Desperate Measures (2 page)

We went back the way we came and up to the woods. Jamie and Sam showed me their camp. It’s a secret though so don’t tell anyone. Only Jamie, Sam and me know about it. They’ve made a little den out of branches and ferns. It’s lovely inside, all green and fuzzy.

We spent ages messing about. Jamie and Sam were making the den bigger and I made some delicious stew. It’s ever so easy. You just get a load of leaves and mud and stuff, put them in a hole in the ground and mix it all up with a long stick. I didn’t have any water so I used my break-time drink. I had to pick out a couple of boogeybugs but it looked all right.

‘Let’s come here again tomorrow before school,’ said Jamie.

‘Yeah. I’ll knock for you both really early,’ Sam told us.

When Jamie dropped me off at the school gates everyone had already gone in. Mrs Edwards was standing outside the Unit talking to Vicky.

‘Where the hell have you been Rhianna Davies?’ Vicky shouted. Her eyes were all red and puffy. I looked down and counted the lino squares. I wasn’t going to tell her about Jamie’s camp. Tough titty if Mrs Edwards told her off. She shouldn’t go off with stinky boys, should she?

Mrs Edwards said there was no harm done and Vicky had better get to her class. We did cooking all morning and I made cheese straws. Except you couldn’t blow through them. They just go soggy.

When it was home-time I saved Vicky my three biggest
cheese straws. I wrapped them up in some foil Mrs Edwards gave me but Vicky said she didn’t want any. She said she was still cross with me about this morning.

We were walking down the corridor when suddenly she stopped and turned round and started staring at the noticeboard.

‘What’s the matter Vick?’ I asked but she didn’t say anything. Then this tall boy came up to her and she went all red. Even her neck. She looked like a big red tomato.

‘You look like a big red tomato Vicky,’ I said. She didn’t answer so I said it again but much louder this time. ‘Vicky. I said you look like a big red tomato.’

‘Shut . . . up,’ she said with her teeth gritty, then she grinned at the tall boy all smiley-toothy.

It was Manky Matt. He saw my cheese straws wrapped up in the foil and said, ‘What’s that then?’ I said cheese straws and he said could he have one. I didn’t want to give him one but then I thought if he was my friend too, Vicky would let me walk to school with them tomorrow. He took two. He was only supposed to take one. Do you know, some people can’t even count.

‘You must be Vicky’s cousin,’ he said with a grin.

‘We’re sisters,’ I said. ‘Twins.’

Vicky was looking at her shoes.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Vicky told me you were cousins . . .’

I heard her call after me but I didn’t stop. I ran past the toilets. Charlene Slackton was outside, leaning on the wall talking to another girl. They screeched with laughter and Charlene stuck out her foot and the other
girl said ‘Loser’ as I tripped up.

I was scared so I got up straight away and ran out of the entrance, through the gates and up the road. Vicky was shouting at me to stop but I didn’t. I ran across the road. A car slammed on its brakes and the driver opened his window and shouted rude words at me.

Vicky caught me and pulled me back on to the pavement. She was really angry. ‘You stupid idiot! You could have been run over!’

I pulled away from her. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘You know you’re not allowed to go home on your own. You know that!’

‘I hate you Vicky.’

‘Good.’

‘I wish I didn’t have a sister. Especially a horrible twin sister.’

‘The feeling’s mutual.’

‘You’re mutual too . . . And smelly. Really really smelly!’ I shouted at her.

We turned round and started walking home. I didn’t want her walking next to me so every time she caught up I raced on. It really got on her nuckets. Serve her right. I wished she
was
my cousin. Then I wouldn’t have to see her every day or share a room with her and have to listen to her snoring like a hippo every night.

When we got home Mrs Frankish was there. I asked her if she’d got me a present but she just sort of mumbled something. Paul came in looking all serious. Mrs Frankish said she’d got something very important to talk to us
about. I told her I knew all about having babies already because of Sarah and it’s really gross and no way was I ever making one. Paul sat down and told us that Sarah was in hospital. I asked if she was having her baby now but Mrs Frankish said it was much too early. ‘So what’s she doing then?’ I said. Mrs Frankish said Sarah wasn’t well and she was going to have to stay in hospital so they could keep a really close eye on her and the baby to make sure everything went OK. Paul kept shuffling about and saying he was sorry and then he told us he wouldn’t be able to look after us for a while. I said was Sarah going to go away like Mum and he just started crying so I gave him my last cheese straw. He didn’t eat it, he just kept looking at it and rolling it on the table like it was a twig or something.

