Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

Author:Stephen Kelman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Literary, Coming of Age, Fiction
ISBN: 9780547737423
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2011-07-19T02:10:22+00:00

Lydia was killing her Dance Club costume. She had the scissors and she was slicing and cutting like a crazy shark. Her eyes were all wet and she kept stopping to pray. It felt like a crazy dream. You couldn’t even move, you just had to keep watching for what would happen next. It was like the time Abena stuck the coat-hanger wire up her nose to make it go like an obruni nose (she thought that was how they got them that shape). Everybody knew it would never work, they were just waiting for something big to go wrong. It was like she’d lost her mind.

I kicked the door. I had to stop her before she got too crazy to come back from.

Lydia: ‘Happy now?’

Me: ‘What are you doing?’

Lydia: ‘What does it look like? You won’t believe it wasn’t blood. You think I’m a liar. Do you believe me now?’

Me: ‘Don’t you want to keep it? I thought you loved it.’

Lydia: ‘No I don’t, it’s stupid. I hate Dance Club anyway. It’s all stupid.’

I didn’t understand what was happening, I just helped her anyway. We took her parrot costume on the balcony. It was all in pieces like something dead. It was a long way to fall. When it hit the bottom it would all be over and you could start again. Both the two of us threw the pieces off. We watched them fall like big slow rain. Rain always washes the blood away in the end. There were some smaller kids down below. They let our raindrops fall on them and picked them up and made them back into feathers. They chased each other with them like crazy parrots and threw them like the lightest bombs.

Lydia: ‘Don’t tell anyone what I did, will you?’

Me: ‘Do you know who it came from?’

Lydia: ‘No, I swear to God. All I did was take the clothes to the launderette, that’s it. It was only a test.’

Me: ‘My coat wasn’t stolen. I threw it down the rubbish pipe.’

Lydia: ‘Why?’

Me: ‘I don’t have to tell you if you don’t have to tell me.’

Lydia: ‘Fine.’

Me: ‘Jordan threw a cat down the rubbish pipe once.’

Lydia: ‘No he didn’t, he’s just bluffing you. You’re so gullible.’

We kept watching until the smaller kids gave up and threw the feathers down. All the landed pieces looked like dead bodies just asleep. I said a sorry inside my head but it wasn’t sad anymore, it was strong. Strong to protect us from whatever came after, like an alligator tooth for all of us.

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