Weird

by Jeremy Strong

‘We’ve had a fall. What was that word? Oh yes – a bummer. Some of the roof came down last night. That’s the problem with tunnels. It’s difficult to find roof props. Zimmer frames are the best. My husband told me how to do it. Jack knew, you see. He’d worked on two in the war.’

  ‘Two?’

  Mrs Kowalski nodded proudly. ‘He was shot down and ended up in a POW camp. He joined an Escape Committee and they tunnelled out, six of them. Four got away but Jack and a friend were recaptured. Later they tried again, and then the war finished. He talked about it a lot, told me how they did it. Now it’s our turn.’

  ‘I thought you were digging it on your own?’

  Mrs Kowalski shook her head. ‘Oh no. I couldn’t do it by myself. Madame Dupont is helping me. She’s French, you know.’ I nodded and Mrs Kowalski went on. ‘She was in the Resistance during the war, getting escaped prisoners out of France and blowing up ammunition trains. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Cool!’

  ‘Oh yes. I don’t suppose you could get me a spade? It would help so much with the digging.’

  ‘How do I get it into the building?’

  ‘You must think of something,’ said Mrs Kowalski. ‘Use your noddle. There’s a war on.’ She winked at me and slipped silently back into the shadows.

  Great. More problems. Smuggle a spade into Marigolds. As if wondering what to do about Fizz coming back to my house wasn’t enough. How was I going to get out of that? Life in all its glory. And then it came to me.

  Fizz

  Late again this morning. Air-bags had a good go at me, but I was way ahead of her and had my excuse ready. ‘The taxi didn’t turn up,’ I explained.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I hadn’t ordered one.’

  Well, I thought it was funny. Hey, it was, come on! When I know I’m in trouble I have this dreadful compulsion to tell jokes. I guess I’m trying to make people laugh and forget about what I’ve done. The problem is, I can’t remember it ever actually working and it didn’t work this time either. But then anything I said to Matron was bound to be wrong, so in for a penny, in for a pound.

  ‘I’ll have to tell the Major,’ she said, when quite clearly she didn’t have to at all. She was enjoying getting me into trouble. And why did she keep threatening me with her air-bags? I shrugged. What else could I do? Beg for my life? The morning was turning into a complete disaster zone and I was the centre of it.

  After lunch I went off to find Madame Dupont. She always cheers me up.

  ‘How I wish I were young again.’ That’s what she said when she saw me.

  ‘Why do people say that?’ I asked. ‘I want to be older.’

  ‘And when you get older you want to be younger. We are never satisfied. But I see you now and I wish I could dress like you, with your miniskirts and your short-cut tops. I bet all the boys stare at you.’

  ‘Huh!’

  ‘Oh! C’est Mademoiselle Mécontente!’ She laughed and patted my arm, then translated, thank goodness, because my French is just the same as the French they have in France – incomprehensible. ‘Miss Grumpy. So, why the long face? Is it that boyfriend of yours?’

  ‘That’s the trouble. He’s not my boyfriend. I wish he were, but I think he’s in love with someone else.’

  ‘Ooh lè lè! That is sad. Who is she, this little minx that has your boyfriend’s heart?’

  ‘My sister. Lauren.’

  ‘Ooh lè lè!’ repeated Madame Dupont.

  ‘She’s seventeen,’ I added pithily, and Madame Dupont sighed deeply. As well she might.

  ‘She’s seventeen and has proper boobs, not little squashed things like Yorkshire puds that have gone wrong, and she’s… she’s… really beautiful!’ I burst out.

  Madame Dupont folded me in her arms and held me tight while I tried so, so hard not to cry, and I didn’t. She rocked me back and forth and it was like she could feel my heart thundering away and she was waiting until it all went calm. Finally she let go and looked carefully at my face. She took off my glasses and wiped away the tears I was sure I hadn’t cried and studied me again.

  ‘But he is mad,’ she murmured. ‘There is no doubt. He is mad. You are a beautiful girl and soon you will be a beautiful woman and don’t let anyone tell you anything different. You have spirit. Isn’t that why they call you Fizz?’

