Mum is keen for us all to get along like a house on fire, another thing my sister says would never happen, seeing as Grandad goes around at night switching every single plug socket off. We aren’t supposed to make up our minds about him yet, because we don’t know him well enough to reach a proper verdict. Mum says, Family is Family is Family, whatever side of the fence you’re on, whatever your domestic habits or whatever you believe. Dad says we all need to be patient with each other, and spend more time together, and let the dust settle.
Claude says, ‘Fat chance,’ and I think, ‘What dust? There isn’t even one speck,’ but they both say that it will be worth the wait, and that eventually the real Grandad will emerge like a butterfly coming out of its chrysalis, or at least a snake shedding its old skin.
I have seen thousands and thousands of Monarch butterflies hatching in Mexico, turning the hillsides a living, quivering red, and I have watched a rattlesnake leave behind its own skin outside in the hot sand, quick and papery as a crayon wrapper. So I wonder exactly how soon and how spectacular Thomas Extravaganza Blake’s big reveal might actually be.
Claude shakes her head at me, and then at Mum and Dad, and then at our new squashed-in world in general, and says something muffled and full of gravel about nobody bothering to hold their breath.
Before we landed here, we had always travelled about. A lot. The four of us have been moving and living and working and mucking about in all sorts of parts of the world since I was a baby, since before I can even remember. Claude and Mum and Dad and me. We have always been free as birds. Claude keeps a list somewhere, in one of her many notebooks, of all the different places we have been, and I’ve forgotten the exact number, but there are 195 countries in the world and counting, so we were only just getting started.
Grandad likes to call what we did ‘gallivanting about the globe’. Mum and Dad always called it ‘living’.
Before, if we were a family of plants, we would have been sycamore blades or maple keys or those bits of dandelion fluff that float along on the breeze from one place to another, minding their own business, going places, never worrying where.
Mum used to watch the sunset over wherever we were, and sigh in a good way and say, ‘Aren’t we lucky?’ She used to say she could never see us stuck in one place, in a box, on a street with identical boxes, all nailed down.
And the rest of us agreed.
When it was hard to leave stuff behind, there were always new things ahead of us to make up for it. The giggling sisters in the café in Hanoi that makes the sweet soup, or the elephant boats in Mumbai, or Fabiola, the girl in Mexico City who taught me Spanish at the exact same time as teaching me how to roller-skate, so that I didn’t even realize until later that I was learning to do both.
And if problems started to mount up, such as giant mosquito bites, or genuine real-life cooked guinea pigs on the menu, or traffic fumes as thick and damp as cotton wool, then moving day was a very handy thing that could not come fast enough.
So far, I have grown up always looking forward to what’s next. For as long as I can remember, there has been something interesting to do and somewhere exciting to be right around the corner.
The four of us have liked it that way, and I’ve never known anything else, which is why Mum and Dad say it’s no surprise that I’m the sunniest, most adventurous person they know.
Continue Reading…
A Girl Called Joy
Jenny Valentine
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
Text copyright © 2021 Jenny Valentine
Illustrations copyright © 2021 Claire Lefevre
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The rights of Jenny Valentine and Claire Lefevre to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London
WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
www.simonandschuster.com.au
www.simonandschuster.co.in
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
PB ISBN 978-1-4711-9650-8
eBook ISBN 978-1-4711-9651-5
eAudio ISBN 978-1-3985-0009-9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Love From Joy Page 8