Six Pounds Eight Ounces E-Book

Rhian Elizabeth

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 551

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Hannah King is a liar, so everyone says. That means her stories of growing up in the Rhondda, as told in 'Six Pounds Eight Ounces', must be treated with caution. Debut novelist Rhian Elizabeth opens Hannah's notebook up on her own little world of crazy friends and crazy family, and a crazy school with crazy teachers who aren't always what they seem. From dolls and sherbet lemons, to a bright student who drops out of school in favour of drink, drugs and glam rock up on an estate which feels like another planet, Hannah, it seems, has always been trouble.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Love Poem

Blue Balloons

Spaceships

Questions

Pink Custard

Candyfloss

Spit Shake

Salt

Danville

Seven O’clock

Laser Ludlow

Rainbows

Lettuce Sandwiches

Room 58

Stitches

Dissecting Snails

‘Ted’

Pear Drops

Fourteen Days

The Club

Frankensteins

Bruises

Sixteen

Dead Dogs

Van Gogh’d

Racetracks

March 1972

Banana Milkshake

Rocketshaped

1

2

0

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

Six Pounds Eight Ounces

Rhian Elizabeth

Love Poem

I want to write you

a love poem as headlong

as our creek

after thaw

when we stand

on its dangerous

banks and watch it carry

with it every twig

every dry leaf and branch

in its path

every scruple

when we see it

so swollen

with runoff

that even as we watch

we must grab

each other

and step back

we must grab each

other or

get our shoes

soaked we must

grab each other

Linda Pastan

Blue Balloons

My first word was clock only it came out as cock. That was when my mother knew I was trouble. A sign of things to come that was, Hannah King, she always says, but I’ve got absolutely no idea what she’s on about.

I like words though – I know that. They’re my favourite things. I like putting them together into something that makes sense, makes colours. I can even tell you the exact day, the exact moment, I fell in love with them. It was when Nanny came back from Ponty market. A Wednesday. It’s where she goes every Wednesday but this time I wasn’t with her. Now and again she will take me along too, see, like if I’m sick and can’t go to school, but when she goes on her own she brings me a present back in her massive navy shopping bag. I like Nanny, and I like her best when she goes to Ponty.

Ponty’s got a big park as well as a market, but she never takes me there. Always says that shehasn’t got timeand I know that’s a lie because Nanny doesn’t have a husband and she doesn’t have a job. Nanny is an old person and all old people do is sleep and eat and buy things. That must mean she’s got plenty of time for pushing swings and sitting on the other end of a seesaw, but no amount of nagging I do ever changes her mind.

Ponty isn’t very far away and to get there Nanny always catches the 120 Stagecoach bus on Pandy Square. That’s what we call the place where we live.Pandy,not Tonypandy, because we aren’t posh. And that’s also why we call Ponty Ponty instead of Pontypridd.

My mother says that Nanny is off her head catching the 120, that it goes everywhere before it gets to Ponty bus station. She tries to explain that Nan would be better off getting the 130 because it’s much quicker, but Nanny doesn’t care what my mother says. She likes the slow bus because it passes the mountain on the way. And this is what Nanny does. She sits down the front, never up the back and especially not on the wheel, cradling her shopping bag on her lap like it’s a fat navy cat. Nanny looks out of the window for a while and then when the bus gets near it – the mountain – she shuffles forward on her seat and stares up at the rows of dead people. Nanny knows them. She rubs the palm of her hand over the green stone on her finger and smiles, one of her really burny mints floating like a tiny white rubber ring on her tongue.

My grandfather is up on that mountain and the last time I went to Ponty with Nanny on the 120 bus, when I had a stinking cough and couldn’t go to school because my nose was running like mental, she talked about him the whole way. I was absolutely busting for a pee and Nanny promised me only one more stop now love, every single time we stopped. Well, it was my grandfather who gave her that green stone ring she rubs, and it’s really special to her although I don’t know why she smiles at it because he’s dead. I can’t count change out like Nanny does when she pays the driver, and I can’t tie my laces without them coming undone again straight away, but I do know that being dead isn’t something to be happy about. I think she must smile because the mountain makes her remember nice things. She crunches her mint and says she’ll be up there with him one day under the dirt and the earth and the flowers and I sayNan, shut up, you’re still quite young, aren’t you? How old are you? Apparently my nanny is sixty-seven years old and I’m not sure if that’sreallyold or just old but I know she can climb the steps up to Ponty market as fast as I can and sometimes she even beats me when we have a race, even though she’s carrying that heavy shopping bag. So she definitely can’t be old enough for dying yet.

But I started telling you about this particular Wednesday when she went on her own, didn’t I? And it really was the most important day of my life. That day I wasn’t sick, I was absolutely fine. And after school I waited by the window for her to come with my present. I waited hours for that slow bus to bring Nanny back to Pandy from Ponty. I bounced on my toes as I watched her empty her shopping bag, watched her carefully take out the things she bought for herself and put them down on our dining table. Boring old lady things. Potatoes. Some brown tights and a gold can of hairspray and a slimy fish in a see-through wrapper. This fish had an actual real proper eye that stared at me. Yuck! She must’ve stunk the bus out all the way back. Buses smell quite bad anyway what with all the old people on them and that. I didn’t say it though. Kept it in my head where I keep most bad things because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings and mainly because I didn’t want her to say I was being too cheeky for my present.

So she carried on pulling these things out, like a magician, and I thought it would never end. She’d actually bought the whole of Ponty town centre. Unzipped her bag and tipped all the shops and shelves into it. But then there it was for me, red and sparkling with silvery glitter. A notebook. What did I think it was, a bastard broomstick? Something different for a change and half price in W. H. Smith. I really wasn’t being ungrateful. I couldn’t help my face. Nanny said it looked as if she’d just whacked me across it with her kipper by there. It was just that I’d been expecting sweets from the market stall. Normally when we go to Ponty Nanny gets a plastic scooper and fills a bag to the top with all sorts and when the man puts the bag on his silver weighing scales she always says, Jesus Christ, how much?

