‘It’s an unusual name you’ve chosen,’ she said. ‘The kids will find it funny.’
I just told them I was a Teletubby . . . They took to me right away, probably ’cos I screamed playing chase, jumped at the jack in the box and went mad with paint and Play-Doh. I played every game except one . . . In What’s the Time, Mr Wolf? I got more nervous waiting for the Wolf to cry ‘Dinner time!’ than the kids did.
The kids broke my heart every day just by taking my hand . . . showing me they trusted me even though they shouldn’t – and wouldn’t have done if they’d known what I was really like or how I’d let Amy down.
There was one little boy . . . Elliot, I think his name was . . . he had a big thing about building towers with bricks, you know, the brightly coloured ones with letters and pictures on the side. The nonsense words he made were like the stuff I used to write.
Anyway, one day he spelled out ‘Amy’, and on the row below there was a brick with a picture of a hand. I stuck me foot out and brought the whole lot down, scattering the bricks, like the runes I’d read about in me magic books. It was an omen . . . telling me Amy was reaching out to me, not as my friend but to accuse me.
There are ghosts in games, and fainites don’t work . . . Trust me, I know, I tried.
I got lucky again soon after I started the job, as Maggie had a spare room in her flat in Wythenshawe and wondered if I fancied it. She’d been a foster mum apparently, taking in strays like me. I was the latest but it turns out I weren’t the last.
I’d not been there long – two months tops – when Maggie told me her boyfriend had asked her to live with him. I wasn’t to worry, she said, I could stay on in the flat. She didn’t want to let it go ’cos she needed it as insurance just in case things didn’t work out with her boyfriend.
‘We’ll just put the bills in your name and leave it at that, eh?’
I couldn’t believe me luck! First a roof over me head, now a place of me own. I almost hugged her. Then she said I weren’t going to be on me own as someone she knew had been dumped in some crappy B and B by the council and she wanted to help her.
‘Not the place to bring up kids, as you’re all too well aware.’
She must have seen the panic on me face.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘She’s only got the one child. She used to come to the nursery but she’s about eight now. Bright and bonny little thing, she is. It will be like having a baby sister around. Her mum’s only about six years older than you, so you’ll have a big sister too. I’ve got a good feeling about this. I think you’re really going to hit it off.’
Well, what could I do? I couldn’t say no, that’s for sure. Maggie had been kind to me . . . generous. I had to be too. The company would be good for me, she reckoned, and I’d be good for them.
‘They need some security. Your brand of TLC.’
A housemate and a ghost moved in.
B is for baby. A new generation.
The air under the duvet is damp and stale and smells of me. I can smell the truth too. Realisation seeps like sweat. Dana and Libby and Esme. Living together. Sharing lives. Sharing stories. Making up tales.
Adrenalin shoots through me. Fury. The need to know it all.
C is for . . . cat.
I tell you, Manchester might have looked like the Emerald City that night I first arrived, but I bet it don’t rain in the Emerald City like it does here. They don’t call this place the rainy city for nothing. It ain’t a quiet, misty kind of drizzle . . . it just tips it down, hour after hour of fat, cold, steady rain. That’s how it was the day Libby and Esme rocked up.
Maggie brought ’em round in her car. I watched from the flat window. The glass was all huffed up by my breath and the raindrops looked like lace, so when I first saw Esme it was like looking through a web . . . What I saw was Amy.
When I put me fingers to the window, trying to touch her and check she was really there, I felt the chill of the glass like the skin of a ghost. I told meself it was all in me head, just a trick of the light or wishful thinking, but I knew it was more to do with a guilty conscience.
I’ve read about déjà vu . . . had plenty of them wacky, been-here-before moments, usually in me nightmares. But this time was the worst. Amy was there, close up and real and alive, staring back at me . . . through Esme’s eyes.
