The Girl Who Saw Lions Read online

  After a bit Carmel opened the door again with my plate of sandwiches in her hand. The other girls lay as still as snakes. She shook my nightie in front of me, laughing and snorting and spraying into my face. I didn’t like her. I didn’t want to be in her house. She sent me to the bathroom, and when I came back, the big girls were eating my sandwiches. I lay in the dark, listening to them giggling and whispering, and I tried to close my ears till I was in the church at home with the birds swooping in and out and all the people singing in harmony, and Mama’s sweet blue voice rising right up to heaven. But just as I was drifting off to sleep the girl below lifted up the springs under my mattress with her feet, kicking and laughing so I had to cling onto the side of the bed. I wouldn’t let myself go to sleep after that. I was frightened that if I did, I would fall into a deep black hole, and I would never be able to climb out again.

  I whispered to Susie that I was sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry. The other big girl shouted at me to shut up but I kept on and on repeating it. I am sorry. I am sorry. If I stopped saying it, if I stopped hearing my own voice, I would disappear for ever into the black hole. The girl got out of bed and climbed up my ladder and started hitting me.

  Blue fireflies zizzed in the darkness. Little frogs crickled. Mama sang to me.

  14

  Rosa

  I DIDN’T WANT Anthony to come. I had set my heart on having a sister, someone nearly my age; a best friend. I could do her hair, I could lend her my clothes. I’d look after her, and share my secrets and my favourite CDs. I didn’t want a little boy. But I knew I couldn’t let Mum down again. I couldn’t change my mind, not this time.

  ‘It’s not a girl, Mum,’ was all I said. ‘Don’t you mind?’

  ‘Well, maybe we have to take what comes.’ Mum gathered up the photographs like a pack of cards and fanned them out in her hand, selecting one and then another. ‘After all, a natural mother can’t choose whether she has a boy or a girl. And look at him, Rosa. He’s beautiful.’

  He was. He had huge melting brown eyes and a smile that was as wide as a letter box. Molly brought us a video of him playing with a puppy in his foster-mother’s house and he was like a puppy himself, tumbling and play-scrapping and making happy little yapping noises.

  ‘He looks a real cheerful little chap. It’s amazing, after what he’s been through,’ Mum said for the tenth time, and at last I gave in and asked her to tell me what his story was.

  This was it, Anthony’s story: he was born in Tanzania. His mother was black, his father was white. His parents came to England and they were involved in a train derailment when he was a baby. His mother died. His father was seriously ill for months. So was baby Anthony, but when he was better he was put in the care of a foster mother. His father took him back when he was out of hospital, but he wasn’t really better, he couldn’t cope. Then he was ill with depression for months, so Anthony was back with the foster mother. The father married again, the new wife wouldn’t have Anthony. She wanted a family of her own. She wanted white children. And so, Anthony was placed for adoption.

  I know Anthony’s story backwards. It’s another fairy-tale, like mine, another life crammed into a few sentences. If I was a writer I could sit down and write a whole book just about Anthony, just about those four years of his life.

  And Mum, just by knowing his story, his case history as Molly called it, just by looking at his photographs and watching a video of him tumbling over like a puppy, giggling into the camera, had fallen completely in love with him. She went to see him, and she came back with stars in her eyes, bubbling over with stories about him. He had charmed her socks off. His social worker brought him to see us one Saturday after skating, and he held Mum’s hand as she showed him round the house, smiling up at her sweetly. Twitchy, the traitor, purred herself round his feet and blinked kisses up at him. She let him carry her round as if she was a soft toy, abandoning all her dignity.

  When he’d gone, Molly asked us what we thought of him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum. ‘He’s gorgeous.’

  ‘What do you think, Rosa?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He is.’ But my heart was full and heavy with storm clouds, with deep down bottle green disappointment.

