by Claire Sandy
I downloaded Officer and a Gentleman. I tried to watch it. Honest! Why why why why why why is it your favourite film? You usually like the HIPSTER stuff. You’re a Juno/Reservoir Dogs/Lost in Translation girl. Sorry. Woman. Officer and a Gentleman is slushy mushy romantic rubbish, innit?
If we met face to face you could explain what you see in it.
And you could also help me work out what the f*@k I should do about my so called life.
Everything nearly blew apart the other day.
Mum turned up out of the blue to take us home. There I was happily sitting in the cafe when I noticed her rubbish car. Have you ever bunked into school? Of course not. You’re normal.
Ish.
Climbed over the hundred foot wall and dropped into bushes on the other side then sneeked through the playground to find my sisters. If a teacher spotted me my whole plan would have been ruined. (And there’s no need to tell me agen – I know you think it’s a dumb plan.) Luckily Mum believed my excuse for having leaves in my hair. All those years of nerdy good behaviour paying off! Just like my teacher believing the forged note about my ‘shingles’. (Never google shingles by the way.)
I felt bad about lying to Mum. She explodes now and then but most of the time she puts up with my moods. The other day she said all sad, ‘Where did my lovely little boy go?’ because I shouted at one of the twins. She’d understand if she knew about the Clones.
The twins helped me out with the cover story, then they cut a deal with me. They’re worse than the mafia. Said they’d tell the Olds about the bunking off unless I explain to them why I’m doing it. Had to confess all or the shit would hit the fan. And the fan is right by my face.
I gave them the PG version.
Once upon a time there was an evil Queen called Lauren. She ruled the kingdom of St Ethelred’s with black magic and short skirts. All her serfs were desperate to go to Queen Lauren’s fantabulous ball at her uncle the school governor’s amazing house but only the aristocrats were invited.
And a lowly dork named Angus.
Gasp!
The dork is embarrassed to admit that he punched the air and shouted YESSS! when the text arrived.
But the ball sucked big time. Clones in stripper shoes trying to get off with the trendy knob heads he couldn’t stand at school. The evil Queen made a beeline for the dork and he was mightily confused. Was Lauren (who all the knob heads madly fancied) flirting with him?
Angus wasn’t flattered.
Angus was SCARED.
Scared like a rhino was charging him.
Angus the Dork tried to avoid the evil Queen. Thanks to the Goth Girl Across The Road he has skills in this area. But nothing worked. Even when he shut himself away with the Queen’s dad’s vinyl collection (you’d have loved it – he had BOWIE) she sent a minion to summon him.
‘Come, O Dorkish one,’ said the minion. ‘Queen Lauren is screening your favourite movie in the home cinema.’
You know this Dork well so you know he couldn’t resist a HOME CINEMA.
Plus he was drunk. (This wasn’t included in the twin version.)
Angus assumed there’d be other people there.
Duh!
The Queen was alone in a dark room with an amazing Bose Acoustimass system and a big squashy sofa. Twilight was on the screen.
Twilight!
Yes. The Queen thought TWILIGHT aka Lamest Film EVER was the Dork’s favourite film.
The Queen was kind of odd. Eyes shining. Skin clammy. (No need for the twins to know that this was cos the Queen was off her freaking head on the tablets being passed around like Smarties.)
The Dork sussed out what was happening a minute too late. He genuinely hadn’t realised he was a sacrificial offering.
The Dork tried to act normal when the Queen sat on him and squirmed about like a lap-dancer. He moved his head when she tried to snog him.
This is hard to believe but the Dork felt sorry for the Queen, i.e. the world had officially turned upside down. He felt sorry for her cos she was wasting her best moves on the wrong guy.
The Dork is a romantic.
The Dork wouldn’t admit this to anybody except you.
When the Queen wrapped her legs around the Dork, he tried to get her off without hurting her or groping her. Not easy when one of you is smashed and the other one is high. The Evil Queen morphed into an Evil Octopus. She was sticking her tongue down his throat and grabbing at his fly.
So the Dork held her shoulders and said, ‘Look! Any of those guys upstairs would kill to be with you but I’m into somebody else.’
(He didn’t add that this someone else wouldn’t even give him her address cough cough.)