Jamie burst in. He was all out of breath and he had blood on his face. He wiped it off with his sleeve but no one noticed except me because they were all crying except Mrs Frankish who was patting Paul’s hand. Some of her nail varnish was chipped off so I had a good look but I didn’t see any black. (Witches have black fingernails, Jamie told me.) Jamie said, ‘What’s up?’ and she explained it all over again. When he asked who we were going to stay with, Paul just looked at Mrs Frankish and didn’t say anything.

Jamie said no way was he going back to those rude word, rude word, very rude word children’s homes. Mrs Frankish didn’t even tell him off for swearing – she just sighed and said we couldn’t go back there anyway because they were all full up. I asked, ‘Where we going then?’ and there was another big silence. Then Mrs
Frankish said that there was a lovely school that I could go to, and they had a swimming pool and you didn’t go home when lessons were over, you stayed and had a sleep-over every night. I always wanted to have a sleepover but my friend Maxine can never come to stay because she has funny fits when she goes to sleep. I said great, I can’t wait but then Vicky said no way was I going to be parcelled off like that.

‘But you’ll come too Vick,’ I said, ‘and Jamie. I’ll tell them you don’t like swimming.’

I’ve got my five-hundred-metre badge. Vicky says she can swim but she can’t – I’ve seen her and she puts her foot down all the time.

Mrs Frankish said they couldn’t come because it wasn’t suitable for them. I asked why not and she said it was a special school. I told her Vicky and Jamie were special and she just nodded and said of course they were. But then she said she had managed to find two families who could each foster one child for a while. Mrs Frankish said she was sorry but it was all arranged. We were going tomorrow.

I followed her out of the room.

‘Tomorrow? Tomorrow! No way!’ I yelled. ‘You can’t do this to us!’

‘I’ve been chasing round half the afternoon trying to find places for you all,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Believe me, we’re lucky to have got what we have.’

‘We? WE! It’s not we, it’s nothing to do with “we”!
You’re
not going to be shoved away with some horrible family or carted off to some manky school where you don’t know anyone and no one knows you.’

She turned and looked at me. ‘There’s no point in making a fuss, Vicky,’ she said with that ‘I’m a caring and concerned social worker’ look slapped across her face. ‘There
is
no other option.’

I could feel the anger boiling up in me. She must have
realised because then she said, ‘I’ll just leave you to have a little time out on your own to calm down a bit, then you’d better start getting your stuff together.’ She started to walk out but stopped at the doorway.

‘Oh,’ she said casually, like this sort of thing happened all the time, ‘I’ve got some bin bags if you haven’t got enough cases.’

Bin bags! That just about summed it up. She was shuffling us around as if we were no more than a few bags of rubbish to be tidied out of her way.

Well, what about what
we
wanted? Didn’t that matter? That stupid woman had so much power over us. It was criminal. And what was worse, she pretended that everything she did was in our best interest or some other rubbish. She didn’t really give a monkey’s. Once she finished her shift and had gone home, as long as we were neatly filed away in her out-tray, I bet she never even gave us a single thought.

I didn’t want to stay with some family twenty miles away, I didn’t want to leave my school and I didn’t want to leave Matt. It wasn’t fair. I’m not going, I thought. And I’m not leaving Rhianna and Jamie either. Jamie was always in trouble; if he was shoved somewhere else he’d really go off the rails and Rhianna was such a baby it would be cruel. She might be a right royal pain in the butt ninety-nine per cent of the time, but she was my sister and she needed me.

But what could I do? I grabbed my mobile and pressed Rosie’s number. I hadn’t known her for long and she was pretty odd sometimes but she was my friend and boy, was I a friend in need. Maybe she could help; after all she was
supposed to have an IQ of three billion or something. The second I heard her voice, I realised I was living in cloud cuckoo land. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have possibly said, ‘Hey Rosie, will your parents put me up for a bit? Oh, and there’s my delinquent little brother and my brain-damaged twin sister too . . .’ So I wittered on about Matt and she promised to lend me a book of seventeenth-century romantic poetry. I didn’t get round to telling her that tomorrow I’d be living somewhere else, without Jamie, without Rhianna and I wouldn’t see her or Matt again for ages. I don’t know how I did it really. Old Mackintosh, my drama teacher, should put me up for the lead role in the school play. Except I won’t be at the same school. I’ll be at yet another new place with no friends because I can’t get into anyone’s stupid little clique and I’ll be spending every break-time head down, walking purposefully round pretending I’m just on my way to meet up with my fantastic gang of super cool mates.

