for all Pumpkins, everywhere

Contents

Cover

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Finale

Also by Jean Ure

Copyright

About the Publisher

THIS IS THE story of a drop-dead gorgeous girl called Pumpkin, who has long blonde hair and a figure to die for. Skinny as a rake, thin as a pin, with long luscious legs right up to her bum.

I wish!

It is my sister Petal who has long luscious legs and a figure to die for. I am Pumpkin, and I am plump. Dad, trying to make me feel better, says that I am cuddly. Some people (trying to make me feel worse) say that I am fat. I am not fat! But I did go through a phase of thinking I was and hating myself for it.

I am the middle one of three. There is my sister Petal (drop-dead gorgeous), whose real name is Louise and who is two years older than I am. And then there is Philip, known as Pip, who is two years younger. So you see I really am stuck in the middle. An uncomfortable position! Well, I think it is. Pip, being the youngest, and a boy, is spoilt rotten. (Mum would deny this, but it is true. She is the one who does the spoiling!) Petal, on the other hand, being the oldest, is treated practically as an adult and allowed to do just whatever she wants.

At the time I am writing about, when I got all fussed and bothered thinking I was fat, my sister Petal was fourteen, which may seem a big age when you are only, say, six or seven, but is nowhere near as grown up as she liked to make out. She was still only in Year 9. My Auntie Megan, who is a teacher, says that Year 9s are the pits.

“Think they know everything, and know absolutely nothing!”

Petal was certainly convinced that she knew everything, especially about boys. To hear her talk, you’d think she was the world’s authority. She was boy mad.

What do I mean, was! She still is! She’s worse than ever! I suppose it is hard to avoid it when you are so drop-dead gorgeous. Petal has only to widen her eyes, which are quite wide enough to begin with, and every boy on the block comes running. She ought by rights to be a dumb blonde airhead. I mean if there was any justice in the world, that is what she would be. But it is one of life’s great unfairnesses that some people have brains as well as bodies. That’s Petal for you. She is not a boffin, like Pip, but she can pass all her exams OK, no trouble at all, without doing so much as a single stroke of work, or so it seems to me. Well, I mean, the amount of socialising she does, she wouldn’t have time to do any work. Even in Year 9 she was busy buzzing about all over the place. This is what I’m saying: she’s the oldest, so she could get away with it. Nobody ever bothered to check where she was or who she was with.

Actually, I suppose, really and truly, nobody ever bothered to check a whole lot of things about any of us. About Petal and her boyfriends, me and my fatness, Pip and his secret worries. This is probably what comes of having a dad who is (in his words, not mine!) “just a slob”, and a mum who is a high flyer.

It was Dad who stayed home to look after us when we were little, while Mum clawed her way up the career ladder. It was what they both wanted. Dad enjoyed being a househusband; Mum enjoyed going out to work. She’s into real estate (I always think that sounds more impressive than estate agent) and she pushes herself really hard. Some days we hardly used to see her. It was always Dad who sent us off to school and was there for us when we came home at teatime. It was Dad who played with us and read to us and tucked us up in bed. I think he made a good job of it, even though he calls himself a slob. By this he means that he is lazy, and perhaps there may be just a little bit of truth in it. It is certainly true that he always considered it far more important to stop and have a cuddle, or play a game, or go up the park, than to do any housework. But that was OK, because so did we!

Mum used to despair that “the place is a pigsty!” Well, it wasn’t very tidy, and the washing-up didn’t always get done, and sometimes you could write your name in the dust, but we didn’t mind. We looked on it as one big playground. Poor Mum! She really likes everything to be neat and clean. And ordered. Dad has other priorities. His one big passion is food. Unfortunately, it is a passion which I share…

Petal is lucky: food leaves her completely cold. She can exist quite happily on a glass of milk and a lettuce leaf. She is a vegetarian and won’t eat anything that has a face. Which, according to Petal, even includes humble creatures such as prawns. I know that prawns have whiskers. But faces???

“They are alive,” says Petal. “They don’t want to be eaten any more than you do.”

In spite of her obsession with boys – and clothes, and make-up – I suppose she is really quite high-principled.

Pip is just downright picky. Where food is concerned, that is. He won’t eat skin, he won’t eat fat, he won’t eat eggs if they’re runny (he won’t eat eggs if they’re hard), he won’t eat Indian, he won’t eat Chinese, he won’t eat cheese and he won’t eat “anything red”. For example, tomatoes, radishes, beetroot. Red peppers. Certain types of cabbage. Actually, any type of cabbage. Oh, and he absolutely loathes cauliflower, mushrooms, Brussel sprouts and broccoli. It doesn’t really leave very much for him to eat. He is Dad’s worst nightmare.

Now, me, I am Dad’s dream come true. I would eat anything he put in front of me. And oh, boy! When he was at home, did he ever put a lot! It really pleased him to see me pile into great mounds of spaghetti or macaroni cheese.

“That’s my girl!” he’d go. “That’s my Pumpkin!”

