MY NAME IS Flipper Harries and I am a gift from God. Neither the midwife nor Dr. Beynon was ready to catch me when I came shooting out like a sleek fish into the hot little room. Through the open door, my sister, Tanya, stared at the creature lying in the kicked-up sheets of our mother’s bed. Green and glistening with a small red face and at its shoulders—Tanya could see—tiny wings, coiled like the ferns on the mountain behind town in springtime.
Tanya was sent to give the news to our father. She searched through all the dark legs in the Red Cow, but his big shape was lost somewhere in the warm noisy crowd along the bar. The only face she knew belonged to Voyle Peg, alone in a shadowy corner, sprinkling salt on his crisps, the dark blue skin of his face glowing beneath the fluorescent lights. He saw her too and knew that I’d arrived.
‘Boy or girl then, Tanya?’ he asked my four year old sister, cupping his hand behind his ear and stooping closer to her face for the answer.
Tanya, very serious, shook her head. ‘Neither.’
And then, in a whisper so small he could barely hear it, ‘An angel.’
She spotted Dad then and went running off to tell him the good news and Voyle Peg was left opening and closing his thin navy lips without making a sound.
When my mother wouldn’t look at me, Dad sent for the minister, Mr. Morgan, because he didn’t know what else to do.
Mr. Morgan took me, wrapped like a pupa, like an ordinary baby, from the midwife. ‘Remember, Marion,’ he said to my mother, ‘every baby is a gift from God.’
When she didn’t move, he put me on the pillow next to her face. ‘This one is too.’
None of them knew yet that the doctor’s magic pills were to blame for the way I am. (He’d fed them months ago to my sick mother with a cool glass of water and she’d called him a miracle worker). Nobody knew then, not even Dr. Beynon, that there were other babies being born all over just like me, hands like wings and no arms at all.
My mother has kept those words of Mr. Morgan’s, like something precious in a box. She has a way of seeing inside me, and at certain moments during the day, she comes over and takes my face in her hands and looks into my eyes and repeats them to me. ‘Remember, David, you are a gift from God.’
My name is Flipper Harries and I am fifteen years old.
I’m surprisingly good at rugby, terrible at the piano. At school I’m considered neither stupid nor clever. I’m cleverer than Mr. Clark thinks—he’s forever yelling over the noise, ‘No shouting out. Hands up!’ But he doesn’t mean hands up, he means arms up, and in the forest of limbs he never notices my waggling hand, flapping like a flannel with the answer.
I’m cleverer than Tom Ellis, and quite often, I do his schoolwork for him. I’ve perfected his handwriting, the tall left-sloping ts and the way his us are almost closed at the top like an a. I’ve been doing it, off and on, for ten years, ever since we were in class one and did Monday morning diaries. He could never think of anything to put, so I began taking things out of my life and writing them into his:
On Saturday we went all the way to Porthcawl for Angela Hansford’s birthday. Flipper bought her a pet chicken for a present. Her dad has built a wooden hut for it in the back yard.
A gypsy read Flipper’s fortune with a pack of greasy cards. He wouldn’t tell anyone what she said.
Tom Ellis is probably the most beautiful boy who has ever lived.
He has dark hair and dark skin and a narrow jaw and such a serious, almost stony expression that when he smiles it feels like a prize you have won.
He’s tall and lean and there’s not one single girl in the entire valley who’s not in love with him. His mother accentuates his beauty with the clothes she gives him to wear, most of which she makes herself. She knits strange, striped shirts for him and washes them in Dreft so they always have a sweet fresh smell in them which I’ve come to think of as his smell. All of them are soft and fall in folds from his shoulders like the loose wrapping on a present. When the girls get half a chance, they stroke and tug at his shirts.
It’s a mystery how anyone as fat and ugly as Annie Ellis could have produced someone like Tom. There’s something strange and foreign in his looks, his skin has a dry, dusty quality quite unlike the soft pale skin of the people here. He’s like a warm thing that’s fallen out of the sky into our damp little town. It’s impossible to think of him ever going underground and turning pale like the men here, and old before his time. I think that’s partly what the girls love about him, that he’s different, that he doesn’t seem to belong here. He’s like the bright vinyl paint the girls’ mothers put on their doors and window frames, Tango and Bermuda Blue, a bit of colour and excitement against the dark stone of the houses and the black of the mountain and the mine. He’s all the colour and excitement of their lives. When he and I are together, they follow us about like a plume of smoke, all watching and waiting to see who he’ll chose.
