by Holly Webb
She sighed, and leaned back against her mum’s shoulder. “I wish you weren’t going off working tomorrow. It’s so nice being able to talk to you about school stuff.”
“Well, I’m only in Italy for two weeks, then I’ll be back for a bit. And Dad’s not coming. He loves hearing about all your friends.”
Maya sniffed. “Yes, but I can’t see Dad being much use on a fashion project.”
Her mum tried to keep a straight face. “He might be…” but then she gave up, and sniggered. “No, all right, maybe not. I threw away his tracksuit bottoms last night, you know. I actually buried them in the bottom of the wheelie bin. Otherwise I’m certain he would have answered the door to the magazine people in them this morning.”
Maya laughed. “What did he say?”
Her mum looked shifty. “I haven’t actually told him… He spent a while looking for them this morning. Don’t you dare tell him, Maya! He’s got so many pairs of perfectly good trousers. He didn’t need to be living in a pair with holes in.”
“And paint stains,” Maya added.
“And they didn’t fit him properly in the first place,” her mum agreed. “Oh, I’m going to miss you, Maya. I don’t suppose the school would let you come too, even if we said it was educational.”
Maya closed her eyes for a moment. She’d been to Italy before with Mum and Dad, for holidays. She loved it there. It was always sunny, and full of delicious smells. And the food was fab, even for vegetarians. They could not tell school… She could say she had chicken pox. “It would be nice,” she whispered. Then she shook her head. “But I’ve got this project. I think it’s going to be really good.” She looked up apologetically at her mum. “I’ll miss you too, though.”
“I know you can’t come really,” her mum said with a sigh. “I suppose I ought to pack, we’re flying out tomorrow.”
Maya frowned. “Oh, Mum. Couldn’t you get the Eurostar?”
Her mum looked away, and Maya sat up. “Tell me it’s not a private jet!”
“I didn’t book it, Maya! The production company’s organised it because there aren’t a lot of scheduled flights, it’s such a small airport. And I will mention the tree thing a lot. I promise I will personally say it to every single camera.”
“You can’t just call it the tree thing,” Maya grumped. “Carbon offsetting, Mum. It isn’t just planting trees.”
Whenever Maya’s mum flew, she donated money through a website which used it to pay for green projects. Maya did it, too, whenever they went on holiday. Which was quite a lot. She was pretty sure she’d paid for several trees out of her allowance. The carbon offsetting website she’d found used the money to put solar panels on houses in Africa too, to stop more fossil fuels being burned.
“Don’t forget to do it, will you?” she asked her mum, getting up.
“I’m doing it now! Look. Carbon Future, I’m on the website. I’m typing the flights in now.” Her mum tapped the keys triumphantly. “See?”
“OK.” Maya nodded. “Thanks, Mum! I’m going to work on the project now.”
“Wow, that must be at least six trees’ worth,” her mum muttered. “Couldn’t we just plant them at the bottom of the garden, Maya? I could have a little forest. We could have fairy lights in them for parties. Solar-powered ones,” she added quickly.
“Sorry, Mum, I don’t think it works like that…”
Maya opened the chat message from her mum, and clicked on the link to the fashion blog she’d sent. Along with about fifty kisses. Maya grinned, and held down the x key to send even more back, before she settled down to read the blog.
It was mostly about Emma Watson, and the clothing collection she’d designed, but it explained a little bit about the company she’d worked with. It definitely said they were a Fairtrade fashion producer. Maya bounced a little with excitement. So they could do their project on fashion! She couldn’t wait to talk to the others about it tomorrow. Maybe she could ring Emily now? No, she’d find out a little bit more first. She read through to the end of the article, and then followed a link to the clothes website. For once, she didn’t really want to look at the clothes themselves, although she noticed some very cool earrings. She was more interested in how they were made. And who was making them, especially.
