Angry Coral Week Read online

Angry Coral Week

  “Are you gonna do it?” asked Dani, still through her hand.

  “I might,” she replied, stiffly. “If he’s good enough for me.”

  She was having a laugh, right? Just last month she and Keisha had turned fourteen, and with a snap of the fingers they’d transformed into the sort of people who would be walking this week into future-warping GCSEs – not SAT exams! That they were even wasting valuable revision time considering sex was sort of beyond me…

  Angry Coral Week

  Dillie Dorian

  Copyright 2007-2013 Dillie Dorian

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

  Double Dates (& Single Raisins)

  A Bended Family

  While Shepherds Washed My Socks

  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 I Can Feel It Stumbling In The Air Tonight

  #2 Angry Coral Week Continues

  #3 Why It Doesn’t Matter

  #4 Follow The Little White Lie…

  #5 Donuts, Peanuts & Hard, Hard Tests

  #6 Robots & VO5

  #7 Another Test, Another Text

  #8 Kit-Katting

  #9 Analysisy

  #10 Hand-Crunching, Canned Laughter & A Set Of Ratty Towels

  #11 Wibbly Pig & A Bladder To Match

  #12 A Lot Of Delayed-Reaction Sniffles

  #13 Rainclouds & Not-So-Natural Disasters

  #14 Please, God, No!

  #15 One Donut & A Trilby Hat

  #0 Preambling Note To Shells

  Dear Shelley + Assorted Prying Aussies

  What a to-do. The last few weeks have been taxing, what with the SAT exam stress and everyone being baby bonkers, but it’s finally half term once again and I have time to get it all down on paper.

  After the drama it’d be fair to say we’re all at peace for once – for reasons that will be discovered soon if I was right in thinking you’re not mad and going to read this…

  WDIB – that’s “Why Do I Bother?” in abbreviated terms.

  Harley.

  #1 I Can Feel It Stumbling In The Air Tonight

  The baby room had become my chosen hideaway for times of SAT revision stress. It was easy to hang out in there all day unnoticed, given that the rest of the family rarely popped up or down to the middle floor for reasons other than the bathroom.

  On the Sunday before the week before exam week, I paused my perusal of our set text to escape for a biscuit break before Mum and Harry got back from Andy’s dad’s and piled on the chores Charlie and Zak plain hadn’t bothered to do. Yeah, it wasn’t fair, but we all knew things got done quicker and with less casualties if I just assumed the maid position until Mum was flexible again.

  At least there had been one upside to what felt like constant dishes, laundry and basin-scrubbing – when I was studying (i.e. all the time I wasn’t cleaning), the everyday supervision of Kitty fell to our brothers. Zak had rolled the same week as us for his exams, but his brand of revision for the Year 6 SATs had rapidly declined into spending all his weekends on the Wii, while I knew for a fact that Ryan had been kept under a close watch for the last month along with Andy. Charlie and Kitty on the other hand had made the top storey of our house borderline uninhabitable with their completely separate singalong sessions. (Him: S Club 7 – her: an unseasonable slopping of “Walking in the Air” accompanied by the one and only Christmas song cassette we owned.)

  Yup, in the baby room, I could barely hear them. I just had to hope that our littlest brother would be able to stay curled up inside Mum’s tum until our exams were over. It wasn’t worth betting on, considering that Zak, the healthy seven pound baby, had still bounced his way out at least week before expected. The whole thing made me nervous if I’m honest – as bad of a coincidence it was that I’d be having a new baby bro just in time for the gruelling two years of my GCSEs, knowing my luck he’d probably arrive in time to scupper SATs week with all the standard screaming.

  I put down my Key Scenes from Richard the Third, the Shakespeare text we were studying for English. I’d emphasised all the marginally interesting quotes in orange highlighter, but next there would be past paper questions to work through. Struggle through, more like! I was still in top set for English, but I didn’t quite get the analytical side of it. Everyone else covered pages when Mr Wordsworth set a question in class, but I never knew where to start on pulling apart someone else’s play.

