by Rae Earl
Mum will go mental but I don’t care. She won’t chuck me out – because if I do get to university, she will be able to boast about it for the next 20 years.
Wednesday 16.8.89
8.03 a.m.
MOTHER IN A RIGHT STONK. Oh, get over it, woman . . . So I gave up my job?! If you’d had to see the same pot 20 TIMES in one night, you might think differently too. There are only so many fantasies I can dream up to get me through it. Anyway, I had to go or I’m sure I would have got the push. Battered Sausage, who has been a waiter there all summer, told me some rogue prawns in hollandaise sauce were found blocking up the sink. HA!
Lack of man syndrome is settling in again. I am relieving the . . . err . . . ‘tension’ . . . with the help of pillows, but it’s hardly the same as the real thing, I suppose.
A-level results for the year above tomorrow (aka Haddock, Battered Sausage and Fig). An all-day session at the Vaults is planned. I haven’t been paid yet, so the question is, can I nurse a soda and blackcurrant for eight hours?
Thursday 17.8.89
11.55 p.m.
LOADS OF PEOPLE BOUGHT ME drinks today so everything was fine. Even tight-arse Battered Sausage forked out – crucially BEFORE he got his results.
RESULTS
Fig got CCD and seemed pretty pleased with himself. Battered Sausage got UDD!
Battered Sausage made out he didn’t care for the first couple of hours, saying, ‘I don’t care. I got a U – what a battered flange!!’ etc. But then he got really pissed and disappeared down the Meadows, where according to sources he ended up crying, swearing and kicking the bridge repeatedly. Some girls were worried about him – but us seasoned Battered Sausage-watchers know violent outbursts and foul language are normal behaviour for a pissed Battered Sausage. Especially one that has so royally fucked up his A levels.
Haddock got the best A-level grades out of all the lads: BCD. Yet he still wants to go into the army! Sometimes I just want to . . . Oh, I don’t know. Listen to this speech: ‘I’m very happy with my girlfriend. We have a laugh – she’s classic – I love her, etc.’
When I see how happy he is, perhaps I should be all selfless? And say that his are real emotions – and if I really care for him, I should be happy if he is happy. It should be like the old bird thing – if you love somebody, set them free.
Horse crap! Because the more I find out about him, the more I like . . . I mean, I just ACHE for him. He told me last night he was jealous of Battered Sausage at first because Battered Sausage knew me and it was like I was ignoring him. And he makes me laugh so much! His Phyllis Pearce from Coronation Street impression is fantastic.
If he went into the army and we had a war, I swear I would assassinate Mrs Thatcher.
Friday 18.8.89
7.12 p.m.
EVERYONE TOO HUNG-OVER. No one out.
Mum has cleared the spare bedroom for Adnan coming to stay. All my brother’s posters of motorbikes and AC/DC have come down. Even his ceiling poster of a pork pie (which he put there when we first moved in 11 years ago so he could dream about pies) has come down. Yes, he has left home – but it’s still a cheek. The jet-black walls have been painted, and she has even managed to get specially slaughtered meat in, as Adnan is a Muslim. This meant a SPECIAL visit to Leicester. Notice the lengths she is going to to please this man? This is not just another houseguest. In fact – we never have houseguests!
Oh, bloody hell. Can you imagine the talk around town, and the questions and the gossip?
There is only one thing to do in a situation like this. Put on ‘Oliver’s Army’ by Elvis Costello full blast and sing it word for bloody word. Yes, Mum, I know you can’t hear your programme properly . . . Live with it, because Costello is more bloody important than Wish You Were Here . . . ? or whatever holiday programme you are currently watching. And, no, I don’t fancy Mexico. Why are you asking me? Will the DHSS pay for that too?
Saturday 19.8.89
11.50 p.m.
JIBBED TONIGHT AT THE PUB. Just feel so flat about everything. Oh, and then Haddock . . .
Haddock is such a gorgeous bloke it’s phenomenal. He is so caring, and his girlfriend is so classic. Don’t get me wrong, nothing is ever going to happen, but sometimes I can see her getting jealous just because I have his time and attention, and it gets uncomfortable. He was lovely tonight. Lent me his Barber jacket thing because I was cold. Oh, I fancy the shit out of him. But he’s hardly seeing the best of me – depressive, nuts, with a gravy stain down my hooded top – WHICH I DIDN’T HAVE TIME TO WASH BECAUSE MUM WAS WASHING ADNAN’S SHEETS . . . He isn’t even here yet and he is getting on my nerves.
