Oops! Did I Forget I Don't Know You? Read online

Oops! Did I Forget I Don’t Know You?

  Our Year 1 teacher actually told us that you cannot take away five from two, because five is bigger and you can’t work it out with cubes. Obviously, a few years later our minds were blown when the concept of negative numbers was introduced. What with all the horoscopes and invisible boyfriends going around, it felt a bit like that now, realising that there were other things than God that people argued over because they couldn’t see them.

  Oops! Did I Forget I Don’t Know You?

  Dillie Dorian

  Copyright 2006-2013 Dillie Dorian

  Double Dates (& Single Raisins)

  A Bended Family

  While Shepherds Washed My Socks

  Coming soon:

  Sitting Down Star Jumps

  Now, Maybe, Probably…

  Was He The Queen?!

  Not Zebedee!

  And many more…

  https://www.dilliedorian.co.uk

  Contents:

  #0 Preambling Note To Shells

  #1 Muzzy Heads & Moulting Eyebrows

  #2 Hendrix & The Runaway Shoes

  #3 A Bad Firth Impression

  #4 Bleurgh!

  #5 Careful What You Wish For…

  #6 Tears (& Snogs) At Bedtime

  #7 Oops! Did I Forget I Don’t Know You?

  #8 Zip, Zap, Boing!

  #9 Clothing Down…

  #10 Breaking The News & Not The Egg

  #11 …& Nothing But The Tooth

  #12 The Adrenaline-Junkie Slug

  #13 Fluorescent Lettering, Fluffy Walls & Furry Men

  #14 The Grammar Of The Barfing Moose

  #15 The Mystery Of The Escaping Bra

  #16 Puke Of Edinburgh

  #17 You Live In A Zoo

  #18 Welcome To Zizz Zone

  #0 Preambling Note To Shells

  Dear Shelley + Assorted Prying Aussies

  I kept my promise about the letter-writing business. I know it sounded like last-minute sleepover blab when I came up with the idea about a month ago, but it looks like I’m serious. Forty scrawly, dog-eared pages of serious judging by my draft.

  It was hard to get started at first. Who knew you could get writer’s block when you’re trying to write about things that actually happened?

  It was looking like the highlight of my life since you went away was going to be jotting down my school timetable for the year, and Andy’s dad’s birthday barbecue.

  That was, of course, before the shoe situation, and before I became an amateur party planner of the infant school variety, and before a squeaky Scottish girl scuttled into our History class. (More on all that later.)

  I hope you’re going to write back. Maybe not hundreds of pages, if you don’t want, but I’m just dying to know what it’s like going to a school that’s practically on the beach! Do you get to do swimming lessons in the actual sea? If we tried that in our sewery seaside town, I’d expect to catch something more than just pneumonia.

  Course, this is supposed to be secret, but if you DO suddenly get the urge to splurge the details to any new friends of yours, that’s perfectly OK. (As long as I never have to look any of them in the eye!) I’ll just spell everything out for them.

  That is, if they can even read my handwriting – staying ’til five every day after school to type this up would be all but impossible with our dinner rota. ’Fraid it’s snail mail for us!

  I miss our evening phonecalls as much as you do. It’s SO unfair that everyone else has texts and MSN just to catch up with people who live across the street! Right now we’re looking closer to being cut off than getting broadband, and something tells me a mobile phone between me and Charlie would be asking too profligately of Mum…

  She’s been out looking for a job, by the way, but there seem to have been some edits to the conventional walk-into-Jobcentre-and-show-CV approach – involving makeup, makeouts and motherly maltreatment. (Erm, as far as expecting us to cook our own tea is considered that.)

  Baffled? Well that makes both of us – but you’ll just have to keep reading!

  LOL (the “lots of love” kind)

  Harley.

  #1 Muzzy Heads & Moulting Eyebrows

  I woke up muzzy-headed on Monday morning (the week after the first week of Year 9).

  By muzzy-headed, I mean to say that my hair was frizzed up all over the place, sticking out in all the spots it shouldn’t when it’s supposed to be all one length – and so was my brain. (Not that it was hanging out of my ears or anything, you have to understand, but it felt like it for sure.)

  I slipped out of bed in that noodly state of mind, and went immediately to the bathroom to check if I looked as crap as I felt.

