Poking Seaweed with a Stick and Running Away from the Smell by Alison Whitelock

breakfast queue asking me, ‘Is that for your porridge or are you going to plant crocuses in it?’ And so I sobbed even more and then the sobbing turned into wailing until the Commissioner knew she had no choice but to agree to drive me home before all of the other Brownies started wailing for their mammies too. So with my head hung low, I dragged my bag of essential camping items through the wet grass behind me to the Commissioner’s car and didn’t dare look up from the grass for fear that the Brownies would be staring at me and ­whispering in each other’s ears about the Brownie from The Blue Tits who’s missing her mammy.
    The sun was almost set for the night and the darkness wasn’t far away as me and the Commissioner drove up the dirt track and out of the Brownie camp. Just before we turned right onto the sealed road that would take us to the motorway, I turned back and looked one last time at the camp. Each of the tents had its own oil lamp burning outside and I could see the Brownies in their sturdy shoes sitting around the orangey flames of the camp fire telling each other stories and all sorts of lies about their breakfast bowls and how they weren’t missing their mammies one little bit, and me, I just turned my head in the direction of home and watched the dusky hills roll past as the rhythm of the Commissioner’s car rocked me gently to sleep.

16
Vladimir’s deli and my bare arse
    I used to think Mum drank the vinegar straight from the gherkin jar ’cause her grandparents were Lithuanian. Once the last gherkin in the jar had been eaten, Mum used to lift the jar to her mouth and gulp down its contents using her teeth as a sieve for the pickling spices and the long bits of stringy dill that floated in amongst the gherkins. Lithuania is right next door to Poland and we grew up on Polish gherkins and Polish sour-dough bread and Polish pork ring sausages and we used to get them once a week from Vladimir’s delicatessen at the Gorbals.
    We didn’t have a telly back then or Monopoly or Scrabble or Buckaroo like our cousin David had and so for a laugh sometimes I’d lift my skirt and run through the living room exposing my bare arse to Mum and Izzy and Andrew. And then one day Mum came up with a new game that involved cutting off the little knot of skin that tied the two ends of the pork sausage together to keep it in its ring shape. Then she’d keep it in her pocket and when I exposed my arse again she’d grab me and stick the little knot between the cheeks of my arse as I ran past. The first time it happened, I didn’t like the new game very much, but Mum and Izzy and Andrew thought it was the best game they’d ever played. Buster loved this new game too ’cause it meant he would get the knot of sausage skin as a treat at the end, so when the game started Buster joined in enthusiastically, running after me and sniffing and licking my arse, searching for the treat. Sometimes even when I wasn’t exposing my arse and just minding my own business, Mum and Izzy and Andrew would tease Buster and give him orders like, ‘Get the pork ring, boy, get the pork ring!’ and Buster would run after me, salivating at the thought of the tasty morsel he might find.
    As time went on, having the dog run after me trying to lick my arse every minute of the day lost its appeal and so I turned my attention to other ways of passing my time which saw me keep my knickers up and my skirt down and life became very dull. And just when I thought things couldn’t get any duller, I became vegetarian and Mum seemed to respect that if I didn’t want to eat meat, then I certainly didn’t want to have pieces of pork sausage stuck up my arse and so she let me be, although not before ­considering nut cutlets and lentil rissoles as vegetarian alternatives.
    With my arse now covered up at all times, Mum ­continued on her weekly trips to