Keeping the House by Tice Cin

Author:Tice Cin [Cin, Tice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary fiction;debut;heroin;drug trade;gangs;Turkish;Max Porter;queer;coming-of-age;Turkish Cypriot;mafia;Goodfellas;Tottenham;London;Broadwater Farm;Cyprus;Top Boy;Yardie;Spread the Word;poet;single mother;grime;Derek Owusu;Irenosen Okojie;Yara Rodrigues Fowler;Rachel Long;Jay Bernard
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2021-08-25T20:39:41+00:00

‌Damla: meeting Cemile, 2000

When Anne comes in she tells me I have a visitor. A new friend for a new century. I ask her what’s the word for century when it’s in the thousands and she doesn’t know. Bin-something.

I meet her, hair first. She stands at arm’s length from her dad, Ufuk, and her mum, who doesn’t give her name to me. It’s rude that the girl laughs at me. Apparently I stare, and Ufuk whispers about creepy kids who stare.

—Tell her if she looks like that for too long and the wind changes she’ll get stuck with that şeytan face. Go on, talk to her, Cemile.

Cemile. Like the girl in my class, Jamilah. Jamilah for kind, beautiful. I don’t know if Cemile is kind. What a nice name. Reminds me of the window. Our garden has cemile, too. We often collect the fallen petals: İpek, Erhan and I. When we have gathered the petals, we put them in a glass of water until we put so many that the petals sink to the bottom and go brown. I always wanted to see what they looked like after they went brown but Nene throws them away by then.

Cemile has turned up in a sheepskin coat and when she bends over to pick up one of my drawings, she looks like the Simpsons’ dog with stilts for legs. We look at each other, knowing about our two-way looking. Those drawings were supposed to be hidden away by now, drawings of tents and rabbits getting lost. We keep looking at each other looking; our longest look eventually broken by her eyeing my tents and rabbits. My eyes pass hers to look at the bike behind her. Her dad has brought it in and I can tell Anne is annoyed that an outside thing has come inside.

Nobody ever taught me to cycle. It’s never too late, no, but I don’t want to learn. Nene says it is expensive buying a bike, what for when the English government give you buses; sometimes you can even go with trains. If you want to go to the park, you can run to the park. If you don’t want to run, then you can walk through the alley that takes you down to Lordship Rec, if you walk even more you can go all the way through the grass to the bit where the Moselle needs to be pumped through so that it gets the right kind of water in, instead of the wrong kind of water. Brown. Murky. Some shoes floating. All different types of shoes, brown leather ones and Velcro black and whites. Floating on the water, chucked there by someone who isn’t grateful for what they have. I still want to take the bike, though, so when Cemile offers to ride with me perched on the back, I’m gone as soon as Anne lets me.

Us kids in twosbiking like whistles

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