I thought it was boring, this notebook. I picked it up and shook it, ran through the white, light-blue-lined pages with my thumb. The worst present in the world! Of course I didn’t say it. I told you, I keep it all in my head. It’s kind of like when you fall over really badly and your mother holds a tissue down hard on your knee that’s bleeding. And it stops the blood for a while but you know as soon as she takes that tissue off that it’s going to start gushing again. Well that’s what I do … I push it all down, all the things I can’t tell people and the things I know I shouldn’t feel. It’s not very good I know, because one day I will probably explode, and I thought I would that time, thought my disappointment would spill out of me like green slime onto the table with Nanny’s shopping.

But then I found them – words – upstairs, alone in my room. I only wish I’d found them sooner. I realised that I didn’t have to keep all those things in my head anymore. I could take my pen and write them down on pieces of paper, bleed them out like black biro blood, let them gush and run and land in between the lines. Lines that soaked them up and never told on me or thought I was bad. I wrote loads of words in my notebook, really neat until they made a story about some balloons. I don’t know where they came from. They were just there, blue and floating around my head. My head that felt lighter now,better.

The next morning I was so excited. Bouncing on my toes again. I tore the page out and took it with me to school to give in for our St David’s Day story competition which was in a week’s time. St David’s Day is a day all about being Welsh and minging cakes with currants and a dragon. We have prizes and wear stupid clothes and I felt pretty good about my story’s chances of winning. But the next day, our phone rang on the windowsill and when Mum slammed it down she huffed and puffed and said that we had to go up to the school to see my teacher. What have you bloody done now, Hannah King, she said. I hadn’t doneanything. Or at least if I had I couldn’t remember doing it.

Mrs Thomas was behind her desk in class waiting. And in a serious voice she said we were there to talk about my story and something called The Truth, which was apparently a very important thing. I was next to Mum on one of our red plastic chairs, as excited as she was worried, knocking the heels of myblack school shoes together. Mrs Thomas was going to tell my mother that I’d won the competition, that I was absolutely fantastic and lovely and clever, I just knew it.

‘Mrs King,’ she said, ‘the school does not take kindly to parents giving in pieces of work they hope to pass off as their child’s. We must encourage Hannah to be creative. To make up her own stories.’

When I stared at my shoes, at the streaky scratches Mum had gone nuts about a few weeks before, and thought about it for a minute, what those big words meant, I felt my head exploding again. I didn’t think it was possible to feel happy and sad and angry all at the same time, but it was. I knew my story must’ve been good because Mrs Thomas thought Mum had written it. Mymother, who never writes stories, just cheques and birthday cards, who looked funny and huge and awkward sitting on a seat meant for someone much smaller than her. I thought it might collapse and to be honest, I kind of wanted it to. Wanted her to squeal as she flattened the red chair like it was a spider, the metal legs like a spider’s legs squashed under her massive bum. My mother, who was there in her best shoes especially polished for walking across Mrs Thomas’ classroom floor. My mother, who uses a cooker and a kettle and an iron and who can drive our car. My mother, who is a grown-up. Mrs Thomas thought agrown-uphad written my story.

She laughed then on the tiny chair in her best shoes and told Mrs Thomas that she doesn’t have time for writing bloody stories. But Mrs Thomas went and scrunched my piece of paper up into a jagged white ball anyway, and when she chucked it into the bin at the end of her desk with the orange peel and the shredded green cardboard we’d used earlier that day to make leeks, I wasn’t all those loads of things anymore, only angry. Mrs Thomas thought I was a liar. She thought Istolewords. I wanted Mum to go nuts, as nuts as she’d gone about my shoes. I kicked the metal legs on her chair and tugged the strap on her handbag because she needed to believe me. And she needed to make Mrs Thomas believe me and then once everyone knew I was telling The Truth, she needed to rescue my story from the bin and get the creases out of it like she gets the creases out of my clothes with her iron.

But that never happened. On the way home she said she had too many things on her mind. More important stuff to worry about than words and stupid bloody blue balloons. And then she said that thing our mothers say, the thing that is rubbish and we all know it.

‘You know The Truth, Hannah, and that’s all that matters.’

St David’s Day came and we had our Eisteddfod and that was the worst day of my life. That morning my mother had dressed me in a tall black hat that looked like an upside-down bin on my head. It had this ribbon that went around my neck and choked me to death. And if I didn’t look stupid enough already she went and stabbed me with a pretend daffodil through my special Welsh lady’s dress that itched me like I was covered in the chicken pox again. So imagine how angry I was sitting there with my arms crossed in the big hall.

There were songs in Welsh that Mrs Thomas played on her piano but I didn’t sing them. And there were minging cakes with currants but I didn’t eat any. We talked about dragons and rugby and some blind man, and when it was nearly all over the winner’s name was called out. I knew it wasn’t going to be me. My words were buried in the bin, but I couldn’t believe it washim.I had to watch Evan Jones, the stupidest kid in school, sit on a throne that was actually just a normal chair framed in red tinsel while someone placed a spiky crown made of paper and fake jewels on top of his greasy hair. I had to listen to him read his crap story out and while I listened I murdered him twice in my head with my daffodil pin. I had to clap. I had to suck my tears back in.

