Double Dates & Single Raisins

Double Dates (& Single Raisins)

  I’d recently started to realise that those magazines were red herrings – there was no handbook for life, and by Year 9 you looked stupid for believing in that and taking it with you into the exam hall. Now it was surprise inspection time, and I didn’t want to know my grade.

  Double Dates (& Single Raisins)

  Dillie Dorian

  Copyright 2006-2013 Dillie Dorian

  Oops! Did I Forget I Don’t Know You?

  A Bended Family

  While Shepherds Washed My Socks

  Coming soon:

  Sitting Down Star Jumps

  Now, Maybe, Probably…

  Was He The Queen?!

  Not Zebedee!

  And many more…

  https://www.dilliedorian.co.uk

  Contents:

  #0 Preambling Note To Shells

  #1 His & Hers Hysteria

  #2 The Tidal Jelly Wave

  #3 Seeing (Simply) Red

  #4 Born Cheese: The Musical

  #5 Time To Come & Cringe With The Twinnies!

  #6 The Sky Rains Tam-Packs

  #7 The Scale

  #8 Clashes & Hot Flashes

  #9 Torrential Brain

  #10 Batty Boy

  #11 Double Dates (& Single Raisins)

  #12 Dippyfoot & The Custardy Confusion

  #13 Ganguro

  #14 Jet-Balls, Butterflies…

  #15 The Wicked Witch Of The Wardrobe

  #16 Mates, Dates & Double-Donut-Donkey Dares

  #17 The Grand Finale (Of My Life As I Know It)

  #18 Return Of The Jet-Balls

  #0 Preambling Note To Shells

  Dear Shelley + Assorted Prying Aussies

  Here I go again.

  After all that length I went to, painstakingly making my every word legible, instead of watching Zak keepie-uppie his way around our indoor assault course (sorry, snugly cramped living room), or Charlie measure his hair or whatever, you tell me you never even got it! Sorry if that came as such a terrible shock that I said what I said next – if you just read on about the terrible two weeks I’ve just had, you’ll understand, I promise!

  What if it disappeared in the post? What if right now, some stranger is sat at home reading all about my secret thoughts, over a nice brew and plate of cat meat? Just the thought of my whole (cringy) life being open for examination by whatever creep has the time, patience or stalkerish disposition gives me the collywobbles*. (Not that it’s possibly possible to be more of a patient stalkerish person than the new “friend” I experienced this week.)

  Well. As long as it’s like I said about your mates; if I never have to look this person in the eye or anything, we’re sound. At least I didn’t put the real name of my school, or anything about which particular south-coastal sewer we happen to live in.

  In better, worse news – just wait ’til you hear about that dreadful end-of-half-term talent show, and the awful incident at ASDA (again), and a wheelbarrow’s worth of guinea pigs… (um, yeah, I know).

  AAYF (the “as always, your friend” type)

  Harley.

  *Weird word, I know. I always picture a drunk sheepdog swaying over hill and dale.

  #1 His & Hers Hysteria

  All the usual announcements were there, boring people about how girls’ netball was cancelled, that we had assembly on Mondays (just been), and how a local celebrity (as such) was coming to do a talk about how hard it is to be a “soap star”.

  I wasn’t sure what she was acting all excited about. It was only the Year 9 noticeboard, and honestly it didn’t appeal to me – it seemed cluttered compared to the bare one in my room, and I found myself ruminating awkwardly about how only I could be such a weirdo that I get conditioned out of accepting pinboards that actually see some use.

  Chantalle gestured dementedly at an ugly-looking green piece of paper pinned to the upper-left of the board. It was as if she’d mislaid the capacity for speech, and would have to mime for the rest of her life. (Big loss, if you know Chantalle!)

  I skimmed.

  “Talent show…”

  I grimaced, picturing days gone by in spangly strappy tops and glittery jeans, fumbling over dance routines. Who in their right mind would try to organise a Key Stage 3 talent event?

  “Yeah…” She grinned, starstruck already. “Last day before Halloween – we’ve still got ages to practise!”

