I decided that my good deed for the week would have to be guiding Kitty towards her Brownie journey with as little sarcasm as possible.
“Well, to be a Brownie, you’ve got to be able to sit quietly,” I pointed out, feeling very much like we were playing Teacher. “You mustn’t fiddle or play with anyone else’s hair.”
“I don’t play with people’s hair!” she said indignantly. “Jade does. And she’s not going to be a Brownie!”
“That’s because naughty girls like Jade wouldn’t be allowed to go to Brownies. Emily’s very well-behaved. She probably has twenty badges already!”
“She’s got two badges,” said Kitty, not recognising my exaggeration as usual.
Kitty’s best friend Emily had been allowed to go up to Brownies at the premature age of six. I hadn’t pegged her as being confident enough, but apparently she’d been just what they were looking for, bored with all the babyish Rainbow stuff.
I suddenly wished I could throw Kitty into Rainbows for a couple of months. My little sister surely wasn’t cut out for sitting still and being polite, and she could barely read. I balled that idea up in my head and scored a basket in my imaginary rubbish bin when I realised no one would want to subject the little Rainbows to someone so loud and messy either.
“Well…” I faltered. I really wasn’t sure what I could say to spell it out to Kitty that something her old-fashioned friend thought was fun actually involved a certain degree of personal discipline. “What if I told you the Brownie story?”
“A story now?” she asked, confused. “It’s nearly dinner time.”
It’d better be now, I thought to myself. Quickly, before Mum serves up the chicken nuggets and sends us down the road.
I scooted across the carpet and rooted through the bookshelf, but it wasn’t there. I’d been about to waste the whole evening sorting through my holdall of memory shoeboxes when I remembered the Trefoil drawstring bag I’d unceremoniously shoved every Guiding thing I could find into in the embarrassment of leaving so suddenly.
It was in there – my ancient, dog-eared, initially second-hand Brownie book. Looking at it, I nearly rethought the idea. It had to have been printed in the 80s or early 90s. Our Brown Owl had said it was old at the time (which was 2000). I gave myself an imaginary kick, found the chapter in the contents page and read aloud: “The cottage on the edge of the wood was in an awful mess…”
Something weird came over me while I read. It was uncontrollable, the same feeling I would always get looking back on a volume of Enid Blyton or overhearing Kitty indulging in one of our prehistoric Beatrix Potter audio tapes. Nostalgia. Here I was, feeling all of a sudden like a little old lady as I tried to put some emotion into my reading of disorganised Tommy and Betty and the Wise Owl.
I remembered how I once rewrote the whole thing in my awful Year 2 handwriting so it was Charlie and Harley having the revelation, and sometimes when I was in Juniors I would read it back to try and chastise myself into tidying up. (It never worked.)
I felt silly, yet enjoyed it at the same time. I definitely liked the theory of Girl Guiding a lot more than the practise, and was weirdly scared that my younger sister would make the same mistake.
“Good turns?” repeated Kitty, when I finally closed the book. “Is that like in PE?”
“No…” I withered, snapping back to reality. “A good turn is like a… good deed? Um, a nice thing you do for someone else to be kind.”
“Like give them a hug?”
“Kind of. More like doing the dishes, or cleaning the car. Something helpful.”
“Oh,” said Kitty. I knew that she liked to be kind – it was just that most of her attempts at helping around the house ended up just like the loose jelly in the microwave.
“DINNER!” yelled Mum, before I had an opportunity to think of some good turns Kitty was actually allowed to do.
The next thing I knew, we were hand-in-hand walking down the road to the church hall.
I’d always liked going that way down the street. Going the other way, you’d face down towards the block of apartments that now stood where the old Primary school building had been – ugly, neat and new. A crap approximation of the shape of that beautiful old building we started at in Year R while they were finishing the new school.
Heading down in the church direction on a chilly January evening, you’d only go by the giant white, roomy houses like Andy’s, with their low, black iron fences, well-kempt gardens and evergreen bushes, right until the end where the red brick Methodist church faces the main road. It’s particularly pretty at Christmas, but any darkening winter afternoon or pink summer sunset will do.
