The Real Rebecca

by Anna Carey

  And it was not the only annoying part of today. Karen Rodgers, whose life is apparently so boring she has to look to me for entertainment, had great fun with her stupid little pal at lunch today talking very loudly about SOME PEOPLE who supposedly think they’re SO COOL because their MOTHER wrote a BOOK about them. This is particularly irritating because of course I don’t think it’s cool my mother wrote a book that possibly has some connection to me (I refuse to acknowledge that Ruthie O’Reilly’s life could actually be mine). I hope that everyone in the class remembers this and that Karen doesn’t brainwash them into thinking I love it.

  However, today was not all bad. Mrs Harrington is still sick. Maybe she’ll die? At least that would solve one problem.

  Later

  I feel a bit guilty about wishing Mrs Harrington would die. I didn’t mean it really. Obviously. But what if she does? Die, I mean. I’ll have cursed her!

  I am sort of talking to Mum. She asked me whether I would prefer roast chicken or spaghetti carbonara for dinner tomorrow. I had to answer. After all, we don’t get to have roast chicken that often. Who knew food was my weak spot? I can only cook eggs! I’m hardly a gourmet.

  Wednesday

  Mrs Harrington still not in. I can’t pretend I’m not glad, but I’m starting to get a bit worried about the whole possibly-cursing-her thing. I’m also getting a bit worried about Vanessa. She was being all friendly again today. She asked me if I wanted to go out to her house after school and look at her designs for her giant birthday party (yes, designs. She is designing decorations for some sort of giant tent marquee thing). I didn’t, obviously, and it was a completely weird thing to ask someone you’ve barely spoken to for a year, but I was polite and said I had to go straight home. I would like to think that she has just realised how wonderful I am after sharing a class with me for a year, but I’m afraid that’s probably not true. What is she up to?

  But anyway, I don’t care about her so much at the moment, because this evening when we were eating our dinner (roast chicken, yum yum) Rachel said something that has given me a brilliant idea.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, pouring nearly all the gravy on to her plate before I’d even got near the gravy jug. ‘Tom’s friend Sam is moving to America for a year and he has to find someone to look after his drum kit. I’m sure you lot won’t know anyone who could take it in, but I said I’d ask.’

  That’s when I had my idea.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ I said.

  ‘No you won’t,’ said Mum. ‘I’m not having noisy drums in this house.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Rachel. ‘Like you could play the drums.’

  ‘First of all, for our information,’ I said haughtily, ‘I have always wanted to play the drums. Well, sort of. I like tapping along to music on my desk with pencils.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, and it’s really annoying,’ said Rachel.

  ‘No it’s not. Anyway, I think I’d be able to play the drums really well. And second of all, I’d keep them at Alice’s house. They’ve got a million big stables and barns and stuff out there. Well, they’ve got those stables next to the house, and that garage, and the barn at the other side of the yard. And there’s nothing in any of them except a few old lawnmowers and rakes and things. Me and Alice used to joke about starting a band and using one as our rehearsal room. And now we can actually do it!’

  Mum looked at me. She’s trying to be nice since she wrecked my life with her stupid book. ‘Well, if Alice’s parents don’t mind, maybe that’s a good idea.’

  ‘It’s a ridiculous idea!’ said Rachel. ‘You can’t just sit there playing drums on your own! You don’t have a band!’

  ‘I’ll start one,’ I said. Well, why shouldn’t I? Alice can play the classical guitar, after all, and Cass, well, Cass can play the piano. She’s been having lessons for years, she’s on grade 4 or something. Guitar, keyboard and drums are enough to start a band. We wouldn’t have a bass player but they’re not that important anyway. And we can all sing. Well, sort of. Well, Alice can. Although do I want Alice to be, like, the frontwoman and band leader? I kind of want to do that myself. But I can’t sing and play drums at the same time, can I? Anyway, we can sort all that out later. After dinner I rushed straight up to my room to phone Alice and told her my idea. I thought she’d be a bit hard to persuade, especially as I was suggesting we take over her place as our practising room, but she was actually really enthusiastic.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to start a band!’ she said. ‘And we can use my dad’s old electric guitar! Well, we can use it once I get an amp.’

