he slits the knife into a mango and licks off the juice. Then he cuts a big piece off the side and throws it to me. The flesh is a stunning yellow and I suck at it, the juice running down my chin in a river. Nothing has ever tasted so good.
The lemony leaves surround us in a canopy, and the world is green and cool. So we pretend we are hunters of old and we’ve just caught our food—we show our war wounds: scratches from branches and a big scar I have on my arm from years ago when I broke it.
“The possums won’t like our hunting,” I say.
Asim grins. “There will be plenty left for them, I think.”
“Do you hear them thumping at night on your roof? They sound like a pack of soldiers doing their drill, up and down. And they pant so heavily. Mom told me it was the possums, but I didn’t believe her at first.”
“Sometimes we hear them. At first I was scared and ran into my father’s room. I thought it was robbers. But now I just think possums and go back to sleep. You probably hear them more, with your mango tree. You supply their dinner!”
“Yeah. And then last night, they woke me up, it must have been oh, two o’clock—yes, I remember the digital clock saying 2:22 and I thought well at least if I’m awake that number is not the worst thing I could see. Could have been 3:33—”
“So what happened?”
“Well, the thumping was so loud, like heavy boots, and I got my flashlight and crept outside. I aimed it up onto the roof and I saw a furry animal with big dark eyes staring back at me. I guess it was stunned by the light because it just stayed there still as a statue and then, do you know what? I saw something clinging underneath. It was her baby!”
Asim was silent for a moment. Then he said, “That was a good thing to see.”
“Yeah. It felt … good. But sort of sad, just the two of them. They looked like they were on the run. You know, suburbia eating up their habitat. Mom says they’re not homeless, they’re making themselves comfortable on our roof! I like that idea but she doesn’t. Says they wake her up and she’s not a good sleeper and then she has to go and make hot milk and pace and watch TV and by the time she’s done all that there’s only an hour before morning. No, she definitely doesn’t like them.” Suddenly I feel a twinge of fear, right where my heart is. “I hope she doesn’t call the exterminator.”
Asim tears a leaf off the branch and studies it. “Perhaps if you give them another house, they won’t use your roof.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I was thinking, we could make a possum house—a place just for them. We could build a little wooden house in this tree, or maybe the maple tree, it is better.”
“But how would we do that? Where do we get the wood and how do we know—”
“My father has a shed where he keeps all his tools. There is everything we would need—I helped him make the bench where we have breakfast and a work table where we study. My father has much experience in these things. There is plywood left over, we have the hammer, nails, saw, even the electric drill…”
This is really exciting. We sit for ages in the tree, planning how we are going to build this thing. I still can’t quite believe I have a friend who’s happy to hang out every day, someone I can rely on. Seems I can talk to him about anything, as if we’re brothers or something.
Strange, too, because Asim is Kurdish. He even has a different alphabet. The only “curd’ I’d ever heard of was something Little Miss Muffet ate in that nursery rhyme.
When I told Asim about the curd thing, he laughed. That’s how I knew I’d like him straightaway. And when I heard a bit about what he and his people had been through in Iraq, I admired him even more. I don’t think I could ever have a sense of humor about those things. He told me the year he was born his family were driven out of their home and lost everything they owned. They had to escape to somewhere near Turkey and hide—just because they were Kurds. There was no shelter, or clean water or food for them. They were refugees.
And just before he turned one—it was a freezing November day—his mother died.
Asim doesn’t remember her, but he has an album that tells her story in photos. His father made it for him, and it has a thin polished wood cover, with a gold lock and key.
When Asim first told me about what happened to him, I didn’t know what to say. Only that, in a weird way, I felt like we had a lot in common: my father died when I was two. I don’t really remember anything about him except a smell of fish and salt baked in the sun. It was a comfortable smell. And there was a blue T-shirt and lots of crinkles around his eyes. He had blue eyes like mine. Sometimes you don’t know if you remember how a person looked because of photos you’ve seen. You make up a picture from there.
So I told Asim about my dad, and that I’ve had to move around a lot since then—“just like you,” I said. How stupid did I feel as soon as I blurted that out! There’s me in comfortable apartments or houses with heating and hot water and food and no Iraqi police spying outside preparing to take my family away—no having to run for my life. I felt ashamed after I’d said that. I went home and told Mom and she said she knew what I meant, but not to worry. “What you have showed Asim is empathy,” she said, “and it is a good, decent human quality. It’s a pity there aren’t more people like that ruling the world.” I asked her what empathy meant and she put down the potato peeler and took a deep breath so I quickly said, “It’s okay, I’ll look it up in the dictionary,” because I knew one of her speeches about the government was coming on, and I just wanted to lie on my bed
and think about things.
In that first week Asim and I talked about moving and meeting new people and how weird it all is, but most of all we talked about numbers. For Asim, although English was so difficult to learn, counting was the same in any language. He’d had to stay in a detention center for six months, and there were so many different languages and problems, the only way he could really communicate was with numbers. And he found he was good at it—he had to be, he said. He could add, multiply, entertain with math. He collected a class of kids there; they’d sit around in the dirt and he’d teach them how to add and subtract, play games with numbers. Mainly, the kids wanted to learn how to count the number of days before their release but no one ever told them when this would be. That was the hardest part, he said. Some people had been there for years. You should see him doing long multiplications in his head, or adding strings of three-digit numbers together in a few seconds. He’s worked hard at it, he says, but I think he’s just a natural talent. Any new school he walks into, he’s a math star.
I’m not like that—I just enjoy making patterns with numbers. I like the way a math problem will always have a solution. Just one neat, tidy answer. No room for ifs and buts and maybes and what will happen? Just a single fact. That’s cool. Something you can rely on. And then if you make up the problem yourself, you can make sure you get an even solution. Everything is in its proper place in the world. At least for a while.
Asim isn’t so crazy about even numbers. He likes all kinds. Odds and evens, they all work for him. You can’t have light without dark, ice cream without spinach, he figures. But he said a great thing about eight. The best I ever heard. He said eight was maybe the source of all life. It is the shape of DNA. The blueprint, the grand plan for living cells to grow. Isn’t that the best?
Well, we’re sitting in the tree, dreaming about the house we’re going to build when suddenly a bang like gunshot cracks our ears. We both jump. Asim nearly falls off. We stand up shakily, hanging onto a branch and look out across the street. A heavyset boy with spiky hair is running down the road. Badman, with his shirt flying out behind him. He’s shooting glances back as he runs, watching the smoke drifting from a brightly painted mailbox. The door has blown off, hanging crazily by one hinge, like a broken arm. We watch as an old lady comes out and wrings her hands.
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