Ian Barrett was going to kill me. Everyone was saying so. He was the best fighter in the school and I was dead.
Even Kat came to say goodbye.
‘Ian Barrett’s gonna kill you. Can I have your pocket money?’
‘When he kills you, can I have yours?’
‘We’ll see about that,’ she said, and skipped off back to her gang to watch. They were all watching. I was on my own.
I saw Ian Barrett in assembly, but he didn’t look at me, he smiled at someone behind me. I looked round to see who it was, but no one looked back. Everyone was avoiding me, they all knew I was in trouble. He was smiling because I couldn’t stop him killing me.
My brothers beat me up, but they could see in my eyes they couldn’t beat me up badly enough for the way I was going to get my own back. I was going to stamp on my glasses, I could make my nose bleed look really messy. They had to bear that in mind for when it was time to go home.
There was a new teacher in assembly. She put on some cowboy music. A creepy, gravelly voice crawled out, I was born under a wandering star ... But there was nowhere to run. She was swaying to the music. Everyone looked bored. They were waiting for Ian Barrett to kill me.
Right now, I thought, I don’t like anyone. I listened to the gravelly voice. I could feel the grit in my teeth as he punched me. I could see stars.
The bell rang. It was breaktime.
‘Aren’t you going outside?’ the teacher asked. I thought of telling her there was this boy with hard fists who was going to break my nose and bang the tears out my eyes – but she was new.
‘I’ve got a cold,’ I said.
Round one to Ian Barrett. Only I didn’t go out lunchtime. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t feeling well.
‘Let him be the best fighter in the school,’ I said out loud to the shafts of light falling from the tall windows on to the empty classroom, screams of laughter echoing up from the playground, ‘I don’t have to get beaten up.’
It wasn’t true. Ian Barrett had to beat me up. Manus and Connor were the best fighters in the school, but they’d left. The only person who ever stood up to my big brother was my other brother. No one else got a look-in. They’d knock you out so they could get on with it. One wanted to be Cassius Clay, the other was a bulldozer. When they couldn’t find each other, they found me. I couldn’t always see it coming, it would just spill over. But they never expected me to take it personally, even the time I got my tooth knocked out. ‘What you crying for?’ ‘Stop snivelling!’ It wasn’t about me, it was about them. It was about fighting, and being the best fighter in the school.
‘Cat and dog!’ my dad said, when I got my mouth home, crumpled and bleeding. ‘Chinese, Japanese, Congolese, Cat-and-Geese!’I started complaining they were out of control but I couldn’t get used to the new way my mouth felt, the feeling of being sore and sorry at the same time with my tongue in the way, I couldn’t get the words out. I was annoyed and ashamed – it hurt – and started blubbing, which made it worse, especially the way my mum was shaking her head, so I had to use the tight, angry look in my eyes until I found a way of spitting blood out through the gaps in my teeth to tell them I’d had enough.
Not even them getting beaten by my dad could stop it. Manus and Connor weren’t only the best fighters in the school, they were the only ones. There wasn’t room for anyone else. No one else got beaten up, and no one had to worry about being beaten up but me.
Manus left, but that left Connor, and people knew not to cross him. He tried to be fair and control his temper. When he had me on my back with my arms pinned down under his knees and he was going to punch me in the face, one of his mates said, ‘Mind his glasses!’ He stopped, and snorted up the snot from his nose instead and gobbed it on me the way Manus used to. He was saying he was the only fighter in the school and I shouldn’t challenge him. People were standing round in a big circle and even they went, ‘ Urgh!’ He looked up and shook his head like What you looking at? and they all moved back. It was Kat who stepped in and said, ‘Get off him.’
When Connor left everyone said I was the best fighter in the school. Until Ian Barrett said he was gonna kill me. Lots of people didn’t come back after the holidays, and more were leaving as their houses got knocked down, it felt in the playground anything could happen now to anyone.
‘What you gonna do?’ said Patrick.
It was the afternoon and the new teacher was letting us muck about while she did something out the room. It was only Patrick with his sticky-out ears who came up and said anything. He was a loner and everyone knew he didn’t speak much. If he hadn’t asked me, I wouldn’t have had to come up with an answer. I would have gone on avoiding it. But the way he asked didn’t let me – pulling on his ear which made it look bigger when he was so little.
