How To Get The Family You Want by Peony Pinker

by Jenny Alexander

  If there was a Most Selfish Sister competition, Primrose would win it hands down.

  Chapter 3

  The Silver Surfer and the Happy Haddock

  I stayed in my bedroom until I heard Gran arrive, and luckily Primrose stayed in hers. I didn’t even want to look at her. As soon as I went into the kitchen I could see that Mum and Dad were at the not-wanting-to-even-look-at-each-other stage too.

  Gran was as brown as a nut. She was wearing her usual shorts and sandals, and a new purple and green top like the ones you see hanging outside the beach shop in the breeze.

  ‘Cup of tea, Gwen?’

  Mum put the kettle on while Gran was giving me a hug. Primrose came down and Gran tried to hug her too but she was as limp as last week’s lettuce in her arms because of the trauma of breaking up with Matt. Gran didn’t ask.

  Mum opened the cupboard to get some tea-bags and the blue biro fell out again, along with the bunch of old bus tickets, some empty envelopes and half a packet of chewing gum. Mum gave Dad a dirty look, scooped the whole lot up and dumped it in the bin. Dad pretended not to notice.

  ‘How’s the surf in St Ives?’ he asked Gran.

  Gran took up surfing eight years ago, after she and Grandpa split up. She got so into it she moved to St Ives, which is like Polgotherick but with waves. Then she had the great idea of becoming a surfing instructor. Gran has lots of great ideas and nearly all of them turn out to be terrible, but this one proved to be a winner.

  It seems that heaps of old people wish they could surf but think they’re too old to learn. When they see my Gran out there in her wetsuit they decide maybe they aren’t. She must be the oldest surfing instructor in the universe but she still brings the customers in. She’s quite famous in St Ives – they call her the Silver Surfer.

  Mum opened the fridge door to get some milk and found there wasn’t any. ‘Sorry,’ she said to Gran. ‘It looks like tea’s off because we don’t seem to have any milk in the house. Dave must have been so busy all day that he simply could not find ten minutes to do some food shopping.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Gran said. ‘I often drink my tea black.’

  Dad was pleased with that answer. Mum wasn’t. ‘It’ll be beans on toast for supper too. Same reason,’ she said.

  ‘No worries,’ goes Gran. ‘As it happens I’ve booked a table for us all at the Happy Haddock tonight. My treat.’

  ‘What a good job I didn’t prepare anything then!’ said Dad, really pushing his luck. Mum looked as if she might explode.

  In the nick of time, explosion-wise, there was a rat-a-tat-tat on the door and Mr Kaminski came in.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ he said. ‘I needing help. Is good time, yes?’

  ‘Yes!’ we all said at once.

  Gran introduced herself. ‘I’m Gwen, Dave’s mother. Primrose and Peony’s grandmother.’

  ‘Viktor Kaminski. I living next door.’

  ‘I would offer you some tea if we had any milk,’ said Mum. ‘I left Dave a list but it seems...’

  ‘You wanted some help, Viktor?’ asked Dad, cutting Mum off, much to everyone’s relief.

  Mr Kaminski explained that he had run into some difficulties with the problem page. Dad should have been doing it really, because his editor had asked him to take over when the real agony aunt, Daphne, went missing. But it turned out Dad was completely clueless, and Mr Kaminski had taken pity on him and offered to help.

  Before long, Mr Kaminski was doing it on his own, taking the letters, writing the answers and giving them to Dad. All Dad had to do was correct his English and send it to his editor.

  Mr Kaminski said he didn’t want any payment because he enjoyed doing it, so Dad bought him presents instead. As Dad wasn’t very adventurous on the presents front, Mr K was building up quite a collection of cardigans.

  ‘Is summer holiday coming,’ said Mr Kaminski. ‘Many letters about family things. What can I do with childrens when not going to school? Such things I do not know. I have no childrens, never, just me and my wife.’

  He got that sad look he always gets when he mentions his wife because he still misses her. He shook himself as if he had to literally shake it off. Then he pulled a handful of letters out of his cardigan pocket and unfolded them. Dad reached over and took one off the top.

