by Grace Dent
SATURDAY 20TH SEPTEMBER
I packed the maps and my lipgloss and my purse and my pink scrunchy and a spare neon-green scrunchy and an emergency packet of biscuits into my white H&M handbag. I ironed my pink hoodie, my navy Nike T-shirt, my fake Evisu jeans and put on my whitest Adidas trainers and my thick gold hoops. I looked in the mirror and thought about stuffing my bra with panty-pads ’cos my breasts still ain’t made much of an appearance, but then I thought no, ’cos this is all about keeping it real. I told Mum I was off to play bingo in Chadwell Heath with Nan and left the house. At 6 PM I stood outside The Spirit of Siam Chinese restaurant on the High Street and I felt proper scared. I couldn’t decide whether what I was doing was well brave or proper thick but I’d started this now so I had to go through with it. All I wanted to do was see Cava-Sue and know she’s all right and tell her she has to come home.
I started to think about Cava-Sue coming home and sleeping in the top bunk again and how this time I would stick up for her in front of Mum and say it was a good thing that she was doing an A-Level and that she wasn’t a scrounger. I’d say that in fact Cava-Sue was an inspiration and that I wanted to do an A-Level too. Then I started to feel scared and think how much easier this would all be if Carrie was here with me ’cos she’s good at planning things and persuading folk to do stuff. Then a car horn beeped and I looked up and it was him.
“Y’all right?” I said, getting into the banana-yellow Golf.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry I’m late. Roads are all backed up in Ilford, innit.” He smelled of sports deodorant and chewing gum. “You know where we’re going?”
“Course I do,” I said.
“You sure, innit?” he laughed.
“I’ve got a map,” I said, waving some papers in his face. “Come on, let’s go.”
Me and Wesley set off to London, listening to Kiss FM and not talking much. I didn’t know how much Wesley would want to know about what I wanted to do in central London ’cos he’s a boy and most boys aren’t that bothered about girls’ feelings and emotions, and this was all about those type of things. I couldn’t explain why I wanted to see Cava-Sue. It’s all about emotions.
Anyway, soon Wesley asked me what was going on at home and I started to tell him all about the house-duties chart with the rude graffiti and Cava-Sue buying dresses off eBay and her refusing to clear up Murphy’s skidmarks and our dog being on a diet but eating Aunty Glo’s jam tarts and Cava-Sue kicking off about complex carbohydrates in her pizza and all that stuff. Wesley was really laughing at bits of it. Wesley said that my house sounded like it had plenty of banter going on. I thought about that for a second and suddenly felt a bit sad. We do have some proper barneys at Thundersley Road but we laugh a lot too. Like when Dad makes his cross-eyed face when Mum is telling a story. Or when me and Cava-Sue make dances up in the kitchen. Or when Mum’s doing the ironing and she puts a pair of Dad’s underpants on her head with a totally serious face and says, “’Ere, kids, I’m just off down the shops.” She’s done that ever since we were little and it’s still really funny.
“I wish my house was a bit noisier,” said Wesley. “It’s just me and Mum. I always wanted a brother or a sister. But I’ve not got anyone. Well, I got Bezzie but he’s not like my blood brother or nothing.”
We drove into the Wanstead tunnel.
I didn’t know what to say for a bit, then I said, “Do you remember your dad, what he was like and all that?”
“Just bits,” said Wesley. “Just blurs and shapes and stuff really. He was really tall. Well he seemed tall to me. He smelled of oil ’cos he was always fixing his motor. He used to crawl about the carpet on all fours with me on his back laughing his head off.” Wesley stopped for a second then he thought really hard. “I can remember a time at Christmas when we made a snowman in Goodmayes Park and he held me up in his arms to poke the carrot in for the nose . . . but that’s about it, innit.”
I looked out of the window. We were coming into Leytonstone. I thought about how weird it must be to have no sister or brother or dad. I suddenly felt totally grateful for my lot.
“Thanks for driving me,” I said to Wesley.
“No worries,” he said. “That’s what friends are for, innit.”
