I can’t believe I said that now. I wish I hadn’t.
‘Poodle?’
Dodi burst into tears and ran away.
Pixie has given Jas a tiara. ‘To channel your inner princess,’ she told her. ‘You could wear it for Halloween.’
‘I don’t want to be a princess,’ Jas said, but she wore the tiara anyway so as not to disappoint Pixie. Flora Skyped later and said how much she liked it.
‘Don’t you think it’s drippy?’ Jas asked.
‘You’re thinking of the wrong princesses,’ Flora told her. ‘You’re thinking of the ones who wear pink and droop about waiting for Prince flipping Charming to come and slay their dragon. I’m talking about the sort of princess who wields swords and wears armour and gallops about killing the dragons herself while wearing a tiara. Show me.’
Jas jumped on to a chair and started making stabbing, thrusting moves with an imaginary sword. Everyone cheered, even Mum who didn’t have a clue what was going on.
She is taking it to school tomorrow.
‘Seriously?’ Twig said. ‘After the wings?’
‘I’m not going to wear it,’ Jas said. ‘I’m just going to show it. For Halloween, to see if I can go as a princess.
She wore the tiara all evening, even in the bath, but afterwards when she was drying and straightening her hair, I tried it on too. And there is something about tiaras. Something not Barbie but glamorous and powerful and strong. I waved regally at the mirror.
Imagine all the power you would have if you were a queen.
I don’t know what you’re supposed to do when you’ve stood up to someone, or been mean to them. It’s not something that has ever happened to me before. I waited all evening for Dodi to text me about what happened this afternoon, but tonight my phone has been silent. It was Tom who messaged later, to say that Jake and Dodi had spent ages talking, and that Jake had finished with her. So then I texted her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I wrote. ‘I didn’t mean for that to happen.’
She hasn’t answered. Suddenly powerful doesn’t feel so good.
The Film Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby
Scene Six
The Ponies
Lunchtime, the pedestrian area outside the stables under the motorway, where six horse trailers have been given exceptional leave to park and stand open for loading. Quite a crowd has assembled. Neighbours, former pupils, stable-hands, friends. The buyers from the leisure centre and a man from the council. Quite a few people are crying. Toddlers have to be restrained from running to hug ponies’ legs.
GLORIA holds a bunch of flowers someone has brought her, which MOPSY is munching without her noticing while she gives a farewell speech about how much it has meant to her to work in such a wonderful place with such amazing people, and how she will never forget any of them. One of the stable volunteers, a small girl with pigtails, runs away towards the riding ring, overcome with emotion.
GLORIA
(uncharacteristically weepy)
There is something truly magical about a riding school under a motorway. I shall carry you all forever in my heart.
Mopsy sneezes agreement and goes back to chewing a tulip. People laugh. A TWEEDY WOMAN HOLDING BACK A TODDLER hands Gloria a tissue.
TWEEDY WOMAN
The ponies will be happier in the country, dear.
And then Gloria and TWIG and ZORAN and SKYE’S FATHER ISAMBARD and SKYE’S FATHER ISAMBARD’S FRIEND FROM DEVON and various stable-hands begin to load the ponies into the trailers. Some accept their fate with resignation. Mopsy, possibly high on his bouquet of flowers, tries to escape. Gloria catches him, pushes him into the trailer and bolts the door. Mopsy neighs loudly to express disgust.
TWEEDY WOMAN
Attagirl, Gloria! You show ’em!
Final hugs and handshakes are being distributed when the small volunteer with pigtails re-emerges, no longer crying, a look of wonder on her freckled face.
SMALL VOLUNTEER WITH PIGTAILS
Gloria! Gloria! Have you seen?
GLORIA
Seen what? What are you talking about?
SMALL VOLUNTEER WITH PIGTAILS
The drawings! The horse drawings! You have to come and look!
