Nightingale Point. Luan Goldie

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      The waitress comes and buries a hand in her thick curly hair. ‘Hey, honey,’ she says overly familiar, ‘ain’t seen you in ages.’

      Pamela used to tease Malachi about the waitress having a crush on him.

      ‘Where’s your girlfriend today?’

      ‘Oh.’ His head falls to the side and he feels an overwhelming desire to confess all to her, just for someone to talk to, but it’s not in him to do that. ‘She’s around. You know.’ He pulls his gaze away from her face to the blue evil eye at her neck.

      The woman smiles and wipes the table. ‘Trouble in paradise?’ She asks so gently he feels he might break.

      ‘Ah, actually … Well, we broke up.’

      ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ The crumbs fly from the table onto his lap as she pushes about a blue cloth. ‘Well, it won’t take you long to find someone else. I’m sure they’re lining up.’

      But he doesn’t want anyone else, he wants to sit here with Pamela and share a plate of chips and laugh about last week’s episode of Father Ted. It hurts being here, reliving all those times they sat in this very booth, getting to know each other and making plans.

      He puts his head in his hands.

      The waitress comes back over and puts a milkshake on the table. ‘On the house,’ she says, tapping his shoulder. The kindness of it, of her and the way she looks at him, reminds him of all those teachers and social workers who would give him extra attention when they knew his mum was having a turn for the worse. It’s not empathy, it’s pity, and it still breaks his heart.

      He can’t bear to see the pink glob of powder at the bottom of the glass so he drinks it to the halfway point. He misses Pamela so much. He’s not going to be able to concentrate on studying this afternoon. He can’t imagine being able to concentrate on anything ever again. Not without her.

      ‘Get it together,’ he mumbles. ‘Get it together.’

      He knows he can’t speak to Pamela now; she surely wouldn’t want to hear anything he’s got to say. But maybe, just maybe, he can speak to her dad.

CHAPTER EIGHT

       Chapter Eight ,Elvis

      Elvis runs across the field to the other side. On his way he passes some girls who are sunbathing with not a lot of clothes on, some friendly drunk men, and an old man who walks a giant, scary dog, which he does not stop to pet. He pulls open the door of the phone box and shields his eyes from the photo cards of women with their breasts exposed.

      He cannot remember George’s phone number and Elvis wishes he had spent more time trying to learn it and less time flapping the laminated sheet in the air. He takes his notepad from the pocket of his grey shorts and flicks through the pages to see if the number is written down in there. It isn’t. Instead, the notepad is filled with other important information, such as what takeaway dish is best from Express Burger (quarter pounder with chilli sauce and salad) and what time the postman arrives on his floor (8.57 a.m.).

      It is too hot inside the phone box and it smells of wee, so he steps back outside. Elvis wonders if Archie, his friend from the Waterside Centre, was telling him the truth when he said that teenage black boys were dangerous. Archie had warned, ‘You can’t live on a council estate. It’s full of bad black boys that will try to stab you.’ Archie is Elvis’s best friend. Elvis misses Archie. He also misses the Waterside Centre. He misses the small bathroom attached to his bedroom, the paintings of lily ponds in the hallways and Tuesday night bingo with Bill.

      As he stands outside the second emergency phone and looks across the green he sees the Filipina nurse he knows coming towards him. This makes him smile again. She lives in his block. Elvis likes her as once, when they were in the lift together, she told him a long but nice story about storms in the Philippines. The Filipina nurse is so small and Elvis always has an urge to pick her up, but he knows you cannot do that to strangers as it will scare them and some short people do not like to be reminded that they are short.

      ‘Hot enough for you?’ he asks as she walks quickly towards the bus stop. But she is in a rush today and has no time to stop and chat about storms. She needs to catch the number 53 bus because that goes to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital where she works. Elvis hates the Queen Elizabeth Hospital as it is where he went when his arm was broken by the car that time and it hurt so badly and he screamed and cried. Then, worst of all, he bit a nurse, which made him scream and cry all over again because he had done something so terrible.

      Elvis’s leg hurts now from where he bashed it on the stairs. He looks down at the purple bruise on his glowing white skin and wishes the Filipina nurse had time to look at it for him, but the 53 now pulls away with her on it.

      If Elvis tells George, his care worker, all the things that have happened today, maybe he will make him go back into assisted living. Elvis does not want to go back into assisted living. He has only been living alone six weeks, which he knows for sure because he puts a red dot on his calendar each morning.

      His glasses will not balance on his face correctly because the left arm is all bent, so he puts them in his pocket along with the packet of Euro ’96 stickers he bought yesterday, then he slowly walks back across the green. He likes the way Nightingale Point gets bigger and bigger the closer you get. He looks up a few times to feel the sun hit his face. It feels lovely. But because he is a ginger he should not get too much of it. One summer Elvis had fallen asleep in the sunshine without his coconut suntan lotion on and his skin had burnt red raw, even his eyelids.

      He crosses Sandford Road carefully, after looking both ways and listening for traffic, then heads into the estate. A group of teenage boys sit on the wall that lines the car park; one has a very impressive beard and Elvis wonders if he has a special little brown comb for it like his Sikh friend Mandeep. Some other boys cycle about and laugh loudly, and one sings a song Elvis does not know but would like to. In the middle of the group he notices the bad black boy from the stairs again, the one with the zigzags in his hair who pushed Elvis earlier and made his glasses all bent.

      The boy has a bright blue ice pole hanging from his mouth, the kind Lina bought Elvis last week when she was in a happy mood. Elvis has an idea. He stops and gets out his notepad. This is his chance. He will make a description of the boy so that he can report him to George and then maybe even to the police. He sketches the boy’s white trainers, white shorts, white T-shirt, and shiny diamond earring. The trainers are very difficult to draw correctly. He scribbles them out and tries again. He looks up to check what the laces look like and it is then he sees that all the boys are staring at him.

      Rumbled.

      He tries to place his notepad back in his pocket inconspicuously and pretends to be very busy kicking the stones from the path into a neat pile. Which is a very valid job.

      ‘What were you drawing there, fatty?’ a voice from the wall calls.

      Elvis says nothing, just concentrates on making the path straight. Of course he knows it is rude to ignore someone, but then it is also very rude to call someone ‘fatty’.

      ‘Oi, I’m chatting to you,’ the voice calls again.

      Elvis СКАЧАТЬ