by Hayley Long
And this time, instead of screaming at me, my inner being was just mumbling and muttering to itself. And the words that it was mumbling and muttering were these:
you’re being absolutely absurd you’re being absolutely absurd
you’re being absolutely absurd
And within a short while, I started to feel less like an emotional hardcore punk and more like the biggest nerd in the entire nerdiverse. Because it began to occur to me that possibly –just possibly – my mum was right and I was absurd. I clambered out of my wardrobe and sat on my bed for a bit and then I got up and took my dictionary off my bookshelf and looked up the word absurd.10 It said this:
absur’d adjective silly; ridiculous; incongruous
And even though I didn’t have a flipping clue what incongruous meant, I understood the words silly and ridiculous perfectly well and I’m still troubled by those words even now and it doesn’t make me feel very clever when I think that possibly –just possibly – this is how I’ve been behaving. So then I looked up the word incongruous and it said this:
incŏ’ngruous adjective absurd; out of place; disagreeing
I put down the dictionary and scratched my head. However much I wanted to deny it then, and would still like to deny it now, I have to admit that the Hippo Eater Happy Pub is really not the place to throw a wobbler. Some people might even argue that my behaviour in the Hippo Eater at Saturday lunchtime was actually downright disagreeable and the mark of someone with a totally bad brattitude.
I scratched my head again and put the dictionary back on the shelf. Then I did what I always do when I need an immediate honest answer to an important direct question. I picked up my phone and texted Goose.
And barely a minute later, my phone bleeped back at me with Goose’s reply.
Which made me feel ever so slightly better but only by a microscopic mini-fraction. To be honest, with each passing second, I was getting more and more and more regretful about having told my mum that she was sad and tragic.
I switched off my mobile and stared into space. I was beginning to feel quite sad and tragic myself. Blake, my counsellor, once told me that when I’m feeling like this, it’s probably best not to think too much. He reckons I should try to switch my head off and allow myself to float quietly through the dreary feeling. Then, when I’m feeling more positive and in control of things, I can do all the thinking and reflecting I need in order to avoid the same situation happening again.
So I switched my head off and tried to think of nothing.
Downstairs, the sound of the telephone cut through the silence. I curled up on my bed and put my pillow over my head and continued trying to think of nothing. It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Instead of thinking of:
I was now thinking about how it was really warm and cosy under my pillow and how it smelt faintly of hair dye. And I was also thinking about how I could still hear the stupid blinking telephone. Which led me to thinking about how my mum obviously wasn’t in any sort of mood to pick it up.
After a few more noisy and thought-packed seconds, the answer-machine finally kicked into operation and the house plunged back into silence. I took the pillow away from my face and sat up again. On the opposite wall of my bedroom, a picture I had of René Descartes which I’d printed off the internet stared back at me. Underneath I had scribbled the words:
And when I read those words again, it suddenly dawned on me that, in spite of all Blake’s good advice, I needed to listen to what the father of modern philosophy was telling me and actually start thinking straight away. Because, somehow, I had to make things better between me and my mum.
And seeing as how I’m much better at writing than I am at thinking, I got up from my bed, picked up a notepad and pen from my desk and decided to write down exactly what was in my head and why I was feeling so completely cheddarly-cheesed off.
Before I even knew what was going on, I had written my mum a letter. It went like this:
I read it through a couple of times. It said what needed to be said. I put the letter in the pocket of my jeans, opened my bedroom door and listened. The house was still really quiet. Weirdly quiet. I couldn’t hear any of the usual Saturday sounds. Sounds like the TV or my mum singing along to the radio or the thump thump thump of her jumping around to her fitness CD. I snuck along the landing to my mum’s room and knocked nervously on the door. There was no answer so I pushed the door open to check that she wasn’t hiding from me and then I went to Ruthie’s room and pushed that door open too. Inside, Winnie was sitting up and washing his little white face. It’s extremely rare for Winnie to be awake before teatime so I took this as a sign that he wanted to give me some moral support, scooped him up and carried him along with me. At the bottom of the stairs, I paused again and listened. There was really no sound at all. Nothing.
