Zelah Green (5 page)

‘I own this place.’

I
ignore the hand.

‘Rituals,’ I say, by way of explanation.

‘Oh shit, of course,’ says the man. He really does look like Jesus.

I sneak a peek at his feet. Yup – he’s even wearing the battered brown sandals. He’s got long, soft, mud-coloured hair and a wispy beard and he’s got the same little round glasses as the Doc, except whereas her eyes are bright and awake and firm, his are sleepy and half shut and misty, as if he’s thinking of something he loved and lost.

‘I’m so sorry about the mess,’ the man is
saying. ‘Wednesday nights are always dodgy. I blame it on the chemicals in the Chinese takeaway.’

He delivers this line with a soft wink and a soppy grin.

‘Do you want a coffee?’ I say. To my horror, I’m blushing.

The man is already hunting around for jars and cups but at that he turns round and blesses me again with his disarming smile.

‘This place will soon knock those manners out of you,’ he says. ‘Shame. I think you’re great.’

My heart is doing flips and hops and missing beats. I’m going insane. One minute I’m laughing at this man in my head for being a nerdy Jesus-look-alike, the next he’s a grinning Sex God and I’m feeling as if the legs on my chair are about to give way beneath me.

‘Giving you the old patter, is he?’

The Doc’s just come in. She touches the man
lightly on the shoulder and smiles at me.

‘This, as he probably hasn’t bothered to tell you, is my husband, Josh,’ she says.

My heart falls to the ground and is kicked until it lies dead.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Husband. Hello.’

‘He has a way with the ladies,’ says the Doc, peering with a frown at the green shoots growing on the windowsill. She is minus the apron today, but still wearing the white linen shirt and grey skirt. ‘But the best thing is he’s completely unaware of it.’

Josh is staring at her with a bemused look upon his saintly face.

‘I’ll leave you women to it,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a toilet to unblock and then I need to brave Caro’s den.’

This is the second time I’ve heard the name ‘Caro’. I remember the appalling scream from last night.

‘She’s in isolation today,’ says the Doc, as if this explains everything. ‘She’s having a rough time at the moment. Josh is having a session with her later.’

‘What do you mean?’ I say. Is she talking about massage? Or yoga? Mum used to say that yoga was very calming to the soul. When I came home from school she was often to be found on a green mat with her legs knotted round her head. It never looked very calming to me. I tried it once and cricked a muscle in my neck.

The Doc is cradling her cup of coffee at the kitchen table.

‘The kids here all have sessions,’ she says. ‘Either with Josh, or with me. We use behavioural therapy, which means we address patterns of behaviour and look at how we might break them.’

When she says ‘break’, I feel unsteady, as if somebody has pulled a rug from under my feet
and replaced it with a barrowful of sharp, uneven rocks.

I grip the sides of my chair and hook my feet round the bar underneath.

‘Your first session won’t be until this evening,’ she says. ‘Until then you’re free. Treat the place as home!’

She bustles out again, leaving me staring at my empty plate.

It’s only eight o’clock in the morning. At home I’d be doing my rituals and getting ready for school about now.

Everything’s been thrown upside down. All the usual time frames have been shattered. I can’t even do my jumps on the top step in case somebody sees.

The kitchen is quiet and empty. A cat thunders through the cat-flap, gulps down a plate of Whiskas, sneezes and bolts outside again. I shudder. Cats carry a lot of germs.

Upstairs I can hear taps running, doors slamming and voices calling out to one another.

Fran
, I think.
I’ll go upstairs and see if Fran has replied to my text
. Or maybe Dad’s tried to call me. That will kill, oh, about two minutes of this longest-ever morning. Then I can do my hand-washing again and work out what to do next.

I creep upstairs. On the first floor, all the doors are open now except for the bathroom. I can hear the trickle of a bath being filled.

I try not to look inside each room as I pass by, but it’s hard to resist.

In the first one is the girl who took the yoghurt – Alice, bending over, tying up her trainers. She’s wearing dark-green baggy combats and a long-sleeved green top, even though it’s boiling hot outside. Where her hair falls away from her neck I see blue veins bulging out and the jut of her collarbone.

