Secret Friends

by Elizabeth Laird

  He reached out for a jacket that hung on a peg behind the door and threw it round my shoulders.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ I said, ‘but I had a terrible dream and I wanted to see your mum and dad and tell them I was sorry.’

  ‘Lucy!’

  I looked up. Rafaella’s parents were standing at the top of the stairs in their dressing gowns. They seemed to have grown smaller, as if they had shrunk in on themselves.

  Rafaella’s mum came down the stairs slowly, as if all her joints were stiff. She didn’t say anything, but stood shaking her head as though she had just heard some news that she could not believe. She held a tissue to her lips and her eyes were fixed on me as if she was seeing me for the first time.

  ‘The child is shivering,’ Rafaella’s father said. ‘Come into the warm. Dani, put on the gas fire.’

  We went into the sitting room.

  ‘I dreamed about her, about Rafaella, and about all of you last night,’ I said. ‘You were angry with me. I know it was all my fault. I started it all, but I didn’t mean to … I never knew she’d … She didn’t even tell me about the operation.’

  Rafaella’s mum began to say something but her voice was choked up with tears. Her husband put out his hand to stop her speaking.

  ‘Wait, my dear,’ he said. ‘Let her say what she has come to say.’ He settled himself painfully in his chair. ‘What was your fault, Lucy?’

  ‘On the first day of term, the day I first met Rafaella. I laughed at her name. I said I’d call her Earwig instead. The others heard me. They always called her Earwig after that. They were horrid to her. They used to look at her as if she wasn’t there. She said – she said it was like being one of the living dead.’

  I sat down on the floor, put my face in my hands and sobbed like I hadn’t done before. Then I smelt a soft powdery smell as Rafaella’s mum bent down and pushed a tissue into my hand. I felt something else too. An arm, thin but very strong, went round my shoulders and shook me gently.

  ‘You know what,’ Dani said. ‘You’re talking a load of rubbish.’

  I was so surprised I stopped crying and looked at him. ‘Rafaella said you were the only good thing about that school, the only person who kept her going. She nearly killed me when I was so horrible to you that time you came here.’

  ‘But I was the one who called her Earwig!’

  ‘It was better than what they called her at her last school. She was “Batty” there.’

  ‘But I went off with all the others! I left her on her own!’

  ‘She understood. “Lucy and me are secret friends”, she used to say. “She’s not like the others. She makes school bearable.” That’s what she said.’

  I looked over his head into his mother’s eyes. There was no anger there, only grief, a grief that seemed almost to drown her.

  ‘Lucy,’ his dad said. ‘Dani is right. You were a real friend to Rafaella. Listen, why don’t you go up to her room and take something of hers that you can keep. You would like that, wouldn’t you?’

  I nodded and jumped up.

  I knew that if I looked at Rafaella’s mum again the tears would fall faster than ever.

  I was glad that none of them came upstairs with me. I wanted to be on my own.

  I pushed open the door of Rafaella’s bedroom and went in.

  It was just as it had been before. Her bed was made up. Her school skirt hung from a hanger behind the door and her school books were stacked on the table. Propped up on them in pride of place was the Christmas card I’d sent her.

  I looked round helplessly. It seemed wrong to open her drawers and look through them. Instead I let my eye wander along a shelf where she had kept some books and a few little ornaments.

  A small parcel wrapped in Christmas paper caught my eye. I lifted it down. It was labelled ‘Lucy’. I tore the paper off. Inside was a little yellow bear, a twin of the blue one I’d given her. There was a note too.

  It said:

  I stood there for a long time. Then I heard someone at the door. I turned round. It was Rafaella’s mum.

  I couldn’t say a word. I just held out the letter and the little yellow bear. She took them, and read the letter silently.

  ‘Oh, Lucy,’ she said. ‘I am so sorry. She gave these to me to post to you but I forgot all about them. So the little blue bear was a present from you? I never guessed. We found it after …’

  I burst out crying again then. I couldn’t help it. And she did too. And we put our arms round each other and cried and cried. We stopped at last and dried our eyes.

