22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [47]
Yesterday, the last day of school before the holidays, his teacher called him a brat. A heathen child who needed punishing for his rudeness. She told him to take his shoe off, and then smacked his legs with it. He had bitten her hand, grabbed his shoe and run away. She came to the house after that, with her hand in a bandage. The enemy told her he was sorry and that Aurek would be punished.
Aurek doesn’t care. They are all wrong. He is not a heathen child, whatever that means. He is a wild boar. All thick black hair and wet snout, scraping the earth, finding tree roots in the dark.
He spits on the ground, rubs a finger in it and wipes mud across his face. Through a gap in the metal he can see Silvana frowning, looking up the garden.
She walks up to the shelter but doesn’t crawl inside to be with him. She bangs on the boards and starts an avalanche of water droplets that fall on him. Aurek digs into the muddy ground and curls up.
‘Aurek,’ Silvana calls. ‘Peter is here. He has brought your clothes back. Why don’t you come out and say hello?’
Aurek ignores her. He longs for the encircling safety of the trees of his past. In the forest the trees spoke to him in green whispers, telling secrets that could crack the bones of those that did not belong. He walked among them and felt their words like falling leaves, soft and understanding. He does not like this England where he must wear his school cap straight, sit up and recite the Lord’s Prayer from memory. He does not belong in a country where he must not swing his legs on the bus, where he mustn’t eat with his fingers, must endure the smart of a ruler across his knuckles in class and not fight back. He digs the ground with his fingers again, angrily scraping away at the earth.
‘Is Aurek in there?’
Aurek stops still. It is a man’s voice he has heard.
His mother replies. ‘Yes. Yes, he’s hiding. But he will come out soon.’
‘Don’t worry. We can come back another time. Perhaps he’d like to come to play at the pet shop?’
Through a gap, Aurek sees Peter and his father standing together.
‘Why don’t you crawl in with him?’ Peter’s father says.
‘Dad, you know I can’t fit through that gap. Hey, Aurek! You coming out?’
Aurek considers what to do. He’d like to see Peter, but it’s not easy to change out of his pig shape. He can’t bring himself to be a boy just yet.
He watches Tony Benetoni grinning at his mother. He can see the man’s slicked shiny hair, his large nose, his white teeth in his open mouth. Peter is sucking on a pink stick of rock. Aurek hears his mother apologizing and watches them walk away. He grunts, snarls, lets out a yell and rolls over in the dirt like an animal in pain.
After they have gone, Silvana puts the flowers Tony brought in a jam jar on the windowsill, arranging them for a while, shifting first one dahlia and then another as if she is organizing a complex colour scheme, when in reality they are all white.
She can’t remember the last time anybody bought her flowers. In her grandmother’s village, dahlias were always known as bachelor’s flowers. Giving white ones was a single man’s way of telling a girl he liked her. She allows herself to dwell on this and then dismisses it as ridiculous. Of course he wouldn’t know about Polish traditions.
She had white flowers for her wedding, an armful of peppery-scented carnations. Janusz’s father had grown them in his garden. She moves the flowers from the windowsill onto the kitchen table and climbs the stairs with a cup of tea for Janusz.
‘Are you awake?’
Janusz stirs in bed and sits up, yawning.
‘I’ll be glad when I don’t have to work the night shift any more. I don’t like sleeping in the afternoon. Did I hear voices downstairs?’
She puts the teacup down, perches on the edge of the bed and thinks of the flowers again.
‘Tony brought Peter to play with Aurek. But Aurek was in the shelter at