The Island (27 page)

‘You could always wait, you know. It's not long. You have a legal right –'

‘If you think I'm going to wait another month, when I don't know, I don't know…' I'm close to tears but I'm not breaking down in front of her. I'm not.

I have the address written on a piece of paper, neatly printed in Angela's writing.

I had to look all the way along both sides of the street before I found the house. It's not a place I come to very often. It's confusing because the numbers suddenly skip from odd to even and before you know it you're fifty numbers away from where you want to be.

I reread the address:
17A Bartholomew Lane.

At first I think it's a flat; these houses look like they could have several flats in each one. When I ask a resident, she laughs, a high little sound, and looks shocked. She's squirting her roses with a green plastic spray-gun. Her hair is toffee-blonde highlights and she has her sunglasses on top of her head.

‘We're all single dwellings here,' she says. She shades her eyes. ‘Do you want somewhere in particular, dear?'

I shake my head and hurry away. I can feel her eyes watching me, roses forgotten.

These are the houses with the posh, painted doors. I name the colours: aubergine, vermilion, cyan.

Turns out the house I'm looking for is tucked away down a side street, and it's the biggest one of all.

17A Bartholomew Lane has a door of forget-me-not blue.

It's one of those Georgian town houses with loads of layers like a wedding cake. There's an iron fence painted in treacly black surrounding its front drive and there are steps leading down to its basement kitchen.

All the curtains look clean. There's no cardboard at its windows.

I slink back in the shadows and perch on the opposite wall, between a shrubby hedge and a parking meter. All the cars here have big yellow permits on their windscreens.

As I watch, the door opens and a lad a few years older than me comes down the steps and saunters over to a little Fiat parked on the street outside. He has his keys dangling from his finger and is checking his phone.

‘Wait!'

A woman hurries after him; she passes him a wrapped package and he laughs and kisses her on the cheek. She's tall and has iron-grey hair in a bob. She has a shin-length cardigan and boots the colour of cinnamon. I watch the boy open his package and tear at one of the sandwiches inside as he pulls away. The woman calls to him to drive safely.

I'm staring so hard that at first I miss him.

Then a movement in one of the upstairs windows makes me look up and there he is, my little brother, all serious-faced at the window, chin on hands.

I hiss in my breath and my heart's going
boomboomboom
, but then I remember he's not supposed to see me.

‘Let him settle in,' Angela says.

I pull my hoodie over my face and stare at him so hard I swear I'll melt holes in the window.

He's lonely, I think. Must be, to be sitting there all alone.

His little dark head in that huge window makes me think of the princes in the Tower. Miss told us about them when we were doing
Richard III
. They were taken to the Tower of London 'cause they threatened his takeover bid for the throne.

Ended up smothering them, so they say.

But now Johnny's head bobs and he's gone.

Lights go on in the basement and I move closer like a shadow. Cross the street and shrink into the bushes spilling over the iron-fenced driveway.

It's a posh kitchen, one of those ones with an island unit and pans hanging from the ceiling. There's a great steel stove with a silver hood. And in front of the stove is a table full of people.

I pull apart the shrubbery and creep closer.

There's adults and kids, all helping themselves to something that steams in a big cream pot.

They're all happy, all laughing.

I stare and stare, swigging my Coke.

Where is he?
I'm thinking.
Where is he?

And then he's there, right in the middle of them all.

A woman with a smiley face ladles a huge pile of meat sauce on to his plate and he helps himself to spaghetti, struggling with the tongs.

A teenage kid helps him slide the pasta on to his plate. Gives him a friendly knuckle-punch.

The sun beats down on the back of my neck but still I watch.

I watch till the kitchen light snaps off, and then I wonder whether I even saw him at all.

 

Home Alone

He's gone.

Rufus has left me.

He's taken his bedding, his machete, his plaited flip-flops. And he's taken Dog.

