The halfway house was on Glasshouse Walk, that’s where Emily stayed, she was in my class and they were calling her a fleabag. All her brothers and sisters had white hair and grubby faces. There were lots of them. They came in the summer and someone said they were gypsies. I couldn’t go near because she wasn’t one of us and they stuck together. In class she spoke in a mumble and didn’t really have a voice. No one spoke to her, just about her to say they weren’t sitting next to her or on a chair she’d sat on. She didn’t say anything and it stung me she didn’t feel it was wrong, or didn’t say it was. I wasn’t sure what it was you were catching, if it was only fleas. She wasn’t dirty, only her clothes were, they were old, and to me she just looked sleepy. I could see she was different from us, the way her face was covered in a white cloud and her eyes were far off, but I couldn’t see why people didn’t like her. She wasn’t saying she was better than us, she just wasn’t joining in saying she was worse.
Sonia grabbed her hair in the playground and swung her round by it, trying to make her hair come out. A circle of people crowded round to watch and they were on Sonia’s side. It was mostly girls, but some boys too, shouting ‘Fleabag’ and I could see there were tears in Emily’s eyes. Her younger brother and her sisters were watching. She wasn’t fighting back, she was being dragged and trying to get her hair back from where she was bent forward and being swung. She had one hand on Sonia’s wrist and the other trying to keep her balance on the ground and stop Sonia pulling her over. It was a girls’ fight so I couldn’t get in and get Sonia’s hands off even though I could feel them hurt. I had to go in close and use my voice to put her off, ‘If she’s a fleabag, why you touching her?’ There was a moment when it was Sonia or me who was gonna come off worse, but she let go the clumps of hair and looked at her own hands like they were greasy and people laughed at her and moved away so she couldn’t touch them, so she was it. I could feel people looking at me so I didn’t get away with it completely, but I didn’t care who found out I was on Emily’s side. I was only worried she heard me call her a fleabag.
The reason was when we had to take our clothes off in PE, Emily was allowed to keep her vest on and the shiny, scaly skin on her neck went down both sides of her shoulders. It swirled in flows of pinks and whites down her arms and sides into the back of her knickers. It was a burn she got from an iron pot of water when she was little. She had to be careful to keep it covered up, so I only ever saw glimpses of it moving and changing under her vest. It was like watching splashes of paint turn into skin. She didn’t mind me looking, it was her skin, she lived in it. She said it didn’t hurt. It was her quick body, the way she threw herself around, I liked. The way she drew her legs up under her chin and looked around at what we were doing and enjoyed being her. It was the way we got on. She knew I was there and let me see where the burn went down the back of her vest, but she never said anything.
It was only when her older sister came up and took her away with her lip cut and bleeding and her hair pulled out of place she looked at me. I was standing there like I’d called her a fleabag, and people were looking like they weren’t sure what I’d caught.
I told my mum about it, the way I felt about stopping the fight. She looked at me sideways and shook her head, ‘Ah, no,’ she said, ‘you’re barking up the wrong tree. Those people will take from you, but they won’t owe you a kindness.’
I didn’t care. I showed Emily how to do the sums and carry the numbers across with 77 and 99 ... 9 and 7, 16. Put down 6 and carry across 1. 7 and 9, 16, add the 1 you carried across, 17 ... 176.
I wasn’t sure that was a clear example. People were looking at me, I was sat next to her, helping her with her sums, but they were the sums my dad was showing me and we hadn’t done them in class yet. I was giving her everything I could think of. Maybe she thought I was showing off because she blinked, like that wasn’t what she was thinking about and she wasn’t getting it. I put my hand up to scratch the back of my head and the girls on my table started giggling. I looked at Emily, she was going back to being blank in her eyes, like she wasn’t there and I was calling her fleabag. The teacher looked up from her desk and frowned.
‘What are you doing?’
