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Chapter one
I love the feeling of ice melting in my mouth. The cold on m tongue, clanking it round, gives me a sense of false pleasure. What I like best is that eerie sound it makes when I slowly push my teeth through it. I remember, when I was younger, gently sliding my finger tips down my empty glass, grasping the cube and popping it secretly into my mouth. I used to eat every bit of ice in everyone’s glass, until mom would stop and slap my wrist, sending the ice skidding across the table leaving a wet trail in its wake. I always used to whine, why leave the beautifully preserved water alone in the glass; letting it melt its sorry life away, when it could be melting its sorry life away in my mouth? “It’s bad manners” she would hiss in my ear. I never cared too much for manners…not the extremes that she did. It was about the only thing mom worried about.
Mom's hair was always tied crudely back into a bun, crystallised nicely with an obscene amount of hairspray. The bun always looked so crackly, I used to lick my lips with anticipation of biting it. It was sure to have made the most satisfying crunch that you could possibly imagine. But after a few years and a few meaningless one night stands, mom began to show her age, she didn’t tie her hair up anymore. The nights of me laying awake listening to her bedposts slamming against the wall turned into silence and petty pillow talk. Her eyes began to loose their colour, fleshy pockets settled themselves under her lashes. She was gormless, unfulfilled. I guess her glamorous charade shattered that rainy day her heel broke in town. Her knee jolted suddenly, sending her spiralling to the pavement in a twirl of her colourful clothes. And there she lay, her tears intertwining with the salty rain as she sobbed. I stood in my shiny yellow rain mac with matching wellies, grimacing down at her. In utter confusion I began to laugh because I had lost all sense of what was happening. The same thing happened not two weeks later, but minus the heel braking and the rain. But his fist was added into the equation. He hit her so hard that tears erupted from her eyes before she pounded to the ground. He turned to me after his actions and smiled “You like ice don’t you? Well, why don’t you go outside and play in it?” I told him that its ice cubes I like, and that snow is very different from ice-cubes, but he grabbed my hair, telling me not to act smart, and threw me out into the back yard. That was the last time I ever saw mom, they told me she couldn’t cope anymore. The snow bit my heels.
It’s a horrible feeling. Being alone. Even though I was sent to a foster home, miles away from the happy little town that I used to play in, I have never felt more alone in my entire life. The foster family, they didn’t choose me or anything. I was just standing there with that social worker's firm grip around my wrist. That woman used to smell of peppermint.
“Having a boy here with us has always been our dream” The kind lady beamed at me. They had even bought me a wooden plaque for my door, it had my name ‘Jamiy’ printed in a sick yellow colour across it.
“Do you like it?” He asked me, his hot breath tickling the tip of my ear. He used to ask me that a lot, she just seemed happy all the time, he didn’t.
It’s a strange thing, love…isn’t it? From what I have experienced, it's that feeling you get when your sitting on a train. You think your moving, when, in fact, it’s the train next to you that is heading for its destination and your still grounded at the station. Or, maybe…this will explain it better; When your going up the stairs in the dark, that uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach when you take another step, your foot falls down and you realise that there are no more stairs to climb. I’m not sure if love is to be experienced like this: I was only fifteen when she left home. She took the twins and I stayed with him. After she left he asked me to call him Rob, it made sense because it wasn’t like he was my real dad or anything. He took me to my first football game, we lost two nil but it was fun all the same. The way the crowd would leap up, shouting obscenities at the other teams players amused me in a strange way. I kept looking at him, singing the chants and mouthing off at the referee. But then those feelings came along. That was the love I felt for him. Its unusual that someone could love someone who hurts them. When I turned eighteen, I told him I was leaving home. He got so mad. It was like…a shard in my memory…each time I think of it I get this prick in my mind, those throbbing pains you get down the sides of your head…I’ve never spoken about him before, and to be completely honest, I will never speak about him again. I became this person around him, I didn’t like it, I would come home, there he would be sat on the dirty brown sofa sucking away at yet another cigarette, watching daytime TV. Dinner consisted of a can of beans and tinned sausages. Although all we basically ate was grease, I somehow managed to stay as thin as always and I never really got those teenage spots. Unlike Rob, his stomach hung lifelessly over his jeans, his cheeks were constantly red, he dripped with sweat in the heat. Yet I loved him, slept with him at night, stayed with him over the weekends. Till I moved out anyway. The last thing I heard was that he was found dead on that sofa, weighing just over twenty-two stone and was surrounded by empty bean cans. But then again, for such a man, you couldn’t expect his death to be particularly clean, could you?
