Aye, he can do it alright. Practicing hour after hour in his mother’s bedroom mirror. The vanity mirror above the scrawl of lipsticks and powderpuffs and rusting rings and the jingling bangles tied together with a baby blue plastic crucifix.
He sits on the velveteen stool with its bandy legs, hunched forward, his face dead centre, steaming the mirror, lips pursed, a pout, a scrunch of his forehead, a deep inbreath, jaws tight, hands on hips, a further lean in, and brrrrrrrrrr. Blows the perfect potted raspberry. Again and again. Two minutes between each one. The two minutes break is important although he no longer remembers why.
He doesn’t tell the rest of them. The gang. Jesus they would kill him, not for the raspberries, they love the bloody raspberries, heh Kent, go on, look at the copper, rasp him, mate, rasp him! No they’d crucify him for the practising, the urging on of his facial facias, the vanity mirror, his thin boned hands on his thin boned hips.
‘What are you doing up there, Kent?’ His mother’s voice hovers up the stairwell, drifts into the bedroom. The words barely make it; his mother is tired.
‘You in my room again.’ It’s not a question.
‘I’m not, Mum.’ Kent stands up, shakes his head, and turns for the door. Takes a last look at the mirror and pulls his lips in over his teeth. Two new freckles above his lip. He searches for something to blot them out, finds a dried-up concealer stick and rubs it across his skin. Now he looks like he’s diseased. No tissues anywhere. He rubs at it with his sweater sleeve. Jumps down the stairs three at a time. Blows a raspberry at his school photo that’s pinned to the hall wall at a jaunty angle with a red tack.
Kent is fourteen. He has facial fluff and growing pains and feet that are too big for his legs and cheek bones born of angels. Kent is an only child of an only parent in the only house without a hedge in the only street without street lights in the only suburb without a bus or a train or even any hint of a promise of a levelling-up.
Other kids do fags like Kent does only. He picks up only and rolls it between his fingers, holds it up to his mouth, sucks, breathes in deep and coughs and splutters.
When Kent’s only mother is at work in the club she tells men to fuck off and tells women to keep their titties in their blouses there’ll be none of that round here. There’s no voice-hovering with these exhaltations. Titties and fuck offs are forbidden in the only house without a hedge, though, and Kent whines that it’s unfair and his mother says there’s nothing fair about this world now eat the bran flakes to keep your ‘tines rigorous.
Kent learnt the raspberries off his mother and his mother learnt origami off Youtube. The only street without buses is also the only street without the drone drops. Does his mother steal the coloured card that comes in packs of a hundred, ten sheets each of ten rainbow colours? There’s no money for meat so how come there’s money for origami paper and how does it arrive without the drones?
As it’s Sunday, and his mother isn’t working, they sit together in the room with the table, folding the thick clean-smelling card. Out in the street, there’s a drive-by shooting. The walls shiver and they turn their heads briefly to look through the lined shadows of the window security bars, then return to the folding, eyes down, nails carefully scrubbed and trimmed. You have to respect the paper, his mother always says. Clean hands make mean origami.
Pink flapping cranes pop out of Kent’s hands and stalk across the broken television and step down the piles of old music magazines. The cranes do not have eyes but they see, Kent is sure of it.
Bethany, Kent’s mother, sits on the floor, her legs long, her eyes crossed, her fingers deft and magic. She twists orange dragons and green wizards and glorious bulbous crimson toads. She uses the wrong coloured card for the right kind of mystery and blows a raspberry at Kent for every finished creature.
Kent folds a kitten out of brown card that will lie on his hard pillow behind his head at night and purr and purr and purr as Kent hides his heart from the livid bloody blasts that rampage across the night city.
The tap tap tap at the window is all yellow beak and irridescent feathers. Small. Persistent. Bethany looks up at the bird and back to the dove taking shape in her hands. She hasn’t seen a live bird in months. Not since Kent’s birthday. Even then, she’d only caught the shadow, and afterwards, had doubted she’d seen anything live at all.
‘Look, love,’ she says to Kent. ‘The poor wee thing is blowing raspberries.’
This piece was from a two word prompt exercise: raspberries and origami.
SANDERLINGS 