Zelah Green Read online

  Vanessa Curtis

  ZeLaH

  GReen

  Zelah Green first published as Zelah Green: Queen of Clean in 2009

  This edition published 2010 in Great Britain by

  Egmont UK Limited

  239 Kensington High Street

  London W8 6SA

  Copyright © Vanessa Curtis 2009

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  ISBN 978 1 4052 5505 9

  eISBN 978 1 7803 1070 1

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Typeset by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford on Avon, Warwickshire

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by the CPI Group

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgements

  For my husband and my family

  Chapter One

  My name is Zelah Green and I’m a Cleanaholic.

  I spend most of my life on Germ Alert.

  Germ Alert is for when people forget to wash their hands and then try to touch me, or when they sneeze on to a tissue and throw it at the bin like they’re playing netball and then miss, or, even worse, try to pass it to me. Germ Alert also covers cats, dogs, unflushed toilets, greasy metal poles on tube trains, computer keyboards and mobile phones without covers on, people spitting, kissing or dribbling, coughing or doing anything else with their horrid bodily fluids.

  When I’m not on Germ Alert, I’m on Dirt Alert.

  Dirt Alert is for when people come into the house from the garden with bare feet and tread bits of worm and grass and earth around the house. Dirt Alert also covers drifting bits of fluff, crumbs, grimy black fingernails, people sweating too much, rancid fat on the cooker, old butter wrappers, smears on plates and windows and layers of dust on windowsills.

  Dirt Alert is not as serious as Germ Alert, but it still takes up a lot of my time.

  It’s a miracle I ever get to school.

  The school bus is waiting outside right now, clouds of grey exhaust smoke being coughed into the environment way too close to my sparkling clean windows (I know it’s a bit sad, but I had a good go at the diamond lattices this morning).

  I’m standing with my stepmother in front of a mirror with a black frame and gold swirls, like an elaborate Bakewell tart topping. I don’t like the mirror, but then again it’s my stepmother’s taste and I don’t much like her either.

  There’s a big black smear in the middle of the mirror. Dirt Alert. My stepmother is watching me watching the smear. She’s willing me not to reach out and wipe it away.

  My rituals really hack her off, that and the fact that I’m younger and thinner than she is. Mind you, I’m not looking that great today. My face is all red and raw from scrubbing and my black hair is frizzing up and out instead of down.

  My stepmother also has black hair, but hers floats in a controlled cloud of black wire around her squirrel-sharp features. She’s filled the cracks in her face with some sort of nutcoloured foundation and mismatched it with a red lipstick.

  Her hands are hovering just above my shoulders. I can almost feel the dirt and sweat from her fingertips soaking their way into my pristine clean white shirt.

  I’ve tried for two years to get on with my stepmother and, to be fair, she’s tried quite hard to get on with me, but it hasn’t worked. We’re just too different. She doesn’t like my rituals and my stroppy temper. I don’t like the disapproval all over her face whenever I talk about Dad or the way she tries to take over where Mum left off.

  ‘Zelah, darling,’ she begins. She stops. She’s just noticed that I’ve trimmed all the geraniums in the front garden to exactly the same height.

  My stepmother takes a deep breath and grits her teeth.

  ‘I need to talk to you about something,’ she says. ‘Something important.’

  At that moment the school bus honks and emits another explosion of dirty grey smoke.

  I can see my best friend Fran leaping up and down as if she’s about to burst a blood vessel. Major Germ Alert. That would be yet more unnecessary mess to clean up.

  I stop my stepmother in her tracks.

  ‘Later,’ I say.

  I clad my hand in a white tissue as if I’m about to investigate a gory crime scene. Or grime scene, in my case.

  Swoosh. The smear’s gone from the mirror.

  I sling my schoolbag over my shoulder, leave my stepmother doing her daily ‘keep young’ face exercises in the mirror and run for the bus.

  Fran’s an awesome best friend. I’m fed up with calling her ‘awesome’ so today I’ve got a new word that I found in the dictionary last night.

  ‘Fran, you’re such a sophisticate,’ I say, trying it out.

  A smile creeps over her smooth brown face.

  ‘I’m like so knackered,’ she says. ‘Stayed up half the night teaching my mum how to go online.’

  Fran has already placed a sheet of A4 paper on my seat so that my bottom can sit down without fear of dirt. My locker at school is full of pristine sheets of A4 and cellophane packets of tissue. I’m the only kid in the school with an air freshener positioned inside the door.

  ‘I need it back, mind,’ she’s saying. ‘Without an imprint of your arse on it or you’re so dead. We’re doing sonnets today.’

  She’s holding out a tube of mints. Brand new and unopened, just the way I like it. I hook my fingernail through a circle of white and drop it on to my tongue without touching the paper.

  We suck away in a fug of mint. Fran’s cleaned her teeth so that she can breathe in my direction without me fearing contamination. I’ve scrubbed my own teeth so hard that the bristles on my toothbrush bend back like a demented weeping willow.

