Prying Aussies should note that it’s not just our pets’ names that are painfully random. It might not look like it, but me and Charlie only have matchy-match names by choice. We were born Mahala and Chaziah (that’s M’-har-la and Cha-zee-ah according to Mum, but knowing our luck it probably isn’t).
She picked our names out of a big dusty baby name book she found at a car boot sale, and then had to remember how to spell them at the hospital. One day at stay-and-play our mother and aunt met a lady who was insistent that that’s not how you pronounce or even spell Chaziah, so Sharon asked Mum how she was sure and she said she wasn’t. That day began my lifelong vendetta against made up names (not that I realised it until we were retold this story aged eight), but that’s another tale. Anyway, Shaz managed to persuade her to go with Zachary and Kitra for our younger siblings after that…
I hadn’t noticed that I was already more than halfway to school on that thought, when Keisha sidled up to me, closely accompanied by Rachel and Narinder. (Prying Aussies should note that for me, being late for school doesn’t mean being late to meet my mates, most of whom live much nearer to school and leave dangerously close to registration every day.) I also hadn’t noticed them gawping at my (brother’s) shoes.
“We really need to go shopping,” Keisha snorted.
“What happened to your shoes?” asked Narinder, brushing cat hair off my arm as we cut through the odd-angled alley they hedged off from the roundabout in a failed attempt at prettying up the neighbourhood.
“Hendy happened,” I groaned, and went on to tell them all about Hendrix and the runaway shoes.
Five minutes later, we trudged in the school gate, unsettling the golden autumn leaves so they fluttered around our ankles. (That’s about as much imagery as you’re gonna get; to us, September is the time for going back to the tragic Constantly High with a pathetic attempt at a suntan, and placing bets on how many times particular radio stations will play “Wake Me Up When September Ends”.)
We’d missed the start of Tutor, but only by ten minutes – passable. (In the Harley Hartley book of rules and records, that is.) It was Assembly that day anyway, so we crept into the main block and occupied our usual seats among the latecomers, kindly kept for us by Danielle and Chantalle:
“You’re just in time for a major rant from Pringle!” hissed Chantalle, unnecessarily pointing her gaze away from the row in front.
As you do, I looked at what she was trying not to look at. Asta, Courtney, Sophie, Jack, Lauren, Tom, Joe, Andy, -sigh- Jordy… and Charlie, narrowing his eyes at me in way that would make anyone uncomfortable. “You’re dead, Harley,” he mouthed.
#3 A Bad Firth Impression
It was the start of our History lesson with Mrs Stone. A knock came at the door, which turned out to be today’s Duty Pupil.
I remember being a Duty Pupil last year; it’s like what the old boys’ schools used to call a “fag” – being at the Beckham Call of every member of the office staff and running errands all day. (Note for Prying Aussies: we say “Beckham Call” because that’s what Zak used to think people were saying.)
Today’s DP was calling Asta Price to the Head of Year office for something important. Their usual five star students had gone on a day trip to a university with the Head of Geography and every other member of staff who fancied a day off. (I say this meaning our year has only five “star students”, not that they are five-star students at all.)
Asta is one of those girls who is lit from drippy to bitchy with a millimetre long taper. Teachers usually think she’s sweet and kind and understanding, and that the most annoying thing about her is the constant faffing with snapping bleached hair and makeup in class. They are so wrong. Asta and her friends Courtney and Sophie are possibly the biggest cows I’ve met.
When Asta came back, still in eyelash-flutter mode from twenty minutes’ worth of flirting with our HoY who is probably older than her dad, she had in tow a palpably timid natural blonde, who looked to be taller than me and a trifle skinnier.
“Fernella Firth?” nodded Mrs Stone. “Would you like to introduce yourself?”
“M-must I – Miss?” stammered the real blonde, trying to conceal her blush behind her limp hair.
Mrs Stone refocused her specs and motioned to an empty seat next to a row of boys, and I went back to wondering why according to my twin brother, I was dead. I knew I was very much alive, though I didn’t really feel it. It was almost like having hayfever in September, and I wanted to crawl back into bed.
