Lola Rose (11 page)

Mum smiled and raised her eyebrows at me. ‘There now, isn't that lucky?' she said. ‘That's very understanding of you, Ms Balsam. So, can I leave the kids with you today?'

‘Certainly. I'll take them along to their classes – unless you'd like to come with Kendall to settle him in?'

‘Lola Rose might be better. Our Kenny—Kendall tends to play up a bit with me.'

Mum gave us both a quick kiss and then dashed off with an airy wave before we could take in she was abandoning us. Kendall's mouth wobbled, the corners turning tight down. I had to fight not to cry myself. It was OK for Mum. She didn't have to stick it out at this scary new school with all these tough kids who would hate us because we were new and weird.

But it wasn't scary at all! Ms Balsam let me hold Kendall's hand tight while she took us into the reception class. There were loads of little kids messing around finger painting, bashing bricks, kneading red dough and trooping in and out of a little playhouse. A big girl with long fair hair in a ponytail and dungarees was having a funny paintbrush fight with a scabby little boy with a bristly head.

I thought she was an older sister like me but it turned out she was Ms Denby, the
teacher
. She gave Kendall a big smile as if she'd known him all her life. ‘Hello, darling. What's your name, then?'

Kendall swallowed and looked at me, scared to speak in case he said something wrong again.

‘His name's Kendall,' I announced.

The scabby boy sniggered. A plump little girl with a topknot stuck her chin out. ‘
I'm
Kendall,' she said.

‘Kendall's a girl's name,' said Scabby. He laughed. The other boys did too.

‘It's a girl's name
and
a boy's name. Didn't you know that?' said Ms Denby. ‘Welcome to our class, Kendall. What would you like to do? How about finger painting?'

Kendall's hand screwed itself up inside mine. He hates getting his hands dirty.

‘How about the dough?' said Ms Denby.

Kendall shuddered at the thought of getting it up his fingernails.

‘He wants to build a big tower of bricks,' I suggested. I knew he should make a safe, boy's choice.

Kendall was staring at the playhouse. ‘I don't want to do bricks,' he said. ‘I want to go in that little house with George.'

I held my breath, waiting for the scabby kid to sneer. Surprisingly no one seemed to think it sissy to go and play house. When I led Kendall over I found two little boys and one little girl crouched inside, having a tea party.

‘Do you want tea or coffee?' the little girl asked, laying a place for Kendall with her blue plastic tea set.

‘Coffee. Black. And a ciggie too,' said Kendall.

‘Coming right up,' she said, pouring imaginary coffee and lighting an invisible cigarette for him.

Kendall took it from her and inhaled thin air with appreciation. ‘Thanks, babe,' he said.

Ms Denby and Ms Balsam and I were in silent stitches. Ms Denby gave me a thumbs-up sign. I nodded and went off with Ms Balsam. She patted my shoulder.

‘There, he's settled in already,' she said.

We both knew it might not be so easy for me. I felt sick when we walked into the Year Six classroom. I thought I was quite tall but lots of the girls were much bigger than me, and so grown-up! They wore tight designer tops that showed their figures, and they had elaborate plaited hairstyles and nose rings and fantastic fingernails.

OK, not
all
the girls. There were a couple of little scruffy twitchy girls who looked sad. Then there were a clump of girls with big headscarves who all sat together. There was another Asian girl sitting by herself. She had her hair in a long glossy plait and when she grinned she had a gap in her front teeth. She was grinning at me.

She came up to me at play time. ‘I love your jacket!' she said, stroking it admiringly. ‘I'm Harpreet. What's your name again? Lola?'

‘Lola Rose.'

‘Cool name!'

I didn't need to worry. I wasn't sad old Jayni who got picked on.

I was cool Lola Rose in her fantastic furry jacket.

So now we were the Luck family – Victoria, Kendall and Lola Rose – and we had a whole new life going for us. It was strange how quickly it stopped feeling new. After a few weeks it was weird thinking back to the
old
life. I didn't feel fussed when someone asked me my name and wanted to know where I lived. I felt like I'd been Lola Rose for ever. I could have grown up in Flexley Park and been at Larkrise Primary all my school life.

Harpreet was the sort of best friend I'd always longed for. We sat next to each other in class and helped each other with all our work. She was brilliant at maths and IT and science. I'm OK at English and better at art so it worked a treat.

Ms Balsam
did
do a special collage lesson! She brought in a huge pile of old magazines for us to cut up. She suggested we do a picture with a family theme. Harpreet flipped through a big glossy magazine, trying to find photos of people who looked like
her
family. She had a huge family – her mum and dad, a little sister, a big sister, two big brothers, and hundreds of aunties and uncles and cousins and her grandma and grandpa out in India. She started moaning because all the people in the photos were too pink.

‘You can colour them with brown felt pen if you like. Or maybe you can find stuff that kind of
represents
your family,' I said.

‘Like what?' said Harpreet.

‘Like . . . you could find someone with a big smiley mouth and cut it out and then find a white rabbit and a top hat and that could be your dad,' I said. I loved Harpreet's funny dad. He made a big fuss of me and did all these daft conjuring tricks, pretending to find eggs behind my ears and a string of coloured hankies from the sleeve of my new jacket.

‘What about his body?' said Harpreet, who didn't quite get it.

‘You don't need to show the actual people. Look, your mum could be represented by lots of gold jewellery and a television set because she can't miss any of her soaps. Your brother Amrit could be a state-of-the-art computer, right?'

‘What shall I be?' said Harpreet.

‘You can be sweets and a long plait and lots of little numbers because you're good at maths and you could find two linked hands and colour friendship bracelets round the wrists and they could be you and me.'

