I used to tell Zac we were like gypsies always travelling to exciting places but I stopped saying it because it didn’t make moving exciting. It made it worse. But that night I pretended there was a horse sleeping outside and an old-fashioned caravan with flowers painted on it and in the morning we’d go on an adventure. We’d go down a long road with grass on both sides and trees blowing in the wind and there’d be hills in the distance and me and Zac would be holding the reins and singing. And then I realised I didn’t know if horses sleep standing up or lying down and I was trying to work it out and I think that’s when I fell asleep.
At first I thought I was having a nightmare. I was bumping all the way down the stairs. The banging was really loud and I was trying to count the steps and thinking it’s going to really hurt when I get to the bottom. But when I woke up I could still hear banging. Zac was holding on to me really tight and digging his fingers into my arm. His eyes were squeezed shut.
“Ghosts!” he whispered.
But I knew it wasn’t ghosts. I could hear the wind howling outside. I jumped out of bed and ran to the window. It was the middle of the night and a storm was crashing through the garden. It was pulling up bushes and ripping pieces of wood off the shed and throwing them into the air. The tree was rocking from side to side and all the time the wind was wailing. It was like when a kid has the worst tantrum ever and you know you won’t be able to calm them down. You just have to wait for it to be over and hope they don’t break too much.
“Zac!” I called. “Look!”
Zac got to the window just as the tree blew over. It was amazing! The wind was pushing it so hard it went diagonal and then suddenly it couldn’t get up again and it crashed to the ground. As it fell it howled like it was a dying animal and its roots came up and they were being blown by the wind so it looked like it was still alive. Like an antelope being eaten by lions. Only it wasn’t alive. It was dead.
At first me and Zac could hardly breathe. Then we started laughing like we were on a ride at the fair. We felt sick but it was brilliant. We could hear people running around downstairs but we didn’t go down. We just sat on my bed and listened to the storm and I crossed my fingers and hoped the house wouldn’t blow over.
Seeing the tree blow down was one of the best things I ever saw. I know it shouldn’t be but it was.
The storm was gone by the next morning. I don’t know if it went somewhere else but it wasn’t in London. We couldn’t wait to see what had happened. All the Skilly kids ran out into the street. We didn’t even have breakfast. Another tree had blown down right across the road and landed on a car. There was a dent in the roof and the windscreen was smashed into tiny pieces. I don’t think you could ever fix it.
Bins were blown over too and rubbish had gone everywhere. There was a banana skin stuck in the branches of the tree and some plastic bottles and lots of wrappers. An old man wearing a dressing gown was sweeping glass off his path and two women were trying to get a bike off some railings. It was twisted on so it looked like a cartoon and there was a crisp packet stuck in the wheel. The women were half laughing and half annoyed. Because even though the storm was amazing the bike was ruined.
Silas’s rosebush had completely disappeared. Even the string was gone. It probably went miles. It might even have landed in someone else’s garden and in summer people would wonder where the red roses came from because maybe they only planted white. Silas wasn’t annoyed though. He was laughing.
“I didn’t think it was going to be this windy,” he said. “Go down in history, it will.”
And it really will because it was the biggest storm for three hundred years. That means even before Skilly was built and when women wore long dresses and couldn’t vote or go to school. And there were no cars or TV and there was no electricity and people played the piano in the dark and the whole family would sing along. Me and Zac might be in history books too because we saw what happened.
On the news it showed what else the storm had done. There was a house with its roof blown right off. You could see into the bedroom. You could even see what kind of wallpaper the people had and what books they were reading.
The wind blew lorries over too. It just picked them up and threw them on to their sides and they were lying across the motorway like elephants that poachers had killed to take the tusks. And the wind threw caravans into the sea so all the pots and pans were floating around.
