“I can’t win.”
“You might.”
“I CAN’T!!!” Jas shouted, and then she started talking really, really slowly, like I was really, really stupid. “This is not a children’s competition. It is the West London Poetic Society’s Annual Open to All Competition, but it is not ‘open to all’ because it is for people aged sixteen years and over. I can’t win, BECAUSE I AM NINE YEARS OLD. It is spectacularly unfair.”
“But why do you need Zach?” I asked.
“I need Zach,” Jas said, “to pretend to be me.”
Flopsy gave up on nudging, and nipped me on the shoulder. It hurt. I yelled. Flopsy pushed me out of the box.
Bill was sitting on a bench right outside the door, polishing a bridle. “You want to be more careful around horses,” he said.
I stuck my head out of the top half of the door.
“Were you listening?” I cried, and he shrugged and said, “Sounds like someone needs to have a word with this lad.” He looked straight at me when he said that.
“Me?” I asked.
“Someone’s got to,” he said.
“He’s not answering his phone,” I told him.
“More than one way of talking to a person,” he said.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 5
I spent ages writing to Zach.
I wrote loads about understanding how strange it must have been to see his mum again after so long, and how hurtful her leaving must have been.
I wrote about Iris and how I know what it feels like to miss someone you really love.
I wrote about how annoying Flora can be, and how when they quarreled she was probably a load more hurtful than she told me.
Then I got annoyed, because even though this is Zach and not Jake, I am still wasting my time worrying about finding the right thing to say to a boy, and I limited my letter to facts.
“I’m truly sorry about your mum,” I wrote. “But the point is, we are here, and she is not. We miss you, and we are not going away.”
Then I wrote about Flora and how much she missed him and hadn’t stopped moping since he went away, and about Jas, and how upset she was because of her poetry recital. I finished by telling him if he wanted to finish with Flora, he should be brave enough to do it properly, and otherwise he should come around and see her immediately.
“PS,” I added. “Flora is upset, but she may choose to play it cool. I recommend flowers and chocolate.”
I wrote the letter very late last night and got up early this morning to cycle over to Zoran’s flat before anyone was awake to ask me what I was doing. With school starting tomorrow, I assumed they would be back soon, if they weren’t back already. After I’d put it through the letter box, I sat and stared at the letter box for a while, wondering if I’d done the right thing, and then I decided there was nothing I could do about it anyway, so I came home.
At lunchtime, Mum got a phone call from Zoran, saying they were back in London.
At two thirty, Flora announced that she was going to bed with a fever and that she might never get up again.
At five minutes past four, the doorbell rang, and it was Zach, clutching a bunch of tulips. Twig answered the door, which was good, because anyone else would have made a fuss. All Twig did was say, “Oh, cool, you’re back,” and yell upstairs for Flora.
Flora didn’t play it cool.
She appeared at the top of the stairs much too quickly for someone dying of a fever. Zach held up the flowers. Until today I never truly understood what people meant when they said “she flew down the stairs.” One second Flora was on the landing, the next she was in the hall with her arms around Zach’s neck. Her feet didn’t touch a single step.
“You don’t hate me!” she cried.
“I brought chocolate too,” Zach said, and then they didn’t speak for a while because they were too busy kissing. Then Jas appeared, and Zach was all, “Hey, Jas,” and she said, “You’re back!” Zach said, “Yeah, and we’ve got work to do,” and Jas beamed, and then Mum waddled down from her room (the waddling is quite new, something to do with the baby pressing down between her legs, which I don’t really want to think about), and then Dad came out of his study with the mad hair he gets when his writing is going badly, looking grumpy because he’d been interrupted, and even Twig left his comics, and it was impossible to get a sensible word out of anyone.
Whatever problem Zach had with our family, he has clearly gotten over it.
He came to find me later, before Zoran came around for dinner, when Flora was in the kitchen helping Mum and singing her head off. I was finishing Jane Eyre (and why does Mr. Rochester have to be blind at the end, why?) when he turned up in my room and not quite looking at me said thank you for the letter.
“That’s okay,” I said, not quite looking at him either. Then, because he was just hanging around in the doorway, I said, “Do you want to sit down,” and he went and sat on my window seat.
“It’s funny,” he said. “First that video, then the letter. It’s like you’re writing my life for me.”
“I do want to be a writer,” I told him. “And a filmmaker.”
“Well, I just wanted to say it really helped. The stuff about you all missing me, and being here and everything,” he said. Then he didn’t speak for ages and I was wondering if it would be all right to go back to Jane Eyre, when he said, “Just for the record, I never wanted to break up with Flora. I was really upset, but the reason I never called her was I threw my phone in the sea.”
“That was extreme,” I said.
“Mum wasn’t answering my calls, and it just did my head in. So I threw it like a skimming stone. I made it bounce four times. It was kind of awesome.”
“I wish I’d seen it.”
Zach smiled that slow amazing smile that always reminds me why Flora likes him so much, except I think it was a little bit sadder than it used to be.
“Just don’t tell Zoran,” he said. “He doesn’t know about it yet.”
