Darcy Burdock, Book 2 Read online

  ‘What’s Maggie got to do with anything?’ I snap. I am just stressed from starting big school and joining the magazine, and maybe also it’s because she’s right and Will and I have a little rip in our friendship. ONLY a little one.

  ‘All right, sorry, I didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers.’ I imagine myself as a giant exotic bird with an angry face and multi-coloured feathers being blown about in the wind.

  I feel like I have to defend my actions to myself.

  Maggie is the year above me and her days are different to mine, so sometimes she even calls me on the house phone after school, which is very strange for me and makes Poppy look at me like ‘WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?’ but really I know she’s just jealous. Mum and Dad are proud of me, I think, and I’ve seen Dad smile when the phone rings and Mum shouts, ‘Darcy, it’s for you!’ They keep telling me to invite Maggie over for Chinese takeaway or Mum’s wretched fish pie, but I feel weird to ask because she’s in the year above me and anyway she’s not my BEST friend, Will is. Everybody knows you’re not meant to be BEST friends with people in the year below or above. Then again, everybody seems to be thinking it’s pretty weird that I’m best friends with a boy.

  I shake my head and start writing again but I can’t do it. If I’m going to get this story finished I need to push all my real-life worries to the back of my head or deal with them. I’m not that good at pushing things to the back of my head. Mum’s right. Will hasn’t been over for takeaway or wretched fish pie for the longest time in the history of us being mates. I think probably I should work on making Will more importanter in my life once again, and so for the first time in all our lives I am going to pick up the phone and call him. I punch in the numbers and wait on the line.

  Annie picks up.

  ‘Hiya, Annie, it’s Darcy, is Will please in?’ I tumble the words out so quick like I am a rattlesnake.

  ‘’Allo, Darcy, yeah, I think so. Hold on . . . Ginger Nut!’ she calls up the stairs. Annie is the only person in the world who Will lets call him Ginger Nut. It’s funny, it’s a bit like how you can call your sister a bajillion words under the sun but the moment somebody else is mean about her, then you want to plunge a sword through their belly.

  ‘Hello?’ His voice is all low like he has turned into a shy person.

  ‘Hi, Will. It’s me, Darcy.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  What on earth do people say when they are on the phone? ‘So, erm, how are you?’

  ‘Why are you calling me on the phone?’ he asks, saying the word ‘phone’ as though it is disgusting and offensive. I don’t obviously inform him that the phone and me have been getting on these days.

  ‘Well, why not?’ I ask, taken aback. I wasn’t expecting that.

  ‘It’s weird. Why can’t we just speak at school? I thought you were busy anyway.’

  ‘That’s why I was calling actually – we haven’t really seen each other much . . .’

  ‘That’s why I came over, you doughnut. To hang out. Look, it’s not a big deal. I know you are busy, you being a writer, and that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes . . . but . . .’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘There’s no problem.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine.’ I swallow to the back of my throat and it tastes like horrible. My tongue is like a giant cream cracker, dry and plain. It feels so awkward. Why does ‘no problem’ scream ‘BIG PROBLEM’. I knewed we weren’t speaking to each other but I didn’t realize that there was an actual real-life problem bubbling between us. I panic.

  ‘What are you having for dinner?’ I ask. In moments of terror always resort to food, unless there is none about and then chew your hair.

  ‘Takeaway pizza.’

  ‘Oh, lucky.’

  There is a frosty pause.

  ‘I’ll bring you in a slice tomorrow if you want.’ Phew.

  ‘That would be really good.’ I smile to myself.

  ‘I’ve got a football match at lunch time. It’s a big one, against the older boys, if you want to watch.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I would love to. I’ll be there.’

  ‘OK, bye. Don’t ring again, it’s weird, I don’t like it.’

  ‘Sorry, I won’t. I don’t like it either.’ Which isn’t true. I love the phone.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Bye then.’

  ‘Bye.’

