by Holly Smale
Nat takes it off me and frowns. “Nat and Harriet’s Summer of Fun Flow Chart?”
“Exactly!”
I do a little dance and then gesture at the coloured bubbles: yellow for me, purple for Nat, and – thanks to the nature of the colour wheel – an unfortunate poo brown for everything in between. “I’ve got every detail planned out for maximum fun and entertainment value,” I explain, pointing proudly. “Starting with Westminster Abbey, which is where Chaucer, Hardy, Tennyson and Kipling are buried, and then Highgate Cemetery to visit George Eliot, Karl Marx and Douglas Adams. We’re working our way through dead writers chronologically.”
I’ve focused our Summer of Fun Flow Chart on London because all there is locally is a roller-skate rink and a Mill museum, and as much as I love both wheels on my feet and bread we totally exhausted both of those options before we left primary school.
“The Charles Dickens Museum?” Nat reads slowly. “Glass-blowing in Leathermarket? The Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London?”
She’s impressed. I can tell from how quiet she is and the fact that she’s not making eye contact.
“Amazing, right? They’ve just discovered traces of ancient blue paint on the Parthenon statues at the British Museum, scientifically proving that ancient Greece looked like Disneyland. We can go and see the new exhibition!”
Nat nods a couple of times and scratches at her neck. “Uh-huh.”
I suddenly realise how selfish I sound. “Nat,” I say quickly, “there’s loads of stuff for you on here too. There’s an exhibition on ball gowns at the V&A, and the London College of Fashion are doing a graduate show that I’m sure Wilbur can get us tickets to.”
Toby nods knowingly. “Did you know the Victoria and Albert Museum employs a hawk every summer to discourage pigeons from the gardens?”
“And tonight … I thought we could celebrate together with these!” I pull DVDs of The Devil Wears Prada and David Attenborough’s African documentary from my satchel. “And these!” I pull out some sparkly purple nail varnish and toe-dividers and a pack of Game of Thrones playing cards. “And – wait for it – these!” I pull out a pack of no-calorie caramel popcorn and an enormous chocolate muffin.
Then I look at Toby. “I didn’t forget you,” I add fondly. I hand him a Lord of the Rings Lego set.
“Harriet Manners,” he says solemnly. “I shall begin constructing a YouTube stop-frame video sensation immediately.”
“What do you think, Nat?” I squeak, bouncing up and down on my toes. “Are you ready to start the Most Incredible Summer Of All TimeTM?! I’m calling it MISOAT for short, by the way.”
“Umm,” Nat says, and glances at me then back into the middle distance. All signs of laughter or twirling have completely disappeared. “Toby, can you leave us alone for a second?”
“Girl stuff?” he says wisely. “Natalie, I know all about menstruation. We studied it in biology.”
“Toby.”
“Ah. Not menstruation then.” Toby cocks his head to the side. “Perhaps bras?”
Nat scowls so hard her forehead looks like something out of Star Trek.
“Kittens?”
Just as Nat reaches out a hand to physically throttle him Toby ducks behind a tree.
I guess old stalker habits die hard.
“What’s going on?” I ask nervously. “Have you already seen The Devil Wears Prada?”
Nat’s lips twitch. “Of course I have. It’s not that … I’m so sorry, Harriet. I only found out two days ago. I didn’t want to upset you during exams.”
My stomach tightens into a hard ball. I can already feel our trips to the Natural History Museum and the Imperial War Museum shutting down, like tiny little lights being turned off. “What’s going on?”
“I’m …” and she takes a deep breath. “I’m going to France.”
A couple more bulbs break. “What? For how long?”
“A whole month,” Nat says miserably. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
And – just like that – my entire summer goes completely dark.
rance? What has France got that my Summer of Fun Flow Chart doesn’t have?
A French Home-stay Programme, apparently.
Nat’s mum is making her go, as punishment for catching Nat in Boots when she should have been doing her French GCSE. Nat quickly explains this as her mum pulls up at the kerb alongside us and makes the universal gesture for Get In This Car Right Now, Young Lady.
