Me Myself Milly (12 page)

I got the shoebox out from under the bed and picked out three random dolls. I didn’t care any more which ones I used, I just wanted to make up the numbers. Then I spotted a small plastic
model of Eeyore on the windowsill. Perfect. I was going to use that for Devlin; it would serve him right for being such a grump.

There was a part of me that didn’t want to bother with this stupid ritual any more. Up until recently it had been a good way of keeping track of who was living in the house, which seemed
pointless now. Devlin obviously didn’t want anything to do with us.

Before I put the new dolls in and there was just us downstairs, it hit me as to exactly how small my family had become. Not for the first time I began to wonder about grandparents. I’d got
used to not knowing who my dad was and accepted the fact that I’d never know. His parents were never going to be grandparents to us, but Mum’s parents had to be somewhere. Before,
whenever we’d asked about them, Mum always shrugged off our questions and said it wasn’t important. Well, she was wrong. It had suddenly become very important. What if something
happened to Mum?

I found her in the sitting room reading a book. She looked up when I came in and I said, ‘Mum, I want to talk to you.’ She put her book down.

‘What is it?’

‘I want to know about your mum and dad. I mean, they’re my grandparents and I’ve never met them. I don’t know anything about them and I think I have a right to
know.’

Mum looked through me for a whole minute, like she was thinking really hard. Eventually she said, ‘They’re called Eileen and Frank Pond and they live in Wimbledon.’

I couldn’t believe it. It was that easy.

‘So how come I’ve never met them?’

Mum sighed. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘How do you mean?’ It didn’t sound very complicated to me.

‘The thing is, when I got pregnant they didn’t approve because I wasn’t married. We argued. Milly, shut your mouth, it’s hanging open.’ I closed my mouth.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ Mum continued. ‘This is the twenty-first century and all that, but you have to understand that they’re from a different
generation. Actually, they’re quite old. I was adopted, which was something they didn’t tell me until I got pregnant and then it all came out.’

Mum looked cross, like she was remembering the awful scene and I felt guilty for reminding her about it.

‘Anyway, things were said, hurtful things, and we haven’t really been in touch since.’

‘Okay, sorry,’ I said and went back to my room.

I brought it up with Ted on my next visit.

‘So what’s the problem?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve lost anything. I’ve never had grandparents, and I still don’t have any. But I sort of thought they were dead or something
and then I found out they weren’t, they were living in Wimbledon, and just for a second I thought perhaps I could go and see them.’

‘Would your mum mind if you contacted them?’

‘I don’t know. Probably, you know what she’s like; stubborn as hell. Besides, what if I got in touch with them and then I didn’t like them? It would be embarrassing. I
think it’s best if I just forget about the whole thing.’

‘How’s the journal going?’ asked Ted.

‘I’m working on it,’ I told him. Ted asking made me feel prickly and I wondered if that’s how Mum feels when people ask her how her next book’s going.

I sort of want to write about what happened, but at the same time it scares me. I’m going to try though. I might start on it tonight.

Lily and I were in the kitchen, trying to scrape together a picnic.

Lily had woken up early and shaken me until I woke up too, and told me we were going on an adventure.

It’s true it was unseasonably cold that day, Sunday, April 20th. Lily was unstoppable though and pulled all the covers off my bed to prevent me from snuggling back down to sleep. Sunday
was a lie-in day and I reluctantly got dressed. She wouldn’t tell me where we were going, it was a surprise.

I think she was hoping that we’d be able to sneak out before anyone else woke up and asked where we were going. But the sun was out and when we got to the kitchen Jeanie was in the
backyard, hanging out some sheets on the line.

We made it into a game – trying to find a picnic without her seeing us, though I was sure she could hear us giggling a mile off. We knew better than to try and find a picnic in our own
kitchen where the bread was always brown and grainy and there was nothing like crisps or biscuits.

As it turned out we didn’t have much more luck upstairs. We managed to find two boiled eggs and the tail-end of a loaf of white bread, but we couldn’t be bothered to make them
into sandwiches so we stuffed them into a carrier bag, along with a bottle of salad cream and an apple and a dry-looking satsuma that had, not unsurprisingly, been overlooked in the bottom of the
fruit bowl.

We were just casting about the kitchen, trying to find any loose change that might have been left lying around because, Lily said, we’d have to go some of the way on the bus, when
Archie walked in.

‘What are you doing? Where are you going? I want to come.’

I cringed. Archie really brought out the worst in Lily and I suspect Lily brought out the worst in Archie, too.

‘Go away, Squit,’ she said in her bored voice. We used to call him Squib because he was on the small side for seven, but then Lily had changed it to ‘Squit’ one day
because he’d had a tummy upset. I went back to calling him Archie when she did that. I felt sorry for him because Lily was always so mean to him.

‘ You can’t come with us because we haven’t got enough food for three,’ Lily told him. She was whispering because she didn’t want to alert Jeanie to what we were
doing. There are two Lilys: the charming, cheerful one that she wants the adults to see and the cruel, dismissive one that comes out when people like Archie are around.

Archie left the kitchen and we could hear him thudding up the stairs. Lily thought she’d won so we started to get our outdoor things on.

‘I think we’d better wear our wellies,’ Lily decided, but I couldn’t find mine.

‘I think they’re in Mum’s room,’ I told her after we’d looked everywhere else.

‘We can’t go in there,’ said Lily. ‘She’ll wake up and want to come with us.’

I found a rucksack, though, so I stuffed the lunch bag into it. ‘Should we take a phone?’ I asked.

‘ You can if you want. Mine hasn’t got any credit on it,’ Lily replied.

