Mrs Wright went back to critiquing work. “Charlie, did you do this homework with your eyes closed? I appreciate abstract, but even I have limits…”
My brother shrugged from his behind his midnight mane, not looking like he gave a toffee.
“Look at me when I’m talking. Let me explain: the homework was to draw a landscape. What is this?”
He peeked out slightly, cheeks flaming. “That’s a tree, and that’s another tree, and that’s another tree. Three trees.”
“And is three trees a landscape?” she persisted.
“It’s a close-up of a landscape: look at the detail!”
She scrutinised it. “Oh. Oh! I see! Three close-up trees, and leaves… actually, that’s rather clever, now I understand…”
Devon sighed. “The creative mind…”
I rolled my eyes. “Devon, have you actually seen Charlie’s homework?”
“No. Why?”
“I was with him when he did it – it’s a bunch of different sized lines and scribbles that don’t even look as good as Kitty’s ‘tree, house and sun’ landscape on the fridge – and hers had a strip of green at the bottom and a strip of blue at the top, not making contact with the tree, house or sun!”
Devon got up and went for a look, leaving me with my looking-very-stupid-now-Miss-had-mentioned-it tiny tree, and her piece with the close-up, immaculate human hand with a butterfly perched on the index finger, before a perfectly perspectified garden landscape.
I sighed.
Just like Mrs Wright, Devon had the innate ability to decide bad and good and then find reasons. She was going to love Charlie’s half-boiled crayon efforts because she thought it was attractive not to try, even though I was certain she tried very hard at most things. Me knowing it was rubbish and hadn’t meant to be anything in particular because he’d told me so wasn’t worth consideration – especially the part where he overheard me being complained at about close-up trees and decided to apply it to his explanation just to be annoying.
“Asta! That is traced!” Mrs Wright exclaimed. “I can see the lines where you’ve scribbled on the back of the tracing paper to transfer it, and one of them even goes through…”
Asta flicked her ponytail and said nothing.
“And Courtney… is that traced from Asta’s work?”
OK, so they’d wasted more effort than any of us, just trying to get by. Perhaps this Thursday wasn’t going so badly after all…
#8 Family Emergency!
“Dev,” I said. “Call this ridiculous, but I reckon I may have un-learned some things about Music since we’ve had Mr Kirkpatrick.”
“Why?” she asked. “Who did you have the other two years?”
“Mr Cooknell. He let us muck around with the keyboards and ‘interpret’ pieces of trendy music he’d brought in.”
“Oh, he’s the one that stands on duty at the gate on Fridays and talks to all the grungers, isn’t he?”
“That’s the one. With the loo-brush hair and long brown coat, yeah…”
I spotted that Andy was back, and had caught up with Charlie, just as Kirkpaddy reached the door. “Alright, rabble!” he shouted. “Shoes off; coats off; bags outside; diaries out; NO PENS!”
We obliged, and the hubbub of students talking died immediately, as did group morale. Just as I was getting my diary out of my bag, a small, neatly shoed-shined Duty Pupil appeared with a Post-It in her hand.
“I just need to give this note to Mr Kirkpatrick…” she mumbled vaguely to me and Dev.
“Go right in,” I said. “But take your shoes off or he’ll kill. Um, not meaning to scare you or anything…”
She kicked her pumps off and wandered into the classroom, a large, blue-carpeted expanse. There were counters around the edge for the xylophones, thick curtains and laminated sheets bearing instruction on what Level 7 in Theory entailed. It was nothing like the room we’d become accustomed to over Years 7 and 8 with Mr Cooknell – instead of the admittedly cramped lines of chairs facing computers with keyboards for keyboards, Mr Kirkpatrick always had us sitting in a circle on the floor.
I slipped my own shoes off, pausing to contemplate Devon’s fluffy socks by comparison to my “Thursday”-labelled trainer pair. “It’s child-cruelty; making twelve year olds have to face up to that guy. He has to be four times her height…”
“Shh!” Devon giggled, as the boom of Kirkpaddy’s voice made us both start.
“-AND I WILL NOT ACCEPT CONDUCT LIKE THAT IN MY CLASSROOM!”
