I can’t sleep again. Billie woke me earlier but she’s sleeping now, her soft breathing next to me in the bed. I pick up my notebook, open it and take out the gold paper crane that’s folded into its pages.
I wonder how many we’ve made since. I lost count long ago. I see in my mind a trail of birds marking the path of our journey here, folded into books, hidden under pillows, fallen down the side of seats, drifting out to sea, made out of newspaper and flyers and anything that came to hand.
But this was the first one we ever made.
Billie hopscotched her way along the cracked pavements, splashing me with puddle-water as she went.
‘Billie, can you not?’ I snapped. ‘My tights are soaked.’
I had to take Billie to breakfast club every day and I was sick of it. In the old days, I’d walk to Mischa’s and we’d get the bus together. Now I had to get up an hour earlier, and with the extra ID checks on the bus and the army checkpoint that had been set up on the main road which took for ever to get through I was always getting detentions for being late for school. Today everything possible had gone wrong and now we were both going to be late for school.
Billie looked at me, eyes wide with reproach. ‘Mama never minded.’
According to Billie, Mama never minded anything. From Billie watching TV till midnight to Billie’s packed lunch consisting entirely of chocolate or being allowed the day off school because her favourite socks were in the wash, Claudia had apparently just smiled and let her get on with it.
It has to be said, that’s not exactly how I remembered it (‘I don’t care if Freya goes to bed at eleven. You go now’… ‘No, orange flavour sweets are not a fruit, Billie’) but I knew that wasn’t the point. Billie missed Claudia. Everything was right when she was here and now it was wrong. That much we could all agree on. In the weeks since she’d been gone, I’d realized just how much Claudia did to keep everything running smoothly, keeping everyone happy, seeing arguments brewing and defusing them before the rest of us had really noticed them, spotting difficulties on the horizon and dealing with them in advance so that by the time we got to them they weren’t problems any more. And all the while making sure Billie’s favourite socks had been washed, packing a healthy lunch that Billie would actually eat instead of leaving it mouldering in her bag all week, getting her PE kit to school on the right day, making dentist’s appointments, not forgetting to fill in the forms for after-school clubs, remembering when Billie’s friends’ birthdays were and buying them presents, staying calm and reasonable, doing yoga every day and being a doctor. I’d always quietly mocked Claudia’s uber-organized control-freakery, but now, too late, I was in awe of it.
‘Sorry, B,’ I said. ‘Hopscotch all you like. Just try not to splash me. And try to do it at Olympic hopscotching speed because we’re so late it’s not even funny.’
As I said it, a car drove past spraying me with water from the roadside and I couldn’t help swearing.
‘I wish Mama was here,’ Billie said to the pavement, standing on one leg.
‘I know, B,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking the same thing.’
‘Why can’t we go and see her?’
‘You know why.’
We still hadn’t found out where she’d been moved to.
‘But why doesn’t Mama even phone?’ Billie asked, taking hold of my hand.
‘You know she would if she could. She’s just not allowed.’
‘Why is nothing allowed? It’s not fair.’
I sighed, trying and failing to think of something positive to say. ‘I know, B.’
‘Sakura told me something,’ Billie said as we turned into the road where her school was.
‘She did?’
‘She told me about it because I like birds.’
‘Like’ was an understatement. Borderline obsession might be closer. She knew all sorts of random facts about them and her room was full of bird toys and pictures and ornaments and books. I think it started with Luna, her toy owl, or maybe I just think that because Luna was my present to Billie when she was born.
‘Oh yeah? How did she know that when you only mention birds ten times in every conversation?’
Billie didn’t even notice my teasing. She was too focused on what Sakura had told her.
‘She said in Japan, if you fold a thousand birds out of paper – what’s it called again, the paper-folding thing?’
‘Origami.’
‘If you make a thousand birds out of origami, you get a wish and the wish definitely comes true.’
‘It does?’ I didn’t need to ask her what her wish would be.