Then she waves miserably goodbye at us from the back windscreen.
“Harriet,” Toby says, when he comes out from behind the tree two minutes later. “Do you know what this means?”
“No,” I say curtly, because obviously I do.
Don’t say it, Toby, I will him silently. Please. Just don’t say it.
But as always Toby’s ability to read minds, verbal inflections or really-quite-obvious facial expressions remains non-existent.
“It means,” he says – staring at me with eyes like lava lamps, all liquid and glowing – “you’re going to be spending the whole of summer with me.”
OK, I’m going to bed for the next month.
I’ll just spend the next six weeks under my duvet, learning how to embroider hieroglyphics by torchlight. I’ll get Annabel and Dad to whizz up all my food so I can drink it through a straw from under my duvet, like an old lady’s budgerigar. By the time I start A Levels I’ll be the same shape as a mattress, covered in fungus and shrivelled into an even smaller and even more muscle-less mass than normal.
As Robert Burns once wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley” and the same can obviously be said for teenage girls. My plans are aft-agleying all over the shop.
“Harriet?” Annabel shouts downstairs as I slam the front door as hard as I can behind me. “If you’re trying to break all the windows in the house simultaneously, that is an incredibly efficient way to do it.”
“Hey!” I hear my dad say indignantly. “How come Harriet gets complimented for slamming doors when I get in trouble? I demand a retrial.”
“There hasn’t been a trial, Richard,” Annabel laughs, “so we can’t technically ‘re’ anything.”
“Oh, fine, you win again. It’s a good thing you’re about to pop out a mini-me or I wouldn’t be letting you triumph so easily.”
“Thank you, darling. Your gallantry is, as ever, much appreciated.”
I hear a loud cheerful kiss, echoing down the stairs.
“You know,” Dad muses afterwards, “I am pretty gallant. I’m a bit like a modern-day Lancelot. Except with no horse. Why don’t I have a horse, Annabel? How are we expected to be real men these days without horses?”
Yup. If you think that the prospect of creating a new human life has in any way forced my father to grow up even slightly over the last six months you’d be wrong.
There’s a jellyfish called the Turritopsis nutricula, which Marine Biologists say is the only animal in the world that renders itself immortal by reverting back to adolescence every time it starts to age too much. All I’m going to say is: they obviously haven’t met my dad yet.
Let’s just see how long he sticks around.
Throwing my satchel into the corner of the hallway, I start a slow, stompy climb up the stairs. Six months ago they were pretty, white-painted wood; they are now covered in horrible beige, hard-wearing carpet with fiddly stair gates at either end. There used to be a space under the banister where the cat would climb the stairs and headbutt me from eye-level, as a kind of greeting. It’s been blocked up.
There are also fake plug-coverings in all of the plug sockets and padding around the edges of the tables and more gates in doorways, just in case we need to be herded safely from room to room like cattle.
I reach the newly safe and sanitised landing and stare at my parents. “What are you doing?”
“Hello, Harriet.” Annabel is wearing an enormous, elasticated, pin-stripe suit, and is calmly wiping one of my fossils with a cloth. “S
weetheart, why is your face gold? And what on earth happened to your jumper?” She looks down. “I know I’m full of pregnancy hormones, but I’m certain you were wearing two socks this morning.”
“Oh amazeballs!” Dad cries from the study. “You coloured yourself gold! To win an exam! That is creative genius!”
I think my head is about to explode. “I’m serious, what are you doing? You can’t clean fossils, Annabel. You are literally wiping away 230 million years of history!”
“I think this is a coating of dead skin cells and dust mites, actually. When was the last time you dusted these, Harriet?”
I grab the fossil from her. “This is an Asistoharpes! This is 395 million years old! Why don’t you just stick it in the washing machine while you’re at it?”
My stepmother raises her eyebrows in silence.
“I think if it’s survived that long it can handle a bit of wet cloth, don’t you?”
