The Island (11 page)

I can't write anything. It's all crap. Everyone's scribbling away, even Tyra, even Jaheem with his headphones on.

The starting line on the whiteboard is:
Once on my way to the bus stop…

I start to write.

 

“Cave Girl” by Fran Stanton

Once on my way to the bus stop, a girl rose like a wraith to greet me, all streaming mascara and waving arms and acid-jaggy teeth.

‘My boyfriend – he's beaten me up – I need help. Please.'

Her eyes flit to my bag.

‘I need money for my bus fare – to go to my mum.'

Yeah, right.

‘Please,' she repeats, giving me a ghastly grin.

She's no older than me, probably. Looks about sixty though.

She stares as I open my purse. Hungry eyes. She has badly dyed hair with the roots showing, and her arms and bare legs are silver-scaled.

‘The bus fare's seven fifty,' she informs me. And all the time her eyes are flitting round, perhaps for her pimp boyfriend, perhaps for her dealer.

I give her a couple of quid and she melts away, back into her hole.

All day I think about her.

All day I worry for her.

‘And three, two, one, pens down.'

Everyone stops writing and sighs.

Miss goes round, and I sit cringing in case she gets me to read mine out.

But she doesn't.

When she passes me, she murmurs, ‘Very strong', and nudges my arm a little.

I'm not going to write in her stupid notebook.

'Course I'm not.

 

Rooftops

I take a swig of my cider and light a new fag from the old one.

In front of me, there's the Gherkin, and to the left of that, the London Eye. Everything's sort of misty and hazy.

I've got a pile of blankets and an old mattress that I've found up here, and cushions. I've made myself a nest from vintage scarves. I've brought candles and matches and my notebook because this is where I'm going to do my writing.

I chew Miss's pen, which I never gave back.

Below me, I can hear children playing in the park.

‘
Write a fairy tale
,' she said. ‘
A story for children. Just let yourself go
.'

Once upon…

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time there was…

To get up here, I have to wait for Albert to start his litter-picking, then drag the broken old ladder from the empty balcony downstairs and take it all the way up to the top floor. There's an iron ladder that hangs from the ceiling for maintenance work. Albert is supposed to lock it with a padlock but he never does because he's up and down the flats all day; it's too much bother. Basically, anyone can get up on the roofs if they want to.

I look down and see a large lady with Sainsbury's carrier bags waddle to the ground floor. Never seen her before, but then no one sees anybody round here. I hear her footsteps go up the steps. There are no lifts in these flats because they're only three storeys high. She'll be a while.

I blow a smoke ring and think of Johnny, down in the flat. He'll be playing games on my phone, eating the packet of biscuits I gave him. I made sure he did his spellings first though 'cause I don't want him to be a loser like his big sister.

No one's supposed to be on these roofs except for repair work, but I can see it's been used before. There's this mattress I'm sitting on, and a row of dried-out plastic pots. Cannabis plants, dried up and dead. I know because Cassie tried to grow them once; we couldn't use our bathroom for months because of all the special lighting and plastic sheeting she'd rigged up. She's more into Tennent's Extra Strength nowadays.

I rearrange my cushions and settle into the evening.

Evening noises over Brockwell Park include:

Kids playing on the swings and chattering away in Portuguese or Spanish.

The
thwack thwack
of tennis balls, even though the courts are miles away.

Planes from Heathrow.

A pipe. Someone on their balcony is playing a pipe, like one of those hollow things from the African room in the museum.

It feels good to write, sort of freeing.

I tuck the blankets more tightly round my legs and take another handful of crisps. It's getting cold but it's OK; the late sun's still slanting over my face and arms.

I've run out of fags now but I hardly care. Can't stop can't stop scribbling.

Wayne won't be back for a while.

It's March or April and the day melts into night like the cider on my tongue.

 

“Our House by the Sea” by Fran Stanton

Once upon a time there was a little girl and she had a brother. Their daddies had left and their mother had gone far, far away.

But that didn't matter because the little girl knew that when she grew up, she'd live in a house by the sea and she'd have all the time in the world to look after her brother. She'd cook and she'd clean and she'd fix the roof when it leaked and make a garden full of flowers and shells.

There'd always be cold wine in the fridge and vodka in the cupboard and lots of books on the bookshelves, which she'd make out of boxes that she'd paint in bright colours: yellow and orange, and blue like the sky.

Outside there'd be a little garden, small as a pocket, but it wouldn't matter because it'd be big enough for the two of them. Each evening after all the chores were done, the girl and her brother would cuddle up in the last of the sun on a bench specially put there amongst the flowers. The girl would drink wine out of a vintage glass and the boy would drink milk, which gave him a big white moustache. And they'd watch the sea as it endlessly patterned and unpatterned under the bluer-than-blue sky.

 

Let's Be Partners

Next day, I go into school early so that I can leave the notebook on Miss's desk. Then I leave to hang around town a bit because who wants to be on time for registration?

English is unit four, and all morning I'm waiting for her to notice.

I'm waiting for her to read it.

Miss reads it and is delighted, 'course she is. Her blonde wavy hair is up in a messy knot today. She wears vintagey clothes. There's always a button missing or a tiny hole in her cardigan. She doesn't look like she tries too hard.

‘Let's be critique partners,' she says.

She knows and I know that she's playing it cool. Doesn't want to scare off the difficult girl.

But then she leans forward and starts to give me feedback, and it's careful and precise and she's really read it, you can tell. She's even placed Post-its in the pages with scribbled comments. She really cares about this memory, these words.

I can feel them turning into a story.

‘So, try to develop your characters a little more,' she says.

And she puts the notebook back on my desk. Turns to write on the board.

