Catcall (9 page)

16

J
UNGLE

W
e had PE last thing, so I was a bit later than usual getting to St Luke’s. Most of the mums and kids had gone, but through Jamie’s classroom window I saw two people in there, talking. Mr Rose, and Mum.

Brody nudged me. ‘Hey, look–I bet your brother’s gone mental again!’

‘Shut it, will you?’ I said, through clenched teeth.

Noori, the peacemaker, wasn’t with us today–he’d gone to the dentist. Brody looked surprised at how angry I’d sounded, and the truth was I’d surprised myself, too.

‘Hey, cool it,’ he said. ‘Just joshing.’

His idea of a joke, that is. I’ve only heard it about twenty million times.

I told him, ‘Well, don’t josh with me, OK? Not about that.’

Brody shrugged. His little sister, Angie, was waiting for him by the gate. ‘See you,’ he called, and went on home.

I couldn’t see Jamie. I went through the double doors to the corridor, then saw him sitting at the back of the cloakroom, zipped into his anorak with his woolly hat pulled down nearly over his eyes. He was kicking his feet, banging them against the bench.

‘Hi, Jamie!’ I said. He didn’t answer, of course, just looked at me from under the rolled brim of his hat, then down at his feet.

I could hear what Mr Rose was saying to Mum. ‘It’s completely unlike him, this kind of behaviour.’

‘Thank you for letting me know,’ Mum said. ‘Do phone me straight away tomorrow, if anything––’

‘I will,’ said Mr Rose. He came to the door while she pushed the buggy through, and gave a tight little smile when he saw me there with Jamie. ‘Bye, then. Have a good evening. See you tomorrow, Jamie.’

‘Oh, hello, Josh,’ Mum said to me. ‘Come on then, Jamie.’

Jamie looked at her sulkily and heaved himself to his feet. A happy gurgling sound came from Jennie’s buggy, but no one else looked cheerful.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked Mum, when we were all outside.

‘Jamie’s been in trouble.’ She bent down to adjust the cover on the buggy. ‘He’s still not talking, but he seemed all right when I brought him back from the doctor’s. Now Mr Rose says he broke Arran’s new coloured pencils–snapped them in half, every one!–and he scratched Arran’s hand when he tried to get them back. And since then he’s been quite impossible. Behaving like a three-year-old.’

Jamie was trailing behind us. If he heard what Mum said, he showed no sign of it.

‘Oh.’ I wasn’t sure whether this was progress or not. Being naughty on purpose, scratching people–that wasn’t Jamie. He’d never done anything like that before. And Arran was his best friend.

This
wasn’t
Jamie. It was Leo. I had a weird feeling of something crawling under my skin.

‘What about the mask?’ I said. ‘He’s not wearing it today.’

‘No.’ Mum looked round to check he was keeping up. ‘He had it on at Dr Awan’s–it was the only way I could get him to talk to her. He told her that Leo was fine. And he had it on when I left him at school at lunchtime. But Mr Rose says he took it off when he was supposed to finish the play with Arran, and wouldn’t join in. Wouldn’t cooperate at all.’

‘He did yesterday,’ I said. ‘He talked yesterday. It’s like he’s frightened of what Leo might say.’

Mum shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’ll have another go at talking to him at home, with or without the mask. We’re going the long way round, by the shops, to buy new pencils for Arran, then we’re taking them to his house. You go on home, if you’d rather.’

The nearest shops are in the High Street. We went into Smith’s, and I bought two Pilot pens, and Mum chose a really nice set of pencils for Arran. I wondered if Jamie would have to pay for them out of his pocket money, or whether he’d get away with it, the way he seemed to be getting away with lots of things lately. He showed no interest, staring across the street, pushing out his lower lip. Half of me wanted to shake some sense into him, but the other half was really worried. What if we never got our normal Jamie back again? Where had he gone?

