Mum stuck with him… No. None of it was my fault. I didn’t have to put up with it or face it. I could get away from all of it. Australia!
I knew I should tell her. I knew it. But I thought she’d say I couldn’t go.
“I’ll be all right, Mum,” I said. And I even heard myself add, “Give Dad my love.” But I didn’t mean it. Not really. I was ready to clobber him for taking Mum away from me.
I didn’t tell Gran about the call.
That same day, she asked, sort of carelessly, “When does school break up?”
“On the seventeenth.”
“Oh, right.”
When I came home from school on the last day of term, I found the flat in, like, chaos. I thought at first we’d been done over. Then I looked closer and saw the suitcases. Her sunflower ones, open. One of them was full of summer clothes. Not her size. Mine.
I picked up a green and purple bikini and dropped it again. “Gran! What’s going on?” I shouted.
She popped out of her (my) room. She sort of sang, “Glen-dine’s been shop-ping!”
“I can see! What’s it all for?”
“It’s all for you, cookie. I hope you like it. I’d have taken you to help choose, but we’re leaving tomorrow, there was no time.”
“Leaving? Where are we going?” But I knew. And suddenly it was real. She was kidnapping me, just as she’d promised!
“We’re flying to Perth, love,” she said. “Not Perth, Scotland. Perth, Australia.”
“What? But we can’t! Don’t I need a passport?”
“You’ve got one, ducky!” she said, triumphant. She held up a new red passport. I took it from her and looked at it. There was a picture of me that we’d had taken in a booth one day when I was out with her, she’d said she wanted it for a souvenir.
It struck me a lot later that she must’ve been planning this for a long time. She’d have needed Mum’s signature on the form, so she must’ve forged it. But I never thought of any of it. Not at the time. I was too upset about Mum and Dad, and now there was something really exciting going to happen to make up for it.
I had my doubts – give me that much. That night while Gran was having one of her endless baths – she’d imported a big bottle of bubble bath, which I could hear her frothing up with her hands till it must’ve looked like she was lying in a huge milkshake – I phoned Nan and told her I was going to Australia with my other grandmother.
Nan was already in a state about Mum bombing off. She’d been round a few times to see I was all right. She didn’t like Glendine, I could tell. She always turned her head away, as if Gran was too bright for her eyes. Now Nan said, in her pursed-up-lips voice, “I don’t think it’s right, her carrying you off like that without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“How can we ask Mum, when she’s gone off?”
“She’ll be back. Then what’s she going to say?”
“I’m leaving her a note. And you can explain. Besides, I’ll be back before school starts. Nan, I want to go!”
Nan fussed and carried on. She didn’t want me to go, but I remembered Mum’d said she was jealous of Gran, because of her throwing her dosh around and giving us treats. In the end I just said, “Well I’m going. I’ll send you a postcard with a kangaroo on it, bye.” That was that, because I put down the phone. Yeah, rude. But if you don’t bring Nan’s phone calls to an end she can witter on at you for hours.
What bothered me much more, after I’d hung up, was that I hadn’t told her I’d heard from Mum. I just left her to worry. But wouldn’t she have worried even more if I’d told her about Dad being in trouble with the law?
I’d never flown before. It was a long flight but I didn’t care. I loved it. I wasn’t even impatient, because Gran told me her self-hypnosis technique for long flights.
“You settle down and put your seat belt on, and you think, ‘Nothing to do but sit here and read magazines and watch movies and eat and drink and sleep and look forward to Australia!’” I did that and it worked. I suppose I’m naturally lazy, like my teacher says (what she actually said was, I was seriously talented at laziness), because doing nothing for thirteen and a half hours didn’t bother me a bit.
I wanted to see if Gran would sleep on the floor again, but she didn’t. She got very uncomfortable though. She sighed and groaned and wriggled and said her legs were killing her. I felt really sorry for her with her long legs all cramped up, or out in the aisle where people kept kicking them, but not so much when she fell asleep sprawled all over me.
We landed in Singapore and had a wonderful Chinese meal in the airport. I wanted to go into the town (we had to wait three hours) but Gran said, “We’re not allowed, and anyway you wouldn’t like it. It’s the opposite of London, it’s the cleanest city on earth, and if you drop so much as a sweet wrapper they put you in jail and flog you.” Then we flew on to Perth.
I was already in my new clothes. Gran had different taste for me than for her. She’d bought me really cool gear. I was surprised about one thing – it was all casual stuff. She’d said we were going to stay at a hotel, and I supposed that meant dressing up (it didn’t, as it turned out), so what did I need two pairs of combat pants and three pairs of army-looking shorts for? Not to mention all those sleeveless tops.
When we got to Perth I liked it straight away. It was lovely and clean, even without jail and flogging. You could taste the air. The sea was blue and the weather was hot – there were loads of parks and flowers, and gumtrees like in the movies about Australia, that had smooth trunks all patchy green and white, and leaves that smelt like rubbing oil. Some beautiful coloured parrot-things were flying in them.
We checked into a fantastic hotel. I’d never seen anything like it. It was so grand. I had my own room and beautiful bathroom. Gran had the room next door. We unpacked a bit and then had lunch in a big dining room with a buffet. The food! It was unbelievable. Everything you could ever think of to eat, all laid out on silver dishes. Things like baby lobsters. Oysters. Chicken. Duck. Pink roast beef. A zillion salads and hot dishes, and mountains of fruit and cheeses, half of which I’d never seen in my life. There were about ten different kinds of fish. The desserts were like a dream, coloured jellies and flans and creamy cakes and fruit salads like a mass of jewels, and lots more. You helped yourself. You could choose anything you liked, as much as you liked, and come back for more. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I think if we’d stayed there for long I would have died, from overeating.
Gran ate oysters till I lost count. I tried one. Yuck! It was like solid snot. She laughed when I said that. She was laughing a lot. Then, just as I was eating my third pudding, something went clunk in my head and I nearly fell asleep right into the whipped cream. Gran saw my eyes closing.
