Mimi (5 page)

“Chop-chop!” shouted everyone, and lifted whatever glass they were holding, and then wee Billy said his very first words: “Chop-chop!” And everybody clapped and laughed.

As we were driving home I asked Sally if she would wash our clothes now because she was the oldest girl, and she thumped me on the arm.

“Yeah, that’s right, Mimi, Sally will have to wash our clothes now,” said Conor from the front seat, just teasing.

“I hate you, Conor,” snarled Sally. “I hate you both!”

“Take a joke, Sally!” Conor snapped back, but Sally would not take a joke. She just sat there with her arms folded and her lips thin and stared out of the window.

Nobody spoke after that. Dad just drove the car.

Monday is Granny’s day. It is usually a good day, but this Monday was a bad day.

First Bad Thing:
I woke up dead late and I couldn’t find my shoes for ages — but they were behind the sofa where I kicked them off last night, so that was OK.

Second Bad Thing:
There was no milk in the house and I had to eat my cornflakes with water on them. Ugh!

Third Bad Thing:
The car ran out of gas on the way to school, and Sally and I had to walk the rest of the way. Sally was raging. “This is so embarrassing!” she shouted at Dad. “You don’t care about us at all, do you?” And then she slammed the car door shut and stormed off without waiting for me.

“Sorry,” muttered Dad, looking totally fed up.

Fourth Bad Thing:
My new teacher is horrible. Her name is Ms. Hardy, and she is the total opposite of Ms. Addle. By the way, Ms. Addle had a baby boy, Roger, and she sent us all her love. Archibald (that’s what everyone calls Mr. Masters now, behind his back) came in and told us. He was trying to be all strict and businesslike, but he couldn’t help smiling when he told us that Ms. Addle had had a boy. “And she sends you all her —
cough, cough
— love. Ms. Hardy will be your teacher for the next three months and you are to be very good for her. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Mr. Masters,” we all answered together.

Fifth Bad Thing:
Ms. Hardy does not like pupils to be late, and I was very late.

“And your name is?” was the first thing she said to me when I burst into the room at five past ten.

“Mimi.”

“Well, Mimi, you are over an hour late. I take it you have a good excuse,” she said in her cold, hard voice.

So I told her about waking up late and losing my shoes and Dad running out of gas, and she just looked at me and said nothing. When I was finished she just wrote something in her notebook and told me to sit down.

Sixth Bad Thing:
Sarah was her usual disgusting horrible self during recess. “So Crybaby overslept and lost her shoes and Daddy let the car run out of gas, did he? So what excuse is it going to be tomorrow, Crybaby? The bed exploded? An elephant sat on the car? Your thumb fell off from all the sucking? I don’t think Ms. Hardy likes you very much, Crybaby,” and she punched my arm and ran off cackling with her gang.

“Losers,” said Orla, but I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s me and Orla who are the losers.

Seventh Bad Thing:
Mrs. Lemon gave me no free sweets again. Why is everyone being so horrible?

Eighth Bad Thing:
There was a power outage when I was at Granny’s house. It happened one minute after Granny had put the buns in the oven. So no cakes. Can you believe it? And that’s not the worst part . . . no telly either. How will I find out now if Ginger will be found in time before the tide comes in and drowns her?

Actually it wasn’t all bad, because Grandad sent me up to the attic to find a lampshade he had thrown up there about ten years ago. He gave me a flashlight and I had to climb the stepladder and pull myself up through the hole in the ceiling and then he shouted up to me to be careful and to step only on the wooden beams or else I’d fall through the roof.

Granny was chatting with Sally in the kitchen, so she didn’t know what we were up to or she would have had a fit. Anyway, I found the lampshade — but much better I also found a box of toys that my aunts and my mammy used to play with when they were little girls.

It was mostly dolls.

“The ones with missing heads or arms or legs belonged to your mother,” explained Grandad when I spilled them all out on the living-room floor. “She loved to play doctor, and that always involved amputating some poor doll’s head or leg or whatever.”

Another good thing in a day full of bad things was that Grandad forgot to give me my chess lesson.

Ninth Bad Thing:
Grandad crashed the jalopy into the pillar when he was reversing out of the gate. I was sitting in the back with Granny and Sally; Conor was in the front.

“Oops,” said Grandad.

“OOPS!” screamed Granny. “Is that all you can say? Oops! You could have killed us all!”

Grandad didn’t answer that, and we three children stayed very quiet. Grandad and Granny got out to inspect the damage. “Not too bad,” said Grandad. “Just a broken taillight.”

But Granny was speechless with rage. All the way home Grandad drove even slower than usual. He stopped at all the red lights. The atmosphere in the car was awful — nobody said a word. How many bad things can happen in a day?

Actually a lot of bad things can happen in one day — too many for one chapter!

Tenth Bad Thing:
Dinner. I usually don’t care whether the pizza is burnt or not because I don’t usually eat it, but today I was so hungry because I’d had no sweets or cakes that I ate my dinner and it was like chewing a tire.

