The Real Rebecca

by Anna Carey

  So I got the money off Mum and went back to the hall (Rachel followed me out just to annoy me more) and gave it to Paperboy and he said, ‘Thanks’ and I said, ‘You’re welcome’, and he turned to go. He’d taken a few steps down the drive and I was just closing the door when he turned around and said, ‘Cool t-shirt, by the way.’ And I was so astonished I didn’t know what to say so I just gawped at him and finally said, ‘Um, I got it on the Internet’ which was a very boring thing to say. I should have thought of some witty retort, or at least said something cool like, ‘Oh, I just picked it up in New York last month.’ Although that would have been a lie, and he might have started talking to me about New York, and I would have to admit that I’d never been there and he’d think I was mad. Anyway, he sort of went ‘oh, right’ and then he waved and went off to his bike and the rest of his paper round. I closed the door in a state of bliss which vanished when I turned around and saw Rachel standing there with a very, very irritating expression on her stupid face.

  ‘Oh my God, you so fancy him,’ she said.

  ‘No I don’t,’ I said. ‘He has excellent taste in t-shirts, that’s all.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Rachel. ‘No wonder you’re all dressed up.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ I said. ‘You’re just jealous because he said something nice to me and ignored you.’

  ‘He couldn’t see me!’ said Rachel, before she remembered that she was too old and snotty to take her little sister seriously and said in this very patronising voice, ‘I think it’s great, anyway. It’s nice for you to have a boy who isn’t a fictional character to think about for a change.’

  And then she ran up the stairs before I could leap on her in a fit of rage and kill her, which is what I wanted to do. But my rage quickly subsided because PAPERBOY TOLD ME HE LIKES MY T-SHIRT! I rang Cass and told her what had happened.

  I felt a bit guilty telling her what Paperboy said about my t-shirt in case she thought I was gloating. She was a bit quiet when I told her about it. I hope our love for Paperboy doesn’t come between us. I don’t think it will because we’re not stupid and we know what friends are more important than boys (even very, very cute boys in olive-green Converse), but passionate love makes people do strange things.

  SUNDAY

  Rachel is driving me mad. She’s acting like she’s a twenty-five-year-old woman of the world who knows everything about love, not a sixteen-year-old who’s been going out with her very first boyfriend for six months. She keeps following me around the house and asking me do I want to talk to her about anything. Which I don’t. And even if I did, I wouldn’t, because I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of watching me come to her for advice. Which is something I will never, ever do.

  Except when I went to her about Mum last week. But that was different. I will never, ever go to her for love advice.

  LATER

  Although she really is more experienced in the ways of love than any of my friends.

  LATER

  But she is also much more annoying.

  MONDAY

  I’m writing this in history. It is very, very boring. We are doing the Reformation and have to write about what it would have been like to hear Martin Luther preach in the 1520s. I can only imagine that listening to him going on about reading the Bible in German was just as boring as this class. To amuse myself I have drawn a picture of Cass as a turnip-eating sixteenth-century peasant at the back of my copy book. I just showed it to her and she has written a note on it saying ‘Why is your self-portrait wearing my glasses?’ Huh.

