Stuff

by Jeremy Strong

  My Second Most Embarrassing Experience

  When I was ten I had a girlfriend at school called Molly. In the summer she went away on holiday with her family and I was lonely. I was hoping to get a postcard from her, but she never sent one. So in the end I had to write one myself, to myself. I got a piece of paper and wrote this letter:

  I put it under my pillow and every night I read it before I went to sleep and I felt a lot better. But then my mum found it and I didn’t know. So what happened next was, Molly and her parents came back from their holiday and my mum took the letter round to their house and said, ‘Look what your depraved daughter has been writing to my son. Goodness me! She’s ten years old – wicked girl!’

  Only, of course, she hadn’t and she wasn’t. Weren’t they surprised! Yes, of course they were. So they sent for me and asked me what I knew about the letter and I wanted the ground to swallow me up, but it didn’t and instead I had to stand there and admit that it was me.

  Were they cross?

  No. Instead they shrieked and roared with laughter. All except for Molly and me. Molly cried and I wanted to die. She never spoke to me again.

  End of Second Most Embarrassing Experience

  Which is just as well, because otherwise I would now have three women to juggle instead of two. And if you want to know what my first most embarrassing moment was, I might tell you later.

  But I was really pleased about my drawings and I was looking forward to doing some more because, like I said, I was getting one or two ideas. Most important of all, though, it would mean drawing Sky.

  14

  Darcy

  A Short Note About Cuckoos

  I don’t know how much you know about cuckoos, so I shall assume you know nothing and start from scratch. If you do know something, then you can skip this little bit if you want. (Off you go, skippity-skip.)

  Cuckoos are as big as magpies. They don’t make nests for themselves but search around for nests built by small little birdies. When they find a suitable nest, they lay their egg in it. Then they fly away. That’s it. That’s their bit of parenting done. (I know some people like that.) So, there’s the cuckoo egg, in a nest belonging to, let’s say, a robin. The nest has four little robin eggs and one whopping great cuckoo egg in it. The robin doesn’t appear to notice. Big mistake. The eggs all hatch out – four robins and one cuckoo. Of course, the cuckoo is already bigger than the tiny, helpless, little baby robins. The first thing the baby cuckoo does is start pushing at the newborn robins. The cuckoo pushes the little babby-boos up the side of the nest, right up to the edge, over the top and, whoops, oh dear, now they’re FALLING, FALLING, falling, and they haven’t got wings yet and they can’t fly, so they fall and fall until SPLAT they hit the ground and they’re dead. End of baby robins. And the mummy and daddy robin just carry on, feeding the cuckoo because they think it’s their little babby-child.

  ARE THEY STUPID? CANT THEY SEE THEY’RE FEEDING A GIANT?

  No, they can’t. This is Nature’s way of ensuring that there will always be cuckoos.

  It’s tough out there. How life goes.

  End of Cuckoo Bit

  You will find out later why I have told you the above. Now I am going to change the subject and horrify you with information about Delfine’s stinknoid brother, Darcy.

  Darcy is sixteen. He does a lot of bunking-off school and hanging around the town centre with his mates and matelles, or whatever you call female mates. I don’t wish to give them the nice title of ‘girlfriends’ because when they’re all together they look and behave more like a pack of hunting baboons, whooping around the precinct.

  You are probably reading this and thinking that Darcy sounds like a right yobbo.

  You are so wrong. It’s more scary than that.

  When you first meet Darcy you are impressed, because Darcy is tall and even handsome, if you like that sort of look. He’s well spoken. In fact, adults are impressed with his good manners and politeness. But what the adults don’t experience is Darcy’s vicious sadism. Basically he’s a bully – the quiet kind. He speaks softly, lulling you into a sense of security and then, all of a sudden, he lashes out – fist, arm, leg, foot, head, doesn’t really matter which. Because from then on all you feel is PAIN.

  Darcy goes to the gym for bodybuilding. He does judo and tae kwon do. He does boxing. In fact, he does a lot of stuff that involves hitting things. He likes hitting things.

