by Cathy Cole
“No!” Josh said.
“There are two identical suitcases in the hallway.” Lila felt genuinely sad for Dorothy Watkins. “The atlas, wrapped carefully in tissue paper, is in one of them.”
Josh’s fingers were flying. “What’s in the other one?”
It felt so obvious to Lila, she wondered why Josh had to ask. “Andrew didn’t run away at all,” she said. “He curled up in a nice quiet suitcase…”
“No!” Josh exclaimed again.
“Yes. Dorothy Watkins is taking Andrew on her adventure by mistake. Without her atlas, Dorothy Watkins loses her courage. She ends her days in another seaside town a bit like Heartside Bay, wistfully watching the boats depart for South America and Africa and New Zealand without her as Andrew sleeps on the window sill, using her red hat as a cushion.”
Lila realized she was staring at the fictitious Dorothy Watkins’ suitcase, convinced that she could hear a faint miaowing from inside. Imagination was a crazy thing.
“Lila, that’s brilliant,” Josh said.
She tore her eyes from the suitcase. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a silly story to help you visualize your character.”
Josh flipped through his sketchbook and tore out a blank sheet of paper. “Will you do me a favour? Will you write that story down for me? I’ll use it to work up the details on my sketches.”
Lila doubtfully took the paper. “Sure,” she said. “If you want.”
NINE
Lila stared at the ceiling as the morning light washed through the curtains and across her bedroom. Monday again. Josh would go to his illustration class and she would do … what, exactly?
Last Monday had dragged by. Lila couldn’t see today being any better. Polly and Ollie would be working at the market, Eve and Becca would be doing stuff together, Rhi and Brody would be singing… Everyone had their routines, and none of them included her.
It’s good for you to be away from Josh sometimes, she reminded herself, thinking of all the married jibes her brothers had been throwing at her that weekend. She had to have her own interests, her own life. When she thought of spending day after day sitting with Josh on the beach, watching him draw, she almost felt like she couldn’t breathe. But the thought of being alone, idly wasting time because she didn’t know what else to do, depressed her even more.
She turned over and tried to go back to sleep. It was only ten o’clock. She could snooze until eleven, and then have a late breakfast, and then … then…
With a groan, she got out of bed. The irritable energy coursing through her meant there was no chance of going back to sleep. She had a long shower, and deep-conditioned her hair, and spent ages doing her make-up and choosing her clothes. She was all dressed up with nowhere to go.
“Morning, love,” her mother said as she slouched into the kitchen.
Lila grunted, and wrestled two pieces of bread into the toaster with more force than necessary.
Her mother laid down the file she’d been reading. “You’re all sweetness and light this morning,” she observed. “What’s the matter?”
Lila banged open the fridge and stared morosely at the contents.
“Come on, love,” said her mother briskly. “Let’s have a cup of tea.”
Lila wanted to groan. Her mother was a psychotherapist, and who wanted to be psychoanalysed by their own mother? But something sat her down at the kitchen table with her toast as her mother poured out two mugs of tea, slid one mug towards Lila and waited with an enquiring look on her face.
“Don’t look at me like that, Mum,” she muttered.
Her mother stirred her tea. “Look at you like what?”
“Like you want me to ‘talk’.”
Her mother smiled. “I do want you to talk. And I think you want to talk as well. Otherwise you’d have taken that toast up to your bedroom, wouldn’t you?”
Her mother had a point, Lila realized. She wriggled uncomfortably on her chair. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she began. “I’m so restless, I could scream. I’m thinking about the future, and I’m thinking about Josh, and I’m so bored—”
Her mother reached across and took her hand. “Why do you think you’re feeling like this?”
Lila gestured hopelessly at the kitchen walls. “All my friends are doing things they like, stuff that will help their futures. They have their lives all mapped out inside their heads, and they’re all going to be brilliant at what they do. What do I have? Nothing.”
“Josh is hardly nothing,” her mother said.
“I don’t want to be defined by my boyfriend,” Lila said, nettled. “This is the twenty-first century, Mum. And anyway,” she added, “I’m having doubts about Josh and me too.”
Her mother looked concerned. “What kind of doubts?”
If only they were the kind of doubts she could put into words, thought Lila hopelessly. “He’s nice and lovely and kind,” she tried, “but we never do anything exciting, we never go anywhere new, we never see things we’ve never seen before, or … anyway, he’ll probably meet someone better on his course, someone who’s as talented as he is and twice as beautiful as me.” That thought pained her more than she could say.
“You are in a muddle,” said her mother. “On the one hand you say you’re bored with Josh, and in the same sentence you’re worrying about him meeting someone else.”
Lila silently lifted a shoulder in response. Real life was a muddle. Nothing was black and white.
“Josh is a lovely boy, Lila,” said her mother. “But that’s not enough if he doesn’t make you happy.”
“He does … sometimes,” Lila groaned, resting her head in her hands. “But then I catch myself snarling at him all the time, and he looks so hurt… Maybe I should just end it.” It sounded strange and frightening when she said it out loud.
“You’re in a rut, that’s all,” her mother soothed.
