Love From Joy

by Jenny Valentine

  ‘Imagine meeting your husband when you are ten,’ I tell Claude, and she laughs and does this little song about how I’m going to marry Benny, and I don’t say a word because honestly, I will not mind if I do.

  When we came back to be with Grandad, Claude said we would turn into sticks in the mud. She said she would miss the beaches in Zanzibar and the mountains in Peru and the forests in Costa Rica and California and France. She said we would miss the vans and huts and boats and tents and rooms we slept in, the markets and temples and museums where we lost and found each other again. She said we would be stuck and muddy and freezing and bored.

  She said, ‘This place is going to be a great big land mass of nothing. Guaranteed.’

  But I watch Benny’s family finish each other’s sentences and drop everything to look at the sunset and turn their sitting room into an actual orchestra and cut up the last piece of cake into five little pieces so we can all have a bite, and tell jokes at the dinner table until they are laughing so much they can’t get the food in their own mouths, and I know that if you put your whole heart into it, same as anything, being sticks in the mud is an excellent thing to be.

  Being best friends with Benny is nearly wall-to-wall silver linings. But I’m afraid that Clark Watson is Benny’s tornado on the horizon, with a guarantee of rain. Clark and Benny used to be friends and now they are not. That is all I know because it is all Benny will tell me. I don’t know what Benny has done to annoy Clark Watson. I don’t know if even Benny knows. But it is definitely something. Because he is most definitely annoyed.

  Clark Watson goes to the same school as us. We are in the same class. He also lives in Benny’s building, on the ground floor, at number 9. So him not being Benny’s friend any more is everywhere. He is wiry and small and his hands are pale and non-stop busy, like quick fish in a tank. In lessons he can be loud enough that sometimes Mrs Hunter can’t hear herself think, but in the playground, he speaks so quietly you have to lean in very close and listen if you want to hear him. The meaner the words he uses, the quieter he gets. It is the sort of thing that the villain in Benny’s comic books would do.

  These days, whenever Clark is nearby, Benny gets smaller and is just generally less Benny. It’s as if he is watching himself from the outside and doesn’t like what he sees. He shrinks, and the little frown line on his face that is shaped like a comma disappears and goes all smooth like it was never even there. I have only seen this happen twice before: once when a baby elephant on TV headed the wrong way all alone to get lost in a sandstorm, and once when we went on the ghost train at the fair. Twice is enough to know that the comma on Benny’s forehead vanishes when he is sad or afraid.

  Clark Watson has a big brother called Jet. He is the same age as Claude so I ask her if she knows him, from school. We are putting the knives and forks away after dinner, and I drop it into the conversation, just when I am dropping the tin opener into the drawer.

  Claude pulls a face. ‘Jet Watson?’ she says. ‘How do you know him?’

  ‘I don’t. Benny knows his little brother. Sort of.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Jet Watson is weird.’

  When I ask her what sort of weird, she says, ‘He is the kind of person Mum and Dad lie awake at night worrying I am friends with, when my friends are nothing like him at all.’

  ‘What do they worry about exactly?’

  Claude breathes out extra-patiently and tucks her hair behind her ear on one side. She is wearing gold hoop earrings that are so big I think I could fit my whole arm through them.

  ‘I can’t explain all this to you,’ she says. ‘When you’re my age, you’ll just know.’

  ‘Have you ever spoken to him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jet Watson.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t hang around with him. I told you.’

  ‘Well, does anybody?’

  Claude rolls her eyes. ‘I have no clue.’

  Sometimes I wish Claude could be the teeniest tiniest bit more observant.

  ‘Why are you asking me anyway?’ she says, and I tell her about Clark and Benny and how they used to be friends and now they’re just not.

  I say, ‘I’m trying to find out, you know.’

  ‘Find out what?’

  ‘The reason. Like maybe Clark is being mean to Benny because he is bored or unhappy,’ I say. ‘Or both. Or maybe it’s because Mrs Hunter clearly thinks Benny is amazing and Clark Watson isn’t. I know how that one feels.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just horrible,’ Claude says. ‘Maybe he enjoys it.’

