Charlie groaned. On this occasion, at least, he had an excuse. “I can barely stand on these feet…”
#6 Tears (& Snogs) At Bedtime…
By ten thirty, I’d just managed to get Kitty to bed (my bed, to be precise). She’d decided that she absolutely could not sleep without Tigsy (the cat teddy thing I’d found earlier in Toots’ nest), and we’d just spent half an hour “looking” for him (since I knew exactly what’d happened to him, and it really wasn’t a good idea to let on).
She was finally asleep, and I was practically falling from my feet. I heard a car pull right into the drive (we still don’t have a car, and nobody even parks by our house because they think we’re a “rough” family – Mum must have been doing something really exciting!). Someone’s attempt at hushed voices could be heard through my thin and leaky second-storey window, so I almost thought they must be drunk. I glanced outside and immediately set eyes on Mum, under the amber glow of the streetlight, kissing somebody goodbye.
I nearly did a double take. I’d never seen Mum snogging before. (She’d never exchanged much affection with Dad.) I had just enough sense left to check out the man involved – he had light, mousy hair, and a smart suit.
Mum disappeared from view, and I heard her struggling the front door open. I dashed downstairs, in time to pretend to be watching an old film on the tellies. (Prying Aussies note: we do have more than one TV, but it’s because one only receives picture properly, and the other only gets sound.)
I needed to ply her for shoe money while she was in a good mood, and who knew how much less enthusiastic she’d be come morning?
“Hi, Mum!” I trilled. “Where have you been?”
“I went to meet a guy about a job,” was her reply.
“What kind of work involves smudging your lipstick halfway up your cheek?” I teased.
“Oh, no! Harry didn’t see me like this, did he?”
“I have a fair idea that it happened whilst you were sucking his face off,” I snorted, puzzled by her enhanced ditziness.
“Nothing’s going on,” she smiled, nodding upstairs, knowing she wasn’t fooling me.
“And I’m Janet Jackson…” I grinned, knowing where I belonged and making for the stairs.
#7 Oops! Did I Forget I Don’t Know You?
I shuffled into Tutor only two minutes late.
That was good going considering the slightly-too-big court shoes Mum had dispatched me in that morning (along with merely £20 towards replacement everything), and the quickie conversation I’d tried to get out of my brothers once Zak had offloaded Kitty and the invites to Emily and her mother. (Prying Aussies should note: Emily’s mum is the sort of parent who you automatically sit up straight and refer to as a “mother”. Emily is the sort of girl who will probably be calling her “Mummy” until her A Levels.)
It was clear that I had arrived before Mrs Newton herself:
“What do I do? I have such huge JUBBLIES and they bounce when I run! All the boys laugh at me and I’m so afraid that one day they will splat up and hit me in the eye!”
Roars of adolescent male laughter erupted from the classroom, as Andy waved a copy of this month’s Bliss around. “I didn’t think I’d find myself writing to a problem page, but I, er, have a problem. My boyfriend wants me to give-”
I grabbed the magazine before he could fabricate more while pretending to read from the totally wrong page, and looked around for the owner. I found that not only had Fern joined our tutor group, but also looked distraught (in a quiet, shy, not-about-to-protest way) at the prospect of £2.50’s worth of fashion advice down the drain.
I abandoned my own shyness for curiosity and approached Fern, who was twisting her weak-looking hair around her finger nervously. “I’m sorry about Andy. He’s my brother’s mate. He can be a laugh, sometimes, but really he’s a big dummy.”
Fern silently took the magazine from me.
“Is it ripped?” I panicked, feeling stupidly responsible for the immature one-time friend I’d known since I was four. “I can get him to buy you a new one. His dad’ll be mega cheesed-off at him.”
“N-no, it’s alright – there are l-loads more where that came from…” she mumbled, opening her pastel pink rucksack to show me.
Startled, I laid eyes on all the latest issues of Cosmo Girl, Shout, Mizz, Sugar, and a lot of ladies’ mags I’d never even heard of. (I only ever buy magazines when I have spare money, or if they have a decent free gift.) Either she’d looted WH Smith, or she had rich parents. “Wow!”