I ignore her and turn to Dad, who is standing on the office chair, trying to get down my collection of books about the Tudors. Every time he reaches for one he swivels slightly and has to hang on to the shelf for balance. “What are you doing?”
“There’s a whole load of stuff here that’s yours, Harriet,” he explains, reaching for a biography of Anne Boleyn and swivelling again. “So we’ve built some more shelves in your bedroom. This is going to be the baby’s room.”
I grab a few of my books off the bed from where they’ve just been thrown, willy-nilly. “This room is called the study, Dad. If this was a room for a baby, it would be called something else!”
“It is, Harriet,” Dad says, laughing. “We just renamed it.”
I can feel every single cell in my body fizzing and bursting like those crackly sweets that pop on your tongue. First Alexa, then Nat, now this. Today isn’t even making an effort to go to plan any more.
“There isn’t room in my bedroom for all my stuff!”
“Then throw some of it away,” Annabel suggests with a tiny smile. She’s cleaning another fossil. “Or we can put it in the attic. Or maybe in the garden. I imagine these rocks would probably be very happy there.”
My throat is getting tighter and tighter. “What do you mean throw it away? You can’t just throw preserved evidence of natural evolution in the bin!”
Annabel puts her hand gently on her enormous straining belly. “Harriet, what’s going on, sweetheart? Did your last exam go badly? What’s the matter with you?”
“Me? What’s the matter with both of you? Baby, baby, baby! It’s all baby, baby, baby!”
“Are you about to start singing Justin Bieber?” Dad asks. Annabel snorts with laughter and then puts her hand guiltily over her mouth.
My head pops.
“Oh my GOD!” I yell. “I hate you, I hate this house and THIS IS GOING TO BE THE WORST SUMMER EVER!”
And with one grand gesture, I burst into tears, sweep every single fossil I can into my arms and storm into my bedroom.
Leaving every window in the house rattling behind me.
Reasons Not to Think About Nick
He told me not to.
I’ve got much more important things to think about.
OK. So maybe I didn’t tell you everything.
I told you the stuff you might tell a teacher, or a neighbour or the old lady who works at the corner shop and won’t stop asking questions. But I didn’t tell you the real stuff. Not the stuff that counts.
I slide down the back of the door and stare blankly at the jumble of fossils now sitting in my lap. Here are some interesting facts I’ve discovered recently about the animal kingdom:
The cuckoo is built with a small dip in its back so that it can toss out the other eggs as soon as it’s born.
Mother pandas only care for one of their cubs, and allow the other to die.
Shark embryos fight and eat each other in the womb and only the winner is born.
Don’t even get me started on what the spotted hyena does to its relations. Trust me, you really don’t want to know.
What I’m trying to say is, I’m incredibly excited about having a new brother or sister. Of course I am. Babies are cute – in a baldy, screaming kind of way – and a really big part of me can’t wait to meet my new sibling and buy it cute little dinosaur T-shirts and a miniature satchel and (eventually) matching crossword puzzles so that we can do them together over breakfast.
But another part of me is anxious.
Literature, history and nature repeatedly remind us that it’s not always TV deals and record contracts and matching outfits when it comes to siblings. If King Lear and the Tudor dynasty taught us nothing else, it’s that you might want to watch your back. Especially if you’re a half-sibling like me. Because if push comes literally to shove, somebody normally ends up getting kicked out of the nest.
Over the last six months, the baby has started taking over everything:
First breakfast streamlined into one topic: did you know that the baby’s heart starts beating after twenty-two days? Did you know that by seventeen weeks it has fingerprints?
Then random questions: do you think it’ll hate mushrooms, like Annabel, or cinnamon, like Dad?
Then it started demanding olive milkshake and ketchup on ice cream and once – to my absolute horror – a bit of the white chalk from my maths blackboard.
People started visiting and walking straight past me to ‘The Belly’.
Annabel started looking tired all the time. Dad started looking anxious and being extraordinarily loud to make up for it.
