Lucky Star

by Cathy Cassidy

  ‘I do too,’ I say. ‘Your dad sounds cool.’

  ‘He’s OK,’ Cat says, uncertainly. ‘I suppose. He works too hard. He never has time for me.’

  I hold up my hand in the darkened room, spread the fingers wide. Skin, bone, blood … or stardust? How could there not be magic and hope and miracles in the world, if all of us were made of stars? Cat must have it wrong. There’s no magic around here, that’s for sure.

  But when she catches my hand in the darkness, holding it tight, I’m not so sure. ‘Do you ever wish you could go back in time?’ she asks me. ‘Turn the clock back to when things really were perfect? When you were a kid, y’know, and happy?’

  I frown, because the closest I’ve ever been to perfect is here and now, holding hands with a green-eyed girl who thinks I’m made from stardust. ‘The past wasn’t such a great place, for me,’ I remind her.

  ‘I guess not,’ she says. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go back, though? Do things differently?’

  I can tell from the longing in her voice that Cat would, but I also know that there’s no going back, no matter what. I shrug. ‘Things would still have happened the same way,’ I tell her.

  ‘Do you think so?’ she asks. ‘I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t mind trying to make things different.’

  She makes a snuffling sound in the dark. ‘You OK?’ I ask.

  ‘Hay fever,’ she says, but I don’t think you can get hay fever in October. She’s crying. Maybe the past wasn’t such a great place for Cat, either.

  I find a box of tissues and hand her some, watch as she wipes her eyes. ‘Want to talk about it?’ I ask.

  ‘Nope,’ she says. ‘Everyone has their dark secrets, don’t they?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But … well, talking about it can help, y’know.’

  ‘Talk then,’ Cat says in a muffled voice. ‘Tell me about what happened after your dad went away. Did you stay in touch with the people you met, that summer?’

  ‘I tried,’ I say. ‘When Dad went to India, everything changed. I ended up in London, with the foster-parents I told you about, Jan and Paul. I wasn’t much good at letters. I couldn’t read or write at all back then – I was learning, at school, but it was tough. I’d get Jan and Paul to write for me, or send pictures I’d drawn maybe. Dad never answered. Not ever.’

  Cat bites her lip.

  ‘I got letters back from one friend, for a while,’ I go on. ‘Dizzy – she was like a big sister to me, even though we weren’t related. Her mum was Dad’s girlfriend – the one he took off to India with. She rang a few times, and I’d write to her and send her pictures for this other guy, Finn, and biscuits for the dog, Leggit.’

  ‘How come you lost touch?’ Cat asks. Her voice seems clearer now, softer, as if getting wrapped up in my past has chased her sadness away.

  ‘It was when I went to live with Mum again,’ I say. ‘We moved here – I had to change schools and there was nobody to help me with my writing any more. I stopped trying.’

  Cat frowns. ‘But why couldn’t your mum . .?’

  I sigh. ‘She can’t write, Cat. Not at all.’ In the thin dawn light, her face is serious, shocked, struggling to understand. How could she? I bet her mum went to university and everything.

  I get up, pad across the scratchy nylon carpet to my bedroom, reappearing with a shoebox and a duvet. I flop down again, wrap the duvet round myself. ‘These are the letters,’ I tell Cat, taking the lid off the shoebox. ‘Four of them. I kept them all.’

  ‘Your friend didn’t keep on writing, after you stopped?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I shrug. ‘If she did, nobody ever passed the letters on. She never had this address, and Jan and Paul – well, they thought all of those people from my past were bad news.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They had their reasons. They were wrong about Dizzy and Finn, though.’

  ‘You could get in touch now,’ Cat suggests.

  ‘No. I’ve left it too late – I wouldn’t know what to say.’

  I reach for the shoebox, lift out a letter from the mess of seashells, friendship bracelets, crystals and festival tickets from long ago. I scan through the childish, curly handwriting. It says that Leggit is going to dog-training classes and Finn sends his love, and have I heard anything yet from India, because Dizzy hasn’t, but we’re bound to soon, don’t worry. Oh, and thanks for the Mars bar.

  Across the room, Cat huddles in her sleeping bag. She holds out her hand and I pass the letter over for her to read. Outside, on the balcony, sunrise streaks the sky behind Skylark Rise with shades of pink and peach and purple. I curl up, eyes closed, and fall into sleep.

