Lucky Star

by Cathy Cassidy

  Great. A posh girl in a scary school uniform, trailing along behind me.

  I look down at the face of the little pirate dog, pressed flat against my chest. His eyes are closed again, his grin fixed and rigid. His heartbeat is steady beneath my palm, but still, I walk a little faster.

  ‘Where are you going, anyway?’ the girl asks. ‘If you’re looking for the nearest vet, you’ve missed the turning. It was just back there.’

  I stop abruptly, frowning. She’s right – I have no idea where I’m going. ‘OK. Sorry.’ I try for a smile. ‘Show me. Please?’

  The girl wheels round and turns down to the left, and I follow.

  ‘Is he really your dog?’ she wants to know. ‘I thought he was a stray too.’

  I sigh. ‘He’s mine now, anyhow. Someone has to look out for him.’

  ‘He might be lost, though,’ she points out. ‘Someone could be looking for him right now, wondering if he’s OK.’

  I hold the dog tighter. I don’t think there’s anyone out there worrying about him, somehow. He’s small and skinny and sad, like a ghost-dog. He looks like he lives on the streets, getting by on his wits, chasing chip papers, stealing scraps. He doesn’t look loved.

  ‘What’re you gonna call him?’ the girl wants to know. ‘He needs a name.’

  ‘I’ll think of one,’ I say.

  ‘How about Chip?’ she offers. ‘Or Patch, or Scruff? Hey, I don’t even know your name, do I? Mine’s Cat.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ I say.

  ‘No – Cat, short for Catrin, but only my parents call me that. Cat is better.’

  I laugh out loud.

  ‘It’s not that bad!’ she says, huffily. ‘What’s yours, anyway?’

  ‘It’s … well, it’s a nickname, really, but everybody calls me it, ever since I was little. It’s …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Mouse.’

  Laughter explodes from her soft, pink mouth like the fizz from a can of Coke. ‘Mouse?’ she snorts. ‘Mouse?’

  I crack a grin. ‘Well, it says Martin on my birth certificate, but no one ever, ever calls me that,’ I say. ‘Except my teachers and stuff, when they’re trying to be snotty.’

  ‘So why Mouse?’ she wants to know.

  I shrug. ‘Mum says it’s because I was small and quick and quiet. Or maybe because I have mousy hair and a serious addiction to cheese and chocolate. Either way, I’ve been stuck with it all my life.’

  ‘Cat and Mouse,’ she says, grinning. ‘That’s cool!’

  The skinny little stray is stretched out on the examining table, eyelids fluttering. His coat looks dull and grey under the bright lights, and his ribs stick out like the keys on a xylophone. The vet says he’ll keep him in, do some X-rays, run some tests.

  ‘It’s not just the accident,’ the vet says, frowning. ‘He’s in very poor condition.’

  ‘I haven’t had him long,’ I say. ‘He was a stray, before. He just came up to me in the street.’

  ‘About twenty minutes ago,’ Cat chips in, and I roll my eyes up to the ceiling.

  ‘Ah,’ says the vet. ‘That makes sense. He’s very weak and thin, and in shock, obviously. This leg is quite swollen – the X-rays will tell whether it’s a break or a sprain. Overall, I’d say he’s been lucky.’

  This is one of the reasons I find it hard to believe in luck. A small, scruffy, half-starved dog gets squashed by a bicycle, and I’m meant to be grateful because it wasn’t a motorbike or a bin lorry?

  ‘Lucky?’ I echo. ‘Yeah, right.’

  As I speak, the little pirate dog pricks up his ears, raises his head and looks at me intently. His mouth twitches into a shaky grin.

  ‘Lucky?’ I repeat, and the little dog beats his tail against the examining table like it’s Christmas or something. I turn to Cat. ‘See that?’ I tell her. ‘That’s his name. Lucky!’

  ‘Yeah?’ she says. ‘Well. He probably needs all the luck he can get.’

  I stroke Lucky’s ears softly, and he sighs and lowers his head again, still grinning. ‘So when can I collect him?’ I ask. ‘Take him home?’

  The vet looks puzzled. ‘He’s a stray – don’t feel you have to take him. I’ll ring the dog’s home, once I’ve fixed him up a bit. They’ll look after him, see if he can be re-homed.’

  ‘No chance,’ I say. ‘Like I said, he’s mine.’

  The vet scratches his head. ‘That’s very commendable, of course,’ he says. ‘If you’re serious, you could call back tomorrow afternoon, see how he is. Take some time to think about it.’

