Following Flora

by Natasha Farrant

  “If I stop now,” I told her, “I will forget where I got to, and the paint will be uneven. Go and ask Flora.”

  “Flora is at a play audition. I’m not supposed to know.”

  None of us are supposed to know about Flora’s play auditions, because Flora is not supposed to be going to them. Flora is taking her finals in June, and all theatrical engagements are Strictly Banned.

  “What about Twig?”

  Jas’s expression darkened.

  “He’s gone to have his hair cut,” she sniffed.

  As well as suddenly becoming tall, Twig is obsessed with how he looks. It makes Jas cross because she says he never has time to play anymore. We always used to call the two of them together the Babes, but that’s all changed now, mainly because they no longer ever seem to be together.

  “It could be worse.” I tried to cheer her up. “He could be one of those boys who never wash at all.”

  “It’s disgusting. It’s all because of stupid Maisie Carter at school. He fancies her. You have to help me.”

  “I have to finish painting my room.”

  “Then I’ll stay until you change your mind,” she said, and she sat down on the floor.

  “I’m ignoring you,” I told her.

  “Fine,” she replied.

  I stopped feeling her glare at me after a while and had almost forgotten she was there when suddenly she said, “I found two kittens in the graveyard,” and I dropped my paintbrush.

  There is a spray of silver paint all over my bedroom floor, but under the circumstances it hardly seems to matter. The graveyard is several streets away, and though I don’t think anyone has ever told us not to go there, I’m also fairly certain it’s not a place Jas should be going to on her own.

  “What were you doing in the graveyard?” I asked.

  “I go there quite often,” she answered. “It’s quiet, and there’s a lovely gravestone of an old lady called Violet Buttercream where I like to sit.”

  “Violet Buttercream?”

  Jas told me I was missing the point.

  “I’ve hidden them in the shed,” she said. “And you have to come now.”

  So much for eternal heartbreak. I think she’s already forgotten all about the rats.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9

  Orphaned kittens need constant attention, which is particularly difficult if you have to keep them a secret.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do they have to be secret?”

  “Because they’re mine,” she growled. “Dad would let them run away, and Twig would probably try to sell them.”

  “But are you quite sure they don’t have a mother?”

  “I’ve been watching them for two days. She never usually leaves them for more than a few minutes, but today she didn’t come back for hours. I think something must have happened to her.”

  So now the kittens have a nest of their own in the shed. We plugged an electric radiator in so they wouldn’t get cold, and we filled a cardboard carton with old fleeces and blankets, and then we went to the pet shop where Jas bought a litter tray, cat litter, and kitten food with money out of her savings. The kittens are the scrawniest creatures I ever saw, but they are also completely adorable. There are two of them, a boy and a girl, and they are completely black with green eyes and enormous black whiskers, which look much too big for their bodies. Jas made me take a photograph of them on my phone to show the girl in the pet shop, who says they are about twelve weeks old. She also says Jas should take them to the vet, but Jas says that’s too expensive.

  I don’t know how long she thinks she can keep them secret. Zoran came around to see us this afternoon. He came on his new electric scooter that Flora thinks is ridiculous, but even though it normally makes him really happy, he looked so depressed when he walked in that the first thing Jas did was drag him out to the shed to show him.

  “I’ve named the boy Ron,” she said. “And the girl is called Hermione.”

  “They’re adorable,” said Zoran, but he looked really glum. We went back into the kitchen where Twig, who for reasons nobody knows is teaching himself to bake, was pulling a tray of perfect raisin and hazelnut cookies out of the oven, but even that didn’t cheer Zoran up. As we ate them, Flora told us all about her audition. She is down to the last three for a small but very important role in a West End production, but we’re still not allowed to tell the parents about it. She went through the plot, down to the minutest detail, and then she said, “All right, Zoran, what’s wrong, you haven’t been listening to a word I said.”

  “Nobody has listened to a word you said,” Twig pointed out.

  “Is that boy still staying with you?” Flora asked.

  Zoran sighed and said he needed our advice. Mr. Rudowski woke up from his stroke this morning, but he can’t come home yet. Instead, they are moving him out of London to a hospital in the country where they will teach him to walk and eat and sit up again, because one half of his body has forgotten how to do all these things. He has asked Zoran if Zach could carry on living with him “until other arrangements can be made.”

  “What other arrangements?” Flora asked.

  “Until his mother gets in touch, I suppose.” He explained again what he’d already told me, that he’d tried calling her but that she still hadn’t replied. He also said that she and Zach had lived with her parents ever since Zach’s father left them when he was little, but after Zach’s grandmother died two years ago, there was a quarrel and ever since his mother and grandfather have been estranged.

  “She left Zach with his grandfather and they haven’t seen her since,” Zoran said.

  “What does estranged mean?” Jas wanted to know.

  “They don’t talk to each other.”

  “Ever?” Jas looked appalled.

  “What about Zach?” Twig asked. “Does he talk to her?”

  “I know they e-mail occasionally, but he hasn’t heard from her either.”

