The Ant Colony

by Jenny Valentine

  I went back to my room and I did a bit of sweeping. I didn’t think about the girl again that day, or the one after that. That’s the kind of person I must be – I never think about things I care about until I’ve lost them.

  Seven (Bohemia)

  Mum was under the covers in all her clothes and her shoes were sticking out at the end of the sofa, still on her feet. They were my favourites, dark blue with little holes, and they looked really pretty lying there.

  I took about £2 out of her purse and I went to the shop for some milk and something to eat. Mum gets cross if there’s no milk in the morning for her tea. When I came back, Isabel was sweeping. She was wearing an apron and flip-flops and her feet looked really blue and old.

  She asked me what I was doing with my day, seeing as I wasn’t in school, and cos I hadn’t decided yet I didn’t answer. I asked about the new boy. I said I remembered him from before, at Isabel’s. I didn’t tell her about the stealing. I’m not a total idiot.

  She said, “Sam? Maybe he could give you lessons. He dresses badly enough to be clever.”

  I hadn’t been thinking about lessons, but I had thought it would be good to know someone closer to my age, someone who wasn’t Steve or Isabel, cos if you added them up you got about a hundred and thirty-nine.

  Obviously I didn’t say that. I said, “Tell me about him then.”

  Isabel said that for once she didn’t know that much, and then she winked at me and tapped the side of her nose. “I’m working on it. Maybe you can help me.”

  When we knocked on his door, I don’t think he was all that pleased to see us. It took him ages to answer. I said maybe he was out and we should go away, but Isabel said she wasn’t going anywhere because she knew he was in there.

  “I’m asleep!” he shouted after about a hundred knocks.

  “Well, wake up then,” Isabel said. “For God’s sake, do something with your life.”

  He opened the door. I don’t know what he thought when he saw us standing there.

  “Where’ve you been?” Isabel said.

  “What do you mean?” he said. I think he was annoyed.

  She said, “Someone’s been looking for you.”

  He seemed to wake up then. “Who?” he said, and he looked past us and down the stairs.

  Isabel smiled. “Don’t panic,” she said. “It’s just Bohemia here,” and I smiled at him with my smile full of holes.

  “Bohemia?”

  I hate when people do that, say my name again because they can’t have heard right.

  I nodded and smiled harder because I didn’t know what else to do.

  “She wants to play,” Isabel said.

  “You’re joking, right?” Sam said, but he wasn’t laughing.

  “Come on,” Isabel said. “She’s bored to death.”

  This was a lie cos I just can’t get bored. Some people can’t lie or roll their tongues into a sausage or lift one eyebrow or say one sentence without using the f-word. I can’t get bored. There’s always too much to think about.

  Sam said, “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. Go and play. Take Doormat with you. He’s desperate too.”

  He banged his head three times against the doorframe, just hard enough.

  “He doesn’t want to,” I said, and I tried to turn away, but Isabel had my hand and she wouldn’t let go.

  “You realise you woke me up,” Sam said.

  Isabel said she meant to. “Sleep when you’re old.”

  “What if I say no?” he said.

  I said, “It’s OK. You don’t have to.”

  “You’ll hurt her feelings,” Isabel said. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  Sam said, “Well, why don’t you take her then?”

  “Because I’m old,” she said. “Bohemia doesn’t want to spend the day with someone old, do you, dear?”

  “Not really,” I said. “No offence.”

  He looked at Doormat. “He’s old as well. How far can he go?”

  Isabel said, “He’s a dog, Country, not a wind-up toy.” I laughed at that.

  “OK,” he said, looking at me. “I’ll take them to the Heath, but that’s it.”

  I tried smiling again, but he just looked at me and sighed like this wasn’t the day he’d been hoping for.

  Isabel gave him a bag with some things for Doormat – a little jacket for if he got cold and a thing that must have once been a tennis ball, but was more like glue and wet carpet. I wasn’t touching that.

  “Good,” she said, putting my hand into Sam’s and giving me the lead to hold. “Neither of you goes out enough in daylight.”

  When Isabel started off down the stairs, Sam told me to wait right there and he followed. I heard what he said. He asked her if it wasn’t a bit weird, a total stranger taking a kid out for a walk.

  “You’re hardly a stranger. We all know where you live.”

  He said, “You don’t know anything about me. I could be dangerous.”

  She laughed. “Well, are you?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  She said, “What’s weird about being nice to a child with no friends and not enough vitamin D? I’ve heard of worse.”

  He said he wasn’t a childminder.

  “No,” said Isabel. “You’re far too dangerous for that.”

  Me and Doormat had to wait outside while he got dressed.

  On the way down the stairs, Sam said that Doormat might not be a wind-up toy but he looked like one, and it was true. The way he bumped and scuffled down the front steps made me laugh.

  I said I wondered what it was like living in London with your belly that close to the ground.

  “Unhygienic,” Sam said, and I wasn’t sure what it meant exactly, but I knew it wasn’t comfortable.

  “Does your mum know where we’re going?” he said.

  I was still watching Doormat bounce down. “She’s asleep. She won’t be up for ages.”

  He said, “Do you want to leave her a note? Tell her where you are?”

