Lynne Banks - Stealing Stacey

“I remember exactly where I was when I heard she’d died. I was skinning a kangaroo.”

I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on that. I just thought it was a joke or something. I sometimes think I’m not very bright.

The other suitcases were piled up and she stood things on them. She’d brought lots of interesting things with her.

There were postcards of pictures all painted in dots. I couldn’t make them out until she explained them. They were painted by Australian natives and were all in code. A fire was a bunch of red dots, for instance, and white dotted lines were trips their ancestors made in something called the Dreamtime, across the outback. That’s the middle of Australia where it’s all desert. And there were special kinds of dots for animals or their footprints, or curvy coloured lines for snake tracks. The animals were wonderful weird kinds. I loved those postcards and Gran gave me some to stick up on my side of Mum’s dressing-table mirror.

Then there were some wooden animals with burn marks on them. Big lizardy things called goannas, and snakes (I wouldn’t even touch those. God how I hated snakes, not that I’d ever seen a live one). She had miniature wooden things like long bowls and something called a throwing stick, for spears, she said. She gave me a boomerang, only where would I have space to try throwing it? She showed me a picture of a didgeridoo, a musical instrument, which is a long, thick pipe. It gets hollowed out by termites, and it’s so heavy you have to rest the far end, the end away from your mouth, on the ground. She told me women aren’t allowed to play it because it’s symbolic, you can guess what of!

She showed off her clothes. They were sort of naff in a way, but rich-naff, not like Mum’s shell suit that I told her not to buy at the Oxfam shop (but of course she did). It’s a sort of metal-pink. I die every time she goes out in it.

Gran took us out. Not on week nights, she was very hot on me getting to bed early so I wouldn’t be tired at school, but on Fridays and Saturdays. She took us for meals out, and not at the local dumps, either, except once we took her to one of the African cafés for the experience. I took her around the market a couple of times, she said she loved it, which was quite something, because it can be fun in the summer, but it’s pretty dismal in the rain. Mainly though, she wanted to treat us. Once we went to a Holiday Inn right up West and had a really swish meal with proper waiters. That was the night she took us to see the show at the Hippodrome. It was amazing. I’d never seen a live act before. She took us to loads of good movies too. We took taxis and minicabs everywhere, she wouldn’t ride the buses or trains.

She talked. How she talked! And she wanted me to talk, too. When I came home from school she asked me to tell her my whole day. I was used to slumping in front of the telly after school to chill out. Now I had to articulate. She soon spotted I hated school. She never mentioned the truant-cop, but I think she’d heard, or maybe Mum had ratted on me.

“It’s really bad not to like school, sweetie,” she said. (By now I’d lost count of all her pet names for me.) “You have to get your priorities right. School’s a top priority at your age.”

“It’s so boring.”

“It’s up to teachers to make learning fun.”

“Tell that to ours,” I said.

“Kids have to make an effort too,” she said. She fixed me with her eyes. She wasn’t reproaching me exactly, more sort of measuring me. “Isn’t there any lesson you like?”

I didn’t answer at once. I didn’t want to tell her I quite liked English, for some reason. I fancied myself as an anti-school rebel, like Loretta. But she kept her eyes fixed on me, so in the end I muttered that computer studies weren’t bad.

Gran brightened up. “Oh, good that you like computers! I’m surprised you don’t have one at home.”

I gave Mum a look. I’d begged , just about on my knees, for a home computer. I’d told her, like one million times, that my teacher said that was one reason why I wasn’t keeping up, cos I didn’t have a PC. I was pretty well the only one in my class that didn’t. (Well, that was what I told Mum anyway.)

“Now don’t start, Stace, you don’t need a computer!” Mum snapped at me. “It’s up to the school to make you keep up, without telling me I ought to spend hundreds of pounds we haven’t got.”

“Of course she needs one,” said Gran. “A good one, with a colour printer and a scanner and all the bits. Christmas is coming, isn’t that right, cherry pie?” and she winked at me.

“Glendine! Don’t even think about it, please !” said Mum. “I couldn’t accept it.”

“Rubbish! Why not?”

“Because… I don’t know why not. I just feel I couldn’t.” Typical Mum. Gran just smiled her big white smile. (Her teeth weren’t false. I knew because Nan’s were and I could tell the difference, close to.) I felt my heart sort of bob up and down. I knew I’d get a computer for Christmas and there wasn’t a thing Mum could do about it.

I had it all worked out by the beginning of December. Where I’d set it up would be in the living room. I’d surf the net and send e-mails and join chat rooms and play computer games. I might even use it for a bit of schoolwork.

But then in the end I didn’t get a computer at all. Because Gran got a better idea.

She told me it was a secret.

“Not a word to Mum yet! I’m going to kidnap you.”

“Go on, Gran. You’re just having me on, right?”

“I’m serious. I couldn’t be more serious if I tried.”

I couldn’t take it in at first. It was too amazing. She wanted to take me to Australia for the Christmas holiday!

I was, like, ecstatic. The more she told me about Australia, the more I wanted to see it. She made it sound so exciting. She had a wonderful book with coloured photos in. Everything looked so different from boring old England.

It seemed like the sun shone all the time, there was tons of swimming and sports, and lots of wildlife. I’m really into wildlife, on the telly, that is. There’s not much of it in south London – unless you count birds. And I saw an urban fox once. But foxes and pigeons don’t stack up against dingoes and koalas and wallabies and wombats and duck-billed platypuses. That’s aside from kangaroos, which have been my favourite animal since I had a Kanga and Roo toy when I was little. The snakes put me off a bit, but I tried not to think about them. Or the crocodiles. We’ve got no dangerous animals at all in Britain, unless you count the Loch Ness Monster and the Beast of Bodmin Moor, which nobody really believes in. About our most dangerous thing apart from Rottweilers is mosquitoes. (OK, adders. But in London? Get real.)

But what I wanted to see most was the outback, because I’d seen videos of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Crocodile Dundee. But it was because of Gran’s things, too, what she called her Aboriginal artefacts. I wanted to meet some of those people.

“There are big mobs of Wonngais where I come from,” she said carelessly. “I’ll introduce you.”

I was just so scared Mum wouldn’t let me go.

“Don’t you worry about that! You leave your mum to me.”

But before she could tackle Mum, something really radical happened.

When I think back to it now, I remember what a good day we’d had, the day before. First off, we’d had a row, because I’d been to Loretta’s, supposedly just for a sleepover, and of course we weren’t supposed to go anywhere, but we did. We sneaked out to a party and danced and, yes, we did drink a few alcopops, actually more than a few, but it wouldn’t have mattered – I mean we didn’t get legless or anything, we were just enjoying ourselves. But by the lousiest luck on earth, the son of a friend of Mum’s was there (the others were mostly older than us) and he must’ve ratted on me. When I got home the next morning, which was Saturday and Mum’s day off from the checkout, Mum was waiting for me. She was practically jumping up and down. It was just lucky for me Gran was there or I would’ve really copped it. Even as it was, Mum dragged me off to our room and had a hissy-fit and I had one back, but even the hissing was kind of muffled because we knew Gran was listening.