Planet Janet (3 page)

Stopped at the bookshop on the way home. I reckoned this would be a good time to read one of the books Ms Staples is always talking about. Deep, meaningful, angst-filled modern classics are her speciality. I got
The Outsider
by Albert Camus because Ms Staples says he was into the absurdness of life, and because I definitely identify with the title (the
Spiritually and Creatively Gifted
are always on the outside, aren’t they?). And also because it was about three thousand pages shorter than
Ulysses
(another of Ms Staples’s favourites).

I’m absolutely exhausted! Marcus, David and Flynn came round to help me and Disha paint my room today. I could only find three rollers, so Disha and I did the woodwork with brushes. It looks well wicked! We did the walls purple and the woodwork black. It’s v sophisticated, but powerful and moody at the same time. You can imagine someone sitting in it, writing poetry and listening to jazz. (Which, of course, is what I plan to do!)

Started
The Outsider
. The narrator’s mother dies on page one, which seems promising. I fell asleep though before I could get any further. Thank God I didn’t get
Ulysses
, or I’d be reading it for the rest of my life!!!

This really is going to be a year of incredible maturity. I had my first BRUSH WITH THE LAW today! Willow gave me ten quid to take Jupiter (son of Willow) and Mars (dog of Willow) to the park for a couple of hours so she could have her hair and nails done for the New Year. (Willow may be a hippy but she’s pretty desperate for a boyfriend, so she cares about her appearance.) You can see why I call Willow the Dippy Hippy. Can you imagine naming someone you’re meant to love Jupiter? I mean, if you want to RUIN someone’s life! And also I think it’s affected him v badly. Jupiter’s only six, but he’s already a sex pervert. He’s always trying to rub against you or grope your breasts. It’s
so
disgusting. I’ve learned never to sit down when he’s in the room (once I actually went home with a chocolate handprint on my left breast). Anyway, Mars found this stick that was almost as big as he is and insisted on dragging it home. We weren’t in the flat five minutes when a copper turned up at the door, threatening to arrest me for removing public property from the park! Is this what we pay taxes for? Fortunately Willow came home before me, Mars and Jupiter were actually taken away in handcuffs. She’s a lot like Sappho in some ways. Authority figures don’t intimidate her. She told the policeman he should be out hunting criminals, not harassing innocent dogs and children. Then she threatened to report him and he said he could report her for child neglect for leaving Jupiter with someone as irresponsible as ME!!! So then Willow threatened to go to the media with the story.

My family have the aesthetics of wildebeests – which probably isn’t v fair to wildebeests. Not one of them appreciates the new decor of my room. The Mad Cow said it reminded her of a whorehouse. I asked her if she was saying this from previous experience, or if she was just basing it on her wide knowledge of whorehouses in general, and she told me I wasn’t half as funny as I thought I was (how original is that?!!). Nan said that she would never have been allowed to get away with painting her room like that When She Was a Girl. I said I was surprised she could remember that far back.

D and I were invited to a Bruce Lee Festival at Marcus’s for New Year’s Eve but we declined. Even though I find boys can be pretty interesting on their own, when you get a few of them together their maturity level collapses in a v alarming way. They think a car chase is intellectually challenging. Disha agrees. She says it sometimes strikes her as absolutely amazing that all of the Great Thinkers are men. It doesn’t really seem possible. So since Disha’s parents went out last night, D and I spent a quiet New Year’s Eve at hers. In anticipation of this momentous upcoming year, we both wore black jeans and tops, and black lipstick and eyeshadow. The effect was excruciatingly DP. There was a bottle of white wine in the fridge, and Disha said we could take it because her parents had had so much to drink over the last week they wouldn’t notice. I’d nicked a couple of fags from Sigmund’s LAST pack (this time he says he really
is
giving up for good). We don’t smoke, of course (never mind the heart disease etc., have you SEEN what nicotine does to your TEETH?), but we reckoned it was a special occasion so we should try it the once. (And also MASSES of Great Artists and Writers have been addicted to tobacco as well as alcohol, so we reckoned it was fitting for the beginning of the Dark Phase.) Disha managed a whole one, but I was coughing too much to exactly enjoy it, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. But the wine was great. (If I have to be addicted to something because of my
Creative Spirit
I would definitely prefer white wine to something that could give you cancer and ruin your smile. Plus Willow says white wine’s NOT FATTENING, and everything else I like is!!! We lit a bunch of candles and some incense, found a jazz programme on the radio, and sat on the floor of Disha’s room. We talked for HOURS. Mainly about life. It was all v deep and intense, and v intellectual. Disha said it was too bad the wine wasn’t one of those bottles in a straw basket, since that was much more Dark Phase than Chardonnay, but I said wine was the drink of intellectuals no matter what it was in. D puked in her waste bin in the middle of the night, but the wine must’ve knocked me out because I didn’t hear her. Neither of us even had a headache today. But Disha told her mum she thought she had a touch of flu, so she didn’t even have to clean out the waste bin herself.

