Hazel Wood Girl (7 page)

Dad drove me into town after breakfast (back to toast now that Mum is too frantic to make muffins), and Em-J and Beau were standing outside the burnt town hall, behind the yellow, plastic tape that the police had put up to keep people back. There were about twenty people there, all staring, one or two crying, and more than that saying stupid things like, ‘It’s the way they let young people do what they like,’ and ‘If the voluntary fire brigade was paid, they would have saved it.’

We plonked ourselves down in the café and Em-J 
explained that Beau’s cousin, Barry Finch, was the student who got hurt. If he gets out of intensive care soon then there’s hope.

Beau is massively proud of his cousin for running back inside a burning building to make sure no one was trapped inside, but he’s really worried too. You can tell by the way he is sitting up so straight when he’s usually slumped over. Beau says that Barry doesn’t have any burns, but that he breathed in so much smoke that he was unconscious by the time the fire brigade found him.

Now I understand why Mum and Dad don’t want me and Mindy to do things around the farm, they don’t want to have us in hospital or worse.

I feel like I want to help make things better again, but don’t know what to do.

Em-J says that they haven’t the heart to do the band any more and I sort of know how she feels. I’m a bit relieved too that I don’t have to put the effort into avoiding Christophe.

Beau went off to be with his aunty and uncle and I hung around town with Em-J for the morning until Dad was going back home. From the café window we watched the police stop random people along the main street, asking questions and taking notes.

Dad was a bit stressy and kept banging the palm of 
his hand on the steering wheel, and told me that some of the documents needed to sort out the problem with the big, stone barn were probably in the town hall, so things are even messier on that front. After this month they’re going to stop using that barn altogether.

With the fire, and the barn problems, Christophe being weird with me, and the stuff going missing from our farm, everything feels a bit headachy at the moment. Just when things were getting good.

The police were around at the farm this morning and were asking Mum, Dad and Adam questions for ages. That made me feel scared, like it was closer to us and we might be in trouble, but Mum was all no-nonsense about it, and said that they have to talk to everyone in the town and the outlying farms because that was their job. They had to interview Dad first because he had been spending a lot of time at the town hall.

Luckily we all had alibis (not that we really needed them!). Sammy-boy and I feel like even closer pals 
because we are each other’s alibi. He even drew a picture of the two of us sitting in the greenhouse and a speech bubble coming out of both of our mouths saying, ‘We didn’t do nothing!’ It’s so cute I can’t help laughing every time I think about it.

Em-J just phoned. She let Christophe know about not doing the band anymore. Barry Finch is going to recover but he’ll be in hospital for a few weeks. That means that he won’t be able to earn enough money this summer to do his next year of university. It seems so unfair. It’s funny how you can care so much about someone you’ve never met. I wish there was something I could do.

It’s the middle of the night and I just woke up with a GENIUS (if-I-do-say-so-myself) PLAN. If Em-J reforms her band, they can play a concert in the stone barn and use the money collected at the door for Barry! We could make enough that he’ll be able to go back to university in September like he originally planned. I just
know
they’ll go for it.

It’s going to take some major hot milk to get me back to sleep now, I’m buzzing enough to run all the way to Em-J’s. Instead I’ll phone her first thing. Also, I want to show Christophe that I don’t care about 
him and that he isn’t better than me. Maybe if he hangs out with me more he’ll want to actually talk to me and then I can just tell him I’m too busy to be his friend. God, my head is like strange soup, all these unidentifiable bits of weirdness floating around endlessly.

I didn’t fall asleep for two hours. Every time I tried to think of boring things like rainy car journeys, and cows and sheep, images of a couple of hundred people at a gig in the stone barn would crash about my brain again. Finally, after dawn, I nodded off and ended up sleeping in until ten in the morning, which around here is pretty much the same as sleeping all day.

Em-J wasn’t in when I phoned, and Dad wanted me to go with him to visit some farm where they were doing something environmental. So I left messages 
for her to meet me at the Hazel Wood at nine o’clock tonight, and explained to her how to get there.

I feel like the Hazel Wood is such a magical place that if we do the planning there, then it just
has
to happen. I also want to make it a place where I think about lots of things, not just The Watcher.

It’s now six o’clock and I’ve just had a long bath after the day visiting the green farm.

