Alice in Time (4 page)

As he got older and had one of those cots with bars and could sit up and look out, I discovered that if I took all my toys into his room and played with them on the floor in front of his cot that usually kept him quiet for hours. I’d take all my Barbie dolls in there and play out stories with them. It was a bit like being at the theatre for him. He had the best front-row seat and I got to play everyone from the princess to the prince and the evil witch. Of course he didn’t really know what was going on, so I could make anything up as long as I made them have funny voices and made them move around a lot.

This worked quite well until Rory was about two. By then Mum was getting better and not relying on me so much. But then Gran died and Mum got bad again for about a year. If she was in bed having a nap, it was up to me to keep Rory quiet.

The problem was, the old game of him watching me play didn’t work any more. Now he wanted to play as well, but his idea of fun was to stuff my Barbie dolls into his slobbery mouth, rip their limbs from their bodies and stick their feet up his nose. Those were the darkest days but I managed to convince myself that, as I was nearly ten, I was getting too old for them anyway.

Then last year Mum got a job at the old people’s home, or nursing home I should say, where Miss Maybrooke is. It’s only at the end of our road, which Mum thought would be great because she wouldn’t need to drive there and she’d be on hand if we needed her. Unfortunately, all it means is that when they’re short-staffed, which seems to me to be all the time,
they call on my mum because she lives so close and she says she can’t say no, because the boss gets funny with her if she does, and cuts her hours down. I can’t help thinking that Mum is a mug to play into his hands in this way and she should tell him where to get off. Anyhow, it means that she’s never here any more and it’s down to me to look after Rory again.

So I hope you can see that my fantasy wasn’t that harsh after all and that if Rory wasn’t here my life would be drastically improved. That’s why I conceived the Plan I was talking about earlier, where I go and live with Dad and Trish and can lead a civilised and peaceful existence. Which reminds me, I forgot to mention it to Dad at the wedding. I’ve been trying to find the right moment for ages now. I will definitely do it next time I see him.

I make a half-hearted attempt at picking up some of the things that are all over the floor. Rory’s school bag has burst open and his tatty books are littered about. As I pick up his literacy book, it falls open and catches my eye because at the top of the page it says
My Big Sister
. His homework was to write an essay on me! I can’t resist reading it.

My big sister is big and scary
.

The cheek! I’ll give him scary! I read on.

She shouts a lot and she doesn’t like me much. I wish I had a little sister then I could shout at her. I like it when she reads me stories but she never does. She is mean and she smells pooey.

That’s the thanks I get, after all I do for him! I see with some satisfaction that the teacher wasn’t too impressed either. She’s circled the word ‘pooey’ and written,
This is not a nice word, Rory.

Rory has got bored with playing dead and comes out from under the chaos. I stuff the book back into his school bag.

‘Quick,’ I tell him, ‘get into bed before Mum gets back.’

‘Never,’ he says defiantly.

‘You’ll be in trouble.’

‘You mean you’ll be in trouble,’ he says, giving me a sly grin so I feel like hitting him. Unfortunately he’s got me on that one. Mum will be cross with me for not getting him into bed and he knows it, which makes my job all the more difficult.

‘You said you’d read me a story,’ he whines. ‘I’ll go if you read me a story.’

‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous, it’s far too late,’ I say. There is nothing I hate more than reading Rory a story. And I’m certainly not going to read him one after what he wrote about me.

‘But you promised!’ He’s folded his arms now and stuck out his bottom lip. The next stage is a full-blown tantrum.

‘I never promised,’ I yell back at him.

‘You did, too.’

‘Didn’t.’

‘Did.’

This could go on for hours, and sometimes does, because I want to see who is the first to crack, even though it’s usually me; Rory can go on all day. I decide I’ve had enough already so I grab him by the arm and drag him into the hall and of course he starts screaming so I don’t hear the key in the lock as Mum lets herself in.

‘For God’s sake, Alice. Why isn’t he in bed? It’s ten o’clock! He’s not even in his pyjamas.’

Great. Here we go.

‘Is it really too much to ask? I’ve just done a twelve-hour shift and I have to come home to this.’

I let go of Rory’s arm and he runs, blubbering, to Mum who gives him a big hug.

‘She hurt me,’ he wails and Mum gives me that awful disappointed look.

‘You’re lucky I didn’t kill you,’ I yell.