And so they go. The former pupils and the neighbours, the manager of the leisure centre and the man from the council, the volunteers and the Gadsby family, and they stand in the sawdust of what used to be a riding ring and they gape and laugh and point and tell each other they can’t believe what they are seeing.
Across the wall beneath the motorway, tucked away where no-one would see them unless they went to look, twelve chalk ponies gallop through a grassy meadow.
There are hills and trees, a river. Blue sky with puffy white clouds. It’s a rough drawing, not as neatly executed as the zebra or the flowers or the dachshund. It’s a lot bigger and looks like it must have been done in a hurry, but even so.
It’s obvious, just looking at it. The ponies do look happier in the country.
Friday 22 October
There wasn’t time to think too much about the drawings, because we had to go and fetch Jas.
She didn’t come with us to the stables. School broke up for half-term at lunchtime, but when Twig and I raced round to the primary school to collect her, she said she was going to the shopping centre with Courtney, Megan, Chandra and Fran.
‘But what about the ponies?’ Twig asked.
‘Shh!’ Jas begged. ‘They’ll hear you!’
‘You’re not allowed to go shopping on your own,’ I said.
‘I won’t be on my own, I’ll be with them. Please let me! Please?’
‘But Jas, with them?’ I asked.
She looked so desperate, as Megan and Courtney and Chandra and Fran swished up to us, and they actually seemed so nice, like none of the things she told us about them could ever have happened, and it seemed to matter so much, that I said all right, fine.
‘But I’ll come and pick you up at the shops.’ I pulled her aside to tell her my conditions. ‘We can’t go home without you, or there’ll be a fuss.’
I told her to meet us by the ice-cream place in the shopping centre at three o’clock. We were five minutes late arriving but she wasn’t there. I scanned the crowds for her.
‘Over there,’ said Twig. He pointed. Jas and the four swishy girls were standing in a huddle by the cupcake stand, about twenty metres from us. The four girls were talking. Jas was shaking her head and backing away.
‘We have to rescue her!’ Twig started running towards them, but I held him back.
‘Don’t make things worse,’ I said.
But now another group was approaching them. Five boys. Four dressed like any other boy, in jeans and T-shirts and trainers and hoodies. One, tiny in comparison, wearing a waistcoat and a bow tie.
‘That must be Todd,’ I said. ‘Remember, she told us about him?’
The cupcake girls nudged each other. Jas took another step away. The tallest girl (Courtney) pulled her back while the dark-haired one (Chandra) snatched her bag and started rooting around inside it. And then everything went very fast.
‘A freak for a freak!’ Chandra cried, jamming Jas’s tiara on her head.
The hoody boys pushed Todd towards Jas. He stumbled. She put her hands out to stop him falling. The girls pushed her closer to him.
‘Kiss her! Kiss her! Kiss her!’
As the taunts and laughing grew louder, I thought I saw Jas stand taller. The light glinted off her tiara, and just for a moment she was the princess Flora had talked about – eyes flashing, nostrils flared, off to kill a dragon.
‘Shut up!’ she snarled. ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’
‘What’s the matter, Your Majesty?’ Courtney crowed. ‘Isn’t he your boyfriend?’
‘We have to help her!’ Twig said. We both started to run, but then we stopped again, because Jas was already pulling Todd away. The cupcake girls and the hooded boys all roared with laughter, but Jas marched with her nose in the air, and b
ecause she had her back to them they couldn’t see how hard she was trying not to cry.
We took them home and fed them cake.
‘I thought they wanted to be my friends,’ Todd explained as he ate.
‘Same,’ Jas said. ‘I thought they liked me now I dress like them. I wish I’d gone to see the ponies instead. At least I know they love me.’
‘I hate looking like everybody else,’ Todd said.
‘Me too!’ Jas cried. ‘Oh, me too!’
Todd stayed for supper. He called his mum to tell her where he was, and Pixie spoke to her too, using a very grown-up voice no-one had ever heard before, and he and Jas locked themselves away in her room with a bag of Flora’s old makeup, ‘To look as unlike ourselves as possible,’ Jas announced.
