How To Get What You Want by Peony Pinker

by Jenny Alexander

  ‘I didn’t say your advice was bad,’ Mum pointed out. ‘Just that it might not be the kind of thing the real Daphne would say.’

  ‘The real Daphne is missing,’ Dad declared. ‘Noone has any idea where she is. She is a person who hasn’t even got the common sense to find her way into work or phone in sick if she can’t make it. I, on the other hand, am a practical and down-to-earth person. My advice is full of common sense. It’s a breath of fresh air after Daphne’s airy-fairy wafflings and Ed is going to love it!’

  Chapter 5

  Choc-chip cookies and shoe-box beans

  Sunday was a nice day. I didn’t have to worry about Lollie any more, Dad was in a whistling mood because he’d decided that being Daphne wasn’t going to be too hard after all, Mum only worked till lunch-time and, the icing on the cake, Primrose and Bianca spent the whole day at the beach.

  Mum said, ‘Why don’t you ask a friend round?’ but I like being on my own. Primrose says that makes me a Sad Loner. Just because she’s a Sad Best-Friend-Addict.

  Anyway, I took a stack of toast up to my bedroom and read the rest of the stories in my book about Amazing Dogs. Then I found some pictures of dogs on the internet and printed them off for my wall. That brought the number of breeds I had up to 37, all lined up in neat rows in the space between the door and the bookcase.

  I lay down on my bed and looked at them, one by one. Just looking at them always made me feel happy. Feeling happy, I started to wonder whether Mum and Dad could be right. Perhaps, I was just making a fuss about Primrose and Bianca. The only problem really was the hour and a half after school before Mum or Dad got home. Could it really be as bad as all that?

  OK, so maybe Primrose and Bianca said mean things to me and hogged the TV, but I wasn’t scared of them. I was careful around Bianca but that was just sensible, like when a new dog comes into the kennels and you know it’s got a history of biting.

  You don’t aggravate a biter, and Bianca actually does bite if the stories about her are true. Ellie in my class says she bit her big sister in a fight over some boy in Year 9. She saw the tooth-marks and everything.

  I had settled into thinking I should put up and shut up by the time Primrose and Bianca came back from the beach. But the first thing Bianca said to me was, ‘Lost any more dogs today, Pea-brain?’ She laughed and Primrose joined in. How could they, when they knew how upset I had been all the time Lollie was missing?

  All the mean things they had ever said to me came flooding back, and then I knew that Mum and Dad were wrong. No-one should have to put up with people being horrible to them like that, even if they can cope with it, even if it might blow over soon.

  Becky was right – I had to make Mum and Dad understand just how mean Bianca and Primrose were being. But this time, I needed to choose my moment better.

  I went to my bedroom to think about it. I could see Mum and Dad from my window. They had moved two garden chairs into the small patch of sunshine in the corner of the yard and were sitting there, drinking tea. They weren’t busy or stressing about work today. Could the perfect time be now?

  Yes, I thought, it could! But you know what it’s like when you’ve decided to tell your mum and dad something really big and important. You want to work out the best way to say it first. The words fall into all different sentences inside your head like lottery balls that aren’t quite making the right combinations.

  In the end you wander half-heartedly out into the back yard, hoping that by the time you get there you’ll know exactly how to put it, but before you can open your mouth your mum says, ‘Would you like one of these?’

  Mum handed me a bag of cookies. ‘Bianca brought them for us from her uncle’s shop,’ she goes.

  ‘She’s a nice girl, isn’t she?’ says Dad.

  The cookies were those lovely big chewy ones with white choc chips, but I shook my head. If I tried to eat one I knew I would choke on it. Mum and Dad looked at each other in surprise. ‘Are you feeling all right, Peony?’ they said.

  No, I was not feeling all right. I couldn’t try to tell again now, not while they were in full gush about how great Bianca was. The perfect moment had been snatched away. I felt like someone who had got the winning number and then lost the ticket down the drain.

  ‘This yard could be quite nice if we got some proper plants in it,’ said Dad.

  ‘What do you mean, proper plants?’ Mum bristled.