The Queen’s face changed. (The twins liked this bit best.) She went from super sexy to screaming monster, with lipstick all over her chin. She said ‘Don’t you get who I am?’
The Queen shouted, ‘Help!’
The Dork heard heavy pissed feet thump along the corridor. The Queen – who was turning out to be less nice than the Dork had expected, and he’d expected her to be an almighty bitch – said ‘You’re nobody and you should thank me for even noticing you. You. Are. Dead.’ With a full stop after each word like in American sitcoms. The Clones arrived and things got very loud. The Dork shouted they shouted the Queen shouted.
She said I’d jumped her and forced myself on her. She shouted ‘Throw him out but don’t beat him up!’ Nice touch your majesty. But then she said, ‘Spread the word.’
The Dork is a perv!
The Dork is a sicko!
The Dork is a rapist!
The Dork is a poof! (Confusing, I know.)
The Queen’s subjects carried out her bidding. On Facebook. On Twitter. By text. By phone. In notes. In whispers. In graffiti in the bogs. The Clones are very obedient.
And the Dork lived unhappily ever after
The End.
My little sisters had no idea. Even tho we go to the same school, primary and secondary are different worlds. I thought they’d tease me but they cuddled me. After all the ess aitch one tee that’s what made me cry!!! Iris and Rose are too young to really understand. They don’t realise it’s not the rejection that makes Lauren hate me, it’s the fact that I know.
Me, the dorkiest dork in our year, I know she’s a virgin. In Lauren’s fucked-up world being a virgin is embarrassing. Sex and love aren’t tied up together. She just wants to ‘do it’.
Plus she’s a virgin with a crush on somebody who doesn’t fancy her back.
She assumed I’d tell everybody. She thinks boys are a different species with willies where their hearts should be. She could have trusted me. I’d never tell. Instead she tried to destroy me so nobody would believe me.
The twins promised to ‘sort her out’. Sure.
Right. I’ll go now. That was a long one! Not exactly Christmas cheer. Sorry.
And listen, I get it. You don’t want me to come to Scotland. I’ll stop nagging.
laters
Angus
P.S. It’s very very quiet downstairs. The traditional Christmas Day row should start any . . . minute . . . now . . .
How Marie came to be on the sofa, she had no idea. A cushion was propped up behind her, her shoes were off – she always cooked Christmas lunch in ‘good’ shoes – and there was a glass of halfway-decent wine (i.e. more than £6.99 a bottle) in her hand.
She remembered the smoke alarm going off. She remembered somebody who sounded a lot like herself saying loud things about ‘this bloody family’ and ‘Who am I? Superwoman?’ She remembered Robert entering the kitchen with a determined but wary air, like a vet about to sedate a skittish llama. She remembered him saying, ‘Step away from the smoke alarm. I repeat: Step away from the smoke alarm.’
And then, somehow, she was on the sofa, with a Terry’s Chocolate Orange.
On the rug the twins were absorbed in a complex doll game. They were silent. Robert had used ‘Daddy’s Remote’ on them. Marie had never fathomed how it worked, but every
now and then, when things got out of hand, Robert aimed an imaginary handset at them and pretended to press a button. ‘Mute,’ he’d say. And they would. They’d mute.
Angus came downstairs with his trademark half-stumble, half-lope. ‘All right?’ he said, head round the door. That wary look, just like his father.
‘More than all right.’ Marie popped a dark segment into her mouth, this being the only date in the calendar when a Terry’s Chocolate Orange was acceptable as a pre-lunch snack.
Twenty minutes later there was a Dunwoody bottom on every seat around the dining table. The candles on Marie’s mother’s embroidered tablecloth were lit. The gravy steamed in its boat. (Where on Earth had Robert found the gravy boat? It had been AWOL since last Christmas.) Slabs of luscious white meat lay stacked on their plates, cosying up to roast potatoes all golden and crisp and come-hither.
His sleeves rolled up, a sheen of sweat across his brow, Robert held up his glass. ‘To Mum,’ he said.
‘To Mum,’ three voices echoed.
‘To us,’ said Marie, properly, stupidly happy.
The Yule log lay devastated, as if run over by a tank. The family, already full of turkey and ‘all the trimmings’, had somehow found a second wind when confronted by the magnificent cake.
