Every Time a Bell Rings

4

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.

Winnie the Pooh

May 1988

‘You’re the only black person I’ve ever known,’ Jim says, hoisting himself up on his pillow. We’re in our den, eating chocolate that we’ve nicked from Tess’s secret stash.

‘Well, you’re the only red-haired boy I know,’ I say, sticking my tongue out at him and he laughs in response.

‘What’s it like being black?’ he asks.

‘What’s it like being an eejit?’ I reply and throw a packet of cheese-and-onion Tayto crisps his way.

But I don’t mind his questions in the slightest. Within a few weeks of arriving, Jim became my very best friend. Just like I asked Santa for Christmas.

‘Thanks for today,’ I say to him.

He shrugs off my praise. ‘Shut them up anyhow.’

‘Sure did,’ I say.

Joyce O’Connor and her cronies had shoved past me so I fell down and then started pointing and laughing at me. I’ve got one of those faces, it seems.

‘What you looking at?’ Jim shouted at them, standing on his feet.

‘What are you looking at?’ Joyce mimicked and her friends laughed some more.

‘Not much, from where I’m standing,’ Jim replied.

‘Where’s your friend from? Bongo-bongo land?’ she shouted.

‘I told you, I’m from Dublin, just like you,’ I said and started to pick up my lunch stuff. I just wanted to get away. I could feel myself getting angry and when that happens, I usually end up in a fight and that never ends well for me.

‘Liar,’ Another one shouted at me and then they all started to chant ‘Bongo, Bongo, Bongo,’ over and over.

‘Take that back. She is not a liar and that’s not nice.’ Jim clenched his fists and walked towards them.

‘Oh. I’m shaking,’ Joyce, the obvious ringleader, said.

‘Wagons the lot of them. If they weren’t girls, I’d give them a slap,’ Jim said.

‘It’s no big deal,’ I replied. I pretended to yawn and hoped he didn’t look too closely at my eyes, which I knew must be shiny with unshed tears.

Then Jim stood up and sauntered over to them, his hands in his pockets. ‘You know who she is? That girl over there, that you’re picking on?’ He pointed in my direction.

‘Who?’ Joyce sneered. ‘The Queen of Sheba.’

‘You know who Paul McGrath is?’ He said, and of course they all nodded. Everyone in Ireland knows who he is. He’s our most famous footballer and a hero to practically the whole nation.

‘Well, Belle is his niece. I’d be nice to her if I were you. Because I don’t think he’d like it if he heard kids were picking on his favourite girl.’ He walked away, leaving them all gawping at me with their mouths wide open.

‘Jim,’ I said. ‘I’m not. …’

He winked at me as he replied, ‘Sure, how do you know? You could be. You said yourself that you don’t know who your father is.’

‘You know, I didn’t know I was black until I was four.’ I tell him. ‘I hadn’t noticed that I was any different to anyone else.’

‘What do mean?’ he asks. ‘Surely you’d looked in the mirror? Sure you couldn’t miss that ugly mug.’

I look around for something else to throw at him, but as he’s tucking into my crisps now, I realise that he’s only deliberately baiting me, just to rob my treats.

‘I know your game,’ I tell him and slowly open my bar of Cadbury’s Tiffin. I know it’s his favourite and pop a piece in my mouth. That will teach him. I was going to share it with him, but now I won’t.

‘What I mean is that I’d never heard that term before. Black. As in, used to describe someone, that is. Not until I moved into my last foster house, Joan and Daniel’s. They had this big house out in Dun Laoghaire, three stories high,’ I tell him.

I’m pleased to see that he looks impressed at that nugget of information.

‘It had a basement too and they had it made into a playroom for all the children they fostered.’

‘Deadly,’ he replies.

Yeah, it was deadly, I agree.

‘There was more than just you living there with them, then?’ he asks.

‘They had loads of kids. There was always someone coming or going. Some came for a day or two only, others for weeks or months. I was there the longest, though,’ I tell him.

‘Did you call them mam and dad, then? Seeing as you were there for ages?’ he asks.

‘No. Never.’ I answer quickly.

‘Why not?’ he asks.

‘Because they weren’t my mam and dad, stupid,’ I say. He’s so dumb sometimes.

But what I don’t tell him is that they never asked me to call them mam or dad either.

‘I’d love a playroom,’ Jim says. ‘When I’m grown up, I’m going to have the biggest one ever in my house.’

‘With a slide,’ I say. Jim is always sliding down things.

