So apparently Sonia Cathcart’s dad hears me and his face goes dead purple and he starts shouting at Miss Bunt that these kids “HAVE SATAN WITHIN THEM.” Then he shouts that he KNOWS that his Sonia is going to heaven but we’ll all be left to roam the earth on Judgment Day with THE BEAST. So then Luther’s dad, who used to be a kickboxer, stands up and tells Sonia Cathcart’s dad to shut his bloody mush and stop “being a God-botherer” and one of them “religious funnymentalists.” So Sonia’s dad calls Luther’s dad a “filthy heathen” so Luther’s dad gives him a backhand and Sonia’s dad starts doing some weird martial arts moves and Mr. Bamblebury, our headmaster, has to split them up.
Then Miss Bunt shouts at Nabila Chaalan’s dad to stop filming the fight with his digital camera and Uma Brunton-Fletcher’s mother shouts at him, “Yeah, Abdul, stop filming, you bleedin’ sicko, you’re always here filming! What do you want a film of this for?!”
Then everyone starts really arguing with everyone else and Mr. Bamblebury gets dead angry and shouts that the Mayflower 2006 Winter Festival is now CANCELED. Then the Bean twins from Year Nine’s mother starts crying ’cos she’d spent all night making kitchen towels into shepherds’ outfits and now “her kiddies won’t even get to behold the baby Jesus or anyfin’!!!!” And at some point the police got called and that’s how we ended up on the front of the
Ilford Bugle
getting called “Superchav Academy” AGAIN.
3
PM
— Of course, at the end of the day, I do feel partly responsible for all of this.
SUNDAY 6TH JANUARY
4
PM
— Carrie and Carrie’s mum have just bumped into Miss Bunt with the moustache, our English teacher, in the pizza section of Asda. Carrie said that Miss Bunt says that she is no longer our English teacher. Carrie said Miss Bunt is going back to Adelaide in Australia to retrain as a florist. Carrie asked Miss Bunt if it was the Winter Festival that had done it. Miss Bunt said it was that and the constant nicknames she had to put up with from “some of the kids.” I feel terrible now. I was the one who started off “Hairy Bunt.”
11
PM
— I’m a bit worried about school. I can’t sleep. It is not helping that Cava-Sue has been getting mushy phonecalls and texts all night. I asked her who they’re from and she said, “Mind your big nose, beakgirl.” I know they’re from Lewis, ’cos I’ve been pretending to be asleep but I am not.
11:15
PM
— Cava-Sue needs to start being nicer to me or when I meet this “Lewis” I will totally grass her up about the panty-pad boobs she wore on New Year’s Eve. Cava-Sue is flatter than me. Cava-Sue’s baps make mine look like cantaloupe melons.
MONDAY 7TH JANUARY
BACK TO SCHOOL!!!!
Mr. Bamblebury gathered all of the Year Nines and Tens into the assembly room today and moaned at us about behavior. Mr. Bamblebury said the whole point of Marlowe Comprehensive School’s name being officially changed to the Mayflower Academy last September and being given all that money by the Prime Minister to become a center of excellence was that WE WERE ALL SUPPOSED TO BE TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF!!
Mr. Bamblebury really really shouted when he said “new leaf” and stared at me and Luther and Chantalle and Carrie.
Mr. Bamblebury said that he was tired of the blatant disregard for rules, non-attendance, and general tomfoolery. (Tomfoolery! I love that word!! Why are some words so good?) Mr. Bamblebury said he was not standing for ANY MORE OF OUR DISRESPECT. Then he said that a number of measures were in place and we’d certainly be noticing them over the coming weeks. I don’t know what that meant.
Mr. Bamblebury said to begin with he wanted to see Uma Brunton-Fletcher in his office at 10
AM
to talk about the FILTHY language and accusations about him and his pet cat on her My Space page. Kezia Marshall shouted out that he’d have a job doing that as Uma’s mother always takes her out of school during the first two weeks of January to go to the Dominican Republic.
Mr. Bamblebury’s eyes bulged out of his head then and he made us spend the next fifteen minutes singing gay songs about robins and rainbows from the
Come and Praise
songbook, while he stared out the window mumbling things that sounded like bad swear words.
Miss Bunt has definitely gone for good. Me and Carrie went to English today and Miss Bunt wasn’t there. We had a substitute teacher from Poland instead who had a small face and a long neck and looked a lot like Jar Jar Binks.
I didn’t learn her name as she won’t be here very long anyhow, so we all called her Jar Jar, not to her face though, just behind her back (although I have got quite a loud voice so she might have heard).
