As we gathered our things after the bell rang, I said I liked her Wham pencil case.
“Andrew’s my favourite,” I added nervously.
“No way!” She had a throaty Scottish voice that sounded a bit dangerous. “George is my dream ticket.” Her face brightened. “My Auntie Joyce is getting me and Mum tickets to see them live in London next month.”
I wasn’t sure what a dream ticket was but I skipped home that day repeating the words in her accent, rolling the ‘r’ in a ‘dream’ around my tongue the way she did.
We quickly became friends. I hung around with a couple of girls but I’d never had a best friend. I never invited anyone home as I was scared of them finding out about Tess not being well.
I was over the moon when Karen invited me to Hillingdon Road for tea a couple of weeks later. Her mum Dee was out. Karen made Findus Crispy Pancakes followed by Angel Delight and we listened to, “I’m Your Man,” in her bedroom. A huge CND wall-hanging covered the window where curtains should have been, dreamcatchers dangled above her bed and incense candles burned on the dressing table. I thought it was the coolest room ever. Picking at a loose thread on the patchwork quilt, I tentatively asked Karen if being caned had hurt.
She shook her head. “Not as much as Julie Kawalski’s stitches.”
I put my hand over my mouth, trying not to laugh. “Julie defo won’t be calling you names again, that’s for sure.”
Julie Kawalski was in Karen’s former class. She had targeted Karen with racist taunts from the day she walked through the school gates. Pudgy and lank-haired, Julie lived on the Nell Lane Estate with her fat parents, a rake of skinhead brothers and a litter of pit bulls. One day at break she called Karen one name too many and Karen snapped. Catching hold of Julie by a pigtail, she slammed her into the school railing. Julie caught her head on an iron spike and had to be taken to the Infirmary by the deputy head to have five stitches. The next day Julie’s dad, two brothers and one of the pit bulls turned up at the school baying for Karen’s blood. She was moved out of Julie’s class and caned, the last girl ever to receive corporal punishment in the school. Years on, she still maintained it made her feel like Ruth Ellis.
She once told me the episode was life-changing. Karen was born in Manchester, not Scotland. But when she was a toddler, Dee had fallen on hard times and left Manchester to return to the tiny village outside Glasgow where she was raised. After their initial shock and horror at having a mixed-raced grandchild, her grandparents doted on Karen. They were both teachers in the local secondary school and well respected and Karen suffered surprisingly little racist abuse growing up in the village. During that time she’d had no contact with her dad or any relatives from Nigeria so she said she didn’t really identify as black. It was only when she was targeted by Julie Kawalski that she started looking in the mirror and asking questions about her identity. She said everything changed after that.
Karen and I had things in common and we bonded quickly. We were both outsiders and the children of immigrants. We were waifs and strays, jetsam bobbing around the streets of South Manchester with no stable home life. Tess was struggling to cope with Dad’s death and spent a lot of time in bed, crushed by depression. The few cleaning jobs she had were long gone and we got by on benefits cheques. Karen’s home life wasn’t much better. Dee was rapidly descending into alcoholism. No matter how bad Tess was feeling, at the end of the day she always managed to put a meal on the table for the three of us. But at Hillingdon Road the fridge was always empty. After school Karen would often have to go in search of Dee for money for food. She was usually in the Spread Eagle or the Royal Oak in Chorlton. If her luck was in, the pair of us would count out the pennies then skip to the Chinese chippy for chips and scrapings with curry sauce and cans of Iron Bru. We shared everything we had, which was never much. Any money I got from relatives in Ireland went on sweets and copies of Smash Hits magazine from Etchells newsagents for both of us.
At fifteen we were clubbing. With our wages from our Saturday jobs at the Kellogg’s factory we made our own clothes: taffeta tutus and silk bodices from the cut-off basket in Leon’s fabrics in Chorlton. We shopped for cheap accessories in Affleck’s Palace in town, we backcombed our hair and saved up for twelve-hole Doc Martens boots. Some of the clubs used to let us in for nothing because the bouncers said we looked good on the dance floor. They called us “Ebony and Ivory” and “Chocolate and Cream”. I once asked her if we should go in if they were calling us names like that, but she said she didn’t give a toss as long as we got to dance the night away for free.
I often stayed over at Hillingdon Road after our clubbing nights. Tess never let me stay out that late, but Dee was usually trashed and never noticed what time we got in. Karen had a lock on the inside of her bedroom door. When I asked her why, she said it had been there when they moved in. But something happened one
