Bloom

YOU KNOW WHEN you go Easter egg hunting and you have a hunch where an egg is going to be right before you find it in that very spot? I had that feeling. Like someone had put a little treasure down there for me to find.

Not only that, but it had been there my whole life. Waiting for me.

I felt exhausted and terrified, as wrung out as an old sock stuck in a spin cycle for too long. Yet I sank to my knees and peered closer. The thing in the slab was brown and papery. I could only see the top of it, but it looked like a leaf.

And here was the weird thing. Even though the sensible part of me was jumping up and down with disbelief – what was I doing, trying to rescue a random leaf, when I should be inside, running for cover before another earthquake? – there was another part of me with different ideas. And it seemed to be winning the battle of wills, because there I was, sweaty and hot and obsessed with jabbing my fingers into a broken concrete lump so I could pull this thing out.

Then it glowed.

I stared at it. I rubbed my eyes. Engaged the old eyeballs again. But no – it was not glowing now. Yet for a second it had looked almost alive …

All of a sudden, I didn’t care about my homework. I didn’t care about my schedule. I didn’t even care about my school trousers getting dirty. I eagerly reached down. But my fingers were too wide and it was wedged at least fifteen centimetres too deep. My fingertips scrabbled desperately but touched only air.

I ran into the kitchen, yanked open a kitchen drawer and rummaged around with shaking hands. What I needed was something narrow and sharp to stick down the crack and fish out what was down there. Barbecue tongs? No, they wouldn’t fit in the gap. A cocktail stick? That could work!

I ran back outside, kneeled down on the paving slab and poked the cocktail stick down the gap. It fitted perfectly but wasn’t long enough. I could have cried with frustration. I didn’t know why it mattered so much. I was spellbound somehow.

I hurried inside, pulled open the second kitchen drawer and found a yellowing plastic wallet stuffed with paperwork and a roll of cling film. Great if you wanted to cling-film some paperwork; less great if you wanted to impale something inexplicable your patio had just thrown up.

Forget your little rescue mission. Just get back to your schedule and make up for lost time.

I went to retrieve Mr Grittysnit’s letter from underneath the willow tree and threw a final glance at the cracked paving slab. That was weird. The thing stuck down there seemed to have … moved.

I could see a brown corner poking out now. That would make it much easier to pull out. But hadn’t it been wedged so far down my fingers hadn’t been able to touch it?

At that point, I could have done the sensible thing. Walked back into the house and called the emergency services. Reported an Unidentified Brown Papery Thing and had it removed by the authorities. Lived off the excitement for a couple of weeks, and then got on with my life.

But I didn’t.

And that is something I have to live with for the rest of my life. And potentially, although it’s very unlikely, so will you. But let me offer you an important bit of advice just for your peace of mind.

If you are in any way changed by this book, you may feel, at first, like blaming me. But you’re going to have to push past that, seriously. Blame is a toxic emotion that will only, in the end, make you suffer, not me. So remember. No blame. No hate. Aim for brave acceptance instead. I offer you this advice as a friend. Or you could always try punching a pillow – apparently that helps.

Where were we? Oh yes. Shivering a little in the shadows, I looked again. I was right – the old papery object had moved. The top half of it now stuck out of the slab completely. How had that happened?

My brain leaped ahead of me, desperate to provide answers. Perhaps there was another tremor when I was in the kitchen just now and the shockwaves made it move?

I bent down and reached. As the tips of my fingers brushed the object, a jolt of energy ran all the way up my arm, like tiny electric shocks skipping up my bones. For a second, a vision flashed in my brain. Bright green grass, damp with dew. A tangle of tree roots.

I pulled the entire thing free, and straightened up. It was in my hands, so light it was almost weightless.

I stared at it eagerly, wondering what treasure I had discovered.

It was a …

… brown paper envelope.

A brown paper envelope, ladies and gentlemen.

Disappointed yet also completely mystified, I brushed the earth off it, revealing some curly writing on one side which said: THE SURPRISING SEEDS. The words were scrawled in faded, old-fashioned green ink.

