Zelah Green (4 page)

Although I saw those bedrooms downstairs, a small thrill of fear grips my stomach.

‘Don’t worry about them,’ says the Doc. She’s starting to seriously freak me out now. I wonder if I’m speaking my thoughts out loud without realising it.

‘It’s a quiet month,’ she says. ‘We’ve only got four kids in at the moment, plus Josh and me make six. Seven, if you include Sneezer. He’s the cat.’

I’m too tired and wired to ask who Josh is.
And I hate cats. They carry a lot of germs.

As soon as her tall figure passes through the doorway I rush to the sink.

I wrap a tissue round the left-hand tap and twist. With a small squeak it jets out a stream of warm water. I wash my right hand thirty-one times. I grab the sliver of cream-coloured soap and scrub my face with my right hand until it is red and raw. Then I wash my left hand. I sniff one of the white towels. It smells of starch and airing cupboard. Perfect. I blot my hands on the towel and then take off my clothes and pull on my pyjamas.

I brush my hair thirty-one times until it wobbles and crackles with static.

I haven’t been to the loo for hours, so I push the door open, trying not to make a noise. There are only two other doors on this landing. I nudge one with my fingernail and sigh with relief when I see a bathroom.

I place some tissue on the rim and lower my bottom on to the toilet. My pee tinkles noisily into the bowl.

Now I’ll have to wash my hands all over again.

By the time I’ve finished it’s nearly quarter to eleven and I’m dizzy with tiredness.

But there’s one more thing. I need to jump.

I try sitting still on the bed and seeing if the desire will go away if I ignore it.

It doesn’t.

I can’t go and jump on the stairs and risk waking everyone up.

I lay out one of the white towels on the floorboards.

Then I jump, as light as I can. One hundred and twenty-eight times on tiptoe, skin on fluffy cotton. By the time I’ve finished, the cotton feels like a cheese-grater on the soles of my tender feet.

I sniff the duvet, peel it back and slide in. My
tired bones shift about on the cool clean sheet.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I say to myself. ‘It’s going to be OK here. Go to sleep.’

The birds begin some sort of mental dawn country chorus at three.

I lie awake for hours.

I
’m woken by the whine and clink of a milk van.

It’s just gone six and I’ve had two hours’ sleep.

I think about Fran, still asleep hundreds of miles away, her smooth brown cheek pressed into a pink pillowcase, her mother bustling around the kitchen, putting together packed lunches and schoolbooks, heating up porridge and scraping yellow butter across crusty brown toast.

I swallow hard, a mixture of hunger and fear. Fran will look for me as the school bus passes my house. What will she do when I don’t come out? Will my stepmother tell her I’ve gone to
the local hospital or will she make up some other excuse?

Fran will find me, I decide. She’s not going to accept any old explanation. She’ll find me and take me back to her house. I’ll live with Fran and her mother until I hear from Dad. My stepmother won’t want me back, so Fran will just have to take me in. I’ll become part of that warm, bustling, normal family. They’ll let me get on with my rituals and everything will work out fine and then Dad will take me home.

I slide my feet out of bed and into my slippers. I pad over to the sink. There’s plenty of time to get my morning rituals done, but one little problem. No Green Day to time it to.

I look around the room. There’s a portable CD player stashed underneath a small brown desk by the window, but no CDs with it.

I dig out my mobile phone and set it to ‘choose ringer’. I select a tune called ‘The
Entertainer’. It’s a silly tune – Mum and Heather used to bash it out on our piano, giggling like mad after a glass of wine – but it’ll do.

I set targets: sixteen repeats of the tune for washing my left hand, ten for my face and another sixteen for the right hand. Then another sixteen repeats for brushing my hair.

This works quite well, although the tinny little tune isn’t a patch on Green Day.

I open my suitcase and rifle through my clothes, pull open the doors of a large pine wardrobe and hang things up with four centimetres in between each item.

I put on a plain white T-shirt and a pair of cut-off jeans. I do my jumps on the towel in bare feet and then slide into a pair of silver flip-flops and tie my hair into a short pony. I hook a pair of small dangly silver hearts through my earlobes. Not too long, not too short. Fran would say I’m in ‘average’ mood.

I survey the results in the mirror. Somebody has polished it to perfection. No smears and smudges. For once I can concentrate on how I look.

