Izzy's River (9 page)

Alex shoved the wheel back into the water and paddled furiously towards her, and as she fell, Izzy saw that his friends were heading her way too.
At least there’ll be someone to fish me out
, she thought unhappily.
This is so stupid! Everyone’s going to laugh at me
…

“Got you!” Alex yelled triumphantly, and Izzy gave a painful little squeak as she hit hard canoe instead of soft(ish) and very very cold water. Only her feet went into the river, and Alex had his arm round her waist, hauling her up. “Sit on the front, that’s it.”

Izzy shook her head, dazed. The whole thing had happened so fast that she wasn’t really sure
what
had happened. There had been such a huge splash. Had her feet really made that much of a splash as she went in?

“Help me!” someone wailed, and Izzy gasped.

It hadn’t been her feet at all. It was Ali.

“Why?” Alex leaned over slightly to peer down at her. “You pushed Izzy in, I watched you do it. Stupid little cow.”

Ali’s honey-blonde hair (which Maya swore was dyed, as nobody naturally had hair that colour) was water-dark now, and dripping in rat-tails around her face. She looked furious, and frightened, and somehow a lot less scary than usual. She was splashing about, half-swimming and half-scrabbling at the edge of the bank and Alex’s canoe.

Izzy couldn’t help it. She laughed. She felt ashamed of herself immediately – Ali could have been hurt, after all. But it was too hard to resist.

“Get me out, it’s really deep!”

“Should have thought of that before you decided to push somebody in then, shouldn’t you?” Alex growled at her. “I’m not pulling you out. Forget it. Get out yourself.”

“What happened?” Izzy’s dad, Poppy, her mum, and practically everybody had come running over, and for the first time, Ali started to look alarmed instead of angry. But she wiped the expression off her face after a second.

Emily’s dad crouched down and hauled her out, and she stood on the bank shivering and trying to look innocent and forlorn. “Izzy overbalanced, and she grabbed at me and pulled me in after her!” she wailed. Standing there dripping water, with streaks
of mud up her legs, and water weed in her pretty sandals, she looked sweetly pathetic.

Izzy gasped. Still, for Ali, it was pretty close to the truth. At least she hadn’t accused Izzy of deliberately pushing
her
. Which she could have done, on past history. Then, huddled up on the front of a very wobbly canoe, with her trainers (her old scruffy ones, but still) soaking wet, Izzy lost her temper with Ali. For the first time ever.

“I did not!” she yelled, wriggling out of Alex’s helpful arm and letting her dad pull her from the canoe on to the bank. “I didn’t fall, and you know it! You pushed me, on purpose!” She was right up in Ali’s face, shouting at her. She must have a deathwish, a tiny part of her pointed out, but she squashed it down again.

“Go, Izzy!” Poppy muttered next to her. “Don’t let her get away with it.”

“She’s a little liar! She did push Izzy. I saw,” Alex said, loudly and helpfully. “That’s why I came in so close, I only just managed to catch Izzy, she wobbled around on the edge for a bit, and I got there just in time.”

“I didn’t, it was an accident,” Ali said hurriedly, stepping back. “You’re just clumsy, Izzy.” She added
something under her breath that sounded like, “And stupid…” and the people around her murmured and tutted, and Izzy’s dad took in a sharp breath.

They didn’t believe Ali, Izzy realised. They were all staring at her with definite dislike. She’d never seen people do that before. Ali always came out golden, whatever went wrong. Even when Izzy’s dad had got her dragged into Mrs Angel’s office and accused of bullying, it had somehow ended up being Izzy’s fault.

“Are your parents here?” Poppy’s mum asked disapprovingly.

“No…” Ali said sulkily.

“Well, we’d better phone them – you need to go home and change.”

“And I’ll be speaking to your head teacher on Monday morning. This is obviously just more of what’s been going on at school,” Izzy’s dad snapped, pulling Izzy tightly against him as if he thought Ali might try and push her again. “You’ve been bullying Izzy all year; at least now someone’s caught you at it.”