When I grow up, when I’m much bigger than this, when I can count change and tie my laces tidy, I’m going to be a writer. I’m ginger, poor dab, Nanny says, and I’ve got freckles all over my face. This means I can’t be on the telly, or famous or pretty or anything, but I’m okay with it. I like words most of all and I like my notebook, too. I suppose it’s better than sweets because it won’t make me fat and it won’t make my teeth green and yellow and black. And I like it because I can write anything I want in it. All the things stuck in my head. I can write stories about people I know, even if they’re not true. In my notebook I can make people do whatever I want them to do.

But I’m not showing it to anyone ever again. I’ll write what I want and when I feel like it. It’s easier to tell a piece of paper secret stuff than it is to tell a real person. And real people don’t believe you anyway, even when youaretelling The Truth.

Spaceships

I’m bored. Evan likes Lego but I can’t stand it. We’re in a terrible mess by here on the carpet. Bricks everywhere. He never wants to play the games I want to play and there’s loads of other better things we could be doing in class instead. Like playing with the doctor’s set. It’s really cool. It’s got a white costume and everything. And a pretend thermometer and one of those things you use to listen to someone’s heart to see if they’re dead or not. I could wrap bandages around his arm and pretend he’s been attacked by a massive bear. But he doesn’t even want to dothat.

Evan Jones loves me. He tells me all the time. I love you Hannah King, I really, really love you. And when he says it it makes me feel a little bit sick. He’s silly loving me because I definitely don’t love him and it must be really rubbish loving someone when they don’t love you back. I’m the only kid who plays with Evan but don’t go feeling sorry for him because it’s his own fault. Light brown hair he’s got and I don’t think he’s ever cut it, not in his whole life. It’s quite long for a boy’s and it shines with grease as if he’s been out the yard playing in the rain. But it’s not just his hair. Evan Jones, I think to myself, you smell so bad I have to hold my breath and pinch my nose when we’re close together on the carpet like this. Think it, yeah, because my mother taught me that if you haven’t got anything nice to say then you shouldn’t bloody say it at all. Although I don’t always keep not nice things in. It’s hard. Sometimes they squirt from my mouth cold and mean like water out of a water pistol. Sometimes my nasty words shoot Evan Jones dead.

And he’s got plenty of other things wrong with him as well. His clothes, for example. Jumper sleeves that are too stretchy for his arms and he’s always tripping over his laces that are long and floppy like black noodles trailing behind him. Sometimes I step on them and then he kind of goes flying and I kind of laugh, especially when he gets carpet burns, or bleeds … that’s the funniest. My mother says his family are poor. Not poor like kids in Africa with flies in their eyes, it’s just that they can’t afford new things like we can. Of course I don’t want to play with him, but there’s no one else. The other kids in class don’t like me either. They say I’m weird but I don’t know why because there’s nothing wrong with me like there is with Evan and I always brush my teeth.

‘Are you pretending?’

‘No. Honest now,’ I tell him. ‘Itis.’

Evan will believe anything. Yesterday I told him my dad’s an astronaut who lives on a spaceship up in the stars, and heactuallythought it was true.

‘Well if it’s your birthday today, how old are you?’

‘Six,’ I say. ‘And I’m having a party, too.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Yeah, I am, after school. It’s going to be fan-tastic.’

‘Why haven’t you got a birthday badge then?’

‘Because it’s in the house, of course. On top of the telly, nice and safe so I can wear it to my party. Do you want to come or what?’

My mother says that to be a good liar you need to have a good memory, which is lucky because I remember lots of things. I always remember my spellings and my homework and to wash my hands after I’ve been to the toilet. I’ve got really good at telling lies. Me and my mother are kind of backwards because when I’m lying to her she thinks I’m telling The Truth and when I’m telling The Truth she thinks I’m lying. Grown-ups are quite stupid really. And so are kids. Especially this one by here. Evan’s eyes tighten. The blanket of Lego bricks moves and rattles around us as he squirms. His very small brain is trying to work out if I’m telling The Truth or not today.

He goes and picks a red brick up and screws it down on top of his wobbly tower. How dare he. He’s not even listening to me anymore. Doesn’t he care about my birthday? I know. I know that Evan likes cake. Every day he’s got a cake in his packed lunch. I tell him there’ll be a massive one at my party.

‘A chocolate cake?’

‘Is that your favourite?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then yes, a massive, double chocolate cake with chocolate sauce and chocolate buttons and chocolate cream. And there’ll be sausage rolls. And cheese sandwiches.Andcrisps. Onion rings and Chipsticks and Petrified Prawns. And Tangy Toms and Skips.’

‘What about Wotsits?’

‘Millions of them.’

I watch his tongue move slow and fat across his top lip. A hungry, slippery slug.

‘Will your dad be there?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘Just won’t.’

‘Why haven’t I seen him pick you up from school?’

‘Because Itold you. He’s in space. He’s much too busy because he’s fighting aliens up in the stars, stupid.’

‘Oh, yeah. I forgot. Sorry.’

‘It’s okay, Ev.’

‘I love you, Hannah King.’

‘More than Lego?’

‘Yeah.’

‘More than your mother?’

‘Yeah.’

‘More than Mrs Thomas?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Even more than chocolate cake?’

He stops building and instead fusses with his long noodle laces. The bricks break the silence, knock around his nervous, twisty feet. I’m feeling very angry. My insides heating up like a radiator. He isn’t allowed to love anything or anyone more than me. That’s just not right. So I ask him again … Evan Jones, do you love me more than chocolate cake or what?

‘I love you, Hannah King. I really, really…’

I stop him. Stop him before he says something that might get me so angry I’ll just have to stamp on his Lego bricks with my black shoes and crush them into plastic dust. I tell him that if he does love me, crosses his heart and hopes to die love me, he can come to my birthday party later.

‘Okay.’

‘Promise you’ll come?’

‘Yes, Han.’