  Then we hang up the phone. Well, that went well. At least I can be sure that we are still mates. He is bringing me pizza and I am going to watch him play football at lunch, and even if that rogue Clementine is there I will simply have to just be mature about it like a stinky old lump of cheese. I am a really good friend. I am a REALLY good friend. I AM REALLY good at being a REALLY GOOD friend. I brush my hair, which I have been doing a bit since I am a journalist, and get Mum to re-plait it all nice and neat for me. I work on my story really hard and think it’s finished and I feel happy with it and Dad helps me put the story on a posh little keyring thing that means I can take the story to school and work on the same document tomorrow. Sadly I can’t write everything in my own writing book. I watch a bit of The Simpsons with Poppy and Hector, burping up my dinner as loud as I can to nearly the whole theme tune, which is making them laugh, and then I’m nearly a bit sick so I stop.

  I lie in bed with my hand around Lamb-Beth’s ear. I am humming. I think about picking my nose but that’s gross and I figure if I don’t pick my nose by this age it’s probably not a good time to start a disgusting new habit. I dream . . .

  Through the twinkly sky the light shades fades every colour and a gentle humming noise finds Will, in the centre of the ocean, on a boat rocking. It is calm and peaceful. I am a mermalade (magical like a mermaid and normal like marmalade = mermalade – obviously) and I am flapping about beside the boat but still in the water and sharing some tacos and pizza with Will, and because we are expert at this none of the tacos or pizza get wet. We then play some table tennis and it’s going well because we are pretty much the same level of good at table tennis. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a terribly scary and awful storm brews. A storm that thunders and lightning and the sky gets all dark and stormy and the birds are swooping and the trees surrounding are blowing and rattling and a white brilliant light is flashing over up and crackling and cackling and the sea gets more choppy and starts sucking me under, and even though I’m a mermalade my normal abilities seem to be dominating my magical mythical ones and I begin to drown.

  I panic and my hair is so swampy and heavy I can barely lift my head. I can’t breathe and then the sea trembles and monsters come, huge big oily ones with ginormous big tails and talons, and whipping lashing furious sounds are groaning out of them and I am screaming and Will keeps trying to tip me up into his boat and scoop me in, but I keep slipping – it’s as though my skin is covered in butter and I keep dipping back into the water. Instead of helping me stay afloat my tail is like a dead weight now, dragging me down, and the more I try to swim the more the water becomes thick and stiffens like custard. Will can’t grip me! The monster is snaking closer and the sky is thick and heavy like a stew pot of smoke tipping on our heads and the water begins to swirl, and at the last moment Will finally manages to pull me up and into the boat and we are yelling and out of breath and soaking wet and crying, and just when we think we are safe, suddenly the boat tips, capsizes us . . . and I wake up, panting, with hot tears streaming down my face.

  Chapter Ten

  The next morning Will is doing his looking like I’m not but I am waiting for you look at the gates with a bunch of tinfoil in his hands. This will be my delicious pizza, I think. He hands it to me.

  ‘Pepperoni.’ He smiles. He has orange-juice breath. I wonder if he brushed his teeth because everybody knows that toothpaste mixed with orange juice makes revolting acid.

  ‘Yummy. Thanks, Will.’

  ‘You still coming to watch me play football today?’

 
‘Of course. I can’t wait.’

  ‘Cool, you don’t have to, you know, if you’re busy or whatever.’

  ‘No, I want to.’ AS IF I’m going to let Clementine have that smug grin all over her face AGAIN – I don’t think so!

  ‘Cool.’ He looks pleased and then walks away.

  ‘Good luck!’ I call after him. We are friends again.

  The day goes so fast, and even though I am in lessons I keep thinking about how the magazine deadline is tomorrow ALREADY, and if I’m going to get my story in this first edition I have to hurry up and edit this stupid thing. This is much more stressful than writing my own little stories in my writing book. There is so much to do, every spare second I have I spend in the computer room with Maggie, Gus, Arti and Koala typing away like mad. I also know my spelling and grammar is bad ugly and have to try really hard at making sure it is a good piece of work, and all that tidying up is NOT my strong point. Olly has handed in all his written work so I haven’t seen him much, but this doesn’t stop him leering over my computer screen at break time for a good five minutes.

  ‘Erm, Darcy, an apostrophe goes before the “s” when it belongs to somebody,’ he snoots, rubbing his greasy hands on my screen.

