by Jean Ure
“What’s so special about it, anyway?” I said.
“It’s part of my youth,” said Mum. “Just imagine, Cresta! You’re missing out on so much! You won’t have anything to look back and remember when you’re my age.”
Oh, yes, I shall! I shall remember reading War and Peace.
I am now on page one hundred and forty-three.
Phew!
Monday
(3rd week)
Mum said to me over tea, “Harry and I have been invited to a party on Saturday.”
I said, “That’s nice.”
I know that Mum likes parties. She is a very sociable sort of person, which is one of the reasons I am such a huge disappointment to her. Mum really loves to be with a crowd! I just sort of shrivel. I am one of those people, if ever I go to a party (which mostly I don’t, because no one invites me) who end up standing in the corner with no one to talk to. It makes me feel very self-conscious. Like everyone’s looking at me thinking “Look at that boring girl standing in the corner.” I know that is what Cindy Williams and Tasha Lansmann would be thinking.
I don’t know why it is that I can’t behave the same as other people. Sometimes I really wish I could! I am sure it would make my life a whole lot easier, plus it would make Mum happy and stop her worrying over me. I hate it when she worries!
She started worrying this evening, about the party.
“I really don’t like leaving you on your own! Couldn’t you ask Charlie to come round? Ask her to stay the night!”
I will ask Pilch, as I think it would be quite fun; but as I said to Mum, “I’m fourteen. You don’t have to think you can’t go places, just because of me.”
“I sometimes feel so guilty,” said Mum. “I always seem to be out on the razzle!”
I told her that that was all right, she was obviously a razzling kind of person. I said, “It’s like having a teenager for a mother.”
Mum liked that. She laughed and said, “I still feel like a teenager!” And then she went all sort of regretful and said, “But it ought to be you going out, not me!”
I immediately thought, Oh, please! Don’t start!
She didn’t. Not exactly. She just launched into this speech about being a single mum and how difficult it sometimes was, knowing what to do for the best.
“What I desperately don’t want,” she said, “is to stop you going out and having fun.”
“I do have fun,” I said.
“Yes, but you know what I mean,” said Mum. “I feel you’re missing out on so much! And it bothers me that it might be my fault.”
I said, “It’s not your fault, and I’m not missing out, and in any case we are quite different people.”
Mum said, “Yes! I’m just a fun lover. You’re far more sensible!”
Even if I hadn’t been, she said, there was one thing she had always sworn, right from the beginning, and that was that she would never be an overprotective mother. She looked at me very solemnly as she said this.
“You don’t think I’m overprotective, do you? Tell me, Cresta! Tell me if you think I’m overprotective!”
I said, “No, Mum, I don’t think you’re overprotective.”
All the same, it is just as well, I can’t help feeling, that I keep my thoughts about Carlito under lock and key… Mum would probably have heart attacks if she knew what my imagination got up to!
Tuesday
Asked Pilch about Saturday. She said she’ll have to check with her Mum but she’s pretty sure it will be OK. Cindy Williams overheard us and shrieked, “Hey! Wow! What are you two up to?” And then she cackled and said, “Whatever it is, don’t do anything I wouldn’t!”
I didn’t deign to reply, but Pilch can never resist it.
“We’re having a sleepover,” she said.
“Ooh!” Cindy made her eyes go big. “Just the two of you? Or can anyone join in?”
“I’m afraid we shan’t have room for you lot,” said Pilch. “We’ve invited the local football team round.”
“Oh, wow!” cried Cindy.
I asked Pilch afterwards why she’d gone and said that about the football team, but she didn’t seem to know. It is the silly sort of remark one makes to people such as Cindy. You can’t talk sensibly to them.
This evening I was sitting at the dining-room table doing my homework when I suddenly became aware that the room was filled with vapour. I immediately rushed to the door screeching, “Steam! Steam everywhere!”
Mum was on the phone. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and hissed, “Well, turn the kettle off, then!”
