‘I just don’t like it,’ I said. ‘She’s not doing this because she thinks the wings are pretty. She’s making a point, but I don’t know what it is, and I can’t help feeling that wearing turquoise and emerald knee-length wings is not going to help. Please talk to her. She won’t listen to me. She thinks I sound like Mum.’
‘Jas won’t listen to anybody,’ Skye replied. ‘And anyway, you can’t help people if they don’t want you to. That’s what my dad always says – people have to learn from their own mistakes.’
‘But she’s so little!’ I wrote.
Skye replied that she might be little, but she was tougher than she looked, and to stop worrying so much.
The Film Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby
Scene Three
Primary Playground, With Wings
Daytime, 3.30 in the afternoon, outside the gates of Clarendon Free Primary School, a four-storey Victorian red brick townhouse, with white trim windows, a shrubby garden at the front and a mini playground at the back. Sound of multiple recorders from an after-school music club comes through open window, together with cries from a harassed music teacher crying ‘No, no, no, that is not it at all!’
CAMERAMAN (BLUEBELL) and DODI stand with a gaggle of carers, mothers and a few fathers as primary school children of all sizes pour out. On this dry and mild afternoon, coats are dragged along the ground, gathering dust. Lunchboxes swing. Two small boys stop and hold up the exodus to argue over trading cards.
The crowd parts and flows around them like the Red Sea in that Bible story. A large plimsolled woman with a dachshund on a lead (the presumed star of the last chalk drawing) eyes Cameraman with suspicion before approaching her. She is Mrs Doriot-Buffet, the American neighbour from Chatsworth Square.
MRS DORIOT-BUFFET
Young lady, you should not be filming here without permission.
DODI
She’s waiting for her sister. It’s for a school project.
CAMERAMAN
I promise to erase it as soon as I get home.
MRS DORIOT-BUFFET
If it’s for a school project, why are you going to erase it?
The exodus has thinned to a few stragglers, the sort with undone satchels spewing out worksheets and half-eaten sandwiches, or scuffed-up trainers and belligerent attitudes emerging from their five-minute end-of-day detentions.
There is still no sign of JASMINE.
MRS DORIOT-BUFFET
(not going away)
I know you. You’re those girls from the square who destroyed Mrs Henderson’s hydrangeas.
DODI
(displaying amazing lack of tact, even for her)
And you’re the fat lady in the turquoise tracksuit!
A couple of parents nearby snigger. Mrs Doriot-Buffet splutters. Cameraman hands camera to Dodi.
CAMERAMAN
I’d better go and look for her.
DODI
I’ll come with you.
Mrs Doriot-Buffet retrieves her child and moves away. Bluebell crosses the playground followed by Dodi, who randomly films everything she passes.
At the far end of the tarmac play area is a door, leading on to a corridor which goes straight on to the office or right towards the toilets. As Bluebell sets off towards the office, four girls emerge from the toilets, giggling and flapping their arms like wings.
Bluebell changes direction.
DODI
(follows, still filming) Seriously, the toilets?
BLUEBELL
Shhh!
From the far cubicle comes the sound of muffled crying. Bluebell crouches down. Through the gap in the door, she spots a pair of silver high-tops.
BLUEBELL
Jas, it’s me. Open the door.
The door to the cubicle creaks open and Jasmine emerges. Her face is red and puffy from crying. Her nose is snotty, and her hair bedraggled.
In her hands, she holds a pair of beautiful, shiny broken wings.
Monday 27 September
This morning the giggling started before we reached the school gates but even so, I thought Jas might get away with it.
She was dressed exactly like Flora and her friends, in black leggings and a black jumper, plus her silver shoes, the yellow scarf trimmed with the green pompoms she made herself in craft classes in Year Four, and the wings. She had cut herself a fringe at the end of the weekend too. It makes her big dark eyes look even more huge, and she’d put a tiny smear of glitter on her cheeks.
As we said goodbye at her school gates, she looked like a very strange, waiflike and beautiful fairy, but also quite a nervous one.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Dodi asked. ‘Because so far everyone has laughed at you, and it’s not going to get better.’
Jas whispered, ‘Yes.’
Twig asked, ‘Are you feeling elevated yet?’
‘Shut up,’ I told him, and then I said to Jas, ‘Remember when Flora got dreadlocks and dyed them pink? You’re totally as cool as her.’
‘Yeah,’ Dodi said, like she was trying hard to sound convincing.
‘Tell you what,’ I suggested. ‘We’ve got study period last thing this afternoon. We’ll skip it and come and pick you up, OK? Then I can film you coming out, and we can send the film to Flora.’
Jas squared her shoulders and stepped into the playground, wings a-flutter, without looking back.
Then, this afternoon, we found her crying in the toilets.
‘What happened?’ I asked, as I picked up the broken wings.
Jas just carried on crying.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said, but she shook her head.
‘I don’t want Twig to see me.’
‘The park, then. It’s not raining. I’ll buy you a hot chocolate and we can sit somewhere no-one will see us and you can tell us all about it.
Jas sniffed and stopped crying.
