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I personally wouldn’t want to be a member of the Inner Circle with the eyes of all the world upon me. I would be too self-conscious!
“We will just be us,” says Saffy.
Really, what else can you be? It is no use thinking you can turn yourself into someone completely different. I know, because I have tried it. Lots of times! These are just some of the things I have attempted to be:
Bright and breezy, exuding confidence from every pore. “Hey! Wow! Way to go!”
Pathetic. Utterly pathetic.
Loud and laddish. Smutty jokes and long snorty cackles at anything even faintly suggestive.
Total disaster. I boil up like a beetroot even just thinking of it.
Creepy crawly. In other words, humble.
Even worse. I just oozed humility. All I can say is YUCK.
Eager beaver sports freak. Madly playing football in the playground every break. Dragging myself to school at half-past seven to practise netball in the freezing cold.
Bore bore BORE! I quickly gave up on that one. It wouldn’t have worked anyway.
None of them worked. None of these things that I have tried. When I thought I was being bright and breezy, I just came across as obnoxious so that people kept saying things like, “Who do you think you are, all of a sudden?” They don’t say that to Dani Morris, and she is just about as obnoxious as can be. But she can get away with it, and I can’t!
This is the point that I am making. Like when I went through my oozy phase. All I did was just smile at Kevin Williams and he instantly stretched his lips into this hideous grimace and made his eyes go crossed. Why did he do it??? He wouldn’t have done it to Petal! If Petal had smiled at him, he would most likely have gone to jelly. But Kevin Williams is a friend of Nathan Corrie, so I should have known better. Nathan Corrie behaves like something that has just crawled out of the primeval slime.
However. To return to this typical day that I am talking about. Here are me and Saffy, sat together in our little cosy corner at the back of the class, and there at the front is Ms Glazer, our maths teacher. She’s collecting up our maths homework from yesterday and handing back the stuff we did last week. She’s given me a D+. Not bad! I mean, considering I did it all on my own. At least it’s better than D-, but Ms Glazer doesn’t seem to see it that way. At the bottom, in fierce red ink, she’s written: Jenny, I really would like there to be some improvement during the course of this term. D+ is an improvement! What’s she going on about? I happen to have this mental block, where figures just don’t mean anything to me. Sometimes I seriously think that an essential part of my brain is missing. I have tried putting this point of view to Ms Glazer, but all she says in reply is, “Nonsense! There is nothing whatsoever wrong with your brain. Application is what is lacking.”
Dad is the only one who ever sympathises with me. Mum, in her ruthless high-flying way, agrees with Ms Glazer.
“Anyone can do anything if they just set their mind to it.”
That is RUBBISH. Can a one-legged man run a mile in a minute? I think not! (I wish I had thought to say this to Mum. I’d like to know how she would have wriggled out of that.)
To make up for my D+ in maths, I get an A in biology. It’s for my drawing of the rabbit’s reproductive system. I am rather proud of my rabbit’s reproductive system. I have filled in all the organs in different colours – bright reds and greens and purples – so that it looks like one of those modern paintings that make people like Dad go, “Call that art?” I try showing it to Saffy but she takes one look and shrieks, “That’s disgusting! Take it away!” She says it makes her feel sick. She says anything to do with reproduction makes her feel sick. She is a very sensitive sort of person.
All through the lesson I keep shooting little glances at my brilliant artwork. It occurs to me that the rabbit’s reproductive system, in colour, would make a fascinating and appropriate design for certain types of garment. Those smock things, for instance, that people wear when they are pregnant. It would be a fashion statement!
I get quite excited by this and wonder if perhaps I should go to art school and become a famous clothes designer. Why not? I can do it! Already I have visions of being interviewed on television.
“Jenny Jo Penny, the fashion designer…”
I would put in the Jo, being my middle name, as I think Jenny Penny is just too naff for words. There would be the Jenny Jo Penny collection and all the big Hollywood stars would come to me for their outfits. I would be a designer label! And I wouldn’t ever use fur or animal skin. I would be known for not using it.
