Lottie Biggs is Not Mad

by Hayley Long

  sOmetimes Life CaN reaLLY sLaP YOu iN the faCe

  Goose is going out with Neil Adam. Neil Adam and Goose are going out. Together. Goose and Neil. Neil and Goose. How sly is that! It was Gareth Stingecombe who told me. I was walking home from school today when I heard all this huffing and puffing and running footsteps come charging up behind me. I stopped to turn around, and Gareth Stingecombe crashed right into the back of me, causing me to drop my premium-favourite genuine authentic Donna Karan shoulder bag, which is a totally essential school accessory even though it is too small to hold anything more than an MP3 player and a pen. My Donna Karan bounced right off my arm and landed in a puddle.

  ‘Oh thanks, Gareth,’ I said. ‘I really wanted my genuine designer shoulder bag to be soaked in rainwater. That was really brilliant, thank you!’

  Gareth looked a bit surprised for a second and then said, ‘Phew! I thought I was in trouble. But you’re right. It does look better now it’s a bit scuffed up.’

  I remembered then that Gareth Stingecombe doesn’t do sarcasm. Take Beca Bowen’s fifteenth birthday party, for instance. Almost everyone in Year 10 got invited to Beca’s party, but by some weird trick of fate it was me that ended up dancing with Gareth Stingecombe. Gareth is a very good rugby player. He plays for our school and even plays for the Wales youth team sometimes, but this does not mean that he’s a good dancer. He’s not. I’d even go so far as to say that he’s the worst dancer in the whole of Wales, if not the world. Gareth is quite a big lad, and I had to keep very alert in order to prevent him from amputating my toes with his size eleven feet. He can be quite sweet though so I kept these observations to myself. That was until he said, ‘You need to loosen up a bit, Biggsy. It feels like I’m dancing with a stick of celery.’

  I’d said, ‘Oh I am sorry. It’s just that it’s not every day a girl gets to relive all her Strictly Come Dancing fantasies with Mr Sexy-Moves.’

  Gareth had smiled and said, ‘I suppose I am a bit of a sexy mover. Just relax and follow what I’m doing.’

  Mr Wood once told us that Oscar Wilde6 famously said that, ‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.’ If this is true, it means that Gareth Stingecombe is completely off the witty scale, but only because he has never actually managed to get on to it. He is good at rugby though. And he does have a fairly nice face. So on that occasion I snogged him anyway.

  I was thinking about all this while Gareth rubbed my bag dry against one of his colossal rugby thighs. Then he said, ‘I know it’s still ages away, but do you fancy coming with me to the upper-school disco at the end of term? The Sellotape Sistas are doing the music – it should be really good.’

  I was not in a very good mood so I said, ‘Not really. And besides, the Sellotape Sistas aren’t all that fantastic.’

  This is true. The Sellotape Sistas are actually just a couple of tragic teachers from the history department who do all our school discos and make us listen to random no-mark music from the ark, like Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. For some reason though, everyone except me and Goose thinks they are really cool. Clearly mine and Goose’s listening tastes are far more sophisticated and cutting edge than everyone else’s. Goose even owns a CD by a band from Kortrijk which is a city in Belgium. She likes them because they are also called Goose.

  Gareth Stingecombe looked a bit disappointed and said, ‘Everyone else is going in couples. Hannah Roberts is going with Lee Fogel and Beca is going with my mate Spud. You’ll be the odd one out, Biggsy.’

  I said, ‘That’s OK, thank you. I’ll go in a girl-power, man-magnet couple with Goose.’

  And then Gareth said, ‘You can’t. Unless you want to be Goose’s gooseberry, that is. Goose is going out with that posh boy who works in Suitably Booted.’

  When he said these words, a funny thing happened to me.7 It’s not that I wasn’t pleased for Goose because she’s my best friend and I’m always pleased when something nice happens for her, but this time I went all hot and felt very very sick. I said, ‘How do you know that?’

  Gareth Stingecombe said, ‘It’s only a wild guess, but I just saw her snogging his face off in the public garden.’