  I smile and say, ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he chimes. ‘We can’t all be fortunate enough to be as clever as I am.’ I roll my eyes, watching him do some stretches and rubbing his chin. He is playing in the football match at lunch time – apparently he is a ‘big deal’ – and I wish he would hurry up and leave.

  ‘I should be the punctuation police, cracking down on all those slippery apostrophes. It’s not really your fault, Darcy,’ he snipes, glaring at his reflection in the window. He licks his fingers and spreads the spit over his eyebrows, shaping them into horrible mountain points. ‘You have to have the knack for it, I simply can’t imagine what the ratio is of people that ARE writers in comparison to people who WANT to be writers but will never get the chance, purely because simple things like bad grammar or laziness lets them down.’ He shrugs. ‘Ah, c’est la vie.’ IS HE SPEAKING FRENCH NOW? Really?

  Maggie whispers in my ear, ‘Pretentious.’ I don’t know what that means either but I giggle anyway because her tone lets me know she thinks he’s a twit.

  Luckily for me, Olly air-punches the ceiling a few times, mooches around and then slumps out of the computer room to play football. I can’t be bothered to row with him. I didn’t even agree with a single word he just said but sneakily Google c’est la vie just to see. It means ‘such is life’. I speak English and still have NO idea what that means either. Oh, great.

  I have a brisk ten minutes before Will’s football match where I can get up to the computer room and have one final read of my story before deadline. Then I can eat the pizza Will gave me and cheer him on during his game. Maggie is sitting there when I arrive.

  ‘Hi,’ I pant when I plonk myself down next to her.

  ‘Your story looks great – want one final read and make any changes?’ she squeals.

  ‘That’s why I’m here, yes please.’

  The Craggle Twins

  They lived five doors apart at the top of a steep stalk of a hill: the Craggle Twins. Their relationship was one of the most fussy and complicated relationships ever known in the dizzy tapestry of relationships because they loved and hated each other exactly to the same degree. They couldn’t live together but they couldn’t live apart. Their names were Cora and Dora and they were both middle-aged. They had long-to-the-ground knotty scraggly hair, really skinny bony arms and legs, with big fat round bodies. They looked like boiled eggs with four toothpicks stuck into them as limbs. They had the same interests, hobbies and tastes. Their interest was gerbils, their hobby was stuffing the gerbils once they had died, and their taste was eating tinned fish. They had never had a boyfriend because whenever one met a man she liked, the other would find a way to destruct and destroy the other’s bliss. They were quite happy in their loneliness, well, they had to be, they wouldn’t let each other have any happiness so they had to have each other. That was until the new postman came. Dave. Simple, unibrowed, toothless Dave.

  Cora’s house was first on the route, number 19. He had a parcel of stuffing for Cora to continue her hobby with those poor gerbils, and took quite a fancy to this miserable-looking dollop of a woman, in her lilac nightie and her hair rolled into little mini pigs in blankets. She liked the idea of a handsome postman called Dave being her boyfriend, and couldn’t help but scrape her needle fingers over his soft hands as they exchanged the parcel for a signature before saying, ‘Cheerio.’ The smell of dead gerbil and sardines followed him down the road. ‘I fancy that Dave,’ she said to herself as she closed her net curtains. ‘And I think he fancies me too!’ But there was one problem: Dora.

  Cora was near certain her twin sister would have the hots for Postman Dave just as she did and dreaded what would happen when he paid Dora a call . . .

  Knock, knock, knock. It was the new postman, Dave, with the package of stuffing that Dora too had ordered. When she opened the door of number 24, it was love at first sight for Dora, but déjà vu for Dave. He was shocked and he shook his head. Hadn’t he seen all this before? The attractive woman, the smell of dead gerbil and sardine all on the same road no more than two minutes ago? Still, it was nice to see her again and he was so simple he soon got over it. Dora couldn’t help but flick her knotty hair over her shoulder and breathe her fishy breath over Dave with a lovestruck smile.

  Cora peered out of her window and saw Postman Dave leaving Dora’s house. She had to put a stop to this and quick. Meanwhile Dora knew that Cora lived at number 19, so she must have been visited by hunky Dave before her. That meant that she technically found him before her. Finders keepers. She had to do something.

