Dizzy

by Unknown

  Hiya

  I thought I’d tell you a bit about myself. I live in the Scottish countryside with my husband and our two children, a girl and a boy. We also have three cats, two rabbits and a mad, hairy lurcher very like Leggit in this story!

  When I’m not writing books I work as an art teacher travelling around the local primary schools, and also as the agony aunt for a magazine. I’ve always loved daydreaming and inventing stories, and the stories just got bigger and bigger until they had to be told. Some of the ideas in Dizzy come from real life – I used to be a chocolate-eating vegan, and I still drink yukky herb tea! I also have a slightly charred toy mouse stuck to my pinboard, but that’s another story…

  I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  Best wishes,

  Cathy Cassidy

  cathycassidy.com

  Books by Cathy Cassidy

  DIZZY

  DRIFTWOOD

  INDIGO BLUE

  SCARLETT

  SUNDAE GIRL

  LUCKY STAR

  PUFFIN

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  puffinbooks.com

  First published 2004

  20

  Copyright © Cathy Cassidy, 2004

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193883-7

  Thanks!

  To Catriona, who told me to stop daydreaming and start writing – and gave great feedback and advice. To Liam, for putting up with my stressy, can’t-do-it moments, and Calum and Caitlin, who endured many dinners of peanut butter on toast and were such excellent first readers. Thanks to Mum, Dad, Andy, Lori, Mary-Jane, Fiona, Helen, Kirsty, Sheena, Zarah and all my brilliant friends – for believing in me, even when I didn’t. Also to Dr Gill Russell for help with the starry stuff, and to Dr Shelagh Neil for advice on the medical bits.

  Thanks to Tallulah and Roxanne, whose enthusiasm helped me to find the best agent in the world, Darley Anderson, and also to Lucie, Julia and everyone at the agency. Last but not least, thanks to Rebecca, Francesca and the whole fab team at Puffin, for making the dream come true.

  I never sleep, the night before my birthday.

  It’s not the usual kind of excitement – I don’t get all wound up about whether I’ll get a new CD player or a pair of rollerblades or a guitar. It’s a guitar, anyway – Dad told me.

  I’m not stressed out about a party or a sleepover or a trip to the ice rink, either. We have this tradition, Dad and me. We stay home with a takeaway and a video. If it’s his birthday, Dad picks Indian food, along with something hippy-dippy or all-action to watch, like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. When I was little, I used to go for Disney, then soppy stuff like The Secret Garden or Fairy Tale. This year, we’ve got Sky TV and I get to have complete charge of the remote control all evening. I’ll probably just skip between MTV and Kerrang!, munching pizza as I flick.

  Birthdays are pretty cool, I know. It’s just that, no matter how hard I try, I can’t relax, I can’t not care – and I’m always a little bit scared the night before. Every year, I’m up at dawn watching for the postman, because there’s one very special card – a parcel, even, sometimes – I just have to get.

  It’s the only day of the year I hear from her.

  When I was five, I got a postcard from Kathmandu. It had a picture of a Buddhist temple with a pointy golden roof and weird, staring eyes painted beneath it, and the message was written in three colours of felt pen with loads of kisses.

  When I was six, there was a postcard of a donkey with flowers in its mouth, and the postmark said West Cork, Ireland. The next year I got a proper birthday card and a handmade rag doll with pink and purple hair made from fluffy yarn, and a dress stitched from somebody’s old tie-dye T-shirt.

  On my eighth birthday, there was a postcard from Marrakesh in Morocco, a picture of a grinning Arab girl with armfuls of gold bracelets. The next year I got a rainbow-striped hat with a floppy brim and a postcard of a castle in Wales. I wore the hat every day, till the edges got frayed and the colours ran in the wash. Then I stuck it to my pinboard, along with the postcards and the photos, and it’s still there now.

