The Bad Karma Diaries

by Bridget Hourican

  14) 5.01pm. Food fight over. Order restored by yours truly and Mrs Mahony. Anna too helpless with laughter to restore order. Everyone singing ‘Happy Birthday’, but no cake left to sing it to. Cake all over the little girls. Chloe unappeasable.

  15) 5.15pm. Enter Mr Mahony. Chloe and little girls by now cleaned of cake and Playing Nicely – Anna has given them pieces of paper to draw their Ideal Cake on. Karen’s Ideal Cake is just like ours – a splotchy sagging mess. Chloe sees her father – ‘Daddy … … my cake …’ Mr Mahony is tall and thin with enormous eyes behind glasses – obviously the source of the supermodel. He backs away from the room and his daughter’s brimming eyes as if he’s just witnessed a child being fed to a crocodile.

  16) 5.38pm. Last child gone home. Chloe: ‘My party’s o-o-o-over!’

  17) 5.42pm. No Going Home Bag for the Birthday Girl: ‘Where’s my Going Home Bag!’ Anna: ‘It’s a going home bag, you’re not going home, you’re at home!’

  18) 5.44pm. ‘Where’s my At Home Bag?’

  19) 6pm. Me and Anna leaving. Chloe: ‘Wouldn’t you like to stay and play with my new toys?’ Us: ‘We can’t, sorry.’

  MONDAY OCTOBER 5TH

  The party was worth it – not just for the money (not even!) but cause it’s such a good story. Everybody is laughing about it. So now I know: Anna was right – these parties are good for a comedy blog. (N.B. Must get going on blog soon!)

  David Leydon has started hanging out with Brian and Derek. This figures. Brian and Derek have attitude. They have long fringes, and listen to music which sounds like vomiting or cats screeching and they try hard not to try to be popular, and make like they consider the rest of us spoilt little rich kids, which is not very observant of them because Anna and I are definitely not spoilt or rich, but some others are, it’s true (naming no names!) If you’d asked me and I’d thought about it I guess I’d have guessed David Leydon would hang out with them. Although he might have got friends with J.P. and he still might. Although, maybe he’s too … young? Uncool? … for J.P. I mean I think he’s cool till I compare him to J.P. and then I see he’s more like the rest of us than he’s like J.P.

  J.P. is in our year but he’s too cool for school. This is a stupid phrase, I admit, but it is the only possible phrase for J.P. so, sorry, I have to use it. I definitely fancy J.P. and so does everybody else, it’s just that nobody will admit it. This is because he’s ugly and dirty – he doesn’t even wash. He has long, lank, greasy hair and small red-rimmed eyes and white pasty skin and a big nose (Wow! Doesn’t he sound dreamy?) There is something dangerous about him like he might suddenly do something crazy. He’s also rude and jeering, although he’s not cruel rude, I mean, it’s good-tempered jeering. But what with him being dirty and ugly and dangerous and jeering, nobody can admit to fancying him. Tommy is the acceptable face to fancy cause he’s good-looking and charming and artistic and kind-hearted, blah blah blah. But, fact is, when J.P. speaks to you, you get goosebumps and he has this way of looking at you … Even Anna fancies J.P. (I know though she’s never admitted it).

  But anyway David Leydon hasn’t graduated to J.P. yet. After break Anna had Spanish and I had French, so we separated and I saw David Leydon with Brian going towards French, so I caught up with them, and said ‘Hi …’

  They said, ‘Hi’.

  I said to David, ‘So did you stay long in town?’

  He looked completely blank. This was potentially mortifying!

  I said, ‘Last Saturday..?’

  ‘Oh yeah … yeah… we hung round a bit…’ Then he said ‘How was your kid’s party?’

  It’s incredible that he remembered this!

  I said, ‘Well, our cake caused a food fight, and the birthday girl cried nineteen times, and our games ruined the flower beds, but otherwise fine, perfect!’

  Derek started to laugh, so the others did too. (I meant them to!).

  Brian said, ‘What were you doing at a kid’s party?’ but he has an inner city accent, so it sounded like, ‘Wha’ were you doin’ a’ a kid’s par-ey.’

