Rebecca Rocks (10 page)

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Alice.

‘Oh, come on, Alice,’ said Cass. ‘All this practice! Hours a day! We’ll be practically professionals! Ooh, look, there’s Jane and Ellie, they’ve saved us some seats. And who’s that with Ellie?’

‘It’s Sam!’ I said. ‘From
Mary Poppins
. I don’t know who the other red-haired girl is, though.’

‘Jane!’ roared Cass. ‘Ah, she heard us.’

We hurried over.

‘Look who it is!’ said Ellie. ‘Sam’s doing the art course too!’

‘Hey!’ said Sam in a cheerful way.

It was cool to see him again. He had been quite shy for most of the musical, but it turned out that this was because of his terrible fear of having to understudy John Kowalski’s stupid part. Anyway, we talked properly for the first time on the very last night of the show, and he turned out to be really nice.

‘And this is Lucy,’ said Sam, pointing to the red-haired girl. She was very tall and quite imposing, with high cheekbones.

‘Hey,’ she said, waving at us. We waved back. Then I
realised
who she was.

‘Oh, you do comics together, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Sam told me about them when we were doing the musical.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Lucy. ‘Hello.’

‘Cool,’ I said. But Lucy didn’t say anything else. She just smiled a bit distantly and looked down at her hands. I am not sure if she’s rude or shy. There is a fine line sometimes.

Anyway, the art course sounds really good. Cass thought so too. In fact, she is a bit jealous of our artist chums.

‘I’m starting to wish we could do a bit of both courses,’ she
said, as Ellie and Sam explained about their teachers and how they were all going to work on different projects – Ellie’s going to do fashion-design stuff, and Sam and Lucy are going to do comics. ‘It might be good for my theatre-set-design career.’

But I think we’re both glad that we’re doing the rock camp. It really is so much fun. And it looks like we’ll be able to avoid Vanessa and Karen fairly easily. We only saw them once today, when we were on our way out with Richard.

‘What are you doing here?’ said Vanessa in her usual
charming
and not-at-all-rude fashion.

‘We’re doing the rock camp,’ said Cass.

‘Oh, right,’ said Vanessa. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Um, you’re the one who told us about it,’ said Alice.

‘Did I?’ said Vanessa, in a bored voice. Then she noticed Richard and said, ‘Oh, hey, Bert. So you’re doing this rock thing too.’

Richard looked confused for a minute.

‘Um, it’s Richard,’ he said. ‘I just played Bert in
Mary Poppins
.’

‘Richard? Really?’ said Vanessa. ‘Oh, whatever. I just saw the role, not the boy.’ And she marched off, leaving us staring at each other. I can’t believe she played the lead role of the musical opposite Richard for weeks and weeks and she can’t
even remember what his name is.

Oh God, my mother’s roaring at me, I’d better go and see what she wants.

I don’t believe it! Apparently even during my actual summer holidays when I am spending my days working hard on the future of music, I am not allowed to relax. Apparently my mother has a problem with me leaving my bag on the floor in the hall. I am not sure where else I’m meant to put it. It’s not like there’s a special bag cupboard. She also gave out to me for leaving my jacket on the couch instead of hanging it up on the coat rack, which is a bit much if you ask me. It’s not like anyone was trying to sit on the bit of the couch where the jacket was. Anyway, I am too fatigued after all that
arguing
to write much more. But basically we spent the afternoon working on one of our songs with Kitty. It was brilliant, and I actually felt I was learning something. Which is something that doesn’t happen in actual school that often.

Ugh, that boy Charlie and his stupid band Crack Parrots are so disgusting. They were hanging around the main foyer this morning when Ellie, Alice, Cass and I walked in, and when we passed them Charlie pointed at each of us in an obnoxious fashion and said, ‘Seven, eight, seven and …’ – he pointed at Cass – ‘seven, but if you lost the glasses you might be an eight.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Alice.

Charlie smirked, which seems to be his normal facial
expression
. ‘Marks out of ten, girls,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry, you didn’t do too badly. I mean, I’d go with any of you if I had to.’

We just stared at him in disgust while his idiot bandmates sniggered. And then we walked off.

‘I think we should have said something to him and totally put him in his place,’ said Cass. ‘But I couldn’t think of
anything
.’

‘Neither could I,’ I said gloomily. ‘What a pig.’

‘My mum always says that if someone is rude you should never respond with rudeness,’ said Ellie. ‘Because the laws of the universe mean that whatever someone sends out into the world is returned to them threefold. Which supposedly means
that if anyone is horrible, they’ll get three times as much
horribleness
and bad luck back to them. But I’m not sure this is actually true.’

We looked back at Charlie. He and his stupid friends were still hanging around making comments at some other girls who had just come in.

‘He looks pretty happy,’ said Alice. ‘And Richard says he’s always been like that.’

‘And think of Vanessa,’ said Cass. ‘I don’t think the universe has punished her yet either.’

