Chapter 4
9 June 1991, Sunday
It was a day. Morning at Mrs. Figg's was good. Breakfast was bagels with cream cheese and lox and all the milk I could drink. I swear it's like she owns a cow, which I'm pretty sure wouldn't be allowed anywhere in greater Whinging.
Being fed is nice. I highly recommend it.
AP picked me up around ten. I spent the rest of the morning mowing the lawn. Lunch was a hardboiled egg, a handful of raisins, and water, and then I swept the driveway and washed the car. UV spent the day building something or other in the garage. I kept out of his way. Dinner was another hardboiled egg, a baked potato and some broccoli stems.
So, I have two more weeks of school left. Dud's birthday is the Sunday after school gets out, and then it's summer. Not looking forward to it.
For the rest of school, show up, do school stuff, go home, do chores, with heavy work on the weekend. Dud's birthday I'll spend with Mrs. Figg, then it'll be heavy work all summer. At least UV doesn't have me clean gutters anymore after Mr.
Stewart next door complained.
My plans this summer - work hard, shut up, get the summer over with as easily as possible, and figure out how I'm going to handle schoolwork at the new school. I really need to have a plan in place before I walk in the door there. Who do I want to be at Stonewall?
One thing I don't want to be is remarkable enough in any way that anyone feels the need to send notices home. So no 100% marks on papers. No idea yet how hard that will be, though. I think I'm going to go with a gradual rise in my marks. The later years are more important than the early ones, and I definitely want to do well enough to go to Sixth Form. I may need to get emancipated to go to Sixth Form, though, which then leads to needing to figure out where to live and how to support myself. I don't need to have that all figured out by the end of the summer, but I need to at least start on my research. Wouldn't do to be caught flat-footed later. Whatever happens, I don't expect to be living here on 1 August 1998, so the sooner I have at least a few loose plans in place, the better. Seven years, one month, twenty-three days. It only sounds like forever.
I can't get to the library unless I'm with Mrs. Figg, but UV's newspapers aren't hard to get hold of. I'll just have to start reading them every day.
10 June 1991 Monday
This is bollocks. I'm only ten years old, how am I supposed to make sense of all this shite? I am so utterly buggered.
13 June 1991 Thursday
I grabbed an envelope from the trash, and I've started putting the bits in the paper I want to research in there. Only ten days to the Dud's birthday and blessed blessed library time.
School is school. Home is home, such as it is. I'm reading a water damaged copy of The All-Of-A-Kind Family. I wonder if New York is still like that, or if not, how much it's changed? I also wonder where I found this book. I have got to start noting that down when I add new books.
I found out that my first task for the summer is going to be scraping and repainting the shed. I can't decide what I want to say about that. For future reference, in case I forget, I am not happy. It means I'm unlikely to be grounded before its done, but it also means they'll actually be watching me, so any meals they mean me to miss will actually be missed. It also means sunburn.
Sleep. I need sleep.
14 June Friday
I want to get back to trying to arrange my knowledge. I've been spending way too much time whinging. It's annoying. So, what do I know about what?
I'll start with my dad, since I know the least about him. He looked pretty much like I do, except he didn't have green eyes. He had a group of annoying immature friends. He went to the same public school my mum did. He was arrogant, careless, and thought he was funny. One of his friends dumped me on the doorstep on a November night with just a note and not having been seen by a doctor, which is evidence in favor of the "annoying, immature" part. A traffic accident where your best mate gets killed has got to be all sorts of upsetting, but I can't imagine not waiting for the ambulance, at least. Maybe they were all drunk or drugged or something and wanted to avoid the police?
My mum was ginger with green eyes. Her name was Lily Marguerite Evans, everyone thought she was really special, and Aunt Petunia was really jealous of her. Circumstantial evidence (another new vocabulary word) points to her having been privileged over AP. She also didn't have good judgement in friends. Her best friend in Junior School was a rough boy from a bad part of town, and then she met my father and his friends. I like to think that this means she was kind and tried to see the best in people. I can't think of any nice way to view my dad, though. The rough boy AP has said was so sharp he should cut himself, so probably they were friends because he was interesting to talk to. Maybe she thought my dad was fun to hang around with? Not a great reason to marry someone, but Mrs. Figg says that young girls can be very foolish in who they fancy, even if they're otherwise sensible. I'm not looking forward to that part of growing up. I should make a list now, while I still have my good sense, so I have it to look at when I turn into a teenager and get stupid. I'll do that later, though.
Other stuff I know. Mum's special school was in Scotland somewhere. Mum & AP grew up in a northern factory town. My grandparents died in a house fire before I was born, maybe because of the IRA? That doesn't seem right, but something I overheard UV say once sounded like that's what he was getting at.
Why do I actually listen to my aunt and uncle about my father and assume they're at least partly right? I know they're mean spirited people who rarely have anything nice to say about anyone (although UV likes Margaret Thatcher). But for one, that's the only data I have, for two generally AP's opinion of someone has some basis in fact, and for three, we have my dad pulling practical jokes that spoiled or nearly spoiled AP and UV's wedding.
One of my books here is The Notebooks of Lazarus Long. It's missing the cover and a bunch of pages, but most of the advice is really brilliant (someday I have to find the whole book). There's a whole bunch of it I try to live by, but these three especially:
1. "What are the facts? Again and again and again-what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history”--what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"
2. "Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate--and quickly."
3. "A “practical joker” deserves applause for his wit according to its quality. Bastinado. For exception wit one might grant keelhauling. But staking him out on an anthill should be reserved for the very wittiest."
I know my relatives' opinions are not facts, but they're the only data I have to work with. #2 is really useful for dealing with my relatives (although I really don't care that in his own eyes, Piers is the hero of his story). And #3 isn't really so much a mantra as an opinion that isn't my aunt and uncle that my dad wasn't a nice person. I looked up bastinado a long time ago. Ow. But really, jokes are funny, but not when you're hurting other people with them. They really only work if the other people aren't really people in your eyes.
That being said, the time Tango ripped shreds off Piers when he was trying to set him on fire was very very funny and watching Piers run away any time he sees that cat is even funnier. You don't mess with Mrs. Figg's cats. Not if you value your skin. They're smarter than some people - especially the Dud and his friends.
One more quote: "A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate." Granted, civilized people don't kill people for the most part, but I'm not going to kill Piers, I'm going to work in school and make more money and have a batter life than him and someday I'll come back to Little Whinging in my awesome car and bespoke suit and that will make up for everything