  I started to tell him, but then we reached French class.

  I have made contact and am cementing my friendship with David Leydon. Chloe’s party is worth its weight in cake and tears!

  Oh – we have decided what to do to Pierce we are going to hide his homework. This is Simple, but Effective.

  TUESDAY OCTOBER 6TH

  Today was The Day. We took Pierce’s English homework. It was quite easy. At break we found his schoolbag by the lockers and took out his copybook and just ripped out the English essay. It was a spiral copybook so it didn’t even show where we ripped. Then I put it carefully in my copybook so the pages would stay neat because today his homework was going to miraculously disappear, but tomorrow it had to miraculously appear, unharmed!

  In Maths I took a quick look at Pierce’s essay cause I was curious what he wrote. The essay was on To Kill a Mockingbird and his first line was ‘In my opinion Atticus Finch is one of the most important characters in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.’

  So I nudged Anna and whispered sarcastically, ‘Guess what? Atticus Finch is one of the most important characters in To Kill a Mockingbird!’

  ‘In Pierce’s opinion,’ said Anna, deadpan.

  At the beginning of English class we all handed in our essays. I stole a look at Pierce. He was flicking through his copybook, front to back, back to front, front to back, with a totally amazed look on his face. He looked like someone had just plucked a Mars Bar out of his hands. All the essays were handed up. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything right through the class, but just sat there. When the bell rang he went up to O’Toole. I lingered a bit going through the door and heard O’Toole saying, ‘That’s okay, Pierce, just bring it tomorrow.’

  So now I know: Pierce is more cunning and diplomatic than Elaine. He stayed calm and totally got away with not having his homework. This proves that there is never any point losing your temper. It just makes things worse. I am surprised though. I would have thought he’d lose his temper and get all nasty.

  ‘I think our Karma is a good test of character,’ I told Anna, ‘you get to see how people will react in a crisis. So now we know Pierce stays Cool, Calm and Collected.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Anna, ‘he’d be good under fire.’ Our history teacher, Mr McMahon, is big into battles and likes telling us how we should behave if we’re ever under attack, like this is likely to happen.

  ‘And Elaine would be a rubbish,’ I said, ‘Hassled, Hysterical and …’ I paused trying to think of a third H-word.

  ‘Helpless,’ said Anna, ‘Hassled, Hysterical and Helpless.’

  After lunch Anna and I crept into the boys’ changing rooms and put Pierce’s English essay back in his book. This was actually very brave of us. We’d be in real trouble if we were caught in the boys changing rooms. But we didn’t want Pierce to have to write a whole new essay. That wouldn’t have been fair, and the Instruments of Karma actually play it very fair. We slipped the essay back between the pages; he wouldn’t know it was there till he opened the book to write a new essay this evening. Then we legged it out of the changing rooms. My heart was beating very fast. This is very exciting and dangerous work!

  ‘I wish I could see his face when he finds it back there,’ I said.

  ‘Yep, we’re messing with his head,’ said Anna.

  ‘Maybe we should have changed the first line for him though. Maybe we should have cut out “in my opinion”. He’s gonna get a rubbish mark with an opening like that.’

  ‘We’re teaching him a lesson,’ said Anna, ‘not teaching him a lesson.

  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 7TH

  It is going round the class that (maybe!) we hid Pierce’s homework!

  This morning Pierce was telling Ben, ‘When I got home, it was just there! In the middle of the book, but I swear it wasn’t there earlier.’

  Ben kind of nodded but he wasn’t too interested. It is hard to get interested about Unlikel
y Occurrences that happen to other people.

  Then Anna butted in, ‘Did you get in trouble?’

  Pierce said, ‘O’Toole let me off if I brought it in today, but he said not to let it happen again, like two strikes and I’m out.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Anna, ‘it’s rough getting penalised when it isn’t your fault.’

  That’s all she said, but Pierce suddenly looked closer at her. And by first break the whisper was going round that we’d hidden his homework. Then he confronted us with it.

  He stood in front of us, with Ben, and said, ‘Did you steal my homework?’

  Ben was looking a lot more interested about the whole thing then earlier.

