LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

      So this is it; it’s happening. I’m sitting here between Auntie Ellen and Uncle Mark in this room that’s called a chapel, though it isn’t my idea of what a chapel ought to be. Chapels should be beautiful, I think; this is just plain and ordinary. Maybe that is what you get for not believing in God. But you can’t be a hypocrite, just for the sake of a stained-glass window. You can’t say you believe when you don’t. Not however much you would like to. Mum wouldn’t have wanted me to do that. She used to say, “You have to face up to things, Lol.” So that is what I am doing. I am facing up.

      We are sitting in the front row, which is reserved for family. But anyone else could have sat here if they’d wanted; I wouldn’t have minded. There’s lots of room, only a few people have come. There’s Stevie, of course. Why isn’t she sitting with us? She is practically family. Far more than Auntie Ellen or Uncle Mark, even if Uncle Mark is Mum’s brother. Mum used to say that Stevie was a rock. Even Uncle Mark agrees that we couldn’t have managed without her. Auntie Ellen just curls her lip and calls her “that dreadful old woman from next door”. She says she looks like a bag lady, meaning someone who lives on the street and carries all her worldly possessions in a plastic bin bag. I think that is such a horrid thing to say.

      I know that Stevie dresses kind of weirdly and smells of cat, but I can think of worse things to smell of, and what does it matter how people dress? Today she is wearing her best coat that she got from a charity shop. It is dark purple and reaches to the ground, so that all you can see of her big clumpy boots are the tips, poking out from underneath. Originally the coat had fur round the collar, but Stevie doesn’t approve of fur so she ripped it off and gave it to the cats to play with. Unfortunately, most of the collar came off with it, so I have to admit she does look a bit peculiar, especially as she has put on her see-through plastic rain hat. She told me that she was going to wear her rain hat, specially. She said, “You have to be dressed properly, for church. I wouldn’t want to let you down.”

      Generally speaking, Stevie doesn’t give a rap. It’s one of her expressions. She is always shouting it out. “Don’t give a rap!” So I am really touched that she has gone to so much trouble. I think that Mum would be touched too, and agree that Stevie ought to wear her rain hat even though this is only a chapel, and a very plain and boring chapel, and nothing to do with church. And I don’t give a rap if she looks like a bag lady and makes people stare. She was Mum’s friend and Mum loved her.

      Apart from Stevie, the only other people are Temeeka’s mum from over the road, and Mr and Mrs Miah from the corner shop, plus some of the people from Mum’s office where she used to work before she got sick. I don’t really know the people from her office, as I was only eight when Mum had to stop working. But they all came and spoke to me while we were waiting to come in, and two of the women kissed me. One of the men is standing up and talking. He’s talking about Mum. I am trying not to listen. I know he’s saying nice things, because that’s what people do, but I am not going to listen. I am squeezing my eyes tight shut and concentrating very hard…I am building a wall, brick by brick, like a fortress. Soon it will be finished and then nothing will be able to reach me. But for the moment there is still this chink, this tiny chink, where things might be able to slip through. I have to keep them out!

      Auntie Ellen wasn’t sure that I should be here today. She said why didn’t I stay at Stevie’s until it was over.

      “Then we’ll come and fetch you, and take you home.”

      She thought that it would be too much for me. She probably thought that I would cry. Well, I haven’t! I haven’t even sniffled. I am frozen, behind my brick wall. Like in an ice house, where in olden days, before they invented refrigerators, they used to store blocks of ice, hidden underground, deep and dark, where the sun

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