The Strawberry Sisters (20 page)

‘The police are on their way to Dad’s. I need to go . . .’ She stood up and looked around as if she couldn’t remember where the door was.

‘What should we do?’ Chloe asked.

‘I . . .’ Mum’s face was white.

My heart was thumping. What if something really bad had happened? But Lucy would scream if anyone tried to take Kirsti; she would never let anything happen to her, she loves her so much. Then it
hit me.

‘It was Lucy,’ I said.

They all looked at me.

‘You know she’s crazy about Kirsti. I bet she took her. Maybe she went for a walk with her.’

‘She’s not allowed out by herself, she knows that!’ Mum said.

‘When Lucy knows things, she doesn’t always do them,’ Chloe pointed out.

Amelia had picked up her phone and hit some buttons.

‘Dad?’ she said into it. ‘Yes, I know. No, we haven’t found her. Listen, is the pram gone? Did Lucy take the pram?’

That was a very clever thing to think of.

‘He’s looking,’ Amelia said to us. We waited. Amelia’s face lit up. ‘It’s gone! That’s good. Lucy’s taken Kirsti out, but we can find them. Yes,
we’ll go now.’

She hung up.

‘Mum, you go in the car.’ She handed her her phone and her keys. ‘Chloe and I will go to the shop and the swings. Ella, stay here in case they come back.’

‘Check your room,’ Mum said to me. ‘See if she’s taken anything. Or left a note.’

I ran up the stairs and looked on Lucy’s bed and around the room, but I couldn’t find anything helpful.

So Mum dashed off to Dad’s house and Chloe and Amelia left to search too. I sat next to the phone in case Lucy called. But I knew she wouldn’t. She hadn’t got a phone and I
didn’t think she would even be tall enough to reach the slot to put the money in a phone box. Besides, I was pretty sure that she didn’t want anyone to know where she was because she
wanted to be alone with Kirsti. I felt sick in my stomach. Lucy is smart, but what if she forgot to look both ways when she crossed the road?

I should have known that something like this was going to happen. I could see how miserable she was about Kirsti. I should have tried harder to make Dad and Mum understand that Lucy was horribly
upset about not living with Kirsti. I really thought that I had helped by telling Lucy that she could teach Kirsti everything about being a Strawberry Sister. The day before, at Dad’s,
I’d heard Lucy singing Kirsti the rude song that Chloe made up about farting in the bath. She seemed so cheerful that I was sure I’d solved her problem. But perhaps I should never have
said that stuff about teaching Kirsti because maybe that’s what gave Lucy the idea that it was OK to go wandering off with her. I wish I’d been better at helping. If anything happened
to either of them, it would be all my fault.

I lifted the phone up to check that it was working, then put it back down again quickly just in case that was the exact moment that Lucy chose to call. I went to the window to see if she was
coming down the road, but she wasn’t. I filled a glass of water from the tap, but it was hard to swallow so I poured it away again. I stared around at the untidy kitchen and decided to get
started on the washing-up, but all the time I couldn’t stop thinking about Lucy and Kirsti. Kirsti still needed feeding all the time. Suvi said baby stomachs are weeny so, even when
she’s just had a feed, it’s not long before Kirsti is starving again. What if she was crying now?

My mind felt like it was doing crazy loop-the-loops. I needed to think straight. I sat down on the sofa and took ten deep breaths.

If Lucy really was trying to show Kirsti how to be a Strawberry Sister, where would she take her? Lucy loves the fountain and the milkshake shop, but they’re both in the town centre.
Surely she wouldn’t go that far? There’s the swings and the newsagent’s where we buy sweets, but Amelia and Chloe were going to check them. I tried to remember exactly what Lucy
said when she told me that she thought Kirsti was missing out. She was talking about March of the Zombies while she was swinging from her bat bar . . . Her bat bar! Maybe that’s where she
was.

I grabbed my phone and my key from the table in the hall and sped out of the door.

