Authors: Natasha Farrant
Dodi flinched. I saw it, and Marek saw it. His eyes widened again, and that is when I saw something else.
Tom’s right – Jake
is
sentimental. But Hattie’s right too, he’s also sweet. And I love Dodi, but she
shouldn’t try to make me do things I don’t want, or treat Jake the way she does.
I don’t know if the chalk artist saw our pictures, but it’s too late now. It rained last night, and all our drawings have disappeared. Jas’s good mood, however, has lasted.
‘The cupcake girls have asked me to be their friend.’
‘Their friend?’ Twig looked appalled.
‘It’s true!’
‘When did this happen?’ I asked.
Jas said, ‘They’ve apologised. They say they didn’t mean to upset me. They were just having a bit of fun. They like my hair. They’ve promised me a cupcake pendant.’
‘Fun?’ Twig cried. ‘Hair?? CUPCAKES?’
Jas said if Twig didn’t shut up, she would use her straighteners on him, and not just to burn his hair.
Lunchtime, the stables under the motorway. Twelve huddled horseboxes facing into a tiny yard sandwiched between a leisure centre and a bus depot. A big plane tree by the entrance to a narrow passage, just wide enough for a horse and rider, leading to a sawdust ring beneath a network of busy roads. In the riding ring, non-broken cones sit in an orange circle beside striped jumping poles and cross-shaped supports.
The doors to the box at the back of the yard are open. Crates of stuff are piled up inside. Halters and leather wax, horse brushes and combs, hoof picks and saddle pads. There is a pile
of saddles, a crate full of bridles, another for girths and stirrups, each labelled for an individual pony or horse, crates with tags saying ‘medication’, ‘whips’, ‘boots’, ‘hats’.
Outside in the yard is a growing pile of junk. Broken saddles, chairs, electric heaters, traffic cones, bits of rope, a burst football, torn waterproofs, an old mattress. The range is astonishing.
CAMERAMAN (BLUEBELL) crosses the yard, into the tiny office and up the rickety stairs to the flat above. More boxes, full of china, cutlery, books, bed linen. Suitcases bulging with clothes, pictures stacked on the floor, grimy outlines on the walls where they used to hang. Furniture labelled with different coloured stickers – green for the few items going to Devon, orange for everything that is to be sold or given away.
Back in the yard, ZORAN, GLORIA, TWIG and MOTHER sit on benches
eating crisps with cheese and pickle sandwiches and drinking mugs of sweet, strong tea. JASMINE eats standing up, half-hidden by the open top half of a stable door. A pony (Mopsy, her old favourite) hangs its head over the door. She nudges Jas, who offers her a piece of sandwich. Mopsy signals her dislike of pickle by blowing air noisily through her nostrils. Pony snot lands on Jasmine’s brand new sky blue hoody. She squeals and pushes Mopsy away.
JASMINE
My new top! It’s all dirty!
MOTHER
I did tell you not to wear it.
JASMINE
I had to! What if someone had seen me?
MOTHER
What could it possibly matter?
JASMINE
(tossing her newly straightened, super-swishy hair and sounding remarkably like Flora) You wouldn’t understand.
Jas has changed now that she is friends with the Cupcake Crew.
Ever since Gloria came back from Devon on Monday, Twig and I have been at the stables every day after school to help her pack, but today was the first time Jas came, even though out of all of us Jas is the one who loves Gloria the most. Being friends with Megan, Courtney, Chandra and Fran means being exactly like them, and hanging out with dirty animals isn’t one of the things they do.
It started with the hair straighteners. Then, the day after our chalk drawing, there was the shopping expedition with Mum. Now, as well as the right hair, she has the right pastel hoodies from the right shop, the right trainers and the right jeans.
We watched as Jas, well out of Mopsy’s reach, rubbed away at her sweatshirt, still trying to clean it. Mopsy, who is the cleverest pony in the yard as well as the smallest, reached over the top of her box, pulled the bolt back neatly with her teeth, pushed open her door, ambled over to Jas and blew down her neck.
Everybody laughed. Mopsy looked round, ears waggling like she was saying ‘Aren’t I clever?’ Jas
screamed and pushed her away again.
‘Why can’t you leave me alone!’ she screeched.
Zoran put his arm round Mopsy’s neck and pushed her back into the box, remembering to padlock the door. Jas flounced away to clean her sweatshirt in the bathroom upstairs.
‘If you have to change who you are in order to be friends with someone,’ Gloria observed, ‘that someone is not a true friend.’
Which is easy to say when you’re a grown-up, and a lot more difficult if you have to go to school.
