The Suitcase Kid by Jacqueline Wilson

she’d sneer if I came creeping back so soon. And Radish was still down the tree, so lost and lonely and frightened. I thought of her tiny heart beating violently under her soft fur and my face screwed up in pain.
    â€˜I’m coming, Radish,’ I whispered. I stared up at the stars. ‘You’ve
got
to make my wish come true.’
    So I set off walking. I walked and walked and walked. I walked until I was so tired I started to wonder if I was dreaming. Everything seemed so strange and silvery in the starlight and every so often my head would nod and I’d stumble and start. I kept expecting to blink my eyes and find myself tucked up in bed at Mum’s, but it didn’t happen. So I just walked some more, my head down, shoulders hunched, feet going
left right left right left right
.
    I missed my way several times but then I’dsuddenly recognize a shop or a house and I’d know I was back on course again. But then I found myself in streets I was certain I’d never seen before. I walked on and yet it was all new and different and I realized I was lost again. I tried going back but I kept getting to corners and not knowing whether to take the left turn or the right. So in the end I kept on walking anyway, and after a while I stopped thinking about finding the way. I just looked up at the stars and whispered Radish’s name and walked on and on and on.
    Then I suddenly recognized a house at the end of a road, with gables and a curly iron gate and a caravan parked in the front drive. It was Aileen’s house and she went on her holidays in that caravan and we’d swung on that gate together and she was probably asleep in her bedroom under the gables right this minute.
    â€˜Aileen’s house?’ I whispered. Then I’d somehow missed Larkspur Lane altogether. I’d bypassed the school. I was back in my own old territory, the other side of the school. The part of the town where I never went any more. If this was Aileen’s house then I knew what was down the road and round the corner.
    I stood still, shivering. No. I had to go toLarkspur Lane and find Radish. I couldn’t waste time going anywhere else. But I had to. My feet started walking and I couldn’t stop them.
    I went past Aileen’s house. Past all the other houses in the road with their neat privet hedges and their pointed roofs making a zig-zag pattern against the starry sky. I got to the corner. I stood still again, holding my thumb. Then I started walking, very very slowly.
    I could see it in the starlight. A cottage at the end of the road. I could only see in black and white but it was easy to paint in the colours. A white cottage with a grey slate roof and a black chimney and a bright butter-yellow front door. There were yellow roses and honeysuckle growing up a lattice round the door and the leaded windows, and lots of other flowers growing in the big garden. And in the middle of the garden was the old twisted tree with the big branches bent almost to the ground, and at the tip of each twig grew big bunches of black mulberries . . .
    No, no mulberries. The berries had long ago withered on the tree. No roses, just tangled thorny branches. No sweet-smelling honeysuckle, just leathery stems trailing untidily. But it was still Mulberry Cottage. I was back. I was home.

‘ ANDY? ANDY DARLING, is that you?’ Mum’s at the door, smiling at me. ‘Come in, sugar-lump, I’ve got tea all ready on the table.’
    â€˜Yes, come on, Andy, Mum’s made a lovely mulberry pie and my mouth’s watering,’ Dad calls.
    â€˜Dad?’ I step inside, shaking my head. ‘Dad, what are you doing here?’
    â€˜He got off work early, didn’t you, darling,’ says Mum.
    â€˜But what are
we
doing here?’ I say, dazed.
    â€˜We live here, silly,’ says Mum, and she ruffles my hair. ‘What’s up, Andy? Don’t you feel very well?’
    â€˜No, I