I can’t believe Jas. She is dead to me. Like in the Bible, when somebody goes off and becomes a prostitute or something. She is now the girl who has no name.
9:00 p.m.
Phone rang. I leaped downstairs.
It was Rosie, Ellen, Jools and She Who Has No Name (Jas) calling me from the phone box at the end of our road. Rosie said in a fake Chinese accent, “Bringey selfey to phone boxey.”
I put on some mascara and lippy so that no one would know about my broken heart. Not that it made the slightest difference to Mutti and Uncle Eddie– they were too busy trying to trap Angus.
He’s lurking on top of my wardrobe. I know he’s got a few snacks with him because he dropped a piece of mackerel on my head when I passed. He’ll be happy up there for hours. Serve them right if they can’t find him. Catnappers!
I don’t want to be rude to the afflicted but Uncle Eddie is bald in a way which is the baldest I have ever seen. He looks like a boiled egg in leather trousers. Once he came round and after he and Mum had had their usual vat of wine he fell asleep in the back garden face down. So I drew another face on the back of his head. Very, very funny indeed, especially as I did it in indelible pen. He got his own back, though, by turning up to a school dance on his pre-war motorbike and asking all my mates where I was because he was my new boyfriend.
Still, that is life for you…one minute you are snogging a Sex God and have got up to number six on the snogging scale without crashing teeth. The next minute you are made to go to the other side of the world and hand out with Kiwi-a-gogos. Whose idea of a great time is to sit in mud pools and eat toasted maggots. (This is very, very true as I have been reading a brochure about Kiwi-a-gogo land and it says it in there.) Oh pig’s bum!! Or as our tiny French friends say, Le gran bum de le porker!!!
9:30 p.m.
When I got to the phone box the gang were all in there. They squeezed open the door and Jools said, “Bonsoir, ma petite nincompoop.”
Once I was in we were all squashed up like sardines at a fish party. Rosie managed to get a hand free and give me one of those photobooth photographs.
“We brought you a present to remember us by.”
It was a picture of her, Jools, Ellen and Jas (She Who Has No Name), only they had their noses stuck back at the tip with Sellotape so that it made them look like pigs with hair.
On the back it said, GRUNTINGS from your mates. STY in touch. This is a PIGTURE to remember us by.
It made me a bit tearful, but I put on a brave face. “Cheers, thanks a lot. Goodnight.”
We had to get out of the telephone box because Mark (the boy from up the road with the enormous gob who I went out with for a fortnight but dumped me because this other girl Ella let him “do things to her”) came to use the phone. He just looked at us as we all struggled out. He really has got the biggest mouth I have ever seen. I was lucky to escape from snogging him with my face still in one piece.
BG (Big Gob) said, “All right?” in a way which meant, “All right, you lesbians?”
What do I care, though? My life is over anyway.
We all walked back to my house arm in arm. I wouldn’t link up with Jas though because she has annoyed me. Uncle Eddie must have eventually got Angus into the cat basket because the gardening gloves he was wearing were lying in the driveway with the thumbs torn off.
We all hugged and cried. It was awful. I’d nearly got to the door when Jas sort of threw herself at me. She couldn’t speak because she was crying so much and she said, “Georgia, nothing will be the same without you…I…I love you. I’m sorry I ate my sandwich.”
Wednesday July 21st
Dawn– well, 10:00 a.m.
Phoned my dearest friend Jas who loves me. Huh.
Now that she thinks she has got a “proper” boyfriend she acts like she is one hundred and eighty.
“Look, Gee-gee, I can’t talk really because I am on the dash to meet Tom. Dig you later, though. Ciao for now.”
…Ciao for now? I wonder if she has finally snapped? Nobody really cares about me. No one wants you when you are in trouble; no one is interested when you are not the life and soul of the party. I may have to try to make it up with God again at this rate.
2:30 p.m.
I don’t care what happens. I am not going to New Zealand. Not. Definitely. They will have to carry me on to the plane. Or give me knock-out drugs.
That is it. I am not going.
3:00 p.m.
I am not speaking to Mum but as she has gone out shopping (again) she probably hasn’t noticed.
3:19 p.m.
Sitting by the phone and using telepathy to make it ring. I’ve read about it a lot– it’s where you use your willpower to make something happen. In my head I was saying, “Ring, phone!” and “The phone will ring and it will be Robbie…by the time I count to ten.”
3:21 p.m.
“OK, the phone will ring and it will be Robbie by the time I count to a hundred…”
3:30 p.m.
“…in French. By the time I count to one hundred in French the phone will ring and it will be SG.” (God, or whoever it is that deals with willpower, will respect that I am making a bloody huge effort by counting in a foreign language.)
Everything really is sheer desperadoes and in tins. In two days’ time I will be on the other side of the world and the Sex God will be on this side of the world. And, what is more, I will be a day ahead of him. And upside down.
3:39 p.m.
I’ve got an appalling headache now.
While we are on the subject of French, why in the name of Louise the Fourteenth did Madame Slack (honestly– that is her name) make us learn a song called “Mon Merle a Perdu une Plume’?
My blackbird has lost a feather. That will be a great boon and help if I ever get to go to Paris. I won’t be able to get a sandwich for love nor money but I will be able to chat to le French about my blackbird’s feathers. Not that I have got a blackbird and, if I did have one, believe me it wouldn’t be just the one feather it would lose with Angus around. Not that he is around.
I really miss him already. He is the best cat anyone ever had. I can still imagine his furry head snuggled up in my bed. Bits of feather round his mouth. The way he used to bring me little presents. A vole, or a bit of poodle ear or something.
3:41 p.m.
How do you say my blackbird has had its legs chewed off by my cat? Mon merle a perdu les jambes…
Phone rang
3:45 p.m.
Thank goodness, because I thought I was going to have to count up to a hundred in German and nobody wants that. (And besides, I can’t.)
“It’s me, Jas.”
“Oh…What do YOU want?”
“I’ve just called to see how you are.”
I said, “Dead actually, I died a few hours ago. Goodbye.”