Little Darlings (8 page)

When Sweetie was fed and changed and ready for the cameras again, I reluctantly laid Mrs Furry down for a rest on her bed and sat on the floor with my sister, trying my hardest to look winsome. I was hopeless at it. I couldn't keep my lips over my teeth and my head kept lolling self-consciously to one side, and I was so worried about blinking each time the camera flashed that I stared, cross-eyed and rigid, into the lens. Sweetie was newborn but she already had the knack. She couldn't quite smile yet but she opened her blue eyes wide and pursed her little rosebud lips and clasped one of my fingers in the cutest way, already playing to the camera.

When we were done at last, and the photographer and his assistant were packing up all the weird white dishes and silver paper and endless cameras and stands and batteries and cables, I went and knelt by the doll's house. I woke Mrs Furry and she trailed wretchedly round each room, kissing each bedknob on the bed, the woolly edges of the rug, the rings of the cooker. She even bent down and kissed the toilet.

‘What's she doing? Is she being sick?' asked Mark, kneeling down beside me.

I blushed in case he thought I was being rude. ‘She's saying goodbye to the house,' I whispered.

‘Doesn't she want to live there any more?'

‘Yes, it's her absolute dream home!' I said, which made him laugh.

‘Then tell her she can stay there. It looks like the doll's house is yours to keep.'

‘Really!'

‘We tried to hire it, but it was going to cost so much we bought it outright. I don't see the point of lumbering it back to the studio. You keep it, sweetie.'

I thought for one stomach-churning moment that he meant it was my baby sister's doll's house. ‘I'm not Sweetie, I'm Sunset,' I said, crestfallen.

‘I know, darling. I call everyone sweetie.' He very gently pinched the end of my nose. ‘And you're a total sweetie.'

Oh, I loved Mark so much. For a long time I pretended that he and I lived in the pink and white house together, with Mrs Furry as our housekeeper.

Mum bought me two doll's house dolls but I never liked them very much. They had china heads and stiff white cloth bodies so they couldn't sit down properly. I had to prop them up or let them
lie flat on the floor as if they'd suddenly fainted. They were dressed in Victorian clothes, the lady in a purple crinoline and the man in a grey frock coat and pinstripe trousers. Mum said I should call them Victoria and Albert. I didn't really want to. It made them seem stiffer and stranger than ever. I started having bad dreams about six-foot monster dolls with painted heads and staring eyes, ready to fell me with one flick of their stiffly stuffed arms. I banished Victoria and Albert to the very bottom of my sock-and-knicker drawer.

I invited the next-size-up teddy into the doll's house to keep Mrs Furry company. This was Mr Fat Bruin, a tubby bear with a big smile who told jolly stories, especially after I'd given him a drink out of a miniature liqueur bottle.

I decided Mrs Furry and Mr Fat Bruin might like some children, so I gave them Chop Suey, a tiny Chinese cat permanently waving his paw, and Trotty, a pink glass horse, and a baby, Peanut, specially made out of pink Plasticine.

Mum got cross with me when she found me playing with my new family.

‘Why are you cluttering up your lovely doll's house with all this
junk
? I bought you proper dollies to play with. These silly things aren't
dolls
. They look all wrong. They're too big or too little.
And you know I hate you playing with Plasticine – it gets everywhere.' She squeezed Peanut, mangling her terribly.

I said I was sorry and agreed I was silly and took my family out of the doll's house – but as soon as Mum had gone out of the room I brought them all back. I asked Mrs Furry to stand by the stove to cook them my favourite meal of sausage and mash and baked beans. Mr Fat Bruin flopped on the sofa with a tiny folded-up scrap of newspaper. Chop Suey played marbles with tiny beads. Trotty did her ballet exercises wearing a wisp of pink feather. I tenderly moulded Peanut back into shape and tucked her up in her matchbox cot. I'd keep my family safe and splendidly housed no matter what.