The whole class turned round to look because it was quiet time and you were supposed to be getting on with work. Yakubu was looking, and Patrick, and Shelley, Sky, Bobby, Sonia, everyone. My face started to burn, I put my pencil down on the table and the click sounded too loud because everyone was listening.
‘Sums, miss.’
The teacher told everyone to get on with their work and came over to me and moved my chair to another table. She spoke quietly to me and said, ‘Leave Emily alone. Go on with your work.’
I looked at everyone on the new table after the teacher was gone. No one was looking at me. My ears were hot and I had to cool them down with my hands and pretend I was leaning my elbows on the table to read. Nothing was going in because Yakubu reached over and turned my book round the right way. He had his head down and wasn’t looking at me, no one was.
‘Can I come home with you?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘But if I help you with your sums?’
She shook her head and wiped her nose with her sleeve because she had a cold. ‘Don’t.’
I went up the halfway house on my own. There was a dark courtyard inside with pipes going up the walls and washing hanging down out the windows. Water was dripping down the pipes and making puddles. It smelt of the drains and there were some boys and a girl playing out with their dogs. They saw me come in and stopped, and the dogs started growling. A dog with a stiff tail and scabs on its back started barking at me. I couldn’t move, so I stood there looking up at the windows, thinking I didn’t know which one was Emily’s.
‘What do you want?’ one of the boys said to me. He had dark hair and was older so I didn’t know who he was.
‘Does Emily live here?’
‘What do yous want with her?’ one of the younger ones said. He had ginger hair and I’d seen him in school, but I didn’t know him.
‘She’s in my class,’ I said.
That gave me the right to stand there against the dogs who’d stopped growling and started moving up and down in front of me like they were excited and waiting for someone to say bite. Emily came out one of the stairwells. She must have seen me from the window. She leaned out by the brick wall covering the bins and shook her head.
‘Go away,’ she said. ‘Go home!’
The big boy growled at the dogs and got them to come to him. I didn’t know why they called it the halfway house except from the outside there weren’t any doors. There was a narrow passageway with a tall iron gate to go in and that’s the way I came out with the sound of the dogs panting and scuffling their feet behind me. It closed up again like it was somewhere I shouldn’t be.
Rows of houses were standing empty all the way back, with broken windows and dirty curtains left up. I couldn’t see why the halfway house was any different from the other houses they were going to knock down. I started to run, past the shut-up doors and windows and the ones lit up with people still living inside. There was a damp smell of charred wood like there’d been a fire. The sound of thunder, it was going to rain. Emily told me in school they were moving on, but when I reached out to touch her elbow she shook me off. She said they were going near the sea to pick hops and everyone would get drunk. I didn’t want her to go and she shrugged and said she had to. Everyone was going, I didn’t know where. I ran my hand along the bumps of the corrugated iron. I didn’t know why people were trying to stop me being with her, and I didn’t care. I was going to follow Emily. And I wasn’t going to tell my mum.
My mum was in the front room telling this story that in the old house they lived in down by the quay in Limerick there was a hook in the ceiling which they couldn’t take down because it held the roof up.
‘And let the rain in,’ Busola said. ‘Why don’t we just move?’
Buckets were out upstairs again in the big bedroom because it was starting to rain, but we couldn’t repair it because the council were knocking us down and it would be a waste of money.
Busola wanted to move, we all did, but my dad was holding out and Manus shouted her down so we could get on with the story. And the story was that a Spanish sailor had hanged himself off that hook and sometimes you could hear it creaking in the night and it would stop you sleeping.
‘Boring!’ Busola said, pretending she wasn’t listening.
‘Why you telling us this?’ I said because when I got in my mum asked if I’d been with Emily, and when I shook my head said, ‘Don’t be sad.’ I could see she thought that was why I wasn’t sleeping. I didn’t want her to bring it up again but Manus shouted me down as well because we were in the middle of the story.
