I held my breath, waiting for the scabby kid to sneer. Surprisingly no one seemed to think it sissy to go and play house. When I led Kendall over I found two little boys and one little girl crouched inside, having a tea party.
‘Do you want tea or coffee?’ the little girl asked, laying a place for Kendall with her blue plastic tea set.
‘Coffee. Black. And a ciggie too,’ said Kendall.
‘Coming right up,’ she said, pouring imaginary coffee and lighting an invisible cigarette for him.
Kendall took it from her and inhaled thin air with appreciation. ‘Thanks, babe,’ he said.
Ms Denby and Ms Balsam and I were in silent stitches. Ms Denby gave me a thumbs-up sign. I nodded and went off with Ms Balsam. She patted my shoulder.
‘There, he’s settled in already,’ she said.
We both knew it might not be so easy for me. I felt sick when we walked into the Year Six classroom. I thought I was quite tall but lots of the girls were much bigger than me, and so grown-up! They wore tight designer tops that showed their figures, and they had elaborate plaited hairstyles and nose rings and fantastic fingernails.
OK, not all the girls. There were a couple of little scruffy twitchy girls who looked sad. Then there were a clump of girls with big headscarves who all sat together. There was another Asian girl sitting by herself. She had her hair in a long glossy plait and when she grinned she had a gap in her front teeth. She was grinning at me.
She came up to me at play time. ‘I love your jacket!’ she said, stroking it admiringly. ‘I’m Harpreet. What’s your name again? Lola?’
‘Lola Rose.’
‘Cool name!’
I didn’t need to worry. I wasn’t sad old Jayni who got picked on.
I was cool Lola Rose in her fantastic furry jacket.
So now we were the Luck family – Victoria, Kendall and Lola Rose – and we had a whole new life going for us. It was strange how quickly it stopped feeling new. After a few weeks it was weird thinking back to the old life. I didn’t feel fussed when someone asked me my name and wanted to know where I lived. I felt like I’d been Lola Rose for ever. I could have grown up in Flexley Park and been at Larkrise Primary all my school life.
Harpreet was the sort of best friend I’d always longed for. We sat next to each other in class and helped each other with all our work. She was brilliant at maths and IT and science. I’m OK at English and better at art so it worked a treat.
Ms Balsam did do a special collage lesson! She brought in a huge pile of old magazines for us to cut up. She suggested we do a picture with a family theme. Harpreet flipped through a big glossy magazine, trying to find photos of people who looked like her family. She had a huge family – her mum and dad, a little sister, a big sister, two big brothers, and hundreds of aunties and uncles and cousins and her grandma and grandpa out in India. She started moaning because all the people in the photos were too pink.
‘You can colour them with brown felt pen if you like. Or maybe you can find stuff that kind of represents your family,’ I said.
‘Like what?’ said Harpreet.
‘Like . . . you could find someone with a big smiley mouth and cut it out and then find a white rabbit and a top hat and that could be your dad,’ I said. I loved Harpreet’s funny dad. He made a big fuss of me and did all these daft conjuring tricks, pretending to find eggs behind my ears and a string of coloured hankies from the sleeve of my new jacket.
‘What about his body?’ said Harpreet, who didn’t quite get it.
‘You don’t need to show the actual people. Look, your mum could be represented by lots of gold jewellery and a television set because she can’t miss any of her soaps. Your brother Amrit could be a state-of-the-art computer, right?’
‘What shall I be?’ said Harpreet.
‘You can be sweets and a long plait and lots of little numbers because you’re good at maths and you could find two linked hands and colour friendship bracelets round the wrists and they could be you and me.’
‘You have such good ideas, Lola Rose,’ said Harpreet. ‘I’m so lucky having you as my friend.’
I helped Harpreet stick all her family on a bright pink background with a border of red hearts and yellow flowers. We outlined everything with a gold glitter pen. It looked lovely.
‘I can’t wait to show Dad,’ said Harpreet. ‘I bet he’ll frame it and hang it in the lounge.’ She paused. ‘What about your dad, Lola Rose?’
‘I haven’t got one,’ I said. I selected a large piece of turquoise paper for my own collage.
‘You must have had a dad once,’ said Harpreet. ‘What’s that blue for? Is that going to be sky?’