“Disgusting,” someone behind Izzy muttered.

“Did you swallow any water?” Alex called to Ali, very sweetly.

She stared at him furiously. “What?”

“The water – when you went under, did you swallow any?” He smiled at her. “Or did it get in your eyes, or up your nose?” Some of his canoeing mates sniggered, as though they knew what he was going to say. “Just watch out if you start feeling ill. Like flu? Go to the doctor.”

“What are you talking about?” Ali sounded scared now.

“You might have caught Weil’s Disease. There’s rats round here. You can get Weil’s Disease from rat wee.”

Ali rubbed her hands on her shorts frantically, as though that was going to help, and sniffed. She obviously had got water up her nose.

“Is that true?” Izzy whispered to Poppy, who was standing right next to her now, glaring at Ali.

Poppy shrugged. “Yeah, I think so, I know Mum watches Alex and Jake like a hawk if they get flu – it looks like flu when it starts off, and they’re at risk because of the canoeing. But it’s really rare. Super-rare. Just let’s not tell Ali that, OK?”

Izzy nodded, smiling to herself.

Poppy’s mum led Ali and Elspeth and Lucy up to the side road to wait for Ali’s parents. She told Izzy’s dad not to get involved, even though he wanted to.
She said he was better off going to Mrs Angel, not getting into a fight now.

Izzy’s dad wouldn’t let go of her, and he kept thanking Alex for catching her, again and again, so that Alex went bright scarlet and headed further off down the river to get away from it for a bit. Maddy went with him. She was looking very proud of him, Izzy noticed. Poppy and Maya and Emily fussed over her, and Maya lent her a spare pair of wellies that were in Anna’s car.

“Let’s have our lunch,” Poppy’s mum said, when she came back. “Those little horrors have gone – I have to admit, Ali’s mother did apologise in the end, after she’d said there was no way her little darling pushed someone in the river, and I told her that she’d been caught doing it. Ali was still claiming it was an accident though.”

Izzy sat down on the rug that her dad spread out, and nibbled at a sandwich. She felt weird. Shaky, almost. It wasn’t from the fall, or she didn’t think so. Just surprise, probably, surprise that she’d actually managed to answer back to Ali for once. She still couldn’t quite believe she’d said it. People she didn’t know kept coming over and asking if she was OK.

“This is really embarrassing,” she muttered
eventually, jamming a last chocolate biscuit in her mouth. “I’m going to go and do some more litter-picking, OK?” She was planning to go and tidy up round the bushy bits, where no one would see her.

Poppy and the others scrambled up too. “I know Ali’s gone,” Poppy murmured, “I just feel like we still need to keep an eye on you! You might end up in the water again.”

Izzy sighed, but it was quite nice, really. Especially when Emily kept finding more and more horrible ways to describe what Ali had looked like covered in mud and dripping green slime. It whiled away a long afternoon of picking up crisp packets beautifully.

Izzy had almost forgotten the sleepover, with all the drama. She certainly hadn’t worried about it, she realised with a jump, when Emily pointed out that it was two minutes past four and everybody was handing their high-vis vests back to Izzy’s dad.

Izzy looked around the river bank. It was a lot tidier – apart from the huge pile of bits of bike and other grot that Alex and his mates had hauled out of the water. They’d have to go and put all that in the skip tomorrow.

“It’s starting to look good,” Maya said, approvingly. “But there’s all that rubbish under the bridge to do
tomorrow. And a load of stuff caught up in the bushes on the other side. Do you think Alex could get us over there, Poppy? Sitting on the front like Izzy was? Then we could tidy those bits up too.”

“You can’t get to it easily from that side,” Emily agreed, frowning. “There’s that great big wall.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Emily’s dad told them. “We don’t want any more of you falling in.”

Izzy’s dad was nodding firmly, and Izzy sighed. It would be really annoying to have one side of the river all beautiful, and the other bank still scuzzy with rubbish.

