Dani’s Diary

by Narinder Dhami

  There was the sound of a key in the lock, then the front door opening. Tabitha streaked out from under the window seat, a lightning flash of stripy fur, and headed down the hall towards freedom.

  ‘Nan, stop her!’ I yelled.

  Nan closed the front door smartly, just before Tabitha reached it, and scooped her up. Between the two of us, we got Tabitha, wriggling and grumbling, into the basket.

  Nan glanced from my sulky face to Mum cradling her scratched hand to Tabitha glaring haughtily through the bars of the basket. ‘Looks like I turned up just in time,’ she remarked. ‘Ready to go?’

  Mum nodded. ‘You’d better give me your key,’ she told Nan, ‘and I’ll leave it in the kitchen with the others.’

  I swallowed and swallowed again as Mum went off to the kitchen. My eyes kept filling with tears and it was taking a lot of effort to keep them from falling.

  ‘Chin up, Dani,’ Nan said, slipping her arm round me. ‘We’ll still see each other all the time. Things won’t be so different.’

  ‘I know,’ I gulped. ‘I keep telling myself it’s not like I’m going off to a whole different country, is it? Not like you had to do, I mean.’

  Nan smiled. ‘You’ve started my diary?’

  ‘It’s really interesting,’ I said eagerly. ‘But it’s taking me ages to work it all out.’ Luckily I’d discovered that Nan had used quite a lot of English words and sentences mixed up with the Punjabi, even though sometimes she hadn’t spelled them quite right. I was writing it out in English as I went along, so that I didn’t forget what I’d already translated. But I was having to guess at bits of it. Now I looked speculatively at Nan. ‘I don’t suppose …?’

  ‘You suppose right,’ she said with a chuckle. ‘I’m not translating it for you.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ I shrugged. ‘It’ll give me something to do while I’m ignoring Lalita.’

  ‘Danjit.’

  ‘All right.’ I held up my hands. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Time to go.’ Mum came back from the kitchen, avoiding my eye, I noticed. She picked up the bag with Tabitha’s toys and food dishes packed in it, and we all trooped up the hall towards the front door. I didn’t look back because I thought I might start bawling, but the thud behind us as the door swung shut for the very last time made my throat ache.

  ‘I must get back to the surgery.’ Nan kissed Mum and then gave me a long hug. ‘I’ll be round to see you as soon as you’ve settled in.’

  ‘That could be years,’ I whispered in her ear.

  Nan shook her head, but didn’t say anything. I put Tabitha on the back seat of the car, wondering how she was going to get along with Ravi and Lalita’s dog, a big, shambling, shaggy hound called Charlie. I climbed in beside Mum and we drove off, Nan waving until we turned the corner.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dani, believe me,’ Mum said, her eyes fixed firmly on the road. ‘I know you didn’t want to leave.’

  ‘Well, what I want doesn’t seem to make any difference,’ I replied moodily. I’m not like that really. I think I’m quite a happy person most of the time. But at the moment I’m queen of the sulks. I feel like I’ve got a big black cloud sitting above my head and it’s raining down on me all the time.

  ‘Dani, please trust me,’ Mum said, very seriously. ‘I know you think I’m pleasing myself by marrying Ravi, but it really isn’t that simple. I want us all to be happy, and I think this will be the best way, in the end.’

  ‘Tell that to Lalita,’ I muttered. Then I turned my head away, making it very clear I did not want to talk. Mum was happy that we were moving in with Ravi; I wasn’t, and I didn’t see how we could ever get over that. Neither of us had changed our minds yet. It simply wasn’t going to happen.

  Ravi’s house was in a much more expensive part of town. It had a paved driveway in front of it with room for three or four cars. Not like our terraced house, where everyone fought for parking spaces in the narrow street and Mum muttered under her breath, trying not to swear as she shoe-horned our battered old Golf into a tiny gap. We’d had windowboxes and a back yard. Ravi and Lalita had a landscaped front garden filled with shrubs and flowers.

  The front door opened before Mum had even turned the engine off.

  ‘Welcome to your new home!’ Ravi called. He ran down the steps as we climbed out of the car, and hugged Mum tightly. I shuffled backwards out of reach. Don’t hug me, don’t hug me, don’t hug me.

  ‘Hello, Dani.’