I snatch it up and put it in my bag, and it's like a prize, this book. All day I think about it, lying there at the bottom like a dragon's egg.

 

Once upon a Time

In my story, I have a character called Carrie and there's this girl called Anna and her little brother Jake. A nasty bloke called Aaron moves in and once he shoves Jake so hard when he's whining that Jake falls against the table and gets a massive bruise on his face. Anna and Jake are always hungry and Carrie is always asleep.

There isn't a bedroom for Jake or Carrie because all the rooms except for the lounge and Anna's room are filled with junk, so Jake has to sleep in Anna's bedroom with her. Anna doesn't mind. She once spent a whole night reading Jake
The Magic Faraway Tree
.

My story's a good one.

I really get into it once I'm past chapter seven, and I start describing this crazy dream Anna and Jake have:

 

‘So we're living together in my house, and I've got a little job. I'm an artist. I paint the sea, and always there's this view of the sea, like when we went to Weymouth that time, do you remember?'

Anna snuggled closer to Jake and smelled the shampoo and warm scalp smell of his little head. She'd washed his hair that night, because it was Sunday and she didn't want him to get bullied at school for being a ‘gyppo'.

His soft hand squeezed hers.

‘More, Annie,' he whispered. ‘Tell me more about the house.'

‘Well,' she said quietly, ‘it's in Weymouth, just on the seafront, and it's only a little house, just a terrace really, but it's the best one on the row.'

‘Why is it the best one, Annie?'

‘Because it has a bright painted door – yellow because it's a happy colour – and it has the best front garden. Only tiny, but it's paved in shells that we've collected from the beach, and this is where you do your homework, Jake, and I sit sipping Pinot and watching the sea.'

‘What's Pinot, Annie?'

‘It's nice white wine, Jake, which is what I'll be drinking when we're there.'

I've stopped the conversation there because Miss said it's not a good idea to make dialogue go on too long.

‘
You've got to weave in some action
,' she said.

So.

 

Just as Anna was describing the tiny bedrooms up in the loft, the white walls and smell of clean, fresh paint, and Jake was snuggling in close, his warm breath huffing on her cheek, the door burst open.

‘Get that boy to his own bed,' bellowed Aaron, his pig eyes glinting in the half-light.

He leaned lower, his mean breath beer-sour.

‘He'd better not have bleeding well wet the bed again.'

 

The Could-be Pile

The sun beats down as I saw into the plastic with my safety knife. Dog and I have decided to cut up the life raft because it's definitely punctured and there's no chance of us sailing away on it like
The Owl and the
frickin
Pussy-cat
. No way. So we might as well put it to good use. It's good work; if I get our new shelter finished today, we'll sleep well tonight.

It's on the fringe of the forest but I don't mind because Dog is with me now and he'll chase any monsters away.

The tin cans are wedged in our fire, the water inside them bubbling away. Whatever happens, I make sure that the fire's always going.

It's the last thing me and Dog do before we snuggle down for the night: make sure that we shove another couple of logs on, so that we're warm and safe and our water's always boiled.

Sometimes we get it wrong and the driftwood must be too wet or something because the smoke billows into our faces and sets Dog wheezing and me coughing, but still it's better than the alternative.

The fire can't ever go out.

We have a could-be pile, Dog and me; it's where we store things that might be useful some day: bits of rope and broken plastic crates and lifebuoys and oil drums and even a rubber duck we found caught up in some roots. Our could-be pile is growing day by day with all the stuff we bring back from our foraging trips to the swamp.

We're making the roof of the raft into a hammock. I use a sharp rock to pierce it at opposite ends and then thread blue nylon rope through it. I pull the rope tight and then tie the edges to each tree so that it's secure.

Dog waits in the shade as I use one of the life-raft pieces as a sheet to help me drag a big piece of driftwood over the beach. He wags his tail when he sees me, his little rump wriggling in the sand. I lie down to take a break from the sun and Dog jumps on me and headbutts me with licks till I roll away, laughing.

‘Oh my God, Dog – leave off, won't you?'

He sits nicely then, grinning like hell.

It's a good spot we've chosen, Dog and me; sunlight plays around the edge of the palms and scribbles crazy patterns on the soft sand. We're not close enough so that we get could-be nuts hurled on our heads but I can still watch the palm leaves sharpened by the sun.

From here I can see:

One Tree Beach.

Fang Rock.

And, right at the other end of the beach, the little cluster of rocks that hide the swamp.

Squinting at it reminds me that we need more plastic bottles for water. And while we're at it –

‘Coming to check for fishies, Dog?'

His little tail wags so hard I swear it'll whizz away.

Dog's fish-trap is the best; it's basically his own travel bag but with stones weighing it down inside. When it got washed up by the sea, we set it in the shallows at the start of low tide with its door propped open; then all we had to do was to go away and come back again. When we came back that first time, a squid and two fish were waiting for us. The fish are so stupid they get washed inside and when the tide drags back they can't find a way out again.

Today there are three big blue fish and one that kills me, it's so beautiful; when I hold it up it shimmers pink and coral mother-of-pearl and its fins spread like delicate lacy fans.

I toss a blue fish to Dog and he swallows it whole. Beautiful or not, we've got to eat.

‘Didn't even taste that, did you? Pig.'

He grins at me, tail whirling, and I decide to leave collecting the other fish until later.

If you climb over the rocks at the far end of One Tree Beach and wade right out, even further than Fang Rock, you can just see the white flash of another beach, tucked up tight in its cliffs. Except it's deceptive 'cause when you finally get there (after swim-wading for hours), it's not sand but swamp, and it's crawling with weird, twisted roots with leafy tops like trees. I think they might be mangroves, like they have in Florida.

This swamp is the best place for foraging.