  I wake up to swirling, New Age music and the smell of cooked breakfast. Mum is in the kitchen, singing along to a CD player, clanking pans and sipping coffee. On the other side of the room, Cat groans and burrows down into her sleeping bag, pursued by Lucky.

  ‘Sleep OK?’ Mum asks from the open doorway. She doesn’t seem to notice that Cat and I went to bed at half ten last night in separate rooms, then woke up fully dressed in the living room. Well, I guess she notices, but just doesn’t mind. I clear away the shoebox and the duvet, then wash and pull a comb through my hair. It doesn’t make much difference – I still look like I slept in a hedge.

  ‘Breakfast’s ready!’

  Mum and Cat are tucking into toast, scrambled eggs, baked beans and mushrooms, grinning together. Cat looks bright-eyed and wide awake, like she just spent the night in a five star hotel instead of curled up in a sleeping bag on a nylon carpet. ‘This is good,’ she says. ‘Thanks, Magi!’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Mum replies. ‘How did it go, anyway? The art project?’

  Cat just about chokes on her toast. I shrug. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘You can see for yourself, later.’

  ‘He thinks he’s some kind of modern-day Van Gogh,’ Mum tells Cat. ‘Only with both ears intact, of course.’

  Cat swallows a forkful of scrambled eggs, wide-eyed. This is probably not the kind of conversation she’d have with her mum, a strict but successful lawyer. The first whiff of rebellion and she’d be grounded for the rest of her life. Longer, maybe. Me and Mum have a different kind of relationship, more like friends than mother and son, or maybe just like two people who have come through a lot of bad stuff together and managed to survive.

  Later, as I walk Cat back across the estate, Lucky trotting beside us on his washing-line lead, I see Mrs S., Scully’s gran. She is on her knees in the ashes where the Phoenix used to be, digging away with a spoon. ‘Mrs S., what are you doing?’ I ask, dropping down beside her.

  Her wrinkled face breaks into a smile. ‘Well, I saw what your mother had done, planting those flowers,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d do the same. I got some lovely winter pansies from the supermarket!’

  ‘Cool,’ I tell her. ‘You could do with a trowel, though, to plant them.’ I take the spoon and scrape away at the ash and soil until a couple of little holes appear, and Mrs S. lifts her plants into place and presses the soil down round them. She takes a plastic bottle of water from her shopping bag and soaks the flowers, then packs the bottle, the spoon and the empty plastic pot away inside her bag. I help her to her feet.

  ‘I’m not the only one, either,’ she says, and I look again. Half a dozen new plants are sticking up through the rubble since yesterday. I can’t help smiling. In a small way, the locals are fighting back.

  ‘It’s a great idea,’ Cat tells her. ‘Magi’s gonna love it!’

  ‘Some of that dreadful graffiti art has sprung up overnight too,’ she tells us. ‘I don’t approve of it, mind, but it shows people are angry about the blaze. Tell your mum that – people care.’

  She takes a long look at Lucky, who gives her a winning smile. ‘He really does look like my Frankie’s dog,’ she says. ‘But now that I see him in daylight, it’s very clear he’s yours. That’s a good thing, Mouse, what with my Frankie being away for a while. Look after him.’

  I swallow. ‘I will, Mrs S.,’ I tell her. �
��Promise.’

  Mrs S. turns back towards Nightingale House, then stops and looks back over her shoulder. ‘Frankie’s not really a bad boy,’ she says. ‘Tell your mum that, Mouse. He just got in with the wrong people, lost his way.’

  ‘Of course,’ I tell her.

  I wish I could believe it.

  The doorbell rings, and when I open the door there’s a girl in a black net tutu and fluffy black fairy wings standing on the doorstep. Her face is painted white, and she has black lipstick and smudged eyeliner, like an emo panda. Her corkscrew curls are piled up on her head, tied with black velvet ribbon, and she’s wearing a kid’s hairband with a spangly bat at the front.

  ‘Wow!’ I say.

  The black fairy looks cross. ‘You’re supposed to scream,’ she tells me. ‘Or shudder, or faint. You don’t just say “wow”.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I grin. ‘You walked across the Eden Estate looking like that?’

  ‘I flew,’ she says, tugging at the black fairy wings. ‘Look, I haven’t got all night. Trick or treat?’

