Pumpkin Pie

I should have learnt my lesson. I should have learnt that it is foolish and futile to put yourself through agonies of pain in a vain attempt to be beautiful. But of course I didn’t. Saffy says, “Does one ever?” I would like to think so. I would like to think you reach a stage where you are content to be just the way you are, without all this stress about freckles and hair and body shape; but somehow, watching Mum put on her make-up every morning, watching her carefully select what clothes to wear (like when she has a client she specially wants to impress) Somehow I doubt it. I feel that we are doomed to hanker after unattainable perfection. Until, in the end, we get old and past it, which surely must be a great comfort?

Although in my plumpness I take after Dad, I think that in many other ways I take after Mum. I am for instance quite ambitious. Far more so than Petal, though not as much as my little boffin brother, who will probably end up as a nuclear physicist or at the very least a brain surgeon. But I wouldn’t mind being a high flyer, like Mum – if only I could make up my mind what to fly at. Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. Over the years I have been going to be: a tour guide (because I would like to travel); an air hostess (for the same reason); something in the army (ditto); a children’s nanny (I would go to America!); or a car mechanic.

It is so difficult to decide. I once tried speaking to Dad about it, because I did think, at the age of twelve, I ought to be making plans. Dad said, “Rubbish! You’re far too young to bother your head about that sort of thing. Just take life as it comes, that’s my motto.”

“But I want to know what to aim at,” I said.

Dad suggested that maybe I could follow in his footsteps and be a chef. He was all eager for me to start straight away. I know he would like nothing better than to teach me how to cook, but I feel I am already into food quite enough as it is. I don’t need encouragement! I’ve seen Dad in the kitchen. I’ve seen the way he picks at things. He just can’t resist nibbling! Sometimes when he cooks Sunday lunch Mum tells one of us to go and stand over him while he is dishing up.

“Otherwise we’ll be lucky if there’s anything left!”

She is only partly joking. Dad did once demolish practically a whole plateful of roast potatoes before they could reach the table. He doesn’t mean to; he does it without realising. I can understand how it happens, because I would be the same unless I exercised the most enormous willpower. I think food is such a comfort!

I could see that Dad was a bit upset when I showed so little enthusiasm for the idea of becoming a chef. He said, “Don’t let me down, Plumpkin! Us foodies have got to stick together.”

I thought, Plumpkin? I looked at Dad, reproachfully, wondering whether I had heard him right. You couldn’t go round calling people Plumpkin! It was like calling them fatty, or baldy, or midget. It wasn’t PC. It was insulting!

“Eh? Plumpkin?”

He’d said it again! My own dad!

“It’s up to us,” said Dad, “to keep the flag flying. Beachballs versus stick insects! There’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know, in having a healthy appetite.”

Saffy has a healthy appetite. She eats just about anything and everything and never even puts on a gram. Life is very unfair, I sometimes think.

I managed to get Mum by herself one day, for about two seconds, and said, straight out, “Mum, do you think I’m fat?”

She was whizzing to and fro at the time, getting ready for work.

“Fat?” she cried, over her shoulder, as she flew past. “Of course you’re not fat!”

“I feel fat,” I said.

“Well, you’re not,” said Mum, snatching up a pile of papers. “Don’t be so silly!” She crammed the papers into her briefcase. “I don’t want you starting on that,” she said.

“But Dad called me Plumpkin,” I wailed.

“Oh, poppet!” Mum paused just long enough to give me a quick hug before racing across the room to grab her mobile. “He doesn’t mean anything by it! It’s just a term of endearment.”

“He wouldn’t say it to Petal,” I said.

“No, well, Petal doesn’t eat enough to keep a flea alive. You have more sense – and I love you just the way you are!”

“Fat,” I muttered.

“Puppy fat. There’s nothing wrong with that. You take after your dad – and I love him just the way he is, as well!”

With that she was gone, whirling off in a cloud of scent, briefcase bulging, mobile in her hand. That’s my mum! A real high flyer. It is next to impossible to have a proper heart-to-heart with her as she is always in such a mad rush; but it would have been nice to talk just a little bit more.

