Authors: Vanessa Curtis
Zelah Green
Vanessa Curtis
GReen
Zelah Green
first published as
Zelah Green: Queen of Clean
in 2009
This edition published 2010 in Great Britain by
Egmont UK Limited
239 Kensington High Street
London W8 6SA
Copyright © Vanessa Curtis 2009
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
ISBN 978 1 4052 5505 9
eISBN 978 1 7803 1070 1
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Typeset by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford on Avon, Warwickshire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the CPI Group
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
For my husband and my family
M
y name is Zelah Green and I’m a Cleanaholic.
I spend most of my life on Germ Alert.
Germ Alert is for when people forget to wash their hands and then try to touch me, or when they sneeze on to a tissue and throw it at the bin like they’re playing netball and then miss, or, even worse, try to pass it to me. Germ Alert also covers cats, dogs, unflushed toilets, greasy metal poles on tube trains, computer keyboards and mobile phones without covers on, people spitting, kissing or dribbling, coughing or doing anything else with their horrid bodily fluids.
When I’m not on Germ Alert, I’m on Dirt Alert.
Dirt Alert is for when people come into the house from the garden with bare feet and tread bits of worm and grass and earth around the house. Dirt Alert also covers drifting bits of fluff, crumbs, grimy black fingernails, people sweating too much, rancid fat on the cooker, old butter wrappers, smears on plates and windows and layers of dust on windowsills.
Dirt Alert is not as serious as Germ Alert, but it still takes up a lot of my time.
It’s a miracle I ever get to school.
The school bus is waiting outside right now, clouds of grey exhaust smoke being coughed into the environment way too close to my sparkling clean windows (I know it’s a bit sad, but I had a good go at the diamond lattices this morning).
I’m standing with my stepmother in front of
a mirror with a black frame and gold swirls, like an elaborate Bakewell tart topping. I don’t like the mirror, but then again it’s my stepmother’s taste and I don’t much like her either.
There’s a big black smear in the middle of the mirror.
Dirt Alert
. My stepmother is watching me watching the smear. She’s willing me not to reach out and wipe it away.
My rituals really hack her off, that and the fact that I’m younger and thinner than she is. Mind you, I’m not looking that great today. My face is all red and raw from scrubbing and my black hair is frizzing up and out instead of down.
My stepmother also has black hair, but hers floats in a controlled cloud of black wire around her squirrel-sharp features. She’s filled the cracks in her face with some sort of nutcoloured foundation and mismatched it with a red lipstick.
Her hands are hovering just above my
shoulders. I can almost feel the dirt and sweat from her fingertips soaking their way into my pristine clean white shirt.
I’ve tried for two years to get on with my stepmother and, to be fair, she’s tried quite hard to get on with me, but it hasn’t worked. We’re just too different. She doesn’t like my rituals and my stroppy temper. I don’t like the disapproval all over her face whenever I talk about Dad or the way she tries to take over where Mum left off.
‘Zelah, darling,’ she begins. She stops. She’s just noticed that I’ve trimmed all the geraniums in the front garden to exactly the same height.
My stepmother takes a deep breath and grits her teeth.
‘I need to talk to you about something,’ she says. ‘Something important.’
At that moment the school bus honks and emits another explosion of dirty grey smoke.
I can see my best friend Fran leaping up and down as if she’s about to burst a blood vessel.
Major Germ Alert
. That would be yet more unnecessary mess to clean up.
I stop my stepmother in her tracks.
‘Later,’ I say.
I clad my hand in a white tissue as if I’m about to investigate a gory crime scene. Or grime scene, in my case.
Swoosh. The smear’s gone from the mirror.
I sling my schoolbag over my shoulder, leave my stepmother doing her daily ‘keep young’ face exercises in the mirror and run for the bus.
Fran’s an awesome best friend. I’m fed up with calling her ‘awesome’ so today I’ve got a new word that I found in the dictionary last night.
‘Fran, you’re such a sophisticate,’ I say, trying it out.
A smile creeps over her smooth brown face.
‘I’m like
so
knackered,’ she says. ‘Stayed up half the night teaching my mum how to go online.’
Fran has already placed a sheet of A4 paper on my seat so that my bottom can sit down without fear of dirt. My locker at school is full of pristine sheets of A4 and cellophane packets of tissue. I’m the only kid in the school with an air freshener positioned inside the door.
‘I need it back, mind,’ she’s saying. ‘Without an imprint of your arse on it or you’re so dead. We’re doing sonnets today.’
