‘Yeah, I do,’ I said, thinking of his dark brown hair and dark brown eyes and the lopsided smile that made the other girls jealous when it was directed straight at me.
‘So why don’t you ask him out?’ she suggested and I muttered something about Mum, but Stuart that wasn’t the reason I was keeping my options open, and you know it.
Aaron had been to the library three times since the moment by the window. He’d write essays and I’d stack shelves, but as our bodies pretended to work, our eyes would do this secret dance. They’d flick together then away. Together then away. Together, hold, blink blink blinnnnnk . . . and then we’d smile, shyly, and the whole thing would start all over again. We’d talk too, about everything and nothing, whispering between bookshelves and at his desk and once in the foyer when I was pinning up posters about a reading group. I didn’t ask about his girlfriend and Aaron didn’t mention her. Honest truth I had no idea where I stood, so I decided to let the situation play out for a while. To see what happened. No harm in that, I told myself. If nothing physical happened with Aaron and I didn’t agree to anything exclusive with Max, I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
My last shift before Christmas was on December 19th. It had snowed heavily, fifteen centimetres in total, clean and white and fluffy, the sort of snow you’d make out of cotton wool on a card if you were trying to capture the perfect Christmas. Every time the revolving door spun, I looked up, smiling, but Aaron didn’t walk in at 9am or 10am or 11am, and when he wasn’t there at 12pm, I slumped behind the computer, my Santa hat drooping as I typed numbers into a spreadsheet about borrowing figures.
‘You can go,’ Mrs Simpson said when the clock hit 1pm.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, pretending to study the spreadsheet. ‘I’ll just put a few more numbers in.’
‘I can finish that.’
‘No, really, I don’t mind,’ I said, and if the mouse had been real then Stuart it would’ve squeaked because I was gripping it so hard. Mrs Simpson put down her coffee then shooed me away.
‘Go. Your dad will be waiting. Oh, and Zoe?’ With a rare smile, she pressed the badge pinned neatly to her cardigan. It flashed Ho Ho Ho as she waved.
The library was in the centre of the city and the streets were crammed with Christmas shoppers and tourists. Sighing heavily, I wandered down to the pavement, annoyed Dad was late.
‘Zoe?’ came a voice from my right. ‘Zoe!’ Aaron was waving, standing in the middle of the library garden in a coat and mismatched gloves.
‘You’re here! I thought you weren’t . . . Hi!’ I exclaimed, unable to hide my delight.
Aaron beckoned me over. ‘Nice hat.’
I nudged it so it flopped to the side at a jaunty angle, the pompom dangling by my chin. ‘Thanks.’
‘And it’s appropriate attire for your surprise . . . Happy Christmas!’ he said, pointing at something at his feet.
‘Er . . . Happy Christmas,’ I said, not sure what I was supposed to make of the snowball that came up to his waist.
‘It was supposed to be bigger. And I couldn’t find a flat cap or a pipe.’ He stared at me desperately. ‘It’s Fred! Your French snowman, Fred.’ Aaron grabbed a croissant out of a plastic bag and stuck it in the middle of the snowball. ‘Voilà!’
‘But where’s the head? And eyes? And nose?’
‘I didn’t have time,’ Aaron mumbled. The croissant fell off the snow and landed by our feet. ‘Oh God, it’s pathetic, isn’t it?’
‘A little bit,’ I said, laughing, and then I stopped because Aaron was gazing at me, shaking his head.
‘God, you have a sexy laugh.’ My face was cold and my toes were frozen but inside I was warm warm warm warm warm. ‘Your giggle . . . Right up there with my dad’s sneeze and the squeak of green beans as my all-time favourite sounds.’
‘Your dad’s sneeze?’ I repeated because I couldn’t for the life of me think what else to say. He pretended to do it, loud on the AAAAA but ridiculously quiet and high on the chooooooo, and then held out his hands. I nodded in complete agreement. ‘That is a great noise.’
‘I heard it every night for years. We had this cat, you see. Ugly thing . . .’
‘Don’t be mean!’
‘You didn’t see her! She was fat, really fat, and too furry with a squashed up face. I was devoted to her, though. So was my dad. I mean, he’s allergic to cats, but he let her sit on his lap anyway and he’d sneeze all evening. Mum would get on at him, calling him stupid and telling him to put the cat in the kitchen, but Dad said he loved the cat and the cat loved him, so he didn’t mind. ‘True love’s about sacrifice.’ That’s what Dad said.’
