Lottie Project Read online

  I mostly stuck to reading horror stories, the spookier and scarier the better, but I wanted to find out more about this Esther.

  ‘What happens to her? Does she keep her baby? Does she get a job? She doesn’t get married at the end, does she?’

  ‘I haven’t got that far yet. OK, you can borrow it after me. Or some of my other books if you want. I’ve got a whole lot of Victorian ones sorted out because of my project.’

  ‘Oh, Jamie, you would!’ I said. Then I suddenly realized this was my golden opportunity. ‘So, I might come round to your famous Victorian house sometime and see your books. What number Oxford Terrace, eh?’

  ‘Number sixty-two,’ said Jamie.

  I felt my stomach squeeze. Number 62. Jo’s Rosen family lived at Number 58, next door but one to Jamie. What if he saw her going into their house? What if Jamie’s mum nipped along the road to have a cup of coffee with Mrs Rosen when Jo was dashing around with a duster? What if Jamie’s mum thought Jo looked dead handy with a hoover and offered her a job? I was proud that she was working so hard but I couldn’t stand the idea of her cleaning all Jamie’s junk.

  ‘Has your mum got her own cleaning lady?’ I blurted out before I could stop myself.

  Jamie blinked at me, baffled. ‘What? Why? Are you scared you’ll get all dusty if you come round to my house?’ he said.

  ‘Does your mum do her own dusting?’ I persisted.

  ‘No. Mum’s hopeless at any sort of housework. We did have a cleaning lady once but then she got ill and—’

  ‘You’re not looking for another one, are you?’ I asked, horrified.

  ‘My dad does the housework now. The hoovering and that. Mum might do the bathroom, and I’m supposed to do some stuff, me and my brother, only we skive off mostly. Why?’

  I shrugged elaborately. ‘I – I’ve got interested in the whole idea of housework and stuff because of my servant project,’ I said.

  Angela and Lisa put their heads round the classroom door.

  ‘Come on, Charlie. Playtime’s nearly over. What are you doing?’ said Angela.

  ‘Of course, we don’t want to interrupt anything if you and Jamie are busy,’ said Lisa, giggling.

  ‘I’m coming,’ I said, charging over to them.

  But then that idiotic Jamie put his great big foot in it. ‘So, you’re coming round to my house after school tonight, right?’ he said, in front of Lisa and Angela. Their mouths dropped open. Mine did too.

  ‘Wrong!’ I said, and rushed off.

  Lisa and Angela rushed too.

  ‘We were just kidding you before. But you really have got a thing going with Jamie, haven’t you?’ said Angela.

  ‘You’re going round to his house!’ said Lisa. ‘Oh, I do wish Dave would ask me round to his house.’

  ‘I’m not going round to Jamie Edwards’s house,’ I insisted. ‘He was just going on about these boring boring boring Victorian books and he seemed to think I was mad enough to want to look at them, that’s all.’ My heart was thumping a bit as I said it. I knew I was kind of twisting the truth. But I had to stop Lisa and Angela getting the wrong idea once and for all.

  So all that day I sent them notes under the quivering Beckworth nose as often as I dared, with silly caricatures of Jamie and rude little rhymes about him. Jamie saw his name and must have thought I was writing a note to him. He peered over my arm and read it. I’d just written a very rude bit about him. (Sorry: far too rude to be repeated where adults like Miss Beckworth might whip this book out of your hands at any minute!) Jamie read the very rude bit. He blinked. He didn’t look baffled this time. He looked upset.

  Still, it was his own fault, wasn’t it? He shouldn’t have been nosy enough to read my private note. I passed it to Angela and she cracked up with silent laughter and then she passed it on to Lisa and she read it and snorted out loud and had to protest to Miss Beckworth that she had a horrible cold and couldn’t help it. Lisa and Angela and I all fell about helplessly when we came out of school.

  I certainly didn’t go round to Jamie’s house after school. Lisa and I went round to Angela’s house first because her big brother had just got some dead flash roller blades for his birthday and we were hoping we’d get to her home from our school a good half-hour before he got back from his school, so we could all maybe have a sneaky go on his blades. But he’d got wise to Angela’s wily ways and installed a brand-new padlock on his bedroom cupboard. We found his old skateboard stacked in a corner but we weren’t really into skateboarding any more, and anyway, one of the wheels was all wobbly.

  Angela’s mum was doing a day shift at the hospital so she couldn’t fix us anything exciting to eat so we all went round to Lisa’s instead. That was far more promising, because Lisa’s mum was being a hostess for a jewellery party that evening and so she was making all these fiddly little vol-au-vents and tarts. She let us sample them while she got busy icing a cake. Lisa wanted us to go straight up to her bedroom, but I hung around her mum for a bit, watching how she did the icing with this natty little squeezy bag.

  ‘I always wondered how people wrote those little messages,’ I said. ‘Is it difficult?’

  ‘No, pet, it’s easy as anything,’ said Lisa’s mum, and when she had finished she let me practise icing these cookies she’d baked. I iced my name and then Lisa’s and then Angela’s. That was dead crafty, because we got to eat them!

  I asked Lisa’s mum how she made the cake and she thought I was angling for a slice of that too.

  ‘Sorry, pet. I’m saving it for the ladies at my party. Hey, maybe your mother would like to come?’ She hesitated. ‘I mean, just for the chit-chat at the party. I know she’s not really in a position to buy any jewellery right this moment.’

  ‘She goes to bed really early now. Because she has to get up at five for this new job,’ I said.

  Lisa’s mum’s smooth face went into a crease of pain.

  ‘Oh my goodness. She’s being so brave,’ she said, as if Jo went and wrestled with a pit of poisonous snakes instead of one unwieldy industrial cleaner.

  ‘But I really would like to know how to make a sponge cake like that. We don’t make cakes at home,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s so simple. And really not very expensive. Tell your mother you just need to put the butter and the sugar and the flour in the blender and—’

  ‘No, we haven’t got a blender.’

  Lisa’s mum stared as if I’d said we hadn’t got a kitchen.

  ‘Oh. Well. I suppose you could mix it all by hand. I know!’ She went to her shelf of cookery books beside the spice rack and pulled out an old fat book; the pages had gone a little yellow. She flicked through it.

  ‘Aha! This was my mother’s cookery book. She certainly didn’t have a blender. Yes, there’s a whole section on cake-making. Do you think your mother would like to borrow it?’

  ‘It’s not for Jo, it’s for me. I’d love to borrow it,’ I said eagerly. ‘I want to suss out how to make cakes. Proper ones, not the packet sort.’

  ‘Well, good for you. I wish my Lisa would get interested in cookery. You’re a strange girl, Charlie. You’ve always seemed such a tomboy. I never thought you’d get keen on cake-making. Still, you’re all getting older. It’s only natural you’re changing.’

  ‘I’m not changing,’ I said quickly.

  ‘What’s that saying? “Too old for toys but too young for boys.” Though my Lisa has certainly started on boys already. It’s Dave this and Dave that until we’re sick of the sound of him! Which boy do you like, Charlie?’

  ‘None of them,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Give it another six months,’ said Lisa’s mum, smiling at me.

  I had to stay polite because she’d just lent me the cookery book but when I got home to Jo I moaned like anything.

  ‘She’s treating me like I’m retarded or something,’ I said. ‘Like I still play with my Barbie dolls.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Barbie dolls?’ said Jo.

  She used to buy me lot