Time for Jas

by Natasha Farrant

  TOM

  (sits up, rubs his head)

  That was AWESOME. I can see stars.

  DODI

  Blue, sit with him. He’s obviously hallucinating.

  Tom stands, staggers, sighs, tucks his board under his arm and walks across to Cameraman’s bench.

  TOM

  It does actually hurt.

  CAMERAMAN

  (heartless)

  Serves you right for showing off.

  Tom laughs. They sit in amiable silence watching as Dodi, blonde hair flying, takes her turn on the ramp. Cameraman gives up trying to make this film into anything artistic and turns towards the park.

  Toddlers, smokers, dogs …

  Picture freezes beneath the big horse-chestnut tree where a boy stands, alone, leaning against the trunk.

  A boy with a pale face floating beneath perfectly coiffed hair, his hands deep in the pockets of an exquisitely tailored leather jacket.

  Now Tom sees him too. He waves. Slowly, hesitantly, Marek Valenta waves back.

  Thursday 30 September

  Dodi skated over as Tom and I watched Marek disappear, and said Jake’s parents have invited her for dinner on Saturday, and she thought we should all go.

  ‘But they’re not invited,’ Jake objected.

  Colin said he had a family party. Tom said he’d rather eat his skateboard, and anyway he was going to Bristol tomorrow to see his dad for the weekend. Dodi looked disappointed. I left before she actually suggested I go to Bristol with Tom.

  I looked for Marek as I crossed the park, but I didn’t see him.

  At home, Twig was ordering Jas to explain why she had missed yet another day of school, and Jas was still refusing to tell him.

  ‘I’m sick,’ she growled.

  ‘You’re lying!’

  Pixie, who was mashing hardboiled eggs and avocado for Pumpkin’s tea, murmured something about lying being bad for people’s karma.

  ‘If you lie,’ she said, ‘bad things will happen to you in a future life.’

  ‘Bad things will happen to her now if she doesn’t tell me the truth,’ Twig said. ‘Blue knows what’s going on, don’t you Blue?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘LIAR!’

  Pixie cried, ‘Karma, karma, karma!’ Pumpkin, encouraged by all the shouting, started hurling avocado egg around the kitchen. Twig folded his arms and glared at everybody, looking quite scary because his purple eye is turning green and yellow and he can’t really open it.

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you!’ Jas grumbled.

  Afterwards, Twig said hadn’t he told her the whole wearing wings to school thing was a terrible idea, and what was she thinking putting those stupid leaflets in people’s lockers and she was even more of an idiot than he thought she was. Jas burst into tears.

  ‘I knew something was up!’ he shouted. ‘I knew it! Why didn’t you tell me? I would have sorted them out!’

  ‘Tell him, Blue,’ Jas sniffed.

  ‘She didn’t want a fuss,’ I said. ‘She thought it would make things worse.’

  Twig started to punch his left hand with his right fist, which I think is something people do before rugby matches, and announced that he was going to kill Courtney and Megan and Chandra and Fran. Pixie murmured that violence was never a solution. Twig said sometimes it was. Jas said she would rather Twig didn’t kill them, but that it was nice of him to offer. She stopped crying. They went outside to practise his catching (which is still hopeless), and I went up to my room and lay on my bed and thought about Marek, standing watching us from under the horse-chestnut tree.

  ‘Do you miss Prague, Marek?’ I remembered Mum asking when he came for that drink.

  ‘Yes, I do. Very much,’ he had answered.

  I wonder what it is like to leave your country and come somewhere that is completely new? His English is so good, sometimes I forget that he doesn’t come from here.

  Did he have friends in Prague? When he waved at us, should I have gone over to talk to him?

  Sometimes, like when he helped me in English or when he almost smiles at something, I think he likes me, but most of the time he looks at me like I am just weird.

  Anyway, I couldn’t have spoken to him in the park. He was gone the minute I saw him.

  If he’d wanted to talk to us, he would have hung around.

  But maybe I should have tried harder, just the same.

  Saturday 2 October

  I went for a walk with Zoran today, and he said that Gloria is going to Grandma’s tomorrow to start getting things ready for the horses.

