by Jean Ure
“A what?” said Mum.
Harry said, “A fish of some kind. It wants to speak to another fish.”
“Oh, you mean Pilch,” I said.
It was his idea of a joke. He knows perfectly well that we call each other Pilch. We have done for years. I remember the day we started doing it. It was when we were really young, like nine or ten, and we had this simply humungous row, and Pilch yelled, “You look like a stupid pilchard!” To which, with immense wit, I instantly retorted, “So do you… you… pilchard!” And we have called each other Pilch ever since.
Rather silly, really, but these things stick. I expect we will still call each other Pilch when we are middle-aged. Sometimes I forget that Pilch is really Charlie. Well, Charlotte, actually, but no one ever calls her that.
So anyway I charged out to the phone and said, “Why are you ringing me at this time of night?” I mean, it is practically unheard of. People simply do not do that sort of thing in Pilch’s house. Unlike Mum and Harry, who behave like teenagers, Pilch’s mum and dad go to bed at reasonable grown-up type hours. Pilch says they are always safely snoozing by eleven o’clock. That is what grown-ups ought to do. Not sit around playing loud music and keeping their children awake till after midnight.
“I wanted to tell you,” said Pilch. “I’ve found some more swear words for you. For Carlito. He could say… caramba.”
I said “What?”
“Caramba,” said Pilch.
I asked her what it meant and she said she didn’t know, but she thought it had to be swearing of some kind. She had just read it in a book.
“In Anna Karenina?” I said, somewhat surprised.
Pilch said, “Well - n-no. Not in Anna Karenina. I’m not actually reading that just at present.”
I said, “Why not?”
“I’ve read nearly a whole chapter!” said Pilch. “How much have you read?”
“More than you,” I said.
It’s true. I have now reached page 55! (It is still rather difficult, but I think maybe this is because the print is so small.)
When I went back to the kitchen, Mum and Harry were grappling with each other over by the cooker. They broke apart in a guilty fashion as I came in. I felt like saying, “Please don’t mind me. I realise that you are in the throes of sexual passion.”
Tasha Lansmann said today that she thinks Mrs Pritchard is having an affair with Mr Bunting. She said that she bumped into Mr Bunting coming out of the library, and that he looked decidedly shifty and was “adjusting his dress”. This is such a disgusting expression! All it means is fiddling with his flies. And it is probably quite untrue. He probably just had an itch in an embarrassing place. Tasha Lansmann sees sex everywhere. All the same, I shall look at Mrs Pritchard most carefully next time I go to the library. These things do happen.
Tuesday
Something intensely annoying. At lunch time me and Pilch had gone to the loo when suddenly there was the sound of the door crashing open and feet clumping in, and it was Cindy Williams and Tasha Lansmann. I could tell it was them by their loud squawking voices.
“So who are you asking?” goes Tasha. “You asking Mel and her crowd?” Cindy says yes, she’s asking practically everybody.
“I want it to be a real rave, you know?”
She’s talking about her birthday party.
“Boys?” says Tasha.
At which Cindy sniggers and says, “What do you think?”
So then they have a bit of a giggling session, then Tasha goes, “What about Ticky and Tocky?” And I freeze, ‘cos this is a name they’ve recently invented for me and Pilch.
“You must be joking!” goes Cindy. “That pair? They’d put the kiss of death on anything, they would!”
Personally I wouldn’t go to Cindy’s rotten party if she fell on her bended knees and begged me, and Pilch says that she wouldn’t, either. All the same, it just goes to show that you cannot be even the teeniest, tiniest bit different without being reviled and cast out. As Harry said the other day, when Mum was going on about the government, “It was ever thus.” Not that that is much comfort.
I just hope they haven’t upset Pilch. She is very sensitive.
Have reached chapter five of War and Peace. The trouble with very thick paperbacks is that you can’t open them wide enough to read the left-hand side of the page properly. It is quite tiresome. But I am going to persist because after all it is a classic.