Anyway, my mum said, when she was a girl they lived at the top of the house and there were times coming home in the dark they’d find strange people on the stairs. My uncle said goodnight to an old lady on the step as he was going up, but when there wasn’t an answer he looked back, and she wasn’t there.
Other families moved out, the house emptied and they were alone at the top. No one would come and visit them. My mum had to wait for her brother to come home before she could get the courage to go up. Then one night she’d woken up to see a woman in old-fashioned clothes leaning over her sister’s cot. She couldn’t speak and wasn’t able to call out when the woman turned and looked at her with dark eyes and the white face of a ghost. All she could do was go under the bedclothes and not move till the morning.
When she told that story no one could breathe. Our dad wasn’t home, the house was dark and it sent shivers down our spines.
‘What about the hook?’ said Busola. Manus told her it was all part of the story and if she didn’t believe it she should go on her own to bed, see if she liked that. There was a squabble and I didn’t get involved and didn’t listen because it was stopping me thinking. Then Busola said, ‘Wait till Daddy gets home!’
It stopped for a moment.
‘And then what?’ he said.
But our mum told us all to get ready for bed, there were plenty of stories to be getting on with before the ones that wouldn’t help. But no one wanted to leave the room.
I thought about it feeling like the story our dad told when he had to leave for school in the morning in the dark because it was far. He met a man on the road who worked for his dad, who looked at him strangely and wouldn’t answer when he said hello. He was so upset he complained to his mum when he got home, but she took him to see his dad who told him he was lying because that man had died in the night and he shouldn’t be telling lies like that. It was only when they saw the look on his face they realised he wasn’t, and they all got a fright at the same time.
It was the same story that they’d both grown up with ghosts. The stories they told about the countries they grew up in were ghost stories. And the story was you couldn’t go back there because everyone would be dead, and you wouldn’t be – ‘Let’s turn on the telly,’ Connor said.
‘Can dead people cross water over to this country?’ Busola asked, which was what I was worried about.
Manus said there were dead people everywhere and we shouldn’t think we wouldn’t meet one, so we better be ready.
‘Can they come over from there?’ I said.
And my mum said yes – that a man had followed her over and called up at the window. She’d looked out and told him no, to go away, she wasn’t coming back. So though she never saw him again she was haunted by him, not knowing was he alive or dead, and only the dark tinker’s eyes to remember him and the sadness on his face that it wasn’t going to be possible.
‘Who was he?’ Connor asked, and she said he was a tinker because there were lots of those people in Ireland and though they didn’t live long they had beautiful eyes and they could steal your heart.
I was going to ask more but Connor put on the telly and while it was warming up my mum said we could stay up as a special treat until my dad got home. She put a blanket on over our laps and the crackle of the television turned into a roaring noise. It was King Kong banging on the doors of the jungle. I didn’t want to be in the same room, ‘Turn it off,’ I said. ‘Turn off the telly!’
They couldn’t hear me because Busola was snuggling up with my mum who was looking at her not me, Connor’s lips were looking at the telly saying ‘Shh’ ... and Manus was hiding part of his face under the blanket.
‘I don’t want it!’ I said, and jumped up to the door.
Manus looked up at me from far away and said if I didn’t like it I should leave the room.
‘Go to bed,’ said Busola.
I couldn’t sleep, so I sat up on the stairs. I tried to keep pressing in the button for the light to stay on but it wouldn’t. It was dark upstairs with the buckets for the rain and downstairs to the front door. I didn’t want to be on my own, so I sat outside on the landing with the front-room door between me and King Kong where I could be close to the others. I couldn’t think about running away, my heart was pounding and the telly was screaming. It went quiet, there was a sound of water. But then they switched the light off in the front room and I froze, watching the blue flicker of the telly under the door. I could feel the draught coming up the stairs and started to shiver and sweat at the same time.
