Drama Queen

  DRAMA QUEEN

  Chloë Rayban

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  By the Same Author

  Chapter One

  The morning we moved to Rosemount Mansions I picked every single daffodil in the garden and made them into a huge bunch to take with us.

  ‘Couldn’t you find something more useful to do?’ asked Mum. She had her ‘worried face’ on. I could tell she was really upset. She was absent-mindedly picking things up and wrapping them in totally insufficient pieces of newspaper.

  ‘Why don’t you let the removal men pack those? They’re being paid to do it.’

  Mum put down the mug she was holding and looked defeated. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘Come on. I’ll make us a cup of tea.’

  I went into the kitchen. The cooker had gone. There was just a gas tap sticking out of the wall where it had been. The electric kettle was still there. I filled it with water, plugged it in and looked around for the mugs, remembering, too late, that those had been what Mum had been wrapping. ‘Where are the … ?’ The box she’d been packing them in was already on its way down the drive to the van.

  Mum sank into an armchair.

  ‘Sorry, luv. But we’re about to take that chair,’ said a man standing over her.

  So we made do with a family bottle of Coke, taking sips out of it in turn. We watched through the window as the potted plants, the last of our possessions, were on the move down the garden drive.

  ‘Till Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane …’ murmured Mum.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Macbeth.’

  The foreman was leaning through the front door. He had a list in his hand. ‘Can you sign this, luv?’ Mum started scrabbling in her bag for her pen.

  I wandered back up to my room. It was empty now except for a wicker cat basket with Bag asleep inside. There were pale rectangles on the wall where my posters had been. And the ghost of my bed traced in fluff on the carpet. I leaned on the windowsill and stared down at the garden. The daffodils had been the only patch of colour. Mum hadn’t had the heart to do much gardening last summer. And Dad had never come to mend that bit of the fence that had come loose as he’d promised he would. Now the garden looked damp, overgrown and neglected, as if it had somehow absorbed all the misery of the past year. I wasn’t sorry to leave.

  I leaned down and hauled Bag (short for Bagpuss) out of the basket. He stretched and purred luxuriously in my arms. His fur smelt of dust and musk.

  This was the room in which I’d woken up for all the Christmases and birthdays of my life. This was the room where I’d put on my first school uniform and thought it was the greatest day of my life – and to which I’d returned at the end of the day, older and wiser, having discovered what school was actually like.

  It was here that Mum had come up and told me that Grandad had died and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’d had a dream that night in which I’d bumped into him at the fair and he’d held a finger to his lips and said, ‘Don’t tell Grandma, I want it to be a surprise.’ I’d woken up thinking the dream was true.

  This is where I’d hidden the basket with Bagpuss inside after I’d found him in the street. He’d been small enough to sit in my hand then. When Mum had found out she’d gone berserk but I’d pleaded and pleaded. She’d let me keep him in the end.

  It was in this room that Dad had come and sat on the edge of my bed and said that he was moving out – for a while. Just as a trial …

  ‘Jessica!’

  ‘Coming.’ I stuffed Bag back in the basket and did up the straps. Then after a last look around, I lumbered down the stairs with it.

  Mum was standing by the front door with the keys in her hand. ‘Are you absolutely sure there’s nothing left upstairs?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Maybe I should double-check?’

  ‘Trust me! Let’s go.’

  We drove away. Mum didn’t look back.

  Rosemount Mansions. You could hardly find a greater contrast with the home we’d left. Everything back there had been neat and respectable and ordinary. A street where people washed their cars on Sundays and joined the local Neighbourhood Watch. The kind of street where, if you carried out a survey, it could represent the entire country, it was so crushingly average.

  There was nothing ordinary about Rosemount Mansions. It was on the poor side of town. An area I’d passed through on the bus on the way to school and wondered about. There was a Caribbean supermarket that sold strange ethnic vegetables, an Indian deli and a Lebanese take-away with an endlessly rotating doner kebab. It was in the kind of street where people dumped supermarket trolleys or abandoned cars. There were always rubbish bags stacked on the pavement and there was a launderette on the corner where lost-looking people sat watching their washing going round and round, for what seemed like for ever.

  The building itself, however, was amazingly gothic. It was tall, built in red brick, and it had somehow managed to collect every single style of architecture under one roof. At each corner there was a little fairy-tale tower with a witch’s hat roof. Balconies sprouted in the oddest places – each with railings which had strange sinuous plants cast into them, looking as if some giant creeper had fallen under a spell and been changed into iron. The whole building was finished in ragged castle battlements from which bunches of London pride sprouted like windblown hair against the sky.

  I’d been taken there with Mum by the estate agent. She’d sighed and moaned about how run down the place was. But I’d turned her attention to its finer points. Like the totally over-the-top lift at the end of the lobby which had ornamental brasswork decorated with scenes of knights on chargers and maidens with flowing hair. In the end she’d had to give in, because Rosemount was all we could afford.

  We arrived that afternoon to find the removal van already parked outside. Most of our belongings were stacked on the cracked and broken front steps. The removal men had taken possession of the lift so we trudged up the umpteen flights of stairs that led to our flat. Bag’s basket seemed to grow heavier with each floor. He was wailing as his nose met up with all the unaccustomed smells.

