Louisa the Ballerina

by Adele Geras

  A dragon made from a green sock

  A frog made of brown velvet

  A knitted person called Stripy, because her body is knitted in red and blue stripes

  A teddy bear called Mr Snuggly

  A purple felt hippo called Horace

  It’s very hard to think of a story they can all be in together, and I haven’t had time to concentrate on it, because of being so busy, and because every time we have a spare moment, we seem to be walking the dogs. We only do it for twenty minutes each morning and for half an hour every afternoon. In the morning, we have three dogs (Tilly, Jess, and Pug) but only Tilly comes out with us in the afternoon. Yesterday Weezer said as we trudged around the pavements, “I never thought it would be as boring as this.”

  “What did you think would happen?” I said.

  “I don’t know . . . I thought perhaps the dogs would lead us into exciting adventures, or be naughty, or chase cats, or growl at little children. I just thought they’d do something interesting.”

  “Me too,” I said, but the dogs were as well behaved as could be, and trotted along quietly with Weezer and me hanging on tight to their leads, because, as Weezer put it, “We don’t want them to run away. We’d never get our money if we lost the dogs.”

  We had also spent ages getting the Bring and Buy Sale ready.

  “It’s hard work, isn’t it?” said Weezer. “Collecting all that stuff together. I thought it would be easy.”

  We had gone from house to house with a big black dustbin bag to hold all the jumble. Most people we spoke to hardly gave us anything.

  “The NSPCC were collecting last week,” someone said. “We gave them everything we had.”

  Other people said, “Well, I don’t know if this will be of any use to you,” and then they’d give us a lamp that didn’t work, or some children’s books with half the pages scribbled over in crayon, or jigsaw puzzles with some bits missing. Only Mrs Posnansky gave us anything pretty at all.

  We had spread everything out on the carpet when we got home. Weezer said, “It all looks horrible. No one will want to buy this stuff. We’re never going to get enough money. I think we should put in some of our own things as well.”

  “What things?” I said. “I don’t want to sell my belongings.”

  “There must be something you don’t want. Just have a look in your drawers. I’ll go over and ask Tony too, and Mum might have some bits in the kitchen.”

  She went off to see them, and I was left alone to clean up the jumble we had managed to collect.

  At about quarter to six last night, Weezer and I stood at the window of our front room and waited for the crowds to arrive. Brad was tiptoeing through the jumble, which was all neatly laid out on the dining-room table. He gave some ornaments a sniff, and was just starting to curl up for a nap on somebody’s knitted tea-cosy when Weezer spotted him, and lifted him down to the floor.

  “Sorry, Brad,” she said. “You can’t stay on the table. Someone might want to buy you to be their cat.” Even Brad never argued with Weezer. He jumped up on to the windowsill and stared out at the street.

  “Nobody’s come yet,” said Weezer. “Tony said he’d be here early.”

  “It’s only just six, Weezer. Calm down,” I said.

  Mum was sitting on a chair at the front door, waiting to let people in. “I’ll do door duty for half an hour and not a minute more,” she’d told us. “At half past six I have to start cooking supper.”

  “Here they come!” Weezer shouted. “Maisie and Tricia and Mrs Posnansky and the couple from down the road with their little girl . . . it’s going to be all right. Oh, Annie, it really is.”

  She was very nearly right.

  The Bring and Buy Sale was almost a great success, except for what Weezer did. At first no one noticed. Everyone had left and Mum, Weezer and I were tidying up.

  “We’ve got £12.25!” I told them. “Isn’t that brilliant!”

  “Well done, girls,” said Mum. “I’m proud of you both.” She turned to smile at Weezer, and then her smile turned into a frown.

  “Where’s my little china vase? The one that lives on the mantelpiece . . . I hope no one has bought it by mistake.”

  “I sold it!” Weezer said. “Wasn’t that clever of me? I got five pounds for it from Mrs Meadowes. Isn’t that great?”

  “You did WHAT?” Mum was so cross her face was quite white.

  “Mrs Meadowes offered me five pounds for it, so I sold it to her. Five pounds, Mum. That’s a fantastic amount of money. And you never specially said you liked the vase.”

