Model Misfit

My stomach tightens into a hard ball. I can already feel our trips to the Natural History Museum and the Imperial War Museum shutting down, like tiny little lights being turned off. “What’s going on?”

“I’m …” and she takes a deep breath. “I’m going to France.”

A couple more bulbs break. “What? For how long?”

“A whole month,” Nat says miserably. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

And – just like that – my entire summer goes completely dark.

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rance? What has France got that my Summer of Fun Flow Chart doesn’t have?

A French Home-stay Programme, apparently.

Nat’s mum is making her go, as punishment for catching Nat in Boots when she should have been doing her French GCSE. Nat quickly explains this as her mum pulls up at the kerb alongside us and makes the universal gesture for Get In This Car Right Now, Young Lady.

Then she waves miserably goodbye at us from the back windscreen.

“Harriet,” Toby says, when he comes out from behind the tree two minutes later. “Do you know what this means?”

“No,” I say curtly, because obviously I do.

Don’t say it, Toby, I will him silently. Please. Just don’t say it.

But as always Toby’s ability to read minds, verbal inflections or really-quite-obvious facial expressions remains non-existent.

“It means,” he says – staring at me with eyes like lava lamps, all liquid and glowing – “you’re going to be spending the whole of summer with me.”

OK, I’m going to bed for the next month.

I’ll just spend the next six weeks under my duvet, learning how to embroider hieroglyphics by torchlight. I’ll get Annabel and Dad to whizz up all my food so I can drink it through a straw from under my duvet, like an old lady’s budgerigar. By the time I start A Levels I’ll be the same shape as a mattress, covered in fungus and shrivelled into an even smaller and even more muscle-less mass than normal.

As Robert Burns once wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley” and the same can obviously be said for teenage girls. My plans are aft-agleying all over the shop.

“Harriet?” Annabel shouts downstairs as I slam the front door as hard as I can behind me. “If you’re trying to break all the windows in the house simultaneously, that is an incredibly efficient way to do it.”

“Hey!” I hear my dad say indignantly. “How come Harriet gets complimented for slamming doors when I get in trouble? I demand a retrial.”

“There hasn’t been a trial, Richard,” Annabel laughs, “so we can’t technically ‘re’ anything.”

“Oh, fine, you win again. It’s a good thing you’re about to pop out a mini-me or I wouldn’t be letting you triumph so easily.”

“Thank you, darling. Your gallantry is, as ever, much appreciated.”

I hear a loud cheerful kiss, echoing down the stairs.

“You know,” Dad muses afterwards, “I am pretty gallant. I’m a bit like a modern-day Lancelot. Except with no horse. Why don’t I have a horse, Annabel? How are we expected to be real men these days without horses?”

Yup. If you think that the prospect of creating a new human life has in any way forced my father to grow up even slightly over the last six months you’d be wrong.

There’s a jellyfish called the Turritopsis nutricula, which Marine Biologists say is the only animal in the world that renders itself immortal by reverting back to adolescence every time it starts to age too much. All I’m going to say is: they obviously haven’t met my dad yet.

Let’s just see how long he sticks around.

Throwing my satchel into the corner of the hallway, I start a slow, stompy climb up the stairs. Six months ago they were pretty, white-painted wood; they are now covered in horrible beige, hard-wearing carpet with fiddly stair gates at either end. There used to be a space under the banister where the cat would climb the stairs and headbutt me from eye-level, as a kind of greeting. It’s been blocked up.

There are also fake plug-coverings in all of the plug sockets and padding around the edges of the tables and more gates in doorways, just in case we need to be herded safely from room to room like cattle.

I reach the newly safe and sanitised landing and stare at my parents. “What are you doing?”

“Hello, Harriet.” Annabel is wearing an enormous, elasticated, pin-stripe suit, and is calmly wiping one of my fossils with a cloth. “Sweetheart, why is your face gold? And what on earth happened to your jumper?” She looks down. “I know I’m full of pregnancy hormones, but I’m certain you were wearing two socks this morning.”

“Oh amazeballs!” Dad cries from the study. “You coloured yourself gold! To win an exam! That is creative genius!”

I think my head is about to explode. “I’m serious, what are you doing? You can’t clean fossils, Annabel. You are literally wiping away 230 million years of history!”

“I think this is a coating of dead skin cells and dust mites, actually. When was the last time you dusted these, Harriet?”

I grab the fossil from her. “This is an Asistoharpes! This is 395 million years old! Why don’t you just stick it in the washing machine while you’re at it?”

My stepmother raises her eyebrows in silence.

“I think if it’s survived that long it can handle a bit of wet cloth, don’t you?”

I ignore her and turn to Dad, who is standing on the office chair, trying to get down my collection of books about the Tudors. Every time he reaches for one he swivels slightly and has to hang on to the shelf for balance. “What are you doing?”

“There’s a whole load of stuff here that’s yours, Harriet,” he explains, reaching for a biography of Anne Boleyn and swivelling again. “So we’ve built some more shelves in your bedroom. This is going to be the baby’s room.”

I grab a few of my books off the bed from where they’ve just been thrown, willy-nilly. “This room is called the study, Dad. If this was a room for a baby, it would be called something else!”

“It is, Harriet,” Dad says, laughing. “We just renamed it.”

I can feel every single cell in my body fizzing and bursting like those crackly sweets that pop on your tongue. First Alexa, then Nat, now this. Today isn’t even making an effort to go to planany more.

“There isn’t room in my bedroom for all my stuff!”

“Then throw some of it away,” Annabel suggests with a tiny smile. She’s cleaning another fossil. “Or we can put it in the attic. Or maybe in the garden. I imagine these rocks would probably be very happy there.”

My throat is getting tighter and tighter. “What do you mean throw it away?You can’t just throw preserved evidence of natural evolution in the bin!”

Annabel puts her hand gently on her enormous straining belly. “Harriet, what’s going on, sweetheart? Did your last exam go badly? What’s the matter with you?”

“Me? What’s the matter with both of you? Baby, baby, baby! It’s all baby, baby, baby!”

“Are you about to start singing Justin Bieber?” Dad asks. Annabel snorts with laughter and then puts her hand guiltily over her mouth.

My head pops.