  Our floor was the seventh – at the very top. The lift didn’t even reach it. You had to climb a final set of winding stairs to get to it. The flat consisted of four low rooms tucked in under the battlements. Mum said it must have been the servants’ quarters once – in the days when the people in the building were grand enough to have them.

  The removal men were currently sweating and moaning over that last flight of stairs. We forced our way through the queue of boxes into our front corridor.

  ‘Oh my goodness, we’re never going to get it all in,’ said Mum.

  ‘Where’s this one to go, luv?’ asked a man who’d got a box wedged between the washing machine and the doorframe.

  ‘They should all be marked for each room,’ said Mum. ‘Where’s my list?’

  I left her to it while I took Bag on a tour of inspection. This didn’t take long. Mum had the largest room which looked out on to a narrow light well at the back. Mine was all oblique angles and dramati
cally slanted ceilings with a view down on to the front entrance. Apart from the bedrooms, there was a kitchen, just big enough to hold a table, a balcony, just wide enough for Bag and his kitty-litter box, and a room we rather grandly decided to call the sitting room, which had enough space for the sofa, the TV and a small round table that used to be in Mum’s bedroom.

  This table was already standing in the bay window. Edging my way through piles of bedlinen and flattened boxes, I made for the kitchen. I found an empty jam jar, put the daffodils into it, and placed it on the table by the window.

  Mum was leaning in through the doorway watching me with a strange expression on her face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You are such an incurable romantic.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are. How about that cup of tea now? I’ve relocated the mugs.’

  ‘Is there enough milk for Bag?’

  ‘Better not let him out till the men have gone. We’ll have to butter his paws.’

  ‘Butter his paws?’

  ‘Yes. Makes a cat feel at home. Licking it off.’

  ‘How weird.’

  ‘I know. But it works for some reason.’

  It was some six hours later that we actually got the place almost straight. With aching backs and cobwebby hair, we sat side by side on the sofa eating beans on toast. Bag was on the floor on a pile of newspapers washing butter off his paws. He kept pausing to lick his whiskers thoughtfully.

  ‘I suppose it makes sense really. He only washes his paws when he’s really contented, like after turkey at Christmas,’ I said.

  ‘Association of ideas,’ said Mum. ‘Butter breeds contentment.’ Bag had started to purr.

  The sun had come out. A watery ray slanted through the dirty window and fell across the table. The daffodils seemed to light up the room. Mum leaned over to smell them. ‘Heaven. We should’ve left them, really,’ she said.

  ‘Rubbish, the new people aren’t moving in for a fortnight. They’d all be dead by then. Anyway, they’ll have them next year. And the year after.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum and she looked very sad. I leaned down to stroke Bag, not wanting Mum to see I was upset too. ‘I’ll go and make some more tea,’ she said. Her voice sounded funny.

  I hated to hear her like that. Moving out had made it all so final. As long as we’d been in the old house, I could imagine that at any moment I would hear Dad’s key turning in the lock and he’d come in and hang up his coat and everything would be back to normal.

  Except it hadn’t been normal, not for ages. I suppose I just remembered the good bits now. Like the daft jokes we shared and that holiday we’d had in that horrible stuffy mobile home when it had rained nonstop and we’d nearly worn out the Monopoly board. Dad and Mum hadn’t been arguing much then. At least, not in front of me. It was difficult to place the time when it had started to go wrong. It was sometime after that holiday. They’d begun to have these rows, at least Dad had. He did all the shouting while Mum went all quiet. More recently the rows had got fewer and been replaced by long silences. Then they’d virtually stopped talking to each other. Whenever they said anything it was in a tired voice, as if they were making a tremendous effort. I know a lot of it was my fault. I’d shouted at both of them. And I’d sulked. I thought it would get through to them. I wanted to make them wake up and be normal again. But I’d only made it worse.

  Then Dad had gone out a lot. He’d leave the house, slamming the door behind him and revving up the car in that exaggerated way I hated. Gradually he’d stopped coming back for meals – he just arrived late and went straight to bed. I think he used to eat in a pub, he always smelt of beer when he came to say goodnight. One day I discovered he was sleeping in the spare room. And then he started staying away at night. ‘On business’, he said.

  Nine months ago he’d moved out altogether as a trial. The ‘trial’ went on for a month. And then another month. And then one day he took me out for that awful walk by the river and tried to explain that he was moving out for good. That he wasn’t coming back ever. He was almost crying. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Tea up.’ Mum’s voice interrupted my train of thought.

  I blew my nose and took the mug she offered.

  Mum sat down on the sofa beside me. ‘We’d better think how we’re going to redecorate your room,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t have to try and cheer me up.’

  ‘You didn’t have to bring the daffs,’ she said.

  I lay in bed that night listening to the traffic pass and watching the angled shadows of the headlights swing around my oddly sloping ceiling. A police siren wailed in the distance and a couple of cats started up an anguished chorus down below.