  ‘There is a lot to organise,’ he said. ‘Moving twelve horses across the country … will you help?’

  ‘What, ride to Devon?’

  Zoran laughed and said that charming though it was picturing the entire Gadsby family setting off on a giant pony trek from London to Dartmoor, the horses would actually be going by truck.

  ‘I meant, will you help us pack up in London, and unpack in Devon? Blue, what are you doing?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘You keep staring at the pavement.’

  With everything that has been happening with Jas, I haven’t thought about the drawings for a while, but it has become a habit, I guess. Gutters, alleys, walls – everywhere I go, I am looking for them.

  ‘No reason,’ I said. ‘Of course we’ll help.’

  After Iris died, when our whole family was falling apart from being so sad, Zoran is the one who saved us. I’m not exaggerating. We had become these crushed, sad little people, but then he came to live with us, and even though he is quite chaotic and not always very efficient, he managed to make us all feel better. I’m very happy that he’s going to live with Grandma, but I don’t like the idea of him going away. Not just because, along with Skye and Grandma, he is the only person who ever listens to me, but also because the way things feel at home right now, I think we need him here.

  ‘Jas is being bullied at school,’ I told him, and explained about the Cupcake Crew (I left out the bit about Jas’s poems and the wings).

  ‘Do your parents know?’ he asked.

  ‘She doesn’t want them to. Zoran, what should I do?’

  ‘She won’t let you get involved?’

  ‘She doesn’t think I can help.’

  Zoran frowned as he thought. ‘I should talk to your parents.’

  ‘Please don’t!’ I begged.

  Zoran said fine, but made me swear that if things got worse, I would call him. Then he said that all I could do was to try to make Jas feel better about herself.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know! Do something fun with her.’

  We passed another alleyway, then turned onto the Avenue, just opposite the toy shop. Suddenly I had an idea.

  ‘Can you lend me some money?’ I asked.

  There was a smell of burning in the house when I got home. I followed it upstairs. Jas was sitting on the floor of her bedroom, holding some old hair straighteners of Flora’s in one hand and a strand of smoking hair in the other.

  ‘Do you know how to use these?’ she demanded.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s for those girls.’ Twig wandered in from the bathroom, examining his greeny-yellow eye in a hand-mirror.

  ‘What girls?’ I asked.

  ‘Those cupcake creatures. She’s trying to look like them. She’s basically giving in.’

  ‘I’m not giving in!’ Jas glared at him. ‘I’m just following Dodi’s advice.’

  ‘What was Dodi’s advice?’ I asked.

  ‘To be more mainstream.’

  Twig grunted that Jas couldn’t be mainstream if she tried. Jas threw the hair straighteners at him. He dodged. They landed on his desk instead, knocking a glass of water all over his maths homework.

  ‘I bought chalks,’ I said.

  Twig stopped shouting. Jas frowned.

  ‘Let’s draw,’ I said.

  And that is how we spent our Saturday evening. We practised with c
halk flowers on the paving outside the kitchen, then worked our way up the wall and on to the trellis before moving to the front of the house. Our drawings are nothing like the chalk artist’s. Those are art. Ours look like children’s scribbling, because the sad truth is none of us are any good at drawing, and we can only do flowers and birds and cats, but when you have lots and lots of them in different colours all squished together higgledy-piggledy, it doesn’t matter.

  The final effect was like one of those cards where you have a picture of loads of jelly beans or M&Ms so close up you sort of lose sense of what they are, and just see a big jumble of shape and colour. Except more messy. Really, really messy. So messy that by the time we had finished, way after it got dark and we could only see what we had done by street light at the front and the garden light at the back, the three of us were covered head to toe in multi-coloured chalk.

  ‘You look like a butterfly,’ I told Jas. She’d used mainly pink and orange chalks for her cats, and rubbed her face a lot.

  ‘A butterfly!’ she scoffed.

  ‘And Twig looks like a sort of sci-fi warrior,’ I said, because his face was all blue and white.

  ‘But your face is clean …’ Twig exchanged a glance with Jas. I started to back away but they were already pouncing on me.

