Dustbin Baby (11 page)

She watched over me at nights too when she and Venetia and Rayanne smuggled me out after midnight. Not
every
night, only the times Billy or Lulu were in charge. They were both heavy sleepers and never stirred. Then Gina and her gang crept out – and a lot of the boys did too, though we never got involved with them. Gina got us girls organized into a highly efficient burgling team. I was Gina's key ingredient when it came to breaking and entering because I was so small.

Most people left their little bathroom windows open. Gina hoisted me halfway up every handy drainpipe and I clambered the rest of the way and then hooked my arm right through the window up to my shoulder, tucked my head right in tight, wriggled through up to my waist, tried to get my hands on the bathroom windowsill and then tumbled down, one leg after the other, to land in the washbasin.

I thought I was stuck for ever the first time, head in the stranger's bathroom, bottom and legs poking out into blank air behind me. I snivelled, teeth clamped in my bottom lip so I wouldn't make a sound, and then gave one last desperate wriggle and landed head first, my head catching
such
a clunk from the cold tap that I nearly knocked myself out.

I got a lot better at burgling but I always hated it. Sometimes I wet my knickers or worse during those night-thieving sessions I was so scared of getting caught. I had to creep out of strange bathrooms in the pitch dark, find my way across the landing, holding my breath at each creak of the floorboards, listening for a lull in the snores behind the bedroom doors, looking over my shoulder constantly in case someone was creeping after me, ready to catch me and hand me over to the police.

I had to scamper down the stairs and then find out the way to open the back door for Gina – and Rayanne and Venetia too if they were all along for the laugh. They really
did
seem to find it fun. I hated every second even when everything went like clockwork – and often it
didn't
. One time I couldn't work out all the bolts and locks on the back door and twiddled and tugged for ages while Gina whispered impatiently from the garden. And then I heard the thump of someone's feet on the floor above my head and then the clomp, clomp of slippers coming down the stairs. I gestured frantically at Gina through the kitchen window. She pointed towards the front door – but the steps were nearly down in the hall by now and they'd catch me. I shook my head at Gina and she suddenly bobbed out of sight.

I thought she'd abandoned me and started crying but then she bobbed back, her shoe in her
hand
. She smashed the window, stuck her arm through, grabbed me and pulled. By the time the man reached the broken window we were right over the garden fence. I had glass in my hair and my hands were bleeding after all the tugging but at least we'd escaped. This time. It was so hard knowing there was going to be a next time – and a next and a next.

It wasn't just the fear of being caught. It was the terror of knowing I was going straight to Hell for being a thief. Mummy had taught me it was wrong to steal so much as a dropped grape in Marks and Spencer's food hall. When she'd caught me chewing she'd told me off so sorrowfully I wouldn't go to bed that night in case I was sucked straight to Hell in my sleep. I was April the Awful Grape-Stealer and I'd have to be good for the rest of my life to make up.

But I had very nearly murdered Pearl and so I was shut up with all these bad girls – and now I was bad too.

I suppose I didn't have much choice. You certainly couldn't argue with Gina. You didn't tell on her either. Not that there was really anyone to tell. The staff at the Children's Home kept changing. One woman arrived and immediately got into an argument with Venetia. Venetia slapped her and she slapped Venetia straight back so she had to leave an hour after she'd arrived, which was a quick turnover even for our Children's Home.

Billy had been there the longest but he was frightened of Gina and her gang. He was frightened
of
almost everyone. Even me. I learnt to look at him really hard, widening my eyes so that they nearly popped. It seriously unnerved him. He'd read my notes. Perhaps he thought I was selecting him as my next victim.

Lulu was kind in a soppy sort of way but she never really listened. She nodded and looked in your direction but she was only ever thinking about her boyfriend Bob, a big lollopy guy who came and watched television with her when she was working nights. They wore matching T-shirts. Lulu's said
I LOVE BOB
and Bob's said
I LOVE LULU
. Even when he wasn't around Lulu was still tuned into him, as if she were wearing invisible headphones.

So I kept quiet. I kept quiet at my new school too. I was tired of trying to make new friends so I kept to myself and hid in the toilets at playtime. I didn't say a word during lessons. It was more peaceful if everyone thought you were too thick to know any of the answers. I
felt
thick anyway, my brain in a fog, because I never had enough sleep. It was easy for Gina and Venetia and Rayanne because they went to secondary school by themselves so they could all bunk off but I was driven down to the primary school in the Children's Home mini-bus. It had a big sun painted on both sides and the words
SUNNYBANK CHILDREN'S HOME
but someone had spray-painted the S into an F and added
FOR TOTAL NUTTERS
. I felt as if I'd been spray-painted with the same scarlet paint.

I was sent once a week to a strange lady with a lot of toys in her office. I thought she was a special teacher and I was having extra-easy lessons but now I see she was probably some kind of psychiatrist. They needed to find out if I was really bad – or mad, a nutter just as my schoolmates suspected.

I couldn't decide which was worse. I knew I was bad. I was still haunted by Pearl and every time she came near me in my dreams I'd give her another push. Now I was a thief too, up all hours with Gina night after night. The neighbourhood was fuming at all the break-ins. The police had visited the Children's Home making general inquiries. I nearly wet myself when I saw the men in uniform but Gina stayed calm, answering every question with off-hand grunts and shrugs. Venetia and Rayanne were equally nonchalant.

The boys all tried to be too smart, getting aggressive and alleging harassment. Gina grinned slyly, knowing they were the prime suspects.

Nobody thought about me. I wasn't even interviewed.

I didn't breathe a word about any of this during my therapy sessions. I played obediently with the weird dolls in the lady's office, handling them gingerly because they all had very rude-looking realistic bottoms. I rearranged the dolls' house, and put the mummy doll in the bath. I shut the daddy doll in the wardrobe. I twiddled the baby doll in my fingers. I couldn't find a toy dustbin.