  Yep.

  Half the hair on my head wasn’t mine anyway – it belonged to whichever stray I’d been fussing before I fell asleep. (I couldn’t quite remember, but I was certain it wasn’t Zak’s rat.) Then moving down, there were my eyebrows, as ominously furry as my twin brother’s – if not worse.

  Ugh. I really needed to pluck them.

  While that may sound like an averagely non-interesting observation for most people, for me it was a formidable one. I’d never plucked my eyebrows before.

  Before? I was starting to think like I meant to try it right then that morning.

  I hadn’t.

  That said, Mum’s makeup bag was sat invitingly on the cistern of the toilet. No, I told myself. Think of all the OTHER times it’s “invited” you into Beauty Hell!

  Those other times included the one where it enticed me to try eyeliner for the first time (I never even knew you could get poked in the eyeball that many times in the same place without causing puncture), and to wear bright red lipstick (OK, that had been when I was eight).

  Just like when temptation got too much for me, eyeing up her leg razors when I was hunting in the cupboard, aged twelve. (Technically, on this specific Monday, I’d less than a month ago finished being twelve – but I’d been hoping to tide the “new year” in with never being that dumb again.) Two things I learnt from that experience were: a) never, ever dry-shave your legs (ow!), and b) never, ever, ever attempt to soothe the damage, cut-wise, with your dad’s left-behind shaving lotion – a thousand times ow!

  Anyway, borrowing Mum’s tweezers for two or three miniscule minutes sounded much friendlier than shaving the gap between my eyebrows, like Danielle once had. (To disastrous, stubbly effect.) Before I knew it I was unzipping that little floral bag and grabbing the dreaded hair-pluckers.

  Could I do it, though?

  For God’s sake, Harley, I told myself. What’re you waiting for to pluck your eyebrows? To turn sixteen? Eighteen? Twenty-one? To have a driving license, passport and proof of age? A published book? A young magazine journalist lifestyle? A Bridget Jones one? A child? More than one child? To hit the menopause? Get a subscription to Saga Magazine? Death certificate???

  Oh, shut up!

  Right. That long, dangly one there. Pluck! Argh! Now the one next to it. Pluck! Aargh! No, don’t stop! Next one. Pluck! Aaargh!

  Oops. That last “aaargh!” was a little too out-loud for an inner monologue…

  “What’s going on in there?” – That’d be my non-identical, non-conjoined twin, Charlie.

  Maybe we’d known each other since we were but tiny specks on Mum’s inner spectrum, but this wasn’t exactly something I wanted to share with him. Like periods. And bras. And my eyeliner (bought for a second go after the stabbing disaster) – but there’s no stopping that guy.

  “Oh, nothing, Charlie. You go away and leave me alone, please…”

  “I hear pain,” he sniggered from outside the door. “Em-o!”

  What sort of
an insult was that, coming from the moodiest, grungiest, sulkiest, most pastel-sock-stealerish pop-punk enthusiast on the planet? After close to a decade of bullying, the overcompensation had finally kicked in, and I have to say I wasn’t loving it!

  “Grr!” I yelped (yelping due to the shock of removing another hair). “Go away.”

  “I need the loo, though!”

  “Tough.”

  “But what’re you doing in there?”

  “Brushing my teeth, if you must know,” I said, through gritted gnashers.

  “That doesn’t hurt!”

  “It does if you have braces. Anyway, my gums are bleeding,” I improvised. “Just leave me alone.”

  I caught sight of the tacky pink watch Kitty must have left behind before her bath the night before. 7:56.

  I was gonna be late for school.

  Sod plucking for a bucket of fish! I thought, as I rushedly brushed my teeth. (And doing it that fast; now there’s a thing that makes your gums bleed.)

  I vacated the bathroom to see my equally late, equally still-dressed-for-bed twin, eyes rolled to the ceiling as if I was the gigantic nuisance.

  “You have loose eyelashes on your cheek,” he snarked.

  “They’re eyebrows,” I corrected him, before realising that I’d landed myself well and truly in it.

  “Uh… how come?” He furrowed his similarly disorganised brow. “Eyelashes fall out all the time; eyebrows just sit there like furry caterpillars all day! Just admit I’m right!”