“Jenny Jo Penny, the animal-friendly fashion designer…”
Hurrah! I’ve found something to aim at.
But wait! The last lesson of the day is art, with Mr Pickering. We are doing still life, and Mr Pickering has tastefully arranged a few bits of fruit for us to draw. In my new artistic mode I decide that just copying is not very imaginative. I mean if you just want to copy you might as well use a camera. A true artist will interpret. So what I do, I ever so slightly alter the shape of things and then splosh on the brightest colours I can find. Blue, orange, purple, like I did with the rabbit stuff. These will be my trademark!
I’m sitting there, waiting for Mr Pickering to come and comment, and feeling distinctly pleased with myself, when Saffy leans over to have a look. She gives this loud squawk and shrieks, “Ugh! It looks like—”
I am not going to say what she thinks it looks like. It is too vulgar. I am surprised that she knows about such things, although she does have two brothers, both older than she is, which perhaps would account for it. All the same, it was quite uncalled for. (Especially as it made me go all hot and red.)
What Mr Pickering says is not so vulgar, but it is certainly what I would call deflating. I am not going to repeat it. It makes me instantly droop and give up all ideas about going to art school. It is terrible to have so little confidence! But between them, Saffy and Mr Pickering have utterly demolished me.
Get home from school to find the house empty. Mum and Petal not yet back, Dad has gone off to pick up Pip. Help myself to some cold pasta and slump in front of the television till Dad and Pip arrive. Dad at once bustles out to the kitchen to prepare some food, while Pip settles down to his homework. I hardly had any homework when I was ten, but Pip has stacks of it. This is because he goes to this special school that Mum and Dad pay for, and where they are all expected to work like crazy and pass exams so that they can win scholarships to even more special schools and pass more exams and go to university and become nuclear physicists. Or whatever. Me and Petal just used to go up the road to the local Juniors. Nobody cared whether we passed our exams and became nuclear physicists. But Mum says Pip is gifted and it would be a crime not to encourage him. She is probably right. I am not complaining, since I don’t seem to be gifted in any way whatsoever. Not even artistically, in spite of getting an A for my rabbit’s reproductive system
At five o’clock Dad goes off to Giorgio’s for the evening, leaving a big bowl of macaroni cheese for us to dig into. I help myself to a sizeable dollop and go back to the television. Pip is still doing his homework. Petal comes waltzing in, snatches a mouthful of macaroni cheese and rushes upstairs to her bedroom, where she spends most of the evening telephoning her friends. Every half hour or so she wafts back down to grab an apple or a glass of milk. I hear her discussing some party that she is going to at the weekend. Her main concern seems to be whether a certain boy is likely to be there, and if so, who will he be there with?
“Please not that awful tart from Year 10!”
If it’s the awful tart from Year 10, Petal will just die. Why, is what I want to know? But it is no use asking her. She has already gone wailing back up the stairs.
“What will I do? What will I do?”
Fascinating stuff! I sometimes think that Petal and I inhabit different worlds.
We all do actually. Me and Petal and Pip. There’s Pip obsessed with work, and Petal obsessed with boys, and me very soon to become obsessed with fat. We never talk about our obsessions. We never really talk about anything. We are part of the same family and live under the same roof and I think we all love one another; but we never actually communicate.
Mum gets in at quarter to nine. She gives me and Pip a quick peck on the cheek – “All right, poppets? Everything OK?” – pours herself a glass of wine and disappears upstairs to soak in the bath. Pip packs up his homework, makes himself a lettuce sandwich and takes himself off to bed. Just like that! Without being told. It doesn’t strike me as quite normal, for a ten year old, but that is Pip for you. He has the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Obviously nobody is going to eat Dad’s macaroni cheese, so I decide I’d better polish it off to stop Dad from being upset. I then finish off my homework, watch a bit more telly, eat a bag of crisps and go upstairs.
