Love From Joy Read online

  ‘We can hear you,’ Dad said.

  ‘Tell them,’ Claude said again, ‘that I am not actually talking to them.’

  Mum snapped the laptop shut like a trap. She said, ‘Well, you’re still grounded.’

  ‘Tell them,’ Claude said, looking at me, ‘that this is an infringement of my civil liberties. Tell them that I will not live under a tyrannical regime.’

  ‘Maybe you should just tell us you’re sorry,’ Dad said, and he sail-cracked another sheet.

  Claude didn’t tell me to tell them anything after that.

  I poured myself the last little dribble of orange juice and Grandad cut a slice of bread for me and put it in the toaster. While I waited for it to pop up, I pretended I wasn’t having plain old toast and a measly teaspoon of juice for breakfast. I was having pancakes with syrup, or a two-egg omelette, or porridge with a runny-honey smiley face. I was having tamarind rice cakes with coconut sauce or samosas with chilli chutney, or a fresh mango, fizzing with flavour and just pulled from a tree.

  ‘Is it done yet?’ I asked, and something stuck very low down in the bottom of the toaster started burning, and nobody said a word.

  It is a very good job that I am such an expert on silver linings. In fact, it is a silver lining all by itself. Everything has an upside if you just know where to look for it. For example, even the giant iceberg of doom filling the kitchen and blocking out all of the fun had the silver lining of me looking forward to getting out of the house. Iceberg, bad. Walking to school, good. It’s simple.

  Buster came with me as far as Miss Wolfe’s garden, and then he leaped up and high-beamed along her front wall with his tail flipping backwards and forwards like a sea snake.

  Miss Wolfe lives on the other side of the street at number 57. Her house has the same grey front door and small square windows as number 48, but the gardens could not be more different. If they were countries, Miss Wolfe’s would be Brazil and Grandad’s would be North Korea. His garden is all straight and organized and mainly grey, and not a lot is allowed to happen, while hers is messy and colourful and teeming with life, like a party. There are bees and butterflies everywhere you look and it is so packed full of flowers that even the air around it smells nicer. I watched Buster lick his lips and flex his teeth, and his eyes glinted like the blade of a knife.

  ‘Be good,’ I said into his swivelling ears. ‘Be kind to other creatures and please look after Grandad while we are out.’

  I am not one hundred per cent positive that he heard me.

  Mum or Dad used to keep me company on my walk to school, but now I know the way, I mostly do it by myself. On the short bit of the main road that I walk down, there are shops and cafés and two hairdressers and a gym. Outside the train station, which breathes people in and out like a tide, there is a stall that sells fruit piled up in bright pyramids and rainbow towers. After the fruit stall, I go past a park with black railings and baby swings and a seesaw and a funny sort of rocking horse on a big spring that isn’t shaped like a horse at all, but a giant parrot. There are real-life parrots in the trees too, little grass-green parakeets with berry-red beaks. In India, those birds are all over the place, although I don’t think I have ever seen an actual park. Not really. Here, they flit about in the branches, a tiny glimpse of our old life come to visit our new. When I am walking past, I imagine all the other things there would be, as well as the little parakeets, if this was a park in India. I layer things over what I am really looking at, like transfers, until I get it right. Cows, wandering down the middle of the road with bells and necklaces on. Strings of marigolds and magnolia on the railings, and little black taxis that look like the only kind of car you can draw when you are six. Red dust, and women in bright saris, and four people on a motorbike, at least, and a tangle of wires overhead, like spaghetti with squid ink. Trucks all brightly painted, sounding their horns on repeat, and bicycles with man-sized stacks of flattened carboard on the saddles, and the smell of chai and hot sugar and exhaust fumes and incense. A skinny dog driven mad with fleas, and rubbish like you wouldn’t believe, and everything moving, and more wires, and music, and a thousand extra people for every step.

  My walk goes by in a flash, like time travel. After I have finished walking in India, I am right around the corner from school.

