Puppy Party

by Anna Wilson

  The room looked even more vaster now that it had no clothes and make-up and hairdryers and magazines all about the place.

  Honey was sitting at my feet inspecting the empty room and peering at Cheese as though she’d never set eyes on him before. Cheese arched his back and hissed, but gave up when it was clear Honey was not going to do anything. I looked at my pooch quizzically and wondered what was going through her mind.

  ‘Summer?’ Molly said, snapping me back from my wonderings.

  ‘Oh, erm. I had not really thought of a Look exactly,’ I admitted. ‘I had only ever dreamed of how utterly fantastical it would be to have all this space just for me. And how it would be for you to be able to come for a sleepover without me having to clear a patch on the floor among my heaps of stuff.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Molly, raising one eyebrow. ‘That would be good, yes.’

  I looked at the walls which were a bit dirty and sad-looking now that all April’s pictures and posters had gone. ‘I think more than anything we need to just get on and paint the walls,’ I said, in as decisive a tone as I could manage.

  ‘And what colour were you thinking of?’ Molly asked.

  ‘I, er . . . green?’

  Molly raised her eyes to the heavens. ‘You need to be rather more clearer than that!’ she said impatiently. ‘Look, I have brought some magazines to give us Inspiration.’ And she fished around inside her bag and pulled out a bundle of shiny glossy magazines with names such as Spectacular Skirting Boards and Wonderful Wallpapers.

  Who in the name of sanity comes up with whole magazines about such yawnsome things? I thought.

  I was about to say so, but Molly had already flicked open Wonderful Wallpapers and was gushing in an over-the-top manner about something called a ‘feature wall’, which apparently is when you only put wallpaper on one wall and you paint the remaining three walls. I thought that would look bizarre and freaky, as though you only had enough money to decorate one wall and then had to stop. But I did not have a chance to a word in edgeways, or front ways or any old way, because Molly was chattering on almost without breathing.

  ‘And it really is the best and most fashionable thing for Interior Design these days,’ she was saying. ‘I saw it all on this faberoony programme about moving house and redecorating and so on.’

  I should have known really that the only reason that Molly was excited about me moving into April’s room was so that she could come round and Take Over in that way she has. She was clearly obsessed with this Interior Design thing. Why on earth it is called that, I don’t know. It is just a posh way of saying ‘decorating’. There is not much that is Design about it if you ask me. You just say, ‘That wall should be purple,’ and ‘The bed cover should have stars on it,’ and then you go to a shop which sells those things and you get them and hey presto! The room is decorated. The Interior bit is a load of utter randomness too, as how can you decorate the Interior of a wall? It is the EXTERIOR, in other words the outside, of a wall that you put the paint on. You do not peel off the surface of the wall and stick your hands into the bricky stuff and do the painting there.

  ‘We must make a List of all the things we need to progress the designing of the Interior of your new room,’ Molly was saying bossily. ‘And I have to tell you, Summer, that we should crack on with the designing and updating of your new room BEFORE you start moving your stuff in. On the extremely informative TV programme Moving On Up, the presenter and designer Farrah Ball is always saying that you must start with a Clean Slate, in other words you must clear out and Declutter all your junk before you redecorate.’

  ‘Excuse me!’ I said, feeling rather quite a bit outraged. ‘I have not got a lot of junk that needs decluttervating, thank you very much.’

  Molly took me by the hand and led me into my room. We stood in the doorway, which to be honest was the only place we could stand as the floor was a bit covered in clothes and stuff. Honey bounded across a jumpery-type mound and plonked herself down on my duvet which had somehow found itself trailing over the side of my bed.

  ‘It’s that Lived-In Look,’ I muttered.

  Molly put her hands on her hips while she cast a glance around my room. Her top lip curled and her nose wrinkled in an expression of what could only be described as utter DISTASTE. In other words, she looked as if my stuff was giving off a .

  ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘That is one way of putting it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Molly. She was now in Brisk and Efficient mode. ‘I have got a truly Masterly Plan as to how we can get your room made-over and gorgeous in a super-fast time.’

  I sighed noisily. When Molly is on a roll like this, there is no stopping her (unless you want to have a major falling out, which is never pleasant and not to be recommended). ‘So tell me,’ I said.

  Molly beamed and whipped out one of her notebooks. Now, I like notebooks (who doesn’t?) but Molly really is the , not to mention the .

  She began by wittering on again about the TV programme, which apparently gave all sorts of tips and hints about decluttervating. ‘First of all you need coloured stickers so that you can go round your room and divide your possessions and books and things into piles that say “Keep”, “Throw Out” and “Maybe”. Luckily I have come prepared.’

  She flipped open the cover of her notebook and there were three sheets of coloured stickers: one sheet of pink, one of blue and one of yellow. ‘We can use the pink for “Keep”, the blue for “Throw Out” and the yellow for “Maybe”.’

  It looked as though I was not going to have a say in a single thing. I wondered if I was going to be allowed to say exactly WHAT I wanted to ‘Keep’, etc. Possibly not at the rate Molly was going.

  Molly busied herself around my old room. She walked up and down, scribbling things in her notebook and eyeing objects in the way people do on those programmes like Money for Old Rope where they look at the stuff you’ve been keeping in your attic and try and guess if it is worth anything at all. (Often it is not.) She picked up a lamp, sighed a bit, then put it down. Then she picked up my favouritest pair of huge ladybird slippers that make my feet look as massive as a clown’s and which are the most cosiest footwear ever to be invented. She was holding them sort of between one finger and thumb as if they stank as badly as Frank Gritter’s socks.

  This is when I got rather angry. ‘What are you going to tell me is wrong with my ladybird slippers?’ I shouted.

  Molly dropped them in shock. ‘Oh, er, nothing at all!’ she protested, hastily grabbing a pink sticker and slapping it on to the slippers. ‘They are definitely going into the “Keep” pile.’

  I walked over and held out my hand. ‘I will have those pink stickers, please,’ I said. Molly could see that I Meant Business, which does not mean that I was about to open a shop and try to sell the contents of my old room. It means that I was mega-serious about being in control of this particular plan.

  And so we spent a whole day dividing my stuff into piles. And actually, though I do hate to admit it when Molly is right, I have to say that it was quite a THERAPEUTIC exercise, which is a posh word for saying that I quite enjoyed myself. Honey gave up on anything interesting happening and settled down for a snooze.

  Mum came in at one point with some biscuits and some orange squash. She nearly tripped over the “Maybe” pile when she opened the door, and the glasses of squash slightly on the tray.

  ‘Oh my goodness, Summer!’ she gasped, as she struggled to rescue the drinks. ‘What on earth are you two up to?’

  Molly explained her Masterly Plan, making sure Mum knew that it had been all her idea.

  Mum literally beamed from one ear right across to the other. ‘What a marvellous idea, Molly!’ she said. ‘I think we’ll have to enlist you to go through the rest of the house. I have been trying to get my daughters to sort out their stuff for years. Oh . . .’ Her beaminess was very suddenly switched to a MELANCHOLY sort of mood, in other words she suddenly looked sad. ‘Wh
at I meant to say is, now that April’s gone, it’s a good chance for you and me to organize ourselves, Summer, isn’t it? Just the two of us, I mean.’ She hastily put down the tray of drinks and biscuits on my old music box which was in the ‘Throw Out’ pile (because it played a ‘babyish and somewhat annoying tune’ according to Molly) and left us to it.

  Molly narrowed her eyes and chewed in the corners of her mouth as Mum shut the door. ‘Mmm,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I asked, picking up a glass of squash and taking a (which is a piratical word for gulping down a drink in a thirsty fashion).

  ‘I think your Mum is suffering from Empty Nest Syndrome,’ said Molly, still narrowing her eyes in a thoughtful manner.

