While Shepherds Washed My Socks Read online

  So my darling Twinnie had run to a foreign girl for relationship advice before his own sister. And he must’ve rambled on about liking Tomb Raider and being rubbish at Sonic The Hedgehog. He’d’ve given her the scowly picture the school sent home with a complaint after he failed to compose himself for the student record photos in Year 7.

  As much as none of this would help me, it at least told me generally what not to talk about.

  In the end, I just put:

  Dear Gerry,

  It’s nice to hear that you’re talented in sport and a music fan. My brother (the psycho one that’s writing to your friend Laura) is a fan of all sorts of rock, metal and emo. My other brother (the trendy one) is a hip hop maniac, and v. popular at school. I’ve decided that while Charlie is a Z-list celebrity in the music field, and Zak is a millionaire pimp, I will still be living in squalor in a small house or flat, writing books.

  Despite what Laura’s letters may say, Charlie is actually very nice and he doesn’t bite (he’s even naff at computer games). Maybe you two would get on. When she said that you’re her “male” friend, I’m guessing you’re a couple.

  “Devon” also accepts Alfonso’s apology, and won’t hold anything against him (except possibly herself).

  T.T.F.N. means “ta-ta for now”, and that’s how us English sometimes say goodbye.

  Love, Harley.

  That should do, I thought. Now all I needed was to ask “Devon” whether she did accept the apology, and what it was even about. I was fairly sure she would, being so smitten with her precious snapshot of Alfonso that she nail-varnished a copy to the side of her bedside table, and now he’d said she was pretty looking (pretty funny-looking, maybe – she’d been in deelyboppers and a tutu in the photo; something I forgot to mention before).

  #3 Nurture Over Nature

  “Urgh,” sniffed Rindi, on my right.

  “What’s up?” I whispered.

  “Keisha,” she withered. “She’s being a pain in the bum.”

  That was believable. Kay and I had just spent our break in the library doing homework, which likely left Rindi and Danielle alone with resident bitches Keisha and Chan. Fern was off with a cold, and Rachel had been nowhere to be seen all last week.

  “What’s she done?” asked Kay, on my left.

  Rindi paused to blow her nose. “Nothing special, just being a cow. She paraded me around for ten minutes asking people whether they thought my earrings were fake.”

  “Why does she do these things?” asked Kay, bemused. She was still completely dumbfounded by the carry-on of Chan and Keish. And honestly? There was no good reason any of the rest of us could give her for why we were still friends with them. Oh, maybe because we’d lose Danielle in an instant, and that would be terribly unfair on her. It isn’t her fault that her cousin has a stranglehold on her social life.

  “She’s just insecure,” I suggested.

  “About what?” hissed Rindi. “The girl’s damn near perfect.”

  “Those girls are the worst,” Kay provided. “I read about it in a psychology book. If you’re too good-looking you just get paranoid and stuff because your only competition comes from actresses and supermodels. And like, you’re not an actress or a supermodel, so you start overcompensating.”

  That made my head hurt. Keisha and Chantalle did obsess more over their looks than we did. It always struck me as mad, because after all they were the ones who were pretty enough to get boyfriends.

  “So we should just let them vent all over us?” I muttered. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Would you rather they were bulimic?” Kay hissed back. “You’re so selfish, Harley.”

  What? I never said that. The thought had never crossed my mind.

  “This would make an interesting article for the paper,” said Rindi.

  “Yeah,” said Kay. “‘Do we have a social responsibility to be bullied?’”

  “That’s absolutely nuts,” I pointed out. “If we don’t want to be picked on, they can just deal with it the same way we … deal with being picked on.”

  “Because you ever speak up for yourself,” snorted Kay.

  At least I’m not writing a passive aggressive news article…

  “We have to raise awareness,” said Rindi. “The other students have to understand why bullies are bullies.”

  Well that sounded fair enough – if only the two people behind this venture weren’t way too considerate for their own good. Maybe Keisha and Chan had some good reasons for being downright horrible to us, but Kay and Rindi were basically suggesting the entire school put up with it. I’d been putting up with it for the last two years, and even longer with Chantalle – but that didn’t mean I thought anyone else should have to.

