Posh and Prejudice

by Grace Dent

  So Carrie says to me, “Well, we could ring Wesley and Bezzie and ask, couldn’t we?” And I say, “Errrrm, dunnno about that.” And Joshua bursts out laughing and says “Wesley Barrington Bains II!! Ha ha ha, are there two of him?” So I say, “Shut up, Joshua. Just shut up!” but Joshua is proper wetting himself going, “The G-Mayes Detonators! I’ve heard it all now! Ha ha ha ha!”

  “Oh, just shut it!” I say. “And anyway what’s that bloody mark on your neck?!”

  And at that point there is a huge, ear-splitting scream in the kitchen and it’s Mrs. Fallow howling, “Oh my God! Oh my God! Joshua, call the police! Call the animal control! There is a rottweiler in my kitchen! A ROTTWEILER! Call the dog-catcher! And it’s eating my Portuguese Pasteis de Natas that I’ve baked for my book club! Aaaaaaaaaghhhhhhh!”

  So we all run into the kitchen and Mrs. Fallow is standing on the kitchen table flapping her arms and crying and Uma tries to catch Zeus but he is properly distracted by the Portuguese jam tart things and Mrs. Fallow is shouting, “Get it out! Get that rottweiler out of here! Call the police!” And in the end Uma shouts, “Oh, shut your trap you silly cow, it’s only a Staffy!” and Mrs. Fallow goes PROPERLY BERSERK then and chucks us all out and somehow in the confusion poor Zeus forgot all the things he learned from his Dog Whisperer DVD and he ended up taking a wee right up the front of Mrs. Fallow’s Aga cupboard thing.

  But it’s made of iron, I’m sure it’ll wipe clean. Some people are so dramatic.

  APRIL

  THURSDAY 9TH APRIL

  34, Thundersley Road,

  Goodmayes,

  Essex,

  IG5 2XS

  Dear Wesley Barrington Bains II,

  I’m writing this letter to you, but I pretty much one hundred percent know that I’ll never send it. I just need to write stuff down to make things clearer in my head.

  So much totally mental stuff has happened over the last few months that my brain is in a proper spin. Well, anyway, I was watching the morning shows the other day before school and this agony aunt was saying the best thing to do with feelings is write them in a letter then set fire to it, so the feelings can get some “closure.” So that’s what I’m going to do. Right, here goes.

  First of all, Wesley, thank you so so so much for helping us out with the “Increase the Peace” campaign. When Uma started saying that we should call you and Bezzie up, well I was like, NO WAY, UMA, ’cos I thought you’d be all moody with me and would hold a grudge. But you didn’t, Wes. You were proper lovely and chatty and helpful and you totally saved our lives. I was bricking it that Tuesday last month when me and Carrie came over to Bezzie’s on Dawson Drive to chat to you both about the Prince Charles thing.

  But then we gets to Bezzie’s house and Bezzie opens the door and Bezzie’s ancient King Charles Spaniel, Shane—who is somehow still alive ’cos he must be about 102—runs out and starts trying to give me a paw and lick my face and Bezzie’s mother starts shouting to shut the door ’cos there’s a draft and it felt well weird ’cos it was exactly like when I very first met you. Everything was exactly the same, except now everything was totally different ’cos I’ve totally broke your heart.

  So I walk up the stairs into Bezzie’s room and there you are sitting on Bezzie’s bed in your white Hackett sweatshirt and Nike trackie pants and your Von Dutch cap reading Super Street car magazine, smelling of Burberry aftershave and we start talking and my heart is beating really quick ’cos I’m nervous and I can tell you’re nervous too ’cos your top lip is all sweaty. And you’re like, “Hello, Shiraz Bailey Wood.” And I’m like “Hello, Wesley Barrington Bains II!” and quickly we’ve settled into taking the mickey out of each other and you never mention Joshua Fallow once at all and that’s proper good of you Wesley ’cos if you’d left me for another bird I’d never have let you forget it, mate. I’d have added her name into every single sentence. In fact, I wouldn’t have spoken to you ever again at all.

  I don’t deserve a friend as properly lovely as you.

