Young Writers Society

I thought that there would be something magical about it when we crossed the boarder into England, like with Narnia. I thought that there would be a point when suddenly all the fields would turn green and villages full of massive houses with fountains and flower gardens would spring up out of the ground. I thought I would be able to smell the tea leaves and red jam in the air.

Instead, we drove through cities and countryside until it all blurred together and at some point just as the sun was coming up we were plunged into the darkness of the tunnel that took us from Europe to the United Kingdom. As I drifted in and out of sleep I dreamt of rushing waters and huge fountains.

Instead we came out of the tunnel to the waning light of morning obscuring the long motorways and strings of street lights. It looked the same as all the other countries we'd driven through on our journey, and I wondered if it would have been better if I had been paying attention.

Ma' looked back at us, three sisters and I wedged like furniture in between the boxes that we had stuffed into our car. It felt like a lot because we'd never packed that much into a car before, but it wasn't at all of it. I guess there was something sweet about being in there. In their plight to traverse the rolling landscapes my parents had been strict to only pack the things that were precious, or essential- clothes, toothbrushes, jewellery, photographs- and we, my sisters and I, had been counted among these precious things.

'We're here now,' she said, with an expression on her face that I didn't really understand. It was like happy, but if happy had spent the past six years in a dungeon without sunlight. She looked aged and dry, and somehow unfamiliar. 'We don't have to run away any more.'

I didn't know that we were running away from anything.
Four hours later we were following signs into Manchester, and as we got closer to our destination the roads got tighter until we were driving through narrow streets, surrounded by stone brick houses and grubby faces. They looked more like white gremlins than people.

Eventually we pulled up onto the roadside and Da' got out, glanced around and opened the gate to the house that had a yellowed plastic number six nailed to the door. The garden was a two by one metre patch of brambles warding us off. Ma' came around and dragged me out through a gap in the luggage and stood us in front of the house. It didn't take long for some kids nearby to stop and stare at us, and two neighbours in a garden pause their conversation.

I wondered if this is where we would get our key from, and then, if this was a hotel that we would be staying in. It was empty and gloomy, and smelt like cold dirt. The walls were a salmon kind of pink and with the stairs right in front of the door the hallway felt more like a big cupboard.

'This is it,' Da' said and put his arm around Mama.

I touched the wall, where the paper was old and felt furry and flinched away from it. My eldest two sisters started to amble clumsily, peering together into the two rooms on the ground floor.

'I think maybe they're tired,' Ma' said.

'Ma?' I asked her. 'When will we get to England?'

During the monsoon the rain used to fall so hard, Fray knew there was no point trying to avoid it. The best thing to do was wrap her jumper tight in her backpack inside a plastic bag, and go out and get soaked. Then she'd get changed when she got to wherever she was going. There were no waterproof shoes either- nothing was waterproof enough. She just had sandals and wet feet, and that's the way the world became.

The best thing about the rain was that when it fell really hard, she could walk up across the hills to the shelter up on the top. She would wrap up her guitar and wander up to the top of the hill to practice and sing as loud as she could. It was her favourite time of the year. Behind the wall of water nobody could hear her anyway, so she sung as loud as she dared to.

There were enough people telling her that she was wasting her time, that there's no point in dancing when there's work to be done. She didn't care. For her it was a release, to imagine being somewhere else- to be loved by someone else. In that tiny village everyone knew everyone, and emotional heartbreak spread like fire with every rejection and every betrayal, and love was teased into blooming even before it was grown. Its inhabitants dreamt of new beginnings and of finding their way out, and gossiped about everyone because it's all they really had to do there, gossip and work.

So she danced, and gossiped very little with anyone. She told lies and everybody knew it, but it meant that she didn't tell truths, and in a small town it's the truths that would destroy a person. Out there on the hillside, her voice drowning in the wall of water, she could scream her secrets as loud as she wanted and the world would never hear them. Only the rain. The rain knew all of her secrets, and it was the only one.

