Zelah Green (12 page)

Caro’s room is like that of most teenage girls. CDs lying around in piles, dressing table covered in brushes, bottles and make-up, clothes draped over the bed and packets of tobacco with their lids open, spilling out what looks like dried brown worms.

She’s taking ages to come back with the spray.

I get up and wander about. I don’t know what makes me crouch down and look under the bed, but I do. I lift the duvet up and peer underneath.

There’s a brown box.

I listen for a moment to see if I can hear Caro trudging back upstairs and then I slide the box out and lift the lid.

Inside is Caro’s sketchpad.

It’s large, with a blue cover. With one ear on the door I wrap a tissue around my hand and flip open the pad to a random page.

My eyes nearly pop out of my head.

The picture is drawn entirely in red. There’s a girl with long hair in a dress crouching down at the foot of a bed, tears streaming out of her eyes and her hands clasped together as if in prayer. On top of the bed stands a man beating his chest like an ape. Caro’s drawn him in the style of a cartoon so his top half is inflated to giant size and his tiny legs can hardly support him.

Underneath in angry, spiky letters, Caro has given her picture a title.

Our Father, Not in Heaven
.

I’m still reeling with shock when I hear Caro coming back upstairs. I shove the pad back in the box and push the whole thing under the bed, fling myself into the chair and pretend to be studying my nails.

Caro’s got a white bottle of sticky gunk. She squirts it into her palms and works it through my head, ignoring my squeals of protest.

‘It’s CLEAN,’ she says. ‘Honestly, OCD. You drive me demented.’

She picks up a hand mirror and holds it right in front of my face.

I shriek with delight and shock.

Zelah Green the pudding-faced teenager with frizzy black hair has left the building.

A new Zelah blinks back at me. This one has an oval-shaped face with a friendly smile. Her hair is sleek and glossy and just brushes the tops of her shoulders before falling into gentle layers
around her face.

I shake my head from side to side, unable to take my eyes off the gorgeous vision in the mirror.

Caro is trying to look disinterested, but a smirk of satisfaction hovers on her lips for a moment.

‘See?’ she says. ‘I’m not all bad.’

I think of the drawing I’ve just seen and realise that, if Caro is bad, she’s been made that way by something terrible.

I want to reach out and touch her damaged arm. Instead, I take off my heart-shaped dangly earrings and hand them to her. I’ve seen her looking at them when she thinks I’m not concentrating. Mum gave them to me just before she got really ill and they’re the most precious things I’ve got.

I think Mum would have wanted me to do something good with those earrings.

‘Payment,’ I say.

Caro looks down at the tiny silver hearts nestling in her open palm. She closes her fingers over them and sucks her lips in so that they disappear.

She seems about to speak and then her eyes brim over and she makes a big play of sweeping up locks of hair and folding towels.

I leave her to it.

When the Doc comes up to find me for my session, I’m sitting on my bed thinking about Caro.

‘OK, what’s up?’ she says. ‘You look done in. Nice hair, by the way. I like the wavy bits around your face. Very Dorothy Lamour.’

I have no idea who Dorothy Lamour is. I wonder if she was the girl who had this room before me.

‘I’ve seen some of Caro’s drawings,’ I confess.

The Doc looks concerned. ‘So now you know why she’s got a lot of anger inside her,’ she says. ‘But I wish you hadn’t looked at the drawings. It might set back your own progress.’

I assure her that it won’t. I’m haunted by what I’ve just seen, but I’m starting to really want to lose my rituals. I’ve already cut my jumps down to half and stopped checking all the electrical appliances in my bedroom.

I still can’t touch anything without a tissue, though. And I’m still doing all the scrubbing and washing.

The Doc wants to work on this today.

She asks me to perform my rituals so that she can observe them.

I feel all self-conscious being watched. I grab the soap and do my right hand, counting to thirty-one, and then my left hand. I finish with a face scrub.

‘How did you pick the number thirty-one?’
asks the Doc, leaning back in her chair and gazing at me over the top of her glasses.

‘Easy,’ I say. ‘Mum was thirty-one when she died.’

‘Ah,’ says the Doc. ‘Right. Well – let’s pick another important number. Your age next birthday will do.’

