Writing On the Wall
Page 1
By the same Author
(Published by the Bodley Head)
MY DARLING VILLAIN
SARAH AND AFTER
(Published by Vallentine, Mitchell)
ONE MORE RIVER
(Published by W. H. Allen)
LETTERS TO MY ISRAELI SONS
For adults
THE L-SHAPED ROOM
AN END TO RUNNING
CHILDREN AT THE GATE
THE BACKWARD SHADOW
TWO IS LONELY
(Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
DARK QUARTET
PATH TO THE SILENT COUNTRY
This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Epub ISBN: 9781446430361
Version 1.0
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by
Chatto & Windus Ltd
40 William IV Street
London WC2N 4DF
*
Clarke, Irwin & Co. Ltd
Toronto
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Chatto & Windus Ltd
British Library Cataloguing
in Publication Data
Banks, Lynne Reid
The Writing on the wall.
I. Title
823’.9’1F
ISBN 0-7011-2568-3
© Lynne Reid Banks 1981
Contents
Dedication
1 · My Background
2 · Kev
3 · Dutch Treat
4 · Connie
5 · The Music Mill
6 · Michael
7 · Ready for the Off
8 · Bikes and Dykes
9 · Darryl
10 · Dutch Disco
11 · Old Erasmus
12 · Blue Room
13 · Nightlife
14 · Neils and Yohan
15 · Nasties in the Cupboard
16 · Reunion
17 · After the Little Town
18 · Tent-Talk
19 · Turned Right Off
20 · Dogs and Coppers
21 · My Ordeal
22 · Dad
23 · Coming Home
24 · Butterflies
To the Ronders
1 · My Background
Well, I didn’t know, did I. Well. I did know. I mean I did in a way.
My brother Vlady kept saying, “Didn’t you see what he was up to? Can you swear you didn’t guess?”
Well, I can tell a lie same as anybody, but swearing’s something else. Swearing’s like on the Bible. Mum used to make us put our hands on the Bible when she thought we were telling lies, and make us swear. Sean – my other brother – he could do it all right, but I never could. Never. I’d go all red and start to stammer. Honest to God, I thought I’d be struck dead. A bit of me still does.
So did I know, or didn’t I?
I knew there was something fishy. That I knew. I may not be clever but I’m not daft. But then, you often break the law, don’t you. Little ways I mean. Nicking sweets as a kid, and going on the tube without paying, and sneaking in to X films and pubs when you’re under age – that’s just silly, everyone does that, they shouldn’t make such silly laws. Even my dad, that’s so strict, breaks the law sometimes. Parking on the double yellow and that. Course, it’s not his fault they spoilt trade by putting a double yellow outside his shop, and he’s got to unload. Still, who knows what he gets up to when nobody’s looking?
Of course I’m not saying what I did wasn’t worse. But at the time I didn’t think. That’s why it came as such a shock when they all started going at me. At me, and at each other. That was the worst in a way. The rows inside the family. Over my head. Feeling it was my fault, just because I hadn’t stopped to think. . . .
Well. I’d best start at the beginning.
You could say the real beginning was Dad and Mum meeting at the Polish Club in the war. Mum’s Irish, so someone must have taken her there. The Poles were big heroes in those days. Dad’s older than Mum – he’s over sixty now. He was in Anders’ Army. Anders was a Polish general who got together some Poles who’d got out of Poland, to fight the Nazis.
And the ones stationed in London had their own club. Girls used to go there to dance with them. And Mum was Catholic, like Dad, and pretty in those days. Lots younger than Dad. Anyway, about five years after the war, they got married.
Dad got work in a shop. It wasn’t what he could have got if only he’d spoken better English. He’s got a brain, my dad has, but no ear for languages he says, and that was his big handicap.
