When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister (best books to read now .TXT) 📗

by the daytime army of nannies and cleaners and window-washing guys. The retro milk truck doesn’t stop here with its glass bottles at dawn. Instead there are lace curtains, ceramic menageries, garden gnomes, plastic conservatories added to the front thirty years ago and leaning at odd angles. There are no shades in the slim windows by the doors to hide the shelves of shoes kept there. Sometimes you might see an old reel for a washing line hanging from the corners of the outdoor/indoor foyers, with the boxers of the man of the house on display. The houses might be sided in cracked pebbledash, or aluminum siding from the eighties, or bricks painted a red-brick color.

The yummy mummies walk by pushing their babies and the professional couples say to each other, “Such a shame. That could be such a lovely house.” Which is another way of saying that these people and their crappy stuff should just move somewhere else already, somewhere where they won’t ruin the aesthetic and dampen the property values.

In front of one of those houses Johnny is talking to a sturdy bruiser of a boy and his grandma. The boy is holding the giraffe. “My baby brother dropped that, may I have it back, please?” Johnny says. But the boy and Grandma act like they haven’t heard him. They mull around their front garden space with its carpet of Astroturf. Not the expensive, middle-class, velvety kind. The kind that is obvious and unapologetic about being plastic grass.

The boy is eight or nine, tall and destined to be a big guy. Johnny’s nearly the same height, but he’s a twig next to him. The boy is sullen, in an Arsenal jersey and shorts that are too tight though he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s much too old for this toy and has no real interest in it. He knows it; Johnny knows it; Grandma knows it too.

Watching this scene is like reading a page pulled from the script of my childhood and the childhoods of everyone I grew up with. Mom is working her ass off somewhere in a dead-end job where they don’t pay her enough for all the hours she does. Dad is working his ass off too, if he’s around. Grandma doesn’t want to be doing this but she has to. She’s doing what she can but her swollen ankles and her diabetes and her blood pressure and just her fucking exhaustion from an entire lifetime of this shit don’t make it easy for her to raise this boy. The boy takes care of her more than she does of him. He carries the groceries, washes the dishes, sits in the waiting room with her when she goes to the doctor. His hands already calloused.

He sees how the skinny, rich families look at this street, at his house. At him. Like when the foxes get into the trash but Grandma can’t bend down to clean up the mess in the morning. So he’ll do it when he gets home from school. But the bankers in their suits on the way to the Tube who have to step over the scattered garbage don’t know that, and they shake their heads in disapproval and disgust when they walk past his house. As if it was Grandma’s fault, or his.

It’s fucked-up and unfair and upside down and this kid’s been left behind before the race even got started. I know all this and I just want to walk away. But my boy’s here too and he doesn’t understand urban socio-economics in a class-based society. He doesn’t know about structural inequality and capitalism. He just wants the toy back because for him there’s only right and wrong.

I say, “Hi there, excuse me, my baby dropped that.” Grandma’s wearing a tank top tucked into the elastic waist of her skirt. She heaves herself into a folding chair in the pathway to her door and takes a slow drag of her cigarette. The elastic of her nude knee-highs is cutting into her calves below the knee. She says, “Well, ’ee found it. So I said ’ee could ’ave it.” She takes another drag. The boy stands behind her squeezing the giraffe. It squeaks.

“C’mon now, you know that’s a baby toy. He’s too old for something like that. My baby dropped it. I’d like it back, please,” I say, and I hold out my hand and Johnny’s eyes get wider and wider.

“Well, ’ee found it. It were on the pavement. So it’s ’is.” I look at the front garden: broken concrete, plastic grass, the old folding chair. Then I see her shoes and my heart catches, beats a double beat. She’s wearing pink terry-cloth slippers just like Ma’s. Molded to her hammer toes. They’re gray around the edges where the pink cloth scrapes the sidewalk because she probably wears them to the store and to pick her grandson up at school. I wasn’t expecting to see Ma today.

I can feel Johnny’s hot child’s anxiety and disbelief at the unfairness of the crime he’s watching this woman and her boy commit, disappointed in me for not fixing it and making it right. The past and present are burning up in front of me and falling off with the ash at the tip of Grandma’s cigarette.

I drop my hand, drop my head. I look at her again and I know that with her silence she’s challenging me to continue the confrontation. She’s teaching her grandson to take what he can get, keep what he finds, give nothing away to people who’ve taken so much from this neighborhood, even if it’s theirs. Keep the things they’re stupid enough to lose and don’t give anything back. For spite. In protest. If she teaches him to take what he wants from a world that’s not ever going to give him anything then he’ll survive and she’ll have done right by him.

I don’t know how to tell this woman that I have much more in common with her than