  I can’t believe you could just put all that stuff out of your head and get on and help us out. If it wasn’t for you and Bezzie we’d never have talked the Rinse and Go Fraternity into coming to our school and performing a track with the Year Sevens. And we’d DEFINITELY never have talked the Crowley Park Brapboys into coming to Mayflower and doing a little collaboration with Delano and Meatman in Year Ten. In fact, without you making some phone calls and giving us some lifts in your car and basically being properly supportive, well, I reckon we’d have had nothing to show Prince Charles at all.

  That said, maybe that would have suited Prince Charles down to the ground ’cos he had a face like a drizzly day on Walthamstow Market right through the lot of it. In fact, I reckon if he’d had a choice between listening to the Rinse and Go/Year Seven track again or dying slowly of full-blown cat AIDS I think the AIDS might have won hands down, but that don’t matter Wes ’cos we’re still going to be in all the newspapers tomorrow and we’re still all over BBC today with that Max Blackford dude going on about “An amazing change of fortune for Mayflower School who were once a bleak and war-torn establishment.” ’Cos, y’know, I’m not saying we changed the world today or nothing but for one day in Mayflower Academy everyone got on and the peace was temporarily increased and there was hope. And we need some hope right now ’cos for some mental reason kids are stabbing and shooting each other all over London right now over nothing and it’s heavy as hell. I think what we did today was amazing.

  The thing that totally gets my head properly flummoxed about me and you, Wesley, is that although we are totally different in loads of ways and you reckon I’ve changed loads and got right up myself, well, the thing is we’re also totally, exactly the same too.

  Like today for example, from the second you arrived at Mayflower, I knew you were sort of seeing things in the same way as me. ’Cos we’re from the same place and we’re from the same type of family and same type of background and we find the same type of stuff funny and we notice the same type of stuff going on about us that other folks don’t. From the very first moment I ever met you sitting on that bed in Bezzie’s house the other year it was just like one big, long, silly conversation about stuff. ’Cos me and you Wesley, we just sort of gel.

  So I knew today that you were finding the same type of stuff bare jokes, like the way the school all smelled of fresh paint ’cos Mr. Bamblebury had been flying about with a paint can himself that morning. And the way there was suddenly no litter or grafitti anywhere ’cos old Bumbleclot had been up all night scrubbing it off. And the way the cafeteria ladies were all wearing lipstick and fresh clean pink smocks and not looking like bloody lesser-spotted Mexican swamp-donkeys as usual. And how all these total nutters have started appearing at the school gate clutching Union Jacks and tea towels, including my mother who has been lurking outside the school with Aunty Glo since 7:30AM wearing a T-shirt that says, CHARLIE IS MY DARLING that she’s had in her wardrobe since she camped outside Buckingham Palace for the Royal Wedding in 1981! Properly shameful I know!!!

  But the thing is Wes, I’m not ashamed about my family when it comes to you ’cos your family are just like that too. ’Cos you’ve got a mad Uncle Terry who reckons he’s Batman who drives about Ilford in a battered old Subaru playing proper loud Madness on his stereo. And you’ve got a daft Aunty Lil who’s married to a Pearly King and she walks around Bermondsey on Sundays in a jacket and big hat covered in buttons collecting money for a kiddie’s charity.

  And you’ve got a bonkers godmother, Sheila, who’s proper obsessed with Phantom of the Opera who always wears an official baseball cap and sweatshirt and runs the Internet fan club from her extra room. And your mum is always showing me the latest two-for-one bargain she bought down at Food Lion. And you don’t think it’s weird that we own a Staffy and all our friends own Staffies (sometimes two or three Staffies each!!) or that I knock about with someone who has a fridge in their front garden, or that we all decorate the front of o
ur houses at Christmas or that no one in my house has ever been to university ever or that all the women on my street wear a lot of gold, because the thing is, Wesley, they’re all like that on your street too.

  I miss that, Wesley. I don’t have that with Joshua Fallow.

  But the thing is, Wesley Barrington Bains II, although we are totally the same in lots of ways, we are also properly different too.

  And I don’t know why that is, Wes, sometimes I just think that maybe our brains are wired up different. ’Cos ever since I started doing well at school in Year Eleven, my brain started properly racing ahead to learn the next thing and I started working out where I could go with it all and thinking and thinking and thinking about the whole big world out there and my part in it and you don’t really think like that at all, do you?