I had bad dreams going on from when I saw it before that King Kong had me in his fist on the edge of a cliff and was waving me about. Down the bottom, the devil was standing over a boiling hot cauldron of fire, shaking his horns and roaring to have me. I couldn’t go anywhere. That’s how I was until downstairs the front door banged open and my dad came home.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
I looked up at him, standing in his work clothes with pieces of solder on the sleeve, mud on his boots and rain on his face.
‘Hiding,’ I said.
‘What happened?’ My mum was looking up at my dad with a hand over one eye. The light went on and the telly went off, so I could go in with everyone blinking and frozen by the film. He got a blue airmail letter crumpled out his pocket and showed it to her. He looked like he’d seen a ghost because his dad was dead. He opened it on the bus on the way home and didn’t know what happened next until the conductor told him it was the last stop and the bus had to go into the garage. He walked home knowing his dad was already in the ground.
‘Oh, God!’ she said, and put her arms round him because he looked like he was going to fall. He shook his head and sat down by himself on the edge of the armchair and looked at the floor.
‘Sorry, Daddy,’ Busola said.
He looked up like he didn’t know we were there and had to think about why everyone was still hiding under the blanket. Then he nodded and said, ‘Everybody, get ready to write home.’
‘Tch, shh ...’ my mum said, even though my dad was upstairs and couldn’t hear. We were brushing our teeth out in the bathroom and Busola was saying she didn’t even know what his dad looked like or what his name was.
‘How can we write if he’s dead and we don’t know who anyone is?’ Connor said. ‘Who we writing to?’
‘Your grandmother.’
Connor gave her a look, and she said, ‘Don’t use his name, it’s Ajagbe. Just say you’re sorry to hear the news, and do it before the pain goes away and you bring it back. Do it tomorrow.’
‘Daddy says she doesn’t speak English,’ Busola said with the toothpaste in her mouth.
‘Oh for God’s sake, someone’ll read it to her, just write, I’m going upstairs.’
‘Did you ever meet him?’ Manus asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘but look at your father and he’d not be far off that.’
I wasn’t sure, we didn’t look anything like our dad, but Manus didn’t say anything and neither did I. But when she’d gone back indoors and left the lights on for us to come back he did say, ‘That’s the end of that.’
‘What?’ Connor said.
‘Him taking us back to show off,’ he said.
‘The sun’s so hot it burns you as you get off the plane,’ Busola said, and spat out.
‘What makes you say that?’ I said, but she ignored me. I felt wobbly at the thought of getting on a plane.
‘I don’t want to go to his hot country and get burned,’ Manus said. ‘I want to stay here.’
Connor pulled the string of the bathroom light off and ran into the rain in the backyard leaving us in the dark. We all made a rush to the door not to be the last left out and I hadn’t finished brushing my teeth. I kept hold of Manus and didn’t let him get me off in case a ghost got me. The door banged my shoulder and Busola trod on my foot but that just made me go faster. Our dad was by the stairs coming out to the toilet and watched us piling in through the back door and pulling each other back. He could see everything and Connor looked like he’d been caught.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said. ‘Go to bed.’
He moved back and we filed past with our heads down. I glanced up at him from the bottom of the stairs as he stepped out in the rain and pulled the back door shut.
‘At least we’re alive,’ Busola said.
The next day I told Emily my granddad was dead.
‘How did he die?’ she said, and I didn’t know and I’d forgotten what his name was. We were hiding on the back steps at playtime where no one could see us.
‘He’s from Nigeria,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how they die.’
‘My dad’s dead.’
I didn’t know that. I couldn’t imagine what her dad was like, if he had white hair like her. Her cold made her nose raw and her top lip red. I couldn’t let her go shivering like that, but I felt I couldn’t leave my dad in case he died as well. I wasn’t going to be able to love her enough.
‘What about your mum?’ I said.
She looked at me with her hands squashed up against her cheeks and her elbows on her knees, ‘She drinks.’