I thought I saw Em-J in the middle of the Hazel Wood and went running over, only realising as I got right up close, that it was Christophe. It was a MAJOR cringy moment. We both just mumbled ‘Hi’, and he said something about Em-J asking him to be there and her being on her way. He was wearing dark, slightly baggy jeans, a long, ripped sweater, and an old pair of sneakers covered in artwork he’d designed himself. It’s like ancient symbols done in a cartoon way. He is too cool. I so wanted him to draw on my sneakers like that, but was too shy to ask. In fact, we didn’t say anything for the next two minutes. He’s so much easier to talk to when he’s The Watcher than when he is Christophe and in front of me.

Eventually he decided to speak to me and said,

‘Thanks for looking after my brother, he really 
loves hanging out with you, especially drawing and eating, those are his favourite things to do.’

It didn’t occur to me that he’d know what Sammy-boy and I got up to, so that twisted my brain a bit. I just said,

‘Oh, yeah.’

Just when I thought that things couldn’t get any more awkward, Em-J and Beau rolled up laughing at how lost they had got on the way.

I relaxed a bit once they were there, and so did he, both of us chatting away to them separately. The sun was setting, and the Hazel Wood looked like it was on another world, with a purple, green and orange sky. The birds sounded so loud without people or traffic sounds in the way. Beau suggested we go to the ruined cottage, but I explained that it’s dangerous and doesn’t have a roof.

Instead we sat on this small space of tufty grass between four of the trees near the centre of the wood. I’d say we looked like a band of Native American’s in pow-wow, except Em-J handed around gum, rather than a pipe.

Everyone completely
loved
the idea of having a benefit concert, and they were all relieved to get the band going again. We tried to come up with another venue closer to town, but only the café was a
possibility, and that’s too small for us to be able to make the kind of money we need. So I’ll be asking Mum and Dad about the stone barn.

Christophe even started to glance at me every now and them and almost said something to me before looking over at Em-J at the last second before he said it.

He said,

‘OK, we need a name for the band, and if we don’t find one tonight we
have
to call ourselves The Twinkle Fairies. That should get us focused.’

‘Twinkle Fairies, Christ!’ said Beau, and you could hear his head starting to work.

We each wrote a few suggestions, one on top of each of these sheets of paper that I’d brought to take notes. Then we each put a tick at the bottom of the page if we really liked the suggestion (we could tick as many or as few as we wanted), left it if we were just OK with it, and put a cross if we didn’t like it. Then we rolled up the end with our mark, so no one could see how the others had rated it. That way no one knew who suggested which one, or who voted what way, and it was all fair.

In the end, Christophe sorted through them and announced that only one suggestion had unanimous ticks. He climbed into one of the hazel trees to make 
the announcement more official. With a hands-on-knees drum roll from Beau, and the cheers of a roaring crowd from me and Em-J, he said,

‘And the name of the greatest rock band in the world is – Farmer!’

We cheered some more, and we all did this crazy dance around the wood making drum and bass sounds. I even eventually owned up to it being me that thought of it, and I love that I have named a real rock band. Now I’ll actually feel
good
if they call me The Farmer in school.

It was really late by then, so even though we all wanted to stay, Christophe went back to his place while Beau and Em-J had decaf coffee over at ours and waited for a lift from her dad. I feel that at least now it’s not as impossible with me and Christophe as before, that we can at least do this band thing with the others there to talk through. He’s OK, just a bit up himself.

Back in our kitchen Em-J said,

‘You have such cool ideas, super-chick! I’m so glad you moved here.’

Beau said,

‘Yeah!’ and looked exhausted from that much.

We talked with Mum, Dad and Adam, and they 
have agreed that we can use the big, stone barn for the concert and they are going to help out on the night. Adam is going to feed extra power lines in tomorrow so Farmer can rehearse there. (God, that sounds so good!)

Mum said how pleased she is that I have made such lovely friends. Dad is recovering from being called ‘chick’.

From the minute the sun first hit the window right up until evening rehearsal, I was working out plans to get a big enough audience to make the gig a success. I came up with every idea short of stopping each person on the main street and begging them on my knees (although I am even keeping that one in reserve). Several ideas got binned early on, including ones that involved Rollerblades, swimsuits and dressing up in a rooster costume. Going down more sophisticated routes, I now have the phone numbers for the local paper, the radio station, the big
businesses like the hotel, and all the places where we put the audition notices (except the town hall, of course).

