Louise Rennison_Georgia Nicolson 08 (2 page)

one minute later

He is trying to catch the stones in his mouth.

one minute later

He's just slightly dazed himself by heading one of them.

in jas's garden
9:00 a.m.

No sign of Jas being up and her curtains are drawn. Damny damn damn. She is so lazy, snoozing in
Pantsland. I don't want to arouse any interest in the elderly mad by ringing the bell. Even though Jas's m and d are on the whole more acceptable than most in that they provide snacks and Jas's dad doesn't speak, they are still technically in the elderly loon category.

three minutes later

How can I get Jas to get up without ringing the doorbell?

one minute later

Oh here we are! There is a ladder in the shed, I can use my initiative and Girl Guide training (which I haven't got and never will have) and use the ladder to make a small fire to send smoke signals past her bedroom window. Shut up, brain.

five minutes later

It must be a child's ladder, as it only reaches to just above the lounge window. I would have to have orangutan arms on stilts to reach Jas's window. Poo and
merde
.

two minutes later

As I was looking up wondering how to make my
arms grow, something bit my ankle really viciously. Angus was on the ladder with me, looking at me and playfully biting my legs. Ouch, bloody ouch.

I reached down to strangle him and I was just saying, “You bloody furry freak, I'll kill you when I get down from here” when I saw Jas's dad standing on the garden path with his paper, smoking his unlit pipe. He was looking at me. Like I was Norma Normal.

I said, “Aah yes, I was just…thinking I'd see what your garden looked like from up here. And yep, yep, it looks very, very nice indeed. Full of stuff. Growing and so on.”

What am I talking about?

five minutes later

Jas's dad is sensationally nice, or insane, it's hard to tell. He let Angus carry his newspaper into the house, and didn't even seem to mind when he ate it.

in jas's bedroom

I managed to dig Jas out from underneath her owls. How many stuffed owls can one person collect? A LOT is the answer in her case. What is the
matter with her? Also, she was vair vair grumpy when I woke her up with a kiss. It was only on her cheek, but you would think she had been attacked by hordes of lesbians in cowboy outfits. Blimey. She looks very odd in the mornings and her fringe was akimbo to the max. She looked like a startled earwig in jimjams.

I said, “So, so? What happened?”

She looked at me and started early morning fiddling with her fringe. Vair annoying.

She said, “You just ran off like a fool.”

I said, “Yes, I know, I was there.”

“Yes, you say that, but you weren't there, that is the whole point. And everyone was going, ‘What's Georgia doing, has she gone mad?' and so on.”

“Jas, if I get you a little cup of tea and a snack-let, will you try to be normal and tell me everything that happened? It is a matter of life and death. YOUR life and YOUR death.”

ten minutes later

It's quite nice and cozy tucked up in bed with Jas and snacksies. Except that I think I have an owl's beak up my bum-oley. Jas was munching and rambling.

“Well, first of all, after you had run off like a ninny. By the way, you run in a really weird way in those high heels. You looked like Nauseating P. Green when she's playing hockey. Her legs go all spazzy and—”

I hit her with snowy owl.

She almost choked on her toast.

I said, “Jas, get on with it, I have only got about fifty more years to live.”

“Well, first of all, the boys did that boy thing with Robbie.”

“What boy thing?”

“You know, slapping each other on the shoulders, shaking hands and so on.”

“Yeah.”

Jas went on, “Robbie was saying hello to a lot of people and Masimo got his jacket on. You were just approaching the park by then, we could still see you. Masimo said to Tom, ‘She asked me about footie results. Then she ran away. Is she normal?'”

Ohmygiddygod. I said to Jas, “What did Tom say?”

“Well he stood up for you, of course.”

“I love Hunky very much, as you know, Jazzy Spazzy.”

“Yes, he said you were quite often normal. He had seen you being normal once or twice himself. Usually when you were asleep.”

Marvelous.

