After Iris: the Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby (15 page)

Zoran understands. How is it my family doesn’t?

I left them to their singing last night and came up to my room to get some peace.  I lay on my bed and used the camera to focus on the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. They freaked me out at first but Iris loved them, so I brought them with me when I moved. Downstairs, they were back on the Beatles, with Zoran thumping out ‘All You Need Is Love’ and them all belting it out, even Mum and Dad, and I thought, is that really all it takes to make them forget? A piano appears and they turn into the family von Trapp?

Mum came up. Flushed from singing but wearing a serious expression and carrying a mug of tea.

‘I brought you some chocolate biscuits as well,’ she said.

She put the mug on my bedside table together with the biscuits. I filmed the ceiling hoping she would leave, but she just stood at my window watching the rain.

‘You were singing,’ I said at last. ‘Yesterday was the third of December and you didn’t say anything and today you were
singing
.’

She turned away from the window. I carried on filming the ceiling.

‘Look at me, Blue,’ whispered Mum. ‘Look at me
really
, not hiding behind your camera.  Look at me and tell me it doesn’t hurt me every bit as much as it hurts you.’

‘You were singing,’ I repeated, still filming the ceiling. ‘And I would like you to leave.’

She stopped at the door on her way out.

‘Happiness is a choice, Blue,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it’s the hardest choice we have to make.’

When Mum was gone, I picked up the mug of tea. It was exactly how I like it, hot and milky and very sweet.

Exactly how Iris liked it.

I drank it all, down to the very last drop.

Then I threw the mug against the wall and smashed it.

I couldn’t care less about the parents’ stupid new rules. Today I marched up to Jake as soon as I got to school and told him that I wanted him to teach me to skate.

‘Properly,’ I said. ‘Tonight. After school.’

‘WOO HOO!’ said Tom. ‘I’m up for it.’

‘Not you,’ I hissed. ‘Just him. And I’ll need your board.’

‘DOUBLE WOO HOO!’ said Tom. Jake and I both silenced him with a glare.

It was totally different tonight. Usually, when we all go together, the boys are joking and messing about, but Jake and I hardly spoke. We got to the park and he asked, very quietly, what I wanted to do.

‘I want to learn to fly,’ I told him.

‘Right,’ said Jake.

I stood in the middle of the park, staring up at the ramps. I pushed myself off, making straight for one of them, trying to gather enough speed to go up it, and I slid straight back down again.

‘Not like that,’ said Jake. ‘Watch me.’

He showed me how to rock sideways, each time going a little higher up the ramps, gathering speed. I fell off, but before he could ask if I’d hurt myself I tried again. Backwards and forwards, higher and higher, falling, hurting, getting up, until by the time it was almost dark I was bruised all over but soaring to the top of each ramp and whooshing back down and up the other side. I was cold when I started but each time I fell I shed another layer and each time I got back on I felt lighter and went higher, hair flying, the night wind whipping my face.

Jake said it was time for a break and we sat with our backs against the ramp, sharing a Snickers he pulled out of his bag.

‘Iris would have loved skateboards,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’m surprised she never tried.’

‘Is that what this is all about?’ asked Jake. He wasn’t looking at me when he said it, but straight ahead at the ramp opposite.

‘Mum says happiness is a choice,’ I told him. ‘And Zoran says I’m lost but don’t want to be found.’

‘You’re here now, though,’ Jake said.

Our feet were almost touching. I jumped up and grabbed my board.

‘I’m going to try and flip,’ I said.

‘I’m not sure you’re ready for that,’ he called, but I was already away.

Jake was wrong, I was ready for it. All I’d done this afternoon was go up and down the ramps, faster and faster, but this time I flew off the top. Literally, I flew. It didn’t last long but there was a moment which felt like forever when the board left the ground and I was just floating, and then I managed to twist, and the board hit the ground with a jolt which went straight up my spine, and I skidded down the ramp on my tummy and lay at the bottom in a heap, with everything hurting, and I laughed. I laughed until I had cramps in my tummy and my eyes were streaming and even I couldn’t tell any more if I was laughing or crying.

When I finally stopped, Jake was standing beside me .

‘That was brilliant,’ he said. He held out his hands to help me to my feet and smiled. ‘That was totally brilliant.’

For a moment, standing there in the dark with the wind rustling the trees and the whole park to ourselves, we looked at each other like we had never seen each other before.

‘Brilliant,’ repeated Jake. And then we left the park, carrying our boards.

Mum and Dad have been away all week, and despite their rules Zoran isn’t even trying to stop Flora from seeing Joss. This might be because at the moment, she is the only happy person in the house. She was practically singing when she climbed back through my window on Sunday. Apparently Trudi is not Joss’s girlfriend like we all thought, or even his ex-girlfriend, but the best friend of a girl called Kiera he used to go out with in Guildford. (Kiera is the other girl in the photograph on his Facebook page, the fair wispy pretty one.) He dumped her when he left Guildford, and she sent Trudi to London to tell him she wants him back, but Joss said no, because he loves Flora. Also, he agreed that his friends had been completely out of order, and he yelled at them on the phone and threatened never to speak to them again unless they took the video down.

Today I came home from school to find Jas and Twig Skyping Dad in the kitchen.

‘I would
not
like to live in a medieval castle,’ Jas was saying. ‘Medieval castles are draughty and broken.’

‘Well obviously
now
they’re broken,’ Dad said. It’s always quite funny to see him on Skype. He sits much too close to the screen and looks like an alien. ‘In medieval times, they were quite different. Twig?’

‘It would depend on the castle.’ Twig wasn’t really paying attention, because he was trying to do his
science
homework at the same time as talking to Dad. Twig has had so many notes about overdue homework he could bind them together and make quite a thick book.

‘But if you were a princess,’ said Dad, sounding desperate. ‘If you didn’t have a choice and
had
to live in a castle but could have anything you wanted there, what would that be?’

‘If I could have anything I wanted,’ Jas said, looking very prim, ‘it would be to have all my family around me.’

I have never seen an alien look so depressed.

Tom Myers, that loudmouth, has told the entire school that Flora is going to have a baby.

Tom says
but I only told my sister
, like he doesn’t understand that’s not the point, which is that when something is secret, you don’t tell
anybody
. His sister probably only told one person too. Who told someone else, who told someone else until everybody knew except the people concerned. Who found out in the canteen when that idiot Graham Lewis bounced up to them making baby noises.

‘Oh my God!’ cried Flora. ‘Are you saying I look fat?’

‘Mama!’ said Graham, cracking up. ‘Dada!’

Joss laughed his head off when he understood what Graham meant. ‘Mate,’ he said to Graham (who told everyone who wanted to listen), ‘mate, you and me need to have a little conversation about the facts of life.’

Normally boys want people to think that they are doing loads more things with girls than they actually are, but Joss didn’t seem to care. Graham said ‘What, really, never?’ and Joss just laughed harder and said in a blokeish sort of way ‘not for lack of trying, mate’ and Flora went bright red and looked like she might murder Graham and throw his body to ravening vultures.

It took her about twenty seconds to work out that the source of the rumour was me. I tried to apologise but she didn’t listen. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you lately’, she fumed, and ‘I used to like having you as a sister and maybe one day when I forget what it feels like to be HUMILIATED in front of the WHOLE BLOOMING SCHOOL I might forgive you’.

Joss was still laughing all the time she was yelling at me, so then she turned on him and started screaming at him about how insensitive and immature he was being.

‘Just because I’ve got a sense of humour,’ said Joss, and Flora said, ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ and Joss said ‘Lighten up, can’t you?’ and suddenly they were in the middle of an argument and didn’t notice me tiptoeing away.