At half seven, Mum pulls on her jacket and runs round to the phone box. Again, she’s back in minutes, frowning this time.
Jane’s still not in,’ she says. ‘I left a message, but… what shall I do?’
‘We’ll be OK,’ I say bravely, not feeling it.
‘No, no, I can’t just leave you.’
The doorbell chimes and I feel all sad and panicky.
‘Oh, Max,’ Mum is saying. ‘Jane’s not back yet and I can’t think who else to ask. I need someone to sit with the kids. What shall I do?’
‘How about your friend with the flowers?’ Max says, his lip curling a little.
‘No, no. I hardly know him. And he’s out tonight. And Mrs Green, she’s just too old, she wouldn’t be able to cope. And the students are never in at the weekend. There’s nobody I can ask, Max. Maybe we should just…’
‘No,’ Max says. ‘The table’s booked for eight o’clock and we’re going, Anna. It’s important. It’s our future.’
‘I know, I know…’
‘Indie’s eleven,’ Max says brightly. ‘That’s old enough to babysit. You can look after Misti, can’t you? Just for an hour or so?’
I stare at Max. My cheeks feel pink, and my heart is thumping.
He throws an arm round my shoulder. ‘You’re a big girl now, aren’t you, Indie? You’ll do it, won’t you, to give me and Anna a bit of space? We’ve got stuff to talk about, important stuff.’
I look at Mum. She looks away. I can’t work out what she wants me to say.
‘OK,’ I say at last. ‘Max is right, Mum, I’m easily old enough to babysit. We’ll be fine, won’t we, Misti? Honest.’
It takes another twenty minutes before we convince Mum, but eventually she gives in, her hand wrapped tight in Max’s. She looks back over her shoulder, waving, her face all white and sad and beautiful.
‘Just you and me, Misti,’ I say.
It’s no big deal. I’ve been looking after Misti for months, on and off. And Mum’s been out before and left us alone, even if it was only to walk to the phone box on the corner. No big deal.
Misti peers up at me from under her blue felt hat.
‘Supper time,’ I say.
We eat jam doughnuts and drink milk, cuddled together in the big armchair in front of the three-bar electric fire. I eat three doughnuts and Misti manages four. She gets jam on her face, jam in her hair, jam all over her clothes. She smears jam all down my stripy top, dusts sugar across my nose and cheeks.
Bathtime.
I’ve run half a bath full of water before I realize it’s stone cold. Mum’s used all the hot water. She must have switched the immersion heater off.
I drain the bath, and wet a flannel instead.
Misti doesn’t like flannels, especially not cold ones. She screams and howls and wriggles free, and all I manage to do is dilute the jam smears and spread them about a bit more.
She’s wet too. What with everything that’s been happening this afternoon, maybe Mum forgot to change her.
I check in the bathroom for nappies, but there are none left. I look in the kitchen for the big new bag we bought earlier, but I can’t find it. I hunt in the cupboards, root in the wardrobe, check under the bed. It’s not here. It’s not in the flat.
I think back to when we unloaded the car. We were laughing, joking, messing around. Maybe we forgot to unload the nappies. They’re probably still in the boot of Ian’s car, wherever that is. I stand on a chair and peer out through the high bedroom window. No red Fiat.
I check Mum’s blue suede shoulder bag, in case there’s a spare nappy hidden. There isn’t.
I strip off Misti’s soaking tights and chuck out the nappy. When I try to wash her with the cold flannel, she howls again, kicking and scratching, so I drag on her pyjama trousers anyway and let her go.
Within minutes, she’s wet again and I have to peel off the pyjamas and scrub the place on the cheap blue carpet where she dripped. I dress her again in a clean pair of jammies and tell her it’s time for bed.
‘No,’ Misti says. ‘No, Inky. No bed. Want Mummy.’
Her face, tired and jam-stained, threatens tears. ‘No bed.’
I give in. We cuddle up on the big armchair with Misti’s big book of fairy tales. She picks out Rapunzel. We’re just at the bit where the wicked witch shuts Rapunzel in the tower when the lights flicker and go out.
We’re sitting in darkness, watching the three-bar electric fire fade from red to orange to nothing at all.
Misti starts to roar.