  “I don’t need to.”

  Isabel came back out to the doorstep. She waved a fiver at us. Sam went back up the steps to get it.

  “What’s this, my wages?” he said. I wished he hadn’t.

  Isabel said, “It’s for you to get them an ice cream.”

  “Them?”

  “Doormat likes ninety-nines.”

  We walked to the end of the street without talking, his big steps and my quicker ones, and Doormat’s claws tap-tapping on the concrete the fastest of all. My trainers looked a bit scruffy, but I’d done this careful rolling thing with my socks that kind of made up for it.

  “When did you move in?” I said, and I looked up at him. Sam had dark hair and outdoors skin, and he was tall in a way that made my neck ache from looking.

  “Not long ago,” he said without looking at me.

  “Who do you live with? Mum or Dad or both?”

  He said he lived on his own.

  “Isn’t that lonely?” I said.

  “No, it’s just alone.”

  Sam liked that word. He said it a lot. I know he didn’t want to be with me and Doormat at all. He wanted to be ALONE. Sam was like the opposite of me. I like to be surrounded by people.

  Later, in the park, I shivered and shivered until he let me borrow his sweatshirt. It was huge, like a dress, and it was warm and smelled kind of boyish and oily. His T-shirt underneath said FDNY and on the back it said STAY BACK 200 FEET. I asked him what FDNY stood for.

  “Fire Department New York,” he said.

  I said, “Are you a fireman?” And he laughed and said he just liked the shirt cos 200 FEET was about as close as he wanted people to get.

  See what I mean? ALONE.

  While we walked he wasn’t doing any of the talking so I had to.

  “How old are you?” I said.

  “Seventeen.”

  “I’m ten. If you add us together, you’d get my mum.”

  He said, “Cherry.”<
br />
  “Yes,” I said. “You met her the other night.”

  “She seemed all right.”

  “Thanks,” I said, cos I think he meant it in a good way. “She is.” And then I shouldn’t have done, but I said, “But not in the mornings. My mum doesn’t like mornings.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Or Mondays, or policemen, or marzipan, or bills, or me doing too much talking …”

  “You? Doing too much talking?” he said.

  I nodded. “And I’m supposed to call her Cherry cos she doesn’t like the M word.”

  “The what?”

  “M-u-m. It makes her feel old. I’m not allowed to use it.”

  We hadn’t got very far on account of the length of Doormat’s legs. Sam said he could picture him giving out on the lead from too much exercise. Actually it was quite worrying cos the poor dog looked done in already with his tongue hanging out sideways and his tiny teeth showing in a smile.

  “Maybe we should get the bus,” he said.

  “We’d probably have to wait ages.”

  Plus we only had the money for ice cream and I really wanted one of those.

  Sam said he just thought the dog might like a lift so I picked him up and put him like a doll in the bend of my arm. “There,” I said, and Doormat put his wet nose against my skin and started sniffing. It was cold and wet and it tickled, like a living, breathing mushroom.

  “He likes you,” Sam said.

  I lifted Doormat higher and rubbed my cheek in his fur. “We’re best friends,” I said. “Aren’t we, boy? Yes, we are.”

  The park was freezing and the ice creams made it worse. Doormat walked with his nose practically glued to the ground, just sniffing. Sam wanted to go into the woods. He said even though he got sick of the sight of trees at home, he quite wanted to be in some now.

  I said, “Where did you live?” And he told me but I’d never heard of it.

  Suddenly on the path there were hundreds of ants. Thousands. They’d kicked up this dust all around the edge of the stones, like they were trying to move them or something.

  “Ooh,” I said. “How weird is that?”

  Sam got right down to have a proper look. “Myrmica rubra,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?” I said.

  “Red ant.”

  I asked him how he knew. I love it when people know stuff out of the blue like that and then I get to know it too.

  “Myrmecology,” he said, and he grinned at me like I should know what he was on about.

  “Murmur-what?” I said.

  “Myrmecology. It means the study of ants.”

  It was like looking down at people from a helicopter. “It’s like rush hour,” I said,

  “That’s exactly what it’s like,” Sam said.

  We were crouched down staring at them. They were all so busy and knowing where they were going. I said Isabel would boil a kettle and pour it all over them if she saw ants running around like that. I said I’d seen her doing it on the front steps before, to those ants that get wings and all fly about like an ant-cloud on only one day of the year.

  “She shouldn’t do that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “She just shouldn’t. Ants are pretty incredible creatures. If you knew Max you’d never boil an ant to death again.”

  “Who’s Max?”

  Sam said it was just someone he grew up with. He said he was like an ant expert and he knew about all different types and what they could do. He said Max knew pretty much everything about everything.

  “Cool. What a good friend to have,” I said.

  He said, “Did you know, that the weight of all the ants in the world is the same as the weight of all the humans?”

  I asked him how anyone could know that.

  “It’s a fact,” he said.

  “Who’s weighed them all?” I said. “How can you weigh something like that?”

  He looked at me funny. Then he said it was also a fact that even though there were thousands and thousands of different kinds of ant out there, they still hadn’t finished finding new ones.