  ‘Dear Daphne,’ he read out loud. ‘My children argue all the time and with the long school holidays coming up, my husband says if we have another summer like last year he’s putting them both up for adoption...’

  ‘She should make their waste-of-space father get up off his sun-lounger and organise some activities for them,’ suggested Mum.

  ‘Or,’ said Dad, ‘maybe she should stop working all the hours and spend some time at home for a change.’

  Mr Kaminski, who had got out his pencil to take some notes, slid it back into his pocket again. Gran asked Dad to read us a bit more of the letter.

  ‘Dear Daphne...my children...blah blah, etc... adoption...’ He found where he was up to and read the next line. ‘I try to keep them apart but they seem to seek each other out. It’s as if they actually want to argue. What can I do? From a frantic mum.’

  ‘They should get rid of the annoying younger child,’ said Primrose. ‘Farm her out to an auntie or something. Then she can’t keep winding her sister up.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘They should get rid of the older one because she’s probably a drama queen.’

  Primrose went purple. ‘Did you hear that? She called me a drama queen – me! As if I haven’t got enough to cope with! Today of all days!’

  She did her very best tragic hero look. Mr Kaminski glanced longingly at the door. He was obviously starting to realise he had come to the wrong place for advice about family life.

  Gran said, ‘She needs to stop trying to keep them apart and make the whole family spend more time together.’

  We all gawped at her.

  ‘They’ll kill each other,’ said Mum. ‘Which would be an even bigger problem for the problem page.’

  Gran said surely we had heard the old saying, ‘The family that plays together stays together’?

  ‘Put that in your answer,’ she told Mr Kaminski.

  Dad said on the contrary, it should be ‘The family that plays together falls out over the rules.’

  ‘Look what happens whenever we try to play Monopoly,’ he said. Which pretty much proved his point.

  Mr Kaminski looked confused. ‘I go now,’ he muttered. ‘I see you very busy.’

  Gran reached across the table to shake his hand.

  ‘It’s been a delight to meet you, Viktor,’ she said.

  It’s hard to tell with old people, but I could have sworn he blushed.

  Gran asked me to walk down to the Happy Haddock with her and help her get settled in. When we were little, she used to sleep in my room and I would move in with Primrose, but now we were older she said it was easier for everyone if she stayed at the pub.

  Dad carried her bags down the front steps. Then I took the little one and she took the big one and we wheeled them down the path towards the harbour. It wasn’t raining any more but you could feel there was more rain on the way so I was wearing my coat this time – one soaking in a day is more than enough.

  ‘You haven’t really booked a table, have you Gran?’ I asked.

  She laughed, and shook her head.

  ‘No – fingers crossed they’re not completely booked!’

  Chapter 4

  The Wise Old Owl and the Wishes that Won’t Work

  Gran asked me how I was getting on at school, which was really nice considering no-one else seemed to bother lately.

  ‘School’s all right,’ I said. ‘But Mum and Dad keep arguing and Primrose is being a proper pain.’

  Gran put her free arm round me. She said everyone’s mum and dad argued sometimes and everyone’s big sister could be a pain. It was just a bad patch we were going through and it would soon pass.

  ‘Things will settle down once
your mum’s got her business up and running,’ she said.

  I nearly asked if I could go and live in St Ives with her in the meantime, but the problem with Gran is she’s unpredictable. One minute you might be having a normal life, going to school and everything, and the next minute she could be whisking you off to live on a bus and sell beads.

  ‘I’m an ideas person,’ that’s what Gran always says. The trouble is she gets all these ideas and goes for them without really thinking things through.

  When she and Grandpa lived in Polgotherick, Gran got the idea they should turn their house into a bed-and-breakfast. But she had forgotten she isn’t really a morning person and she could never get up in time to cook breakfast for the guests. Grandpa had to do it, which was a disaster because he burnt everything – bacon, sausages, even scrambled eggs. That must be where Dad gets his barbecuing skills from.