‘Mine needs recharging,’ I said.

Lily was putting on David’s old duffle coat.

‘What do you want to wear that smelly thing for?’ I said.

‘Because it’s cold. Anyhow, it’s dead retro.’

‘It makes you look like Paddington Bear,’I told her.

Then Archie came thumping back down the stairs. He was clutching a banana, a yoghurt and a teaspoon, and a packet of chocolate biscuits. ‘I’ve got my picnic,’ he announced
and started to pull his shoes on. I glanced at Lily. This was the first time that we realised the others were keeping food in their rooms and not in the kitchen where we could get it.

‘ You still can’t come,’ Lily told him. ‘We’ve only got enough bus fare for two.’

‘I’ve got my own,’ said Archie, waving a five-pound note at us. I could tell Lily was wavering at the sight of all that money but she held firm.

‘ You can’t stop me coming,’ Archie announced. ‘ You can’t stop me walking down the road and getting on a bus and then getting off the bus and then . . .’
He had to stop because he didn’t know what was going to happen or where we were going.

Lily was getting impatient. She wanted to go and we all knew this argument could go on for ages and then result in him following us and ruining the adventure.

So she played her trump card. ‘Milly – you decide.’

I stared at her. She was so certain I was going to side with her. I stared at Archie. I knew that if I told him he couldn’t come he’d back down. But I couldn’t do it; I just
stood looking at each of them in turn and saying nothing.

In my mind this moment lasts for ever, though it can only really have been a few seconds. This is the moment that I play over and over again in my mind and sometimes I hear myself saying,
‘No, sorry, Archie, you can’t come,’ and watch him as he thumps away up the stairs. If only that was what had happened.

ButI didn’t. I did nothing. It amazes me how doing nothing resulted in such dire consequences.

So I said nothing and Lily finally lost patience and said, ‘Well, I’m going anyway,’ and grabbed her duffle coat and went out the door. I followed her and Archie followed me
and that’s how we arrived at the bus stop: a sad little line following Lily on her adventure.

We got on the first bus that came along. I’m sure Lily didn’t know where we were going, she was just making it up as we went along. Maybe that was the adventure.

Archie seemed to know that he was there on sufferance so he sat quietly and didn’t make a nuisance of himself.

The bus drove out into the countryside and I wondered where Lily was going to get off, or if she even knew and how she would decide. I looked out the window at the trees and cows and houses.
The bus stopped in a village and three boys got on. They were older than us and they came up the stairs where we were sitting. Lily was immediately on high alert. She followed them with her eyes as
they made their way to the back of the bus.

Lily kept turning round to look at them so I kicked her on the shin.

‘Stop it! They’re not interested in us, for God’s sake,’ I told her. ‘And even if they were, I’m not interested in them.’

‘Well, I might be,’ said Lily. ‘The one in the blue hoodie isn’t bad.’

I decided to ignore her and them. But when we got to the next village and the boys got up to get off the bus, Lily watched them disappear down the stairs then stood up and said, ‘Come
on, we’re getting off here too.’ It was so obvious she was following them and I really didn’t want to, but Lily was already halfway down the stairs, so I followed her and Archie
followed me.

I knew that Amy was trouble. She turned up in our religious studies class today. It turns out she was meant to be there all along but had been sent to the ‘out
time’ room for a month for bad behaviour. If it was meant to reform her it didn’t work.

When we walked into the room Amy said in a loud, posh voice, ‘I used to go to St
Fart’s
, don’t you know, darling!’ which isn’t how Effy speaks but we got the
point. Naturally we ignored her but I could see that Effy was embarrassed and upset. Luckily the teacher arrived and told us to get our work out which we did, apart from Amy who got her nail
varnish out instead.

When the teacher told her to get her books out Amy said, ‘Who’s going to make me?’

The teacher ignored this remark and got some paper out of the drawer and put it on Amy’s desk in front of her. Amy made a big show of ‘accidentally’ knocking it onto the
floor.

The teacher went back to her desk and got a report card out and started filling it in. Anyone who’s been on out time has to go a whole week without a behaviour mark. Amy wasn’t going
to make it through the day.

Mrs Clark, our religious studies teacher, is okay. Katy told me she’s covering for their other teacher who’s on maternity leave. When she’d filled in the card I thought she was
going to give it to Amy and tell her to take it to the office but she put it back in the drawer.

She then told us about the new project she wanted us to do. We have to write about the worst day of our lives and then put a positive spin on it. She said it cheerfully, as if she couldn’t
imagine us having anything really bad to write about.

I wondered if Mrs Clark had really thought this project through. Asking a room full of adolescent girls to write about the worst day of their lives was a bit risky if you ask me. It could open
up a whole can of worms.

Amy started acting up again and Mrs Clark was forced to deal with her.

Most people were chatting among themselves, trying to work out exactly which day was the worst. I could hear one girl telling her friend that it must have been last Christmas Day when her mum
gave her a pair of boots and a new handbag, and how pleased she was, and then she found out they were fakes and she spent the rest of the day in tears.

Mrs Clark must have decided she’d had enough of Amy because she got the report card out of the desk drawer and handed it to her, telling her to go and report to Mr Hargreaves. I’d
die of fright if I had to report to Mr Hargreaves. He’s seriously scary, which is probably why he was chosen to deal with the trouble-makers. Amy took the card and held it up in front of Mrs
Clark, then calmly tore it in half and dropped the bits in the bin. Mrs Clark pressed a button on her mobile phone. She must have Mr Hargreaves on speed dial. She asked him to come to room
twenty-four and pick up Amy.