“Come on, you girls. Help me put this stuff in the truck. Then you can come back to ours.” He sighed, and rolled his eyes at Emily’s dad. “You can have a cup of tea, and then abandon me with this lot…”

“I’m so full…” Maya moaned.

“I know. It was the chocolate cake.” Poppy was stretched out full-length on the sofa. “I don’t think I’m ever going to eat again. That was the best cake ever, Izzy. Your dad should open a chocolate cake shop.”

“He is good at cakes,” Izzy agreed proudly. Her dad had always liked cooking, and even though he
was usually a bit too tired to cook exciting stuff for tea in the week (it was lucky she liked fishfingers, really), he made up for it at weekends.

“I’m getting in my sleeping bag,” Emily yawned. “I think I’m caked to death.”

“Hey, you lot.” Izzy’s dad was standing in the doorway, holding the phone, and looking excited.

“No more cake!” Maya yelped. “I’m full!”

He laughed. “You ate it all, anyway. No, I’ve just had a call from someone at the radio station. How do you girls fancy being on the radio tomorrow morning?”

“Whaaat?” Izzy shrieked.

“They want to interview you, as part of the breakfast show. To try and get more people to come and help, and just because they think you’re fab. Someone who helped today rang them up, apparently, and told them it had all been organised by you.”

“You helped,” Izzy reminded him fairly.

“A bit. But it was mostly you four.” He handed the phone to Emily. “You’d better ring all your mums and dads, tell them to listen tomorrow!”

EIGHT

There was a slightly nervous pause, while no one was sure who should talk first. Then Maya jumped in. She wasn’t nervous around reporters, she’d been surrounded by them since she was tiny, because of her mum. “It was Izzy’s idea,” she explained. “She suggested it to us at school a few weeks ago.”

“But only because Poppy took me down to the river,” Izzy agreed.

“We went for a walk down there with my dog, Billy, and he jumped in the water and got his paw caught up in an old bike that had been dumped there.”

“My dad told me that round by the river was really beautiful a few years ago. We even found a sign that said it used to be a nature reserve. So we decided that we’d like to help clean it up,” Izzy went on.

“We’re just glad it’s nice weather, it wouldn’t have been as much fun if it was raining,” Emily said.

“It definitely wouldn’t. And you organised this all by yourselves?” The interviewer’s voice was so familiar – Izzy’s dad usually put the local radio on when they were on the way to school, and quite often it was Jenny Wells presenting the show.

“It wasn’t all that difficult,” Izzy said shyly. “We had to get permission from the council, and then we had a cake sale to raise money to hire the skip. Oh! Please can we say thank you to Sampson Skip Hire? They gave us about two-thirds of a skip free! So please use them if you want a skip!”

“And the supermarket in Millford! They gave us all the bin bags,” Poppy put in.

“And Mr Finlay and Mrs Angel at Park Road School for helping us with the cake sale,” Maya remembered to add. Izzy nodded gratefully. It was a good idea to keep Mrs Angel sweet, and she’d totally forgotten.

Jenny was laughing. “OK, OK. So is there anything else you girls need? The clean-up’s going on again today as well, isn’t it?”

“Yes. So more people to help would be brilliant,” Izzy agreed. “And anyone who can do other things – like maybe make a sign? If we put up a new sign, saying that it’s a nature reserve, maybe people
wouldn’t drop so much rubbish.”

“There’s a really nice bit under the bridge too, where you can sit and watch the water even if it’s raining. If anyone’s got an old bench, or something like that, it would be even better…” Emily added.

“Nice idea. And they need to come and find you girls at the river at the bottom of Illroy Park, from ten o’clock today?”

“Yes. And please can we say thank you to everyone who helped yesterday,” Izzy added. “There were thirty people altogether off and on.” That was counting Ali, Lucy and Elspeth, who hadn’t exactly helped, but thirty sounded like a good number. More of a round number than twenty-seven.

