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Sucking Shrimp Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

The Sanchez Family lives by the sea. Who is the father? The father is called Paco and the mother is Carmen. Paco is on the beach where he paints his boat. Carmen is in the kitchen where she prepares soup, potatoes, tomatoes and fruit. The son of Paco is called Miguel and the daughter is Maria. Miguel is in the garden where he studies a book. Maria works with her mother in the kitchen.
My name is Rosa Barge. I am fourteen years old. My mother is called Brenda. She hates the kitchen. Her idea of a special meal is boiled brisket in tinned oxtail soup gravy. She hates abroad. When she was a child and she went out in the sun without wearing a hat, her mother would confine her to a dark room for three days with strips of raw beef all over her face.

A shadow falls over my desk and there is the smell of hot Christmas cake. A man with a moist mouth puts a pale hand on my exercise book and fills it with a row of neat red ticks. Ten out of ten for the familia Sanchez translation and only a little less for my own autobiography. The man makes a giblety smile and says, 'Nice one, Rosa.' Mr Jones, our Spanish teacher with lips like open-heart surgery and a body soaked in Old Spice, has just graduated from Reading University. He wants to be our friend.
 	It seems to be working. Most of the girls feel completely at ease about spending the lesson applying mascara while Nikki Kilroy, who recently went on a package holiday to Spain with his parents, entertains his friends with English translations of the Spanish he picked up there: 'What the cunt do you think you're doing? I shit on God, do you understand? I shit on the mother who gave birth to you, you son of a prostitute, I shit in the milk.'
 	It is so noisy in the classroom that nobody can even hear Mr Jones read out my near-perfect autobiography. 'Now, this is very interesting,' he says, picking up my book and trying to get the attention of the class. 'Interesting!' he shouts towards the Kilroy corner. Spit flies off his lips and lands on my desk. He gives up.
 	'Lively lot, aren't they, Rosa?' He shrugs shyly, bringing a chair to the side of my desk. Sometimes, Mr Jones pronounces my name in the Spanish fashion: Rrrrosa, which means 'rose' in Spanish. It sounds like he is crushing the air with a lash of the tongue on a palate made hard by vibrations of steel, and for those few seconds, he is no longer a damp English weed called Mr Jones and I am no longer a stupid Englsh Rose in dolly –mixture colours. He is a gravelly Mexican bandit and I am a machine-gun rose called Rrrrrrrrrrrossssssssa.
 	He grips my exercise book in his hands and launches into a live translation of my Spanish composition.
 	'Mi madre se llama Brenda,' he begins, in deep, rich tones, and already I hear the drumming of hoofs coming from somewhere far off. I stare at the page until my eyes go funny and the words starts breaking up and flying around on the paper like a red hall of mirrors. The soft gentility of 'days' and 'meat' and 'abroad' get tossed up in the air as a stampede of red Spanish horses gallops through the middle of them, thrashing them into 'días' and 'carne' and 'extranjero' as Mr Jones mouths them. He cracks open hot, juicy husks of sound and releases molten spurts of double Rs and hissing Ss and, best of all, pickaxe Js that sound like live hearts torn from ribcages: 'No quiere ir al extranjero. Si salía al sol, su madre la encerraba en su habitación durante tres días…' More blody-tendrilled vowels claw their way out of the wet tonsil cave and twist their red, tangled roots round the white, clumsy blob of 'Brenda'. The hoofs are getting louder, the horses are pounding in my throat, coming closer and closer and closer and there is dust and drums and glittering metal, and when Mr Jones says, 'Muy bien, hija,' with the throat-scraping, kettle-descaling, death rattle J of 'hija' – eeeeeee-hhhhhhhha- I jig in my seat, I pick up my compass and I stab Jack in the kidneys.
 	Jack makes a puppy yelp. My Jones stands up and is on the verge of saying something about the  small red clot he can see oozing through the back of Jack's white shirt. Then she sees what Jack has written in his homework exercise book: 'Sir, you have lips like a freshly-cut peach.'
 	Mr Jones puts his hand in front of his mouth, pretends to cough and then decides that the shark pool of Nikki Kilroy and his friends is more tempting than Jack Flowers in fullest courtship mode. You can't really blame him. When Mr Jones joined St Dougal's at the beginning of term, he entered the room to the fanfare of Jack Flowers shouting, 'Backs to the walls, boys! Backs to the wall!' in his best John Inman from Are You Being Served? voice. Then, when he asked Jack what his name was, Jack said he was called Fanny Nancy Plum Caramel Dolores Ramona Shirley Whisky Norwood.
 	As the weeks pass, Mr Jones has been getting redder and redder, damper and damper. Not that this deters Jack. He usually gives Mr Jones a Shirley Bassey wink every time he addresses him, although his best efforts are saved for Nikki Kilroy. Nikki Kilroy is the best-looking boy in the class.He often has a tan from the package holidays his parents take him on. A package holiday means a holiday with a plane ride, a hotel, a swimming-pool and rings of squid in batter for your meals, all included...