Boys on the Brain. Jean Ure

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       Monday

      (2nd Week)

      Pilch rang last night. It was almost half-past eleven, so I thought it must be one of Mum’s friends. They are always ringing at these weird hours. They are a pretty weird bunch of people. Always shrieking and giggling. They don’t act their age at all. But Mum seems to think they are amusing.

      Anyway, it wasn’t one of Mum’s friends. Harry came back from the hall and said, “There’s a fish on the phone.”

      “A what?” said Mum.

      Harry said, “A fish of some kind. It wants to speak to another fish.”

      “Oh, you mean Pilch,” I said.

      It was his idea of a joke. He knows perfectly well that we call each other Pilch. We have done for years. I remember the day we started doing it. It was when we were really young, like nine or ten, and we had this simply humungous row, and Pilch yelled, “You look like a stupid pilchard!” To which, with immense wit, I instantly retorted, “So do you… you… pilchard!” And we have called each other Pilch ever since.

      Rather silly, really, but these things stick. I expect we will still call each other Pilch when we are middle-aged. Sometimes I forget that Pilch is really Charlie. Well, Charlotte, actually, but no one ever calls her that.

      So anyway I charged out to the phone and said, “Why are you ringing me at this time of night?” I mean, it is practically unheard of. People simply do not do that sort of thing in Pilch’s house. Unlike Mum and Harry, who behave like teenagers, Pilch’s mum and dad go to bed at reasonable grown-up type hours. Pilch says they are always safely snoozing by eleven o’clock. That is what grown-ups ought to do. Not sit around playing loud music and keeping their children awake till after midnight.

      “I wanted to tell you,” said Pilch. “I’ve found some more swear words for you. For Carlito. He could say… caramba.”

      I said “What?”

      “Caramba,” said Pilch.

      I asked her what it meant and she said she didn’t know, but she thought it had to be swearing of some kind. She had just read it in a book.

      “In Anna Karenina?” I said, somewhat surprised.

      Pilch said, “Well - n-no. Not in Anna Karenina. I’m not actually reading that just at present.”

      I said, “Why not?”

      “I’ve read nearly a whole chapter!” said Pilch. “How much have you read?”

      “More than you,” I said.

      It’s true. I have now reached page 55! (It is still rather difficult, but I think maybe this is because the print is so small.)

      When I went back to the kitchen, Mum and Harry were grappling with each other over by the cooker. They broke apart in a guilty fashion as I came in. I felt like saying, “Please don’t mind me. I realise that you are in the throes of sexual passion.”

      Tasha Lansmann said today that she thinks Mrs Pritchard is having an affair with Mr Bunting. She said that she bumped into Mr Bunting coming out of the library, and that he looked decidedly shifty and was “adjusting his dress”. This is such a disgusting expression! All it means is fiddling with his flies. And it is probably quite untrue. He probably just had an itch in an embarrassing place. Tasha Lansmann sees sex everywhere. All the same, I shall look at Mrs Pritchard most carefully next time I go to the library. These things do happen.

       Tuesday

      Something intensely annoying. At lunch time me and Pilch had gone to the loo when suddenly there was the sound of the door crashing open and feet clumping in, and it was Cindy Williams and Tasha Lansmann. I could tell it was them by their loud squawking voices.

      “So who are you asking?” goes Tasha. “You asking Mel and her crowd?” Cindy says yes, she’s asking practically everybody.

      “I want it to be a real rave, you know?”

      She’s talking about her birthday party.

      “Boys?” says Tasha.

      At which Cindy sniggers and says, “What do you think?”

      So then they have a bit of a giggling session, then Tasha goes, “What about Ticky and Tocky?” And I freeze, ‘cos this is a name they’ve recently invented for me and Pilch.

      “You must be joking!” goes Cindy. “That pair? They’d put the kiss of death on anything, they would!”

      Personally I wouldn’t go to Cindy’s rotten party if she fell on her bended knees and begged me, and Pilch says that she wouldn’t, either. All the same, it just goes to show that you cannot be even the teeniest, tiniest bit different without being reviled and cast out. As Harry said the other day, when Mum was going on about the government, “It was ever thus.” Not that that is much comfort.

      I just hope they haven’t upset Pilch. She is very sensitive.

      Have reached chapter five of War and Peace. The trouble with very thick paperbacks is that you can’t open them wide enough to read the left-hand side of the page properly. It is quite tiresome. But I am going to persist because after all it is a classic.

       Wednesday

      Went to the library to look at Mrs Pritchard. Also to see if there was a copy of War and Peace that I could borrow that might be easier to read than the one I bought, but there wasn’t so I took out Harry Potter, instead. I am not giving up on War and Peace, but I have come to the conclusion that a diet of nothing but classics is probably a bit indigestible, especially when they are in small print and you cannot read properly on the left-hand side of the page.

      Looked hard at Mrs Pritchard but couldn’t see any signs that she was any different from usual, which I think there would be if she were having an affair with Mr Bunting. Whenever Mum takes up with a new bloke it’s like total meltdown. She goes all moony and giggly and starts wearing these utterly unsuitable clothes. Crop tops and miniskirts and stuff that makes me really ashamed to be seen with her. Mrs Pritchard wasn’t in the least bit moony or giggly, she was quite sharp and spiky, the same as always. So I think Tasha was just fantasising.

      In any case, it would be entirely too trivial. I mean, Mrs Pritchard is a librarian. She has better things to do with her time. I know Mr Bunting is generally reckoned to be quite hunky, like he has these muscles all bulging out of his arms like waterlogged balloons, and people such as Cindy and Tasha hang around and gawp when he goes running in his shorts. But he teaches geography and has a brain the size of a pea. He is totally illiterate. He once gave me C minus for my geography homework and wrote “Its not good enough Cresta.” Its instead of It’s. And no comma! How could Mrs Pritchard have an affair with a man like that?

      I hate geography, anyway.

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