by Jean Ure
“What we ought to do,” she said, “is see if we can find her in one of the school photos. All those great long ones they’ve got in the main corridor? They go back decades. She must be in one of them. I know it won’t actually tell us anything, but the more we discover the better.”
“Yes!” Jem was practically bouncing on the spot. She wanted to rush off and start looking right there and then, but we are not allowed in school during break. I have no idea why; it is just another of their rules. Maybe the teachers like to get up to things while we are not there, though it is hard to think what.
“After school,” said Skye. “We’ll do it after school.”
Fortunately, from my point of view, the last lesson of the afternoon was PE. I like PE! Today it was hockey and I especially like hockey. I think it is hugely satisfying to tear up and down the field whacking at the ball and cracking your hockey stick against other people’s sticks. For a while it meant that I was able to give my brain a well-deserved rest. Skye thinks hockey is barbaric and Jem once got whacked on the ankle and now tends to turn and run whenever she sees the ball coming towards her.
“You are such a nutter,” grumbled Skye, as I walloped after her and Jem on our way back to the changing room.
“I bet Mia didn’t like hockey,” said Jem. “If she did, I’d have inherited it. Like your mum was probably a nutter like you.”
“My mum was in the First Eleven,” I said. “She had her name in the school magazine.”
“Mia might have had her name in the magazine! Not for hockey. For singing, probably. I bet she did! I bet—”
“This is all irrelevant,” said Skye. “I thought we were going to go and look at photos?”
In the front hall and all along the main corridor are photographs going right back to when the school first opened. Skye led the way to the most recent ones.
“They’re only taken once every five years so we’ll have to look from here –” she tapped a finger – “to here. You start with that one,” she told Jem, “and you –” she gave me a little push – “start with this one.”
Skye can be incredibly bossy at times, but as she is good at organising and usually talks sense (when she is not being negative) I mostly just put up with it. I didn’t mind which photograph she told me to look at. As it happens, it was one I am familiar with.
“Look,” I said. “That’s my auntie.”
“Ooh! Where?” Skye craned to see.
“There, in the top row. Year 11.”
“I didn’t know your auntie came here.”
“My mum did too.”
“I knew about your mum.”
“She’s just had a baby,” I said.
“Your mum?”
“My auntie.”
“Oh!” Skye laughed. “For a minute I thought you meant your mum!”
Jem’s voice hissed accusingly at us: “I thought we were supposed to be looking for my mum?”
“Yes, yes, we are! I’ll find her,” I said. “She’s got to be here.”
Nobody ever escapes school photographs. Not unless they have a really good excuse, like being abducted by aliens. It was Skye, in the end, who discovered Mia, sitting cross-legged and beaming in the front row. She was in the same photograph as Auntie Cath. Jem squealed, excitedly.
“It’s her! It’s my mum!”
“Maybe your mum.”
“No, it is! It’s got be. It all fits!”
We stood, looking at the picture of Mia when she was young. There was definitely a resemblance.
“Imagine her being here at the same time as your auntie,” marvelled Skye. “Now that’s a coincidence.”
Jem spun round, her eyes shining. “Your auntie might have known her! She might be able to tell us something. Could we go and see her?”
“I suppose we could say we wanted to see the baby,” I said. We’d obviously need an excuse of some sort. If I told Mum we were trying to find out as much as we could about somebody who might be Jem’s birth mum she’d only start on at me again about my habit of interfering.
“When can we go?” said Jem. “Could we go now?”
“I’ll have to check with Mum first.”
“See if we can go tomorrow. We could go in lunch break!”
“Excuse me,” said Skye. “We’re not allowed out in lunch break.”
“Who’s going to find out?” Jem twirled, defiantly. “People do it all the time.”
“It’d be easy enough,” I said. “My auntie only lives ten minutes away.”
