Poppy Shakespeare (12 page)

'Well go on then,' said Banker Bill. 'Go on!' And he waved me away like that! I looked back to give him a dirty look but he
never seen being squatted down changing the rates on his blackboard.

'Fuckin'ell!' I said to Poppy as we walked back towards our seats. 'Fuckin'ell! You know what you's doing!'

'Eh?' said Poppy. 'Oh!' she said. She still had the Phlegyapam in her hand, and you know what she done? She held it out, the
bright pink capsule, like a precious jewel between her finger and thumb. 'Here,' she said.

'What's that?' I said. Her nails was like rubies.

'Take it,' she said and I held out my hand, like without even knowing, and she give it me just like that.

I stood there with my hand held out just staring at the bright pink capsule. My hand looked like it hadn't been washed for
a week. 'For me?' I said.'Well I don't want it,' Poppy said.

'You done all that for me?' I said.

'I thought at twenty butts a pill, they must be good for something,' Poppy said.

'Phlegyapam!' I said. 'They's fucking gold dust!'

Poppy smiled.

'I can't believe it,' I said. 'We can share it if you want,' I said. 'You can rub it into your gums if you don't fancy snorting.'

'It's alright,' said Poppy. 'I really don't want it. Take it; it's fine.

'Would you do something for me?' she said.

'Course!' I said. 'What else are friends for?'

'Will you show me this Abaddon Patients' Rights?'

'Oh that,' I said. 'It's only open Wednesday and Friday mornings.'

Poppy looked so disappointed, I felt like it was
my
fault the opening hours. 'I'll show you in the morning,' I said. 'I'll go with you if you want.'

'It's alright,' said Poppy.

'Are you sure you don't want to share this?' I said. She looked so upset I reckoned she might be regretting what she done.

'Actually,' said Poppy. 'Do you mind coming with me? It might be a good thing seeing as you know how it works.'

'Alright,' I said.

'You don't mind?' she said.

'Course not,' I said and I zipped the Phlegyapam safe inside my pocket.

22. Next morning outside Abaddon Patients' Rights

The way the ground floor was was like this: first you got the doors leading into the foyer, with Sharon in his cage and the
farting sofa, then there was the sliding doors, and if you turned right, the staircase up to the Dorothy Fish and the common
room like I told you, and if you gone on past the staircase, that's where the lifts was. By the lifts was a cupboard where
Minimum Wage kept her cleaning stuff and put on her overall and gone for her breaks. I can't think of nothing else there was
to the right.

If you gone through the sliding doors and turned left, that's where you got APR, and aside of that and the line of chairs
and a rack full of leaflets about all your rights, there was a door led into Sharon's cage with one of them number locks on
and there was so many numbers the lock half-covered the door, and when Sharon come out to go to the toilet - got a number
lock too, to stop people nicking the paper - it taken him half an hour to get back in his cage.

Next morning I was outside APR by twenty-five to nine. The ticket machine had ran out of tickets but I seen I was first anyway.
I taken a chair and sat down to wait for Poppy. The chairs was orange plastic, linked together like school assembly. Mine
had a crack in the front of the seat which opened as I sat back. I must of read the sign on the door about a thousand times;
'Abaddon Patients' Rights,' it said. 'Wednesday and Friday 9.30-12.
Please take a ticket!'
After a bit, I weren't reading no more, just staring at the letters and I stared so hard they stopped being letters and become
just shapes and lines like a foreign language.

'What
you
got to complain about!' Fat Florence parked herself at the end of the line, the opposite end from me, and as she sat down
I felt my end go up like a see-saw. Word was Fat Florence had used to be anorexic, which if she was she'd been making up for
it since. She worn a big flowery dress which shown off her arms all covered in white scars like rashers of streaky bacon.
Paolo taken the chair next to her, or half of it, the half that weren't overflowing Florence. 'You should try swapping places
with us for a bit, then maybe you'd have a proper complaint . . .'

'Fuck off.' I said, but she carried on, so I shown her the back of my head.

It weren't long before Elijah shown up, and he took a seat in the middle and he carried this Kwik Save bag with him, stuffed
full of papers, and propped it between his legs. After Elijah come Curry Bob and Clifton the Poet and Third-Floor Lemar and
Carmel and Sanya, who weren't over-happy, 'cause I'd kept a seat for Poppy. Elijah and Curry Bob and Clifton and Lemar and
Sanya was all doing MAD money appeals. You knew they was doing MAD money appeals 'cause they all had these carriers stuffed
full to bursting with proof of how mad they was. Every few minutes one would panic they'd left out something they needed and
they'd empty their bag on the floor and start going through it, and that would set the others off and they'd do the same and
the piles was as high as your knees. Carmel weren't applying for MAD money; she had a complaint 'bout Dr Azazel. Carmel's
complaint been building for fifteen years. No one knew what it was sparked it off, not even Carmel no more. Carmel's complaint
was a great-grandma at least. It been married, had kids and the kids had had kids and half of them was divorced and remarried
or living together or living alone and all the stepchildren, half-brothers and sisters, and foster kids too;her complaint
had great nieces and their nephews had cousins and their cousins had more cousins four-times removed, and to find the complaint
what started it all, do you know what I'm saying, was like trying to find Eve at the top of a family tree. Dr Azazel weren't
nothing to the main complaint. He was something like a stepson of a step-step-step-half-brother. But one step at a time, said
Carmel, and he was her job for today.

