Lemonade Sky by Jean Ure Page B

away,” said Tizz, knuckling at her eyes.
    Cal sat for a while in silence, a frown creasing his forehead.
    “This Nikki,” he said. “Do you have a number for her?”
    I shook my head. “Mum’s probably got it on her phone.”
    “I take it you have tried calling your mum?”
    “She’s switched her phone off,” said Tizz. “Either that or it needs recharging.”
    “Or it’s run out of money.”
    “So how about an address?”
    “For Nikki? We haven’t got one.”
    “Not even sure where she lives,” said Tizz.
    “And anyway,” I said, “we couldn’t go and live with her. She’s an idiot!”
    “Yeah, I remember,” said Cal. “I just thought she might have some idea where your mum could have gone. What about the place they used to work? Chicken ’n’ Chips, or whatever it was?”
    “It closed,” said Tizz.
    “Hm.” Cal drummed his fingers on the table. “In that case, I wonder…”

Me and Tizz sat waiting. What was Cal going to say?
    “I wonder if there’s any way we could get in touch with your nan?”
    Our nan? We stared at him. We didn’t even know we had a nan!
    “You never hear from her?” said Cal.
    Silently, we shook our heads.
    “Your mum never mentions her?”
    A faint memory came back to me. “I think she might have done,” I said, “one time when I was little and I was, like, refusing to eat my sprouts, or something.”
    “You still do,” said Tizz.
    “I know, I hate them!”
    “And Mum always lets you off.”
    “Yes, cos she says she doesn’t believe in forcing a person to eat stuff they really don’t like, but her mum used to make her sit there until she’d cleaned her plate. That’s what she told me.”
    “Sounds about right,” said Cal. “I always gathered she was a bit of a martinet.”
    I looked at him, doubtfully. I didn’t know what a martinet was, but it didn’t sound like it was anything good. Tizz, boldly, said, “I never heard Mum say that, and what’s a mart’net?”
    “Someone who’s very strict,” said Cal. And then, catching sight of my face, he quickly added that it could just have been Mum’s interpretation. “She’d have been a handful, you can bet.”
    Tizz, in her aggressive manner, immediately demanded to know how. “ How would Mum have been a handful?”
    “Playing up?” said Cal. “Acting out? Never doing what she was told.”
    I thought privately that it sounded a bit like Tizz, but I didn’t say so. I wanted to hear more about this unknown nan. Already I was starting to not like the sound of her.
    “I just met her the once,” said Cal. “Remember when you lived in Portsmouth? Some dreadful dump down near the Docks. D’you remember?”
    I did, vaguely, though we had lived in lots of places since.
    “I don’t,” said Tizz.
    “You were too young. And Sammy wasn’t even born. Anyway, this woman suddenly turned up when your mum was out, saying she was Deb’s mum, so I let her in and said she was welcome to wait, and I remember she sat there looking like she’d stepped into a pig sty and got pig muck on her. Ugh !”
    Cal gave a little high-pitched shriek and a ladylike shudder and crossed his legs. Both Tizz and me giggled.
    “Mind you,” he said, “I can’t honestly blame her. Your mum was going through one of her bad patches. The place really was a bit like a pig sty. I was pretty glad to get out of it. I guess I should have stuck around, but—”
    “You had itchy feet,” I said. I didn’t want Cal feeling guilty.
    “Is that what your mum says? I’ve got itchy feet? Well, I guess she’s right. But I should have stayed on. I was really worried about you kids, how your mum was going to cope. I kind of assumed, now your nan had turned up, that she’d take care of things. See, I’d really just dropped by to say hallo, and – then I was off. I didn’t stay around long enough to check how things worked out. It was only later, like months later, I found out what had happened. Seems your mum and your gran had