Love From Joy

by Jenny Valentine

  To friends in kind places

  My name is Joy Applebloom, and I am ten years old. My family used to move around. A lot. We have slept by the sea and near rivers, on mountains and in forests. We have lived in the silent middle of nowhere and in non-stop noisy cities, sometimes where the sun doesn’t shine for weeks, and sometimes where the sky is a never-ending, wall-to-wall blue. Together, we have been all over the world, but at the moment we live in one place and one place only, 48 Plane Tree Gardens, which is my grandad’s house.

  My big sister, Claude, says that 48 Plane Tree Gardens is the most boring place on Earth we could possibly have landed. According to her, we could not have picked a duller spot on the planet if we had tried. These days, Claude is very good at finding things dull and boring. It is one of her special skills. Luckily, seeing the good in them is one of mine. I have a nose for silver linings like a sniffer dog’s. It might not be the Alhambra palace or a rollercoaster in the Nevada Desert or the glinting surface of the Indian Ocean, but I think 48 Plane Tree Gardens is still full of promise and surprises. The sun comes up in the front garden and goes down at the back, so it is always somewhere. We have our own front door and we are a five-minute walk away from all sorts of stuff worth doing. Grandad’s house is warm and cosy and filled with cooking smells and piles of books and laundry drying and people I love. It’s true that it is hard to find a quiet spot to do my homework, Claude reckons our clothes all stink of onions, the hot water is rarer than gold dust, and we probably are a tiny bit overcrowded, but we are all in one place together and so it is home.

  Claude is three years older than me. She is tall and strong and she has shiny red hair and cold hands and very long eyelashes and a perfect nose. I am much shorter, and my arms and legs and eyelashes are quite spindly next to hers, like spiders’ legs. Or twigs. But I have seen some incredible spiders, and twigs mostly grow into branches, so I’m quite confident that all I have to do is wait.

  Even though I am on the small and cheerful side, I have some big and serious things on my mind. I am juggling them like a clown at the circus and I don’t know yet if juggling is one of my special skills. I have made a list, so I can see how many things I’m supposed to keep in the air without dropping them.

  NUMBER ONE: Claude has been grounded. This is the end of her actual world.

  TWO: she is not talking to Mum and Dad. Not one single word. Grandad says this is called sending them to Coventry and I don’t know why it’s Coventry’s fault but I do know that I would hate to get the silent treatment from my sister. It would be like getting locked out of a bright room.

  NUMBER THREE: I think Grandad is lonely. Even his own cat has abandoned him.

  NUMBER FOUR: my best friend, Benny, is being bullied by a boy called Clark Watson. I don’t know how long this has been going on, and I have no idea why, but lately Benny is being strangely jumpy and gloomy and quiet, and I am worried.

  FIVE: I am on a mission to get my teacher, Mrs Hunter, to actually like me.

  SIX: I am behind on my correspondence. I have a load of important letters I need to write and the pile is getting bigger every day.

  Big thing NUMBER SEVEN is a top secret and very exciting plan about a birthday. I can’t say one thing about it to a single soul or the secret will spring a leak and I will be a sieve and not a clam. So, for now, I am having to send a certain person’s birthday surprise to Coventry. Even if that certain person is so jumpy and gloomy and quiet that they don’t seem interested in having a birthday coming up at all.

  Oh, and NUMBER EIGHT: I have started sleepwalking.

  It is extremely tricky trying to juggle eight things at once, especially when you are also having to be tidy, do your share of the washing-up and keep enough room in your head for school. But I have watched acrobats in Kazakhstan throw clay pots at each other at the same time as doing one-armed handstands, without one single breakage. I have seen travelling performers in Morocco balance goats on their shoulders and still keep thirteen skittles in the air. So I know that all of it is possible. I just have to do my best and try.

  Claude has been dropping stuff all over the place since she got grounded. Yesterday she broke Grandad’s Home Sweet Home cup, accidentally on purpose, and she’s a total butterfingers for bad words. My furious big sister can swear in nine different languages and she is definitely making the most of that talent.

