WE WERE UNDER the bed with coconut cakes, and we were keeping pretty quiet. The big lump above us was Huck’s sister with the big lips. We could see her brown leg dangling over the side, all smooth from shaving. It hung down past the crocheted blanket with its bright woollen stripes; pink and purple and bright green and rusty orange.
Huck was lying on his stomach, poking his finger right into the middle of a coconut cake to scoop out the jam. Me and Lewis were huddled together up against the wall. We’d just wanted a quiet place to scoff the cakes without Huck’s mother catching us. We hadn’t known that Rachel would come in with her man, and plonk her big bum right down in the middle of the wire–wove bed. She stretched the crisscrossing cobwebs that were strung across and back and forth like soft strands of string, nearly invisible in the pale halflight. Some of them were dangling and broken. I could wind them around my hand like wool and make a glove.
Her man got on the bed too, and they made kissy sounds as if one of them might get slurped down the other one’s throat. The bed springs wriggled like coiled silver snakes. We were quiet, because we knew that if Rachel found us, we’d all get a good smack in the side of the head. Then we could see the back of his heels on the floor, and his white undies, which were down around his ankles. Huck was shaking, trying not to laugh, because Rachel was squatting down next to the bed, between his legs. All we could see of her was her big black bush.
Rachel’s man moaned a bit, and then he pulled up his undies and got off the bed. One more kiss, and he was out of there. After that, Rachel stood up and walked around a bit, and when she sat down on the bed again, our noses wrinkled from the smell of her nail polish. The only wriggles on the bed above us were little, while she adjusted her toes.
It was a long time past what the coconut cakes were worth before we could get out of there. Lewis crumpled up the white paper bag that they’d come in, and wedged it between the bed frame and the springs. Huck crawled out first, and then me. I didn’t get far, because my head brushed against the wire–wove and the long black strands of my hair got snagged.
I was scared that Rachel might come back, and I started to cry. The harder I pulled, the more it hurt. Huck was laughing again, but Lewis told him to shut up. He put his hand under my head and cradled my cheek with his palm to take the weight off my hair, so that Huck could untangle it from the wire. ‘You should cut it off, sooky bubba,’ said Huck.
I looked at myself in the heart–shaped mirror on Rachel’s bedroom wall. I was pretty with my hair, so I paid no attention to Huck. The mirror was frilled around the edges, like a pie crust that someone had pressed down with their thumb. I smoothed out the knots. Sunshine came in through the lace curtains and sprinkled itself on us. Most of the morning was gone, but we weren’t hungry for lunch. The crumbs from the coconut cakes lay on the dusty floorboards underneath the bed.
All the houses in our blink–and–miss–it town were colourful. Huck’s house was painted bright blue like the sky. We sat on the step for a while and talked about Rachel, and then Huck picked some lemons off the tree and threw them at us. I threw some back. When we got bored with that, we went around the back of the house to where the weeds grew through the floor of the glasshouse with the broken pane. We crawled inside, and watched out to see if there was anyone we could spy on. Nobody, so we got bored again. Huck fiddled with the broken glass.
‘We should make a bond,’ he said. ‘Like where we smear our blood into each other’s cuts, and promise to be brothers for ever.
‘That would hurt,’ I told him.
‘You can’t do it anyway,’ he said. ‘You’re a girl.’
‘So?’ I said. ‘I’m braver than you.’ He snorted, but we all put our wrists together. Huck spat on a piece of glass to get some of the mould off, and then he drew a straight line across all of our left wrists with his right hand.
It was like drawing with chalk. A red line of blood sprang to the surface straight away, and it stung to hell. We rubbed our wrists together, and Huck said that blood was thicker than water, and that we would always, always stand by each other. Lewis’s cut was bleeding quite a lot, and he had to go home because it was getting all over his sleeve. He had to get five stitches, but we didn’t find that out till later.
*
When we got a bit older, I started going out with Huck. Lewis was nicer, but Lewis didn’t ask me. I had it in my mind that he liked me though, because he never got with any other girls. Huck was a spunk, but Lewis had fine bones like me, high in the cheeks. We still all three of us hung around together, bonded by blood, as Huck was fond of saying. Until the night when everything changed.
