Snowflake

by Heide Goody

  I showed the picture to a small girl who was daubing and colouring industriously. “What do you think?” I asked. The girl looked at the picture and then gave me a look of disdain. She pulled the picture towards her and dabbed with a glitter glue pen. She gave my mom a glitter halo, and she added glitter to my dad’s handiwork so that his irrigation system looked as if it was powered by fairy dust. All in all, I thought they were improvements so I nodded my thanks and put the pictures away for later.

  Cookie and I sat in the sunshine during lunchtime. We were out the back by the bins, so the view wasn’t great, but it felt good. I had my sketching pad and quality pens and added final touches to my posters to take my mind off my stomach.

  “Feel a bit sick,” I complained.

  “Did you eat something?” Cookie asked.

  “Three plates of chips, two bacon sandwiches, a Cornish pasty, half a chicken pie, a tea cake and six assorted cakes.”

  “The universe always answers if we learn how to listen,” she nodded. “Your stomach will settle.”

  “The staff in the kitchen kept giving me funny looks. Eventually the old one with a face like a cat litter tray –”

  “Trudy.”

  “Yeah, she asked me if I’d been sorting the trays out properly, as there was nothing in the food waste container. I told her that everyone had been eating up all their food. She gave me this look and then said that they always get food waste, the same sort of amount every day. She got this funny smirk on her face and said” – I made sure I replicated Trudy’s evil witchy voice – “‘tell you what, I’ll show you’ and then she opened up yesterday’s food waste bin. It was horrible! It smelled even worse than that time I tried to toast cheese on the top of an electric heater and it fell in. The smell lasted for weeks, my parents blamed the cat.”

  “I can see why you’re feeling a bit queasy. She’s an old bat. Don’t take any notice,” said Cookie.

  “She was judging me,” I murmured, thinking about that list of Lexi’s.

  Chapter 8

  By the time I’d finished work at three o’clock – three o’clock! That was nine hours at work! So much for the promise of a zero hours contract! By the time I’d finished work, the feeling of sickness had gone, and I’d started to worry about what I would do for food and money. I wandered about the city centre, on the lookout for dropped change. I ended up down near the markets, and while dropped change was thin on the ground I did find a lemon.

  “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

  All I needed now was some water, sugar, that fizzy gas stuff and a factory to make it in. I didn’t find any of those but I did find some other vegetables on the ground that had either rolled away or been cast aside by the stall holders. Some of them were obviously mushy and horrible, but I ended up with a haul of four lemons and a swede. My spirits were high. I was sure to be able to make a meal out of those, although I really wasn’t very fond of swede. I decided to walk over to Norman’s newsagents to put up the new posters that I’d done. It took a while. The old Belkin family residence (I sniffed nostalgically) and its nearby newsagents was some distance from the city centre but the sun was still out and I wanted to be back among the streets I had known and loved since childhood.

  Here, the park with little boating lake Adam and I had played on as kids. Here, the little cut through to Mansfield Gardens where I’d once snogged Leo Bickers and, some years later, thrown up after drinking a whole bottle of Malibu. Here, the garden wall I’d ridden my bike into after convincing myself that I could pop a wheelie off the kerb and jump straight over it. And, here, Mr Patel’s newsagent or Norman’s newsagent or whatever, a magical world of magazines, confectionery, fags and alcohol. I breathed it in as I entered and the memories flooded back. It seemed like only yesterday I had been here.

  Norman scowled at me from his high counter.

  “I’ve brought new versions of the posters,” I said. “Can you put them in the window, please?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “I said please.”

  “You haven’t paid me for the last ones yet.”

  “Aha!” I said. “I can do something about that. How about a nice swede?” I pulled the swede out of my bag and offered it up to him.

  “You’re mad.”

  “Or, seven, eight… nine paperclips. And there’d be more where those came from.”

  “You need to get out of my shop before –”

  “Swede and the paperclips?”

  “What would I…?”

  “You could fashion them into a brilliant swede hedgehog. It’s a hedgehog. It holds papers. It makes a nutritious soup.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “She’s a bloody menace,” said a voice from the back of the shop.

  There was a door that led from the back of the shop and in the frame stood Mr James Reynolds. He was pulling his tartan trolley of newspapers with one hand and jabbing an accusing finger at me with the other.

  “Did you know he’s moonlighting as a museum-thingy person?” I said to Norman. “Reckons he knows about Romans and stuff.”

  “I do,” said Norman, “and he does. He’s doing his doctorate. So, you know this woman, James?”

  “Yes,” said James. “She was in the gallery this morning, messing –”

  “I was not messing,” I said.

  “Messing with a load of valuable artefacts. Cleaning staff are not permitted to access the exhibits. You have committed vandalism against the university’s antiquities!”

  “One man’s vandalism is another man’s art,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.

  “Are you aware of how valuable the exhibits are in the museum.”

  “What? Some old pots?”

  “Old pots as you call it and rare artefacts and a treasure house of painting and sculpture. You know, a very valuable painting went missing from there a couple of years ago. The finger of suspicion ranged far and wide and several people lost their jobs.”

