An Island of Our Own

by Sally Nicholls

  “Shh,” I whispered back, though I was wondering that myself. “Don’t be so rude.”

  “What does he want?” said Jo. She looked pleased to have something to talk about, I thought.

  “He wants to know if he can have some cake,” I said hopefully.

  Uncle Evan made an angry noise. He got up and banged out of the room.

  Jonathan and I looked at each other. “Was that me?” I said. “Did I upset him?”

  “Oh…” Jo sighed. “No, of course you didn’t, Holly. He’s just… well, with Mum being ill…”

  “We don’t have to have cake,” I said. “It’s for your mum. We don’t mind.”

  “No, cake is a good idea,” said Jo. She got up. “I’ll go and see if I can find a knife.”

  “I’ll come too,” said Jonathan hastily. I expect he was going to apologize for us or something, although I didn’t see that we’d done anything that wrong.

  Davy and I were left alone with Auntie Irene. We sat and watched her.

  “Do you think she’s going to die?” Davy whispered.

  “Now?” I said. “No.” I hoped not, anyway. They wouldn’t have left her with us if she was going to die, would they? They wouldn’t, right?

  Davy padded over to the bed and peered at Auntie Irene. “Why does she look like that?” he said.

  “Like what?” I said, though I knew really.

  Davy gave a sort of one-armed shrug.

  “She’s sick,” I said, helplessly.

  And then Auntie Irene opened her eyes.

  Davy made an “Agh!” noise, and jumped back.

  I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t. I was a bit scared too. “Hello,” I said, nervously. I figured that was probably safe. Either she didn’t know we were there, and it wouldn’t make any difference, or she did, and she’d be pleased. “Hello, Auntie Irene. It’s Holly and Davy.”

  Auntie Irene gazed at us. Her mouth moved but no sound came out. Davy retreated so far away from the bed that he bumped into my legs. He was staring at her like she was something evil coming up from the sewers to kill him.

  I remembered what Jo had said, about the stroke, and how Auntie Irene couldn’t talk. Like Grandad. How awful, I thought. Imagine waking up and whole bits of your body not working any more.

  “Har–” she said. “Haar–”

  “Are you trying to say Holly?” I said, hopefully. I decided that was a better option than some of the alternatives – help me, say, or ha ha ha.

  To my surprise, she started jerking her head, like she was nodding. I hadn’t really believed that she was still in there. She’d looked pretty out of it to me.

  “That’s right,” I said. Knowing that she knew who I was made me feel safer. I took her hand. The skin was loose and dry and white. There were brown speckles on the back of her hand, like water marks.

  She pulled her hand away angrily. “Eya–” she said.

  “What?” I said. I’m the person in our family who’s happiest talking to people, and even I wasn’t feeling very sure about this. “I don’t know what you’re try to say.” I looked at the door. I wished Jonathan and Jo would come back.

  “Eya eenu–” she said, and then she tossed her head in a little gesture of frustration. She started jabbing her hand at the bedside cabinet.

  I was beginning to panic. “Shall I get Jo?” I said. She shook her head, furious, and continued jabbing. “You want something from here?” I pulled out the drawer. It was full of her things, things that I guess Uncle Evan and Jo had brought or unpacked from her handbag or something. “What is it? This?” I held up her earphones. “This?” A box of pills. “This?” A packet of Polo mints. “This?” I pulled out what looked like a book, and she started to get really excited. She stopped jabbing and waved her hands about and beamed at me.

  I looked at the thing in my hand. It was a photograph album, just a little one, the size of a single photograph, and probably with room for about twenty photos in it. It had green cardboard covers, and plastic sheaths inside for the photographs to sit in.

  It surprised me, that Auntie Irene would have something like that. She wasn’t the sort of old lady who didn’t know how a computer worked. She made her living from technology. I’d have expected all her photographs to be digital ones, on a complicated double-encrypted data cloud somewhere.

  I opened the photograph album, but she started shaking her head again.

  She pushed the album towards me. “Eeyore – eeyore.”

  Davy started to giggle nervously. I knew just how he felt.

