When I woke up on Monday morning, mother was already gone. She had fried some bacon and eggs for me and left a note saying that she was organising something with Mrs Smith.
I would have liked to go back under the warm blankets, but I forced myself to grab a plate and go to the table to eat. It was so cold that I had to put my winter coat on. The electricity hadn’t come on for some reason, and mother hadn’t used enough coal when frying the bacon to heat our flat.
The doorbell rang. It was Charlie. I yawned when I opened the door.
‘Do you know that you have a piece of bacon hanging from the side of your mouth,’ was the first thing he said when I opened the door.
I tried to wipe my mouth before noticing the mischievous grin on his face.
‘Very funny, Charlie!’
‘I’m sorry, but when you were trying to kiss me, your breath smelled so much of bacon that I had to think of something quickly to get your bacon-breath away.’
We had never kissed, not really, and I hadn’t tried to kiss him then, but his words still made me worry. I mean, how can you tell what your own breath smells like? To try to get a whiff of my scent, I kept blowing on my hand while we were running down from the eighth floor. We were not the only ones leaving at the last possible moment. It almost looked like army barracks with uniformed boys and girls pouring out of every door.
Once down and out, we almost crashed into Lola and Lucy. They are twins and were my best friends at the time.
‘Hey Lola, do my breath smell like bacon?’
‘Huh?’
‘Never mind her, she is just trying to show off, "Here I am, just eating my bacon and honey, while the rest of you lot just have your government-issued porridge,"’ Lucy said.
‘Who eats bacon with honey?’ asked Sunitha, who joined us with three of her friends. She had put pink highlights on her hair again. She was going to get into so much trouble if Mr Owens saw her.
‘What are you all talking about?’
‘Emily is just trying to remind us how rich she is by announcing to everyone what she had for breakfast.’
I looked at Charlie. He was trying hard not to start laughing. ‘Stop smiling, Charlie, and say something. This is all your fault.’
This statement got a lot of ooohs and aaahs from the crowd. Charlie never said anything, but luckily, people got tired of making animal noises when someone started singing ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells’.
We had to slow down near the gate because the police had come back again, and Scottish Liberation Army had locked the entrance meant for vehicles. This made getting out of the estate ridiculously slow as the side gate was so small that only one person at the time could get through. The taller kids had to bend their heads to fit.
‘Did you hear about Jonas,’ Sunitha whispered. ‘I don’t like gossiping, but I heard that Jennifer’s death really devastated him. Nobody has seen him since the Saturday morning.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said.
‘Somebody saw him walking around with a thick rope. Do you think—’
‘I said that I don’t want to talk about it!’
‘Jeez, Emily,’ Sunitha exclaimed theatrically. ‘I was just making conversation. You don’t have to become violent.’
We waited in silence. Charlie took hold of my hand. His touch felt electrified, and warm shivers spread all over my body. It felt like getting back inside the heated tent after freezing outside for hours guarding against enemy attack. I squeezed his hand as hard as I could and rested my head on his shoulder.
Mother was just outside the gate with a dozen men and women wearing something that faintly resembled a uniform. Ten feet in front of them were a dozen officers from the auxiliary police wearing their full combat gear. They clearly couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that powerful weapons and fancy uniforms are not all that’s needed to make people do as you want. This time, they had brought an ambulance with them, and three paramedics were standing next to it. They looked more bored than anything else as if this assignment was nothing but a waste of time. They were not wrong: one ambulance wouldn’t make much difference if things really started to go wrong here.
We all kept our heads down and mouths shut as we walked between the two armies. Probably we all sensed that what stopped anything from happening was that no one really knew what to do next. None of us wanted to be the one who triggered something, because whatever came next could not be good. We were not wrong.
At the school gate, we had to stop again. After a stabbing incident during recess a few months before, our school had bought a metal detector. For the first week or so, we had waited in front of the school for ages while the security checked everyone, but lately, it had been used more as a deterrent with random searches conducted now and again.
