Looking for JJ (13 page)

Jennifer nodded. There was a bright side. They were friends again.

 

 

 

Mr Cottis, the new photographer, first came to the house at the end of the Easter holidays. He drove up in a black van. It looked brand new, as if it had just been driven out of a showroom. He got out and stood looking at the houses. He was tall and thin and was wearing tight jeans and a black jumper with no coat. He had a completely bald head and glasses that seemed to go darker as he stood there.

Jennifer and Michelle were hanging around, bored with their holiday pastimes. Michelle walked straight up to him.

“Are you looking for Carol Jones, the model?” she said.

He nodded, his face breaking into a smile.

“She lives there,” Michelle said, pointing. “This is her daughter. She’s my best friend.”

“Thank you very much, young lady,” he said and did an old-fashioned bow.

“Come on,” Jennifer said, embarrassed at having been pointed out to a complete stranger.

The small park near the shops was empty except for Lucy Bussell’s brothers. They were in the play area. The older one, Stevie, was leaning back against the climbing frame, the younger one, Joe, was messing around with a football. They were both wearing the bottle-green trousers and camouflage jackets that they had on most of the time. Stevie had a distant expression on his face and Jennifer was immediately reminded of his sister, Lucy.

They’d not seen much of her in the previous weeks. She’d been unwell, off school. In the holidays she’d been indoors a lot. Michelle had even knocked for her a couple of times but she’d not come out, saying that she was looking after her mum. Jennifer had been relieved. It meant that she and Michelle could be on their own.

Joe was zig-zagging around the play area. His body was taut, trying to keep the ball up in the air, bouncing it off one foot. His limbs were moving like clockwork and his face was heavy with concentration. Stevie was completely still, only his hand moving back and forth with a cigarette.

They could have walked away, ignored them, headed off to the other end of the park and sat on one of the benches. Michelle had different ideas though.

“You’re not supposed to be here. It’s for under twelves. See the notice,” she said, pointing at a faded noticeboard behind the swings.

Stevie didn’t respond. He didn’t even acknowledge that she’d spoken. He stayed in exactly the same position, his legs splayed, blowing little rings of smoke into the air. Joe gave his ball a fierce kick and it hit the fence with a thud.

“You’re not supposed to be smoking here!” Michelle continued, her voice louder.

Stevie’s eyes flicked in their direction. They settled on Jennifer.

“You tell him,” Michelle said, drawing Jennifer in. “You tell him, he’s breaking the law!”

Jennifer frowned. Couldn’t Michelle just leave her out of it? Stevie’s gaze had stayed on her and it was making her feel uncomfortable.

“Let’s go,” she said, in a half-whisper.

“Why should we? This park’s for us, not them!”

A smile broke out on Stevie’s face and he flicked the rest of his cigarette in their direction. Michelle stood with her arms crossed as the dog end flew past her and dropped a few centimetres from Jennifer.

“That’s it, start a fire!”

“Get lost, you brats,” Joe said, walking towards them, bouncing the football off his knees, first one then the other.

“I’m going!” Jennifer said, fed up with the row.

“How’s your mum?” Stevie suddenly said.

Joe dropped the ball and it rolled towards her. She picked it up, looking quizzically at Stevie.

“What?” she said.

Joe snatched the ball from her hands and turned away.

“How’s your mum?” Stevie repeated, his mouth open.

She stared at him, waiting for some sort of insult, when he put his tongue out and started to lick his lips.

“Gross,” Michelle said. “I’m telling my mum about this. The police could prosecute you. You wait.”

The football whizzed past her head and hit the noticeboard. Jennifer took Michelle’s arm and pulled her away, out of the park.

“They’re not worth it,” she said.

Walking towards her house she saw the photographer, Mr Cottis, coming out of her gate. He looked momentarily surprised to see them and edged past with a big shoulder bag and a small case on wheels. He looked like someone going on holiday. The girls stood back until he got his stuff out on to the path.

“Are you finished?” Michelle asked unnecessarily.

He hardly answered, just nodded his head and cleared his throat and got into his van. They watched as the shiny black van did an awkward three-point turn and then stuttered a bit before it drove off up the road.

“I wonder what the photos will be like!” Michelle said, her voice full of wonder, the upset of moments before gone.

“Let’s go and see,” Jennifer said, the tension draining out of her.