“M-my uncle runs a corner shop; he’s a-always sending me unsold g-goods…”
“What about your mum and dad?” I blurted, realising too late what I’d just done – assuming that everyone except me has a mum and a dad handy. “I’m sorry, I mean, I kinda forgot I didn’t know you! It’s cool! My parents split up, and what’s more, I think my mum’s got this new bloke and… and…”
“S-sorry to hear that,” she said, sincerely, looking at me strangely. Well, I was being really strange. “My mum ran away with a postman when I was three,” she said, dropping the stammer when she could see I was equally nervous. “It’s OK really; you can’t exactly miss what you don’t remember. My dad runs the pet shop in town, but he’s very busy since we moved down from Scotland last week…”
(Where had I heard about jobs at shops lately?)
“My cousin Shelley just moved to Australia ’cause of Uncle Peter’s work; everyone seems to be moving just recently!” I laughed, tensely, as our form tutor passed through the doorway.
I’d never been so glad to see Old Newt.
#8 Zip, Zap, Boing!
I’d obviously been forgiven for shoenapping Charlie’s sole pair yesterday morning. He’d accompanied me to the newly built Performing Arts block for our usual forty-five minutes of extra-curricular silliness.
It was 2:35 on Tuesday, and the first week of Drama Club since term started – the first Drama Club without you. New Year 7s bobbed all around us. I noticed that Cousin Brandi was not one of them. Clearly she’d become one of those people who snubs anything that isn’t timetabled in by the government as “for geeks”. (If I’m honest, I’d suspected that ever since she dropped out of Brownies after one measly session of cross-stitch.)
I tried to calculate which of the flurry of newbies would stay even until the end of term. Not the chavvy-looking pair clutching the teen magazines – if they were anything like Keisha and Chantalle, no aspirations of movie-stardom would keep them playing Zip, Zap, Boing! until Christmas. Probably not the boys who were playing an improvised game where two people stood either end of a bench and attempted to smack each other off with their oversized schoolbags either – Miss Bowman would see to it that they were not invited back.
Aha! The loner-looking girl with out-of-control frizzy brown hair and her nose in a worn copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. She looked promising. She wore combat boots and had a big purple rucksack at her feet with a guitar decal and four multicoloured paperclip chains attached. A girl like that seemed as if she’d have better things to do than show up to an after-school club unaccompanied if she didn’t have good intentions.
Charlie and Andy guffawed with laughter as one of the boys received a hefty thwack and plummeted off the bench onto the leafy grass. I despair at the males of society sometimes. That is, except Jordy.
Jordy Johnson wouldn’t laugh at people’s misfortune one minute and then trip over and cry the next, like Charlie often does. Jordy wouldn’t blame people for meddling with his games consoles after he’d taken them apart out of curiosity, like Andy had once done. Jordy wouldn’t get hair gel in his eyes and then run round the house screaming “I’M BLIIIIIND!!” like Zak had done just last week.
“Guys!” called Miss Bowman, marching out of the main block with a box of apples undoubtedly for some kind of warmup game. “We’ll have less of that, I think!”
The new boys stopped, startled and stood up straight in the presence of a member of staff.
They weren’t to know that if there’s one thing Miss Bowman can’t manage, it’s “strict”.
I glanced towards my brother and his best friend, my only Year 9 company besides nerdy Norma and her library friends. Charlie was absorbed in watching a tussle between seagulls on the other side of the grounds, but Andy was giving Miss Bowman his whole attention. No change there!
Remember how in Junior school, Charlie and Chantalle were the ones big on acting, and me and Andy were just quietly clumsy and praying not to be picked for anything? Then in Year 7, everything changed. We got Miss Bowman for Drama, and for Andy it was love at first sight. He started reading Hamlet after she mentioned performing in it for her uni course once. He liked her to overhear how he loves a brunette bookworm with blue eyes.
We’d probably never have joined Drama Club if it wasn’t for Charlie and Andy – and now you were gone, what was the point? On closer inspection, Miss Bowman’s apples were plastic. As we piled into the Performing Arts block, the new and spacious interior looked more tacky and space-age, with its imitation metal panelling that had already been picked away at in the first seven days of school. (I mean, how cheap do you have to be to decorate a school with imitation metal?) OK, so I was the only one feeling it, but it seemed all empty and wrong being a part of Drama Club, in Year 9, without you.
