The Bad Karma Diaries (15 page)

This will have to do. I will put it up on blog to make her look less try-hard. It is not as out there as
Crime and Punishment
. But how come she’s so obsessed with murders?

I am also gonna put Britney in my Music because I think she’s asap but I still egg her …

Declan came up to us at break.

He said, ‘So Bomb and Demise … you’re the racist stickers!’

I forgot he’d be following our blog, of course.

Anna said, ‘Enough already,’ in a dangerous voice.

He didn’t hear the danger. He said, ‘Did you plan the whole thing to spice up your blog?’

Anna said scornfully, ‘We’re not that
stupid
.’

And I said wittily, ‘And we’re not that
smart
.’

And we both began to giggle. He looked at us in his confused, despairing, way. Then Anna suddenly said in a nice voice, ‘But you’re right, I mean, if we were really cunning, we
could
have planned it … Do you think it reads like a good story?’

He said eagerly, ‘Yeah, well it had that element of surprise, didn’t it? And it’s something to follow, not just your likes and dislikes.’ He looked at me.

I said, ‘Yeah, well it’s over now. Closed chapter,’ in a snappy kind of voice. He went off.

Anna looked at me, ‘There’s no need … he’s not
insulting
you.’

‘I
know
!’ I felt really guilty. I was not behaving like that on purpose. There is something about him that makes me want to torture him is all.

Actually Declan might be right that this incident has spiced up our blog – I logged on today and found a comment posted up!!

well racist stickers, you HAVE let a bomb off. Or two bombs? Are x and y demised? who rumbled you?

The comment was from curiousinDenver. Amazing!! We have an interested
and
witty reader a million miles away!!

I uploaded:

Our intentions were good. We thought we were clearing the school of racism! We thought the situation needed a bomb. But we were mistaken. The racist wasn’t so racist
and our informer wasn’t informing right… So now we know (cause we’ve been told), we’re: well-meaning but misguided, interfering, egocentric, secretive, bullying, anarchistic, naive, foolish, sloppy, lucky, intelligent, contrite, mercenary, ruthless, deluded, wasteful, narcissistic messers!!

This is a lot to take in!

We’re grounded and we’re doing community service and we’re giving money to charity and we’re putting up with the whole school jeering.

Our bombs did not cause demises! X and Y are just fine.

But maybe
we’ll
be demised …!

And maybe this chapter is not closed after all!

There is actually a discussion about us on the blog! Three people are in on it. This is just incredible!

And they seem to be on our side!

From Heimlich manoeuvre:

well at least you have taken some action against perceived injustice!

From curiousinDenver:

yeah, you guys acted a bit hastily, but it’s cool you got indignant and didn’t just sit on your asses about it!

From Pippa:

I don’t think this is the demise of you! (hope not!!!)

Anna just called and said (in a German accent), ‘Vell, at least vee hof taken zum ack-tchung against perceived injustice, yah!’

I said (in an American accent), ‘Yeah, man, we din jus sit around on our asses, man.’

We are big in Denver and Germany!

A new and pertinent question from xenawarrior cleaner:

do you two get paid for hiding homework/sticker-ing, or do you just have a superhero complex???

Not sure how to answer this.

Now Anna’s getting into the blog. She has been leaving it all to me but the thought of our global supporters is getting her going. She did a quite funny thing. She took photos of the stickers and uploaded them:

1. A photo of the sticker saying
R
ACIST!
(black on yellow) and an arrow:

what we stuck on Y’s back!

2. Then: photo of the sticker saying
Lame-Oid!
and an
arrow:

what was stuck on our backs!

Oh – good news! Heeun is having a party next Saturday. And I won’t be grounded by then so I can go. And David Leydon might be there! (He is invited but of course he might not come. He might think it sounds too babyish. He might be going to a Death Metal club or be spending the night in a graveyard).

I am off to do my community service. I have to do two and a half hours today and two and a half tomorrow. The school arranged it. I think they spoke to a) Fr Bailey (our religion teacher) and b) the youth club, and c) our parents. So I am helping in a soup kitchen in town and Anna is helping asylum-seeker families learn English.

I can’t believe we’re not in the same place! This is way hard! I have the feeling our parents insisted on this. Anna’s mum rang my mum the other day and I tried to eavesdrop but she took the phone into her bedroom so I couldn’t but I bet they agreed we were seeing too much of each other.

We are not going to crumble in the face of their pathetic attempts to separate us!

Later

It is very hard work making soup for two hundred people. I had just one job which was chopping carrots. The carrots are donated by kind shops. It is a pity they aren’t donated by supermarkets, where they’re ready-chopped! But now I am wondering whose job it is to ready-chop all the carrots in the bags in supermarkets. I now feel very sorry for these people. But maybe supermarkets have machines to do it? It would be nice if they donated these machines to the soup kitchens!

