‘Oooh!’
‘Come on.’
I rattled the knob of the lost property cupboard until the door sprang open. It has one of those ball bearing catches, so stiff some people always think it’s locked. There is a proper light inside because it isn’t really a cupboard at all, but the tiniest room with a steep sloping ceiling that fits under the back fire stairs. You can’t stand up in there unless you’re a midget. You have to sit on piles of everyone’s lost property. It’s comfortable enough, unless the games staff have just done one of their massive clear-outs and left nothing but one old tennis racket with busted strings, and the odd welly boot.
We were in luck. It was quite full. I pushed Helen down on the softest-looking mound of stuff, and stood guard at the door till I heard the burblings of the first people going through to their classes. I waited through a couple more door bangs, and then, as I expected, saw Liz prowling between the racks, looking both ways in search of her best friend.
‘Helly’s in here,’ I said, pointing.
‘Is she better?’
‘No. Worse.’
Liz made a face. ‘Maybe she ought to be sent home.’
From inside the cupboard came a strangled, ‘No-oo!’
‘She doesn’t want to be sent home,’ I told Liz.
Liz glanced behind her anxiously.
‘I’m definitely not supposed to be down here,’ she told me. ‘Loopy insisted I was to stay right away. “This one is up to Kitty,” she kept saying. I think she’s mad.’
She looked at me as if I ought to be the first to leap up and agree that anyone who thought to send me on an errand of mercy rather than her had to be queuing up to sign on at the bin.
‘Maybe you’d better push off,’ I suggested.
‘Maybe.’
She peered over her shoulder again, as if she feared Mrs Lupey might materialize in the cloakroom doorway any moment. Then, leaning forward, she called over my outstretched arm into the dark of the cupboard: ‘See you later, Helly.’
She turned to me. ‘I’ll tell Loopy you two are hiding in the cupboard,’ she said. ‘In case she worries that you’ve both got run over.’
Then she hitched up her school bag and drifted off towards the cloakroom door. I caught the last few words that floated back.
‘I just can’t understand why she chose you…’
I didn’t bother to reply. To be quite honest, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t understand why I’d been chosen, either. So far as I’m aware, the name Kitty Killin is not a byword for sensitivity in our school staffroom. Especially not since Alice came in one morning really upset because her pet rabbit Morris had got too doddery to climb in and out of his hutch, and I suggested that she change his name to Morribund.
So why me? Why me? But Mrs Lupey must have had her reasons. Helen and I must have something in common, apart from mothers who shop at the same Safeways, and fathers with sticky-out grey hair…
But I’ve seen Helen’s father. He hasn’t any hair at all. He is completely bald. And her parents have been divorced longer than mine!
I wrenched the cupboard door wide open. She was still sitting, hunched and miserable.
‘I know!’ I cried. ‘I know why you’re so upset! I know why you’re crying your eyes out! I know why you don’t want to be sent home!’
She lifted two fierce, red-rimmed little eyes that burned through the gloom of the cupboard like live coals.
‘Your mum’s going to marry that man with grey hair!’
Her mouth fell open. I felt like Sherlock Holmes on a good day.
‘And you think he’s a proper creep! You’ve thought he was a creep all along, but, being the sweet Helly that you are, you’ve been too gentle and polite to say so. And now she’s talking about your happy future together, and it’s too late to explain that you don’t like him.’
She twisted her fingers so tightly I thought they would snap.
‘Don’t like him?’ she repeated in a cold, low voice. ‘I can’t stand him.’
And all the colour drained out of her face.
‘Helly?’
I flicked the cupboard light switch. Luckily for her, it was the dimmest light bulb ever seen. I slipped inside and dropped on a pile of old gym shorts and woollies. I pulled the door closed to shut us in.
‘Listen,’ I said, leaning towards her. ‘No need to tell me about this sort of thing. I am the World’s Great Expert, Helly Johnston. The stories I could tell you!’
She looked up.
‘Go on, then,’ she said, still ashen. ‘Tell me.’
‘Wait till you hear.’ I prised a rather sharp welly boot out from under my bum, and shifted till I was more comfortable. There was no hurry. We’d be left in peace. Good old Mrs Lupey must have known from the start that it would take me hours to get through even a half of it. Not for nothing has she been sloshing her red ink all over everything I’ve written this year – all my poems and free essays, my play in rhyming couplets, even my supposedly anonymous contributions to the school magazine. Oh yes, she knows all about what happened to me when my mum took up with Goggle-eyes.
And I knew why she’d sent me down, and not Liz.
2
Mum’s had boyfriends before, of course. Goggle-eyes wasn’t the first. For a long time it was Simon, who was tall and dark and a bit wet, and wore nice suits. I liked Simon. He was the only person in the world who could sit down and help Jude with her arithmetic homework without her ending up in floods of tears. ‘Now you have to go next door and borrow from Mr and Mrs Hundreds,’ he’d remind her, over and over again. ‘Don’t forget to pay back Mrs Tens.’ He never got ratty, like Mum and I do. He never abandoned her in the middle of a sum, saying, ‘I’m sure you’ve got it now.’ I used to sit the other side of the kitchen table, admiring his patience, with Floss tightly clenched between my knees so she couldn’t break away under the table and spread dribble and cat hairs over Simon’s nice suits. Floss is friendly and sweet but she’s terribly messy, and Simon works in a very posh bank.
Then Simon got the push, I’m not sure why, but I suspect he was too wet for Mum. She went a few months without anyone, and said she quite liked it, and wasn’t going to bother with fellows in future. ‘I’d rather stay home and watch telly,’ she said. Whenever she really needed a partner for something, she took a woman friend from work. And sometimes she borrowed Reinhardt from next door in return for their really long loan of our ladder.
Then, one day, she met Gerald Faulkner. Don’t ask me where and why and how. All I know is, one day my mother’s her normal, workaday Oh-God-I-hate-my-job-I’m-going-to-resign-what’s-on-telly self, and the next she’s some radiant, energetic fashion plate who doesn’t even hear when you tell her it’s the last episode of her favourite series, and she’s going through last year’s babysitter list like the Grim Reaper, winnowing out all the old biddies who’ve cracked and gone off to spend their last years with their daughters-in-law, and all the bright teenagers who made it to college.
‘I can’t find anyone for Friday night!’
‘Why don’t you stay home and watch Dynasty with us?’
She sweeps round, all fancy skirts and high heels and different eye make-up.
‘Oh, lovies! You watch it, and then you can tell me what happens.’
How old does she suddenly think we are? Three? And who was he, this man who had made all the difference? I’d heard his voice. He rang up early one evening before Mum even got home from work. I was the one who picked up the phone because Jude just ignores it whenever it rings. It could go on and on for hours, and she’d never bother to pick it up. She’s odd that way.