Johonny Noo Noos and the Ding Dongs - 2

Johnny Noo Noos and the Ding Dongs - 2
(not necessarily in sequence)

Wet hard air pushed at me and I ducked my chin down into my chest worried that my hair tonged bangs would uncurl and droop like strands of oily string. I leaned forward into the wind. Must be gale force five. Maybe more. I didn't know what that meant but it meant that the wheelbarrow is no longer outside the shed, it’s in Cripply Wipply’s field across the road. Mummy’s told me to go and get it.
- Why can’t Michael?
- I need him to help me keep the roof on.
- Oh.
I took Natasha with me, holding her leash tight. Last time she got off she flew over the road and into the field and up and over the purple heather covered treeless mountain and we didn’t see her for three days. She came back looking like an excited fox, bright eyed and tail wagging but I knew what her eyes said and they said I’ve done something bad and she had. She had chased three of James Donnelly’s sheep over a cliff. He wasn’t happy but he didn’t say anything as mummy paid him for helping us fix up the schoolhouse.
    The wheelbarrow was turned over face down. Legs stuck out like a dead man. I couldn’t budge it. The wheel was stuck in black bog mud. I crouched down to shield myself against the wind, holding Natasha close. She sniffed my face, licked the rain off my check. Her almond shaped black eyes looked at me and I looked back and she smiled. I stood up, pushed the wheelbarrow with my foot as hard as I could but it still didn’t move. I turned to go back home but my uncle Robin came towards me, his arms flapping up and down in the wind as if this is the most wonderful thing, this revolting weather. His long blond hair blew wildly across his face and he wiped it away without stopping.
- Let me do that, he said.
- Great, thanks.
He lifted the wheelbarrow easily, righted it.
- No point in wheeling it in this shit, he said and picked up the barrow one armed and carried it over the road to the tool shed. I followed him but I couldn’t keep up.
    My mother was on the roof of the schoolhouse, hunking concrete blocks about. I felt my stomach clench. Michael’s not up there so why did I have to go get the wheelbarrow? I felt like crying.  I wanted to get inside, to my deck above the kitchen and climb into bed and hide. I’m soaked through and my hair needs re-curling. I knew that if I went inside the front door my mother would see me and ask me to do something else so I went round the other side of the building where she can’t see me, around by Margaret’s place.
    I peered into Margaret’s window. Nothing. Maybe she is in the schoolhouse. I’ll go inside, I thought, warm up. Be alone. Away from Shelly. Look around. Margaret always had something interesting in there. I opened the door, it was quiet. Smelly. Old bread, dead flowers, old skin, face powder, baby powder, lipstick, wet newspapers, dusty books, drying pantyhose, oil paints, mouldy towels. Toilet smell. 
    Margaret lived in the schoolhouse toilet hut. When we moved into the schoolhouse the toilets were out back and in ruins. My mother and Robin and Michael pulled the toilets out and made the hut into a two-room studio space for Margaret. She even had a new toilet. She was the only one who had a real toilet that flushed. The rest of us had to use a chemical toilet and pour smelly blue liquid on our pee and shit. I didn’t mind it so much. What I minded was James Donnelly walking through the bathroom with his bucket of concrete when I was sitting on the toilet.
- Grand day, he said, opening the door to the outside where a yet another gale force wind hammered across the fields. He didn’t even shut the door. After that I peed outside, even in the rain.

     I sat down on Margaret’s couch, holding Natasha close. She put her head on my knees. The couch dipped in the middle and I felt myself sinking into her, drowning. I was sure bits of her old face powdered skin were embedded into the lurid green blanket she’d thrown over it. I got up quickly, brushed myself off.  She had a painting propped up on an easel in the corner. I walked over to it, stepping across a two feet high pile of newspapers. The painting was another unfinished still life. The rest were stacked in a pile behind the easel. The bunch of yellow gorse in the vase she was painting had turned brown, little petals lay in a heap on the table. In the painting they were still yellow, still sprouting from the thorny branch.
- You can’t be in here, Margaret said in her booming voice. I jumped. Natasha jumped. Margaret must have been in the bedroom.
- Why? I mouth.
-  It’s got VD. You have to get out, quickly. She shooed me out into the rain, batting her hands at me.
    I didn’t know what VD was so I went to find Michael. He was lying on his bed in his tin room off the side of the schoolhouse, reading A History of British Sea-Anemones and Cora. Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare was blasting out so loud a pile of LP’s on the floor was jumping up and down, falling over. Natasha found an empty square of carpet to lie on and went to sleep, I took off the leash, she opened one eye and then closed it.
- Michael.
He didn’t look up. Couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t hear myself
- Michael!
Nothing. His foot was wagging up and down and he was picking his nose, putting whatever he found there into his mouth.
I grovelled underneath a pile of clothes and turned down the volume switch to his LP player. Last time I picked up the needle and I scratched the record and Michael whacked me in the stomach so I wasn’t going to risk that again.
- What’s VD? I ask.
- What’s what?
- VD.
- Venereal Disease.
- What’s that?
- You don’t know what that is?
- No.
- God you’re stupid, he said and went back to his book. – Turn the volume back up.
- Don’t be like that.
- Like what?
- Like that. Tell me what it is.
- Where’d you read it?
- I didn’t. Bonma said not to go into her room because it has VD.
Michael looked at me.
- That’s ridiculous.
He sounded serious but I could tell something was funny so I came closer and sat on the end of his bed.
- A room can’t have venereal disease, only people can.
- Well I figured that out but what is it?
- It’s an STD.
- Stop being like that.
- Like what?
- You know.
- I don’t. Like what?
- Michael, stop it. Tell me.
- Tell you what?
- What an STD is.
- Oh that. Well. You are too young.
- You’re horrible.
- I’m not horrible.
- You are. Why aren’t you helping mum?
- I’ve got a sore foot.
- Yeah right.
- I have, look, he says, shoving it in my face. The heel was cracked open, red and sore looking.
- Yuck. How’d you do that?
- Stood on a piece of glass when the bathroom window shattered last night.
- Ow.
- Yeah, he says and picked at the crack, opening it even more. I turned away. He picked at everything. His nose, his toes, his fingernails, his hair. All of it went into his mouth at some point, even my own hair which he said tasted of cabbage.
- So what’s an STD?
- A sexually transmitted disease.
- Oh.
- Time you knew about such things.
- I’m thirteen, I said feeling the blood climb to my cheeks.
- Exactly. I said you were too young.
- So I’m too young or it’s time I knew about such things?
- I don’t know smarty-pants. You tell me.
- I hate you.
- No you don’t you love me, he said, leaning dangerously forward. Last time he tickled me I nearly threw up.
- Well I’m going. I climbed off the bed quickly and stepped on something squishy. It’s a half a peanut butter sandwich. I push it under the bed with my foot hoping he won’t notice.  He didn’t, he was back inside his book.
- Turn the volume up.
- Okay, I said, and grovelled on the floor again holding my nose against the stink of his socks.