  When I was ten, I got a dreamcatcher, a circle of willow criss-crossed with a crazy spider’s web of bright threads and beads. Soft, white feathers hung down either side, with some tiny bells in the middle. The postcard (a spooky stone circle in Wiltshire, this time) told me to hang the dreamcatcher over my bed. Its magic web would catch all my bad dreams and melt them away, so I could sleep safe and deep, all night long. Wish I’d had that when I was five.

  Last year, when I was eleven, she sent a silver chain with a tiny chunk of rose-quartz crystal hanging from it. I always wear it, even at night. There was no postcard that year, just a letter. It’s the kind of letter that’s difficult to read, even now, but also the kind of letter I needed to have a long, long time ago. It said that she loved me, that she was sorry, and that one day we’d be together again.

  I rolled the letter up, tied it with a strand of purple yarn from my moulting rag doll and put it in my treasure box. Then I stuck the envelope to my pinboard, so I could see her loopy, gel-pen handwriting and the postmark, which said somewhere in Cornwall. Not so very far away. But far enough.

  I love my mum, but I can’t really remember her. Not properly.

  There are two photos of her on my pinboard.

  In the first, she’s standing in the rain on a pavement in Birmingham, hand in hand with Dad. It’s their wedding picture, taken just outside the registry office, twelve and a half years ago.

  Mum is tiny and elfin with startling lilac-coloured hair, all braided and beaded and hanging down around her shoulders. She’s wearing what looks like a lace tablecloth. It was a lace tablecloth, Dad told me. It cost a quid in a charity shop, and she made it into a weird, dip-hemmed number and wore it over a purple sack-dress, with purple and black stripy tights and Doc Marten boots.

  Dad looks just as scary. He’s so young and skinny and smiley, in patched, worn-out jeans and a vast, black mohair jumper. His hair is dyed ketchup-red, and it stands straight up as if he’d just stuck his fingers in an electric socket.

  I’m in this picture, too, hidden away under the lace tablecloth. I’m just a bump, a secret, impossible to se
e because of the way Mum’s holding her flowers (dandelions, along with some orange daisy-things pinched from the local park). All the same, I’m there, and I bet I’m the reason they’re standing there in the rain, smiling at the camera and brushing confetti out of their hair.

  Five months later, there I am for real, in the second photo. I’m a few weeks old, a small, angry face with black button eyes and a shock of dark hair, dressed in something bright and stripy. Mum’s face gazes up at the camera, looking pale and bewildered, her lilac hair chopped short now, tousled and scruffy. I’ve looked hard at that picture for signs of blissed-out motherly love and all that happy-families stuff, but Mum just looks lost, unhappy.

  She left when I was four.

  I don’t remember, of course, but by then we’d lived in a bus, a caravan, a squat, a council flat. We toured the music festivals, Mum and Dad selling lentil soup, dreamcatchers, scented candles, handmade earrings. They worked in an organic vegetable garden, a wholefood café, a clog workshop, a pottery. They signed on the dole and lived on social security and bought me second-hand shoes and forgot to brush my hair so it got all matted and fluffy and made old ladies at bus stops tut and shake their heads.

  They tried, Dad said, to give me a name, a family, a future. She tried. Must try harder, like my maths teacher says.

  When I was four, she ran away with a bloke called Mitch. He was taking a Volkswagen camper van to Kathmandu, and Mum must have thought that sounded better than another ten or fifteen years of wiping my nose and not brushing my hair and reading me stories about fluffy bunnies. She kissed me extra hard one night, and told me she loved me, and in the morning she was gone.

  We managed, Dad and me. We stayed in the council flat and I started school and he started college, doing ceramics, which is just a fancy name for pottery. I made friends with Sara and Sasha and Jade, and Dad made mugs and bowls and wiggly-edged plates all glazed with speckly stuff. He also made beautiful models of elves and fairies and sad-faced mermaids, and all of them looked a bit like Mum, but I never mentioned that.

