Ella on the Outside

by Cath Howe

  But then Molly suddenly said, “While Mum’s in hospital, would you help to look after my rabbit, Jack?”

  Jack’s face lit up like Christmas. “Really?”

  Chapter 25

  Whisper it to Me

  Hi Dad,

  My skin is bad. Mum says I’m scratching a lot at night and she’s making me wear the scratch mitts again. Mrs Reynolds says the Queen wears gloves for her garden parties at Buckingham Palace. But those parties are in the daytime. And, anyway, my mitts are brown and splotchy and they smell really yuck, like vinegar, because of all the creams.

  I do all the things like long sleeves and the washing and the soaking and the creams and all the food things. I hate not having ice cream when we go out. Every time we have the soya one at teatime I say I should have double because I’ve missed so many and Mum laughs. But I should! The doctor said my skin was angry. I keep thinking about eczema being a shouting thing but I think eczema is more like insects burrowing inside and trying to escape. I would like to unzip my skin and hang it up so I could go to bed without it, so all the itches would leave me alone. Then I’d be a skeleton. I’m going to tell that to Jack cos he really likes skeletons. Sometimes Mum holds my hands still and says “You’ve scratched enough.” But it isn’t like that. Even if I scratched all the skin off I think a little itch would find me.

  Love, Ella

  Molly was going to stay at our house while her mum was in hospital.

  We made a bed for her in my room on the spare mattress. There wasn’t any extra space to walk around; we were like peas in a pod, Mum said. The first night, Mum came in and kissed us both goodnight. “Not too much chatting or you’ll never get up in the morning!”

  The light flicked off and all the shapes in the room disappeared. I snuggled down. I was pleased Molly was here. In the quietness, I listened to the water pipes making their clanking noises on the landing.

  But then a snuffling noise started. I listened. It turned to long, choking sobs.

  “Molly,” I whispered. “Are you all right?”

  Some words I couldn’t hear. Mum… Something about Mum? “What’s wrong?”

  “Your mum kissed me… She hugged me.”

  “I’ll tell her not to. It’s all right.”

  But Molly was sobbing again. “I don’t want her to stop. She… nobody… nobody kisses me goodnight.”

  I stared down into the dark where Molly’s voice was. “So, your mum doesn’t…?”

  “No… I always check she’s OK. Then just… go to my bed… on my own.”

  “Oh!” A cold picture came into my head: Molly lying all still in a bed in her house.

  A big gulp rose inside me. Mum always tucks us in. She doesn’t really tuck – she just calls it tucking us in – and holds me, smelling of Mum: her jumper, her hair. “Oh, Molly, I’m so sorry your mum isn’t… your mum can’t…”

  Molly’s voice again. “I think Mum got too sad when Dad died. I think that made her go strange. I was scared sometimes. I don’t think she knew what she was going to do. She was like Mum but … somewhere else. I didn’t tell anyone at school. I didn’t want Mr Hales knowing things… He might think Mum was mad. She isn’t mad, Ella.”

  Molly’s voice turned into a whisper. “Sometimes I did think she was mad… like when she made a big mess in the kitchen and I got back from school and there were eggs everywhere and I got so angry and shouted at her and she just cried. I wanted to make you a cake, Molly. I wanted it to be waiting when you got back but I couldn’t make the eggs work… I think the sadness was just making her brain wrong.”

  Molly was silent. The clanking noise from the pipes had stopped, and our house was very quiet. It seemed to wrap itself round me, warm. I couldn’t bear thinking about the cake Molly’s mum had tried to make.

  “But she’s getting better now?” I asked.

  Molly sighed. “Yes. The tablets make her sleepy. She still cries a bit but she holds my hand more and looks at me and it’s like… she can really see me now. And she asks me about school and my art. Before she had me Mum used to do art too; she was a painter.”

  “That’s why you love art!”

  “Yes. I don’t know why Mum stopped. I’d like her to start again. And be happy.”