“Of course. So, there you are, everyone. If you’ve got some free time between ten and four today, get your wellies on and get down to Illroy Park. And a big thank you to Izzy, Poppy, Emily and Maya for such a brilliant campaign.”

“We heard it on the radio!” That was what everyone was saying. That and “So which one are you?”

Izzy had told people she was Izzy about fifteen times. But she didn’t mind. There were so many of them. And lots of people had brought their own
gloves, and even some more bin bags, which was good, because they were starting to run out. The skip was getting full too, and Izzy’s dad had done one run to the tip already, with the big stuff, assorted bits of bikes, and the stinky damp mattress. There was a fridge in the back of the truck waiting for the next run.

The best bit was that a man had turned up with an inflatable dinghy in the back of his van, and volunteered to ferry people over to the other side of the river.

“How did you know?” Izzy asked him delightedly. “We were saying yesterday that we couldn’t get that bit clean, and wasn’t it sad.”

He laughed. “I walk my dog along here as well. But I’d never thought of organising everybody to clean it up. Hats off to you girls. Still, I thought to myself that you’d need help getting across to the other bank, so here I am.”

She could see them now, a couple of girls from Year Six at Park Road, as well as a few other people she didn’t know, filling bags on the other side of the river.

“Do you want a biscuit, Izzy?” Poppy came over with a tin of cookies that her mum had made.

“Hello.” An elderly man with a grey, pointed beard was standing in front of her, and Izzy looked back round at him, smiling.

“Hello, have you come to help?” She hoped he would be all right, he looked a little bit fragile for hefting stuff about.

“Yes, although I’m not absolutely sure what you’ll want me to do. I heard you on the radio, you see, and one of your friends – at least, I don’t think it was you – mentioned the area under the bridge.”

“Oh! Do you have a bench you want to get rid of?” Izzy asked him hopefully. No one had turned up offering one yet, but then it had been a long shot.

“No, I’m afraid not. I’ve come with an idea, instead. I’m an artist, you see. I wondered if we could paint it. The underside of the bridge.”

Izzy blinked. “Wow. I suppose we could. Would anyone mind, do you think? What sort of things were you thinking of painting?”

“I’m not sure yet. But I doubt anyone would mind.” He smiled. “I’ve done the same sort of thing before – the council have commissioned me to paint murals in the past – they’ll be pleased to get one free, I should think.”

Poppy looked at him hopefully. “Would you be
able to paint birds, and butterflies, and that sort of thing? This used to be a nature reserve. Look, just wait a minute.” She dashed off, but she was back a minute later with a wooden board with a sheet of plastic over it, very torn and scrappy, and faded by the sun so that most of the pictures on it were a sort of worn-out coffee-brown colour. “You see? It’s the old guide to what sort of animals and birds you might see. Herons, look. And water rats. That could be a kingfisher, do you think, Izzy? Your dad said he’d seen one here once, didn’t he?”

Izzy nodded. “But what’s that got to do with the bridge?”

The old man was nodding excitedly. “You want to do a life-size version!”

“Yes!” Poppy was practically dancing up and down, she was so excited. “It would be brilliant. And I bet there are loads of people here we could ask. People who remember what it used to be like. They could tell us what to paint. Um, that is if you wanted any help?” she added shyly.

“Your idea.” The old man nodded at her. “You definitely help. We might not finish it all today, though, if we’re doing something complicated like that.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind. Mum would bring me down after school, I bet she would. Or Alex could come and practise canoeing, and bring me with him. That’s my brother.” She nodded at Alex, who was helping the man with the dinghy heave something disgusting-looking out of the river.

“Right. Well, we need a layer of masonry paint on there first, as a primer.” The old man looked suddenly business-like, and somehow much younger. “I brought some, I’ll just go and fetch it out of the car. And my acrylics, for the actual painting.” He frowned. “Actually, give me quarter of an hour. I’m going to nip to the library, get a few reference books out.”