When Pip started school full time, Dad went to work as a chef in a local pizza parlour, Pizza Romana, only we all know it as Giorgio’s, because Giorgio is the man who owns it. He is a friend of Dad’s and that is how Dad got the job. It means he has to work in the evenings, and quite often Mum does, too, so we are frequently left to our own devices. But it doesn’t stop Dad trying to pile up my plate! He brings home these enormous great pizzas, which Pip won’t eat (on account of the cheese) and Petal just picks at (on account of her sparrow-like appetite) so that I am expected to finish them off. If I don’t, Dad is disappointed.

“What’s all this?” he would cry, opening the fridge and seeing half a pizza still sitting there. “Come along, Pumpkin! Don’t let me down!”

Pumpkin is Dad’s pet name for me. Pumpkin, or Pumpkin Pie. My real name is Jenny. Jenny Josephine Penny. Dad calls us his three Ps: Petal, Pip and Pumpkin. I don’t know how Petal became Petal; probably because she is so beautiful, like a flower. Pip is short for Pipsqueak. Meaning (I think) something little. Pumpkin, I am afraid to say, rather speaks for itself.

It didn’t bother me so much being called Pumpkin when I was little, but it is not such fun when you are twelve years old. It is not dignified. It brings to mind a great round orange thing. Mum says it is a term of endearment and nothing whatsoever to do with great round orange things. Huh! I wonder how she would like it?

At school, thank goodness, I am usually just Jenny, or Jen. Nobody knows that at home I am Pumpkin. Only my best friend, Saffy, and she would never tell. We are hugely loyal to each other. Saffy is the only person in the entire world that I would tell my secrets to, because I know she can be trusted and would never betray me. Needless to say, I would never betray her, either, except maybe under torture, as I am not very brave. If people started pulling out my toenails with red hot pincers, or trying to drown me in buckets of water, I have this horrid feeling that I might perhaps talk. But not otherwise! Like the time in Juniors when she confided to me this big fear she had that she was not normal. She’d heard her mum telling someone how she’d been born in an incubator. Saffy, that is.

“I think I may have developed in a test tube… I could be an alien life form!”

Well, we were only nine; what did we know? Poor Saffy was convinced she was going to start sprouting wings or turning green. Later on, of course, she discovered that she had been born too early and had been put in an incubator, so then she stopped worrying about being an alien and got a bit boastful.

“I was a premature baby!”

Like it was something clever. If ever she starts to get above herself I remind her of the time she thought she was an alien, but I have never told a living soul about it and I never will. Her secret is safe with me! Because that is how it is with me and Saffy.

Maybe because of being premature, Saffy is incredibly dainty. She is not terribly pretty, as her nose is a bit pointy and her mouth is rather on the small side, but she is very sweet and delicate-looking. She has green eyes, like a cat – she really ought to be called Emerald, not Sapphire! – and feathery red-gold hair. Oh, and she has freckles, which she hates, but which personally I think are really cool. I would like to have freckles! I once tried painting some on out a rather horrible boy in our class yelled “Spotty!” at me, so I didn’t do it any more.

Alone of all us three pennies, I take after Dad. Mum is slim and graceful: Dad is tubby. He is also a bit thin on top, which I am not! I have fair hair, like Petal – quite thick. But whereas Petal’s is thick and straight, mine unfortunately is thick and curly. Ugh! I hate curls. Another thing I once tried, I spread my hair on the ironing board and ironed it, to get the kinks out, but instead I just went and frizzed it up into a mad mess like a Brillo pad. I didn’t try that again! Saffy suggested I should hang heavy weights off it, which seemed like it might work. So I collected up all these big stones from the garden and spent hours in my bedroom sewing little sacks for the stones to go in, I even stitched ribbons on to them – pink, ‘cos I wanted them to look nice in case anyone saw me – and I tied them on to my hair and went to bed all clunking and clanking in the hope that I would wake up in the morning with my hair as blissfully straight as Petal’s.

Well. Huh! What a brilliant idea that turned out to be. First off, I had to sleep on my front with my nose pressed into the pillow, as a result of which I nearly suffocated. Second, every time I moved a stone would go clonk! into my face. Third, I woke up with a headache; and fourth, it had no effect whatsoever on my hair. All that hard work and suffering for absolutely nothing!

I should have learnt my lesson. I should have learnt that it is foolish and futile to put yourself through agonies of pain in a vain attempt to be beautiful. But of course I didn’t. Saffy says, “Does one ever?” I would like to think so. I would like to think you reach a stage where you are content to be just the way you are, without all this stress about freckles and hair and body shape; but somehow, watching Mum put on her make-up every morning, watching her carefully select what clothes to wear (like when she has a client she specially wants to impress) Somehow I doubt it. I feel that we are doomed to hanker after unattainable perfection. Until, in the end, we get old and past it, which surely must be a great comfort?

Although in my plumpness I take after Dad, I think that in many other ways I take after Mum. I am for instance quite ambitious. Far more so than Petal, though not as much as my little boffin brother, who will probably end up as a nuclear physicist or at the very least a brain surgeon. But I wouldn’t mind being a high flyer, like Mum – if only I could make up my mind what to fly at. Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. Over the years I have been going to be: a tour guide (because I would like to travel); an air hostess (for the same reason); something in the army (ditto); a children’s nanny (I would go to America!); or a car mechanic.

