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  Ella’s hands were already scrambling over her face as Nancy turned to look at her. “Ewww! And what’s suppurating mean?”

  “It means to produce a discharge of pus,” I explained patiently before I gave her the swift once over. “Urgh! What are those weird stains on your legs?” All four of us turned to look at Nancy’s white jeans. I could have pointed out that when your arse is the size of a mountain, white jeans are not your friend, but it would have been too easy. No finesse to it. “It kinda looks like . . . no, it’s too gross, but have you wet yourself?”

  Now it was Ella’s turn to “Ewwww!” as Nancy cast a horrified look downward. “No! It’s just . . . It’s the streetlights, they make everything look yellow-y.”

  “Whatever you say, sweetie.” With all signs of rebellion firmly squashed, I could enjoy the rest of my chips in peace.

  It had been a long and strange night, but it wasn’t until I was curled up in my bed next to Dot, with a very subdued Nancy and Ella on the floor beside us, that I realized how bone-weary I was.

  I could feel my eyelids drooping before Dot even switched the light off. There wasn’t even time to tell Nancy that she was snoring, even though she wasn’t, before I fell asleep.

  We were on a plane, which was strange because the only time I can remember flying was the year we lived in America when Dad was teaching at Amherst College. Usually we’d load up the car and have to spend two sticky days driving to fricking Umbria to be bored godholy.

  But we were on a plane. Mum and I were on a plane, and I was small enough that my feet didn’t touch the ground, and I was wearing this pink flowery dress from when I was little.

  She was holding my hand tightly, the weight of her wedding ring digging into me, but I didn’t want to tell her that she was hurting me, otherwise she’d let go.

  “You have to be brave, Bella,” she said soothingly. “Have to get used to flying. Here, have some peanuts.”

  Then this little bag of nuts suddenly materialized on my lap and we both sat there and looked at it. She unpeeled her fingers from my tight grasp so she could pick up the nuts and rustle them enticingly.

  “Go on,” she urged me. “Open them.”

  It took ages to tear into the bag, my sweaty hands fumbling with the plastic, and when I finally tore them open, there weren’t nuts inside but these dried-up insects that suddenly swelled into life and started climbing out of the packet.

  I turned to Mum and—oh, God, not again! —I couldn’t scream or speak or even whisper. She peered over at the rapidly multiplying cockroaches and spiders and insects bursting out of the bag and crawling all over me. Furry feet skittering up my arms.

  “Oh, Belle, now what have you done?” She sighed wearily. “It’s no use pulling those faces. It’s not you they’re after.”

  And she was right because I was just the climbing frame they were using to get to her. I tried to brush them off her, I really did. But my hands hung limply by my side, and I tried to call for help, attract the attention of a stewardess, but no one would look at me.

  “It’s all right,” she said, sitting there calmly, even though there were tiny rivulets of blood streaming from her face and her neck and her arms as the insects bit at her. “Worse things happen at sea, don’t they? Or should that be worse things happen in the air? I told you not to open the bag but you never listen.”

  I could feel her blood dripping onto me as she suddenly lurched to one side. . . .

  “Is! Jesus! Wake up!”

  There was this strangled yelping noise and as I opened my eyes, I realized it was coming from me.

  “Nance, get her a glass of water. Is, are you all right?” Dot touched a hand to my face. “You’re really hot.”

  I struggled upright and balled my hands into little fists so nobody would see them shaking. “Just had a bad dream. I’m fine,” I said in this scratchy voice.

  Ella was hovering by the bed, which looked like it had been caught in a hurricane: duvet on the floor, pillows scrunched up. “We thought you were having some kind of fit,” she reported gleefully. “Is there, like, epilepsy in your family?”

  There were icy fingers clutched around my heart and squeezing it so tight that it was forced to beat in this frantic rhythm. “No. I had too much to drink,” I snapped, and I hated that it came out all quavery. “Made me have a nightmare, that’s all. Sorry about the bed, Dot,” I added, and she sat down next to me and shrugged.

  “It’s okay, worse things happen at sea. God, now you’ve gone really pale. Shall I go and wake your dad up?”

  I closed my eyes in the hope that when I opened them, Dot and Ella would have disappeared. No such luck. “Really, I’m okay.”

  Nancy padded back in with a glass of water. Knowing her, she’d probably spat in it. “There you are,” she said without a shred of sympathy. “I’m never going to get back to sleep after that.”

  “Yeah, can you say drama queen?” Ella snickered and I knew what she was thinking: that with my hair all sticking up, face drained as I tried not to drop the glass, I wasn’t anyone special. Wasn’t someone you had to respect.

  I placed the glass on the nightstand and got to my feet so I could help Dot straighten up the bedclothes.

  “I mean, it’s not really normal, Is, this whole Exorcist routine. Maybe you should see someone,” Nancy suggested with saccharine sweetness as she snuggled down on the nest she’d made out of sofa cushions and blankets. “You might be going mad. Delayed reaction and shit. I’ve read something about it.”

