Time for Jas (5 page)

‘That’s hilarious.’ Twig had rugby practice before school today (another reason we left early), and was jumping up and down in his kit, trying to keep warm in his shorts, but laughing like everybody else. Only Jas carried on looking serious.

It was strange, looking at the picture. Partly because it was so realistic – I mean because dogs, unlike a field of bluebells or a zebra, do actually exist on London streets. But partly also because lots of other people were looking at it, and it didn’t feel so personal, and also – I felt a pang of disappointment – partly because this picture had nothing to do with me. I realised how much I had liked that, the feeling they’d given me when I looked at them – as if the artist was seeing straight
through all the layers, straight to what I am like underneath.

Still, I have films of the other drawings. I took my camera out of my bag.

‘Please don’t make a film,’ Jas begged. ‘There isn’t time.’

‘Just a few pictures then,’ I said, but she was already walking away. I photographed the dog from different angles to look at later, and ran to catch up with her.

When we arrived at school, Twig asked if he could show my pictures to the boys at rugby practice.

‘Please, Blue,’ he said when I refused. ‘It’ll make them laugh. They’ll think it’s hilarious.’

Twig
knows
I don’t like showing my camera to anyone. What I do … it’s not like the chalk artist’s drawings. It’s not
art
. But Twig was begging me, and looking at him I saw how true it is, when he says how skinny he looks compared to the rest of the boys on the team, and also just how
wrong
too, with his floppy hair and his glasses and his shorts flapping about his legs and his shirt hanging off his bony shoulders …

‘Only the dog pictures,’ I said, as I gave him the camera. ‘Don’t show them anything else.’

The rugby boys did think it was hilarious.
They crowded round the camera, sniggering and pointing and saying things like ‘mental’ and ‘sick’ and high fiving Twig when they’d finished looking. I swear Twig seemed to grow about a foot right in front of me.

Then Dodi arrived with Tom and Jake, and even though she also knows how much I hate people looking at my camera, she plucked it out of Twig’s hands and started showing Tom my pictures.

Tom laughed and said, ‘Excellent! The dog you were telling us about on the first day,’ and I thought Dodi was going to faint, she looked so pleased.

‘He remembered!’ she whispered, when I finally got my camera back and we were walking across the schoolyard towards Spanish. ‘He remembered the dog! Even
I
didn’t remember the dog, and I was there! Blue, he
so
likes you.’

‘He likes me because he remembers I once told a story about a dog trying to do a poo?’

‘Oh my God!’ Dodi cried, and stopped dead in her tracks. ‘What if he is the artist?’

‘Tom?’

‘He does Art! And remember how in Year Nine he and Jake and Colin decorated their skateboards all over with drawings of rats?’

‘That doesn’t mean …’

‘It totally
does
mean. He knows you like art. He’s sending you secret messages. Look, he’s over there!’

She waved manically towards where Tom stood, on the other side of the yard. He waved cheerfully back.

‘This is going to be
great
,’ Dodi sighed.

When I walked past the dog drawing on my way home, other people had started to scribble comments on the wall above it, things like, ‘Who left this lying around?’ and, ‘Scoop my poop’, and lots of much ruder things about dogs and messy pavements. It didn’t rain this afternoon, but it drizzled. The chalk – drawing and writing – was fuzzy round the edges, and the dog was starting to look a bit sad.

I have looked and looked at my pictures, but there isn’t a bluebell or anything else to link the picture to me.

Could Tom have done this?

The poor dachshund – it looked so dignified. If I’d had a piece of chalk, I’d have written on the wall too. I would have said ‘Hey, leave me alone! I’m just doing my thing!’

If people did look on the outside like they do within, then there would be somebody wandering about our neighbourhood with flowers in their hair and chalk dust all over their multi-coloured clothes,
and everyone would know without the slightest doubt that this was an artist. But I have not seen a single person who looks like that, except perhaps for mad Mrs Bird who lives underneath the railway arches and ties rags and scarves and plastic bags to the shopping trolley she keeps all her things in. And maybe that does make her an artist in a way, but I don’t think she is
my
artist. I think she is just trying to make her life a bit more pretty, which is sort of the same thing but not exactly.