  Lying talking in the dark beside Molly was like talking to myself. I couldn’t see her listening. “I’ve got something to tell you too,” I said. “My dad’s in prison. He stole some money.” It was easy to tell Molly. “When he first got in trouble Mum went up to my school and talked to the headmistress, and I had to look after Jack in the playground and I kept wondering what they were saying. I knew it was bad though. I could hear Mum and Dad arguing when I was in bed. How could you do something so stupid? Mum kept saying. Dad was crying. I did it for us.

  “Did you tell anyone?” Molly asked.

  “No, only my friend Grace. I said that Dad was going to be in a big court case and she mustn’t tell anyone and she just said, Don’t worry. Dad kept hugging me and Jack so much.”

  “Who did he steal from?”

  “The bank where he worked. The court was to decide how to punish him. It took a whole week. Dad said he was guilty right at the start. He said he needed the money to pay someone back and he hadn’t told anyone, not even Mum. I think all my teachers knew by then. I hated them asking, ‘Are you all right, Ella?’”

  “And your dad got taken away?”

  “He’s been in prison for six months but they’re keeping him for three years.”

  Molly was quiet.

  “After Dad went, a man jumped out from between the cars on our road waving a long camera when we had only just got back from the supermarket. Mrs Mackay, do you have any comment? and Mum screamed at me to Get Jack inside and shut the curtains. So we ran. And Mum was grabbing shopping bags and slamming the car doors and the man was rushing round taking pictures. It was like a hunt. And when he’d gone, we all sat at the bottom of the stairs while Mum cried. I thought it was just Dad who did the bad thing but I think some people thought it was Mum or they wanted to watch us and see if we were bad too. And when I was going to school, Mrs Griffiths opposite came out on her step and shook her doormat then stared at me really long and hard without saying hello or smiling. It was horrible, just looking down at my shoes till I heard her door slam. And Mum shouted at Grandma. ‘I’m not staying here with everyone staring at us; I’ve not seen a penny of that money!’”

  I stopped.

  The secret was gone, all smashed and gone away. I stared into the dark where Molly was. “I write to my dad,” I told Molly. “I’ll tell him you’re my new friend.”

  Molly’s gentle voice came again. “Do you go and visit him?”

  “Mum doesn’t want us to.”

  Molly sighed. “But he’s your dad.”

  I lay in the warm, quiet dark and thought about Dad: his face in a happy grin, Dad running around the garden with Jack on his shoulders, Dad chasing me on the beach on holiday.

  Chapter 26

  Cooking

  Dad,

  What do you do if you feel sad in prison?

  “What is your dad like?”

  “He likes doing funny things. We’ve got this joke: sometimes he used to make us a Pizza Jellybeana if we had a bad day at school or someone was fed up. Dad loves jellybeans. But the pizza can have anything on it: stupid things like fruit or sweets. When Jack fell off his bike and bashed his nose he had the hankie in one hand pressing his cut nose and did the toppings with the other.” I smiled. “Dad says there’s nothing so bad that a Pizza Jellybeana won’t make it better.”

  “Could we make one?” Molly’s voice came out of the dark.

  I leaned up on one elbow. “Now?” I wanted to laugh.

  “Well, your dad can’t make one but we could.”

  Molly wasn’t used to a grown-up checking. She did what she wanted.

  I was sure I remembered a pizza in our freezer though, near the bottom. I started to grin. “OK then. Come on.”

&n
bsp; We found ourselves giggling at the door. “I’ll talk to Mum. You just go down.”

  Molly padded away downstairs. I crossed over to Mum’s room and eased the door open.

  Mum was sitting in bed in her red pyjamas. She had the laptop on her knees and all the usual work papers in piles around her. “Ella! Are you all right, love?”

  “I… I… Molly and me, we’re both a bit hungry.”

  Mum’s eyes went wide. “But you had a huge tea!”

  I nodded. “We’re just… hungry again. Could we go down and get a snack? We’ll be quiet.” I tried to make my face look ordinary and blank. “Maybe Molly needs to… build herself back up.”

  Mum nodded. “Some crackers or something?”

