by Jana Hunter
But I didn’t need to tell them twice. They went mad, gagging at the horrendous outfits and trying on crazy stuff. We’d all brought our pocket money (’cos the good thing about charity shops is they don’t cost too much, if you’re clever with what you pick). But we were still soon out of money (natch!).
“Can’t we use some of the fundraiser money?” I suggested. “It’s all in a good cause.”
That prompted a major discussion. The kind that needed a visit to the burger bar for a milkshake and French fries to help thrash it out (which, wouldn’t you know, took up more money).
But in the end we all had to agree that the clothes were important for the makeovers. So we used the £10 we’d raised last night doing Rosie’s mum.
“She said we can use some of her chuck-outs to play with too,” Rosie told us.
“Play with them?” I said huffily. “We’re not children. We are going to transform them!” I ran my fingers ecstatically through a floaty evening dress and the gang guffawed. They never take me seriously.
After they’d laughed their silly heads off we went on to the next charity shop. (Luckily Cuddington has two.)
“What I really need is feathers,” I said, imagining the floaty things I could make. “But they’re so expensive to buy at the hobbies shop and you only get one or two measly ones in a packet.”
“I know where there are loads of feathers,” whispered Lyndz mysteriously.
“What sort of feathers?” I asked.
Lyndz waggled her eyebrows wickedly. “Ostrich feathers.”
“Where are they?” I wanted to know.
“On the ostriches.”
I thwacked Lyndz. “I mean where are the ostriches, idiot!”
Lyndz grinned. “Well, if you really want to know, they’re on the farm next door to the stables.”
“Huh?”
Lyndz explained that since the BSE crisis when nobody was eating beef, the cattle farmer next to the stables had opened an ostrich farm as an alternative. (Gross. You’d never get me to eat those funny-looking things.)
“Why did the farmer choose lovely birds like that?” Frankie the vegetarian sighed.
“Because their meat is s’posed to be really tasty,” teased Slushbucket, who’d eat anything that wasn’t nailed down. “Yum, yum!”
Frankie glared at Lyndz and pretended to stick her fingers down her throat. “Yuck!”
“Hey, look at this!” squealed Rosie, who was kneeling on the charity shop floor in front of the bookshelves. “It’s about making natural skin preparations. It’s even got a section on face packs.”
I peered over Rosie’s shoulder. “All you need is oatmeal and honey… Sounds a bit sticky.”
“If it doesn’t work, we could always throw it into the Grumpies’ pond,” chuckled Kenny. She was remembering the time we chucked porridge and waffles over my garden fence and they landed in the snooty Watson-Wade’s prize pond. We got a real earwigging for that one, but it was well funny.
While we were rooting about the bookshelves I found a great wedding book for my Auntie Jill. Her wedding was getting closer and my mum was already in a state about what she was going to wear. “Auntie Jill might like to know what the ‘Done Thing’ is for the mother of the bride…”
“Doubt it,” grinned Frankie. “Snowy Owl is a major rebel.”
It was true. My Auntie Jill had all sorts of wild and crazy things planned for her wedding and not one of them involved proper hats and speeches.
“Do you think the bride would like a face pack for her special day?” asked Rosie. “We need to try out these recipes.”
“And work on our wedding outfits.” I looked at the gang and waggled my eyebrows. “So what do we need most of all, gang?”
“A SLEEPOVER!” they shouted together. Then we all cheered and gave each other high fives. We’d have to nag our mums for another one tonight, till one of them caved in.
But first we had to pay a visit to that ostrich farm…
“Oooh, Lyndz!” I yelled at her from the farm gate. “Don’t go in there. It’s covered in…”
“Poo!” giggled Lyndz as she jumped SPLAT! over the farmyard fence, into a stinky pile of ostrich droppings.
Yuck! It was splattered all over her trousers and everything. But the Slushbucket was quite at home wading through the stinky mess. As she said, when you muck out horses all the time, you get to quite enjoy the smell of manure.
How sad!
The ostriches’ long necks craned towards the intruder and their bulging eyes stared at her stupidly. They hadn’t got a brain between them.