  ‘Ones that aren’t half-dead and droopy. In fact,’ goes Dad, ‘how come all the plants at the Green Fingers Garden Centre keep keeling over?’

  Mum frowned. It was a bit mysterious, she agreed. And even more mysterious that as soon as she brought them home they started to get better.

  ‘Of course, the ones indoors do best,’ she said. ‘The front of the house is so sunny, and plants need plenty of sunlight.’

  ‘People need sunlight too,’ said Dad.

  This was something he mentioned from time to time but he wasn’t one to waste his energy having full-on arguments. It always made me think of that science experiment you do at school when you grow one lot of beans in a jar on a sunny window-sill and another lot in a shoe-box in the dark. The window-sill beans grow green and bushy, but the shoe-box beans grow long and spindly, and as pale as a piece of string.

  In our house, Mum’s plants got the window-sills and blocked the sunlight out, so we were like the beans in the shoe box. I hoped Mum knew what she was doing.

  ‘People can move around,’ laughed Mum. ‘If we aren’t getting enough sunlight we can always go and find some.’

  ‘Good idea,’ goes Dad. ‘Let’s dig out the Frisbee and hit the beach.’

  They made me go too. Mum and Dad love playing games but grown-ups mostly don’t play games on their own, so they always want me or Primrose to join in. That way, they can pretend they’re only doing it for us.

  As we walked down to the beach, the three of us, I kept thinking, ‘If only it could always be just Mum and Dad and me.’

  Chapter 6

  The Day of the Triffids and Mr Kaminski’s very green greenhouse

  The mystery of the sick plants was solved the very next day. Mum came home from work fuming. She dumped her bag and stormed straight back up the zigzag path with the wheelbarrow. As soon as she arrived back, Primrose and Bianca shot through on their way to the beach like rats leaving a sinking ship.

  ‘Give me a hand with these spider plants, Peony,’ said Mum. No ‘please’ or anything. Charming!

  There were eight of them, so we had to make several journeys up and down the steps. We put them on the kitchen floor, just inside the door. They looked like a giant-size shaggy brown doormat that had gone nuts and sprouted.

  ‘Aren’t they supposed to be green?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, they’re supposed to be green!’ snapped Mum. ‘And they used to be green. Oh, they used to be green, all right! They used to be super-green because that’s the way we make them at the Green Fingers Garden Centre!’

  I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. I backed towards the stairs muttering about it being nearly Neighbours time. But Mum was bursting to tell someone and I was the only someone around. There was no stopping her.

  ‘Harold was off work today so I had to do the watering. “Give them a double dose of Magic Max Plant Food with it,” goes Mr Pryce. “But they only had some yesterday,” I tell him.’

  I tried to look as if I had a clue what she was on about.

  ‘You’re only supposed to feed plants once a week,’ Mum explained impatiently. ‘It seems we’ve been feeding all the plants every single day! We’ve been force-feeding them so they’ll look super-healthy and sell quickly but if they don’t sell they get stressed out and die of exhaustion.’

  ‘So when you bring them home,’ I ventured, ‘they get better all on their own because you aren’t feeding them?’

  ‘Got it in one,’ said Mum.

  ‘Didn’t you tell Mr Pryce that feeding them so much is killing them?’

&nb
sp; ‘Of course I did. But he said, “I don’t give a flying fig – they’re plants, not pets!” And then he told me that if I didn’t like it, I could leave.’

  ‘So… are you going to leave?’

  ‘I wish!’ said Mum. ‘And I would, if we didn’t need the money.’

  I put the kettle on. Mum loves it when I make her a cup of tea and I thought it might calm her down. I put two mugs out, then added a third because I heard Dad coming down the path. He took the steps two at a time and burst in. He had to swerve to miss the spider plants.

  ‘Not again, Jan!’ he cried. ‘This can’t go on. It’s like the Day of the blooming Triffids in this house!’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. ‘What’s a triffid?’

  ‘Nothing,’ goes Mum. ‘Dad’s being silly.’

  Dad ignored her, and said to me, ‘The Day of the Triffids is a book about some plants that take over the whole world.’

  We both looked at Mum.

  ‘Oh, all right!’ she said. ‘I’ll put them outside.’

