Time for Jas

by Natasha Farrant

  ‘If you go out with Tom,’ Dodi ploughed on, ‘we can go on double dates. We’d be like, two couples. That way I don’t have to be alone with Jake.’

  I do wonder about Dodi sometimes.

  ‘Why don’t you just finish with him instead?’ I suggested, but Dodi said she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

  ‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘I don’t like Tom.’

  Dodi said, ‘If you loved me, that wouldn’t matter.’

  I said, ‘I do love you, I just don’t love Tom.’

  Dodi said, mysteriously, ‘Well, we will see about that!’

  The thing about Dodi is, she never gives up. In English, she made everyone switch places so I was ‘accidentally’ sitting next to Tom. At afternoon break, she made him share his Snickers with me, all, ‘They’re Blue’s absolute favourite too, aren’t they Blue?’

  She wanted us all to go to the park together after school. ‘Let’s skateboard!’ she said, and ‘You can borrow Tom’s!’ when I said that, unlike the boys, I don’t take a skateboard with me everywhere I go.

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ Tom said, ‘but I don’t lend my wheels to anybody.’

  ‘What, even Blue?’

  ‘I have extra Maths homework,’ I said, and ran away before she could suggest a giant group maths study session.

  Twig was in the kitchen when I got home, cooking pasta.

  ‘Is it dinner already?’ I asked.

  ‘This is tea,’ he said.

  ‘Twig has decided to join the after-school rugby club,’ Pixie explained.

  ‘Rugby? Twig?’ I stared at him, astonished. ‘What about, I don’t know … Science Club?’

  ‘Please!’ Twig cried. ‘I already know most of the stuff they talk about in Science Club, and they’re not even allowed to do experiments. Rugby’s excellent. You get to play matches and go on tour and the team are like instant friends. But I have to bulk up, because I’m so skinny compared to all the others.’

  Pixie handed him a banana. ‘Chop that into it,’ she advised.

  ‘A banana? In pasta?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It just looks disgusting.’ I peered into the pan. ‘You know there are other ways to make friends, right?’

  Twig started grating cheese onto the banana and said I understood nothing.

  I made tea and took it out to the garden, where Jas was lying on her front in the grass in pink and orange stripy tights and a knee-length lime green jumper, writing in a notebook while Pumpkin rolled about kneading chewed-up rusk into the grass.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Private.’

  ‘Is it your performance piece for the art show?’

  ‘Haven’t started that yet.’

  ‘Are you going to do it?’

  ‘I am very, very busy,’ Jas said, ‘so please could you stop talking to me?’

  I lay down beside Pumpkin, who gurgled and shoved a fistful of rusk in my mouth, laughing like a demon. I put him in the middle of the blanket and took my mug to the back of the garden, where I could still watch him without getting covered in food.

  Today is that sort of September day when the air feels fresh and damp even though the sun is shining, and there is a big blowy wind stirring up smells of earth and leaves, and the light is all rich and gold. My phone pinged. It was Dodi, with a picture of Tom on his skateboard. ‘Forget Maths Come and join us!’

  Very softly, almost like I didn’t want Dodi to see me do it, I deleted the photograph. Then I lay back on the bench to watch big fluffy white clouds scud across the pale blue sky.

  Thursday 23 September

  Flora Skyped, asking could we post her bunny rabbit onesie and also more thermal underwear, because the house is in a dip by a river, dripping with damp and completely unheated.

  ‘I did tell you,’ Mum murmured, but Flora was too busy issuing orders to respond.

  ‘I also need new wellies. My old ones got full of water from lying in the stream in my nightie, and they won’t dry, and now I think there are things growing in them.’

  Twig asked, why was she lying in the stream? Flora said because they had to spend the whole day pretending to be a character from a play, and she was Ophelia, who is a girl in Shakespeare who went mad and drowned herself. Mum said no wonder she was cold and next time maybe she could choose a character less prone to hurling herself into icy waters. Flora said please could Mum just send the clothes, because she was soon going to run out of layers.