I squat down and begin to pick up the broken post, the smashed pieces of melon. I scoop up a handful of mushy seeds and lay them one by one on the chopping boards to dry in the baking sun. It takes ages but it's good work. I'll plant them later.

It feels like hours have passed and he still hasn't come back.

I pull on a pair of Rufus's spare flip-flops to protect my feet from fire ants and take his second-best knife and a long stick. Next on, the grass skirt he's made me. After a pause, I put on what's left of Rufus's headdress. It's all crushed and broken but I'll look for feathers and repair it. I'll cut down a fresh melon pole too; make it a new head and re-carve its face with zigzag teeth.

It's calm here in the jungle. The oh-dear-me bird's calling away like an old friend and the
churra-churra
of the cicadas is sort of restful, comforting.

But it's so much harder without Rufus to help.

It takes me twenty thwacks with the knife to make a cut in the sapling, and then another twenty bounces up and down on the trunk to snap it in two. The trees here are iron-hard compared to the trees on the other side of the island. I can't do it without him.

I'm melting hot when the tree finally gives up its struggle and sinks with a sigh.

I stare at it, defeated; it's split down the middle and useless.

I put down the knife, take off my headdress and place it on a tree trunk. Then I break.

I break myself

into little chunks, scatter pieces

of myself over the forest, raw

and open

and glistening; a salt-wound,

knife-wound,

heart tattered

like the tattered leaves and shreds of blue-sky

flashing

because if I

pull myself apart like this then it means I'm sorry.

And I am so sorry.

This world spins around me: silver-green; lime-green; blue-blinding flashes of light; harsh throaty
caaaa-caaaaaaws
of far-off birds; endless creaking, hushing, sighing, hissing forest sounds. And I am nothing. But it's good, this stripping away of myself. I close my eyes and let it in; let it all in.

I get up, after a time, and stagger, disorientated; wander through the forest, gathering, collecting.

Scrubbing around on the forest floor, I unearth brownish withered stalks that turn out to be wild onions. When I tug at them, their round, white bulbs gleam like pearls in my hands.

I breathe deep their wild, strange scent and hang them by their stalks from my bikini bottoms.

I also find:

Three green bananas

Two giant stick insects

Two handfuls of feathers

A brownish piece of root that could be ginger

One wild plum.

I find myself in Mosquito Alley, the grassy track which we avoid because of the clouds of bugs that always seem to attack Rufus but never me. His skin must be sweeter. I need poles, and here I find them: a whole thicket of tightly packed stalks with silvery leaves, stems musical as wind chimes.

Bamboo. I run my fingers along their straight, nubbled stems. Canes, like for my grandad's tomatoes. Much easier than saplings to cut.

This is a real find, but I have no one to tell.

I'll make a fence too, for my new melon garden, I think.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a thought flickers.

Hollow. These stems are light, and hollow.

Like there's a much better use for them than a fence.

But the sun's sighing, and my ears are straining for the sound of a short, high bark and Rufus's voice saying something like, ‘
Where are you, Cow-bag?
'

I work hard, cutting down poles, as the shadows lengthen.

Then I turn home.

They're still not back.

 

Visiting Time

Their eyes slide over me, twist like pins. Don't want to look too close or too long at Monster Me, do they?

Mr Nice has even bought me a Coke (ha! Like you can bribe a gorgon) but it sits where I've left it on the table, in a small pool of spill.

‘He'll be along in a minute, don't you worry.'

‘Found some new friends, he has. What are boys like?'

All the time Angela smiles and smiles.

I glare; burn through their tiny hearts and wither them into raisins. I bite my nails. I jiggle my foot and hatehatehate.

When Johnny sees me, what will he see? Will he see the change in me, what I've become? Will he flinch?

Mr and Mrs Nice are well dressed. They're mixed-race like Johnny; they've been carefully matched like paint samples. Their mouths move as if they're talking but I can't hear a word 'cause all I'm thinking is, when he comes, will he,

will he

see a monster?

Johnny doesn't come.

