That pushed me over the edge. I was completely fed up with being the only person in the whole of Year 8 without a boyfriend. And that was when Barney entered my life. He was in Year 10 and went to school in a different town. Barney was completely head over heels in love with me, right from the beginning.
I enjoyed showing Lauren and Nat the bead bracelet that he bought me to celebrate our two-week anniversary. He was such a softie and totally romantic. I told my friends to keep it a secret, that I didn’t want anyone to find out I was dating an older boy. That ensured that everyone in my French class knew about it before lunchtime and by the end of the day I was the talk of Year 8.
It was fantastic! Barney was generous and funny and obviously, drop-dead gorgeous. He had black, curly hair and sparkling blue eyes and his favourite thing of all was to write love songs about me that he would play on his guitar. Best of all, he thought that I was the most amazing girlfriend that a boy could possibly have.
‘He sounds too good to be true,’ said Nat dreamily, every time I mentioned him. She had no idea how right she was.
Yes – Barney was perfect in every way. The problems only began when Lauren and Nat started demanding to meet him. Then, his lack of existence became a bit of an issue and I had to think quickly.
So one rainy Monday morning I went to school looking sad. It was over, I told my friends. Barney was just getting too needy. He wanted more from me than I was prepared to give and the final crunch had come over the weekend when he said that I was spending too much time with Lauren and Nat. They were utterly horrified. They dried my tears and held my hand and together we made a pact.
‘Mates before dates,’ we said. No way would we ever let a boy tear our friendship apart. Lauren and Nat even dumped their boyfriends in a show of solidarity and we spent all our spare time together for the next week, listening to music and reading magazines and slagging off all the boys we knew. Then life got back to normal – they got asked out and I was left passing messages of undying love (at least until morning break) from one end of the classroom to the other.
If Mum was more interested, then I suppose that I could ask her why no boys seem to like me. I could ask her what other people see when they look at me. When I look in the mirror I just see me. An ordinary person. I mean, my hair’s a bit of a state – it’s kind of a blackish mop stuck on top of my head, and my nose has got a bit of a bump in the middle and I’m quite short for my age but I’m not hideous or anything. Maybe it’s my personality that’s the problem. Perhaps I’m just the sort of person that other people don’t want to be around? Mum could probably answer that one really easily but I’m definitely not going to ask her. I’m scared of what she might say.
Then again, Mum wouldn’t understand even if I did ask her opinion. She’s got two men that want to be with her. What would she know about feeling lonely and unattractive and unwanted? And there’s no way I can ask Dad – he’d have an actual heart attack if I started talking about emotions and feelings and stuff and I’d die of complete humiliation.
I’ve been in the hideaway all morning, eaten a silent lunch with Dad and am now dragging my sorry self towards the water fountain, ready for yet another thrilling afternoon of boredom. As I walk down the pathway from Dad’s shed I suddenly see Martha and Beatrice rounding the hedge ahead of me, on the path that leads to the fountain. I fling myself off the path and hide behind a bush, desperate not to be spotted. I realize that this is a bit ridiculous but my punishment time doesn’t start until I reach the bench and I don’t intend to prolong the agony by walking there with the pair of them, Beatrice all chatty and Martha all moody.
Suddenly I feel goose bumps on the back of my neck, as if somebody is watching me. I turn my head slowly and stifle a shriek as I see a pair of big eyes peering at me from behind a tree. Then I relax. It’s just one of Dad’s sculptures. I haven’t seen this one before and it’s actually really realistic, in a freaky way. He’s used a knobbly bit of old tree trunk to create a weird, lizard-type creature that looks as if it’s about to scuttle off into the undergrowth. Mum was right – Dad is pretty good at this stuff.
I turn back to my bush and peep through the leaves, breathing a sigh of relief as I watch Beatrice and Martha head away from me, the wheelchair crunching over the gravel towards the fountain.
Once they’re out of sight I get up, brushing bits of twig and leaves off my legs and feeling a bit foolish. Then I follow them down the path, walking as slowly as I can, keen to prolong my freedom for a few more minutes.