‘Sakura gave me one she’d made to get started,’ Billie said. ‘Look.’ She reached into her school bag and rummaged around till she found it, pulling out a complicated-looking bird folded from red paper.
‘Wow, impressive,’ I said. ‘It’s a crane, I think.’
Billie nodded. ‘They’re lucky in Japan. Kind of like horseshoes and four-leaf clover, but even more special.’
I took it from her and examined it as we walked the last few steps to the school gate, trying to protect it from the rain. ‘And you’re planning to make a thousand of these? Not gonna lie, B, that could take a while.’
‘That’s why I need you to help. Sakura showed me how to make one but I can’t remember. She says you can look on YouTube though.’
‘Okaaay,’ I said. ‘And exactly how many years of my life is this going to take?’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘It’s for a wish, Clem. It’s really important. Really. It’s not a joke.’
‘I know, B,’ I said quickly, putting an arm round her. ‘I know. I get it. We’ll google it when we get home, okay? Anyway, you’d better run.’ It was so late that everyone had already gone in.
She kissed me and I watched her hopscotch across the empty playground, her head full of the magical birds that would bring her mum home. I looked at the folded bird in my hand and found I had tears in my eyes. I remembered how it felt when Mum left. It felt like the safe, solid ground I’d been walking on had turned into a tightrope and at every moment I thought it might snap. I’d do anything to stop Billie feeling that.
Less than an hour before, as she’d stood in her pyjamas yelling at me because I’d put milk in her cereal bowl, I’d felt like yelling right back at her, that she was a brat, that I didn’t want to have to look after her, that it was boring and exhausting and I hated it. I’d had to lock myself in the bathroom so I didn’t, and so I could cry without her seeing. Now I hated myself for even thinking those things.
I took out the stupid old phone Dad had given me and texted Mischa.
Soooo late. Can you say I’ve got a hospital appointment or something.
If anyone really was spying on my messages, they were going to be very bored.
Mischa replied straight away:
U okay?
I replied:
I am NEVER having kids. If I ever get broody kill me.
Mischa sent something that I assumed was emojis, but the phone was so old it just did a row of question marks instead.
I walked towards the bus stop, thinking. About how angry I’d felt with Billie this morning, how overwhelmed and desperate and lonely. What if you really didn’t know you didn’t want kids until after you had them? Could that happen? Was that what had happened to Mum? I tried not to think about her, or to try and make sense of why she’d gone. It had got easier over the years but sometimes I couldn’t help it.
I saw the bus just pulling up to the bus stop. I knew I should run but I didn’t. I was already going to miss half my first lesson and it was maths, and I’d get a detention either way so why bother? I decided to walk even though the rain was starting to fall again, Billie’s red paper crane still in my hand.
It turned out I was right: origami cranes are very difficult to make, even with the help of a step-by-step tutorial on YouTube.
Our first attempt was a complete failure because the paper was too thick and wouldn’t fold properly.
The second time round, I got so annoyed with the calm and patient tone of the YouTube tutor that I didn’t listen properly and rushed ahead, which caused a massive argument between Billie and me. The mangled piece of paper that should have been a crane ended up in the bin.
The third one, which we didn’t try till two days later because we weren’t talking to each other, seemed to take us hours to make but we were very, very careful. I had found a sheet of gold paper in Billie’s craft box, left over from some Christmassy creative project Claudia had done with her last year. We were going to do this properly. We folded precisely, corner to corner, edge to edge, and we were gentle with the tricky petal folds when it would have been easy to tear the paper. And, at the end of it, we had an actual recognizable paper crane. We’d somehow managed to create this delicate creature out of a piece of paper, with no mistakes or rips or lopsided wings, no drama or slamming doors, against all the odds, and we were so ecstatic about it that we danced around the kitchen and Billie had to call Sakura to show her.
‘Just nine hundred and ninety-nine to go,’ Billie said.
I could make them in my sleep now, those birds, I’ve made so many of them. I almost don’t notice I’m doing it. Sometimes I find my fingers moving along imagined folds even when I don’t have any paper. If we followed them, the trail of magic birds we’ve left behind would lead us home.
