by Grace Dent
MONDAY 6TH OCTOBER
Carrie and Uma were caught shoplifting in Superdrug in Ilford Mall this afternoon! They got taken down to the Ilford police station and were given a warning. Kezia said that Carrie had two cans of Ambre Solaire spray-tan up her sweater and Uma had a box of condoms and some blue Bourjois eyeshadow down the front of her jeans. Barney Draper had to go and pick Carrie up, then he rang my mum to see if I’d been there with them too. “No Barney,” said my mother with a face as smug as smug. “My daughter was in school. In fact she’s here now doing her homework.”
My mum put the phone down and cackled like a maniac. “See what I told you?” she said. “Carrie Draper, shoplifting in Superdrug! They ruined that girl. Ruined her.”
Carrie isn’t ruined. But she will be if she carries on hanging out with Uma Brunton-Fletcher.
Sometimes I see Carrie looking over at me when I’m having a laugh in class with Sean and Kezia and everyone, like she wants to join in and all that. I just blank her though ’cos I’m not getting shouted at again.
THURSDAY 9TH OCTOBER
Still no word back from Fast-Track Family Feud. I’m well disappointed. I thought we’d be right up their street. I should never have mentioned about Penny farting. The TV producers would have found out for themselves soon enough when she let one rip and the skin on their faces started melting. I’ve stopped her sleeping in my bed recently ’cos the smell is so bad it can actually wake you up. If you think about that, that’s quite impressive.
FRIDAY 10TH OCTOBER
A birthday card from Cava-Sue arrived today. Four days late but better than nothing. The message said, For my favorite little sister from Cava-Sue (and Lewis too!). It was one of Lewis’s homemade efforts. Black cardboard, words and pictures cut out of magazines then glued on to card, with wonky scribbling on it.
Cava-Sue used to say that Lewis’s art is full of hidden meaning and one day he’ll be a famous artist and we’ll sell these cards and make a fortune.
I looked at the card for ages and tried to find some hidden meaning, but the only one I could come up with was he probably should have his head looked at.
There was no message about her coming home.
SATURDAY 11TH OCTOBER
Went to Ilford Mall with my mother today ’cos she wanted to look at a new washing machine ’cos the old one is knackered. We walked through the town center and my mum was rabbiting on and on about me getting a job and earning some money ’cos then I can help her out buying things like washing machines ’cos after all it’ll be me that’s using it too. I felt like saying, “Yeah, unless I run away from home like Cava-Sue did,” but I didn’t. Me and Mum get along just fine as long as we don’t talk about important things. We wandered through the mall and then my mum’s face lit up like someone had flipped a switch on her head ’cos she saw Collette Brown outside Cheeky’s. Colette’s face seemed to be a bit green.
“’Ere Collette, how are you love?” my mum said.
“Oh all right, Mrs. Wood. Not so bad,” said Collette. “Just getting some fresh air.”
“Ooh, you been out on the town last night, have you?” smiled my mum.
“Erm . . . Not really,” said Collette. “I’m, erm, well . . . I’m three months pregnant, actually.”
“Oh!” my mum gasped, really searching about for words. “Ooooh . . . erm, congratulations, lovey! Good for you!”
“Thanks very much,” said Collette, quietly.
“And it’s you and your fella Curt — ” began my mum.
“Earl!” said Collette, quickly. “It’s my boyfriend Earl’s. Earl who owns Cheeky’s.”
“Yes, Earl,” said Mum. “That’s right.”
I tried to imagine Collette Brown with a baby. Collette pushing a pram. Collette changing a nappy with her acrylic nail extensions. Collette sitting in every night covered in poo with her tiara on. I couldn’t quite picture it.
(“You don’t have to get knocked up aged twenty by some random, Shiraz!” that’s what Cava-Sue said.)
“So was it a surprise?” smiled my mum.
“Well, yeah,” said Collette. “But y’know we would have probably wanted kids soon enough anyway. Earl loves children.”
“Good for you both,” said my mum. Collette smiled a nervous smile. Then she retched a bit.
“Well, we’ll see you again soon, eh? You take it easy,” said my mum as we walked off.
My mum thought for a bit then she said to me, “See, she’s not daft that one? Knocked up by the owner of Cheeky’s? She’ll be quids in there with him. She’ll want for nothing.”