A girl with red-raw cheeks and fuzzy black hair stares back me. In her eyes is a look of uncertainty.

‘You’ll do, gorgeous girl,’ whispers my mother’s ghost.

My heart leaps with pleasure and relief. I need Mum with me today.

I perch on the bed and text Fran.

‘Been sent to weird place in country,’ I type in. ‘Not sure when home. Miss u. Z.’

By the time I’ve opened my bedroom door and crept down the first flight of stairs, my confidence is fading fast.

All the bedroom doors on the landing below are shut. A faint snore rises and falls from
beyond one of them. There’s no sign of life, and no sign of breakfast. My stomach sucks itself in with a gurgle. My mouth is dry. I have a sour, sick feeling inside. The last thing I ate was the tuna sandwich in Heather’s car.

I ease my way down another flight of stairs taking care not to touch the banisters.

When I reach the ground floor, I glimpse a black Aga in the room at the back of the house. I head for the kitchen, my flip-flops slapping on the tiled floor.

I stop short on the threshold.

Major Germ Alert
.

I’m staring at a bright, square, roomy kitchen with a fireplace at one end and an Aga running along one wall, a set of sash windows along the other. There’s obviously been some sort of massive party. In the middle sits a long wooden table strewn with dirty plates and cups. On the windowsill, egg cartons packed with green
sprouting things jostle and crowd for space. The tap is dripping into a sink full of pans with crusty brown stuff stuck on them. There’s a faint smell of old omelette and stale beer. Chairs are dotted around the kitchen floor at random angles. Two bowls of stinking cat food flow over on to a fish-shaped mat. A radio babbles to itself in the corner. The floor is strewn with magazines, cushions, crisp packets and coats.

While I’m standing there taking all this in, a huge boiler whooshes and flares into life, nearly giving me a heart attack.

How am I going to eat any food that comes out of this kitchen?

How am I going to get
into
this kitchen to put the kettle on?

I run back down the hall and tug at the front-door catch.

Locked.

And, even if I did get out, I have no idea
where I am or how to get home from the country.

‘Calm, Zelah,’ I say. ‘Deep breaths.’

Despite the horrendous mess in the kitchen, my stomach is still growling with hunger.

I tiptoe towards the sink, holding my arms rigid by my sides, trying not to brush against anything.

I fumble in my pocket for tissues, wrap one around each hand and pull open the cupboard underneath. Leaning against one another like hopeless drunks is a selection of Natural Earth cleaning products in green and orange bottles and a packet of new washing-up gloves.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ I whisper. My voice has dried to paper.

I roll up my sleeves, stretch the rubber gloves as high up my arms as possible, twiddle the radio knob until the familiar sound of Radio One invades the kitchen and get stuck in.

*

After one hour of spraying, scrubbing and tidying, my nose is running and my stomach is trying to eat itself but the room looks less like the aftermath of a riot and more like what it is: a homely, country kitchen with lots of pine shelves and flowery china.

I’m squirting germ-killer around the sink and giving it one last go with a metal scourer when my neck starts to prickle and turn cold.

I turn around.

A girl is leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded, chewing gum. The expression on her face is a mixture of patience, amusement and curiosity.

‘I’d say you were the cleaner, only I know for a fact that we’re still saddled with dear old Doris,’ she says.

‘So you must be the new girl. The Doc said you’d be here today. I’m Lib, by the way.’

I pull off my gloves, wipe my dripping nose
with a tissue wrapped around my right hand and then scrunch it up with my left before lobbing it into the bin. I wash my left hand, wrap another tissue around it and reach for the radio to turn down the volume.

‘’S all right,’ says the girl. ‘Leave it on. The Doc always tunes into some crap on Radio Three. This is better, but still a bit over-commercialised if you ask me.’

The Madonna song that Heather loves comes on. The girl groans and waves a squashed cigarette packet in my direction. I shake my head. She pulls one out with a grubby hand in a fingerless glove and sticks it into her mouth. Her bottom lip has a gold ring through it and there is a dark mole just above her top one, underneath her nose. Her hair is the sort of hair I pretend to hate but secretly admire: dyed yellow, short and peaked up on top with a serious amount of black root showing through.
The girl is big-boned with a large white face and a gappy grin. She’s wearing pink pyjamas with a green parka slung over the top and fuzzy pink bed socks. The whole effect is bizarre, but somehow works.