She makes me wash my hands fifteen times left, fifteen times right. It only takes a couple of minutes.

‘Stress levels out of ten?’ she says.

I blot my hands dry on the towel and survey them. They look clean enough.

‘Maybe a five?’ I say.

She looks pleased and jots something in her book.

‘Homework this week,’ she says. ‘Wash your hands only fifteen times each, once a day’

‘Yes, Miss,’ I say. She makes as if to play-cuff my head, remembers just in time and wafts her
hand vaguely in front of my face instead.

As she leaves the room, Josh comes in with a brown paper parcel.

‘This came for you,’ he says, leaving it on my bed.

I wrap a tissue round my hand and rip open the package. Inside is a black box of chocolates with a little red heart-shaped card dangling off it.

My own heart leaps for a second.
Dad?

The chocolates glisten. Each dark globe is topped with a tiny violet crystal. I select one, pop it in my mouth.

Then I open the card.

See you soon, darling
, it says in a familiar scrawl. I might have known. Dad only ever bought Selection Boxes at Christmas time, not fancy chocolates with ribbons and bows.

Just when things were starting to get better for me.

I run to the sink and spit out a mush of
brown cream into the sink. Then I brush my teeth thirty-one times.

Odd little images of my past life start to run in front of my eyes as I brush my teeth like a lunatic to get rid of the vile tainted chocolate taste.

I remember my stepmother’s face as she packed me off in Heather’s car.

How she didn’t smile or wave as we drove away.

How the month of living alone with her in the house without Dad was like a strange nightmare, both of us going through the motions every day, but secretly wondering what on earth we had in common.

I suppose Dad was the only thing we had in common.

I gargle a big mouthful of nasty-tasting mouthwash.

Then I spit it out as hard as I can.

*

Lib fails to come down at the sound of the lunch gong so Josh goes upstairs to get her.

‘She’ll go mad if she misses lemon meringue,’ says the Doc.

There’s the sound of a shout upstairs and then Josh runs downstairs and grabs his coat and car keys with his hair and beard flying all over the place. I’ve never seen him move so fast.

‘Nothing to worry about, just stay in the kitchen,’ he throws at me, over his shoulder.

‘Zelah, you’re in charge,’ says the Doc, who’s gone white in the face and is following Josh into the hall and grabbing her own coat and bag.

Josh is helping Lib downstairs. I can’t see her face but she’s mumbling something incoherent and she can’t seem to walk very straight.

I watch out of the window as they push Lib into Josh’s old estate car and drive off with a screech of tyres.

I sit in silence at the kitchen table with the others.

‘Christ,’ says Caro, rolling up a cigarette.

I wait for her usual barbed comment.

Nothing more comes out of her mouth.

The Doc and Josh bring Lib home after supper. I’ve had to cobble together something to eat as I’m in charge so we’ve all had lumpy beans on charred toast. Nobody complains.

Lib is taken straight up to her room and I ask if I can take her up some of the leftover pudding from lunch.

Josh and the Doc exchange looks.

‘Yes, OK,’ says Josh. ‘But just a quick hello. She’s a bit subdued at the moment.’

Lib? Subdued?

I think they must be exaggerating, but when I push open the door of Lib’s room and see her lying on her side on the bed with her arms
wrapped tight round her stomach as if it hurts, my heart sinks.

‘Oh, hi, Princess,’ she says. She continues to lie on her side.

‘What’s up with you?’ I say. ‘Run out of happy pills?’

Lib’s faint smile fades. ‘How do you know about that?’ she says.

‘What?’ I say, confused.

She pulls her knees in towards her body until she’s huddled up like a foetus.

‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘You’d better get back to your supper, hadn’t you?’

It’s not a question. It’s an order.

I put a plateful of lemon meringue pie on the floor and creep out.

My world is turning black again.

I pop in to see Alice before I go to bed. Josh has decided that she’s doing well enough to spend a
weekend at home and her parents are about to turn up and take her away in their car.

I sit on the bed and watch her fold up a striped top and place it in a rucksack. She’s all dressed up for the occasion in a long black skirt with three layers and a white gipsy blouse.

