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He knew Dad didn’t give me my pocket money until Saturday, so there was no way that I could. I went to my room and had a quick sulk. Then I sorted out my sock drawer. I’d intended to do that for ages as I couldn’t find any proper pairs any more and had gone to school that morning wearing one white sock and one cream one.
I’d spent all day expecting the M&Ms to notice and make fun of me, but they were far too busy boasting about how brilliant they were at being the Spice Girls, and how no other Spice Girls act stood a chance against them. They didn’t know I’d seen their dancing hippos routine. They were so sad.
It got to Friday and we still didn’t know if Stu was going out or not.
Tom, my next oldest brother, wasn’t. He had made up his mind to enter a picture in an art competition in one of his weird magazines.
For a whole week, he’d spent every night in his room, drawing and painting. Every morning, he’d stagger down with his full waste-paper bin, dropping screwed up sheets of paper all down the stairs. I swooped on one and when I un-crumpled it, I saw it was an amazing science fiction type of picture, complete with space ships and aliens and weird creatures with horns and antennae and tentacles, all in brilliant orange and slime green.
“Hey! Give me that back!” he shouted, and went all red with embarrassment.
“It’s good,” I told him. “Can I keep it?”
He looked pleased. “All right,” he agreed.
I un-crumpled another one. It was seriously loony, with lots of funny purple creatures and bright red cactus plants.
“It was supposed to be Life On Mars, but it went wrong,” he explained.
He snatched it out of my hand and tore it to shreds. Buster came bounding up the stairs and ate them.
“He’ll be sick now. Red and purple sick, all over the carpet,” Tom said, putting me right off my Coco Pops.
The first big disaster of our rehearsal was that Fliss hadn’t brought the guitar.
“I looked in the shed but it wasn’t there. Andy drove me here, anyway. I couldn’t have brought it because he’d have seen it,” she said.
At least Frankie had remembered her keyboard, so all was not lost. She reckoned it wouldn’t take long to learn the tune from my tape. At least we’d still be able to practise.
Last time we’d held a sleepover at my house, we’d all been seriously into cucumber. We’d gone off it now. Celery was our new thing. It was so nice and crunchy and didn’t give you the burps like cucumber did. So when Mum had asked me yesterday what kind of food we’d like, I’d told her to give us lots of celery.
Mum had made cheese and celery sandwiches, baked potatoes with pineapple and celery stuffing, and a big salad with loads of celery in.
There were two pizzas, one vegetarian, as both Frankie and I are veggie, and a ham and mushroom one for the others, plus all the usual crisps and cakes, and a huge bag of popcorn. Oh, and lots of lemonade and Coke.
“What’s that?” Rosie asked, pointing to the plate in the middle of the kitchen table.
We all looked where Rosie was pointing. I’d thought it was a bit of Dad’s wonky pottery which Mum had turned into a table decoration, but on close inspection, which involved prodding it a bit, it turned out to be a pile of celery sticks, arranged as a kind of mountain with the curly leaves looking like bushes on top, and tiny flakes of carrot stuck on like flowers.
“Weird!” said Frankie. “Really weird.”
I had to agree with her. It was very weird indeed.
We weren’t sure whether it was intended to be eaten, or just looked at, but Fudge solved it for us by leaping on the table, which she wasn’t supposed to do, striding between our plates and knocking the celery heap over with her tail. After that, none of us wanted to eat it at all, as it was covered in cat hairs.
I’d told everyone to bring some Spice Girls costumes with them, so after we’d eaten the proper food, we took the crisps and things up to my room and got down to sorting out our clothes.
The bathroom’s next to my bedroom. It soon got turned into an extra changing room, as it’s got a big mirror in it. Fliss and Rosie were in there when suddenly we heard an ear-splitting scream!
Had they found a humongous spider in there, or was it something worse…?
Before any of us could arm ourselves with spider-killing weapons, there was a screech of, “Get out! Go away!” and the bathroom door slammed so hard that the pictures on my bedroom wall rattled.
Well, anyone knows that spiders can’t understand English. So whatever was in the bathroom had to have more intelligence than a spider. Buster? One of the cats?
When we dashed out to see what the matter was, we found my brother Tom standing there. Now, the average spider has considerably more brains than Tom. I mean, surely he could hear bumps and voices and know that the bathroom was occupied?