Sunday 20.8.89
9.14 p.m.
RADIO 1 ARE A BUNCH of hypocrites. They banned Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’, YET nobody seems to have noticed (or have they conveniently forgotten?) that the LIL’ LOUIS song ‘French Kiss’ has a woman having a full-blown orgasm on it. And let me tell you – if you are sitting there listening to the charts with your mum, it is bloody, bloody embarrassing. Mum was embarrassed too, as she started telling me about something irrelevant from her Woman magazine to cover up the noise! It’s such a full-on coming session you can’t even dance to it.
Adnan arrives tomorrow. Great.
Monday 21.8.89
10.10 p.m.
WELL . . . ADNAN – MUM’S NEW Moroccan ‘friend’ – is here.
Bloody great enormous mountain of man. About six foot three, and that wide. Can’t speak a word of English, but I am managing to communicate with my GCSE French. Unfortunately that is a bit limited, so at the moment our conversations are mainly about fish, clothing, going to the zoo and the weather – those are the only bits of vocabulary I really remember. He seems nice enough. Terrible teeth, though. Mum reckons he is ‘just a friend’. Oh yeah – and I’m Madonna.
Keep looking at Haddock’s jacket. It sounds ridiculous because it’s just a wax jacket, but it’s a thing of beauty. It’s the way it just hangs off the chair. All droopy and male and smelling of aftershave.
Tuesday 22.8.89
LOADS OF MY FRIENDS ARE passing their driving tests and getting cars. I’m still on my Raleigh Shopper with a bloody basket on the front. No wonder no bloke is interested.
Mum and Adnan are NOT just good friends. I’m not stupid. I heard her go to his room at 2 a.m. this morning. Then I put the radio on. Full blast. Don’t want to hear anything. She leaps from one relationship to another. No matter that they have to talk in sign language. No matter that she has only known him about five minutes. No matter that he eats in a day even more than me (and he’s still in shape – git!). No matter all of that. I guarantee they will get married. Today he ate an entire Battenberg cake like I’d eat a Mars bar.
Wednesday 23.8.89
7.25 p.m.
SAT IN A FIELD LISTENING to Enya. Proper field music. It’s times like this when everything that troubles me is here in my head. Sometimes I feel I am bad, rotten, dreadful. And the thoughts spiral out of control and I can’t stop them. And all the questions:
Who made us?
How does He judge us?
Who made the rules now?
Will I ever lose my virginity?
‘Evening Falls’ by Enya – bloody appropriate.
It’s so bloody gorgeous out here. What is life? We do not know. They tell us we must do our best here and worry some other time about what is coming in the next life, but my brain says I control everything. The sun is gorgeous – you can’t hide from it. Can’t stop the need to do some things time and time again, and feeling if I don’t do this, terrible stuff will happen. You know this, I have told you before. I don’t want to write it but it’s there in my head. And I can’t share this with anyone else because I KNOW no one else feels this way. It’s just mad.
Fat and mad – who wants that?
‘Waterloo’ by Abba at the end of the tape slightly buggers up contemplative mood.
Thursday 24.8.89
9.15 p.m.
G OT HOME TONIGHT TO HEAR grunting from the back garden. Adnan had filled up two buckets with mud and was using them to weight-train! I said hello to him but he was in a world of his own. Mum says he is worried about losing ‘definition’ and ‘muscle mass’. Am I living in this house? Is this all happening? Now she is talking about getting an aviary because they both like budgies. And she wonders why I live in my bedroom listening to music and eating Maltesers!
Adnan sings everything with an Arabic wail. Today I had Madonna on full blast and he started singing ‘Material Girl’ like it was a prayer. This shouldn’t be my life. This is Edinburgh Road, Stamford, Lincolnshire. I want normal. I want oven chips and roast dinners – not bloody tajines and fucking couscous.
11.20 p.m.
Adnan just tried to iron for the first time in his life, and left the iron on!! I check every plug in this house at least 20 times before I go out. It’s my worst fear come true. This is a nightmare.
I wish Haddock would come and save me. Preferably on a white horse, but frankly on bloody foot would do today.