  She looked down at her laptop again. “Keep the noise down, though,” she murmured.

  “Thanks, Mum.”

  I pulled her door firmly shut and scurried away down the stairs.

  The kitchen was lit up with warm orange light from the tiled bit over the oven.

  “I put the oven on,” Molly said.

  Of course; she was used to cooking in her house.

  I found the pizza at the bottom of the freezer and pulled it out of its packaging. It felt very light and cardboardy. “Mum’s busy doing work things,” I told Molly. “What shall we put on the pizza?”

  We grinned at each other. “Everything!”

  “Raisins… half an apple… marshmallows…?”

  There are so many things you can put on a pizza.

  “Shall we do a clown face?” Molly suggested.

  “It always goes splurgy in the oven anyway,” I said. “You never know how it’s going to look.”

  We put halves of grapes for eyes with raisins pushed inside the marshmallows for hair. I raided Mrs Reynolds’ fairy cake decorations: chocolate sprinkles and jelly fruit shapes.

  “Chocolate flakes for eyebrows,” Molly giggled, breaking up a bar and fanning it out.

  “Banana mouth,” I said, carefully slicing one.

  “A whole mushroom for his nose.”

  “He looks like a pig in a wig.” I thought of Dad and how much he would laugh. I felt as if he was with me, finding all the silliest things.

  How about a peanut toffee coconut pizza?

  No, Dad!

  Molly put the pizza in the oven and we watched through the glass as the tomato started to ripple and the marshmallows rocked about.

  Molly giggled. “It’s bubbling… his eyes are exploding!”

  The whole clown face was alive, popping like lava. An eye slid off and fizzed on the baking tray.

  We poured glasses of squash and watched the face slide. Then, when the edge was going browner, Molly took the pizza out and laid it on the breadboard. We stared. Now our pizza looked like a planet with craters and strange lakes and coloured pools. The marshmallows were still bobbly and sticky when I poked them. We began to pull bits off.

  Molly screwed up her nose and took a bite. “It tastes weird. I like the raisins… not so sure about the chocolate eyebrows.”

  “Have you tried a grape?” I giggled. “Grapes with tomato and a marshmallow on top. Dee-licious!”

  We clinked our drinks together, Molly and me. It was like a birthday… our silly pizza day for Dad. “Let’s always make Pizza Jellybeana!”

  Then Mum was there in the doorway, all tousled in her pyjamas. “What are you two doing?” Her voice had a hard edge.

  I looked at the mess of decorations on the worktop: little heaps, bags lying open, sprinkles around the kettle. I leapt from my chair. “Sorry, Mum.”

  “Ella, this is—” Mum’s voice stopped. She rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes and sat down on one of the chairs. “I see what you’re doing…” Her voice sank to a whisper. “Ella…”

  “It’s all right, Mum. Please don’t be angry. We’ll clear it all up.”

  Mum’s head sank down onto her hand. She sighed. “You made a Pizza Jellybeana.” She smiled and held out her arms to hug me. “He would have loved it, Ella.”

  Chapter 27

  Lists

  Dad,

  Jack’s still playing that Sports Champ game you bought him and he said that if he gets a really high ranking he’ll be much better than you when you get home – see, he does still think about you!

  Guess what – Molly and me made Pizza Jellybeana.

  When you come home, you’ll be able to go on your mountain bike again, won’t you, and have three scoops of ice cream?

  Here’s a picture of the bike and lots of ice-cream flavours for you to choose from.

  Mum says hello.

  Love, Ella

  Some days Molly came with me to school, but other days she went to be with her mum and did extra schoolwork in the hospital with a special teacher. Molly’s clothes smelled of our washing powder now. We moved Nelson’s cage to our back garden and Jack took him all over the place, murmuring to him. We even discovered him in Jack’s bedroom and Mum was very angry and said, “Never, never does that rabbit come in your room, do you understand me, young man?”

  But I knew Mum was laughing inside because when she’d finished the telling off, she did a tiny smile at me. “He’s got to learn,” she whispered.