The ‘twist’ had gone down very well.
‘It’s white!’ Rose had breathed.
‘That’s meant to be snow!’ Iris had melted with the romance of it, and the prospect of so much white chocolate. ‘Awesome, Mum,’ Angus had said.
There were only streaks of white left, and a tiny traumatised plastic robin on its side.
The sitting room – its untidiness a testament to the long, cheerful day – was flattered by the cherry-and-emerald glow of the lights on the tree. Head on her mum’s lap, Iris slept, mouth open, eyelids flickering. On the opposite sofa Rose was propped against Robert, quietly debating Father Christmas’s existence.
Angus, from where he lay flat on his back on the rug, was firmly anti-Santa, but Robert allowed Rose space to prolong her faith in him by saying, ‘If you believe in Santa, he exists. And I do believe in him.’ He was wearing the lilac/heather jumper: despite his protestations, Marie could see it was too snug under the arms.
Iris snored a tiny snore, like a fairy coughing. Feeling sleepy and safe and ready, Marie slid a Christmas card from its red envelope.
Robert heard the rustle. ‘I thought we opened them all.’
‘Just one left,’ said Marie.
Best girl,
I know how hard you’ve worked to make this Christmas special, but really all I need is you and Daddy and Robert and little Angus. No talk of ‘last this’ or ‘last that,’ please! I’ll always be with you at Christmas, and every other day of the year for that matter, watching Angus grow, and laughing at the antics of those two little girls growing in your tummy. Say hello to them for me, and remind them how much their grandma loved them, even when they were just two little pipsqueaks inside her own darling daughter.
Marie, listen. This is important. Your mother has a promise for you and it’s this: Love changes, but it can’t die.
Merry Christmas
Mum x
DECEMBER
New Year’s Eve
Croquembouche
Wedding Cake
NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS
1 Lose 7 lb by March (i.e. ½ lb per week – easy!)
2 Go to gym 2 3 2 times a week
3 Get up half-hour early
4 Look after feet
5 Read more
6 Walk everywhere and take stairs
7 Swear less
8 Stop making bloody stupid resolutions I can’t pissing well keep.
The P.S. to every year, New Year’s Eve brought the usual automatic, no-need-for-an-invitation invitation to the yearly bash thrown by Marie’s oldest friend. She and Jo had met at university, and although they lived just an hour’s drive from each other, life conspired to keep them apart for much of the time. New Year was sacrosanct. Just as Jo didn’t need to invite them, the Dunwoodys didn’t need to say they’d be there: attendance was mandatory.
‘I hope there’s a magician again this year,’ said Iris as she helped her mother fill the (thankfully fully recovered) dishwasher after a lunch of festive leftovers.
‘I hope there isn’t,’ said Robert. Magicians came a close second to clowns in his nightmares. ‘Mar, are you driving tonight, or am I?’
‘Dad means,’ said Angus, tipping his sprout-’n’-stilton soup dregs into the yucca, ‘is he drinking or are you?’
‘I’ll drive. You drove last year.’ Marie fell on her sword, sacrificing the vodka luge for the sake of marital harmony. ‘If Dad’s drunk,’ she said to the twins, ‘he might dance.’
‘Oh, please dance, Daddy!’ Rose clasped her hands together, a Dickensian orphan begging for gruel. ‘You’re hilarious when you dance!’
‘Must be some other daddy you’re thinking of,’ huffed Robert. ‘I’m suave, lithe. Sensual even.’
Angus shuddered and left the room.
‘Jump in the shower, Angus!’ shouted Marie, adding: ‘now!’ She turned her gaze on the twins, both in dire need of a general going-over with a sponge. ‘I must throw you two in the bath, too.’ Hygiene standards had slipped over that cosy, nameless period between Christmas and the New Year. She looked at her watch. ‘What time are we expected?’
‘Nine. As usual.’ Robert tucked what was left of his latest loaf into the bread bin as tenderly as if it were a newborn. ‘Seven hours should give you just about enough time to get ready.’
‘Ooh, how I love your gender-joshing,’ deadpanned Marie, handing out slabs of Victoria sponge (now an oft-requested family favourite) to Iris and Rose. ‘I’m not the one fannying about with scruffing lotion and anti-fatigue eye gel before bed.’