It is so difficult to decide. I once tried speaking to Dad about it, because I did think, at the age of twelve, I ought to be making plans. Dad said, “Rubbish! You’re far too young to bother your head about that sort of thing. Just take life as it comes, that’s my motto.”

“But I want to know what to aim at,” I said.

Dad suggested that maybe I could follow in his footsteps and be a chef. He was all eager for me to start straight away. I know he would like nothing better than to teach me how to cook, but I feel I am already into food quite enough as it is. I don’t need encouragement! I’ve seen Dad in the kitchen. I’ve seen the way he picks at things. He just can’t resist nibbling! Sometimes when he cooks Sunday lunch Mum tells one of us to go and stand over him while he is dishing up.

“Otherwise we’ll be lucky if there’s anything left!”

She is only partly joking. Dad did once demolish practically a whole plateful of roast potatoes before they could reach the table. He doesn’t mean to; he does it without realising. I can understand how it happens, because I would be the same unless I exercised the most enormous willpower. I think food is such a comfort!

I could see that Dad was a bit upset when I showed so little enthusiasm for the idea of becoming a chef. He said, “Don’t let me down, Plumpkin! Us foodies have got to stick together.”

I thought, Plumpkin? I looked at Dad, reproachfully, wondering whether I had heard him right. You couldn’t go round calling people Plumpkin! It was like calling them fatty, or baldy, or midget. It wasn’t PC. It was insulting!

“Eh? Plumpkin?”

He’d said it again! My own dad!

“It’s up to us,” said Dad, “to keep the flag flying. Beachballs versus stick insects! There’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know, in having a healthy appetite.”

Saffy has a healthy appetite. She eats just about anything and everything and never even puts on a gram. Life is very unfair, I sometimes think.

I managed to get Mum by herself one day, for about two seconds, and said, straight out, “Mum, do you think I’m fat?”

She was whizzing to and fro at the time, getting ready for work.

“Fat?” she cried, over her shoulder, as she flew past. “Of course you’re not fat!”

“I feel fat,” I said.

“Well, you’re not,” said Mum, snatching up a pile of papers. “Don’t be so silly!” She crammed the papers into her briefcase. “I don’t want you starting on that,” she said.

“But Dad called me Plumpkin,” I wailed.

“Oh, poppet!” Mum paused just long enough to give me a quick hug before racing across the room to grab her mobile. “He doesn’t mean anything by it! It’s just a term of endearment.”

“He wouldn’t say it to Petal,” I said.

“No, well, Petal doesn’t eat enough to keep a flea alive. You have more sense – and I love you just the way you are!”

“Fat,” I muttered.

“Puppy fat. There’s nothing wrong with that. You take after your dad – and I love him just the way he is, as well!”

With that she was gone, whirling off in a cloud of scent, briefcase bulging, mobile in her hand. That’s my mum! A real high flyer. It is next to impossible to have a proper heart-to-heart with her as she is always in such a mad rush; but it would have been nice to talk just a little bit more.

It was definitely round about then that I started on all my fretting and fussing on the subject of fat.

BEFORE GOING ANY further I think I should describe what was a typical day in the Penny household.

Typical Day

8am. In the kitchen. Mum standing by the table, blowing on her nails. (She has just painted them with bright red varnish.) Mum is wearing her smart grey office suit, very chic and pinstriped. She looks like a high-powered business executive.

Petal bursts through the door in her usual mad rush. She is no good at getting up in the morning, probably because she hardly ever goes to bed before midnight. (As I said before, she is allowed to get away with anything. I wouldn’t be!)

Petal looks sensational even in our dire school uniform of grolly green skirt and sweater. The skirt is pleated. Yuck yuck yuck! But Petal has customised it; in other words, rolled the waistband over so that the skirt barely covers her bottom. Her tiny bottom. And nobody says a thing! Mum is too busy blowing on her nails and Dad wouldn’t notice if we all dressed up in bin bags. But wait till she gets to school and Mrs Jacklin sees her. Then she’ll catch it! But not, of course, before all the boys have had a good look…

Mrs Jacklin, by the way, is our head teacher and a real dragon when it comes to dress code. Skirts down to the knee. No jewellery. No stack heels. No fancy hairstyles. It makes life very difficult for a girl like Petal. It doesn’t bother me so much.

I am sitting at the table trying to finish off my maths homework, which I should have done last night only I didn’t because I forgot – a thing that seems to happen rather frequently with me and maths homework. I, too, am wearing our dire school uniform but looking nothing like Petal does. For a start, there is just no way I could roll the waistband of my skirt over. I wouldn’t be able to do it up! There is a hole in my tights (grolly green, to go with the rest of the foul get-up) and I suddenly see that I have dribbled food down the front of my sweater. From the looks of it, it is sauce from yesterday’s spaghetti. Ugh! Why am I so messy?

It is because I take after Dad. He is also messy. We are both slobs!