‘Jesus too.’
‘Yeah. But Jesus didn’t bang the next door neighbour, making anything he said about love totally irrelevant.’
‘He might have done,’ I muttered, surprised by the sudden bitterness in Aaron’s tone. ‘I always get the feeling the Bible left out the juicy bits. Jesus was a man, wasn’t he? He went to the toilet. Burped.’ I wiggled my eyebrows. ‘Scratched himself down there when no one was looking. Maybe he had an affair.’
‘You,’ Aaron said, stepping over the croissant so he was standing directly in front of me, ‘are officially unique.’ I shook my head quickly. ‘You are, Zoe. A belching son of God? A blue furry creature called Bizzle?’ he said, earning himself massive brownie points for remembering the name. ‘Who else imagines that stuff?’
‘I dunno, but I reckon Jesus’ burp would make my list of all-time favourite sounds.’
Aaron laughed, his breath warm on my face. ‘What else would?’
I crinkled up my nose as I thought. ‘The noise of birds’ wings when they take off. That’s a cool sound.’
‘The sound of freedom.’
‘Precisely,’ I replied, amazed that he understood without me having to explain. ‘Oh, and you know what else?’ I asked, but I never got the chance to describe the tap of Skull’s claws on the kitchen tiles because Aaron’s phone had started to ring, a noise I didn’t like one bit. We both stared down at the name on the screen.
ANNA.
‘I should go,’ I said suddenly.
‘No. It’s okay.’ His phone fell silent and he put it back in his pocket. ‘She can wait . . . But my mum can’t,’ he said, sounding disappointed as he gazed over my shoulder. I turned to see a plump woman with black hair and mahogany highlights hurrying towards the library, studying us closely. ‘I said I’d give her a lift back home.’
‘No worries. My dad will be here in a minute, anyway.’
He bent down to pick up the croissant and stuck it back on the snowman, where it stayed in place. ‘S’long, Bird Girl.’
‘S’long,’ I said, grinning as he ran off to meet his mum, his words ringing in my ears.
She can wait.
Well after that of course I couldn’t resist sending him a message, though I managed to hold off until the evening so as not to look too keen.
Thanks again for my surprise. Fred was without doubt the best non-snowman the world has ever seen.
I don’t know about that, he replied straight away. Have you seen The Snowman? The little boy waking up to the pile of snow at the end? Surely that’s the best non-snowman.
No way! He was all drippy and dead. A pile of slush. Fred is better.
Fred appreciates your kind words, but he knows he can’t compete with a snowman that FLEW TO THE SOUTH POLE.
You mean the North Pole?!
Whatever. Wherever. HE FLEW. IN THE SKY.
But Fred’s smile is made out of pastry. That has to count for something . . .
The conversation was still going on when I stumbled outside in my wellies to fill up the birdfeeder, ready for the morning. My phone vibrated against my thigh as I poured seeds into the wire mesh tube. Smiling, I pulled it out of my pocket.
Missing ur kisses ha x
My face fell. Max. I jumped as the phone beeped again.
It counts for a lot, I’ll give you that. Sweet dreams, Bird Girl.
p.s. Fred says bonne nuit out of the corner of his croissant x
I laughed. I couldn’t help it, even though my mind was conjuring up a picture of two brothers side by side in the same room with their phones, no idea they were texting the same girl. The birdfeeder swung from the branch as I gazed up at the stars. Aaron liked me. And I liked him. Girlfriend or no girlfriend, I wasn’t being fair to Max. I decided to cool things off with him over the next few days and put a stop to it after Christmas.
Surprise surprise Mum and Dad spent the whole of it arguing.
‘How do you know where those birds have been kept? They might just write Free Range on the packet so mugs like us pay twice as—’
‘If it says Free Range then it’s Free Range,’ Mum interrupted, tossing some carrots into the supermarket trolley and wandering forward. ‘There are laws for these things, as you should know. Didn’t you used to be a solicitor?’
‘Didn’t you too?’ Dad replied as I trailed behind, sick to death of it. I looked at the lines on Mum’s forehead and the frown on Dad’s face and his crossed arms and Mum’s hands gripping the trolley, neither of them willing to concede, and Stuart honest truth it felt as if the Cold War was still going on by the potatoes in the vegetable aisle.
‘Look, there’s no point in spending all that money on a turkey when money’s tight,’ Dad said.
‘It’s only tight because you can’t get a—’ Mum stopped herself at the last moment, picking up a bag of sprouts.
