Birdy Flynn Read online

  I ignored him and tried to think if there was another way I could get into Chemistry. Then I heard ‘cat killer’ and those two words were like the gun going off at the start of a race because I spun and sprinted towards him, and as I ran Liam escaped in the other direction. When I hammered into Martin, Joe and Gypsy Girl fell away and Martin rammed his holdall into me and I pushed it back and he barged me with his shoulder and I punched his arm and his ribs and grabbed his collar and he kicked the back of my knee, which buckled under me. I grabbed my leg.

  Martin stood over me. ‘Traitor,’ he said.

  ‘What you on about?’

  ‘Like a dog.’ Martin spat at my feet.

  I grabbed his blazer collar. He pushed me away.

  ‘Is your name Birdy because your brother’s in prison?’ Joe said.

  ‘Answer the question, Birdy.’ Martin pushed me into Joe’s solid body. He shoved me back.

  I stepped away from them.

  ‘Go on, Brains of Britain. It ain’t that tricky. It’s where you’re going.’

  ‘Or is Flynn Irish for thick?’ Joe giggled.

  ‘He’s not in jail,’ I said. I wanted Noely there with me. ‘He’s gone to fight in the war, if you must know.’

  Martin raised his eyebrows. He actually believed me.

  ‘Shut up,’ Joe said. He looked to the others, but they weren’t laughing. ‘No way has he.’

  ‘He has.’

  ‘Cool hair today, Birdy,’ Joe said, but didn’t look at me.

  Martin moved around me, getting a look from all sides. ‘Yeah, nice, Birdy. Did the council do it?’

  ‘Love the way you do your fat tie as well,’ Joe carried on. ‘And your shoes are wicked, like little bumper cars. Is that to protect your little birdy feet? And have you lost an earring? You’re only wearing one? Reckon you should be fully stocked on that front.’ I’d never heard Joe say so many words in one go.

  ‘Why you being like that, Joe?’ I asked, and straight away he looked embarrassed.

  ‘Is he in the army?’ Martin stood close to me.

  I said nothing.

  Martin got angry. ‘Little Birdy killed a cat. What a prat. Little Birdy killed a cat. What a –’

  I went to push him backwards, but he grabbed me. He pressed his fingers and thumbs into the muscle of my arm.

  ‘We’re not mates no more,’ he snarled at me. ‘You’ve gone mental.’ Martin tapped his head.

  Joe laughed.

  My body turned cold and hard like rock. Martin shook his head and as I went to punch him he gripped my throat.

  ‘Why?’ was the only word I could get out.

  ‘And your family’s so stupid you were all out searching for it,’ Martin said. ‘My dad says you’re all thick as pigs.’ He squeezed his fist.

  ‘Don’t, Martin.’ Gypsy Girl tried to stop him.

  ‘You knew it was our cat?’

  ‘Course I did,’ he laughed and tightened his grip.

  Murphy squealed inside my head as my brain started panicking. My nose tubes filled with something. My eyeballs were ready to burst. I tried to kick his shins; he squeezed tighter.

  ‘Off,’ I said in a croaky squawk, drips making my face itch from where my eyes were watering.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Mrs Cope shouted from across the playground. I heard her delicate shoes running.

  He dropped me down, and I bent over gasping.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Mrs Cope put her hand on my shoulder and crouched down to talk to me.

  I felt her breath on my cheek. She uncurled me, touching my neck, checking for injury.

  I couldn’t speak.

  Gypsy Girl was gone.

  ‘It was manky anyway,’ Martin said as he moved to walk off.

  ‘You two,’ Mrs Cope shouted.

  Martin and Joe stopped.

  ‘Mr Williams’s office.’

  ‘Don’t grass, Birdy.’ Martin held up his two-finger gun. ‘Or I’ll tell your mum everything.’

  ‘Go.’ Mrs Cope pointed in the school office direction. She turned and took my chin in her hand. It smelt of flowery soap. A little silver bracelet jingled on her wrist. ‘Is your neck in one piece?’ Her skin was lovely. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

  She looked at the skin on my hands and my neck and my cheeks as if I was an alien and she had discovered me.

  ‘Yes, miss,’ I said. My voice sounded different. I wondered when the niceness would stop – when she would treat me like the others, dismiss me and tell me to buck up.

