After Iris: the Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby (2 page)

My plan is to record my life through words and
images
. I am using video footage for the images and some spoken words. There are not many spoken words in the video footage, because usually when people realise I am filming, they stop talking. Dad says that by the time I am grown up people will be so used to seeing me with a camera in my hand they won’t be able to
stop
talking, and that I will make my fortune as a TV interviewer. But Dad says a lot of things. In the meantime, what I can’t record on film, I write about on what he calls ‘a contemporary echo of the old-fashioned notebook’ – my laptop, recently inherited from Flora.

When I write, nobody can tell me to get lost. So I have lots of mini-films, for atmosphere, plus their transcripts, on the laptop, as well as longer chapters for detail. It is a multimedia record. I have seen installations like this in Tate Modern, where Dad takes me sometimes when he says home is too much.  

Just when things were getting interesting this afternoon, what with Flora screeching and Dad looking lost, Mum made me turn the camera off. I tried to explain – again – about the plan to record my life, and that I write about everything I don’t film anyway, but Flora said she didn’t care.

‘I don’t have to read your stupid diary,’ she said. ‘But you’re not filming me without any make-up.’

‘Try to be nice,’ said Mum. ‘A few more days and you’ll be back at school.’

‘Thank GOD!’ cried Flora.

Dad beamed and said, ‘Do I detect the late blooming of an academic?’ and this time it was Flora who snorted.

‘I think Flora is mainly looking forward to seeing her friends,’ murmured Mum.

‘Can you blame me?’ cried Flora. She pulled her mobile out of her pocket and groaned. ‘All my friends get home today and I’m stuck up a hill with no network and nobody to talk to.’

‘You could talk to us,’ suggested Mum. ‘Or go for a walk with Blue.’

‘Blue!’ said Flora, and after that nobody talked. Which was a shame, because tomorrow Mum is flying to Moscow and Dad is driving a hundred miles back to Warwick, with us children left in the frankly dubious care of Zoran until school starts on Thursday.

When we were little, Flora used to read me and Iris stories. She even had baths with us. Our nursery was next to her primary school, and we used to wait for her at the gate with Mum.  On the day we started primary at St Swithin’s, it was Flora not Mum who took us to our classroom, holding our hands all the way, not caring if she didn’t look cool in front of her friends (except Flora always looks cool). It was Flora who punched Digby Jones when he laughed at me because of my glasses, and Flora who complained to the Head when Mrs Fraser, my form teacher in Year 2, said my reading wasn’t good enough. She told him I could read by the time I went into Reception, and that the reason I didn’t concentrate in Literacy was because at home I was already reading Charles Dickens. Which wasn’t exactly true, but it was nice of her to say so.

Now, all I get is: ‘Blue!’

Breakfast was interrupted this morning by Twig, shouting. He was at the bottom of the garden jumping up and down by the rat run, but when we got there he couldn’t talk, only point.

‘
What?
’ yelled Flora.

‘Are they dead?’ cried Jas.

‘They’ve
multiplied
!’ screamed Twig.

We all stared, and he was right. Last night there were only three rats but this morning there were seven, including four very tiny ones. No one said anything for a while.

‘But they were all girls,’ whispered Jas at last.

‘Well they can’t have been,’ said Zoran.

‘Perhaps they’re lesbians,’ suggested Flora.

‘How would
that
work?’ I asked.

We stared some more. The rats were all nestled together in a heap in the straw, and the sun made criss-cross shadows over them through the wire of their cage.

‘So which one’s the boy?’ asked Twig.

‘Male,’ said Zoran. ‘Not boy.’

‘And which one’s the mother?’ Flora crouched to peer more closely. ‘You must have noticed she was getting fat.’

But all the adult rats looked enormous.

‘If you watch them long enough,’ said Zoran, ‘the mother will start nursing.’

‘Are they ill?’ asked Twig.

‘He means she’ll start feeding them,’ said Flora. ‘From her breasts.’

‘Rats have
breasts?
’ Jas looked horrified.

‘Not as such,’ sighed Zoran.

‘Can you look?’ asked Twig. ‘Can you look underneath and see which one is the mother?’

And I bet Mum never told Zoran about this when he came for the job, that one day he might have to hold a rat upside down to work out if it had just given birth. He sighed again and looked depressed.

‘I’m not sure I know how,’ he said.

 ‘Will you film them, Blue?’ asked Jas. ‘Please?’

I don’t film animals. It’s a matter of principle. They’re pretty and everything, but they are not as interesting to me as people, and I don’t like that they can’t speak. If Flora doesn’t like me filming, she tells me to get lost, or she hits me. All a rat can do is hide in its bedding and even then I can always film the straw.

Jas was doing that cat thing, when her eyes go all round with the pupils very black. Her dress was torn at the shoulder and held together with a safety pin. Jas has a wardrobe full of dresses, but this has been her favourite for years and she won’t wear anything else. It’s pink, very faded, and only reaches about halfway down her thighs. Also, since last week, it has bloodstains down the front. She has a scab on her right knee and she hasn’t brushed her hair since the beginning of the summer. Mum tried to make her at first, but Jas dug her heels in and when Jas does that it’s best to just say yes.

