Family Fan Club

by Jean Ure

“No problems,” said Jazz.

  “One, two, three … where’s number four?”

  Number four was upstairs in her bedroom, frantically hiding Mum’s dress and shoes in the recesses of her wardrobe. It wasn’t until they had all retired for the night that she appeared, like a wraith, at the side of Jazz’s bed.

  “Now what’s the matter?” said Jazz.

  “Something awful.” Laurel’s face crumpled. “I’ve lost one of Mum’s earrings!”

  “Where’s laurel?” said Mum. It was eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, and Laurel hadn’t yet put in an appearance. “Why is she still in bed? What’s she been up to?”

  “She went to a party,” said Rose. “With Simon.”

  “Oh, did she? I hope she hasn’t been drinking again.”

  Daisy giggled.

  “It’s not funny,” said Mum. “We’ve all been there, we’ve all done it – but not at fourteen years old, thank you very much!”

  “It’s all right,” said Jazz. “She swears she’s never going to touch drink again, ever.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that before,” said Mum.

  “I think she means it,” said Jazz. Laurel was in enough trouble as it was. “I’ll go and wake her!”

  Jazz galloped up the stairs in her usual fashion and burst unceremoniously into Laurel’s bedroom.

  “Wake up, wake up, you lazy slug!”

  Laurel ungummed a bleary eye.

  “I’ve only just gone to sleep,” she said. “I’ve been awake all night, worrying.” She wriggled into a sitting position, clutching the duvet round her. “How am I going to tell Mum?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know.” Jazz regarded her sister with a mixture of exasperation and pity. Laurel had been stupid, no doubt about that. She had brought it all on herself. But then, if you were in the throes of love, thought Jazz, striving to be broad-minded, it probably frazzled your brain.

  “Mum’s going to be so mad at me!” wailed Laurel. “They were her favourite earrings!”

  “They were the ones Dad bought for her,” said Jazz. “The time he got that film part. When he went to Spain.” Dad had come home loaded with presents for all the family. Mum had scolded him for spending his hard-earned money.

  Laurel suddenly brightened.

  “Maybe she won’t mind that I’ve lost one!”

  “Why? Just because they were from Dad?”

  Laurel nodded, happily. “She probably won’t ever want to wear them again. She mightn’t even notice they’ve gone!”

  “You must be dreaming,” said Jazz.

  “Well, then, she might think she’s gone and lost them herself.”

  Jazz sucked in her breath. “That would be the meanest thing ever!”

  “What?” Laurel lay back, sullenly, against the pillow. “Not telling her?”

  “Yes, ’cos just suppose one day she and Dad make it up and Dad says where are those earrings I got you and Mum goes to look for them and they’re not there … he’d think she’d got rid of them!”

  There was a silence.

  “D’you really think they’ll ever make it up?” said Laurel.

  “Well … they might,” said Jazz.

  “But Mum says she doesn’t ever want to see Dad again!”

  “People say things like that. They don’t always mean them.”

  “Mum does!”

  “How do you know? She might just be saying it ’cos she’s hurt.”

  “So what am I going to do?” bleated Laurel.

  “If you really want my advice,” began Jazz, and then stopped as Rose’s voice came bellowing up the stairs.

  “Jazz-it’s-Theo-on-the-phone!”

  “Wait there,” said Jazz. “I’ll be back.”

  Laurel groaned. When Jazz and Theo got talking, there was no stopping them. Laurel couldn’t imagine what they found to talk about. She and Simon hadn’t really talked at all.

  Simon was hateful! She didn’t want to think about him. And she most certainly wasn’t ever going out with him again.

  She burrowed back down beneath the duvet. Perhaps she could go into a decline, like Victorian women used to. She would just stay in bed and gently fade away. Anything would be better than facing Mum’s wrath!

  Jazz was back again almost immediately. Laurel heard her bounding up the stairs.

  “You’ve gone to sleep again!”

  “Don’t feel well,” mumbled Laurel.

  “Stop being cowardly! You’re just trying to avoid things. If you want my advice—”

  Laurel wasn’t at all sure that she did.