“Oh dear,” I sighed. “I hope he’s not shouting at that girl…”
Devon giggled again. “Maybe she had a pen sticking out of her pocket or something.”
Mr Kirkpatrick’s voice had come back down to talking volume, in his Scottish twang. “I’ll be having you in detention next Friday afternoon for an hour, now get out of my classroom!”
“Not the kid, then,” I mumbled. “I don’t reckon even Kirkpaddy could give a Duty Pupil detention.”
Charlie mooched out of class. He looked up at us briefly from his floor-fixed gaze behind his hair. “Sent out – I might just go to the nurse and go home…”
“That’s skiving,” I said, stating the obvious.
“I know,” he hissed.
“What’d you do?” Devon asked, nosily. I didn’t want us to get into a conversation with him, or we’d get in trouble for dawdling.
“Doesn’t matter – I’m going,” he muttered, walking away.
“Charlie!” yelled Kirkpaddy, striding towards us like a lanky Goliath. “Where’re you going?”
“Dunno.”
“I’ve got a note here – you and your sister are to go home,” he said, as if I wasn’t standing right under his nose.
“I was going home anyway,” Charlie snorted, defiantly.
“Do yourself a favour, laddie – don’t give me lip,” Mr Kirkpatrick said, seriously, nodding at us both to leave. “Kaylean – in.”
I put my shoes back on and grabbed my bag and coat. “Oh, I see, you didn’t take your shoes off,” I realised out loud.
Charlie snorted again. “Only ’cause I’m wearing the fluffy socks Dev gave me. I didn’t reckon they’d go down any better…”
I gave him a look. “I guess. Did you see what the Post-It said? Why’re we going home?”
“It said ‘family emergency’…” he shrugged.
Shrugged! It wasn’t like him not to get in a panic.
We both looked at each other as we took it in, wondering if we were thinking the same thing.
“Mum!” we gasped, at not quite the same time.
I quickly signed us out at Reception and we rushed home. It’s strange what adrenaline does to you – we’re talking the two worst otherwise healthy PE students in the whole of Year 9, and we got home in what felt like ten minutes. It’s something like a forty minute walk back from school if you don’t get the bus. But all that was on my mind was that Mum must’ve gone into labour early like she did with Kitty – and I so badly wanted to be there for her.
* * *
“Mum! Harry!” I called out, as soon as I had a foot on the hallway rug. “What’s going on?!”
Eileen met us in the kitchen. She was sat at the table with tea and a biscuit, right at home, and she beckoned us to be seated also before she spoke. “Your mother and Harry have been sent through to the hospital. It’s just to check – they thought they couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat.”
I gasped. Oh my God… did that mean the baby had… died? My heart sank – in that moment it was like time would never carry on. It was absolutely devastating – seven months into gestation, this little brother or sister, gone forever. My Play-Doh dream! And what would we tell Kitty? We hadn’t been much younger than that when she was born, and her long stay in the incubator confused the life out of us at the time, even though as Mum explained we’d both been in Special Care too. Just thinking about that was enough to put things in perspective.
Eileen noticed our faces, locked i
nto twin states of pure horror. “They’re just getting things checked out. It’s not necessarily over; your mum just thought you should be prepared for that. She said she could do with you here when they get back…”
I sensed that Charlie was crying, even though I’d stopped looking at him, and squeezed his hand for support. For once, instead of reacting to Eileen’s words as though Mum was just useless and always piled everything on me, I felt like she had the much, much worse deal here. Of course she wanted her two big kids home to help her through. What did Harry know about the trials of her other pregnancies?
“Cup of tea?” offered Devon’s gran.
Being offered a cuppa in my own house? The look on her face said everything about the gravity of the situation, even if she had managed to can her usual accusatory tone in favour of sympathetic softness. It was uncharacteristic for Eileen to be so gentle, and I knew she drove Devon nuts. Some nights I heard her screeching next door about glitter on the kitchen table, or dog muck on the carpet.
“Yes, please,” I croaked. “Milk and no sugar.”
“Charlie?”
“None for me, thanks,” he sniffed, putting his head down on the table and twitching.
“Is he alright?” asked Eileen, observing his daft little foot-stamping routine.