Jas’s big cat eyes mean more or less the same as her dug-in heels. And it
was
sweet, the way she and Twig were looking at the baby rats. They sat cross-legged by the pen, whispering to them.

‘Wake up, wake up,’ they said. ‘Open your eyes.’

I don’t think rats can even
hear
when they’re this small, let alone understand English, but try telling an eight- and ten-year-old that. I didn’t want to film the rats, but I did want to catch the Babes looking at them. I left them where they were – Jas and Twig on the ground, Flora on the swing, Zoran looking glum – and I picked my way over the damp grass to fetch my camera in the house. A shadow flitted across the lawn – I just caught it out of the corner of my eye. I know it sounds mad but I swear it was human.

‘Iris?’ I whispered, but it didn’t make sense, and by the time I got to where the shadow had been, it had gone.   

‘But what a peculiar thing to write!’ said Zoran.

After inspecting the pen, we went back to the kitchen, where Zoran made hot chocolate and Flora groaned under the duvet she had dragged downstairs with her.

‘Is that all you can say?’ she said. ‘
What a peculiar thing to write?
’

‘Well it is,’ said Zoran.

‘The weird thing,’ cried Flora, ‘the creepy, freaky thing is that somebody is obviously watching us and has broken into the rat run!’

I don’t know if anyone else saw Zoran’s mouth twitch.

‘Was it you?’ I asked.

‘Me?’ he said. ‘Go near that monster?’

‘Then
who
?’ demanded Jas, and Twig repeated
who who who?

The weather has changed and it rained all day but we all took turns watching the rat run, even Flora, who huddled under the umbrella in a blanket with more hot chocolate and a book and said she’d like to catch the so-and-so who was spying on us and give him a piece of her mind. Those were her actual words. She sounded like Grandma.

And obviously we never saw the spy.

Tomorrow we go back to school. I have never looked forward to anything less in my entire life. Dad always says that anything is possible. Perhaps this term things will be different, but somehow I doubt it.

Since Iris died, at school
I
am the shadow. I slip down corridors, from assembly to class to break and back to class and no one sees me, no one talks to me. People who have known me since primary school, people I’ve peed with in paddling pools and who have smeared my face in birthday cake – they squeal when they see each other and fall into each other’s arms, they giggle and whisper, but me they just blank and I know that nothing has changed.

For a moment this morning, I thought things might be different. I caught Dodi Cartwright’s eye in assembly and I was pretty sure she acknowledged me – not much, a sort of half dip of the head, an almost smile. But then in our first class, which was English, I was going to sit down near the window at the back, when Dodi shimmied in and parked herself on my chair. I did try to say something. I thought,
what would Flora do now
and I tried to say
hey, Cartwright, get lost that was my seat
but no words came out and even if they had there wouldn’t have been any point because by then everyone was crowded round listening to her yabber on about her summer holiday in Italy or Spain or somewhere. So I just picked up my stuff and slunk off to the only free desk, which was right at the front next to Jake
Lyall
, who has to sit there because the teachers say they have to keep an eye on him and was actually asleep so couldn’t have spoken to me even if he’d wanted to, which he probably didn’t.  

We have Miss Foundry in English, who is insane even by Clarendon Free School standards. Today she wore a beaded shawl which reached down to her ankles, told us to call her Anthea and tried to recruit us for the Clarendon Players’ Christmas Extravaganza.

‘This term,’ she announced, ‘they will be doing tales from the Brothers Grimm!’

Everybody looked blank. ‘The brothers who?’ yawned Jake.

‘Snow White! Hansel and Gretel! Little Red
Riding
Hood!’ cried Miss Foundry.

‘What’s she on about?’ asked Tom Myers.

‘Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm,’ said Hattie Verney, confirming that she is going to be just as much of a swot in Year 9 as she was in Year 8. ‘Together they collected and rewrote over two hundred traditional folktales, some of which we know today through Disney adaptations.’

Tom pulled a face at her. Miss Foundry pretended not to notice.

‘As usual, the Clarendon Players are looking to local schools to swell the ranks of their Christmas production. Bluebell, dear, will Flora be taking part?’

Cressida Taylor, who is Dodi’s best friend, sniggered
Bluebell
like it was the most idiotic name on the planet. Which, of course, it is.

‘I suppose so, Miss,’ I stammered. Flora has been taking part in the Players’ productions pretty much since she could walk. Her dream is to be discovered, leave school, appear in a West End show and then be whisked off to Broadway. ‘Please, dear, call me Anthea.’

‘Antheaaaaahhh’, said Tom, and Miss Foundry ignored him again.

‘What about you, dear?’ she asked. ‘Will you audition?’