  “You can’t just tell people to let themselves get bullied,” I grumbled. “Weren’t you listening to a thing Mrs Stone said? That’s where Nazis come from.”

  “Harley, you are full to the brim with rubbish,” said Kay. “You say not to lie down and take it, but that’s all you actually do. And it works for you.”

  Ridiculous! Kay was so good at taking sides, and so persuasive, that she could probably get the Green Party into power and spend all the money on saving one baby whale. Maybe I didn’t always have an answer, but I was pretty sure I was better at being fair than she was.

  “We don’t want to let them be bullies,” said Rindi. “We want people to get why they’re bullies so they can help them not be bullies and not be bulimic either.”

  That made sense. The problem was that we already knew what Keisha and Chantalle’s problems were. Between us, me and Rindi had known them since Junior school. Keisha was impulsive and impressionable, and Chantalle was bitchy and even more impressionable.

  I said as much, but Kay was quick to retort, “Those aren’t their problems. Those are the problems with them. I bet they have other problems, like maybe Keisha misses her dad.”

  The sympathy card again. It probably annoyed me more than it should’ve, because that was just what Mum was always saying about Aimee not seeing her mum. Why was it alright for some? Why should that be an excuse, when a lot of us just got on with our lives regardless?

  “Kay,” I grumped. “I like Keisha and Chantalle. They are my friends, and Rindi’s. You don’t know them, and I’m sorry you wish they were different, but they are the way they are. If you try to be sympathetic, they will shoot you down.”

  “I just want to write an article,” Rindi pointed out. “I don’t want to change anyone. I’ve got an example of Keisha being self-conscious, right? Her real name was Keely Rose, but she didn’t like it because people used to read it as ‘Kelly’, so before we came up to secondary she had it changed to Keisha Marie.”

  I was gobsmacked. “Really?”

  “Really. And her dad just let her do it, too. I mean, we don’t go a bundle on our names either, but doesn’t that show how uncomfortable she is?”

  Uncomfortable? More like spoiled. She could never have legally changed her name if her dad wasn’t rich.

  “Eh.”

  “So I’m gonna put, ‘Bully Lisa Renee, not her real name, changed her name before secondary school because she thought people would laugh. This is one of many examples of “mean girls” who suffer under the pressure to be perfect.’”

  “She’s gonna know that was you,” I pointed out.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s you. You use your real name in the school paper.”

  “Guest article!” suggested Kay. “Say I wrote it. It could be someone from my old school.”

  Right then, Wacky Macky strode into the classroom in her cloppy, square little office heels.

  “Mr Wallis will not be with you today,” she announced. “I shall substitute.”

  The class groaned as one. Now, not only was it not a free lesson, but TV time was off the table as well.

  “Marco, hand the textbooks out.” A thud resounded as she dropped each stack of maybe ten onto his desk at the front.

/>   * * *

  Charlie plunged his hand into the baseball cap and read out loud: “Aw, Aimee.”

  “Chazzie!” moaned Zak. “You’re not s’posed to tell anyone who you got! It’s called Secret Santa.”

  “Yeah… I’ll put it back again then,” said Charlie, in what I sensed was an eager tone beneath the lovelorn sigh that indicated he might not be concentrating.

  “No!” chorused Zak and Kitty, and I realised a moment later that I’d gone and joined in. Unison seriously isn’t a twin thing, in our house at least – nurture over nature in a big way.

  I smiled, secretly – I’d got Kitty, which was terrific, ’cause I now knew about the secret charity shop grotto for dress-up dolls…

  #4 Chalk & Cheese

  “Cheese!”

  “Shut the hell up!”

  “Cheese!”

  “Cheesus Christ, shut up!”

  “Say ‘shush please’,” Charlie insisted.

  “I thought we were done with ‘shush please’.”

  “Well that kid Adam overheard me saying it and he’s been annoying Ceri’s other little mates with it.”

  “So?!” said Zak, exasperatedly. “S’not as if he has the voice for it, has he?”

  “Oooh. Is that a compliment?”

  “No. I was only saying he’s a few years off man-boy yet.”

