by Hayley Long
And all of a sudden I got this big buzzy rush of giggles and I started laughing so hard that Gareth Stingecombe on the next table looked over and said, ‘Biggsy’s off her blinking head again,’ and then he winked and blew me a kiss, which actually made me shut up fairly quickly. But Goose wasn’t laughing at all. For some reason she was just sitting there looking at me with this worried expression on her face. And then she took hold of my hand and squeezed it and said, ‘Well, so long as that’s all it is. If ever you need someone to talk to about anything, you know you can always talk to me.’
And it was a real relief to feel close to Goose again, and I smiled and squeezed her hand back and then we both picked up our pens and started drawing the fried-egg diagrams that Mr Thomas was putting up on the board. And all the time, I was still sort of quietly laughing to myself about the Iceland joke even though I knew it was blatantly a very pathetic joke indeed. But the truth is, I didn’t want to stop laughing because, all of a sudden, I had this terrifying feeling that if I did stop, I’d start crying instead, and I just couldn’t have handled that in the middle of Mr Thomas’s double-science lesson.
trYiNG NOt tO LauGh whiLe resCuiNG a Giraffe
Gareth Stingecombe was waiting for me when I walked out of school at the end of the day. He was sitting on the wall of the graveyard, eating a chocolate bar and fiddling with his iPod. When he saw me he shoved the remaining half of the chocolate bar in his mouth and jumped down off the wall. I carried on walking and pretended I hadn’t seen him. It’s not that I don’t like Gareth or anything, it’s just that after all the aggravation with Mr Thomas and his amoebas, I didn’t fancy talking to anyone all that much – not even Goose who had got herself a detention for performing an unbleeped version of a 50 Cent song in her music lesson. It hadn’t been a very good day.
Gareth said, ‘All right, Biggsy? You seemed off your head in science.’
I stopped walking and stared at him. I couldn’t exactly remember what had gone wrong in science or why Mr Thomas had got so mad at me. I said, ‘If you don’t mind, Gaz, I’d rather not talk about it right now.’
Gareth Stingecombe shrugged. I started to walk on again, and Gareth walked alongside me. I didn’t say so to him but, actually, it felt quite nice to have his company. Instead of turning right towards my house, I crossed over Church Road and began making my way towards the shops in Merthyr Road. My mum never gets home from work until gone six and I really didn’t feel in the mood to be by myself.
Gareth said, ‘Tell you what, Biggsy, how about I buy you a cup of tea or something in that fancy cafe over there?’
I looked to where he was pointing and saw that he meant the Dragon Coffee House. I gave a half-smile and said, ‘It’s not that fancy, actually, Gareth. Me and Goose go in there all the time.’
Gareth went a bit red. ‘You’re hard work, Biggsy – you know that?’
I immediately felt awful. I can be an awkward witch sometimes, I know I can. It’s probably what comes of having beige hair for most of my life. I wanted to say sorry to Gareth but I didn’t really know how to without getting all intense, so instead, I linked my arm through his, gave him a big smile and said, ‘I had a difficult day at the office, darling.’
Gareth looked surprised and went even redder. It made him look seriously cute and a bit sensitive. But then he went all tough again and said, ‘You’re telling me, Biggsy! You’ve had a face like a dropped pie all day.’
I started to laugh. Gareth laughed as well and seemed to relax a bit. I think he quite liked having my arm hooked through his. I quite liked it too. As we arrived at the coffee house he said, ‘So are you absolutely definitely sure you don’t want to come to the end-of-term disco with me? Say no now, Biggsy, and you could spend the rest of your life kicking yourself.’
I hesitated, my hand on the door of the cafe. Gareth looked at me, waiting for me to say something, and when I didn’t he began to look a touch annoyed. I started to panic then and this stern voice inside my head said, ‘DON’T BE SO RUDE, CHARLOTTE! GIVE HIM AN ANSWER.’ I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing at all came out. It was as if I’d completely forgotten how to speak. And it wasn’t as if I was struggling because I didn’t know how to let him down gently or anything like that. That wasn’t the problem at all. Because right there and then, at that particular moment in the whole history of time, I WANTED to go to the disco with him, I REALLY DID, but there was this other question which had just broken out in my head and that was:
Because right then I wasn’t sure about what I felt like doing from one second to the next. Right at that moment I wasn’t actually very sure about anything at all. Not even why I was alive. It’s not a nice feeling to have, believe me.