  For a crazy minute I thought Ravi was going to shake hands with me. But in the end he simply nodded. I tried not to look at his face, which was all eager and excited and hopeful. To be honest, I felt a tiny bit sorry for him. Didn’t he realize this was never going to work?

  I lifted Tabitha out of the car and followed Mum and Ravi up the steps. I’d been to the house before, and I knew it was big and light and airy and beautiful, with large rooms and modern furniture, a plasma TV and lots of hi-tech gadgets. But it wasn’t home. As the front door closed behind me, I felt like a prisoner when the cell door clanks shut and locks them in.

  Lalita was sprawled on a squashy cream sofa in the living room, watching MTV. She didn’t move or even look up when Ravi ushered us in; not by one flicker of an eyebrow did she acknowledge our presence.

  ‘Lalita.’ Her dad’s voice held a warning.

  Yawning, Lalita flicked the remote control at the TV and turned it off. Then she stood up and nodded at us. ‘Hello,’ she said coldly. Then she turned to her dad. ‘Can I go out now?’

  Ravi shook his head.

  ‘But you said I could go after they got here,’ Lalita grumbled, her face like thunder.

  ‘Lalita, I want you to stay home and welcome Meeta and Danjit properly,’ Ravi said, keeping his temper but only just, I thought.

  Eyebrows raised, I looked expectantly at Lalita. I didn’t want her to welcome me, I just wanted to annoy her. She gave me a glare full of poison.

  ‘Well, it must be nice for you to move into a great big house like this and leave your poky little one behind,’ she said in a honeyed voice. ‘Welcome to our home.’

  ‘Not good enough,’ I shot back. ‘Try again.’

  ‘Danjit!’ Mum snapped, at the same moment as Ravi muttered, ‘Lalita!’

  There was a clicking noise behind me and I turned to see Charlie trotting along the wooden floor from the kitchen. He sniffed the air a few times and then homed in on Tabitha in her basket.

  ‘Woof! Woof! Woof!’

  There was a blur of shaggy fur as Charlie charged at me, barking loudly. Inside the basket Tabitha arched her back, hissing and spitting and wailing dramatically. I lifted her out of reach as Charlie began to jump up at my legs.

  ‘Get away, you stupid dog!’ I snapped.

  ‘Lalita, put Charlie outside,’ Ravi ordered, grabbing the dog’s collar.

  Lalita was laughing and wasn’t even bothering to hide it. She pulled Charlie, still barking, over to the patio doors and pushed him outside. He slumped on the flagstones, nose pressed against the glass, looking hard done by.

  ‘You can let her out now, Dani,’ Ravi said.

  Quickly I unbuckled the basket straps. Tabitha sat sulking for a minute, refusing to move. Then curiosity got the better of her. She stepped out of the basket, sniffing her way along the living-room floor.

  Outside, Charlie spotted this interloper and began throwing himself at the glass, barking. Lalita had left the patio door slightly ajar, but it wasn’t wide enough for Charlie to get through. Well, not until he pushed his wet black nose into the gap, forced the door open wider, squeezed through and hurtled into the room.

  ‘Tabitha, come here!’ I cried in alarm.

  ‘Charlie!’ Lalita squealed with laughter. ‘You are a naughty boy!’

  Tabitha spun round as Charlie, tongue lolling, bounded towards her. She drew herself up to her full, furry height, lifted her paw and smacked him hard round the nose.

  Charlie whimpered, falling back on his shaggy haunches in surprise. And I grinned. Th
at had wiped the smile off Lalita’s face! Meanwhile Tabitha sprang elegantly up onto the arm of the sofa, and began kneading her claws into the soft cream leather.

  ‘Well, we can see who’s going to be the boss around here,’ I said airily.

  The look on Lalita’s face was priceless.

  ‘Let’s start unpacking, Dani.’ Mum scooped Tabitha up under one arm and grabbed me with the other. Then she swept us both out of the room and up the wide wooden staircase. Ravi stayed behind and I caught the first few words of Lalita getting a good telling-off. I smirked.

  ‘You can take that smile off your face, Danjit Kaur,’ Mum said coolly as we reached the top of the stairs. ‘You’re no better than Lalita.’

  ‘I am so better than her,’ I muttered with all the maturity of a five-year-old. ‘Anyway, she started it.’

  ‘This is your room.’ Mum flung open a door, held Tabitha out to me and then marched off down the landing. I knew I’d annoyed her. Well, what did she expect?

