Most of the rejects were pulped at the end of each day, but Mum would take as many home as she could fit into the car boot because I loved them. They were cheesy. They were spicy. They came with unidentified slices of other stuff, which could have been mushrooms, but nobody knew, and that was part of their magic. And they were all for me. Because Mum, weirdly, never touched them.
*
Once inside, I threw the packet of Surprising Seeds on the table, got a Reject Special out of the freezer and tried to understand what had just happened out on the patio. Would I have to call the police and report an earthquake? Would Mum have felt it in the factory? Would the pizzas be affected? How could that packet have glowed, deep down in the ground? And what level of trouble was the broken patio going to land me in when Mum saw it?
It was too much. I decided to slip into a harmless little daydream just to calm down. In it, we were stepping off a plane in Portugal. Mum was beaming as she turned to look at me. And those dark bags under her eyes had gone.
I smiled back blissfully.
‘Where’s the pool, love?’ she asked as a breeze smelling faintly of coconuts ruffled our hair. I could hear her so clearly, we could have been there. ‘How was school, love?’
Er – what?
My daydream faded, replaced by the sight of a short plump woman with bleached blonde hair. Her tortoiseshell glasses were perched on the end of her nose, and she was rocking her pizza-themed overalls, as usual, although she wasn’t smiling quite as widely as she had been in the daydream.
‘How was your day?’ she asked, her hands cupping my cheeks.
I tried not to prise her icy fingers off my skin. (Her skin was always freezing – that’s what you get when you work in sub-zero temperatures! Talk about a cool mum, right?)
I hesitated. Where can I even start? ‘I think we’ve just had an earthquake.’
The tap gave a sad drip.
‘What?’
‘I was outside in the backyard, and … everything went super loud. I heard a chainsaw – it was a pigeon – and … Did your pizzas rise okay? I was worried …’
Mum raised an eyebrow. ‘What?’ she said gently.
I took a deep breath. It seemed a mad dream now; the details were already fading, and it was hard to tell the difference between what had really happened and the misshapen remains of my jittery imagination.
‘The patio shook.’
‘It shook?’
‘And then the patio broke.’
‘It broke?’
‘And then I found something.’
‘Found something?’
We stared at each other.
‘You’d better show me,’ she said.
I unlocked the back door and, with a trembling finger, pointed at the mess of broken concrete. ‘There.’
Mum’s hands flew to her face and her mouth opened, but she said nothing. She simply stood there, in her grubby white socks, gazing out at the chaos, and somehow her silence was as loud as the patio cracking.
‘It w-wasn’t my fault, Mum,’ I stammered out.
‘I believe you,’ she said, turning round. ‘Where were you when it happened?’
‘Out by the old willow tree.’
She frowned. ‘You know the rule, Sorrel. Don’t go near that tree. It’s not safe.’
‘But I had a reason.’
I filled her in on Mr Grittysnit’s important letter and the branch it had got wrapped round. But she didn’t seem that interested in the letter or the competition. I mean, honestly, it was like telling a sock. But I knew, once it had sunk in, she’d be as excited as I was.
We went back into the kitchen. Mum sat at the table with a heavy sigh and took her glasses off.
After rubbing her eyes for a bit, she reached for her mobile. ‘There’s nothing on the local news about an earthquake.’ Her bitten fingernails flew across the keys. ‘Subsidence,’ she announced eventually.
‘Eh?’
‘When the earth begins to sink it can cause tremors. Break up concrete. That sort of thing.’
She got up and went over to the kettle. ‘It must have been the tree – it’s so diseased. I bet all its nasty little roots are dying, which is why the earth around it collapsed. Promise me you won’t go anywhere near it again.’
While the kettle boiled, she gazed out of the window, fiddling with the small silver hoops in her ears. ‘That blasted tree,’ she sighed. ‘Not only do we have to look at it for the rest of our lives, but it’s going to cost me an arm and a leg to—’
‘Why have we got to look at it for the rest of our lives?’ An idea popped into my head. I felt very clever to have it before Mum. ‘Why can’t you just cut it down?’
She poured boiling water into her mug and added milk. ‘Before I was allowed to buy this house, I had to agree not to remove or harm that tree in any way. The lawyers were quite pushy about it. Made me sign my name and everything.’
She nibbled a biscuit. ‘I wasn’t concentrating much if I’m honest. You were a tiny baby, your dad had just swanned out and all I wanted was a home for us both.’
She gulped her tea and stared up at the clouds. ‘This seemed a perfect place to bring up a baby. Wide pavements for buggies. New houses being built all the time. I would have promised to paint my ears bright purple and sing the royal anthem dressed as a banana if it meant the house would be mine. So, I signed the paperwork. More fool me,’ she said, with a hollow laugh. ‘But back then the tree didn’t look too bad. It’s definitely got worse over the years.’ She gave it one last disgusted look and came to sit down, the smears of smudged mascara under her eyes making her eye-bags look even darker.
The pipes moaned. My stomach gave a queasy lurch. There it was again – that sad feeling in the house had seeped into Mum.
But she put on a bright smile and reached for my hand. ‘Don’t worry. Maybe it’s a chance to give it all a bit of a spring-clean. We’ll put down some fresh concrete and …’ She sniffed the air with an expert nose tilt. ‘Reject Special with unidentified topping?’
‘Yep.’
‘Fancy some of my home-made lemonade to go with that?’
‘Please.’
Mum dug about in the fridge, humming, while I took my pizza out of the oven. As I cleared a space on the table, I spotted the Surprising Seeds. They were still lying where I’d left them, near the salt and pepper shakers. Maybe Mum would know what they were.
‘Look,’ I said, and held the packet out, but the rest of the sentence died on my lips as if I’d lost my voice. I tried again. ‘Ha … Mmm, I foun …’
My lips went all rubbery and loose. Speaking proper words was impossible.
While I sat there, lips flapping about like party streamers and grunts coming out of my mouth, Mum poked her head round the fridge door. ‘You okay?’
With superhuman effort, I managed to force my lips together, but this had the horrible effect of gluing them shut. ‘Mmmm’ was all that came out. ‘Mmmm,’ I said again, desperately.
‘Oh, you’re excited about your pizza,’ she said, walking over to the sink.
I tried to call her back. ‘Mmmm! Mmmm!’
‘All