“Tell you what, Sherifa,” I said. “Why don’t you go home and put your feet up. I’ll hang out here and bring the girls home.”
Sherifa looked shocked. “On your own? It’s dark now.”
“Come on, it’s not far, and I’d love a look in at the older class.”
“Seren, darling, they’re not just going to let you walk in. I mean, we had the girls down on waiting lists for months.”
“I know, but you’ve been at work all day, and I’ve been at school. Thanks for the offer, for the shopping and that, though.”
“You’re sure?” Sherifa looked as if she couldn’t wait to get back into the car.
I nodded.
After she’d gone I went back to the older class. They looked as if they were doing some kind of improvisation in four groups. The sort of thing we do in school, but all the kids here were really good. I thought I recognised a boy from my school, from Year Ten, but I wasn’t sure. There weren’t any Sanjays or Eds mucking around, no Christinas with hands like plastic spoons. They all wanted to be there. I took three deep breaths and pushed the door open, and went in. Everyone stopped and looked.
“Can I help?” One of the tutors smiled at me. I knew he was a tutor because he was older, with a bit of a beard.
I pretended I had loads of confidence and smiled back. The groups went back to their work.
“Seren Campbell Ali,” I said. “I was wondering if I could, you know, watch, or maybe join in? I’m just visiting, I’ve got sisters in the other class.” I said it quickly so he wouldn’t stop me and chuck me out.
I saw the tutor flick a look at a woman – the other tutor – but he showed me a seat. I couldn’t help feeling a tiny bit disappointed. I would have loved to join in, to be a part of it. But then these kids probably had parents who could afford to pay whatever the classes cost. Mum had never been able to fork out for extras. We’d never had all those singing and dancing and breathing lessons my two little sisters had. We did all the free stuff in the summer holidays. You know, in the libraries or at the swimming pool. I’d even done Drama one time with Summer Uni but it was full of girls who wanted to be Hannah Montana. It was nothing like this.
All the groups came up with brilliant scenes. The performances were so good! So much better than school. They’d been given the theme of ‘endings’ and every group’s performance was different. One group acted as a class of Year Elevens on the last day of school, another was a family breaking up, mother leaving father.
My favourite was the scene the last group did. It was two brothers arguing over who would inherit the family farm. One shouted horrible things at the other, hurting, hateful things, and suddenly I felt my throat dry and catchy, and I thought I was going to cry.
I realised I felt so choked up because it made me think of me and Sasha, and I knew, more than anything, that I had to make it up with Sasha, even if she didn’t want me to. Even if I couldn’t see how to do it right now.
The time went so fast, I suddenly realised the girls’ session was over. I dashed upstairs and took hold of one bored, tired little girl in each hand and dashed back to try and talk to the tutors.
“Just wait, I won’t be a second,” I said. Ayshe looked as if she could curl up on the hard, plastic chair and fall asleep right there.
“Excuse me again,” I said, and asked about the class. If this had been on telly it would have happened like this. He would have let me join in the class, seen how absolutely fantastic I was at acting and asked, no, begged, me to come every week for nothing. But as this was real life he just gave me a leaflet.
We walked back in the dark and the girls really perked up.
“Don’t you want to do Drama, then?” I said.
“Classes are boring,” Ayshe said. “They go on and on.”
“Gabriella in High School Musical does Drama, I bet,” I said.
“No, Dur-brain! Gabriella does Maths! She does Science! She doesn’t do Drama!”
“Ayshe,” Gamze said, all big-sister know-it-all. “Gabriella is fictional.”
That was me told.
We got back to the house and the girls ran in through the wood-floored hall and away upstairs, each begging me to come and see her bedroom first.
Sherifa was in the kitchen stirring something in a saucepan, drinking a glass of red wine. “You must come more often. When things aren’t in such a rush.”
“Isn’t it like this all the time? The girls said they have classes every night,” I said.
“It keeps them busy. And me and your dad have too much work.”
“He does seem really tired at the moment, Dad.”
Sherifa shot me a look.
“Oh and you do too, you both do. I bet you’re both working very hard.” I was starting to gabble. I took a breath. “Couldn’t Nene have them more often?”
Sherifa looked at me again and made a face, and I smiled. “Oh,” I said.
“Oh. Exactly. Would you want your daughters spending more time with her than absolutely necessary?”
“I thought it was just me,” I said.
“Oh no!” Sherifa said, “I am the devil in human form as far as Nene is concerned.”
“Now you’re way off. That is my mother.”
We laughed. She told me some of the things Nene had said about her drinking. “I have the odd glass of wine. If you listened to her you’d think I was on my back in the gutter draining crates of the stuff! And of course she hates me working. Very traditional is Nene. Can’t stand it that I earn more than your dad.” Then Sherifa told me how Nene also hated the way they brought up the girls, and banged on about how they should all move to Cyprus with her.
“Ohmigod!” I suddenly remembered the empty front room. “You’re not moving, are you? Only Mehmet in the cafe was sort of talking about it, and Dad’s been really funny and given my big sister the sack....”