Make a mental note to change my ways. Do not wish to be a slob for the rest of my life. Begin by going over to the sink and pawing at spaghetti marks with dish cloth. Have to push past Pip to get there. Pip is down on his hands and knees, packing his school bag. He is a compulsive packer. He puts things in and takes them out and puts them back in a different order. Everything has to be just right.

Query: at the age often, what does he have to pack??? When I was ten I just went off with my fluffy froggy pencil case and my lunch box and my teddy bear mascot. Pip lugs a whole library around with him.

“Don’t tread on my things!” he yells, as I cram past him on my way back from the sink.

Pip is wearing his school uniform of white shirt and grey trousers. He looks like any other small boy. Perhaps a bit more intense and serious, being such a boffin, though I am not sure he is quite the genius that Mum makes him out to be. Although I don’t know! He could be. My brother the genius…

What with Pip being so brainy, and Petal being so gorgeous, I sometimes wonder what it leaves for me. Maybe I shall have to cultivate a nice nature – like Dad. Dad never snaps or snarls. He never loses his temper. He’s never mean. He’s over at the stove right now, all bundled up in his blue woolly dressing gown, fixing a breakfast which only two of us will eat. ie, him and me!

From the way he’s stirring it, I would guess that he’s doing porridge. Dad’s a great one for porridge. He makes it very rich and creamy and serves it up with milk and sugar. Yum yum! I love Dad’s porridge. Mum won’t eat it because she’s in too much of a hurry. She’ll just have black coffee. Petal won’t eat it because she can’t be bothered. She’ll probably have a glass of milk and a banana. Pip, needless to say, won’t touch it. He says it’s all grey and slimy and reminds him of snot. Dad still tries to tempt him. I don’t know why he bothers; Pip’s a lost cause. Foodwise, that is. All he ever wants is two slices of toast, lightly browned with the crusts cut off (he won’t eat crusts) and smeared with marge. Butter makes him sick; and marmalade, of course, being orange, is a shade of red and therefore taboo.

Dad and I finish off the porridge between us, sharing the cream from the top of the milk. We’re still eating when Mum yells at Pip that it’s time to go. She drops him off at school every morning; me and Petal have to take the bus. We don’t really mind. It gives Petal the opportunity to show off her legs before Mrs Jacklin gets hold of her, and it gives me the chance to finish off my maths homework. Even, if I’m lucky, to pick someone’s brains. Esther McGuffin, for instance, who gets on two stops before us and truly is a genius. She is very good-natured and never minds if I copy. The way I see it, it is not proper cheating as I always make sure to copy some of it wrong and have never ever got more than a C+. (On the days I don’t copy I mostly get a D.)

At the school gates I meet up with Saffy. We’re in Year 7. Bottom of the pile. Petal flashes past us, showing all of her legs, and most of her bum, in a crowd of Year 9s. Year 9s are incredibly arrogant! I can see why Auntie Megan doesn’t care for them.

On a typical school day, I would say that nothing very much occurs. Of interest, that is. It just jogs on, in the same old way. One time, I remember, a girl in our class, Annie Goldstone, went and fainted in morning assembly and had to be carried out. That caused some excitement. Oh, and another time a boy called Nathan Corrie, also in our class, fell through the roof of the science lab right on top of Mr Gifford, one of our science teachers. Then there was Sophie Sutton, and her nosebleed. She bled buckets! All over her desk, all over the floor. But these sort of events are very few and far between. They don’t happen every day, or even, alas, every week. Mostly it is just the daily slog. The best you can hope for is Nathan Corrie being told to leave the room. But that is no big deal!

In spite of all this, me and Saffy do quite like school. We are neither of us specially brilliant at anything, and we are not the type of people to be chosen first for games teams or voted form captain or asked to join the Inner Circle, but we bumble along quite happily in our own way.

The Inner Circle is a gang of four girls, led by Dani Morris, who consider themselves to be the crème de la crème (as Auntie Megan would say). They are the ones who get invited to all the parties. The ones who decide what is in and what is out. Like for instance when they came to school wearing ribbed tights and all the rest of us had to start wearing ribbed tights, ‘cos otherwise we would have been just too uncool for words, until suddenly, without any warning, they went back to ordinary ones again and threw us into confusion.

I personally wouldn’t want to be a member of the Inner Circle with the eyes of all the world upon me. I would be too self-conscious!

“We will just be us,” says Saffy.

Really, what else can you be? It is no use thinking you can turn yourself into someone completely different. I know, because I have tried it. Lots of times! These are just some of the things I have attempted to be:

Bright and breezy, exuding confidence from every pore. “Hey! Wow! Way to go!”

Pathetic. Utterly pathetic.

Loud and laddish. Smutty jokes and long snorty cackles at anything even faintly suggestive.

Total disaster. I boil up like a beetroot even just thinking of it.

Creepy crawly. In other words, humble.

Even worse. I just oozed humility. All I can say is YUCK.

Eager beaver sports freak. Madly playing football in the playground every break. Dragging myself to school at half-past seven to practise netball in the freezing cold.

Bore bore BORE! I quickly gave up on that one. It wouldn’t have worked anyway.

