Time for Jas (4 page)

Flora said we’d be sorry when
she
ended up dead. Twig thought that was so funny he got hiccoughs. Flora gripped her plate like she was trying to stop herself from throwing her chocolate cheesecake at him. Mum took it away from her and gave it to Dad, who started to eat it. Gloria said, why didn’t Zoran play something on the piano?

I love it when Zoran plays. Then Flora started singing, all the old songs Zoran likes, things like ‘Stormy Weather’ and ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’, and even though her voice isn’t the best, no-one minded because she was happy again. Pumpkin woke up and Mum brought him down, and we all sat in a heap on the sofa, with Mum leaning against Dad on the floor, and then Gloria sang a flamenco song she learned from her Spanish grandmother and it was exactly the sort of evening our family does best.

Just for a minute, I think Flora forgot about her exciting new life, because her voice wobbled when she said goodbye to us all last night. ‘Don’t get up tomorrow,’ she ordered. ‘I don’t want weepy dawn farewells on the doorstep.’ But I heard Dad come
up before it was even light to wake her and I got up anyway. I wrapped my duvet round my shoulders and sat on the stairs while they packed the car with bags of clothes and her vintage turntable and boxes of books and records and a new duvet and her favourite pillow and a bicycle and kettle and mugs and a big cake in a tin Mum made for her, until there was no room for anything except her and Dad squeezed into the front.

Mum pulled Flora into a hug and said again about the thermal underwear.

‘Mum!’

‘I’m going to miss you so much.’ Mum started to cry.

‘Blue, stop her!’ Flora said. ‘This is exactly what I didn’t want.’

‘I’m going to miss you too,’ I admitted.

‘I’ll be back for Christmas.’

‘Christmas!’

‘Maybe before.’

I shuffled down the stairs and Flora put her arms round my duvet.

‘Don’t be too much of a dork,’ she said.

‘Don’t be too much of a diva,’ I replied.

And then she was leaving, in her fabulous new drama school purple fedora and her fabulous new drama school orange angora coat, perched on
top of her fabulous new drama school chunky heeled leopard skin ankle boots, and it felt like all the air was being sucked out of the house.

She turned at the door and dropped into a low curtsey, the sort actresses do when they’re taking a curtain call, and started doing that comedy waving with her hand sticking round the door. Mum started to cry again. I tunnelled an arm through my duvet to hug her. The door closed.

‘Flora!’ Jas appeared on the landing looking like a wild mad animal, her hair even more tangled than usual, her nightie bunched in her hand above her knees as she tore down the stairs.

‘Flora!’ she shrieked. She threw open the door and ran into the street, where Flora was about to climb into the car. ‘Don’t go!’ she sobbed. ‘Please don’t go.’

She flung herself in Flora’s arms. Flora’s eyes met mine over Jas’s shoulder and I swear they were wet as well.

‘I have to go, Jazzcakes,’ she whispered in her ear. Mum took Jas by the hand and prised her away. Flora got in the car.

‘Remember what I told you,’ she said to Jas. And then they drove away.

Flora is the most annoying person in the world to live with. Everywhere she goes, there is mess. The bathroom is covered in half-squeezed tubes of foundation and cotton-wool pads covered in makeup, and the landing is covered with clothes leading right up to her bedroom, and there are damp towels draped over banisters and shoes all over the hall and the smell of her perfume and hairspray everywhere, but that’s all gone now.

Jas cried for ages, first with Mum, then, when Mum had to go out, with Pixie.

I thought Pixie would do something Pixieish like yoga, but actually she was quite tough, in a gentle sort of way.

‘I don’t see why she has to go,’ Jas sobbed, and Pixie said that everyone has to leave sometime, because everyone has to grow up and you can’t grow up unless you have adventures, and you can’t have adventures if you just stay at home.

‘Look at me,’ Pixie said.

‘Are you having an adventure?’ Twig asked, and Pixie said she was.

‘But you’re just here with us.’

‘Still an adventure.’