Mum had to buy a birthday card for her friend Claire. I knew she’d spend ages choosing, so I wandered over to look at the magazines. Jamie stayed with Mum, still with that babyish scowl on his face, just standing there looking at nothing. If he wanted attention, he wasn’t going to get it from me.

‘Hi, Josh,’ said a voice. ‘Thought it was you.’

I turned round, and there was Floss. We’re meant to wear plain coats for school, black or navy, but Floss had this patterned knitted thing with red zig-zags across it, and a bright red scarf and hat. I suppose, being new, she was allowed to wear it till she got a dull boring coat like everyone else’s.

‘Is that your mum?’ she asked me. ‘And your little brother? He looks cute.’

I scuffed my shoe against the bottom magazine shelf and gave a Kevin-like mumble in reply.

‘Are you going home now?’ Floss went on. ‘Cos I live quite near you, in Lansdowne Avenue. You’re in Lansdowne Crescent, aren’t you?’

Mum was at the checkout now, paying. She looked round for Jamie, and saw me with Floss. I started thinking about my Book of Cats, which is what I do when I don’t want to be somewhere. It’s like I can hide in it, just by thinking.

But Floss hadn’t finished yet. When we left the shop, she tagged along.

‘Hello!’ she said to Mum. ‘I’m Floss Darrow. I’m in Josh’s class.’ And she actually held out her hand to shake Mum’s.

Mum looked surprised, because Floss is taller and looks older than me, and wasn’t in proper school uniform, but they did the handshaking thing like business people at a meeting. ‘Hello, I’m Josh’s mum. This is Jamie, and baby Jennie.’

‘Hi there, Jamie,’ said Floss. Then she bent down to the buggy. ‘Hello there, Jennie, how are you?’ You’d have thought she seriously expected Jennie to answer. ‘She’s gorgeous, isn’t she? You’re so lucky, Josh. I’d love a baby brother or sister. I’m an only child, and I’m OK with that, but it’d be really cool to have a baby in the family.’

I could see that Mum was well impressed with Floss and her good manners. Mum’s always going on about Noori, how polite he is, how he always says
thank you
and
please,
and calls her Mrs Bowman, and whenever he’s going home from our house he thanks her and Mike for having him. ‘Such a
nice
boy, Noori is. I’m glad you’re friends with him.’ You’d think I was a total slob, compared. I knew she’d say, later on, ‘Such a
nice
girl, that Floss is. I’m glad you’re friends with her.’

We set off home, Floss with us. When we got to the corner of Harcourt Drive, where Arran lives, Mum and Jamie and the buggy turned right. Mum gave me the key, and I walked on with Floss. All I needed now was Bex or Toby to come by on the bus.

I was wondering how soon I could get rid of her, when she said, ‘See this.’ She took a screwed-up piece of paper out of her coat pocket, and handed it to me. I unfolded it, and read:

Dental, dental, dental Floss

We think U R total dross

What we see is what we get

UR such a teacher’s pet

Y don’t U shut your gr8 big mouth

Go back home to Africa (South)

‘Who gave you this?’ I asked, though I could guess.

‘No one
gave
it to me. I found it in my coat pocket after PE. It’s that Bex girl, isn’t it, and Toby?’

‘It’s just a joke, I expect,’ I said. ‘They’ll get tired of it soon.’

Floss frowned. ‘But why do they do it? I’ve tried to be friendly.’

‘It’s just–anyone who’s new, they’ll try to wind them up. Specially if there’s anything, well, different about you. With you it’s cos you talk different and there’s lots of stuff you don’t know about school yet. And it’s cos you’re, you know, quite brainy. Just ignore them.’

I sounded just like my dad. We’d had conversations like this.

Floss was striding along the pavement so fast that I had to scuttle to keep up, then wondered why I was bothering. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so I’m brainy. So are you. So’s Noori. What’s wrong with that?’

‘It’s like, if you’re clever, you have to hide it a lot of the time,’ I told her. ‘You don’t have to keep putting your hand up. It helps if you sometimes act a bit thick. Noori’s OK, cos he’s quiet. No one bothers him. So’s Sophie Cheung, and she comes top in everything.’