“Now I know what they mean by bird brains!” giggled Lyndz.
“You said it,” agreed Frankie.
The daft things copied everything this one big bird did like he was king (although why he was special beats me as he looked exactly like the rest of them).
“He must be first in the pecking order,” quipped Kenny and we all laughed.
The funniest thing was, the whole flock moved in time together like they were in some kind of chorus dance routine, jerking their spindly necks and flapping their huge wings in unison – turning this way and that.
“Swan Lake, I don’t think!” I laughed.
We hung on to the fence, killing ourselves, while Lyndz tried to creep up to them to collect their flying feathers. But every time she got close they hared off in another direction, flapping like mad.
“Don’t get in a flap!” laughed Frankie.
But that only made them worse. They squawked away and took off in time together run, run, running.
Boy, could they go fast!
“Maybe if they think I’m one of them, they’ll slow down,” giggled Lyndz. So she did a hilarious imitation of a spindly-legged ostrich loping round the yard and jerking its neck…
We were all wetting ourselves by this time.
“Only clean feathers, pleeease!” I spluttered, as Lyndz picked up a greasy-looking feather from the ground. But it was hopeless. Every feather dropped got plastered in mud and dirt and you-know-what. Imagine my Makeover customers draped in that poo!
“Are you tormenting my flock?” teased the farmer, coming over to the fence. “It’d be easier to get the feathers in the shed, you know…”
“Oh, yes,” stammered Lyndz. “Of course…”
But the farmer had to laugh at Lyndz. “You make a lovely ostrich,” he grinned as she slid in the mud.
And Lyndz blushed.
In the end we got piles of feathers. But I refused to carry a placcy bag full of them. “Carting round pooey stuff is not my idea of being a fashion designer,” I protested daintily.
At that Lyndz waved a big smelly feather under my nose. “Miss Fliss, chief of the dirt patrol…” she teased.
OK, so I like things clean and nice. What’s wrong with that? Personally, I couldn’t wait to get home and have a long shower.
I was dying to tell Mum all about our hilarious day, but just my luck, she was on the phone. She didn’t even notice the state of my jeans, and went right on talking to my Auntie Jill about the wedding. “I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to look for an outfit,” she sighed. “The twins take up all my time.”
That’s the understatement of the century.
“If I could just get a day to shop, I might find something,” she yawned. “But I’m so tired I’d probably fall asleep!”
I was just about to offer to babysit when Joe and Hannah crawled up to me clamouring to be picked up. “Nooo,” I said, backing away in horror. “Go to Mummy!”
Before I could explain that it was only because I didn’t want to get ostrich muck over my clean little brother and sister, Mum was glaring at me. “Oh, she’s no help!” she complained to Auntie Jill down the phone. “She won’t even pick them up!”
Well, if that’s the way she felt about me, blow the twins and blow her! Hurt and misjudged, I ran upstairs, with the tears pricking my eyelids.
It was so unfair.
The first mum to giv
e that night’s Sleepover the go-ahead wasn’t mine like in the old days, but Kenny’s. So by 7.30 we were all at Kenny’s house, armed with our charity-shop haul, glue, sewing stuff and, of course, bags of ostrich feathers.
“They still smell!” I protested when Lyndz dumped them on to Kenny’s bedroom floor.
“That’s the natural odour,” said Lyndz. “I washed them in Fairy three times.”
“Peeuw. Pass me the Febreze,” I said, holding my nose. I had my work cut out making glam gear with the stink of the century clinging to it.
“Fusspot’s at it again,” teased Frankie and I gave her a thwack.
“She’ll shut up when she hears my news.” Lyndz was looking like she was about to explode.
“What! What?” we all squealed, bashing Lyndz with our rolled-up sleeping bags to make her give in (not exactly a squishy poo but it would do).
“Well…” began Lyndz when she’d had enough, “you know the photos Rosie’s mum took last night?”
“Yes, yes…” We’d all had a good giggle at the pictures Karen had taken of our painted faces. (She’d had them developed at a one-hour printing place.)
