Tiger Moth (10 page)

Her black hair was longer than I remembered, she seemed a bit older too, and when I smiled up at her she lowered the stick she’d been waving in the air. She reminded me of a mini
Pocahontas and when I blurted that out I felt really stupid, but she didn’t say anything; she just stared like she did the last time.

I expected her to tell me to leave, but she didn’t. She didn’t say a word and when I asked her if she was here by herself she just nodded. In fact, every time I asked her a question,
she just nodded.

The odd thing was, when I looked up into her big brown eyes, it was as though I knew her and that had never happened to me before. I muttered something about my mum and when she still
didn’t say a word I wondered if she was from another country or something. I can speak a bit of French and a tiny bit of Spanish. Whenever we went on holiday, my dad would do this really
embarrassing thing of talking English loudly, slowly, but with a sort of accent that made him sound completely silly. It used to make Mum and I laugh because he didn’t even realise he was
doing it.

I looked up at the girl again.
Perhaps she doesn’t even speak English
, I thought, so I turned back to her, smiled and said very slowly: ‘I am Zack.’

She took the stick she was holding and wrote in the sand,
I am Alice.

Me and Zack stayed on the beach until the sun got cooler and the tide had gone out. I don’t know how long we were there together, but we’d already swum out to the
rocks twice, eaten my picnic and played noughts and crosses in the sand when Zack suddenly sat up.

‘Best get home,’ he said, pulling on his grey hoody.

I nodded. I knew I’d be in big trouble if Mum and Dad found out I’d come to Culver Cove again and I wanted to be able to sneak back into the garden without being noticed, and then I
realised something which made me feel strange. Mum and Dad always let me just go off in the garden for hours. They know I can spend all day making up a magical world in the walled garden, they know
I can spend hours trying to make perfume out of the rose petals, but they always asked me loads of questions when I got home. They always wanted to know what I’d been doing and what
adventures I’d had, but recently they hadn’t been doing that. Now they didn’t ask me anything and I knew why. They didn’t care. They didn’t care about me any more.

‘Alice,’ said Zack and I looked up at him. ‘Alice, will you tell? I mean, like, will I get into trouble?’

Would I tell? No way
, I thought
, I’m not Casper. I’m not a telltale at all
. I frowned at him and tried to get the words out. I wanted to say, ‘Cross my heart
and hope to die,’ but in the end I just raised my finger to my lips and drew a cross over my chest.

‘Awesome!’ he said and I watched him clamber over the rocks, and before he jumped down off the last enormous boulder he turned round and waved.

Zack Drake
, I thought as I climbed back up the path towards the waterfall. Zack Ethan Drake who told me that he used to have a dog called Otter and I wanted to ask what happened to it.
I’ve always wanted a dog, but Dad won’t let me. He actually got quite cross the last time. He suddenly sighed, stood up from the kitchen table and said, ‘No means no.’ The
really weird thing is that Florence said that Aunt Aggy had said the exact same thing to her about getting a dog, but, when she had asked her mum to tell her why, Aunt Aggy said something about an
accident, but she wouldn’t tell Florence any more. It was really weird.

As I wandered back along the path, I started to feel scared. What if Mum and Dad knew where I was? What if I got caught? Then another thought came into my head. A much worse thought. I had
forgotten all about it. Being on the beach with Zack had been so much fun that I hadn’t thought about the horrid thing that was happening.
Urgh
, I thought. My soon-to-be little
sister was sure to be there by now. I felt my heart sink and my legs get slower and slower until I was standing in front of the gate, but I couldn’t move any further. Culver Manor would not
be
my
special place any more. I was going to have to share it and I didn’t like the way that made me feel. It made me angry and sad and I knew, right then and there, that everything
was about to be very different.

No sooner had I closed the door behind me than I heard shouting. I heard my dad calling my name and I knew I had to run really fast before he saw me. I raced back through the orchard, the rose
garden, the walled garden, along the side of the tennis court and, by the time I reached the cedar tree, I was panting and gasping for breath.

‘Alice! Alice!’

Dad was standing on the terrace at the back of the house and I just had time to change direction so that it looked as though I was walking up the lawn instead.

‘Alice – there you are! I’ve been looking all over for you! Come on, your sister has arrived!’

I looked up at my smiling dad and, as I walked up the hill towards the terrace, I saw that he was grinning his big Christmas Day grin. I thought about how Mum and Dad always used to say that the
day I arrived was the happiest day of their lives and I got slower and slower. Was this going to be the happiest day of their lives instead? It felt as though the ground was sinking beneath my feet
and when I looked back up towards him I thought I was going to cry.

‘Come on, Alice, don’t drag your heels. This is a happy, happy day.’

I followed him back inside through the hallway and up the stairs to my parents’ bedroom. It’s a big bedroom and has the sort of princess bed you sometimes see in fairy-tale books.
Mum says it’s called a four–poster, but Dad calls it her Sleeping Beauty bed and it’s so big and tall that I have to climb on to a little stool to reach it. It has these heavy red
and yellow curtains that you can pull all the way round it, and when me and Florence were little Mum let us sleep in it sometimes when she stayed with us.

I walked across the wooden floor until my toes touched the rug at the foot of the bed and I peered over the mountain of white towels, sheets and blankets. Mum looked hot and sweaty, and her
cheeks were so pink I thought she might be ill. She sat up slowly, holding a finger to her lips, but I didn’t see a little sister at all. I just saw a white bundle of blankets and then Mum
held out her hand towards me. For a while I didn’t move at all. I didn’t want to look. If I didn’t look, I could pretend it wasn’t there, just like my dad once told me to do
when I got really upset about a spider in the corner of the bathroom.