TUESDAY 8TH JANUARY
CARRIE DRAPER IS IN LOVE! With someone she doesn’t even know. She told me in math. This isn’t totally shocking news as Carrie is always falling in love. She was in love with Keith the Robbie Williams tribute bloke last week, but he hasn’t returned any emails to her and this is after him personally telling her to check out his MySpace and everything.
Anyway, now Carrie likes some lad that lives down Dawson Drive. Carrie said she sees him fixing his Vauxhall Nova with his mate when she is out walking Alexis, her mum’s Chihuahua. (Walking! Ha — that stupid fluffy thing just gets carried everywhere.)
Carrie said I must remember him as we saw him when we went on our walk at Christmas. So I said to Carrie was it that guy with the strawberry nose who shouted at us and Carrie said no, don’t be sick, that was the park-keeper and he was like forty. Carrie said that the lad she is in love with is totally gorgeous and tall and he’s about eighteen and has a silver car with alloy wheels and silver wheel arches. I don’t remember him at all but Carrie says she’s seen him a few times now about Goodmayes and in Burger King once and he is lush.
Nothing exciting happened at school today. That Jar Jar Binks woman tried to make us look at our GCSE set text,
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë. The book is about a munter teacher who lives in a castle or something. She tried to make us study a page then answer a question about why we thought the woman was so sad. What is the point? I’m not going to pass GCSE English, no chance.
“Are there any queries?” Jar Jar said after we read through a page together.
“Yeah miss, Sean Burton!” I shouted and pointed at Sean in our English class who dyes his hair blond and has a pink MySpace page and always goes on about his Kylie Minogue
Showgirls
DVD and wears concealer. Everyone laughed for ages and we got nothing done.
Jar Jar Binks pulled a sad face. I think she’s done well to last two days.
THURSDAY 10TH JANUARY
Carrie dragged me and Alexis for a walk down Dawson Drive to see if we could spot “The Most Gorgeous Boy In The World Ever” and his mate. They weren’t there. Carrie was dead hacked off as she says TMGBITWE is always there poking his Nova with a spanner most nights and yesterday he even looked up and noticed her!
Carrie said this was just her luck as Alexis the dog had just done a poo five minutes beforehand and Carrie was still carrying the poo in a little plastic bag looking for a trash bin to dump it in. This is why Carrie totally wanted to see TMGBITWE again tonight I think. Carrie is paranoid that TMGBITWE thinks she always carries about a small plastic bag of dog poo.
Anyway, he wasn’t there and neither was his mate or the Vauxhall Nova. I hope something happens soon as I am sick of freezing my arse off on Dawson Drive carrying a dog that looks like something my nan once got me for my birthday to keep my pajamas in.
SATURDAY 12TH JANUARY
No school today, thank God. Me and Carrie went to Ilford Mall ’cos Carrie needed to take back the too-small Calvin Klein bra. All the usual Year Ten faces were down the mall. Chantalle, Luther, Kezia and like twenty other randoms were all on the third floor hanging about the food court stressing out the security guards by wearing their hoodies up and laughing too loudly and asking the staff at Magic Spuds for beakers of free tap water.
So we were all laughing our heads off ’cos Luther had just tried to run down the up escalator, when the big scary Chinese security guard arrived and said we were taking up the tables where the real people could be sitting so we all had to go. So Kezia started getting all up in his face like a rudegirl going, “Like what am I bro? NOT A REAL PERSON?” And the security guard just laughed at her ’cos he was like two hundred fifty pounds and six feet tall and looked like he could kill her with one flick.
Then Kezia said, “I got like civil liberties, y’know bredren!”
And the security guard laughed and said, “You go have your civil liberties outside McDonald’s, not in my mall then.” Then he chucked us all out.
Then me and Carrie left everyone and went to Superdrug to look at the nail polish. We were coming out of Superdrug and Carrie saw this dead fit lad with tiny cornrow dreads and wide shoulders called Lee Coatchford, who everyone calls Cotch, who used to work for Carrie’s dad as an apprentice at Draper Hydration after he got asked to leave Mayflower last year. But then Cotch left Draper Hydration ’cos he said he was going to go in the marines, but then he didn’t do that either so it seems.
Anyway Carrie sees him and she says, “All right Cotch!”
And Cotch sees Carrie and he looked well happy and he’s like, “All right darling, how’s it going?”