Beatrice is quick to leave once I’ve reached the water fountain and I sink on to the bench without even glancing in Martha’s direction. God, it’s so utterly dull around here. There is exactly nothing to do and nobody worth talking to. I think about the rest of the summer holidays, stretching away into the distance with no end in sight and I start to feel desperate. I can’t just sit on this bench for the next four weeks. I’ll actually go stark staring crazy.
And then my phone beeps. Pulling it out of my pocket I see a text message from Nat.
OMG!!! U HAVE TO RING ME NOW!!! U WON’T BELIEVE WHAT JUST HAPPENED!!!
The buzz of excitement in my stomach has less to do with the shouty capitals and more to do with the fact that something has happened. Something unexpected. Finally! I scroll to Nat’s name in my contacts list and press dial. And my stupid, lame phone loses signal.
No – this is not fair. I’ve done everything everyone has asked of me. I’ve spent every weekday at Oak Hill and I’m generously giving my own free time to looking after a grouchy old woman. Surely I’m paying my dues?
I wave my phone in the air, but nothing happens. This is a critical situation – time critical. If I don’t ring Nat now then she won’t bother to text me next time and I won’t have a clue about what’s going on because she’ll tell Lauren instead and I’ll be even more on the outside than I already am. I have to make this call.
I leap on to the bench but it’s no good. The water fountain is surrounded by trees and I think they might be blocking the signal or something. Holding my phone in front of me like a person searching for water with a divining rod, I step off the bench and walk slowly forward towards the other side of the fountain. Nothing.
There’s a path that I haven’t been down before on the other side and I head towards the end, passing between hedges and under trees. And then, finally, just as I’m starting to think that there is no hope, my phone beeps and I’ve got three bars of signal. Not great, but hopefully enough to make a call. I cross my fingers as the phone rings and when I hear Nat’s voice on the other end I nearly shout with happiness.
‘Nat! Tell me what’s going on!’ I screech.
‘Is that you, Erin?’ Nat’s voice sounds a long way away.
‘Yes! What’s the big news?’
‘You totally won’t believe it!’ she shrieks, and then my phone cuts out again.
‘No!’ I cry, waving it frantically in the air. Why is my life so rubbish? Is it really too much to ask that I have a bit of happiness every now and again?
I take a step forward, determined to find signal again if it kills me, but a noise from behind stops me in my tracks.
I turn, but the only things I can see are hedges. Perhaps I was mistaken? But then I hear it again – a faint cry in the distance. It’s quiet and frail and unmistakably human. And it’s coming from the direction of the water fountain.
Shoving my phone into my pocket I start to run, dodging small bushes and rounding hedges as fast as I can. As I burst out on to the gravel area round the fountain I see three things. The first is Martha’s notepad, lying on the ground. The second is her wheelchair, tipped over on its side with one wheel still slowly turning and the third is Martha, sprawled next to it and making a sound unlike any I’ve ever heard before.
I freeze, my feet skidding and making the gravel spray up over my trainers. For a second I lock eyes with Martha, her cheek pressed against the ground. The look in her eyes makes me feel something new. Some
thing unwelcome. I did this. I left her on her own when I was supposed to be looking out for her.
I blink and start to take a step forward but before I can move I’m shoved to one side as somebody blurs past me.
‘Hey!’ he shouts, sprinting over to her and kneeling down on the ground. ‘Are you OK? What happened?’
My brain seems to have entered a planet all of its own because I am making no sense of the scene in front of me. It’s him. The boy I met in town the day that I bought the iPad. I have no idea why he’s here and I don’t know what to do about Martha but my feet are doing the thinking for themselves and suddenly I’m standing over the pair of them.
The boy looks up at me. ‘Go and get some help,’ he tells me and while he’s speaking quietly I can hear the fear in his voice. ‘And be quick.’