  So I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ in a casual, impatient, bewildered voice, which was just exactly the right kind of voice. Maybe I should become an actress!

  Ben said, ‘Come on! You stole his homework to get him back for not paying you interest, didn’t you?’

  Anna said, ‘That would have been a brilliant idea!’ in a very enthusiastic voice, but like it had just occurred to her. Also very convincing – she could be an actress too.

  And I said, ‘Huh! It’s your guilty conscience for not paying like you said you would, that makes you think it’s us.’

  We went on like that, and they couldn’t pin anything on us. They suspected us, maybe, but they weren’t sure. We were so relaxed, they were unsure.

  In the end I said, ‘Do you really think we’d do that to you? I mean you’d kill us.’ And I watched his face go all flattered and sly and could see him thinking to himself, ‘Yeah, they’d be too scared to get me.’

  Later Elaine said, ‘It was you two, wasn’t it?’

  Anna said, ‘It was Karma.’

  Elaine said, ‘Karma?’

  I said, ‘If you do something bad, it gets back to you, that’s the Karmic circle.’

  ‘What comes around goes around,’ said Anna.

  THURSDAY OCTOBER 8TH

  We – me and Anna – have agreed it’s quite good we’re suspected of stealing Pierce’s homework because it’s kind of publicity for the Instruments of Karma. We can’t advertise our services so we need the word to be whispered round. But at the same time we can’t have people knowing it as a Sure Thing because we could get in trouble, so at first break we found Emma and swore her to secrecy about Elaine’s gym-bag. Well, we kind of threatened her to secrecy. We said if she told something bad would happen her. This was the only way to make sure she didn’t blab. She hasn’t said anything so far, but that’s because she’s afraid of admitting her part in it, but I bet that if the conversation got round to us and Pierce’s homework, she’d start in on the gym-bag. Just because it would make a good story – she’d get everyone’s attention, and normally she never gets anyone’s attention. People will say anything to get everyone’s attention, I’ve discovered. But I think we scared her bad enough for her to stay dumb. She’s not so hard to scare. She’s like jelly. We didn’t mean the threats of course. That was just our excellent acting.

  SATURDAY OCTOBER 10TH

  No birthday party to organise today. I’m afraid that maybe the word has gone round the six-year-olds and their parents that we are Trouble. This is pretty unfair because actually if Mrs Mahony had been left to organise that party by herself she would have had a nervous breakdown and probably Karen would have ripped the Birthday Girl’s dress and hacked off her supermodel hair.

  MONDAY OCTOBER 12TH

  Back in business! We have a party for next Saturday – a five-year-old boy’s from the next road to Anna’s. We dropped cards in all the houses round hers and mine. This time we are gonna ask for €55 to buy food and prizes, and we don’t do birthday cakes. Well, we will buy one, but not out of the €55. We are getting the hang of this.

  Oh and we’re finally doing the blog! It’s going to be a proper blog, like a website, not just a Facebook entry. We need a proper blog because a) we have too much to write just for Facebook, and b) in Facebook you have to follow a set formula and we need to express our creativity by not following a formula, and c) you go on Facebook to make friends and comment on everyone else’s entries and our blog is for the whole world to read, not just signed-up friends.

  Declan, this friend of Tommy’s, is helping us design the blog. Declan is a computer genius and quite nerdy. He has glasses, and spots, and is bad at sport. Outside school, like in Anna’s house, he wears just jumpers and cords. He is not exactly the friend you’d expect for Tommy because he’s not cool at all, but in fact him and Tommy are good friends. Maybe because of music; Declan is not in a band like Tommy, but he makes electronic music.

  Anyway, how he agreed to help us design the blog was he was in Anna’s kitchen with Tommy, when I said to Anna, ‘We’ve got to get going on our blog!’ and she said, ‘Yeah, I know …’, but not in that interested a way.

  She is not as interested in this as me, and also she was drawing with Charlie so wasn’t really concentrating.

  But Declan said, ‘Your blog?’ immediately interested, because it was to do with computers, so I told him my idea and he and Tommy cracked up laughing in a definitely patronising, but also a cheerful way, if you know what I mean.

  Declan said, ‘So what adventures are you putting in?’

