One More Little Problem (2 page)

Then we step into the paradise which is Heather’s house next door.

T
he really weird thing about Heather’s house is that on the outside it is exactly the same as ours, but on the inside it’s like stepping into a different country, or even a different world.

Long polished corridors with wooden floors stretch towards a huge glass kitchen extension at the back of the house. Heather had this put in when she got a big cash bonus for being Fashion Editor of the Year. The kitchen is full of gorgeous big pieces of pottery and artfully placed green tropical plants with leaves that droop at just the right
angle from the windowsills. The floor is made from cool grey slate tiles and the ceiling is inset with tiny round spotlights that shine a pure white light down on to the granite kitchen work surfaces.

The walls in Heather’s house are all the most pristine white. Here and there is a minimalist piece of modern art showing a blaze of orange or a calm sweep of Mediterranean blue against the white. But mostly it’s all just – white.

I love the white. Most of all I love that the house is so clean.

Heather pays Tina-the-Cleaner to come in three times a week and keep her house looking the way she likes it.

If Dad wasn’t unemployed I think I’d ask Tina to come and sort our house out too, but I reckon we can’t afford it. Plus she might well get lost underneath the piles of decaying crappy furniture and old carpets. And she
smokes, and although Heather has banned her from lighting up inside, my dad would just smile and let her smoke herself to death in the living room.

In Heather’s house I don’t have to tuck my elbows into my sides or hold my breath as I walk down the hallway or up the stairs. There are no grimy smears on the oak banisters or bits of dried snot on the walls or rancid smells of food past its sell-by date.

I’d quite like to move in with Heather but she’s always going on about how she isn’t very maternal.

Shame. If I moved in with Heather there’s just the smallest chance that my little problem might get better.

Or even go away.

Dad’s not interested in Heather’s house. He splashes some water on a few house plants
even though she’s only just watered them and then slopes off home to his asparagus beds.

I rescue the drowning plants and then go into Heather’s shiny disinfected kitchen to lean back against her gleaming black Aga.

I take a deep breath of all my favourite smells: bleach, apple-scented washing-up liquid and lemony dishwasher tablets.

We don’t have those smells at home.

Hey! I could use Heather’s new laptop to surf the Internet and check my email. Dad’s computer is so ancient that it takes half an hour to download even the most basic website.

But computer keyboards are evil.

I read that they have more germs in them than an entire toilet.

Keyboards are like major
Germ Alert
AND
Dirt Alert
all at once.

I pull on a brand new pair of pink rubber
gloves from the pile kept by Heather’s cleaner, grab a new bottle of disinfectant spray and head to the office.

I roll the gloves as high up my arms as possible and then pick up Heather’s keyboard by the tips of my fingers and shake it upside down with a shudder.

A little spray of crumbs, dust and bent paperclips hits the desk.

Gross.

I sweep all the gunk into the bin and then give the computer keyboard a good scrubbing with the disinfectant before shaking it upside down again one more time just to check I’ve got every life-threatening germ out of there.

Then I settle down, log on to the net and am just about to start surfing about a bit when I notice that Heather’s stuck a little yellow post-it note on the desk next to the laptop.

‘Zelah, friend of mine’s just launched this
site,’ it says. ‘Might be fun to give it a try? Hx.’

There’s a website address so I type it into the search engine and watch while a pink website flashing big red hearts pops up on Heather’s screen.

‘Aged fourteen to sixteen? Register now for fun, friendship and flirting at
mysortaspace
, the site everyone’s talking about,’ it says.

I roll my eyes and slump back in the chair.

Yuk!

But then I think about the fact that the one boy I really like, I’ll probably never see again and then I think about the prospect of yet another evening with Dad being gloomy and I don’t know what comes over me but I click on the link and before I know it I’ve set myself up a profile on
mysortaspace.com
and registered to get a password.

My new secret dating name isn’t very imaginative. I just call myself ‘Zelah’.

And I’m not putting a photo on there.

My face is all red-raw from a mad bout of scrubbing last night and my hair has stopped being sleek and swishy and grown back into mad black fuzz since the haircut from Forest Hill.

