Little Darlings Read online

  ‘What’s she doing? Is she being sick?’ asked Mark, kneeling down beside me.

  I blushed in case he thought I was being rude. ‘She’s saying goodbye to the house,’ I whispered.

  ‘Doesn’t she want to live there any more?’

  ‘Yes, it’s her absolute dream home!’ I said, which made him laugh.

  ‘Then tell her she can stay there. It looks like the doll’s house is yours to keep.’

  ‘Really!’

  ‘We tried to hire it, but it was going to cost so much we bought it outright. I don’t see the point of lumbering it back to the studio. You keep it, sweetie.’

  I thought for one stomach-churning moment that he meant it was my baby sister’s doll’s house. ‘I’m not Sweetie, I’m Sunset,’ I said, crestfallen.

  ‘I know, darling. I call everyone sweetie.’ He very gently pinched the end of my nose. ‘And you’re a total sweetie.’

  Oh, I loved Mark so much. For a long time I pretended that he and I lived in the pink and white house together, with Mrs Furry as our housekeeper.

  Mum bought me two doll’s house dolls but I never liked them very much. They had china heads and stiff white cloth bodies so they couldn’t sit down properly. I had to prop them up or let them lie flat on the floor as if they’d suddenly fainted. They were dressed in Victorian clothes, the lady in a purple crinoline and the man in a grey frock coat and pinstripe trousers. Mum said I should call them Victoria and Albert. I didn’t really want to. It made them seem stiffer and stranger than ever. I started having bad dreams about six-foot monster dolls with painted heads and staring eyes, ready to fell me with one flick of their stiffly stuffed arms. I banished Victoria and Albert to the very bottom of my sock-and-knicker drawer.

  I invited the next-size-up teddy into the doll’s house to keep Mrs Furry company. This was Mr Fat Bruin, a tubby bear with a big smile who told jolly stories, especially after I’d given him a drink out of a miniature liqueur bottle.

  I decided Mrs Furry and Mr Fat Bruin might like some children, so I gave them Chop Suey, a tiny Chinese cat permanently waving his paw, and Trotty, a pink glass horse, and a baby, Peanut, specially made out of pink Plasticine.

  Mum got cross with me when she found me playing with my new family.

  ‘Why are you cluttering up your lovely doll’s house with all this junk? I bought you proper dollies to play with. These silly things aren’t dolls. They look all wrong. They’re too big or too little. And you know I hate you playing with Plasticine – it gets everywhere.’ She squeezed Peanut, mangling her terribly.

  I said I was sorry and agreed I was silly and took my family out of the doll’s house – but as soon as Mum had gone out of the room I brought them all back. I asked Mrs Furry to stand by the stove to cook them my favourite meal of sausage and mash and baked beans. Mr Fat Bruin flopped on the sofa with a tiny folded-up scrap of newspaper. Chop Suey played marbles with tiny beads. Trotty did her ballet exercises wearing a wisp of pink feather. I tenderly moulded Peanut back into shape and tucked her up in her matchbox cot. I’d keep my family safe and splendidly housed no matter what.

  They still live in the doll’s house now, years and years later. I’ve got new dolls, little sturdy smiling ones, and five tiny felt mice, all in different outfits, but they’re just friends and cousins to my proper family. I’ve got lots more furniture now too: a four-poster bed with a set of rose-silk covers, a television, a tiny bird in a white cage, rugs in every room, pictures hanging on the walls, curtains at each window, but the original key pieces are still my favourites. Mrs Furry has a whole set of saucepans and can serve her meals on special miniature willow-pattern plates. Mr Fat Bruin’s sofa has velvet cushions with little braid tassels. Chop Suey and Trotty and Peanut have roomfuls of tiny toys, including a perfect miniature doll’s house. It has a little hook at the side so it can swing open. I’ve made minute Plasticine replicas of my family inside, playing with another even smaller doll’s house. I like to imagine that inside that one there’s another weeny family playing with a crumb-size doll’s house, on and on until it makes me feel giddy.

  The doll’s house is still my favourite possession, even though I suppose I’m much too old to play with dolls now. Sweetie wanted to play with the doll’s house too as soon as she could crawl, but she just chewed on the furniture. She very nearly swallowed Peanut.

