Angel Kiss - Laura Jane Cassidy [6]
I called Sophie too, but it also rang without answer and I got a text from her a few minutes later saying that she was jamming with her brother’s band and that she’d call me afterwards. I got a horrible sinking feeling. I hadn’t talked to her in days – she could at least have spoken to me for two minutes. I tried not to get mad though. It wasn’t her fault Mum had made me move to the middle of nowhere.
I picked up a marker and started to doodle on my hand. I liked drawing little sketches on my skin – plans for the tattoo I was going to get once Mum finally gave in and let me. Earlier I’d drawn a heart, broken down the middle, on the inside of my right wrist, where I hoped to eventually get a treble clef tattooed. Mum sat down beside me and gave me a gentle squeeze.
‘Your heart’s not broken. It’s still in one piece,’ she said, pulling my hair back from my neck and prodding the little heart-shaped freckle below my left ear. I couldn’t resist smiling too. It was in the perfect shape of a heart, tiny but distinct. My gran had been the first one to notice it, and had always insisted that I’d been kissed by an angel.
I smiled at Mum. No matter how much I hated it that she’d dragged me here, I still couldn’t help loving her more than anyone else in the world. Since it had been just us we’d grown closer than any other mother and daughter I knew. We screamed and shouted and fought and bickered, but we adored each other all the same.
Apart from hating the thought of a treble-clef tattoo, Mum had always been supportive of my love for music. She’d spent her entire childhood dreaming of being a movie star. She’d had half a dozen posters of Marilyn Monroe taped to her wall and had watched Some Like It Hot hundreds of times. But my grandparents insisted that acting was just a hobby, and that she couldn’t possibly expect to pursue it as a career. So from the time I was four and had said I wanted to be a rock star, Mum had been driving me to guitar lessons, saving up for music equipment and listening to me singing much too loudly around the house. Her only request was that if I became famous I would dedicate one of my songs to her. I decided that was a fair trade.
I waited until she’d left the caravan, then took Alf Meehan’s letter out from my back pocket. I knelt down on the floor beside my bed and pulled out my suitcase. Mum had allowed me to bring just one suitcase of stuff to the caravan, as there wasn’t room for any more. It was packed full of clothes and a Converse shoebox that held my most prized possessions including a little silver bracelet given to me by my dad, my purple hardback notebook that I wrote my lyrics in, a couple of photographs of my friends and me and a battered paperback copy of The Commitments. I carefully hid the letter in the shoebox and placed it back in the suitcase. I knew Mum wouldn’t be impressed that I’d opened someone else’s post. I didn’t even know why I had, so there was no way I’d be able to explain it to her. But something was stopping me from throwing it away.
When I stepped out of the caravan Des was talking to Mum again. I decided to go over and rescue her. But the closer I got to them the more freaked out I became. Mum was standing close to Des and twirling a strand of her hair. Then I heard her giggle. This was actually making me queasy. I wanted to turn round and go back but Des had spotted me.
‘Jacki, we were just talking about you …’
I faked a smile and walked towards them.
‘Hi,’ I said to Des. A hi that said If you lay one finger on my mother, I will most certainly strangle you. He didn’t seem to notice.
‘So,’ he said, ‘your mum was telling me you like to play guitar? And that you’re in a band?’
‘Was in a band,’ I corrected him. ‘I had to leave it because we were moving here.’ Myself, Sophie and Ross had played together, but we’d all agreed that there was no way we could keep it up now that I was living so far away.