Time for Jas

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Time for Jas Page 10

by Natasha Farrant


  ‘Because she’s supposed to be in Scotland,’ Twig said.

  ‘Just pretend it’s a normal Halloween,’ Flora said. ‘Carve pumpkins. Buy trick or treat stuff. Then get dressed and come and find us.’

  Everyone is nervous.

  I am nervous in case Dodi will be in Chatsworth Square and won’t want to talk to me, and also in case Marek sees us and thinks we are ridiculous.

  Twig is nervous because Flora has persuaded him to ask the rugby team to join in the parade, and they are all coming to our house this afternoon to get ready, and he has to convince them to let him put makeup on them.

  And Jas is the most nervous of all, because of the sheer scale of what Flora wants us to do.

  The Film Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby

  Scene Eight

  A Halloween to Remember

  Early evening. The sky is dark above London. Thanks to Mrs Doriot-Buffet’s leaflets, the normally sedate Chatsworth Square has been transformed into a sort of parallel universe as scores of residents have risen to the challenge of decorating their houses.

  Only the church on the north side of the square is in darkness (the local vicar not approving of the living dead).

  Exceptionally, the square has been closed to traffic. Fake spider webbing swathes rosebushes. A rubber corpse swings from a lamp post. Oversized papier-mâché bats hang from trees. Houses are garlanded with glow-in-the-dark skulls. Flickering pumpkins adorn doorsteps. Children dressed as skeletons and witches, vampires and ghosts, fairies and princesses and monsters, dart in groups from door to door like shoals of exotic fish gathering sweets, followed by sheepish-looking grown-ups in pointy hats. Teenagers too old for trick or treating roam the streets in packs.

  A girl with devil’s horns and a black netting skirt reapplies grey lipstick using her mobile phone as a mirror. A nurse covered in fake blood shares a can of drink with a boy in a leopard print waistcoat with whiskers painted on his face, and a hammer in his head. Four zombie schoolgirls with back-combed hair and knee-high white socks swish by, stuffing their faces with loot from their trick or treat bags.

  They are MEGAN, COURTNEY, CHANDRA and FRAN.

  In the heart of the square, behind their iron railings, the communal gardens are in darkness. If you stop to listen, you can hear rustling in the bushes. High above, plane trees sway. Camera lingers before returning to the thronging streets.

  Six o’clock. It’s time. CAMERAMAN (BLUEBELL, dressed in a man’s three-piece suit and beret in the manner of iconic American comic Buster Keaton in his film The Cameraman, with white stage makeup, hollowed-out dark-rimmed eyes, talcum-powdered hair and gold lipstick) runs up the steps of the church and turns towards the entrance of the tiny church mews.

  A trumpet blast tears through the air. All around the square, monsters and werewolves and ghouls stop wandering.

  All eyes turn towards the church.

  Another trumpet blast, and FLORA’s parade emerges from the mews, marching to the sound of Barney’s violin.

  It is – they are – magnificent.

  They process in the flickering light of live flame torches held aloft by Flora in a tutu and gas mask, and PETER in a scarlet cape and top hat, while BARNEY (in a tweed suit) plays on his fiddle and MAUD in her riding habit sounds her trumpet, and PIXIE in her witch’s cloak carries a wide-awake PUMPKIN in a purple velvet sleeping bag with demon’s wings on his back. Behind them, fifteen boys in full rugby kit toss a ball back and forth, painted silver to reflect the firelight.

  At the head of the procession marches JASMINE. She wears a white satin dress carefully shredded by Peter, so that long tendrils flutter as she walks, over black leggings decorated with silver spiders and her favourite silver high-tops. On her head, thrown back from her face and secured by her tiara, she wears Grandma’s wedding veil. Beside her, in an army uniform much too big for him, TODD waves Grandpa’s ancient regimental banner. They all wear the same dramatic makeup as Cameraman.

  They are an army of ghosts, unified by death.

