Zelah Green (3 page)

Dad used to give Heather admiring looks when he thought that Mum and me weren’t looking. Mum used to tease him about it and say, ‘Typical man!’

Besides, Mum was just as pretty as Heather in a different sort of way. Dark curls instead of long red-blonde hair. Red cheeks instead of tanned ones. Mum was all curvy and feminine, but Heather was as thin as a stick insect’s inside leg. Mum wore combats and little vest tops. She had an outdoorsy daytime sort of look. Heather wore micro mini-skirts and tight jeans. She looked as if she only came alive at night inside a trendy wine bar perched on a high barstool with lots of men ogling her.

‘Why aren’t you married?’ I ask Heather. I’m trying not to think about the hospital.

She’s driving with assurance, her long brown arms tipping the steering wheel this way and that, leaning her head back against the headrest, tapping one foot to the radio.

‘It’s not the most important thing in life,’ she says. That’s a typical Heather answer. It leaves other questions begging to be asked.

I think about asking Heather if I can live with her instead of going to the hospital, but I already know what the answer will be.

‘I’m a career woman,’ she’ll say. ‘I mean – love you, and all that, but I’m just not cut out for looking after kids. What would happen to my gorgeous nails? Do I look like your typical mother?’

Heather’s squeezed into a red sleeveless top today and black skinny jeans. She looks like a teenager.

Her nails end in perfect scarlet tips with not a chip in sight.

I stick a tissue behind my head so that I can lean it back without fear of getting my hair dirty, and watch the brown concrete walls of our local hospital loom into view. It’s a converted Victorian lunatic asylum. Appropriate. My stepmother’s always telling me I’m crazy.

‘They won’t chain my head and legs to the
wall or anything, will they?’ I say. My heart is starting to pound beneath the wads of tissue. I miss Dad so much that there’s a great panging ache washing up my legs towards my head.

‘Nope,’ says Heather. ‘That I can guarantee you.’

We’ve got caught in a traffic jam just outside the hospital gates.

‘You’re in the wrong lane,’ I point out. ‘You need to turn left in a minute.’

Heather has developed selective deafness. She turns up the volume on the radio and a jangly blast of Madonna blares out, all booming bass. The car windows vibrate and a man in the car next to us smirks at Heather and does a horrid wink.

Heather taps her nails on the outside of the car door. She’s bawling at the top of her voice to the Madonna song.

She ignores the man.

The lights change. Heather puts her foot on the accelerator and screeches away, staring straight ahead and singing like a maniac.

The hospital becomes a small brown dot in my wing mirror.

‘Erm,’ I say. A small knot of fear is growing in my stomach. Has she gone mad? Is she kidnapping me? Where are we going? At least the hospital would have been nice and clean with lots of good disinfectant and bleach.

‘I love that song,’ says Heather as Madonna reaches her climax and is cut off by the prattling drone of a DJ. ‘Fifty and she’s still got the body of a sex goddess, the cow.’

Heather’s hair whips around her face like red spaghetti as we join a busy road. Every now and then she pushes it back behind her ears and then a few strands break free again, starting a mutiny until the whole lot flips out and whams her in the face.

‘Note to self, bring hair clip next time,’ she laughs. The frowning snappiness has vanished, to be replaced by a vibrant pair of grinning red lips. I feel a bit plain sitting next to Heather, even though I quite like my own mop of hair and I’ve got very long legs. But Heather looks like a film star.

We’re driving down a dual carriageway at breakneck speed and the tissues are flying off my chest in the breeze and Heather is still not telling me where we’re going.

‘The hospital’s back the other way,’ I say, just in case she’s truly flipped and failed to see the enormous building.

‘I know, I know, it’s off down the road we go,’ sings Heather. She ferrets about in the glove compartment without taking her eyes off the road and chucks a sandwich at me. It’s my favourite sort, one of those ones in a lovely clean, sealed, plastic triangle.

I sigh and shake my head. She really has lost it, I reckon.

I peel off a cellophane corner and sink my teeth into soft tuna and cucumber mayo.

There doesn’t seem to be anything else I can do.

Three hours later Heather swings off the A30, navigates a couple of roundabouts and turns into a long street studded with tall white Victorian houses. Daylight is fading to a birdsong-soaked twilight.