  Anyway. Me and Cass and Alice were a bit late for class so we couldn’t sit together. I am sitting next to Vanessa Finn. She is very annoying. I mean, she’s not particularly annoying at the moment, because she’s just sitting there staring blankly at pictures of popes in the history book, but in general she is annoying. So is her best friend Caroline. Vanessa never shuts up about how terrible it is for her having to go to a state school and Caroline just nods sympathetically. They never do any spontaneous dancing; they just talk about hair and about all the things Vanessa buys when she makes her weekly trek over to the Dundrum shopping centre and pretends she’s from the southside. Alice, Cass and I never talk about hair, partly because our own hair is just too depressing to talk about. Well, mine and Cass’s is. Mine is boring, brown and wavy. That sounds okay, but it always looks a bit mad. It doesn’t respond well to damp weather so most of the time I have to tie it back or it just gets bigger and bigger as the day goes on. Cass’s hair is also wavy and sort of golden brown and would be okay if it wasn’t taking about ten years to grow out her fringe. She has had a sort of fringe for as long as I’ve known her (a year), but apparently she got it cut when she was about eleven and has been trying to grow it out ever since. But every time she goes to the hairdresser the hairdresser trims the end bits ‘to frame her face’ so she can never get rid of it. In fact, the only one who has nice hair is Alice. She has shiny, well-behaved proper golden blonde hair, the sort of hair no one really has in Ireland unless they dye it. This is because her mum is German and incredibly blonde. Alice’s mum came over here in the eighties when she was a student and for some weird reason she loved Ireland so much she couldn’t bear to leave. She says she thought Ireland was a magical place and by the time she realised it wasn’t she had made lots of friends here and had got together with Alice’s dad so she liked it anyway. Alice can speak German perfectly. The first time I heard her talking to her mum ‘auf Deutsch’ (as they say) it was really weird – it sounded so strange to hear perfect German coming out of ordinary old Alice. But there you are.

  Alice doesn’t do German at school, even though she would get all As if she did, because as far as I can tell her German is better than our teacher’s. She certainly sounds properly German, whereas Frau O’Hara sounds like someone from Cork who just happens to be speaking German, which is basically what she is. But anyway, Alice thought doing German with a bunch of halfwits like me, who take two weeks to learn how to ask for directions to a youth hostel, would give her an unfair advantage so she did French instead. This is because she is a good person (or possibly mad). I, of course, am not good at all and if my mother was German there is absolutely no way I’d have done French. This is why Alice is a better person than me. Every so often she offers to help me practise German conversation. I always say no, mostly because I know it’s because she’s heard me speaking German and knows how bad my German is. She just feels sorry for me. Cass (who does Spanish) says I’m being silly and should take advantage of having a special tutor but it’s actually embarrassing talking so badly in a language to someone who speaks it properly (I don’t think Frau O’Hara notices, her own German is pretty awful. According to Alice, of course. I’m hardly one to judge).

  TUESDAY

  Today for the first time this term Miss Kelly actually did proper normal geography instead of telling us about the end of the world. I never thought I’d say this, but it was kind of a relief just to listen to her waffle on about the Ruhrgebiet and the sorry state of German industry in general. All those long descriptions of tidal waves crashing over Dublin and killing us all were freaking me out. Also, I was secretly getting afraid that she was never going to teach us anything on the course and we would all fail our Junior Cert. I mean, I always welcome anything that can distract a teacher from the actual class (which is why we always try to get Mrs O’Reilly to tell us about the time she was visiting an ancient amphitheatre and her husband fell down the steps and into a lion pit). But Kelly hasn’t actually done anything on the course since January. Our summer tests were all about greenhouse gasses (we all got As). But sadly, the end of the world is not going to be on our Junior Cert exam. I mean, I don’t care about geography, but I don’t actually want to fail it or anything. It was even too much for Cass, who always manages to get As without doing any work at all and who is always the first to get O’Reilly onto the subject of Roman steps and how very, very slippy they were.

  WEDNESDAY

 
Kelly told us about French rivers today. I started falling asleep until Cass kicked me.

  TUESDAY

  Oh my God, I would give anything for Miss Kelly to tell us about mile-high tidal waves. Anything! She’s been talking about EU livestock quotas for forty minutes.

  LATER

  I have decided that Mum needs my help to get over this terrible writer’s block. I mentioned this to Rachel this evening and she laughed. I’m glad she finds me so amusing. When I’ve single-handedly saved our mother’s career she’ll be sorry. Of course, I’m just not sure how I’m going to do it yet. But I’ll come with something. God knows my life is so boring I have plenty of time to use my imagination. It seems as though all bestselling books for grown-ups include three women who are meant to be very different but are all the same really (their hair is usually different colours, but that’s about it) and how their friendship supports them through the hard times. And as it is a book by my mum, then there will have to be a devoted mammy who dispenses wisdom to her daughters (very unlike my own mother, I must say). I could even write it myself, actually. How hard could writing a book be?