  ‘You can’t have done,’ I said. ‘Goose is in detention right now for giving Beethoven dreadlocks on the cover of her music book. She’d be walking home with me otherwise.’ I put my hand up to my forehead. Nothing seemed to be making sense any more.

  Gareth Stingecombe shrugged his shoulders. ‘I say what I see, Biggsy. And I plainly saw Goose, just now, with her lips glued to the lips of that shoe-shop boy.’

  This made me feel sicker than I can say. Neil Adam has got beautiful lips. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed about kissing those lips myself. Just thinking about Goose getting in there first made me feel really bad. And she was probably wearing ESMERELDA when she did it as well. I got that painful feeling in my heart that I get when I can’t breathe properly because I’ve been laughing too hard – only this time it felt one hundred per cent painful and no per cent funny. I suppose I probably sound like I’m a very awful person for not being pleased for the pair of them, but it wasn’t my fault. It really wasn’t. Hearing this piece of news regarding the good fortune of my best friend Goose – who was SUPPOSED to be in detention – and my dream lover Neil Adam caused a serious malfunction somewhere deep inside my brain.

  And then someone switched them back on again and I felt all dizzy and started laughing in a really weird way and said, ‘Oh yeah, I remember Goose telling me about that now.’

  And Gareth said, ‘So will you come with me then?’

  And I said, ‘Sorry, Gaz. Maybe another time.’

  And Gareth looked a bit sad and shrugged and walked off back towards the village, and I felt even worse.

  iNNOCeNt fLOwers, DaNGerOus serPeNts aND the truth aBOut the COLOur GreeN

  ‘I just can’t believe it! Me and Neil are getting on so well. Last night I went round his house and he made me chocolate fondue. Chocolate fondue! How totally sophisticated is that? He is so unlike the scatty boys in our school. I can’t believe we’ve only been together a week. It feels like we’ve known each other all our lives. Lottie, me and Neil are so compatible you wouldn’t believe it.’

  Goose has changed. Last night she was supposed to come round my house to watch Free Willy 3 with me, but she rang up at the last minute and cancelled because she’d decided that she’d rather see Slumber Party Massacre with Mad Alien. I ended up watching FW3 with my mum, who fell asleep twenty minutes after the opening credits. The old Goose would never have subjected me to such a tragic evening. The new Goose is a much more heartless individual. She keeps on dyeing her hair deliberately green and she is in love. She is also FANTASTICALLY BORING. Today in work she talked about Neil Adam the Mad Alien for twenty-six minutes solidly. I tried shifting around the shop to shake her off but she just kept following me. I also tried changing the subject.

  ‘How many pairs of tights have you sold?’

  ‘None yet. I’m so in love just at the moment that I can’t really keep my mind on anything as trivial as a triple-pack of 10-denier American Tan. You’d understand if you were in the same situation.’

  I have to be honest – this last comment was fairly annoying, but I am a very loyal friend and I like to think that I don’t give up on people easily, so I tried again.

  ‘How is recording going with the Tribe of Pixies?’

  This time, for a minute or two at least, it worked and I managed to get Goose off the subject. She put down the duster she had been holding but not using for twenty-six minutes and frowned. ‘Really rubbish. I’m getting severely stressed out with my backing band. Bill and James keep arguing all the time. I should have known that trying to create a CD masterpiece of grunge-folk-rock brilliance with them would be a complete drain of my artistic energy.’

  Bill and James are Goose’s musically gifted twin brothers. They are both child prodigies who have won countless competitions for playing the violin and the piano even though they are onl
y in Year 8. Like me, they are also short for their age. This is why Goose always refers to them as pixies. As far as I can tell, they don’t seem to mind. Despite the fact that Goose moans about them most of the time, Bill and James are actually quite cute. I haven’t got any brothers or sisters who live in the same house as me, but if I did, I wouldn’t mind a couple of pocket-sized musical geniuses like Bill and James. My older sister, Ruthie, is away at university in Aberystwyth studying archaeology. Ruthie is cool, but we aren’t really on the same wavelength. I am fairly normal, whereas she has got a thing about damp, muddy holes and bits of broken pottery. My baby brother, Caradoc, is five now and lives with my dad and his new wife in Wrexham so I don’t get to see him very often. He might as well live in Oompa-Loompa land. Wrexham is miles away. Sometimes Caradoc doesn’t even seem to be all that sure who I am, although I do try to talk to him on the phone now and again. It will be easier when he’s a bit older, I suppose, and he knows how to text. Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that if I was Goose, I’d be quite pleased to have Bill and James around. Sometimes being an only child at home can get a bit intense. Especially when your mum is a policewoman.