  After six weeks of occasional visits and two sleepover weekends, Anthony moved in with his little brown suitcase, patchworked with stickers of teddy bears and dogs. For the time being he had the spare bed in my room, the one we’d bought for my new sister. Mum read him stories at night, and he sat with his thumb in his mouth and his eyes going glazy till he dropped off to sleep in her lap. She took two months’ adoption leave off work and spent the time clearing out the spidery little spare bedroom, getting rid of her life’s collection of books, clothes, the sewing machine that didn’t work, the old computer, my broken dolls’ house, paintings, all the stuff that might come in useful and which was now labelled ‘junk’.

  ‘Not the shoes,’ I insisted.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’ll keep the shoes.’

  The bag of shoes went back as far as Great-Grandma, who died when I was six. Lace-ups, heeled shoes, flat shoes, boots, zip boots, lace-boots, Velcro fastenings, little button fastenings, and every colour you could think of. Grandpa’s slippers, with a hole under the right toe where he kept pressing the sustain pedal on the piano. Nana’s little dancing pumps, soles worn threadbare from dancing at ceilidhs. When I looked at them I could imagine her, light-footed and laughing, dos-à-dos-ing and honouring her partner.

  ‘They’re a bit smelly,’ Mum said, edging them towards the wastepaper basket.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ I said.

  We found a box for them and stored them under my bed. Then she steamed off the wallpaper in the spare bedroom, singing every minute of the way, and took Anthony on a special trip to town and let him choose his own wallpaper. He chose Wallace and Gromit.

  Grandpa adored him. He decided to come to the ice rink with Mum and me on Saturdays just so he and Anthony could learn to skate together. Anthony had no fear; within minutes he was out in the centre of the rink, tripping over his own skates, his legs scissoring and splaying, and he didn’t care. By the end of the first session he was skating, really skating, a little brown blob with flashing feet, while Grandpa groped his way round the rink bar, clinging on for dear life. The new word for him is stoical.

  It has to be said that everybody loved Anthony. The postwoman, the window cleaner, the woman next door, Sophie Baxter’s mum, everyone. And if everyone loved him, what was wrong with me? I tried to make him cry, and it didn’t work. I nipped him, and he pretended not to notice. I tipped his food away in the kitchen bin and he didn’t care. It got worse. My one aim in life was to make Anthony cry.

  Molly asked me if I was happy and I said yes. She looked at me for ages while I looked at her shoes, which were the square-toed sort that I don’t like much, and she said, ‘Are you still writing your diary, Rosa?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said, but it wasn’t true. Somehow I’d lost heart when I knew I wasn’t going to have a new sister.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘It’s important.’

  As soon as she had gone I rummaged in my sock drawer and found the diary. I turned it upside down and opened it at the back page.

  OK, Anthony, I wrote. I hate your grinning sweety-pie googie-eyed guts.

  15

  Abela

  NEXT DAY, ABELA’S breakfast remained untouched, but in the morning scramble nobody seemed to notice or to care. Mrs Sanderson arrived when the older children had already tumbled out of the house for their school bus or for work. She brought with her a warm jumper in the same cherry red that the other children in Abela’s new school wore, and a grey pleated skirt, black woollen tights and lace-up shoes.

  ‘You’re a lucky girl,’ she told Abela. ‘Mrs Mount’s little girl has just grown out of these, and she says you can have them. I’ll take you to school this morning, and Carmel will fetch you home.’

  Home! Abela’s heart lurched at the word, but sh
e looked gravely at Mrs Sanderson. She had come to expect disappointments. She already knew that home was a treacherous word; it meant many things. It was a word that kept slipping away and meaning something else. She dressed silently in her new clothes, hid her car and book under her pillow, and left the house with Mrs Sanderson, clopping along the pavement next to her in the stiff lace-up shoes that were heavier than her feet. As long as I can still go to school, she thought, it will be all right. She clenched her fists anxiously in the pockets of her new skirt, and only relaxed them when they turned a corner and at last she could hear the trilling sound of children’s voices in the schoolyard.

  ‘Off you go,’ Mrs Sanderson said.

  Jasmine skipped over to Abela as soon as she came through the gate, and they went into assembly together holding hands. Today I am one of these children, Abela thought, looking down proudly at her red and grey uniform. Now I belong. Nobody stared at her, nobody giggled. In class, Mister Hardy crouched by her table and asked her to read to him from a book with many words, which she did, slowly and bravely.