In the room opposite there’s a blue bed
made up as if nobody’s slept in it. There’s a poster of Pamela Anderson tacked to the wall over the bed. No signs of life.

The room adjacent to that one is about as messy as the kitchen was. There are books and CDs all over the floor and a bundle of rumpled clothes strewn across the bed. I recognise Lib’s green parka and smile. It’s a relief to see something familiar.

The room at the end of the corridor has the door shut and the sound of a hairdryer coming from it. As that’s the room I heard snoring from last night, I reckon that this is Josh and the Doc’s room.

I climb the narrow stairs to the floor where my little bedroom is.

As I get to the top I notice that the door next to the bathroom is open a fraction.

I peer through the crack, holding my breath.

There’s a girl sitting in a window seat. Her
legs are bunched up underneath her and long wings of fair hair fall across her face, catching the sunlight.

The girl is busy doing something with her right hand.

I’m dazzled by the sun and struck by how pretty the girl is, a skinny blonde modern angel sitting in profile against an old sash window.

There are pictures pinned all over the walls of this attic room. Some are done in an angry red blaze of paint, others are sharp-edged cartoons in black and white. With a shock of envy, I realise that the girl has painted them herself.

She’s doing some sort of painting right now.

I can’t see what she’s holding – her hand’s obscured by one wing of hair dipping down across her arm, but she is taking great care over her work.

She’s so into what she’s doing that she hasn’t noticed the stream of red paint dripping
from her brush on to the pale floorboards.

I clear my throat. It’s stressing me out to see the watery red falling on to the white floor.

The girl looks up, startled.

Her face is narrow and hostile, sickly grey with a light sheen of sweat on the forehead.

Something falls to the ground with a tinkle.

She pulls her sleeves down, too late.

The stuff dripping on to the floor is forming little red veins that trickle towards me.

It’s not paint.

I
only once saw so much blood coming out of a person.

On the day before Mum died I visited the hospital with Heather. We perched on the un-comfortable ridges of Mum’s special mattress.

She wasn’t talking much, but her eyes spoke volumes. They glowed and sparkled as I talked about what I’d done at school and what I was planning to do over the weekend.

‘That’s nice, love,’ she said, when I’d finished going on.

Then she shot up in bed, coughed up a great lungful of dark blood all over my white skirt
and fell back down like one of those cardboard people you shoot at a fairground.

Heather put her arm round me and led me out of the ward while the nurse cleaned Mum up.

The skirt already had a pattern of deep red flowers so Heather washed it in some special stuff for me and I carried on wearing it, but I never felt right in it after that.

The girl in the window seat is swearing and wrapping her long sleeves round her wrists.

I pull out a tissue and pass it to her. As she lifts her sleeve to apply it I catch a glimpse of her arm.

The skin is raised in bumps and ridges of angry red. All up her arm are criss-crossed lines, some weeping and sore, others healed and white.

‘Get lost,’ says the girl. ‘You’re not supposed
to be in here anyway.’

I bend down, wrap a tissue round my hand and pick up a metal nail file from the floor.

I hand it back to her.

‘I didn’t realise you could do such a lot of damage with a nail file,’ I say. It sounds crass, but what else am I supposed to say?

I like what you’ve done to your arm.

Is it fun, hacking holes in your own skin?

You really should put a plaster on that.

The girl pulls her sleeves down again and slumps forward with her head on her knees.

‘Do you want me to get someone?’ I say.

She lifts her head up and regards me with cold eyes.

‘You some kind of do-gooder?’ she says. She’s older than I first thought – fifteen or so. Her body is tiny, but there are worn blue shadows under her eyes.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ve just got here. I’m in the room
next door.’

‘Oh yeah, the OCD,’ says the girl, disinterested. She turns away, gazes out of the window.

I feel a flash of anger.

‘I have got a name, actually,’ I say. ‘Zelah Green.’

That gets her turning back round sharp.

‘What kind of a weird name is that?’ she says. ‘Your mum got issues with you?’

‘She’s dead,’ I say.

The silence is charged with several things. I can see the girl trying to backtrack, apologise even, but she’s gone too far.

I feel sick at the mess on the floor. Embarrassed. Awkward.

There’s only one thing to do.

I walk away.