  ‘If that happens again, you come straight to me.’ She held my head up, waiting until my eyes were looking at hers. As she blinked she showed off her bright blue eyelids. ‘OK?’ she said in a teachery way.

  ‘Yes. Yes, thank you, miss.’

  ‘You can do better,’ she said, and I saw that on her cheeks she had pink but her lips were orange and her ears were soft and small – and for a blurry, perfect second I was somewhere safe and sound, not in the school playground.

  ‘Thank you,’ I repeated.

  She lowered my chin and straightened my tie. ‘Come to me if there’s any more trouble.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘No more scrapes today,’ she said, like it was a question.

  I smiled and slowly shook my head.

  She held the door open and I zipped up the stairs, jumping two at a time, like I was Daley Thompson.

  My face was fixed in a grin as morning classes passed in a whirly sort of spin. I wasn’t listening to my teachers but I was doing non-stop thinking. Martin and Joe were sent home. Liam knew I wanted to rip his puny guts out, so he was hiding. Each time I looked round, Gypsy Girl seemed to be stood near me, smiling.

  At lunchtime I ran home and knocked next door to see Edna. I wanted to tell her my good news – about a teacher that liked me and how I had a brilliant plan to show her my thanks by making her special earrings. But there was no answer at her house and the curtains were pulled, so I dug out our keys from the pot of hydrangeas by the front door.

  As I went inside the stench of bleach burnt the insides of my nose. Six mugs were getting their regular cleaning and every window was closed. A fresh pile of Daily Telegraphs sat next to our local paper on the kitchen table. I had a look through. Both had headlines about the Falklands War. In the Echo there was also a story about a teenage mum that might go to jail for stealing hair gel. No mention of a cat murder, as far as I could tell.

  Mum brought home the pile of Daily Telegraphs each time she cleaned Mr and Mrs McNaughton’s big house. For reading, Mum said. They were the closest we had to books. The houses that Mum cleaned did have all sorts of books – I saw them when I helped her out – but I was only allowed to look and not touch. It made me itch to take them off the shelf and open all of them up.

  Mum didn’t seem too interested in the Daily Telegraphs and Dad ‘wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole’, so I had them to myself. The letters page was the best. I wondered how people got to be important enough to have a letter in there, to have other people read it and care about what you said.

  I took the newspapers to my room, fetched my tools and the earring tub and stepped lightly back down the stairs. I got out Mum’s scissors. How big to make the loops? Around the biro was too small. Mum’s bingo pen too fat. As I tapped my fingers on the kitchen table to help my thinking, Dad burst through the back door. His hip knocked against the table and his clumsy arms swept my tools on to the floor. He snatched the scissors out of my hand, held out a piece of paper and started cutting from end to end.

  ‘Look at this,’ he shouted.

  ‘Mum’s asleep,’ I said.

  ‘Look at this.’ He held out a letter he was cutting into pieces. ‘I don’t need to be part of that rubbish. I’ll be fine on my own,’ he said. ‘Shall I tell you a story?’ Dad carried on. ‘Shall I?’ He waited and I nodded to get it over with. He held his yellowed, dirty thumb out. He kissed it a few times and stared at the mangled thumbnail as if it was a medal. ‘Will
you look at that?’

  I looked with my best listening face, wishing him gone.

  ‘Don’t you ever be under someone’s thumb.’

  ‘OK, Dad.’

  ‘You know what that means?’ He asked me that every time he was angry about trade unions and big bosses and him not getting work. Whatever I said, I would have to listen to the dignity speech. The one about taking pride in your work and skills and other things. If I said no, then he would be disappointed in me. He’d shake his head. But he’d smile and fill his lungs before telling me what it means to be a man, to be strong and take a stand.

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘It means be your own boss, little Flynn. Don’t let any fool push you around. Use your brain, not your hands.’ He play-punched my shoulder. ‘You get it?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  I was relieved. Dad had two speeches that he liked to give. The dignity speech was the short one. Mention of wages, rights, decent houses with pitched roofs not useless flat ones, the Tory parasites, the socialist hypocrites, the royals who are German and not English, the gangsters at the bank who wouldn’t give him a loan, the crooks who charged so much for our phone. Dad would say, Don’t let them push you around, stand tall, be proud,’ and his sermon would be done.

