By Any Other Name Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2013

  by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

  The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

  Text copyright © 2013 Laura Jarratt

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  ISBN 978 1 4052 5673 5

  eISBN 978 1 7803 1328 3

  www.electricmonkey.co.uk

  www.egmont.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Please note: Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont cannot take responsibility for any third party content or advertising. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

  EGMONT

  Our story began over a century ago, when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Petersen found a coin in the street. He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he then set up in his tiny apartment.

  The coin brought him such good luck that today Egmont has offices in over 30 countries around the world. And that lucky coin is still kept at the company’s head offices in Denmark.

  For Holly Hughes, who encouraged me to write

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Holly

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Acknowledgments

  They told me to pick something unobtrusive, then they handed me a book of baby names and a cup of hot chocolate from a machine, and they left me there in the white room.

  The cup was beige plastic. The chocolate tasted powdery. I stored these points away for later, as a memory of rebirth. The first moments of my new life: plastic and powder.

  Strange that I should save that memory to take forward into the future, out of all the thoughts I could have had but didn’t. All those feelings that should have been welling up inside me, bursting out . . . But I didn’t feel anything. Numb from my skin to right down deep in my core. My senses concentrated and focused instead on just three things – a beige cup, the cheap chocolate drink and a baby names book.

  I picked up the book and thumbed through the pages. Names in alphabetical order, names with meanings, names I knew, names I’d never heard of. How to pick? Nothing that would stand out, nothing that would link me to the past – those were the instructions.

  The past. As if everything that had gone before this moment was buried already.

  Rebirth . . .

  I read through the book until the words blurred and blended into one long muddle and every name sounded the same.

  In the end, I chose Holly. Because it was December.

  The removal men manoeuvre the sofa through the front door and disappear inside the house. Dad’s voice shouts directions to them. The late February wind gusts up the hill so I fold my arms to keep my jacket closed.

  There’s no fence around the garden. It feels exposed, as if anyone can walk right up to the windows and look in. The door is made of frosted glass, which is even worse. It’ll be like living in a fish tank, on display to everyone, and I don’t want to go inside.

  The house itself is ugly. Apart from the too-big windows, there’s a pointless wood-plank effect that starts halfway up the wall and continues to the roof. It’s hideous. The upstairs windows stick out of the eaves like they were put in as an afterthought. The drive is full of weeds where the tarmac is crumbling.

  I survey the house next door from the pavement. It looks tidier than the one we’re moving into, but the garden is gravelled over and dotted with stupid stone ornaments, including a giant mushroom with water fountaining out of a hole on the top. OK, riiight . . . a fountaining mushroom. Mum is so going to shudder when she sees that.

  Dad’s voice drifts out of the front door again as the removal men come out and go back in with a mattress. The open door beckons me to go inside and explore, but I don’t want to. I don’t want this scruffy house on a nowhere street in a dot-on-the map village to be home.

  This isn’t my home.

  But neither is the place we lived before the fifth of December last year. Not now. Because there is no before. That’s when I became Holly Latham, aged fifteen years and ten months.

  Down at the bottom of the hill of identical, ugly, semidetached houses, a bunch of figures in school uniform appears and walks up the hill towards me. I check my watch – quarter to four and school’s out.

  They get closer. The first group are about my age and I step on to the drive to let them pass, pretending to stare over the roofs of the houses to the hills on the other side of the village. OK, so maybe now I do want to go in through that open door, to hide. I can feel their curious eyes on me.

  I try to block them out. I can see most of the village from here. There’s a cut-through to the high street and there’s more shops than I expected. The church spire towers up over the black-and-white timbered cottages in the old streets, while the sprawl of the school lies on the outskirts, down the hill and in among fields dotted with sheep.

  People choose to live here?

  The country’s all right for holidays, but what do they do here day after day? There’s something missing, something that unsettles me, makes me jittery. It’s the heartbeat of the place. The fast, excited, racing lub-dub of the city is subdued into a slow, dull, measured thud here.

  I hate it already.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see the first group has gone past, disappearing round the corner into a rabbit warren of cul-de-sacs. Some younger girls, maybe eleven, walk by and I take the chance to study their uniform because I’ll be wearing it next week. Black trousers, white polo shirt, black sweatshirt with a small school badge. Unobtrusive. Just like I’ll be.

  They move on and the street goes quiet again. I breathe out and relax, letting out a pffft of tension. The front door stares at me, challenging me – am I too chicken to go through it? It’s waiting to swallow me up.

  No, not yet. I’m not ready to be the person who lives here. Not quite yet.

