Love From Joy

by Jenny Valentine

  Benny unwraps his sandwich and I tell him he’s brave. He takes a big bite and I tell him he’s generous. His glasses slide down his nose and almost into his egg and cress and he looks at me and laughs. Just like the old Benny.

  A shadow looms over us. I’m not sure how long it’s been looming before we see it.

  ‘Joy Applebloom,’ the shadow says. It is Mrs Hunter.

  The old Benny stops laughing.

  Mrs Hunter’s hair is tied up in a bun and strands of it are coming loose. Her glasses have made a red welt on the bridge of her nose and she is pinching it. She looks like she could do with a hot water bottle and an afternoon on the sofa, just like Claude does when she is sick. She is a long way up, like a giraffe, or a giant redwood tree, from where we are sitting.

  She says, ‘I want to talk to you about what just happened in our classroom.’

  ‘I’m sorry I called out,’ I tell her. ‘I know you don’t like it but I wanted to—’

  Mrs Hunter closes her eyes and breathes through her nose like she often does when I am talking. It makes her look like a patient and very worn-out horse. It makes me stop.

  ‘Sorry,’ I tell her, just to make sure she heard me the first time.

  ‘I haven’t come to tell you off,’ she says.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I have come to say thank you.’

  Mrs Hunter smiles. It is a bit alarming. I look at Benny and his eyebrows are hovering like flying saucers above the frames of his glasses.

  ‘Thank you?’ we say at the exact same time.

  ‘Yes, Joy. I know why you spoke up in the classroom like that, and it is just the sort of behaviour we are striving for in this school. You are a very kind and very outspoken girl.’

  And then she walks away, leaving me so surprised, I almost forget how to eat my own lunch.

  ‘Did that just happen?’ Benny says.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Benny says. ‘You are very kind.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Yes. And speaking up for Clark Watson felt good. It was the right thing. And it’s either that or the sandwich, but I’m starting to feel better already.’

  Next time we go to Sunningdale, I ask Benny’s mum if she knows the Watsons. I do it while Benny is chopping pineapple and I am making coconut icing. He doesn’t know it, but we are doing a trial run for his birthday cake. Angela is whisking egg-whites in a big shiny bowl. I speak quietly so Benny won’t hear me over the clatter of her beads.

  ‘From downstairs?’ I say. ‘From number 9?’

  Angela frowns. Her voice is hushed too. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I do. Lovely family. It’s very sad.’

  ‘Is she very ill?’ I say. ‘Their mum?’

  Angela looks at me. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Claude,’ I said. ‘She’s at school with Jet.’

  ‘She doesn’t want people to know at the moment,’ Angela says. ‘So I haven’t told anyone. I’ve been going over there now and then when the boys are at school. You know, keeping her company, doing the odd thing around the house. Oh! That reminds me, I said I’d go to the launderette for her tomorrow. Those boys are wearing out their clothes.’

  ‘Do you know Clark?’ I say.

  ‘Of course. We’ve known Clark since he was born, haven’t we, Benny?’

  Benny doesn’t look up. He isn’t listening and he can’t hear us. Clark hasn’t thrown anything at Benny for nearly a whole week now. He hasn’t pushed him over or ‘borrowed’ his money. He even managed to ‘find’ Benny’s phone down the back of a bookshelf in 6C, and when he gave it back there wasn’t a scratch on it. And this afternoon, in the playground, when Benny and I were sitting under our thousand-year-old tree, Clark came up to us and sat down too.

  Benny’s shoulders went stiff and he sat sort of bolt upright like he was waiting for something horrible to happen.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Clark said, in his quiet voice, and we both leaned in a bit closer to hear him. ‘I’m not here to cause trouble, I promise.’

  ‘What are you here for, then?’ Benny said. He pushed his glasses back up and frowned the way he does when he’s trying to see something really close up.

  Clark coughed a bit, like he was getting ready. He wiped the palms of his hands on his coat. He seemed nervous.

  ‘Are you all right, Clark?’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, I think so,’ and then he looked straight at Benny. ‘I’ve come to apologize,’ he said.