  “Hang on a minute-” I fizzed, letting the great memories of a time too young to care vanish uncomfortably. The thought of being onstage made me feel instantly naked in the corridor. “We? Practise? Are you seriously expecting us to enter?”

  Keisha snorted. “You won’t catch me hopping about to Steps in front of the whole school. What’re you thinking?!”

  Goodie, at least someone was backing me up. There wasn’t much me and Keish came to agree on, but a distaste for looking stupid in public was supposed to unite teenagers everywhere. What went wrong with Chan? I could only assume that she didn’t plan on looking stupid, but her talents happened to be swimming and netball, so I didn’t hold out much hope that she’d be successful.

  “To be fair,” Rindi pointed out, “anyone you’d be hoping to impress wouldn’t pay the £4 admission to watch that anyway.”

  I wasn’t sure which of us that was aimed at, and for the first time in my life I was itching to get to History. If Chan thought something was a great idea, and Keisha thought it was a lame idea, we could be dealing with the fallout for weeks to come.

  “You’re auditioning too?!” came an excited yelp from someone more or less exactly my height. Charlie, who I hadn’t realised was around, was wearing a similar look of starstruckness. I could tell that Chan and Dani hadn’t forgotten his starring role in our Pirates Of The Caribbeanbag play at the end of Year 6 any more than I had.

  “We’re just looking…” I started. “Chan saw the sign and just-”

  “Course we are!” she interrupted. “We’re … forming a girl band, or writing a play or something!”

  Charlie looked impressed. That’s so typical of him – you could bluff and puff until you’re certain a five year old isn’t buying your star quality, and then it would turn out he’d been hanging on your every word.

  “Harley…” mumbled Fern, meekly. “She doesn’t mean me as well, does she?”

  She probably hadn’t. Having started at our school only a month ago, Fern was still at the awkward hovering stage in our group of friends – sort of not quite invited but not told to go away either. Like, she’d followed me out of Assembly and waited patiently while the others argued about the talent contest, and followed me again when I broke away from the group to avoid being late. I didn’t mind, because we had History together, but Chan and Keisha continued to act like she was invisible most of the time. Drama queens that they are, they appreciate a nameless, faceless audience just as much as any that they’d have to get to know.

  Charlie had been pretty schtum around her if we ever ran into him at school. He had every right to feel like an idiot around her, given the open speculation that had gone on in our house last month. You can never quite come back from wondering if someone’s going to be your stepsister, and up until our mum ran into her dad during Parents’ Evening last week, I’d found myself trying to come to terms with the idea of seeing her face at the breakfast table every morning. Though I’d eventually found out that the oddness of her invitation to Kitty’s birthday had been down to our family’s propensity to leave jottings of names and numbers on the kitchen pad, that hadn’t disproved a thing until they finally actually met.

  Thinking about that squirmy little episode of my life had just reminded me of all Mum’s madness again – who, or what, was
her new boyfriend?

  #2 The Tidal Jelly Wave

  Prying Aussies might find it strange to return home from school to a tidal jelly wave and one very dead hamster in their kid sister’s wake, but for me that’s just an especially messy variation on pretty normal. Still, when I got in from an approximate six hours of hell, it was so not what I’d hoped for.

  This disaster was all down to how nobody had told Kitty that when you put jelly in the microwave, the water needs to go in a container. She’d been pouring and pouring hopelessly into the machine, trying to fill it up enough to dissolve her raspberry cubes. Course, she was likely never going to get past this step, seeing as once it filled up to the bottom of the door-hole, it would keep slooshing out over the side – so luckily, she hadn’t got as far as trying to switch it on.

  On a decent, organised day, Zak was supposed to be supervising her inbetween the time the pair of them got out of school and the time me or Charlie arrived back from ours right across town. His excuse this particular time was having dashed upstairs to get ready for football practise, but living with a barely-seven-year-old who has a common sense rating of four, he really should’ve known better.