  “Well, I do,” Mum said. “And you can just take this five-pound note and go round to Mrs Meadowes at once. Tell her you made a mistake and please could you have your mother’s vase back. Go now. And I don’t want to hear a single solitary squeak out of you till that vase is back in this house. Annie, go with her please. It’s too dark for her to go on her own.”

  On the way over to Mrs Meadowes’ house, Weezer said, “We’ve only got £7.25 now. I don’t see why Mum is making such a fuss about a silly old vase.”

  “She likes it,” I told her. “You shouldn’t have sold it, Weezer. You know you shouldn’t. You wouldn’t like it if someone sold your ballet shoes.”

  Weezer snorted. “Ballet shoes aren’t at all the same thing. I need my ballet shoes.”

  “Maybe Mum needs her vase.”

  “What for? She never puts flowers in it, not ever. It just sits there.”

  “I don’t know . . . Anyway, it’s not that she needs it; nobody really needs a vase. But she likes it, so you shouldn’t have sold it, and that’s that. Now, this is Mrs Meadowes’ house. You knock.”

  We got the vase back, but Mrs Meadowes made quite a fuss, and when we came back, Mum sent Weezer to our room in disgrace. I wasn’t allowed in there till bedtime, so I sat at the kitchen table, putting the finishing touches to the Puppet Show, ready to show Weezer when I went upstairs.

  Chapter Four

  “THIS IS ALL wrong!” Weezer said. “This Puppet Show is not going to work. We haven’t had enough rehearsal.”

  “It’s not our fault,” said Tricia. “We came on Monday and the play wasn’t ready yet.”

  “Then we came on Wednesday morning, and you were all busy with the Jumble Sale,” said Maisie.

  “Bring and Buy,” Weezer sighed. “I know. We’ve only really been doing it since yesterday, but everyone’s coming in two hours, and we’re not nearly good enough yet.”

  “Don’t worry, Weezer,” Tony said. “It’ll be fine. I’ll be the director and tell you what you’re doing wrong.”

  “I won’t even let you watch,” Weezer said, “if you call me ‘Weezer’. You know what my name is.”

  “Oh, all right, then,” said Tony, “Louisa, if you insist.”

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s start again.”

  Weezer, Tricia and Maisie went behind the sofa and put their glove puppets on. I’d written a story about a dragon who ate teddy bears for his tea, and a teddy bear who wanted to be a hero and kill the dragon. This teddy bear had two friends, a frog and a hippo, who were timid and kept playing tricks on him to stop him from climbing into the dragon’s cave. Teddy wouldn’t be stopped, and in the end he did kill the dragon and then he got married to Stripy, who was being a sort of knitted princess. It was a very silly story. I’d written all sorts of bits for people to say and even a song for Teddy to sing. It went like this:

  “I’m going to kill the dragon,

  the dragon I’m going to kill,

  as soon as I’ve pulled my wagon,

  to the top of Dragon Hill.”

  Weezer, who was being Teddy, refused to sing it.

  “We haven’t got a hill,” she said. “We’re all up on the back of the sofa together. I’m not singing a song about a hill that isn’t even there. And we haven’t got a wagon. It’s stupid to sing a song about stuff that’s invisible. What will the audience think?”

  “People,” I said, “will ha
ve to use their imaginations.” But I could see what she meant.

  “Don’t sing the song, then,” I said. “In fact, don’t bother with my words at all.”

  “You mean make it up as we go along? Are you sure? We do that at ballet sometimes. We call it ‘improvisation’,” Weezer said grandly.

  “Try it,” I said. “It couldn’t be worse than it is now.”

  I had to admit that everything sounded much better when everyone was making up their own words. I cheered myself up by imagining myself standing at our front door and saying:

  “Sorry! The Puppet Show is sold out, I’m afraid. There are no more seats left . . . Oh, you’d be willing to pay to stand at the back . . . Oh well, in that case, sir, thank you very much.”

