Lost Read online

  ‘Lost is a breathless, thrilling adventure, a story to make your heart beat faster. Lola is a wonderful girl, resourceful, brave and loyal, and I desperately wanted her to find her way home’

  Elizabeth Laird, author of The Fastest Boy in the World

  ‘A gripping tale of a young girl lost in a concrete jungle. It shows how hope, determination and friendship can win through, even in the most challenging environment’

  Malcolm Duffy, author of Me Mam. Me Dad. Me.

  ‘This gripping, poignant and timely novel shines a humane light on the deep inequalities of our world as two children search for family, friendship and the safe, loving heart of home’

  Sita Brahmachari, author of Artichoke Hearts

  ‘Ele Fountain’s vivid page-turner conjures the world of street children with empathy and compassion’

  Paul Dowswell, author of Auslander

  ele fountain worked as an editor in children’s publishing where she helped launch and nurture the careers of many prize-winning and bestselling authors. Ele’s debut novel, Boy 87, won four awards and was nominated for nine more, including the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. She lives in Hampshire with her husband and two daughters.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Street

  Home

  Song

  Bella

  Unfair

  Mila

  Holiday

  Lucky

  Freedom

  Distraction

  Denial

  Missing

  Police

  Fear

  Leave

  Night

  Lost

  Alone

  Freefall

  Boy

  Search

  Boy

  Trip

  Haircut

  Bella

  Famous

  Hurt

  Secrets

  Surprise

  Gift

  Lies

  Plan

  Escape

  Amit

  Rescue

  Paper

  Dad

  Truth

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  You can’t cross the sea

  merely by standing and staring at the water

  rabindranath tagore

  Street

  I sense that I am being watched. I lift my head and see a station guard looking straight back at me. They don’t normally bother patrolling the far end of the platforms. His hands are by his sides, but the baton he clutches tilts upwards, ready.

  Our eyes lock, and my heart beats faster. I hold his gaze, while slowly unfolding my crossed legs. A low rumble grows as a passenger train pulls in. Its brakes screech and the guard’s eyes flick towards the noise. In that split second, I push myself up and start to run.

  He lunges to grab me but gets the edge of my T-shirt. I stumble but keep running. Behind me I hear his footsteps slapping on the hard floor.

  “Little rat!” he shouts.

  He is fat but fast. I weave round the concrete columns in the middle of the platform. His wheezing breath is loud and I know that he is close. There are passengers ahead, with bags strewn around. I leap over a large bag and swerve round a family. They shout at me to “watch out, rat”.

  I cannot hear the guard’s footsteps now, or his raspy breath. He has decided to let me go.

  Sweat runs down my back. The air is sticky, like always before the monsoon clouds burst, spilling soft rain on the city. I walk into the swelling crowd of passengers. People flow around me without making eye contact.

  I crouch down next to a column of rusty, battered trunks, painted cream and blue like the trains. From here I can see the platforms stretching away in rows. On my other side is the ticket hall. A queue snakes from the ticket window. The customers cling on to wallets, suitcases, children’s hands. They all have places to go, people waiting to see them. I was one of them. Now I have nothing. I am nothing.

  I look across the platforms and see friends smiling and hugging each other. I see families chatting and sharing food. My stomach growls. I see men in suits, foreheads shiny in the sticky midday heat. But I am not really looking at them. I am looking for someone else.

  I am looking for my brother.

  Home

  I wake to silence. Weird. As my confusion grows, the veil of sleep lifts gently from my senses, and I hear a soft thrumming sound which had muffled all others. Rain. Seconds later a bicycle bell tinkles below my window, then another, and from further away the unbroken song-like notes of a man praying. Monsoon! Finally. It’s late this year.

  I pull my sheet over my shoulders and lie in bed listening to the morning orchestra with its new percussion. Monsoon means watching films with Bella. It means hanging out with Amit. It means cooking with Mila. It means school holidays and new clothes. As I start to drift into a cosy monsoon daydream, my bedroom door swings open.

  “Rain!” shouts Amit.

  “Go away,” I groan, my eyes still shut.

  Amit stands in the middle of my room, wiggling his bottom from side to side and waving his arms in the air. “Last week at school, last week at school,” he sings, in an impressively high voice.

  I tug my warm pillow from beneath my head and hurl it at him. “Do you know the words to the ‘Go away I’m still in bed’ song?”

  I know grumpiness will have no effect on Amit. He is a puppy in a school uniform.

  “Mila has made doughnuts.”

  “Doughnuts?” I sit up in bed. “When did Mila learn how to make doughnuts?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!” Amit sings. Then before I can throw anything else at him, he runs out of my room and back to where the food smells are coming from.

  I place my feet on the cool marble floor and follow the doughnut smell.

  “Good afternoon.” My dad looks up from some papers on the table, as I wander into the dining room. He’s hilarious. “I’m sorry but we had to eat your doughnuts too. We were worried they might slow you down.

  I know you like to be ready first.” I look from the empty plate in the middle of the table to Amit’s sugary, grinning mouth. “What! We’ve got loads of time. Haven’t we?”

