Pumpkin Pie (7 page)

I was really determined to take this thing seriously. The acting, I mean. At the back of my mind I was already thinking that maybe, when I left school, I could go to a proper drama academy. One of the big ones, up in London! They’d just had the film awards on television and I’d seen myself, in a few years’ time, stepping on stage to collect my Oscar for Best Actress.

The self that I saw was tall and willowy, verree sexy, wearing this slinky designer dress. Black with silver sequins, and a slit down the side. The dress would not only show a lot of leg, but a lot of everything else, as well, because by then I would have a figure worth flaunting, ie,
thin.
This was my daydream! But it was precious, and it was fragile, and I didn’t need my little genius brother shattering it for me.

I hugged my daydream all to myself. I didn’t even tell Saffy! I knew she wouldn’t laugh, as we are never unkind to each other; but I had this feeling that beneath the polite exterior she would probably be going, “Yeah yeah yeah!” just as I do when she starts on about Brad. I do it to humour her. But that is different. Saffy must know, deep down inside herself, that her feelings for Brad are just fantasy. This was my whole future!

I remembered how Saffy herself had said this, when she was instructing me what to say to Mum. “Tell her your entire future is at stake.” A premonition! I thought that when I was famous I would have a lot to thank Saffy for, and I immediately added an extra bit to my Best Actress scene.

In the new, extended version I didn’t just waft on to stage in my slinky black dress to collect my award, I actually gave an acceptance speech in which I graciously referred to “My best friend, Saffy.” Saffy would be there, in the audience. She would blush and clasp her hands to her cheeks as the camera zoomed in on her. She would be looking very chic but not too beautiful. Afterwards, I would invite her to join my party for a celebratory dinner in a posh restaurant, one where all the stars went. Maybe Brad would be there! He would walk past our table and catch sight of me and do this huge double-take and go, “Jen! Baby! Congratulations!” Then he would give me a big kiss on my cheek. And I would be very cool and laid back and say, “Brad, I’d like you to meet my friend Saffy. Saffy, I’m sure you recognise Brad Pitt?” And he would take her hand and say, “Hi there, Saffy!” and she would just nearly die.

Oh, it was such a beautiful dream! Far more exciting than any of my others. I simply couldn’t
imagine
what had ever made me think I would like to be a car mechanic! It is without doubt an extremely useful occupation but I don’t think anyone could call it glamorous and I have never heard of any Best Car Mechanic Awards, though of course there may be, there may even be Oscars, only it is not done on television and you would probably not get many of the mechanics wearing slinky black dresses and showing their legs. But it is a nice thought!

Not many of the boys at the Academy looked like they would ever become car mechanics. I don’t think I am being unfair to car mechanics when I say that on the whole you don’t expect them to be especially sensitive and creative sort of people. Then again, of course, I could be wrong. Just because a person likes to lie upside down beneath cars and stick his head into their engines, and get covered all over in oily black gunge, doesn’t necessarily mean they are not sensitive. Or creative. I am sure you can be very creative inside a car engine. It is just a different sort of creative. That is all.

One thing Saffy was right about, we didn’t have any boys like Nathan Corrie. Thank goodness! They weren’t all gorgeous, but at least they all came from this planet. One or two of them were actually quite geeky, not to mention goofy, and even what I would call plain. But they weren’t boring! What I mean is, they had
personality.
Plus they could talk about stuff other than football or computers. You could have real proper conversations with them, like discussing what you had just done in class or a new scene you’d worked out for
Sob Story.
I really enjoyed doing that! I’d never thought of boys as being people you had conversations with.

Some of them were quite funny. The boys, I mean. There was this one boy, Robert Phillips, who couldn’t pronounce his Rs and had to keep reciting
Round the ragged rocks the ragged rascal ran.
It always came out as “Wound the wagged wocks,” which drove Mrs Ambrose to despair. On the other hand, she said there was quite a demand, these days, for “upper class English twits” in Hollywood movies, so maybe he could turn his speech impediment to good use.

I personally found it quite difficult to picture Robert as a movie star, but Saffy, in her wise way, said that stranger things had happened. I was just glad that I didn’t have any kind of speech impediment. Mrs Ambrose said the only sound I had to work on was the “oo” sound and she told me to practise “the moon in June” and
mmmmmOO.
I made sure only to do it when Pip was downstairs and safely out of earshot!

