After Iris: the Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby (3 page)

‘But why didn’t you come and
get
us?’ wailed Jas. ‘We could have caught him!’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Flora. ‘You can see for yourself, he’d already gone.’

‘I did come and find you,’ I said. ‘You were asleep.’

They all piled into my bed at dawn this morning, the Babes dragging Flora, demanding to know what happened to their watch.

‘Not necessary,’ I told them. ‘I got him.’

‘Show us,’ ordered Twig.

And there was that face again – I’d looked at it several times already before going to sleep. Messy hair, wicked grin, with a look of owning the world.

‘He looks nice,’ said Jas.

‘He looks weird,’ said Twig.

‘He’s quite good-looking,’ admitted Flora.

‘Blue?’ asked Jas.

‘He looks interesting,’ I said.

‘What was he
doing
this time, anyway?’ said Flora.

‘The rats!’ Twig froze. Literally. His face went white and his body went stiff, then he threw himself off the bed and pounded down the stairs.

‘Oh, God,’ sighed Flora. ‘More rodent drama.’

‘I thought you
cared
,’ said Jas.

‘I don’t like being spied on,’ said Flora. ‘I couldn’t give a toss about the rats.’

This time there were ribbons tied round the rats who aren’t the daddy – two pink ones for Betsy and Petal, the two fat adults who aren’t Jaws, three blue and one pink for the babies. Which is no mean feat, considering how tiny they are.

‘It is a mystery,’ said Zoran, ‘who would do such a thing.’

‘We know!’ chirped Twig, and then Zoran made us tell him everything and yelled at us for staying up and not following orders .

‘Ignore him,’ said Flora. ‘He can’t hit us, he’s not our father.’

‘He couldn’t hit us even if he
was
our father,’ said Jas. ‘It’s actually illegal.’

‘I am
trying
to
protect
you.’ Zoran sank into the kitchen sofa and put his head in his hands.

‘Pathetic,’ muttered Flora, but Jas threw her arms around Zoran’s neck to say sorry, and then Twig said he was sorry too, and after a minute so did I.

‘
Completely
pathetic,’ grumbled Flora. She picked up her school-bag. ‘Come on, Blue.’

I had to run to keep up with her. I don’t know when she got so tall. ‘It’s humiliating,’ she raged as we walked. ‘He treats us like a bunch of kids.’

‘We
are
a bunch of kids,’ I said, then because that only made her crosser I added, ‘He’s quite useful. You know, with the Babes, and the parents away so much.’

Flora shot me one of her sideways Flora looks. ‘I suppose you like him.’

I thought about Zoran making hot chocolate for us, putting double the amount of powder in Jas’s
because
that’s how she likes it, and about how he sat working on his thesis in the rain when it was his turn to watch the rats.

‘I don’t like his beard,’ I said. ‘But I do think he’s nice.’

‘That,’ said Flora, ‘is just typical.’

‘I hate school,’ I said.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

I wanted to ask her if she remembered lying to the Head at St Swithin’s about me reading Dickens when I was five, but I could tell she wasn’t in the mood. She flounced off to join her friends as soon as we reached the gates, and I knew she probably wouldn’t notice if I spent the rest of the day screaming naked in the playground.

No chance of skipping out at lunchtime with Mr Maths on the door. Flora nabbed me as I slunk into the canteen.

‘He’s here!’ she hissed.

‘People are staring,’ I said, and to be honest I’m not surprised. Flora is widely regarded as one of the coolest girls in school, but the pink dreads do take getting used to. ‘If it’s all the same to you,’ I said, ‘
I
am doing my best not to stand out.’

‘He’s here!’ she repeated. ‘He’s in my year!’

‘
Who
is here?’

‘Who d’you think? The spy! The rat boy!’

‘Are you sure?’

‘He
introduced
himself!
I believe we’re neighbours,
he said, then he took his hat off like he did in the video.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Quite cute, to be fair, but God he fancies himself.  
I believe we’re neighbours
–
who even talks like that? He actually
winked
at me!’

‘We
are
neighbours,’ I pointed out, but Flora wasn’t listening.

‘Whoah,’ she said. ‘They really are looking at us.’