  I thought about what Pixie said, about clothes showing on the outside what you look like inside. This is me, I thought as I put away the chalks. Messy and colourful and much more crazy than I look.

  After we’d finished, I sat in the bath for ages, watching the water change colour as the chalk washed off me. I wonder what a chalk artist looks like when a drawing is finished. Is it like us, a multi-coloured bird or alien or butterfly? I don’t think that’s possible, because if someone like that was around surely people would notice. Maybe the opposite is true. Maybe, when the chalk artist draws, all the vivid colour and strange beauty flow right out and into the picture, so that in the end he or she isn’t multi-coloured and shining, but rather grey and tired.

  I guess Zoran was right. Maybe it won’t last, but doing something fun did help. But I’d be lying if I said it was the only reason I did it. I want the chalk artist to see what we’ve done.

  I want to see what the next drawing will be.

  I pulled the plug. Sunset-coloured water swirled around the drain and disappeared.

  Monday 4 October

  Sometimes you only notice things when you see them through other people’s eyes. It was like that at lunchtime.

  Ever since that English lesson when he read out loud, the boys have become obsessed with Marek Valenta.

  ‘Why?’ Dodi said, when they were talking about him at the end of Maths. ‘He’s just a secret swot, and he clearly doesn’t like any of us.’

  ‘Does that matter?’ Tom asked. ‘We like him. He’s so odd! Let’s ask him to eat with us.’

  He bounced over to Marek, and carried on bouncing him all the way to the canteen. I don’t think anyone could resist Tom, once he’s decided something.

  At lunch, the boys asked Marek who his favourite football team was (something Prague) and did he skateboard (he prefers roller-blading). Hattie asked why he loved Steinbeck so much and did he like acting (he just thinks it’s a great book, and no). There was an awkward silence, and then Tom changed the subject and asked me what I was doing for half-term.

  Dodi beamed. ‘Blue’s going to Devon,’ she said. ‘To help Zoran and Gloria move the horses.’

  Tom asked, what horses. Dodi explained. ‘I can’t believe you’ve never been to Gloria’s stables,’ she said. ‘They’re so cool. They’re right under the motorway. You should ask Blue to take you.’

  I glanced up. Marek was frowning, looking from Dodi to me like he couldn’t believe I just let her talk instead of me. He looked away when he saw me looking, but I felt hot with embarrassment.

  I hadn’t realised until then how much it actually annoys me that Dodi won’t let me speak.

  ‘I’m actually allergic to horses,’ Tom said. ‘Otherwise I’d go like a shot. What’s everyone else doing?’

  Hattie is going to violin camp. Tom is going back to Bristol, and Colin is going with him. Dodi is repainting her bedroom.

  ‘And I’m helping her,’ Jake said.

  Tom laughed and called Jake a sentimental idiot. Colin elbowed him in the ribs. Hattie said she wished she had a boyfriend as sweet as him. Jake went red.

  Dodi flinched. I saw it, and Marek saw it. His eyes widened again, and that is when I saw something else.

  Tom’s right – Jake is sentimental. But Hattie’s right too, he’s also sweet. And I love Dodi, but she shouldn’t try to make me do things I don’t want, or treat Jake the way she does.

  I don’t know if the chalk artist saw our pictures, but it’s too late now. It rained last night, and all our drawings have disappeared. Jas’s good mood, however, has lasted.

  ‘The cupcake girls have asked me to be their friend.’

  ‘Their friend?’ Twig looked appalled.

  ‘It’s true!’

  ‘When did this happen?’ I asked.

  Jas said, ‘They’ve apologised. They say they didn’t mean to upset me. They were just having a bit of fun. They like my hair. They’ve promised me a cupcake pendant.’

  ‘Fun?’ Twig cried. ‘Hair?? CUPCAKES?’

  Jas said if Twig didn’t shut up, she would use her straighteners on him, and not just to burn his hair.

  The Film Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby

  Scene Five

  The End of an Era

  Lunchtime, the stables under the motorway. Twelve huddled horseboxes facing into a tiny yard sandwiched between a leisure centre and a bus depot. A big plane tree by the entrance to a narrow passage, just wide enough for a horse and rider, leading to a sawdust ring beneath a network of busy roads. In the riding ring, non-broken cones sit in an orange circle beside striped jumping poles and cross-shaped supports.

