Rebecca is Always Right (3 page)

‘I bet that baby could take you in a fight now if it really tried,’ she said. ‘You’re pretty weedy, really.’

A bit much coming from her – she’s hardly the pinnacle of physical fitness. I’d say she’s about as scrawny and feeble as I am.

Anyway, luckily I don’t see the baby very often. But I do have to see my other nemesis, that horrible little Sorcha Mulligan. I haven’t written about her in a while because she and her mysteriously normal parents (how did they produce such a monster?) have been on holiday, but I was doing my homework in my room this evening (yes, we’ve started getting proper serious homework again) and when I looked up at the window, there she was in her own room across the road, staring at me! Her traditional activity is to make horrible faces at me and dance around, but this evening she just stared at me for ages in a genuinely spooky way. I actually started feeling a bit scared after a while. I don’t know how she managed to stare so long without blinking. It was really creepy.

Mum always says I should just ignore her and it’s silly to let a seven-year-old child annoy me so much, but I bet if I hovered outside Mum’s study window and just stared at her like a terrifying serial killer/ghost child it would do her head in too.

On the plus side, a year ago Karen Rodgers was my nemesis – she was pretty awful to me when Mum’s book about a teenager came out and everyone thought it was about me – but
she’s calmed down now and never really bothers me at all. Not directly, I mean. She still irritates me by going on about her drama group and her amazing boyfriend Bernard the Fairytale Prince (we call him this because she met him when he was being a fairytale prince at Vanessa’s birthday party). But she’s not actively trying to annoy me when she does this, so I can’t really call her my nemesis anymore.

That does still leave the baby and the Mulligan kid, though. I think the baby might be innately violent, but maybe the little Mulligan will find something better to do than freak me out? There must be something she likes doing besides harassing her neighbours. Mustn’t there?

God, school really is more boring this year. Even Miss Kelly telling us about natural disasters and the awful environmental consequences of leaving the water running while you’re brushing your teeth can’t make things exciting. And of course, we were right, all the teachers are constantly going on about how this is a big exam year. You’d think we were doing our college finals or something.

The only plus side is that Mrs O’Reilly seems to have forgotten that she banned me and Cass from sitting next to each other in history, so once again I can amuse myself by drawing pictures of Cass in the guise of historical figures and taunting her with them. Childish I know, but I have to take my pleasures where I can find them. I did a very good picture of her as Queen Victoria today, right under Mrs O’Reilly’s nose.

Home isn’t much more exciting than school. When my parents aren’t pointlessly reminding me and Rachel about our exams (which, lest we forget, are not for another nine months. Well, almost), they are blathering on about
My Fair Lady
. Dad is constantly singing ‘I’m Getting Married in the Morning’. I tried playing my snare drum earlier this evening to drown him out, but it didn’t work because he has a very booming voice.

And to make matters worse, when I was doing this Mum came into my room and told me to stop making so much noise! I told her I wasn’t making half as much noise as Dad, which was perfectly true, but she told me not to be silly and walked out before I could say anything else. I wish they wouldn’t treat me like a baby. They can’t go on about how I’m doing these supposedly really important exams one minute and then talk to me like I’m the same age as Sorcha Mulligan the next.

Right, I’m going to go and read more of
I Capture the Castle
now. It is very good. It’s about a teenage girl with a spoiled older sister who is very bored with her life and who sits there just praying for something exciting to happen. And then it does. I can really relate to it, even though she lives in a castle in the middle of the English countryside in the 1930s and I live in a semi-detached house in Drumcondra in the twenty-first century.

Nothing much happened in school today, apart from Vanessa going on about her future advertising stardom.

‘Don’t worry, girls,’ she said to me and Cass when she was leaving school today. ‘I won’t forget about you once I’m on TV.’

I hope she does. Maybe she’d stop talking to us then.

What makes her bragging even more ridiculous is the fact that she hasn’t even heard back from the agency yet. I’m starting to hope this means she hasn’t got the job. But I bet she has. I just have a feeling. So does Cass. She and Alice came over to my house after school to make our famous delicious fudge. We’ve started regretfully to accept that our dream of becoming the youngest celebrity chefs ever might be a bit ambitious,
or possibly even deluded, but we might as well keep our hand in.

‘We can’t take our eye off the ball,’ said Cass, as we mixed together the ingredients. ‘Someone else might step in and become the first teenage sweet-making sensation. Plus we can still sell the fudge at our gigs. Or give it away as a gimmick if people aren’t willing to pay for it.’

‘If Vanessa gets that ad,’ I said, passing her some bits of white chocolate (we were experimenting with a new flavour), ‘she’ll steal our thunder. Well, sort of.’