  This may lead you to the conclusion that what Darcy really needs is LOVE and AFFECTION. LOVE will soothe his fevered brain and melt his anger. Come here, Darcy, and let us spread LOVE’s calming balm around you. After all, something must have made him the way he is. Don’t ask me what.

  Well, I think what Darcy really needs is to be spread with honey and shut inside an ants’ nest. Really BIG ants. Really BIG nest. Nibble nip ow.

  Imagine my utter delight when I saw Delfine at school and she said: ‘My brother wants to see you.’ That brightened my day! Bee’s buttocks! She might just as well have handed me a note saying: YOU WILL BE SHOT AT LUNCHTIME, VERY SLOWLY, WITH BLUNT BULLETS.

  ‘What have you been saying to him now?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. He saw me crying.’

  ‘Why were you crying?’

  ‘Because of you.’

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You like Sky. I know you do.’

  ‘We’ve hardly spoken to each other!’

  ‘Everybody knows. Everyone knows about it.’

  ‘Knows about what?’

  ‘You drew her.’

  This rather knocked the breath from me. What did Delfine know? For a second or two I almost panicked. Then I remembered that stupid conversation I’d had with Pete when he reckoned I must have drawn Sky in the nuddy. I bet he’d been winding Delfine up. It was just the sort of thing he’d do. And look where it had landed me. Thanks, Pete.

  ‘It was our art lesson. We all had to draw a portrait of someone else.’

  ‘She was almost naked.’

  (Yep, that was Pete all right! If only it were true!) ‘That’s news to me.’

  ‘You know what I mean. You drew her all … thingy.’

  Obviously thingy was something so awful Delfine couldn’t even think of the proper word, let alone say it.

  ‘I drew her, that’s all.’

  ‘You’ve never drawn me.’

  ‘Deify, you’re not in my art class.’

  ‘Darcy says he’ll see you at lunchtime.’ She stared at the ground for a moment, sniffed and then walked off.

  It was a wee bit difficult to concentrate on school after that. Lunchtime arrived and so did Darcy, looking cool, casual and, therefore, at his most dangerous. He glanced around to make sure the corridor was clear, then shoved me back against a wall.

  ‘You’ve been giving my little sister the runaround.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh yes, dear boy, I think you have.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Never argue with Darcy, you mucoid wozzer. That’s not the way to sort things out.’

  ‘I’m trying to explain … Ow!’

  My head thudded back against the wall as Darcy pushed me again.

  ‘I know all about your dirty little drawings, you pustulous puss-pot. You’d better listen to me very carefully. Are your ears pinned back, ready to listen? Do let me assist.’

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Now my little fuzzbag, you be good to Delfine or you’ll feel this.’ Darcy waved a fist in my face. ‘Upset her one more time and you’ll be history.’

  ‘Right,’ I choked.

  Darcy took a step back and reached into his pocket. ‘And I have a little task for you. Make sure your sister gets this, or you’ll have to answer to me and I don’t think you’ll want to do that, dear boy.’ He smiled and stuffed a piece of paper in my shirt pocket.

  ‘She’s not my –’ but he was already striding off – ‘sister,’ I finished weakly, gazing after him. What on earth did he want with Natasha?
r />   I pulled the note from my shirt and opened it up. It was scribbled in pencil, with several mistakes.

  Hell in a thing-thong! Tasha was a god! Darcy wanted to lick her! (Urgh!) A love letter! What a laugh!

  15

  The Grange (creepy stuff)

  On the other hand, maybe not such a laugh after all. Darcy fancied my stepsister. Serves her right, I thought. They suited each other. Mind you, it was the sort of thing you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, and Tasha just about was my worst enemy. So, should I give her the note and cause a lot of grief for her, or pretend to lose the note and cause a lot of grief for myself? It was grief either way, courtesy of Darcy Smith.

  What I couldn’t understand was why he wrote like that – all those mistakes. It was obviously deliberate, but why? Was he trying to disguise himself in some way? He’d signed the letter with his own name, so it couldn’t be that. Was it a joke? That could be it. His sense of humour was loopy enough.