  Th
ere’s a last, lone figure beginning to trail up the hill. He’s not in uniform . . . oh no, wait . . . he is. No sweatshirt, that’s what confused me. But his polo shirt has the school logo on it. His arms are bare despite the wind, but he’s got headphones jammed in his ears and his hands are stuffed in the pockets of his school trousers. He slouches along as if he isn’t aware that the skin on his arms is goosebumped and mottled purple with cold. Black hair flops over his face and his head is down, staring at the pavement, so I’m safe watching him. Metal glints in his ear and his eyebrow. Does this school allow piercings or did he put them in when he left? The black Converse All Stars he’s wearing certainly wouldn’t be allowed at my last school . . .

  . . . But that’s a code violation. An unauthorised memory access. Holly isn’t allowed to think about the time before Holly came to be. That’s how I choose to play it, how I make this craziness work and keep away the fear always present at the edge of my mind.

  The boy glances sideways as he passes, walking in the middle of the road as though he can’t be bothered to cross properly, and he catches me looking.

  Dark, hostile eyes in a pale face glare at me. Eyes so hostile that I take a step back, even though I’m annoyed with myself for doing it. Then his head ducks down again and he’s gone round the corner.

  ‘Freak,’ I mutter after him.

  But he’s unnerved me enough to make me brave the house. To walk slowly up the drive, to take a deep breath, to step inside. I let it swallow me whole.

  I go into the kitchen and Dad brushes past me with a box. ‘Make the removal men a cup of tea, would you? The stuff ’s over there.’ He nods to the counter and carries the box through to the dining room.

  ‘How do they take it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ask them.’

  He’s unpacking plates from the box and putting them on the table so I follow the sound of footsteps on the bedroom floor above to find the removal men putting our wardrobes back together. One’s younger than the other and pretty cute in a rough-edged kind of way, but Holly Latham doesn’t flirt. She doesn’t do anything to draw attention to herself, so once I know that they both want milk and two sugars, I go back downstairs without smiling at him or checking to see if his eyes follow me.

  Dad’s still unpacking at speed. ‘Give me a hand when you’ve made the tea. Your mum just texted. She’ll be here in an hour because Katie’s fretting so we need to get a move on.’

  I make the tea and Dad never says a word about all the time I wasted outside when I could have been helping him. I feel a surge of gratitude for that and for him not asking why I was lurking out there so long. Maybe he knows. Maybe he feels the same. I take the tea up to the men and then grab the box nearest to Dad and begin to unpack too.

  It’s nearly an hour before the removal men finish, even with both of us helping. The van has barely got down the hill before Mum’s car comes into view.

  She looks tired as she pulls up. Katie’s grizzling in the back seat. ‘How’s she been?’ Dad asks as Mum gets out. The answer’s obvious but he asks anyway.

  ‘Difficult.’ Mum goes to open the back door to get Katie, but Dad stops her.

  ‘I’ll do it. You’ve had her all day. Take a break. Look around the house – see if you’re happy with where we’ve put the furniture.’ He leans into the back to unclick Katie’s seat belt and he talks quietly to her.

  It’s the first time Mum’s seen the house. She scans the outside and her lips purse. Her eyes move on to next door and I know the exact moment when she sees The Mushroom because she winces the same way I did. When I snigger, her mouth quirks upwards and she gives me a push towards the door. ‘Get inside before they see you.’

  She knows I won’t last long. We fight with each other to get through the front door before it’s too late. I don’t make it and she pulls me inside as I fall about laughing.

  ‘Where have we moved to?’ She leans against the wall, her eyes streaming. ‘That dreadful toadstool . . . oh, Lou – Holly . . .’

  We stop laughing as if someone has slapped us. Mum broke the rules: never, ever call me Louisa. Even inside the house that matters. My skin goosebumps like that boy’s in the street.

  Dad brings Katie in, doing her robot walk where she moves her left arm and leg together, then her right, and he has to stand behind and steer her shoulders. My sister’s tall for eight years old and she’s got startling corn-coloured hair. You read that description in books, though you never see it on people you know, but Katie’s really is like ripe corn. I realise again how hard it is for her to be inconspicuous. Katie makes us far too traceable and the goosebumps rise on my flesh again.

  She’s making one of her noises. I think it’s her robot noise, though it sounds more like a strangled scream. Dad hurries her in and shuts the door.

  Katie jerks free and runs past us, chasing from room to room and letting out a shrill squeal in each one as she explores. We stand in the hall and hold our breath as she stomps up the stairs. Her feet thump on the floor above . . .

