‘I know there is, but until now no one decided to use it as a gate.’ I came outside to be alone. I’m not in the mood for people. ‘You’re trespassing,’ I tell him.
‘You’re right. Someone call the police!’ he shouts.
He steps over Nana’s flower beds and stomps up our garden. He’s wearing a jumper with a giant frog on it and a pair of green wellies that are far too big for him. His cheeks and forehead are smeared with what looks like black warpaint.
‘Are you going into combat?’ I ask.
‘Sort of. Dad forgot to go shopping. I reckon we’ll be having pasta and rice pudding for Christmas dinner. Mum’s furious, so I’m hunkering down outside until it blows over.’
I noticed a new family move into the house behind ours a few weeks ago. It had been empty for so long, I thought it would stay that way – become a home for spiders, mice and homeless people.
‘I think your house is haunted,’ I tell him. I’m being mean, but I’m not really sure why.
‘Yep. It’s totally haunted. I hear ghoulish whispers at night. I’m not worried though; it’ll keep the robbers away.’
I gaze at the moon.
‘So why are you out here? Shouldn’t you be working your way through a box of After Eights?’ he says.
‘Not that it’s any of your business, but my dad and stepmum just told me they’re having a baby, and my nan is trying to make me act like I’m pleased. So if you could leave me alone to be depressed, I’d appreciate it.’
‘Ugh. Babies are so boring. I don’t know why everyone gets all freaky around them.’
I shrug and look through the kitchen window into the sitting room where Trish is laughing and clapping. ‘I’d better go inside,’ I say.
‘OK,’ he says. He walks away. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Apple,’ I say hesitantly.
‘Apple? Like Apple Blossom?’
I blink. Normally when I tell kids my name, they make a nasty joke about Crab Apples or Bad Apples or go on and on about iPads.
Not that Apple is even my real name. My given name is Apollinia Apostolopoulou, which hardly anyone is able to pronounce. So instead of even trying to get people to say it, I tell them my name is Apple. The Apostolopoulou bit is still there; I can’t do anything about that, and I often wonder why Mum even gave me Dad’s surname. She wasn’t going out with him when I was born. And I don’t think she loved him. But she went ahead and chose a Greek first name too. There must have been a reason. When she returns, I’m going to ask her all about it.
I wish she were here now. I wish she’d never left me in the first place.
‘My real name is Apollinia,’ I tell him. ‘But people have been calling me Apple since I was a baby.’
‘Cool. All right. Well, nice to meet you, Apple. I’m Del.’ He hops over Nana’s gnome. Its fishing rod is broken. ‘Oh, and Happy Christmas.’ He vanishes through the gap in the fence.
‘Happy Christmas,’ I say quietly, even though it’s anything but happy.
The back door opens. ‘What are you doing out here?’ Nana asks.
‘Nothing.’
‘Do you want to catch your death? Come inside.’
‘I don’t mind catching my death,’ I say.
Nana tuts. ‘Don’t talk nonsense.’
I pick at my nails. ‘Nana, did Mum send a message? Did she email you?’
‘Wouldn’t I have told you? No, she didn’t. I haven’t heard from her in about a year, Apple. You know that.’
‘How hard is it to send a card?’ I say. At least she could pretend to remember us. Give us a bit of hope.
‘Stop worrying about that. It’s Christmas. And you’ve had some lovely news. A little brother or sister, Apple, like you always wanted. Now let’s go inside and crack open that tin of Quality Street.’
‘You bought Quality Street?’
‘Of course I did,’ she says. I think for a minute she might hug me, but she doesn’t. She nods briskly and pulls me inside.
‘That’s a good girl,’ she says. ‘Now close the door behind you. It’s bitter out.’
4
In English, our first lesson after the holidays, I sit next to Pilar and tell her Dad and Trish’s news.
‘But babies are so cute,’ Pilar says.
‘They might be cute, but they’re a lot of work. I hardly see Dad as it is.’
Pilar glances at her wrist. ‘Ms Savage isn’t usually late. Do you think she’s sick? She was coughing a lot last term.’
‘She smokes, that’s why she was coughing.’ I say. ‘Did you get a new watch?’
‘I got it for Christmas. The hands are made of real gold. What did you get?’
‘Argos vouchers.’