It was the sun who knew her lies, who shone down on the town and every step she took, but it was when the sun was gone- when evening fell down over the shadowy town and the shadows wrapped around her and nobody could see her, or when the rain swallowed everything until nobody else could hear her- that was the time for truths that nobody could touch.

The daylight was for gossip. Gossip and lying. So long as everybody knew she lied, they never expected her to tell the truth, and she never had to be dishonest.

She had been looking forward to the monsoon, but one dry summer evening right when the storm fronts broke lightening struck the shelter and burned the whole thing to the ground. The monsoon hit and it was too wet to build anything. Not for lack of trying, but the wood would get soaked and never dry, and rot before she had the chance to fully rebuild and treat it.

There's only so long a person can hold on to an unspoken truth. Like every thought not acted upon, eventually they evaporated in her chest and she breathed out her truths into the misty morning air, whilst the lies lay on her tongue like fire and burned every honest thing she tried to say.

Some kids get to choose, and some kids don't, but ultimately it's still the grown ups who decide whether or not you have that choice. I saw a video on the internet once of a young girl handing an envelope to her mothers husband for his birthday. He opened it and immediately fell to his knees and tears started to stream down his face. Adoption papers.

We didn't get a choice. My parents argued. They were never loud, but they were wicked. Mama, who had once been a thin, iron statue of a woman, had come to slink and slouch around our house and stare often out the curtains like the rest of the women in the street, whilst Da' would get annoyed with her and say the most awful things. He was angry with her for not finding work, and not educating herself, and eventually I think he became angry with every inch of her skin and bones. He never hit her, but for some reason our neighbours thought he did because his temper would get so bad and his words so bitter.

Sometimes he stayed out, one night, maybe two. Then one day a strange man- pink skinned and built like a giant- turned up at our house and told Da' to leave and not come back. Da' was shorter than most men anyway. He tried to argue with Ma' in the hallway, but he had to tip around to see beyond the tower in front of him. Slowly he got driven out.

I was nine back then. The quiet, two-tap footsteps of my Da' turned into the loud thumps of the stranger who then came to reside in our house, and who Ma' told us was our new Dad. I didn't like it, but we were given no other name for him, so for a long time I meandered in between languages to always refer to him as him in hope that the issue would never come up.

Then he never came back. Not for his clothes or for us or anything.

There was a thing called visitation that some kids talked about. It was where their Dads got to see them on the same day every week, or they got to go and stay over at their Mums house, or something like that. When I was old enough and brave enough I asked one of my teachers.

'How does it work?'

'Sometimes parents agree to do it. Sometimes if a parent doesn't want the other parent to see them, then they go to court and the court decides who the child stays with and who they go with,' she told me. 'Why, is everything okay at home?'

'Everything is okay,' I assured her, but pushed the subject. 'So that's the only reason why the parent wouldn't see the child?'

'Not all parents get to see their children. It depends on the situation. Some parents are bad to their children.'

Da' was never bad to me. That day I went home and stormed in through the front door. I threw my bag onto the couch and went straight into the kitchen to Ma. My oldest sister was with her already.

'Why didn't we get to see Da'?' I demanded.

My sister, who had seemed somewhat annoyed with my intrusion, looked up at her wilfully. We had asked each other the question in hushed whispers on the moonless nights of our childhoods, but now I was almost twelve and for all that I cared, not a child. Not right now.

Ma' looked suddenly sad. She put the potato and grater that she was holding down onto the side and I knew what was about to happen. This was one of our quiet conversations, and I was done being quiet.

'Come sit down.'

'I'm sick of sitting down,' I snapped. 'Why do other kid get visitation with their Dad's and we don't? Why didn't you let him come back and see us?'

A pink shadow of anger flushed across her cheeks. 'Sweetheart come and sit down.'

'He didn't even get to come and take his clothes, you just put them in boxes outside. He didn't even get to say goodbye to us. Didn't you ever think of what that would do to us? Don't you grown ups ever think about us? I never wanted to have a new Dad.' All of the words came out at once, even the ones I had buried years ago came lurching out like vampires bursting from their graves.

'He didn't want to come back.'