  “What did you say to Mr. Rudowski?” Flora demanded. “Did you say you would do it?”

  “Well how could I say no?” Zoran asked. “Poor kid, it’s either me or a foster family he doesn’t know. And I like Mr. Rudowski. He’s still in mourning for his wife, and he doesn’t talk much, but he’s a kind old man and he’s a friend of Auntie Alina’s. She’s the one who put us in touch.”

  Alina is Zoran’s great-aunt, who brought him up when he came to live in England after escaping the war in Bosnia. Zoran adores her.

  “So you are going to be his nanny.” Jas’s lower lip started to wobble.

  “Not his nanny, exactly,” Zoran said. “A seventeen-year-old boy doesn’t need a nanny. More a guardian, I suppose. And just for a short time. It’s not like it was with you. You do understand, don’t you, Jas? He needs me.”

  “Like you looking after the kittens,” I whispered in her ear.

  Jas nodded reluctantly.

  “You said you needed our advice,” Flora said.

  Zoran sighed, and said that he had always liked Zach, but the problem was there was a big difference between teaching a person for an hour a week and them actually living with you, and how could he get Zach to talk to him? “At the moment,” Zoran said, “he barely acknowledges me at all. I understand that he’s worried and angry, of course, but this morning, he wouldn’t even have breakfast! He just said he wasn’t hungry.”

  “I never have breakfast,” Flora said.

  “I made pancakes!” Zoran looked so indignant we all had to try really hard not to laugh at him. “I’m not used to not getting on with people,” he said. “I thought I was good with teenagers.”

  “You can’t lump all teenagers together, like we’re all exactly the same,” Flora lectured. “We’re people too, you know. You can’t get on with every single one of us, just because you think you’re good with us.”

  “And sometime
s people don’t want to be helped,” I added. “You can’t make them talk if they don’t want to.”

  “Is he playing in your concert?” Twig asked.

  Zoran has got a load of his students working toward a sort of family concert, except us because Flora says it will be terrible, and we all secretly agree. If our own musical standard after nearly a year of lessons is anything to go by, I don’t hold out much hope for his other students.

  Zoran said he had asked him, but Zach had said no.

  “Flatter him,” Flora advised. “Boys love that. Tell him the concert will be rubbish without him.”

  “We’ll all come to support you,” I said. “We’ll all cheer him like crazy and he’ll feel amazing and it’ll be like an unbreakable bond between you.”

  “Either that or everyone’ll hate him, and he’ll never speak to you again,” Flora said.

  “He’s not speaking to him anyway,” Twig reminded us, and Flora said that was true, so there was nothing to lose.

  Zoran looked unconvinced, but said that he would give it another try.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10

  Today I got an e-mail from Jake in which he told me that the weather in Australia is awesome and that surfing is a bit like skateboarding but a lot more wet.

  Yesterday was his aunt’s wedding. They had their reception on the beach, and all the wedding guests did a giant conga in the sea, and apparently that was awesome too. He also said my e-mails are hilarious, and he reads them out loud to all his Australian relatives, who nearly died laughing over Dad releasing the rats and say my family is nuts, which I am not very happy about, because even though it’s a little bit true, it’s not for him to say so.

  “Plus it’s not very romantic,” Dodi agreed when I told her. She told me I should write back straightaway and tell Jake that while I’m glad his relations find me so entertaining, our correspondence is supposed to be private.

  “That makes it sound like I’m cross with him,” I said.

  “Well you are cross with him,” Dodi replied. I said yes, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, and Dodi said that was a little bit pathetic.

  This whole boyfriend business is so complicated, and Jake isn’t even in the same country.

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12

  Ron and Hermione are living up to their magical names.

  Today I had to go and collect Jas from Zoran’s flat when I got home from school, because she ran away there after a row with Dad. Zoran called to let us know she was there.

  “I don’t know what is wrong with that child,” Dad grumbled when I came home from school. “You all know not to interrupt me when I’m writing, but she barged in when I was right in the middle of an extremely difficult chapter, and when I asked her to leave she just stormed off. I didn’t realize she’d actually left the house.”

  Zoran’s flat is only a ten-minute walk from us, but where Chatsworth Square is all leafy and peaceful with the big communal garden in the middle, the road he lives on has shops and buses and there are always people about. He lives in a big old converted house, right on the top floor, and he has this window seat which feels like a sort of bird’s nest because when you look outside you’re completely surrounded by trees. I was a bit apprehensive as I walked up the stairs, thinking this would be the moment when I finally got to meet Zach, which was sort of exciting but also a bit worrying. I couldn’t think what to say to him without giving away that Zoran had been talking about him behind his back. But then Zoran opened the door and I went in and the boy wasn’t there and the flat looked just like it always does, with shelves crammed with books and the pictures Alina gave him when she sold her house to go into her nursing home. The radio was playing piano music, and there was the smell of Earl Grey tea and fresh paint and blue flowers in a pot, and Jas was curled up wearing one of Zoran’s sweaters and wrapped in a duvet, pretending to do homework but really playing with the kittens who were tumbling in and out of Zoran’s guitar case next to her on the sofa.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” she said. “I’m perfectly capable of walking home on my own.”