  I said, ‘Adventures like the birthday parties. Funny adventures!’ Then I explained about The Party People. I didn’t go into the Instruments of Karma.

  Tommy said, ‘It’s not exactly “from the war zone”, is it? Not exactly “Adolescent life from besieged Baghdad” or “Under the Veil: teenage girls speak out from Iran”.’ He was really taking the piss now, bit like Renata, but less cutting.

  I sighed because actually I am quite jealous of teenagers in war zones and dictatorships because everyone wants to read their blogs. But I said, ‘Write what you know. All experience is relevant!’ in a deliberately prissy, teacher-y voice, because that’s what O’Toole says when we have to write stories. He never wants us to imagine we’re stolen by space aliens, or that we’re international spies, or that we’re witches or wizards. He always just wants us to write about our own lives. I dunno about this. I think it has led to some really boring stories. I mean, imagine Pierce’s stories: ‘I got up. I had breakfast. I watched TV.’ I think it would be better getting him to imagine being an arch criminal. Even Mr O’Toole said once, ‘These are dull, dull, dull!’ and with every ‘dull’ he whacked his palm down on our pile of stories. Every so often he gets enraged like this but unfortunately for him it’s always more funny than scary, so it doesn’t affect our behaviour much. But it’s true that thanks to him I sometimes look at my life and see which bits of it would work in a story. And sometimes I get to thinking what situations mean, why did someone do that, what is the story behind the story? And now I think about it, if Pierce actually told the truth about his life – I mean if he wrote about bullying people, then this would a) make a more interesting story (nasty-interesting but still interesting) and b) might make him think about why he’s doing it. Still he never would. O’Toole wants us to tell the truth in our stories. But that is way ambitious of him. You’re not going to tell the truth in a story that the whole class might read. Just in a diary (ha!)

  Anyway, Tommy and Declan got my ‘Write what you know. All experience is relevant’ immediately because that’s O’Toole’s famous catchphrase.

  Declan said, ‘Yeah, Tommy, they could be like Sami.’

  Tommy laughed.

  I said, ‘Who’s Sami?’

  Turns out Sami is a Turkish blogger who got an astronomical number of hits. He is a cult, and all because his blog is so boring. All he does is write about what he has for tea and what his mother-in-law says and things like that. I thought this was a pretty insulting comparison because our adventures are better than that but anyway I laughed to show I was a good sport. And then Declan said, well, if we were really set on it, he’d help us design the blog! I gasped. This is incredibly kind of him!

  THURSDAY OCTOBER 15TH


  Another Karmic duty! Maybe the whispering campaign worked in our favour because at break Gita came up to us and she isn’t even in our class. She’s a First Year, like Justine. So our reputation is spreading! She is the daughter of someone in the Indian Embassy. Our school gets a lot of embassy kids, I don’t know why because it’s not top of the league for Leaving Cert results or anything. Maybe it’s because our school is mixed boys and girls, when most secondary schools are single-sex. Even though we wear uniforms, our school looks a bit more like a school on American TV than other schools in Dublin. We can wear jewellery and boys can have long hair and sometimes you see kids kissing. Maybe embassy kids want their schools to be as close to America as possible? Anyway, Gita said would we do something bad to Jayne O’Keeffe because she was saying racist things to her. Anna went nuts over this! There is nothing worse than racism for a person with a strong social conscience.

  FRIDAY OCTOBER 16H

  Declan said to check out as many blogs as possible and see which ones we liked the look of and then he’d help us design it. Thanks to Declan we’re gonna have a really cool-looking blog that will avoid all the clichés. But I’m worried about how to blog about the Instruments of Karma because we can’t really admit to it, but on the other hand it is too good not to put up. This is a Conundrum.

  We are taking our job for Gita very seriously. In fact we considered not charging her because this is a question of Justice, but then Anna pointed out that Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the to poor but Gita isn’t the poor – no way, she wears designer shoes. To school! So we are charging her €10.50. We haven’t decided what to do yet. It is a very serious crime that Jayne is committing and we think this time she needs to know why she’s being punished. For something as serious as racism it’s not enough to leave it to Karma.