At eleven o’clock Dad comes home from work and calls out to see if anyone’s awake and wants a nightcap. I am, and I do! So Dad makes two mugs of foaming hot chocolate and we drink them together, with Dad sitting on the edge of my bed. I love these private moments that I have with Dad! I tell him all about school, about my A for biology and my D+ for maths, and Dad tells me all about Giorgio’s, about the customers who’ve been in and the food that he’s cooked. The only thing that slightly spoils it is when he says goodnight. He says, “Night night, Plumpkin! Sleep tight.”
He seems to be calling me Plumpkin all the time now. I pull up the duvet and fall asleep, only to dream, for some reason, of whales. Big beached blubbery whales. I wonder what Petal dreams of? Boys, probably.
That was how it was when I was twelve. I’m fourteen now, but nothing very much has changed. Dad still cooks, Mum is still high-powered, Petal still casts her spell over the male population, Pip still does oceans of homework. The only thing is, I no longer dream about whales. That has got to be an improvement!
This is how it came about.
IT WAS SAFFY who suggested we should go to acting classes. I was quite surprised as she had never shown any inclination that way. Just the opposite! Once at infant school she was chosen to be an angel in the nativity play, a sweet little red-headed, pointy-nosed angel, all dressed up in a white nightie with a halo on her head and dear little wings sprouting out of her back. Guess what? She tripped over her nightie, forgot her line – she only had the one – and ran off the stage, blubbing. Oh, dear! It is something she will never manage to live down. She gets quite huffy about it.
“I was six,” she says, if ever I chance, just casually, to bring it into the conversation. Which I only do if I feel for some reason she needs putting in her place.
When she is in a really huffy mood she will waspishly remind me that I didn’t get chosen to be anything at all, let alone an angel, which you would have thought I might have done, having fair hair and blue eyes and looking, if I may say so, far more angelic than Saffy. In my opinion, she would have been better cast as a sheep. (Then she wouldn’t have had a nightie to trip over, ha ha!)
The only reason I didn’t get chosen was that I caught chicken pox. If I hadn’t had chicken pox, I bet I’d have been an angel all right! And I bet I wouldn’t have tripped over my nightie and forgotten my line, either. Saffy has absolutely no right to crow. It is hardly a person’s fault if a person gets struck down by illness.
I have said this to her many times, but all she says in reply is, “You picked yourself.”
What she means is, I scratched my spots. She says that is why I wasn’t chosen.
“It was a nativity play, not a horror show!”
It’s true I did make a bit of a mess of myself. Petal, who had chicken pox at the same time as me, didn’t even scrape off one tiny little crust. Even at the age of eight, Petal obviously knew the value of a smooth, unblemished skin. But it is all vanity! What do I care? In any case, as Saffy always hastens to assure me – feeling guilty, no doubt, at her cruel jibe – “It hardly shows at all these days. Honestly! Just one little dent in the middle of your chin… it’s really cute!”
Huh! It doesn’t alter the fact that she had her chance as an angel and she muffed it. It is no use getting ratty with me! What I didn’t understand was why she should want to go to acting classes, all of a sudden.
I put this to her, and earnestly Saffy explained it wasn’t so much the acting she was interested in, though she reckoned by now she could manage to say the odd line or two without bursting into tears. What it was, she said, was boys.
“Ah,” I said. “Aha!”
“Precisely,” said Saffy.
She giggled, and so did I.
“You think it would be a good way to meet them?”
“I do,” said Saffy.
In that case, I was all for it! Meeting boys, in that second term of Year 7, had become very important, not to say crucial. We had to meet boys! There were lots of boys in our class at school, of course, but we had already met them. We met them every day, and we didn’t think much of them. Well, I mean! Kevin Williams and Nathan Corrie. Pur-lease! Not that they were all primeval swamp creatures, but even those that hadn’t crawled out of the mud seemed to come from distant planets. Trying to suss them out was like trying to fathom the workings of an alien mind. Were they plant life? Or were they animal? They probably thought the same about us. But you have to get to grips with them sooner or later because otherwise, for goodness’ sake, the human race would just die out!
I didn’t say this to Saffy, knowing her sensitivity on certain subjects, eg, the rabbit’s reproductive system. I just agreed with her that meeting boys was an essential part of our education, and one which at the moment was being sadly neglected.
