by Grace Dent
“No, not necessarily,” contradicts Claude. “We’ve got so much talent to choose from, it’s really undecided at the moment.”
Claude and Panama turn to each other, scowling.
Ouch.
“Ooooh, listeners! A little bit of controversy there to go with your cornflakes. We seem to have a disagreement!”
“There’s no disagreement,” says Panama. “Claudette is just a bit confused. Catwalk WILL be the headline act, no one needs to worry about that—”
“Well, actually,” begins Claude, “I think you’ll find—”
“Oh, don’t make me have to come over there and slap you,” snarls Panama.
“Don’t threaten me, you bully,” snaps Claude back.
“Oh, that’s great, kids, but there’s no more time!” butts in Warren, sensing a fight about to break out. “Now, on 86.4, here’s the grrrreat sound of the Happy Clappers with ‘La La La Love!’ ”
And then we’re off air.
Along with the entire town, I think I just witnessed Claudette Cassiera very nearly lose her cool.
Big time.
It’s an exceedingly long, quiet journey back to Blackwell School.
Warren and Frankie never did “get back to us” after the Happy Clappers. In fact, we were ushered rapidly out of the studio by a Wicked FM researcher.
In a bid to “make it obvious” to Jimi I think he’s hot, I planned to nab a seat in the minibus beside him; however, Panama’s tiny bottom was already perched in place. For once she wasn’t speaking. She was simply staring at her reflection in the minibus window, reapplying glistening pink lip gloss to her luscious, full lips. And sort of smiling at herself.
Bizarrely enough, at Blackwell’s school gates, a gaggle of Year 7 kids have gathered to wave and cheer as we pass by. Panama perks up when she sees some fans and waves graciously. In the middle of the throng stand two unlikely Catwalk devotees: Benny Stark and Tara from Guttersnipe lurking on the curb, smiling from ear to ear.
“Nice one, girls!” says Tara, clapping me on the shoulder as I tumble out of the bus.
Claude sighs.
“Everyone is talking about Wicked FM this morning, man,” begins Benny.
“Yeah, that was really funny. I almost peed my pants!” chips in Tara.
“Hmmm, maybe,” mutters Claude, “I think we let ourselves down a bit.”
“Nah . . . you didn’t,” argues Benny, beckoning us to follow him in the direction of the drama studio. “That’s what we came to tell you. Come and see what’s happening . . . it’s brilliant.”
We all look at him with perplexed expressions.
“Those two Bellringing dudes,” mumbles Benny, “the ones you left in charge of selling Blackwell Live tickets this morning . . . they’re a bit, er, stressed-out. Mrs. Guinevere has been making them cups of sweet tea and trying to instill a bit of order down there—”
“What do you mean?” Fleur asks.
“Well, have you ever heard that saying ‘All publicity is good publicity’?” asks Tara, cocking her head to the side rather coolly.
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, since your little spat with Panama this morning, they’ve already sold 487 Blackwell Live tickets—”
“Four hundred and eighty-seven!” mouths Claude.
“It’s all gone a bit freaky-disco,” sniggers Benny, his ringlets shaking as he chuckles.
“What?” we all gasp, spying queues of kids reaching right out of the drama studio and past the gym.
And when I look back around, Liam is twirling Claude round and round shrieking, and Fleur . . . well, Fleur is glued to the spot, for the first time fully realizing the sheer gravity of what the LBD have created.
Chapter 9
hold the front page
How the Look Live TV crew condensed an entire day of filming around Blackwell School into three and a half measly minutes was astounding. And they also sandwiched our story between a clip about local otters and the pollen forecast!
This was not how I’d envisioned my TV debut.
I thought we were going to at least be a news headline. Serves me right for spending the entire day clutching a clipboard, trying to look professional, aiming to get my schneck into every shot. For all my dramatic efforts, the Look Live crew eventually reduced the whole Blackwell Live scoop down to some footage of Catwalk’s Leeza and Abigail shimmying in tight-fitting fuchsia leotards, a bit of Death Knell’s Ainsley Hammond and Candy wailing and hitting steel drums with wooden spoons, plus two seconds of Claude saying: “Er, please buy a ticket. It’ll probably be quite good, honest!”