So much for the laws of the universe.

Anyway, besides Charlie and his stupid friends, today was pretty good. We started writing a new song with Kitty.

‘You shouldn’t be afraid to mess around,’ she said. ‘Some of the best songs happen when you’re not trying too hard. Just fool around with some chords and riffs and see what happens.’

It was very inspiring. We also got talking to some of the other bands, who seem pretty nice. They are mostly boys, but there are quite a few girls. There’s a girl called Maggie in a hip-hop group called Positive Trigger who seems cool. And there’s a band called Exquisite Corpse, who are all girls apart from a boy who plays drums. They are kind of gothy and look
very dramatic and gloomy, but they’re not really, as we
discovered
. When I heard what they were called I thought they were going to be into, like, sitting around in graveyards
writing
poetry about death, but they turned out to be much more entertaining. We got talking to them when we were in the hall waiting for the afternoon workshops to start. A tall girl with black dyed hair, lots of very dramatic make-up and an amazing sort of corset-y dress that looked very uncomfortable leaned towards us.

‘Hiya!’ she said, in a very cheerful voice. ‘I’m Paula. What d’you think of all this so far?’

She and her bandmates are from Beaumont and are very nice. They practise in her attic.

‘My parents were a bit scared at first,’ she said. ‘I think they thought we’d turned into Satanists or something. They thought we were going up there to do dark rituals. Which we weren’t, obviously.’

‘They’re okay about it now, though,’ said her bandmate Sophie. ‘Your mam helped me fix my skull hair bobble last week when the skull started coming off the elastic bit.’

‘And I think they’ve got quite into the music,’ said Paula. ‘I heard my dad humming “Chemical Eternity” the other day. 
That’s one of our songs,’ she added.

‘I don’t know if that means he likes it, though,’ said Sophie. ‘It could just be because he’s heard it a million times and now it’s stuck in his head forever, whether he likes it or not.’

‘Yeah, I think my parents are quite relieved we’re doing this course,’ said Paula. ‘It gives us somewhere to practise so we won’t be up in the attic for a while.’

‘We’ve got a big shed at my house,’ said Alice. She explained about living in the middle of nowhere. ‘It should be perfect. But it’s tricky for the others to get to. I wish there was
somewhere
in town we could use.’

It was fun talking to another band about this sort of thing. It’s good to know we’re not the only ones with organisational problems. They were all really nice. And it turns out even their name isn’t that creepy really. It’s just what a group of artists used to call that game where you draw a head and fold over the paper and then someone else does the same and draws the body and then someone else draws the legs. So not very scary at all. In fact, Paula is more chirpy than I am, even though she sings songs about falling in love with ghosts.

There is also the other, shorter Paula, Paula Howard, the small solo artist with the fringe. She is very quiet in a mysterious sort
of way. Whenever you say anything to her she just answers in very short sentences. But she’s not unfriendly. Small Paula is the only solo artist, and no one really knows what her music is like yet. She is quite intriguing. In fact, everyone on the course seems to be doing lots of different things. It’s a good mix. We’re all going to put on gigs for the whole camp over the last few days of the show, but of course we’ll get to see most people do stuff during the workshops over the next few weeks.

But, if I am being very shallow (and surely I should be allowed to be shallow in my own diary), I must admit that I am quite disappointed with the boys. Is that really mean? It’s just that I was hoping I might fancy someone, and there isn’t really anyone there that I fancy. Even though there are loads of boys on the course. I have a horrible feeling I really will never find love again. Maybe Paperboy and John Kowalski are all I’m ever going to get. And maybe I should be content with that, but I do still want to, like, fall madly in love with
someone
and not have them leave the country after five minutes or turn out to be a total goon. Surely that’s not too much to ask?

Also, my fringe is still misbehaving. I hoped it might have grown a bit in the last few days which might weigh it down some more. But it doesn’t seem to have happened. It’s still as
fluffy as ever. On the plus side, I have got better at clipping it back and to the side so it doesn’t look too bad then. But still.

If we are not complete musical experts by the end of this course I will be very surprised. Today we had an excellent songwriting workshop with Richard’s beloved Ian Cliff. I do not think he is as much of a genius as Richard does, but he was very good. And very imposing, as he is about ten feet tall in his stylish suits (he always wears suits – I can’t imagine him in, like, jeans) and looks even taller because his black hair is pushed up in a sort of quiff. But he has revitalised my
creativity
, especially when it comes to writing lyrics. Ever since Paperboy’s absence fuelled my creative powers, I’ve ended up becoming the band’s chief lyric-writer, but so far I’ve mostly written lyrics about what I was feeling at that very moment, which is probably why I haven’t been feeling very creative lately, what with things being dull and exam-centric.

But Ian Cliff reminded me that we can all draw from our past. And, as my love life seems to be a thing of the past, this
was fine by me. So I have come up with some lyrics for the song we started working on yesterday. They are about John Kowalski.