  ‘We don’t usually get people coming round,’ I apologize. ‘No treats. Sorry.’

  ‘Nothing?’ she says, crestfallen. ‘No sweets, no monkey nuts, no fruit?’

  ‘There’s half a tin of beans in the fridge,’ I say.

  ‘You’re too good to me, Mouse.’

  Cat pushes me into the flat, right up against the coatrack. Then she kisses me, and her lips taste of sugar and facepaint. ‘Who is it?’ Mum calls through from the living room, and we pull apart.

  ‘You did have a treat, after all,’ Cat says with a sly grin.

  ‘It’s just Cat, Mum,’ I shout. ‘I’ll bring her through!’

  ‘Your lipstick’s smudged,’ Cat says carelessly, and I glance in the hall mirror just in time to wipe away the smears of black and white imprinted on my mouth.

  ‘Happy Hallowe’en!’ she says, giving Mum a couple of penny chews from her black plastic cauldron. ‘Can Mouse come trick-or-treating? We won’t be late.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Mum says. ‘Not around the estate, though – it’s not safe. And don’t be too late …’

  ‘We won’t,’ Cat says, producing a pair of devil horns and a pointy tail from her cauldron. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be prepared, so I brought these. OK?’ I slide the horns on over my fringe and tuck the tail into the back of my drainpipes. ‘I didn’t forget you,’ she tells Lucky, fixing a length of black tinsel round his collar. ‘There – perfect!’

  ‘So,’ Cat wants to know as we wait for the lift. ‘Was it you then? The spray paint?’

  ‘What spray paint?’ I ask.

  Then the lift arrives, the door wheezes open and I see that someone has painted the whole of the inside a soaring turquoise blue. It’s like stepping inside your own, private piece of sky. ‘Cool,’ I say.

  ‘Not you then,’ Cat says. ‘I guess someone was fed up with the swear word graffiti and the curry sauce stains. Thought you said people around here just don’t care?’

  ‘They don’t,’ I say. ‘Not usually. This is a first.’

  Cat raises an eyebrow. ‘It’s a good sign,’ she tells me. ‘People are trying to change things.’

  We mooch past the Phoenix, where yet more bright flowers and climbers twine amongst the ruins. We get a few shouted insults from the kids down by the playground. Cat just laughs and chucks them a load of penny chews, and they look at us like we’re crazy. Outside the estate, things are just as strange. Cat doesn’t want to call from house to house, collecting sweets. Instead, she stops gangs of small children dressed up as witches and goblins, handing them sweets and biscuits printed with spiders’ webs.

  ‘Why are you giving us sweets?’ one small vampire demands.

  ‘I want to,’ Cat says. ‘It’s fun. Tell me a joke or something, OK?’

  ‘Why didn’t the skeleton go to the Hallowe’en disco?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Cat says.

  ‘Cos he had no body to dance with. D’you get it? No body?’

  ‘Cool,’ Cat says, and hands him a jelly snake.

  ‘I think you’ve got the rules of Hallowe’en a little bit muddled,’ I say.

  ‘So what?’ Cat grins. ‘I like my rules better.’

  ‘I like your rules better too,’ I admit, as another small knot of ghouls heads off into the night. ‘You’re good with kids.’

  ‘I used to be,’ Cat says. ‘Once. Look, I’m all out of sweets now. We’ll go back to mine.’

  We turn into her road, Lucky straining at his washing-line lead, trailing tinsel. ‘School on Monday,’ Cat says. ‘Can you believe it? How come we get eight weeks of school for every week of holiday? That doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘Kind of unbalanced,’ I agree.

  ‘Shall we skive off, go up to town again?’

  ‘Cat, no way,’ I tell her. ‘You know I have to be on my best behaviour after the exclusion. I promised Mum, and Dodgy Dave.’

  ‘D’you always do what Dave tells you?’ she asks.

  I laugh. ‘Hardly ever,’ I admit. ‘But he’s OK, for a social worker – I don’t want to let him down.’

  We stop on the pavement outside her gate. ‘Let’s go in, anyhow,’ she says. ‘You have to get your treat, I’ve got it all planned …’

  ‘If I see another sweet I think my teeth might melt,’ I confess.

  ‘Who said it was sweets? Mum and Dad are out, and it’s a cool, clear night …’

  A cool, clear night? I’m not sure why this matters, unless it means we have to huddle together for warmth or something. The idea of that has me feeling hot all over, then breaking out in a cold sweat.