  “How on earth did you get the kittens here?” I asked.

  “In my pockets,” she said, like it was obvious.

  “Your sister got caught in the rain,” Zoran told me. “She was soaked to the skin when she got here.”

  Zoran hates it when Jas goes wandering off. He started on this whole lecture about how, in fact, Jas is still very small and has to learn to do what she is told, and how the rest of us really ought to look after her properly. He didn’t even notice when Hermione rolled off the sofa, padded across the carpet, and started to climb up his trouser leg.

  “It was pure luck two of my students canceled this afternoon and I happened to be in. Pure luck!” Zoran scolded.

  “Where is the boy?” I asked to distract him.

  “He has football practice on Tuesdays.”

  I curled up next to Jas and tickled Ron, who started to purr, sounding like he might just burst out of pure excitement. It’s quite unbelievable that something so small can make so much noise. Then I looked round the flat again and noticed that unlike Ron, the boy Zach hadn’t made his presence felt at all.

  “Where are all his things?” I asked. “Can I see his room?”

  “It’s private,” Zoran said, and then he screamed as Hermione sank her fangs into his hand and started pedaling against his wrist with her back claws.

  Kitten claws are surprisingly sharp.

  I know Zoran said I shouldn’t, but his spare bedroom is one of my favorite rooms in the world, and I couldn’t resist looking to see what it looked like with someone actually living in it. It’s tiny, not much bigger than a closet. When Zoran first moved in he thought about just using it as a study or something, but then he decided that he really wanted somewhere people could come and stay, like his sister who lives in Sarajevo. So he bought a bed which fits perfectly across the width of the room under the window, and he put up hooks and shelves and even a fold-down table, painted the walls a soft pale blue like the sky, and hung those green and red glass balls you find at the seaside. It’s like a ship’s cabin, with a space for everything, but when I opened the door I was disappointed, because it looked exactly the same, but with clothes and schoolbooks dumped all over the floor and nothing hanging up.

  “It’s like he can’t be bothered.”

  “I told you, he’s not exactly overjoyed about our arrangement,” Zoran said, and then he added, “I need you to take Jas and these animals home. My hand is actually bleeding.”

  “Is he going to play in your concert?”

  “No, he is not. Apparently, he doesn’t do concerts.”

  Zoran picked up Hermione so her tummy was on his hand with her little legs and her head sticking out the side so she couldn’t hurt him again, and held her out to me.

  “Ron just peed on your duvet,” said Jas.

  Zoran closed his eyes and made this little whining noise. Jas shoved Ron in one coat pocket and Hermione in the other, and we tiptoed out of the flat.

  Poor Zoran. He looked so despondent when we left him, with his hands covered in scratches and his duvet covered in kitten pee, but the reason I wrote that Ron and Hermione are living up to their magical names is that when Zach got back, he found Zoran cursing and swearing as he tried to stuff his duvet into the washing machine, and he thought the whole story of the kittens so hilarious he agreed to play in Zoran’s concert.

  “I think he felt sorry for me,” Zoran said when he called to tell us the news.

  “Nobody likes cat pee,” I agreed. “Did you flatter him, like Flora said?”

  Zoran said that was none of my business, but I bet he did. I can just imagine them, Zach laughing his head off, Zoran choosing that exact moment to tell him how stupendously gifted he is. The thing with Zoran is he’s so nice, when he wants something you nev
er even realize what you’ve agreed to till it’s too late.

  “I suppose I should be grateful to the little beasts,” Zoran said. “It’s the first time I’ve heard Zach laugh about anything since he got here.”

  Jas is acting like she did the whole thing on purpose.

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13

  It’s weird being at school without Jake. Today in English Miss Foundry was talking about the Brontë sisters. “The Yorkshire moors!” she cried. “The tragedy of tuberculosis! The horrors of contemporary education!” except she has a lisp so it came out as twagedy and howwors of contempowawy education.

  Tom asked, “Miss, how do you spell Bwonte?”

  Miss Foundry, who is oblivious to teasing, said with two dots over the e.

  “Exactly as I have witten it on the whiteboard,” she said, and Tom and Colin both collapsed. I know it’s mean, but it gets them every time, and there’s something about the way those boys laugh. It spreads, and soon the whole class was shaking. That’s when I thought of Jake. Normally there would be three of them messing about in class, but the place right in the middle of the front row where teachers always make him sit, because he is always either asleep or laughing, was empty. Suddenly I could picture exactly what would happen if he had been here, how he would have turned around and grinned at everyone behind him, like making fun of Miss Foundry’s lisp was still the best joke in the world.

  I do kind of miss him, in spite of his unromantic e-mails.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16

  Zoran came around this afternoon to ask me if I would film the concert. He said it would mean a lot to him.

  “I would love to,” I said, because films and their transcripts are an important part of my diaries. Ever since I got my video camera, my plan has been to record my life in words and images, but I don’t often get the opportunity to film anyone other than my family.