  But at least I’d got Goose to change the subject.

  I said, ‘Are they still arguing about who’s got the squeakiest voice?’

  Goose wrinkled her nose and said, ‘Yup, that kind of thing. Anyway, what are we talking about those little squirts for? Did I tell you what Neil said about the moment he knew for sure that he was totally in love with me? He said that when he bumped into me on the pavement when I first had my green hair, he just KNEW that I was the one for him. He said that …’

  Luckily for me, I never got to hear what else the Mad Alien said because a customer came into the shop. It was a woman with three wailing little children who all needed their feet measuring. Asserting my authority as Head Saturday Girl, I instructed Goose to go and serve them. While she was busy, I disappeared out the back. Once safely out of view, I dragged the taller of the two stepladders around to the remotest corner of the stockroom and climbed up the top to sit and think for a bit.

  There were a whole lot of questions whirring around my head. In fact, there were so many of them they didn’t all seem to fit comfortably inside my brain. It felt like one more question could have caused my entire mind to blow a fuse.

  It was all beginning to give me a bit of headache.

  In front of me was a pile of shoeboxes containing a ladies white slingback shoe called SADIE. Pulling one of the boxes out, I took a marker pen from my pocket and adjusted the label a bit.

  I put the marker pen back in my pocket and pushed the box to the back of the shelf where it couldn’t be seen. My head felt a little bit better.

  I stayed at the top of the ladder for another sixteen minutes before raised voices on the shop floor awakened my curiosity enough for me to abandon my perch. Downstairs, Goose was getting an ear-bashing from Dionne, who had only just surfaced from her office and was seeing Goose’s latest application of bright green hair for the first time.

  ‘I thought I told you that green hair was unacceptable for work. This is the second time I’m going to have to send you home on account of your personal appearance. If it happens again, Gail, I’ll have to replace you with somebody else. Consider this your first and final warning.’

  Dionne had gone a bit red in the face while she was saying all this. Goose said, ‘It was an accident. Honestly, Dionne. I didn’t read the label properly. I thought that if you’d recently coloured your hair, you had to double the development time, not halve it. And anyway, I thought emerald was a red colour. I did, honestly. I’m really sorry.’

  I happen to know for a fact that Goose knows full well what colour emerald is because she had a ring set with an emerald stone for her last birthday.

  In the corner of the shop I laced up some trainers and watched quietly as Dionne sighed in an exasperated fashion and told Goose that she had two hours to sort her hair out. Goose promised that it wouldn’t happen again, grabbed her bag from the stockroom and hurried out through the door. Crossing over to the window, I watched her as she ran up the street to her house via a short snog-stop at Suitably Booted.

  In English we’ve been studying a play called Macbeth8 by William Shakespeare, the creative-writing expert. Unfortunately I’m starting to see some similarities between that terrible woman Lady Macbeth and my so-called best friend, Goose. Both of them seem sweet and harmless on the outside but both are in fact driven by selfish greed to hurt other people in order to get what they want. It hurts me to say this. It really does. As any self-respecting scholar of Mr Shakespeare knows, Lady Macbeth said that it was important to look like an innocent flower hut he the serpent underneath, and this is EXACTLY what Goose is doing now. She is pretending her green hair was a mistake and she is pretending to be innocent of the deep emotional wound she has given me by stealing away my chance at happiness with Neil Adam. But actually her hair is as deliberate as the love bite that she is hiding beneath her polo-neck.

  And whatever Mad Alien thinks, I don’t think her green hair looks all that great.