  The crowds part to let them pass. A gaggle of ghouls start to cheer. They pass the four zombie schoolgirls. Jasmine (not very subtly) grins. Maud toots her trumpet in their faces. They scream. People laugh. The parade passes DODI, JAKE, COLIN and TOM, all wearing bowler hats and fake glasses and moustaches.

  Dodi’s moustachioed face is expressionless as she stares back at the camera, but the boys cheer and join in the procession. Tom catches the rugby ball and tosses it to TWIG, who is leading the team. Twig fumbles and drops it. Another player picks it up and lobs it back. One of his teammates jumps to catch it like he’s in the line-up on the field.

  A vaguely familiar large woman in a Venetian mask and gold cape asks Flora if she has a permit for those torches. Flora ignores her. Maud blows a comedy tune on her trumpet. Handsome MAX, who lives at number 72 and is dressed as Prince Charming with a rope around his neck, runs out of a house carrying a fiddle and starts to play alongside Barney.

  The large woman in Venetian mask and gold cape strides towards them. Her size and American accent reveal her to be Mrs Doriot-Buffet.

  MRS DORIOT-BUFFET

  Those torches are a fire hazard!

  The fiddling grows faster and louder. The rugby boys start a conga line. A few of them trip and fall out. The ball throwing grows wilder.

  They are passing the entrance to the communal gardens when the ball sails overhead and disappears into the darkness. One of the rugby boys swears. His friends give him a leg-up over the wall. The parade moves on, but Cameraman remains standing.

  She zooms in on the door which stands in the brick wall of the communal gardens.

  A door which on any other day is just a door, plain and wooden and unadorned, but which tonight …

  Tonight the door is woven with ivy and lilies. A squirrel clings to it upside down, bushy tail curling round railings that should not be there. A robin cocks its head, bright eyes inviting. Something very like a pixie peers out from behind the foliage.

  The door is no longer a door.

  It is a gateway to another world.

  Cameraman steps closer.

  It is made entirely of chalk.

  Cameraman scans the crowd now. She is looking for Dodi or Marek, but as the silver ball flies back over the wall, she is forced to return her attention to the parade. The ball clips Flora on the shoulder. She swings round, still brandishing her torch.

  FLORA

  For goodness sake, Twig, can’t you control them?

  TWIG

  I’m not captain! You’re the one who said they could come!

  The rugby team break into song.

  And now Pumpkin has had enough and begins to cry. Pixie announces she has to take him home. Prince Charming and Barney have stopped playing their fiddles and look like they might be about to kiss. The rugby players have started a scrum. Todd lowers his banner. Jas looks at Flora as if to say, ‘Now what?’

  From behind Flora, sparks begin to fly. Smoke wafts upwards. Something crackles as flames grow taller, feeding on privet hedge and fake spider webbing and papier-mâché bats.

  MRS DORIOT-BUFFET

  My house! My garden! My decorations! She sprints into her house and emerges with a garden hose. She sprays water over the fire. It goes out, but the decorations are ruined.

  MRS DORIOT-BUFFET

  (turns her hose on Flora)

  I told you those flames were dangerous! I should report you to the police!

  DODI

  (emerging from the crowd)

  Oh for heaven’s sake! It’s not that bad!

  MRS DORIOT-BUFFET

  You two! I might have known! Never come near my home again!

  She turns her jet on the disintegrating parade. The rugby team are rolling on the ground, getting as dirty as possible. Pixie hurries away with Pumpkin. Flora has started to scream unrepeatable names at Mrs Doriot-Buffet, who is screaming back, still spraying. Jake, Colin and Tom are cheering and eating miniature chocolate bars from a pumpkin-sha
ped bag they found abandoned in the street.

  Jas stands apart from the others, away from the water jet, but it is already too late. Makeup runs down her face. Her wet veil is plastered to her hair. All her earlier poise has gone – no longer a bride from beyond the grave, but a little girl in ripped-up second-hand clothes. She is not crying, but her lower lip wobbles dangerously.

  The zombie schoolgirls smirk, triumphant.

  The crowd parts again, and the Gadsby children’s MOTHER appears.