  Benny opened his mouth but he didn’t say anything. No words came out. He looked like Benny, if Benny was born a fish.

  Clark Watson said, ‘I understand if you never want to be my friend again but I just wanted you to know that I’m very, very sorry.’

  Fish Benny nodded, and when he and Clark shook hands on it, I smiled until I thought my face was going to fall off. And then, as quick as he’d sat down, he got up and left us under the tree.

  ‘That was nice of him,’ I said.

  ‘Wow,’ Benny said back, and after that he didn’t talk for a bit. ‘Just wow.’

  At the Hoopers’ house, in their kitchen, while Angela beats egg whites and Benny eats as much pineapple as he chops, I take my chance, speaking quickly and quietly. I know I haven’t asked his permission. I can’t do that without ruining the big surprise. So I am taking matters into my own hands. It’s a risk but I think it is the right thing to do.

  ‘Could we invite Clark to Benny’s party?’ I say. ‘Do you think he’d like to come?’

  Angela puts the bowl down on the counter and wipes her hands on a tea towel.

  ‘Great idea,’ she says, and she winks at me. ‘He’ll love that. I’ll add him to the list.’

  * * *

  At home I have been even more busy with my to-do pile of letters than normal. As well as all my other ones, I have had more than thirty party invitations to write for Benny’s birthday. Claude helped me with the design. Each envelope opens like a treasure chest, and the card inside is the treasure. There is a map of the trail that Angela and Ed have planned out, with gold coins marking ten spots. It is one of my jobs to tell people which spots to be on, and at what time. Everyone is going to leap out and surprise him as he goes along. And at the end, which is 48 Plane Tree Gardens, Benny is going to dig up his treasure.

  This part is extremely, eye-wateringly exciting and very hard to keep quiet about. Because Grandad has done something incredible. He has bought a real life actual Roman coin on the internet and it has arrived and it is buried in the garden in my wooden box with some other chocolate coins, a horseshoe that we dug up when we were making new flower beds, and an egg cup that Claude drew a picture of Benny on, which is really quite realistic.

  A real Roman coin.

  I write a letter to my friend Maria in Madrid, telling her all about it. I say, It has been a very busy time. I have been juggling a few things but I haven’t dropped any. And this is going to be the best surprise birthday treasure hunt ever.

  All of 6C is invited. And my whole family. Grandad asked if he could bring a friend, and his eyes twinkled when he said it. I am excited for Mum and Dad to get to know Angela and Ed a bit better. And Claude won’t admit it, but I know she is looking forward to seeing Sam.

  And Clark Watson is definitely coming. I know he is, because I delivered his invitation by hand, and he said about forty-three thank-yous and he promised his answer was yes.

  Acknowledgements

  THANK YOU to Veronique Baxter, Rachel Denwood, Lowri Ribbons, David McDougall and Claire Lefevre. And thank you to Luky Chanian for the stick and the glass.

  1. Make sure the paper you choose matches the person you are writing to. For instance, my letter to Miss Wolfe was very garden-y and green, with flowers and bugs down the side. But I wouldn’t send that to Claude.

  2. If you don’t have fancy stationery, it is actually more fun to decorate your own. I like to doodle on my letters, along the top and bottom, down the sides, and sometimes even in the middle of a se
ntence.

  3. (This one includes the envelopes, too.) I love sending letters that also look like works of art. I draw crowns and balloons on people’s names, and if I’m sending a birthday card, there are always candles and cake. Envelopes are fine as long as the address is right and you can still read it. I like to think my drawings make the post-people smile.

  4. Sometimes I send sweets and stickers and sometimes I send seashells and other stuff I’ve found. Lots of my friends own a leaf or an acorn from my favourite old oak tree. Letters with little presents in them are even more fun to receive.

  5. Start with your name and address in the top right hand corner. Just in case the person you are writing to has forgotten it and really wants to write back. Stack it up in a sort of square like a pile of bricks.