  You think it’s proper weird when I want to buy a big newspaper or if I want to find out about other people’s religions or that I think it’s totally OK if Nabila Chaalan’s mother wants to walk about in head-to-foot Niqib if that’s what makes her happy or if Danny Braffman wants to grow the biggest Jew-fro hairdo this side of Stamford Hill and his mother wants to wear a wig that is exactly like her normal hair ’cos it’s her religion. Or if Sean Burton wants to turn up to meet Prince Charles in a pink T-shirt with a big rainbow on the front and then do a rap which rhymes the words “King Lear” with “totally queer” that gets such a loud sucking of teeth from the whole of the Year Ten rudes that I think he’s going to get knocked backward off the stage with the sonic boom of noise. Even you were tutting too, Wesley.

  But Sean Burton don’t care ’cos he is proud to be different and I’m proud of him too. I reckon you’ve got to live and let live, Wes. There’s so much out there in the big wide world, Wesley, and I want to find out about it all ’cos I’m proper curious and I don’t just mean about schoolbooks and Shakespeare, I mean real life, real people, real situations, and real experiences and you don’t want to have them, do you? You don’t want to see the real world outside Essex at all. You don’t want to stand on Waterloo Bridge and feel alive.

  Do you?

  But, whatever. The one thing that today’s events have made me see, Wesley Barrington Bains II, is that you’ve always got my back. You’re always looking out for me and there’s not many folks in this world I can say that about, ’cos as far as I can see in this life, you’ve got your family and you’ve got maybe one or two other folks who would honestly give half a crap if you got squashed by a falling piano or run over by a herd of startled gazelles. And one of them folks in my life is you. I’m proper scared, Wes, that I’ll mess this up with you and then there won’t be no others.

  ’Cos like today, you could see how pissed-off Joshua Fallow was getting when he wasn’t getting no attention at all from the TV crews or the teachers or Prince Charles during the “Increase the Peace” assembly. You could see that he was starting to take it out on me. Especially when Uma got up in her hoops and her mini and gave her little speech about Mayflower becoming a Center of Excellence and how teachers like Ms. Bracket had totally given her a chance and turned her life about and she wanted to carry on in education.

  Well, everyone loved that and people were clapping and Prince Charles was nodding—well at least I reckon he was nodding unless he was having problems keeping his head upright due to the weight of his big ears—and all the papers wanted to take pictures of Uma and interview Uma for the TV news and everyone remembered Uma’s bit of the day and NOTHING about the fact that Joshua was up on the stage beside Prince Charles when he unveiled the plaque. No one remembered Joshua’s part in things at all. And as soon as the assembly was over Joshua started having a proper go at me, saying, “Oh brilliant, Shiraz, now everyone thinks Uma organized this whole thing! That looks great, doesn’t it?”

  So I laugh and say, “Well Uma did organize it! She had all the ideas! She’s been working every night on it! All you did was hang about trying to get on Sky News so it looks good on your Oxford University application!” So then Joshua just snorts and says, “Well, I should have known all you chav-scummers would stick together.” So I goes, “Who are you calling chav scum?! You bloody snobby-nosed prat.” So Joshua just laughs and says, “Look, Shiraz, I don’t think this whole relationship thing is working out, is it? I don’t think we’re very compatible?”

  So I got proper cross then and shouts, “No, Joshua, I don’t think we’re very compatible ’cos you keep turning up at school on Mondays with hickies, saying they’re eczema!” So Joshua just laughs and says, “Look, I’m going to be totally honest with you, Shiraz, ’cos I know you respect people ‘keeping it real’ and not being ‘fakers’ and all the chav warrior blah-blah-crap. I’ve been seeing Claudia in Hampstead, my mum’s friend’s daughter. I need to break things off.”

  Well, I was totally stunned. I wasn’t expecting that and I don’t know how ’cos now I think about it it’s totally obvious. Josh didn’t even look embarrased. “I know there’s been a bit of an overlap,” he said. “But you understand, don’t you? Yeah? Good.”

  And then he walked off. Just like that.

  So I walked out of the Sixth Form block and sat on the bench by the parking lot and my face felt red and my head felt dizzy and I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. And that’s when you came out and sat on the bench and put your arm around me and didn’t say anything for ages and then you made me get into the passenger seat of your banana-yellow Golf and you drove me home to my mum at Thundersley Road.

  So thank you for all of that, Wesley Barrington Bains II. Thank you.