‘Hey, hey, hey!’ I tell her. ‘Don’t panic, Misti, it’s just that the leccy’s gone. We need to find the spare powercard…’
It’s in my school bag, along with Jane’s purse of emergency cash and the phonecard she gave me weeks ago. I just have to get the torch and find it…
Misti is howling, clinging on to me like a monkey. Every time I try to put her down, she pinches my arms, pulls my hair, kicks out at my ribs, my belly.
‘Inky, no!’ she screams. ‘Want light! Want Mummy! Bad, bad, Inky!’
‘Misti, let go… I need to find the torch…’
But she clings and screams and scratches and bites, trying to hang on in the dark.
I hoist her up on my hip and hold her as tightly as I can, stumbling around in the dark trying to find the torch. My eyes blink against a blanket of darkness, struggling to make sense of it. I finally get to the stripy cupboard and drag open the drawer.
Papers. Clothes pegs. Address book. No torch.
But this is where it always is.
‘Oh, Muu-um…’ My voice is a wail of despair.
Misti, hearing the panic, collapses on to my shoulder, limp and sobbing.
I bite my lip and check the other drawers. Tea towels, scrubbing brush, dishcloths. Paints, crayons, brushes, biros, sketchbook. No torch.
I shift Misti on to my other hip, trailing my spare hand around every surface I can find. Dusty window sills. Kitchen worktops. Table. Bookcase. In the bedroom, I trip on a heap of Misti’s dolls and fall. The two of us topple sideways against the wardrobe, hard.
Misti’s stopped screaming now. Her breath comes in huge, long gasps.
I sit on the bed and peel her arms and legs from round me. Her tiny fingers twist into the cloth of my sleeves, my hair. Her knees press into my waist.
‘No, noo-oh,’ she whispers. ‘Bad, bad, Inky.’
‘Misti, I need to find the torch,’ I hiss. ‘I need to find my school bag.’
Finally, I prise her free and fling her down on to the bed, sobbing.
I crash around the pitch-dark room, groping for my bag, the torch. I stumble next door to Mum’s room, stub my toe on a suitcase, read every surface with my fingers like a blind girl. Soft chenille bedcover, plaited rag rug, splintery floorboards. In the distance, Misti’s crying reaches fever pitch.
‘It’s OK, Misti,’ I shout, more to comfort myself than her. ‘I’m still here. I won’t be long. I just have to find my bag…’
I crawl across the kitchen lino on hands and knees. Spilt lemonade. A drip of jam. Misti’s old pyjamas, cold and wet.
No torch. No bag. My heart is thumping.
‘Ihhh-innn-keee!’ Misti howls.
In the bedroom again, my foot tangles up in Misti’s tartan blanket. I drag it off the floor, wrap my little sister in its soft, safe warmth. I pull her on to my lap and we sit for a long moment, heads touching, damp cheeks pressed together.
‘I can’t find it,’ I tell her.
‘I want Mummy,’ she whispers back.
I try to think. I hoist her up again and we make slow progress through the dark flat. I bang my leg on the table, skid a little on felt pens scattered across the carpet. I pull open the door, and the cold air rushes in, but also the dim yellow light from the street lights round the front, the orange glow of the city sky.
I walk up the steps on to the gravel, shuffle round to the front of the house. No red Fiat. All the same, I carry Misti up the steps to the front d
oor of 33 Hartington Drive, the tartan blanket trailing behind us like a dragon’s tail. I find Ian’s doorbell and lean on it.
Please be in. Please, please, please, be in. OK, so your car’s not here, but let there be a miracle, please.
Nobody comes.
Next, I press Mrs Green’s doorbell. She’s in, I know. I can hear the loud canned laughter and phoney applause from some TV game show, the volume turned up high.
Please.
Nothing happens.
I come down the steps, crunch across the gravel, peer in through the tiny crack of light in Mrs Green’s curtains. She’s asleep in her chair, her face falling sideways into the overstuffed chintz, the TV screaming at nobody.
I bang on the window. I scrunch my hand into a fist and hammer on the glass.
Mrs Green stirs, shifts around in the chair. A skeletal hand stretches out and knocks the TV remote to the floor. Her head lolls forward, white-haired, frail.
She’s old. She’s deaf. She can’t hear us.
We stand on the gravel drive, stranded. I scan the upstairs windows for some sign of life. Everything is dark.
