by Nigel Smith
“Fan mail,” said Darius, who was sitting on the sofa eating beans from a tin. “Can you believe it?”
“I don’t want fan mail, I don’t want fans, I don’t want to be famous,” sniffed Nat, plonking herself down on the sofa. “It’s horrid and embarrassing and awful. Send them all back.”
She looked at some of the bigger parcels for a while. She was tempted … but no, she had made up her mind, she had had enough …
She stood up, turned her back on it all, and marched upstairs.
Two minutes later she marched back down, writhing with indecision.
“Do it, do it, dooo it!” chanted Darius.
“I shouldn’t,” said Nat, touching a letter briefly, as if it was hot. “Besides, they might be saying mean things.” Her fingers picked at the Sellotape of a big box. “Celebrities get nasty letters as well as nice ones.”
She looked at the labels. “And I’m certainly not opening anything addressed to the ‘Bum Girl’,” she said decisively.
“Probably best, now you mention it,” said Dad. “But the others should be OK.”
“Just get on with it,” said Darius, who had already spread bean juice on most of the packages.
“Hang on,” said Nat. “How did these people know where I live?”
“They don’t know where you live – I’m not totally daft,” said Dad. “But this is the address for my new Talent Agency. It’s on the website Darius made.”
“I’m just ace,” said Darius modestly.
“Talent Agency?” said Nat.
“Bumolé and Bagley. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“It sounds terrible.”
“That’s what I said,” said Darius. “I said it should be ‘Bagley and Bumolé’.”
“Mum is going to kill you.”
“Possibly. But your mum’s in a meeting in Milan or Madrid or somewhere beginning with ‘M’.”
“Is it definitely miles away?”
“Miles and miles.”
They all stared at the mail for a while.
Nat knew Dad loved packages. They reminded him of Christmas, which Dad also loved. Mum said that was just because it was the only time of year he got paid.
“I should open one box,” said Nat. “Just so I know what I’m sending back.”
“Good idea,” said Dad.
Nat opened the first box and out tumbled a whole load of really nice tops.
“That’s lame,” said Darius.
“OMG!” said Nat. “Are these for me?”
“They don’t suit the colour of my eyes so I guess so,” joked Dad, holding one up. It was full of holes and said:
I’m a rebel. What against? What have you got?
Another one, equally ripped, said:
Be yourself because nobody else can be.
And a third had:
This is what cool looks like. Deal with it.
“Oh, they’re all torn,” said Dad. “I’ll definitely send them back now.”
“They’re supposed to be torn,” said Nat. Then she spotted a tiny label on each of them.
DBGG.
She almost squealed in delight.
“Dad Dad Dad Dad, they’re the new tops from Dinky Blue, Girl Guru, Rebellion – Be Yourself range!” she gabbled. “Everyone wants these.”
“There’s a note in the box,” said Dad, rummaging about. “Oh, it’s from her publicity people. Let’s see, they say you can keep them as long as you wear them every time you get photographed. And say how great they are, and what good value for money.”
“They are good value for money,” cackled Nat, her cold and her shame forgotten. “I won’t be fibbing. They’re free!”
She ripped open another box.
“Get in!”
“Is it ray guns of doom?” said Darius hopefully.
A delicious sweet smell filled the living room.
“Bath bombs, my fave! Ooh and candles and body washes and scrubs, plus moisturisers, conditioners, moisturising conditioners, condition-ing moisturisers, lip balms, hand creams, nail creams and, urgh, spot cream – cheek! – and an organic sponge.”
Darius, now totally bored, hopped off the sofa and walked off in disgust to play with the Dog.
“Who’s it from?” said Dad.
“Splash, obviously.”
“Splash?”
“Dad, you are so old. This is their whole new range of Kid in a sweetie shop products. It’s all good enough to eat.” She read a card. “I’m right, it’s from Splash. It says: ‘Please use them all, with our compliments.’ Thanks, I will. Dad, can you run me a bath, please?”
