A Bended Family Read online

  “What was he even famous for again?”

  “Guitar legend.” I found my eyes in an involuntary roll. (Help! I’m turning into a music snob.) “And anyway, I meant my dog!”

  “Get off!”

  #12 Off-Pink

  Our “homemade” wedding prep wasn’t going to plan.

  Nobody’d made any decent invites, so we were getting dangerously close to having to use Kitty’s “creations” if I didn’t pop to the shop, pronto. We hadn’t bought any suitable balloons, so we’d probably end up fishing out the leftover “Congrats, It’s A Girl” ones from Kit’s “Welcome Home Baby” party back in 1999. (Or had I already used those on her birthday in September?)

  The expensive wedding cake Harry had brought home yesterday, worth approximately half the budget, had magically transformed into a pile of crumbs on a plate overnight (no doubt down to three hungry doglets), and the “Ring Out The Bells” Crimby banner was going to have to serve as a wedding banner too at this rate.

  Kay hadn’t even got back to me on the subject of the wedding-wear makeover yet. The only thing worse than agreeing to one of her “bright” ideas would be permitting her to follow through with it without even checking just what it is…

  I’d decided to go and ask Dani if she had any lifesaving ideas. It’d’ve been absolutely no use asking Chantalle, who was way too busy studying 30 Seconds To Mars and mooning over my brother. The very same brother who was moping around at home – half in excitement, ’cause he really fancied her back, and half in distress, wondering what all the big goths in Year 11 would think of him for going out with somebody so conformist. (Because it has to be said, Chantalle likes to stay as trendy as possible.)

  “Well, do you have any ideas?”

  By that, I meant, did she have any ideas more beneficial than the one that Rachel had just put forward – “How about giving the wedding a Spanish theme? We’ve got loads of decorations and stuff left over from my auntie’s wedding – Kay could probably make the outfits to match that.” (Did I need to be reminded about the Spanish Penpally Scheme?)

  Or the one that Fern suggested – “Why not use these? Surely Kay’ll have some ideas of what you could do with them?” (I had a sneaking suspicion that even the warped mind of Kay Cox would not be able to make something beautiful out of some illustrated “Ta For Looking After My Gerbil” banners, or whatever they were supposed to be.)

  Or the least useful of all; Keisha’s idea – “Uh, I dunno. Ask Kay. The wedding’s already past rescue if she’s in charge of the clothes. At least the decs will match the outfits then…”

  Danielle didn’t even try to force her own interests / obligations / snipes on me. (Possibly because, mean as it makes me sound, she doesn’t really have any of her own.) “We’ve got these decorations. My uncle dumped the lot on us after that production of Grease.”

  She thrust a load of balloons and banners at me, all emblazoned with “Danny & Sandie”, “Greased Lightning” and “You’re The One That I Want”.

  Cute, but one problem. “Um… these would be great, but… my mum and step are called Harry and Sandie. They’re probably going to think I just got it wrong.”

  A “Greased Lightning” balloon slipped free of her lips where she’d been attempting to test it out, unfurling with a freeeeep. “Um… what about these then?” she asked, fishing out some advertising banners which read “When Harry Met Sally”.

  What was this? Cut-and-stick personalised party deco with Danielle Dimon? No – it was supposed to be me, Harley Hartley, enlisting help from one of my saner friends. I was pretty sure you couldn’t collage balloons with pinned-on bits of banner, so with two days to go, raging cramps, and a big box of crap I was expected to keep, I was still very much stuck at square one.

  I decided to make Rindi my next port of call.

  “I’ve got some old party invites, or I could print you off a new batch,” she offered, looking at the computer screen instead of my face.

  “Really, would you?” I asked, not having thought of that. “It’s just a small family do – it’s just that I really don’t want to get lumbered using Kitty’s attempts.”

  With a small bit of typing and a couple of clicks, Rindi had knocked together a totally professional invitation design. Sure, it had Clip-Art balloons and messy dotted lines, but it was better than anything I could’ve done.

  “You can borrow my bike to deliver them,” she suggested, handing me a printed-out pile of thirty. “Oh – and make Kay tell you what she’s come up with now, or you will soooo regret it.”