  Have you ever noticed how just one person can cause so much misery? Darcy was spreading doom and gloom around the school like poison gas. Now he wanted to get Tasha into his clutches.

  I didn’t see Tasha until school had long finished and I got home. I pulled out the crumpled note. ‘I was asked by the writer of this to pass it on to you.’

  Tasha read it and blanched. ‘Oh my God,’ she murmured. ‘He’s a sadist.’

  Wonder of wonders – Tasha and I actually agreed with each other about something, not that I was going to let on.

  ‘I’m not going out with him,’ she said.

  Fine. Tell him.’

  Tasha shook her head. ‘You tell him. You brought the note. You can take one back.’

  ‘What? He’ll kill me!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘He’s a maniac’

  Tasha ignored me, got a piece of paper and began writing. It didn’t take long. She passed the note across.

  I looked at her. ‘You’re really serious about getting me killed, aren’t you?’

  ‘Don’t be so dramatic. Darcy won’t kill you.’ Tasha paused and gave a little smile. ‘He might rearrange you slightly, I suppose, but look on the bright side.’

  ‘Which is …?’

  ‘You can see the hospital from the school.’ Another pause while she listened to the sound of me not laughing. ‘Look, he won’t touch you. This is between me and him. Just give him the note and tell him exactly that – it’s between him and me. You are not responsible.’

  I took the note and went up to my room to take stock. What sort of state was my world in now? Well, Tasha was making my life miserable, Darcy was about to turn me into a very good copy of a pile of mashed potato, Delfine seemed to think I was some kind of sex maniac, La Trifle was going to produce a cuckoo for the nest, and Sky wasn’t speaking to me.

  Definitely time to go, I thought. (You see? I was already being pushed by that cuckoo.)

  I slipped downstairs to the kitchen, snitched a frying pan and a tin-opener and hid them under my bed. I’d find a better place later. I needed to get them out of the house and somewhere safe where I could pick them up when I was ready to go. But where? That was when I remembered The Grange.

  The Grange was like something out of a horror movie. It had once been lived in by triplets – three elderly sisters. They had been born there, all within an hour of each other, and they had died there eighty-seven years later, all within an hour of each other. Spooky or what? The house had been empty ever since. Ivy had crept up the walls and through the windows. So had spiders. There were rumours that the spiders inside The Grange had grown bigger than elephants, but that might have been someone exaggerating – quite possibly me. It was a place full of ghosts and memories, cobwebs and strange shadows. It had such a feeling of doom, death and despondency that people kept well clear.

  It would be the ideal hiding place. I shoved the bits and pieces I had scrounged so far into a rucksack, slipped from the house and went straight there.

  Creepy? Oh yes. The back door was so rotten I hardly had to look at the lock before it fell off. The smell was like being inside the tomb of an ancient pharaoh – not that I’ve ever been inside one, but I bet it would smell like The Grange. The floor was littered with bits of broken furniture, old newspapers, the odd photograph.

  My heart was thudding. I kept expecting to see the circling fins of sharks as they closed in, ready to surge forward and take off both my legs.

  Yes, I know, you don’t get sharks in dining rooms; that’s how creepy it was. It made you think daft, scary things. I tried to calm my nerves by searching for a safe place to stash my equipment. In one of the rooms I discovered an old piano, standing forlornly in the corner. There was something about the instrument that brought ghostly pictures to mind of the three sisters – one playing, one turning the pages of the music, one singing. I could almost see them. I could almost hear them. Tra la la, liddle-lee, dee-lah …

  That was me, humming to myself in a squeaky, nervous voice. I pulled the piano forward a little way and stacked my kit behind it. Then I crept out, back to the garden, back to the road. I grinned to myself. I had made a proper start at last. Phew.

  16

  Darcy Again

  Have you ever considered how much time you spend at school? Have you ever wondered why it is that teachers can retire, but us kids can’t? What I say is: bring the age of retirement down to fourteen.

