It was a genius plan. It simply could not fail. I wasn’t proud of myself for thinking of it; I would never normally do anything to hurt anyone. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
When I got home Primrose and Bianca were watching TV and Mum was hacking her way through the brambles at the top of Mr Kaminski’s garden. I tipped the super-strong fart sweets into a bowl and put it in the middle of the kitchen table. I knew Primrose wouldn’t take any because she had broken her brace on a hard sweet a few months before and hadn’t touched one since.
I waited, and sure enough after a while they came downstairs to have a rummage in the fridge. I made sure I was on the other side of the room, nowhere near the fart sweets, so I could act surprised at seeing them on the table.
‘Ooh, sweets!’ I said. ‘They look nice!’ I took one and pushed the bowl a few inches towards Bianca.
‘I don’t eat sweets,’ she said, pushing it back. ‘And quite honestly, Peony Pudgyface, neither should you.’
Primrose took two cold bottles of Diet Pepsi out of the fridge and shut the door. Then they grabbed their bikinis out of their beach bags, which were still lying on the floor where they had left them from last time, and went back upstairs to get changed.
It wasn’t a good start, but I still had the itching powder and I had to act fast. I took Bianca’s beach towel out of her bag and sprinkled the itching powder all over it. Then I carefully rolled it up again and put it back.
I had only just finished when Mum came in. She pulled off her gardening gloves, pushed her hair off her face and went straight to the kettle.
‘I’m gasping for a cuppa,’ she said. Then she noticed the sweets.
‘Where did those come from? Proper old-fashioned boiled sweets – you know who would like them? Mr Kaminski!’
I tried to stop her. ‘Do you think his teeth are up to it?’ I said. ‘What if he chokes on one and dies? Old people are always doing that.’ But she shovelled them into her pocket, finished making her tea and disappeared back over the fence.
This was not good. This was not good at all. If Mr Kaminski liked boiled sweets he might eat them all. Just one fart sweet was supposed to make you trump like a train – if a person ate the whole packet, well, he might explode! But before I had a chance to work out how I could get them back Bianca and Primrose came bounding down the stairs.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Primrose said as she rifled through her bag looking for her sunglasses. ‘Why don’t we swap towels today? Mine would go really well with your bikini and yours would go really well with mine.’
Oh, great. Oh, that’s just great, I thought to myself as I watched them disappear down the zig-zag path. But I couldn’t stand there feeling bad for long because I had to try and stop Mr Kaminski from eating the fart sweets. Primrose was going to get itchy, but things were looking even worse for Mr K and it was my fault.
I went out into the yard. Mum was still hacking away at the brambles and Mr Kaminski was sitting on his new deckchair on the patio she’d found under all the weeds a few days before. On the paving stone beside his foot, a small pile of empty sweet wrappers glistened in the sun.
The fart sweets couldn’t have kicked in yet because Mr Kaminski looked very peaceful and not at all like someone who was about to blow up. I ran back indoors and made a big jug of iced water. If I could get him to drink lots and lots of it maybe it would flush the fart sweets out of his system before they had a chance to work.
Mr Kaminski was delighted with me for taking a drink out to him. He took a few sips and nodded in appreciation. He sipped again. I hovered with the jug but he didn’t drink any faster. Sip, sip… Sip, sip…
Time ticked away and the fart sweets were not getting flushed, so in the end I gave up and went back indoors. If I couldn’t prevent the worst from happening, then I certainly didn’t want to be there when it did.
Mr Kaminski wasn’t getting flushed… but it turned out that Primrose was. After an hour or two lying on a towel covered in itching powder she came home looking like a beetroot. Dad asked her if it was sore and Mum told her off for not using enough sun cream.
‘Does it itch?’ I asked.
‘Sunburn doesn’t itch,’ Mum said, and Primrose didn’t contradict her. Weird.
Now I didn’t only have the fact that Mr Kaminski might blow up at any moment to worry about but also Primrose’s bright red skin. What if stayed red? What if it started to go other colours or… what if it all peeled off?