  Pedalling off down Rindi’s road, I felt a mixture of angst and vertigo. It suddenly seemed very high up, on the saddle of that off-pink mountain bike, and the folder of invites under my arm was making it hard to navigate.

  I stopped off at home to get a list of details to scribble on them (and envelopes! I’d forgotten the envelopes!), and caught Zak on his way out of the back door.

  “Zak,” I said, “could you have a look in the cupboard? We need a wedding cake, and you could probably make a decent one if you chuck a few Tom and Jerry mixes in a bowl. Just multiply the recipe by eight.”

  He groaned, chucking his keys back on the counter and checking the cupboard. “We’ve only got six packets. Is that enough? And what about the little people on top? They got eaten too…”

  “Oh, I’ll sort that out,” I promised. “Just try and concentrate on the cake. Six should be enough, but check we’ve got eggs!”

  I nearly tripped over Kitty on my way to the sofa. She was lying on the floor sculpting animals out of coloured clay.

  “That’s nice, Kit,” I praised, schemingly. “D’you think you could make little models on Mum and Harry for me?”

  “OK,” she agreed. “Why?”

  “For the cake. You know when they have little statues of people getting married? The ones you saw on the other cake last night.”

  “I can do that! But the skin can’t be pink, ’cause I made a piggy, and it can’t be brown, ’cause I made a hegghog.” She held up a hedgehog that was round like an egg what with how she couldn’t figure out how to make spikes.

  “What about the white?”

  “I made a seagull too.”

  Who makes models of seagulls?

  “See what you can do,” I told her, meaning maybe take apart some of those animals.

  I dumped the load down on the sofa, and summoned Harry, who was back from work already. “I need a list of people to invite.”

  “No need – I already phoned.”

  Oh touché, Mr Smart-Casual. I’d just walked practically as far as school to get those amateurly printed, and cycled back even though I can barely ride a bike, which I now don’t need and will have to take all the way to Rindi’s again.

  I stormed upstairs to my room as subtly as I could manage. I didn’t want Harry to know I was mad at him. Kay, too, I could happily have avoided soas not to argue, but I desperately needed to know how the outfitting was coming along. I popped my head through the wardrobe. “Kay, what’re you up to?”

  “You can’t come in!” she yelped. “I’m trying not to knock over the-”

  Silence.

  “Knock over the what?”

  “Fabric paint!” she squeaked. “And now I have!”

  “Calm down,” I groaned through the wall of clothes, both mine and hers, not in the mood for melodrama. “It’s not going to kill you. What do you need fabric paint for anyway?”

  “Well, I’ve died already, thank God, so it’s not a massive waste…”

  “Excuse me?!”

  “Yeah, the ruffles on your mum’s dress. Powder Pink.”

  “Cool,” I breathed. That didn’t sound too bad after all. “Can I come in now?”

  “I s’pose,” I heard her mumble.

  I slithered in, avoiding the spillage, and flumped onto the bed, which was free. If Kay had resembled a young Johnny Depp with her shears, then with her pair of seethrough doctoresque gloves dipped in the carmine of carnag
e and spattered surgical mask, it was as if she’d been conducting illegal surgery. It genuinely looked more like she’d been killing than dyeing.

  “I thought it was meant to be Powder Pink,” I said, dumbly, eyeing the crimson pool on the carpet. “That’s more Scarlet Shock.”

  “It is Powder Pink. If you put half a cap in a bucket of water. That’s three quarters of a bottle!”

  “Oh…” I mumbled.

  “Not to worry.” Kay shrugged, motioning to the puddle of redness on the carpet. “I had a major papier-mâché mishap the other day, and Gran said she’d have to replace it. The carpets in this house are off-colour anyway.”

  Erm, not compared to ours – there was probably a fiftieth layer of dog hair and fluffy play-dough being trampled into the living room floor as we spoke.

  Kay went to lift the perfectly pinked ruffly dress out of the disaster scene, but I stopped her just in time. “Uh, red gloves?”

  “Oh…” she sighed, going to pull them off.

  The front door slammed downstairs, and I heard cantering footsteps heading right up into the attic. Or rather, cantering pawsteps.

  Bilbo burst into the bedroom and skidded into the puddle and muddle we were sat around, splashing the hems of my jeans with dye and getting the slightly dipped look of one of our stray cats – only Billy looked like he’d been dipped in blood.

