The snow falls faster now, and I stop beside the fenced-off building site, the abandoned diggers hunched in the darkness. I look up into the navy-blue sky, and I see the snowflakes falling softly, relentlessly out of the darkness.
Beyond the whirling snowflakes, way up above Nightingale House, I think I see a bright star, silver-white, glinting above me, and then it’s gone, lost in the gathering storm.
By morning, the whole world is muffled and quiet. The new garden is carpeted with snow, the diggers draped in white. All the ugliness has gone, as if it were never there at all. Lucky is smiling hopefully, his tail beating against the floor.
It’s very early, but I pull on a hat, a hoodie, a jacket. I lace up my Converse trainers and slip out of the flat, along the corridor to the lift. Down in the lobby, everything is quiet beneath the twinkling icicle lights, and outside the estate is still and silent.
Lucky launches himself forward and almost vanishes into a snowdrift. He emerges grinning, his tail twitching. My trainers crunch into unspoilt snow as if I am the only boy alive, and I walk through the Eden Estate, catching snowflakes on my tongue.
I try to imagine the place in a year’s time. I picture kids playing on a new, revamped playground, mums chatting over their pushchairs outside the nursery, oldies calling into the Day Centre for a cup of tea and a biscuit. The garden will be bursting with colour and life, and the new Phoenix will be up and running, and better than ever. It’s hard to see the future, but snow has a way of washing the whole world clean, making anything seem possible.
Almost anything.
Seeing Cat again is going to be the hardest thing of all. I know I’ve let her down – I wasn’t there for her when she needed me. I got angry, and I backed off and walked away. I tried to forget her, but I couldn’t.
Some people are just part of your life, whether you like it or not.
There’s my mum, who messed up so badly when I was a kid she almost didn’t make it through. She did, though, and now her whole life is about helping others to survive, even when everyone else has given up on them.
There’s my dad, who didn’t really want to know me, but gave me my crooked teeth, my love of colour and countryside and risk-taking. As dads go, he’s pretty useless, but who knows, one day I might just save my money and buy me a ticket to India and surprise him. Wonder what he’d say about that?
Bad stuff happens sometimes, and there’s not a whole lot of point in looking around for someone to blame it on. Who’s to say my life would have been easier if Dad had been around? I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure. These days, I live my own life and I make my own luck, and that’s something I think he’d understand. Besides, if Dad hadn’t been so hopeless, I might never have found people like Finn and Jake. Even – don’t laugh – Dodgy Dave and Mr Brown. There are plenty of people out there who care, or try to, if you just give them a chance.
Lucky – well, Lucky is my best friend. His lopsided grin, his pirate patch, his murky past … I didn’t rescue him, he rescued me.
As for Cat, well, I realized a while ago that trust is something you either have or you don’t have, no matter what. OK, so she lied to me. So what? I knew everything I needed to know about her anyway. I knew that she was messed-up and lost and lovely, and that all she ever wanted to do was to make the world a better place. She wanted to be loved too, and that’s where I let her down.
I walked away from her, and nothing has been worth anything since then, nothing at all. I’m hoping it’s not too late to tell her that.
I’ve left the Eden Estate behind me, and I’m cold now, my feet soaked and frozen as I trudge along the snow-caked pavements. The trees in Cat’s road are bare, their branches bowed with snow, and when we get to her house I can see that it’s still too early to call on her, way too early. The curtains are closed, the house still and silent.
I push the gate open softly, creating a mini-snowdrift. What if she doesn’t want to see me? Four weeks have gone by since she wrote me that letter, and a lot can change in four weeks.
I don’t know what I’d say to her, anyway – words have never been my strong point. When I don’t know what to say, I say nothing at all. Lucky blinks up at me, tail wagging. I root through my rucksack and my fingers close round a can of paint, a half-used can of red. I take it out, shake it, and start to work.
I’ve never painted on snow before, but it can’t be vandalism because the snow will be gone in a few days’ time. That’s what I reckon, anyhow. The red paint bleeds softly on to the crisp, white snow and pretty soon I step back and there is a giant heart curving across the snow-covered lawn beneath Cat’s bedroom window. I tag a little mouse-face and a cheeky cat-face underneath it, then I whistle Lucky softly and we walk away, leaving two sets of perfect tracks in the snow.
Later on, I’m sitting on the corrugated roof of the bus stop along the road, eating a Mars bar, legs dangling. Lucky is tucked inside my jacket, a long-suffering expression on his face. My bum has frostbite and my legs are like blocks of ice, but I can’t give up, I can’t go home. Not yet.
An old lady comes along, looks up and bashes my feet with her walking stick. ‘Bloomin’ hooligan,’ she says crossly.
A girl appears in the distance, a cool, cute, skinny girl with coffee-coloured skin, walking fast, slipping and sliding in the snow. She’s wearing a little parka jacket with fur round the hood, corkscrew curls of golden-brown hair flying out around her face. Under the parka, I see what looks like a Hello Kitty nightdress over black leggings, and on her feet are red fluffy funfur slippers, which may explain why she’s slithering around so much.
Lucky wriggles out from my jacket, tail wagging, his face one huge grin that stretches from ear to ear.
‘Hey,’ says the girl. She looks up at me with slanting green eyes that are wet with tears, starred with snowflakes.
‘Hey,’ I grin. ‘What took you so long?’
Thanks …
Thanks, as ever, to Liam, Calum and Caitlin for keeping me sane and putting up with me – also to Mum, Dad, Joan, Andy, Lori and all my fab family for endless love and support. Thanks to my lovely friends, Sheena, Helen, Fiona, Mary-Jane, Zarah and co. for the pep talks, hugs and chocolate, and to my cheerleading fellow writers, Catriona, Meg and Lisa. Also to Paul for the web support, Martyn for doing the adding-up bits, and John for driving the Dizzy-mobile!
Big thanks to Magi for being a fab first reader and offering lots of great insight, and to my editor, Rebecca, for carefully unearthing the story I’d planned to write all along! Thanks too to Amanda, Adele, Francesca, Kirsten, Emily, Ali, Jodie, Katya, Sara, Sarah, Jennie and the whole team at Puffin HQ for being so brilliant, and to best-ever agent Darley and his angels Julia, Lucie, Zoe, Emma and all at the agency.
The last thank you goes to my readers, whose emails, letters and pictures make all the hard work worthwhile. To know that you love the stories as much as I do means everything to me – you’re the best!
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Lucky Star Page 16