Underneath that was the sentence SELF-SEEDING BE THESE SEEDS.

I turned the packet over, hoping to find more explanation, or at least something a bit more exciting, but there was nothing.

No instructions.

No use-by date.

No picture.

No hashtag.

Not even a barcode, for crying out loud.

I shook it with frustration. Something rattled inside.

I shook it again. It rattled again. Yikes.

There was no way I was going to open that. Who knew what might come scuttling out? Instead, I held it up to the late-afternoon sky. The light shining through the flimsy paper revealed about thirty small black things inside.

These things had small, round black bodies, out of which grew four thin black stalks. They weren’t moving – they looked as if they’d dried up a long time ago. But they were spooky. Even their not moving was kind of frightening.

Here’s a list of the things they looked like:

1. Small, petrified jellyfish.

2. Aliens with no faces and four legs.

3. Dried-up severed heads, with mad hair.

I stared at them again. They seemed to be waiting for me to do something. But what, exactly?

My cheeks burned. Mixed in with my fluttery sense of revulsion was a feeling of being tricked. It was like discovering that something I thought would be exciting wasn’t, after all. Our Year Three class trip to the Little Sterilis dishcloth factory, for instance. (Take it from me: not the adrenaline-fuelled ride it sounds. And a very limited range of gifts in the gift shop, if you know what I mean.)

I crumpled the packet up in my hand, scooped up Mr Grittysnit’s letter, stomped back inside and locked the back door firmly.

Because – and pay attention, folks, for here is an important life lesson at no extra charge – if you want to protect yourself from a mysterious dark magic against which you are totally defenceless, then bringing it into your home and locking the door, thereby locking yourself in with it, is definitely the right way to go about it.

Like I said, on the house.

MUM HAD THE best job in the world. She spent her days gazing at mountains of cheese, lakes of tomato sauce and a gazillion giant tubes of spicy pepperoni meat coming down from the factory ceiling like blessings from the pizza gods. Mum made pizzas at Chillz, our town’s frozen-pizza factory.

Well, if you wanted to split hairs, the machines made the pizzas; Mum looked after the machines that made the pizzas. She kept them clean, dealt with any tech glitches and shut the factory down if they got contaminated. She wasn’t a pizza chef as such, more of a machine looker-after.

Or so she kept telling me. To me, Mum made pizzas. Plus she got to wear these awesome pizza-themed overalls, covered in red and green splodges to make her look like a slice from the bestselling product in the Cheap Chillz range. (The Pepperoni and Green Pepper Spice Explosion!, only 79p. Yes, that’s for an entire pizza. I know.) I loved those overalls; I loved even more the wedge-shaped badge pinned to their front pocket which said:

As if all that wasn’t amazing enough, she also got first dibs on the pizza rejects from the conveyor belts. These were the pizzas that either had too much topping or not enough, or that weren’t a perfect circular shape, or were one millimetre out of the required Chillz regulation thickness of 2.1 centimetres.

Most of the rejects were pulped at the end of each day, but Mum would take as many home as she could fit into the car boot because I loved them. They were cheesy. They were spicy. They came with unidentified slices of other stuff, which could have been mushrooms, but nobody knew, and that was part of their magic. And they were all for me. Because Mum, weirdly, never touched them.

*

Once inside, I threw the packet of Surprising Seeds on the table, got a Reject Special out of the freezer and tried to understand what had just happened out on the patio. Would I have to call the police and report an earthquake? Would Mum have felt it in the factory? Would the pizzas be affected? How could that packet have glowed, deep down in the ground? And what level of trouble was the broken patio going to land me in when Mum saw it?

It was too much. I decided to slip into a harmless little daydream just to calm down. In it, we were stepping off a plane in Portugal. Mum was beaming as she turned to look at me. And those dark bags under her eyes had gone.

I smiled back blissfully.

‘Where’s the pool, love?’ she asked as a breeze smelling faintly of coconuts ruffled our hair. I could hear her so clearly, we could have been there. ‘How was school, love?’

Er – what?