  Ooh, tough choice: risk him telling everyone at school I’d somehow found a way to moult my eyebrows overnight, or pretend he was right for once?

  “Yeah, you probably are,” I mumbled, wishing him away until it occurred to me that I could remind him away. “I thought you needed the loo?”

  “I do…!” he said with wonder, as if this was some heavy epiphany, rather than something that had slipped his mind. He dashed past me into the bathroom.

  Speaking of brothers, Zak was already clothed and rushing around. Course, that didn’t mean he was up and ready for school; just that for him, every second of the day is worth spending as a reincarnated Lurcher, to some sort of drum’n’bass beat.

  “Hey, sis!” he yelled, barging past me on the steps up to the two attic bedrooms (one = mine; the other = theirs), bouncing as usual in his bright white non-school-uniform hi tops.

  Zak has a set of fireworks on constant replay in his head. Prying Aussies should note that there’ll be no trouble telling my brothers apart – while Charlie usually “gets” things really slowly, Zak’s racing round the house like he’s on a Skalextric with a broken lever. Then again, Charlie’s a top speller, and Zak can barely read. You might say “opposites”.

  By that musing, I’d made it back to my room and dragged some school uniform on. My perfect-for-me, idyllically girly, cluttery, cosy room. My room which as hard as I sympathise with my brothers, I’m glad that I don’t have to share with anyone else but guests.

  There’s that skylight in the ceiling (only because there used to be a big fat hole there where the roof had caved) which is mostly no use as it tends to precipitate constantly in England, blocking my view of the sky. The other window looks out onto the street in front of the house, and is currently covered by that giant white chair that used to be in your room, what with the sunlight being insensitively cheerful since you’ve been gone.

  Prying Aussies should also note the poster of Charlie Simpson from Busted (who I used to “lurve!!” – the closest I’ve ever been to a Mad Boyband Crush), which is now used for storage of pins for my mostly empty noticeboard. (By “storage”, I mean facial decoration – last week I fashioned him a handlebar moustache, and the one before he was treated to piercings of the eyebrows).

  There are boxes of old scrap material from the scrapbooks I never made, including photos, stickers, and pieces of tickets for the ferry – plus a tonne of other unexciting stuff which I keep in shoeboxes in a big black holdall under my bed, and which maybe, one day, will make it to the noticeboard.

  Then there’s a wardrobe full of things I bought on impulse from charity shops, and would never, ever dare to wear in public – like the stripy tie I got when I was going through a Defy School Uniform phase last year (defiance because: our uniform doesn’t include a tie! See, clever? Not…). Or the collosso-cardi that I wear cuddled up by the fireside at home, but will never see the light of day. Or the purple beanie hat that I once thought made me look like Avril Lavigne. It’s like having a pantomime prop cupboard instead of a wardrobe.

  On the wall under my desk are three very special, very one-decade-old drawings. Three-year-old style self portraits labelled “Harley”, “Shelley” and “Charlie” in Mum’s neat print. And wait! Have I maybe finally thought of something Charlie might dislike me showing any friends of his? Especially the one, the only Jordy Johnson. (I could go on for eighty pages about the wondrous Jordy, but I’ll try to curb it with consideration for the fact that I find everyone else’s crushes yawn-inducing.)

  OK, not one of my best ideas, given that for Jordy to see Charlie’s toddler art, he’d have to see mine at the same time. That’s the extra-horrible thing about being a twin: virtually anything you can say to embarrass them, they’ll come up with something much, much worse – and people will take it as gospel, regardless of whether it’s true. Sure, it sucks bearing unwilling witness to every humiliating moment of someone else’s life – especially when you’re made to wear matching dungarees and have the same haircut – but the absolute worst part is that everyone knows your twin was there for all of yours.

  I was going to be late for school anyway, psychically close to how late Charlie would be or not, so there’d be no harm in inspecting my botchjob at eyebrow art in the cracked full-length mirror for a few minutes extra…

  Ugh. Three hairs – no, four, were definitely not enough to improve my appearance even marginally. And speaking of eyebrows and their loosening-or-not, I thought. It’d be a bit weird anyway. If we English moulted like animals, or shed hair like the leaves of trees – tourists would go “Oh, look, it must be autumn because nobody’s got any eyebrows!”