‘It’s going to be water,’ I said.
I cut out a pink girl and added bright yellow hair way down past her waist. I fashioned a tail from a photo of green grass and made her into a mermaid. I cut little red roses for her hair and wound them round and round her long tail in a garland. I stuck her up at the top of the water, waving to a little green frog leaping up and down on a lily pad.
I searched for a woman pretty enough to be Mum but I couldn’t find one, so I turned a beautiful white statue into a water nymph. I added lots more golden curls and inked tiny black musical notes coming out of her parted lips.
I cut out more red roses, a great fluttering drift of them, and stuck them in a big red heart round the mermaid and the frog and the statue. It looked like it was keeping them safe. The rest of the blue paper looked a bit bare so I stuck on some buried treasure and a little aeroplane sailing like a ship and ice lollies swimming along like a shoal of fish.
I wanted to stop there, but I couldn’t. I cut out a shark from a nature magazine. I didn’t like touching it with my fingers even though I knew it was only paper. I didn’t want it in my picture. I wanted to rip it into little bits. But I stuck it down right at the very bottom of the page. It was looking up up up through the water at the three people caged in the heart.
‘That looks scary,’ said Harpreet.
It did look much too scary. I tried to ease the shark off the paper but the glue stuck fast. I tried pulling.
‘Don’t rip up your lovely picture!’ said Harpreet. ‘You’ll spoil it.’
‘I don’t like the shark,’ I said. ‘I’m going to cover him up.’
I found a picture of some houses. I started cutting out a whole row of them, complete with little gardens. ‘I’m going to have an underwater buried village,’ I said.
I arranged it right along the bottom of the page, covering up every tooth and fin and scale. I put shells and seaweed hedges in the gardens and stuck anchors on the top of every roof as television aerials. I stuck and stuck until the bottom of my picture was twice as thick as the top, but it didn’t stop me worrying about the shark swimming silently in and out the windows and doors, looking for his family.
I dreamt about the shark at night. I couldn’t get back to sleep, even though I huddled close to Mum.
I hated her being out so much. I put Kendall to bed about eight but I stayed up until Mum came home, even though she sometimes didn’t make it back till midnight.
‘You should go to sleep, Lola Rose, you silly girl,’ Mum said, rubbing her finger under my eyes. ‘Look at these dark circles. You look like a little panda. You’re a bad bad girl.’
But she didn’t get cross with me. She was always in a good mood now when she came home from the pub. It wasn’t just the drinks her customers bought her. I was scared she might have started a thing with the manager, Barry. She seemed to be very thick with him, especially since they had a karaoke night and Mum sang a special Kylie medley.
‘He said I’m every bit as good as Kylie – and he said my bum’s just as good as hers too,’ Mum said, dancing round the bedroom in her underwear.
‘Mum!’
‘He says he might give me a regular singing spot. He’s got this mad idea that I could stand on top of the bar counter and prance round a bit.’ Mum waggled her bum and held her hairbrush like a
mike, demonstrating.
‘Mum!’
‘Your face, Lola Rose!’ said Mum. ‘Look, darling, if I’ve got a nice voice there’s no reason why I shouldn’t show it off.’
‘It sounds like this Barry guy is more interested in your nice bum,’ I said sourly.
‘Ooh, you cheeky girl,’ said Mum, pretending she was going to smack my bum with the hair-brush. ‘Nah, old Barry’s a sweetheart but he’s too much under his wife’s thumb. She doesn’t mind the singing idea if it brings in more customers but she’ll make sure Barry behaves himself. Not that I’d let him get anywhere. He’s way too old and dull for me. I’ve got other fish to fry.’
Mum grinned at herself in the dressing-table mirror we’d bought at the weekend at a hospice shop.
My stomach squeezed. ‘What do you mean, other fish to fry?’ I said.
‘It’s just a silly expression, sweetheart. Take no notice,’ said Mum, brushing her hair.
‘Have you got a new boyfriend?’
‘No! Well, not exactly. You can’t call him a boyfriend. We’ve not even been out together. But he’s interested, put it that way. Well, a number of the guys down the pub have chatted me up, as a matter of fact – but Jake’s different.’
‘Jake?’
