Little Darlings Read online

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she says, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘It’s just I so hoped we might stay with Danny for a day or so, and that he’d be so thrilled to see what a lovely girl you are he’d maybe want to buy you stuff, be like a proper father to you.’

  ‘I’ve got a proper mother. I don’t want him for a father, not now.’

  ‘No, no, you mustn’t take that attitude, babes. Don’t blame him. If he’d realized you were there then he’d have been so thrilled. It was just that Suzy – and it’s clear that she’s really, really insecure.’

  ‘Really, really a prize cow,’ I say. ‘You know what, Mum? I feel truly sorry for Sunset. Imagine having Suzy for your mother!’

  Mum gives me a wan smile. ‘Yeah, it beats me what Danny sees in her,’ she says. ‘OK, sweetheart, I’m off now. Try to get to bed early. You need to catch up on your sleep.’

  She gives me a kiss. When I look in the mirror again I see a ghost red mouth on my cheek. I finish my toasted cheese and Mum’s portion too, and then I prowl around the house, too wired up to sit and watch television. I think about Sunset in her great big mansion. She’ll have one of those televisions as big as a cinema screen. Perhaps there’s one in every room in the house. There must be so many rooms. Would they really use them all? I imagine sitting for ten minutes on a huge leather sofa in one room, then walking to the next room and curling up in a big velvet chair, then two minutes later going to loll on a Victorian chaise longue, changing seats dozens of times throughout the evening, with kitchen intervals to fix myself snacks.

  Perhaps she has a whole suite of bedrooms too – one for each day of the week, with individual themes and colour schemes. I think up an ultra-girly pink room with rosebuds in pink glass vases and pink teddies and a candy-striped duvet and Sunset’s very own pink candyfloss machine. Then I invent a blue room with blue fairy lights and a blue moon painted on the ceiling and an en suite blue bath with dark-blue dolphin taps. I decide on a sunshine room with a huge cage of singing canaries and big bowls of bananas and smiley suns all over the walls, and by contrast an entirely black room with a black velvet duvet and black satin sheets and an enormous black toy panther curled up on top. Then she might have a Victorian room with a four-poster bed and a scrap screen and a rocking horse, or an ultra-modern room with elegantly stark furniture and odd glowing lamps and a trapeze hanging from the ceiling. Best of all, she could have a round bedroom with a soft curved bed and shelves of round Russian dolls and a little trapdoor in the middle of the room, so that when she gets hot she can put on her swimming costume, open the trapdoor, and slide all the way down to a turquoise swimming pool in the basement.

  I get my homework jotter out of my school bag, tear out a page, and do tiny drawings of each bedroom, so that I’ll remember each one.

  Then I go into my own bedroom. I look up at the big damp patch on the ceiling (the roof leaks every time it rains). I look down at the fraying carpet squares on the floor. I look at my old bed with my faded duvet bears waving wanly at me.

  I go to bed but I can’t get to sleep. I toss and turn for hours until I hear Mum’s key in the lock at last. I hear her tiptoeing about in the dark.

  ‘It’s OK, Mum, I’m still awake,’ I call.

  ‘You’re a bad girl then. Go to sleep at once!’ says Mum, but she’s not really cross.

  She takes off her clothes and crawls into my bed, and we spend the night huddled together under Pinky and Bluey. Neither of us sleeps much, even though we’re exhausted. Mum gets up first and brings me a cup of tea on a tray – but I don’t want to wake up now.

  ‘I’ve set your alarm for eight. Promise you’ll get up then,’ Mum frets, sipping her tea as she gets dressed. ‘Destiny? Promise!’

  ‘Maybe,’ I mumble, sliding back down under the duvet.

  ‘You do as you’re told,’ says Mum, prodding me. ‘Come on, babe, promise me you’ll go to school. No bunking off. You’re going to get a good education if it kills me.’

  She has to leave or she’ll be late for her cleaning job at the uni. It’s a good forty-minute walk to the campus but at least she’s not in her high heels now, she’s in her old trainers – though she’s still blistered from yesterday.

  ‘I wish you didn’t have to walk so far, Mum,’ I say, propping myself up on one elbow.

  ‘You’ll be walking there yourself in a few years’ time,’ Mum says. ‘Doing some fancy degree course. If you get a good education.’

  I sigh. ‘OK, OK. Don’t nag.’

  ‘That’s what mothers are for,’ she says. She gives me a kiss goodbye. She sings the usual verse from a Danny song: ‘Goodbye, my babe, it’s time to go, don’t wanna leave, I love you soooo.’

  I generally sing along with her but I shut up this time. When my alarm goes off at eight I shuffle around the house eating cornflakes straight out of the packet. I stop and stare at each Danny poster on the living-room wall. There are so many we don’t need wallpaper. I look at the biggest poster, a young Danny striking a pose, head back, singing into his mike. My Destiny is printed at the top.

  I suddenly tug hard on the poster and it falls down with a crash, the edges tearing, lumpy with dried Blu-Tack.

  ‘I don’t want to be your Destiny, you silly old fart,’ I say, kicking the poster.

  Then I pick up my school bag and slam out of the door, turning the key and then slipping its string down my neck, under my school blouse. I’d give anything not to go, but I promised Mum.

  I go the long way round, of course. If I took the short cut through the estate, someone would be sure to spot me and they’d start chasing me. There are two major gangs on the estate, the Flatboys and the Speedos. They’re silly baby names but they’re not all little boys playing at being baddies. Some of the bigger guys carry knives, real serious flick knives, not kids’ penknives. Jack Myers is in my class and his eldest brother is the leader of the Flatboys. The Speedos captured him recently, and when he swore at them they cut him down his arm and tattooed him on either side of his eyes with a lead pencil to show he was a marked man. So then the Flatboys caught one of the Speedo kids and hung him by the ankles from the top-floor balcony and very nearly dropped him.

  The Flatboys and the Speedos mostly pick on each other. They don’t often hurt girls, but you never know. Both gangs would go after me because I’m a Maisie. They call me that because our house is one of the maisonettes around the edge of the estate. Everyone hates the Maisies and thinks we’re snobs. You’re especially hated if you own your house instead of renting.

  So I trudge all the way round the outside of the Bilefield Estate. My school shoes are too small for me and cramp my toes but I don’t want to tell Mum because she’ll only worry.

  I hope she’s feeling better now. My own stomach cramps thinking about her. I try to remember Sunset’s seven different bedrooms to distract myself. I count them on my fingers. Then I make up different outfits for her. It’s almost as if she’s walking along beside me, keeping me company. She isn’t wearing any of her cool designer clothes, she’s in her pyjamas and huge fleece, and she’s a bit embarrassed about it too, but I promise I’ll flatten anyone who dares tease her. I can do that, easy-peasy, with most of the kids in my class. Well, I’m a bit wary of Jack Myers and Rocky Samson and some of the other boys already in Flatboys/Speedo gangs, but I’m just as tough as any of the girls, even Angel Thomas, and she’s twice my size and should have been christened Devil Thomas. I can fight and be really mouthy if I want, but most of the time I’m dead quiet at school. I don’t even talk to the teachers much.

  I liked my last school more, especially the teacher I had in Year Five, Miss Pendle. She lent me storybooks and gave me a gold star in literacy and said I had a Wonderful Imagination. I didn’t even mind when the other kids teased me for being a teacher’s pet. I wanted to be Miss Pendle’s pet. But now I’m in Year Six at Bilefield and I’m still looked on as the new girl. I’m not really anyone’s friend. The Year Six teacher