That was almost the worst of it. “I’m fifteen years old,” said Lila passionately. “My life shouldn’t be in a rut already!”
“Here’s what you do,” said her mother. “You find something new to do. Josh as well. That boy has a lot of good in him.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Lila demanded.
“Give it a try,” said her mother, looking unperturbed. “Find somewhere new that you can go together.”
“He’s doing his course today,” Lila muttered.
“Then let’s focus on you.” Her mother steepled her fingers, resting her elbows on the table. “You have a lot of different talents, Lila. You were a little dynamo when you were growing up, so full of ideas and imagination. Do you remember how you used to play make-believe for hours in your bedroom with your teddies?”
Lila smiled reluctantly. “I did teddy school on the window sills.”
“Not just teddy school. Teddy everything. You built them houses out of bricks and books. You had a naughty one, I remember, what was its name…”
Lila had a flash memory of a threadbare black toy cat, all arms and legs and whiskers. “Dodger,” she said. How could she have forgotten? “Dodger was the troublemaker.”
Her mother laughed. “You were always making him sit in the corner for being naughty in your school games. You wrote stories about him. You even built a jail for him, out of an old box Dad had in the garage.”
Even now, Lila could see Dodger’s naughty face peeping out through the wonky string bars she’d stuck over a hole in the box she’d turned into her jail. If only life was still so simple, she thought wistfully. “That was fun and everything,” she said aloud, “but I was seven, Mum. It’s kids’ stuff.”
“That imagination is still going strong,” said her mother. “The stories you came out with when you were late for curfew shortly before we left London… Dad and I would tear our hair out at you, but we’d have a good laugh in private once we’d sent
you up to your room.”
Lila flushed, remembering. “I don’t do that any more.”
“There’s a blessing!” said her mother ruefully. “You wrote stories all through primary school, you know. I’ve still got a few in my desk drawer. Wait there, let’s see if I can find any.”
Five minutes later, Lila found herself staring at her own childish writing, complete with stick-man illustrations, as her mother pressed a fold of paper into her hands. “The Adventures of Mr Egg,” she read, laughing and squirming at the same time. “He was a spy.”
“How he never got splatted by all the villains and tanks and explosions and dangerous cake-baking exploits, I’ll never know,” said her mother.
Lila grinned. Mr Egg! His motto had been Eggstremely Dangerous. “He had a sixth sense for risk,” she said.
Her mother patted her hand. “You should do something with that wild imagination of yours, love. You’ll surprise yourself, I guarantee it.”
Lila thought about Mr Egg. She thought about Dorothy Watkins and Andrew the cat; Mr Wrinkles and Maria and Hans. She had more stories tucked away in her room upstairs somewhere. She suddenly found herself wanting to dig them out.
Excusing herself from the table, she took the stairs two at a time and dug through several old shoeboxes at the back of her wardrobe. There was a story she’d written once, something she’d been really proud of… A rainbow, that was it. A rainbow, and pilots, and a cloud war.
“Got you!” she said, pouncing on a fold of lined paper tucked at the bottom of one of the shoeboxes. She shook out the paper and started reading it. It wasn’t too bad, given she’d scrawled it down when she was only twelve. There were even a few decent jokes. It just needed a bit of tweaking. Spreading the paper out on her desk, she sat down and opened her laptop.
It didn’t take long to type the story up. She embellished it in a few places, and read it over a few times to double-check the spelling. Then, on a whim, she typed story competition into Google and pressed enter.
There were hundreds of competitions. Lila scanned them quickly, trying to find one that would suit. You had to pay to enter some of them, so she avoided those. Some had actual prizes, while others simply promised to publish the winners’ stories on their websites.
She suddenly caught sight of a competition called Write a Rainbow. The deadline was the very next day.
If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is, she thought, feeling excited.
Before she could change her mind, she scrawled a fake name across the top of her story and pressed send. And the moment her story vanished from the screen, Lila found herself wishing she could fetch it back.
TEN
“Your feet stink,” Josh remarked.
“They don’t,” Lila objected.
“When did you last wash them?”
Her boyfriend could be really annoying sometimes. Lila moved her feet a little irritably from his lap, despite being almost too comfortable to move.
The weather had stymied any plans for “doing something different” with Josh today, as her her mum had suggested. At least we’re not on the beach, Lila thought, gazing out of the living-room window at the rain as it fell in silver sheets from the sky. She rested her head on the sofa cushions and stared at the ceiling for a while.
“Anything interesting up there?” Josh enquired.
“Spiders,” Lila replied. “Big ones.”
“How big?”
She said the first thing that came into her head. “Big as llamas.”
Josh yanked out his sketchbook and flipped to a fresh page. Without even looking, Lila knew he’d be drawing llama-spiders. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see how they turned out.
The remote was just out of reach, on the coffee table. Wriggling as far down the sofa as she could, Lila stretched her feet out and took hold of the remote between her toes, successfully dropping it in her lap. She glanced triumphantly at Josh.
“I’m not touching that now your feet have,” said Josh, barely looking up from his sketching.
That was fine by Lila. Whenever her brothers got the remote, they played couch commando all evening and she never got to choose what to watch.
