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Cover
Title Page
Chapter One
All I can say is, it wasn’t my fault! I…
Chapter Two
“So long as it is only a game,” said Skye.
Chapter Three
We watched like hawks all the rest of the week,…
Chapter Four
I took a deep breath, and swallowed. Jem waved her…
Chapter Five
While it is true that Jem is one of my…
Chapter Six
“I suppose –” Jem turned hopefully to Skye as we…
Chapter Seven
One of my teachers once wrote on my school report…
Chapter Eight
Although I say it myself, I am not the sort…
Chapter Nine
We watched in frozen horror as the dark shape moved…
Chapter Ten
It is very hard to admit this, but if it…
Chapter Eleven
We all agreed that that was the question: what did…
Other Books by Jean Ure
Copyright
About the Publisher
All I can say is, it wasn’t my fault! I wasn’t the one that let Rags in from the garden with muddy paws. I might have been the one that let him out, but I wasn’t the one that let him in…
All I can say is, it wasn’t my fault! I wasn’t the one that let Rags in from the garden with muddy paws. I might have been the one that let him out, but I wasn’t the one that let him in. Angel was the one that let him in. It was her responsibility, not mine.
She got all angry when I accused her of it. She said, “He was scraping at the door! What was I supposed to do? Let him ruin Dad’s paintwork?”
What she was supposed to do was clean up the floor. That is the rule: whoever lets him in with dirty paws has to clean up after him. It wasn’t any good her screeching that she was about to go out and was all dressed up. She is always dressed up. She works on the principle that a gorgeous boy could walk into her life at any moment and she has to be prepared. Like she might answer the front door and there he’d be, SuperGuy, and omigod, what a disaster if she was wearing tatty old jeans and a raggedy T-shirt!
Not that she would. She is obsessed with the way she looks. Like Mum is obsessed with the kitchen floor.
“Look at my floor!” she goes. “Covered in dog prints!”
It’s so weird, the things people get hung up about. My feelings are, a kitchen floor is a kitchen floor. It is there to get messed up. But it matters to Mum, and it doesn’t do to be small-minded about these things. I could just have left it; I’d have been within my rights. But I was thinking of Mum. Poor Mum! She and Dad work their fingers to the bone taking care of me and Angel and Tom. Well, that is what she always says.
“I don’t expect gratitude, but just now and again a bit of consideration wouldn’t go amiss.”
I think I am quite considerate on the whole. I do like to make Mum happy whenever I can. And I don’t mind getting down on my hands and knees, sploshing about on a wet floor. Wouldn’t bother me if SuperGuy suddenly appeared.
I filled a bowl with hot water and added a nice big dollop of washing-up liquid. I am one of those people, I believe in doing things properly. I thought while I was there I would give the whole floor a going-over, so when Mum came in she’d be, like, knocked out at the state of it.
“Oh!” she’d go. “Who’s cleaned the kitchen floor for me? Whoever it was, they’ve done an excellent job!”
I crawled all over, getting quite damp in the process. We used to have a mop thingie. A squeegee thing. I used to enjoy using that, but last time I’d used it, it hadn’t got put away properly. It had been left propped up against the side of the sink, and Dad had gone and trodden on it. He said it was lying on the floor. Don’t ask me how it got there. I didn’t leave it on the floor. But Dad trod on it and snapped it in two and as usual it was my fault. Everything is always my fault. Mum said it was time I learned to put things away after me. But I was going to!
I’d been on the point of shutting the mop back in the cupboard when my telephone rang and there was a text from Jem, something about Daisy Hooper, who is this girl at school that we all absolutely hate, so obviously I had to stop and text back – Wot u talkin bout? – and just as I’d done that the phone had gone and rung again. It had been Skye this time. I couldn’t help it if my friends wanted to talk to me! I got sort of sidetracked and wandered into the garden, talking about Daisy and this super-gigantic row she’d had with her best friend, Cara Thompson, and one thing sort of led to another, cos after speaking to Skye I felt I had to speak to Jem, who is, like, really talkative and practically never stops, plus Rags had come bundling out with me and wanted me to throw his ball, which I had to do cos you can’t just ignore him, and by the time I got back it was too late. Dad had gone and trodden on the mop and broken it.
