Popcorn

by Clare Nonhebel

CHAPTER 2

  Soony spent Sunday in the garden, thinking about things. She couldn’t spare the time to go in for lunch when Jim called her because she hadn’t finished thinking.

  ‘You can eat my lunch,’ she said graciously.

  Jim came out a bit later and stood on his head to make her laugh. ‘I brought an apple out with me,’ he said, ‘but I can’t eat it upside down. You’ll have to eat it for me.’

  So Soony ate the apple for him, twisting her head round every now and again to remind herself of what his upside-down face looked like the right way up.

  Later on, June came out into the garden, near to where Soony was thinking, and started to dig up weeds. Soony watched her when she could spare the odd moment.

  June gathered up some of the lupin flowers that Soony had scattered yesterday. ‘Each one of these little flowers,’ she said, ‘turns into a purse full of seeds. Then lots of new lupins grow.’

  Soony eyed her cautiously. ‘So you didn’t kill it then?’ she said.

  ‘Sooner or later it had to die anyway,’ June said, ‘so that all the new ones could grow.’

  She bought out two pieces of cake on a plate and sat on the path to eat one. ‘The other piece is for you,’ she said, so Soony took it away and ate it behind the compost heap.

  ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea,’ said June. ‘Will you come in and give me a hand, Soony?’

  ‘You do it,’ said Soony. ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘Would you just help me fill the kettle?’ said June. ‘My hands are covered in mud.’

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ Soony said.

  The senior social worker wore gold-rimmed spectacles and drew little spiders over the files on his desk.

  ‘Brad Smith?’ he asked.

  ‘Settling in quite well. No incidents of self-harm since the placement began,' said Miss Janes.

  ‘Eating normally?’

  ‘No, still not eating.’

  ‘How long is that now?’

  ‘Three weeks. They're giving him crisps and chocolate. I advised them not to do that, but the foster carers said if they don’t, he doesn't eat at all,’ Miss Janes told him.

  ‘Keep an eye on the situation. Tell the foster parents again - no snacks; just meals. He needs to engage with the family.’

  ‘But he’ll die if he keeps refusing to eat anything!’ said Miss Janes.

  ‘If it becomes a medical emergency’, said Mr Fisher, ‘it may be different. But in the end, you know, if someone refuses to eat you can't force them. That’s the client's choice. Unfortunately.’

  ‘But...’ said Miss Janes.

  ‘There is a limit’, said Mr Fisher, drawing spiders’ legs, ‘to how much we can interfere in even a minor's life. Try and talk to him again on his own. Any other cases? Susanna Becket?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Miss Janes. ‘Soony.’

  ‘How is she getting on in the foster placement?’

  ‘Quite well,’ said Miss Janes, ‘on the whole. A few little teething problems. Just one thing...’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The mother wants to visit her this week. The foster parents would like to leave it a while, to give Soony time to settle in.’

  ‘Is this the first visit since Soony was taken into care?’

  ‘The father and sister visited once during Soony’s year at Springfields.’

  ‘Have you tried to persuade the mother to postpone the visit for a week or two?’

  ‘I’ve tried. She won’t. For no particular reason, she said, except that she doesn’t see why anyone should tell her when she can see her daughter.’

  ‘She’s right, of course,’ murmured Mr Fisher. ‘You can’t stop her.’

  ‘But can’t she see that it’s in Soony’s interests to settle into a family?’ cried Miss Janes. ‘She doesn’t want her, and it’s taken us a year to find someone who does!’

  Mr Fisher raised an eyebrow at her.

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Miss Janes, giving in. ‘“There is a limit to how far we can interfere...”’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mr Fisher.

  ‘See you soon, Soony!’ said Jim, taking his briefcase down from the rack.

  ‘See you soony too!’ she said back. It was their special joke, repeated every day when he went off to work.

  He kissed Soony and then June.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ said Soony. ‘What are we going to do now?’

  ‘Make pastry?’ suggested June. ‘Something tells me you’d be good at jam tarts.’

  ‘I am,’ Soony said.

  ‘You know,’ said June, ‘it’s your birthday in a few months. We’ll have to make a cake. With candles on.’

  ‘Purple ones,’ Soony said.

  ‘All right,’ agreed June. ‘Purple ones. Do you know how many candles you’ll need? How old are you going to be?’

  Soony laughed. If she didn’t know the answer to questions she generally laughed. Or said yes.

  ‘You’ll be sixteen,’ June told her.

  ‘I know that,’ Soony said.

  June reached down the packet of currants and stuck them on to a pastry shape.

  ‘What the fuck’s that?’ screamed Soony.

  ‘It’s a cat,’ said June. ‘With currants for its eyes.’

  Soony shrieked with laughter. ‘Make something else,’ she said. ‘Make a lupin.’

  ‘One lupin,’ said June, ‘coming up. It’s not a very good one, is it?’