  I managed to get Charlie to dry off the kitchen counter and floor, while I shepherded Kitty upstairs to get rid of all the dust and grit that had collected on her skin and school uniform from crawling on the work surface and rummaging in cupboards. That was some small miracle in itself – despite last week having been his laundry week, Charlie had not touched the washing machine even though everyone had changed and dumped their bedclothes.

  The dust and grit was caked on. I even found an ancient spider corpse up her sweatshirt sleeve, and everything I rubbed at with a flannel just smeared nastily. You could’ve been forgiven for thinking her class had built a snowman out of peat during the school day, but a quick questioning about what exactly she’d been up to brought me to the sorry conclusion that our kitchen was filthy like something from an extreme health hazard documentary.

  Had we really been so lax with the housekeeping? It was only very recently that these tasks had fallen to me and the boys, as ironically Mum had been a competent and enthusiastic cleaner both by trade and hobby until she lost her job and started spending her time at all these interviews. I didn’t think I’d been so bad at taking responsibility over the summer, but September proved to be a whole different story, what with the heavy loads of homework and general bleh feelings.

  Kitty’s war paint required a bath, using the remains of Mum’s birthday bodywash set that Auntie Sharon helped us gift. I didn’t have much of a choice, given that we should’ve gone shopping three days ago for best results, but couldn’t until our benefits came through. Breakfast had been half a ginger nut each for me and Kitty, while Mum sighed over last week’s Thursday job column and insisted she wasn’t hungry. That was the Mum I missed. In the mornings she was almost like normal, kissing us goodbye before school and coming into the day slowly with a cup of tea – but why, by night, did she transform into a petulant teenager if anyone else wanted to use the phone?

  On top of the transferable dustiness and pileup of spider carcasses, one final element of uncleanliness made me flip my lid. The black and white fluffy thing I very nearly stepped on in the attic hallway, which was definitely more than an insect, and definitely dead.

  I quickly steered my sister away so that she wouldn’t set eyes on it, but she panicked at my sudden movement and went sprawling on the carpet anyway. When I bent to help her up, I could see from uncomfortably close quarters that the body was a rodent.

  We had rodents in our house! DEAD rodents. It was the final straw – the final straw in my entire life, it felt like. Probably nowhere was clean if we were attracting vermin. Maybe I should’ve listened at Guides when Karen Kestrel advised future campers not to leave food out in the tents. That was to avoid ants, and we had here several solid centimetres squared of… what? Whatever it was, it was big enough to have required a good few packets’ worth of Hobnobs crumbled into the carpets to feel like our house was the house where anyone was likely to eat for free!

  “It’s Michael,” said Kitty, in awe.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, but maybe this was a perfectly typical reaction from an Infant school child who hardly understood the concept of permanent death. Our little sister had never seen a body so still and somehow so dull.

  “Michael…?” I repeated, uncertainly.

  “Michael, Olivia’s hampster,” she embellished. “’Livia that moved.”

  OH. Olivia that moved! The Morlings had moved in July, apparently without their daughter’s beloved pet. How could one even forget a hamster? Maybe he’d run away beforehand, like Charlie’s hamster, Biscuit. So he’d been living off his own ingenuity for like three months! Now that… that was a hamster to be respected.

  Those neighbours seemed to have taken everything but the kitchen sink – even that small pear tree we helped them plant in their garden back in Juniors. The sort of family with two perfect children who could be heard squealing with excitement when a certain generous grandparent visited, more than one car and new computers every year as if it somehow made up for their dad being made target practise countries and countries away. Decidedly Not Poor, just like everyone else in our street.

  You Prying Aussies are probably wondering how come my description of our house seems to fit so badly into that mould. While all the others on our road are prim and pretty, ours must be looked upon as a disappointing disappointment – grim and gritty. It’s as if a giant hand picked up one of the renteds from the rough area near school, and plopped it down on our street’s bomb wound like a fixer-upper sticking plaster. We were never quite sure how it got to be such a shambles, but according to Mum, the middle floor and attic were gaping in places and unusable until me and Charlie were on the way. The old woman who’d owned it before us had no children and resided on the bottom floor with special living equipment for years before she went into a home. She’d sold it to our parents for just enough to pay for her care, and it cost about as much as a flat, Mum says.