  He finished his course and we rented a place with a workshop attached, and after a while he made enough money for us to live on, selling the wiggly-edged bowls and plates to craft shops and the elfy-things to posh shops and galleries. We stopped eating lentil stew every day and progressed to French bread, oven chips and frozen vegetable lasagne, and we were happy. Mostly.

  Last Christmas, Dad bought me pink flowery fairy lights, and I draped them all around my pinboard, the board where I’ve stuck all my postcards, along with the hat and the photos and the loved-up raggy doll.

  ‘Looks like some kind of Hindu shrine,’ Dad said when he saw it, and it does, a bit, but that’s how I like it.

  It’s all I’ve got of my mum.

  ‘Hey, Dizzy! Wake up, birthday girl!’

  Dad brings me breakfast in bed on my birthday, every year. And every year, I hide under the covers and pretend I haven’t been lying awake, thinking about Mum. I yawn and stretch and wipe imaginary sleep from my eyes.

  The room floods with light and Dad lowers a tray laden with birthday breakfast on to the duvet. Each year, it’s the same – my favourite, cheese on toast, but with a special birthday twist. Dad always layers yellow cheese over the bread, then shapes a number out of orange cheese and puts it on top to melt under the grill. This year, there are two slices of toast spelling out the fact that I’m twelve. It smells fantastic.

  Dad sits down on the edge of the bed. He’s skinny and mop-haired, wearing striped pyjamas and an ancient T-shirt.

  ‘Happy birthday, Dizzy,’ he grins, giving me a hug.

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  No more birthday blues. I bite into the toast. Happy.

  There’s a flower in a jam jar on the tray, and a banana milkshake, and a small, familiar parcel wrapped in blue paper. These days, I’d rather have apple juice or Coke than banana milkshake, but it was my favourite once. I tear off the blue paper and there’s another old favourite, a tube of Smarties.

  Everything is just the way it was the first time Dad made me a birthday breakfast, when I was five, the first birthday after Mum left. I like it like that. It’s a tradition.

  We share out the Smarties and Dad brings in my pressies, a couple of small parcels and something huge and guitar-shaped tied up with newspaper and Sellotape. I rip off the paper to uncover the glossy curves, wood the colour of honey and chocolate.

  ‘Dad, it’s gorgeous!’ I squeal. I strum out ‘Happy Birthday’, slightly out of tune. My other pressies are the plum suede trainers I admired in town last week and a cool make-up bag stuffed with glittery nail varnishes. Perfect!

  I’m all showered and dressed by the time the post plops on to the mat in the hallway. I flick through the fat, pastel birthday card envelopes, looking for a postcard, a parcel, anything addressed in rainbow-coloured pen in her childish, loopy writing.

  There’s nothing from Mum.

  After school, we pile into the window seat at Dimitri’s, Jade and Sara and Sasha and me. We’re all school bags, stripy ties and smiles, and Dimitri rolls his eyes as he wanders over to take the order.

  ‘Four Cokes, please,’ Sasha says, wafting a fiver.

  Dimitri pretends to be shocked. Normally, we order two Cokes and four straws between us, and make them last an hour at least.

  ‘Four Cokes?’ he asks. ‘What’s the special occasion?’

  ‘Dizzy’s birthday,’ Sara tells him. ‘Twelve today!’

  Dimitri mutters something about hopeless kids, and when the Cokes arrive I laugh, because he’s loaded mine up with cocktail umbrellas, ice, lemon slices, even a huge strawberry, all floating in a sea of brown fizz.

  We sip and chat and roll up our white shirtsleeves to compare tans, because it’s 18 June and summer is trying hard to burn through the grey city clouds. Sara and I are milk-bottle white, Sasha’s freckly and Jade is a gorgeous golden brown, but then that doesn’t count, because she always is. We decide to ditch our school trousers in favour of little skirts and ankle socks.

