by Jean Ure
I solemnly gave her my promise. Of course we would watch out for Ali! It made me feel good that Mum trusted me.
Or did she??? The last words she said, as we kissed her goodbye, were: “Just remember … no boys. I mean that, you two! I’m serious.”
PERSONAL PRIVATE DIARY (not to be confused with Mum’s!)
Week 1, Saturday
Our first day of independent living! Not that it has been all that independent so far as it was half-past two when Mum left and at seven o’clock Auntie Jay invited us down to have dinner with her and her friend Jo, so we only had just a few hours on our own. But that was enough to convince us that it is going to be the hugest fun!
Me and Tash started off by moving all the furniture about. It was Tash’s idea. She said the way you arrange your living space is an expression of your personality, and it was the other people, the people who had been there before us, who had put the bed in the corner and pushed the table against the wall. She insisted that the bed had to go under the windows, and the table had to go in the middle.
“That way, it’ll cover up the stain on the carpet.”
I do hope she isn’t going to become house-proud! She was actually talking of finding a rug to stand the table on. I had to remind her that we are only here for eight weeks. Tash said, “Yes, but we want the place to look nice.”
So long as she is not going to nag. I mean, there are more important things to worry about than stains on the carpet. Ali, of course, hasn’t even noticed the stain, she spent the entire afternoon sorting out her Star Treks. She has stacked them up all round her bed. She is hemmed in by them! She has brought 104 videos with her. More than enough for eight weeks, but she says it is best to be on the safe side. What she means by this, I have no idea. I’m sure Mum won’t be away longer than eight weeks; she was dithering even as we packed her into the car. But there is absolutely no need, we are perfectly capable of looking after ourselves. We have tins in the cupboard and food in the fridge, and Auntie Jay has said that every weekend we are to go downstairs and eat with her. Whatever happens, we will not starve!
This evening was a real dinner party. Very grown up! Auntie Jay said, “I’m giving it in your honour, I’ve invited everyone in the house.” We weren’t quite sure who else was in the house, but thought we had better get dressed up, just in case.
“It’s probably only old people,” said Tash.
“Yeah,” I said, “like married couples.”
“On the other hand, you never can tell.”
She didn’t have to explain what that meant! It meant, you never can tell when there might be a boy … Me and Tash practically live inside each other’s heads, we can always tune in to what the other is thinking – though perhaps upon reflection that’s not so difficult, since it usually concerns boys! We are on the lookout for boys wherever we go. On the way in to school, on the way back from school, in the shopping centre, even on the building site in Gliddon Road, where we once saw Justin Timberlake pushing a wheelbarrow. Big day! It wasn’t really Justin Timberlake, of course, but it sure did look like him. You just never know when someone gorgeous is going to pop up, and that being the case it seems only sensible to be prepared. Tash and I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing last year’s washed-out fashion statements! We dressed with as much care for Auntie Jay’s dinner party as we would for a rave.
“It’s only polite,” I said. “Exactly,” said Tash. And then we both looked at Ali and went, “Ali!” We screamed it at her. “You’re not going like that!” Ali said, “Like what?” Well! Like a derelict, if she really wanted to know. A horrible old saggy T-shirt and striped cotton trousers that ballooned round the bum.
“Haven’t you got anything better?” I wailed.
Ali seemed bewildered. She said, “It’s only Auntie Jay.”
And all the other people in the house … who knew what kind of gorgeous male might be there? I didn’t say this to Ali, however; there wouldn’t have been any point. She is so immature! It’s like, for her, boys are still an alien species. And to think she is almost fourteen!!!
