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| 'My Cat Prurrr' by Trish |
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I think I am four years old, and I am very excited because in the morning I will go to school for the first time. My black uniform is spread out on a chair, my new white blouse is hanging on the knob of the bedroom door, and on the floor at the end of my double bed are a pair of shiny new black shoes that look like little boats. I don't know then that the new shoes, new uniform, the white blouse and anything else that may be new was almost the last time it would be like that.
In the morning my mother walks me to the school gate. She turns me around and points to our house in the distance."When it's home time come out this gate and walk towards our house". I squint my eyes and nod my head as I look at our front gate which seems far away from where we stand. Someone puts their hand on my shoulder, turns me around and leads me away from my mother. I can feel they are displeased with me and my mother.
The hand on my shoulder leads me into a room and sits me down with other children. I'm still excited but starting to feel a bit lonely as I don't know any of the children. I don't know anyone in this big place. I try to chat with the little girl beside me but she just stares straight ahead. Before I can try again, I hear "You miss! You with the plaits! Sit next to the boy in front of you as punishment for talking". I don't move, I am scared of boys even though I have four brothers. Now the nun is beside me tugging at the sleeve of my new white blouse. "Out! out of the seat I say!" I fall to the floor and hold tight to the leg of the wooden desk. The floor too is wooden and it smells so nice. Now the nun has me by my ankle and drags me to the front of the class.
I am screaming. The nun lets go of my ankle and grabs one of my plaits.This allows me to spin in circles at her feet. She tries to catch hold of my wrist. I continue to scream, kick and spin.
"Glory be to God! You child! quickly go and get Sister Bernadette to help me." In spite of my high pitched scream, my kicking and spinning,in spite of the nun's panting and puffing and saying "Glory be to God" over and over, I can still hear the mouse-like steps of a child as they scatter past on their way to get help.
Thrashing around all tangled up in the nun's long brown skirt, I see two tiny black boots. It is then I understand, this is not a big black eagle with brown beads and a big gold cross that reaches to the waist and somehow looks like a jailers key. It is then I understand that this is a person, a human being! I've never seen a nun before. So I stop crying and let the red faced angry nun and the white faced pudgy nun who has rushed to help ,walk me to the seat where the little boy is. They push me in beside him and he cringes as far away from me as possible. After a few minutes, out of the corner of my eye, I sneak a look at him. I feel very sorry for him because he looks so frightened of me.
I am walking towards our house. In the hot summer sun I smell the tar footpath and here and there I see bubbles bursting out of black pools and I begin to count the tar pools and then the bubbles. In front of me I see a fat fly crawling its way along, I pick it up. "So, you've broken your wings and can't fly" I say. I take the remains of a jam sandwich from my pocket, and place it beside the fly which is now crawling across the palm of my hand.
When I reach my mother she is too busy talking to our neighbor to listen to my story of the nun who looked like a black eagle, or to notice the poor sleepy fly with the broken wings that still zig-zags blindly back and forth across my palm. So, I raise my hand up as high as I can and say, "look! look! the poor fly's wings are broken". My mother screams and hits out at my raised hand. "It's a bee you stupid girl a blasted bee!" My mother's swipe launches the bee's heavy body into the air , it hangs there as if about to fall, but then I watch in delighted amazement as it whirrs up and away and out of sight.
From my bed I watch the night shadows, make strange shapes before my wide open eyes. In the darkness I hear my father's shuddering snores and my mother's horsey cigarette cough. My eyes want to go to sleep, but in the night shadows I see the big black eagle that appeared on my first day at school. I don't like that, so I shake my head and send it away.
As I drift and dream, I recall the nice woody smell of the school floor and the licorice smell of the syrupy tar, and the bee whose wings weren't broken after all. Slowly I push the fear I felt at the school gate when some one's bony fingers bit into my shoulder, I try to put a white square over the face of the frightened little boy. When my eyes are almost closed, a screeching black eagle,zooms down to take me away; slowly I push the memory of the awful black creature further and further to the back of my mind, and soon I am fast asleep.
Tushie
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