Dragon was the toughest kid at our school. At fifteen, he
was as wide as three boys and as tall as two. He had a moon-round face with a
double chin and a pug nose.
To my twelve-year-old eyes, he was the biggest kid I’d
ever seen. He was called Dragon because he always wore one of those transfer
tattoos on his right forearm. The ones that you have to wet the back of, then
rub. They sold them at our local Post Office, but nobody else ever bought the
dragon ones. The last kid who did had an unfortunate accident on the geodome.
He hit the ground and broke his nose.
Dragon had an older brother in the sixth form called
Donk, after that guy from Crocodile
Dundee, but he left last year, so now Dragon was in charge.
I didn’t have much to do with him, though. I was the
quietest girl in school. I wasn’t always that way. At primary I was quite
talkative, but for some reason I tended to get things wrong – or the way I said
things was wrong. Either way, people often took offence or laughed at me. I
didn’t like either reaction much, so eventually I just found it easier to stay
quiet.
At eleven, I went to secondary. I took this as my fresh
start. I promised myself I wouldn’t say or do anything stupid ever again from my
first day at big school. One year in and I was doing pretty well. Although, I
did turn up on the first day wearing my school tie. I didn’t realise it was
optional for girls, and I rather liked it. But apparently that wasn’t cool, and
by first break I went to the toilets to hide it in my bag. I haven’t worn it
since, though I still think it would be better if all girls did. They look
well smart, and not in a geeky sense.
Anyway, like I said, I didn’t have much to do with
Dragon. Not until I accidentally got in his way.
I’d just been to the canteen to get myself a baked potato
with cheese and beans. They had green jelly too, which was weird. It was
usually jam roll with cream, and I don’t like cake much. So I took a helping,
with custard.
I was carrying my tray outside to the benches near the
playing field. It was a really sunny day and my friend, Alice, was saving me a
space at our favourite one. Alice was like me, she didn’t say very much either,
but that was because she had a really pronounced lisp and everyone teased her
about it. Even our geography teacher did once, then clasped his hand across his
mouth and practically grovelled when he realised she could lodge a formal
complaint with the head of Student Welfare.
She didn’t, though. Alice isn’t that sort of person. She
just acknowledged that he was a prick, and lives happily in the knowledge that
she will probably earn three times his salary once she graduates with a
chemistry degree from Cambridge.
Anyway, I was crossing the path outside D Block at the
same moment Dragon decided to punch this ginger kid in the gut. He came flying
towards me faster than I could step out of the way. The next thing I know, I’m
watching my tray somersaulting in slow motion up into the air. There goes my potato
and each, individual, bean.
It lands on this kid’s head, my green jelly clashing starkly
with his red hair.
The sound of me and this kid is silence. The sound of the
onlookers is a steady roar of laughter, like chimpanzees on too many E numbers.
The sound of Mr. Aldercott, Head of Maths, is like a booming lion roaring
through the schoolyard jungle.
They send me to the nurse’s office because I’ve been
winded. It’s a misdiagnosis. Really I’ve been wounded. Well, my pride has. I
even have some jelly in my own hair.
They send the other kid home. His mother is taking legal
action against the school, apparently. Alice came to visit me, to tell me that
Dragon had been suspended.
It made me feel mad knowing that Dragon got suspended,
yet everyone in the school would keep looking up to him. He’d been suspended
twice already this year and his kudos only increased. Everyone became more
afraid of him. Yet I had done nothing wrong – I had been an innocent victim –
and people would laugh at me in the corridors for the next three weeks as the
‘Green Jelly Girl’. Oh, such hilarity.
Alice sympathised with my situation. She wanted to speak
out against the injustice, but couldn’t, because of her affliction. She told me
that once she had earned her Nobel Peace Prize, she would name and shame all
those who had harmed us at school and make them pay with public humiliation
from the likes of presidents and film stars.
I took a little comfort in this.
When the bell rang, we walked home together as far as the
park, then I left her to cut across to my back yard.
