on Wednesdays because Mum works. I’d rather do football but that costs more and, anyway, Mum says I can use the time to catch up on my homework.
‘Spellings especially,’ she says.
I want to argue – but I can’t really. Spellings! There are just so many letters! And the way they join together, the Is and Es always swapping places like Year 1 kids trying to wind up Mrs Mason. We’ve also started doing these things called apostrophes, which at first I didn’t understand.
‘They show you own something,’ Miss Phillips said. ‘Like “Cymbeline’s football”.’
I nodded but I still didn’t get it. Everyone knows that it’s Billy’s football. As for where you put the apostrophes in the actual words, that’s just not possible to know. You may as well be playing pin the tail on the donkey. I can’t wait until I can use a computer to do my writing because of the wavy red lines that help you out, and it makes me wonder: why has no one invented a pencil which does that?
‘Hi, Cym,’ Mum said later that day, putting her head round the door of the ICT suite. ‘Ready?’
I said I was and when she’d signed me out I put my coat on. I followed her into the playground and through the gate on to the road. There were some men out there with clipboards, staring at the school and making notes. One was even on the roof. The police …? Mr Baker really was taking this jelly thing seriously. I grabbed Mum’s hand and pulled her up the steps towards Blackheath.
Now, if I’ve done something at school which perhaps I shouldn’t have, I would NOT normally want to tell my mum. This time, though, I did want to tell her, because Mum knows Mrs Martin. They’re both in the Friends’ Forum, which raises money for St Saviour’s. They do things like getting everyone to bake cakes to sell to themselves at the school fair and they ask parents to donate back the same bottles of cheap wine they won at the last fair and didn’t drink. Toys as well. In Year 2, Lance’s mum donated his old Buzz Lightyear for the Christmas Fair without telling him. Darren Cross won it in the tombola. Neither of them knew until Darren’s mum donated it back for the Easter Fair without telling him, and who should pull it out of the lucky dip? Lance!
‘Buzz!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought you’d gone back to Gamma 4!’
When his mum saw it at home later, she said she thought she was going crazy.
The reason I wanted to tell Mum was simple – I had to explain my giggle. I wanted her to tell Mrs Martin that it was just a giggle and that I DID NOT PUT JELLY IN HER SHOES. The idea that she might think it was me was terrible, not least because she’d have to tell Mr Baker, wouldn’t she? So I started to tell Mum – but she wasn’t listening. First she had to find her car keys, which always takes ages because her bag’s like the TARDIS (well, probably – ask Lance, why don’t you?). Then, when we were finally in the car, she just said things like ‘Oh dear’ and ‘What a shame’, before coming out with something totally and utterly RANDOM.
‘Cym,’ she said, putting her hand on my arm, ‘you do want me to be happy, don’t you?’
Now that was a weird question, and not only because it had nothing at ALL to do with Mrs Martin (or jelly). Before Christmas, Mum had been totally not happy, and that had been horrible. Had she asked me then if I wanted her to be happy, I’d have said yes, of course – but she seemed happy enough now. And why wouldn’t she be – Charlton were up to third! Also, my last school report was, and I quote, ‘not quite as bad as the last one’.
She’d also got a new job teaching art, which meant we could afford a car now, and she’d started going out to the cinema on Friday nights with this new friend of hers called Stephan.
‘You mean even happier?’ I asked.
‘Maybe.’
‘Like in The Sound of Music?’
‘Why not?’
‘We’d better hope Charlton beat Wigan, then. Though no singing in front of my friends. Why are you asking?’
Mum went red. ‘Something happened today.’
‘What?’
‘Just … something I need to think about.’
‘But it’s a good thing?’
‘I hope so. But I have to think first. Actually, forget I said anything, okay?’
Mum put the key in and I shrugged, happy to forget it because I wanted to go back to the subject of Mrs Martin. Even now, my favourite teacher could be asking herself what she’d done to turn me against her. When I got back to telling Mum, though, she got distracted again. I was just getting to the bit where we came down from the heath, when Mum’s phone rang.
‘Hello?’ she said, sounding a little surprised by who was calling. I tried to carry on talking, but Mum put her hand up. Her face went serious and she said, ‘Of course,’ and ‘Right away,’ before hanging up. She started the car, did a three-point turn, and thirty seconds later we were shooting across the little roundabout as I asked her what was going on.
‘Is it Mrs Martin?’ I said, my voice a bit wobbly. ‘Does she want to see you?’
The answer was no, because Mrs Martin lives in Westcombe Park, and three minutes later we were pulling up outside a house on the other side of Blackheath Village.
Veronique’s house.
And in the driveway was an ambulance.
The first time I met Veronique’s granny she was asleep in her chair. Veronique took me down to her little wooden house. We’d brought her tea, but instead of watching her drink it I looked at all the photos on the wall showing her with Veronique when Veronique was little, and even older ones when she herself had been a child, standing with her mum, dad and sister with some boats behind them.
I would have liked to ask her about that time, and just talk to her generally, because I don’t have any grandparents, and people say they’re fun. Apparently they give you sweets and pound coins AND they fall asleep when you’re watching telly (which means you don’t have to stop). Veronique’s granny didn’t do any of these things that first time I saw her because she didn’t wake up, making me wonder what the point of her was.
But the next time was different.
‘So,’ she said, squinting at me through these MASSIVE glasses. ‘You’re the famous Cymbeline. What sort of a name is that, might I ask?’
‘Nanai!’ Veronique said.
‘I don’t mind. It’s Shakespeare, Veronique’s granny.’
‘I know that! I’m not completely gaga, you know. And call me Nanai. But Shakespeare used normal names as well, didn’t he? Duncan, Richard, Henry …’
‘But I could have been called Hamlet,’ I said. ‘Or Romeo.’