And the photograph of my mum on the mantelpiece mysteriously moved to the guest bedroom, as if that would help everyone forget what happened to the last person in this house who tried to have a baby.
Or the fact that the baby was me.
And – bit by bit, gate by gate – the house started changing, and my room started feeling smaller, and my parents stopped talking or thinking about anything else.
Then – without warning – Nick dumped me.
So I threw myself into the thing I’d kind of been neglecting for once: schoolwork. I studied at breakfast, lunch and dinner. I studied in the bath, and on the toilet, and on the bus, and in the shower by sketching maths equations into the steam on the glass. I even studied during modelling shoots, as you already know.
Basically, I stuffed my head with facts and formulas and dates and equations and lists and diagrams so there wouldn’t be room for anything else.
But now exams are finished, and school is over.
Nat is leaving for France.
Lion Boy is still gone.
I’m less important to my parents than someone who isn’t even born yet.
And all I can do is sit in my room, staring at my overcrowded new bookshelves and wondering what to do next.
Because that’s the truth about people with obsessively organised plans: we’re not trying to control everything in our lives. We’re trying to block out the things we can’t.
But now there’s nothing left.
Nothing but the baby.
nyway.
By the time I wake up the next morning – owner of the world’s most sparkly pillow – I feel a bit more hopeful. On the bright side, there is no way my life could get any worse.
Last night, everyone else in my year was getting ready to party. Sneaking out of the house in one outfit so they could change into a smaller one. Discussing in excited whispers who was going to kiss who, and who was going to wish they hadn’t. Giggling and laughing and getting ready to celebrate the end of compulsory education in a way they would never, ever forget.
Meanwhile, I was sitting on my bedroom floor on my own, painted gold, crying, with a shredded school jumper pulled over my head. I think that’s pretty much rock bottom, even by my own socially redundant standards.
Things always look better in the morning, though, and by the time I wake up I’m actually quite entertained to discover that I’ve left a trail of damp gold glitter behind me, like an enormous sparkly
fairy.
Hugo’s lying patiently at my feet. I give him a quick cuddle to let him know I’m mentally stable again, then hop out of bed to grab my phone and switch it on. It gets so little activity these days, sometimes I actually forget I have one.
Which is why it’s a bit of a shock when it rings immediately.
“Hello?”
“Ferret-face, is that you?”
I never know what to say to questions like that.
“Hi, Wilbur. It’s Harriet.”
“Oh, thank holy dolphin-cakes,” my agent sighs in relief. “I was starting to think you’d spontaneously combusted. I just read about a man that happened to, Kitten-cheeks. One minute he was washing up and the next minute, POOF. Just a few bubbles and a broken plate.”
I blink a few times. Sometimes talking to Wilbur is like falling out of a big tree: you have to just try and catch a few branches to hang on to on the way down. “Is everything OK?”
“Not enormously, Baby-baby Panda. I’ve left nineteen messages on your answer machine, but you’re a naughty little lamp-post and haven’t answered a single bunny-jumping one of them.”
Sugar cookies. I’d totally forgotten about the mess I made of the shoot yesterday. “Is this about Yuka?”
She’s going to hang-draw-and-quarter me like they did in the sixteenth century. Except she’s going to do it with words instead of a sword and it’s probably going to hurt more.
“It most certainly is, Poodle-bottom. Time is, as they say, of the essential oils. Where have you been?”
I swallow with difficulty. “I-I-I-I’m so sorry, Wilbur.”
“It might be too late now, my little Monkey-moo,” Wilbur sighs. “There are forms to fill in, things to sign, governments to inform.”
They’re going to tell the government? That seems a little bit excessive, even for Baylee. “Please, Wilbur. I won’t do it again.”
“Once is enough, Cupcake-teeth. It normally is.”
I close my eyes and sit heavily on my bed.
I don’t believe this. I actually don’t believe it.
It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning yet; I haven’t even opened the curtains. There’s sleep in my eyes and the imprint of Winnie the Pooh’s nose on my cheek. And it looks like I’ve just been fired.