Dandelion Clocks Read online

  My brother is sitting on the floor of the shop, grabbing magazines frantically off the shelf and throwing them to one side. He’s not saying anything at the moment, just whispering under his breath.

  ‘You can’t behave like that in here! What are you playing at? Stop that this instant!’ screams the shop lady.

  ‘Don’t yell at him,’ I tell her and sink down on the floor next to Isaac.

  ‘Talk to me – tell me what’s wrong,’ I say to him gently.

  ‘It’s all wrong, Liv, all wrong,’ mutters Isaac, still yanking magazines out of the rack and on to the floor.

  ‘Just be calm and tell me what it is,’ I say, keeping my voice quiet. I can see a crowd gathering at the end of the aisle, trying to see what’s going on.

  ‘I’ll give him calm!’ shrieks the shop lady. ‘Get out now – and I’ll expect you to pay for the damages.’

  She takes a step towards Isaac.

  ‘Don’t touch him!’ I shout at her but it’s too late. She grabs his arm and tries to haul him up.

  Big mistake.

  Before she touched him, Isaac was upset but I could have talked him round. By grabbing him she has made a huge error. Mum and Dad have taught Isaac lots of rules and one of them is that it’s really important not to touch other people unless they say it’s OK (he didn’t used to get the difference between gentle and rough touching and he can be a bit, well, in your face, so we all make a point of letting him know if we want to give him a hug and we would never hurt him). The shop lady broke a big rule when she grabbed Isaac, and Isaac cannot stand people breaking the rules, which is fair enough when he has to work so hard to keep them.

  To put it simply, he goes ballistic.

  Instead of throwing the magazines, he starts ripping them up and doing this high-pitched scream that goes right through you. People say that the sound of nails on a blackboard makes them shiver – that sound has nothing on Isaac when he’s really going for it.

  The shop lady backs right off, which should have been a relief, except I am trying to figure out how to get Isaac out of the shop without us both being arrested. I can hear lots of tutting from the onlookers and I really want to swear at them, but Mum says not to sink to their level and that they don’t understand.

  ‘Isaac, it’s OK, it’s all right. We’ll go home and Mum will sort it out,’ I say, trying to keep my voice steady. If Isaac knows that you’re freaked out it just makes him worse. ‘Let’s go home, Isaac. Leave all this here. Turn it around now – make a good choice.’

  I am running out of things to say and am just pulling my mobile phone out of my pocket to ring Mum when Isaac stops screaming.

  The silence is as surprising as the noise had been. I look at him and see huge tears dripping down his face as he starts sobbing, great big sobs that make him breathe in air in huge gulps. Right now, my big brother looks about five years old.

  I take hold of his hand and start leading him down the aisle, past all the nosy shoppers who step aside as if we’re contagious.

  ‘Honestly, what a way to carry on!’ tuts one old bag.

  ‘Well, he’s got a lifetime ban from this shop,’ whines the shop lady. ‘He’s probably on drugs.’

  I’ve had enough. I know that Mum says we shouldn’t have to explain about Isaac to anyone, but these people are judging him in a way that I can’t bear – not when they’ve all been happy to stand and gawp and act as if they’ve never made a wrong decision in their lives.

  ‘If you must know, he’s got Asperger’s Syndrome,’ I inform the tutting woman and the shop lady. ‘He doesn’t always see things the way that you might see them. Sometimes things get a bit much for him but he never means to cause any trouble. He can’t help it – and something must have upset him.’

  The shop lady goes a bit red in the face and the other shoppers melt back into the shop – amazing how people aren’t so interested when they feel a bit guilty.

  ‘I’ll get my mum or dad to ring you up and you can tell them all about how much they owe you. Perhaps you can explain the lifetime ban to them too.’

  I turn to the door and pull Isaac with me, my heart beating so fast that I think it might come right out of my chest. We walk down the road, me ignoring the curious looks of people walking past and rubbing Isaac’s back so hard that he winces and pulls away.

  After a few minutes I feel calm enough to speak to him, although I don’t actually want to look at him right now.