Finding the living room empty, looking unused, she led Michelle into the kitchen.

“Mum’s probably getting changed,” she said. “You stay here and I’ll go and see.”

She ran up the stairs and without thinking pushed open her mum’s bedroom door. The room was in darkness so she clicked on the light. She expected to find the room empty and had half turned to go to the bathroom. But her mum was there, lying on the bed on her side, her knees drawn up. Her eyes were closed but she wasn’t asleep, Jennifer could tell because she was holding her hand up to shield herself from the sudden light. Jennifer clicked the light off and went across to the curtains pulling them back.

“I didn’t know you were in here!” she said. “I thought you’d gone for a bath!”

Her mum was wearing a short skirt and a white blouse and tie. Like a schoolgirl. She had short white socks on as well, the kind that Jennifer wore herself.

“Has the photographer finished?” she said, unnecessarily.

The room was a mess. A chest of drawers had been moved and on top of it there was a globe, just like the one they had in school. There were books and papers strewn across the bed, as if someone had been doing homework. There was a chair in the middle of the floor that had been brought up from the kitchen and it was making everything look untidy. She took hold of it and pulled it to the side.

Then she noticed the money. Three pink notes. Fifty-pound notes.

“You got paid!” she said, uncertainly.

Her mum nodded.

“When will you get the photographs?” she said, uneasily, sensing something not right.

Her mum sat up, stretching her long legs out.

“Why are you dressed like that?” Jennifer said, edging the door shut behind her, afraid that somehow, without warning, Michelle might appear at her shoulder.

“That’s what you do in modelling,” her mum said. “You dress up in other people’s clothes.”

“Will it be in a magazine?”

“Not this time, love. Now, I think I will have a bath,” she said and walked past Jennifer, into the hallway.

Jennifer came slowly downstairs, each foot pausing a second before continuing. She was not sure what she was going to say to Michelle about the photographer, not sure why she felt so gloomy.

“You’ll have to go,” she said, walking into the kitchen. “My mum’s got a headache. It’s the bright lights they use. It gives her a migraine.”

Michelle looked miffed. She took her key fobs out and rattled them indignantly.

“I’ll call for you later,” Jennifer said.

Michelle didn’t answer and the front door closed smartly behind her. Jennifer stood uncertainly at the bottom of the stairs. She expected to hear the water running from the bathroom but there was no sound.

The house was silent. As though no one was home.

 

 

 

The ambulance came in the middle of the night.

Jennifer was woken up by the sound of voices from out in the lane and lights shining through the window. She got up and looked out, craning to see what was going on. The ambulance was untidily parked and its back doors were wide open, throwing a shaft of light on to the lane. Two paramedics were wheeling a chair carefully down the garden path of Lucy’s house. They were going slowly, one of them tucking a cover round someone. Mrs Livingstone was there in a dressing gown but there was no sign of Michelle or Lucy or even the two boys. When the chair turned out of the gate she saw that it was Mrs Bussell who was tucked up, only her small head visible above the blankets.

Jennifer moved away from her window and into the hallway, standing at the door of her mum’s room. She opened it slightly and could hear soft snores coming from her mum’s bed. Her mum had been at work all day on a photo shoot, so she decided not to wake her. She put her slippers and dressing gown on and went downstairs. Opening the front door she felt the air, crisp and cold, making her skin tingle. The ambulance doors banged shut and it moved slowly away. Then she saw her neighbour pulling Lucy by the hand, towards her own house, talking slowly, her voice soft and soothing.

“What’s happened?” Jennifer said.

Mrs Livingstone guided Lucy into her path and sounded mildly cross.

“You should be in bed, Jennifer.”

“Is Mrs Bussell ill?”

“Yes, but she’ll be all right. Is your mum up?” Mrs Livingstone said, getting a bunch of keys out of her dressing gown pocket.

“Yes,” Jennifer said, lying. “She’s in the bathroom.”

Jennifer looked at Lucy’s worried face as Mrs Livingstone fed her into the door. She turned towards Jennifer and spoke in a whisper.

“Tell her that poor Mrs Bussell has had a heart attack. The boys have gone with her to hospital. I’m looking after Lucy. Now, go back to bed. No point in everyone losing sleep.”

