Читать книгу The Tutti-frutti Collection - Jean Ure, Stephen Lee, Jean Ure - Страница 31

He’s still shoving these stupid cards under my door. I really hate the thought of him creeping about doing that while I’m asleep. I just keep chucking them in the waste-paper basket. I’m still on strike and so the basket is practically overflowing and everything is thick dust except for the crinoline lady on her shelf. I am too scared to dust her because she is so fragile and so I blow on her, ever so gently. Maybe if she gets too dirty I can give her a bubble bath and use the hair dryer.

Terrible row with Mum this morning when I arrived downstairs in T-shirt and leggings and my Doc Marten’s. She screamed, “You can’t wear that gear to school! You go back upstairs and change immediately!” I said, “Into what?” I said, “It may have escaped your memory, but we don’t happen to have any school uniform at this school, we can wear whatever we like, and right now everybody is wearing T-shirt and tights and Doc Marten’s.”

Mum said not to take that tone with her. (What tone? What is she talking about?) She said she didn’t care what other people were wearing, she wasn’t having her daughter go to school looking like some kind of big-footed grotesque. I said, “That is very big-footist.” And she snarled, “Never mind the smart mouth! I have spoken and that is flat and final. How can you expect to do any serious learning in that ridiculous get-up?”

Mum is incredibly hidebound. I said, “Well, if it comes to that, how can you expect to have any serious baby, wearing those ridiculous dungarees?” which is what she has taken to wearing now that her secret is out. I said, “I bet the Queen didn’t wear dungarees when she was having babies.” Mum started to get all red and hot, but old Slimey laughed and said, “She’s got you there!” almost as if he were on my side against Mum. She still wouldn’t budge.

I met the Skinbag at the school gates and asked her what the sleep-over was like. She said it was brilliant and that Harry meeting Sally was even better second time round and why wouldn’t my mum let me go? I told her it was because of Gemma’s brother saying That Word and Mum thinking I might start saying it and the Melon agreed that mothers could be a real drag. She said that right at this moment hers was being even more of a drag than usual which I found hard to believe as the Melon’s mum is really nice. She would for instance never make promises and then break them. Like if she said the Melon could have a dog, then she’d let her have a dog. I mean she’s already got one, of course, but if she’d said she could have another, or choose a video or whatever, she would let her. So I said, “How is she being a drag?” but the Melon wouldn’t tell me. She just said, “Behaving like a teenager.”

I don’t see anything particularly draggy about that.

When I got home from school, Mum started on about the baby again, wondering whether it was going to be a boy or a girl, trying to get me to say which I’d prefer. I wouldn’t prefer either! I don’t want to know about the beastly baby. I hope it never comes out. I hope it withers on the vine. I hate it!