  I wondered what the future would bring. I’d been flat out all day so hadn’t even had time to check my mobile. I leaned over and raked it out of the bottom of my backpack. There was a text message from Clare.

  welcome to your dream home

  love wobble

  I texted her back.

  bag in basket, me in bed

  sweet dreams

  love j

  Chapter Two

  So our life at Rosemount Mansions began. I’d like to call it a turning point. And it was in a way.

  We’d moved from the suburbs into the inner city. And while Mum moaned about the dirt and the noise and the lack of a garden, for me it was the start of something new and exciting. OK, so I’ll let you into a secret. I’ve always had this ambition to be a writer. I don’t tell many people because they think it’s so uncool. And I don’t write much, because frankly my life back where we used to live was so-oo dull. What’s there to write about when absolutely nothing happens?

  But Rosemount was different. I loved the way the building seemed to have a life of its own. Whatever the time of day or night you could feel the buzz of other people’s lives around you – the creak and slam of the lift door, a sudden burst of laughter, a baby crying or the purr of a taxi waiting outside. Every sound was a story about to happen.

  From my viewpoint high up over the entrance, I could see whoever came or went. And long before I could match these aerial views of people to the names beside the doorbells, I had started making up imaginary lives for them.

  ‘So what’s the latest Rosemount news?’ Clare would ask as I slid into the seat she’d saved for me in the bus. Clare lived in the nice quiet suburb we’d left. For her, my new inner city life was jam-packed with potential. Not much had happened so far. So I’d decided to make it sound more interesting.

  ‘Another woman disappeared into number nine. Not seen to emerge. I’m watching to see if SK comes out with a large leaking suitcase.’

  ‘SK?’

  ‘Serial Killer.’

  ‘Yukk. How about the clairvoyant in number one?’

  (I didn’t actually know she was a clairvoyant. I mean, she didn’t have a crystal ball in her window or anything. But groups of people used to turn up in the afternoons and not emerge for hours. So I painted Clare a nice spooky picture of them inside, hand in hand around her table, calling up the dead.)

  ‘Strange knocking sounds emerging from her flat. Blinds firmly closed.’

  ‘Spotted any talent yet?’

  ‘None so far.’

  ‘How about the guy with the hairy wrists?’

  ‘Mr Hyde? He’s scary. His flatmate’s not bad though. But we haven’t established eye-contact.’ (I’d seen each of these guys emerging from the same apartment on separate occasions. One with a black mac and hairy wrists, the other the same height and build but blond and blue-eyed. Never once seen together. Strange.)

  Clare sighed. ‘I thought the whole point of moving to a block of flats was all those encounters in the lift. Or on the fire escape.’

  Clare’s lack of love life was her constant obsession. Most of the other girls in our class had, or claimed to have, some male in tow. But whether it was the double brace, or the fact that she was so devoted to those shapeless tracksuit bottoms o
f hers, Clare never seemed to have any luck. I wasn’t bothered myself – the boys who the girls in our class went out with were really immature. Personally, I preferred to remain single until I found complete perfection.

  ‘So how on earth did she get him?’ Clare nudged me and nodded in the direction of a curiously mismatched couple. A really fit guy was sitting beside a plain girl with lank hair.

  ‘Maybe she’s his sister.’

  ‘They’re holding hands.’

  ‘Are they?’ At that point the girl nuzzled up to the guy. ‘I give up. I dunno. It happens,’ I said.

  ‘It’s so unfair.’

  ‘It’s love. There’s no logic to it.’

  At that point we reached the stop for Westgate, our school. The bus disgorged its load of kids on to the pavement. Clare strode on ahead of me but I lagged behind, thinking about what I’d just said.

  It’s love – there’s no logic to it. But there should be. Surely love is the most important thing in life? Who you ended up with couldn’t simply be down to chance.

  I considered the way the people up ahead of me were paired off. There was Marion, who’d been glued to Mark since nursery school – they were even planning to apply to the same colleges. And there was that boy in Year 9 with the big nose, whose name I never could remember, who’d teamed up with the girl with the dodgy legs. Then there were the drippy Frinton twins who each had their totally uncool boyfriends. In fact, if you imagined a great cosmic game of Pelmanism, you could probably sort most of the people at school into matched pairs.

  The school bell was already ringing as I reached the gates, so the last of us stragglers made a headlong dash for the doors, to avoid getting on the late list.

  It was three hours later in a biology period while the teacher was droning on about ‘natural selection’ that the phrase came back to me again. It’s love – there’s no logic to it.

  What was this curious process that attracted one person to another? Was it the survival of the ‘fittest’? The bullfrog with the deepest croak gets the most frog wives. The strongest stag who can fight off all the other males gets the biggest harem. Were human beings just the same? All of us girls were after the ‘fittest’ male, after all. And all of the males were after the ‘hottest’ girl. Some people of course, sickeningly enough, attracted the opposite sex like filings to a magnet. But what about the rest of us? Did we just have to settle for what was left over? Maybe we were simply after the best we could get. We’d aim for the fittest but we’d then have to scale down our standards until we met someone who we thought were the best they could get.