The Diamond Girls by Jacqueline Wilson

Author:Jacqueline Wilson [Wilson, Jacqueline]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Love & Romance, Juvenile Nonfiction, Family, General
ISBN: 9781407045238
Google: jtKxtrW1jqUC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2008-09-03T18:30:00+00:00

11

I DIDN’T KNOW what to do. I kept blinking at Sundance’s little bare bottom, hoping it would rearrange itself in front of my eyes.

Sundance was a boy. Mum had known right from the start. She’d consulted her star charts, read the tarot, dangled rings above her stomach, gazed into her crystal ball. Jude had scoffed – but then Mum went to the hospital for her scan and they confirmed it. She was definitely having a baby boy.

Mum had bought a pair of little blue booties that very day. She’d stuck them on the ends of her fingers and made them dance up and down her tummy. She’d had a little baby boy. She’d said so. She’d called him her little son.

Perhaps the hospital had made a terrible mistake and mixed up the babies. Maybe my little brother Sundance had been whisked away by the wrong mother, leaving this dark little changeling girl by mistake.

‘Who are you?’ I whispered to the baby.

She didn’t know. She kicked her tiny legs, her little feet arching, her toes so weeny, each tipped by the tiniest slither of nail. Her bottom looked very bare indeed as she lay there, flat on her back.

I got her a clean nappy and covered her up with it. I thought about finding her another sleeping suit as the legs were damp, but then Mum would know for sure that I’d undressed her.

I bundled her back into the damp leggings and wrapped the shawl round her. She didn’t seem to mind. I looked at the wet nappy, not knowing what to do with it. I couldn’t let Mum find it.

I gazed around the crowded room desperately. Rochelle’s fancy white dressing table with the little gilt handles was right in front of me. She’d seen it at a car boot sale and nagged Mum rotten until she bought it for her. I opened the top drawer quickly and shoved the sopping nappy inside. Then I picked the baby up and held her against my thudding heart.

I didn’t know what to do. I wished Jude hadn’t sloped off. I heard Bruce whistling in the kitchen and wondered about telling him, but it seemed too extraordinary, too personal, too strange. I was already starting to wonder if I could possibly have been mistaken. I didn’t know much about babies after all. I’d never seen a baby boy naked. Maybe they had very tiny willies at that age and I’d simply not noticed it. I wanted to undress the baby all over again to have another look but I could hear Martine murmuring above my head and I wasn’t sure how long they were going to be.

I sat cross-legged on the mattress, holding the baby in my arms. ‘Are you my sister?’

She looked at me with her strange blue eyes as if she understood, but couldn’t tell me one way or the other. Then Mum and Martine came back, Mum a little pinker now and wearing her rose-red silky nightie and black embroidered kimono, trying to look pretty.

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