The Ant Colony. Jenny Valentine
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look at me, didn’t ask how old I was. Nobody looked at me. It was like magic, like finding an invisible cloak.
It was the opposite of home.
It’s what I’d longed for, for weeks and weeks, to be the blind spot in a room, the black hole in the universe, to be absent without trying to at all.
I wanted to stay like that forever.
Later, I stood on the pavement outside the pub and tried to make sense of where I was. I remember pretending the road was a river, fed by other smaller roads like the streams that run off the hills, but thick with cars and bikes and buses instead of water. I remember thinking I’d had too much to drink.
Across the street a black plastic sign with pink writing said The Kyprianos Hotel. There was a fracture in the plastic and a round hole, like someone had thrown a tennis ball in there, or a rock. I had my hand around all the money in my pocket. I could afford it, I knew that, maybe not for long, but I suddenly needed to sleep.
I’d never stayed in a hotel before. It didn’t amount to much, apart from some soap in a box and a plastic shower cap, and a bathroom where you had to practically stand on the loo seat if you wanted to close the door. I didn’t close the door because there was nobody watching. I was completely and utterly on my own.
I almost regretted it then. I very nearly decided I’d done the wrong thing. But I swerved away from it at the last minute and kept my eyes on the road.
If only I’d learned to do that earlier.
I couldn’t sleep because there was too much going on outside the window – a whole orchestra of sirens and yelling and footsteps and door slams and engines. I wondered how anyone ever slept. I stared at a clamshell stain in one corner of the ceiling and thought about becoming someone new with nothing to be ashamed of, no past, just a future.
I thought about how weird it was, to be missing in one place while you’re right there in another.
I was waiting for my mum. That’s what I was doing.
I was pressing patterns into a piece of old chewing gum with the bottom of my shoe. There were more than nineteen pieces of gum on the square of pavement outside the bar. I was counting them.
I wasn’t allowed in cos I’m underage. That’s why I was waiting outside in the black doorway in the freezing cold. She was in there for ages. Mr Thing and her weren’t friends any more, which meant she’d also lost her job and we had to leave the flat. Things happen that way a lot because Mum’s good at putting all of her eggs in one boyfriend.
We went so she could collect her wages and they had one more massive row while I stood outside counting spat out gum, trying not to listen. When she stormed out her mascara had slipped and the end of her nose was red, and she was halfway through a sentence about what a something he was.
When she saw me she rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and cracked a smile. She’s got nice teeth, my mum, all straight and small. Not like my mouth, which is still full of holes and frilly edges, even though I’m ten already. I hope I get teeth like her when I’m finished. I hope I hurry up.
“Let’s go,” Mum’s pretty teeth said. “Let’s spend some of his money, quick.”
She got me by the hand and we walked really fast across the road, and I thought she was saying stuff to me that I couldn’t hear.
“What?” I said, and she turned to me and I saw she had her mobile out already.
We packed before we went to see Mr Thing cos Mum’d been expecting it and she’d helped herself to a few extras out of his house, like towels and wine and stuff. We’d stashed our bags in a pub.
She phoned around and found a place, quick as a flash. She’s clever like that.
“Small apparently,” she said, and then licked her lips. “Like we could afford anything else”.
We lugged everything from the pub and stood outside the house with our suitcases. I looked at Mum, her big black glasses reflecting the sun, a little smudge of lipstick on her teeth when she smiled. I didn’t have time to point it out cos she rang a couple of bells and this lizard man in a pair of faded jeans appeared in the basement.
He stood there talking to her. I swear he was trying to see up her skirt. I tried to tell her, to pull her a bit out of the way, but she just said, “Not now!” sort of through her grin, so I glared at him instead. He was the landlord and I didn’t like him at first, smarmy old scale-face called Steve.
The corridor smelled funny, of cabbage and pot noodle and then something else like bleach with flowers in it. There was a big stack of old letters so the door couldn’t open all the way. Steve kicked it to one side with his cowboy boot and it fanned out over the floor. The carpet was the colour of a camel and looked like a camel had been eating it. He said it needed to be “refurbished” and when he said the word, he flowered his arms around like we might see it change before our very eyes, but we didn’t. There was a bike against the wall, with no front tyre and no saddle. It made me think of dinosaur bones in the desert. It was locked to the radiator with a big big chain.
“That’s Mick’s,” he said. “He lives below you. The rest of it is in his kitchen.”
We were on our way upstairs when an old lady came through the front door. It was only me that turned round to see. Her little dog started sniffing around all the envelopes and lifted its leg for a pee. It made me laugh, the sound of it landing. I didn’t tell. The old lady winked at me and tickled the dog and jingled her keys and went into her flat.
Our house was at the top. Steve carried one of Mum’s bags and she took one of mine. I dragged the other one up with two hands cos it was easier than lifting and it made this sound, scratch-thump, scratch-thump, on every step.
There was a loo, straight ahead, like as soon as you walked in, actually a bathroom, a kitchen to the left and a room with a sofa bed in it. I like sofa beds cos they’re a secret and you can have a bedroom any time you want, night or day. This one was a weird peachy colour that wasn’t so nice, but I didn’t mind cos it was bigger than our old one and it didn’t have such sharp corners.
“What do you think, Mum?” I said. “It’s all right, isn’t it?”
She frowned at me for calling her Mum in public and then she said to Steve, “We’ll take it.”
They shook hands and she did that laugh she does for boys only, which sounds like tiny stones landing on the high bit of a piano.
After she handed over the money and Steve handed over the key and left, she did a bit of ranting. That’s what I call it when she’s angry and she talks like she’s forgotten I’m there or I could be anyone, or something.
She said that maybe this was what Steve meant by “furnished” – one crap sofa, rubbish in the bins, not even a table, a couple of plates – but she could think of another name for it. She couldn’t believe how low she’d sunk. She said the place was filthy. She said, how did we know he wasn’t just re-letting to us while the people who really lived there were out at work?
“Huh!” she said, like a cross sort of laughing. “Imagine them coming home to you and me.”
While she ranted I did our Mary Poppins trick. I call it that cos there’s a bit I really like in the film where Mary has a bag made out of carpet and it’s full of stuff you’d never fit in a bag in real life, lamps and flowerpots and everything. My bag is a bit like that. Unpacking it never seems to end and there’s all sorts of stuff you can fling about until it feels more like home. Me and Mum’s favourite thing in that bag was a fold-up cardboard star with holes cut out. It was white when we got it and I painted it ages ago, when I was like six, and even though I didn’t do such a great job of it I never let her throw it away. It goes over the light