  ‘That’s very good,’ he told her. ‘You’ve been taught very well, Abela.’

  ‘Soon I be doctor,’ she told him. ‘Go home, make people better.’

  ‘I’m sure you will.’ He stood up, giving a little grunt as his knees creaked. ‘But you’ll have to wait, oh, about twenty years before you’re qualified. You’ll have to work very, very hard.’

  ‘I will work very, very hard,’ she repeated the words joyfully. ‘Then I go home.’

  ‘Home to Tanzania. I’ve never been to your country,’ he told her. ‘Draw me a picture to show me what it’s like.’

  Abela thought for a long time before she took up any of the coloured pencils. She thought about her village, about the dusty red earth where children played and hens scratched, the sun striping through the trees where monkeys screamed and gibbered, the little vegetable plots and paddocks where skinny humpbacked cows lowed moodily to be milked. In the classroom around her, the other children worked at their various tasks, some of them whispering and giggling. She had forgotten about them, or where she was. She was so absorbed in her drawing that Jasmine had to shake her shoulder and take the coloured pencils away from her hand at the end of the afternoon.

  ‘That’s a funny house,’ she said. ‘It’s good though.’

  When the other children had run out to meet their parents, Abela still sat at her table, not knowing what to do or where to go. Mister Hardy came across and peered over her shoulder at the picture. It showed a round, thatched mud-red hut next to a tree that flamed with crimson flowers. Red and yellow swirls streaked the earth, and the sky was twisting with blue. A huge, yellow sun peered over a pointed mountain, vibrating with light and colour and life.

  ‘This is Bibi’s house,’ she said.

  ‘It’s beautiful, Abela.’ He held the picture up. ‘Do you know, I can feel the heat throbbing up from the ground! Or is it the sand in the wind? There’s so much movement!’

  Abela only bobbed her head and laughed. She was so pleased with her picture that she wanted to stroke it.

  ‘And who is Bibi?’

  ‘My grandmother, Teacha,’ she said softly.

  Bibi, oh, Bibi. What are you doing now without me? Do you think about me?

  Mister Hardy tiptoed quietly round her, clearing away his papers, tidying the classroom, just watching her without saying anything. All the other children had left by the time Carmel arrived.

  ‘I’m always in a rush!’ she laughed, her breath wheezing in tight little squeaks. ‘How’s she been? Not crying for her Carmel, I suppose?’

  ‘She’s been fine. She’s been very busy,’ Mister Hardy said. ‘She’s just finished a lovely picture.’

  ‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘Is this for me?’

  Abela looked anxiously at Mister Hardy, saying no with her eyes. Please, no!

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘It would be nice for the other children in the class to see where Abela lived. Perhaps we could put it up in the classroom here?’

  He stuck it on the wall with Blu-Tack, and Abela looked at it, and then at him, her eyes wide and shining with pride. Mister Hardy was right. You could feel the dense, sticky blanket heat of home; you could feel the throbbing sun and the dusty swirl of sand. It was exactly right.

  When they arrived back at the foster home, Carmel told Abela to run upstairs and change out of her school uniform before tea. In the girls’ room she found some different clothes laid out for her on the bed; green trousers and a yellow sweatshirt. Lola and Cathy were in the room changing.

  ‘Take your school clothes off,’ Cathy said to her. ‘You won’t half be in trouble with old Ma Carmel if you don’t.’

  Abela ignored the new clothes, which she disliked, and put on her kanga, Mrs Long’s cardigan, and Bibi’s friend’s sandals. Then she climbed onto her bed to look for her animal book. She wanted to carry on colouring now. Maybe Carmel had some coloured pencils that she could borrow. She could imagine the lion with flashes of black in his golden mane, as if it was lifting as he moved; swirls of air and sand around him. She opened the first page, the Simba page, and caught her breath in disbelief. She flicked over page after page. Every one had been scribbled on. The two girls watched her, raising their eyebrows at each other, pressing their hands against their mouths, shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.

  ‘My book!’ Abela gasped, hugging it to her. ‘My Susie book.’