#4 Bleurgh!
I had to take a very important note to Mr Pringle.
It seems Duty Pupil has nothing on what you get in Year 9 – well, if you’re trusted. Due to his patent awareness that punctuality is my main flaw, I could only conclude that Mr Smithson didn’t care whether I came back this hour or not. Pity I didn’t feel like I had a single skiving gene in me, taking after Mum who got an award for 100% attendance at the end of Year 11, while twelve-year-old Auntie Sharon loitered in the park.
Pringle wasn’t around, so I turned and made the nerve-wracking journey back along the quiet, narrow hallway, past the angry-looking (obviously exiled) older boy who was chewing his gum loudly, and out into the staff side of Reception to hand in the note. The assistant receptionist took it from me without a word, and my pathetic bubble of false importance floated away. Weirdly, I missed being Register Monitor in Year 4 – the odd texture of the snap-folder, and the way the ladies in the office always smiled and looked pleased to see me, and sometimes commented on how responsible and grown up I was. (Not that I wouldn’t be a bit pink in the cheek if I was talked to like that at thirteen!)
Trudging back to Maths, I caught a glimpse of Charlie’s (he wishes) girlfriend Malice in the stairwell above, locking lips with some far more eligible guy in her year. Is it bad that this put a skip in my step?
* * *
After Maths was break, and after break was PE with the cranky Miss Winterbottom. Brandi says her first two PE lessons were spent hearing about how craptastic our class has been for the last two years. Our class of all. What cheek. (Brandi, Prying Aussies, is my little cousin from Dad’s side.)
I remembered when last term we had our fingers crossed not to get her again this year. Karma is overrated – what did I ever do to deserve this?
She was certainly full of the joys of spring, summer, autumn and Winterbottom that day: “Remember, girls, we have swimming on Fridays up until Halloween. You can’t have your period every week!”
Mrs WB is always coming out with things like this. I suspect because she gets some secret joy out of making half the class cringe and the rest audibly go “bleurgh!” Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like if she taught the boys. She’d probably have them jog on the spot while listening to her lecture them on the importance of contraception, or force them to carry military rucksacks full of bricks during the Bleep Test. Then I remember that if that happened we’d likely get Mr Ball, who is by all accounts nearly as bad, and shudder to think what happened to them both in their childhoods to make them this cruel.
Standing in the midst of all the girls, cringing and “bleurgh!”ing respectively, was Fern – doing both. She looked a bit late and a bit lost.
I hadn’t spotted Fern since History (we weren’t in the same Maths) and I was half shocked and half glad to see her. I shot a warning glance at Keisha and Chantalle, who both looked desperate to expel their Winterbottom-induced anger at the nearest thing that moved. (Probably a good thing they were going to netball.)
Once in the humiliation chamber I fixed my gaze on the usual (modified) sign tacked onto the off-white wall. (“Aerosol deodorants must ___ be used in the changing rooms SKANK.”) As you do, because girls can be just awful about the idea that you can see them getting changed. I tried to level my head about Fern (whose face bobbing above mine appeared to be getting redder by the second – and we hadn’t even done any sport yet), and what I could do to help her, and about Charlie, and what I must have done to make him wa
nt me proverbially dead.
#5 Careful What You Wish For…
Looking back on it, it wasn’t exactly Home Alone. All I wished for in Science was for Mum to be happy again. (She says she is happy, she has been ever since Dad left, but I know she’s been lonely inside since years before he went.)
I could have asked for a new (single unit) TV, a lifetime’s supply of Maltesers Hot Chocolate, or even a gazillion more wishes – but of course, how could I have known it would come true?
If I’d wished for lots of money, it would have been more useful (hey, she’d’ve been happy then), but on the other hand, if I’d gone ahead and wished Hendy off the face of the earth for eating me out of shoes and slippers I would be feeling pretty terrible round about now.
So that Monday afternoon I’d made it home to discover that Mum had already disappeared out, “shopping” in full makeup. Since this information came from an indifferent-sounding Zak, I guessed it was trustworthy. (He’d let me in and gone back to lying upside down on the sofa eating Butterkist and watching the afternoon cartoons.)