  ‘I know, we should have done this ages ago,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you didn’t have the drums,’ said Alice.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Well, I have them now! Or I will soon. Rachel rang Tom and he rang Sam and I can get the drums on Saturday! Mum said she’ll take me to get them and then we can go straight out to your house if it’s okay with your mum and dad.’

  ‘They’ll love it,’ said Alice. ‘They’ll probably want to join in. Don’t worry, I won’t let them.’ We talked about where exactly we would have our practice room. I thought the barn would be quite cool, because we could pretend it was a big music venue, but Alice said, ‘We can put the drums in the garage, because it’s the only one of those old buildings with electricity.’

  I hadn’t even thought of that. Alice’s sensibleness is very useful. It probably comes from living in the countryside. She is full of practical rural wisdom. And of course if she was still living around here, she wouldn’t have all those barns and things.

  ‘That garage is very basic, you know,’ she said. ‘If all those buildings had been, like, done up, we’d never have been able to afford the house. Remember what the house was like when we moved in?’

  I did, it practically had no walls. They’d had to live in two rooms for about six months. Luckily it was in summer so it was quite fun (well, we were only eleven at the time) and I used to come out here and stay over – it was like camping.

  ‘I’m not expecting a luxurious studio!’ I said. That will come later, of course. When we’re famous, as we inevitably will be.

  After talking to Alice, I rang Cass, but to my amazement she wasn’t quite as excited.

  ‘I can’t exactly take our piano out there,’ she said.

  ‘You can use Alice’s mum’s keyboard!’ Alice’s mum decided a few years ago that she wanted to learn the piano and got a keyboard instead. It’s quite big but not as big as a piano and we can get it out to the garage pretty easily. Anyway, that wasn’t enough for Princess Cass.

  ‘I can’t play indie music,’ she said. ‘I can only play, like, Mozart and Debussy. Not the sort of stuff we’d want to play in our band.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Cass,’ I said. ‘You won’t have to play big keyboard solos. You can use the cool electric sound on your keyboard and play bass lines and things.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Cass. She didn’t say anything for a few moments.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said. I wasn’t used to her being so silent.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ said Cass.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  Then Cass sighed and said, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll do it. As long as you don’t expect me to be particularly good.’

  ‘Hurray!’

  ‘But don’t get too excited,’ she said. I promised her I wouldn’t. But I am excited! I’m excited about the whole thing, and it seems like ages since I was excited about anything. Mum’s horrible book doesn’t count, because that didn’t make me excited in a good way; it just made me angry. But the band will be loads of fun. We can write songs and play gigs and make t-shirts and it will be brilliant. And it will be the sort of thing stupid Ruthie O’Reilly would hate. Ha!

  Thursday

  Mrs Harrington was back today. I no longer feel guilty for possibly cursing her. She had the flu, and as she told the entire class, it wasn’t so bad ‘because I was able to read Rebecca’s mammy’s new book!’

  Everyone, even my own f
riends, turned around and stared at me. Some of them, like Alice and Cass and Ellie, were looking at me with sympathy and pity. Others, and I think you can guess who, were sniggering away like stupid pencil-eating fools.

  ‘And it was brilliant, of course!’ said Mrs Harrington. ‘Now I know all about what you and your friends get up to, Rebecca!’

  As soon as she said that, my friends stopped looking sympathetic and started looking appalled. Ha! Now they know how I feel.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I mean. It’s not like it’s actually about us. I’m nothing like Ruthie whatserface.’

  ‘She’s really not,’ said Cass.

  Mrs Harrington laughed like this was the funniest thing in the world. ‘You can’t fool me, girls! I read that report in the paper where Rebecca’s mammy said she based it on her and her sister’s antics. I’m not going to ask who won the competition, though!’

