Indigo Blue (15 page)

I walk up the steps on to the gravel, shuffle round to the front of the house. No red Fiat. All the same, I carry Misti up the steps to the front door of 33 Hartington Drive, the tartan blanket trailing behind us like a dragon’s tail. I find Ian’s doorbell and lean on it.

Please be in. Please, please, please, be in. OK, so your car’s not here, but let there be a miracle, please
.

Nobody comes.

Next, I press Mrs Green’s doorbell. She’s in, I know. I can hear the loud canned laughter and phoney applause from some TV game show, the volume turned up high.

Please
.

Nothing happens.

I come down the steps, crunch across the gravel, peer in through the tiny crack of light in Mrs Green’s curtains. She’s asleep in her chair, her face falling sideways into the overstuffed chintz, the TV screaming at nobody.

I bang on the window. I scrunch my hand into a fist and hammer on the glass.

Mrs Green stirs, shifts around in the chair. A skeletal hand stretches out and knocks the TV remote to the floor. Her head lolls forward, white-haired, frail.

She’s old. She’s deaf. She can’t hear us.

We stand on the gravel drive, stranded. I scan the upstairs windows for some sign of life. Everything is dark.

‘I could ring Jane,’ I whisper to Misti. ‘She must be in by now.’

Jane,’ says Misti.

But I can’t ring Jane, because I can’t find my bag and the purse Jane gave me with the phone card, the number, the emergency cash. I can’t ring anyone.

I can’t fix the lights.

I can’t stop Misti from crying silently into my shoulder.

I don’t know what to do.

We sit on the back steps by the flat’s open door for a very long time. I watch out for a red Fiat, a blue builder’s van, a student on a bicycle from the middle flat. I wait to be rescued.

The last time I noticed the time, before the lights went out, it was past ten. It’s much later now. Mum will be home soon. She said she wouldn’t be long – she promised.

It may be early June, but it’s freezing. Misti’s hands and feet are like ice. A group of blokes walk down the street, shouting and laughing and kicking a tin can along the gutter. The pubs must be closing.

Mum won’t be long.

Misti is shivering, her whole body shaking gently in my arms. Even in the yellow light from the street lamps, her face looks pale, her lips blue. I lift her up, my own hands and feet numb now from sitting so long. I take a long, last look along the drive, then walk down the steps into the pitch-black flat.

It must be very, very late.

I close the door.

My eyes struggle to make sense of the dark, and again I’m stumbling, shuffling. I make it to the nearest armchair, the one where we toasted our toes beside the fire just hours ago. We flop down into it.

Misti burrows into my neck.

‘Bad, bad, Inky,’ she breathes softly.

I pull the tartan blanket over us, and we fall into sleep.

Someone is hammering on the door, pressing the doorbell, banging on the glass.

I pull the blanket over my head, but the noise won’t go away. It drags me out of sleep and back to reality.

Mum. She must have forgotten her key.

I haul Misti off my lap and leave her curled in the armchair, the tartan blanket around her. ‘Mum?’

I navigate blindly towards the door, towards the banging. My fingers fumble with the doorhandle, the deadlock. I pull.

‘Miss Collins?’ says a woman’s voice from the steps outside. ‘Miss Collins, this is WPC Barrie. Could we come in?’

My body is cold all over. WPC Barrie?

‘Miss Collins, is there a light?’

I stand in silence, in darkness, drifting.

‘Is there a light?’

‘No,’ I manage to say at last. ‘The powercard ran out. Nothing’s working.’

WPC Barrie says something to the man behind her, and suddenly the broad, bright beam of a flashlight reaches into the flat. It lights up the felt pens, skewed across the carpet, the flowery Doc Marten boots Misti was playing with, the abandoned blue felt hat with the curling feather. Beyond them I can see my school bag, tucked neatly out of the way under the table.

The powercard, the phonecard, the emergency cash.

‘Can we come in?’ WPC Barrie asks, but they’re in already, the flashlight sweeping across the carpet. It wakes Misti, who slides down from the chair and squints in the torchlight. In its bright beam, her face is filthy, streaked with jam and snot and tears.

WPC Barrie reaches down and lifts her up. ‘Hello, pet,’ she says. ‘Oh, Lord`she’s soaking wet. And worse. Oh,
yuk…’

She picks up the tartan blanket and tries to wrap it round Misti, but my sister is crying again now, wriggling and scratching and biting.

‘Inky!’ she shrieks. ‘
Inkeeee!’

I hold out my arms and WPC Barrie hands Misti over. She
is
soaking. She stinks.

‘Miss Collins.’ The policewoman puts a hand on my arm. She clears her throat. ‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident. We have your mum down at the hospital. Now, she’s OK, she’s going to be
fine,
but she’s very worried about you two. We’re here to check…’

I press my face into Misti’s hair, sticky with jam. I smell sugar, talc, the hot, sour reek of a full nappy, except there’s no nappy there. I close my eyes tight shut and hug my baby sister.

The world spins and turns and we’re alone in the dark.

‘Indigo?’ The policewoman puts an arm round my shoulders. ‘Did you hear me? Is there anyone we can contact, anyone who can look after you?’

‘Mum,’ I whisper. ‘I want my mum.’

WPC Barrie shakes her head. ‘You can see your mum in the morning. She’ll be well enough to see you then,’ she says. ‘Right now, though, we need to find a safe place for you two to stay overnight. Are there any relatives, friends, neighbours…?’

‘
NO-OOO…’

It can’t be me screaming. I know I can’t make such a loud noise. I wouldn’t dare. I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance, cause any trouble. So why are they staring at me like that? Why is Misti roaring and struggling and beating her fists against me?

White faces, dark peaked caps, strangers in the middle of our dark, musty flat.