I sigh. Don’t know how many times I’ve got to tell him. It’s not Han, it’s Hannah King, or Your Majesty. Say it.

‘Yes, Hannah King, I promise.’

‘No. Say Yes, Your Majesty.’

‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

‘And you’d better bring me a present to my party or I won’t let you in.’

I tell him straight and then I get up. I’m bored of talking about parties and my bum’s gone dead on the carpet. He carries on doing his tower massive and I go and play doctors on my own. Even though I haven’t got a patient it’s better than being childish with bricks. I’m not a builder. It’s much more fun being a doctor. Doctors are really important people. They fix you when you’re sick. They make you better and then when they’re finished fixing you, you can go home from hospital. I take my temperature. I wrap my bleeding wrist up with a bandage and give myself a couple of stitches. It’s dangerous fighting bears. I put the silver thing for my heart up my shirt and it makes me jump. Freezing!

I play until the bell goes and I see my mother hovering outside the door in her green coat. She wears it every day and when she lifts the furry hood over her head it makes her look like a lion. Mum says it’s very important to wrap up warm. That’s why my coat is huge and black. She straightens me out in the corridor because I’m all squiff and bloody scruffy. Pulls and yanks me, buttons every single button and zips my zip all the way up. My coat hangs past my knees and the zip goes over my mouth and now I’m completely, absolutely covered. My coat is probably the reason why the kids in class don’t like me. They tell me that I look like a big bug in it. A caterpillar with two legs and two arms. And now she’s wiping something off my cheek.

‘Mum, get off me!’

‘Watch your bloody lip, Hannah. And why can’t you call me Mam like everyone else?’

Most kids around here call their mothers Mam or Mammy, but I like to call mine Mum. She says it’s because I think I’m posh, something special, the Queen of bloody Tonypandy, but it’s not that. It’s just that calling my mother Mum gets her all angry and sad, which weirdly makes me feel really good. My mother reckons I’m not normal, but then again she’s the one spitting on me and rubbing it in with her Kleenex tissue. When she’s done with my cheek we walk home past the blue railings and then she goes and holds my hand while we cross the road.

My mother is like a Russian doll. She’s small and round and her hair never changes, always brown and short, so neat and tidy I’m sure she’s got someone who paints it on for her every morning when I’m not looking. She’s got rosy, blusher-dusted cheeks and a serious thin pink mouth that hardly ever moves to smile. If you opened her up you’d find more of her inside. Tiny, serious mothers getting smaller and smaller in their green coats. Mum’s got a big hand though and I try to wriggle free but she grabs me really tight and hurts me with her wedding ring. I need to stop messing around by the traffic. I’ll get run over now, you watch, and she doesn’t have time for scraping me up off the bloody concrete.

I try and explain to her as the cars and buses whoosh past like shooting stars and rockets that I’m not a baby. I sayMum, you don’t need to hold my hand,Mum,because we’ve already done roads in school. But this only makes her squeeze me tighter. She just doesn’t get it. Laugh their heads off, they would, the boys in class if they saw me holding my mother’s hand. Like they laughed at me when I told them my dad is the prime minister. One boy called Robbie Jenkins said it was rubbish because the prime minister is a man called John Major so he definitely couldn’t be my dad because my last name is King. Hannah King, the big liar caterpillar bug with two legs and two arms. But it’s okay. It doesn’t matter that they laughed because I put a butter knife through Robbie Jenkins’ football and burst it. He didn’t know it was me. He was in the toilet. I took it out of our kitchen drawer and snuck it into my packed lunch bag the morning after he called me a liar. Tucked it under my sandwich foil, in between my crisps and my banana-flavour yoghurt with chocolate flakes on the side andbang.

Mum switches the telly on when we get home. It’s the first thing she does, even before taking her coat off. And next she turns the gas fire on, not up full though because my mother is very tight according to Nanny, and while she’s in the kitchen running taps and banging pots I have to sit on the settee and watch a show with letters and a large, round clock. This is what’s on every day after school. It’s like that clock is a part of our living room, and Carol Vorderman a member of our family.

‘That Carol is wonderful,’ Mum shouts. ‘Lovely teeth, she’s got, and if you grow up to be half as clever as Carol you’ll be alright.’

Our kitchen is down a couple of steps from our living room. That’s where my mother is, wiping a silver pot dry with a tea towel, bubbly white sleeves up her arms as she’s going on and on about Carol. She bets Carol never cheeked her mother. Carol must’ve worked hard in school to get where she is today. Carol this, Carol that. I scrunch my nose up at her. It’s not my fault that I’m not wonderful like Carol Vorderman or that some of my new, big teeth haven’t grown back yet. I don’t care anyway. I just want to watch cartoons. They’re on the other channel and cartoons are so much better than clocks. But Mum gets to watch what she wants. She’s in control of the remote. It’s because she bought the telly and the house and because she pays the electric bill and she also owns the air I breathe.

My mother cooks my dinner too and she’s pretty good at it, I’ll give her that. We eat it on trays on our laps. We do have a dining table in the living room but we only use it when there’s something really special going on like Christmas. Actually, only at Christmas. Mum’s tray is plain and red and mine is blue with yellow fishes on it, and plants and pebbles, like a camera’s taken a picture under the sea. Today we’ve got homemade corned-beef pie.

‘Where does corned beef come from,Mum?’

‘From cows.’

‘Realcows? Like the ones on the mountain?’

Mum’s sitting the other end of the settee. Our settee is dark blue and the cushions are also dark blue. I daren’t drop any food. Not one single crumb. If I did then the world would definitely end. And of course corned beef comes from real cows.

‘Are you saying there’s a cow on my plate? That’s just cruel. I can’teata cow.’

