Darcy Burdock, Book 2 Page 10

  DAD Come on, monkey, I didn’t me—

  ME Don’t monkey me.

  DAD I honestly didn’t mean it like that, we could never replace Lamb-Beth, she’s part of the family.

  Then Poppy starts to cry because she misses Lamb-Beth and then so does Hector and for maybe 0.5 seconds I sort of see why we were talking about getting a puppy because there was a hole in our world without Lamb-Beth. But the hole was Lamb-Beth-shaped. Grandma sips her brandy and pretends to flick through her little diary even though the only plans in there are probably reading her book and making soup.

  We get up and leave Pizza Express after paying our bill and a new family sit down in our seats as quick as can be and this annoys me so much. When you eat at a restaurant you begin to feel like that table is yours – it’s a horrible sight to see new people in your chair acting out your lifestyle. It’s like watching intruders plod around your kitchen using your whisk or whatever.

  She can’t just have gone. Colds go. Tempers go. Lambs don’t go! I can’t digest it at all. I wish she would come back to me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Monday, the launch of the magazine, and the day has not started ideally. No Lamb-Beth and no Will being my friend really puts the sourest of tastes in my mouth and I didn’t sleep at all well. We’re up early as Grandma wakes up at hours that don’t even exist they are so early and Dad makes us peanut butter on toast and sweet tea because it’s still so freezing outside and we need warming up. I don’t like Mondays. Or Tuesdays or Wednesdays, and actually Thursdays or Fridays or Saturdays or not even Sundays. In fact, Sunday is my worserest of all because it tricks you like it’s a free empty play day but really you spend all of Sunday dreading Monday, which was never as bad as what Sunday decided to pretend it was. Sunday, the hammy drama king.

  As we had cried quite a lot over missing Lamb-Beth we have red giant panda stains around our eyes that actually made Mum laugh a bit, as those red rings with my terrible new hair do . . . (or hair don’t) make me look like a Victorian ghost, which would be perfect for Halloween which was just round the corner but would come and go unnoticed and uncelebrated if Lamb-Beth didn’t come home and Will decided to still enjoy hating me. We thought we maybe shouldn’t go to school today but Grandma said school might distract us and help us get on with it, that we’d be no use moping around crying or feeling sorry for ourselves.

  Life must go on, Grandma says as we leave our housy comfort behind for another day of empty no-Will-friendship, pressure from the school magazine about my risky gamble of putting a new handwritten spelling-mistooked story in, which will mean Mrs Ixy is going to be disappointed in me and then triple trouble for me not doing my homework over the weekend due to trauma. Not forgetting all of that . . . the worserest bit of all – NO Lamb-Beth to hug onto. I lean my head against the car window and watch the world slip by outside.

  On the way, after dropping off Poppy and Hector, we sit in morning traffic and I see a huge derelict building, gutted and empty, the windows all smashed in and the insides showing themselves off like it’s in the middle of an operation. I look closer; I can just make out the design of leftover wallpaper of a bedroom, tiles from the bathroom. I see the edges of a picture frame even, some battered books on the bookshelf.

  ‘Sad,’ Mum sighs to herself. ‘That was a beautiful house once, but they had a fire.’

  ‘A fire?’ My eyes widen. It’s hard to imagine all those chaotic bright orange flames ripping everything up now it’s so dull and grey and concrete.

  ‘It was in the paper,’ Mum continued, watching the road carefully. ‘The family are fine, but everything they loved was in that house, their memories, their history. Just look at it now.’

  I gulp and look harder, and it all becomes clear: the black smoke and charcoal burns on the wall, the decaying crumbling brick, the sprays of dirt dust splattered on every edge of the house. I see the houses next to it, mirroring what this house once was, reminding it every day that it was once as elegant and as amazing as them. We pull away just after I notice a tiny bluebell flower shooting through the heap of ashes. A little shade of hope.

  I put things into (big word alert) perspective, like how I’m meant to do this days and I’m groaned up. All this moaning I’ve been doing, all this crying and stomping and arguing and complaining when some people have to deal with things like this. I am embarrassed and ashamed. I will change my attitude. Lamb-Beth will come back. Will and I WILL work it out, the magazine will be successful and homework, well . . . it’s just homework, it’s not the end of the world.