Of course, there isn’t a lock on the door. It broke ages ago and Dad never got round to fitting a new one, though bathroom door locks are about the most important thing in a house. I mean, you don’t want someone walking in when you’re on the toilet, do you?
Tom was standing there like a twit, with a clean T-shirt and a pair of underpants in his hand.
“I was only going to have a bath,” he complained.
“A bath? You had one last month! Don’t you think it’s a bit soon for another one?” I said.
“Perhaps he’s got a girlfriend,” Frankie said.
To my amazement, Tom went bright red.
“He has! He has! Tom’s got a girlfriend, Tom’s got a girlfriend,” sang Frankie.
“No, I haven’t!” he said.
He bolted back into his bedroom and banged his door shut, making my pictures rattle again. I plonked myself down so hard on my bed that I bounced.
“I can’t believe it!” I exclaimed. “Tom? He can’t have a girlfriend. He’s never been interested in girls.”
“He’s nearly fifteen. He could be,” said Kenny.
“I think he’s quite hunky,” said Fliss, wiggling back into my room in her silver dress and matching shoes. She thinks anything male is hunky. She probably even fancies Buster!
“Better looking than Ryan Scott?” asked Frankie.
Fliss refused to answer.
“I’m going to write Fliss Loves Tom and put it under his door,” said Frankie, looking round for some paper.
“Don’t you dare!” screamed Fliss, flying at her and grinding a paper plate of crisps to dust on the carpet.
“No, don’t. He’ll get upset. He’s really shy,” I told her.
I thought it was really funny, though. He’d be in for a good teasing from me tomorrow.
I tried the red wig on. Once they’d stopped laughing, the others thought I looked quite like Ginger Spice. She likes shiny clothes and I’d made a black plastic mini skirt out of a piece of bin-liner.
I wore a black T-shirt with Stu’s old black leather jacket over it, and my winter boots. I was sure Stu wouldn’t mind my borrowing his jacket. He hadn’t worn it for ages as it had got a bit small for him. I was boiling hot, but I tried not to moan. I knew the Spice Girls wouldn’t have complained. Some of their video was shot in the boiling hot desert, yet they still jumped around and danced. They’re amazing. Really professional. So we had to be the same.
Frankie looked great in a leopard print T-shirt of her mother’s, worn as a dress. Rosie had a black bikini top on and a black skirt which was really a stretchy jersey top of Mum’s.
Kenny just had her normal clothes on, Leicester City T-shirt and track suit bottoms. She really did look like Sporty Spice.
Frankie balanced the keyboard on the windowsill. She knocked over one of my china horses, but luckily it didn’t break or I’d have broken her!
I hit the power button and fast-forwarded the tape player to Mama. The second Frankie’s finger hit a key, I knew we were in deepest, darkest Doom-with-a-capital-D. Instead of sounding like a keyboard, it made a buzzing sound, as if twenty thousand bluebottles were trapped in it.
“You haven’t just spilt your lemonade on that, have you?” I asked her.
“No.” She frowned. Then she said, “I did upset a strawberry yogurt over it yesterday…”
“You’re hopeless, Frankie!” Kenny told her.
Frankie tried every note, but they all sounded the same. She had really truly wrecked it. Now what were we going to do?
“We might as well give up,” said Kenny.
She cracked the tab on a can of Coke, took a swig and passed it around. We all had some. Coke often gives me the hiccups, because it’s fizzy. But not this time. Even my hiccups were too depressed to hic. They stayed in my middle, in hiding.
“I want to go to the loo,” said Rosie.
“Tom’s in the bath,” Fliss reminded her.
“I can’t wait. I’m desperate!” Rosie wailed.
“There’s another loo downstairs,” I reminded her. “Through the kitchen and turn right.”
It was the original outside loo that had been built for our old-fashioned house. You had to be tough in those days. If you wanted to go to the loo in winter, you had to grab your wellies and brolly and risk sprouting icicles between leaving the kitchen door and entering the bog.
Good old Dad had put a nice little plastic conservatory roof over it, which meant you couldn’t get wet any more. Mum hated it because horrid, slimy moss grew on it - the roof, not the loo - and she had to climb on a chair to scrub it off with a brush.