I woke up this morning feeling like someone was watching me, and when I opened my eyes, Jas was sitting on the floor by my bed with her face right next to mine.

‘Wake up wake up wake up,’ she whispered.

‘Go away,’ I groaned.

‘You have to take me shopping.’

I looked at my phone. ‘It’s half-past ten. It’s Sunday. The shops won’t be open yet.’

‘They will be by the time we get there.’

I slumped back against my pillow. Jas ran away and came back with a cup of milky warm water with
a tea bag floating in it. She watched anxiously as I drank it.

‘Is it nice?’

‘It’s much better than it looks.’

‘Can we go now?’

‘Can’t you go on your own?’

‘Apparently I’m too little.’ Jas glared in the general direction of Mum’s room. ‘It’s not fair. Twig’s staying over with his new rugby friends and you’ll probably go off and see Dodi, but I’m not allowed to do a thing on my own. Please, Blue. Please please please please please.’

‘All right,’ I sighed. I swung my feet out from under the duvet. ‘All my friends sleep till at least twelve,’ I informed Jas, but that turned out not to be true, because Dodi rang as we turned into Blenheim Avenue.

‘Jake just called,’ she said. ‘He wants to meet up. But it’s Sunday morning! Who meets their boyfriend on Sunday morning? I told him I have to hang out with you. I said you’re depressed because you’re in love with Tom.’

‘What?’

‘I’m coming over right now.’

‘I’m not at home. I’m out with Jas. We’re going to …’ I raised my eyebrows at Jas.

‘The toy shop,’ she said, and my heart skipped a beat. And I know when I told Dodi, she was thinking the same thing as me, because she was silent for a moment.

‘Right,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll see you there.’

The thing about the toy shop is Iris, and her obsession with Sylvanian Families. An obsession so huge her collection used to cover most of the floor of our bedroom and all of the shelf-space as well.

‘There’s no room for my books,’ I used to complain, and, ‘They’re creepy,’ Dodi told her. ‘They’re miniature toy animals in human clothes.’

Iris didn’t care. Every month, when she got her pocket money, she used to march us down to the shop to buy more Sylvanians. After she died, they were the last thing Mum packed away. And until today, Dodi and I never set foot in that shop again.

Jas is too young to remember all that. And this morning – well, by the time I found out where we were going, we were already halfway there.

The shop hasn’t changed, but it’s smaller than I remembered. The Sylvanians, which used to be at my nose height, were somewhere around my belly button. I crouched down to look at them.

‘Hello,’ I said. A mother squirrel in a flowery
apron stared back at me, her baby squirrel in her arms. My eyes started to prickle.

‘Creepy.’ Dodi was standing behind me, her nose all wrinkled like it goes when she’s trying not to cry.

‘Hideous,’ I agreed. We stood there for a while sniffing and looking at those stupid squirrels, then Dodi grabbed something from the rack beside her.

‘Look!’ It was a bowler hat, the fancy-dress kind that comes with round glasses and a pink nose and plastic moustache attached. She settled the glasses on her nose and smoothed her hand over her upper lip.

‘The name’s Bond,’ she said in a deep voice.

‘How is
that
Bond?’ I cried, but I couldn’t help laughing. That’s the thing about Dodi. Walking over, I was so cross with her because of what she said about Tom, but then she knows exactly how to make things better.

‘I’m going to get one for all of us for Halloween,’ she said. ‘I babysat my nephew last night, so I’ve got loads of money.’

‘Found them!’ Jas cried, and we turned away from the squirrels and mice and hedgehogs and other woodland creatures and forgot all about Iris and Halloween and James Bond and bowler hats. Because there, surrounded by princess costumes and clown wigs and witches’ brooms and animal masks,
stood my little sister wearing the most extravagant pair of fairy wings I have ever seen.