  The Puppet Show was a disaster. We made four pounds. Not counting Mum and Mr and Mrs Delaney and Mrs Posnansky, only four people came who were, as Weezer put it, ‘real audience’. They were Mrs Rosebush, Linda and Pam from ballet class, and Daisy from Weezer’s class at school. After everyone else had gone home, we sat at the kitchen table with Tony.

  “It was awful,” Weezer said. “I’m never doing another Puppet Show ever.”

  “If we’d known how bad it was going to be,” said Tony, “we could have sold the puppets at the Bring and Buy and made a bit more money.”

  “Not much use having good ideas now, though, is it?” said Weezer. “The Bring and Buy Sale is over and so is the Puppet Show and we still haven’t got the money we need . . . even with the boring dog-walking.”

  Weezer’s face was looking more and more frowny, and her mouth was starting to turn down at the corners. I said, “Cheer up, Louisa.” (I was careful about her name.) “Let’s make a list of all the money we’ve got.”

  “We know how much money we’ve got,” she said.

  “But it looks better if you write it down,” I said. I took a clean piece of paper and made a list.

  We all stared at the figures.

  “We can’t go and that’s that,” Weezer said. “We still need more than fifteen pounds. Don’t forget we need money for the bus fares as well.”

  “And we have to have the money by tomorrow,” I said, “because that’s when we’re going to buy the tickets.”

  Weezer was looking more and more as if she was about to burst into tears. As I was wondering what to say, Mum came into the kitchen. She was carrying her purse.

  “I’ve just been on the phone to your dad,” she said. “I told him you were busy so he’s ringing back later to chat to you both, but he did tell me to give you any money that you needed to make up the ticket prices. £20, is it? Or £15?”

  “It’s exactly £17.55, including bus fares,” I said, and Mum opened the purse and put the money down in front of Weezer.

  “There we are,” she said. “Two front stall seats for Louisa Ballerina and her sister . . . You shall go to the ball, Cinders!”

  Weezer jumped up and hugged Mum.

  “That’s brilliant, Mum,” she said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you all there is! I’m so happy!” She beamed at us. “You get extra happy, don’t you, when you’ve just been feeling miserable and then it stops?”

  Tony and I both agreed that you did. I was pleased about the money, of course, and about going to the ballet, but best of all was not having to do all sorts of things like collecting jumble and writing plays for puppets which then never got used, and walking dogs. The last week had been so busy that I was quite looking forward to going back to school, where I could have a bit of a rest.

  Chapter Five

  WEEZER SPENT THE whole of the bus ride from our house to the theatre telling me the story of Coppélia. She came tearing back from her ballet class at lunchtime and could hardly eat anything at all because she was so excited.

  “Have you got the money, Annie?” she kept asking me, and I kept having to get my purse out of my jacket pocket and showing her the four ten-pound notes that Mum had given me in exchange for all our odd pound coins and bits of change.

  “Take care of it,” Mum had said to me. “Keep your pocket zipped up and be careful of the traffic. Hold Weezer’s hand crossing the road. You know she’s quite capable of doing arabesques in the middle of all the cars if the mood is on her.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Weezer had said. “I’d never do anything like that.”

  I said to Weezer, “Stop worrying. I won’t lose the money,” and she said, “OK, I will stop worrying. I’ll tell you the story of Coppélia instead.”

  So there we were on the bus and Weezer was talking, and I wasn’t really listening to her properly. I was staring out of the window and pieces of the story floated into my ears from time to time.

  “A spooky doctor who makes a doll . . . his name is Coppélius, so the doll’s called Coppélia . . . she’s so real that the hero, Fritz, falls in love with her . . . but Fritz’s girlfriend, Swanilda, plays a trick on him . . . she dresses up in the doll’s clothes and the Doctor thinks it’s real magic and she’s come alive . . . it all ends happily, though. When you see it, it’ll all be much clearer. The music’s lovely. Are we nearly there?”

  “Yes,” I said, “Come on, we’re getting off now.”

  “Yippee!” Weezer said and everyone on the bus turned to look at us.

  “I don’t care,” she whispered to me. “I’m going to get tickets for the ballet.”

