Tally looks out of the car window and grasps her hands around the seatbelt.
“I’m not going in there.”
Mum unfastens her own belt and swivels to face Tally in the backseat. “We’ve been through this, Tally. I’ve already spoken to Dr Zennor on the phone and she sounds really nice. You’re just going to have a chat with her.”
Tally glowers at her from inside her tiger mask. She knows that she’d feel so much better if she could wear it for the appointment with the doctor, but she also knows that there’s no way the doctor would understand and it’d just make her agree with Mum and Dad that there’s something wrong with Tally.
“I don’t care how nice she sounds. I’m not sick.”
Mum frowns. “Of course you’re not.”
“So why are you trying to make me go in there, then?” She flings her hand out and points in the direction of the large building ahead of them, its gloomy greyness a stark contrast to the bright sunshine of the day.
Mum’s face softens and she releases a long breath. “People come to hospital for lots of different reasons,” she tells Tally. “Sometimes they’re unwell and need help to get better, and other times they come looking for answers. And that’s why we’re here. To try and find out—”
“—What’s wrong with me,” interrupts Tally before Mum can finish her sentence. “You think there’s something the matter with me and it needs to be fixed.”
Mum twists away from Tally and opens the car door, stepping outside into the bright sunshine. Tally feels her stomach twist with worry, but before she can figure out what Mum is going to do next, the back door of the car opens and Mum slides on to the backseat next to her.
“Tally.” Mum’s hand reaches across and rests on her knee. “We don’t think that there is anything wrong with you.”
Tally scowls. “But you want to change me, don’t you? That’s why we’re here. So that you can figure out what to do to make me a better person.”
Mum’s hand tightens on her leg. “Absolutely not! You are perfect exactly as you are and there is nothing about you that Dad and I would ever want to change, not in one million years!”
Tally turns and fixes Mum with an earnest look. “So let’s just go home, then,” she pleads. “I promise that I’ll be good – I really do.”
Mum scoots closer and slips her arm around Tally’s shoulders. “It’s not about you being good,” she says quietly. “When I say that Dad and I don’t want to change anything, I guess that’s not entirely the truth.”
Tally holds her breath. Here it comes. The moment she’s been waiting for. The moment when Mum finally tells her that she’s not the girl they wanted.
“We do want to change a few things – and one of those things is the way that we support you,” Mum says quietly, her mouth close to the tiger mask. “We see how tricky life can sometimes be for you, and we just want to do whatever we can to help you figure yourself out. And right now we need a little bit of help with that, which is where Dr Zennor comes in.”
“What if she says I’m autistic?” whispers Tally. “What will happen to me then?” Mum and Dad had sat her down last night and done an awful lot of talking about today’s appointment, most of which Tally blocked out. She remembers the bit about autism though – the same word that Mum had said to Miss Balogun at parents’ evening all those months ago. The same word that people say about Miles. She lay in bed afterwards, rolling the word around her tongue before deciding that it didn’t sound like her at all.
“Nothing will happen to you,” Mum assures her. “It’s what we said last night – if Dr Zennor thinks that you might be autistic, then she’ll write a report and send it to another doctor, and then that doctor will look at the report that we sent in and the ones from school and decide whether or not to make a diagnosis.”
She pauses for a second. “And then we’ll know. And we can make sure that you get the help you need with some things.”
“I don’t think I am autistic, though.” Tally pulls away from Mum’s arm and looks up at her. “I’ve been thinking about it and I think I’m just me. So this is probably all a waste of time.”
Mum gives her a smile. “You are absolutely you. Nothing that the doctor says is going to change that. Let’s go and have a chat with her and take it from there, yes?”
Tally closes her eyes. It’s clear that Mum really wants her to go inside the hospital. And Tally is still feeling pretty bad about how she screamed at Mum this morning when she couldn’t find her favourite purple T-shirt. It wasn’t Mum’s fault that it had somehow ended up underneath Tally’s bed, she can see that now – even if at the time, all she could think about was that Mum was trying to get her to wear the yellow T-shirt and that was all wrong. Sometimes she feels really sorry for Mum, having to deal with a child like her – although feeling sorry usually just ends up making her even more scared and upset and shouty.