  You can tell when you’re nearly there because of the oak tree that towers over the rooftops like a giant. It waves at me every morning from the far end of the street. It is a thousand years old so it has been there for a long time, way before anything else, the street included, and the school and the railings and the houses, and probably even the park. I am very keen on that oak tree. It has done me a lot of favours. It introduced me to my new best friend, Benny Hooper, for a start. It made me and my teacher Mrs Hunter agree on something for the first time ever. It helped me become a member of the Historical Society and I really do love belonging to things. Me and Benny and Mrs Hunter and Grandad are all members, which is proof that even very different people can have a lot in common. When Benny and I found out that the council wanted to chop the tree down, we started a campaign to save it. It’s not over yet, because campaigns can take ages, but I think we might be winning.

  School was hard at the beginning, because I had never even set foot in one before, and I couldn’t put one foot right. It isn’t always easy. I forget the rules sometimes, because there are so many. And trying to get Mrs Hunter to tolerate me is still a bit of a challenge. This has a lot to do with me talking too much and not being the most brilliant at sitting still, and also getting in a lot of trouble for climbing the thousand-year-old tree and hiding out in it when I wasn’t supposed to. But that was a long time ago. I am much better at all the rules than I used to be, and I am crossing my fingers that any day now Mrs Hunter will really start to notice.

  I like it here, I really do. For lots of reasons. Like how good I am getting at maths and back bends. And how there are so many people, from so many different places, that it can sometimes feel like being all over the world again, in all of my favourite places, at the same time. My new friends’ families come from Ghana and Nairobi and Iran and Somalia and Milan and Kosovo and Karachi and Syria and Paris. And that’s just the ones in my year. Sometimes when the corridors are full of people and everyone is talking, it’s like being at a soukh in Marrakech or on the Metro in Paris or at the seaside in Barcelona or on a busy street in Lima, Peru, all at once. There are forty different languages in this one school. Even the United Nations only speaks six. When I tell Benny this, he says exactly what I am thinking, which is, ‘WOW. This place is like the PLANET in miniature. It’s like the whole world on the head of a pin.’

  Apart from Benny, that is my absolute favourite thing about it.

  Benny Hooper read somewhere that parakeets like the smell of apples, and that if you hold out some chopped apple in your palm and stand very still, they will fly down and perch on you in the hope of a snack. We wanted to try it. So we walked a big loop from his house to Grandad’s house, with the park in between.

  As soon as we got to the gates, Benny picked up a big stick and started swinging it about and passing it from one hand to the other. Once or twice he looked like he might be going to throw it for an invisible dog, but he didn’t let go, not even while we were trying to tempt the birds out of the trees, not even when we gave up and ate half the chopped-up apple ourselves and left the other half on the grass for them to enjoy in peace later. Then, nearly at Plane Tree Gardens, outside the shop where you can buy everything from shoe polish to cat food, there was a bollard leaning over a big yawning hole in the ground. It looked like it might topple, any second, almost as if it had been waiting, and Benny wedged the stick down into the hole to straighten it, and left it there holding up the bollard, and kept on walking. He didn’t miss a beat, not one step. He didn’t even look back.

  I did, though. I stopped and I laughed out loud and he said, ‘What? What’s funny?’

  ‘That!’

  ‘What?’

/>   I pointed at the bollard. ‘That was amazing,’ I said.

  Benny grinned at me. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I couldn’t work out why you had that stick with you the whole way. It was a mystery.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And then there it was,’ I told him. ‘The reason for the stick. That bollard. Waiting for you. But right at the end. Like you knew it was coming. Did you know it was coming?’

  Benny pulled a face and shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘WOW,’ I said, and Benny laughed.

  ‘You’re funny,’ he said.

  ‘And you’re a bit magic,’ I told him, because I really think he is.