What had I been thinking? I turned around, pushed open the main door and went back outside. Getting some shoes of my own before the shops shut was much more important than wallowing in awkward warmup games with a bunch of little kids.
#9 Clothing Down…
It was only on my way into town for shoes that I realised what was bugging me. It all began to add up: Mum applied for a job at a shop; Fern’s dad runs the pet shop; Fern’s dad’s been single for yonks and is new in town; Mum’s got a boyfriend.
BINGO!
I tramped past the pet shop, now devoid of the familiar lettering it’d had ever since I could remember, and past Clarks, where Mum had purchased every pair of our shoes since babyhood, no matter the negative figures in her bank account.
Things must have got really tight since Auntie Sharon stopped paying her off. (Prying Aussies should note that Shell’s mum used to treat our mum, her big sis, like Instant Childminder – Just Add Puppy Eyes.)
Mum had put a tonne of emphasis on the importance of comfy, well-fitting school shoes and a proper winter jacket, even if it meant everything else (barring underwear) had to come from Oxfam. She always said that back when she was a girl she used to wear the same shoes until her toenails got infected from the squashing, and then usually Sharon got them as hand-me-downs. (Now that I think about it, the sheer mention of the relative poverty of growing up in 1970s and 80s Jersey drove Sharon to four extra pairs of shoes’ worth of pity a year.)
Today, I was set to lose my shoddy school shoe virginity – I either had to join the ASDA ranks with Rach and Rindi, or head for the trendier budget shoe shop in town where Keisha, Chantalle and Dani get theirs. I wasn’t going to be seen dead at ASDA after what happened last month, and I especially wasn’t going to be seen buying footwear on my first visit since.
The budget shoe shop in question had the same “CLOSING DOWN SALE – EVERYTHING £10” sign up that it’d had all year. I didn’t want to trust a company that would pretend to be going out of business just to shift some sandals, but it appeared that I didn’t have any choice. I mooched in the door, still struggling to keep Mum’s shoes on my feet as I went, and got the most unsympathetic look from the manageress who was hovering behind the till girl explaining something or other. Had she recognised my school uniform and associated it with shoplifting?
I’m not a shoplifter, I growled inside, fixing my posture as best I could in Mum’s stupid shoes. And I’m not a shoe snob! I had to remind myself.
In fact, nothing in this shop looked outwardly uncomfortable – no worse than Mum’s size sevens on my size six feet, and certainly better than Dad’s size elevens on Charlie’s size seven feet. Maybe Chantalle and Dani were exaggerating when they said their pumps were Painful with a capital P?
They didn’t stock comfy pasties though, and I was pretty certain that the dolly shoes I’d had to select weren’t made of real leather. Instead of the plain or patent choices from Clarks, this shop offered uneven faux leather or a lacquered version that looked like it’d been painted with black nail polish.
They were only a tenner, though. This (hopefully) left me enough for some semblance of PE trainers. It would be Inter-Tutor Sports on Thursday morning, and two and a half hours of absorbing multiple strangers’ sweat from some nasty Cupboard offering was more than I’d be able to take. After all, I’d heard that you could absorb poison through your feet, and STDs were rampant at school.
I unwillingly put my slippy, borrowed shoes back on and made for the trainer rack. Nearly everything was white-with-pink-trim, even in my size, and they had cheapo light-up kiddie trainers like I remembered not being allowed because twin pairs of those in the ’90s were about to cost Mum the weekly food shop. They had tacky denim trainers, knockoff Disney Princess trainers, and the odd white-and-a-colour design that would’ve been OK if I wouldn’t get laughed out of even our council-estate neighbouring school because the tongues read “K. Swish!” instead of “K. Swiss”.
Would it kill them to make shoes that are just one colour? I seethed inside. I needed plain white or black for school. I was already one of the girls who did indoor PE with bare feet because non-marking soles were hilariously expensive.
