by Anna Wilson
Mum and I glanced at each other warily and then we both tiptoed to the sitting-room window to peek out cautiously. Honey was hot on our heels.
The scene that we saw would have been quite literally amusing if it had not been quite so literally terrifying.
Outside our house was a quite Scary Mary of a person in what can only be described as a Torrent of Rage, throwing milk bottles at the pavement. This person had very DISHEVELLED hair, which means it was all over the place as if it had gone through a bush backwards – in other words it was a mess – their face was a deeply strange purply colour and their eyes were ringed with so much black stuff they looked like the Creature from the Swampy Lagoon or something similar.
It was April. With Nick. And the Bottom Shuffler!
April was doing what Molly would call Making A Scene, which does not mean that she was being filmed for an extremely glamorous Hollywood movie. It means that she was screaming and shouting so loudly that people would start staring if we did not get her inside as Quick As A Flash.
‘Stay here, Summer,’ said Mum again, and she dashed outside.
I sat in the window with Honey, waiting to see what Mum would do.
Mum went up to April and started talking to her, and then she talked to Nick and the Bottom Shuffler as well. They all followed her back into the house.
A feeling of utter nervousness swept through me like a giant wave. What was going on?
The front door closed quietly and I heard Mum sag, Til make us all some tea and we can talk about this calmly.’ She sounded as though she was talking to some frightened animals rather than a bunch of grown-ups who had had an argument.
I tiptoed to the kitchen to watch the Proceedings Unfold. (In fact I sort of hid in the doorway like a spy.)
‘Now,’ said Mum, ‘why don’t you tell me what’s going on?’
Nick was staring at the floor. The Bottom Shuffler was staring at Mum, her hands on her hips and a Look of Insolence on her face. She flicked her hair (which was not in a pony tail today, I noticed) and said, ‘Nothing.’
April glared at the Bottom Shuffler. So did Honey.
Then April’s face went crumply, her already very smeary eyes went watery and she started to blub in a very un-April-type way.
‘That idiot has been cheating on me,’ she squeaked in a HICCUPY fashion, pointing at Nick. ‘WITH HER!’ she added, pointing at the Bottom Shuffler.
‘Wha–?’ Mum and I said in UNISON – in other words, together.
Mum turned and spotted me in my Hidden
Spy position, but luckily for me she was too shocked to tell me to go away.
‘He’s a said April. It was too impossibly rude of her and I will never tell anyone what she actually called him.
‘Is this true?’ Mum asked Nick. He looked up and his face was red and upset-looking. ‘Listen, Angela–’ he started.
‘OF COURSE IT’S TRUE!’ April howled. ‘I SAW THEM TOGETHER WITH MY OWN EYES!’ Her eyes didn’t look as if they would be able to see anything much just at that moment. They were severely red, and the blackness around them had started running down her face.
‘Darling,’ said the Bottom Shuffler, rolling her eyes like Molly does when I’ve said something der-brainish, ‘don’t you think you’re being just a teensy bit paranoid? Just because your boyfriend and I work together and go out and have a bit of lunch together, and just because he sometimes gives me a lift home after work – it doesn’t mean you need to overreact like this!’
‘I NEVER OVERREACT!’ April screamed.
‘Listen, dear,’ said Mum, backing away slightly. ‘I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this.’
‘Yes, and the “perfectly reasonable explanation” is that SHE has STOLEN MY BOYFRIEND!’ April yelled. ‘I saw them at lunchtime – she had HER ARM through HIS ARM, and they were LAUGHING! And then I go to meet him after work and SHE is in HIS CAR!’ April added, glaring at Mum, as though it was all her fault.
‘Well, I don’t think that proves anything–’ Mum said.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the Bottom Shuffler – and for one moment I thought she was apologizing to April – ‘but I’ve got to get out of this madhouse. Come on, Nick. Didn’t you say there was a heap of paperwork to go through tonight? We can do it at my place if you like.’ And she blinked at him. That woman has severely bad problems with her eyes, I thought once again.
Nick muttered something I couldn’t quite hear and then looked at April with the sort of pleading puppy-dog expression I was using on Mum only minutes earlier.