  ‘I don’t think I can take anything else of hers,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t seem right, somehow.’

  ‘We’ll think about it another time,’ she said. ‘It’s so cold up here. Come down to the kitchen. I’ll make you some breakfast.’

  ‘I couldn’t eat a thing,’ I said.

  She smiled sadly.

  ‘Neither could I.’

  ‘Are you two coming downstairs?’ Dani called up. ‘I’ve got the breakfast ready.’

  Rafaella’s mum and I looked at each other and laughed shakily.

  ‘Lucy,’ she said. ‘Dear Lucy. You’ll come back often to visit us, won’t you? I couldn’t bear to lose you too.’

  I followed her out of the room and gently closed the door behind me. Then I followed her downstairs to the warmth and light of her kitchen.

  Turn the page to read the opening chapters of Elizabeth Laird’s award-winning first novel, Red Sky in the Morning

  Chapter One

  As long as I live, I shall never forget the night my brother was born. For one thing, I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I’d only been in bed a few minutes when I heard Dad talking on the telephone. My bedroom’s pretty small, and if I lean out of bed far enough I can open the door without actually getting out of bed, so I did, and I heard Dad say,

  ‘That’s right, the second house on the left past the shops. And please hurry.’

  His voice sounded so urgent I guessed at once he must be calling the ambulance and I knew my time had come. Well, it was Mum’s time really, but mine too, in a way, because I was going to be in charge while she was away. I’d practised everything in my mind, so I just got calmly out of bed, and put on my dressing gown, and groped around for my glasses. Then I went calmly out of the room and walked down the hall to Mum and Dad’s bedroom. I didn’t even run.

  ‘Now just relax, Mum,’ I said. ‘Everything’s under control.’ I must have said it too calmly because no one took any notice. Mum’s face was screwed up, and Dad was looking at her, standing quite still, with one leg in his trousers and the other out. He looked perfectly ridiculous. Then Mum’s face went ordinary again, and she turned her head and saw me, and she looked quite normal. In fact, she gave me a smile. Then Dad started pulling on his trousers again. It was like starting up a video again after a freeze frame.

  After that, everything I’d planned to say was swept out of my head, because things happened too fast. Mum’s face screwed up again, and she started taking loud, rasping breaths. I’ve never seen such an awful look in anyone’s eyes, not even in a war film.

  Dad grabbed his jacket, and pushed past me out of the room. Then I suppose he must have realized it was me, because he came back and ruffled my hair the way he does when he wants to be nice to me. I hate it, but I don’t like hurting his feelings, so I just suffer in silence.

  ‘Be a nice girl,’ he said. ‘Go and get me a cup of tea. The ambulance won’t be here for another five minutes. I’ve got to go and phone your granny.’

  I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never heard anything so callous in all my life. There was his wife, probably dying, in the most awful agony, trying to give birth to his own child, and all he could think of were his own selfish pleasures. I realized how woman has suffered from man’s selfishness since time began.

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ I said with dignity. ‘I expect Mum needs me. You’ll find the tea in the usual place.’

  But then Mum gave an awful scr
eam, and Dad rushed back into the bedroom and shut the door in my face. I didn’t dare go in. I didn’t even want to any more. I felt too small and helpless. Frightful thoughts rushed through my mind, like what would happen if Mum died, and I had to sacrifice my youth to looking after Dad and bringing up Katy, who was seven, and absolutely horrible.

  The minute I thought of Katy, I remembered my responsibilities. It was my job to run the house and family while Mum was otherwise engaged, and I decided I had better start by running Katy. I went back down the corridor to her room.

  Katy is an unusually irritating child. Even Mum admits that she’s a nuisance. She says it’s because Katy’s going through a stage, but either Mum’s wrong, or else it’s a very long stage, because Katy seems to have been in it since she was born. One of the worst things about her is that you can never get her to go to sleep. We all have to creep around the house once she’s gone to bed, and I can’t even play my own tapes in my own room, which I feel, quite frankly, is a violation of my human rights. And she wakes up in the middle of the night if a moth so much as brushes its wings against her bedroom window. I never would have thought she’d sleep through the noise Mum was making, but that’s the maddening thing about Katy. She’s so unpredictable. There wasn’t a sound coming from her room. I knelt down, and looked through the keyhole. She always has a nightlight on because she thinks she’s so delicious that witches are just dying to come and eat her in the night, so I could see clearly enough that she was fast asleep.

  ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘that gives me one less thing to worry about,’ but at the same time I almost wished Katy had been awake, because I hadn’t got anything to do. I certainly wasn’t intending to betray Mum by making Dad a cup of tea.

  Then I realized that I could at least phone Granny, which Dad seemed to have forgotten about, so I went downstairs to the phone in the hall, and was just beginning to dial when the front doorbell went. The ambulance had come.

  There were only two ambulancemen but they filled up our small downstairs hall completely. It’s so narrow that if two people meet, one of them has to turn sideways and stand against the wall while the other squashes past. I used to think of ways of making sure it wasn’t me who had to stand against the wall, like pretending, if I was holding something, that it was very heavy, or being in a hurry for the loo, but I stopped all that kind of childish thing years ago. Still, I’ve never stopped minding that our hall is so mean and small, not like Debbie’s (she used to be my best friend), and suddenly I got worried about it.

  How would they get Mum down the stairs on a stretcher? Supposing it stuck, like that time when Dad was fitting units in their bedroom, and he and Mum were trying to get the old wardrobe down the stairs? It got completely wedged between the wall and the banisters, and Dad had to get a saw and cut it in half before it took off any more wallpaper. He was furious, and it took hours to free the wardrobe. But Mum hadn’t got hours. If she got stuck on her stretcher, she’d have to have the baby right there on the stairs.

  As it happened, Mum didn’t need a stretcher at all. Dad came out of the bedroom, looking pale and shaky and awful, and the men ran upstairs, and then one rushed out again and said,

  ‘Where’s the telephone, love?’

  And he dialled, and when I heard him talking I started to feel trembly myself, and sick.

  ‘This is Alan here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an emergency over on Blythe Road. Lady in labour. Too far gone to get her to hospital. She’s started pushing, and the baby’s almost there. Stan’s doing what he can, but he says it’s not looking quite right. Best get a doctor over here quick. We’ve got the oxygen and stuff, but we haven’t got all the neo-natal kit if they need to do full resuscitation.’

  He must have forgotten about me, because he started off up the stairs again when he’d put the receiver down. I couldn’t bear to let him go. I had to know what was going on.

  ‘Is – is everything all right?’ I said. It sounded more feeble than it meant to, but I didn’t know what to say. I was frightened.

  ‘Course it is,’ he said. He was using that awful cheerful voice they use to children when they want to deceive them. ‘Just a precaution. Your mummy’s going to be fine. So’s the baby, I expect. It all happened just a bit too quick, that’s all.’

  He patted my shoulder just as if he’d been a relative. I was only twelve then, but I was mature for my age, and it was not surprising that I felt offended.

  ‘I’m quite prepared to give blood, if necessary,’ I said. The idea made me feel sick, but if Mum needed my blood, there was naturally no more to be said. He had the cheek to laugh.

  ‘Oh, we won’t need your blood,’ he said. ‘Best thing you can do is be a good girl and keep out of the way. Tell you what, do you know how to make a cup? Why don’t you put the kettle on, then? Me and Stan could do with a cuppa when we’ve finished with this lot.’

  If he hadn’t put it like that, of course, I wouldn’t have dreamed of making a cup of tea. But I knew that if I didn’t he’d think I didn’t know how to, so I went to the kitchen, and filled up the kettle. But all the time it was boiling, and while I was putting mugs and milk and sugar on to the tray, I kept thinking about Mum and the baby.

  Up until then, I hadn’t thought about the baby much as a real person. Quite honestly, I’d been shocked when Mum told me she was pregnant. I couldn’t imagine her and Dad having sex. The whole idea seemed disgusting. Especially in our house. Their bedroom didn’t look right for it. It was too ordinary. But I’d got used to her getting bigger, and being tired, and relying on me more for things. In some ways I’d enjoyed it. I got quite good at doing a fry-up for supper, and heating up pizzas in the oven. I could even do lamb chops and two veg, though it took hours to peel the potatoes.

