Andie's Moon (8 page)

“Come on!
What
did she say?”

Prune could hardly get the words out between sobs. “She said – I haven’t – haven’t – haven’t got the looks or the bone structure – or the figure – I’m too
big –
I – I – I could make myself look a lot better but I’m just – just not model material – oh, Andie! You should have seen the way she looked at me, all sniffy – like I’m substandard or something, a reject –” She grabbed another tissue and blew her nose hard. “And she went, ‘That friend of yours, with those gorgeous exotic looks, we could do something with her. But you’re not what we’re looking for, I’m afraid, darling.’
Darling!
She really called me darling, only it sounded like an insult. And the reception girl sort of sniggered – she didn’t think I heard it, but I did – so I just turned round and walked out.”

“Well, I’m glad you walked out,” Andie said with feeling. “They sound awful! Why’d you want to have anything to do with people like that? As for saying those things – of course you’re not substandard! Snobby cow. Don’t take any notice.”

“But how
can
I not take notice? You don’t understand, Andie, you just don’t get it – I want to be a model more than anything else, and if I can’t do it, I don’t know what the point of anything is – and Sushila could do it if she wanted, only she doesn’t, and it’s such a waste – oh, you don’t know how
useless
it makes me feel!”

“Don’t be daft! Of course you’re not useless. Are you going to let that bossy woman tell you what to think of yourself, just ’cos you’re not an identikit Chelsea Girl?”

The answer was obviously
yes –
Prune dissolved into another tearburst. Andie looked at her in dismay. To be quite honest, Prune looked terrible – her eyes red and puffy, her make-up streaked, her mouth stretched sideways with crying. Andie had been about to say, “That was only one agency. You could try others.” But that would surely lead to more disappointments. Prune was never going to turn herself into one of those sleek girls with their racehorse legs and pouty faces and straight glossy hair, the girls she saw every time she opened a magazine or went to the King’s Road. Instead, Andie said, “You look nicest when you’re just you. When you’re not trying to look like everyone else.”

“But I
want
to look like everyone else!” Prune wailed.

Andie felt rebuffed. She was doing her best, but nothing she said could make Prune feel any better. She tried to care as much as Prune did, to see how it felt. She thought: it’d be like someone telling me I’ll never be any good as an artist, no matter how hard I try. It’d feel like one of my arms or legs was useless, and might as well be chopped off.

“Come on! You’d better stop crying before Mum and Dad get in,” she told Prune. “You don’t want them to know where you’ve been, do you?”

“No,” Prune said, in a muffled voice. She got up from the bed, and went through to the bathroom.

Later, in bed, Andie listened for telltale creakings from above, hoping that Ravi might be skyhopping again. Not a sound. Disappointed, she wondered whether to creep out of the flat and go up to the attic, just in case the door was unlocked and Ravi up there. But while she was still dithering, she fell asleep.

Chapter Ten

Mountains on the Moon

Kris was away for part of the next week, visiting a cousin. With time to herself, Andie painted and painted. She worked at the kitchen table, so that Mum wouldn’t fuss about spilled water and stained carpets. Pleased with her moonscape, she made a whole series – fantastical landscapes with rocks and ravines, craters and crevices. She used harsh, bright colours that made the settings look larger than life.

At night, when she looked out of the window at the real moon, it felt like sharing a secret with it. But what sort of secret could it be, when the TV news and the papers were full of the approaching Apollo 11 launch? There were charts, diagrams, interviews, discussions – and it was still more than a week away.

And what about Ravi? When would she have the chance to look at the moon properly again through his telescope, or to stand lost in wonder at the huge spread of blackness and stars? She saw him only once – out in the garden with his mother, who was snipping mint from the herb bed beyond the shrubbery. Ravi had just come from school, and wore a brown blazer and a brown and white striped tie.