Apparently after I had run off to “catch my train,” Masimo had gone home with the band, and just after he'd gone, Wet Lindsay had come stropping back looking for him. Jas said her no forehead was all crinkly and mad and her hair extensions were swishing around in a nervy b. central way. Then she had seen Robbie and was all over him like a rash and they had gone off together.

What, what???

I said, “Wet Lindsay went off with the Sex God?”

“Well, they did go out together once, didn't they?”

“Yes, Jas, I know, I was heartbroken. Do you remember? “

“I mean, maybe he still likes her, I don't know, maybe he has had a secret thing for her, some people like lanky girls.”

“Jas, shut up now.”

“Well, I am just saying that absence makes the heart grow fonder and so on. It's an ill wind that—”

“Jas, that is not shutting up, that is rambling on and on about rubbish.”

She was chomping away on her Jammy Dodger like Wise Mabel of the Forest. I really, really wanted to shove it down her throat, but I knew it would take another million years to get the end of the story if I did, so I just said, “Jas, you know when you were going on and on about ‘maybe something good will happen,' and I didn't want to go to the gig in the first place, but you persuaded me, well, did you know that Robbie was going to be there?”

“Well, I sort of thought he might. I knew he was coming home because he rang Tom and said that he had booked his ticket. And that he would be back in time for the gig.”

“But did he say why he was coming home?”

“Erm, no, not exactly no.”

Oh noooooo. I have left the cakeshop of luuurve thinking I have accidentally bought two cakes and found out that I may have only got one cake. And I might have already eaten that. I may in fact be cakeless.

I said to Jas, “We must call an emergency ace gang meeting.”

“Well, I thought I might go to the river with Tom and—”

“No, Jas, you thought wrong.”

park
midday

Angus is still trailing me around like Inspector Morse in a furry coat. (And on all fours.)

on the swings

Rosie said, “I hope this is worth it, Sven and me were going to practice artificial respiration on each other in case anyone chokes on the vats of mead at our wedding.”

Even the ace gang has no sense of community these days. Jas bleating on about missing Tom, Jools wanting to go hang around Rollo whilst he played footie, Rosie banging on about Sven, half reindeer half fool, and Ellen…well, Ellen just being Ellen.

five minutes later

Ellen, Rosie, Jools, Mabs, Jas and me are all swinging on the swings. Not backward and for
ward like normal people enjoying a day in the park, but sideways so that the Blunderboys can't see anything. Life is not easy. The Blunderboys are in the bushes watching us on the swings. They think we don't know they are there; it's pathetic. They are so noisy and keep falling over things and fighting with each other.

five minutes later

Now the Blunderboys are lying down on the ground, hoping they might see up our skirts. I can see their beaky eyes blinking under the branches. If they do happen to see our knickers, they will think we are doing it on purpose to attract them. Dear God.

one minute later

Just then a Pekingese dog came hurtling by, dragging its lead behind it, followed by Angus. Oh no. He loves Pekingese. A LOT. I hope it is a fast runner.

Anyway, I haven't got the time to worry about everything. If careless people will let their small dogs loll around in parks they are asking for trouble. It's a cat-eat-dog world.

twenty minutes later

The general mood of the gang is that I should play it cool until I know what is really going on. Although what Ellen knows about cool I really don't know. She had a massive ditherspaz trying to describe how Dave the Laugh had said good night to her at the Stiff Dylans gig. Apparently, and I know this because I heard it about a zillion times, “Er. Well, then he well, and I didn't know, what, he meant, but then well he just said…he just said to me…he said…”

I shouted, “WHAT, what in the name of heaven, Ellen, WHAT, WHAT did he say?”

And I didn't even want to know, I just wanted to get to the bits about what happened after I left and what did people say about me and so on, but you know what people are like, it's just me, me, me with them.

Ellen went even more divvyish. Good grief.

“He said, ‘Well good night then, Ellen, never eat anything bigger than your head.'”

I didn't know what to say.

No one did.

fifteen minutes later

Anyway, the nub and the gist is that the ace gang are useless and don't know anything more than I do. It seems they all watched me run off like a loon (to catch my train) and then lolloped home. Useless.