  Biscuit and wee – maybe a spot of television if it turned out to be early. There was no clock in the baby room, and I’d figured out weeks ago how counterproductive it was to take my phone in there with me.

  The walking part was hard. Once again my vaguely relaxing weekend had been interrupted by stomach cramps so harsh that I’d still been cocooned under the covers when everyone else schlepped off to Andy’s for lunch. I’d only come down when the boys were back, and made myself a cheese sandwich. It was a poor substitute for Hugh Godfrey’s peppery gravied chicken and veg. So OK, I’d probably been revising for about thirty minutes in total.

  I checked the clock in the kitchen – it was just about to be two. Twenty minutes, it had been. It had felt like an hour with the roaring furnace in my uterus, but hey, I was just about used to this. Usually I’d be at school at the time.

  I cleared the barrel, still hungry. Though I was perfectly capable of hoovering up a whole packet of biscuits, at this point it just meant the one I’d come down for and then the last lonely ginger nut that had been left afterwards.

  Hearing the front door click, I tried to peg it – revision was more important (and appealing) than a wild haul of sheets from every bed with a bad back and belly. Harry’s most recent buy had been a new tumble drier, so gone were the days where we could write off “big laundry” ’til the next morning because of lack of time to air things.

  Aimee barged past me on my way back upstairs.

  “Hey, mind out!” I winced, despite a secret gladness that it was only her back home and not the notoriously unsympathetic Harry.

  “What’s your problem?” she sniffed, carrying on to the landing. As my roommate, she knew exactly what my problem was, and how it had cost me a delicious lunch and a restful morning before homework time.

  “You know!” I shouted after her.

  “Ha!” she yelled back, gloatingly.

  You’d never believe she was pregnant, so pregnant now that it was too late to turn back. I mean, yeah, underneath her presumptuous slogan hoodie there was a definite belly, but the way she threw her weight around the house anyone would think she was (suddenly) simply fat.

  I sighed to myself and headed for the loo. I’d been putting it off, hoping that the lightheadedness from standing would manage to go away before I had to manipulate my footing over the tarp (i.e. gap) to the toilet. We’d had this hole in our bathroom floor for about six months, now, and Harry still hadn’t got anyone to fix it. This was despite the fact that although not large, said gap dominated most of the step space between the bath, sink and loo and whenever the tarpaulin fell, exposed pipes that I always dreaded would be burning hot underfoot. Worse than that, of course, when the tarp fell it exposed whoever was in there at the time, and there was nothing they could do about it.

  Walking back, I let my guard down. What should’ve been a long step to the sink was accidentally a woozy shuffle. I tripped and found that my feet were wound up in the big heavy sheet. Something wasn’t right. Pain shot through my left ankle where it was wadded up in the tarp next to my right one. To make things worse, I was now s
o dizzy that I couldn’t muster the energy to slither both feet out of the hole at once, so I let myself fade shakily into sleep right there on the bathroom floor.

  Bad idea. I woke with a thump of the sharp door corner against my forehead. It would never have happened if we currently had a lock for the bathroom – but then again, the whole thing would never have happened if we had a fully functioning floor.

  “Bloody-! Harley, what happened?!”

  I’d never heard Harry swear before. Things probably looked awful from his position – he’d just smacked his ostensibly unconscious stepdaughter on the skull with a full-sized wooden door. (Also, he’d technically just walked in on me.)

  “I’m fine,” I told him. I mean, I was absolutely miles from fine, given that my ankle was in forty shades of agony, the cramping hadn’t let up yet, and now I had headache to boot. With one of those things being Harry’s fault, and the other being ugh, I had a total of one item left that I could comfortably talk about, and none of the energy needed to do so.

  “Why’re you lying on the floor?”

