Pigtopia

Y’know when you wake up from a frightening dream, how the edges of everything are blurred, like the everyday picture of the world hasn’t had time to come back? Well, when I was there, standing so close to Jack Plum, it was like things had shifted just a little bit, like it wasn’t real time. All the way up the uneven path from the wood I felt as if I was wading in custard. I didn’t look behind at all, just kept going and I had a stitch by the time I got to the others.

It had all dropped back into place by then, no more fuzziness. Samantha’s bored face was sharp and clear. She lives on our street and she calls herself my best friend, but she’s always going off and trying out new girls or getting a boyfriend. Then I don’t see her outside school for weeks and weeks, till it all goes wrong, which it always does. She can get a bit clingy and people don’t like that -- sometimes it freaks me. Because she’s very pretty she gets away with a lot. Anyway, she was fed up with the skateboarding competition and wanted me to join a team for a game of cricket, but I shrugged her off. She’d just come back to me after getting really close to this girl Paula for a few weeks, so I didn’t see why I should do everything she wanted all of a sudden. I thought she was going to complain, as per usual, when I said I was going home, but she didn’t -- something just shifted behind her eyes like she was notching up my faults. Or maybe I was feeling a bit paranoid. My legs were unsteady and I wanted to be in my bedroom, alone, to think about what had happened so I didn’t give a damn.

I lay on the bed for about half an hour. My head was all sort of frantic, hopping about from one thing to another and I wasn’t sure if I was trembling because I was still scared or if it was just relief. It’s funny about dreams, how they make this world seem unreal and how you get similar feelings when you’re frightened, like it all goes out of focus for a few seconds. I mean, I was only meters away from our house when Jack Plum spoke to me, but I felt as if I was in some other unexpected place. Mam says I’ve got an “excess of imagination” as if it’s some sort of hormone imbalance but maybe it’s all just chemicals.

I calmed down slowly and then began asking myself questions. I mean, how did Jack Plum know when my birthday was? It was a surprise to me that he knew my name, as I didn’t even know he could talk. Then I thought, what if he’d been stalking me, like those nutters do, following me, digging through the rubbish in our bin, looking for information. But he didn’t try to stop me when I started to run, and he could have, the size of him.

When I felt better I got up and looked at myself in the long mirror. Too small, too skinny, no breasts, mad hair, doggy sort of a face, more like a lad than a lass. Why would anyone want to stalk me? I was a runt -- that’s what Dad used to call me before he took off. He said if I’d been born a dog, I’d have been dumped at birth. Charming. Mam always took my side when he went on about me not being pretty -- she reckoned she’d been a bit of a tomboy herself. But whenever she bought clothes for me they were always a bit too big or a bit too flouncy, like she was secretly willing me to grow up.

My room is great -- I chose the colors, the bedding and the blinds. Green’s my favorite color, all shades of green, but especially the darker ones like emerald, viridian, olive. I’ve got an en suite shower, bath, washbasin and toilet with sage green tiles. Next to the wide window there’s a wood and metal plant stand. This is cool because I want to work with plants when I leave school. Not sure what exactly I want to do, maybe train to be a botanist. What I’d really love is to discover a new species of plant and have it named after me. That’s why I go into Pardes Wood. It’s a very old coniferous forest and there’s always the chance of finding something unusual. I was on the hunt for a ghost orchid today, Epipogium aphyllum. It’s only been seen aboveground a couple of times in the past century and apparently likes the shady area below beech trees. There’s plenty of those in Pardes Wood, especially at this end. Saxifraga is one of my favorite plants, Saxifraga sarmentosa, better known as mother of thousands. The little plants at the end of the runners can grow as long as sixty centimeters. I’ve got one hanging above my bathroom window with the extensions drooping right down over the glass like old lace.

On my stand there’s Paphiopedilum callosum, slipper orchid; Ipheion uniflorum, spring starflower, the Froyle Mill variety which has beautiful purple flowers; Felicia amelloides, kingfisher daisy; and my absolute favorite, Pelargonium crispum, lemon geranium. It smells fabulous all the time but when you pinch and rub the leaves between your fingers it’s heavenly. It’s a very thirsty little beast but it doesn’t like being misted.

Mam got home while I was watering the plants. I heard her in the kitchen. I thought of telling her about Jack Plum but then remembered that I shouldn’t have been in the woods alone anyway.

It was pepperoni pizza for tea, followed by strawberry cheesecake. My choice. Mam and me take it in turns to choose what we eat. It’s really so she can make me eat proper food every other day, but that’s okay because I can choose anything I want on my days. And after tea on Fridays we always have a quiz and score points. I do one set of questions and she does another. The first to get twenty points is owed a favor, like she sometimes wants help with the ironing or I want some new music.

I like it at home. Just me and Mam, it’s relaxing, but I couldn’t let on at school -- everyone’s always moaning on about their parents splitting up, not giving enough pocket money, grounding them for no good reason or not letting them smoke, etc., etc. I’m lucky, I guess, because when Dad left things got better. No more of him griefing us all the time. Being on my own’s good but I’m not that comfortable in a group -- never know what to say -- unlike Samantha, who can rabbit on for hours. Sometimes I go through the motions, hang out, pretend I’m enjoying myself -- you’ve got to. If I owned up at school that I’d rather stay in and watch a video with my mam than hang around the dingy precinct sharing a bottle of cider and a joint, they’d think I was crazy.

Sometimes I do wonder why Dad didn’t love me enough to stay and why he’s never bothered to get in touch, not even at Xmas time or birthdays.

