This house is driving me MAD. You never get a minute of peace unless you actually get into your bed then pull the duvet over
your head and shut your eyes and even then my gigantic little brother Murphy will be poking the duvet saying, “’Ere Shizza,
the toaster’s got all black smoke coming out of it. Is it meant to do that?” Or my mother will be in my room going, “Ooh,
lying down are we? All right for some! It’s your turn to pick up the dog turds in the back garden. I’ll get you the shovel!”
34 Thundersley Road is always proper hectic. Especially when me and my mum and my dad and Murphy and my big sister Cava-Sue
and her bloke Lewis and my bloke Wesley are all in at the same time. Nan comes round a lot too. And sometimes she brings her
mate Clement from bingo.
Dad says he’s thinking of installing a ticket system on the loo door like at the ShopRite deli counter so he stands a chance
of taking a dump. We all laughed our heads off when he said that ’cept Mum who told him to stop being so filthy. My dad don’t
say much but when he does he is bare jokes.
There was a bit last year where our Cava-Sue got well rinsed out with Thundersley Road and was proper sick of sharing a bedroom
with me and sick of our bunkbeds and sick of Mum bending her ear about her looking all emo and sick of Goodmayes altogether
so she did a runner to London. But me and Mum really missed her so I got us all on the TV show
Fast-Track Family Feud
and got her back.
Yeah, good idea, Shiz.
I didn’t know two months later she’d move her flipping boyfriend in here too!
“Lewis’s mother Vera is moving to Benidorm!” Cava-Sue says last February. “She’s setting up an English lesbian mock-Tudor
theme pub called the Fistwell Inn and making my Lewis homeless! She says Lewis can fend for himself! Can you belieeeeeve it?
He’s only nineteen! What’s he going to dooooo??!”
No sooner had Cava-Sue begun hinting loudly that she was moving out again to be with Lewis than the floppy-haired emo git
had moved his collection of thrift shop shirts, ties, and nose rings into our house.
I was turfed out of the room me and Cava-Sue used to share. Then Mum dispatched Dad off to Home Depot to buy some plasterboard
and Murphy’s room was halved in two with plasterboard and me and Murph both got half a room each. I still ain’t seen the funny
side and I don’t care who knows it.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with your mush!” Cava-Sue said tonight when we were making food. “You always used to jar my bloody
head in that bottom bunk about not having your own space!”
This made me proper angry. “Yeah, fair play, Cava-Sue,” I said to her. “But now I’m living in a three-by-four square plasterboard
space with no bleeding windows! There’s geezers in that Abu Ghraib terrorist compound who see more daylight than I do! I ain’t
happy!”
“Oh, you’re so bleeding dramatic! It’s not forever! Me and Lewis are going traveling soon, remember!” Cava-Sue sighed, poking
a Linda McCartney vegetarian sausage with a spatula.
“DRAMATIC!?” I shouted. “Maybe if your bed was separated from Murphy’s by a two-inch-thick piece of posh cardboard and you
could hear him grunting his bleeding way through
Nuts
magazine you’d feel bleeding DRAMATIC too!”
That well shut her up.
10
PM
—My best friend Carrie just came round and did my and Cava-Sue’s nails. She did mine hot pink with acrylic tips and did Cava-Sue’s
dark purple. Carrie says I look well pretty with mine all long and that I’m looking proper womanly nowadays. Carrie says no
wonder Wesley Barrington Bains II talks about marrying me one day. Carrie says I’m proper lucky to have found true love and
know someone will love me forever. I suppose I am.
Carrie says she’s well bored hanging about the house with her mother, Maria, and she wishes she had a job too. I said I’d
ask Mr. Yolk if he needed anyone to help fry eggs.
“’Ere don’t be daft, Shiz,” Carrie said. “Once the GCSE results are out next week we’ll be going back to Sixth Form, right?!”
Bless her. We are so NOT going to Sixth Form. She is proper delusional.
All I remember about the English Writing to Argue, Explain, or Advise GCSE Paper is spending three hours trying to convince
folk—over a load of different exercises—that the theme parks of Florida were a steaming good place to go on holiday.
I mean, fair enough, I know I did better than Kezia Marshall ’cos when I looked over at Kezia fifteen minutes into Paper One,
I swear she was coloring in a doodle she’d done of a stroller. But I don’t think I did brilliant. The whole thing was a proper
stress-out and the faster I wrote the more I began to get proper mixed-up and think bleeding hell I don’t know if I’m putting
apostrophes in the right place or using commas right or nothing. And all I seemed to keep saying was that dolphins were well
good fun to swim with and by the time the bell went off I’d begun to think that I weren’t even spelling the word dolphin right
and I could feel my throat and my eyes beginning to hurt like I wanted to cry. But I didn’t cry ’cos I never ever cry in front
of no one at school and I weren’t bloody going to start then.