‘She promised she’d read me a story and now she won’t.
And
she swore at me.’

‘Enough,’ says Mum. She looks at Rory. ‘You go upstairs and get into your pyjamas and clean your teeth and then Alice will come up and read you a story.’

‘Mum!’ I yell, as Rory gives me a triumphant smile and scurries upstairs. ‘That is
so
unfair.’

‘Don’t start,’ says Mum, firmly. ‘If you made a promise, you must keep it.’

‘But I didn’t.’ My voice is getting more shrill, but I can’t help it. She hasn’t even asked about the wedding.

‘Stop arguing and just do as you’re told for once.’

‘Why is it always me that has to do as I’m told? Why can’t Rory do as he’s told?’ I scream back. I can’t remember the last time I had a normal conversation with my mother where one or the other of us wasn’t shouting. Then I remember that I’m not even meant to be speaking to her.

Just then Rory, now in his pyjamas, comes shooting down the stairs.

‘Mum, look what Dad gave me.’ He retrieves the monster truck from behind the umbrella stand and shoves it at Mum.

‘Very nice,’ she says, but I can see her lips pursing and I know exactly what she’s thinking, even though she’d never say it to Rory. She’s calculating what it will cost to buy new batteries when these run out, and thinking how thoughtless Dad is to buy him such a present.

‘He bought Alice a mobile phone,’ pipes up Rory. Mum’s mouth goes so thin at this news that her lips practically disappear. She glares at me.

‘What?’ I say as nonchalantly as possible.

‘Is that true?’ she asks.

She looks really upset. I know exactly what she’s thinking. She’s thinking, if Dad can afford to give me such an expensive present, how come he can’t afford to pay her more maintenance and why does he keep missing payments? Of course she’ll never say this out loud because she never badmouths Dad in front of us. Not that that makes any difference when I can tell what she’s thinking. She should give Dad a break. After all, he spent the money on us, which is more than she ever does. Hence our long-running argument about the mobile phone.

‘Yes, he did,’ I reply. ‘And it’s just as well, because I could really have used it this morning.’ Damn, too late I realise what I’ve said. I wasn’t going to tell Mum about going to the wrong place and missing the wedding.

Mum is busy taking her coat off and getting her slippers on and I think I might have got away with it but of course I’d forgotten about Rory and his big mouth.

‘We got lost and then we got wet and had to run and then we had to hide from some bad people and we never saw the wedding. We just went to the pub instead.’

Thanks, Rory. Now Mum’s going to think that Dad is totally incompetent and if I’m not careful she might not let him look after us at weekends. Not that we’ve been to see him much lately. He’s had so much work on.

‘It wasn’t a big deal,’ I say airily. ‘The taxi driver didn’t know that the registry office had been moved to the town hall, that’s all. If I’d had a phone I could have rung Dad, and he could have come and got us.’ I’ve definitely scored a point there, I think.

‘No he couldn’t, silly. He was getting married,’ Rory points out.

‘Whatever.’ I shrug and go into the kitchen.

I still can’t believe we missed Dad’s wedding. He finally finds a lovely woman that he wants to spend the rest of his life with and we miss the big moment. Suddenly I feel like crying. I flop down into a chair and rest my head on the table and think about what an awful day it’s been. My peace is soon shattered when Mum and Rory come into the kitchen.

‘I’m hungry,’ wails Rory, ‘I want something to eat.’

‘What did you have for tea?’ she asks us. There’s a silence while I think. We haven’t had anything to eat since lunchtime, which seems an awfully long time ago now.

‘We didn’t have anything,’ pipes up Rory.

Mum gives me The Look.

‘It’s not my fault. We’ve only just got home.’

‘No we haven’t. We’ve been home ages. I built a den but Alice ruined it and buried me under a pile of books and stuff. I could hardly breathe. I thought I was going to die.’ Rory is always exaggerating and tries to make me look bad whenever he can.

‘That is such a lie.’ I take a swipe at him across the table because I know that Mum always believes him over me.

‘Stop it, you two,’ says Mum. ‘I’m too tired for this. I’m going to make us some scrambled egg on toast and then we’ll all go to bed.’

While she shuffles around the kitchen, Rory tells her all about the day and I can tell by the way she is bashing the eggs to death in the jug that she doesn’t really want to hear about Dad’s wedding. Well, it’s her fault for throwing him out. In fact, the thought of that makes me so cross I decide to chip in.