I swear the whole canteen was in shock, like they’d just worked out we were related. Candy-floss Head and Little Miss Nobody.

‘Gotta shoot,’ said Flora.

‘Can I have lunch with you?’

‘Sorry, tadpole,’ she said. ‘I’m going out.’

I wanted to leave then too, spend lunch in the toilets or the library or something, but I was too hungry. I needn’t have worried anyway. With Flora gone, people lost interest. I carried my tray to an empty table and tried to look like I was eating alone by choice.

I stood up to clear my tray when I finished, and froze.

The boy from next door sat alone on the other side of the room, and he was staring straight at me.

It’s warmer tonight. Zoran has said that even though he is not our father he will personally whip us if we keep watch again, but I couldn’t sleep so I climbed out of my window on to the flat roof like I did last night. I sat with my duvet around my shoulders, and in the moonlight my shadow looked like a giant mushroom with my head a little bobble on top. I slid my hand out from under the duvet and moved it like the Indian dancers Dad took me to see last winter, then pinched my fingers and thumb together to look like a duck.

I waved, and the mushroom waved back. I shook my head and the mushroom’s hair went wild. I held out my hand, and the shadow of another hand reached out and touched mine.

I have never moved so fast in my entire life. I dived through the open window – literally, head first. I’d have made it too, if I hadn’t tried to take the duvet with me. As it was, Joss Bateman caught hold of it (the duvet) and pulled and we ended up sitting on either side of the window, me inside, him out.

‘Sorry I scared you,’ he said.

Flora always says you should never admit to being frightened. Or weak. Or to feeling stupid. She says if people know any of these things about you, they will take advantage. So even though I must have looked completely petrified, sitting there on the floor of my bedroom hugging my duvet and eyeing the open window like it was some portal I had to close against the Forces of Darkness, I still said, ‘I’m not scared.’

‘I just wanted to meet you.’

What I should have said is that it’s a bit weird climbing on to people’s roofs like a burglar in the middle of the night just because you’re after an introduction, but I didn’t think of that until later. As in right now.

‘Oh.’ Is what I actually said.

‘Did you like what I did with the rats?’ he asked.

‘Um,’ I said.

‘The sight of you all,’ he grinned. ‘Sitting there in the rain waiting for me to come back! I nearly died it was so funny.’

‘Hilarious,’ I croaked.

‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ he said.

‘Well you are,’ I said. And then I yanked the duvet in and slammed the window shut. He pressed his face against the glass but I closed the curtains. Then I ran to my bed and pulled the covers over my head until I heard him leave.

Flora is ecstatic because Craig, the director of the Clarendon Players, told her that this year she could audition for a speaking part. The auditions were this morning and she came back glowing because she is going to play Snow White. Twig said, ‘Snow White? But she’s such a drip!’ and Jas said, ‘Don’t they mind about your hair?’ Flora said it was completely
typical
of her family to be so unsupportive and that her Snow White was going to be unlike any other the world had ever seen.

‘Craig says I am the perfect person to inject personality into the role,’ she announced, and then she went on and on about how she was the youngest member of the speaking cast and how there were
going
to be film scouts and agents and everything on the opening night and how this was the beginning of the sparkling career in show business which was going to take her away from her humdrum schoolgirl existence.

Or something like that.

‘So I spoke to Mr Bateman,’ said Zoran when she stopped for breath. ‘The boy is their grandson. He is going to Clarendon Free School for the sixth form.

‘We knew
that
already,’ said Flora.

‘Doesn’t he mind?’ asked Jas. ‘Being sent away from his parents?’

‘From what I gathered,’ said Zoran, ‘things are not easy for him at home.’

‘Why not?’ asked Twig, but apparently Mr
Bateman
didn’t say and Zoran didn’t like to ask.

‘Should I tell him about last night?’ I asked Flora when Zoran had gone upstairs.

‘What, that our psycho neighbour’s crawling all over the roof trying his hand at breaking and entering?’

I shrugged.

‘He’ll only make a fuss,’ Flora sighed, ‘and then we’d have Mum and Dad on our backs.’

‘Maybe they’d come home,’ I said, and she gave me another Flora look.