  “Says the even younger boy with nothing on his chest.”

  “Better than a triangle of tummy fluff that looks like it was done with a snooker-ball set-upper thingy made for mice!”

  “Chalk and cheese,” muttered Harry to me with a wry smile. Great, my daily dose of brotherly banter was now laced with smart-casual “dad jokes”.

  “Born cheeeeese; as cheesy as-” Kitty piped up, before I covertly covered her mouth.

  “Enough, guys,” Harry laughed, about to take his laptop into his study. “If you boys have nothing productive to do, then one of you should go and play on the computer – it’s up and running again.”

  “Going to put music on my phone!” lurched Charlie. He leapt up and rushed upstairs to continue with the meticulous task of copying his CDs.

  “Grr!” seethed Zak, beside me. His present from Harry had been a new mp4 player, and he’d no doubt realised he could be filling it with internet bounty if Charlie hadn’t bagsied the computer. (If, of course, he was up for waiting an hour for each track to download.)

  I was just trying to decide between heading upstairs to enjoy my CD and book, and staying downstairs to keep Kitty company with her Disney colouring book, when just my luck, the phone rang.

  I’d been thinking it was doubtless for Aimee, prize bitch and socialite, so I picked up expecting to have to yell her back downstairs. Amazingly, it was Keisha, for me.

  “Hi?”

  “Have you noticed summin’?”

  “What? Other than Charlie’s started up all this ‘shush please’ catchphrasey crud again, no…”

  “I meant, there’s no interference – I’m not on a mobile!”

  “And?”

  “That means I’m home!”

  I was puzzled. “Why should I care if you’re at home or wherever if I’m not there too?”

  “You should be.”

  “Stop being so vague!” I groaned. I was not in the mood to decipher her witterings today. Morning break at school had been an uproar after Keisha sniped at Rindi about her hair being a little greasy, and Kay just had to add, “Alright, Keely!”, and afternoon break spent hiding in the loos with Fern until the usual moosome twosome eventually found us.

  Maybe I’d been a little blurred and mousy, when I thought about it, because the fact that I was not hanging out with the intolerable activist and her journalist pal – Keish and Chan seemed to have taken that to mean I was on their side over all this.

  “OK, OK. It’s an early Crimbo prezzie!”

  “Um, thanks, but… couldn’t I have it at school?”

  I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful, and I hadn’t said it the way she heard it. Keisha exploded: “Because I just got a new one! God, Harley. Try to do something nice and it’s just thrown back in your face like.”

  I sighed. “Sorry, I meant tomorrow. It’s a bit of a ways to your house, and it’s nearly teatime.”

  “Be here in ten minutes or I’ll give it to someone else,” she said, seriously.

  “How’s twenty or so? It’s impossible to do in ten even if I catch a bus.”

  “Fine!”

  * * *

  “Thirty-five minutes – too bad.”

  I sighed, still shivering on the doorstep. My cropped winter jacket had been a decent idea back at the start of Year 8 when it was big on me, but now my insides were freezing. “Sorry. I came as fast as I could.”

  Harry was parked a few doors down from Keisha’s house. He wanted to know if I was staying or going, but I couldn’t figure that out myself.

  “Well I’ll let you have it anyway, because I’m feeling generous today. If you can guess what it is, I’ll even throw in a free SIM-card!”

  “Easy!” I clicked. “It’s your old mobile, isn’t it?”

  After all, what else would make her want to give me a SIM-card, knowing that I have tragically never owned a mobile phone in my life?

  “Presumptuous cow!” Keisha grinned, borrowing one of her mum’s favourite words for her. She ducked back inside the house for a minute, and returned with phone, card and charger, shoving them at me without so much as a box or ziplock bag, although it threatened rain. She couldn’t even have known I had a lift!

  “Tha-”

  “K, bye!”

  The door slammed shut.

  She’s like that.

  It wasn’t until I got home that it hit me that I had absolutely no idea how to work the thing, and that I hadn’t considered that the card wasn’t in the phone. It was a puzzle present. Nice mobile though – a hot pink Motorola with a really good camera and about a million useless numbers still stored in the phone itself. And one of them was Malice’s, so undoubtedly Charlie’d be willing to help me figure out where to put the card…

  * * *

  Before bed, I rang Keisha’s house from the mobile, to thank her for it. She hadn’t let me stay long enough to collect her new mobile number, so I figured I’d get that, too.