“It’s magical being outside in the dark!” exclaimed Kitty, although it was often very nearly dark by the time she’d come home from school.
“Just wait until I come to get you later,” I said, patiently. By then it would be pitch black, a tar sky like the one I’d only seen without Christmas lights for comfort, out on the pavement in person for the first time when I was seven.
Kitty clung to my hand as we approached the main road, suddenly aware of the cars with their headlights and a cold couple of people across the high street who somehow looked automatically shadier after dinnertime.
“We’re not crossing over,” I reminded her, absently, still musing on this one small patch of our town we’d just stepped out of – the one patch right up until the posh neighbourhood by the beach where you could tread outside into the glow of an old-fashioned streetlight instead of a puddle of puke.
“I know!” she said indignantly, not letting go. “There’s a man.”
There was a man. He was coming down the wheelchair ramp outside the community building attached to the church, with his wheeled walking frame, and a little girl’s coat.
“He’s probably someone’s dad or granddad,” I explained. “To drop them off at Brownies.”
She still didn’t look convinced. “What if he was stealing a girl’s jacket?!” she exclaimed, seconds after we’d entered the building. I winced at the volume of her voice. She’d grasped not to say certain things in front of people, but still seemed to think that if you entered a different room you could not be heard.
“Of course he wasn’t! When I was a Brownie, we didn’t have anywhere to hang up our coats, so some people’s mums and dads used to take them back home and bring them again at hometime. You know that boy in your class whose mum wheels his scooter home after he’s ridden it to school?”
“Jamie,” she giggled. “We did about near and far, and he lives the nearest.”
“To us?”
“To school.”
I found myself giggling, then. Fancy wanting to ride your scooter the piffling few metres to the gate!
A girl only a little older than me appeared at the door of the room the Brownies hire. “Hi! Can I help you?” She towered over me, and was twice as wide.
“Um, I’m Harley, and this is my sister, Kitty. We were wondering if you have room in your Brownie pack for one more.”
“Which one?” she joked, badly. “I’m Manda. The girls call me Panda. I’ll take you to Brown Owl.”
I was expecting a round, retired woman with white hair and glasses and a Beanie Baby owl mascot on her table at the front of the room. Our Brown Owl. I quickly realised how stupid that was, seeing as I’d left three years ago and she’d been in and out of hospital with her hips back then.
“Hello! I’m Brown Owl,” announced a hippie-looking woman who couldn’t have been older than forty. She had curly fair hair with a few pieces that looked like they’d been decorated with a hair wrapping set like Auntie Sharon once bought for my birthday. “Who do we have here?”
“I’m Kitty!” said Kitty in a bright, excitable voice that I knew was the result of thinking what to say and having to sit on it for over two minutes. “I want to be a Brownie! Emily says it’s lots of fun.”
I wanted to have a quiet aside with someone and make it absolutely clear that my sister wasn’t exac
tly on-target at school, could be loud and difficult, didn’t quite “get” manners, still took the best part of a day to do up anything that wasn’t velcro, etc. All of those things that would save them the mistake and her the embarrassment of this whole Brownie thing.
“Emily’s right,” said the lady next to her who barely looked old enough for university. She had a great big patch badge sewn across the bust of her jumper that said “TAWNY” in multicoloured letters. “Emily! Is this your friend?”
Emily came bounding across the carpet in her slightly compromised way. She always looked as if she couldn’t quite balance right, and I’d heard so many stories of how pairing her and Kitty in PE had gone to assorted shambles when they both lacked the motor skills so far to get through the warm up activities. “She’s Kitty!” Emily provided.
“I think that’s about everyone,” muttered Brown Owl. “Tawny, will you start?”
I glanced back across the room. There were only eight girls there including Kitty and Emily – when I used to go, it had been oversubscribed.