  “If you want my advice, you ought to go to Mum and throw yourself on her mercy. You should say, I’m deeply humbly sorry, I’ve behaved like a total idiot, I lost my heart to slimy Simon.” Jazz clasped both hands to her bosom. “I gave him my love and he let me down.”

  Laurel stared at her, revolted. “I can’t say that!”

  “Why not? It’s true,” said Jazz. “You went completely gaga over him. I told you he was a slimeball! Anyhow—” She yanked at the duvet. Laurel screeched, and yanked it back. “It’s all right, you don’t have to hide,” said Jazz. “You’ve been lucky. Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Theo’s found the earring! It was in his dad’s car.”

  “Oh!” Laurel gave a great squeal of joy and jumped out of bed. She hurled herself at Jazz. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  “He’s going to bring it round right away, so if you really want to slurp over anyone,” said Jazz, shoving at her sister, “you can slurp over him.”

  “No!” Laurel shook her head. “I’m through with men.”

  “Until the next time,” said Jazz.

  “There isn’t going to be a next time! Oh, I do hope Mum doesn’t want to wear her earrings before he gets here!”

  Since Mum had just finished washing her hair and was in the middle of giving herself a facial, there didn’t seem much danger of it. Theo came, the earrings were safely smuggled back, together with the gold strappy sandals and the slinky dress (with the pins taken out and the hem untacked) and Laurel swore that from here on in (an expression she had picked up from Dad, who had picked it up in America) she was going to be a model of good behaviour.

  “After all,” she said, piously, “it’s up to me to set an example to the rest of you.”

  “Well, get her!” jeered Rose.

  For the whole of the following week, Laurel was quite unbearable. She censored their television – “You can’t watch that! Mum wouldn’t approve.” “You’ve sat there for over two hours, that’s quite long enough!”

  She organised a cleaning rota – “It’s your turn to do the dusting!” “It’s your turn to polish the furniture!”

  She started checking that their beds had been made and their bedrooms were tidy. She told Jazz off for not cleaning the bath – “You’ve been cutting your toenails in it. Ugh! Disgusting!” She raged at Rose for dropping crumbs over the sitting room carpet – “which I have just vacuumed”. She even had a go at poor little innocent Daisy for not clearing up a fur ball that one of the cats had deposited on the upstairs landing.

  “I didn’t know it was there!” wept Daisy.

  “Well, I don’t know how you missed it! I saw it the minute I went up there. How do you think Mum’s going to feel, coming home and treading in a fur ball?”

  “Oh, stop it!” cried Jazz. “You’re nothing but a nag!”

  “A harridan,” said Rose.

  “I am just trying,” said Laurel, “to keep a bit of order round here.”

  Rose stomped off, muttering about “power going to people’s heads".

  “It’s for Mum!” shrieked Laurel. “Poor Mum,” she added, virtuously. “She’s working herself to a shadow. The least we can do,” she yelled, “is try to make life a bit easier for her!”

  Certainly the house was clean and tidy – a great deal cleaner and tidier than when Mum was around. Mum wasn’t much use at housework. One thing she and Dad had alw
ays agreed on, a bit of a mess made a place look lived in. But Laurel wasn’t having any of it. She harried them relentlessly.

  “It will be so nice when Mum’s back,” sighed Daisy.

  One day towards the end of Mum’s second week of filming, Rose came home from school with her face all scrunched and scowling.

  “What’s the matter?” said Jazz. “You look like you’ve been up for the lead and been given an understudy!”

  “Huh!” said Rose.

  She sat in grim silence all through tea, then went off – still in silence – to her room.

  “Something’s happened,” said Jazz. Rose was one of those people, a bit like Dad, who tended to clam up. Jazz and Laurel were more like Mum. Everyone knew when they were upset: they banged about and made a lot of noise. But it didn’t take much for Jazz and Laurel to start banging. It took a great deal to upset Rose. She was what Dad called well-balanced.

  “Daisy, go and see if you can find out,” said Jazz. If Rose was going to confide in anyone, it would be Daisy.

  “Ask her what’s wrong.”

  “All right.” Daisy trotted off, obediently.

