‘And yet … you sit here, away from your friends, alone?’ I say. ‘Are you very sad about Marley?’
Lexie laughs. ‘About Marley being gay?’ she checks. ‘No, I’m really, really not. I’ve known for a few weeks now, and it actually makes a lot of sense. I’m glad he’s told everybody. He can start to be himself, stop trying to be something he isn’t. It’s a good thing.’
‘But still … still you are sad?’ I push.
Lexie jumps up and runs a few steps into the greenery, scooping up Mary Shelley and holding her close. ‘I’m often sad, Sami,’ she says softly in the twilight. ‘I try not to be, and it’s not all the time, but … I miss my mum. Sometimes, things like this catch me unawares, remind me of the past. It must be a bit like that for you.’
The words catch in my throat. ‘A bit like that,’ I reply.
Abruptly, the front door of Greystones House opens, casting a pool of light, and Louisa Winter, the eccentric artist who owns the place, appears at the top of the steps. She’s a striking woman, dramatic in a blue linen tunic layered over an embroidered skirt, her long auburn hair swept up into a messy knot secured with paintbrushes. She is holding a bowl of chocolate-drenched pastries and a small ribbon-wrapped gift.
‘Children!’ she exclaims, as if we’re both five years old. ‘How nice to see you! And your famous tortoise, of course, Lexie. How lovely to meet her at last! I’m just going down to the party. I have some profiteroles for everybody, and a little present for Romy. It’s a silk scarf – a vintage Biba one. D’you think she’ll like it?’
‘She’ll love it,’ Lexie says.
Louisa walks down the steps and heads through the trees towards the fairy lights and the music and the buzz of laughter.
‘What exactly is a vintage Biba scarf?’ I ask Lexie.
‘No idea!’
She pads across the grass and sits down beside me on the wall, holding the tortoise on her knee. She is so close I find myself inhaling her sunshine and vanilla smell again, and just for a moment it makes me feel dizzy.
‘Where did you get her?’ I ask, keeping my voice steady. ‘Mary Shelley.’
‘She wandered into my foster family’s garden on my eleventh birthday,’ she tells me. ‘Nobody ever claimed her – I think it was fate. I looked her up on the internet … she’s a Hermann’s tortoise. They live in the Mediterranean, mostly. She’s a long way from home.’
I know that feeling.
‘She was lost and I rescued her,’ Lexie is saying. ‘I like to rescue lost stuff. Books, things, pets, people …’
The words come tumbling out before I can stop them: ‘I wish someone would rescue me.’
Lexie’s eyes snag on mine, then slide away again, shining in the half-light. A dark curtain of hair falls across her face, and she dips down to place Mary Shelley on the grass at the foot of the steps.
‘I guess I could try,’ she whispers softly, then leans across and kisses me.
7
Take a Risk
The kiss is perfect. The touch of warm lips on mine, soft fingers trailing across my skin, the smell of vanilla and the taste of birthday cake still on her lips … but I am frozen. I’m a human glacier, made of ice and moving at a rate of one centimetre every hundred years. Two, three seconds go by, or possibly two or three lifetimes, and I’m motionless, stuck, just letting it happen.
By the time I recover the ability to react, it’s over, and shame floods through me like poison. This is what happens when your heart is in the deep freeze.
Lexie jumps up and runs across the grass, chasing a runaway tortoise. I watch her scoop up Mary Shelley and turn to face me in the dusk.
‘Sami,’ she says. ‘I shouldn’t have … I don’t even … I’m an idiot, OK? Forget that happened!’
I want to tell her she should have, that she’s not an idiot – I am, and that I won’t be able to forget, but she’s gone, running through the dusk towards the music and the glinting lights of the party.
Over the next few days, I tell myself to forget it, like Lexie said. She kissed me, I froze, it was awkward and she ran away. I’d have to be mad to wade back in there when my feelings have been stuck in the permafrost for so long, when I don’t even know if a thaw is possible. I’ve watched the kids at Millford Park. Some of them have a different partner every week … it makes romance look like a fast track to getting hurt all over again.
Still … it was my first kiss. That’s not the kind you forget in a hurry. And Lexie … well, she’s not like anyone else I know.
Take a risk, the shadow of my father’s voice says. Take a risk.