We drove on for a few more miles through Hackney in east London. It was dark now and the traffic was busy and it started to feel more built up and scruffy and dirty, then we headed toward central London and I started to feel quite sick then as I totally didn’t have a clue where we were and it was proper hectic with people everywhere. We parked at least a mile away from Oxford Street, then we walked the rest of the way through posh people going to the opera and smelly hot-dog stands and pigeons and poor people sleeping under newspapers and clubbers all dressed up to go clubbing and tourists wandering about with backpacks and people going home from shopping in fancy boutiques. I stopped and looked at my notes again.
Young and Lost club — every Saturday at Milo, 324
Oxford Street — doors open 9:30 PM 20th September — DIY
Taxidermy on stage 10:30 PM
Eventually we found the nightclub, Milo. It was 9:15 PM. Wesley and me went into a McDonald’s over the road and we bought a Big Tasty meal each and sat in the window. The doors weren’t open at the club yet so a line was beginning to form. The girls all looked a bit like Cava-Sue, all dressed in weird outfits like old-fashioned coats and high heels and pearl necklaces and weird berets, the boys looked like Lewis in skinny jeans and messy hair and baggy sweaters. I tried to eat my fries but I was proper nervous. The doors opened and people started to file in and my fries were going cold so Wesley ate them and I checked my print-out ten times to make sure I was at the right place. Then suddenly I spotted a group of people walking down the far side of the street, laughing and drinking cans of lager. My heart started to beat really really fast. I could see Cava-Sue!
She had a little white furry coat on and a green frilly skirt and high heels and a big black leather bag over her shoulder. She was swigging from a can of lager and her arm was linked through another girl’s who looked like it might be Pixie. Pixie was wearing a green army jacket, hightops, and a navy-blue T-shirt dress so short you could see her bum cheeks. I forgot all my plans to be cool then and ran out of McDonald’s and ran over the road and jumped out in front of them both.
“Cava-Sue! Cava-Sue!” I said, looking right in her face. Her eye-makeup was thick and black like a witch. Cava-Sue looked at me, then her face lit up.
“Shiraz!” she shouted, then she grabbed me and gave me a big cuddle. “Shiraz! What are you doing here? How? . . . Why? . . . Shiraz, does Mum know you’re here?”
I stared at her and held on to her hands.
“Who’s this, Cav?” said Pixie, staring at my hoops and hoodie, then at Wesley’s gold chain and Hackett sweatshirt like we were bloody martians or something.
“This is my little sister,” said Cava-Sue, who looked quite choked up now. “This is Shiraz Bailey Wood!”
“Shiraz?” said Pixie. “Like the red wine?”
“Like the red wine,” laughed Cava-Sue, then she gave me another hug. “Shiraz, what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to take you home,” I said. As soon as I said it, I realized how retarded it sounded. “I want you to come home,” I said again, quieter this time.
“Oh . . . Shiz,” said Cava-Sue, “I ain’t coming home. I ain’t coming home again ever.”
“But . . .” I began. “Please! I won’t borrow your stuff anymore. And I’ll do all your housework. And I’ll stick up for you when Mum says you’re a scrounger. Things would be different this time.”
Cava-Sue looked at me proper sadly.
“Oh Shiz, none of this is your fault,” she said, smoothing my hair down with her hand. “You’ve not done anything wrong. This is between me and Mum.”
I looked at her and wanted to cry.
“Mum is upset y’know?” I told her. “She’s proper depressed.”
“Yeah, right,” said Cava-Su
e, shaking her head. “Mum doesn’t care about me.”
“Yes she does,” I said.
“No she doesn’t,” said Cava-Sue. “Y’know what? Mum should adopt Collette bloody Brown to be her daughter, that’s who she bloody loves. She always loved Collette. I’m a big bloody disappointment. But y’know what, Shiz? I can’t be Collette Brown!”
Cava-Sue gave me another hug. Then she looked straight into my eyes.
“I ain’t putting up with all her crap anymore, Shiz!” she said. “There’s a world outside Goodmayes y’know? A world where you don’t have to wear fake tan and get your nails done and go down to Jumping Jacks on Fridays. You don’t have to get pregnant by some random when you’re twenty like everyone else, y’know?”
I stood there, proper still then. Not knowing what to say. Cava-Sue wrapped her fingers round mine.
“Y’know something, Shiz?” she said. “I suddenly realized that folk like me and you can do stuff with our lives. We can get a degree and get a good job and travel places and see the world, y’know?”