Wednesday
Went to the library to look at Mrs Pritchard. Also to see if there was a copy of War and Peace that I could borrow that might be easier to read than the one I bought, but there wasn’t so I took out Harry Potter, instead. I am not giving up on War and Peace, but I have come to the conclusion that a diet of nothing but classics is probably a bit indigestible, especially when they are in small print and you cannot read properly on the left-hand side of the page.
Looked hard at Mrs Pritchard but couldn’t see any signs that she was any different from usual, which I think there would be if she were having an affair with Mr Bunting. Whenever Mum takes up with a new bloke it’s like total meltdown. She goes all moony and giggly and starts wearing these utterly unsuitable clothes. Crop tops and miniskirts and stuff that makes me really ashamed to be seen with her. Mrs Pritchard wasn’t in the least bit moony or giggly, she was quite sharp and spiky, the same as always. So I think Tasha was just fantasising.
In any case, it would be entirely too trivial. I mean, Mrs Pritchard is a librarian. She has better things to do with her time. I know Mr Bunting is generally reckoned to be quite hunky, like he has these muscles all bulging out of his arms like waterlogged balloons, and people such as Cindy and Tasha hang around and gawp when he goes running in his shorts. But he teaches geography and has a brain the size of a pea. He is totally illiterate. He once gave me C minus for my geography homework and wrote “Its not good enough Cresta.” Its instead of It’s. And no comma! How could Mrs Pritchard have an affair with a man like that?
I hate geography, anyway.
Thursday
Pilch came into school today very upset as her mum suggested to her last night that maybe she should go on a diet. Pur-lease! Has her mum never heard of anorexia? It is true that Pilch is a bit on the plump side, but so what? That is the way she is made. It is the way she is happy. Why should she go and change her natural basic shape just to satisfy her mum?
Pilch said gloomily that it’s because of her sister being thin as a pin and going out with all these boys, even though she is only twelve and a half.
“Mum thinks I’m being left behind.”
“So she wants you to starve yourself?” I said.
Honestly! What with my mum going on about boys, and now Pilch’s mum wanting her to starve herself, it’s a wonder we’re not both on Prozac.
Pilch said anxiously, “You don’t think I’m fat, do you?”
I said, “No, you’re just well covered, and even if you were fat, what would it matter?”
“I wouldn’t want to be fat,” said Pilch.
I said, “Now you’re just being sizeist! You’re as bad as your mum.”
Pilch said it was all very well for me as I am what she calls “a fashionable shape”. In other words, thin. I said, “That just happens to be the way that nature made me,” and I got on my high horse a bit and started lecturing her about turning herself into a media creation.
Pilch said, “What do you mean, a media creation?”
“Like you read about in the papers,” I said.
I told her that I was sick of young people always being depicted as lame-brained airheads only interested in the opposite sex, head-banging music, designer drugs and clothes.
“Some of us have a bit more going for us than that! We don’t spend all our time gazing into mirrors and tarting ourselves up and going on diets and making ourselves ill. Your mum ought to be ashamed of herself,” I said.
Pilch cheered up a bit when I said this. She confessed that she had lain awake half the night pi
nching bits of flesh between her finger and thumb and wondering whether she ought to give up eating entirely, or at any rate stick to yoghurt and raw carrots.
“It was making me really miserable,” she said, as we stood in the queue for lunch. “And oh, look!” she added. “They’ve got macaroni cheese!”
I don’t really like macaroni cheese that much but I ate some just to keep her company. I think it is important that we stand shoulder to shoulder in this crisis.
Friday
Harry came round. As usual. He and Mum went up to the pub. Also as usual. Mum said, “You don’t mind, Cresta, do you?”
I said, “Why should I mind?”
“Well -” Mum looked at Harry. This sort of “Help me!” look. “It seems so awful! Me going out to enjoy myself while you just mope here with a book.”
“I’m perfectly happy,” I said.
“Yes, I know,” said Mum, “but—”
“You ought to get out more,” said Harry.