  ‘Actually, it’s short for Felicity,’ I explained, and Madame Dupont shook her head.

  ‘No, no. It’s Fizz because you are so fizzy,’ and she laughed, and when she said it like that, with her French accent, it sounded so good, so cool. It made me smile.

  ‘I must have words with your boy,’ said Madame.

  ‘Don’t tell him I told you!’

  ‘Of course not,’ she snapped back. ‘But I think maybe you – he – you both need a little help.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea whatsoever,’ said Madame, and we both burst out laughing. ‘Maybe you have some time together on your own?’

  ‘We have to write a daily report for school. We’re going back to his house this afternoon.’

  ‘Good. Then pay him some attention. Don’t tell him how handsome he is, or that you love him. If you say those things he will vanish for sure, fwitttt, like an Olympic runner. Tell him he looks tired. Rub his back for…’

  ‘… a massage!’ I cried. What a brilliant idea. That was something I could actually do. My mum does run a beauty parlour, after all.

  ‘Yes,’ said Madame Dupont. ‘I think that will help him forget your sister.’

  ‘He’s going to be blown away!’

  ‘You be gentle with him,’ she warned. ‘Take it slowly.’

  I could hardly wait to start and the rest of the afternoon was such a drag. It came to an end at last and Josh and I set off for his house.

  ‘So where exactly do you live?’ I asked.

  ‘I had a good idea,’ he said, striding ahead. ‘We’ll go to the library to do the project.’

  ‘The library!’

  ‘Yes. Then if we need to look anything up, we can.’

  ‘The library?!’

  ‘Yes. Come on.’

  I stopped dead. All my plans were being piled on the bonfire and were about to go up in flames. I had to stop this somehow. I pulled at his arm.

  ‘We can’t,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We can’t because, because, because I’ve been banned.’

  ‘You’ve been banned from the library? What did you do?’

  Good question. I desperately tried to think of a good answer to go with it.

  ‘I made a noise.’

  ‘You don’t get banned for making a noise. Don’t talk rubbish.’

  He turned to go and I yanked at his arm again. ‘I did. I made a noise and I got banned.’

  ‘Oh yeah, right. So what sort of noise got you thrown out?’

  ‘I screamed.’

  Josh just looked at me. I could see he didn’t know whether to believe me or not, and I’m not surprised because I didn’t believe me either.

  ‘They wouldn’t throw you out just because you screamed,’ he said.

  Huh! What would he know? This was making me cross and I grabbed his arm again. ‘Listen, Mr Know-All, I screamed, right? I saw a mouse and I screamed. It ran out from under a huge, ginormous bookcase – you know, like they have in libraries –’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know libraries have bookcases,’ growled Josh.

  ‘Right, and it was huge, this bookcase, and the mouse ran out and I leaped back and banged straight into an old man and then we both fell back against another ginormous bookcase and it toppled over and hit another bookcase and the two went down kind of like dominoes, right? Big mess. Horrendous. Books everywhere. So I got banned.’ I looked at Josh to see if he’d bought it.

  ‘What happened to the mouse?’ he asked.

  ‘What mouse? Oh, the mouse! It escaped.’

  Josh looked really tired now. Great.

  ‘I’m not allowed in,
’ I added, in case he hadn’t got the message. ‘I’m sorry, but it doesn’t matter. We can go to your house, like we planned.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m working with someone who got thrown out of a library.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s quite an achievement really. They should give me a certificate, or a badge, you know, like when you’re a Girl Guide.’

  ‘I’ve never been a Girl Guide.’

  ‘Shame,’ I said. ‘That was the one thing missing from Girl Guides.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Boys. Now, which way to your house?’

  Report for Tuesday by

  Josh Cameron and Felicity

  Foster-Thompson

  Josh had a brainwave. Dad. They’d go to his dad’s house. Josh had his own key and Dad would still be at work. It was only a couple of streets away and it was clean, tidy and quiet. Nobody would be there. It was perfect. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. A wave of relief swept through him. The only problem now was that they had to walk down his own road and past his real home to get to Dad’s. He hoped Mum wouldn’t spot them. It was a risk he’d have to take. He crossed his fingers.