I don’t like seeing the stables look like the way they did today, like something that has ended. I told Mum, who said she didn’t either but also that nothing new can start without something old ending first, that this was also part of the circle of life and that I should just think how much happier the horses are going to be in Devon.
We were sitting in what used to be the riding ring. I drew a circle in the sand with my finger, and thought about how the chalk artist still hasn’t responded. Then I thought that when Mum talked about the circle of life, we were both thinking about Iris, and how difficult it is sometimes for that circle to keep on turning. I told her about wishing Zoran would stay even though I was glad he was going
to live with Grandma. Her eyes shone a bit, and I knew she was thinking about the time after Iris too, when he first came to live with us and saved us from being crushed.
‘Nothing is more important than for all of us to be happy,’ she said, in her fierce I’m-not-crying voice, and pulled me into a hug.
I do love Mum, especially when she listens.
Flora Skyped. She has a cold. This time she was dressed in a thick fleecy dressing gown, a polo-neck jumper, flannel pyjamas, bed socks, two shawls and a woolly hat, and she kept on blowing her nose.
‘That is what comes of floating around rivers in your nightie,’ Mum scolded. ‘Even if you were wearing wellies.’
Flora said that had nothing to do with it. Pretending to be tragic heroines, Flora said, was the best bit about acting school, and why do people make such a big deal about wearing nightclothes outside?
‘It’s just like wearing a dress,’ she said. ‘The reason I got ill has nothing to do with drowning. It’s the
house, Mum. It’s so damp my sheets are actually wet when I go to bed, and there’s no heating.’
‘I’m sure they’re not actually wet,’ Mum said. ‘Not
dripping
.’
Flora said they were totally dripping and she had to dry them with a hairdryer. ‘I’m practically dying,’ she said. ‘I have to come home right now.’
Mum said, ‘But you’ve only just left!’
‘I am sorry,’ Flora huffed, ‘if the prospect of my imminent return fills you with displeasure.’
Twig said, ‘Oh my God, she even
talks
like she’s in a play.’
Flora changed tack. ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a job.’
‘A
job
?’
‘A friend wants me to be in his play. It’s
Romeo and Juliet
. I’m Juliet.’
Mum said that was wonderful, who was this friend and where was he putting on the play? Flora said his name was Angel, he’s done loads of plays already and this one would start in a pub in North London, but that it would definitely get transferred to a proper theatre.
‘Definitely?’ Mum asked.
‘Possibly,’ Flora conceded.
‘But you’re in Scotland,’ I pointed out.
Flora said she knew that, and that was why she had decided she was going to leave drama school.
Mum repeated, ‘Leave? But you’ve only just got there!’
‘You don’t understand!’ Flora cried. ‘Everything we do here is useless! We have whole classes just teaching us to breathe. Breathe! Yesterday I had to lie on the floor and learn how to massage my tongue.’
Mum said she was sure massaging your tongue was very useful.
‘I want to do Angel’s play,’ Flora said.
Mum said, ‘No,’ and closed the laptop.
Zoran and Gloria drove to Devon today. The stables and the flat are almost empty. We helped them load the furniture and things Gloria wants to keep into the removals lorry she hired, together with all the horsey things that aren’t still needed in London. Earlier in the week, they took all the last things to the dump and charity shops. An auction company took away the things they could sell, like her iron bed-frame and her dad’s vintage motorbike, and the council came to take away the fridge and dishwasher
and old mattresses. There is nothing left now but the horses themselves, enough feed for a few days, hay nets and brushes and water pails and halters and all the other things horses seem to need. They will be here until Friday with Gloria’s friend Penny in charge of the volunteers who will have to exercise them. Skye and his parents are going to help Zoran and Gloria unload when they get to Devon.
It’s strange seeing the stables like this. I don’t care what Mum says about endings being the start of new beginnings. It was already dusk as Zoran and Gloria drove the truck out of the yard, that sort of early dark damp cold which makes you realise summer is over and isn’t coming back for a very, very long time.
I felt sad.
Twig and I sat around for a while after they had gone. We waved them off from the entrance to the yard, and then we petted the ponies we used to ride back in the days when Grandma forced us to have lessons, and then we wandered back through the passageway to the riding ring, and sat on the ground with our backs against the wall.
The ring doesn’t even look like it’s part of a riding school any more. They’ve taken up the fence that bordered it and packed that off to Devon too. All that’s left is a large rectangle of sawdust with a circular
track round the edges made by the ponies, with a wall on one side and a concrete pedestrian area on the other where kids kick balls and hang out on their skateboards, and a motorway overhead, and one brave plane tree reaching up towards the light.