“I didn’t say it like that!” moaned Claude. “That was me messing about. I said it another ten times after that in a really sensible way. Ooh, I can’t belieeeve they used that take . . .”
Thank Jehovah Paddy Swan wedged his face into the report. We never heard the last of it after we totally forgot to mention him on Wicked FM. “The ink’s not even dry on that check, and already I’m yesterday’s news!” he’d grumbled.
Luckily Paddy’s face filled the screen for almost twelve seconds at the end of the Look Live report (yes, he did count them). He was billed as “a local entrepreneur and music fanatic,” and was shown harping on about giving something back to the community that had given so much to him.
Ha ha ha. “Music fanatic”? This is the man who actually cut the plug off Fleur’s stereo when she refused to study for the Year 8 exams.
“I look fantastic, don’t I?” announced Paddy to Mrs. Swan, rewinding the video to make us all watch him for the tenth time.
“Yes, darling. You look outrageously handsome,” Saskia Swan concurred.
“Shall we watch it again?”
“Oh, yes, let’s!” gushed Mrs. Swan.
Feigning homework, the LBD managed to escape.
Then, later this week, a Daily Mercury reporter and photographer showed up to snap the LBD for a Blackwell Live preview article. Very exciting, huh!? And, this time, with only three faces in the picture, it was a breeze stealing a more starring role . . . even though the very moment the newspaper plopped on the doormat of the Fantastic Voyage this evening, with the LBD plastered all over the front cover, I immediately regretted it.
I’d been quite nervous, you see, about looking good in the local paper. So nervous, in fact, that I’d spent my entire lunch hour preening my hair into something more fluffy . . . then changing my mind and combing it flat again. Then trying to work in a hip side parting. Then spraying ultrafine hair serum all over it to make it a bit more orderly . . . then eventually trying to breathe a bit of life and movement into it again. By this stage my hair was lying flat and rock hard against my skull like a fifty-year-old businessman’s hairdo. It was at this point Fleur Swan, who once partook of a Fashion Modeling Course (which cost Paddy stacks of money and promised to make her a supermodel the second she finishes school) stepped in with some great advice.
“Never mind your hair,” she said. “When you’re being photographed, the trick is to follow the golden rules of modeling if you want to look amazing.”
“Which are?” I said, trying to remove a comb tangled in the back of my head.
“Okay, well, number one, point your chin slightly down so you can’t see any double chinnage.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to remember this.
“Then, two, swivel your hips to the side with your hands on your waist. This makes you look sleeker and also emphasizes your curves,” Fleur said, demonstrating the pose.
“Wow,” I gasped. Fleur looked like a real fox when she did that.
“Three: Hold your upper arms slightly away from your body,” advises Fleur. “This avoids chunky corned beef upper arms problem.”
“But I don’t have—” I began.
“Oh, you will if you don’t do this, believe me,” Fleur announced. “And try to look confident and enthusiastic, not so flaky. You really wind me up when you do that.”
“I’m not flaky! There’s that word again! ‘
Flaky.’ Stop calling me fl—”
“Then, most importantly,” continued Fleur, “place your tongue gently behind your top teeth, open your mouth ever so slightly and SMILE!!!”
It seemed an awful load of trouble to go to for one photograph, but I was willing to give it a go. Especially as Jimi would no doubt see it.
Of course, when the Daily Mercury came out this evening, Fleur and Claude were standing completely normally, while I was standing like some sort of contorted, deeply disturbed circus sideshow escapee with a backward wig on.
“I’m going to keep this beside the cash register. It’ll scare people from robbing my takings,” remarked my dad before giving me a big hug.
I really really hate Fleur sometimes.
a small oversight
But somewhere this week, between schmoozing reporters and TV crews, amongst the band practices and the battles with Panama, between flirting with Jimi and arguing about the worst-case scenario with Mr. McGraw, as well as stinging Paddy for a grand and fantasizing a whole lot about July twelfth . . . I seem to have overlooked something quite obvious.