“Charlie?!” I called from the hallway between our bedrooms. I was hesitant to venture inside the boys’ room because frankly it’s full of crap. Crap… PS2 games, football posters and scratched CDs. Not to mention that if you so much as move anything a centimetre in there, one brother will be blaming the other for touching it.
“What now?” he seethed from inside, as if I was some little pest instead of his thirteen-minutes-older twin.
“Did you hear from Mum before she went out?” I said offhandly, staying away from the subject of me being supposed to be dead.
“Nah, she went straight down the Co-Op,” he grunted.
“It’s only down the road,” I pointed out. “Zak said she was wearing foundation.”
“I dunno, job interview? Now shush, please, I’m trying to play Worms.”
It infuriates me every time he uses that stupid phrase. With Charlie, it’s as if adding “please” to anything makes it automatically polite, no matter how snippy the tone. It’s almost as bad as when Keisha calls me names and then adds “No offense” in the least sincere voice available.
“Excuse me if your stupid PlayStation game means more to you than family,” I growled, before setting eyes on Charlie’s feet. They were stretched out in front of him on the carpet, grazed on the soles with bits of grit still stuck there, and greasy with Savlon. “Charlie, what happened to your feet?”
“It’s all your fault,” he snapped, smacking Pause and turning to glare at me. Me and my feet, still clad in his Vans. “You were making me late this morning, and I couldn’t find my shoes – and then I couldn’t find my PE shoes!”
I realised what had happened. “You walked to school barefoot?”
“No, I had socks, and a pair of Dad’s boots that were way too big, and you know how I hate anything that reminds me of him, and they rubbed my feet so badly and now I have blisters and crap, ’specially ’cause I ended up having to take them off and walk around without shoes all day…” He pouted.
“Not everything that reminds you of him,” I pointed out, nodding to the powerful stereo blasting The Specials, in a bid for it to be turned down a notch.
He obliged, still glaring. “Nobody even noticed I didn’t have any shoes until PE with Ballsy! Well, no teachers anyway. Do you know how many people trod on my feet on purpose? And Ballbag was all set to make me do PE anyway, until he saw the state of my feet and packed me off home with borrowed Nikes. Nikes! And I had to walk.” All of this he said with scarcely a pause for breath.
“I’m so sorry, Twinnie,” I said genuinely, kicking the trainers off under his bed and giving him a hug.
He was quiet for a moment. “Maybe I can forgive you… Will you make tea?”
“OK…” I sighed, glad it would be that easy to put things right.
“And will you use your First Aid Brownie Badge skills to patch up my feet?” he simpered. “They keep sticking to the carpet…”
* * *
After mending Charlie’s feet, I went to my room to concentrate on my Maths homework. When I found that I couldn’t do my homework for lack of a protractor, and couldn’t have a snack because the cupboard and biscuit barrel were empty again, I very almost went in search of that furry lollipop from under my bed. (Um, not really. Nobody gets that desperate, and besides – I think it may have actually been just a hairball on a stick.)
In my room, I found: one full-sized hairball, Toots, happily zizzing on my bed with the nice lilac duvet which she had happily converted into a nest (a tent, more like). This was already worse than it sounds, because she was in season – again. In the nest-tent was one soft teddy which sort-of looked like it used to be a toy cat (before it had all the stuffing brutally ripped out and lost an eye) and a chewed up “customised” cricket bat from under Zak’s bed. (Ironically that’s what he uses to shoo her out of his room – cruel boy. At least now he can’t commit animal abuse without getting splinters.)
To cap it all, there was a cat (Gerald) on the top shelf of my built-in wardrobe, as predicted that morning. It always amazes me how he can even get up there, due to the sheer volume of knickknacks where any footholds might be. Why would a cat, or anyone for that matter, want to sleep in the wardrobe?
