Read Online Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah - Free Book Online Page B

Fitzgerald turned to Alem. ‘I’m sorry, sometimes she gets like this. It’s nothing, just ignore her.’
    There were no more such outbursts but the tension was ever present. And there was not much for them to talk about. Ruth was into pop music, Alem was into books; Alem loved buildings, Ruth loved clothes; Alem thought Ruth’s parents were interesting, Ruth thought they were boring; Alem was thirsty for knowledge but Ruth thought that she knew it all.
    Despite the lack of communication between him and Ruth, Alem did not have a single bad word to say against the Fitzgerald family – at one point he even tried hard to find faults after watching a televisionprogramme on the failures of mixed-race adoption. The programme highlighted case after case of white families that had adopted and fostered black kids and failed because of a lack of understanding or of cultural differences. But Alem was sure the Ruth problem wasn’t about race, and he had come to the conclusion that the Fitzgerald family’s willingness to look after him was more important than their lack of African culture. Their lack of African culture was not their fault.
    The day before Alem had to visit the school, Mrs Fitzgerald called Ruth into the living room where Alem was sitting. ‘Ruth, tell Alem about the school! It wasn’t that long ago you were there, I suspect not much has changed.’
    Ruth sat on the chair opposite Alem. She sighed and crossed her legs and began to pick things off her jeans that could only have been visible to her eyes. Her mother noticed her actions, as did Alem.
    ‘Well, the school’s called Great Milford,’ Ruth said as she groomed her jeans, ‘there are more boys than girls, the playground’s big, the library’s big, the classes are big, the headmaster talks a lot and the teachers are not bad, and when I was there they boasted that they spoke about twenty languages.’
    ‘What!’ Alem said, eyebrows raised high in surprise. ‘The teachers are that good, they speak twenty different languages?’
    ‘No,’ said Ruth, ‘I didn’t mean it like that. They – the teachers – were boasting that there were about twenty different languages spoken by the pupils of the school.’
    ‘What else?’ Mrs Fitzgerald said. ‘Tell him more.’
    ‘The building’s about seventy years old, the teachers are about seventy years old, it’s never had a royal visit, and there’s mice in the kitchen. It’s OK, but I hated it,’ she said.
    Ruth was serious. Alem smiled. Mrs Fitzgerald said, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have asked you.’
    Early the next morning Alem went to the school with Mrs Fitzgerald to make enquiries about his admission. After an interview with the headmaster, they were told to go home and wait. They were assured that the school would contact them very soon.
    That night Alem took longer than usual to fall asleep. He was excited about the prospect of going to school; he missed school and was eager to take up the challenge of learning in an English school. When he had thought enough about that subject, he began to look at the photo and think about his family’s situation. Since moving to Manor Park, he had been so busy getting to know the area and getting to know the Fitzgeralds that he hadn’t had much time to think about anything else. At quieter moments, when he was not watching television or reading one of themany books in his room, he would be playing CD-ROM games on the computer. He was slow at first but he soon learned how to play games such as Treasure Hunt and Euro Racer. When he was not playing he would be working his way around one of the many educational CD-ROMs.
    Alem was amazed at the amount of knowledge that was lying around in his bedroom. When he first moved into the room he formed a plan that he had not told anyone about: he wanted to read every book in his room. But in his overeagerness to learn, he hadn’t finished a single one. Instead, at the side of his bed he had four piles of books, each one