Sleepover Girls in the Ring (8 page)

“What about practising here in the hall?” I suggested. “It’s big enough. We’ll have plenty of room.”

Rosie looked a bit uncertain.

“Come on, Rosie, we can’t really do any
harm in here, can we?” said Fliss gently.

The paint was peeling from the hall skirting boards, the wallpaper was tearing off in strips and there were only bare bulbs in the sockets, no light fittings or anything.

“OK,” Rosie agreed at last.

“Great!”

Fliss set up her plate-spinning stands at the far end of the hall near the kitchen. She was using special plastic plates which looked like china, but they didn’t break if they fell. Frankie had plenty of space to ride up and down on her unicycle, as long as she avoided Rosie parading about on her stilts.

Lyndz and I really didn’t need that much room for our juggling. Once we got into our routines, it felt pretty cool. Especially as Adam was clearly thrilled with it all. He’d wheeled himself out of the dining room so he could get a better look, and he was grinning like mad. Frankie rode over to him and started cycling backwards and forwards round him. He loved that.

“Hey, do you want to see my clown act, Adam?” I shouted, and dashed upstairs to
change into my costume.

I’d been practising a routine at home, and it was about time I showed the others. I know that Ailsa’s dad had said that all we needed to do was run about in silly costumes, but I wasn’t going to do that. I wanted everybody to remember what a great clown I was! The others hadn’t planned anything special – they just said they were going to have a laugh.

Anyway, I went into Rosie’s room, pulled on the zany clown costume Mum had made for me (without Molly knowing, I hasten to add), and sprayed some shaving foam on to two paper plates.

“What are you doing with those?” squeaked Rosie as soon as I appeared downstairs again. “Please, Kenny – you promised we wouldn’t make a mess!”

“Keep your knickers on!” I told her. “I’m just getting used to holding them, that’s all. I’m not going to throw them, you dill!”

“Well, just make sure you don’t, OK?”

Frankie was still careering about on her unicycle, picking up speed as she got used
to turning in the hall.

“I’m bored with this now,” Fliss moaned, removing the last plate from her pole. “Can I have a go on those moon shoes you got for your birthday, Rosie? They’ll make me feel like I’m flying the way I did on the trapeze!”

We all groaned. She was
still
going on about her stunt on the trapeze, and it was driving us all crazy! Rosie told her where her moon shoes were, and carried on walking about on her stilts.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever seen moon shoes before. They’re like boots with trampolines on their soles. So when you walk on them, you bounce up and down like an astronaut on the moon or something. And the more you bounce, the higher you go.

Well, Fliss was just in her element with those strapped to her feet.

“Look, I’m flying!” she kept yelling as she bounded down the hall.

“Just be careful in those,” Frankie warned her. “We don’t want any accidents, do we?”

Famous last words or what?

We were all happily doing our own thing
one minute, and the next… It still gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. And I know that we usually blame Fliss when anything goes wrong, but what happened that day was absolutely
one hundred percent
her fault, no question.

Frankie was steaming up and down the hall on her unicycle. Admittedly she was getting faster and faster, but she was always in control. That is until Miss Felicity Proudlove entered the scene. (Yup, she’s Proudlove these days, ever since her mum married Andy in July. Gross, huh? Though perhaps not as bad as her old name, Sidebotham.)

“Watch me – I bet I can touch the ceiling!” she yelled.

She gave a huge bounce, somehow leapt at an angle and came crashing down right on top of Frankie.

“WAAAYHAAYY – I can’t see!” Frankie shrieked, and skidded the length of the hall, the unicycle obviously out of control beneath her. Unfortunately, Rosie, who was on her stilts, could see her coming but
couldn’t do anything about it. One minute she was strutting about four feet in the air – the next, she’d had her stilts whipped from under her and had gone sprawling on to the ground.
CRASH!

And this is where the really unfortunate bit comes into it.

You remember how Tiff had told us that the lounge door was open, don’t you? And how under no circumstances were we to go in there? Well, we didn’t have much choice. Lyndz and I were standing right by the lounge door when Rosie came hurtling towards us. Lyndz took the full force of her fall, and crashed through the door with Rosie sprawled on top of her.

The momentum of those two falling hurled me through into the lounge, which would have been OK apart from two things – a) Lyndz’s juggling balls and b) my two foam pies. Somehow a ball got under my feet, and I felt like one of those clown toys trying to balance on top of it… I slithered and I staggered, and after what felt like about five whole minutes, I crashed to the floor.

All I could think of was saving myself, so I let go of the plates so that I could break my fall. I could only look on in horror as one blob of shaving foam landed slap bang in the middle of Rosie’s mum’s new rug, and the other slithered horribly all down one of the throws.

The words BIG and TROUBLE flashed over my eyes in neon lights.

For a few moments, as I lay there, there was deathly silence. Then the whole world went crazy.

“What’s happened, Kenny?” shrieked Rosie, as she flew into the room. She took one look at the mess and started to wail. “Mum’s going to
ki-i-ill
me!”

“It’s not that bad!” I tried to sound confident as I got up and dusted myself off. “We’ll soon get it cleared up. It’s only shaving foam, it can’t have done so much damage.”

The others looked at me in disbelief.

“It’s not my fault!” I told them huffily. “If Fliss
here hadn’t wanted to do her moon-walking bit, none of this would have happened!”

Fliss started to protest, but was stopped by the sound of Adam’s wheelchair approaching down the hall. And the sound of him laughing like a maniac.