She opens her eyes and slowly pulls the mask off her head before reaching her hands down to unclick her seatbelt. Mum’s face sags with relief as Tally opens the door and swings her legs out to step on to the hot tarmac of the car park. The doctor is going to look inside her head and write a report about her, but the doctor doesn’t know everything. She can’t possibly know that right now, Tally has the ladybird necklace tucked inside the pocket of her jeans. Her lucky charm that’s going to make sure everything turns out fine. Her lucky charm that’s going to help her show the doctor just how nice and good and normal she can be.
It seems to Tally that she has been sitting in the doctor’s waiting room for an eternity. Mum perches next to her on the seat, flicking through the pages of a magazine that Tally knows she can’t possibly be reading. She’s already tried to engage Tally in a conversation about the summer production, but Tally would rather not pursue this line of conversation. She keeps intending to tell Mum and Dad that she’s actually helping Miles with the sound and lights and wasn’t given the part of Little Red, but every time she opens her mouth to tell the truth, she thinks about how proud of her they are and how they keep telling people about how well she’s done to be given the lead role and her mouth snaps shut.
She doesn’t want to take it away from them.
Or away from her.
“What’s the doctor going to ask us?” Tally keeps her voice quiet so that nobody else can hear. There are only two other people here and they’re sitting on the far side of the room. Well, the woman is sitting. The little boy with her is crawling under the chairs and making a noise that sounds distinctly like a train. Tally watches, envious of the way he doesn’t seem to be aware that anyone else is there. She imagines it must be quite nice not having to notice all the time.
Mum turns another page. “She’s probably going to ask about how things are at home,” she says. “She just wants to get to know us a little bit.”
Tally jerks her head to face Mum.
“You’re not going to tell her about what I’m like, are you?” Her words come out in a rush. “You’re not going to tell her about what happened when Auntie Tish was staying with us? Or about what happened when we were playing that game?”
It still hurts Tally to think about the Monopoly incident, even though it was ages ago. She likes playing family games, she really does. It’s the losing that she hates. She tries, though; she tries very hard to remind herself of all the things that Mum and Dad are constantly saying when they play together.
It doesn’t matter if you lose.
It’s not the winning that counts – it’s the taking part.
The thing is – those things just aren’t true. It does matter if she loses, because when Tally loses a game it makes her feel like the biggest failure on the planet, and who would want to feel like that? Mum can tell her over and over again that it’s only a game, but it doesn’t feel that way to her. When she lost at Monopoly it made her whole body feel heavy and dull. It made her feel like she must be useless at everything. And that’s why the curtains got ripped down from the wall and it’s why Nell burst into tears and said that she was never playing a family game ever again – which Tally thought was even more unfair because it wasn’t actually about Nell.
Nell was the winner.
“You can’t tell the doctor about the things I do at home,” she says urgently to Mum, gripping her arm. “That stuff is none of her business”
Mum pauses for a second and then nods. “I won’t tell her,” she says. “You don’t need to worry – it’s just going to be a nice, calm chat.”
A door on the opposite wall opens and the doctor steps into the waiting room.
“Tally Adams?” she says, giving them a smile. “Sorry for the slight delay. Please come in.”
She waves them forward and steps aside so that they can enter the room. Tally presses herself tightly against Mum and reminds herself not to do anything even a little bit unusual.
This is it. This is when the test is really going to start. This is when the doctor is going to decide if she’s good enough.
Or if she needs fixing.
It is a very tired Tally who leaves the room, more than an hour later. The last ninety minutes have taken all of her energy and she isn’t sure that she even has the strength to walk to the car.
“That was all right, wasn’t it?” asks Mum as they head out into the sunshine. “You did really well.”
Tally clamps her lips together. “Uh-hmm.”