Maya guessed that the Fairtrade clothes meant that the workers got paid more, but she wasn’t sure if there was anything else they needed to know to decide about their project. The photos Mr Finlay had shown them that afternoon at school of the children harvesting cocoa had made her really sad, but Maya wasn’t sure how children would be able to make clothes – after all, clothes were made in factories. How could children work sewing machines and things like that? Her grandma had a sewing machine, and she’d shown Maya how it worked. It was really complicated.
Then again, that little boy harvesting the cocoa had been using a knife that looked dangerous even for an adult. And her mum had said that children had been working in factories in India.
She went back to the search box and typed in “child labour clothes”.
A whole long list of matches came up, pages and pages of them. Mostly they were newspaper articles, talking about the companies who’d been discovered using child labour. Maya’s eyes widened. She knew the names of almost all those shops! She loved to go clothes shopping with her mum, although they couldn’t go shopping anywhere around Millford now that Maya didn’t want to be recognised as India Kell’s daughter. Even if her mum wore huge sunglasses, she almost always got spotted, and then Maya usually ducked behind a clothes rail and pretended she wasn’t with her. But it was their favourite way to spend a day together, pottering around the shops – not always buying that much, just trying on and talking, and stopping for Maya’s mum to have coffee, and Maya to have a milkshake.
Maya read through one of the articles, from a few years ago. This was what her mum had been talking about. It sounded as though there’d been a television programme, with secret footage of what were called sweatshops – which were factories where the workers were treated really badly and made to work long hours. Even all night sometimes. And some of these workers were only nine or ten. Younger than her. Maya swallowed. Why would they want to use children? She didn’t understand.
She read further on, and sniffed. She felt like she was going to start crying over her computer in the middle of her bedroom, which was just stupid. It was all about money! Children didn’t need to be paid as much as adults – that was why so many of them were employed in the factories, just to save even more money. It was so unfair.
Maya sat up straight suddenly with a gasp, and grabbed the back of her yellow T-shirt, wriggling it round so she could see the label. She’d thought so – she and her mum had bought it in one of the shops mentioned in the article. It could have been a child her own age sewing all the little beads and sequins on to the flower pattern on the front.
Hurriedly, she pulled it off, and changed it for another one from the drawer – she didn’t know for certain where this pink one had been made either, though.
She spread the yellow T-shirt out on her bed, and stared at it, looking at the pretty design on the front. It was so delicate – embroidery, and hundreds of glittering sequins and beads. She remembered buying it. It hadn’t been very expensive, and she’d been surprised, because it looked so special. She’d used some money her gran had given her for her birthday. She wouldn’t ever know exactly who’d made it. But the website she’d just been reading said the shop this T-shirt came from had actually admitted they’d used child workers. Children had been working in the factories they used in Delhi, which was in India. They claimed they hadn’t known about it, and they weren’t using those factories any more. They’d stopped using them as soon as they found out.
Maya frowned. So what happened to all those children? There was a photo with the article, of a little girl sitting cross-legged sewing beads on to a vest top. She looked so tired, and there was a pile of more vests next to her – Maya couldn’t tell if they w
ere ones she’d already done, or what she still had to sew. The caption explained that she had been working at the factory for two years, because her parents couldn’t afford to send her to school, and she needed to earn money to help her family. Maya wished she knew what the girl’s name was, and what had happened to her after the clothes shop stopped using her factory. It sounded like such good news – but if her family had really needed the money the girl was earning, then it must have been terrible for them if she suddenly didn’t have a job any more.
She’s probably working in the same place, and being paid even less, because now the factory doesn’t have an expensive shop as a customer any more, Maya thought miserably. She would have to work even longer hours. Or maybe she lost her job, and her whole family went hungry.
Maya looked at the T-shirt unhappily, knowing that she’d probably never want to wear it again – but that felt almost worse. Someone had worked so hard for it, and she’d never even known.
She clicked on a link to another page. More children! She was sure they were younger than her, too. Maya hated even looking at the photos – she couldn’t imagine how frightening it must be to know that your family needed you to work, just so they had enough to eat. She sat staring at the computer, sniffing, and trying not to cry.
