A Pocketful of Stars, page 5
I frown. Aminah?
‘I’m not, Mama, I swear,’ the older girl calls from the landing.
And that’s when I confirm it. The wild curly hair. That’s Mum. And the younger girl must be her sister.
‘Mama, she hit me!’ The younger girl, my Aunt Zaina, pouts, showing off her sore arm.
Mum, or I guess Aminah, rolls her eyes. ‘Zaina stole my bracelet,’ she says, both of them speaking a mixture of English and Arabic.
I look at the bracelet in my hands. It’s gold with white pearl beads and an Arabic inscription.
Aminah.
‘It’s here!’ I say, waving it in front of their faces. But there’s no point. I’m invisible to them all.
‘And why would she do that?’ My grandmother, ‘Mama’, asks, her voice as sharp as her features. ‘It has your name on it.’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Aminah replies, and I can’t help but smile because she’s just like the Mum I know.
‘I didn’t steal it, Mama,’ Zaina insists. ‘She lost it.’
Mama turns to Zaina now. ‘Go inside and ask your aunt if she wants more tea,’ she orders. Zaina nods right away. ‘And close the door behind you.’
Mama turns to Aminah. ‘Where are you going?’
In the time it took for Mama to address Zaina, Aminah had tried to sneak off downstairs. She spins round now like a clumsy ballerina, and faces Mama.
‘Are you a child?’ Mama asks.
Aminah shakes her head.
‘How old are you?’
‘Thirteen,’ she mutters.
Like me.
‘Then –’ Mama pauses – ‘you know it’s wrong to hit your sister.’
‘But, Mama, Zaina was the one who –’
Mama puts her hand up to silence Aminah, and her voice stops dead.
‘Zaina is younger than you, Aminah. You can’t use her as an excuse.’
‘Sorry.’ Aminah sniffs, and I see tears in her eyes.
‘And you lost your bracelet.’
Aminah doesn’t argue back this time.
‘I won’t buy you nice things any more if you can’t look after them.’
Mama’s not yelling, but she doesn’t need to.
‘Sorry, Mama,’ Aminah squeaks again, eyes trained on her feet.
I don’t recognize this side of Mum. She looks scared and mouse-like.
‘You’re back from school for one day . . . one day,’ Mama says, her voice echoing across the hall despite her tiny frame, ‘and already you cause trouble. I wish sometimes your father would take you travelling with him over the summer. Then I wouldn’t have to deal with all of this.’ She sighs exasperatedly. It’s an offhand remark, kind of like the ones Mum makes sometimes, but I can almost feel the burn of it on Aminah’s heart.
Aminah’s tears fall freely now. She runs down the stairs, out of the house and into the scorching heat of the courtyard.
I follow her, barely keeping up. I want to give her the bracelet and tell her she hasn’t lost it after all.
Outside, Aminah sits on the set of swings I saw last time and lets herself cry. I try to pat her shoulder to comfort her, but my hand goes right through her.
I think for a moment about the rules in this dream in the same way I would approach one of my games. I can’t touch anyone and they can’t see me. But I can pick things up, like the bracelet, and brush my hands against the leaves on the walls.
I sit on the swing next to Aminah and it jiggles around, but she doesn’t appear to see that either.
Aminah rocks gently to and fro, letting her feet graze the ground, until her tears dry up and she falls silent.
But the sound of someone singing cuts through the quiet.
‘Hello?’ Aminah calls, looking around her.
Silence.
Then: ‘Ow!’
Something lands hard on Aminah’s shoulders. She whips her head up to the right, searching for the source. She doesn’t spot it, but I do. Just about.
Two cats rush under the shelter of one of the cars.
They had come from somewhere beyond the courtyard wall and had used Aminah as a landing pad. From down here all you can see are palm trees beyond a great big wall. They hold more of the silver branches that line the house.
The singing has stopped now, and is replaced by the light padding of feet on sand.
‘Hello?’ Aminah tries again. She pulls an old slide up against the wall, climbs to the top, and peeks her head over.