'What?' Something in my chest started to buzz, like static on a radio when you're in between channels and the signal can't quite get through. The silence rung in the air.

'Listen to me.' She leant in close to me and looked me straight in the eyes. 'He chose not to come back. Not me. I asked him, I called him, I left his things outside in boxes so he could come pick them up and not even have to speak to me, and he didn't turn up. Not for you. Not for me.'

I breathed. It's all I could do. Out, and in.

My sister opened her mouth, her voice dampened even more than her usual, mulled tone. 'He didn't want us?'

'He used to leave for a days or weeks to get away from us, and I told him I could cope with him skipping out all the time. I told him if he was going then go, and he didn't come back. Then the money stopped coming in and we had to make ends meet.'

'Why didn't you tell us?' My sister asked. 'We thought you wouldn't let him come back.'

'I didn't want you to blame yourselves.'

That's not entirely true either, another lesson that I wasn't to learn until I reached adulthood. So long as she acted like it was her decision, she never had to let us know that she didn't have the answers to the questions we asked. Questions like where is he and why hasn't he come to see us and doesn't he love us. Questions that broke her own heart every day.

I can remember the day one of my sisters finally got into a fight.

It was Danny, my second sister, who was the most fearful. She would be anxious and on edge, and we all wondered when it was that she would break. She would bottle everything up until it got too much and unleash it in one wicked tantrum. She and Izzy would have a shouting match across the house, and when they did I stayed clear of them. We used to think that it was poor Izzy who bore the brunt of it, until we figured out that when Danny went on a rampage and dangled those words in front of her Izzy couldn't resist biting onto them. She secretly relished that moment when they could unleash their frustrations on each other, blow the lid off the kettle and fill the house with hot steam.

Opal would sit in the middle, baiting them both. Whilst Izzy was soft and Danny was volatile, nobody really knew what was going on with Opal. When worst came to worst and someone pointed their sword at her it was my fathers voice that came out, and the malice with which he used to talk to Ma'. We recognised it well enough.

I read somewhere that boys who watch their fathers hit their mothers are more likely to hit women in the future, because it's what they see. They imitate what they know. Whilst Izzy had cried at the things our father said, Opal never did. The words fell straight onto her like seeds onto stone and instead of being brushed away they stayed there, perfectly preserved, until years later when they started to take root in the cracks left behind.

It left us in that uncertain space with her. Ma' used to say that sisters say things they don't mean when they're angry, but Opal never seemed to be angry, and we could never be sure of how much she meant. If she ever ended up in Danny's firing line the things she said became scorched into our minds, and there were moments I could have believed she hated her. We wondered sometimes if maybe she was just bad.

Then one day after school there were some girls standing around Danny trying to kick up a fight. I was in first year, Izzy was in sixth form and wouldn't be finished for another hour. From what I could gather from their conversation (and Danny's lack of denial), she had gotten wrapped up in some gossip and instead of stepping back she had said some spiteful things about one of her old friends, Bernadette. When the gossip died down and those things came out into the open, there was hell to be wrought.

'She didn't mean it like that!' Lucia said.

'If she didn't mean it then why did she say it?' Bernadette scowled.

'It was just, there was stuff going round, you know.'

I tried to move closer, but Danny put her hand on my chest and held me back at arms length. Bernadette looked down at me.

'Is that right? There was just stuff going round?' She said to Danny.

Danny. Sweet Danny. Fearful. Anxious. Volatile. She could have said anything else in that moment but she didn't. Anything else. Instead she answered; 'I meant every word of it.'

Bernadette swore and gave her a hard shove. She looked at me sharply. 'Get out the way or I'll hit you too,' she said to me.

Opal leant over my shoulder. I swear I could feel her skin burning. 'You won't touch any of my sisters,' she said.

'Don't hit her,' someone else said. 'Look she's only little, don't hit that one.'

'I'll take you all on,' Bernadette said, though she didn't seem all that committed.

'Are you going to fight or not?' Another girl, with dyed black hair, pushed them forward.