‘They’d only leave again,’ she said.

This is what happened with Mum and Dad.

Seventeen years ago, when Cassie (Mum) had just started work at l’Oréal in London and David (Dad) was finishing his doctorate in medieval literature at Oxford, they went to Glastonbury. And even though they had been to Glastonbury every summer for years and had never met, this time they pitched their tents side by side. It rained. Cassie’s tent collapsed. David and his mates invited Cassie and her friends into theirs. He played his guitar in the tent and sang ‘Moon River’. She told him that ever since she saw Audrey Hepburn sing it in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
which was her favourite movie, it was her favourite song.  

 After that they went to the cinema every night for two weeks and with every new film they fell a little bit more in love. David loved the movies even more than medieval literature, and Cassie definitely loved them more than l’Oréal. Two weeks later, in the middle of a Quentin Tarantino double bill, between
Reservoir Dogs
and
Pulp Fiction
(both films they have forbidden us to watch), David proposed.

Luckily, because David and Cassie were quite poor, David’s father had pots of money from working in the City before he and Grandma retired to go and live in Devon. So David and Cassie brushed the popcorn off their clothes and went to see him and Grandma, and told them that not only were they gaining a daughter but they were also going to be grandparents, and Grandpa bought them the house on Chatsworth Square where we still live now, which is old and draughty though apparently quite valuable.

Grandma also dusted down Dad’s old nanny who came to look after Flora while Cassie carried on
climbing
the ladder of the cosmetics industry and Dad, who had always secretly dreamed of becoming a famous film director, became a teacher at Goldsmiths and wrote books that nobody ever read except his students because he made them.  And then Dad’s nanny retired for the second time, and Iris and I were born, and Mum stopped work, and three years later Twig came along, and then Jas, and even though Iris died everything was
fine
until last year when Dad announced he had this job in Warwick which was a promotion and they had a row which we weren’t meant to hear but did. The row was all about Mum going mad stuck at home all day thinking about Iris and Dad saying let’s move to Warwick we all need a fresh start and Mum saying over her dead body and she had a right to a life too and then she cried and the next thing we knew she told us she had a job and was flying to New York for training with Bütylicious.

Bütylicious is based in New York but has offices all over the world that she has to visit all the time, for reasons she has tried to explain but none of us understand. So then there was Katya, who was Lithuanian and couldn’t cook, and Eva, who was Slovakian and homesick, and that took us up to the beginning of this summer, when we went to Devon to stay with Grandma. And now we have Zoran, and Dad’s in Warwick even at the weekends, and Mum Skypes us from China as long as it’s not too late and this is just how things are and there is absolutely no point in Flora getting cross about it or dyeing her hair pink.

Rain. Rain. Rain.

Today none of the sixth-formers went out at lunchtime. Flora and all her noisy friends took over half the canteen and the rest of us had to squeeze up like sardines in a tin, except I found a table on my own in the corner where I can watch people but they can’t see me because I’m hiding behind a
pillar
, and that is when I saw Joss Bateman again. He was in the lunch queue, also alone, but somehow his aloneness was different to mine because he didn’t look invisible, he just looked like he couldn’t care less. Graham Lewis, who Flora says is an idiot and nobody likes, tried to sneak past him in the queue. Joss stuck his foot out and everyone laughed their heads off at the sight of Graham lying on the floor covered in chips, but Joss just sort of smiled and stepped over him like he wasn’t even there, and the next thing I knew I heard the scrape of a chair being pulled back and his voice above me saying ‘Do you mind if I sit here?’
and I looked up and there he was.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Tough,’ he said, and sat down anyway.

We didn’t talk. He was eating the pasta bake, and I just focused on my rice pudding. However much I hate Clarendon Free School, you have to hand it to them, they make a mean rice pudding.  I tried to ignore Joss but then he coughed, and when I looked up he had stuck his spoon on his nose. He looked completely ridiculous.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘You’re even prettier when you smile.’

Which was really cheesy (as well as a lie – I am never pretty). I would have left except he sat back in his chair with his arms crossed and these long, long legs stretched out in front of him, looking like he just
expected
conversation.