“Come with me, someone, in case I get lost,” Rosie said.
“I’ll come. I want to go, too,” said Frankie.
Off they went, and while they were gone, Kenny, Fliss and I leafed through Girl Power, our Spice Girls book, to see if anything about our costumes needed changing.
By now, I’d got so hot that I’d taken Stu’s leather jacket off. I slung it on the bed but it fell on the floor and guess what? It went right to the spot where the cake had got squashed. Isn’t that typical? I told you what I thought about us being grot magnets! I’d just have to wipe it down before I sneaked it back on the coat hook in the hall.
“You know what?” I said to Fliss. “I reckon I could make myself a top out of the spare bits of bin-liner. I kicked them under my bed.”
I knelt down to look at them. My knees got all wet from the spilt lemonade. I pulled the bits of bin-bag out. Then I remembered the scissors were in the bathroom.
And so was Tom! Now we could get our own back on him.
I beckoned to the others and we lined up by the bathroom door, trying not to giggle.
“One, two, three,” I whispered. Then I yelled, “Charge!” and we burst the door open and galloped in.
Rats! He’d gone. Only a scummy line round the bath and a steamed-up mirror told us he’d ever been in there at all.
I got the scissors, laid the bin-liner on the floor and started to cut.
“That’s funny,” I said. “It’s only plastic. It should be easier to cut than this.”
Kenny had gone a funny shade. Sort of pale, with her eyes all bulgy as if she’d seen something nasty. “Er, Lyndz…” she said.
“What?” I frowned at her, wondering why she was looking at me like that. Had someone - The Goblin, perhaps - just turned me into a toad without me knowing anything about it?
I snatched up the piece of black plastic I’d been cutting. I realised what had gone wrong when my stripy cotton rug came up with it. I’d managed to cut through that as well.
“Mum’s going to murder me!” I said, my face going as pale with horror as Kenny’s.
“If you put some things on it, maybe she won’t notice,” Fliss said.
There normally were loads of things on my carpet, like books and shoes. Fliss was right. I started to breathe normally again.
There was a knock on my door. “Reggie-Veggie!” said Frankie’s voice. It was our password for the night. We always had one, for every sleepover, to keep out people we didn’t want to come in.
“Enter, Friend!” I said.
Frankie and Rosie were looking really pleased with themselves.
“I think I’ve solved all our problems!” Frankie said.
I don’t know about you, but when someone says they’ve solved all my problems, I expect them to have come up with something really good. Instead, Frankie and Rosie stood in the doorway arguing.
“It was me who heard it first!” Rosie said, looking indignantly at Frankie.
“Heard what?” I asked, shooting Fliss and Kenny a look which said quite plainly that these two had left their brains behind in the outside bog.
“We were passing the door of the babies’ room when we heard it,” Rosie went on.
She meant the room where my two little brothers, four-year-old Ben and baby Spike, sleep. It’s on a kind of half landing, between the ground floor and the floor where my bedroom is.
“It was in tune with the album. We could still hear the song as we went downstairs. Couldn’t we, Rosie?” Frankie said.
“I haven’t a clue what you mean,” I said.
“A musical instrument. As in bong-plink,” said Frankie, giving me a pitying look.
Bong-plink? I couldn’t think of anything that went bong-plink, unless it was her keyboard being thrown out of the window.
We all went down to listen, but we couldn’t hear a thing. The babies slept with their door ajar. I went in. Ben had fallen asleep with his xylophone on the bed next to him and the stick to bong it with still in his hand.
I gently slipped it out of his fingers while Frankie picked up the xylophone. We all tiptoed away.
Back in my room, Frankie hit a few bongs and plinks and began to sing - or rather, groan - Mama.
“We can’t use this!” I cried. “It’s a baby’s instrument. Everyone would laugh. The M&Ms would wet themselves!”
Everyone except Frankie agreed with me. She continued to play it. We all joined in singing. Suddenly, I saw the funny side and started laughing. That set everyone else off, until we were rolling about on the bed and on the floor, kicking our legs in the air and shrieking helplessly.
Next moment, there was a thunderous knocking on my door. We all held our breath, trying to stop laughing. It was Mum. She came in, looking very cross. Some extremely loud wailing was coming from somewhere behind her.
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