  ‘It’ll do,’ said Soony generously. ‘Now make a friend.’

  ‘A girl friend or a boy friend?’

  ‘Dirty bugger!’ said Soony. ‘A girl friend. What’s that you’re doing?’

  ‘I’m drawing lines for her hair.’

  ‘I’ve got a friend,’ said Soony.

  ‘Have you?’ said June. ‘At Springfields?’

  ‘No!’ said Soony scornfully. ‘In my room!

  ‘In your room here?’

  ‘Of course here!’ said Soony. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Her mouth. Soony ... your mother’s coming tomorrow. Soony? Did you hear?’

  ‘Make some shoes,’ said Soony.

  ‘Your sister’s coming too,’ said June. ‘Beatrice. And your baby brother. He’s eight months old now, you know. Soony?’

  Soony had one floury hand inside her knickers.

  ‘Look,’ said June. ‘I’ve made a pastry baby. Want to put his eyes in?’

  ‘Have you got a baby?’ Soony asked.

  ‘No, we haven’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘People can’t always have babies, Soony, when they want them.’

  ‘Don’t you know what you have to do to get a baby?’ Soony said.

  ‘Mm, yes,’ said June.

  ‘Did you do it?’ Soony asked.

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  ‘But not just once,’ Soony insisted. ‘You have to keep on and on.’

  ‘Yes,’ June agreed.

  ‘So how many times did you ask?’ Soony said. She took her hand out of her knickers and started picking up currants and eating them.

  ‘Ask what?’

  ‘You see!’ Soony shouted. ‘You didn’t do it right! You have to ask God for a baby over and over again!’

  ‘Oh I see,’ June said. She started to laugh.

  ‘I’ll do it for you, shall I?’ Soony said. She dropped a handful of currants back into the packet and wandered into the garden.

  June sat down on the stool and laughed.

  God had been living in the lupin but since it fell down he’d had to move on somewhere else. Soony sat down and waited for him to turn up.

  While she was waiting, the friend she had met last night popped up again, very faint, but unmistakably there. ‘Hello again,’ said Soony. She listened again, but it was too much effort. ‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ she said.

  She tugged up tufts of grass and watched a worm tunnelling into the ground. Up on the aerial on the roof a blackbird tilted its head back and let loose a ribbon of sound. />
  ‘Oh, there you are, God,’ Soony said. ‘Listen, you have to give June a baby because she wants one, OK?’

  The blackbird sang again, clear and pure and untroubled by any doubt.

  ‘That’s all right then,’ said Soony. ‘I fixed it for you,’ she told June, going back into the kitchen. ‘He’ll see you right.’

  ‘Oh Soony,’ said June, ‘I do love you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s OK,’ Soony said.

  ‘It would have put too much strain on the rest of the family,’ said Soony’s mum. ‘It was a difficult choice for us to make. You can’t understand it unless you’ve been in that situation yourself.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ said June.

  June was worried again, Soony knew; she was giving out waves of worry all over the place. And Miss Janes wasn’t even there. Soony stayed well away from both June and her mother.

  ‘And we had no way of knowing if the new baby would turn out all right,’ Mrs Becket said. ‘If I’d had another one like Soony, my God...’

  ‘Do you take sugar?’ asked June.

  The baby was all right, Soony thought. He chuckled and pulled himself up by hanging on to her fingers.

  ‘Is this baby a loony or a normal?’ she asked. Beatrice snickered.

  ‘He’s normal,’ said June. ‘And so are you.’

  ‘I am not a normal!’ shouted Soony. ‘How dare you!’

  ‘Don’t shout!’ shouted Soony’s mum. ‘You’ll frighten the bloody baby!’

  ‘Why don’t you show Ben the garden, Soony?’ suggested June. ‘He’d like that.’

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ said Soony. She held out her hand. ‘Come on, Ben.’

  ‘Beatrice,’ said Mrs Becket. ’Go and keep an eye on her.’

  ‘Do I have to?’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Go,’ her mother said.

  ‘What’s this place like?’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Mind your own business,’ Soony said.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t live here if you paid me a million pounds.’

  ‘Fuck off!’ shouted Soony.

  ‘I’ll tell mum what you said.’

  ‘Don’t care!’

  ‘You’re a nutter.’

  ‘You’re a nutter!’

  ‘I am not. I got a prize for spelling. You never got a prize for anything.’

  Soony stuck her tongue out at Beatrice.

  ‘You’re deficient,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘No I’m not,’ said Soony. ‘I’ve got a friend. In my room.’

  ‘You see!’ Beatrice crowed. ‘You don’t even know what deficient means!’

  ‘Yes I do!’

  ‘No you don’t’

  But she did. Deficient meant that sore, angry, empty feeling that she had now. Whenever someone called her names, or whispered behind their hands or stared at her in shops, Soony knew what it meant to feel deficient.