“I think she’s quite young to have a baby,” I said.
“She’s twenty years old,” said my mum. “I’m glad I had mine early, got ’em out of the way. There’s nothing worse than an old mum. So narrow-minded.”
We got the bus home and I went straight into my room and started learning some French vocabulary for my test on Monday. I’ve heard a language GCSE can be dead useful for getting a good job.
TUESDAY 21ST OCTOBER
FAST-TRACK FAMILY FEUD
JETSTAR TELEVISION
ROOM 345 ORION HOUSE
LONDON WC3 H78
Dear Shiraz Bailey Wood,
Thank you very much for getting in touch with Fast-Track Family Feud! We really enjoyed hearing all about your dilemma involving your mum, your nan, your sister Cava-Sue, your brother Murphy, your dad, and not forgetting your famous flatulent dog!
The team at Fast-Track Family Feud really feel that we could help you with your problems. Here at Fast-Track Family Feud, we give you the chance to air your grievances in public and speak to a trained counselor.
Please could you give our researchers, Jocasta and Samantha, a call at 0-800-435-7880 (we’ll call you right back) and we can get the ball rolling.
Yours sincerely,
Zac Flinty-Farnham (Producer)
NOVEMBER
WEDNESDAY 12TH NOVEMBER
The Wood family appeared on national telly today! No, I can hardly believe it either but it is TOTALLY TRUE. Go look on YouTube if you think I’m a faker. Luther uploaded it right away and it’s had about two thousand seven hundred views already. I am a bloody TV star! The whole thing is totally off the scale. I can hardly explain it. I suppose I should start at the beginning. First thing was that I got a letter back from the Fast-Track Family Feud people. That was a shock enough ’cos I’d been watching the show all week and they’d had this one family on last Tuesday called the Barret-Coopers from Doncaster who’d blown up their uncle’s house with a pipe bomb over a row about lottery scratch cards, so I was beginning to think that maybe our family feud wasn’t that exciting after all.
So the letter arrived and I was proper BUZZING. I rang this woman called Jocasta who sounded quite posh and she rang me straight back to save my bill and she said, “So is your family still having problems, Shiraz?”
So I said “Well, Jocasta, my mum is chugging her way through forty Lucky Strikes a day and cries when you mention Cava-Sue and last thing I heard about Cava-Sue was that she was wrapping herself into a tinfoil representation of a Victorian chimney sweep and standing very still on a box near the Houses of Parliament to entertain tourists, so you could say that, yeah.”
Jocasta laughed out proper loud then, before she realized I wasn’t kidding.
“And what about your nan? Has she been any help?” asked Jocasta.
“Well,” I sighed, “Nan was over on Sunday, but she had a right go at Mum about not trying to sort things with Cava-Sue. So Mum told her to go and shove her advice somewhere very rude indeed, then Nan shouted “You’ve no heart, Di! Just a swinging brick on a rope!” Then Nan left without even eating her Sara Lee chocolate gateau, threatening to move to Benidorm and get the hell out of it, which made me right upset, although Murphy was quite pleased as he got Nan’s cake.”
Then Jocasta asked me about our fat dog and I said that no one wanted to take Penny out for a stroll no more on account of the abuse we rece
ive from passersby in cars about animal cruelty, which I don’t really agree with ’cos if you’d seen how happy that dog is when she’s eating jam cookies you’d not think it was cruel at all. Jocasta asked me a load more questions about the family and I rambled on for a bit, then she said she’d put in “a provisional date” of Wednesday, November twelfth. Jocasta said if I gave her some contact details for my family members and connected parties then we “could get this show on the road.”
I went downstairs and my mum was sitting in front of the telly watching Britain’s Nightmare Plumbers in her cardigan which used to be white but is now nicotine-colored. I sat beside her on the couch and she put her arm around my shoulder and played with my hair like she used to do when I was a little girl. I got the letter from Fast-Track Family Feud out of my pocket and said, “’Ere, Mum, don’t flip out or nothing but I wrote to these people the other day.”
