The Amazing Mind of Alice Makin (2 page)

M
onday. November. Bright and cold as a packet of pins. I walk home from school, whistling. A weak winter sun leaks into the sky. Charcoal clouds smudge out the blue, rubbing out colour as if the sky is a drawing gone wrong. The air is smoky; tastes of bonfires. Mist on a stick. Have a lick of autumn.

I live in this block of houses, three storeys high. Bit like flats. Some people call them tenements. Mum calls them slums. We live on the ground floor. I go in, walk down the passageway. The passage is open to the street and the only way in and out for everyone who lives there. ‘Like Piccadilly Circus that passage,' my mum says, ‘never know who you're going to meet.' The floor is stone, the walls flake paint. It's always cold.

I call out as I go past the one bedroom where we all sleep and walk towards the one room we all live in, ‘Mum? Where are you?'

She calls back, ‘I'm in here.'

The voice comes from the bedroom. I stop, go back and in. In the room are two beds separated by an old curtain. Mum and Bert sleep in the one near the door. I sleep in
the one over by the window. Mum's sitting on her bed mending a hole in the sheet.

‘Anything to eat, Mum?'

‘“Hello” would be nice.'

‘Sorry.' I say it slowly. ‘H.e.l.l.o. Mum. Anything to eat?'

‘Don't be a clever-clogs. For that, you can wait.'

I watch her sewing.

‘How was school?'

‘All right. I got into a bit of trouble with Miss Lacey.'

‘Why?'

‘Talking. She said I must have given Sheila Morgan an earache.'

Mum smiles. I sit on the bed.

‘I got a prize from Sister Bernadette for my story.'

‘Another one?'

She says it a bit like I've told her I've got toothache.

I go to a Catholic school. It's called Our Lad's. Well, it's not really called Our Lad's. It's Our Lady's. It's just that the ‘y' went missing off the sign on the school gates – the Spicers probably nicked it to use as a catapult.

The school is run by nuns called the Sisters of Charity. The Sisters wear hats. They're stiff as a board and they sweep up on either side of their heads into wings. Flying nuns – now that would be something to see!

I write stories. I'm not a swot, I just like doing it. Making things up. Making people up. Once, Sister Bernadette, she teaches English, found one of my stories
inside my English book. Said she liked it. I got embarrassed. Sometimes she looks to see if there are any more. Occasionally I slip one in. Nice to be told you're good at something. Doesn't happen that often.

‘So, what did you write about?'

‘Dunno. I can't remember.' I can, but I can't be bothered to go into it. I want something to eat. I fish in my pocket. ‘She gave me this.'

It's a little white plastic statue of the Virgin Mary. On the way home from school I put it under my jumper, and it glowed. ‘It glows in the dark.'

Mum looks up from her sewing. ‘That'll be all right when we run out of shillings for the electric meter then, won't it?'

She's trying to be funny. When my mum is trying to be funny, she has this little smile on her face like she's laughing at her own joke which only she understands. She looks up. Looks at the statue.

‘It's lovely.'

‘Mum?'

‘Yes, love?'

‘I think I need glasses. When I'm concentrating hard on something I get this funny dizzy feeling in my head.'

She pulls a face. Re-threads the needle.

‘You probably need to go to the lav.'

‘Mum. It's in my head.'

‘'Spect it's your age then, love. You'll grow out of it.'

I once heard Mrs Gilbey tell Mum she had a pain in her
back and a bad shoulder and Mum said, ‘'Spect it's your age, love.' At least she didn't say, ‘You'll grow out of it'. Just as well, as Mrs Gilbey is seventy.

‘And how's Reggie been?'

She asks the question casually. Like she doesn't really care. One eye on me, one on the sewing.

I've seen quite a bit of Reggie since the start of term. Trouble is, Bert doesn't like him: says he's a ‘bad lot'. I said, ‘A bad lot of what?' He clouted me for being cheeky. It was worth it though.

Mum knows I like Reggie, so she gets caught up in the middle. She said the other day that she felt she was the rope in a tug of war, with me pulling at one end and Bert at the other.

‘Alice, stop daydreaming. I asked you how Reggie is.'

‘Dunno.'

‘Don't say “dunno”; it's common. Anyway, what d'you mean you don't know? You spend enough time with him.'

‘You can't tell with Reggie. He don't say a lot.'

Reggie lives in the flat upstairs. There's him, his granddad and Flash. Flash is his dog.

Reggie doesn't go to school much. Even when he's there he just sits looking out of the window most of the time. Miss Druce liked him. You could tell. She used to keep an eye out for him. Sat on a cushion to see over her desk. Sweet as sugar and sharp as an acid drop. Strict but fair. Worried at us like a sheepdog worrying sheep, nipping at us with a glance or a word. The Spicers didn't mess with
her. She wasn't very big, but her stare was. She had this way of making her voice just loud enough, her stare just hard enough.

‘Denis Spicer, I saw that.'

‘But, Miss . . .'

She full-stopped the Spicers. ‘Leave. Reggie. Alone.' End of sentence. End of story. Miss Druce was water, putting out their fire. She didn't shout or anything. Just
sssssssshhh
on the flame. The Spicer twins extinguished.

She understood Reggie straight away. Most people don't. She only taught us for six weeks, but I'm sure she knew us all.

