But today it’s my turn.
I thought Mary Magdalene High School for Girls would be some dramatic-looking Victorian turreted pile, but it’s a dull and doomy modern block. I pictured the gates being huge and gnarly swirls of iron, but they’re institute-plain bars. Actually, the place reminds me more of a prison than the Harry Potter-esque castle I had in my head.
I don’t know why exactly I imagined it that way. I suppose I thought that it would suit Alice B. Lovely more. This place and Alice B. Lovely go together like haddock and ice-cream sprinkles.
Tick-tock, tick-tock…
It’s nearly three.
I’m not standing right up close to the grim gates with the waiting mums and dads and childminders. I’ve chosen a spot further along, with a bush for cover.
I’ve seen a lot of greenery since I walked out of school, mainly because I’ve spent most of that time in the park.
For who knows how long, I sat on a bench and stared at the photo Alice B. Lovely took of me in the gallery, stupidly happy and full of hope beside the Countdown to happiness clock.
Then I walked and walked myself in circles, trying to understand what’s happened, to think of reasons why the newspaper got it all wrong.
To figure out why Maggie Baxter might have said that Alice B. Lovely wasn’t her niece.
To guess why Alice B. Lovely ran out of the gallery, and ran out on me.
But instead of figuring anything out, my mind has spiralled into a tangled muddle, repeating the same few sentences over and over again…
What really happened last night?
Did that reporter tell the truth?
Or has there just been some dumb mistake?
But then why did Alice B. Lovely vanish?
And when I haven’t been slouched on a bench or stumbling around, I’ve been lying flat on my back on the grass, staring up at the towering tower block, wishing I could be up on the flat roof once again.
Up there in the cool, pure breeze I could gaze down at the swaying green treetops full of nests, or up at the close-to-the-touch clouds and circling birds and fluttering Post-it notes.
As I lay on the damp ground, I visualized a yellow heart-shaped Post-it in my hand, with my message written on it: Is Alice B. Lovely just another phoney nobody?
Help; that thought is shoving it’s way into my mind again and I’ve got to ignore it.
Alice B. Lovely is the least phoney person I have ever met.
She is not, and never has been, a BFP.
She is genuine, amazing and caring.
There is an explanation.
There has to be.
Which is why I’m here.
DRINNNNNNNNNGGGGGGG!!!!!
A bell blasts out, and almost instantaneously, hundreds of girls pour out of Mary Magdalene High School.
Hundreds of girls in the most horrible uniform: brown blazers; brown ties; brown pleated skirts worn down past the knees. It’s like waves of mud are sluicing towards the gates. I worry for a second that I won’t be able to spot her, but then I remember she’s in sixth form; they often get to wear normal clothes. And even if she’s forced to wear the drab and dreary uniform, there’ll be no disguising the waterfall of hair, the freaky doll eyes.
I stare and stare.
Girls come and go.
The sea of mud slowly tapers off to a trickle.
All I see is an older girl or two making their way out, followed by a bunch of young-looking Year Seven types, snickering and giggling together. There’s virtually no one waiting at the gate any more.
The next person I’ll see will probably be the caretaker, come to lock up.
Where is she?
Didn’t she come to school today?
I should have asked her the name of her street. I could’ve gone round to her house now, knocked on her door, found out the truth.
Instead, I’ve skived off, and will have to face my fearsome form teacher tomorrow for nothing. I should’ve thought about this more. I should’ve—
Uh-oh. The Year Sevens, they’ve just barged into one of the older girls, and are laughing.
The older girl, mousey-looking with a brown hairband, rights herself, but says nothing.
“Out of the way, grim girl!” one of the younger ones bellows.
“Grim girl, grim girl, grim girl!” the others chant as they go running and giggling ahead, through the gates and off down the street.
I don’t know what the name-calling’s all about, but I do know a bunch of nasty girls when I see one.
The older girl in the headband comes out of the gate and stares after them.
When she does this, her back is to me, and I see that her fair hair is tied into a long, loose plait that courses down the back of her dull brown blazer.
With a lurch of shock, I know.
It’s her.
It’s Alice B. Lovely.
She’s moving off now, crossing the road, and I follow her with jelly legs and a thumping heart.
Into the park we go, my eyes glued to the clumpy sensible black loafers just ahead of me.
What am I going to do? What am I going to say? I’ve had hours to think of possible questions but they’ve all fizzled and popped out of my head. But seeing this girl I think of as a parakeet, a vintage doll, a swan princess disguised as a shy, plain schoolgirl has thrown me.
It makes my head swirl to think she goes home every day and transforms herself from this moth-coloured person to the butterfly that turns up and waits for us.
But why does she do something so extreme?
And where’s she going now?
She’s slowing down…
She’s stopped to talk to a street cleaner guy who’s emptying a bin by a park bench.
What’s she saying to him?
Asking him the time, maybe?
If she’s planning on picking up Stan as usual, she’ll have to get going on her extreme makeover.
The thought of Stan fans a flame in me. If she is some kind of fake – a BFP like all the others – then she can’t be trusted with my gorgeous little brother!