I said, “I do get out! I go to school every day. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“There’s no need to be rude,” said Mum.
I wasn’t being rude. But I hate it when they start on at me like I’m some kind of freak! Is it truly so abnormal to want to get somewhere in life? You’d think with all the bad experience Mum has had she would be pleased I don’t gad about, as Nan would say.
Maybe she is scared that I am a lesbian, though what there is to be scared about I really don’t know. It is perfectly acceptable. But anyway, I’m not! If Carlito were to suddenly appear I would gad like crazy. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself! I would do all kinds of unspeakable things. I would snog, I would French kiss, I would probably even have under-age sex… Gulp! It is probably just as well that he is merely a figment of my imagination.
“So! You really don’t feel like joining us?” said Mum.
“Truly,” I said. “I have things to do.”
“Well, all right. We shan’t be late,” said Mum. “We’ll probably all come back here.”
“Yes, and this time,” said Harry, “the nasty old folk will behave themselves. No noise! That’s a promise!”
They’re back here, now. I’m in my room and they’re downstairs, and they are making a noise. It seems they can’t help it. They’re playing music VERY LOUD. But I don’t want to be laughed at again so I’ve just stuffed cotton wool in my ears and am doing my best to ignore it.
It is not easy.
Saturday
Met Pilch in the shopping centre. Bumped into Tasha, on her own, i.e. without Cindy. But with a boy. The boy was Brad Sullivan. So much for Mum’s plan for him and me to get together. Ha! I didn’t want to, anyway. But it intensely annoyed me when Pilch said, “Wow! Where did she get that from?”
I said, “It’s only Brad Sullivan. He lives in my road.”
“Oh! He’s the one your mum wanted you to meet,” said Pilch.
“I don’t need to meet him,” I said. “I’ve already met him. I know him.” Well, I do, sort of. We always say hello.
“He’s kind of cute,” said Pilch.
Cute??? Brad Sullivan??? No way!
“He reminds me of Carlito,” said Pilch.
Indignantly I said, “He isn’t anything like Carlito!”
Pilch said, “I think he is.”
“Well, you can think what you like,” I said, “but he’s not your character, so how would you know?”
She said, “I’m just going by the way you describe him.”
“Well! Ho!” I said. “If I were going by the way you describe Alastair I would think he was a total nerd.”
Pilch’s face suddenly transmuted into this big overripe tomato.
“What do you mean?” she said, all tight and quivering.
“Tall and willowy, lissom of limb and lithe of body, with hair like spun sunshine.” That is, actually, what she wrote. It was so naff that I memorised it. “Anyway,” I said, “if he’s Scotch he’s a Celt, and Celts don’t look like that.”
“Oh?” said Pilch. “So what do they look like, according to you?”
I said, “I know what they look like… short and dark and squat.”
That shut her up! I know it was mean, destroying someone’s fantasy, but it served her right for saying that that stupid Brad Sullivan looked like Carlito. She didn’t talk to me again for another five minutes, until this woman came over to us wanting us to give money for cancer research and we wouldn’t because we once read somewhere that they torture animals, and the woman said, “Suppose you got cancer?” to which Pilch replied, “A principle is still a principle,” which I thought was rather good, and that got us talking again. Me and Pilch never stop talking for very long. We have too much to say to each other!
Mum complains about it, because of the telephone bill. She says, “How you can be at school together all day and then gabble on for hours in the evening, I really do not know.”
It is because we have things to discuss. Important things. School things, work things, book things. Things about Alastair and Carlito! Pilch and I have always talked. Back in Year 7 Ms Martin used to say, “Cresta McMorris and Charlotte Peake. I want you at opposite sides of the room.” But even then we used to pass notes!
And then we had our secret language that no one but us could understand. IBBY language. We used to put an Ib after the first letter of every word - unless it began with a vowel, in which case we put an N in front of it. Verree complicated! But we got so’s we could rattle it off.