The door swung open a little, and Maya jumped, glancing up from the laptop. Her eyes were blurry, so Henry looked even furrier than usual as he trotted over to her bed, and leaped up. “Hey,” Maya muttered, fussing over him, rubbing him behind the ears and under the chin, so that he purred blissfully and sat down on the keyboard of her laptop, jealous that she was paying it so much attention.
Maya gulped and laughed at the same time as the computer beeped warningly, and Henry glared at it. She scooped him closer to her, and closed the laptop lid. She didn’t want to read any more right now anyway. It was too sad. At least she could turn it off.
“I’m not sure this project is going to be as fun as we thought it was,” she muttered to Henry, but he only purred, and banged his nose into her cheek the way he did when he wanted more petting.
Henry was a black and white Norwegian Forest cat, and he officially belonged to Maya’s mum. But Henry had decided he was Maya’s now, whether she liked it or not. He was very big – not fat, but heavy, and muscly for a cat. He had long black fur, and a tail like a feather duster. He was not a vegetarian. Maya had once ordered some vegetarian cat food online for him, but he had stared at his bowl in horror, and then gone out and caught a mouse. He left most of the mouse on the kitchen floor, and Anna had trodden in it in her new slippers. Maya decided to stop experimenting after that.
“What if it’s just too sad?” she asked Henry, frowning. That was stupid. She already knew about the sweatshops now. Pretending that she didn’t care wasn’t going to work. She had to do something instead.
“Did you find out anything useful?” Her mum was standing in the doorway. “Oh, Maya, what’s wrong?”
“It’s so awful. Those factories.” Maya sniffed.
Her mum sighed. “I’m sorry, Maya. I should have looked at it with you. Maybe this isn’t a good idea for a project,” her mum said doubtfully. “Perhaps you should do chocolate, like the rest of your class.”
But even though Maya had been thinking the same a few minutes before, she shook her head firmly. “No. We have to tell people about it.” Then she sighed. “But the only people we’ll be telling are the others in our class. That isn’t much use. We need to make our project really important somehow, so that people notice it.”
“Could you do a school assembly? I’d be surprised if your teacher hadn’t thought about something like that already,” her mum suggested.
Maya nodded, but she’d been thinking bigger than that somehow.
“Anyway, when I’m back from this trip, Maya, maybe I can help with the project. I’m useless at numeracy and the other stuff you bring home from school but at least I know a bit about clothes!” Her mum gave her a hug. “I’m really pleased that you worry about things like this, but don’t spend the whole time getting upset about it, will you?”
Maya shook her head. What was the point in crying? She needed to do something, not just be sad. “Thanks for saying you’ll help.”
“As long as you don’t want me to draw anything,” her mum warned. “You know how bad I am at it. Anyway, what I was coming to say was that I’ve told Neil to clean out the pool, and refill it – it’s getting summery enough to use it now.”
Maya’s eyes brightened, and she felt a little jolt of excitement, just for a second. The pool! It was one of her favourite things. It was wonderful for sitting by on a hot day, but since it was heated, she loved swimming in it even when it was a bit chilly. She just stayed under the warm water, with only her nose and eyes out in the air. Then she remembered.
Her mum noticed her face and sighed. “It isn’t really that bad,” she said, sounding slightly annoyed.
“Yes, it is,” Maya muttered. “It’s a disaster. All the energy we waste heating it! And the chlorine!” But it’s so much fun, a little voice inside her was saying. And I try so hard all the time, making everybody recycle, and moaning at Dad about driving the car. Isn’t it worse if the pool’s there and no one even swims in it?
“You know you love swimming, Maya. Don’t be so dismal. You could invite your friends round to swim, while your dad and I are away.” Her mum smiled rather sadly. “I wouldn’t be here for them to recognise.”
Maya gave her a little hug.
“The pool’s there anyway, Maya. Just make sure you get Anna or Neil to be around if you use it.”