“In that case,” said Skye, “we can go after school.” She was very firm about it. She’d already done her bit, begging favours from Mrs Holliday and almost being late for registration. She’d got away with it once, but she wasn’t risking it a second time. “Ask your mum if we can go tomorrow. OK?”
I said OK and cornered Mum as soon as I got home. She was in the kitchen, mixing stuff in a bowl.
“Oh,” I said, “you’re cooking! Would you like me to help?”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Mum. “These are for our dinner tonight.”
I was silent, wondering what she meant. Would she have wanted me to help if they hadn’t been for our dinner? I didn’t get it!
“Well, all right,” I said. “If you don’t want me to, I won’t. But children are supposed to help their parents. By the way—” I scooped up a bit of glop that had splodged over the side of the mixing bowl. “Yummy! Would it be OK if I took Jem and Skye to see the new baby?”
“I don’t see why not. You’d have to give Auntie Cath a ring, though, to check when it’s convenient.”
“I’ll go and ring her right now,” I said.
Auntie Cath wasn’t there, so I left a message on her voicemail and went back to the kitchen, where I found Mum frantically splashing dollops of splodge on to a baking tray.
“Oh, Frankie,” she said, “you can be of some help, after all. My four thirty’s just arrived, so if you could finish off here for me… all you need do is just make these into nice firm shapes, brush a bit of egg over them and put them in the oven. Do you think you could manage that?”
“No problem,” I said.
“And don’t let that dog have the mixing bowl, he’ll put his teeth through it.”
I promised that I wouldn’t let Rags anywhere near the mixing bowl.
“It’s all right,” I said. “You can trust me.”
Mum went off and I began carefully moulding all the little rissoles into neat shapes. I made some of them square, and some I made round, and some I made long and sausage-like. Mum is a good cook, I think, but she doesn’t always have much imagination. After I’d finished with the shaping I wiped out the mixing bowl with my finger and gave the finger to Rags to lick, then put the bowl in the sink, out of his reach. I felt proud of myself for remembering. Don’t let Rags near the mixing bowl! And I hadn’t. Mum would be pleased with me.
I’d just about finished brushing egg yolk over my assortment of shapes when my mobile rang. Rags immediately started barking; he always barks when the phone rings. He seems to think it is some kind of intruder. It was Auntie Cath, calling me back. I took the phone into the garden.
“How’s Henry?” I said.
“He’s fine,” said Auntie Cath. “He’s just thrown up all over me!”
Some people might think yuck on hearing that a baby has thrown up over someone, but it doesn’t strike me that way. It’s like when Rags throws up. He is only a dog: a baby is only a baby. They don’t know any better.
I asked Auntie Cath if I could come round with Jem and Skye after school next day, “cos they really, really want to see Henry.” Auntie Cath is so sweet! She said she would love it if we went round.
I rang Jem to tell her, and we had a bit of a chat about Mia, with Jem wanting to know whether I really thought she could be her birth mum, and whether I really thought they looked alike.
“You’re not just saying it?”
I assured her that I wasn’t. Jem would have liked to
carry on talking, but I told her I had to go.
“I just remembered… I’m supposed to be putting something in the oven!”
I went back to the kitchen and found to my surprise that the rissoles had disappeared. So had the baking tray. Mum must have come back and seen them there and put them in the oven herself. Well, that was all right. I’d made them into interesting shapes and brushed them with egg yolk, and Rags hadn’t got the mixing bowl. Mum could hardly complain!
I went upstairs, feeling virtuous, to make a start on my homework. Some time later I heard the door of the front room open and Mum call out.
“Frankie? Angel? Anyone there? Tom? Oh, Angel! Just go and take the rissoles out of the oven, would you?”
“I’ll do it!” I yelled. They were my rissoles. I’d made them into shapes! I wasn’t having Angel take the credit.
I raced into the kitchen to find that she had got there first.
“Where have they gone?” she said. She’d opened the door of the oven and was peering inside. “They’re not here!”
“They’ve got to be,” I said.