My daydream faded, replaced by the sight of a short plump woman with bleached blonde hair. Her tortoiseshell glasses were perched on the end of her nose, and she was rocking her pizza-themed overalls, as usual, although she wasn’t smiling quite as widely as she had been in the daydream.

‘How was your day?’ she asked, her hands cupping my cheeks.

I tried not to prise her icy fingers off my skin. (Her skin was always freezing – that’s what you get when you work in sub-zero temperatures! Talk about a cool mum, right?)

I hesitated. Where can I even start? ‘I think we’ve just had an earthquake.’

The tap gave a sad drip.

‘What?’

‘I was outside in the backyard, and … everything went super loud. I heard a chainsaw – it was a pigeon – and … Did your pizzas rise okay? I was worried …’

Mum raised an eyebrow. ‘What?’ she said gently.

I took a deep breath. It seemed a mad dream now; the details were already fading, and it was hard to tell the difference between what had really happened and the misshapen remains of my jittery imagination.

‘The patio shook.’

‘It shook?’

‘And then the patio broke.’

‘It broke?’

‘And then I found something.’

‘Found something?’

We stared at each other.

‘You’d better show me,’ she said.

I unlocked the back door and, with a trembling finger, pointed at the mess of broken concrete. ‘There.’

Mum’s hands flew to her face and her mouth opened, but she said nothing. She simply stood there, in her grubby white socks, gazing out at the chaos, and somehow her silence was as loud as the patio cracking.

‘It w-wasn’t my fault, Mum,’ I stammered out.

‘I believe you,’ she said, turning round. ‘Where were you when it happened?’

‘Out by the old willow tree.’

She frowned. ‘You know the rule, Sorrel. Don’t go near that tree. It’s not safe.’

‘But I had a reason.’

I filled her in on Mr Grittysnit’s important letter and the branch it had got wrapped round. But she didn’t seem that interested in the letter or the competition. I mean, honestly, it was like telling a sock. But I knew, once it had sunk in, she’d be as excited as I was.

We went back into the kitchen. Mum sat at the table with a heavy sigh and took her glasses off.

After rubbing her eyes for a bit, she reached for her mobile. ‘There’s nothing on the local news about an earthquake.’ Her bitten fingernails flew across the keys. ‘Subsidence,’ she announced eventually.

‘Eh?’

‘When the earth begins to sink it can cause tremors. Break up concrete. That sort of thing.’

She got up and went over to the kettle. ‘It must have been the tree – it’s so diseased. I bet all its nasty little roots are dying, which is why the earth around it collapsed. Promise me you won’t go anywhere near it again.’

While the kettle boiled, she gazed out of the window, fiddling with the small silver hoops in her ears. ‘That blasted tree,’ she sighed. ‘Not only do we have to look at it for the rest of our lives, but it’s going to cost me an arm and a leg to—’

‘Why have we got to look at it for the rest of our lives?’ An idea popped into my head. I felt very clever to have it before Mum. ‘Why can’t you just cut it down?’

She poured boiling water into her mug and added milk. ‘Before I was allowed to buy this house, I had to agree not to remove or harm that tree in any way. The lawyers were quite pushy about it. Made me sign my name and everything.’

She nibbled a biscuit. ‘I wasn’t concentrating much if I’m honest. You were a tiny baby, your dad had just swanned out and all I wanted was a home for us both.’

She gulped her tea and stared up at the clouds. ‘This seemed a perfect place to bring up a baby. Wide pavements for buggies. New houses being built all the time. I would have promised to paint my ears bright purple and sing the royal anthem dressed as a banana if it meant the house would be mine. So, I signed the paperwork. More fool me,’ she said, with a hollow laugh. ‘But back then the tree didn’t look too bad. It’s definitely got worse over the years.’ She gave it one last disgusted look and came to sit down, the smears of smudged mascara under her eyes making her eye-bags look even darker.

The pipes moaned. My stomach gave a queasy lurch. There it was again – that sad feeling in the house had seeped into Mum.

But she put on a bright smile and reached for my hand. ‘Don’t worry. Maybe it’s a chance to give it all a bit of a spring-clean. We’ll put down some fresh concrete and …’ She sniffed the air with an expert nose tilt. ‘Reject Special with unidentified topping?’