Poppy nodded blissfully, and Izzy laughed. This looked like Poppy’s dream come true. As the old man hurried away up the bank, Poppy turned back to Izzy, her eyes sparkling. “This is so cool! This was the best idea ever, Izzy!” She threw her arms round Izzy and gave her a huge hug. “You totally got your own back on Ali yesterday, even if it was by accident. You still told her off, and it was brilliant, and now I get to do some painting with a real artist.”

Izzy nodded happily. Poppy was right. And three weeks ago, she thought that Poppy and the others
wouldn’t want to hang around with her any more. It just showed how wrong you could be.

“Izzy, look!” Poppy was pointing down the river with a paintbrush. She had smears of paint on her nose, and down her jeans, and even in her hair, but Izzy thought she’d never looked happier.

“What is it?” Izzy stood up slowly. Her back was starting to hurt from so much bending over picking up grot, and she was really tired.

“A boat! A beautiful narrowboat, look.” Poppy spun her round to see.

“Oh!” Izzy peered down the river. They hadn’t seen any boats in the whole weekend, and she certainly hadn’t expected to see one. The river had been so full of stuff, a boat as big as that would probably end up with half a washing machine stuck to it somewhere. “Are they stopping?”

“Looks like it to me. Yes, look, that lady’s tying a rope to that tree.”

“Nice paintwork,” George, the artist, said admiringly. “All those flowers.”

The boat was beautiful, painted dark green, with curtains at all the windows, and pots of flowers on the roof – it almost looked like a tiny garden up
there. And all along the side was the most beautiful painting of flowers. Izzy could just about make out the name of the boat:
Painted Lady
.

Poppy laughed. “We’ve just done one of those, look! It’s a butterfly, this orangey spotted one.”

Izzy looked back admiringly at the bridge. It was the middle of Sunday afternoon now, and they’d only just managed to start painting the animals and birds and flowers, because of waiting for the undercoat to dry, but already it was looking beautiful. The butterfly was sitting on top of a clump of painted primroses. Poppy and George had filled in the time waiting for the paint to dry by working out which creatures they would paint, and where, and drawing out life-size sketches that they could transfer on to the wall. It was very organised.

The lady who’d tied up the boat was now walking down the river bank towards them, and the girls smiled at her. Somehow, someone who lived on such a pretty boat had to be nice, they were sure.

“Hello! We heard you on the radio this morning.”

Izzy laughed. “Sorry! It’s just that so many people have said that today. Your boat’s so beautiful. Do you live on it all the time?”

The lady nodded. “Yes – and we often come down
the river here, but we’ve never been along this bit. Not in the
Lady
anyway, we’ve walked along, and seen what a state it was in. So when we heard that you were cleaning it out, we thought we might come and help, and then sail on through. I’m Sally. Matt’s still on the boat.”

“That would be brilliant!” Izzy beamed at her. “Like a grand opening! You ought to have flags!”

Sally laughed. “We have got some, somewhere, from being in a gala day. I’ll go and find them, and then I’ll come back and do some picking up. Although it looks like you must have nearly finished. It’s so much nicer now!”

Izzy nodded. “It’s nearly three, and we officially stop at four, so hopefully it’s almost done.”

“You look exhausted,” Sally said sympathetically. Then she smiled. “If you can do without Matt for the last bit of clearing up, I think I’ll send him off to the supermarket for some biscuits and stuff. Then we could put the flags up, and you girls and all your helpers could come on the boat and have some tea, and be part of the grand sail-through. A celebration.”

“Would you really let us?” Poppy asked delightedly. “It would be a fab end to the weekend. It would have been a bit dismal just giving up and going home.”

“Oh no, you definitely deserve a bit of a party. And now you’ve cleaned the river up the best way to see how beautiful it is, is obviously by boat.” Sally nodded. “Tell everyone, four o’clock, party on the
Painted Lady
! I’ll go and make sure she’s tidy!”