Esme stepped towards me and smiled. That smile, oh God, that smile. The one I’d missed for so long, wanted to see again. It was sweet and kind, forgiving . . . She cocked her head when Maggie introduced me, like she hadn’t heard me name right.
‘That’s not your real name though, is it?’ she said.
Her smile was half playful, half suspicious. It didn’t change when I told her it was me real name.
Libby might just as well have not been there . . . she didn’t even register, not right away, but then she pushed into the corner of my eye, all slow, like a tear.
She was pale and pinched and dripping wet, and looked older than she really was but younger in some ways too . . . like a large kid – another kid I could help.
I got her a towel for her hair. When she’d rubbed it dry, she looked flushed and giddy, like a toddler after a go on the roundabout.
‘We do appreciate this,’ she said. ‘Don’t we, Esme?’
Esme nodded quickly.
‘We won’t be any trouble, will we?’
Esme smirked and shook her head slowly.
I left them to unpack and went back to Maggie in the corridor. She said I looked . . . wired, a bit shocked, like I’d been punched. I told her it was just starting all over again and living with strangers.
‘I thought you’d be used to that after all that time in the hostel,’ Maggie said. ‘It’ll be a bit strange at first, but once you’ve got to know each other, you’ll think you’ve known one another all your lives.’
That was the problem.
Esme caught me looking at her when she was eating a bowl of minestrone soup in the kitchen. She frowned at me.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Nothing.’
The frown vanished and became a smile . . . as if she knew what I was thinking. The way Amy always did . . . like twins, Miss Clapton used to say, as if we were telepathic.
I didn’t want Esme to know she did my head in or that she confused and scared me. I didn’t want her to know I believed in ghosts. But I think she knew all that anyway . . . That’s what scared me the most.
That first night together, I ran Esme a bath, a deep one, chucked in some bath gel and got it all frothy. I left her to it and went and found Libby asleep on the bed. I pulled off her shoes, tucked the duvet around her, picked up their bags of clothes and put them in the washing machine.
Suds splatted against the porthole . . . Esme splashed in the bathroom . . . rain drummed on the window. I couldn’t tell if the flat was washing itself, rinsing off the scum, or whether it was the past washing all around me, trying to get in.
When she got out of the bath, Esme asked me to dry her hair, which is what me and Amy always did on sleepovers. I’d wish my hair was thick and shiny and Baby Spice blonde like hers. I used to think every brush stroke tied us closer, but touching Esme was . . . like an electric shock. I pulled back.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You didn’t hurt me. It’s not that tangled.’
It was for me . . .
I ain’t touched no one for years, you see, and wouldn’t let them touch me. I’d given up good-night kisses years ago, although Mum and Dad weren’t that bothered. After that, the only contact I had to put up with was the graze of a hand when I took cash from Little Chef customers. I did me best to steer clear of that too. The touch from the kids at the nursery was different . . . more innocent . . . so it didn’t get under me skin like the rest. It was just part of the job.
Anyway, I rubbed Esme’s hair with a towel, all nervous like, then brushed it with long, soft strokes. When I finished, she was all cosy and glossy and relaxed and happy as a cat in the sun . . .
‘All I want is to be a better mum to Esme than mine was to me,’ she said. ‘For us to be a better family.’
She stopped looking all lost and disappointed and didn’t keep going on about if only she’d done this or that. She stopped feeling sorry for herself . . . got her confidence back, so much so that she began to apply for jobs. And eventually she got one – as a sales assistant at the airport’s duty-free shop.
We celebrated with a bottle of the cheapest wine from Costcutter. Libby and Esme danced to songs on the radio, their hands above their heads, while I watched from the sofa. They wanted me to join in, but I wouldn’t. I ain’t no good at dancing . . . if anything, I’m even worse at dancing than I was at juggling, and that’s saying something.
Esme grabbed me wrist and tried to pull me up, but I told her I couldn’t, I was too much of a lummox.
‘You can’t fight it,’ she said.
Fingers jabbed into me ribs.