  I tried gently distracting her, but it only made her more determined. She started using the doll’s house to pull herself up, hanging onto the little window ledges and buckling them. I couldn’t bear it and tapped her little scrabbling fingers – and Mum saw and shouted that I was a bad, jealous, selfish sister and I must learn to share my toys with Sweetie. I was willing to share most things with her, but not the doll’s house. So I dragged it laboriously inside my wardrobe and shut the door on it, so that Sweetie couldn’t get at it.

  I kept the doll’s house in the wardrobe, very sensibly, because Ace proved to be a total menace when it came to wrecking my things. In this week alone he’s spoiled the points of every single one of my felt pens and pulled the head right off Suma, my biggest teddy bear.

  But Wardrobe City is safe behind locked doors. I only open up my world when Sweetie and Ace are out or asleep. I’ve made three more houses out of shoe boxes stuck together, furnishing them all myself, and built a towering apartment building out of wooden bricks. After various terrible castrophes I had to use up several tubes of Evostik cementing the bricks together.

  There’s also two shops. One sells little packets of cereal and small pots of jam and miniature alcohol bottles and a variety of Plasticine ready-meals. The other is a clothes shop specializing in a denim range – lots of little jackets and jeans that I made out of an old pair of dungarees. There’s also a small farm so everyone has fresh milk and eggs every day, and a garage with a fleet of Dinky cars. I’m secretly saving up for a castle, though it’s going to be a bit of a squash fitting it in.

  I don’t ever tell anyone about Wardrobe City. They’d think me weirder than ever at school. I hate school. I’ve been to four different schools already and they’re all horrible. I didn’t mind lesson time at my last school, but Ridgemount House is awful because there aren’t any rules. We don’t even have to do proper lessons if we don’t feel like it. The other kids mess around all the time. I don’t fit in at all. They don’t like me. They call me Wonky Gob. I haven’t got a single friend.

  I can’t tell Mum or Dad. They’ll just go on about the tough schools they attended when they were little kids and say I have to learn to lighten up and join in with the fun and then I’ll soon make friends. Like Sweetie. She is in Year One at my school and every single child in her class wants to be her best friend.

  I hear a howl and a scratch-scratch-scratching outside my door.

  ‘Go back to sleep, it’s too early,’ I hiss.

  I want to rearrange the bedrooms in my doll’s house in peace – but Bessie grumbles and moans and complains so bitterly that I have to shut Wardrobe City up and go to her.

  I open my bedroom door and pick her up. She’s an old lady cat now, but she’s still beautiful, a big fat black cat with white paws. Someone gave her to Mum after she’s done a modelling job with kittens, but Mum doesn’t really look after her, and Dad doesn’t like cats. Sweetie’s supposed to be allergic to them, and Bessie avoids Ace because he chases her, so basically I’m the one who looks after her now.

  ‘It’s not breakfast time yet, Bessie,’ I whisper, rubbing my cheek against her soft furry head.

  Bessie disagrees. It’s always breakfast time as far as she’s concerned. I carry her downstairs to the kitchen and empty a tin of her wet goo into a bowl. She gollops it down eagerly while I keep her company with a bowl of cornflakes. No one else is stirring. Claudia lies in as long as Ace will let her. Margaret, our housekeeper, doesn’t come to do breakfast until late on a Sunday. Her husband, John, doesn’t start mowing the lawn or fixing stuff till midday so that Dad isn’t disturbed. It’s very peaceful in th
e early morning.

  Bessie finishes her bowl before I finish mine. She goes to the back door and starts yowling again to be let out. It’s hard working getting all the locks and bolts sorted but I’m a dab hand at it now. I open the door and Bessie shoots out, across the long lawn, round the pool, under the trampoline, up the path to the wild woody part where the grass is high and she can hide.

  I follow her out in my pyjamas, snatching John’s old gardening fleece from the peg on the back door. I feel less inclined to stick my feet into his gardening boots so I wander out barefoot. The grass is wet and tickly. It feels a bit like paddling. I skip about, waving my arms in the air, kicking my legs out, being a ballet dancer.