Anyway, as it happened there wasn’t a gorgeous male in sight. Mostly it was what we had predicted: Auntie Jay’s friend, Jo Dainty; a married couple that live on the ground floor called Anne and Robert (quite nice but very boring), and a man from the second floor, directly beneath us, who is called Andrew and wears cardigans. Well, that’s what he was wearing tonight, all shapeless and woolly. I thought to myself that what he needed was a girlfriend to advise him on such matters and make him a bit more trendy. Auntie Jay, perhaps? She is unattached, and she obviously shares my views on cardigans cos at one point I heard her whisper, “Andrew, really! I thought you were going to donate that thing to charity?” He was quite shamefaced and clutched at his grungy old cardy with both hands in a defensive kind of way, as if she might be going to snatch it off him right there and then. I felt quite sorry for him. Auntie Jay can be really bossy!
Now I have come to the part which I have been dying to write. We have a piece of Extremely Interesting Information. In fact it is the BIG NEWS of the day: the cardigan man has a son who lives with him.
A boy! A real boy! Under the same roof! He was out with his friends this evening and so didn’t come to our little dinner party, boo hoo! And to think we got all dressed up … Of course we have no idea what he is like, he may be a total geek, but you can see that the cardigan man must have been quite fanciable when he was young, so we have high hopes. The annoying thing is that Ali – of all people – has actually met him. What a waste! She came back upstairs literally five minutes ahead of us, which means we only just missed him. She wouldn’t even have thought to tell us if she hadn’t heard me and Tash eagerly speculating what he might be like. All casually she goes, “I just bumped into him on the stairs.”
Breathlessly, Tash said, “What’s he like?”
Ali shrugged. “Just a boy.”
“How old is he?”
“Dunno,” said Ali. “Didn’t ask.”
“How old does he look?”
“Dunno. ’Bout my age?”
Yessss!!! Needless to say, we pumped like crazy, trying to find out whether he was gorgeous or geeky, but Ali is just so unsatisfactory. All she could say was, “He’s got brown hair.” The only thing she noticed … brown hair!
“Well, that’s cool,” said Tash.
“Yeah, like really unusual,” I said.
We were being sarcastic, but sarcasm rolls right off Ali.
She said, “I only saw him for about two seconds.”
Well. Two seconds is all that me and Tash would need!
“Do you think you would recognise him if you saw him again?” I said. Still being sarcastic.
“I’m not sure,” said Ali. “I might do.” She was being serious!
Tomorrow is Sunday, so with any luck we shall manage to catch a glimpse for ourselves. We plan on going up and down the stairs quite a lot, and generally hanging about on the landing.
On the whole, it has been a good day. Promising, I think I would call it. It’s now eleven o’clock and I am going to lie down. Ali is tucked away in her broom cupboard, with her Star Treks and Fat Man, and I am here in the big bed with Tash. Tash is giggling and twitching her toes. She had better not twitch in the night!
Sunday
She did! She twitched! In the middle of the night I woke up to find the bottom of the duvet dancing a jig. I had to kick her before she would stop. When I taxed her with it, she said that I’d made whiffling noises with my mouth.
“Like this!” And she began blowing air bubbles through her lips, like a goldfish.
I don’t believe that I whiffled. She is just saying it to get back at me! She definitely twitched because why else would the duvet have been going up and down? We are not going to fall out over it, however; me and Tash never fall out. In any case, as Tash so wisely said, it’s good practice for when we get married.
Talking of marriage … we still haven’t seen The Boy. I went up and do
wn the stairs seventeen times, and hung about like mad on the landing, but he never appeared. But we have discovered his name! It is Gus. Gus O’Shaugnessy. We got O’Shaugnessy off the downstairs doorbell, otherwise I most probably wouldn’t have known how to spell it. Auntie Jay told us that he was called Gus. A good name! We think it’s really neat. Far more promising than, say, Kevin or Shane. I’m thinking of Kevin Trodd who lives in our road and is the sort of boy that would cut worms in half, just to see if they wriggled and Shane Mackie who is Avril Mackie’s brother and a bit of a nerd. Gus sounds like … well! We shall see. He has to emerge at some stage. When he does, we shall be watching!