None of them worked. None of these things that I have tried. When I thought I was being bright and breezy, I just came across as obnoxious so that people kept saying things like, “Who do you think you are, all of a sudden?” They don’t say that to Dani Morris, and she is just about as obnoxious as can be. But she can get away with it, and I can’t!

This is the point that I am making. Like when I went through my oozy phase. All I did was just smile at Kevin Williams and he instantly stretched his lips into this hideous grimace and made his eyes go crossed. Why did he do it??? He wouldn’t have done it to Petal! If Petal had smiled at him, he would most likely have gone to jelly. But Kevin Williams is a friend of Nathan Corrie, so I should have known better. Nathan Corrie behaves like something that has just crawled out of the primeval slime.

However. To return to this typical day that I am talking about. Here are me and Saffy, sat together in our little cosy corner at the back of the class, and there at the front is Ms Glazer, our maths teacher. She’s collecting up our maths homework from yesterday and handing back the stuff we did last week. She’s given me a D+. Not bad! I mean, considering I did it all on my own. At least it’s better than D-, but Ms Glazer doesn’t seem to see it that way. At the bottom, in fierce red ink, she’s written: Jenny, I really would like there to be some improvement during the course of this term. D+ is an improvement! What’s she going on about? I happen to have this mental block, where figures just don’t mean anything to me. Sometimes I seriously think that an essential part of my brain is missing. I have tried putting this point of view to Ms Glazer, but all she says in reply is, “Nonsense! There is nothing whatsoever wrong with your brain. Application is what is lacking.”

Dad is the only one who ever sympathises with me. Mum, in her ruthless high-flying way, agrees with Ms Glazer.

“Anyone can do anything if they just set their mind to it.”

That is RUBBISH. Can a one-legged man run a mile in a minute? I think not! (I wish I had thought to say this to Mum. I’d like to know how she would have wriggled out of that.)

To make up for my D+ in maths, I get an A in biology. It’s for my drawing of the rabbit’s reproductive system. I am rather proud of my rabbit’s reproductive system. I have filled in all the organs in different colours – bright reds and greens and purples – so that it looks like one of those modern paintings that make people like Dad go, “Call that art?” I try showing it to Saffy but she takes one look and shrieks, “That’s disgusting! Take it away!” She says it makes her feel sick. She says anything to do with reproduction makes her feel sick. She is a very sensitive sort of person.

All through the lesson I keep shooting little glances at my brilliant artwork. It occurs to me that the rabbit’s reproductive system, in colour, would make a fascinating and appropriate design for certain types of garment. Those smock things, for instance, that people wear when they are pregnant. It would be a fashion statement!

I get quite excited by this and wonder if perhaps I should go to art school and become a famous clothes designer. Why not? I can do it! Already I have visions of being interviewed on television.

“Jenny Jo Penny, the fashion designer…”

I would put in the Jo, being my middle name, as I think Jenny Penny is just too naff for words. There would be the Jenny Jo Penny collection and all the big Hollywood stars would come to me for their outfits. I would be a designer label! And I wouldn’t ever use fur or animal skin. I would be known for not using it.

“Jenny Jo Penny, the animal-friendly fashion designer…”

Hurrah! I’ve found something to aim at.

But wait! The last lesson of the day is art, with Mr Pickering. We are doing still life, and Mr Pickering has tastefully arranged a few bits of fruit for us to draw. In my new artistic mode I decide that just copying is not very imaginative. I mean if you just want to copy you might as well use a camera. A true artist will interpret. So what I do, I ever so slightly alter the shape of things and then splosh on the brightest colours I can find. Blue, orange, purple, like I did with the rabbit stuff. These will be my trademark!

I’m sitting there, waiting for Mr Pickering to come and comment, and feeling distinctly pleased with myself, when Saffy leans over to have a look. She gives this loud squawk and shrieks, “Ugh! It looks like—”

I am not going to say what she thinks it looks like. It is too vulgar. I am surprised that she knows about such things, although she does have two brothers, both older than she is, which perhaps would account for it. All the same, it was quite uncalled for. (Especially as it made me go all hot and red.)

What Mr Pickering says is not so vulgar, but it is certainly what I would call deflating. I am not going to repeat it. It makes me instantly droop and give up all ideas about going to art school. It is terrible to have so little confidence! But between them, Saffy and Mr Pickering have utterly demolished me.

Get home from school to find the house empty. Mum and Petal not yet back, Dad has gone off to pick up Pip. Help myself to some cold pasta and slump in front of the television till Dad and Pip arrive. Dad at once bustles out to the kitchen to prepare some food, while Pip settles down to his homework. I hardly had any homework when I was ten, but Pip has stacks of it. This is because he goes to this special school that Mum and Dad pay for, and where they are all expected to work like crazy and pass exams so that they can win scholarships to even more special schools and pass more exams and go to university and become nuclear physicists. Or whatever. Me and Petal just used to go up the road to the local Juniors. Nobody cared whether we passed our exams and became nuclear physicists. But Mum says Pip is gifted and it would be a crime not to encourage him. She is probably right. I am not complaining, since I don’t seem to be gifted in any way whatsoever. Not even artistically, in spite of getting an A for my rabbit’s reproductive system

At five o’clock Dad goes off to Giorgio’s for the evening, leaving a big bowl of macaroni cheese for us to dig into. I help myself to a sizeable dollop and go back to the television. Pip is still doing his homework. Petal comes waltzing in, snatches a mouthful of macaroni cheese and rushes upstairs to her bedroom, where she spends most of the evening telephoning her friends. Every half hour or so she wafts back down to grab an apple or a glass of milk. I hear her discussing some party that she is going to at the weekend. Her main concern seems to be whether a certain boy is likely to be there, and if so, who will he be there with?

