The Mixed-Up Summer of Lily McLean

by Lindsay Littleson

  “No way, you watched three programmes yesterday and I only got to watch one. Mummmm, Hudson took the batteries out!”

  Excellent, everyone’s still alive. I put my earphones back in and go back to thinking about David, who isn’t going to be invited to my house any time soon. Even though I’m sure he wouldn’t sneer at the mess. He has nice manners, drilled into him by his mum, who teaches gym, so that tells you what she’s like. And David isn’t the tidiest person himself. His hair is always sticking up at funny angles, as though he has slept on it, and his clothes look permanently dishevelled and ill fitting, probably because he is a bit of a tricky shape. David is shorter than the average eleven-year-old boy, a fact which worries him a lot, and he’s a little overweight, which doesn’t bother him at all.

  But I wouldn’t want to watch him stepping over the broken toys and dirty laundry and the pushchair in the hall. And then where would we go? We wouldn’t get any peace in the cramped pigsty of a bedroom I share with Hudson and Bronx. And I wouldn’t want to take him into our cluttered, untidy living room. Even the newish table lamp has a bash in it now, thanks to Jenna’s latest meltdown. Nope, it’s not happening.

  And Rowan’s parents won’t let her through the door of my house. Her mum came round to our old house in Kelvin Street one evening last October. I think she was selling tickets for the PTA Halloween disco or something. My step-dad had started early on the vodka. He was totally off his face and pretty unpleasant.

  Rowan has explained repeatedly to her mum that my step-dad has gone for good, but she is still not allowed to visit, which is fine with me, even if I’m mortified by the reason for it.

  So, at this precise moment, I’m in the cupboard in the hall, earplugs in and the radio blaring, reading Anne of Green Gables for the umpteenth time. Anne always says exactly what she’s thinking, which both impresses and appals me, and I can totally sympathise with her red hair issues. The words are bouncing about on the page though, as they always do when I’ve got a headache, so I close the book and sit and think about my troublesome family.

  Jenna is probably still stropping about being forced to go to Millport for her summer holidays, leaving her beloved ‘bezzies’ behind. Bronx and Hudson will be squabbling over the remote or sitting glassy-eyed on the couch, watching Sponge Bob or Scooby Doo. Summer might be wailing, because nobody is paying her any attention. If she is, I will go and pick her up and play with her for a wee while. Somebody has to and it isn’t going to be Mum or Jenna at this rate. I put my book down, take my earphones out and listen intently.

  The television is blaring, the boys are silent and I can hear Mum clattering about, obviously having given up on attempting to talk Jenna out of her room.

  “Right, Summer,” she says, sounding a bit grumpy and impatient. “Let’s get that smelly nappy off.”

  “Not here, Mum!” yells Bronx. “Take her somewhere else! She stinks!”

  “Don’t say that,” tuts Mum. “She can’t help having a dirty nappy. You’ll hurt her feelings.”

  “Summer hasn’t got feelings, silly, she’s only a baby! An ugly, buggly, stinky-poo baby!”

  That’s really mean, Bronx. Admittedly, Summer may have a permanently runny nose and stained hand-me-downs, but I think she’s pretty cute. She has curly ginger hair, a freckly face and a snub nose, like Little Orphan Annie in the musical, if Orphan Annie had been shrunk in the wash. And had a permanently runny nose. But I am very fond of her. She smiles at me sunnily every time I pick her up and we’ve got to do something to make up for the fact that she’s got the dad from hell.

  I keep my earphones out, since it’s quite peaceful now in the house, and make myself comfortable on my cushion. I lean back against the wall, pick up my book again and am trying to enjoy the quiet, when my cupboard door is flung open and daylight streams in. Can a person not get any peace? I poke my head out, but there’s nobody in the hall. I can hear the television, and Mum clattering in the kitchen, and Summer banging a rattle against the wall of her playpen, happy to finally be wearing a clean nappy. Silence from Jenna. She has probably barricaded herself in her bedroom and is now messaging her friends, threatening to run away from home.

  If only.

  I pull the door shut and sit back down on that hideous cushion.

  “I wish you were here, Lily.”

