Panic makes me hear her words in the wrong order and my heart starts thumping. Lots of cars are queuing behind her, hooting their horns. It’s all too much. I accelerate away like Usain Bolt.
The path’s level now. I run past the shops, the newsagent’s, the Indian grocer’s, the Polish deli that had its windows smashed in so there’s cardboard in their place. Someone sprayed graffiti onto it in a foreign language I don’t understand. We buy bread there sometimes because it’s nicer than the bread in the supermarket and the same price. I start to relax now that I can’t hear those cars hooting like an orchestra from hell.
I’m in the centre of town now. I run through the Pound Emporium, even though the floor’s slippery and the flickering overhead lights always give me a headache, and out the other side to the car park, where they sometimes have a market selling bruised fruit. I go this way because there aren’t as many people. I run past the big supermarkets we never go to because Grandma’s leg pains her when she walks more than 200 metres, and on past the industrial estate.
This is the best part of town. Old, grey buildings used by businesses, and no people. It’s the best place to run. The windows look like eyes with no sockets and sometimes big lorries go in making a rumbling noise like they’ve taken over from human beings.
We live in a flat on the other side of the industrial estate in a row of houses nicknamed ‘The Mush-Rooms’. I think they’re called that because the walls are so damp mushrooms grow out of them. Our landlord’s Italian and he doesn’t charge the same rent as the English ones. Most of the people who live there are Nigerian or Polish, except Mrs Leggett, who acts like she owns the place. The houses are terraced, so I can hear what people are saying in the next flat, though Grandma says that’s not possible with old houses. But I can.
I’m starting to get tired but have a second wind when The Mush-Rooms come into view. I do a sprint finish and only stop running when I reach our front door, number 36.
When she comes through the flat door, even though she’s out of breath from walking up the stairs, Grandma sings ‘Elle Bíbi-Imbelé!’ and looks at me with her what-big-eyes. Most people just call me Elle. My full name is Elle Bíbi-Imbelé Ifíè. I write it with accents so people say it properly but they still get it wrong. Ifíè means time in Izon, which is a Nigerian language. Bíbi-Imbelé means mouth-sweet, as in sweet-talking. I like having time as one of my names and I like sweet-talking, except when I’m tongue-tied, and I love Elle because it’s a palindrome like Hannah. It reads the same backwards and forwards. Before she died, Mum called me Elle after the fashion magazine.
Grandma says Mum died before I was born. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? Grandma says Mum was in a coma after the car crash, so it was like she was dead. Maybe that’s what she means. After Mum died, my dad went back to Nigeria and married someone else. I don’t miss my mum or dad because I don’t remember them. Grandma’s like a mum to me. She’s very short for a grown-up.
I was the same size as Grandma two years ago. People say ‘Elle, you’re tall for your age’ but they don’t know my TRUE age. I’m not 11 going on 50 like Mr Branch says. I’m two going on three. I bet you’ve guessed why. I’m a bissextile, a Leaper, or Leapling. I only celebrate my birthday every four years.
This Saturday I’ll be 3-leap. And I’m going on a school trip to 2048! We’ll be staying at the Time Squad Centre. Only four pupils from my class were chosen. They sent secret letters to our parents six weeks ago and I had to read mine out to Grandma because she can’t read or write but still puts on her glasses like she can. I was so excited and scared, I almost went tongue-tied. My favourite line from the letter was: ‘Elle has been chosen for this trip because she scored the highest for Effort in Past, Present and Future for the whole of Seventh Year.’
Leaplings are just like Annuals, but a tiny percentage of us have The Gift. I had to swear the Oath of Secrecy on my 2-leap birthday after Grandma discovered what made my body fizz. She swore the Oath, too. The room was round and dark, with no windows, and whichever way I looked there were people holding hands with each other. I didn’t know which way to face. The walls smelled of the woods after it’s rained. One voice said my Gift was extraordinary. I love that extra ordinary means very, VERY ordinary but extraordinary means the opposite. Big Ben has worked out The Gift is super rare. Only 0.6% recurring of Leaplings have it. If you let him, Big Ben would say 0.6666666 666666666666666666666666666666 and keep on going to infinity.
Big Ben’s in the same class as me at school. He’s autistic too. He has short, scruffy hair that’s blond and brown at the same time, though he’s never had it streaked, a round face and extremely long legs. He corrects Mrs Grayling in double maths on a Tuesday afternoon and she gets cross. His real name is Benedykt Novak, which is Polish. Grandma likes his name because it means blessed and her own name is Blessing Ifíè. He’s called Big Ben because of his height and obsession with timing things.
Big Ben has a stopwatch that times things down to two decimal points. He times me doing the 100 metres even when I don’t want him to. He can’t help it. He times EVERYTHING. And throws chairs when he goes from 0 to 10 on the anger scale. Big Ben’s already been excluded from two schools. At his first school, he overturned his desk and books went everywhere. He’d only just started Second Year but was very strong. He went to the same primary school as me after that. In Sixth Year, he threw a chair because the teacher told him off for talking when he wasn’t. It landed on the teacher’s desk and snapped like firewood. Everyone cheered except the teacher and me. I missed him when he left.
Intercalary International’s his last chance. After that, it’s the Pupil Referral Unit. That’s a school for children who get excluded and they can’t find another school to take them on. I worry Big Ben will end up there one day. He never remembers to do time-out. When I do time-out, I do running round the playground or the athletics track. He doesn’t throw chairs at people now, though, just at tables or chairs with no one sitting in them. Zero occupancy.
Big Ben’s favourite car is a Lamborghini Asterion, which goes from 0 to 60 in three seconds, but his ambition is to time its acceleration down to a nanosecond. That’s a billionth of a second. His uncle’s a second-hand-car dealer. Last year he told Big Ben he’d teach him to drive when he was tall enough. He didn’t expect that Ben would grow 6 inches that year. Now Big Ben can drive better than his uncle, even though he’s exactly the same age as me and it’s illegal to drive a car until you’re 17.
Everyone thinks he’s my boyfriend but he’s not. I hang out with him because he’s clever and kind and times me when I’m running. He says I’m the best sprinter in athletics club because I’m faster than boys the same age. Once I was crying at school because Pete LMS kept repeating everything I said in a silly voice so the teacher gave him detention. Big Ben gave me one of his socks straight off his foot. It was dark grey, at least a size 10 and smelled of cheese. I hid it in my bag because people might make more fun of me but it made me feel much happier. Big Ben doesn’t care what people think. He’d never give me perfume or flowers just because I’m a girl. He says ‘Am I your boyfriend?’ 100 times a day.
Grandma’s plaiting my hair before bed. I love it when she plaits my hair, even when she cornrows it so tight that I can’t close my eyes in bed for the first night. She says it must last a long time so the tighter the better, but it pulls my skin so I look like I’ve had a facelift. It takes days for my face to feel normal!
Tonight, she’s doing single plaits I can comb out in the morning. I sit on the floor and she sits on the sofa behind me, combs my hair with the afro comb, then the fine-tooth comb to divide it into sections. She massages pomade into my scalp, which smells like tar but in a good way. Some of the other pomades used to make me sick so we only buy this one. When I start shuffling on my bottom, shifting from one side to the other because I find it hard to sit still on the prickly carpet, Grandma sucks her teeth.
‘Elle Bíbi-Imbelé! You are too antsy-pantsy. Sit, not run-o!’
Grandma