“I don’t know how Petal got going,” I said. “She just seemed to do it automatically.”
Saffy said that Petal was a natural.
“People like you and me have to work at it.”
“And you honestly truly think,” I said, “that drama school would be a good place to start?”
Saffy said yes, it would be brilliant! She sounded really keen. At drama school, she said, we would meet boys who were creative and sensitive, and gorgeous with it. All the things that the swamp creatures weren’t. It’s true! You look at a boy like Nathan Corrie and you think, “Is this life as we know it?”
The thought of meeting boys who were both creative and sensitive and gorgeous seemed almost too good to be true.
“Do they really exist?” I said.
“Of course they do!” said Saffy. She said that you had to be all of those things if you wanted to be an actor. You couldn’t have actors that were goofy or geeky or just plain boring.
“Or even just plain,” I said. And then immediately thought of at least a dozen that were all of those things. I reeled off a list to Saffy.
“What about that one that looks like a frog? That one that was on the other day. And that one that’s all drippy, the one in Scene Stealing, that you said you couldn’t stand. You said it was insulting they ever let him on the screen. And that other one, that Jason person, the one in—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” said Saffy. “But there’s far more who are gorgeous. I mean—” She gave this little nervous trill. Nervous because she knew perfectly well she was being self-indulgent. “Look at Brad!”
By Brad she meant Brad Pitt. (Famous American movie star, in case anyone has been hiding in a hole for the past ten years.) Don’t ask me what Brad Pitt had to do with it. Just don’t ask. Saffy brings Brad Pitt into everything. She can’t help it, poor dear, she is infatuated. I somewhat sternly pointed out (being cruel to be kind) that Brad Pitt is not exactly a boy, in fact he is probably old enough to be her grandfather. Well, father. I might just as well not have bothered! Saffy simply smiled this soppy smile and loftily informed me that she preferred “the mature man”.
“Well, you’re not very likely to meet any mature men at drama classes,” I said. “Not when they’re advertised for 12 to 16 year olds!”
“That’s all right,” said Saffy, still in these lofty tones. “If I can’t have Brad—”
“Which you can’t,” I said.
“I know I can’t!” snapped Saffy. “I just said that, didn’t I? He’s married!”
“On the other hand,” I said, trying to be helpful, “he’s bound to get divorced. Movie stars always do. If you wait around long enough—”
“Oh!” She clasped her hands. “Do you think so?” Heavens! She was taking me seriously. Her cheeks had now turned bright pink.
“Well, no,” I said. “I don’t, actually. By the time you’re old enough, he’ll be practically decrepit.”
Her face fell, and I immediately felt that I had been mean, turning her daydreams into a joke. It’s not kind to trample on people’s daydreams. Specially not when it’s your best friend. But Saffy is actually quite realistic and never stays crushed for long. She is a whole lot tougher than she looks!
“Well, anyway,” she said, “as I was saying, if I can’t have Brad I’ll make do with someone else. Just in the mean time. To practise on.”
“While you’re waiting,” I said.
“Yes.” She giggled. “As long as they’re not geeky!”
“Or swamp creatures.”
“Or aliens.”
But they wouldn’t be. She promised me! They would be creative and sensitive and hunky. She said we must enrol straight away.
“We’ve already missed the first two weeks of term. They’ll all be taken!”
I said, “Who will?”
“All the gorgeous guys!”
“Oh. Right!” An idea suddenly struck me. If all the guys were going to be gorgeous, wouldn’t all the girls be gorgeous, too? I had visions of finding myself among a dozen different versions of Petal. What a nightmare!
I put this to Saffy, but she reassured me. She said that loads of quite ordinary-looking girls (such as for instance her and me) fancied themselves as actresses, but the only boys who went to drama classes were the creative, sensitive, and divinely beautiful ones.
“If they’re not creative and sensitive they go and play with their computers. And if they are creative and sensitive, but not very beautiful—”
I waited.
“They go and do something else,” said Saffy.
“Like what?” I said.
“Oh! I don’t know.” She waved a hand. Saffy can never be bothered with mere detail. She is quite an impatient sort of person. “Probably go and write poetry, or something.”