  “And tell her it’s her turn to do the washing-up!” bawled Laurel.

  “Oh, don’t fuss!” cried Jazz. “I’ll do it for her!”

  “No.” Laurel stamped a foot. “She can’t be allowed to get out of things just because she’s in a hump. We all have to take our turn.”

  Really, thought Jazz, there were times when Laurel–in–love, however tiresome, was vastly to be preferred to Laurel–out–of–love. Laurel–out–of–love was just one big pain.

  After a few minutes Daisy came trotting back downstairs with the news that a teacher at school had accused Rose of cheating.

  “Cheating?” Jazz and Laurel echoed it, incredulously.

  “He wouldn’t give her a mark for her homework. He said she must have copied it from somewhere.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Jazz threw down the dish mop. “Let me go and talk to her!”

  Jazz went storming up to Rose’s bedroom.

  “Who is this teacher? What’s he on about?”

  The teacher was Mr Gallimore, who took them for English. He was new that term so Jazz didn’t know him very well. Obviously, she thought, he didn’t know Rose at all. Nobody who knew Rose would ever accuse her of cheating.

  “Where is it?” said Jazz. “This thing he thinks you’ve copied?”

  Silently, Rose handed over a wodge of paper. Eight pages! All covered in Rose’s neat, square writing.

  “What is it? An essay?”

  Rose nodded.

  “Where does he think you copied it from?”

  Rose humped a shoulder. She had gone into her non-talking mode, which meant that she was really upset.

  “Can I take it downstairs, to show Laurel?”

  “If you want.”

  “I mean, I know you didn’t copy it,” said Jazz. “I just want to see why he thinks you might have done.”

  Rose looked at her, rather hard.

  “I’m not doubting you,” said Jazz. “But I’ve got to read it, haven’t I?”

  Rose said nothing, just very slowly turned away.

  “You stay here. I’ll be back,” said Jazz. “We’re not letting him get away with it!”

  Downstairs, she spread the pages on the kitchen table. Laurel viewed them with alarm.

  “How much has she written?”

  “Eight pages,” said Jazz.

  “Eight pages?”

  You know what she’s like. I think we ought to read it.”

  Laurel pulled a face. “I’m not wading through all that lot!”

  “Read it out to us,” said Daisy.

  “All right.” Jazz never minded a bit of reading aloud. She cleared her throat. “My View of Society. That’s what it’s called. Society is a conglomerate of individuals. Each—”

  “What’s a kerglomrit?” said Daisy.

  “Oh! Um – well, a sort of – mixture. Each individual is a cog in the wheel of life—”

  “Oh, wow,” said Laurel.

  “—but some cogs are more important than other cogs. A few cogs are extremely rich and powerful—”

  Laurel groaned. Daisy said, “What’s she going on about cogs for?”

  “Look,” said Jazz, “am I reading this or not? ’cos if I am, then just shut up and listen.”

  They listened, in awed silence, as Jazz worked her way through the whole eight pages. Every now and then she would stumble and have to go back to the beginning of a sentence to make sense of it. Sometimes she came across words that she didn’t fully understand or wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce. But that was Rose for you. It didn’t mean she had copied them. She just naturally knew words that most people hadn’t even heard of.

  “Well?” Jazz shuffled the pages back into order.

  “Is that it?” said Laurel, relieved.

  “I didn’t understand hardly any of it,” said Daisy.

  “It’s all the stuff she reads. I can see why he thought she might have copied it—”

  “But she didn’t!” Jazz stated it, very fiercely.

  “No, well, we know she didn’t,” said Laurel.

  “She didn’t! Rose doesn’t do things like that. And look what the creep has written at the bottom! I would have preferred to have your own ideas rather than someone else’s. Cheek!”

  “He asked her where she’d got it from,” said Daisy.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she got it out of her head but he didn’t believe her.”

  “So now he’s accusing her of lying, as well! What are we going to do?” demanded Jazz.

  “Don’t see that we can do anything,” said Laurel. “We can’t prove she got it out of her head.”

  “If she says she did, then she did! I’m going to have it out with him,” declared Jazz.