  Being an animal expert, I grabbed the bespattered Bilbo and tried to rub him down with my old greyish hood-jacket to stop him leaving puce pawprints all over the “off-colour” carpets of the whole house, but he slithered from my grip and bounded up onto the bed, where Kay’s ungloved hands had put Mum’s dress, safely out of the way. Before we knew what was happening, he was rolfing and rolling all over it.

  “Oh no!” Kay wailed, manhandling Bilbo off the bed and out of the bedroom, before holding up the ripped, reddened remains of the dress. “The whole bottom of this is so slashed that it might as well go in my scrap drawer!”

  “Let me see,” I said desperately, leaning over to get a better look.

  It was, too. The red splashes had an amazing pawprints-and-tufts appeal, but although the ripped-up dress looked like something Kay (or Malice) might pin to her wall, it looked about as much like a wedding dress as a guinea pig looks like a fruitcake.

  Kay tutted, took a deep breath and grabbed her artificial scissorhands before setting to the below-knee region of the dress skirt. “I guess I’ll have to find something to remake the bottom of it. Thank God the tearing’s quite contained after all.”

  “Thank God? Do you really picture my mum walking up the aisle dressed like Edward’s unfortunate girlfriend?”

  She rumpled her face up in that way that’s gorgeous on girls like her, and Kit, and… most people who aren’t me. (Me and my bony nose.) “No! I have an idea about that! I’ll put it in the washing machine – that’ll even the colour out. Trust me; it ruined my tie-dye T-shirt dress beautifully.”

  Only Kaylean Cox could refer to something as ruined beautifully…

  She put down the dress and shears, whipped out a green and yellow swirly shirt/dress and grinned. “It was supposed to be just green and white, but when the colours ran all the yellows came out of the green dye and like felt tip on wet paper.”

  Downstairs (after shutting the bedroom door with care, to avoid any more Hobbitdog invasions) we bundled what was left of the dress into the washing machine. Then Kay dragged me back upstairs to show off what else she’d been doing.

  “I had this brilliant idea when I spotted you coming up the street with your Grease balloon. I thought maybe we could do a theme on it – and now it’s worked out, because I can just do the dress in that style!”

  “Isn’t it a tad late for faffing around with the theme now?” I panicked. “What’d you do for the rest of the time? How come you didn’t start sooner?”

  “I did. I still think it kind-of goes. Colour-wise, anyway. Wanna see?”

  “Yes, I think that would be best…”

  She opened her wardrobe to reveal Harry’s smart-casual leather jacket (admittedly more Sam Tyler than Danny Zuko) now looking neither smart nor casual, but rather cool instead with badges and tassels sewn on; Charlie’s old, battered-at-the-edges T-shirt – now with studded writing that spelt out “Pageboy, 13, Destined To Be A Groupie” (a bad-taste joke about his, ahem, experience with the band); Zak’s oldest, skinniest jeans – now with the rest of the leather tassels coming off them; and America’s pinkish vest top – now screaming “Always The Bridesmaid, Never The Bride”.

  “Um… what about me and Kitty?” I asked, a lump hovering in my throat as visions of matching outfits of all preposterous kinds danced in my head.

  “Ah… what d’you want to see first?”

  “Kit’s I suppose,” I sighed, thinking of the little rainbow clay people that she was probably distractedly feeding lumps of Bargain Bin muffins to.

  Kay pulled out a sweet little dress – pink, with dainty glittery wings sewn on, and matching sparkly words – “Flower Girl By Name, Flower Girl By Scent” stitched across the chest. (I mentally noted to make sure she got bathed the night before and steered clear of baked beans.)

  “It was mine at her age,” Kay explained. “But I sewed on the writing and wings yesterday.”

  “Aww…” I smiled, thinking Kay was about to make a new best friend in my cloudcuckooish darling sis. “What’ve you done for me then?” I added, bracing myself for the worst, un-trendiest outfit in existence.

  But when I laid eyes on it, it wasn’t the worst, un-trendiest outfit in existence – only the most eyerollingly obvious addition to my memorabilia collection: a pink fitted T-shirt that read “Live It, Dream It, Love It… Harley”.