Luckily Mum knows just about everything there is to know on the planet and taught me how to write a press release to send in to the newspapers and media people like the radio station.

‘A press release has to be very short because they don’t have much time to read things,’ Mum explained. ‘Be sure to include all the details such as the name of the band, where and when it is, and how much the tickets are. It also has to have something in it that will make it an interesting news story, not just another band putting on a show.’

Mum, Adam and Dad all talked it through in detail with me at lunch time and we decided that what will interest the media is the fact that Beau is in the band and it’s to get money for his cousin, and the fact that Christophe only moved here a few weeks ago, and that Em-J’s mum works in the very place where the fire was.

They were surprised that I’m not actually in the band so I told them that I prefer being behind the scenes. And they gave me ‘yeah, right,’ looks, so fingers crossed Mum doesn’t start making her famous phone calls. 

Tonight, when I was watching them rehearse, I felt a bit sad and knew I would do anything to be in the band, but it’s too late now. And I am happy to be included even this much.

I asked Em-J to ask Christophe to design the poster, and Em-J is going to find the equipment, the amps, mikes and mixing-board and all that. We also need to get a sound engineer for the night. I had no idea that there would be so much involved. I have to go to bed now so I don’t doze off during the early rehearsal in the barn in the morning.

First, I am going to run down to the Hazel Wood and hang my sneakers on the note-leaving tree. If Christophe gets the idea he might decorate them for me, and if not I can say I was just mucking about and accidentally left them there. I kind of miss our Hazel Wood thing, it’s like there are two totally different people, Christophe who’s just a co-worker (and a slightly stuck-up one at that), and The Watcher who knows me and is there for me.

It was
so
weird. We were all in the barn, the band rehearsing, me drawing a plan for where to put the stage, and Sammy-boy watching Beau in awe. Before we knew it, Mrs Granger from the Egg Farm was standing in the middle of the barn, yelling at us all to get out, and pointing her bony finger at me.

For ages we just gawped at her. My voice was shaking then as I shouted back that this barn was leased to my father until the end of this month, and that
she
was the one who had to go away. I was like,

‘You have
no
right to be here!’ 

I can’t believe it was me shouting that loud at someone.

Beau said, ‘Yeah!’ a lot, and started to calm Em-J down as she looked like she was about to throw something, or someone. Christophe ran over to where I was and in a softer voice than the rest of us, said to Mrs Granger,

‘There’s obviously been a misunderstanding, and we
will
be leaving the barn, either when Poppy’s dad asks us to, or at the end of the month.’

As she started to walk towards him I was sure she was going to hit him, she’s
that
unstable, but suddenly she went all jumpy-looking and starting telling
us
to calm down. Just as she got to the door, she said, in her version of an ordinary voice,

‘There’s
nothing
here that’s yours, so don’t you go nosing about!’

At the time we were all just weirded out by the whole thing, but thinking about it now, I wonder why she said that? I mean, there’s nothing in the stone barn except my and Sammy’s chairs from the greenhouse and three that Em-J brought over, and we already took out the buckets and the last of the hay after the audition. I swept it out myself and there was nothing to snoop after. At least that’s what I thought until she said it, but now I’m not so sure. 
And
if there was nothing to be found, why was
she
there? What was she looking for?

I bet this has something to do with the food that’s disappearing. Adam has Trug on guard duty outside most of the time and he hasn’t barked or anything. But he’s probably used to the Grangers. I bet it’s them.

Adam says that they don’t make much money from the Egg Farm because most people these days want free-range eggs where the chickens get to roam about, not the kind where the hens are all in rows in a shed, like on their place. I thought the Grangers must have been there forever but he told me they only moved in three years ago when Mr Granger’s brother moved to the city to find easier work.

After lunch I phoned the place where Dad gets a lot of the farm equipment and they agreed to lend us a large wooden platform, four-feet-high and nine-feet-square, which will be perfect for a stage. In return we are going to let them put posters for their business around the walls of the barn.

I got a bit bogged down in all the organising, and so I just listened to the French stuff again for a while to get my mind off it. I am now imagining myself staging rock gigs in Paris so I’ll need to get the next level of lessons because I only know the words for things like 
‘fish’ and ‘timetable’ and ‘excuse me,’ but not for ‘distortion peddle,’ ‘chick’ or ‘sound check.’