  Fran’s done her usual bus thing of falling asleep within seconds. As the bus takes a tight corner a small hard coconut plops on to my shoulder.

  I sigh, remove the head and place a tissue underneath it before replacing it. I take a good sniff of the hair to check that it’s clean. It smells of violets, chicken pie and caramel.

  I envy Fran lots of things. Like the fact that all the boys in the class go silly and moony over her and she tosses her plaits and doesn’t care. She’s above all that.

  I also envy her being able to switch off wherever she is. I’m condemned to remain an upright rigid ferret amidst a sea of snoring slack-jawed commuters. Sometimes this makes me feel superior.

  At other times it’s just plain annoying.

  Like now. I want to talk to Fran about my stepmother’s mysterious words this morning. What is it she’s got to tell me later?

  A small snuffle comes from the head on my shoulder.

  I wish I could rest my sore cheek on my best mate’s soft hair, but that’s out of the question.

  I gaze out instead.


  I know there are clothes shops and colourful people and sweet dogs passing by, but I don’t see them.

  I never see them.

  My eyes are fixated by something else.

  The smudges on the window of the green school bus.

  Chapter Two

  You might be wondering why I’ve got such a weird name.

  When I was little and couldn’t sleep, Mum used to sit on the edge of my bed and tell me where it came from.

  I got my name from the place where my mother lay down in the back of a rust-coloured camper van with my father and conceived me.

  When they woke up the next morning, my father tried to cook sausages on a flame about the size of a Bunsen burner and my mother staggered out of the van, shielding her eyes against the sun rising over the fields and went to find out where they were.

  ‘We’re in Zelah,’ she shouted to my father. He came out of the van, blinking with a sausage speared on the end of a yellow screwdriver.

  ‘What?’ he shouted back.

  My mother rolled her eyes and gave him her ‘affectionate exasperated look’.

  ‘Zelah,’ she said again, quieter. ‘We’re in Zelah. Cornwall.’

  She grabbed the burnt sausage and ran away with it over the poppy fields, shrieking like a child. My mother was just eighteen and my father twenty-two. They were running away from their jobs and parents to start a new life together on the Cornish coast. It was the eighties, so my mother was wearing pedal pushers and a white ruffled shirt with big gold hoop earrings and her black hair in a ponytail.

  (‘Yes, really,’ she said, looking at my face of disgusted disbelief.)

  My father was wearing what he always wore: red checked shirt, jeans and Timberland boots.

  By the time my mother turned nineteen, she’d given birth to a black-haired, red-cheeked baby girl. Me.

  She looked into my cot at the hospital and remembered that magical night in the leaky camper van on the road towards Penzance.

  ‘Of course,’ she murmured, sniffing my sweet, baby-smelling skin. ‘Zelah. That’s what I’ll call you. Zelah.’

  And that’s how I got my name.

  Actually, that’s a complete load of crap. But that’s the version I believed until I was about twelve and then, after Mum died, Dad came into my bedroom one night and broke down in tears.

  ‘We never stopped arguing even back then,’ he said. His fingers were pressed over his face. Hot tears squeezed into the webbed bits between them and ran slowly down his leathery hands.

  He smelled of old beer and cigarettes and kept letting out these weird belching noises.

  To add to my major stress levels he was eating a bag of bacon-flavoured crisps and every time he opened his mouth I could see loads of soggy potato moving about on his tongue.

  Gross.

  ‘Even on the night you were born we argued,’ he said.

  I frowned. In my mother’s version of events, my father was at home smoking fat cigars and ringing friends and relatives with the wondrous news of my birth.

  I told him this, trying not to look too closely at Dad chomping on his crisps.

  ‘Your mother always wanted you to think that our marriage was perfect,’ said Dad with a big hiccup. ‘Actually I was at the hospital all night, arguing.’

  With this revelation he shattered another piece of family history to bits of fake plastic in the blink of a hot, wet eye.

  I asked him what they were arguing about. Big mistake.

  ‘Your name,’ said my father, screwing up the crisp bag and chucking it on the floor.

  ‘I wanted to call you Louise, but your mother said that was wet and boring and she was going to come up with something outlandish and weird, just to spite me.’

  ‘What happened next?’ I said. I was keeping one eye on the empty crisp packet on the floor and edging away from my father to avoid being touched by his wet, salty hand. My fear of contamination was new and raw back then. I hadn’t yet invented Germ Alert or Dirt Alert.

  ‘She picked up a copy of Country Hiking magazine from the bedside table,’ said my father. ‘And she flicked through it with her eyes shut and then she stabbed her finger down on to the page.’

  He hiccupped again and stabbed his own finger hard on to my leg at that point. I winced but said nothing.