I didn’t even know the kettle was on. I mean, I was doing my homework! I was writing an essay! I can’t be expected to concentrate on two things at once. It was quite uncalled for, what Mum said, about me being wilfully stupid and going round with my head in the clouds thinking I am so superior to everyone else.
I said, “I don’t think I’m superior.”
“Yes, you do!” said Mum. “You exude it at every pore!”
“At least I’m not a dizzy blonde,” I said.
“You can say that again!” said Mum.
She was mad because the bottom of the kettle was burnt out. She went off muttering about yet more expense. Now I suppose I shall have to offer to pay for a new one.
Wednesday
Things are going from bad to worse with me and Mum. Now she says I’ve broken the vacuum cleaner.
All I was doing was pushing it across my bedroom floor, like you’re supposed to do with vacuum cleaners. I mean, that is what vacuum cleaners are for. And the only reason I was doing it in the first place was because Mum said my bedroom looked like a tip. Well! Have I got news for her! If she thinks my bedroom is a tip she should see Pilch’s.
I told Mum this. I said, “You’re only making me clear up because of Pilch coming to stay the night. You’re scared in case she tells her mum we live in a dump. But she wouldn’t, because she wouldn’t even notice! You could grow things in her room.”
Mum said she didn’t care what you could do in Pilch’s room, it was my room she was concerned about. Could I please, she said, just do as she asked and “At least remove a layer of top soil.”
So I lugged the vacuum cleaner upstairs and switched it on and pushed it across the floor, and all of a sudden it was like ping! GRAUNCH dong. Total blow out.
I went on to the landing and shrieked, “Mum! The vacuum cleaner’s stopped working!”
Mum came pounding up the stairs going, “Now what have you done?”
I said, “I haven’t done anything! I only just switched it on.”
She could see I’d only just switched it on from the tiny swathe of carpet that was a different colour from the rest.
“You must have caught something in it,” fumed Mum.
It is always her first reaction - to blame me when anything happens.
Rather coldly I said, “There wasn’t anything to catch. There’s obviously something wrong with the thing. Some fundamental flaw.”
I mean, if you can’t just push a vacuum cleaner across a perfectly flat piece of floor without the thing breaking down, then it has to be faulty workmanship. That’s what I would think. Not, “Oh, it must be Cresta’s fault.” Mum, however, said that it didn’t happen when she pushed it across the floor.
“It’s you!” she said. “Not bothering to look!”
If that is what they choose to think, there is nothing you can do about it. Teenagers are natural victims.
I sat on my bed and watched sourly as Mum upended the thing and peered at it. I know what she was hoping to find. She was hoping to find an elastic band or a pen top or something, so that she could say “I told you so!” Needless to say there wasn’t anything there, so after revving up a few times without any result Mum yanked out the plug and shouted, “First the kettle, now this!”
“Oh, just leave it for Harry,” I said. “He’ll know what to do.”
I couldn’t be bothered with it. I just like stuff to work. Washing
machines, videos, TV sets. Computers. If they don’t, then I get bored. Find someone else to see to them is my motto. I mean, why waste time if you don’t have to? But Mum worked herself into a right old froth and bitingly informed me that, “Men aren’t here to be our servants, you know! We have to learn to shift for ourselves occasionally.”
So we shifted for ourselves and lugged the vacuum cleaner back downstairs and I stood there while Mum took the thing to pieces and nearly electrocuted herself by switching it on and then forgetting to switch it off again while she jabbed inside with a screwdriver, and then she lost one of the screws - which naturally I got blamed for, because she said I was supposed to have been holding them - and finally she took the belt off and couldn’t get it back again, so now it has to be left for Harry after all.
And, of course, it is all my fault.
I don’t like being on bad terms with Mum, but sometimes it seems I just can’t do anything right.
