‘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