Carmel Harrington - Every Time a Bell Rings

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.