‘I don’t get it! How come Bex and Toby get to decide what’s allowed and what’s not? There are what, twenty-eight other kids in the class?’

‘Right, but those two are the loudest. They make more noise than the other twenty-six.’

‘My mum warned me it might be hard,’ Floss said. ‘School’s a jungle, she said. She hated it, when she was my age. She got bullied. That’s why she taught me at home.’

‘So what made you want to start school, then?’ I still couldn’t get my head round this.

‘I wanted to meet other kids. And now I am. I’ll be OK. I can deal with it.’

‘Look––’ I didn’t quite know how to put this. What I really meant was, if she stopped acting like she thought she was better than everyone else, people might be friendlier. ‘Even Chad isn’t as thick as he pretends. It’s not cool to be all that interested in lessons. You could pretend to be bored sometimes. Here’s where I live.’

‘OK. Thanks. D’you want to come round, some time? To ours, I mean. We’re only round the corner.’

‘Dunno,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m a bit busy.’

I let myself in. It was a bit much, having to be Floss’s agony uncle. I’d got enough problems of my own.

A
t home, Jamie put on his Leo mask only briefly, told Mum what he wanted for tea, then took it off and didn’t speak all evening.

Something had got into the house, something that made me not want to be there. Mum and Mike were obviously worried, but trying not to show it. Whenever Mum spoke to me, it was in a fake breezy way, like she wanted to pretend everything was normal. I did my Maths and Geography homework, then went up to the bedroom and spent some time on my Book of Cats. I stuck in the ‘Tiger’ poem (William Blake’s, not my unpoetic one) and drew a picture to put with it. Then I had an idea for a better poem of my own, so I wrote that down. I was quite pleased with it, so I copied it out and stuck it into the book as well.

When Mum brought Jamie up at bedtime, I’d had enough of the fake-cheerful stuff, so I went to the computer. It was in the spare room, the room that was going to be Jennie’s. It was wedged in near the door, on its little table, because the rest of the room was taken up with boxes and piles of stuff that need sorting. I was still there when I heard Mum talking to Dad on the phone, from her bedroom.

‘I’m taking him on Monday…yes…are you tied up? A-huh–I know–yes. Well, how about Saturday? Can you come over? A-huh. A-huh.’ (Mum always does a lot of this
a-huh
ing on the phone.) ‘Right, yes. Oh, Josh is fine! He’s made friends with a girl from his class–yes, she’s new, from South Africa–It’s good Josh is helping her settle in–fine, I’ll give him a shout, hang on, I think he’s on the computer––’

She brought me the phone. Dad was doing it too, the fake-jolly ‘So, how’s things? What’s this about a girlfriend, hey?’

‘Dad! She’s not a girlfriend. Just someone in my class. We bumped into her on the way home. Don’t even know if I like her.’

‘Just winding you up,’ said Dad. ‘I’ll see you on Saturday. I’m coming over in the afternoon.’

‘What, with Kevin? And Kim?’ I didn’t want Kevin
here,
with his grumpy face and shifting eyes! Even saying his name made me bad-tempered.

‘No, no. Just me. Josh, I know you’re being a big help to Mum. Good boy. Big help to Jamie, too. You will understand, won’t you, if I spend a bit of time with Jamie on our own–maybe take him out somewhere? But we’ll have a chat, too.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’ I knew he hated me saying that. ‘D’you want Mum again?’

But now, from Mum’s bedroom, I heard Jennie starting to cry–a rising wail that would soon be full-scale yelling.

‘Sounds like your little sister needs attention,’ Dad said. ‘No, it’s OK. Night, then, Josh. See you Saturday.’

‘Josh? Why aren’t you in bed?’ Mum called above the racket of bawling baby. She was using her tired, cross voice that I didn’t like. ‘You ought to be getting ready by now. I’ve been too busy with Jamie and Jennie to notice the time.’