Pixie and Flora’s wings are like an old pair of jeans next to a couture ball gown compared to Jas’s. Pixie and Flora’s wings are the sort we used to have in our dressing-up box, white and gauzy with silver edges, four oval hoops like a child’s drawing of a butterfly. The wings Jas found today in the toy shop were emerald green with bright blue edging, gold sequins sewn into the top where they peeped up over her shoulders, and gold ribbons trailing down to her knees.

‘They’re perfect,’ Jas declared.

She paid for them with her birthday money, and says she’s going to wear the wings to school tomorrow.

‘I don’t think it’s a very good idea,’ Mum said when Jas told her.

‘Everyone is wearing wings,’ Jas said. ‘Look at Pixie. Look at Flora.’

‘Flora’s Flora,’ Dodi said. ‘And Pixie is Pixie. And they are both mildly insane. No offence, Pixie.’

‘None taken,’ Pixie replied.

But Jas stuck her chin out and made us all look at Flora’s Facebook. There were about a dozen people from her course all dressed in black and pretending
they were flying with silver wings on their back just like hers.

‘They can’t
all
be mad,’ Jas said.

‘But why do they do it?’ Mum was astonished.

‘To make them happy,’ Pixie said, and Mum looked even more baffled.

‘School won’t let you,’ Twig said.

But the Clarendon Free School dress code is as vague for primary as it is for secondary. We checked their website. ‘No bare midriffs,’ I read out. ‘No short skirts, no swimwear, no high heels.’

‘Absolutely nothing about wings,’ Jas said.

‘Please do not let a single one of my friends see you,’ Twig fretted. ‘And if they do, deny you are my sister, or they’ll all laugh at me.’

Jas said that was Twig’s problem, not hers.

I have been reading back through my diary, and I realise I can’t remember when I last saw Jas look happy or smile, but I am not sure what to say to help.

‘Can’t you talk to her?’ I messaged Skye. Jas loves Skye, because he taught her to ride without a saddle last summer, and she loves horses almost as much as he does.

‘Why?’ he replied.

‘I just don’t like it,’ I said. ‘She’s not doing this because she thinks the wings are pretty. She’s making
a point, but I don’t know what it is, and I can’t help feeling that wearing turquoise and emerald knee-length wings is not going to help. Please talk to her. She won’t listen to me. She thinks I sound like Mum.’

‘Jas won’t listen to anybody,’ Skye replied. ‘And anyway, you can’t help people if they don’t want you to. That’s what my dad always says – people have to learn from their own mistakes.’

‘But she’s so little!’ I wrote.

Skye replied that she might be little, but she was tougher than she looked, and to stop worrying so much.

This morning the giggling started before we reached the school gates but even so, I thought Jas might get away with it.

She was dressed exactly like Flora and her friends, in black leggings and a black jumper, plus her silver shoes, the yellow scarf trimmed with the green pompoms she made herself in craft classes in Year Four, and the wings. She had cut herself a fringe at the end of the weekend too. It makes her big dark eyes look even more huge, and she’d put a tiny smear of glitter on her cheeks.

As we said goodbye at her school gates, she looked like a very strange, waiflike and beautiful fairy, but also quite a nervous one.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Dodi asked. ‘Because so far everyone has laughed at you, and it’s not going to get better.’

Jas whispered, ‘Yes.’

Twig asked, ‘Are you feeling elevated yet?’

‘Shut up,’ I told him, and then I said to Jas, ‘Remember when Flora got dreadlocks and dyed them pink? You’re totally as cool as her.’

‘Yeah,’ Dodi said, like she was trying hard to sound convincing.

‘Tell you what,’ I suggested. ‘We’ve got study period last thing this afternoon. We’ll skip it and come and pick you up, OK? Then I can film you coming out, and we can send the film to Flora.’

Jas squared her shoulders and stepped into the playground, wings a-flutter, without looking back.

Then, this afternoon, we found her crying in the toilets.

‘What happened?’ I asked, as I picked up the broken wings.

Jas just carried on crying.

‘Let’s go home,’ I said, but she shook her head.