‘Seriously? What are you going to buy with those?’
‘An electric toothbrush.’ I’ve already looked online. It’s the only thing that interests me. ‘Apparently it only takes one minute to brush which will save me three minutes every single time and six minutes a day. Within a year I’ll have saved thirty-six and a half hours.’
Pilar looks unimpressed. ‘If you have any money left over you could get a bedside cabinet.’ She laughs, and then so do I, and we keep laughing and making jokes about what we could buy from Argos, until a tall man with sideburns and wearing a silky green scarf sweeps into the room. The class goes quiet. The man plops a pile of papers on Ms Savage’s desk.
‘Good morning, Year Eight. I’m Mr Gaydon,’ the man says.
Some boys at the desk next to mine titter, presumably because of the ‘gay’ bit in his name, but no one else laughs. We’re waiting to hear the news. Did Ms Savage leave? Is she dead? No one liked her all that much. But at least we knew her.
‘Your teacher has broken her leg in a skiing accident, so I’m afraid she won’t be at school for several months.’ A few students mutter. Someone cheers. Mr Gaydon acts as though he can’t hear any of it. ‘I’m taking over. But don’t worry, I won’t ask you to go around the room telling me your names and something interesting about yourselves. To be honest, I hate icebreakers. They’re always a bit embarrassing. Let’s hope you all participate enough that I learn your names naturally. But if I learn your name too quickly, it’s probably a bad thing.’ His voice is soft and confident and completely unlike Ms Savage’s, who sounds like she expects an argument to come of everything. He sits on the side of his desk. ‘I heard from the head of department that you’re starting a poetry unit this term.’ There are grumbles. Mr Gaydon holds up his hands. ‘I was guilty of hating poetry when I was younger, but that’s because I didn’t know what it could do. Do any of you know what poetry can do?’ he asks.
We all gape at Mr Gaydon. Has the lesson begun? Are we being quizzed? After a short, awkward silence, Jim Joyce raises his hand. Mr Gaydon nods, inviting him to speak. He doesn’t know that Jim Joyce is a troublemaker.
Jim smirks. ‘Can poetry make a great lasagne?’
If Ms Savage were here, he would be sent into the corridor for a comment like that. Mr Gaydon just laughs. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Jim,’ he says.
‘Well, I won’t forget your name, Jim, that’s the bad news. The other bad news is that your answer is way off the mark. But I think you knew that.’
Jim gives Mr Gaydon two thumbs up. ‘What about skateboarding? Can poetry skateboard?’ he asks.
Mr Gaydon shakes his head. ‘Oddly, no. And I reckon you’ve had enough guesses,’ he says.
Jim sits back and puts his hands behind his head.
Mr Gaydon hops off his desk. ‘I’ll tell you what I think it can do, but maybe in a few weeks you’ll have an even better answer than mine. Poetry can teach us about ourselves. It can comfort us when we are in despair. It can bring joy. But not only that . . .’ He lowers his voice. ‘It can open us up. It can make our worlds bigger and brighter and clearer. It can transform us.’
‘What did he say about Transformers?’ Jim calls out. ‘Those films are lame.’
Half the class snigge
rs. I don’t think Jim’s funny. Mr Gaydon’s trying to get us excited about something and all Jim can do is take the mickey. If I weren’t such a coward, I’d tell him to shut up and listen for a minute.
‘Right, settle down. Today we’re going to read a poem by someone very famous and very dead called Alexander Pope.’ Mr Gaydon reaches for a handful of papers. ‘It’s called “Ode On Solitude”. Can anyone tell me what solitude means?’
Donna Taylor raises her hand and the rest of us relax, safe from being picked to speak for a while. Even though Donna’s really smart, she’s still the most popular girl in our year. It’s probably because she wears a ton of make-up so she seems older than the rest of us. And she walks wiggly, like she’s got salsa music playing in her head.
It’s funny because at primary school Donna was shy. She hid under triangular, toadstool hair. She didn’t have many friends. But at Artona Academy no one knew what she’d been and she became something else. She transformed, and she didn’t use poetry to do it. She just went to Boots.
‘Solitude means being alone, sir,’ Donna says.