Hopeless. It was all totally hopeless.

Mrs Frankish cooked us tea because the hospital phoned Paul. He looked really scared and when I asked, he said he had to rush up there to take Sarah a fresh nightie. She’d only been there one day! It must be a really posh hospital and if you spill your dinner or something you have to change your nightie or they shout at you and tell you off. When Mum was in hospital they never told her off and she used to knock things over all the time.

There was this lady there and she used to come and do Mum’s lovely long hair every week until it went all thin and wispy and then she’d only let me do it. I’d bring in all my hair slides and scrunchees and lay them on the bed cover and she’d pick which ones she wanted. Then I’d put them in really gently and bring the little mirror over and show her and it would make her smile for a little while.

I didn’t have time to finish my card for Sarah. It says
GET WE
. After Paul rushed off I went into the kitchen and told Mrs Frankish he had forgotten to take the clean nightie with him and Sarah would get into big trouble. She said couldn’t I see she was busy cooking tea and told me to go away and not to be so silly. She had three blobs of orange sploppy stuff on her black jacket. They looked like three orange ladybirds.

Tea was yucky. It was supposed to be spaghetti hoops with little sausages but because she’s a witch I think she bunged in some chopped worms or frogs’ eyeballs when no one was looking. Jamie ate mine. Do you know, he said he really liked it! Vicky said she was a vegetibblarian and made herself a ham sandwich when Mrs Frankish was on the phone. Then Vicky and me got the birthday cake out of the box and put the candles on it. I blew them all out twice and made two wishes but I can’t tell you what I wished for because if I do they won’t come true. Sorry. I had three and a half pieces of cake because Vicky left most of hers.

After tea we went out into the garden to Jamie’s tree house. He didn’t usually let us in but he said we could come up as long as we didn’t touch anything. Vicky told him she wouldn’t want to touch his scrotty old rubbish but she came anyway to get away from Mrs Frankish.

I loved Jamie’s tree house, it was like a little wooden nest but instead of soft feathers to line it, he’d pinned up all the postcards from Dad. He’s a lorry driver and when he used to drive somewhere he would always post Jamie a card. He’s got millions and billions and trillions. I tried to
count them once but I kept getting it wrong. It’s a good job Dad doesn’t send them any more because there isn’t any space left.

Once at school Jamie told this boy Ollie Stanmore about them all but Ollie didn’t believe him so Jamie whacked him. Jamie does a lot of whacking. I heard Mrs Frankish tell Sarah that it’s because he’s got a lot of emotional baggage but that’s not true he’s only got his school rucksack. (Mrs Frankish gave him five bin liners for all his stuff!) Sarah and Paul had to go and see Mr Biggs and Mrs Featherstone because Jamie gave Ollie a nosebleed once and he nearly got secluded from school. Jamie said he didn’t care and it served him right but then Mrs Featherstone asked what would your Dad say if he knew what you’d done, and he started crying. He never cries. Once he fell off the climbing frame in the park and broke his arm but he didn’t even cry then and the bone was all poking out and there was blood everywhere.

I tried to count all the postcards again. I got to twenty-seven but then I gave up because I couldn’t concentrate. I wished Dad was still living with us. Every Friday night when he came back from work, he used to bring me a big tube of Smarties. He’d watch me line them up on the table in their different colours and then I’d count them and do some sums before I ate them. He always helped me get the answers right. Sometimes, when he used to come home late, Mum would let us wait up for him. He’d come through the front door and we’d run up to him in a mad bundle. He was the strongest man in the whole world. He could pick us all up in one go and swing us round and
Mum would laugh and yell at him to watch the ornaments. Sometimes when I try to talk to Vicky about Mum and Dad she says there’s no point remembering anything because it’s like watching someone else’s home movie. I don’t know what she means and she gets all cross if I ask.