  “Yeah, like post-traumatic stress syndrome,” Ella piped up. “Would probably explain why your cute boy radar has got seriously malfunctioned because, y’know, you’ve gone insane.”

  “Well, I might be going insane but you’ve always been retarded,” I snapped, practically hurling myself back under the covers. “And if you’ve all finished diagnosing my mental condition maybe we could get some sleep.”

  The three of them were snoring happily within minutes of turning off the light, and I had to lie there on my back, limbs rigid, counting the shadows on the ceiling because I was too scared to go back to sleep.

  Thankfully, Nancy had to piss off at the crack of dawn because she goes to this lame drama group on Saturday mornings in the vain belief that she has star quality. And that meant that Ella slunk off behind her because without Nancy there, she’d have to take some serious shit from me for the big can of whupass she tried to open last night.

  It wasn’t until Dot and I were finally alone that I could let out the breath I’d been holding.

  “I thought they’d never go,” she said feelingly, turning and giving me a tired smile. “I know we’re all friends and stuff, but sometimes I really don’t like them.”

  “They’re a pair of evil little trolls,” I admitted with a wry twist of my lips. “But you know what they say. Keep your friends close . . .”

  “And your enemies closer,” Dot finished for me and because it was her and we’d been friends for ages, I let her put her arm around me and we shuffled toward the kitchen so we could eat our body weight in toast and scrambled eggs.

  We sat there in a silence that didn’t have claws for once. Just me and Dot hanging without the gang, like we used to when life was simpler and we were eight and there were Barbie dolls and Jammie Dodgers and we really thought that if you were nice to people they’d be nice right back to you. Then we grew up and got over it.

  That’s why I let Dot come along for the ride. Even though she’s really built for better than being one of my evil henchmen.

  She knows me, the real me, no matter how deep I’ve buried her. Which is another reason why we’re still friends. She’s got far too much on me to ever let her kick it freestyle.

  She looked up and gave me a smile. “Just like old times, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. Wanna braid my hair after this?”

  “So, okay, I want to know what’s going on with you,” she said calmly, ignoring my feeble attempt at humor. “It’s like Isabel ha
s left the building. No, it’s more than that. Even when you’re here, you’re not here. You know what I mean?”

  “Not really,” I replied, and gingerly speared a little heap of egg with my fork.

  “Is,” she tried again, this time with a lowered voice for added dramatic emphasis. “I know that you’ve got stuff going on, but I’m here for you.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Really, I’m fine. Just lighten up, will you? Jesus, you’d think someone had died the way you keep going on.”

  A mottled flush swept over her face. “That’s so not funny, Is. It’s kinda harsh, actually.”

  And then she glared at me because I wasn’t fitting into any of the acceptable patterns of behavior she’d read about in the manual on How to Deal with the Recently Bereaved that she’d obviously been consulting.

  “What do you want me to say?” I asked her and I was completely serious. “Would you like me to walk around weeping and wringing my hands and getting all snotty? ’Cause I could have a go, if that would make you feel any better.”

  “I don’t know,” she wailed helplessly. “It’s just, like, you’re not you.”

  “Well, who the hell else would I be?” I shrugged and I could see that she was struggling, forehead pitted with effort and oh no, her eyes were filling up. “Dot, I’m fine. I just want things to be like they were, and I want people to treat me like they normally do, okay?”

  Dot gave me a tiny nod and pushed her chair into the table so sunlight sliced across her face from the big picture windows, and I could see how all her freckles had joined up over the summer. She had the exact same tremulous look as the time we got caught shoplifting nail varnish from Boots and I tried to pretend that it had been all her idea.

  “I guess . . . this is hard for me,” she admitted, resting her chin on her hand. “Like, I don’t know. I thought yeah, you’d be crying all the time and wearing lots of black.”

  We both looked down at my ratty blue V-neck jumper and waited for it to materialize into a T-shirt that said, “My mum’s died. Stop me and ask me how.” “I was working on this whole sackcloth and ashes thing but it really chafes.” I grinned, reaching across the table to squeeze her hand. “Can we please talk about something else now?”

  Dot smiled gratefully. “Well, Ethan Parker actually acknowledged my existence yesterday and not much else. My mum’s on at me about choosing a university already and you know what she’s like . . .”

  She clapped her hand over her mouth; her eyes two perfect circles of horror because I couldn’t possibly know what mothers were like as I didn’t have one.

  “Still on your case about going to Cambridge so she can tell everyone that you take after her side of the family?”

  “Yeah, yeah!” Dot nodded frantically, her voice far too shrill. “Like, spending three years with a bunch of snotty, posh kids is going to be a rewarding experience. She’s the original Desperate Housewife.”

  “Well, at least she hasn’t learned everything she knows about life from a fusty novel written about a hundred and fifty years ago by some emotionally crippled Victorian guy.” Even I was surprised at how venomous I sounded. Dot nodded again so she could show me how big she was with the empathy. And the really annoying thing? It was working.

