My Mum Tracy Beaker Read online

  ‘Sometimes I pretend Basil’s a spaceman,’ said Alice, holding him up and making him swoop through the air, his long ears flapping.

  Basil is the name of her blue toy rabbit. He’s very big and soft and cuddly. She has an entire rabbit warren in her bedroom. Basil is the biggest. The smallest is Little Titch, a weeny china rabbit only as big as my thumbnail. There are all shapes and sizes of rabbit in between, and different colours too – red and green and pink as well as white and brown.

  ‘I often pretend that they’ve all escaped, and then they hide all over the house,’ said Alice. ‘Or sometimes they’ve got rabbit flu, and I lie them on their backs with their paws in the air, and I’m the vet and I have to give them medicine and nurse them back to health. I play all kinds of rabbit games. Ava says I’m a hopeless baby, playing with cuddly toys at my age.’

  ‘Doesn’t she have cuddly toys herself?’

  ‘She has bears. Three of them.’

  ‘Does she pretend she’s Goldilocks?’ I said, joking. I couldn’t imagine Ava playing a pretend game in a million years.

  ‘They’re those very expensive bears with a yellow tag in their ear. Ava says you’re not supposed to play with them, they’re more like ornaments. She’s got fed up with them anyway and says I can have them, but I don’t really want them. They look like they’d bully my rabbits,’ said Alice. ‘I’ll show you.’

  She took me to have a peep in Ava’s room. We had to be very quiet because Alice isn’t allowed to go in there. It was a much deeper blue, with lacy white curtains and lots of framed pictures on the wall – and a special fitted wardrobe.

  ‘She keeps it so neat – look,’ said Alice, opening it up.

  Most of Ava’s clothes hung on hangers – her shirts, her dresses, her jackets, her coats. Her T-shirts were in a neat stack, her jumpers too, and her jeans lay side by side, their legs tucked up tidily. Her shoes were on racks, all clicking their heels together, though they were already home.

  ‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘It must get annoying at times, having a sister like Ava.’

  Alice nodded in agreement.

  ‘If I had a sister, I’d much prefer her to be like you,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps we can be friends,’ Alice suggested. ‘Friends are better than sisters because you can choose them.’

  ‘Do you have a best friend?’ I asked.

  Alice went a bit pink. ‘Not really. At school I’m in a sort of threesome with Katie and Angela, but they like each other best.’

  ‘I’m not even in a threesome,’ I said. ‘All the other girls had made friends before I started at my school.’

  ‘Then we could be best friends,’ said Alice. ‘If you’d like to … You don’t have to if you don’t want.’

  ‘I do want!’

  I couldn’t quite believe it. I’d been hoping to find a best friend for so long, and now, just like that, I had one.

  Mum called up to tell us that the cakes were cool enough to ice, so we ran downstairs. Icing was the best bit. We dripped it on and then spread it like butter. Mum had found a big packet of Smarties for decoration.

  ‘Our granny gave us the Smarties. We’re only meant to have one a day,’ said Ava.

  ‘One a day?’ said Mum. ‘Oh well, suit yourself.’

  It suited Alice and me to decorate our cakes with copious Smarties. I picked out the blue ones and made a B for Basil cake for Alice. She was very touched.

  She made me a face cake, with two brown Smartie eyes and a big red Smartie smile.

  Ava iced her cake very carefully indeed, and designed a perfect flower. Alice and I looked at her enviously.

  ‘Whose cake do you think is best, Tracy?’ Ava asked.

  Mum pondered as she finished adding icing to her own cake. She made a face cake like Alice’s, giving it two eyes and a red smile. Then she went to the larder and brought out a packet of currants. She pressed lots of them round the edge, making curly black hair.

  ‘It’s you!’ said Alice.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum. ‘And mine’s definitely the best cake.’

  ‘You can’t choose your cake. That’s not fair. You’re an adult,’ said Ava.

  Mum just smiled at her. She never sticks to any of the rules. My mum’s Tracy Beaker.

  We were still quite full of McDonald’s, so we saved our cakes to show Marina when she got home. She was very impressed. We had tea with her and ate cake. Mum and I had proper brown tea, and Marina and Ava had green tea, though it looked brownish too. Alice had milk. She wouldn’t eat her Basil rabbit cake.

  ‘Go on, Alice. They taste OK actually,’ said Ava, nibbling her flower cake enthusiastically.

  ‘Yes, but I want to keep it. Jess made it for me and it’s lovely,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll go stale, silly.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  I’d already had a mouthful of my face cake, but I kept the rest of it. It was only a little nibble. We both ate plain iced cakes instead.

  Then Marina looked at her watch. ‘Goodness, it’s late – and it’s a school night too. Bedtime, girls! Say goodnight to Tracy and Jess, and thank Tracy for looking after you so well.’

  ‘Night. Thank you,’ said Ava. Then she smiled at us. ‘It’s been fun,’ she added surprisingly.

  ‘It’s been the best ever,’ said Alice, and she gave me a hug. ‘It’s not fair, I don’t want to go to bed. I want to stay up with Jess. She’s my friend.’

  ‘We’ll come again,’ said Mum. She looked at Marina. ‘In fact, we could come permanently, if you like, seeing as your au pair has done a runner.’

  Marina had started to tidy the kitchen, wiping down the sticky surfaces. Then she threw the cloth into the waste bin. She saw all the McDonald’s cartons inside and frowned.

  Mum sighed. So did I. It looked as if she’d blown it.

  ‘Well, we’ll have to establish a few ground rules,’ said Marina. ‘But we could give it a trial for a week or so and see how we all get on.’

  So now Mum works for Marina and we all get on splendidly. Mum likes it much more than the car-showroom job, especially as she split up with her car-salesman boyfriend and it was awkward still working for him. And I love it because I get to see my friend Alice every day, and Ava isn’t too bad, though I don’t like her anywhere near as much.

  I didn’t mind not having a best friend at school any more, now that I had Alice out of school. It was great going to their house. And then it was great going back to our flat, just Mum and me.

  Only now Mum has this boring old Sean Godfrey for a boyfriend, and he keeps coming round. He stays ages after I get sent to bed – I often can’t get to sleep. I lie awake worrying about him.

  Still, they’ve been seeing each other for just over three months – he’s already past his sell-by date. Mum will be getting sick of him any day now.

  IT WAS SEAN Godfrey’s birthday yesterday, and he asked Mum if she’d celebrate with him that evening. Mum doesn’t usually go out on school nights. We all have tea at Marina’s (sometimes pasta and fish and the dreaded broccoli, worst luck – it looks as if the McDonald’s meal was a one-off). I get to play with Alice, and then, when Marina gets home, Mum and I go home too. We cosy up at either end of the sofa and have a little chat or watch television, and then I go to bed and Mum reads to me.

  I can read, obviously, but it’s lovely to share a story. Mum says she’s catching up because no one ever read to her when she was young – not until Cam fostered her. Then I go to sleep. Once Mum nodded off mid-sentence as well, and didn’t wake up until the middle of the night.

  She doesn’t go out on school nights because it would mean I’d have to stay with Cam. There would be a huge rush in the morning because Mum would have to drive over early to collect me, and then drive the other way to pick up Ava and Alice, and we’d all be late for school.

  But Mum has a thing about birthdays. They’re very special to her. When she was at the Dumping Ground she hated having the same birthday as Peter because they had to share the