“Hello there, Andie! Isn’t it a lovely day?” called Mrs. Kapoor, and Andie went over hoping to talk to Ravi. Maybe Mrs. Kapoor would go indoors with the mint; then Andie could ask Ravi when he was next going star-watching. But he only said hello, in an awkward, formal way, then made an excuse and went indoors, and it was Mrs. Kapoor who stayed.

“You’ll have to excuse Ravi. He’s so shy, especially with girls,” she told Andie. “I hope you don’t think he’s unfriendly. He doesn’t mean to be.”

But Ravi
hadn’t
been unfriendly, or even the slightest bit shy, when they’d been up on the roof! He’d been a different person – confident, fun. Andie was mystified. Had she upset him, somehow? Or only dreamed about being outside with him in the middle of the night?

Prune remained doleful and downcast, though she tried to hide it when Mum or Dad were at home. She lay out in the garden on a towel, trying to get a tan, and complaining that the high walls and the walnut tree gave too much shade; all the same, she managed to get herself sunburned and sore. Without telling Mum, who wouldn’t have approved, she had bought herself a bikini – bright pink, with turquoise stripes – but was too self-conscious to let anyone but Andie see her in it. If anyone came into the garden, she made a grab for her towel, and shrouded herself from shoulders to ankles.

Andie did the sketches Prune had asked for, and Prune tried to draw clothes on the models, getting cross and frustrated when the drawings didn’t turn out as she wished. “
You
do it, Andie!” She flung down her latest attempts on the kitchen table. “I just can’t get them right! I’ll tell you what I want, and you can draw it.”

Anything for a quiet life, Andie thought. She put her own painting carefully to dry, and drew and drew to Prune’s instructions. The results, they both thought, looked good. Andie had expected Prune to want frills and beads and floaty dresses, but the designs were surprisingly tomboyish and practical. Fashions For The Future, Prune called them. Since the clothes could be worn by either boys or girls, Andie developed a face and hairstyle to match – longish sleek hair, and a handsome face that could be either male or female.

On Wednesday, Maria, who was Mrs. Rutherford’s cleaner and came once a week, interrupted Andie and Prune in the kitchen. “Hey!” she said, bending to examine the drawings. “Ought to work for a fashion magazine, you two! I could see myself in that one-piece trouser suit, if I lost a pound or two. Very Space Age.”

“There, you see,” Andie told Prune later. “Even if that stupid agency didn’t want you as a model, that’s not the only way of working in fashion. You could be a designer.”

“Thanks, And. I owe you a favour.” Prune collected up the sheets, and put them into a special folder, which she referred to as her portfolio.

Andie was quick to cash in this favour, before Prune forgot or changed her mind. Next day, she asked Prune to go with her to the National Gallery. Prune managed it with barely a complaint, though she got bored fairly soon and sat reading about “How to be a Switched-on Dolly Bird” in her magazine. “Dolly bird!” Andie scoffed. “Haven’t you had enough of that? Who wants to be a
doll
? Something to dress up in pretty clothes, and that’s all?” But it wasn’t worth starting a real argument, not when she was having her own way. They bought sandwiches in the café, then Prune left Andie for an hour and a half while she went to investigate the shops in the nearby Strand. “Nothing like the King’s Road,” was her verdict. “More like Mum’s sort of shops.” But Andie had seen Renoir and Pissarro and Monet, and was happy.

That evening Prune went down to see Sushila. Andie was reading in bed when she came back, bringing with her a book called
The New Astronomer.
“Ravi said to give you this. What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing!” With great curiosity, Andie took the book and opened it. “It’s…to help with my painting, that’s all.”

Tucked inside the flyleaf was a small, handwritten note. “
ROOF – TONIGHT – MIDNIGHT
” it said, in sloping capitals.