  In fact, it looks fairly putrid.

  BuzziNG MY heaD Off

  After Goose disappeared to de-greenify her hair, I started selling tights. American Tan. California Bronze. Large polka-dot. Small polka-dot. Fishnet. Seams and bows. If we had them, I sold them. I’m no mathematical genius, but the way I worked it out, it was simple. There was one prize and three Saturday girls. That meant my chances of winning were one in three. When you compare this to the odds of winning the lottery – one in thirty-three zillion – this is definitely quite favourable. Not even the reappearance of Gina worried me. Dionne had stated very clearly that this was a competition for Saturday girls, and it doesn’t take supersonic specs to see that Gina is way past ever qualifying in this category – even if she does have the fashion sense of a Teletubby. In short,

  Which left me up against Emily and Goose. Elvis Presley in the public garden has more chance of ever selling any tights than Emily, and he spends most of his time asleep on a bench. Don’t get me wrong – Emily is a good and sensible person, but she lacks the necessary drive and ambition to succeed in the cut-throat world of retail commerce. Sometimes a little bit of nastiness is necessary if you want to get ahead. In short,

  So that meant that the competition was really just between me and Goose. And although Goose has already proved that she is more than capable of enough nastiness to rival Lady Macbeth, I knew she couldn’t win if I maximized on my two-hour head start. In short,

  Which meant that I was actually the only serious contender in this contest. And those REALLY ARE good odds. To be honest though,

  With this thought burning a hole in my head, I prowled the shop floor and began my campaign. I was quite buzzed up. I couldn’t think about anything except winning, I wanted to win. I HAD to win. Without even needing to work out a strategy, my mind switched on to autopilot and began to take me step by step through a masterclass in tights-selling brilliance.

  Step One: Send Emily out the back to hunt for a pair of ESMERELDAs in size five for an imaginary customer called Audrey. (This would keep Emily out of the way for a while, because the only pair of ESMERELDAs I’ve ever seen now live under Goose’s bed.)

  Step Two: Rush forward and approach all customers before Gina gets to them. Overwhelm them with helpfulness and charm and fetch from the back whatever shoes they want. (Gina couldn’t match my speed and agility on the shop floor because one side of her head is heavier than the other and this gives her severe steering problems.)

  Step Three: When customers are at till, say ‘Oh, aren’t these ANGIE court shoes lovely! I think they’d look totally tremendous with a pair of 10-denier silk-finish midnight tights.’ (Or something similar.)

  Sometimes it all worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

  As the morning wore on, I got more confident. In fact, I started to feel so confident that I became convinced I could sell ANYTHING. I sta
rted to say stuff like, ‘Wow, these NICOLE high heels are gorgeous. I think they’re just screaming out to be teamed with a pair of foxy black freaky fishnets.’

  Then when Goose returned with brown hair and added a real sense of urgency to my tights-selling operation, I asked Gina if I could stand on the pavement outside the shop so that I’d be able to take maximum advantage of any passing trade, and after a bit of humming and hah-ing, she agreed. I filled a basket with tights and went outside and started approaching people in the street. And I was doing SO well. I must have shifted at least twenty pairs. But then something very weird happened. The Pixie Twins, Bill and James, turned up and Bill was carrying Goose’s guitar.

  They were blatantly up to something, and if I hadn’t been so busy pretending not to be interested, I’d have had a good stare. Instead, I kept my head turned in the other direction and went right on shouting, ‘Give your husband some sexy nights – buy a triple-pack of budget tights!’

  A few moments later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Goose appear and place a basket of tights next to her on the pavement. She took the guitar from Bill and then, pulling a plectrum from her pocket, she picked out an opening E chord and began to SING to the passing public.

  How completely random is that?

  Her song was kind of slow and bluesy and went like this.

  I woke up this morning

  And my tights were a fright

  So wrinkled and crumpled

  Like I’d been in a fight.

  Several people smiled and stopped on the pavement to listen.

  So I got me down to Sole Mates

  With one-fifty in my hands

  And now I’m the proud new owner