But my heart was still in my mouth. This place was horrible. It looked like an old haunted house and now there were wild animals living in the garden.
‘I hate it,’ I sobbed, as Mum brushed my hair later that night back at our old home. ‘Why do we have to leave here? Why do I have to leave my best friend?’
‘But Nabila, you’ll have your own bedroom,’ she soothed. ‘We’ll have so much more space there. Won’t that be lovely?’
She hoped that I’d take the bait, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to. I didn’t care about having my own bedroom, even though I desperately wanted one – not if it meant leaving our lovely neighbourhood and moving to the horrible new house. I didn’t want to live in a house with wolves in the garden. I wanted to stay here with my friends, the Sikhs.
But the decision had already been made. Dad started work on the new house and was gone from dawn till dusk trying to make it habitable. He did most of the work himself, although my older brothers helped to mix cement and paint the walls.
Three months later it was ready for us to move in. Dad stuck tape across the last cardboard box and gave it a satisfied tap. Our lives had been packed up and shipped out in a series of bags and cardboard boxes.
‘That’s the last of it,’ he called to Mum.
I watched as Dad struggled out to the car parked in the street outside. He turned sideways as he shuffled the heavy box of breakables into the open boot. We were officially leaving. I couldn’t believe it. This was the moment I’d been dreading.
Suddenly fear gripped me. I glanced out of the back window towards Suki’s home. The back door was open. I saw my chance and ran all the way across the road to my best friend’s house without looking back. Her mother answered the front door and smiled warmly as she looked down at me, breathless and seeming a little lost, on her doorstep. She invited me in and I saw my chance and dashed into the front room, whereupon I refused to move.
Moments later, my mother came to the door asking for me. Suki’s mum ushered her in and pointed towards me, but I wouldn’t budge.
‘I’m not leaving, I’m staying here. You can’t make me go!’ I screamed, and began to sob.
The two women looked at me sadly. Suki came and wrapped her arms tightly around me and she began to cry as well. We didn’t want to be parted; we wanted to stay best friends forever, just as we’d always promised to be.
‘I want to live here with Suki and her family,’ I insisted. Big, hot, wet, angry tears stung my skin as they rolled down my cheeks and dripped onto the carpet below.
‘Nabila,’ Mum tried to reason, ‘come on. You can see Suki any time. Your father is waiting outside in the car with your brothers and if you don’t hurry up we’re going to be late.’ She was beginning to lose her temper.
But I was adamant. ‘I don’t care. I’m not living there! I want to live here in this house. I love this house.’
I looked over at Suki, who was sobbing silently, and knew she felt exactly the same way. Then I looked up at Suki’s mother with big, brown pleading eyes and she smiled gently. I hoped this might be like it was in the storybooks, that Suki’s mum might offer to adopt me and save me from the haunted house and the wolf in the garden. I hoped that she would let me move in with them here, where I would live happily ever after. But instead she remained silent.
Mum tried to reason with me, but the clock was ticking and Dad was waiting in the car.
‘Come on,’ she said, taking my hand in hers.
‘No!’ I replied defiantly before launching myself at the huge stone fireplace. I stretched my arms as wide as I could so that I was gripping the corners of the stone. ‘You can’t make me!’ I shut my eyes, hoping this would make my mother disappear and leave me here.
Mum tugged, but I resisted and clung to the fireplace like a limpet. Soon there was a right old commotion. Suki’s brothers heard the racket and came running downstairs to see what was happening. By now, spurred on by an audience, I was in full flow. One of the boys started to giggle but he was silenced by a stern look from his mother.
Finally, Mum wrapped her arms around my tiny waist and gave one last big tug, which extricated me from the fireplace. The palms of my hands smarted where the stone had scraped against them. The rough edges had grazed them slightly and they were red and sore. I licked them, but that made them sting even more. This was the worst day of my life.
‘Come on, Nabila, we need to leave now,’ Mum said crossly. Then her voice softened a little. ‘She can see Suki any time, can’t she?’ she asked Suki’s mum.
‘Of course she can.’
That day, I left our familiar old street and our wonderful friends behind. Little did I know the nightmares that awaited me at the new house, or the bigger demons that lay ahead, ready to snatch me from my happy and safe little world.
Chapter 3
The Wolf, the Witch and the Wallpaper
As soon as we arrived at the new house I shot straight to the back window to look for the wolf, but he was nowhere in sight. I was convinced that he was still there, his evil hungry yellow eyes watching out for me. He was hiding in the bushes waiting to attack me, I knew he was.
The grass was long and overgrown, just as it had been when we came to view the house three months earlier. Dad had done the most important jobs such as putting in new ceilings, replastering the walls and uprooting the plants in the living room so the house was safe to live in, but it was still a work in progress. The garden was the least of his worries so it remained overgrown. Of course, my brothers were delighted – a jungle was every boy’s dream!
‘Let’s go and explore!’ Saeed urged, leading the others through the back door, but I refused to budge.
‘Nabila, go and play with your brothers,’ Mum instructed, but I shook my head firmly. I was quite simply terrified.
‘It’s the wolf,’ I whispered. ‘I can’t go in the garden because the wolf might gobble me up, just like the one in Little Red Riding Hood.’
Mum sighed and undid her coat, throwing it on the side. She knelt down beside me and held me by the arms.
‘There is no wolf. It’s a fox – a poor little fox. It lives in the garden because the garden is overgrown. It’s probably hungry and just scavenging for food.’
‘Well, I don’t like it,’ I said, folding my arms in defiance. ‘I want it to go away. It scares me.’
At that moment my father walked into the room carrying a box.
‘What’s the matter with Nabila?’ he asked.
‘It’s the fox in the garden,’ Mum replied, rolling her eyes skywards.
‘The wolf,’ I corrected her.
Dad tried to reason with me. ‘It’s probably more frightened of you than you are of it.’
But I wouldn’t have it. There was no way I was playing out in the jungle where there was an animal on the loose with big sharp teeth. No way.
‘Okay, okay,’ Dad said wearily. ‘What if I clear the garden? What if we cut away all the long grass and trim back the trees, then will you play in it?’
My face lit up at his suggestion.
‘I guess that’s a yes,’ he said, patting me on the head.
The garden was vast – around sixty feet long – but Dad and my elder brothers worked long into the hot afternoons, cutting back all the yellow-green wispy grass so the wolf had no more hiding places. All the big scratchy bushes and dark looming trees were cleared away until within a few days our horrible jungle looked more like a normal garden. My brothers weren’t so happy