Lola Rose Read online

  I held my breath, waiting for the scabby kid to sneer. Surprisingly no one seemed to think it sissy to go and play house. When I led Kendall over I found two little boys and one little girl crouched inside, having a tea party.

  ‘Do you want tea or coffee?’ the little girl asked, laying a place for Kendall with her blue plastic tea set.

  ‘Coffee. Black. And a ciggie too,’ said Kendall.

  ‘Coming right up,’ she said, pouring imaginary coffee and lighting an invisible cigarette for him.

  Kendall took it from her and inhaled thin air with appreciation. ‘Thanks, babe,’ he said.

  Ms Denby and Ms Balsam and I were in silent stitches. Ms Denby gave me a thumbs-up sign. I nodded and went off with Ms Balsam. She patted my shoulder.

  ‘There, he’s settled in already,’ she said.

  We both knew it might not be so easy for me. I felt sick when we walked into the Year Six classroom. I thought I was quite tall but lots of the girls were much bigger than me, and so grown-up! They wore tight designer tops that showed their figures, and they had elaborate plaited hairstyles and nose rings and fantastic fingernails.

  OK, not all the girls. There were a couple of little scruffy twitchy girls who looked sad. Then there were a clump of girls with big headscarves who all sat together. There was another Asian girl sitting by herself. She had her hair in a long glossy plait and when she grinned she had a gap in her front teeth. She was grinning at me.

  She came up to me at play time. ‘I love your jacket!’ she said, stroking it admiringly. ‘I’m Harpreet. What’s your name again? Lola?’

  ‘Lola Rose.’

  ‘Cool name!’

  I didn’t need to worry. I wasn’t sad old Jayni who got picked on.

  I was cool Lola Rose in her fantastic furry jacket.

  So now we were the Luck family – Victoria, Kendall and Lola Rose – and we had a whole new life going for us. It was strange how quickly it stopped feeling new. After a few weeks it was weird thinking back to the old life. I didn’t feel fussed when someone asked me my name and wanted to know where I lived. I felt like I’d been Lola Rose for ever. I could have grown up in Flexley Park and been at Larkrise Primary all my school life.

  Harpreet was the sort of best friend I’d always longed for. We sat next to each other in class and helped each other with all our work. She was brilliant at maths and IT and science. I’m OK at English and better at art so it worked a treat.

  Ms Balsam did do a special collage lesson! She brought in a huge pile of old magazines for us to cut up. She suggested we do a picture with a family theme. Harpreet flipped through a big glossy magazine, trying to find photos of people who looked like her family. She had a huge family – her mum and dad, a little sister, a big sister, two big brothers, and hundreds of aunties and uncles and cousins and her grandma and grandpa out in India. She started moaning because all the people in the photos were too pink.

  ‘You can colour them with brown felt pen if you like. Or maybe you can find stuff that kind of represents your family,’ I said.

  ‘Like what?’ said Harpreet.

  ‘Like . . . you could find someone with a big smiley mouth and cut it out and then find a white rabbit and a top hat and that could be your dad,’ I said. I loved Harpreet’s funny dad. He made a big fuss of me and did all these daft conjuring tricks, pretending to find eggs behind my ears and a string of coloured hankies from the sleeve of my new jacket.

  ‘What about his body?’ said Harpreet, who didn’t quite get it.

  ‘You don’t need to show the actual people. Look, your mum could be represented by lots of gold jewellery and a television set because she can’t miss any of her soaps. Your brother Amrit could be a state-of-the-art computer, right?’

  ‘What shall I be?’ said Harpreet.

  ‘You can be sweets and a long plait and lots of little numbers because you’re good at maths and you could find two linked hands and colour friendship bracelets round the wrists and they could be you and me.’

  ‘You have such good ideas, Lola Rose,’ said Harpreet. ‘I’m so lucky having you as my friend.’

  I helped Harpreet stick all her family on a bright pink background with a border of red hearts and yellow flowers. We outlined everything with a gold glitter pen. It looked lovely.

  ‘I can’t wait to show Dad,’ said Harpreet. ‘I bet he’ll frame it and hang it in the lounge.’ She paused. ‘What about your dad, Lola Rose?’

  ‘I haven’t got one,’ I said. I selected a large piece of turquoise paper for my own collage.

  ‘You must have had a dad once,’ said Harpreet. ‘What’s that blue for? Is that going to be sky?’

  ‘It’s going to be water,’ I said.

  I cut out a pink girl and added bright yellow hair way down past her waist. I fashioned a tail from a photo of green grass and made her into a mermaid. I cut little red roses for her hair and wound them round and round her long tail in a garland. I stuck her up at the top of the water, waving to a little green frog leaping up and down on a lily pad.

  I searched for a woman pretty enough to be Mum but I couldn’t find one, so I turned a beautiful white statue into a water nymph. I added lots more golden curls and inked tiny black musical notes coming out of her parted lips.

  I cut out more red roses, a great fluttering drift of them, and stuck them in a big red heart round the mermaid and the frog and the statue. It looked like it was keeping them safe. The rest of the blue paper looked a bit bare so I stuck on some buried treasure and a little aeroplane sailing like a ship and ice lollies swimming along like a shoal of fish.

  I wanted to stop there, but I couldn’t. I cut out a shark from a nature magazine. I didn’t like touching it with my fingers even though I knew it was only paper. I didn’t want it in my picture. I wanted to rip it into little bits. But I stuck it down right at the very bottom of the page. It was looking up up up through the water at the three people caged in the heart.

  ‘That looks scary,’ said Harpreet.

  It did look much too scary. I tried to ease the shark off the paper but the glue stuck fast. I tried pulling.

  ‘Don’t rip up your lovely picture!’ said Harpreet. ‘You’ll spoil it.’

  ‘I don’t like the shark,’ I said. ‘I’m going to cover him up.’

  I found a picture of some houses. I started cutting out a whole row of them, complete with little gardens. ‘I’m going to have an underwater buried village,’ I said.

  I arranged it right along the bottom of the page, covering up every tooth and fin and scale. I put shells and seaweed hedges in the gardens and stuck anchors on the top of every roof as television aerials. I stuck and stuck until the bottom of my picture was twice as thick as the top, but it didn’t stop me worrying about the shark swimming silently in and out the windows and doors, looking for his family.

  I dreamt about the shark at night. I couldn’t get back to sleep, even though I huddled close to Mum.

  I hated her being out so much. I put Kendall to bed about eight but I stayed up until Mum came home, even though she sometimes didn’t make it back till midnight.

  ‘You should go to sleep, Lola Rose, you silly girl,’ Mum said, rubbing her finger under my eyes. ‘Look at these dark circles. You look like a little panda. You’re a bad bad girl.’

  But she didn’t get cross with me. She was always in a good mood now when she came home from the pub. It wasn’t just the drinks her customers bought her. I was scared she might have started a thing with the manager, Barry. She seemed to be very thick with him, especially since they had a karaoke night and Mum sang a special Kylie medley.

  ‘He said I’m every bit as good as Kylie – and he said my bum’s just as good as hers too,’ Mum said, dancing round the bedroom in her underwear.

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘He says he might give me a regular singing spot. He’s got this mad idea that I could stand on top of the bar counter and prance round a bit.’ Mum waggled her bum and held her hairbrush like a