But except for my arm dropping off – and the fact that I will never again be able to eat a carrot – it was fine, actually quite fun. The other volunteers were nice. They were a lot older than me. They asked me what I was doing there. Obviously it is not usual for 2
^nd
Years to help in soup kitchens and they thought I was a very religious person. I considered playing up to this and saying in a very pious voice that I was there to help my fellow man who was less fortunate than myself but I didn’t because a) it would have sounded nauseating and b) it is not very religious to lie about being religious. So I told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It was a good story to amuse us while we chopped and peeled and grated. They thought it was hilarious, except one of them said in a sniffy voice that she didn’t see that this – working in the soup kitchen – was a
punishment
and I realised that it wasn’t very tactful of me to put it like that, but then Agnes – she’s the lady who organises things and tells us what to do – rolled her eyes at me, so that was okay.

But then this guy came in and he was quite mad, as in mad insane, not mad angry. He had a big box of potatoes which he dumped triumphantly on the table. He had an enormous amount of energy – even before he spoke, you knew he’d shout, and shout he did.

‘How are you today?’ he shouted at Agnes, and then before she had a chance to answer, he shouted, ‘All new potatoes!’

He was just like Mr Noisy. I looked at his feet to see if he was wearing big clumpy shoes, but in fact he was just wearing runners with quiet, rubber soles. Maybe someone insisted he wore them to tone him down? Then he went to the sink and began washing the potatoes with maximum noise – splosh! splash! scrub! – and he broke into a cheerful song all about sheeps, or sheets, or sheaves. He did not have such a brilliant voice.

His presence was a disturbance in the force. No place for our nice, quiet chat now. But he didn’t stay long. He finished those potatoes with maximum speed – I have to admit, his scrubbing technique was much more impressive than mine – and then he was off, whistling loudly. Nobody said anything bad about him when he was gone because a) this was a soup kitchen where people don’t say bad things about people, and b) he is obviously a helpful person – but everybody relaxed as soon as he left the room, I did notice that.

He was back again to serve the soup though. They let me serve the soup too, and this was a nice change from chopping
carrots. Most of the people getting soup were men. They were nice to us. They said ‘Thanks love’. Some of them looked like homeless people you see on the street, but some of them looked completely normal. Agnes says since the recession, there are many more people coming in who used to do normal jobs and it is not their fault their jobs disappeared. It’s a bit like if no one had any money they wouldn’t be able to hire Anna and me to do their children’s parties, which would mean we wouldn’t have a job and it wouldn’t be our fault. (But when our job as the Instruments of Karm ended, it
was
our fault).

Afterwards we cleared up and stacked this enormous dishwasher (it is lucky someone donated an enormous dishwasher, the washing-up would have taken forever!) Then Agnes made some tea. I do not normally like tea, but this tea was delicious because I was so tired after all the work.

I discovered that I actually did three and a half hours, but I am not counting. Well I am
counting
, but I am not
holding
to account.

Wonder how Anna got on?

Came back very tired this afternoon, very tired. I love Agnes, but it is very tiring chopping, and scrubbing, and serving, and clearing, and stacking.

When I came in the door, Dad said, ‘Carrots?’

I said tragically, ‘Onions!’ and raised my reddened eyes to his.

It was a good moment between us.

When we sat down to table, Mum said brightly, ‘Carrot soup for starters!’

I said, ‘Waa-ugh!’

They all started laughing, even Justine. She sometimes has a good sense of humour in a quiet way. She is quiet like Dad and I am chatty like Mum. It wasn’t carrot soup, obviously. It was fish pie, which I devoured because I was starving. Justine said she didn’t really like fish pie, but she ate some of the potato top.

Mum said, ‘But darling, you hardly like anything, it seems.’

I was about to give Justine a lecture on the homeless and how grateful they’d be to get something that wasn’t carrot soup, but I didn’t. I was feeling tired and suddenly I thought Agnes wouldn’t like me saying that.

After dinner I decided to write up my soup kitchen experiences on the blog. I think our readers must be done debating our vigilante-ism. They need some new entries. But Anna had got there before me. This is what she wrote:

Wow! I do not even need to speak to Anna anymore. I can follow her life on the blog.

Well, Anna must have spent all weekend talking to her family about asylum-seekers because she bombarded me with a load of
information as soon as I got into school. I cannot remember all of it, but apparently their situation is a disgrace (which I already knew from the blog). I wished I had something about homeless people to give her but unfortunately I did not spend all weekend getting information on them. So it seemed from our conversation that asylum-seekers were much worse off than homeless people. This doesn’t seem fair. I feel I am letting my homeless people down by not sticking up for them as being the worst off.

Anna says she is going back next weekend to continue her classes. That figures. But actually, although I do not have such a strong social conscience, I know what she means and I might even go back myself. I would like to see Agnes. Probably she is a saint. Anyone who puts up with Mr Noisy must be a saint.

Dissent on the blog!

Pippa has posted up:

you girls need to get out more! targeting racists and helping asylum seekers … it’s cool but stop carrying the cares of the world on your shoulders. go play in the traffic …

From Xenawarrior cleaner:

yeah, paint your nails electric blue, backcomb your hair …

But from curiousinDenver:

no! your idealism is inspiring!

From Glasshouses:

you don’t know what you are talking about about Asylum Seekers. These people should not be let in!

I feel dizzy. I think I agree with Pippa and Xena.