Fruit and Nutcase (13 page)

Like a secret code!

When we get home old Misery’s on the prowl. She’s found a dob of yellow paint on the hall floor and she wants to know how it got there. Mum says, “Oh, dear, it must have dropped off the brush when I leaned over the banisters,” and old Misery does her bits and pieces.

What’s her problem??? We’ve got
loads
of dobs on the upstairs landing! Brightens the place up, if you ask me.

So we get upstairs and go into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and you’ll never believe it, the kitchen cabinet’s fallen off the wall again and half the cups and saucers are smashed.

Oh, and the telephone’s been cut off. It turns out it’s been cut off for days and we never even realised.

As Mum says, trying to look on the bright side, “It just goes to show how much we need it.”

This is the story of my life. Tape no 2. To be continued…

Soon I’m going to have filled up another tape. That will be the third one! I can’t believe I’ve found so much to say. I thought at first my life was completely empty, but now I see that quite a lot of things have been going on in it. It’s only when you stop and think about it that you realise.

Something I haven’t said anything about is when I was little. This is partly because I can’t remember very much and partly because I think probably it would be quite boring. I don’t want my book to be boring! This is the trouble with some of the books that Miss Foster reads to us at school. Right at the beginning they’re a drag because you don’t know what’s happening or who the people are; and then just as you’re starting to get into the story and thinking maybe this book is not so bad after all, you come to another draggy bit that makes you yawn and fidget and feel you never want to go near a book again
ever,
as long as you live.

I am trying very hard not to have draggy bits. That’s why I’ve started my story when I’m old
enough to talk and have opinions, and haven’t bothered going back to babyhood. Babies are lovely but not very interesting in books, I don’t think. What babies are best at is
doing
things.

I expect I must have done all those things when I was a baby, but who wants to read about it? Not me!

So all I’m going to say is that I was born in the hospital and that for the first few years of my life we lived with Nan and Crandy in Soper Street, which is just round the corner from where we are now. I don’t think Mum liked living with Nan. Nan used to nag her and tell her what to do and what not to do, like for instance whenever I cried she would tell
Mum “Not to go running! Let her get on with it.” But my mum is a big softie. She couldn’t bear the thought of me lying there crying so she didn’t take any notice of Nan. She used to cuddle me all the time. I think this is right. When I have triplets—two lots!—I will cuddle them. You bet!

Cuddling is what babies are for.

When I was about three, Nan and Crandy’s house was knocked down. The whole street was knocked down and all the people, well, most of the people, were sent to live on this new estate way out at the end of the tube line. It’s called Arthur’s Mill, because once upon a time, before they went and built houses all over it, it was owned by a man called Arthur who had a farm
arid a windmill. It sounds lovely but in fact it is rather ugly and boring.

Nan likes it because she says it’s a step up. From Soper Street, I suppose she means. She reckons it’s dead superior, living on a new estate! But it is
grey
and
dreary
and it is UGLY. Not like Linden Close!

Anyway, Mum and Dad came to live in Bundy Street and that is where we have been ever since. And I have been at the same school, which is Spring Street Primary. And that is the story of my life up to the time I started writing this book!

Oh, I almost forgot: when I was five I had the chicken pox and got all covered in spots some of which I
picked.

Also there is a photograph of me with my front teeth missing.

Thank goodness I grew some new ones!

I can’t remember where I left off. I think it was the end of term, the day we broke up.

Yes, it was! I’ve just gone back and listened.

Everyone except me and Oliver had gone off to camp and I was stuck in London. Not that I’d have wanted to go to their rotten camp even if I could. Crammed in a barn with Tracey Bigg for two weeks? Ugh! No, thank you!

Just because it was school holidays didn’t mean Mum could stay off work. She still had to go into Bunjy’s and sell bread every day, like Dad still had to clean windows.

We discussed what to do about me, and I said that I’d be all right on my own. I don’t mind being on my own! I quite like it, as a matter of fact. The one thing I begged Mum not to do was send me to my nan’s.

I said, “
Please
, Mum! Please don’t make me go away!”

I mean, partly it was ‘cos I didn’t want to leave Mum and Dad. I just didn’t see how they would be able to manage without me. And partly it was ‘cos I really really
hate
going to Nan’s. I hate the way she picks on me and the way she grumbles all the time about Mum and Dad being rotten parents.

There was only one place I would have liked to go, and that was Croydon, to stay with Uncle Allan and Auntie Liz, but they wouldn’t have me any more. I went there once and it was ever so lovely, only something really terrible happened: Auntie Liz sent me home in disgrace. I’d only been there a couple of weeks and she said she didn’t want me in the house any more on account of my language. “Language of the gutter,” she called it. She said, “We got out of London to avoid all that. I don’t want my little Princess being contaminated.”

Mum was really hurt and I felt ever so ashamed.
I
didn’t know I spoke the language of the gutter. Dad just laughed. He said that Allan and Liz had become “proper toffee-nosed twits” since they’d moved to Croydon.

But when I stopped and thought about it I could see what Auntie Liz meant ‘cos it’s really
really nice in Linden Close, where they live. There’s no mess or rubbish or burnt-out cars. There’s no rude words sprayed on the walls. Nobody has punch-ups or gets drunk.

“Dead boring,” says my dad. But I don’t think it’s boring! I think it’s lovely. And I can understand why Auntie Liz doesn’t want me to contaminate her little Princess.

The little Princess is my cousin Jade. I wish I had a beautiful name like Jade! It’s a pity her surname is Small, as Jade Small doesn’t sound very good, but maybe when she grows up she will marry a man called something grand such as Fairfax or Winstanley. These, I think, are very aristocratic.

Jade probably
will
marry someone aristocratic as she is extremely pretty, with dark curly hair and bright blue eyes. She is only four at the moment but already I can imagine how she will be when she is grown up.

I know it sounds truly yucky her mum and dad
calling her their little Princess, but she is so beautiful that I can forgive them. Normally I wouldn’t! Normally I would make vomiting noises.