Bernadette shook her head and looked at me. 'It's not worth it. And I'm not hitting a little kid.' She turned to leave and Danny did the same, but the crowd had barely begun to disperse when something caught the back of my trousers and tipped me forward into Opal. I looked back at the girl with black hair, who smirked.

Bernadette froze, her mouth open and eyes wide. I could only see in the corner of my eye that Opal and turned to me and followed my gaze to the black haired girl. The force that she shoved past me was only a fraction of that with which her fist collided with the other girls stomach.

The sound of air being forced out of her lungs was audible. She keeled over, gasping for air, gagged and threw up on the side of the school yard. Danny and Bernadette exchanged the same horrified expression. A chill ran through the crowd, that awful kind of chill that tells you that summer is over and winter is very much on the horizon. We all learned two valuable things that day.

One. Danny and Bernadette, though devout enemies, never really left behind the promises they swore to each other when they were still friends.

And Two. Opal wasn't bad. She was, however, something far more dangerous than we had given her credit for.

One. The day grown ups start to treat us as if we're one of them. They talk to us like we're people and we talk to them like they're people, and suddenly this gateway opens up and the realisation pours in of how many worlds there are drifting around our own. We're suddenly faced with the knowledge that our parents hurt and bleed, that they lust and desire and crave as much as we do. The knowledge that they want just as we want, and that they break just as we break, and that when we cry in secret, they cry too.

Two. The day that comes long after we've fallen out of our nests and started flying. Flying is the easy part. This is the day when we're already out there over the water and we start to get tired, we look back but it's too far back, and too far ahead, and there's nobody around to catch us. It's a new reality, and a frightening one.

Three. The day a young person turns to us and asks us a question without a hint of doubt that we might know the answer. Nobody ever really knows anything, we just make the best guess we can and say it as if we're certain. We remember what it was like when we thought the world was safe, and we tell them what we need to so that we might be able to give them some sense of security.

Four. Not the day that we fall behind, not the day that we finally catch up or find ourselves equal, but the day that comes after that. When we go to run that familiar road next to those who went before us, and find them lagging. They're falling behind as if they're not trying hard enough. Then the days that come after, as the journey stays the same, but the follower becomes the followed and we look back and wait for them to catch up. It's when we slow down, and we understand that it's not the tradition that matters, but the sentiment behind it. We walk slower now.

Five. The day we realise that there's nobody left before us. Now we're the ones who know the most and we know barely a thing. We're at the front now guiding the flock, trying to make guesses on how the world is going to change, always watching out for storms. We realise how much weight those frail bodies carried, and we are reluctant to grow in case we too become frail, whilst those at the back flitter along as if we know everything. As if we're not orphans now.

Six. We cling to life, throwing ourselves into the wind because our tired bodies are the only things left to protect them from the storms. Each day we live is a day we shelter them, whether or not they appreciate it, knowing one day that they will grieve for us but not whilst we're alive. No harm can come to them while we're alive. It's then, on that day, that we realise just how much a day is worth.

My sisters and I stood side by side in our new school uniforms. Mine was a red checked dress that came down to my knees, and we wore trousers underneath. Mine were purple and loose and bunched around my ankles. Over the top was a bright red cardigan. I had a gold-yellow scarf to go around my neck. Izeah had a blue one with flowers. Aria was clad all in red with black shoes and looked like a poppy. Izeah was the oldest, but Opal was tall like Ma'. Dineah had a brown scarf. She was anxious. When we were in the bathroom she kept putting it on and taking it off again, as if she could use it as an invisibility cloak if she could get it just right, but in front of Ma' she stood upright and stiff.

We walked to the school gates and even as we were on the way there I could see that everyone else looked different to us. At the gates Ma' told us that she would be there at the end of school and that we mustn't leave the school gates for any reason until she came to get us, just like back home. Then she was gone again.

Red wasn't the only colour. The school yard was a kaleidoscope of polo-shirts and school dresses, but everybody had to wear black shoes. I watched one girl running across the yard. Her dress was above her knees and her legs were scrawny and naked. Both of her knees were crusted with grazes. There was a boy with a yellow shirt that already had something spilled on it.

