The Bad Karma Diaries (9 page)

I looked at Anna, a bit embarrassed.
Now
we knew why they all wrote like eight-year-olds exclaiming! Maybe this wasn’t cool? But Tommy said, ‘It’s cool. Look, it’s better than coming across all earnest.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Declan ‘it’s hysterical.’ But then he looked at the photos of the party, ‘I’m not sure you can show these,’ he said ‘not without permission. I’m pretty sure you can’t just put photos of other people’s kids on the web.’

We were disappointed about this. But Declan had a look at some of the photos and said he’d photoshop them. He’s gonna blur out the kids’ faces and blow up the birthday cake, cause apparently you’re allowed to show other people’s kids’ birthday cakes on the web. But he said next time to take photos without kids, or just with bits of kids, a leg would be okay, or a little hand reaching for cake, because all kids’ legs and hands look the same.

Then Declan started playing round with the design – changing the background colour and moving round the photos and asking did we like the letters this size? Or like this? Or this? To be honest I couldn’t see much difference, they seemed small unimportant changes, and his questions were giving me a headache.

We went back down to the kitchen and Anna’s mum asked if I wanted to stay to dinner. Which was great! So I phoned Mum to ask and she said no! I couldn’t believe it.

I said, ‘But Mum …’ and she said, ‘No, Denise, we want you home for dinner.’ And I couldn’t start arguing over the phone in Anna’s house, so I had to just say ‘okay’ and hang up, and then explain in as normal voice as I could that I wasn’t allowed. I don’t know how normal my voice was though, because I was raging.

But Anna’s mum said, ‘Well, it’s a school night, I do see your mother’s point.’ She has a very soothing voice. Maybe this is because of her job. She has to talk to mad people. Probably they need soothing.

When I got home I said, ‘How come I couldn’t stay for dinner?’ in a quite reasonable voice, I thought, but Mum said, ‘I’m not starting a fight over this, Denise. You spend quite enough time in Anna’s. I’m not having them feed you as well.’

I thought that was crazy. ‘They don’t mind,’ I said.

‘Well,
I
mind,’ she said.

I had a good answer to that. I was gonna say, ‘It’s not about
you
,’ because it wasn’t, but before I could get this out Dad said, ‘That’s enough now, lay the table,’ in a warning voice and I decided to swallow my words instead of having a big old row and being sent to my room and not getting fed.

They are definitely stifling my freedom of speech and I am letting them.

I decided the only way to get back at them without getting into trouble was to sulk and not speak through dinner. I wanted to point out that we were just eating boring old chicken while
at Anna’s they were having an exciting
pink
soup called boar-shsh or something like that, but I managed not to comment on what we were eating, and not to say anything in fact. I didn’t even make an issue of it when Justine got
both
the wings.

I
commented
on it obviously, I said ‘Hey, why is she getting both?’

But when Mum said, ‘Oh, don’t be such a baby, they’re her favourite,’ I kept my mouth shut, although it wasn’t
me
being the baby and the wings were wasted on Justine. She doesn’t know how to pick bones clean and she didn’t even eat the skin! It was a very quiet meal. Dad is the quiet type and recently he’s just been exhausted from work, and Justine never says anything, of course. I realised then that it is only me and Mum keeping this family talking.

Here’s what we’re gonna do to Jayne: we are gonna get loads of stickers and write
Racist!
on them and stick them to her back, her bag, her locker, etc.

This is definitely the most daring, bravest thing we’ve done yet as Instruments of Karma but the punishment must fit the crime and the crime is serious!

I said we’d better run it by Gita. Anna said, why bother? Because, I told her, if she
doesn’t
agree to it
initially
, she might
use it
later
as a way to get out of paying. She might say:
that’s not what I meant, I’m not paying
. Anna was pretty impressed by this argument. So was I – it sounded just like something an economist would say.

Actually Gita thought it was a brilliant idea, but she was nervous too.

‘Jayne’s gonna think it was me,’ she said. She was getting in a state about it.

Anna said, ‘Well what do you want us to do?’ quite belligerently.

But then Gita calmed down, ‘I know, I’ll be off sick that day. You gonna do it tomorrow? Day after? Okay, I’ll be off sick. Then she can’t blame me!’ This seemed pretty neat, but pretty cowardly too!