“Slow down, love. Listen, we are not going anywhere. Especially not to Cyprus with Nene. Wild horses would have to drag me. I don’t mind a holiday, in the spring when it’s not too hot, but all year round? No way! I know your dad’s been a bit... well... I don’t know how long he can keep that place open.”
“So you’re not packing up and moving?”
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
I told her everything, about the front room, about knowing the restaurant was losing money and that Dad might have to sell up. “I thought he’d leave me and I’d never see him again.”
Sherifa smiled. “Oh, Seren! Love! That’s not it at all. We’re just having the front room redecorated.” She came over to me and took my hand. “And another thing. Your dad loves you. He wouldn’t leave you. I know he’s got me and the girls, but you’re special to him, you know that. And to me for that matter.”
I wanted to say, ‘No, I don’t know that.’ I wanted to say, ‘Gamze and Ayshe get classes in stuff they don’t want and holidays in the sun and I get nothing.’ But I didn’t. I did say, in a small, six-year-old’s voice, “If you went to Cyprus I’d never see him because Nene would be there all the time.”
“Seren, when that woman has gone, my life, our lives, will be much easier, you know that.”
Sherifa told me again that no way would they ever be moving. Nene, however, was moving just as soon as she sold her flat in Wood Green, and she had tried, and failed, to persuade the whole family to go with her.
“Your dad might have to sell, love, but believe me, he’s not going anywhere.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not if I have anything to do with it. Have you seen the jobs available in northern Cyprus? It would be a miracle if I got something that paid half as well out there.” Sherifa hugged me tight. She smelled delicious: perfume, cooking and red wine. I felt exhausted.
I wanted to go home. But I played two rounds of High School Musical the computer game with the girls, out of sisterly duty, first.
On the bus on the way back I read the leaflet. Arcola Theatre Youth Drama Group. Seniors, 13-18. How much
did it cost? I flipped the leaflet and read, Classes cost £20 for a 12-week term. That worked out at less than £2 a week. I imagined the future, with Nene in Cyprus, and Sherifa paying me to babysit or take the girls to Music or Dancing or Origami or whatever, and me going to Drama classes. Nene was leaving! I leant my head against the glass and shut my eyes and smiled.
10
FREAKY FRIDAY
I hardly saw Sasha, not at school or at home. I had used her computer to send an email to the theatre about classes and they emailed back almost right away. I was on the list for next term!
Keith said he thought it was a brilliant idea about Drama classes. He said I looked much happier, and I told him what had happened with my dad and what Sherifa said.
“See, Seren? Isn’t that what I said? You have to talk to people! You should talk to your mum too. I bet she is so worried, just cos you’ve been worried.”
“She doesn’t notice a thing,” I said.
“Liar,” Keith said. “And you have to talk to Sasha.”
“I know that!” I said. “You’re supposed to be less I-told-you-so and more matey-supporty.”
“Yeah, but I was right, wasn’t I?”
“Yes, Keith, yes, you were.”
“As I said before, I am your Director and I am always right.”
“Keith,” I said. “You are asking for it, you know that?”
We walked over to the estate where we were going to film the scene where Miranda comes down in the lift.
“I’ll see how it looks. You might have to do the stairwell too, if it doesn’t work out.”
“Thanks for that, Keith,” I said.
“It’s great for your thighs,” Keith said, and got out of the way so I didn’t hit him.
We were filming on the Arden estate. I know people have this idea of Hackney as being full of council estates and tower blocks overrun with gangster hoodies and teenage mothers. Believe it or not, that is so not true. Mum told me how they blew up most of the tower blocks years ago, and the newer estates, like ours, are all red and yellow brick.
But the Arden estate was a sort of throwback. It was what most people think of when they say ‘estate’. It had one white tower, and a lot of low-rise blocks on concrete legs that you could walk through or hide behind. It wasn’t like a war zone or anything, but I’d probably have thought twice before I walked through it at night.
The tower was fifteen storeys high, and had a nasty metal box of a lift which smelt of disinfectant. After we’d been up and down ten times though, I stopped noticing. I had to go up on my own and Keith waited for me on the floor below, filming me as I stepped out.
Then we went up to the top floor, and looked west across the city and my heart almost stopped, we were so high up. The city was spread out all around for miles and miles. As if it never ended. To the west was a sort of tourist view of London, with a slice of St Paul’s and the Gherkin, in between the pointy fingers of the city skyscrapers.
“Amazing!” I said. And I looked round to the north, where what was left of the marshes was criss-crossed with circles of tyre marks from scooters and motorbikes, like the biro lines you make with a Spirograph.
Then we walked round to the other side of the block and we could see all across to the east.
The Olympic Park looked like a giant plastic toy, a city made by Lego or Fisher Price, spread out on a carpet of bright green grass. I could just see the shine on the river Lea as it snaked through the park, like a gold ribbon.
Keith took out his camera and started filming.
I looked down into the courtyard far below. The people were tiny, not much bigger than ants. I saw a woman with a pushchair loaded up with shopping bags, two boys kicking a bright orange dot of a ball and a girl, with a sort of familiar walk, striding across the concrete...
