Sepia

Stephen Kennedy likes to spit in my face.

No, there’s more to it than that. Him and his mates – Mike Dennings, Mike Tucker, Benny… I don’t even know that Benny kid’s surname – they like to get me down on the ground, soften me up with a few good kicks to the tender parts, hold my arms to stop me struggling, pull my hair so hard my head jerks back, punch me in the gut till I’m winded and gasping for breath, and then – and only then, Stephen Kennedy likes to spit in my face. Or, to be more accurate, he likes to hawk up a massive greeney – though really it’s more of a browney – from way in the back of his throat, and then let it dangle, slow as he can, like a spider on a web, down into my open mouth. After that they clamp my jaw shut and hold my nose till I swallow. That cold, wet, fag-tasting slug. Then they wait for me to puke. Because I always puke. All over the playground, or the pavement, or the towpath by the canal – wherever they’ve got me today. They squeal and they laugh – “Look out, lads!”, “There she blows!”, “Count out the carrots!”, then they head off back to wherever they were going in the first place. Only occasionally do they decide to give me second helpings.

Me, I carry on puking till I know it’s all out of me. Then I pick myself up and walk home. Smile at my mum, tell her what we read in English that day, eat a Jaffa Cake to take the taste away (“Eddie - you’ll spoil your appetite!”), talk about that new game she got me for my Spectrum, talk until I know she knows I’m OK, I’m happy, then run upstairs and bawl into my pillow, with the radio on so nobody can hear, till there’s nothing left to cry.

Why do they pick on me? The answer to that’s easy. It’s because I’m different. It’s because of my hair.

Ginger nut. Carrot head. Copper top. Duracell.

Red, Red Swine. Simply Red. Mick Fucknall.

Red Ed.

They’re not allowed to pick on the black kids: that’s racialist. And when Mr. Horrocks saw them tormenting Ewan Price for being fat, he made them all stay behind and put the chairs up on the desks, every night for a week. But nobody minds when they pick on me. Some of the teachers even join in. Mr. Townsend calls me Richie Cunningham and everybody loves that. I’d rather be the Fonz, but that’s never gonna happen.

My uncle Stewart, he’s the only person I ever told.

“You know why they call you those names, Eddie-boy? Because they’re jealous. Because you’ve got your mother’s hair and that’s the most beautiful colour in the world. You take a straw poll of all the kids in your class and ask them what their favourite colour is. How many you think would say yellow? Blond? Do you know where the word ‘bland’ comes from, Eddie-boy? OK, maybe a few might say black, but they’ll be like the ‘ooh, woe is me!’, broody moody kids, the ones who end up… no, you’re probably not old enough for that just yet, but give ‘em a couple more years. And as for brown – you know what else’s brown, Eddie-boy? Who wants hair the colour of… S – H – I – T? Eurrrghhh!”

I laugh at the way he spells out that word, with hardly any sound at all, cranking his jaw round the shapes of the letters.

“No, you take that straw poll in your class tomorrow, Eddie-boy – I bet you the overwhelming majority says ‘red’. Why? Because red is the coolest colour, everyone knows that. Even in nature. What’s the coolest flower – the red, red rose? Coolest bird? Rockin’ robin redbreast! The cunning fox! The pretty flamingo! And, of course, the noble, majestic squid!”

My uncle Stewart is always going on about the noble, majestic squid. He says it’s the noble, majestic squid what made him a success as a writer after all those years trying. He’s had three books published now, and the last one’s being made into a film with Ian Ogilvy and everything. But it took him twenty years for anyone to even read his stories, and the first time they did, it was all thanks to the noble, majestic squid.

Sepia. That’s the posh name for it, the name people use when they don’t want to say ‘squid ink’. The first book my uncle Stewart had published, he wrote it entirely with a pen filled with sepia. Not the version he sent off to the publishers, he did that on Mum’s old typewriter – you could hear him in the extension till well after bedtime every night, the sound of his typing reminded me of my old machine gun, the one that Mrs. Cooper took off me and threw in the back of the dustbin wagon because she said I was a young terrorist and if I carried on like that, I’d end up in the IRA. I told her it wasn’t a real gun, it didn’t even have bullets – just a rattlesnake noise when you pulled the trigger – but she didn’t listen to me. It doesn’t matter; I’m too old for toy guns now anyway. A toy gun wouldn’t be any use against Stephen Kennedy and his mates.

After he sold that first book, Uncle Stewart used sepia for everything he wrote. Sometimes he’d let me shake the bottle to get it all mixed up for him, otherwise the gunge all settles to the bottom – the pigment, he called it – and then it goes a funny colour and it’s not so good to write with. You have to be careful not to get it on your fingers too, or they end up smelling like the fish stall in the market.

“Give it a few more years, and you’ll be aching for fishy-smelling fingers!” Uncle Stewart said one time, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. I wasn’t so sure about lots of the things Uncle Stewart said, ‘specially when he talked about my hair and how red was the coolest colour and all the other kids were just jealous of me. I mean, he must be smart, or people wouldn’t buy his books, but…

“Feel sorry for them, Eddie-boy – all they have is their jealousy.”

Read the complete story here.