Another boy who was a bit geeky was Ben Azariah. He had a head like a turnip! His hair grew
upwards,
to a point. He did this thing of twizzling it with his finger which made us all laugh! In spite of being geeky, he was totally brilliant as a mimic. He could take off Ant and Dec really well. He could also do this famous footballer that I won’t name in case it might count as libel, plus loads others, who I also won’t name, because I mean you just never know. Celebs can be really touchy. Mum says they will sue you at the drop of a hat. I wouldn’t want that!

Another person Ben could do was Mrs Ambrose. He had us all in stitches being her.

“Robert, my
deah
boy! You really must learn to pronounce your Rs!”

I certainly couldn’t imagine Ben being a big Hollywood star, but I could easily see him having his own TV show. Saffy agreed. She added that when people were a bit odd-looking, they often turned to humour. She said, “It’s a defence mechanism.”

I found this rather worrying and immediately rushed home to examine myself in the mirror and see if I was funny-looking, and if that was why I had chosen to play an old person in
Sob Story,
so that I could make people laugh and they would stop noticing how weird I was.

But I thought on the whole I was OK. I didn’t have a head like a turnip, my hair didn’t grow to a point. I even thought, secretly – I mean, trying to pretend to myself that I wasn’t thinking it, as it seemed rather vain – that I had nice eyes. They are bright blue, like Petal’s. Dani Morris once asked me if I wore coloured contact lenses, because she said you couldn’t have eyes that were as blue as that, it wasn’t natural. Well, it is, and I do! So sucks to Dani Morris.

All the same, I was glad that I’d hit on the transformation scene. Under my baggy old lady coat I intended to wear something really sensational. I hadn’t yet decided what, since it was still a long way off, but even when I had I was going to keep it a secret so that everyone would be taken by surprise and go “Ooooh!”

There were two people I specially wanted to go “Ooooh”. Both of them were boys. Surprise, surprise! There was Gareth Hartley, who was the one that had corpsed when I wandered into the recording studio doing my complaining, and there was Mark Nelson, who played the DJ. Both were truly cool! Everything that Saffy had promised. Creative and sensitive and
seriously gorgeous.

Mark was like the big star. He had once been in a movie and had had real lines to say! Everyone fancied him like crazy. Even Saffy said that he was “lip-smacking” (what kind of disgusting expression is that?). She said that she would actually be prepared to accept him as a substitute while she was waiting for Brad to get divorced. But “Some hopes!” she added.

I told her that she could always dream, though as she was already dreaming about Brad I thought perhaps I could be the one to dream about Mark. I knew it was a dream that couldn’t ever really come true. Gorgeous guys, especially when they are nearly seventeen, don’t very often fall for plump twelve year olds, even if the plump twelve year olds do have bright blue eyes. Maybe when I’d taken the world by storm doing my transformation scene… Well, anyway. We would see!

In the mean time, there was always Gareth. He wasn’t quite as gorgeous as Mark, but on the other hand he was only fourteen, so I thought perhaps I might stand a bit more of a chance. Saffy said he wasn’t really mature enough for her, but that he would do “if all else failed.” She had some nerve!

One thing she’d been wrong about, and that was the girls. She’d promised me they wouldn’t all be gorgeous, and it was true they weren’t
all,
but lots of them were! Even the ones that weren’t were just so-o-o cool. And guess what? They were all thin! Thin as pins. All except for Connie Foster, who was little and bouncy and could walk on her hands and do the splits and pick up her leg and pull it straight up into the air, as far as her head. I would love to be able to do that! If I could do that I would be doing it all the time, just to show off. The only reason I don’t show off is that I have nothing to show off about. What I mean is, it is not a
virtue.

Connie was the same age as me and Saffy and really nice. I’m not just saying that because she was the only person who wasn’t thin, but because she was sweet and giggly, and
she
didn’t show off, either. Not like some of them! Angie Moon, for example. She was the most horrible show-off. She had this habit of twinkling, by which I mean she would suddenly open her eyes very wide and stretch her lips into this great mindless grimace with her top teeth showing. I think it was supposed to be a smile. She did it whenever a boy happened to look at her, and especially Mark or Gareth. Me and Saffy thought it was pathetic. Saffy started calling her Little Miss Twinkle, which soon got shortened to just Twinkle, or Twink. She never understood why we called her that! She probably thought it was a compliment, as she had a very high opinion of herself.

Another girl who thought she was the cat’s whiskers was Zoë Davidson. She was the one I crashed into when I got my left muddled up with my right and turned the wrong way. She had an even higher opinion of herself than Twinkle. This wasn’t because she was specially gorgeous, it was because she’d been on television and had recently done a commercial for something-or-other, I have forgotten what as thankfully I never saw it. Saffy did. She said it was nauseating.