  ‘What in the highest heavens are you wittering on about now, Molly?’ I asked. ‘Mum is not a bird-watching type of person and probably wouldn’t even notice if there was a FULL nest in our garden, let alone an empty one—’

  ‘No, no!’ Molly laughed in a grown-up way. ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with nests!’

  ‘But you just said—’

  ‘“Empty Nest Syndrome” is an expression,’ said Molly, in an over-the-top patient manner. ‘It is what you say about a mother when her children have left home. It means that the mother gets sad. Apparently birds and other animals in nature behave in a bizarre way when their young have left – or Flown the Nest.’

  ‘But I haven’t left or Flown the Nest,’ I said, puzzled. ‘I am only sorting out my bedroom so that I can move into April’s.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Molly pointfully. ‘April has moved out of your family’s “nest”, so leaving it a – bit – emp-ty – get it?’ she added, slowing her voice right down to the level people use to talk to immensely stupid other people.

  I would have got offended under normal circumstances at being talked to like this, but the words Molly had said caused a sudden and vast to occur to me, and I all at once realized what it was that Molly was saying: Mum was sad because April had moved out (although why she could not have said that in plain and decent English instead of going on about nests, I don’t know).

  In an instant a wave of sadness and sympathetic feeling washed over me and I wanted to rush out and give Mum a ginormous hug and tell her it was OK because she still had me and Honey.

  ‘Wh-what do you think I can do to make Mum feel better?’ I asked, flumping down on to my favouritest beanbag, which had a pink ‘Keep’ sticker on it.

  Molly was tapping her teeth with her pencil, which is what she quite often does when she is deep in thought.

  ‘I think your mum needs a large dose of distractivation,’ she said finally. ‘In other words, we have to come up with something to keep her occupied so that she doesn’t think about April not being here. I feel the need for another dose of Masterly Planning.’

  I agreed, but secretly hoped whatever Molly came up with wouldn’t involve a Total and Complete Decluttervating of the Entire Contents of our house.

  t was getting close to the Easter holidays by now, and I had only just been able to at last move into my new room. It had certainly been a huge PALAVER, but it had been good as it had been distractivating for Mum as well as me (mainly because she spent a lot of time and energy going to the paint shop for me to change paints when I didn’t like them). Cheese and Toast had been very unimpressed by the whole upheaval and had gone into major sulk mode (which is not that different from their usual mode of being, if I’m totally honest). Life had been full and busy and totally hectic.

  However, now the holidays were nearly upon us (which does not mean they were about to come crashing down around our ears, but that it was nearly Easter time) I was beginning to worry that without all the distractivating and decluttervating, Mum might go back to thinking about her nest being empty.

  I wondered if I should talk to Molly about this one day after school while we were walking our pooches together in the park.

  I should break off from the NARRATIVE (in other words story) at this point to explain that there was a time when it would have been impossible to even think of saying that last sentence. Molly’s mum had always very definitely been what you might call Not That Keen on Dogs, and would say things like, ‘If you think you’re getting a puppy just because your best friend has one, you have got another think coming, Miss Molly.’ I used to wonder how on earth Mrs Cook would know that Molly had Other Thinks Coming. Was she perhaps one of those types of people who could read your very mind? But I soon realized that this was not what Mrs Cook meant. What she meant was what my mum says whenever I ask her if Honey can have another litter: ‘Over My Dead Body!’ In other words, NO.

  So Molly was not the only one to be totally flabbergasted and bewildified when her mum came and saw Honey’s puppies, took one look at Titch (who obviously was the smallest – with a name like that it is not really ) and went all melty and gooey and speechless for words.

  Titch had settled into the Cook family right away (well, once he had learned all the Dos and Don’ts about where he could sit and couldn’t sit and where he was allowed to breathe in public . . .) and Molly was actually doing quite a good job of training him. So we had got to the stage where we could go for a walk in the park without anything too disastrous happening.