“Please not that awful tart from Year 10!”

If it’s the awful tart from Year 10, Petal will just die. Why, is what I want to know? But it is no use asking her. She has already gone wailing back up the stairs.

“What will I do? What will I do?”

Fascinating stuff! I sometimes think that Petal and I inhabit different worlds.

We all do actually. Me and Petal and Pip. There’s Pip obsessed with work, and Petal obsessed with boys, and me very soon to become obsessed with fat. We never talk about our obsessions. We never really talk about anything. We are part of the same family and live under the same roof and I think we all love one another; but we never actually communicate.

Mum gets in at quarter to nine. She gives me and Pip a quick peck on the cheek – “All right, poppets? Everything OK?” – pours herself a glass of wine and disappears upstairs to soak in the bath. Pip packs up his homework, makes himself a lettuce sandwich and takes himself off to bed. Just like that! Without being told. It doesn’t strike me as quite normal, for a ten year old, but that is Pip for you. He has the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Obviously nobody is going to eat Dad’s macaroni cheese, so I decide I’d better polish it off to stop Dad from being upset. I then finish off my homework, watch a bit more telly, eat a bag of crisps and go upstairs.

At eleven o’clock Dad comes home from work and calls out to see if anyone’s awake and wants a nightcap. I am, and I do! So Dad makes two mugs of foaming hot chocolate and we drink them together, with Dad sitting on the edge of my bed. I love these private moments that I have with Dad! I tell him all about school, about my A for biology and my D+ for maths, and Dad tells me all about Giorgio’s, about the customers who’ve been in and the food that he’s cooked. The only thing that slightly spoils it is when he says goodnight. He says, “Night night, Plumpkin! Sleep tight.”

He seems to be calling me Plumpkin all the time now. I pull up the duvet and fall asleep, only to dream, for some reason, of whales. Big beached blubbery whales. I wonder what Petal dreams of? Boys, probably.

That was how it was when I was twelve. I’m fourteen now, but nothing very much has changed. Dad still cooks, Mum is still high-powered, Petal still casts her spell over the male population, Pip still does oceans of homework. The only thing is, I no longer dream about whales. That has got to be an improvement!

This is how it came about.

IT WAS SAFFY who suggested we should go to acting classes. I was quite surprised as she had never shown any inclination that way. Just the opposite! Once at infant school she was chosen to be an angel in the nativity play, a sweet little red-headed, pointy-nosed angel, all dressed up in a white nightie with a halo on her head and dear little wings sprouting out of her back. Guess what? She tripped over her nightie, forgot her line – she only had the one – and ran off the stage, blubbing. Oh, dear! It is something she will never manage to live down. She gets quite huffy about it.

“I was six,” she says, if ever I chance, just casually, to bring it into the conversation. Which I only do if I feel for some reason she needs putting in her place.

When she is in a really huffy mood she will waspishly remind me that I didn’t get chosen to be anything at all, let alone an angel, which you would have thought I might have done, having fair hair and blue eyes and looking, if I may say so, far more angelic than Saffy. In my opinion, she would have been better cast as a sheep. (Then she wouldn’t have had a nightie to trip over, ha ha!)

The only reason I didn’t get chosen was that I caught chicken pox. If I hadn’t had chicken pox, I bet I’d have been an angel all right! And I bet I wouldn’t have tripped over my nightie and forgotten my line, either. Saffy has absolutely no right to crow. It is hardly a person’s fault if a person gets struck down by illness.

I have said this to her many times, but all she says in reply is, “You picked yourself.”

What she means is, I scratched my spots. She says that is why I wasn’t chosen.

“It was a nativity play, not a horror show!”

It’s true I did make a bit of a mess of myself. Petal, who had chicken pox at the same time as me, didn’t even scrape off one tiny little crust. Even at the age of eight, Petal obviously knew the value of a smooth, unblemished skin. But it is all vanity! What do I care? In any case, as Saffy always hastens to assure me – feeling guilty, no doubt, at her cruel jibe – “It hardly shows at all these days. Honestly! Just one little dent in the middle of your chin… it’s really cute!”

Huh! It doesn’t alter the fact that she had her chance as an angel and she muffed it. It is no use getting ratty with me! What I didn’t understand was why she should want to go to acting classes, all of a sudden.

I put this to her, and earnestly Saffy explained it wasn’t so much the acting she was interested in, though she reckoned by now she could manage to say the odd line or two without bursting into tears. What it was, she said, was boys.