“Today we shall mainly be watching … daytime TV,” she said, pressing buttons haphazardly. “Boring, boring, boring … ooh!”
Lorna Lustre’s smooth brown face loomed at the camera on the familiar set of The Blonde Game. Her eyelashes were so long, they probably wouldn’t have looked out of place on Josh’s llama-spiders.
“I remember this episode,” Lila said, sitting up with interest. “It’s when she catches her tennis coach with her best friend. Did you ever see this one?”
Josh was too busy drawing to reply. Lila leaned a little closer to the screen, intrigued by Lorna Lustre’s perfectly made-up face. Lila idly wondered how long it had taken to create this look. The reality star’s blonde hair hung in perfect frizz-free waves around her face, her skin looked impossibly smooth, and her lips were so puffy and shiny, Lila half-thought she might have suffered an allergic reaction to her lipgloss. She snorted with laughter at the idea.
“What’s so funny?” Josh asked, still sketching.
“The Blonde Game. Seriously, who hangs out at a tennis club in full make-up, drinking cocktails? Lorna Lustre can’t be her real name. She’s so dumb, she makes her tennis racket look intelligent.”
Josh’s sketchbook slid off his lap and hit the floor as he snatched the remote control out of Lila’s hands. “There must be something else on,” he said, flipping channels.
Lila tried to snatch the remote back again. “I was watching that!”
“You were watching The Blonde Game?” Josh said incredulously. “Lila, are you serious? It’s a show for idiots. Lorna Lustre sets women’s rights back a hundred years every time she minces on to the screen in those ludicrous fluffy high-heeled slipper things.”
“She’s not wearing fluffy mules today, she’s wearing trainers,” Lila snapped. Dimly she could hear how ridiculous she sounded. “What do you care what I’m watching anyway? You’re drawing. You’re always drawing. I can watch a hundred episodes of The Blonde Game back to back if I want.”
Josh snorted. “I can practically hear your brains dribbling out of your ears.”
Lila suddenly felt weirdly tearful. Did Josh think she was an idiot? With one final lunge, she got her fingers to the little black box and yanked it from Josh’s hand.
“What is your problem?” she demanded. “That show’s just a bit of fun. It’s not trying to be intellectual or arty or anything like that. It’s entertainment.”
Josh snatched up his sketchbook again. “I just think it’s a low kind of entertainment,” he said. “That’s all.”
He must think I’m really shallow, Lila thought miserably. She didn’t even want to watch it now, but there was no way she’d let Josh know that. Making a great show of turning the TV on again, she flicked back to the right channel and stared unseeingly at the screen. It took her a few moments to realize she was staring at an advertisement for hair removal cream.
She felt Josh take her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Let’s not fight about something this stupid.”
Lila pulled her hand away. “Good to know you think I’m stupid,” she said in a brittle voice.
Josh looked upset. “I didn’t mean it that way, Lila. Lila!”
Lila flicked the TV off and stalked out of the living room, smarting with humiliation. She headed up to her room and slammed her bedroom door. She knew she was behaving childishly, but it felt good all the same.
He can draw his stupid llama-spiders but I can’t watch TV, she thought resentfully. Double standards or what?
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
LILZZZ! Sorry I missed ur text!!
Heading 2 ur beach laterz. Wanna meet up?
&
nbsp; xx Iris xx
Her bad mood vanished like fog on a sunny day as she stared at the message in delight. She hit the call button.
“Lost your phone, did you Riz?” she said.
Iris sounded amused. “You know me too well, babes. Left it in the back of Flynn’s car. We’re driving down later, wanna hang out?”
Lila couldn’t think of anything she wanted more. “Who’s we?”
“Me, Flynn, Leo, maybe a few others. Supposed to be sunny later.”
“I am so up for that,” said Lila happily. “We could have a party at this secret cove we go to, just east of the main beach. What time are you coming?”
“I need to get Flynn out of bed first. Like the idea of a party, babes. We’ll call you, OK? Text us directions.”
Lila sent directions the moment Iris hung up, her fingers flying across the keypad. Then she sent a message to all her Heartside friends, telling them there would be a party at the secret cove that afternoon. Already the rain was fading outside, the sky starting to pick itself out of the grey and turn blue. She wanted to hug herself with excitement. At last, something different was happening.
There was a knock at her bedroom door. Her bad mood all but forgotten, Lila beamed as Josh came in.
“Are you OK?” he asked cautiously.
“Never better,” said Lila. “Some old mates are coming down from London later. We’re going to hang out at the beach, have a party.”
“Tonight?” Josh frowned. “That’s pretty sudden.”
“Iris texted me and it snowballed.” She wouldn’t let him spoil her unexpected happiness. “It’s going to be great. You’ll love them, they’re all loads of fun. They’re going to shake this place up a bit.”
Josh sat down on her bed and rubbed his ear. “I thought we were going to the Heartbeat tonight.”
“We go to the Heartbeat every night,” said Lila, rolling her eyes. Why couldn’t Josh be happy for once? “Lighten up, will you? You look like I just invited you to a funeral.”