  I thought I was going to get sick. And then, as if this wasn’t bad enough, Karen Rodgers said, ‘What competition?’

  Now, my friends haven’t read the evil book yet, but they know what it’s about because I told them just how awful it was. So when Karen Rodgers said this, Alice and Cass and Ellie and Emma all stared at Mrs Harrington like they were trying to hypnotise her into shutting up.

  It didn’t work, of course.

  ‘Haven’t you read it yet?’ said Mrs Harrington in a surprised voice, like she couldn’t understand why everyone in the world wasn’t queuing up to read Mum’s stupid books. ‘It’s great fun. It’s all about girls who have a competition to see who will get a boyfriend first – not a good idea, girls!’

  Of course, everyone in the class started laughing, not just Karen Bitchface Rodgers. ‘But Ruth and her friends learn a valuable lesson in the book – and what’s that, Rebecca?’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Um, I don’t know. How to be complete idiots who are always horrible to each other?’

  Mrs Harrington laughed as though this were a joke. ‘Oh, I can see you’ve inherited your mother’s wicked sense of humour! No, the girls learn that the most important thing is friendship. And that nothing is worth losing your friends over, not even a perfect boyfriend. Isn’t that right, Rebecca?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said nervously.

  ‘So I know all you girls are going to enjoy this book,’ Harrington went on. For a dreadful moment I thought she was going to announce that we were going to be studying it in class instead of Great Expectations. I wouldn’t put it past her. But she just said, ‘It certainly made having the flu more entertaining!’ and then actually started talking about ordinary English class things.

  After class, of course, everyone found it hilarious to talk about the book. It wasn’t like they were being mean about it (apart from Karen, of course), but it was very annoying.

  ‘You didn’t really have a competition, did you?’ said Jessie McCabe.

  ‘Of course we didn’t!’ said Cass.

  ‘She’s just saying that because in real life none of them actually won,’ said Karen Rodgers. ‘I haven’t seen them with any gorgeous boyfriends, have you?’

  ‘I haven’t seen you with one either,’ said Cass. ‘You’re obviously too busy spying on us.’

  Karen snorted through her nose at this like a baby pig, but she went off with Alison. Alison looked back at us slightly apologetically. I bet she’s a bit embarrassed by Karen’s rudeness sometimes. She’s not that bad, really. But I’d like her a bit more if she ever actually stood up to her so-called best friend.

  Luckily, there are more exciting things in my life to distract me from all this rubbish. We spent all of lunchtime talking about the band. We haven’t come up with a good name yet. The good thing is that Cass is much more enthusiastic about it now.

  ‘You just put me on the spot,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you two relying on me to be really good, because I mightn’t be. But I’ll give it a shot.’

  ‘I bet you’re much better than you think you are,’ said Alice. ‘I mean, Rebecca’s never even played the drums at all, so you’re bound to be better than her. No offence, Bex.’

  ‘I’ve played the pencils,’ I said. ‘I know how to keep a beat.’

  ‘You are quite good at the pencils,’ said Cass.

  This evening I got two wooden spoons and tried playing the drums on the sofa cushions. It was pretty easy, really. I was playing along to the songs on Phantom FM when Rachel came in and burst out laughing.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she said. ‘You do realize that playing the drums isn’t the same as playing a… a couch, don’t you?’ And she started laughing again.

  ‘It won’t be that much different,’ I said.

  ‘Yes it will! You’ve got to use your feet!’

  ‘What? No I don’t!’

  ‘Of course you do! How do you think they play that big bass drum? The big drum facing the audience, with the band logo on it? You have to play it with a foot pedal. Oh my God, I can’t wait to see you try the real thing, it’ll be hilarious.’ And she went off, sniggering. She’s so superior and annoying.

  Later

  She does have a point, though. I didn’t know about the feet thing. Perhaps playing the drums is harder than it looks.