Could I?
My head fills up with plans to make things right, to try to explain, to start over and ask Lexie on a date. The problem is that I hardly ever see her alone: at band practice we’re just two kids of a dozen; the rest of the time, she’s with Happi and Bex, or talking music and lyrics with Marley. I try to pluck up the courage to call for her, but before I’m halfway along the street I spot Bex sitting on the doorstep reading a brick-like copy of War and Peace, and my courage melts away. I march on past, throwing Bex a gruff nod, as if I’m on my way to an urgent appointment and had no idea they happened to live en route.
Take a risk, my father had said, but I guess he’d never met Bex with her dip-dyed hair and her Doc Marten boots and her acid tongue. I could stand in their garden at midnight and throw pebbles at the bedroom window, but knowing my luck Bex would appear and chuck a bucketful of water over me.
In the end I do what every other kid at Millford Park Academy does and send a text message. It takes every scrap of bravery I have.
Sami: I am not very good at being rescued, am I? Could we try again?
Minutes tick by. An hour. I am helping my uncle in the workshop, taking up the hem on a pair of tweed trousers, repairing a tear on the sleeve of a designer jacket, letting out the seams on a bridesmaid’s dress made from pale orange polyester. It’s not difficult work for me; I am used to it. I’ve always loved the care and precision needed, taken pride in making something look good as new. My father said I had a talent for it. My uncle says my work is better than anything he or Aunt Zenna can do, and I tell him that my mother was better still, that she could take a roll of fabric and turn it into something magical.
‘I wish I’d known her as an adult,’ Uncle Dara says. ‘My father wanted to go home to Syria, and of course he took Yasmine too – she was only a child, the baby of the family. And then there was the falling out …’
‘What happened?’ I dare to ask. ‘My mother said it was about money,’
Uncle Dara sighs. ‘My father needed money for the flight home,’ he explained. ‘And money to open his shop in Damascus. This place was just rented back then, so I took out a series of loans to help him. He didn’t pay me back, and when I asked for the money he got angry and disowned me. It was a great sadness for me that he could do that, but perhaps by then he was already ill?’
‘Perhaps,’ I say. I knew that my grandfather had suffered from dementia in his last years. It seems so sad that it could have caused him to push away his only son.
‘I grew up believing that you had a tailor’s shop on Savile Row in London, not a dry-cleaner’s shop in Millford,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a miracle I managed to find you!’
‘I’m glad you did, Sami,’ Uncle Dara says.
I’m glad too, of course, but there’s such a tangle of conflicting emotions inside me that all I manage is a sad smile.
My mobile buzzes at last.
Lexie: Try again? What would that involve?
I sigh. Is that a knockback? A challenge?
Sami: I would say sorry. Explain why I’m such an idiot. We could go on a date. Maybe?
Lexie: Maybe …
I smile. I can hear my father’s voice, telling me to take a risk.
Sami: I am sorry things were awkward. You don’t have to rescue me. I am probably a lost cause anyway. I am a mess, but I like you very much. Would you like to go out some time? Ma
ybe? Take a risk?
Ten whole minutes go by. The waiting is torture. When my mobile finally buzzes I stab myself with a needle and almost bleed all over a freshly washed and ironed white shirt.
Lexie: Today then, after band practice?
I laugh out loud, then punch an arm in the air and whoop.
I tell my aunt and uncle I am going out, and lock myself in the bathroom to get ready. I take the longest shower ever, then borrow some of Aunt Zenna’s conditioner in an attempt to tame my hair. I iron a clean T-shirt, put on my best pair of supermarket skinny jeans.
I look in the mirror and see the reflection of a tall, thin boy with a tangle of wavy dark hair, a long nose with nostrils that flare, grey eyes that burn, lips that have tasted tears too many times. This is clearly not movie-star material, but I suppose it could be worse. Then I look down, and there’s the overcoat, frayed at the cuffs and worn at the seams, with blotchy stains from the Aegean Sea and Greek sand and Macedonian mud in spite of the time I spent earlier brushing and swabbing it with my uncle’s dry-cleaning fluid.
The coat has definitely seen better days.
‘For goodness’ sake, Sami, just leave it behind for once!’ Aunt Zenna says as I pass through the living room. ‘You look lovely, but that coat – no, no, no! It’s August; there’s a heatwave out there. Nobody needs a coat in this weather!’