‘Do you miss home?’ I asked, and Pixie said yes she did, every single day, but the good thing was she
didn’t realise how much she loved home until she went away.

‘So you’ll go back,’ Jas said.

‘In a few years’ time, I suppose.’

‘A few years!’ Jas started crying again and said she didn’t see why people needed to grow up at all. Pixie said they just did.

Later, I asked Jas what Flora meant when she said ‘Remember what I told you’. Jas said it was nothing.

‘You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if it was something?’ I asked.

‘Something like what?’

‘I don’t know.’ I thought of Jas, standing at Pumpkin’s window in her nightie. ‘Something about school?’

Twig, who was lying on the floor reading a science magazine, snorted something like, ‘School is for idiots’. Jas sniffed and said she quite agreed.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I asked.

Jas said, ‘Not really’, and that I sounded like Mum.

When a child tells you that you are like a parent, it is like a parent telling you that you are being sensible – the last thing in the world that you want to be.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘If you don’t want my help, I won’t give it.’

Dodi wants me to go out with Tom.

It started when we were standing in line outside the science block, waiting for class to start. Colin isn’t in our group for science, so it was just me and Tom standing with Dodi and Jake, trying not to listen to their conversation.

‘What do you want to do this weekend?’ Jake asked Dodi.

Dodi tossed her hair over her shoulder and sighed ‘I don’t know, anything,’ and why didn’t we all go to the cinema. Sometimes I think the only reason she keeps her hair that long is so she can toss it when she’s annoyed, but Jake totally failed to read the signals.

‘Poodle,’ he murmured. ‘I was thinking just me and you.’

Behind their backs, Tom made a puking gesture. I giggled.

Dodi spun round and glared at us. ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.

‘I made a joke,’ Tom explained. ‘Blue thinks I’m hilarious. Don’t you, Blue?’

‘Hilarious,’ I choked, and Tom patted my hand approvingly.

Later, on our way out of lunch, she held me back from the others.

‘He totally likes you,’ she said. ‘And he’s totally cute, if you ignore the spots.’

‘I don’t think he does like me,’ I said.

‘If you go out with Tom,’ Dodi ploughed on, ‘we can go on double dates. We’d be like, two couples. That way I don’t have to be alone with Jake.’

I do wonder about Dodi sometimes.

‘Why don’t you just finish with him instead?’ I suggested, but Dodi said she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘I don’t like Tom.’

Dodi said, ‘If you loved me, that wouldn’t matter.’

I said, ‘I do love you, I just don’t love Tom.’

Dodi said, mysteriously, ‘Well, we will see about that!’

The thing about Dodi is, she never gives up. In English, she made everyone switch places so I was ‘accidentally’ sitting next to Tom. At afternoon break, she made him share his Snickers with me, all, ‘They’re Blue’s absolute favourite too, aren’t they Blue?’

She wanted us all to go to the park together after school. ‘Let’s skateboard!’ she said, and ‘You can borrow Tom’s!’ when I said that, unlike the boys,
I don’t take a skateboard with me everywhere I go.

‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ Tom said, ‘but I don’t lend my wheels to anybody.’

‘What, even Blue?’

‘I have extra Maths homework,’ I said, and ran away before she could suggest a giant group maths study session.

Twig was in the kitchen when I got home, cooking pasta.

‘Is it dinner already?’ I asked.

‘This is tea,’ he said.

‘Twig has decided to join the after-school rugby club,’ Pixie explained.

‘Rugby? Twig?’ I stared at him, astonished. ‘What about, I don’t know … Science Club?’

‘Please!’ Twig cried. ‘I already know most of the stuff they talk about in Science Club, and they’re not even allowed to do experiments. Rugby’s excellent. You get to play matches and go on tour and the team are like instant friends. But I have to bulk up, because I’m so skinny compared to all the others.’

Pixie handed him a banana. ‘Chop that into it,’ she advised.

‘A
banana
? In
pasta
?’

‘Why not?’

‘It just looks disgusting.’ I peered into the pan. ‘You know there are other ways to make friends, right?’