‘I could ring Jane,’ I whisper to Misti. ‘She must be in by now.’
Jane,’ says Misti.
But I can’t ring Jane, because I can’t find my bag and the purse Jane gave me with the phone card, the number, the emergency cash. I can’t ring anyone.
I can’t fix the lights.
I can’t stop Misti from crying silently into my shoulder.
I don’t know what to do.
We sit on the back steps by the flat’s open door for a very long time. I watch out for a red Fiat, a blue builder’s van, a student on a bicycle from the middle flat. I wait to be rescued.
The last time I noticed the time, before the lights went out, it was past ten. It’s much later now. Mum will be home soon. She said she wouldn’t be long – she promised.
It may be early June, but it’s freezing. Misti’s hands and feet are like ice. A group of blokes walk down the street, shouting and laughing and kicking a tin can along the gutter. The pubs must be closing.
Mum won’t be long.
Misti is shivering, her whole body shaking gently in my arms. Even in the yellow light from the street lamps, her face looks pale, her lips blue. I lift her up, my own hands and feet numb now from sitting so long. I take a long, last look along the drive, then walk down the steps into the pitch-black flat.
It must be very, very late.
I close the door.
My eyes struggle to make sense of the dark, and again I’m stumbling, shuffling. I make it to the nearest armchair, the one where we toasted our toes beside the fire just hours ago. We flop down into it.
Misti burrows into my neck.
‘Bad, bad, Inky,’ she breathes softly.
I pull the tartan blanket over us, and we fall into sleep.
Someone is hammering on the door, pressing the doorbell, banging on the glass.
I pull the blanket over my head, but the noise won’t go away. It drags me out of sleep and back to reality.
Mum. She must have forgotten her key.
I haul Misti off my lap and leave her curled in the armchair, the tartan blanket around her. ‘Mum?’
I navigate blindly towards the door, towards the banging. My fingers fumble with the doorhandle, the deadlock. I pull.
‘Miss Collins?’ says a woman’s voice from the steps outside. ‘Miss Collins, this is WPC Barrie. Could we come in?’
My body is cold all over. WPC Barrie?
‘Miss Collins, is there a light?’
I stand in silence, in darkness, drifting.
‘Is there a light?’
‘No,’ I manage to say at last. ‘The powercard ran out. Nothing’s working.’
WPC Barrie says something to the man behind her, and suddenly the broad, bright beam of a flashlight reaches into the flat. It lights up the felt pens, skewed across the carpet, the flowery Doc Marten boots Misti was playing with, the abandoned blue felt hat with the curling feather. Beyond them I can see my school bag, tucked neatly out of the way under the table.
The powercard, the phonecard, the emergency cash.
‘Can we come in?’ WPC Barrie asks, but they’re in already, the flashlight sweeping across the carpet. It wakes Misti, who slides down from the chair and squints in the torchlight. In its bright beam, her face is filthy, streaked with jam and snot and tears.
WPC Barrie reaches down and lifts her up. ‘Hello, pet,’ she says. ‘Oh, Lord`she’s soaking wet. And worse. Oh, yuk…’
She picks up the tartan blanket and tries to wrap it round Misti, but my sister is crying again now, wriggling and scratching and biting.
‘Inky!’ she shrieks. ‘Inkeeee!’
I hold out my arms and WPC Barrie hands Misti over. She is soaking. She stinks.
‘Miss Collins.’ The policewoman puts a hand on my arm. She clears her throat. ‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident. We have your mum down at the hospital. Now, she’s OK, she’s going to be fine, but she’s very worried about you two. We’re here to check…’
I press my face into Misti’s hair, sticky with jam. I smell sugar, talc, the hot, sour reek of a full nappy, except there’s no nappy there. I close my eyes tight shut and hug my baby sister.
The world spins and turns and we’re alone in the dark.
‘Indigo?’ The policewoman puts an arm round my shoulders. ‘Did you hear me? Is there anyone we can contact, anyone who can look after you?’
‘Mum,’ I whisper. ‘I want my mum.’
WPC Barrie shakes her head. ‘You can see your mum in the morning. She’ll be well enough to see you then,’ she says. ‘Right now, though, we need to find a safe place for you two to stay overnight. Are there any relatives, friends, neighbours…?’