We Skilly kids were really excited. We already knew everything could be turned upside down at any moment and now everyone else could see it too. We ran into the back garden and climbed on to the tree and just kept staring at it because we couldn’t believe it was lying on the ground when it used to be up in the sky. We kept running along the trunk and jumping off the roots and we did it over and over and every time felt just as amazing as the first time.
Silas cut the branches off the tree and we gathered them up and put them in a pile with the wood from the shed. And as the leaves and twigs crunched under my feet I had to stop and take a deep breath because I realised I was happy and I was so surprised.
“We’ll have a great fire with this lot,” Silas said.
And we did. On Bonfire Night we stood in the garden and ate hot potatoes and watched the flames flickering in the big hole where the tree used to be.
The tree’s been lying in the garden ever since. Silas cut steps into it so the little kids can get on to the top. The bark’s crumbling and covered in moss and kids have written their names on it. I scratched Ira and Zac were here 16:10:87 into one of the steps because we saw the tree fall and that makes us part of its history and also because it was our first whole day at Skilly. The kids here call the tree the ship or the raft, and we run along the top of it or hide behind it and ambush each other. And when the garden’s quiet I lean against it and draw, or just shut my eyes and listen because when no one’s outside the garden sort of hums.
It’s nearly a year and a half since me and Zac came to Skilly. All the kids who were here when we first came have gone apart from the boy who flicked mash at me. The others have been fostered or adopted or gone home and new kids have come instead, but Jimmy’s still here. He goes away, then he comes back, then he goes away again. Nothing works out for him. Maybe it’s because he’s so tall. Maybe it’s even worse than having curly hair like me and Zac. But I don’t think so. I think it’s because he’s angry. Even when he’s happy he’s angry. Even when he’s laughing and telling jokes you can tell he’s a little bit angry underneath.
I never know what he’s going to do next and he makes me nervous but he’s still one of my favourites because he’s full of life. He doesn’t like life very much but it bursts out of him anyway. He can’t help it. It’s like he’s got bouncy shoes.
He does little skips and jumps when he walks and if his favourite song comes on the radio he dances. He knows all the words and moves. He looks like a pop star. Sometimes Hortense joins in too. She can’t help it either and then they’re both dancing and laughing. That’s the thing about Jimmy. Even though he’s angry he makes people happy.
But apart from Jimmy, me and Zac have been here longest. Hortense says that means we’re old hands. We’re supposed to show new kids what to do but usually they don’t want anything to do with us. Being old hands isn’t something to be proud of. It’s something to be ashamed of.
When new kids come to Skilly they’re either loud and angry, or secretive and quiet. The angry kids tell everyone about their lives, what their families are like and where they’ve come from. They say they’re not staying and they try to fight other kids because they don’t want to fit in. They tell lies too. One kid said his mum was a millionaire and another said her dad was a TV chef. But I’m sure they were lying because rich kids like that don’t go into care. Someone always wants them.
The quiet kids are the opposite. They don’t say anything. They keep their secrets to themselves so no one can take them away. Really they want to be invisible. Usually the angry kids have to fight each oth
er because the quiet kids don’t want to.
People probably think me and Zac are the secretive kind but we’re not really. It’s just that we don’t have anything to tell. We don’t have parents and there’s nothing to show we ever did have parents. We’ve got a Memory Book full of photos and birthday cards but everything in the book comes from being in care.
Except one photo.
There’s one photo of us that was taken somewhere else. If you look at it quickly it looks like a photo of a dog – a big black hairy dog jumping towards the camera, his tongue poking over his lips. The dog takes up nearly all the picture and when people see it for the first time they say, “Oh look, a photo of a dog.”
But if you look closely you can see the dog’s jumping out of an armchair and me and Zac are sitting on each side. We’re almost squashed out of the picture but not quite. Zac’s a baby and he’s propped up with a cushion and he looks surprised, and I’m on the other side, a bit blurred as if I jumped when the dog jumped. I’m nearly two years old. We know it’s us because the photo has Miracle and Zachery, July 1980 written on the back in someone’s writing. I don’t know whose and I don’t know where the chair was and I don’t know who the dog was. And that’s it. It’s hard to get any information from a picture like that. I sometimes wonder what happened to the dog but I expect it’s dead by now.