Puzzled, I wondered for a second if my mum was doing something in the garden but then I saw the rain hammering against the hallway window and decided that this was probably unlikely.
Shifting Winnie to my other arm, I crossed over to the telephone table which stands in a corner of our hallway and pressed the button on the answer machine. After three short beeps, Gareth’s voice broke the silence.
‘Hey Lottie, Gareth it is. I was just wondering if you wanted to come and see a film with me tonight. Love, Lies and Secrets is on at the Ponty-Carlo. It’s supposed to be one of those romcom things. Not my type of film if I’m honest but I thought you might like it. Ring me back, yeah.’
Even though I wasn’t in the mood for smiling, I smiled anyway. I couldn’t stop myself. Normally, Gareth only ever likes to watch films about Rocky Balboa or rugby. Hanging around with me must be seriously giving him the Frillies.
Minutes later, I saw the note. It was in the kitchen, pinned up on the door of the fridge with a magnet. There was nothing weird about that. My mum and I often use the fridge door as a message board. What was unusual, though, was the length of the note. Usually our messages say things like Your shepherd’s pie is in the microwave or I’m at Goose’s. But this new note was abnormally long. Still clutching Winnie, I took it off the fridge and read it. It said this:
And even though I had Winnie’s warm little body cuddled up tightly right next to mine, I was suddenly overcome by this massive landslide of loneliness. I was the loneliest person in the entire loneliverse. Sort of like this:
For a moment, I just stood there, floating without a radio in space, and stroked Winnie’s warm little head. Then, carefully, I put him down on the floor. Taking my own letter out of my pocket, I unfolded it and read it through again. And then I scrunched it up into a tiny ball and buried it in the rubbish bin where my mum would never see it. Because I’d suddenly got this feeling that it didn’t say what was needed, after all. Taking a pen from the kitchen drawer, I turned over my mum’s note and wrote a single word on the back of it.
And then I stuck it back on the fridge and hoped from the very bottom of my heart that my mum would never again feel the need to write me a letter and run away to have a cup of tea with the next-door neighbour. I hadn’t even heard her leave. But I suppose this is one of the dangers of sitting inside a wardrobe or burying your head under a pillow.
hOw we Came tO aN UNCOmfOrtaBLe arraNGemeNt
Since then we’ve spent the last forty-eight hours giving each other lots of space. Our house currently has more space in it than the entire solar system. Today, I got home from school at seventeen minutes past four and it’s now forty-three minutes past nine and I’ve pretty much spent every three hundred and twenty-six of those intervening minutes up here in my bedroom with the door closed. I’ve managed to get tons of stuff done though. I’ve done all of my history homework, written down heaps more of my random reflections and philosophical thoughts and joined eighty-seven different groups on Facebook – including:
I can’t remember what the other eighty-three are.
But obviously, I haven’t been shut up in here for all that time. Occasionally I’ve popped
down the hallway to check up on Winnie and I’ve visited the bathroom three times and I did also go downstairs for a while and eat tea with my mum but the conversation between us was unnaturally flat and lacked its usual sparkle. My mum asked me how my day had been and I said it was pretty much like most other Mondays and then we had a conversation about the sausages we were eating and how they tasted much nicer than the usual brand we buy but how, actually, they cost a staggering twelve pence less. Ordinarily, this is not the kind of thing that my mum and I would bother to discuss.
But nothing is very ordinary at the moment.
In fact, it’s all gone a bit pear-shaped, wonk-ways and completely downside-up. I don’t know how to behave around my mum and I get the distinct impression that she isn’t exactly sure how to behave around me either.
