Boys on the Brain. Jean Ure
me. I realise that you are in the throes of sexual passion.”
Tasha Lansmann said today that she thinks Mrs Pritchard is having an affair with Mr Bunting. She said that she bumped into Mr Bunting coming out of the library, and that he looked decidedly shifty and was “adjusting his dress”. This is such a disgusting expression! All it means is fiddling with his flies. And it is probably quite untrue. He probably just had an itch in an embarrassing place. Tasha Lansmann sees sex everywhere. All the same, I shall look at Mrs Pritchard most carefully next time I go to the library. These things do happen.
Something intensely annoying. At lunch time me and Pilch had gone to the loo when suddenly there was the sound of the door crashing open and feet clumping in, and it was Cindy Williams and Tasha Lansmann. I could tell it was them by their loud squawking voices.
“So who are you asking?” goes Tasha. “You asking Mel and her crowd?” Cindy says yes, she’s asking practically everybody.
“I want it to be a real rave, you know?”
She’s talking about her birthday party.
“Boys?” says Tasha.
At which Cindy sniggers and says, “What do you think?”
So then they have a bit of a giggling session, then Tasha goes, “What about Ticky and Tocky?” And I freeze, ‘cos this is a name they’ve recently invented for me and Pilch.
“You must be joking!” goes Cindy. “That pair? They’d put the kiss of death on anything, they would!”
Personally I wouldn’t go to Cindy’s rotten party if she fell on her bended knees and begged me, and Pilch says that she wouldn’t, either. All the same, it just goes to show that you cannot be even the teeniest, tiniest bit different without being reviled and cast out. As Harry said the other day, when Mum was going on about the government, “It was ever thus.” Not that that is much comfort.
I just hope they haven’t upset Pilch. She is very sensitive.
Have reached chapter five of War and Peace. The trouble with very thick paperbacks is that you can’t open them wide enough to read the left-hand side of the page properly. It is quite tiresome. But I am going to persist because after all it is a classic.
Went to the library to look at Mrs Pritchard. Also to see if there was a copy of War and Peace that I could borrow that might be easier to read than the one I bought, but there wasn’t so I took out Harry Potter, instead. I am not giving up on War and Peace, but I have come to the conclusion that a diet of nothing but classics is probably a bit indigestible, especially when they are in small print and you cannot read properly on the left-hand side of the page.
Looked hard at Mrs Pritchard but couldn’t see any signs that she was any different from usual, which I think there would be if she were having an affair with Mr Bunting. Whenever Mum takes up with a new bloke it’s like total meltdown. She goes all moony and giggly and starts wearing these utterly unsuitable clothes. Crop tops and miniskirts and stuff that makes me really ashamed to be seen with her. Mrs Pritchard wasn’t in the least bit moony or giggly, she was quite sharp and spiky, the same as always. So I think Tasha was just fantasising.
In any case, it would be entirely too trivial. I mean, Mrs Pritchard is a librarian. She has better things to do with her time. I know Mr Bunting is generally reckoned to be quite hunky, like he has these muscles all bulging out of his arms like waterlogged balloons, and people such as Cindy and Tasha hang around and gawp when he goes running in his shorts. But he teaches geography and has a brain the size of a pea. He is totally illiterate. He once gave me C minus for my geography homework and wrote “Its not good enough Cresta.” Its instead of It’s. And no comma! How could Mrs Pritchard have an affair with a man like that?
I hate geography, anyway.
Pilch came into school today very upset as her mum suggested to her last night that maybe she should go on a diet. Pur-lease! Has her mum never heard of anorexia? It is true that Pilch is a bit on the plump side, but so what? That is the way she is made. It is the way she is happy. Why should she go and change her natural basic shape just to satisfy her mum?
Pilch said gloomily that it’s because of her sister being thin as a pin and going out with all these boys, even though she is only twelve and a half.
“Mum thinks I’m being left behind.”
“So she wants you to starve yourself?” I said.
Honestly! What with my mum going on about boys, and now Pilch’s mum wanting her to starve herself, it’s a wonder we’re not both on Prozac.
Pilch said anxiously, “You don’t think I’m fat, do you?”
I said, “No, you’re just well covered, and even if you were fat, what would it matter?”
“I wouldn’t want to be fat,” said Pilch.
I said, “Now you’re just being sizeist! You’re as bad as your mum.”
Pilch said it was all very well for me as I am what she calls “a fashionable shape”. In other words, thin. I said, “That just happens to be the way that nature made me,” and I got on my high horse a bit and started lecturing her about turning herself into a media creation.
Pilch said, “What do you mean, a media creation?”
“Like you read about in the papers,” I said.
I told her that I was sick of young people always being depicted as lame-brained airheads only interested in the opposite sex, head-banging music, designer drugs and clothes.
“Some of us have a bit more going for us than that! We don’t spend all our time gazing into mirrors and tarting ourselves up and going on diets and making ourselves ill. Your mum ought to be ashamed of herself,” I said.
Pilch cheered up a bit when I said this. She confessed that she had lain awake half the night pinching bits of flesh between her finger and thumb and wondering whether she ought to give up eating entirely, or at any rate stick to yoghurt and raw carrots.
“It was making me really miserable,” she said, as we stood in the queue for lunch. “And oh, look!” she added. “They’ve got macaroni cheese!”
I don’t really like macaroni cheese that much but I ate some just to keep her company. I think it is important that we stand shoulder to shoulder in this crisis.
Harry came round. As usual. He and Mum went up to the pub. Also as usual. Mum said, “You don’t mind, Cresta, do you?”
I said, “Why should I mind?”
“Well -” Mum looked at Harry. This sort of “Help me!” look. “It seems so awful! Me going out to enjoy myself while you just mope here with a book.”
“I’m perfectly happy,” I said.
“Yes, I know,” said Mum, “but—”
“You ought to get out more,” said Harry.
I said, “I do get out! I go to school every day. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“There’s no need to be rude,” said Mum.
I wasn’t being rude. But I hate it when they start on at me like I’m some kind of freak! Is it truly so abnormal to want to get somewhere in life? You’d