Wishbones

‘She wouldn’t breathe,’ I say, my voice shaky. ‘They think she’s had some kind of fit.’

Dad’s got bags under his eyes and he’s got that pale, shell-shocked look the soldiers have in the pictures Miss Pierce showed us at school.

‘I should have been with her. I shouldn’t have gone out.’

‘Feather… come on…’

Dad puts his arm around me but I push him away.

‘It’s true Dad. If she hadn’t tried to get up on her own…’

My hands are shaking. I wish I could turn back time, just by a few minutes, then I could have prevented this from happening.

Dad steps forward again and folds me into his arms and this time I don’t fight back.

He kisses my forehead and says: ‘It’ll be okay, Feather.’

I nod, because I want to believe him. Only right now my world feels a zillion miles from okay.

Dad tells the paramedics that we’ll follow in the car, which is his way of saving them from having to point out the obvious: that there’s no room for us in the back of the ambulance.

As we watch the ambulance turn out of The Green, followed by the fire engine and the police car, I realise that it’s already 1am. I’ve missed the New Year coming in.

And then I see Jake running across The Green, and I realise that I haven’t kept our 12:01 promise and that makes me feel worse.

‘I was worried…’ Jake says. ‘When you didn’t call. And then you didn’t answer your phone.’ He looks over at the people gathered on The Green, at our open front door and at the lounge window sitting on the drive. ‘What happened?’

I shake my head and then lean into his chest. He holds me and for a while, we just stay there, not saying anything.

Then Jake takes my hand and we go back into the house. When we get to the kitchen, we find Houdini standing with his front hooves up on the windowsill, his big bell clanging against his chest. He’s got the same zoned-out look as Dad did earlier, which makes me think that he must have known that something was up with Mum before anyone else did. Maybe Dad’s right. Maybe Houdini is a magic goat.

As the three of us stand watching the last of the fireworks petering out in the dark sky, I make the most important resolution of my life:

If Mum wakes up, I say to myself, to the sky and the stars and anything out there that might be listening, if she lives, I’m going to look after her better. I’m going to make her well again – for good.

January (#ulink_378a7981-d1b3-50a3-80b0-6b7ea891b95b)

2 (#ulink_ba67fa0d-7834-5690-9957-2e1834c4b554)

I stand at the door and look at all these grown-up people sitting on tiddly chairs in the Year 4 classroom of Newton Primary.

‘I’m sorry we have to be in here.’ I recognise the man at the microphone. He helped the paramedics with the stretcher. He’s doing up Cuckoo Cottage next door.

Taped to the wall behind him, there’s a poster of a woman in a red dress with curly writing running up her body: Slim Skills: The Key to a Whole New You.

I’ve been reading up about being overweight on the NHS website and it said that joining a weight-loss group was a good first step, so I found the one closest to Willingdon and this is it: my first Slim Skills meeting.

I look around for Jake – he’s meant to be here for moral support – but there’s no sign of him.

‘There was a booking clash with the assembly hall,’ the man goes on. ‘I’ll make sure it’s sorted for next week.’ He spots me and juts out his chin. ‘It’s Feather, isn’t it?’ he asks.

Everyone turns to look at me.

There are a whole load of people from Newton that look vaguely familiar and then I notice Mr Ding, the owner of the Lucky Lantern Takeaway Van, which sits in the middle of Willingdon Green. He smiles at me and wobbles on his tiny Year 4 chair.

I’d never thought of Mr Ding as needing to lose weight. I mean, you’d be suspicious of someone in the Chinese-takeaway business being skinny, right?

A couple of places along from him sits Allen, the reporter from the Newton News who I found in our back garden a while back.

‘Are you lost?’ asks the microphone guy.

‘No…’ I begin.

I know what they’re thinking: what’s a scrawny kid doing at weight-loss meeting?

Be brave, I tell myself. If you’re going to take this resolution seriously, if you’re going to have everything in place for when Mum wakes up, you have to be proactive.

I take a breath. ‘No, I’m not lost.’

A door bangs somewhere in the corridor. A few seconds later, Jake rushes in. He smells of fresh air and Amy’s perfume.

‘Sorry… got caught up,’ Jake says, breathless.

Which means that Amy wouldn’t let him go.

Jake and I go and sign the register at the back of the room and then we sit down. I can feel people looking at me and I know it’s because they’ve heard about Mum. The day after she got taken to the hospital, there was an article in the Newton News with a fuzzy picture someone must have taken on their phone: it looks a polar bear under a green sheet is being stuffed into the back of the ambulance. I bet Allen took that photo.

Anyway, Jake does the paper round so he nicked all the copies he could get his hands on and we made a bonfire in the back garden.

‘You bearing up?’ Jake asks.

‘I’m fine.’ I squeeze his hand. ‘Now you’re here.’

The guy at the front clears his throat. ‘As I was saying.’ He smiles out at the room. ‘I’m Mitch Banks, your Slim Skills Counsellor. And I’ll be with you every step of the way.’

What if she can’t take steps yet? I think.

He walks away from the microphone, grabs a pair of scales off the floor and holds them above his head.

‘At the heart of every meeting is the weigh-in.’ He bangs the scales. ‘They’re our nemesis, right?’ He pauses for dramatic effect and then leans forward and eyeballs us. ‘Our truth teller?’

Half of the people in the room nod. The other half look like they’ve been asked to take their clothes off and run around Newton naked.

‘Well, these scales are about to become your best friend.’

‘Mum won’t fit on those in a million years,’ I whisper to Jake. Even if she did manage to get both feet on the standing bit, the digital numbers would go berserk. Mum’s in a whole other league.

‘We’ll work it out,’ Jake says.