The Illustrated Mum Read online

  ‘She will.’

  ‘But what if something bad has happened to her?’

  ‘She’s the one who does bad things,’ said Star. She reached out and caught hold of me by the wrist. ‘Come on. She’ll be all right. She’s probably met some guy and she’s with him.’

  ‘But she wouldn’t stay out all night long,’ I said, scrabbling into her bed beside her.

  ‘Well, she has, hasn’t she? Hey, you’re freezing.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Never mind. Here.’ Star pressed her warm tummy against my back and made a lap for me with her legs. Her arms went round me tight and hugged me.

  ‘Oh Star,’ I said, crying.

  ‘Sh. Don’t get my pillow all wet and snotty.’

  ‘She is all right, isn’t she?’

  ‘She’s all wrong wrong wrong. But she’ll be back any minute now, you’ll see. We’ll go back to sleep and then we’ll wake up and the first thing we’ll hear is Marigold singing one of her stupid songs, right?’

  ‘Yes. Right. I do like it when you’re being nice to me.’

  ‘Well. It’s no fun being nasty to you. It’s like kicking Bambi. Let’s try to sleep now.’

  ‘I love Bambi.’ I tried to think of all the best bits in Bambi. I thought of Bambi frolicking with Flower with all the birds twittering and Thumper singing away, tapping his paw. Then my brain flipped to fast forward.

  ‘What?’ said Star, feeling me stiffen.

  ‘Bambi’s mother gets killed.’

  ‘Oh, Dol. Shut up and go to sleep.’

  I couldn’t sleep. Star couldn’t either, though she pretended at first. We turned every ten minutes, fitting round each other like spoons. I tried counting to a hundred, telling myself that Marigold would be back by then. Two hundred. Three hundred.

  I wanted my silk scarf but I’d left it in my bed. I put the end of the sheet over my nose instead and fingered the raised edge of the hem. It started to get lighter. I shut my eyes but in the dark inside my head there was a little television showing me all the things that might have happened to Marigold. It was so scary I poked the corner of the sheet in my eye. It hurt a lot but the television set didn’t even flicker. I tried to hum so that I couldn’t hear it. I banged my head on the pillow to see if I could switch it off that way.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ said Star.

  ‘Just trying to get comfy.’

  ‘You’re going about it in a funny way.’

  ‘It’s to stop myself thinking stuff. It’s so scary.’

  ‘Look. Let’s tell each other really really scary stories. We’ll think about that, right? There was this video I saw at that sleepover I went to, and there were these girls in a house, and they played these real witchy tricks on another girl, so that when she got out of bed she stepped into this great squirmy mass of spiders and slugs and snakes, and she screamed and starting running, and all these other snakes dropped on her head and writhed round her neck and down inside her clothes—’

  ‘Shut up, shut up!’ I said, shrieking – and yet it helped. We were suddenly just us playing a scary game and it was almost fun.

  I hadn’t ever seen any horror videos but I was quite good at making them up. Star told me this story about a dead man who comes back to kill all these kids and his fingers are like long knives so he can rip people in half.

  ‘I’ve got a better ghost, a real one. Mr Rowling!’ I said triumphantly.

  Mr Rowling was the old man who lived upstairs. He had this illness when we first moved in here and he knew he was dying and he said he was going to leave his body to medical science. I’d had to ask Star what that meant and when she told me it had given me nightmares, thinking of medical students cutting up all these little bits of Mr Rowling.

  ‘Mr Rowling couldn’t be scary. He was quite a nice old man,’ said Star.

  ‘Yes, he might have been nice when he was alive, but he’s really really scary now, because those medical people cut out his eyes so he’s just got horrible bleeding sockets and they’ve sawn off great strips of his skin and torn out his liver and his kidneys and left a big mess of intestines sticking out all smelly and slimey, and all the rest of him is rotting away so that when he walks around little mouldery bits of him fall off like big dandruff. He wishes and wishes he hadn’t left his body to medical science because it hurts so badly so every night he rises up off the dissecting table and he trails messily back to this house where he liked living and he’s maybe upstairs right this minute. Yes, he is, and he’s thinking, I like that Star, she was always nice to me, I’m going to go and see how she is, and he’s coming, Star, he’s slithering along, dripping maggots, getting nearer and nearer . . .’

  Something creaked and we both screamed. Then we sat up, ears straining, wondering if it was Marigold back at last. But then we heard the whoosh of the boiler in the kitchen. It was just the hot water system switching itself on.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Star. ‘We could just go and have a bath in a minute.’

  ‘Let’s have one more look round the flat. She could have crept in while we were cuddled up. We could have gone to sleep without realizing it,’ I said.

  We both padded all over the flat though we knew there wasn’t a chance Marigold was there. So then we went and had a bath together, because the water wasn’t hot enough for two baths. It was like being little kids again. Star washed my hair for me and then I did hers. I’d always longed to look like Star but I especially envied her beautiful long fair hair. Mine was mouse and it was so fine it straggled once it grew down to my shoulders.

  I suppose Star looked like her father and I looked like mine. Neither of us looked like Marigold, though we both had a hint of her green eyes.

  ‘Witch’s eyes,’ Marigold always said.

  Star’s eyes were bluey-green, mine more grey-green. Marigold’s eyes were emerald, the deepest glittery green, the green of summer meadows and seaweed and secret pools. Sometimes Marigold’s eyes glittered so wildly it was as if they were spinning in her head like Catherine wheels, giving off sparks.

  ‘What if Marigold—’ I started.

  ‘Stop what-iffing,’ said Star. ‘Hey, I thought you fancied yourself as a hairdresser? I’ve still got heaps of soap in my hair.’ She tipped jugfuls of water over her head and then started towelling herself dry.

  I watched her.

  ‘Quit staring,’ Star snapped.

  I couldn’t help staring at her. It was so strange seeing her with a chest. I peered down at my own but it was still as flat as a boy’s.

  ‘Two pimples,’ said Star, sneering at me. ‘Turn round, let me do your back.’

  We got dressed in our school clothes. Well, our version of school clothes. I wore one of Marigold’s dresses she’d cut small for me, black with silver moon and star embroidery. I called it my witch dress and thought it beautiful. It still smelt very faintly of Marigold’s perfume. I sniffed it now.

  ‘Is it sweaty?’ said Star.

  ‘No!’

  ‘I don’t know why you keep wearing that old thing anyway. You just get teased.’

  ‘I get teased anyway,’ I said.

  Star used to wear much weirder outfits when she was at my school but nobody ever dared tease Star. She changed when she started at the High School. She wore the proper uniform. She wanted to. She got money off Marigold the minute she got it out the post office and went to the school’s special uniform sale and got herself a hideous grey skirt and blazer and white blouses and even a tie.

  She customized them when she went into Year Eight, shortening the skirt until it was way up above her knees, and she put pin badges all over the blazer lapels. It was the way all the wilder girls in her class altered their uniform. Star didn’t seem to want to do it her way any more.

  She checked herself in the mirror and then fiddled with my dress.

  ‘Sweaty or not, it needs a wash.’

  ‘No, it’ll spoil it.’

  ‘It’s spoilt already. And the hem’s coming down at the ba