  I shoot into the air and bang my head on the electricity meter. Crumple back down on the floor, head throbbing and heart racing. Glance around, eyes wide. But there’s definitely nobody there.

  Then the light bulb pops. The cupboard instantly goes pitch black. I’m sitting in total darkness, my hand fumbling for the door handle, numb with fear, when I hear it again, right next to my ear.

  “And I wish you could hear me, Lily,” the voice whispers.

  My hand finds the handle and I roll, Ninja-like, out of the cupboard and faceplant onto our garishly patterned hall carpet. I lie there for a moment, staring at the weird squiggly design, and waiting for my heart to stop leaping about in my chest. I’m scared that I’m having a heart attack, like old Mrs McInnes over the road.

  When we visited her afterwards in the hospital, Mrs McInnes told Mum that it had felt like her heart was being squeezed in a vice. I’m not sure what that feels like, but it sounds sore, and as I calm down a bit, I realise I’m not actually in pain at all. It must just be a panic attack, brought on by extreme terror. A disembodied voice will do that to a person, especially when the disembodied voice knows your name.

  I roll over on to my back and gaze up at the ceiling with its swirly loops of plaster. This house does not have restful décor. I try and gather my thoughts.

  I’m hearing voices, is my first thought.

  Well, just one voice, but that’s quite crazy enough, thanks, is my second.

  “Um, Lily, what are you doing?” asks Mum. She’s standing at the kitchen door, wiping her hands on a tea towel. “Why on earth are you lying on the floor?”

  “No reason,” I reply, trying to look nonchalant while lying on my back on the hall carpet. I haul myself upright and smile cheerfully. Hiding my real feelings is my area of expertise – I’ve had years of practice. “I was just checking for holes in the skirting boards. I heard scratching when I was walking through the hall and I thought I should check, just in case.”

  Mum’s look of abject horror makes me wish I’d told her I’d simply gone mad instead. “Jenna!” she screeches at the closed bedroom door. “Get those dirty plates out of your room and into the sink! I told you we’d get rats!”

  “I think I must have imagined the scratching,” I break in hastily. “It was probably Bronx or Hudson carrying on in the living room. You know what they’re like.”

  Mum looks uncertain. She clearly wants to believe that there are no rodents in the house, but needs a bit more persuasion. Then I have a brainwave.

  “Mac and Quipp would have caught any rats or mice as soon as they dared show their little whiskery faces. You can tell Quipp’s a great mouser just by watching him stalk spiders,” I say firmly.

  I see Mum visibly relax, and decide that distraction would be an excellent tactic at this point. Maybe I should be a lawyer, after all?

  “So Mum, what’s all the fuss about Millport?” I ask casually. “Jenna doesn’t seem too thrilled,” I add, with spectacular understatement.

  “I knew Jenna wouldn’t be keen to stay with Gran in a caravan this year. I did suggest Bronx and Hudson go instead of her, but Gran was having none of that. Mean old so and so.”

  I can see both sides of this story. I have a lot of sympathy with Gran, as a holiday in a caravan with Hudson and Bronx would be no holiday at all. And Gran loves her holidays in Millport. But for Mum, it would be an answer to a prayer. She would have a whole week without the gruesome twosome’s constant squabbling.

  “That’s a shame,” I say, although I don’t sound terribly convincing. From a purely selfish point of view, I am completely on Gran’s side on this one. I share a room with Bronx and Hudson all ye
ar. I would like some peace and privacy on my summer holiday too.

  “So I was trying to persuade Jenna to go,” says Mum with an exasperated sigh. “But she is dead against it. I’m not going to force her.”

  I wouldn’t fancy Mum’s chances of success, but if by some miracle she did manage to convince Jenna to go, it would be Gran and me who would suffer. It’d be the holiday from hell. She would make every minute miserable, with her sulks, tantrums and complaints. Now that I think about it, perhaps I’d rather have Bronx and Hudson. At least they would enjoy themselves.

  “Gran will be disappointed if Jenna doesn’t come,” I say carefully.

  I think I’m on safe ground here.