Thursday
Mum and I have made it up. This is because half way through the night I developed a guilty conscience and decided to humour her and do what she wanted, i.e. clean my bedroom. Just for her. So I dusted all the surfaces with a handkerchief and crawled round the floor on my hands and knees using gobbets of spit to get up all the bits of fluff. I confess I am somewhat amazed at how much has accumulated in three short months. I distinctly remember cleaning my room when Nan came.
Housework is a very trivial occupation. However, it pleased Mum and that is the main thing.
Was going to spend the evening reading War and Peace but had a sudden thought about Carlito. He is going to get gored!!! In the bullring!!! He is going to hover ‘twixt life and death and be read the last rites (being a Catholic) and everyone will despair. I am going to lie down and think about it. I must get it worked out for Saturday! If Pilch is going to stay over, we can have a good long session.
Friday
In geography today I was happily pursuing my thought about Carlito when I suddenly became aware of two big hairy hands waving in front of my face. Mr Bunting!
“Is anybody the-e-e-ere?” he goes, in this wailing kind of voice.
His breath smells; I think he smokes. I wouldn’t want to have an affair with him.
When I got home Mum asked if I would like to go down to the pub with her and Harry.
“It’s a lovely evening! We could sit outside, in the garden. Why don’t you come?”
She said it in this beseeching sort of voice. I thought that she was probably trying to make up for being mad about the vacuum cleaner (and the kettle) so I said all right I would go, though I didn’t specially want to. I just feel that if someone offers you an olive branch it is only gracious to accept it. And I do hate Mum and me being cross with each other.
So I put on a sweater and jeans, thinking this would be good pub-going gear and would meet with Mum’s approval, but when I came downstairs her face sort of slithered a few centimetres and she went, “Oh, Cresta! Haven’t you got anything better to wear?”
“You mean, like, my mink stole?” I said. Though as a matter of fact I wouldn’t be seen dead in a mink stole.
“Couldn’t you at least find a different top?” wailed Mum. “Or some jeans that aren’t quite so…” She waved a hand. “Unflattering!”
It’s what I said: I just can’t do anything right. I can’t even put the right clothes on. Whatever I’d have put on, it was bound to be wrong. I’m the wrong sort of daughter. I look wrong, I act wrong. I am just one enormous disappointment.
I think some of my feelings must have shown in my face because Mum suddenly hugged me and said, “Darling, I didn’t mean to have a go at you! But you can look so much prettier if you try!”
I don’t like being a disappointment to Mum. I don’t do it on purpose. So I trailed back upstairs and took off the jeans and sweater and put on a shirt and a pair of trousers, and Mum beamed and said, “There! You see? What a difference it makes!” So then I felt happy because she was happy, and Harry was happy because he’s always happy, he is just a naturally happy kind of person, and that meant we were all happy, and it is nice when everyone is happy. But then…
Then we got to the pub and the whole evil plot was revealed. Mum is so duplicitous it is just not true!
She lured me there, on purpose. It wasn’t because she was trying to make up for being mad. It was because she was trying to pair me off with this boy!
He was sitting there, at the table. My heart just, like, plummeted. I felt like turning round and walking straight out, but I couldn’t as I was sandwiched between Mum and Harry. Mum, all bright and burbling, in tones of utter astonishment, goes, “Steven!” Like she was just so surprised to see him there. Like she hadn’t known all along.
“Steven! How lovely! This is my daughter, Cresta. Cresta, this is Steven. Jo’s son. You know Jo, don’t you?”
Jo is one of her loud shrieking friends. She’s this woman coming towards us dressed in plastic strips. She’s got red hair all piled up like a pineapple, and eyelashes like spokes. She looks about eighteen, but if this boy is her son she can’t be. He’s at least my age.