‘If you’re off sick, you’ll miss her reaction,’ said Anna, but we left it at that.

After school we stopped off and brought a roll of plain white stickers, not too big, but big enough and some markers and then we went to Anna’s and straight up to her room to design the stickers. This was definitely not something to do in the kitchen! On most of the stickers we wrote: Racist! in big black jagged letters like this:
R
A
C
IST
!
(Anna) and
RACIST!
(me) and we coloured in the background red. But some of them we did
in red on a green background, and some in black on a yellow background. Anyway, they all looked very noticeable and truly alarming.

We placed the first stickers just before first class. We put a black and yellow one and a black and red one on Jayne’s locker. At break she obviously hadn’t been to her locker yet because we saw her in the playground chatting quite normally. Then we had to do a very tricky and difficult manoeuvre. We had to get the sticker on her back without anyone noticing us. So we waited till everyone was filing back into class because then there’s this big crush of lines and queues, and we got in behind her. We kept chatting very naturally to each other and Anna had the sticker in her hand and just lightly, lightly, very very lightly, she pressed it on Jayne’s back so she couldn’t feel it. And we didn’t immediately disappear. We kept right on chatting to each other and blocking everyone else’s view of Jayne’s back, until the last minute. We went right up the steps and into the corridor behind her, and then we just turned nonchalantly up the stairs. We totally got away with it.

At lunchtime we noticed these huddles of people from Gita’s class standing round hissing in excitement about something. So we got up close to try and listen. We couldn’t really make anything out, except ‘Did you see?’ and we didn’t want to make
ourselves conspicuous, so we moved off. It seemed pretty clear though. We went to look for Jayne. We couldn’t see her anywhere, so we went inside. We passed by her locker and the stickers had been peeled off! A little bit of them was left on but not that you could make anything out. It looked like someone had used hot water. We stuck two more on. It was a pity we didn’t know which was her gym bag to stick that too. Then the bell rang to go back to class.

We weren’t sure whether to keep up our sticker campaign – well, we needed to know how it was going. So at break we went to find Gita. She saw us coming and left her friends and came over.

‘So?’ we said. ‘So she’s not at school today,’ said Gita, sounding really satisfied, ‘and yesterday she was in tears apparently!’

I said, ‘Wow!’ but I thought:
in tears …!!

‘Everyone’s talking about who did it,’ said Gita, ‘but of course I’m not a suspect cause I wasn’t even in school.’ She sounded really proud, like she’d just got through stage six of
Tomb Raider
or something.

‘Bully for you,’ said Anna sarcastically. Then Gita gave us €11 and we gave her back 50 cent. ‘So don’t tell anyone it was us,’ said Anna sternly in a quietly menacing voice.

‘No way,’ said Gita, ‘that would get
me
in trouble!’ She walked off. We looked after her.

‘Well we’re safe from
her
telling,’ I said.

‘For the moment,’ said Anna, ‘If she’s suspected and questioned, she’ll squeal. She’d sell her baby brother to save her skin.’ I sniggered, and thought what a cute example – I mean the
worst
thing Anna could think of anyone doing is selling their baby brother. That is not the worst thing I can think of, but then I don’t have a baby brother, it’s true, just a little sister, who is not a baby any more.

We walked on.

‘Didn’t know Jayne would
cry
,’ I ventured, ‘and not coming into school today… well…’

‘Serve her right,’ said Anna, ‘anyway, shows she’s got a guilty conscience.’ She sounded brash. She generally sounds brash, Anna, but she didn’t sound 100 per cent brash.

Declan told Tommy to tell us he’d done stuff to the blog, so today at my house we took a look. (We couldn’t do it at Anna’s cause they’d be no privacy, and we don’t necessarily want everyone knowing about this). It does look better. It’s got a gorgeous green background colour, and the pictures of the party look funny, especially the close-up of the cake. If I came across this blog, I’d honestly think it was really entertaining and I’d
want to know the girls who set it up. We don’t come across as trying to seem sweet, cool or sexy, and that’s the main thing.

