The School Gate Survival Guide (13 page)

Just wanted you to know that I am thinking of you. Sorry for causing trouble and telling you things I shouldn’t have. Done with best intentions. Let me know at once if any news. Take care. Zachary.

Bloody Serena. She’d obviously left here and trotted back to tell him off. I should have warned him. It was alien to have someone apologise to me when I was the one who’d screwed up. I lay back down and concentrated on thinking about Mr Peters to stop replaying my last conversation with Bronte that morning. His hair always looked as though he’d just washed it, maybe in some of that Jo Malone lime, basil and mandarin stuff I often saw spring up in the houses where I worked after Father’s Day or birthdays. I was pretty sure he’d never smell of kebabs, or hash, or Guinness. I loved his manners, all that pulling back of chairs, opening doors. I hoped Harley was learning from him. Mr Peters wouldn’t laugh if I told him I wanted to do an Open University degree. He’d sit there looking all public school handsome and show me how to fill in the application form. I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. That was the last thought I had before my limbs sank into the lumpy old foam of the settee and sleep weighed me down like pockets full of stones.

The sound of hammering reached down the dark tunnel to drag me out. Colin was shouting at me to wake up, shaking my shoulder on his way to the door. I blinked for a second before reality rushed in on me again and I sprang to my feet. I glanced at the clock. With a flash of guilt, I realised I’d been asleep for an hour.

By the time I made it the few feet to the door, Colin was on his knees, sobbing, wrapped around Bronte on the front doorstep. All I could hear was ‘fucking hell, fucking hell,’ repeated over and over again like a mantra. Bronte looked up at me, brown eyes wide and uncertain, her curly hair so wet it was almost straight, her blazer splattered with mud, a squashed hat under her arm. I flung myself on her, smelling her, touching her face, kissing her head.

‘Where have you been? We were so worried about you.’ My voice sounded harsher, higher than normal.

Her face crumpled and she started to cry. I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

‘Leave it, Mai, let’s get her warm. We can have it all out later, don’t matter now.’

It was only then I remembered the vague shape I’d seen standing in the shadows as I’d run to the door. I looked out.

‘Tarants?’

He stepped forward into the dim porch light. ‘Was it you that found her? Thank you, thank you.’ I threw my arms round him, registering the stiffness of someone who was used to receiving aggression, not affection. He clamped his arms to his side until the first surge of gratitude had subsided and I remembered the rules of our estate.

He dug his hands in his pockets and shuffled. With a scarf covering his tattoo and his white spiky hair flattened by the rain, he looked quite normal. ‘S’nothing. I owed you. See you around.’

‘Wait. Where did you find her?’

He waved. ‘She’ll tell you.’ Then he was gone, my thank yous and questions washed away with the rain.

For at least the first hour, I couldn’t stop touching Bronte. Kept holding her hand, asking her if she was okay until she got irritated with me. The day had come when Bronte shrugging and telling me to get off filled my heart with joy. I bathed her and wrapped her in a snuggly dressing gown, while Colin phoned the police – ‘Better tell the fuzz that we’ve done their job for them.’ Over endless peanut butter sandwiches, she stumbled out the sorry story of wanting to be like Sorrel and Saffy with a new sequinned top. The escape from the security guard. Hiding at the cemetery where we’d buried Mum three years ago.

‘Why did you go there? It’s such a horrid place to be, so grey and depressing,’ I said.

‘I dunno. Just wanted to be near to
Amatxi
.’

Amatxi
was Bronte’s name for Mum, grandmother in Basque. They were so alike in some ways. Mum couldn’t stand in a queue at the supermarket without discussing the price of plums with the person next to her, but she also had a way of hugging secrets to her, just like Bronte, filtering out information as and when she thought you needed to know. If ever. Bronte was only six when Mum had died, but the long afternoons at the park, the noisy jam tart making sessions in my kitchen, the hours reading and re-reading
Room on the Broom
had helped my mother connect with Bronte in a way I could only dream about.

‘How did you get there?’ I said. ‘Surely you didn’t walk?’

Bronte nodded. ‘Yes, I did. I followed the tow path along the river.’

‘That’s about four miles.’ I bit my lip. I hated her walking anywhere lonely on her own.

She carried on. ‘It took me ages. It was getting dark when I got there but I thought I’d just go in quickly and see if her grave was tidy.’