  “I don’t… I’m sorry, I don’t know what you want me to do with this. Is it a present?”

  She started nodding again.

  Were you allowed to take presents from people with brain injuries? I wondered if I ought to tell Jo, or try and give it back or something, but Auntie Irene was looking more and more agitated, so I said, “OK. All right. Thank you. That’s… I’ll look at it later.”

  And I put it in my bag.

  WHAT WAS IN THE PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM

  On the bus back to the station, I opened the photograph album. I was expecting pictures of my mum, or maybe me and Jonathan as babies. But the photographs were utterly bizarre. There was:

  A picture of Auntie Irene’s living-room wall. Not her current living room, which had been extended so it was about twice the size and had a conservatory, but the one she’d had before.

  A picture of what looked like a railway siding. There was half a signal box, and the tail end of a railway carriage, with FATZ 93 scrawled over it in purple spray paint.

  A beach somewhere hot. A ridiculously bright turquoise sea, a big blue sky, palm trees and little square huts on stilts, with roofs made of straw, or palm leaves or something.

  Another beach, a pebbly, British-looking one. Not even a beach really, a sort of little cove. A grey sea, some long, yellowish grass, a sky full of clouds.

  An office. Not a private office in someone’s house with a big oak desk and a leather desktop like Uncle Evan had, but a scruffy, messy office with a cheap old desk with metal legs and scratched veneer, and an ancient-looking computer, and an in-tray with loads of papers all piled in a heap. The room had the look of an old house that had once been grand, but now wasn’t. A bit like ours. There was a big high ceiling, with fancy moulding on it and a hole where a chandelier had probably once hung. The walls were painted horrible rice-pudding grey.

  There were no people in any of the photos. They weren’t even exciting artistic landscapes. They looked like the sort of photos you take just to test whether your camera is working. I couldn’t work out why Auntie Irene even had the album with her in hospital. She must have been carrying it around in her handbag or something, and it had been unpacked into the drawer.

  “I told you she was crazy,” said Jonathan, when I showed him the pictures. “I’d chuck them out if I were you.”

  But I didn’t. I kept them. I didn’t know Auntie Irene very well, but she wasn’t stupid. And in all the time I knew her, she never did anything without a purpose.

  WHEN I GROW UP

  Science runs in our family. Jonathan likes science, like Auntie Irene did, and so do I. In fact, when I grow up, I’m going to be a climate scientist. Not the sort of climate scientist who takes notes of how much hotter it’s getting, but the sort who builds things, like Auntie Irene did. I’m going to build machines to take carbon out of the atmosphere, and machines to make renewable energy really cheaply, and machines to make the planet colder. Because even if you take all the carbon out of the atmosphere, the planet is already hotter than it ought to be, so the ice caps will probably keep melting. I think what we should probably do is build lots of really big air-conditioning units, but that will obviously be quite expensive and use lots of carbon, so we’ll have to wait until I’ve designed amazing renewable energy sources. But I’ll do it.

&n
bsp; I am the most environmentally-friendly person in my family. I’m the one who nags Jonathan to recycle stuff, and made him get electricity from a green energy supplier, and I’m the person who always takes rucksacks to the supermarket so we don’t have to get plastic bags. Actually, we are quite a green family. We don’t go on foreign holidays, or own a car, and we wear all our clothes until they’re falling to pieces. It’s mostly because we’re poor, though, not because we’re super-ethical. But still.

  Bad things happening to the planet is my biggest worry. I think we are probably all going to be dead by the time I am old, or if not dead, at least all crammed onto the North Pole and the South Pole, which will probably have palm trees on them. It makes me so scared and angry that people don’t pay any attention to real, obvious, provable science, and still insist on flying in aeroplanes, and buying lots of clothes that they don’t wear, and driving cars. It’s like none of the grown-ups cares at all about people like Jonathan and Davy and me, who will have to live in the world they made.

