Pumpkin Pie (17 page)

“Jealous of what?” screeched Saffy. All shrill and squeaky. She’d never done anything about her voice.

“Jealous of me and Gareth,” I said.

Saffy made a scoffing noise. She said, “What’s to be jealous of?”

“Because he danced with me,” I said.

“Oh! Big deal,” said Saffy. “Why should I care if he danced with you?”

I said, “Because he’s one of the coolest boys there and
everyone
would like to dance with him!”

“Who says?” said Saffy.

“Well, if you’d rather dance with old Turnip Head,” I said. “It seems a bit odd, considering you were the one that said we were going to drama school specially to meet gorgeous guys and the only one you can get is a turnip head!”

Saffy turned bright scarlet. She said, “Ever since you started on this stupid weight thing you’ve got meaner and meaner! You were as hateful as could be to poor Ben the other day. You really upset him!”

I said, “When did I upset him?”

“When he wanted you to be his partner and you wouldn’t!”

I said, “No, because I wanted to do my own thing!”

“You wanted to show off,” said Saffy crushingly. “And you just made yourself look stupid anyway. Utterly
pathetic!”

We quarrelled all the way to the bus stop. We quarrelled while we waited for the bus. When the bus came, I went inside, Saffy went on top. When Saffy got out, four stops later, she didn’t even look at me. She’d already told me, “I never want to speak to you again!” To which I had retorted, “Just as well, ‘cos I don’t want to speak to you!”

We had been best friends since the age of six. Now we hated each other.

These things happen.

N
OW IT’S
F
RIDAY
evening. I’m up in my bedroom, having a fit of the glooms. I’ve quarrelled with Saffy and I’m utterly, totally depressed. I shouldn’t be. I’ve lost all that weight and I’ve been a success and I’ve danced with gorgeous Gareth. But I am! I am just so-o-o depressed.

I haven’t only quarrelled with Saffy, I’ve quarrelled with Mum and Dad as well. Quarrelling with Mum is not that unusual, but quarrelling with Dad is practically unheard of. Dad just isn’t a quarrelling kind of person.

It was this afternoon when I quarrelled with Mum. I got home early from school (because of breaking up) to find that Mum was already here. Surprise, surprise! When is Mum ever at home when I get back from school? I made the mistake of saying so. I said, “Surprise, surprise! Has the bottom dropped out of the housing market?”

I thought that was quite clever, actually. It was meant to
be funny,
but I think it must have come out as a bit-well, sarcastic maybe. I was still seething about Saffy and was just in this really vile mood.

Mum snapped, “I can do without that tone of voice, thank you very much!” I guess she was in a bit of a mood, too. She’d raced back home, all in a lather, to pick up some papers she needed. She said, “Some of us round here have appointments to keep!” pushing rudely past me as she did so. I said, “Well, gosh, don’t let me stop you.”

“Jenny, I’m warning you,” said Mum. She paused at the door to point a threatening finger at me. “I’ve had just about enough of you recently. You’d better mend your manners, my girl, or you’ll find yourself in trouble!”

With that she was gone, leaving me standing there, speechless. What had I done to deserve such treatment? Dad then came bowling in, wanting to know what was going on.

“Who’s having a go at who?”

I said,
“She
is.”

“She?” said Dad. “Are you referring to your mother?”

“Oh!” I said. “Is that who it was? I thought it was some stranger come into the house!”

“What exactly do you mean by that?” said Dad.

“That woman that was yelling at me,” I said.
“My mother.
I didn’t recognise her! Does she live here?”

Well! That was when Dad blew up. Unlike most chefs, who are extremely temperamental and will run at you with murder in their hearts and a carving knife in their hands on the least provocation, Dad is really a very amiable, easygoing person. But there is one thing he will not tolerate, and that is any criticism of Mum. He told me how Mum had worked her fingers to the bone, providing for us all, and said if I couldn’t keep a civil tongue in my head I could go to my room. So I came up here and have been here ever since.

It’s now six o’clock and Dad has gone off to work. Mum isn’t yet back, Petal (I think) is in her room, Pip (I think) is in his room. I, of course, am in my room. Brooding and resentful. Why does everything always,
always
seem to go wrong for me? Why can’t I be like Petal and Pip? Nothing ever goes wrong for them. Petal is beautiful, Petal is slim: Petal is popular, Petal has boyfriends. Pip is a genius; Mum spoils him. He’s her favourite, without any doubt.

I am consumed with self-pity, and with vengeful envy of them both. My sister and my little brother. I think that Petal is probably slapping on the lip gloss, getting ready to go out with her latest gorge male, while the boy genius will be on his computer, lost somewhere out in cyberspace, doing whatever it is that techno freaks do. Not a cloud on either of their horizons!

I decide to go to the bathroom and weigh myself. I haven’t done it for at least an hour. As I open my bedroom door I hear the sound of weeping. It’s Petal! She’s crumpled in a heap at the top of the stairs, dramatically clutching her mobile phone to her bosom and sobbing her heart out. I cry, “Petal! What’s wrong?” I drop to my knees beside her and she raises a tear-stained face and wails, “My life is over!”