Dad came back from Devon this afternoon – for good, this time. He rang the doorbell three times then flung the door open shouting, ‘I’m home!’ and then he laughed and laughed when Jas hurled herself down the stairs screeching ‘Daddy!’
‘Who are you and what have you done with my daughter?’ he cried, because Jas was transformed. There was no trace of the sad little girl trying not to cry in the shopping centre. The effect of all that makeup was spectacular – like when we were covered with chalk, but more defined. Jas was luminous in shades of gold eyeshadow, lipstick and bronzer over a pancake thick layer of foundation. Todd was darkly shimmering in variations of black and silver.
‘We’re the sun and the moon,’ Jas told him. ‘Did you get it?’
Dad said he didn’t get it immediately, but he did now.
‘It’s like we’re magic.’ Jas gazed at herself in the hall mirror. ‘Nothing can hurt you when you’re magic.’
I wish Jas could have seen the horse mural this morning, and the people’s faces looking at it.
‘They look real,’ said the small volunteer. ‘Are they going to stay here forever?’
‘They’ll wash away with the first rain,’ I told her.
‘But then what’s the point?’
I don’t know what the point is, why someone would go to all that trouble to make something that’s only going to disappear. I only know that for the short time they will be there, despite the obvious hurry of the artist – the blurred edges, the hastily filled in background – those ponies gallop across that wall like they are about to burst out and charge straight at you, and while you are looking at them you forget about everything else, and that is magic too.
I sent Dodi a photograph of the drawings at the stable. I thought maybe that would show her how things hadn’t changed – I mean, that I still hoped we were friends. That I want us to be friends.
‘Still don’t know who’s doing it,’ I wrote, but she hasn’t answered.
Tom knows about the stables now, of course, because Dodi told him. But I’ve just remembered something – he can’t have known about the drawings we did on the pavement, because he was in Bristol that weekend and by the time he came back to London, the rain had washed them all away.
Also I know that Tom doesn’t like me like that, so I don’t see why he would go about the place leaving drawings for me.
The zebra under our car.
The bluebells on the way to school.
The flowers and vines right outside our house.
The dachshund. Who else knows about the dachshund?
Think, think, think. When did the drawings first appear?
At the end of the summer holidays, the week before school started. When … oh my God! It can’t be!
At the end of the summer holidays, the week before school started – when Marek moved into the square!
The Film Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby
Scene Seven
Horses Are Definitely Happier in the Country
Early morning, Horsehill Farm. Clear blue sky, pale gold sunlight, mist rising from the ground. The trees here have shed more leaves than those in London. Those that remain, in shades of red and yellow and orange, sway in a crisp autumn breeze.
Half a dozen ponies stand in the clean, swept yard between the stables and the paddock, tethered to the wooden fence. Inside the barn, the familiar figures of GLORIA, TWIG and the massive silhouette of Grandma’s neighbour ISAMBARD HANRATTY are busying about. Twig spreads fresh straw in horseboxes. Gloria unpacks crates in the new tack room built last week by Isambard, who is nailing rows of hooks to the wall on which to hang halters and bridles.
CAMERAMAN (BLUEBELL)’s breath makes puffs of steam in the air. In the field beyond the paddock, SKYE HANRATTY (fourteen years old, no riding hat or saddle, sandy hair sticking straight up, wire-rimmed glasses held together with sticking plaster, a broad grin over newly acquired braces) and JASMINE are exercising horses. Manes fly, hooves thunder. Skye rides Tuesday, the black mare and biggest pony in the stables, but Jasmine on Mopsy is doing a fine job of keeping up as they tear around the field, her long hair streaming behind her like a banner from beneath her hat. The Dartmoor hills spread out beyond them in a circle of green and russet.
It is like the chalk drawing under the motorway come to life.