‘You bloody will,’ she says, her voice all crazy, ‘or I’ll shove it down your gob.’

The people who don’t eat animals are called vegetarians and we aren’t like them. They’re mostly hippies and celebrities off the telly, people who like to make a fuss about bloody everything. I just eat my dinner because when my mother says she’ll shove it down my gob if I don’t, I believe her, knife and fork and all. I can tell she doesn’t like vegetarians much, and I know for absolute certain that she doesn’t like it when the door goes and we’re in the middle of eating. I listen to her sometimes when she’s out the front. She’ll tell the person who knocked that she’s got to go because there’s something on the hob when there’s absolutely nothing there at all. Apparently it’s okay for my mother to lie though because her lies are white. It must mean the ones I tell are black. Hers fly gracefully from her mouth like doves but out of mine crows come screaming. She puts her tray down on the carpet and huffs and puffs the way my mother loves to do.

‘Better not be someone selling windows again.’

They do it on purpose, she swears. They were just waiting for her to sit down and relax before they decided to come bloody pouncing. Me and the double-glazing people, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses as well, we’re all in it together. My mother goes to answer the door and I’m glad. I lean over and grab the remote while I’ve got the chance, one hand gripped on my dinner tray, careful not to spill anything. I turn Carol off and switch my channel on and I suppose I’m happy that we’re not vegetarians. Cruel or not, real cows taste good. I watch cartoons until I hear the front door shut, and when my mother comes back in the living room she doesn’t pick her tray up or sit down. She’s just standing there in front of me, hands on her hips, staring.

‘What?’ I say, mouth full of food.

I’m looking up at her from the settee. She seems much taller, bigger, from all the way down here. What you doingMum?Your food’s getting cold. But that’s when I notice she’s put them in. Her angry eyes. Because up in her bedroom she’s got this drawer and it’s jammed full of eyeballs. Honest now. They look like fish eggs because they’re kept in small, clear plastic cases so that they stay clean and shiny forever. My mother’s got lots of different kinds of eyes to match her mood and she changes them like most other mothers change their earrings. When she needs a pair she’ll slide the drawer open and they’ll roll around loose and noisy and fast like marbles. She’ll take them out carefully and they’ll squeak as she twists and screws them into her head. They’re all different, see. Some are wet and some are serious. Plenty of angry eyes, she’s got, and only one pair of happy ones that I hardly ever see her wearing. She uses her wet eyes for sad films and her serious eyes for counting with Carol and her angry eyes are especially for me. They stare at you really hard and nasty, just like they’re staring at me right now. They’re like ice cubes, frozen and cold, with eyelashes that don’t blink, stiff as bristles on a dried-up paint brush. I switch the telly back to Carol and the big clock.

‘There.’

‘Never mind the telly. I’mfuming,’ she says. ‘Do you know who that was at the door?’

‘I’m not magic,’ I shrug.

‘Don’t you cheek me, Hannah King.’

‘I’m not cheeking. I can’tseethrough walls, can I?’

‘I’ll tell you who it was, shall I? Poor little Evan Jones standing there with a box of Maltesers wrapped in newspaper under his arm. Going on about some birthday party.’

Oops. I forgot about that. Idohave a good memory, it’s just that I tell Evan so many things that now and again some of them get lost in the sea of stories in my head.

‘Did you tell him it’s your birthday today, Hannah?’

I open my mouth and set it free. It comes out flapping, black beak and two mean, green eyes.

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah. Course I’m sure.’

‘And is that The Truth, Hannah?’

God. Grown-ups really are obsessed with this The Truth thing, aren’t they? To them it’s as serious as brushing your hair and your teeth and drying inside your ears and between your toes with a towel when you come out of the bath. It’s funny because The Truth isn’t important to me at all. In fact, I hate it.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell her. ‘I can’t be expected to remember everything. I’m only five years old after all. Imighthave told him it’s my birthday.Maybe.’

Mum’s angry eyes get angrier and angrier, icier and icier and crazier and crazier. Any second now they will pop out of her head. She says she could still hear him crying when he turned the corner out of our street and I say don’t worry, mun, he’salwayscrying.

‘Where’s those Maltesers then?’

‘Excuse me, Hannah?’

‘You said he had Maltesers with him. They must’ve been my birthday present.’

‘It’s not your bloody birthday, Hannah!’

‘Well I knowthat. My birthday is in August and I want areal party then.’

And I tell her exactly what I want, just so she can get planning early. I want sparkly hats that make you look like an elf and stay on your head by the elastic under your chin. I want paper plates and tall curly straws that topple the paper cups over and make blackcurrant squash rivers on the tablecloth. A purple tablecloth, that’s what I want. And balloons that don’t fly away when you let them go. I want sandwiches, no crusts, and cakes and every kind of crisps and party rings and pink wafers and pasties and sausage rolls and scotch eggs. And squares of cheese on sticks, no pickles or pineapples though because they’re both just gross. I want a massive double-chocolate cake with chocolate sauce and chocolate buttons and chocolate cream…

‘Party? You won’t be having a party for the next hundred birthdays!’ she shouts, her angry eyes already rolling away down the kitchen steps. ‘You’re a liar. A nasty piece of work, Hannah King.’

She snatches my tray off my lap. Despite being short, my mother is strong. Her hands drive our car, and they lift irons and kettles and hoovers and heavy bin bags, and soon they’re lifting me off the settee by my wrists. She’s like a JCB the way she scoops me up. She’s quick, too. Before I can run away or duck through her legs she’s smacking my bum out of the living room and all the way up the stairs and across the landing until I’m pushed, actually pushed, into my bedroom. The door is pulled shut with a loud thud.