As I hurried across the road, I was completely convinced that I’d find Lucy showing her bat bar to Kirsti.

I slipped through the gate. The skate ramp was blocking my view of the bat bar. My strides turned to a run. I stopped dead.

They weren’t there.

My shoulders sagged. Lucy could be anywhere. Poor Kirsti would be howling. What if they were lost? What if a creepy stranger kidnapped them?

‘Ella?’

I swung round. It was Lucy. With Kirsti in her pram.

My knees wobbled. ‘Lucy! Where have you been? Everyone is looking for you and Kirsti. Is she OK?’ I looked into the pram. Kirsti was fast asleep with a smile on her face.

‘She’s fine. She hasn’t even listened to what I’ve been telling her. She’s just been napping.’

‘Lucy, the police are looking for you!’

‘Why? Didn’t Dad read my note?’

‘What note? Nobody said anything about a note.’

Lucy rolled her eyes in exasperation. ‘I wrote a note telling him to come to our house.’

‘Why? Never mind. Come on, we’ve got to go home.’

I pulled up Mum’s number from my contacts and called her.

Mum answered straight away. ‘Have you found them?’

‘Yes, it’s OK, they’re OK. They were by the skate ramp.’

Mum made a gaspy sound. ‘Oh my goodness. Stay where you are. No, wait, take them home, take them straight home. Don’t stop for anything. I was on my way to check Rose’s house.
I’m very close. I’ll be there in three minutes.’

‘OK.’

‘Take them back to the house now. Promise me, Ella? Straight back to the house.’

‘I promise.’

We had only just managed to wrestle the pram in through the door when Mum’s car pulled up. She burst in through the door with Chloe and Amelia right behind her. Mum pushed past me and for
a moment I thought she was going to shake Lucy, but then she wrapped her arms round her.

‘Don’t ever, ever do that again,’ she said. Very gently, she lifted Kirsti out of her pram. ‘Is she all right?’

‘She’s fine,’ Lucy said. ‘Why are you fussing?’

‘Lucy Jane Strawberry!’ Mum said in a very loud whisper so as not to startle Kirsti. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know that what you have just done was both remarkably
stupid and extremely dangerous! You’re not old enough to be out by yourself and you are certainly not old enough to be in charge of a tiny baby.’

Lucy’s face crumpled.

‘I just wanted Kirsti to come here!’

Mum handed Kirsti to Amelia and gripped Lucy by the shoulders. ‘Lucy, look at me. You must never go out by yourself again. Promise me.’

Mum was so serious and quiet-voiced that Lucy was already hiccuping with tears.

‘I promise,’ she said.

‘Good.’ She pulled Lucy into another hug. ‘You’ve scared us silly. Poor Suvi is beside herself. They’ll be here in a few minutes and you must say how awfully sorry
you are.’

‘Will they take Kirsti back?’ Lucy asked in a very quiet, un-Lucyish voice.

Mum’s eyes widened. ‘Of course they will!’

Lucy’s chin sank to her chest.

‘You must have known that would happen,’ Mum said.

‘But I thought . . . I thought that if I got Kirsti home then we could all live here.’

We looked at each other. Lucy was still hoping for one big family house.

‘I don’t think Suvi could live here,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t like big messes; she’d go insane just looking at Book Mountain.’

‘I know that,’ Lucy said. ‘That’s why I made them something. Look, I’ll show you.’ She turned and went down the stairs to the basement. Mum followed, with her
eyebrows up in her hair, and the rest of us trailed behind her. Lucy tore the tape off the door to the Pit and pushed it open.

Inside was transformed. All the toys and junk had disappeared. The floor had been scrubbed and Lucy’s mural had been painted over (one wall was white and one was lilac: I recognised the
paint from the shed). The toy cars and the train track and the dolls’ heads and the leaky felt tips and the piles of Lego were all gone. Everything was very neat and very tidy. The sofa was
covered with clean white bedding and Amelia’s old doll’s cot was made up in the corner. I sucked in my breath. Lucy had made a bedroom and it wasn’t hard to guess who for.