Carrie said that in her exam paper she didn’t even argue that Florida was that good or nothing ’cos she went once with Barney
and Maria in Year Eight and it wasn’t no way as good as Dominican and the only thing she remembers was that there was tons
of mosquitos at Wacky Water World and one of them bit her on the lady garden.
I said, “’Ere, Carrie, you never wrote that in the exam did you?” and Carrie says, “Yeah, course I did, Shizza. I was keeping
it real.”
We are DOOMED.
So I got home from work tonight and gave my hair a lather-rinse-repeat-wash to get out all the smell of fry grease and I began
ironing it straight and putting on some blusher and finding my charm bracelet when my mum shouts, “Wooooo-hoooo, Shiraz, LOVER
BOY is here!” So I go look out of Cava-Sue’s bedroom window and Wesley is outside parking up his banana-yellow Golf.
He gets out of the car and he’s got on his black Kappa trackie pants and his navy Hackett sweatshirt and his pink Hackett
shirt underneath and his hair’s got styling wax in it like he always does when it’s the weekend and he’s proper making an
effort. I watch him lock up the Golf, turn to walk away, then turn around and check it out for a bit, then walk back to it
and examine a mark on the hood. Wesley loves his car.
My stomach still feels a bit funny when I see Wesley. Not as much as it used to when I first ever met him, but I still reckon
he’s buff and all that in his own way. He’s a well lovely person too. And it’s not like everyone can go out with someone proper
choong like Ashton Kutcher can they?
Everyone in my house loves Wesley. The minute he walks in our house my mother—who can be a right old puffadder—is up making
him a cup of tea and my dad is asking him what he reckons about the new West Ham soccer trade and my brother is trying to
get him to play
Decapitation Nation
on PS2 and even Cava-Sue takes her clonking great clown’s feet off the sofa and lets him park his bum.
“’Ere, Wesley, you couldn’t have a look at our khazi could you?!” my mum was shouting through from the kitchen as I came downstairs.
“It ain’t filling right up when you flush!”
“Mother! Wesley don’t wanna look at our khazi!” I said, looking around for my other hoop earring.
“Oh, I don’t mind, innit,” Wesley said smiling. “I got some tools in the trunk too if need be.”
“In the trunk, Wesley!?” shouted Mum. “You don’t wanna be carrying those tools round with you in yer trunk! They’ll get stolen
round ’ere.”
“Well he never knows when he’ll need them, Mum,” I said, trying not to sound narky. “He never knows when we might have a bloody
toilet emergency.” Wesley laughed and started to go upstairs.
“’Ere, Wesley love, do you want a sandwich?” shouted Mum. “I got a can of corned beef opened here for the dog.”
“Nah, Mrs. W!” shouted Wesley. “I’m taking Shiraz for some nosh before we go to the AMC Loews, innit.”
“Oooh! Out for a meal!?” gasped my mum. “Very posh. ’Ere, you’ve got a good one there, Shiraz! I never got taken for no food
when I was courting, did I, Brian? You never bought me a meal.”
“You’d never have shut up long enough to eat it,” muttered my dad from behind his
Daily Star.
“What’s that?” shouted my mother.
“I said, I was so in love I never felt like eating,” said my dad.
After half an hour of Wesley crouching in our bathroom with his head in the toilet tank we finally left.
Me and Wesley went to Shanghai Shanghai in Romford Plaza for the All You Can Eat buffet, then we went to see
TurboChase Terror II
starring The Rock and Carmen Electra. The movie was about some geezer who had stolen a diamond but he didn’t know he’d stolen
it until he was being chased by The Rock and was being propositioned by Carmen Electra who spent the whole of the film lying
about on car hoods wearing tops that didn’t fit her. I didn’t really want to watch
TurboChase Terror II,
but Wesley was proper keen. I wanted to watch this film called
The Magician’s Maze
that I saw a thing about on telly the other night. It’s about these kids who are left to run the world after a big nuclear
war. Proper creepy it looked. But Wesley saw on the poster that it had subtitles and he was like no way.
“Aw, Shiz, I just wanna watch something. I don’t wanna read too, innit,” he said, when we were choosing our buffet. “I don’t
wanna feel like I’m back at school.”
“Oh… S’alright,” I said. “I ain’t bothered.” I tried to pull my face like I wasn’t bothered but Wesley could see I was a bit
so he paid the extra two quid a head so I could eat stuff from the duck section.