The pizzas were already in the oven when I got downstairs. I could smell the garlic. The radio was turned low on one of those seventies’ hits stations and Mam was wiggling about to the music, trying to sing along with it, but she only knew a few of the lyrics, as usual. My mam knows the first lines of hundreds of songs and she doesn’t always get them right. She was a punk when she was a teenager. I’ve seen photos of her with a Mohawk hairdo and six earrings in each ear. Black clothes were all the rage then, and she’s saved some in a trunk in case the fashion comes back. Now she wears her hair long -- it’s dark and very glossy and she likes long skirts and bright-colored tops, sort of ageing hippie style.

I said hi and she replied, “Hello, sweetheart. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” I said. She handed me the knives and forks to lay the table, and just then one of her favorite songs came on the radio and she grabbed me and made me dance round the kitchen with her.

Does he love you
how can you know
how can you tell if he loves you so
Is it in his eyes. . . .

Bodies are strange. What’s on the outside doesn’t always match up with what’s on the inside. Like I feel very mature for my age but I don’t look it, and Jack Plum looks like a monster but his voice was sweet and soft. He also looks like an adult but doesn’t act like one. Truth was, I had no idea how old he was or what was really wrong with him. I’d always been told to keep out of his way, to leave him alone, just like all the other kids round here. Usually, he stayed away from us as well.

“Mam, y’know Jack Plum,” I said casually. “Is he a boy or is he a man?”

“Why are you asking about Jack Plum?” she said.

“School project,” I replied. This is always the best tactic if Mam’s worried, as schoolwork is sacred in our house.

“A school project about Jack Plum?” she went on, as we sat down to eat. She obviously wasn’t convinced.

“Yeah, special needs and all that, y’know.” Only a small lie.

“Oh,” she said, “okay. Well, I’d probably say he’s neither a man or a boy -- he’s a mixture of both.”

I tried to concentrate on eating for a while, but my curiosity kept niggling at me.

“What happened to Jack Plum? Was he born like that, with that massive head, or did he have an accident?”

“He was born that way.”

“Is he dangerous, mam?”

“It’s difficult,” she said after a pause.

“What is?”

“Well, nobody really knows what’s wrong with Jack Plum.”

“Has he ever done anything bad?”

She looked right at me and her face was sort of sad. “No, Holly,” she said, “I don’t think Jack Plum’s ever done anything wrong.”

“So he’s not dangerous, then?”

“Is this really for a project?”

“Yes,” I insisted. Only way to get a straight answer.

“He’s never been in trouble as far as I know and I don’t think he’s dangerous, Holly, but you never can tell. I’ve not seen much of him since he was a boy, because he hides himself away, as you know, but I just don’t think you can ever be really sure with people like Jack Plum. I mean, he’s been alone with his mother all this time and she’s a very unpleasant woman. Okay?”

“D’you know her, then, Mrs. Plum?”

“No, not really. She’s lived round here all her life, but she’s older than me and -- ”

“What about the dad? Where’s he at?”

“Enough questions for now. Time for my bath. We’ll have the pudding later, okay?”

It was my turn to wash up, so I tuned in to Radio 1 and listened to the charts. Mam came back wearing her dressing gown, looking shiny and hot. She cheered up during the quiz because she loves cheesecake and she scored twenty points. When we watched TV, sitting together on the big sofa, she hugged me tight until it was time to do my homework. Biology and French, not too mind-numbing.

It was dark when I’d finished. I stared out at the street and saw Colin Driver and his lot hanging around, trying to look cool with tabs hanging out of their mouths and baseball caps pushed up. Bloody Chavers. Then I went downstairs to say good night and do Mam’s evening ritual with her.

Before Gran and Grandad Logan went to live in Canada they gave us loads of stuff, and one thing Mam loves is this old tarot pack. She says it was bought in China over a hundred years ago by some relative who was in the merchant navy. The pictures are really beautiful, but you have to be careful because they’re hand painted. Anyway, every night Mam lays the twenty-two cards of the major arcana out face-down, and picks one card. This is supposed to give her guidance on how best to act the following day. She likes me to be with her when she does it because Gran Logan said I had “good energy,” whatever that means. It all seems a bit haphazard to me, but I wouldn’t say that to Mam.

She got the Death card. It always makes me shiver, even though Mam says it’s got nothing to do with death and everything to do with change. There’s this skeleton dressed in armor riding a white horse and holding a black flag with a rose and the roman numerals for thirteen on it. In front of him is a holy man and two females, one very young. In the background the sun is coming up behind a strange landscape with a tower on the horizon.

“It represents a positive change, Holly,” she tells me.

“Changing old ways of thinking. Thirteen was a lucky number in days gone by.” If you say so, Mam.

Back in my room Jack Plum kept drifting into my head. He’d always been there, in that scruffy house at the entrance to Pardes Wood, hiding himself away. We were all terrified of passing his house when we were little. Now, Colin taunts him sometimes, if his mates are around, but he’s still scared underneath. You can tell by his eyes and the way he always looks ready to run. It was definitely weird -- Jack Plum trying to talk to me like that, wishing me happy birthday, like there was some purpose to it, almost like he knew me.

In bed, I was restless, kept getting knotted up in the duvet, then getting cold when I threw it off. I got up while it was still dark to fetch some juice from the kitchen. My mouth felt sour and dry. Before I got back into bed I turned the lights off to peep out into the street. It was dark and gloomy in between the patches of light from the lampposts and I could almost imagine someone lurking in the shadows, watching. Then I saw Jack Plum, striding along the road, pulling a cart piled up high with bits of wood. He looked up at my window as he passed and raised his hand in a wave. As I dropped the curtain my body flashed with heat. For a few seconds I couldn’t tell if I was awake or dreaming.