Indigo Blue (5 page)

The bookcase is rainbow-striped now, and loaded with paperbacks, board games and little baskets, boxes and bundles of pencils, brushes, scissors, beads, threads, wools and stacks of coloured card and paper. Misti has already produced a pasta/sequin/tinsel collage, pinned in pride of place above the leccy fire.

The doorless wardrobe is stuffed with freshly ironed clothes, the squeaky chest of drawers is scarily polka-dotted and packed with knickers, socks, tights, T-shirts.

Misti’s dolls are scattered across the carpet in a way they never were at Max’s, and it’s spaghetti for tea.

When the doorbell rings – thin and reedy and unfamiliar – we all jump. Then Mum laughs and says it’s only Jane, and I run to open the door.

Jane is Mum’s friend. They’ve known each other since we first moved here from Wales – she’s just about the only friend Max hasn’t stopped Mum from seeing. He tried, I think, but Jane is too sensible and determined to let herself be sidelined.

Jane works in an office and wears perfectly pressed suits in navy, grey or black with T-shirts or polo-neck sweaters in pale pastel shades. She wears high-heeled shoes that click when she walks and her hair is cut into a short, layered bob with expensive chestnut streaks among the mousy brown.

It’s just the turquoise and silver dangly earrings and bracelet and the small tattoo on her shoulder blade (only visible when swimming – Jane doesn’t do skimpy clothes) that betray the fact she’s not as sensible as she seems. Jane and Mum can talk for hours about dodgy music from the dim and distant past, about men, fate, reincarnation and whether feng shui, aromatherapy or meditation can save the world. Flaky. Seriously.

‘Wow,’ Jane says, stepping inside and looking around. ‘How long have you been in? Five days? What a difference!’

Mum rang Jane and told her we’d moved, the day of our mega shopping trip and the Pizza-land blowout. Jane was round an hour later with a bunch of flowers, a bottle of wine and a card that said ‘Good Luck in Your New Home’ above a picture of the roses-round-the-door cottage I’d dreamed about that last day at school, waiting for Mum and Misti.

The night after, she appeared with an Indian takeaway, a big box of jelly babies and a vast, faded pink and sky-blue carpet that she claimed she was throwing out. (We put it down in the bedroom Misti and I share.)

Now she’s coming to tea, for our official house-warming, and she’s brought chocolate cake, lemonade, more wine and a bin bag full of curtains in midnight-blue velvet that she swears were going cheap in a charity shop.

We scoff spaghetti and cake and drink too much lemonade, and talk and laugh and turn the CD player up as loud as it can go so we can dance. Misti crashes out on the brown squashy chair, cake crumbs all round her mouth, and Mum lifts her gently and carries her to bed, tucking her in with the old pink rabbit whose ears she loves to chew.

Then Mum and Jane crack open the wine and start talking grown-up stuff, so I stretch out on my beanbag with a sketchbook and a bundle of felt pens.

I draw the dream cottage with roses round the door, a mum and two little girls skipping through gardens that are filled with flowers. I draw a rainbow, a crock of gold and lots of green, rolling hills, more like the ones near Gran’s house in Wales than anything in our grimy northern town.

I draw a doodle in the corner that looks suspiciously like Max, then scrawl a big cross right through the middle to show he’s not wanted here. That makes me feel guilty, because it’s not like Max ever did anything mean to me. He could be good fun sometimes, bringing home pocketfuls of penny sweets and giving me two quid every Saturday to wash the big blue builder’s van. It looks like he’s history now, though.

I yawn and lie down for a while, and when I wake, stretching lazily and pushing felt pens across the carpet, Mum is crying quietly into her wine and Jane is handing her tissues and patting her hair.

‘He’s a loser,’ Jane says gently. ‘He’ll never change, Anna, you
know
that.’

‘I know, I know…’

‘You’re better off without him. Look at you all, you can
breathe
here – you’re not all creeping around scared to make a noise, say the wrong thing.’

‘I know,’ Mum sobs. ‘It’s just…’

Just what?’ Jane wants to know.

Mum pushes a curtain of fair hair back from her tear-stained face and smiles sadly. ‘Oh, Jane,’ she says. ‘I know you’re right, I
know
. It’s just that – well, I still love him. I can’t help it.’

Mum writes me a note to say I’ve had a bad cold and packs me off to school. I’m glad to escape the smell of paint and the wimpy electric fire and the big double bed that still smells faintly of pee. I have been dreaming of spelling tests and the nine times table and school stew for five days, but I feel oddly nervous as I mooch through the streets.

I’m not early – not early enough, anyway.

Getting lost in the graffiti-walled estate doesn’t help. I walk around for ages through rabbit-warren streets that look identical, my feet crunching on glass. A gang of small boys follow me for a while, shouting rude things about my blue fleece bobble hat, but I blank them and they melt away, bored. In the end, I emerge somewhere near the chippy, which means I’ve trudged right round in a circle. I have to skirt round the estate, instead, sulking furiously.

The bell is ringing as I slip through the gates, and long jaggedy lines of kids swarm around the doors, pushing and shoving to get inside. It’s taken me a
whole hour
to walk here, all because Hartington Drive is in the back of beyond.

I’m last through the classroom door, and Miss McDougall clocks me as I try to sneak invisibly to my seat.

‘Ah, Indigo,’ she booms, so that just about every head in the room swivels to stare. ‘Everything all right? How is your grandmother?’

‘Um, fine, I think…’

‘Do you have a note? Did you remember your topic homework?’

I give her the letter, return the emergency bus fare from last week and mumble something about dropping my topic book in a puddle, which doesn’t go down too well. Then Miss McDougall turns her attention to Shane Taggart, who makes a late but spectacular entrance on his skateboard, school bag flying out behind him. He gets a hundred lines for his trouble.