I’ve not set eyes on my mother for four days.
In fact, it’s only this moment, as I walked though the pub doors and noticed Muriel, our sous-chef, gazing at me pitifully before offering to make my a couple of nice poached eggs for my dinner, that I realize something is wrong.
“Where’s my mother, Muriel?” I ask.
“Oh . . . well, I’m not too sure, darling,” lies Muriel. “Maybe you should ask your dad.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me?” I say.
“Cos I don’t know, honeypie. Now, those eggs . . .” Muriel turns her head and pretends to look for a saucepan.
“MURIEL!”
“Okay! Okay!! She’s at your nan’s house. She’s moved out. Er, I think. I’m not sure, though. Oh, Veronica, go and ask your father, I shouldn’t be telling you this, it’s not my place,” Muriel says kindly but firmly.
“Where is he? Has he moved out too!? What does that make me? An orphan?” I say in a high-pitched tone.
“No, he’s upstairs. Go and talk to him, Veronica, he needs you to be sweet to him. He’s upset.”
“He’s upset? What about me? I’m the one missing a mother!!” I storm upstairs, bypassing the den, where I can hear some excessively sad blues music flooding from the stereo.
This is a fine time to be lying about, listening to records, I think. Then I remember that last week, when Jimi didn’t ask me out after collecting his hooded top, I was so depressed that I listened to track four, “Merry Go Round,” which is the saddest song on the Spike Saunders CD, thirty-two times in a row.
Maybe Dad really is upset after all.
I storm into my bedroom, snapping the door firmly shut and flinging myself on the bed, where I lie for almost twenty minutes brainstorming reasons my parents might have for splitting up.
I can’t really think of anything valid.
I mean, they bicker quite a lot. But that’s not really surprising, what with both of them being fairly irritating.
I suppose Mum does have that running niggle that Dad’s family are all of a far lower social class than hers, and that lots of them are “career criminals,” while Dad always bitches about Mum’s family having “delusions of grandeur” and are actually descended from Gypsies. But that can’t be it, can it?
That’s mostly a joke, isn’t it? Well, so I thought.
And they argue about money a lot. Like when Dad forgets to pay bills and we get our meat supply canceled. Or when Mum goes out to buy a new dress and comes home with a new state-of-the-art trunk freezer worth over two thousand pounds. Yep, that argument was a doozy.
But they always get it together again.
Don’t they?
I put on Spike again to drown out the sounds from the den.
Maybe one of them is seeing another person?
Oh, God, that can’t be possible.
No, that would mean someone has literally spied either my mum or my dad and thought, “Oooh, hang on. That is one hot-tie over there! Be still, my beating heart. Blah blah blah . . .” before setting about wrecking my happy family home.
(Funny how you don’t realize what you had until it’s gone, eh? It was quite a happy home.)
But that doesn’t make sense.
I mean, if I, Ronnie Ripperton, in the prime of my life, trying my damnedest to look gorgeous, can’t get a single soul to fancy me, how the heck can a psychotic chef with bizarre eating habits or a man who perpetually smells of stale beer and ashtrays attract the opposite sex?
How?!
And then suddenly I start feeling very cold and alone in my little room. Because maybe this was all my fault.
I mean, I’m not much of a daughter, am I? And I’m always pulling stunts that annoy one of them. And then whoever I have the fight with bawls me out . . . leading the other one to start defending me. Then they both have a big row with each other.
This has definitely got much worse lately.
Mum’s always on my back about something petty, and Dad usually tries to smooth things over by saying: “Oh, come on, Magda, leave her, she’s only a little girl!” which drives my mother totally stark raving bonkers, as she knows full well that I’m fourteen and not a little girl at all. I’m completely capable of cleaning my own bedroom or remembering to lock the back door when I come home at night. Or all those other stupid, thoughtless things I do.
So maybe this is all my fault.
I really don’t feel so clever now.
