by Linda Green
Contents
About the Author
Praise for Linda Green
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
BEFORE 1
BEFORE 2
AFTER 1
AFTER 2
BEFORE 3
BEFORE 4
AFTER 3
AFTER 4
BEFORE 5
BEFORE 6
AFTER 5
AFTER 6
BEFORE 7
BEFORE 8
AFTER 7
AFTER 8
BEFORE 9
BEFORE 10
AFTER 9
AFTER 10
BEFORE 11
BEFORE 12
AFTER 11
AFTER 12
BEFORE 13
BEFORE 14
AFTER 13
AFTER 14
BEFORE 15
BEFORE 16
AFTER 15
AFTER 16
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Reading Group Guide
Landmarks
Cover
About the Author
Linda Green is a novelist and award-winning journalist who has written for the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and the Big Issue. Linda lives in West Yorkshire. Her previous novel, The Last Thing She Told Me, was a bestselling Richard & Judy Bookclub pick. Visit Linda on Twitter at @LindaGreenisms and on Facebook at Author Linda Green.
Praise for Linda Green
Praise for Linda Green:
‘Linda Green is bloody brilliant!’
Amanda Prowse, bestselling author of The Things I Know
‘Clever and compelling’
Dorothy Koomson, bestselling author of Tell Me Your Secret
‘Enjoyable, original and intriguing’
B A Paris, bestselling author of Bring Me Back
‘Brilliantly plotted’
Emily Barr, author of The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods
‘Made me laugh, cry, bite my nails . . . A total stand-out read’
Jo Spain, bestselling author of The Confession
Also By
Also by Linda Green
The Last Thing She Told Me
After I’ve Gone
While My Eyes Were Closed
The Marriage Mender
The Mummyfesto
And Then It Happened
Things I Wish I’d Known
Ten Reasons Not to Fall in Love
I Did A Bad Thing
Title
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2019 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 2019 Linda Green
The moral right of Linda Green to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
PAPERBACK ISBN: 978-1-78747-874-9
EXPORT TRADE PAPERBACK ISBN: 978-1-78747-873-2
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-78747-876-3
eAUDIO ISBN: 978-1-78747-875-6
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.
Ebook by CC Book Production
Cover design © 2020 Lisa Brewster
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
Dedication
For Rohan
And all the boys who dare to be different
Contents
About the Author
Praise for Linda Green
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
BEFORE 1
BEFORE 2
AFTER 1
AFTER 2
BEFORE 3
BEFORE 4
AFTER 3
AFTER 4
BEFORE 5
BEFORE 6
AFTER 5
AFTER 6
BEFORE 7
BEFORE 8
AFTER 7
AFTER 8
BEFORE 9
BEFORE 10
AFTER 9
AFTER 10
BEFORE 11
BEFORE 12
AFTER 11
AFTER 12
BEFORE 13
BEFORE 14
AFTER 13
AFTER 14
BEFORE 15
BEFORE 16
AFTER 15
AFTER 16
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Reading Group Guide
BEFORE 1
1
Finn
My name is Finn, as in Huckleberry, and there is nothing wrong with me. I know this because my dad has tried very hard to find something wrong with me, but I did OK in all the tests. It turns out I am just weird, and they don’t have a test for that yet, or, if they do, my dad hasn’t heard about it.
My surname is Rook-Carter, which also sounds weird because it is double-barrelled (which is the proper way to say it’s two names stuck together). Mum said they did it so that my name had a bit of her and a bit of Dad in it. Only now they’re getting divorced and they’re fighting over who I’m going to live with, so I don’t know what’s going to happen to my name. Maybe I’ll be Finn Rook on Mondays to Wednesdays, Finn Carter on Thursdays and Fridays and Finn Rook-Carter at the weekends when I switch between them.
When I say Mum and Dad are fighting over me, I don’t mean actual fighting, like a Star Wars battle, I mean they are arguing a lot and they both have solicitors who write letters to each other that make them angry. Jayden McGreevy in my class used to write notes to me, which made me angry when I was in year four, but my mum went in to school with one of them and he got in trouble and had to write another note saying he was sorry, even though I knew he didn’t mean it.
Mum and Dad have both told me that the solicitors cost a lot of money, which seems stupid because if they asked Jayden, I’m pretty sure he’d write letters to make them angry for a bag of Haribos.
I can’t eat Haribos because they’ve got gelatine in and me and Mum are vegetarians and the kids at school don’t get that because you can’t see bits of dead pigs or cows in sweets, so it’s another thing that makes me weird.
