Iggy and Me Read online

  Dad said, “it’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?”

  Mum said, “When you stop crying I’ve got something to show you.”

  I counted in my head to a hundred and Iggy was nearly finished. Her shoulders were still going up and down, but she wasn’t filling the room with noise like before.

  “Come with me,” Mum said.

  We went back downstairs to Mum’s thinking room and she opened a drawer, looking for something. Iggy was still sniffing. “Here it is,” Mum said, and she pulled out a photo which she gave to Iggy.

  “Let’s see,” I said.

  It was a little girl about the same age as Iggy.

  “That’s me,” Mum said, and Iggy giggled.

  “You look funny,” I said.

  “I know,” Mum said. “I’d just cut my own hair.”

  Iggy and me looked really closely at our mum when she was little. Her hair was brown like mine. Her fringe went straight across the very top of her forehead and it was really, really short. She looked silly. But seeing your Mum when she is five is a weird and silly thing anyway, it doesn’t matter what her hair looks like.

  “Let’s have a look,” Dad said.

  “Do I look like that?” said Iggy.

  “No,” I said, “Yours doesn’t look that bad.”

  “Not from the front anyway,” said Dad.

  “Good,” Iggy said, and Mum laughed.

  Iggy said to Mum, “Did you get told off?”

  “A bit,” Mum said. “And then I got a new hat and some hair clips.”

  “Can I have some?” Iggy said.

  “Tomorrow maybe,” Mum said. “We’ll see.”

  “And when did it come back?” Iggy said, reaching up to twirl a strand of Mum’s hair, which is long and shiny, with no fringe any more.

  “Oh, a few months,” Mum said.

  “Months?” Iggy said. “Months is ages.”

  Mum stroked Iggy’s scruffy hair and looked at her old self in the picture. “No it’s not,” she said. “You’ll see. It’s no time at all.”

  Iggy’s world

  Iggy is really good at pretending. It is her favourite thing to do. She can turn our front room into a water-lit cave or a forest with a mossy floor or an echoey castle, just by thinking. Her eyes go all wide and then she doesn’t see the sofa or the rug or the table like I do, she sees other things. And when she tells me what they are, she’s so good at it I start to see them too.

  Yesterday, when it was too rainy to go outside, I went into our front room and found Iggy walking very slowly on the spot in the middle of the room. She was wearing sunglasses and had a pillowcase tied round her head.

  “What are you wearing that for?” I said.

  “To protect me from the sun,” she said, as if it was obvious.

  “What sun?” I said.

  Iggy took her sunglasses off and frowned at me. “The desert sun,” she said. “It’s scorching.” She pointed to the big lamp that lives in the corner of the room. She had it on the brightest it would go and looking at it made me screw up my eyes, the way the real sun does.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  Iggy pointed to the curtains. They have green trees on them. “To that oasis,” she said. “Come on, we’ve got to make it there before sunset, and she nodded at the lamp like it might go out any minute, suddenly and without warning.

  I taught Iggy what an oasis was. And I told her about the word scorching. I learned them at school. We have been doing deserts.

  “Am I coming too?” I said.

  “So hot,” Iggy said, putting her sunglasses back on, walking in tiny steps across the rug. “I can’t go much further. Oh, for a cup of water in this blistering heat.”

  “I hope it isn’t a mirage,” I said.

  “What isn’t?”

  “The oasis,” I said.

  Iggy said, “What’s a mirage?”

  I told her that it was a thing you can see that isn’t really there, usually in the desert. “It’s seeing things,” I said, “but not because you’re pretending. It’s because of the heat.”

  “Sounds fun to me,” Iggy said.

  Then I said, “Do you think we’re allowed a biscuit when we get there?”

  Iggy stamped her foot and frowned at me again because I wasn’t trying hard enough. “There are no biscuits in the desert,” she said.

  She had a point.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Help me get my camel up,” she said. “He’s fallen over.”

