tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77232894765367368362024-03-08T15:28:39.182+00:00Lifting the worldA story...chapter by chaptergranny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-47672354372126458812007-07-17T07:49:00.000+00:002007-07-17T07:50:09.669+00:00Going Mental Chapter sixgranny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-35996595125880519012007-04-11T08:32:00.000+00:002007-04-11T11:41:51.821+00:00Part Two Chapters 13 and 14<div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER THIRTEEN<br /></div><span style="font-style: italic;">When it is time for the crane to come down it disassembles its own mast.</span><br /><br />‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I say. Then I shout it. ‘WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME.’<br /><br />Granny isn’t sitting down. She is standing by the window gazing out at the cranes. I can’t see her face properly.<br /><br />I say, quite gently, as if I was the grown-up and she the child. ‘Why don’t you sit down granny? You’re making me feel giddy,’<br /><br />Immediately I wish I hadn’t. I don’t like to see granny sitting there on the edge of the sofa, looking like - well, not like granny. Biting her nails. And then taking them out of her mouth, looking at them angrily and sitting on her hands for a moment as if to control them. At last she pulls a packet of cigarettes out of her .bag. I knew she smoked sometimes. But she’s never smoked in our flat before -. now she takes out a lighter too and lights a cigarette and pulls on it gratefully. I fetch a saucer from the kitchen for her to use as an ashtray. I know my mother. .<br /><br />Actually I am glad of an excuse to be out of the room for a moment. I have a lot of things to get used to. Not just what my grandmother is telling me. I’ve seen a lot of different versions of her before angry, nice, funny, distant, grannies: I’ve grown used to her many different selves, some of them nicer to know than others. It is part of her being a real person, rather than ‘I’ve got to be nice patient person because I’m a grandmother’ kind of stuff,’ which was what my other grandmother, used to be like, the one that’s dead now.<br /><br />(‘Maybe that’s why she’s dead,’ Trace said when we were talking about grandmothers once. ‘She doesn’t sound cool, not like you’re other one. ‘Yeah, Granny is cool,’ I said. ‘My other granny wasn’t for sure, I don’t think that’s why she’s dead.’)<br /><br />But this isn’t cool granny. This was one is the opposite of cool; not the granny I know at all. More like granny’s identical twin, perhaps. Like a wrinkled baby. (I’d don’t think I’ve ever noticed before how many wrinkles granny has.)<br /><br />‘And you believed them?’ I say. ‘They told you you’d killed Ella and you believed them? Rahilah was a twin. Her mother told her she was the blessed one, because she lived. And they told you that?’<br /><br />How could anyone be so stupid I am thinking? How could anyone think an unborn baby could kill another unborn baby in any proper sense of killing? How could anyone even say it?<br /><br />‘Alright,’ I say. ‘So you were the bigger and stronger twin and when you were in the womb you so squashed Ella she was born weak and died after a few days?’ (This is the rough, very rough version, of what granny just told me.)<br /><br />Granny flinches.<br /><br />‘So who’s fault was that?’ I say, ‘How could a foetus know what it was doing?’<br /><br />Granny flinched still more at the word ‘foetus.’ As if it was a word I shouldn’t know. But how can I not know it with all that anti-abortion stuff around? (The pro-life people have got a lot to answer for - giving teenage girls nightmares, Trace says.)<br /><br />‘Of course I know that now,’ Granny says. ‘Of course I know that NOW. But I didn’t know it for a long time and I didn’t want that happening to you. I didn’t want you grieving the way I did.’<br /><br />‘For Ella?’ I say.<br /><br />Granny hesitates. ‘For my twin,’ she says. ‘Ella. They gave me her name too. Or rather added it to mine. Ellanora.’’<br /><br />‘But you’re Nora,’ I say stupidly. ‘Not Ellanora. That’s a stupid name.’<br /><br />‘Yes. I’ve always left the first bit off. ‘<br /><br />‘Ellanora, “ I say wonderingly, sadly. ‘Ellanora.’ And again, angrily. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’<br /><br />‘Why should I have told you,’ Granny says, suddenly almost angry herself. “It wasn’t any of your business. Or anyone’s business for that matter. Except mine.’<br /><br />‘And Ella’s,’ I say.<br /><br />‘There was no Ella. There is no Ella. She’s dead,’ answers Granny. She stubs out her cigarette and lights another one. I open the window,<br /><br />But it wasn’t like that for me was it?’ I say, when I sit down again. ‘My twin was only there in the beginning: then disappeared. It happens to lots of people. It doesn’t mean anything.’<br /><br />‘No.’ granny says ‘No. Maybe not.’ She looks at the open window. ‘I’m cold, Esther.’<br /><br />I go and shut the window again. Outside the cranes are swinging as usual. I can see one driver in his little cabin. It seems like a dream that I was up there too, high as that. It was a dream: in a way.<br /><br />‘And you really think Mum would have told me what your mum told you? That it was ..’<br /><br />I couldn’t say, won’t say, ‘my fault’. It wasn’t. For a sudden moment I am so angry I want to scream out loud. With mum and granny, both.<br /><br />‘No, not really. Of course not,’ whispers Granny.<br /><br />‘Why didn’t she tell me I had a twin that disappeared then?’<br /><br />‘I suggested she didn’t,’ Granny says.<br /><br />‘And mum always does what you tell her?’<br /><br />Neither of us answer. (And actually when I’ve calmed down, and thought about it all, there doesn’t seem any reason Mum should have told me. My twin wasn’t such a big deal, really, we hadn’t spent nine months alongside each other in the womb; he or she’d been gone before I was a real person; it was kind of curious, interesting, not much else. OK I was almost a twin, OK, but so are millions of people, Granny said. Nor should Mum have told me about Granny if Granny really hadn’t wanted her to. It was granny’s private secret. Maybe if Mum had known about the Ella stuff she would have told me. But Ella hadn’t put messages on her mobile, Mum never knew who my imaginary friend was; or that lately she’d come back.) None of this means I felt like forgiving either of them. I still don’t.<br /><br />‘Did mum know that you were called your name and your twin’s both? Ella and Nora?’<br /><br />‘Why should she?’ Granny says. ‘She wouldn’t even have known I had a twin if her grandmother, my mother, hadn’t told her. And my twin’s name never was Ella, officially. She wasn’t registered, christened her, she didn’t have a name – they said that was my fault too, and that babies who hadn’t been christened went to hell. I don’t know why they added her name – the one they’d meant for her– to mine. But they did.’<br /><br />Everything comes back to Granny. It is such a terrible story she is telling me that I shouldn’t be angry with her. But I am.<br /><br />‘You should have told me,’ I say in a little hard voice that I don’t recognise as my own.<br /><br />‘I know,’ she replies in a voice so small, so desolate, I don’t recognise it as hers, either. And she adds. ‘But then I thought you did know after all. When the messages from Ella came from your phone I thought – I thought….’<br /><br />‘And you thought I could do anything like that?<br /><br />‘I must have done, mustn’t I.’ she says. ‘What other reason could there be?’<br /><br />She has a point. What other reason could there be? Ella came out of my head didn’t she? Didn’t she?<br /><br />‘Gross,’ I say. ‘Gross, Granny. Creepy.’ And at this we look at each other at last and each of us shudder a bit, and each of us shakes our head.<br /><br />********<br /><br />We’re sitting side by side on the sofa now. I don’t know where mum is. She’s being tactful, I daresay, just like mum. I rather wish she wasn’t. I tell granny about Jay then. ‘He’s going to be alright,’ I say. ‘They hit him on the head. They tried to burn his hair off. I know he’d been teasing them. But he didn’t deserve that. They called him a terrorist.’<br /><br />Granny sighs at this.<br /><br />I say. ‘A girl rang me on my mobile to tell me. To gloat. So I had her number, Trace and I went to the headmistress and told her the number and the police found out who it was. And when they talked to her she was so frightened she told them about Frankie. He’s gone now. He’s not going back to school. I think he’s been put into detention of some sort.’<br /><br />‘Poor kid,’ says Granny. ‘I wonder what hell he came out of?’<br /><br />‘Poor kid? That bully? What about Jay?’ I remember Rahilah too. I am not, not, not, going to feel sorry for Frankie or any of them. Without Frankie the rest of them seem quite normal. But I don’t want anything to do with them even so. ‘He has a horrible mum,’ I say. ‘But so what? So do lots of people. Jay could have died,’ I say. ‘Would you still feel sorry for him then?’<br /><br />‘Even more sorry for him, possibly,’ Granny says.<br /><br />I shrug in disbelief. Granny doesn’t hug me the way she used to, I wouldn’t let her hug me now, but she does let my hand lie quietly on hers; her old hand, wrinkled and spotted. It feels very cold. It’s not only Frankie I’m never going to be able to forgive, I think. It’s Granny too, in a way. Not the Granny I knew anyway. Not the one who didn’t tell me what I needed to know.<br /><br />‘You’re so sad, Granny,’ I say scornfully. Granny doesn’t answer. But she doesn’t stop touching my hand. . ‘Poor Ella,’ I say then. And suddenly, no matter what, this new Granny and I find ourselves sitting there together crying for someone who never lived properly, never had a life, never had a chance to know or be known by anyone. Someone who lived side by side with Granny for 9 months in their mother’s womb. Did it matter? Does it matter? Probably not. But then why, suddenly, almost holding, touching hands, are we both so full of grief?<br /><br />I don’t know what Granny is thinking. I only know that she gives me my hand back after a while like she is giving me a present. And that we keep on sitting there her and me, side by side, weeping our eyes out. While outside the window the cranes keep on making their wheeling conversations.<br /><br />(They haven’t much time left to talk together now, though. If they’ve things still to say they’ve got to say them soon. Soon the buildings will be all finished. Soon all the cranes will have gone.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER FOURTEEN<br /><br /></div>I still like cranes, a lot. Even though I could have died twice over that cold night, of cold, hypothermia, or of launching myself into the air at that great height, as Ella begged me to. But I didn’t die, not once and there’s a bit of me quite pleased that I actually saw into the driver’s cab and so forth. I even wish I’d seen it better, less doped with sleep, with bewitchment, as I was at the time.<br /><br />There is no such word as ‘bewitchment’ of course. ‘Outside yourself?’ the shrink they made me see suggested, when I used ‘bewitchment’ to try and explain how it felt. ‘Inside myself’ I said. So far inside myself I couldn’t get out, I’m thinking. But I don’t say.<br /><br />She’s quite nice the shrink lady. She’s made me understand a lot of things much better, even though she hasn’t a clue really about Ella. How could she? She’s just a doctor. Listen.<br /><br />‘If something really stresses you, Esther, you can make yourself do things like sleep-walking, climbing cranes in the middle of the night; like sending yourself messages from someone else.’.<br /><br />‘You mean my getting messages from Ella means I’m mad? Means you think I’m mad?’ (Me: angrily.)<br /><br />‘I’m suggesting that such manifesting such phenomena mean you are under stress. They do not mean you are mad.’ (Ms Psychiatrist: patiently. We’ve had these discussions before. She’s learned by now that I know quite a lot of long words.)<br /><br />‘So what’s mad then?’ (Me. Truculently.)<br /><br />‘What do you mean by the word ‘mad’?’ Esther?’<br /><br />‘Manifesting such phenomena under stress.’ (Me: smartly.)<br /><br />Ms Psychiatrist sighs. Then she laughs. Then I laugh. She knows I hear what she is saying – I do too. Yet I still believe there is – or was- a real Ella out there. And I prefer Granny’s version of events, which explains some things Ms Psychiatrist can’t. ‘You were like a radio receiver, Esther, picking up the signals. From Ella.’<br /><br />‘So you were you sometimes,’ I say.<br /><br />But either the signals have gone now, or I am no longer a receiver. If they’re still coming they come to someone else. Even so, it is nice to have these people on my side. The shrink lady is cool, I think. Cooler than Granny these days. She feels too sad to be cool. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t like being sad for her.<br /><br />*******<br /><br />Rashid. He saved my life. He did. If I’d been out there much longer, I’d have died of hypothermia. Or I could have been so dazed, uncertain, I could really have thrown myself to the ground. I know that. But he dialled 999, he got all the services there, fire, police, ambulance. Everyone. Including my mother.<br /><br />A fireman climbed up to get me down. It didn’t take him the full half-hour to climb to the top of the crane, because he was swung part of the way up on a fire-engine ladder. But it couldn’t take him all the way to the top, he had to climb the rest of the way inside the tower, the way the driver does, the way I did, on the ladder. He wrapped me in special blankets like cellophane to keep me warm. He carried me down to the fire-engine ladder over his shoulder, in a fireman’s lift. I must have been unconscious by then, more or less. I don’t remember any of it. I only know what other people have told me. All I remember is waking up on the ground and finding myself lying on a stretcher, being carried out of the building site, my mother on one side, Rashid on the other.<br /><br />How Rashid managed to get himself there, for a girl, not his relative, I don’t know. As a Muslim he wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with me, except what he could not avoid, at school. But he did get himself there. Perhaps the title LIFESAVER or RESCUER gave him special rights in the matter. He sent me flowers in hospital too, even though he couldn’t come to see me himself. He got news to Rahilah, and she came to see me instead, carrying samosas from her mother and special home-made sweets from Rashid’s mother too.<br />There was piece about Rashid in the local paper, as well as about me. ‘Quick-thinking boy’, it said. There was even a disapproving report on Crane Talk (Another Unsecured Crane) that did not mention either of us by name. At school Rashid was seen as bit of a hero. I was seen either as a heroine –or mad. (Trace definitely thought I was mad, and said so: many times. Just the same she was the one kept on asking. ‘What was it like up there, Esther? What was it like?’ I tried to tell her. But I couldn’t really. I couldn’t remember much, to be honest. It’s sad.)<br /><br />**********<br />Ah Trace. An amazing thing, but an anti-climax too- she and he took it all so coolly, that it didn’t seem like anything much. Yet it was a big thing, or should have been. A grandfather finding his daughter and his granddaughter: a granddaughter finding her grandfather: a daughter finding her father. The similarity between Bob, the seventh dwarf’s paintings and Misa’s painting was no accident, after all. He had painted both of them. He really was Misa’s long-disappeared father: Trace’s never-known grandfather. He really was the man from whom Misa’s mum had run because he had bullied her. He wasn’t dead at all. Those sun and moon mobiles that he told me about those weeks ago, had been made for Misa – Artemisa - and for her brother Apollo. (Who doesn’t call himself Apollo, these days, Trace says, just ‘Jack.’) What a coincidence, says Granny. Drily. As if she knows more but isn’t saying,<br /><br />It doesn’t make any difference really. I find Trace sometimes, in Poseiden when I visit Bob, that’s all. Also she and Misa got special invitations to the private view of Bob’s exhibition at MAC after Easter, along with me and Granny. Misa didn’t go. Nor will she visit the boat. Bob says he doesn’t mind, and maybe he doesn’t. Anyway Trace says she will, in the end. ‘She kept his picture, didn’t she,’ she says. ‘And her moon mobile. She hung it over my cot when I was little. And why did she bring us to live in Birmingham. Where Bob and my grandmother lived, before my grandmother ran away. She says it was just because there was a job here. But there were other jobs she could have. Why did she take that particular one? ’<br /><br />In the summer we’re going to take the narrow boats out, both of them, Poseidon and Mnemosyne, right out into the country for a week or so. Me and Granny, Bob and Trace. Granny says she can manage the locks and things if we’re all here to help. Trace says if Bob gets too bad-tempered she can always ride with us instead.<br /><br />It’s nearly summer now. The geese have their goslings; they sit on the grass outside the writer woman’s flats – the woman still waves to me sometimes from her window when I cross the bridge. I wave back. One day she isn’t writing, she is leaning out of the window, pointing at a fat-looking goose just below her. And suddenly the goose climbs to its feet and out from under its wings fall FOUR goslings, tottering a bit in a way that reminds me of Barty. The writer woman and I wave at each other like crazy and laugh. She even blows me a kiss. I’m too embarrassed to blow her one back. I pretend I haven’t seen it, that I’m looking back instead at lovely G.S. BROUGH Washers and Gaskets, still standing there no matter what, next to the Mailbox. But I like it.<br /><br />(Barty walks now, by the way. He started walking in mum’s sitting-room, the day I came out of hospital. REALLY. )<br /><br />*******<br />The flats are finished, except for things like windows and inside decoration. The cranes have almost all gone now. I look out at the window at other people’s homes – or soon to be homes – instead. Things keep on changing, but then they always will. Just sometimes they change for the better.<br /><br />Stuart has another boyfriend now, for instance. A nice one, called David. They come to see us often.<br /><br />And there’s the Stampman. Most days now he is sitting outside Holliday wharf holding out his hands with the stamps on. Border wags her tail when she sees him. Granny brings him sandwiches with ham and things inside. (He doesn’t eat the ham. I saw him give it to the ducks once. He only seems to like bread. Maybe he’s a vegetarian. He gives the ducks Granny’s cheddar too. But not always.)<br /><br />Now Frankie’s gone, his gang has split up. Without him noone dares to behave the way they did round him. Better still, Rahilah has come back to our school. She wasn’t doing well at the Islamic School. She wants to be a doctor, she says, her father agrees with that, so does her mother. If you want to be a doctor competition is very fierce. Without good science teaching you will get nowhere, and the science teaching at Anthony Morris High School in Smelly Poke really is much better than at the Islamic School for Girls, Rahilah says. She and I often do our homework together now, at my house or hers. My marks are improving quickly. Miss Key isn’t worried about me any more, which makes my mother happy too. Good.<br /><br />Rahilah is definitely, my best friend, even more than Trace is. ‘She’ll turn you into a Muslim before you know,’ Trace says. ‘No way,’ I say. But don’t think I haven’t thought about it. Would I have a family like Rahilah’s if I did? Would my mum be happier? Perhaps I could marry Rashid if I was a Muslim. He and I dare to be more friends these days. We’ve been for two walks along the canal already. He is my protector, he says. I am his sister. We don’t touch each other. Nothing is said. Not yet. We’re only just fifteen after all. For the moment we are brother and sister. There’s years and years and years of the world ahead of us, we hope. But I still don’t really know what’s inside his head.<br /><br />I’d never ask him to come on our narrow-boat trips, for one thing. He wouldn’t come. Nor would Rahilah - I’d love to ask her, but I don’t think her Dad wouldn’t let her. But he would let her go on little day trips around Birmingham canals; probably we’ll do some of those. It wouldn’t be any use asking Rashid, though, not even for those trips. Anyway I wouldn’t dare.<br /><br />Jay’s hair is growing back. He’s his old joky self again, almost. Though I don’t think he’ll ever be quite that Jay again, he’s alright. We are friends. But things have changed, as usual; we’ll never be quite the friends we were before.<br /><br />(Oh and one more thing. I discovered what crane drivers do about peeing up on the crane. They take up a bottle and bring it down again. Of course that wouldn’t do for women crane drivers, like the one who still writes to the crane-driver’s message board, the other Ella -if that is another Ella- I have to assume she is: I don’t know what she does. I’m not going to write and ask her, for sure.)<br /><br />******<br /><br />I think of my Ella sometimes. A bit of me misses her - I liked my imaginary friend. But maybe I liked her less when she became so very nearly real.<br /><br />Poor Ella, I think. It’s better to have a life than not to have had one. I hope she is peaceful now, no longer struggling.<br /><br />Her last email to me said. Goodbye Esther.<br /><br />I was crying as I wrote Goodbye Ella, my very last email to her. Life can be so very sad. So cruel, I thought as I sent the words winging into space. They came straight back to me, marked from Administrator: undeliverable mail. I didn’t try sending them again.<br /><br />A day or two ago my mobile rang once, twice. Then it rang off. When I looked to see where it came from it just said. Unknown number.<br /><br />That’s it then. Message Undeliverable. Unknown number.<br /><br />The only place I can say the words now is into my head. I say them:<br /><br />GOODBYE ELLA. GOODBYE<br /><div style="text-align: center;">THE END<br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Penelope Farmer Lanzarote 2007</span>granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-36043738845175033102007-04-04T08:11:00.000+00:002007-04-11T08:40:40.991+00:00PART TWO Chapters 11-12<div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER ELEVEN<br /></div>Barty comes to the flat as usual that evening. I play with him while Mum makes tea. His tooth has come through – a darling little white thing on his little pink gum; he’s not grizzling any more. He pulls himself up wand walks around the furniture, grinning away, so pleased with himself it hurts. On the other hand he is so near walking properly that I can’t bear it. ‘This time,’ I think, as if Barty’s learning to walk would solve all my problems. This time he’ll do it. I’m sure he’ll do it.<br /><br />I put a big cushion in the middle of the floor. I pick up Barty, take him over to the cushion and lean him against it. Then I sit a little way away, holding out my arms. ‘Come on, Barty,’ I say. Come on. Come to Esthi.’<br /><br />He stands there his head skewed round, laughing at me, his two little white teeth quite plain. I feel as if I could eat him. At the same time I am very determined.<br /><br />‘Come on Barty. Do it for me.’<br /><br />He does come to me: but not walking. He just drops to the floor and crawls my way.<br /><br />I put him back. I take his hands off the cushion, so that he wavers standing there. He sits down again, hard, on his bottom. Then he crawls towards me again, laughing. He thinks it’s all a game.<br /><br />But it’s not a game to me; not any longer. For some reason I’m almost crying. If Barty won’t walk for me, nothing is ever going to go right again, I think.<br /><br />‘Please, Barty, Oh please.’<br /><br />He is back at the cushion, still laughing at first. The front of his dungarees says OSH KOSH. (Osh is the name of a town in some funny place a long way away. Beyond Russia? Yes. I don’t know why I know this, but I do.)<br /><br />‘Please, Barty.’ He stops laughing now. He looks puzzled. His mouth starts going square, a dangerous sign. Is he going to start crying? He’ll never walk if he does that. So I make funny faces at him and then he starts laughing again. ‘Walk, Barty.’<br /><br />I pull him. This time he takes a step. But then he topples forward. In slow motion I see him landing on mum’s little stool which I’ve not bothered to move. Barty hits his head: hard. A lump comes up almost as quickly as he starts bawling –screaming. I pick him up frantically trying to calm him down but nothing works and now mum comes running – she grabs him up, and as she rocks him looks across at me and says, angrily ‘Have you been trying it again, Esther? What are you thinking of?’<br /><br />Concern for Barty has made her forget about the need to be nice to me because of my sleep walking. She shouts at me and I shout back and run out of the room, my problems made worse not better. I go to bed, bury my head under the blankets and howl stupidly and loudly, hoping that she will hear.<br /><br />When I stop finally I can’t hear Barty crying any more. I hear my mother talking to him, I even hear him laugh. I hear my sister turn up to collect him, hear her and mum talking together in the hall – I can’t hear what they say but I do hear the door shutting behind them. There’s silence for a while. Then my door opens. I bury my head again as Mum comes in. ‘Is Barty alright?’ I ask, from underneath the blankets. It can’t have been very clear, but she still hears me.<br /><br />‘He’s got a bruise,’ she said, ‘but he’ll live.’ ‘Silly girl.’ she adds then; softly; but my head is out from out of the blanket now. I hear every word.<br /><br />I am still very upset. I feel a bit better after she’s been but not much. And in a while I feel as miserable as ever. I don’t get up for the rest of the day, and I don’t want any supper though mum offers to bring me some.<br /><br />I sleep quite well though; I don’t dream, that I remember; I don’t sleepwalk. I wake up feeling better, and go off to school not willingly but not quite so desperately.<br /><br />It’s not raining today; even the wind has dropped. The sun is coming out as I walk in at the school gates. Maybe life isn’t so awful after all, I think. Even when I notice Frankie’s girls smiling at me I don’t think anything of it. They are just smiling at me and I smile back at them.<br /><br />Everything seems normal enough. I notice Jay isn’t in class, but he said he had a cold yesterday, probably his mum is keeping him home. His mum always does keep Jay at home for the least little illness, even though he’s very healthy and catches fewer things than most of us. It means that today at least I won’t have to worry about him winding up Frankie. Trace seems in a good mood, too. Rashid scrawls me a notice about our maths, signing it Rashidx. Maybe next time Barty comes he really will start walking, Until break-time I am happy.<br /><br />Even when I see the two police officers – a man and a woman - coming in at the gate I don’t think anything of it. The police are always coming to our school. When it’s not to do with someone selling drugs or something, it’s what’s our headmistress calls ‘public relations’; meaning ‘make friends with your Bobby.’ Or: ‘Police means nice guys here to protect you: they don’t beat anyone up, ever.’ They walk into our classrooms carrying their hats and introduce themselves as Constable This or WPC that and advise us on road safety, etc etc etc. Some classes have even been given tours of the central police station. Lucky them, Trace says. I guess she’s joking.<br /><br />But these police haven’t come to talk about road safety. When they turn up in our classroom – it’s an English class, our teacher, Mrs Adams, has finished with Lord of the Flies, is trying to interest us in “To kill a Mocking Bird’ a book that is supposed not only to improve our English but our moral attitudes towards Racism, ha, ha, ha - they are not smiling. Standing between her desk and the whiteboard, they talk to Mrs Adams in low voices, while we whisper among ourselves, both curious and scared. Something not nice at all seems to be happening: Mrs Adams is looking horrified. Shaking her head as if to refuse what she’s been told, she turns round, waves at us furiously to be quiet.<br /><br />We stop talking at once.<br /><br />‘The officers have something to ask you, class,’ Mrs Adams says. ‘I’m sure you’ll all tell them anything they want to know..’ She pauses. ‘If you know it. ‘ Our silence grows heavier.<br /><br />‘Did anyone see Jatinder Patel this morning?’ the WPC states, looking around our faces. The policeman standing besides her looks closely at us too. But all they must see apart from worry at this is bewilderment. None of us want to think there’s anyone in our class called Jatinder. If Jatinder is someone we don’t know, maybe Jay himself is alright.<br /><br />‘We all know him as Jay here,’ Mrs Adams says.<br /><br />Trace, Rashid and I look frantically round at each other. This is our worst fear, what we’ve been waiting for. I feel so angry with Jay suddenly. Haven’t we kept on warning him? The sun still shining outside the classroom might as well not be shining. I gaze fixedly at the shadows of the window bars in the patch of sun alongside the windows. It feels as if they are widening and spreading. They are spreading in my head, as much as anywhere, It doesn’t matter. Jay’s dead, I’m thinking. I can’t bear it. I can’t. And it’s all my fault. Not just for telling him they wouldn’t mind him because he’s Hindu. For liking Rashid better than him, too if Trace is right. I pray she isn’t.<br /><br />I reach out and touch Trace’s hand. She doesn’t withdraw it. Just lets it lie there coolly, touched by mine. The two police I see are gazing more fixedly at us than ever. Presumably they are noting the horror and wondering why it should arise so fast at the mention of Jay’s name.<br /><br />Our teacher certainly notes it. She shakes her head. Before the WPC has had a chance to ask her question again, she says, hurriedly - she’s nice, Mrs Adams - ‘Jay’s had an accident,’ she said, ‘He’s in hospital. He’s not...’<br /><br />‘When did you last see – Jatinder – Jay?’ the WPC breaks in again, touching her silly black hat with its black-and-white chequered band. She’s got frizzy red hair under it and underneath that freckles. She’s wearing a wedding ring, a wide gold one. I prefer noting these things to her words, which are stopping our world still. I note a buzz in my pocket too – my mobile vibrating. We are supposed to have our mobiles turned off inside school, but you can get round that by setting them to vibrate only; most of us do. This is a message vibrate, not a phone call. But I can’t check messages at the moment.<br /><br />‘Not dead,’ Mrs Adams says.<br /><br />Someone – Janice - puts up a hand. ‘Jay was at school yesterday,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t come today, so how could I of seen him?”<br /><br />‘Has anyone seen Jay this morning?’ the policewoman persists. I look around. Everyone’s faces are blank; even the faces of the girl who hang around with Frankie’s lot are blank.<br /><br />‘Well, class,’ Mrs Adams says. ‘Well if you do think of anything, if you did see him coming to school, or knows someone who did…’<br />’<br />I shake my head. Everyone shakes their heads. And I don’t think anyone is lying not even Frankie’s girl. I want to shout out ‘Ask Frankie.’ But I daren’t. It feels as much as my life’s worth; as much as anyone’s life’s worth.<br /><br />The policewoman begs a black marker pen off Mrs Adams. Turning her back on us she writes a number on the board. Then she puts the pen down and swings round to face us all again, wiping her hands as if she’s got ink on them. But I don’t think she has.<br /><br />‘If any of you think of something, anything, ring me. Or ask your teacher to ring me,’ she says ‘That’s the number. My number. Anything you tell me will be in the strictest confidence. Don’t be afraid.’<br /><br />She touches the uptilted brim of her hat once more; her wide gold wedding-ring catches the sun and flashes a little. The policeman besides her shifts his hat from one hand to the other. He’s wearing a wedding-ring too I notice.<br /><br />“What’s happened to Jay?’ Trace asks. What we’ve all been wanting to ask, but didn’t dare to; perhaps we didn’t entirely want to hear the answer. At the same time she takes her hand off her desk away from my hand, and folds it with its fellow in her lap.<br /><br />Write the number down everyone,’ our teacher is saying now, before WPC has the chance to answer. But she does so then; while all our heads are bent obediently, writing. I write the number in my rough book alongside a silly scrawled drawing of Homer Simpson. And a much more careful one of the upper part of a crane with the driver’s cab, drawn it from memory, that I’d been pleased with at the time.<br /><br />The WPC says. ‘He’s had an accident, I’m afraid. He’s unable to tell us anything about it yet.’<br /><br />‘Is he unconscious?’ Trace asks. She is of course a doctor’s daughter. If he’s in the QE perhaps Misa is looking after him. Would someone of fourteen be looked after by paediatrician?<br /><br />I use such pointless thoughts, I use observing silly things like the police officers’ wedding rings, and the pink bobbles on Mrs Adams’s scarf, to distract myself from the screams that are desperate to break out in my head. I try the Simpson’s theme tune, I try Neighbours and Casualty. But nothing works. As I hear the WPC say, ‘at this moment in time I can’t tell you, I’m afraid,’ I stop seeing or hearing anything; I faint onto my desk. Banging my head hard, just like Barty banged his head yesterday. Just like Jay has, probably, if he’s unconscious. Except in his case, probably, someone has banged it for him.<br /><br />*********<br />All this is why I too now have a plaster on the side of my forehead, a bruise spreading round my eye. And why I don’t hear the hubbub in the classroom after the police have gone, don’t see the accusing glances being sent the way of Frankie’s girl, don’t see all the people huddled in the playground at dinner time. I am lying flat on the bed in the nurse’s room feeling sick as a dog and waiting for my mother.<br /><br />I don’t just feel like throwing up; I do throw up eventually. I hear the word ‘concussion’ mentioned. But actually I’m not concussed: I am just sick with fear for Jay my friend. I’m so afraid I almost don’t want to know what’s happened, I don’t ask kind Mrs Adams anything when she comes to see me. But she tells me a little bit anyway. Jay is unconscious. Someone attacked him. He’ll be alright she says. (But maybe she’s trying to convince herself too of that. As well as me.) I miss the whole school being summoned to the hall to be told the news, and given the police number to ring if they’ve any information. I miss walking to the bus past the patch of gardens near the school where Jay had been found, now ringed with striped tape.<br /><br />But actually I see that just the same. Mum turns up to fetch me after what seems an age. We walk out of the school past huddled groups of kids who look curiously at the big plaster on my head and then go back to their discussions- most of them are looking upset. I see one or two girls crying.<br /><br />Mum helps me into the car as if I’m an invalid, wrapping a rug round me. We drive the length of the gardens where the blue and white tape is flapping gently in the rising wind. Two or three policeman are standing, guarding it, but nothing is happening inside the tape. The sun is still shining. The bare trees throw long shadows across the daffodils and crocuses.<br /><br />Mum sees me looking. ‘He’s unconscious, Esther,’ she says. ‘He’s not in a coma. That’s good news, Esther.’<br /><br />‘Is it?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘It means his brain’s not too damaged.’<br /><br />‘What else?’ I say. ‘Noone tells us.’<br /><br />‘He’s got bruises all over and a broken collarbone. But he’ll wake up in due course. I promise you, Esther. And the bruises won’t last. And….his hair…’<br /><br />‘They won’t?’ I am not so certain. And then I say. ‘What about his hair? What about it?’<br /><br />She still doesn’t say. ‘If you know anything about it, Esther?’ She hesitates. ‘You must tell the police.’ So the same thing can happen to me? I’m thinking. I say, because I’m sure it’s what she’s thinking,. ‘Well you see what happens when your daughter insists on going to a comprehensive school.’<br /><br />‘Do you want to change?’ she asks hopefully.<br /><br />‘His hair. What about his hair?’ I insist.<br /><br />‘Shall we find a new school for you, Esther?’<br /><br />’No,’ I say violently. ‘It’s all my friends. My friends.’ (Mostly they’re my friends, I’m thinking, keeping my fingers crossed. Despite Mum I’m worried sick about Jay. How do I know she’s not skating over the truth until I’m stronger? What about his hair then? What’s happened to it? Why is he so vain about his bloody hair? I’m furious with him suddenly. And then worried all over again.)<br /><br />Just the same I’m grateful to be put straight to bed when we get home. Mum even brings me hot chocolate and offers a boiled egg. I groan at this. ‘I’d throw it up again,’ I say. But I don’t throw up the chocolate. Ands when she offers me the portable telly I accept it gratefully; along with the extra blankets. On the other hand I slide out from all attempts to give me a hug.<br /><br />I make her shut my curtains even though it’s not yet dark. For once I do not want to watch the endless discussions between the cranes. I watch all the kiddy TV programmes instead, starting with Tweenies. Going on to Blue Peter, News Round. I don’t take in one word one frame of any of them. It doesn’t matter.<br /><br />My school trousers are lying on the chair, folded neatly, where mum put them, not thrown on the floor the way they are when I’m left to myself. I notice the bulge in the pocket suddenly and then, about five minutes later, remember my mobile phone.<br /><br />‘One message’received’ it says, when I dare look at it at last. Huddling back into bed. And also ‘Answerphone message.’ (A missed call? I don’t remember hearing the phone ring. Maybe I had no signal.)<br /><br />I go into messages and push ‘message options.’<br /><br />‘Delete Message?’ it offers. I hesitate for a moment.<br /><br />‘Read message.’ I push instead.<br /><br />The message says. ‘I’m up the crane. It’s safer there. Join me, Esther.’ It isn’t signed, but I know who sent it; I know that even though it’s from Granny’s number, it isn’t her.<br /><br />Afterwards I dial up the answerphone . ‘You have one new message’ the smooth voice says. ‘Press 1 to listen.’ ‘First new message’, says the voice. Then another voice whispers in my ear. ‘You see what happens to vain terrorists. Vain ones.’ I don’t recognise the voice. Nor do I recognise the number when I look for that. If I knew whose number it was I think, coolly, through my terror, I’d know who attacked Jay.<br /><br />Not that I need to know. I know already. Even if I still don’t know what’s happened to his hair.<br /><br />With the telly still blaring away I fall asleep. And for once I don’t dream anything, not that I remember. I have a surprisingly good and peaceful sleep. Maybe it’s the effect of mum’s hot chocolate. (Thanks mum. I mean it. Your loving – yes- loving daughter. Esther.).<br /><br />But I wake up in the end. And then I fall asleep again, and that’s quite a different matter.