The sisters sank down under a tree and hugged each other close to keep warm. The dark was all around them and, as they shivered and wondered how they would ever get home, they had the feeling they were being watched.
Just then there was a great sound of rustling and flapping in the branches about them and a huge vulture swooped down and flew around them, once, then twice. Its eyes glowed orange in the dark, its beak was cruel and tearing, and its talons were sharper than knives. The sisters knew immediately that this was the terrible witch in disguise. They knew that if they let her fly around them a third time they would be rooted to the spot, unable to move.
‘Run!’ the older girl said, grabbing hold of her sister’s hand and holding it tight in hers.
But as they ran they heard the great swoosh of wings behind them. The girl felt her sister’s hand slip from hers and found that all she held was a single blue feather. When she turned, she saw that her sister had been transformed into a bird with wings the colour of a summer’s sky.
Then the vulture shape-shifted into the witch. She snatched up the colourful bird and ran back with it towards the castle, her long blonde hair streaming out behind her. The girl tried to follow but the red roses grew up thick around her and their thorns ripped her skin and tore her clothes and she couldn’t find the castle.
Mischa is turning and walking away from me.
She says something I can’t hear.
She turns and looks over her shoulder—
But when she turns to me she has no eyes, just blank emptiness where eyes should be.
She can’t see me—
Mischa! I try to call out but I can’t…
And I realize it’s not her at all, it’s not her—
So where is she?
I look around desperately, trying to find her, but there are too many people – people everywhere crowding in, pushing so I can’t breathe – but I have to find her, I need her—
Mischa! I try to shout again…
But nothing comes out—
I wake, jolted out of sleep by terror, heart pounding, sweating, trying to scream—
I try to breathe slowly, wait for my heart to slow itself.
‘Mischa?’ I whisper into the dark.
But all I can hear is muffled Peppa Pig music coming from a phone someone’s given their kid on the other side of the dividing curtain.
The relief of waking from my nightmare fades.
I reach for my notebook and take out the photo of Mischa and me that’s tucked inside.
Mischa. I need her.
But she isn’t here.
And I’m falling.
Mischa turned up at the bus stop where we’d agreed to meet, exactly twenty-five minutes late.
‘Hiya, babe,’ she said, hugging me. She smelt of cherry blossom body spray and chewing gum. ‘How do I look?’ She turned around so I could admire her from all angles. She looked amazing, as always, all beehive and eyeliner and curves.
‘Why do you always have to be so late? And you’ve got lipstick on your teeth,’ I said, even though she hadn’t.
I wasn’t in the mood for a party. Billie had been clingy all week, especially at bedtime. She threw a proper tantrum when I said I was going out, like she used to when she was a toddler, lying on the floor, screaming. As I’d tried to get out of the door, I had a memory of Claudia surrounded by parenting books about the terrible twos, trying to work out what she was doing wrong with Billie.
‘But they all say different things,’ she’d said, slamming one shut and looking around despairingly at the others. ‘And how am I supposed to ignore her when she’s lying on the pavement in front of someone’s mobility scooter, swearing?’
‘Ignore the books,’ Dad had said. ‘There’s a whole industry based on making people feel they’re failing because they haven’t found the magic way of stopping their kids behaving like kids.’
‘You’re not helping,’ Claudia had replied. ‘And the swearing is your fault by the way.’
I couldn’t see then why Claudia had to get so angsty about everything. But back then I could be the fun one. Now I had to take more responsibility for Billie and it was different. Eventually Dad had arrived home and prised Billie off me. I’d grabbed a pair of cat ears from Billie’s dressing-up box as a token gesture towards a costume and escaped to meet Mischa, only to find she wasn’t there.
She rubbed at her front teeth with a finger.
‘Sorry, Clemzi. I did try to call you but I couldn’t get through. They’ve got all this extra security round the flats now, since they arrested those guys last week. They took ages checking my ID and I’m sure it was just because the guy wanted to look at my cleavage a while longer. Better?’ She bared her teeth at me.