This isn’t a safe place to show how she’s really feeling.
“I thought Dr Zennor was lovely,” continues Mum, pulling her car keys out of her bag. Tally glances at them, remembering how good it felt to scrape them down the side of the car. She can’t do that now, though – for all she knows, the doctor is spying on her from one of the many hospital windows, waiting for her to mess up.
“That activity with the foam shapes looked fun!” Mum’s voice is breezy as she clicks the car doors open, and Tally slides on to the back seat, yanking her tiger mask over her head. “I was tempted to come and have a go with you!”
Tally closes her eyes and tries to count to ten, just like Dad tells her to do when she can feel the volcano building up inside her body.
One, two. The foam shapes were quite fun. They were squidgy, just like some of her squishy toys at home, and she enjoyed the sensation of them in between her fingers.
Three, four. They smelt wrong though. Nobody else ever seems to notice, but what makes the perfect squishy is the exact right amount of squish and the right smell. Not too rubbery or plastic but definitely not scented, like those awful ones with fake strawberry or banana smell.
Five, six. The doctor had an aquarium in her room, and when she saw Tally looking, she gave her a piece of paper and a tub of colouring pencils and asked her to draw a picture of a rainbow fish, which sounded like an easy thing to do but Tally knew was actually a trick because there are loads of different species of rainbow fish and they all look different, so if Dr Zennor had really wanted her to draw one then she’d have been a little more specific. And secondly, if she were going to draw it properly then she’d need to know how the fish was feeling, because the colours on a rainbow fish change depending on their stress levels. The more stressed out they are, the brighter they think they have to shine.
Tally knows exactly how that feels.
Seven, eight. When she refused to draw a picture, the doctor showed her a picture instead. It had lots of funny-looking blob creatures, all doing different things, and the doctor asked Tally which one she thought was most like her. Tally wanted to answer correctly, she really did, but she didn’t like looking at the blobs and none of them was anything like her. She pointed at one randomly though, just to keep the doctor happy and to show that she could do the right thing. The doctor seemed pleased and let Tally take a proper look at the fish while she talked to Mum.
Nine, Ten. And that’s when it all went wrong.
Inside the mask, Tally’s eyes flash open.
“What shall we have for tea tonight?” asks Mum as they pull out of the parking space. “You can choose.”
“What’s the point?” Tally jiggles her foot up and down, feeling the tiger start to stir. “You won’t listen to me anyway.”
Mum flicks on the indicator and turns on to the main road.
“What do you mean? Of course I’ll listen to you.”
The tiger stretches out first one paw and then the other, flexing its limbs ready to strike.
“Liar.”
“Tally?” Mum glances at her daughter in the rear-view mirror. “Is something the matter?”
The tiger takes a deep breath and then it pounces.
“Yes, there’s something the matter! You told the doctor everything, even though you promised me that you wouldn’t! You’re a liar and you’ve betrayed me and I’ll never forgive you for as long as I live.”
“Tally,” starts Mum. “I don’t—”
“Shut up, you stupid woman!” The scream tears itself from Tally’s mouth, bounces around the car and hurtles back into her ears. “I specifically asked you not to tell her about what I’m like at home, but you did it anyway. I heard you! You told her about the ripped-down curtains and the broken plates and the thrown chairs and the hurting Nell and now she thinks I’m horrible and it’s ALL YOUR FAULT!”
“Nobody thinks you’re horrible,” says Mum, manoeuvring the car safely on to the side of the road and coming to a halt. She turns off the engine and twists in her seat so that she can see Tally. “And I’m sorry that you think I betrayed you. It was important that the doctor got the whole story, though. I needed to tell her everything.”
The tiger bares its teeth.
“I am not a story,” it hisses. “I am just me – and you lied.”
Mum shakes her head and restarts the car. “Let’s get home and we can talk about all of this properly.”
The tiger slumps back in the seat and stares out of the window at the world outside. It wonders why everything has always got to be so very hard and filled with so much hurting.