  ‘Really?’ I say. ‘You think?’

  ‘Yep. Really.’

  Claude pushes the cutlery drawer shut with her bum. She has finished listening. But I haven’t finished thinking. Maybe Clark Watson wishes that he was as good as Benny at the piano or as clever at maths or as super-helpful in the classroom or as fast a runner. Maybe he doesn’t like it that Benny’s new best friend is a girl, i.e. me. Maybe he is jealous. There could be hundreds of reasons for the way Clark is acting, and he is keeping them all extremely well hidden and locked away in the deep dark underground, like a chest full of Roman coins.

  I think about all the stuff I don’t know about Clark and why he’s being horrible to Benny. And for some reason, that gets me wondering what it would be like if all the hidden things in the world got found out suddenly, in one single moment. I think about all the secrets I know. Good ones and bad ones. And then I think about all the ones I don’t know, and what on earth they might be. It’s like swimming in the ocean and knowing that there are miles and miles of water underneath you, all the way down to where it is midnight-dark and no one has ever even been. I wonder who might be keeping these secret secrets, the ones I don’t even know exist, and I think it would be an enormous thing, to dive down and see them all out in the open at once, like long lost shipwrecks. I wonder if it would be a wet weekend or a festival of silver linings, a burden or a relief, or even both.

  Now that I have settled in a bit to my new school and routine, I’ve started letter writing again. I used to do it a lot, but I haven’t really had time since we moved. That’s about to change. I might have found my best ever friend, and lots of new ones, but that doesn’t mean I will let myself forget anyone else, in all the other places I have been. I am still keen to hear what everyone has been doing and to share all of my news, and so I am determined to try to keep up, in different time zones, every day of the week.

  Eiji, my best friend in Tokyo, has his own phone and sends me funny messages on my dad’s phone in the middle of the night (which is when Eiji is on his way to school because for him it is morning). And some people, like Joseph and Prosper in Zanzibar and Anita in Delhi, have email, but others, like Ruby in Ho Chi Minh, or Björg in Iceland prefer a letter. When you’ve travelled around the world as much as we have, letters are a good way to stay in touch with all your old friends. You can take your time over them, and draw pictures. You can start writing them before breakfast and go back to them after lunch and finish them off at bedtime. Lucy and Olivia write to me from Arequipa. Johanna writes from Norway. Thille sends postcards from Amsterdam. And I have made a resolution to always write back. I am getting good at the twenty-four-hour clock and I don’t mind sending messages or emails. Sometimes it is impossible to get a turn on the computer because Mum and Dad are so busy with work and Claude says she needs it for chatting to her friends (disguised as writing an essay about the human reproductive system). But that’s fine, because it turns out that my favourite way of staying in touch is writing real letters. I love when they arrive too, addressed to me on the doormat at 48 Plane Tree Gardens, in all sorts of different envelopes, with beautiful bright stamps.

  Claude calls me old fashioned, and says that I am from the Dark Ages, but some of my friends don’t even have the internet, or their own phones, so it’s the only way to reach them. My sister has just as many friends scattered around as I do, prob
ably more. Our friends are everywhere. When we grow up they are going to be in so many places that we will be able to travel the whole world all over again and never feel alone. One day in the future, Joseph and Prosper and I will have a glass of fresh lemonade on their concrete veranda. Fabiola will take me back to play hide-and-seek in the garden at Frida Kahlo’s blue house in Mexico City. Ruben and Nasreen and I will make bright Rangolis with coloured sand on the just-swept floor of their big yard in Chhattisgarh. In Vietnam, Nelly’s mum will make me a hot batch of melt-in-the mouth vegetable dumplings. Brad will laugh until he is nearly sick at all of my jokes on the Staten Island Ferry. And Sophie will ride with me down the side of a big snow-capped French mountain on our rickety bikes with the wind whipping our hair and filling our ears until they sing.

  Proper letter-writing is a slow business, and I am flat-out busy and already behind, but it is worth it.