  Being grounded means she can’t leave the house, apart from for school, and she is not allowed to go on her phone or anything when she gets home again. This is because she has been sneaking around doing a whole lot of fun-sounding stuff she shouldn’t, climbing in and out of our bedroom window when she is supposed to be asleep, and telling me that I have to keep my mouth shut so that Mum and Dad and Grandad don’t find out.

  Except now they have. Because of big thing number eight.

  I was dreaming about being in a market. It was covered and hot and cramped and dusty and stacked all the way up to the ceiling with buckets and watermelons and blankets and crates of flowers and huge cuddly toys. It was just like the market we used to go to in Mumbai, where Claude couldn’t stop sneezing because of the spices and her face was all scrunched up and quivery like a squirrel’s and I laughed till I cried.

  In the dream, I wasn’t laughing and I wasn’t crying either. I was opening and closing hundreds of teeny tiny drawers, searching for who-knows-what, and the drawers were getting teenier and tinier, and harder and harder to open, until my fingers were about as much use as balloons. The next thing I knew, I was awake and in the room I share with Claude in real life. I was out of bed already and standing up in my pyjamas all the way over by the bookcase, and Mum and Dad were there too.

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Was I sleepwalking?’

  I started telling them about the market dream because it was very vivid and still almost real in my head, but they weren’t what I would call fascinated. Dad was leaning halfway out of the window and Mum was saying, ‘Where the hell has she gone?’ meaning my sister, and I had to admit I didn’t know.

  They looked scared, and that’s not a thing I’m used to seeing, so I said, ‘Sorry,’ and then they said, ‘What?’ ‘Did you know about this?’ and I said, ‘Well, yes. Sort of.’

  Dad’s frown swooped down on me like a vulture and Mum’s lips went bone white. I got quietly back into bed and pulled the sheets up to my neck. There were no nets filled with drying chillies on the ceiling. No umbrellas or jangling cow bells or bicycle wheels. Not like in the market in Mumbai. Not like in my dream.

  ‘And what exactly do you know?’ they said together, at the same time.

  ‘Nothing really,’ I said, which was kind of true.

  ‘It’s MIDNIGHT,’ Dad said, booming like a town clock.

  ‘Has she done this before?’ Mum asked, and I said, ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Oh, JOY,’ Dad boomed again.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘Because Claude told me not to.’

  ‘That’s not a good enough reason,’ said Dad.

  ‘It was a secret,’ I said.

  Mum shook her head. ‘There are some secrets you keep, Joy,’ she said, ‘and some secrets you don’t.’

  This was news to me. It actually still is.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘How do you tell the difference? How do you know which is which?’

  They didn’t answer my question, and Claude didn’t answer her phone the fourteen times they rang it either

  ‘Stay where you are,’ they said to me, as if I had done the sleepwalking on purpose, or was thinking about following my sister out of the window. Then they left the room.

  I concentrated on the wallpaper. Claude says the design choices at 48 Plane Tree Gardens are enough to keep any
one awake at night. But I have found that if I squint and get up extra-close, the flowers-that-look-like-cane-toads pattern in our bedroom is really quite relaxing. I must have just dropped off when Claude made her big entrance, head first and out of breath in the dark. She landed on the floor with a grunt, the exact moment that Mum and Dad burst in and switched the light on, which was a shock to all of us, and made my eyeballs want to hide in their sockets like crabs in their shells.

  ‘Uh oh,’ Claude said, getting up and trying quite hard to look serious. She wobbled a bit, and then she laughed, kind of to herself, like she’d just heard a joke. She smelled of cough sweets and bonfires and cola, and she blinked and squinted at us in the dazzling bright.

  Mum took a long deep breath and spoke su-per-slow-ly, counting the spaces between every word. This is a thing that only happens when she is at the very outer limits of the known universe of being cross. It is rare, like a comet or an eclipse, and I think we are witnessing it more than we used to.

  ‘Where,’ she said, ‘Have. You. Been?’

