The school bell rang out over the roofs and into the streets as my mum was holding me back at the door, buttoning up my duffel coat because it had turned cold. I could feel the sharpness of the air in my nose and my breath was smoking, but I wanted to catch up with Manus and Connor who were joining the other children coming out the houses on to the street and running to school. Busola was staying home because she had a temperature and wasn’t well. It meant she had to stay in bed all day, but I wanted to get out even though I had a runny nose. My mum put her hand on my forehead but I shook it off because she felt cold.
‘Come straight home from school,’ she said, and I ran off up the road after everyone because the bell had stopped ringing. I looked back and she was still at the door watching me, so I ran on until I turned the corner. I was feeling hot and dizzy and sticky, so I slowed down and watched some of the other people who were late run on ahead of me. I walked slowly, round past the London City Mission, and saw the two trees by the side of the flats had dropped their leaves on the ground. I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen it before. There was white frost on the fallen leaves. I wasn’t sure from the way I was feeling I could go all day at school, so I slowed right down as I came up to the wide black iron doors to the playground that were kept locked. The entrance gate further along the wall was still open because a mum was coming out of it, and it didn’t click as it closed. I thought I shouldn’t go in, I should go home. But there was a mystery story on the school television in the afternoon and I didn’t want to miss the episode. I saw one of the playground ladies coming to the gate as I looked in through the gap by the hinge. I wasn’t sure what to do so I ran across the road and ducked down out of sight behind a car. I put my head up and peered through the wet, misted windows. She leaned out to see if anyone was coming, then went in and shut the gate. I heard the lock click and then I knew I wasn’t going in.
‘Oi! You! Get into school!’ An old lady was standing outside her door on the ground floor of the flats behind me. She had on lots of coats over a big apron and was watching me. She waved her arm up at the school like she was pointing at the roof, ‘Go on! What you hiding for? Get in there!’ I looked up where she pointed and felt sick as some pigeons flew over the top, my neck was stiff. When I looked back, her arms hung down with her elbows pointing out and her shoulders hunched round like that was how she had to stand being old. I couldn’t look at her face. Her apron was grey and her coats were dirty. I hung my head down. She didn’t know I wanted to go in, I didn’t know how to tell her I didn’t feel well. She was still shouting, ‘You naughty boy!’ as I got round the corner by the railings to go home, saying she was going to tell my mum and I should be ashamed.
I turned off down Auckland Street towards the railway arches and thought about what I should do. I didn’t want to have to stay in bed all day. I wanted to go to school. But I couldn’t think properly.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I said, and then got worried someone could hear me, but I passed by the shops and by the corrugated iron of the bombsite and no one stopped me. There was frost on the doorsteps. People had gone to school and the street was empty. I kept on going with the long sun behind me and my shadow out front. The old lady was telling me go to school. I couldn’t see her face, only my long legs and the shadow of my duffel coat. I didn’t know why I was running away. It was my fault for not going in, and it was me who wanted to go in the first place.
‘Can I go?’ I said.
It was back when Busola first started going to school, and I was leaning out the window with my mum. The bell was ringing and I could see the pointed roofs of the school over the houses at the top of the street. Manus was holding Busola’s hand to look after her, and Connor turned on the pavement to wave up at us. Everyone was going except me.
‘Can I?’
‘Yes,’ my mum said, ‘as soon as the school says you can.’
I got as far as the school gate and lost my nerve. They were all inside, the playground was empty and I could hear singing. The school keeper with keys came to the gate and I got frightened. I got in under a car in case he came out to look for me. I stayed really quiet and was scraping some tar off my hand when two women going past with a pram shouted there was a child under the car, so I scrambled out and ran. It was winter because the pink tree and the white tree by the flats didn’t have any leaves or blossom on as I looked back to see if anyone was following me.
‘Where have you been?’ my mum said.
‘Just out.’
My dad was there, getting ready to go back to Liverpool, shaving in the round mirror over a bowl, flicking the razor and scratching his chin with it. He laughed at the way I was breathing, ‘Have you been running?’ He was looking at me through the tilted-up mirror that made his nostrils look bigger than his eyes. But I could see his eyes were steady, looking down over the bristles on his chin. He was my dad and school couldn’t be more scary than that. He dipped the razor in water and flicked it, watching me. I took a deep breath and tried to slow everything down.
‘Come and have breakfast,’ my mum said, and we went through the steps of bashing the egg on its head and cutting its throat so we could bloody the bread soldiers in the yolk.
My dad was getting his shirt ready to put on over his vest and saying he’d be back in a fortnight.
‘What’s a fortnight?’ I said.
He shrugged the shirt on to his shoulders and said, ‘Not long.’