What about the men’s section? Surely their designs didn’t involve magic unicorns and sequin roses! I hobbled over to the men’s trainers, and sure enough, every single pair they stocked was black or white. I went for a black pair similar to Charlie’s PE trainers, because they were made out to look like Vans and I knew a few girls who wore those for sport. Sure enough, they were comfy.
I was so relieved that I’d be in before five to cook dinner. Kitty had been cranky as a jack-in-the-box handle when I’d dragged her out of bed that morning, and heaven help us if it lasted until Saturday.
#10 Breaking The News & Not The Egg
It was my turn to make the dinner, and I needed “two big strong boys” to help. Help with what? I couldn’t answer. It was just an excuse to get poor Kitty out of the kitchen while we talked business.
“So y’think Mum’s going out with your mate’s dad?” Zak puzzled.
“It certainly seems that way…” I mused, whipping a block of cheese out of the fridge. I tactfully ignored his assumption that as a girl I was instant BFFs with Fern, in favour of staying on topic.
“But what’re we going to do now? We have to get Mum to confirm it somehow…” said Charlie.
“Yeah, but what if we’re wrong? Mum won’t take too kindly to us being that suspicious.” I took some eggs and parmesan out.
“Maybe. Where is Mum anyway?”
“Oh, I made sure she was out of the house for this one,” grinned Zak. “But she’ll be back any minute; she’s only gone for party food for Saturday.” – Good old Zak, the Undercover Brother.
“Cheers,” said Charlie, flopping down in the dog bed and taking to the rough parts of his toes with the pink magazine-gift nail file Fern gave me.
I reached into the cupboard and retrieved a Tom and Jerry strawberry cupcake mix. Emptying the cake powder into a bowl, I asked, “What’re you two getting Kitty for her birthday?”
“A present…” murmured Charlie, whose attention had gone solely to his flaky feet now.
“I know a present! I was wondering if either of you had any ideas?” I absentmindedly grated an egg over a plate instead of breaking it into the bowl.
“I don’t know. You’re the girl around here,” sniffed Zak, looking longingly towards The Simpsons which was already on in the living room.
Charlie winced in pain and rejoined the conversation. “Harley, remember what you wanted for your seventh birthday?”
“I’m not sure.” I looked down at the mir
aculously still unbroken egg, realised what I was doing, dumped the eggshell-gratings into the bin and began grating again this time with the cheese. “I suppose it was a pony – every girl wants a pony before she really knows what one is or does. I think I got a Vet Barbie, or a baby doll, I can’t remember.”
“I got a Pikachu,” said Charlie, proudly. “It talks and everything. Actually, where is my Pikachu?”
“Kitty’s not really into baby dolls,” Zak pointed out. “I think girls are more into all that Barbie and Bratz stuff at the moment.”
“Um… OK,” I agreed. “We’ll buy Kitty a Bratz.”
“With whose sudden lottery winnings?” said Charlie. “We’re all skint.”
“I’ll go down the charity shop tomorrow.” I accidentally sliced my thumb with the cheese grater, and winced with pain. “And Mum should be back by now, too.”
* * *
Dinner had turned out alright in the end. The boys and I guided each other through creating an edible omelette and a pink strawberry flavoured cake for Kitty’s party. They’d headed upstairs before eight to squabble over music and game choices until bedtime, leaving me the task of getting Kitty to sleep, while Mum’s portion still sat in the cooling oven.
Kitty, who was currently flying around her room.
“It’s gonna be my birth-day, I’m goin’a have a par-teeeeeee!” she half giggled, half sang. She really should be writing lyrics for pop bands; some of them aren’t all that much more creative.
I’d managed to get her into her pyjamas. (Sweet little Minnie Mouse ones with glitter and sequins around the ankles.) The next step would be calming her down…
She was bouncing on her bed in excitement. Of course, I knew that the one and only method of control over very-nearly-seven year olds (and OTT thirteen-year-olds) is aptly named “attack of the tickle monsters” and involves ruthless tickling from head to toe until the victim surrenders.
Kitty gave in as expected, and covered up to the neck with her Barbie bedsheets to avoid any further ambush.
It occurred to me to check that our efforts were not in vain. Our little sister’s social standing is about as reliable as a staircase made of shoeboxes, and not enough friends would mean no party (as such). “Did you give out all your invitations today?”