‘I don’t want Twig to see me.’

‘The park, then. It’s not raining. I’ll buy you a hot chocolate and we can sit somewhere no-one will see us and you can tell us all about it.

Jas sniffed and stopped crying.

‘Jake’s in the park,’ Dodi objected, but I gave her a look and she shut up.

Jas and Dodi went to sit behind a tree in the walled garden where nobody ever goes. Dodi and I pooled all the money we had – she still had some from babysitting – and I bought Jas a hot chocolate the way she likes it with baby marshmallows on top, in a paper cup decorated with mini cupcakes.

‘This’ll help,’ I said as I handed it to her, but she started to cry again. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘It’s chocolate!’

‘The cupcakes!’ she wailed, and the whole sorry story came out.

Jas has never had close friends at school. Until this year she always had Twig, and if he’s not around she has always been happy to ‘just play with whoever’ – that’s what she said in the park. ‘And there were lots of
whoevers
,’ she sniffed. ‘Everyone was nice, sort of. Until this year.’

Dodi asked, ‘What happened this year?’, and Jas said it wasn’t
what
happened, it was
who
, and
who
were four girls called Megan, Courtney, Chandra and Fran.

‘The four girls who were in the playground?’ I asked.

‘They’re called the Cupcake Crew,’ Jas said.

Dodi snorted. I shot her another look. She changed the snort into a sort of sniffle.

‘They all wear the same cupcake necklace,’ Jas explained. ‘They spent all summer together and now they’re best friends, and everyone’s scared of them.’

‘But what have they done to you?’ I asked.

Jas said they laughed at her.

‘Because of the wings?’

‘Ever since the first day. They say I dress like a freak.’

‘What were you wearing on the first day?’

‘Purple leggings,’ Dodi said. ‘And her ripped dress, and Flora’s lace cardigan, and that multi-coloured ribbon in her hair.’

We were quiet for a bit while we thought about this.

‘They say I’m a show-off!’ Jas cried. ‘Just because when we had to write our stupid “what I did in the summer holidays” essay, I wrote mine as a poem to make it less boring, all about learning to ride bareback in Devon with Skye.’

‘So …?’

So after several weeks of the cupcake girls laughing at her, making everyone else laugh at her and calling her names like the Bare Bum Rider and the Horsefaced Poet, Jas wrote another poem. This one was about all the embarrassing things Courtney and Megan and Chandra and Fran have ever done. When you’ve been at school with people since nursery, there are loads of things you’d all rather forget. Like the time Courtney forgot to wear pants in reception and told the whole class she had an itchy bottom. And how Megan once came to school with nits and said she was keeping them as pets. And when Fran let a boy kiss her for 50 pence, and Chandra fell asleep during story time and did a fart so loud the whole class heard.

Jas wrote a poem, and then she typed it up and printed loads of copies and stuck one in everyone’s
locker. But it backfired, because who else in the entire school actually writes poetry? The Cupcake Crew guessed immediately it was her, and they told everyone to stop talking to her.

‘I wish you’d told me,’ I said.

Jas said she wanted to, but also that she knew I’d only have told her not to do the poem.

‘Well of course she would!’ Dodi cried. ‘Blue would have come up with a sensible solution. Honestly, Jas! Of all the stupid things to do!’

Jas and I both glared at her, but Dodi didn’t seem to notice.

‘What about the wings?’ she asked.

‘Flora says you have to stand up to people who are mean to you,’ Jas said defiantly. ‘That’s what she told me, the day she walked me to school. She said, if people know you’re afraid, they pick on you.
Nobody
thinks you’re afraid if you go to school with wings on your back.’

We were all quiet again.

‘It
is
true,’ I admitted.

‘All the same,’ Dodi said, ‘you might want to go more mainstream for a while, Jas.’

Jas glared at her again, then sniffed. ‘I wore them all day,’ she said, and began to pick marshmallows off the top of her hot chocolate. ‘Everyone laughed at
first, but at break Todd Baker said I looked nice. Todd comes to school every day wearing a waistcoat and a bow tie. He’s the only person who still talks to me.’