“Well, my dad happened to see them and…”
“And what?” Lyndz can be a real pain when she’s got a secret.
“And he thinks they’re so good he wants us to paint the little animals’ faces for his play!”
“YES!”
“The Wind in the Willows!” screeched Frankie, bouncing up and down. “I can do some brillo mice and squirrels!”
Frankie always takes over, just ’cos she’s got the face paints, but she forgets I’m really good at make-up too. “It’s not just you,” I reminded her. “Lyndz said ‘us’.”
“I’m the one who painted our faces!” retorted Frankie.
“So?”
“So shut up!”
Luckily, Lyndz the peacemaker stepped in then. “It’ll be much more fun if the whole gang work behind the scenes,” she pointed out. “We could have a right laugh.”
“And we could show the Little Angels who are the really helpful ones.”
Frankie had to admit we were right. With our behind-the-scenes helping out we’d be the biggest angels the Cuddington Players had ever known!
Three-nil to the Sleepover Gang!
Then I had a brainwave (yes, another one!). “Wonder if your dad needs any help with costumes…” I mused, ultra casual-like.
“YES!” shouted the gang and they all gave me high fives. “Good one, Fliss!”
I got so carried away with their praise and enthusiasm I almost forgot about the Makeover outfits. But it was all in the same cause, and I’d wanted to try my hand at theatre costumes ever since we did the school play.
“I’ll phone Dad now!” said Lyndz excitedly, and she got out her mobile.
In no time the whole thing was decided. Mr Collins, Keith that is, thought it was a great idea for us to work on the costumes. “The woodland animals will be played by the infants,” he told us. “So we need lots of little fieldmice, squirrels, ferrets, weasels, birds, stoats, otters… Oh and two young hedgehogs.”
When he’d finished giving us all the information, we couldn’t stop ourselves from leaping about like wild animals ourselves. “Ooo-ooo, ee-eee!” we squeaked and wrinkled our noses. (The Sleepover Gang can go haywire sometimes, and this was one of those times.)
“OK, let’s get down to work!” I gasped when we finally stopped to catch our breath. “Let’s paint T-shirts for the fieldmice first.”
So we flattened out the old T-shirts we’d brought for our makeovers and weighted them down with chess pieces from Molly the Monster’s chess set. (Molly is Kenny’s gruesome sister, by the way, and believe me, she doesn’t get her nickname for nothing!) When we were all set up, we started to do fur on the front of the shirts with fabric paint and markers.
They looked really good when we’d finished. The effect would be just right on the school stage.
“Five fieldmice coming up!” I said happily. “All we need are tails and ears now.” And we draped the T-shirts over the radiators to dry.
“Now for the bird feathers,” I said, sticking Sellotape over my nose.
“Look at Fliss!” screamed Lyndz, nearly choking on the popcorn she was stuffing her face with.
“It’d for art,” I said huffily. “Sho shud up!” (I couldn’t help my nasally voice but that didn’t stop my friends poking fun at me.) They laughed their silly brains out, but I just worked on (someone had to act professional).
I gathered lots of bunches of feathers of different lengths and taped each bunch together at the base. (They would make perfect tails for the birds.) Meanwhile, Lyndz and Kenny got on with making cotton-wool bobtails for the bunny rabbits, while Frankie and Rosie cut out ears from an old blanket Kenny’s mum had given us.
We were totally engrossed when Kenny’s bedroom door suddenly burst open and Molly the Monster stood there with a poisonous look on her face. “What’re you babies doing?” she growled. “Making a mess of my room!”
But she yelled even louder when she saw we’d borrowed her precious chess pieces. “You’ve got paint on my Queen!” she stormed.
“Be careful!” I begged, whipping my feather tails out of the path of her big feet. (But not before she’d squashed two of them!)
“Oh, nooo!”
“Why don’t you just leave?” said Frankie through gritted teeth.
“Why should I?”
Trouble is, Molly the Monster shares the bedroom with Kenny so we couldn’t get rid of her that easily. It made Sleepovers at Kenny’s like a minefield full of Molly’s wind-ups. She just loved annoying us.
