Читать книгу My Name Is Why - Lemn Sissay - Страница 15

CHAPTER 5

Smouldering embers

In the sky above

Anger is an expression

In search of love

28.7.75 I called to see Norman today, the family just having returned from their holiday in Scotland. Mrs. Greenwood was upset, it seems just this morning Norman repeated what he had been doing most mornings while on holiday. He is getting up in the early hours and eating sweet foods, particularly biscuits, he has eaten as many as two packets. Norman says he is sorry for his behaviour but cannot promise not to do it again.

Eight years old. For the record, I did steal biscuits but not two whole packs. This exaggeration would come back to haunt me. What I did was this: I stole biscuits from the biscuit tin and then rearranged them in the tin in a stacked ‘roof-column system’ to hide the fact I had stolen them. Genius.

One holiday in Scotland at my granddad’s home the family left me in the cottage, as punishment for lying about stealing some cake. Sarah, Christopher, David and Catherine walked down the hill to Lochinver. I thought I had been locked in my room but the door was open. I sobbed my way downstairs. The rich smell of silver birchwood from the embers of the fire filled the front room. Wiping tears from my face, I saw on the table a half-cut ginger cake. The tears evaporated, replaced by butterflies in my stomach. Maybe I can have a piece, I thought. If I cut it in exactly the same way as it was already cut then no one will notice I’ve taken a slice. Genius. And so I did. Macavity was much cleverer than that. The cake tasted so good that I figured one more slice wouldn’t do any harm at all. There were no witnesses, but then there was only one suspect. It tasted so good. So I did it again. To this day I don’t know why I got into this habit of stealing biscuits and bits of cake. But I did. They told me I was devious.

The problem was that my first instinct was to say, I didn’t take the cake. I hadn’t considered that the reason they had left me in the cottage in the first place was as a punishment for stealing cake. Still, I denied that I had stolen the cake. Macavity would have had more guile and more style. Soon enough, after another hour in the bedroom, I realised that I had to admit to taking the cake. What I didn’t realise was the significance of my transgression. The lies worried them more than the theft.

This habit of stealing cake was the crack in the dam. There was something bad in me. Something I didn’t understand. ‘Don’t look at me with those big brown eyes’ was the strange refrain my mum would shout at me. I didn’t understand what she saw. If I argued that I didn’t know what she saw, then would I be lying? How could I see what she and my foster father saw?

Back at home, the front room was where I was punished. Same place we ‘entertained’ visitors, same place the books were, same place the social worker would sit. The leather sofa was polished to perfection and smelled of Pledge. Stealing cake and lying about it was an indication that the Devil was working inside me. The front room was where I was caned.

I loved the normal stuff. The middle room, where we mostly lived and watched The Clangers and Crackerjack! on the TV. The files tell a different story, though, a story narrated by my foster parents and filtered by the social worker. Within three years it will be reported that I threatened to kill the entire family, except for baby Helen.