  We reach my school gates, I slam the car door shut and I roll out, head high, into the world, one foot after the other, one foot after the other, one foot after the other, one foot after the other . . .

  And that was when I saw everybody stood around reading the school magazine. Clementine leaning against the wall with her all upturned sourpuss face (like an unhappy cat) and scoffing.

  ‘I can’t go in.’ I shake my head to Mum.

  ‘What?’ she yaps abruptly. ‘Stop being so over-dramatic and get into school, you will be late.’

  ‘No, Mum, I can’t.’ I look at her with my hugest saucer-like eyes.

  ‘But I’ve got a client.’ (Mum is one of those creative types that does roughly one hundred jobs: at the moment she is cutting and bleaching women’s hair in our bathroom when we’re at school.) She narrows her eyes into two darts. ‘Darcy, you can’t just not go to school because you don’t feel like it, imagine if I didn’t get up to take you to school in the morning because I didn’t feel like it – you’d never get to school. EVER.’

  ‘Good. Well, you should listen to your feelings more often then, that would be fine by me,’ I joke, pushing the line a bit, but it makes Mum crack a naughty smile and she takes a breath in and looks at the intensity bubbling around the school gates and probably remembers what it was like in her schooldays and how scary everything was. She sees everybody reading the magazine too, but she doesn’t say anything about that being the reason for my freakout, Mum’s good like that. She looks back at me. Then there is this brief moment between us.

  ‘We will tell them about Lamb-Beth going missing. Everyone will be kind to you all day then.’

  ‘I don’t want to tell them about Lamb-Beth,’ I say.

  ‘Why not?’ she asks.

  ‘In case she doesn’t come home and then everybody asks me about her every day,’ I whisper, and I feel those pesky tears start to prick my eyeballs again.

  Mum accepts this information immediately. ‘OK. You will have to say you felt sick. I can get in trouble for keeping you out of school like this.’

  ‘Of course.’ I nod quickly.

  ‘And Grandma, she’s very strict about these things and I don’t want her thinking her son has married a mad woman.’

  I scrinch my face up because if it’s one thing Grandma knows it’s that Dad has married a mad woman. I decide to keep this truth to myself.

  ‘I’m serious, Darcy. I mean, this is the sort of naughtiness mums go to prison for.’ All right, I’m thinking, don’t milk it. I get back into the car and we drive away from school, just this once.

  BBBBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRINNNNNNG

  BBBBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRINNNNNNG

  BBBBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRINNNNNNG

  The phone is screaming the moment we get home. Grandma has falled to sleep on the sofa so Mum runs for it, lifting the phone out of the cradle and whispers a ‘hello’. She then looks at me, first confused and untrusting and then her eyes popping out of her round glasses. ‘Darcy!’ she yells, startling Grandma. ‘Darcy, it’s good news!’

  After cancelling Mum’s ‘client’ (if you can call the loony housewife from round the corner who is looking for a therapist more than a hairstylist a client) Mum and me get in the car and drive for what seems like a squillion years. You know when a place is roughly a squillion miles away because you have to stop off for petrol on the way. I like the way petrol smells, but there is no time for that now.


  We drive into this big green field full of plants and vegetables and fruit and sheds and scarecrows. I hate scarecrows, with their horrid hay faces and scruffy zombie clothing. This place, Mum says, is called an ‘allotment’ and it’s a shared garden space where people can grow their own food instead of getting it from the supermarket.

  The lady from the phone call, Mandy, trudges over to the car with a very much pleased-with-herself smile. She is wearing one of those sleeping bag jackets with the arms chopped off – she still had her actual arms though, phew. Her breath shows in the cold air like she is a fire-breathing dragon, but a nice one obviously. Gosh, I really do like dragons and I don’t think about them enough.

  ‘You must be Mollie?’ She grins, and Mum nods.