  “I haven’t changed number,” she said with what sounded like a shrug. “That’s my backup pay-as-you-go SIM and there’s only like a fiver on it. D’you realise how much this is costing?”

  “No… why?”

  “You get charged a stack to call a landline from a mobile – catch!”

  Pretty good job I’d contacted her before I got to calling Australia, then…

  My mind wandered as she yakked to me, wasting my credit (her ex-credit, I suppose). I was watching Layla out in the garden, digging a great hole below the big tree. Sometimes I get the feeling that she actually does think she can get under it.

  #5 Rockstar Sunglasses & Fictitious Widdles

  The sunshine was misleading, and Zak had taken to heading off to school in just his T-shirt. It wasn’t too bad because his Primary is only down the road, but that was having a nasty and competitive effect on Charlie and Kit. I’d spent twenty minutes on Friday morning trying to explain to her why it might not be such a good idea to copy him, but ultimately had no fear because the teachers would never let her go out without wrapping up warm.

  Charlie was a different story. He’d developed an aggressive edge where other boys were concerned. If it wasn’t Zak’s frightening ability to withstand the cold, it was Andy’s excellent swimming skill. On Monday, as I’d found out, he’d nearly drowned. I could just picture him getting smacked in the nuts by the vault horse in gym.

  As it turned out, they’d sprung Cross Country on us at a moment’s notice. It wasn’t so bad for us girls, because we’d packed tracksuits for what we expected to be football – the boys only had their shorts and T-shirts to run in.

  I’d just been bemoaning our school’s rubbish choice
of course to my friends (minus a fluey Fern, which meant I had no-one to hide with from the ongoing snarkathon). The object was to run right round the perimeter of the campus and the surrounding warehouses in what could reasonably be described as Serious Arctic conditions. The one small mercy was to be that it hadn’t rained yet, so what would normally be a seven-minute slog through the muddy cornfields might for once involve the rewarding slap of trainers on hard ground.

  Charlie and Andy stood across from us in the icy air of the concrete crush hall, chugging down cans of what looked like alcohol. While I’d love to say that this shocked me half to death, my brother’s persistent re-rejection by Malice seemed to be turning him into a steroid-grade monster as it was. I’d heard of whisky warming you up, but I wasn’t so sure about lager.

  “H-how mad would your m-mum b-be if she knew he was c-carrying on like that?” asked Kay, through chattering teeth.

  “She couldn’t care less,” I said, with a shrug. “It’s not news to her that he’s an idiot. She’d probably nurse him through his hangover with CBeebies and a Lemsip.”

  “M-mmm…” She shivered, producing from her pocket and pulling on a pair of cream-spotted lilac knit gloves in that soft, strokable material that’s popular for scarves and socks at the market.

  “Anyway, if he gets proper smashed, he’ll probably fall in that big muddy ditch beside Polar Cup.” Keisha smirked through a thick wad of bright pink bubblegum. I could smell it from where I was standing – it cut through the icy air of the crush hall in a laboured and mushy way like a toddler’s knife through playdough. She was intent on angering Kay.

  “Shut up; he’ll be roadkill before then!” said Chantalle, viciously, as we reluctantly exited the PE block, ready to begin.

  “That’s not very nice!” protested Danielle, the unintended recipient of Keisha and Chan’s activist bait. “Sure, we don’t like them, but why’d anybody wish them dead? That’s really horrible!”

  Chantalle put her hand on Dani’s shoulder and “explained”. “Dirty grunge kids make their own way home like carrier pigeons – they’ll zoom around dropping their crap on people from a great height, but they won’t die.”

  Really? That was news to me. Those “dirty grunge kids” were more often than not on the receiving end of bullying, while people like Chan and Keisha did the crap-drops.

  “Ugh, shitfires,” muttered Keisha, looking above the chewing-gummed wall to the roof, in case any seagulls or pigeons were there watching her give birds a bad name.