I say, “Why? What’s happened?”

She sobs that it’s Andy (her latest gorge male). “He’s going with another girl!”

I feel like pointing out that Andy is not the only gorge male in the world, that he is not the first gorge male she has been out with (I should think he must be at least number 3, or even 4) and that with her looks she can pick up another one “just like that!” But I don’t, because I realise that at this moment in time it will be of no comfort. There can never be another male as gorge as Andy. If he has deserted Petal for someone else, then that is it. THE END. Life has nothing more to offer. All I can do is commiserate.

“Oh, Petal,” I go, “I’m so sorry!”

Petal immediately bursts into renewed sobbing and begins to rock to and fro. While she is rocking, the door of Pip’s bedroom is thrown open and Pip rushes out. He doesn’t even look at me and Petal. He dives into the bathroom, and I hear a crash as the door of the bathroom cabinet flies back and bounces off the bathroom wall. Pip then reappears, with something in his hand. It looks like a bottle of aspirin. It
is
a bottle of aspirin!

“Pip,” I say, “what are you doing?”

He looks at me, wild-eyed. He says that he is going to put himself out of his misery. He has tried smothering himself with a pillow, and now he is going to swallow aspirin.

“Go away, Pumpkin!” He pushes me to one side and makes a dive for his bedroom. “You can’t stop me!”

But I can. I do! I grab hold of him and scream, “Are you out of your mind?”

Pip says no, he’s not out of his mind, he’s
a failure.
He is no longer top of his class. He has come second.
Second!
Shock, horror! The shame of it is more than he can bear. He is going to take aspirin and put an end to it all.

“Get out of my way! I’m serious!”

I’m serious, too. I can’t believe it! A ten-year-old boy, wanting to put an end to it all? This is madness! Are we all neurotic wrecks in this family?

By now, Petal has come to her senses and taken note of what’s happening. Between us, we march Pip into his bedroom and sit him down on his bed, one of us on either side. Sternly, Petal says, “What is this all about?”

Pip says again that he has lost first place (to a boy called Fur Ball Donnegan, or at least that is what it sounds like) and that his life is at an end. I say, “That makes three of us.”

“You as well?” cries Petal. “What’s your problem?”

What
is
my problem? I think about it. It’s not just that I’ve fallen out with my best friend and got into trouble with Mum and Dad. I hate, hate,
hate
quarrelling with Saffy, I’m none too keen on having Mum get mad at me, and it’s perfectly horrid to have upset Dad; but those are only symptoms. The real problem is that
I am not happy.

I wonder to myself, was I happy before? When I was fat? A happy fatty! I think that on the whole I was. I was happy in my fatness! I wasn’t happy in my thinness. I spent every waking hour worrying about food and whether I was eating too much. My life had become bounded by food! My stomach kept rumbling, I was permanently starving. I weighed myself up to a dozen times a day. My throat was sore from having fingers stuffed down it. My ribs ached from all the heaving I’d done. I was tired and cross and crotchety. I was
miserable.
But I did so want to be thin! I wanted to have cheekbones. And hip bones, and thigh bones, and just
bones,
generally.

Petal, meanwhile, is still waiting for an answer to her question: what is my problem? I give a deep sigh and say, “I thought being thin would make me happy!”

“Ye-e-e-es…” Petal considers me, her head to one side. “You
are
thin! You’ve lost weight!”

“That’s because she hasn’t been eating,” said Pip.

What??? That shakes me! I wouldn’t have thought he’d notice. Can it be that Pip sees more than we realise?

“When she does eat,” he tells Petal, “she goes and sicks it up again. She’s got that bullimer thing.”

“That what?” says Petal.

“He means bulimia,” I say. “Like Princess Di. It’s what she had. But I haven’t! I only sick up when I’ve been on a binge.”

“That’s what people do when they’ve got bullimer,” says Pip.

How does he know???

“Pump, this is terrible!” cries Petal. “You could die!”

“Let’s all die together,” says Pip.

Petal rounds on him. Her tears, miraculously, have quite disappeared.

“We’ll do no such thing!” she tells Pip. “Give me those aspirin!” She snatches them from him. “What’s the matter with this family?”

In tones of morbid satisfaction I say, “We’re dysfunctional.”

“Well, it’s got to stop,” says Petal. “If Mum and Dad aren’t around to keep an eye on us we’ll just have to keep an eye on ourselves. In future, we’ll all watch out for one another!”

And for starters she reads Pip this long lecture about exams not being the be-all and end-all, and how coming second in a class of twenty-two is hardly what any sane person would consider a disaster.

“Most people would think they’d done
well!”

She says that Pip has had too many pressures put on him.

“The family isn’t going to collapse if you only come second instead of top! You’ve got to stop trying to be a genius all the time and start behaving like a normal boy!”

Then she gets going on me. “From now on you are going to eat
properly.
Do you understand? You are not going to go on binges and then sick up. You are not going to go on binges
full stop.
When Dad pushes stuff at you, you just say
no.”

I wail that this is easier said than done. “He gets so upset!”