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER TWELVE<br /></div><br />Some things everybody knows. Or think they know. For instance: there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that I sleep-walked out of my room, out of the flat, down in the lift, out into the Mail Box, then back round into Holliday Street. Goodness knows why noone saw me, noone stopped me, they all say. For noone did. At four in the morning, even under the full moon, there was noone to see, not a single passing policeman or a single passing police car. (They’d looked up the records and there really weren’t. If there had been they’d have stopped me for sure.) Maybe that was why noone saw me. Not because I wasn’t in the street.<br /><br />There is also this; how did I get out of the front door of our flat without waking anyone? It makes such a big clunking noise that it’s hard to go in and out secretly. It’s true that the chain, usually on at night, was off. But my mother says she can’t remember putting it on that night. So maybe she didn’t, and that was why it was it off. Not because I went out of the door in the middle of the night, and couldn’t put the chain back on from the outside.<br /><br />The next question was how I got into the building site; not only is it supposed to be like Fort Knox, it is Fort Knox as far as I could tell. Goodness knows I’ve spent enough time trying and failing to find ways in, so I should know. But they found a hole in the wire fence, apparently, cut with wire-cutters. They assume someone else had tried to get in once. Quite rightly they take for granted I didn’t have wire-cutters, that my hands wouldn’t have been strong enough to use them if I had. But the hole was there, and they reckoned it was big enough for me to have squeezed through. In my sleep?!! Cool. Well, if they say so. But if that was so why didn’t their alarms go off? Why didn’t the guard dogs come running and tear me to pieces? If there are guard dogs.<br /><br />They can believe anything they like. It’s up to them. I know what I think. I believe Ella pulled me there out of time, calling from the stars. I believe she tenderly put the clothes on me so I wouldn’t be too cold and wafted up out of my window still asleep.<br /><br />The one sure thing I know – and they know because I told them - is that I came to myself, wide awake on a ladder half-way up the crane, under a full moon, the rungs cold under my fingers, my coat not enough to keep me from the cold.<br /><br />I don’t think I knew what the rungs were at first. I just felt my fingers curled round one cold bar, my toes clutching to another. When the other hand, the other foot reached out to the next bar it seemed an automatic response. Only gradually did I feel the ladder, the structures they joined swaying round me. Only slowly did I know that the light fingers swirling round me, making me feel colder and colder, belonged to the wind. That the silver light that showed me the rungs I was reaching for belonged to the moon.<br /><br />******<br /><br />Above my head I can see the meshed floor of the next level up. I can see the big hole in it through which I will have to climb to reach the next ladder. Slowly I crawl up towards it, shivering now. Going down doesn’t seem to be an option. I don’t look down, not till I’ve hauled myself up through the hole, till I’m standing upright, both my feet flat on the meshed surface. Then I look back through the hole out of which I’ve just climbed.<br /><br />It’s a long, long way down. My stomach goes down with it. I reach in terror for the next ladder and cling to it. For I don’t know how long I am unable to move. The only thing gets me going again is the cold. If I don’t move I will die of cold, I think. But I can’t go downwards. There is no way now, no possible way but up. My terror doesn’t diminish for an instant, not one bit.<br /><br />I start climbing the next ladder. Each rung in turn burns cold into my hands and feet. The rungs are all now I see and feel. This is like a dream –like a nightmare rather. Maybe it is. The only change is when I reach the next floor up, haul myself through the hole again, my arms aching more with each attempt. I am weak with terror. It gets harder and harder each time and the air gets colder and colder. I can see the dark mass of the slewing-unit clearly now – it’s only two or three ladders further up the mast. I pause before starting on the ladder again. I’m too tired to do anything else. So tired I don’t know what I’m doing. All round me are the diagonal struts that hold up the tower mast; they are the only things between me and the ground. I do not look at them. Except for the moonlight streaming from it, I’m scarcely aware of the sky into which I’m climbing. Which feels nearer than I’ve ever been to it, except in an airliner. And that’s quite different.<br /><br />I don’t know how long it all takes. But suddenly I’m through the hole and onto the walkway round the slewing unit. On the edge of it, hung over space is the driver’s cabin. It’s blowing a gale out there. I walk out onto one side of the walkway, clinging to the supports that stop me hurtling to the ground and look up at the arms above me – I’m the under the machinery arm here with its weights and pulleys. It is amazing to see it so close – or it would be amazing if I wasn’t struck still with terror and dream and unable to take it in properly. I inch my way round the inner edge of the walkway, clinging to anything I can find till I am under the jib arm, near the driver’s cabin and look out under that. The arm’s horizontal now of course. But it can swing up diagonally, like me reaching up my arm. I’ve seen that often enough. It no longer looks delicate from here. It looks massive. Gross almost. Scary. Everything is scary. Except suddenly I’m not scared. Whatever, whoever I am I don’t recognise. It’s just strange. I wish Trace was here. She’d explain it to me. Wouldn’t she? It’s only me doesn’t understand anything. Still. Most likely never.<br /><br />The only thing I want now is to get into the driver’s cabin. I want to see the seat I’ve only seen in pictures, to switch the switches, pull the levers, make the thing above my head turn and dance and talk; that way I could talk to Ella; that way maybe I’d be safe. Out here I can’t do any of these things. The arm is held out there like the leg of a huge dead INSECT. An utterly gross dead INSECT.<br /><br />I inch my way round again. I have to climb up a ladder onto a gantry to get to the cabin. Then I have to open a door and climb down into it. I work that out, easily enough. I climb the ladder, and reach the gantry. I look through the door; but at first all I can see is my ghost; my twin; a little white face with hair flying staring back at me. Ella? I say. But it is not Ella it is me, myself, reflected in the glass, white with moonlight, dark with moonshadow. Go away I say, and pull down the handle. But the door is locked. I shake it furiously,<br /><br />DO THEY EXPECT THIEVES UP HERE? Well, of course, they’ve got one. Me. Except I’m not a thief, unless unauthorised use of lever – or intended use of a lever – is thievery. I hammer on the door, yelling to my own ghostly face, let me in, let me in. Stupid. I look beyond my face and what do I see there? An empty crisp packet. A can of Coca Cola Lite. (A fat crane driver trying to lose weight?) A page three girl, curling at the edges. A tiny picture of a woman with a shawl over her head and baby on her lap stuck to the glass on the other side – the Virgin Mary and Child actually. (A Catholic crane driver?) A picture of a woman with curly hair, and two little boys with crew cuts. (A family man crane driver?) And then the two levers one on either side of the black seat, the dials and switches, the technical stuff. All of it colourless in the moonlight. And all of it ungettable at. The door is locked. I CAN’T GET IN.<br /><br />I howl and howl and bang and bang. I bang louder than the wind. Ella, I shout. Ella! Ella!<br /><br />No answer. But then at last, clinging to that gantry, by the locked door of the cabin, I look out. Out over the city with its lights and tower, out towards our MailBox flats – I’m higher than my own window, but I can’t pick it out from the rest, unless it is the lit one, with a woman moving about inside. My mother?<br /><br />And then at last I look down. Down and down and down. The site rises and falls like the sea below me. If I bent my head under the strut and stepped out I could fly over it like a bird. My stomach is out there already; my light head too.<br /><br />In the pocket of my coat comes a vibration. A mobile phone starts ringing. My mobile phone – it’s tune is the Ride of the Valkeries, noone else has that. MY PHONE. I take it out with shaking fingers. Too late. The tune stops abruptly halfway through – derderder der. I put out a finger to fetch up a number for myself but before I can do it starts ringing me again, so startling me I don’t know quite I manage to hang on up there, but I do, with one hand. The other, shaking, almost drops the phone, but somehow one numb finger presses the green button, connects it. I lift the phone to my ear. A voice – Ella’s voice – the one I’ve kept on hearing that reminds me of someone– asks: ‘Coming, Esther, coming? It’s so lovely up here. Jump. You’ll fly forever. Jump.’ And then it hums my tune all the way through. Derderder der, der der der. der. Twice.<br /><br />Humming it a second time is a mistake. It wakes me up somehow, makes me angry. No, I say loudly, to noone; I’ve pressed the red button and cut the voice off. And suddenly I’m wide awake, terrified, shaking with cold, wanting only to be down and safe and home. It’s a wonder I hold on now, but I do, I creep down from the gantry, and sit on the platform low as I can get – the moonlight shadows the bars across there, across me too, protecting me, somehow. I’m behind bars, I think. I can’t fall. But I’m still shaking with fright, and, still more, with the awful cold.<br /><br />I curl my icy feet up under my legs in an attempt to warm them. My phone is beeping: it’s running out of juice I realise. It’s right down, it’s almost out when I look to see. Frantically I press names on my address list, press dial. Trace first, it rings. But there’s no answer, except Trace’s message. ‘You rang. Cool. Leave a message.’ Granny’s phone. Switched off. Who else then? Rashid.- I’ve never dared ring him before. I’d almost forgotten having his number but there it is. I press the green phone to call it. My phone bleeps and bleeps again. A message comes up. 'Battery low’. Tell me something I don’t know please. Meanwhile the number rings and rings. Rashid is asleep obviously, everyone’s asleep obviously, I’m stuck up here for ever; or at least I will be till I’ve died of cold. Any minute the call will click off.<br /><br />Out over my left shoulder in the sky I see Orion suddenly. The Hunter. The only constellation I know. His sword is at his belt. Right now it’s me he’s hunting. Where is he driving me too? Where where where. I am quite lost.<br /><br />But suddenly then a sleepy voice. Who’s that? Rashid, help. I say. I’m up the crane. At the moment it all comes back to me. ‘WHAT ABOUT JAY’S HAIR? But he can’t have heard me. At that the phone, the screen everything goes dead. And I drift away into the sky with Orion, still murmuring to myself, weeping. ‘WHAT ABOUT JAY’S HAIR?’granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-65545690178557837232007-03-28T10:13:00.000+00:002007-04-11T08:38:40.348+00:00Part Two Chapters 9-10<div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER NINE<br /></div><br />What I chiefly feel when we’re back at our flat is how empty it is. Dad’s not home yet; he rarely is till late, and even at weekends he works in his little study at the end of the hall, as far as he can get from my music, he says. (He should be so lucky: I might play loud rock music all the time. I don’t. Except sometimes when I don’t want to feel too freaky and I play a Jimi Hendrix CD that Trace lent me, or a Manic Street Preachers one I don’t mind either. Maybe I’m a normal teenager after all. But not very often)<br /><br />Except when I play music to relieve the silence, except when other people’s music comes through the floor and the walls, except when Barty comes, our flat is quiet. I’d never realised before how much we were surrounded by other people’s noise; how little noise we made ourselves. Our empty flat is maybe one reason Mum likes having Barty so much. She has few women friends. She rarely goes out for lunch, or coffee mornings. She helps at the Q E hospital once a week but that’s about it. When she’s not looking after the flat and Barty and me and dad, she reads mostly. For the first time in my life I wonder if she’s lonely. Perhaps it’s having seen her so pink-cheeked and lively talking to Mrs Hussein makes me think like this.<br /><br />It’s complicated feeling sorry for mum. It’s doesn’t make me feel happy either. Perhaps that’s it, I think -perhaps being friends with your mum like Trace is friends with hers, means you can’t take her for granted like I’ve always taken mine. If that’s the case I don’t want to be friends with her. Even though I’m a teenager and should know better, I want to be her child; and cuddled now and then, at least when I feel like it. I want her just as mum.<br /><br />Next day at school I tell Trace I’d like my ears pierced, I’d like them pierced, like now. Today, even. ‘OK,’ she says, her voice brisk, ‘Cool. If that’s what you want, Est.’ After school we both get on the bus going into the city, and she takes me to a place in the Pallisades Centre, off New Street. The ears are fine. They hardly hurt at all. That gives me courage for the rest: ‘OK,’ I say, rashly, ‘Now my belly button’. But this does hurt, especially when they put the stud in after. At least, I think, grimacing, at least I can hide this from mum. What I can’t hide are the little studs in my ears that I have to leave in for six whole weeks. My stomach churns at the thought of what she’ll say.<br /><br />Trace goes off to get the bus back along the Bristol Road to Northfields. And I go home to mum all by myself.<br /><br />I sneak into the flat as quietly as I can. Not quietly enough. ‘Esther’, mum calls, not once but twice. When I go, reluctantly, into the sitting-room, I’m astonished to find Mrs Hussein, in hijab and all-enveloping coat sitting on our big sofa. She beckons me over at once, takes my hand and pats it. She says, to my horror. ‘That’s good, Esther, you had your ears done. It’s something I don’t understand about Western women. Why they don’t have their ears pierced as babies like us?’<br /><br />After that how can Mum say anything? She doesn’t. But she glares at me behind Mrs Hussein’s back. She is pink in the face again, and the moment I go out of the room I hear lively voices start up again, hers and Mrs Hussein’s both. . It’s nice in a way. But disconcerting. At the same time I want the visit to go on and on, to delay the moment I have to face her.<br /><br />I will spare you what’s said when she does finally come into my room. Mrs Hussein or no Mrs Hussein she is just as angry as I’d expected. On and on: how she’d thought I had more sense; etc, etc, etc. Boring. I start shouting in the end. ‘You’re so so sad ‘ I yell. I call her an old-fashioned…interfering.. old COW. And worse. I am so angry I almost tell her about the belly-button. I don’t care what she thinks any more. Serve her right. My mum is so really really SAD.<br /><br />Just my bad luck, one ear gets infected quite badly. It hurts. Mum doesn’t exactly say ‘serve you right.’ She just bathes it with disinfectant, looking frosty, taking no notice when I say; ‘Ouch, it stings.’ She still hasn’t seen my belly-button. That hurts too though not as much. It feels very odd not to say uncomfortable every time I stretch my tummy muscles. I’d never realised before how often you do stretch your tummy muscles.<br /><br />*******<br /><br />It’s half-term now. I don’t see anyone. I barely even see Granny. (I’m getting on a bit better with her these days. But when we do meet neither of us mentions text messages from Ella, and we are still awkward with each other: Granny is someone else I can’t take for granted any longer.)<br /><br />Stuart turns up suddenly, but my relief in seeing him does not last long – he seems unhappy too. He spends most of his time with Granny telling her about some love affair which has all gone wrong. I know this because I hear what they are saying one day when I come to fetch Border. I even hear Stuart crying.<br /><br />Stuart realises I’ve heard him. When I bring Border back from her run, he comes out and says ‘Not your problem, chicken; don’t worry, it’ll all come out in the wash,’ and he takes me to have hot chocolate at the café to make up for it. He has hot chocolate himself, to cheer himself up, he says. But it doesn’t cheer either of us much. To see him trying to talk cheerfully only makes things worse. (Though I can’t help enjoying the chocolate.)<br /><br />Next day Stuart is due to go back to London. But when I come to Mnemosyne towards lunchtime to fetch Border I hear him and Granny talking again. This time it’s Granny seems upset. Stuart says something like ‘Don’t you think you should tell her, Nora?’ (Stuart and Norah, our sister, both call Granny ‘Nora’ rather than Granny; which is confusing with Norah having the same name more or less - Norah is a name that’s gone down through Granny’s side of the family for umpteen generations. Granny told mum that being called ‘Granny’ made her feel too old. She must have to have got over that by the time I came along. I think I’m glad.<br /><br />Tell who what? I wonder, as Granny answers in a voice that almost sounds as if she is crying now, ‘What difference would it make? It might only upset her more.’ These were contradictory statements it seemed to me. Never mind. ‘It’s such ancient history, ‘ Granny says next. ‘Why rake it up again? It can’t have anything to do with ….’ She dropped her voice now. Who? I wondered again. Me? Stuart says again. ‘Maybe not. But maybe it does and maybe you should.’<br /><br />‘No’, says Granny furiously, in the kind of voice which from Granny, I know, means mind your own business. I could hear it even from here. It makes me want both more and less to know whatever it is she’s not saying. More because yes, it’s a secret, and I always want to know secrets. Less because sometimes, with grown-up’s secrets, when you do get to hear them you wish you hadn’t. That won for the moment really. I suppose I might have gone on wondering about this conversation later even so. Only what happens afterwards drives it right out of my head.<br /><br />I decide to leave Border for the moment. Seeing smoke coming from Bob’s little chimney I go to see him instead. He shouldn’t have been there, of course, on a weekday, usually he’s out working on the building site - usually I only still see him in the evening. But today he’s not working for some reason. I’m pleased until suddenly I find myself saying something that upsets him very badly. I can’t think why - it was he told me in the first place. But it does upset him.<br /><br />I’m sitting on a stool drinking tea and looking at the painting on the walls all round me when I suddenly remember who it was had a name like Trace’s mum, Misa, or ‘Artemisa’. Dunking a squashed fly biscuit into a mug of his sweet tea I say, excitedly ‘I heard of someone else the other day with a name like your daughter, Artemis…’ At once the dwarf shouts at me – worse BELLOWS -. ‘What do you know about her, what’s it got to do with you, interfering little…’ so sudden and so loud, I am shocked enough to knock my tea over. ‘Careless little ..’ he shouts even louder ‘Get a cloth, wipe up your own mess.’ ‘You told me about her,’ I say, almost crying as I try to mop up the tea with a cloth from his sink, wrinkling my nose. (The dwarf may be tidy but he doesn’t wash his cloths; it smells. Actually it stinks.)<br /><br />‘Can’t you wipe up properly? Where were you dragged up?’ he shouts.<br /><br />I am angry now as well as upset. ‘You told me,’ I shout back. ‘You told me.’<br /><br />He snatches the cloth from my hand now. ‘Get out --. lazy little…’ So I get out, stumbling up through the door, over the deck, falling over his tiller. It’s a wonder I don’t fall in the canal. I bet if I had fallen in, he’d have left me to drown, I think, running home, tears of rage hurt shock still pouring down my cheeks.. The stink of his cloth remains on my hands all evening. I hate him. If he is one of the dwarves he’s Grumpy. Worse than Grumpy. Horrible.<br /><br />I meant not to go near him after that. But of course as always when you don’t want to see someone, you keep on running into them. And I keep on running into the dwarf, even though I try not to, in the street, as well as when I go to fetch Border. Worse still he behaves as if nothing had happened. I can’t believe the way he changes all the time, from nice through to horrible. “Hullo, Esther,’ he says, ‘Coming in for a cup of tea?’ I glare at him. Not on your life I’m thinking. But all I say is, ‘Not now thanks.’ Are grown-ups mad is what I’m thinking? It only needs dad to stay at home all day with his feet up, reading the Sun and playing Britney: then I’d know the world really had gone stark raving CRAZY.<br /><br />I ask Granny about the dwarf. She laughs. ‘He’s like that, Esther, take no notice.’ Fat lot of use that is. Gross. Not to say freaky. He can keep bloody Apollo and Artemis to himself. For ever. No skin off my nose.<br />*******<br />And then there's Ella. And cranes. Cranes aren’t my escape any more. She’s taken them over. The would-be crane driver called Ella sends me emails every day with crane information; if not emails, she sends text messages. Kinky. It’s not even interesting – it’s the same kind of stuff Rashid has been sending me for yonks now. …. I won’t bore you with it again. When I don’t answer she sends me more emails on each of which is just one word: Liebherr is the first one: Pecco, the second. And so on.<br /><br />I am baffled at first. Then I realise, suddenly, that these are the names of different makes of Tower Crane. And sure enough all the others I’ve ever heard of, that Rashid and I have exchanged between us follow: Comanza: Potain: Wolff: Kroll: Lindea: Comedin: Heede: one after the other. When the list ends she starts all over again. On my mobile too. I suppose I should have deleted all the messages without even looking. But I can’t bring myself to do that. Suppose one of those emails or texts explains everything at last?<br /><br />Is granny getting such messages back from me? I don’t know. I don’t ask. But one day she says quite gently. ‘You seem to like cranes a bit overmuch, Esther, don’t you?’ But that could have meant anything. She is very quiet, Granny, these days. Some days she looks at me as if she’s about to say something. But she doesn’t. What has she got to tell me, anyway?<br /><br />This is true: that I spend a lot of my time this week gazing out at the cranes, my ears hurting - the infected one hurting. And what I see still are the cranes, growing ever higher as the buildings below me keep on growing upwards. I see that language of theirs, which I still can’t read, which I’ll never read, that’s like everything I’ll never know and long for.<br /><br />How do I know I’ll never know? I just do. It feels like everywhere I turn comes to a dead end; like every person I know has come to a dead end. Even Rahilah; who sends me the odd lovely email but isn’t there any more. She goes to the Islamic school. I still go to stinking Smelly Poke.<br /><br />Yet the cranes go on swinging, turning, talking to themselves, and more and more I want to join them.<br /><br />I dream about them all the time. I’m going up them, walking along their long arms balancing. I’m swinging with their little loads and then I’m jumping, falling and wake up screaming. Mum comes in then, says I’m a bit feverish, it’s that infection in my ear again, silly girl. No, I say, it’s Ella. Ella whose voice I hear everywhere, on the radio, in the lifts. ‘THIS IS THE TOP FLOOR.’<br /><br />Is it me, going crazy now. Is it ME?<br />******<br />I get a text message from Trace. Meet at MAC, it says, 12 2day? hfterms boring.’ I think hftrm’s boring too. OK I text back: CU. At half-past eleven I get the number Two bus up Broad Street and down through Edgbaston from Five Ways as far the cricket ground on one side and Cannon Hill Park on the other. Then I get out. MAC is the Midland Arts Centre. I’ve been there a few times with Mum for something or other – plays and things at Christmas, or films, but I’ve never met any of my friends there before. It’s better than staying at home round Mum and Barty for sure.<br /><br />Hi, Trace says casually, when I find her. She doesn’t say anything much else. But we hang out together for a bit, quite comfortably. Trace looks less outlandish there than she does in some places. If anything I’m the one who looks out of place, a mere kiddy, I think, come to play in one of the kiddy playgrounds, even if I have got little studs in my ears these days. Not that I care. Whatever I look like I’m fourteen. And an aunt what’s more.<br /><br />We drink coffee in the café and eat crisps and yummy flapjacks, go out and look at the ducks. We ignore the notice in the kiddy playground, under 6’s only; we swing on the swings, go on the seesaw, until some mothers chase us off.. Then we come back in and wander into the gallery by the cinema. A large notice offers EXHIBITION OF WORK BY BIRMINGHAM ARTISTS. ‘All crap,’ Trace says dismissively. I don’t see anything I like much either. A few are so way out I can’t make head or tail of them (one has a plastic doll stuck upside down on a photograph of a factory chimney) lots more are boring portraits or landscapes.<br /><br />Right at the far end, I notice three quite familiar-looking paintings. In a moment I see whose paintings they are –I am quite sure they are; the close lines, the fairy-tale landscapes; closed and open at the same time have to be the Dwarf’s paintings. They look good here, I must say, much better than most. Also a bit sinister. The wreaths of creepers in one painting could choke you any minute. I’m about to say ‘I know the artist, he’s a friend of mine,’ (well he isn’t at the moment, really, but let that pass.) when Trace says; ‘mum’s got a painting like these. It’s by my grandfather. But he’s been dead a long time. I think he has. Mum hates his painting. So do I. I hate these too. I’m off home,’ she says. ‘See you at school next week, Est.’ And she’s gone. Before I’ve had time to ask a single question. I can’t believe this somehow. If it’s coincidence – what else can it be? - it’s yet another thing seems creepy.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER TEN<br /></div><br />The first thing that happens when school starts, is creepier; really creepy. In our classroom after break-time, Trace fumbles in her desk, then hands me a piece of paper. ‘Did you your Ella, at last, like you wanted.’ she says. ‘How I see her.’<br /><br />She hands it to me face down. I hesitate before taking it from her. I’d almost forgotten asking Trace, it was so long ago, and the way things are I’m not sure I want to see a picture of Ella. She doesn’t exist. Or at least I don’t want her to.<br /><br />I turn the piece of paper over. A girl stares up at me, frowning, the way someone in a self-portrait frowns, staring at themselves in a mirror. But it’s not a self-portrait. The girl doesn’t look the least like Trace. Yet she reminds me of someone. Who? Granny? It can’t be. Yet she does - the young Granny, the one in all those photographs, frowning and frowning. She freaks me out. I hate it.<br /><br />I don’t tell Trace this. I just smile and say ‘Thanks, Trace. Cool.’ (I’m getting better at Trace: I really am.) But as soon as she slopes off I open my desk lid, pick out my atlas, the only book big enough to hold the sheet of paper and hide it away. Not that it helps. All the time I’m sitting at that desk, it’s if those staring eyes are boring up at me, through the cover of the book, through the exercise books on top of it, through the desk lid. GRANNY. What is Granny doing pretending to be Ella? I don’t know whether I hate her, Trace, or the drawing more.<br /><br />********<br /><br />Another thing freaks me out today and the next day: all week in fact. I’ve said before how everything keeps changing; not just places, people too – the way Granny has changed lately, the way Mum seems to have a bit. (The Seventh Dwarf of course keeps changing all the time from nice to nasty and back again; but I don’t count that. It’s how he is.)<br /><br />But now Jay has changed and I don’t count that. He’s playing the fool. There’s nothing unusual about Jay being jokey. But usually he’s just jokey with us. He lies low otherwise, like I’ve said. But now he seems to have forgotten about protective colouring. He’s being funny in a way that is dangerous, I think. I can’t think what’s got into him. And I don’t like it. And in some way I think it’s my fault for telling Jay that they wouldn’t think he was a terrorist, they wouldn’t hurt him because he was Hindu not a Muslim.<br /><br />He keeps on saying to anyone who’ll listen. ‘Who me? I’m a Hindu.’ Meaning: I’m no terrorist; meaning he’s one Asian doesn’t have to worry about Frankie and Co. But who says Frankie knows the difference between Hindu and Muslim? Who says he cares that there’s a difference? I bet he doesn’t. (I tell Jay this. It’s one thing I do say to him, these days; I even email him to tell him.)<br /><br />Trace says he’s behaving that way because he’s so angry about what happened to Rahilah. ‘Maybe,’ I say, feeling guilty about that too. ‘And because you’re so nasty to him these days, and because’ she adds, ‘Because you dumped him for Rashid.’<br /><br />I can’t believe this. It really freaks me out ‘You make it sound like he was my boyfriend,’ I say angrily. ‘It wasn’t like that.’<br /><br />‘He thought it was,’ Trace says.<br /><br />‘Well it wasn’t. And Rashid’s not my boyfriend anyway. He’s not allowed girlfriends.’<br /><br />‘Is that why don’t you talk to Jay any more? Suit yourself,’ Trace says, and off she goes, after maddening me as usual. I’ve got enough problems now without this one. Not everything’s my fault, is it? Or Ella’s? And I do talk to Jay, I mutter, about being a Hindu anyway. I sent him an email. But he never answered the email. He doesn’t listen!<br /><br />It isn’t that Jay does any more than tease. One day he turns up in the playground with fake gold rings in his ears – of course he has to take them out before coming into school. Another day he wears baggies and hoodies over his school uniform and swaggers about just like Frankie. I can see that some of Frankie’s girls do find him funny. The bolder ones snigger when Frankie isn’t looking. And Frankie himself claps Jay on the back, says ‘Wanna join the gang then?’ smiling. Perhaps he’s too stupid to see Jay is sending him up. I am reassured for a moment –Jay can get away with more than the rest of us because he is funny – when he’s not being annoying. Maybe we too can afford to laugh.<br /><br />These are his bigger teases. The rest are little niggling ones: jokes; comments; silly drawings on the blackboard in our classroom – Frankie can’t see these because he’s in a different class; but some of his girls can and the brightest one at least can see they’re send-ups. All week Jay goes on doing it, all next week too. By which time Rashid, me and Trace don’t find it funny at all, we’re getting really fed up with him. ‘Can’t you stop playing about for one minute, Jay?’ Trace says crossly. Rashid, in particular, gets more and more nervous. Frankie and Co know he and Jay are friends, and as a Muslim he’s in much more danger. He starts pretending he and Jay aren’t friends any longer. He keeps away from him in the playground. I don’t blame him. I keep away from Jay, too. Which only seems to make him worse. Seeing him comb his hair sometimes I’m so irritated with him, besides worried, I want to scream out, ‘How can you?’ But I don’t. While Jay just keeps on teasing and touching up his hair. I don’t know which is worse.<br /><br />Everything is bad now: I’ll list the bad things, in no particular order.<br /><br />1) Having to stay in after school three times in two weeks, because I haven’t done work properly.<br /><br />2) Trace being cross with me because she thinks I haven’t appreciated her drawing. She doesn’t say anything but I’m sure that’s why she’s unfriendly suddenly.<br /><br />3) Jay being so silly. See above. Frankie and his gang like sharks circling, waiting to get him. (At least that’s how it looks to me.)<br /><br />4)) I haven’t had an email from Rashid in ages; or from Rahilah. Rashid smiles at me awkwardly sometimes but nothing more. I don’t know anything about what goes on in Rashid’s head, I realise, much less than I know about Jay’s. How lonely I think. That’s another thing bugs me.<br /><br />5) Granny being bad-tempered again and not having time for me.<br /><br />7) Border walking on a piece of glass and cutting her paw quite badly. Granny has to take her to the vet which makes her still more unfriendly (see above), her paw is bandaged, but has to be re-bandaged all the time because she keeps biting it off.<br /><br />8) Barty teething and grizzling all the time he’s with us. We’ve had him a night or two to give my sister the chance to sleep; meaning mum doesn’t sleep so she’s cross too. Barty is still not walking, no matter how much I encourage him. (Leave him alone, Esther! mum says crossly.)<br /><br />9) Not talking to the Dwarf. (See above.) Even though it’s my fault.<br /><br />10) Ella/Granny still sitting in my desk, I keep seeing the eyes. I keep dreaming about the eyes, I keep finding email messages about Ella the crane-driver.<br /><br />11) It never stops raining. The cranes look as if they’re standing in a sea of mud. The builders have mud splashes all the way up their jeans. Even the ones I know are too fed up to talk to me when I meet them in the street – which I do quite often. I walk past the site on purpose, almost every day. I wish I didn’t. But I can’t stop myself, any more than I can stop opening Ella’s emails. ‘GET UP A CRANE,’ she says most days now. ‘YOU DON’T KNOW YOU’RE LIVING UNLESS YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE WORLD FROM UP A CRANE.’<br /><br />12. And then there’s dreaming. Dreams about climbing cranes. And falling. And worse than that.<br />********<br /><br />It doesn’t just freak me out the first time. It goes on doing it. It freaks out mum too as soon as she finds out.<br /><br />She doesn’t find out for a week or two. It only happens inside my room at first.<br /><br />The first time I woke up on the floor by my bed I thought I’d just fallen out. I could have just about. But the next time I woke up right over by my desk. And I wasn’t on the floor. I was doubled over my computer as if I’d run into my desk. As if this was what had woken me up.<br /><br />I still didn’t catch on? Why should it? It had never happened to me before. I just went back to bed and fell asleep and in the morning I thought I must have dreamed it.<br /><br />But it happens again. And again. And each time I’m a bit further from my bed. Once I wake up by the window. Next time I’m half out of the door, the next halfway down the passage. It’s the time after that mum comes out of the sitting-room and finds me almost at the front door, my eyes shut, like a zombie; then, for the first time, she twigs I’m sleepwalking<br /><br />Before that I’d told tell myself each time; I was only dreaming; I just dreamed I found myself so far out of my bed. This didn’t explain the odd bruise I picked up; on an arm, on a shin; a small bruise on my cheek that I claimed, even to myself, came from someone throwing a tennis ball in the gym. I didn’t want to know let alone say what was really happening; it was much too scary.<br /><br />I never sleepwalked before Ella came back. I do now though, but not every night. Mum is worried about it. She has even made me admit to myself I am sleepwalking, though I don’t want to. She keeps looking at me carefully, asking me if I’m alright, if I’m in trouble at school. I shake my head. I’m fine, I say.<br /><br />(I wake up cold, when I’ve been walking. When I dream in bed, I wake up too hot. One morning at breakfast Dad explains that I’m too cold or too hot, because of thermo-regulation – which automatically cools your body or heats it as necessary when you’re awake but not when you’re asleep. The science master at school talked about this – so I know Dad’s got it wrong; thermo- regulation works when you’re asleep. It’s when you’re dreaming it doesn’t. I don’t tell him. It doesn’t matter. It’s his way of showing that he too is worried about me, about the sleepwalking. I don’t think he knows how not to talk like this.)<br /><br />Mum has even told Granny about it. Granny thinks she should talk to me now, but I don’t want to talk to her. In particular I don’t want to talk about Ella. But she does. She calls me in each day when I take Border back. But I say I’m in a hurry and won’t stop. One day – is this my mother’s doing? - she comes to the flat, and tries to sit me down in the sitting-room while my mother brings us tea. It is just like a tea party – very polite. I am polite. At first. This isn’t the Granny I know, she is polite too, and anxious, and doesn’t seem sure what to say. Her hands pick up her cup and put it down again. Her hands look older than the rest of her I’ve always thought – mottled with liver spots and with veins that stand out like water pipes. But all of her looks old to me today. See if I care.<br /><br />Each time she tries talking to me about Ella I stonewall her – this is the politer way of saying I shut her up. ‘Why should I want to talk about my imaginary friend?’ I ask. ‘I grew out of her years ago.’ When she’s tried once too often, I snap. I say ‘Has your boyfriend walked out on you Granny?’ (I think this is possible, he never seems to be around any more. If he ever was.) She flushes at this point. ‘Don’t be offensive, Ella.’ Then realises what she’s said and changes it to ‘Esther.’ in a flustered way. ‘Are you sure you didn’t mean Ella?’ I say nastily. (She’d had been mean to me for a while, I remember. So it is my turn.)<br /><br />Once as far as my grandmother was concerned I could do no wrong – and vice versa. Now it seems I can do no right. She still seems to want to do right by me; she’s trying very hard now, but she doesn’t know how to any more. She’s too old I think. She hasn’t a clue.<br /><br />Granny looks hurt at the look I give her. I think she does. I wish she didn’t. One, it makes me feel bad for a moment, two, a truly hurt granny is someone quite new to me, and I don’t like it at all.<br /><br />It’s a relief when my mother comes back into the room. Not long after, Granny says she’s leaving. I glare at her as she goes out. ‘Hadn’t you better come and walk your dog?’ she says coldly, glaring back. ‘I’ve got other things to do this morning.’ It’s a relief to hear her sounding more like normal, sometimes stroppy Granny. She also looks a bit less old from behind.<br /><br />My mother makes to follow her. Then, glancing at me, she stays just where she is. She sighs when we hear the front door close at last.<br /><br />‘You two,’ she says in an exasperated way. ‘I don’t know which of you is worst, my daughter or my mother.’<br /><br />‘Why does she have to be so nosy?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘You used to be pretty nosy with her,’ my mother says.<br /><br />‘I’m going to take Border out,’ I say. But when I get to the Gas Street Basin, Border is tied up outside Poseidon, there’s no sign of Granny or the Dwarf for that matter.<br /><br />*******<br /><br />I find Trace outside on the other side of the pontoon, coming out of Bob’s boat. She’s carrying a package under one arm.<br /><br />‘I found out where he lives and came to see his pictures, and to show him Misa’s.’ is all she says. ‘<br /><br />‘I thought you didn’t like them, Trace.’ I say.<br /><br />‘I don’t, I hate them. I just wanted to find out if he’d painted Misa’s.’<br /><br />‘Did he?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘He wasn’t saying.’ But nor is she saying anything either. Her face is tight. When she sees where I am going she sets off in the other direction. It would have made much more sense for her to get to the bus by going my way, with me.