For God’s sake. This was the girl who wouldn’t sleep without the landing light on. It was all my fault – she’d been asking to go and visit Mum’s grave for ages but I’d kept making excuses. I never went there. I preferred to remember Mum sitting in my kitchen, stirring brandy into her coffee and giving me grief about not going to university nearly twenty years later. ‘You could ’ave been the Premier Minister. But you meet that not good for anything boy. Colin. Pah.’

Bronte’s intensity, her desire to do what she set out to do even though she was scared reminded me so much of Mum.

‘I got a bit carried away because the grave was quite overgrown so I started tidying up, pulling the weeds off it. I didn’t realise how dark it had got because of that streetlight next to
Amatxi
’s grave. Then when I looked around me, I was really frightened. I was about to leave when these two boys came past and started laughing at me, going on about me being a mentalist cos I was talking to myself. I think I must have been whispering to
Amatxi
about the disco and all that.’

I waited. That graveyard had a reputation for gangs of teenagers hanging about, doing drugs.

Bronte stirred her hot chocolate. ‘I told them to get lost, then a whole gang of them appeared and started throwing stones at
Amatxi
’s grave and teasing me about my school uniform. My hat’s ruined. I’m really sorry. They snatched it and played Frisbee with it until it fell in a puddle. They said they were going to rip off all my clothes and make me go to school in my knickers. They wouldn’t listen to me when I told them I lived on the Walldon Estate. They kept saying, “Okay yah” and asking if I went to gymkhanas and where Daddy’s yacht was. Then they surrounded me. They were holding hands and I couldn’t get out of the circle.’

Even though we’d put the heating on high, I felt cold. I’d spent nine years protecting her but when she’d needed me, I hadn’t been there. If I’d left her at Morlands, none of this would have happened. Colin was silent, chewing the skin round his nails and looking like he might burst into tears at any minute.

‘Why did they let you go?’ I said.

‘It was that girl, Mum. You know, the one who used to go out with Tarants. She was with him that day when he hurt his head. She’s called Stace. She doesn’t live here any more cos her mum’s moved in with her boyfriend on that estate near the underpass. Eastward or something. She’s going out with a bloke called Colt now.’

I tried to conjure up the girl’s face. I could only remember thick black eyeliner. Bronte seemed impatient to get her story out. ‘Anyway, she turned up with Colt and her dog, Zip, a long-haired Alsatian thing. I was crouched down in the middle of the circle, covering my head with my hands while they were all shouting and throwing cans at me.’ She stopped, looking worried. ‘I don’t know whether you’ll be able to clean my blazer. It’s got all beer and Coke down it.’

Colin rolled another joint. I stroked Bronte’s hair. ‘I don’t care about the blazer, love. We can sort it out.’ I did wonder how I would ever say no to anything again.

‘I tried to run out of the circle but the dog started barking at me. Stace came over to get the dog and then she recognised me from the day that Tarants got hurt. She shouted at them to leave me alone. She told me I shouldn’t be hanging about in the graveyard when it was dark and asked me where you were. So I explained what had happened, you know, about the top in Next and stuff. She said you’d be worried and told me to go home. The others didn’t believe that she knew me, they thought she was just being wet and kept telling her she’d get chucked out of the gang.’

I was ashamed that a part of me wanted to swing round and say, ‘See? See?’ to Colin and remind him what an arsehole he’d been when Tarants had hurt himself. I wished my life was like Clover’s where thank yous could be sent by Interflora to people who lived at the same address for more than three months. I’d be lucky to bump into Stace again.

Like Colin, I listened in silence as Bronte told me how Stace had had a big screaming match with Colt because she’d dared to mention Tarants – ex-boyfriend and rival gang member – when she was explaining about Bronte. Colt had smacked her in the mouth, but Stace hadn’t gone without a fight either.

‘Was she okay?’ I said.

‘Not really. The others stood round laughing. Colt’s the head of the gang so I think he was really angry that she’d dissed him. Her tooth cut her lip so her mouth was bleeding. Then Colt made it worse cos he wears a studded bracelet and it slashed her face. She went nuts at him. He tried to hold her back but she just kept kicking and kicking.’ Bronte’s face was all fidgety and tense.

‘What did you do, lovey?’ I twisted my hair round and round my finger until it hurt.