I do the same, leaning through her body to look over too. For a moment it’s like we’re the same person.
Over the wall is a long, hidden alleyway filled with all sorts of overgrown trees, which create a tunnel-like arch across it. Each end is blocked by concrete, concealing it from the outside world. Aminah and I spot a short-haired girl just as she starts climbing the wall into the courtyard of one of the other houses.
Aminah starts to call for the girl, but her own name echoes from somewhere behind us. We turn at the same time.
Zaina struts up to the slide. ‘You got in trouble!’ she teases, Aminah’s bracelet dangling from her wrist. I look down at my right hand, but the bracelet is gone.
Aminah sighs and looks back, but the girl has disappeared.
And in that moment everything else disappears too. The house, the courtyard, Aminah and her sister.
And suddenly, instead of the slide, I’m sitting on the hospital chair next to Mum’s bed, her hair as curly and as wild as it was when she was thirteen.
‘How was your mum?’ Dad asks as I get into the car. Lady’s in the back seat and she dives into the front to say hello by licking one of my knees. ‘The doctors didn’t have much to report this time.’
‘Fine,’ I say, stroking Lady until she settles into the footwell, my mind swirling with thoughts of Mum and her family, and the dreams. I spent way longer in the dream this time, but when I woke up only a few minutes had passed. Kind of like in Narnia, when Lucy goes through the wardrobe during a game of hide-and-seek. She’s gone for ages and ages, but when she gets back they’re still playing.
‘Did you speak to her?’ Dad asks as we pull out of the car park.
‘Who? Mum?’ I look up, a little alarmed. Is he testing me?
Does he know?
Dad raises his eyebrows. ‘No, the Queen,’ he says, smirking at his own joke, and I realize obviously he doesn’t.
‘Not really . . .’ I say, not sure how to explain that I usually spend the whole visit asleep. ‘Should I?’ I turn to him, my brown eyes meeting his blue.
Dad shrugs. ‘I was just doing some reading about –’ he hesitates, and I know he doesn’t want to say the word ‘coma’ – ‘patients, and how you can help them recover.’ He explains everything he’s read to me.
I try to listen, but my mind is far, far away. In Kuwait.
I check the temperature in Dad’s car and see it’s almost freezing outside. I find it hard to believe that moments ago I could feel the warmth. Smell it. It smelled just like Mum’s perfume.
Three visits to Mum, three times I’ve had these strange dreams. Except, these aren’t like any dreams I’ve had before. Usually my dreams are hazy, and what happens in them is random. These are different . . . They play out like a story. But how are they happening, and why?
Then it hits me.
‘Dad?’ I bark, making him jump.
He turns to me, eyebrows creased.
‘Is it OK if we stop by Mum’s flat, just for a minute?’
A pause.
‘Of course,’ Dad says, and his voice is softer than I’ve heard it in years.
It sounds like it did that time school called up to say I had fallen over and broken my two front teeth. Dad came rushing in, wrapped me up in his arms, and told me how brave I was.
A while later I jump out of the car. ‘I won’t be long,’ I promise.
Back in Mum’s flat I’m seeing things I’ve never noticed before, like everything has a gold halo around it. The table in her hallway looks just like the one that held the bracelet in the dream, the photos on the walls do as well, and the plants that make her flat feel alive. They’re real, all of them.
So, what if the dreams are real too?
As I approach Mum’s bedroom door her perfume beckons me in. I follow it like Alice followed the rabbit to Wonderland.
I walk over to the dressing table, open Mum’s jewellery drawer, and find it packed with beautiful shining gems. Earrings, bracelets, necklaces. It’s like finding loot in a game. Except there’s only one thing I need.
When I see it, tucked away at the back, like it hasn’t been worn for years, my legs start to wobble. It feels like a butterfly is lodged in my throat, fluttering from my chest right up to my oesophagus. It’s real. Mum’s bracelet is real.
I reach out for it, feeling the smooth gold, tracing my fingers over her name.
Aminah.
It’s exactly as it looked in the dream. But the thing is, I’ve never seen this bracelet before in real life.