But they had the same effect on April that they had on Mum, i.e. No Effect Whatsoever.
‘Yes, you’d better go round to HER place, hadn’t you, Nick?’ she hissed.
And so Nick followed the Bottom Shuffler out of our house.
April sank down on to a chair and buried her face in her hands. It was like watching a balloon go ‘bleurgh’ after all the air has whooshed out of it.
Mum and I glanced at each other and let out a lot of air ourselves, which was a relief as I think I had not breathed at all during the argument.
None of this made even one TITCHICAL SPECK of sense to me: Nick going out with the Bottom Shuffler? Nick already had a girlfriend with long blonde hair who filed her nails and giggled down the phone, so why on earth would he be interested in another girlfriend who looked and acted exactly the same? Surely if you had fallen out of love with someone, you would not go and fall straight into love with someone else who looked and sounded exactly the same as the last person that you had been in love with?
I decided I had to say something.
‘Er . . . April, don’t you think you might have made a mistake? After all, Nick is such a nice man. Maybe the Bott– nurse and he had to do some very important work together at lunchtime, and maybe he had to tell her lots of important vet-related business that they don’t have time for during normal office-surgery -working hours . . .’ I had started to speak faster and faster and was in danger of having what Molly calls VERBAL DIARRHOEA which is a rather disgusting way. of saying that words were flowing out of my mouth at top speed in an unstoppable kind of way.
‘Summer,’ Mum hissed, putting her hand on my sleeve, ‘I think you should take Honey into the garden for a second.’
But I was in a full flow of quick panic-talking and I carried on: ‘– If you like, Molly and I could ask him about it when we next go and see him about Honey, and I’m sure you’ll find it’s all a misunderstanding–’
‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOV April shrieked.’
Honey jumped back and yelped. So did I.
April was now actually pulling at her hair like a demented witch-type person. ‘You are never to go near him EVER again! You will have to get a new vet for Honey. I don’t want to hear that man’s name mentioned in our house from this day forward!’ she added, stomping out of the room and up to her bedroom in a way that was very over-dramatical, even for April.
A new vet for Honey? But if Nick was not our vet any more, there was No Way Ho-Zay in a million trillion years that I would ever get Mum to say ‘yes’ to Honey having puppies.
My Verbal Diarrhoea had stopped. There was nothing more to be said.
The next day I dragged my feet so slowly that I missed the bus and had to drag my extremely slow-moving feet all the way to school. I was nearly there when I heard someone running and panting behind me. I was not really in the mood to talk to anyone so I kept my head down and carried on dragging myself to the school gates.
‘Hey! Wait for me!’
It was Molly!
‘How come you are so late?’ she panted, catching up with me and stopping. She bent over and clutched her sides. ‘Ooh, I’ve got a stitch,’ she said.
Why people say this, I have no idea. A stitch is a pattern you make with a needle and thread on a piece of cloth. What has that got to do with having a pain in your tummy when you’ve been running? Or maybe it means that it feels as though someone has sewn through your tummy wit
h a needle and thread . . .
‘You’re late too,’ I pointed out, a little bit grumpily.
‘Yeah,’ said Molly, standing up again and grinning at me a bit like a loony. ‘I stayed up too late last night getting to the next level in the agility trials on Puppy Power, so I overslept this morning. Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t call you last night, but this game is soooo ADDICTIVE – in other words, I just can’t stop play– hey, what’s up?’
I’m ashamed to say that Molly rabbiting on and on about her puppy game just felt a bit like the last straw and my eyes had gone rather leaky of their own accord.
‘Nothing,’ I muttered, angrily rubbing them.
‘Oh no, I’ve upset you, haven’t I?’ Molly said, suddenly looking really quite anxious and concerned, which is not a look she has that often.
I sniffed and shook my head. ‘It’s not you,’ I said, which was kind of partly true anyway. ‘It’s Mum, and April and . . . and Honey’s not going to have puppies now and it’s all Nick’s fault!’ I sobbed out the last part and went a bit HICCUPY just like my sister had done the night before.