  Somehow, though, I hadn’t thought much about the baby. I’d wanted a brother, I knew that much, mainly because I didn’t want another Katy round the place, and I’d started knitting a cardigan, but I’m not much good at knitting, so I’d pulled it undone and tried to learn to crochet instead. But it got in a tangle, so I never managed to get anything finished. Dad had got the pram down out of the attic, and Mum had lined the cot again in some new flowery material. It looked pretty, waiting there all clean and empty, beside her bed, but I hadn’t been able to imagine a real, live baby in it.

  Then I remembered something I’d read about in a Victorian novel. Grandma’s got a whole stack of them, that she used to read about a hundred and fifty years ago. They have titles like Lost in London, and Little Faith, and they’re all horribly sad and religious. The children go around bare foot in the snow, selling matches, and their mothers are gin-sodden, and the babies die, and when you read them you cry and cry. I even got sinusitis once, because I cried so much over Christie’s Old Organ. But I like them too. After I’ve read one, I feel pure, and refined, and ready to face death.

  Anyway, when babies are born in those old books, the mother’s poor eldest daughter is always sent to the kitchens to boil gallons of water. It never explained what the water was for, but I knew that was the right thing to do. So I got out the pressure cooker, and the biggest pans I could find, and filled them up, and turned on every burner on the stove. I slopped a bit on the floor, but I managed all right.

  It took quite a long time, finding everything, and filling them up, and I was still at work when Dr Randall came. He went up the stairs two at a time, and then another ambulance came, and the men took this funny box thing upstairs. After a while they came down again, holding it carefully, and drove away. The doctor was still there. I could hear him in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, which is right above the kitchen. But the rest of the house was quiet. Then I realized that the first ambulancemen, Alan and Stan, had gone too, and they hadn’t even bothered to have their cup of tea. I knew then for certain that they’d just been humouring me, and trying to keep me out of the way. Typical!

  It was so quiet upstairs that I began to feel a bit worried. What could they all be doing? Was Mum all right? And shouldn
’t the baby be crying? Mum had promised that I’d be the first after Dad to see it, but no one had called me. I wanted desperately to know what was going on. But I felt too scared to go up and open the bedroom door and just walk in. Medical things seem kind of holy to me. Bursting in on the doctor doing something would be as bad as jumping up in church and shouting ‘Hi there!’ to the vicar.

  Then I remembered the tea. Surely everyone would really and truly want a cup of tea by this time. After all, it was practically morning. The kitchen window was filling with a sort of greyish light, and there were red streaks across the sky. I’d never seen the dawn before. It was eerie and grand. Suitable for a birth, really. I checked that I’d put out enough mugs, filled the teapot (the kettle had boiled ages ago) and staggered upstairs with the tray. Then I put it down, and opened the door a crack, and picked it up, and went in, holding the tray in front of me so it would be the first thing they all saw.

  I could see at once that they’d been having a very deep conversation. Mum was lying back in bed, looking white and tired, and Dad was sitting beside her, holding one of her hands. Dr Randall was on the other side of the bed, looking serious. Mum saw me first.

  ‘Oh Annie!’ she said, and gave a wobbly kind of laugh, and then Dad jumped up and came towards me, and made a big fuss about taking the tray. I wasn’t fooled. I knew he was trying to stop me seeing Mum cry. I knew quite well that that was what she was doing.

  ‘Where is it? Is it a boy? Can’t I see him yet?’ I whispered to Dad. He just stood there, not saying anything. Then he turned, with the tray in his hands, and looked over to Dr Randall, and Dr Randall came towards me and said in that stupid voice they never use to each other,

  ‘Yes, Anna, you’ve got a dear little brother, but he’s not very well, and we’ve had to take him to hospital.’

  ‘That box,’ I whispered. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to speak normally. ‘He was in that box, wasn’t he? Is he …?’