‘Go on,’ Dad growled. ‘Say it. I dare you.’
‘Do you think there are enough in here?’ Mum asked, weighing the bag in her hand.
In the end, Mum got her own way about the turkey and despite everything it was golden and delicious and smelt beautiful on Christmas morning, cooking in the oven as we exchanged presents. For once Grandpa had sent us something, cards with money inside them (though they were written in Dad’s handwriting). He beamed as Soph tucked the twenty-pound note into the waistband of her pyjama bottoms. Dad asked Mum if it would be okay for us to visit the hospital, maybe on Boxing Day, but she just sprayed her new perfume onto her wrists and sniffed with her eyes closed.
‘Santa’s rubbish,’ Dot said when Mum and Dad left the lounge to make the stuffing. She was signing more easily because her cast had been removed. ‘He didn’t even read my list.’
‘What did you ask for?’
‘An iPod.’
‘But you can’t hear music.’
‘Or a phone so I can get an upgrade.’ She held up a broken calculator and pressed the buttons sadly.
By the evening she’d cheered up, sprinting into my room with no clothes on to ask if I wanted to smell her new bubble bath. As I picked her up and plonked her in the water, I sniffed the air.
‘Oranges?’ I signed. ‘Or peach? Or strawberries and bananas and kiwis all mixed together?’ I joked as Soph grimaced. She was sitting with her back against the radiator with Skull, trying to encourage him to tackle a jump she’d made out of a bottle of anti-dandruff shampoo and two bars of soap. Sloshing about in the water, Dot told me about a project on the future that she was starting at school and how her class were going to make a time capsule putting all sorts of stuff into a box then bury it underground.
‘I’m going to put in one thing and that is a dandelion.’
‘A dandelion?’
‘To show the aliens in one hundred years what flowers we have now,’ Dot explained. Soph grinned and I did too and Dot beamed in the bubbles but I don’t think she understood what was funny.
‘The dandelion will be dead in one hundred years,’ Soph said out loud.
‘Sssh!’ I warned, but Soph just smirked.
‘Dot, the dandelion will rot,’ she signed clearly. Dot’s brow crumpled.
‘Not if you bury it carefully,’ I signed, glaring at Soph who stuck out her tongue. ‘It will be fine.’
‘Do you think the aliens will like it?’ Dot asked.
I lifted her out of the water and wrapped her in a towel. ‘They’ll love it.’
When she was dry, I put her to bed, trying to ignore Mum and Dad bickering downstairs about who was going to do the washing up. Snuggled up under her duvet, I signed a story about a little green man who lived in the traffic lights. When I got to the end she asked me to sign it again.
‘Greedy!’ I said, tickling her sides.
‘Well, do you want your Christmas present instead?’ she asked. Before I could answer, her chubby knees hit the carpet and she grabbed a parcel wrapped in a plastic bag from underneath her bed.
‘A book!’
‘That’s not the present,’ Dot replied, opening the front cover carefully. ‘Flowers don’t rot, Zoe. Look.’ In between the first two pages was a squashed, dried dandelion. ‘You said they were your favourite that day in the garden.’
‘They are my favourite,’ I said, and Stuart it wasn’t a lie, because all of a sudden they were.
‘Merry Christmas,’ she signed.
‘Merry Christmas,’ I whispered, and Stuart it’s time for me to go so a very Merry Christmas to you too.
Love from,
Zoe x
1 Fiction Road
Bath
January 1st
Hey Stuart,
Well, I was going to hold up my glass of water and say cheers and wish you a Happy New Year and all that, but perhaps that’s not the right thing to do. Probably prison inmates don’t wait up until midnight like the rest of the world because there’s nothing to celebrate. Normally on December 31st people are thinking about the good things they’ve done in the past year and the fun they’ve got to look forward to in the next e.g. leaving school or learning to drive or going to university or whatever. Prisoners don’t have anything to get excited about from what I can gather unless people on Death Row cheer on the stroke of midnight because they’re one step closer to execution. Or maybe they’re waving their arms in the air as they’ve got one more year under their belt, a year they didn’t think they’d have, because living in something the size of this shed is better than not living at all.
Stuart that’s so sad and sort of reminds me of A Christmas Carol to be honest. If you’ve never read Dickens or seen The Muppets then let me explain that Bob Cratchit was a very poor man and his family could only afford the tiniest Victorian goose on December 25th, but his children gazed at it as if it was a great big bird with thick white flesh that would feed them for weeks, clapping when it was put on the table. Their applause seemed a bit over the top for what they were actually getting, and that is exactly the same as you in an orange jumpsuit, holding your own hand while singing Auld Lang Syne, celebrating the tiny bit of life you can live in your cell.