  Later

  Oh, it can’t be though, look at some of the people who do it.

  Friday

  I had an actual conversation with Paperboy! Well, sort of. He looked particularly good this evening. I think he gets better every time I see him. I ran out to answer the door when the bell rang but unfortunately just as I reached the hall I tripped over the straps of Rachel’s stupid bag which of course she had left in the middle of the floor. She is so careless. But I had regained my composure by the time I opened the door. I think. I have a horrible feeling my hair was all over the place. Anyway, Paperboy sort of smiled and said, ‘So, you weren’t in the paper again this week. I thought this was going to be a regular thing.’ I tried to think of something really funny and smart to say so he would go away thinking what a witty, attractive girl I was but all I could think of was ‘um, no, my mum decided to stop embarrassing me for a while.’ And he laughed and said, ‘Good for you,’ and then he asked for the paper money and I gave it to him and he said, ‘Cheers, see you’ and went off, and, to be honest, I was quite relieved because, although of course it is brilliant actually having a conversation with Paperboy, it is also a bit stressful.

  Drums tomorrow!

  Saturday

  I HAVE DRUMS!

  Well, not in my actual possession. They’re in Alice’s garage. But they’re mine (for the moment) and I played them and I hate to admit it, but Rachel was right and they are a bit harder than the cushions. But I wasn’t that bad (even Sam said so, so HA! to Rachel).

  Mum and Rachel (she had to come because she knows Sam) and I all went out to Sam’s house at about ten o’clock. Sam was really nice. He is one of Tom’s best friends. The drums were in the dining room and he had left them up so he could tell me what each drum was called and give me a quick lesson while Mum and Rachel had a cup of tea with his parents in the kitchen. So I had my first drumming session, and it was actually pretty hard – I could play a beat for a couple of minutes but then I’d get a bit confused about which of the drums I was meant to be hitting. And the cymbals were quite tricky too. Working the pedal was the hardest, though – every time I concentrated on getting the pedal beat right, I’d forget what I was meant to be doing with my hands.

  But Sam said I’d get the hang of it soon enough. Then he showed me how to take the drum kit apart (you’ve got to unscrew lots of weird little keys and things) and put it back together again (I’m glad he did that because I wouldn’t have been able to do it properly on my own). He even did a little diagram for me! He is quite good looking too (although not as good looking as Paperboy). I asked him if he was looking forward to going to America and he said not really because he’ll have to come back next year and do sixth year again (well, sort of again, he’s just started sixth year now), but he�
��s looking forward to seeing New York (his mum’s job has something to do with the U.N.). And when I told him about my plans to start a band with Cass and Alice and about how Alice had an electric guitar but no amp he lent me a little amp and some microphones and their stands as well. ‘Someone might as well put them to good use,’ he said. He is brilliant. I sort of wish he wasn’t going to America at all. I would like to see him again. Even though he is (a) too old and (b) my heart belongs to Paperboy.

  Anyway! We got the drum kit and the amp and the microphones and stuff into the car and took it out to Alice’s. Mum went off to chat to Alice’s parents, who were all excited about her stupid new book. They both love Mum’s books, God help them. Alice says Germans love sloppy books about Ireland, and that’s why her mum first came over here in the eighties, because she’d read loads about the beauty of the countryside and how friendly and magical the people supposedly were. That is why she loves Mum’s books so much. Although Alice’s dad is from Clontarf, so he doesn’t have any excuse. Anyway, I put the kit back together again (the diagram helped, and so did Alice and even Rachel). And then there it was. Our band room (well, band garage). Alice’s guitar was there already, and it was propped up against the bass drum and it really looked like a proper band rehearsal room.

  ‘Except you can’t play the drums and you don’t have any songs,’ said Rachel. She is so annoying. She and Mum went home (Mum came back later to collect me – she is still feeling guilty about destroying my life so she is being very good about lifts) and Alice and I sort of looked at the drums and then at each other and then we got very excited and jumped up and down and cheered.