‘Two weeks,’ my mum said, snapping the eggshells with her thumb and putting them in the bin. She picked me up off the chair and held me up to my dad for him to have a look at me. ‘Did you go by the school?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I just went for a run.’
‘He’ll be starting school soon.’
He nodded, taking hold of my hand, and said, ‘Soon.’ I felt him open my fingers up with his thumb and feel the oily smear on my palm, ‘What’s that?’
I looked at them, but they let me go and didn’t say anything.
There were no more questions so I waited until the teachers came out of school.
‘Who’s that one?’ I asked Connor. He was kicking a tin can down the street with his mates.
‘That’s the deputy head, Mrs Bridewell,’ Danny said, because Connor was ignoring me.
I followed her down Auckland Street towards the main road and the train station. It didn’t work because she was going too fast and I couldn’t catch up. She had black hair and yellow skin with dark blotches on her legs under her stockings. She was holding a brown bag close under her arm and walked in a tight way like someone was after her, so I backed off.
The next day I was waiting for her. She walked in the same way but I crossed in front of her so she could see me.
‘Hello, Mrs Bridewell.’
She looked at me and frowned but kept on walking, then looked back over her shoulder, ‘Are you at the school?’
I leapt up to her and walked along, looking up and trying to keep in step. ‘No, but can I go soon? I’m big enough.’
‘Yes, you are a big boy. We’ll be looking forward to having you in the school.’
I was breathless. She said yes! I peeled off and let her go, turned back and ran home.
‘Mrs Bridewell says I can go to school!’
My mum looked at me. ‘She said that?’
I suddenly wasn’t sure, but I nodded my head because it was what I wanted, and said, ‘I’m big enough.’
They let me go to school. But then they folded out these beds and told me to go to sleep. It was the middle of the day. I told the teacher I was too old for that, I’d come to school to play. She told me I wasn’t in school, I was in the nursery and I had to go to sleep. I got in under the blanket but I felt cheated. As soon as she left the room, I got up and went out the glass doors into the nursery playground and climbed over the fence into the main playground. The black iron doors were wide open and a van was coming in. No one was watching so I went to the side gate – it was open – and let it clang shut behind me. I ran home thinking I was going to complain to my mum, but on the way I decided I wasn’t going to make a fuss because I liked being out and able to run.
I knocked on the front door and my mum looked out the window and shook her head at me, ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ve come home to watch with you,’ I said.
The door knocked and Mrs Bridewell was standing there. Her and my mum had a chat. I heard them say it was a bit early and to leave things as they stand. I pushed my head out past my mum’s skirt and looked at them.
‘Hello, young man,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to go to sleep, I want to play,’ I told her.
She laughed, but I tried again.
‘When can I go to school?’
She looked at my mum then looked back at me. ‘Look at the trees,’ she said, but there weren’t any trees on our street so I thought that was a bit strange. ‘When they start to go brown and lose their leaves you can come to school.’
I was back in Auckland Street and I wasn’t in school, I was running away. The leaves were brown on the trees by the flats and on the ground, there was frost in the air and white patches in the shadows. This time it was because I wasn’t feeling well, but I still wasn’t in school. You had to be in school to be safe. I turned away from the main road in case my dad came back from night work and saw me. Going round by the Vauxhall Tavern, I followed the wall of arches under the railway. They echoed when you walked into them, long brick tunnels that felt cold and dark so I only went in when there were lots of us. An ambulance was parked up by the entrance to the second one, with its back doors open and no one there. Its lights were on and I could see the long bed inside, but it wasn’t making a sound, just flashing. As I got nearer, there was a man sitting on the ground under the arch with his back to the wall, groaning in slow bursts that stopped but then went on echoing in the tunnel. The ambulance men were there leaning over a jumble of bags and blankets. I couldn’t see the man because he had his hands over his face. They were black with dirt. A police car was parked inside the tunnel on the other side of the road, but no one was getting out because it was cold and the smoke from the exhaust pipe was misting up in the dark. I watched as one of the men from the ambulance cut up the blankets with some scissors.
At first I thought that’s why the man on the ground was crying, they were cutting up his things. But there was somebody there under the blankets, because the ambulance man was cutting away hair from where it was stuck to the pavement and lifting the head up which flopped back when he let it go. The other ambulance man helped him lift the person up and I saw it was a woman – her head fell back and her long hair came away, leaving a shadow stuck to the ground. She was stiff with cold as they brought her out the tunnel to the ambulance and that’s when two policemen came out their car and walked over to the man who was groaning. There was an icy drip seeping down the brick wall on to the pavement where he was sitting. He was getting wet. The police were helping the man pick up his things and stand, but he groaned and fell over sideways on to the ground, and the policemen were wondering what to do. That’s when they saw me and one of them came over and grabbed me by the arm of my duffel coat.
‘Gotcha!’ he said.