‘Exactly. Good,’ Mr Gaydon says. ‘Now this guy Alexander Pope had a few things to say about solitude.’ He quickly hands each of us a copy of the poem and perches on the edge of his desk again. He flourishes his own paper and says, ‘Listen to this: “Happy the man, whose wish and care; A few paternal acres bound; Content to breathe his native air; In his own ground”.’ Mr Gaydon looks up from the poem for a second. He seems pleased with what he’s just read.
‘Sir, I don’t understand Shakespearey stuff,’ Jim says.
Mr Gaydon nods. ‘It isn’t Shakespeare, Jim, but I hear you. All the poet is really saying is that a person can be happy if he just enjoys being at home chilling out. Now, does anyone want to read the rest aloud for us?’ Mr Gaydon asks.
Donna’s hand is up again and then she’s reading. I try to block out her voice and imagine my own voice reading the poem. When we get to the last stanza, I mouth the words:
‘Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.’
Donna stops reading. We wait for Mr Gaydon to write up a list of the difficult words from the poem on the board. Or to tell us to copy down a question into our exercise books. Instead, he closes his eyes. When he finally opens them, he dips his head like someone’s said something really interesting.
‘Sir, are you on drugs or something?’ Jim Joyce asks.
We laugh nervously. This is cheeky, even for him.
Mr Gaydon points at Jim. ‘Tell me, Jim, what did that poem say to you?’
We all watch, waiting for Jim to say something like, It told me I had superpowers, or It told me it was break-time, but he stares blankly at Mr Gaydon.
‘Anyone else want to talk to me about the poem? Does the narrator see solitude as a bad thing?’ He waits for some hands to go up, but none do. ‘Right, forget the poem. I know it’s hard to understand on a first read-through. So how about you? Do you see solitude as a bad thing?’
I want to put up my hand and tell Mr Gaydon what I know about solitude – that it isn’t possible to be alone and happy. If it were, all the kids at school with no friends would go around beaming. Which they don’t. They’re miserable. They hide in the toilets at lunch or sit in the corner of the canteen, looking like there’s a raincloud about to burst above them. And when I’m alone, especially at night, I think of my mum all the way across the Atlantic in America, and I wish she were closer. I don’t want to be without her all the time.
Mr Gaydon scratches his sideburns. ‘You’re all very quiet, but I suppose you must be a little rusty from the holidays, so I’ll tell you what I think: the poet admires people who live and even die without needing the recognition of others. But the problem is, most of us do need people. Goodness, if I died and no one cared, I’d hate it. What a curse we live with – needing others is sort of rubbish, isn’t it?’
He pauses again and after a few moments, Iona Churchill raises her hand. ‘I would hate being alone all the time. I like talking to people,’ she says. ‘That’s why I have this.’ She holds up her phone, a pink thing rimmed in silver rhinestones.
‘Good point!’ Mr Gaydon says. ‘Phone companies make a lot of money from the fact that we like to communicate with one another as often and as quickly as possible.’
‘I’d like people to leave me alone when I’m playing Grand Theft Auto,’ Michael Evans says. ‘And by people, I mean my mum.’
Mr Gaydon smiles. The discussion continues. Everyone is suddenly eager to contribute. It’s not like any other English class I’ve been in. Usually we get given comprehension questions and are told to answer them ‘in full sentences’ using ‘good spelling and clear handwriting’. Mr Gaydon hasn’t even asked us to pick up our pens.
By the end of the lesson, everyone is arguing about the pluses and minuses of solitude and Mr Gaydon is smiling. He turns to the board to write up some homework and we protest – dutifully. ‘In one hundred words exactly, explain your views on the idea of solitude,’ Mr Gaydon says, reading aloud what he’s written. ‘It can be in prose, which is a normal paragraph, or if you’re feeling ambitious, you could write a poem. I’m asking for one hundred words exactly because I want you to think carefully about the language you use. Keep it lean. OK, have a good day, folks.’
The bell sounds for the end of class and we pack up.
On her way out, Donna Taylor stops at our desk. ‘Nice watch,’ she says to Pilar.
‘Thanks!’ Pilar says. She grins. ‘The hands are made of real gold.’
‘Cool,’ Donna says. She keeps walking, her hips swimming from side to side.
‘Looks like you’ve got a new best friend,’ I tell Pilar.