“Have you heard from your mum at all?” I asked. “Like on e-mail or anything?”
Zach said he hadn’t. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “Truly.”
For a moment, I thought he was going to confide something, but then he smiled and just said, “Me too.”
“There you are, Zach!” Flora appeared at my door, still beaming. “Mum wants ice cream, I have to go to the shop. Come with me!”
“We were talking!” I protested, but Zach was already on his feet, taking Flora’s hand.
“Thanks again, Blue,” he said before he left.
“What for?” I heard Flora ask.
“Just stuff,” Zach replied, but then he turned around when he got to the top of the stairs and gave me a little wink, like we both knew it was a lot more than just stuff.
Flora came into my room again after dinner, wafting in like some sort of fairy princess who hadn’t stuffed herself with homemade pizza and brownies and ice cream all evening in between dragging her boyfriend out of the room to snog him, under the impression no one else knew what she was doing. She draped herself over the end of my bed and hugged her knees to her chest, sighing.
“Did he tell you he threw his phone in the sea?” she said. “Isn’t that dramatic? That’s the thing about Zach. He seems so quiet, but he’s very passionate.”
I swear, drama is to Flora what blood is to a vampire.
“I told him about Scotland,” she burbled. “Zach says, distance doesn’t matter. He says he’ll come and visit me and we can explore the Highlands together. He says he’s going to buy a motorbike.”
She drifted off to bed, and I thought about what I said to Zach, that we should try to be like her. Honestly, life would be so simple. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. It’s windy tonight, and even though the moon is full you can’t always see it because of these big clouds rushing across the sky. I opened the w
indow and the noise was so loud, with the trees in Chatsworth Square blowing and the wind whistling around me. The moon came out. I thought I saw the shadow of a person, not moving, still as a statue by the railings, and suddenly I thought of what Flora had said, how she thought Zach’s mum had been watching her in the park. I shivered.
I wonder what we would look like, if you were on the outside of our house, looking in. I wonder how it would feel.
The moon went back in and the shadow disappeared.
MONDAY, JANUARY 6
When I got to school this morning all everyone was talking about was how I assaulted Jake with a chocolate milk shake because he had two-timed me with an Australian surfer. All through morning school people kept saying things like “nice one Blue,” sniggering and making milk shake slurping noises.
“Man, I wish you’d recorded it,” Tom smirked. “I’d pay money to watch it.”
Jake, who I thought would be mortified, has turned into a sort of minor celebrity. He looked really sheepish when he saw me this morning, in fact he went quite red, but in French when Rohan told him to “déplacez-vous out of my seat or je vais jeter un milk shake over vous,” he laughed and high-fived him.
“Don’t they have anything better to talk about?” I asked Dodi at break. It was freezing and most people stayed inside, but I made her sit in the playground so we wouldn’t be interrupted. The boys were all playing football in the sports cage, but I kept us out of sight by hiding behind the music rooms.
“Better than you lobbing cold milky drinks around in cafés? I don’t think so.”
Dodi is loving the reflected glory of being my best friend right at this moment. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was going around telling people the whole thing was her idea in the first place.
“It’s the best story they’ve had since Flora’s YouTube video,” she said smugly. Then she got all businesslike. “Actually, we need to talk. I left about two hundred messages on your stupid home answering machine last night.”
“Nobody ever listens to those,” I told her.
“Well you should. This is important. Guess what? It worked!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“The milk shake throwing! Jake says you were brilliant. He says he never realized you cared so much.”
“I didn’t do it to impress him,” I objected. “It was a genuine act of anger.”
“He wants to get back together with you,” Dodi said. “He rang me to ask what he should do. If you’d called me back like I asked you would know all this.”
“But Talullah!” I said.
“Talullah was a mistake,” Dodi said. “Now he wants to be with you.”
“Well I don’t want to be with him!” I cried. “I can’t believe you’re even talking about this!”
Dodi said that Jake was really sorry, that he was almost crying on the phone, and that he really liked me.
“He’s desperate for you to forgive him,” she said.
“He can’t be that desperate. He’s even laughing about the whole thing in a different language.”
Dodi said that was just Jake saving face. She said Jake was too shy to talk to me about it himself, and she thought it was very brave of him to admit his mistakes. Jake behaved like an idiot, Dodi said, but he is basically a lovely person, and me and him were her favorite couple, and I should look out for Science, because she had heard rumors he was going to ask me to be his lab partner.
I did another thing today that I have never done before. I lied to the school nurse about having a headache and spent the whole of Science hiding in the sickroom.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 7
Now that we have sorted out the first of our problems, which was Flora and Zack, we have to deal with the second, which is Jas. After that, when everyone is happy again and I am free to live my life without the threat of imminent drowning in a lake of other people’s tears, perhaps we can sort out what I’m supposed to do about Jake.
Zach and Jas’s latest arrangement before he disappeared was this: because Jas is technically too young to perform—almost half the minimum required age—Zach is going to pretend to be her right up until the last moment, when he will stand to one side and she will slip onto the stage. She still won’t be allowed to win, she says, but at least she will have made her point.