  “I felt sick,” I said, truthfully. I still did, so I dreaded standing up, but knew I would definitely have to if he wanted use of the bathroom. “I mean, I fell over, but I didn’t get up because…”

  The rest of the words wouldn’t come because Harry was already helping me to my feet and predictably the room had started to look grainy again. It was only seconds before my vocal functions returned, however.

  “Ow!”

  “What hurts?” he asked, patiently.

  “My ankle… the left one…”

  Harry made me sit on the edge of the bath. He took off my left sock and started poking around at the ankle and foot. When I dared look, I became aware that it had already swollen like a novelty sponge animal.

  “Does it hurt when I do this?” he kept asking.

  “It hurts when you do all of those things!” I yelped. I wouldn’t normally have lost my rag, but this was one of those rare occasions where I could comfortably say that just about everything hurt.

  “Better get you to A&E, then,” said Harry, smart-casually as usual. Without asking permission, he fireman’s lifted and carried me all the way downstairs. That did nothing for my dizziness, so all the way to hospital I had the grave suspicion that I would be sick.

  After a minute or so in the waiting room, Harry groaned.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, conversationally.

  “Aimee keeps texting me,” he said.

  Oh, Aimee. She’d eyed me with jealousy all the way out of the house, and I’d had the perfect view from that position. I couldn’t help feeling that if she was any younger, she would’ve begged to join us at the hospital and made everything about her.

  It was pathetic. No one wanted an ankle injury, and as far as I was concerned, no one would want to be carried upside down with a heavy flow, real father or not! Her sense of fairness was so completely skewed that a small part of me wanted to adopt her baby at birth, but knew I was too young. That would certainly get me out of any further exam stress for the rest of my life, and I wouldn’t even have to have sex. Harry had nothing to say, so I snickered internally at such a sitcommy premise the whole time we were waiting. How ironic that I’d merely have to be willing to raise a baby for every stupid, hideous teenage problem to basically stop applying to me! And it only ever happened to girls who wouldn’t appreciate it.

  * * *

  “Well, there’s got to be some sort of advantage,” Charlie reasoned, from his beanbaggy position (having given me the good armchair). “Like when I sprained my wrist and didn’t have to write anything at school!”

  Yeah, that. I had to get the one injury that although excruciatingly painful and thoroughly cumbersome, didn’t merit any ease from the stresses of Secondary. According to the doctors it was a mild fracture, but the “mild” counted for basically nothing other than that I wouldn’t need surgery. Unable to swallow painkillers, I’d spent the afternoon with my foot propped up on a cushion on the bathroom step-stool no one needed to use anymore, trying to channel my thoughts.

  As if that worked. If it had done, I’d be a past master at dealing with tummyaches and already making a wage giving self-help seminars.

  “Ah, but you were lying,” I grimaced. “You’d’ve got nothing out of it if you told the truth about which wrist it was.”

  “Yeah, but you broke your ankle for real,” he insisted. “There’s no denying that! A simple thing like which one it was can’t change the fact.”

  “Of course not…” I mumbled. I was dreading school, but already had a strong suspicion that Harry planned to send me in anyway. He had done with every other ailment I’d suffered since he arrived, and of course there was the small fact of how Mum considered me invincible compared to my non-uterus-possessing brothers who were kept off at the slightest sign of a sniffle. Just because I liked to keep the full extent of my agony to myself, thank you very much!

  Charlie doodled absently on my cast, with no regard for whether I wanted him to. He’d taken to carrying a pen and pad around in case of lyrical inspiration, but I’d caught a sneaky peek inside and found only a crappy drawing of “sexy” Cleopatra and some self-absorbed thoughts that read like they were straight out of one of the band interviews he and Andy were forever quoting from as if what such-and-such a star would do if he had a reality TV show counted as comedy gold.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” he checked, finally.

  “’Course not,” I repeated myself. Having to give a reason, I’d be sure to make it clear soon enough that I wanted him to keep his grubby hands off. “Have you been revising?”