  Dad pointed out that there wasn’t any room outside. The yard was already chock-a-block and anyway, she’d have to get them past the half-dead cheese-plant by the back door first.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve seriously had enough! They’ve all got to go!’

  ‘Go where?’ Mum demanded.

  ‘Not my problem,’ goes Dad. ‘And if it was, I wouldn’t know the answer anyway. It seems I don’t know the answer to anyone’s problems. Not according to my look-at-me-suddenly-I’m-a-lifestyle-expert editor!’

  Mum seized the opportunity to change the subject from plants to problems.

  ‘So he didn’t like your first Dear Daphne page, then?’ she said.

  ‘According to him, even though it’s true you can’t always have what you want, that isn’t what people expect to hear. They expect to hear they can have what they want. When I said that was just plain stupid, he gave me a heap of Daphne’s books and a list of websites and told me to do some research.’

  Research sounded a bit like hard work. No wonder Dad wasn’t happy. Mum tried to keep him talking while she subtly moved the spider plants towards the edge of the room with her foot. Out of sight, out of mind.

  But Dad wasn’t having any of it. ‘Those pathetic specimens have got to go,’ he said. ‘I’m not backing down this time. They have to go, and so do all the rest. End of.’

  I noticed a movement outside the back windows. It was Mr Kaminski shuffling up his garden path. He was wearing the same old cardigan he always wore that his wife knitted for him the winter before she died. It had a button missing and a hole in the elbow with bits of wool dangling down.

  ‘I’ve got an idea!’ I exclaimed. ‘We could ask Mr Kaminski if he’d mind us using his greenhouse. There’s nothing in it and there’d be loads of room.’

  Mr Kaminski’s garden rose steeply up the slope behind our house and we could see his greenhouse from our back windows. It was quite big, and literally green. The glass panes were green, with ridges of moss growing along the edges. It looked old and uncared-for, like the rest of the garden. Like Mr Kaminski himself.

  Dad looked keen. Mum looked doubtful.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Mr Kaminski keeps himself to himself these days. What if he doesn’t want us to use his greenhouse, but feels too embarrassed to say no?’

  ‘I’d say that’s a result,’ said Dad.

  He looked her straight in the eye. My dad, who was always so laid back, was fired up and determined to dig his heels in. Mum looked as surprised as I was. She seemed to think about it for a few minutes. Then she suddenly decided that, as he wasn’t going to back down, she would have to. Or at least, she’d have to humour him until he’d had time to calm down.

  ‘OK, I’ll ask him next time I see him.’

  ‘You can see him right now,’ said Dad. Then, as she still didn’t move, he added, ‘Or I’m free right now for a trip to the dump.’

  Mum frowned. She couldn’t get out of it. She went out into the yard and coo-eed Mr Kaminski over the fence. We saw them talking but we couldn’t hear what they were saying. After a few minutes, she came back inside.

  ‘He said yes!’ she announced.

  ‘Fantastic!’ goes Dad.

  ‘So I said, when could we move the plants in, and he said, whenever we’re ready.’

  ‘Double fantastic!’ goes Dad.

  ‘So then I said, “That’s handy because Dave’s really keen and he’s told me he’s free right now. He’ll be straight round with a brush and a bucket.”’

  ‘What, me?’ goes Dad, scandalised. ‘Why can’t you do it? They’re your plants.’

  ‘I can’t do it because I’ve invited Mr Kaminski round for supper. It seemed the least we could do.’

  She pulled her recipe book out and started flicking through it.

  ‘I’m sure Peony will give you a hand if you ask her nicely!’

  Chapter 7

  How to get what you want and Mum’s famous gooseberry crumble (these two things are not related)

  Mr Kaminski’s garden was like a jungle. Dad said that somewhere underneath all the overgrown bushes and weeds there had once been a pond, a birdbath, two stone angels and a patio.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Kaminski used to sit out here all the time,’ he said. ‘We often got chatting over the garden wall. But when his wife died, Mr Kaminski went into his shell.’

  It made me think of a sad old snail.

  ‘Do you think he might come out of his shell again one day?’ I asked.