‘Jake’s in the park,’ Dodi objected, but I gave her a look and she shut up.
Jas and Dodi went to sit behind a tree in the walled garden where nobody ever goes. Dodi and I pooled all the money we had – she still had some from babysitting – and I bought Jas a hot chocolate the way she likes it with baby marshmallows on top, in a paper cup decorated with mini cupcakes.
‘This’ll help,’ I said as I handed it to her, but she started to cry again. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘It’s chocolate!’
‘The cupcakes!’ she wailed, and the whole sorry story came out.
Jas has never had close friends at school. Until this year she always had Twig, and if he’s not around she has always been happy to ‘just play with whoever’ – that’s what she said in the park. ‘And there were lots of whoevers,’ she sniffed. ‘Everyone was nice, sort of. Until this year.’
Dodi asked, ‘What happened this year?’, and Jas said it wasn’t what happened, it was who, and who were four girls called Megan, Courtney, Chandra and Fran.
‘The four girls who were in the playground?’ I asked.
‘They’re called the Cupcake Crew,’ Jas said.
Dodi snorted. I shot her another look. She changed the snort into a sort of sniffle.
‘They all wear the same cupcake necklace,’ Jas explained. ‘They spent all summer together and now they’re best friends, and everyone’s scared of them.’
‘But what have they done to you?’ I asked.
Jas said they laughed at her.
‘Because of the wings?’
‘Ever since the first day. They say I dress like a freak.’
‘What were you wearing on the first day?’
‘Purple leggings,’ Dodi said. ‘And her ripped dress, and Flora’s lace cardigan, and that multi-coloured ribbon in her hair.’
We were quiet for a bit while we thought about this.
‘They say I’m a show-off!’ Jas cried. ‘Just because when we had to write our stupid “what I did in the summer holidays” essay, I wrote mine as a poem to make it less boring, all about learning to ride bareback in Devon with Skye.’
/> ‘So …?’
So after several weeks of the cupcake girls laughing at her, making everyone else laugh at her and calling her names like the Bare Bum Rider and the Horsefaced Poet, Jas wrote another poem. This one was about all the embarrassing things Courtney and Megan and Chandra and Fran have ever done. When you’ve been at school with people since nursery, there are loads of things you’d all rather forget. Like the time Courtney forgot to wear pants in reception and told the whole class she had an itchy bottom. And how Megan once came to school with nits and said she was keeping them as pets. And when Fran let a boy kiss her for 50 pence, and Chandra fell asleep during story time and did a fart so loud the whole class heard.
Jas wrote a poem, and then she typed it up and printed loads of copies and stuck one in everyone’s locker. But it backfired, because who else in the entire school actually writes poetry? The Cupcake Crew guessed immediately it was her, and they told everyone to stop talking to her.
‘I wish you’d told me,’ I said.
Jas said she wanted to, but also that she knew I’d only have told her not to do the poem.
‘Well of course she would!’ Dodi cried. ‘Blue would have come up with a sensible solution. Honestly, Jas! Of all the stupid things to do!’
Jas and I both glared at her, but Dodi didn’t seem to notice.
‘What about the wings?’ she asked.
‘Flora says you have to stand up to people who are mean to you,’ Jas said defiantly. ‘That’s what she told me, the day she walked me to school. She said, if people know you’re afraid, they pick on you. Nobody thinks you’re afraid if you go to school with wings on your back.’
We were all quiet again.
‘It is true,’ I admitted.
‘All the same,’ Dodi said, ‘you might want to go more mainstream for a while, Jas.’
Jas glared at her again, then sniffed. ‘I wore them all day,’ she said, and began to pick marshmallows off the top of her hot chocolate. ‘Everyone laughed at first, but at break Todd Baker said I looked nice. Todd comes to school every day wearing a waistcoat and a bow tie. He’s the only person who still talks to me.’
‘I wonder why,’ said Dodi.
Jas licked her fingers. ‘Then other people said they liked them too. Tilly and Anjali even asked where they could get some. And the cupcake girls didn’t say anything, so I thought it had worked. But at home time, they pushed me into a corner and everyone’s so scared of them no-one said anything, and Megan was all come on, let’s see if you can fly, and they made me run and flap my arms and people were laughing so I hid in the toilets and I tore my wings up myself, even though it was all my birthday money …’
She gulped, and a marshmallow got stuck in her throat.
I thumped her on the back. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Everything will be better now.’
I don’t think I sounded very convincing.
Wednesday 29 September
I tried to call Flora last night. I figured she ought to know Jas stood up to the Cupcake Crew like she advised but that it hadn’t worked, and I wanted to ask her what we should do next. But her phone went straight to voicemail, and later, like around midnight, I got a message from her saying sorry, she couldn’t talk because for a whole week they are not allowed to speak to anyone but only express themselves through the medium of movement. ‘I’m not even supposed to be writing,’ she messaged.
Jas’s solution for dealing with yesterday’s humiliation is to not go to school. This morning she managed to have a temperature of 38.5 degrees, and Mum said she should stay home with Pixie. Twig, who has a bruise under his left eye and a limp in his right leg from rugby practice, said he wanted to stay too.