I edge along to my desk, then stop, the colour draining from my face. Aisha Patel is sitting in it, and she and Jo are so busy chatting and laughing they don’t even see me turn from white to pink to deep, dark red.

‘Had a brilliant time… your mum’s so nice… swimming club was excellent… do you think it’s too late for me to start gymnastics? My mum and your dad could take turns with the driving…’

I shuffle past and park my stuff at Aisha’s desk, because I know that if I say anything to her or Jo right now I’ll live to regret it. And Aisha Patel might
not
live to regret it.

I sit down, feeling sick and shaky. I make a big deal out of rummaging in my bag, because I’m scared that I might cry, and there’s no way I want anyone to see.

‘Hey, Indie, you’re back! How’s your gran? Is she OK?’

Why the sudden interest in Gran?

Aisha is fussing round my desk (her desk), beaming and telling me how much everyone’s missed me, how they were all so worried in case I’d gone forever.

‘What exactly are you talking about?’

Aisha says it’s OK, they all know, because Kevin Parker’s dad met Max in the Fox and Squirrel a few days back, and Max told him we’d gone down to Wales because Gran was ill.

‘He thought you’d be away quite a while,’ Aisha gushes, all sympathy and concern.

‘Well, I’m not,’ I say coldly. ‘I’m back. And, yeah, I can
see
you’ve missed me.’

Aisha looks crushed, and for a moment I feel bad, like I’ve stepped on her pet hamster or something. Then I remember. She’s the one who’s pushed me out of my seat. She’s the one who’s stealing my best friend.

‘I’ll get my stuff,’ Aisha says in a small, hurt voice, and I want to slap her for being so weak, so wimpy. If she were tough and mean and spiteful, she’d be easier to hate.

Still, I’m doing my best.

She scoops up her books and her bag and we swap seats. Jo pinches me hard as I flop down, and I giggle and swat her back and I can breathe again, because somehow, at last, everything is going to be OK.

‘So… how was Wales?’ Jo whispers later as we plough through a shedload of fractions. Miss McDougall can be really spiteful on a Monday morning.

‘Wales?’

‘You know, your gran, all that stuff. I don’t suppose you had time for postcards.’

Jo, we didn’t
go
to Wales,’ I tell her. ‘My gran’s fine. Really. That was just some line Max gave out to Kevin Parker’s dad.’

‘Why would he do that?’ Jo puzzles.

I shrug.

‘Embarrassed?’ I suggest.

‘About what?’

I look at Jo. She really hasn’t a clue what’s been happening in my life over the last few days.

‘I
told
you we were moving,’ I say, inventing some creative fraction answers for Miss McDougall to mark wrong.

‘But Kevin Parker said that Max said…’

I make a huffy noise, put down my pencil.

‘Mum’s left Max.’

Jo whistles under her breath, and I can see, at last, I’ve got her attention.

‘I didn’t think… you’ve really moved?’

‘To the mouldy basement from hell.’

Miss McDougall cruises noiselessy to a halt beside our desk and clears her throat in a talk-any-more-and-you’re-dead kind of way.

I huddle down over my fractions, scrawl in a few more imaginary answers and doodle hearts and flowers and crescent moons all down the margins.

At break, we lie in the grass at the edge of the sports field and paint our nails with purple glittery nail varnish from Jo’s stash.

‘Why did your mum leave Max?’ Jo wants to know. ‘Is he having an affair? Is she?’

‘
No!
Course not,’ I say indignantly. ‘I think… I don’t know. Max was grumpy all the time. Mum just got fed up.’

‘Fed up?’

Jo’s not convinced. She wants drama, passion, soap-opera details.

She’s not going to get them, though. I need to get my head round what’s happened. I need to get so I don’t feel scared and ashamed and confused every time I think about it.

‘They were just rowing all the time. It wasn’t working.’

‘They fell out of love…’Jo sighs.

Like I told you, she reads too many slushy magazines.

I open the silver nail varnish and blob tiny silver spots on her perfectly painted nails.

‘Yeuchh! How am I going to eat my crisps
now?’
Jo demands.

‘With great difficulty,’ I grin, tearing open the packet and feeding her a large sliver of cheese and onion.

‘Pig,’ she says. ‘I missed you.’

‘Missed you too.’

It’s not warm exactly, but we grin and stretch ourselves out in the watery April sunshine. School’s not so bad, if you don’t count the lessons bit.

‘Will we do our toenails too?’

‘OK. Silver with crisp-crumb sprinkles?’ Jo suggests.

We take off our shoes and socks.

‘Is it really the flat from hell?’ she asks, and I tell her all about 33 Hartington Drive with its hot and cold running damp, the brown lino with blue Misti-footprints all over it, the grim landlady who looks like she’s about a hundred and three.

I tell her how we cleaned the whole place from top to bottom, then decorated till every surface was bright and fresh and clean. I tell her about the bookshelf with the multi-coloured stripes, the polka-dotted drawers.

‘Sounds cool,’ Jo says. ‘Can I come over? See your new room? I’ll bring my CDs…’

‘Probably. I’ll ask my mum.’

We paint our toenails silver with big purple spots, and when the bell goes we have to limp across the playground barefoot because the varnish is still wet. Miss McDougall marches down the line, sniffs loudly when she sees our feet and confiscates the nail varnish till home time. Then she makes us put our socks and shoes back on, so we both get smudgy toes.

Later, we’re eating lunch and giggling, when I see Aisha hovering at a distance, looking at us wistfully. You can tell she’d love to come and giggle too, but she’s not sure. Not sure if she’s welcome.