  Claude took her trainers off and chucked them on the floor. ‘Out.’

  ‘Out where?’ Dad said, with his teeth pressed together, hardly opening his mouth, a ventriloquist on stage without a dummy. ‘And with whom?’

  ‘Whom?’ Claude said, and she shrugged her shoulders. ‘Just out.’

  ‘Have you been DRINKING?’ Mum said, and my sister snort-laughed, and said, ‘NO,’ and then everyone had another fight. This is something some people in my family have been practising a lot lately, and getting very good at, the same as me and fractions, because practice makes perfect, and I am really already so much better at those.

  In between other, louder words, Mum said Claude was abusing her privileges, and Claude said, ‘What privileges?’

  Dad said Claude had broken their contract and abused their trust and that this was the last, the very last straw, young lady.

  Claude made a shape like a teapot and said, ‘Oh. You think?’

  Mum said, ‘You are thirteen,’ and the teapot said, ‘So?’ It said all it wanted was its freedom.

  Dad said, ‘Freedom is something you earn.’

  Claude stuck her fingers in her ears and shouted, ‘Oh, yeah? Really? WHY?’ and then Mum threw her hands in the air and stormed out of the room and Dad just stood there like he’d missed the last train and wasn’t at all sure what was supposed to happen next.

  My sister followed Mum into the corridor to have the last word. She likes having those. I had my pillow over my ears by then, like a hat, but it was still pretty loud.

  She yelled, ‘I HATE YOU,’ and Mum yelled, ‘FINE.’

  Then Dad said the thing about Claude being grounded and she squealed like she’d just been stung by a wasp.

  I think that’s what woke Grandad up.

  He came out of his bedroom with his hair fluffed up like a spring cloud and his pyjamas buttoned all the way up to the neck. I could see him through the doorway from where I was sitting in bed. I haven’t known Thomas Ernest Blake that long, but sometimes I love him so much my heart feels like popcorn cooking in my chest. I waved at him, the only other not-furious person in the building, but he couldn’t see me without his glasses, so he didn’t wave back.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he said.

  Mum and Dad and Claude all shouted, ‘NOTHING!’ like they were on the same side suddenly, and Grandad should be minding his own business, in his own house, in the middle of the night.

  ‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘So can you all stop doing it, then?’

  He shuffled back inside his room. Mum and Dad stomped down the stairs to where they sleep on the sofa and Claude threw herself onto our mattress so hard that my whole body lifted off for a second, like a magic trick, like I was just lying on a bed of mid-air.

  ‘Again!’ I said, and she growled.

  ‘Don’t speak to me.’

  ‘What? Why not?’

  ‘This is all your fault,’ she said.

  ‘Is it?’ I said. ‘How?’

  Claude put the pillow over her head and squealed into it some more, and when she finally spoke, her voice came out all muffled and squashed and flat. ‘Why couldn’t you just do as you were told?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. You. How hard is it to stay in bed like you’re supposed to?’

  ‘I was asleep,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t know about the sleepwalking because I wasn’t awake.’ Claude’s face was so close to mine I could see the hairs between her eyebrows and the tiny saffron flecks in the whites of her eyes.

  She said, ‘I’m never talking to them again. Ever.’

  ‘To whom?’ I said, because I thought it would make her laugh, but it didn’t.

  ‘Them,’ she said. ‘Mum and Dad. You’re lucky I’m still talking to you.’

  ‘Me? It was an accident. I didn’t sleepwalk on purpose.’

  ‘Well, now I’m stuck here,’ she said. ‘In this prison. So thanks a lot.’

  She put the pillow like a wall between us so I couldn’t see her any more. Not a glimpse.

  ‘It’s not a prison,’ I told her.

  And on the other side of the border she said, ‘It is to me.’

  The sun shone brightly through our curtains the next morning, but my sister was still a raging storm. I was hoping that she would feel better after a good night’s sleep, and I knew for certain that she’d had one of those, because of the snoring. My beautiful big sister snored all night like a warthog who keeps remembering a hilarious joke.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, but she didn’t reply.