<br /><br />Does nobody like me any more?<br /><br />******<br /><br />Not even the crane driver seems to likes me. I run into him just one more time.<br /><br />He keeps looking round to see if his gaffer’s there. ‘Want to get me in trouble do you?’ he asks me, his voice very unfriendly.<br /><br />‘No.’ I say. I point to the notice under which he’s standing. GUARD DOGS ON SITE. ‘Does anyone ever try to break into the site at night. Do the dogs get them?’<br /><br />‘What dogs? That’s just to scare people. Mind you, the fence’s hard enough to get over. I’ve heard of wire-cutters used on some sites, but that’s never happened here, not I know of.’ He looks at me then suspiciously. ‘You’ve not got daft ideas have you?<br /><br />“Of course not,’ I lie. ‘I’ve just got a story to write for school that’s all.’<br /><br />‘Oh a story,’ he says. ‘That’s it, is it? Nothing wrong with that, that’s all, just goo and write it.’<br /><br />He doesn’t even say goodbye. He laughs at me and goes back into the site. Even if his boots are as muddy, his donkey jacket hasn’t got a mark on it, unlike the faded and dusty overalls of most of the other site workers, working on the ground. Only their plastic hats look new and shiny. The hats on a building-site always do look new and shiny, unlike the working clothes.<br /><br />*******<br />Next morning at school, Jay turns up with a gold earring just like Frankie’s. He even turns up in class with it. Trace passes him a note, which he passes on to me and Rashid. ‘What’s the new look, Jay?’ she writes. The glare she throws him at the same time makes it clear she’s not giving him a compliment.<br /><br />‘I’m starting a rap club,’ Jay has written underneath.<br /><br />I add, ‘You can do better than that, Jay.’ I don’t look at him. Rashid adds nothing, but he smiles at me as he hands the note back to Jay; for the first time in ages it’s one of his melting smiles that turn my stomach over, and that I haven’t had enough of lately. Jay intercepts it – he also intercepts the smile I give back – Rashid has made me feel better for a moment. Trace heaves a sigh as if she’s fed up with the lot of us. But I’m sure she’s just as worried for Jay as I am – as Rashid is.<br /><br />Doorey comes in then and makes Jay take the earring out. But it’s back in his ear at the end of the day. Worse still I see him walking round the playground with Frankie, who is holding his arm and talking to him urgently, smiling what looks to me a very dangerous smile. Jay looks small besides Frankie, stocky as he is.<br /><br />‘He’ll have a flat-top next,’ Trace says, sarcastically. ‘I guess it’s about time he got himself a new hairstyle.’<br /><br />I bet she wishes she hadn’t said that. But worried as we were for Jay, how could any of us have guessed?granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-58660173804987187422007-03-21T08:32:00.000+00:002007-04-11T08:39:45.825+00:00PART TWO CHAPTERS 7-8<div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER SEVEN<br /></div><br />The thing about border terriers is that their necks are quite thick relative to their heads. If you tightened their collars till they really couldn’t slip them, they’d choke. Even loose, though, it isn’t easy to slip them– for sure Border doesn’t slip hers as often she’d like. I don’t worry about it, not even now, as she gets more and more excited, jumping up, yelping, pulling harder and harder. The cleaner’s paper and cellophane packet is swinging too, wildly. I’m too busy craning my neck round the rising walls of the new flats to see the bottom of the cranes where the ladders start to notice. I only notice when the lead goes slack: when shouts start up all round me.<br /><br />I look down at an empty collar. And up again to see my dog squeeze through the gap between the gatepost and the gate that a man is closing –not quickly enough –behind the empty dumper truck. The next moment, she’s inside, running, dodging heaps of iron bars and stacks of breeze blocks, haring round walls and deep pits where they’re still laying new foundations. One of the builders, wearing a brown macintosh jacket and an orange helmet is less scruffy than the others - only his boots are muddy. His mouth is wide open, his face red, his nose redder; he is bellowing something at me. ‘I except she’s after a rat,’ I shout back. Advancing right up to me, pushing red face up against mine, the man in the brown jacket hisses. ‘I don’t care if she’s after an elephant: GET HER BACK.’<br /><br />Obediently, I shout her name - through the gate – they won’t let me go any further. ‘Border! BORDER!’ I know it’s hopeless. Once Border gets the whiff of a mouse, let alone a rat, she doesn’t listen to anyone. It’s one of the things I like about her. She has a free spirit. I see men all over the site trying to catch her, running, stumbling, calling, arms out. But she dodges them easily, sniffs busily away as if nothing in the world exists for her now except the rat or whatever it is. Probably it doesn’t: she’s more like a cat than a dog for concentration. (Not like me for sure – concentrate, Esther, I’m always being told.) I see another small group of builders watching the action, just inside the gate. Are they laughing? I think they might be laughing- laughing all the more as the man in the mackintosh jacket grows angrier. Among them, in a red helmet, redder than his beard, I notice Bob. I see him turning and winking at me.<br /><br />‘You’ll never catch her.’ I say to mackintosh man. ‘She only listens to me when she gets like this. And not even me, always.’ He just growls back at me. one builder has fallen flat on his face by this time, and another has fallen into a large hole. Luckily he just climbs out, doesn’t seem to have hurt himself. Bob comes out of the gate. ‘You’ll have to let her in, there’ he says nodding his head at me. ‘Noone else can catch her. She’s a bugger is Toilet Brush.’ ‘Bugger’ is a word I’m not supposed to know; nor any of the words mackintosh man let’s fly now. But I do of course. You should hear the kids at Anthony Morris, Smelly Poke.<br /><br />‘She’s not ‘Toilet Brush,’ I yell at Bob. As usual he takes no notice. He’s another one just like Border. ‘She’s just a kid,’ the donkey-jacket man is shouting to anyone prepared to listen, ‘Noone unauthorised is allowed on site. And a kid! It’s not safe. Health and Safety wouldn’t have it.’<br /><br />‘Border isn’t authorised,’ I mutter to myself. By this time two more builders have fallen over, and Border has vanished all together; with all those new little walls in the way, no wonder. I can hear her yelping the way she does when she’s found a mouse or something. But that’s it. Noone is running any more. They’re all walking round, eyes on the ground looking for her. Bob says again to mackintosh man. ‘You’ll have to let her in.’<br /><br />The bossman – I assume mackintosh man is the bossman– glowers at him, rips out another string of forbidden words, shouts something at another man. Who laughs, takes off his –yellow – helmet, and hands it over. Unceremoniously the donkey-jacket man jams it on my head. Crooked. Bob very kindly reaches over and straightens it.<br /><br />‘You’d better get her then. And be quick about it,’ the man says, then mutters, ‘Health and Safety’d murder me for this, the bustins.’ (The looks on faces all around suggest to me they’d love Health and Safety to murder him. I know I would.) I go in through the wire gate now, a little uncertainly, followed closely by Bossman and Bob. I mean to hand mum’s jacket in the cleaners bag to Bob, but I forget in all the excitement; at being here at last, inside the building site.<br /><br />I still can’t see Border. I can’t hear her any more either She’s quite disappeared down some hole or other. I run around, the jacket swinging awkwardly, yelling her name, tripping over this and that, slipping on muddy patches in my turn. It’s not too long – I’m not aware of going there on purpose, but I daresay I do– before I find myself standing under the widespread legs of one of the cranes. This is the nearest I’ve got to a crane in my whole life. ‘Cool’, I think, peering upwards.<br /><br />I can see just where the ladder starts. It wouldn’t be difficult to put my foot on it; to start climbing upwards, still clutching the cleaner’s bag. I have forgotten Bob and Bossman, close behind me. I have almost forgotten that I’m supposed to be catching Border. As I adjust my unfamiliar and too big helmet, I hear Boss man saying nastily – he makes me jump - ‘I suppose that bloody dog can climb can she? I suppose she’s after a rat up there. Get out of it. Get on with it.’ Bob winks at me. ‘Go on, man,’ he urges me. ‘Go on.’ Is urging me to climb? Cool. And cooler. Maybe not. Reluctantly I move backwards. And yell again, obediently. ‘BORDER’<br /><br />Excited yelps. I head towards them, dropping mum’s jacket. And suddenly there she is at my feet grinning and panting. When mackintosh Bossman bends down to grab her, she eludes him, runs off again, he almost pitches head-forward into the mud. I wish he had done. I can hear him swearing still more as I run after her. In a moment she’s waiting for me again, her head turned my way, her tongue out, panting, her sides heaving. When I pick her up she makes no fuss, just licks my face.<br /><br />We are escorted from the site by Bossman (furious) and Bob (slyly grinning into his big beard and carrying, though I don’t notice yet, mum’s jacket.) The moment we are out of the gate, the yellow helmet is snatched off my head.<br /><br />‘You dare,’ Bossman says, ‘You dare let that animal anywhere near my site again, I’ll shoot her. I’ll wring her neck,’ he amends, as if realising suddenly there’s unlikely to be a gun available. ‘And yours.’ Bob winks again and hands over the jacket still on its wire hanger, though the bag’s all rucked-up and split, the sleeves of the jacket muddy. Bossman, followed by Bob, goes inside the gate and slams it shut. As Border and I head for home, Border on her lead, me frantically scrubbing at the mud on the jacket, I look back once. A line of builders inside the fence are staring after us, grinning. Some of them even look as if they are clapping.<br /><br />(I’m in BIG TROUBLE at home of course. I’m sent straight back to the cleaners with the bag. I’m going to have to pay for the jacket to be re-cleaned out of my allowance. At this moment, really, it almost seems worth it.)<br /><br />****<br />Cheered by my adventure in the building site, I send a long email to Rashid, the first in ages. Writing – remembering – brings everything back clearly. (Remembering always makes me live things much more fully than at the time. I think this is sad. I tried to explain to Granny once how my time rushes by too fast, but she only laughed and said; ‘At your age? that’s nothing! Just wait till you’re old!’)<br /><br />I remember for instance; what it felt like being right under the spread white legs of the cranes. How much higher the top seemed from there, looking up through the platforms, up through all the sections of ladder. Higher than it ever seemed away from them, or even from high up, out of my window.<br /><br />“It makes you feel really small,’ I write to Rashid, ‘The smallest thing in the whole world. Yet if you once got in there it would be easy enough, even if you’re not very tall. The rungs aren’t far apart and there’s a hole in each platform you get to, which looks easy enough to climb up on.<br /><br />I have to go back down past the site next day to fetch mum’s recleaned jacket. I glance at the site sideways as I pass it, a bit embarrassed in case someone recognises me. Without Border, noone seems to. But a little way down Holliday Street, I run into another builder. He does recognise me.<br /><br />‘You proper woon’d up old stinker. All us enjoyed that,’ he says. ‘Site manager’s OK, but foreman’d see you out of a job if you turned your back on him. He gets on us all us wick.’ He seems so friendly I dare ask what I’d have to do to get to go up a crane. The man stares. ‘You’re joking. What you wanna go up thor for anyroad? Folk bigger an’ stronger than you get half-up, look down, start shaking it’s so high and can’t move another step, One o’ us ha’ to fetch ‘em down then, it’s a booger.’ ‘I don’t mind heights,’ I say pleadingly. ‘That’s what all them bustin’s say,’ answers the builder shaking his head, putting up a hand to check his helmet. ‘There’s lots of blokes on this site wouldn’t go up there I tell you. Not like us’<br /><br />‘Us?’ I say. You mean you are a crane driver?’<br /><br />‘Who’s askin’ then?’ he says. He’s teasing me now.<br /><br />‘I am,’ I say.<br /><br />‘Well then, s’pose I am. What’s it to you? You want to be one ‘n all. Girl like you?’<br /><br />‘There are some women crane drivers,’ I say, ‘Aren’t there?’<br /><br />‘None I know. What’s so interesting about cranes to you then?’<br /><br />‘I like watching them,’ I say. ‘They’re beautiful.’<br /><br />‘Beautiful?’ he says. ‘Cranes? Beautiful.’<br /><br />‘Yes.’ I insist.<br /><br />‘They’re just big tools, that’s all. Try sitting up top of one all day, the way I do. Beautiful.’ He starts laughing again then. But I don’t want to go away now, this is the first crane driver I’ve met, and I’ve got questions for him. Again Border and I wait, not very patiently. As soon as he stops laughing I ask, ‘What have you got in your cab up there then?’<br /><br />‘What haven’t I got,’ he says.<br /><br />‘Like what? I insist.<br /><br />‘Everyone asks me that,’ he says.<br /><br />‘Well then?’<br /><br />‘I’ve got a flask and a plastic box with my dinner,’ he says. ‘And a radio. I like listening to Radio Birmingham, the pop one. I had a request played the other day. That Darius. I like him, or rather my missus does. I got it played for her.’<br /><br />‘What else?’ I ask. ‘<br /><br />A photo of my missus and kids. One or two others.’ He winks. Pin-ups I bet he means. I scowl anyway - pin-ups are worse than Barbie, of course they are. (‘Degrading for women, Trace would say, in that voice which might or not mean she’s sending that idea up along with the pin-ups.)<br /><br />‘What else?’<br /><br />‘Want to know it all, don’t you,’ he says.<br /><br />‘I do want to come up a crane one day,’ I say.<br /><br />The man laughs. ‘That’s what they all say. Till they’re halfway up.’<br /><br />He leans down pats Border approvingly. Laughs again and goes off. And I still haven’t managed to ask him what he does about peeing up there. Or poohing.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Back home in my room I get up the crane site on the internet. I go into its message board. There’s a message from an administrator. ‘Yet another unsecured crane.’ There’s also a message from someone who signs herself ‘Ella.’ (A woman crane-driver! Or who will be. So much for the man crane-driver saying there weren’t any, I think, triumphantly.)<br /><br />‘Hey all you guys up there,’ it says. What’s your advice to a gal who wants to be a tower crane-driver? Probably you’re going to tear my butt off. sooner than see female up there? I can't wait to get started. I love buildings, so why the heck not build them? I love cranes, especially Towers. So why not earn my bread and butter working with them? I know the job will have its sucky moments, but doesn't everything?’<br /><br />Perhaps it’s a coincidence, perhaps quite another Ella. This Ella doesn’t write all like my Ella. I think she doesn’t. This Ella too sounds properly grown-up. But all the same it’s creepy.<br /><br />(If it is her, I wonder suddenly, is she telling me to get up there, to be a crane driver too? Noone has answered her yet. I’m certainly not going to.)<br /><br />I go into my email. Ella again; yet another message; the first for ages. ‘Crane drivers united. Reach for the sky, it says. xxElla’ And then my mobile beeps and here she comes again. ‘Keep on climbing, Ella.<br /><br />I don’t know if Rahilah gets emails and so on from her dead twin, but I do know she understands what it is to have someone else out there, just beyond reach. bugging you. In my desperation I give the number to my mother at last and stand over while she rings her.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER EIGHT<br /><br /></div>Going to tea at Rahilah’s is lovely: almost the last nice thing that happens. It’s almost all downhill afterwards.<br /><br />Mum comes too – Mr Hussein says he can’t expect her to drive me all that way and then come back again later. I’m cross about this at first, but it turns out fine. Cool even. Mum looks really happy, she and Rahilah’s mother get on like anything, even after Mr Hussein comes in and doesn’t leave them alone for a minute.<br /><br />I’ve never been in such a crowded and busy house. It’s not just all the people, men women and children. It’s also the noise – at least two radios, though not in the room where we are. (From one<br />comes the voice of a waily singer, from the other Banghra. It’s also all the furniture and ornaments and decoration. There are sofas, chairs, tables, sideboards, mixed up with bright-coloured plastic gear for babies and small children. There’s even a baby bouncing up and down, laughing, in a baby bouncer anchored to a doorframe. People going in and out – they go in and out all the time – have to push him aside like a curtain. It just makes him laugh the harder..(‘We never had any of those Baby Bouncers in Pakistan,’ I hear Mrs Hussein say to Mum.)<br /><br />There are figured metal bits and pieces, jugs with tall spouts and elaborate knobs on the lids, china bowls, plates, cups. There are patterns on everything, on the china plates, on the fringed tablecloths, on the chairs and sofas, on the walls. And there’s even a kind of patterned, smell – incense – cooking – spices – babies. All mixed up.<br /><br />And the food! It’s a feast. The coloured sweets and cakes Rahilah brings to school sometimes, so does Jay - Gulab jamum, and bright coloured squares made of I don’t know what (boiled down milk, Rahilah once said, but it doesn’t taste or look like milk.). Also savoury stuff, parathas and samosas, onion bhajies, little kebabs on sticks. And there’s fruit – apples and oranges, but also papayas and mangos. And there’s tea, of course, and juice and coke. Mum and I are made to eat and drink till we’re stuffed. Rahilah sitting next to me laughs and eats much less. But then she’s not being asked to eat too much.<br /><br />It’s the first time I’ve seen Rahilah without a headscarf. Her hair is long and glossy and very black. She’s wearing jeans and a bright t-shirt just like me. Unlike me she has ear-rings and three or four gold bracelets on each arm. Her sisters and sister-in-laws – I count at least four – there are no men or boys around except two little boys and a rather sulky-looking twelve year old who says nothing – are wearing western dress, too, apart from their jewelry.<br /><br />Even Rahilah’s mother isn’t wearing a hijab, though she does wear a long dress, like a kaftan. I remember Rahilah explaining saying why her mother liked to cover herself up. It makes me laugh to myself. Her mother laughs back as if she knows what I’m thinking. Then she whispers something to my mum and laughs again. By the look of it Rahilah’s mother finds life one huge joke. Even though what happened to Rahilah was no joke.<br /><br />Rahilah and I are allowed to leave the table eventually. We go upstairs to the room where Rahilah sleeps -they’ve fitted in a desk for her now next to her bed, with her new pc. She still doesn’t have it to herself of course. Three other beds are jammed in besides hers. It looks like their occupants have to crawl over each other to go to bed. Above Rahilah’s desk are four shelves, reaching almost to the ceiling. The three lower ones are crammed with books – school books, story books: Harry Potter I notice. Also books with Arabic writing. (Can Rahilah really read that? I wonder, very impressed.) . The top shelf holds ornaments – two little perfume holders with long spouts; two little candles, two little patterned plates.<br /><br />Why two of everything? I wonder. Is it because of Rahilah’s dead twin? It doesn’t seem tactful to ask. I don’t. I am feeling quite shy of Rahilah after all this time: after what happened to her.<br /><br />“Are you alright again?’ I ask her. ‘Are you really alright? It was all my fault.’<br /><br />‘No it wasn’t,’ Rahilah says. ‘It was never your fault. It was just those stupid girls and Frankie.’<br /><br />I shake my head. She shakes her’s back, smiling. ‘But are you alright?’ I insist.<br /><br />‘Don’t I look it? Of course I am alright. OK, it was horrible at the time. But it’s over. There’s not even going to be a scar, not even where the stitches were. Look,’ she says and lifts back her black hair from her cheek. I can see the scar now. I am horrified. It’s quite jagged, though beginning to turn white, not raised any longer.<br /><br />It makes me feel still shyer of her. As if she guesses, Rahilah says. ‘It’s alright, Esther. STOP WORRYING.’ She says it crossly. For a moment her face turns bleak. It’s alright,’ she repeats as if to convince herself as well as me. Then she giggles. And I giggle. Things are OK again, just about. Even though what she says next would have made me feel me bad again if she hadn’t glared at me meanwhile, daring me to feel bad.<br /><br />‘I hate the Islamic school. It’s boring. All girls, some of them so religious it’s boring. And the teachers put you in straight lines and talk at you, and you’re not supposed to talk back, let alone disagree with them, the way you’re allowed to sometimes at Smelly Poke. (I was amazed to hear Rahilah calling our school that. She never did when she went there.) ‘And there’s all that religion. Gross,’ she says. ‘Gross.’ This is a new rebellious Rahilah. But I don’t think that’s Frankie’s fault, I really don’t.<br /><br />‘Can you read Arabic writing?’ I ask. ‘The Koran yes. I’ve always had to read that. Some people says girls don’t need to, but my father says girls should, just like boys.’<br /><br />‘Why don’t you ask to come back to Smelly Poke, if you hate the Islamic School?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘My father says he won’t let me go to a school where you have boys like that. He says ‘it will be murder yet.’ Here Rahilah uses, rather wickedly, the accent both her parents have talking English, very different from her own Brummy. But maybe she doesn’t know she’s doing it. Maybe she talks to them that way herself.<br /><br />‘You are lucky to be allowed to wear earrings,’ I say gazing enviously at Rahilah’s gold dangles. ‘I keep asking mum to let me have my ears pierced but she won’t let me.’ (I don’t add that Trace has said once or twice. ‘She can’t stop you. I can take you to an ear-piercing place if you like. It’s nicer to have someone to go with.’ Does Ella have pierced ears, I wonder, gazing up at Rahilah’s twin plates on their high shelf.)<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Rahilah’s father, Mr Hussein, has arrived home by the time we go downstairs. He is wearing a little grey fur cap and a big coat which he does not take off. He is fattish not very tall and talks all the time, loudly and effusively, (this the first time I’ve had the chance to use the word ‘effusive.’) He makes the room seem smaller than ever, He tries to persuade mum and me to start eating all over again. ‘My family has been starving you, I can see. Muna, Fatima, what are you thinking of, bring tea, bring cakes, bring samosas! You are quite neglecting our guests.’ Rahilah’s mother just laughs and takes no notice. He does not seem to notice she is taking no notice. He accepts the cup of tea she hands him, sits down on the chair next to mum and proceeds to question her closely and precisely about my academic progress. A small boy is sitting at the table next to him now. All the time he is talking to mum, Mr Hussein is feeding titbits straight into his mouth, just as if he was a little bird – some samosa here, a sweet thing or a piece of meat, there. The boy opens his mouth obediently and gobbles up every one. His dark eyes are staring at me all the time. I smile at him but he is too busy eating to smile back.<br /><br />Mr Hussein turns to me after a while. ‘Your mother is giving me a good report, Esther,’ he says. ‘And Rahilah is telling me too you used to help her with her school work.’ I blush: it was so much more the other way about. I see my chance though. ‘Rahilah helped me,’ I say. ‘I don’t do nearly so well when she’s not there. I hope you’re going to let her come back to Anthony Morris one day, Mr Hussein.’<br /><br />But he is not having this, not now. He sighs and throws his hands and eyes in the air and says ‘Mrs Hussein and I are both saying, Esther, that it won’t do. Your school has many merits, the teacher in your class, Miss Key, is an excellent teacher. But we cannot allow our precious daughter to come to a place where are lurking such dangers; such wicked boys and girls who can such things.’<br /><br />My mother is frowning at me. This is clearly something I should not have mentioned. And in any case, it is time for us to leave. We do – with many requests for us to return again soon to what Mr Hussein is calling his humble abode and which is growing more and more crowded as Rahilah’s brothers and brothers-in-law start arriving home.<br /><br />Mr Hussein has taken the bouncing baby down from the door -people now merely have to push the baby bouncer aside when they want to go in and out. He has the baby on his lap. He is bouncing it up and down there, bouncing it even more emphatically when he has a point to make. The baby doesn’t seem to mind. It laughs the harder, or else looks wonderfully puzzled and solemn. (Though this baby has much darker eyes and a lot of much darker hair, it reminds me of our baby Barty when he was a bit younger. I’ll never see that Barty again, I think, feeling a little sad.)<br /><br />‘Mum can I have my ears pierced, please,’ I ask on the way home. ‘Rahilah’s are, so why can’t mine be?’<br /><br />‘Certainly not Esther. You are still much too young. Rahilah comes from a different culture, it’s different for her.’<br /><br />‘The Islamic school does sounds boring,’ I say..<br /><br />‘There you are then,’ mum says, as if it settles everything.<br /><br />It doesn’t. I’ll take Trace up on her offer to go with me to have it done, I think. I really will this time. And I’ll get my belly-button done at the same time. See if I don’t.granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-47254965877458861622007-03-14T12:30:00.000+00:002007-03-21T09:15:52.352+00:00PART TWO Chapters 5-6<div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER FIVE<br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The machinery arm contains the machine’s motor and electronics as well as the large concrete counterweights.</span><br /><br />The only nice thing about Spring Term is its name. Actually it’s got nothing to do with Spring, it’s just winter, grey and wet and cold and miserable on and on and on. BORING. I hate February. The only nice thing ever happened in February was about three years before we came to Birmingham when Granny arrived out of the blue. ‘Only my mother would be mad enough to make such a long canal trip in WINTER,’ my mother said.<br /><br />I rather liked the idea of granny being mad. I thought my mother was much madder, not to say boring, for being sensible all the time. Bringing Mnemosyne our way in winter was much more like fun.<br /><br />That was the first time I got to know granny. I’d only seen her a few times before, and only for a short time. She made up for now. She let me stay overnight on Mnemosyne, in her little spare bunk - I loved the way the boat rocked gently all night. And not long after she took me for a three day trip up the canal towards Birmingham.<br /><br />‘Bring your bike,’ Granny said. She kept it for me on top of the cabin, alongside the jumble of ropes, boxes, plant pots with flowers in them. Sometimes I sat there too watching the towpath roll past. Sometimes I sat alongside Granny in the stern while Border sat on the roof, watching in her way, unmoving, like a cat. Sometimes I rode my bike along the towpath besides the narrow boat, Border running after - we went much faster than the boat and had to stop to let Granny catch us up. Other times, best of all, Granny let me take the tiller and showed me how to steer and turn without hitting the bank (the hard thing is you have to push the tiller the opposite way to what you’d expect.) She taught me how to open the lock gates with the special metal tool, called a key, though it doesn’t look like one, to swing them open, so that she could steer Mnemosyne into the lock. I enjoyed working the locks.<br /><br />Once, when another narrowboat owner was there to work the bottom gate I’d got back on to Mnemosyne with Granny. But I didn’t much like the boat going down and the dark damp-streaming walls of the lock getting higher and higher round us. When the gates opened again and we went out onto the open canal it felt like being let out of prison. Suppose the gates don’t open? I’d thought, for a moment. Suppose we never managed to get out?<br /><br />Now I come to think of it this so called ‘Spring’ Term in Birmingham feels a bit the same. Some dark damp place from which I’ll never get out. Only worse, especially after what happens to Rahilah.<br /><br />*******<br /><br />For several days after I’ve talked to Rahilah I don’t go to school; I’ve got a bad cold, a bit like flu. with a temperature. That’s another of the bad thing about the Spring Term, everyone gets ill; the classroom is full of people coughing and sneezing.<br /><br />I don’t mind being ill for once; it’s nice having mum fuss round me. It’s nice not having to listen to this teacher or that complaining about my work. It’s nice not having to wait for the bus in the rain, morning and afternoon, and being turfed out into a cold damp windy playground during break and at lunchtime. It’s nice not having to think about Frankie and his lot.<br /><br />I creep out of bed every day though to check my email. I send a few with those down-turned mouth not smileys to show I’m ill to Jay and Rashid -. I don’t get any back, but I’m feeling too bad to mind much. I don’t get any from Ella either. Thanks for that.<br /><br />I go back to school on Monday; no Rahilah. I assume she’s got what I had; quite a few other people in the class are away too. I certainly don’t connect it with the smirks of some of Frankie’s girls when I come in through the school gates. I do wonder why there’s a group of Muslim girls in headscarves looking at me and whispering; but that has happened before during Rahilah’s and my friendship. I don’t have time to hang about the playground and talk to anyone. I’m late.<br /><br />It’s double maths first, my hated maths, still worse than usual because I’ve missed a week and don’t understand anything, especially without Rahilah to explain. I’d have asked Trace but she’s not there: she has got flu, the teacher says during registration. It’s no good asking Jay maths aren’t his thing either; Rashid I can’t ask for the usual reasons –I do send him a note saying ‘why haven’t you emailed me?’ But he shakes his head glumly and doesn’t look at me. Jay doesn’t look at me either. Maths: I think. As usual that teacher has got us by the…But I begin to feel a bit uneasy.<br /><br />I try to catch Jay when the bell goes, but he rushes out. So does Rashid. I feel uneasier still. I’m not made to go out into the cold playground this break-time because of just being back from flu. I go back to our classroom, and open my desk take out my copy of Lord of the Flies ready for the next class. A piece of paper falls out. On the back of it are rows of smilys in red ink. On the other side is written, also in red ink<br /><br />THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS TO TERRORISTS. KEEP OUT!!!!<br /><br />Rahilah, It has to be something to do with Rahilah. I grab the first person who comes into the room, not a friend, a fat girl called Janice, who doesn’t seem to like anyone much, not surprisingly since noone much seems to like her – people say she smells, though I’ve never noticed it. I feel a bit sorry for her but that’s about it. She jumps when I scream at her; ‘What’s happened to Rahilah?? What’s happened. ‘ Janice blinks. She’s like that.<br /><br />‘How should I know?’ she asks.<br /><br />‘Rahilah,’ I scream back; ‘in our class; the one wears a headscarf.’<br /><br />‘Oh, a Muslim girl,’ she says, as if Muslim girls don’t count really. ‘Oh her.’ She adds reflectively as if glad to find someone even less popular than her, ‘She got attacked; out of school, by some girls – girls from our school, probably, but noone knows for sure, they had balaclavas on.’ (Oh don’t they, I think. I know who. I know who exactly.) ‘How badly attacked?’ I ask, furiously. Janice blinks again.<br /><br />‘Her scarf got torn off,’ she said. ‘She was wearing earrings, someone said. We’re not allowed to wear earrings at school.’<br /><br />‘But was she hurt,’ I scream. ‘Was she hurt?’<br /><br />‘She might of got a black eye. All her books and papers were pulled out of backpack and torn up.’<br /><br />I can’t bear it; it’s ALL MY FAULT. If I hadn’t talked to her … they told me not to talk to her. I could hardly see Janice now for tears though I can hear her– she hasn’t finished yet. ‘She – the Muslim girl - had red paint poured over her,’ she says.<br /><br />Why haven’t Rashid and Jay told me? I’m angry with them now; it’s easier. I’m angrier with Jay, I don’t want to be angry with Rashid.<br /><br />The rest of the class come in then and look at me curiously. I go on crying, who cares what they think. One or two of the nicer girls try to comfort me, but they can’t. Rashid and Jay I notice looking uncomfortable. I hold tears enough to glare at Jay. ‘But you’re a Hindu,’ I say through them. ‘Not a Muslim. They won’t hurt <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span>. Why couldn’t you tell me?’ The teacher arrives then. She sends me to the school nurse. The school nurse is very nice, makes me lie down for a bit until I stop crying and shaking, she says I’ve probably come in too soon after flu. She asks if my mother will be at home and when I say yes, she sends me home.<br /><br />But when I go to get my coat etc from my locker, I find everything has been pulled out and thrown on the floor and my anorak has been slashed and daubed with red ink, and the covers of my books have been daubed too and some of them even torn off.<br /><br />KEEP AWAY FROM TERRORISTS the notice says.<br /><br />Quite how I get out of school and on the bus, I don’t know. I walk home via the Gas Street Basin – I’m calmer now, zombified more like. I hammer on the door of Mnemosyne – a surprised gull flaps up from the roof of the boat. I can hear Border barking inside, whining, whining ever more frantically – I want her almost more than I want Granny. I want to see her smile at me, and make her greeting noises. I want to bury my face in her lavatory-brush brown coat. But I can’t reach her. Granny’s not at home. I think she would have let me in otherwise. Hearing me scream the way I am doing. People are looking at me from the other side of the canal. I don’t care. I’m weird. GROSS. I don’t care.<br /><br />No good trying Poseiden. The Seventh Dwarf won’t be back from building yet. All I can do is go home, creeping into the flat very quietly so that mum won’t hear me. So that I can go into my room and hurl myself on my bed and cry, scream, whatever I need to do to shut out the horrible pictures in my head. Pictures of Rahilah, my friend, above all; of what has been done to her. I don’t seem to know what the world is any more. I don’t know which way it’s facing.<br /><br />But I am not quite quiet enough. Before I can get to my room, Mum comes out of the kitchen and sees my torn, dirty, anorak – ‘What on earth,’ she starts saying, then she must have seen my face. ‘Oh Esther,’ she says, and to my surprise I fling myself into her arms, glad she’s there after all, howling and howling into her red winter sweater instead of into my bed. I even end up telling her what’s happened, while she makes me sweet coffee, because it’s what I say I want. She doesn’t once say I shouldn’t be drinking coffee at my age, doesn’t once hint once that nothing like this would have happened if I’d gone to the nice kind of school she’d planned for me instead of the Comprehensive in Smelly Poke. She’s alright sometimes, my mum.<br /><br />********<br /><br />But for some reason when I go to bed that night, the face I see while I lie tossing about isn’t Rahilah’s let alone Mum’s. It’s Granny’s. Not her present face. The face of Granny as a child frowning through the family albums stacked above her bed.<br /><br />In all the times I asked her why she looked so sad she only answered once: ‘I was an only child; Esther. I expect I felt lonely.’<br /><br />‘I’m only child,’ I said. ‘Pictures of me aren’t sad. Not like that.’<br /><br />‘You’ve got brothers and sisters,’ granny said. ‘I didn’t have any.’<br /><br />‘Grown-up brothers and sisters,’ I said. ‘I might just as well be an only child. It’s just as lonely.’ I was almost feeling sorry for myself now. Granny just laughed, though. And I still don’t have a clue about what was biting her those long-ago days, frowning at the camera as if the miseries of the world were on her back.<br /><br />Thinking these words, ‘the miseries of the world on her back’ makes me remember Rahilah. I cry a bit. I can’t sleep.<br /><br />At school next day I want to ask her friends if she’s alright. Which is stupid of me, after all Frankie’s lot might do the same as they had done to Rahilah if they saw any of them talking to me. They know it. They hurry away as soon as I come near. They look at me as if I am a murderer, as if I am dangerous.<br /><br />Trace is back at school now. ‘Not your fault, Es,’ she says once from nothing and nowhere. She even touches my shoulder. But then she goes away again. And though I don’t get any more nasty notes, one of Frankie’s girls seems to be there, smirking at me, wherever I look. I hate them. I hate the world. If anyone took a picture of me now, I think, I’d look just as sad as Granny in all those pictures - just as lonely. I switch off my mobile. I don’t even bother to check my email when I get in. Who could be texting me, who could be writing to me except Ella? And I don’t want to hear anything from her.<br /><br />Surprisingly – surprising to me anyway – my best comforter now is Barty, my little nephew. When I come in from school and hear him there, I run to the sitting-room. I love the smile comes over his face, his shouts of glee when he sees me.<br /><br />He is crawling everywhere now. He is also pulling himself up. He’ll be walking soon, I think. I want to walk him for me before he walks for anyone else. I kneel a little way away and hold out my arms – ‘Come on Barty, come on, walk to Esther,’ I urge him. But each time he smiles, drops to the floor and crawls my way.<br /><br />‘He’s not ready yet, Esther’ my mother chides. ‘He’s not 10 months He’s only just learned to crawl.’<br /><br />But I want him to walk towards me now, this minute. Then the world will seem right again – nearly right – I think.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER SIX<br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The motor in the machinery arm lifts the load.</span><br /><br />That night in bed, I fall straight to sleep. I dream I am running away from something, running and running. I can’t see where I am at first; the legs of tall steel towers loom around me. Not solid legs – open legs cross-hatched with steel girders. They are cranes, I realise. In a moment I am on a ladder in the centre of one of them. I am climbing, fast as I can, gasping for breath. Then I am at the top, gazing dizzily at Birmingham spread widely below. I look towards our flats. I see a face at my window. Granny’s face I think at first – then - Ella? -or is it me? – ‘Ella!’ I cry ‘Ella!’ and make a huge jump towards the window – where Rahilah’s face awaits me now; not one but two Rahilahs – twins. For a moment I soar ecstatically. Suddenly I am falling, falling - before I can hit the ground I wake up, shaking, sweating, crying.