‘Natch,’ Jim replies. ‘And I’ll put in a swing for you.’

‘Natch,’ I say. That’s our new favourite word. Followed closely by ‘deadly’. We say them a lot.

‘You’d have loved their basement, though. It was cool. It had shelves painted in every colour you can think of. It looked kind of like a rainbow. And all the shelves were stacked with lots of cool stuff.’ I say.

‘Like what?’ he asks.

‘Well, Lego, books, puzzles, dolls, cars. Kind of like a toy shop. Everything,’ I boast.

‘Wow,’ he’s well jealous now.

‘Yeah.’ The first time I saw the playroom I gasped. I was overwhelmed by the size of the house, my new home, which looked strange and scary to me.

I look at Jim and decide to tell him something. ‘Sometimes I don’t feel like talking.’

He stops munching his crisps and gives me his full attention.

‘And on that first day at Joan’s, I was having one of my non-talking spells’ I say.

I’m expecting Jim to make a smart comment here, but he doesn’t.

‘Why don’t you talk? Why go all quiet?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know. Sometimes I’ve just got nothing to say.’ I reply. I don’t tell him that I learned very young that sometimes it’s safer not to talk.

Shut up with all your constant whingeing. I’m sick to death listening to you. SHUT UP.

‘Fair enough,’ Jim says, satisfied with my answer and I try not to think about her any more.

‘Joan was nice. She made me smile and laugh. Pretty soon I was chattering away to her and the other kids who lived there.’ I close my eyes, remembering those early days.

‘There was a shelf full of dolls there,’ I tell Jim.

‘Is that where you got your doll Dee-Dee, then?’ Jim asks.

I nod and in an instant I’m back in the moment we found each other.

Joan bends down and pulls out a white basket from the bottom shelf and as she does a lone doll falls forward. It is a Barbie doll too, but this one looks different. She has a brown face. And short, black curly hair with long red earrings that dangle from each ear. Her dress is long and bright red with a gold necklace attached to the front of it. She looks exotic and beautiful and I can’t take my eyes off her.

I hold Dee-Dee in my hands for the first time and know that I’ll never let her go.

‘She looks a little like you,’ Joan says to me. She looks down to the doll and back up to me again.

I look back up to Jim. ‘Joan said to me that I was black just like Dee-Dee.’ He doesn’t say a word and I’m glad.

Black. I don’t understand what she means. That word panics me. I don’t want to get into trouble. The whole way over to Joan’s house, my social worker warned me not to get dirty. I’d been so careful.

I must have gotten messed up somewhere along the way to their house. I look down at my hands and fingers, but they are spotless, even my nails. I’m a good girl. I stayed clean. I don’t know what she is talking about.

‘She’s so beautiful, isn’t she? Daniel got her on one of his trips to the US. Her name is Dee-Dee.’ Joan tells me. ‘You should keep her.’

I look at Dee-Dee and cannot believe that she is mine. I pull her in close to me and I smile my thanks to Joan.

Later that night, I can hear my foster carers whispering outside my bedroom door.

‘It’s probably the first black doll she’s ever seen. Nice for her to have a doll that looks like herself.’ Daniel tells Joan.

Dee-Dee looks like me?

Do you Dee-Dee?

I pull the red dress off Dee-Dee’s plastic body and then lift up the sleeves of my pyjama top. Are we alike? I can’t understand why they call us ‘black’.

‘You’re brown,’ I realise suddenly. And Dee-Dee smiles back, agreeing with me. ‘So are you,’ she says. ‘We’re both brown.’

I worked it out eventually, what they meant.

‘After that day, I’d hear people call me black all the time. I used to look at the other kids in school or on our street, searching to see if anyone else had the same colour skin as mine.’

‘And is your mother black, then?’ Jim asks me.

I shake my head and sigh. No. She’s not. Blonde and white. She couldn’t be more different to me if you tried.

‘I have one picture of her,’ I tell Jim. ‘Do you want to see her? My mother?’

Jim nods. So I run to my bedroom and take it out of its secret place, in my favourite book, The Faraway Tree, right at the back of the bookcase.

I feel a little shy showing it to him. I’ve never shown it to anyone before. He looks at it and then at me and agrees we don’t look alike.

My mother looks up at me from the picture. Her face is smiling, but it’s one of the fakers. Her blue eyes are dull and without any mirth. Her mousy-blonde hair is tied back in a low ponytail. It’s fine and straight, again the complete opposite of my afro hair.