I’m supposed to be thinking about my behaviour. I’m supposed to stay in here until I’m ready to come out and say sorry. So I guess I’ll just stay in here forever then, because I’ll never be ready because I’ll never be sorry. It’s not my fault Evan’s stupid. If he’d just play games with me then I wouldn’t be bored and I wouldn’t have to make things up. If The Truth was better than stories then I’d tell it instead of them. And if Dad was here I wouldn’t be a liar. He wouldn’t have to live in space, wouldn’t need to be an astronaut.

Questions

The man’s come to fix our fire and Mum wants me out of the way. It’s because of my terrible habit of asking questions. But I’m not going anywhere. I want to stay down here in the living room. I need to see how you fix a fire and this man who’s doing it, he’s got hair down to his shoulders.

He’s hunched over on his knees on our carpet and it’s disgusting. I can actually see his bum and even more disgusting there’s this thin line of black fur growing on it, like a river running down the middle of two peachy mountains. He’s picking heavy-looking things out of a red metal box and his jeans are absolutely stinking. They’re denim and blue, like my dungarees. My dungarees have gold buttons, go just past my knees, andmydungarees are clean. I wear them every day and Mum says she’s sick of washing them, bored of sewing the same bloody hole up all the time. I know I wear them a lot but it’s only because they’re comfy and because if you fall over in them, if you scrape your knees across the pavement, it doesn’t hurt as bad as if you were wearing shorts or normal trousers or even worse, a dress … yuck! My mother won’t get me in one of them again, no chance. The thick blue material of my dungarees is an extra layer of skin and it soaks blood up really good. My dungarees keep me safe.

‘What’s that?’ I ask him, this man with his bum out.

‘It’s a spanner, beaut.’

‘Spanner rhymes with Hannah. That’s my name. So what’s all that on your clothes then?’

‘Oil. And soot.’

‘Soot?What’s soot?’

‘Black stuff up chimneys.’

‘So what are you going to do with your spanner?’

He bangs and clanks and our fire rattles. He says he’s going to fix it and even though it’s turned off, I think he must be really brave. Anything could happen. The flames could suddenly come back on and he could fall into them anddie. If he did it would be a really good story to tell Evan on Monday morning. It would be The Truth and even better than something I made up. If it doesn’t happen then I’ll probably still tell him it did. I’ll just write it in my notebook anyway, make the flames boiling hot, make his long hair a mane of mental orange, make himscream.

‘Are you scared?’ I ask him. ‘Have you ever made a mistake? Have you ever touched a fire? What about burns? Have you had any burns before? How do you…’

‘Jesus Christ, beaut. Am I onMastermindor what?’

‘What’sMastermind?’

‘Stop asking questions, mun,’ he snaps, dabbing the sweat off his forehead in the sleeve of his red check shirt. ‘I’m trying to concentrate. Go and play.’

‘I don’t want to play. Besides, I haven’t got anything to play with.’

‘Bugger off now, beaut.’

‘Why have you got such long hair? I thought only girls were meant to have long hair. What…’

He cuts me off. He throws his spanner down and it bounces on our carpet. And then he says something very silly indeed. If I haven’t got any toys to play with then…

‘Why don’t you go and shit in the corner or something?’

I don’t like the man with long hair anymore. You’re not supposed to swear at kids and you’re not supposed to be nasty to them when they’re only asking questions. He’s got me all crazy inside, hot as the fire that I wish was on because he’s got his arm right in it now. I’ll show him. I go over to the corner of our living room and next to our tall gold lamp I undo my buttons. My dungarees drop to my ankles and I’m standing there in just my t-shirt and knickers.

Mum can’t see me because I check. She’s in the kitchen making the man a cup of tea. The grey carpet beneath me tickles my bare thighs as I crouch, knickers rolled down, and pretend to do it. It’s really bad to show your foof to boys, I know, because your foof is secret and special, but I don’t care if he sees it. Iwanthim to see it except he’s not looking at me at all so I make faces and these loud squeezing noises to get his attention. I push hard and hold my breath and blow my cheeks out until my face turns as red as his toolbox. And then something bad happens. Really bad. Badder than showing your foof off to a boy. I try to suck it back up but it shoots out, too slippery and too fast. A squidgy brown letter C shape has landed on the carpet between my legs.

Hide it somewhere, Han, that’s what I’m thinking as my heart is pumping like mental, as loud and fast as the man is banging his spanner into the fire, against the pieces of fake black coal. Hide it in the drawer or in the plant pot on the windowsill or behind a cushion.Anywhere. But I don’t have time to pick it up and destroy it, the stinky evidence, because Mum’s coming up the kitchen steps with the cup of steaming hot tea in her hand. It takes her a couple of seconds to work out what’s going on. It’s like someone’s got a remote and is pointing it at our living room and pressing pause. Everything stops, my heart and the banging spanner and the whole entire picture. They press play again and fast forward and then they hold their finger down on the volume button. My mother sees it on the carpet and screams … Hannah bloody King!

She pulls a tissue out of the box on the dining table and closes her eyes and picks it up exactly how she picks spiders up. My brown C-shaped poo has thick, hairy black legs and two beady eyes and some teeth. I’m dragged into the bathroom then, my dungarees clinging onto my ankles, and after she flushes it away down the toilet she makes me sit on the seat. Her angry eyes are in again. Apparently there’s something bloody wrong with me.

‘No there’s not. The man with the spanner told me to do it.’

My mother draws her breath in sharply, as if my foot that I’m swinging like this over the toilet seat has just knocked her in the knee.

‘Don’t lie, Hannah.’

‘I’m notlying.’

‘You can’t help yourself, Hannah. You tell so many you could fill a book with them.’

‘Fill a book with what?’

‘Your bloody stories!’