‘I’m on your side,’ he said.
All the loners were on my side, that’s what it made me think. That’s what I was now and I knew how it felt. I was on my own and my brothers were at bigger schools.
‘What am I gonna do? What you gonna do?’ I said. ‘After me he’s gonna be beating up everybody.’
He looked worried and a bit lost.
‘You on my side?’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
I suppose that’s all it needed, Patrick with his big ears coming up to say he didn’t want Ian Barrett to be the best fighter in the school. I had to do something.
I couldn’t have got home anyway.
‘Tell everyone it’s after school in the playground. I’m gonna deal with Ian Barrett.’
It went round like wildfire. People started coming up to me, ‘What you gonna do?’
‘You scared of Ian Barrett?’
I could see they weren’t sure what to do.
‘He’s gonna kill you, so do what I tell you.’
When I came out in the playground, he was there with his gang. They were making out they’d already won, climbing up on the roof of the shelter with their sticks like he was king of the castle. People were running around the playground like they were going home, but they weren’t, they were waiting to see what happened.
‘You gonna come down?’
‘No,’ he said, and looked down his nose at me. That was a mistake, people getting ready to run saw he was strong but he was stuck, so they stayed. A crowd built up by the chain-link fence on the rough ground separating the infants from the juniors. Some of them started climbing up to get a better view. It was like they were getting up high to show we were strong too. I told them to get down. They did and that put me in control. I told everyone to start picking up stones.
‘You coming down?’
‘Why should I?’ and he looked at me trying to see what I’d do. I threw a stone and hit one of his mates who gave a look like it stung him on the leg – he looked stupid. They all did, they hadn’t seen it coming. It stopped them jumping up and down. I threw another one and missed – they flinched – another one hit Gilbert from my class on the knuckle. He dropped his stick and it fell backwards off the roof. Everyone joined in stoning Ian Barrett and his gang. There was nothing they could do, it was raining stones. A whistle went off from a teacher on the steps but we ignored it. What could they do up on the roof with their sticks? The ones only in his gang because they were scared started climbing down off the roof. We let them off with a kick. One by one, they were skimming down the drainpipe but the stones got thicker and even the girls joined in. A stone caught Ian Barrett on the lip. The ones who were with him because they were gonna win got lots of people kicking them. The bell started ringing. I told people let them go, and they ran off. The last ones, his mates, looked at him, climbed down and got pushed about. They ran off, leaving Ian Barrett alone on the roof, holding his stick.
‘What you gonna do?’ said Patrick.
‘Leave him,’ I said.
‘We won the war, in 1944!
Guess what we done?
We kicked ’em up the bum!’
Lots of people didn’t want to go home because we’d won, but teachers started coming out and made them stop stomping round the playground and go home. They called Ian Barrett down off the roof.
I waited for him outside school. I had Patrick sticking to me, so we sat up on a car bonnet together and waited.
He came out without his stick. He had a welt bruising up on his lip, and stopped when he saw us like he was thinking of running.
‘All right?’ I said.
He nodded.
Patrick slid off the bonnet and shrank back along the side of the car as Ian Barrett walked over. I didn’t move, but I got ready to kick out with my feet. He stopped in front of me. I hadn’t seen him this close up before. He was in the year above and Kat said he was bigger than me. She was wrong, he was the same size, older, more bony. And he had green eyes. I could see flecks of brown and yellow in them. It was his hair made him look bigger, brushed out and frizzy. But his face looked tough like rubber, with brown skin that was paler than me, I could see freckles on his nose and his cheeks. His fists were clenched, and his lip quivered like he was trying to stop himself from crying, I couldn’t tell if he was hurt or angry.
‘Let’s be mates,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ and he nodded, but his voice came out twisted up with what he was feeling.
‘All right,’ I said.
I watched him walk away with a limp like a stone must have got him on the leg.