And apart from that photo there’s nothing to show we ever had a family. Except we look the same – two curly-haired kids. Same but different.
Anita says we had a mum once but she couldn’t look after us any more. It’s what people say to care kids. It doesn’t really mean anything. It’s like saying it’s cold outside when really it could be stormy or wet or snowy or icy and you haven’t got a window so you can’t check. All you know is you’d better put your coat on.
I said, “Can’t she come to visit?” but Anita said, “We don’t know where she is.”
Then she looked so sad I wished I hadn’t asked. She looked like she’d come for a party and arrived on the wrong day.
I don’t think me and Zac will ever get a family. This is why, in no particular order:
We’re not little any more.
Every time someone doesn’t want us it shows a little bit.
We want to stay together.
Anita keeps trying to find us a family. She doesn’t give up. When we came to Skilly she advertised us in the paper next to the holiday cottages so people would see us if they were looking for somewhere nice to stay. They might even think of us if there was a spare room, so as not to waste it. A photographer hung a sheet in the hall and Hortense threw a ball in the air and me and Zac sat in front of the sheet and looked at the ball and smiled. We’ve got the photo in our Memory Book and we saw the advert in the paper. It said:
“Sister and brother aged nine and seven need a family. Ira loves reading and drawing, Zac loves being outdoors and takes a while to settle.”
But the trouble with photos is people can see what you look like. There’s nothing you can do about it. I think people would like us better if they got to know us first instead of looking at a photo. We tried to look sweet but nobody came. I curled my fingers into my palm to hide my chewed nails but nobody came.
And now I’m ten and a half and Zac’s nine and Anita said as we get older it’ll be harder to find us a family. I said, “Well, no one wanted us anyway.” But she said maybe the right people don’t know about us yet. But I think there are too many people for the right ones to find us. There are millions of people just in London so the chances of finding the right two must be really tiny. By the time they find us we will be grown up and it’ll be too late. And that would be even worse than not finding us at all.
I try not to think about my dream home too much because it makes me sad but I’m going to write it down just this one time. Because writing things down makes them real and things don’t happen if they’re not real. You have to tell someone, even if it’s just a diary.
My dream home will have a front door just for me and Zac and our mum and dad, and a key we hang in the hall. There’ll be wallpaper and flowers and not too many rooms. There’ll be stairs that don’t creak and I’ll have my own bedroom with a desk and drawers for my art materials. There’ll be a goal in the garden for Zac and at the end of the road there’ll be a sweetshop with old-fashioned jars and flying saucers and sherbet lemons.
I haven’t imagined my mum and dad but if they’re not beautiful or handsome or clever or rich it won’t matter as long as they’re nice.
Skilly’s nothing like my dream home but it’s OK. Even though me and Zac share a room it’s OK. Zac put up his Arsenal poster because that’s his favourite team. He knows the names of all the players. I put up my Matilda poster because Matilda’s my favourite book. It’s about a girl who’s got horrible parents but it doesn’t matter because she can make things happen just by thinking. I’ve tried to do that myself, thinking really hard, but it doesn’t work. It feels like it should but it doesn’t. My poster’s a drawing of Matilda thinking really hard but you can’t tell what she’s thinking and you can’t see what she’s changing. Sometimes I imagine she’s thinking about me and Zac and she’s going to make our life much, much better.
But the problem with the posters is that Zac’s Arsenal poster is above his bed so I have to look at it, and my Matilda poster’s above my bed so Zac has to look at it. We tried it the other way round but it didn’t feel right – it’s one of those problems people don’t realise if they don’t share a room.
But the very best thing about our room is the only thing above it is the sky. When I wake up in the morning I think about the birds flying over me and when Zac can’t sleep I tell him there’s an owl sitting on the roof and the owl knows all the secrets of the world. And that makes him feel safe.