‘Maybe I will,’ I tell her. ‘Maybe I’ll write all my stories down and then I’ll be rich and famous and I’ll be able to buy myself a new mother. A nice one.’

I’m still swinging my legs over the white chrome seat in our bathroom. It stinks of soap and bleach in here and my mother is laughing. A pretend laugh. She says she’d soon bring me back anyway, my brand new nice mother would, once she realised how much bloody trouble I am. She’s off to scrub the carpet and I’ve got to wipe my bum and start to seriously think about my behaviour. And now do you get what I mean about us being all backwards? I’m telling The Truth by here on the toilet seat, it’s just that my mother doesn’t know it. I think my mother needs some Truth Glasses to help her see it better.

I slam the bathroom door when she leaves, leaves armed with a spray bottle of cleaning stuff and a wet cloth for the carpet. The doors in our house don’t come off their hinges like I plan. They’re supposed to snap and crash and break into pieces when I bang them, but they never do. I slide the lock across and sit back on the toilet seat, and do what I’ve got to do until I’m all clean and dry. There are some things a girl needs to keep private. I button my dungarees up and run the tap into a plastic beaker I find on tip-toes in the cabinet above the sink. It makes the water taste like minty toothpaste. I don’t normally hang around in our bathroom like this. It’s cold and boring, and it smells like soap and bleach, and peach shampoo and Mum’s deodorant, but I’d rather be in here than out there. With my mother who’s angry at me and the long-haired man who I really don’t like at all.

Mum is standing by the sink when I come out. It was very cold in there and I almost froze to death. She’s washing the long-haired man’s dirty cup in the bubbles and I can see she’s changed out of her angry eyes and into her disappointed ones. These ones roll at me like pears on a fruit machine. She is waiting. But the word she wants to hear is clogged in my throat like a lump of fake black coal.

‘Well, have you got something to say, Hannah?’

I stare at my socks and my eyebrows rise without me telling them to. And then I start to whistle when I didn’t even know I could.

‘Because if you haven’t got anything to say, Hannah, then there’ll be no Toys R Us.’

I almost forgot that we’re going there. We’re going there because my mother wants to buy me some plastic people. She thinks I’m bad, keeps saying she’s going to take me to the doctors so they can swap my brain for a normal one. An operation with silver tools and blood and stitches. She’s worried because I’ve got so good at telling stories that people are starting tobelieve them. I think to myself, if only you knew all the stories I’ve got, Mum, not just the ones I choose to tell you and Evan and Nanny and everyone else, but the ones in my notebook. Course I don’t tell her, I only think it. My mother says maybe I can use dolls toexpress myselfinstead of lying. She read it in a magazine and I’ve been looking forward to going to Toys R Us all week. So I cough it up. It comes out all slippery and phlegmy and black.

‘Sorry.’

I’m told to go to the toilet before we leave for Cardiff, even though I don’t need to. That’s another one of my problems according to my mother. She says I’ve got to pee everywhere we go, like I’m leaving my mark, like I’m some kind of dog. Same as that day in bloody B&Q when she never felt so embarrassed in all her life. Here it comes. Mum tells this story to everyone we know, like she’s telling it to me right now for the hundred millionth time behind the wheel of our car.

‘A Sunday morning it was and tipping down.’

And one minute I was there by her knees nagging her, you know how I like to nag her, and the next I was gone. Quick as a flash! Well she looked everywhere, didn’t she? Down the aisle with the tubs of matt and gloss and turps and back up where the rolls of wallpaper and brushes were. She was calling me, crawling under shelves and searching behind the stack of shopping baskets in case I was hiding from her because you know how bloody wicked I am, how I like to play games. Her heart was pounding. She even had them make an announcement over the speakers. Hannah King, your mother is looking for you. Please come to the front of the shop. If anyone sees a small ginger child wearing a purple mac and scruffy denim dungarees, please inform the nearest member of staff.

‘And then you found me,’ I say, fed up.

She bloody found me alright, dungarees and knickers around my ankles,again! Sitting there swinging my legs bold as brass on one of the display toilets in the shop. And I was grinning.

‘Thought it was fantastic, you did, hearing your name ringing around the shop like that. You thought you was bloody famous.’

We’re driving down the fast roads. I open my window and let the wind dry and numb my tongue. This story is rubbish. It always ends the same. She was fuming, felt like smacking me all the way back to Pandy. She pulled my dungarees up and we left B&Q without telling anyone that I’d stained the brand new white toilet yellow with my pee and we haven’t bloody been back there since.

I’m just glad when I see the gigantic, colourful letters on the building. We’re here. Finally. And through the magic doors that open by themselves, Toys R Us is the biggest, brightest place I’ve ever seen. There’s shelves taller than houses everywhere I look, crammed full of colours and toys and teddies and slimy aliens in pods and loads of other really cool stuff. Toys R Us might actually be the coolest place in the world. We find the aisle with the dolls and it’s like being in some kind of pink hospital where they’re waiting to be born out of clear plastic wombs. And some on the shelves really look like actual babies, too, their faces so cute and real in the boxes that I stare at them for a while, absolutely convinced they’ll blink or burp or smile or scrunch a nose at me if I stare long enough. I stand on my tiptoes and get one down. She’s got light hair and blue eyes like me.

‘Look at the price on that!’

‘Butplease.Pretty please. I’ll be good forever, I swear.’

Mum says she’d like that in bloody writing, and she tuts and moans but she lets me have it, because I almost always get my own way when I smile at her like this and my dimples come out. I lay the box carefully in her metal basket and then I pick some more. Barbies this time. Boy ones with hard hair and girl ones with long, soft hair. She even lets me choose clothes for them and shoes and jewelleryandfurniture. I flash my dimples at her more than I think I’ve ever flashed them before. And I suppose my mother’s alright sometimes.

