Thursday 16 October 2008

A Short Story

My dad left us just after I was born. Mum says it was because he was an asshole. My sister says it was because my mum is an asshole. I don’t know why it was.

Pepper is older than me by quite a lot so she knows about things that I don’t know about. Her real name is Pippa but I couldn’t say it like that when I was little so she’s been called ‘Pepper’ since I learned how to talk.

When our dog, Tandy, was alive we would spend all day playing in the woods with him during school holidays. Now he’s gone there doesn’t seem much point going to the woods just to play by ourselves, and anyway, Pepper would rather hang out with boys now.

That’s why we came to the shopping precinct today. There’s this boy Pepper likes who’s always hanging around by the steps near the station. He goes to Pepper’s school, my school now too actually come September; he’s in the year above her. He and his friends like to hang around near the station and show off to everybody, riding their bikes down the steps and smoking.

Today they’re not there though and Pepper and I have been sitting on the wall of the flowerbed, which forms the centrepiece of the precinct, for an hour and a half now, or as long as it’s taken us to drink 3 cans of Fanta each. We make circuits of the shops and sit and watch the old people coming in and out of the bank with their tartan shopping trolleys. The haze bounces off the cement pavement and makes the air mute. The sky has a film over it and the sun has stretched sticky dust over my palms. I’m bored and my teeth itch from all the sugar. I’m trying to attach the key ring I stole earlier from Clintons Cards to my belt loop, but the metal ring is too stiff and I can’t prise the two halves apart far enough to fit over the denim strip.

“Let’s go”, I say to Pepper. Sighing, she hops down from the wall and brushes her skirt off at the back. Only a couple of years ago I could wear Pepper’s old clothes that she didn’t fit any more. I can’t wear any of her clothes now, they’re too big and made to fit over curves I don’t yet have. I think possibly, lately, Pepper has more curves than she should. She says it’s puppy fat and that I will get it too when I’m older. The last time dad came to see us he said she was too old to be a puppy and that she’s just fat now and will be forever. She didn’t say anything at the time, she just laughed and walked out of the room, but later that night I heard her crying in the bedroom and I think it was because of that. I didn’t know what I should have said at the time. I mean, she is getting fat, but dad shouldn’t say things like that to her.

I can’t remember dad ever telling her he loved her or thought she was pretty. We have to see him every other Saturday and he usually takes us back to his house and buys us Maconald’s to eat while he watches the football on TV. It’s his fault Pepper is getting fat. I remember car journeys with him to go and see our nan, who’s dead now. Pepper and I would sit in the back and sing along to the radio and he would get angry and turn around in his seat to tell us to shut up. Because he wasn’t looking straight ahead, the car would swerve across the road and make us scared. He’d tell us that our singing was distracting him from driving. I wanted to say that he was distracting himself from driving by turning around to shout at us but I was frightened of making him angrier so I kept quiet.

There was a teacher at my old school who scared me like dad did. I was making a magazine holder in woodwork class and it was really difficult, because the wood was too hard and I wasn’t strong enough to bang the nails into it. As I struggled with the glue and the vice, I became oblivious to everything that was going on around me. I really wanted it to be right otherwise I might get into trouble. Gradually I noticed that the class around me had fallen silent and through my concentration I could hear a voice shouting “Oi!”. Looking up I realised that everyone was staring at me. I dug my fingers into my palms and felt the glue take hold and, bracing myself, I met my teacher’s eyes and I knew instantly that I had done something to make him angry.

“When I ask for your attention I expect you to give it to me”, he bellowed. I was embarrassed and confused. All the people in the room were looking at me and I thought if he had wanted to talk to me he should have used my name instead of shouting “Oi!”. How was I supposed to know he meant me? He said I was ‘away with the fairies’ and called me other horrible names and I ended up throwing my magazine holder away on the walk home from school.

I can tell Pepper’s pretending not to be disappointed that she hasn’t seen the boy she likes. As we head home she stays slightly ahead of me so she doesn’t have to talk to me. I can see her knickers through the slit in her skirt. It is too small for her.

We come to the metal bridge that straddles the dual carriageway between the two housing estates. Ahead of me I see Pepper slow down. She turns and makes urgent flapping signals down low next to her leg to get my attention. Following her line of sight I see the boy she likes and his friends sitting on their bikes at the other end of the bridge. She falls into step beside me and as we cross the bridge she starts nudging me and walking into me, throwing me off balance, and she’s laughing really loudly like it’s the funniest thing ever. It annoys me when she does things like that. Sometimes when we’re with my aunty and her boyfriend, or any other people we don’t know very well, she will treat me like we used to treat Tandy, as if she wants me to do tricks to make her look good. Like she’s the boss.

We reach the other side of the bridge and we’re right by the boys now. If we want to get down the other side we need to get past them. Every single inch of Pepper’s body is screaming to me “don’t do anything embarrassing”, but I don’t even care now. The boys are stupid and she’s stupid and I just want to go home and put my new locker key on my new key ring.

They nudge their front wheels out of our way so we can walk around them and as we do, no one says anything. I don’t look at the boys because I’m angry that they’re making Pepper act stupid and I wish they weren’t there. I cross my fingers in my pockets and hope they don’t say anything to us. We make it to the other side of the bridge and as we get to the bottom of the steps, Pepper trips on the last one and stumbles onto the pavement. She starts laughing really loudly but I know she’s in pain because her flip flop has twisted round onto the top of her foot and it must have hurt. I can her the boys on the bridge laughing at us and as we walk away one of them shouts “Fat slag!”. My cheeks are burning red and I want to run away but Pepper is walking really slowly for some reason. “Come on”, I say, and I add “I hate those boys”, because I think it will make her feel better about looking silly in front of them and about what they said. But she just says, “You’re such a baby! Why are you shitting yourself?” and rolls her eyes. “Did you see the way he was looking at me?”, she says. “I reckon he fancies me. Boys are always horrible to you when they fancy you. Don’t you know that?”.

I nod my head like I understand, because Pepper is a lot older than me and knows about a lot more things than me. But the truth is I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all.