  “We never have loads of time,” Dad says, raising his eyebrows, “but I think you might be in luck.”

  Mila appears in the kitchen doorway, holding a small plateful of doughnuts. She carries it in front of her, like an offering from the enormous baby bump beneath, and places the plate on the table before I can intercept and help.

  “Mila, your bump is even bigger than yesterday!” I say.

  She smiles shyly. “Four weeks left now.”

  “What will we eat when you’re not here?” Amit asks. “And who will tidy up after us?”

  I find Amit’s foot under the table and press down hard with my own.

  “What was that for?” He frowns at me.

  I look over at my dad, who looks down at his paperwork. He is in total denial about Mila leaving to start her own family.

  She came to work for us after Mum died. Dad said he had to find someone fast, before Amit starved. Mila started on a trial, and eight years later she is still here. But not for much longer.

  Mila says she has a friend who could take over from her. Someone she grew up with, someone trustworthy. Dad should snap her up, but there never seems to be a good time for Mila’s friend to visit.

  “I don’t think they let you into school wearing bedclothes,” Dad says without looking up.

  “Especially ones like yours,” adds Amit.

  I ignore them and sink my teeth into warm doughnut. Bella thinks it’s weird that we all have breakfast together. Her dad is always having Breakfast Meetings or flying off somewhere, literally. It sounds like a g
ood arrangement.

  Outside a car horn honks, followed by three or four other honks and a man shouting. The rain will make the traffic worse than ever today. Too many millions of people on the city roads, which might be flooded.

  “Delicious, Mila!” I shout in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Not so loud,” Dad scolds, half-heartedly.

  Mila appears in the kitchen doorway again. She walks over to my father, moving silently, lightly, despite the extra weight she is carrying.

  “Mr Morel, tonight would it be a problem if I left at six o’clock? It will take me a long time to reach home, I think, if the rain is like this all day.”

  “Of course,” my father answers. “You must leave at six every night while the rain is heavy.”

  Mila always talks to my father like this. She’s looked after us since we were tiny, but Mila isn’t exactly part of our family. She works for our family. There’s a big difference. Bella’s always going on about the Big Difference, like I don’t actually know. Bella also can’t believe we only have one person working in our house. She has six. Almost one for every day of the week.

  Mila’s pretty lucky though. She lives on the edge of town in one of the slum areas, but she gets to spend most of the daytime in our apartment, which is air-conditioned and huge. Dad says that when Mila leaves to have the baby, she will be one hundred per cent in the slum again, and that slums are no place to bring up a baby. I don’t know why he cares particularly. Lots of people have babies in slums.

  “Lola?”

  “OK, OK, I’m getting dressed.” Dad never shouts. Lola? is code red. Bella says her dad is always shouting, mostly at her mum. There’s a lot about our family that I think Bella finds strange, compared to our other school friends anyway.

  Despite having breakfast at different speeds, we all seem to arrive in the hallway to put our shoes on at exactly the same time. It’s amazing how much three people can get in each other’s way—especially in our new apartment, which is about twice the size of our old one.

  I grab my bag and step towards the door.

  “Lola.” I hear Mila softly say my name. I turn round and she passes me a warm paper packet. I know there are two doughnuts inside.

  Song

  “Oh baby! Give me one more dance, one more dance, oh baaaaaby!”

  Dad’s head bobs from side to side as we sing at the top of our voices. But it’s Amit who can hit all the high notes. Most of the time Amit is just annoying, but as soon as he starts to sing, something strange happens. It’s almost like annoying Amit has been possessed by some kind of bewitching songbird. Then when he stops singing it’s all about who’s going to hold the TV remote again.

  The car radio is turned right up. It feels as if the whole city has tuned in to the same song. I haven’t seen the film it’s from, but Bella and I have been practising the dance moves at lunchtime. Phones are not allowed at our school, but Bella always bends the rules. If someone complained, then her family could probably just buy the school—or at least buy someone an enormous present, so they forgot that Bella had brought her phone in.

  Rain hammers on the roof and cascades down the windscreen. The wipers can’t keep up. We are in the middle of three wonky lanes of traffic. Nothing is moving. People press on their horns as if that will make any difference. While we’re all singing, it doesn’t seem to matter.

  A man taps on the window and points to a basket of tissues and chewing gum covered in a sheet of plastic. His ragged clothes cling to him and rain runs down his face. He wants me to buy something. Through the car windscreen, he looks blurry, as if the rain has started to wash him away. I shake my head, annoyed that he’s interrupted my song. The man turns to the car behind instead.

  I remember my paper package and tap Amit on the shoulder. He stops singing and flashes me one of his megawatt smiles. His other special skill.

  He takes a doughnut and pushes it into his mouth. Whole. I need to start documenting this kind of behaviour so that when he’s a famous movie star I can embarrass him instead.

  Last year Amit moved to a new school, one which specializes in performing arts. He has normal lessons as well as extra music ones, especially singing. At least he gets to wear blue. My uniform is a shade of green which doesn’t exist anywhere else. Nature would never create a colour so awful or with so many pleats.