  And so that is what we were doing that afternoon, to get back to the story, I mean NARRATIVE . . .

  I had been thinking about puppies and the fun we had used to have when April was there and the fact that the puppies had all gone to new homes, rather like April had, and I had just got to the point of sadly wondering if the puppies missed each other at all, when I heard Molly’s voice go Up a Notch and sound a bit alarmingly nagging in tone. I quickly tuned back in.

  ‘What is the matter with you, Summer?’ she snapped. ‘You have not been listening to one single word that I have been saying to you.’

  ‘Er – sorry?’ I said, shaking my head blearily and coming out of my weirdly sad mood.

  Molly tutted noisily. ‘Honestly, Summer Holly Love, you are being extremely strange these days. If I did not know you better I would say that you are actually being quite Depressive about something. But I know that cannot be true as you are not a Depressive sort of a person. So I can only think that you are just not listening to me because you have got something else more important to think about, in which case perhaps I should just go home on my own and—’

  ‘Actually,’ I broke into Molly’s TIRADE of nonsense rambling and said in a quiet but firm voice. ‘I have realized that I am quite a little bit Depressive some of the time these days.’

  Molly’s expression on her face changed from outraged to perplexed in one split of a moment. ‘Oh?’ was all she could manage in response.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, blinking a bit, as my eyes were feeling hot and prickly. ‘I am a bit sad.’

  Molly at once flung an arm around me and said, ‘But this is terrible! You must tell me all about it at once and right this minute.’ And she pushed me down on to a park bench that luckily happened to be close by, otherwise I might have ended up falling on my bottom.

  We let the dogs off the lead and sat watching them romp around.

  Then Molly coughed loudly and said, ‘So?’

  I took a very deep breath, so deep that I managed to inhale a passing fly, which was not a good start, as I had to get over a bit of a choking and spitting fit, but it did at least mean that I did not actually cry. At last I squeaked: ‘It’s just that I didn’t realize I would feel this way, and I almost think it’s a bit silly of me, but – I miss April.’

  Molly gasped. Her mouth was hanging open so wide I said, ‘You’ll swallow a fly too if you’re not careful.’

  She snapped her jaws firmly shut and crossed her arms tightly in front of her chest and then said, through teeth that were clamped together against MARAUDING insects: ‘I cannot believe you, Summer!’

  I frowned and blushed a bit. ‘Why not?’

  Molly rolled her eyes as impressively as I have ever seen her do, and flinging her arms up
in the air, she cried: ‘One minute you are saying you can’t wait for your, and I quote, “Bossy Boots Big Sister” to leave home and you are doing all that work moving into her room – and saying how you love having the TV and the sofa and your mum to yourself in the evenings – and the next minute you are turning into a Depressive Person and about it.’

  ‘I am not weeping and wailing!’ I said in a protesting sort of way. ‘And anyway, you have never had a Bossy Boots Big Sister to get annoyed with, or indeed miss, so how in all the earth would you know how I am feeling?’

  Molly sighed and glanced at me in a rather CONDESCENDING fashion. Then she spoke in the sort of voice grown-ups use when they are talking to very small children or animals. ‘I am sorry that you feel so sad, Summer. What can we do to help?’

  What can WE do to help? What in the highest of all heavens above was she babbling on about? Had she actually become two people or did she have an imaginary friend sitting next to her? Or did she suddenly think she was the Queen (who was the only person I had ever heard of who referred herself as ‘we’ in that especially manner of speaking)?

  I was getting really quite moody now. I ignored Molly and stood up and called for Honey to come. She is such a good and obedient poochical these days that she came immediately right away. I wish I could say the same for Titch.

  He must have found something truly honksome to roll about in, because as Honey came bounding towards me, I saw him flip over on to his back and have a good old rub and on the grass. He had his eyes closed and his tongue was lolling out of one side of his mouth and he was wagging his tail madly – which is quite impressively difficult, I would imagine, when you are lying on your back and rolling around, but somehow he was managing to do it.