And just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder, I saw Neil Adam and Emily inside the Dragon Coffee House.
‘So do you want to come with me to this disco or not?’ asked Gareth.
What was Neil Adam doing in there with Emily?
And I couldn’t concentrate on ANYTHING that Gareth was saying because the inside of my brain had gone completely like this:
and I found I was laughing. Like little hiccups at first and then a bit more and a bit more until it was finally a big full-on howling belly laugh and I was having difficulty standing up straight.
Gareth Stingecombe turned a deep beetroot purple and then said, ‘Oh, forget it!’ and stomped off down Merthyr Road.
I watched him walk off, getting further and further away from me, and I wanted to call him back and apologize and try to explain about the black hole in my brain, but I couldn’t because I was laughing too hard to get any words out and, to be honest, it was all beginning to make my heart hurt. And then I turned back to Neil Adam and Emily inside the coffee shop and I stopped laughing. Instantly. One second it was
Because they were snogging shamelessly over what looked like double choco-mochaccinos. Neil Adam and Emily. Emily and Neil Adam. Emily, who doesn’t talk to boys! I spun around so that my back was facing the window. I didn’t want either of them to see me. For a few minutes I stood completely still, staring at the traffic on the road and not daring to move in case I attracted any attention to myself. And then, when my heart had slowed down and I was feeling a bit calmer, I said to myself, ‘Maybe I got that wrong. Maybe it was Goose in there with him. Maybe she got let out early from the music detention. Or maybe that’s not Neil Adam at all. Just someone who looks amazingly like him.’ So I turned around, ever so slowly, to have another look and
it was them! Neil Adam and Emily. In a compromising situation.
I turned and started walking very quickly down Merthyr Road. Neither of them had seen me; that I was sure about. In all honesty, it’s difficult to notice people staring at you through a cafe window when you’ve got your eyes shut and your tongue twisted round someone else’s tonsils. I kept on walking, and all the time I was walking I was thinking HOW AM I GOING TO TELL GOOSE?
And I couldn’t think of an answer so I just kept right on walking until I realized that lots of cars were beeping their horns at me and I was actually one hundred metres up in the air with four lanes of fast-moving traffic whizzing right by my left ear. I stopped then. I’d gone a bit dizzy. Somehow I’d walked on to the flyover – and although it’s got a narrow pavement, I don’t think you’re actually supposed to use it. Which was probably why all the cars were tooting their horns at me.
Holding my breath, so I didn’t pass out from all the traffic fumes, I carefully did an about-turn and began walking back to Whitchurch. My head was all over the place. It reminded me of a doll my sister, Ruthie, had once found in a jumble sale and given to me when I was a little girl. It was made of hard plastic and had a massive head and a tiny body. The tiny body was attached to the massive head by a cord, and when you held on to the head, pulled the body as far as you could and then let go, the cord and body wound back in and the doll spoke. She said loads of different things and all of them in an increasingly manic American voice. Stuff like ‘
That’s quite a stretch!’ Or, ‘Whoops, I lost my head for a moment!’ Or ‘My feet are moving closer!’ It was my most favourite toy ever! Something about that massive head and that tiny body and that bonkers American voice just used to make me laugh and laugh. I played with it all the time, until one sad day I pulled the body too hard and the cord snapped, leaving nothing but a decapitated head in my hand.
I haven’t thought about that mad doll for years, but I was thinking about it as I walked back to Whitchurch from the flyover after seeing Neil Adam and Emily with their faces stuck together. And all I could hear inside my head was this mad American voice saying stuff like:
It was all very random.