I nodded at her. Traffic was sweeping past us in the road, drowning her out, so she made her voice even louder.
“And we can wear whatever we want, y’know?” she said. “We can say whatever we want and think whatever we want and do whatever we bloody want and live our lives however we want without someone — someone who’s done NOTHING with their bloody life except stand in a betting shop — telling us what we can do with it.”
Cava-Sue stopped talking then. She shook her head and laughed at her own rant.
“But I miss you, Cava-Sue,” I said, quietly.
“I miss you too, Shiz,” she said, holding my hand. “I miss all of you, proper bad. I even miss Mum. Despite the fact she’s a total bloody bag.”
We stared at each other for a while. All of Cava-Sue’s friends had gone into the club. Wesley was sitting on the step of Waterstone’s book shop nearby, texting someone, or least pretending to.
“Go home, Shiz,” said Cava-Sue. Her eye-makeup was beginning to run.
She gave me another kiss, then she made Wesley promise to take me back to Goodmayes.
“Don’t worry, Shizza,” Cava-Sue shouted as me and Wesley walked away. “Things will work out.”
I wanted to believe her. But somehow I didn’t.
The journey home seemed to take three times as long as on the way there.
TUESDAY 23RD SEPTEMBER
I’m keeping my head down at school at the moment. Staying out of trouble. Uma’s well glad that Carrie and me are hardly speaking ’cos she gets her all to herself. Uma and Carrie went to Ilford Mall together on Saturday.
“That was a proper laugh, wasn’t it?” said Uma.
“Yeah,” said Carrie, although her face wasn’t making her “that was a proper laugh look” at all. Not like when we used to play That’s Your Boyfriend together or eat ice cream with M&Ms or sing to her iPod on the rocking horses in the park.
That WAS a proper laugh.
Ms. Bracket kept me behind after English today. She asked me if I’d thought anymore about studying at Mayflower next year. I said I wanted to but it was complicated.
“How complicated?” she said.
“Too complicated for me to explain,” I said.
Ms. Bracket raised her eyebrow and said, “Shiraz Bailey Wood, with your vocabulary and intelligence, I very much doubt that.”
I pulled up a chair and began to talk. And talk. And talk. And by the time I’d finished talking I’d had another one of my brilliant ideas.
OCTOBER
WEDNESDAY 1ST OCTOBER
Shiraz Bailey Wood
34, Thundersley Road
Goodmayes
Essex
IG5 2XS
[email protected]
Dear Fast-Track Family Feud,
I am wondering if you could help me out with my family as they are jarring my head big style at the moment and you are quite possibly my last hope before I strangle the lot of them.
I watch your show most days on ITV2 and it seems like you can work miracles. I really enjoyed today’s show, “Mum, you’re a drunk. Keep your junk in the trunk!” featuring the Jackson family from Scarborough who stopped speaking to their mum ’cos she was a right old alco who kept on flashing her bum and boobs in the local pub on karaoke night. One minute everyone was crying and threatening to get ASBOs on each other, then ten minutes backstage with Kirsten-who-is-trained and they were all happy again and talking about going to Falaraki next summer. I wish you could do that for my family too.
My name is Shiraz Bailey Wood. I’m nearly sixteen and I live in Essex. I go to Mayflower Academy. The papers call my school Superchav Academy but it ain’t that bad really. It’s three years since Clinton Brunton-Fletcher stole Miss Brett’s Renault Clio and burned it out on the hockey field, and to be honest no one in Year Eleven got pregnant last term at all. It’s time people built a bridge, got over it, and stopped stereotyping us in such a prejudicial manner.
Our family feud is proper complex. Basically, I want to stay on in Mayflower sixth form and get some exams and get a good job. A job where I can wear lipgloss and not look like a munter and I don’t have to pull mashed rats’ feet out of lamb kofta all day and go home smelling of a dead sheep’s bumhole. My mum, Diane Wood, will kick off big style when I tell her ’cos she says that doing A-Levels is for scroungers, lazing about spending her taxpayer’s money studying degrees in nothing to avoid real work. Mum said this to my big sister, Cava-Sue, about seven hundred and forty-nine times and now Cava-Sue has run off to London and is living with a girl called Pixie with blue hair who looks like a homeless too.