  The doors to the box at the back of the yard are open. Crates of stuff are piled up inside. Halters and leather wax, horse brushes and combs, hoof picks and saddle pads. There is a pile of saddles, a crate full of bridles, another for girths and stirrups, each labelled for an individual pony or horse, crates with tags saying ‘medication’, ‘whips’, ‘boots’, ‘hats’.

  Outside in the yard is a growing pile of junk. Broken saddles, chairs, electric heaters, traffic cones, bits of rope, a burst football, torn waterproofs, an old mattress. The range is astonishing.

  CAMERAMAN (BLUEBELL) crosses the yard, into the tiny office and up the rickety stairs to the flat above. More boxes, full of china, cutlery, books, bed linen. Suitcases bulging with clothes, pictures stacked on the floor, grimy outlines on the walls where they used to hang. Furniture labelled with different coloured stickers – green for the few items going to Devon, orange for everything that is to be sold or given away.

  Back in the yard, ZORAN, GLORIA, TWIG and MOTHER sit on benches eating crisps with cheese and pickle sandwiches and drinking mugs of sweet, strong tea. JASMINE eats standing up, half-hidden by the open top half of a stable door. A pony (Mopsy, her old favourite) hangs its head over the door. She nudges Jas, who offers her a piece of sandwich. Mopsy signals her dislike of pickle by blowing air noisily through her nostrils. Pony snot lands on Jasmine’s brand new sky blue hoody. She squeals and pushes Mopsy away.

  JASMINE

  My new top! It’s all dirty!

  MOTHER

  I did tell you not to wear it.

  JASMINE

  I had to! What if someone had seen me?

  MOTHER

  What could it possibly matter?

  JASMINE

  (tossing her newly straightened, super-swishy hair and sounding remarkably like Flora) You wouldn’t understand.

  Sunday 10 October

  Jas has changed now that she is friends with the Cupcake Crew.

  Ever since Gloria came back from Devon on Monday, Twig and I have been at the stables every day after school to help her pack,
but today was the first time Jas came, even though out of all of us Jas is the one who loves Gloria the most. Being friends with Megan, Courtney, Chandra and Fran means being exactly like them, and hanging out with dirty animals isn’t one of the things they do.

  It started with the hair straighteners. Then, the day after our chalk drawing, there was the shopping expedition with Mum. Now, as well as the right hair, she has the right pastel hoodies from the right shop, the right trainers and the right jeans.

  We watched as Jas, well out of Mopsy’s reach, rubbed away at her sweatshirt, still trying to clean it. Mopsy, who is the cleverest pony in the yard as well as the smallest, reached over the top of her box, pulled the bolt back neatly with her teeth, pushed open her door, ambled over to Jas and blew down her neck.

  Everybody laughed. Mopsy looked round, ears waggling like she was saying ‘Aren’t I clever?’ Jas screamed and pushed her away again.

  ‘Why can’t you leave me alone!’ she screeched.

  Zoran put his arm round Mopsy’s neck and pushed her back into the box, remembering to padlock the door. Jas flounced away to clean her sweatshirt in the bathroom upstairs.

  ‘If you have to change who you are in order to be friends with someone,’ Gloria observed, ‘that someone is not a true friend.’

  Which is easy to say when you’re a grown-up, and a lot more difficult if you have to go to school.

  I don’t like seeing the stables look like the way they did today, like something that has ended. I told Mum, who said she didn’t either but also that nothing new can start without something old ending first, that this was also part of the circle of life and that I should just think how much happier the horses are going to be in Devon.

  We were sitting in what used to be the riding ring. I drew a circle in the sand with my finger, and thought about how the chalk artist still hasn’t responded. Then I thought that when Mum talked about the circle of life, we were both thinking about Iris, and how difficult it is sometimes for that circle to keep on turning. I told her about wishing Zoran would stay even though I was glad he was going to live with Grandma. Her eyes shone a bit, and I knew she was thinking about the time after Iris too, when he first came to live with us and saved us from being crushed.