  Getting to school on a mushbrain of this proportion was just not going to happen…

  #2 Hendrix & The Runaway Shoes

  No chance for breakfast.

  Yes, it was still that awful Monday morning, and I was still of fuzzy, muzzy mind, wondering where my school shoes were.

  I’d been back and forth around the house hunting for them, and my search had taken me full circle, back to my own bedroom.

  It’s fairly normal for shoes to go missing in our house, but one at a time. Never both. And not just both, but my PE trainers had found another more respectable pastime than keeping the field muck off my feet. I could just imagine my minimal shoe collection lying on a beach somewhere in Cyprus, having a non-working working holiday or something.

  In my room, I found only one of my slippers.

  Think rationally, I pleaded with my muggy mind. Where would anything go missing in MY room?

  Um… on the floor? No. Shoved under the bed? Nope. Stuffed inside my pillowcase? Nuh-uh. Hanging from the lampshade? Nah. The shelf above my bed? Again, no, but that’s more commonly the place to go looking for a stray cat than a stray shoe.

  Speaking of pets, I was sure that the missing shoe had little or nothing to do with my carelessness. I went to get that old pair of dolly shoes from Year 8, which were scuddy and muddy beyond repair and could be found in a plastic bag in the conservatoir of our hoardy house.

  What’s that to do with pets? Only that those were involved the time I worked out another life skill from ruddy experience. It turns out that patent pumps aren’t the ideal footwear for a trek to the park with two dogs and a shortie sister in tow (that’s best left to old, comfy trainers – or wellies, if you’re desperate).

  Well, wellies were definitely out of the question anyway; it was way too cold for sandals (something an English September tends to
be), and the only other girls’ shoes around were Velcro trainers in size six-year-old, belonging to the said small, sweet sister.

  I’d lent my new trainers (a Converse-shaped birthday prezzie that Mum couldn’t properly afford in the first place) to Rachel, so I set off to school in Charlie’s black PE trainers. Grr.

  As I finally went out the back door (carelessly leaving my keys on the kitchen table to make a perfect day), I noticed something lying on the garden path. A sliver of black leather…

  Following the trail of shoe pieces led me to the rickety shack of a garage. (Mum’s told us time and time not to go in there in case the roof caves, but we’re always having to tow the rebellious hairy quadrupeds out from their splintery nests.) Opening the door (or what’s left of it), I immediately set eyes on Hendy, surrounded by half our family backlog of shoes, and chewing chunks out of my newly bought, not-quite-affordable Clarks pasties. (I’d never have recognised those as my shoes if he hadn’t then spat them back out after realising they didn’t comprise of cake, Winalot, or anything else remotely edible.)

  Prying Aussies should note that Hendrix is our dog. One of a badly-matching non-set of two, just like me and Charlie. We found him curled up under a tree with no leaves on, when we were out walking our German Shepherd, Toots. (The tree had no leaves on, that is; Hendy had a blanket of them.) Of course, a bare tree is a really choice hiding place for a dog of little brain. He wouldn’t have survived anywhere other than ours…

  While I’m on this, I’d probably better explain the hodgepodge set of names. Dad always said he named Toots after Toots and the Maytals, and ever since he left Mum’s been trying to rename her because it was also an awful slang term he used for us females when I was little. Charlie named Hendrix after inheriting Dad’s music collection. Mum had wanted to go for Jimi, but lost out again as it seemed misleading to give that cheerful a name to such an irrational dog. (Yeah, I always found it ironic that she felt the need to give us such exotic names, and thought something as normal as Jimi was only fit for a dog.)

  Several cats come in and out too, notably tortoiseshell Misty (named by Zak during a Pokémon fan/crush phase), black and white Gerald (you’d think he and Hendy share a braincell), Fluffbum (named by Kitty of course, with the thickest black fur and only a couple of very sharp teeth left), and Diptail (named by me; black with a white tip on the tail as if it was dunked in paint). None of these cats are actually ours; we just feed them, and it costs a fortune too. Other than the dogs, our pet collection comprises of just the one cat, Fred, who is huge and ginger, inherited from Andy who is allergic to cats – and Zak has a rat called Eminem.