Midnight Read online

  ‘You’re brilliant at dancing, Jasmine,’ I said. ‘I’ve always been rubbish at it.’

  ‘I’ll teach you if you like,’ said Jasmine, holding out her hand.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ I said firmly.

  ‘OK, OK,’ said Jasmine, and she swapped her CD for wonderfully weird choral music.

  ‘It’s Lisa Gerrard. Isn’t she great?’ said Jasmine.

  ‘It sounds very witchy.’

  ‘It is witchy. I’m a white witch, didn’t you know? With amazing occult powers,’ said Jasmine. She flicked her fingers as if she was executing extraordinary witch spells.

  ‘Oh yeah – and you’re a vampire slayer too?’ I said.

  ‘You bet. And Supergirl. Watch me put on my special suit and fly,’ she said, spreading her arms wide.

  She was fooling around, of course, but she was so magical I almost believed her. I stood at her dressing table and fingered the green and blue perfume bottles and shook the snow domes and rearranged the Russian dolls, making them line up two by two in a long crocodile of best friends. I felt overpowered by perfume, shaken in a snowstorm, unscrewed into smaller and smaller pieces. I even looked different when I peered at myself in Jasmine’s mirror. My eyes shone in the candlelight and when I shook my hair free of its fat school plait it tumbled past my shoulders in dark waves.

  ‘You’ve got lovely hair,’ said Jasmine, brushing it with a beautiful silver-backed hairbrush.

  ‘Nowhere near as lovely as yours.’

  ‘So we’re the hairy girls as well as the flower fairy girls,’ said Jasmine, and we both fell about laughing.

  ‘I’m starving. Let’s have tea,’ she said.

  I thought about my own tea waiting at home. I knew I should go right that minute. Or at the very least phone. But I still couldn’t bear to break the spell.

  ‘Yeah, great, let’s have tea,’ I said.

  I thought Jasmine’s dad would be in the kitchen but there was no sign of him. Jasmine rummaged in the fridge, selecting stuff.

  ‘Where’s your dad, Jasmine?’ I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t come out to say hello. Why didn’t he want to know how she’d managed on her first day at the new school? Why didn’t he want to give me the once-over. My dad would have given any friend a twice- or even thrice-over.

  Jasmine shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He’s maybe at the theatre, checking stuff. There was a problem with the lighting. Or maybe he’s gone out with Georgia some-place. Whatever.’

  I couldn’t believe she said it so casually. The tea arrangements were casual too. There was lots of luxury food in the fridge, strawberries, special cheese, asparagus, fresh prawns, Greek yoghurt, chocolate éclairs, olives, ice cream, but not the makings of a proper meal. Jasmine didn’t seem bothered about proper meals. She’d had one nibble at her gift KitKat and hardly touched her school dinner. She’d just eaten a few chips and half an apple, that was all. She didn’t eat properly now even though she’d said she was starving. She fixed herself a fancy little mouse-meal, one prawn, three olives, six strawberries and half an éclair. No wonder she was so slender. Her wrists were so thin her bangles clinked right down to her knuckles and she was forever hitching them back into place.

  ‘Help yourself, Violet,’ she said.

  I was hungry enough to eat everything in the fridge but I matched my meal exactly to Jasmine’s.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’ she said, clanking the bottles in the fridge door. She brought out a gleaming green bottle. ‘White wine?’

  ‘You’re allowed to drink wine?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jasmine. ‘I prefer red though. We’ll have that, OK? Let’s take the food back into my bedroom, like a picnic.’

  I took both our plates back to the bedroom, worrying about the wine. I was going to be in serious enough trouble as it was when I eventually went home. If I was also drunk I’d be grounded for ever.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Jasmine, coming into her bedroom with two big blue glass goblets filled to the brim. She gave me one and clinked hers gently against mine. ‘Here’s to us,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, here’s to us,’ I echoed. I took a deep breath and sipped my drink. Jasmine burst out laughing. It was cranberry juice.

  We ate our tiny meal and drank our juice and listened to Lisa in the candlelight. Jasmine had strung Christmas tree fairy lights across the ceiling and now it was getting dark they twinkled red and green and blue and yellow. I felt as if I was in true Casper Dream fairyland.

  It got darker and darker, later and later. My heart thudded when I thought of Mum. Dad would be coming home soon. If I wasn’t back then he’d call out one of his police cars and start a search for me.

  ‘I think I’ll have to go home now, Jasmine.’

  ‘No, please. Not yet. We’re having fun,’ said Jasmine. ‘Look, I want to play you some of my other albums and show you all my drawings and stuff. Please stay.’

  ‘I want to,’ I said desperately, ‘but it’s really really late. I know it sounds pathetic but my mum will be so worried. You know what mums are like.’

  Jasmine pulled a face, pursing her soft lips. ‘Nope. Not my mum.’ She said it very lightly but her voice thickened, almost as if she was going to cry.

  ‘Your mum doesn’t worry?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, she worries all right. You should see her before a first night or a telly show. You can’t go near her. And she has all these little rituals. She has to wear a particular lipstick and line up her little glass animals in a certain way and swallow three sips of wine, like she’s totally nuts. This isn’t just when she’s got a main part, she gets just as fussed if she’s a fairy godmother in some silly panto or a rubbish role in a soap. And she worries about her hair and her wretched highlights and her botox injections and her tummy tuck and her boob job. She goes on and on about herself, and does she really look thin and should she go to power yoga or pilates classes?’ Jasmine was spitting out the words now, her fists clenched. ‘She worries all the time but she doesn’t worry about me. Well, she worries that her new guy makes too much fuss of me. He’s a creep, I can’t stick him, he dyes his hair blond and wanders round posing all the time, you’ve never seen such a plonker, and yet Miranda’s nuts about him. So she shoves me in boarding school out of the way, and she doesn’t even listen when I phone and tell her how I hate it. Thank God Dad rescued me.’

  ‘And are you happy now, with your dad?’ I whispered.

  ‘Yeah, of course. It’s great. I love my dad. He’s a truly super guy, not a bit like a dad. He doesn’t get all heavy or tell me what to do and he acts like he’s glad to have me around – but he’s not here often enough. It’s not his fault, he can’t help it with his job. He’s offered to fix me up with some sort of babysitter but I can’t stand that idea. I’m fine by myself. It’s not like he ever stays out all night, he always comes home, though sometimes it’s not till around midnight and it can get a bit weird just sitting all by myself. I know it’s daft but I get kind of . . . scared.’

  I gave her a big hug. Her long golden hair brushed my shoulders as if it was my hair too.

  ‘I’d get scared. Anyone would. Look, I’d give anything to stay with you, Jasmine—’

  ‘But you have to go.’

  ‘Maybe I can stay later another time. Even sleep over,’ I promised wildly. I gave her another hug and she hugged me back really hard, clinging to me.

  ‘We really are friends, aren’t we, Violet?’

  ‘Of course we are.’

  ‘Best friends?’

  ‘Best friends,’ I said.

  The two words flickered in my head like Jasmine’s fairy lights, glowing in jewel colours.

  Dear C.D.,

  I wonder what it’s like for you, drawing and painting your magic world all day long, fairies and phantoms flying above your head? You must lose all touch with reality.

  How do you cope when you come back to the real world?

  Maybe your real world is magical too. I know you’re very rich. I wonder what