  The other speech, the one about religion and Ireland and England, and sometimes the French, was total torture. The story of wars and famine and terrible travels and never looking back and the slums and the two-roomed house on Blackrock Street in Liverpool (his favourite place in the whole wide world) and his ancestors and the struggles and troubles and the hunger and the death and desperation and hating the Pope but loving him as well and having toilets outside and a tin can for a bath. It was like This Is Your Life, but without Eamonn Andrews’s laugh.

  ‘Get into computers,’ Dad said. None of us had ever touched a computer.

  ‘OK, Dad.’

  ‘They’re going to rule the world one day.’ He knew that from a TV programme.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Proud of you,’ he said, and I wondered what for.

  He shook my hand like a footballer and the fuse wire fell on the floor.

  ‘The bloody unions are worse than the bleedin’ Catholic Church,’ he said.

  My heart fell low. But as Dad opened his mouth again, the slap of Mum’s slippers came across the kitchen lino.

  ‘Oh Jesus, it’s Citizen Flynn,’ she yawned. ‘Will you give over the solidarity speech? I could hear you under two pillows.’ She kissed me on top of my head. ‘You need a hair wash,’ she said.

  Dad gave me the sort of pat on the back you give to someone choking.

  Mum flicked the kettle on.

  ‘Did you get those newspapers?’ she said with a wide-open mouth that made me yawn.

  ‘Yes. Thanks, Mum.’

  ‘Did you have the cold chicken?’

  ‘No, but –’

  ‘They treat me like a clown,’ Dad interrupted, speaking into his hands, turning them up and down, looking deep into the crooks of his skin.

  I gathered my tools up.

  Dad sighed as he lowered himself on to a chair. ‘Solidarity, my arse.’

  ‘I’ll get you some chicken,’ Mum said.

  ‘There’s no bloody union.’ Dad rummaged in his trouser pocket for his pouch of tobacco. ‘I don’t belong.’ His voice faded into a mumble and I wanted Mum to give him a hug and cheer him up, but she tutted and under her breath she sang an Irish song.

  I tried to walk past him but he put his arm out. He made it clear that I should stay where I was, while he rolled a cigarette. I listened as my right knee started shivering, desperate to move on.

  ‘I’m through with them now,’ he said, licking his cigarette shut.

  ‘Ha,’ Mum burst out, ‘you’re through with them?’

  I tried to move but he pulled me back.

  ‘They’re not interested. They hate the Irish, like the rest of them.’ He raised his voice over the squealing kettle. ‘And I’m a bloody Englishman.’ He paused. ‘An English Man.’ I thought he might cry. ‘English,’ he repeated.

  ‘When it suits you,’ Mum muttered while pouring boiling water into her mug.

  Dad was brought to England, to Liverpool, still inside his mum. So he never really knew where he was from.

  ‘When I was a boy . . .’ Dad carried on.

  ‘Oh, good God.’ Mum stirred her tea and walked off.

  ‘I’d watch the miles of water from the quays. Your grandad worked on the docks.’

  ‘I know, Dad. Before that he was a farmer.’

  ‘In Salisbury Dock, he worked.’

  ‘And you lived on Blackrock Street.’

  ‘I did.’ Dad stared at the tip of his cigarette.

  I picked up the fuse wire and put it in the box.

  ‘Birdy,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When will you stop nicking my fuse wire?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You have a whole reel of it in your hand.’

  ‘Oh.’ I panicked.

  Dad said nothing. He lit his roll-up and looked at me.

  My palms got sweaty.

  ‘What you using it for?’ He blew smoke at me like a TV detective.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’m asking you. I’ve seen you in my shed, which, by the way, I’m after getting a lock for.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘What you using it for?’

  ‘Earrings,’ I said, and Dad leant back in his chair.

  ‘Earrings?’ he laughed. ‘Child, you’ve got me there.’

  ‘Get that,’ Mum shouted to me at the sound of our doorbell.

  ‘Earrings indeed.’ Dad kept laughing as I walked past him. ‘Never heard such a thing.’

  I opened the door to a man with perfect brown skin. He smiled and did speed-talking, but slowed down when I kept saying, ‘Sorry, what are you saying?’

  ‘You buy poppy?’

  ‘Do we want to buy a poppy, Dad?’ I said back to the kitchen.

  ‘A poppy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No,’ Dad said, ‘it’s May. And we get ours down the butcher’s.’