The front door shut quietly and Jennifer backed into her own house. Going up the stairs she could hear her mum turning over on her bed, coughing lightly. It was better for Mrs Livingstone not to know that her mum had slept through the ambulance. It made it seem as though she didn’t care when really she was just too tired to wake up.

Once in her room she found herself over by the window again, looking out. The lane was empty. It was four o’clock and it was ages till she had to get up for school. She lay down for a moment but couldn’t rest, couldn’t even shut her eyes. In spite of the seriousness of it all she felt strangely invigorated by the situation. She put her bedside light on and sat cross-legged on top of her quilt, not even feeling the cold.

Mrs Bussell was ill. What was going to happen to Lucy?

 

Michelle told her the following morning.

“She has to stay with us! In my bedroom. Mum’s already got the camp bed out and cleared away a load of my things so that she can fit it in!”

“Will her mum be OK?” Jennifer said.

“Yes. I mean she’s ill and all but she’ll get better. Trouble is she’ll have to go into a nursing home for a couple of weeks so that means I’ll have Mouse in my bedroom.”

“Don’t call her that,” Jennifer said.

“You don’t have to put up with her. She’s got my pink duvet cover and Mum says she can borrow some of my clothes if she wants. Mum thinks it’s fine, she says it’s only for a couple of weeks, and that we have to be kind to her now that both her parents are out of the way. Otherwise she’d have to stay with her brothers.”

“That’d be awful,” Jennifer said.

“Maybe. But I don’t see why she has to stay with
us
! Her brothers are going to stay in the house. Mum says
they
can look after themselves. I don’t see why they can’t look after Lucy. She’s their sister after all, she’s not mine!”

“It’s not so bad,” Jennifer said. “It’ll only be for a couple of weeks.”

“That’s easy for you to say. She’s not hanging round your bedroom the whole time.”

 

For the next week Michelle was in a constant bad mood and it was all Jennifer could do not to fall out with her. She moaned all the time about Lucy’s clothes all over her bedroom, Lucy using her hairbrush, Lucy talking in her sleep.

“Even worse, my mum wants us to have a picnic for Lucy’s birthday!”

“That might be nice,” Jennifer said.

“But why should she? Lucy’s not her
daughter
. That’s up to her mum and dad!”

“But her mum’s ill. . .”

“And her dad’s gone. Exactly!”

Michelle gave a single clap of her hands as if she’d just proved something. Jennifer didn’t know what to say.

“Can I come round your house? After school?” Michelle said.

“I don’t know. My mum might be working. Mr Cottis might be coming round.”

“Does he come round every day?”

“Not every day.”

Mr Cottis came twice a week, maybe three times.

“I’ll call for you later,” Jennifer said. “We could go to the park.”

“We’ll have to take Lucy.”

“That’s OK!” Jennifer shrugged.

Turning into Water Lane she saw his van parked outside her house. Michelle made grumbling sounds but peeled off into her own house and Jennifer opened her front door and went in. Mr Cottis’s bag and suitcase on wheels were lined up in the hallway as usual, making it hard for her to get past. The kitchen door was open and she could hear him and her mum talking.

“Say hello to Mr Cottis,” her mum said, pouring her a cold drink from the fridge.

“Hello,” she said, smiling and looking at another man who was seated at the table dipping a biscuit into a hot drink.

“This is Mr Smith,” her mum said, gesturing at the other man.

Jennifer smiled at both of them and walked out of the kitchen with her drink in her hand. She headed straight upstairs to get out of the way for a while. She didn’t like Mr Cottis. He was too thin, his shoulders poking through the jumpers he wore. She’d never seen him sitting down, only leaning against something, stiff like a ladder. His glasses were disconcerting. One minute they were dark like sunglasses and the next they were ordinary and she could see his tiny blue eyes staring at her. She didn’t feel relaxed when he was there. She hadn’t seen Mr Smith before and only noticed his thin spiky hair and his pierced ear, a tiny hoop with a cross hanging on it.

It was her mum’s job, though, and she had to get used to the visitors. Mr Cottis, her mum said, was acting as a kind of
agent
to get her work. Some of it was in outside locations and occasionally there had to be some home shoots. Hiring a studio was expensive, she said, and with modern technology really high quality pictures could be obtained in ordinary surroundings.