'Where are we supposed to go?' Dineah asked. 'I don't know where my class is.'

'We go to the reception, where we came to enrol,' Izeah said. She always sounded like she knew what was going on, but that's because she was clever. She could figure things out. She was almost eleven and I was six, and that meant she knew infinitely more about the world than I did. When I look back at her now I think the world didn't give her enough credit for that. She took my hand and we started walking across the school yard towards the reception.

Some people stared at us, and I soon found that my months of studiousness meant nothing here. I couldn't understand anything that they were saying, and it all blurred into a haze that frightened me.

In the reception one of the secretaries- who I remember only for the flowery trousers she wore on that day- rushed out to greet us. She said something in English that was loud and came with a beaming smile. I recognised the words new and pretty but nothing else.

'Where is the classroom?' Izeah said in her best English.

The woman put up one hand and spoke, and went back into the other room. I clung tighter to Izeah. Aria, who was normally loud and curious, now reserved herself to merely scanning every inch of our surroundings.

Along the route, one by one we were separated until I bid Izeah goodbye as she disappeared down the corridor and became swallowed up in the new classroom. There were books in the corner and desks that were sized for smaller people, and almost immediately excitement broke out around the class.

It didn't take long for the fear to dissipate. If anything unkind was said, I didn't hear it. Sound quickly became insignificant and everything was about touch. People showed me what to hold, where to put it, how to do it. The first phrase that I learned to recognise coherently was 'I like your hair' as the girls took it in turns to touch my head and, as they grew braver, chatter among themselves as they braided and styled it. If any of the boys came near me the girls would chase them away. I also learned new word; Emma. They even scribbled it paper for me to learn to write it.

A few days later we were reading a book that I figured out Emma was a name that they had given me- probably because it was the closest a group of British six year old children could get to pronouncing my actual name.

Dineah became Danny, by her own choice. Izeah quickly adopted Izzy. The four of us were in the school library one day when Opal, who hadn't been given a nickname, translated her name and we found out that she was a type of rainbow coloured rock.

Nobody else knows what it is that you can see or know. I learned this at a young age. If I knew what was going on around me then it would have been easier. When you look like everybody else and you act like they do then people think you don't need things explaining that much.

Our class was divided and told what to do. We were going to do something in the sand. Then we were sent out a few at a time. When we got outside the others were building in the sand. One of the girls held her bucket and spade out to me, then said something straight too me that I didn't hear because of the others talking nearby, and handed the bucket across to someone else. So I set to work without one, and built a castle along with the others.

Later when we all came back outside to look our teacher got angry. She was angry most of the time anyway, I figured she just didn't like children. She was pointing to my castle and talking with a raised voice. Most of the words were too fast and sharp for me to understand, but I figured she was asking who did it. She flattened it to the ground before taking a picture of the sand pit and we went back inside.

I held back as long as I could in class before I started crying. Long enough for nobody to know what was going on, but if they did figure it out I had no idea. The others chattered, asking me what was wrong as if I knew. Nobody had taught me how to say I'm not good enough yet. I was too scared to admit that the defective castle- so awful that it had to be obliterated from its sandy landscape- was mine.

You can't tell a person by the colour of their skin, or where they're from or what they talk like. We know this. Sometimes people are even afraid to describe people by their skin colour even though it's just what they look like. It's kind of weird to live in a place where the bad guys are defined by how they see colour and the good guys have to pretend not to see it at all. You can't pretend it's not there when every day you live in it.

At thirteen we were in that limbo, where we knew enough about the world but not enough. Grown ups tried to protect us by not talking about the monsters that lurked on street corners as if we never had to walk past them on our way to school or when running errands to the store. There were girls I knew with boyfriends who were much older. With a boyfriend who was sixteen, that meant she must be mature. A boyfriend of eighteen meant she probably spent more time around grown ups than kids. A boyfriend of twenty one... well, that's different. What did we know of twenty-one year old boys? The ones who listened to the same music and hung around in the same places, and who didn't really talk to grown ups.

