Does Bekki still have that lemur?
Is she coorying down with the lemur and that Flora bitch is stroking her hair?
But I cannae think about it.
I cannae think about they fuckers or I’ll go mental so I will.
I put Shrek back on the pillow. The pillow’s baby-blue with a giant white snowflake and ‘Like a snowflake I’m one of a kind’ on it. If Bekki likes all this shite we can take it with us to Spain. Weird but, snowflake bedding and mobiles and that, when it’s thirty fucking degrees.
I go down the stair and get my coat. I leave the heating on low and a light on in the hallway. Then I pick up my bag and lock up and head off down the wee lock-block drive to the street. It’s a cul-de-sac with landscaping and grass and bushes and a blossom tree on the corner that you can see from Bekki’s windae. All the houses in this street are brand new newbuilds, some double-fronted detached like ours and some semidetached, all matching in with white walls and red tiles and wee porches. Dead nice.
I cannae wait, so I cannae, till I’m in the house with Bekki and Carly and Connor. We’re bringing her here when we first get her, and Jed and them will stay at our bit. Then it’s Viva Espana!
I power-walk to the bus stop and when I get there I get out my phone and take a deek at the photies Ryan took last time he was out there. The windaes are in, and the glass doors out to the patio round the pool. Rooms are massive by the way. Ryan’s getting a sound system put in through the whole house, and the heating’s gonnae be remote-controlled.
It’s raining and I’m all bumfled up in a scarf and my big coat and boots. There’s no wee neds at the stop like there would be at our bit, bevvying and yowling and chucking Minstrels at the motors from packets they’ve robbed from the shop. There’s just an old couple with a wee laddie, and they’re reading the timetable up on the shelter and the wee laddie keeps going, ‘What does that say, Nana?’ and when she reads out ‘Bearsden’ he goes, ‘Are there real bears in Bearsden?’ like he’s hoping, and the old guy goes, ‘Aye, Christopher, there’s one there look driving that bus’ and the woman’s like that: ‘Silly Granda.’
Nana smiles at me.
I goes, ‘There was once a bear in Bearsden, but that was hundreds of year ago. The laird’s sons kept a bear cub in a pit.’ I looked it up on the internet in case Bekki asks. The bear died, but I’m no gonnae tell Bekki that bit. I’ve a wee story ready. ‘But that was cruel, eh, and the poor wee bear didnae like it. It wasnae a proper den, it was just a hole in the ground with nothing for the wee cub to coorie down in. He was cauld. The laird’s sons couldnae be doing with him and hardly ever came to play with him any more. They were more interested in drinking fancy wine and that. The bear cub was lonely. He didnae like it in that pit, so he didnae.’
‘Oh, the poor wee bear!’ says Nana. ‘What happened to the poor wee soul?’
Christopher’s looking up at me with big blue eyes. He’s pure gorgeous so he is, with that soft creamy skin bairns have, and I want to pick him up and squeeze him and pinch his wee cheeks.
I give him a big smile.
‘Did he escape?’ he whispers.
‘Oh aye, he escaped all right. He got out the pit one night and ran away, and after lots of adventures he found a nice fisherman with a cottage by the sea who had always wanted a bear for a wee pal, and he lived there in a cosy den lined with wool from the man’s sheep, and he went swimming by the man’s boat when he went out fishing, and just had a rare time altogether.’
‘He lived happily ever after,’ goes Christopher.
Aye, in the version I’m telling Bekki, that’s the happy ever after.
But now I’m thinking: wee fucker, everything’s happy ever after for wee Christopher, eh, and Nana and Granda, off home for tea and fucking crumpets. While my Bekki doesnae even know who the fuck I am. I’m no her nana, I’m just a fucking random.
So aye I shouldnae, but I cannae help it, I goes, ‘He’s happy aye, but then this big fierce mad dug comes along, and it fights the wee bear and gies it rabies so it does, and the bear goes fucking mental.’
Christopher’s wee face!
Nana’s and Granda’s!
‘Fucking mental, and when the nice fisherman comes and goes, “Here, wee bear, let’s us go for a swim, aye?” the bear opens his gub like that!’ I pull back my lips and give Christopher a good long deek at my molars. ‘And he jumps on the man and rips his fucking head off!’
Nana grabs Christopher and wheechs him out the shelter, and Granda hyters after them, but the bus is pulling up. I go and stand at the door but I dinnae get on, I pretend I’m looking in my purse for change, so they have to come back past me. Christopher’s greeting and Nana flings him up the steps and as Granda goes past me he’s like that: ‘Bitch.’ And then: ‘You need help,’ like that’s me telt.
I goes, ‘Excuse me? I think you should maybe watch your language in front of the bairn, aye?’ real loud. As they move on down the bus I goes, ‘You heard that, Driver? You heard that man giving me verbals, calling me a bitch and that, just because I wasnae quick enough looking out my change? That’s sexist. That’s misogynistic so it is. Are you gonnae respect my right to get on a bus without being fucking abused by a sexist prick or are you no?’
The driver sighs and gets out his seat and goes down the bus and says to Granda:
‘Okay sir. Aff.’
And that’s their nice wee day out turned to pish.
12
The corner shop was literally on a corner, the door across the angle of the block, with fresh fruit and vegetables displayed on stands to either side – although Flora never bought any of them because she worried about them soaking up pollution from the busy road. Inside, though, one whole wall contained shelf after shelf of wonderful old-fashioned sweets in big glass jars, all with natural colours and flavourings.
On a Monday after school she and Beckie always came this way rather than taking the quieter, more scenic walk through the leafy back streets, so that Beckie could get her treat. Compensation for it being a Monday. She usually chose jelly babies. They weren’t the usual kind, they were smaller and sharper and ‘more diverse’, as Beckie put it. They had counted nine different flavours in total. Beckie’s favourites were the purple ones, and Jennifer, the girl who usually served them, always tried to get as many of those on the little shovel as she could.
Flora was partial to the jelly babies herself – Atkins was ancient history. They always got a little bag each and ate them as they walked home.
But today, Flora had come this way on automatic pilot.
She had no intention of going in.
She turned and looked at her daughter, who’d been walking a couple of paces behind her all the way rather than bouncing and chattering at her side as usual.
‘Are we getting jelly babies?’ Beckie muttered.
‘No.’
‘Is it my punishment?’
‘Well Beckie, don’t you think you should be punished?’
Beckie shrugged.
She’d done a lot of that in the mediation discussion. A lot of shrugging and sighing and saying ‘Yeah,’ while little Edith had sat so still on her chair next to her mum, and kept aiming pathetic little mini-smiles at Beckie, identical to the ones her mum, Shona, gave Flora. As if it were Edith and Shona who were at fault here.