Sugar and Spice (2 page)

Mum said, “Ah, Ruth! There you are. About time! Just keep an eye on the toast for me, love. Oh, and lay the table, will you, there’s a good girl.”

So I kept an eye on the toast and laid the table and finished dressing Sammy and removed the raw carrot from my lunch box as I’m
not a rabbit,
whatever Mum may think, and put some more peanut butter in my sandwiches when she wasn’t looking, and got out the Sugar Puffs, and got out the milk, and finally took Dad’s breakfast tray in to him, being careful not to spill his mug of tea. Dad always has his breakfast in bed, then Mum helps him get up and settles him comfortably for the day before rushing off to work, dropping Sammy off at Reception and Kez and Lisa at Juniors. I have to make my own way, by bus, but that’s all right; I’m quite good at getting around London. It’s easy when you know how. Also it means that I can d-a-w-d-l-e and not get into school too early. If there is any danger of getting in too early I wander round the back streets until I can be sure that the first bell will have gone.

It’s quite scary in the playground, even in the girls’ part, as there are all these different gangs that have their special areas where you’re not allowed to go. Unless, of course, you happen to belong to them. I do not belong to any of them, so I have to be really careful where I tread. It’s like picking your way through a minefield. Any minute you can stray into someone else’s territory, and then it’s like, “Where d’you think you’re going?”

I don’t know why I never belonged to a gang. Cos nobody ever asked me, I guess. When we were at Juniors we all mixed together. My best friend was Millie and my second best friend was Mariam. I thought that when we went to senior school we’d all go on being friends. But almost the minute we arrived at Parkfield, they got swallowed up into gangs. The gangs were, like, really exclusive –
if you’re not one of us, we don’t want to know you.
It meant that when we were at school, all the people I’d been juniors with almost didn’t talk to me any more. There was a gang of white girls I could have joined, maybe, if I’d wanted, but there was this girl, Julia Bone, who was their leader, and she said to me one day that I looked really geeky.

“D’you know that? You look like a total nerd.
Are
you a nerd?”

I suppose I probably am, cos instead of saying something back to her, such as, “You look like a horse” (which she does, with those huge great teeth of hers), I just went bright red and didn’t say anything, so that everyone tittered and started calling me Nerd or Geek.
I
know
if I’d told her she looked like a horse they would’ve respected me a bit, and might even have let me into their gang, but I always think of these things too late. At the time my mind just goes blank.

It was way back at the start of Year 7 when Julia Bone told me I looked like a nerd. All that term they called me names. Another one was Boffin. The Geek. The Nerd. The Boffin. I’d hoped they’d forget about it during the holiday, but we’d just gone back after Christmas and they were still at it. Yesterday I’d made a big mistake, I’d arrived before the bell had gone, and practically the first thing I’d heard as I crept into the playground was, “Watch it, Geek! You looking for trouble?”

I never look for trouble. I know they say you should stand up to bullies, but how can you when there’s loads of them and only one of you? I think it’s best just to keep out of the way.

I reached Mum and Dad’s bedroom safely, without spilling any of Dad’s tea, and pushed the door open with my bottom. Dad was propped up against the pillows, all ready and waiting. He said, “Thanks, Ruthie. That’s my girl! How’s school?” He talks in little bursts, all puffy and wheezy. He has this thing where he’s short of breath. “School OK?”

I said that it was, because Mum is always careful to remind us that Dad mustn’t be upset; and in any case, what would be the point? Dad couldn’t do anything. You had to go where you were sent, and I’d been sent to Parkfield High.

“Lessons OK?” said Dad.

I smiled, brightly, and nodded.

“Learning how to be a doctor?”

I nodded again and smiled even more brightly. It’s a kind of joke with Mum and Dad, me wanting to become a doctor.

“That’s the ticket,” said Dad. “Keep at it!”

Back in the kitchen, Sammy had poured milk all over himself and Kez was making a fuss because she said her toast was “burnded”. She’ll only eat it if it’s, like,
blond.
Lisa was snuffling and wiping her nose on her sleeve. She’s always snuffling – she can’t help it. She has what Nan calls “a weak chest”. But she doesn’t have to wipe the snot off on her sleeve – that’s disgusting! At the
breakfast
table.

“Where’s your hanky?” I said.

“Haven’t got one.”

“Well, get one!”

“Don’t know where they are.”