  Gran’s B&B got zero stars in the Polgotherick guide the next year but by that time it didn’t matter any more because she had decided they should up sticks and live in Spain, which is a whole nother story.

  ‘Tell me about Mr Kaminski,’ Gran said, as we hit the puddle-zone at the bottom of the hill. You don’t get puddles on the zig-zag paths because they’re too steep. When it rains hard you get rivers.

  ‘He used to be a sea captain,’ I told her. ‘He’s been right round the world.’

  ‘That’s interesting...what else?’

  I thought about it.

  ‘He knows things. He’s like a wise old owl.’

  ‘I like owls,’ said Gran.

  The tide was right in now and all the boats were bobbing in the harbour. We stopped to look at them.

  ‘What sort of things does Mr Kaminski know?’ asked Gran.

  ‘Things like how to get what you want.’

  I told her about Mr Kaminski’s method – you had to be exact, you had to work out exactly what you wanted, and then you had to write it down. You had to think and think about it until you could see a way you might be able to get it. If you tried and your first idea didn’t work you just had to think again.

  ‘We all did it,’ I said. ‘I wanted Primrose to stop hanging out with this horrible girl called Bianca because she was being really mean to me after school. Primrose wanted to be called Annabel. Dad wanted not to have to write the problem page and Mum wanted to stop working at the Green Fingers Garden Centre but still work with plants.’

  The amazing thing was, it worked! That was why I had another list of exact wishes in my pocket right now that I had written while I was drying off in my bedroom after my last ever – thanks to Primrose – walk with Sam.

  We got to the Happy Haddock and went in. It was one of the oldest buildings in Polgotherick, right at the end of the harbour, overlooking the sea. Inside, it was dark like a cave even on sunny days, and nets of tiny twinkling lights hung from the black ceiling beams. It always smelt of chips and old chairs.

  ‘Gwen! Good to see you again!’

  Jane, the owner, used to go to school with Gran a thousand years ago. She squeezed herself out from behind the bar and gave her a hug. ‘I’ve put you in number 4 as we aren’t busy this weekend.’

  ‘The best room in the house,’ goes Gran. ‘I’m honoured! And can I book a table for five tonight?’

  We took the bags up to Gran’s room. It was the one at the front with the big bow window. Gran flopped down on the bed.

  ‘Are you going to show me this list then, or is it secret?’ she asked.

  I don’t keep any secrets from Gran, so I handed it over. The list said, ‘I want Primrose to stop being a drama queen. I want Dad to stop being lazy and I want Mum to stop being so one-track on work, because then they won’t argue all the time.’

  Gran looked at my list for a while, not saying anything. Then she patted the bed beside her for me to sit down.

  ‘See, here’s the thing, Peony,’ she said. ‘Mr Kaminski’s method is brilliant. It’s the best possible way to try and get what you want. But there’s one kind of wish that won’t come true, and that is wanting to change other people.

  ‘Take your dad, for example,’ she said. ‘He was born lazy. It’s in his nature. Trying to make him stop being lazy would be like trying to make a lion stop lying around in the sun all day and leap around in the trees like a lively little monkey.’

  She said Mum was naturally a hard worker. She loved to be busy! Trying to make someone like Mum stop throwing herself into her work would be like trying to make a busy bee stop buzzing around and sit stone still like a frog all day, waiting for a fly.

  And as for trying to make Primrose stop being a drama queen, you’d have a better chance of turning a preening peacock into a plain little hedge sparrow.

  ‘It can’t be done,’ said Gran. ‘But don’t look so glum!’ She gave me a hug. Her skin smelt of coconut sun cream.

  Gran said that on the whole it didn’t matter if you couldn’t change people because you could always choose who you hung around with. You could decide to keep away from the ones you didn’t like, such as Bianca, and hang out with the ones you did. Except for family.

  ‘You can’t choose your family,’ Gran went on. ‘So since you can’t have the family you want, the trick is to learn to want the family you’ve got.’

  I must have looked gloomy again because Gran gave me another hug.

  ‘That’s never going to happen,’ I said.

  ‘Never say “never”, Peony!’

