Boys Beware (20 page)

Thursday

Such excitement! We have seen underpants!!! I am tempted to add, “Like it’s the first time?” But they were hanging out to dry on the balcony below, a whole little line of them, all different colours, fluttering in the breeze. Really cute! It was Tash who first caught sight of them. She came giggling over, going, “Underpants!” and stuffing her hand into her mouth. Ali looked at her like she was mad. Tash squealed, “Come and see!” so I went, and we leaned out together and speculated which ones belonged to Gus and which ones belonged to his dad. This naturally led to further speculation as to what sort of underpants the divine Orlando would wear. Tash’s Orlando, that is; not the real one.

I said, “He probably wears those horrible flappy things.”

Tash screeched, “He does not!”

Well! How would she know? She doesn’t, of course. Trying to be helpful I rushed to get my latest copy of
Glam Girl
, where there is a double page spread entirely devoted to male under garments. A fascinating subject!

We sat at the table and pored over them, deciding which were the most sexy. I chose some stripy purple ones, Tash went for mock leopard skin. Rather vulgar, and
very brief.
We tried to interest Ali, but she took one look and went, “Ugh! Hairy legs!” I said that Orlando probably had hairy legs, being Italian. Tash, defiantly, said that she liked blokes with hairy legs, at which Ali and I, in chorus, shrieked, “Yeeeurgh!” At least there is something we agree upon.

Shortly after we had done our underpants survey, Tash suddenly, for what seemed like no reason at all, said to me that if I still haven’t heard from Wackeen by
the end of the week, why don’t I try writing to his sister and asking her to forward a letter. I know why she said it. She feels sorry for me! She has Orlando, and I have no one. But as I said, I don’t know what his sister’s name is. I can hardly just put “Joaquin’s Sister” on the envelope. Tash said she didn’t see why not, but I told her I am not that desperate. I don’t need her feeling sorry for me, thank you very much! I mean, it is nice to know that she cares, and I’m sure that I would feel the same in her place, but considering she doesn’t even know what
Orlando’s
name is, let alone the name of his sister … I rest my case! And anyway, he is nowhere near as good-looking as I first thought.

But why, why,
why
didn’t I get Wackeen’s address???

Friday

The most terrible panic. We had just got back from school – me and Tash; I don’t know
where
Ali was – when the phone rang. It was me who answered it. I heard Auntie Jay’s voice ring out merrily in my ears: “OK, girls! Spot check, five minutes.”

I couldn’t immediately think what she was talking about. I went, “S-spot check?”

Auntie Jay chirped, “I promised I’d give you due warning.”

And then I remembered … way back when we first moved in she threatened us with the odd visit to make
sure we weren’t trashing the place or turning it into a festering heap of garbage.

I said, “Oh! Yeah, right … spot check. No problem!”

Auntie Jay said that she would be “Up in five.”

I slammed the receiver back and reeled away across the room, feeling faint and moaning, “Spot check … Auntie Jay’s coming up!”

Tash shrieked, “Not
now!”

I said, “Yes, now! In five minutes!”

“She can’t!” wailed Tash.

But she could, and she was, and as we gazed around us, in a kind of stupefied fashion, I realised that a festering heap just about describes the way we have been living. It’s odd, cos you don’t notice it until you are suddenly forced to see it through someone else’s eyes. What we saw was not pleasant. For starters, there were clothes all over the place. Literally
all over.
Clothes on the sofa, clothes on the chairs, clothes on the floor, clothes on the table … clothes littering the bed, clothes draped over the bathroom door, clothes hanging off the backs of chairs. Muddy trainers on the draining board. Knickers – heaps of them! – in the middle of the floor. Filthy gym kit scrunched up in a corner. A pair of someone’s tights, possibly mine, dangling from the lampshade.

There were also: (dirty) dishes in the sink, (dirty) dishes on the draining board, (dirty) dishes on top of the stove, not to mention bedclothes in the bath (the ones
we’d washed but hadn’t yet got around to ironing). As for the table – well, quite frankly, you couldn’t even see the table for the junk that was cluttered on it. Books, papers, make-up, tissues, old crumpled crisp packets, gungy sauce bottles, jars of marmalade, bits of bread, stale biscuits, toast crumbs, orange peel, apple cores, sweet wrappers … These are just a few of the things I happen to remember. Usually when we sit down to eat – if we do sit down – we’ve just been clearing a space in the middle. Looking at it now, the way Auntie Jay was going to be looking at it, we could see that in fact the place was a tip.