  “Nope.” Charlie had the look of someone trying to be confident, coupled with the intonation of a small child cowering in front of the headteacher. Obviously he knew the consequences as well as I did. “How do I… do… that?”

  I groaned inwardly. “You could try staying awake in class and writing notes. If that fails, voice record the lessons – I’m sure Devon would be more than happy to prod you awake if you fall asleep listening to them back.”

  He giggled, and I thought about how I didn’t want to know what about that was funny to him. I sure as sequins didn’t find anything amusing about the prospect of manipulating crutches down the aisles between exams – especially considering that I hadn’t had so little belief in myself academically since the last set of government tests in Year 6. How was I ever going to get through this…?

  #2 Angry Coral Week Continues

  Generally, my life is exasperating enough when it is a) Monday, b) angry coral week, and c) PE day. The deduction of PE from my much-hated list of to-dos really didn’t make that vast an improvement to the prospect of school, given the amount of sporting activity I felt like I’d just undertaken after so much as shifting two metres across the room.

  Getting dressed was chore enough (well, after actually getting out of bed), considering that it was impossible to get anything from the wardrobe without the help of Kitty (Aimee wasn’t interested). Then there was the struggle of getting downstairs – two separate trips because of stopping for bathroom reasons.

  Sure enough, Mum hadn’t even paused to ask if I needed the day off. Well, yes I did! I was tired because I’d spent most of the night madly uncomfortable for ankle reasons, long after the other two pains had faded away. Despite this, I hadn’t wanted to ask – half because I was genuinely scared to hear “no” and finally have the favouritism spelled out for me, and half because deep inside I felt a responsibility to actually go to all my revision classes that week.

  Then, when I thought that getting a bus would maybe have aided my journey to school, there was the issue of actually getting onto the bus. Apparently not allowed to get out of his cabinet and help, the driver unsympathetically pulled away, leaving me to hop back to the house.

  There, I was met by Devon. I hadn’t had time to clue her in about the ankle thing, and for once she looked appropriately appalled at my troubles.

 
“Run and you can catch Ben before he drives off!” she suggested, in effort to be helpful. “Well… don’t run, I mean-”

  “I know what you mean,” I said, wearily, leaning against the wall opposite Ben’s car to wait for the outrage from Aimee.

  “NO, you can’t have a lift!” my stepsister exploded, as soon as I’d explained Devon’s kind offer. “She can’t have a lift!” she repeated angrily in Ben’s direction.

  He looked completely bemused, hovering by the car. “Why not? She’s broken her leg.”

  “Ankle!” corrected Aimee, as if it made a jot of difference. “You have to pull your own weight in this world, Dad always says.”

  “He was talking about your plan to become a benefit queen,” I pointed out, angrily. Any calmness that might once have been associated with me had entirely dissolved over the last few months.

  “And besides,” joked Ben, badly, “most of that weight isn’t even Harley’s to pull. It’s the cast.”

  “But she’s going to make us late!” Aimee whinged. “I have a GCSE to get to!”

  “You’re making us late!” said me and Ben at roughly the same time, at which point he was already helping me round to the passenger side.

  “I sit in the front!” she continued to complain. “People will think she’s your girlfriend. They’ll see you with a Year 9 and they’ll talk, and I won’t stick around to back you up!”

  As average-looking as I thought Ben was, he was seventeen, so I wasn’t about to complain if that happened.

  “No one will see anything,” he reassured her. “She’s sitting in the front because she’s getting out first.”

  Yeah, no one at her school…

  * * *

  It turned out that Aimee might’ve had a point. If she was due for a 9am exam, the 8:55ish point when we pulled into my school grounds indicated that she would quite possibly be late for it.

  I didn’t have time to care about that. I thanked Ben for the lift and made for my first lesson, History, convinced that I’d barely arrive there before tutor groups let out. Nobody was around to see me show up with a seventeen year old driver, but I’d already forgotten about that, considering that the only people who’d be remotely impressed would’ve either clocked Aimee or my ankle and got the story out of me in seconds.