Twenty

India

DEAR KITTY

No, this is silly. I don’t need a fictional friend any more. Treasure is my friend. She always will be. Isn’t that right, Treasure?

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!

I am writing my diary round at Treasure’s home. It’s lovely to be able to call it that. Later on we’re both going to Nan’s Friday night line-dancing class. Patsy comes too. She is brilliant at it, much, much better than us. Treasure is quite good at it, though she gets her lefts and rights mixed up sometimes. I thought I would be hopeless. I’ve never been able to get the hang of disco dancing. I’ve lumbered around at school discos, waggling my arms about (and my bottom too, unfortunately) looking incredibly stupid. I just didn’t have a clue how to do it. But line dancing is entirely different. You don’t make it up as you go along. You learn every single step, every wave of the arm and stomp and clap and kick. You learn until the sequence becomes a little pattern in your head and your feet automatically obey.

I am light on my feet too, even though I’m so heavy. It doesn’t matter a bit if you’re fat. There’s a couple of ladies at Nan’s class who are huge but they’re still great dancers. There are old ladies too, but you should see them wiggle and strut, while the men whistle. Some of the men are quite old too but Jeff and Steve are young and they wear matching checked cowboy shirts and real cowboy boots with steel tips and they dance up a storm. That is the particularly good thing about line dancing. It doesn’t matter what sort of person you are, old or young, boy or girl. You just go along and have fun. It is a fantastic feeling when we’re all stomping along together through each song.

I have never felt in step with anyone else before. Nan says I’m doing very nicely indeed for a beginner. She sometimes puts me at the front so the others can copy me. But you have to concentrate hard all the time. If you think about anything else you forget the sequence and stumble. That’s another especially good thing about line dancing. You can’t dwell on your worries.

I’ve got quite a few worries at the moment. That’s why I haven’t been writing in my diary recently. I haven’t really wanted to write about everything. I’ve talked about it. I’ve told Chris.

That is another extraordinary thing. I am in love.

This is totally private. I am writing with my hand over the page because I don’t even want Treasure to know. I am supposed to tell Chris everything but I can’t tell him that.

I tell him everything else though, and how I feel about it. My mum and dad are splitting up. Sometimes I feel as if I’m splitting in two as well. Other times I don’t care at all. I can’t help it that they’ve made a mess of their lives. I just don’t want them to make a mess of my life too.

I still love Dad best even now, but I’m going to live with Mum most of the time. I couldn’t live with Dad because he’s renting a studio flat now and it’s much too small. And maybe he doesn’t want me around too much because it would cramp his style with his girlfriends. I think he’s started seeing Suzi. He is totally disgusting. Sometimes I think he almost deserves to go to prison.

The police let him go after they charged him. Dad’s got a super-sharp lawyer who’s sure he’ll get him off the embezzlement charge, no bother at all. Mum thinks she’ll have to pay his legal bills. I suppose this is very generous of her.

I asked Mum if she thought Dad had really stolen the money from Major Products.

‘Of course not, India! It’s all a ludicrous mistake. Dad got a bit muddled with his accounts, that’s all.’

But I heard them having heaps of rows about it, night after night before Dad moved out. Mum didn’t say anything about muddles and mistakes. She kept asking him what he’d done with all the money, and had he really just frittered it away on girls and good times?

I know one thing. Dad didn’t give poor Wanda a good time.

Wanda disappeared. Mum said she wasn’t very well and had to go to a special clinic for a rest. I think I know exactly what happened at this special clinic. I think they got rid of Wanda’s baby. I said as much to Mum. She said I’ve been watching too many soaps on television and insisted Wanda wasn’t ever pregnant. I don’t believe Mum. I can’t ask Wanda. As soon as she was well enough to leave the clinic she went back to Australia. Mum paid her air fare.

Mum’s having to sell the house because she’s had to pay for so much. She says it’s time to move on anyway. We’re probably going to live in a flat, just the two of us. Not a Latimer Estate sort of flat. Mum wants us to live in a Victorian mansion block near her work. It’s still quite near here, though it’s too far to go to my school. I’m not sure Mrs Blandford would want me to stay on anyway. It was her idea to send me to the educational psychologist. She obviously thinks I’m some kind of nutcase. Mum does too.

But Chris says I’m the sanest person he’s ever met. And I’m boasting again now, but he also says I’m one of the brightest. He’s given me an IQ test. It would be gross to tell you the exact number, but if the average IQ is 100 then I have enough intelligence for one and a half people. Mum asked him if I stood a chance of getting a scholarship to one of the posh, big girls’ schools and he said I shouldn’t have any problems at all.

Chris is the educational psychologist. I see him once a week and it is wonderful. I was dreading seeing him the first time. I thought he’d be some suspicious old man with a funny accent and a probing manner. But Chris is twenty-five and he actually looks a lot younger in his jeans and T-shirt. He’s not really what you might call good-looking. He’s got this really great smile though and freckles all over his face and fuzzy ginger hair. It’s exactly like my hair.

‘Hi, Ginger Twin,’ he said, grinning. ‘Now, I’ve always hated my hair but it looks great on you.’

‘Do people always think you’ve got a terrible temper?’ I asked.

‘You bet. It’s so tiresome. Maybe I’ll get round to doing a special research project on red hair and temperament.’

If Chris doesn’t do it, I will. I have decided that I’m going to be a psychologist too. We have long, long, long talks on psychology every week. It’s a fascinating way of studying human behaviour. You do it all very scientifically, with experiments. There have been lots and lots of studies on family behaviour and what makes a good or bad parent.

Although it’s difficult to make up your mind. Perhaps psychology can’t ever be an exact science. Even the worst parent in the world can be good some of the time.

Anne Frank wrote that she didn’t love her mother at all but when they were in the concentration camp they clung together, inseparable.

Mum took Treasure and me to see Anne Frank’s house! OK, she was spending a weekend in Amsterdam anyway doing a photo-shoot. Treasure got kitted out in Moya Upton from head to foot. She got made up whiter than ever, with smudged circles under her eyes. She struck scary poses in cobbled streets by the canals while I sat reading an A-level psychology book and eating Dutch apple cake. When Mum and the photographer and the stylist had finished with Treasure at long last, Mum took us to 263 Prinsengracht where Anne hid in the secret annexe. We heard the Westertoren clock strike as we went into the museum, just as Anne describes in her diary.

My heart started beating hard as we went up the narrow stairs and saw the bookcase door. It was all just as I’d imagined it. I stepped into Anne’s bedroom and there were her cards and photos still stuck up on the wall. I cried then. So did Treasure.

We saw Anne’s red-and-white checked diary too. We couldn’t read her neat Dutch handwriting but we didn’t need to. We know her story off by heart.