I dragged my heels because it was Thursday, which meant
fish fingers for tea, and I hated those. Mum only bought them because my brother
liked them. They were the only dish she could get him to eat peas with, and peas
were the only vegetable he didn’t throw at the wall.
I stopped at the sandpit and almost drew a smiley face in
it with my shoe, but thought better of it when I remembered what Dad had told
me about the local cats using it as a litter tray. Everything in our village
seemed a little less than perfect. I wondered whether other places were like this.
Was the whole country a little bit less than it was supposed to be, or was it
just round our way?
I continued on across the park. A tarmac path ran along
the opposite side, with a painted line for bicycles. Five houses backed onto
this path, their gates hidden behind hedges and overgrown brambles that the
Council were apparently responsible for cutting back, but never did.
As I reached for the iron hoop of our gate, I stopped
because I heard a noise. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, so I stayed really
still and tried to stop breathing so that I could listen better.
It sounded like rustling, followed by a sort of kissing
sound. I looked around to see where it was coming from, and saw a big blue and
white stripy ball in the undergrowth to my right. I turned towards it and
watched.
The ball seemed to get larger and then smaller, as though
something were pressing down on it, like a space hopper. Only there was nothing
on top of the ball. Suddenly, a band of pink appeared at the bottom and I
realised that it was a pair of buttocks. A second later a red cap appeared on
top of the ball and all became clear.
It wasn’t a ball at all. Just a really fat kid in a
striped top, crouched down amongst the bushes.
I walked up behind him.
“What are you doing?” I asked, against my better
judgement.
Dragon spun to face me with a look of surprise. Only, I
hadn’t known it was Dragon until he did that. When I saw it was him, I think I
was even more surprised. Or afraid.
“What do you want?” he asked.
Most of me wanted to run to my gate and hide behind it.
But a very small part of me didn’t want him to know how scared I was of him,
and it was this tiny little piece of me that won.
“I want to know what you’re doing,” I said, as calmly as
I could. “Why are you sitting in the bushes?”
“What’s it to you?”
“This is my house. And you’re on my property,” I lied a
little.
“Oh,” he said, squinting along the row of hidden gates.
“You live here?”
I nodded.
He glanced back into the bushes and then back at me.
“Nothing. I’m not doing nothing here.”
“Looked like you were.”
“Well, I wasn’t.”
“Okay.”
I watched him scratch the back of his head. He looked
like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t.
“I’m going now, okay?”
“Okay.”
And he did. I watched him walk off across the park,
glancing back occasionally. When he was completely out of sight, I went back to
my gate and the joy of smelly fish fingers.
When Dragon was suspended, it was like the entire school
breathed a sigh of relief. There was a lot more giggling and silliness. The
boys would play-fight more whilst kicking their footballs at lunch, and more of
the girls – the ones that weren’t so popular – would leave the safety of the
library to eat their lunches in the sunshine. It was as though someone had
removed the shark from the tank.
Because it was Friday, Alice and I went to the Post Office
before going home. We bought ice pops and sat on the bench trying to turn our
tongues the darkest shade of blue we could.
I told her about Dragon in our bushes. She said he was
probably looking for the teeth he had kicked out of a kid last week.
Apparently, if he could find them, they could make dentures out of them and
then his family wouldn’t prosecute him for ‘loss of face’.
I said that was probably unlikely, because it had only
been one tooth, and technically it was a milk tooth anyway and the kid had
slipped over whilst running away from Dragon – he hadn’t physically held him
down and knocked the tooth out of him. Plus that had happened on the other side
of the park, nowhere near my back yard.
A little bit later, once we had finished our ice pops, we
said goodbye and arranged to watch movies on Sunday afternoon. Then I walked
across the park and went to open my gate. I looked around before letting myself
in. There was Dragon again, sitting in the bushes, just like before.
So, just like before, I walked up and asked him what he was doing.
“Fuck, would you stop doing that?”
I wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t swear, but I thought
he would probably hit me, and it would also sound very un-cool, and I wanted to
be cool. Or at least, cool-er. So I didn’t. Instead I just said: “Would you
stop trespassing?”