He'll be whispering about me to his new friends, hiding and watching.
‘There she is, my evil big sister. She's done things you can't imagine. She's blown up the whole world. She set out one day with a thought that ate its way, like acid, into her till it was all she was, all she had.'

Mr Nice is saying something. The word ‘sorry' floats like charred paper.

I get up.

Angela touches my arm but I jerk it off as if scalded.

I need to get away from their curiouseyesconcernedvoicesfakesmiles. Monsters like me need caves to crawl in.

It's screaming loud in here.

‘Johnny,' I cry, and my voice sounds all broken 'cause it's such a long time since I used it; this voice that once told stories is brittle as glass.

We're in Space City, a place full of kids screaming and pushing; hissing inflatables creaking and giant cages full of brightly coloured plastic balls. It's hell. Johnny will love it.

I think I see him then; a small figure in a red hoodie, spinning round and round on a rope. But the kid turns to face me and it's a girl: same eyes, same creamy brown skin.

I climb the face of the evil emperor first: a creaking, grinning monster with a giant purple face and giant red eyes. It sways as I grapple for a foothold on its silver horns.

‘Johnny?' I call.

I can't wait to meet him. I am dreading meeting him.

It's been three weeks now. Three weeks of me refusing to go to school and the community-support lady coming round and counselling and That-Bitch-Angela trying to stick back together the pieces of our smashed-up lives.

Cassie has turned into a zombie. No, scrub that. She's become Queen Zombie; a zombie to beat all zombies. But it's fine because Wayne's found her some dog Valium to calm her nerves and that really frickin helps.

‘Johnny?'

I leave the emperor and crawl through the net tunnel towards the space station. A woman is on her hands and knees, chasing her daughter. She catches her and tickles her and I see the mum's belly, stretched full and tight like an egg.

‘They love it here, don't they?' She smiles at me. She and her little girl have matching My Little Pony glitter-stickers on their faces.

I crawl on, past the mum and her bump and her girl, to the creaking, blue and silver space station.

He's not in Minion City, nor on the Galaxy Hopper. He's not one of the kids lining up for the Plasma Swing.

Then I think I see him; he's darting away, down into a purple slide. He's quick as a whip, squealing.

I push past a load of giggling kids, past a dad on the zip wire, to the slide. It stinks of plastic and disinfectant; bounces as more kids scrabble on behind me.

‘Monkey? It's me, Frannie.'

The slide is longer and steeper than I expected; it curves suddenly, knocking me breathless.

With a whoosh, I shoot out of the other end into a pit of balls. He's crawling through to the Star Raiders spaceship; a big inflatable sign points the way. Stumbling, I crawl through the netting and jump down on to bouncing yellow rubber.

He's here. I've found him.

 

Keeping Busy

I finish cleaning Rufus's hammock and carefully water the melon patch. I use a bunch of twigs as a broom and sweep the whole of our camp floor so it looks all brushed and soft and cared for. I straighten the knives and flip-flops and replait all the stray palm leaves on the roof canopy.

I line up all my finds on our coffee-drum table and put the stick insects in a coffee can with some leaves so they don't escape.

Then I get to work building a melon fence. Cutting through the bamboo makes my hands blister over the blisters but that's good because it means I'm working and keeping busy and it stops me thinking. I sharpen each post with Rufus's knife and bang it into the dirt with the biggest rock I can find. Thirsty work but I can do it.

Then I wait.

And wait.

When the sun slides behind Fear Mountain, I'm shivering even though I've stoked the fire and the flames shoot hot and high into the breaking-out stars.

What if he's left me for good?

I count twenty-nine more stars piercing the sky; then fifteen more, and then I can't bear it any more.

What if he's seen a fishing boat and they've rescued him and gone to a different island?

I edge closer to the fire, hugging my knees. The flames burn deep into my eyes, my skin, my bones.

But nothing warms me.

 

Speed Zombies

The spaceship walls bulge as we bounce.