‘Maybe you look like your father,’ Jim says.

‘Ooh aah Paul McGrath,’ I joke, but there’s no merriment in my words and they fall flat between us.

‘I asked Mrs Reilly for a photograph of him, but she got all weird and did that thing with her voice.’ I say.

‘All high, like she’s being squeezed tight?’ Jim asks and I nod. I knew he’d get it.

‘She kept putting me off, but then when I pushed her, she told me that they didn’t have a record of who he was,’ I say.

‘That sucks,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t know who my father is either. My mam always starts to cry when I ask her about him. I’ve given up trying. Who needs a father anyhow? Losers.’

‘Yeah. Losers,’ I agree.

A tiny bit of me feels jealous of Jim, though. I know his mother is cracked, but at least she comes by every now and then. I think of mine and feel a pain in my heart.

‘Does she ever call you?’ he asks.

I shake my head no. ‘I wrote to her a few times. I was real careful to make sure it was perfect, with no mistakes,’ I say.

I was so proud of those letters.

Shame floods me now at how stupid I was.

‘You have good writing. Better than mine,’ Jim says. ‘I bet they were great letters.’

He’s not wrong about his writing. He mixes up his ‘b’s and ‘d’s all the time and his letters are way too big. I’m going to have to give him some lessons, because he’ll get in trouble at school if not.

‘I got Joan to put a picture of me in the last letter I sent, so she could see what I looked like now. I put on my best dress and stood in the garden by the rose bush for it. Joan had one of those Polaroid cameras,’ I finish softly.

‘What happened?’ Jim asks, his voice so quiet I can barely hear him.

In our cocoon, made of white-and-blue cotton sheets, I suppose the sound of my silence is his answer.

He doesn’t break my silence, doesn’t question me any further, but reaches behind him to his stash of treats and hands me his Club bar. I know he’s been saving this one till last; he loves to suck the thick chocolate off. So I push it back towards him. I can’t take it. But he gives it to me again, insistent.

Neither of us say a word, we just sit there sucking our chocolate bars, lost in our own thoughts of absentee parents.

For weeks I would run to the postman, check through the piles of letters and when I saw a white envelope my heart would soar in hope. But it was never for me.

No reply. No card. No phone call. Nothing.

I look at Jim and hold up Dee-Dee. ‘Until you came, all I had was Dee-Dee. She was my best friend.’

I take a deep breath. I want to tell him something, but I’m afraid that he might laugh. ‘I’m glad that I have you now.’

He looks embarrassed and starts to push his Spider-Man truck up and down the walls made of sheets. But he doesn’t laugh and I catch him peeking at me. I think he looks pleased with what I’ve said.

And even though he doesn’t say it back, I know he thinks it too.

‘Why did you leave their house, if it was so good there?’ he asks when he turns back to me a few minutes later.

‘I had no choice,’ I admit. ‘Joan and Daniel left Ireland.’

‘Oh,’ he says and his eyes are wide.

‘I begged them both to take me with them. Daniel had gotten a job in the US, in some place called the Silicone Valley. They said that they couldn’t take foster kids with them,’ I say.

‘Oh,’ he repeats and his face is like one of those comic books, when it freezes into a shocked look at the end of a chapter.

I wonder what he’d say if I told him about how I pleaded with them the night before Mrs Reilly came to take me away. I feel a flush of shame overtake me again as I remember how much I begged and begged, but how it made no difference whatsoever. I still had to go.

‘You could adopt me,’ I whisper to them. ‘Then you can bring me with you. I wouldn’t be a foster kid any more. I’d be yours. And I’ll be so good. I promise I’ll be good.’

I hold my breath as they look at each other. Daniel looks uncomfortable and starts to fidget and Joan won’t look me in the eye.

I don’t wait for them to answer me, I just get up and walk out of the family room. I know the score. I ignore Joan’s anguished cries that she wishes things were different.

‘Our hands are tied,’ Daniel shouts at my retreating back.

And even though I’m only eight years old, I know already that if they wanted me, if they really did, they could have made it happen.

Better not to tell Jim all that. And I don’t want him to know about the day Mrs Reilly took me away from them either.

Joan cries and tells me that she will always care for me. But I don’t answer her. I can see that my silence is hurting her. I know that she wants me to let her off the hook, to tell her I understand why I can’t go with them.

But I don’t want to make it easier for her. I hate her. I hate Daniel too and I hope that their plane crashes and they die.