I don’t believe in making New Year’s resolutions. I believe in constant and continuous personal growth. My parents, being tr
è
s mundane, make resolutions every year – and usually break them by noon on January first. So, this isn’t a resolution, but one thing I am going to do this year is listen to more jazz. Disha and I really enjoyed the programme on the radio last night, even though a lot of the time there wasn’t any tune you could actually recognize. But that’s because jazz is the music of the intellectual, so it’s meant to be like that. In our house all that’s usually played is the music of the bourgeois (Sigmund’s Capital Gold and the MC’s classical tapes) and the depraved (the noise Justin listens to). And also I’m going on a diet. It’s not like I’m OBESE or anything, but artists, writers and intellectuals in a Dark Phase tend to be lean. (Disha said that’s because they’re usually too poor to eat, but I pointed out that the artist who sold her bed to Saatchi and Saatchi isn’t poor, and Disha said that just because someone put your bed in a gallery didn’t make you Rembrandt, who anyway was FAT. I hope she’s not going to spend the Dark Phase being argumentative.)

When I got back to the
House of Horror
, the MC and Sigmund had had another MAJOR ROW. I knew as soon as I got into the flat because Jupiter was watching telly in the living-room and the MC and Willow were muttering darkly in the kitchen. Sigmund only emerged from the Bunker for supper, and they didn’t say a word to each other for the whole meal. Personally I prefer it when they’re not speaking since at least it’s quiet.

Life really is v ironic, isn’t it? (This is something I’ve been noticing more and more lately.) Every morning during term I drag myself out of bed and listen to the news hoping that a small fire’s closed my school for at least one day, but when it’s the holidays I’m BORED OUT OF MY MIND!!! Disha, of course, feels exactly the same. She says she’s finding the holiday stultifying (meaning it’s turning her brain into oatmeal). I asked her where she got that word from and she said that just shows how bad it is, doesn’t it? She’s started reading the dictionary for fun. Thank God Flynn rang up and said everybody was hanging out at David’s this afternoon if we’d like to come along. Do birds like to fly? Not only were we DYING to get out of the house, but this was our Dark Phase debut, so to speak. (Disha got a red leather jacket for Xmas, which is unfortunate since even though it’s cooler than ice it RUINS the effect. Thank God my boots are black.) The Mad Cow wanted to know if I was going to a funeral (is that funny, or what?!!), and Sigmund said no, it was just the way creatures on my planet dress (surely I must’ve been adopted!). It took me and D so long to get totally ready that by the time we got to David’s Flynn had already gone home! After inviting us and everything. It’s too much, really. Except for David (who said we looked
v Morticia Addams
), none of the others even noticed our new look! They were too busy stuffing their faces and playing the PlayStation game David got for Xmas, which was V BORING, esp. if you were practically starving to death. It made me think about the power of telly and stuff like that. Their reality’s totally distorted. You should’ve heard them banging on about tactics like they were crack SAS troops and not teenage boys who can’t get across London without an A–Z. My feet were hurting a bit from my new boots and my stomach was starting to growl (all I’d had all day was ONE slice of DRY toast and two v small apples) and D looked like she might fall asleep, so we decided to leave. Fortunately I’ve had new boots before, so I’d thought to bring a pair of shoes with me. I changed as soon as we got out of the house and was able to walk home without doing my feet any permanent damage, even though I didn’t look as cool. I was RAVENOUS by the time I got home, of course. I stood at the counter and ate half a packet of water biscuits, which I reckon is OK since they don’t have any fat in them. Not so sure about the cheese.