<br /><br />*******<br /><br />I don’t feel like going back to sleep after that. I get out of bed and turn on my computer. Almost without knowing, I get my email up, my finger poised on the delete button in case there’s anything from Ella. I won’t read any message from Ella, not ever again.<br /><br />I do have a message. I click on and inspect it. And to my amazement it’s not from Rashid, not from Jay, certainly not from Ella. It’s from Rahilah who doesn’t have a computer, who’s never sent me an email before.<br /><br />Dear Esther, I read. Fatima told me what happened to you. I am so sorry. And I wanted to tell you that what happened to me was not your fault. Not at all. Our friendship is good, it doesn’t deserve that. My father says the same thing. I told him that they’d done bad things to you too, and he said that it was a betrayal of your hospitality to me, that we should make amends for it. He has asked if your mother would be so good as to come with you to our house one day, for an example of Muslim hospitality. He has asked me to give you our phone number so your mother can ring us and arrange a day.<br /><br />Rahilah sounds so formal here it might be her dad speaking. Maybe it is her dad speaking. But at the bottom she adds – and this has to be real Rahilah: I am not coming back to Anthony Morris, Esther. I’m going to the Islamic School for Girls. Daddy has given me a computer to make up. I miss you Esther. You are my friend. love Rahilah.<br /><br />I am almost as angry with Rahilah now as I am pleased to hear from her. NOT COMING BACK TO SCHOOL? HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME, RAHILAH? I turn the computer off straightaway. I do not give my mother her phone number.<br /><br />******<br />More than ever I hate this time of year. The sky is always grey. Winter seems everlasting. At school I still spend my time looking over my shoulder for Frankie’s lot but they don’t seem on my case any more. I miss Rahilah so much. Without her, I’ve got noone to giggle with. (It’s funny I should remember her for that - I’d always thought Rahilah so serious.) Trace doesn’t giggle, ever. And at the moment she seems totally wrapped up in her own concerns, just as Rashid and Jay are. Both the boys seem wary of me too, especially Rashid (I can’t blame them. I’m wary of myself too, when it comes to Frankie.) What’s more suddenly they seem thick as thieves. It’s as if Frankie has thrown them together. I get silly notes and emails from Jay still, but he sends copies of the emails to Rashid too. I don’t bother to answer them. I’m still angry with Jay for not telling me about Rahilah. I don’t talk to him at school any more if I can help it. I see Rashid working for his uncle on Saturday mornings still and I get an email from him occasionally about one crane or another – this doesn’t say ccJay; it’s just to me. He still smiles at me sometimes, his brown eyes beautiful as ever. But that is all.<br /><br />To make things still worse, the school seems to think it’s time to stop us all getting overweight. Every class is made to go on a run once a week, no matter how cold and wet the weather. Even the fatties have to; they puff along at the back looking miserable, and end up walking back to school. Afterwards we congregate round the machines in the hall and get out twice as many cans of pop and packets of crisps as usual. Once I see the fat girl in our class, Janice, still red and sweaty from her run get four packets, two cheese and onion and two salt and vinegar and three cokes and gobble them straight down. So that’s no good, is it?<br /><br />As for lessons: they have never seemed so boring – I skimp my homework as much and more than before. Doory – Miss Key –has given up on me; she has stopped telling me to pull my socks up, anyway. She looks at me in kindly way and shakes her head. Obviously she thinks I’m a hopeless case. I am a hopeless case. Granny thinks I’m a hopeless case. Why bother?<br /><br />Not even the cranes cheer me when I feel like this. Instead of staring up at them from my window, I look down at the building site. Breeze-block walls are rising. Soon there’ll be a whole set of buildings hiding my view across the city toward Brindley Place and its clock tower and its lit-up clock and no more cranes anywhere; or at least not near us. Why does everything have to keep on changing, I wonder as usual Why does nothing ever stay the same?<br /><br />The good things in my life are: 1) Border: 2) the woman who writes in the flats I see from the new bridge. (She seems to know I’m miserable: suddenly, most times I go over the bridge she sees me and waves; I wave back.) 3) Barty. 4) when he’s at home, Bob, the seventh dwarf.<br /><br />I feel as at home in Poseidon now as I used to feel in Mnemosyne. I love the smell of Bob’s Old Holborn Tobacco and his acrylic paints and his fry-ups. I’m getting to like the strong sweet tea he gives me. He even paints sometimes when I’m around, squinting at the page as he fills in his endless little lines. His tiny half reading glasses look ridiculously small against his big face, his big beard, his woollen hat. He doesn’t take his hat off even in his hot hot cabin.<br /><br />He is not painting the country and sea and flowers any more, I notice. He’s painting the city and the skyline – and the cranes too! I like that. But there’s still no sky there. As if he is afraid of sky. His cities look as unreal, as much like places in a fairy tale as his country landscapes used to. Weird. AND WEIRDER. I think. I’m not sure I like them much. I don’t say. The dwarf doesn’t like people contradicting him or what he does. He’s a tyrant. (When I told him I didn’t really like sugar in my tea, could I have it without now? he threw the contents of my mug down his sink and told me to go home AT ONCE. I did go home. And next day when he handed me sugared tea again I drank it anyway. I almost like sugar in my tea now, at least when it’s his tea. I think I do, really.)<br /><br />********<br /><br />One day, though, Trace grabs my arm as we are coming out of school and says; ‘Ok, right. You’re coming home with me today.’<br /><br />‘Who says?’ I say, not very friendly. I’ve been pretty pissed-off with Trace lately. Most days she doesn’t seem to notice I’m there. Why should I jump just when and as she says? Why should I?<br /><br />‘I do,’ she says. ‘Have you got your mobile? Ring your mum.’<br /><br />‘I don’t need to ring my mum,’ I say haughtily, following her sulkily, just the same. Why does everyone assume they can tell me what to do? I’m thinking. On other hand I’m pleased in a way. I liked Trace’s place last time I went there. Now I like it all over again. It seems familiar even though I only went there once.<br /><br />Her mum, who Trace calls Misa, not mum, is at home, this time, looking as tired, as thin, as ghostly as ever. (I feel like a ghost sometimes myself, these days.) Besides her Trace seems all angles and sharp as knives. It surprises me that those knives don’t slice straight through her wispy mum but they don’t. They seem as easy together as a married couple. Or as a mother and a child - Trace more the mother, her mother more like the child. At the very least they could be best friends. Is that how it is when your mum’s a single parent, I wonder? (I love my mum when I don’t hate her. But she never feels like my friend.)<br /><br />There’s this too. Trace’s mum not only looks little older than my older sister, I know for a fact that she isn’t so much older than my elder sister. Trace herself could almost be my mum’s granddaughter, then, what a weird thought. Gross even.<br /><br />Misa has all her papers spread out on the table when we come in, listening to music – Mozart I think. She is filling in forms of some kind. She turns off the music and clears the forms away at once, but not before I’ve seen her name printed neatly at the top of one form, Artemisa Miriam Falconer: Artemisa explains the ‘Misa’, I suppose. (Though it seems a funny name, I’ve heard some name like it quite recently – I’m not sure when - so it can’t be that unusual.)<br /><br />I notice the African masks and the figures more than I did last time. I don’t like them as much as the rugs. The masks I find quite creepy. The figures are better, though; the men and women with short bent legs and big heads look much less unfriendly. The one I like best is actually two figures; one carried pick-a-back by the other. The carrying man has bent short legs like all the figures. The wood is dark and with a deep sheen on it. It’s beautiful.<br /><br />I find Misa standing behind me. ‘They’re Dogon figures,’ she says. ‘From Mali. The Dogon culture is based round twins. This is supposed to represent cooperation between two halves, making up a whole.’<br /><br />I can’t understand what she is saying. I don’t see ‘Co-operation.’ here at all.<br /><br />Trace doesn’t see it either. ‘Co-operation?’ she says. ‘Come off it, Misa. The bottom man is just a horse; the other one’s exploiting him. That’s not co-operation. No way.’<br /><br />This is pretty much the way I am seeing things. I can almost hear the man on top saying ‘Gee up.’ I laugh. So does Trace. But then I stop laughing. ‘Twins’ I think. (Look at Rahilah burdened by her dead twin - she always did seem quite burdened. And then Ella: ELLA. My twin? Or not? Burdened by Ella whoever she is - my twin or someone else’s - I feel sorry for the man doing the carrying. I like him much better than I do the man on top.)<br /><br />We eat cheese on toast with Misa. She makes it for us this time – sprinkles chilli on it - surprising but quite nice – we ask for more. (My mother never sprinkles chilli on her cheese on toast. And she calls it Welsh Rabbit.) Afterwards Trace and I go to her room to do our homework, leaving Misa to her papers. I hear the music go on again then. Not Mozart now, but still classical. Trace is making a face.<br /><br />Trace’s room is as tidy as ever: much tidier than mine ever is. There are no piles of drawings on her desk. It’s set out for homework with pens, paper. She only has to take the books from her daypack and turn on her desktop in case we need it. I find myself thinking of Rahilah, ‘I miss Rahilah,’ I say suddenly as I get my maths book out. Trace opens her own. ‘So do I,’ she says. ‘Rahilah’s the cleverest of all of us. I like having someone to compete against.’<br /><br />That’s not why I miss Rahilah, exactly, but I don’t say anything. Trace goes on. ‘Now I’ll have to make do with you, Esther. You’re not so stupid either. When you try.’<br /><br />‘You sound just like Doory,’ I say sourly. ‘Don’t Rashid and Jay count?’<br /><br />‘Boys,’ Trace raises an eyebrow.<br /><br />‘What’s wrong with boys?’ I say furiously. For two pins I think, I’ll go home. What’s with Trace? ‘Why do you have to be so bloody superior?’ I mutter beneath my breath. Maybe Trace hears me. She laughs, anyway.<br /><br />‘No skin off my nose,’ she says.<br /><br />‘If what?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘Anything you like,’ she says, copying something off her notes. ‘If you’re not going to work you can always go home.’<br /><br />But I don’t want to go home yet. I shake my head. ‘Cool,’ Trace says. She’s not even looking at me.<br /><br />‘What’s the point of working, Trace?’ I ask her. And now I do really want to know what she thinks. ‘Look at Rahilah,’ I add almost without knowing I’m going to. Trace stops writing then and looks at me.<br /><br />‘Not working’s letting that lot win,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it?’<br /><br />‘Is it?’ I say. ‘They’re going to beat people up just the same.’<br /><br />‘Poor them,’ she says. ‘Poor you.’<br /><br />‘Poor them, Trace?’<br /><br />‘Poor them. You’re not going to stay in school forever, Est. What then?’<br /><br />‘University, I suppose,’ I say. I haven’t thought about any of it much, in spite of the school meetings about GCE plans, about A level plans, about careers and all that. None of it seems real to me. ‘What about you, Trace? Do you know what?’<br /><br />‘Of course. Medical school. Like Misa,’ she says. ‘I want to be a paediatrician. That’s what I’ve always wanted.’ I look at her in amazement here. Fancy knowing what you want, fancy seeing your grown-up life so clearly. I haven’t a clue about mine, apart from wanting to grow up more like Granny than like Mum. No wonder Trace seems so grown-up. Too grown-up, I think, for a teenager. Almost boringly grown up. I look around her room, at the books, at the posters for singers I’ve never heard of. At a pair of heavily embroidered jeans – dragons I see on it, snow-topped mountains. ‘I never saw a doctor with pink hair before,’ I say. ‘Or with studs in their eye-brows.’<br /><br />‘Well you have seen one now,’ Trace says. ‘Don’t let those bastards get you down, Est,’ she adds. She starts working on a maths problem. Slowly, reluctantly, I get out my books and do the same. We don’t say any more. Through the wall, faintly, I hear Misa’s music, while I do my maths homework properly for the first time in weeks.<br /><br />*******<br /><br />I go straight home after school next day, dump my stuff then set off to fetch Border.<br /><br />It’s getting lighter these days, the seventh dwarf is never home so I have to go to Mnemosyne. Granny is still not saying much to me, she doesn’t ask me in for tea. But since I haven’t had any more text messages from Ella, I suspect she hasn’t either. Some days when I knock on the door she not only hands over Border, she even smiles. ‘You’ll be the death of me, Esther,’ she says one day, almost fondly. ‘I don’t want to be,’ I say. ‘Watch it then,’ she says. Another day she says, ‘I had a call from Stuart. He says he’ll be up again soon.’ But he hasn’t come up yet and today Border is tied up on deck waiting for me: Mnemosyne is locked and dark. A note says, ‘Take Border back to Bob’s please. xG.<br /><br />I walk her along the towpath for a bit as usual. But mum has asked me to pick up a jacket from the dry cleaners across the road from Mailbox. I keep Border with me and then, instead of going back up through the Mailbox I decide to walk along the side of the overpass and back up Holliday Street, past the building site I look at from my window.<br /><br />The gate in the chain-link fence is open for some vehicle or other; an empty dumper truck, like a wide tricycle with an engine and a big barrow in front driven by a man in a yellow helmet. I take the chance to stand by the gate close as I dare to try and get a better look. I hold tight to Border. I can hear her getting excited about something. She’s pulling on her lead, but I’ve got her safe; I think I’ve got her safe: but I haven’t.granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-39959746631383272682007-03-07T09:24:00.000+00:002007-03-07T09:27:21.401+00:00PART TWO Chapters 3-4<div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER THREE<br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The third thing carried by the slewing unit is the much shorter machinery arm.</span><br /><br />I’m not writing any more emails to Ella, I think grimly. I don’t. But I’m also too disheartened to write any more to Rashid. I get one from him, though. ‘Give me a place to stand’, it says. ’I will move the world. ARCHIMEDES: Who invented levers.’ (I suppose he means that Archimedes, whoever he is, said it.) ‘Cranes are enormous levers,’ he adds, in case I don’t know: ‘Love Rashid.x’ This almost cheers me: but only for a moment. After a moment I feel more patronised than happy.<br /><br />The worst thing is that Granny stays in such a strop. She still thinks the message – messages now – there’ve been more, just the same - are my fault. That’s one thing. But why should Ella bug her so much. If Ella is anyone’s twin she’s mine. (This still seems a crazy idea to me, but I can’t think of any other way to explain what’s happening.) Strange messages on your mobile are even creepier than unknown emails. A bit like having a stalker. (I only just thought of that! But yes.) I keep telling her it’s not me sending them, how can it be me sending them if I get them too, from her mobile? But she doesn’t take any notice. It’s as if she just wants someone to blame; anything except believe it could be Ella. What’s it to her though? How can my possible twin get up her nose? The only time we encounter each other – by accident – near her boat, she just bolts her mouth and looks angrier than ever. Weird. Scary, in fact.<br /><br />I’m so desperate I even ask my mother. ‘Who’s Ella?’ But she looks at me as if I’m crazy. ‘That was your make-believe friend, Esther,’ she says. ‘I don’t know anyone else called Ella.’ Do I believe her? At the moment I don’t believe anything that grown-ups say. Every day now I have to pick up Border from Bob’s boat – ‘Poseidon’ is the Greek god of the sea, he says - not from Mnemosyne - Muse of memory. Who’s remembering who then? I miss Granny. I wonder if she misses me. She’s behaving like someone my age I think. It’s like this with schoolfriends sometimes. But not with Granny? Surely?<br /><br />School is school, the same as ever. Frankie and his gang look at me evilly but don’t do much. THANKS FOR THAT. I daren’t spend time with Rahilah after what they’ve said, but we do smile at one another. One good thing happens; Trace invites me home with her after school. ‘Will your mum be there?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘Could be. She was on call last weekend. Sometimes she’s home earlier on days after that.’<br /><br />But Trace’s mum wasn’t there at first.<br /><br />Trace lives in a council block – I’d never have guessed. It’s not a very nice one either: the lifts smell of pee: the hall and corridors smell of disinfectant. But once inside her door it’s lovely. The flat’s full of African stuff – blankets – hangings – rugs; also African statues. ‘My grandmother came from South Africa,’ Trace explains. ‘My grandfather was some kind of bully so she ran away from him when Mum and her brother were little and went back home to her mum. Mum stayed there till she was 17 and wanted to go to university. She hated South Africa, because of apartheid and all that. She won’t go back there even now. And my grandmother won’t come here. That’s why I’ve never met her. Lucky you, Esther.’<br /><br />Not so lucky just now, I think. ‘But I don’t want to talk about granny, not even to Trace. ‘Your mum still likes African stuff,’ I say, looking at it all. There’s a blanket over the sofa that smells of something strange. (‘Goat-hair,’ Trace says casually, when I ask.) But I love the look of it. It’s white and black and red, with small animals and patterns in rows. It’s from Mali, Trace informs me. Not knowing where Mali is, is something else I don’t admit. I’m used to not knowing things Trace takes for granted. I’m used not to understanding her at all really. Maybe she doesn’t understand me. (I don’t understand myself sometimes; not when I wake up terrified out of a nightmare shouting ‘Ella! Ella! Ella!’) Outside this flat, now, in the hallway, I hear shouting and screaming. Trace takes no notice. When she sees I’ve heard she says: ‘The people next door are always fighting. It doesn’t matter.’<br /><br />There’s more smell of goat in Trace’s room – another blanket is spread across her bed. There’s no more African stuff though, just bookshelves everywhere and a view over the not particularly pretty part of Brum she lives in, not far from the Rover car factory at Longbridge.<br /><br />Trace has a pc on her desk like me. And she has a heap of cartridge paper, covered in drawings. Seeing me look at them she says, ‘Be my guest,’ making me feel nosy. Trace is just so brilliant, I think, enviously. I knew she was clever and could sing. But now I find she can draw- really draw – and she doesn’t even take art at school! The drawings are all of people, unlike the Seventh Dwarf’s pictures; though they are as tight and detailed as his. When I ask Trace if she does paintings too, she just says. ‘Nope,’ and goes on turning the sheets over.<br /><br />More and more people appear. I recognise some of them: Rashid, Jay, Rahilah. And suddenly there I am too and I wish I wasn’t. ‘Do I really look like that? Does she always see me as frowning? I wonder Just like Granny in her photographs. Weird.<br /><br />Perhaps I should ask her to draw a picture of Ella, I think. Which is crazy; Ella doesn’t exist and even if she does, how could Trace know what she looks like. I don’t know what Ella looks like. Yet I almost find myself saying, ‘Trace will you draw someone from me?’ But the words won’t quite come out. Next time, I think. Next time I’ll ask her.<br /><br />Trace nods as if she hears my thought. She doesn’t say anything, merely turns up a drawing of a thin woman I half recognise, but don’t know. Lots of pictures of her follow: sitting in armchairs, reading, standing at a stove. ‘Your mum, Trace?’ Before she has time to answer a key turns in the lock, and Trace’s mum herself is flinging herself and her bag down on the sofa, not even bothering to take off her coat.<br /><br />‘Tea, Misa?’ Trace asks. (She hadn’t asked me if I’d like tea, I think. But then why should she? And maybe she was going to ask me later.) She sounds just my mum when I come in from school, or when my dad comes from work. Tea comes out –biscuits - chocolate digestives, like I’ve been getting from Bob the Seventh Dwarf – and her mother drinks the tea and eats the biscuit and livens up fractionally, and tells me, that yes, she remembers me from the school play.<br /><br />‘Have you got to go back to the hospital, Misa,’ Trace asks. (Is ‘Misa’ a special word for mum, I wonder; or is it her name?) Her mother nods. ‘Sorry love. So I need a bit of sleep now. But we can eat something together before I go back.’<br /><br />‘That’s OK,’ Trace says. ‘I’m used to it.’ (Her mother grimaces at that. But I don’t get the feeling Trace means to be unkind. I think she just means exactly what she says. Trace always does.) ‘Go and sleep then. I can cook. Shall I make the salmon and rice dish?’<br /><br />I am impressed by Trace. At the same time I’m glad I don’t have to be like that. I’m glad my mother has time to look after me really. I wish granny still did. WHO IS ELLA? WHAT IS SHE DOING TO US? I shout inside my head. Again I almost ask Trace to draw her picture. But I don’t.<br /><br />We do homework after that; some difficult maths that Trace has to help me with, then notes on Lord of the Flies which we’re finishing in English. Poor Piggy, we agree, seeing what’s done to him by the others on their island.<br /><br />‘Makes Smelly Poke seem a doddle,’ Trace says. Thinking of Frankie I’m not so sure.<br /><br />Tracy walks me to the bus stop in the Bristol Road, then goes home to cook salmon rice and I go home on the bus, and with the help of Google look up Mali on the map. (It’s just South of the Sahara if you’re interested. They make beautiful blankets there. But you know that already, whoever you are.)<br /><br />*******<br /><br />All the next week I continue to collect Border from Poseidon not Mnemosyne. Bob leaves the door unlocked for me the days he’s not going to be home – mostly he is; the site stops working when it gets dark. I see the lights on in Mnemosyne and smoke coming from her chimney. I see that plant pots and things have been moved on the top of the cabin. But Granny I don’t see. Her curtains these days are drawn. I feel horribly shut out<br /><br />An email from Rashid suggesting we meet after his next stint at his uncle’s shop makes me feel better. When I collect mum’s paper that Saturday he winks at me behind his uncle’s back so I know it’s still OK. Outside the shop, three geese are sitting on the patch of grass as if they own it - it’s littered with their round green turds. Turds and all I love them. This morning I love all the people walking up Bridge Street, or getting in and out of cars, mostly Indians today – there must be an Indian wedding at the Registry Office in Centenary Square. The women wear gorgeous silk saris edged with gold; even the children are wearing bright silk clothes and have silk ribbons in their hair. They make English wedding clothes look boring, I think. It makes me still more pleased to be meeting Rashid. Pakistanis wear saris too.What would I look like in a sari, I wonder? If, if? If what?<br /><br />We don’t meet in Bridge Street – that’s too near Rashid’s uncle – but in the Gas Street Basin, just by the Tap and Stile. Even on a day like today people are standing outside it with beer glasses in their hands. We walk past them, past the car park, round the corner along Holliday Wharf. The Stamp Man is sitting on the bench outside, huddled up in what looks like an old army coat. He doesn’t look at us.<br /><br />I feel very shy suddenly. ‘Look at all the geese’ is all I can think of to say, reminded of the geese sitting outside the newsagent’s shop. ‘My uncle is always getting complaints about the geese from people in the flats,’ Rashid answers. ‘He just says, “they live by the canal, so what do they expect? There are too many terrible things in the world to worry about geese.” He should know.’ Rashid falls silent a moment – when he does speak I wish he hadn’t. ‘A lot of my family were killed in India when India split from Pakistan. Some of them were pulled off a train and murdered. Another uncle was killed in anti-Muslim riots in Gujerat, not very long ago. He had his head cut off.<br /><br />I stare at a duck swimming along the canal, at a wok sitting on the other side of the canal below some flats. My mind is so awash with this awfulness, I hardly notice it. I’m trying to imagine such things happening to Granny…. I can’t - I don’t want to imagine it. I cannot believe I’m talking to someone in whose family such things can have happened.<br /><br />‘You seem to have a lot of uncles Rashid,’ I say, at last.<br /><br />‘What’s a WOK doing there?’ asks Rashid.<br /><br />He must have realised how much he’s shocked me. He takes my arm – he almost takes my arm and then takes his hand away. He’s not supposed to be out with a girl, I know, let alone touch one. He points at a crane far over to the left of us. ‘I still find cranes so beautiful,’ he says, ‘But I don’t think I want to go up one, not the way you do, Esther. I don’t like heights,’<br /><br />‘I don’t like heights either,’ I say. ‘That’s not the point.’ But I’m not even sure what the point is. There’s a big dog ahead of us, now. ‘Border.’ I shout before she can try to attack it – she’s not afraid of big dogs. She comes running back and I put her on the lead.<br /><br />The ice between Rashid and me is broken now. We walk along quite happily, talking when we feel like it, not when we don’t – just how things should be between friends, I think. We go through the long tunnel up towards the university. The ground is uneven there, it’s dim almost dark in the middle, damp-smelling, altogether creepy. We don’t go far beyond it. Rashid says he can’t be too late and nor can I. Coming back through the tunnel, I stumble, fall against Rashid who steadies me; for a moment we are almost holding hands. We look at each other in the dark – I think Rashid is looking at me– and hastily separate. Then we walk back silently along the towpath. A train trundles along the line besides us. Two cyclists ring their bells to show they want to get past. Border strains after two more ducks on the canal and barks loudly. ‘Shut up,’ I say. Rashid laughs. When we reach the staircase that leads up to Bath Road, he says; ‘I’d better go now. I can catch the bus at the top of Broad Street.’ ‘See you Monday,’ I say. He smiles and is off, his feet clattering on the iron rungs.<br /><br />The Stamp Man is still sitting outside Holliday Wharf. He holds out his Stamp Hand when I go past; I blow him a kiss I’m feeling so happy. So happy in fact, I even dare knock on Granny’s door - the curtains are open; I know she’s there. I see her face staring out of the window. I knock still harder, but she doesn’t answer. I hand Border in at Poseidon and suddenly I’m not so happy any longer.<br /><br />‘What have you been doing to your grandmother?’ Mum asks when I get in. ‘She seems quite upset.’<br /><br />‘What’s she been doing to me?’ I say, and run out.<br /><br />I slam my bedroom door behind me. Even the lovely warm thoughts of Rashid can’t stop me bursting into tears. Again. These days, it seems to me, I’m always bursting into tears. It’s BORING.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER FOUR<br /></div><br />What would I do without the Seventh Dwarf? When I bring Border back after her evening walk these days, he almost always gives us tea and a biscuit. The tea is the strong sweet stuff we never have at home; mum drinks green tea mostly, and dad, coffee.<br /><br />Bob is so used to me now he even gets his paints out sometimes and his drawing-board. But he covers what he’s doing, never actually paints while I’m in there. Nor does he say much. Once he says, out of the blue. ‘Apollo was my son’s name. I made him a mobile when he was born. With suns all over it. Apollo was the Greek sun god.’<br /><br />‘ I know,’ I say huffily.<br /><br />Another day he says. ‘My little girl; she was Artemis. Moon goddess. She got moons. On her mobile.’<br /><br />‘I bet it was nice,’ I say, not particularly interested. I’m not feeling happy today. I’ve been unable to stop myself thinking about dead babies; what happens to them. Was Ella in hell because she hadn’t been christened? Is that why she keeps plaguing granny and me? I suppose I ought to feel sorry for granny too, if so, but I don’t. I just feel angry. And a bit frightened. As well as alone.<br /><br />At home I spend a lot of my time on Google putting in words like ‘twins’ and ‘past lives’ and ‘unborn’ and ‘ghosts’ and even ‘cyberspace’. I get a lot of stuff back but none of it helps. It doesn’t seem to cover ghosts sending emails, let alone text messages. I go back to cranes with relief; I know all the sites now. Or I think I do. I especially like the message board, its chatroom. Even though you can get too much of crane drivers boasting about the view from cranes in places like Cincinnati or people called things like ‘Bossman’ droning on about safety precautions and security on tower-crane sites- about people getting to the top of cranes who shouldn’t - ‘another unsecured crane,’ I read, over and over. It takes a while for the penny to drop. That this means people like me do get to go up cranes sometimes, in spite of everything done to stop them. I’ll remember this, I think. For a moment I feel encouraged.<br /><br />*********<br />My homework doesn’t go too well now. Even when I do it, it’s pretty skimped. Miss Key our class-teacher (politer nickname ‘Doory’ I’m not going to explain why; just guess) shakes her head and says I’m going to have to pull my socks up or I’ll be demoted. (Miss K – Doory- is always full of phrases like ‘pulling up socks,’ which I put up with because she can, mostly, keep our class in order, unlike some.) I worry about this in a distant way, but not so much that my ‘socks’ don’t remain round my ankles. <br /><br />Trace seems to think it’s my problem, nothing to do with her. Jay teases me as usual. I’m fed up with Jay making a joke of everything; nothing feels like a joke just now. I feel ever more fed up too, with the way he fiddles with his hair. Sometimes I almost hate him. I glare at him, and he looks back – his expression might look hurt on anyone else; but not on Jay, I think. Rashid doesn’t say anything; he just gives me the odd worried glance. Rahilah fills in stuff for me, finds answers, tries to help me keep up with the rest of them. Probably it’s thanks to her I stay where I am, for the moment.<br /><br />I haven’t been to Trace’s again. Rashid hasn’t suggested another walk. Suddenly Rahilah seems the only person in the world who’s nice to me apart from Barty who’s taken to shouting with pleasure every time I walk in at the door. I can’t think why he does, though.<br /><br />I need more and more to talk to Rahilah. She’s the only person who might understand what’s happening, I think, because of her own dead twin. But I don’t want her to think that I’m crazy. Sometimes I feel as if I am.<br /><br />Forgetting about Frankie, let alone his mates, I corner her in the Year Ten cloakroom one day, and ask her ‘do you ever dream about your dead twin?’ It feels tactless even as I say it. ‘Your dead twin.’ Rahilah, her coat in her hands, crumpling and un-crumpling it between her fingers, considers the question very seriously. ‘Sometimes, perhaps,’ she says. ‘But I don’t remember my dreams very often.’<br /><br />‘Do you ever hear her speaking to you in your head?’ I ask still more urgently. She drops her coat – it’s a dark green anorak with a tartan lining. She bends to pick it up – stays down there as if thinking very hard. Again, though, rising to her feet, not really looking at me, she shakes her scarved head.<br /><br />I can’t stop now. ‘Rahilah, can you imagine getting letters from your twin?’ but this time she throws her head back, thrusts her arms into the green anorak, pulls the trailing end of her hijab out of the way, and says almost crossly for her – or is upset? – I wonder: ‘Esther do you think I’m crazy?’<br /><br />‘Of course you’re not,’ I say. Wanting to add. ‘Do you think I am?’ But I don’t. Perhaps because she might say ‘yes.’ And also because I know she is sad about her twin. I also know, suddenly, looking at her, – I don’t know quite how I know, but I do – that her sadness is quite different from mine, much sadder even. Compared to hers, my sadness seems as much about loneliness –bewilderment - anger – fear -as about grief. My grief, though real enough, feels almost like it belongs to someone else.<br /><br />******<br /><br />Talking to Rahilah has been against all my rules. But Frankie’s leaving me mostly alone this term has made me forget. Also, seeing him in New Street being shouted at by his mother has made it harder to see him as scary. Even though I still know that he is.<br /><br />Silly me then. One of his girl hangers-must have been seen me and Rahilah hobnobbing in the girls’ cloakroom. What happens next is my fault, for sure. I wish - I really wish – it has happened to me, not Rahilah. Fat lot of good that does.<br /><br />It wasn’t Frankie did it anyway – I guess Frankie’s a bit too fly to attack a Muslim girl himself. He let the girls do his dirty work for him: out of school what’s more.granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-85791078082908665312007-03-01T09:47:00.000+00:002007-03-07T10:33:33.158+00:00PART TWO; CHAPTERS 1 -2<div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;">PART TWO<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER ONE<br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The second thing carried by the slewing unit is the cabin in which the driver sits, from which he controls the load.</span><br /><br />Let’s face it; everything I’ve been writing here has been like emails to Ella. My New Year Resolution is this; I’m not going to pretend any more that it’s not all messages to her; and if you, whoever you are think I’m bonkers to send messages to someone who doesn’t exist that’s your problem. See if I care. I’M NOT WRITING TO YOU. So here goes; my first – new year - email to Ella.<br /><br />January 1st. Birmingham.<br />Dear Ella, wherever you are, whoever you are: my born dead twin or what? Why don’t I hear from you any more? OK if you’re going to be like this be like it. See if I care. And I tell you what, even if you won’t email me, I’m going to email you: till you’re sick of it, really really sick. Assuming you exist. I’m doing you the honour of assuming you do, somewhere, out there, up there, in another world, Harry Potter’s or Philip Pullman’s, or something quite different. I don’t know where you are. I don’t know who you are. I just know you are there. Dead or alive, I don’t care. EMAIL ME!!!!<br /><br />What’s been going on then? Not a lot. The usual Christmas stuff. Granny came and Stuart and my sister Norah – she’s named after Granny - and Josh her husband and Barty, their baby. I’ve told you about the baby. I’m beginning to like him better. He’s almost crawling. He lies on his front and pushes his bum up and his back legs out. Mum says, fondly, as if she’s looking forward to it, ‘he’ll be a little nuisance once he’s into everything.’. Norah, on the other hand, just groans. I’m not sure she enjoys motherhood. She’s going back to work next week, which means her taking Barty to nursery three days a week, and my mother looking after him one day instead of two. My sister’s supposed to look after him herself on the fifth day, I bet she’ll always be ringing mum up to say she has to do XYZ and then mum will have him on her day too. Why bother with having a baby at all if you’re going to be like that?<br /><br />I like the way I can make Barty laugh. He laughs almost as much for me now as he did for Trace. Makes me think I wouldn’t mind having a baby of my own one of these days, after all.<br /><br />I haven’t seen Trace since the end of term; or Rahilah, or Rashid or Jay or anyone. I miss them – especially Rahilah funnily enough, she’s the only one can’t email me, not that Trace does much. No way I miss Frankie and his lot. I did see Frankie in New Street one day. But he was with a white woman must be his mum, which means it’s his dad is black. She looked nasty. I could hear her screaming at him, like he was a horrible insect, not a person at all. Well he is a horrible insect, I should know, but his mum shouldn’t see him like that. He didn’t shout back. He looked angry, and sulky. He wasn’t wearing his ear-ring, he hadn’t got his hood on, even his flat top didn’t look flat as usual; he stuck to his mum like Border sticks to me when I really tell her off and she’s listening for once. He didn’t see me. I scarpered.<br /><br />At least Rashid’s been emailing me. So has Jay. About cranes mostly, both of them. Rashid wrote; ‘they had to get a crane somewhere in America to lift an elephant!!!! While Jay told me he’d found something about what crane drivers keep in their cabin. “I’ll tell you about that when I see you, Est. Or maybe I shouldn’t!!!!!!” he said, He probably just means they’ve got sexy – what mum calls ‘lewd’ - pin-ups. Why shouldn’t I believe that? Rashid didn’t mention that though I bet Jay told him. He wouldn’t. Not to a girl.<br /><br />Granny has given me a mobile for Christmas. Mum’s furious – she thinks mobiles are a waste of space. And will make me even more materialistic than she assumes I am already. She must be thinking of those ads which say ‘Does your mobile let you down?’ to make you get a jazzier one to show off to your mates. No good my saying my mates aren’t like that. They aren’t. (Trace is the only one with a mobile anyway, and as far as I can see she never uses it. It’s just so she and her mum can keep in touch.) No use either me saying, airily ‘I’m just a typical teenager, I’ll grow out of it’ this makes her crosser than ever – maybe because I pinched her line – I hear her saying it to dad, sometimes, when she’s talking to him about me. Well why do you think I used it? POW.<br /><br />(Actually, being a teenager is something I’d happily grow out of. I don’t like it much. Think of Frankie and Co, lurking down the street. Are there bullies where you are, Ella?)<br /><br />‘Who’s going to pay for all your calls?’ mum asks. ‘Granny’s putting in five pounds a month,’ I say, smugly I admit. That really drives Mum spare as I knew it would. Sparer. Sparest. I send a text to Granny on her mobile to tell her to watch out. She hasn’t texted me back yet. I daresay she can handle mum. She can usually, isn’t that just what drives Mum so totally, utterly mad. At least it makes her forget to be so mad at me.<br /><br />?love Esther.<br />PS. I just went out to see Barty. AND HE’S CRAWLING. HE REALLY IS.<br /><br />PPS. I enailed my number to Rashid.. He emailed his. I didn’t even know he had a mobile! He doesn’t ring me - I don’t suppose he ever will. And I don’t suppose I’ll ever dare ring him!!<br /><br />PPPS. I don’t know if you have mobiles where you are, Ella. Text me if you do. My number is…..’<br />TEXT ME, ELLA.