'So what you doing, Florence?' Sanya said. She got short dark hair and a ring pull through her nose.

Fat Florence jerked her head towards Paolo and lowered her voice to make sure we was all ears. 'He's making a formal complaint,'
she said. 'About
you
know,' she said. 'New girl taken his place.'

'Oh,' said Sanya.

'Ain't right,' said Florence. 'No way it ain't right. Paolo's been waiting years for that place, new girl snatches it right
from under his nose. Right from under his nose,' she said.'But he's not going to sit there and take it, are you Paolo! Ain't
right,' said Florence. 'No way it ain't right. I said to him "Paolo,
you
stand up for yourself!" So here we are,' Fat Florence said. 'And we ain't going nowhere till they done us a letter, and even
if we have to stay sat here forever.'

'It doesn't work like that,' said Carmel.

'They never even
told
him,' said Florence. 'Just stood there while he packed up his things.'

'One step at a time,' said Carmel.

'Just stood there,' said Florence. 'And let him think he was going.'

'The same thing happened with us,' said Elijah, 'you know after Ebenezer, when they moved little Elliot down? It should have
been Ethel,' Elijah said. 'And I should have moved down to four. The same thing happened.' But turned out it weren't the same
thing at all, 'cause Poppy was new whereas Elliot been up on the seventh. And that made it totally different, said Florence,
that made it so different there weren't nothing similar at all. So then everyone else tried to think up something had happened
to them as bad as what happened to Paolo, but nothing they said weren't a quarter as bad; according to Florence, nothing come
close to them slipping in Poppy right under Paolo's nose.

All the time they been debating and in between correcting them and telling them they was wrong and mistaken and didn't know
nothing about it, Florence kept looking over and giving me daggers. But with so many people in the way, she had to lean right
forward to do it proper, and that weren't so easy for someone like Florence; she give it a few attempts but fell back wheezing.
So then she give it one final go and she given it everything she got and I reckon she knocked ten years off her life and bust
a few blood vessels too, but she finally done it. She flopped herself forwards like someone been drowning flopped theirselves
on to the bank and she stayed there, one elbow leant on each knee, gasping her breath back and giving me looks could kill.

Well I was just sat there laughing; I couldn't help it. I didn't give a shit what nobody thought, especially not Fat Florence.
But then the others turned to look on account of she done it so blatant. And it weren't that I felt uncomfortable but I knew
what they was thinking. 'Course some people,' Fat Florence said. She had to keep breaking off for breath and all you could
hear was these wheezy gasps as her lungs, squashed flat between her chest and her stomach, tried to suck in air. 'Course some
people . . . uuuh . . .uuuh . . . uuuh . . .' she said. 'No sense of. . . uuuh . . .uuuh . . . uuuh . . . loyalty. Right uuuh
. . . uuuh . . .uuuh . . . and uuuh . . . wrong don't uuuh . . . come into it. Uuuuuuuhhhh . . .' And she started on about
the war but I weren't even listening anyway. I reckoned I'd go and have a fag and wait for Poppy outside. Only thing was that
as I stood up, the crack in my chair clamped shut on my tracksuit bottoms and it pulled them halfway down my arse before I
could yank them out again, and I could of done without it to be honest.

I sat on the wall outside and smoked a fag. The wall was damp and I felt the cold come creeping through my tracksuit bottoms.
It was clear and light after all the rain, and both ways you looked to the right and the left you seen straight down the hill,
to the Darkwoods Estate, like a jungle all over the bottom, and beyond it the clear ring of Borderline Road, like one of them
moats they have round castles, we been with Mr Pettifer, to keep the enemy out.

I'd been sat there twenty minutes easy. I'd seen Tina come in and Astrid and Middle-Class Michael. I'd seen them start out
as specks at the bottom, nothing to choose between them, then as they come higher there'd be something about them, something
about the way they walked, the way that one nodded his head with each step, the way that one worked his arms like flippers,
and suddenly they crossed a line and there weren't no one else in the world they could be except them. As Brian the Butcher
gone up and down, I kept myself busy trying to work out where he stopped being Brian and turned back to a speck, but it weren't
so easy, not once you knew it was him.

I don't know how many specks I seen. Some turned into doctors and some into nurses and some into care assistants with Bibles
reading to theirselves as they walked along. But none of the specks never turned into Poppy and I started to think she weren't
going to show up and I strained my eyes with scouring the hill, right down to the junction with Borderline Road, where we'd
said goodbye the night before and I'd watched her disappear into Sniff Street, dancing around the buses in her snakeskin heels.

