Time for Jas

The car was parked over a drain cover, the rectangular kind with a grid for rainwater to run into. The dull, brown kind you would never normally notice, except that today someone had used chalks to colour the grid in black and white zebra stripes, with a head and four legs, a stripy mane and tail AND A BLUEBELL IN ITS MOUTH.

A
bluebell.

Just to be clear: a bluebell
like my name.

I stared at the zebra/drain. It stared back. The others shouted for the ball. I nearly told them to come and look, but something stopped me.

It was so … weird. And pretty. And somehow – because of the bluebell – private.

‘Blue, the
ball!’
Twig shouted from across the street, and then Mrs Henderson came out of her house shouting about her flowers and what did we think we were doing?

The real reason for the ball game is that Twig is starting secondary school next week, and he’s worried he’s going to be rubbish at sport. Twig is easily the cleverest person in our family. He knows everything there is to know about things like science and natural history, but he is not very coordinated physically, and
he thinks that now that he is going to a big school everyone will laugh at him if he can’t even catch a ball. I have tried to explain it doesn’t matter, and that I have been at Clarendon Free for years without being good at sports, but he says it’s different for boys and he doesn’t want people to think he’s a nerd and please could we just practise as much as possible. I did think of telling Mrs Henderson, who is quite a nice person when she’s not cross, but by now a group of people had gathered nearby.

There was a dark-haired boy about my age and a little round man I had never seen before, both in spotless white and clutching tennis rackets, and Mrs Doriot-Buffet, the big American lady who moved in at the beginning of summer, dressed in a turquoise velvet tracksuit and trying to stop her fat black and tan miniature dachshund getting tangled up in its lead as it went round and round in circles.

‘I think it’s trying to do a poo,’ Jas remarked loudly.

The boy stifled a laugh. The little round man smacked him on the arm. Mrs Doriot-Buffet flushed and said how sorry she was for poor Mrs Henderson’s hydrangeas. The little round man said
his
son would
never
behave like that. The boy’s hair flopped over his face as he stared at the pavement.

‘We’re extremely sorry,’ I started to say, but then Flora burst out of our house with a naked Pumpkin on her hip and her dress covered in mashed food, yelling at us to come indoors THIS MINUTE for lunch.

Mrs Doriot-Buffet stared at her, horrified.

‘She probably thinks Pumpkin is Flora’s baby,’ Dodi grinned before she left us.

‘Don’t leave us alone with her,’ I begged, but Dodi said there was no way she was staying if Flora was cooking.

The situation at home is this: Mum’s maternity leave is over, but as usual she has left it too late to get organised and find a nanny. Flora doesn’t leave for drama school for a while, so she is in charge of looking after Pumpkin and, supposedly, us. This means she thinks she can shout at us as much as she wants, and also feed us the same mashed-up baby food Pumpkin eats now he doesn’t just drink milk.

We have all begged our ex-nanny Zoran to look after us instead, but he is leaving London soon for Devon with his glamorous girlfriend Gloria. She is in the middle of selling her riding school under the motorway not far from here, after which she will move all her ponies to Grandma’s house to create the
Horsehill School of Riding, while Zoran composes songs on Grandma’s piano and gives music lessons and looks after Grandma because she is getting too old to live in a big house all by herself. Dad can’t help because he is staying in Devon until Zoran and Gloria move, and also because he is hopeless, and the one time he looked after Pumpkin all day on his own he left him in the park because he was so busy thinking about the book he is writing.

‘What vegetable is it today?’ Twig asked, as Flora served up dollops of slop.

‘Broccoli.’

‘It’s
brown
.’

Flora said that was because she added Nutella to make it sweeter, and he should stop complaining or she’d tell Mum about us trampling Mrs Henderson’s garden. Jas and Twig made gagging noises all through lunch. I tried to be polite, but gave up after about three spoonfuls.

‘I saw this amazing drawing of a zebra,’ I said. Now that I’d got over the surprise, I wanted to ask them to come out and look at the drawing. ‘It was the weirdest thing. Someone had drawn it on a drain, and it had …’

I wasn’t so sure any more if the flower
was
a bluebell, and I wanted them to tell me if
they
thought it was, and if it meant anything or was it just coincidence that someone had drawn a picture of a flower that was
my
name under
our
car.

Then Pumpkin threw his bowl on the floor, and Jas laughed so hard she spat water all over the table. Flora shouted, ‘Zebras! I’m already surrounded by animals!’

It was hopeless trying to get their attention. Instead, I took my camera out to the garden and looked at it again and again.

The flower in the zebra’s mouth has a green stalk and a cluster of blue, bell-like petals. It is most definitely a bluebell.

Zoran called yesterday to say he had a friend who wouldn’t mind being our nanny, and he brought her this afternoon to meet us. Her name is Pixie O’Dare, she has just arrived in London from Ireland to make money to pay to go travelling, and she is possibly the prettiest person I have ever seen. She is tiny, with wrists as small as Jas’s, an upturned nose with a dusting of freckles, a mouth like a strawberry, green eyes with thick black lashes and a page-boy cut
with a bleached blonde crown graduating through shades of pink to bright bubble-gum at the tips. She was dressed in a navy boiler suit, but her toe and fingernails were painted with glitter, and on her back she was wearing … wings.

Actual, glittery wings.

Zoran started to introduce us. Pumpkin, who hates not being the centre of attention, did that thing where he goes from giggling to screaming in about two seconds. Pixie held out her arms. Flora handed him over. Pumpkin instantly stopped crying, which
was
impressive, because the fastest anyone has ever got him to stop screaming is one minute and seventeen seconds, when Jas held him right up in a horse’s face in Devon and he was so astonished he practically stopped breathing. I thought maybe Jas would be jealous, but she just frowned like she was a bit puzzled, and asked Pixie why she was wearing wings.

Pixie said, because you should always wear clothes that make you happy. She waggled her shoulders. The wings fluttered, and Jas laughed.

‘You see?’ Pixie said.

Then Flora asked, why was she wearing a boiler suit. Pixie said they were the best thing for looking after babies, and to just look at Flora’s dress.

‘What’s wrong with my dress?’ Flora asked.

‘You’ll never get that mash out. This boiler suit, now. This is heavy duty.’

Flora wrinkled her nose, because she doesn’t like other people being better at clothes than she is. She actually used to have pink hair too, but it didn’t look as good as Pixie’s, and I could tell she was annoyed about the wings as well as the boiler suit, because it’s true that even though Pixie did look a bit mad, the whole combination somehow worked.

Jas was so impressed she made up a poem on the spot –
Pixie O’Dare, so pink and fair, I love the way she does her hair, Her skills with babies can’t compare, To anybody’s in the square.
Pixie said what a lovely poem and she couldn’t wait to hear more of Jas’s work. Flora barged in and said
she
was going to drama school, and then she explained all about how exclusive the Foulkes-Watson School for the Performing Arts is, and how it’s in a big country house in Scotland, and how she was in a film last summer.

‘A real film,’ Flora said. ‘Not like the ones Blue makes.’

‘My films
are
real!’ I protested, but then Mum came home and no-one could get a word in edgeways, between Pumpkin squealing and Jas reciting her
Pixie poem and Twig practising throwing and catching and Flora announcing loudly that she was going to go to the hairdresser tomorrow and maybe get her hair dyed ORANGE.

Jas spent the evening throwing out all the clothes she says don’t make her happy. Twig and I watched leggings and jumpers pile up on the floor.

‘I like that,’ I said, pointing at a brown wool cardigan.

‘Dull!’ Jas cried, with her head in her wardrobe. ‘You can have it if you want.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, but she didn’t get the sarcasm.

‘What do
you
think of Pixie?’ Twig asked.

‘Odd,’ I said. ‘But good with Pumpkin. What do you think?’

‘I think she’s fine, but I don’t want her coming anywhere near my school.’

Flora did go to the hairdresser this morning (she has had a perm, and her hair is so curly it sticks out almost horizontally all around her head so that she looks like a sheep). I looked after Pumpkin while she was gone. Dodi came round and we lay in the garden
in the sun, with Pumpkin rolling about on a blanket in the shade and Dodi going on and on about Jake while I pondered the Mystery of the Chalk Drawing.

Dodi and Jake have been going out since March, if you count the whole of August when they didn’t see each other, and he is beginning to get on her nerves.

‘He messaged me every day while I was in Spain,’ she said. ‘Every single day! And not like interesting stuff. Just “hi” and “miss you” and “thinking about you,
happy face
” and the first time I saw him after I got back he brought flowers. Flowers! Not even nice ones – tulips, that went all droopy. He wants to take me to a theme park for my birthday. I told him, my birthday’s not till
June
and he was like, I know but it’s cheaper if you book early …’

All the time Dodi was talking, I was thinking about the zebra. ‘It is a perfectly logical thing to draw on a stripy drain cover,’ I reflected. ‘If you were going to turn a drain cover into anything, a zebra is the best thing you could do. The question is,
why do you do it in the first place?
And why do you draw a
bluebell
?’

Dodi kicked me. I started.

‘Sorry,’ I said, and tried to pay more attention.

Being back in London feels very different to being on holiday in Devon. In Devon there is Skye, who
even though I only met him this summer is the sort of friend who actually listens to me. And there is Grandma, who even though she is ill and forgetful also pays attention to me. At home, the only one who ever used to listen was Iris. That was the thing about having a twin sister. I mattered to her. Even though she always preferred things like climbing and animals to books and drawings, I know she would have been interested in the zebra because she knew it was important to me.

But Iris has been dead for four years now, and quite frankly sometimes I think I could paint my naked body blue and jump up and down screaming and still no-one would listen.

Today, when Mum came home from work, the whole house was taken over by the argument of what Flora should take to Scotland.

‘It will be cold.’ Mum dumped a load of thermal underwear on Flora’s bed.

‘I’m not wearing it!’ Flora declared. ‘It’s the sort of thing Grandma wears. Those knickers probably
are
Grandma’s. I bet actual live Scottish people don’t wear thermal underwear. I bet they’d rather die of frostbite.’