That was when we were in Juniors. I can’t do it now. Unfortunately. If I could, I would go up to Cindy and Tasha and yell, “Sibtupid miborons!” And I’d do a rude gesture to go with it.
Came back here with Pilch to read our latest episodes and found the whole place pulsating.
“Oh, God,” I said, “they’re at it again!”
“At what?” said Pilch.
I said, “Playing their music!”
As soon as me and Pilch appeared, Harry very ostentatiously turned the volume down.
“Sorry,” he said. He put a finger to his lips. “Old folk being noisy again!”
“What is it?” said Pilch.
Mum, foolishly beaming, said, “They were my favourite group when I was young.” She held out a record sleeve. She has become a real vinyl nut since meeting Harry. It seems CDs aren’t loud enough, or something. “Look!”
Pilch took the sleeve with this air of naive wonderment.
“It’s a record,” she said.
“I know! Isn’t it brilliant?” said Mum. “This album came out on my sixteenth birthday!”
“And it’s still playable,” said Harry. “Who said records don’t last?”
Pilch was staring, like, transfixed, at the sleeve. It was green and purple, with swirly bits.
She said, “Dawn of Humanity… is that the name of the group or of the album?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” said Harry.
“It’s the name of the group,” said Mum. She snatched back her precious sleeve. “Please don’t tell me you’ve never heard of them!”
“Mum,” I said, “things have moved on.”
Mum sniffed. A bit huffy. “Fat lot you’d know about it,” she said. “Spend your life with your head buried in a book.”
I grumbled to Pilch as we came upstairs.
“It’s horrible,” I said. “They play it all the time.”
“I think it’s fun,” said Pilch.
“You wouldn’t,” I told her, “if you were trying to read War and Peace”
Pilch said she didn’t expect, if she were trying to read War and Peace, she would find anything much fun.
“They’re really hard going, aren’t they?” she said. “These Russian things?”
“They’re classics,” I said.
“Yes, I know,” said Pilch; and she heaved this big sigh.
Pilch worries me sometimes. She doesn’t seem as committed as she used to be. I know it was my idea that we should read the classics, bu
t she agreed with me. I didn’t force her. I just felt we ought to tackle something a bit - well! Worthy. Of course I have already done Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice; Pilch has only seen them on the telly. Anna Karenina is the first classic she has ever tackled.
Maybe she just needs a bit of a breathing space. I am not going to nag as I feel that would be counterproductive. I will just wait and see what happens.
Sunday
Drove over to Wimbledon Dog Track with Mum and Harry. Not, alas, to see greyhounds but to look for vinyl at this record fair that’s held there.
Record fairs, it seems, are full of the weirdest people! Strange anoraky men clutching big bags and long lists of the stuff they’re looking for. They speak in these nerdy, high-pitched voices and they loom over you and breathe over you as you go through the records. And when they find one they think they might want, they take it out of its sleeve and hold it up to the light and peer at it this way and that way, sometimes through a magnifying glass. If they discover even the tiniest mark, totally invisible to the naked eye, they point it out, with great earnestness, to the person that’s selling it.
“Look at this,” they go, in their nerdy flutey voices. “There’s a mark about half a centimetre in. Can you see it? Just there, where my finger is… is it fly doings, or is it a scratch?”
I didn’t know that flies did things on records but apparently they do. And then it sticks and causes the needle to go thunk or to fly into the air.
I looked in vain, amongst all the anorakys, for anyone resembling Carlito. I look for boys who look like Carlito everywhere I go! They are very rare in this part of the world, though I did see a pizza delivery boy the other day who looked like him from a distance, only when I got close he turned out to be all nerdy and spotty. A big disappointment! But I live in hope.
Mum, meanwhile, lives in hope of finding this one particular album called Driftwood.
“If you come across it,” she told me, “buy it! No matter what the price.”
She gave me some money and sent me off, but I didn’t find it, and nor did she or Harry. I looked ever so hard! I mean, I do like to make her happy if I can. I waded through stacks and stacks of grungy old fly-spattered records, but it wasn’t there.