I thought about the boys in our class. Writing poetry was not an activity I associated with any of them. Ethan Cole had once written a limerick that started “There was a young girl called Jan”, but none of it had scanned and it hadn’t made any sort of sense and what was more it had been downright rude. That was the only sort of poetry that the boys in our class understood. How could you have a class with fourteen boys and every single one an alien?
I said to Saffy that if I could meet a boy that wrote poetry I wouldn’t mind if he wasn’t beautiful, just the fact that he wrote poetry would be enough, but Saffy told me that that made me sound desperate.
“Why settle for a creative geek when you could have a creative hunk? Ask your mum and dad as soon as you get home. Tell them your entire future is at stake! You don’t have to mention boys. Just say that having drama classes will give you poise and – and confidence and – and will be good for your self-esteem.”
“All right,” I said.
I asked Dad the minute he got back from picking up Pip from school. I followed him round the kitchen as he chopped and sliced and tossed things into pans.
“Dad,” I said.
“Yes? Out of the way, there’s a good girl!”
I hastily skipped round the other side of the table. Dad hates to be crowded when he’s in the kitchen. Mum says he’s a bit of a prima donna.
“Do you think I could go to acting classes?” I said.
Dad said, “What sort of acting classes? Hand me the salt, would you?”
“Acting classes,” I said. “Drama. At a drama school.”
“Pepper!”
“It would give me poise,” I said.
“Poise, eh? Taste this!” Dad thrust a spoon in my face. “How is it? Not too hot?”
“It’s scrummy,” I said. “The thing is, if I went to acting classes—”
“Bit more salt, I reckon.”
“It would give me confidence, Dad!”
“Didn’t know you lacked it,” said Dad.
“I do,” I said. “That’s why I want to go. So could I, Dad? Please?”
“It’s not up to me,” said Dad. “Ask your mum.”
I should have known! It’s what he always says. Dad and me are really great mates, and he is wonderful for having cuddles with, but whenever it’s anything serious he always, always says ask your mum. It’s like Mum is the career woman, she is the big breadwinner, so she has to make all the decisions.
Well, of course, Mum didn’t get in till late, and as usual she was worn to a frazzle and just wanted to go and soak in the bath.
“Darling, I’m exhausted!” she said. “It’s been the most ghastly day. Let’s talk at the weekend. We’ll sit down and have a long chat, I promise.”
“But, Mum,” I said, “I need to talk now.” Saffy would be cross if I didn’t have an answer for her. She wanted us to be enrolled by the weekend. “All it is,” I said, “I just want to know if I could go to drama classes.”
It is easy to see how Mum has got ahead in business. In spite of being exhausted, she immediately wanted all the details, such as where, and who with, and how much. Fortunately Saffy can be quite efficient when she puts her mind to it. She had told me where to find the advert in the Yellow Pages, plus she had written down all the things that Mum would want to know.
“It’s right near where Saffy lives,” I said. “I could go back with her after school on Fridays, and I thought perhaps you could come and pick me up afterwards. Maybe. I mean, if you weren’t too busy. If you didn’t have to work late. And then on Saturdays—”
“We could manage Saturdays between us,” said Mum. “If you’ve really set your heart on it.”
One of the best things about my mum is, when you do get to talk to her she doesn’t keep you on tenterhooks while she hums and hahs and thinks things over. She makes up her mind right there and then. It’s something I really like about her. Especially when she makes up her mind the way I want her to! Though considering Pip has his own computer and about nine million computer games, and Petal has her own TV and her own CD player, and I don’t have any of these things (mainly because I don’t particularly want them) Mum probably thought that a few drama classes weren’t so very much to ask. She is quite fair, on the whole, except for spoiling Pip rotten on account of him being the youngest. And of course a boy. I really do think boys get treated better than girls! Petal doesn’t necessarily agree. She says that if Mum spoils Pip, then Dad spoils me. But he only spoils me with food. He’d spoil Petal with food if she’d let him, but she won’t, so she only has herself to blame.