Читать книгу Home Girl - Alex Wheatle - Страница 10

chapter six

The PRU

No mad drama happened over the weekend. I spent most of my time chilling with the kids. Sharyna loved the The Karate Kid but it was a bit tame for me. I wasn’t loving going back to school on Monday and it came way too fast.

I made sure I was the one to tie Pablo’s laces before he left the house. I was garmed in my black jeans, black polo-neck sweater, and my sky-blue Adidas sneakers snoogled my toes. I joined Sharyna and Pablo in Colleen’s ride. “Thanks, Nomi,” said Pablo. He sat beside me in the back and smiled at me. He had two missing front teeth. Too cute. If I was eighteen he’d be the designer kid I’d like to adopt. I don’t want all that drama trying to get pregnant like Mum had. Bomb that. You wanna get ’em young before they have too many issues. I grinned back at him.

“Seat belts on,” ordered Colleen. She switched on the ignition and the world’s most boring radio station played something that the graybacks in Monk’s Orchard might’ve twirled their walking sticks to. I made a mental note to grime-ucate Colleen on the radio station issue.

It only took Colleen ten minutes to arrive at Sharyna and Pablo’s school. Sharyna checked her hair in the rearview mirror and kissed her mum on the cheek before climbing out of the car. Pablo had cutey-toed through the school gates before his sister had stepped on the pavement.

“Have you got his bag?” asked Colleen.

“Yeah,” Sharyna replied. “I’ll drop it off with his teacher.”

“Thanks, Sharyna.”

“Bye, Mum, bye, Naomi.”

“Bye, Sharyna,” I called out.

“He does that every day,” laughed Colleen as she pulled away. “A couple of weeks ago, he left his right shoe in the car. None of us realized until I picked him up. He thought he lost it at school but it was in the back of the car. That’s Pablo.”

I chuckled and fiddled with one of my braids. I’m not gonna lie, the nerve ends inside my belly were pillow-fighting each other.

“You okay, Naomi?” Colleen asked. “You’ve been quiet all morning.”

“Thinking about how boring school’s gonna be,” I lied.

“I’m sure it won’t be that bad.”

Social worker speak.

“It’s gonna be zombies-rule-the-world bad,” I said. “Anyway, at least I’ll link with Kim and Nats again. Haven’t seen ’em for nearly two weeks.”

“They your best friends?”

I thought about it. “Haven’t got best friends,” I said. “They’re the only ones who chat to me, I s’pose. I might as well not exist for the rest of ’em. They think I’m weird.”

“If you want you can invite them around.”

I busted out a giggle. “Ha ha ha! No way! Kim will hijack your purse before you have a chance to tell her to sit down. And Nats, she doesn’t like stepping in strange peeps’ houses. She’s funny like that. I was staying with my nan for the weekend and Nats once trod all the way from Notre Dame to see me in Ashburton. She was hunting for Kim. She was going cadazy with worry.”

“We could all do with friends who worry about us like that,” said Colleen.

I nodded. “Anyway, when she came to my nan’s gates, I told her that once she finds Kim she should sink a few of her mum’s stress pills to calm her down. And she wouldn’t come in. She just waited outside in the rain till I got ready. She wanted me to help her hunt for Kim.”

“I can understand that,” Colleen said. “She was desperate to find her friend.”

“I s’pose so. Kim goes all ghost on us now and again. Sometimes I need to be on my lonesome to think about stuff, she’s always telling Nats. Nah, Nats got some serious abandonment issues.”

“What are the teachers like at your unit?”

“Boring. There’s only a couple of teachers there in any one day. Loads of staff though. We don’t have too many standard lessons. We have talks and stuff. Personal development, they brand it. Usually it all ends up with everybody cursing and fisting off . . . Were you ever expelled?”

Colleen kept her eyes on the road ahead. “Er . . . yes, I was.”

“Yeah! What for? Fisting off with some bitch? Nah, you don’t seem the type to maul somebody. Jacking from a shop? Can I come in the front?”

“Of course.”

Colleen pulled over. I jumped into the front passenger seat and Colleen rejoined the traffic.

“Going missing from school?” I pressed again.

“No.”

“Setting fire to the science lab?”

“Definitely not.”

“Allowing a teacher to touch ya? Or a bruv in an older year?”

Colleen narrowed her eyes and gave me a hard look.

“Then what was it?” I wanted to know.

Colleen full-stopped for a second and then swallowed a fat worm. “Fighting.”

“Fighting? No jokes? You?”

“Yes, me, Naomi.”

I scoped Colleen from eyebrow to toe corner. “You’re not a hard-curb bitch,” I said. “Or you don’t look like one. What trauma licked you?”

“Let’s not use the word bitch,” Colleen said. “My dad certainly wasn’t the best in the world, nor was my mum. But they weren’t canine.”

“Sorry.”

She hot-wheeled on for about half a mile in silence. Needles of guilt pricked my brain.

“I was fourteen,” she started again. “And even shorter than I am now.”

“I wouldn’t call you a hobbit,” I said.

Colleen smiled. “I’d just started at a new school—Smeckenham Girls,” she revealed. “I was seeing this fifteen-

year-old guy who was going to the mixed Coloma School down the road. I thought he was the hottest thing ever in a basketball kit. But we all do at that age.”

“When you say seeing, you mean linking up with him, slurping tongues, and doing stuff, right?”

“Er, yeah.”

“Did he bust your rosebud?”

“Did he what?”

“Bust your rosebud,” I repeated. “Destroy your virgin status?”

“No. It was just . . . Anyway, the guy was two-timing me with this other girl that I didn’t know about. And as luck had it, she went to Smeckenham Girls too. As soon as I found out I broke up with the guy. But his other girlfriend wouldn’t leave me alone. She called me a slag, a whore, a slut. Called me every name under the sun.”

“What an uber-bitch. Did you clong the brain matter outta her? Did you make her donate a mug of blood to the curb drain?”

“Language, Naomi.”

“Sorry . . . did you . . .” I struggled to find a word that wasn’t a curse. “Did you switch on her? Do her in? Bang her up?”

Colleen took her time in answering. “I could just about cope with all the name-calling,” she said. “And I tried to ignore her.”

“Then how did it all boot off?”

Colleen took in a long breath. “One afternoon I passed her in the school corridor. I was on my way to home economics—what do they call it these days? Food technology or something? Yes, that’s it. We were going to make a Victoria sandwich cake that afternoon. My bag was heavier than usual.”

“And then?”

“She made a comment.”

“What did she say?” I asked.