I relented. ‘You look amazing. Got your ID card for the bus?’
‘Of course.’
When we were sitting side by side on the bus Mischa said, ‘What the hell is that?’
‘It’s why I didn’t get your messages.’ We looked at my ancient phone, one of Dad’s old ones from years ago. I held it up to show her. ‘It’s like something out of a museum.’
‘Oh my God, is it even a phone?’ She took it from me to examine. ‘It’s so big and heavy. Where are you supposed to keep it?’
‘Right? I told him he might as well have given me one of those old contraptions with the dial and the curly wire to carry round with me.’
Mischa laughed. ‘Why though? I mean, why’s he given it to you?’
‘He’s paranoid about surveillance. You can’t go online with it or anything. No apps, no messaging, nothing except SMS. He said I should only use it in emergencies and always assume people are listening into my calls or reading my messages.’
‘I mean, no offence, babe, but do you really think they want to listen to you and me moaning about science homework or our menstrual cycles or whatever?’
‘That’s what I told him but you know what he’s like.’
‘Here’s our stop. Do you think Danny’s going to be there tonight?’
‘I don’t know, Misch,’ I said. ‘Do you really want to do this? I’m so not in the mood for a party.’
‘You’ll enjoy it once you get there,’ Mischa said.
‘That’s what my dad always used to tell me when I was a kid,’ I said, nearly falling down the stairs as the bus lurched to a stop. ‘And he was always wrong.’
The party was too loud. There were loads of sixth-formers there and people who weren’t from our school and most of them already seemed really drunk when we got there. Mischa had brought a couple of cans of beer that she’d found in her fridge and gave me one, even though I didn’t want it.
‘Let’s go and dance,’ she pleaded, tugging on my arm. But dancing was the last thing I felt like doing.
‘You go on,’ I shouted above the noise. ‘I’ll wait here.’
‘Fine, be miserable then,’ she said and stuck her tongue out at me.
‘Thanks, I will,’ I said and went and sat on the stairs, which got annoying because people kept treading on me on their way up and down, but there was nowhere else to sit that wasn’t either really loud or in the kitchen, where Danny and Summer were wrapped around each other.
This nice, earnest sixth-former came and sat with me for a bit and talked in a slurred, sincere way about how bad it was that they’d changed the curriculum so that it censored history, and how he really admired the teachers who’d resigned over it. I agreed with him, but the music was giving me a headache and it was really hard work to hear what he was saying. He poured me a paper cup of neat vodka before he went. I took a sip but it was like drinking petrol. My head was throbbing, worse than ever.
Time passed. Maybe an hour, maybe two. I moved from the stairs to a landing and ended up sitting with two people I didn’t know who were talking about elephants and made no sense. I decided I’d go and find Mischa and see if I could persuade her to leave. But when I saw her, she was blatantly flirting with Adi and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get her to come away yet. I needed air. I gestured to Mischa to say I was going outside.
I found the back door and slipped outside into what wasn’t so much a garden as a small yard with a skip taking up one side. There was a single wooden chair with several slats missing that I perched on, and a bike leaned against a wall. The cold and quiet were a relief. I realized I’d drunk more than I thought, though not enough to do anything embarrassing. I just felt sad.
‘Clem!’
I turned to see Danny.
‘I saw you come out,’ he said. ‘You okay?’
I nodded. ‘Just got a headache. I think I’m going to go.’
‘Not on your own?’
I shrugged. ‘Where’s Summer?’
‘Dancing,’ he said. He sat down on the ground next to me. ‘You don’t like her, do you?’
‘No.’ I’d drunk enough vodka to be honest then. ‘Or Kyle. I don’t know why you do.’
‘They’re a laugh when you get to know them.’
‘They’re not a laugh. Mischa and me are a laugh. They’re…’
‘What?’
‘I dunno, Danny. The Community Guardians thing. The whole grassing-up your neighbours thing. Call it what you like, it doesn’t seem like much of a laugh to me.’