‘They were a present. It’d be rude not to use them.’ Robert patted the skin beneath his eyes surreptitiously; he hadn’t realised they looked fatigued until Magda’s present spelled it out.
‘Before we know it, you’ll be wearing guy-liner.’ Marie enjoyed the twins’ snigger. ‘Which you’ll keep in your manbag.’
‘It’s not a manbag, it’s a perfectly ordinary, if – admittedly – rather small briefcase that . . .’ Robert ran out of steam. He was tired of defending his leather goods.
‘. . . looks like a handbag.’ Marie was anything but tired of the subject. ‘Now shoo, everybody. I need the kitchen to myself.’
‘Oh no, you don’t.’ Robert lowered his head, treating his wife to a penetrating stare. ‘There isn’t time for you and Ms Berry to get down and dirty with a new recipe.’
‘There’s plenty of time,’ said Marie blithely. Or as blithely as she could with her top lip stuck to her teeth. The thought of what she had to achieve before leaving the house, made-up and perfumed, at 8 p.m. made her mouth go dry.
‘This isn’t Lynda’s wedding cake, is it? Bloody hell, Marie! That thing has to be two feet high! I assumed you’d told her you couldn’t do it.’
‘It’ll be fine. I’m good at this stuff now.’ She wanted to lie down and cry, and run up and down the Close with her hair on fire, all at the same time; the feeling opened a wormhole in time and whisked her right back to adolescent Sunday evenings and the prospect of doing a week’s homework in the half-hour before bed.
The week since Christmas Day had been so relaxed that Marie hadn’t squared up to the dreaded croquembouche. Robert had taken leave from work – a risky manoeuvre, leaving Magda in Caroline’s clutches during a notoriously non-productive and relaxed time for buying offices – and the bitter weather had kept all five Dunwoodys indoors with the heat whacked up, tasty goodies emerging daily from the oven, and much mooching-about in onesies to a backdrop of indie and pop and Radio 2.
Looking for a pastime to unify the family, Marie had stumbled on a most unlikely one. Slumped, happy and idle, on the sofa, she’d been channel-hopping one afternoon, but could find nothing she wanted to watch. M
arie’s TV habit was an open secret. In public she would admit only to taking in documentaries and the news, with the odd box set for variety, but Robert and the children, nodding loyally, knew she craved frequent doses of pointless reality TV, inane quiz shows and repeats. There were times when only bona-fide rubbish would hit the spot: dark days when she would emerge drained from a Jeremy Kyle marathon, to check that Robert was there for her 100 per cent and talking in bleeps. She’d been saved from resorting to such a binge by an obscure channel rerunning MasterChef. Lots and lots and lots of MasterChef.
No matter how often she turned the TV on, there was a heat she hadn’t yet watched. Never having enjoyed the show – cooking? in my downtime? she’d always thought, contemptuously pushing buttons until she found an Antiques Roadshow that was itself an antique by now – these days she understood the contestants’ fervour for food.
One by one, the others had crept to her side, attracted perhaps by the demented commentary. Even Angus had corkscrewed his behind into the mound of cushions: MasterChef was unlikely family cement. Phrases from the show wove themselves into daily life. ‘Cooking doesn’t get TOUGHER than this,’ Angus had shouted that morning as he made toast. When he’d added jam, Iris had declared, ‘There’s too much going on on that plate.’
When Robert queried Marie’s no-show at the sales – usually she stormed them, cutting a swathe down Oxford Street like Paris Hilton on steroids, returning home exhausted with eight new outfits that didn’t fit – it was easily explained away by the weather. ‘I don’t blame you, love,’ Robert had said, putting the kettle on yet again, as his wife gave thanks for his lack of curiosity. The real reason would have spoiled his cuppa: sale-surfing at a time when both their financial futures were so imperilled was out of the question.
So the Dunwoodys had been on cushy house-arrest, apart from Marie’s dashes back to Smile! to open up for emergency patients.
One had been a screaming seven-year-old with an abscess; the other Jonas, complaining of inexplicable jaw pain. The problem had palpably been loneliness and not ill health, and Jonas had been sent home with a Tupperware box full of cake.