However, I decided to forgive them.

They are, after all, my besties.

And if I don't forgive them I will never find out anything. And also never go out again, and stay in my house with my parents.

So, grasping the bull by its whatsits, I said to the gang, “In order to make a full and frank decision boyfriendwise, I have to know the intentions of the prospective snoggees.”

Ellen said, “Er, what are they, I mean who, what is, like a snoggee?”

“Ellen, keep up, the pro snogs are Masimo and Robbie. Masimo said that he was single and free for me, but on the other hand did not come running after me and stop me getting on my train. And Robbie only had time to say hello and then not long after went off with Wet Lindsay. Soooo, did Robbie come to the gig to see me, or does he just
want to be friends with me? Why has he come home?”

Rosie said, “Someone must go underground and subtly find out what Robbie's intentions are. Shall I ask Sven? He could wear his camouflage flares.”

I said, “No.”

Jools said, “What about asking Dave the Laugh to find out?”

Ellen nearly fell over with pleasure. “Oh yes, well I mean, I could, well maybe I could like, go with him or something. Be like his assistant? But maybe that would be like too forward or something. What do you think, or something?”

I said, “No, Ellen, it has to be this year, really.”

Jas had gone off into Jasland. She was fiddling with her fringe and I could tell she had Tom and voles on her mind.

I said, “There is someone here, isn't there, who knows Robbie's brother quite well, shall we say, and who could use subtlety and casualosity to find out stuff. Isn't there, Jas?”

Jas looked up like a dog when she heard her own name. “What do you mean, what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to find out about Robbie by asking Tom a few casual questions.”

Jas said, “Oh OK. Can we go now?”

“The key word here, Jas, is ‘casualosity.' Casualosity. Can you say that, Jas?”

Jas got into her huffmobile.

“I know how to be casual, Georgia.”

“Wrong.”

5:00 p.m.

In bed. I am absolutely full of exhaustosity. How difficult can it be to be casual? Four hours we have been coaching Jas. It was like talking to a lemming in a skirt.

First of all, we tried it her way. Always a mistake, in my humble (but right) opinion. Her idea of casualosity essentially means that she says: “Does Robbie fancy Georgia? Or is he normal?”

I had to use clevernosity to get Jas to do what I wanted in the end. I said, “I've got an idea, you know how good you were as Lady MacUseless and everything, Jas?”

Jas said, “Yes, it took quite a lot out of me, actually. Do you remember the bit when I had
the dagger and…”

Oh no, three million years were going to go by whilst she relived her big moments in the school play.

I interrupted her by hugging her so hard that her head was buried in my armpit and said, “Yes, yes, now this is my idea.”

I asked her to act out what she was going to do in an improvised scene like in drama. She loves that sort of thing, as she is such a teacher's bum-oley kisser.

Rosie volunteered to be Tom. She said, “I've got the legs for it.”

Incidentally I'm a bit worried that she was able to whip out a false beard from her rucky. I said that to her, I said, “Rosie, do you carry a beard around with you at all times?”

And she said, “Well, you never know.”

The Viking bride to be gets madder and madder. We are definitely entering the Valley of the Unwell. Anyway Jas was mincing around like a mincing thing, warming up. Flicking her fringe at Tom (or Rosie in a beard, as we know him). It was incredibly irritating. I was on the edge of a mega nervy b. and supertizz as it was. I said, “Jas, what
in the name of arse are you doing?”

And she said huffily, “I am getting into character.”

I said, “But you are being you.”

She looked at me like I had fallen out of her nose.

“I am finding the inner me.”

Good grief. Her “inner me” is bound to be an owl.

Eventually she was ready and came pratting girlishly up to Rosie and twittered, “Oh Tom, I found some vole spore down by the woods.”

Tom/Rosie said (in a French accent, for no apparent reason…it must be the beard), “Ah, did you, my liddle pussycat? Would you like to, how you say, kiss my beard?”

Jas actually blushed and said, “Well, you know I would, Tom…but maybe, you know, in private, not in front of everyone.”