I stand for another moment, looking at Martha lying on the ground. She doesn’t seem so formidable now – just small and vulnerable. Guilt is churning around my stomach and I don’t think I can leave her again – but then the boy glances back up at me.
‘Go!’ he orders and I go, running away from the fountain and down the path towards the house.
When I think about it later, I can see that logically, it only took a few minutes to track down Beatrice and tell her what had happened. It didn’t feel like just a few minutes, though. It felt like hours. When I followed the care workers back to the fountain my heart felt as if it was going to bang right out of my chest. What if Martha died? That happened to old people, right? They couldn’t cope with falling over – something to do with their bones being really weak or something. If Martha died it’d be all my fault because I left her alone.
But she wasn’t dead. Beatrice and the other care workers got her upright and then slowly, carefully lifted her into the wheelchair. The boy had moved off to the other side of the bench and I was too ashamed to look at him – scared about what I’d see on his face. As the quiet, solemn procession headed down the path I shrank back under the trees. This wasn’t the place for me, not now.
Martha
I tend to believe that old worn-out clichés are genuinely a complete load of bunkum and today has proved me right, yet again. With experience comes wisdom. I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life. I have lived for eighty-five years and had a great many experiences but I am no closer to being wise than I was as a girl of twelve.
Erin is self-centred, self-absorbed and only interested in her own needs. Normally I would applaud those characteristics but she has overstepped the mark today. She failed to keep her word and that is a trait I refuse to accept in even my closest friends. I suppose, here, I must acknowledge that I no longer have any close friends, but that’s not the point. There are rules and while I, possibly more than the next person, believe that rules were made to be broken, there is no excuse for breaking a promise. She agreed to stay with me in the garden and she wandered off at the first opportunity. No backbone, that’s her problem.
I must admit to feeling a little sad when she turned up at the water fountain and refused to speak to me. I had hoped that her chattering would provide me with some entertainment. Instead I’ve had to listen to Beatrice, who means well but is overworked and underpaid and gives out a perpetual aura of exhaustion. I have enough exhaustion in my life – what I crave, what I need, is youth and verve and enthusiasm. Zest for life and couldn’t-care-less. The girl has all of that flowing out from her in waves. She has enough to share.
I’ve been thinking about my childhood since Erin asked me those questions the other day. It’s funny, the things that you remember. Growing up in the war, you’d think it was all terror and misery, but we children just didn’t see things like that. I remember being given our gas masks and Mim and I having to practise putting them on. They were hot and smelt of rubber, which I loathed. I couldn’t see the point of carrying them around with me everywhere I went. I had no fear of death. Death wasn’t something that happened to children, or so I thought in the early days.
I hated the gas mask – although I loved the small cardboard box that we were supposed to keep it in. It had a long strap that I wore over my shoulder and if I took the gas mask out and hid it under my bed, there was room in the box for my penknife and a pencil and an apple. I used to imagine it was my handbag.
Of course, Mim cottoned on to what I was up to and reported me to Father. He was furious and I had to present myself to him every evening at 6 p.m. for gas-mask checks.
Death wasn’t something that was part of my life until the summer that I was fourteen years old. I was playing with my friends in the field behind our house when a German plane, obviously in trouble, swooped right low down by us, preparing to land. I could see the pilot’s face through the cockpit window and my feet just wouldn’t move. They were rooted to that field as if I was wearing a pair of concrete boots – there was no chance of getting out of his way. Everything happened very quickly. My friends were screaming and I saw him looking at us, and then he zoomed up again into the sky, only to crash into the next field where his plane burst into flames. I have often wondered if his mother knew of his bravery and the way he sacrificed himself to save his enemy’s children.
It surprises me, when I’ve been remembering, to look in the mirror. In my memories I am a young (and rather beautiful) girl. The reality is shocking and it can take me a moment to work out who the wrinkled old woman is that appears to be standing by my shoulder. The problem is that everyone from the old days has gone – there is nobody left to see the Martha who was young, full of energy and love. Only I know that I’m still here inside.