Sometimes I’m a bit ashamed of the way he talks. Mum’s Irish isn’t so bad, it’s less foreign. There were always lots of Irish families and kids around where we lived, but not so many foreigners. The kids used to tease me, say I was up the Pole and ask me if my dad used a po, seeing he came from Po-land. They only switched to sneering about the Irish when the IRA started up heavy again in the last few years, and the Irish jokes came in. God, I hate those Irish jokes! Nobody’d dare tell jokes like that about the blacks; you’d be had up by the Race Relations.
Anyhow, Mum and Dad worked hard and after a few years they moved to Acton where there’s as many Polish people as Irish. They bought a big house on a big mortgage and took in lodgers until they’d filled the whole place up with their own kids. The first one died and Mum swore she’d never have another, and she didn’t for quite a bit; but being Catholic she couldn’t keep to it. After a few years she had Vladimir. He’s twenty-four now. And then she had Sean, who’s nineteen. That was one name for each country. Then came my big sister Mary. Then came me.
They christened me Teresa, but I wasn’t having that. When I went to high school from middle school I changed it to Tracy. Mum and Dad didn’t like it, they said it sounded cheap (they knew I’d got it out of Fab magazine). Besides, there’s no saint called Tracy (and there’s not going to be one, not if anyone’s counting on me). But I’d made my mind up. I wouldn’t answer when they spoke to me unless they called me Tracy. In the end even my little sister, Lily, gave in. Lily made five of us and Mum drew the line at that. I don’t know how you draw the line when you go to confession every week, but this time she did stick to it.
So I grew up in this big house with a big garden where Dad grows vegies and Mum hangs out rows and rows of clean washing. Soon as Lily was in school, Mum threw out the last lodger and went back to work. Even though Dad had his own shop by this time. It’s a Polish delicatessen on the High Street – lots of different sausages, and breads, and shelves full of Krakus products. Every Pole in the district shops there. Once, Dad was making an appeal for kids in Cambodia and he put the notice beside the box in Polish. An English woman complained. She said, “Can’t I contribute? This is England, you know.” Dad misses Poland. He hates the government there and couldn’t go back, but he’s still homesick.
We were all right. Ups and downs, same as any family, but all right. Funny, I suppose, Mum and Dad coming from different countries and that, and the age difference, but getting on so well. Must be the religion. They’re ever so different, aside from that. How different I didn’t know till recently.
Well, so that’s my background. As to what I look like, that’s a family joke. Every kid in the family takes after Mum – even Vlady, in looks – except me.
That’s why Dad calls me his Polish daughter. I’m the only fair-haired, round-faced one. I’ve got a big forehead and a balloony mouth and these sort of long, wide-apart eyes. All the others are either very dark like Mum, or red-haired like Gran, and have green eyes. My eyes are pale blue with dark blue rims. Dad says I’m beautiful, but then he would. I’m his favourite.
I was. Don’t know about from now on.
I’m sixteen. I left school last July. No tears, you can bet; I’d been aching to get out since I was fourteen. Couldn’t seem to learn any more. Well, I haven’t got my dad’s head. None of us has, saving Vlady. Talking of favourites, he’s my favourite brother. But I’m not his favourite sister. He thinks I’m stupid. Though he used to help me a bit with my schoolwork when he had the patience. Maths and that I never could do, never got the hang of it somehow. English was my best subject. I’ve got this good imagination, I could always invent stuff. Trouble was my spelling.
Once I wrote this smashing story about a girl who gets mixed up with a black boy (I fancied one myself a bit at the time). I just wrote and wrote. I wrote half the night, and my writing got ropier and my spelling got weirder, but I was carried away. I couldn’t be bothered to copy all that out again of course, so next day I handed it in. Miss Nelson, my teacher, always gave me good marks before, but this time do you know what she wrote on the bottom? One out of ten. “One for effort,” she said but the spelling ruined it.
I never tried for her after that. I used to write bits at home sometimes, but I never did another good thing for her. Cow.