Known gang members were randomly searched every day, and the rest of us often enough to stop the gang members from bullying others to take weapons in for them. Getting caught got you automatically excluded from school. In addition, the social services were informed, and your parents had to convince the authorities that nothing illegal was happening at your home. When Sunitha got caught with a tiny pocket knife, his father had to bail her out from the Merton police station.
This heavy-handed approach created enough hoo-ha that it only had to happen a couple of times before the Red Devils took action. They informed the gangs that they were not looking for publicity and would stop supplying drugs if it happened again. After that, the school became a sort of demilitarised zone.
The security guards had forgotten all about that. They tore everyone to pieces so enthusiastically that the line outside the school was hardly moving. I was hopping from side to side to keep warm and couldn’t feel my fingers when it finally became my turn. The metal detector beeped.
The new female security guard let out a long sight. She was wearing her hat in a funny way. The brim pointed towards the sky while her voluptuous hair exploded underneath it.
‘Why are you holding the line. I told you to put all the metallic objects you are carrying on the tray. I don’t understand why nobody here listens.’
I was so cold that it was difficult to speak. ‘My pa-pa-pants will fall if I take off my belt. Is that what you people want?’
Mike, our regular guard, smiled at me. ‘Just forget it, Shanice, don’t you know who she is?’
Shanice turned towards Mike, who whispered something to her ear.
‘What? Say that again? So what?’
‘So...have you got anything else except the belt buckle, Emily?’
I shook my head, and he waved me through. Shanice rolled her eyes and shook her head.
We didn’t really study anything at school that day, but it was good that we came. Even though I can’t remember what the celebration was about, all the silly competitions, old songs and pompous speeches made everything feel more normal again. Mr Owens really knew what he was doing; no one can deny that. Children are incredibly resilient and can adjust to almost anything. But if possible, it is best not to let them get accustomed to anything horrible unless you don’t want the world to be normal during your lifetime.
When school ended, Charlie came to find me. He had somehow found a bag of all-sorts liquorice. They were my favourite, and his bag was the real thing, fresh and wonderfully soft, not one of the cheap knock-offs that were small, hard as stone and mainly tasted of sugar.
I grabbed a fistful of sweets. ‘Take some yourself. If you don’t hurry, I’ll just eat them all.’
I sat down on a bench in the lobby. Charlie sat down next to me and put the bag of sweets between us. Lola and Lucy walked past and waved. Normally, I was just as much in a hurry to leave as everybody else, but the thought of walking home with machine guns pointing at me was a lot less appealing than sitting on the bench with Charlie eating sweets.
Soon, everybody had left. The empty hallway had an echo, the kind that makes your whispers sound mysterious and the bright laughter like piano music.
‘Are you waiting for someone?’
It was Shanice. She wanted us to leave. We said that it was too cold outside and we just wanted to sit somewhere while we finished the bag of sweets. Charlie even lifted up the bag as proof that we were not lying. There were probably no more than five of them left inside, and Shanice could clearly see that. I wish I hadn’t been so greedy.
‘Your coffee is getting cold, Shanice,’ Mike shouted.
‘In a minute, Mike.’ She turned back to us. ‘I suppose you two can stay there for a few minutes, but you have to leave when I come back to lock the door. Don’t go anywhere else. We can see you from the reception.’
Shanice never came to lock those doors. We sat there eating and talking until it started getting dark. The cleaning lady smiled when she saw us holding hands. My head rested on Charlie’s shoulder. I closed my eyes. The lady must have thought that there was hope for the world yet. So many things were badly wrong back then, and nobody knew how to fix them, but there was still beauty left in life. And like seeds, those small perfect things would ensure that flowers would grow again when the winter was over. Bright, colourful flowers that smelled familiar, comforting and exciting, just like your lover.
‘Are you sleeping, Emily?’
‘What—no…I was just resting my eyes.’
‘Do you know that you snore a little, but in a cute way?’
It was something only Charlie could have said. I looked outside. It was now completely dark, and Shanice still hadn’t returned.
‘I think we should leave before people get worried. They must have forgotten us. I hope that they didn’t lock us in.’
‘Unlike you, I wasn’t sleeping. Nobody came to lock the doors.’
The door was locked. But pressing the big round green button unlocked it.