I drew a dustbin with the lady's felt-tip pens but she started watching me and I got worried. I turned the dustbin into a big vase and drew flowers all different colours. Red and yellow and blue and purple. Then I cried but the lady didn't know why.

Gina saw I'd been crying when I got back to the Children's Home. I told her about Daffodil, Rose, Violet and Bluebell and how I still missed them. She thought I was daft carrying on about paper dolls that weren't worth a penny. I just hung my head, snivelling.

‘Cheer
up
, April,' she said.

I tried but without much success.

‘
I'll
cheer you up. You wait and see,' said Gina.

She went round the shops on Saturday without me. She came back with a clutch of Barbie dolls and thrust them into my hands.

‘There you are!
Real
dolls,' Gina said triumphantly. ‘Much better than scrappy old paper dolls, eh?'

I fingered their pointy fingers and pointy breasts and pointy feet. I still secretly mourned my flower girls but the Barbie dolls were wonderfully glamorous. I couldn't play with them openly because Billy or Lulu would have wondered where on earth I'd got them from, but I had fantastic secret games with them in the wardrobe, the door just a little open to let in a chink of light. I pretended it was our house and Barbie-Ann and Barbie-Beth and Barbie-Chris and Barbie-Denise and I lived there together and
styled
each other's hair and swopped clothes and shared secrets.

Gina crawled into the wardrobe with me sometimes and played too. It was a bit of a squash because Gina was so big. She was impatient too, tugging the tiny outfits too hard and tearing seams but I couldn't very well shut her out.

One time one of the other girls got in; not Venetia or Rayanne, a sad, older girl called Claire with long straggly hair who wasn't friends with anyone. No-one seemed to bother to speak to her. She can't have been that old because she went to the Juniors too though she looked like a teenager. She acted it too, hanging round the big boys and letting them do whatever they wanted.

Claire tried to make friends with me but Gina objected fiercely so that wasn't possible. She still crept into my room every now and then and once caught me playing with the Barbie dolls. She gazed at me beseechingly but I didn't dare invite her to join in my game in case Gina caught us.

The next day the Barbie dolls went missing. They weren't in their shoe-box bed at the back of the wardrobe. They hadn't crawled into the rubbery hidey-holes of my trainers or Wellington boots though I tipped them up to check. They hadn't hiked across the carpet on their tippy-toes to sneak a peak in my knicker drawer or play tents in my T-shirts. They weren't peeping out of my dressing-gown pocket or doubled up in my pencil case. They weren't anywhere at all though I searched and searched and searched.

I knew Gina was going to go mad. She didn't go mad at me. She went mad at Claire, deciding she was to blame, even though I hadn't breathed a word that she'd seen the Barbies. She swore she didn't know what Gina was on about, keeping to her story even when Gina seized a hank of her stringy hair and pulled hard. I believed her and begged Gina to stop, but no-one could stop Gina once she'd started. She slammed the poor girl against the wall and started searching through her bedroom, tearing it apart, ripping half her stuff. I started howling and Gina misunderstood.

‘Don't you fret so, April. I'll get your Barbies back for you,' she said.

She flapped the duvet in the air, tossed the pillows around and then seized the mattress. Claire squealed and Gina jerked it upwards triumphantly. There were the Barbies entombed underneath, each wrapped in a white paper tissue like a shroud.

‘I
knew
you had them, you dirty little thief,' spat Gina. ‘Well, you'll be sorry now.'

Claire ended up very, very sorry, though I begged Gina to stop.

Gina was a thief too, of course. She'd probably stolen the Barbie dolls herself. But that was different. She'd stolen them for me. That sort of stealing didn't seem so bad when I was Sunnybank. It was the way you got things, the way you got your own back.

It makes me feel bad now. I don't want to think about it. So why am I getting on the wrong train
at
the station? Why am I going back to Sunnybank? Gina won't be there now. She'll be twenty-one, twenty-two. I can't imagine her grown-up. I wonder what she's doing now? Maybe she's locked up.

13

IT'S TAKEN ME
a while to find it. I was starting to think I'd maybe made it all up. But here it is. Here's the gate with the sun's rays. I run my finger up and down them as I stare in at the white house with the yellow door. I don't feel anything. It's as if I'm acting in a film. This is just a wooden gate. Sunnybank is simply a big house. Maybe it's not even a Children's Home now.

Who am I kidding? There are toys littering the stubbly grass and bikes and skateboards are all over the porch. A battered mini-bus is parked in the driveway. I wonder if Billy still drives it?

I don't want to see him, or Lulu, even if they're still around. The only one I'd love to see is Gina.

I cried and cried when I had to leave Sunnybank. We got caught, Gina and me. Lulu
and
Billy were waiting up for us when we crept back into the house at dawn after a night's burgling. It was Claire. She told them. There was no way we could lie our way out of it. Gina had a stack of CDs tucked down her jacket and three hundred pounds and a handkerchief full of gold jewellery in her pockets.

So I got sent away to a special school. I don't know why they didn't send Gina away. Maybe she was too old or they felt she was too set in her ways. This new school was supposed to be giving me a new chance.

I didn't want to go but no-one listened to me. That's the scariest thing of all about being in care. You don't get to choose. You just get shoved here, sent away there.

I felt I was being chucked out of Sunnybank because they'd got sick of me. I wasn't supposed to have anything to do with Gina that last week. There certainly weren't any more midnight jaunts. There was a new padlock and an alarm system put on the front door, the back door, even the windows. Lulu had a new regime too, getting up in the small hours to check we were all safely in our beds.