The ponies finish their lap of the field and decelerate like a car changing gears, from a gallop to a canter, a trot and then a jog and finally a walk as they file through the gate into the paddock where Cameraman is standing.
Skye and Jasmine are beaming. No – they are glowing, eyes bright, cheeks whipped to high colour by the exercise. As they lean down to pat their ponies’ necks, to pull their ears and tug their manes and congratulate them, they don’t look like riders at all. Rather, they are extensions of their mounts, so that it is almost a shock, when they slide off in the yard, to discover they have legs of their own and a human shape.
It is almost impossible to imagine two people looking more happy.
Sunday 24 October
When we left Grandma at the end of the last holidays, she was all small and frail because she’d been ill and kept forgetting things. But when we arrived yesterday she was at the station with Zoran to meet us, looking a bit thin but otherwise exactly like she always has in her usual combination of pearls and gardening clothes, and not at all like a woman who needs looking after.
Last night at dinner, she sat at the head of the table tucking into Zoran’s beef casserole like she hadn’t eaten for weeks, firing away horse questions at Gloria like, WILL THE BLACK MARE FOAL NEXT SPRING? and SHOULD YOU TRY THE BROWN GELDING ON THE MARTINGALE? almost as loudly as she used to.
Horsehill has become completely horse mad.
Everyone is happy here. Pixie is happy because she says being here feels just like being with her family where she lives in the country in Ireland, and Pumpkin is happy because seeing so many ponies all together is blowing his tiny baby mind, and Twig is happy because when he is here he spends his whole time doing things like investigating natural science stuff like the lifecycle of newts or the nesting habits of barn owls, and not getting beaten up playing rugby. And Gloria is happy because she loves having so much space for the ponies, and Zoran is happy because he’s always either playing the piano or cooking, when he isn’t running down to the yard to kiss Gloria when he thinks nobody is looking.
Even Mum and Dad are happy, because they’ve stayed all alone in London for some Mum and Dad time, and happiest of all is Jas, who has morphed right back to being a half-wild person with tangled hair who spends her life galloping about on horseback wearing layers of torn multi-coloured jumpers over jodhpurs covered in mud and horse hair.
I am the only person, I think, who is not completely overjoyed to be here.
There’s no Wi-Fi at Grandma’s house (though Zoran says he’s going to change that), and no mobile signal either. The only way you can actually send messages to anybody is using the broadband connection in Grandma’s study, and even that’s not easy because her life’s mission has always been to shoo people outside because ‘nothing beats fresh air and exercise’. I have been checking email and Facebook whenever I can get past Grandma, and this afternoon I took my phon
e on a walk up a hill to try to get some reception. I got three bars of signal for about half a minute, but Dodi still hasn’t answered.
What if she never does?
Was it worth sacrificing our whole friendship just because she was a bit bossy?
Grandma came in as I was composing an email to Dodi, to send with a picture of the horses this morning, and asked what I was doing. When I explained, she said that it’s difficult to be friends with someone who is very controlling, that if we were truly friends, then Dodi will forgive me and also that I should stop writing to her but talk to her face to face.
‘But …’
Grandma took my hand off the mouse, turned off the computer and told me to go outside.
I’ve found Marek on Facebook. I want to write to him.
I want to ask, am I right? Is it you? And if it is, why do you do it?
The film I made this morning is pretty. What with the mist and the galloping horsemen, it looks mysterious and almost poetic. I wonder what Marek would think of it. I broke my rule of not sharing my films this afternoon and showed it to Skye when I came back from my walk.
‘Do you like it?’ I asked.
Skye looked out across the paddock to the field where half a dozen horses and ponies were grazing. Gloria and Zoran were walking towards them, hand in hand. The sun was already setting. The sky was darkening, touched with pink and gold around the edges, and our breath was coming out in puffs again.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘But it’s not as good as the real thing.’
I thought a lot of things when he said that.
Time for Jas Page 8