Twenty-eight

Mum is home! But she is supposed to take it easy. She isn’t though. As soon as she had her bag unpacked, she went up to the attic to see what Martin has been doing. Of course, the garage was not on the roof! In fact, it’s starting to look like a real room now. They’ve put a window in the middle of the ceiling and, if you stand on tiptoe on a chair, you can see out of it. And, if you lie on your back underneath it, you can see the clouds floating past.
Mum told me not to stand on tiptoe on a chair. So, we both lay on the floor and watched the sky. Mum said it was very peaceful, so maybe it counts as resting.
‘Are you going to be OK?’ I asked her.
‘Of course,’ she said. And the way she said it meant I believe her. She said it in a solid way, like there was no way that her answer could be anything else. ‘I’m only having a baby,’ she said. ‘People do it all the time. It isn’t an illness.’
And that’s true isn’t it? Babies get born every day. Though on the telly stuff happens all the time to the mums and the babies.
‘But that’s just make-believe,’ Mum said when I pointed out how often things go wrong in soap operas. ‘Bad stuff has to happen to make the story interesting. Imagine if it was just families sitting around playing Monopoly with nothing happening at all. Nobody would watch it.’
I agreed.
Then, with the clouds still up above us, I told Mum about seeing Maya.
‘Keemo?’ she asked, when I told her about Maya’s mum. And the way she said it wasn’t solid. It was kind of slippery and cold.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘It means she might be quite poorly,’ Mum said. ‘I don’t know. I could try to find out. Or you could ask your friend.’
‘She isn’t really my friend,’ I said.
And then Mum gave me a sad look.
I think I have to try harder with Maya.