I keep a list of things about me that they think are weird. There are actually loads of things, but people always do top-ten lists, so this is the top-ten list of the things they seem to think are most weird:
1.Not liking footb
all or being able to name a single player
2.Not eating Haribos
3.Having curly, red hair and not normal straight, short brown hair like them
4.Not having a mobile phone
5.Not doing gaming
6.Never having been to a McDonald’s
7.Liking gardening and my hero being Alan Titchmarsh
8.Playing the ukulele
9.Not liking football (they think it’s so weird, I’ve put it in twice)
10.Having a bee rucksack
On the last one, I don’t mean having a yellow and black rucksack in the shape of a bee. I had loads of those when I was little – Mum got me a different one every year – but on my tenth birthday she gave me a grey rucksack that had bees printed on. She said it was more grown up. Dad rolled his eyes when she said that, only he didn’t let her see because they are still pretending to be nice to each other in front of me and especially on birthdays. I took it to school the next week and the kids still laughed at it, so I guess Dad was right.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The way I see it, if you’re going to be weird, you may as well be weird all over, rather than think there’s a little bit of you that’s not weird, because they’ll still laugh at you anyway.
And when I go to secondary school in September, it’s going to be a whole lot worse. Mum and Dad did a lot of arguing about that as well. Dad said I couldn’t go to the school most of the other kids in my class are going to, because I would get ‘eaten alive at a comprehensive in Halifax’. He didn’t say that in front of me, he said it in one of the arguments I overheard. They thought I was practising my ukulele in my bedroom and I was but then I had to go for a wee and I heard them arguing in the kitchen (kitchens are rubbish for arguing secretly in because they haven’t got a door and I don’t get why they don’t know that). When Dad said I would get ‘eaten alive’, Mum’s voice went funny and at first I thought it was because she is a vegetarian and didn’t approve of anyone being eaten but then she said sometimes it was like he was embarrassed to have me as a son and he said he wasn’t embarrassed, just realistic about the fact that I wouldn’t fit in and she said that was why she wanted to home-educate me and he did a snorty sort of laugh and said I needed to go to a good school, not have half-baked lessons with her at the kitchen table, and she started crying and I couldn’t hear anything else, so I went back to playing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ on my ukulele.
A couple of weeks later I had to go and play my ukulele and the piano at a different, old-fashioned-looking school near Ilkley on a Saturday morning and not long after that, Mum and Dad sat me down and told me I had got a place at that school from September. Mum had her smiley face on and nodded a lot but didn’t say anything, which I think meant it was Dad’s idea. She said not to tell anyone the name of the school because not everyone could afford to go to a school like that and they might not understand how music scholarships work.
I did tell Lottie, who’s my best friend at school, well, my only friend actually, and she googled the school and said the real reason they wanted to keep it a secret was because it was a private school for posho boys like Tory MPs’ sons. She knows about things like that because her mum is a Labour councillor and once sat next to Jeremy Corbyn in a soup kitchen for the homeless (her mum had made the soup and Jeremy Corbyn was visiting. I thought it was wrong that Jeremy Corbyn ate the soup when she’d made it for homeless people, but I didn’t tell Lottie that).
‘Finn, do you want to come down and help me with the muffins?’
It is Mum’s voice calling up the stairs. She thinks baking is a ‘fun thing to do together’ after I’ve come home from school. To be honest, pretty much anything is fun compared to school and if it gets me out of having to do homework, I don’t mind.
When I get downstairs, I see that the ingredients are already out on the kitchen table. We are making the apricot, orange and bran muffins as usual. That is another weird thing about me. When they have charity bake sales at school, the cakes I take in don’t look like the other kids’ cakes. Mine are a sort of orangey-brown colour, instead of being chocolatey, and they don’t have icing on or sprinkles or anything like that. I suppose that’s why none of the other kids ever buy them. Mine are always the ones left at the end. Sometimes my teacher buys one, probably because she feels sorry for me, and sometimes we’ve even bought our own ones back at the end of the day, to save them being wasted.
Mum smiles at me. ‘Right, are you being the Honey Monster as usual?’ she says as she pops an apron over my head. Sometimes she talks to me like I’m still nine. I don’t think she realises she’s doing it.
‘Yeah,’ I say, smiling at her as she hands me the jar of honey from the table.
We have made these muffins together so many times that we both know exactly what to do without looking at the recipe or anything. I do all the measuring of the ingredients because otherwise Mum just guesses, and I don’t like that.
‘So, how was school today?’ asks Mum as I tip the flour into the bowl.
‘OK,’ I reply. I have worked out that this is the best way of answering the question. If I say it was great, she knows I am lying. ‘OK’ is a way of saying I didn’t enjoy it, but I wasn’t beaten up or anything.
‘What’s your class reading at the moment?’ Mum asks, as she tucks a long red curl behind her ear.