“Mum?”
“Oh, hello, darling,” she says. “Oh, so you’ve eventually called me. Have you run out of clean knickers or something?”
Touché.
“I didn’t realize you’d gone.”
“Exactly,” says Mum.
“Is that why you’ve gone?” I say, deciding to skip straight to the point of the phone call, sparing formalities. “Because I’m thoughtless and you have to wash my underwear and do loads of stuff for me?”
My voice is all wobbly now.
“Oh! Oh, God, no, Ronnie. No, not at all,” Mum says, realizing that I’m putting two and two together and coming up with 157. “I didn’t mean that last bit. I know you’re really busy at the moment. I’m not really annoyed you didn’t notice I’d gone.”
“When are you coming home, Mum? And why are you there? And what’s going on?” I say, mumbling all my key questions at once.
“It’s okay, Ronnie, chill out,” says Mum.
“Chill out!? What are you doing at Nan’s house?” I say, beginning to raise my voice.
Long pause.
“I’m having some time to think.”
“About what?”
“About what I want.”
“What, about whether you want to live here anymore!? What’s wrong with living with me and Dad?” I say.
My mother has quite clearly gone mad.
“No, I need to think about the future,” says Mum.
“But you can do that here!” I snap back.
“I can’t,” says Mum firmly. “Me and your dad . . . we want different things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, right now he wants me to live at the Fantastic Voyage. And I, well, I want to live at your nan’s,” Mum says. Then she starts softly chuckling.
I am in no mood for her hilarity.
“Mother, have you been drinking?”
“I wish I had,” she sighs.
“Mum, I’m really getting freaked about all this now,” I say, even though freaked isn’t really how I feel. I can’t explain how I feel. A bit numb really. A bit like life as I know it has just unceremoniously crashed and burned, and I’m too stupid to even work out why.
“Just tell me what’s going on,” I eventually say. And this time, by asking the obvious question, I seem to gain a smattering of information.
“Okay. Okay,” Mum sighs. “I know I’m being unfair, that we’re being unfair. I just didn’t see the po
int in dragging you into things. Look, shall we just say that something important has happened. And me and your dad have got different opinions on how to handle, er, it.”
“What, has a big bill arrived? Something like that? Or do you want to fire someone and he doesn’t?”
“Er, no. Not like that. It’s bigger than that. Look, don’t worry about it—”
“Oh, all right, I won’t worry about it then,” I snap at her.
And then we both don’t say anything for ages. I can hear Nan’s cuckoo clock ticking away in the background.
“Look, Ronnie, I’m really riled by what your dad said last night. I don’t want to look at him at the moment,” she says. “I just need a few days—”
“Days?” I repeat.
“Or weeks. Months. I can’t tell. You’ll be fine whatever we decide to do. You’re dead important to us, Ronnie,” says Mum. “I’ve gotta go. I need the toilet, Ronnie. I’ll call you.”
And then she hung up.
I really don’t know how to feel about all of this. So I opt for “angry.” And in strict alignment with the universal rule of bad moods, I decide to bum out the day of the very next person I come across. This just so happens to be my dad.
“Hmmph,” I say, flouncing into the den, throwing the door back so heavily, it hits a nearby freestanding wall cabinet with a huge smash. I’ve only been told not to do this about seven zillion times before.
“Hello, sweet pea,” says my dad rather glumly. He’s surrounded by mountains of old vinyl LPs, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays. It’s almost as if he’s forgotten that it’s Friday evening and hundreds of beer addicts are heading toward the Fantastic Voyage for fun and lager-fueled frivolity. Oh, no, that’s not a priority. He’s too busy listening to old blues records.
“Why is Mum living at Nan’s house? What have you done?” I begin, as subtly as a tornado.
“I’ve not DONE anything,” says Dad, looking deeply wounded. “Well, not much. Your mum’s decided to move out. For a bit. Er, well, I hope for a bit anyhow. There’s more space for her to think at your nan’s.”
“Space to think!?” I splutter. “Why is everyone talking in riddles?”