The next thing I knew, I was in the Pound Shop. I don’t know why I’d gone in there because it’s a very scatty shop full of very scatty items and most of the customers who go in there have still got their slippers on. But somehow I was in there, and I was walking up and down the aisles just staring at stuff when I came to a stop in front of a shelf full of small cuddly giraffes. They looked like this.11
They were actually quite cute and not bad quality really, considering they only cost a pound. So I stood there in the Pound Shop, looking into the brown button eyes of this stuffed giraffe and, I swear to God, it felt like the toy was talking to me. First, my mad doll and now this one-pound giraffe!
The giraffe said, ‘Lottie, why don’t you give me to Goose? I’m dead cute and she’s going to need some serious cheering up when she finds out what a total toad that minging Mad Alien is.’
And I thought about it and then I said, ‘You’re right! Hang on, I’ll just get my purse out of my authentic Donna Karan shoulder bag.’
I didn’t say this out loud, of course. I said it telepathically. I’m not a maniac.
And then the giraffe said, ‘Oh, don’t bother with that. Just rescue me. It’ll be more funny if you rescue me.’
I looked up and down the aisle, but I couldn’t see any staff about. It was nearly five o’clock and it seemed that the only two people working were both at the tills dealing with the last-minute rush of customers who were queuing up to pay for their garden gnomes and clothes pegs and the other types of stuff you get in a shop where everything costs a pound.
I picked the giraffe up from the shelf.
‘Quick, Lottie. Put me in your bag,’ he said.
I looked at my authentic Donna Karan shoulder bag. It already had my purse, a biro, my mascara and my MP3 player inside it. It was full to bursting. There wasn’t any room for anything else. There especially wasn’t any room for a giraffe.
Taking a deep breath, I held the giraffe casually by its neck and let it swing down by the side of my leg. And then I slowly continued wandering through the aisles of the pound shop pretending to browse the gnomes and the clothes pegs as I went. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to rescue a giraffe from a pound shop before, but I have to say there was really something hysterically funny about it. It was even funnier than being moaned at by Mr Thomas for seventeen hours. It was so funny that I was actually having a hard job trying not to laugh. But I knew that if I was to save the giraffe, it was really important that I didn’t start acting all peculiar so I kept my face perfectly still and continued casually wandering up and down the aisles, swinging my giraffe by its neck until I casually just wandered right out of the shop. And then when I was out on the pavement, I shouted,
and laughed so much that I nearly fell over. It was definitely the best moment I’d had all day. I almost went straight back inside the shop so that I could rescue another giraffe for Gareth.
When I got home my mum still wasn’t back from work. I put my rescued giraffe on the kitchen table and got my dinner out of the fridge and put it in the microwave. The note on the fridge from my mum said that it needed six minutes. I turned the timer and then I sat down and looked at my giraffe. Inside the microwave, my cottage pie was going round and round and starting to glisten a bit. In front of me, on the table, my giraffe wasn’t doing anything. One of its legs was a bit shorter than the others and was causing it to wonk. And it looked like one of its button eyes was soon going to fall off. To be honest it was not a very good giraffe. It was actually fairly tragic.
I sat for a while and just stared at my giraffe. My cottage pie carried on whirring around inside the microwave and then I heard the ping that meant that it was ready. But all of a sudden I didn’t feel hungry. I picked up the giraffe and headed to my bedroom. I didn’t want to give Goose a tragic giraffe that was on the wonk. I especially didn’t want to give her something I hadn’t paid for. I opened the door of my wardrobe, threw the giraffe inside and then closed the door again.
a Brief wOrD aBOut the tOtaLLY raNDOm Nature Of LOve aND POetrY
Mr (or Mrs) Examiner, I know that the middle of my Creative Writing Coursework is not exactly the best place to share my thoughts on the utterly bizarre and freakish topics of love (yuck!!!) and poetry (yawn) but I’m going to anyway. I have to. I need to share my thoughts with somebody, and you are the only person who will listen to me. Goose is currently in a state of emotional derangement and any mention of the word love is likely to tip her right over the edge. My mum is no good either. During the week she’s hardly ever in, and during the weekend I hardly ever am. My sister, Ruthie, is only interested in muddy bits of broken pottery. She is not really the sort of person who would understand. And besides that, she’s in Aberystwyth.