‘He is gorgeous, Lola Rose. He’s an artist. He says he wants to paint my portrait. Imagine, I might find myself hanging in an art gallery one day! It’s Jake who’s the oil painting though. He’s got this thick dark-blonde hair, quite long, as lovely as a girl’s, but there’s nothing girly about Jake, oh no!’
My heart was beating so fast I felt dizzy. ‘Mum, don’t!’ I was in such a panic I didn’t think what I was saying. ‘What if Dad finds out?’
Mum stared at me. ‘Dad?’ she said. She acted like she’d forgotten all about him. ‘Your dad’s got nothing to do with it, darling. He’s in the past. Over and done with. We’ll never see him again.’
‘But . . .’ I screwed up my face, struggling. I didn’t know why I felt in such a panic. That’s what I wanted to hear, wasn’t it? I didn’t want to see Dad. But it seemed so weird for Mum to talk about him as if he was an old film she could barely remember. Dad had always come first with her.
‘Don’t you love him any more?’ I said, as Mum got into bed.
She wasn’t listening properly, humming under her breath. ‘You what? Do I love Jake? It’s early days, darling, early days.’
‘I said do you love Dad!’
‘Shh! Don’t shout, you’ll wake Kendall. Why are you going on about your dad, for God’s sake? Don’t you remember what he was like? He’s left me with lots of little mementoes – look.’ Mum tapped the caps on her teeth.
‘Yeah, I know, Mum. But that’s just it. Why are you taking up with another guy when you’ve only just left Dad? Why can’t you be happy with Kendall and me?’
‘Oh grow up, Jayni – sorry, Lola Rose.’
‘I do act grown up, you know I do,’ I said, turning my back on her.
‘Oooh, don’t go in a huff, sweetheart.’ Mum cuddled up to me.
I tried to pull away, stiff as a board. Mum tickled me until I squealed and doubled up.
‘Shh, shh!’ said Mum, though she was giggling too. She cuddled in quick and this time I didn’t wriggle away. ‘I just mean when you are grown up you’ll understand. I love you and little Kenny with all my heart, darling – but I need a man too. Life isn’t worth living if you don’t have someone to make your heart flutter. You’ll see when you’re older.’
I was sure I wouldn’t. My heart had done enough fluttering to last me a lifetime. I didn’t think I’d ever want a man. Especially not the kind of guy my mum liked.
I hoped this Jake would fade out of sight as quickly as the footballer, but Mum started going out with him on her nights off. When she was working he stayed till closing time and then walked her home. He came into our flat sometimes. Whenever I heard two lots of footsteps I snapped the light off quick and pretended to be asleep.
I wasn’t in any hurry to meet him. I was very glad we only had one bedroom, and Kendall and I were sprawled right across the only bed.
But then he came round on Sunday, Mum’s day off. I should have suspected something. Mum got up early and showered and shampooed for ages. She got dressed in a new tiny turquoise top that showed off her navel diamond and put on her tight white jeans. Usually on Sundays we had a long lie-in until eleven or twelve and then Mum just muddled around the house barefoot, a big cardie over her nightie.
But that Sunday Mum nagged at Kendall and me to get up bright and early. Well, it was early but we weren’t feeling bright. I didn’t want to get dressed in my new jeans. They were already uncomfortably tight around my tummy. I always seemed hungry now, especially in the evenings when Mum was out. I’d eat three bars of chocolate on the trot, or go on buttering slice after slice of bread until I’d polished off the whole loaf.
I wanted to stay in my nightie and sit up in bed and stick stuff in my scrapbook. Ms Balsam had given me lots of her magazines. I was having fun snipping out heads and bodies and arms and legs and making new people on my page. Sometimes I invented strange new species with six arms or car wheels for feet. I’d cut the heads off the skinniest fashion models and stick them onto enormous elephants and whales.
‘Come on, Lola Rose, stop that sticking and get washed,’ said Mum, snatching my scrapbook. She pulled a face. ‘You’re definitely sick, you! One warped, weird little kid. What’s with the whale lady? Tell you what, she’s a dead spit of your Auntie Barbara.’ Mum giggled and adjusted her jeans over her own tiny hips.
Kendall wanted to stay in bed too. He was involved in a complicated game with George under the covers, swimming in their own dark private ocean. Mum fished him out and carried him squealing to the bathroom.