  My new bedroom was about twice as big as the one back home. Ravi had offered to buy new furniture for me, but I wasn’t having that, was I? So I’d told Mum I wanted to keep my old stuff. Now the battered wooden bed and the wobbly desk and the rickety bookcases looked as small and insignificant and out of place as I felt myself.

  But what surprised me most was the walls. They were painted a soft, pale lilac, my most favourite colour in the whole world. I put Tabitha on the window ledge and looked around the room. So much beautiful colour, so much space, so much light. If it was anywhere except Ravi and Lalita’s house, it would be perfect …

  Footsteps were coming up the stairs and I tensed. I didn’t have time to close the door. Quickly I opened one of the suitcases and began unpacking my clothes, hoping whoever it was would walk on by.

  It was Ravi, and he stopped in the doorway. I forced myself to look up.

  ‘I hope you like the bedroom, Dani.’ He sounded anxious. ‘Your mum told me what your favourite colour was, so I bought the paint and decorated it for you …’

  I felt – oh, I don’t know. Surprised, ashamed and a bit guilty. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  Ravi nodded. He waited hopefully to see if I was going to say anything else, but I honestly couldn’t think of anything more, so he wandered off after my mum.

  Why did he have to be so nice? I thought glumly. If Ravi was an evil stepfather, like a character in a fairy story, it would be so easy to hate him. I was determined not to like him too much, but it was really difficult. I just felt that in a funny sort of way, I was betraying my dad. Even though I’d been kind of relieved when he and Mum decided to split, because they argued all the time.

  I sighed. ‘Why is life so complicated?’ I muttered under my breath.

  ‘First sign of madness.’

  Lalita was leaning against the doorframe.

  ‘What did you say?’ I snapped, annoyed that she’d made me jump.

  ‘Talking to yourself.’ Lalita stared at me with naked dislike. ‘It’s the first sign of madness.’

  ‘You’d drive anybody up the wall,’ I said, turning back to the pile of clothes on my bed.

  ‘At least I wouldn’t go where I’m not wanted,’ Lalita retorted.

  ‘Oh, do tell me what I should have done instead,’ I came back immediately. ‘Stayed in the old house on my own? We’re kids, remember? We don’t have a say in all this.’

  Before Lalita could reply (and believe me, she was going to), there was a burst of the latest hip indie band single from her jeans pocket. She pulled out her phone and stared at the caller display. Then, as she turned away, a smile lit up her face, so big and wide she glowed like a Christmas tree.

  ‘Hello?’

  That was all I heard before she half ran down the landing and shut her bedroom door behind her. But it was enough to tell me, from her soft and delighted tone, that there was someone special on the other end of the line.

  Ooh, a mystery! I love mysteries. Who could it be? I frowned, mulling over the possibilities, remembering the tone of her voice. Maybe Lalita had a boyfriend? If she did, I bet her dad didn’t know. Or her gran. Very interesting …

  I swung my empty suitcase off the mattress and knelt down to push it under the bed. Of course, it isn’t any of my business. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know.

  ‘Oh! Help!’

  I shrieked with fear, scuttled backwards away from the bed on my backside and leaped up onto the top of my desk. In the dim light under the bed I’d spotted an enormous spider, the biggest I’d ever seen, with long, wobbly, hairy legs!

  ‘Mum!’ I yelled, shivering and shaking.

  She didn’t come. I suppose her bedroom was too far away for her to hear. Great. She’d already started to let me down.

  Alerted by my screams, Tabitha had jumped down from the window ledge and begun sniffing around the bed with interest. Now she flattened herself like a furry mophead and squeezed underneath, tail waving.

  ‘Tabitha, be careful!’ I wailed. She loved chasing spiders, but if she flushed this one out into the middle of the room, I’d have to leap out of the window. I couldn’t see any other escape.

  Tabitha was backing out from under the bed again. She had something in her mouth. Eeek! She was carrying the spider by one of its legs!

  ‘Tabitha, drop it!’ I moaned, trying not to look. ‘Tabitha!’

  Tabitha was sitting on the floor, staring up at me, a puzzled look on her face. There in front of her lay a very big, very realistic rubbery spider.

  ‘It’s not real!’ I gasped with relief, clinging to the edge of the desk for support as I climbed down.