‘You have such
good
ideas, Lola Rose,' said Harpreet. ‘I'm so lucky having you as my friend.'

I helped Harpreet stick all her family on a bright pink background with a border of red hearts and yellow flowers. We outlined everything with a gold glitter pen. It looked lovely.

‘I can't wait to show Dad,' said Harpreet. ‘I bet he'll frame it and hang it in the lounge.' She paused. ‘What about
your
dad, Lola Rose?'

‘I haven't got one,' I said. I selected a large piece of turquoise paper for my own collage.

‘You must have had a dad
once
,' said Harpreet. ‘What's that blue for? Is that going to be sky?'

‘It's going to be water,' I said.

I cut out a pink girl and added bright yellow hair way down past her waist. I fashioned a tail from a photo of green grass and made her into a mermaid. I cut little red roses for her hair and wound them round and round her long tail in a garland. I stuck her up at the top of the water, waving to a little green frog leaping up and down on a lily pad.

I searched for a woman pretty enough to be Mum but I couldn't find one, so I turned a beautiful white statue into a water nymph. I added lots more golden curls and inked tiny black musical notes coming out of her parted lips.

I cut out more red roses, a great fluttering drift of them, and stuck them in a big red heart round the mermaid and the frog and the statue. It looked like it was keeping them safe. The rest of the blue paper looked a bit bare so I stuck on some buried treasure and a little aeroplane sailing like a ship and ice lollies swimming along like a shoal of fish.

I wanted to stop there, but I couldn't. I cut out a shark from a nature magazine. I didn't like touching it with my fingers even though I knew it was only paper. I didn't want it in my picture. I wanted to rip it into little bits. But I stuck it down right at the very bottom of the page. It was looking up up up through the water at the three people caged in the heart.

‘That looks scary,' said Harpreet.

It did look much too scary. I tried to ease the shark off the paper but the glue stuck fast. I tried pulling.

‘Don't rip up your lovely picture!' said Harpreet. ‘You'll spoil it.'

‘I don't like the shark,' I said. ‘I'm going to cover him up.'

I found a picture of some houses. I started cutting out a whole row of them, complete with little gardens. ‘I'm going to have an underwater buried village,' I said.

I arranged it right along the bottom of the page, covering up every tooth and fin and scale. I put shells and seaweed hedges in the gardens and stuck anchors on the top of every roof as television aerials. I stuck and stuck until the bottom of my picture was twice as thick as the top, but it didn't stop me worrying about the shark swimming silently in and out the windows and doors, looking for his family.

I dreamt about the shark at night. I couldn't get back to sleep, even though I huddled close to Mum.

I hated her being out so much. I put Kendall to bed about eight but I stayed up until Mum came home, even though she sometimes didn't make it back till midnight.

‘You should go to sleep, Lola Rose, you silly girl,' Mum said, rubbing her finger under my eyes. ‘Look at these dark circles. You look like a little panda. You're a bad bad girl.'

But she didn't get cross with me. She was always in a good mood now when she came home from the pub. It wasn't just the drinks her customers bought her. I was scared she might have started a thing with the manager, Barry. She seemed to be very thick with him, especially since they had a karaoke night and Mum sang a special Kylie medley.

‘He said I'm every bit as good as Kylie – and he said my bum's just as good as hers too,' Mum said, dancing round the bedroom in her underwear.

‘Mum!'

‘He says he might give me a regular singing spot. He's got this mad idea that I could stand on top of the bar counter and prance round a bit.' Mum waggled her bum and held her hairbrush like a mike, demonstrating.

‘Your face, Lola Rose!' said Mum. ‘Look, darling, if I've got a nice voice there's no reason why I shouldn't show it off.'

‘It sounds like this Barry guy is more interested in your nice bum,' I said sourly.

‘Ooh, you cheeky girl,' said Mum, pretending she was going to smack
my
bum with the hair-brush. ‘Nah, old Barry's a sweetheart but he's too much under his wife's thumb. She doesn't mind the singing idea if it brings in more customers but she'll make sure Barry behaves himself. Not that I'd let him get anywhere. He's way too old and dull for me. I've got other fish to fry.'

Mum grinned at herself in the dressing-table mirror we'd bought at the weekend at a hospice shop.

My stomach squeezed. ‘What do you mean, other fish to fry?' I said.

‘It's just a silly expression, sweetheart. Take no notice,' said Mum, brushing her hair.

‘Have you got a new boyfriend?'

‘No! Well, not exactly. You can't call him a boyfriend. We've not even been out together. But he's interested, put it that way. Well, a number of the guys down the pub have chatted me up, as a matter of fact – but Jake's different.'

‘Jake?'

‘He is
gorgeous
, Lola Rose. He's an artist. He says he wants to paint my portrait. Imagine, I might find myself hanging in an art gallery one day! It's Jake who's the oil painting though. He's got this thick dark-blonde hair, quite long, as lovely as a girl's, but there's nothing girly about Jake,
oh
no!'

My heart was beating so fast I felt dizzy. ‘Mum, don't!' I was in such a panic I didn't think what I was saying. ‘What if Dad finds out?'

Mum stared at me. ‘Dad?' she said. She acted like she'd forgotten all about him. ‘Your dad's got nothing to do with it, darling. He's in the past. Over and done with. We'll never see him again.'

‘But . . .' I screwed up my face, struggling. I didn't know why I felt in such a panic. That's what I wanted to hear, wasn't it?
I
didn't want to see Dad. But it seemed so weird for Mum to talk about him as if he was an old film she could barely remember. Dad had always come first with her.