‘Zoran says that the people who have bought the stables are going to tear them down to build flats,’ I said. ‘So there will be nothing to remind people that twelve ponies once lived here. And don’t you dare say they’ll be happier in Devon. I
know
they’ll be happier in Devon. The point is they won’t be
here
.’
Twig just stared at the empty yard.
‘Do you ever think,’ I asked, ‘about how much has happened? I mean, I’m only fourteen, and I feel like millions and millions of things have happened to me, so much that I can’t imagine there’s any more room for new things ever again. And yet here are Zoran and Gloria, who are practically ancient, off to start a brand new life.’
‘I miss Jas,’ Twig said. ‘Do you think Jas will even come to Devon?’
‘Of course she will,’ I said. ‘She loves Devon. And she loves all this, really. She’s just distracted right now. Anyway, she has to. She’s only ten.’
But when we got home, Jas was marching round the house in a black and white mini-kilt, knee-high
socks, a tatty old blazer of Flora’s and an old tie of Dad’s, with back-combed hair sprayed grey, black lipstick, tonnes of eyeliner, her face plastered in white stage makeup and fake blood dripping down her neck.
‘Take a photograph,’ she ordered before I was even in the door. ‘I have to send the girls a picture of my outfit.’
‘Once again,’ Mum shouted, appearing behind her with her a wailing Pumpkin on her hip, ‘you are
not
going out dressed like that.’
‘I’m a zombie schoolgirl,’ Jas informed me. ‘For Halloween. Tell her.’
‘You are a zombie,’ Twig agreed. ‘But I’m not sure you’re a schoolgirl. Not in Year Six, anyway.’
Jas said, what was that supposed to mean? Twig said, what did she think it meant?
‘You just look much older than you are,’ I said.
‘But that’s the whole point!’ Jas wailed. ‘Courtney says Halloween is going to be huge this year. She says we have to have the best costumes,
or else.
’
‘Or else what?’ Twig asked, but Jas wouldn’t say.
‘Why is Halloween going to be huge?’ I asked.
‘Mrs Doriot-Buffet,’ Mum sighed. ‘It’s because she’s American. She’s been dropping leaflets all round the square, saying we have to decorate.’
‘Everyone’s going to be here!’ Jas cried. ‘Everyone! Blue, take the picture!’
I took the picture. Jas emailed it to Courtney. She and Mum argued late into the night about hemlines, makeup and how many shirt buttons Jas was allowed to undo.
The chalk artist has responded at last!
Flowers, vines, cats, birds. Today’s drawings were all over the pavement outside our house, the same motifs we used when we drew on it, but so much better they made me wish all over again I could be as good on the outside as I am in my head. The artist’s roses looked like real flowers had bloomed all over the pavement. The ivy looked like it was growing through the cracks, and the cats looked they were about to pounce on birds that were actually flying. Apart from all that though, they were the same drawings.
Jas crouched down to look at them, tracing one of the cats with her finger. ‘It’s like a picture book,’ she said. ‘Like a different world. Like in Mary Poppins.’
Twig scoffed, ‘What, you think if you jump into them you’ll end up in a magic world?’
‘I wish we could,’ Jas said. ‘I wish Mary Poppins lived with
us
. Pixie’s hopeless. All she’s done is those wings, and that wasn’t any help at all.’
‘Jas, are you OK?’ I asked.
Jas sighed, stood up and said please could we now go to school. ‘I can’t be late,’ she said. ‘We’re having a meeting about Halloween.’
‘You and the Cupcake Crew?’ Twig said.
‘Me and my
friends
,’ she corrected.
‘I’ll catch up with you,’ I told Twig. ‘I just want to take a few pictures.’
Mrs Henderson came out while I was photographing.
‘It wasn’t us,’ I assured her. ‘In case you were wondering.’
‘I wasn’t,’ she replied. ‘These are far too good.’
‘Do you know who it could be?’ I asked. She shook her head, regretfully like she wished she
did
know, not so she could tell them off but to say how pretty the drawings were.
Zoran is right. Art does change people.
‘I haven’t a clue,’ she said. ‘But it seems to me, after your antics the other day, that whoever did this has been watching you.’
‘Do
you
think it’s creepy?’ I asked.
‘In a way,’ Mrs Henderson said. ‘But it’s also rather lovely.’
Dodi made me run out of school as soon as the bell went, to avoid seeing Jake, and said that if he saw us I had to tell him we were doing homework together at my house, but when we came out Jas was waiting for me, sitting on the low wall just outside our gates, all bunched up with her face on her folded arms.