Maya nodded. She knew she shouldn’t, but it was so lovely and warm, lying there looking up at the sky, and the clouds streaming past. Maya loved the way swimming made her feel – all light and floaty and happy. She supposed she could always save up for another few trees…
Emily raced up the aisle of the bus to her, trailing all her bags, and Toby and James’s too. She dropped them on a seat in front of Maya, and sighed, rolling her eyes. “We had to go back for James’s coat. I swear, we need a checklist and they’re not allowed out of the front door without everything on it. How can you lose a coat between the hall and the front gate?”
“You made it, though,” Maya said comfortingly, picking up Emily’s coat as it threatened to slide down the aisle.
Emily sighed. “Neither of them’s got a water bottle, and I don’t know where they are. On somebody’s garden wall, I should think. We found Toby’s outside the hairdresser last week. And we hadn’t even been to the hairdresser!”
Maya giggled. She could see Toby and James further down the bus. It looked as though they were having a competition for who could bounce the highest. Emily looked too, and then huddled down in her seat. “I’m not related to them, really,” she muttered.
“Did you talk to your mum about the new shop?” Maya asked hopefully. “Had she been in there?”
Emily brightened up. “Yes! And she said it was gorgeous, and not as expensive as she’d expected it would be. She bought me some really nice hairbands, but I’m not wearing them for school in case I lose them.”
“Did she say anything about it being Fairtrade stuff?”
Emily nodded. “That was why she went in. They had Fairtrade baby clothes in the window too – I don’t think we had time to spot those. She bought some cute leggings for Sukie, and a little T-shirt that says Save My Planet on it. And money from them goes to a project in Bangladesh. Toby and James got really grumpy because she didn’t buy anything for them, but Mum said she’d be quite happy to go back and buy them hairbands or pink leggings too, and they shut up.” She smiled to herself, and then sighed. “But I didn’t get a chance to look anything up on the computer. I’d just about finished my maths homework from yesterday, and then it was tea, and then we had to take Toby to Beavers, and then Mum said would I look after Sukie while she managed to have a bath, and then when Dad got home he wanted to do some work on it.” Emily gasped for breath. “He
said I could have it tonight, though. And I did check our cupboards. Fairtrade rice, and sugar, but that was all.”
Maya shook her head. “You know, yesterday at lunch I was wishing I had brothers and sisters too, but I don’t think I could cope with your lot. You don’t get a minute.” And I don’t have to share my gorgeous purple laptop with anyone, she added to herself. She didn’t want to gloat over that to Emily. But she felt a bit ashamed of herself for moaning about being an only child.
“I’m never lonely, that’s for sure.” Emily shrugged, and grinned at her. “So did you find anything?”
“Yes…” Maya sighed. “You know how the stuff Mr Finlay showed us about the cocoa harvest was really sad?”
Emily nodded, frowning. “This was too?”
“Worse, almost. It was scary, Ems.” Maya stared down at her fingers. “Kids our age, stuck in these horrible factories.” Maya felt her cheeks burning. “And there was a list of clothes shops that have been caught out using child labour. I was wearing a T-shirt from one of them while I was looking stuff up on the computer. I felt so guilty.”
Emily put an arm round her. “But you didn’t know that!”
Maya shrugged. “It feels like I should have done. I remember being really pleased about how cheap the T-shirt was, because it was so pretty. And even if it wasn’t made by someone our age, it was probably made in a sweatshop, where the workers weren’t paid enough.”
“Wonder where our school uniform was made…” Emily muttered. “Mum usually gets it in the big supermarket just outside Millford. She says there’s no point buying expensive stuff for school, it just gets trashed.”
“I didn’t even think about school uniform.” Maya’s eyes widened. “But it’s getting cheaper and cheaper, isn’t it? There was a TV ad for uniform that only cost four pounds, back at the beginning of the year. Four pounds! That’s nothing. It’s like – a sandwich and a drink in a café!” She frowned. “How can you get someone to make a shirt and a skirt and a jumper, and then ship it to this country, and then sell it for that much? It just doesn’t work.”