  Dad nodded. ‘I reckon this might be just the nudge he needs.’

  Mr Kaminski did come outside to watch for a while as we cleared all the rubbish out of the greenhouse. He said he had some planks we could use to rig up some shelves if we needed more space.

  Mr Kaminski spoke with a foreign accent and his voice was very quiet. I couldn’t remember ever hearing him speak before, so maybe us borrowing his greenhouse really might have given him the nudge he needed to come out of his shell, like Dad said. But knowing what our family mealtimes could be like, asking him to supper might just nudge him right back in.

  On the upside, Bianca couldn’t stay and eat with us because it was her brother’s birthday. On the downside, Mum had decided to cook a quiche. Mum’s pastry is bad enough even if you’ve got all your teeth, but I could see that Mr Kaminski was struggling. He had to put so much energy into chewing that he didn’t have any left over for talking.

  ‘Thank you so much for letting us use your greenhouse,’ said Mum.

  Mr Kaminski nodded and chewed.

  ‘We were heading for a big row earlier,’ Dad said.

  ‘Well, we’d both had a difficult day,’ said Mum.

  Mr Kaminski chewed and nodded.

  Dad explained about having to be Daphne and his editor telling him his first problem page was no good.

  ‘I’ve got all these letters from people complaining about their lives, and I can’t stand complainers!’ complained Dad. ‘But did I tell them they were a bunch of losers? No, I did not! I simply said they might like to stop whinging and get a life.’

  ‘Maybe that’s not so much solving problems as ignoring them?’ suggested Mum.

  Dad gave her a look.

  ‘Ignore anything for long enough and it goes away,’ he said.

  We all joined Mr Kaminski in chewing and nodding. According to Dad’s reasoning, that should’ve been the best way to get him to shut up. No such luck.

  ‘There’s Frustrated Fan who wants his girlfriend to like tennis and Sad Soprano who wants to be a star; there’s some woman who wants next door’s cat to stop peeing in her garden and some guy who wants not to be scared of doorknobs. Well, you can’t always have what you want. That’s life!’ said Dad.

  Mr Kaminski chewed and swallowed. I noticed he wasn’t nodding any more.

  ‘Ed says I have to give these people stupid advice,’ Dad went on. ‘I have to tell them they can have what they want!’
>
  ‘Well, of course,’ said Mr Kaminski.

  Dad gawped at him.

  ‘You can have what you want!’ declared Mr Kaminski. ‘You just have to know how. This I learn from my mother when I am little boy in Poland.’

  Mum put on her polite look. Dad was still gawping. Primrose glanced at me and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘So, will you tell us the secret?’ asked Mum. ‘How can we get what we want?’

  ‘Secret is very simple,’ said Mr Kaminski. He took another mouthful of quiche. We were in for a wait. When he eventually told us, it was a bit disappointing.

  ‘You have to be exact,’ he said. ‘Not wish-washy. You have to know exactly what you want.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Dad. You could tell he wasn’t impressed, though he was trying not to show it.

  ‘It certainly is simple,’ said Mum.

  ‘Is more,’ said Mr Kaminski. ‘When you know exactly what you want, you must think about it, dream about it, you must believe that you can have it.’

  Another long pause.

  ‘And that’s all?’ said Dad. ‘That’s how you get what you want?’

  Mr Kaminski nodded. He suddenly turned to Mum.

  ‘What do you want right now?’ he asked.

  Mum sighed. ‘Right now, I want a new job,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go on working for that vile plant-poisoner, Mr Pryce.’

  ‘So…’ goes Mr Kaminski. ‘You would rather work in office? You would like to be hairdresser?’

  Mum said no – she would still want to work with plants. Except the Green Fingers Garden Centre was the only one for miles around, so that wasn’t going to happen.

  ‘Is only important to know what you want. Not to worry about how you can get it.’

  ‘All right then,’ said Mum. ‘I want to stop working for Mr Plant-poisoner Pryce and get a new job, but still work with plants.’

  ‘Now write that down,’ said Mr Kaminski.

  While Mum was finding a pen and paper he asked Dad, ‘What do you want right now, Dave?’