I spent the rest of the evening running backwards and forwards between spying on Mr Kaminski and trying to get a close look at Primrose’s skin without making her suspicious. It was worse than getting blasted by power ballads or called nasty names.
On the up side, by bed-time Mr Kaminski still didn’t seem to be suffering any ill effects and Primrose’s skin had faded almost back to normal. On the down side, I was a nervous wreck.
There was no doubt about it, going to the East Lane Emporium had not been a genius idea after all. It had been a stupid one. It had been more than stupid, it had been dangerous, because innocent people could have got hurt, at least if the tricks hadn’t been so rubbish and had done what they were supposed to do.
I decided to check on Primrose’s skin one last time before I went to bed. It was easy because she was fast asleep in front of the telly. Unlike Dad, she didn’t usually snooze on the settee, and I hoped this wasn’t a side effect of too much non-itching itching powder. Her phone was lying on the cushions.
Seeing it gave me the glimmer of an idea. I could send Bianca a text from Primrose’s phone, saying something like ‘You can’t come round to my house any more.’
I picked it up and the screen saver flicked on. It was a fuzzy picture of a boy outside the beach cafe. I knew that boy – it was Matt! What was a picture of Matt doing on Primrose’s phone?
She stirred in her sleep and I put the phone back on the cushions quick-smart. Texting Bianca from Primrose’s phone might be a good idea but on the other hand it might be a terrible one and I wasn’t about to rush into anything, not after the day I had just had.
Chapter 13
Feeling stupid and falling apart
The next day, Dad was home early. We found him and Mum drinking home-made lemonade in the back yard when we walked in. Behind them, Mr Kaminski’s garden was starting to look really nice. Our little yard looked quite sorry for itself in comparison. There was nothing in it except dark rings on the paving stones where the pots and plants had been.
Dad was looking sorry for himself too. It turned out Ed wasn’t happy with his second try at answering the Dear Daphne letters and he only had the weekend to come up with something better. Daphne had left a few articles on file about topics such as ‘Weight Worries’ and ‘Losing a Loved One’ that they could use instead if they had to, but you couldn’t have a problem page which never actually got around to answering people’s letters.
‘Why wasn’t he happy with it?’ asked Bianca.
Dad shrugged.
‘He says telling Sad Soprano to go on The X Factor might be setting her up for global humiliation if it turns out she can’t sing, and if Frustrated Fan goes down the chocs-and-wine road his girlfriend will end up looking like the back of a bus. It’s all nit-picking stuff like that.’
‘Cat-poo lady?’ asked Primrose.
‘Apparently it’s not OK to throw the poos over the fence, even though technically they do belong to the neighbour’s cat so she’d only be returning his property.’
‘Man who’s scared of door-knobs?’
‘Well, it seems that covering them up with paper bags is a silly idea.’
‘Maybe Ed thinks some people might not find door handles wrapped up in paper bags a very attractive design feature,’ suggested Mum.
Dad ignored her. He rattled through the rest of the problem page with Bianca and Primrose. They all seemed amazed that Ed hadn’t liked any of the solutions Bianca had come up with. I was secretly loving it, Dad’s Official Life-Saver Bi
anca turning out to be completely useless.
‘I told you you couldn’t expect a couple of fifteen-year-olds – no offence, you two – to write a problem page in a respected newspaper, didn’t I?’ Mum reminded him.
‘Oh, yes,’ goes Dad, ‘very helpful. There’s nothing like “I told you so” to make a bad situation better.’
‘No need to be sarcastic,’ said Mum.
Primrose and Bianca sidled off.
‘It’s no good, Jan,’ said Dad. ‘I just can’t do it. I’m going to have to start looking for another job in case Ed really does sack me from the sports desk over this.’
‘But the Three Towns Gazette is the only newspaper around – where are you going to get another sports-reporting job?’
Dad shrugged again. He drained his glass.