‘Yeah, catch you later, OCD,’ she says. Her voice is loaded with disgust.

She puts on a Marilyn Manson CD as I shut the door to my own room. The savage roar of the music bursts through the wall and casts a black shadow of menace over my white furniture.

I rip my earrings out and chuck them back in the box. I have to scrub my hands sixty-two times each to get rid of the feeling of the blood.

I check my phone for a message from Fran.

Nothing.

The Doc whacks an old gong in the hall to summon everyone down to lunch.

She’s changed into a sleeveless orange summer dress with roman sandals and a gold ankle chain. Her curly grey hair is as wild as ever.

Josh is already in the kitchen in shorts and a white shirt, dishing up some sort of rice concoction and buttering soft brown rolls. He
is mock-conducting an imaginary orchestra in between ladling the steamy, starchy risotto on to plates. Radio Three has won the battle of the airwaves again.

‘Zelah, can you pour the drinks?’ he says. He waves in the direction of three cartons of orange and apple juice.

The table is only laid for six.

‘Sol’s gone home for a day or two,’ says the Doc, reading my mind as usual. ‘He’ll be back.’

‘Not that you’d notice he’s gone,’ says Lib, twirling into the room and grabbing a bread roll from the basket Josh is putting on the table. ‘He’s a man of few words, our Sol. And that’s an exaggeration.’

‘Lib,’ says the Doc with a reproving frown. ‘You should let Zelah make her own mind up about people. And you shouldn’t tease people who aren’t around to defend themselves.’

‘Ooh, sorry,’ says Lib, but her plump features
are spread in a wide grin. She’s wearing a hooded black sweatshirt and grey tracksuit bottoms. Her feet are still shoeless but her socks have changed from baby pink to fuzzy white. She’s run some sort of hair gel through her peaky blonde fringe so that it stands to attention like a line of rigid white ferrets.

‘Sit down, you lot,’ says Josh. As he’s putting mushroom risotto in front of us, Alice drifts into the kitchen with a sullen expression on her face. She sits down and hugs her own elbows, staring at the plate.

Her cheekbones cut through the pale skin underneath her eyes. There is a fine moustache of soft down on her upper lip and her teeth bulge out slightly. Her long brown hair is wispy and unwashed. Despite all this she’s the prettiest person in the house. Except for maybe Josh.

‘Now,’ says the Doc, passing round a dish
of green broccoli with slivers of grey-yellow Parmesan on top. ‘Have you two met Zelah?’

There are brief nods from Alice and Lib.

I don’t mention my meeting with Caro earlier. Something tells me that the less I let on about what I saw, the easier my life at Forest Hill House will be.

The others begin to eat. Well – Lib does, shovelling rice into her mouth as if it’s her last meal ever. Josh too eats with enthusiasm, grains of rice getting caught up in his beard and then dropping like tiny white maggots back on to the plate.

The Doc discards her knife and uses her fork to scoop up rice with her right hand, left elbow resting on the table.

I pull my own knife and fork out of my pocket and slide them into place. The Doc and Josh act as if they don’t see.

Alice pushes her food around her plate and
from time to time, brings one fork prong to her lips where she pushes in a single grain of rice.

‘Try a small bit,’ says Josh, sliding the bread basket towards her.

Alice breaks open a wholegrain roll, refuses the butter and picks seeds off the top, placing them between her lips as if they might explode in her mouth.

Lib is rolling her eyes at me.

‘You’ll get used to this madhouse,’ she says. ‘Number one lunatic is upstairs. You’ve still got that pleasure to come.’

‘Lib, shut up and get the pudding out of the oven,’ says Josh.

Lib leaps up and returns with a blackberry crumble and a small yoghurt. She passes this to Alice.

Alice pushes back her chair, puts the yoghurt in the pocket of her baggy trousers and leaves the room with a murmur of thanks. At least, I
think that’s what it is. It sounds like ‘ffa’.

‘Believe it or not, she used to be worse than that,’ says Lib.

I look at the plate Alice left behind her. Messed-around risotto lies in cold circular trails.

‘Crumble?’ says Josh.

I’ve brought my own spoon too. I pass my plate and let him pile it up with the steaming purple mess.

The Doc is waiting in one of the upstairs offices at half past five.