Video Rose and Mark Spark Read online

  Mrs Mackay thought she’d fainted. Rose was hurried off to the school sickroom. The secretary tucked her up on the sofa and gave her a cup of sweet tea and a digestive biscuit. Rose managed to miss the entire arithmetic lesson after all. This Little Piggy Rose went hee-hee-hee all the way home.

  6…

  Rose kept looking at her hands as she walked towards her block of flats. If her left hand could rewind her years back into the past then perhaps her right hand could hurtle her years into the future? She kept opening and closing her fingers, waggling them about, wondering.

  Rick and his mate Charlie passed her on their roller-skates. Charlie waggled his fingers back at her.

  ‘Hi there, Square-Bum,’ he shouted.

  Rose was too preoccupied to do more than toss her head at him. She had to sort this out carefully. It was a bit scary thinking of zapping straight into the future. At least she knew what had happened in the past. Suppose there was some terrible war or disaster in ten years’ time and she ended up right in the middle of it? And what if she got stuck and couldn’t get back? The video had broken down, after all. What if Rose’s fist suddenly went phut and stopped working too?

  ‘Hello, Rose,’ said Cherry Chalmers, who lived along the balcony. ‘Do you want to come and play with me?’

  Rose hesitated. Cherry was only six and she was a right pain. She had long fair hair that her Mum did up in ringlets and great big brown eyes like Bambi and when she was three she’d been a runner-up in the Miss Pears contest. Her Mum had all the photos up on the wall, hundreds of glossy pictures of Cherry in a pink party frock, and Cherry’s best French doll had a special pink party frock to match.

  Cherry was the sort of child Rose avoided like the plague but she was allowed to help herself to as many ice lollies from the fridge as she wanted and her Mum usually had a big box of chocolates on the go and handed them around quite often.

  ‘We can watch videos if you want,’ said Cherry.

  Rose decided to take a little break from time-travelling and had a relaxing afternoon watching Alice in Wonderland and sucking first a raspberry ice lolly, then an orange one, and finally a lime lolly.

  ‘My insides must look like a traffic light,’ said Rose.

  ‘Do you want to try one of my Belgian fresh cream chocolates, dear?’ said Cherry’s mum.

  ‘Mmm, yes please,’said Rose.

  Cherry’s mum was very kind and kept handing round her chocolates. Rose started to feel a bit of a greedy pig after she’d eaten five on the trot but her mouth still watered when she looked at the box. She solved things by gently clenching her left hand and rewinding a few minutes so she could accept the last especially wonderful chocolate cream all over again — and again and again.

  She found she lost track of real time and Rick had to come knocking on the door to fetch her.

  ‘Hello Rick,’ said Cherry enthusiastically, tossing her long curls. ‘Have you come to play too?’

  ‘I don’t play with little girls,’ said Rick, looking mortally offended. ‘I’ve come to get Rose. Mum’s back and she’s getting tea.’

  ‘Is it teatime already?’ said Rose, who didn’t feel quite ready for tea now.

  She thanked Cherry and her Mum for having her and went along the balcony to her own flat to tackle spaghetti bolognaise.

  ‘Like in Lady and the Tramp, eh, Dad?’ said Rose, valiantly doing her best to stuff long strands of spaghetti into her mouth.

  Rick was sucking his spaghetti up very noisily, strand by strand.

  ‘Rick! Behave yourself,’ said Mum, chopping up Robbie’s tiny portion.

  Rose decided to compete. She sucked her own spaghetti, making wonderful slurping sounds.

  ‘Rose! Now stop it, both of you,’ Mum snapped. ‘You kids don’t half get on my nerves sometimes.’

  Robbie decided Rick and Rose were getting too much attention. He leant forward in his high chair, grabbed his dish and sank his head right into the spaghetti.

  ‘Robbie!’ Mum shrieked.

  Robbie bobbed up again, snorting with laughter, his face bright orange, little strands of spaghetti sticking to his eyelashes. He looked so comical that Rose and Rick dissolved into helpless laughter, and even Dad had a bit of a splutter to himself.

  Mum wasn’t at all amused.

  ‘Don’t laugh at him, it’ll only make him worse. He’ll start doing it at every meal — and then I’m the poor Mrs Twerpy who has to mop him up.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have had another baby, Mum,’ said Rose unwisely.

  ‘I shouldn’t have had any of you,’ said Mum darkly. ‘I can’t wait for the three of you to be grown-up and off my hands, I’m telling you.’

  ‘We’ll live it up a bit then, eh?’ said Dad. ‘I’ll be done with night shifts then, so we can go out and enjoy ourselves in the evenings.’

  ‘Yes, you kids will be the ones stuck in with yelling babies,’ said Mum, unstrapping a struggling Robbie, who did his best to rub spaghetti in her hair and an orange swirly pattern all down her jumper.

  ‘Who, me?’ said Rick. ‘I’m never going to have kids. The King of the Rollerball doesn’t have kids.’

  ‘You wait and see. I thought I was going to be playing Centre Forward for England — and now look at me,’ said Dad, sighing. ‘We don’t know what the future holds in store for us.’

  ‘I could find out,’ said Rose, and she suddenly decided to give it a go. She looked down at her hands under the table. Her right hand was glowing like a little electric fire. She tucked her thumb right into her palm and squeezed it tightly, making a hard fist.

  She was suddenly jolted forward, swooping through the table, through the flat, through time itself. She tried to keep her eyes open to see if she could make sense of what was happening, but there was a great howling wind that made her eyes stream.

  ‘I want to go right into the future, to when we’re all grown up,’ Rose cried out above the high-pitched roaring in her ears.

  She had no idea whether she was going to make it safely. She seemed to be hurtling on forever. What if she carried on until she was an old lady and died? How could she ever get back then? She tried to open up her right hand but her arms flailed helplessly in the air, out of her control.

  Then the roaring and the whirling got louder and wilder and she was suddenly jolted into place so violently that she shook all over.

  ‘Rose? Are you all right? You didn’t get a shock from that cable, did you? Here, you’d better sit down.’

  Rose opened her eyes and blinked. She was in a strange large room with cameras and cables all over the place. There were very bright lights right in front of her and several people in odd clothes and a lot of make-up were standing in front of half a kitchen.

  Rose blinked again. Did they only have rooms with three walls in the future? And why was the lighting so strange, was there something wrong with everyone’s eyes? And what about all these cameras…?

  She suddenly understood. This wasn’t her home. She was at work in a film studio. All the people on the set were looking at her, obviously waiting for her to tell them what to do.She swivelled in her seat and looked at the back of her canvas chair. There was one word spelled out in big letters. DIRECTOR. Oh boy! She was directing her own video!

  ‘I’m fine, folks,’ she said jumping up and into action.

  She found she knew what she was doing. She bossed the actors around quite a lot but they didn’t seem to mind at all. Then she decided they all needed a break and someone went running for coffee and sandwiches. Rose had a sticky bun and a bar of chocolate too. She was the director. She didn’t have to fuss about staying skinny like the actresses. Maybe it was just as well.

  She was very curious when it was time to go home because she didn’t have a clue where her home would be. She found there was someone waiting for her outside the studio.

  ‘There you are, Rosie. I’ve been waiting for you for ages. Oh darling, I’m going crazy without you. Please come back to me. We’ll get married if th