  ‘Look what I’m wearing!’ she said, and waved her laptop about so we could see her thermal leggings, leg-warmers, boots, mittens and an enormous man’s sweater.

  Then Mum said did Flora realise how expensive it was to keep sending clothes to Scotland? Flora said fine, if you want me to freeze to death, and turned away from the camera.

  ‘Are those wings on your back?’ I asked.

  Flora cried, ‘Why are you all so obsessed with how I look?’ and logged off.

  ‘They were wings,’ I said. ‘But why?’

  ‘To make her happy,’ Pixie said. ‘Maybe she’s feeling sad.’

  Twig asked, ‘How does that actually work? The happy thing, I mean?’

  Pixie thought quite carefully before she answered. ‘It’s about showing you won’t let the world get to you,’ she said. ‘Like you’re saying, you can try and bring me down, but I don’t care because I’ve got wings to elevate me.’

  Twig told her she was barking mad, but affectionately, like he’s actually quite fond of her.

  ‘Or, if you’re Flora, you could just be making an empty fashion statement,’ I suggested.

  Pixie said, ‘There’s no such thing as an empty fashion statement.’ Jas said she knew exactly what Pixie meant. ‘Clothes should show the world what you are like on the inside,’ Pixie said. ‘Like you, Jas. So full of colour.’

  The two of them beamed at each other, like they were both in a secret colourful dressing club, and I came upstairs to look at my clothes.

  Today I am wearing my big grey sweatshirt again, over skinny black jeans and black and white trainers. My hair is in its usual plaits and the only makeup I’m wearing is a little bit of blue mascara which you can’t see anyway because of my glasses. Even though inside I am bursting with ideas, I am completely devoid of colour.

  Friday 24 September

  There was a new picture today.

  It was on the corner of Chatsworth Square and the Avenue, and even though Jas made us leave uncharacteristically early this morning, by the time we reached it there was already a crowd of people gathered in a semi-circle in front of it, all laughing.

  On the pavement, in the middle of the semi-circle, was a neat pile of dog poo. And on the wall, right above the poo, was a drawing of a life-size black and tan miniature dachshund squatting, seen from the back but looking over his shoulder with an expression that was partly apologetic but also defiant.

  ‘That’s hilarious.’ Twig had rugby practice before school today (another reason we left early), and was jumping up and down in his kit, trying to keep warm in his shorts, but laughing like everybody else. Only Jas carried on looking serious.

  It was strange, looking at the picture. Partly because it was so realistic – I mean because dogs, unlike a field of bluebells or a zebra, do actually exist on London streets. But partly also because lots of other people were looking at it, and it didn’t feel so personal, and also – I felt a pang of disappointment – partly because this picture had nothing to do with me. I realised how much I had liked that, the feeling they’d given me when I looked at them – as if the artist was seeing straight through all the layers, straight to what I am like underneath.

  Still, I have films of the other drawings. I took my camera out of my bag.

  ‘Please don’t make a film,’ Jas begged. ‘There isn’t time.’

  ‘Just a few pictures then,’ I said, but she was already walking away. I photographed the dog from different angles to look at later, and ran to catch up with
her.

  When we arrived at school, Twig asked if he could show my pictures to the boys at rugby practice.

  ‘Please, Blue,’ he said when I refused. ‘It’ll make them laugh. They’ll think it’s hilarious.’

  Twig knows I don’t like showing my camera to anyone. What I do … it’s not like the chalk artist’s drawings. It’s not art. But Twig was begging me, and looking at him I saw how true it is, when he says how skinny he looks compared to the rest of the boys on the team, and also just how wrong too, with his floppy hair and his glasses and his shorts flapping about his legs and his shirt hanging off his bony shoulders …

  ‘Only the dog pictures,’ I said, as I gave him the camera. ‘Don’t show them anything else.’

  The rugby boys did think it was hilarious. They crowded round the camera, sniggering and pointing and saying things like ‘mental’ and ‘sick’ and high fiving Twig when they’d finished looking. I swear Twig seemed to grow about a foot right in front of me.

  Then Dodi arrived with Tom and Jake, and even though she also knows how much I hate people looking at my camera, she plucked it out of Twig’s hands and started showing Tom my pictures.