<br /><br />I hesitate before writing this. Do I WANT Ella send me texts as well as emails?<br />I write it anyway, Maybe she won’t text me. And she doesn’t text me. Not at first. What she does is much MUCH worse.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER TWO<br /></div>Dear Ella.<br />Still nothing? Who cares? I’m back at school now. It’s boring. But not as boring as being at home with just mum and me. And it’s good seeing Rashid and Rahilah and Jay and Trace again. Though I still have to be careful about seeming too friendly with any of them, except Trace. You know why. That’s all. Your turn? EMAIL ME. Love? Esther<br /><br />Actually the very morning after I write this I discover how I can see Rashid sometime outside school. This is how.<br /><br />A new little newsagent has opened in the corner of the flats in Bridge Street, opposite the multi-storey car parks. It’s more than a kiosk than a shop, barely enough for more than one customer – when there are two, the second one in has to move outside to let the first go out again. Mum thinks a newspaper shop is A GOOD THING. This means she has cancelled the delivery from our old newsagent and until the new man finds a delivery boy - he keeps promising he will - she picks up her Independent from there instead, except on Saturdays when she sends me instead. So it is not such A GOOD THING for me. When I grumble at having to get up early on a Saturday, she says it doesn’t hurt me to get moving even if I’m not like some of those other teenagers she hears about who only get out of bed at the weekends to go clubbing. ‘You wouldn’t let me go clubbing anyway,’ I say, crossly.<br /><br />(In fact I’m not sure I’m much into that kind of thing. Yet. Not that I tell mum. Trace says clubbing’s dead boring and I believe her, especially as all the people at school who claim they go are boring. BORING. Not to say silly. If Rashid could go clubbing with me that might be different. But I don’t suppose he’s allowed to go clubbing either.)<br /> <br />The second Saturday morning who should I see inside the shop but the builder man who lives on the boat opposite Granny, and who I’ve taken to calling the Seventh Dwarf - not just because he’s shortish and roundish and bearded but because he always carrying something as if he’s off to work like in that silly song. (‘Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to work…’ etc). Today, for some reason, he’s got a small coil of rope over one shoulder. He’s buying a bar of Cadbury’s fruit and nut, a Bounty bar, a small packet of Old Holborn tobacco, a copy of the Guardian, a copy of Sporting Life and a copy of the Daily Telegraph. He shows me all these things when he emerges. ‘Guardian, man, for your pinko Gran’ he says. ‘Telegraph for me. Telegraph crossword’s better.’<br /><br />‘Granny only does the easy crossword,’ I say. ‘Sometimes I do it with her.’<br /><br />The Seventh Dwarf just snorts. Then off he goes with the papers etc under one arm, his mysterious coil of rope over the other. His name is Bob really. That’s what granny calls him anyway.<br /><br />There’s more room now in the tiny shop. The man smiles at me, says ‘Come for your Independent have you?’ “My mum’s Independent,’ I correct him. And at that moment someone who’s been a bent back till then, sorting out a pile of Saturday supplements just inside the door of the store-room, pops up his head and says ‘Hullo, Esther.’ ‘What are you doing here, Rashid?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘She’s in my class,’ Rashid mumbles to the newsagent, a bit red in the face: maybe because he’s not supposed to talk to girls. Not that the newsagent seems to mind. “I am Rashid’s uncle,’ he says.’ Rashid’s a good boy, he’s coming to help me out with all these supplements on Saturday mornings. It’s much too much work for me. You will know from school that Rashid is a good boy, that he works hard and is helpful and doesn’t get into trouble.’<br /><br />I agree that Rashid is all these things; Rashid doesn’t look at me again until I start turning to go out of the shop when he gives me a big wink behind his uncle’s back. ‘See you at school next week, Esther,’ he says.<br /><br />‘See you, Rashid,’ I say. Maybe he and I can meet on Saturday mornings sometimes, after he’s finished work, I think, as I head for home with Mum’s paper. That is if Rashid would like to. I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that it would be safer to meet round here, so far from school.<br /><br />***<br /><br />I don’t stay at home long. Mum is busy reading her paper, dad writing something in his office. I decide to collect Border for her walk. I go the Bridge Street way hoping to see Rashid again, but there’s no sign of him. I don’t dare go looking for him inside the shop.<br /><br />There’s no sign of granny either. I take my mobile and call her up, but her mobile is switched off and the door of Mnemosyne locked, her Guardian slung in a carrier bag on the tiller. As I stand hesitating, I hear a familiar bark. Bob, the Seventh Dwarf, appears with Border behind him. ‘Your gran had to go off so I took Toilet Brush here. She said you might want her before she could get back.’ <br /><br />‘Her name’s Border,’ I say indignantly.<br /><br />‘She looks like a toilet brush to me, man,’ he says.<br /><br />I walk Border along the towpath for a bit, as usual. It’s a grey windy winter morning – even the geese look cold. I’m frozen. I don’t stay long. When I get back to Gas Street Basin Mnemosyne is still locked, Granny’s Guardian still hung on the tiller.<br /><br />I knock on the Seventh Dwarf’s door. When he takes Border in, she doesn’t seem to mind one bit, even gives him a pleased bark. ‘Cold are you?’ he adds to my surprise. ‘Got the kettle on. Come in.’<br /><br />I only hesitate a minute. Then I bend my head to his door. I don’t know quite what I expect to find; something deep and fuggy and underground like him, perhaps. And it IS deep and fuggy and underground in a way. There is a reek of paraffin lamp, coal stove and some kind of cooking – onions? - also pipe smoke. There’s a bit of damp - a faintly watery smell; (there’s always a watery smell in these boats; Mnemosyne has it too.) There’s some other smell I can’t quite place. What surprises me is how orderly everything is. Bob’s bed just inside the door is made up as tightly as a hospital bed, a striped blanket folded across the foot. The brass rim to the window is shining. The face on the old-fashioned black alarm clock is white white white. More surprising still this cabin is not just a bedroom. It’s a toolshed. On every wall are rows of hooks, on every hook a hammer, a pair of pliers, a can of nails, a Stanley knife, a plane, a set of screwdrivers in a bag. All the tools are clean; every blade shiny.<br /><br />There are more tools in the kitchen, a row of yellow mugs lined up like soldiers just below the roof, and another neat row of tins – mostly baked beans and tomatoes - on shelves under the calor gas hob. It’s lit. The kettle is beginning to shout. On the other side, beneath the sink, are rows of smaller cans with lids, all different colours – before I can inspect them the Dwarf ushers me through to the little sitting-room at the back and that is the most surprising place of all. Not another tool room– a picture gallery. Really!! Small pictures are so crammed up against each other you can’t see an inch of the walls. All of them alike. I don’t mean they’re the same picture of the same thing: I mean they’re the same sort of picture. Landscapes mostly - seas, valleys, mountains – and a few of plants –climbing plants like vines covered in exotic fruits and flowers. Some– even fewer – have landscapes and flowers. Sea, mountains, etc are framed by climbing plants.<br /><br />While the Dwarf (I must remember to call him, Bob) goes back into the kitchen to deal with the screaming kettle, I peer more closely. I see that the pictures are all painted the same way, in tight little lines of colour like cross-hatching. They must take hours of close work. I am not surprised to see 3 pairs of reading specs hung on a hook by the door. There’s also a big jar of mostly fine-pointed paintbrushes on shelf over the stove. The familiar smell was paint, of course. The small cans in the kitchen would be paint cans.<br /><br />I’m not sure I like the pictures. While I’m wondering Bob reappears with two mugs of tea. He must see me looking at them but all he says is, ‘I had a daughter once.’ Then he fills a saucer with tea and milk for Border. We sit watching her lap it up and he doesn’t say anything more. So I ask him about being a builder and about cranes.<br /><br />He doesn’t answer that. He just asks me suddenly why I want to go up a crane. I’ve forgotten asking him about this before, obviously he hasn’t. I look back at him silently I can’t – I don’t want - to explain. In the end he says; ‘must be air you like.’ Then he adds, ‘not my element. Water and earth; that’s me. Sky’s not my scene, man.’<br /><br />That’s right. None of his pictures leave much room for sky. Perhaps that’s why I don’t seem to like them much. This cabin has no sky in it anywhere. Out of the window all I can see are buildings – brick buildings made of earth - and the water of the canal. The bitter smell of coal overwhelms everything as Bob opens the stove door and dumps new stuff on the glowing coals.<br /><br />‘Not my scene, man.’ I am enchanted suddenly by the Seventh Dwarf’s way of putting things – calling me ‘man’ all the time. ‘Not my scene, man…. sounds like something out of the sixties, like he’s a hippy: or was a hippy. He’s too old to be a hippy now.<br /><br />Border stops lapping tea, suddenly, pricks up her ears and yelps. A knock comes on the door. ‘It’s open,’ Bob yells. As Border gives a welcome bark, there’s Granny’s face arrives in the entrance. But when I go to hug her she pushes me away, yelling angrily, and pulls her mobile out of her pocket. She stops yelling for a moment as she keys something in, then she hands it to me and starts all over. ‘What do you mean by this Esther?’ I hear. Border is barking now, too. The Seventh Dwarf with his back to us stokes the fire furiously. And I am looking at a message on Granny’s mobile saying: ‘Remember me? Love Ella.’ I look for the number the message has been sent from. My number. Sent at 11.05 am. But it’s only 11.15 now and my phone has been in my pocket all morning switched off.<br /><br />I throw Granny’s phone back at her and scrabble for my own. As soon as I turn it on the message signal sounds. And there it is; just the same. ‘Remember me? love Ella.’ Sent from Granny’s phone. I hand my mobile to Granny. She only stops shouting for as long as it takes her to look. Then she starts all over again. I don’t know what upsets me more, her being so angry, so unfairly, or the creepiness of the message. I can’t bear it either way.granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-23151019405000320682007-02-21T11:02:00.000+00:002007-02-21T11:06:27.995+00:00CHAPTERS ELEVEN AND TWELVE<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">CHAPTER ELEVEN</span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-style: italic;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">A trolley runs along the jib to move the load in and out from the crane’s centre</span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-style: italic;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"></span></span></div><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br />One thing Rashid has emailed me about cranes sticks especially in my head; how they grow right from inside themselves. They sit inside buildings and raise their arm – their jib part – then pick up another section and slot it in underneath; they can go on like that, on and on, as high as they need to. I was so pleased with this one I even told Trace about it one wet day when we’re sitting in a corner of the hall eating our lunch. Trace had marmite and lettuce sandwiches – she always has marmite and lettuce sandwiches. Her mum used to give her peanut butter instead, she says. But that isn’t allowed any more because some people are so allergic they swell up and die if you put a hand on their arm with the smallest trace of peanut butter: if their hand touches it and they lick that hand.<br /><br />‘I’m not allergic to peanut butter,’ I say.<br /><br />‘Lucky you, then,’ Trace says.<br /><br />‘To die just like that,’ I say. And for a moment we both sit in silence. Is Trace thinking what I am, I wonder? – about sudden deaths sitting around us, everywhere we look. Not just the poisons they keep warning us that get into our food. About all the other lurking dangers. Suicide bombers. Dirty bombs. Car crashes. Meningitis. Serial killers. So on and so forth.<br /><br />To counteract such gloomy thoughts I tell Tracy how cranes grow themselves. And how when the time comes they take themselves down again, using the reverse process.<br /><br />‘A bit like we do really; people, animals, all of ourselves,’ Tracy says. ‘Growing from the inside. While noone’s looking.’<br /><br />‘Cranes take their new sections from outside,’ I point out.<br /><br />‘So do we,’ Tracy says. ‘We eat. We take stuff from outside too.’<br /><br />I’m doubtful about this. But then Tracy adds. ‘Look at babies. Look at your baby, how he eats.’ And then I do think of him with my usual mix of tenderness and fury; and it’s true he does take a lot of milk and other stuff, he does seem to get seems bigger by the day.<br /><br />“Well there you are then,’ Tracy insists when I admit it.<br /><br />‘But people don’t get smaller getting older, and they go on eating,’ I say, thinking of Granny who seems the same size to me that she’s always been.<br /><br />‘Oh but they do,’ Tracy says. ‘My great gran in South Africa did. She just shrivelled upside herself. Till she shrivelled away.’ She said it almost ghoulishly. Glancing over her shoulder as if to tell her ghosts to get lost.<br /><br />‘Well my granny doesn’t,’ I say.<br /><br />‘But she will,’ Trace says ‘She will, she will.’ Why do we keep getting onto to such sad subjects today – now I’m remembering the urn on the shelf in Mnemosyne. But then Trace and I look at each other and giggle as if the best thing to do is laugh. And I ask her about the play and being Potiphar’s wife and that’s all right, that matter’s not sad at all, it’s nice. Potiphar’s wife hasn’t any songs of her own, Trace says. But because she can sing – or so the play producer’s think - she’s being allowed to sing a solo. Potiphar’s wife has to try and seduce Joseph after all and songs are good for that. As long as the producer agrees she can even choose her own.<br /><br />‘What song are you going to sing?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘Wait and see,’ Trace says.<br /><br />*********<br /><br />In fact it’s only a few days now till the play; only a week or ten days then till the end of term. And now, suddenly, it’s the day of the performance.<br /><br />At dinnertime, I ask Trace, cautiously, if her mum’s coming. (Trace never talks about her mother. I’m not sure that it’s a safe question.)<br /><br />‘Of course she’s coming, if she can; if she’s not bleeped.’<br /><br />‘Bleeped?’ But Trace is calling someone else now across the room. Maybe she doesn’t want me asking more questions. If I don’t understand what ‘bleeped’ means that’s my problem.<br /><br />Trace is often like that. As usual I’m left to work things out for myself. The only people I know who have bleepers are doctors like the ones in Casualty. If Trace’s mum was a doctor, wouldn’t Trace have told us sometime? I don’t know what to think.<br /><br />But then it’s evening and everyone’s coming in and I’m showing them to their seats in the school hall turned theatre. The stage at the far end is set with a throne and a palm tree and a blown-up photograph of a desert reaching back far away, a pyramid in the middle distance. For some plays they put up curtains but Mr Painter the music teacher said – according to Trace who did not appear impressed – that curtains – and what he called ‘a proscenium arch’ -were old hat. Theatre in the round was much more interesting. The problem is that there is nothing in the round about our school stage: it’s at end of the hall and that’s that. All he can do is put a few fidgeting seventh years in the aisles and up the sides of the hall dressed up as Egyptian slaves to make the whole hall look like the Pharaoh’s court. It doesn’t. Even a camel – or an elephant – couldn’t have made our school hall look like Pharaoh’s court.<br /><br />Granny and Stuart arrive and I show them to their seats, correctly. Granny is wearing a dark red coat I haven’t seen before, she doesn’t look the least eccentric, just a nice granny to have. Stuart is wearing jeans and a leather jacket as usual. If he’s got an earring in one ear, so what, there’s plenty of other older brothers have; even some of the Asians have.<br /><br />My parents are due soon, too. ‘I’m looking forward to this,’ my mother has said, and my father is coming home early especially, even though I’m only an usher.<br /><br />I don’t show them to their seats. Jay ushering on the other side does that. Looking out all the time for someone who could be Trace’s mum, I pick one or two small and thin women with fairish hair as possibles but I don’t know for sure. And then I see Mrs Scott who’s organising what she calls ‘front of house people’ frowning at me; I’m forgetting to do my job; I have to stop.<br /><br />All the seats are occupied I see as the doors close and I take up my position at the back. Even though I’m not taking part myself I feel a small shiver of excitement as the room darkens and Mr Philips starts to play his piano accompanied by a brilliant drummer – a Jamaican boy I don’t know from Year ten. Two other boys, one white, one black, neither so brilliant, play guitars – one electric, one accoustic. A girl is playing the trombone, an assortment of drums, bells, clangers, rattles, bangers are played by all sorts of people, boys and girls, of all ages, from all classes. Mr Philips has been training them up since the start of term. The rest of us are sick of the racket.<br /><br />But it’s different on the night: and with the singers too. I think they sound pretty good. Of course like everyone else by now I know all the tunes and pretty much all the words of ‘Joseph’ by heart. I chant them under my breath most of the way through.<br /><br />Trace does not come on for quite a while as Potiphar’s wife, though I see her in the chorus earlier on. Then suddenly there she is, reclining on a couch at the back of the stage wearing her golden pyjamas covered in sequins sewn on by me. She has a flimsy veil on her head round which she peers seductively at Joseph while the choir is singing about Potiphar’s wife’s scheming. Joseph is played by a black boy, Clinton Kingston from another class in year ten–.he’s not handsome unfortunately: he got the part because he can sing really well. (Lots of people tell him he should enter for Pop Idol. But he says he’s going to be a doctor, so he won’t have time. Just as well really. Somehow I can’t see him as the next Will Young.) <br /><br />The choir stops singing. The stage is beginning to darken when the door alongside me creaks open. I’m supposed to stop anyone coming in mid-performance, but for some reason I don’t try and stop this person. She’s so little and light, like a tired ghost, she floats rather than enters, closing the door so softly it doesn’t make a sound. The next minute she’s leaning against the wall besides me. She’s wearing a long dark coat; her hair tied up in a scarf; that’s all I have time to notice, because the lights are coming up again on Trace’s couch. Every eye in the house is on her.<br /><br />Slowly she gets to her feet – I can almost forget it is Trace now, the slow way she unwinds her scarf, reveals her face, slowly, lazily takes the microphone someone is handing her, leans back against a convenient pillar in her suit of gold. Alone but for a solitary rattle, the trombone plays an introduction tune, and suddenly Trace is singing.<br /><br />The introductory tune sounded faintly familiar – I only realise why until a little way into the song which Trace is singing oh so simply, lazily, almost lovingly, when I hear the words… ‘The fundamental things apply…As Time Goes By.’ ‘As Time Goes By is the name of an old sitcom on TV; also the name of the song they use at the beginning and end of it. I don’t like the sitcom much myself; it’s soppy, it’s about people almost as old as granny. Yet now the song makes me want to cry; or maybe it’s just the way Trace sings it makes me want to cry. She’s singing it for me, I think, she’s looking straight at me. And then I see that the little woman in the big coat standing next to me really is crying; and that maybe Trace is not looking at me she’s looking at her. More likely she’s not looking at either of us, too blinded by the stage lights to see anyone at all. And maybe, the way she’s singing, there’s not a person in the hall doesn’t think she’s singing just for them. Even the kids who may be laughing at the soppy thing inside their heads - gross they may be thinking, just as I should be thinking - are silent. It’s the way she’s singing it, probably; in such a mellow, soft loving way. Like she loves all of us. ‘Time goes by.’ ‘Gross’ I repeat to myself, furious for being made to feel so soft; so like crying. But then it’s over. There’s a long pause. Then everyone starts clapping.<br /><br />I am clapping like everyone else when I hear another faint, beep, beep sound. The next moment I feel someone tapping on my arm. It is the woman beside me in the long coat.<br /><br />‘If you see Trace, could you very kindly tell her I did come,’ she says. ‘I heard her sing. But I can’t stay. I have to get back to the hospital.’<br /><br />‘Are you her mum?’ I whisper back, even though I know the answer. ‘Misa,’ she says. And then she’s gone.<br /><br />********<br /><br />I do see Trace after, just for a minute. I do tell her. I say the name ‘Misa.’ ‘Your mum?’ I inquire. ‘Misa?’ She just nods. Then adds. ‘She’s a doctor,’ matter-of-factly, ‘A paediatrician, up at the QE. That means dealing with sick kids all day and every day.’<br /><br />‘Must have been useful when you were little and sick,’ I say. ‘She was just a medical student then,’ Tracy says ‘She didn’t know anything about sick children then.’ She adds: ‘She’s always done her thing and I’ve always done my thing. It’s all worked out.’ I think she isn’t going to say any more. But suddenly, back over her shoulder she throws. ‘I’m glad she heard me. She likes that programme. She likes that song.’<br /><br />Granny and Stuart come up then and my mother and father. All of them go on and on about how lovely Trace was. Was that really your friend? The one who came to tea?’ My mother asks. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was her kind of song.’ (Or Trace’s kind of sitcom I’m thinking, imagining Judi Dench and Co, the actors. All very cosy: unlike Trace. My mother of course loves it.)<br /><br />‘I don’t think it is her kind of song usually,’ Stuart says. ‘She rang to ask me what she should sing. It was my idea.’<br /><br />‘You?’ I say. ‘I might have known. You always like such corny things.’ I roll my eyes, and we all go on home linking our arms, in silence. The whole time, though, when I’m not thinking about Stuart and Trace exchanging mobile numbers - how dare they? – my brother and my friend behind my back? – I’m thinking about that song.<br /><br />********<br /><br />It’s about love and lovers of course, as well as time. How it goes on ‘as time goes by.’ Will I still love Rashid’s beautiful brown eyes, I wonder, ‘as time goes by?’ But actually it’s not love so much I think about when I hear those words. It’s time. I don’t know how to deal with time; it scares me the way it moves on so fast. It scares me in Birmingham all the time. All those builders; all those cranes. One minute there’s an empty space; the next zillions of people are living in it, or shopping in it, or driving along it. This summer I saw a notice on an exhibition about Birmingham at the Ikon Gallery. People were asked to write their comments – and one girl said – it had to be a child, she hadn’t got grown-up writing; ‘why does Birmingham have to rebuild itself completely, now this year, this moment, August?’ I knew exactly what she meant. <br /><br />Even the way the baby keeps on growing scares me sometimes. It doesn’t seem any time since it was a tiny space creature, its eyes looking at nothing, its face crinkled up, its little limbs punching and kicking invisible objects. And now he sits up and looks around himself and chortles; any moment he will be crawling then walking and talking and growing up to go to school like me. Does nothing ever stop for a moment? It’s all time’s fault, I think, that everything keeps on changing, so fast.<br /><br />Sometimes I try to make time stop still. Eating my school picnic about of my lunchbox, I look around and think; stop; I’ve caught this moment and it’s here for as long as I want it. Jay is nibbling on crisps and a chapatti. Trace’s marmite and lettuce sandwiches are uneaten besides her while she fiddles with her belly ring, her eyes miles away. Ralilah and her best Muslim friend scarved heads together so can you can hardly tell which belongs to which, are giggling; there are the sounds of boys outside and a plane in the sky and the moaning hoot of a train on the railway line. All of it will stay there the same, like people and places in picture, until I tell it to stop. Now, just in this moment, I’m safe.<br /><br />But then something distracts me. I don’t think of the moment again for hours sometimes, not till I’m home again. And then I think: I’ve lost it. And all those moments in between that I’ve never noticed. Time has simply kept on going by. And by. And by. No matter what.<br /><br />I wonder if other people my age think like this? If so they don’t say, and I’m not going to ask in case they think I’m crazy. I’m sure Trace would think I’m crazy. Is it because of Ella I think like this I wonder suddenly? (I haven’t thought about Ella much lately: I haven’t had any more messages from her. What with the play and with Christmas coming up, and horrible Frankie, I’ve had too much else in my head.) Do I worry about time so much because Ella lives in the past? Is she slipping ever further away the more time goes on, her emails coming from further and further away? The thought of a growing distance, of a bigger and bigger gap opening between us feels both creepy and sad. Is that what makes me feel so sad?<br /><br />I don’t enjoy thinking like this. I was so happy after hearing Trace sing and now I’m not happy at all. Only a week now till the end of term, till Christmas, I think, hoping to cheer myself up. It doesn’t cheer me up. I put Simon Rattle and Beethoven on very loudly. But when even that won’t do, I take it off and put on Morcheeba. Tonight I do not go to see if I have any emails; even from Rashid. I don’t want any emails. They’re too scary. My mother bangs on my door. ‘Turn that racket down,’ she shouts. But I don’t. I turn it up. I need it. Loud. Louder. LOUDEST.<br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">CHAPTER TWELVE</span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"></span></span></div><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Comanza: Potain: Wolff: Kroll: Lindea: Comedin: Heede: different makes of tower cranes.</span><br /><br />The day after the play is Saturday. I sit at my desk, doing my homework; well that’s the idea. In fact I’m looking out of the window.<br /><br />They work on the building site on Saturday mornings. By the car park in Bridge Street, I can see people getting out of their cars dressed for weddings in the Registry Office round the corner. Down below me the workers move around like ants, like pictures in history books on the building of the Pyramids. This side of the site, the foundations of the flats are already rising. Steel girders are set in vertical rows ready to support the next layers of breeze blocks. On the far side mobile cranes are moving about, lifting, digging. One tower crane is working, swinging bundles of girders across to the places where they are needed. The others are both still. Looking down to the bottom of the one nearest me, I suddenly see a man swing himself onto the ladder and start climbing up inside it.<br /><br />He is wearing an orange safely helmet and a black donkey jacket, with something written on the back of it that I can’t see properly, except once, briefly, when he reaches yet another platform and starts on the next ladder. Even then I don’t have time to read it. He has a green plastic box slung over one shoulder. His lunch, I wonder? Cheese sandwiches? Ham? A pork pie? A flask of tea? Or coffee? When he’s up there in his cabin, does he sit longing for dinnertime I wonder, the way I do during especially boring classes at school. Or is he too busy concentrating, mesmerised like Border in front of a mouse hole, by the little bundle he’s negotiating towards its destination way below? What does he think about all day? What can you think about high up there all by yourself? Maybe his mind wanders just like mine does. Does he have a radio? Does he listen in to radio Birmingham, the way I’m do sometimes? Does he like eighties music? Or seventies music? And how does he go to the loo, I wonder? I really wonder about that. I send the question up to him in my thoughts as loudly as I can.<br /><br />He won’t be able to hear me though, or what I’m listening to at this minute – a cd of granny’s, Bob Marley that I love to little bits, almost as much as I love Simon conducting Leonora number 3. He can’t hear anything except the wind noise, climbing. I really see, or do I just imagine the wind buffeting the ladder gently, swaying him about? I can hear the wind buffeting my own window.. It is blowing quite a bit today. The Christmas tree at the back of the jib above the counter weight is swaying but only a little. Its lights are winking on and off. Even in the daytime they’re not turned off. Does the man notice them? Do they make him too think ‘good, it’s almost Christmas?’ Or do all grown-ups dread Christmas like my mother says she does. Is he cold I wonder? Does he look down? Does he ever feel giddy with the height? Or does he simply not notice it?<br /><br />The man in the donkey jacket is almost at the top. He swings onto the platform. He opens the door into the little glass cabin with its slanted front, and disappears inside. He’s shut inside away from everything and everybody. He doesn’t have a mother calling outside the door: ‘Esther!’ ‘Esther!’ ‘Coming,’ I shout, filled with longing and envy. ‘I will get up there myself one day, I tell myself. ‘I will, Ella, I will, I will. See if I don’t. I don’t mind if it’s scary.’<br /><br />That’s a lie of course. Even if I am not scared at the thought of that ladder – not too scared - I’m scared of lots of other things. In particular I’m scared of Frankie and Frankie’s bullies. They’ve lain low recently. But I know they haven’t gone away altogether.<br />********<br /><br />It’s a sunny day, quite mild really. Even the wind seems kindly enough. I take Border for a longer walk on Saturdays. I take her along the canal as usual, but the other way now, up towards the university. At weekends especially there’s plenty of life; runners, cyclists, families with children, pushchairs, prams; people walking dogs. I usually have to be careful of Border with other dogs, but even she seems laid back today. Just sniffs and passes on. There aren’t any narrow boats. There almost never are in winter. Though one or two might ride the canal over the Christmas holidays.<br /><br />When we walk back, I see the usual drunks on the seat outside Holliday Wharf. At least I think it’s all drunks. But as I get nearer I see that the man sitting away from the others, on the far end, is the Stamp Man. I haven’t seen him since the day he was attacked. He doesn’t look any different from then, he’s staring at the ground as usual; when I say ‘hullo’ he doesn’t look up or move let alone speak. His hands are dangling besides him. Border goes up and licks them gently as if she remembers him. He doesn’t move them away. He lets her lick as if too remembers her too. I am happy to see that. At the other end of the bench one drunk is waving a can of Carlings Best Bitter and shouting; ‘I’ve got to protect my rights I have.’ ‘Yers’, mate,’ agrees the other. ‘You’ve got to protect them.’. I hope they’re nice to the Stamp Man. If he stays around I can ask Granny to keep an eye on him. I know she walks this way herself.<br /><br />I take Border back to the Mnemosyne. I haven’t expected to see Granny, she’d told me she was going to see a film at the multi-screen at the top of Bridge Street. But it looks as if she’s been to Tesco instead. There’s stuff laid out for tea, chocolate olivers (wow!) even a hunk of cake from Costa Coffee. ‘Are you expecting someone, Granny?’ I ask. ‘I thought I might be expecting you, Esther,’ she answers. ‘How about staying to tea?’<br /><br />It’s quite a while since I’ve stayed to tea with Granny. I say yes, wondering what she’s up to.<br /><br />But she doesn’t seem up to anything at first. We talk about lots of things; the play, Trace, Stuart, school. Very casually at some point Granny asks if bullying goes on. I eye her suspiciously. She looks back, as casual as ever.. ‘A bit, I think,’ I say, equally casual. ‘I mean there are some gangs, and they do rather go for nerdy kids.’<br /><br />I am not a nerdy kid, I tell myself. I stare granny straight in the eye to make sure she knows it. Granny pours more tea into my cup. ‘You know the theory about bullies?’ she says. ‘That they only attack people they think are weak. Meaning it’s better to show you’re not frightened, that you just don’t care. But I still think it’s a good idea to tell someone in the school that it’s happening. One of the teachers.’<br /><br />‘That would only make it worse,’ I say. ‘Some of them bully teachers too.’ I think of poor Miss Petty who was new at the beginning of term and is supposed to teach us French, but hardly gets the chance. I’ve a feeling she won’t be there next term.<br /><br />‘Not that kind of teacher,’ granny says.<br /><br />‘Then they’d call you – the person – a snitch,’ I say. ‘And it would be even worse.’<br /><br />‘Does anyone bully Trace?’ Granny asks. ‘I don’t think so,’ I say.<br /><br />‘You see,’ she says.<br /><br />I don’t quite know what I’m supposed to see. But Granny changes the subject, starts asking me what I want for Christmas, and when I tell her I haven’t a clue, tries to help me think.<br /><br />It’s wonderfully cosy in her boat. She brings out old photograph albums for me to look at - one of my favourite things. I leaf through snaps of mum as a child – in colour mostly – but faded – and earlier pictures of granny herself as a child, mostly black and white. There’s little Granny in smocked frocks and fair-isle sweaters; bigger granny in a pair of boy’s corduroy shorts passed on from her brother; bigger granny still in a tweed coat and skirt like a grown-up’s, hair in long plaits. There’s even grown-up granny in black jeans and black polo-necked sweater, her hair cut in a fringe now, holding a baby mum. She looks happier in this one. In all the child photos, plaits granny, shorts granny, smocked frock granny, one thing never changes: the frown on her face.<br /><br />The stove is hot: I’m perched on a stool in the shape of a hand that fits me exactly. Border is snoring on the sofa, somewhere she’s not allowed in our house –but then we have white sofas. Granny’s little sofa is covered by a bright Indian cloth set with tiny mirrors. Over the top of it is the shelf holding the Indian god and the shadow puppet, between which for a while stood the urn containing dead man’s ashes. Outside it’s dark already. The boat rocks slightly in the water. I wish I could stay here forever.<br /><br />‘Why are you always frowning in your pictures, granny?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘Only a week till Christmas,’ Granny says, as if I haven’t spoken.<br /><br />‘And then what?’ I ask, wanting to ask the first question again, but somehow not able to.<br /><br />‘And then what indeed?’ she answers. Which is hopeless. And I have to go home lonely. Because not only the bullies, all this stuff with Ella too, not being able – not being allowed - to tell anyone about her is lonely. Lonelier. Loneliest. I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t what will happen – what Ella may make happen – next.<br /><br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">END OF PART ONE.</span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"></span></span></div><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /></span>granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-5094166197262289092007-02-14T10:04:00.000+00:002007-02-14T10:08:29.124+00:00CHAPTERS NINE AND TEN<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>CHAPTER NINE<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></div><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />The slewing unit carries three parts: first the long horizantal jib, the portion of the crane that carries the load.</span><br /><br />Waking next morning I can hardly believe any of it. Surely they can’t have left me in the dark all these years? Then I remember Stuart’s hesitations. Maybe there is something I haven’t been told -but who can I ask about it? I can’t bring myself to ask my mother. Usually I go to Granny, but this does not seem something I can ask Granny about. If such a secret has been kept from me, it’s her I’m most angry with. She of all people should have told me. When I take Border back from her walk, I don’t stay to talk.<br /><br />I try and talk to Rahilah a little. But she doesn’t seem to want to discuss the subject of twins any more. I daresay it hurts her. I look up twin websites on the internet, after school, even though I should have been doing my homework. I can always pretend to myself – or to my mother if she comes into the room- I do once - that I’m still pursuing the subject of genetics. As I am, in a way. But not for homework.<br /><br />I learn a lot, little of it helpful. I learn that there are huge organisations of twins – mostly identical - who have posted up pictures of themselves wearing the same clothes and looking just the same; copies of each other. A bit creepy I think. Not to say freaky. I’m not sure I’d want to have been a twin if it meant not being a single person at all just a copy of someone else.<br /><br />Would Ella be a copy of me? Would we really be one and the same if she was alive now? I find the website of a restaurant in New York called ‘Twins’ where all the staff, from the owners to the waiters and waitresses, to the barmen and girls, to the people who take your coats, are look-alike twins, where most of the people who come to eat are twins too, so that everywhere you see double. Surely twins aren’t just twins, I think. Surely they’re separate people too, and different in some ways?<br /><br />I don’t find anywhere I can just ask questions. I do discover an English organisation called The Lone Twin Network for people whose twins have died. But they don’t have a website, only an address to write to. I don’t know for sure that I am a lone twin. So how can I write to them?<br /><br />I also come across a scientific site. Many more people in the world than used to be thought, it says, started off as twins in the womb; but the other twin disappears soon after conception; within two or three or four months anyway. How do they know this? Because sometimes two babies come up on the first scan and only one on the second. What happens to the second twin? The first twin kind of ‘swallows it up’, they suggest. Does that mean that the one does get born is made up two people, I wonder? Gross. Creepy. Weird. But the idea’s in my head now. I can’t do anything about it.