‘What?’ said Molly, looking confused now. She linked her arm into mine and we started walking towards school as the bell for registration rang.
I told Molly everything that had happened and ended with a quite full-on impression of April screaming like the Creature from the Swampy Lagoon.
Up until that point Molly had listened very sympathetically, but when it came to my (even though I say so myself, extremely realistic) impression of my loonitistical sister, Molly’s face changed from Caring and Concerned to Giggly and Hysterical.
And of course that set me off too.
We were both seeing a quite hilarious picture of my sister in my head, and all we could do was laugh about it. This kind of thing happens quite a lot when you are the Bestest Friends in the Universe and you find yourself on the very exact same length of brainwave.
So that is how we both came to be walking through the playground, laughing the tops of our heads off and doing impressions of April, just as our form teacher, Mrs Wotherspoon, came out of the headteacher’s office.
‘Oh, so we think it’s highly amusing to miss registration, do we?’ she squawked.
Not for the first time I sighed inside my head and wished with all my heart that we were still in Year Four with Mr Elgin. Mr Elgin had been annoying in a mild sort of teachery way and would say doolally things like: ‘You have two ears and one mouth, use them in that proportion,’ and ‘Do I have to say everything twice?’ and ‘Act your age, not your shoe size’ (which never made any sense to me, as I was nine at the time and my feet were size twelve, so surely he should have said, ‘Act your shoe size and not your age’). But apart from this, he was actually quite nice, and he had even arranged for the Talent Contest which Molly, Honey and I had won hands (and paws) down.
Mrs Wotherspoon was in a completely different CATEGORY of teacherliness. After our first day in her class Molly had said, ‘If Mrs Wotherspoon was a dog, she’d be a Dobermann pinscher,’ (which is not a dog that belongs in the lovely, cuddly bracket of poochiness at all). She was tall and spindly-looking, as if she would get blown over in the lightest of summer breezes, but this does not mean that she was gentle.
Oh no! When she spoke you realized that she was spiky and fierce and probably had a Grip of Iron like the Bottom Shuffler. Her facial features were, as Molly said, ‘so sharp that if someone put a handle on them they would turn into a knife’, her eyes were like those glassy eyes you get on old-fashioned teddy bears and dolls, and worst of all her fingers were the longest and spideriest I had ever seen. Personally I was convinced she was a witch, but Molly said she couldn’t be as she didn’t have a Familiar.
‘A familiar what?’ I had asked.
‘You know, a cat or something,’ Molly said.
‘Oh,’ I had said, nodding wisely, but inside my brain I was thinking, What in the name of all things sane is a Familiar Cat? One you have got to know particularly well, perhaps? In that case, is Honey my Familiar Dog? And does that make me a witch?
‘Are you going to stand there all morning gawping like a goldfish with rigor mortis, Summer Love?’ Mrs Wotherspoon said, dragging me back into the present situation by the terrifying screechiness of her crone-type speaking.
‘N-no,’ I stammered, making a mental reminder of the word ’riggermortiss’ and thinking that I must look it up in the dictionary.
‘Good,’ snapped Mrs W. ‘I won’t bother asking you and your sidekick here the reason for your appalling lateness, but let me make one thing abundantly clear: if it happens again, you will be spending every break time from here to the end of eternity picking up the litter in the playground. Do you understand me?’
Molly and I nodded silently and tried desperately hard not to look at each other in case we started giggling again. Mrs W.’s voice is so completely freaky that it often makes us nearly wet ourselves with laughter once she gets going on something.
‘Good,’ she said again. ‘Well, hurry along to the hall. We have already started the English lesson. Everyone is ready to show the work they’ve done on the scenes from Romeo and Juliet. I hope you have at least done your homework?’
‘Oh no!’ hissed Molly as we followed Mrs W. on her clicky heels. ‘I forgot to do it!’
I hissed back, ‘So did I!’
Mrs W. did not even turn round. ‘That’s a shame, girls. I shall have to pair you up with some people who have done their homework, shan’t I?’
I didn’t think life could throw anything else at me that could possibly make me feel any worse and fall further down into the Pit of Despair which was where I was right at that very moment.