I stride over, while a scream boils inside me.
She suddenly sees me coming and her pale face turns ashen, her invisibly light eyelashes fluttering in panic.
The man in the yellow reflective jacket and thick rubber gloves clanks the emptied bin back into place.
“Everything all right, love?” he asks, glancing first at me, and then staring at a silent and stunned Alice B. Lovely. “Ali? C’mon, smile, sweetie! Smile! And tell me what’s going on!!”
My scream is stifled with shock.
There’s a badge on his fluoro jacket. It’s got the council’s emblem on there; his name and job title, in bold letters.
STEVE GRIMLEY: REFUSE OPERATIVE
I’m not any kind of genius, but I have a hunch that he might know a woman called Norma Grimley.
And that they might have a daughter called Ali.
Who has a horrible nickname of “Grim Girl” at her school.
Wouldn’t it be funny if I just opened my mouth and said, “Ali Grimley, pleased to meet you!”
But instead, I think I might just join the cross-country team at school.
’Cause all I do these days is run, and run, and run.
“Edie!” I faintly hear her calling after me.
But I’m gone, reaching and fumbling in my pocket as I stumble, my fingers frantically searching out my mobile so I can delete the photo that … that whatever-her-name-is took of me last night at the gallery beside the so-called happiness gum clock.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
STOP.
A plate piled with baklava is sitting on a flowery doily, which in turn is sitting on the highly polished coffee table in front of us, along with two tall glasses of milk.
Stan is slowly chewing on a piece.
He’s been slowly chewing on it for quite a while now.
The baklava’s absolutely delicious, made of honey and nuts, but it might as well be made of papier maché for all he’s enjoying it.
“Edith, darling,” pleads Mrs Kosma, standing small and wide in front of me. She has her pudgy hands held palms together in front of today’s black dress, as if she is praying.
“No,” I say firmly.
“Pleash, Edie,” Stan begs me, through a mouth full of sweet pastry.
“You don’t understand,” I tell him.
How can he understand? He’s only six. I’m thirteen and I don’t understand.
One minute, life according to Edith P. Henderson is gloomy and complicated.
The next it’s bright, light and beautiful.
But now hands of the happiness clock are giddily spinning, whizzing, backwards out of control, and here I am, dumped into that familiar world of gloom and complication – with added, extra disappointment, just for fun.
“But the lovely girl! She is very upset, and very sorry,” says Mrs Kosma, who’s been back and forth to her open bedroom window, having conversations with Alice B. Lovely before returning to the living room to relay them to me. “Can’t you just listen to her?”
“No.” I repeat again. “She’s a liar. Why would I want to listen to any more of her lies?”
I don’t mean to be rude to Mrs Kosma. I didn’t even mean to get her involved. After I left (OK, ran away from) Alice B. Lovely or whoever she is, I went straight to Stan’s primary and pulled him out of after-school club.
I’d planned to head for home and let ourselves into the flat, but then I remembered Mrs Kosma still had my spare key, from sorting out the supermarket delivery the other evening.
So I’d ended up ringing her doorbell.
The minute she saw us standing there – well, saw me crying, I suppose – Mrs Kosma insisted we come inside.
And that’s why we’re here in her flowery flat.
Outside her flowery flat right now, probably surrounded by cooing pigeons, is Alice B. Lovely, who’s come to apologize or explain or tell me some more phoney stories. I don’t know.
With a sad sort of sigh, Mrs Kosma pads off. I hear chat.
She comes padding back.
“The girl said for me to give you this, Edith, my love.”
Mrs Kosma hands me a yellow heart-shaped Post-it note.
It has one word on it, in her swirly writing.
Please?
Stan leans over and reads it out loud, after finally gulping his Greek treat down.
I look at my adorable, freckle-nosed brother … and decide to do it for him.
Furious as I am, maybe I can get answers. Enough, at least, so I can tell Stan why Alice B. Lovely can’t be our nanny any more when he asks.
“Let me do this on my own,” I tell him, as he goes to follow me off the sofa.
Stan looks crushed. But hey, don’t we all feel that way?
Taking a deep breath, I head towards Mrs Kosma’s bedroom, and the window she uses to watch the world go by, feed her birds and hold unsuccessful peace talks with a girl I can’t trust.
“Edith, darling,” says Mrs Kosma, bustling behind me. “Not in there. I tell Alice to come inside the main entrance hall; her magpie was getting upset at the pigeons so close around its box.”
Mrs Kosma is motioning to the front door of her flat. Then she backs away into the living room, to give me some privacy and keep Stan company, I suppose.
And I suppose she is expecting me to open the front door – but I’m not going to.
Instead I creep silently up to it and squint through the peephole. It’s still a bit of a shock to see the pale, ordinary girl in the brown hairband and dull uniform. Stan wouldn’t recognize her, I bet, if she wasn’t carrying the black-covered bird box.
“Hello!” squawks Buddy, and makes me jump away from my spying spot.