They still live in the doll's house now, years and years later. I've got new dolls, little sturdy smiling ones, and five tiny felt mice, all in different outfits, but they're just friends and cousins to my proper family. I've got lots more furniture now too: a four-poster bed with a set of rose-silk covers, a television, a tiny bird in a white cage, rugs in every room, pictures hanging on the walls, curtains at each window, but the original key pieces are still my favourites. Mrs Furry has a whole set of saucepans and can serve her meals on special miniature willow-pattern plates. Mr Fat Bruin's
sofa has velvet cushions with little braid tassels. Chop Suey and Trotty and Peanut have roomfuls of tiny toys, including a perfect miniature doll's house. It has a little hook at the side so it can swing open. I've made minute Plasticine replicas of my family inside, playing with another even smaller doll's house. I like to imagine that inside
that
one there's another weeny family playing with a crumb-size doll's house, on and on until it makes me feel giddy.

The doll's house is still my favourite possession, even though I suppose I'm much too old to play with dolls now. Sweetie wanted to play with the doll's house too as soon as she could crawl, but she just chewed on the furniture. She very nearly swallowed Peanut.

I tried gently distracting her, but it only made her more determined. She started using the doll's house to pull herself up, hanging onto the little window ledges and buckling them. I couldn't bear it and tapped her little scrabbling fingers – and Mum saw and shouted that I was a bad, jealous, selfish sister and I must learn to share my toys with Sweetie. I was willing to share
most
things with her, but not the doll's house. So I dragged it laboriously inside my wardrobe and shut the door on it, so that Sweetie couldn't get at it.

I kept the doll's house in the wardrobe, very sensibly, because Ace proved to be a total menace when it came to wrecking my things. In this week alone he's spoiled the points of every single one of my felt pens and pulled the head right off Suma, my biggest teddy bear.

But Wardrobe City is safe behind locked doors. I only open up my world when Sweetie and Ace are out or asleep. I've made three more houses out of shoe boxes stuck together, furnishing them all myself, and built a towering apartment building out of wooden bricks. After various terrible castrophes I had to use up several tubes of Evostik cementing the bricks together.

There's also two shops. One sells little packets of cereal and small pots of jam and miniature alcohol bottles and a variety of Plasticine ready-meals. The other is a clothes shop specializing in a denim range – lots of little jackets and jeans that I made out of an old pair of dungarees. There's also a small farm so everyone has fresh milk and eggs every day, and a garage with a fleet of Dinky cars. I'm secretly saving up for a castle, though it's going to be a bit of a squash fitting it in.

I don't ever tell anyone about Wardrobe City. They'd think me weirder than ever at school. I hate school. I've been to four different schools
already and they're all horrible. I didn't mind lesson time at my last school, but Ridgemount House is awful because there aren't any rules. We don't even have to do proper lessons if we don't feel like it. The other kids mess around all the time. I don't fit in at all. They don't like me. They call me Wonky Gob. I haven't got a single friend.

I can't tell Mum or Dad. They'll just go on about the tough schools they attended when they were little kids and say I have to learn to lighten up and join in with the fun and then I'll soon make friends. Like Sweetie. She is in Year One at my school and every single child in her class wants to be her best friend.

I hear a howl and a scratch-scratch-scratching outside my door.

‘Go back to sleep, it's too early,' I hiss.

I want to rearrange the bedrooms in my doll's house in peace – but Bessie grumbles and moans and complains so bitterly that I have to shut Wardrobe City up and go to her.

I open my bedroom door and pick her up. She's an old lady cat now, but she's still beautiful, a big fat black cat with white paws. Someone gave her to Mum after she's done a modelling job with kittens, but Mum doesn't really look after her, and Dad doesn't like cats. Sweetie's supposed to be allergic
to them, and Bessie avoids Ace because he chases her, so basically I'm the one who looks after her now.

‘It's not breakfast time yet, Bessie,' I whisper, rubbing my cheek against her soft furry head.

Bessie disagrees. It's
always
breakfast time as far as she's concerned. I carry her downstairs to the kitchen and empty a tin of her wet goo into a bowl. She gollops it down eagerly while I keep her company with a bowl of cornflakes. No one else is stirring. Claudia lies in as long as Ace will let her. Margaret, our housekeeper, doesn't come to do breakfast until late on a Sunday. Her husband, John, doesn't start mowing the lawn or fixing stuff till midday so that Dad isn't disturbed. It's very peaceful in the early morning.