Friday 25.8.89
Late
DIDN’T GO OUT. CAN’T STAND any more questions. To get away from Adnan’s ‘definition’ problems (HELLO, SOMEONE! I AM ABOUT TO DO MY A LEVELS . . . THAT IS A REAL PROBLEM!), I went to the market this morning. Everywhere there seemed to be whispers, and I wasn’t being paranoid. I know this because eventually I was cornered into endless false stops. You know ‘false stops’ – people who only vaguely know me pretending they were interested in me when they were just on a mission to extract as much juicy information from me as possible.
For example: this conversation took place near Needle-crafts the sewing shop with a woman who used to live near us. A woman who has got so much dirt on her it’s unbelievable. She shagged the gardener for years!! That didn’t stop her from trying to get my dirt, though:
MRS BEEN HAVING AN AFFAIR FOR YEARS:
Hello, Rachel!
ME: Hello, Mrs Been Having an Affair for Years
With the Handyman Who You Claim Is Just Coming to Tie Up Your Tomatoes in Your Greenhouse.
MRS BEEN HAVING AN AFFAIR FOR YEARS: How are the A levels coming on?
ME: OK . . . Well, actually I’m struggling a bit. I’m finding histo—
MRS BEEN HAVING AN AFFAIR FOR YEARS (interrupting): How’s your mum?
ME (having just clicked on): Fine.
MRS BEEN HAVING AN AFFAIR FOR YEARS: Who is that young black man staying with you at the moment?
ME: Adnan.
MRS BEEN HAVING AN AFFAIR FOR YEARS: Oh?
Where’s he from?
ME: Morocco.
MRS BEEN HAVING AN AFFAIR FOR YEARS: How long is he here for?
ME: I don’t know.
MRS BEEN HAVING AN AFFAIR FOR YEARS:
What’s he doing here?
ME: Don’t know. Got to go – I’m meeting someone.
And that’s how it continued. Eventually I couldn’t face it any more. I used all the old shortcuts and passages to get home. I even went through someone’s hedge off New Cross Road. I made a big hole in someone’s hedge. Sorry, someone, but your hollyhocks were the least of my worries.
Listening to ‘Rat Trap’ by the Boomtown Rats. And this place is a rat trap. I know people say Bob Geldof is a do-gooder who needs to comb his hair, but he knew what it was like to be stuck in a small town where you can’t breathe without it being reported, and it’s a bloody great song.
Going down the pub tomorrow night. Pray Haddock will be out. I will pretend I have forgotten his jacket. Don’t want to give it back just yet. When it’s here it’s like he’s here. Bloody hell, if anyone ever saw this . . . Everyone thinks I am super-confident, funny Rae – and I am just such a total, total mess. I am even pleased about having someone’s jacket. Pathetic!!
It’s not just someone, though, is it?
Saturday 26.8.89
Nearly midnight
I T WAS ALL GOING SO well tonight. Battered Sausage picked me up in Clarence the Cortina at about 7.30. He knew I was a bit flat and tried to cheer me up by saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, Battered Flange. If your mum wants to get her oats, then fair play.’ I think this was meant to make me feel better. It didn’t, but I appreciate what he was trying to do. We met Dobber down the Vaults and we were just having a brilliant game of Captain Birds Eye the drinking game, when SHE walked in . . .
BETHANY IS BACK.
From InterRailing. Tanned to bits, wearing a short skirt and a neckscarf. She looked shit. No she didn’t – she looked amazing. I could be sick with it. She pretended she hadn’t seen me for ages. She had. She then sauntered over and sat on Battered Sausage’s knee immediately. She purred a ‘Hi all!’ and then goes, ‘Rae, do you want to meet for coffee tomorrow?’ I was thinking I’d rather pickle my own eyes, but my mouth said, ‘Yes!’ in a totally fake enthusiastic voice. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.
Just then Haddock came in after yet another argument with his girlfriend and – HA, HA, HA! – ignored Bethany completely, despite her wriggling on Battered Sausage’s knee like a really wet snake or something. A snake with her skirt riding up higher and higher.
Eventually she went, after telling us about Dieter – her new Swiss boyfriend, who is six foot tall and plays the drums.
I am going to hate tomorrow. Why am I going?
