MORNING SERIAL

UNTIL the last couple of months the other girls weren’t much interested in me anyway, because I don’t do sport or have nice clothes and until last year I was short.

This year I’ve grown and got those new trousers and I’m getting some looks from the boys now, you can see it. They’ve got interested, the boys.

Interested enough for behind the wall anyway. So now the girls are paying attention at school too, and it’ll be a dangerous time. A dangerous time of back and forth looks, and words that scar you across the back along the school corridors and up the town’s darkening streets where the air is turning black with the tit for tat insults of the girls. The girls are all like that. We’re all like that. Becoming a woman is so embarrassing. You feel it. The shame. And so you’ve got to lash out.

But there’s none of that with Cher. That’s the thing about Cher. Since the accident you can depend on her. She’s regular. There’s nothing lively uncoiling in her with that dangerous electricity that fills the bodies of all the other girls. Womanliness. Efa calls it. Womanliness. A warm word.

Still, I feel cold when we pass Pigeon’s house. I feel it again, the feeling of that day.

Walking downtown, we’re almost at the shop. You don’t want anyone to see you going in, because it’s a charity shop. It’d be “Iola Williams wears dead people’s clothes”, it’d be “sloppy seconds Iola” and all that. So me and Cher walk along the High Street, past Nasareth Chapel which is closed now and boarded up, and has a sign that says For Sale.

They say someone’ll buy it and make it into flats, even though you can’t imagine it. How can they make that chapel into somewhere for someone to live?

That should’ve lasted forever, even if we didn’t go. It was just a place that existed and should always exist. But it’s over. The chapel’s over. It’s like a big dead person lying on a slab.

Then there’s Spar, the Chemists, and then the British Heart Foundation shop.

> Pigeon is the winner of the Wales Book of the Year and the Rhys Davies Fiction Prize. Published by Parthian

CONTINUES TOMORROW