Mark Czanik

The blue terrapin

I brought my first brown envelope home from school when I was eight. It had my parents’ name written on it in pencil in joined up letters. I had no idea what kind of letter it concealed, but no one else in my class seemed to have been given one, and I remember feeling apprehensive as I carried it down the hill. It was only a short walk to my house and I got there far too quickly.

     Through the window I could see Mum lying on the settee as I came up the path. I rang the bell. She opened the door for me, and after taking my shoes off in the passage, I went into the living room where she was lying down again. Mum was a dinner lady at Flatlands, which I loved, but she would often have a lie down after work, or sit with her pale, calloused feet magnified in a bowl of hot water.

     I stood watching her. Normally I would have let her sleep, but I had a strong feeling that whatever was in the brown envelope shouldn’t wait. I watched her face for clues as she read.

     ‘Oh, trust you. What am I gonna tell your Dad now?’

     ‘What is it?’

     ‘Can’t you try a bit harder?’

     ‘What?’

     ‘They wants you in the remedial class. Starting September.’ She tucked the letter back into the envelope and put it on the coffee table. I could still see a slither of it poking out, like a petticoat showing.

     ‘Is that bad?’ I said, knowing it was. I knew enough about the remedial class to know it was for slow learners, anyway. Backward kids. Jack told me they had a star chart on the wall for things like clean ears and fingernails.

     She lay down and closed her eyes again, but the news was already scored on her forehead. I asked her if she was going to tell Dad.

     ‘Well, he’ll have to know, wunnee?’ she said without opening her eyes.

     A terrible fire swept the house not long after he got home. All I could do was run for cover from one room to the next every time the wind changed direction, while Mum rushed around trying to put out the flames. Something she often did with no apparent concern for her own safety. How many times had she saved me from Dad’s flamethrower temper in the past?

     I escaped to my room. Sometime later there was a tap at my door. It was Martha. She had been ordered to teach me how to read and write. ‘This instant,’ she said with a quick flick of her eyebrows. I closed the door behind her, sat on the bed, and burst into tears.

‘I’m stupid,’ I kept saying through my sobs, not knowing if I believed it or not.

     My sister sat on the windowsill like a trapped bird. ‘You’re not stupid. You’re just a bit slower than the other kids, that’s all. You’re the youngest in your class, remember. Besides, I know plenty of people who can’t read yet and they’re much older than you.’ But when I asked her to name some of them, she changed the subject. ‘Oh, that’s not important. The important thing is to keep Dad happy. As long as he’s happy, everything will be fine.’

     ‘He said I wasn’t even allowed out anymore,’ I said, humiliating tears bubbling up again. The summer holidays were only a week away.

     She slipped down from the windowsill and lay on the bed. ‘Oh, you are. Of course you are. He can’t keep you in all summer. God, I haven’t seen him that angry for ages.’

     ‘I’m a dunce.’

     ‘You’re not a dunce.’

     ‘I am. He said I am.’

     ‘No, you’re not. It’s just bad luck, that’s all. Everybody has bad luck now and then.’

     ‘You don’t.’

     ‘It’s true actually. I do have quite good luck.’ She was absently picking at a rough discoloured patch on her sleeve which obviously hadn’t entirely escaped the flames. There was still a strong smell of smoke in the air. How far had it travelled this time? How many people on our hill knew? As far as it always did, the answer came. Everyone.

     The soaring trumpet of The Waltons theme tune reached us, spiralling upwards from downstairs, beckoning me down. It was Monday, eight o’clock, and right on time my favourite programme had begun. In my mind’s eye, I saw John-boy writing at the desk in his room with his window open in the beginning bit; his father arriving home with a chirpy beep of his horn from his old-fashioned car, and John-boy and the rest of them rushing out to greet him.

     ‘He hates me.’

     ‘Of course, he doesn’t hate you. He’s just worried, that’s all. Plus, he’s on twelve hour shifts.’

     How could she stick up for him like that? Surely, she could see what a monster he was! I could hear the voice of the grown up John-boy now, introducing this week’s story, going back in time while the camera panned slowly over Walton’s Mountain. They didn’t even have the decency to turn it down.

