Hazel Wood Girl (13 page)

I woke up at 6 am because I forgot to close the curtains last night and the sun came streaming in. I decided to wear my blue t-shirt with my faded jeans and my Converse. I did my hair in a couple of little pigtails to try and make it look like something other than just long and straight.

I spent half an hour writing to Charlie and Hellie and then read a book for a while. It’s really cool, all about a girl my age who speaks lots of languages and gets to help foil an international smuggling ring. Next year I will pay more attention in German class now that I have a reason! I wonder if you can do espionage as a degree? I guess they’d have to call it 
something else, so no one would know. I’ll ask Dad if I can learn to ski too, but that would involve money so I know he’ll say no. I sometimes fantasise that I’m older and can ski and ride horses and ice-skate and play tennis, and all Adie’s lot and the Rat Pack are trying to be my friends. Ridiculous, I know, but I can’t help it.

Dad asked me to mind the shop again so he could take Mum and Mikey to the doctors for Mikey’s check-up. He can’t walk properly because his feet are a bit funny, and so they need to get it sorted. He’s so cute though with his tufty, auburn baby-hair and the way he laughs all the time as he waddles around. He’s the only person in the world I get hugs from these days.

Mum won’t let me wear any of what she calls my ‘weird stuff’ when I’m working. As
if
people would change their minds about wanting a carton of milk and a newspaper just because I’m wearing a shirt with a Japanese cartoon and have three earrings in each ear. I don’t mind looking after the shop, I just hate the way they
tell
me rather than ask me, and the way it’s always so last minute. Like as if I don’t have my own life. Actually, now that the girls are gone, I don’t, but they still shouldn’t presume.

Then when they got back from the doctor’s I 
thought I could do something like go to the library and that’s when Dad handed me a
huge
bag of dry cleaning to bring up to the laundry place. It’s half a mile away and I don’t have a bike or anything, and as I took the bag Dad said something about my face, about my having an attitude. God, I hate him. I know for a fact that he spent every summer as a teenager swimming, fishing, rock-climbing and playing golf with homemade golf clubs with Uncle Paul. I might ask him to tell me that story again later tonight, just to remind him.

On my way back from the cleaners there was this old lady who was struggling with loads of laundry bags so I asked her if I could help. She was tiny and smiley and had white hair tied up on the back of her head with a purple gem clasp. She was well dressed for an old lady; you know the way some of them dress for comfort or as if they are still in the era they liked best, well she looked really classic and she didn’t have a million Kleenexes hanging out her sleeve.

Luckily she only lived nearby because those bags weighed a
ton
, it was like she had just got her armchairs dry cleaned or something! Mrs Miggs (weird name, I know) invited me in for a cup of tea. I actually really needed it at this stage, and plus, I was in no mood to go home, so I said yes. She had 
all these pictures of horses everywhere, and her house smelled of lavender, but not in a spray air-freshener way. (Our house always smells of rice for some reason.) When I asked her about the horses she told me this really cool story about how she got her first horse when she was seventeen. First we had to pour the tea as Mrs Miggs said,

‘You need tea to oil a good tale.’

She had been helping her mother wash the front step and polish the door when a beautiful chestnut horse just arrived, trotting along with its saddle half hanging off. She ran after the horse and tried to catch it; it was running so fast that it took her a while to notice this young man who was running behind, all irate looking. So, by now she’d caught the horse by the bridle, and the man thanked her and asked her to help him to get the horse back to his father’s stables, because he’d hurt his leg in the fall. Her mother looked at her disapprovingly (I know that look so well!), but she went anyway. When they got to the stables, the young man’s father started to yell at them both for the state of his magnificent horse. The young man explained to his father that he had to borrow the carriage horse because his own horse was too afraid of the trains to make the trip across the tracks and over to the sports ground. His father 
yelled at him even more and told him that he had exactly one day to find a new home for that useless old nag who cost him a fortune in oats and hay.

The young man had nowhere to put his own nervous grey horse and so she (young Mrs Miggs) said he could keep it in her back garden while his father calmed down. She spent the summer meeting up with the young man in the lane and sneaking into the garden to feed the horse and ride it before her parents woke up; they were fine about the horse, not so fine about the man.

I was so into the story that I was surprised to see someone else in the room.

‘Has Granny been telling you her “horse and hand” story?’ This really tall girl, about my age, with black hair in a shoulder-length bob, went over and gave Mrs Miggs a hug and then gave out to her for fetching the laundry bags. Mrs Miggs explained that I had helped and the girl grinned at me. She had the most teeth I had ever seen in one person, a bit like a horse herself, but good looking. She smelled like a farm, but not the worst bits of a farm.

‘I heard about the horse, but not about a hand,’ I said. I hate how I always blush in front of new people, but no one noticed, or at least they didn’t say anything.

‘Well, by the end of the summer my grandad had 
asked for Granny’s hand in marriage,’ the girl said as she poured herself a cup and reached for a slice of cake, ‘That’s why we call it the “horse and hand” story.’

She then looked me up and down and said that she loved my style, and Mrs Miggs said, ‘Yes, indeed, very unique.’

I felt my face burning so I mumbled that I had to be back home and they both said to drop in anytime.

I think I look ordinary, even though I wear arty clothes. I bet people can tell that I’m ordinary, all dressed up with no place to go, and all that. I don’t care, I like my clothes, and my friends think I look good too. It’s only Adie and Doris who ask me if I made that outfit myself, but they are professional bitches and it’s their job.

Sometimes when I look at Adie sneering at me, I can’t believe that we used to be best friends. We met when we were four at our first day at kindergarten and she used to be round at my house all the time – until we were nine and Doris joined the school and took Adie out on her dad’s boat and then that was it. I remember Mum kept asking where Adie was and I couldn’t think what to say, and then she eventually stopped asking. It was another year before I became friends with Charlie and Hellie and I can’t
believe
 
that Adie let me sit on my own at lunch (or with other groups of friends who would be a bit confused as to why I was sitting with them) for all that time. She didn’t start to get really, really horrible until I had new friends, but we decided early on not to stoop to their level although we are just as bitchy behind their backs, which means I’m not as brilliant as I pretend to be.

The whole thing is really stupid and it means I sometimes can’t get to talk to Johnny Saunders because I don’t want her to see me talk to him because she and Doris would tell him horrible things about me. One time after I got an A for an English essay and they got Ds and the teacher had me read it out at assembly, they told everyone that I had a verruca on my foot and that’s why they couldn’t invite me to their pool party.

That girl at Mrs Miggs’s looked amazing, not pretty and over-groomed like Adie and Doris, but like she could be a model when she’s older, really different …

Copper Girl
by Judy May, 2006

ISBN:978–0–86278–990–9

JUDY MAY grew up in Dublin and is an international traveller and adventurer. She has visited over thirty different countries and has lived in Kathmandu, Paris and New York. She has a degree in Drama and a Masters in literature from Trinity College, Dublin. When she was a journalist Judy May got to interview loads of famous bands and singers. When she was a teenager she met her favourite rock star and he sent her letters from time to time.