<br /><br />Did I swallow up Ella? I ask myself. Is that why I have an imaginary or not imaginary, more likely dead friend? But if I did, surely Ella would seem more like me than she does? I don’t have any idea what Ella would look like. And now I think about she has always seemed like someone older than me, like a big sister, rather than a twin. Why? Nothing is sure about any of this, which is disturbing; I wish I could go back to seeing Ella as I used to. As my imaginary friend, no more, no less.<br /><br />*********<br /><br />I don’t tell any of my friends, Jay, Rashid, Rahilah, Trace, what I’m thinking. I don’t tell Jay or Rashid about Stuart either, any more than I tell Rahilah. Like I said, I don’t know what Muslims think about gays. Jay I suspect would just make a joke of it anyway, as he does of most things. I don’t want anyone making a joke of my big brother. Trace, though, is a different matter; I do tell her. With difficulty. I’m not used to talking about my brother to anyone, not because I’m embarrassed that he’s gay, but because people in my family rarely talk about each other, even between themselves. (The way Stuart and I discuss granny and mum is a relief, though it feels odd.)<br /><br />Trace thinks it’s Stuart’s being gay makes me slow to get the words out. ‘Big deal,’ she says when I make it at last. ‘Big deal. You’re brother’s gay – is that all? Cool.’ Sounding at the same time both interested and bored. ‘Would you like to meet him?’ I ask. ‘Why?’ she sounds more bored than ever. ‘I think you’d like him’ I say. ‘I’m meeting him later as a matter of fact. Do you want to come?’ Trace just shrugs. But after school she heads for the bus stop on my side of the road as if there’s never been any question.<br /><br />Stuart has suggested meeting up at the same Mailbox café where he and I went before. This time we stay there quite a long time. Skinny Trace eats the way she did at our flat: lots that is. She has two slices of cheesecake and three cappuccinos, but doesn’t look as if she notices because she’s so taken up with Stuart and he with her. I can’t get a word in edgeways. Though on the one hand, I’m glad to see my friend and my darling brother getting on so well, on the other I’m quite jealous. I don’t know a lot of the music they’re talking about, let alone the films. Trace is only two months older than me, so how did she get to see and hear all these things? Through her mum, I suppose. I’d always suspected her mum wasn’t a bit like mine. Now I know for sure.<br /><br />It’s not just what they talk about; it’s how they talk about it; camping it up, making jokes. I can’t do that. I can talk about things seriously, or not at all. Stuart is quite happy to talk my way with me, but alongside Trace he turns into someone quite different. ‘Darling’, he says, ‘DARLING - in ways which are both like and not like him. As if bouncing off her turns him into someone else.<br /><br />Trace even says ‘DARLING’ back: but only once. She raises an eyebrow from time to time – she’s had a stud put in the right hand one lately, it looks fantastic - and laughs or says something funny, at least it sounds very funny at the time. But I can’t remember a word of it afterwards – or of what Stuart says. It’s as if they are bouncing words between them. ‘Witty repartee’ I suppose you’d call it. Witty I’m not. All this makes me feel even less so. Stuart smiles at me affectionately sometimes, but it looks like Trace has forgotten I’m there. Nibbling at my cheesecake to make it last, I watch the remaining bubbles in my coffee cup burst one by one and feel gloomier by the minute.<br /><br />How would Ella do, I wonder? If I’m not witty I’m sure she must be. And then I think: that’s odd, I haven’t heard a word from Ella lately. Not since I heard her voice – if it was her voice – in the lift. Two days ago I even emailed her –but I haven’t had a reply yet. Maybe they’ll be one waiting when I get home. All at once I want, desperately, to be at home, in my room, by myself. But I just keep on sitting in the café. ‘More coffee?’ Stuart asks. I shake my head.<br /><br /> We leave the café at last. It’s a wild night out there, grown wilder still since we went inside. The sign on the nearest crane is swinging madly, reflected as madly in the canal itself. Catspaws of wind are running up and down, on top of water racing along so wildly it looks like a living river, not like a man-made waterway. Up in the sky the wind keeps tearing the cloud apart– I see the whole of Orion the hunter once, my favourite constellation. But he doesn’t comfort me tonight.<br /><br />Trace and Stuart seem even more excited by the wildness of the wind. ‘Let’s walk along the canal,’ they say. We cross the new bridge –as usual I look up at flats to see if the writer is at her window; but though the light is on, her curtains are drawn – no comfort for me there, either.<br /><br />‘I’m not coming,’ I say. ‘I’m going home.’ I start running back over the bridge fighting the wind, the bridge thumping under me, my backpack thumping against my shoulders. I don’t look back to see where Trace and Stuart are. I don’t care what they are doing. I arrive, panting, in the hall of the mailbox feeling like the whole world is against me.<br /><br />‘This is the fifth floor,’ says the lift in its normal voice, reminding me that I’d meant to go and give Border a quick run. Too late now, I think, heading for our front door: not to say too bad. I’d taken her out before school. Granny would have to take her out this evening.<br /><br />Back in my room I sit straight down at my computer, go online. No email from Ella, not even one from Rashid, which is unusual – most nights we go back and forth two or three times. On the other hand it’s Friday: I know that Friday is like Sunday for Muslims, maybe he’s had to go with his father to the mosque.<br /><br />I send an email myself: Ella, again.<br /><br />‘Are you my dead twin?’ I ask. ‘Are you my dead twin? ARE YOU?’<br /><br />Again I get no reply.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER TEN<br /></div><br />Nearer and nearer Christmas: baby Jesus and all that stuff. Our school is not putting on a Nativity play, of course, that’s for little kids in the Juniors and Infants. We’re doing Joseph and his Amazing Technicoloured Dreamcoat. Some of the kids in my class auditioned for it: four are in the chorus and Trace is playing Potiphar’s wife. As the time for the two performances gets nearer she’s off at rehearsals more and more, I hardly have a chance to talk to her. I’m still cross with her after the evening with Stuart, so I don’t mind. ‘Why didn’t you audition too?’ she asks. ‘I can’t sing for one,’ I say shortly. ‘I can’t act for two. That’s why.’<br /><br /> The tops of the cranes have sprouted strings of lights and Christmas trees. There’s a competition for the best decorated crane in Birmingham. I don’t know how they’ll choose it. They all look pretty much the same to me. But I do like the lofty little trees scattered with gaudy light. There are coloured bulbs strung over some of the narrow boats in the Gas Street Basin too, along with branches of fir and holly. Mnemonsyne is not decorated; granny says she might put up some lights in due course; but she doesn’t like Christmas to start until the proper time. In her childhood, she says, the proper time was Christmas Eve. But she might do it sooner than that.<br /><br />She’s not the only one still lacking in Christmas spirit. Some of the kids in our school have so very little that they’ve taken to waylaying me in the playgound at breaktime and after school and they aren’t bringing messages of love and peace, let alone goodwill to all men. Far from it.<br /><br />I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t told you about the builder yet. Not that I know he is a builder when I meet him coming off Granny’s boat one weekend. At first I even wonder if he’s her boyfriend, until I realise she’s not the least worried about my running into him the way she might be if he was. Nor can I imagine her having a boyfriend quite like him. He doesn’t speak much except in smiles and grunts. Any boyfriend of granny’s would have to be VERY gabby.<br /><br />He seems a bit familiar, too, I don’t know why. He doesn’t look easy to forget. With his big belly, his short, stocky legs and his bushy red beard, he’s a more or less full-sized version of one of Snow White’s dwarfs. A matching bushy ponytail sticks out from under a red and black striped woollen hat with a pom-pom on top.<br /><br />It’s the beard I’m sure I’ve seen before. It reminds me of a rhyme Granny used to recite, and which she recites again, obligingly, when I ask her. ‘There was an old man with a beard, who said it is just as I feared, an owl and a hen, two larks and a wren, have all made their nests in my beard.’<br /><br />‘I don’t think old red-beard could manage the hen,’ I say thoughtfully. ‘Or even the owl. But the larks and the wren could have made it for sure.’ We both crease ourselves up laughing, till Granny stops and says warningly, ‘We shouldn’t laugh, really. He only brought his boat here last week. He started helping me out straight off.’<br /><br />Turns out he’s been lugging her Elsan about for her and bringing in coal, even lighting her stove sometimes when it’s playing up. His narrow boat is moored at the pontoon on the other side of the walkway. ‘He’s works on a building site,’ granny says. Immediately my mind replaces the striped hat with a plastic helmet. I remember the bearded man coming out of what I think of as my site.<br /><br />Next time I run into him near his boat – it’s called Poseidon - he’s carrying a coil of rope over one shoulder and a bucket laden with coal in the other hand. ‘Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go,’ I hum to myself. Is he Bashful? Or Grumpy? I wonder. He smiles at me but clearly doesn’t want to stop.<br /><br />Never mind that. ‘I saw you at the building-site once,’ I say. He nods, passing the coal bucket from hand to hand as if it’s filled with something light as paper.<br /><br />‘I live in the flats’ - I eye him closely.‘I’m always watching the building. I like the cranes.’<br /><br />‘It’s flats we’re building,’ His jeans look like they could do with a wash; so does his beard. I can smell the beard. I imagine I do. Maybe it’s the birds inside. It is quite big and bushy enough to hide a bird - or three.<br /><br />‘Are you a crane driver?’ I ask. He looks startled, shakes his head. Puts the bucket down now, shifts the rope to the other shoulder, picks the bucket up again and moves one foot forward.<br /><br />I block his way still. He can’t get round me.<br /><br />‘I’d like to climb one of those cranes,’ I say. ‘I’d really like to climb one.’<br /><br />‘More than I would, man,’ he says.<br /><br />‘If I went and asked would they let me?’ I enquire out loud. <br /><br />‘Likely not, man’ he says.<br /><br />‘Who would I ask?’ I persist.<br /><br />‘Foreman. Site Manager, to you. Don’t waste breath.’<br /><br />You don’t waste yours, I’m thinking. But he does not look hostile, he’s smiling awkwardly, shifting his bucket between coal-grimed hands and at last I take pity on him and stand aside to let him pass. He grunts a goodbye. Looking back over his shoulder, he jerks his head at Mnemosyne and says, ‘Tell her in there I got her more coal up.’<br /><br />‘Alright,’ I say, wondering why Granny’s boyfriend doesn’t do these things for her. Maybe he’s too posh. Lifting my left leg over the chain, I hop onto Granny’s section of the pontoon, then step up onto the boat. There’s a jar of mixed holly and fir standing on top of the cabin now, but still no sign of Christmas lights. I can hear Border yipping on the other side of the closed door, which means she’s heard me coming. She doesn’t make that yipping noise for anyone else.<br /><br />********<br /><br />Meeting the builder is alright. What isn’t alright is my other meetings these days, in the playground, or just outside the school gate.<br /><br />It’s boys mostly. Big year eleven boys. Plus some girl hangers-on, year tens mostly like me. They don’t say much just giggle obediently. I know the boys’ leader; everybody in the school knows him: he’s very tall, and part black, though I don’t know whether it’s his dad is black or his mum. It doesn’t matter. His name is Franklin – after Frank Bruno, everyone says – the boxer. You have to be aggressive to be a boxer and this Franklin – Frankie they all call him – is all of that. ‘Our Frankie’s got form,’ they say in between pride and terror. He’s got a flat-top, and one gold earring. Despite his colour – or part colour – his skin is not that much darker than theirs - the gang he hangs around with is all white, bar one boy, a really dim Jamaican who’s a cousin of his. Some of the white boys have flat-tops too which look pretty weird on them.<br /><br />Seeing that lot hanging around together, some stupid teachers see it as good racial integration in our school. Ha bloody ha. Black boys and white ones may get on but both kinds have it in for the Asians. This is why they are getting at me. ‘Paki-lover,’ they chant, ‘Hanging round with Paki girls. and boys. Terrorists. Got the hots for Paki terrorists have you?’<br /><br />‘Maybe she’s a lezzie,’ one of the girls chips in. ‘Maybe it’s the girls she fancies. Maybe she wants to know what’s under all those clothes. A pervert.’<br /><br />I think they can see into my head. I think they see how I fancy Rashid. I’m terrified. I’m also angry.<br /><br />‘So,’ I say. ‘SO?’ The threatening way they crowd round me then, hiding me from the safer people who might come to my rescue, I wish I hadn’t. Someone – a boy I think – leans over and pulls at my backpack. Immediately I pull it round and hold to me closely.<br /><br />‘Got love letters in there, have you?’ a voice behind me says. I can’t see whose voice it is. Another adds. ‘Does she know what happens to paki lovers? Does she know?’<br /><br />‘We could tell her,’ says someone else. It’s all the worse for being someone I can’t see. ‘Leave my bag alone,’ I say.<br /><br />‘And just listen to her fancy accent,’ yet another voice chips in; one of the girls this time. Esther bloody Rantzen are we?’ I almost laugh at this; wondering what my ma would say. She’s always complaining that I sound like a Brummie these days. Someone tweaks my hair. Someone else puts a small punch on my back. A little kick meets my shin. I stop laughing straightaway.<br /><br />‘Watch it, paki lover, just watch it. Keep away from terrorists or else.’ This time I can see who’s speaking: Frankie himself. He bends his head towards me, good as rams his greasy flat top into my face, his little gold earring bobbing. Then he stands back, pulls his hood over his head, jerks his hand, and suddenly the group parts, lets me out into the normal world. Still noone else dares come too near. People skirt round me, looking the other way. I stand by myself, in the middle of the playground, shaking.<br /><br /> ‘They’re bullies,’ Trace says when I tell her later. ‘Take no notice. The more you do the more they’ll go for you.’<br /><br />‘They might go for Rahilah,’ I said. ‘Or Rashid.’ I am terrified for Rashid, suddenly, and for Jay too, still more terrified than for myself. Sometimes aggro like this ends in knives. Oh yes I’ve heard it. But how could they know about Rashid? We never speak to each other except in class, when we have to, during some lesson.<br /><br />‘Don’t give them an inch,’ Tracy adds. If I can stick around with you, Tracy, they wouldn’t, I think. But Tracy is never in the playground these days, never comes out if school with me at the end of the day; she’s always rehearsing. She does suggest, though, I help with the props and costumes for the play. This means my working in the artroom at breaktime instead of spending it in the playground, means I can stay on after school until everyone else has gone home.<br /><br />But still, sometimes, they get me. I feel a punch at my back, coming from nowhere, I hear hisses from people I can’t see: ‘Paki-lover’. Once I find a nasty little note topped by a skull and crossbones stuck onto my bag. ‘Keep away from TERRORISTS’ it says.<br /><br />I stop hanging out with Rahilah. I see her only in the classroom, or outside school where it’s not so obvious. Rahilah hasn’t got a pc so I can’t warn her by email. But to both the boys I write ‘I’m getting a bit of aggro – if I seem a bit stand-offish, don’t worry. I just don’t want you getting aggro too.’ I guess they know what I’m talking about. Once Jay finds me by myself in the art room sewing sequins on Trace’s mother’s gold pyjamas from M and S that she’s going to wear as Potiphar’s wife. He gives me half of an awkward hug, surprising himself as much as me from the look on his face. He’s gone at once and I wonder vaguely why he’d come there. He’s not working on the play, he had no real reason. But I’m glad he did.<br /><br />Nothing actually happens. Nothing. No word comes from Ella either. ‘Are you my twin?’ I ask again. Nothing.<br /><br />‘You look peaky, Esther,’ Granny says next time I deliver Border. ‘I’m fine,’ I say. Wanting and not wanting to tell Granny what’s happening. I’m afraid that for once she might tell my mother who would see it as one more reason I shouldn’t have gone to Anthony Morris. ‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Just fine.’ I tell her about Joseph just to change the subject. ‘Would you like me to come?’ she asks.<br /><br />‘Please,’ I say.<br />.<br />‘’Right,’ she says, ‘Tell me the day and then get me a ticket.’<br /><br />‘Do you want to come with mum?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘Only if you want me to.’<br /><br />‘Of course I do’ I say. All the same I’m hoping that granny won’t put on one of her more outlandish get-ups.<br /><br />Granny as usual knows exactly what I am thinking. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she says ‘I’ll wear my ordinary old lady look. If Stuart’s around why don’t I bring him too?<br /><br />‘Only if you get him to wear his ordinary old lady look,’ I say. Though it’s not such a good joke really, we both burst out laughing. And suddenly I feel much better, better than I have for days.<br /><br />‘There,’ Granny says, ‘You’ve stopped looking like you’ve seen a ghost. Good.’<br /><br />The word ghost sends my eyes to the shelf to see if the urn full of ashes is still standing there next to the Hopi Indian pot. It isn’t. Granny sees where my eyes are going, shakes her head, but says nothing. I’ve been too angry with her recently to visit much. But I realise now that I need her more than ever. I need to ask her about Ella more than ever. But I can’t. It’s as if she won’t let me somehow – and at that thought, for a moment, I’m angry with her again.granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-1654794710499325082007-02-07T08:49:00.000+00:002007-02-07T08:49:38.994+00:00CHAPTERS SEVEN AND EIGHT<div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER SEVEN<br /><br /></div><span style="font-style: italic;">Attached to the top of the mast is the slewing unit. The slewing unit allows the crane to rotate.</span><br /><br />The year’s moving on. The baby, Barty, is not just sitting up, he’s almost crawling I see when my sister brings him over again. Now the clocks have changed it gets dark so early I need to take Border for a walk first thing in the morning, or else straight after school. Meaning I can’t hang out by the bus-stop any longer. Granny doesn’t always like me coming first thing in the morning, though, no matter how quietly I open the door, no matter how softly I call Border. She never has liked being woken early, mum says - quite often when she was a child she had to take herself to school. Sometimes, too, I suspect that Granny’s boyfriend is staying, and none of us have ever been allowed to meet him. (Perhaps her boyfriend was one reason she agreed to remain moored in the Gas Street Basin instead of moving Mnemosyne all over the way she used to. But I don’t think that was exactly what mum was thinking of when she urged Granny to stay put. Poor mum.) Those times granny shouts, ‘Forget it, Esther. I’ll walk her later myself.’ And I have to go away leaving Border whining in disappointment behind me.<br /><br />Clocks changing means Halloween and fireworks night. Fireworks have been going off for a week or two, and every day there are more and more of them. I see rockets, sometimes, reflected in the canals and going up into - where Ella is? – if Ella is?….if I haven’t just invented her.<br /><br />I love fireworks and fireworks night, I love them almost as much as I don’t any longer like Halloween. I’m too old to go trick and treating the way I used to when I was little, in the village in Worcestershire. I don’t think Trace ever did that here, in Birmingham, let alone Rahilah and Rashid and Jay. Noone in my class does it now, for sure, except for the really bad boys. And they’re not interested in treats unless the treat are real money. They just like the excuse to play tricks, meaning things like throwing bad eggs at peoples’ front doors. One advantage about living in a high flat is that we don’t get even the little kids dressed as witches and ghosts wanting sweeties, let alone the big ones wearing devil masks and t-shirts with skulls on, throwing eggs or flour or whatever.<br /><br />The boat-dwellers don’t seem to get it either, luckily for them. Or so granny says when I visit her next day, November the first. My gay brother, Stuart, who has come to stay at our flat, is visiting her too. ‘It’s All Souls Day today,’ he says. ‘In Mexico it’s much more important than Halloween. They call it the Day of the Dead, and buy sweets and candles, toys, masks, decorations shaped like skulls, skeletons, coffins, and put them in their windows and all round their houses. It’s kind of creepy, and it’s kind of fun. It’s taking death seriously and laughing at it at the same time.’<br /><br />I like the sound of this. At the same time I don’t like it. My brother is into death these days and for good reason considering his friends who have died.<br /><br />********<br /><br />Of all my older siblings Stuart’s the one I really know and like. Granny likes him best after me. And I know he likes Granny, he comes to see her as much as me and mum. Though he’s been living in San Francisco lately, he may come back to London now for good. A friend in London has offered him a job in a design studio. He looks happier. Good.<br /><br />Some of his friends in San Francisco died because of AIDS, he says, some would have, but for the new drugs. On this visit he’s brought the ashes of one of the dead ones in an urn. He was English, like Stuart, and he wanted his family to scatter his ashes in England. In the meantime, Stuart says, would Granny mind hanging onto them until he goes to see his dead friend’s family? It’s awkward hauling the urn around with him all the time. (He must have had the urn in the flat till now, I think. I’m glad he didn’t tell us. Creepy.)<br /><br />‘Of course,’ Granny says. And she sets the fancy metal urn on a shelf between her Hopi Indian bowl and her Indonesian shadow puppet. It’s creepy yet interesting to see it sitting there: I can’t stop myself trying to imagine the dead person inside: the ashes of the dead person. When I ask my brother what human ashes look like he laughs and says ‘like any other ashes, grey and powdery. Do you want to have a look?’<br /><br />‘No thanks,’ I say. It doesn’t stop me staring at the pot, remembering Ella for some reason. And thinking: ‘she’s a dead person. I know she is.’ I don’t know why I do think this suddenly, instead of just wondering about it, but I do. If so, it means that that I can’t have made her up in my head, after all. I don’t know which spooks me more: thoughts of a dead Ella or the ashes on the shelf. Maybe the ashes on the shelf more when Granny says, looking at the urn, ‘I’ll be that way myself before any of the rest of you, or so I hope. Good for me, I daresay, to contemplate all that.’<br /><br />‘No it isn’t,’ I say violently. ‘No it isn’t.’ Though I know that people die – even young ones – someone at my school died once, of asthma – I also know that I couldn’t bear it if anyone I loved died. Granny, mum, Stuart, whoever. How can they sit there being so cool about it all? How can they? They both look at me then. They start talking about other things and I look at them and think how they are two of the people I love best and that’s alright. The cabin of Mnemosyne feels altogether so cosy and normal that after a bit I stop feeling spooked.<br /><br />‘You couldn’t have left that urn with Mum,’ I say as Stuart and I walk home. ‘Granny’s much cooler than mum don’t you think? I expect that’s why I get on with her much better than I do with Mum.’ My brother laughs. Then he says, ‘Mum’s alright really. Granny gives her a pretty hard time, haven’t you noticed? She’s always given mum a hard time. I mean what would you feel having to grow up with a mother spouting all that sixties stuff the way granny did? Even before the sixties.’<br /><br />I don’t answer him at first. I watch a line of geese swimming alongside us and think of the way Granny and my mother argue about nothing very much. Only last week, for instance, I heard them going on and on about Granny’s shopping habits: Granny talking to my mother as if she was a cussed teenager – a bit the way my mother talks to me – my mum talking to granny as though she was about ten.<br /><br />My brother says. ‘They’re bound to be like that because they’re so different, chalk and cheese.’<br /><br />‘I don’t think it’s as simple as that,’ I say. ‘I mean if Granny’s the chalk one there’s quite a lot of cheese in her too; whereas mum’s got quite a lot of chalk. If you see what I mean,’<br /><br />My brother laughs. ‘You might be right,’ he says. I add, crossly, ‘What’s it matter if granny hauls all her stuff down from Tesco on foot, instead of letting my mother drive her to Sainsbury’s? Who cares? I feel like telling both of them to grow up! Grown-ups,’ I add. As if my brother wasn’t a grown-up too. Which he is, but also my brother, and so not just another grown-up like Mum is, like Granny is too, though I don’t usually see Granny as an ordinary grown-up.<br /><br />Because Stuart is my brother and because he also knows about death, I say something I don’t think I could have said to anyone else. I hardly know I’m going to say it to him, until I do. ‘Do you think it’s possible to get an email from someone who’s dead?’<br /><br />It’s almost dark already. The bright blue lights on the bridge reflect gaudily on the water. We’re about to walk onto the bridge, my brother has his hands on the rail. But he stops dead now, removes his hand, and says quietly, ‘What do you mean Esther?’<br /><br />I wish I hadn’t said anything. Of course Ella never lived; of course she’s just an imaginary friend. I mumble about it just being an idea for a story or something. But my brother says, ‘Really, Esther?’ When I don’t answer he says, looking at the brightly lit cafés opposite, ‘I think I need a bit of pepping up. Granny does wear you out somehow. How about a cappuccino, Esther?’<br /><br />‘I love cappuccinos,’ I say. ‘I usually only ever have them when I’m with Granny. Mum thinks coffee stops you growing.’<br /><br />My brother looks me up and down here with a very serious look on his face. ‘I don’t think you’re in danger of being stunted, Esther,’ he says. ‘Come along.’<br /><br />As we cross the bridge, I look up to see the writer woman’s room lighted. She can’t see me in the dark, she doesn’t wave – I don’t tell Stuart about her, of course. She is my secret. And soon we are settled in a quiet corner of one of the cafés, and I am taking the chocolate off the milky froth at the top of my coffee with a teaspoon, sighing with pleasure. Stuart allows me a first delicious swallow, before asking, still very seriously–‘What is this about, Esther. You’d better tell me.’ Adding more kindly. ‘If you can tell me? Can you?’<br /><br />‘I’m not sure I can,’ I say. But he is sitting so quietly and so sympathetically, not pushing me at all, that at last I manage, ‘Did you know Stuart, that I had an imaginary friend called Ella when I was little?’<br /><br />‘Did you?’ Stuart says thoughtfully. ‘No I don’t think I did know. I didn’t see much of you when you were little, if you remember.’ I nod. He hadn’t come out to mum then about being gay, so he never came home much.<br /><br />Secrets, I think, so many secrets. I hate them. Even if Stuart’s secret wasn’t secret any more, I know there are others. ‘I had an imaginary friend,’ I say. Then I say –it sounds so silly, so completely loony that I wish I hadn’t the moment the words are out of my mouth. ‘Everyone thinks I grew out of it. But I didn’t. I still have an imaginary friend called Ella.’<br /><br />‘So?’ Stuart says.<br /><br />I don’t know what makes me go on then. Maybe it’s remembering Stuart’s dead friend sitting on granny’s shelf between the Indian pot and the shadow puppet; maybe it’s thinking that because of this Stuart more than anyone knows what sadness is about. ‘I imagine I’m getting emails from her. Only I’m not imagining it, not really. I do get them. And so I’m wondering,’ I say – and though it’s such a new thought it seems a very certain one just now; ‘I’m beginning to think there might really have been an Ella once; only she’s dead.’<br /><br />Stuart is silent then. He starts pinching the little gold earring in his left ear – there isn’t one in his right. I add, anxiously. ‘But it’s only a thought. I still think I made her up, really. I must have, mustn’t I?’ At last he says ‘I think I want another coffee. Would like one, Esther?’<br /><br />‘No thanks,’ I say. ‘But I wouldn’t mind a piece of the chocolate cake.’ I feel ravenous suddenly.. Suddenly it feels as if there is another person inside me, a hungry one that can’t eat for itself. I fall on that cake when Stuart brings it like I’ve never eaten in my life before, while he sips his espresso in its tiny white cup looking at me with amazement. Gross, I think. But delicious just the same. In a moment I’ve finished the delectable squidgy stuff; am saying contritely, ‘Oh Stuart, I’m sorry, I should have given you a taste.’ Then I say in a sudden rush of worry. ‘You’re not going to die of AIDS are you, Stuart, I couldn’t bear it.’<br /><br />‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I’ll die someday, we all have to, you too. But not for a long time yet. I haven’t got AIDS. And anyway you get treatment these days, at least if you live in Europe or the U.S of A. People with AIDS don’t die necessarily. My friend Simon was unlucky.’<br /><br />‘I couldn’t bear it if anyone else dies.’ I say.<br /><br />Stuart looks at me again. Anyone else? What can I mean? He starts to say something then he shakes his head and stops. But he does add, after a minute – I’m not sure it’s what he’d been going to say before, ‘Granny’s one of those people can’t ever let go. It what makes her so interesting and so alive, but it’s not always comfortable to be close to her. I don’t always think it’s good for you, Esther.’<br /><br />I look back at him, staring him out. ‘But I love granny,’ I say, furiously. ‘She’s the best.’ Stuart knows too many dead people, I’m thinking. I’m angry with him, even though it’s not his fault.<br /><br />‘I never said she wasn’t,’ Stuart says. Maybe he’s guessing my thoughts. He’s said all he’s going to say for now, anyway, more than I want to hear. As for the rest… secrets? For now I think I’d rather they stayed that way; particularly if they are to do with death. (I remember suddenly, fleetingly, the way Granny’s eyes went back and back to that shelf, as if fascinated- as if – this thought comes from nowhere suddenly – as if she was checking out part of herself. No sooner has this thought arrived than it vanishes.)<br /><br />I stare regretfully at my smeared-with-chocolate but otherwise empty plate. Stuart takes his last swig of coffee and pays the bill. And then we are outside again, by the water. The reflected blue lights of the bridge are like the twins of the real ones. To the side of us, on the building site, a pair of cranes are swinging back and forth, lights winking from the top. They are still swinging back and forth, when we arrive home, in the flat. We stand in the dark looking out of the window, watching them. ‘Twin cranes,’ I say, ‘twin cranes talking to each other,’ not noticing the odd look Stuart gives me then: though I remember it later. I’ve had enough of death suddenly, of ghosts and all that. I tell Stuart about the cranes and about Rashid and Jay. I show him Rashid’s email which I’ve printed up, the one with the different crane names on them, like a poem. I say, wistfully, ‘I’d love to go to the top of a crane one day and look down on everything.’<br /><br />‘Me I’d rather look down on everything from a plane. It’s safer,’ said Stuart. ‘Lucky you’ll never get the chance to go up one, Esther. I wouldn’t like to think of you doing that,’ – he points to the man, a little pin figure from here, climbing down the long ladder through the middle of the crane. ‘I’m not so sure about that ladder, either,’ I say.<br /><br />‘Good,’ Stuart says.<br /><br />I’m not angry with my brother any longer. ‘You’re so cool, Stuart,’ I say looking at him affectionately, ‘I mean cool for a grown-up.’<br /><br />‘Is that meant to be a compliment, little sister?’ he asks, aiming a pretend blow at me.<br /><br />We hear my mother’s key in the lock. A moment later she marches into the room, carrying the baby in its little chair. ‘Hullo little nephew,’ says Stuart gathering the baby up in a way that makes me feel almost jealous. After a bit I go to my own room. I don’t think anyone noticed. See if I care.<br /><br />I switch on my computer and investigate my email. Two new ones: Rashid first, something about homework. Then Ella. I hesitate a moment before getting that one up. ‘Hi, Esther,’ Ella says. ‘LOL Ella.’ Why should that make me think of a grey powder with nubbly stuff in a thin metal urn? But it does. I put on Stuart Rattle playing Beethoven very loudly to drive her away, which works, even though my mother does put her head round the door after a bit and ask me to turn the noise down. Stuart’s head follows. ‘Be grateful its not heavy metal, ma,’ he says, winks at me and disappears. I put my headphones on and listen to the music through them afterwards. I only vaguely hear the doorbell go, hear my big sister’s voice outside. When I come out of my room again she and the baby and Stuart have gone.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER EIGHT<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The motors that drive the slewing unit are located above the unit’s large gear.</span><br /></div><br />Rahilah and I are friends more and more. One day – it’s pouring with rain outside, we don’t go out at breaktime but hang around in the classroom talking about this and that – I ask her, ‘Would your mum let you come round to my place after school one day? We could do our homework together. And you could meet my mum.’<br /><br />I don’t believe she’ll say yes, I don’t think she can, coming from her kind of strict family. And she just says, ‘I’ll ask at home. Maybe. I’ve told them I’ve got this nice English friend, and I think my mum noticed yours at the open evening with the teachers. She said she looked nice; older than most of the parents.’<br /><br />‘She is older,’ I say glumly. I don’t really expect to hear any more about it, I am surprised when only a day or two later Rahilah says, ‘I can come home with you one day, if you like. Only would your mum take me home afterwards?’<br /><br />‘I don’t see why not,’ I say. My mum would understand the reason, certainly. Even if she won’t much like having to drive through the Bristol Road traffic in the rush hour. And she does say she will do it, provided it’s not one of her baby-minding days. Between us all we arrange things for the next Wednesday. And on that afternoon, instead of Rahilah staying at the bus stop opposite we wait together outside Sainsbury’s, then sit side by side on the top deck of a bus heading for the City Centre. Some girls from our school are sitting three seats back. As we make for the stairs on our way out, they stare at us. They’re not girls I know. I don’t think anything of it.<br /><br />It’s getting towards Christmas already. New Street is seething with people. The lights along the middle of the street provided by our local electricity power company advertise the company as much as Christmas. Not very charitable really, Rahilah and I agree, dodging Big Issue sellers and shoppers and the remains of Farmer’s Market that always takes up the middle of the street the first and third Wednesdays of the month.<br /><br />Very soon we are under the motorway, under the arrays of round multi-coloured lights – my mother calls them vulgar: ‘only in Birmingham,’ she sighs. But Rahilah and I agree that they’re pretty as we walk beneath them, and up the stairs through the red façade of the Mailbox. All the smart shops, Harvey Nichols, Armani, are empty as usual. Rahilah stares in at the clothes with much more interest than I feel. I almost have to drag her away from them and in through the private entrance to the flats above.<br /><br />Rahilah seems awed by everything. Awed by the husky voice in the life, which breathes, ‘you are at the first floor,’ or you are at the second floor,’ and finally ‘You have reached the fifth floor’ - awed by the view out of the windows of the flat when we reach it at last. ‘Yasmina lives on the top floor of the council flats near Northfields,’ she says, gazing at the canals, the lights, the cranes, the cafés over the way, ‘but it doesn’t look like this from her flat.’<br /><br />What awes her most of all is the fact that noone lives in our flat except my mother and me and my father when he comes home. (Though Stuart is still supposed to be staying with us, he’s gone to London for a few days: just as well, I think, rather meanly. Rahilah would be surprised he wasn’t married yet. All her brothers are married by the time they’re twenty-five. I don’t know what Muslims think about people being gay.) Rahilah’s house, she says, is not only much smaller it’s crowded with people. Not just Rahilah’s parents and unmarried brothers and sisters, but also one of her brothers and his wife and their two small children live in their house. ‘And there are fewer rooms in our house than you have here,’ Rahilah says. She looks at my room as if she can scarcely believe it’s all mine.<br /><br />‘You don’t know how lucky you are, Esther,’ she says. ‘I do my homework with babies crawling over me, and the television on, and my mother holding conversations with everyone in the front room even when she’s cooking in the back.’<br /><br />‘We do sometimes have a baby here,’ I say. ‘My sister’s baby comes often.’ I know it’s not quite the same thing as having him live with us all the time. Still, Rahilah and I agree that our both being aunts is something else we have in common, even though this is more usual in large Muslim families like hers than it is in English families like mine.<br /><br />‘We can do our homework without babies, that’s one good thing,’ I say.<br /><br />‘Good,’ Rahilah says.<br /><br />Our biology homework today is about a monk called Mendel who discovered how peas pass on their genes. We have to write an essay describing this, and draw a diagram of inheritance patterns; how each gene has two parts to it called alleles, how you inherit one from your mother and one from your mother. How everyone in a family gets different combinations of these, except in the case of identical twins, created from a single egg, whose genes are exactly the same.<br /><br />Rahilah’s diagram is better than mine, much neater and stronger. As I stare enviously at her work, Rahilah says quietly: ‘I was a twin, but my twin died when we were born. I think we might have been identical but I don’t know for sure.’<br /><br />‘You are a twin, Rahilah? I mean you were one?’ My mouth is open with surprise. ‘But that’s so sad. Having a twin, but not being one.’<br /><br />‘I don’t remember it,’ Rahilah says quietly. ‘But yes sometimes it makes me feel very sad. Sometimes when I think of her I feel quite lonely. My mother told me she was alive a little while, but very weak. And then she died. And she tells me I’m the blessed one because I lived, so they love me all the more for that.’