‘Maybe the new Daphne will be able to give me some advice,’ he said bitterly.
Mr Kaminski chose that moment to come over and show Mum a fountain he was thinking of buying from his gardening catalogue. He straight away spotted that Dad was out of sorts. Mum told him about the latest Dear Daphne development.
‘But is good!’ declared Mr Kaminski. ‘You think of plan, you try plan, now you think again, yes?’
Mum, who was obviously Mr Kaminski’s biggest fan by now, agreed.
‘That’s right! When you first wrote down what you wanted you thought the only way to get it was if you could make Daphne come back. That didn’t work so you came up with another plan – finding someone else to do it. Which would have been fine except you chose the wrong someone.’
‘I know, I know,’ Dad interrupted. ‘A couple of fifteen-year-olds – bad choice.’
‘So when you think about it, you just need to find the right person, someone who’s got a bit more of a clue about life, someone older and wiser.’
‘I asked you, but you said no.’
‘Well, we’d only argue about it, wouldn’t we?’ said Mum.
Mr K sat silently nodding his head like a scrawny old owl in a tree.
‘Keep thinking about what you want, Dave. Exactly what you want. Plan will come.’
It was so true. When you thought and thought about the thing you really wanted, the plans came thick and fast. I wished I could tell them about my new idea for banishing Bianca, because the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.
I realised that sending a text from Primrose’s phone which said ‘You can’t come to my house any more’ wouldn’t do – Bianca would just ask Primrose why not and Primrose would say she never sent it and then they would straight away know it was me.
But people were always falling out over texts, so it could definitely work if I could just come up with the right message. It had to be something that would make Bianca so cross she wouldn’t even speak to Primrose, because then Primrose wouldn’t have a chance to explain it away.
And it wasn’t only my secret wish that was moving closer to coming true – there was the wish they knew about, me getting a dog. Who would have thought a few short weeks ago that I had a frog’s chance in a piranha pond of getting a dog, yet the very next morning Becky’s plan was about to make that happen.
I don’t know how I managed to not say anything, especially with Dad being so down in the dumps, but the success of Becky’s plan depended upon the element of surprise. I passed an hour or so in my bedroom practising my limp, chatted to Becky on Facebook and went to bed early so the morning would come quicker.
I was up and out of the house early, but Becky was already waiting for me in the close. She was so excited you would think it was her and not me who was getting Lollie. The sun was shining, the birds were singing in the hedges – the whole world was a haphap-happy place.
Mrs Teverson was surprised to see us. She checked her watch and gave it a little tap in case it had dozed off or something. ‘You’re early!’ she remarked.
‘We thought we’d play with Lollie before we start,’ said Becky.
Mrs Teverson said we couldn’t play with Lollie because Lollie had gone home. Her owner had come for her. He admitted that he’d intended to abandon her but in the end he couldn’t do it.
‘Isn’t that wonderful news?’ said Mrs Teverson.
Becky and I tried to smile.
‘Could you start by cleaning out Lollie’s pen? We’ve got a rough collie coming in later today.’
We got our mops and buckets from the caravan. The gate to Lollie’s pen was lying open and her cupcake was caught underneath it. Her owner hadn’t even bothered to make sure she had her favourite toy.
We stood in the empty pen, not saying anything. Becky touched my shoulder. Then she put her arm round me. Then she gave me a hug. I’m not normally a huggy person and maybe that’s why the minute my face touched her shoulder, I burst into tears.
I’m not the kind of person who cries a lot either, except when I’m watching Homeward Bound. I don’t like people who cry all the time. Sasha in our class cries every single day and I wish she would stop and give herself a chance to dry out.
But it was really weird because as we mopped out Lollie’s pen and hosed it down, tears kept spilling out of me as if I had sprung a leak. I had really believed our plan would work and I would end up taking Lollie home. How could I have been so stupid?
Feeling stupid, stupid, stupid, I cleaned the pens and walked the dogs and my eyes kept suddenly leaking. I was grateful to Becky for pretending not to notice because if she were to give me another hug I was sure I would full-on fall to pieces.