  Anyhow, school – it dominates your life. In fact, if you think of Time as a mountain range, then school would be Mount Everest. Consider this: you arrive aged four and a half and you leave … let’s say, at sixteen. That’s eleven and a half years, and each year you spend forty-one weeks at school – that’s two hundred and five days. Six hours a day – that’s one thousand, two hundred and thirty hours a year and, all in all, fourteen thousand, one hundred and forty-five hours of your life. In other words, eight hundred and forty-eight thousand, seven hundred minutes. Or fifty million, nine hundred and twenty-two thousand seconds.

  A whole Mount Everest of Time.

  Anyway, there I was, back at Mount Everest and wondering when Death (alias Darcy) would show up. I was pacing the corridors, hoping I wouldn’t bump into him, when I bumped straight into – Sky. Sent her sprawling. Splat.

  I just stood there, staring down at her. I was horrified, embarrassed, stricken. I didn’t know what to do. Should I help her up? If I touched her, what would she say? Would she scream? All this was going through my head in a flash.

  Sky raised herself on one elbow and looked up at me. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  I swallowed and nodded, still speechless.

  ‘Oh good,’ she went on evenly ‘I’m glad. Now it’s your turn.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Now you say to me, “Are you all right? I’m sorry I just knocked you off your feet. I hope you didn’t hurt yourself, falling on to that hard floor, Sky. You haven’t broken anything, have you? Here, let me help you up.”’

  I must have looked brain-dead because she started to laugh as she clambered to her feet. ‘You’re weird,’ she said.

  ‘It’s my genes,’ I answered as my brain began to return to some form of normal function.

  ‘You’re not wearing jeans,’ observed Sky.

  ‘No, genes, as in DNA and stuff.’

  ‘Right,’ nodded Sky. ‘How does that work, then? Why does your DNA make you bump into people and knock them over?’

  ‘My mother was a bulldozer.’ God! What was I saying? Now she’d think I was a complete gobbersaurus.

  Sky smiled. She laughed. My heart went off like some million-starred exploding firework with whizz-bangs, doo-lallies and sparkly-sprinkles. It slowly reassembled itself. She looked so wonderful when she smiled. I felt myself grinning back at her like some love-struck teenager. I didn’t care. I was a love-struck teenager!

  ‘I love the strip,’ she said. ‘I know Miss Kovak said it’s a secret, but since I know and you know, it’s … you know!’

&nbs
p; ‘Do you really like it?’

  She nodded.

  I swallowed hard. OK. Here goes. ‘Would you go out with me?’ I asked.

  Sky’s eyebrows shot up and she took a step back. ‘Sorry,’ she frowned. ‘But I don’t two-time.’

  Damn! She already had a boyfriend. Hardly surprising, but bloody annoying. She smiled again but now she had her lips pressed together in that kind of oh-well-better-get-on-it’s-a-rotten-life kind of way.

  ‘Nice to bump into you,’ she said, and off she went.

  I watched her walk up the corridor, unable to take my eyes off her. I loved the way she walked. Hip talk. I loved everything about her.

  ‘I told you he liked her.’

  Delfine’s voice brought me crashing back into the real world, a world that not only contained Delfine, but big brother Darcy too. He pushed me against the wall.

  ‘I thought I told you to keep your hands off Sky, scuzzbag.’

  ‘You did, I was. I mean, I have, I am, I will. We bumped into each other, that’s all, and she fell over and –’

  ‘You fancy her, I know you do! You were laughing with her.’ Delfine pushed out her lower lip. It quivered. Very soap opera.

  ‘I don’t fancy her,’ I lied, hoping it didn’t show. (Yep, I know it’s not right to tell lies; it’s not nice, but I was trying to SAVE MY LIFE.)

  Darcy shoved me against the wall again, banging my head. He was making a habit of this and I didn’t like it. Apart from anything else, I was worried because the more the wall hit the back of my head the more it felt as if the jolt was raising more and more acne spots.

  ‘This is your last warning, dearest pustule,’ he growled, twisting my tie until I could barely breathe. ‘If I see you chatting up that girl again, I’m afraid that I shall have to rearrange all your teeth for you, one by one. Permanently. Understand?’