  ‘We get ours down the butcher’s,’ I said to the man.

  ‘Oh.’ His eyes looked confused.

  Behind him our neighbour Sheila held on tight to our wall. A white plastic bag was hanging from her arm and her pink dressing gown was dragging on the ground. I smiled at her while the nice man dug for something in his pocket and I hoped he wouldn’t look around.

  ‘I have brown ones and black ones – look.’ He pulled out a crumpled-up photo, unfolded it and flattened it down.

  ‘Oh, you mean puppies!’

  ‘Yes, yes. Poppies. Rescue. Save from bins,’ he said, and when I took a closer look at the picture he started ratter-tatter-speaking about good homes and how they were left for dead and did I like animals and how it was so cheap to keep them fed.

  ‘Sorry, no,’ I said. ‘My dad would kill me.’

  ‘Oh.’ The man stepped back.

  ‘He can’t get a job because he was arrested for planting a bomb, which he didn’t. The bomb nearly killed him, or blinded him, or blew his arm off. And the police locked him up.’

  ‘That’s terrible, truly.’

  ‘I know, so now we’ve got no money.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And he thinks keeping animals is cruel.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Would you like to buy some earrings?’ I said. ‘You don’t need piercings.’

  He stepped back further. ‘Very good to meet you.’ He held out his hand. I put out mine and we shook. He gave a sort of bow and then he turned and walked away, very upright. How calm and nice, I thought. He must have had parents who were experts in being polite.

  ‘Foreign?’ Dad said as soon as the front door was shut.

  Mum was back in the kitchen.

  ‘Are they my best scissors?’ She tugged at my shoulder.

&nb
sp; ‘No.’

  ‘They are, they bloody are. Are you cutting with them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you cutting, Birdy?’

  ‘Paper.’

  ‘Paper? Behave,’ Dad laughed.

  ‘And what is this for?’ Mum grabbed the fuse wire.

  ‘I’m making a present.’

  ‘A present?’ Mum stared at me.

  ‘Yes. Give it back.’

  ‘Anyone we know?’ She held it high.

  ‘No, Mum.’ I tried to reach up, wishing Mum would stop acting like a child.

  ‘Earrings,’ Dad laughed. ‘As in jewellery?’ He waited for Mum’s reaction. ‘As in –’

  ‘Jesus, Frank. I know what earrings are. You bought me some in the sixties.’ Mum looked at me. She seemed confused. I opened the tub to show her dozens of hoops. ‘Bloody Hell.’ She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Which of your friends is liking those?’

  ‘Nobody you know.’

  ‘Why the big mystery?’ Dad stood up and peered in.

  ‘I sell most of them.’

  ‘Why don’t you spray them gold?’ Dad winked at me. ‘Double your money, like a right proper Tory.’

  Mum whacked him across the shoulder. ‘Don’t be saying that to my child.’

  On my walk back to school I stuffed my mouth with the ham sandwich made by Mum. Edna always said I had a fine attitude of gratitude and I was excited because, when she woke up, maybe after school, when her curtains were pulled, I was going to tell her how Mrs Cope was kind to me, and protected me, and I was giving her a gift in return. Edna would be proud to see my clever plans and my way of thinking, and she’d call me a ‘fine creation’ or something mighty and she’d give me one of her biscuits that she saves for special celebrations.

  Chapter 5

  Stealing was on Edna’s list of sins, but I took to it instantly. Nicking small things, not proper theft. The boys and me did it for a hobby. I was the best. Martin was too clumsy. Liam had wee running down his leg when he tried to nick a Burton’s tie for me.

  Mum stole from the houses she cleaned, but it wasn’t real stealing – it was her bonus, she said, something for her back-breaking pain. I wanted her to stop the cleaning and the thieving. But she never listened to my pleading about her ending up in jail and the damage it would do to her lungs. She filled baby bottles with gin and whiskey. Under our kitchen sink at home were paper bags of washing powder and soap flakes and tins of shoe polish, but not the shoes to fit the colour, and in our fridge there were things called olives that never got eaten because they were foreign. One day Mrs Muswell, who lived in a big detached house, got home early from work. She called Mum a ‘thieving Paddy drunk’. But Mum hadn’t touched a drop. She was trying out the new sunbed, in Mrs Muswell’s new blonde wig and one of her Dorothy Perkins tops.