‘I wonder why,’ said Dodi.

Jas licked her fingers. ‘Then other people said they liked them too. Tilly and Anjali even asked where they could get some. And the cupcake girls didn’t say anything, so I thought it had worked. But at home time, they pushed me into a corner and everyone’s so scared of them no-one said anything, and Megan was all come on, let’s see if you can fly, and they made me run and flap my arms and people were laughing so I hid in the toilets and I tore my wings up myself, even though it was all my birthday money …’

She gulped, and a marshmallow got stuck in her throat.

I thumped her on the back. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Everything will be better now.’

I don’t think I sounded very convincing.

I tried to call Flora last night. I figured she ought to know Jas stood up to the Cupcake Crew like she advised but that it hadn’t worked, and I wanted
to ask her what we should do next. But her phone went straight to voicemail, and later, like around midnight, I got a message from her saying sorry, she couldn’t talk because for a whole week they are not allowed to speak to anyone but only express themselves through the medium of movement. ‘I’m not even supposed to be writing,’ she messaged.

Jas’s solution for dealing with yesterday’s humiliation is to not go to school. This morning she managed to have a temperature of 38.5 degrees, and Mum said she should stay home with Pixie. Twig, who has a bruise under his left eye and a limp in his right leg from rugby practice, said he wanted to stay too.

Jas said, ‘You’re not ill.’

Twig said, ‘Are you?’

‘Jas has a temperature,’ Mum said.

‘Has she?’ Twig cried. ‘Has she really?’

‘Yes,’ Jas croaked, glaring at him. ‘She has.’

‘She’s faking,’ Twig grumbled as we left the house (early, again, because of his leg and not being able to walk fast). ‘She did that thing Flora always used to do, where she drinks tea before putting the thermometer in her mouth.
I
am in actual physical pain.’

‘Stop playing rugby then,’ I said. ‘Do you even like it?’

Twig said that wasn’t the point, and he couldn’t give up now because that would mean he was weak, and
being on the rugby team was a very big deal.

‘Your eye is
purple
,’ I told him.

Twig said, ‘Exactly, it means I’m really one of the team.’

Boys are mad.

‘It probably is a good thing for Jas not to go to school for a bit though,’ I said, without thinking. Twig asked why, and I had to say ‘Oh, nothing,’ because yesterday on our way home Jas begged me not to breathe a word to Twig of what had happened.

‘Because he warned me,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want him to be right.’

‘You have to tell him the truth,’ I told her. ‘And Mum. Mum can talk to your teachers. She can stop these girls.’

‘She’ll make a fuss,’ Jas said. ‘And that’ll make things worse.’

I said that I sympathised, but also that sometimes you need help from other people.

‘If you tell either of them,’ Jas said, ‘I will never speak to you again.’

‘But …’

‘No.’

So now, as well as not being able to talk to Flora, I am lying to everybody.

Today in English Marek Valenta astonished us all.

Miss Foundry announced that we were going to spend the entire period reading aloud from
Of Mice and Men.

‘So we can get a feel for the dramatic, claustrophobic quality of the narrative,’ she explained.

I don’t know if she genuinely doesn’t notice when people look blank, or if she just chooses to ignore us.

‘Let’s start at the front!’ she trilled. ‘Marek Valenta, please begin!’

And Marek read.

Most people mumble when they read out loud. A few, like Hattie, speak clearly. Every now and then, someone like Charlie Obuku, who is into drama and wants to be an actor like Flora, hams it up. But no-one ever reads like Marek did today.

Sure, we’d have a little house an’ a room to ourself. Little fat iron stove, an’ in the winter we’d keep a fire goin’ in it …

People giggled. Dodi raised her eyebrows. Tom, Jake and Colin stared at him with their mouths open. Cressida and Jodi nudged each other. Marek didn’t notice. On and on he read, way beyond the end of the passage Miss Foundry had asked for, and I swear it was like listening to someone in a theatre or on the TV or radio or something, even with his slight Czech accent.