It was all right until Errol Clark stood up to me the next day and said he’d enjoyed that. He didn’t have any supporters, he was dangerous. His older brother was in prison for killing someone. He looked skinny and tough, and wore a black Crombie coat with the buttons missing that he held closed with his hands in the playground because he didn’t have a lot of clothes. He had scars on his face and bony knuckles, and I didn’t feel I should fight him.
‘Fuck off,’ I said, and he smiled and walked off.
One of the dinner ladies on playground duty came up and said to me, ‘Were you involved in the stone throwing yesterday?’
She had Theresa and Kat on her arms like they were steering her, then making out they didn’t know me. I looked up at her and didn’t say anything.
‘They’re watching you,’ she said.
‘How’s school?’ my mum asked.
My uncle Gerry was there who’d been away fighting in the army when we were growing up.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I had a fight.’
They both looked at me, and looked at each other.
‘What you fighting for?’ he said.
‘Not to get beaten up.’
He looked at my mum and shook his head, ‘A rough school is it?’
‘It’s who’s doing the fighting,’ she said, turning on me. ‘You’re not to be fighting with your fists and you must never hit anyone with glasses, do you hear?’
‘They hit me,’ I said, and touched my glasses to make the point.
‘Who hit you?’ she said, looking suspicious.
I didn’t answer because Manus and Connor flashed into my mind and I didn’t want my uncle Gerry to know.
‘Can you teach me to fight?’ I asked him.
He put up his big fist in front of me and said, ‘Here, catch that!’ I tried to grab it as it moved about prodding me in the face and the stomach, but he pulled it away as strongly as he prodded it. ‘Have you no strength?’ he said, and caught my hand in his and crushed it.
‘Ow!’ I said. ‘That’s cheating!’
‘You’ve got to know your own strength,’ he said, and let go. My hand ached and I couldn’t use it. I felt tricked, he’d damaged me, I felt mean.
‘Did you kill anyone?’ I said.
‘That’s enough now,’ my mum said, pushing me away. ‘Go on with you.’
I wouldn’t budge and stared back at him as he lifted up his cup, I could smell it was whisky.
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said, putting it down and making his eyes larger than saucers. ‘If you start fighting, you’ve already lost.’ The new teacher was telling me my work wasn’t neat and I wasn’t concentrating. That was because Errol Clark was waiting to get me. He didn’t have anything to lose. He didn’t have socks, there were holes in his shoes – in the toes and under the sole. He watched me in the playground and he hung about after school to see where I went. I had to go out the other gate and take the long way round.
At first I ignored it, but Patrick came to school and he’d got beaten up – he had a black eye and a bit of his ear missing. He said it was an accident, but everyone soon knew it was Errol Clark.
‘What d’you say to him?’
‘Nothing,’ and he looked away from me, ‘he just came up and bashed me.’
‘What you gonna do about it?’
He looked back at me like I’d let him down, like I was a coward, like he’d learnt his lesson, like he’d trusted me. ‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Was it because of me?’
He shrugged and pulled away, ‘Why should everything be about you?’
I didn’t have anything to say.
‘When I leave school, I’m gonna join the army,’ he said. And he stopped talking to me.
I was gonna have to think about it. What did Errol Clark want? He was a loner, his brother was in prison. No one wanted to play with him. He did everything on the sly, but he wanted people to notice him, make way and be afraid of him. He was pulling pieces off me and I was pretending he wasn’t, picking on my friends and showing everyone I was a coward. He hadn’t touched me, but he made me feel weak. He’d taken a bit out of Patrick’s ear, and it wasn’t even about him, it was about me.
Or was it? I saw Patrick walking off with the flap of yellow skin loose on top of his ear, everyone did. It was about fear. Fear stops you feeling properly. He was making everyone feel he was there. It wasn’t about me, or Patrick. It was about him, Errol Clark. He didn’t have a feeling for people. He was fighting because fighting stops you feeling afraid. It stops you feeling –
‘That’s enough!’
We were in assembly and the headmaster gave a warning about fighting, they were going to come down hard on it.
‘I believe in every one of you!’
