A Bended Family Read online

  The wedding would be a week Saturday. Harry had booked a venue, but that was about it. No arrangements had been made for a cake; we hadn’t bought (or even made) any decorations; no one had even begun to draw up a list of who was coming – so it was a reasonable assumption that the answer was “nobody”. Worst of all, Kaylean Cox was in charge of the outfits. Maybe having little-to-no attendees would be a reputation-saving miracle…

  * * *

  “Go ’way!”

  “Phone for you!”

  “No, go ’way!”

  “Charlie, grow up,” I sighed.

  “My life is over! Nobody’ll ever speak to me ever again!” he sobbed.

  “Yeah, sure they will…” I reassured him. So I was only saying it on autopilot because it was the right answer to his statement if meant literally – it might’ve worked. Prying Aussies should note that we’re talking about the boy who was once convinced that sharks could swim up and get you… in the public toilets. My twin brother isn’t known for his ability to discern facts from fallacies.

  “Really?”

  “Um, yeah. It’s not like they actually know you’re no virtuoso. They could still be wondering why you had to leave.”

  “Because stage fright or explosive diarrhoea would be more appealing!” he wailed.

  I wanted to ask if this really felt any worse than the time he was upstaged at the skate park by an eight-year-old Zak, but that would probably start him off again.

  It’s not like I wasn’t used to this. Prying Aussies should note that Charlie’s about as emotional as a person can get. But there was something weirdly weird about this particular talking down. Probably the part where I was standing on the sofa in the living room in my socks, trying to coax him down from his sniffly spot on the closed loo lid with a slimy pink face. (He had one, I mean. I don’t think that would entice anyone.)

  On the upside, that gaping hole in the ceiling/floor made it somewhat hard for him to hide, even in the bog. On the downside, an uncomfortable-looking Kitty was swaying cross-legged on the carpet while she doodled hearts and flowers and monotone rainbows and stars and swirly cupcakes on college-ruled paper. Illustrated wedding invitations – brown; already the only colour that still worked out of the ten-pack of felt tips she’d got for her birthday.

  I tried to hand him the cordless phone through the ceiling/floor, but he wouldn’t take it. Sure, I’d had trouble adjusting to Harry’s sleek black technology too, but I got the feeling it wasn’t that – Charlie had known who was calling, so I hadn’t had to say anything.

  “Charlie!” I snapped, losing my patience.

  “What?”

  “You’re being really inconsiderate. No one likes the garden loo – especially you. Think how poor Kitty feels.”

  “At least we have a garden loo!” he huffed, though I knew that was the last thing he would want to hear in our situation, and he wasn’t the one who had to sit down for a wee!

  “I’ll remember that next time I’m in the bath…” I threatened. In reality, as much as I needed one, I was holding out on the bath thing until Harry had fixed the floor. I was simply not comfortable with anything that involved longer than five minutes in there, what with Charlie and Zak’s friends.

  “I’m not coming out!” Charlie insisted. “Kitty, stop being such a baby.”

  “I am not being a baby!” she shouted back, glaring up at him with Infant hatred. “You are! You are a baby! The toilet is for weeing, not for crying!”

  “Yeah, why aren’t you in the Baby Room, Chazzer?” teased Zak, who’d just come in from cleaning out the hutches. “That pizza should be ready by now.”

  “Take it out then,” I ordered, impatiently. Looking back on it, Zak was sharing the short end of the stick with Kitty that evening, but at the time, it felt like it was me. I dreaded having to stuff myself into that creaky, spidery loo with my little sister.

  “Your mum’s going to blame you when she gets home,” warned Aimee, smugly, from her beanbag right up close to the TV which was blaring Corrie. “I know I would.”

  I didn’t know which of us that was targeted at, but felt that it was most likely both. “Charlie! I swear! I will get a ladder and climb in that window and crack your-”

  “Hey- hey!” said Harry, who had come out of his Cold Room study at long last. I wasn’t sure how much he had heard, but one thing was for definite – he’d heard me threaten violence.

  Kitty leapt to her feet and ran through the kitchen to the garden like an electrocuted cheetah. He’d obviously startled her.

