scratch-thump, scratch-thump, on every step.
There was a loo, straight ahead, like as soon as you walked in, actually a bathroom, a kitchen to the left and a room with a sofa bed in it. I like sofa beds cos they’re a secret and you can have a bedroom any time you want, night or day. This one was a weird peachy colour that wasn’t so nice, but I didn’t mind cos it was bigger than our old one and it didn’t have such sharp corners.
“What do you think, Mum?” I said. “It’s all right, isn’t it?”
She frowned at me for calling her Mum in public and then she said to Steve, “We’ll take it.”
They shook hands and she did that laugh she does for boys only, which sounds like tiny stones landing on the high bit of a piano.
After she handed over the money and Steve handed over the key and left, she did a bit of ranting. That’s what I call it when she’s angry and she talks like she’s forgotten I’m there or I could be anyone, or something.
She said that maybe this was what Steve meant by “furnished” – one crap sofa, rubbish in the bins, not even a table, a couple of plates – but she could think of another name for it. She couldn’t believe how low she’d sunk. She said the place was filthy. She said, how did we know he wasn’t just re-letting to us while the people who really lived there were out at work?
“Huh!” she said, like a cross sort of laughing. “Imagine them coming home to you and me.”
While she ranted I did our Mary Poppins trick. I call it that cos there’s a bit I really like in the film where Mary has a bag made out of carpet and it’s full of stuff you’d never fit in a bag in real life, lamps and flowerpots and everything. My bag is a bit like that. Unpacking it never seems to end and there’s all sorts of stuff you can fling about until it feels more like home. Me and Mum’s favourite thing in that bag was a fold-up cardboard star with holes cut out. It was white when we got it and I painted it ages ago, when I was like six, and even though I didn’t do such a great job of it I never let her throw it away. It goes over the light bulb in your ceiling and makes everything look like a disco at Christmas. Except there wasn’t a light bulb, just an empty socket hanging, so I said I’d go to the shop and get one.
Mum was in the bathroom by then. I know what she does in there.
The street was way nicer than where Mr Thing lived, which was just flats and more flats and dark places I didn’t like being in by myself. For a start it was quiet, except for the cars whizzing across at the end. There was a garden on the other side of the road and a pub halfway down. The pub was covered in green tiles, like a bathroom. The houses were all the same and sort of elegant. I walked slowly, looking into all the windows. You can learn a lot about a place that way, about who lives there and the kind of stuff they keep. Like in some places there’s always books, more than you need really, and some houses look like they’re actually in a magazine, with the right flowers and everything. And some have net curtains older than me and Mum put together, and you can’t see in at all, but you can see they need washing and that nobody who lives in them ever goes out.
In our new street it was harder to see cos the bottom windows were under the pavement and the next windows up were too high. The basements mostly had leaves and bicycles and dustbins and broken chairs in, apart from one that had little trees cut to look like squirrels, but you couldn’t swing a cat down there.
Each house was cut up into so many flats you wondered where they put them. I read the little lit-up cards by the door on my way back in to ours and tried to work them out.
Basement was S Robbins, which was lizard-face Steve.
Flat one said Davy, the old lady with the peeing dog.
Flat two was water damaged, all brown and cloudy so I couldn’t read it.
Flat three said Flat three, which seemed pointless and was where the rest of the bike was.
Four was ours now, but it still said Fatnani.
The first thing I did, before the light bulb even, was cut a little piece of paper the right size off an envelope. I wrote CHERRY & BOHEMIA, drew some stars and fireworks, to put downstairs at the button for number four.
Cherry’s my mum’s name. I’m supposed to call it her now I’m ten cos the word MUM makes her feel old. Cherry loves it the times someone asks if we’re sisters. She knows they don’t mean it and they know she doesn’t believe them, but everyone plays along anyway. That’s what she told me. She said, “The men I hang out with are suckers.”
The time I like her best is some Sunday afternoons. We stay in our pyjamas, watch TV if we’ve got one, and eat what we want under a duvet. Some Sundays, she looks at me like she hasn’t seen me all week.
Steve the landlord lent us a broom and some bin bags and we cleaned up. Mum sprayed some perfume about so the whole flat smelled of her. When he came to get his stuff back, he asked Mum if she wanted to come out for a drink, just down the road at the pub that looked like a bathroom.
“You can come if you want, little lady,” he said to me. “Have a lemonade and a packet of crisps.”
Mum said I was all right here. She said, “You don’t mind do you, Bo, if I pop out?”
It was fine with me. I like being in a new place because there’s loads to do and look at and think about, and it takes longer than normal to mind being on your own. Mum gave me a pound for some chips if I got hungry and she said she wouldn’t be long. I put the money in my pocket and I made the sofa into a bed for later. I unpacked my clothes and made two really neat piles of them under the window. Then I played snake on Mum’s phone and made a few calls – not real ones because if she ran out of money I’d be in for it, and anyway, who would I speak to? I pretended to be like her when she’s on it, talking really quiet and biting her nails and saying things like “No way” and “ten minutes” and “you out tonight or what?”
Before she left I showed her the card I made for the front door. She liked it. She said she’d take it with her and put it by our bell. Maybe nobody would notice. But at least it showed we were alive in there.
It happened faster than I’d thought, my new life getting started. First I found a job, stacking shelves in an all night sort of supermarket. I only went in for a carton of milk. From the shelves I stacked most, I’d say most people went in for SuperTenants and five-litre bottles of cider. The hours were strange and peopled with drunks. I kept my head down. Nobody asked me any awkward questions and they didn’t need any paperwork, and they were as content as I was not to bother being friends.
And I found somewhere to live.
My place at number 33 Georgiana Street was the third bell of five. All the other bells had a name on apart from mine, and no name suited me fine. I found it outside a newsagent’s on a notice board. A guy came out while I was standing there and stuck a postcard on with a pin. I watched him walk back in the shop before I read it.
I’d been throwing my money away at the hotel for nearly a week. I couldn’t afford it and I couldn’t go home. I didn’t want to be one of those people who moves to London and then ends up sleeping