My favourite hobby is drawing. I draw flowers and nature and people and sometimes I do sketches called caricatures. I started doing caricatures when I was trying to draw Zac and I couldn’t get him right so I gave him a long nose and he looked really funny. I like drawing people this way – the way I see them instead of the way they actually are.
I’ve done lots of pictures of Skilly kids. I’ve drawn the boy with the knobbly knees who stayed for a week, and the kid who gelled his hair into a spike, and the girl with rings in her nose. I’ve drawn the short kids, the fat kids, the tall ones and the thin ones. Sometimes I put them in a line with the really tall ones next to the really small ones and sometimes I make up kids who’ve never been here.
I’ve also drawn Silas with his hair tangled like a lion and Hortense with wings because she’s like an angel and Mrs Clanks as a skeleton. I’ve drawn Zac riding a dinosaur and as a pirate and as a strongman at the circus. I’ve even drawn him as a bouncy ball, because that’s what he’s like. He always bounces back.
The only people I don’t draw are the children who lived here before us. I try not to think about them because they must be old now or dead. If I see reminders like scribbles on the wall I think about something else.
But there’s one girl I can’t help thinking about. She scratched her name into our windowsill so every time I look at the garden I think of her. It says “Glenda Hyacinth, 1947”, which is forty-two years ago. She must have stood at the window too and that means she lived in our room and she’s probably dead now and that makes her a ghost. And then I remember that I scratched me and Zac into the fallen tree and we’ll be ghosts one day too. And that makes me feel horrible.
But mostly Skilly’s OK. And when I feel sorry for myself I talk to Silas. He tells me one day things will be different.
Silas is the best person ever. He’s not like a grown-up. He doesn’t mind mess, he doesn’t get angry and he can fix things. He always smells of fresh air. It’s like he’s got the outdoors wrapped round him. If someone made that smell into perfume they’d be rich. It could go in a little green bottle with a daisy lid. Everyone would want to buy some.
Silas is full of life like Jimmy but he doesn’t have b
ouncy shoes. Life comes out of him in a different way, like leaves in a breeze. He’s never still for one minute. He can’t help it. Sometimes he has tea with us in the kitchen and even though he’s sitting at the table he’s rocking and his fingers are moving and his face is smiling and laughing and frowning all at the same time. It’s because his head’s full of memories.
He’s been all over the world and done loads of things. We get him to tell us his stories over and over again. Sometimes he says, “Haven’t I told you that already?” but we always say “No,” because Skilly kids want to know his stories off by heart so we can pretend we were there ourselves.
When he was younger he lived in Australia. He rode horses and looked after cattle. It’s called being a rancher. If you could dig a hole right down through the pavement and keep digging you’d end up in his ranch. Only there’s fire in the middle of the world so you can’t go through. You have to go round. When it’s daytime in Australia it’s night here so when everyone in London was sleeping Silas was riding his horse and when everyone in London was having breakfast he was looking at the stars. It sounds confusing but it isn’t because the sun tells you when it’s time to get up or go to bed.
He’s been in the rainforest too. He says if you stand really still and listen you can hear insects running over the leaves and little drops of water falling. He’s also been to India and he’s seen cows sit in the middle of the road and not move even though cars are hooting at them and there’s a traffic jam. The cows even go to sleep there. They don’t mind. And he’s seen spices so bright they made his eyes hurt.
One time he was camping in a forest and when he woke up there was a python in his sleeping bag. Pythons can swallow a crocodile whole so it could easily have eaten Silas. He had to lie really still until the snake woke up and slithered out. He lay there all day, just keeping calm and hoping the python wasn’t hungry. You have to be very brave not to move if a python’s in your bed. Me and Zac tried pretending and we couldn’t do it. And that’s without a real python. If me and Zac had been there we’d have been eaten.
Little Bits of Sky Page 2