  There’s a louder squeal, excited, and then it goes quiet. We wait . . . then we hear a happy giggle and Dad breathes out. ‘She’s found her room.’

  We trail upstairs. Katie’s lying face down on her duvet cover with the pink ponies and she’s snuggling her big fluffy rabbit. The rabbit isn’t allowed out of her room. Ever. Her other teddies are, even the cuddly monkey she’s had since she was born, but that rabbit has to stay put. That’s a Rule.

  ‘You did her stars!’ Mum points at the ceiling. Katie rolls on to her back and looks up at the luminous net of stars and planets. It’s an exact copy of the one she used to have in our old house.

  ‘Great Bear, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Canis Major,’ she recites, pointing at each in turn.

  Dad smiles and pats her head. ‘Yes, angel, that’s right.’

  ‘However did you put them up so quickly? And get them all in the right position? It took you ages the first time.’ Mum shakes her head in amazement. We all know Dad has got them right because if even one of the plastic shapes was a centimetre out, Katie would notice. She can’t tell the time, but she remembers exactly where every star should be.

  ‘I made a tracing of the original and transposed it on to the ceiling when we got here, while the removal men were dropping the covers down on the carpets. I thought it would help her realise this place is permanent for us – our forever place, not like the last two – then she might settle quicker.’

  ‘An angel’s got to have stars to sleep among,’ Katie chirrups.

  Dad only said that once to her, on the day he first put the stars up on her old bedroom ceiling, but she latched on to it and says it over and over.

  He grins and kisses her. I slip out and go downstairs to carry on unpacking. The fewer boxes there are when Katie comes down, the less likely it is that she’ll freak out. It’s bad enough that her routine’s been broken again, and Mum’s had the worst of that today, but it isn’t over yet. There’ll be crying fits eventually. A lot. Like there was the last time and the time before that.

  This is supposed to be the final time and I hope so. It’s only a few months till my GCSEs. It has to work here. We told the Witness Protection Liaison Officer that. We can’t go through moving Katie again.

  At least she has her stars back now.

  ‘Boo-Boo!’ she shouts as she runs down the stairs, and she hugs me. We can’t stop her calling me that, her version of Lou-Lou, no matter how hard we try to teach her to say Holly instead. I hug her back and hold her tight – after what happened last year I’m grateful I still have the chance to hug her at all.

  It was a horrible, wet November night and my mood matched it. Rain pounded down, soaking my hair, running in little rivers down my neck. I shifted my violin case from one aching hand to the other.

  Hate walking home. Hate walking home in wet weather especially.

  The puddles were lit up orange under the street lamps. I tried to dodge the worst of them, but it was like playing hopscotch. I s
hould’ve brought an umbrella, but that would have just been something else to carry in addition to my PE kit, violin, schoolbag, Tasha’s birthday present.

  ‘Skin’s waterproof,’ Dad would say if he was here, as he did every time he dragged us out in the rain on family holidays. Mum laughed at me when I grumped at him about it once I got old enough to care about looking sodden and bedraggled.

  ‘Skin might be waterproof,’ I muttered at the rain, ‘but that won’t keep me warm when you soak me through.’ A gust of wind blew water into my mouth so I ducked my head down further, shifting my grip on my violin case as the handle slid through my wet fingers.

  A crappy day. It started badly. I forgot my maths homework and got yelled at – Mrs McPherson spitting, literally, about GCSE failure staring irresponsible ‘gurrrllss’ like me in the face. Then I got a ton of English coursework back to redraft. And I was dropped from the hockey team for Saturday because I still had a sprained ankle from the match two weeks ago. The only thing that hadn’t been a disaster was that Tasha loved the birthday present I bought her: a pamper kit of bath bombs and body butters, and a silver and crystal charm for her bracelet.

  But everything else had been crappy. Stupid day, miserable weather and miserable, stupid me.

  I kicked a splash of water up from a puddle, then wished I hadn’t as a cold gush filled my shoe. I shifted the violin case back to my right hand and struggled to adjust my bag because the corner of my maths textbook was digging into my back. My toes squelched in the wet shoe and the rain battered down harder on the pavement, laughing at me.

  Tasha was eating out with her parents tonight. We weren’t allowed to party on a school night so we had to wait until the weekend to celebrate her sixteenth properly. Although my coursework mountain had put a dampener on that. What a sucky year! Still, suckier things than exams and coursework had happened this year . . .

  Every time I thought of the summer and Katya, I shivered. Was it when I remembered her that I heard the splish-splash of another pair of feet? Or did the sound trigger the memory? I wasn’t sure, but I was suddenly aware of someone walking close behind me.