Dustbin Baby Read online

  I could ask Gina if I could use her phone. I want to. But I can’t. Marion will want to know where I am. If she finds out I’ve bunked off school she’ll go really mad.

  I could tell her I’m at Cathy’s or Hannah’s. But then she’ll want to come round to collect me. It’s too complicated.

  I won’t phone her but I’ll go home straight away and I’ll tell her how sorry I am and I’ll make it up to her somehow.

  ‘I’d better get going, Gina. My foster mum will be wondering where I’ve got to.’

  ‘You’re a good girl, April,’ says Gina.

  I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad.

  Gina gives me a huge hug when we say goodbye. I cling to her, wishing I was as little as Benjamin so she could carry me around all day.

  ‘You’ll keep in touch now, babe,’ says Gina. ‘Write to me? I’ll write back properly this time, I promise.’

  I go down in the smelly little lift, trying not to cry. When I get out into the courtyard and look up I see Gina standing way up on the balcony. She’s clutching Benjamin tightly with both hands so she can’t wave but she bobs her head at me and he does too. They look like two dark flowers blowing in the wind.

  Gina’s a wonderful mum.

  I wonder if my mum ever got a second chance.

  14

  I’VE GOT TO go home.

  I’m on the tube, on my way to Waterloo. I’ll make up some story for Marion. I’ve made up stories for me enough times.

  This story doesn’t have a happy ending. I haven’t found her.

  No that’s silly. I’ve found two great friends, a new one and an old one. I’ve found my very first foster mother and the grave of my adoptive mother. I’ve found so many people today – but I still feel lost. Lonelier than ever. There’s only one person I want.

  How can I ever find her? She could be anywhere at all. Like looking for a needle in a haystack. Tealeaf in a dustbin.

  The Dustbin Baby.

  There’s one more place.

  I have a Travelcard. I can journey on from Waterloo.

  Or I can go home to Marion.

  I’m no good at making decisions. When I first went to live with Marion I couldn’t even choose what I wanted for tea. You didn’t get a choice at Fairleigh. You just got your baked beans or your scrambled eggs – splat – on your plastic platter. You got iced buns afterwards on a Friday, for a treat, pink ones with jam or white ones with currants or yellow ones with a cherry on top but I was such a slow eater they’d mostly all gone by the time I’d cleared my platter. You had to finish all your main course. It was one of the rules. Sometimes I got a big girl called Julie to eat mine for me, surreptitiously shovelling forkfuls from my plate as well as hers, but then she got friendly with an anorexic girl who paid her twenty pence a plate so Julie concentrated on helping her out instead.

  I don’t need to go on a nostalgic trip back to Fairleigh. I lived there five years, longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere else. I didn’t even go away any place in the holidays, apart from one sad summer camp for children with special needs, where I mostly helped the helpers.

  Marion and I are going on holiday this summer. Italy. Five days doing all the culture and history and art stuff, but then five days by the sea for me.

  ‘It’s only fair. It’s your holiday as much as mine,’ she said.

  She is fair, even though she’s so fussy. It’s getting so late. What am I going to do if she’s phoned Cathy or Hannah and they tell her I wasn’t at school? I wish I was at Cathy’s or Hannah’s now. I mostly feel so ordinary with them. We have a laugh together and a moan about the teachers and a sigh about boys and a wail about our hair/spots/figures. We might talk about what we want to happen in our lives but we never talk about who we are or where we come from.

  They’re the friends I’ve always longed for. I had friends at Fairleigh but they were odd friends, sad girls, bad girls, mad girls – like me. That’s why we got sent there. It’s a school for vulnerable girls: girls constantly in trouble; girls with special needs; girls with learning difficulties; girls in distress. We were all lumped together and dressed alike in our blue-and-white checked dresses and blue blazers. We were all given identical teddy bears with blue knitted jerseys to take to bed at night.

  During the day we were put into very small classes so we could have individual attention. I didn’t want attention. I wanted to hide inside myself and keep out of trouble. There were quite a few Down’s girls at the school like Esme back at Big Mo’s. I made friends with a very kind Down’s girl in my year, called Poppy. She loved sweets. She bought a lollipop every day from the school tuckshop.

  ‘I’m Lollipoppy,’ she’d chortle, over and over, sounding so funny and daft she got me giggling too.

  I wanted to sit beside Poppy in classes and do colouring with her big wax crayons. She had special alphabet pictures. I thought how peaceful it would be to colour in ‘A is for Apple, B is for Baby, C is for Cat’, but I had to do sums and science and stories. I didn’t know how to add up or experiment or invent so I was useless at first. I thought it was because I was simply thick. I didn’t realize it was because I’d been in and out of so many schools I’d missed out on learning all the really basic stuff.

  They did their best to remedy this at Fairleigh. After a term or two I felt as if someone had stuck a pair of strong spectacles on my nose. I could see straight at last. It wasn’t comfortable. I preferred seeing inside my own head. There wasn’t time to daydream now. I had to think, to work things out, to come up with answers.

  Maths and Science and Technology stayed a struggle but I liked English and I loved History. Miss Bean made it fun. She was older than the other teachers and she looked a sight in terrible hand-knitted jumpers in pastel colours, baby blue and pale pink and insipid lilac. We all called her the Beanie Baby – but not to her face.

  No-one dared be naughty in Miss Bean’s class. She was much stricter than the other teachers. She nagged me something rotten. ‘Try, April!’, ‘Come along, think’, ‘No this isn’t good enough, you can do better than that’. But sometimes she could make things magic. Especially History.

  We did the Romans and she let us take the sheets off our beds to wrap round us like togas. We had a Roman feast with wine (Ribena) and all sorts of sweetmeats (Miss Bean provided home-made fudge and toffee and coconut ice, plus an extra lollipop to keep Poppy happy). We made our own special model of the Colosseum (she showed us photos of it from her summer holiday in Rome) with tiny cardboard Romans and wild animals and Christian martyrs. I felt a pang seeing these little cardboard figures, remembering poor Bluebell, Rose, Daffodil and Violet, but I quickly entered into the spirit of the thing. I fashioned some especially ferocious wild animals and then cut out a champion gladiator with a gilt-sprayed toothpick sword in his clenched fist.

  ‘Well done, April!’ cried Miss Bean.

  I really came into my own when we did the Victorians. I settled down happily to making an elaborate Victorian villa out of a big cardboard box and a stack of cornflake packets, copying the details from the pictures in the Victorian history books in the library – but some of the slower girls got everything mixed up and wanted another toga party with wine.

  ‘No, no, that was the Romans. They lived hundreds and hundreds of years before the Victorians,’ said Miss Bean.

  They still couldn’t get it. It was all History to them. The Victorians were every bit as ancient as the Romans.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ said Miss Bean. ‘We’ll all do our family trees and then you’ll see that your very own great-great-great grandmothers were Victorians.’

  I kept very still. I didn’t join in the silly jokes about family trees and Great-Auntie Oak and Grandpa Maple. I didn’t even pick up my pen. I sat with my hands clasped in my lap, my nails digging into my palms.

  Miss Bean bobbed around the class in her baby-blue jumper, giving advice here and there. She printed ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ in pencil on Poppy’s piece of paper and Poppy traced ov