  I said that didn’t make sense. Cos if they haven’t found them yet, how would they know they’re there? I said, “And how did they weigh them all if they haven’t found them yet?”

  He laughed at me then, and even though I hadn’t meant it to be funny I was glad that it was.

  He let an ant crawl up on to his hand. “You should meet Max,” he said. “He’d like you.”

  “OK. When?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, putting the ant back and watching it scurry around at mad angles. “I don’t know when I’ll be seeing him again.”

  “How come?”

  All he said was, “Long story,” like I didn’t have time to listen, like I was busy doing other things.

  After the woods, which were warmer out of the wind and patchy with light, he kept worrying about my mum, about her worrying. I wished he wouldn’t.

  He said, “She’s going to wake up and you’re not there.”

  “She won’t wake up,” I said.

  “She will at some point.”

  “Well, she won’t worry.”

  He looked at me funny then, like he didn’t believe me. “All mums worry.”

  I shrugged and rubbed Doormat’s back. He’d worn himself out with sniffing. We were going to have to carry him all the way home. “Mine doesn’t, honest.”

  When I asked Sam about his mum and dad he said they weren’t really speaking at the moment. We were sitting on the grass outside the playground. I quite wanted to go in, but I didn’t want to leave him on his own outside so I didn’t.

  “How come?” I said.

  He sort of laughed to himself and said, “Right now they don’t like me.”

  “Are they cross with you?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have a big fight?”

  “Not really.”

  “Are you cross with them?”

  “No,” he said. “Maybe.”

  He lay back on the grass and closed his eyes. I lay down next to him and I kept my hand on Doormat just in case by some miracle he got the energy to try and run away.

  The Story of My Life Part Two by B Hoban

  After The Haven we lived in William’s house that William hardly ever lived in. It was a big flat in a big block of flats near to Harrods.

  William was a friend of Derek’s, but I don’t think he had anything to do with tights. Actually, Mum said William didn’t have anything to do full-stop cos all his money was just there waiting for him when he was born, which must be weird. Mum said William’s money stopped him from being good at much at all, apart from spending it. His flat was a really hard place to be clumsy in cos everything was white or nearly white and if you tripped carrying a cup of chocolate milk, your life was over. Mum liked it there though cos all she had to do was make it nice for when William came to visit, which was every Tuesday and sometimes on the weekends if his wife was away. The rest of the time Mum just pretended it was hers and had her friends round and drank William’s wine and spent William’s money on bras.

  On Tuesdays and Sundays I had to be not seen and not heard. When William stayed the night I had to have enough food in my room to last for breakfast, and enough pens and paper and things to do. I wasn’t allowed to make a sound. Mum said we couldn’t put a foot wrong or we’d be out on the street. Mum said I was a big secret and she was going to surprise William with me sooner or later.

  It turned out I was putting both my feet wrong just by being alive cos when Mum surprised him he definitely wasn’t pleased about it. She was angry for weeks about that.

  We went to stay with her friend Nancy in an attic. All the houses round there were huge and looked like pictures on a chocolate box, white with black wood patterns on the outside. There were lots of them all the same and inside each one was about thirty flats, and it was only girls who lived there, which Mum said was weird and like living on another plane
t. She didn’t say that in front of Nancy though cos I think Nancy liked girls best of all.

  I liked it there in the daylight cos there were other kids to play with and the park was close. But sometimes at night Mum and Nancy locked me in and went to work at the Casino.

  They were always very pretty when they left. Mum’s hair didn’t feel like hair and her lipstick was sealed and shiny like a rain mac and the same colour as her nails. Sirens got suddenly louder when she wasn’t there, and planes, and small noises outside and in the hallways that you probably wouldn’t notice if you weren’t by yourself – doors and footsteps and voices. I spent the whole time working out how I would escape if there was a fire or a burglar or something.

  Once I could hear somebody breathing right there in the room, I swear I could, and it wasn’t me cos I was hardly breathing at all. I couldn’t move. I could hardly even blink cos I knew he would hear me.

  Every night Mum did the same thing, which was make me drink my milk and close my eyes and tell me not open them again until she got back. Maybe it was my fault cos I always opened them as soon as she was gone.

  Eight (Sam)

  You couldn’t get a dog more different to mine than Doormat. My dog was called Ringo, a massive black thing ten times the size. He could have eaten him for breakfast, but he was terrified of small yappy dogs so Doormat might have had the upper hand.

  I told Bohemia about Ringo while she was walking along with Doormat in her arms. I said, “You’d never carry him, but he might give you a ride on his back.”

  “Nuh-uh,” she said. “No thanks.”

  We played this game of hers while we were walking, called three favourites. We had to, apparently. She picked a category and I had to give my three favourite fruits or colours or TV shows or whatever. I tried to explain that you can only have one favourite thing really, by definition, but she just looked at me blankly and said, “I can have as many favourite anythings as I want. It’s a game.”

  Bohemia’s favourite dogs were Chihuahua, King Charles and Daschund, and mine were Labrador, Wolfhound and anything, because I didn’t care. We had to choose meals and drinks and books and songs, and I thought it would never end. The last one she said was people.