‘What is this?’ I say. ‘Why are we here?’

Heather is brushing her hair back into a sleek wave of red and gold.

She pushes her glasses back on to her head and turns to face me.

‘I couldn’t take you to that hospital,’ she says. ‘I don’t think it was the right place for you.’

‘But my stepmother told you to take me
there,’ I say. ‘She’ll go mad when she finds out.’

Heather juts out her chin and gives me her stubborn look.

‘I’ll keep her off the track for a while,’ she says. ‘Your father wouldn’t want you to go to that hospital.’

‘How do you know?’ I say.

We fall silent for a moment. It’s been over a month since I last heard from Dad. Nobody seems to know where he’s gone. The head-mistress of the school where Dad taught has rung home about a million times complaining about having to get in emergency supply teachers at short notice.

Heather is waving at somebody. A tall figure in a white apron has appeared at the top of a flight of stairs and is waving back.

‘Who’s that?’ I say. This is all becoming a bit much. It’s been hours since I’ve washed and I feel grimy and hot and numb from the car seat.

‘That,’ says Heather, grinning, ‘is Erin. She’s like a big sister to me. Come on.’

She leaps out of the car and pulls my suitcase from the tiny boot of her car.

I straggle behind, removing bits of tissue from my front. I kick shut the car door to avoid touching it with my hands.

Heather is embracing the woman at the top of the steps. As they hug they bounce up and down like excited kids. Heather slips the woman some sort of folder. I can’t see what’s in it, but I catch a glimpse of my name written in black marker pen across the front.

I wait for them to finish, shifting from my right leg to my left. The cracked black and white diamond tiles I’m standing on look just right for jumping on. I could do with a good jump, but I’m not giving in to my ‘little problem’ in front of a complete stranger.

The woman steps forward. She’s wearing a
shapeless white linen shirt over a long grey cotton skirt. Her apron has a bold picture of a red chilli pepper on it and says ‘Hot Stuff!’. She has dishevelled dark-brown curly hair, shot through with grey, and a face not smooth like Heather’s, but lined and brown. She must be at least ten years older than Heather, but when she smiles at me, her eyes crinkle up at the corners.

‘I’m Erin,’ she says. ‘I won’t shake your hand, Zelah. I don’t want to stress you out straight away.’

I have no idea what to say to this as I’m already pretty stressed out by the weirdness of everything, but the woman looks OK. Heather is gesturing for me to step inside, so I walk in behind her.

There’s a gold plate by the front door. It says ‘Forest Hill House’.

Just as the door shuts behind us, the most unbelievable thing happens.

There is a scream from somewhere upstairs. The loudest scream I’ve ever heard. The sort of scream I would make if I were being throttled by a pair of naked hands, or if I’d just found Fran with her neck slit open by a dirty knife, or somebody was sticking burning hot pins into my eyeballs without sterilising them first.

The scream is followed by the sounds of footsteps running, doors opening and shutting and a low adult voice trying to calm the screamer down.

Even Heather loses her confident grin for a moment. She freezes. She stares at me, wide-eyed. We both goggle like scared rabbits in the direction of the scream.

The woman with the curly hair never stops smiling for a second. She looks as if she’s caught the faint tinkle of heavenly bells rather than the heart-stopping screech that we’ve just heard.

‘Don’t worry, it’s Caro having one of her
expressive moments,’ she says. ‘Sounds far worse than it is.’

I want to reach for Heather’s hand but I can’t. I’ve got no gloves and I’ve run out of tissues.

Heather’s glancing at her watch and biting her lip.

‘You’re not going, are you?’ I say. ‘Can’t you just stay for a bit longer?’

‘Sorry, kiddo,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a date tomorrow morning with a rack of black gothic puffball skirts.’

She makes as if to grab my shoulders, remembers just in time, blows me a gentle air-kiss involving as little breath as possible, hugs the tall woman again and bounds down the steps towards her Porsche.

‘You’ll be fine here,’ she calls over her shoulder, throwing her Gucci bag into the back of the car and easing her slim frame into the driving seat.

She revs up the engine and roars back off to her other life, leaving a cloud of thick grey smoke hovering in the street.

It’s like my last link with Mum and Dad has just vanished.

