Queenie by Jacqueline Wilson Page A

Mum,’ I said. A sudden overwhelming desire for Nan washed over me. ‘I must see her!’
    ‘Don’t be silly, Elsie – you’ve only just seen her.’
    ‘But if I’m going to be in this hospital, I need to say goodbye. Can I get the bus out to the sanatorium while you go for your interview?’
    ‘No you can’t! You’re so gormless you’d never get the right bus. You’d be off to John o’ Groats or down to Land’s End. And it would be a wasted journey anyway. There’s no visiting allowed on weekdays. Now, come on, we’ll take you home and you can get packed up while I go to my interview. There’s a good girl.’
    Home still seemed so strange without Nan in it. It was a very small basement flat but now it seemed very big and very bleak. I wandered from room to room, playing a ridiculous game. If I held my breath and counted to twenty, then maybe, just maybe, I’d find Nan in her armchair, Nan standing stirring something at the stove, Nan having a doze on the bed, Nan on the toilet with her floppy pink knickers around her ankles. I looked for phantom Nans in each room, scarlet in the face from holding my breath, even though I knew she was in the sanatorium, imprisoned in that narrow bed as if her green coverlet were chain mail.
    ‘Nan!’ I wailed, and then I covered my mouth with my hand because my voice sounded so eerie in the silent flat.
    I retreated to my bedroom, stood on a chair, and fetched my cardboard suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe. I packed my new kitten pyjamas and my comic. I didn’t have a sponge bag so I put my toothbrush and toothpaste into an old sock. I tucked Albert Trunk’s trunk into the other sock, pretending it was his nosebag. I thought he needed a little comfort, stuffed up in my suitcase.
    I spent a long time picking over the rest of my toys, wondering if I should take any of them with me. There was a teddy I’d had since I was a baby, but he’d lost his glass eyes. Nan sewed new eyes on in thick black thread, but they changed his whole expression, so he looked incredibly bad-tempered. I decided he’d much prefer staying at home undisturbed.
    I had a plastic duck and an enamel spinning top and a set of little coloured bricks, but they were all baby toys and I never played with them now. I had a book,
Treasure Island
, given to me long ago by Uncle Stanley. He said it had been his favourite book when he was a little boy. I was in the top set for reading and I liked books, but I couldn’t get into
Treasure Island
– I wasn’t very interested in pirates. I invented an island game for Nan and me instead. I still had a whole pad of drawings of our own special treasure island, with a mermaid lagoon and banana trees and beautiful shells, and a little house made out of twigs and palm leaves, just big enough for two. We found treasure, of course – a great tin trunk of rubies and emeralds and diamonds. I threaded them on necklaces and we wore six each, our chests flashing red and green and sparkling white in the tropical sun.
    I wondered about packing the drawing pad in my suitcase, but there were no spare pages left and my pictures seemed embarrassingly childish now, Nan and I gawky pin-people, and the yellow sand just smudged scribble.
    I didn’t have any other toys. I wandered into Nan’s room instead. I touched her china crinoline lady and her lace doilies and her little pin pot in the shape of a strawberry. Then I picked up her button box with Snow White and Sooty and Marmalade on the front. I gave them all a stroke, stretched an elastic band right over the box so it wouldn’t come undone, wrapped it in my vest to muffle the clatter of the buttons, and packed it underneath Albert Trunk.
    There! I sat back on my heels and played a little drum tune on my suitcase. I thought that if I acted in a jaunty manner, it might stop feeling so scary. ‘Hey, it’s all right, Elsie!’ I said out loud. ‘Maybe the hospital will be really nice and they’ll give you lots of