‘Nothing. We’re just doing English SATs practice papers,’ I reply.
‘What, all the time?’
‘Yeah. Apart from when we’re doing maths SATs practice papers.’
Mum shakes her head and does something funny with her lips. She doesn’t agree with SATs. She told me at the beginning of year six that I didn’t have to do them, but I knew I would be the only one who didn’t, and I get fed up of being different from everyone else all the time. That’s why I said I’d do them.
Mum lets me crack the eggs into the bowl. I make chicken noises as I do it. It always makes Mum laugh, which is why I do it. She starts doing chicken noises too and funny chicken arms as she dances around the kitchen. I like it when she is like this. She used to be like this a lot more than she is these days. I start doing the funny chicken dance too. We are both doing it and laughing so much that we don’t hear Dad’s key in the front door. We don’t even realise he is home until we see him standing in the kitchen looking at us with one eyebrow slightly raised and a kind of half-smile on his face.
‘Hello, what’s all this then?’ he says, ruffling my hair (everyone ruffles my hair, there is something about curly hair that seems to work like a magnet to people’s hands). He is looking at me. He doesn’t really look at Mum when he says anything, even if he is partly talking to her.
‘We’re doing the crazy chicken dance,’ I say.
‘Any particular reason?’ he asks.
‘Because it’s funny,’ I reply.
Me and Mum do it some more. Dad looks like he feels a little bit left out of the whole thing. He has never joined in with the baking, but he has always eaten what we made and when I was little, he used to take my muffins or cookies to work and take photos of them before he ate them to show me when he came home. I can’t remember the last time he did that.
‘Right. And have you done your revision yet or are you doing it later?’
Mum stops dancing and stares at him. It’s like someone has stuck a big pin in our happiness bubble and made it go pop.
‘We’re having a bit of fun, Martin. If that’s still allowed.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘Right. Well please don’t spoil everything by mentioning revision the second you walk through the door? It’s like you don’t want to see that he’s been having fun when you’re not here.’
They have gone into the talking-about-me-like-I’m-not-here thing they do. I don’t know if I actually become invisible to them or if they think my ears stop working when they argue or what.
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‘You know that’s not true.’
‘So why bring up revision? He gets enough pressure about the stupid SATs at school, he doesn’t need it here.’
I wipe my hands on my apron, even though they aren’t actually messy. I cough as I do it to remind them that I’m still here. They both look at me, then look down at their feet.
‘Right, well I’ll leave you to get on with it then,’ says Dad, putting a made-up smile on his face. For a moment, I think he is going to ruffle my hair again, so I step forward and pick up the wooden spoon. Dad leaves the kitchen without saying anything else.
‘He didn’t even ask if he could have one later,’ I say.
‘No,’ replies Mum. ‘He didn’t.’
We go back to the baking but neither of us do the crazy chicken dance or the laughing again. When we put the muffins in the oven, I stare at them for a bit and wonder whether the arguing will have knocked all the air and laughter out of them, and they won’t taste as good as usual. But later, when they have cooled down and Mum brings one up to my room on a plate, I find out they taste exactly the same as usual, which makes me feel a bit better.
I lie in bed that night, listening to them arguing downstairs. I can’t hear the words, only the spikiness of their voices. They didn’t always have spiky voices. I remember hearing sparkly voices and tinkly laughter. I don’t know where they went. Sometimes I feel like hunting around the house for them, in case they’ve left them in a cupboard or something and can’t remember where they are. I wish I could find them again and give them back, so I don’t need to listen to the spiky voices any more.
It never used to be like this. When I was little, we’d all go on walks together and Dad would tell jokes and Mum would groan, but be smiling at the same time, and we would stop and look at flowers and I would collect leaves and things and when we came home, Mum would help me make a collage and Dad would say nice things about it and everybody was smiley and there was no spikiness at all. At some point that I can’t quite remember, it stopped being like that and started getting more like this and now it’s a lot like this and I don’t like it at all.
I turn over in bed and bang my head down on the pillow. The spiky voices have stopped, and they are back to the spiky silence now. Sometimes the silence is worse because, whatever they might think, you can still hear it. And what I want more than anything else in the world is to stop the arguing and the silences and make it go back to how it used to be: Mum’s laughter tinkling about the house, her singing coming from whatever room she was in. I can even remember my giggles when I snuggled in between Mum and Dad in bed in the mornings when I was little and they started tickling me. I am very ticklish – just like Dad. Me and Mum used to tickle him to make him giggle. I want us to go back to being a family that make happy sounds again, but I don’t know how to make that happen. I know how to make apricot, orange and bran muffins and how to play the ukulele and stupid stuff like that, but I don’t know how to do the one thing I really want to do.