“Ah,” I said. “Aha!”

“Precisely,” said Saffy.

She giggled, and so did I.

“You think it would be a good way to meet them?”

“I do,” said Saffy.

In that case, I was all for it! Meeting boys, in that second term of Year 7, had become very important, not to say crucial. We had to meet boys! There were lots of boys in our class at school, of course, but we had already met them. We met them every day, and we didn’t think much of them. Well, I mean! Kevin Williams and Nathan Corrie. Pur-lease! Not that they were all primeval swamp creatures, but even those that hadn’t crawled out of the mud seemed to come from distant planets. Trying to suss them out was like trying to fathom the workings of an alien mind. Were they plant life? Or were they animal? They probably thought the same about us. But you have to get to grips with them sooner or later because otherwise, for goodness’ sake, the human race would just die out!

I didn’t say this to Saffy, knowing her sensitivity on certain subjects, eg, the rabbit’s reproductive system. I just agreed with her that meeting boys was an essential part of our education, and one which at the moment was being sadly neglected.

“I don’t know how Petal got going,” I said. “She just seemed to do it automatically.”

Saffy said that Petal was a natural.

“People like you and me have to work at it.”

“And you honestly truly think,” I said, “that drama school would be a good place to start?”

Saffy said yes, it would be brilliant! She sounded really keen. At drama school, she said, we would meet boys who were creative and sensitive, and gorgeous with it. All the things that the swamp creatures weren’t. It’s true! You look at a boy like Nathan Corrie and you think, “Is this life as we know it?”

The thought of meeting boys who were both creative and sensitive and gorgeous seemed almost too good to be true.

“Do they really exist?” I said.

“Of course they do!” said Saffy. She said that you had to be all of those things if you wanted to be an actor. You couldn’t have actors that were goofy or geeky or just plain boring.

“Or even just plain,” I said. And then immediately thought of at least a dozen that were all of those things. I reeled off a list to Saffy.

“What about that one that looks like a frog? That one that was on the other day. And that one that’s all drippy, the one in Scene Stealing, that you said you couldn’t stand. You said it was insulting they ever let him on the screen. And that other one, that Jason person, the one in—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” said Saffy. “But there’s far more who are gorgeous. I mean—” She gave this little nervous trill. Nervous because she knew perfectly well she was being self-indulgent. “Look at Brad!”

By Brad she meant Brad Pitt. (Famous American movie star, in case anyone has been hiding in a hole for the past ten years.) Don’t ask me what Brad Pitt had to do with it. Just don’t ask. Saffy brings Brad Pitt into everything. She can’t help it, poor dear, she is infatuated. I somewhat sternly pointed out (being cruel to be kind) that Brad Pitt is not exactly a boy, in fact he is probably old enough to be her grandfather. Well, father. I might just as well not have bothered! Saffy simply smiled this soppy smile and loftily informed me that she preferred “the mature man”.

“Well, you’re not very likely to meet any mature men at drama classes,” I said. “Not when they’re advertised for 12 to 16 year olds!”

“That’s all right,” said Saffy, still in these lofty tones. “If I can’t have Brad—”

“Which you can’t,” I said.

“I know I can’t!” snapped Saffy. “I just said that, didn’t I? He’s married!”

“On the other hand,” I said, trying to be helpful, “he’s bound to get divorced. Movie stars always do. If you wait around long enough—”

“Oh!” She clasped her hands. “Do you think so?” Heavens! She was taking me seriously. Her cheeks had now turned bright pink.

“Well, no,” I said. “I don’t, actually. By the time you’re old enough, he’ll be practically decrepit.”

Her face fell, and I immediately felt that I had been mean, turning her daydreams into a joke. It’s not kind to trample on people’s daydreams. Specially not when it’s your best friend. But Saffy is actually quite realistic and never stays crushed for long. She is a whole lot tougher than she looks!

“Well, anyway,” she said, “as I was saying, if I can’t have Brad I’ll make do with someone else. Just in the mean time. To practise on.”

“While you’re waiting,” I said.

“Yes.” She giggled. “As long as they’re not geeky!”

“Or swamp creatures.”

“Or aliens.”

But they wouldn’t be. She promised me! They would be creative and sensitive and hunky. She said we must enrol straight away.

“We’ve already missed the first two weeks of term. They’ll all be taken!”

I said, “Who will?”

“All the gorgeous guys!”

“Oh. Right!” An idea suddenly struck me. If all the guys were going to be gorgeous, wouldn’t all the girls be gorgeous, too? I had visions of finding myself among a dozen different versions of Petal. What a nightmare!

I put this to Saffy, but she reassured me. She said that loads of quite ordinary-looking girls (such as for instance her and me) fancied themselves as actresses, but the only boys who went to drama classes were the creative, sensitive, and divinely beautiful ones.

“If they’re not creative and sensitive they go and play with their computers. And if they are creative and sensitive, but not very beautiful—”

I waited.

“They go and do something else,” said Saffy.

“Like what?” I said.

“Oh! I don’t know.” She waved a hand. Saffy can never be bothered with mere detail. She is quite an impatient sort of person. “Probably go and write poetry, or something.”