‘Yeah right,’ Pilar says. She links my arm and we rush off to PE.
Pilar and I are in the science lab waiting for Ms Whyte to photocopy a worksheet. While I wait, I watch Nana push through the crowded playground and sit on one of the graffiti-covered benches. Her giant green golf brolly is keeping the rain at bay. She is sucking on the straw of a Ribena carton.
I sigh.
‘What?’ Pilar asks, her nose pressed against a tank of tadpoles and gunk.
‘Nana’s outside.’
Pilar comes to the window. ‘You’ve got to tell her. No one else in Year Eight gets picked up any more.’
‘I tried.’
‘Well, try harder. It’s embarrassing, Apple.’
‘Here you go,’ Ms Whyte says, scurrying into the classroom. She’s carrying a box of folders and holding the biology worksheet between her teeth.
‘Thanks, miss,’ I say.
Pilar and I are still packing up when Donna Taylor rushes into the room. ‘Miss, miss, I dropped my worksheet in a puddle,’ she says. She holds up a soggy piece of paper.
‘Wait here.’ Ms Whyte sighs and trudges off to use the photocopier again.
Donna smiles. ‘Are you in detention or something?’
‘No. No, I needed a worksheet too,’ I say.
‘And I’m waiting with Apple,’ Pilar adds. As though that isn’t obvious.
Donna puts her hands behind her back. None of us say anything for about a minute. Then suddenly my stomach growls loudly.
‘Was that you?’ Donna asks.
I nod. My face flushes – I don’t exactly have the figure of someone who starves herself.
‘I’m going down to the pier for chips with Hazel and Mariah in a minute. If you two want to come, you can,’ Donna says. She doesn’t seem very keen, but I’m not sure that matters. The point is that Donna Taylor has asked us to hang out with her and that sort of thing never happens to Pilar and me. Usually it’s only the two of us. We always sit together in class and eat together at lunch and pair up for projects. When Pilar is absent, it’s a bit lonely because we only have each other.
‘Yeah, sure. Sounds brilliant,’ Pilar says quickly.
Then she turns to me, her eyes wide and frantic, in case I go and spoil it by saying no. But she can’t have forgotten that Nana’s outside; if I want to do anything, I’ll have to ask first.
Ms Whyte comes back into the room and hands Donna the worksheet. ‘Thanks, miss,’ Donna says. ‘OK, so see you two by the bike racks in a few minutes, yeah?’
Pilar and I watch Donna leave.
‘Can you believe it? Donna Taylor invited us to get chips,’ Pilar says.
I put my arm around Pilar’s shoulder. ‘Calm down. It’s not like Egan Winters has asked us to go to Paris with him.’
‘Egan Winters? You’ve got to get over him, Apple. He’s too old for you,’ Pilar says.
I shrug. ‘Maybe.’
‘There you are,’ Nana says. She stands up from the bench and pats me. ‘Do you want a Ribena?’
‘No thanks.’ I steal a look at Donna, Hazel and Mariah who are in a huddle by the bike racks, watching.
‘Good day at school?’ Nana asks.
‘It was fine,’ Pilar says. Her voice is impatient.
‘Can I go to the pier for chips?’ I ask.
Nana gazes at the rain tiptoeing across the surface of the puddles. ‘It’s a bit wet for that kind of thing.’
‘We won’t be long. And there are five of us going, so we’d easily ward off an attacker,’ Pilar says.
I elbow her. She isn’t helping.
Nana frowns. ‘How many adults?’
‘Technically none. But we’re all very mature,’ Pilar says.
‘Hey! You coming?’ Donna shouts across the playground. She’s unlocked her bike and is pushing it towards the gates. Hazel and Mariah follow on scooters.
‘Please, Nana.’ I sound whiny. I can’t help it. I really want to go.
Nana examines Donna and the others. ‘I’m roasting lamb, and I don’t want it to dry out. Come on, Apple.’ She marches out of the playground.
The rain pelts me.
‘Quick, go and beg her,’ Pilar says.
‘It’s pointless. Her noes mean no.’
Pilar pulls the belt tight on her woollen coat. ‘Well . . . would you mind if I went?’ she asks gently. She smiles using only half her mouth. Pilar is usually a whole-mouth, whole-face smiler.