The school nurse found a penknife on Errol Clark but he wasn’t going to be expelled. He was gone, but then he was back in his black Crombie smiling at me. He had the same shoes on but different trousers, too short that showed above his ankles even though they were let down at the bottom. There was a strange smell as he kept pushing past me in the corridor. I didn’t know what it was, it stuck in my nose. He got too close and I grabbed his sleeve to push him off. His coat came open, his T-shirt was torn and dirty, and where his sleeve came up there was a bandage round his wrist with brown stains on it. That was the smell. He pulled away fast and walked off. I could feel the violence like a shock from his arm. It wasn’t like anything I’d felt before.
I walked out the gate from school and he was standing on the corner with a metal pipe hanging under his Crombie, he saw me and pulled it out. He was in the way between me and home so I didn’t slow down, I kept walking towards him. He turned out the way with a swagger, folding the pipe back into the coat flap. I was trying to keep my walk steady until I got round the next corner. My shoes had holes in the bottom and my socks were wet on the puddles I wasn’t avoiding, the pavement felt cracked and uneven, every step was heavy and clumsy, I felt I was going to trip.
‘You want my help?’
He wasn’t sure he’d got me right, and gave me this puzzled smile like he couldn’t believe I was going to take on Errol Clark. I needed Ian Barratt on my side. I looked at him, there was still a red mark on his lip, his face was puffy and he had rings under his eyes like he couldn’t sleep. It was like looking into a mirror.
‘He’s not like us,’ I said. ‘We have to talk to him.’
‘Why don’t you just beat him up?’
We stood there looking at each other, and it took a while to sink in. I shrugged and said, ‘I’m tired of fighting.’
He blinked his green eyes and brown lashes at me. A look of being hurt welled up in them. He could have shook his head or thumped me, I wouldn’t have blamed him. He pulled his lips shut and looked away.
‘You gonna help?’ I said.
He was thinking, but there was a shy look in his eyes I hadn’t seen before that made me like him. Like he recognised what I was saying, I wasn’t trying it on but where did that leave us?
‘I like you,’ I said. ‘And I don’t wanna fight any more.’
‘You don’t like Errol Clark,’ he said.
‘Do you?’
He stopped for a moment, looked away and back again, ‘You know he’s mad, don’t ya?’
Errol Clark did up his zip as we came in the boys’ loos, it was too quick, he got stuck and spilt a bit on his pants. He made both his hands into fists and faced us. It felt like we shouldn’t have cornered him. He was looking both of us up and down, trying to find a way through, his face stony and hard. I thought he was going to charge at me, but Ian Barrett shook his head, ‘You can’t beat both of us.’
‘We want to talk to you,’ I said. But we’d gone about it wrong from the way he was breathing. He was squeezed into his chest, ready to ram his way through. His shoulders were back, his chin up and his mouth was pressed shut so he breathed through his nose. His nostrils twitched and his eyes were glassy and bloodshot. ‘But not if you don’t want to,’ I said.
He said if we wanted to, come and try. He had big people could come and he wasn’t gonna talk to us. We should get out his way and not vex him, he could look after himself so we should mind out.
I looked at his trousers and the holes in his shoes, ‘Who looks after you?’ But I already knew he didn’t have anyone looking after him, he was getting himself to school on his own.
‘No one,’ he said.
‘Leave us alone,’ Ian Barrett said, ‘and we’ll leave you.’
We turned to go but he started shouting we were scared of him, cussing like he wanted us to fight him. We looked at each other but Ian Barrett shook his head.
So we left him there, screaming at us to come back, on his own in the toilets with the pee dripping down his pants.