  FRIDAY

  Miss Kelly seems to have reached a compromise. She did boring geography for about half an hour and then gave us a passionate lecture on the evils of not washing everything we put into the green recycling bin. It’s nice to have her back. Well, not nice, exactly, because she’s always a bit scary and sometimes when she’s been particularly extreme I have nightmares about the end of the world, but it’s better than learning about the GDP of Belgium.

  Called in to Cass’s after school. Alice couldn’t come because her guitar teacher was sick on Tuesday, when she normally has classes, and she had to switch days. Alice is quite good at the guitar, but she’s learning classical guitar so she doesn’t have an electric one, just an acoustic one with big plastic strings. She can play some cool stuff on it anyway. Apparently her dad has an electric one somewhere but it doesn’t have an amplifier so it’s no use. Anyway, Cass’s brother is so annoying. We were in her room trying to have a serious conversation (well, sort of. Actually, Cass was telling me about her recurring dream in which Miss Kelly has challenged her to a duel like in days of old, and Cass only has twenty-four hours to learn how to use a sword. She doesn’t know what on earth this means. Neither do I, although I did have a few theories, mostly about global warming). But Nick kept coming in saying stupid and usually disgusting things like, ‘Did you know the human body is 90% snot?’ (which isn’t even true THANK GOD). He is so irritating. He actually makes me grateful for Rachel, and I never thought I’d say that.

  MONDAY

  My plan to inspire my poor, suffering mother has begun. I spent today thinking of excellent plots for her (it was a nice distraction from my classes, which were very, very boring) and have begun to work them casually into conversation in the hope that it will inspire Mum’s creative powers. Although frankly I think I have done nearly all the creating myself already. I’ve practically written four books today (in my head). I began putting the plan into action when I was helping Mum make the dinner, peeling potatoes like a slave (what would Mrs Harrington say if she knew her beloved Rosie Carberry used child labour in the home?). Mum was messing around with a big orange casserole dish and saying something boring about not cutting off half the potato when I got rid of the purply bits when I said, ‘You know, Mum, I heard a very interesting thing at school today.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said Mum. ‘Was it more interesting than peeling those potatoes properly?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A girl in my class was telling us about her aunt. Apparently she had two really good friends, right, and they all went to school together but when they got older one of them became a teacher, and she was really bored and frustrated because she had to teach girls about tidal waves all day, and then another of them ran a fancy hotel, and she met all these glamorous men who were staying in the hotel, and the last one was a nurse and she was very saintly.’

  ‘Really,’ said my mother. ‘Which one was your friend’s aunt?’

  ‘Um,’ I said. ‘The nurse. No, sorry, the teacher. Anyway, over the years they all went their separate ways, and then they met up again and shared their stories. Oh, and they went on holiday together and the nurse found love for the first time. And the teacher learned to follow her dreams and see all the places she’d taught classes about.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Mum. ‘What about the hotel manager?’

  ‘She decided she liked just, like, flirting with all the men in the hotel. So she was pretty happy.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Mum. ‘That’s quite a story.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Just thought you’d be interested.’ And I gave her a meaningful look. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was sort of looking off into the distance with a funny expression on her face. Could I have inspired her already?

  TUESDAY

  I don’t think I have inspired Mum. I heard her on the phone to Joscasta this evening. First of all she was laughing in a sort of mad sniggering way. Why doesn’t she ever laugh like a normal person when she’s on the phone? She sounds like a horse. Maybe she has a special phone laugh like some people have a special posh phone voice. Although you’d think if she went to the trouble of coming up with a phone laugh she wouldn’t sound like a farm animal. Then she was saying ‘no, Jocasta, they don’t know. It’s not a big deal!’ Then she saw the door into the sitting room was open and went upstairs to her and Dad’s room so I couldn’t hear anything else. What is she going on about now?