  On the walk through the turnips and potatoes Mandy tells us how she had spied some nibbles in her carrots and that was when she saw something ‘very white’ and ‘very sweet’ crunching away in the corner. I was thinking to myself, Get on with it a bit as by now I had guessed that this was a Lamb-Beth story. Mandy says there are lots of animals in this area so she wasn’t entirely surprised to find an animal feeding off her ‘produce’ (posh word for vegetables) but when she saw Lamb-Beth’s nametag she thought, That’s not a countryside lamb, that’s a pet. I could tell Mandy was posh and I didn’t understand why she was doing all this hanging around outdoors business when she could be in a hotel lobby or something doing some serious complaining and drinking champagne like posh people are meant to spend their time.

  ‘How did you find us, then?’ Mum asks, hunching her shoulders to keep warm, crunching her boots through the leafy ground.

  ‘Ah, now here’s the best bit.’ Mandy giggled. ‘I was on the phone to my daughter that evening – she is a journalist.’

  ‘Like me,’ I mouth.

  ‘And I told her about the lamb with the nametag, in my patch, crunching away on some carrots. My daughter said she had been given a missing lamb poster by the sweetest little boy on a bike called Jamie . . .’ WHAT?! I look to Mum and she looks to me but we don’t say anything. Mandy continues, ‘And this missing lamb had the same name! And here we are!’ Jamie? JAMIE? JAMIE HADDOCK, WOW, just to think he used to be my enemy in school and now here is he saving my heart from breaking. How the tables turn! I feel glad. For a second I picture Jamie being my best friend instead of Will but it feels clunky and weird and I stop myself from getting carried away. Just because he’s replacing me with Clementine doesn’t mean I can replace him with anybody. That’s not how friendship works. It’s not a competition. Mandy slams her hands together, which breaks my trail of thought and leads us to a little wooden wagon. It is probably in the top ten most beautiful things I have ever seen ever.

  ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ Mum touches the side of the wagon, which is decorated in intricate beautiful flowers of gold and yellow and pink and blue.

  ‘Thanks, I live in it!’ Mandy beams. ‘I couldn’t even imagine living in a proper house now.’ I thought this was wonderful. This really was a surprise for a posh person. A posh person choosing to live in a giant garden inside a wooden tent on wheels.

  ‘It really is so fantastic.’ Mum couldn’t stop staring. I did like it but I was hoping Mum wasn’t about to decide to move us into one of these. I am not sharing a room with Poppy and Hector for anything.

  Mandy smiled, she has a big gap in the middle of her teeth big enough to slide a pencil into. ‘It’s a little tired now but it does the job for me and Sleep-Pig.’

  ‘Who is Sleep-Pig?’ I finally peeped out. The sound of my voice shocked even me as I hadn’t spoken out loud in so long.

  ‘This is she, the laziest, snooziest one of all . . .’ Mandy opens her wagon door proudly and there, under the amber glow of a little lantern, curled up on the most perfect, comfortable armchair, was a pale pink-haired pig, and wrapped up in its trotters was my Lamb-Beth.

  ‘I never knew a lamb and a pig could get on so famously,’ Mandy says, her eyes sparkling.

  It really was the best feeling when Lamb-Beth saw Mum and me. She bounded up to our faces, licking us and kissing us and walking all over our laps and hopping and jumping and tickling and bleating and being the cutest I had ever seen her. She wanted to introduce us to Sleep-Pig so much. Sleep-Pig was quite an old pig. She was slow and patient but affectionate and gentle. She sniffled our clothes and skin with her probing snout. Snuffling and huffing and inspecting every inch of us. She smelled like warmth and strawberries. Mandy was so excellent with her and rolled her over onto her back and tickled her tummy. This made Sleep-Pig grunt for approximately one hundred years and she got all happy and her whole mouth opened, showing us her chunky browning teeth.

  Mum was laughing so much and kept squeezing my hand because the moment was so nice and Mandy was so friendly. When the evening started to drop down and the murmuring sky began to get shady, Mandy walked us back to our car with two boxes full of apples, turnips, carrots and potatoes from her allotment. It felt really special to have properly growed vegetables to eat. We stroked Sleep-Pig goodbye but Lamb-Beth seemed slightly reluctant to leave as she booted the earth with her little feet. Sleep-Pig snuffled her white springy coat and they stood there for a second as though they were gossiping.

  ‘Can we keep in touch?’ I pat Sleep-Pig and ask Mandy (even though I would have quite liked Sleep-Pig to answer but obviously she is a pig and that would be weird).