The woman clicks the heavy front door shut behind me and locks it. The sound echoes in the tiled hall.

‘I expect you’d like to see your room,’ she says.

It isn’t a question and, in any case, I wouldn’t know how to answer it.

The banisters are brown and smooth and made of polished oak.

I can detect the smear of recent fingerprints.
Dirt Alert
.

I tuck my elbows into my sides and shove my hands into my pockets.

It’s too late for escape now.

I follow the woman upstairs.

E
rin leads me up two flights of stairs, past lots of doorways.

Some of the doors are closed. Others give a flash glimpse of unmade beds, posters, the flicker of television screens, desks and heaps of washing. The whiff of perfume, sweat, bubble bath and stale burgers hangs around the hall.

‘Wednesday night we have takeaway,’ says Erin, reading my mind. ‘It’s our way of telling them they’re doing well.’

Well at what?

I can tell from the rooms I’ve passed that this isn’t a hospital. There’s too much mess.
Hospitals smell of disinfectant and bleach. This house smells of teenage life.

We’ve reached a smaller flight of stairs at the very top of the house. Erin bustles up them, jangling a bunch of keys in her hand. Her bulk fills the narrowing stairwell. Childbearing hips, as Heather would say.

She leads me into a room bursting with light. The floorboards have been painted white and the chest of drawers by the bed is a pale yellow. White curtains flap in the breeze, like a room overlooking a big blue sea somewhere. Except that this room overlooks the untidy front garden of the house opposite. Unlike the rooms I just saw downstairs, this one is clean. Tidy.

My eye buzzes around the furniture and alights upon a tiny sink in the corner of the room and a rack of clean white towels.

I glance at my watch. Nine thirty-five. I’m already running late for my bedtime rituals. Erin
shows no signs of leaving. She’s sitting on the edge of a small neat white bed and patting for me to come and sit next to her.

A slight sweat breaks out on my face.
Dirt Alert
.

Everything is out of sync. For all I know, one of the taps won’t work. That will screw up the whole washing thing. If I can’t wash on time, I can’t get to bed and go to sleep.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll leave you to settle in soon,’ says Erin. Her habit of reading my mind is starting to unnerve me.

‘It’s OK, I didn’t mean . . .’ I mumble, flushing.

Erin is beaming at me from behind her small round glasses.

‘You must be wondering what this is all about,’ she says. ‘Did Heather tell you anything?’

My mind flashes back to the car journey and Heather’s hair whipping around. Her long
tanned fingers on the wheel and her loud, outof-tune singing.

It seems a lifetime ago.

I’m itching for Erin to go. There’s a piece of grey fluff drifting over the white floorboards. Uh-oh,
Dirt Alert
again. If I don’t pick it up before it gets to my feet, I’m going to have a major panic attack.

Erin follows my eyes. She gets up and squashes the piece of fluff between finger and thumb before shoving it in her apron pocket.

My stepmother wouldn’t even have noticed.

‘Thanks,’ I say. I fiddle with my fingernails, ease out a piece of dirt from underneath one of them.

Erin laughs.

‘No need to thank me,’ she says. ‘It’s my job.’

I must have looked blank at this.

‘I’m a doctor specialising in the treatment of teenage disorders,’ she says. ‘In fact, the others
call me “the Doc” around here. You’ve been sent here because of your Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.’

I give a little jump and have to refrain from looking around to see if she is speaking to someone else. I know that my rituals have a medical name, but I prefer not to use it.

This is one of my beliefs:

Giving something a name makes it more real.

When Mum got cancer we never called it ‘cancer’ at home. We called it ‘this dratted thing’, or ‘the situation’. It was only when she was admitted to hospital that the word leapt up and smacked us in the face. A ‘cancer care nurse’ made Mum more comfortable. A doctor said that the ‘cancer had progressed two stages’. A healer visited Mum and told her to ‘visualise her cancer cells being beaten into submission.’ Once the word got out, it followed us home and got into our nightmares and Mum’s bloodstream.

Then it killed her.

That’s why I don’t like giving things a name.

The Doc gets up, pressing her hands into the small of her back like pregnant people do, stretching with a grimace.

‘Long day,’ she says. ‘I’ll let you get a good night’s sleep and in the morning I’ll introduce you to the others.’