  I rolled over to face her. ‘I had a dream that an armadillo was teaching you geography.’

  Nothing.

  ‘What is your geography teacher called? Do they look anything like an armadillo?’

  Again. Nothing. Claude frowned and kept her eyes closed, and told me to stop talking, using only her face.

  ‘Claude?’ I said. ‘Are you still grumpy?’

  One eye opened. One eye, as sharp and beady as a laser, but no mouth.

  There is more than one way of helping Claude out of a bad mood. Sugar sometimes helps. An arm-tickle is quite reliable. I have a whole menu of impressions that usually do the trick. But this morning, absolutely nothing was working. My last butter mint was rejected, she snatched her arm away when I went to touch it, and not one of my impressions made a difference, not even the one of Dad when he has got something in his eye and hops about on one leg for no reason, which is her go-to favourite. Claude groaned and put her whole pillow over her face, and kicked her feet really fast under the covers like she was swimming.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m GROUNDED,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe you’re not,’ I told her. ‘Maybe they changed their minds.’

  ‘No way,’ she said.

  ‘You never know.’

  Claude came out from under the pillow and blinked at me. Her eyes were bright balls of fury. ‘You know what they are?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fascist dictators,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I hate them,’ she said.

  ‘No, you don’t!’

  ‘Well, I’m not talking to them. And I’m not getting up and I’m not going to school either.’

  She rolled over to face the wall and her breathing went all slow like she had gone back to sleep.

  ‘Claude,’ I said.

  ‘Nope,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m on strike.’

  ‘That’s just going to get you in more trouble.’

  One shoulder shrugged. ‘So?’ she said. ‘How much worse can it get? They’ve already robbed me of my freedom.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, pulling at her arm. It was all floppy like a ragdoll. ‘Let’s go and have breakfast.’

  ‘No chance,’ she said. ‘I’m staying here for the rest of my life.’

  I had to use my emergency strategy to get her to change her mind. This involves talking wall-to-wall non-stop nonsense until she has to leave the room
for some peace. I don’t have to do it very often. It really is only for extreme cases. And it works every time.

  I said, ‘How easy do you think it would be to replace somebody with a robot? How many different sections are there in our spines? I think Dad is getting a bad back from sleeping on the sofa. If he was a robot, would he get a bad back? Or would he fake one to be convincing? Do you think Grandad ever gets a bad back? He stands up super-straight all the time, like a pencil. Have you noticed that? Mrs Hunter would give him a gold star for posture. She stands like a sack of potatoes but I wouldn’t say that to her face because I am trying to get her to like me. Do your teachers like you? Who is your favourite? Have you even got one? Do you think Mum was ever in trouble at school? Do you think pickled walnuts are disgusting or delicious or weirdly in between? If you had a dog, what would you call it? Is it true that everyone has got one eye bigger than the other?’ And so on.

  I talked without hardly breathing until Claude rolled over onto her back. She opened one eye and used it to look at the ceiling.

  ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘You win. I’m up,’ and she threw back the covers and thundered out of the room.

  When I got downstairs, she was pulverizing innocent cornflakes with the back of her spoon, Mum was doing something on our laptop and Dad was hanging up crumpled sheets. The atmosphere in the kitchen was about as warm and welcoming as a floor-to-ceiling block of ice. At least Grandad was smiling, with his hair all combed and his shoes so shiny the cat could see his face in them. Grandad’s cat is called Buster. He is extremely handsome, and he loves nothing more than gazing at his own reflection. It is his absolute all-time first-choice thing to do.

  ‘Hello,’ I said to all of them, Buster included.

  Grandad said, ‘Good morning, Joy,’ and after that it was so quiet I think I could hear the bubbles popping on the surface of Mum’s tea.

  I packed my school bag and put it by the door. I brushed my hair, sort of, and had a look in the fridge.

  ‘Are you three friends again yet?’ I said to the rest of my family.

  Claude glared at me. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘that it is actually against my basic human rights to keep me inside against my will.’