  It was a flat. For all intents and purposes, anyway. The living room which had been the old lady’s bedroom became Mum and Dad’s bedroom instead, and all Mum’s savings and Dad’s wages went straight into some semblance of floorboards, and eventually carpet when us two started threatening to crawl. First, there was the second storey, and me and Charlie shared a bedroom. Then, when Mum was pregnant with Zak, they had the attic sorted out into a nice nursery for us. Zak’s room was the baby room, but before long we were old enough to need our own space, and along came Kitty. Our big attic bedroom got split with thin plasterboard into two bedrooms, a box room and a corridor – so Zak and Charlie had their room, and I had mine (with Shelley to stay so often that it barely felt just mine at all). I love that story…

  * * *

  Later, we assembled at the end of the garden, where Zak had offered to play undertaker in his already muddy kit, and Charlie vicar in a T-shirt emblazoned with a grinning skull.

  “This – is – the funeral of Michael – Michael? – Michael the hamster, belonging to Olivia Morling of – next door.” Charlie struggled to make out my five-year-old handwriting on the crumpled A4 laden with mini multicoloured Post-Its of changed details. “Michael was well-loved, avocadoed-”

  “Appreciated,” I groaned. “Appreciated by all. Do be serious!”

  “I’m sorry, I read it wrong,” he whined.

  “You can’t have, because that’s just stupid!”

  “Appreciated by all. OK,” he mumbled, mind truly in the clouds of smoky rockstar fame.

  “Well, goodbye Michael!” I said clearly, determined to upstage my daft twin brother as Zak lowered the shoebox into the hole. “Right: ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’…”

  Now why was it that actually I wasn’t feeling utter enthusiasm for this funeral anymore? It just wasn’t the same as when we were little and sniffling over a pet of ours; Michael wasn’t
our hamster, and I’d met (nay, heard of) him for the very first time in the attic hallway after school.

  I was roused from my lack of passion by the realisation that where me and Charlie and Kit had closed our mouths after one verse, Zak had powered on:

  “Aaaall things fart and that’s a fact, from e-le-phants to ducks! But to make more a-ni-mals, then they will have to-”

  I slapped my hand over Zak’s mouth, to avoid Kitty hearing the next word – and because I have to admit I was still trying to take this a bit seriously. All our pets had received a proper send-off; everything from the first adopted hedgehog to an experimentally-drowned woodlouse had been decomposing luxuriously in our garden for yonkey’s dears. I was sure that it was what Olivia would have wanted (even if I only just barely knew her by name) – the clean version of Michael’s funeral, with no extra phrasing that she would never have encountered at the innocent age of five.

  Minus the bit where Zak used to dig them up…

  #3 Seeing (Simply) Red

  The entire family was sat around the wobblific dinner table in our cramped kitchen, playing a very biased guessing game against Kitty. Not that she was losing…

  “Mum mum mum mum you’re having a baby!” she announced excitably, as if simply saying it would make it true. In her enthusiasm, she knocked over her blackcurrant squash, sending me scrabbling for the very last of the kitchen roll.

  Kitty has been desperate for Mum to have a fifth child ever since she was about to start school, when we’d gone round to see the neighbours’ newborn and have our offer of old baby gear politely rejected. Speaking from experience, I’d been on Mum’s side the whole time when she said we had all the family we need. Kitty hadn’t been particularly well when she was born, and the last thing Charlie and I needed starting in Year 7 was the hanging threat of more worried trips to the hospital and sickly wailing for months afterwards. Kitty had not cried like a normal baby, but rather moaned theatrically like she was already a ghost, giving us nightmares. Dad used to joke that she was best to get her strength up so that she could rattle those chains. Something about that sat very wrongly with Mum – ooh, probably the part where he said one thing while kind of transparently meaning another. Dark times…