“I take it you’re keeping everything then,” said Dad.
“Maybe I was being selfish,” said Nat, opening more parcels. “I was only thinking about myself and how horrid it is being famous – and it really is very very horrid – but I was forgetting about the poor pets. And Darius, of course.”
“Can’t forget Darius,” agreed Dad.
“So just maybe I should put up with being famous until I save the— whoa, a new phone! And these trainers are lush!” Nat settled down to read a bunch of letters from little girls telling her how funny and great she was.
Yup, I’m definitely doing this for the pets, she thought. “Oi, Dad,” she shouted, “is my bath ready yet? If I’m gonna say how brilliant my new bath bombs are, I have to try them out. It wouldn’t be professional otherwise.”
Nat settled down in her big steamy bath feeling that just maybe she’d be able to face everyone at school tomorrow. OK, she thought, sliding into the bubbles, so the thing at the park didn’t go according to plan, and everyone’s having a good giggle at my name AGAIN, and yes, the voice-over went badly and of course there’s that video of me with a bird in my hair and another one of me jumping up and down shouting about being normal, but as someone said in a movie once: Fame costs and this is where you start paying.
She stretched out in the delicious-smelling water, thick with Splash’s finest, newest and gloopiest bath products.
It’s a tough job, she thought, but someone’s got to do it.
She tipped some more bath foam under the hot tap, and bunged another couple of bath bombs in for good measure.
She put her head back on a free bath pillow and closed her eyes. I hope the horrible ugly pets appreciate all my hard work, she thought, totally relaxing. Until she noticed … that her head, hands and feet were no longer poking out of a nice hot bath, they were poking out of a pink, rock-hard, bath-sized bath bomb.
All the lovely chemicals she’d put in the tub had mixed and reacted and then fused together in a sort of evil mud, trapping her in a massive block of sweet-smelling concrete.
“DAD!” Nat yelled, wriggling helplessly. She was lying at a funny angle and her arms and legs had gone to sleep. She realised with horror that she wasn’t able to break free. She was stuck fast!
“DAD!”
Dad opened the door.
“Are you all ri—” he began. Then saw her and burst out laughing.
“Don’t you dare laugh!” she yelled. “It’s definitely not in any way funny.”
“I’m not laughing,” laughed Dad, stuffing a hanky in his mouth to stifle his giggles. “But you have to admit, it’s a bit funny.”
“Get me out.”
He tapped the rock.
“How much did you put in?”
“Some. All. I don’t know. Do something.”
“That is properly solid,” he said, scraping at it with his nail.
“I do know it’s solid, Dad.”
“I’ll probably need a hammer and chisel.”
“You are not going to hammer-and-chisel me out. I’m not a statue,” said Nat crossly.
“I don’t want to hurt you. We should call in the experts.”
“The experts? In getting girls out of bath bombs? Who are the experts in that?”
Twenty minutes later she got her answer as a couple of firemen entered the bathroom and started laughing uncontrollably.
“Get that camera away from me!” shrieked Nat, now draped in towels, as she saw a lens on a fireman’s helmet.
“Health and safety, I’m afraid,” said the fireman. “We have to video everything these days. It’s OK, it won’t end up on the news.”
It didn’t. It ended up somewhere worse.
T LEAST NO ONE CAN SEE ANYTHING RUDE–you’re all covered up by the giant solid bath bomb,” said Dad the next day.
Somehow, the fire brigade’s video had found its way on to the Internet.
The video was called Another Normal Day for Normal Girl. It featured blurry images of her trapped in what looked like a giant pink sausage, along with the hysterical firemen rolling around on the bathroom floor.
It had already got over a million hits. Nat reckoned she had felt each hit personally, like little pinpricks. She spent the day pretending she had still got a terrible cold. She was hoping to stretch out her illness until she was eighteen when she could leave school and get a job in a town where no one had ever heard of her.