After she had gone, I felt shit. Battered Sausage didn’t notice I was narked off, but Dobber and Haddock did. Dobber bought me another snakebite and black, and Haddock . . . well, we had a chat while Dobber was at the bar and Battered Sausage was having a piss. (Why is it I can remember everything that Haddock says? It burns itself onto my brain.)
HAD: What’s up with you?
ME: I’m a bit flat . . . Nothing really.
HAD: Come on, tell me.
ME: No. It’s nothing.
HAD: Tell me.
ME: OK. My mum has moved a Moroccan body builder in. I’m sick of . . . Oh, forget it.
(I can’t tell him everything. He can see half my problems – and the ones he can’t see I don’t want him to know about.)
HAD: But you are a really good dancer, you make me laugh, and in pop quizzes you are unbeatable.
Where’s my jacket?
ME: Sorry – I forgot it.
HAD: Don’t worry. Just look after it for me.
Then Battered Sausage came back and they started talking about rugby and tits.
I won’t let that jacket out of my sight. I’m looking at it now.
Might wear it to meet Bethany. It can be like my armour. Dreading tomorrow.
Sunday 27.8.89
10.19 p.m.
JUST THE FACTS, BECAUSE I am too pissed off to write in full:
1) Bethany had the greatest time ever Inter-Railing. (Of course she did.)
2) Dieter ‘goes like a train’, and his dad owns a plastics factory.
3) ‘Don’t Wanna Lose You’ by Gloria Estefan is their song. (Spare us..
4) She lost nine pounds abroad. (Bitch features..
5) She can’t understand why I haven’t lost weight.
6) Obviously we are not, according to her, close friends any more, but have to be mature and civil to each other at school. She realised while she was away that the ‘disintegration of our friendship’ was because of my insecurity about her ‘duckling to swan’ transformation. Her mum agrees.
Haddock’s coat felt lovely on the way home. And ‘You’re History’ by Shakespear’s Sister came on the radio. That was telling me something.
Monday 28.8.89
9.14 p.m.
SOMETHING PISS FUNNY AND WEIRD happened today. I was just listening to Hereward Radio and they had an astrologer on called Wyn Baines who was saying to call in if you want your fortune done – SO I DID – and I GOT ON!! And what she said was so true, it was painful:
I am a Sagittarius with a Scorpio moon. This means I probably have a dominant mother, and I am an extrovert ‘hiding some more complex secrets’. My perfect par
tners are Geminis, Librans and Arians. Haddock is an Aries. Enough said.
She also said there was lots she could tell me but not on air. I hung on after they had said goodbye to me, but she didn’t come back and I eventually got cut off. Perhaps it was really dark stuff? Perhaps I’m a potential murderer or something. Hope not.
Anyway, Mum was really impressed, and said I sounded very natural and confident. Praise from her is a bloody miracle.
I’ve always known there was something mad between me and Haddock, but I didn’t actually realise it was cosmic.
11.52 p.m.
Just remembered I think Bethany is an Aries and I don’t get on with her. Either she has got a strong moon sign or astrology is bollocks.
Tuesday 29.8.89
So late (Adnan is snoring like a cement-mixer)
ON THE BACK OF YESTERDAY’S astrology, got Mum’s second husband’s Tarot cards out. I used to play with them loads; but ever since one of the twat child psychiatrists decided to end one of our sessions by asking me to pick four cards from her Tarot pack, I have gone right off them. I mean of course I picked Death just to shit her up. (Besides, it looks cool – a skeleton on a horse.) I wish I hadn’t. That meant more sessions talking about . . . the stuff that happened.
Anyway, I did a spread today and it was basically crap except for the King of Cups card, in a place which meant ‘a significant person or event in your life’. Now listen to this description from the book: ‘A good-humoured man with a calm exterior who is difficult to work out and may be emotionally complex.’
IT IS HADDOCK – AND IT IS FREAKING ME OUT NOW.
Everything is pointing towards it – it is scary. I have to lose weight. The fat is the only thing that could stop the planets and Fate and everything else.
Wednesday 30.8.89
2.12 p.m.
THE INSANITY CONTINUES. ADNAN IS currently building an aviary for Mum in the back garden. He is singing in Arabic style to everything on the radio. So far today I have heard the wailing Arabic versions of ‘Nights in White Satin’ by the Moody Blues, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by Rick Astley and ‘Blame It on the Boogie’ by Big Fun.