“Well, they’re not! And what’s that?” She sprang back, with a shriek. “That! Down there!”
I followed the direction of her quivering finger. Dog sick. Yuck! A great big gooey pile of it.
“Where are the rissoles?” said Angel.
We both turned to look at Rags, wagging guiltily in the doorway.
“He must have taken them out of the oven!”
“What, you think he’s some kind of canine genius? You think he’s learnt how to open the door?”
“Maybe it… came open.”
“You mean, maybe you didn’t close it properly!”
“No! I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me!”
“So who put them in there?”
I said, “Mum!”
Well, I thought she had. Suddenly, I was beginning to have doubts.
“Where’s the tray?” said Angel. “He can’t have eaten the tray!”
We found the tray under the fridge. Two of the rissoles were still there; a square one, and a sausage-shaped one.
It was a nasty moment.
Chapter Nine
Everyone seemed to think it was my fault Rags had eaten the rissoles.
“What I can’t understand,” said Skye, as we went off after school the next day to visit Auntie Cath, “is why you were stupid enough to leave him alone with them in the first place. You know he eats things!”
“He ate those eggs that time,” said Jem.
I shouldn’t ever have told her about the eggs. A dozen of them, all smashed.
“He licked them off the floor,” I said.
“Yes, but only after he’d knocked them there.”
“Well, that wasn’t my fault!”
Skye was still wittering on. “I can’t understand why you had to go into the garden, anyway, just to answer the phone.”
“He was barking,” I said. “I couldn’t hear.”
“So why not put him in the garden?”
“Cos I didn’t think!” My voice came out in a bit of a bellow. I will put up with A LOT, but Skye was really starting to get on my nerves. “If you want to know,” I said, “I was too busy arranging for us to go and see the baby. I was thinking about Jem!”
“We’re not just going to see the baby, though. Are we?” Jem looked at me, anxiously. “We are going to ask about Mia?”
“Yes, but we’ve got to see the baby first. He’s very sweet,” I said. “He’s really cuddly. I wouldn’t mind having a baby like him. I reckon I’m going to have lots and lots of babies! Probably about… ooh, I don’t know! Ten, maybe?”
“That would just be, like, totally gross,” said Skye.
“Well, all right then! Five.”
“That would still be gross. There’s not going to be enough food to feed people as it is,” said Skye. “Not when we have global warming.”
She did have a point. “OK,” I said, “I’ll just have two. I suppose I’m allowed to have two? ’Specially if people like you aren’t going to have any at all.”
“I never said I wasn’t going to have any at all! I j—”
“I wish you’d stop talking about babies and work out what we’re going to say to your auntie,” wailed Jem.
I told her that I knew what we were going to say. “We’re going to say we’re interested in Mia cos of her being a celeb and being at our school.”
“And you’d better let me and Frankie do the talking,” said Skye. “We all know what’ll happen if you start up.”
She meant that Jem would give the game away. We’d already decided that we couldn’t tell Auntie Cath the real reason we were interested in Mia. Apart from anything else she might go and mention it to Mum and then I’d be in big trouble. Even bigger than the trouble I was already in for letting Rags eat the rissoles. Mum had been pretty unpleasant about that.
We didn’t spend very long looking at the baby. We all had a cuddle and made lots of cooey-gurgly noises, but Skye really isn’t into babies, whatever she says, and Jem was practically dancing a jig with impatience. In fact she was jigging about so much that Auntie Cath asked her if she needed the loo. Really embarrassing! Well, it was for Jem. I just giggled.
We all went to sit in the kitchen and drink Coke and eat cookies. Jem kicked at me under the table: I kicked her back. She mouthed at me, furiously. OK, OK! Time to ask the big question.
“When you were at school,” I said to Auntie Cath, “did you ever know Mia Jelena?”