I thought she would hit the roof and start jarring me head but she didn’t. She just read the letter quietly and sighed and said, “Well that Kirsten-who-is-trained woman who sits backstage seems like she knows what she’s doing, don’t she? Maybe we should give it a go.” And before I knew it we were all going on national telly to discuss our problems. Me, Mum, Dad, Murphy, Nan, Cava-Sue, and even the dog.
Fast-Track Family Feud is filmed in Norwich and the TV people promised to pay for us all to go there and to stay in a hotel overnight and said we’d get our makeup done and said we’d be treated like proper celebrities. I was well excited even though I was dreading the train journey to Norwich ’cos one hour fifty minutes is a long time to be stuck on a train with Mum, Dad, Nan, Murphy, and Penny, especially as Nan and Mum would only talk via me like I was an interpreter, plus our dog spent the first half hour out of Liverpool Street Station either washing her own bum or hell-bent on getting to the buffet car ’cos she could smell bacon sandwiches.
“Ask your nan if she wants a cup of tea,” said my mum.
“Mum says do you want a cup of tea, Nan?” I’d say.
“No I’m fine thanks, tell your mother.”
“Nan says she’s fine thanks, Mum,” I’d say. Then they both sat with their arms crossed staring out of the window, while Murphy and Dad read the sports section of the Sun and pretended everything was fine.
We got picked up at the station by a bloke holding a sign which said Shiraz Bailey Wood and put into a swanky van and taken to our hotel, which was called The Norwich Traveler’s Rest and was on a traffic circle overlooking a traffic jam. When we got to the front desk the receptionist gave us a form which reminded us that any bills or damages we ran up in the hotel were our responsibility and not Fast-Track Family Feud’s and we had to sign a form saying we’d behave ourselves. “What a flaming liberty! Who do they think we are?” said my mum, but then I reminded her about the Barret-Coopers from Doncaster last week and their pyromaniac son, then Mum admitted the form was probaby a good idea. I hoped we might see Cava-Sue at the hotel but she wasn’t there. I started to worry then that she might not come at all.
Soon Jocasta and her friend Samantha arrived to escort us to the TV studio. Jocasta took me off by myself and said she loved my pink tracksuit and gold hoops and said I would be the main focus of our show as I am “such a spirited, interesting character” which is the sort of thing teachers used to write in my report card when they meant “gobby annoying cow” but somehow Jocasta made it sound like a good thing.
“OK,” I said, “but I want my makeup done ’cos I don’t want to go on national telly looking butterz.” Then Jocasta laughed and said she’d sort it out.
I sat in the makeup chair and this woman with a spiral perm stuck peach blusher and brown mascara on me like I was thirty or something, then she looked at my hair, which was in a neon-pink scrunchy, and said, “What do we want done with this then?”
So I said, “I want it left like that but with more hairspray.”
And the woman said, “But it’s all poking up like a pineapple!”
So I said, “Have you looked in the mirror recently? Your hair is all frizzy like pubes.”
Then Jocasta nearly spat tea everywhere and the makeup woman shut up after that.
Then Reuben Smart, who is the host of Fast-Track Family Feud, came in the room and he shook my hand and said, “Shiraz Bailey Wood?” and I didn’t recognize him at first ’cos in real life he is well scrawny and really brown, like a skeleton dipped in Marmite. Then Reuben said, “Are you the girl who has all of the Jonas Brothers’ faces tattooed on your back?”
And Jocasta said, “No Reuben, Shiraz is the girl with the runaway sister and the morbidly obese dog.”
“Ah, OK, right,” said Reuben. “Well, Shiraz, you have a good show. And remember, plenty of energy. Plenty of backchat. No swearing because it’s live television. We’re all your friends here so let’s get all the tension out in the open and work through it.”
“Is my sister, Cava-Sue, here?” I said.
“She’s just arrived, she’s talking to Kirsten at the moment,” said Jocasta.
They stuck a microphone up my top and clipped it on to my bra, then told me not to go for a wee or anything ’cos everyone upstairs in the control room can hear the woosh sound and they put them all on a tape and laugh at it at the Christmas party. Then they said, “Five minutes to go, we’re going to take you through to the studio now, Shiraz,” and they took me through onto “the floor” and placed me on a seat in front of about a hundred people who looked a lot like the Brunton-Fletcher family ’cos a lot of them had funny teeth and looked quite aggressive. When I looked closer at the front row, I saw Pixie, Lewis, my dad, and my brother. They didn’t look very happy to be there. Not one little bit.