‘The rhythm’s gonna get you in the end.’
Another jab. And another.
‘The rhythm’s gonna get you in the end.’
Libby started prodding too.
‘The rhythm’s gonna get you in the end.’
I struggled and they stumbled and landed on top of me . . . I wriggled, and that just made them laugh even more, and all the time their fingers were poke, poke, poking.
‘She likes it really!’ Esme said.
I begged them to stop and tried to push them off, but they were fitter, slimmer, more bendy. Esme got her arms on me knees and tried to pin me down, but I . . . I bucked her off, screaming me head off, and slapped her hard across the face.
Libby yelled at me that it was only a game. I buried me head in the sofa, crying, and kept saying sorry over and over again . . .
Esme didn’t ask why I hit her, because she knew. She stroked me hand, all understanding like, but her fingers were really just pointing at me . . . picking me out . . . ready to accuse me.
C is for cats. The games they play with mice.
D is for . . . duck.
I never thought I’d have kids as I knew I shouldn’t be trusted with them. It was okay at the nursery . . . the gates were locked so the kids couldn’t get out and no one could get in unless we buzzed them in. And there were other people around . . . responsible people to look out for them too, so it weren’t all down to me.
It’s different for parents, and that’s what I became. If that weren’t a big enough surprise, an even bigger one was I was good at it . . . especially the worrying bit.
Libby’s shift work meant she weren’t always around to do the school run and I had to stand in when she couldn’t. Some days she would take Esme in and I’d pick her up and carry her paintings and wonky pottery back to the flat . . . or it’d be the other way round.
I never left the gates until Esme had gone into the school building. When I picked her up, I was always there on the dot . . . before the dot. I weren’t gonna make no mistakes this time. I had me eyes front and back and all points in between, like something out of Monsters, Inc.
If I picked Esme up, she had to come back to the nursery with me and wait until I’d finished with the after-hours club for kids with parents who were still at work. Esme didn’t mind it, as she didn’t like walking on her own on the estate ’cos of all the dogs running loose, you know, thick-necked Staffies wearing leather collars with spikes and studs. I didn’t like them much either, dogs full stop, come to that. I ain’t too fussed about cats neither, if I’m honest, but dogs . . .
Once, me and Amy got chased around the park by a Westie when we were there on our skates. We’d just got an ice cream from the café. I dunno what the dog wanted more, the ice cream or us, but it ran after us, yapping at our feet. We both fell over and scraped our knees. Mrs Archer put cream on our grazed knees and gave us the money for another ice cream, but I think she thought it was my fault Amy had got hurt as it had been my idea to go out skating.
Esme was way older than the other children in the nursery, but she enjoyed playing with them . . . handing out beakers of juice . . . sitting cross-legged on the floor for fairy-story time . . .
The versions I told were the fluffy Disney and Barbie ones. They had to be . . . I ain’t never read the books. I’ve only seen the films, and they don’t max out on the gore like I’ve been told the books do.
Anyway, Esme hunched up during the scary bits, clapped when the hero escaped and groaned when the story finished. I told her I was surprised she weren’t bored with them, as she’d heard them enough times.
‘I just play along for the others,’ she said. ‘I’m not into the stories that much. The real ones are much better.’
She dragged me into the poky old library on the estate. The books on the shelves were yellowed . . . didn’t look like no one had ever read any of ’em. She took down a book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
‘I know these off by heart,’ she said, ‘but they’ll be brand new if you read them to me. With all the voices and actions. Like you do at the nursery.’
It’s like she was challenging me . . . daring me to read. To see if I could. Testing to see if I was who she thought I was . . .
I read her the stories all right, sitting on her bed with me arm around her. I weren’t quite word perfect, but good enough to throw her off me scent. What made me stumble weren’t the words, but the actual stories. Gory or what? It was like they was written in blood, with heads and arms chopped off and people left for the wolves . . .
Every time I looked up from the book, Esme’s lips would be miming the words, her eyes fixed on me.