We arrived in the hall to find that everyone had taken advantage of Mrs W. not being with them to do what Mum would call Run Riot
- in other words, they were chasing each other round the place, climbing on the wall bars that we use for gym and screeching like monkeys at a rather EXUBERANT tea party.
‘SILENCE!’ Mrs W. screamed.
It was like a quite scary version of musical statues. Everyone stopped in the mid-tracks of what they were doing. The people on the wall bars looked particularly shaky.
‘I am beginning to think that teaching serious literature to you lot is rather like trying to get a fish to sing the national anthem,’ Mrs W. spluttered. ‘I really don’t think William Shakespeare would approve of all these shenanigans.’
I didn’t know what shenanigans were, but judging by the kind of language this Shakespeare person used in his olde worlde daye, I personally thought he would probably like shenanigans very much indeed.
‘Molly,’ Mrs W. continued, ‘I would like you to pair up with Rosie. She doesn’t appear to have a partner yet.’ I wonder why, I thought. ‘Summer, you can go with Frank Gritter. He is one person at least who seems to know what he is doing this morning.’
It seemed that the Pit of Despair had reached new depths of Despairedness.
‘Now, Frank, you had chosen to work on the balcony scene, hadn’t you?’ Mrs W. was saying. ‘I want you to think yourself into the character. Think love. Think romance.’
Oh my goodness dearie me. I wanted to die there on the very spot, but as I knew from the film, that didn’t happen to Juliet until some time after the balcony scene. I pulled a face at Frank as if to say, ‘I know this is horrendous, but it wasn’t my idea.’ I thought Frank would roll his eyes or something to show me that he agreed, but instead he just winked at me. I nearly groaned out loud. This really was the end of everything. Life would never be worth living ever again. I would never smile or laugh or run through the spring flowers with a pooch on a lead in my whole long miserable life. ‘Stop leering like that, Gritter. You are supposed to woo the girl!’ Mrs W. demanded.
‘OK,’ said Frank, with a distinctively mischievous look in his eye. ’like this?’ and he got down on one knee and held one hand to his heart and the other out to me as if he was going to ask me to marry hi
m or something.
I thought I was going to be sick, so I closed my eyes tightly and prepared for total and utter Public Humiliation of the hugest degree. Then I heard a very strange noise.
‘Woooo! Woooo!’
Everyone in the class exploded into raucous and uproarious laughter and I opened my eyes to see the expression on Mrs W.’s face. Now she was the one who looked like a goldfish with rigorous ortis.
I did the only thing a girl could do in such a situation. I giggled so hard I left the Despairedness behind.
‘We have to think of something.’ I said to Molly on the wag to the bus that afternoon. It was getting darker earlier in the evenings now so we were not allowed to walk home unfortunately. It left less time for chatting, but at least it was warmer.
‘What are you two gossiping about?’
Frank had caught up with us.
Oh no, I thought. Just because I laughed at his Wooooing, he now thinks I will allow him to hang around with me.
‘Nothing that concerns you, Frank Gritter,’ said Molly in her best mature-type way of speaking. Then she turned to me. ‘We just need a Masterly Plan to beat the most masterly of masterly ones we’ve ever come up with before,’ she said carelessly.
‘You make it sound so easy,’ I grumbled, doing my best to avoid Eye Contact with Mr Stinko-Pants, ‘but it’s not. We’ve only had to solve one problem at a time before. Now we’ve got to think of a way of getting April and Nick back together – otherwise I don’t have a vet for Honey and her puppies – AND we’ve got to find a way to get Mum to agree to breed from Honey in the first place.’
I saw Frank from out of the corner of my eye. He was definitely listening in on my private conversation with my Bestest Friend. The sneak. He might be funny sometimes, but he’s still an annoying smelly boy, I thought irritably.
‘Don’t worry, Summer,’ Molly said in her soothingest Best Friend voice (although the effect was not as good as it should have been, as she was waving a half-munched doughnut at me as she spoke). ‘We just need to tackle one thing at a time. That’s what Puppy Power says about dog training! In fact, only last night when I was getting to the next level on the agility I found out–’