‘Yep.’

‘Fancy some of my home-made lemonade to go with that?’

‘Please.’

Mum dug about in the fridge, humming, while I took my pizza out of the oven. As I cleared a space on the table, I spotted the Surprising Seeds. They were still lying where I’d left them, near the salt and pepper shakers. Maybe Mum would know what they were.

‘Look,’ I said, and held the packet out, but the rest of the sentence died on my lips as if I’d lost my voice. I tried again. ‘Ha … Mmm, I foun …’

My lips went all rubbery and loose. Speaking proper words was impossible.

While I sat there, lips flapping about like party streamers and grunts coming out of my mouth, Mum poked her head round the fridge door. ‘You okay?’

With superhuman effort, I managed to force my lips together, but this had the horrible effect of gluing them shut. ‘Mmmm’ was all that came out. ‘Mmmm,’ I said again, desperately.

‘Oh, you’re excited about your pizza,’ she said, walking over to the sink.

I tried to call her back. ‘Mmmm! Mmmm!’

‘All right, darling, point made,’ she said over the splutters and groans of the tap. She put a glass of lemonade in front of me. ‘I’m going upstairs to get out of these overalls.’

It was no use. I looked around frantically for a pen, so I could scribble a message asking for help. But what would I write?

Oh, hi, Mum.

Only me.

I think I might be going slightly mad. How are you?

In other news, currently I can’t speak because my lips have become mysteriously glued together. And I think this is all connected to what happened outside. The details are admittedly a little fuzzy, but I heard voices, thought I was being watched, and saw strange glowing things I couldn’t explain.

Maybe you’d like to look into this packet that I found – are you interested in small black motionless objects resembling jellyfish?

But back to my mouth that I can’t open. I feel very weird. Can you send for a doctor, please?

Oh yeah, she’d send for a doctor all right.

Maybe I shouldn’t tell her. Mum had enough on her plate. Plus, what if she confided in a friend? That was how rumours got started. ‘I’m a bit worried about Sorrel’ would turn into ‘Trixie’s daughter is losing her marbles’ and by the time it reached Mr Grittysnit it would be ‘Obedient pupil? Sorrel Fallowfield can’t even make her own mouth obey her’. And Chrissie would probably come up with another catchy nickname I’d have to grin through for a year. Mad-mouth Sorrel would probably be high on the list.

I twisted in my chair, grabbed my school bag and pushed the Surprising Seeds way down into its depths, out of sight. The moment they were hidden, my lips became unstuck.

‘Testing, testing,’ I said under my breath. Yep, I could definitely talk again.

‘Pardon?’ Mum had reappeared in the doorway in her black tracksuit bottoms and a denim shirt, a look in her eyes that meant temperatures were about to be taken.

‘Nothing.’

And that was when the secret began, I suppose.

THE NEXT MORNING, I was finishing off my toast when there was a knock on the door.

I opened it. Swallowed. Flinched. Tried not to wince.

‘What was it this time?’ I asked the girl with black scruffy hair standing on my doorstep.

‘Hydrogen peroxide and sodium iodide.’ She grinned at the memory, which seemed to make her glow with happiness. ‘I threw some soap into the beaker to see how much gas was in there and BOOM!’

‘Bad reaction?’ I asked, glancing at the weeping raw sore where Neena’s right eyebrow used to be.

‘Only from Mum,’ she muttered, jerking her head to indicate the smart-looking woman behind her. ‘The experiment itself went perfectly.’

‘Mujhe takat dijie,’ said Neena’s mum, which I know is Hindi for Give me strength because Mrs Gupta says it about Neena so often.

We shared a knowing look.

Neena went through a lot of eyebrows in the name of science. Basically, when she wasn’t talking, dreaming or thinking about it, she was holed up in a rat-infested shed in her garden, rearranging her face with a dangerously out-of-date chemistry set from a charity shop.

