Up on Cloud Nine

by Anne Fine

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  DELL YEARLING BOOKS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelor's degree from Marymount College and a master's degree in history from St. John's University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.

  For my Ione,

  from both sides

  stol's laid out …

  Stol's laid out on this strange bed-trolley thing. He might as well be waiting for his funeral. There's no blood in his face. No twitching or rolling. He's just a slab of dead meat on a hospital bed. I'm pretending I can't see the tube going in and the tube coming out. Or hear the pumping noises, and the occasional shlup!, like the sheep getting squashed by the hay bales in Farm Freak!

  Mum hurries in. “So where's his dad?”

  “On his way. One of his junior barristers phoned to say he was just going through to the judge, to explain.”

  Mum took a look at Stol, just lying there. Flat out. Not even breathing, so far as I could see. You could tell what she was thinking.

  Not everyone would say it, though.

  “Well, his dad's the last person we need.”

  She'll not forget the time that Mr. Oliver showed up in Casualty so furious at being called out of court, he practically started dishing out malpractice suits to all the doctors who'd spent the last two hours saving his son's life. And then he'd turned on me, as if it were my fault for suggesting we play Pirate Attack! in the first place. How was I supposed to know Stol would get so overexcited he'd start yo-ho-hoing and swigging that stuff with the skull and the crossbones? Good thing I hadn't said a word about the pathetic knots he'd used to truss me up for the gangplank. If I hadn't moved so fast, he'd have been in the mortuary.

  “No, probably best off without Franklin.”

  Mum grabbed the phone she'd left me earlier and took off down the ward. I didn't bother following to try to listen. No one gets straight through to Mr. Oliver anyway. He's far too important. But even in emergencies Mum prefers things the way they are. If she can leave her message with Jeanine, his secretary, quickly enough, she can get off the phone before Franklin snatches it and starts all his arguing.

  The nurse was bending over Stol when Mum came back.

  “I told Jeanine to stop him canceling. After all, nothing's happening.” Suddenly superstitious, she went pale and crossed her fingers. So did I, in my pocket, and together we stared at Stolly till the nurse moved off and Mum went on, “I told her to tell Franklin we'll stay here till he's out of court.”

  We know what “out of court” means. Back to chambers for discussions that might go on till midnight, or even later if the case isn't going well. But maybe this time, what with Stol having done for himself so comprehensively brilliantly, his dad will make the effort to get away sooner.

  “What about … ?”

  What with the nurse still being well within earshot, Mum didn't finish, as she does usually, “… his daffy mum.” So I just answered.

  “On a shoot. In the jungle.”

  “The jungle?”

  “Nicaragua.”

  “I'm not sure Nicaragua's jungle.” But clearly even Mum had grasped this was no time for elementary geography. To tell the truth, though, she did not look sorry. Esme Oliver is a menace in a sickroom. She is the sort of person who would unthinkingly lift off your sterile dressing to wipe off her nail polish. Or fetch out her hair spray in a ward of asthmatics.

  “But is she on her way back?”

  “No, not yet. They can't find her.”

  “Can't find her? Is she lost?”

  “No,” I explain. “It's just that her assistant can't raise a signal. You see, she and the photographer have taken the models where there are no landlines in order to get that absolutely authentic sense of lost-in-the-rain-forest chic to launch her new range of three-tiered mock-python and marabou waterproo—”

  Normally Mum adores this sort of stuff. She says my bulletins from the World of Esme have been one of the principal compensations for feeding Stolly pretty well every sensible meal he's ever eaten, checking his hair for nits whenever she does mine, and having him sleep over practically every other night, while trying to make sure he keeps up with his homework.

  But this time, Stol's too white, too still. She cuts me off.

  “Right,” she says. “You keep him going till I get back from seeing the doctor.”

  What does she mean, “keep him going”? But I don't argue. I just trail her to the door. “The doctors won't talk to you,” I warn her. “I asked a nurse, and she said if I wasn't family, she couldn't tell me anything.”

  “So I'll say that I'm family.”

  I panicked. “But what if they ask you to make a decision?”

  “Well,” she said. “If they ask me which ice cream he's going to want for his supper, I'll tell them toffee pecan. And if they want a decision about how late he ought to be allowed to stay up watching telly, I'm going to be quite tough and insist it's before ten.”

  Brave stab. But Stol has sailed too close to death and I can't smile.

  We both turn back to look at him. “For pity's sake!” says Mum. “I'll just find out what's what. And if there are any decisions to be made, I'll get back to Franklin. The man's supposed to be one of the cleverest barristers in Britain, isn't he? He can surely read a note pushed under his nose in the middle of a court case. Should we switch off your dear son's life support? Tick Yes or No.”

  But simply joking about it has unnerved her worse. She has to come back to lay her hand against his cheek. “Oh, Stolly! Stolly! What a little fool you are!”

  Back at the door, she tells me sharply, “You look after him!”

  This time, I have to ask. “What does that mean?”