     ‘It’s alright for you,’ I said, staring at a stray piece of Lego by the skirting board. Meaning she was clever as well as lucky. When she didn’t respond I stole another glance at her. It was nice having Martha in here – I had the brown envelope to thank for that, at least – but her powerful presence was almost too much for my little room. Her slinky black hair spread out across my pillow, her legs stretching matter-of-factly across the bed with her socked feet almost touching my hip. She reminded me of Mary Ellen, John-boy’s beautiful, rebellious sister, although Martha didn’t go barefoot. She had breasts now too, I noticed for the first time. They made little dunes under her jumper.

     She sat up, feeling my eyes on her. She was already bored and I was afraid she was going to leave. All my most special things were in this room: my cowboy fort, my vintage car collection, my Spitfire and Messerschmitt models, the Airfix Pontoon Bridge and Lego and Action-Man boxes in the fireproof treasure chamber under my bed. The brown dressing gown that doubled as a bed for Mooska and a shape-shifting island on the blue ribbed sea of my eiderdown, full of hidden coves and caves and hills on which my soldiers waged long emotional battles to the death. Yet I knew none of it meant anything to Martha.

     ‘Have you read it?’ I asked, to keep her a bit longer.

     ‘What ...? Oh, yeah, I have,’ she said, sounding almost indifferent. 

     I asked her what it said.

     She hesitated. ‘Oh, never mind that. Just concentrate on the good stuff.’

     She didn’t explain what that might be. I prayed Tabatha didn’t get hold of it, but was suddenly sure it was too late. That would explain the hint of victory I’d seen on her face downstairs. Why wasn’t she in the backwards class? But then she wasn’t the one who kept running home from school as soon as morning whistle went. She wasn’t the one always lying on the settee with a pretend tummy ache under the chequered blanket watching Mr Ben and Crown Court and Paper Moon and The Servant, with Mum running home during her lunch break to make sure I hadn’t burnt the house down she told Pam, but I wasn’t the one she should be worrying about.

     Mooska would usually be there to keep me company. She slept on the white rug in front of the dead fire, but even she would wake to look at me a bit surprised, as if to ask what I was doing home again on a school day in the middle of the afternoon.

     I struggled to shove down the tears again.

     ‘Come on, stop crying. Crying won’t get you anywhere – not in this house anyway.’ She stood up. ‘Okay,’ she said, looking around with a sigh at my shelves, ‘we better get on with it, I spose. Now, have you got any actual books in this place?’

We didn’t get much done that evening, or any other evening that summer. Martha didn’t teach me how to read. She had no patience for my faltering reading voice, which would stumble to a stop every few seconds at the jumble of tangled letters that confronted me on every page. That was the last time I remember her coming into my room too. Once the summer holidays started, the brown envelope and all that had been ignited by its entry into our world was never mentioned again, and I didn’t worry about not knowing my alphabet or times tables. I went back to playing war and ‘kick-the-can’ and ‘knocking-down-the-stick’ outside up the garages with everyone else, until Mum’s silhouette finally appeared on the back doorstep to call me in.

     One thing that did start to happen, though, was that once or twice a week I began sleeping in my sisters’ room. On these nights Tabatha would sleep in my bed and I would sleep in hers, and Martha would read to me from her bed. Fairy-tales mostly, but stories from the Bible too, which she read every night. And even if a lot of the time I didn’t really follow the stories or get to hear them through to the end, it didn’t matter. She had a good reading voice. Mary Ellen’s was brash and whiny by comparison. Often I just lay there following the trail of words she left as best I could as the orange lamppost outside on Horseshoe Walk flickered on and off like Morse code. Not worrying if I left the path now and then to let my eyes wander over the huge bookcase and the sleeping snow domes and the David Cassidy and kitten posters and the dragon’s mouth of Scandinavia on the world map, but trusting I would pick it up again before she turned the light out.

     But I didn’t envy my sisters their big room overlooking the playing fields on account of the sinister attic hatch just above the door with only  a tiny swivel lock to hold it in place.  