I met some of them once. I was out at the market with some girls and we went through a small shop and into an alleyway at the back. There was enough of a breeze for it to feel like we'd just gone back outside into the open, only there was no open out there. We stood and had a chat. One of the boys tried chatting to me, but I wasn't one for talking much with strangers.

Several of the men there worked or owned stalls in the market. They were all the same colour with the same accent. There were no women there, only girls- us. I made polite because they were friends of my friends and that seemed like the right thing to do.

I didn't think any more of it until a few weeks later when Ma', Izeah and I were walking through the market together and I saw one of them by the store. He smiled and winked at me as were walking past, and said 'hiya!' as if we were friends. Ma' smiled and nodded to him, not realising that he was looking at me. I stared straight at him and fell closer in line with Izzy. He was a grown up, a man, not a boy. Most men don't even recognise the young girls that run around under their feet. I was only glad that he never knew my name.

The more I learned from the girls my age the more I knew, but it's not like we could tell the grown ups. I wouldn't even have known how, and there were words we weren't allowed to use. All I knew was that there was a type of man, who I, and the lucky ones of us, learned to be wary of. We recognised them for their colour and their accent and the places they worked.

I felt no guilt in years to come when I branded them with the same slurs that were used against me. Ma's boyfriend used to tell me not to use those words because I knew how they felt, but he also didn't know about the boys in the market. At least if I used those words that attempted to dehumanise me, if I could own them, it meant I could throw them at someone who actually deserved it.

Men marry women, and women marry men. Boys don't marry girls because you don't marry until you're grown up, but boys kiss girls sometimes because it's like practising for when you marry. Then you have children and live a good life. Before the good life comes marrying, before marrying comes engagement, before that comes going out, or dating, or whatever way people phrase it. The meanings change so often.

There were all kinds of words for kissing. Kiss. Snog. Meet. Peck. First base. Cop off. Get in. Get out. In movies, kissing was the end goal, the plot climax, but most of the time in real life it was the beginning. Especially when it came to teenage boys, and even though I had no personal experience of teenage boys I had three sisters who each had a network of friends who knew all about teenage boys. One by one my sisters concluded, and I through them, that kissing was the first part and when you're older you go to the sex, and even though you should wait until you're older, that doesn't mean that kissing isn't still the first part.

So, you start with the dating (most of the time) and then go to the kissing, and then you go to second base, and third and fourth, which vary from person to person because nobody actually knows what they are. Then you get to the being in love, and the marriage and the children and the good life.

Boys kiss girls and girls kiss boys because the other way doesn't work. You can't get to the good life if you don't have a boy and a girl because you can't marry and have children. But then there was love, and in all Ma' taught us about birds and bees and the good life, love never made it into her stories.

Then Tuesday happened. On Tuesdays I did Wild Training after school, whilst Danny stayed behind for music practice. We finished up early so I tidied away the ropes and belays that we had been working with and went to the outdoor gym area where I could see the gates.

I watched Danny reach the gates first, and Lucia come along from a different direction not long after. I climbed down and started to run towards them, and they kissed.

Right on the lips.

It wasn't even an accident. I slowed to a halt and Danny looked up and blushed awkwardly. This wasn't an unusual thing, Danny was easily embarrassed and awkward about most things, but this was different.

We greeted each other without a word and I walked in between the two, as if I could take the strings that tied them together and stare at them, pulling and tugging and trying to figure out what was going on. It was exciting, and I grinned in fascination at the mystery of it. I couldn't take my eyes off Lucia. What was she now?

'Danny she keeps staring at me.'

'Stop it,' Danny shoved me. I looked at them both in turn. 'Hey.' Danny grabbed my shoulder. 'What's going on?'

'You kissed her!'

'Oh jeez,' Lucia said and put her hand over her eyes. 'It's not a big deal okay?'

'Yes it is.' I skipped ahead and started walking backwards. 'You're in love.'

'I'm not- stop it!' Danny said.