  Dot and I stood up at the same time and before it could even register, she was gathering me up in her little skinny girl arms and trying to hug me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she kept saying.

  I knew she was and I knew that she meant it, but I didn’t know what to do with her sorry. I struggled away from her and scurried down the hall to grab her bag.

  “Is, I’m here for you any time,” Dot said, getting to the front door before I could and making it evident that she didn’t have plans to exit in a timely fashion.

  “I know,” I said, reaching past her to close my fingers around the door handle. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” She stepped aside and I wrenched open the door and shoved her through it.

  “If you tell anyone about this, I swear I’ll make you sorry,” I hissed so vehemently that Dot took a step back and almost collided with the lavender bush.

  And finally she stopped being there for me and that wounded, worried look was back in her eyes. “O-kaay,” she said hesitantly. “So, um, okay. I’ll call you.”

  “No, I’ll call you. If I need you.” I let the words hang around for a while so she’d get the message that my likelihood of needing her was highly unlikely. Then I gave her the fakest smile I had in my repertoire. “Hey, this was great. We really should do it again sometime.”

  Let'sGetLost

  Let's Get Lost

  9

  I never cry. Like, ever. I don’t write bad poetry. And I certainly don’t phone up this carefully hand-picked selection of confidantes and whine about what a bad joke my life is. I deal with whatever’s bugging me and messing my shit up by getting down on my hands and knees with a bottle of Flash and a scrubbing brush.

  So after I’d got rid of Dot but the gut-gnawing after-effects of her little chat wouldn’t budge, I cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom. I even did Felix’s bedroom, which had several new species of amoeba festering in the collection of mugs and plates under his bed. My bedroom was already a shiny paean to hygiene, but the lounge and the dining room took me the rest of the afternoon.

  The only two places I avoided were their . . . his bedroom and the study. Even if we’d been grooving along in perfect father/ daughter harmony (oh, my aching sides!), I’d have avoided all those piles of paper, which apparently are in some kind of order that’s only understandable if you have a degree in astrophysics. And then there are the books. Big books, little books. Crisp new books, static clinging to their pages. Old, yellowing books that smell of dust and damp. Books in his study, books in the box room, books in every room of the house, and when I come across them, I just stack them up neatly and carry on with my one-woman mission to annihilate every speck of dust that gets in my way.

  He and Felix had gone out. They’d left me a garbled message on the answerphone about art-supply shops and possibly a trip to the museum, but the washing machine chose that moment to go into its spin cycle, which reverberated around my pounding head, and it wasn’t like they’d have wanted me along, anyway. Two’s company, three’s a crowd and all that.

  They came back laden with shopping and plans to rent some DVDs, just as I was tweaking the last cushion into place.

  I unplugged the vacuum and looked up to see Dad staring in bemusement at the kitchen, which was now a gleaming advertisement to the benefits of Mr. Muscle.

  “You make a mess and I’ll make you wish you were never born,” I told Felix as I relieved him of the bags he was holding. “I’ll put this stuff away before you muck the cupboards up.”

  “You cleaned inside the cupboards?” Felix giggled, whacking me on the arse as I reached up to the top shelf. “You need to get out more, Is.”

  I ignored him and started unpacking tins and bottles, arranging them to my system. Yeah, I had a system. Not alphabetical because even I haven’t reached that level of anal control freakery, but more by genre.

  There was a cough behind me and I realized that he was still there, standing and watching me as I happily shuffled the tinned tomatoes to the side of the spaghetti hoops.

  “Isabel, could you stop that for a second, please?”

  I nudged the last tin into place, took a deep breath, and turned around with my face a perfect blank.

  He gestured with his hand to encapsulate the total spick and spannery of the kitchen. “You’ve done a wonderful job.” He sounded like I’d dragged the admission out of him with a pair of rusty pliers. “Though I recall, your moth— Should I be alarmed by this obsession with tidying?”

  “No, I’m not . . .” I protested, and then folded my arms so my hands would stop fluttering about. “I just like things to be neat, orderly.”

  “Do you remember the time you were being bullied by that awful creature—what was her
name? Jasmine, Rose, something flowery . . .”

  “Daisy? In middle school.” I shuddered at the thought of the ten-stone ten-year-old who’d made me cry every day for six weeks.

  “We didn’t even know there was a problem, but you came home every day and insisted on laying the table with a ruler to measure the exact distance between each knife and fork.” He paused and gave me a considered look.

  Which I returned with knobs on. No way was I about to go into overshare mode about—well, any of it, really.

  “Anyone else would be pleased to have a daughter who’s not a total slob,” I pointed out. “This house would look like the inside of a trash can if I didn’t keep on top of it.”

  He nodded his head in acknowledgment of my kick-ass housekeeping skills. “I’ve been talking to Felix about the thorny topic of pocket money, or allowance as I understand it’s to be called. It seems that you received money straight into your bank account in return for certain chores?”