“I’m not.”
“This is part of my house, and you’re on it.”
“It’s part of the park.”
“No it’s not.”
I was determined to win.
“Look, just piss off would you.”
He won.
I took a step back and he returned to bending in the
undergrowth.
“Please tell me what you’re doing,” I asked, changing my
approach. I really did want to know.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll tell your parents, and then they’ll get
involved, and it will frighten her.”
“Who?”
“No one. Now go away, would you.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll tell them that you’re
trespassing.”
“I’m in the park, you lunatic!”
“They’ll still come and ask you questions.”
“And I’ll punch your teeth out.”
“You wouldn’t hit a girl.”
He straightened up and stared at me. I suddenly felt very
uncertain about that last statement.
I heard a mewing sound.
“Have you got a cat?” I asked.
He scratched the back of his head and looked at his shoes
for a moment.
“Look,” he eventually said. “Come here.”
Carefully, I picked my way through the tangled weeds
until I could see where he was pointing.
“See that hole over there?”
I could. It went down beneath a crumbling redbrick wall,
half-buried in the mud, and held back by an ivy-covered garden fence.
“Yeah.”
“My cat’s down there.”
I heard another mewing sound.
“What’s it doing down there?”
“She’s having kittens.”
My eyes widened.
“Why’s she having them down there?”
“When cats have kittens, they make a nest – somewhere
they feel safe.”
“She feels safe down there?”
“Guess so. It’s dark and well hidden.”
“Why didn’t she make her nest at your house? Is she
frightened of you?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“It’s not stupid. Everyone else is.”
He looked at me a little funny then.
“No, she’s not scared of me. But the problem is that if
she has the kittens down there, they might not get out, or she might not be
able to get the right food. Or, if it gets too cold… well, they might not be
safe down there. I need to get her out.”
I thought about this for a moment. “What about milk?”
“Tried that. And food. She didn’t go for it.”
I thought about it some more. I tried to think about what
our cat liked. He was a big, fat old thing that sat on the window most of the
day and watched the cars go by. White, with black and grey splodges.
“Do you want to see my pussy?” I asked.
His head snapped round.
“What?”
“My pussy, would you like to see it?”
He just stared at me, eyes wide. It was a little
frightening.
“He’s just inside. His name’s Thomas.”
Dragon let out a loud hoot and creased up, covering his face
with his hand.
“Shit, kid!” he laughed.
“What?” I wasn’t sure what I’d said that was so funny,
but people usually took things I said wrong anyway, so it wasn’t new to me. I
just waited for him to calm down.
“You know what a pussy is, right?”
I frowned, but didn’t answer.
“It’s another word for your… well, your fanny.” He
grinned.
“No it’s not!”
“Yeah. It is.”
I felt my cheeks burning. I hate language, it always
seems to mean things you didn’t think it did.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said.
“Yeah, I know.”
I didn’t ask if he wanted to see it again. He seemed to
be concentrating on the hole, anyway.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Don’t know.”
“She’ll probably be okay down there. I promise I’ll bring
her food.”
He looked at me funny again. “You’d do that?”
“Course I would.”
“You like animals?”
“Course I do.”
“Me too,” he said.
I looked at him a little funny then, too. I’d never
really thought of Dragon liking animals. Animals were soft and kind. Dragon
wasn’t.
“Even rabbits?” I asked.
“Err, sure. Rabbits. Whatever.” He shrugged.
His cat mewed again.
“Shit,” he sighed.
I wanted to tell him that he swore an awful lot, but I
didn’t.
After a while, he stood up straight and scratched the
back of his head again. “Look, I’ll bring you some tins of cat food, okay? Two
tins. You put half down each morning. If it goes by the afternoon, you put the
other half down, okay?”
“Okay.”
“But you stay – and you watch to see if she takes it.
You’re not meals on wheels for every badger and fox in the neighbourhood,
alright?”
“Alright.”