Cava-Sue hates my mother and my mother hates Cava-Sue, well, so they pretend but they don’t really. They ain’t keeping it real at all. Truth to tell, my mum is proper depressed about it all and cries every night and Cava-Sue misses home and is so skint she’s been singing on the London Underground for money. This is well worrying ’cos I have heard Cava-Sue singing and it sounds like someone with their goolies trapped in a revolving door. I am worried she will starve. I wish Cava-Sue would come home ’cos I miss her so much. That’s two problems for Kirsten-who-is-trained to be going on with.
The only person who speaks to Cava-Sue regular-like is my nan from Chadwell Heath. Nan is trying not to get involved in this ’cos Nan and my mum don’t get on. Nan is my dad’s mother. Nan jars Mum’s head by coming over to our house on Sundays and making gravy without lumps and going through our fridge looking at sell-by dates and making us watch Last of the Summer Wine repeats and then falling asleep sitting on the remote control with her teeth out, snoring.
Mum says that Nan has never liked her anyhow ’cos back in 1985 Dad used to have a girlfriend called Flo who had her typing qualification, a green bike with a shopping basket, and mousey brown hair with a side part who went to church, and Nan never ever got over the fact that Dad dumped Flo for Mum, ’cos Mum used to wear a tube skirt and a tight sweater and they used to go to see bands in Romford called stuff like Level 42 and come home drunk on brandy.
I just want my family to all get along.
There is no one else for me to talk to about all of this. My brother, Murphy, and dad, Brian, are neither use nor bloody ornament, as Nan would say. They spend all night in the living-room chatting rubbish about West Ham Football Club transfer rumors and then whenever I mention Cava-Sue running away from home it’s like they’ve gone deaf.
I have more sensible conversation with our Staffy, Penny, and believe me she’ll be dead soon as the entire street is in a conspiracy to feed her until she is as big as a small horse, and despite being on a strict low-fat/low-sugar diet I found her at number thirty-four just yesterday in Mrs. Khan’s kitchenette guzzling lamb passanda with a keema nan. She was blowing off garlic and coriander farts all night. Does Kirsten-who-is-trained know anything about dogs?
To make matters worse, me and my best mate, Carrie Draper, have fallen out big time. Carrie has been my bes
t friend in the whole world since Year Seven but then she met this rapper called Bezzie who was a right clown and she turned into a right drippy tart about him. Well, I said some stuff I maybe shouldn’t, like that he was a munter and had no skills as an emcee, and now even though Carrie’s split up with Bezzie ’cos he says she’s a dirty skank, Carrie’s still not talking to me, just ’cos I was the one who gave her all her stuff back, when Bezzie wanted to chuck it over her garden wall.
You can’t do right for doing wrong in this world can you?
Can someone from Fast-Track Family Feud help me make friends again with Carrie ’cos if I got that sorted out then maybe I could do the A-Levels/Cava-Sue/Nan/Mum/Dog’s obesity problems on my own?
Thank you for reading my letter. We are all available to appear on Fast-Track Family Feud on ITV2 whenever you would like and look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible.
Yours sincerely,
Shiraz Bailey Wood
I printed this out and sent it today. On reflection, maybe I shouldn’t have said that we were all available to go on telly, but I got a little bit carried away.
FRIDAY 3RD OCTOBER
It is my sixteenth birthday today. I didn’t tell anyone at school ’cos they’d all want to know what I was doing and the answer is nothing. Mum asked if I wanted to go to the Wimpy for an ice cream sundae or something. I said no ’cos a) the Wimpy closed down in 2001 and b) I’m not four. Mum said I should stop with the lip or I wouldn’t be getting my present, so I shut up quick. Dunno know why I bothered ’cos it was a fluffy hot-water bottle. A bloody fluffy hot-water bottle?! Having paid a bit of attention in geography recently the last thing I’m going to need with global warming is a hot-water bottle. Mum doesn’t give a crap about global warming, she says it’ll be nice to get a bit of sun without having to mix with foreigners and eat their food.
If the ice caps do melt and polar bears begin swimming further afield for sustenance I hope they find her betting shop.
Nan came round and gave me a £5 WH Smith’s gift card and a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. No card from Cava-Sue.