I didn’t have a lot of time to think about Errol Clark going home with no one to look after him or being frightened, or what was happening when he came to school. I punched him in the face as he tried to whack me with the metal pipe. The clatter as it hit the pavement set off a reaction – my arm was bruised and the blood moved from my head into my chest. I could still use the arm and tried to grab him but he slipped out backwards and found a milk bottle he brought down on the side of my face. I was distracted by the glass smashing on the pavement, I didn’t realise it cut my cheek and tore open my ear lobe and there was blood streaming out. I’d gone down on one knee on top of him but he picked himself up and ran. I jumped up over broken glass to go after him, but a grown-up grabbed me from behind under my arms and pressed my head down so I couldn’t move. I thought it was one of his big people and lashed out backwards with my foot against his shin. It hurt him but all he did was tighten the pressure down on my neck so I had to go limp. Errol Clark came back to give me a kick but the man swung me round away from him and shouted, ‘Oi!’ It turned out to be a man from the Lord Clyde pub who could fight because he let go one arm and grabbed Errol Clark by the collar, knocking the legs out from under him and pushing us both down on the ground. I saw my blood dripping on to the pavement and there was a look on Errol Clark’s face like he’d won and I’d got the worst of it. I struggled to get him but it was over, the man pushed my face down into the blood and I ended up in hospital.
I had stitches in my ear and a padded plaster over my cheek. I felt I could face Patrick again, but he didn’t say anything and he wasn’t going to. I felt like a walking bandage and I wasn’t going to talk about it to anyone, either.
When the plaster came off I couldn’t smile properly. It looked ugly from the stitches and lopsided in the mirror, so I tried to smile only on one side of my face, but that didn’t work, it made me look sorry for myself. I didn’t feel like smiling anyway. There was a mood in the school like that’s what you get for fighting. No one looked at me like I had stitches hanging out my ear or a big patch on my cheek, they looked at me like I had it coming and Errol Clark had done it. But no one went over to him – there wasn’t a best fighter in the school any more, only a bad smell hanging over it and nobody was going to get involved.
The new teacher, Miss Lollard, wasn’t new any more. She said, ‘Concentrate on getting your sums right. The cut will heal.’
Shelley told me they were going to expel Errol Clark, but it wasn’t about me, it was Patrick’s mum complaining. Then I heard they were going to send Errol Clark to another school, but he went missing. The fight was over and I’d lost. There was no way of getting my own back and I had to face people knowing I couldn’t make it add up. Fighting wasn’t worth it, I was proof you couldn’t beat people up to make them like you. You ended up losing friends, and you looked like me.
‘How is it?’ my mum said, peeling back the plaster they put on once they’d taken the stitches out.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, looking in the mirror, ‘it doesn’t hurt.’
It did, it throbbed. And there was the purple-brown smell of the ointment they put on – and something else, that smell again my mum had when she wasn’t well that was like stale soap.
‘You’ll end up looking like Al Capone if you’re not careful,’ she said, and I couldn’t stop my smile making the crack of the scar look longer. I changed it quickly to the other side of my face. She watched it happen and held me in the mirror. ‘You’re still handsome,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s dance.’
There was music coming from her radio in the bathroom, with us swaying from side to side in her old-fashioned way that there wasn’t a care in the world and I was the best dancer she’d ever met, and it was just the two of us dancing cheek to cheek ... My dad came to the hospital and told me, as well as my cheek and my ear, my eye was bloodshot. I’d nearly knocked it out and they’d put a stitch in the corner. If I wasn’t so badly injured, he’d have beaten me himself, but for now I should recover and he’d be watching me. It made me feel safe to be in hospital, out of reach but looked after. And that was how it felt in the bathroom with my mum holding me up. I was all right, I was going to get better. But as we danced I had a flashback to Errol Clark in the loos with no buttons on his Crombie and his pants wet, crying out he could look after himself. I went stiff and couldn’t dance any more. My mum felt my arms go heavy, I couldn’t disguise what I felt because I didn’t know until then I was still carrying him, that I was on his side.
‘What is it?’
She looked at me seriously, so I told her about him wolfing down dinners at school and waiting for seconds, the look of still being hungry, about the holes in his shoes, not having socks or anyone to go home to, about not knowing how to be with people and being scared on his own. She frowned and pushed me away.
‘You’re too sympathetic,’ she said.
The news went round Errol Clark had been stabbed and was dead. He’d been found in a boarded-up house you could climb in by pulling back the corrugated iron over the front window. They’d found him there and taken his body away. He’d got into trouble with big people and that was what happened. He hadn’t been to school, but being dead brought him back and people looked to me to see what to feel about it.
I could still feel my scar when it itched, and see it the wrong way round in the mirror, but I couldn’t always remember what side it was on when I wasn’t looking. I was told it was going to fade, so I waited.