She could so easily have missed it! Or been asleep, and not even opened the book till tomorrow! Now, tingling with excitement, she prepared to stay awake for the next two-and-a-half hours. She turned the pages, looking at diagrams of the constellations. Maybe, if she swotted up now, she could impress Ravi by recognizing some obscure star-pattern, or by mentioning that Galileo Galilei, who’d lived near the Leaning Tower of Pisa, had made a telescope good enough to see the mountains of the moon. In 1610! And it was Galileo who thought the moon had seas, though it didn’t really, and had named the Sea of Tranquillity, where the astronauts would be landing. Of course Ravi would know all that – this was his book – but maybe she could work it casually into the conversation.

Prune got ready for bed, but sat fiddling with her transistor radio; Mum and Dad were still up, watching
Wojeck,
Dad’s favourite crime drama
.
Andie kept an anxious eye on the time. Her parents were usually in bed by eleven, but what if they stayed up late? How would she escape then? At one point, in spite of her worry, she almost dozed off – but then snapped her eyelids open and pushed herself up from the pillow. She dreaded being fast asleep in bed, while Ravi waited for her on the roof. Not that he
would
be waiting, with the night sky for company – Cygnus the Swan, and Sagittarius the archer, and Ursa Major and Minor, which meant Great and Little Bear. It was hard to make herself believe that what looked like scatterings of bright dust was actually made up of distant suns, fixed in their sky-patterns. She flicked back to a coloured picture of the solar system. The diagram made it look as if some observer had stood right outside the Earth, noting distances and orbits and colours. But, she thought, it’s been worked out by people standing just like I did, staring up at the sky – looking and comparing and puzzling – and asking themselves questions about how it could possibly make sense. People used to think the sun went round the Earth, didn’t they? – she’d just read that Galileo had even gone to prison, for saying it was the other way round.

How astonishing it was! How had she not been fascinated ever since she was old enough to gaze up at the sky?

She heard footsteps in the hallway. Mum, in her dressing gown, looked round the door.

“Put your light out now, Andie. It’s time you were asleep. Goodnight, love.”

It was ten past eleven. Prune was already sleeping. Andie clicked off her bedside lamp and waited until her parents were in their room and the flat in darkness, allowed a little longer for them to fall asleep, then turned her light back on and continued reading.

At last! Five to midnight, and all quiet. While she was putting on socks and sneakers, and pulling a warm sweater over her pyjama top, she heard the faint creak that meant Ravi was on his way up to the attic. She tiptoed out of the flat, remembering to put the door on the latch, this time, so that the cats couldn’t escape.

He was there, setting up his tripod on the flat part of the roof. Andie gazed up. The night was beautifully clear, the sky spangled with stars – luring her closer, making her wish she could spread her arms and fly into them.

“Hello! It’s lovely and clear tonight. I want to look at Lyra,” Ravi said, just as if he hadn’t virtually ignored her in the garden, last time they’d met. “It’s only small but it’s got one of the brightest stars in it, Vega.”

“Does Kris know you come out here?” Andie asked, while he was adjusting the telescope.

“Course! That’s why she was winding you up about the ghost. She knew it was me,” Ravi said, with his shy grin.

“Wouldn’t she want to come, too? I mean, Patrick and Marilyn let her do whatever she wants – she wouldn’t have to sneak out, like I do.”

“She did come up a couple of times. But she’s no good at staying awake, or waking up once she’s gone to sleep – and when she did, she had to stay in bed till ten in the morning, to get over it.”

“It’s just – you know,” Andie tried, “I don’t want to leave her out.”

Ravi looked at her in surprise. “Leave her out? Who’s leaving her out? She’s not bothered about this, and we are, that’s all. But I was telling you about Vega. You can’t miss it, even with just your eyes – it’s the fifth brightest star of all. Fifty times brighter than our sun. That’s a useful one for skyhopping. Here, look through the scope. See it, the really bright one?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“And if you look really closely at Delta,” Ravi continued, “which is left and a little bit down, you’ll see that it’s really a double! Can you see the two separate stars, very close together?”

“Yes!” Andie said, after searching for a few moments. “And they’re different colours – one’s sort of reddish, and the other one’s white.”