“Oh, Mia!” Auntie Cath laughed. We all held our breath. “Yes, I think everyone at school knew her. She was always a bit of a – well! A bit of a tearaway. Had quite a reputation. I remember when I was in Year 12 and we sometimes had to do cloakroom duty – do you still have that? Year 12s acting like a sort of police force?”
We nodded, solemnly.
“Well, I just dreaded it if Mia was around. She used to play us up something rotten! Not that she was malicious, or anything. Just totally hyper. Couldn’t keep still, couldn’t keep quiet—”
“Always fizzing and bubbling,” said Jem.
Me and Skye glared at her across the table.
“Yes! That’s exactly the way to describe it. It was like she might go pop at any minute. One of my friends had a sister in the same class? She used to hang out with Mia. I remember her mum was always worried in case Mia led her into trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?” Jem said it eagerly. “Boys?”
“She certainly liked the boys.”
“Did she ev—”
I interrupted, hastily. “We’re only asking,” I said, “cos of her being at Hillcrest and being so famous.”
“It’s like she’s a sort of role model,” said Skye.
“She’s done really well for herself, hasn’t she?” nodded Auntie Cath.
“Did you ever think she would?” said Jem.
“I suppose, looking back… I’m not totally surprised. She was the sort of person whose life could have gone either way. Up or down. Nothing in between. She was never going to just muddle along in the middle like the rest of us. She was a real live wire.”
“It said in this article,” said Skye, “she ran away from home when she was only sixteen?”
“Yes, I saw that. In the local paper, wasn’t it? I vaguely remember it happening. I’d left school by then, but I remember my friend Anna saying how the police had gone round to talk to her sister—”
Jem leant forward. “The one that hung out with Mia?”
“Yes. They wanted to know if she had any idea where she might have gone.”
“Did she?”
“She said not. I’m not sure they altogether believed her.”
“You don’t think she was having a baby, do you?”
O-mi-god. Would nothing shut her up? I tried frantically to think of something to say, but nothing came.
“I mean,” mumbled Jem, “it’s just an idea.”
“She can’t help it.�
�� Skye turned apologetically to Auntie Cath. “She has this thing about babies.”
“She’s been nagging at us for days,” I said. “When can I see your auntie’s new baby?”
Jem’s face was growing slowly crimson.
“She actually told us,” said Skye, “she wants to have ten.”
“I did not!” Jem’s voice was an indignant squawk. “That was Frankie!”
I said, “Me?”
“You know it was!” spluttered Jem.
“Whoever it was,” said Auntie Cath, “I wouldn’t advise it. One is enough to scramble your brain. Ten would just about turn it to mush!”
“Besides being just, like, totally irresponsible,” I said.
For a minute, I thought Jem was going to burst a blood vessel. But it was her own fault! We’d told her to leave all the talking to me and Skye. She hunched herself up so that she was facing Auntie Cath. All we could see was her back, still quivering with rage.
“In the article she said that something happened.”
“Yes, that’s right. She did, didn’t she?”
“So I was just trying to imagine what it could be,” said Jem.
“Well, it was certainly one of the rumours, that she’d got herself pregnant. But there were so many rumours! She’d had a row with her foster parents, she’d gone off with her boyfriend, she’d met someone on the internet. If she had got herself pregnant, I doubt she’d have told her foster parents. Apparently they were very strict.”
Jem flashed a triumphant glance at me and Skye. “Told you so!” she said, as we walked back home afterwards.
“Told us what, exactly?” said Skye.
“That I was the reason she left home! And you heard what your auntie said… about her being a live wire? I’m a live wire!” said Jem. “I’m an up and down sort of person. I bubble and fizz!”
It was true; we couldn’t deny it.
“But if she left home cos she was having a baby—” I said.
“You mean, having me,” said Jem.
“Well… maybe.”
“What d’you mean, maybe?” Jem practically screamed it at me. Since speaking to Auntie Cath, she’d got herself all worked up. Very fizzy and bubbly. “How much more proof do you need? She said. She told us. Sh—”