  “Over a painting?”

  “Zeus wakes on Mount Ida by Fuseli.”

  “That’s a kind of pasta. You’re making it up.”

  “That’s it,” he growled. “I’m calling the police.”

  “Total overreaction! Tell him, Norm.”

  “Call the police, James,” said the newsagent.

  Well, that’s the last time I support my local small business, I thought.

  Now I knew what Lexi meant about stress and anxiety. I clutched my lucky pendant. (I didn’t know if it was lucky, but I was willing to give it a go.)

  “Don’t you think you might be overreacting a teeny bit?” I said.

  James gave me a quiet, intense look. “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?” he said. It was a genuine question, like he thought I was a moron or something.

  How could this be happening? I’d tried to help and it had backfired on me completely. I wondered what I was going to do. I gestured wildly.

  “I can fix the things if you want?” I called.

  “You’ll touch nothing!” he snapped and went outside with his trolley to call the police or whatever.

  Norman shook his head sadly and rearranged his sweet display.

  Something caught the corner of my eye at that moment. A small movement down by the newspaper rack. Did Norman have a rodent problem? I stooped down to get a better look and really wished I hadn’t. A tiny woman glared back at me. It was – I blinked – it was Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. She was no more than four inches high, and as I goggled at the sight of her, a miniature Vladimir Putin and a diminutive Nigel Farage slid out from within a Times and a Daily Mail respectively. It was like the Borrowers had decided to go all political. Merkel was stabbing at a miniature mobile phone and making small squeaks of annoyance that it wouldn’t work.

  “Angela, what are you doing?”

  And then another Merkel appeared from the pages of the Telegraph. And another and another. Oh, and more Putins and Farages and a few Kim Jong-wossnames and s
ome other world leaders, including that mad one, you know, the one with the hair. The Merkels were trying to corral all the others. The Putins were in deep and secretive discussions with each other. The Farages had started to fight among themselves and one had ripped off his shirt and was wearing his tie as a headband.

  I looked up in a panic. Surely Norman must have seen this weird sight too? No, he was rearranging his sweet display. This had to be a hallucination (another sign from Lexi’s list) but what was I supposed to do about it? I glanced down, but they’d gone.

  A weary Kim Jong-wossname, trailing behind the others, vanished through the open shop door. I started after them. Two dozen Barbie-sized politicos stood in front of the telephone box outside. They conferred in a group, and there was lots of finger-wagging and posturing, but I couldn’t hear what they said. Hear what they said? It was a hallucination. I might as well try to eavesdrop on a dream.

  “Right,” I said. “I think it’s time you all popped back inside your newspapers before Norman gets really annoyed with me.”

  Several the figures made some very unstatesmanlike physical gestures and, pushing and shoving as they went, they ran off the pavement and out into the road.

  I needed to do something. The tiny figures were running fast and I had no idea how to apprehend them. For all I knew, they might have guns or polonium or something. I should think a good few of them knew nuclear launch codes. That’s not the kind of thing I wanted on my conscience.

  And that’s why I ran out into the road after them and straight into the path of a road-sweeper van.

  Chapter 9

  I woke up in a bed with one of those old-fashioned blankets draped over me, the sort with holes in it that only come in appalling pastel shades. There was a distinctive smell about the place, too. It was like nail polish with the fruity, fun bits taken out. I realised I could only be in hospital. A lady approached with a tea trolley.

  “Care for a drink, bab?” she asked.

  Moments later, I was propped up in bed with a cup of tea in my hands. This was nice! I could feel a bump on my head from my earlier adventures, but I had my feet up and someone had brought me a cup of tea. Jobs and hard work had brought me nothing but trouble, but a brief argument with a road sweeper ended with my feet up enjoying a cup of tea. Then another.

  Two cups of tea later, a doctor came around with a stethoscope and a concerned expression. She took my blood pressure and wrote on the chart at the end of my bed.

  “Hi. I’m Jasmin. How are we feeling?” she smiled.

  I wondered which answer would be the right one to extend my stay for an evening meal. “Not bad?” I ventured.

  “You’ve had concussion,” she said. “No fractures. Do you remember what happened to you?”

  I straightened against the pillows. “What kind of a doctor are you?” I asked. “Will you be able to tell if I’m going mad?”

  She smiled. She had a nice smile, the kind that could get her a job in a toothpaste commercial. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Lori, but I can certainly help you evaluate the current state of your mental well-being.”

  “Brilliant!” I said. “Well things have been going wrong for a couple of days. Oh no! I just realised I’ve ticked another box!”

  “What box is that?” she asked.

  “I keep getting in trouble with the police. I’m at odds with social norms. It was on a list of signs that you’re going mad. It’s official, I don’t think you need to examine me. I’m definitely mad.”

  She leaned forward. “Let me be the judge of that. What’s been going wrong then?”

  “I lost my house and my parents, brought a naked man to life, destroyed my brother’s flat, brought some tiny politicians to life and then ran out in front of a road-sweeper and got clonked on the head.” My face fell. “Worst thing of all, I got a job.”