When the police had gone and boarded up the house again, I climbed in the toilet window you could reach by going through the bomb site at the back and getting over the wall. The top flap fell back and I was standing on dust and floorboards in the loo until my eyes got used to the gloom. It was dank-smelling out in the backyard with overgrown weeds and the stink of cat pee, but inside there was a smell of old people. I listened but I couldn’t hear anyone. The toilet bowl was cracked and stained, there was poo but no water in it. I started to go through the rooms. They were full of rubbish. Furniture was left but it was broken. There was a Crombie in a pile of dirty clothes and blankets pushed up against a wall in the back room. That was his bed. Empty bottles and chip packets were scattered about on the floor. In the front room there was a toothbrush with the bristles flattened and a dirty bit of soap stuck to a plate. He was living there. I didn’t go upstairs, the banisters were broken and there were some steps missing, it was too dark. I panicked and got out, scratching my stomach on a nail where the flap hooked shut from the inside. My legs were shaking and I couldn’t get over the wall, so I stood for a while in the backyard looking up at the house. I was afraid Errol Clark would look down from a window. A tree was growing up out the brickwork just under the roof. It was still. The sky was high up and clouds were moving slowly over as though the wall of the house was going to fall back on top of me. The house was dead and the windows were dark, and I was down underneath in the earth. I don’t know how I got out of there.
‘What’s the matter?’ Connor found me on the street, squeezing back out the bomb site under the corrugated iron.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘What you gonna say about that?’ He pointed at the cut in my shirt where it was torn across my stomach, there was a patch of dried blood along the edge of it.
‘Nothing,’ I said as I put my finger in it. ‘It got caught on a nail.’
He stood back to look up over the fence at the backs of the houses like he didn’t believe me, then turned and shoved his chin out, ‘What did Errol Clark say?’
I punched him hard on the face. He got me, banging my head up against the corrugated iron with his hand under my chin, holding my arm and kneeing me on the inside of my thigh. ‘You’re fucking mad!’ he said.
‘I hate you!’ I shouted.
He pushed me off and made a big bang kicking up against the metal fence. People came out the shops along the street to see what was happening. They saw us and shook their heads – Connor with his bloody nose, me with my cuts – and Mr Edwards the greengrocer shouted, ‘Get outta there! Go on, bugger off!’
I followed Connor down the road, keeping my distance, waiting for it to start up again.
We got home and went straight out the backyard. He got a dirty shirt out the washing and a towel to clean up in the bathroom, and put some of the brown ointment from the medicine cupboard on the scratch across my stomach telling me to let it dry before I put the shirt on. It stung the tears out my eyes but he told me not to make a noise. He had dried blood round his nose and washed it off with a bit of water.
‘What you gonna do?’ he said.
I shrugged.
‘You’ll get yourself killed. You have to stop.’
‘You fight.’
‘Not like you. You fight to lose.’
I wanted to hit him again, but I stopped myself. Because that would make it true. He wasn’t fighting me, he was talking. I was the one punching out with no one there. I was losing because I couldn’t stop. I was always going to be losing to Errol Clark, I was fighting for breath.
He tapped his forehead. ‘They wanna drive you bonkers,’ he said. ‘You’re stupid if you let ’em.’
‘Who?’
‘Because you’re black,’ he said.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘You are to them. You stand up for yourself and they say you’re aggressive, and push you into fights. What you gonna do about that?’
I wasn’t sure what he was on about, so I shrugged.
‘What you gonna do?’
‘Stop fighting?’ I said, but I was guessing.
‘They can’t treat you like that, it’s wrong!’
He looked angry, so I got ready. ‘I don’t want to win, I just don’t want to get beaten up.’
‘You’ve got to! Or you’ll always get beaten up!’ He was waving his arms with his fists clenched to stop all the punches, ‘But there’s more of them than you ...’
‘More of who?’
He looked at me like who was he talking to? ‘I’m telling you. Are you listening? You have to pick your fights. They want to see the black boys fight each other. You can’t give in.’