That was when panic set in. I screeched, “Do something, do something!” and began snatching at the dishes in the sink and frantically piling them into the
cupboard underneath, amongst the cleaning stuff. Tash seized a bin bag and began sweeping all the junk off the table. I went round grabbing clothes and stuffing them haphazardly into drawers. Any drawers! Lots of them went in with the knives and forks. Just so long as they were out of the way. We took the bedclothes out of the bath and crammed them into the bin bag, which we then bundled under the sink. It was all rather disgusting, really; I mean, mixing dirty stuff in with clean stuff, beautiful spotless sheets all scrunched up with orange peel and yucky apple cores, but we simply didn’t have time to get it all sorted. This was an emergency!

At the last minute I went to the fridge to put away an open carton of milk that Tash had missed and found that
the freezer bit at the bottom wasn’t quite closed – again. There seemed to be something stopping it, and when I looked inside I saw what it was:
ice.
Huge great mounds of it, spreading all over like some kind of creeping crystalline fungus. Obviously somebody who shall remain nameless but certainly wasn’t me had gone and put stuff in there without bothering to check that the door was shut properly
and without putting the bucket back in front of it.
(I strongly suspect that it was Tash, though she denies it. But it is the sort of slapdash thing she is capable of.)

All I could do, with great presence of mind – well,
I
think it showed great presence of mind – was bash at the ice with a hammer, knocking enough chunks off it to get the door closed, in the hope that Auntie Jay wouldn’t
want to look inside cos quite honestly it was like something out of the polar regions, a great frozen waste, and I didn’t want us getting a bad report. Specially not after Mum went to all that trouble when we moved in, giving us lessons in fridge-door closing.

I’d just slung the hammer back under the sink when there was a knock at the door. Tash, running distractedly about the room with her dirty trainers, squeaked, “Help, help, what shall I do with these?” and flung them in the oven. I clawed up a pair of knickers that had escaped my earlier clothes gathering and stuffed them under a sofa cushion. In the nick of time. Phew!

Auntie Jay was quite impressed. She said, “Well, I congratulate you, you’ve kept the place really neat and
tidy.” We had, too! Well, if you didn’t look too carefully, which fortunately Auntie Jay didn’t. She opened the fridge, but only the top part, not the polar regions, and she just glanced in passing at the sink, which was just as well as we afterwards discovered it was coated in some kind of greasy grey mould.
Not
very wholesome. I did notice that the carpet seemed to have changed colour from what it was when we moved in, and Tash obviously noticed it, too, as she somewhat nervously explained to Auntie Jay that “We haven’t actually done the – um – ah – vacuuming yet. We do it like – um, ah—”

“Once a week,” I said. (More presence of mind!)

Tash said, “Once a week.”

“On a Friday,” I said.

“On a Friday,” said Tash.

I added helpfully, in case Auntie Jay might not be aware, that Friday hadn’t yet finished.

Auntie Jay said, “Quite,” and went to look in Ali’s little room. We didn’t know – at the time – what she saw, as we never go in there, but whatever it was she shut the door on it double quick, saying, “Yes … I think perhaps we’d better draw a veil over that.”

Tash, being a bit cheeky, said, “Do we get a gold star for the rest?”

Auntie Jay said, “How about a silver one?” She then told us that she thought we’d done “a really good job these last few weeks” and had proved we were “mature and responsible”.
She said, “Your mum and dad will be proud of you.”

That made us glow! But after Auntie Jay had gone back downstairs we went to look in Ali’s broom cupboard and see for ourselves what it was that had to have a veil drawn over it. Tash cried, “My God, what has she done?” It’s like some kind of mad maze. I mean, you can hardly move in there. The bed is
entirely
hemmed in by stacks of books and videos, and there are great mountains of paper, almost up to the ceiling (which is admittedly quite low). On top of the mountains there are piles of clothes, along with an assortment of cups and plates and glasses – plus Fat Man, beaming down at us. Between the stacks there is this narrow path leading to the bed. It is
so
narrow that if you were a plump sort of person, like Avril, for instance, you would never be able to squeeze your way through. Even Ali probably has to go sideways.