The lady at the till scans them and puts them in a carrier bag and I just can’t wait to get my dolls home. I’m dying to twist the silver wires off their thin arms and legs and set them free. I’m a doctor. Doctor Hannah King. I’m going to cut them out of their plastic wombs and save them. In the back of the car I stamp my feet on the mats and beg Mum to drive fast back to Pandy, the fastest she can possibly drive, but I’m sure she goes slower on purpose. We get there eventually though and I burst through the front door and straight away put my baby to sleep upstairs in my bed because she’s knackered after travelling all the way from Cardiff. And then I sit behind the settee in the living room and tip the Barbies in boxes out of the bag. I bite and rip them free until the carpet is covered with girls and boys and all their accessories. I bend their stiff legs and sit them down on pink plastic chairs. I give them names. I change their clothes. And when you think about it I’m not really a doctor at all. I’m actually God because I give themlife.

I do like them and don’t get me wrong, I am glad Mum bought them for me. But dolls aren’t much good. I just don’t get it. Their smiles are stuck and they can’t make faces, you know, like the way people react when I tell them lies. Dolls aren’t as good as stories because with words I can control everything, completely. I can have whatever I want whenever I want it. I can make the people I know feel and do things the way they should and they don’t even know it. So I’m going to go back to making stuff up because playing with real people is much more fun.

Pink Custard

Friday is my favourite day. You probably think it’s because tomorrow’s the weekend, but it’s nothing to do with that. I actually like school. I like it much better than being at home.

The thing about Friday that makes it different from all the other days is that Friday is Well Done Badge Day and Well Done Badges are the most important things in the world. A Well Done Badge is a circle shape that Mrs Thomas cuts out of a glossy sheet of card with her scissors and then she goes and squeaks a smiley face on it with her black permanent marker pen. To get the badge on a Friday morning she has to pick you, has to think you’ve been the best kid in class all week.

We’re in the big hall, me and all the others, and we’re waiting to find out who’s getting it this week. If you were a fly and you buzzed around the ceiling above our heads we’d look like rows of tomatoes down below because we’re all wearing red cardigans or red jumpers. It’s annoying. I can’t stop sliding. It feels like I’m sitting on an ice rink. The wooden floor of the big hall is shiny and to be honest, I blame my new trousers.

I wish Mrs Thomas would hurry up. She’s finished her prayer and now she’s reading us a poem but I’m not really listening. I can’t concentrate because the butterflies in my belly are having some kind of disco in there. It’s all because of that badge she’s got in her pocket. It’s got to be mine. I’ve done my best this week, got every word right in our spelling test, the only kid in class to get ten out of ten and Mrs Thomas licked one of her tiny gold stars and stuck it on the bottom of my page. I lined our Biff and Chip books up in alphabetical order on the shelf and I made sure all the Geosafari computers were knocked off tidy. I put lids on felts and swept rubber bits and pencil shavings out of the carpet with a pan and brush, and I didn’t pull Evan’s hair for one whole day. Wednesday.

But right now I’ve got bigger things to worry about than Evan Jones. The butterflies in my belly morph into birds and then pterodactyls. Mrs Thomas stands on the edge of the stage, right on the edge now, like it’s a diving board and she’s about to leap off. She’s a much taller lady than my mother. Mrs Thomas wears skirts so long you never see her legs, just her sandals and her toes. She pulls the badge out of her blouse pocket. It’s ruby red, the smiley face actually winking at me as she holds it up in the air. It’s going to look lush on my jumper I think, and I listen hard with a smile on my own face. She says it was an easy decision this week. Because this person tries really hard all the time. This person is kind to everyone. This person never makes a fuss. Mrs Thomas’ list goes on and I nod because it’s true. She’s right. I really am all those good things. I get ready to stand, step through and over the red tomato bodies and up the steps to the stage but then she goes and says…

‘This person tidies his Lego blocks away at the end of the afternoon without even being asked.’

Mrs Thomas doesn’t say anything about spellings. She doesn’t mention bits and shavings and lids. Nothing whatsoever about Geosafaris. She doesn’t say my name, she says his.Evan Jones. Class 3.He shoots up off the floor like a pressed spring through the tomatoes and to the stage and I really want him to trip over his black noodle laces face first into the steps, but he doesn’t. Mrs Thomas sellotapes the badge to his jumper and makes sure it’s stuck down properly with her firm fingers. Evan’s smile is as massive as the black permanent marker smile he shows off on his chest, proper puffs it out. I don’t like Fridays anymore, and when he sits back down next to me I know for sure that I definitely don’t likehimanymore. I slide over two spaces.

‘I love you, Hannah King,’ he says as he shuffles closer, uninvited. ‘Do you like my badge?’

‘Minging,’ I tell him. ‘Absolutely minging. You can’t even see it tidy on your jumper. It’s camouflaged.’

‘What does that mean?’

I say don’t worry, thick-o, and I slide further across and I wouldn’t mind if I slid away off the Earth for good. I can tell I’ve hurt his feelings, can see his lip quivering out the corner of my eye. But I ignore him, Evan Jones and his stupid badge. Mrs Thomas plays the piano and the words to ‘Colours of Day’ roll down on the overhead projector above the stage. I’m not really singing though, just opening my mouth like I’m a goldfish. I’m too sad for singing, too sad for anything. The morning goessoslowly. More spellings in class, and times tables which I just can’t do. Numbers are stupid anyway. It pretty much takes forever for the dinner bell to ring and when it does I’m back in the big hall again where there’s high windows and scratched benches and paintings on the wall from our last concert, Peter Pan. There’s a massive collage of him and Wendy suspended over the stage, some green trees made out of card and tissue paper, too.