She walked, I mopped; I walked, she mopped. We worked our way along the pens. When we had finished, Becky said, ‘We should do something new now to cheer ourselves up. Shall we go down to the beach and get a pasty?’
That would certainly be new. We had never been anywhere together except the kennels, what with her being older than me and everything, and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to go. But Becky said she was sad too about Lollie leaving and lunch at the beach might cheer her up.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘That would be nice. I’ll phone Dad and let him know I won’t be home.’
So I did, and then we walked down the hill together, me and Becky, in the baking hot sun.
Chapter 14
Cornish honeycomb ice-cream and a red rag to a bull
The tide was out and the boats in the harbour were stuck in the mud among a criss-cross of gulls’ footprints and bits of rubbish. We passed a long queue of tourists outside the chip shop and carried on walking till we got to the beach. All the tables outside the Crocodile Cafe were full.
‘We can get takeaway,’ said Becky.
Matt was serving behind the counter but he was too busy to talk, so we took our pasties and sat at the top of the beach. I noticed Bianca and Primrose hanging around with some other girls near the lifeguards’ hut but they were too busy trying to impress the lifeguards to notice me.
We had finished our pasties and were lying down on the warm sand when Matt came over. He had two ice-cream cornets in one hand and one in the other. They were beginning to drip.
‘I’m on my break and I thought my best girls might like some dessert,’ he said.
We sat up, blinking in the bright sunshine.
‘I’ve got choc chip…’ said Matt, nodding towards a chocolate ice-cream with a cold chip stuck in the top. ‘Or butterscotch and vanilla…’ which was vanilla ice-cream with a butterscotch boiled sweet sliding slowly down it. ‘Or my personal favourite, Cornish honeycomb!’ You guessed – that one had a new comb from the box on the counter sticking up out of it.
We actually laughed.
‘That’s better,’ goes Matt. ‘You looked like a wet Wednesday when you first came down and that can’t be right – it’s a sunny Saturday! What’s going on?’
We told him we were sad about Lollie leaving but we didn’t tell him about Becky’s plan. Well, it sounded silly now. I had the Cornish honeycomb ice-cream because I wanted to keep the comb to remind me that nice people can make you smile even when you’re having a leaky day.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Bianca had seen me and was pointing me out to Primrose. She said something and they both laughed. I tried to ignore them and Bianca soon lost interest, but every time I glanced across after that I caught sight of Primrose staring back at me.
What was her problem? Did she think I was following them or something? I wanted to shout out, ‘I’ve got as much right to be on this beach as you have!’
Soon Matt’s break was over and Becky had to go for her riding lesson. I walked home up the zig-zag path on my own. Dad was sitting on the front steps listening to the cricket on his MP3. He took one earphone out.
‘Nice lunch?’
I nodded.
‘Mum’s shopping,’ he said. ‘She and Mr K have gone with Stella in her van to look for some garden furniture.’
Stella was Mum’s friend from the Green Fingers Garden Centre. She still worked there because she needed the money, but she was looking for another job. She thought Mr Pryce was out of order giving Mum the sack just because she called him a plant-poisoner.
When you’re having an up-and-down day there’s nothing like TV to even things out so I went indoors, flopped on the settee and started flicking the channels. I had just decided to go with two and a half hours of Neighbours omnibus when I heard voices outside talking to Dad.
What were Primrose and Bianca doing back from the beach so soon? I turned the volume down.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Bianca was saying, as they dumped their stuff in the kitchen. ‘I had exactly the same as you for lunch and I feel fine.’
‘Thanks for walking back with me but you don’t have to stay,’ said Primrose, coming up the stairs. ‘I think I’ll just go and lie down for a bit.’
‘Of course I’ll stay,’ goes Bianca. ‘You’ll probably feel better soon and we can go back down to the beach.’
They came into the room.
How To Get What You Want by Peony Pinker Page 6