We went down to Auntie Jay’s again for dinner. Her friend Jo was still there. She is quite funny and sharp and ever so left-wing. Dad would most probably have had a seizure! But me and Tash like her as she makes us laugh, and also she is not at all patronising. Like Anne and Robert last night kept asking us these really dumb questions about which year we were in, and when did we get to take our GCSEs, and what subjects we were best at, and what did we want to do when we left school, yawn yawn. I know they were only trying to be polite but you could tell they really weren’t in the least bit interested. Jo doesn’t bother with questions, she engages you in conversation and actually listens to what you say. We like that!
Me and Tash, of course, were desperate to learn more about The Boy (which is how we referred to him before we found out his name). However, we didn’t want to ask Auntie Jay ourselves in case she got it into her head that we were interested and flew into a Mum-like panic, so we got Ali to do it for us. We gave her strict instructions.
“Don’t just go jumping in. Be discreet.”
“Like how?” said Ali.
“Like sort of … building up slowly,” said Tash. “You could ask about his dad, and what he does, and how long he’s lived here, and then you could just, like … slip it in.”
“I happened to bump into his son on the stairs last night. That sort of thing. ”
“Then what?” said Ali.
“Oh, well, then you could sort of very casually ask what his name was, and how old he is, and where he goes to school, and—” Tash waved a hand. “Stuff like that.”
We should have known better than to trust Ali. She has no idea how to be discreet! First off we had to kick her, quite hard, under the table before we could get her going; and then when she did get going she went at it like a mad creature. There wasn’t any stopping her!
“What does that man do that lives here? The one that lives underneath us? The one with the son? Has he lived here long?”
“Andrew?” said Auntie Jay. “He moved in last year, after he broke up with his wife. He’s a writer, he writes educational books. A very interesting man! He—”
“What about his son?” said Ali.
Oh, God! I nearly died. I saw that Tash had gone bright red.
“What about him?” said Auntie Jay.
“Well, like, what is he called and how old is he, and all that sort of thing.”
“Ali!” Tash was mouthing at her across the table. I was kicking at her.
“He’s fourteen,” said Auntie Jay. “His name is Gus. What else would you like to know?”
Ali shot an inquiring glance at Tash. Tash, deliberately, kept her eyes on her plate.
Auntie Jay seemed amused. She said, “How about where he goes to school? Whether he’s got a girlfriend?”
“Yes!” Ali beamed, triumphantly, at me. I squirmed. Tash concentrated very hard on shovelling food into her mouth.
“He goes to Simon Standish,” said Auntie Jay. “As to whether he’s got a girlfriend –” She was laughing at us! “ – I’m afraid I really couldn’t say. But I’m sure you’ll make it your priority to find out!”
At least she didn’t fly into a panic and remind us of the No Boys rule. Just to reassure her, however, we have stuck a big sign on the outside of our door:
Ali wanted to know what it meant. She said, “What peril? What would happen if they came in?”
“We’d jump on them!” yelled Tash.
Ali plainly thinks we are mad. But we think she is a total whacko, so that’s OK!
Monday
Everyone at school is just so envious of us! Meg Hennessy couldn’t believe that we are truly independent.
“All on your own?” she kept saying. “Completely on your own?”
Daisy Markham was the only one that wasn’t envious. She said she thought that she would be a bit scared if she were left on her own, but as Meg pointed out, “There are three of them. It must be such fun!”
Daisy still seemed doubtful. She really is a complete wimp. She said, “I can’t imagine my parents leaving me to look after myself.”
Like this was some kind of criticism of Mum and Dad. I resented that! I said, “Mum knows she can trust us.”
“Yes, and it’s good training,” said Tash.
“But you could get up to anything,” said Daisy.
“Like we might have orgies,” I said; and me and Tash went off into a fit of the screaming giggles.