  6. Remember to put the date underneath too. Imagine, in hundreds of years, your letters might end up in a museum as actual relics of an ancient time.

  7. If you are writing to a friend, you can say, ‘Hello! It’s me!’ But if you are writing to someone else less friendly (AKA Mrs Hunter), start your letter with ‘Dear…’ as in ‘Dear Mrs Hunter’. Not ‘Hi, Mrs Hunter. How’s it going?’

  8. Tell your news and remember to ask questions. It improves your chances of getting a reply.

  9. It is important that you get exactly the right stamp. They come in all shapes and sizes and cost different amounts of money. Sometimes they are a bit plain and simple, and sometimes they have lovely pictures on them. Sometimes you need quite a few. It costs a lot more to send something far away and heavy than it does to send something quite light in the same country as you, and if you want your letter to get there safely, you have to get that bit right. I like weighing my letters at the post office. They have a shiny scale and they also have pretend letterboxes to make sure what you send isn’t too bulging with surprises to fit through.

  10. There are lots of different ways to end a letter. If I was writing to Joseph or Prosper in Tanzania, I might say Tutaonana Baadaye, because that means ‘see you later’ in Swahili. If I was writing to Anita in Delhi, I could say dher saara pyar, because that’s ‘LOTS of love,’ in Hindi. My friend Fedor always signs his letters Doei, bestie. Tot ziens, which means ‘Bye, bestie. See you later’. For more serious and grown-up things you are supposed to say, ‘Yours sincerely’ or ‘Yours faithfully’ or ‘Best regards’. But most of the time I just write ‘Love from Joy’.

  More from the Author

  A Girl Called Joy

  Keep reading for a preview of

  A Girl Called Joy

  by

  Jenny Valentine

  There is absolutely no storybook magic in our family. We don’t have a grandad who can fly, or an uncle who is busy somewhere building a time machine, or parents who are world-famous wizards-in-hiding. Our grandad walks with a stick, we have zero uncles, and our mum and dad have out-of-the-blue started saying things like, ‘Put that back where it came from,’ and, ‘Where’s your school uniform?’ and, ‘Please hoover your room immediately.’

  According to my big sister, Claude, this makes us extremely ordinary. But we have never been ordinary. And I don’t think we should be ready to start now.

  I’m not pretending there haven’t been some big changes. Things are feeling very pedestrian around here, that’s for sure. Extremely squidged in. And it goes without saying that nobody has a wand to get us out of trouble, or their own super-helpful pack of wolves, or a lump of rock that can speak in whole sentences. There are no parallel universes under our sinks, or other worlds in our wardrobes, or perfect tiny humans between our walls. There are cleaning products, and clothes, and possibly mice. I don’t have shoes that rush about all over the place with a mind of their own. I have one pair of trainers that are at least one size too small, and I am not ready to throw them away yet because they have been with me everywhere, on so many adventures. The washing machine won’t get the grass stains out of Claude’s precious new jeans, and right now, Dad can’t get rid of the coffee he spilled on Grandad’s carpet. So I am pretty sure that none of us can make stuff disappear.

  But the thing is, there is more than one kind of magic. It shouldn’t have to mean the same as impossible, and only be allowed to happen in stories. That just doesn’t seem right to me. Claude says our definitions of magic are different, and that I am always marvelling at something or other for no good reason because I am way too easily impressed. I am twenty-four seven on the lookout for some everyday, actually real-life magic because that’s the kind I believe in, and, to be honest, I think we could do with some.

  When I say so, Claude does one of her semi-professional eye-rolls and says, ‘Oh, yeah? Well. Good luck with that.’

  When you don’t have storybook magic, your problems are less fancy and not as much fun to fix. For example, Dad has stuck a big heavy book about trees over the coffee stain, in a hurry, and now it is lurking there in the middle of the room where it doesn’t belong, like a suitcase in a canal. Any minute, somebody, most likely Grandad, is going to bump into it and find out the truth. Claude says it’s not going to be pretty when he does, and it is only a matter of time. Even with my talent for positive thinking, I am starting to think she might have got that one right.