  “You know. Sit close. And concentrate. Will him back.”

  “Will him?”

  Now I'm unnerved as well, because it sounds so much like something from the World of Esme.

  “That's right. Stay close. Don't let them send you off to the coffee shop or anything. I'll bring you back something to eat. Just sit here and remember he's your friend. Stick with him.”

  Strange. (For my mum.)

  And she has slid away, round next door's curtain.

  I know her. I sat very quietly, and, sure enough, I heard the nose-blow and the little sniffle. And the deep tranquillizing breaths she had to take before she could set her face and go and ask whoever she could find what might be happening in Stol's flat silence.

  on planet clean and bright

  I look around. It's Planet Clean and Bright that we're on now. Far cry from either of our dumps at home. His bedroom is a riot. Mine's a mess. And this place hurts the eyes: the walls so white, the light so strong; even the floor seems to be winking.

  I asked the nurse unhooking Stol's chart from the end of the bed, “Am I allowed to have my chair this close?”

  She scribbled a number inside a box. “No need to whisper. With all the stuff we're pumping into him, this one is well away. Up on cloud nine.”

  Up on cloud nine. A weird expression—and one I've heard about a million times, round about Stol. With him, the normal e
veryday things often stop mattering. Mum, for example, hasn't even mentioned school since she screeched to a halt outside the gates and, leaning across to push the passenger door open, explained why I'd been pulled out of class.

  “Stol. In the Western General.”

  “Not again!”

  Stol's had more accidents than most of us have had hot dinners. Mum blames a lot of them on Esme and Franklin. (“Paint thinner? Under the sink?”) But personally, I think it's more to do with something about Stolly.

  Now that the nurse has gone, I shunt my chair along the bed, back to the chart. I can't make head or tail of it. It looks like something Mrs. Hetherington would use to torture her top set in physics. Or some quick test for Hieroglyphics I. But underneath, there is a clipboard with a ballpoint pen. And in my school backpack is the brandnew pad I was given for rough work.

  He looks so—dead—for someone who has always been so alive, spilling with words and ideas. To look at him now, you'd find it hard to credit he's had a life. If he went now, all his past stuff would shrivel, even in our minds. The dead all vanish, unless they have some ferreting biographer to track down their life again after they've gone.

  Or someone trailing around after them, charting it as they go. Stol helped me with my autobiography project once, way back in fourth year. Except you couldn't really call it helping, since what he did—after I'd spent about a hundred thousand hours on it—was leaf through quickly and tell me,

  “You can't give in this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it's rubbish.”

  “Rubbish?” I snatched it back and stared down at the carefully printed cover sheet:

  My Earliest Years, by Ian James Paramour

  I flicked through. There was the photo of Granny pretending to play the piano in the great flood of 1965, with the water almost up to her knees. There was my uncle Harry, waving from his super-duper drive-around mower. And Mum soppily pointing at a cloud like a tulip.

  And, in between, written in—for me—quite unbelievably neat chunks, were the stories I'd heard all my life about Great-uncle Caspar losing both legs in a car crash, and how Granny was arrested for taking someone's real fur coat by mistake when she left a restaurant, and how Dad's father regularly used to come home steaming, shouting that the whole family should get out of bed and pack everything, ready to move to the country and start a fresh, wholesome new life in the morning.

  My project looked all right to me.

  “What's wrong with it?”

  “Well, it's supposed to be an autobiography. Stuff about you.”

  “It is about me.”

  “No, it isn't.” He took it back and flicked through again. “It's all about your great-aunt Chloe and grandfather Thing.”

  “So? I bet yours is all about your rich uncle Lionel, and all those aunties you hate going to visit.”

  “Yes, but at least I put a heap of stuff in at the start about where I was born and how much I weighed, and all that.”

  “But I don't know that stuff, do I?”

  He wasn't listening. He was scrabbling through my first few pages. “No, this won't do. You've missed out all the important bits. You'll just have to start again.”

  I snatched the jotter back. “Not likely!”

  Even Stol, who can write whole novels when he's in the mood, let me off this one.

  “All right. Just pull out the folder clip and shove the rest of it in at the front.”

  “There isn't any ‘rest of it.' I was just found. In a box. Up an alley.”

  “What was it called, this alley?”

  “Robin Lane.”

  He eyed me with the deepest suspicion. “That can't be true.”

  I was mystified. “Why should I lie to anyone about that? And why would they lie to me? That's what they told me.”

  “Well, it has to be nonsense. If you'd been found up somewhere called Robin Lane, the nurses would have called you Robin.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Of course they would. That is the sort of thing they do. You're forever seeing it on telly.”

  And then and there, he dragged me off in front of Mum. Confronted, she went red as a radish. And it turned out I'd actually been found two alleys up.

  “See?” Stolly crowed.

  I stared at Mum. “Why would you lie?”

  She was still blushing horribly. “It isn't lying, exactly,” she said, trying to defend herself. “Your father and I were hardly likely to be in a rush to explain exactly which alley it was, in case you went off to look at it.”