“I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He was, too. He cycled home and returned with two tins of
supermarket own brand. We put a little on a saucer and placed it by the
opening. We sat there the whole weekend. I even forgot about going to Alice’s
to watch films.
Dragon didn’t say much, and I didn’t say much. So we got
on fine.
I went back to school on the Monday, but Dragon was
suspended, so he didn’t have to go. I didn’t tell anybody what we had done that
weekend, not even Alice. It wasn’t that I didn’t want anyone to know that I was
sitting in the park with Dragon, but I was worried what Dragon might say if I
did. They might make a comment about him hanging out with a younger kid – a
girl – and if they did, he would probably hit them, and then he’d be expelled
for good. Alice said he was on his ‘last warning’.
When I came home that day, Dragon had gone. So had the
saucer. When I leaned down to the hole to listen, I couldn’t hear anything. I
tried calling into the hole, but no mewing came back.
I felt a little sad about it. I thought maybe Dragon
would have wanted to tell me what had happened. We weren’t friends, I guess.
But we had still sat there together all weekend. I wasn’t as afraid of him as I
had been. He’d told me things, like how to get the chain back on a bike when it
falls off, and how to tell if a cat is pregnant.
I wanted to ask him why he was always so mean to people.
I wanted to know why he liked animals so much, but didn’t like humans. But I
didn’t have the courage. I didn’t want him to get mad at me or storm off. We
all have the right to keep secrets.
On Wednesday I got told off by Mrs. Martin, my English
teacher, because I wasn’t concentrating. I was looking out of the window
instead, because I was thinking about what had happened to Matilda, Dragon’s
cat. I hoped she was okay, and that Dragon hadn’t done anything bad to her. I
didn’t think he had, because he did like animals, and he seemed very concerned
about her. But he was still Dragon. Maybe he did something by accident, because
he was so big.
When Thursday came, I felt really sad, and twice as much
because it was fish fingers for tea, and I really hated those. So I said
goodbye to Alice and walked across the park. I stopped to look at the sandpit,
wondering whether Matilda ever used it as a toilet. Perhaps I would see her if
I waited long enough.
I pulled the latch on our back gate and was about to go
in when someone came up behind me. I turned, surprised.
It was Dragon.
“Hey,” he said. He was holding a cardboard box in his
arms.
“Hey,” I replied.
“I just wanted to come by.”
I wasn’t sure why, so I didn’t ask.
He looked down at the box and then back at me.
“She came home in the end,” he started. “But she only
brought one kitten with her.”
“Only one?”
“Yeah. I came back looking for the rest, but they… Well,
they didn’t make it. It happens sometimes.”
I felt my eyes prickle a little, like they do when you
hear really sad news, like when someone dies.
“Um. Look, I just wanted to say thanks and everything.
For helping me out.”
“That’s okay.”
“And, uh. Well, I wondered if you’d like this?” He
stepped forward and lifted the lid on the box. Inside was a tiny tabby kitten.
“Only, we’ve got plenty of cats, and my mum said we can’t keep any more.”
“Is that the one she brought home?”
“Yeah.”
It looked so fragile, wrapped in a piece of cloth. Its
eyes were shut and it opened its tiny pink mouth to make a soft hissing sound.
“She’s still a little young. I need to take her back home
in a minute. But I wanted you to see her – I thought maybe you could ask your
parents.”
“I will!” I smiled brightly. It was the most beautiful
thing I had ever seen.
“Cool.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’d better go now.”
“Okay.”
“Hey, stay still a minute.”
I did as I was told. He tucked the box under one arm and
reached forward with his free hand. He plucked something from behind my ear and
gave it to me. For a moment I couldn’t see what it was.
“For me?”
He scratched the back of his head and shrugged.
“Sure. Thought you could maybe wear it to school some
time.”
He waved and turned to walk back across the park.
I stood, holding the dragon transfer in my hand. I could
wear that to school and be the only person who wouldn’t get beaten up because
of it. Nobody would ever pick on me again.
I put it in my pocket, not sure whether I ever would or
not.