But she couldn’t avoid returning to school forever and the next day she knew she’d have to face the music. As Nat approached the school gates, she fully expected everyone to snigger at her stupid embarrassing name or to laugh at the toe-curlingly awful bath bomb video.
Which they all did, obviously.
But it was even worse than that.
From snatches of conversation she overheard in corridors, in the playground, in the cloakroom or the loos, it became clear that most of the school now thought Nat was just showing off.
“She just wants attention, all the time,” said one girl.
“Yawn. Another day, another Nathalia video,” said another.
And the worst of all:
“I liked her early videos, when she was funny.”
Nat was just praying that, even though her popularity seemed to be fizzling out, she was still famous enough for Flora Marling to let her come to her mega secret birthday pool party sleepover on Saturday.
“I’m more famous than ever now,” Nat said to Darius that evening. She wanted to put her head on the kitchen table in misery, but it wasn’t her kitchen table she was sitting at, it was the greasy one in Porter Ogden’s pets’ home, and there were very few surfaces there that anyone would wish to touch.
“Yeah, it’s good,” said Darius, eating dog biscuits with his mouth open.
“No, it’s TERRIBLE,” said Nat. “It would have been bad enough facing everyone at school after the park disaster, but now it’s ‘Oh look, here comes the Bath Bomb Bumhole’.”
“That would be a brilliant hashtag,” said Darius as Nat threw a tin of cat food at his head.
“And I don’t understand girls. First they liked me because I was a little bit famous and now they don’t because I’m too famous.”
“They’ll like you again if you get even more famous,” said Dad. “That’s how fame works.”
“Shut up,” said Nat. “Can’t you see I’m really confused?”
“Oh, and next time you make a dead funny video without me,” continued Darius, “talk about the pets’ home, Buttface. We’re saving it, remember?”
“Yes, I remember the pets’ home; I’m sitting in the pets’ home,” snapped Nat. “Actually,” she said, reaching down, “what AM I sitting in?” She looked at her hand and pulled a face. She wiped it on Darius.
This was a crisis meeting between the directors of ‘Bumole and Bagley Talent Agency’ (Dad and Darius) and their most famous client (Nathalia).
The meeting was in their new office (Porter Ogden’s Ugly Pets’ Home). Dad decided to move the agency in case of ‘possible emergencies’ (Mum finding out about it and hitting the roof in rage).
“I’m not talking to either of you about it any more because you are both totally sacked,” said Nathalia, sitting with her arms folded. She was ice-cold angry and her chill filled the room. She looked very much like her mother.
“Every so often, Dad, I think ‘This is the most humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me’, but I’m always wrong. There’s a massive list of ‘most humiliating things that’ve ever happened to me’ to choose from and I keep thinking, No they can’t get any worse. But then they get worse.”
She stood up and pointed to the video taken by the fireman. “But THIS video – this is definitely the most humiliating. And so I’m not doing anything you suggest ever ever again.”
“To be fair, I didn’t suggest that you put all your bath stuff in the bath in one go,” mumbled Dad quietly.
“What about the pets?” said Porter Ogden, who was washing blood out of his trousers. He looked tired, worried and half-chewed. “What about the little pets?”
“Stuff the little pets,” said Nat.
“Great idea,” said Darius. “We could sell stuffed pets as ornaments or voodoo dolls. I say we stuff Simba first.”
“She doesn’t mean that sort of stuffed,” said Dad. “Or do you?”
“Can either of you take anything seriously, ever?” said Nat. She looked at them and sighed. “Stupid question.”
She got up, shoved her chair away roughly and stomped out into the back garden.
She needed some fresh air. Of course, what she got was less fresh and more stinky, rotten air, but still …
Ooh that’s a bit ripe, she thought, sniffing the aromas from the cages and wrinkling up her nose. It was like standing downwind of Nan after Christmas dinner.
She found a patch of grass between the mud and the jungle, checked it was more green than brown, and plonked herself down. Nat could just make out the roofs of the houses nearby and she wondered if any of them had girls inside having as rubbish a time as her.