  As they passed his house Sheba lunged at the gate and barked furiously. One of the goats stared out at them from the front-room window.

  ‘Hey!’ cried Fizz. ‘That must be where Wacky-Woman lives.’

  Josh cringed. Wacky-Woman. Was that what they called his mother? His face flushed with shame and anger. Wacky-Woman? He jumped to her defence.

  ‘All she does is look after strays and sick animals. Somebody has to.’

  ‘Yeah, but she’s weird,’ laughed Fizz. ‘And she’s a lezzie.’

  Josh stopped dead and shouted. ‘You are SO STUPID. You don’t know anything, do you? You just shout your mouth off saying stupid things.’

  Fizz took several steps back, eyes wide. ‘OK, OK, it’s a joke, all right?’

  ‘No, because jokes are funny and that wasn’t, it was sick. You can’t just say things about people that aren’t true. Suppose someone believes you?’

  ‘That’s why it’s a joke,’ Fizz hit back. ‘Nobody believes a joke.’

  ‘OK, so suppose, just suppose, that someone says your mum is a lezzie. How would you feel about it?’

  ‘I’d think they were stupid, because she isn’t.’

  Josh folded his arms and looked at her. Fizz stared back at him. A faint flush came to her cheeks and she frowned momentarily. ‘OK, I’m stupid, but she is definitely weird. I mean, did you see that goat looking at us? It was in the front room.’

  ‘So?’ Josh started walking again, rather pleased with himself.

  Fizz trailed behind. ‘I really don’t get you,’ she called after him. ‘Sometimes you’re completely uptight and straight and then you act like goats in the front room are OK.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. She’s doing a proper job looking after sick animals. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Not in the front room! You don’t put goats in the front room!’

  Josh stopped. ‘Why not?’ he snapped.

  ‘Because that’s where you put the television, stupid.’

  Josh burst out laughing. ‘You are something else,’ he said. ‘That takes the biscuit, that does. You can’t put a goat in your front room because that’s where the telly goes? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No. No, not only the television, but lots of reasons like, like they might do a whoopsie on the carpet and they might want to sit on the armchairs and the sofa and leave their hairs all over the place and before you know it they’ll be putting their feet up on the coffee table and eating TV dinners and snatching the remote control and demanding to watch boring animal programmes and soon they’ll be taking over the whole house and sleeping on your bed and they’ll probably mate and have lots of little goats and then they’ll throw you out of house and home and before long they’ll have formed the next government and taken over the world and the world will be ruled by goats.’ Fizz looked up at him and smiled. ‘No offence, Goat.’

  Josh was astonished. Apart from a bit of exaggeration here and there Fizz had painted an almost complete picture of life in his house. He couldn’t think of an answer. And the way she called him Goat at the end made him realize something else. Everyone at school, even Charlie, called him Goat. But hearing Fizz emphasize it like that made him aware that she’d never called him Goat. She always called him Josh. He was confused. ‘Come on, let’s get on so we can write up this wretched project.’

  Fizz didn’t think much of what she assumed was Josh’s house. It was empty and lifeless. There was nothing on the walls. It was all too clean, like those demonstration rooms in furniture stores – the kind of room where you die of boredom within twenty seconds.

  ‘They ought to put the wrinklies in here,’ she muttered.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It would put them out of their misery. They’d give up the will to live and die on the spot.’

  Josh found himself surprised, again. He’d never found anything wrong with Dad’s house. Maybe it was because he needed a strong antidote to his own home. He liked coming here, to the peace and quiet, where he knew where everything was because it didn’t get eaten by goats or buried by dogs or sat on by sleeping tortoises. He went to the computer.

  Tuesday

  Today we did the same as yesterday. Is this what the wonderful world of work is like? At school every new day is much like the day before. Go to lesson. Break. Go to lesson. Lunch. Go to lesson. Games. Go home. At Marigolds it’s like this: Put out soap and toilet rolls. Make tea. Break for tea. Do washing-up. Put out more soap. Clean baths and basins. Lunch. Clean more baths and basins. Do more washing-up. Put out toilet rolls. Go home. Day after day.