<br /><br />More death. It’s all I want. But still I eye Rahilah with astonishment, imagining two of her; trying to imagine what it must be like to have a sister exactly the same age as you. ‘What do Muslims think happen to people when they die?’ I ask. ‘What do they think happen to babies?’<br /><br />‘They go to heaven,’ Ramihah says. ‘Muslims think only Muslims will go to heaven, everyone else who doesn’t believe in the prophet and obey his laws will go to hell. But of course a baby born to a Muslim family must be a Muslim too.’<br /><br />‘Christians think babies only go to heaven if they’re baptised,’ I say. I don’t know how I know this but I do.’<br /><br />‘That’s not very nice,’ Rahilah says.<br /><br />‘Do you think I’d go to hell because I’m not a Muslim, assuming there is a heaven, there is a hell?’ I ask her.<br /><br />“Would I go to your Hell because I’m not a Christian?’ she asks me.<br /><br />I hesitate. I’m not sure I believe in the existence of hell, either Christian or Muslim. Nor in heaven either, which is much sadder. I know my parents think that when you die that’s the end of it. So do I really. Though sometimes I wish I didn’t. I like the idea of living forever, in heaven. I want to know what Rahilah believes, just the same.<br /><br />‘Christians –some Christians – think only people who are baptised will go to heaven, that everyone else, including Muslims, will go to hell. What’s the difference?’ Rahilah asks.<br /><br />‘Perhaps Muslim and Christian heaven and hell are quite different places,’ I say, imagining the universe out there full of little paradises, little gardens of Eden, all designed for people from different religions. And equally a whole lot of different hot places in the bowels of the earth, making hells for non-believers and evildoers from I don’t know how many different populations and different beliefs. Maybe Rahilah and I are having the same thought. The two of us look at each other and nearly – very nearly –burst out laughing. But we don’t. I think Rahilah takes religion much more seriously than I do. She says: ‘I know a lot of good people who aren’t Muslims, you for instance and I can’t believe all of them will go to Hell.’<br /><br />‘And I know plenty of good people who aren’t Christians,’ I say, thinking of Granny in particular who always swears she is an agnostic; thinking of Rahilah too. Thinking of my parents come to that. I can’t believe any of them will go to a Christian hell. Assuming such a place exists.<br /><br />I say, thoughtfully. ‘Jay says Hindus don’t have heaven or hell. You just get reborn as someone else. If you’ve behaved badly in your life you get born as someone very poor and miserable, or even as an animal; if you’ve behaved well you get reborn as a rich man or woman or anyway as a fortunate one.’<br /><br />‘I don’t believe that,’ says Rahilah, briskly.<br /><br />‘It sounds far-fetched to me,’ I say. (Though to be honest I’ve sometimes thought it might be quite nice to be reborn as a bird, say, able to fly. Or how about being reborn as Kylie? Or Eminem? Or David Beckham? Or Posh? Or Simon Rattle? Or Simon Rattle’s girlfriend? I’d sooner be Simon’s girlfriend than David Beckham’s wife, any day.)<br /><br />I had not said any of this to Jay at. I do not say it to Rahilah now. Without a word, we agree to leave it at that and turn to our maths homework.<br /><br />It’s much nicer doing the work alongside someone else, instead of by myself. Rahilah seems to like it too. Yet I can’t stop thinking about her dead twin, in or out of heaven. I think about her while we sit and eat tea. (Eggs fried with tomatoes; no bacon.) I’m still thinking while my mother is driving us through the traffic to Rahilah’s house, and while I watch Rahilah’s father come out of the house and greet my mother standing by the car, waiting to see Rahilah safely inside. He shakes my mother’s hand. ‘I am glad to see Rahilah friends with a modest English girl who has a decent woman for a mother like your good self,’ he says. (Modest? Me? As things stand I don’t dare be anything but modest. But things might be different one day. I hope one day my legs will look good in miniskirts. I hope I’ll have a boyfriend, at least.)<br /><br />I am still wondering about Rahilah’s twin while we are driving back home. Turning into the underground car park below the Mailbox, a horrifying, not to say scary thought strikes me: perhaps I’m a twin, too. Perhaps my twin died at birth too; perhaps Ella, my imaginary friend was never an imaginary friend, at all, but my dead twin. In which case why has noone ever told me about her? And is this why I sometimes feel so sad? The next moment I am angry. Angry angry angry.<br /><br />I clench my fists all the way up in the lift alongside my mother. The voice sings out. ‘This is the fifth floor.’ The usual voice. Except it isn’t the usual voice; it’s a younger one, almost a child’s voice. ‘This is the fifth floor’. ‘This is the fifth floor’. Ella’s voice?granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-81780683829843705812007-01-31T10:36:00.000+00:002007-02-02T15:04:46.179+00:00CHAPTERS FIVE AND SIX<div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER FIVE<br /></div><br />One thing about Birmingham is that it’s full of Asians. It has, it seems to me, as many mosques and Sikh temples as it has churches. Driving down into Birmingham from above, the domes and minarets of mosque so flash in the sun it feels like driving down into some place out of the Arabian Nights.<br /><br />Most of the Asian men –all the boys certainly - dress like non-Asian men and boys. Many more of the women and girls though dress like Rahilah, very prim, reminding me of nuns, even though nuns aren’t allowed children, whereas Muslim women often have lots of them. You think the girls must be especially good, much better than the rest of us, thinking holy thoughts when they’re not thinking about babies. Not thinking about pop groups and sex and boys like the rest of us. But then you see them giggling together and after a bit you realise they’re like us really; just as capable of being silly and frivolous and even irreverent. Rahilah is friends with two girls from another class, they’re not quite as strict as she is, they wear dresses and jeans and things, even though they cover their heads with scarves like her. She looks quite different when she talks to them, much less severe than she does in class. I even heard them discussing boys once; who they’d like to marry, who not. (As soon as they heard me listening they stopped talking in English and went back to Urdu.)<br /><br />There must be some kind of grapevine among them. The day after I’d been rescued by Rashid, Rahilah comes up to me and says she’d heard all about it. It’s almost the first time we’ve spoken to each other outside class and neither of us knows what to say after that. I mutter something about our English homework just to break the ice she starts the same moment talking about a science project. Then we look at each other and burst out laughing and after that I don’t think we feel shy of each other again. I even dare ask her what I’ve always wanted to ask, whether she felt hot under those clothes, whether she minded having to dress like that.<br /><br />‘Everyone always asks that,’ she answers, surprising me, because I’d never noticed her talking to anyone who wasn’t Muslim.<br /><br />‘Well then, do you mind?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘Not really. I’m used to it. And anyway it’s useful,’ she adds. ‘My mother says she doesn’t envy non-Muslim women, always having to worry about what they wear, what they look like, if their hair is neat and so forth. She can put on anything, have her hair anyhow, and then cover it all up when she goes out. Noone can see. Of course not everyone thinks like that. Some women care a lot what they look like even if it’s only in front of their families.’<br /><br />‘Can you wear anything you like at home?’ I ask. ‘Of course. And I can wear anything I like here. Today I’ve got my favourite blue sweater on under this. It’s got little loops and squares embroidered on the front. And I’m wearing ear-rings,’ she adds, almost naughtily. I look at her admiringly: in awe even. We are not allowed to wear any jewellery in school. I can’t wear earrings at all, ever, except the clip on kind that pinch, and only those when my mother isn’t in sight: she thinks I’m too young to wear earrings, and that ear-piercing is mutilation at any age. (Granny says this is nonsense, and she’ll take me to have my ears pierced if I want, but not till I am sixteen. She doesn’t want still more trouble from my mother.) Looked at like this, Rahilah sounds like a rebel, hence my awe. Thinking about it afterwards, I decide she isn’t as much of a rebel as she sounds. Where she comes from wearing earrings is normal when you’re four, let alone when you’re fourteen.<br /><br />I like talking to Rahilah in this way. It makes up for the fact that though Rashid smiles at me now, he’s gone back to not talking to me. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, but I am; I’m even cross. I want to talk to him about cranes again. But I can’t; I have to talk to Jay, instead.<br /><br />I haven’t told you about Jay have I? Perhaps I should. He’s my best friend and I ask his advice about most things. Even about Ella in a roundabout kind of way. Like how you could send emails to someone who didn’t exist outside cyberspace. Which he treats as a serious question, funnily enough: I knew he would, that’s why I asked him. Of course he doesn’t know what I mean by it, he goes off into some story of his own about parallel worlds that he says he wants to write one day. Which isn’t helpful really, not that I expected it to be - I couldn’t tell him about Ella, properly. What is helpful is being able to mention it to him.<br /><br />Jay: he is taller than me, taller than Tracy but not so tall as Rashid. He’s stockier than Rashid and not nearly so good-looking. His eyes, though just as dark, aren’t more beautiful than Border’s, like Rashid’s eyes. (Not that I could tell Rashid that. Border being a dog he’d think it was an insult.).<br /><br />Jay’s eyes are not only deeper-set and less brilliant, he covers them with such thick black-rimmed glasses you might think he was a nerd if you didn’t know him. But he isn’t a nerd and I don’t know anyone who really thinks he is. He has straight black hair, cut so it stands up in a brush at front: when he doesn’t comb it down it stands up all over – after he’s been playing soccer in the playground, for instance. He never lets it stand up for long; he combs it down a lot -. his thick hair is the one thing Jay seems vain about. (Outside school I’ve seen him wearing it greased up into in fancy spikes. He has to take them out before his mother sees him, he says.)<br /><br />The chief thing about Jay, though, is that he’s joky all the time. It’s hard to say anything to him that he doesn’t turn into a joke, even things he cares about like cranes – he’s another one, like Rashid, who says he’s interested in cranes. (Although only after I’d told him I was. Nor does he say he wants to be a crane driver.) His jokiness used to annoy me at first. When I sat next to him in class. I didn’t like the way he teased me - not because it was unkind but because it was boring not to have anything I said taken seriously. Trace is good at throwing the jokes back at him, but I’m not. So what changed that? What made us start being proper friends?<br /><br />It was like this. We all had to write a story about time travel one day, and some of us had to read them out to the class. This wasn’t much fun, because half the class is too rowdy to listen. Some people gave up reading after a bit, and the teacher, Mrs Adams, didn’t make them go on again. She’s not a strong teacher. She couldn’t make the noise stop, either.<br /><br />Jay didn’t give up. He has a very loud voice when he chooses to and he ploughed on regardless of the noise. And after a bit people around started to listen to him and then people beyond them did, and it was only some idiots right at the back of the class continued to fool around.<br /><br />The story was about Jay himself. How he went to sleep at home one day and woke up in the same house but a hundred years earlier. And how everybody in the house looked at him as if he came from outer space and said what are you doing here? Where did you come from? And they drove him out as if he was a mad dog, got into the house – his own house – by accident. And then he wandered round the streets not knowing where to go, and everybody there looked at him strangely as if they hadn’t seen such a person before. And of course they hadn’t – most of them hadn’t – seen such a person before. ‘It was because there weren’t many Indians in Birmingham then.’ Jay said.<br /><br />In the story a kind Vicar rescued the 100 years past Jay – and took him in and gave him a bed and food. But even this vicar didn’t like it when Jay and his daughter fell in love with each other. He threw Jay out too then. I don’t remember how the story ended. Maybe it didn’t end properly. I just know that Jay stopped reading and some people around started clapping. Then the whole class started clapping. I clapped too. But all the time I was looking at Jay and thinking; this isn’t about Jay a hundred years ago; this is about Jay now, how he feels different because he’s Indian in an English city, even though there are lots more Asians here now. And I knew what he felt like, in a way, even though I am English in an English city and so shouldn’t feel like that. But I do. Sometimes.<br /><br />I saw him look at me once and I looked back at him, straight in the eye. And I knew he knew that I understood what the story was about. I think he did. We were friends after that. He stopped turning everything I said into a joke, especially when I was talking about cranes. In particular he never turned any of my hints about Ella into a joke. As if he understood somehow what a truly serious subject it was. Even as if he knew it freaked me out.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />As for Trace. When she’s tired of joking back to Jay she tells him to shut up. And he does. Joking or not joking, they talk non-stop about everything under the sun: about what they’ve got up to in chat rooms for instance. Not the kind of chatrooms I know about, though. When I tell them the silly stuff I’d found in my kind, Trace shrieks ‘teen chatrooms? – you’ve been into teen chatrooms? – all that junk? – ‘what about Britney?’ ‘Do you fancy me?’ ‘How do you know they’re like that if you haven’t been into them?’ I ask coldly. Trace does get on my wick sometimes. ‘OK, so I did,’ she admits, not quite apologetically. ‘But only once or twice; till I found out what a waste of space they were.’ Her and Jay’s chatrooms discuss the problems of the world; some of the newspapers have them, you can post up all kinds of things and get answers and questions back. Jay says he found one on ‘why Muslim men have problems with sex’ … but he’s pretty vague about what those problems are.<br /><br />We’re all in Selly Oak at the time – Trace calls it ‘Smelly Poke’ - she would – sitting in the bus-shelter in the Bristol Road, outside the big Sainsbury’s. It’s after school, home time, but none of us are in a hurry to catch our buses yet. I look at my watch after a bit, though. I have to go back to granny’s and take Border for her walk before it gets dark. I think of suggesting Jay and Trace come too, but before I can make up my mind. Jay says - he’s looking at me now - ‘Guess what, I just found a new chatroom. For crane drivers, or anyone else who works with cranes.’<br /><br />‘Cranes?’ says Tracy looking at him as if he’s out of his mind. ‘What’s interesting about cranes?’ (I thought Trace would say this. That’s why I’ve not mentioned them before.)<br /><br />“Difficult not to be interested in them when it’s all you see around this town these days,’ Jay says, jerking his head. Though actually all you can see of tower-type structures around Selly Oak are the chimneys at the QE hospital, and the dark red clock tower thing at the university which my mother says is the ugliest thing she ever saw. (Typical Birmingham, she says. My mother hates Birmingham almost as much as she half loves it.)<br /><br />.’Yeah well, takes all sorts,’ Trace says in a bored voice. ‘What do these crane drivers chat about? About looking down on the rest of the world and feeling superior?’<br /><br />‘Of course not. They talk about different kinds of crane; how they’re used, stuff like that. Where people have seen them. Bet you didn’t know how careful you have to be stop tower cranes overbalancing themselves?’ he adds. I look at him in amazement. It’s never occurred to me that such beautiful things could have problems of that sort. They just are, as they are. That’s how they seem to me. Anyway I’m interested enough to ask for the address of this chatroom on the web, and he scribbles it down on a piece of paper. And then I look at my watch again and seeing how late it’s getting, seeing my bus coming, I wave goodbye to them and run to catch it.<br /><br />*******<br /><br />I walk past the building site this evening on my way back home from the bus-stop. I don’t have to go that way, but I do sometimes. It’s interesting to see it from ground level for a change. I stand by the gate for a minute, looking at the bustle, the heaps of building blocks, the rusty iron supports standing up everywhere now, listening to the noise of the machines, the shouting men. The cranes make no sound so far as I can tell. The drivers’ cabins on top look so tiny from down here. Hardly big enough to hold a man.<br /><br />A gaggle of builders comes out of the gate now: some of them stare at me. They all look alike to me in their shiny orange helmets; except for one who is shorter than most of them and fattish and has a very bushy beard and carries a bucket in one hand. He’s weird, I think.<br /><br />All this makes me still later for walking Border. She only gets a short run today. I don’t stay with Granny long either. She’s crochetty– maybe she’s had a row with her boyfriend. (You think Grandmothers don’t have boyfriends? – then you’re wrong. Mine does – and not just mine. I was talking about granny at school one time, how unlike a granny she was, and when I said, ‘And she’s even got a boyfriend, ‘someone else said ‘That’s nothing. My granny’s got three. She goes on holiday with them by turns.’ This sounds gross to me. But I daresay it’s true.’)<br /><br />Turning out my daypack when I get home, I find Jay’s website address for cranes, and decide to try it out. But first, as usual, I go into my email. There’s only one email – from Ella. But it’s not blank this time. What it says freaks me out; I mean SO freaks me, I leave the website for now. It says – exactly like this -: Cranes. CRANES. CRANES. CRANES. CRANES.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"> CHAPTER SIX<br /></div><span style="font-style: italic;">The mast grows itself one section at a time. </span><br /><br />Next time I see Granny I tell her what Jay said about how cranes stand up. I’d never wondered that. before. They were like dancers to me. You’d never ask why dancers don’t overbalance; it’s just their skill, the way they are. But now I know that cranes need to be embedded in concrete on the ground to keep them steady.<br /><br />Of course it’s interesting to know how things work. Yet I’d still rather see cranes as holding their own balance, like dancers. When I try and explain this to granny she laughs and says ‘I suppose there are two kinds of people – the kind who assume cranes will stand up and the kind that don’t. Your idea is fine in its way, Esther; but be careful; it can be a dangerous way of going on.’ Did I understand what she was saying? Maybe I did. I’m not sure though. I’m even less sure I want to believe it. I might as well have asked why I keep on getting messages from Ella. When there is no such person as Ella, I made her up. Maybe if I told Granny about Ella, she’d assume I was sending the messages to myself. But I’m not. I don’t think I am; unless I’m doing it in my sleep. I don’t sleep walk so far as I know.<br /><br />*********<br />This evening my parents have to go to the parent’s evening at my school. My father has even come home early so he can go too. I’ve been a bit worried about that. What with thinking about Ella and going into chat rooms in the library and so on, I’ve been skimping homework lately.<br /><br />To stop myself thinking about it I skimp homework tonight too. I go into my email and get up Ella’s crane message. I reflect on it for a while. ‘Does this mean you like cranes too?’ I write at last. ‘I watch tower cranes all the time from here - I think it might be cool to go to the top of one, some day.’ I think a bit more, then I add, ‘I wish I would. Even though it would be scary.’<br /><br />Do I really believe that? Or do I write it for something to say? What can you say, after all, to someone who, in your heart of hearts, you don’t believe exists? I don’t believe Ella exists I don’t even want her to. ‘One day I would like to..’ I write. “I wish..’ As if! Get real! But the moment I reread what I’ve written I know it’s true. I would like to go to the top of one the cranes I keep watching. Even though my stomach turns right over at the thought of it. I almost don’t send the email off. Because that might make my wish come true.<br /><br />But I do send it. Straight afterwards I open an email from Jay saying ‘Howdy pardner.. What do you think they’re saying about us at school…?? I’m your boyfriend? GARBAGE!!! Jayxx.’ I liked the xx.<br /><br />I should have got to my homework then. I really mean to. But I don’t. Instead I put in the address of Jay’s crane-driver chatroom. It comes up at once. Two guys – I assume they are guys – one calls himself ‘GUNMETAL’ and the other ‘SKYDIVER’ - are arguing about whether it’s better to drive a tower crane or one of the much lower, squatter mobile cranes. (There are a lot of mobile cranes on the building site too so I know about them. But they don’t interest me as much as the way the towers do. They’re not beautiful for one thing.)<br /><br />The tower crane driver says he likes driving tower cranes because it makes him feel he’s right above the world, in a place all his own. The mobile crane driver tells him that up a tower crane he doesn’t have to think for himself. ‘You get your orders about what to lift and where, mate, the machine does the rest. But me, driving a mobile crane I’m in the driving seat, I have to think for myself, it’s just my skill matters.’ The tower crane driver comes right back at him; ‘That’s what all you mobile crane drivers are, cowboys, Michael Shumacher with lifting tackle. Well, that doesn’t appeal to me, mate. That’s boy’s stuff. What’s man’s stuff is climbing all that way up and keeping a clear head.’ And so on. On and on. I get bored after a while.<br /><br />And then my parents come home, and then I really do wish I was high up a crane far away from anyone. It seems my class teacher thinks I’m just ‘fooling around’ ‘wasting my potential’ along with some other bright kids who should know better. My parents don’t listen when I tell them we’re not wasting our time, we’re into all kinds of interesting things not just schoolwork. They seem to take it for granted that these kids aren’t as bright as me, let alone brighter: not in a comprehensive school. Whereas if I’d gone to the kind of school they’d chosen I’d have been with plenty of brainy kids, all properly motivated, and all of the same class as me – well they didn’t actually say this last bit, but you could feel the words hanging around.<br /><br />“Excuse me,’ I say. There’s some kids in my class who are near geniuses.’ I’m thinking of Trace, here, which might have been exaggerating a bit, but not by a lot. (I heard one staff mutter ‘Oxbridge scholarship’ round her; I doubt they’d do that of me.) And there’s two really bright Asian boys – ‘Jay’ I say, ‘He’s Hindu.’ ‘It doesn’t sound like a Hindu name,’ my mother says doubtfully. ‘But we did meet a very nice Indian woman, in a sari. Her son was called Jatinder? or something,’ – ‘Jay,’ I say. ‘He hates his Indian name.’ My mother isn’t listening though. ‘She was hearing just the same things about her son as I was hearing about you. How he fooled about at school, and at home spent all his time on a computer playing computer games, or on the internet, and didn’t do his work. We agreed that perhaps we should both ban you from computers some of the time.’<br /><br />‘Oh great,’ I say, ‘Oh great.’ Thinking almost panicked – my very first thought, which surprised me – but it was my first thought – but then I wouldn’t get my messages from Ella.<br /><br />********<br /><br />My mother doesn’t say anything more over breakfast about banning me from the computer; I’m not going to remind her, for sure. We have a double maths class first thing, so I don’t have a moment to talk to Jay till break time. I grab him going out into the playground and tell him about my mother’s threat. He doesn’t sound impressed; ‘my mother’s always saying that,’ he says dismissively. And before I can say more Trace comes up. ‘Have you talked to Rahilah today?’ ‘Excuse me? During double maths?’ I say. (The small group that includes me, Trace, Rahilah, Jay and Rashid is always being pulled out and given extra work, and the maths’ teacher never lets us get away with anything. My mother would never get any complaints from her.) I’ve noticed Rahilah looking a bit subdued, but that’s all. ‘Look at her,’ Trace says, ‘She’s really upset, all the Asian girls are.’ Across the playground I see a group of them in a huddle; some of them are even crying. ‘What’s up?’ I ask. ‘Why don’t you ask Rahilah?’ Trace says in her usual maddening way. I punch her on the arm a bit, but she shakes her head and isn’t saying.<br /><br />She gives me an idea, though. If my mother once met Trace she’d give up all her ideas about noone in my school being bright enough for me. I mean she might get other ideas seeing Trace’s pierced ears and pink hair, which is why I’ve never suggested taking her home before. But she couldn’t think she was stupid, possibly. ‘Why don’t you come home with me after school?’ I say, hesitantly. I kind of assume Trace'll say no. I can’t imagine her doing anything so boring after school as coming home with me. To my surprise, though, she says, ‘OK. Right, Cool.’ So that’s that. Which leaves me nervous and apprehensive for the rest of the day. Suppose my mother is looking after the baby? She might be- I can’t see Trace being into baby talk. And what will my mother say about her pink hair?<br /><br />I don’t get to talk to Rahilah till dinnertime. She brings her lunchbox over and sits down next to me at the table. ‘Did Trace tell you what happened to Naifah in year 5?’ She asks. ‘No,’ I say. I don’t even know which of the Muslim girls Naifah is, for sure: I don’t know anyone much in year 5. ‘She’s disappeared – she went to Pakistan, just for a holiday, her parents said, she was very excited about it, but she’s not come back. It wasn’t a holiday after all. Her father had sent her to get her married. To an old man. Well a man of 40, anyway.’<br /><br />‘But she’s only fifteen,’ I say, horrified. ‘Noone can get married when they’re fifteen, it’s against the law.’ ‘So? You don’t think things are different in Pakistan?’ Rahilah asks. ‘You can be married at 13 or 14 there. Or younger even.’ ‘And have children?’ I ask faintly. ‘And have children,’ she says. Some of her friends have come to stand behind her, and they are all looking at me. I am 14, I’m thinking. Suppose someone forced me to marry someone twenty-five years older whether I wanted to or not? Gross. Well it couldn’t happen to me. But maybe it could happen to them. I look at each of them with new eyes: Nasrhula. Fathima - I don’t know the names of any of the others. They look back at me. Then they go away, giggling a bit, as if my look of horror has cheered them up. ‘What do you know, baby English girl?’ they might be saying. What do I know, I wonder? Later, when I catch Rahilah on her own I ask if her father could do that to her. She shakes her head.<br /><br />‘Daddy says he’ll find me a husband, but that’s alright by me because he says he won’t make me marry anyone I don’t like and whoever it is will have to promise he’ll let me finish my education and get a good career.’<br /><br />How old will you be then? When you marry?’ I ask. ‘Seventeen; eighteen,’ she says. That still sounds much too young to me. But Rahilah just says, teasingly; ‘I might even ask you to the wedding if we’re still friends and you promise to dress modestly and not shock my family. You’d have to come with your father and your mother, of course.’<br /><br />‘Of course,’ I say faintly. Though I’m not at all sure I’d fancy the idea of my parents turning up at Muslim wedding and being anthropological about it all. ‘How fascinating to see other cultures at work.’ And all that. It’s how my parents are. Never mind.<br /><br />*******<br /><br />Trace, if you ask me, belongs to a culture of her own. All the way back to central Birmingham on the bus I wonder if asking her home isn’t a big mistake, if my parents will look at her anthropologically, too. Not only has Trace’s hair been re-dyed lately, it’s pinker than ever, she’s put ear-rings with yin yang symbols into her pierced ears the moment we got out of school, and replaced her school shirt with a crop top. The ring in her pierced belly button will show as soon as she takes her jacket off. If anything I’m still more alarmed about what she will make of my mother; especially if the baby’s there. Taking Trace to see Granny was one thing; taking her home quite another.<br /><br />But I needn’t have worried. True my mother does look at Trace a bit oddly, but then most grown-ups look at Tracy like that. It doesn’t last for long. If anyone goes on looking at Trace oddly it’s me, the way she plumps herself down on the ground besides the baby, playing with him like she’s done nothing but play with babies all her life. (Which she hasn’t: One of the few things I know about Trace, outside school, is that she’s an only child; of a single mother what’s more.) ‘Isn’t he a duck,’ she croons, ‘Est, you’re so lucky being an aunt. Just listen to him laughing?’ I’ve never heard the baby laugh so much. His rolling chuckles make me want to laugh too. I can’t think what Trace’s doing exactly; she only seems to be making faces at him, tickling him, which is what I do sometimes when there’s noone to see (to stop him creating, I tell myself). But the baby doesn’t think it’s the same at all judging by the way he giggles and chuckles and flourishes his little fists. My mother is delighted – not only by him but by Trace too by the look of it, pink hair and all. After a bit she makes us tea in the kitchen while Trace leans against the units and chats to her like she’s grown-up friend of my mother; or like my mother is a schoolgirl friend of hers. Turns out they’ve both been reading a book by Margaret Atwood – re-reading my mother insists - The Handmaid’s Tale, about women being enslaved to men. It makes me think of Rahilah’s friend married to a man old enough to be her father; but I don’t say. I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, even if I wanted; and I have to hold the baby because my mother doesn’t have a hand to spare and his baby chair is still sitting in the other room.<br /><br />My mother not only produces tea, but also bread and honey and a fruit cake of which Tracy eats a lot, to my surprise, she is stick thin and never bothers much with lunch at school. Afterwards we go to my room and turn on my pc – Tracy says she’ll put me onto one of her serious chatrooms, as opposed to the silly teen ones. ‘I can’t get those anyway,’ I say. My email comes up at once usual. Tracy peers at the list of senders: ‘Who’s Ella?’ she asks. ‘Just a friend from my old school,’ I say hastily, and switch over at once, but not before I notice that a new message coming up, not from Ella, but from Rashid. Rashid? It can’t be, I think. But it is.<br /><br />If Trace notices she doesn’t say. She’s not staring at the screen any more, her eyes are going round my room at my posters and so forth; I’m glad I got rid of Girls Aloud last week and David Beckham too. She doesn’t think much of Morcheeba, she says, the group on the poster still stuck above my desk. And ‘who’s that?’ she asked staring at the picture of Simon Rattle I’d put up instead of David Beckham. (I know Simon Rattle is old enough to be my father and older, but I think he’s dishy all the same. Granny has taken me to Symphony Hall to hear him once or twice, he comes back there sometimes. Liking classical music is something I don’t admit to at school. And as for Simon– if I could find a boyfriend who looked like him I wouldn’t look any further.) Trace doesn’t seem any more interested in him, though, than in Morcheeba.<br />.<br />Her proper chatroom of course, is a newspaper one. People are discussing what should happen in the Middle East: it reads very seriously, not a bit like the teenage chatrooms. Trace even adds a comment herself, but it’s quite flippant, her heart doesn’t seem to be in it today. She seems more interested in having another session with the baby before she goes home. ‘He’s such a duck, Est,’ she said; ‘Aren’t you lucky.’ I decide to take her word for it, though it’s not exactly how I see myself. I am in a hurry myself now; I want to know what Rashid has to say. He hasn’t spoken to me for days; but then I know he’s not really supposed to speak to me at school. One thing for sure, he doesn’t look a bit like Simon Rattle. Simon Rattle doesn’t have beautiful dark brown eyes like Rashid. Come to think of it I don’t even know what colour Simon Rattle’s eyes are.<br /><br />‘I like that friend of yours, Esther’ my mother says as soon as Trace has gone. ‘Though I can’t think why she has to deck herself up in such a peculiar way. Thank goodness you don’t want to look like that, at least.’ (Give me a chance I think; though I suspect I wouldn’t be cool enough to get away with it; not yet anyway.) ‘She seems most intelligent,’ mum adds.<br /><br />‘I always told you there were bright kids in my class, mum. Much brighter than me.’ I say.<br /><br />Back in my room I head straight for Rashid’s email. ‘Hi, Esther,’ it says. And then; ‘On a website I found the names of all these different cranes and thought you might like them; it’s a bit like a poem don’t you think?<br />mobile henbow cranes<br />knuckle boom cranes<br />pedestal cranes<br />railway cranes<br />equilibrium crane<br />hydraulic truck crane<br /><br />He’s written it out like that, like a poem, too. Mobile henbow cranes - knuckle boom cranes, I like those names especially. I haven’t the faintest idea what any of look like. I just think the words look lovely set out like that. Jay wouldn’t see them that way, I think. Maybe Rashid doesn’t either, but at least he understands that I don’t see cranes only in practical terms.. Mobile henbow cranes - knuckle boom cranes.. Unreal. They are as real unreal as Ella. They too might as well be from outer space.<br /><br />See you tomorrow, ends Rashid’s note ends. He doesn’t seal it with a kiss.<br /><br />Why do I feel so happy and yet so sad? Trace has come to tea. Rashid has sent me an email. Jay sends me emails signed with xx. Rahilah is more and more my friend. What have I got to be sad about except about being a teenager? - which is sad enough, I know - not just sad, pathetic: gross; not knowing sometimes where your body starts and ends. Really it feels like that sometimes and it is sad: as if something you can’t quite catch is over and done with forever and ever, amen. Maybe that’s not what makes me sad. But something does, for no reason that I can see.<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">CHAPTERS SEVEN AND EIGHT WILL APPEAR NEXT WEDNESDAY: FEBRUARY 7TH</span>granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-13510391257857541872007-01-26T09:34:00.000+00:002007-01-26T11:07:05.870+00:00CHAPTERS THREE AND FOUR<div style="text-align: center;"> CHAPTER THREE<br /></div><br />Actually, I do have some friends, real friends, in real time. But they’re all from school, and I don’t see them out of school. Where I live, almost in the city centre, is too far away for me to drop in or out of other people’s houses, or for them to drop in or out of mine. I don’t ask them anyway. I told someone once that I was an aunt. But she just said ‘So what? Who wants babies?’ Which made me feel freakier than ever. Trace did say ‘cool’, true, but she’s like that. Anyway she’s got a pierced ears and a pierced belly button, and dyes her hair pink. I can’t see her sitting about in our flat.<br /><br />I did take Trace to see Granny once, though, on her narrow boat. Trace said ‘cool’ about the boat too, and she and Granny got on famously. ‘Pity I’m a bit too old for all such things,’ Granny said when she saw the pink hair, ‘Aren’t I?’ she asked appraisingly, looking at me. ‘Yes,’ I replied firmly. She did add that she wouldn’t fancy having her belly button pierced, let alone her tongue. ‘You’d look cool with a pierced tongue, Bella,’ Trace said. (Granny’s name is Bella; she’d told Trace to call her that. I was almost jealous.) ‘I’m going to have a tongue stud when I’m sixteen and a little lizard tattooed on my shoulder, but mum won’t let me do it yet. She wasn’t too pleased about the belly button. But I told her she’d had my ears done when I was little what’s the difference?’<br /><br />Trace speaks broad Brummy of course. So do I when I’m at school. One reason my mum wanted me to go to a posh girls day school in Sutton Coldfield was so I wouldn’t speak with a Brummy accent; it’s the ugliest in England, she says. So I still don’t speak like that at home, though she’s always complaining that I do. But of course I speak Brummy at school; I have to - it’s called protective colouring. That’s what butterflies have when they turn the same colours as the leaves they live on so their predators can’t see them and eat them; we’re doing stuff about evolution in science just now which is how I know about that. It interests me a lot. Partly because it’s how I live my life, at home, at school, everywhere. I hide my freakiness and don’t get beaten up. Protective colouring.<br /><br />(The one place I don’t need protective colouring is anywhere Granny is. I spoke Brummy to Trace in front of her. I saw she noticed. She smiled a bit, to herself, not me. Not in a patronising way though: just an interested, fond one. I’m in danger of making her sound too good to be true, my grandmother. In a way she is too good to be true, the way she treats me like a friend, talks to me like a friend, not like a child. My mother wouldn’t see it like that. My mother thinks granny is a pain, I know. I’ve heard her say so to my dad. Maybe she is a pain, for my mother. But not for me.)<br /><br />Living where I do, I should go to school somewhere nearer, like Ladywood, or Balsall Heath. My mother told me I deserved to go somewhere really tough and awful after I’d refused Sutton Coldfield. But even so she couldn’t quite stomach seeing me in schools largely Asian and Afro-Carribean. Of course she didn’t put it quite like that. She just said I’d get a better education in a school in what she called ‘a nicer area.’ Meaning more white; not to mention more middle class. She had to pull lots of strings to do it. My mother’s good at pulling strings.<br /><br />And it isn’t as if there aren’t Asian and Afro-Carribbean kids at Anthony Morris Comprehensive School, Selly Oak: it’s just that there are fewer of them. There is Rahilah in my class, for instance: a girl who wears a head scarf and never looks at anyone much or talks to anyone much. She won’t talk to me, though once or twice I’ve tried to talk to her. I feel sorry for her in some ways, but in other ways not at all. Why I wanted to talk to her was because she always seems to know where she is, what she wants. When we are asked to write something, she thinks for a minute and then picks up her pen and writes quickly, almost happily, while the rest of us are still looking round and groaning. Her brown face is oval within its white scarf. She has thick eyebrows that I notice her raise sometimes. I’m beginning to suspect that she isn’t quite as meek as she seems.