‘I want two clean, charming, well-dressed kids, if you don’t mind,’ she said.
‘Why?’ I whined. ‘It’s Sunday.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mum. ‘It’s Sunday. Funday. My Jake’s coming round and we’re all going out to have fun at Camden Lock market.’
Kendall and I were going to need some convincing. We got washed and dressed sullenly.
‘For God’s sake, smile!’ said Mum, when Jake knocked on the door. She glanced at us anxiously. Especially me. It was as if she was suddenly noticing how big I was.
Jake came as a shock. He was good looking in a scruffy sort of way. His fair hair was longer than mine, tied back in a ponytail. But he was young. I’d imagined this big artist guy in his thirties. Jake was an art student.
‘He’s much younger than you, Mum,’ I hissed in the ladies at Camden Lock.
‘Not that much,’ said Mum.
‘How much?’ I said. ‘He’s still at art college, isn’t he?’
‘Look, you’re acting like he’s still at school.’
‘How old is he, Mum?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Now shut up and get a move on. I want to look round all the stalls. It’s great here, isn’t it? Jake told me all about it.’
When we came out of the ladies Jake and Kendall weren’t there. We both stared at the wall where we’d left them as if expecting them to rematerialize. The spot stayed empty.
I clutched Mum’s hand.
‘They’ll be in the gents,’ she said.
‘Kendall wouldn’t let any stranger take him to the toilet,’ I said.
Kendall was weirdly private. He hollered if Mum or I happened to burst in when he was on the loo. He’d often hang on grimly rather than use a public toilet. Sometimes he didn’t make it in time.
‘Jake isn’t a stranger,’ Mum said crossly.
She walked over to the gents. I followed her. We waited a minute. I started to feel sick. I must have gone white because Mum nudged me.
‘It’s OK, Lola Rose. For God’s sake, they’re just having a pee.’ She shouted through the door. ‘Oi, Jake, Kendall, get a move on in there! Lola Rose is getting worried.’
No one answered. Mum swallowed, pulling her wh
ite jacket higher round her neck.
‘Jake? Kendall?’ she shouted.
A strange man came out of the toilet, grinning stupidly. ‘You lost someone, darling?’
‘It’s OK, it’s just my boyfriend and my little boy. Maybe he’s had a bit of an accident?’
‘There’s no one in there, pet.’
‘What, not even in the cubicle?’
‘There’s only one and I’ve just come out of it.’
‘Oh God,’ said Mum. She looked at me. She chewed on her finger. ‘Well, they’ve obviously gone for a little wander round. Boys!’ she said, trying to sound jaunty. She gave me another nudge because I was crying. ‘Stop it! Kendall will be fine. He’s with Jake.’
‘We don’t know Jake, not properly. And what if Dad tracked us down and saw them together? Maybe he’s got Kenny?’
‘Oh my God, they’ve killed Kenny,’ said the toilet guy, quoting South Park.
‘Shut it, mate,’ said Mum. She pulled me away.
‘What are we going to do?’ I looked at the heaving crowds in the market. ‘How are we going to find them?’
‘We will. Just shut up.’
‘We shouldn’t have left Kenny with Jake. Why did we have to go out with him anyway? He’s not part of our family.’
‘He could be one day,’ said Mum. ‘Don’t look at me like that. And you were the one whining on about needing to go to the ladies.’
It was so awful thinking it was my fault. ‘Kenny!’ I yelled.
I rushed down the first little alleyway between the stalls. ‘Kenny, where are you? Kenny!’
‘I’m Kendall,’ he said, bobbing up out of nowhere, laughing at me. ‘Look what we’ve got, Lola Rose. Pancakes! Yummy yum.’
‘Jammy crepes,’ said Jake. ‘Kendall chose the jams. He’s got blackcurrant for you, Lola Rose, because he says you like purple.’
I love pancakes. I love blackcurrant jam. But my stomach was so stirred up, it was like swallowing an old sock. I only ate a mouthful and then threw it away.
Mum glared at me. ‘You mean little cow,’ she hissed. ‘It was sweet of him to buy us pancakes. He hasn’t got much money, Lola Rose, seeing he’s a student. You could at least act like you’re grateful. You’re showing me up. At least Kendall’s behaving beautifully.’