So when I finally left I hadn’t even taken one O-level. I took four CSE’s because they made me, but the only one I think I might’ve got is History. Because I happened to’ve read a book about Henry VIII after that thing about him on the telly, and one of the main questions was about the Tudors. So I just wrote lots of detail. Like how when Anne Boleyn (wife number two) was topped on Tower Green, Henry was out hunting in Richmond Park. They fired off the guns like they always did for a royal execution, and instead of feeling sorry, Henry shouted out: “The deed is done! Uncouple the hounds and away!” What a sod, eh? Anyhow I bet they’ll like me knowing that and some other stuff. So maybe I’ll get a good grade; you never know.
Not that that’ll get me a good job. I didn’t even try for any of the other subjects. Dad wasn’t half upset, but I couldn’t help it, could I? I hated school. Such a row going on all the time. How could you listen even if you wanted to? Not that I didn’t join in sometimes. Well, you have to, you can’t help yourself when everybody’s doing it.
Anyhow I wasn’t panting to get a job right away. I wanted a bit of a rave-up first. I got it, too. And now look at me!
I had this boyfriend. Kevin, his name was. This bit’s hard to tell. First because I have to go back to before I left school. Second because if I’m going to tell the story right, I have to imagine myself back into fancying him, before all the mess.
Mind you, he was good looking. The haircut suited him, and you can’t say that about a lot of them. You have to have a good shape to your head, and flat ears and that. And a good profile. And not too many spots. Funny how many punks and skinheads are very thin, and have spots.
Kevin had a skinhead cut on top, and at the sides he grew it long and did it up with black shoe-polish to make it stand in spikes. And after school he’d wear the whole bit, bondage trousers, pins in his ears, the lot. Some of his mates copied him, and I got to like some of their gear, and the whole look. It just about showed what I thought of school. So one night I got Mary to give me a hair-cut in our room, and she helped me dye my hair (what was left of it) pink and white. She kept egging me on to try the green, but I reckoned Mum and Dad would have enough of a fit as it was. And I wasn’t wrong.
When I came down to breakfast next morning I put a scarf over my head, but Vlady caught a glimpse of pink tuft and pulled it off (the scarf, not the tuft). You should’ve heard the row. Mum screamed and Lily had hysterics laughing. The boys simply went mad. They jeered and pointed and fell all over the table. Sean went over backwards in his chair and his big feet sent a plate of bacon flying. Dad? Dad just sat there looking at me. Then he got up and walked out.
My form-teacher started creating before you could turn round that morning. He must’ve been spying as I walked across the yard.
“What’s the idea, Tracy? Gone over to the barbarians?”
“Dunno what you’re on about,” I said.
“You look idiotic. And ugly. I don’t allow outrageous cult-fads in my class.” He’s a fanatic of course. At least about the girls. (He turns a blind eye on the boys, that’s how Kev got away with it.) He won’t stand for high heels or earrings or anything. He even tried to stop us using make-up!
I got a bit stroppy next off, and told him it was none of his business. So I got sent to Mr Breasley. That was our head. And he gave me his ultimatum.
No waiting for it to grow out, nothing like that. “You’re not going to class looking like a hooligan,” he said. “You’re going to Woolworth’s or wherever you got that rubbish you’ve used on your hair. If they’re selling pink in bottles they’re selling blonde in bottles. You can dye it back to its natural colour.”
And that’s what I had to do. Except I had to use brown to drown out the pink, which upset Dad almost worse because now I didn’t look so Polish any more. And in case you think I was scared of old Breeze-up, I wasn’t. Believe me. It was my dad. I wasn’t having him looking at me for weeks and not saying anything, the way he had at breakfast.
Still, I didn’t do it right away. I wanted Kevin to see it first. So I hung around till break, and when he came out with his mates, Cliff and Darryl, I signalled him from the school gate. And they all strolled over, goggling at my hair.