An email flashes into my new inbox, welcoming me to the website and telling me that any interested flirty boys can now send me emails in confidence.

I sink into my chair and bury my face in my hands.

What am I doing? Even if I did meet the boy of my dreams I wouldn’t actually be able to touch him so you can imagine the fun date that we’d have, waving at one another from opposite sides of the sofa that might as well be opposite sides of the planet.

Plus boys don’t actually wash much so there’s a risk of major
Dirt Alert
AND
Germ Alert
if I ever meet up with one.

And there’s another thing. I already met the boy of my dreams three months ago.

He had olive skin and dark hair and scowling brown eyes.

Oh Sol. I miss you. Loads
.

I switch everything off and lock the office before staggering back next door for a comforting Ribena and a stale custard cream.

It’s only the second day of the summer holidays and already my little problem has flared up a bit after the madness of signing on with
mysortaspace.com
.

So I’m doing thirty-one jumps on the bottom stair just to make myself feel a bit better.

I used to do hundreds of jumps but after a lot of help I managed to cut them down to fifteen a day. At the moment I’m doing at least
thirty on the bottom step and the same on the top and then the whole thing in reverse when I come down again.

I’m just in the process of doing the final few jumps when the doorbell rings.

Damn.

Dad’s down the bottom of the garden with a big fork in his hand. I can’t answer the door until I’ve finished the ritual or else lots of bad things might happen (although you could say they already have, seeing as my mother is dead, my father is unemployed, my neighbour’s bogged off to a foreign land and my ex-best friend thinks that I am a deranged lunatic, which I probably am seeing as how I’m standing on the staircase jumping up and down in broad daylight).

I finish as fast as I can, aware that whoever is on the other side of the frosted glass front door can see my shadow leaping about.

Well, I’ll just have to pretend I was head-banging to thrash metal or something.

I finish my jumps off, tidy my frizzy black hair in the hall mirror and approach the front door.

There’s something familiar about the small slouching shadow on the other side of the glass.

Doesn’t look like the postman. He’s tall and ginger.

I pull open the door and then I nearly fall over in shock.

Tiny frame, long fair hair dipping over her tired face, dark circles underneath her huge eyes and the usual black outfit of baggy trousers, biker boots, armbands and T-shirt with the white moony face of a satanic death-metal singer staring out at me.

‘Well, aren’t you going to ask me in, OCD?’ says the small girl. ‘Jeez. I’ve come about two
hundred miles to visit you. You could look a bit more pleased.’

She pushes past me.

I stand for a moment on the front doorstep trying to pull my shattered thoughts back into order.

Then I close my gaping mouth and follow her into the house.

C
aro. The girl who made my time at Forest Hill House either a complete and utter nightmare or, sometimes, a bit of a relief. There was never much in between.

Forest Hill. The place I was sent to three months ago when my stepmother decided she couldn’t cope with my rituals any longer.

I’d heard from some of the other kids at Forest Hill House, but not Caro.

I’d kind of missed her but now she’s sitting in my kitchen with that weird look on her face – half-grumpy, half-defiant with a micro-speck of shyness hidden somewhere underneath –
I remember how much air she seems to suck up. And how many grey vibes of angst she can puff out into the atmosphere without even speaking.

Caro can change the mood of a room by just sitting down in it.

She can be very tiring.

I click the kettle on and look down the garden to where my father is spraying the leaves of a giant marrow plant with some weird mixture of milk and water that he insists gets rid of mould.

Caro follows my glance.

‘Jeez, OCD,’ she says. ‘I know you’re posh and all that, but I never knew you had a gardener.’

My back prickles with indignation and I’m about to stand up for Dad, but then I look out again and see him through a stranger’s eyes and I feel embarrassed and confused and too
tired to bother explaining. In his old brown apron and worn-down shoes with grotty gloves and a weird flat cap, he does look a bit like a sad old gardener.

‘Yeah,’ is all I say. ‘He’s good with vegetables. Coffee? Tea? Hell’s Juice?’

Caro does her small cheek-twitch smile, the one where it looks as if a baby moth has landed on her face and she’s trying half-heartedly to remove it.