She’s holding out a tube of mints. Brand new and unopened, just the way I like it. I hook my fingernail through a circle of white and drop it on to my tongue without touching the paper.
We suck away in a fug of mint. Fran’s cleaned her teeth so that she can breathe in my direction without me fearing contamination. I’ve scrubbed my own teeth so hard that the
bristles on my toothbrush bend back like a demented weeping willow.
Fran’s done her usual bus thing of falling asleep within seconds. As the bus takes a tight corner a small hard coconut plops on to my shoulder.
I sigh, remove the head and place a tissue underneath it before replacing it. I take a good sniff of the hair to check that it’s clean. It smells of violets, chicken pie and caramel.
I envy Fran lots of things. Like the fact that all the boys in the class go silly and moony over her and she tosses her plaits and doesn’t care. She’s above all that.
I also envy her being able to switch off wherever she is. I’m condemned to remain an upright rigid ferret amidst a sea of snoring slack-jawed commuters. Sometimes this makes me feel superior.
At other times it’s just plain annoying.
Like now. I want to talk to Fran about my stepmother’s mysterious words this morning. What is it she’s got to tell me later?
A small snuffle comes from the head on my shoulder.
I wish I could rest my sore cheek on my best mate’s soft hair, but that’s out of the question.
I gaze out instead.
I know there are clothes shops and colourful people and sweet dogs passing by, but I don’t see them.
I never see them.
My eyes are fixated by something else.
The smudges on the window of the green school bus.
Y
ou might be wondering why I’ve got such a weird name.
When I was little and couldn’t sleep, Mum used to sit on the edge of my bed and tell me where it came from.
I got my name from the place where my mother lay down in the back of a rust-coloured camper van with my father and conceived me.
When they woke up the next morning, my father tried to cook sausages on a flame about the size of a Bunsen burner and my mother staggered out of the van, shielding her eyes against the sun rising over the fields and went
to find out where they were.
‘We’re in Zelah,’ she shouted to my father. He came out of the van, blinking with a sausage speared on the end of a yellow screwdriver.
‘What?’ he shouted back.
My mother rolled her eyes and gave him her ‘affectionate exasperated look’.
‘Zelah,’ she said again, quieter. ‘We’re in Zelah. Cornwall.’
She grabbed the burnt sausage and ran away with it over the poppy fields, shrieking like a child. My mother was just eighteen and my father twenty-two. They were running away from their jobs and parents to start a new life together on the Cornish coast. It was the eighties, so my mother was wearing pedal pushers and a white ruffled shirt with big gold hoop earrings and her black hair in a ponytail.
(‘Yes, really,’ she said, looking at my face of disgusted disbelief.)
My father was wearing what he always wore: red checked shirt, jeans and Timberland boots.
By the time my mother turned nineteen, she’d given birth to a black-haired, red-cheeked baby girl. Me.
She looked into my cot at the hospital and remembered that magical night in the leaky camper van on the road towards Penzance.
‘Of course,’ she murmured, sniffing my sweet, baby-smelling skin. ‘Zelah. That’s what I’ll call you. Zelah.’
And that’s how I got my name.
Actually, that’s a complete load of crap. But that’s the version I believed until I was about twelve and then, after Mum died, Dad came into my bedroom one night and broke down in tears.
‘We never stopped arguing even back then,’ he said. His fingers were pressed over his
face. Hot tears squeezed into the webbed bits between them and ran slowly down his leathery hands.
He smelled of old beer and cigarettes and kept letting out these weird belching noises.
To add to my major stress levels he was eating a bag of bacon-flavoured crisps and every time he opened his mouth I could see loads of soggy potato moving about on his tongue.
Gross.
‘Even on the night you were born we argued,’ he said.
I frowned. In my mother’s version of events, my father was at home smoking fat cigars and ringing friends and relatives with the wondrous news of my birth.
I told him this, trying not to look too closely at Dad chomping on his crisps.
‘Your mother always wanted you to think that our marriage was perfect,’ said Dad with a
big hiccup. ‘Actually I was at the hospital all night, arguing.’
With this revelation he shattered another piece of family history to bits of fake plastic in the blink of a hot, wet eye.
I asked him what they were arguing about. Big mistake.
‘Your name,’ said my father, screwing up the crisp bag and chucking it on the floor.
‘I wanted to call you Louise, but your mother said that was wet and boring and she was going to come up with something outlandish and weird, just to spite me.’