  My gran dotes on Jenna and me, despite Jenna’s recent transformation. She is not nearly so fond of the other three, which is sad for them, and sometimes a bit uncomfortable for us, particularly at Christmas and birthdays, when Gran’s favouritism really shows (much to my mum’s fury). The fact is, she’s mine and Jenna’s gran by blood, but not theirs – and while she looks out for all of us, I guess she can’t hide her affection for her own son’s daughters. Gran would be mortified if we said anything though.

  Despite her love for Jenna, Gran isn’t afraid to muscle in with the discipline. She says she needs a good smack. Mind you, Gran says that a lot, mostly in a big loud voice when she sees a kid misbehaving in the street or in a shop. It’s mega-embarrassing.

  “Listen to that cheeky wee so and so!” she bawled last weekend, when she and I were out getting her shopping. (She needs me to be her bag-carrier.) “If I’d spoken to my mother like that, she’d have boxed my ears!”

  The child’s mother whirled round and swore at my gran, who now felt completely justified.

  “That explains everything,” Gran said loudly as she flounced out, while I trailed behind, scarlet-faced and laden with plastic carrier bags. “Poor wee wean, having a mother so foul mouthed.”

  It was unimaginable humiliation. No wonder Jenna refuses to help Gran with the shopping.

  So I am her favourite grandchild now, by a mile. I do as I’m told, say the right things and keep my thoughts firmly to myself.

  “You can say no to this…” continues Mum, “but would you consider going to Millport on your own? Just you and Gran? If you think it would be really boring, I’m sure we could come up with a polite excuse.”

  I consider for all of one second.

  “I’d love to go,” I say, and I absolutely mean it. A week without my noisy siblings on an island I adore. It sounds like heaven.

  Thinking about heaven reminds me that I am being haunted, or almost worse, am hearing imaginary voices in my head. It seems another very good reason for getting out of this house.

  “When do I leave?” I ask happily. Mum looks a bit affronted and I think maybe I am overdoing my enthusiasm to get away from here. “I just wondered if Gran is planning to go during term time again,” I add quickly, “because they don’t love that at school.”

  “Last week of term, I think. You won’t be doing any work by that point, will you?”

  I guess that Mrs McKenzie would beg to differ, and I know for a fact that the last week of this term is a pretty significant one. It’s my final week of primary school ever. At the end of the summer holidays I’ll be starting secondary school. I feel really torn, but I’m not going to argue myself out of the only holiday I’m going to get this summer. And the realisation that I will miss the Leavers’ Dance swings it. I really, really don’t want to go to that dance.

  “Great,” I say, and I quickly do a countdown in my head. This time in two weeks, I’ll be out of this house. And, hopefully, I’ll be leaving the voice behind me. I need a break from that, more than anything else.

  ***

  I haven’t really explained the voice properly, have I? That’s because I have no earthly idea what’s going on. I just know it’s terrifying; scarier than scratchy vampire fingers, because at least the vampires are outside the window, scratching to be let in, not right in the room beside you, whispering in your ear.

  The whole haunting thing started about a month ago. In fact, it was on the 9th of May, which was Summer’s birthday. We were all sitting around in the living room helping Summer open her presents, which wasn’t hugely exciting for her, as she got a peach woolly cardigan and a pair of little flowery dungarees from Mum and a five-pack of white socks from Gran. Mum said she’s too young to care what she’s given for her birthday, but it seemed a bit mean to me. Though, to be fair, she was having the time of her life just tearing up the wrapping paper.

  I had bought her a cuddly lion. Well, strictly speaking, I hadn’t bought it for her, but I had put so many 20p coins into the grabber machine on the sea front that I might as well have gone into a shop and paid for a decent-looking toy lion, instead of the rather bedraggled creature I’d won. But you know that feeling when the metal grabber bit keeps letting go just as you think you’ve won and you become absolutely determined to get your hands on that particular toy, at whatever cost? Well, that’s why Summer got a tatty orange lion with a fluorescent pink mane for her second birthday.

  Summer ripped all of the spotty pink wrapping paper away and was delighted with it – the lion this time, not the wrapping paper. She cuddled her new toy tightly round its mangy fur tummy and chewed on its orange ears, which I presumed meant that she was pleased. I was feeling quite smug about the whole thing, cause I think Jenna had completely forgotten she even had a baby sister, never mind that it was her second birthday.