  ‘Care to explain that little drama then?’ I ask, my voice sounding harsh even to my own ears. ‘Seriously? It mattered that much to you, did it? I mean, is it actually too much to ask that you behave like everybody else just for once? Because, maybe I’m massively selfish, but I would really like to go out of the house occasionally and not have people stare at me because you’re doing something weird. Why me, Isaac? Why do I have to put up with this all the time? It’s so unfair …’

  I stomp along, not even caring for a moment whether Isaac is behind me or not. I can’t stop thinking about the people in the shop – and everyone else who has ever ground to a halt and just stood there, watching our family try to do normal things like everyone else but usually messing it up. I try to tell myself that I don’t care, that Isaac’s my brother and I’m not embarrassed – but sometimes, I really am.

  I stop, and turn round. Isaac is trailing behind me, looking a bit confused. He’s stopped crying and is sniffing loudly, great big disgusting sniffs that yank the snot back up his nose. He has no idea why I am upset.

  I sigh. ‘What was wrong in the shop?’

  ‘My magazine. It wasn’t there. Somebody must have taken it, Liv, and that’s not right.’ He takes the tissue I am offering him and blows his nose loudly, startling a passing pigeon. ‘It’s my magazine and somebody took it. They didn’t ask me if they could have it and that’s breaking one of the rules.’

  He hands the tissue back to me. I scrunch it up and put it in my coat pocket, making a mental note to get Mum to remove it and wash my coat before I next wear it.

  There is no point trying to tell Isaac that nobody has stolen his magazine. Not up to me, anyway – that’s Mum and Dad’s job. My only responsibility is getting him home safely, preferably before my stupid, lame coat actually dissolves in the rain.

  ‘Where’s my milk?’ asks Mum when we finally get through the front door.

  Oh yeah – the milk. The milk that I dropped on the floor when I raced to rescue Isaac. I think about how I felt in the shop and how scared I was that Mum wasn’t there to handle Isaac – and the relief of having actually got him home in one piece suddenly hits me and I start laughing hysterically. By the time I have calmed down she has cleaned up Isaac’s face, got the gist of what has happened from him, promised to drive him into town later to buy his magazine from a bigger shop that won’t have sold out and brought me a calming bar of chocolate. Then she sits down on the sofa next to me and lets me cry for a bit. She lets me moan about what a nightmare it is, having to protect Isaac all the time, and she doesn’t say a word. She only stops me when I start going on about his rules.

  ‘His stupid, pointless rules. They cause more trouble than they’re worth. Life doesn’t have rules for everything – I don’t think we should keep telling him that it does.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Liv,’ says Mum. ‘There are rules for every situation you will ever find yourself in. The problems come when you don’t understand what those rules are. Isaac needs us to explain the rules to him in a really clear way – your rules can be less clear but they’re still there and they’re still just as important.’ She bends over and kisses me on the forehead. ‘Now, I’m going to take Isaac to get his magazine because I promised, and that’s one rule that definitely cannot be broken. However, the rule about you not watching TV before your room is tidy is slightly more flexible!’

  I sink back into the sofa and listen to the sounds of Mum and Isaac getting ready to go out. Dad is pottering around in the kitchen and has already stuck his head through the
door to tell me that, in honour of my awesome little-sister skills, he is cooking up a Mexican feast of all my favourite foods. And that he is proud of me. I think that really, even though my family cause me more than my fair share of embarrassment and humiliation, I wouldn’t change them for anything.

  I’m mooching around the garden trying to find something interesting to snap with my camera. I’m kind of obsessed with photographs. I love the way that they’re memory evidence, total proof that you saw something or did something or were just there. It’s not actually raining for a change, and I’m starting to enjoy myself when Mum marches out through the kitchen door. She has that look of determination that I know so well – and I know there is no point in trying to (a) escape from her or (b) argue my way out of whatever it is that she wants me to do.

  ‘Right, come on, Liv, let’s get moving.’

  She says this as if we have plans, as if I have the foggiest idea of what she’s going on about.

  I stare at her blankly.

  ‘Chop chop – I haven’t got all day.’

  She turns round and walks back towards the house and then, sensing that I haven’t moved, spins back to look at me.