Tuesday
Kim Rogers asked us today if we were going to take the opportunity to have a party. Tash said, “You bet!” It is in fact no. 1 on our list of things to do. We’ll have to check it out with Auntie Jay, of course, but I’m sure she’ll say that we can. She might even let us invite boys, if it’s a party! After all, you can’t really have one without them. I have to say that Auntie Jay is pretty relaxed about most things. She has made up one or two rules that we have to follow, but they are mostly just common sense, such as always being sure to tell her if we are going out and where we are going. She has put a book on the hall table – the In-and-Out Book. We sign out, and sign in! We’re cool with this. Just because we are teenagers – almost – does not make us unreasonable. It’s only when grown-ups are unreasonable that we take umbrage. That is such a good word! Umbrage, umbrage. I have just said it to Tash, who says that she has never heard of it.
“What’s it mean?”
I said, “It means when you get the hump.”
Tash said that she had the hump right now, with Ali. “She’s doing baked beans again. She did baked beans last night. We’ll get bean-bound!”
We are taking it in turns to do the cooking, and this week it’s Ali’s turn. I’m all for cutting down on the workload, but I do think that baked beans two nights in a row is a bit much. I have just said this to Ali. I said, “Can’t you do something different?”
“Like what?” said Ali.
I said, “I dunno! Omelettes, or fish fingers, or something.”
Ali said that that would mean cooking. She said, “I told you before, I don’t cook. I just open tins.”
I said, “Well, couldn’t you at least have opened some other kind of tin?”
Honestly! It’s like she never even thought of it. Primly, she said that now she had opened the beans, we would have to eat them.
“You can’t waste food.”
I suggested she fed them to Fat Cat, but they are in tomato sauce and tomato sauce, it seems, is bad for cats.
“This is going to look really great in my Food Diary,” said Tash. “Monday: beans. Tuesday: beans. Wednesday—”
“Beans are good for you,” said Ali.
Tash said, “Beans give you wind.” And she pursed her lips and made a long, loud growly noise. I immediately did the same.
“That is so rude,” said Ali.
Tash said, “Beanz meanz fartz!” and we both collapsed.
Wednesday
Email from Mum. She says she is not going to email us every day, just once a week, and she would like us to email her back once a week. We have delegated this task to Ali. We feel it is the least she can do (to make up for the beans) and have told her that it will be good for her. She was quite meek about it and promised that tonight she will open a different kind of tin.
Me and Tash have just been down to see Auntie Jay and ask her about the party. She has said yes. Hooray!
She has also said that we can invite whoever we want, including boys, but that a) it will have to finish by nine o’clock and b) she will have to look in on us every now and again, just to check.
“I won’t cramp your style, don’t worry! But I did promise your mum I’d keep an eye on you.”
The party is to be on Saturday week. We are quite excited! We have already made out a list of the people we intend to invite. They are: Meg Hennessy, Kim Rogers, Zoella Barling, Ishara Khan, Avril Mackie and Shauna Bates. Meg, Kim and Zoella because we are particular friends with them, the other three because they have brothers! Ishara’s is rather plain and has spots, and Avril’s is a bit of a nerd, but Shauna’s is quite nice, and in any case we reckon that any boys are better than no boys at all. We are not inviting Daisy Markham because we don’t think she deserves it, and anyway she doesn’t have any brothers.
“What about him downstairs?” said Tash.
A knotty problem! We still haven’t set eyes on him. It’s really annoying as we are for ever racing up and down the stairs or out on to the landing. We have found a secret way of referring to him, for when Ali is around. We refer to him as “Gosh”. From his name: Gus O’SHaugnessy. Pretty neat, we think! The way it works is like this. One of us, Tash for instance, will come into the room, and I will go, “Gosh?” meaning, “Did you see him?” and she will shake her head, meaning “No I didn’t.” Then a few minutes later it will be my turn. I will stand up, and stretch, and say, “Gosh,” meaning, “Now I am going to go and have a look.” And Ali will be completely mystified! I suppose it is a bit mean, keeping her in the dark, but really she is not in the least bit interested. Tash and I are just waiting for the day when one of us bursts in and cries, “Gosh!!!” meaning that at long last there has been a sighting.