Bessie finishes her bowl before I finish mine. She goes to the back door and starts yowling again to be let out. It's hard working getting all the locks and bolts sorted but I'm a dab hand at it now. I open the door and Bessie shoots out, across the long lawn, round the pool, under the trampoline, up the path to the wild woody part where the grass is high and she can hide.

I follow her out in my pyjamas, snatching John's old gardening fleece from the peg on the back door. I feel less inclined to stick my feet into his
gardening boots so I wander out barefoot. The grass is wet and tickly. It feels a bit like paddling. I skip about, waving my arms in the air, kicking my legs out, being a ballet dancer.

Mum once sent me to dancing classes when I was about five. Maybe it was to get me out of the way when Sweetie was born. Mum said it would help me to look graceful. I stuck it out for a whole year. I liked Miss Lucy, who taught us. She was very kind and never ever got cross even when I kept starting on the wrong foot and twirling the wrong way. I was the only child in the class who couldn't skip. I'd feel myself getting hot and red, and I could see all the other little girls sniggering as I staggered about. But Miss Lucy always said, ‘Well done, Sunset. I can see you're trying hard, dear.'

Then one day Mum couldn't take me because she was having extensions at the hairdresser's and the nanny had to take Sweetie to the doctor's, and Margaret and John were having a weekend off, and the temp girl from the agency didn't turn up – so Dad took me dancing.

He sat with all the other mums while they twittered and fussed because they were actually sitting next to Danny Kilman, and most of them had had crushes on him since they were little kids. Dad just sat basking in the attention, leaning
back, hands behind his head, his long skinny legs stretched out, his cowboy boots pointing upwards – and I was so proud that he was
my
dad. But when I started dancing he sat up straight. After a while he hunched over, head bent, as if he couldn't bear to look at me any more.

As soon as the dancing lesson finished, while I was still doing a wobbly curtsy with all the other little girls, Dad took me by the hand and hauled me out of the room.

‘Do you like dancing, Sunset?' he asked.

‘I don't know,' I mumbled.

‘Well, I don't see the point of you going, darling, because you're absolute rubbish at it,' Dad said – and I never went back.

I know I'm still rubbish, I'm not daft, but I love whirling around and leaping about, and so long as I can't see myself I can pretend I'm in a sticky-out white dress with pink ballet shoes on my feet. I do a figure-of-eight around the pool, a wafting float through the long grass, and then start a serious wood-nymph ballet in and out of the trees. I'm getting seriously out of breath now, so I slow down and sweep a deep curtsy to my imaginary audience while they clap and cheer and throw flowers at me.

I can hear clapping!
Real
clapping, muted but
unmistakable. I look up and there's a face at the top of the wall, elbows, two clapping hands. I feel myself blushing all over. I must look such a
fool
. Who is it? A girl, not very old, only about my age. A thin dark girl with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

Do I know her? She looks sort of familiar. She's not one of the girls at school, she's not any of the girls who used to come round to play, she's . . . She's the girl from last night at the premiere, the girl who said I was lucky!

What is she doing
here
? And how did she get up the wall? It's a good six feet high. I stand dithering, still brick-red, not knowing what to do. Maybe I should run right back into the house. Perhaps I should find John – he's meant to be our security guy. I should tell him there's a girl climbing the wall.

‘Hello,' she says tentatively.

‘Hello,' I say, as if it's the most normal thing in the world for us to meet like this.

‘I liked your dancing,' she says.

My heart thumps but she doesn't seem to be teasing me.

‘I must have looked a right idiot,' I mumble.

I realize I
still
look incredibly stupid in my pink teddy-bear pyjamas and John's old fleece. She
looks so effortlessly cool in her black T-shirt. She's still got her little black mittens on. Her mum was dressed identically.

‘Where's your mum?' I ask.

‘Oh, she's here, but she's asleep just now.'

‘What do you mean, here?'

She nods to her side of the wall. ‘Here!'

‘What, your mum's sleeping on the
pavement
?'

‘Yep.'

‘Is she all right?'