  Gran jumped up and started unpacking her things.

  ‘A family is like a pack of pets. All different kinds can live together perfectly happily but they’re never going to learn to get along if you keep them in separate pens. What you all need is a project to bring you together.’

  I didn’t like to mention what happened when she and Grandpa got the joint project of retiring to Spain after they sold the B&B. They went out there together, and she came back on her own. He was still living there with Juanita.

  I was beginning to wish I hadn’t told her about my list but it was too late. She had already got her thinking-cap on. I guess it’s just her nature. Trying to change her would be like trying to make a crafty rat leave a lovely lump of cheese in the middle of a maze and not try to work out how to get to it.

  ‘Don’t you worry about this!’ she said. ‘Leave it with me. I’m sure I’ll think of something!’

  Chapter 5

  Gran’s Great Idea and a Quick Getaway

  The next day was Saturday, which is normally the best day of the week because I help out at the kennels in Hayden’s Lane. I get up before everyone else and walk up the zig-zag path on my own to meet Becky, the other Saturday girl. Then we go on across the fields between her house and Hayden’s Lane together.

  Becky is living proof that all teenagers are not a pain like Primrose, whatever Mum says. She’s thirteen and a half, which is only two years younger than Primrose, but she doesn’t have moochy moods or go ballistic at the slightest thing. Or talk about make-up and boys till you wish your ears would drop off.

  Unfortunately, Becky was on holiday and Mum said I couldn’t walk up to the kennels on my own.

  ‘Your father will walk up with you.’

  ‘What?’ goes Dad.

  ‘I would do it myself but I’ve got lots of lawns to cut before lunch.’

  Dad isn’t a walking kind of person so we took the car. We passed Matt coming down the hill. His family owns the kennels and he used to work there on Saturdays, but now he’s seventeen he’s got a proper job at the beach cafe. Becky and me always pass him in the lane on Saturday mornings. He gives us a cheery hello and jokes around.

  I waved at him through the car window. He saw me and waved back, but it was a sad and sorry sort of wave, which was Primrose’s fault. She had crushed him like a cornflake and now he was in bits.

  Rotten Primrose! Rotten Mum for being too busy to walk up with me and rotten Dad for making us take the car on a lovely sunny morning like this! I wished I hadn’t shown Gran my list. At least whe
n I believed I might be able to change them there seemed to be some hope.

  Plus now I had the extra worry that Gran might do something drastic, such as book us all on a team-building weekend where we had to rescue each other from icy rivers and stuff.

  By the time I started cleaning out the pens I was already feeling grumpy, and things did not pick up. Matt’s little brother, who is only nine, was doing Becky’s job and Mrs Teverson still wouldn’t let me walk the big boisterous dogs, even though I’m much bigger than him.

  Mum picked me up at lunchtime in Stella’s van, which they’re using for their business. It’s got grass growing in the back like a proper lawn from where earth and grass seed have spilled out of the bags. By the time we got home, Gran had arrived and Dad was cooking frozen pizza for lunch.

  Primrose kept checking her phone every three seconds to see if Matt was ready to beg her forgiveness and get back together. When she wasn’t checking her phone she was checking her look in the mirror in case he should turn up out of the blue with some chocs and a mushy card like Marcus used to do.

  Gran didn’t mention any mad plans so by the time Mum went back to work I was feeling a bit less worried, although she did wink at me over her pizza when no-one was looking. That didn’t feel like a good sign.

  We were clearing up the lunch things when there was a rat-a-tat at the door. ‘Come in!’ yelled Dad, expecting it to be one of the neighbours.

  It was a man we didn’t know. He had a big grey and white rabbit under his arm.

  Gran jumped up to greet the man and he handed the rabbit over. Then he went back down the front steps to get ‘the rest of his things’. We all watched in astonishment as he brought in a hutch, two feeding bowls, some rabbit food, a bag of hay, a box of cat litter and a litter tray.

  The man shook hands with Gran and said it had been a pleasure doing business with her. Then he left and Gran said, ‘This is Dennis – your new rabbit!’