“It’s a tic,” I explained. If I was feeling funny, I could’ve said he was the drumming equivalent of an air-guitarist, but I couldn’t laugh in this condition.
The phone rang; I seized it.
Charlie looked up.
It was Harry: “Eileen?”
“It’s Harley.”
“Good news!” he exclaimed. It was the most enthusiasm I’d ever heard from him. “He’s fine; the baby’s fine!”
“‘He’…?”
Harry choked a little with surprise. “Er… wow. That only just dawned on me – the doctor said ‘he’s fine’ to me, and I didn’t think anything of it, but obviously… we’re having a boy!”
I beamed, mouthing to Charlie and Eileen, “Harry says it’s OK!”
They looked ever so relieved.
“Can I speak to Harry?” Eileen asked me.
I handed her the phone, hugged Charlie, and relaxed with my tea. “It’s all going to be OK!”
Charlie smiled, probably for the first proper time this month. “I really do hope so…”
I smiled back, sneakily. I knew something he didn’t know, and I wouldn’t give it up with ease.
#9 Anvilicious
The first thing I did after school on Friday was rush up to my room and do my homework. It wasn’t normal for me, but the scare with our baby brother had given me a new loaf on life. Our baby brother…
Harry had sworn me to secrecy the minute he came down from his ecstatic state of relief. Mum was convinced she didn’t know the sex of the baby, and I explained to him that I hadn’t told Charlie. Charlie was awful at secrets, and Mum would’ve known within hours, but the real reason I’d kept this to myself was the lively sense of empowerment I got from knowing something special.
Aimee was huddled in my big white chair by the window with the large ragdoll Noddy from the windowsill on her lap. We’d had that thing since Charlie and I were babies, and I secretly thought it was probably the most germy toy of them all that she could’ve picked to cuddle, but I didn’t say.
“Hey Aimee,” I said, on autopilot.
“Hey Harley,” she mumbled, fiddling with Noddy’s sewn-on hat.
Kitty was downstairs watching the afternoon cartoons, so I was due some peace and quiet from her. Aimee seemed fairly quiet and musey as well, and I knew to leave her to it. Ben had probably dumped her again – I couldn’t help thinking no guy could bear her for a girlfriend for longer than a week. I frequently wished for a break from her, and she was only my stepsister.
I dragged my Geography book out of my bag and sat down at the desk, trying to remember what a cumulonimbus cloud was and what it did. Was it one that you got on a clear day? One that brings heavy rain? One that only appears to block the view of a spangly rainbow with bows and a white unicorn, even?
I heard a sob from behind me. “Aimee?”
“I’m OK,” she insisted. “Just waiting for, y’know.”
I didn’t know. It had to be either Ben’s “Sorry” text or her period, and I wasn’t interested in which. I reached for the dictionary. Cumulonimbus… cumulative, cumuli… c-u-m-u-l-o… cumulonimbus!
A tall, dark cumulous cloud shaped like an anvil (whatever an anvil is) that brings thunderstorms.
Out of curiosity, I then looked up “anvil”: A metalworker’s hammering block. Oh, useful. Nothing about what a shape cumulonimbus cloud was supposed to be.
Suddenly there was a great, gasping sigh. I cautiously went over to Aimee. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing!” she squeaked. Now, Aimee didn’t do squeaking. She had to have found out she had Chlamydia or an extra toe to access emotions that could be expressed without shouting. I found myself concerned after all.
“Oh come on,” I groaned. “Tell me…”
She sniffed. Her dripping eyes blinked and conveyed a begrudging recognition of the fact that whatever it was couldn’t be kept to herself forever. “You can’t tell anyone,” she bargained.
“I wouldn’t,” I promised. If there’s one thing I don’t like to do, it’s gossip. I don’t even talk about half of my own problems out of fear that I’ll be looked upon as attention-seeking, and, yes, fear that certain friends will tattle to someone like Asta with their ammunition about my chilblains or that one tiny recurring hair on my chin.
“I’ll be in so much trouble if this is real,” she whispered. It felt like the opposite of an enchanting realisation that fairies exist – like I was on the lip of discovering something seriously serious.
It’s probably real, I thought. Under normal circumstances I would’ve said it out loud.