  Sunday 31 October

  Mum loved our costumes when we showed her them before going out, and she didn’t mind at all about the rugby boys (who were very well behaved), but she was furious about the fire, and mystified about Flora’s presence.

  ‘Torches!’ she cried. ‘Fiddles and trumpets and setting fire to things!’

  Dad, who thought the whole thing was splendid (his word), tried to placate her by saying how creative the whole parade idea was.

  ‘Creative! A house nearly burned down!’

  Flora said that was a bit of an exaggeration. Mum turned on her.

  ‘What are you even doing here, Flora? You say you’re on holiday, but I don’t remember seeing any mention of half-term when we looked at term dates.’

  Barney, Peter and Maud started shuffling towards the door.

  ‘We’d better go,’ Maud said.

  ‘Class tomorrow,’ Barney agreed.

  ‘Long drive,’ Peter murmured.

  Flora tried to back out of the room with them.

  ‘And that’s it?’ Mum cried, unreasonably. ‘You’re leaving, just like that?’

  Flora turned back. In the hall outside, the others froze. For a very short moment, no-one spoke.

  Then Flora said, ‘Actually, I’m not going back to Scotland,’ and Mum went nuts again.

  Twig and I tiptoed out with Maud, Peter and Barney and walked them round the corner to the blue car with the red door.

  ‘What’s going on with Flora?’ I asked Peter, but he said that she should be the one to tell us.

  ‘So long, camera girl.’ He pulled me into an enormous hug. ‘I’m looking forward to that film we’re going to make together one day.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said, and then they were gone.

  As we turned for home, a group of zombie rugby players ran past us, still tossing the silver ball back and forth across the street.

  ‘Do you want to join them?’ I asked Twig, but he shook his head.

  ‘I dropped the ball,’ he whispered. ‘When Tom threw it to me. Did you see?’

  I wasn’t sure what to say, because obviously I did see – I even caught it on film.

  ‘Anyone would have dropped it,’ I said, but Twig just sighed and looked depressed.

  When we got back Jas and Pixie were sitting on the landing in their dressing gowns, with most but not all their makeup scrubbed off, listening to Mum and Dad and Flora shout at each other in the living room.

  ‘Flora has come back to do Angel’s play,’ Jas whispered to us. ‘She’s been doing rehearsals by Skype.’

  ‘Is that even possible?’

  ‘That’s what Dad asked, but Flora says yes. The play opens in two weeks, and after it’s finished Flora says she’s going to stay.’

  Downstairs, the noise was getting worse.

  ‘We have paid for a whole year of tuition!’ Mum cried. ‘You begged and begged and said this was what you wanted!’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ Flora didn’t sound sorry at all. ‘I’ll pay you back!’

  ‘WITH WHAT MONEY?’

  ‘The money I make from the play!’

  Mum started to laugh like a crazy person.

  ‘Cassie.’ Dad’s voice was unusually firm. ‘Let her do this. Then we can talk about what she wants to do next.’

  ‘This is what I want,’ Flora said. ‘The real thing. Not tongue massages and breathing exercises. Proper acting.’

  Jas shivered and sneezed. Pixie stood up and pulled her to her feet. ‘A hot bath,’ Pixie said. ‘I have some herbs you can put in it to stop you getting a cold.’

  Twig and I followed. There seemed no point in staying. No-one can ever get in Flora’s way when she’s made her mind up about something.

  Later, when things had calmed down and we’d had dinner and done some of the homework we should have done in the holidays, and Flora was happy again because Mum and Dad agreed to let her do the play, I went in to see Jas.

  Her eyes were red and her nose was running, and she kept either blowing it or sniffing.

  ‘I’ve got a cold,’ she said. ‘Pixie’s herbs didn’t work.’

  I pretended to believe her.

  ‘The parade was great,’ I said, but I was lying too, and she knew it.

  Afterwards, when Jas had gone to bed, I went through my film of Halloween. There were Flora and Jas and all the others, splendid in their costumes, and there was Mrs Doriot-Buffet and the rugby team and Prince Charming and his violin, and the door to the gardens with the ivy and pixies and robin, but however hard I looked, I couldn’t find a single sign of Marek Valenta. I zoomed in on the fire, but instead of looking at the burning hedge, focused on his house next door.