  We do not feel that the experience of work experience we are experiencing is particularly beneficial. When we leave school we are not going to work in an old people’s home. Felicity is going to be a singer in an all-boy band (somehow), and I am going to work in space.

  ‘You’re a girl,’ Josh said. ‘How will you get into an all-boy band?’

  ‘You’re so picky, aren’t you? I could have a sex-change operation. What about you then? An astronaut? In your dreams! Building a rocket, are you?’

  Josh opened his mouth and closed it. He’d almost said yes, he was. But he didn’t. He didn’t trust her, especially after the things she’d said about his mother.

  ‘Listen, by the time I’m in my twenties space travel will be normal. Lots of people will do it and anyone who goes into space is an astronaut. That’s where I want to work. Out there, among the stars.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Fizz, and went quiet. She stood behind him and they both stared at what Josh had written. Josh’s brain seemed to congeal inside his skull. He couldn’t think of any more. Fizz gazed over his shoulder. She wanted to put her hand in his hair and ruffle it up, but didn’t dare. She remembered her conversation with Madame Dupont.

  ‘You look tired,’ she suggested.

  ‘Really?’ Josh was taken aback, because it was true, he was tired. He felt her hands on his shoulders. She began kneading, digging her thumbs and fingers into the flesh above his shoulder blades. Surprise gave way to submission. Behind his back, Fizz smiled. Her thumbs worked on the base of his neck. Josh lowered his head and closed his eyes.

  ‘Good?’ she murmured, after a couple of minutes.

  ‘Mmmm. Where did you learn how to do that?’

  ‘Mum does it to all of us – me, Dad, Lauren.’

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Sorry,’ Fizz said quickly. Speaking her big sister’s name had made her lose concentration for a second. She wanted to ask Josh about Lauren and had to press her lips together hard and remind herself of what Madame Dupont had said.

  ‘We’ve got to finish this report,’ muttered Josh.

  Fizz stopped. ‘OK, my turn, shove your bum off that seat.’

  Here are some of the surprising things we have learned
while working at Marigolds.

  1. The only dishwasher they have is me. You really would expect a twenty-first-century home catering for a large number of people to have a dishwasher, wouldn’t you? What is wrong with them? Are they so stingy they think they can’t afford one? If they bought one they would save money because they wouldn’t have to pay me – not that they do pay me, which they jolly well should – but they have to pay the person who normally washes them when they are not taking advantage of the slave labour provided by the local schools Work Experience programmes.

  2. The staff of Marigolds do not seem to like us trying to broaden our knowledge of working with old people. For example, Josh and I spent part of the morning trying to familiarize ourselves with the workings of the hydraulic bath hoist. Instead of praising our efforts we were chastised…

  Josh couldn’t help laughing. ‘Chastised? Where on earth did you get that from?’

  ‘Mrs Taylor, of course. She’s good on words.’

  … by the staff and told to get on with far less interesting work. How can we possibly learn anything in such an environment?

  ‘You’re giving your vocabulary a bit of a workout,’ Josh admired. Fizz blushed.

  ‘I remembered what you said yesterday, when you complained about my writing being crap and you rewrote it and made it sound all flowery.’

  Now Josh reddened. ‘I didn’t say it was crap. It was only some of the words you used.’

  ‘Exactly, so now I have given you “chastised” and “environment”. I’ll check the number. Three hundred and thirty-four. What else can we put?’

  ‘It would be really good to say something about Mrs Kowalski and the tunnel but it might get her into trouble, me too after hiding that spoon for her. Which reminds me, she wants me to get her a spade. How am I going to smuggle a spade into Marigolds? I’ll never get it past Air-bags.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ offered Fizz. ‘There’s one in the shed. It only ever gets used once in a blue moon.’

  ‘How will you do it?’

  ‘I’ll think of something.’

  Josh didn’t doubt it. If there was one thing Fizz was good at, it was thinking up hare-brained ideas, like trying out bath-hoist equipment for example. He gazed down at the computer screen, wondering what else they could write.