The house is quieter today, like a forest after rainfall. I walk up to the glass table, just as I did last time, but the bracelet is no longer there. Instead it’s dangling from my wrist after I put it on in Mum’s flat.
It makes me feel closer to her somehow, and braver too. Like the bracelet is my armour, and I’m ready to go into battle.
A familiar smell draws me to the kitchen. I walk across the marble-floored foyer, bypassing the stairs, and enter another leafy tunnel.
I know this house is Mum’s childhood home but it feels different, more like it’s a living creature rather than just a house. The heartbeat follows me as I walk, drumming to my steps. When I enter the kitchen I’m met with the biggest feast I’ve seen in my life. I recognize some of it from dishes Mum’s cooked before.
Stuffed vine leaves, zaatar bread and cheese, stacks of sugar sweets and honeysuckle melon, and lots and lots of tea. I peer around to see if I can find the person who made all this food, but no one is there, and I hear nothing but the pulse of the house, and the thump, thump, thumping in my chest.
I sit down, reach for a stuffed vine leaf, and take a bite. It’s delicious.
I take another, and pour myself a helping of tea too. I bite into a sugar sweet when I’m done, the syrup dripping down my chin. I catch it with my thumb and lick each of my fingers in delight. A few minutes, maybe more, pass, until I’m interrupted by a very determined miaow.
I jump, and my cup of tea clatters to the floor. But when I look back it’s on the table again, where I first found it.
Sitting in front of me, its tail wagging impatiently, is a cat with yellow eyes.
I stand up and walk towards it. As soon as I take my first step it launches itself at the back door, which stands open, and walks a few paces into the courtyard beyond.
Then it sits, looking at me determinedly again. And it glows a little brighter than everything else, the way the bracelet did. I think I’m supposed to follow it.
The cat is a grey tabby; bits of its fur are missing in places, and there’s a scar on its left ear. It looks like a stray. But the most remarkable thing about the cat is the white heart-shaped line of fur that starts in the middle of its back and winds down towards its tail.
As we make our way along the courtyard I notice the house is crumbling in places it wasn’t before. One of the windows has no glass in it any more, and I can see the staircase peeking through a great big gouge in the wall. I have to dodge pieces of rubble the way I do in Fairy Hunters whenever I approach the ruined palace.
I’m back at the swings now, the ones Aminah sat on the day she was crying. That’s when I realize this must be one of the cats that had landed on her head. I didn’t see them properly last time, but I know there were two of them.
‘Where’s your friend?’ I ask.
The cat doesn’t answer.
‘Just like Lady,’ I mutter.
The cat jumps up on to the courtyard wall, looks at me, and miaows again.
This time I know it wants me to follow because the slide is standing there in the same spot as before. I rest my hand on one of the silver branches as I climb and notice a flower has bloomed where Aminah stood. It’s bright yellow, with a little cupped section in the middle and five long petals closing round it protectively.
As soon as my feet hit the sandy ground on the other side of the wall I hear a voice.
‘What are you, some sort of assassin? I didn’t hear you at all.’
The girl from beyond the wall is staring at me now.
I soon realize it’s not me she’s looking at but Aminah, who is standing right next to me.
It was morning when I last had one of these dreams, but this time the sun is beginning to set.
Aminah laughs. ‘Maybe,’ she retorts. ‘I was beginning to think I’d imagined you.’
The girl looks at her quizzically.
‘From the other day?’ Aminah continues. She seems a little embarrassed. ‘I called out to you as you were climbing back over . . .’ She lets her words fizzle out.
The girl’s eyes widen. ‘It was you? I’ve been avoiding this place because I thought some stupid little kid started playing here.’
The pair settle beneath a tree, and I join them. From down here the wall that leads back to Aminah’s house looks giant, like a skyscraper, and the trees just as tall. I can no longer see either end of it. Instead I’m surrounded by a canopy of leaves and sand, like being marooned on some sort of desert island.
Everything here is strange, ever-changing. Before Aminah and the girl appeared it was just a plain old wall with some sand on the ground. Now it’s like a secret garden. Suddenly I feel so tiny, in a big, big world, the way I always do when I play Fairy Hunters.