The pub her mum went to was over by the China Walk. You could sit out on the steps or go in the cubicle where they sold you crisps through the hatch. You could see people inside there when the side doors opened into the bars. And Emily’s family sat in the rough part, which meant I could go in and look and they couldn’t send me away, and dogs weren’t allowed.
‘I’m coming to talk to her,’ I said.
‘She’ll only tell what I’m telling you,’ Emily said. ‘You can’t come with me.’
I put my foot in the side door as it was closing and looked into the pub. Her mum was sitting there, smiling and laughing with her head back on the wall, surrounded by people with drinks on the table. Some of the men had their caps on, they were all dressed in clothes that were different from other people’s. Their clothes looked dusty like they came from a long time ago and got worn out with working. The women had big earrings, Emily’s mum didn’t, like her smile was all she had on. She was looking at me over people’s shoulders and they all began to turn round and notice me. ‘Shut the door, I’ll be out,’ she said, like she knew who I was. I’d seen her before when she came into school after the fight, and I saw her through the pub window when I was standing on the ledge and holding on to the sill to see who was in there. But then Emily came out the pub carrying her little brother and looked at me. I got down and looked at her sandals on her feet where the straps were broken and couldn’t say anything, or even lift my head up.
‘What you doing?’ she said.
I couldn’t say, so I said, ‘Can you play with me?’
She lifted her brother higher up on to her side because he was wriggling to go, and shook her head, ‘I’m going a different way from you.’
She was sending me away but looking over her shoulder at the boys who were playing football in the road in between the cars, and shouting for them to be careful, ‘Car coming!’
‘Just stay with me,’ I said.
She turned back and shook her head with her hair going everywhere so I couldn’t see her eyes and said, ‘I’ve got my family.’
‘What’s your mum say?’
She pulled the hair back off her face and shrugged, ‘She says there’s no one for you to fight.’
Some of the boys were watching from their game in the road, her brother struggled free and ran over to them, so she didn’t stay with me and I went in on my own.
I didn’t move at first because I wasn’t sure what Emily’s mum was saying, she was telling me go outside, but then people were whispering and I wanted to know what they were saying. I didn’t know how to tell my foot to move back, I had my face wedged in the door and people were looking at me. I felt stupid and said, ‘I’m Emily’s friend.’
Her mum said again, ‘I’m coming,’ and a man took off his cap and shook his head, but he smiled like he wasn’t sure and that gave me the feeling I could step back and not let the door bang on my face, my ears were stinging and hot already.
‘So you’re the fella with Emily to carry numbers in your head and wants to teach her, is it?’ Her mum was sitting down on the steps of the pub with me one side and Emily on the other, handing us crisps from a packet. I nodded and she said, ‘Do you love her more than me?’
That stopped me chewing.
‘Learning’s a fine thing,’ she said, ‘if you’ve love in your heart.’
I couldn’t follow the different ghosts that swooped down and went different ways through me. Emily’s mum had straggly silver hair, I didn’t know what my granddad looked like but my dad’s hair was black, Emily’s was white, so her dad’s must have been like hers and that’s where it was leading – I couldn’t love her like her dad did. Any more than my dad could go back and change anything now his dad was dead. The ways were cut off and the ghosts were guarding them.
‘What was Emily’s dad like?’ I said.
Her mum looked at Emily, and then back to me. ‘I see,’ she said.
Emily’s eyes were darting around the cars as though she could see an accident coming, or she could see her dad and I couldn’t. Her eyes were always moving, going somewhere I couldn’t follow or coming in close so there wasn’t any room between us.
‘I’ll tell you he was a dreamer. Are you that?’
I looked back at her mum, leaning down towards me with her silver hair, her face full of lines and hairs round the bottom of her chin. I could smell the drink on her breath. She blinked and I looked at her eyes, grey flecked with yellow and dark eyelashes.
‘Are you?’
I nodded a little bit because I was still getting woken up by King Kong.
‘Who are your people?’ she said.