‘They had the reception in a really lovely pub,’ I tell her.

‘Oh,’ says Mum, ‘which one was that?’

‘I can’t remember what it was called,’ I say.

‘I can,’ says Rory, ‘it was called the King’s Head. I remember because Terry told me that there used to be a picture outside of a king who had his head chopped off. But Terry said people complained because it was too gory. There was blood and stuff coming out of it —’ He would have carried on if Mum hadn’t interrupted.

‘The King’s Head! What, the one in the middle of town?’

I don’t say anything, because I don’t want Dad to look bad, but it’s too late.

‘He actually had a wedding reception in there?’

‘Yes,’ said Rory. ‘It was great. We watched the racing and I played on the fruit machine.’

Mum’s lips are pursed up again, but she just sighs and gives me that look again. As if it was my fault! I’ve had enough. I get up so quickly that my chair falls over. I don’t care, I leave it where it is and shout, ‘It was a lovely wedding and Dad looked
so handsome and Trish was really happy and everyone had a brilliant time,’ then I flounce out of the kitchen and run up to my bedroom.

When I’m alone I start crying, I don’t know why. I pick up the pink dress that I left in a heap on the floor but instead of putting it in the laundry basket I stuff it into the wastepaper bin – but only after I’ve blown my nose on it. Then I crawl into bed and pull the duvet right up over my head and try to imagine that I’m somewhere else and some
one
else.

I’m standing at the bus stop waiting for the school bus. This has definitely got to be the worst part of the day for me. Well, this and the bus home. There’s only one other person from my school who catches the bus from this stop and that’s a boy from Year Eight, so we ignore each other. As the bus comes round the bend and pulls up at the bus stop, I curse the fact that it’s a single-decker bus. I do this every morning. If it was a double decker I could get away from Sasha and her cronies. But as it is, by the time the bus gets to my stop, she is sitting halfway up the aisle and the front of the bus is full of boys from Years Seven and Eight so I have to go past her to get a seat.

Every day Sasha makes it her mission to embarrass me in some way. She used to call me ‘Anorak’ because Mum wouldn’t let me out of the house without my coat on. It was no good explaining to her that
nobody
wears a coat (except a few geeky boys) and that by making me wear one she was literally
ruining my life. Then I hit on the solution of getting a bigger rucksack and hiding my coat in the bottom of it. Now Mum is willing to accept that I have one of those raincoats that packs up into a small bag which I keep in the bottom of my bag, ‘for emergencies’. Of course there is no emergency on earth which would force me to actually wear the thing, but Mum lives under the illusion that if it was raining hard I would get it out and put it on.

So far it’s been at the bottom of my bag for over a year and is covered in specks of melted chocolate, and is sticky at one end where a banana gunked all over it because I forgot it was in my bag and I didn’t find it until it had gone black and split. So anyway, Sasha stopped calling me ‘Anorak’ and took to tripping me up as I went past and then saying, ‘Ooh look, it’s Alice in Blunderland.’ Everyone laughs of course, not because it’s funny but because everyone always laughs when Sasha does something cruel. I think they’re relieved it’s not them she’s picking on. Sasha has a way of saying things that seems to require a reaction, like she’s playing to an audience.

I steel myself for what she has in store today. As I walk past her she says, very loudly so that even the Sixth Formers at the back of the bus look up, ‘Oh look, it’s The Virgin Alice.’

I know I’m blushing and that everyone is staring and giggling and I hate her so much and I hate myself for blushing and probably looking like I’m about to cry, but I can’t help it. I stumble as far down the bus as I dare without entering the Sixth Form zone. I sit down in the nearest available seat and pretend to be looking for something in my bag, because I daren’t look up and catch anyone’s eye.

My red face is just subsiding and my heart is returning to its normal rhythm when the person I have sat down next to leans over and says, ‘You should just ignore her, you know.’

I look round and once again the blood rushes to my cheeks and my heart goes mad again. I’m sitting next to one of the Sixth Form boys. What’s he doing sitting this far forward? I’ve never seen him before – he must be new. I mean, he’s not the sort of person you could miss. He’s absolutely gorgeous. His hair is longer than most of the boys’ and it’s caramel-coloured. He’s got blue-grey eyes and no spots. And he’s talking to
me
. Then I remember that only a few minutes ago the whole bus was sniggering because Sasha had called me a virgin and I want the floor to open up and swallow me.