I looked at Lucy. Her red-gold fringe was stuck to her forehead with jam. There was a tomato-sauce stain on her T-shirt. Her elbows were scabbed and there was a streak of dirt across her cheek.
Lucy had never made anything neat or tidy in her life. She hated neat and tidy. She hated cleaning up. When she saw white things, her fingers itched to cover them with blobs of colour. But she had
made this room. This was how much she wanted Kirsti and Dad and Suvi to live with us. I reached out and held Lucy’s hand.

‘Oh, Lucy,’ Mum said. ‘What a lovely thing to do! But Dad and Suvi have got their own house with their things in; they can’t squeeze in here.’

Lucy’s face crumpled.

The doorbell rang.

‘That will be Dad,’ Amelia said.

We followed Mum, carrying Kirsti, back upstairs. She opened the door. Suvi reached out for Kirsti in a quick, desperate way and then pulled Lucy to her too. There were tears running down her
cheeks. Dad sagged with relief when he saw they were all right.

‘Come in,’ Mum said.

‘I can wait in the car,’ Suvi said, looking at my dad.

‘No, Suvi. If you don’t mind, I’d like it if you both came in,’ Mum said. ‘I think we need to talk to Lucy. All of us.’

So we all sat down in the sitting room, eight of us including Kirsti. Lucy gazed round at everyone. It was what she’d always wanted: all of us together in the same house. She looked
miserable.

Dad sat down slowly and sucked in air through his nose. He looked exhausted. He took hold of Lucy’s hand. ‘I know you didn’t mean Kirsti any harm, but you put both of you in
danger.’

Lucy blinked.

‘Promise me that you will never, ever take Kirsti anywhere, not even out to the garden, unless you have an adult with you.’

She’d already promised Mum and usually Lucy is always pointing out what she has already done and complaining if someone expects her to do the same thing twice, but she just bowed her head
and said, ‘I promise.’

‘You’ve frightened us all horribly. We had to call the police. You could have been hurt.’

Lucy’s face was tight with shame and misery. ‘I didn’t mean to! It wasn’t meant to be scary for you.’

‘I just don’t understand why you’d do such a silly thing.’

Lucy was gulping.

‘She’s been missing Kirsti,’ Mum said.

‘I know,’ Dad said. ‘And we’ve always been quite happy for her to come round and say hello. She’s very wel—’

‘Lucy was hoping that we could all live together,’ Mum said.

Dad stopped talking.

‘In fact, she’s cleaned and redecorated the basement, in the hope that you three could move in down there.’

Mum looked at Dad, Dad looked at Suvi, Suvi looked at Mum. All the adults in the room were having some sort of conversation with their eyes.

‘It’s really nice!’ Lucy said hopefully. ‘I did it properly!’

Mum looked like she might cry.

Dad pulled Lucy on to his lap. ‘I’m very sorry, sweetheart, but we can’t live here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we’ve got our own home. And that’s your home as well; you’ve got two houses now because you belong to two families. And I know that can be a bit complicated and
I know your homes are a bit different, but I want you to try to enjoy both of them.’

His forehead scrunched in the effort of trying to get things to make sense to Lucy, but I don’t think their divorce will ever really make sense to us.

‘Some people don’t mix,’ Dad said. ‘You don’t mush up your chips with your ice cream, do you? You enjoy those things separately. Try and think about your life as if
it’s a lovely meal with different courses.’

‘I don’t want that!’ Tears were streaming down Lucy’s face. ‘I don’t want a meal! I want everybody all mixed in together. Like a pie! In one big
pie!’

Everybody in the room had wet eyes by now. ‘I know you do,’ Dad said. ‘And I’m really sorry, Lucy, but you can’t have it.’

And Mum, Dad and Suvi all said a lot more things after that, but basically they all meant just the same thing: no matter how much you wish things were different, you can’t always have what
you want.