  Prying Aussies should note that it wasn’t the most horrible piece of motorbike merch I’d ever wanted to binbag – before now I’d owned a coffee mug reading the same with the addition of “Ride It”, before Mum had realised the connotations and condemned it to the charity shop. Kay wasn’t the first person to think this was imaginative – it’d caused Mum and Dad many arguments over the years about who first nicknamed me Harley, only half angry that it stuck. He’d say I could at least have been called after a British bike; she’d say that the problem was the bike bit at all. No, the really sucky part about this was that Mum would have to think about it on the day she’d be wed to the most wonderfully smart-casual man on the planet. (Who would never name his daughter after a motorbike, but a continent is another matter.)

  “It’s, er, very … nice.” I grinned, realising too late that I’d used the most grimacingly boring word in the entire English language.

  “You don’t really like it, do you?”

  “No, I do.” It wasn’t a lie as such; this was the cutest bit of the eBay-worthy stockpile so far. “I’m just worried about Mum’s dress…”

  “Well, it’ll be fine!” She twinkled.

  And that was when I remembered it was my turn to cook dinner.

  The scene at our house when I got in was uproar. I walked in on the aftermath of the argument that had started in the kitchen when Zak opened the oven to reveal not fish fingers and chips for seven, but several cake tins of off-pink packing foam. At half past seven on a weekday, not one person in my now extended family was prepared for that disappointment. It was nearly Kitty’s bedtime anyway. In my eagerness to take charge of the wedding plans, I had screwed up royally.

  “Charlie!” I moaned, praying everyone would forget the rota. “Why haven’t you cooked tea?”

  “Because it’s your turn to cook!” he snarled. “Come on Harley, I’m not that stupid!”

  “There’s just too many things to do all at once,” I protested. “It would be nice if someone else pulled their weight around here, now that there’s so many of us to share.”

  “I AM!!” shouted Zak, offended. His knuckles were probably white inside those oven mitts as he gripped the grey pan of cake. “Mrs Stapleton says it never works in a blended family!”

 
Ah, the Staplegun. Font of old-fashioned knowledge that she is. I remember in Year 3, getting annoyed when she told us we all must wear PE shorts under our dresses to do handstands. (Though that, like –possibly– this, turned out to be common sense after all.)

  “Well that’s the Stapler,” scoffed Charlie. “We can blend families just fine.”

  “What’s a bended family?”

  I wasn’t tuned in for the explanation, because what Kitty had just said sounded so much more apt. To suggest that we blended sounded gross – if you blend two families, you get this yucky mix of pureed people. We weren’t quite at that stage yet. It really did feel like we were bending this way and that to accommodate Harry, Aimee and Fisty…

  #13 Something Filched, Someone Blue

  “What the hell’re you doing?”

  “Sleeping…” came a grunt from under the faded Pokémon covers. “Issa Saturday… go ’way…”

  “You’ve gotta get up,” I grumbled. “It’s the wedding today!”

  Charlie snuffled, sleepily. “K, but go away; you can’t see me like this.”

  I flinched when Zak yanked the covers off him, thinking for one horrible second that he must’ve been sleeping naked. Instead, it turned out, he’d been wearing his ancient Tweenies T-shirt and pants.

  “No secrets in this house!” chirped Zak, who along with Ryan and Andy was already dressed up for the celebration. Andy and Ry wore black drainpipe trousers and a waistcoat and suit shirt, while Zak itched and twitched in Ben’s old overlong blazer and his stupid tassly jeans. Kay couldn’t put together an outfit to save her life.

  “I need my beauty sleep!” grouched Charlie.

  “He’ll be a while then,” I giggled to the boys. “You can do that after the wedding! Get out of bed!”

  “Charlie, Zak. Over the road, now!” commanded Harry, temporarily trussed in a knit jumper and slacks.

  The males were supposed to be preparing at Andy’s house, where they would run no risk of seeing Mum in her dress before the ceremony. Her dress that we’d all seen before in the box room and old photographs, that is. It was still safely hung up in Kay’s wardrobe.

  “I finished the cake people!” announced Kitty, still in her pyjamas.

  “We have your cake people,” I reminded her. She must’ve been confused.

  “Now all the cake people are ready!” she insisted.