So now we didn’t have a mop, which I just bet was the real reason Angel didn’t bother clearing up. Catch her down on her hands and knees!
The floor seemed a bit slippy when I’d finished. But at least it was clean. Quite sparkling, really. I reckoned Mum would be well happy. I ever so carefully emptied the water down the sink and wrung out the cloth, the way she likes it. She goes mad if you leave it all soggy and dripping. Another of her weird hang-ups!
I was so pleased with the job I’d done that I decided to sit down and read the local paper while I waited for Mum to appear. She’d only popped over the road, so I knew she wouldn’t be long. I really wanted to see her face when she opened the door and all the lovely bright shininess rose up before her!
One of my favourite bits in what Dad calls “the local rag” is the horoscope page with Crystal Ball. That is her real actual name. It says so at the top of the column: Your Horoscope Read by Crystal Ball. I think that is so neat! I also think there has to be something in it. Fortune telling and stuff. Crystal is really gifted, she can predict all sorts of things. Like once, for Capricorn, which is Dad’s star sign, she said, “A big change could be coming your way,” and that very same week Dad shaved off his moustache. And once for Gemini, which is Angel, she said, “Diet plays an important part in your life at the moment.” Well! You couldn’t get much more accurate than that.
Tom said it didn’t count since diet always plays an important part in Angel’s life. He also said that Dad’s didn’t count cos he shaved off his moustache himself.
“Wasn’t like it was something that just happened.”
I said, “Well, it hardly could, could it? A moustache can’t just fall off by itself.”
“Be more impressive if it had,” said Tom; and he sniggered, as if he had said something clever.
The trouble with my brother is that he has no imagination. None whatsoever. He says horoscopes are nothing but piffle and bunk. Dunno where he got those words from, but anyway he is wrong, wrong, wrong! Crystal Ball knows what she is talking about. I proved it that morning, without a shadow of a doubt.
I’d just been reading the horoscope for Taurus, which means bull and is me, which Mum says is fitting cos it’s a perfect description.
“Like a bull in a china shop! Only have to come through the door for things to start crashing down.”
Like I said, I get the blame for everything. But guess what? My horoscope was sympathetic! This is what it said:
Not for the first time, you run the risk of being falsely accused. Try to stay calm. Matters will be resolved.
I couldn’t help wondering what I was going to be accused of this time. What had I done? I hadn’t done anything! Then Mum came in and slipped on my beautiful sparkly floor and nearly broke her neck, or so she said. She screamed, “Good God, Frankie, what have you been up to? This floor’s like a skating rink!”
I felt really hurt. After all my hard work!
“I cleaned it for you,” I said.
“Well, I’m sure that’s very sweet of you,” said Mum, pressing both hands into the small of her back, “but what on earth did you use? Furniture polish?”
I said, “No!” Who’d use furniture polish for cleaning a kitchen floor? That would be just stupid. I told her proudly that I’d used washing-up liquid.
“Like about half a litre of it,” said Mum. “Do we still have any left?”
Of course we had some left! What was she on about?
Mum just shook her head, like she was feeling defeated.
“What?” I said. “What have I done?”
It seemed I’d used a bit more than I should have.
“All you need –” Mum said it almost pleadingly – “is just the tiniest, weeniest little drop. If any!”
How was I supposed to know? They don’t give you measurements.
“The floor was in a right mess,” I said. “There were muddy pawprints everywhere.”
“Yes, you did a splendid job,” said Mum.
Well, I reckoned I had, specially as it shouldn’t have been up to me in the first place.
“I wasn’t the one that let Rags in,” I said. “She did. She never cleans up after him.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Mum. “You’ll know better next time.”
Pardon me? If this was the way I was going to be treated, there wouldn’t be any next time.
I watched as Mum grabbed a bunch of kitchen roll and set about drying the floor. I guess it was still a bit wet. I thought of saying how we needed a new mop, but decided against it on account of that was yet another thing I’d got the blame for. She’d only start on about me not putting things away. Probably best to change the subject.