  I can’t help wondering about what Grandad does all day long when the rest of us are out. I have been trying to imagine how it must feel to spend that much time by yourself, with nobody to talk to apart from a self-obsessed and painfully good-looking cat who is only there part-time and whose listening skills are about a hundred times worse than mine.

  I don’t think Grandad worries much about Grandad. This might be because he has been mainly worrying about Buster. He thinks the cat is off his food.

  I say, ‘He looks one hundred per cent fine to me,’ and he does, all glossy and fluffed up and pleased with himself. He is licking his lips and soaking up all the attention he is getting. Buster adores being talked about. You can tell.

  Grandad says that Buster hasn’t touched his food in nearly two days.

  He says, ‘It is very unlike him.’

  He is going to call the vet because he thinks Buster might be sick, but I don’t. I have never seen a sick cat look so healthy and flawless and alive. It is a mystery.

  When I ask Claude what she thinks Grandad does with his time, she says that he mostly gathers dust. I find this funny because she is the one who lies on the sofa without moving for so long that sometimes I have to check she’s still breathing. When I talk to Mum and Dad about it they say that Grandad is fine, but in a way that means they have too much on their plates already to be worrying about that as well. It is clear that juggling big thing number three is going to be completely up to me. If Grandad is stuck at the top of lonely mountain, I am going to have to come up with my own way to help him down.

  First, I need to find out if he has any undiscovered interests. I am going to have to dig for them like treasure, because they might be just what I need to solve the problem. But the digging doesn’t really go to plan. At dinner, Claude is very busy carrying on using me as a go-between to communicate with the fascist dictatorship. Sometimes I wish that she would be a bit more like Benny’s Sam, and maybe hug me just because she feels like it, or smile at Mum, or pay even a tiny bit of attention to what Grandad is saying. But at the moment, wishing isn’t going to make it happen. It is too much of a mountain for my sister to climb.

  ‘Joy,’ she says. ‘Please ask Dad to pass me the ketchup.’

  ‘Joy, please tell Mum to stop touching my foot under the table. It is giving me the creeps.’

  In between all the go-between-ing and message-passing, I just about manage to ask Grandad what his top five favourite hobbies are. He looks at his plate for so long before he answers that I think he might have forgotten the question. I am crossing my fingers for ballroom dancing or tightrope walking or lion taming. This is another pointless wish.

  ‘Joy,’ Claude says. ‘Please tell Mum or Dad that I can’t eat this macaroni cheese because I have just this minute decided to be a gluten-free vegan.’

  ‘How convenient,’ says Mum, and Dad says, ‘Oh, well, that’s just great.’

  ‘Reading,’ Grandad tells me, looking at me over the top of his glasses, and I say, ‘Great. What else?’

  ‘Joy,’ Claude says. ‘Please remind our parents that principles are more important than convenience.’

  ‘That’s rich,’ Dad says, and Mum makes a comment about fast fashion, and how many times a certain person wants to go shopping.

  Claude is grinding her jaw. I can hear it.

  ‘Birdwatching?’ Grandad says. ‘Oh! The Historical Society, of course.’

  ‘Joy,’ Claude says, pushing her uneaten food across the table and leaning back in her chair until the two front legs come up off the ground and she’s balancing there. ‘Please tell the Lords and Masters that I have finished and if it is convenient, I am getting the hell out of here and going upstairs to do absolutely nothing that’s worth doing because I don’t even have access to my own phone.’

  ‘That’s three so far,’ I say, ignoring her because I am trying very hard to focus on Grandad. ‘Have you got any more?’

  ‘Take your plate to the sink,’ Mum says to Claude, and Claude says, ‘Joy, please inform our mother that I would like her to use the word please when addressing me, as demonstrated above.’

  Mum says she doesn’t think Claude is in a position to teach anyone about manners.

  ‘Seriously?’ Claude says, landing her chair with a bang, before she remembers she isn’t talking directly to Mum. ‘Joy, please tell my accuser that she should think twice before making such false allegations.’

  ‘Do you know,’ Grandad says, ‘I think I might quite like to take up gardening.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I say, which is when Claude falls out with me as well, for not doing my job properly.

