Bloom

‘Found something?’

We stared at each other.

‘You’d better show me,’ she said.

I unlocked the back door and, with a trembling finger, pointed at the mess of broken concrete. ‘There.’

Mum’s hands flew to her face and her mouth opened, but she said nothing. She simply stood there, in her grubby white socks, gazing out at the chaos, and somehow her silence was as loud as the patio cracking.

‘It w-wasn’t my fault, Mum,’ I stammered out.

‘I believe you,’ she said, turning round. ‘Where were you when it happened?’

‘Out by the old willow tree.’

She frowned. ‘You know the rule, Sorrel. Don’t go near that tree. It’s not safe.’

‘But I had a reason.’

I filled her in on Mr Grittysnit’s important letter and the branch it had got wrapped round. But she didn’t seem that interested in the letter or the competition. I mean, honestly, it was like telling a sock. But I knew, once it had sunk in, she’d be as excited as I was.

We went back into the kitchen. Mum sat at the table with a heavy sigh and took her glasses off.

After rubbing her eyes for a bit, she reached for her mobile. ‘There’s nothing on the local news about an earthquake.’ Her bitten fingernails flew across the keys. ‘Subsidence,’ she announced eventually.

‘Eh?’

‘When the earth begins to sink it can cause tremors. Break up concrete. That sort of thing.’

She got up and went over to the kettle. ‘It must have been the tree – it’s so diseased. I bet all its nasty little roots are dying, which is why the earth around it collapsed. Promise me you won’t go anywhere near it again.’

While the kettle boiled, she gazed out of the window, fiddling with the small silver hoops in her ears. ‘That blasted tree,’ she sighed. ‘Not only do we have to look at it for the rest of our lives, but it’s going to cost me an arm and a leg to—’

‘Why have we got to look at it for the rest of our lives?’ An idea popped into my head. I felt very clever to have it before Mum. ‘Why can’t you just cut it down?’

She poured boiling water into her mug and added milk. ‘Before I was allowed to buy this house, I had to agree not to remove or harm that tree in any way. The lawyers were quite pushy about it. Made me sign my name and everything.’

She nibbled a biscuit. ‘I wasn’t concentrating much if I’m honest. You were a tiny baby, your dad had just swanned out and all I wanted was a home for us both.’

She gulped her tea and stared up at the clouds. ‘This seemed a perfect place to bring up a baby. Wide pavements for buggies. New houses being built all the time. I would have promised to paint my ears bright purple and sing the royal anthem dressed as a banana if it meant the house would be mine. So, I signed the paperwork. More fool me,’ she said, with a hollow laugh. ‘But back then the tree didn’t look too bad. It’s definitely got worse over the years.’ She gave it one last disgusted look and came to sit down, the smears of smudged mascara under her eyes making her eye-bags look even darker.

The pipes moaned. My stomach gave a queasy lurch. There it was again – that sad feeling in the house had seeped into Mum.

But she put on a bright smile and reached for my hand. ‘Don’t worry. Maybe it’s a chance to give it all a bit of a spring-clean. We’ll put down some fresh concrete and …’ She sniffed the air with an expert nose tilt. ‘Reject Special with unidentified topping?’

‘Yep.’

‘Fancy some of my home-made lemonade to go with that?’

‘Please.’

Mum dug about in the fridge, humming, while I took my pizza out of the oven. As I cleared a space on the table, I spotted the Surprising Seeds. They were still lying where I’d left them, near the salt and pepper shakers. Maybe Mum would know what they were.

‘Look,’ I said, and held the packet out, but the rest of the sentence died on my lips as if I’d lost my voice. I tried again. ‘Ha … Mmm, I foun …’

My lips went all rubbery and loose. Speaking proper words was impossible.

While I sat there, lips flapping about like party streamers and grunts coming out of my mouth, Mum poked her head round the fridge door. ‘You okay?’

With superhuman effort, I managed to force my lips together, but this had the horrible effect of gluing them shut. ‘Mmmm’ was all that came out. ‘Mmmm,’ I said again, desperately.

‘Oh, you’re excited about your pizza,’ she said, walking over to the sink.

I tried to call her back. ‘Mmmm! Mmmm!’

‘All right, darling, point made,’ she said over the splutters and groans of the tap. She put a glass of lemonade in front of me. ‘I’m going upstairs to get out of these overalls.’

It was no use. I looked around frantically for a pen, so I could scribble a message asking for help. But what would I write?

Oh, hi, Mum.

Only me.

I think I might be going slightly mad. How are you?

In other news, currently I can’t speak because my lips have become mysteriously glued together. And I think this is all connected to what happened outside. The details are admittedly a little fuzzy, but I heard voices, thought I was being watched, and saw strange glowing things I couldn’t explain.

Maybe you’d like to look into this packet that I found – are you interested in small black motionless objects resembling jellyfish?

But back to my mouth that I can’t open. I feel very weird. Can you send for a doctor, please?

Oh yeah, she’d send for a doctor all right.

Maybe I shouldn’t tell her. Mum had enough on her plate. Plus, what if she confided in a friend? That was how rumours got started. ‘I’m a bit worried about Sorrel’ would turn into ‘Trixie’s daughter is losing her marbles’ and by the time it reached Mr Grittysnit it would be ‘Obedient pupil? Sorrel Fallowfield can’t even make her own mouth obey her’. And Chrissie would probably come up with another catchy nickname I’d have to grin through for a year. Mad-mouth Sorrel would probably be high on the list.

I twisted in my chair, grabbed my school bag and pushed the Surprising Seeds way down into its depths, out of sight. The moment they were hidden, my lips became unstuck.

‘Testing, testing,’ I said under my breath. Yep, I could definitely talk again.

‘Pardon?’ Mum had reappeared in the doorway in her black tracksuit bottoms and a denim shirt, a look in her eyes that meant temperatures were about to be taken.

‘Nothing.’

And that was when the secret began, I suppose.

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THE NEXT MORNING, I was finishing off my toast when there was a knock on the door.