  “What did Malice want?” asked Charlie, self-centred still.

  “She wanted- wants to talk about what happened.”

  What happened. Long story short, Charlie had finally found no way out of his audition for Malice In Blunderland, and Malice had finally figured out that he didn’t know the first thing about guitars. (Like maybe which way up to hold one…)

  “You mean she’s still there?”

  “Well, yeah… I mean, probably.” I shrugged and put the phone back to my ear a second. “Wait, no, she’s gone now.”

  “So you don’t know how much of this she heard?”

  “It’s dinnertime, lad,” Harry interjected, subtly but seriously. “You might stop being a pansy and set the table.”

  Charlie did not budge a centimetre. I knew he’d never been spoken to quite like that – firm and fair were pretty much opposite ends of the spectrum in our house.

  Harry twitched with incredulity the whole way through tea.

  * * *

  It was half nine at night when Charlie finally came out of the bathroom. Kitty wasn’t in bed yet; she was lying on her nail-paint splattered duvet, still working on wedding invitations that we patently wouldn’t be using. By this point, she was down to my orange school highlighter, and refusing to go to bed until Mum got back from the college open evening.

  Harry had driven her shortly after me and the boys arrived home. She’d got the idea of perhaps taking Accounting so that she could work with Harry. (If you Prying Aussies thought me and Charlie are hopeless at Maths, Mum struggles to count the right change.)

  “I’m not going to college with my stepmum!” Aimee had protested.

  “You’re right, not if you don’t knuckle down and do some revision,” Harry had retorted.

  Taking my opportunity to pee, my eyes wandered down into the living room, which much like the rest of the house looked a bit like someone had dumped a tonne of rubble and then tried to sweep it out with a toothbrush since the floor failures. When I should’ve been cringing at how easily eyes from the storey below could wander to me with my PJs round my ankles, I instead found myself straining my ears to hear the conversation between Aimee and Ben on the sofa.

  “Giz a minute… this is hard for me to say.” – Aimee.

  “I’m listening…” – Ben.

  “I-” Aimee paused at the flush of the loo and looked right up at me. Fortunately I was washing my hands by then. “I’m…”

  “You’re not!” Ben choked with disbelief.

  I felt my eyebrows shoot up then. She couldn’t be… I mean, I knew people in Year 11 were probably more often than not doing it, but I just couldn’t quite see my bitchy stepsister, human or not, having a baby. She barely knew how to look after a dog.

  I squeaked involuntarily and dove back into my room and under the covers. I didn’t hear any of that. I decided to put it out of my mind until she chose to tell us all. Maybe if I ignored it, it would just go away. I could pretend it never happened. I could pretend someone else’s accidental baby never happened! I didn’t hear any of that. Think happy thoughts, happy thoughts.

  In my head, I went through all the things that normally cheered me up. That “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” song… Natalie Imbruglia… Jordy. NOT Jordy! For the first time since Year 7, I was deliberately not thinking about Jordy while I lay awake in bed. I wanted to be back in Primary school, when no one I knew, not even Andy’s big cousin, was old enough to think
about kids.

  “Harley…” said Aimee, from nearby.

  “No,” I replied, as obnoxiously as possible. I knew I was doing an awful job of pretending to be asleep – my seven year old sister was still up, colouring with the light on.

  “It’s not what you think,” she supplied. “Imean- we didn’t do anything… like that.”

  “I don’t care what you do,” I managed, from under the covers. “I don’t even wanna know.”

  “I can’t believe you’re a teenager,” my stepsister couldn’t resist sniping. “What happened to you to make you such a prude?”

  I could’ve hit her. I mean, who says that? Who actually asks, especially in that tone of voice, what happened to you to make you prefer not to think about the act of sex? What had she been expecting me to say? Because I’m sure any actual valid answer would’ve stunned her to death, and anyway, I didn’t have one.

  “Aimee,” I grumbled. “Nothing happened to me, thank you for asking. I’m a normal person and I don’t have a boyfriend – why would I be thinking about… that?”

  “I was just dumping him!” she snapped. “You are so not normal.”