Shame floods my body for thinking such a bad thing. And I know that it is my own fault that they don’t want me.

Who would want me? My own mother didn’t.

Mrs Reilly puts me in her car and takes me away. I can feel their eyes watching me as we drive off, but I keep looking forward.

Maybe they’ll change their minds, Dee-Dee says. But we both know that’s not true. So I move into a new temporary home. One where people keep trying to make me talk and unzip my lips.

But I am so tired. What good do words do anyhow? No one ever listens to me. They do what they want to do and send me away.

I turn my back to Jim and pick up my Simon game. I don’t want him to see me cry.

‘Why did you speak to me when you saw me on that first day?’ Jim suddenly asks and his voice is gruff. I can’t help it, I look back towards him.

Because you were the answer to my wish. Because I know that you were in pain and scared and I know what that feels like. Because … Just because.

‘I dunno. Felt sorry for you, I suppose. Loser,’ I say instead, joking to try to banish the tears.

He looks at me for a moment, locks his eyes on mine and even though he doesn’t say anything, I know that he knows the real reason. And in that look, he is thanking me and I am thanking him too.

‘You’re alright for a girl,’ he says.

He looks away and throws his Spider-Man car down to the ground.

‘I feel sorry for you now, Belle Bailey, cos’ I’m about to beat your record on that stupid Simon game of yours. Prepare to be destroyed.’ He replies, picking it up and switching it on.

‘In your dreams, Jim Looney,’ I say.

5

Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale of all.

Hans Christian Anderson

July 1990

It’s one of those days where the heat is so strong, the air around me looks hazy. And even lifting my hand to move the pages in my book is too much effort.

‘That story is for babies,’ Jim says, flicking my Cinderella book closed as he passes me by.

‘Get lost,’ I reply and kick myself that I’ve not got a wittier retort. ‘I’ll have you know that Cinderella is a story for all ages.’

Strictly speaking, I know that I should have outgrown my Disney princess stage about five years ago, but no matter how old I get, I never tire of this story. My copy is battered and the corners of the book are curled from constant sticky fingers and thumbs working their way through them.

‘You wouldn’t catch me reading fairy tales,’ Jim tells me. ‘They are so lame.’ He demonstrates said lameness by pretending to limp around the room.

I resist the urge to laugh. It only encourages him.

‘You think you know everything, Jim Looney, but you’re a mere ten,’ I sigh and open my book again. He’s such a pain sometimes. I should just go upstairs and hide from his childishness, but I’m too hot to climb the stairs.

‘So does the princess always get the prince in these fairy tales of yours?’ Jim asks, as I stick my nose back into Cinderella again.

I put my book down and give him my best withering look. I’ve been practising it in front of my mirror and think that it’s pretty good. ‘Of course they do. That’s what always happens in fairy tales, you big eejit,’ I reply.

‘And you reckon that one day a prince is going to just rock up here to Drumcondra, on a white pony, and ask you to marry him too?’ he says, as he balances his football on one foot.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ I shake my head. Sometimes I just give up with him. ‘We’ve had this conversation before, Jim. You know what’s going to happen.’

He pretends to put a gun to his head to shoot himself. ‘Not that again.’

‘Haha, very funny.’ I say. ‘But you can’t fight the inevitable.’

As he runs out the back door, I shout after him, ‘I’m going to marry you one day, Jim Looney. You wait and see. I cannot wait for the day when you drop to one knee just like Prince Charming.’

Jim laughs, his usual response to my bold prediction. I’m sure many would be offended by his obvious mirth, but I’m not in the least bit worried by his reaction. First of all, he’s a boy. Second of all, he’s only ten. And okay, I know I’m only two months older than he is, but it’s a proven fact that boys don’t mature as quickly as us girls.

Mind you, I have noticed something. I’ve been telling him he’ll marry me for years now and even though he always laughs, he never says he won’t either.

I think about going for a kick-about too, but it’s just too hot. Tess has had to go to bed for a few hours. She said she was about to melt.

As it goes, I’m not too bad at football. Jim jokes that I’d give Paul McGrath a run for his money. With every ‘OOH AAH Paul McGrath’ that the whole of Ireland has chanted over the past couple of years, my life has gotten way easier.

The best defender Ireland has ever had, Jim reckons. All I know is that he has made it cool to be black. He’s a legend in my books and one day I’ll tell him so, if I ever get the chance to meet him.