Like I say, he’s well lovely like that, is my Wesley.
Today was PROPER WEIRD.
On Mondays Mario always gets obsessed with bleaching the teacups. Don’t flaming ask me why. He seems to think it’s well important
that the clientele always get a proper sparkling white teacup, when obviously BACK IN THE REAL WORLD it totally isn’t. Half
the geezers who come in Mr. Yolk for Set Breakfast C wouldn’t give a monkey’s if you served them tea in one of my Nan’s old
fluffy slippers with a corn bandage that fell off in the toe. They ain’t fussy. But I don’t argue with Mr. Yolk as to be honest
it’s quite nice having a bit of time out back faffing about with my yellow rubber gloves on, listening to KISS 100.
So anyway, it’s 10
AM
and I’m at the sink up to my elbows in Clorox when Mario comes in and he goes, “Hey Shirelle, your little friend is here
to see you.” So I’m like, “Which one?” And he goes “One with all pink mouth and surprise face,” so I know right away he means
Carrie ’cos Mario has never understood what’s going on with Carrie’s eyebrows, which she plucks into proper thin arches these
days.
Carrie has been really experimenting with her look ever since she got this book for Christmas called
Butterz to Babe in Thirty Days!
by this girl called Tabitha Tennant from Dagenham who got kicked out of
Big Brother
for cheating but now runs a beauty academy in Covent Garden in London. Tabitha is Carrie’s heroine. Tabitha is the woman
who started off the “cupid-bow” lips trend this summer where you paint your lipstick on in hot pink in dramatic arches like
a doll. Carrie does that a lot at the moment.
So I take off my gloves and come through and right enough there’s Carrie all made up, cupid-bow lips, two tone eye shadow,
wearing a stripy off-the-shoulder top with a pink bra strap showing and jeans and big hoops looking like she’s off to a club
in Romford to see DJ Platinum. She looks at me and pulls a proper annoyed face and goes, “Shizza, are you mental or something?”
And I’m like, “What?” and she’s like, “You were supposed to be taking this morning off! I been calling your phone since 8
AM
? Why you not showing me no love?”
So I go, “I’ve been frying eggs, you clown, I’m at work.”
Carrie laughs and says, “I know you’re at work, but you’re supposed to be picking up your GCSE results!” and suddenly I remember
and I feel all sick and proper anxious again just like when I finished the English exam and looked back through all that crap
I’d scribbled about the dolphins.
“Oh God, yeah,” I said to her. “I’ve been blocking it out mentally.” Carrie just shook her head and sighed.
“Oh come on, Shiz,” she said quite impatiently. “I wanna know what we got.”
“But I’m busy,” I mumbled, “I’m bleaching cups.”
“Mmm… yeah, whatever,” said Carrie. “Leave it to me.”
Then Carrie wandered over to Mario who was sitting in the corner studying the racing section of the
Sun
with a pen in his mouth.
“Mr. Yolk?” Carrie said, making her voice even softer and tilting her head to the side. “Mario?”
“What you want, sweetheart?” he said.
“Mario? Is it OK if I borrow Shizza for a while? She has a doctor’s appointment that she’s clean forgotten about. I said I’d
go with her… for moral support…” Carrie was doing a loud whisper now, “Shiraz is a bit EMBARRASSED to ask you, y’know? It’s
one of those
downstairs
things.”
Carrie pointed in the region of her thong.
“Downstairs?” said Mario, then his face proper crumpled, “Oh… Go! You women and your bits. It never end. I have enough of
you. You got an hour. Then Shirelle she come back and do lunch busy time. Go!”
I grabbed my pink hoodie and pulled it on over my apron and we skipped out of the door.
“I can’t bloody believe that always works,” I said to Carrie.
“I know, why do men always fall for that?” Carrie laughed. “That Mr. Cleaver who did gym at Mayflower actually thought I was
on the blob four times a month.” We both laughed well loud then ’cos just the thought of it was bare jokes.
Me and Carrie got the bus down to Mayflower Academy, listening to the new Dizzee Rascal on her Nokia and eating Whoppers which
to be honest felt like stones in my gob ’cos I was feeling proper nervous. When we got to school we had to go to the brand
new assembly hall which had just been re-opened after the fire at Christmas. We got in the line for our results. Everywhere
you looked there was all my old year with cells clamped to their ears, holding brown envelopes. Sean Burton was there dancing
about waving his envelope in the air making a squeaky sound which didn’t actually mean he’d passed or nothing ’cos he’s proper
flamboyant at the best of times. Kezia Marshall was sitting on a seat with her envelope resting on her bump looking at her
result slip looking proper sad.