Celia2

When Mrs Pilchin, the school dinner lady, wasn’t tastin’ ‘a bit of this or a bit of that’, as she liked to call stuffing her gob with chips and pizza and whatever else flitted into her man sized paws in the school canteen, she smoked fag after fag and let her mouth run like a long-running gramophone. There was no end to the juicy bits of gossip she snacked on working in the engine room of the school. She could hardly wait to tell the latest and watched the second hand tick down to 13.45. She carefully picked off her nest of a hat that ostensibly protected school children from swallowing any of her springy blue hair, but did not have time to take off her smear stained coverall before she bustled, all hips and stubby snowman arms, up Mountblow Hill, blowing out of the side of her mouth like a volcano. She lit up a little Embassy Mild outside number 10 for her nerves, licked her lips and arranged her face into an appropriate sombre mask before banging on the door and chapping at the letterbox, like a highwayman. She had news for that stuck-up next door neighbour of hers about her precious niece getting pulled up in front of the headmaster, Mr Ball, for fighting and refusing to take the belt and getting threatened with expulsion and if she didn’t like it so much the better. By the time the door had opened and Mrs Pilchin’s mind had chewed over these matters she was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea and a cheap Digestive biscuit she’d become a bit tearful and sorry for the poor orphan. Auntie Margaret had heed-and-hummed as she’d not only filled in the blanks, but overwritten them so thoroughly that what happened to Celia at school was a background noise to cosmic events in which she was a centrifugal force of speculating and knowing that those Hepburn girls were up to no good and going to come to a bad end.

Celia trailed slowly down the back lanes avoiding the steady stream of other pupils laughing and joking as they went home as if getting expelled was contagious. She didn’t know what she was going to say to Aunt Margaret. When she looked into the shade of the low winter sun at the old brown-capped bulrushes in the canal pointing to the sky the thought crept into her mind that perhaps it would be better… It would be sore, of course, and she’d struggle and her mouth would be filled with mud, but her body would drift down and settle like silent sediment at the bottom.

‘Fucking gypsy slag.’ Jo was matching her stride for stride, on the footpath at the other side of the canal.

Helen, a curly helmet of hair bigger than her sister and a mouth moving up and down like barbed-wire, was beside her pushing her along, whispering and whipping he into a cur frenzy so that it was a surprise when she spoke, bridging the cap between them with wheezed matter of fact words:

‘We’re going to do you.’

Celia tried not to look at them. She could go back the way over the old bridge and up and loop round the school again. They were locals but she was pretty sure she could lose them that way. Although her legs shook her feet seemed to make the decision and kept going steadily forward. The bridge over the canal wasn’t far. Out of the side of her eyes she saw they’d linked arms and bits of their cackling drifted over the water and stabbed at her ears and heart. She fingered the filigree of the chain round her neck. There was heaviness in her breathing and strangeness in her head that weighed her down and made thinking impossible. She felt blinkered as a horse and didn’t dare look at anything but the path in front. Round and round a mantra went like a carousel in her head.

‘Holy Jesus Meek and Mild please help this little child’.

Helen’s lips were as curled and fixed into a smear of distaste and her corvine eyes darted this way and that, waiting. When Celia came over the bridge she shoved Jo towards her, screeching:

‘Let’s kill the cow.’

Celia ran and ran, not looking back, until she felt that her lungs would burst open like sunflower seeds in the hot sun. She only slowed down when Auntie Margaret’s house came into view. She was glad to be home, but her face was all sticky and sweat ran down her back and her hair felt like Worzel Gummidges straw head. Usually Celia would have flounced in and sat in the living room with the telly on whilst Auntie made her a cuppa before dinner. Now she didn’t know what to do with her body and timidly chapped on the front door and waited. With her head down she noticed how mucky her once clean shoes were and was sure that Auntie would be angry with that. She heard Auntie Margaret’s feet sloshing up the hall in her old slippers and that made her feel all sick as if she should run and hide. The door opened slowly and the clean carbolic smell of Auntie Margaret made her want to bury her head in her lap and beg forgiveness. Auntie Margaret’s knees clicked as she crouched down and her ring finger tickled her under the chin so that she looked up at her. Auntie Margaret’s eyes, hot malachite stones with flecks of gold, were swimming in such sadness that Celia gulped and couldn’t look away.

‘Stuff and nonsense.’

Auntie Margaret pulled Celia gently over the threshold and into the warmth of the hall. Before Celia could even get her anorak off she bundled her into the straight back green leather chair with the two electric bars on. That’s when she knew it was serious. Only invalids were allowed to put two bars on. Even then it would involve lots of muttering. Uncle George when he was well enough to venture out of the bedroom usually sat there. ‘Dad’s seat’ felt all wrong to Celia. She’d have much rather have sat with her feet up on the old grey mottled couch and picked at her feet whilst reading the Jackie and watched the telly. Auntie Margaret said you couldn’t do the two things at once; although she knitted and watched telly, it seemed that didn’t count.

‘Are you alright lass?’

Celia didn’t know how she knew, but she was glad she did. She wanted to say that she’d be all right as long as Auntie stopped all her fussing. Tears ran down her onto her nose and dripped onto her mouth. She didn’t want to wipe them in case Auntie Margaret noticed and sent her away for being too much bother.

‘Why does she hate me? Why does everyone hate me?’ The words came out snot- nosed wrong, running together and barely making sense to Celia.

Auntie Margaret’s arms thick as a man’s from a life time of plunging washing in and out of a tub, battering it into submission and squeezing it through the roller into cartoon flat- cakes of clothes, held her gentle as a baby, her bum nudging her up and along the seat until there was no more room and Celia found herself sitting rocking on her lap.

‘Cilly-Cilly’ purred Auntie Margaret stroking Celia’s hair up and down, up and down so that they both fell into a kind of trance, ‘That little Hepburn girl is just jealous of you, because she isn’t as pretty as you and she never will be. It’s a shame that her mother spoils her. Spoils all of them kids. And truth be out she’s not the brightest either.'

‘Why did she call me a “gypo-bastard”?’

Auntie Margaret cleared her throat, jiggled herself about like hen’s plumage on an egg and flicking one of the electric bars off, held her even tighter.

‘Maybe it’s time you talked to Papa.’

Auntie Margaret’s words felt like a blow to Celia because she needed no reminding her mum and dad were dead. Her face reddened but not before she’d worked out that Auntie Margaret was talking about Uncle George. She could see no reason to speak to him. They were like two lodgers in different ship’s cabins. They had an understanding. He never spoke to her unless it was about small things. She didn’t speak to him, unless it was strictly necessary.

‘I will.’ Celia tried to sound enthusiastic.

Auntie Margaret lifted her straight up and out like a Toby Jug and placed her down in front of her. ‘Go on then.’ She flicked at her back as if she was a clockwork toy and needed propelling on. ‘And take off your anorak and brush your hair,’ she flung in as an afterthought.