  Tom laughed and said, ‘Excellent! The dog you were telling us about on the first day,’ and I thought Dodi was going to faint, she looked so pleased.

  ‘He remembered!’ she whispered, when I finally got my camera back and we were walking across the schoolyard towards Spanish. ‘He remembered the dog! Even I didn’t remember the dog, and I was there! Blue, he so likes you.’

  ‘He likes me because he remembers I once told a story about a dog trying to do a poo?’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Dodi cried, and stopped dead in her tracks. ‘What if he is the artist?’

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘He does Art! And remember how in Year Nine he and Jake and Colin decorated their skateboards all over with drawings of rats?’

  ‘That doesn’t mean …’

  ‘It totally does mean. He knows you like art. He’s sending you secret messages. Look, he’s over there!’

  She waved manically towards where Tom stood, on the other side of the yard. He waved cheerfully back.

  ‘This is going to be great,’ Dodi sighed.

  When I walked past the dog drawing on my way home, other people had started to scribble comments on the wall above it, things like, ‘Who left this lying around?’ and, ‘Scoop my poop’, and lots of much ruder things about dogs and messy pavements. It didn’t rain this afternoon, but it drizzled. The chalk – drawing and writing – was fuzzy round the edges, and the dog was starting to look a bit sad.

  I have looked and looked at my pictures, but there isn’t a bluebell or anything else to link the picture to me.

  Could Tom have done this?

  The poor dachshund – it looked so dignified. If I’d had a piece of chalk, I’d have written on the wall too. I would have said ‘Hey, leave me alone! I’m just doing my thing!’

  If people did look on the outside like they do within, then there would be somebody wandering about our neighbourhood with flowers in their hair and chalk dust all over their multi-coloured clothes, and everyone would know without the slightest doubt that this was an artist. But I have not seen a single person who looks like that, except perhaps for mad Mrs Bird who lives underneath the railway arches and ties rags and scarves and plastic bags to the shopping trolley she keeps all her things in. And maybe that does make her an artist in a way, but I don’t think she is my artist. I think she is just trying to make her life a bit more pretty, which is sort of the same thing but not exactly.

  Sunday 26 September

  I woke up this morning feeling like someone was watching me, and when I opened my eyes, Jas was sitting on the floor by my bed with her face right next to mine.

  ‘Wake up wake up wake up,’ she whispered.

  ‘Go away,’ I groaned.

  ‘You have to take me shopping.’

  I looked at my phone. ‘It’s half-past ten. It’s Sunday. The shops won’t be open yet.’

  ‘They will be by the time we get there.’

  I slumped back against my pillow. Jas ran away and came back with a cup of milky warm water with a tea bag floating in it. She watched anxiously as I drank it.

  ‘Is it nice?’

  ‘It’s much better than it looks.’

  ‘Can we go now?’

  ‘Can’t you go on your own?’

  ‘Apparently I’m too little.’ Jas glared in the general direction of Mum’s room. ‘It’s not fair. Twig’s staying over with his new rugby friends and you’ll probably go off and see Dodi, but I’m not allowed to do a thing on my own. Please, Blue. Please please please please please.’

  ‘All right,’ I sighed. I swung my feet out from under the duvet. ‘All my friends sleep till at least twelve,’ I informed Jas, but that turned out not to be true, because Dodi rang as we turned into Blenheim Avenue.

  ‘Jake just called,’ she said. ‘He wants to meet up. But it’s Sunday morning! Who meets their boyfriend on Sunday morning? I told him I have to hang out with you. I said you’re depressed because you’re in love with Tom.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m coming over right now.’

  ‘I’m not at home. I’m out with Jas. We’re going to …’ I raised my eyebrows at Jas.

  ‘The toy shop,’ she said, and my heart skipped a beat. And I know when I told Dodi, she was thinking the same thing as me, because she was silent for a moment.

  ‘Right,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll see you there.’

  The thing about the toy shop is Iris, and her obsession with Sylvanian Families. An obsession so huge her collection used to cover most of the floor of our bedroom and all of the shelf-space as well.