  There were no decorations outside, and only one light, right on the top floor.

  Was it his?

  Oh God … if the fire had been worse, Flora could have set fire to his house!

  My phone pinged. A message from Dodi, with a photograph. Her and me and Iris, eight years old, dressed up as ghosts for Halloween with sheets over our heads with cauldron-shaped trick or treat bags.

  The message just said, ‘Meet me before school?’

  It didn’t say where, but I already knew.

  There is only one place.

  ‘Eight o’clock,’ I replied.

  Dodi wrote, ‘I’ll bring snacks.’

  Monday 1 November

  The place is the bit in the park where nobody is allowed to go, where the gardeners keep their tools and machinery.

  It is the place we always used to come with Iris, when there were important things to say.

  The place where she was going on the night she was hit by a van, on her way to rescue some baby foxes born at the wrong time of year.

  We haven’t been back there since she died four years ago. I wasn’t even sure you could still get in. The hole in the fence we used to squeeze through when we were children has been blocked off, but we’re bigger now, and when I got there this morning I realised how easy it was to climb over.

  Dodi was already there, wiping dirt off her jeans. As I jumped down beside her, she held up a packet of Bourbon biscuits and two cartons of Ribena.

  ‘Oh!’ Something caught in my throat. ‘You remembered.’

  ‘They were her favourites,’ Dodi said. ‘Of course I remember.’

  We sat with our backs against the gardeners’ shed and our faces tilted towards the morning sun, nibbling the biscuits the way Iris used to until only the filling was left.

  ‘I’m sorry for being mean,’ I said at last. ‘For making you split up with Jake.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Dodi said. ‘For going on about Tom when you kept telling me you didn’t like him.’

  I didn’t want to say any more after that, but in my mind I could hear Grandma saying, ‘It’s difficult being friends with someone who is always controlling you,’ and I knew that if I wanted us to carry on being friends, I had to.

  ‘It’s just,’ I started. ‘I mean … I don’t think you realise, but you’re a bit …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bossy. It makes me feel a bit …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bullied.’

  ‘Bullied?’

  Dodi looked so upset I wanted to take it all back, but I bit my lip.

  ‘I would never bully you! Blue, you’re my best friend!’

  ‘I know! I know, I’m just saying … Because you’re my best friend too.’

  Dodi stared at her carton of juice. Then she put it down on the ground in front o
f her, next to the half empty packet of biscuits, so she could lay her hands over them both, and turned to look at me.

  ‘On Iris’s memory,’ she vowed, ‘I swear that I will never crush you or boss you or bully you again.’

  I put my hands over hers. ‘And I swear I will never let you, but that if you are, I will not be mean or cause you to split up with your boyfriend.’

  Iris would have laughed at us, swearing over her favourite snacks. We almost laughed too, except for the tears in our eyes. Then Dodi sniffed, and we finished the biscuits, and slurped the juice, and realised we were going to be late for school.

  ‘I’m actually back with Jake,’ she said, as we hurried down the Avenue.

  ‘I wondered,’ I said. ‘I saw you at Halloween. I didn’t know if you were just friends.’

  ‘He wouldn’t talk to me all half-term. But then yesterday he came round and said he still wanted to go out with me, but that he promised to not be so serious if that was what I wanted. And I realised …’

  She stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I realised I don’t mind him being serious. I think I was just … I was just afraid before, because I think – I think I’m in love with him, Blue. I’ve never been in love with anyone before.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Dodi. I’m so happy for you!’

  But I think that was enough emotion for Dodi for one morning, because she just gave herself a little ‘pull yourself together’ shake and said, ‘Explain last night, because that was completely mental.’

  I explained how it was Flora’s idea, to show the Cupcake Girls what Jas was capable of.

  ‘It may have worked.’ I tried to keep the doubt out of my voice. ‘I guess we’ll find out after school.’

  Dodi snorted and said of course it hadn’t worked.

 

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