What bonded me and Anna when we were first making friends at the beginning of First Year was how embarrassing people’s web profiles were. Even people trying to seem ultra-casual always reveal themselves as trying too hard to project a certain image. Like Caroline Hunter putting up that baby picture, pretending she found it an
embarrassing
baby picture, because it showed her mouth all smeared with chocolate, but you just
knew
that she thought it was adorable and that she wanted everyone else to think it was adorable too. Or Celine putting up a picture of herself with backcombed hair and loads of black eye make-up and black lips, and underneath the caption: ‘Marilyn Manson meets Dracula!’ Well she was hoping by her ironic caption to dissociate herself from the photo, but she couldn’t hide that she’d put it up because she thought she looked cool. And the thing is: she did look cool! Celine is very sexy because of being half French – she is super-skinny, and she always looks sulky, and she looks very cool when she smokes, unlike everyone else who look like idiots when they smoke, which is part of the reason Anna and I don’t smoke. (And also because it’s bad for our health, and also because it’s a ruinous habit, Anna says, meaning it’s ruinously expensive. She knows this because her brother, John, at Oxford, smokes and he says there’s no point starting because then you’re hooked and before you know it, it’s costing you €50 a week.
€50 a week is
definitely
a lot of money! It is the profit from one and a bit children’s parties! This Puts Things in Perspective, as Anna’s mum says, and probably we will never smoke, although – who knows? – when we start college, it might just happen. At college people sit around and drink black coffee and smoke and go on marches protesting about what the Americans do to poor people.)

Anyway, so Celine really suits back-combed hair, and black eye-make up and black lips. It is A Good Look for her, and I could see why she wanted to put up that photo, and I don’t know if I’d have been able to resist myself if I’d had such a good photo, but Anna said sternly, no way, you have to exercise control, and that it diminished Celine, and she was right, it did diminish Celine! It would have been okay if someone
else
had put up that photo – like if someone was putting up photos of a party, and that photo happened to be among them, but it is not okay to put up a flattering photo of yourself. That is the rule! Now that we know Celine is trying so hard to be cool, she is
less
cool.

Mum and Dad were out (at a garden centre probably! They are obsessed with boring things like garden centres), but Justine wandered into the study while we were looking, probably ’cause she heard us having hysterics laughing, so I said ‘Out, out!’ and then, ’cause Anna kind of looked at me, I added, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s private,’ in quite a nice voice. She left.

Then Anna said, ‘We
could
let her into the secret.’

I said, ‘Don’t trust her.’ That was not entirely true. I mean Justine hardly speaks. Who was she going to tell? She might tell someone in her class though, and then it would get round. Anyway I didn’t want her knowing! Things are no fun when your family knows.

Afterwards we went round to Anna’s cause Declan was there and we wanted to thank him. It’s pretty amazing he did this for us. He is in fourth year! It’s amazing he’d bother.

But he said, ‘It’s cool. I like doing those things.’

It’s true he’s a computer wizard, and probably he needs to practise. Probably he is going to invent something like Bill Gates did and he needs to get experience. Which means that actually
we’re
doing
him
a favour! This is a good way of looking at it. He said he’d show us all the tricks of Photoshop in case we got more photos from kids’ parties, and also he said he’s not 100 per cent happy about the design, there are a few things he’d like to change, but he wants us to sign-off on them. So he said why not meet in town tomorrow and we’d go through it. He said to meet in Ukiyo because it’s got wi-fi.

We said sure. He’s taking a lot of trouble with us! I dunno why we’re not just meeting in Anna’s, but it’s true we have to keep going up to Tommy’s bedroom because of not wanting the rest of the family to know, and Tommy’s bedroom is not the tidiest. There is another bed in it where John used to sleep, and still does sleep when he’s home, but you can’t hardly see it’s a bed anymore, it is so overloaded with clothes and books and
DVDs and CDs and crisp packets and chewing gum packets too (those are pretty gross!) Actually, there is nowhere to sit really. You have to try and find space on the bed by shoving up all the stuff on it. Well, maybe there is nothing you can do about boys’ mess? Also Anna’s mum believes in self-expression. Once Charlie began to draw on the wall with his crayons, so I screamed, ‘Oh my God!’ and she just said, ‘Well, he needs to express himself. We mustn’t inhibit him.’