There was a band down at the pub, and they’d pushed all the tables up against the wall. It was a reggae band, and the place was packed. The air was sort–of golden from the lights above the band, and thick, as if you were looking at things through a glass of beer. There was a red, gold and green Rasta flag hanging across the stage, and men with dreads were everywhere, smoking drugs and blowing each other sweet-smelling shotties. It was hard to move because of the crowd. The beat was throbbing, and I could feel my hips starting to sway. ‘Come on Huck,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a dance.’ But Huck only wanted to get drinking. He was busy prospecting for the Mob.
So I went up the front and started dancing in front of the bass player. After a while, Lewis came over to me, and I did a twirl for him so that my hair spun out and brushed his arm. ‘What do you think of the bass player?’ I said. ‘Pretty spunky, ay?’
‘You should watch out,’ he said. ‘You know how jelly Huck gets.’
‘Last time we were out, he wouldn’t speak to me because he said I dance like a stripper,’ I agreed. ‘But I was only dancing.’
Lewis pulled me away from the bass player. ‘Stand over there,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a drink.
A man I didn’t know came over. ‘Huck wants you outside,’ he said. ‘He wants his smokes.’
‘Tell him I haven’t got them,’ I answered.
He shrugged. ‘Tell him yourself,’ he said, and went away. Lewis was still up at the bar, waiting patiently to be served in the crush, so I decided that I would tell Huck myself, seeing that I had no one else to talk to.
There was a big man blocking the doorway, and I had to ask him to move to the side so that I could get out. I stood on the steps, my breath making puffs of steam in the cold night air. A car was parked by the curb. A Valiant, red, like a fire engine, or cherry tomatoes. A man put his head out the window. ‘He’s in here,’ he said.
I stepped down on to the footpath, to where the glow from the street light was frosty and clear. The car door opened. I ducked my head to see where Huck was, but they grabbed me by the arm and pulled me in over their knees like a sack of potatoes. I screamed my loudest, so they put their hands over my mouth. I bit someone, and they hit me so that I could see little golden stars lighting up the blackness on the inside of the car. One of them held a cigarette lighter to the ends of my hair, and it caught on fire. It smelt like burning flesh.
My cheek got pushed up against the window, and I saw three men in the shadows of the entrance to the pub. The one on the left cupped his hands to light the cigarette of one of the other men. The smoke rose upward across the blackness in silver curls, like a glittering snail trail. I could have sworn that the man inhaling the smoke was Huck.
Then they pushed my head down into the vinyl on the back seat. They were trying to pull my jeans off, and I was trying to kick them. But suddenly the car door opened, and I was yanked out, and someone was hitting my head, putting out my smouldering hair. ‘Lewis,’ I gasped, and I was crying, and my tears were stinging, and Lewis’s hands were burnt and smudged with black.
Behind me, the car skidded on its tyres and accelerated up the footpath. The smell of burning rubber mingled with the smell of burning hair. It hit the side of a concrete power pole, and two of its wheels lifted off the ground before it slid back down on to the road again, reversing into the kerb, spinning into a scorching U–turn and screeching away.
There was a silent crowd gathered on the steps behind us. The men who’d been in the doorway had gone. ‘Take me home,’ I said to Lewis.
*
I cut my hair short after that, and moved away. The next time I saw Lewis was in a park on a Sunday. He was sitting on the steps of the band rotunda, having a smoke. We arranged to meet up for a drink the following week.
We found ourselves in a pub where the hard men drank. The tables were plain with tin ashtrays, and there were oil paintings of big, fat, red and white cows on the walls, with sad brown eyes. Blue skies and knee–length grass scattered with daisies weren’t enough to make them happy.
‘You look good with your hair short,’ said Lewis. ‘It suits you.’
I didn’t bother answering. I wasn’t too worried about being pretty any more. Somehow Huck came up in the conversation. Lewis tightened the corner of his mouth. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘Wears a red scarf. Acts like a dickhead. Not much to be said there.’
A man walked past and knocked into our table. Beer washed over the side of our jugs. Lewis decided that he was off to the toilet. I waited for a while, drawing stars on the table by dipping my finger into the spilt beer. I started to feel uncomfortable, standing by myself. I looked hard at the blades of grass that the cows in the nearest painting were standing in for as long as I could, and then I went to find out where Lewis had got to.
The door to the men’s toilets was shut, but I opened it anyway. Lewis was lying on the ground in the corner by the urinal, and blood was coming out his mouth. ‘Fuck off, little girl,’ said one of the men with steel–capped boots. ‘Everything we’re doing to this faggot, we can do to you.’
So I shut the door behind me, and walked out of there. I kept on walking and walking. And all the time, I was looking down at the finely drawn scar on my left wrist.