I was stretching and straining my eyes so hard that when I suddenly heard her voice behind me - 'Sorry, N! Have you been waiting
long?' - I jumped that high in the air with surprise I seen straight through the staff-room window, Rhona the Moaner slouched
over her desk circling words in a wordsearch magazine. 'Saffra's teacher wanted to see me.' 'Saffra?' I said. 'My daughter,'
she said. 'Oh, right,' I said. I'd forgot she had a kid.

Saffra was six years old then, like six and three quarters. Her birthday was January twenty-third, which made her just Aquarius,
at least if you believe in that shit, which sometimes I do, depending. Poppy believed in it anyway. She got Saffra's star
chart printed out and framed on her bedroom wall. This woman done it for twenty quid, but it was only like off a computer.
Twenty quid, do you know what I'm saying! But Poppy fucking loved that kid, reckoned the sun shone right out Saffra's arse.

Saffra was
alright
and everything. She got shiny dark hair like her mum's 'cept tighter curls. Poppy used to go on 'bout how pretty she was and how
clever and all of that stuff and most probably she was - though I reckon
anyone
would of been, the amount of attention she got. Poppy was always like helping her read and tucking her up in bed at night
and making her tea all laid out nice - fish fingers and potato stars and beans. And I know she was only a kid and that, and
I ain't saying nothing, but I reckon she knew which side her bread was buttered. This one time right, I seen her do it. Poppy
and me was sat there chatting and Saffra was laying on the floor doing this picture - Poppy just give her the pens like a
second before. So she done this house in pink and a tree besides it and a couple of squiggles meant to be birds. 'Look, Mummy!
Pigeons! They're coming to get the bread.'

'Where's the bread?' says Poppy.

She rolled her eyes, really cocky she was. 'I haven't
drawed
it yet!' she goes.

'Well quick!' says Poppy. 'They look pretty hungry to me!'

So Saffra does a couple more squiggles in blue then jumps up to show her. And as she jumps up she catches her leg, like
nothing
—
she hardly
touches
it -just a tiny tap, like
nothing,
on the edge of the table. I seen her do it, I seen her thinking, like 'Shall I, shan't I?' 'Yeah,' she reckons. And then she
begins to cry. She starts sort of slow and shy, like looking at Poppy, but then as she sees she's got her, she turns up the
volume, and inside of ten seconds she's creaming and crying like you'd think she'd had her fucking leg blown off. 'Oh!' says
Poppy, straight up, arm round her shoulders.

'Show me. Where does it hurt?'

'Here,' says Saffra - it don't even hurt - and she pulls up the leg of her little designer jeans.

'Where?' says Poppy.

Saffra points.

'There?' says Poppy. Saffra nods, still crying.

'Oh,' says Poppy. 'That looks sore!' It don't - there ain't no mark or nothing. 'Shall I give it a kiss?' she goes and she
does and Saffra looks down at her, pleased.

'Ointment,' says Saffra, as Poppy looks up.

'Magic
ointment?' says Poppy. 'I'll have to see if I've got some in my bag.'

Saffra stands watching and waiting, one trouser up, and her little leg with its soft downy hair and not a scratch and her
lip starts to tremble and honestly you got to hand it to her.

'I'm coming!' says Poppy. 'Just try and be brave!' And she gives me a look, like 'I won't be a sec . . .' but I make like
I never seen her.

'Look what I've found!' she says, coming back and she hands her this little kid-size box of raisins. Saffra takes it.

Then Poppy gets this tube of Savlon, ain't nothing magic
I
can see, and she squeezes out a tiny smear and rubs it in Saffra's leg - you can smell it, so strong it gets right in your
eyes. 'There,' she says, and she pulls down her trouser leg.'Does that feel a little bit better?'

Then Saffra sits on Poppy's lap, pushing the raisins into her mouth and giving me daggers and Poppy's arms all round her.
'Sorry,' says Poppy. 'Where were we, N?' But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Course Carmel and Sanya had nicked our seats like I knew they would all along.

'I was sat there,' I said. "Scuse me!' I weren't going to let it go.

'I thought you'd gone,' said Sanya, but she didn't move.

Poppy leant against the wall besides the rack of leaflets on patients' rights.

'You're a fine one to talk!' Fat Florence said.

'Why's that?' I said.

'Why's that?' she said.

'Fuck off!' I said. 'I was only saying.'

'I saved you one,' I said to Poppy.

'I'm alright,' said Poppy.

'I thought you'd gone,' said Sanya, but she didn't move.

'You're a fine one to talk anyway,' Fat Florence said.

'Oh?' I said. 'Why's that?' I said.

And she couldn't even answer 'cause she knew she was wrong, so she just give a huff instead. And she give such a huff it was
stronger than a gale or even a hurricane probably, and the piles of proof all taken off and blown around like washing in a
drier gone mad, and Lemar and Sanya and Clifton the Poet, they run around in circles trying to catch it. And I kept on waving
to Poppy and winking and pointing at Sanya's chair, but Poppy shook her head like it weren't worth the hassle and stayed where
she was by the wall, and a piece of the proof fell out her hair and drifted down on to the floor.