'You can't marry her though,' I informed them. 'That's not the way it works. If you can't marry her, the only other reason you would kiss her is if you're in love.'

'I'm sure you'll understand it when you're older,' Lucia said. Danny looked down awkwardly. She reached out and looped her fingers with Lucia for a few seconds and let go again.

Lucia spoke quietly, maybe so quietly that she thought I wouldn't hear. 'Are you embarrassed?'

Danny's shoulders sunk, like someone had just put a heavy chain around her. I didn't know much, but I knew that face. I stopped walking and it took a few more steps for her to realise and almost walk into me. I looked her dead in the eyes, the same awful way that Opal used to do.

'Don't tell Ma',' I said in the lowest tone I could.

Danny nodded. She put her arm around my shoulders to turn me back around homeward, and held on to me for the whole of the journey back.

'Thanks kid,' she said after a while of silence.

'No problem,' I said.

Ma's tall. Da' was short. Izeah is short. She and Dineah grew up around the same height, fluctuating as they ran through their growth spurts, but at nine and eleven Dineah took the lead over our eldest and never looked up again. She kept on growing and Izeah stayed stunted. Opal was still small back then, and nobody really knew where I would fall on the side of our genetics. At thirteen, fifteen and seventeen, Opal was not near as tall as Dineah, who was peaking at 5'8, but some fraction taller than our 5'2'' Izeah. We wouldn't really know who I would follow until I hit puberty, but the fact that people referred to me as 'the little kid' and where astounded when I turned up with them at the high school gates, was probably an indication enough.

'How many sisters have you got?' One of Izzy's classmates gasped.

'Three,' she said proudly.

'She's so little!'

'I've got three cousins,' someone else said.

I don't know why at that moment a memory from my past emerged. Why then? The thought perplexed me. You know that feeling when you set up a long joke an the punch line falls flat? Or you prepare a speech in your head but at the end nobody applauds?

My plan had been to march into high school like a butterfly and shine beneath my sisters legacy. Instead whilst they cooed over me I stared ahead at the dirt on the ground and the shadows in the corners, and a boy in a brown shirt who flitted in and out of my memory. I remember his mouth hanging open as he looked at my suitcases, and a tall, skinny man standing next to him with one hand on his shoulder.

I remember not saying goodbye. He had crossed my mind when we were on our journey first to England... Maybe I expected him to meet us on the other side, and when the other side came it was so busy that I had forgotten about him. I was young then, I could forgive myself, but for some reason it was that moment that I became fixated on his ghost.

Where was he? Why didn't he come to England with us? I searched for his name, one I used to know so fondly, but I couldn't remember it.

What's our cousin's name? I wanted to ask. The guilt of it was falling over me. I wanted to go find him. Why hadn't I gone to find him before? I reached out and grabbed Izeah's hand. The gathering around me parted a little and several pats tried to reassure me that this place wasn't scary, but I didn't care.

'You'll get used to it soon enough,' she said and started to pull me forward out of the crowd. The feeling of people surrounding me seeped from my imagination and into reality. There was smoke somewhere and people moving fast. Izeah had looked behind us as she pulled us forward, until our uncle scooped me up in his arms and nudged Izeah to run forward through the crowd as far as she could. 'Amae,' she paused and her eyes darted from one side of my face to the other. 'What's going on?' she asked in a language that set something burning at the back of my head.

'It's so loud,' I said, because I couldn't figure out a different way to say it. 'Come on let's go somewhere a bit quieter, I'll give you a tour.'

She led me by the hand into the building, and we took a long route up and down some stairs and into the cold chill of the girls toilets. 'Amae,' she put her hand on my head and leant down to my height. 'Amae what's doing on?'

I tried to slow down my breathing. 'I just remembered something,' I said.

'Was it something bad? Somebody there?'

I shook my head. 'Something from before. It's gone now.'

'If you're scared at all, come find me, okay. You can just go to the sixth form reception and ask for me.'

'I'll be fine,' I said, patted my cheeks and smiled. 'I'm big now, I don't need you to look out for me.'