  “No, don’t, you mustn’t!” Laurel seized hold of her arm as if she thought Jazz might be going off to do battle right there and then. “Just leave things alone!”

  “No way!” said Jazz. “I’m not having my sister called a cheat and a liar!”

  “But you can’t have a go at a teacher!”

  “I won’t have a go. I’ll just tell him.”

  “You’ll get all loud and obstreperous.”

  “I won’t get loud and obstreperous! I shall keep calm as calm,” said Jazz.

  “Maybe we should wait till Mum comes home,” said Daisy. “She could go and talk to him.”

  “No. Mum’s got enough to do. I’m going to handle this,” said Jazz.

  Next day, last period before lunch, Jazz’s class had English with Mr Gallimore. He was youngish – well, not positively ancient – and quite reasonable looking. In fact Jazz’s friend Carmel had a bit of a thing about him. She thought he was gorgeous. But Carmel always went for the older man; she said boys were just too silly and boring. Her eyes grew round as soup plates when at the end of class Jazz hissed, “See you outside. I want to talk to Mr Gallimore.”

  “What about?” mouthed Carmel, but Jazz shook her head. She wouldn’t even tell her best friend what Rose had been accused of.

  “Yes, Jasmine?” said Mr Gallimore. “What can I do for you?”

  Jazz stood with her hands clasped behind her, one in the other, very tightly. Last night, all fired up, she could hardly wait to go rushing into the fray. This morning, faced with the reality of Mr Gallimore actually sitting there, waiting for her to say something, she found herself not feeling quite so brave. But it had to be done!

  “Well?” said Mr Gallimore. He smiled at her, encouragingly. He probably thought she had a question about the text they had been studying. He liked people to ask questions. “You have a problem?”

  “It’s not me,” said Jazz. “It’s my sister.”

  “And who is your sister?”

  “Rose Jones.”

  “Oh!” He tipped his chair back, bracing his knees against the edge of the desk. “So Rose
is your sister, is she?”

  “Yes, and my sister doesn’t cheat!” said Jazz.

  Mr Gallimore raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware that anyone had accused her of doing so.”

  “You said she copied her essay off someone else!”

  “And didn’t she?”

  “No, she did not!” Jazz could feel herself starting to shake. She clenched her hands even tighter. She had promised Laurel that she would stay calm! “You don’t understand about Rose,” she said. “She’s like … well! She’s really really clever.”

  “I grant you she’s bright,” said Mr Gallimore.

  “She’s not just bright, she’s—”

  Jazz floundered, unsure how to put it. You could hardly say your sister was some kind of genius.

  Mr Gallimore said it for her.

  “A genius?” he suggested. “Child prodigy, perhaps?”

  Now he was being sarcastic. He wasn’t taking her seriously! Jazz felt the anger welling up inside her. If only Dad had been here! Not Mum. Mum was too much like Jazz. Ruled by her emotions. Dad was more laid back. He would know how to keep his cool.

  “That essay,” said Mr Gallimore, “would have been a remarkable piece of work from a Year 10 pupil.”

  “Yes, because Rose is remarkable! And she doesn’t cheat! She doesn’t have to.”

  “No one ever said she was cheating.” Mr Gallimore was starting to sound a trifle testy. “She’s obviously been doing some pretty heavy reading – for which she is to be congratulated – and she’s simply copied down what she’s read. That’s not cheating, that’s—”

  “A lie!” cried Jazz. “Rose doesn’t copy things. She reads things and she thinks about them and then she makes up her own mind. And then she writes them down in her own words!”

  “Yes,” said Mr Gallimore, “and very extraordinary some of them are, too! I doubt, if I asked her, she’d even know what they meant.”

  “Of course she would!” Jazz was scornful. “She never uses words she doesn’t understand. She has a very wide vocabulary. I bet if she was white and spoke all posh” – Jazz put on her actress voice – “I bet then you wouldn’t say she’d copied it! You just have low expectations on account of she’s black!”

  There was a moment of appalled silence. Jazz trembled from head to foot. How could she have said such a thing? To a teacher? It was the sort of argument that Rose herself might use – and they would all groan and go, “Don’t start!”