It all changed after she left. Miss Lacey is nice too, but different. She's young, soft skin, white blouse, bright smile, expectation in her eyes, uncertainty in her voice. She doesn't seem to see things: the crafty elbow in the ribs, the kicks under the desk, name-calling, embarrassment, hurt feelings.

The Spicers don't like new boys, they do their best to make Reggie's life a misery. Nothing very dramatic, they never were original. They take the mickey, hide his things, write rude words on his books, that kind of stuff. They pick on him because he won't fight back.

Although I'm friends with Reggie, they leave me alone. I've got a bit of a temper – goes with my red hair. Mum says I chose to be his friend so that I could protect him. ‘That's the way you are, darlin', God help you,' she said.

I love my mum, but sometimes she doesn't know what
she's talking about. I liked Reggie from the start. He doesn't try to be something he's not. He's just himself and you either take him or leave him. That's the way he is. Trouble is, there are a lot of people out there who won't let you do that. Reggie just likes being outside and making things. He's brilliant at that, he can make anything. Except a friend.

Mum bites off the thread. ‘They're a strange lot.'

‘How d'you mean?'

I can see her looking at me. She doesn't really know. But that's part of the thing with Reggie, you know what you feel but you don't know why.

‘Well, for a start his granddad's not his real granddad, you know. He's just looking after him. Even the dog's a bit scatty. And . . . well . . . there's just something about that boy I can't put my finger on.'

Her eyes rest on my shoes. ‘You been scuffing the toes of your shoes again?'

‘No, I fell over.'

‘I'll give you fell over.'

I wonder what ‘I'll give you fell over' is supposed to mean but I don't say anything.

‘You won't get any new ones until Christmas, you know.'

‘Roll on Christmas.'

‘Don't you be so cheeky, my girl.'

I get up. I keep the things Sister Bernadette has given me on the windowsill near my bed. There are quite a few
there now. I'm proud of them really, although I pretend I'm not. Maybe I'll be able to read a comic under the bed-clothes later by the light of the luminous Virgin Mary. Then again, maybe not. I go to put the statue with the rest of my prizes. Can't see them. That's strange.

‘Mum. My things have gone from the windowsill.'

She looks up. There's something in her voice.

‘Oh, they're over on the chest of drawers.'

I go over to the drawers, knowing there's something wrong.

My treasures are all messed up, a wreck of paper and plastic. The holy picture's ripped. A rosary broken; beads scattered. Some things are missing. I don't say anything because I know what's happened.

‘Your dad must have knocked 'em on the floor by accident.'

Mum calls him my dad but he isn't really. He's my stepdad. I think of him as Bert, not Dad. That's his name, Albert Makin. Bert's what most people call him. He doesn't like me writing or reading or drawing or, come to think of it, doing just about anything – except clearing up; that seems to be all right. He's always complaining that I'm cluttering up the place with all my ‘junk' from school.

‘Why can't he just leave my things alone?'

I can feel Mum looking at me, though she's pretending not to. ‘Oh, you know what he's like.'

I do, but that's an excuse, not an answer.

I clear up the beads and torn paper. I feel a bit upset so
I go out to the back yard. It's quiet out here. I sit on the wall. Wait for the feelings to pass.

Out here everything still looks a mess: it's ten years since the war, but bombs leave deep holes in the ground, and even deeper holes in people's lives. There are empty spaces where there used to be houses, empty places where there used to be people. I look across to the bombed ruins – torn-apart buildings that used to be homes. On walls open to the sky, wallpaper flutters. The ghosts of mirrors linger in neat, clean empty squares.

From where I'm sitting I can see up to Reggie's window. A light comes on. A shadow passes behind the curtain. I wonder what did happen by the canal? That was a real mystery.

‘You there, Sherlock?'

‘Yes, dear girl.'

I sometimes talk to Sherlock Holmes when I've got a mystery that needs solving.

‘I was just wondering, about the canal that day. You're a great detective.'

‘Wouldn't argue with that.'

‘You can solve any mystery. What d'you reckon happened?'

He lights his pipe, thinks for a long time, puffs out a cloud of smoke and says, ‘Haven't got a clue, dear girl. Not a clue.'

‘Well, almost any mystery.'

M
orning. Light squeezes thinly through the curtain. It's freezing cold in the bedroom: my sleeping breath is iced into lacy patterns on the window. Layers of frosty me. I scratch my name into it. It's Saturday. Funny how it's easier to get up when you're not going to school.

My clothes drape over the chair, cold and stiff, waiting to come back to life. I put them on, go through the old curtain that Mum put up to separate my space from theirs, then out the bedroom door.

I walk down the passage and into the front room which is also the kitchen. We call it the front room, but it's the only room besides the bedroom, and it's at the back not the front. Suppose we should call it that, really. But ‘the only room besides the bedroom at the back' would sound stupid. So we don't.

There's an old gas stove, a sink, a table and two chairs. It always smells stale, feels cold, looks bare. I turn on the tap over the sink; it chugs like a train, then gurgles out a stream of brown water. I let it run until it gets cleaner. No one's watching, so I only have a quick wash. A lick and a
promise, Mum calls it. I roll my collar down, attack the tide mark.

On the draining board are a few dirty plates. A saucepan of leftover porridge – a bit burned. My mum's not exactly the best cook in the world. She's better at burning things. Her bread pudding is great, though. I could live on her bread pudding.