  ‘Don’t need to think about it,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll be here.’

  ‘We both will,’ Cat says.

  ‘You’re certain you can offer him a good home?’ the vet presses, looking at me doubtfully. ‘Your family won’t object?’

  It depends what his idea of a good home is, of course. The ninth floor of a high-rise on the Eden Estate might not be exactly what he has in mind.

  ‘I’m certain,’ I say. ‘And my mum’ll be fine with it.’

  ‘It’s not quite that simple,’ the vet says. ‘The dog’s home would normally pay his vet’s bill, but if you take him, that bill becomes your responsibility. It won’t be cheap.’

  My heart sinks to the bottom of my battered Converse trainers. Money? It feels like a ransom demand.

  ‘You’re saying I can’t get him back until I cough up a wad of cash?’ I demand. ‘What are you? A kidnapper or a vet?’

  ‘Is money a problem?’ he asks, and I want to punch him.

  ‘No problem at all,’ Cat cuts in, smoothly. ‘We’ll pay. Thank you for all your help! See you tomorrow!’

  She grabs my arm and drags me to the door. I crane my head round for a last glimpse of Lucky, but his eyes are closed now, his breathing slow and steady. He doesn’t even know he’s been kidnapped.

  ‘What are you on?’ Cat hisses, the minute we get out the door. ‘You can’t go around insulting people like that. We’ll get the money, OK?’

  ‘How?’ I want to know. ‘I have 73p to my name.’

  ‘Rich and good-looking, huh?’ she jokes, and her green eyes are laughing. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was flirting with me, but posh schoolgirls don’t flirt with kids like me. Do they?

  ‘I’ll get the money,’ she says. ‘Easy. I’ll meet you here tomorrow afternoon, yeah? What time?’

  I think of Lucky, lying there on the examining table, waiting to be ransomed. ‘Half nine?’ I suggest. ‘Ten?’

  Cat laughs. ‘OK … so that’s, like, early afternoon, huh?’

  I look at her blazer, her tartan pleated skirt. She’ll be in school at ten, obviously, studying French irregular verbs or rainfall in the Kalahari desert, or whatever they do at those posh places. She’s not excluded, like me. ‘Too early?’ I ask, curling my lip. ‘Gonna be in trouble at school?’

  ‘No, no … but d’you think the vet will have had time to run all his tests and stuff?’ She’s unchaining her bike from the railings, wheeling it to the kerb. Any minute now she’ll cycle right out of my life, and I’m kidding myself if I think she’ll turn up tomorrow with a handful of cash.

  ‘Mouse?’ she prompts.

  I scowl, because there’s no way I want her to see how I’m feeling. I find a dog, a funny little pirate dog. I give him a chip and the next thing I know he gets squashed flat by a bicycle, and it’s all my fault. OK, I got him to the vet, but I can’t get him back without a miracle or a handout. I look at Cat from behind my fringe, trying for a smile, but she’s not fooled.

  ‘Ten o’clock then,’ she says, pulling her beret down, flicking a curl from her face.

  ‘I just want to know he got through the night OK, y’know?’ I tell her. ‘It was my fault, wasn’t it? With the chip paper and the whistle and everything. I feel responsible.’

  ‘You were trying to help him,’ she says. ‘We’re in it together.’

  I like the idea of that. ‘OK,’ I tell her. ‘Thanks.’

  She
still doesn’t move, just looks at me with those big green eyes until I think I might forget how to breathe. I tilt my chin and stare right back, scuffing the pavement with the toe of my trainers.

  ‘Look, Mouse,’ she says, eventually. ‘We haven’t got all night. Are you walking me home, or what?’

  Actually, she cycles and I run along the pavement beside her, grinning all over my face. We cut across the park and turn into a quiet, tree-lined street. Cat slows a little, freewheeling, studying me. ‘How old are you, anyhow?’ she asks.

  I think about lying, but I’m small and skinny, so there’s not much point. ‘Fourteen,’ I tell her. ‘Year Nine.’

  ‘Me too!’ she grins. ‘Got a girlfriend?’

  My heart thumps. ‘Not right now.’

  Not ever, unless you count Neela Rehman, who dated me for two whole days back in Year Five, in the days when dating just involved lots of smiling and sharing your Mars bar at playtime. I have a sneaky feeling that might have been the attraction. On the third day, I had no money for a Mars bar, and Neela dumped me. She said she’d fallen in love with that blonde-haired guy off Blue Peter, but I saw her later in the week, batting her eyes at Liam Gilligan, who had a bag of chocolate caramels.