  Tabitha gave me a withering look. Well, of course it’s not real, you dummy!

  I poked cautiously at the spider with a pen, just to be on the safe side. It was very odd. Surely the room would have been empty when the removal men brought my stuff in? Maybe someone had sneaked in and left the spider there after they’d gone. Someone who knew I was petrified of them. Hmm. Who could that be? I wonder.

  Ravi and Mum had decided that we’d have a special meal together that evening; our first meal as a family, they said. Me, I think it takes a bit more than us all sitting round a table and ordering in takeaway pizza to be a family. But I suppose we had to start somewhere. Lalita was in a worse mood than when we arrived though. She hadn’t been allowed to leave the house all day and she was obviously burning with resentment. There was a small argument about the pizza toppings but nothing too awful. Lalita wanted pineapple, onion and extra cheese – which just happens to be my favourite too. But, just for the fun of it, I said I wanted tuna, olives and peppers. Mum was onto me straight away though, so I gave in.

  ‘Well.’ Ravi looked around at us as we sat at the table, the pizzas in front of us. He and Mum were getting stuck into the red wine a bit heavily, I noticed. Not that I blamed them. ‘Here we all are.’

  ‘Go to the top of the class, Dad,’ Lalita muttered.

  Ravi gave her a look. ‘Now no one ever said this would be easy,’ he began.

  ‘Oh, please, not a speech,’ I said under my breath. This time it was Mum’s turn to give me the look.

  ‘But it’s up to us to make it work,’ Ravi went on doggedly. ‘And I know we can do this.’

  ‘Huh!’ said Lalita and I together.

  ‘Well, that’s probably the first thing you two have agreed on all day,’ Ravi said, his face breaking into a smile. ‘So that’s a start.’

  Mum laughed, and I had to force myself to keep my face perfectly straight. Lalita was still scowling and fidgeting with the cutlery. She knocked her knife off the table and stretched down to pick it up.

  ‘Aaaargh!’

  It really was like something out of a movie. Lalita’s head was under the table; we heard her scream at the top of her lungs; she tried to jump up from her chair, banged her head and got tangled up in the tablecloth. As she finally struggled to her feet, she leaped up, taking the tablecloth with her. The pizzas, the plates, the cutlery all cras
hed to the floor in a tangled heap.

  ‘Lalita!’ Ravi jumped to his feet too, as did Mum and I. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘A mouse!’ Lalita streaked across the room and hovered in the doorway. She was so scared, her hair was almost standing on end. ‘A mouse under the table!’

  I tried not to smirk. I had a pretty good idea of what she’d seen. Kneeling, I crawled under the table and picked up the grey furry object by its long pink woolly tail.

  ‘It is a mouse,’ I said, dangling it in my fingers. ‘But it’s not real. It’s one of Tabitha’s toys.’

  I so enjoyed watching Lalita turn from pale with fear to red with embarrassment.

  ‘It – it looks real,’ she stuttered.

  ‘Lots of these things do.’ I eyeballed her coolly. ‘Mice. Spiders. All very realistic.’

  Lalita turned a bit pinker.

  ‘Spiders?’ Mum stared at me.

  I nodded. ‘Lalita’s scared of mice, obviously, and I’m scared of spiders.’ I glanced at Lalita. ‘But then you know that, don’t you?’ Once, when we were all out in Ravi’s car, I’d spotted a spider on the rear window and gone crazy.

  Lalita had obviously decided that attack was the best form of defence.

  ‘You put that mouse there to scare me!’ she snapped.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘But I wish I had.’

  Lalita glared at me. ‘I hate you!’ she shouted, and ran off. We heard her footsteps stomping up the stairs like a baby elephant.

  ‘Wait for it,’ I said.

  Bang! Lalita’s bedroom door was predictably slammed shut.

  Mum and Ravi were both looking accusingly at me. Ravi opened his mouth to say something, but I just caught Mum shake her head very slightly at him.

  ‘Danjit, did you put Tabitha’s mouse under the table?’ asked Mum quietly.

  ‘No, I didn’t!’ I said hotly. ‘Why don’t you ask her about the big fake spider I found in my bedroom this morning?’

  Mum sighed.

  ‘No pizza for me, thanks,’ I went on, swallowing down a stupid burst of tears. ‘I don’t fancy it much now.’

  And I walked out of the room, leaving Mum and Ravi to clear up the mess.