  It was Auntie Irene who helped me not be so scared, actually. I told her how worried about it I was, and she said the best thing to do with a worry was to find something to do about it, which is when I started nagging Jonathan about recycling and stuff. I said, if climate change was such a big worry, why weren’t all the scientists working overtime trying to fix it? And she said that was a good question, and when I grew up I ought to do something about it.

  So I’m going to.

  GREAT PIVOTAL MOMENTS IN BECOMING A WOMAN

  (OR, JONATHAN AND DAVY IN A BRA SHOP)

  The next day was Sunday, and I made Jonathan take me bra shopping. Normally, when you get your first bra, either your mum tells you you need one, or you tell your mum you want one. What happened to me was I noticed all the other girls in my year had one and I didn’t. Well, all the girls except for Amber Hale, who looks about nine.

  So, that night, when Jonathan came home, I said, “I need a bra.”

  Jonathan looked flummoxed. (Flummoxed is a good word to use about Jonathan.) “Are you sure?” he said. “I mean, define ‘need’. Couldn’t you be a sixties feminist and not bother?”

  You’d think my brother had never been to secondary school.

  “No,” I said. “I need one. People at school are going to think it’s weird if I don’t.”

  Now Jonathan looked anxious. “Are they expensive?” he said. And then, “Do I have to come with you?”

  “How should I know?” I said. “And yes, you totally do. I can’t go on my own.”

  So I went with Jonathan and Davy instead. Because that was totally normal.

  We went to BHS, because they do toys as well as bras, and Davy was already whining about having to spend his Sunday lingerie shopping. We went to the toy department first. They had a table with Lego on it for kids to play with, so Davy ran straight there and started building a spaceship. Jonathan and I mucked about pressing all the buttons on the toys with buttons and giving stupid names to the teddy bears, until the staff started glaring at us. So then we dragged Davy out and went down to Clothes.

  Even a cheap department store like BHS has a fancy clothes bit. I tried on four different bridesmaid’s dresses, and three different fancy bridesmaid shoes. I tried to get Jonathan to try on one of the wedding dresses but he wouldn’t. He and Davy were just boring and played secret agents with the hats.

  Eventually, I got sick of waiting. “Come on,” I said. “I’m supposed to be buying a bra.”

  “So go and buy one then,” said Jonathan. He adjusted his top hat in the mirror. “We’ll be right here.”

  What, I was supposed to go to the lingerie department on my own, grab a knicker-selling lady and tell her I wanted my first bra? No way.

  “They’ll think I’m weird!” I wailed. “They’ll call social services! In twenty years’ time I’ll be depressed and alcoholic and telling a psychiatrist that my brother made me buy my first bra on my own! I’ll write one of those books you see in supermarkets with sad black-and-white kids on the front of them and when I get to be interviewed on TV about it, I’ll tell them this story, and then you’ll get hate mail and I won’t even care!”

  Jonathan tipped his hat to one side so it sat at a jaunty angle. He probably thought this made him look cool and sophisticated. Unfortunately, he was wearing jeans with a big hole in the knee and a T-shirt with mathematical equations on it, so he just looked ridiculous.

  “Jon-a-than,” I wailed. This is supposed to be a significant day in a young girl’s life! It’s – like – a whatchamacallit – a rite of passage. Like a bat mitzvah, or confirmation, or being dumped in the Australian Outback on your own without any food and having to find your way home. Come on. It’s an important mother-daughter bonding ritual.”

  “But we’re not your mother,” said Davy. He was wearing big woolly mittens with elephants on and an enormous pink hat with lace and flowers and feathers stuck on it.

  “Well, you’re the best I’ve got,” I said.

  We went to the lingerie section. It was totally weird. Lacy knickers, and weird stretchy elastic to wear under your clothes to make you look slimmer, and awful ugly bras with lace and frills on them.

  Was that really what grown-ups wore?

  Davy went straight to the tights rack. “Holly, look! Pink tights! And frog tights, look! Can I have frog tights?”

  There were two Ladies Who Lingerie waiting at the door to the changing room. We went up to them.

  “How many items?” said the lady, smiling at Davy, who was still wearing his enormous pink hat. “Are you going to a wedding, sweetheart?”