'Yeh, sure,' she ruffled my hair.

The day slipped by, gliding over a horizon of new faces and new names. I buried my accent as deep as I could in hope that this wave of first graders might never have known what went before me. When nightfall came I climbed into bed with Izeah and told her about what had happened.

'I don't remember that,' she shrugged and draped one hand lazily over me. 'Iacob, is his name. We could ask Ma' tomorrow if she's heard from them.'

Tomorrow. I sighed and shuffled down further until the covers swallowed me up. She pulled me tighter and nestled her nose against the back of my neck. Tomorrow seemed like forever away.

I sat on the top of the counter with the weighing scales in hand.

'Five hundred and ten grams of self raising or all purpose flour, with half a teaspoon of baking soda,' Opal said. Her job was to read the ingredients, but instead she was sitting on a chair in the corner reading a book, with the ingredients list on her phone sitting on the worktop. I opened the packet of flour and started to carefully measure it into the scales. 'Two or three eggs.'

Danny opened the fridge, put the egg box on the counter and took one out in each hand. 'Is it two or is it three?' She asked.

'Those are big eggs, so make it two,' Izzy said. 'Smack it on the counter, and then put your thumb in where the cracked bit is and pull it apart.'

'I've cracked eggs before,' Danny retorted.

'Three hundred and fifty millilitres of milk.'

Izzy put the milk and a measuring jug in front of me and took the flour away. On the other side of her Danny had picked out the pieces of eggshell from the bowl and started to whisk it all together.

'Two tablespoons of butter,' our human instruction manual said. I reached over to tap her phone to check the ingredients. She gave me a sideways glance and then pulled it further out of my reach. 'Two tablespoons of butter,' she repeated.

'I heard you!' Izzy said, having not seen our interaction.

'I'm on it,' Danny said. She took a clean spoon and carefully spooned
out two half-heaped chunks of butter into a tiny bowl and put it in the microwave for a few seconds to melt.

'Five tablespoons of sugar and a pinch of salt.'

Izzy took the flour, eggs, and the biggest wooden spoon she could find and started to mix them together. Once they were mixed she poured in the milk and melted butter. When it got running enough she passed it over to Danny who started to whisk it vigorously.

Izzy put the sugar and salt in front of me and Danny held out the bowl. I carefully tipped in the five tablespoons of sugar and tipped a tiny amount of salt into my palm to dust into it.

'Alright,' Izzy said. 'Ready?' She turned on the cooker and put a frying pan on there, and waited for it to heat a little before spreading a marble-sized amount of butter around it. When it started to sizzle she poured in some of the batter and pooled into the middle of the frying pan until it looked about the size of a saucer. I watched the gooey white darken in colour around the edges until it was solid enough for Izzy to shimmy the spatula underneath it and turn it over. Once it was started to brown on both sides she put it onto the plate.

Danny took a turn next. She was rougher with the spatula, and ended up having to fold over the edge of the pancake to make it circular enough to flip. I did the next one, clumsy and half burned but I was happy enough with it.

Opal stepped up next. 'Izzy, Danny, you go sit at the table, I'll do the rest.'

'If you really want.' Izzy shrugged. She took some juice out of the fridge and Danny collected four cups from the cupboard and took them in to the other room.

'Right, come on tiny,' Opal said once they were out the room. 'Strawberries in the fridge, get chopping.'

I took the strawberries and rinsed them under the tap, then laid them out on the chopping board. 'Cut them into four pieces longways, don't forget to chop off the leafy bit at the top.'

I did as she said and waited. Once all of the pancakes were on the plate she scattered the strawberries over the top and drizzled the honey in a criss-cross pattern. After that she took the biggest knife she could find and carefully sliced six pieces straight down the middle.

She carried them into the other room and put them in the middle of the table, with each of us a plate and cup in front of us.

Once we'd taken our seats we waited the customary few seconds to not look like 'hungry pigs' as Ma' used to say, and relished in our triumph. Danny was the first to pick up her fork and all at once we followed and stabbed for the biggest pieces.