I knew who that was. It was Sasha, it had to be.
I followed her with my eyes and strained to make out her brown hair piled up on top of her head. With every step the girl took I was more sure it was Sasha.
“Shall I go down there?” I said. “You could film me in the courtyard from up here. I could look sort of lost… It might work.”
“Great idea,” Keith said, not looking away from the flip-down screen.
The lift seemed to take forever and when I did make it down to the bottom the girl who I thought might have been Sasha had vanished. My phone went off but it was just Keith telling me to act disorientated. I had to get him to explain what it meant and eventually he said, “What you just said, kind of lost.”
Down on the ground, in between the blocks, the wind was vicious, and I had to shut my eyes to stop the grit and dust that tried to blow into my eyes.
I wandered around looking like a well-meaning nutter, getting laughed at by the football boys, until Keith came down and showed me what he’d done on the little screen.
Then the football boys came over to look too. And suddenly they were all over Keith wanting to be in his film, and asking him how much his camera cost. I started to worry that the football boys might have older, bigger brothers who might be even more interested in the camera.
Keith was obviously thinking the same thing because he got up at the exact same time as me. “We better go,” he said. And we walked back towards the bus stop. But he couldn’t help flicking the camera on and running through the stuff we’d just shot as we walked. I slowed and watched too. The colours seemed brighter in the dark under the flats. The little picture shone, it was almost magic.
“What about the people who make flames come out of their fingers?” I said. “How are you going to do that?”
“Oh, one of my cousins does classes at Circus Space. He’s got a mate who does stuff with fire.”
I was about to ask what he meant when he stopped. There was the tinny roar of motorbikes coming fast behind us.
Keith bundled the camera into his bag and whispered, “Don’t look round! Just walk on!”
He looked terrified. He moved the rucksack with the camera from his back round to his front, but fumbled and dropped it just as the bike boys sped past. A can of Coke, a bag of white-rabbit sweets and the camera, carefully wrapped in Keith’s school jumper, tumbled out on to the street.
I gasped. “Is it all right?”
Keith was getting wound up. He was all fingers and thumbs until he was sure the camera worked.
“I thought they were going to jack us,” he said. “It happens, they come up behind you and take your bag. Miss Tunks would have killed me.”
“No, she would have killed me,” I said.
“Hang on,” Keith said, stopping. “Isn’t that Sasha?”
“Where?”
Keith pointed to a couple standing up against one of the concrete pillars, practically glued together. No mistake, it was Sasha. She was wearing her favourite blue top, and her brown hair was snaking down her back in springy brown curls. She had her head bent up at what looked like a very tricky angle because she was kissing a hugely tall boy.
“Oh my days!” I said.
“Jamie Kendrick!” Keith said out loud. “Looks like she’s got herself a date for the Leavers’ Prom after all.”
I yanked Keith back behind the nearest pillar.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“They might see us!”
“So?”
“She’ll think I’m spying on her or something!” I whispered. “She’ll think we’re stalking them. Ohmigod! Put the camera away! Now! She’ll think we’re filming!” I practically pulled the camera out of Keith’s hands and stuffed it back into the bag.
“Careful!” Keith was losing patience. “Seren! Calm down! Why would I want to film your sister and Jamie Kendrick?”
I could picture her storming over, telling me all sorts, accusing me of ruining her life all over again.
“She hates me, OK? We just have to get out of here. Quickly, without them noticing,” I said. I could see the bus stop ahead, and coming round the curve of the road from the junction was a
little red bus.
“Seren, I don’t think either of them would notice if the sky fell in.”
He had a point. Given that Jamie and Sasha were glued together, if me and Keith made like Usain Bolt and got on the bus they wouldn’t know we were here. But I wasn’t taking any chances.
“The bus! Now!” I pulled Keith along after me and sprinted for the bus stop, one hand on Keith’s arm, one arm stuck out in front of me hailing the bus like it was life or death. I was in luck, we made it and the bus doors squeaked open.
I was totally out of breath. Me and Keith swiped our cards and I looked round in case I could see Sasha, but she was in love-land and hadn’t noticed a thing. I grinned at Keith and we flopped down on the back seats.
“What was that about?” Keith said.
“I said, I didn’t want them to see us,” I wheezed.
“I got that. A bit extreme, no? I don’t get what else she could do to you?”
I took some more deep breaths. “It’s just easier like this.” I thought for a minute, then looked at Keith. “Jamie Kendrick!” I said.
“You are mad, you know that?” Keith said.
We were almost home, just passing the marshes. The trees all had their new leaves and the colour was fresh, bright green, like school powder paint.
Keith must have thought so too. “That would look good,” he said, and took the camera out of his bag. He clicked it on.
I saw the colour drain from his face. He went from normal Keith to paper-white in seconds.
“What’s up?” I said.
Keith patted his pocket. Then he patted his other pocket. He stood up and patted everywhere.
“What is it?” I said again. I was getting nervous just watching him. “The camera? Is it OK?”
Keith said nothing. He stood up again. He emptied his pockets out and now he took everything out of his rucksack. The camera was there, his notebook, and school jumper.
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