‘Pretend he’s not there,’ he’d whispered when I pointed at the large eight-legged creature that was hiding on the other side of the toilet. ‘Pretend he’s not
there and you don’t need to be scared.’ It had worked, sort of. And, as I had my hair washed and splashed around in the bath, I did forget all about the spider.

As I stood next to Mum’s bed, I tried to do the same thing. I kept my head up and tried not to look down at the white bundle that was moving. Then it made a noise, a gurgling kind of cry,
and Mum held the thing up higher so that it was lying on her chest and I could see its face.

I must have been frowning really hard because Mum said, ‘Alice, come here, don’t frown. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

I peered over the covers to take a better look and stared at my sister for the very first time. Her eyes were closed tightly and her tiny hands rested on my mum’s finger so that I could
see just how little she was. She was so small. Smaller than I thought she’d be.

Had I been that small? Had I lain on my other mother like she did? I knew I was born on a rainy day. I had been taken away immediately from my other mother, but my little sister was born into a
bath of golden sunlight and was able to sleep next to her REAL mother in a beautiful princess bed. It made my hands clench into fists, and a feeling that I had never felt before got bigger and
bigger in my stomach, so big that I knew all I wanted to do was turn round, run out and never look at her again.

I stayed in my bedroom until the sun went down and the sky was so dark and clear that the moon lit up the garden below. Dad begged me to come and have some dinner with him, but
I didn’t want to. I just shook my head and in the end he left a tray of sandwiches outside my room. I heard him talking on the telephone and realised quickly that it must be Aunt Aggy so I
went to the door and listened.

‘But Alice won’t talk at all. There’s nothing wrong with her and we’ve tried everything. Sophie said that, when she went in to see the baby, she wouldn’t go
anywhere near her or the baby. She said she just glared at her so much that it scared her a bit. It’s just jealousy. Alice is jealous . . .’

I didn’t hear anything else because I ran back to my bed, grabbed the photograph from the table and jumped under the duvet. I didn’t hear Dad softly knock at my door. I didn’t
hear the words he said or feel him stroke my back as I cried.

Was I jealous? Was that what this horrid feeling was?

Mum and Dad like to talk about feelings a lot. They say that it’s better to show a little of what you’re feeling than bottle it all up inside. Mum once told me that if you were
feeling sad and you wanted to cry you should just cry until the feeling stopped. Dad said he would much rather I shout and stomp around a bit when I’m cross than sulk in silence, and when I
asked why they said: ‘If you don’t cry when you need to or get angry when you have to, you won’t ever know how.’

But I hadn’t spoken for six months so I hadn’t told them how I was feeling. I didn’t even know
what
the feeling was until now, and Mum once told me that being jealous
was not a good thing to be. AT ALL. She said it was a very bad thing to be. I once heard her say to Dad that jealous people can be the worst kind of people, and I remember it really well because I
was eating an apple at the time.

‘When someone starts feeling jealous,’ she’d said, ‘they find it hard to stop. It sort of eats them up like a worm inside an apple.’

Was I the worm inside the apple? Or was the jealous thing like a worm inside me? Would Mum and Dad want to send me back to the place where they’d chosen me from?

I suddenly felt very afraid. Remembering what Mum had told me about Dad and Aunt Aggy. I felt a fizzing noise in my head. Would they send me back?

That night I cried myself to sleep, but then my little sister cried me awake and she did that every night for five nights. Mum and Dad looked so tired that they stumbled around
the kitchen as though they were still asleep. The only good thing about them being so distracted was I got to sneak out of the house and run down to Culver Cove nearly every day, where I could
forget all about the screaming, crying little sister who so far didn’t have a name.

Mum and Dad said they couldn’t decide. They said I was an Alice from the moment they saw me, but they just couldn’t agree what my little sister should be called which was fine by me.
They had the screaming baby and I had the beach.

Zack always turned up after me, and even though at first I was angry to see him there, the more we met, the more I realised that him being there with me made the cove even better. He’s
told me nearly everything about himself. Actually, he talks quite a lot, for a boy that is. He told me that he was named after a world-famous mountain climber and when he told me that it was a bit
like he kind of wanted me to be impressed or something.

But there are so many times when I want to ask questions. Like the time he told me about kicking a policeman. I wanted to say something to make him feel better. I wanted to say that I’d
never been on a plane, but might be scared to. I wanted to ask if he’d said sorry or what happened when they missed the plane. I wanted to, but the best I could do was to look like I
didn’t understand. Only that didn’t work and I had to listen to him tell me the whole story all over again and it sounded even crazier the second time around. So I got out the notebook
and after I drew a really rubbish picture of a shell I wrote another list.

One day, towards the end of our first week on the beach, I watched him climb on to the large rock.

‘Alice, come here quickly!’ he shouted at me.

I put my drawing book down and ran across to him. He helped me up on to the rock and I realised that while he was quite small for a boy that was nearly thirteen he was very strong. He helped me
on to the top of the boulder where we both sat side by side with the sun on our faces.

‘Look! Look, Alice, the seals that led me here are back,’ he whispered, pointing at a black shape in the water.

I squinted and after a moment two roundish grey and black heads popped up from the water and started swimming on their backs towards us.

‘Come on then!’ And with that Zack slid into the water towards the seals, but I didn’t. I can swim really well, I’ve got all my badges and everything, but as the seals
got closer I could see that they were a lot bigger than they’d seemed. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be too close. I watched them dive under the water alongside Zack. It’s like
he’s a mermaid boy or something. I don’t know anyone that can hold their breath as long as he can, or do backflips off the rocks, or cartwheel off them into the sea like he does.

Whenever we would meet, Zack didn’t say much about me not speaking, but he sometimes said he wished his mum wouldn’t talk so much. Actually, he said quite a few mean things about his
mum and the cottage that they were living in. Sometimes I wondered if he wanted to just run all the way back to London and his best friend Lou.