  Iggy’s camel was a beanbag with a blanket thrown over it. She nudged it a bit with her foot and said, “It’s no good. I think he’s given up. We’ll have to leave him behind.”

  “I’m not leaving a camel in the desert,” I said. (I hate cruelty to animals, even pretend ones.) “I’ll carry him.”

  “You can’t carry a camel,” Iggy said.

  “You can if it’s a baby one,” I said, picking the beanbag up easily. It was a big beanbag, but it wasn’t heavy. “Let’s pretend the oasis is in the kitchen and then we can ask for a biscuit while we’re there.”

  Iggy took the pillowcase off her head and said, “You are always spoiling things,” but she came out to the kitchen with me anyway.

  Mum wouldn’t let us have a biscuit because lunch was ready. It was green soup. Green soup is Mum’s favourite way of tricking us into eating vegetables.

  While we were trying to work out what it tasted of, and making sure we had exactly the same size bits of bread, Iggy said, “I know, let’s…” This is what she always says when she’s about to turn the stairs into an avalanche or the bathroom into the land behind the waterfall.

  “I know, let’s…” she said, and the kitchen became a dungeon where we (the princesses) had been imprisoned forever by the Wicked Queen (Mum) and made to eat green soup.

  “Made out of poisoned toads,” Mum said, eating hers quite happily. I think Mum actually likes green soup.

  “No, you’re eating the poison,” Iggy said to Mum. “And we’re going to escape.”

  “Not until you’ve finished,” Mum said.

  We ate as quick as we could, then Iggy suddenly hid under the table and said, “Psst! Psst! Hide! Don’t let the Wicked Queen see you or she’ll cook you for supper.”

  There wasn’t time for another drink of water or anything.

  Mum wasn’t being all that Wicked Queeny. She was doing the washing up and listening to the radio, which is quite normal and not what queens are supposed to do when they’ve got princesses hiding in their kitchen. I thought Iggy was going to say something about Mum not joining in, but instead she said, “Look—she’s making a spell in the sink! Now’s our chance!”

  We made a run for it to the kitchen door. I crashed into the back of Iggy because she was having trouble opening it. Mum turned round to see what all the noise was and Iggy screamed, “Don’t look at her or you’ll be turned to stone!”

  We got the door open and made it up the stairs without the Wicked Queen catching us. Then we fell on the floor and laughed and laughed.

  Iggy didn’t stop giggling until she rolled over and hit her head on our dressing-up box, which is enormous. “Ow,” she said. But she didn’t cry. She just opened the lid and looked inside.

  The box smells funny and is very old because it used to be Mum’s when she was little. There’s a whole Dalmatian suit in there and a bear and a pirate and swords and things because Mum had a brother who is our Uncle Pete. There’s also a lot of princess dresses.

  Iggy put on a pale blue dress made out of slippery material, a tiara with real glass in it, sparkly tights and my old ballet shoes. I picked a red dress with a broken zip, a tickly scarf made out of feathers that made my nose itch, and a pair of shoes with high heels. The shoes were too big, but you couldn’t tell because the dress went all the way down to the floor. They made walking very hard, but it was nice being so tall.

  As soon as I was ready to be a princess, Iggy had changed her mind. She said, “I know, let’s
be pop stars. Let’s do a show.”

  She said, “What’s your name going to be?”

  “Blanche,” I said, because it was the first name that came into my head.

  Iggy looked at me funny.

  “It’s French,” I said.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means white, I think.”

  Iggy looked at me even funnier. “Why would anyone want to be called white?” she said.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “What’s your name?” I said.

  Iggy wasn’t wearing the slippery dress any more. She had a black T-shirt on over her sparkly tights, and her sunglasses from the desert. She was pulling faces in the mirror. “My name is Maddy,” she said in a gravelly voice. “Out of my way, my fans are waiting.” And she went into my room and put my CD player on full blast.

  “That’s too loud,” I said, putting the clothes back in the dressing-up box. Iggy couldn’t hear me. She was jumping around on my bed pretending to play the guitar.