  Benny changed school for me, overnight. Thanks to him, I went from being fish-out-of-water-ish and lonely to being someone who belonged. And it’s not just school that he changed for the better. It is everything. I honestly think he might be the best best friend I have ever had. This is why I want to make sure that he is all right, and why I am very seriously starting to worry that he isn’t.

  Benny notices the exact same things in the world as I do, like the delicate skeleton of a leaf, or the thousands of ways dogs are like their owners, or how a stepped-in puddle at night can look like a photo of the Milky Way. From the moment I met him in the playground, from the very first thing he said to me, about a tiny acorn having just what it needs to turn into an enormous oak, Benny and I have seen eye to eye, and treasure everywhere.

  At the moment we are almost non-stop searching for treasure. It is one of our top five favourite things to do. This is because of a thing we saw on the internet about a boy who discovered a valuable Roman coin in his very own back garden. We dig around the edges of the playground or at the bottom of Benny’s building or, best of all, in Grandad’s garden at number 48. Benny wants to be an archaeologist. He really does believe that there is treasure everywhere, like I believe in silver linings. According to him, priceless stuff is just a few metres away underneath us, wherever we are, at all times.

  I tell him that Claude says the exact same thing, but about rats.

  So far, we have dug up a brown glass medicine bottle, a 1p coin from 1976, a rusty old key, some bits of broken plate, a toy soldier with one arm missing, two chipped marbles, a dinner fork and an empty travel tin of lemon sherbets. We haven’t found anything Roman or priceless but we are not giving up yet. Not me and Benny Hooper. Not even close.

  Sometimes I think a thing right before Benny says it, like, ‘That cloud looks like an upside-down umbrella,’ or, ‘In all seriousness, don’t you think that magnets are actually incredible?’

  Sometimes we talk at the same time, at a thousand miles a minute, and sometimes we are so busy and quiet we realize we haven’t said anything at all. We are both vegetarians and we both love chocolate and we both know nearly all the flags of the world and what countries they belong to. And Benny has a definite talent for spotting silver linings. He is almost as good at it as me.

  Benny says that I have changed stuff for him too, in lots of ways, and that all of them are good.

  He likes having a friend who has been to so many places and seen so many things.

  He says, ‘I have never met anyone who knows as much about killer whales or train timetables or what snakes like to eat as you do.’

  He says, ‘Nobody else I know has been inside a volcano or under a waterfall or on top of a camel, and you’ve done all three.’

  He says that I make people interested in things because I am so interested in them. He says that kind of thing is catching. According to Benny, I am the bug that everybody wants to get.

  I like it when he says that. Some people wouldn’t want to be compared to a contagious disease, but I take it as a compliment, the best compliment, because I know that’s how it is meant.

  Benny says I make break time fun, because I always have a plan. He says I even make lessons less boring because I talk about stuff.

  ‘Mrs Hunter wants me to stop talking,’ I tell him, and Benny smiles and pushes his glasses up his nose and says, ‘Well, I don’t.’

  Benny sticks his tongue out, just a tiny bit, when he is working hard on a maths question. He frowns when he is reading and when he is talking on the phone, and when he isn’t happy his eyes get ten shades darker in the time it takes to blink, like there is an eclipse of the sun happening inside his own head. His hands are square and they are mind-bogglingly spine-tinglingly brilliant at playing the piano. Benny’s house is full of musical instruments. Everyone in his family can play. He writes his own comic books about a boy called Nut and they are exciting and funny and terrifying in all the right places. He is always making things and he is a very good cook. Sometimes, at his house, when he is getting us a snack, he lifts the big wooden spice box out of the bottom cupboard and uses a bit of everything, and it is like watching a wizard making a spell.