  ‘How useless are you?’ she says, and I am about to answer when Dad says, ‘That’s a rhetorical question, Joy.

  ‘What does rhetorical mean?’

  ‘It means you don’t need to dignify it with a response.’

  I am always happy to learn a new word.

  ‘Sorry, Claude,’ I say. ‘I was just trying to have a nice talk with Grandad. But if it helps at all, I’m sure Mum and Dad heard you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mum says. ‘Unfortunately, we did.’

  Claude leaves the room with a bang and stomps up the stairs. Mum and Dad clear the table and slam some cupboard doors in the kitchen and I’m fairly certain that the knives and forks get dropped from quite a distance into the sink. 48 Plane Tree Gardens is an angry orchestra. Everyone is making so much noise that I can hardly even hear Grandad say his fifth hobby, which is called Solitaire and is a game for one person, and no use for solving a loneliness problem at all.

  Meanwhile, Benny is shrinking and getting quieter. Things in that department are only getting worse. The other day, Clark Watson had fun throwing stuff at us when we were on our way up the stairs at Sunningdale. First he threw food and then he threw some dirt and then he threw stones and one actually stung like a bite when it hit me. Thankfully, he is not a very good shot, so it was just the one. After he threw everything, he hid. Badly. Benny pretended it wasn’t actually happening, even when we were ducking to avoid cold chips and a fistful of grit. I am about as good at pretending as Clark Watson is at hiding. I hopped about like the floor was hot lava and made noises that even I wasn’t expecting, and even though I couldn’t see him, I shouted, ‘Clark Watson! What are you throwing stuff at us for?!’ And all that time, Benny kept his head down and moved smoothly and quietly up the stairs, like he was somewhere else entirely, most probably an escalator, and nowhere near to Clark Watson or me.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked him when we got to his yellow front door. I could hear music coming through the letterbox. I could see bright shapes moving on the other side of the rippled sunrise of glass. Inside 114 Sunningdale, it was another great day on Planet Earth. But out here, on the doorstep, it was a very wet weekend.

  ‘Do what?’ Benny said.

  ‘That! Why did you ignore Clark and just let it happen?’

  Benny held his hands out, palms up, as if to show me they were empty. His eyes were empty too, like all the lights had gone out. Benny was having a power cut, but he didn’t have any candles. It w
as a terrible sight to see.

  ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ he said.

  ‘How long has he been picking on you?’ I asked, and Benny shrugged. ‘Not long. A while.’

  ‘Why???’ I say, and Benny shrugged again and said nothing.

  ‘Have you told your mum and dad?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ Benny said. ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said

  ‘Okay. Sam, then,’ I said. ‘Does he know?’

  Benny shrugged.

  ‘He must have noticed something,’ I said, and Benny scratched his head.

  ‘He did ask,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I told him I have a bad stomach.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘If Sam was my big brother, I wouldn’t keep Clark Watson a secret.’

  ‘Would you tell Claude?’ Benny said.

  ‘Probably. Definitely. She’d make mincemeat of someone who was bullying me.’

  Benny shuddered. ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’

  ‘What?

  ‘If I tell Sam, or my mum and dad, or Mrs Hunter, even, Clark will be in big trouble.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then he’ll hate me even more.’ Benny shook his head. ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said for the second time, and I don’t think either of us believed it. ‘Telling tales will just make it worse.’

  I didn’t point out that doing nothing wasn’t exactly making it better. I kept it zipped because I could see that Benny just needed to go inside and make a snack and watch some cartoons and forget about it.

  But forgetting about it isn’t working. At school this week, Benny has ‘forgotten’ his lunch money and ‘lost’ his school bag, and ‘dropped’ his new phone, which is actually Sam’s old one, but still, new to Benny, who is not a forgetful or clumsy person, and who also likes lunch, very, very much.

  Mrs Hunter says, ‘What are we going to do with you, Benny Hooper?’ and he looks at his shoes, all scuffed and muddy on the stinky school carpet, and says, like it is his fault, ‘I honestly do not know.’