“Mum,” I said, “what’s your star sign? Is it Virgo? I’ll read your horoscope… A very bad accident narrowly averted.” I wrinkled my nose. “What’s that mean?”
Mum said it meant that she could have broken her neck and ended up totally paralysed, while as it was she had merely ricked her back. “Which is quite bad enough.”
“So, like, something nearly happened, but then it didn’t.”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Mum.
Wow! That was two things Crystal Ball had predicted: me getting falsely accused and Mum almost breaking her neck.
I said, “You know Tom thinks that horoscopes are rubbish? Do you think they’re rubbish?”
“Absolutely,” said Mum.
“Even when they say things that come true, like about you not having an accident?”
“I did have an accident.”
“Yes, but you could have had a really bad one.”
“Tell me about it!”
“No, but really,” I said.
“Really,” said Mum, “take it from me, horoscopes are a total nonsense. Completely made up.”
“You mean, like, people just invent stuff? Like, what shall I say for Virgo? Oh, I know! You nearly have a bad accident, but in the end you don’t, sort of thing. And then it just happens to come true, and you and Tom say it’s all rubbish.”
“Coincidence,” said Mum. “It’s bound to happen occasionally. Then gullible people like you think it’s some kind of magic.”
I frowned. “What’s gull’ble?”
“Easily taken in,” said Mum. “You’d believe any old nonsense!”
What Mum didn’t realise was that Crystal Ball had made two correct predictions, not just one. But I didn’t bother arguing with her. I have noticed before that when people close their minds there is nothing you can do to convince them. It’s like Dad and UFOs.
“Flying saucers?” he says. “Load of claptrap!”
He would still say it was claptrap even if one landed in the back garden and a crowd of aliens got out. Fortunately, I am the sort of person who is always open to new ideas; I think it is the way one develops. If we were all like Mum and Dad, we would still be living in caves.
I tore out the horoscope page and put it in my bag to show Jem and Skye as we walked into school.
“Just no way,” I said, “no way was it my fault!”
Jem and Skye are my two best mates in all the world, but I have to say they are not always as supportive as they could be. You would think they would automatically be on my side. I mean, that is what mates are for. They are not supposed to jeer and make stupid remarks.
I told them in great detail about Rags coming in from the garden with muddy feet. I told them what the rule was. But when I read out my horoscope, about being falsely accused, they treated it like it was some kind of joke.
Well, Jem did. Skye was more like, “Oh, please!” Skye can be just a little bit superior at times. She said, “Yawn, yawn! What’s new? You’re always being falsely accused.”
“Yeah, right,” said Jem. She went off into a peal of idiotic giggles. “Nothing isn’t ever her fault!”
Crossly, I said, “It wasn’t my job to clean the kitchen floor.”
“But whoever did clean it,” said Jem, “left it soaking wet and nearly broke your mum’s neck!”
I said, “So? It still doesn’t make it my fault. Does it?”
Jem giggled again. Skye just hunched a shoulder. I really didn’t know what was wrong with Skye these days. She was behaving very oddly. Not depressed, exactly, but certainly not her usual self. She’s never been what you’d call a bouncy sort of person, but just suddenly she’d stopped being fun.
“Anyway,” I said, “that’s not all. Guess what Crystal Ball wrote for Mum? A bad accident, narrowly averted.”
Jem cackled. She sounded like a hen that’s just laid a square egg. “Living with you, I should think your mum spends her life having bad accidents narrowly averted!”
I decided to ignore the uncouth cackling.
“Seriously,” I said, “it can’t just be coincidence that she got it right for both of us. And both on the same day!”
“What’s my one?” said Jem. “What’s she say for Leo?”
“Leo… Take action now to start de-cluttering.”
“Oh!” Jem gave a high-pitched squeal. “Mum told me only yesterday that my bedroom was too cluttered and I really ought to see if I’d got any stuff we could give to charity.”
Well. So much for her and her silly giggling.
“I reckon that just about proves it,” I said.
“What’s she say for Skye? Read what she says for Skye!”
“Sagittarius… You need to face a fear and conquer it.”
We turned expectantly to Skye.