  Benny hums when he is eating, and he likes the shady edges of the playground as much as I do, and I have noticed that he always tries to be the last one to leave the classroom so he can switch off the lights. He has been going to our school since he was five. His big brother Sam went there too, four years before him. Even Benny’s mum and dad went there, but Benny’s mum says that was a ‘very, ve-ry’ long time ago. Benny asks her if Mrs Hunter was their teacher, and she laughs and taps him on the nose with her pointing finger and says, ‘Nope.’ She also says that Mrs Hunter is one of the best teachers on the staff, and one of the nicest people you could ever meet. Benny looks at me then with his face all stretched and his glasses balancing on the very end of his nose, like she has just told us there are cream cakes the size of hippos living on the moon. But his mum doesn’t smile and she is not joking and I can tell by her eyes (which are just like Benny’s) that she thinks it is completely and totally true.

  Benny’s mum is called Angela. She is an artist and her paintings are big and loud and quick and strange, and she has lots of different jobs and one of them is to work sometimes in the school canteen. She has a laugh that makes you want to start laughing and a walk that looks like a dance. Her wrists are loud with bangles and she wears bright flowy clothes that remind me of rainforest birds and sweet wrappers. Wherever Angela is, it feels like somebody just turned up the colour.

  Benny and Sam and Angela and Ed, who is Benny’s dad, live in the flat that Angela was born and grew up in, on the Meadows Estate. The label on their doorbell says,

  THE HOOPERS

  Their block is called Sunningdale. This is the perfect name for it because on a good day all the rooms are full of sunshine. It is high up on the eleventh floor and the view is breathtaking and enormous. I have spent hours looking out of Benny’s windows. You can see the parakeet park, and the high street stretching all the way down to the roundabout with the giant mangled goalpost sculpture in the middle. You can see the quick glint of the faraway river in between things, and the neat rows of houses in Plane Tree Gardens and cars inching around on the roads, and the fancy pink-and-white birthday cake mansion near the doctor’s surgery.

  When the fair came to the park, we could see all the rides and the stalls and the big wheel, lit up and flashing, and the people with their noisy mouths like dots and their arms flailing. One minute we were right down in it, breaking toffee apples inside their wrappers and screaming our heads off on the Wurlitzer and breathing in hot-dog steam and jumping out of our skins on the ghost train. The next, we were watching it all from above, like gliders or eagles or gods. We could see where we had only just been walking, in the narrow path between the bumper cars and the place where you have to go fishing with tiny magnets to win a giant panda. The Wurlitzer was no bigger than my thumb.

  I spend a lot of time at Benny’s house. Angela says I am already part of the furniture. She says I can come here whenever I like, so at the moment, I do. 114 Sunningdale is full of laughter and music and stories and loud family card games and even louder family conversations, and jokes and the smell of cooking and the bustle of eating, and dancing in the kitchen and
stretching out on the massive sofa to read a book or watch cartoons. There are shoes everywhere, not always in pairs, and roller skates for doorstops, and sometimes Ed comes into the room talking through a megaphone, just because. Sam is really cheerful for an older brother. He plays the cello and takes his headphones off when I am talking to him and he laughs at most of my jokes. He calls Benny Grandmaster B and he is always putting his arm around him, always kind to him, just because. Sam lets Benny borrow stuff without threatening to kill him if he drops, scratches or breaks it. He loves the Nut comics and he can sit through a whole family conversation without yawning, crying or storming out of the room. Being with the Hoopers is just like being at our house when we are talking to each other, and not calling people fascist dictators and not having to eat breakfast on an iceberg. All rowdy and free and lumped in together and having a great time.

  Angela knows that we have done nothing but move around the world since I was born. She says it must have been incredible, and that she is a bit jealous, and can only imagine. I have been learning that this also works the other way round. Staying in the same place has given Benny’s family very strong roots. Angela and Ed and Benny and Sam know everyone. They can’t go five metres without someone saying hello. Benny’s parents’ best friends are people they went to school with, people they have known since they were three or four. Angela and Ed were friends when they were ten, which is thirty years ago at least, and the exact same age as me and Benny are now. Angela says Benny’s dad was a very good roller skater and wore short blue shorts and long white socks that still make her laugh when she thinks about them.

  She says, ‘I will dig you out a photo. You won’t believe your own eyes.’