‘That’s just it, Mum. I didn’t do anything. There were about seven of them, all clapping and cheering, watching Stace get really hurt. I was so frightened. Colt pushed her over and she hit her head on one of the gravestones. The dog went for Colt, so Stace grabbed me and we ran for ages. She was worried about them coming after us so we went a really long way round all the back streets until we got to that pub by the roundabout. She made me hide by the bins while she got herself cleaned up in the toilets. Then she phoned Tarants. He didn’t want to come at first cos he was at some club. But when she told him she was with me, he said he’d come and fetch me. It took him ages to get there, though. Stace bought us some KFC and we waited in a bus shelter because it was so cold.’

In the end Bronte looked like she could stay up all night, whereas Colin looked on the verge of collapse. His unspent fury seemed to have turned in on itself. Great surges of shock carried me from one horror to another – drug addict graveyards, bullying teenagers, aggressive dogs – mixed with a sing out loud high that Bronte had made it home safely.

Colin took her upstairs. Bronte had begged to sleep in our bed and neither of us wanted to let her out of our sight. When I went up ten minutes later, they were both flat out. Colin hadn’t even bothered to get undressed. He lay with his arm around Bronte who was curled up into his warmth, her face pale, but smooth and unworried. Bronte, one day older. Me, ten years.

I couldn’t contemplate getting into bed and going to sleep. My head was buzzing. I wanted to phone everyone, wake up Sandy and get drunk to a point where I wouldn’t be asking myself any questions. Life had offered me a second chance. Mr Peters had said to call him if there was any news. I really wanted to talk to someone though, someone who could offer me more than the different types of torture they would inflict on the Eastward gang at a later date. I decided to let the phone ring five times. He picked up on the second ring. ‘Maia?’

I was thrown by the use of my Christian name. We’d been fannying about Mr and Mrs-ing for weeks. Shyness made me stumble.

‘Sorry to be disturbing you so late.’

‘It’s fine, no problem. Is everything okay? Hang on a minute, I’ll just turn the music down.’

Michael Bublé was singing in the background, then cut off in his prime. Mr Peters came back on the line. ‘Is there some news?’

I gave him a quick rundown of events. I heard his smile. ‘That’s brilliant. Thank God she’s not hurt. We need to get together and work out how to manage Bronte’s return to school. Could you come to my office before school starts on Monday, say, eight o’clock?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, preparing to hang up.

‘Don’t rush off. Please.’ I heard the sound of a door opening and closing and the thud of feet on a wooden floor. ‘Where’s Bronte now? Was she very distressed when she got home?’

I couldn’t stop thinking that it was almost midnight and that I should deliver my message and get lost, so I started off ‘Yes/no/fine’. Every answer seemed to lead to another question and eventually I stopped trying to hurry off the phone. Somewhere along the way a bit of banter crept in but it wasn’t like chatting to Sandy or even Clover. Every now and again I’d feel self-conscious, squirming because I’d been too familiar. Or used terrible grammar.

‘How is your husband, er, partner – Colin, isn’t it? – coping in all of this?’ The elephant in the corner swinging its trunk and squirting water down its back had finally made an appearance.

‘Colin’s okay. He’s asleep now. Bronte is his princess, so he’s found it really hard. Anyway, I’d better let you go now. Thanks for listening to me ramble on.’

‘You make sure you look after yourself. Get some rest. We’ll talk on Monday. One more thing, when we’re not at school, you can call me Zachary. Or Zac. Mr Peters makes me feel ninety-five.’

I was saying goodnight for the second time when I heard a woman’s voice in the background, I didn’t catch it all, but I did hear ‘little chat’ and ‘like a stuffed lemon’. I rang off quickly.

Shit. Why didn’t he say he had company? What if I’d called him as he was about to get down to business? I remembered Michael Bublé in the background and cringed. Then with no rights, no reason, no warning, the shock of an emotion that I didn’t know I was still capable of feeling. Jealousy.

When we got to Stirling Hall on Monday, it felt like five years since I’d last been there. I’d already been up for three hours, done my cleaning shift and rushed home to change. Bronte seemed to have brushed off the whole thing, nattering about seeing Sorrel and Saffy again and somehow turning her role of failed shoplifter and blubbering wreck into some kind of brave, dog-handling heroine. Harley was getting a bit fed up with her being the centre of attention and was saying, ‘Big deal’ to everything. I kept rubbing my lips together. Lipstick always made me feel self-conscious. My early morning eyes were threatening to stream against the unfamiliar mascara.