‘NO-OOO…’
It can’t be me screaming. I know I can’t make such a loud noise. I wouldn’t dare. I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance, cause any trouble. So why are they staring at me like that? Why is Misti roaring and struggling and beating her fists against me?
White faces, dark peaked caps, strangers in the middle of our dark, musty flat.
‘We’re going to need Social Services,’ the policeman says. ‘Two hysterical kids, home alone, in a smelly, damp flat with no heat, no light. Look at the state of them.’
‘Dave, give them a chance,’ says the policewoman. ‘They’re bound to be distressed, aren’t they? And there must be someone. Someone they can call.’
She keeps her arm round my shoulders, a hand stroking my hair. She whispers something soft and kind as she holds me, and slowly the panic subsides, the jagged pain dulls.
I’m still, now. I crouch, curled round Misti, trying to steady my breath, gather my thoughts.
‘Indigo,’ says the policewoman again. ‘Is there anyone we can ring? Someone to look after you for a while? We can’t leave you here alone.’
‘I need to see my mum,’ I say. ‘I need to see her now.’
‘That’s not really possible,’ the policewoman says. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘I need to see my mum,’ I plead. ‘Please. I have to. I have to see her.’
The two strangers exchange glances.
‘We can see if that’s possible,’ WPC Barrie says at last. ‘We can try. But first, we need a responsible adult, someone to look after you for a day or so.’
We stand on the front doorstep of 33 Hartington Drive while the policeman pushes the bell for Ian’s flat. No reply. There’s no red Fiat, no Ian.
‘Mrs Green?’ I suggest, and they try her doorbell too. They rap on the glass. Her flat is dark now, and silent as the grave. I imagine her asleep, earplugs in to dull the sound of student parties overhead. Or lying awake, terrified to answer the door because it’s the middle of the night.
‘She’s a bit deaf,’ I explain. ‘She’s eighty-something.’
‘That’s no good,’ says WPC Barrie. ‘Anyone else?’
‘Not really,’ I say, b
ut they try the bell for the student flat anyway. After a long wait, one of the balcony windows above creaks open and a grey, swaying figure appears. It says something very rude.
‘Can you open up?’ shouts WPC Barrie.
‘What?’ slurs the grey figure. ‘What d’you want? We haven’t done nothing, honest.’
An empty beer can clatters down from above, rattling across the gravel at our feet.
‘Not a chance,’ says the policeman. ‘Hopeless.’
‘Ring Jane,’ I say. We dash back down to the flat and I grab my school bag, pulling out Jane’s number. They call from the police car.
‘Answerphone,’ he says. ‘I’ll leave a message, but…’
We sit in the squad car and drive towards the hospital. WPC Barrie holds my hand in the dark. Misti, cocooned in soggy tartan, sleeps in my lap.
‘Anyone else?’ she asks me gently. ‘Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins? Anyone we can call?’
‘Gran lives in Wales,’ I say.
‘Do you know her phone number?’ WPC Barrie asks.
I shake my head.
I pull my hand free of her grasp and reach down into my school bag. Phonecard, powercard, pound coins. My Victorian-project folder. Spelling jotter. Pencil case. Empty crisp packet.
At the bottom, dog-eared and creased, there’s a fat, grubby envelope addressed to Gran. I never got around to buying a stamp. I hand the letter over.
‘OK,’ says WPC Barrie. ‘Well done, Indigo. Well done.’
My mum is lying in a hospital bed, a tall bed made of shiny metal tubes and covered with a pale-blue waffle coverlet. She is wearing a white, short-sleeved nightie that ties behind her neck and looks like someone made it in a hurry from old sheets and white shoelaces.
She is propped up on huge white pillows, and she’s smiling at me, but I can’t smile back.
My face is frozen.
‘Indie, love, iss OK…’ she says, but her lips are swollen and black and held together with tiny slivers of white tape. The words come out all distorted.
My mum has plastic tubes stuck into her arm above her bandaged hand, bandages around her face, her chest, her body. There’s a wad of white cotton taped over her left eye to hide the swelling and the stitches and the shiny, purple bruises. She has seven broken ribs, the nurse tells WPC Barrie, and a fractured jaw, and her left hand is crushed and badly bruised. Her fingers, purple, swollen sausages, flex slightly on the coverlet, the pale-blue sparkly nail varnish still perfect, unchipped.
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