“What d’you mean, you don’t know where they are? They’re where they always are! Th —”

“Oh, Ruth, just go and get her one!” said Mum. “And scrape Kez’s toast for her while you’re at it.”

I’m frequently surprised that my legs aren’t worn to stumps. I know Mum can’t do everything, but I do occasionally wish that I could have been Child Number Two instead of Child Number One. I don’t think that being Child Number One has very much going for it.

In spite of fetching hankies and scraping toast and collecting Dad’s breakfast tray and getting the tiresome trio into their shoes and coats while Mum saw to Dad, I still managed to reach school before the bell. My stomach did this clenching thing as I turned into Parkfield Road and saw it there, waiting for me, like a great grey prison.

There’s this wire mesh stuff over the windows, to stop them from being broken, and the walls are always covered in graffiti. Every term the graffiti’s removed and every term it comes back again. I think some graffiti’s quite pretty and I don’t know why people object to it. But the stuff on our school walls is mostly just ugly, same as on our block of flats. If Mum’d seen them she would’ve known why I hated school so much, but Mum had enough to cope with, what with Dad, and work, and the tiresome trio, so she hardly ever went to parents’ evenings. Actually, I don’t think many other parents did, either. They would’ve found it too depressing, not to mention a total waste of time. You know those tables that they print, saying which schools have done best and which have done worst? Well, my school was one of the ones that did worst. It always did worst. It was the
pits.

I was about to go slinking off down a side street and give the playground time to clear when someone called out, “Hi, Ruth! Wait for me!” and Karina Koh came huffing up the road. I obediently stopped and waited, cos it would’ve been rude not to, and also I wouldn’t have wanted her to feel hurt, but I can’t say that my heart exactly leapt for joy.

Out of the whole year, Karina was the only one who called me Ruth (rather than Geek or Nerd) and the only one that ever wanted to hang out with me, so you might have thought I’d be a little bit grateful to her; maybe just at the beginning I was, when she first,
like, came up to me in the playground and sat next to me in class. It’s horrid being on your own and I did think that Karina would be better than no one. I even hoped we might become proper friends, but the truth is, I didn’t really terribly like her. She’d been thrown out of Julia Bone’s gang, which was why she’d latched on to me. She said we could be a gang all by ourselves. “Just the two of us! OK? And we’ll take no notice of the others cos they’re just garbage. They’re all garbage, and we hate them! Don’t we?”

She was always wanting me to hate people. Usually I agreed that I did, just to keep her happy, but it was a lie, cos I didn’t. Not really. I hated
school.
I think perhaps I hated school so much that I didn’t
have any hate left over for actual people. Not even Julia Bone, who Karina hated more than anyone. She told me all sorts of things about Julia Bone.

“She
smells.
Have you noticed? I always hold my breath when I have to go near her. I don’t think she ever has a bath. I don’t think she even knows what a bath is for. She doesn’t ever wash her hands when she’s been to the toilet. I’ve seen her! She’s
rancid.
She lives in a bed and breakfast. Did you know that? She has to live there cos her dad ran off. Her mum’s, like, on drugs? She’s a real junkie! And her sister’s a retard. The whole family’s just garbage.”

Karina knew everything about everybody. But only
bad
things; that was all she ever told me. Like that morning, on the way in to school, when she told me that “Jenice Berry’s mum’s gone into the nut house.” Jenice Berry was best friends with Julia Bone, so naturally Karina hated her almost as much as she hated Julia.

“They took her off last night. Came to collect her. She was raving! I know this cos we live in the same block.”

She sounded really pleased about it. I said that it must be frightening, having your mum taken away, but Karina said that Jenice deserved it.

“They’re all mad, anyway. The whole family.”

Sometimes I thought that Karina wasn’t really a very nice person. Then I’d get scared and think that maybe I
wasn’t a very nice person, either, and that was why nobody wanted me in any of their gangs, which would mean that I was even
less
of a nice person than Karina, since she’d at least started off in a gang. I hadn’t even done that.

Other times I thought maybe Karina had only become not very nice because of everyone rejecting her, in which case I ought to be more understanding and sympathetic. So I tried; I really tried. I
wanted
us to be friends and she kept saying that we were, but every time I felt a bit of sympathy she went and ruined it. Like now when she said in these gloating tones that “People like Jenice Berry always get what’s coming to them. Her and Julia Bone…they’ll get theirs! It’s only a question of time.”