‘Families can be so nasty to each other, can’t they?’ she said. ‘Especially the stepmothers. They’re always evil.’
I looked away. I was as bad as the woodcutter’s wife who insisted Hansel and Gretel was left in the forest . . . and Esme knew it.
I lost count of the number of times she took that book out . . . over and over again, like Amy with The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes. I only read that because she did, and I only read it once too, as it was a silly book, even for a numpty like me.
Amy kept telling me to read them big thick books by Philip Pullman, but they were too long and there weren’t no pictures. But it was one of them books Esme wanted me to read to her next.
And she changed something else too . . . Instead of sitting next to her like I usually did, she made me sit on a chair at the end of the bed. When I asked her what difference it made, she just shrugged.
‘Dunno. Just because . . .’
I reckon she just wanted a better view, so she could see my reactions to the story. She said she’d not read it before, but she knew it off by heart and was way ahead of every little twist and turn, even getting the spooky sciency bits without me having to explain. Not that I could have, even if she’d asked. To her, Lyra flitting between parallel worlds was real, the sort of thing that happened every day.
The bits about experiments on kidnapped children freaked me out . . . I couldn’t read on.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’m scared too but I want to know what happens.’
She weren’t scared, she was playing . . . the cat with her mouse. But I carried on reading, from me seat at the end of the bed.
We got through that book . . . and the next in the series. That’s when Lyra’s friend Will gets given a knife that can cut windows between different worlds. Esme nodded, ‘yes’. When Lyra got kidnapped, Esme was pleased to see me trembling. At the end of the book, Lyra was still missing.
‘It’s not a happy ending, is it?’ Esme said.
That ain’t the ending, I told her, there’s still another book to go. So she wanted me to read that to her as well, to see if it all came right in the end.
Course, it didn’t. Will and Lyra fess up to loving one another but are forced to live apart, in different worlds.
‘I knew it wouldn’t be a happy ending,’ Esme said. ‘Didn’t you?’ Her voice sounded all hard and her eyes were like drills.
It ain’t unhappy either, I told her. ‘They get to meet up again, after all.’
‘But we’re not told if that’s a good thing or not,’ Esme said. ‘That bit of the story hasn’t been written. Yet.’
That was that as far as me reading to Esme went. She didn’t ask me again but sat on her own on the bed, reading to herself. She weren’t reading stories either, as she’d moved on to my books instead.
You Can Heal Your Life.
The Element Encyclopaedia of 5,000 Spells.
Working with Guides and Angels.
The Celestine Prophecy.
The Gilded Tarot.
Libby reckoned it was all a load of old crap, but Esme loved it, especially the tarot cards. She laid them out on the floor and asked Libby to pick one. Libby sighed and plonked a finger on the nearest card.
‘Ten of Cups.’ Esme flicked through the book for the card’s meaning. ‘A happy family life. True friendships.’
Libby smiled.
‘That’s nice.’
Esme looked at the card, then back at the book.
‘Oh no, wait a minute. Your card’s upside down. That means the loss of a friendship. Children may turn against their parents.’
Libby laughed and said that meant things would be staying exactly as they were. Esme mixed the cards up again and said it was my turn. I tapped one with my toe. The Ten of Wands . . . I didn’t need her to tell me what it meant, as that one always came up for me.
‘An oppressive load,’ Esme said. ‘Pain. All plans ruined.’ She was gloating, chuffed to bits . . . I tell you, the prophecy in the cards never felt more real than it did that time.
When Esme took her turn, she got the Wheel of Fortune.
‘Destiny, an unusual loss, end of a problem, unexpected events,’ she said. She pulled her legs up towards her and perched her chin on her knees. ‘Ooh, I wonder what they could be?’ She stared straight at me. ‘Let’s hope it’s something nice.’
She didn’t say it like she was daydreaming . . . She said it like a threat.
The Second Life of Amy Archer Page 20