  I tap him on the shoulder again. “When’s your audition?”

  “Next week. I’ve got to practise practise practise this week, and then give my voice a rest for a few days. My singing teacher thinks I’ll get a part. Maybe not a big one, but she thinks that’s better for my first film.” He pushes his hands from side to side in a seat dance.

  “Don’t forget I’m coming to watch, OK?”

  “Sure. As long as you don’t embarrass me.”

  The irony is, he doesn’t even know what irony means.

  “Well it’s going to be the holidays by then, so you should be grateful I’m not busy.”

  He rolls his eyes.

  “I might ask Bella to come too.”

  “You don’t have to go everywhere with Bella.”

  “I don’t,” I say, prickling. “She said she wanted to come. She’s movie obsessed.”

  “OK, fine, she can come,” he says, like he has just done me a huge favour, but I can tell that he’s actually quite pleased. He starts humming. Even his humming sounds good.

  Bella

  “Sorry I’m late, Mr Banik. The roads were flooded.”

  He nods. “Sit down and open your book at page fifty-eight.”

  Bella looks up at me and rolls her big eyes. I am always late. My school is in the new part of the city. So are my friends. Dad will never move from the old town. He likes the narrow streets and little shops. I like shopping malls, ice-cream shops and not having to drive for an hour and a half to get to school.

  I slide into my chair next to Bella.

  “Look at my hair,” Bella whispers.

  I open my book at page fifty-eight and try to look like I’m reading it. “What about it?” I whisper back, hoping for a clue.

  “The gold?” she says urgently.

  I glance at the side of her head. Within her ponytail I can see strands of gold woven into the long black hair.

  “Totally awesome,” I whisper. Bella seems satisfied.

  I have learnt how to listen to the teacher and keep Bella happy at the same time. Totally Awesome, No Way and Yesss! work for most things. I can listen to the teacher and nod to Bella. She talks a lot. But this time the teacher notices me peering round the back of Bella’s head.

  “Have you lost something, Lola?”

  “No, Mr Banik.”

  Even though Mr Banik is still looking at us, Bella starts writing in the margin of her textbook.

  When the teacher looks away, I glance down. She has written Holiday Plans in swirly writing, and a picture of a mobile phone with wavy lines coming out of it.

  She knows I don’t have a mobile phone. “Yesss!” I whisper. For the next hour and ten min­utes while I am learning all there is to know about glaciation, Bella will be thinking about cool new shops for us to visit.

  When the bell sounds for lunchtime, I drift towards the canteen. It’s still quite empty so I spread my stuff out over a table in the corner and wave at Bella when she joins the food queue. She always schedules a hair-maintenance break before lunch.

  “So, I have some ideas for next week,” she starts talking before she’s even reached the table. “How about a makeover party on Saturday? It would be such a great way to start the holidays.” She doesn’t even wait for a reply. “Who shall we invite?”

  “Sounds fun,” I say, “but I don’t really have any make-up I can bring.”

  “So what? Mum bought bags of it at the airport last month and she doesn’t even like most of it, so we’ll have loads to share.”

  “Cool!” I say, and I mean it. Dad doesn’t like me wearing make-up, so I only get to try things out at Bella’s house. “Oh,
and I asked Amit about his audition. He says it’s fine if I bring you too. You might have to pretend you’re my sister though.”

  “Woah that is sooo amazing!” Bella squeals, leaning forward to grin in my face.

  I look up as Asha and Yasmin slide their trays onto the table to join us. “What’s going on?” Yasmin smiles.

  “Lola’s brother is having a film audition and we’re going to watch,” says Bella.

  “Do you think they might need some extras?” asks Yasmin, wide-eyed.

  “I don’t know; they’re very fussy about who comes along to the audition,” Bella says, like she arranged it all herself. “But we were thinking of having a makeover party on Saturday. Wanna come?”

  “Yesss!” Yasmin and Asha say together.

  Bella turns and looks appraisingly at my face, like I might be the focus of Saturday’s makeover. “You have such great skin,” she says. “I want to try some of my new highlighter on your cheeks.” She reaches for a lock of hair from my ponytail. “I wish I had hair like yours, it’s so shiny. You must brush it for hours.”

  I smile and nod, thinking how I brushed it for around ten seconds this morning.

  I’m grateful when Asha says dramatically, “It’s the boy with the green eyes. Twelve o’clock. Don’t all look at once.”

  “Is he the one with the really cheap watch?” says Bella dismissively.

  I glance at her face to see if she’s joking, but she’s not. Sometimes I try to remember how we ended up being friends. I pass under most people’s radars. Not Bella’s though. When we started having classes together, she seemed to pick me out, which felt good. The other girls don’t invite me to after-school stuff because I live on the far side of town.

  Bella liked the fact that I was usually free and I liked feeling included. Recently, though, it seems a bit more like I’m Bella’s show-and-tell object, which is the same as being the odd one out again.

  Unfair