  Mum once sent me to dancing classes when I was about five. Maybe it was to get me out of the way when Sweetie was born. Mum said it would help me to look graceful. I stuck it out for a whole year. I liked Miss Lucy, who taught us. She was very kind and never ever got cross even when I kept starting on the wrong foot and twirling the wrong way. I was the only child in the class who couldn’t skip. I’d feel myself getting hot and red, and I could see all the other little girls sniggering as I staggered about. But Miss Lucy always said, ‘Well done, Sunset. I can see you’re trying hard, dear.’

  Then one day Mum couldn’t take me because she was having extensions at the hairdresser’s and the nanny had to take Sweetie to the doctor’s, and Margaret and John were having a weekend off, and the temp girl from the agency didn’t turn up – so Dad took me dancing.

  He sat with all the other mums while they twittered and fussed because they were actually sitting next to Danny Kilman, and most of them had had crushes on him since they were little kids. Dad just sat basking in the attention, leaning back, hands behind his head, his long skinny legs stretched out, his cowboy boots pointing upwards – and I was so proud that he was my dad. But when I started dancing he sat up straight. After a while he hunched over, head bent, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me any more.

  As soon as the dancing lesson finished, while I was still doing a wobbly curtsy with all the other little girls, Dad took me by the hand and hauled me out of the room.

  ‘Do you like dancing, Sunset?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Well, I don’t see the point of you going, darling, because you’re absolute rubbish at it,’ Dad said – and I never went back.

  I know I’m still rubbish, I’m not daft, but I love whirling around and leaping about, and so long as I can’t see myself I can pretend I’m in a sticky-out white dress with pink ballet shoes on my feet. I do a figure-of-eight around the pool, a wafting float through the long grass, and then start a serious wood-nymph ballet in and out of the trees. I’m getting seriously out of breath now, so I slow down and sweep a deep curtsy to my imaginary audience while they clap and cheer and throw flowers at me.

  I can hear clapping! Real clapping, muted but unmistakable. I look up and there’s a face at the top of the wall, elbows, two clapping hands. I feel myself blushing all over. I must look such a fool. Who is it? A girl, not very old, only about my age. A thin dark girl with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  Do I know her? She looks sort of familiar. She’s not one of the girls at school, she’s not any of the girls who used to come round to play, she’s . . . She’s the girl from last night at the premiere, the girl who said I was lucky!

  What is she doing here? And how did she get up the wall? It’s a good six feet high. I stand dithering, still brick-red, not knowing what to do. Maybe I should run right back into the house. Perhaps I should find John – he’s meant to be our security guy. I should tell him there’s a girl climbing the wall.

  ‘Hello,’ she says tentatively.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world for us to meet like this.

  ‘I liked your dancing,’ she says.

  My heart thumps but she doesn’t seem to be teasing me.

  ‘I must have looked a right idiot,’ I mumble.

  I realize I still look incredibly stupid in my pink teddy-bear pyjamas and John’s old fleece. She looks so effortlessly cool in her black T-shirt. She’s still got her little black mittens on. Her mum was dressed identically.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, she’s here, but she’s asleep just now.’

  ‘What do you mean, here?’

  She nods to her side of the wall. ‘Here!’

  ‘What, your mum’s sleeping on the pavement?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘I think so.’ She peers down and nearly slips. ‘Whoops! Hang on a minute.’ She pulls hard, wriggles a lot, and then somehow gets one foot up on the wall too.

  ‘Oh, careful, you’ll fall!’

  ‘No, no, wait a minute.’ She levers her foot further across, wriggles a bit more, gets her leg right up – and then suddenly there she is, sitting triumphantly side-saddle on top of the wall.

  ‘How did you do that? How did you get right up it?’

  ‘I’m good at climbing. And there’s the creeper-thingy so I hung onto that. I could jump right down into your garden, if that’s OK with you?’

  ‘Well. . .’

  ‘I’d come through the gate, but it’s all locked up and it’s one of them ones with a security code, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘So how do your friends nip round to see if you want to play out?’