  One evening, I sat in Mum’s bed and I showed her the letters Dad had sent me. We talked quietly about the bad time before he got taken away.

  When Molly’s mum, Beth, had been in hospital for two weeks, we all went down to Molly’s house to collect more rabbit food and bedding. Mum said we should check the house too. Mum, Jack, Molly and me let ourselves in.

  “Right,” Mum said, wedged up against an antique sink and staring up at the strange carved wardrobe in Molly’s hall. The smell was worse: damp and mouldy, like the inside of an old shed.

  Molly went up to her bedroom to collect some more clothes she needed and Jack darted between mountains of furniture.

  “There’s just so much,” Mum said in a voice that sounded very sad and shocked. “I just can’t believe they’ve been living here. Beth can’t come back home to this. She needs space… light.”

  When Molly came down, we all weaved through to the back of the house to find the rabbit bedding and Mum stared around the wild, tall garden. Jack threw himself into the grass, saying, “I can’t find my legs. My legs have gone.”

  We went back to lock the house and Mum said very gently to Molly, “Molly love, do you think your mum really wants all these things?”

  “Not any more.” Molly shook her head. “She just wants to get better.”

  That evening, I waited until Molly was playing a computer game with Jack and helped Mum sort the washing.

  “You said Molly’s mum mustn’t come home to all this stuff in the house, that it was making her miserable.” I matched up a red and black stripy sock with its partner and made a ball. “So how will she get better then?”

  Mum sighed. “It’s great you want to help the Gardeners, Ella, really it is. Some things just have to be done slowly, that’s all. And there may be other people who can help, people at the hospital. We mustn’t be steamrollering them.”

  “But there must be something we can do now … and not be steamrollering?”

  Mum folded a towel and smoothed it flat. “Molly’s mum might have special memories about some of the furniture.” She reached for another armful of washing. “Molly’s the one we have to help. Why don’t you try talking to her about it gently?”

  So that night, when we were lying in bed, I said to Molly, “Is there anything we can do to help make your house nice for when your mum comes home again? But only if you want to…”

  “There is something.” Molly’s voice was soft in the dark. “Mum said she would like us to make a list of all the things in the house.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll ask Mum.”

  So we all went round to Molly’s again at the weekend.

  I made lists on a big sheet of paper – name of room, type of object, what it was made of and, sometimes, the measurements.
Mrs Reynolds had said she had a friend who knew about antiques and might be able to work out how much some of the things were worth.

  Some of Jack’s descriptions were really stupid, like ‘monstrous sink’ or ‘smelly fireplace’ so I ignored them. It was hard to remember which objects we had already done so I put our gold behaviour stickers on them. Then I had the idea of taking photos of all the bigger things so we could give the list to Molly’s mum with a photo. “That way she’s bound to realise some of the things are horrid and she doesn’t want them,” I whispered to Mum, when Molly had gone upstairs to her room.

  We carried some of the smaller objects like stools and small cupboards outside into the back garden so we could see the big pieces of furniture properly.

  Although Molly came back downstairs, she didn’t really help us make the lists, just wandered about staring at the things. I wondered if maybe she was trying to work out which things she and her mum could sell to antique shops. Mum and I gradually moved from the door into the middle of the room, me calling things out and Mum writing them down and then doing measuring together.

  Jack just went off exploring and calling, “This is a werewolf warehouse!”

  We found Molly crouched down, rubbing the dust and cobwebs off something. “Dad loved this,” she said quietly.

  It was a domed box the size of our microwave, made of gleaming metal.

  Jack popped out from behind the wardrobe. “What is it?”

  “It’s a cash register, isn’t it?” Mum said, bending to look. “For taking the money, in the shop? It’s lovely, Molly.”

  “Dad said it was a quality piece. It’s the actual one from his shop,” Molly said.

  Together we lifted it onto a table. It smelled oily and some dark grease streaked on my sleeve.

  The cash register was an old gold colour with a fancy curly top. The domed metal front had lots of buttons standing out. It didn’t look a bit like the ones I’d seen in shops and supermarkets.