I thought about the boys in our class. Writing poetry was not an activity I associated with any of them. Ethan Cole had once written a limerick that started “There was a young girl called Jan”, but none of it had scanned and it hadn’t made any sort of sense and what was more it had been downright rude. That was the only sort of poetry that the boys in our class understood. How could you have a class with fourteen boys and every single one an alien?

I said to Saffy that if I could meet a boy that wrote poetry I wouldn’t mind if he wasn’t beautiful, just the fact that he wrote poetry would be enough, but Saffy told me that that made me sound desperate.

“Why settle for a creative geek when you could have a creative hunk? Ask your mum and dad as soon as you get home. Tell them your entire future is at stake! You don’t have to mention boys. Just say that having drama classes will give you poise and – and confidence and – and will be good for your self-esteem.”

“All right,” I said.

I asked Dad the minute he got back from picking up Pip from school. I followed him round the kitchen as he chopped and sliced and tossed things into pans.

“Dad,” I said.

“Yes? Out of the way, there’s a good girl!”

I hastily skipped round the other side of the table. Dad hates to be crowded when he’s in the kitchen. Mum says he’s a bit of a prima donna.

“Do you think I could go to acting classes?” I said.

Dad said, “What sort of acting classes? Hand me the salt, would you?”

“Acting classes,” I said. “Drama. At a drama school.”

“Pepper!”

“It would give me poise,” I said.

“Poise, eh? Taste this!” Dad thrust a spoon in my face. “How is it? Not too hot?”

“It’s scrummy,” I said. “The thing is, if I went to acting classes—”

“Bit more salt, I reckon.”

“It would give me confidence, Dad!”

“Didn’t know you lacked it,” said Dad.

“I do,” I said. “That’s why I want to go. So could I, Dad? Please?”

“It’s not up to me,” said Dad. “Ask your mum.”

I should have known! It’s what he always says. Dad and me are really great mates, and he is wonderful for having cuddles with, but whenever it’s anything serious he always, always says ask your mum. It’s like Mum is the career woman, she is the big breadwinner, so she has to make all the decisions.

Well, of course, Mum didn’t get in till late, and as usual she was worn to a frazzle and just wanted to go and soak in the bath.

“Darling, I’m exhausted!” she said. “It’s been the most ghastly day. Let’s talk at the weekend. We’ll sit down and have a long chat, I promise.”

“But, Mum,” I said, “I need to talk now.” Saffy would be cross if I didn’t have an answer for her. She wanted us to be enrolled by the weekend. “All it is,” I said, “I just want to know if I could go to drama classes.”

It is easy to see how Mum has got ahead in business. In spite of being exhausted, she immediately wanted all the details, such as where, and who with, and how much. Fortunately Saffy can be quite efficient when she puts her mind to it. She had told me where to find the advert in the Yellow Pages, plus she had written down all the things that Mum would want to know.

“It’s right near where Saffy lives,” I said. “I could go back with her after school on Fridays, and I thought perhaps you could come and pick me up afterwards. Maybe. I mean, if you weren’t too busy. If you didn’t have to work late. And then on Saturdays—”

“We could manage Saturdays between us,” said Mum. “If you’ve really set your heart on it.”

One of the best things about my mum is, when you do get to talk to her she doesn’t keep you on tenterhooks while she hums and hahs and thinks things over. She makes up her mind right there and then. It’s something I really like about her. Especially when she makes up her mind the way I want her to! Though considering Pip has his own computer and about nine million computer games, and Petal has her own TV and her own CD player, and I don’t have any of these things (mainly because I don’t particularly want them) Mum probably thought that a few drama classes weren’t so very much to ask. She is quite fair, on the whole, except for spoiling Pip rotten on account of him being the youngest. And of course a boy. I really do think boys get treated better than girls! Petal doesn’t necessarily agree. She says that if Mum spoils Pip, then Dad spoils me. But he only spoils me with food. He’d spoil Petal with food if she’d let him, but she won’t, so she only has herself to blame.

Anyway, Mum said that on Friday she would leave work early and come with me so that I could get myself enrolled. When she said that, I just nearly burst at the seams! I thought that for Mum to actually come with me was worth far more than if she’d bought me a dozen computers or TV sets. Mum works so hard and such long hours, she almost never gets to do anything with us. I couldn’t resist a bit of boasting, on the phone to Saffy.

“Mum is going to come with me,” I said.

“Yes, well, she’d have to,” said Saffy. “Mine’s coming, too. You have to have your parents’ permission.” I couldn’t really expect Saffy to understand how momentous it was, Mum leaving work early just for me. Saffy’s mum only works part-time, and then all she does is answer someone’s telephone. She’s not high-powered like my mum! She is very nice, though. The sort of mum you read about in books. The sort that cooks and sews and all that stuff. Kind of… old-fashioned. Though I don’t think Saffy sees it that way. She thinks it’s quite normal to have a mum who’s there in the morning when she leaves for school and there again in the afternoon when she gets back. She once told me that she found it a bit peculiar, me having a dad who stayed home to look after us.

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