  I am ten, and Claude is thirteen.

  She smells like cherries and wears black make-up all over her eyes. She has the straightest, whitest teeth and the shiniest toothpaste smile I have ever seen. When she is happy, she looks like an advert for the dentist, but at the moment that isn’t very often. Dad says Claude’s toothpaste smile has become a bit like a meteor shower, because it might only happen once or twice a year, and if you blink you’ll miss it.

  We saw a meteor shower in California, when I was six and Claude was nine. The sky rained stars for hours and hours, and I fell asleep before it was finished. You would have to do a long old blink to miss that.

  Claude is short for Claudia Eloise, and rhymes with bored, which these days is just about right. Ever since we got back to the UK and moved into Grandad’s house, she is always complaining that nothing is worth doing and there is less than nothing to do. Mum and Dad have started calling her the brick wall, but not so she can hear them. They whisper it behind their hands, but I’m not sure they need to bother. As far as I can tell, she has pretty much completely stopped listening to anything they have to say.

  Mum and Dad’s names are Rina and Dan, short for Marina Jane Blake and Daniel Samson Applebloom. They have been hyper-distracted and crazy-busy since we arrived, doing out-of-character and mind-bendingly ordinary things like applying for jobs that involve zero travel, signing up at the doctor’s, and shoe-horning us into schools. These are not activities we are used to our parents being busy at. In fact, they are the total opposite of what we have spent our whole lives being taught to expect. It is very unsettling. Claude reckons Mum and Dad had radical personality transplants, like, overnight, when we weren’t looking. She says they might not actually be our original parents any more, and we need to stay alert, because absolutely anything could be about to happen.

  I say, ‘Are you sure they’re the only ones?’ because right now I would bet money on the fact she’s had the personality transplant too. She definitely isn’t acting like my original sister. She isn’t nearly as much fun as she used to be.

  I haven’t had anything transplanted. I am exactly the same as ever, even though everything else has changed. My name can’t be shortened and I don’t have a middle one. It is what it is, and everyone just calls me Joy.

  The here that we have got to is Grandad’s house.

  His name is Thomas Blake, and he is Mum’s dad, although sometimes I find it hard to believe they are even related. I would never ever pick them out of a line-up of fathers and daughters, unless I knew. Not in a million. Grandad is sort of faint and blurry, like someone drew him with a soft pencil, and Mum is marker-pen dark. Mum is loud and bombastic and colourful, and Grandad is more narrow and faded and quiet. Mum is a socialist, which is a long political
word for being good-at-sharing, and Grandad? Well, Grandad is not. Mum says we are world citizens and should support the free movement of people across the globe, and I think Grandad would prefer to put a nice tall fence around this one little island, and cover it in great big signs that say,

  NO TRESPASSING

  and

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  and

  KEEP OUT.

  Our family does not see eye to eye with Grandad on a long list of things. I think that’s why we spend so much time talking to him about the weather.

  The letters on his doormat say Mr T. E. Blake but he won’t tell me what the E is for, so I have decided to guess. I have been allowing myself a new guess every day. I don’t think I am close to getting it right, but so far he has not decided to correct me, so I’m just going to carry on trying.

  Thomas Elephant Blake’s face is full of pockets and pouches like a backpack and when he speaks, the pockets and pouches fill and empty with air. The letters he gets are mostly catalogues for slippers that plug into the wall, and baths with actual doors in the side for getting in and out, and hearing aids disguised as reading glasses. I think the catalogues are brilliant and inventive, but Thomas Eggcup Blake does not agree. He says that having permanently cold feet and not being able to climb in and out of the bath or hear and see properly are not reasons to celebrate. I think he says that about a lot of things. I’m not sure he is really the celebrating kind. He is mostly grey from head to toe, like he has just walked through a room where the ceiling fell in. Claude says that wouldn’t happen at Thomas Eagle-Eye Blake’s house, where everything looks scared of being out of place. She says the ceilings wouldn’t be brave enough. They actually wouldn’t dare.