Tawny gave us an exaggerated beam and rose from her seat to address the other six Brownies. Brown Owl took a sip of her tea and got me to fill out a form with Kitty’s name and our address and phone number, and said that we wouldn’t have to pay subs for this first week and that Kitty and Emily could go and sit down closest to Manda Panda (who I realised was their Young Leader), and then I inferred that I should go, and wandered back down our nippy road, past Andy’s and home, picturing that they were willing to accept just about anyone if it meant they could at least run the group with two Sixes of four.
Staff included.
#12 The Kurt Shirt
“If Charlie’s with you, make him go away – I need to talk to you NOW.”
I abandoned my resolution to stop writing full words and punctuation in texts in an angry instant. Stuff had started to fall into place. Kay and Charlie HAD to be a thing, and a thing that I wasn’t quite ready to tolerate. Selfish? Maybe, but can you blame me for having my infinite patience dissolve all of a sudden when it was irritatingly obvious that this girl wanted to swap lives with me? Incest style!
She’d admitted to admiring our guinea pigs on that day in October with the double date drama. The next month she’d tried to cut my hair to be just like hers! She’d fawned over Mum and Harry’s wedding and obsessively tried to help out. Then in December she’d gone inexplicably “aww” about the kind of things that would make any right-minded sister embarrassed to be related to him.
NOW, it had occurred to me that seeing so little of Charlie over the last week had had shockingly little to do with the whole Malice issue. He’d been round at Kay’s, dutifully absorbing her cold through far too much huggy contact, and I needed to know what they’d been talking about.
No sooner had I sent that text, when someone suspicious came slithering miserably out of my wardrobe, black Avenged Sevenfold top peppered with white plaster from the crappy broken drywall.
“Your turn,” he mumbled my way, as if the neighbour with the adjacent attic had become some sort of amenity we shared.
“Charlie…” I asked, cautiously. “Do you fancy Kay? And don’t say ‘Yes – no – I don’t know’ or I’ll-”
“No.” He cut me off. “But she’s nice to me, and it’s …nice. Since we got too old for all that hug stuff.”
“God, Charlie,” I said, annoyed. “You don’t get too old for hugs. You get too old to come sniffling into your sister’s bedroom when you’re scared of the dark. It’s not …normal.”
“You get too old to be scared of the dark!” cackled Zak, from the hallway.
“PRIVATE MOMENT!” I yelled, scaring him away. It wasn’t often that I had the room to myself these days, and I was almost having second thoughts about going to Kay’s. Zak lurking around was somehow the final straw at the time.
“I guess,” said Charlie, glumly.
I even started to wonder whether I was in fact jumping to conclusions – he still seemed spooked about the car accident, and maybe the girl stuck in bed with the chronic sniffles and no voice was a better candidate for listening than I was. Despite that thought, I still couldn’t bury my suspicions until one or both of them elected to pick up a shovel and help. “But get out of it. You love her.”
“I don’t. It’s just, nobody else really knows what I’m about. Nobody gets me. Kay thinks I’m creative.”
Oh, the old indie defence. He could only be friends with someone who gets him. Because he’s… creative. If we all said that, my technical current best friend would be Kay. (Oh, wait.)
“You don’t really know what you’re about,” I snickered, rotely. “Last I heard from you, you wanted to be a pirate.”
It was true. Ever since Johnny Depp and his movie getup, my twin brother had been convinced he could grow up into a bandana-wearing, dreadlocked badman, complete with eyeliner. Like, as a career choice, but without having to actually do anything illegal. At best he’d be an aging glam metal band’s secretary, and at worst I didn’t even want to think.
“I have matured,” he replied, huffing as he spoke. “Like a good wine and a good cheese have come together to make – the greatest frontman the world has ever seen. See, I know about grown-up stuff now.”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. So his aspirations had risen from male groupie to the actual Axl. Clearly it was all still in his head, but knowing “Devon Magenta” and her art school dreams, it wouldn’t be long before he was busking in pink legwarmers and a Boy George hat…
“Oh, so you have,” I said, mock-disinterestedly as I shushed him out of my room. Of course the meanie sister in me wanted to see him try and fail, while the normal person in me cringed at the thought, and the now-dead patient and kind girl swooped back from heaven to feel a little sorry for him in the mix.