  Could she be sick?

  I am a bit worried.

  WEDNESDAY

  This evening I sort of cornered Dad when he was making the risotto and hissed, ‘Dad, do you know what’s wrong with Mum? Why isn’t she writing her new book?’

  Dad sort of looked at me and then he said, ‘Bex, are you really, seriously worried about this?’

  ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘I’m worried she won’t be able to write any more and then she’ll be miserable and …’

  And then, to my shame, I burst into tears. Dad was very nice and even though normally these days whenever either of my parents try to hug me I just go ‘gerrof’ and escape from their annoying clutches as fast as I can, I didn’t actually mind being hugged this time. He told me seriously not to worry and that Mum didn’t have writer’s block and that soon she would have a nice surprise for all of us. ‘Especially nice for you,’ he said, which cheered me up a bit. Maybe Mum is writing a film, and maybe there will be a part for me! Or maybe one of her books is being made into a film, and someone really famous and cool is going to be in it. I’m quite looking forward to the stupid book party now.

  THURSDAY

  It’s Mum’s book party tomorrow and she still hasn’t started a new book. At least, if she has, she’s not telling us about it, which just isn’t like her at all. She’s off at the shops now, looking for a bag to go with her book-launch dress. I really am worried about her, although Rachel pointed out (in quite a kind way, really, not her usual horrible, patronising way) that if Mum really was suffering from writer’s block, she wouldn’t be so cheerful. She’d be sobbing and wailing in frustration, according to Rachel. I couldn’t imagine Mum wailing, and it wasn’t a very nice thought, but I suppose Rachel is right about the writer’s block thing.

  ‘But then what do you think is wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think anything’s wrong,’ said Rachel. ‘Seriously, I think she’s working on something. She’s in her study every morning, as usual. And she seems fine.’

  ‘But if she’s working on something, why won’t she tell us?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe it’s something she doesn’t want to tell us about,’ said Rachel. ‘Maybe she’s changing direction.’ She stopped, and suddenly looked a bit sick. ‘Oh, God, Bex, maybe she’s writing, like, really sexy stuff.’ She stared at me in horror, and I stared back. ‘Maybe she’s writing a big sexy blockbuster. Like Louise Bagshawe, Jilly Cooper or Jackie Collins or something. That’s
… that’s practically porn!’

  ‘What?!’ I said. What a horrible thought! It’s bad enough having a mother who writes about feisty Irish mammies and their roguish children, but having a mother who wrote porn would be a zillion times worse. I could never, ever live it down.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Rachel. ‘The shame. And we can’t ever read it. We’d keep imagining … urrrrrrgh. It’ll traumatise us for life.’

  ‘No wonder she hasn’t told us anything,’ I said, sitting on the couch. ‘Oh, God, I feel sick.’

  ‘I feel sicker,’ said Rachel. She sat down next to me.

  ‘Should we ask her about it again?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, Bex, we’ve both tried that,’ said Rachel in an exasperated way. So she had asked Mum about her new project! I knew she thought the whole thing was freaky! And there she was telling me I was over-reacting. ‘She’s not going to suddenly tell us anything now.’

  Then the phone rang. We both jumped about ten feet in the air – I think we both thought it was Mum ringing to remind us to put the casserole in the oven for dinner. But it was Tom for Rachel. She’s on the phone to him now, talking in her Tom-phone-voice, which is absolutely sickening. At least she has a boyfriend to comfort her about having a pornographer for a mother. I don’t even have a Cass and an Alice because they’re both out at the cinema tonight (I didn’t go because they’re going to see a scary film and I can’t watch scary films in the cinema. In fact, I can’t really watch scary films at all unless I’m watching them from the sitting-room door so I can leap back into the hall if anything gross happens). At least I’ll get to see my future love, Paperboy, tomorrow, though.