‘What,
her
?’ sneered Cressida.

‘No, Miss,’ I said.

Anthea looked worried and sad and disappointed. All at once.

Dad says there are victims in life and there are fighters. He says he hopes that we will always be fighters, and by lunchtime I’d had enough. There was no way I was going to give Cressida and Dodi the satisfaction of seeing me eat alone. It wasn’t difficult to slip out with a group of sixth-formers. Most of them didn’t notice me but those who did sort of fell in around me so the teacher on gate duty didn’t see. Which considering it was Madame
Gilbert
didn’t really matter anyway.

I ate tomato soup and bread and butter in a cafe off Portobello Road. The cafe is called Home Sweet Home and it was full of mothers with pushchairs and workmen in overalls and people with black-rimmed glasses reading iPads. A very old Labrador panted by the counter. Capital was on the radio, and the whole place smelled of chips and coffee and wet dog. Nobody talked to me, but it didn’t matter because nobody was meant to.

Madame Gilbert was just finishing off her Gauloise when I got back. I wasn’t supposed to be out but then she wasn’t supposed to smoke, so she just looked vague and waved me in. We revised factorisation in maths. Dull, but so, so easy. I slept all the way through and Mr Forsyth (aka Mr Maths) didn’t even notice.

Like I said. Totally invisible.

I am sitting on the flat roof outside my bedroom window, and I am very cold.

At dinner (sausages and mash – Zoran doesn’t cook anything else and he gets really hurt if you complain) Twig said we should be watching the rats
twenty-four/seven
. His words. He said it was only luck that nothing else had happened since last time. Jas said what about when we are at school, and Twig said Zoran could watch them then. Zoran said he had to go to classes too, and he couldn’t just sit around here all day waiting for us to come back and he had a thesis to write or didn’t we know? Jas said no, she didn’t know and what’s a thesis, and then Twig said, what about when we are asleep?

‘Last time he came at night,’ said Twig.

‘He’s only been once,’ said Flora. ‘And he might be a she.’

‘Even so. It doesn’t mean he won’t come again, and when he does, I bet it’ll be when we’re in bed.’

‘You can’t stay up all night,’ said Zoran. ‘I expressly forbid it.’

Zoran has been trying to assert his authority this evening because Mum emailed this morning to say she wasn’t coming home between Moscow and New York, and Flora went to her friend Tamsin’s after school where she dyed her hair bright pink and also dreadlocked it using a kit Tam’s brother had ordered on the internet.

Really. Pink dreadlocks.  Zoran went ballistic.

‘And another thing.’ Twig pushed his plate aside, brought it back for a last mouthful of sausage, and hopped off his chair. ‘We haven’t even looked for clues.’

‘Oh God,’ Flora groaned.

‘Blue?’ Twig doesn’t do the round cat-eye thing like Jas, but his lower lip wobbles when he wants something and you just can’t say no.

‘Oh, go on then,’ I sighed.

We all went, even Zoran who after only a week has pretty much given up on the washing-up. Flora insists there’s no point doing the dishes at night
because
what if you die when you’re asleep, so now he makes us take turns doing them in the morning. We crossed the lawn and stood by the pen and Twig gave us our orders, which were basically
leave no stone unturned.

‘That child watches too much television,’ grumbled Flora.

It was Jas who found the footprints. There was nothing on the lawn or the gravel – nothing we could see, anyway, and it
had
been raining – but right in the far corner, behind the rhododendrons, at the bottom of the Batemans’ wall, there were two deep marks of somebody’s trainers.

‘Male, I should think.’ Zoran was getting into the swing of the whole detective thing. ‘Judging from the size. And they’re facing the wall, which suggests he jumped down or climbed up here.’

‘Mr
Bateman
?’ cried Jas.

‘He’s like, a hundred and three,’ Flora explained to Zoran.

‘He would
die
if he jumped this fence,’ said Twig.

‘So there must be somebody else.’

Zoran wanted to go round to the Batemans’ to talk about it but we said no, we’d known them all our lives and it would be too embarrassing. He sighed (in actually a very
non-
authoritarian way) and asked what we wanted to do, and we sort of shuffled around and said nothing, it didn’t matter.

So here I am. Sitting on the flat roof. Freezing my little socks off in the middle of the night.

I took over from Flora at one o’clock. We’re doing two-hour shifts.

I love London at night. At Grandma’s, in Devon, the night is black as coal and the stars are brighter, but it’s creepily quiet. Here you can still hear the traffic, and the sky is dark but orange, and even though most people are asleep you can still feel the life of the place because it never completely stops. Grandma calls London
THAT STINKHOLE
and says she can’t understand how we can survive here for even a minute. She says that leaving London after Grandpa retired was the best thing she did in her entire life, but every morning last spring we saw a fox sunbathing on the roof of the Batemans’ shed. In the summer, you can lie on your back on the lawn and watch the swifts, and at weekends you can smell barbecues going all the way down the street.

I just saw something move.