I didn’t have an answer, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I looked around – there were people passing in the street, going up the Cut for the market with their shopping trolleys now Lambeth Walk was closed. ‘The people here,’ I said.
‘Which ones?’
I shrugged. ‘All of them.’
She put her head back, and then she nodded. Emily was looking at me and listening.
‘It’s a big world out there,’ her mum said. ‘Are you ready?’
I wasn’t because I shrugged my shoulders, and then I shook my head. I felt myself getting smaller, and felt ashamed that Emily could see it. There was a lump in my throat and my chin creased up. Emily looked down so I could only see the side of her face, covered in cloud. I didn’t have anything else to say, so I told her mum, ‘I don’t pick people who want me.’
Some of Emily’s sisters came jumping round the corner of the pub, chasing marbles past us along the pavement with the other girls. Her older sister stopped when she saw me, her mum nodded her to go on.
‘Go over there and play with them,’ her mum said to Emily, getting her to jump off the steps and run over. Then she turned to me and gave me the packet of crisps, ‘That’s all for you.’
I didn’t want them, so I shook my head to give them back, but she took a crisp and put it in my mouth.
‘There’s love gone into the making of you, and it’s not everyone can pick and choose,’ she said. ‘Emily’s told you we’re away?’
I nodded, and so did she.
‘She asked if I’d put it to you.’
I knew she was sending me away but I couldn’t move.
‘We only moved here for the hospital and that’s – no more.’ She stopped for a moment, and swallowed, lifting her eyes up to catch back the tears and look across at the girls. Emily flicked a marble and ran after it, throwing herself into the chase like a white cloud in a grey dress with one of her sandals flying off. She told me this would happen. She didn’t tell me when she said her dad was dead that it was still going on.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
Her mum tried to smile and shook her head, ‘A dreamer. And you could drink the stories would come out of him, to Emily and all of them sitting here as you are now. Where we are there with the drains, in that halfway house, he told them there’d been a garden with a palace out of China was good for work on the way down to the coast and he wanted to see the sea. He put me in that palace and he put the gold in my eye, do you see?’
I nodded at her eyes and let her see me looking.
‘I’m not the one now to let his name go out of the community.’
I frowned because I couldn’t follow everything – was there a palace? There weren’t any gardens left round the halfway house, just the green across by the flats. There were factories along the railway, and there was Glasshouse Walk, was it a glass palace? We were by the China Walk, but that was a dark old estate, it was a long walk back to the halfway house, over Black Prince Road. ‘What garden?’ I said. ‘Do you mean Vauxhall Park?’
She laughed and shook her head, ‘It’s not to be found. This garden’s a dream not a memory. But Emily knows now there’ll always be dreamers.’ She leaned in towards me and went serious, ‘We’re going down to the sea. I’m telling you this not because your skin is different from ours – you’ve a fine pelt on you,’ and she rubbed the side of my arm with the back of her hand, ‘but because he’d want me to be careful of you. You’ve tried to help Emily but she doesn’t need it. You’ve your own people and Emily has hers. Take those crisps, now, and go on.’
I turned the corner of the pub towards Bedlam Park, not because it was the way home but because I didn’t want to see Emily watch me being turned away.
‘Mum?’
She looked at me as I got out my wet clothes from school and she was searching for some trousers for me to put on.
‘Emily didn’t come to school today. None of them did. They’ve gone.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Emily’s dad died,’ I said, ‘in the hospital. They were going away.’
I couldn’t undo the button on my shirt because it was wet down the front and if I pulled too hard it might tear. I looked up at her for help and she was looking at me like I’d already said too much. I looked down at my button.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said, ‘but I’ve something to ask you.’
I thought of Emily playing marbles up by the China Walk, their swirls of colour as she flew to pick them up, and there being no one to fight. Maybe someone saw me on the steps of the pub with her mum. What was I doing there? My mum lifted up my chin so I had to meet her eyes, and I could see I’d done something wrong.
‘Have you written your letter?’