Everything turned round in my head. It wasn’t about me, it was about him in school having to fight. He was in his big school, and Manus was in a different one. I was getting beaten up by Errol Clark but I hadn’t thought about him coming home with holes in his knees, my dad complaining about his jacket being torn. He was black there and they were making him fight. He was stopping all the punches in the air, talking about going mad. But you can’t pick your fights if you can’t think –
‘Can yer?’ he said.
I looked at him. It sounded clear but he felt confused, like he was looking at me but talking to himself. It wasn’t going to get better when we had to move school, it was going to get worse. He was out there having to fight and everyone was against him.
‘You got any friends?’ he said.
He was looking down his nose at me like I didn’t. I thought he was gonna bash me because I was on my own and a loser. But he shrugged and didn’t bother, I wasn’t worth it.
‘All the black boys are on my side,’ he said. ‘We’re picking off the ringleaders.’
Ian Barrett was avoiding me. I got him outside school on the swings behind the pub on Vauxhall Street. He was on his own smoking with a cloud round his face but threw it away on the ground when he saw me. He shifted on his swing, then changed his mind and picked it up again. As I came over he was sucking it to come alight and coughing. Then he chucked it away. I sat down on the swing beside him and rocked it with my feet on the ground.
‘Are you black?’ I said.
He’d been holding it in and let it cough and stream out in grey smoke between his lips. ‘You smoke?’ he said.
I shook my head.
‘Go on, have one.’
He held a fag out from his top pocket and got a box of matches out his shorts. I could smell his fingers and shook my head again. He lit up and made a big cloud of smoke blowing the match out. It looked like it was coming out his nose and ears as well as his mouth and I had to dodge it coming my way. He shook his head to clear it and turned the fag round for me.
I only took one drag but it burnt my mouth and came out my nose and made my eyes water. I felt sick and there was a taste that made me feel poisoned. He took it back while I tried to stop coughing and went on smoking.
‘My dad’s black,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know him, he doesn’t come round.’
I tried to imagine what not knowing your dad was. I couldn’t, it was just blank.
‘My mum’s white.’
It was me who asked him, but I couldn’t get used to black and white like it was television when it was my mum and dad. I hadn’t thought of my mum being white. Only being my mum. It made me feel sick. It was the cigarette smoking. I rocked my swing back to stand up straight and sort my head out.
‘So what are you then?’ I said.
He chuckled and spat tobacco out on the ground. ‘Same as you,’ and he looked at me with his green eyes. If that was true, his face was looking yellow from smoking. ‘But I’m not on your side any more.’
I sat back down on the swing and took it in. No one was on my side.
‘Do you blame me for Errol Clark?’
He took a deep drag like he was drawing in all the different things that happened and breathing them out slowly between his fingers like it was all just smoke now anyway.
‘Didn’t help, did it?’ he said.
Everyone thought it was me, but it was him too. I’d dragged him into it. He was never gonna be on my side.
‘So what do you want?’ and he flicked the cigarette into a puddle.
I didn’t have a side for me to be on.
‘Why did he want to fight me?’ I said.
The rain was drying up, but it was still chilly and windy enough to make everyone go home. We were both in shorts, I could see goose pimples going up both our legs. It looked like chicken skin, but I was shivering and he wasn’t.
‘He was scared of you,’ he said, and stood off his swing to go. ‘You scare people.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. I watched Ian Barrett walk away across the playground, jumping over puddles with gusts of wind rippling the surfaces. He turned at the gate and shouted out, ‘You know he was my dad’s cousin?’ He swung the gate closed between us. ‘That’s why he came, but no one looked after him and his brother went to prison.’ He went round by the pub and left me there.
I watched the sky pass in the puddles. When I got up and leaned over one to look in at myself I was standing under grey-white clouds with blue patches. I put my foot into the dirty water and let it seep in through the hole in my shoe. It was cold. I felt my toes go numb. There were cigarette butts and metal bottle tops all round the swings. Brown glass smashed over by the fence, and clear glass scattered everywhere. I thought what would happen if I got my feet cut or fell over on to my palms.
I couldn’t see a way through. I looked down in the puddle and told myself to stop fighting, and kicked my reflection away.