“And counting down . . . five-four-three-two-one,” said a bloke in a headset. “Going live!”
All of a sudden the really cheesy Fast-Track Family Feud theme music began to play and we were on LIVE NATIONAL TELEVISION and Reuben made his face look very very serious.
“Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Fast-Track Family Feud!” said Reuben. “Now, we’ve got a case today that I know is going to shock you to the core, just as it shocked me and all of our researchers!”
All the crowd sat forward in their seats looking proper excited.
“Shiraz!” said Reuben, suddenly turning to me. “Thanks for coming. Tell me about your mother, Diane. . . . She’s a total nightmare isn’t she?”
“What?” I said, feeling a bit shocked. “Well. No. I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well you said it to our researchers,” said Reuben. “You said your mum drove your own sister out of the house. You said she smokes like a chimney! And she drinks too, doesn’t she? Didn’t you tell them that your mum once drank so much Peach Lambrella that she was dancing about the house making a right old carry on . . . and she got you drunk too!”
The crowd all began grumbling. This sounded really bad. I looked up at the monitor and there was a subtitle on the bottom of the screen that read: Mum! Leave us alone — you’re wrecking our home!
“’Ere, hang on a minute!” I laughed. “What I said was my mum and me had a drink on New Year’s Eve.”
Reuben ruffled his notes and gave me a black look.
“A drink is a drink whatever date it says on the calendar, Shiraz,” he said.
The crowd gave him a round of applause. I looked at my dad and he was looking proper angry now.
“My mum’s not a drinker. And she only smokes because she’s stressed!” I said loudly. “And she’s stressed because our sister Cava-Sue has ran off to London.”
“Ah . . . Cava-Sue?” said Reuben, looking at his notes. “Is this the one who is working as a stripper?”
The crowd mumbled excitedly again. A man in a beanie hat cheered. Murphy looked really unhappy. Suddenly someone began shouting in the audience. It was Pixie.
“Cava-Sue Wood is not a stripper, you bloody liar,” she yelled at Reuben. “She is a mime artist and a singer! She does NOT strip. I’m her frien
d so I should know!”
The crowd were loving this.
“Wooooo! Another stripper!” shouted some blokes in the back row. “Strip! Strip! Strip! Strip!”
“I never said any of this!” I said loudly, although no one was listening by now. “My mum isn’t a drunk and my sister isn’t a stripper.”
“Sorry, Shiraz, could you speak louder?” shouted Reuben.
“They’re both proper nice people really!” I shouted. “They just don’t get on ’cos Cava-Sue wants to do her own thing and Mum keeps getting on her case all the time. So Cava-Sue has gone. I just want everyone in my family to be friends again.”
The audience clapped then like I’d said something right.
“Well let’s bring out Cava-Sue and see what she has to say about all this!” said Reuben.
Suddenly the glittery doors at the side of the stage flung open and there was our Cava-Sue, standing there in her white fluffy fur coat, a smock dress, footless tights and high heels. She looked FURIOUS. She stormed toward me and began wagging her finger.
“Shiraz, you are a liberty!” she said. “What did you go and tell them I was a druggy and a stripper for? That ain’t true!”
“Woo-hoo! Fight!” roared the crowd.
“I didn’t tell them that at all!” I shouted above the noise.
Suddenly I was beginning to realize why Fast-Track Family Feud is always worth watching Sky+ for.
“Take a seat, Cava-Sue,” said Reuben. “Now there’s no use shouting and screaming. Just be calm and make your point.”
“I’m not a stripper,” said Cava-Sue, crossly. “I ran away from home as I am protesting against the outdated, unjust ideology that is bandied around our home as common law by my mother!” Cava-Sue took a deep breath and carried on, “I am a post-feminist, a green voter, and a free spirit! I’ll wear whatever I want and go wherever I want. No one can tell me what to do!”
Cava-Sue sat back in her chair looking triumphant. Everyone in the audience stared at her like she’d just announced that she was a giant hot-dog from the planet Tharg. Well, everyone except Pixie, who clapped dead loudly.