  She didn’t laugh at me, just nodded. “There’s a heck of list, Lori. Break it down for me, will you? Now you mentioned your family twice in there. What’s it like, your family?”

  “Oh, pretty much a normal family, I think. Mom, Dad, my brother Adam and me.”

  “And you all get on well?”

  “Yes, mostly,” I said. “I mean, my brother is an insufferable overachiever, who never misses an opportunity to remind me that I’m hopeless and my parents sold the family home while I was on holiday, but mostly we get on pretty well.”

  “You were living there and they sold it while you were away?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How did that make you feel?” she asked.

  “It was really tough, I had nobody to pay the taxi,” I said.

  “Interesting. I ask you how you feel and you mention a practical detail,” she said. “How did it make you feel?”

  “Oh.” I pushed aside the chaotic scramble for survival I’d endured for the last couple of days and tried to isolate what my feelings really were on my parents’ abandonment.

  “Like it’s not fair,” I said finally.

  “You feel that your parents have let you down?” she asked.

  “Yes! It’s their job to look after me!”

  “Of course it is,” she agreed smoothly. She looked at the chart at the end of the bed.

  “How old are you, Lori?”

  “Isn’t it on my chart?” she said.

  “It is,” said Dr Jasmin. “I wonder, do you expect to reach an age where it won’t be their job?”

  What a strange question! I thought about it for a moment. “No.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not being selfish,” I assured her. “Parents live for their children. We’re like oxygen to them.”

  She wrote something on her pad before she looked up and asked me another question. “So, you’ve been staying with your brother, yes?”

  “Not exactly. I’m living in his flat but he’s away at the moment.”

  “So, how’s that working out for you?”

  “It should be fine except that he has all this creepy spy stuff in his flat, so I’m too scared to put the heating on in case it makes him mad. Looking back, it probably wouldn’t make him anywhere near as mad as the fire damage is going to make him.”

  “There was a fire?”

  “A small one yes. It seemed like a great idea to use the fireplace, but it turns out that the plastic parts of a fake fire will melt if you light a fire on top of them. Who knew?”

  She made another careful note on her pad and sucked at the end of her pencil for a while. Careful lady, I thought, you might ruin those toothpaste commercial teeth.

  “So, you’ve gone to great lengths to evade the lifestyle that your parents and your brother wish for you. Is that a fair summary?”

  “What? No.” It sounded like nonsense to me. Surely, she was putting words into my mouth?

  “No?” she said. “But your parents seem to think that it’s time you took care of yourself?”

  “Have you been talking to them? Holy crap!” I scrambled to get out of bed. It suddenly occurred to me that they might be here. “Where are they? I need to speak to them.”

  It also occurred to me that I was wearing one of those hospital gowns, you know, the ones that are pretty much wide open at the back. I’ve always thought they were kind of pervy. I mean, who needs quick and easy access to the back of someone?

  Dr Jasmin put a hand on my arm and gently ushered me back into bed. “Relax, Lori. I haven’t spoken to your parents.”

  “You sound as if you’re in cahoots with them.”

  “I’m not going to pick sides, Lori. If we all went round judging each other’s family lives, we’d never have time for anything else. I’m just trying to picture the dynamic here. For example, did you share the household chores with them when you were all in the same house?”

  “Of course. Right, it was always my job to make little cartoons of everyone for Christmas and then put them inside homemade crackers.”

  “Cartoons?”

  “Little comic drawings. I’m a cartoonist, comic st
rip author and graphic designer. I draw the Florrie comic strip. Have you seen it?”

  “Don’t think so,” she said slowly.

  “You can look at it on my blog. Florrie is amazing. And the cracker thing. It took ages. And you know how often Christmas comes around.”

  “Every year?”

  “Exactly?”

  “Yes, and did you do any chores when it wasn’t Christmas?”

  I thought for a moment. “My mom and dad did try to get me to do the cracker thing for a neighbour’s silver wedding, but I was worried that I might get taken for granted, you know?”

  She gave me a long look – she either thought I was an ‘interesting case’ or was beginning to fancy me; I couldn’t be sure – and she made another note. “So, how about you talk me through some of the unusual things that you mentioned earlier. The naked man, for example.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. Earlier in the day I’d been looking through a scrapbook from when I was younger. I’d made a collage of a man, from bits I’d ripped out of magazines –”

  “– and he was naked?”

  “What? No! Where would I get a magazi–? No, don’t answer that! Later that evening, a man with the exact same face appeared, stark naked outside the flat. He came inside and I panicked. I don’t think he meant to hurt me, but he was a bit more naked than a stranger ought to be in my view.”

  “And yet, he wasn’t a stranger,” Dr Jasmin said thoughtfully. “He was someone you invented?”

  “I didn’t invent him naked,” I said.

  “I’m sure Freudian analysts would have a lot to say about how the mind will often use nudity to reflect our inner feelings of anxiety and social embarrassment,” she said. “This, they argue, might manifest itself in dreams where you are inexplicably forced to appear naked in public.”