Читать книгу The Tutti-frutti Collection - Jean Ure, Stephen Lee, Jean Ure - Страница 11

There are times when I hate Mum for the way she treats me. Skinny Melon couldn’t walk home with me after school today because, guess what? Her mum was taking her to buy a bra! Skinny Melon who is as thin as a piece of thread! Not a bump to be seen. Not even the beginnings of a bump. I am practically a double-D cup compared to her. I mean, she doesn’t even get on the chart! But her mum is so nice. It’s like she went out and bought her brother a razor for his birthday even though he hadn’t got anything to shave, hardly. So the Melon hasn’t got anything to put in a bra, but still her mum takes her seriously.

She even takes the Blob seriously, for heaven’s sake! The Blob is Skin’s sister and rather immature, as one tends to be at only eight years old. She is still at the stage of asking these dippy questions such as “Where do babies come from?” Skinny’s mum never fobs her off with yucky stories about storks or gooseberry bushes but treats her like a real person and tells her the truth. That’s how grown-ups ought to behave. It is very patronising and hurtful when they laugh at you behind your back, which is what Mum and Slimey do. I’m not saying they do it all the time but it is what they did tonight.

When I got back from school, Slimey was up in his studio (the back bedroom, which ought by rights to have been mine) and I took the opportunity to suggest to Mum in strictest confidence that maybe it was time I, too, started to wear a bra. I said, “If the Melon does and I don’t, I shall get the most terrific inferiority complex … It could stunt the whole of my future sexlife.” Mum said, “Oh, my goodness, we can’t have that! But really why you all want to grow up so quickly I can’t imagine.”

I said, “Why? Isn’t it any fun being grown-up?” and she said, “Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.” So, as I said to her, where’s the difference? She needn’t think it’s all fun being a child, because I can assure her it most definitely is not. Not when the parents go and split up and the child is just left like an old bit of baggage. “Who is going to take it? You or me?” And then they both go and get married again and probably wish there wasn’t any child because really it is such a nuisance, always being so selfish and unpleasant. “Why did we ever have it in the first place?”

If Mum thinks that’s fun, she must have a very strange sense of humour, that’s all I can say.

Anyway, she agreed we could go in on Saturday maybe and buy me a bra, so that was all right. In fact I felt quite warm towards her and thought that in spite of divorcing Dad and marrying the Slime she was every bit as nice a Mum as Skinny’s. I thought of what Carol had said about her and Dad growing apart and I thought that perhaps it was just one of those things that happened and that it wasn’t really her fault. I even half made up my mind that in future I would try to be nicer to her and forgive her for what she’d done.

And THEN she had to go and blow it all. She went and betrayed me with him.

What happened, I’d gone upstairs to wash and she was in the back bedroom with Slimey and she’d left the door a bit open. I wasn’t eavesdropping, but even if I had been, so what? I think one has a right to know what people are saying about one behind one’s back. What I heard Mum say was, “Hasn’t got anything there!” and then go off into these idiotic peals of laughter. I hate her for that. I shall never trust her again. I bet old Slimey thought it was really funny.

And anyway, I’ve got more than Skinny has!