‘It’s not about the weather,’ I say.
‘I know it’s not,’ Uncle Dara says. ‘We know that the coat means a great deal to you, Sami, of course we do. But you must see that soon this coat will fall apart, no matter how carefully you try to mend it. No matter how special it is to you, Sami, you will lose it if you wear it every day. Perhaps we should wrap it in tissue paper and hang it in the wardrobe, keep it safe?’
‘One day,’ I tell him. ‘Perhaps.’
‘OK,’ my uncle agrees. ‘I’m just asking that you think about it, Sami, that’s all.’
‘I will think about it.’
I turn back to the mirror, rake a hand through my hair.
‘Your hair needs cutting too,’ Aunt Zenna chips in. ‘You look like one of those pop stars from the seventies. If you’d just let me –’
I run out of the flat before she can grab a pair of scissors.
‘Has Sami got a girlfriend?’ I hear my uncle asking as I head down the stairs, and I can’t help wondering the same thing.
If I’ve taken some time over my appearance, it’s clear that Lexie has too. She always looks good, but today she’s wearing a little black T-shirt with a red polka-dot skirt and leggings, and has a gauzy red bow tied in her hair. She smiles and looks away, her cheeks pink.
‘You look … different,’ Bobbi-Jo tells her. ‘Very original. Like Minnie Mouse!’
Lexie looks uncertain about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but she’s the kind of girl who always sees the best in people and she gives Bobbi-Jo the benefit of the doubt. I’m not sure Bobbi-Jo deserves it – her face takes on a sneery look when she glances at Lexie. It looks for a moment as though she’s going to take a dislike to Sasha too, but when our lead singer misses her cue for the first song, Marley shouts at her to wake up and pay attention, that she’s not on holiday now, and Bobbi-Jo visibly relaxes. It’s like she is trying to suss whether Sasha is any kind of threat to her, and she decides she’s not.
I’m guessing that Bobbi-Jo still hasn’t heard the newsflash that Marley is gay, because she has him targeted like a rabbit in the headlights. She is not about to give up. ‘This song’s quite tricky,’ she says, looking at him from beneath her lashes. ‘Can you show me again?’
‘Just follow the tune,’ Marley says, confused. ‘Take it slow … and stop worrying. You’ll pick it up!’
‘We’ve all been there,’ Lexie says helpfully. ‘You should have heard some of our earlier practices … They were chaos!’
‘What are you trying to say?’ Bobbi-Jo snaps. ‘That I’m making the band sound bad? That I’m chaotic?’
‘Er … no, not at all!’ Lexie says. ‘I just thought you seemed worried about the song. I was only trying to say, give it time!’
Bobbi-Jo gives one of her slightly scary smiles. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she says icily.
Bobbi-Jo is not fine, though. She crashes through the notes so clumsily that at times it sounds like an elephant has sat down on the keyboard, and she seems not to notice that she’s out of time and out of tune. Maybe she is new to the keyboards, but that’s not the problem; it’s more that she has zero musical talent.
The old railway carriage is stifling in the summer heat, even with the door wide open. I’ve had enough of fighting the chaos for today. I set my flute down and take the notebook from my pocket, lean back and start to draw. I draw Romy first, her face lost in the music as she plays her violin, then Bex, tall and fierce with her bass guitar and her sea-green hair, anger brewing behind her eyes like a smouldering volcano. I draw Marley looking annoyed, and Bobbi-Jo, totally oblivious, her face radiant, crashing out an endless stream of bum notes. And I draw Lexie, of course, her pixie face serious beneath that shrunk-in-the-wash fringe as she sings backing vocals for the songs she and Marley have written together.
I notice that Lee has put down his trumpet, that Dylan is just going through the motions, drumming out a gloomy beat and smashing the hi-hat cymbal savagely every time Bobbi-Jo gets it wrong. Which is every few seconds.
‘Enough,’ Marley decrees at last. ‘Stop, all of you. I think that’s probably enough for today – it’s just not working, is it? It’s a shambles!’
The entire practice has lasted twenty minutes instead of the usual two hours, but it feels like an eternity.