Jas said, ‘You’re not ill.’
Twig said, ‘Are you?’
‘Jas has a temperature,’ Mum said.
‘Has she?’ Twig cried. ‘Has she really?’
‘Yes,’ Jas croaked, glaring at him. ‘She has.’
‘She’s faking,’ Twig grumbled as we left the house (early, again, because of his leg and not being able to walk fast). ‘She did that thing Flora always used to do, where she drinks tea before putting the thermometer in her mouth. I am in actual physical pain.’
‘Stop playing rugby then,’ I said. ‘Do you even like it?’
Twig said that wasn’t the point, and he couldn’t give up now because that would mean he was weak, and being on the rugby team was a very big deal.
‘Your eye is purple,’ I told him.
Twig said, ‘Exactly, it means I’m really one of the team.’
Boys are mad.
‘It probably is a good thing for Jas not to go to school for a bit though,’ I said, without thinking. Twig asked why, and I had to say ‘Oh, nothing,’ because yesterday on our way home Jas begged me not to breathe a word to Twig of what had happened.
‘Because he warned me,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want him to be right.’
‘You have to tell him the truth,’ I told her. ‘And Mum. Mum can talk to your teachers. She can stop these girls.’
‘She’ll make a fuss,’ Jas said. ‘And that’ll make things worse.’
I said that I sympathised, but also that sometimes you need help from other people.
‘If you tell either of them,’ Jas said, ‘I will never speak to you again.’
‘But …’
‘No.’
So now, as well as not being able to talk to Flora, I am lying to everybody.
*
Today in English Marek Valenta astonished us all.
Miss Foundry announced that we were going to spend the entire period reading aloud from Of Mice and Men.
‘So we can get a feel for the dramatic, claustrophobic quality of the narrative,’ she explained.
I don’t know if she genuinely doesn’t notice when people look blank, or if she just chooses to ignore us.
‘Let’s start at the front!’ she trilled. ‘Marek Valenta, please begin!’
And Marek read.
Most people mumble when they read out loud. A few, like Hattie, speak clearly. Every now and then, someone like Charlie Obuku, who is into drama and wants to be an actor like Flora, hams it up. But no-one ever reads like Marek did today.
Sure, we’d have a little house an’ a room to ourself. Little fat iron stove, an’ in the winter we’d keep a fire goin’ in it …
People giggled. Dodi raised her eyebrows. Tom, Jake and Colin stared at him with their mouths open. Cressida and Jodi nudged each other. Marek didn’t notice. On and on he read, way beyond the end of the passage Miss Foundry had asked for, and I swear it was like listening to someone in a theatre or on the TV or radio or something, even with his slight Czech accent.
Marek, who to this day has still barely addressed a word to anybody.
‘Thank you, Marek.’ Miss Foundry was practically crying.
He stopped. He looked dazed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just like that part.’
It could have gone either way. The moment when the weird foreign kid held up his hand and confessed to a love of miserable American literature, it could have been the kiss of social death. But like I said, we were astonished. He was so good maybe because he was just doing it for himself, and not trying to convince us the book was a masterpiece. And it was clear he was telling the truth. He wasn’t trying to show off – he really did like that part.
Tom started to clap first. Then little by little, the rest of the class joined in, until everyone was cheering and making as much noise as possible, and Marek Valenta was beetroot red with embarrassment and mortification, but also trying quite hard not to grin.
I think, underneath his poker face exterior, Marek Valenta is not as stiff and boring as he likes to pretend.
I think Marek Valenta might even be quite interesting.
The Film Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby
Scene Four
A Strange Boy in the Park
Afternoon, the park. Watery blue sky. Hazy sunlight. Children running round the
adventure playground, café garden full of toddlers and their carers, a huddle of teens in uniform smoking and thinking no-one can see them, a raucous match on the basketball court, dogs tearing about. Everyone making the most of the fine weather as the last leaves on the trees turn red and gold.
In the skateboard park, TOM and COLIN practise tricks called things like Butter Flips and 50/50s and Pogos. They cruise, they flick, they flip, they fall, they get back up again. Every time they pass each other, they slap their hands together in exuberant high fives.
JAKE and DODI sit on a bench, skateboards at their feet. He holds her hand and whispers in her ear. She looks longingly at Colin and Tom (Dodi is an ace skateboarder). CAMERAMAN perches on the back of a separated bench. She is attempting to make a film about skateboarding, trying to remember what Zoran said about the point of art being to make people look at things differently.
As far as she can tell, Colin and Tom look exactly the same on her film as they do in real life. But the camera is also a useful tactic for ignoring Dodi, who is still trying to match-make her with Tom.
TOM
Hey, Blue! Watch this!
He skates to the top of the ramp, twists, falls, smacks his head and lies still. Colin hops off his board and runs over to him. Cameraman carries on filming. Dodi calls out meaningfully.
DODI
Blue, aren’t you going to help him?
CAMERAMAN
He’s OK.
Time for Jas Page 5