Bet they don’t, she thought, picking a daisy savagely. I bet they’ve got normal families and normal friends.
The infamous words, ‘Can’t you be normal?’ buzzed around her head, tormenting her, like a mosquito trapped in a sleeping bag.
She shook her head to clear the buzzing noise, then realised there was a REAL buzzing. There was a dirty great wasps’ nest under a branch of a nearby tree. Nat watched as they flew backwards and forward in the late afternoon sunshine.
Even the insects here are ugly, thought Nat. There wouldn’t be butterflies or anything, would there? A mournful howl started in the cages, followed by a sinister hissing Nat recognised as coming from the evil Simba. An old, broken slate slid off Porter Ogden’s roof and smashed by the back door.
This place really is a mess, she thought. Maybe, just maybe knocking this house down and spreading concrete all over it and building a shiny new car park isn’t such a bad idea?
Nat looked down and realised that she was absent-mindedly stroking a pathetic-looking bundle of damp, muddy fur that had crawled out of a pond. She peered at it. It was Fang, a beaver with no teeth and a flat nose. It looked like it had been chasing brick walls.
The gummy beaver sucked on her hand wetly.
“Gerroff,” she said, pushing it away. “You sound like my nan eating trifle.”
Fang the useless beaver shuffled back to her and started slurping on her hand again.
Nat giggled. “That tickles,” she said. “You stupid toothless beaver. What’s the point of you?” The beaver made a rude noise and Nat thought that, from a certain angle, it looked like … Darius.
She sighed. Darius was also annoying and smelly and a bit pointless. And he was in trouble too. She remembered Miss Hunny saying that saving the pets’ home might just save Darius from being expelled. Then she imagined him living rough on a rubbish tip with only the revolting monkey and Simba the Dreadful for company.
Maybe he’d like that, came the same voice that was trying to tell her why car parks were ace.
Yes, he probably would like it, admitted the real Nat. But I wouldn’t.
She thought of all the times he’d stood up for her. She could walk down the darkest corridors of school and no one would dare tweak a single hair of her head, just because she was best mates with Darius Bagley.
School without Darius jumping out of cupboards or putting superglue on the toilet seats or ever finishing his epic poem Diarrhoea or telling the world’s best jokes or helping her with her maths? Unthinkable.
Nat chuckled to herself remembering Darius overhearing the slimy Lucy Tapper from 9C make fun of Nat’s ‘Normal’ video, then tipping a box of worms into her Spaghetti Surprise.
She remembered the grin on the little menace’s face as he was hauled off to the Head’s office, followed by a shrieking Lucy Tapper picking munched worms out of her braces.
Nat tried to imagine school life without him. It was quieter; it was less bonkers; it was less smelly, embarrassing, weird and revolting.
But it was rubbish.
He had to be saved.
And so did the pets’ home, with all its unfit, unloved and unlovable creatures. It was the right thing to do.
She wasn’t Nat the Normal Girl, or Nat the local celebrity or even Bath Bomb Bumole. She was ‘The Girl Who Always Did The Right Thing, Eventually’.
That was the Nat she liked.
Even if no one at school does, she thought glumly.
She trudged back to the house, her mind made up. She was on the side of the angels. Even if the angels were really ugly angels with snotty noses, busted wings, terrible table manners and a naughty streak a mile wide.
She was going to save the flipping ugly pets’ home.
AND SHE WOULD DO IT WITHOUT USING HER EMBARRASSING, RUBBISH FAME.
But she had less than a week and she didn’t know where to begin.
Nearing the back door, she felt like one of those superheroes in the films Dad liked to watch. There was always the bit towards the end of the film where the superhero can’t use his superpower because it’s too dangerous … yet it’s the only thing that can save them all!
Then she trod in something.
This never happens to Iron Man, she thought bitterly as she scraped it off her shoe.
HAT’S A DOSH-A-THON?” ASKED NAT, WALKING back into the kitchen and overhearing the strange word.