Instead, I waited.
Aimee looked at me for a while, clearly considering not telling me, which likely equalled not telling anyone, given how many so-called friends she had that would definitely know by now if anyone was going to.
“Well… it’s my time of the month…”
Was this going to be gross?
I waited.
“It’s, supposed to be. But… nothing’s happened since December.”
I felt fleetingly jealous, but instantly enough that passed, replaced by inference like a hard punch in the gut.
“December…?”
“I know, I’m an idiot. I didn’t really think because I missed six last year but they weren’t in a row, and I had it when I had sex with Ben the first time, and… I was really stupid and I thought that made it OK…”
People seriously believed these things? It hurt my head. Anyone who’d devoured even two teen magazines, or, y’know, lived in the real world after the 1990s couldn’t actually have missed the big bold messages about what was fact and what was a myth?
“So… you think you’re pregnant?” I asked, calmly. I sure did. I was already unwilling to believe that she wasn’t pregnant. If this was me, I decided, I’d be praying to be struck down by a bus because I’d never bear labour or an abortion.
“I don’t think, I know! I sort-of knew a couple of months ago. And you can’t TELL anyone!” she snapped, balefully. The temper was back…
“Oh my God…”
“I know…” she mumbled, quiet again. Tears were sliding down her face, streaking heavy black mascara into her orange foundation. It was a pitiful sight. “I even have the test right here – one of those ones for stupid girls that just says ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant’. So there.”
She showed it to me, and it did indeed. I guessed it must’ve cost a bit for a display that had room for “NOT PREGNANT” in little calculator style letters. Except it didn’t say “NOT PREGNANT” – it, of course, said “PREGNANT”.
“So what do you think you’re gonna do?” I asked.
“I don’t know…”
?
??Have you told Ben?”
“No.”
“Any of your mates…?”
“No.”
“Anyone at all?”
“No. Just you…”
“You have to tell your dad.”
“I can’t.”
I reeled at that. There was a stirring inside that felt painfully Devon – as a fellow supposed woman, I felt totally cross that someone could go through this and feel like shame had to come before comfort. The Fire Goddess in me heaved and swirled for the first time in ages, and against my better judgement I found myself insisting, “Well, you have to!”
“Don’t shout at me, I’m pregnant,” she huffed, oh-so maturely. “And you’re not telling anyone either.”
Just like that, my previous burning secret was doused and swept onto the sands by this tidal wave of confidentiality. Who cared if I knew we were having a baby brother when no one else did? It was as if all the happy surprises were gone from my life, now that all I could think of was the lairy, expectant bitch I shared a room with.
#10 In The Pink
Saturday, Aimee was out.
Selfishly, I was glad. I woke up to an empty room, makeup scattered all over her bedside table, and no sign of Kitty either. Charlie seemed to think she’d been taken out by Mum to pick a present for the party her friend was having on Sunday.
That left me with all the space I could hope for to pick something vaguely acceptable from my small collection of secondhand clothes to wear to Rindi’s party.
First, I had a nice relaxing bath. My own tummy wasn’t exactly flat. I pictured that an alien could’ve laid eggs inside me and got squicked out. Not so relaxing. Having dumped my old pyjamas in the laundry basket, I scoured the house top to bottom for the other set. I’d always had only two sets of pyjamas, and that had usually been fine, but since Mum stopped doing the washing because she couldn’t lean into our open-top machine, we’d got behind. Harry was always too busy with work, and Aimee had ways to exempt herself from whichever chore she was pencilled in for this week.
Naturally, it was my week to do the laundry. I hadn’t even known, but now I had no one to blame but myself for the fact that I couldn’t find any pyjamas to wear to Rindi’s that night.
I’d momentarily gone off Otter’s hand me down tees after what happened with Andy, but having been reminded what the guy who used to wear them looked like, the scratched-up Iron Maiden top was starting to seem like a bearable choice. To wear with that, I nabbed Zak’s football shorts straight off the airer. He wouldn’t miss them until Monday, and anyway, if I didn’t get a chance to wash them tomorrow, I didn’t smell. The whole point of football was to get sweaty and mucky, so he’d need to give me a break over that.