  ‘Her Susie book!’ Lola snorted. ‘Ah! Look, it’s all spoiled. What a shame. Who’d have done that?’

  Abela dived under her pillow for her car. It was missing. She slid off the bed, losing her balance in her panic, knocking her head on the ladder. The girls smirked at each other as she rummaged under all the beds, searching for the car.

  ‘Where is my car!’ she demanded.

  ‘I don’t know anything about a car,’ Lola said. She was twisting Abela’s beaded key-ring round and round in her fingers, looking at herself in the tiny mirror. ‘Do you, Cathy?’

  ‘No,’ grinned Cathy. ‘Haven’t seen anything except that old tin can that fell out of the window.’

  ‘Window,’ repeated Abela. She ran to the window and looked out, and there it was, lying on the pavement below. ‘My car!’ she shouted.

  One of Carmel’s sons was coming down the street. He looked up when he heard Abela’s voice, saw the car she was pointing at, and kicked it idly. It clattered into the gutter.

  ‘Oi!’ Lola shouted down to him. ‘Don’t leave no litter, ugly chops!’

  The boy picked it up and Abela ran downstairs, her loose sandals clapping on the steps, and snatched the car off the boy. She hugged it to herself and refused to part with it, even when Carmel demanded to see it so she could find out what all the fuss was about.

  ‘For goodness’ sake!’ the foster mother shouted. ‘A battered old pop can! Wants chucking in the bin, that does. Kids, kids, kids. Maybe I’ve taken on one too many this time!’

  Her husband growled something incomprehensible, and helped her to serve dinner for seven in the steamy, cluttered kitchen. Again, Abela refused to eat. She sat with her head down, stroking the Coca-Cola car that had been the best in her village.

  ‘Eat,’ Carmel demanded.

  Abela moved the food round her plate with the back of her fork, and ate nothing.

  At the end of mealtime Carmel took her upstairs, lifted her onto her bed, and scolded her loud enough for the entire household to hear.

  ‘In this house, you eat what I give you to eat, do you understand? You wear what I tell you to wear, and you do what I tell you to do. Then we’ll all get along very well.’

  She repeated it every mealtime, every morning, every afternoon, and the other children would chorus after her, ‘And we’ll all get along very well, very well.’ Carmel would stand with her hands on her hips, her big breasts wobbling, and scold and laugh and wheeze till tears streamed down her cheeks.

  Abela didn’t see her social worker a
gain until the end of the week. Carmel called her downstairs and said that there was someone to see her, and she ran down eagerly, smoothing her green trousers and yellow sweatshirt, sure that it must be Bibi at last, at last, come all the way from Africa to take her home again. She was bitterly disappointed. She sat bleakly on the settee, head down, saying nothing, while Mrs Sanderson looked through all her notes and drank sweet tea with Carmel.

  ‘How’s she been?’ the social worker asked.

  ‘Sulky,’ Carmel replied. ‘She won’t eat her food. But she’s quiet enough, not like my other monsters,’ she laughed. ‘Like a zoo it is in here these days.’

  ‘Are you happy here, Abela?’ Mrs Sanderson asked her, when Carmel had gone outside to fetch some washing in. Abela nodded. If she said no, she might be taken away from the school, and she loved every minute of that.

  ‘Where is Susie?’ she asked.

  ‘Susie’s been in prison,’ Mrs Sanderson told her. ‘She might have to go back, but she’s gone to live with her parents, a long way from here. All right? Understand?’

  ‘I want to see her,’ Abela said.

  ‘No,’ Mrs Sanderson said firmly. ‘I’m sorry, Abela. It’s not possible. Be a good girl here. I’m trying to sort things out for you. And I don’t want to move you away from the school.’

  As long as I can go to school, Abela thought, I will be all right.

  When she dressed for school again the next morning, Lola and Cathy shrieked with laughter. They didn’t even bother to get out of bed. Ignoring them, Abela went down to breakfast.

  ‘Oh, look at this eager beaver,’ Carmel said to her husband. ‘Get those school clothes off at once, child. No school today, nor tomorrow neither. Don’t know what a weekend is?’