Dustbin Baby Read online

  I couldn’t decide which was worse. I knew I was bad. I was still haunted by Pearl and every time she came near me in my dreams I’d give her another push. Now I was a thief too, up all hours with Gina night after night. The neighbourhood was fuming at all the break-ins. The police had visited the Children’s Home making general inquiries. I nearly wet myself when I saw the men in uniform but Gina stayed calm, answering every question with off-hand grunts and shrugs. Venetia and Rayanne were equally nonchalant.

  The boys all tried to be too smart, getting aggressive and alleging harassment. Gina grinned slyly, knowing they were the prime suspects.

  Nobody thought about me. I wasn’t even interviewed.

  I didn’t breathe a word about any of this during my therapy sessions. I played obediently with the weird dolls in the lady’s office, handling them gingerly because they all had very rude-looking realistic bottoms. I rearranged the dolls’ house, and put the mummy doll in the bath. I shut the daddy doll in the wardrobe. I twiddled the baby doll in my fingers. I couldn’t find a toy dustbin.

  I drew a dustbin with the lady’s felt-tip pens but she started watching me and I got worried. I turned the dustbin into a big vase and drew flowers all different colours. Red and yellow and blue and purple. Then I cried but the lady didn’t know why.

  Gina saw I’d been crying when I got back to the Children’s Home. I told her about Daffodil, Rose, Violet and Bluebell and how I still missed them. She thought I was daft carrying on about paper dolls that weren’t worth a penny. I just hung my head, snivelling.

  ‘Cheer up, April,’ she said.

  I tried but without much success.

  ‘I’ll cheer you up. You wait and see,’ said Gina.

  She went round the shops on Saturday without me. She came back with a clutch of Barbie dolls and thrust them into my hands.

  ‘There you are! Real dolls,’ Gina said triumphantly. ‘Much better than scrappy old paper dolls, eh?’

  I fingered their pointy fingers and pointy breasts and pointy feet. I still secretly mourned my flower girls but the Barbie dolls were wonderfully glamorous. I couldn’t play with them openly because Billy or Lulu would have wondered where on earth I’d got them from, but I had fantastic secret games with them in the wardrobe, the door just a little open to let in a chink of light. I pretended it was our house and Barbie-Ann and Barbie-Beth and Barbie-Chris and Barbie-Denise and I lived there together and styled each other’s hair and swopped clothes and shared secrets.

  Gina crawled into the wardrobe with me sometimes and played too. It was a bit of a squash because Gina was so big. She was impatient too, tugging the tiny outfits too hard and tearing seams but I couldn’t very well shut her out.

  One time one of the other girls got in; not Venetia or Rayanne, a sad, older girl called Claire with long straggly hair who wasn’t friends with anyone. No-one seemed to bother to speak to her. She can’t have been that old because she went to the Juniors too though she looked like a teenager. She acted it too, hanging round the big boys and letting them do whatever they wanted.

  Claire tried to make friends with me but Gina objected fiercely so that wasn’t possible. She still crept into my room every now and then and once caught me playing with the Barbie dolls. She gazed at me beseechingly but I didn’t dare invite her to join in my game in case Gina caught us.

  The next day the Barbie dolls went missing. They weren’t in their shoe-box bed at the back of the wardrobe. They hadn’t crawled into the rubbery hidey-holes of my trainers or Wellington boots though I tipped them up to check. They hadn’t hiked across the carpet on their tippy-toes to sneak a peak in my knicker drawer or play tents in my T-shirts. They weren’t peeping out of my dressing-gown pocket or doubled up in my pencil case. They weren’t anywhere at all though I searched and searched and searched.

  I knew Gina was going to go mad. She didn’t go mad at me. She went mad at Claire, deciding she was to blame, even though I hadn’t breathed a word that she’d seen the Barbies. She swore she didn’t know what Gina was on about, keeping to her story even when Gina seized a hank of her stringy hair and pulled hard. I believed her and begged Gina to stop, but no-one could stop Gina once she’d started. She slammed the poor girl against the wall and started searching through her bedroom, tearing it apart, ripping half her stuff. I started howling and Gina misunderstood.

  ‘Don’t you fret so, April. I’ll get your Barbies back for you,’ she said.

  She flapped the duvet in the air, tossed the pillows around and then seized the mattress. Claire squealed and Gina jerked it upwards triumphantly. There were the Barbies entombed underneath, each wrapped in a white paper tissue like a shroud.

  ‘I knew you had them, you dirty little thief,’ spat Gina. ‘Well, you’ll be sorry now.’

  Claire ended up very, very sorry, though I begged Gina to stop.

  Gina was a thief too, of course. She’d probably stolen the Barbie dolls herself. But that was different. She’d stolen them for me. That sort of stealing didn’t seem so bad when I was Sunnybank. It was the way you got things, the way you got your own back.

  It makes me feel bad now. I don’t want to think about it. So why am I getting on the wrong train at the station? Why am I going back to Sunnybank? Gina won’t be there now. She’ll be twenty-one, twenty-two. I can’t imagine her grown-up. I wonder what she’s doing now? Maybe she’s locked up.

  13

  IT’S TAKEN ME a while to find it. I was starting to think I’d maybe made it all up. But here it is. Here’s the gate with the sun’s rays. I run my finger up and down them as I stare in at the white house with the yellow door. I don’t feel anything. It’s as if I’m acting in a film. This is just a wooden gate. Sunnybank is simply a big house. Maybe it’s not even a Children’s Home now.

  Who am I kidding? There are toys littering the stubbly grass and bikes and skateboards are all over the porch. A battered mini-bus is parked in the driveway. I wonder if Billy still drives it?

  I don’t want to see him, or Lulu, even if they’re still around. The only one I’d love to see is Gina.

  I cried and cried when I had to leave Sunnybank. We got caught, Gina and me. Lulu and Billy were waiting up for us when we crept back into the house at dawn after a night’s burgling. It was Claire. She told them. There was no way we could lie our way out of it. Gina had a stack of CDs tucked down her jacket and three hundred pounds and a handkerchief full of gold jewellery in her pockets.

  So I got sent away to a special school. I don’t know why they didn’t send Gina away. Maybe she was too old or they felt she was too set in her ways. This new school was supposed to be giving me a new chance.

  I didn’t want to go but no-one listened to me. That’s the scariest thing of all about being in care. You don’t get to choose. You just get shoved here, sent away there.

  I felt I was being chucked out of Sunnybank because they’d got sick of me. I wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with Gina that last week. There certainly weren’t any more midnight jaunts. There was a new padlock and an alarm system put on the front door, the back door, even the windows. Lulu had a new regime too, getting up in the small hours to check we were all safely in our beds.

  I waited until she’d padded round everyone. Then I crept out and went in search of Gina. I climbed into her bed and she gave me a big cuddle and called me her baby. I cried and I think Gina cried a bit too, because her cheek was wet when she gave me a kiss. We stayed cuddled up tight, me on Gina’s lap, until morning.

  I never saw her again. She did write to me once at the school but she wasn’t really much of a letter writer so she just drew me a picture and signed her name very elaborately, swirls all down the page and then added lots of kisses.

  I wrote to her every week for the first year even though I gave up hoping for further replies.

  Maybe I could write just one more time. The Sunnybank staff might have Gina’s address. I open the sun gate and walk up the path. I stare at the door and then give the knocker