  ‘There’s no room for my books,’ I used to complain, and, ‘They’re creepy,’ Dodi told her. ‘They’re miniature toy animals in human clothes.’

  Iris didn’t care. Every month, when she got her pocket money, she used to march us down to the shop to buy more Sylvanians. After she died, they were the last thing Mum packed away. And until today, Dodi and I never set foot in that shop again.

  Jas is too young to remember all that. And this morning – well, by the time I found out where we were going, we were already halfway there.

  The shop hasn’t changed, but it’s smaller than I remembered. The Sylvanians, which used to be at my nose height, were somewhere around my belly button. I crouched down to look at them.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. A mother squirrel in a flowery apron stared back at me, her baby squirrel in her arms. My eyes started to prickle.

  ‘Creepy.’ Dodi was standing behind me, her nose all wrinkled like it goes when she’s trying not to cry.

  ‘Hideous,’ I agreed. We stood there for a while sniffing and looking at those stupid squirrels, then Dodi grabbed something from the rack beside her.

  ‘Look!’ It was a bowler hat, the fancy-dress kind that comes with round glasses and a pink nose and plastic moustache attached. She settled the glasses on her nose and smoothed her hand over her upper lip.

  ‘The name’s Bond,’ she said in a deep voice.

  ‘How is that Bond?’ I cried, but I couldn’t help laughing. That’s the thing about Dodi. Walking over, I was so cross with her because of what she said about Tom, but then she knows exactly how to make things better.

  ‘I’m going to get one for all of us for Halloween,’ she said. ‘I babysat my nephew last night, so I’ve got loads of money.’

  ‘Found them!’ Jas cried, and we turned away from the squirrels and mice and hedgehogs and other woodland creatures and forgot all about Iris and Halloween and James Bond and bowler hats. Because there, surrounded by princess costumes and clown wigs and witches’ brooms and animal masks, stood my little sister wearing the most extravagant pair of fairy wings I have ever seen.

  Pixie and Flora’s wings are like an old pair of jeans next to a couture ball gown compared to Jas’s. Pixie and Flora’s wings are the sort we used
to have in our dressing-up box, white and gauzy with silver edges, four oval hoops like a child’s drawing of a butterfly. The wings Jas found today in the toy shop were emerald green with bright blue edging, gold sequins sewn into the top where they peeped up over her shoulders, and gold ribbons trailing down to her knees.

  ‘They’re perfect,’ Jas declared.

  She paid for them with her birthday money, and says she’s going to wear the wings to school tomorrow.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a very good idea,’ Mum said when Jas told her.

  ‘Everyone is wearing wings,’ Jas said. ‘Look at Pixie. Look at Flora.’

  ‘Flora’s Flora,’ Dodi said. ‘And Pixie is Pixie. And they are both mildly insane. No offence, Pixie.’

  ‘None taken,’ Pixie replied.

  But Jas stuck her chin out and made us all look at Flora’s Facebook. There were about a dozen people from her course all dressed in black and pretending they were flying with silver wings on their back just like hers.

  ‘They can’t all be mad,’ Jas said.

  ‘But why do they do it?’ Mum was astonished.

  ‘To make them happy,’ Pixie said, and Mum looked even more baffled.

  ‘School won’t let you,’ Twig said.

  But the Clarendon Free School dress code is as vague for primary as it is for secondary. We checked their website. ‘No bare midriffs,’ I read out. ‘No short skirts, no swimwear, no high heels.’

  ‘Absolutely nothing about wings,’ Jas said.

  ‘Please do not let a single one of my friends see you,’ Twig fretted. ‘And if they do, deny you are my sister, or they’ll all laugh at me.’

  Jas said that was Twig’s problem, not hers.

  I have been reading back through my diary, and I realise I can’t remember when I last saw Jas look happy or smile, but I am not sure what to say to help.

  ‘Can’t you talk to her?’ I messaged Skye. Jas loves Skye, because he taught her to ride without a saddle last summer, and she loves horses almost as much as he does.

  ‘Why?’ he replied.