  ‘OK,’ Cat says. ‘Good.’

  I grin. ‘Yeah? You interested?’

  ‘Might be,’ she says. ‘Might not. I’ll think about it.’

  So will I. Sheesh, I’ll probably dream about it too.

  ‘How about school?’ Cat wants to know. ‘Don’t you just hate it?’

  I think of Green Vale Comprehensive, with its eight-foot fences topped with razor wire, its blank, grey, crumbling buildings. It looks more like a detention centre than a school, or a prisoner-of-war camp left over from the Second World War. My mate Fitz once found an ancient, yellow-paged history textbook held together with sellotape, with his grandad’s name in the front, dated 1971. Seriously.

  ‘I go to Green Vale Comp,’ I tell her. ‘It’s a dump.’

  Her eyes shine. ‘Isn’t that the place where the kids carry knives in the corridor and they can’t get the teachers to stay for more than a week?’

  ‘Uh? No, no, you’re way out. The kids carry iPods and most of the teachers have been there since the Dark Ages. Seriously. It’s got a bad reputation, though, I guess.’

  ‘I wish I went somewhere cool like that,’ Cat sighs. ‘I want fun and excitement, not netball and maths tests and diagrams of the digestive system.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like Green Vale,’ I tell her. ‘Trust me. Fun and excitement are not on the timetable.’

  ‘They would be if I was there,’ she says.

  That makes me smile. We stop in front of a tall, Victorian terraced house with climbing roses around the front door. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Coming in?’

  She wheels her bike through the gate and up the little path, turning her key in the lock. Me, I’m still stranded on the pavement trying to take in the shiny blue front door with a stained-glass picture of a sunrise, the bay windows, the way the red-and-yellow brickwork has been arranged to make a pattern all around the doorway. I count the windows going up. Three storeys.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Cat says over her shoulder. ‘Dad works late on a Thursday, and Mum’s at her yoga class.’

  Inside, the house smells of freshly ground coffee and furniture polish, and I take a deep breath, letting it all sink in. The Eden Estate smells like burnt tyres and pee in the lifts, and that’s on a good day. There’s a full-length mirror in the hallway, and I catch a glimpse of a wide-eyed kid with a dipping emo fringe, stripy top and skinny jeans. The back of my hair, razored short, is sticking up in clumps like I just spent the night in a hedge. I look shifty, guilty, awkward. I look like trouble.

  I haven’t a clue what Cat sees in me.

  She leans her bike against an antique bookshelf stuffed with more books than I’ve ever seen, then kicks off her shoes and pads through to the kitchen. ‘Drink?’ she says.

  The kitchen is almost as big as our whole flat. Cat’s pouring us fresh orange juice from a fridge the size of a wardrobe. I can’t stop staring. I peer into the half-open dishwasher, switch the retro radio CD on and then off again, and sniff at the big vase of roses in the middle of the kitchen table. Then I fling myself down on the big red sofa, bouncing up and down.

  ‘Who has a settee in their kitchen?’ I ask, amazed. ‘And a telly?’

  ‘Well, we do. Obviously.’

  I shake my head. How come some people have so much?

  ‘Knew you were a rich kid,’ I say at last.

  Cat looks defensive. ‘Not rich,’ she argues. ‘Not really. Rich people live in stately homes and have their own private jets, don’t they? They wear designer clothes and jewels at the breakfast table. We’re not rich, but we’re OK, I suppose. Mum and Dad have good jobs.’

  I open a cupboard and find glass jars filled with funny shapes of pasta, tins of Italian tomatoes, jars of things I’ve never heard of in my life. I try the fridge, which is stuffed with green salad and Greek yoghurt and weird salami sausages and stinky cheese. ‘What are they?’ I ask, doubtfully, sniffing at a bowl of what looks like small, shiny animal droppings.

  ‘Black olives,’ Cat says. ‘Try one.’

  ‘Urghhh!’ I have to spit it out into my hand. Cat’s family must be loaded. You’d think they’d be able to afford Coke and oven chips and plain old orange cheese, and a rug for the floorboards that isn’t threadbare in the middle. Still, I guess they like all that stuff. The rug is probably ancient and valuable, woven in Afghanistan by tribes of nomadic goatherds or something.

  ‘You’re rich,’ I tell her. ‘Don’t kid yourself.’