‘Not “sort of ” at all!’ cried Cass. ‘It’s an ad for biscuits! We make fudge! And besides, it’s not as though she makes the biscuits herself.’

‘Oh God, listen to us,’ I said. ‘We’re talking as if she’s got it already. We still don’t know whether she has or not. And I’m still hoping not.’

‘I’m kind of sure she has, though,’ said Cass.

‘I’m not,’ said Alice. ‘It’s not that she isn’t talented, but there are loads of talented girls out there. There’s no guarantee that she’ll get the job.’

‘I’m sure she’s got it,’ I said, absent-mindedly eating one of the nuts for the next batch of fudge. ‘Unfortunately.’

‘Maybe we’re psychic,’ said Cass. ‘Actually, if we were, we
really would definitely get our own cooking show.’

‘Psychic teenage chefs,’ I said. ‘Imagine the theme tune.’

‘What on earth are you waffling on about now?’ said Rachel, coming into the kitchen.

‘Our future amazing TV career,’ I said. ‘Leave that white chocolate alone! We don’t have a lot of it.’

‘I was just tasting it,’ said Rachel.

‘Well, don’t hover over us,’ I said. ‘We’re trying a new recipe and we need to concentrate.’

Rachel looked very insulted.

‘I have no desire to hover over you, thanks very much,’ she said. ‘I’m going out.’

She and Tom and Jenny and a bunch of their friends are all going to one of their friend’s band’s gigs. She says she’s got to go out while she can because Mum and Dad have really started going on at her about the fact that it’s her Leaving Cert year. In fact, I must admit that for once they are being tougher on her than they have been on me. Soon she’ll barely be able to go out at all. So I suppose I can’t begrudge her her freedom now.

Anyway, both batches of the fudge turned out very well, especially the white chocolate one. When I think back to how bad the first lot we made was, it’s kind of amazing how much
we’ve improved. A bit like the band.

And speaking of which, we’ve got a practice tomorrow. It’s still just out in Alice’s garage, but fingers crossed we’ll hear from Veronica soon about the practice space and then we won’t have to trek all the way out to Kinsealy just to practise for an hour. Of course, Alice will have to trek into town, but she doesn’t mind as much because it’ll mean she’ll be able to meet Richard more easily afterwards. So it’s an excellent situation all round. In the meantime, I hope my parents can give me and Cass a lift tomorrow – Cass’s parents are going to one of her brother’s boring football matches so they can’t.

Very good band practice this afternoon, and definitely worth the epic journey out to Alice’s place (I got the bus because my parents were going to look at plants in some stupid garden centre with Maria who lives around the corner, so they couldn’t give me a lift). We now have eight whole songs of our own that we can play pretty well from start to finish, as well as a few covers like the Kinks song we sang at the Battle of the Bands last year. But we don’t spend much time on the covers
anymore, because it’s much more fun to play our own. All those songwriting workshops in the summer camp were really useful. Though in a way the most useful thing of all has been my rhyming dictionary, which has made it so much easier to write song lyrics. I’d never have thought of rhyming ‘long ago’ with ‘pistachio’ (it’s in a song about my memories of Paperboy) if it wasn’t for that.

Mum and Dad have always said that Dublin is like a village and that you can’t walk down the street without seeing someone you know. I always thought this was ridiculous because (a) Dublin is clearly a large city and (b) there have been plenty of times when I have wanted to bump into people and didn’t, like when I really fancied Paperboy, and Cass and I would go for walks around the neighbourhood hoping we would see him. If Dublin really was like a village we’d have definitely caught a glimpse of him at some stage. I mean, he only lived two miles away.

But anyway, sometimes it really does feel like a village because last week we met not one but two Paulas and today
I went into town with Cass and Alice and we met even more summer-camp people. It was almost like being back there again. We were coming down Grafton Street when we saw them. There was Sam, who doesn’t technically count as a summer-camp person because we first met him when we were doing the school musical – he was playing Uncle Albert in
Mary Poppins
. But we only really got to know him during the summer. He was with his comics-writing partner Lucy and also with Gemma, who did the drama part of the summer camp and had to put together a play with Karen and Vanessa (and our friend Jane).

Of course we all stopped for a chat. It was great to see them, but actually I did feel a bit odd about the whole thing because the last time I saw Gemma and Sam together, they were snogging in front of the stage at the end-of-camp disco thing. I’ve seen Sam once since the camp ended, but Gemma wasn’t there and I didn’t want to ask, at the time, if anything was going on between them. But now it looks like there might be. I mean, they weren’t hugely close during the camp, but now they’re clearly meeting up in town at the weekends. So I presume something is happening.