There was a good side to it. There was a lot of money in the house. Her mum kept a pile of notes in a box in the wardrobe. There was to be no bank account, she said, because she didn’t want the tax people to know how much she earned. It had meant new clothes, a settee, lots of pocket money with which Jennifer had bought teenage magazines and a bright pink cassette player that worked with batteries. Her mum was feeling generous. In the future it would pay for a holiday, maybe even a car in the long run. Why not?

There was a bad side. In previous weeks Mr Cottis had found a lot of work for her mum. Almost every day she’d been up early and out on a shoot of some sort. On the days when she was at home Mr Cottis came round. It meant that she was rushed and a bit forgetful. The shopping had run low and she had given Jennifer a fifty-pound note to go down to the Co-op and get what they needed. The washing had piled up and she’d had to take it to the launderette. Her mum explained.
You have to take the work when it comes, Jen. You know how long it took me to get back into modelling!

However fed up she got, she had to admit that it was better than the times when her mum was lying around not doing anything, miserable, with one headache after another.

“You could always go to Gran’s for the next few weeks. She hasn’t seen you for a while. You could just visit, until I get this work over and done with.”

“No, no, I don’t want to go to Gran’s!”

She had no intention of going to Gran’s. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her; over the years she had got used to her gran’s way of life, to the new dog that sat on Nelson’s chair, to the tobacco smoke and the sound of the sewing machine thundering away in the back room. It was just that visits to Gran’s were dangerous. They often started with a day or two and ended up as a couple of weeks, or maybe longer. No, she had a school and friends and her own house, and she and her mum were together. She might not see much of her, but she’d still rather be there, sleeping under the same roof. If it meant waking up in the middle of the night and standing for a moment to hear her moving around in bed she’d put up with doing everything else – making do, enduring Mr Cottis and his long thin fingers and bony knuckles, his bag and suitcase on wheels blocking up the hallway. It wasn’t the kind of life she’d thought they would have when they moved into Water Lane, but it was better than living with her gran.

She heard a soft knock on her door.

“Jen, are you going out to play?”

She opened the door. Her mum was on the landing beside Mr Cottis and his bags. Behind him, pausing on the top stair, was Mr Smith, his earring glinting under the light.

“I don’t
play
, Mum! I’m too old for that!”

“I know, love. Are you going out with Michelle? Here’s some money for fish and chips if you like.”

She held out a ten-pound note.

“OK,” Jennifer said.

“Only we’re going to set up a few shots in my room and tea might be a bit late. Anyway, you’d get bored if you hang around here. We’ll be about an hour or so.”

“All right.”

Her mum had asked her to go out before so she didn’t mind. She changed out of school uniform and into some new jeans and a top that had been bought the previous weekend. She tucked the ten-pound note into her back pocket and went out, grabbing her sweatshirt. From inside her mum’s room she heard things being moved around. They were probably setting up the camera and the equipment; big lights that flooded the room making it look like a film set, her mum said. It was the lights that made models look so beautiful. It was the lights that were going to put her on the front cover of a magazine.

Jennifer called for Michelle who came out immediately, closing her front door quietly as if she was escaping from somewhere.

“My mum’s friend’s giving Lucy a haircut, so we can be on our own. We could listen to some music, read some mags.”

Michelle had taken to calling magazines
mags
. She had also begun to make fun of all the games they had played in the past calling them
kids’ stuff
. Since Lucy had moved in Jennifer had noticed Michelle trying to be more grown up, using swearwords more often and talking about periods and tampons and problem pages and even boyfriends. She had even insisted that they have new nicknames. She was to be
Ginger
, after a pop star, and Jennifer was to be
JJ
. Lucy wasn’t to have one, Michelle said. She was only a visitor. It meant that Lucy often didn’t know what they were talking about and couldn’t join in.

“I’ll have to go back for the cassette player.”

“Be quick. We can get away before Lucy’s finished and then my mum won’t tell me off.”

Jennifer ran back into her house. The furniture moving had stopped and there was just a low mumble of voices from the room next door. She picked up the cassette player and gathered up the tapes, and was about to go out of her room when she heard a strange sound from next door. A yelp. As if someone was in pain. She listened again, her body tense, and she heard it a second time. It was her mum’s voice. She dropped her cassettes and went out on to the landing and knocked loudly on her mum’s door.

“Mum, are you all right?” she shouted.