MORNING SERIAL

MY whole body turns into concrete. She’ll ask me. She’ll ask me about Pigeon. Her dad.

But she doesn’t. She just says, “Hi,” and nothing else. And then she sits there. Staring straight ahead. Efa’s right. Cher’s not the same since the accident.

All we say is “Hi”, most days. She doesn’t speak much. And since then, this is the way we’ve been. One month after the other, until the summer, and the one month after the other all through the year. Time passes. Time passes by like watching fields through the window of a train.

... “You’re a big reader aren’t you, lad?” Allan says to Pigeon.

Pigeon just stares at him and says nothing. Allan looks at him in that way. But Pigeon doesn’t care; he just puts his book under his arm and walks out of Education Block into the centre.

“What d’you get?” asks Neil as he goes past Pigeon, “Fairytale?”

Pigeon ignores him, keeps on walking along the corridor to his room.

In their room Salim’s asleep as usual. Pigeon lies on his bed and opens the book. There’s a lot of pictures of space that look like photographs but aren’t.

They’re done with a computer. They’re pretty, the pictures of space. There are super nova and nebulae, and the most awesome thing about them is that they’re far away.

Pigeon likes that word, ‘awesome’. Not the way the kids here use it, not with an exclamation mark after it. ‘Awesome!’ No. But ‘awesome’, said quietly and full of fear. Big and almost frightening, but beautiful. Awesome. Like the nebulae in this book. So far away that you can’t even imagine it, the distance, and so big that you’re not important at all. In the books about space you can find so many things which you couldn’t see or understand with your own eyes and mind.

Pigeon turns the pages, and it’s as if there isn’t the centre all around him, as if he isn’t somewhere between concrete and walls and roofing, not hours away from the hill, and his town, not in England.