“I don’t have any fears,” said Skye.
“You must have some,” I said. “Everybody has some.”
“Well, I don’t!” She said it quite angrily. “It’s all rubbish! What have I got to be scared of?”
“Spiders?” said Jem.
“I’m not scared of spiders!”
“I know, I know!” I clapped my hands. “Not getting A+ for her maths homework!”
“And for her French homework!”
“And for geography!”
“And for history!”
Now I was going off into giggles myself. Skye is like the class brain; it would frighten the life out of her if she ever got a B for anything. She once got A-for an essay and it threw her into total depression for a whole week.
“You are such morons,” she said.
I suppose it is not quite fair to laugh at a person, especially if they are one of your best friends, but all the same I do think people should be able to take a joke now and again. I know I can. I am always being laughed at. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Even if it does, I don’t make a big thing of it.
“Where are you going?” said Jem.
“I’m going to school, if that’s all right with you.” Skye flung it at us over her shoulder. “I want to get there on time.”
We watched as she went stalking on ahead of us, her legs, long and spindly, clacking to and fro like a pair of animated chopsticks.
“What’s her problem?” said Jem.
I shook my head. It is a known fact that Skye doesn’t have the hugest sense of humour. Unlike me and Jem, who have been known to giggle ourselves senseless, Skye is a very serious-minded person. But still there was something not right.
I said, “I dunno. In some kind of a mood. Thing is, about horoscopes –” I folded up Crystal Ball and put her back in my bag – “they might just be all made up, but that doesn’t mean they’re rubbish. Loads of what they say actually does come true.”
“This is it,” said Jem. “I remember once my auntie was told she was going to have a shake-up in her career, and the very next day she shook a bottle of tomato ketchup and the top flew off and it went everywhere, all over the place, and look what happened!”
“What?” I said. “What happened?”
“She got a new job!”
“What, because of the tomato ketchup?”
“No, cos she went down the job centre.”
“Because of the ketchup.”
“No. She was going there anyway. The ketchup didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Excuse me?
“Just that she shook it,” said Jem. “Like it said in her horoscope… a shake-up. And then she got a job. See what I mean?”
I nodded slowly. I do sometimes find that I have a bit of difficulty following Jem’s train of thought. She has a brain that hops about all over the place.
“My auntie was really miffed about the ketchup,” she said. “It went all down her blouse, and she couldn’t get it out. You can’t, with ketchup. But if it hadn’t been for that, she might never have got the job. Least, that’s what she told Mum, so I reckon you’re right. There’s got to be something in it.”
That was better. At least I’d got one of them to agree with me.
“Know what?” I said. “We could do horoscopes. We could ask everyone what their star signs are, and then we could make up horoscopes for them, and wait and see if they come true.”
Jem liked that idea. I could tell, already, that her brain was whizzing into overdrive, thinking what sort of things she could make up.
“What about Skye?” she said. “Are we going to tell her?”
I said yes, we had to. She was our friend; we didn’t do things separately. Besides, it might cheer her up. Stop her being so glumpy.
“Even though she thinks it’s rubbish?”
“We’ll tell her it’s just a game,” I said. “After all, it’s not like we’re really expecting things to happen.”
“So long as it is only a game,” said Skye.
I assured her that it was. “Just a bit of fun!”
“So long as that’s all.”
“It is. I just said.”
“Cos I think it’s really stupid, when people take this sort of stuff seriously.”
I laughed, as if the very idea was absurd. “Whoever would?”
“You’d be surprised,” said Skye.
“Well, but sometimes –” Jem jumped in eagerly – “sometimes they get it right. It’s just a question of working out what they mean. It’s not always straightforward. Like if your horoscope said ’Beware of big hairy monsters!’ and later that night a bunch of spiders went marching across your bedroom ceiling, well, you mightn’t realise that that’s what it had meant. You might have been expecting something more, like, a load of big hairy muggers coming along and…” Her voice faltered slightly under Skye’s withering gaze. “And mugging you,” she said. “Or something.”
“You might,” agreed Skye, “if you were dumb enough.”
“No, honestly,” said Jem, “they can predict things! Like with my auntie. There was this one time—”
Omigod! She was going to go on about the tomato ketchup again.