On Saturday, after I found her note on the fridge, I went into the living room and flopped out in front of the TV. To be honest, I just put it on so that I could hear some other human voices. But then, because every human voice on the television was talking total drivel and irritating my bits off, I ended up switching over to the Welsh language channel. This was actually a lot less irritating because I no longer had the foggiest clue whether anyone was talking total drivel or not. On the screen, a young guy wearing a pin-striped suit was playing a purple guitar and singing to an audience of old folks in an old folks’ home. The titles on the screen told me that his name was Harri Parry and his song was called Lladfa yn y Disgo.11 Even though I couldn’t understand a single word that he was singing, he had quite a nice voice and was strumming a very relaxing tune. Throughout the whole song, the old folks sat with their heads down, blatantly asleep, but when it was over they all jumped up in their seats and started clapping and wolf-whistling and banging their walking-frames on the floor. Then they threw their cushions at him. It was classic! I’m definitely going to try to watch Welsh telly a bit more often.
I don’t think Winnie liked it much though. As soon as the song began, he ran off and hid behind the back of the sofa, leaving me all on my own. So when it had finished and the programme had moved on to an interview with a man who was shovelling piles of poo out of a pigsty, I pressed the mute button to encourage Winnie to come out from his hiding-place and sit with me again. But he wouldn’t. In the corner of the living room, the lights on our Christmas tree were twinkling and changing colour and, after a while of watching them, I struggled up from the sofa and switched them off. And then, because I was in a bit of a dark mood, I turned off the living room lamp as well so that the only light in the room was the flickering light of the silenced television.
An hour or more must have passed like this before finally, I heard the noises I’d been waiting for. The front door creaked open and then slammed shut and my mum’s footsteps moved towards the kitchen. I heard the click of the light switch and then there was a moment of silence which, to me, seemed noisier than all the other stuff put together. This was replaced by the sound of my mum’s footsteps again, and the door of the living room was pushed open. My mum was holding the fridge-note in her hand. Without looking at me, she walked over to the TV and switched it off and then she crossed over to the lamp and switched it on, before moving over to the Christmas tree and switching those lights on as well. Then she turned around and jumped right out of her skin.
‘Hi,’ I said.
My mum said, ‘Why on earth are you sitting in the dark?’
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you jump.’
My mum looked at me. She had a very serious expression on her face. It was the most serious expression I’d seen on her face for ages. Even her glamorous new shade of lipstick didn’t do anything to soften the overall effect of deadly seriousness. After a second or so of total tension, she said, ‘Never mind that – how about a proper apology for the way you talked to me this lunchtime!’ And then she held up the piece of paper taken from the fridge door.
‘That is a proper apology,’ I said.
My mum gave me another long hard serious stare and then, finally, she sat down on the chair opposite me and said, ‘You really upset me, you know.’
I sat with my head down, just like I’d seen the old folks on the TV doing earlier. I was blatantly wide awake though.
My mum said, ‘I’ve been on my own for six years, Lottie. Six years! Is it really so impossible for you to be happy for me now?’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
My mum sniffed.
I chewed my thumbnail for a moment and then I said, ‘I’m not going to find him sneaking around our house in a dressing gown, am I? Because that would really freak me out.’
My mum looked shocked. ‘We’ve only just started seeing each other. What kind of a woman do you think I am?’
I smiled a bit then. My mum smiled a bit too. ‘Sorry,’ I said again, louder this time.
‘Apology accepted,’ said my mum.
And then, because it had been on my mind, I said, ‘Gareth phoned up earlier and invited me to go to the cinema with him tonight. Can I go or am I grounded?’
My mum raised her eyebrows. ‘Am I grounded?’
‘Huh?’ I could hardly believe my own ears. My mum was actually asking me if she was grounded! Confused, I searched her face to see if she was joking. She wasn’t.
‘Well,’ explained my mum, ‘I don’t see why you should get to go out but I have to sit in the house all by myself on a Saturday evening. That doesn’t seem very fair to me.’
I sighed. She’s a very clever woman, my mum. It’s hardly surprising that she manages to out-manoeuvre all those shifty Cardiff criminals. Through gritted teeth, I said, ‘If you want to go out tonight with Stevie Wonder, that’s perfectly fine by me.’