Even after Kenny had polished her silly chess piece till it was positively glowing, Molly still hung around. “What babies!” she sneered, pointing at my bird-feather tails. “Are you ickle girls still playing dressing up?”
“You’re just jealous because you can’t make clever costumes, like Fliss,” retorted Kenny.
“Huh!” Molly jabbed a tail feather with her big toe. “I wouldn’t be seen dead in that rubbish.”
What a pig.
It was definitely payback time. Luckily, Rosie was mixing up a face-pack recipe just then, so it gave me an idea. I shrugged and then I said, ultra casually, “By the way, Molly, what’s that spot on your face?”
“Spot?” Despite herself, Molly looked stricken. “What spot?”
“That one there,” I pointed to the angry red bump erupting in the middle of the Monster’s chin. “Did you grow it to match that other one on your forehead?”
Molly glared at me. “I don’t have any spots,” she hissed.
We looked at one another and then back at the spotty one. “Oh, yes you do!” we shouted out loud and clear.
That got rid of the Monster at last. She stormed out with her silly nose in the air.
“Good riddance!” snorted Kenny. “Well done, Fliss.”
But Molly the Monster was back in no time. (Since she had no friends of her own round, she had to come and bother Kenny’s.) “What’s that gunk?” she said, pointing to the oatmeal and honey face mask Rosie was stirring in a bowl.
“Ohh… it’s just a spot remedy,” I chipped in before Rosie had a chance to answer. “It’s magic for nasty spots…” I looked pointedly at Molly’s chin.
Molly gritted her teeth. “Prove it.”
“£1,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Daylight robbery!” she complained, but she gave me the £1 just the same.
So I set to work smearing her face with the sticky stuff. “Keep absolutely still,” I warned. “You mustn’t crack your face.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t laugh,” giggled Kenny, as flakes of oatmeal stuck to the honey, making Molly look more like a monster than ever.
“Um, I think you’ve got another spot coming here,” I said dabbing the reddening bump like I’d seen my mum do.
“Another spot?” said Kenny. “Don’t worry, Sis, you could always
play ‘Join the Dots’.”
It was torment for Molly because you could tell she was dying to crack her face and tell Kenny to shut up. (Serves her right, after the way she treated us!)
“Mmm,” said Frankie, sniffing the bowl of honey and oatmeal. “Anyone got some toast?”
“No, but if you’ve got another bowl we could have porridge,” laughed Lyndz. “And dribble honey on it!”
“Talking of honey…” said Rosie suddenly. “Why do bees hum?”
“Dunno,” we said in unison.
“Because they don’t know the words!” giggled Rosie. Then she started to hum and sing:
“I wish I was a little bug,
With hairs all on my tummy.
I crawl into a honey pot,
And make my tummy gummy.”
And we all joined in. (All except Molly, that is.)
“It’s itching!” she growled through tightly-closed lips.
“That’s your imagination,” I said calmly. “There’s nothing in this mixture that could irritate the skin.”
“Well, it’s itching!” screamed Molly, her voice rising to an ear-splitting yelp.
“Keep still!”
Suddenly, unable to keep her face straight another second, Molly the Monster leapt up and rushed to the bathroom.
“It won’t work if you wash it off before time!” I called out to her helpfully. But already the sound of crazed whimpering and frantic water splashing could be heard coming from the bathroom.
That Molly is a wuss. Would you believe it, as soon as she was done, she stomped downstairs to tell on us. (Natch!)
In no time, Mrs McKenzie was upstairs with a big frown on her face. “What have you been doing to Molly?” she asked suspiciously.
“Nothing,” said Kenny quickly.
“She’s come out in some sort of an allergic reaction. Whatever was in that concoction?”
“N – nothing,” I said nervously (you know how I hate getting into trouble). “Just oatmeal and honey basically…” My cheeks were burning as I showed Kenny’s mum the facial. (But not half as much as Molly’s cheeks.) She’d come back upstairs to smirk at the earwigging we were getting and they looked beetroot and as blotchy as anything. It was a truly horrible sight.