In case you’re wondering, auld lang syne is Scottish for old times’ sake according to my Geography teacher, and she should know because haggis is her favourite food. We sing it to remember the good times we’ve had with the people from our past, which is a whole lot nicer than my original interpretation. Lauren told me the correct words twelve months ago, and I think that’s where we’ll begin tonight, with her laughing her head off when she realised I’d misheard the lyrics and thought everyone celebrated the end of the year by singing about a pensioner’s dodgy vision.
PART NINE
‘Old Lan’s eye! As if you thought it was that!’
‘Shut up,’ I said, whacking her with a balloon because we were getting stuff ready for her party. Lauren had only decided to invite people round that morning when her mum had announced that her boyfriend had booked a surprise trip to London for a long weekend. ‘A dirty one,’ she’d explained on the phone. ‘They’re going to F in the Hilton.’
I blew up a balloon.
‘How many people are coming tonight?’
Lauren took the balloon out of my hand, tied a knot in the bottom and hit it into a growing pile.
‘No idea. Invited everyone I know though so hopefully enough people will turn up. My brother asked a few of his friends too.’ She poked me in the ribs. ‘M
ax said he’s coming.’ When I didn’t reply, she said, ‘You’re excited aren’t you?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, ’course I am,’ I said, forcing a grin, though I was thinking about the dozens of messages he’d sent over Christmas, and how I’d only replied to a few. Enough to be polite, though it must have been obvious that I was losing interest.
‘Good! Because if you don’t want him, I’ll have him. Seriously. Last term I heard these girls talking about you in the loos and they were all like ‘Oh God, she’s so lucky’ and that Becky with the weird neck said she’s had a crush on him for three years, not that she’s got any chance unless Max has got a weird fetish for swans.’ I smiled properly this time. ‘Right, that’s done,’ Lauren said when the last balloon had been blown up and dropped onto the pile. ‘You can go in the shower first. Time to get yourself ready for lover boy . . .’
Now Stuart you’re probably surprised that I was allowed to go to this party but Mum had no clue whatsoever about it. She’d agreed to let me sleep at Lauren’s because I’d said we were having a girls’ night in and in case you’re wondering I felt no guilt whatsoever about lying after all the Christmas arguments.
‘A sleepover? Doing what?’ Mum had asked.
‘Painting our nails. Watching a film,’ I’d replied.
‘Keep your nails subtle,’ she’d said. ‘You’ve got school in a couple of days. And don’t watch anything unsuitable, my love. No horror or anything. I’ve got that cartoon of the giant if you want it?’
A few hours later, Shrek lay abandoned on Lauren’s bed and the house was packed and I mean packed like one of the suitcases I take on holiday with the zip almost bursting because I just can’t travel light. I joined the crowd round the drinks table in the kitchen, weaving my hand through five bodies to take a handful of crisps and a bottle of wine. Mum popped into my head as I popped the cork, but I poured myself a large glass and honest truth it looked great in my hand, the wine and my nails an identical shade of ruby red.
Music kicked in and people started to dance wherever they were, in the hall or the porch or the lounge, moving in time to the thumping beats, drink splashing out of plastic cups and also mugs and even a milk jug because Lauren had run out of glasses. Hips thrust and shoulders jerked and heads swayed, everyone in the house moving as one, and for the first time ever I was right in the middle of it, all wooooo and waving my arms in the centre of the kitchen near the toaster. Funny how clever your eyes can be, how they can spot things in your sideways vision when you’re staring at something directly in front of you. Lauren was twirling under my arm in a sparkly top, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a black jacket and red hair, flames on coal flickering faintly on my radar. My stomach lurched with recognition and sure enough Anna walked into the kitchen with Aaron right behind in an oversized jumper. Lauren’s brother must have invited him, that was the only explanation, and I forgot to dance and just stared and stared. After all the flirting. The snowman. My fists clenched as Aaron laughed at something the girl whispered in his ear. He’d lied, Stuart, telling me he had no plans for New Year’s Eve. Admittedly I’d said the same thing because I hadn’t wanted him to know I was going to the same party as his brother, but still. Gutted, I watched Aaron touch Anna’s arm and ask if she wanted a drink, pointing at the table full of beer and wine and vodka just to my right.
Ketchup Clouds Page 11