  ‘How is anyone meant to look cool in school uniform?’ Jade demands, dragging off her tie. ‘Green with puke-yellow stripes? Attractive. Very.’

  ‘Although,’ Sasha says, dragging the stripy tie from Jade, ‘from time to time, they do come in handy…’

  I don’t see it coming.

  There’s a quick scuffle and Sasha has the tie over my eyes. Everything goes black and there’s a hand muffling my squeals and more dragging me upright. My so-called mates twirl me round three times, then there’s a firm shove in the small of my back and I’m sitting again, tearing at the blindfold as they start singing ‘Happy Birthday’.

  The tie slides down my face and I look up, pink-cheeked. Dimitri is there, carrying four slices of hot chocolate-fudge cake with ice-cream scoops. The largest slice is stiff with pink birthday candles, flickering dangerously. There are even a few stuck in the vanilla ice.

  I laugh and blush and blow out the candles and the café breaks into a sudden round of applause. I love my friends.

  *

  ‘You’ve got chocolate on your nose,’ Sasha tells me later, as we mooch along the street. We’ve linked arms and the four of us fill the pavement, high on fudge cake and the luxury of having a whole Coke each.

  ‘I love my bracelet,’ I tell her with feeling, jangling my wrist while she dabs at my nose with a tissue. ‘And the CD, and the posters.’ I beam at Sara and Jade.

  At the traffic lights, Sara and I wave goodbye to the others and cross over, taking a short-cut through the park.

  ‘Any postcards?’ she asks quietly as we pick our way across the grass. ‘Anything from…’

  ‘Mum? No, not yet.’

  ‘Well, that one from Morocco that time, you said that was late.’

  ‘Three weeks,’ I told her. ‘I was only eight. I watched for the postman every morning.’

  ‘I know,’ Sara sighs.

  I also cried myself to sleep every night, stopped eating, stop
ped talking. Then the postcard came and everything was OK again. Dad said the postal service in North Africa was probably a bit dodgy. It definitely wasn’t Mum’s fault. Not like she’d forgotten, or anything.

  ‘Anyway,’ I say brightly, ‘Dad’s ordering in a pizza. Three cheese and mushroom. And I can have MTV on all night if I like.’

  We leave the park, cross the road. Sara lives in a red-brick semi halfway along the street. The garden’s stuffed with violently coloured flowers and the grass is so short it looks like it’s been ironed.

  ‘Coming in for a bit?’ she asks.

  ‘Nah. Pizza’s calling. Thanks for the posters, Sara, I love them. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘See ya.’

  I turn away. My chirpy mood has disappeared along with Sara. There’s a heavy feeling inside my chest, like I just swallowed a small iceberg and not a vast slab of hot chocolate-fudge cake. Suddenly, I feel a whole lot older than twelve.

  Our flat is right down at the end of the road, a tall town house divided into three apartments. We’re in the ground-floor one, so we get to use the workshop (which was once a garage) for Dad’s studio. I turn into the drive and see a big, grubby van skewed across the flagstones, one front wheel squashing a straggly patch of lupins. Mr Desai from upstairs will have a fit.

  It could be someone delivering sacks of clay for Dad, although there’s no courier logo on the side. The van is mostly red with one blue wing and one grey one. One of the back doors is purple, and someone’s scrawled ‘wash me’ in the thick grime of its window. Lovely.

  I let myself into the flat. Dad’s left a pile of cards from the second post on the hall table for me, and I take a deep breath before scanning it quickly.

  Nothing with her handwriting.

  I open the cards, trying not to feel bad. Twenty quid from Auntie Mel, a card with kittens on it from Mr Desai, a book token from Mrs Coulter, my old childminder. If they can remember, why can’t she?

  I can hear Dad talking to someone in the living room. I hope it’s not Lucy, his girlfriend. She’s OK, and I’m getting used to her, but I don’t really want to share my birthday with her. Birthdays are for me and Dad.