Abandoning all hope of finishing my Maths, I changed out of my uniform headed downstairs to find Kitty. As it turned out, I did end up doing homework, as she had spellings to learn (drip, clip, chip, white, quite, took, shook, cook) and her own Maths. I learned that I quite like to numb my mind with silly games where you count to 100 and say “pop” every time you get a multiple of ten.
“Why don’t you go and see if Blue Peter’s still on? I’ll watch it with you!” I suggested (having noticed that Zak had vacated the sofa whilst we were lost in homework-land, and gone out leaving his popcorn behind him).
“No,” replied Kitty. “I need to write my birthday party in’tations!”
I’d completely forgotten about her birthday, and it appeared to me that so had everyone else.
I stifled a groan of exasperation. “Did Mum say you were having a party? When is it?”
“Yep! It’s on Saturday and there are going to be balloons and streamers, and all my friends will come!”
If it was Monday now, and the party was on Saturday, then Mum had clearly forgotten about her promise – though maybe she was out shopping for party snacks, which could take a fair while, I guessed. With my worry about Mum’s whereabouts extinguished, I was fully prepared to help my sister write invites for her seventh.
* * *
“And how do you spell Kayleigh?” Kitty asked.
“Is it Kayleigh Chilcott, or Kalie Beale?” I asked.
“Chilcott.”
“K-A-Y-L-E-I-G-H,” I spelt out.
“Kalie Beale tripped me up at lunch, and didn’t say sorry, so she’s not coming to my party.”
It seemed time to change the subject – and fast:
“Who next? There’s only one invitation left.” I pointed to the last, most generously-decorated sheet of paper. We hadn’t bought any invitations; they were bits of lined paper coloured all over in pink crayon by me (as neatly as possible, what with the lumpy texture of the carpet), gently declining in quality towards the top of the stack.
“Matty Davis. I like him specially, and I definitely want him to come!”
Oh dear, my sister hadn’t got a boyfriend already, had she?
“Can you spell Matthew?”
“No, but I’m just goin’a put Matty anyway. He gave me half his Kit Kat at lunchtime, and he said he likes me because my name sounds like a cat and he has seven of them!” she told me, matter-of-factly, as she doodled messy flowers and hearts onto the invitation. (Er, point proven.)
“I’m just going to see if Charlie’s alright.”
I raced upstairs and into the boys’ bedroom, where Hendy was gleefully chewing on Zak’s (cheap) mp3 player (and destroying all trace of Zak’s many hours of begging m
ates to let him on their computer for his –presumably– piracy needs).
Actually, that’s a matching thing about my vastly opposite brothers; they both have identical cheap mp3s. I regretted hinting for the stereo to be turned off, as Charlie was plugged into his at that moment, oblivious to Hendy and in fact anything that wasn’t Worms.
“Hendy, leave!” I scolded. “Leave!”
He took no notice, so I grabbed it from his mouth. No damage seemed to have been done (yet) but I checked his mouth for loose parts anyway. (It seemed his chewing fetish didn’t just stop at shoes. I could picture it now: “Harley, where’s my mp3?” “In the dog, Zak, in the dog!”)
Charlie paused his game momentarily, unplugged his ears, and glanced back at us.
“Have you noticed that it’s gone half-six at night and Mum isn’t home yet?” I said, urgently. “Nowhere would give her an interview at this time!”
“She told me that she was going to meet this guy at a restaurant about a job,” Zak piped up from somewhere behind us.
Ooh! Waitressing? Fancy…
“When did she tell you that?”
“Coming out of the Co-Op at five.”
“You went looking for Mum?”
“Yeah, she gave me the shopping to carry home. There are chicken nuggets in the freezer – but you’re on cooking duty tonight, Charlie!”
Prying Aussies should note that since Mum decided to go back to work, we three have taken turns to do the cooking – never mind that she hasn’t actually got a job yet, and insists on using the time socially like an overgrown teen. Me and Charlie are supposed to do proper meals like we’re taught in school, and Zak does easy stuff like chips and chicken nugs. Course, you can barely trust Charlie with the cooker, so he usually does a nugget skive too, and burns them if I don’t remember to turn it down for him.