One minute you’re casting spells against a wizard, the next you’re hit with a shrink potion and you’re the size of a mouse. And, all of a sudden, your perspective shifts.
The cat I had followed sits a few metres away next to a smaller cat that looks identical. But even they’re different here. Bigger, wilder.
Aminah scowls. ‘I’m not a child! It was probably my sister you heard.’
‘So, what’s your speciality?’ the girl asks, changing the subject at lightning speed.
Aminah frowns. ‘What?’
‘You know, if you’re an assassin?’
The sun’s almost gone now, and the girl pulls a torch from her backpack, setting it out between us all. It lights up the circle like a magic orb, but everything surrounding us is coated in inky darkness – apart from the two pairs of feline eyes that stare from the bushes.
‘Oh, yes, right!’ Aminah says, biting her lip, as if in contemplation.
‘Mine’s a bow and arrow,’ the girl says, answering her own question. ‘That way I can watch my victims from a distance.’
‘Remind me never to come back here before you do, so you can’t ambush me.’
‘Who says you’re allowed back?’
Aminah raises her eyebrows. ‘It’s behind my house, isn’t it?’
‘Mine too,’ the girl says dismissively, pointing at her own home. You can just about see the top of the roof from here; it looks like a castle turret. ‘And anyway, I found it first.’
‘What is this place?’ Aminah looks around in wonder the way I had moments before.
‘A secret,’ the girl says simply. Then she adds with a smile, ‘I’ll let you back if you pass the test.’
Aminah sits up straighter. ‘I’m good at tests,’ she says a little smugly.
I laugh. Mum’s ridiculously clever.
The girl rolls her eyes. ‘Not that kind of test.’ She nods over at the cats. ‘If you can pet one of them, you can come back.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘Then this was all a dream,’ the girl whispers spookily, holding the torch up to her face.
Aminah gulps. ‘Fine,’ she finally says. ‘I’ll do it.’
Aminah stands up, her shoes noisily grazing against the ground. Immediately one pair of eyes disappears as the first cat bolts.
The girl lets out a low murmur. ‘Not a good start,’ she teases, the smile evident in her voice.
‘Pass me the torch,’ Aminah says, gritting her teeth. She holds it under her arm, takes her shoes off one at a time, and creeps silently across the sand.
I follow her, careful to be quiet too.
The second cat, the smaller of the two, is much braver. It’s poised, ready to run, but it looks curious too, eyes locked on Aminah as she inches closer and closer.
She’s now less than a metre away and the cat takes a couple of steps back.
Aminah changes tack. She sits down. As soon as she does the cat stops, watching her.
‘What are you doing?’ the girl calls.
‘Shhhh!’ Aminah says, but the noise has scared the cat even more, and it bolts into the leaves after its mother.
‘You lose,’ the girl says coolly.
My heart sinks. I wanted her to win.
But Aminah’s not given up yet. She ignores the girl and focuses instead on her task. She watches the cats peer out at her from the bushes.
She takes the torch and shines it just in front of where the cats are sitting. She darts the light left to right.
A minute passes.
Two.
Nothing.
Then, a tiny paw.
Both of the cats jump out of the bush to chase the light.
Aminah holds the torch over her head and directs it closer and closer to her until the cats are playing less than a metre away. She clicks her tongue. Both cats look up at her, alarmed, as if surprised to see her there. Then Aminah puts her left hand out, palm up, beneath the cats’ mouths. They sniff. And she takes her chance.
She strokes the smaller cat – the braver one – first. It pulls back a little, until it realizes she isn’t going to hurt it. And then, rather abruptly, it leans into her, purring.
The second cat lets her pet it once, before retreating back into the bushes.
Aminah turns and points the torch at the girl. ‘I win!’ she says triumphantly. She settles back into her old spot and puts her shoes back on.
‘I was kind of joking, you know,’ the girl admits. ‘Even I’ve never been near those cats. I’ve decided what your speciality is, by the way.’