  Cat leads me along the path and into the hallway that still smells of coffee and spices, but this time we don’t head for the kitchen. She drags me upstairs. ‘Is this a good idea?’ I ask, as she steers me along the landing and up a second flight of stairs. ‘I can’t stay too late …’

  We’re on the second storey now, creeping along a little landing under slanting eaves, past attic rooms. ‘Relax!’ she tells me. ‘We won’t be late, anyhow. My parents’ll be back at eleven, and you have to be out of here by then or I’m dead meat …’

  She pushes open a pine door and shoves me into the room, with Lucky at my heels. It’s dark inside and Cat doesn’t switch on the light, but my eyes adjust and I can see from the light on the landing that this is not a bedroom. It’s a study, built into the roof of the house beneath glossy Velux windows that face the sky. Right in the centre of the room is a telescope, a proper telescope, on a stand, like you’d see at a museum or something. It’s pointing up at the windows, towards the night sky.

  ‘Oh, man,’ I whisper. ‘How cool?’

  ‘Thought you’d like it,’ she smirks. ‘It’s Dad’s. You can have a look, if you like. On a cool, clear night you can usually see the stars. I wanted to show you that they really are there, even if you can’t see them without a telescope.’

  I take a step forward, unfasten the lens cap. I blink and swivel the telescope slightly, then gasp as the sky comes into focus. The orange haze has gone, and in its place is a blanket of darkness pierced here and there by tiny, glittering diamonds. Cat was right. Above us is a perfect sky, filled with stars. ‘Well?’ she wants to know, tugging at my elbow. ‘What d’you think? Trick or treat?’

  I grin. ‘Treat,’ I tell her. ‘Most definitely, treat.’

  Cat brings up mugs of hot chocolate and a slice of French cheese for Lucky, and we sit on the floor looking up at the attic windows, looking past the orange haze to the velvet sky beyond. ‘It’s like one of those magic-eye pictures,’ Cat tells me. ‘Once you know what to look for, you can see it.’

  ‘Your dad must know loads about the stars,’ I say. ‘Is that what he does? Is he a scientist or something?’

  ‘No, no, this is just his hobby,’ she says, vaguely. ‘He knows lots about it, though. The names of the constellations and all that. He used to show me, when I was younger.’

  ‘Not now?’


  Cat shrugs. ‘He’s too busy, these days.’ She gets up and switches on the light, and suddenly the windows to the sky are just two dull rectangles of glass in the slanting ceiling. The telescope looks smaller under the electric light, a spindly thing stranded in the middle of the carpet. The walls are covered with maps and charts, patterns of stars and lines and scribbles.

  ‘What are these?’ I ask Cat.

  ‘Star maps,’ she tells me. ‘They show you how to find the constellations. It’s just like with an ordinary map – it shows you where you are in the sky. The one you’re looking at is for the constellation of Orion the Hunter – these three stars make up his belt. That’s his sword, and that’s his shield …’

  I frown. ‘I can’t see it,’ I admit. ‘Looks like someone’s been scribbling over a dot-to-dot book without following the numbers.’

  ‘I know … but that’s what those stars looked like to the first astronomers, thousands of years ago. This shape here is Orion’s companion, the Great Dog …’ Cat points to a chart of dots and lines that looks like a jerky sketch of a lopsided dog.

  ‘Hear that, Lucky?’ I grin. ‘You’ve got your own constellation!’

  ‘And a star,’ Cat says. ‘Sirius – the Dog Star.’

  Lucky’s tail beats against the carpet, like he knew this all along. I sit down, leaning back against the desk. ‘A star map, to help you find your way around the night skies,’ I say. ‘Wish I’d known that when I was sticking up those stars at home the other day.’

  Cat rolls her eyes. ‘What, are you gonna peel them all off again and arrange them like this?’ she scoffs, nodding at the charts. ‘I didn’t have you down as someone who followed the rules, Mouse. Why don’t you make your own stories up?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I say.

  ‘That’s what I do,’ Cat says. ‘I have my own theories about the sky, my own version of a star map. Ever see that Disney film, The Lion King?’

  I nod. I remember seeing it on video, not long after I moved in with Jan and Paul. All that stuff about fathers and sons really upset me, coming just after Dad took off for India.