I think the Mad Cow’s really starting to lose it (she is pushing fifty). If she’s not picking fights with Sigmund, she’s picking them with me! I sat down to have a cup of tea with her this afternoon while she was cooking something and she went BERSERK because I sniffed the milk. I just wanted to make sure it hadn’t gone off. Is that a crime? I swear that I am not going to become grumpy and senile when I get old. I’m going to have a
Young Heart and Soul
, even when I’m sixty. And maybe plastic surgery.

D says it sounds to her like the MC must be MENOPAUSAL!!! She says she’s heard of cases where the woman either won’t come out of her room for months or does weird things like painting the entire flat bright orange (sometimes on the OUTSIDE!!!). When her nan went through the menopause she thought that ghosts were after her and kept climbing into the washing machine because she thought she’d be safe there (it was a top loader).

Went with Disha to exchange my three gift sets of Raspberry Ripple for three sets of White Musk, since Raspberry Ripple is tr
è
s unsuitable for the Dark Phase (as Disha said, it sounds like an ice cream and intellectuals don’t eat ice cream; they eat brie). But the sales assistant wouldn’t exchange them because I didn’t have the receipts. I asked her where else she thought they came from, since they say Body Shop on them, but she was a right stubborn cow. Disha says I can always use them as presents for other people, as long as I don’t give her one.

The Mad Cow was sitting in the kitchen, sniffing into a cup of tea, when Disha and I got back. I couldn’t tell whether or not she’d been crying, but she looked like she was getting into one of her
Moods
. We made ourselves scarce. Disha says the MC seems V TENSE lately, but I explained that it’s just her hormones. She’s up and down like a staircase. You never know what mood she’s going to be in. D says she hopes that if we ever get that old they’ll have invented some drugs to combat it.

Andrew the Missing Link Jeffers, Justin’s best mate for reasons that will become obvious, accosted me in the kitchen while I was making myself a cup of tea. He wanted me to know that he thinks my friend Disha is v fit. I said that’s because she works out and has a black belt in karate, and he said that wasn’t what he meant. (Really? Um, duh…! I didn’t know that!) He said to tell her she has great tits. I told him to tell her himself.

According to
The Lives of the Great Feminists
, Virginia Woolf is famous for saying that every woman should have a room of her own. You can tell right off that she didn’t live with my family. I woke up this morning to find the child my parents should NEVER have had standing over my bed taking pictures of me! (I wouldn’t sleep in the nude in this house in a heatwave.) It’s all the Mad Cow’s fault for getting him that new camera for Christmas. (She’s always spoiled him!) It’s digital or something like that and so he’s started taking pictures of US again. Of course, the MC’s on
his
side, as per usual. She says Justin doesn’t mean any harm; he’s just obsessed. Possessed, more like. Then she went off on one of her tangents, yammering on about how talented Justin is and how proud she is of him. (For pushing a button!) The MC says that Justin wants to experiment more with style, now that he’s made a bit of a name for himself. I said and what would that name be? Shithead? She thought I was joking. Personally I think she’s delusional. (I can only assume that my father the shrink hasn’t noticed this because he’s not home or they’re fighting or he’s in the Bunker pretending to be working but really sneaking fags.) It was soooo excruciatingly BORING. I was tempted to tell her that Justin takes pictures of her and Sigmund sleeping as well, but I decided to use the information to blackmail him instead. I need the money.

Talked to Disha for EONS last night. It’s so civilized, being able to lie on my bed in privacy and have a conversation without everybody eavesdropping on my business or constantly interrupting to tell me the time or that they’re waiting for a call. I’m going to need another phone card soon.

Disha and I hung out with the others at David’s again this afternoon, and this time Flynn managed to stay for more than two seconds. David and Nick were on the PlayStation as per usual, so Flynn suggested we go for a walk and then Marcus said he’d come too. Marcus got us laughing so much I had to go into a pub to use the loo. I pretended I was looking for my mother. After Marcus and Flynn went home Disha and I went back to mine. Justin and Andrew were in the kitchen. I went to the loo and Justin went off to get something and can you believe it? The Missing Link DID IT! He actually DID IT! He told Disha she had great tits! And then he tried to TOUCH THEM! I lied about Disha being a black belt, but she did take a self-defence course from the police last summer because her parents are refugees. She flipped Andrew over and he crashed into the fridge. Disha and I didn’t stop laughing for HOURS. I got yelled at by the MC for knocking most of the magnets off the fridge, of course. Like it was MY fault, right? And then she made ME pick them up, not Justin! Talk about INEQUALITY between the sexes! I should ask Sappho who I should complain to.