  ‘It would be a pleasure. Let’s send photographs of our little monsters to each other and please always feel welcome to come and visit now you know where to find us.’ Mandy grins and we do too. I will never know how Lamb-Beth managed to make her way to this amazing allotment, but I am sort of glad she did.

  Mum puts some chips in the oven and reheats some homemade vegetable chilli and when I hear Dad’s key in the door I know the rest of our family is about to be reunited because Lamb-Beth is home. Poppy screams when she sees Lamb-Beth and hurtles towards her, knocking everything over. She scrunches Lamb-Beth’s face into a little ball and speaks to her in baby language, going, ‘Oh, we missed you, we love you, love, love, love.’ And loads of other nonsense. Throughout this experience, Hector is gently patting Lamb-Beth’s back and combing her fur with his gross jam-covered hand until he can no longer take the wait and completely knocks Poppy out the way so that he can have an air-robbing squeeze. Dad takes his time, but when the madness has died a little, he bends down with his cracking kneebows and softly strokes Lamb-Beth’s face and ears, she snuggles into his hand and he laughs deep and all bear-ish. We are happy.

  Grandma says there are a few answerphone messages for me and that Maggie’s called loads, but Maggie isn’t Will, is she? So it just doesn’t matter and I don’t bother or feel like speaking to Maggie at the moment. Now that Lamb-Beth is all ‘safe and sound’, as Grandma says, I just want to relax and paint my toenails every single colour of the rainbow, but all I can keep thinking about is all those wretched scarecrows at the allotment.

  I look outside and see our washing still swinging on the line, blowing and going backwards and forwards, my dotty leggings, Poppy’s swimming costume, Hector’s rocketship pyjamas and Dad’s curly wool jumper that he got from the very exact farm where we first met Lamb-Beth when she was just borned. The moon is slicing silver patterns all over the garden like knife shapes and then suddenly, as if by magic, Dad’s jumper falls. Drops off the line, just like that. My heart stops and I panic for a moment.

  That was weird. I want to run up to the kitchen window and get a closer look for myself, but I am very afraid, you see. What if a skeleton has grabbed his jumper to conceal himself underneath? Or what if a zombie uses it as leverage to clamber up to his feet and is slowly staggering to the door in long droopy slurring lunges?

  I run into the living room but transform my run to a quick walk to look casual for when Grandma sees me.

  ‘You all right, my love?’ she nips and takes a swig of her red wine. ‘You look as white as a sheet.’

  ‘Speaking of sheets . .
.’ I start. ‘The washing is still out in the garden.’ Hoping she will come out and investigate and tell me it’s a pile of nonsense.

  ‘Oh, is it?’ And as she uses all her might to pull herself up out of the sofa, her joints make tick-tocking noises like a xylophone made of bone and I think about all the washing she must have taken in over the years – probably even when she was young, in the olden days they had to wash clothes by, I don’t know . . . dragging and beating rocks against them and leaving them to soak in the river, that would get tiresome.

  Before I can stop and think the words tumble out. ‘Don’t worry, Grandma, I’ll get the washing.’

  ‘Darcy, do you know what you have made me? The happiest grandma in London.’

  I go back to the kitchen, flicking my head over to the window to see the washing, and that is when I notice that mysteriously Dad’s jumper is back on the line again and it is then that I have no choice but to open my mouth and scream.

  SCARING-CROWS

  Teddy was a tall person. Especially for a thirteen-year-old. He was so tall he could reach the precious posh glasses on the top shelf in the cupboard and put the angel on the Christmas tree without a chair to stand on.

  Teddy lived in the attic room of a farmhouse and so as you can imagine his head was always completely decorated in bruises from where he had banged his head on the beams of the ceiling. He lived here with his miserable Aunt Beard and his aunt’s out-of-control farm that Teddy absolutely hated. Teddy hated it here because Teddy was born in the city, where he liked the commotion and the wildness and the business. There was nothing he enjoyed more than peeling his eyes back as wide as they would go and soaking up the shops and the people and the bustling cafés and the honking buses. He liked flowering his ears open as wide as they could go and sponging up the arguments, the bargaining, the worrying and laughter of the city. But mostly Teddy loved it because it was the life he knew with his mum and dad. It was where he called home.