As much as Dad and Breeze-up didn’t reckon it, of course, Kev did. I suppose he guessed right off I’d done it for him. He’d never touched me before, except to punch my arm and that, like all the boys do when they want you to notice them. But now he put his hand on my head and rubbed my short hair.
He did it a bit rough. Not like in that old film where the girl had her hair shaved and it grew back into little short curls and the hero (Gary Cooper I think it was; anyhow one of those old stars who’s dead now) kind of strokes it, gentle, and it pops up between his fingers. Fair brought me out in goosebumps, that did. More than all the rolling about in the raw you get now.
Anyhow, Kev gave my head this hard rub which nearly broke my neck, and Cliff and Darryl wanted to have a go too, but Kev stuck out his elbows and kept them off me. I reckoned that was a good sign. Then I told him about old Breeze-up and how I had to dye it back, and Kev said, “Don’t worry, girl, it’s the cut I like. What you do it with, a Polish razor?” (When they call anything Polish, it means it doesn’t work. I’m used to it. Just so Dad doesn’t hear.)
“My sister cut it with Mum’s sewing shears,” I said.
They all hooted. “What you laughing at?” I yelled.
“Tracy’s been sheared! Where’s your fleece then? I want Tracy’s wool to make my winter woollies!” Bunch of clowns, jumping about. . . . But Kev just stood there looking at me and I knew he really liked my hair. I felt sick at having to go back to being dull and normal.
Didn’t matter though, as it turned out, because even after I’d done it he still fancied me. We were in the same class and he used to pass me notes. They were never anything private because of course everyone had a peep, didn’t they, when they were passing them. They were usually just something like, Why don’t you wash your neck sometimes? or Stop listening so hard, you’ll get ereacke. (His spelling was worse than mine.) But I reckoned he wouldn’t be writing notes in the first place if he didn’t like me. He didn’t to any of the other girls. Even Karen, and all the boys were after her.
Karen and me’d been pals since we started high school. She’s ever so lucky. Her dad works as a commissionaire for the BBC up Western Avenue and she goes there sometimes and even sees some of the shows. And she can
go in the staff canteen, where there’s telly stars all over the place. Just imagine – Esther Rantzen and Terry Scott and all that lot, queueing up with their trays like anyone else. Once she sat at the same table with Larry Grayson and he passed her the salt! I kept on at her to take me, but she never would.
That’s one advantage she has. She’s got another. And that’s something she does share around. I don’t want to be catty, or gossip. But I was surprised that Kev never seemed to fancy her. And glad. Because she’s dead sexy. I won’t say she’s anybody’s. But she’s not exactly nobody’s, either.
2 · Kev
Dad didn’t like Kev.
I knew he wouldn’t. Karen says your dad never likes the boys you go out with, he never thinks they’re good enough. But I think with Kev it was more than that. Dad just took one look at his hair-spikes and his Dayglo socks and his brass-studded collar, and he sort of closed up.
Not that he said much. Mum’s different. She said plenty. But then she says her mind about all my friends, boys and girls. She never says she doesn’t like them, she just criticises them to death. With Karen, it was: “Why does a girl with such pretty eyes want to paint round them like that for?” and “She’ll grow old with bunions, titupping along on those silly heels!” As for Kev, it was: “He looks like the Statue of Liberty with that mad hairdo” and “If he spends so much on his boots, it’s a pity he can’t buy some polish to go on them.” She asked about his family. She always does. “Is his dad in a job? Does his mum go out to work?” She didn’t ask if they’re Catholics. Everyone who goes to our school is.
That’s why I never brought that black boy home, nor let them see me walking with him. Not because he was black. Because he was Rastafarian. For Mum, that’d be the same as pagan.
So when Kev finally asked me out, I didn’t tell them the truth. I said I was going to the pictures with Karen. Dad always wants to know what I’m going to, to make sure it’s not an X. Even now, he does it. Little does he know I’ve been going to X’s since I was fourteen – I was always tall for my age.