‘Coffee,’ she says. ‘Black. Obviously. Is there any other colour?’

I give her a cautious smile back. She fiddles with her fingernails, the black leather wristbands on her thin arms sliding up and down.

‘How’ve you been?’ I say, spooning evil black granules into a mug. Dad drinks a lot of rubbish instant coffee. Heather is forever trying to hide the jar and force him to drink The Proper Stuff, as she calls it. She makes this
in a large shiny pot from some designer kitchen store, and serves it in giant white ceramic cups with tiny flowers on them and little caramel biscuits in nice sanitised plastic placed on the side of the saucer.

I plonk a cracked mug and half a packet of stale Bourbons next to Caro.

‘Cheers, Big Ears,’ she says, rolling up a cigarette and putting her heavy-duty black boots up on the edge of my chair.

She tips her seat back and takes a long drag from the fag, blowing smoke up into the air.

I duck. Major
Dirt Alert
!

Caro smirks.

‘Still got your funny little habits then, OCD?’ she says. ‘Saw you jumping on the stairs just now. Figured you might have cut out all that rubbish.’

‘And have you stopped cutting yourself?’ I shoot back. Caro really is winding me up.
She’s taken over the kitchen, eaten five biscuits in three seconds and is polluting the air around my head.

Caro’s smile fades a little and she tugs at her sleeves to hide her wrists.

There’s no need. The sleeves are already down to her fingertips, covering up her arms.

‘Dunno, really,’ she mutters.

Typical Caro. I mean – she must KNOW if she’s cutting herself or not. Unless she’s possessed by the spirit of Marilyn Manson while she’s doing it and enters some sort of trance. Which I doubt. Because you have to be dead to become a spirit, right? And Manson’s not dead.

I rescue the last biscuit, check it for cigarette ash and pop it into my mouth.

‘I take it that you’re still cutting, then?’ I say.

My voice sounds harsh and unfeeling. I’m ashamed. Maybe she has come an awful long
way to see me. Her angelic face is etched with tiredness and there are the usual mauve shadows underneath her eyes.

Caro breathes out a quivering smoke ring above our heads and stubs her limp cigarette on the biscuit plate.

I remove the plate with my fingertips and dump it in the sink at arm’s length.

I catch her eye.

The tension in the room hovers, evaporates, and then we’re both laughing.

Proper laughs.

‘Look at us,’ says Caro. ‘You couldn’t make us up, could you?’

I tell Caro about Heather and my dad’s unemployment and how I’ve managed to cut down some of my rituals since I last saw her.

She gives me an appraising stare.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘You look more relaxed. At Forest Hill you were always jumping up and
washing the whole time. Or thinking about washing.’

I’m just basking in the glow of this rare compliment when she does another typical Caro thing by following it with a dazzling insult.

‘You’re fatter though,’ she says.

I’m not going to let her get to me.

‘Perhaps I could say the same to you,’ I say.

We both know that Caro is about as far from fat as it’s possible to be. She’s got to be at least a Size Zero. And even then there was a girl at Forest Hill who made Caro look obese in comparison.

‘OK, OCD,’ Caro says, holding up her hands in mock-defence. ‘Chillax! I touched a nerve there!’

I sneak a look at my watch. It’s gone lunchtime and Dad will come in at any moment to make himself a limp cheese sandwich and a
can of lager, his usual I’m-unemployed-can’t-be-bothered-oh-woe-is-me sort of meal.

‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude,’ I begin, ‘and it’s great to see you, it really is. But – erm, how long are you planning on staying?’

Caro tips some worm-like shreds of tobacco out of a green pouch and starts to roll up another cigarette. It’s like she exists in a different time zone to everyone else. A zone where time doesn’t exist.

‘Might hang out here for a while,’ she says, all casual. ‘Not getting on very well with my olds. My foster olds, that is. Had a huge ruck last night and I kind of walked out on them.’

‘How did you get here from Somerset?’ I say. ‘Where did you spend the night then?’

‘Lorry,’ says Caro. ‘Hitched a ride with some old dude delivering boxes of underwear to London. Made a pillow out of knickers and kipped in the back.’