  And then that voice whispered in my ear, just loud enough for me to hear.

  “Why didn’t you stay?”

  I spun round as quickly as a Waltzer at the fair, but there was nobody there. I could see my entire family in front of me. The boys were sprawled on the swirly lime carpet and Gran, Mum and Jenna were perched on the couch. None of them was standing next to me, whispering in my ear. On a scale of zero to ten, with zero being totally ok and ten being a zombie invasion, it was about a seven.

  Ever since, the voice has been getting more and more insistent. It only happens in the house, never at school, and it always takes me completely by surprise, like today’s encounter in the cupboard.

  ***

  “Lily, can you get the boys dressed before your gran comes over!” shouts Mum.

  I sigh, and wander into the living room, preparing to haul the boys off the couch. It’s the afternoon and they aren’t even out of their pyjamas yet.

  “Right lads, PJs off! Clothes on!” I shout.

  Suddenly the voice speaks, quite loudly in my ear.

  “Who said that? Who are you?” I scream like Jenna in a strop and Mum comes running. I have to pretend that Bronx kicked me when I was pulling him off the couch, which isn’t very fair on Bronx. The poor wee soul doesn’t even try and defend himself. Kicking people is an automatic reflex for him, so he probably believes he’s actually done it. But what choice do I have? I’m afraid Mum will drag me off to the doctor for a brain scan or something. And the thing is, I really don’t think that I’m imagining things.

  I’m sure that I recognise the voice.

  Chapter 3

  Things I love about my baby sister:

  She has a cute laugh.

  She thinks I’m wonderful.

  She doesn’t pee against walls.

  I decide that hanging around the house doing nothing is not a productive way to spend a warmish Sunday afternoon and I can’t possibly return to the cupboard until somebody changes the light bulb. What can I do?

  I need to get out of here. I wrestle with the buggy in the hallway until eventually it unfolds. Then I pick up Summer from her playpen, stuff her chubby little arms into her anorak and plonk her into the buggy. She sits there looking up at me expectantly, clutching her tatty orange lion.

  “We’re going for a walk, Summer! That will be fun, won’t it?”

  She gets very excited, beams delightedly and makes some loud noises, which sound to me almost like words. Gran s
ays she should be talking by now.

  “That child clearly has developmental delay,” I heard her mutter last weekend, when she was watching Summer sitting in her playpen, bashing the wooden sides with her favourite rattle and babbling nonsense to herself.

  Gran says I could speak in sentences when I was Summer’s age, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Summer at all. She just needs people to talk to her and then she will talk back.

  “I’m just going to take Summer for a wee walk!” I call. Mum pokes her head round the kitchen door, and gives me a grateful smile. She looks shattered after her fight with Jenna. Her long, curly hair is all over the place and her eyes are red rimmed and tired.

  “That’s a great idea, Lily. She could do with some fresh air and it’s a nice day. Thanks, love. Why don’t you take some bread and feed the ducks?”

  I squeeze past her, take a slice of rather stale brown bread from the bread bin and stuff it in the pocket of my hoodie.

  I am hopeful that Mum will suggest I buy Summer an ice cream, And here’s some money, Lily, but sadly she doesn’t. And asking Jenna for cash is a non-starter nowadays.

  ***

  I bump the buggy down the two front steps and along the cracked little path to our gate. In two minutes we are whizzing down the High Street, past the newsagent’s and the many gift shops and cafés, towards the pier. I slow down at the sweet shop.

  “Look in there, Summer. Look at those yummy stripy lollipops and all those scrummy chocolates. I might get you a chocolate mouse next time. Would you like that?”

  Summer makes some more of her garbled noises and sticks her hands up towards the sweet shop window. She stiffens, throws herself backwards in her pushchair and lets out a wail. I don’t think she wants to wait until next time for a chocolate mouse. She wants one right now. Stopping here was a bad idea. I push the pram faster along the pavement.

  We have to dodge past hordes of people on the narrow pavement, but I am quite good at using the buggy as a battering ram if they won’t get out of the way.