‘We’re going to need Social Services,’ the policeman says. ‘Two hysterical kids, home alone, in a smelly, damp flat with no heat, no light. Look at the
state
of them.’

‘Dave, give them a chance,’ says the policewoman. ‘They’re bound to be distressed, aren’t they? And there must be
someone
. Someone they can call.’

She keeps her arm round my shoulders, a hand stroking my hair. She whispers something soft and kind as she holds me, and slowly the panic subsides, the jagged pain dulls.

I’m still, now. I crouch, curled round Misti, trying to steady my breath, gather my thoughts.

‘Indigo,’ says the policewoman again. ‘Is there anyone we can ring? Someone to look after you for a while? We can’t leave you here alone.’

‘I need to see my mum,’ I say. ‘I need to see her
now.’

‘That’s not really possible,’ the policewoman says. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘I need to see my mum,’ I plead. ‘Please. I have to. I
have
to see her.’

The two strangers exchange glances.

‘We can see if that’s possible,’ WPC Barrie says at last. ‘We can try. But first, we need a responsible adult, someone to look after you for a day or so.’

We stand on the front doorstep of 33 Hartington Drive while the policeman pushes the bell for Ian’s flat. No reply. There’s no red Fiat, no Ian.

‘Mrs Green?’ I suggest, and they try her doorbell too. They rap on the glass. Her flat is dark now, and silent as the grave. I imagine her asleep, earplugs in to dull the sound of student parties overhead. Or lying awake, terrified to answer the door because it’s the middle of the night.

‘She’s a bit deaf,’ I explain. ‘She’s eighty-something.’

‘That’s no good,’ says WPC Barrie. ‘Anyone else?’

‘Not really,’ I say, but they try the bell for the student flat anyway. After a long wait, one of the balcony windows above creaks open and a grey, swaying figure appears. It says something very rude.

‘Can you open up?’ shouts WPC Barrie.

‘What?’ slurs the grey figure. ‘What d’you want? We haven’t done nothing, honest.’

An empty beer can clatters down from above, rattling across the gravel at our feet.

‘Not a chance,’ says the policeman. ‘Hopeless.’

‘Ring Jane,’ I say. We dash back down to the flat and I grab my school bag, pulling out Jane’s number. They call from the police car.

‘Answerphone,’ he says. ‘I’ll leave a message, but…’

We sit in the squad car and drive towards the hospital. WPC Barrie holds my hand in the dark. Misti, cocooned in soggy tartan, sleeps in my lap.

‘Anyone else?’ she asks me gently. ‘Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins? Anyone we can call?’

‘Gran lives in Wales,’ I say.

‘Do you know her phone number?’ WPC Barrie asks.

I shake my head.

I pull my hand free of her grasp and reach down into my school bag. Phonecard, powercard, pound coins. My Victorian-project folder. Spelling jotter. Pencil case. Empty crisp packet.

At the bottom, dog-eared and creased, there’s a fat, grubby envelope addressed to Gran. I never got around to buying a stamp. I hand the letter over.

‘OK,’ says WPC Barrie. ‘Well done, Indigo. Well done.’

My mum is lying in a hospital bed, a tall bed made of shiny metal tubes and covered with a pale-blue waffle coverlet. She is wearing a white, short-sleeved nightie that ties behind her neck and looks like someone made it in a hurry from old sheets and white shoelaces.

She is propped up on huge white pillows, and she’s smiling at me, but I can’t smile back.

My face is frozen.

‘Indie, love, iss OK…’ she says, but her lips are swollen and black and held together with tiny slivers of white tape. The words come out all distorted.

My mum has plastic tubes stuck into her arm above her bandaged hand, bandages around her face, her chest, her body. There’s a wad of white cotton taped over her left eye to hide the swelling and the stitches and the shiny, purple bruises. She has seven broken ribs, the nurse tells WPC Barrie, and a fractured jaw, and her left hand is crushed and badly bruised. Her fingers, purple, swollen sausages, flex slightly on the coverlet, the pale-blue sparkly nail varnish still perfect, unchipped.

I try to put my arms round her, but there’s nowhere I can touch that doesn’t hurt. A perfect tear rolls down her swollen cheek.

‘Sorry, pet,’ she whispers. ‘I’m sorry.’

Then her eyes flicker shut and she turns her head away.

‘Let her sleep,’ WPC Barrie says. ‘It’s the best thing. Everything will look brighter in the morning.’

But it
is
the morning, four in the morning. The nurse finishes checking Mum’s dressings, fiddles with the drip and switches off the light.

WPC Barrie shepherds me out into the hushed ward corridor. We walk noiselessly past the nurses’ station, past the open doors to dimly lit rooms. We push through the heavy, swishing double doors and into the brightly lit foyer.

‘What kind of an accident was it?’ I ask WPC Barrie. ‘Were they in the van? Was it a crash?’

Sitting on the sofa by the lift is a plump social worker called Lou. She cradles Misti in her lap, a tiny fair-haired refugee child wrapped in a tartan blanket. Lou smiles and nods as we approach.

She’s
our
social worker now.

We never had one before.

‘What happened?’ I ask WPC Barrie again. ‘Is Max OK? Is he hurt?’

She turns to look at me.

‘Max Kelly isn’t hurt, no,’ she tells me gently. ‘He’s safe and well, locked in a police cell, down at the station.
He’s
the person who did this to your mum, Indigo. It wasn’t an accident. It was assault. If your mum will only press charges, he’ll go to prison for it too.’

‘Oh,’ I say.

Misti sucks her fluffy rabbit and sleeps. Lou looks at me with sad, sympathetic eyes. WPC Barrie shrugs her shoulders, puts a hand on my sleeve.

I take a deep breath in.