‘Lucky you,’ I say. I’m jealous. I’ve been here for nearly four weeks and it feels like a lot longer. Part of me wishes that Heather would turn up in her red car and whisk me away. But where would I live? Heather’s away too often to look after me. My stepmother only wants me around because my problems make her feel better about herself.

And Dad – well, who knows where he might be?

‘They’re here!’ says Alice, watching a green car pull up outside. She gives me her shy look from beneath soft wings of hair. A pleasant-looking couple dressed in Barbour jackets and
Wellingtons get out of a Range Rover and wave up to where Alice is hanging out of the window.

My heart lurches with envy. I know I’m never going to get Mum back again, but I can’t help wishing that that was my dad down there, waving up with a proud look in his eyes.

Not that Dad would ever have been able to afford a Range Rover. He drove the same blue Hillman Avenger for about a million years until the bonnet caught fire.

‘Have fun,’ I say. ‘And keep up the muesli. Not literally, of course.’

Alice laughs. I watch her skinny arms hoist the rucksack on to her back.

Maybe Heather will pay me another visit soon.

Heather doesn’t come, but the next morning Josh taps on my bedroom door and announces that I’m needed in the kitchen.

It’s Sunday so I presume that he wants help with the fry-up. The sun is out and I’ve managed
to stick to my new routine of washing only fifteen times on each side. I insert a pair of green glass dangly earrings into my lobes and brush my new swishy sleek hair into place. I take a pale green T-shirt from the wardrobe and rearrange all the other items so that there are equal spaces in between them.

Then I slide into my favourite skinny jeans and my silver flip-flops and run downstairs, not stopping to jump at the top.

There’s a rich smell of ground coffee coming from the kitchen.

‘OK, shall I do the eggs and you the bacon?’ I say as I burst through the kitchen door.

There’s only one person sitting at the table.

Clouds of hair hovering around her head. Thin face, sharp nose.

Her face is tilted towards the door in expectation.

She stands up and holds out her arms.

‘Zelah, darling,’ she says. ‘How are you?’

My stepmother has found her way to Forest Hill House.

I
stop dead and start backing away, but it’s too late.

She’s up in a flash and is standing with her back against the kitchen door.

No escape.

‘Zelah, darling,’ she says again, extending her arms towards me. ‘Sit down. We need to talk.’

‘You know I can’t touch you,’ I say. I edge towards the sink and lean against it, trying to see whether anyone’s in the garden just in case I need to scream.

‘You’re looking better than I expected,’ she says, moving in on me with a critical
frown. ‘Yes. A lot better.’

Her smile fades a little. She fingers her own flyaway hair.

I’m getting scared. There’s nobody around. Where are they all?

‘What do you want?’ I say. Without moving from the sink I feel around behind me until my fingers brush a wooden spoon. I grasp it hard, shuddering at the feeling of the dry wood on my skin, but even the thoughts of germs invading my body is preferable to another five minutes with my stepmother.

My stepmother has a faint smile hovering on her lips.

‘Zelah,’ she says. ‘Don’t be silly. It’s not about what I want. It’s about what’s best for you, of course.’

I’m not buying that one.

‘You loathe me,’ I hiss. ‘Ever since Dad went you’ve only pretended to like me.’

At the mention of Dad’s name her smile fades. She sits down at the kitchen table with a heavy sigh and fumbles in her shiny black bag, rattling a bottle of pills and tipping two into her mouth.

‘Life’s been very difficult for me,’ she says. ‘First your father left me and then I was left alone to cope with you and your little, ahem,
problem
.’

‘Well, my “little problem” is getting treated now and I’m fine, so could you just go away, please?’ I say. I wish that the Doc would bustle into the kitchen in her comforting outsized linen shirt and with her bracelets jangling, or that Josh would amble in and fill the kettle, blinking at me through his half-closed eyes.

My stepmother has stood up again. She’s sizing up my hair and clothes with a keen eye.

‘Oh, Zelah,’ she says. ‘It’s not that simple, darling. You see – you being in here is very,
very expensive. I could never have afforded these fees.’

Fees?

I’m silent. It’s never occurred to me that my place at Forest Hill House costs Actual Money. I kind of assumed that the Doc and Josh were treating kids out of the goodness of their own hearts, but as soon as this thought comes into my head I realise I’ve been stupid. Of course they have to get paid.