Pumpkin Pie (4 page)

I am not going to say what she thinks it looks like. It is too vulgar. I am surprised that she knows about such things, although she does have two brothers, both older than she is, which perhaps would account for it. All the same, it was quite uncalled for. (Especially as it made me go all hot and red.)

What Mr Pickering says is not so vulgar, but it is certainly what I would call
deflating.
I am not going to repeat it. It makes me instantly droop and give up all ideas about going to art school. It is terrible to have so little confidence! But between them, Saffy and Mr Pickering have utterly demolished me.

Get home from school to find the house empty. Mum and Petal not yet back, Dad has gone off to pick up Pip. Help myself to some cold pasta and slump in front of the television till Dad and Pip arrive. Dad at once bustles out to the kitchen to prepare some food, while Pip settles down to his homework. I hardly had any homework when I was ten, but Pip has stacks of it. This is because he goes to this special school that Mum and Dad
pay
for, and where they are all expected to work like crazy and pass exams so that they can win scholarships to even more special schools and pass more exams and go to university and become nuclear physicists. Or whatever. Me and Petal just used to go up the road to the local Juniors. Nobody cared whether we passed our exams and became nuclear physicists. But Mum says Pip is gifted and it would be a crime not to encourage him. She is probably right. I am not complaining, since I don’t seem to be gifted in any way whatsoever. Not even artistically, in spite of getting an A for my rabbit’s reproductive system

At five o’clock Dad goes off to Giorgio’s for the evening, leaving a big bowl of macaroni cheese for us to dig into. I help myself to a sizeable dollop and go back to the television. Pip is still doing his homework. Petal comes waltzing in, snatches a mouthful of macaroni cheese and rushes upstairs to her bedroom, where she spends most of the evening telephoning her friends. Every half hour or so she wafts back down to grab an apple or a glass of milk. I hear her discussing some party that she is going to at the weekend. Her main concern seems to be whether a certain boy is likely to be there, and if so, who will he be there
with?

“Please not that awful tart from Year 10!”

If it’s the awful tart from Year 10, Petal will just
die.
Why, is what I want to know? But it is no use asking her. She has already gone wailing back up the stairs.

“What will I do? What will I do?”

Fascinating stuff! I sometimes think that Petal and I inhabit different worlds.

We all do actually. Me and Petal and Pip. There’s Pip obsessed with work, and Petal obsessed with boys, and me very soon to become obsessed with fat. We never talk about our obsessions. We never really talk about anything. We are part of the same family and live under the same roof and I think we all love one another; but we never actually
communicate.

Mum gets in at quarter to nine. She gives me and Pip a quick peck on the cheek – “All right, poppets? Everything OK?” – pours herself a glass of wine and disappears upstairs to soak in the bath. Pip packs up his homework, makes himself a lettuce sandwich and takes himself off to bed. Just like that! Without being told. It doesn’t strike me as quite normal, for a ten year old, but that is Pip for you. He has the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Obviously nobody is going to eat Dad’s macaroni cheese, so I decide I’d better polish it off to stop Dad from being upset. I then finish off my homework, watch a bit more telly, eat a bag of crisps and go upstairs.

At eleven o’clock Dad comes home from work and calls out to see if anyone’s awake and wants a nightcap. I am, and I do! So Dad makes two mugs of foaming hot chocolate and we drink them together, with Dad sitting on the edge of my bed. I love these private moments that I have with Dad! I tell him all about school, about my A for biology and my D+ for maths, and Dad tells me all about Giorgio’s, about the customers who’ve been in and the food that he’s cooked. The only thing that slightly spoils it is when he says goodnight. He says, “Night night, Plumpkin! Sleep tight.”

He seems to be calling me Plumpkin all the time now. I pull up the duvet and fall asleep, only to dream, for some reason, of whales. Big beached blubbery whales. I wonder what Petal dreams of? Boys, probably.

That was how it was when I was twelve. I’m fourteen now, but nothing very much has changed. Dad still cooks, Mum is still high-powered, Petal still casts her spell over the male population, Pip still does oceans of homework. The only thing is, I no longer dream about whales. That has got to be an improvement!

This is how it came about.

I
T WAS
S
AFFY
who suggested we should go to acting classes. I was quite surprised as she had never shown any inclination that way. Just the opposite! Once at infant school she was chosen to be an angel in the nativity play, a sweet little red-headed, pointy-nosed angel, all dressed up in a white nightie with a halo on her head and dear little wings sprouting out of her back. Guess what? She tripped over her nightie, forgot her line – she only had the one – and ran off the stage, blubbing. Oh, dear! It is something she will never manage to live down. She gets quite huffy about it.