  ‘They don’t. I suppose their mum and my mum might fix it up first, on the phone,’ I say uncomfortably, not wanting to let on that I don’t have any friends just at the moment.

  ‘Well, I’ve come round on the off-chance, haven’t I? Can I come in?’

  I know I shouldn’t let her. Mum would go bananas. She’s always going on to Dad that we should have more security. She tried to get the wall built even higher, with jagged glass at the top, but the other Robin Hill residents objected, saying it wouldn’t be in keeping with the rest of the estate. Mum was furious, saying they were all a load of nosy interfering snobs, and they simply didn’t understand our security problems because they just had boring old managing directors for their husbands, not world-famous rock stars. We didn’t just have to worry about burglars – the kids could well be stolen and held to ransom.

  But this girl with the ponytail is clearly not a burglar or a kidnapper. It’s so strange: I don’t know her, I don’t even know her name, and yet I don’t feel shy with her. I feel I can say anything and she won’t laugh or screw her finger into her forehead or call me weird.

  ‘Yes, of course you can come in – but do be careful. Look, wait . . .’ I take John’s fleece off, roll it up and put it on the ground by the wall. ‘This should break your fall – or I could try and catch you if you like.’

  ‘I’d knock you flying!’ she says. ‘It’s OK. Watch!’

  She suddenly leaps, landing neatly and gracefully on the fleece, bending her knees and then straightening up and flinging her arms wide, just like a gymnast.

  ‘Now I’ll clap you,’ I say, doing so.

  ‘I hope I haven’t got your dressing gown muddy,’ she says, picking it up and shaking it out.

  ‘That’s not my dressing gown!’ I say. ‘It’s John’s fleece.’

  ‘Who’s John?’

  ‘Well, he’s mostly our gardener,’ I say, embarrassed.

  ‘Oh, yes. I can’t imagine Danny Kilman doing the gardening,’ she says.

  ‘Do you – do you have a big crush on Danny then? You were at the premiere last night.’

  She hesitates. ‘It’s . . . complicated,’ she says, in a very grown-up way, though she looks uncomfortable.

  ‘It’s OK. I think I’m getting a crush on Davie in Milky Star. I think he’s cute.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I like him too. He spoke to Mum and me last night.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Yes, he did, honest.’ She’s peering through the trees towards the house. ‘You’ve got the biggest garde
n in the whole world, Sunset!’

  ‘How do you know my name?’ I say, blushing.

  She laughs at me. ‘You’re in all the celebrity magazines, silly.’

  ‘I hate those things. I mean, I know my dad and my mum are in them and that’s OK, because they’re famous, but I just mess it up.

  ‘You’re famous too! And what are you on about? You always look great in the photos. You’ve got such lovely clothes. I love those red boots you’ve got – and that little leather jacket! You’re so lucky.’

  She’s still acting like she really means it. The leather jacket doesn’t fit me properly any more: it’s so small it cuts in under the arms. This girl’s as tall as me but much thinner. It would probably fit her. Shall I offer her my jacket? But would she think me rude and patronizing? Would she be offended?

  ‘Would you like a leather jacket like that?’ I ask cautiously.

  ‘That’s a daft question!’ she says, but she’s laughing.

  ‘Well . . .’ I start, but she says something that distracts me.

  ‘My absolute favourite photo of you is one where you’re quite little and you’re playing with Danny on the beach? Do you remember that one?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Well, what about when baby Sweetie was just born, and you’re playing with your doll’s house. Do you remember that?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘It was such a lovely doll’s house, all pink and white. Is it Sweetie’s now?’

  I hesitate. ‘Well, she’s got all her own stuff.’

  ‘So it’s still in your bedroom?’

  ‘It’s in my wardrobe actually.’

  ‘Hey, you must have a ginormous wardrobe! Do you sneak inside and have a little play with the doll’s-house people when no one’s around? I would!’

  I nod, because I know she won’t laugh. I wonder about inviting her right into the house, taking her up to my bedroom and showing her Wardrobe City. I know she’d love it. I’d introduce her to Mrs Furry and all her friends, and we could do the housework together and go to the shopping centre and hang out at the farm, me and my friend . . .