After Iris: the Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby (14 page)

That is why I love it.

Today I am not leaving my room. I hardly left it yesterday either.

It’s difficult to know who Mum and Dad are most angry with. At first they kept shouting at Zoran, then Flora leaped to his defence and yelled that at least Zoran was
here
, unlike them, and then the parents started to go on about trust and responsibility and how she has no idea how difficult everything is for them. Then Mum started to cry about how this family was falling apart and how Dad should do something about it, and Dad said Flora wasn’t allowed to finish the play and Craig had found another dwarf to replace her. Then when he saw how relieved she was he took away her phone and told her she was grounded.

On and on they went, missing the point.  

Grandma left at tea-time. Flora went to her room to check her emails (she told the parents they can’t stop her using her laptop because she needs it for school) and discovered Joss’s friends had filmed her Dance of Doom – as Twig calls it – on their phones and posted it on YouTube.

More tears. More tantrums. More
missing the point.

I went up to my room as soon as dinner was over. I sat by the window. I didn’t film, or think, or look at the stars. I literally just sat, and when Joss knocked on the glass I wasn’t even surprised.

I opened the window.

‘Thanks, Bluebird,’ said Joss. ‘Let me in? It’s freezing out here.’

I didn’t let him in. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked instead.

‘Flora’s not answering my texts,’ he said.

‘Mum and Dad took her phone.’

‘That’s not very nice of them.’

‘Flora has seen the YouTube video,’ I told him. ‘She says she will never forgive you.’

‘Yes she will,’ said Joss. He was so cheerful.

‘Who is Trudi?’ I asked.

‘Trudi,’ said Joss, ‘is ancient history.’

‘She didn’t look like ancient history,’ I said, and Joss said whatever, she was gone now and he wanted to see Flora so please would I go and get her, and I said
no.

I tried to close the window but he grabbed my wrist.

‘Come on, Blue,’ he smiled. ‘Don’t you want to help us?’

I tried to laugh. I think I wanted to show him that I really couldn’t care less about him and Flora but that’s not how it came out. My
whatever
laugh sounded more like a sob.

‘Blue?’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Blue, look at me.’

I did, because I didn’t have a choice. He held my chin in his hand and he forced my head back until I looked him in the eyes, and he must have seen that mine were full of tears.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘It’s the third of December,’ I told him.

He should have guessed what I was talking about. I know I never told him
when
, but he should have guessed. The old Joss would have. I twisted my head so that my cheek lay against his hand and closed my eyes.

‘What’s going on, Bluebird?’

I didn’t answer. He sighed. Not loudly, but I heard him.

‘I really do need to talk to Flora,’ he whispered.

I shook my head. I didn’t watch him go.

Dodi answered her phone on the first ring.

‘I miss her,’ she said, before I even spoke. ‘I miss her so, so much.’

Three years ago last night, Iris left our house, alone.

I was reading
The Hobbit
and didn’t want to stop. Dodi was at her house watching
The X Factor
semi-
finals
. It was raining and it was cold and somehow Iris had heard that even though it was winter and not at all the time for breeding a vixen had given birth to a litter of cubs under the old shed in the bit of the park where no one is allowed to go, and she had decided we had to rescue them
now
.

‘It’s so cold!’ she pleaded. ‘They’re so little!’

‘Their mother will bite us,’ I said.  ‘We have no idea how to look after baby foxes, the park is locked, it’s raining and I’ve got to really good bit in my book.’

‘IT’S THE SEMI-FINAL!’ said Dodi when Iris rang her. ‘And anyway, you know how I feel about wild animals.’

Iris hated reading almost as much as she hated
The X Factor
. She loved animals and she was always in a rush. She never looked where she was going.

We were her almost partners in crime, her faithful lieutenants. We were supposed to look after her.

The florist’s van hit her exactly halfway between our two houses, by the entrance to the park.

The driver was distraught.

‘I’m sorry,’ sobbed Dodi on the phone last night.

I hate the stupid
Hobbit
. 

‘Your parents have gone to the park with Jas and Twig,’ said Zoran. ‘They thought you were asleep. Where is Flora?’

I pointed at the window. ‘She went out there,’ I said. ‘Hours ago. To see Joss.’

Zoran sighed and looked discouraged.

‘Three years ago last night,’ I said, ‘my twin sister Iris was hit by a van.’

Zoran sat down next to me on the floor.

‘Nobody said anything,’ I whispered. ‘They were all too busy shouting at Flora about her stupid play, and
they never said anything.
’

Zoran held my hand.

‘Joss Bateman,’ I said after a while, ‘is not as lovely as I thought he was,’ and Zoran said that people rarely are.

‘I have only just realised,’ I said,

‘I wish I had known your sister,’ said Zoran, and I wanted to say ‘I wish you’d known her too,’ except I couldn’t speak because my throat hurt. Zoran squeezed my hand harder.

‘I have a sister,’ he said. ‘But I never see her.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Have I not told you about my family?’ said Zoran and I said no, and he said it was a sad story and I said well, today was a day for sad stories.

So then Zoran told me how when he was six years old his parents travelled through their country which was at war, all the way from the town where they lived to the coast, where they put him and his sister on a boat.

‘To England? All the way from Bosnia?’

‘To Italy, and then we took a train. We were lucky, we had passports and some money and Alina’s address in Putney to give to anyone who asked us. My sister was older than me, she spoke a little English.’

‘Why didn’t your parents go too?’

‘They meant to, but then there wasn’t enough room for them on the boat, or rather not enough money to pay for them too. They said they would come after us. That was the story at the time. Looking back on it, I think they always knew we would be going alone.’

I had a vision then of a young Zoran crying on a rickety old ferry, with every deck crammed full of people trying to catch one last look at their loved ones on the quayside, and six-year-old Zoran waving to his mother, with his big sister standing behind him holding his hand. In my head the sky was blue and the sun was hot and there were gulls circling overhead. The boat pushed away from the quay and everyone was crying and the people on the quayside were growing smaller and smaller, including Zoran’s mother whose heart was breaking into a million little pieces even though she was waving back and smiling.

‘You never saw her again,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Zoran. ‘I didn’t.’

‘How did they die?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And your sister?’

‘She went back after the war. She is married to a Bosnian man, they have two sons and she works as a paediatric nurse. She was always good at looking after people. She doesn’t like to come to England, because it reminds her of leaving our parents. And I don’t like to go to Bosnia, for the same reason. Sometimes we meet up in Paris.’

We stayed there, not talking again, and I thought of his parents doing what they thought was right for their children, and his sister helping children who were sick, and then I thought of Iris.

‘It seems to me, Blue, that you are lost,’ said Zoran after a while. ‘And yet also that you do not wish to be found.’

Zoran and his cryptic comments.

‘You should go and see her,’ I said. ‘Your sister.’

‘Maybe I will, soon,’ said Zoran.

‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

‘Lena,’ he said. ‘My sister’s name is Lena.’  

I started to cry then. Zoran put his arms round me.

We sat there for ages not talking, and the tears just kept on coming, as together we watched the light outside my window fade from grey to blue then black.