‘You probably need to get hold of a keyboard to practise at home,’ Marley tells her. ‘You have to get up to speed on the basics before you can slot in with the songs. It’s not quite working yet.’
Bobbi-Jo looks stricken. ‘I’ll try harder,’ she promises. ‘And I’m sure Dad will buy me something to practise on. I’m sorry! I don’t want to let you all down!’
‘You’re not letting us down,’ Marley says. ‘But you do need to bring your playing up to scratch. How about we put in some extra practice here? I can help you go through the keyboard part for each song. Maybe simplify things a bit?’
‘That would be wonderful!’ she gushes. ‘I’ll do whatever it takes! Shall we do that now, Marley? Go through the songs one by one, just you and me?’
‘Er, not right now,’ Marley huffs. ‘I’ve got a few things I need to sort. Can you fit in an extra practice tomorrow at five?’
‘Of course!’ Bobbi-Jo says, her smile about a mile wide. ‘See you then, Marley. See you guys! Oh, Lexie, that bow – not being horrible, but it’s just not working. It makes you look about seven years old!’
She stalks down the steps and off across the grass, leaving the rest of us feeling what Marley describes as ‘gobsmacked’.
‘You look lovely,’ I tell Lexie, and, although she blushes a furious scarlet, her lips twitch into a smile. Everyone else turns to look at me, the quiet kid who has finally said something interesting. I shrug and raise an eyebrow and pick up my flute again.
‘Sami’s right,’ Marley says. ‘Take no notice, Lexie. Bobbi-Jo is a bit … well, let’s just say she’s not quite what I expected.’
‘No kidding,’ Bex comments. ‘She’s a nightmare! Marley, you’ve messed up big time – you have to get rid of her before she ruins the band. We’ve worked so hard, and suddenly, thanks to her, we’re back to square one. If Ked Wilder had heard that practice, he wouldn’t touch us with a barge pole!’
‘He’d have to have good hearing to hear it all the way from France,’ Marley says. ‘Some mentor he’s turned out to be … Ms Winter says he’ll be away all summer and doesn’t want to be disturbed. Like it or not, we’re on our own and we’re just going to have to work extra hard to get ourselves noticed.’
‘I think we’d better hope people don’t notice us right now,’ Lee comments. ‘We’ll ne
ed to hand out free earplugs pretty soon, if Bobbi-Jo stays in the band.’
‘She just needs time to settle,’ Marley says. ‘I’ll make sure she gets the hang of things. Her dad’s a brilliant contact, and we need all the help we can get right now. Can’t you see what a great opportunity this could be?’
Nobody seems convinced.
Marley sighs. ‘We just have to be patient, give Bobbi-Jo a bit more time – I guarantee things will work out.’
‘I guarantee they won’t,’ Bex says. ‘Look, this is going nowhere. We’ve finished our practice early and the night is still young – shall we go and do something? Catch a movie or take a boat out on the lake? Cheer ourselves up?’
‘Yes, let’s,’ Happi agrees. ‘It’s ages since we’ve done something like that!’
Jake suggests going bowling, and that meets with everyone’s approval.
‘Should we go?’ Lexie asks me in a whisper. ‘I’ve never been bowling before …’
‘Me neither,’ I tell her. ‘We could go, if you want. Or we could just stay here?’
‘Stay here,’ she says under her breath. ‘Yeah?’
‘What’s up?’ Bex wants to know, catching the tail end of the conversation.
Lexie grins. ‘I was just saying I don’t think Bobbi-Jo likes me much. I mean, Minnie Mouse!’
‘You don’t look like Minnie Mouse,’ Bex says. ‘She’s jealous. She must know you used to go out with Marley, and she’s letting you know she’s set her sights on him, that’s all.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Marley groans. ‘Can’t she see I’m not interested?’
‘Clearly not,’ Lexie says. ‘You’re a born flirt, Marley. Looks like Bobbi-Jo is getting mixed messages. Just tell her!’
‘I will,’ he says. ‘Probably …’
‘Are you scared?’ Happi asks. ‘Do you think she’ll judge you or something?’
‘No, no, it’s just … I don’t know. I’m still getting used to it myself, that’s all,’ he explains. ‘It was easier with you guys – you’re proper friends. I don’t know Bobbi-Jo so well. I will tell her, some time. Promise.’
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