  I am properly mixed up about how I feel about everything right now, and to be honest writing it all down has only made me feel more confused.

  But I suppose the one thing I do know for sure is if I was to get squashed by a piano or trampled by a herd of startled gazelles tomorrow I would go to my grave having known what it feels like to feel properly, properly loved.

  I need to burn this letter now.

  Lots of love, now and forever,

  Shiraz Bailey Woodxxxxxxx

  MAY

  MONDAY 4TH MAY

  OH MY GOSH. Carrie has been chucked out of Mayflower Sixth Form Center of Excellence.

  Mr. Bumbleclot has finally snapped and terminated her pupil contract. He simply refuses to believe Carrie was off on Thursday and Friday due to the Ministry of Agriculture running tests to see if her sore throat was the human strain of Taiwanese bird flu.

  “A laughable history of preposterous lies and excuses”—that’s how our headmaster described Carrie’s general attendance in his letter to Barney Draper. (It’s harsh, but sort of true.)

  Well, Barney Draper has hit the bloody roof. He’s gone totally 110 percent radio-rental-mental-shouting-and-screaming-kkkkrrraazy. He’s gone that sort of mental your mum and dad go when you know if they could actually get away with walloping you they’d just bloody do it, ’cos you’ve pushed them so far that they’re just standing there shouting like loonies and they’re not even making sense at times and their eyes are so big you actually think “crapping hell they’re going to have a heart attack and I don’t know any first aid.”

  That sort of mental.

  My mum used to get like that all the time with Cava-Sue. Well, until Cava-Sue started living 5,000 miles away and then all of a sudden my mother rewrites history with Cava-Sue as some sort of saint, and not someone who is basically getting drunk in bars across Australia and passing it off as “world exploration.”

  So anyway, Carrie calls me this morning at 8:30AM crying her eyes out going, “That pig Bamblebury has chucked me out of Sixth Form! My dad is doing his nut! Come over and save me!” So I pull on my hoodie and my jeans and get over to Draperville and the electric gates are stood open for some reason so I wander in and right away I hear ONE HELLUVA bloody fight going on and I follow the noise round to the swimming pool and there’s Maria Draper standing on the terrace wearing a beige velour tracksuit and pink flip flops with Alexis their chihuahua under her arm, shouting,
“Will the two of you bloody get inside now! The neighbors can hear every word!”

  So I look over by the pool and there’s Carrie in her nightie standing on top of a patio table underneath the pool cabana screaming at Barney Draper, “I hate you! I hate you! I wish I’d never been born! You don’t know who I am! You think you do but you don’t! Get away from me, you bloody pig!” And Barney is there in his work clothes: trackie bottoms, old Lacoste T-shirt, and tool belt, shouting, “And you can get down off that table too before you break it! You spoiled little brat! Where do you think this all comes from? Do you think it grows on trees! No, I work day and night! Day and bloody night! And I built this whole place up from scratch! I had nothing when I was your age! NOTHING! Not a bloody pot to piss in! I’ve worked my arse off for TWENTY BLOODY YEARS for you and your mother! Now look at you, you lazy little brat! You could have all of this on a plate! But you don’t want it! Oh no! All you had to do was get some qualifications then it was yours! But you don’t want to work! You make me sick!”

  Then Carrie, whose face is bright red, shouts, “OH, SHUT UP! Shut up! You stupid bloody man! I hate you! I don’t want any of this! I didn’t ask for any of this! And I’m not bloody interested in running a Jacuzzi installation bloody business! I don’t want it! It’s boring! You can’t make me be something you want me to be, you bloody headbending, brainwashing weirdo! I should get social services on you! You won’t let me be who I want to be! I just want to be me! I don’t need you and your head-control!”

  So Barney’s laughing now, but not funny laughing, angry laughing, ‘Oh, you don’t want none of this, do you?!” he’s shouting. “Do you!?? You don’t want your allowance? You don’t want the widescreen TV in your room and your iPod and your gym membership and that running tab I keep settling at Cheeky’s Vertical Tanning Salon and the bags full of designer outfits I seem to keep paying for! You don’t want me being your bloody ATM, do you!? I should get a fizzing key-pad fitted to my chest! You’re a little leech! If you don’t want none of this then pack your bags! Go and stand on your own two feet!”