  ‘It’s not my fault!’ Cat says. ‘I didn’t ask for middle-class, Guardian-reading parents, did I? Everything has to be organic and fairly traded and politically correct. It drives me mad!’

  I look out of the kitchen window on to a small garden, lit up in a pool of light. I try to imagine Lucky rooting around the neat flower beds and the green velvet lawn, lifting his leg to pee against the rustic bird table. I can’t. My mum would love a patch of garden like this – she’d have the whole thing bursting with colour, dig up the lawn to grow vegetables, train apple trees and jasmine all around the walls.

  ‘I hate this place,’ Cat says, her green eyes dark with feeling, and I wonder how she can hate something that seems like heaven to me.

  ‘Swap you then,’ I tell her. ‘Any day. Life’s one big lucky dip, isn’t it? You got something cool wrapped in shiny paper, I got the sawdust from the bottom of the barrel.’

  She laughs. ‘Sawdust? Yeah, right. It can’t be that bad. What, d’you live in a cardboard box or something?’

  ‘High-rise block, Eden Estate,’ I say bleakly. ‘Ninth floor.’

  ‘Wow!’ she breathes, which isn’t exactly the reaction I was expecting.

  Everyone’s heard of the Eden Estate – it’s a rabbit warren of crumbling high-rise blocks just five minutes walk from here. It might as well be a whole different planet. It’s in the paper just about every week. Joyriding, drug dealing, mugging, vandalism – it all happens where I live. At night you can see the helicopters circling round above, like noisy vultures, their searchlights raking through the dark.

  ‘I’ve never met anyone who lived there before,’ Cat says, her eyes shining. ‘Cool.’

  I roll my eyes. The Eden Estate is not cool – it’s a hole, a delapidated, bottom-of-the-pile dumping ground for people who have nowhere else to go. Half the flats are boarded up and derelict, the rest are damp and scummy and falling to bits. People don’t choose to live there – they move in until something better comes along, and then they get stuck. It drags them down.

  There’s a small, stubborn part of me that’s proud of the place, though. I’ve lived there since I was eight years old, and I’ve survived – just about. Eden made me streetwise, made me tough. It’s a mess – but at least it’s my mess.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I tell her. ‘Not cool, but you can
get by.’

  ‘So where do you live, exactly?’ Cat presses.

  ‘Nightingale House, ninth floor,’ I say, then stop short. ‘Don’t even think about visiting, OK? It’s dodgy if you don’t know what you’re doing. I mean it, Cat.’

  ‘You worry too much!’ She slides on to the sofa next to me, looking at me closely like I’m some fascinating specimen of insect she has under a magnifying glass.

  ‘I like you, Mouse,’ she says. ‘You’re funny. And cute.’

  I try not to panic as she slides an arm along the back of the sofa, because things never got this far with Neela Rehman, back in Year Five, and I’m way out of my depth.

  Out in the hallway, the front door slams and Cat jumps across the room like she’s just been scalded.

  ‘Cat?’ calls a woman’s voice. ‘Is that you? I thought you’d still be at drama club! I forgot my yoga mat, so … oh! Who’s this?’

  A small, striking black woman stands in the kitchen doorway, eyes narrowed. She looks at me like I’m a lump of chewing gum stuck to her shoe, or maybe something worse.

  ‘Hello. I’m Mia, Catrin’s mum. And you are …?’

  ‘Just leaving,’ I say, standing up quickly.

  ‘His name is Ben,’ Cat says quickly. ‘Ben … Smith.’

  I grin. I’ve never heard of Ben Smith, but he’s obviously more acceptable to Cat’s mum than I am.

  ‘Well, Ben.’ She looks me up and down, eyes lingering on my bird’s-nest hair and trailing bootlaces. I feel like I should grab a comb and start saving up for a suit right away. ‘I take it you’re at drama club together?’ she asks.

  ‘Er …’

  ‘That’s right,’ Cat says. ‘We’re working on a new play, in pairs …’

  ‘Oh? What play?’ She’s looking right at me with dark, suspicious eyes, and my mind goes blank.

  ‘Shrek?’ I suggest.

  ‘Hamlet,’ Cat corrects me, but her mum is unimpressed.

  ‘It’s, like, a postmodern version of Shakespeare,’ Cat gabbles. ‘A sort of fusion of two opposing styles. All the main characters are played by trolls and donkeys …’

  ‘Yeah,’ I cut in, before she has a chance to dig herself in any deeper. ‘It was cool. Anyway, Mrs … erm, Mia. I have to go now. Nice meeting you!’