To say that Flora, who now knows everything, is happy with this arrangement is like saying Dad wasn’t furious when he discovered Ron was using his favorite suede shoes as a toilet. Jas said at least he wasn’t doing it on the carpet anymore, but it didn’t stop the shouting.
“Your name is Jasmine,” Flora said to Jas. “It’s a girl’s name. And Zach is not a girl.”
“I registered as Jas,” Jas said. “It could be short for Jason.”
Flora ignored her.
“It’s bad enough you pretending you are nine,” she told Zach, “without also making out that you are a girl.”
“I think you’re missing the point,” I said, but she ignored me too.
“I will pretend to be Jas,” she declared. “At least I’m the right gender.”
“I can’t do it without Zach,” Jas said, and her voice was really shaky. I admit that at the start of this whole business I thought that two performance artists were more than one family could cope with, especially when you factor in Dad’s artistic temperament and Mum’s hormones as well, but when Jas said she couldn’t do it without Zach I remembered how different she and Flora actually are.
“You don’t have to do this,” I told her.
“Of course she does,” Flora said. “She’s started, hasn’t she? She can’t give up halfway through.”
The performance is less than two weeks away, and since Flora can’t take to the stage in this particular role, she has appointed herself director. She has given Jas five days to prepare, and then she has to perform in front of an audience.
“And be ready to receive constructive criticism,” Flora said.
“You scare me,” Zach said.
“Me too,” whispered Jas, but unlike Zach she wasn’t laughing.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 10
If Jas really was overlooked before—and personally I have my doubts about this—she certainly isn’t anymore, because the other thing Flora has insisted on is telling Mum and Dad.
“You clever, clever girl!” Mum (literally) cried, while Dad mumbled that he too was very proud and did we know that as a young man he also wrote poetry? Mum said we didn’t need reminding and that for once this really wasn’t about him, and then she asked Jas if many of her friends had entered the competition as well.
Flora may not have been completely honest about everything.
“The point is,” she said, “it’s Jas’s big night, and we must all be there.”
Mum and Dad said they wouldn’t miss it for the world. Jas looked like she might be sick. Mum made her soup and a hot-water bottle and told her she didn’t have to go to school.
The person who doesn’t get any attention in this family is not Jas, but me. And maybe Twig, but he enjoys it because it means he can impress Maisie with his babysitting skills without anyone asking where he is going. I, on the other hand, would welcome some advice because I am now being stalked by Jake. He has taken to leaving me notes saying things like “I’m sorry” and “Friends?” and “I just want things to be like they were before.” Dodi denies all participation. If she’s lying, which I’m pretty sure she is, it might be her putting the notes in my bag and coat pocket. If she really doesn’t have anything to do with it, then Jake is finding a way of doing it, which is creepy.
Rehearsals for Jas’s poetry recital are in full swing, which you would think the dictator, I mean director, would be happy about except she isn’t, because Jas has refused to let Flora coach her and has insisted that Zach do it. “He is my boyfriend,” Flora complained tonight after he and Jas d
isappeared upstairs to her room. “She is completely monopolizing him. Seriously, he is totally neglectful. I’m beginning to regret that I agreed to help.”
“When you say you agreed to help,” Twig said, “did anyone actually ask you?”
I was tempted to add that Flora had no idea what it means to have a neglectful boyfriend, except Zach had come downstairs again and was already making my point for me with a very extended good-night kiss.
Until now Jas has refused to tell us anything at all about her poem, but tonight Flora beat it out of her, and I only just mean that metaphorically.
“If you don’t tell me what you and Zach are up to,” Flora said, “I will tell everyone, Mum, Dad, and the organizers, that you are only nine years old.”
Twig said, surely Mum and Dad already knew that Jas was nine years old. Flora said he was really starting to get on her nerves this evening and whose side was he on? Jas said that while blackmail was despicable and Flora horrible, she was prepared to reveal her secret, which is that Zach has been helping her rehearse by setting her poem to music.
“What, that’s it?” said Flora.
“Not setting exactly,” Jas went on. “Zach says that he is helping me find the poem’s rhythm. It’s more that he helps me pick out the rhythms in the poem by playing them on his guitar. Then when I perform, I just have to imagine the music in my head. Zach says it is all to do with the inherent musicality of the text.”
We all just stared at her.
“Oh my God,” Flora said. “Zach’s created a monster.”
“Thank you,” said Jas.
Zoran says Zach is writing songs again. When he isn’t helping Jas or kissing Flora or playing soccer with Twig, he does the same as Jas and scribbles away in a corner. I asked what he was working on and Zoran said apparently it is completely different from his earlier work, which was very emotional and dark, and that he is trying to write a song that is perfectly happy but that this is much more difficult than you might think.
“It’s about Flora,” Zoran said. We were sitting on the veranda, even though it was cold and nearly dark. Flora was hanging off the edge of the tree house with her sweatshirt riding up almost all the way to her bra. Zach was standing underneath her, looking up and grinning.
Following Flora Page 10