Looking Back to a Bright Future*
It’s Saturday and we’re back at Oak Hill. Dad had the chance of some overtime and when he asked if I minded I told him that it didn’t really matter to me – being grounded in the house is just as bad as being grounded at Oak Hill. I think he looked a bit sad when I said that but I don’t care – I hope he feels guilty for wrecking my summer.
Nobody has said a word to me about what happened the other day with Martha. I turned up at the water fountain as usual the day after but she didn’t appear. I expected to get hauled in front of Dad and given a hard time, but it’s like nobody knows that I abandoned her. Almost as if she didn’t tell anyone, which I find difficult to believe because I definitely get the impression that she can’t stand me. She could have written it down in her notebook and shown Beatrice.
After saying goodbye to Dad at his shed I race through the gardens, heading straight for my secret hideaway. A whole day on my own will be good – I could do with some peace and quiet after all the excitement of this week.
I run round the corner and screech to a halt. There is somebody here. In MY hideaway. I haven’t spotted a single person here all summer but now I can see somebody crouched down in the long grass by the stream. I stand still, unsure whether to turn and run before I’m spotted or march over there and tell them to get lost.
Before I can make up my mind, the figure stands up and looks straight at me.
‘Hey!’ he calls. ‘Come and see this!’
He crouches back down in the grass and I walk forward slowly, staring at him in disbelief. It’s him again. The gorgeous, scruffy-haired boy. The one that raced in to rescue Martha the other day. Why is he HERE, in my secret place? Maybe he’s come to have a go at me about leaving Martha all alone. I make a pathetic attempt to smooth my hair down as I get closer to him and wish that I wasn’t wearing my old jeans and a ratty T-shirt.
He looks up as I get close.
‘Look! It’s so cool!’
I look where he’s pointing and my first instinct is to recoil in horror. It is not cool. It is disgusting. There, right next to gorgeous boy, is the ugliest, wartiest frog that I have ever seen. Not to mention the biggest.
‘I haven’t seen one this size before,’ he says, sounding excited. I sigh, feeling disappointed. There’s always something to spoil it. He might look stunning and seem kind of friendly – but he’s obviously a total wei
rdo.
‘Er – no,’ I say. ‘Me neither. But then again, I don’t exactly go out of my way to look for frogs.’
‘It’s not a frog!’ he says, laughing and standing up. ‘It’s a toad.’
‘Oh – I’m so sorry. My bad. Frog – toad. Whatever.’
I’m aware that I’m not being very friendly but I’m seriously put out that someone else has intruded into my personal space – even if he is really good-looking. Plus I’m getting ready to defend myself if he starts blaming me for Martha’s fall.
‘I’m Lucas,’ says Frog Boy. ‘We go to the same school, don’t we? You’re about to start Year Nine, right?’
He holds out his hand and it takes me a moment to realize that he wants us to shake hands. I hesitate – if he’s been touching that frog then I have no intention of getting slime on me and anyway, who shakes hands in this day and age?
‘It’s OK,’ he tells me. ‘I haven’t got toady hands.’ And then he grins at me and I find myself putting my hand in his – this strange, mind-reading, gorgeous Frog Boy.
‘You must be Erin,’ he says and I feel my insides lurch. Maybe he is actually psychic. I really hope he didn’t read my mind when I was thinking mean thoughts about him.
‘Yeah,’ I say. I am not behaving like a particularly sophisticated young lady right now but thankfully, Frog Boy either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care.
‘My grandad told me about you,’ he says and we start walking through the grass towards the bench that I spent hours clearing. ‘I’ve been looking out for you for a while – I mean, Grandad’s great and everything but when him and Mum start rambling on about the old times I do get a bit bored. I thought I’d tracked you down the other day but then we had to deal with Martha falling out of her chair. By the way, sorry if I sounded bossy – it’s just that you looked so freaked-out and I knew we needed to get some help! And today I stumbled upon this place – I guess I’ve found your hidden lair!’
Five Things They Never Told Me Page 6