  “Flo!” Mum said from the bottom of the stairs. “That’s too loud!”

  “I know”, I said. “It’s not me. It’s Iggy.”

  Mum said. “I’m trying to work.”

  I turned the music right down.

  Iggy stopped jumping around. She picked up my hairbrush and spoke into it like it was a microphone. “Why did you do that?” she said.

  “Mum’s working,” I said.

  “So am I,” she said.

  “You’re not really.”

  Iggy said, “Do you think singing to crowds of people is easy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Shall we do something else?”

  I said. “Let’s do some drawing. You can stay in my room if you want to do drawing.”

  “OK,” Iggy said.

  And we did. Iggy and me sat on my floor and we drew pictures. It was nice and peaceful after so much noisy pretending.

  I did a picture of me and Mum and Dad and Iggy in a park with some squirrels and a picnic. Iggy was holding a kite. There was a rainbow. It was one of my best.

  “Do you like mine?” Iggy said, and she held it up for me to see. It was an island, with sharks in the water all around, and palm trees and strange birds and snakes and flowers.

  “It’s really good,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Iggy said, and she drew a big X right in the middle of it. “It’s a treasure map.”

  “Wow!”

  “Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s find the treasure right now.”

  It was still raining. I said, “I don’t think we can.”

  “I hate wet days,” Iggy said, looking out of my window in a gloomy way. “The pirates will find all the treasure before we do and there’ll be nothing left for us. I’m so bored of rain.”

  She looked so unhappy standing there. I had an idea. “But what if the treasure’s not buried outside?” I said.

  “What? Where is it?’

  “Stay there,” I said. “And no peeking.”

  I went down to Mum and I begged her for some of the biscuits wrapped in shiny paper that she keeps in a very high cupboard. I put them in one of Dad’s socks with some marbles and the shiniest bits of rock from my rock collection, and then I hid the sock in the bathroom, in a box Mum keeps our hair brushes in, under a pile of towels.

  When I got back to Iggy she was still being gloomy at the window. “Quick,” I said. “We have to go now or we’ve lost our chance.”

  “Why?” said Iggy, dangling her map in one hand. “Where are we going?”

  “It’s a trick map,” I said. “I heard the pirates talking about it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “What’s the trick?”

  “It’s not an island in the sea at all, it just looks like one. It’s a special code and I can read it. The treasure is buried inside the pirate’s castle. I’ll take you to it.”

  “How do we get there?” Iggy said.

  “We have to row across a lake.”

  “A lake?” she said. “Is it deep?”

  “Yes, really deep,” I said, “ and the boat will probably get a hole in it, and there will be crocodiles.”

  “Oh good,” Iggy said, grinning at me. “I love crocodiles. Let’s go.”

  And in my suitcase I put…

  We were going away to see our friends for the weekend. They are a family just like us, with a mum and a dad and two sisters. They used to live in our street, but now Dad says they live in the middle of nowhere and we have a really long journey to go and see them.

  I like going places in our car. It’s nice being all together like that. It’s not very big and we always take loads of stuff with us so it’s really cosy.

  Dad says it’s not cosy, it’s crowded. He says Mum doesn’t need to take thirteen outfits for three days. He says there’s no reason why we have to bring absolutely all of our toys with us. He says, “And why do you need to make exact replicas of your beds in the back?”

  “It’s comfy,” we say.

  And he says, “Not with that Sylvanian house digging into the back of my chair, it’s not.”

  It took us quite a long time to get going. We were all in and Mum had checked our seatbelts. Iggy and me had our pillows in the right place and we were sharing the covers exactly in half. Then we all had to open and shut our doors again because the light that says one of them is open kept flashing. It’s Iggy’s door usually. This time it was Mum’s.

  Then Dad said, “Are we ready?” and Iggy said, “I need a wee.”

  Mum said, “Oh, Iggy, I asked you that two minutes ago in the house.”

  “I didn’t need one then, “ Iggy said, “but now I’m busting.”