  “What's wrong with my alley?” I demanded.

  And it took ages to get out of her that the one I was found in was the one with the dustbins.

  “A fitting start,” Stol often said, when we were older. And when we did symbolism in English, I had to put up with a good deal of joshing. But at the time, he simply shrugged, satisfied his intuition was correct, then went on to nag Mum about showing him my Memory Box.

  “That's up to Ian,” Mum said. “They're his memories.”

  “Not mine,” I said. “I don't remember them.”

  She wiped off that “Well, you're supposed to” look and said instead, “It's your decision. It's your box.”

  But no decision's yours if you've got Stol around. So while I busied myself drawing a picture of a merry little baby waving out of an overflowing dustbin, he had a rummage through my Memory Box and, dumping the blanket in which I was found onto the floor, out of the way, picked out a couple of photos.

  “So who's this?”

  “Nurse Sarah Deloy. She was the one who first looked after me when I was brought into the hospital.”

  “And this one?”

  “Doris. My social worker. She brought me round here. And she made the box.”

  He wasn't satisfied. He kept on at Mum till he'd tracked down a whole new starting chapter to my project. First, we waylaid the very postman who had brought the letter telling my mum and dad they were definitely getting a baby. (At the time, they didn't know it was me.) The postman had no problem remembering that morning. He said that after Mum read the letter, she shouted, “We did it!” and chased after him and kissed him. (All Mum recalled was that he'd told her, rather sourly, that if she had taken to offering homes to other people's children, she could have his three little horrors, and welcome.)

  Then Stol started positively grilling Granny. And after she gave up trying to swat him off and had a think, things started coming back, and she remembered that, what with no one expecting the letter that day, and Dad disapproving of alcohol because of his father, the only thing they'd had in the house to toast my future arrival was some sickly homemade rhubarb-and-elderberry cordial.

  And even then Dad had had to dig out the cork with Granny's nice silver-plated Salisbury Cathedral key ring holder (“Ruined it, Ian. Completely bent the spire!”) because none of them could think where to lay their hands on the corkscrew.

  “Oh, very festive!” I said bitterly. But Mrs. Tallentire was delighted with my project and gave me a star. (“Most enlightening. I only hope Nurse Deloy thought to bathe you very thoroughly indeed after contact with that dustbin.”) I didn't let on Stol had forced me into changing most of the first part till it was closer to the truth. And she would never have believed me anyway, since Stol was already notorious in school for being the most shocking, most dedicated liar.

  stol blames the aunts

  Stol claims he's not a liar but a fantasist. He blames the aunts. Three times a year (before my family started rescuing him) he was sent off to stay with his mad aunts.

  “Not stay,” he'd always insist. “More, be imprisoned.”

  The problem was that Great-aunt Dolly, who was bossiest, was sick in the head. She had the most terrible visions and thought the world was full of vicious strangers, all out to kidnap little kids like Stol and keep them in cellars forever and ever.

  “Well, what about the other two?”

  “They were no use. Maeve couldn't arg
ue with a jelly, and Tilly was always busy weeping.”

  “Weeping?”

  “All the time. Into handkerchiefs. She was as wimpy as Maeve. So, since I wasn't even allowed in the garden in case I got kidnapped, I simply read all day.”

  “All day?”

  “Better than weeping in handkerchiefs. And some of the books were rather good. And Tilly helped with the big words.”

  And maybe being imprisoned by mad aunts did something to feed Stol's imagination even more, because by the time we reached the junior school, he was well past the colorful fiblets stage and into great raging porky pies. (Sorry, fantasies.)

  Mythomania, the teachers called it. They fussed and frowned. But we all loved it. It was like sitting round a telly that ran a different soap opera every day. He had so many lives. One day, he'd be an orphan, and we'd hear the terrible story of how he'd lost both of his parents in a hotel fire. Or tidal wave. Or hurricane. Next day, he would mysteriously seem to have six beautiful sisters, all born dumb, and all talented at seeing the future. The day after that, there'd be some brother who worked as a spy. Or a whaler. Or an ace pilot. By the following morning, Stol would as often as not have somehow reacquired a set of parents (nothing like his own) who were meeting the queen today, or lying, mad as mops, upon their deathbeds in some foreign clime. By the end of the school week, his father would be starring in a film, but his sisters might have vanished. And the following week, he'd be back as an orphan.

  “Not even your name's real,” Tom Hunter dared complain once. “ ‘Stolly'! Honestly!”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Stol insisted. “Stuart Terence Oliver. Stolly.”

  And that was about the only bit of him that stayed the same from week to week. The teachers used to come unglued.

  “Stolly, did you tell those poor little third years getting on the bus for their school trip that the world was going to end in two hours, and that's why they were being taken away?”

  He'd make his “vacant but trapped” face.

  “You did, didn't you?”

  “I may have mentioned that some people do in fact believe—”