  And that was when the front door clicked open. Mum was home. She was immediately up the stairs to tuck Kitty in, and I peeped out across the room from under my quilt. Not long ago I’d thought my mum a bit of a prude, if that’s the word for it. I’d thought I would grow up to be just like her, like a normal mum who has children with someone she’s been with for quite a while. Obviously we really weren’t that alike after all.

  #9 A Woman On Her Own

  The girl named for the Land Of The Missing “U” could be heard hissing at Ben in the front garden just minutes after talking to me like I was Kitty’s age, and had to be called in by Harry like a cat at dinnertime.

  Kit herself had a few questions, which only surfaced once we were alone in our room at gone ten in the evening, waiting for Aimee to come to bed.

  “When Mum and Harry get married…” she started, but then paused expectantly for acknowledgement. Kitty has a hard time believing I’m awake if she can’t see my eyes open.

  “Yeah…?”

  “Will Harry be my dad?”

  “He’ll be your stepdad.”

  “Will he be your dad?”

  “He’ll be my stepdad too. And Charlie and Zak’s.”

  “And Aimee’s.”

  “He’ll still be Aimee’s real dad,” I managed, though I cringed at the exclusivity of what I was saying.

  “Why won’t he by my dad and your dad?”

  “Because he’s not our dad.”

  “How come?”

  Uh-oh. I couldn’t exactly come right out with the birds and the bees. I was talking to a very tired Infant schooler! “Because we had a different dad first, only he’s not around anymore.”

  “How come?”

  “Because Mum and Dad didn’t want to live together anymore. Our dad didn’t want to be our dad, so now he’s not anymore.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. Away.”

  “Will he come home?”

  “He’s not coming back.”

  “And he’s not our dad anymore? So we don’t have a dad?”

  Ugh. “He’s not being our dad anymore. It’s not important. We were fine before Harry came along and we’re fine now he’s here.”

  “If we don’t have a dad, why can’t Harry be our dad?”

  “He can be like a dad.” (Just not like our dad, I hope.)

  “But what makes him Aimee’s dad? Who’s Aimee’s mum?”

  I sighed. “Aimee’s mum is the lady who gave birth to her. She hasn’t seen her mum in a while, because Harry and his wife didn’t want to live together either.”

  “But what makes him Aimee’s dad?”

  Kids. I could’ve thrown the lamp at her. Only because I was tired and rather sick of being a part of this family for the time being. (Of course I wouldn’t really throw anything at anyone.) “He just is. Aimee’s mum chose him to be her dad.”

  “Can Mum choose Harry to be my dad?”

  I wanted to say no. You only get that choice once, really, if you even look at it as a choice at the time. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  “Can we have a wedding for Harry to be my dad?”

  “A wedding?”

  “With rings and, flowers… and things…” she mumbled, obviously drifting off.

  I supposed so again.

  “And a… chocolate fountain…?”

  Now, that was going to be the difficult part.

  * * *

  I’d expected Kitty to drop the subject once she fell asleep, but she was up bright and early designing a new set of invitations. “You are ivvitde to mum ande harryse weddine ande harryse goin to be kittyse DAD.” This needed explaining fast, or Harry might even get scared off. Kitty isn’t exactly the easiest person to assume responsibility for.

  Mum and Harry were the first downstairs as usual, so before any of the washing and dressing stuff, I zoomed straight to the kitchen to assault them with Kitty’s proposition.

  “There’s a problem!” I announced, hastily.

  “And what might that be?” asked Harry, who was already suited smart-casually for work, briefcase at his feet as he buttered toast.

  “Kitty wants you to be her dad. She kind of thinks there’s going to be a part of the wedding where she gets to marry you as your new daughter.”

  Harry chuckled. “That’s alright. I think we can accommodate it.”

  “Sure you don’t want to marry Harry as his daughter as well?” teased Mum. “We could make it a double daughter wedding.”

  How typical. She’d put me in the awkward position of having to answer. Sure, it seemed like a joke, but whatever answer I came up with could easily be taken to heart. I didn’t know him from Adam the BT guy really, and it wasn’t that I didn’t want him to be my stepdad. I just didn’t need a special ceremony to prove that. I didn’t want to stand up in front of everyone on the big day and accompany Kitty in her cringeworthy service.