  ‘She opened her eyes and her finger was on the word “Zelah” said my father. ‘And that was it. That’s what she called you.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I felt flat and cross and very much in the present day. ‘So you didn’t come up with the idea in Cornwall on a romantic camping holiday, then?’

  ‘Nope, sorry,’ said my father. ‘We never camped. And whilst I’m ruining all your childish illusions I might as well tell you that you were conceived in a damp council flat in Deptford. We had cockroaches.’

  Then he blew his nose (I ducked under the sheet to avoid droplets) and left me sitting up in bed with my sense of identity lying in pieces around me.

  There was nothing safe or solid any more. My past was a fraud, my name was rubbish, my mother was dead and my father was drinking too much beer, eaten up with regret and guilt.

  That’s when the rituals began to take over my life.

  I suppose I ought to explain exactly what they are.

  Chapter Three

  My rituals are all part of Germ Alert and Dirt Alert.

  These are some of my rituals.

  You might think they sound a bit crazy, but to me they’re normal, just something I have to do before I can leave the house. It’s a pain if I’m running late for school, but I have to do them or else the whole day goes wrong and I get hot and anxious and can’t concentrate on anything.

  My rituals change a bit depending on what music I’m listening to. At the moment I’m listening to Green Day. Just as the first track finishes I step into the bathroom. Then I’ve got four tracks to get my hands done. To get them properly clean I have to wash them thirty-one times each, right hand then left. On a good day I finish this just as the fifth track comes to an end. On a bad day I forget and touch the toilet by mistake as I’m reaching for the towel. That means I have to wash them another thirty-one times, which takes me to the end of track eight. After my hands I load up a nailbrush with clean white soap and scrub my face until it’s raw. Then I have the tenth track to put my clothes on and get my hair brushed. I brush it thirty-one times using downwards strokes. At the end of all this it still looks like a mad black bush but that’s not really the point. I try to tie in the last brush stroke with the last note of track eleven. I never get to track twelve. If I do, it’s bad luck for the entire day and people I love might get run over or fall off a cliff, so I make sure this doesn’t happen. I once got to track twelve when I was listening to the Kaiser Chiefs, but their songs are shorter so I told myself that that was OK.

  I do one hundred and twenty-eight jumps on the top step and then I go downstairs, changing my shoes on the bottom one.

  Once I’ve gone down for breakfast I can’t go upstairs or I’ll have to start the whole washing thing over again.

  This is really annoying when I leave my school bag upstairs. If my stepmother has already gone to work, then I’m stuffed.

  Teachers don’t like ‘Sorry, Miss, I couldn’t go upstairs to get my homework or else I’d have had to wash my hands thirty-one times’ as an excuse.

  This is another one of my rituals:

  Wardrobe spacing.

  I go mental if anything is touching the item hanging next to it. There has to be a gap of at least four centimetres between each piece of clothing, and I keep a ruler in the cupboard just in case so I can measure the gaps and woe betide if anyone gives me a piece of new clothing because that screws up all the measurements and I usually end up having to give it back to them, which is rude, or else I wrap it in tissue paper and put it on a shelf in the top.

  The last thing I have to do before I go to school is this:

  Checking. This is my checklist for checking:

  Check kettle s
witched off. (Up to ten times.)

  Check back door locked. (Up to ten times.)

  Check no crumbs on kitchen worktop. If there are, put on plastic gloves and wipe them away with a clean tissue. Throw away tissue without touching bin. If touch bin, wash hands thirty-one times, left then right.

  Check that labels on jars, bottles and tins are all lined up in the cupboard and facing the front.

  Check television switched off at mains.

  Check all lamps switched off.

  Make sure curtains pulled open and exactly same distance apart.

  Check all windows are locked.

  That’s my morning rituals and my checks. My evening rituals take place when I get home from school. This is what I have to do:

  Change from school shoes into flip-flops on bottom stair.

  Go upstairs not touching banister.

  Jump one hundred and twenty-eight times on top step.

  Have shower.

  Change out of school uniform.

  Wash hands another thirty-one times, first left, then right.

  If I go to the toilet after that the whole hand-washing thing has to be done again.

  Do homework in bedroom.

  Jump one hundred and twenty-eight times on top step.

  Go downstairs not touching banisters and change shoes on bottom step.

  That’s all of my rituals.

  After I’ve done all my rituals I usually manage to have a pretty normal evening until I have to go to bed at ten, when the whole washing thing starts up again. Most of the time I cope OK with my ‘little problem’. There aren’t many people around to be annoyed by it. Mum’s dead and my stepmother’s out as much as possible.

  Oh yes. And just over four weeks ago my dad vanished off the face of the planet. Picked up his briefcase one day and air-kissed me goodbye to avoid major Germ Alert. He smelled of leather and aftershave and wood chippings and that weird dried shampoo stuff, just like normal.

  Dad got into his car and drove off to his teaching job at school. And he never came back.

  Which is why I’ve been stuck in this house with my vile stepmother for the last month.