And Carrie goes, “Aw not bad, Cotch, just shopping!” Then she puts her head to the side and made her voice all softer and said, “’Ere Cotch, how’s your mum doing?”
So Cotch starts telling Carrie all about his mum who’s had some kind of blood cancer thingy and Carrie’s saying all the right things back like, “Well, Cotch, it sounds like the doctors know what they’re doing,” and “’Ere, well tell her that me and my mum and dad are all thinking of her.”
After about five minutes, Cotch walked off saying he was dead happy to have bumped into Carrie and he’ll IM her or comment on her MySpace pics. Then Carrie put her arm through mine and dragged me to H&M to look at the earrings, and as we walked to H&M I was thinking to myself, why can’t I do that with boys? Why can I never think of the right thing to say?
SUNDAY 13TH JANUARY
Nan came over for Sunday dinner today. We had chicken and roast potatoes and carrots and Brussels sprouts and peas and gravy, which was nice ’cos Nan cooked most of it. When I woke up at 10
AM
I could smell the chicken cooking and hear my mum giving my dad earache to take the trash bag out and Cava-Sue singing in the shower and Murphy throwing squeezie Bart Simpson down the hallway for Penny and I don’t know why that made me feel happy but it did.
When no one was listening, I told Nan that I was writing in the diary but it was A SECRET.
Nan says that my secret is safe with her and that she is glad as I was always good at writing when I was little and had a good imagination too. Nan said she always remembers how once when I was little I locked Murphy in the under-the-stairs cupboard and told everyone he had run away with some pikeys in long capes and long flappy shoes in a big yellow car with a loud horn.
Nan says everyone laughed their bleeding heads off ’cos they could totally hear Murphy crying and when they opened the cupboard and all looked inside he screamed the house down even more. Nan says that I told everyone that the pikeys must have changed their minds and put Murphy in the cupboard instead. Nan says I’ve always been “sharp as a tack.” I’m not sure how this story proves that ’cos I’ve heard it like a hundred times now and I still think it makes me sound like someone who ends up in special ed.
Me and Cava-Sue washed up then and listened to Dave Pearce dance anthems in our room like we always do on Sunday. It’s not as much fun now ’cos Cava-Sue reckons she doesn’t know any of the songs anymore as they’re all “commercial” and that. Cava-Sue doesn’t want to sing along with me anymore and she definitely doesn’t want do any “hands in the air” bits.
Cava-Sue said she’d rather listen to bands that no one has heard of ’cos it makes it more special. It’s dead weird ’cos the more clever stuff Cava-Sue learns at college, the more thick things she says. Who wants to listen to a band that no one has heard of?
MONDAY 14TH JANUARY
BIG GOSSIP TODAY. Latoya Bell says that Kezia Marshall thinks she’s PREGNANT! Latoya says Kezia was crying in the nurse’s office this afternoon when Latoya went in to get an Advil for period pain. Latoya, who is a right gobby cow, says she saw Kezia in the nurse’s “advice” armchair and the nurse with the calendar out, counting days. I don’t know how this proves Kezia is having a baby but it seems to be enough for Latoya, who is telling everyone in Mayflower and saying Kezia is a slut. Latoya Bell said to me in the lunch line that at Uma’s New Year party she saw Luther going into the laundry room with Kezia then shutting the door and coming out laughing.
Latoya thinks I am her friend but I’m not. I just pretend to be ’cos I saw what she did to Chenai Green when Chenai and Latoya stopped being friends. All that stuff with the fake MySpace and the text messages. That was nasty. It’s easier to just be a faker. But I ain’t going to crawl up her arse or nothing. I ain’t no beg friend.
Luther said it was all crap when Carrie told him the rumor at lunch. But then he gave me his cheese and chips ’cos he couldn’t eat them and didn’t say much else today at all. I hope it isn’t true. He wouldn’t be a very good baby-daddy. He can’t even remember to bring a pen most days, let alone buy nappies and stuff.
WEDNESDAY 16TH JANUARY
Jar Jar Binks has gone! This other woman turned up instead, who was tall and not fat but quite big. She was dressed in a black jacket and black skirt with high heels, and she had black glossy skin, lipgloss on her lips and a stern voice. She kicked open the door to the English room, then walked in carrying a box of books.
“Year Ten, Stream Two?” she said.
“Yeah,” we all said.
“’Ere, are you the new substitute?” I shouted.
The woman ignored me. She had those black-rimmed trendy glasses on that pretentious people from the middle of London wear.
“Sit down, all of you right now and turn off your cell phones,” she said, standing behind the desk.