I feel a prude in my boring jeans and neat T-shirt.

‘Well?’ she says. ‘Gonna introduce yourself, then, or are you just gonna stand there flapping your rubber gloves at me?’

‘Zelah,’ I say. ‘Zelah Green.’

The girl gives a snort of laughter.

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s just a bit more exotic than I was expecting. You don’t look very exotic.’

From anyone else this would be an insult, but Lib manages to make it funny and I find myself smiling despite trying not to.

‘What time’s breakfast in this place?’ I say. ‘I’m starving.’

Lib laughs again. ‘I wouldn’t use that
expression around here,’ she says. ‘There’s one person who might take offence.’

I haven’t any idea what she’s talking about, but I’m still smiling.

Lib is pulling eggs from the fridge and cracking them on the rim of a glass bowl.

‘We do our own breakfast in the week,’ she says. ‘It’s easier that way. Wouldn’t be fair on the Doc to have to cook loads of different meals.’

‘Why does everyone have a different meal?’ I say.

She shoots me a look, raising her brown pierced eyebrows up towards her yellow fringe.

‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ she says. ‘But, as I’m in a good mood and you’re new, I’ll make you breakfast today. Just this once.’

The hiss of an egg hitting hot fat makes my stomach leap in anticipation.

‘I like the yolks runny and the whites nice and crispy,’ I say.

Lib splutters with amusement from where she’s jiggling the frying pan around.

‘If you carry on like that around here, they’ll nickname you Princess,’ she says.

I shrug.

Dad used to call me that when he was in a good mood. Compared to some of the names I’ve been called at school, it doesn’t sound bad at all.

I have to run up to my room for a clean towel to put on the kitchen chair. Seats have had thousands of bottoms on them. Bottoms are well-known carriers of germs.

Lib watches me spread the towel over the scuffed wooden seat, but says nothing. She shovels food down with her elbows stuck out like bent branches and her mouth scrunched up, scowling with concentration.

Whilst I’m cutting into my second yolk with
a sigh of pleasure, another girl, younger than Lib and with long brown hair hiding half of her face, slopes into the kitchen, says, ‘Oh hi,’ in an offhand, disinterested way, grabs a yoghurt and disappears again.

‘That,’ says Lib, pushing her plate away and reaching for her fags again, ‘was Alice. She’s allergic to just about everything in the world. Oh, and she doesn’t eat.’

‘Except for yoghurt,’ I say.

Lib is putting the eggs back into the fridge.

‘Don’t be fooled by that,’ she says. ‘The yoghurt will probably last her all day, if not all week.’

I’m silent for a moment, enjoying the post-egg hit of satisfaction and watching Lib as she pours a glass of water, gulps it down and then lights her fag.

She seems happy enough in my company, so I risk another question.

‘What are you in here for?’ I say.

Lib scrapes back her chair and stands up, still grinning.

‘Me?’ she says. ‘Oh, there’s nothing wrong with me. House clown, I am. Keep everyone laughing. I’ll be out of here soon.’

She ambles towards the kitchen door, sucking hard on her cigarette, but then turns around.

‘OCD, yeah?’ she says.

My smile fades. I give a short, curt nod, trying not to take on the title as it whizzes across the kitchen towards me, looking for a home.

‘We’ve had a few of those in here before,’ says Lib. ‘One left last week, in fact. She had your room. Anyway – catch you later. I need to buy fags before my session.’

She leaves me puzzling over ‘session’ and feeling deflated. They’ve had a few of me here before, then.

I’m not as unique as I thought.

I’m staring at the tabletop, picking off crumbs, lost in thought, when a man who looks like Jesus wanders into the kitchen, clutching his head and yawning.

‘If we’ve run out of painkillers, I’m going to die,’ he says.

He stops dead and stares about him.

‘Is this the same kitchen I left last night?’ he says. ‘Only it looks like somebody’s been in and waved a magic wand.’

I’m just plucking up courage to ask what his problem is and why he’s the only adult in a houseful of crazy teenagers, when the man holds out his hand towards me.

‘I’m Josh, by the way,’ he says. A clutch of knotted leather bracelets slithers down his arm towards me.