  They all had tea together. Jim came home early from work.

  ‘Good afternoon, Soony,’ he said, but she didn’t answer.

  They all sat up at the table, even the baby, on Mrs Becket’s knee. Soony stood by the door, humming loudly, with both hands inside her knickers.

  ‘Don’t do that, Soony,’ said Soony’s mum.

  ‘I’m humming,’ said Soony, and carried on.

  ‘Not the singing. That. You dirty girl.’

  ‘Dirty cow!’ Soony shouted back.

  ‘She never used language like that at home,’ said Mrs Becket.

  ‘Yes she did,’ said Beatrice

  Soony sat watching television with June and Jim. She rocked back and forwards and banged her head against the wall.

  ‘Come and have a hug, Soony,’ said Jim, but Soony didn’t answer him.

  ‘We’ll go to the shops when I’ve done the washing up,’ said June.

  ‘Not today,’ said Soony. ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘What are you busy doing?’

  ‘I’ve got to see my friend.’

  ‘The friend who lives in your room?’ June asked.

  No reply.

  ‘Is your friend a girl or a boy?

  ‘I don’t know, do I?’ Soony shouted. She stomped out into the garden and sat down to listen. After a while she returned. ‘My friend’s a girl,’ she said.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said June. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Oh, fucking hell!’ roared Soony, and rushed out again.

  Sitting on top of the compost heap, she said, ‘What’s your name then?’ but the faint little presence gave no glimmer. It had to be, Soony thought, the nicest name of all, because this was the nicest thing that had ever happened to her. Her own friend, in her own room.

  ‘My friend’, said Soony, ‘is called Popcorn.’

  ‘That’s a funny name,’ said June, and laughed.

  ‘Your name is a funny name,’ shouted Soony rudely. ‘Joooon. Joon and Jim. Jim and Joon. Ha ha ha Ha!’

  ‘Come into the bathroom a minute, Soony,’ said June. ‘I want you to see where the Tampax is kept, for when you need it. See, here in the cupboard?’

  ‘Yes,’ Soony said.

  ‘Miss Janes said you use Tampax, all by yourself. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Soony said.

  ‘But if you can’t manage or don’t want to bother, there’s a packet of pads as well. OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Soony. ‘Shall I do it now?’

  ‘Not now,’ said June. ‘When you have your period.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Soony agreed.

  ‘And if you need any help, you can just ask me, OK?’

  ‘I can do it myself,’ said Soony. ‘Doris showed me.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good,’ said June. ‘Was Doris one of the staff at Springfields?’

  ‘No, she’s one of the loonies,’ Soony said.

  ‘Not that it’s really a problem,’ said June apologetically.

  ‘Except that it gets a bit embarrassing,’ Jim put in.

  ‘But I thought we should mention it,’ June said.

  Miss Janes sat back in her chair and smiled. ‘Oh, it’s very common,’ she said. ‘In the absence of intellectual stimulus, physical stimulation becomes more dominant.’

  ‘She seems’, said June, ‘to do it more when she’s upset. Like, for comfort. But we thought she might be settling down by now.’

  ‘Oh, she is,’ said Miss Janes. ‘Believe me, she’s a different girl. Very few of the temper tantrums they had with her at Springfields. You may be right about the comfort aspect of course. But let’s face it,’ she said, smiling, ‘it’s not only a common habit among mentally disabled youngsters, is it? I mean, normal teenagers do it too.’

  ‘But not’, said Jim, ‘in the middle of the butcher’s shop.’

  ‘I don’t like sausages,’ Soony had said, after Jim had bought them.

  ‘You told me you did!’

  ‘I do. But Popcorn doesn’t.’

  ‘I’m not going back in that shop,’ said Jim firmly. ‘What popcorn?’

  ‘Popcorn,’ she said crossly. ‘My Popcorn.’

  ‘I don’t think these shops sell popcorn,’ said Jim, after a moment’s pause. ‘Shall I buy you a packet of crisps?’

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ Soony agreed.

  ‘That’s another thing,’ said June. ‘I mean, she is a normal teenager, isn’t she, physically? Not that she really meets any boys at the moment, but when she goes to the day training centre this autumn...’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Janes. ‘Of course, that’s always a problem. Some authorities automatically put all their post-pubertal girls on the pill, or even sterilize them, but we don’t believe in that here. In Soony’s case, anyway, there are contra-indications to being on the pill: her weight and the fact that she gets headaches.’

  ‘What causes the headaches?’ asked Jim.

  ‘It’s common in some brain-damage cases,’ said Miss Janes. ‘But it may be time to think again about the pill when she starts at the centre, as you say, or at least when she starts showing some
interest in boys. She’s a bit of a flirt, is our Soony, but according to Mrs Hobgrass, so far there’s been no sign of anything more.’