Twig started grating cheese onto the banana and said I understood nothing.

I made tea and took it out to the garden, where Jas was lying on her front in the grass in pink and orange stripy tights and a knee-length lime green jumper, writing in a notebook while Pumpkin rolled about kneading chewed-up rusk into the grass.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Private.’

‘Is it your performance piece for the art show?’

‘Haven’t started that yet.’

‘Are you going to do it?’

‘I am very, very busy,’ Jas said, ‘so please could you stop talking to me?’

I lay down beside Pumpkin, who gurgled and shoved a fistful of rusk in my mouth, laughing like a demon. I put him in the middle of the blanket and took my mug to the back of the garden, where I could still watch him without getting covered in food.

Today is that sort of September day when the air feels fresh and damp even though the sun is shining,
and there is a big blowy wind stirring up smells of earth and leaves, and the light is all rich and gold. My phone pinged. It was Dodi, with a picture of Tom on his skateboard. ‘Forget Maths
Come and join us!’

Very softly, almost like I didn’t want Dodi to see me do it, I deleted the photograph. Then I lay back on the bench to watch big fluffy white clouds scud across the pale blue sky.

Flora Skyped, asking could we post her bunny rabbit onesie and also more thermal underwear, because the house is in a dip by a river, dripping with damp and completely unheated.

‘I did tell you,’ Mum murmured, but Flora was too busy issuing orders to respond.

‘I also need new wellies. My old ones got full of water from lying in the stream in my nightie, and they won’t dry, and now I think there are things growing in them.’

Twig asked, why was she lying in the stream? Flora said because they had to spend the whole day pretending to be a character from a play, and she was Ophelia, who is a girl in Shakespeare who went
mad and drowned herself. Mum said no wonder she was cold and next time maybe she could choose a character less prone to hurling herself into icy waters. Flora said please could Mum just send the clothes, because she was soon going to run out of layers.

‘Look what I’m wearing!’ she said, and waved her laptop about so we could see her thermal leggings, leg-warmers, boots, mittens and an enormous man’s sweater.

Then Mum said did Flora realise how expensive it was to keep sending clothes to Scotland? Flora said fine, if you want me to
freeze to death
, and turned away from the camera.

‘Are those
wings
on your back?’ I asked.

Flora cried, ‘Why are you all so obsessed with how I look?’ and logged off.

‘They
were
wings,’ I said. ‘But why?’

‘To make her happy,’ Pixie said. ‘Maybe she’s feeling sad.’

Twig asked, ‘How does that actually work? The happy thing, I mean?’

Pixie thought quite carefully before she answered. ‘It’s about showing you won’t let the world get to you,’ she said. ‘Like you’re saying, you can try and bring me down, but I don’t care because I’ve got wings to elevate me.’

Twig told her she was barking mad, but affectionately, like he’s actually quite fond of her.

‘Or, if you’re Flora, you could just be making an empty fashion statement,’ I suggested.

Pixie said, ‘There’s no such thing as an empty fashion statement.’ Jas said she knew exactly what Pixie meant. ‘Clothes should show the world what you are like on the inside,’ Pixie said. ‘Like you, Jas. So full of colour.’

The two of them beamed at each other, like they were both in a secret colourful dressing club, and I came upstairs to look at my clothes.

Today I am wearing my big grey sweatshirt again, over skinny black jeans and black and white trainers. My hair is in its usual plaits and the only makeup I’m wearing is a little bit of blue mascara which you can’t see anyway because of my glasses. Even though inside I am bursting with ideas, I am completely devoid of colour.

There was a new picture today.

It was on the corner of Chatsworth Square and the Avenue, and even though Jas made us
leave uncharacteristically early this morning, by the time we reached it there was already a crowd of people gathered in a semi-circle in front of it, all laughing.

On the pavement, in the middle of the semi-circle, was a neat pile of dog poo. And on the wall, right above the poo, was a drawing of a life-size black and tan miniature dachshund squatting, seen from the back but looking over his shoulder with an expression that was partly apologetic but also defiant.