He’s really geeky. I have to say it. He’s got red hair, same as her. He’s gelled it, so it’s all sticking out in spikes. He’s wearing these goofy glasses with lenses the size of cartwheels, and a white T-shirt out of which his scrawny arms and neck protrude like broom handles. Every time he swallows, which is a lot, his Adam’s apple bobs up and down like a ping-pong ball. He also has this nervous affliction of cracking his knuckles. His knuckles are huge and knobbly. They go off like gunshots; it’s quite alarming. It makes me jump, almost, but nobody else seems to notice. All the rest of them, all Mum and Harry’s friends - Jo in her pink plastic strips, and Beth, who has a bum like two ferrets fighting in a bag, and Lisa that sometimes Mum goes line dancing with, and Derek and Darren and Jools, which are the men that belong to them - they’re all into their laughing-shrieking routine, leaving me and Steven to get on with it. He’s spooky! Like some kind of alien from inner space. He reminds me of a fungus.
It is very wrong to judge people by their looks; I know that. And I try hard not to. But on this occasion I couldn’t help it. I was just so angry with Mum! She has no right to deceive me in this way. It was truly embarrassing! We just couldn’t find a single thing to talk about. In desperation I asked him if he’d ever read War and Peace, and he said no; so then I racked my brains and asked him if he’d read Harry Potter and he said, “You mean that wizard thing?” and I said, “Yes! The wizard thing,” thinking this must indeed be some kind of alien if he has to ask who Harry Potter is.
I said, “It’s not as rewarding as War and Peace” (I am now on page 218) “but it is quite fun.” All he said was, “I haven’t read it,” so that was the end of that sparkling bit of conversation.
It wasn’t until someone mentioned the word computer that he suddenly sprang into life and started to churn on at great length about chat rooms. He told me how he visits this one particular one that is for hamster enthusiasts. It seems he is really turned on by hamsters! Also by chat rooms. He suggested that perhaps we might visit one together some time. I said, “What, you mean like both using the same computer?” I pictured us cosily sitting side by side. But he said, “No! I could use mine and you could use yours, and then we could meet up and chat.”
About what, I ask myself? Hamsters? I told him that in fact we do not have a computer, and his eyes goggled at me behind their saucer-sized lenses. It was like he was now thinking that I must be the one that was some kind of alien. I mean, life without a computer! Wow!
I wonder which is more odd? Not having a computer or not having read Harry Potter? Of course there might be some people that don’t have a computer and haven’t read Harry Potter, though I doubt it. You would practically have to be braindead or live in a cave, I would have thought.
Anyway, from that point on me and Spook sat in this awkward silence, him cracking his knuckles and me gnawing great lumps of flesh out
of the side of my thumb, which is now very sore and bleeding, thanks entirely to Mum. Why does she do these things to me???
At least he didn’t come back with us afterwards. He mumbled something about having to meet people and went loping off, presumably to indulge in hamster talk with some of his hamster chums. I don’t mean to poke fun at hamsters, as I am sure they are very sweet little cuddly things, but I was just so relieved to be rid of him!
Now I have come upstairs to read War and Peace, leaving Mum and Harry and their friends downstairs, where from the sound of things they are playing Mum’s Dawn of Humanity records. Full blast, as usual. I think I may have to invest in some ear plugs.
Saturday
Harry has just told me that the vacuum cleaner is working again. He said, “I took the sock out.”
Triumphantly I turned to Mum and said, “There! I knew Harry would be able to mend it. We could have looked at it all night without realising.”
“Realising what, exactly?” said Mum.
I said, “Well, that the sock could be taken out. I mean, goodness! I wasn’t even aware that vacuum cleaners had socks.”
“They don’t,” said Mum. “This is the sock.” And she held up a mangled-looking object that I recognised (unfortunately) as belonging to me.
“Properly gummed up the works,” said Harry. “Beats me how you managed to get it in there.”
Mum has said that as a penance I can vacuum the whole of the upstairs for her. In the circumstances I feel it is probably best to just get on and do it.
When I have vacuumed, I am going into town to meet Pilch. We shall probably mooch round the shops and look in Paperback Parade, then we can come back here and read each other our latest episodes, and Pilch will stay the night. I am looking forward to it! It will be fun.