MORNING SERIAL

PIGEON’S mam came, making her way down from the kitchen. And she had the tray in her white hands. His mam brought their breakfast down to the shed. And this was the best part of the day. His mam though, always looked tired, and perhaps not very well.

They sat on the bed, Pigeon and his mam, with the cereal and the tea. Pigeon drank black tea, his mam white. The air was cold, so that the tea lifted from the cup in streaks of steam. His mam had a blue mark on her face again, blue and yellow, like a wet sunset. This one was because there were other men looking at her. And He saw them. They were looking because she’s beautiful. But He said it was because she was ‘asking for it’. Which she wasn’t. She’d never ask for anything at all.

Pigeon’s mam ruffled his hair, until it all stuck up, and Pigeon, Pigeon almost smiled then, before she picked up the tray and went to the house.

As she went, she told Pigeon in her cracked, soft voice to “Hurry now, love. Get dressed”, and, although it was Sunday, she told him to get on off to school, as if it was a dream, a hope, and not telling him what to do, and it was as if her voice was getting lost in the air on the way to his ears.

Pigeon pulled on his grey school trousers, and his only black shoes, his only white shirt and his only green jumper. And he hated and hated the way the ugly clothes felt when he pushed his arms through into them, and how the clothes were scraping and pulling at him, trying to skin him alive. And, without going to the house, so that He didn’t see him, or Cher either, with her pretty smooth hair, her perfect clothes and her sorry eyes, Pigeon went on, pretended to his mam to be going to school, to the tit-fortat-tattletale school where, between Monday and Friday, he kept his head down, right down under the radar.

Pigeon went over the wall, and down the path that was like a snake by the wood as it followed the river as that went down with the weight of the rain and the grey sky and the hill. And then Pigeon stopped. Sat. What to do with an empty Sunday? And with a half-empty mother too?