     Sometimes I went in search of the brown envelope and the terrible truth it contained. I don’t know what I planned to do if I ever found it. Burn it probably, as if the evidence of my slowness could be erased that simply. But when end-of-world-September began, I discovered the remedial class wasn’t nearly as bad as people made out. I didn’t feel like a dunce or a misfit – not when I was there anyway. It was a small class, so it wasn’t hard to make friends, and I looked forward to the coloured stars the teacher took from her desk each morning and stuck to the star chart against our names. They weren’t just for clean ears and fingernails either. They were for drawings and being kind and poems and stories, and learning to spell ‘beautiful’ with all those vowels jostling for space inside it, but there was no room at the inn for the ‘o’, Miss Richards said. The first week we were all given a big old-fashioned map of Herefordshire rolled up in a red ribbon to take home with us too, with all the names of the villages and hills on it, a lot of them spelt wrongly, as if to remind us we weren’t the only ones who’d ever had trouble with words.

     We were in a blue terrapin set apart from the rest of the school on the other side of the playground, overlooking the Lugg down in the meadowy distance, and the faint Sphinx-like shadow of the Clee Hills. That winter the river, with its hidden overhangs and treacherous undercurrents, burst its banks and flooded the flats fields again, making it look as if a great impossible lake had landed there overnight. It was shallow mostly so you could still wade through it, but the memory of the river was always there, waiting, ready to suck you under and carry you away if you strayed too close, like the bloated sheep we sometimes found floating that hadn’t made it to the safety of the slopes.

     One spring day we went on a trip to a farm and saw all the animals: the piglets and the kneeling lambs and the calves in their beds of straw. The cows coming home from the fields. The herd always had the same leader, the farmer said, but the milk from the ones at the back was just as good as the milk from those in front. He pointed out the wagtails nesting under the bonnet of the rusty old tractor in the long grass, and asked us if we wanted to go for a ride in the new one to see the Hereford bull up on the hill and give him his cake. But then the weather turned so we had to go home, and all the way back in the minibus I kept picturing it standing there unmoving and alone in the hammering rain with its colossal body and short thick legs and muddy socks and the frayed rope of its tail and those heavy horns weighing down its slushy white head. The sizzle of hot breath drifting up from its ringed nostrils like smoke.

     What a strange and lonely fate to be a bull on a hill.

I was in that class for a year. The following September I was back in normal class again with my old classmates, thanks to my mother so she always said, who convinced Mr Waring I didn’t belong there by giving him extra helpings whenever he slid his dinner tray by her serving hatch. For a long time I wished she hadn’t. Instead of the star chart and Miss Richards telling us that if anyone said we were slow we should just think of the tortoise in the story, my new teacher smoked at his desk and introduced us to a cane on the first day he called Mr Wackadoo.

     The blue terrapin is gone now, pulled down years ago. I still have a Polaroid of my old classmates, though. For some reason it’s the only school photo I have from my years at Flatlands. There we are, thirteen of us, unlucky for some but not for me, as it turns out. Ten boys and three girls clinging to the raft of that bench just outside the classroom on the edge of the empty playground. Cut adrift from the rest of the school for poor tables and spelling, squinting our smiles into the lens: Elaine with her carrot orange hair; little blond Thomas who gave me my first Marvel comics because his parents had forbidden him to read them anymore; Pollyanna Black who could somehow run as fast as me; Tom Thick, the giant of the class, whose name alone must have sealed his fate; Darren in that white jumper he wore every day, with his hands in his pockets; Trudy; my neighbour Ted; and me standing at the back in my green tank-top and John-boy glasses with that butterfly stitch on my eyebrow from another fall.

     Behind us, at the bottom of the grass bank, is the out-of-bounds field where one bonfire night a spark drifted into the fireworks box, and all the blue, red, yellow, silver and gold stars in Miss Richards’ desk were thrown up and given out at once.

Mark Czanik was brought up in the sweet borderlands of Herefordshire, and now lives in Bath. Recent poems, stories and artwork can be found in ROPES, Riptide, MIR, The Rialto, Porridge, Black Nore Review, Pennine Platform, 3AM, and Adelaide. He is currently, very slowly, walking the south west coast path with his wife.