Sally was hungry too and she was still cross with Dad about this morning. “This is horrible,” she told him. “Disgusting, gross, vile, poisonous, inedible gunk! Can’t you cook your children anything else except pizza? And you can’t even cook pizza properly! I hate you!” And she flung the rest of her pizza in the trash (which was a pity because Sparkler would have enjoyed it). Then she ran out of the kitchen and up to her room and slammed her door so hard that the pictures on the wall shook.

She cried for hours and hours. I had to turn the telly up to top volume so as not to hear her. I wish Mammy was here.

Dad was upset too. He just sat in his chair and said nothing, but his forehead was all wrinkled up and his eyes were black and his lips were very thin. And he kept sighing.

Conor just disappeared up to his room and started hammering away at his drums.

Eleventh Bad Thing:
The house is very messy because Aunt B. didn’t come to tidy up. The breakfast bowls and plates are still dirty, and there seem to be a lot of lost clothes and shoes on the floor. The curtains have not even been opened in most of the rooms. Our house is turning into a dump.

Twelfth Bad Thing:
The doorbell rang. Mona and Brian were standing at the door when I opened it. They are our neighbors and they are very nice people, but as Granny would say they keep themselves to themselves so we don’t see too much of them — except in the summertime when they are out in their garden having barbecues. They have a little baby called Barry.

“Hello, Mimi,” said Mona. “Can I speak to your father, please?” She was very red in the face. Mona is the kind of woman who blushes all the time.

I stood behind Daddy when he came to the door.

“Hello, Paul,” said Brian (Paul is Daddy’s name).

“Hello, Brian. Hello, Mona,” said Dad. “What can I do for you?”

“Well,” began Brian, “I don’t know where to begin, but . . .”

“We know how difficult it must be for you since Poppy, you know, passed away, but . . .” And then Mona went even redder and just looked down at her shoes.

“It’s just that . . .” began Brian.

“We can’t sleep!” blurted out Mona.

“And Barry can’t sleep either,” said Brian, “and it has to stop!”

“What has to stop?” asked Dad, looking puzzled — but I knew what they were talking about.

“The racket!” said Mona. “The awful racket every evening: the telly at top volume and the music at top volume and worst of all the drums . . . on and on nearly all night, every night. Bang, bang, bang, bang, on and on!” Mona was really red in the face.

Brian just nodded and nodded and looked very serious.

“Oh,” said Daddy. And then he just stood and listened, and sure enough the telly was roaring in the front room and Conor was going mad on the drums and Sally had decided to turn on her music — at top volume. The house sounded like a carnival.

Dad bent his head to one side like a bird listening for worms. “It
is
noisy, isn’t it?” he said, as if he was only noticing the noise for the first time.

“Yes!” said Mona and Brian together.

Now it was Daddy’s turn to go red in the face.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “What have I been thinking? The noise is terrible! Why didn’t you mention it before? I’m so embarrassed. It will stop straightaway. Don’t you worry! I’m really sorry.”

“Thank you, thank you,” muttered Mona and Brian together as they backed away from the door.

Turning on his heel, Dad marched into the living room and switched off the TV. Then he marched straight upstairs and straight into Sally’s room and yanked out the plug of her speakers. Next stop was Conor’s room; Conor’s mouth fell open when Dad grabbed the drumsticks out of his hands and marched straight back down the stairs, his neck as red as a beet.

That’s when I decided to go to bed. Twelve is enough bad things for one day. I stuck my thumb in my mouth and told my photo of Mammy that I wasn’t talking to her because it was all her fault for getting run over on the bike and leaving us to cope all by ourselves.

When I woke up the sun was streaming in through the window, and it was just lovely to lie there in my cozy little bed knowing that it was Saturday and I didn’t have to get up for school. Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever woken up on a Tuesday and thought that it was a Saturday and rolled over and fallen asleep in the sun for another hour?

Well that’s what happened to me on Tuesday. And when I did finally wake up and realize — oh, my God! — that it really was Tuesday, not Saturday, and I was going to be dead late for school again, I got in an awful panic.

Where was my uniform sweater? All my clothes were in a heap all over the floor. I threw them here and there and I found my sweater in the end, only there was a big blob of tomato sauce from my pizza all down the front of it — but it would have to do. My tie (yes, we have to wear a tie in school — can you believe it, in this day and age?) was nowhere to be found, so I just said “Sod that” in a real Sally way. Sally and Conor had already gone to school without calling me, of course. They are the meanest, horriblest sister and brother in the whole wide world.

When I found Dad sitting looking out of the kitchen window at the weeds, he turned and looked at me in surprise. “I thought you had gone to school,” he said.

“Well, you thought wrong,” I nearly shouted at him. “Now drive me to school!”

Luckily there was enough gas in the car this time. Unluckily Ms. Hardy caught me trying to sneak into the classroom while she was turned to face the blackboard. I might just have gotten away with it except that Sarah called out, “Ms. Hardy, Mimi is late again.”