  To be perfectly honest, I’m not in the mood for this. I’ve had a rubbish day at school. I thought I’d got away with it – however, it turns out that gossip moves slowly but steadily through our school and Moronic Louise Phillips had obviously just heard all about my excruciating experience in Hair & Things. She spent the whole day making stupid comments about how cool it is to be able to wear earrings, and flicking her hair about so that everyone could admire her obviously fake gold hoops. The only good bit was when Mr Jackson, our science teacher, threatened to confiscate them if she ever wore them to school again. I tried to ignore her but she has one of those voices that really gets in your head and buzzes about, like an irritating insect.

  I probably shouldn’t have called her a liar, though. I know it’s better to just let her get on with it and that confronting her only makes her worse, but I couldn’t just stand there and let her talk down about Mum.

  ‘My mum’s so cool,’ she said. ‘Not like your mum at all. Honestly, Liv – how do you cope having such a control freak for a mother?’ Her ridiculous friends all sniggered and I could feel Alice pulling my arm and trying to walk us away. My blood was boiling, though. I mean, yeah – my mum can be a total nightmare sometimes, but that’s for me to say, not Moronic Louise.

  ‘Actually,’ she carried on, ‘my mum said that I can get my nose pierced and that as soon as I’m eighteen she’ll take me to get a tattoo!’ Her friends all ‘oohed’ and ‘ahhed’ like the pathetic hangers-on that they are.

  ‘What will you have done?’ asked Molly, Louise’s second-in-command.

  That’s when I should have walked away. But I didn’t and the sound of Moronic Louise debating whether she’d look cuter with a tattoo of a rose, or a tattoo of her puppy, made me want to throw up. So I volunteered my own suggestion – that she was a total liar and there’s no way that her mum would let her do that. I said that I thought she’d look particularly striking with the letters M-O-R-O-N tattooed across her forehead. And then I offered to save her time and money by doing it myself with a biro.

  She was obviously not mad keen on my idea, or particularly pleased that some of the boys in our class overheard me and laughed. A lot. So it was probably my own fault that she decided it’d be oh-so-hilarious to tell Ben that I fancy him. Actually, I really do, but as he started making retching noises and rolling his eyes at his mates, I had to pretend it was the most disgusting thing I’d ever heard and that ‘I wouldn’t go out with him if aliens had inhabited earth and he was my only hope of survival’. So that’s the end of that. Thanks, Louise.

  Anyway, Mum has been in a really foul mood all week. She keeps snapping at Dad for coming home late and then on Wednesday, she didn’t come back from work until really late and I missed going to Guides. She didn’t even tell me that she’d be late – I could have been really worried. Alice said Guides was a total laugh and they made peppermint creams, but they wouldn’t set and were all runny and went everywhere, and Sophie (chief, most-important, bow-down-before-her, Head Guider) went mad and it was hysterical.

  So I am not particularly interested in whatever dumb activity Mum may have dreamt up for me, especially as she seems to have an allergic reaction to the sight of me chilling out and doing my own thing.

  ‘Liv, I’m serious – move yourself right now. Don’t make me count to five like you’re four years old!’

  This is a bit rich coming from a woman who seems to believe that the clocks all stopped when I became a toddler and that I haven’t actually matured since.

  ‘I’m busy, Mum. What is it?’ I whine, ever hopeful that she’ll go away and leave me alone.

  ‘Busy! Doing what, may I ask?’

  No, actually, you may not … I might not look like I’m doing very much but there’s a lot of thinking going on here.

  ‘Could it be that you’re busy doing your homework? Or frantically tidying your bedroom? Or maybe working on a plan for worldwide peace and harmony?’ My mother can be very sarcastic. ‘Hmm, I thought not – so clean that mud off your trainers, get inside, wash your hands thoroughly and meet me in the kitchen in three minutes. You can take your photos later.’

  She strides back inside, a mother on a mission, and I grudgingly start to move. That’s another thing about my mum. If she issues you with a direct instruction, she expects you to comply with it exactly – and she is very precise about what she expects. I mean, why three minutes? Anyone else would have said ‘a few minutes’ or ‘when you’ve washed your hands’, but not her. She’ll have planned just how long I can reasonably be expected to take to carry out her demands, and probably added thirty seconds for the sulking part where I pretend that I’m not going to do what she’s asked.