“It is not funny, Adam!” Rosie yelled through her sobs.

“No it most certainly is NOT!” said a furious voice behind him.

Our hearts stopped. It was Tiff.

“What on EARTH is going on?” she demanded. Then she surveyed the lounge. “I
knew
something like this would happen,” she raged. “I told Mum she was mad, trusting you lot here. You wreck everything you touch! Mum’s going to kill you this time, Rosie, she really is!”

Rosie had somehow recovered herself, and was now staring at Tiff defiantly. “Well, she’ll kill you too then, won’t she? You were supposed to be supervising us, not messing about with Spud.”

They stared each other down like it was the OK Corral or something. Then Tiff spoke.

“All right then, I’ll help you clean it up. But if you put a foot wrong again, I’ll tell Mum everything, OK?”

Rosie nodded. Then, to our total relief, Tiff went into clean-up overdrive. She gave us all instructions of where we should find various cloths and buckets of water to get the stains off the rug and the throw. She even dispatched Rosie to fetch a hairdryer so we could dry off the marks.

We were all on our hands and knees rubbing at them furiously when the front door closed.

“Mum!” screeched Tiff and Rosie together.

“Right! Everyone sit down where you are so she won’t notice anything,” Tiff commanded. “And act normal. That’s
our
normal, Kenny, not yours!”

Charming! It wasn’t my fault I was still dressed as a clown, was it?

We all flopped down. Frankie and I lay on the rug, the others sprawled over the sofa. Just at the last minute Rosie noticed the bucket of water and managed to hide it behind the door before her mum appeared.

“I thought we had a deal about no-one coming in here,” she said crossly. Oh-oh, someone wasn’t having a good day.

“We wanted to see your new room,” Frankie smiled sweetly. “Rosie’s been raving about it so much.”

“And I said it would be OK if I came in with them,” Tiff continued brightly. “They’re hardly likely to get into any trouble if I’m here, are they?”

“I suppose not,” Mrs Cartwright agreed with reluctance.

“Hey, you look tired, Mum,” Tiff coaxed. “I’ll make you a cup of tea if you like.”

“That’d be nice, love!” Mrs Cartwright smiled. “So, how do you like the room then, girls? It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“Fabulous!” we all agreed.

“Well, make sure you don’t mess it up, won’t you?”

Tiff ushered her mum out of the door and mouthed to us, “Start drying the stains, I’ll keep Mum in the kitchen.”

Once we were sure they’d gone, we all stood up.

“Yuck! I’ve got a wet patch on my bum!” I announced.

“Well, at least you’ll have dried it off a bit,” Frankie grinned. “It means we won’t have to use the hairdryer so much.”

“Won’t your mum think it’s a bit suss if she hears that whirring away?” Fliss asked.

“I’ve thought of that,” Rosie smirked, and turned on the radio really loudly.

We took it in turns to dry the stains, and when we weren’t drying we were dancing! It was great. But because we had the radio on so loud we didn’t hear footsteps in the hall. We nearly jumped out of our skins when Rosie’s mum suddenly reappeared.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

I was holding the hairdryer, and fortunately had a brainwave. I held it like a microphone and started singing at the top of my voice.

“Sorry, Mrs C,” I grinned. “I just love this song, don’t you?”

“You might find it sounds better if the hairdryer isn’t actually
on,
Kenny,” she said
suspiciously. “But then again…”

She cast her eye over the throws and the rug, but thankfully the stains had gone.

“Right, I think it’s time you tidied all this lot away.” She looked down at all the circus props we’d abandoned on the floor. “And get yourselves ready for supper. I would appreciate a bit of quiet this evening too. I’ve got a mountain of work to do for college.”

We picked up the stilts, juggling balls and all the other stuff, and took them upstairs. Whilst we did that, Rosie sneaked outside and emptied the bucket of water.

Before supper we had a peek in the lounge. It looked perfect. I couldn’t believe that we’d actually got away with it!

But we nearly didn’t, because Adam did his best to land us in it with his mum.

He’s really clever, is Adam. He might not be able to speak clearly because of his cerebral palsy, but he sure knows how to manipulate people. We ended up playing stupid games with him all night, because when we said we were going to do our own stuff, he called “MUM!” and we just knew
that he was going to grass on us. I mean, normally I would just love to play football games on the computer with him, but we really had more important things to be doing – like practising our routines for the circus.

When Adam finally went to bed, we looked as though we had our chance. We piled into Rosie’s room, pushed all our sleeping bags and stuff to one side and started rehearsing. Rosie was making us all laugh by dancing on her stilts when Tiff burst in.

“If you lot don’t shut up right now, I’m going to tell Mum!” she shouted.

“Tell me what?”

Rosie’s mum was standing behind Tiff. She looked dead tired and kind of cross.

“Erm that, that… we’re going to stay awake all night!” I blurted out. Well, could you have come up with anything better under the circumstances?

“Oh no you’re not!” Rosie’s mum raged. “In fact, you’re going to get ready for bed right now, and I don’t want to hear another peep out of you! And if I do, there’ll be no circus performance for any of you tomorrow.
Do I make myself clear?”

Rosie certainly hadn’t been kidding about how mad her mum can get!

I can’t ever remember us getting ready for bed so quickly before, or so quietly. We hardly spoke to each other.

“Do you think your mum’s found out about the lounge?” Frankie whispered when we were tucked up in our sleeping bags.