The thing is, as far as I can tell, love and poetry are pretty much the same thing. Let me explain. Firstly, they are both what Mr Wood would describe as abstract nouns. This means that you can’t really touch them, hold them, draw them or collect them but they’re both still kind of just there, if you know what I mean. Sort of like period pain. Or detention.
Secondly, you can’t have one without the other. When people are in love they write poems, and when you read that poetry you learn about how blatantly random the whole concept of love is. We have been doing a whole load of poetry in school lately because it’s Mr Wood’s favourite thing. Sometimes he reads a poem to us and then, when he’s finished, he takes off his specs and just sits there at his desk for a moment, waving the specs in front of him while he stares into space and mutters, ‘Wonderful. How perfectly wonderful!’ Clearly the inside of his head is a very freaky place. Anyway, from what I have read so far, I estimate that probably at least half the poems ever written are soppy love poems. I happen to know that the correct term for these is sonnets. Now, you would assume that a sonnet would be a happy and uplifting poem because the person who wrote it was so madly in love and generally feeling fairly good about life . . .
Poets – and writers of sonnets in particular – are the most messed-up bunch of people who ever walked this earth. Most of their poems are full of very strange and, frankly, quite useless questions like:
‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’
and
‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’
and all that usually happens is that the poet whines on for fourteen lines about how terrible they feel and then, when you get to the end, you find out that the person they fancied is actually God. Or somebody else equally unavailable. It’s all totally pointless and just a little bit weird.
So, if being in love causes people to write such drippy crap, you would think that the sensible thing to do would be:
NEVER to fall in love
and
NOT to read any poetry.
Unfortunately this is not easily done. Mr Wood told me AGAIN today that I HAVE to study poetry because it’s ON THE CURRICULUM. I told him quite bluntly that this means that the curriculum is responsible for a shocking waste of my time. I could be learning something useful and interesting like how to talk Russian or how to train a baby guide dog, but instead I’m forced to fill up my head with the weird words of Stevie Smith. She, actually, doesn’t write about love but she does write stuff like this:
Aloft,
In the loft,
Sits Cr
oft;
He is soft.
I have no idea why.
As for falling in love, you may try to steer clear of it, but it creeps up and gets you in the end. And when it does, the results are messy. I speak from experience. Not personal experience. I am as yet to find any boy, other than Gareth Stingecombe, who is not completely put off by my dodgy nose – and I’m steering well clear of him right now because the LAST thing I need is my own total eclipse of the heart. However, I can speak from observing the CATASTROPHIC impact that love has had upon my best friend, Goose. Goose has been a wreck ever since she found out about Evil Emily’s dirty affair with Emperor Ming. It wasn’t me that told her. I know, as her best friend, I should have done, but it wasn’t exactly a topic of conversation I fancied. I’m sure that sounds selfish but I just couldn’t bear to witness the total meltdown of Goose’s happiness.
The day after The Cafe Scandal, I got the bus into town or somewhere instead of going to school. I couldn’t face Goose. I didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t actually know what to say to anyone. I just wanted to be on my own. But then Saturday came and we were all back in the shop. Emily was keeping a low profile and looking a bit edgy. I noticed that she’d started wearing red lipstick, probably for Mad Alien’s benefit. When Goose was out the back getting some DWAYNE trainers in a size ten, I whispered, ‘Nice lipstick, Emily. Matches your eyes.’ Emily’s face went red then as well, and she moved over to the furthest corner of the shop and started picking up bits of fluff from underneath the men’s slip-on fixtures.
And I was really agitated so I started taking all the laces out of all of the shoes. I’d been doing this for about twenty minutes when a man tapped me on the arm and said, ‘Excuse me. A young lady went out the back to fetch me a size ten training shoe some time ago and she hasn’t come out again.’