‘Smashing!’ said my mum. ‘So the arrangements for this evening are settled.’ And then, for the second time that afternoon, she jumped right out of her skin because Winnie picked that exact moment to come out from behind the sofa and bounce straight into her lap.
hOw MICheLaNGeLO stOPPeD me BehavING LIke a tOtaL turNIP
On the stroke of seven o’clock, Gareth rang the front doorbell. Gareth is a very punctual person. I’ve never once known him to be late. But what’s unusual about Gareth is that I’ve never known him to be early either. As I opened the door, I said, ‘How do you do it, Gaz? Bang on seven! Your timekeeping is extreme!’
Gareth kissed me on the lips for five full seconds and when he’d finished he said, ‘Extreme’s got nothing to do with it, Lottie Biggs. I’m just in control of the situation, that’s all.’ Then he drop-kicked an invisible rugby ball through an invisible pair of goalposts at the end of our hallway and added, ‘Wanna know what Coach Jenkins has to say on the subject?’
‘Of course!’ I said, my eyes round with exaggerated eagerness. ‘I’d be extremely interested to know.’ And then I smiled very sweetly. Gareth thinks that Coach Jenkins is the man with the plan. Coach Jenkins is in charge of the school rugby team and Gareth goes on about him quite a lot.
Gareth looked at me disapprovingly and waved his finger in my face. ‘I hope you’re not being disrespectful to The Jenkins, young lady, cos he’s the chief with the beef I waited. I knew there was more to come. Sure enough, Gareth bunched his fist into an imaginary microphone, raised it to his mouth and made a few random beatbox noises. Then, while working the decks of a non-existent turntable, he sang, ‘He’s the geezer with the visa – he’s the dude in the snood – he’s the okey-doke bloke with the masterstroke!’ And then he started beatboxing again.
I’d never seen him do this before. It made me giggle.
Gareth grinned and said, ‘To be honest, it works better when me and Spud do it as a freestyling dubstepping duo.’ And then, nodding his head thoughtfully, he added, ‘But in all seriousness, Coach Jenkins reckons that time flies and if we aren’t careful pilots, we’ll end up as mutilated victims in the twisted wreck of the air crash.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘That’s cheerful!’
Gareth shrugged. ‘Coach Jenkins says a lot of things an
d not all of them are cheerful. Coach Jenkins reckons that sometimes you gotta be blunt to stay in front.’
I don’t know whether it was the sublime rhyme in his concise advice or whether it was the influence of the street coming up through his feet but, whatever it was, Gareth started to beatbox again. At the same time, my mum stuck her head into the hall and said, ‘Hi, Gareth.’ Instantly, Gareth stopped beatboxing, turned as red as the dragon on the Welsh flag and mumbled, ‘’lo, Mrs Biggs.’ Then he lapsed into an embarrassed silence.
My mum said, ‘Have a nice time, you two.’ And then, for the first time since our disastrous lunch, she grinned. ‘And I love those block-rocking beat noises that you were just making, Gareth. Very funky.’
Gareth’s face went even redder than the dragon on the Welsh flag. Mine probably did as well. I think it’s safe to say that we were both fighting off a really nasty attack of the cringe-flu. My mum turned to me and said, ‘Be back by eleven.’
‘You too,’ I said a bit sharply.
‘I will be,’ said my mum a little sharply back to me. ‘But have you got your key, just in case?’
I hooked my door key out of my pocket and swung it around on my little finger to show her.
My mum nodded. ‘OK.Well, make sure you don’t lose it.’
‘You too,’ I said.
‘And don’t get into any trouble,’ said my mum.
‘You too,’ I said.
My mum frowned and, just for a second, the horribly serious expression that I’d seen on her face earlier reappeared. She widened her eyes, flared her nostrils and tilted back her head to glare at me. Sort of like this:
