“Oh, my! That naughty dog!” she calls out, obviously looking out of the open window.
I scramble to my feet, same as Stan, and hurry to the bedroom as well. I’m sure I recognize that bark…
“Sorry! Sorry!!” Tash is calling out, as I see her chase Max around the grass with the lead and the collar he’s obviously slipped out of.
I’m guessing she’s come round to check on me, since I dodged out of school, and probably because I’ve been dodging her calls and texts all day too.
She’s not the only one checking up on me; Dad’s car has just pulled up!
“Edith, I call your mum and dad when you first arrive,” says Mrs Kosma. “I was worried about you and not sure what was happening!”
When she went to get us the baklava and the glasses of milk from the kitchen, she must have phoned them then…
CLUNK!!
That was the sound of Mrs Kosma’s front door shutting.
SQUEEEE!! Thud.
And that was the main entrance door beyond that opening and thumping closed.
I hadn’t even realized Stan had left my side, but there he is, running past the girl in the brown school uniform standing on the path, and he’s jumping into Dad’s arms.
“WOOF! WOOOFF!!!” barks Max, thrilled with seeing people he knows, especially people he knows running about like him.
He doesn’t know which way to jump, so he pounces on the nearest person, who happens to be Alice B. Lovely.
“Max – get down!” yelps Tash. “GET DOWN!!”
Max’s puppy training must be going well; he does what he’s told and flops to the ground.
And finds his nose next to an interesting-smelling box.
“Edie!” Dad calls out, with Stan wrapped around him. “What’s going on?”
What’s going on?
Currently a couple of pretty terrible things, actually.
The first is that I have just spotted Mum stomping up the street, with a face that’s a mixture of concern and fury. (I suddenly realize she may have had a call from school, as well as Mrs Kosma – it’s policy for parents to be called if kids have unexplained absences.)
The second is that Max has started scrabbling at the door of the pet carrier, and before either Tash or Alice B. Lovely can stop him, he has managed to loosen the catch … and a petrified black and white bird hurtles into the air, swooping and squawking and flapping its wings so hard that several monochrome feathers flutter down.
“No!!” shrieks Alice B. Lovely. “Nooooo!!!!”
In the general scheme of things, yes, I might be angry with her, but right this instant, I’m frightened for Buddy.
He could fly off and be lost for ever!
He’d starve; he doesn’t know how to find his own food.
There are hawks out there who’d be more than happy to swoop on a naïve magpie with no clue about the outside world…
“We’ve GOT to get him back down!” I call out to anyone who might be able to help.
But we’re all flapping around ourselves: me, Mrs Kosma, Alice B. Lovely, Tash, Dad, Stan.
“Justine! Thank God,” Dad suddenly calls out, as Mum now speeds her way towards us. “You always know what to do. How can we get Buddy to come back?”
Mum stares up at the whirling bird for a second, then snaps out some orders.
“Tash, take Max inside now, and keep him quiet!”
Tash shoots a hand out to catch the keys Mum throws her, then throws herself at her dumb pup, scooping him up in her arms and letting herself into the entrance hall of the flats.
“Right, we need to get something that’ll attract him down. Something he likes. Any ideas?”
I expect Alice B. Lovely to speak, but she’s standing trembling, her eyes – her natural, dull-grey eyes – fixed on the traumatized bird up above.
“Maybe some bread? I get some bread!!” Mrs Kosma suggests, and scurries off to her flat.
But Stan has beaten her to it.
Before we even knew it he’d scrambled indoors, grabbed his school bag and is back, yanking Arthur out and holding him up.
Alice B. Lovely spots what he’s doing and seems to snap out of the daze she’s been lost in.
She holds her arms aloft, gives a whistle, then calls out, “Come on down! Come!! Please, come on down, Lulu!”
Lulu?
Lulu?!?
Does the magpie have two names, same as her?!
(Don’t even get me started on the boy bird/girl bird thing…)
“It’s working! Look! It’s interested!” says Dad, as Buddy/Lulu makes ever-decreasing circles, spiralling lower and lower towards us.
“Hello!” laughs Stan, as the bird eventually lands with a thunk on his shoulder.
“Hello!” squawks Buddy/Lulu, as it nuzzles the toy croc that my brother is holding up to it.
I’m closest to both bird and boy, so I do some swooping of my own and gently grab the magpie.
Alice B. Lovely has already lifted up her pet carrier, and after I slip Buddy/Lulu inside, she fastens the catch with shaking fingers.
Our eyes meet.
“Lulu?!” is all I say.
“Yes,” she nods. “It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing. I just came out with Buddy, when I first took her here.”
“But why?” I say with a weary shrug.
“Well, I – I knew it was one of Stan’s nicknames,” says Alice B. Lovely. “And I thought it might make Stan more likely to be interested and less nervous around Lulu. Buddy, I mean.”
At that moment, Stan walks over and stops by my side.
With an earnest expression he looks up at Alice B. Lovely, studying her face.
“Who are you?” he asks simply.
Oh, wow.
My brother really doesn’t recognize her.
Tears trickle from the small, dull-grey eyes of the ordinary girl in the brown uniform.
“Hello, Stan,” she says in a soft and sorry voice. “My name is Ali…”
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
That’s the sound of the happiness clock, still going strong, a whole year on.
Oh, yes – it did and does exist. In my head and on my wall (I got the photo from the gallery blown up into a print). The original tiny one on the pavement has pretty much faded away, thanks to rain and constant footsteps.
As for the clock of doom, it clunks on, though now it’s down in Mrs Kosma’s flat, after she unwittingly admired it once and Mum practically forced it on her as a thank-you present for all the help she’s given our family. (Who knew Mum lay awake in similarly long, sleepless nights listening to the dreaded drumming of minutes and hours dragging by?)
Of course there’ve been a few little blips along the way, but I try not to get hung up on those.
I try not to get hung up on lots of things that used to bug me.
Do you want a quick list, off the top of my head? All right; in no particular order, here goes…
False nails: Hey, everyone is free to like what they like, even crazy fashions that make it difficult to text or squeeze your spots.
Heights: Nana took me and Stan on the London Eye last Easter and I loved it, which is pretty amazing for me, since I’m someone whose head went woozy after three steps on the bunk-bed ladder not too long ago. (Though I did keep a yellow heart-shaped Post-it clutched in my hand during the whole ride which read, Remember, this is OK!)
Yellow: It’s fine. It’s the colour of sunshine and heart-shaped Post-it notes, and it reminds me to stop moping if I’m sliding that way. I have stuck a couple of vampire-book posters up on my walls, though, which counterbalances the overpowering cheerfulness.
Soft toys on beds: Don’t laugh, but I now have a hippo called Maurice on mine. It’s the one I got from my uncle who went to Kenya, remember? Stan said Arthur wante
d him for company when we’re at Dad’s, so that’s where he lives, on my bottom bunk. (I can never say no to Stan, after all.) I did think about customizing Maurice to stop him looking so cutesy, but then Buddy pecked his glass eyes out and did the job for me. She was a little jealous of Maurice and Arthur’s friendship, if you ask me.
(Yep, we stuck with calling her Buddy, ’cause Stan says she “likes it”. And hey, it’s a cool name for a girl, don’t you think?)
Big Fat Phoneys: Since all the stuff happened with Alice B. Lovely, it dawned on me that acting a little phoney – with the exception of some of our rotten ex-nannies – isn’t that terrible.
People might do it to be kind (like the author-who-I-won’t-name, with Charlotte Adamson), or because they’re lonely (Mrs Kosma, noseying at all the neighbours) or because they just want to be nice (Alice B. Lovely, even when she took it too far, and found herself fibbing).
People arguing: That’s their problem. Maybe it’s easy for me to be laid back about this now, since Mum and Dad don’t do it any more. Honestly – really and truly honestly – they are nice and polite to each other these days, and even laugh at each other’s jokes (!).
Get this: we all went out for a family meal on the day their divorce came through. Tash thought that was dead weird, but me and Stan were cool with it. The way we see it is, if you can’t have parents who love each other, it’s a good second best if they quite like each other. Which means, if you hadn’t noticed, that last-minute number eleven on my original list of “Things I Hate” definitely doesn’t bug me any more. ’Cause I did get what I wanted: parents who don’t hate each other and a family that’s vaguely happy. (I can live without the local, handy mountains, no problem.)
Oh, and before you go checking back, I have to say that Mum’s choice in mushy rom coms still make me barf, nits haven’t grown on me (except when they do, literally) and cheese is … well, all wrong. Stan tried to introduce me to the delights of stringy cheese, which is his current packed-lunch favourite, but he soon stopped when he spotted me giving it to Buddy, who ended up caching it in Stan’s gym shoes. (Very unpleasantly squidgy when you’re jumping on the trampet, apparently.)
By the way, Stan is still my assistant.
But not in torturing nannies.
Oh, no, those days are long gone.
In fact, we don’t have nannies any more.
Mum and Dad each try and do a couple of super-early finishes in the week, so they can pick Stan up from school, while I make my own way home.
The rest of the time, Mrs Kosma fusses around us, making our tea, hand-feeding Stan baklava and knitting us truly terrible jumpers.
Mrs Kosma; I can safely say that she loves looking after us, and Buddy too, of course. As part of a pet-share, I mean, when Buddy’s not living with me and Stan upstairs at Mum’s, or staying over at Dad’s.
“Finished!” says a voice now.
“What took you so long?!” I say, with my usual sarcasm.
I’m up a stepladder, taping net curtains to the side of the bus shelter. The cushions are already Blu-tacked in place on the red plastic bench. I’ve set up a little table too, with a flowery lace-edged square, lent by Mrs Kosma, with strict instructions to give it back once we’ve finished our art project.
“Do you like it?” says Stan.
My brother has added a bird cage to the table. He made it out of an old cardboard box. It has a tiny wire-and-papier-maché flamingo in it, perched on a squint branch.
“I love it!” I say, trying not to smirk. I look at my watch. It’s six forty-five on Saturday morning, and it’s going to start getting busy here soon.
Stan and I need to clear up and then take a few photos: first, we’ll take one of the bus shelter as it is, and later, once it gets busy, we’ll snap puzzled passengers.
We’re going to email the pictures to Alice B. Lovely later, to show her that we believe in her dreams (and her), even if she’s not around any more.
Where is she?
Has she flapped her fairy-tale wings and fluttered off?
Blinked her ice-storm eyes and magicked herself away?
No.
It’s not that enchanted an ending.
Almost, but not quite.
The afternoon that Buddy was nearly lost … what happened?
Well, as we all shook and swayed, my mum took control.
Justine Henderson herded us all – kids, soon-to-be-ex-husband, dog, bird and nosey elderly neighbour – inside and up to her flat.
What followed was endless cups of tea, stony silences, bursts of chattering explanations, hugs and tears. Lots of tears. (From me, mostly, but who’s counting?)
There was baklava too (brought up by Mrs Kosma, who felt those in shock needed sugar).
There was also open-mouthed staring (from Stan, who crept closer and closer to the strange grey-eyed girl, till he finally recognized her – despite her disguise of normality – and ended up resting his tufty-haired head in her lap).
“All the stuff you made up … did you just want to fool us?” I remember asking this different/familiar person, testing her one last time, as my hands ached to hold hers.
“No!” she’d cried, looking heartbreakingly sad and lost, her beautifully slate-coloured eyes misting over. “At first I did it ’cause I wanted the job. I wanted the money to buy things I was desperate for, like my clothes and art stuff and new contact lenses. And then…”
She didn’t finish.
Not till I stared at her so hard she had to.
“I – I did it ’cause you and Stan, and your mum and dad … you all believed in me. The real me,” she’d said, tears trickling down her pale cheeks. “And that felt amazing!”
At that second, there wasn’t a sound – apart from Max quietly howling in the kitchen he’d been shut in – from anyone.
Me and Alice B. Lovely (’cause that’s who she’d always be to me) grabbed hands, and with elbows bent, held them up in front of us like the hands of a clock, pointing to twelve…
A little while later, Dad drove her home and made Alice B. Lovely tell her startled parents just how unhappy she was at school. Thanks to Dad’s advice, they pretty quickly let her switch to a sixth form specializing in art.
My parents are also helping her go through various art school prospectuses so she can decide which one to apply to in the future.
The downside is that Alice B. Lovely is…
a)studying hard, and
b)a long way away.
She’s going to a college – one where you don’t have to dress in a mud-coloured uniform, and no one minds if you wear different coloured eyes and eyelashes every day – which is ten miles away, near her (100% real) Aunt Betty’s, and so she’s staying with her most of the time now.
I guess that’s pretty much perfect, since Alice B. Lovely gets on great with the aunt she’s named after. (Alice Betty Grimley! Who’d have guessed that’s what the “B” stood for?)
CLICK!
I take a photo of the bus shelter in all its glory, then look at the image on the tiny screen – and laugh.
The whole thing is glowing, glimmers of light radiating, as if a magical presence has decided to perch its fairy-tale bum on one of the second-hand cushions.
I know it’s just a trick of the early morning light, rays of slowly rising sun glinting against the clear plastic walls of the bus shelter.
But the wild-eyed Alice B. Lovely has made me see that there are sprinkles of specialness everywhere, if you just know where to look.
And I’m looking, all the time now.
Because the one thing I can honestly say I love is…
Life according to
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First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2012
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Text copyright © Karen McCombie, 2012
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