  Both Craggle twins wrapped themselves up in their mustard corduroy coats and headed to the other’s house ‘for tea and a bun’. But they ended up meeting in the middle of the street, at number 22.

  ‘What do you want?’ Dora grunted.

  ‘Same as you,’ Cora sneered.

  ‘What’s that then?’ Dora frowned.

  ‘You tell me,’ Cora smirked.

  ‘I was coming to see you.’ Dora lifted her voice in high fakery.

  ‘Me too,’ Cora chimed.

  ‘What for?’ Dora sniffed.

  ‘Bun and tea,’ Cora curled.

  ‘How delightful,’ Dora spat.

  ‘And you?’ Cora gritted her teeth.

  ‘The same . . .’ Dora held her tongue.

  ‘Well . . .’ they said together, ‘aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  They stood hawking over each other before they both said, again, at the same time, ‘Hands off, he’s mine!’ and then they gasped and screwed their faces up.

  ‘I saw him first!’ Cora cried. ‘Finders keepers.’

  Dora snickered. ‘I’m inviting him over,’ she barked.

  ‘Me too!’ snaked Cora.

  ‘Then we’ll see who he likes best!’ announced Dora.

  ‘Yes we will, you pesky hag!’ pronounced Cora.

  ‘You wretched worm!’

  ‘You cabbaged caked cod!’

  ‘You man-nicking knicker head!’

  ‘You boyfriend-boasting beastly bum bum beef burger!’

  ‘You horrible handsome-husband hovering hacking hole in my head!’

  ‘I WISH YOU WERE DEAD!’ they roared in unison, huffed and stropped back to their own houses. This meant war.

  They both had the same tactic: if they were going to invite Postman Dave inside for a date the first thing they had to do was get him to deliver them a package. It couldn’t be a letter because a postman doesn’t knock for a letter so they both ordered a big box of stuffing to be delivered the next day.

  However, Dora knew that Cora would be ordering something for Postman Dave to deliver, same as her, so she needed to do a little something else, just to make sure her sister’s date didn’t go quite as smoothly. Dora
ordered 500 tablets of a special medicine that makes someone stop farting so much. She ordered them to be delivered to her twin sister’s house the very next morning, knowing full well that Postman Dave would see the box and think Dora was a Problem Farter. ‘Hee. Hee. Hee,’ she cackled to herself and said ‘Stupid Cora’ to her stuffed gerbils, to which the stuffed gerbils said nothing.

  Knock, knock, knock, at number 19. Was it that time already? Cora sprang up from the couch and dusted herself down. It was Postman Dave. He was happy to see her and wriggled his unibrow and gaped at her with his toothless grin.

  ‘Delivery for Miss C. Craggle: one box of stuffing.’ He handed her the box and she did the hand touchy thing again, thanked him and smiled, thinking that this would be the right moment to invite him in. But Dave picked up another box, ‘Ooh, busy day for you, Miss Craggle, you have another box here . . . five hundred tablets of Fart Killer?’ Dave tried to keep a straight face but he wanted to laugh.

  ‘That’s not mine!’ Cora hissed.

  ‘Well, it’s got your name on it,’ Dave replied.

  ‘WHO ORDERED THESE?’

  ‘Not sure, I’m just doing my job, Miss Craggle.’

  And suddenly she knew exactly who had ordered them. Her sister, Dora. This was serious. Cora said goodbye to Dave: the moment was gone, the date was now ruined. Now she had to ruin her sister’s chances too.

  Meanwhile, five doors down, Dora was wearing a very-too-small-for-herself dress, her pale skin pouring out in big fat fleshy folds. She thought she looked great and couldn’t wait to answer the door to Postman Dave, especially now her sister would be out of the picture thanks to the fart tablets. He would be coming any minute, she thought as she drank the last of the tuna oil at the bottom of the can, waiting for the knock at the door.

  But it didn’t come.

  Eventually she opened the front door, and saw Dave’s postman van speeding away. She was furious and completely confused, but then she noticed her door numbers had been swapped around to read ‘42’ rather than the correct ‘24’ and Postman Dave (being not the smartest cookie in the cookie jar) had simply driven right past her house. Only someone with a brain as deadly as her own could achieve such a trick: Cora.