Free A Place for Us by Harriet Evans Page A

and rats everywhere and Wilbur is terrible at catching them. He hides under the sideboard or once in the games cupboard in the sitting room when they appear. There’s wasps, too, under the roof. No one else has spotted the wasps yet. And a huge garden. Ma is cross all the time. She wants to draw and she can’t draw because she doesn’t have time because of the mice and the dogs and dropping us at school andmaking food and all of the housewife chores. Daddy is off in London having meetings and lunch with friends. He comes home late, he smiles, Ma hisses at him and she gets so cross. They shout but they also whisper things, and that’s when I like listening, when they’re in bed at night and they can’t hear me pressed against the door.
    Everything’s different since we came here. And Florence is here. Since she came along everything’s worse. We moved because of her. We had to leave Putney and our old house with the poppies and the corn wallpaper because of her. Everything was fine before she arrived. It was quiet and nice and I knew where we were, me and Bill, Daddy and Ma. Ma had time for me, for Wilbur. Now she’s always cross.
    The other thing is we don’t have enough money to pay for the house. I worry about it all the time. I try to say it to Ma and Daddy: ‘There’s not enough money because you told me once Daddy gets £100 for a painting or a sketch and this house was £16,000.’ And Ma doesn’t have any money. She is from a poor family too, though not as poor as Daddy’s. We don’t see her family very much. There wasn’t room for them in Putney to come and stay, but they stayed the night here last week and I hope they don’t come again. Her sister speaks with a funny accent and she was mean to me. She told me to shut up when I wanted to talk some more about Wilbur. So before she went I put a piece of broken glass from the time I pretended Florence broke the mirror—well, I keep some of the pieces in my tree by the daisy bank at the back of the garden—and I put it in her handbag. So when she reaches in for her handkerchief she will slice her fingers. I hope she slices them right off.
    •   •   •
    So I have got three things that I want to do. One, move back to Park Street, Putney. Two, get rid of Florence. An accident like what happened to Janet, although that scares me, and I didn’t mean for it to happen. Three, make everyone say that Wilbur is my special dog, not the family’s. They can have Crispin as their family dog and Wilbur can be mine. I drew some pictures of him doing funny things, and I put them up in my room. The first one is of Wilbur hiding with the snakes and ladders in the cupboard when he sees a mouse. The second is him jumping up like a beanpole on the other side of the table when he sees food held in the air. He looks so funny. The third is him walking behind me downthe hill to school. He does it every day and then he walks back up to Winterfold and sits with Ma and waits for me to come home. I love Wilbur more than anyone else in the whole world. He is a bit sandy, and he is a cross between a Labrador and a retriever, I think.
    This is what I’m worried about most at the moment: just before the holidays, Janet Jordan at school laughed at him and said he was ugly and a mongrel. The next day Janet fell on the steps and hit her head and now she can’t speak. At all.
    I worry that I did that to Janet. I didn’t make anything special happen like I do sometimes, but I thought a lot about it, I wanted her to die for being nasty to Wilbur. I really did. Sometimes I stare at things very very hard and I’m sure I move them just a bit with my thoughts, and I get so scared but I can’t stop doing it. When I look at books late at night in the new room sometimes the colors jumble up and start to jump in front of my eyes like they’re talking to me. And when I see myself in the mirror I think an evil person’s talking to me, and sometimes he is. Then I think: So what? Janet