On the Meadowfield Estate—Burwood’s only council housing—Grace Cummings was tying a French plait in her ten year old sister Dixie’s hair while Dixie, who was going through a major Sound of Music phase, tried to pick out the tune for ‘Edelweiss’ on a mouth organ she got in a Christmas cracker the year before.
Their mother—Nicole Cummings—had been working at Fleurs, the florist, for a year now. She used to have a job cleaning until Grace bullied her into applying for the one at Fleurs when it was advertised in The County Times. Despite the early start—which left Grace in charge of getting Dixie to school—working with flowers had changed Nicole in a way nothing or nobody else ever had. For the first time in her life, she had a career rather than a job, was sitting exams to get accredited and even—poised on patchy lino inhaling the green perfume of cut flowers on the threshold between life and death—nurturing a silent ambition to run a florist’s of her own one day.
When Grace had finished, Dixie shook her head smiling and ran a hand over her hair. ‘Emma’s going to be so jealous.’
‘Here, put this on,’ Grace said, handing her a duffel coat that used to belong to her.
‘Not that one—it’s scratchy.’
‘It’s the only one you’ve got and it’s cold so put it on.’
Dixie conceded. ‘D’you want to be a hairdresser when you grow up?’
‘Not really,’ Grace said, distracted.
‘So what d’you want to be?’
‘I want to go up in space.’
‘People still need their hair cut in space.’
They were running about five minutes late.
‘Who’s picking me up from tap tonight?’
‘Me.’
‘Can I wear my tap shoes to school?’
‘Where are your school shoes?’
‘I left them in the back of the car.’
‘You’re sure?’
Dixie nodded.
‘What about your trainers?’
‘Can’t find them.’
Before the job at Fleurs, Nicole had been seriously thinking about re-locating to Perranporth in Cornwall—to a council flat overlooking the beach and some municipal palms.
She didn’t sleep well, and didn’t read the Financial Times, so didn’t know about the reassuring statistics concerning crime, teenage pregnancy and male mortality—or that Burwood was a good place to live. Only last week she dreamt she woke at two a.m.—to the sound of the neighbour they backed onto beating his disabled wife with a shovel, out in the garden. When she looked out the bedroom window, however, there was nobody there—no grunting, enraged shovelwielding husband, and no terrified, disabled wife scrunched up on the lawn in threadbare moonlight. Unfortunately there was nobody lying beside Nicole in bed, and when she got up there was no article attached by magnets to her fridge door that she could read in order to dispel her fears. So the dream stayed with her, made worse by the fact that she was sure she’d heard an ambulance in a nearby street just before dawn, and hadn’t seen the disabled woman since.
Eventually they left the house, Grace pushing her bike and the metal plates on the bottom of Dixie’s tap shoes ringing out on the pavement, the echoes muffled by fog.
They cut down an alley where Grace remembered being pushed into a pile of nettles when she was about Dixie’s age. The attack was still vivid in her mind because she hadn’t seen it coming, and couldn’t understand it. Like the time that girl in the red anorak had put a stone inside a snowball and knocked out part of her tooth so that now she had a different coloured bit in one of her front teeth.
‘Emma says she can do the splits but I haven’t ever seen her do it and every time I ask her to show me she comes up with some excuse so now I don’t know whether to believe her or not.’ Dixie paused, waiting for Grace to comment, but Grace—who’d been even more distracted than usual this morning—didn’t have anything to say. ‘She says she can sit on her hair as well but I’ve actually seen her do that. So—’ Dixie swung her head, pleased at the slapping sound the French plait made against the back of her coat.
‘I hope Ms Jenkins isn’t sick today. She was sick last week and we had Ms Clarke whose hair’s pulled back so tight you can see all the veins on her forehead. She makes us put our heads on the table with our thumbs up and keeps on shouting “Silence” even when nobody’s talking. How can you talk less than silence? She made Emma and me sit apart and I had to share with Mandy who smells like going to the toilet and has to go to the hospital to have her bath ‘cause her mum’s in a wheelchair. That’s what Emma says.’
‘When am I going to meet Emma?’ Grace said at last, making an effort.
‘Emma’s mum says she’s not allowed to come to our house so I’ve got to stop asking her. It’s because of the dogs near us—the ones that don’t wear leads that might have rabies.’
‘She said that to you?’
Dixie nodded. ‘Maybe her mum’ll let her come now you’re Head Girl.’
Grace ran her hand protectively over Dixie’s hair.
‘Ms Jenkins said microwave food isn’t good for you—is that true?’
‘Probably.’ Grace felt exhausted and the day hadn’t even begun.
They were almost at the school crossing where she’d recently agreed to leave Dixie and let her go through the school gates on her own.
‘I told Ms Jenkins you were Head Girl, but she already knew. She said one day they were going to have to put a blue plaque up on the school to say you’d been a pupil there.’
Grace smiled.
‘What’s a blue plaque?’ Dixie asked.
‘It’s like a sign—they put them on buildings when a famous person’s lived or worked there.’
Dixie stopped. ‘Are you going to be famous?’
‘Who knows?’
Grace watched her younger sister cross the road with the Lollipop Lady, who gave her some sweets. When Dixie got to the other side she waved the sweets triumphantly in the air.
She gave a final wave before disappearing through the gates into the crowd of children and parents.
Grace could still hear the tap shoes. She waited until she couldn’t hear them any more before getting on her bike, preoccupied, thinking about what Ms Jenkins had said about the blue plaque, and feeling suddenly tearful.
As she stopped at the next set of lights, she heard somebody call out her name. ‘Grace!