“I was
six,”
she says, if ever I chance, just casually, to bring it into the conversation. Which I only do if I feel for some reason she needs putting in her place.

When she is in a
really
huffy mood she will waspishly remind me that I didn’t get chosen to be anything at all, let alone an angel, which you would have thought I might have done, having fair hair and blue eyes and looking, if I may say so, far more angelic than Saffy. In my opinion, she would have been better cast as a sheep. (Then she wouldn’t have had a nightie to trip over, ha ha!)

The only reason I didn’t get chosen was that I caught chicken pox. If I hadn’t had chicken pox, I bet I’d have been an angel all right! And I bet I wouldn’t have tripped over my nightie and forgotten my line, either. Saffy has absolutely no right to crow. It is hardly a person’s fault if a person gets struck down by illness.

I have said this to her many times, but all she says in reply is, “You
picked
yourself.”

What she means is, I scratched my spots. She says that is why I wasn’t chosen.

“It was a nativity play, not a horror show!”

It’s true I did make a bit of a mess of myself. Petal, who had chicken pox at the same time as me, didn’t even scrape off one tiny little crust. Even at the age of eight, Petal obviously knew the value of a smooth, unblemished skin. But it is all vanity! What do I care? In any case, as Saffy always hastens to assure me – feeling guilty, no doubt, at her cruel jibe – “It hardly shows at all these days. Honestly! Just one little dent in the middle of your chin… it’s really cute!”

Huh! It doesn’t alter the fact that she had her chance as an angel and she
muffed
it. It is no use getting ratty with me! What I didn’t understand was why she should want to go to acting classes, all of a sudden.

I put this to her, and earnestly Saffy explained it wasn’t so much the acting she was interested in, though she reckoned by now she could manage to say the odd line or two without bursting into tears. What it was, she said, was
boys.

“Ah,” I said. “Aha!”

“Precisely,” said Saffy.

She giggled, and so did I.

“You think it would be a good way to meet them?”

“I do,” said Saffy.

In that case, I was all for it! Meeting boys, in that second term of Year 7, had become very important, not to say crucial. We had to meet boys! There were lots of boys in our class at school, of course, but we had already met them. We met them every day, and we didn’t think much of them. Well, I mean! Kevin Williams and Nathan Corrie. Pur-lease! Not that they were all primeval swamp creatures, but even those that hadn’t crawled out of the mud seemed to come from distant planets. Trying to suss them out was like trying to fathom the workings of an alien mind. Were they plant life? Or were they animal? They probably thought the same about us. But you have to get to grips with them sooner or later because otherwise, for goodness’ sake, the human race would just die out!

I didn’t say this to Saffy, knowing her sensitivity on certain subjects, eg, the rabbit’s reproductive system. I just agreed with her that meeting boys was an essential part of our education, and one which at the moment was being sadly neglected.

“I don’t know how Petal got going,” I said. “She just seemed to do it automatically.”

Saffy said that Petal was a natural.

“People like you and me have to work at it.”

“And you honestly truly think,” I said, “that drama school would be a good place to start?”

Saffy said yes, it would be brilliant! She sounded really keen. At drama school, she said, we would meet boys who were creative and sensitive, and gorgeous with it. All the things that the swamp creatures weren’t. It’s true! You look at a boy like Nathan Corrie and you think, “Is this life as we know it?”

The thought of meeting boys who were both creative
and
sensitive
and
gorgeous seemed almost too good to be true.

“Do they really exist?” I said.

“Of course they do!” said Saffy. She said that you had to be all of those things if you wanted to be an actor. You couldn’t have actors that were goofy or geeky or just plain boring.

“Or even just plain,” I said. And then immediately thought of at least a dozen that were all of those things. I reeled off a list to Saffy.

“What about that one that looks like a frog? That one that was on the other day. And that one that’s all drippy, the one in
Scene Stealing,
that you said you couldn’t stand. You said it was insulting they ever let him on the screen. And that other one, that Jason person, the one in—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” said Saffy. “But there’s far more who are gorgeous. I mean—” She gave this little nervous trill. Nervous because she knew perfectly well she was being self-indulgent. “Look at Brad!”

By Brad she meant Brad Pitt. (Famous American movie star, in case anyone has been hiding in a hole for the past ten years.) Don’t ask me what Brad Pitt had to do with it. Just
don’t ask.
Saffy brings Brad Pitt into everything. She can’t help it, poor dear, she is infatuated. I somewhat sternly pointed out (being cruel to be kind) that Brad Pitt is not exactly a
boy,
in fact he is probably old enough to be her grandfather. Well, father. I might just as well not have bothered! Saffy simply smiled this soppy smile and loftily informed me that she preferred “the mature man”.