Poking Seaweed with a Stick and Running Away from the Smell Read Online Free Page B

something important to tell us and that important thing was that, at only nine years old, Fiona was dead. She said that we should try not to be scared, sometimes terrible things like that just happened to people and nobody knew why and that’s when Timmy Strachan put his hand up and asked Mrs Cameron why God let terrible things like that just happen to little girls at nine years old and again we all wished he would just sit on his arse and mind his own business. Then Mrs Cameron said we should take out ‘ The Folk of the Faraway Tree ’ from our desks and she started to read where she’d left off the day before, but none of us had the mind for the folk of the faraway tree and their antics, what with Fiona being dead. And when we went into the playground at playtime that day none of us ran and none of us laughed and all of us stood by the steps at the green painted doors and thought about Fiona. I thought about that day I saw her standing by herself in the very spot I was standing in now and I remembered her pulling up the hood of her black duffle coat to keep her shaved head warm and then pulling her coat tight around her body to keep the cold lonely air out. And that’s when I pulled up my own hood and my own black duffle coat tight around my body and I hoped that I’d never catch a brain tumour and die like that too.

7
Let’s all go to the Clyde
    We used to get singing lessons at school and Miss Bright was our singing teacher. She looked like she was 95 years old and she wore aqua-blue eyeshadow and peachy-pink face powder and at three o’clock every Tuesday afternoon she would get out the tape recorder to play cassettes of recorded singing lessons called ‘Singing Together’. The singers on the tape would sing lines from songs then leave a gap and we had to learn the songs and fill in the gaps when the singers stopped singing.
    Miss Bright had been trained in classical music and she said when she was younger she could sing in any number of languages you care to mention. She was always going on about how we should all be learning to speak another language, when all we wanted to do was fill in the gaps on the cassette and go home.
    One Tuesday afternoon Miss Bright asked if anybody could name another language apart from English and that’s when Martin Sedgeworth said he knew another language and that that language was swearing and Miss Bright took the chalk from her desk and turned to the board and wrote ‘Swedish’ in big writing. Everybody laughed and Miss Bright, well, she wanted to know what was so funny and none of us dared tell her that Martin Sedgeworth had said ‘ swearing ’ and not ‘ Swedish ’ and Martin Sedgeworth was the hero of the day. Me, I got butterflies in my stomach ’cause I knew that French was another language but I didn’t dare say anything in case everybody laughed at me too, so I just stayed silent and Miss Bright put the cassette on again and we filled in the gaps and eventually the bell rang and we all went home.
    The following Tuesday, Miss Bright gave us a song-writing competition for our homework and I got nervous wondering how I was ever going to write a song and what if you had to sing it out in front of the class if you won? The song had to be about the River Clyde, which flowed all the way from Greenock to Lanark and we had to have it done by the next Tuesday at three o’clock. I was in a right state but my pal, Maggie, she got her mum to write her a brilliant song about the Clyde being magical and winding and in line two she said its name would live forever in the hearts of many. When I read that, I knew that my song was rubbish and that it would be Maggie’s mum and not me who would win the competition.
    The Monday before we had to hand in our homework I read my song over and over again and I was embarrassed to put it in the same pile as Maggie’s mum’s, what with her big words and fancy