I ducked under the clothes rail myself and went to see what Kay was up to.
“Knock knock!” I announced, a few seconds late but still successful in getting her attention.
Kay, who obviously felt well enough to have got dressed in a blue floral puff skirt and T-shirt, was lying on her side on the big double bed, sniffling over a magazine article.
“How kind of you to finally check on me!” she wavered, reaching for another tissue from the overly colourful box that clashed so hard with everything else in the entire room. “I’m only a two second waltz away!”
“To be fair, you never invited me over,” I muttered. “Why would I think you wanted to see anyone, feeling like this?”
“Charlie’s been over every day!” she huffed, turning to face me. To match her exaggerations, her face was perfectly made up all the way to false eyelashes while she cried theatric tears.
“Yeah, about that.” I wandered towards the bed and sat down. “Do you think it’s really helping, having him and his problems around when you’re trying to get well?”
“God no!” she gushed. “Charlie makes wonderful company. He always puts on my glittery party hat and goes all cute and we have the best talks!”
She indicated a pink glitter trilby hat like those pound-shop ones our teachers wore to the disco in Primary. He was obviously more than halfway to Karma Chameleon.
“If he’s so much fun, then what’re you crying about? Obviously he’s been going on about Malice again. You know you don’t have to get involved.”
“My Kurt!” she wailed, pointing to her scuzzy-looking Nirvana T-shirt, then the magazine with its whole-page glossy picture of an unkempt-looking young man, and back to her shirt.
“Where did you even get that?” I asked, meaning the shirt.
“Oh, Andy’s cousin with the plugs had this big clearout and gave Charlie a couple of boxes of things. Charlie said I could have it because he knows how much I miss Kurt.”
She was speaking as if he was someone she’d actually known, or even been aware of at the time of his death. I knew all about Kurt Cobain through Charlie, and it was quite clear that our friend had been going nuts over the cou
rse of her delirious illness.
“Kay, he died a very long time ago. You’re probably the last person on earth who still cares about it.”
“Don’t say that!” she shrieked. “Don’t you EVER say that! Kurt Cobain was an amazing man, and I’m sure his daughter still cares. Don’t you know that his stupid wife KILLED him and he left behind a baby! You’re lying if you don’t think that it’s the most tragic thing that ever happened.”
“Devon, please,” I started, hoping that the use of her preferred name would placate her some. “Take off your tinfoil hat. You’ve been wallowing in bed all week with nothing better to think about, but seriously, I really don’t expect she killed him.”
“You don’t know a thing about it,” she insisted. “Charlie agrees with me. He said I was smart to figure it all out, though I used a website.”
Oh. I don’t know a lot about the internet. We only get to use it a bit at school, and since Harry and Aimee came it’s been her and Zak hogging the socket for music downloads and MSN. Maybe if there’s an actual website, it might be true.
“Oh, fair enough,” I seceded. “So what were you and Charlie up to all week, except conspiracising about dead celebrities?”
“Watching Scrubs.” She gestured to her own TV in her own room in that envymaking way of hers, reminding me about how I wasn’t allowed one even though I shared my room with two other people. “He told me he sort-of fancies Elliot, and I know how it’s a battle for the telly at yours, so I thought I’d put it on for him here.”
I did a double-take. Elliot? A man? This whole Boy George thing was getting too real. “Sorry, what? Who’s he?”
“No, Elliott. The woman that goes out with JD. It’s like in Friends, how sometimes they’re together and sometimes not.”
“Oh,” I said again. “I thought you meant a man for a second.”
Kay laughed. “You would. You like, never watch TV. Oh yeah, and Charlie’s starting his own band!”
“What?!” Visions of Pirate Charlie filling stadiums of screaming girls danced in my head. It was a silly dance, which made me giggle faintly.