*

Neena and I were born three hours apart. Our mums met in the maternity ward and bonded over a box of home-made Sohan Halwa sweets Mrs Gupta had smuggled in. As a baby, I’d never taken that much notice of Neena, being more interested in things like crying and dribbling, but that all changed at my fifth birthday party. When every other boy and girl started sobbing in my lounge just six minutes after arriving, she’d simply stared at them and went back to shaking each of my presents calmly.

One by one, the other kids were whisked away by their concerned parents – ‘So sorry we can’t stay,’ they’d all said. ‘My little angel’s never done this before – must be a sudden temperature, probably got a bug or something. No, honestly, don’t worry about party bags – wouldn’t want to put you out …’ Cheery Cottage had gradually emptied. Ten minutes into my party, Neena was the only guest left.

I held my breath. Our mothers hovered nervously, holding huge platters of food they’d slaved over all morning. I looked at Neena. Neena looked at me. And then she said something so wise, so profound, so comforting, that I’ve never forgotten it. She said: ‘Cake.’

The four of us polished it all off that afternoon. Neena also sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me extra loudly, helped me open every single present and refused to leave until we’d sung ten rounds of ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’. From that day on we’d been best friends for life.

*

‘Ready to go?’ asked Mrs Gupta.

As we set off for school, Neena threw me an appraising glance. ‘Something’s different about you today,’ she said.

‘Is it my hair?’ I patted it carefully. I’d taken extra time over my ponytail that morning, making sure each strand was lying flat. Every detail counted on the first day of the Grittysnit Star competition.

‘No.’

‘My shoes?’ I pointed my feet with a flourish.

‘Sorrel, they’re always shiny.’

‘Do I look taller?’ I asked casually.

Neena threw me a sympathetic glance. ‘Nope.’ She examined me again. ‘I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s definitely something new about you.’

‘Maybe it’s my face. Have I got an inner glow?’

‘You what?’ said Neena, frowning.

‘You know, cos of the Grittysnit Star competition?’

‘It sounds like a load of old methane gas to me.’ She kicked a drinks can out of her way. ‘A holiday means I’ll be away from my lab for a whole seven days.’ She stared into the distance as if she couldn’t think of anything worse. ‘And Mum and Dad will try to drag me out to the beach and stuff. Anyway, I’m hardly off to a great start. Not with this.’ She pointed to the patch of skin where her eyebrow used to be, bright red in the September sunshine, and smirked.

Neena had a point, but I didn’t want to gloat.

When we reached the underpass, she stopped suddenly. ‘Hang on, Mum. This is important.’ Her eyes raked over me. ‘I know what it is! You’re crumpled!’ She stared at my grey shirt approvingly. ‘What happened, Sorrel? Was the iron broken? You’re nearly as scruffy as me.’

At this point, I should have just given up altogether. Forgetting to iron my uniform in the morning was so unlike me I should have recognised it as the sign of doom it was, right there and then.

I might as well have started wearing a leather jacket and tearing around town on a motorbike, such were my chances of winning that competition.

Someone should just have tattooed

on my forehead, which might not have looked very nice, but at least would have acted as a handy hint whenever I brushed my teeth, and saved me from an awful lot of guesswork.

But, this being real life, none of that actually happened. And even though I was totally unprepared for the malevolent dark power I’d unearthed, I still thought I was in control of my life, which was kind of sweet, while also completely wrong.

So I turned on my heel, pushing against the hordes of Grittysnit pupils swarming around us. ‘I’m going home. I’ll do a quick iron and run back. I’ll catch up with you.’

‘If you go home now you’ll be late,’ said Neena.

‘Great,’ I said bitterly as the stream of pupils pushing past us got thicker. ‘It doesn’t matter what I do. I’m off to a terrible start.’

‘Girls,’ said Mrs Gupta, ‘the bell’s rung. Time to go in.’

Neena gave my shoulder a sympathetic squeeze as we walked through the school gates. ‘Look, don’t worry about your clothes, Sorrel. You’ve still got the shiniest school shoes I have ever seen.’

She grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the stairs while the shrill bell clanged in our ears. I ran up behind her towards our classroom, panting a little.