(“Smile, sweetie! Smile!” the guy in the park had said. So no guesses where Buddy picked it up from.)
“Edie? Please can I talk to you?”
My heart’s pounding. I say nothing for a few seconds, till I can be sure my voice is able to carry words without them wobbling.
“OK,” I say curtly. “But like this. I’m not opening the door. I don’t want to look at you.”
“All right…” a sad-sounding voice answers from the entrance hall of the flats.
I’m hit by a sudden wave of exhaustion and let myself sink down to Mrs Kosma’s patterned carpet, my back against the white-painted door.
I feel a little thump from the other side and realize she must’ve done the same.
“Honestly, I didn’t mean to hurt you, Edie,” she begins. “I just wanted you to be happy!”
You know, I don’t really want to hear that. The rage in my head won’t let me listen. I just want plain facts. So I start with an obvious question.
“Who are you?”
“I’m … I’m Ali Grimley. Alice Grimley,” she says, stuttering slightly.
I knew that much already, of course, but I needed her to admit it.
“Why did you change your name?”
“It’s ’cause… Look, I don’t like being me very much. Being me is hard, sometimes.”
I gulp. There have been times over the last few months, since Mum and Dad split up, that I haven’t liked being me much either. But this isn’t about me, it’s about her, this lying, phoney stranger.
I want to know more, but with my scrambled brain I’m not sure what questions to ask.
Then I remember the game she played with Stan, that first day we knew her.
“Tell me something else,” I demand, trying to force my voice to sound stern.
“Um … I guess I don’t get on with many people. Well, anyone at school, really. They all think I’m weird. Even the teachers.”
The Post-it notes on the worry wall … some of the scribbled messages are starting to make sense now.
“Tell me something else,” I demand, as my mind whirls.
“My parents – they don’t get me either. I mean, I love them and they love me, but I think they’re just totally confused by me and the way I dress, and the stuff I like and the art I’m into.”
Oh. So perhaps some of the yellow heart-shaped messages were to do with them as well.
“Tell me something else,” I say, pushing on.
“OK … uh … well, out of school, I love dressing up – it makes me feel like a different person. The person I’m really like inside; the me who likes art and vintage clothes and getting people thinking; not the me who gets called ‘Grim Girl’ at school. So, I decided to give myself a different name too.”
Suddenly I feel the tiniest twang of sympathy.
There were times in the last few months when I’d have liked to be a different person.
But then again, not to the extent that I’d openly lie to people, like she did.
“Tell me something else,” I say, hardening my voice.
“I played around with lots of ideas, but I came up with Alice B. Lovely, just ’cause – ’cause I think I imagined it looking really great on an art gallery wall one day!”
As I press my back into the door, trying to get closer to hear her better, I notice the living room door opening.
Stan and Arthur; they’re sneaking out, tiptoeing towards me.
I think about shooing them away, but instead I put my finger to my lips, so my brother – and his crocodile – know to be quiet.
“Tell me something else.”
“She’s not my aunt. Maggie Gibson. I mean, of course I’d love, love, LOVE to be related to someone like that – it was such a buzz when she offered to paint me that day! – but I’m not.”
Stan
stares at the door, listening, then sits down and snuggles beside me, nuzzling Arthur into my arms.
“Tell me something else,” I say more softly, knowing the fire has gone out of my voice.
I hear a deep intake of breath through the few inches of wood separating us.
“I live with Mum and Dad in the block of flats we went to. They’re the caretakers of the place. It’s only a part-time job, so Dad works as a street cleaner too. He loves being out in the fresh air, specially in the park. He found Buddy there, when he was just a tiny fledgling. Remember I told you about that?”
Stan looks up at me imploringly, and makes Arthur nod his soft, squidgy head.
“Tell me something else,” I say, ignoring her question. So much for her father being some kind of posh-sounding park ranger.
“I told you my dad went on safari when he was younger … but it wasn’t in Africa. It was in Great Yarmouth. He worked at a fun-fair ride called The Safari when he was a teenager.”
Stan silently slaps Arthur’s paw to his knitted mouth, to show how shocked he is.
“Tell me something else.”
“And I told you Mum works in fashion, like your mum. I said that because I really wanted it to be true. And it is, sort of … she’s the cloakroom attendant at the art gallery. She’s the reason I got the tickets to the preview show.”
I’d sussed that part out, at least, I think to myself, as I give Stan’s shoulders a comforting squeeze.
The shock of it all is settling into just a shade of weary sadness for me now. I’m glad I deleted that photo on my phone; the Countdown to happiness! clock is nothing but a doodle on a spat-out chunk of gum, nothing more.
But I can’t help asking the same question again, in case there are any last pieces of the puzzle to fit in.
“Tell me—”
“WOOF! WOOF!! WOOF!!!!”
Outside somewhere there’s the panicked fluttering of wings and urgent cooing of distressed birds.
Mrs Kosma – always alert to her bird friends – hears it and comes hurrying out of the living room as fast as her creaky knees will take her and disappers into the bedroom.
Life According To...Alice B. Lovely Page 14