  “Ah, well,” I stalled. “Do I really need a wedding to show that?”

  “That’s my girl,” Mum tittered. “Always a woman on her own, this one.”

  A woman on her own… thanks, Mum, for the vote of confidence. I know what she meant to say was that I’m my own woman and I do what I please, but I couldn’t help hearing it as if she’d said I’d be single forever just because I wasn’t completely sold on love and sex and marriage as of yet.

  “You’re invited to my wedding!” Kitty announced excitedly to the dogs. She thrust a piece of gluey paper at Hendrix and then Layla, who sat up with interest as they hadn’t had anything to eat yet. “Let me read it to you: ‘Dear Hendrix: You are invited to Mum and Harry’s wedding, and Harry’s going to be Kitty’s DAD.’ ‘Dear Layla: You are…”

  Mum burst out laughing. It was bizarre. I knew she could hardly keep a straight face with her new man in the room, but now she was even laughing at her little girl.

  “What’s so funny?” demanded Kitty.

  “You…” (hiccup) “…have to ask someone to marry you before you organise your wedding!”

  Kitty thought for a moment. “Oh, well, Harry, will you be my awfully wedded dad?”

  “I wouldn’t like to replace your father,” Harry replied. With most little kids that would’ve been the right answer, but this, unfortunately, was Kitty. She couldn’t even remember our dad.

  “I haven’t got a farver anymore.”

  “That’s right, she hasn’t,” said Mum. “Just like you and Aimee, we are all absolutely free for the taking!”

  “Well in that case…” Harry beamed as he spoke. “I will take your hand.”

  “You’re not having my hand!” Kitty shrieked incredulously, recoiling across the room and tripping over the dog bowl.

  I exited stage backwards as fast as possible. One more late stamp for entertaining Kitty would be the end of me.

  #10 Devon Mag
enta, Scarlett O’Hara

  A friend Señor Campbell qualified with teaches English in Spain. They’d video-conferenced over half term and formulated a fabuloso idea. A penpal scheme between us and some Spanish Year 9s.

  Worse, it’s cross-gender penpalling! Erk! Sure, I can easily spin off my whole (random) life story when I’m writing to a girl (just look at this fat wad of paper), but the thought of writing to a boy sort of makes my wit dry up. I mean, it’d be like letting Jordy read my innermost thoughts or something, except with a Spanish boy who would misunderstand even more of it, if possible.

  Unfortunately, there turned out to be enough of each to go round. I’ve been paired with a boy called Gerardo, which is about as Spanish-sounding as it gets. “Herardo”, as Señor Campbell enunciated.

  Homework for next week: write letter, enclose photo, bring letter for dispatch.

  I’d got it all planned out though; write the stupid letter in English and get Rach to translate it. At least then I wouldn’t go off on a tangent and start drawling about socks or muffins or something (at least not out of selecting the wrong words).

  Or so I thought. The idea was infectious. Rach’s French class have subscribed themselves to escargot-mail penpallies. (Plus, I’d had to wait over an hour to get through to her, every one of our friends having had the same idea.)

  So I stared down at the little sheet of lined papel ripped from my Spanish book (which I’d taken home to rip some decent phrases from). So far, it went:

  Dear Gerardo,

  Supposedly I’m your English penpally. My name is Mahala “Harley” Hartley, and I hope you understand that this project is causing me mucho stress-io up to my ears(io). Hoping you speak English well, ’cause my Spanish is muy fatal. But don’t worry if you can’t ’cause one of my best mates is fluent and could translate to us (for cash).

  My mum’s training to be an accountant so she can go and work with my stepdad, who is a car salesman. That involves a smart-casual demeanour at all times, but it hasn’t infected Mum just yet. My real dad is miles out of the picture; just a bit of muck on the skirting board in the museum of my life. He could be anywhere from the other side of town to deepest España (but please don’t go looking for him; we don’t want him back).

  I have two brothers – se llama Zak y Charlie (one cool, 10; one crazy, 13), a sweet little sis, Kitty (7), and a stepsister who may or may not be from a foreign planet even further afield than Spain. My neighbour and other close friend Kay may also be a Martianess.