On Wednesday evenings, I walk down the hill and slip inside the Co-op. If I’ve got some money I buy something, otherwise I pretend to be looking at the pyramids of John West salmon. I hang about as long as I dare, wanting to stay but also wanting to clear off before my loitering gets on Minty Clegg’s nerves—before she looks up from filing her dirty nails and mutters, ‘Fuck off, Flipper.’
Minty Clegg works in the Co-op on Wednesdays after school with Angela Hansford. They both serve behind the counter and wear green nylon shopcoats.
Minty Clegg is a stale-looking girl with sparse hair, and large, sharp teeth. She wears her shopcoat very short and has rough, blotchy legs. When Tom comes in she smiles, baring her sharp teeth and a pulse flickers in the hollow of her freckled throat above the cold zip of her shopcoat.
Angela stays where she is behind the counter, watching too. She is quite small with short brown hair and I have been in love with her my whole entire life. I think if I could eliminate this one fact from my life, I could be happy.
She lives three doors down from us. If I lean out of my parents’ window upstairs I can see the smoke from the Hansfords’ fire chugging out of the chimney. I can see a sliver of Angela’s bedroom window and sometimes a corner of her blue curtains blowing against the sill. The chicken I gave her for her fifth birthday died years ago but the wooden hut her dad built is still there in the yard. Tom has never told me what he thinks of her and I’ve never asked him.
All I can think of is that he will chose her. These past months, I can feel how she’s begun to creep between me and Tom, something that rubs against us, like a tiny seed of tragedy.
In the bottom drawer of the pine chest in my bedroom, underneath a pillowcase, I have hidden a set of Tom Ellis’s clothes. One of his knitted long-sleeved shirts and a pair of his soft homemade trousers. They still have his sweet fresh smell in them. They are neatly folded and ready to put on.
For some time now I’ve been avoiding my mother because of her trick of looking inside me. She’s been looking at me in quiet moments of the day when Dad is asleep and Tanya is out. When she thinks I’ve been sitting too long without saying anything, she comes up to me and touches my cheek with the back of her hand.
I never planned to steal the clothes, and, really, it’s not that I’ve stolen them, it’s that he gave them to me and I’ve not given them back. A little while ago it was so hot one day after school that we went swimming in the black pond in the Dip at the bottom of town with all our clothes on. We had a bath at Tom’s house and he gave me a set of his clothes to wear.
I don’t know if it was in my mind then to keep them, but I do know that when I put them on I didn’t feel like Flipper Harries any more.
Yesterday I left a note in Angela’s desk. I didn’t sign it but I wrote it in Tom’s handwriting, the same writing I use when I do his schoolwork for him, with the tall ts and the round us. I will be under the trees by the stream in the Dip tomorrow at nine o’clock. Please come.
Undressing, I glimpse myself in the long wardrobe mirror, stooping over the clothes. It’s such a shock to see my old familiar body that I close my eyes against the sight of it and pull the knitted shirt over my head, but a cold skin has begun to close around my heart and before I know it the thought of Voyle Peg’s plastic leg is bringing a swelling into my throat, because even though Voyle is old and dying from the coal dust silted up in his yellow lungs, he can still stand on the pavement outside the Red Cow with the creases of his trousers breaking over his black shoes and no one would ever know there was a plastic leg hiding inside. He can go about with his peg between his shoe and his bum and if you didn’t know, you’d be completely fooled.
But this feels to me like the only chance I’ll ever have. In ten minutes she’ll be there, searching in the dark for the bright white gleam of the stripes in Tom Ellis’s long-sleeved shirt.
‘David?’ calls my mother from the front room.
I do tell her goodbye but I’m not sure if she hears. My voice comes out as a croak, and then I’m out the door into the night, the cuffs of his shirt tucked carefully into my belt.
It’s so quiet here tonight, nothing but the shuffle of branches above my head, a slow dropping where the water slides into the black pond.
Here she comes.
A little way from me still, she stops, and seems to give her head a little shake. In the dark I can’t see her face, only the shimmer of her blouse. One of the empty sleeves has worked loose from my belt and in the cool breeze I can feel it wafting about, like a scarf.
For a long frozen moment I stand with my eyes closed and pray for the thick waters of the black pond to rise up and swallow me whole.
‘You’re a daft idiot,’ she whispers, and laughs quietly into the darkness. There’s a soft cracking in the long grass beneath her feet, the cold touch of her hands under the woollen cloth of the perfumed shirt. She reaches up under the shirt and holds my face between her hands and kisses me on the mouth. Still holding my face, Angela Hansford pulls me down into the grass.
Oh bloody hell. Oh Jesus Christ!
MY NAME IS FLIPPER HARRIES AND I AM A GIFT FROM GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!