  The Theatre Royal had thick red carpets in the foyer.

  “There,” said Weezer. “That’s the Box Office.”

  “It looks more like a cage than a box,” I said. “Look at the gold bars. The ladies who work there must feel as though they’re in a zoo or something.”

  Weezer giggled. “We could feed them bananas through the bars.”

  “Ssh!” I said. “Behave yourself. I’m going to queue up now.”

  We had to wait about ten minutes until it was our turn.

  “Yes, dear,” said the lady behind the bars. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like two tickets for Coppélia for next Saturday’s matinée, please,” I said.

  “It’s sold out, I’m afraid,” said the lady.

  “Sold out? What does that mean?”

  “We have no more tickets for the Russian Ballet left at all. Every single performance has been sold out since last week. I’m very sorry.”

  “Even the seats in the gallery?”

  “Even those, I’m afraid. There’s just nothing more available. I’m really very sorry.”

  Suddenly I felt cold and sick and I didn’t dare to look at Weezer, but of course I had to. What would I do if she burst into tears? If she did, I knew she wouldn’t stop for ages. I took a deep breath.

  “Weezer,” I said and then nearly bit my tongue. What a time to get my sister’s name wrong! But Weezer was so unhappy that she didn’t even notice.

  “Don’t say a word, Annie,” she said to me. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not ever.”

  She stalked out of the theatre and I ran after her. “Wait!” I shouted. “Don’t cross the road without me!”

  She gave me her hand in silence and all the way home she didn’t make a single sound, but sat staring down at the space between her feet, her face as stiff and white as a doll’s.

  She went on being silent as we walked home from the bus stop. Usually, when Weezer’s miserable, I can cheer her up by chatting to her, or else I can make her laugh by telling her a joke, but I knew that she was so upset now that any words I might say to her would be the wrong ones.

  Mrs Posnansky was coming out of our gate as we got to our house.

  “It is my Little Swan and her sister!” she said. “I am come to invite you to my house. There is a guest there I wish for you both to meet.”

  Mrs Posnansky’s words were like a spell. Before she’d finished speaking, Weezer had opened her mouth and begun to howl. It was just as if she’d been keeping all her sadness locked up somewhere, and Mrs Posnansky had turned a magical key. Tears poured down Weezer’s cheeks. I think the noises
coming out of her mouth were what’s called ‘wailing’ in stories. I’d never heard her make these sounds before.

  I didn’t know what to do, but Mrs Posnansky did. She said to me, “Annie, darling, go and tell your mama you are having tea in my house. I will deal with this.”

  She put her arms round Weezer and led her away, still wailing and sobbing.

  Mum opened our door as soon as I knocked and said, “What’s happened, Annie?”

  I told her everything, and I couldn’t believe how calm she was about it. I expected her to want to rush off to Mrs Posnansky’s and cuddle Weezer to make her feel better, but all she did was smile mysteriously and say, “Well, that’s very interesting, Annie, but Mrs Posnansky was here to invite you both to tea, so you’d better go over and keep Weezer company.”

  “Weezer isn’t much company when she’s in a state. I’ll have to do all the talking on my own.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Mum, even more mysteriously. “Go on. They’ll be waiting for you.”

  Mrs Posnansky’s house is full of lovely things to look at. She has more ornaments on her shelves than anyone I know, and lots of framed photographs hanging on her walls. Her mother was a ballet dancer, long ago, and this means that she and Weezer always have a lot to chat about. Weezer shows Mrs Posnansky every new step she learns in class, and the feathered headdress Mrs Posnansky gave her when she was a Little Swan is Weezer’s most treasured possession.

  “Come in, come in, Annie,” Mrs Posnansky said as she opened the door. “There is someone here I wish you to meet. He is good friend of mine from the old country, from Russia. Oh, we have many, many things to talk about!”

  “Where’s Weezer?” I asked. “Is she all right? Is she still crying?”

  “No, no,” said Mrs Posnansky. “She talks with my friend. The feathers of the Little Swan are no longer in a ruffle. They are smooth and white. She is quite calm.”