‘Don’t be a kid, Clem. Grassing people up? It’s not the playground. Don’t you think if someone’s a criminal, maybe dangerous, you’ve got a duty to keep people safe?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And, actually, you’re judging me and my friends right now, deciding you’re better than us. You don’t know them properly, but you’ve decided you know what they’re like. Isn’t that being prejudiced too? You think everyone who doesn’t agree with you is racist or bad or something. They’re not like that.’
‘If you say so.’
‘How could Summer be? Her dad’s whole family’s from India.’
I shrugged. ‘She and Kyle literally boast about getting people arrested and deported.’
‘They only deport people who shouldn’t be here. And if people are detained, they’ve obviously done something wrong, haven’t they?’
‘Like my stepmum?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘You know I didn’t mean it like that. Maybe. I don’t know. Like I said. If she hasn’t, they’ll let her go.’
‘If she hasn’t? Danny, this is Claudia we’re talking about. You know her. She’s not dangerous. She’s not a criminal. She’s done nothing wrong.’
‘Well then, she’s got nothing to worry about, has she?’
I shook my head. When Danny had come outside, I’d thought – hoped – that he was trying to get away from Summer, that he knew he was wrong and wanted to come back to Mischa and me and for things to go back to how they used to be. Now I realized he’d only come out to try and convince me that he was right.
‘Danny, I came out here to get some peace. Why don’t you go back in and find Summer?’
‘Look, I don’t want to argue. I just think you’ve got the wrong idea about them, about Toby Knight and all of that. I don’t want us to fall out over it. There’s going to be an election, right? People can decide for themselves. I just want to get on with my life, don’t you?’
‘Not everyone can just get on with their life though. Look at Claudia.’
‘I’m sorry about Claudia,’ he said. ‘I know it must be tough for you. Come on, Clem, we’ve been friends since for ever. This can’t change that. We’re still us, aren’t we? Let’s just agree to disagree.’
I looked at Danny. Pale skin, shaded with stubble now, curly brown hair. He was nearly a man, I realized, seeing him for a split second through the eyes of someone who didn’t know him. But really, he didn’t look so different from the skinny little kid sitting in the front row of our reception class photo. His hazel eyes watched me, concerned, wanting to make things okay for me, like he always had. I remembered how we used to talk when he was worried that his mum would die. I’d told him stuff about what it was like after my mum left that I hadn’t told anyone else. He’d always been kind and straightforward and thoughtful. He still was all those things. But he was other things too.
If it wasn’t for all of this, I’d probably never have known. I’d just have known the kind, straightforward Danny who sometimes tried a bit too hard to be liked. We’d have been friends for ever. Maybe more than friends, who knows. Does the kind of person you are depend on luck? On living at the right time, in the right place, with the right people around you? I never thought about it like that before.
‘I don’t know. Are we still us?’ I said, slowly.
He laughs. ‘What do you mean? Course we are.’
I stood up. I didn’t feel drunk now. I felt clear-headed.
‘Clem? Where are you going?’
‘Away.’
‘Clem!’ he called after me. ‘Come on. Don’t go!’
I didn’t look back.
I take out the photo of Mischa and me again. The right side of the photo has been cut at a slight angle. On Mischa’s shoulder there’s a hand. The hand is Danny’s. This photo used to be of the three of us, my favourite photo of us. Danny printed it for me. I look at the space where he should have been. I can remember exactly what he looked like in the photo, grey T-shirt, looking not at the camera but at Mischa and me, laughing. We’d been on a school trip to the Globe Theatre. There’d been a pencil case in the gift shop I wanted to buy for Billie but I couldn’t afford it, so I got her a badge instead. When we were on the train home Danny got the pencil case out of his school bag. He’d bought it so I could give it to Billie.
Where is Danny now?
Do I hate Danny? Yes.
Do I hope he’s okay? Yes.
Do I still care about Danny?
I don’t know.
Nothing makes sense.