  Davy shrank back against Jonathan’s legs and shook his head.

  Jonathan shot me a look of utter panic. “Er–”

  “I need a bra,” I said.

  “OK,” said the Lingerie Lady. “Do you need a fitting?”

  “Er – yeah. I guess so.”

  That bit was weird, but not as weird as I’d worried it might be. The lady measured me, then went and found me bras in different sizes to try on. She stayed outside while I put them on, but came back in when I was done to see how well they fitted.

  “You’re still growing,” she said. “So once they start getting a bit tight, you’ll need to come and have another fitting.”

  “Right,” I said. I was starting to panic a bit. I’d had a look at the price tag, and bras were expensive. How many was I supposed to buy? How often was I supposed to change them? Every day, like knickers? I had a whole drawerful of knickers, but you could buy them in multipacks from Asda. I tried to imagine Jonathan’s face when I told him I needed a whole drawer of bras, but was probably going to grow out of them in a couple of months. How fast do breasts grow? And would the lady think I was a minger if I only bought a couple? Would she think it weird that I didn’t already know this? Did she already think it weird that I was here with a big brother in a top hat and a little brother in a pink one?

  “Um,” I said. “Um. How many are you supposed to buy? Only…” I hesitated.

  The Lingerie Lady smiled. “I’d just get two or three for now,” she said. “They come in multipacks – go have a look.”

  I could have hugged her.

  We went back outside. Davy was still wearing his flowery hat. He was trying on silk scarves from a silk-scarf rack, winding them round and round and round his neck until he looked like an Egyptian mummy whose mummifier had got bored halfway through making him. I glanced at the Lingerie Lady to see if she was angry, but she was still smiling. I wondered if she was going to ask where my mum was, but she didn’t.

  “Nice to have a brother who’ll come shopping with you,” she said, instead.

  I smiled back. “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

  MUM

  My mum’s name was Theresa Kennet, or Tess for short. She was a policewoman, which sounds like it’s all catching serial killers l
ike on TV, but is actually mostly cordoning off bits of road when there’s been a car crash and standing around being bored at London Pride, and protest marches, and arresting drunk people late at night when they’re causing trouble.

  My mum was little and fierce and funny. If she wanted something, she wouldn’t shut up until she got it. I’m like that too. I’m the one of us who’s most like her. But she was kind as well. She was great when you were sad, or scared, or lonely. She wasn’t afraid of anything, not even really big drunk men. She told them what was what.

  When my mum was young, she was a bit of a rebel. She hitch-hiked all the way to Rome once, when she was nineteen. She lived in a squat for two years when she was sixteen, with her boyfriend, because she didn’t have enough money to pay proper rent, and she kept having fights with my grandparents.

  When she was twenty, she met Jonathan’s dad and got pregnant. And then she decided she had to get a proper job, and that’s when she joined the police. Some of her friends from the squat thought she was awful for doing that, because they thought the police were thugs who just did what they were told and beat up innocent people who weren’t doing anything wrong. But my mum knew the police weren’t going to go away, and she knew they were useful for things like car crashes and murders. And she thought it would be a good idea if nice people signed up to be police, as well as thugs, and then maybe there’d be less thuggery and more niceness.

  My mum was a very good policeperson. She worked hard at her exams, even though she was looking after baby Jonathan on her own. She was a sergeant when she died.

  When Jonathan was four, she met Davy’s and my dad. His name was Steve, and he was a nurse. Male nurses on telly are young and sexy and usually gay. (Apart from Charlie on Casualty.) My dad wasn’t young – he was thirty-two. And he had red hair and a beard. But he was nice, and kind, and he picked broken glass out of my mum’s arm when a drunk person threw a broken bottle at her, and didn’t laugh when she swore at him because it hurt so much. And then she said, “I owe you a drink for that,” and he sort of shrugged and said, “Just doing my job,” which my mum liked. My mum liked people who liked their jobs and worked hard at them and were good at them. She always told Jonathan and me, “It doesn’t matter if you don’t earn lots of money, but you should be proud of what you do, and do it well.” And my mum and dad both were, and did.