<br /><br />There are two other Asians in my class, both of them boys. Rahilah doesn’t talk to them either. But then she wouldn’t. Muslim girls aren’t allowed to talk to boys. I know that. Muslim boys aren’t supposed to talk to girls either, certainly not heathen, non-Muslim girls. Rashid doesn’t speak to girls, though he speaks a lot to boys and I’ve seen him smile at some girls, though not me or Trace.<br /><br />The other boy, Jay, isn’t a Muslim. He’s Hindu, he can talk to anyone; he does. Especially to me – next to Trace he’s the one I like best, in some ways he’s a better friend than Trace because she goes her own way, does her own thing; I never know if she’ll be there or where I am with her, whereas I always know where I am with Jay. Like me he goes in for protective colouring. Both of us pretend to like the kind of rubbish music everyone else does, for instance. Trace doesn’t pretend anything, ever. Shes a bit Goth: a bit retro; that is she is some days, some days she’s not. Other days she says ‘I’m grunge.’ But she never hangs out with the grunge kids. What she really likes is 60’s music, people like Janis Jopling and Jimi Hendrix, who most kids our age haven’t even heard of. Trace has got them all at home. On Vinyl, she says: left by long dead gran in South Africa, she says, but looking at me sideways. Perhaps she’s not always so cool as she seems. If so I’m the only one who thinks it. Most of our class think she’s coolest of the cool; they all want to be mates with her. She’s the cleverest in our class by far.<br /><br />In our kind of school other people wouldn’t get away with that, they’d be called nerds, swots, brains. But Trace can get away with anything, just because she doesn’t care. It means Jay and I can hide our brains behind her and so we do. The three of us, along with Rashid and Rahilah are the brains in our class, though noone knows anything else for sure about Rahilah. She has her own protective colouring. So does Rashid, I think. Jay and I have Trace for protective colouring.<br /><br />************<br /><br />Before I had a desktop of my own I used the pc’s at the Central Library in Victoria Square when I wanted to look things up; kids have priority on all of them after school, not just in the Children’s Library. I didn’t mind having to go there. Noone bothered me, I could google away as long as I wanted. Now I only use the library pc’s for chatrooms. Not very often, they’re silly like I said. But someone at school has been going on about a brill teen chatroom, so next time I go to the library for books I see a free pc in the children’s library and give it a whirl.<br /><br />Estpest I call myself. It looks silly when ‘Estpest enters the chat room,’ comes up on the screen. But it’s a lot less silly than most of the other names in the chatroom with me: SoppySal, Bubbletop, Cyperpot, for three. ‘Hi, Estpest, u wanna?.’ comes back from someone – it seems about the level of just about everything else in there. What’s so brill about it all, I wonder? ‘No wanna,’ I punch in. Bubbletop asks me for a one to one chat then, but I don’t fancy that. Suppose Bubbletop is some old perv pretending to be a teenager? I’ve got more sense than to fall for such stuff. (I know what goes on. My mum goes on about it all the time.) I read some of the other chat that comes in – it is all just as silly. I am about to sign off when, suddenly, I see this; which is not silly at all, not to me. Ella enters the chatroom. ‘Hi Ella,’ someone writes. I don’t write anything. I sit there, frozen, too spooked to leave the chatroom, let alone the pc, though I know I should. I wait for something else to come: as it does come, soon enough. ‘Hi Estpest. How about a one to one with Ella?’ it says. I hesitate. I hesitate so long, the message comes again. ‘One to one with Ella, Estpest?’ This time I type ‘No thanks.’ and sign out of the chatroom, firmly, before I can change my mind. (‘Estpest leaves the chatroom.’)<br /><br />I go into Google then. I punch in one word – or rather one name: ‘Ella’.<br /><br />I am amazed by the number of Ellas that come up. Ella Fitzgerald, of course, along with all kinds of unknowns – long-lost grandmothers maybe. But these can’t be my Ella. Ella Fitzgerald can’t be my Ella, for sure; she’s big and old and American and a singer and black. My Ella I realise – and I haven’t thought any such thing before, but I know it for sure in that moment - my Ella is little and wispy. She could be older than me or she could be my age, exactly. I’m not sure about that. But she isn’t old or big for certain.<br /><br />Ella Fitzgerald and most of those other Ellas are dead anyway. But my Ella isn’t dead. How can she be? Yet suppose she is? Such a thought is gross: creepy. How could a dead person get into a chatroom? If I went back into the chatroom would she still be there? I don’t go back. I try to put the thought away. Scary. I am still sitting quite safely in the familiar teen bit of the children’s library with its comfortable cushions and manuals on looking after yourself and avoiding drugs, and those in-between novels people think we want to read, about drugs and underage pregnancy. (Me I’d rather read about Hobbits, or Discworlds or King Arthur But actually books like that are there too. Plus the Harry Potters of course.) There’s a tall black girl, her hair in beaded braids, reading something by June Jordan, a nerdy boy with a crew cut playing on a Dungeons and Dragons website on one computer, an Asian boy doing what looks like maths on another. It ought all to be fine. But it isn’t.<br /><br />I’m almost afraid to leave the library in case it would be worse outside. I go back to the Google question bar and key in the word ‘cranes’; cranes should be safe enough.<br /><br />Cranes as birds come up at first; I don’t want them. I add the word ‘lifting’: ‘lifting cranes.’ That’s not quite right either. To get the kind of cranes that fly like angels above my head, that talk and dance with one another, I have to put the word ‘tower’ in place of ‘lifting’. Words like ‘lifting’ and ‘tower’ sound boring to me. They don’t show how the cranes talk and dance. The cranes are tall, of course, like towers, and their job is to lift, to hoist bundles of steel crates and girders and RSJs through the air all day. But they are so much more magical than that. They are to me. Suppose they lifted things so high that they lifted them right out of the air into the ether? Suppose they lifted me right out into the ether? Suppose I met Ella up there? If she’s dead, I might meet her, I think. But ghosts are dead, and Ella isn’t dead, I tell myself yet again – why do things always come back to that? I dreamed up a live person not a dead one. I know I did.<br /><br />I shut the computer down firmly. It can’t be worse outside than here: not possibly. I go home to a pizza out of the freezer from Tesco – mum has had the baby all day and is too tired to cook I watch EastEnders, then fall into bed. I don’t dream of Ella. I’ve never yet met Ella in my dreams – or not in a dream I remember when I wake up. I hope things go on that way.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">CHAPTER FOUR<br /></div><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />The base connects to the mast or tower. The mast is a large triangular lattice structure. This structure gives the mast the strength to remain upright.</span><br /><br />Even though I don’t want to go into chatrooms, I moan at mum endlessly for barring them from my pc. It’s censorship I say. All the other kids are allowed them, I say. We’re allowed them in the library! I tell her, triumphantly,<br /><br />Other kids are braver than me, I think. Or perhaps they haven’t had their mums banging on about the dangers the way mine does; she goes on about perverts all the time. Not just on the internet, She also, not so much, warns me about the dangers of walking the canal towpaths on my own. But I am much less frightened of them. I’ve always got Border with me for one. And then there’s the Stamp Man.<br /><br />I’ve known the Stamp Man for ages. He lives – or seem to live most daytimes – on a bench besides the Digbeth Canal, on the more open ground well beyond the smart new flats and the anything but smart BT tower. Why do I call him the Stamp Man? Because he has stamps that’s why. (As my mum says ‘ask no silly questions, and you’ll get no silly answers.’) Whatever the weather he wears a long grey anorak, dirty enough the first time I saw it; it doesn’t seem to have been washed since. It has a hood that he sometimes puts up in winter, and sleeves so long that he has to push them back to show you what’s in his hands. First class stamps are in his right one – about ten, I think – the same number of second class stamps in his left. He always opens his left hand first and when I shake my head he opens the right, smiling. ‘First class,’ he says proudly. ‘First class.’<br /><br />Sometimes but not always he holds them out to me; he pulls them back quickly if I dare to get too close. That might be because Border used to bark at him and he was scared of her. But she doesn’t bark any more. She just sniffs his legs in a friendly way, sometimes she jumps up and puts her paws on his lap. This one time he beckoned me, and since I wasn’t a bit frightened of him by then– he seems quite harmless, just batty - I got nearer. He motioned my head down; curious, I did as I was told. Next thing was I felt this pressure on my forehead. I put my hand up to find he’d stuck a stamp – an orange first class stamp - on my forehead, right in the middle, in the place where Indian women like Jay’s mother, like one of girls in our school, like one of our Indian teachers, wear little red marks. He was smiling at me meanwhile; the biggest, loveliest, sweetest, yet saddest smile I’ve seen on anyone.<br /><br />‘Thankyou,’ I said, smiling back. At that moment I didn’t care a bit what anyone thought. I walked back along the canal, Border trotting ahead, with the stamp on my forehead and the silliest grin on my face, feeling like a princess.<br /><br />Border is my dog; has been my dog since I was about eight. She’s a little brown bustling Border terrier, hence her name – ‘she’s just like a dung beetle,’ Granny said once. When I saw some dung beetles on television later I knew just what she meant, even though dung beetles are black and not hairy, only the dung they push is brown. She doesn’t actually live with me now: we’re not allowed dogs in the flats. (I can’t think why - babies make much more noise and nuisance but there’s no rule against keeping them.) When we were going to move from Worcestershire my mother said we should find her a good home, she wouldn’t be happy in a city. I said they’d have to find a good home for me too then, because I wasn’t going to go anywhere without her. Impasse, as they say. BIG PROBLEM. Even my mother could see that I’d never forgive her, ever, if Border didn’t come to Birmingham. Granny came visiting about that time. ‘I’ll have her,’ she said, to my mother’s astonishment.<br /><br />‘But you’ve always said you hated dogs,’ she said. ‘So I do,’ said granny. ‘But I don’t like to see Esther’s life blighted.’<br /><br />‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my mother, coldly. ‘Noone’s blighting Esther’s life.’ Fat lot she knows I thought, looking her. A blighted life was exactly what I would have had if I’d had to leave Border behind. But I didn’t have to. Border went to live on the narrowboat with Granny. Now Mnesmosyne’s in Birmingham too, the rule is that I have to walk her every day. ‘I’m not being seen out with something looks like a dung beetle,’ Granny said. But this suits me fine. It gives me an excuse to go to the Gas Street Basin most days. Even the days I can’t go, my dog gets a walk or two, whatever Granny says - Border has to have a pee for one thing. Nor does Granny complain about it, though she continues to complain about dogs in general and Border in particular. ‘Yap, yap, yap,’ she said, ‘all the time. Yap, yap, yap, how can you stand them?’ I don’t remind her how she sits by her stove in winter, reading, with a happy-looking Border on her lap, almost making me jealous. Not almost. I am jealous. But not as jealous as my mother was cross, still crosser than she usually is around Granny. ‘I told you, you could do nothing wrong around your grandmother, Esther,’ she complained. ‘I told you.’<br /><br />Most days I walk Border along the Worcester Canal towards the university and back. There are always so many people there, even my mother would think it safe enough. My walking her all the way round the Digbeth Canal is quite different. Most people, most definitely including my mother if she knew – she doesn’t - would say that was stupid, for a girl my age, on her own. And I admit this part of the canals is a bit creepy in places, especially beyond the BT tower, in the creepy tunnel, which smells of pee. But if I don’t go there, I never get to see the Stamp Man. And I like the creepiness, in a way; it makes me feel brave and adventurous. Also I like feeling that noone except me knows where I am. I like the old iron bridges with their names on neat plaques in the middle – Saturday Bridge for instance. I like the paved towpaths and I like the locks, which lets the canal goes downhill. I even like, I think, the sad fading mural by Farmer’s Bottom Lock, that noone can see properly, because it faces straight onto blank walls on the other side of the canal. At least I sort of like it. And I do, really, like seeing the narrowboats coming up through the locks – not many of them; there are eight locks in this stretch, a bit too much like hard work I think for most holiday narrow boat people.<br /><br />Border likes the canal too. The whole business of life of terriers is catching mice – or should be if they don’t live on narrowboats . Judging by her excitement there’s plenty of mouse smells by the canal: plenty of rat smells too probably – in fact she did catch a rat once, a young small one, from under a pile of boxes. She bustles about wagging her whole backside, not just her tail, yelping with excitement. And she makes me feel quite safe.<br /><br />I meet other people walking sometimes – men on bicycles: men with briefcases, in a hurry: nutty looking people like the Stamp Man: sad-looking unemployed-looking men: sometimes groups of boys - Asian boys more often than not. But they don’t bother me and I don’t bother them. Border protects me is how I feel.<br /><br />And she does protect me, my hairy little dog, the first time I need her to.<br /><br />One day, in September, a kind, golden sort of day, it felt like a good day for a walk – good enough for walking along the Digbeth Canal. I reached a place I’m glad of usually, the open space beyond all the creepier closed-in ones, where buddleias grow along the walls and geese sit on the towpath. There were no geese that day, only the Stamp Man inhabiting his bench. I saw this group of teenagers – white boys mostly, for once, and one black one - coming towards us, but they weren’t looking at me, they were looking at him and saying things I couldn’t quite hear but that didn’t sound nice. Maybe they weren’t really going to hurt the Stamp Man. But they laughed and pointed and one of them picked up a stone and pretended to throw it. The Stamp Man was cowering; ‘No, no’ came out in a terrible high-pitched wail, giving me instant goose pimples. And then I shouted and Border began to bark and the young men began looking at me instead. They shouted at me – things I didn’t want to hear. They kicked out at Border. They began moving towards me as if trying to back me into the canal.<br /><br />Maybe they weren’t going to, really. I was terrified just the same. There were at least five of them and just one of me - the Stamp Man curled up, sobbing, on his bench, wasn’t going to be much help. There was Border, of course, my protectress. She kept on barking, standing her ground and showing her teeth; but she looked very small compared to them. One of them aimed a kick at her.<br /><br />There are some old factories next to the towpath. Not so old that they don’t work still. There was one right here - I could hear its machinery, throbbing away behind a big door in the wall that I’d seen open sometimes and men standing outside, smoking, having their teabreak. It was shut fast now, but I rushed over and tried to open it, and when I couldn’t, I hammered at it hard as I could, shouting at the top of my voice. It flew open, suddenly – I almost pitched straight into the arms of the boy standing there: I couldn’t see his face until we had disentangled ourselves. Even then it took a moment for me to recognise him as Rashid from my class. He was shouting too, shouting in what sounded like his own language – Urdu I think – if you live in Birmingham you know about these things; I doubt if the boys understood the words any more than I did. At the same time he was hauling me inside the factory. He was smaller and younger than the others but he had the door on his side - a good strong door, fortunately. ‘The Stamp Man,’ I yelled, before he could shut it on us, pointing at the bench. ‘Help him too.’ He looked at me as if I was mad, but all the same he went outside and somehow got the Stamp Man off his bench, and then he was inside with us, and Border too, who hadn’t waited to be asked but trotted in between his legs. She was panting and jumping all over me, licking my face, yelping a bit.<br /><br />Rashid didn’t seem to think much of this show of canine love. I know now, though I didn’t then that Muslims think dogs are unclean, so I expect that was it. As soon as he’d slammed the door he pulled Border off me, not unkindly, but firmly. I saw that the Stamp Man had dropped his stamps and was anxiously picking them off the floor near the door. Apart from a brief glimpse of some kind of machinery, much noisier, now, of workers standing about or working the machines, all of them men and all of them Asian - I didn’t see anything of the factory. Rashid hustled me past the men and the machines, and up a flight of echoing steel steps into a little office, a steel box perched up above the factory floor, in one corner of the roof. He closed the door firmly behind us, shutting out the factory noise.<br /><br />There was a woman sitting there behind a small desk, typing at a word-processor. She was a Muslim woman, wearing an even heavier headscarf than Rahilah’s that left hardly any room for her face. A long garment covered the rest of her from her neck down to her feet.<br /><br />‘My aunt,’ Rashid said. ‘My uncle’s wife. This is my uncle’s factory.’ He then said a lot of things to his aunt in what I knew now must be Urdu, to which she responded with what sounded like questions in the same language. I’d half expected she wouldn’t speak English, a lot of the Muslim women don’t. But I was wrong about this one. In a voice pretty much like my mother’s, very correct and without a trace of Brummy, she turned to me and said, ‘You must have had a shock. Can we offer you a cup of tea?’<br />*********<br />Rashid’s aunt scolded me gently over the tea. ‘A girl like you shouldn’t be walking in such a place alone,’ she said. For once I agreed she might be right. It was very kind of Rashid to rescue me,’ I said meekly. ‘It was lucky I had my dog too,’ I added, perhaps a bit less meekly. Rashid’s aunt smiled, the light from her desk lamp glinting on her little gold spectacles, on the huge gold and ruby ring she wore on one finger. She almost laughed. ‘Your dog I hear,’ she said, ‘Is valiant. But bad people are always bigger and stronger.’ She said a lot more to Rashid then. Of course I didn’t understand a word. But when I’d had time to recover myself, he walked me home, along the roads though, not the towpath, Border following, tethered to a piece of rope his aunt had insisted on providing. There was no sign of the Stamp Man. When I asked about him, Rashid said he’d gone back to the homeless hostel he lived in. One of the workers had taken him. Good.<br /><br />I was surprised that Rashid was allowed to walk with me. ‘I thought you weren’t allowed to speak to girls,’ I said, as we came back to the canal by the NIA opposite the Aquarium, where there are always lots of people so it is quite safe. ‘No I’m not,’ he said, ‘Only relatives; sisters, cousins, that kind of thing. But when I told my aunt you were in my class and clever, and a good girl, not like some of them, she told me to take you home even though I’m not supposed to speak to girls.’ He said more than that. He said she told him I had to be an honorary sister, or an honorary boy or something. Also that it was some kind of duty to help a stranger in trouble. He said this was only a rough version of why he could take me, but it was hard to explain in English, to a non-Muslim, so he wouldn’t even try. We talked about other things after that. About school and things. But then I pointed at some cranes and said ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ and to my surprise he said; ‘I wouldn’t call them beautiful. But I do like them. A lot. Once I wanted to be a crane driver. But my father says that would be a waste of my education and I’ve got to help him in his business – he’s got a clothing business, importing silks and sarees, and I suppose I will.’<br /><br />‘What a pity,’ I said. Rashid just shook his head from side to side in a very Indian way and laughed<br /><br />He speaks the broadest Brummy I’ve ever heard by the way; practically Black County. Funny I didn’t know it till then. But he’d never spoken to me before; and you rarely hear him say anything in class. He’s another keeps his head right down.<br /><br />He didn’t take me all the way home to the flat. When we got to Gas Street basin I pointed to Mnemosyne and said ‘My Granny lives there. Border lives with her, I’ll have to take in. I’ll be alright now really, I promise.’ He looked at the boat a bit doubtfully, said he’d promised he’d see me home, and this couldn’t be my home could it? But he let me go in, when I assured him the owner really was my granny. He wouldn’t come in to meet her. He handed me past the tiller, went back along the pontoon, jumped cleanly, sideways –I envied that neat leap - over the chain looped across the entrance to keep non-boat people out, waved at me, then loped off home. I bent my head into the door. Granny asked me crossly where I’d been, why I was so late. She was waiting to go out. Ignoring the annoyance in her voice, I hugged her anyway. ‘I hope the Stamp Man’s alright,’ I heard myself saying. ‘Who’s the Stamp Man?’ she asked as she hugged me back, in a tone of voice that suggested I’d made him up, the way – I think- I made up Ella. ‘Just a poor old man who likes stamps,’ I said casually - there are some things I can’t tell Granny even. At such moments I realise she’s just a grown-up after all, even though a special one.<br /><br />It’s Rashid I thought of, though, lying in bed later. Till that day I never realised what beautiful eyes he has; dark as dark, with thick black lashes round. I’ve always thought Border’s eyes the most beautiful, soulful eyes of any in the world. But Rashid’s are still more beautiful, I think.granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7723289476536736836.post-16833307606154868612007-01-23T18:37:00.000+00:002007-01-26T09:54:42.540+00:00CHAPTERS ONE AND TWO<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-style: italic;">Give me a place to stand, and I will lift the world:</span> Archimedes<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br />CHAPTER ONE<br /></div><br />I live in the sky, on the top floor of a tall block of flats. They are not so tall as the cranes on the building site next door but near enough. There is a man climbing up the crane nearest me towards the driver’s cabin. Watching him shift up, rung by rung, I wonder if he ever dares look down, and if his cabin sways in the wind. It is windy today: enough to blow the seagulls about.<br /><br />To my right I can look across the city. Directly below me are men in orange helmets working on the building site, beyond them people walking up Holliday Street, getting in and out of cars. They can't see me. I like that - seeing but not being seen. If they can’t see you they can’t think you're a freak, either. I’ve been into kids’ chatrooms sometimes (but only on the library computers. Mum has barred all the chatrooms on my desktop.) Most of the stuff there is silly. Once, though, I wrote that I felt like a freak and a whole stack of messages came through from people who said they felt like freaks too. A few said freaks were a waste of space. But who cares about them? Actually I quite like being a freak. If I am one.<br /><br />Looking the other way, up towards the canals and the Gas Street Basin, though I can see the canal, I can't quite see into the Gas Street Basin, see Granny's boat. But I know it's there. This gives me a warm feeling. Granny seems to like me as I am, freak or not. 'In your grandmother's eyes you can do no wrong,' my mother is always saying, with a sigh that implies that in her view I can do no right.<br /><br />Thinking of granny makes me decide to go and see her. I write an email to Ella to tell her where I'm going - I don't send it; what’s the point. If you are going to ask who Ella is, please don’t. I’ll tell you. Ella is the imaginary friend I had as a child. It’s no use asking me to explain her, though, I can’t explain her even to myself. I just put the letter in the draft folder labelled Ella and pretend to send it.<br /><br />I wave at the man on the crane– he’s almost at the top now - then I put on my fleece and head out of my room. There are baby noises coming from the sitting-room. I put my head round the door to find the baby sitting in his baby seat wearing a trendy black-and-white striped babygro and my mother making cooing noises. At least the baby's got sense; it's staring at her as if she's mad. But then she is mad. Becoming a grandmother has sent her right off her head. Perhaps becoming an aunt should have had the same effect on me, but it hasn't. It’s my mother's silly noises and sillier faces makes me mad. YUK. Having babies is a mug’s game, I think. I’m not going to, not ever. Get a life.<br /><br />'I'm off to granny’s,' I tell them. My mother sighs but says nothing. Not to me anyway. 'Who's the best baby in the world?' she asks the baby who continues to stare back unblinking. I wink at it. But it doesn’t take any notice of me, either.<br /><br />I look beyond them, out of the window. The climbing man has vanished into his cabin. Three of the cranes now are swinging back and forth in that dance of theirs, like it’s a conversation, speaking not speaking, meeting not meeting. They make me sigh with mysterious longing.<br /><br />'Oh Ella,' I whisper to myself. Then I'm out of the door, into the shining steel lift - 'this is the seventh floor' it says in its husky voice, ‘Going down.’ Out past the reception desk, through the glass doors and up the steps in the mall, along the lines of expensive boutiques where my mother and my sister buy their clothes, out onto the terrace past the cafes and people drinking, eating chattering, clinking their glasses, their knives and forks, their silly voices. Onto the new bridge, at last. I don’t mind the bridge, though; if you jump on it you can make it bounce.<br /><br />I make it bounce now, looking back at the one untouched building and business that the developers haven’t managed to get rid of. GS Brough, Washers and Gaskets it announces in faded letters. I’m always glad to see GS Brough, relieved that something and someone stays the same. Nothing else does here, these days. Everything changes. (Including me – look at the way my body has changed, is changing, what it does to me every month now without fail. Yukky.)<br /><br />The bridge I’m standing on for instance, has only been here a year or so. This is a change I don’t mind, though. I like the bridge. I stand for a moment looking across at the not so new flats opposite. In the window at the end a woman sits all day writing. Sometimes I wave at her. Sometimes she sees me and waves back. She doesn’t see me now. I run off down onto the towpath, past the café, past the little pub, the Tap and Spile, dwarfed by all the new buildings round it. Over the steep bridge onto the pontoon where Granny’s narrowboat is moored. Onto the deck. Knock, pull the door open, bend my head and climb down in. I’m back in Granny’s world.<br /><br /> *********<br /><br />I tell Granny about most things. But I don’t tell her about the chat rooms and I don’t tell her about Ella. (I was less careful about things like that when I was little; I told everyone I had a friend called Ella then, but Granny wasn’t around for me to tell.) I tell Ella all about Granny, though, in the emails I don’t send. ‘Granny is my favourite person by a long way,’ I write. ‘She lives on a boat with the crazy name of Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne is the Muse of Memory according to Granny, she doesn’t think it the least crazy. She says it’s the most important muse of all, more important than poetry, more important than history. ‘Where would either of them be without memory,’ she says. “What would we be without memory? How can you face the future, let alone live in the present without memory?’<br /><br />Granny is apt to talk like that, though. Sometimes I understand her. Sometimes I don’t.<br /><br />‘What happens if you don’t want to remember things?’ I ask her once. (There’s plenty I don’t want to remember; like being sent to Coventry at school once; like having a tooth out.) ‘Aren’t there things you don’t want to remember, granny?’<br /><br />‘Of course,’ Granny says, her eyes far away suddenly. ‘But that’s not the point.’<br /><br />‘What is the point then?’ I ask.<br /><br />‘Work it out for yourself, Esther,’ she says. This is one of granny’s most annoying habits: seeming about to tell me something interesting and then saying. ‘Work it out for yourself.’ Not much else annoys me about Granny. If I can do no wrong in her eyes, according to my mother, she can’t do much wrong in mine either. 'A mutual admiration society,' my half sister calls us. Maybe she’s jealous. I don’t think granny ever liked her as much as she seems to like me.<br /><br />But probably she never had the chance to get to know Granny the way I have. Granny didn’t live on a boat when my sister was little. She lived all over the world, and rarely came home to England, until I was eight or so. She got her narrow boat then and has lived on it ever since, going up and down the canals.<br /><br />Granny kept the narrow boat out in the country mostly then. But the winter of the Foot and Mouth epidemic, she decided to bring it up to Birmingham to see us – this was not long after we moved there. She’d planned to go on from there up the Worcester canal, but when they closed the towpaths to prevent the infection spreading, she said there was no point, she had stayed all spring in the Gas Street Basin. Even when the restrictions were lifted she’d stayed on. She goes off for a week or two sometimes but she always comes back.<br />,<br />My mother said it was a good thing, because granny was getting on a bit. She couldn’t keep moving the boat all by herself here there and everywhere. There was too much heavy lifting. Suppose she got sick? And it was true I could help her empty the Elsan – her loo – now, things like that. I do help her. But I don’t think that’s the reason she stays. I think she really likes the things everyone thought would drive her mad here in the middle of the city. Like the jazz on Sundays from The James Brindley on the other side of the canal. Like the people, the music, the general bustle to and fro. Admittedly she’s a bit deaf, the noise is less of a nuisance to her than it might be to someone else. But even so. It’s one of the nice things about granny. That she likes all sorts of things that most grown-ups think of as a trial; or even illegal. (Like that faint smell in her cabin sometimes, which I suspect is something it shouldn’t be. But I don’t say. And nor does Granny.)<br /><br />Today, for instance, when I negotiate my way round the tiller and knock on her double door, she puts her head out of the door and says ‘Are you hungry, Esther? How about a bite at the Tap and Spile?’ ‘Cool,’ I say. But Granny is cool. (Not like my parents: they’re the uncoolest of uncool.) She doesn’t mind the least, for instance, that we have to sit outside because I’m too young to go in the bar, even though it’s not very warm, if sunny. It’s especially nice because it means Border – my dog that she keeps for me - can come too.<br /><br />Afterwards we go back to the boat and she makes coffee: real coffee in a little espresso pot she puts on top of the calor gas stove. I’m not allowed coffee at home. It’s nice down there in her cabin - the opposite of being in the flat at home. The flat is like a nest in the sky. Granny’s two little cabins crammed with books, pictures, bits and pieces from all over the world, feels like a burrow, underground. Never mind the water rocking slightly underfoot, never mind the seagulls swooping past the window, the geese and ducks sitting on the towpath or swimming round the boat hoping for scraps. Granny likes feeding the geese. When Border barks at them – she always will bark at them Granny tells her to shut up and she does. (Drat her. Border never shuts up like that for me.)<br /><br />I also notice outside the window some newly-arrived cranes. The whole city is like a building site these days. ‘I do like cranes, though’ I tell Granny now, dipping a piece of chocolate into my coffee. ‘So do I,’ Granny says. ‘I’ve always wanted to go right to the top of one. I don’t suppose I ever will.’<br /><br />‘Wouldn’t you be scared?’ I ask. ‘Probably,’ Granny says. ‘But so what? I asked if I could once, the man I talked said a lot of people who went up got halfway up and then lost their nerve and were hard to get down. He said I could ring up and try to get permission if I wanted, but every time I rang the man I needed wasn’t available. I think he made sure he wasn’t. People like me would be a nuisance to them.’<br /><br />I wondered if I would be scared; if Ella would.<br /><br />I’d better go home now,’ I said. ‘I hope the baby’s gone.’<br /><br />‘You don’t like him, do you?’ Granny said.<br /><br />‘Why should I like him? Mum isn’t interested in anyone else now. She isn’t interested in me.’<br /><br />‘I don’t think that’s entirely true, Esther,’ Granny says quietly.<br /><br />‘Anyway I don’t like babies. They smell and scream and they’re always in the way.’<br /><br />‘I’m not that fond of babies either,’ granny says.<br /><br />‘Why don’t you like babies?’ I ask, surprised. ‘You had one once. You had mum.’<br /><br />‘Have another biscuit, Esther,’ Granny says, as if I haven’t spoken; her eyes look distant again..<br /><br />‘Mnemosyne’s a really silly name for a boat,’ I say thoughtfully. Then I grab another biscuit, kiss Granny and go crouching out of the door onto the pontoon and home again; past the James Brindley this time and Bridge Street and the multi-storey car park.<br /><br />When I get back there’s a note from Mum – no her, no baby. ‘Back in half an hour,’ it says. ‘If you’re hungry there’s a pizza in the fridge.’<br /><br />But I’m not hungry after coffee with Granny. I switch on my email to see if there are any messages. There is one, but from someone I’ve only pretended to send messages to. Someone who doesn’t exist except in my head. Or so I think – yet there the message is - subject ‘hello’ - from someone called ella@yahoo.com. Warily, I click the mouse and get it up. But it’s quite blank. I click reply. The reply form leaps into its little square; from ella@yahoo.com it says, as before. But the message space still comes up blank. I write a large question mark; add my name ‘Esther’ and send it. The message goes.<br /><br />CHAPTER TWO<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The base is bolted to a large concrete pad that supports the crane</span>.<br /><br />1. My family is very small. 2, My family is very big. How can two opposite things be true at once? Discuss.<br /><br />1. My family is very small. There’s just me and my mum and my dad – sometimes. More often there’s just my mum and me. A smaller family than that you cannot have. Often, when anyone asks me, I say I am an only child. Because I am in that way.. Just me and my mum and sometimes my dad living in our flat in the centre of Birmingham.<br /><br />2. My family is very big. I have three brothers and four sisters. My father is old, though not as old as Granny. He’s more than old enough to retire, mum says, but he doesn’t. He keeps working harder than ever, and isn’t at home much. He has been married three times and has five children apart from me, all of them years older than I am. My mother has been married twice and has two children apart from me, and the one grandchild. I don’t know how many grandchildren my father has, or how many times I’m an aunt on that side. His three older children are married, but they won’t have anything to do with him because their mother doesn’t want them to. I wonder sometimes about these brothers and sisters of mine, but they don’t feel like brothers and sisters – they’re much too old – only ten years younger than my mother. Their children must be as old as me if not older. His other two children I have met but neither of them are married yet or seem interested in starting families. As for my mother’s other children: I do see my sister, the baby’s mother - a bit more often than I want really. Even before the baby she didn’t take much notice of me and now she doesn’t take any. My brother’s alright. I like him a lot, and he seems to like me. But he’s been all over the world – China, Vietnam, Russia, Africa - teaching English as a Foreign Language - and lately he’s been living in San Francisco, learning to be a designer. We rarely see him, and last time he came he told my mother he was gay: no nephews and nieces there, either. What a relief.<br /><br />That’s it for my big family. Since we’re never together, it really it doesn’t mean much, except a certain amount of complication and upset, every now and then. Most of the time I feel part of a small family, an only child. I don’t get the benefits of being only child, though. Both my parents have spent too much of their lives bringing up children to find anything very special about me. Sometimes it feels like I’ve got the worst of both worlds: big families and small families.<br /><br />There are some advantages. I get to do pretty much what I want, most of the time, no questions asked. And above all I get granny, mostly to myself. And that’s cool.<br /><br />So you see two opposite statements can both be true 1, big family, 2, small family. Me, mum, dad, granny, my little family. Quite big enough for me.<br /><br />*******<br /><br />A second message comes from Ella, as blank as the first. This time I reply with two question marks. As the little bar fills up with green marks – ‘sending message 1 of 1’ – I wonder where it is being sent to - and through what. I’ve never thought much about cyberspace before; I suppose I thought it was a bit like space. Maybe it is like space- an emptiness full of silent – and, thinking of the internet – not so silent chatter. Can they hear our chatter on other stars, I wonder? Is Ella on another star? She just as well might be. In which case my message might have to go way back in time to reach her: the blankness of her message might be thousands of years old.<br /><br />The thought of all that space, all that time makes me shiver. I’m not sure I like these messages very much. I don’t think I’d like them any better if they weren’t blank. It’s real friends I need, not spooky ones from out in the ether, whether or not I’ve made them up myself.granny phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10208296185844897146noreply@blogger.com0