  So Dad groaned, and Mum got Iggy out of the car and unlocked the front door and went back inside the house and took her to the loo.

  When they came back out, Mum said, “Are you sure you don’t need one, Flo?” And even though I’d just been, this little seed of worry got planted in my brain that I might need one in a minute, so I got out and went too.

  “Women!” Dad said, and Mum said loudly, “We’ll ignore that.”

  Anyway, we all got strapped in again and then we were off. I turned round and looked out of the back window while we drove away from our house. It’s fun seeing where you’ve been.

  We didn’t get very far because we had to stop at the petrol station and put air in the tyres and buy newspapers and things like that. Iggy wanted crisps.

  “You’ve just had breakfast,’ Mum said.

  “Can I have cheese and onion?” Iggy said.

  “Crisps are bad for you, Iggy,” Dad said. “They’re full of salt and fat and they give you spots.”

  “No they don’t,” Iggy said. “I’m hungry.”

  Mum rustled around in a bag at her feet and pulled out a banana. “If you’re hungry you can have this,” she said. “A nice piece of fruit.”

  “I’m not hungry any more,” Iggy said. “I’m thirsty. Can I have a drink?”

  “No liquids,” Dad said. “Not until we get there. I’m not stopping every five minutes for you to wee.”

  “I’ll hold it in,” Iggy said.

  “No you won’t,” said Dad. “That’s the problem.”

  And then we were actually moving.

  I watched the people outside on the pavement as we zoomed past them and I wondered if they were going somewhere nice like we were. Maybe to the beach or to visit their granny or have a big lunch with loads of people in their family they hardly know, or to the middle of nowhere, just like us.

  On the way we played some games. First we played I Spy. This didn’t take very long because Iggy wasn’t very good at it. She said “I spy with my little eye something beginning with tree.”

  I said, “Tree?” and she said “Your turn.”

  I said, “I spy with my little eye something beginning with W.”

  “Windscreen,” Dad said.

  I said, “How do you know?”

  Mum laughed and
said, “You always start with windscreen. Just like in Hangman you always start with elephant.”

  This is true because they are both pretty long words and I never think anyone is going to get them. But they always do.

  Then Mum and Dad chose things that were really hard, like N for nothing and G for gearstick, and we gave up.

  Next we played Who’s in the Bag? I like this game a lot. There’s no bag, you just think of a name in your head, like a famous person or a cartoon character, or a piece of fruit (if you’re Iggy) and everyone has to guess it. They can ask you questions and you’re only allowed to say Yes or No.

  Iggy didn’t play it properly. When it was her turn to think of something, I said, “Is it a girl?”

  Instead of saying yes or no, she said, “Lemons can’t be girls, silly.”

  So I said, “Is it a lemon?” and she said, “No.”

  She was cheating.

  On her next go, I said, “Is it an animal? (yes) Is it black and white? (yes) Is it a zebra?”

  And then all of a sudden it wasn’t an animal at all, it was Bart Simpson and then a tangerine. I got cross and then I got in trouble.

  Dad said, “Seeing as we’re all hurtling along in this metal box on wheels with no means of escape for the next two and a half hours, do you think you could keep the noise down?”

  And Mum said, “I wasn’t shouting.”

  And he said, “I didn’t say you were.”

  Except she was, sort of.

  When I wasn’t cross with Iggy any more we played the Alphabet Game. You have to go through the whole alphabet the right way round and take it in turns to say boys’ names and girls’ names. Dad kept saying silly ones.

  I said, “Adam.”

  Iggy said, “Ben.”

  Mum said, “Chris.”

  Dad said, “Desmondo.”

  I said, “Eddie.”

  Iggy said, “Freddie.”

  Mum said, “George.” (Which Iggy found hysterical for some reason.)

  Dad said, “Humperdink.” (Which set her off again.)

  “Dad!” I said.

  He said sorry, but he didn’t mean it. He said Lego, Pinky, Taleggio and Xylophone after that, and that was just the boys.