“I think we should get started,” I said.
“But I want to tell Skye about my auntie! See, her horosc—”
“Later!” It’s important, with Jem, to stop her before she gets going. Preferably as soon as she opens her mouth. Mr Hargreaves, our maths teacher, once said that if uncontrolled babble was an Olympic discipline, Jem could babble for England. And get a gold medal. “We don’t have time for all that now,” I said. “We’ve got horoscopes to write.”
Jem looked at me, hurt. “Just because you’ve already heard it!”
Just because I didn’t want Skye hearing it. Fortunately, Skye came to my rescue.
“No, Frankie’s right,” she said. “If we don’t get started we’ll never get anywhere. Everybody pay attention! First we need to get organised.”
Jem pulled a face. Normally I’d have pulled one too, and even given an inward gro-o-an, cos when Skye starts organising she turns into this really evil dictator type, bossing and bullying and laying down the law, but at least she’d managed to stop Jem going on about her auntie all over again.
If Skye had heard the tale of the tomato ketchup she’d have gone into full boffin mode and started lecturing Jem about being gullible, cos you can just bet she’d know what gullible meant. Jem would then have got upset, and then they’d have had words, and then they’d have tried dragging me into it, both of them wanting me to be on their side, like, “Frankie, tell her! You heard about my auntie,” and “Frankie, for goodness’ sake! You don’t believe in all that rubbish?”
I wouldn’t have known what to say. I mean, I did sort of believe. Sort of. Just not in the tomato-ketchup story. What we needed was some kind of definite proof, which was exactly the reason I was conducting my experiment. Cos that was what it was, I suddenly realised. Not just a game or a bit of fun, but a proper bony fido experiment. Or whatever the expression was.
“What’s that thing you say when you mean something’s, like, real?” I said.
“You mean, like, real?” said Skye.
“I mean like bony fido, or whatever it is.”
“Bona fide. It’s Latin,” said Skye. God, she’s like an encyclopaedia, that girl! I guess it’s cos of her mum and dad both being teachers. Always telling her to find things out and look things up. “Bona means good and fide means faith, and what’s it got to do with anything, anyway? I thought we were going to get started?”
“We are, we are!”
“Then let’s work out the ground rules.”
“What ground rules?” Jem was sitting cross-legged on my bed, cuddling Rags. She was obviously in a bit of a sulk. “What do we want ground rules for? Why can’t we just make up horoscopes like we said?”
Oh, but it wasn’t that simple! Nothing is ever simple, with Skye. First off, she made me Google “Star Signs” on my laptop. Then she told me to write them all down.
“Neatly.”
Jem and I exchanged glances. Jem put a finger to her forehead and tapped. I just did what I was told. It seemed easier, somehow.
These are the star signs:
Aries (ram)
Taurus (bull)
Gemini (twins)
Cancer (crab)
Leo (lion)
Virgo (virgin)
Libra (scales)
Scorpio (scorpion)
Sagittarius (archer)
Capricorn (goat)
Aquarius (water carrier)
Pisces (fish)
Now, said Skye, we would cut them up.
Excuse me?
“Cut them up!”
She held out her hand for the scissors. I passed them across. Me and Jem watched without saying anything, as Skye turned my list into a load of shredded strips.
“What we do is take out our own star signs – well, go on! Take them!” Meekly, we did so. “Put those to one side. Then fold the others over, so we can’t see what they are. Now we do our horoscopes. Four each!”
“You mean –” I said it slowly, trying to fathom the workings of her superior brain – “you mean we won’t actually know which star sign we’re writing stuff for?”
“Exactly!”
“What’s the point of that?” said Jem.
The point, said Skye, was that nobody would be tempted to write nice things for some star signs – like if they knew who the sign belonged to – and nasty things for others.
“Though personally,” she added, “I’m only going to write nice things, anyway.”
“Why?” Jem said it aggressively. I guess she was still pretty mad at Skye for siding with me and not letting her tell the tomato-ketchup story. Not to mention bossing us around. “If you think it’s all rubbish, what’s it matter what you write?”