  Which is what I’m doing now and – oops – time’s up, so I’d better get a wriggle on. No point in annoying her. Who knows, maybe she wants to take me shopping or to the cinema or something else cool. She didn’t actually say what it was she wanted me for, did she?

  Precisely thirty-eight minutes later and I am not happily browsing this season’s latest look, nor am I settling down with a bucket of toffee popcorn to watch a film.

  No – I am standing at the work surface in our kitchen, chopping a red pepper and listening to Mum explain why, if need be, man (or woman) can live on spaghetti Bolognese alone.

  For some reason, known only to her, it is utterly crucial that I learn how to concoct this wondrous dish today. This task cannot wait until a rainy day, or indeed a day when I actually feel like touching squirmy, wormy strands of beef (sometime never). Mum has decided that I need to learn to cook now and that she is the one best equipped to teach me – which is bizarre, cos Mum hates cooking and is actually an awful cook.

  I’m not being mean here, or saying anything I wouldn’t say to her face. She knows how bad her food is and she’s as happy as the rest of us on the days that Dad gets back from work early enough to cook supper. So this lesson is a bit inappropriate and fairly unnecessary. I have no intention of ever needing to know how to cook. When I’m working in my high-powered job I’ll just get takeaways, or maybe marry someone who’s a good cook. Sorted.

  ‘The thing is, Liv, a meal like this can provide all the necessary nutrients needed for a healthy lifestyle. If you make sure that you buy lean meat and throw some extra vegetables in and serve it with grated cheese, you’re basically covered.’

  ‘That’s great, Mum.’ I keep chopping my pepper. Best to humour her when she’s like this.

  ‘And I’ve chosen this meal to teach you because – guess what!’

  ‘I don’t know, Mum – what?’

  ‘It isn’t just a spaghetti Bolognese!’

  ‘No! What else could it possibly be? A flat-screen TV? A new mobile phone? Wait – I’ve got it! A buy-one-get-one-free voucher for a pizza! Something I’d actually be interested in?�
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  ‘Less cheek from you, madam, thank you! No, what I was about to say was that this meal can be used as a pasta sauce or with baked potatoes, or you can add some kidney beans for an instant chilli con carne. It’s extremely versatile and you’ll thank me one day for sharing my culinary wisdom with you!’ Mum tries to swat me with the tea towel and I dodge out of the way, giggling. She starts laughing too, and for the next few minutes we chop our vegetables together and I tell her about the French test I aced today.

  The pepper has been chopped into the tiniest pieces possible (Isaac hates peppers and always picks them out of his food, so I am working hard to make this extra difficult for him).

  ‘Shall I put this in the pan now?’ I ask, thrusting the fruits (or vegetables) of my labour in front of her.

  Mum looks up and I see a tear dripping silently down her cheek, followed by another. She sees me looking and quickly brushes them away.

  ‘Mum?’ I put my hand on her arm. ‘Are you crying?’

  She shrugs me off with a laugh.

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous, Liv! I’m chopping onions – it always makes my eyes water. Not sure why, must be to do with oniony chemicals. Or something. We could Google it. What do you think – have you learnt about onions in school?’

  My mother is rambling. I keep on looking at her, searching her face for evidence of more tears, but they seem to have dried up – which is funny because now she’s chopping onions as if her life depended on it.

  ‘Get the olive oil out of the cupboard and bring it over here,’ she says, not looking at me. I do what she tells me, feeling worried but not really sure why.

  ‘Now just slosh a bit in this pan.’ Mum points to a pan on top of the stove and I take the lid off the oil.

  ‘Does it actually say “slosh” in the recipe book?’ I ask her.

  ‘What recipe book?’ answers Mum, and she finally looks across at me and grins. I stifle a groan. This is not good news. Mum’s experimental cooking is never a success.

  I follow her instructions, although there’s a good chance that when she said ‘slosh’ she didn’t mean half the bottle. She gets me to turn on the hob and then hovers next to me while I heat up the oil, acting like I might set myself on fire at any moment. I tell her that I have used a stove before, at school, but she still stays right next to me.