It was definitely round about then that I started on all my fretting and fussing on the subject of fat.

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BEFORE GOING ANY further I think I should describe what was a typical day in the Penny household.

Typical Day

8am. In the kitchen. Mum standing by the table, blowing on her nails. (She has just painted them with bright red varnish.) Mum is wearing her smart grey office suit, very chic and pinstriped. She looks like a high-powered business executive.

Petal bursts through the door in her usual mad rush. She is no good at getting up in the morning, probably because she hardly ever goes to bed before midnight. (As I said before, she is allowed to get away with anything. I wouldn’t be!)

Petal looks sensational even in our dire school uniform of grolly green skirt and sweater. The skirt is pleated. Yuck yuck yuck! But Petal has customised it; in other words, rolled the waistband over so that the skirt barely covers her bottom. Her tiny bottom. And nobody says a thing! Mum is too busy blowing on her nails and Dad wouldn’t notice if we all dressed up in bin bags. But wait till she gets to school and Mrs Jacklin sees her. Then she’ll catch it! But not, of course, before all the boys have had a good look…

Mrs Jacklin, by the way, is our head teacher and a real dragon when it comes to dress code. Skirts down to the knee. No jewellery. No stack heels. No fancy hairstyles. It makes life very difficult for a girl like Petal. It doesn’t bother me so much.

I am sitting at the table trying to finish off my maths homework, which I should have done last night only I didn’t because I forgot – a thing that seems to happen rather frequently with me and maths homework. I, too, am wearing our dire school uniform but looking nothing like Petal does. For a start, there is just no way I could roll the waistband of my skirt over. I wouldn’t be able to do it up! There is a hole in my tights (grolly green, to go with the rest of the foul get-up) and I suddenly see that I have dribbled food down the front of my sweater. From the looks of it, it is sauce from yesterday’s spaghetti. Ugh! Why am I so messy?

It is because I take after Dad. He is also messy. We are both slobs!

Make a mental note to change my ways. Do not wish to be a slob for the rest of my life. Begin by going over to the sink and pawing at spaghetti marks with dish cloth. Have to push past Pip to get there. Pip is down on his hands and knees, packing his school bag. He is a compulsive packer. He puts things in and takes them out and puts them back in a different order. Everything has to be just right.

Query: at the age often, what does he have to pack??? When I was ten I just went off with my fluffy froggy pencil case and my lunch box and my teddy bear mascot. Pip lugs a whole library around with him.

“Don’t tread on my things!” he yells, as I cram past him on my way back from the sink.

Pip is wearing his school uniform of white shirt and grey trousers. He looks like any other small boy. Perhaps a bit more intense and serious, being such a boffin, though I am not sure he is quite the genius that Mum makes him out to be. Although I don’t know! He could be. My brother the genius…

What with Pip being so brainy, and Petal being so gorgeous, I sometimes wonder what it leaves for me. Maybe I shall have to cultivate a nice nature – like Dad. Dad never snaps or snarls. He never loses his temper. He’s never mean. He’s over at the stove right now, all bundled up in his blue woolly dressing gown, fixing a breakfast which only two of us will eat. ie, him and me!

From the way he’s stirring it, I would guess that he’s doing porridge. Dad’s a great one for porridge. He makes it very rich and creamy and serves it up with milk and sugar. Yum yum! I love Dad’s porridge. Mum won’t eat it because she’s in too much of a hurry. She’ll just have black coffee. Petal won’t eat it because she can’t be bothered. She’ll probably have a glass of milk and a banana. Pip, needless to say, won’t touch it. He says it’s all grey and slimy and reminds him of snot. Dad still tries to tempt him. I don’t know why he bothers; Pip’s a lost cause. Foodwise, that is. All he ever wants is two slices of toast, lightly browned with the crusts cut off (he won’t eat crusts) and smeared with marge. Butter makes him sick; and marmalade, of course, being orange, is a shade of red and therefore taboo.

Dad and I finish off the porridge between us, sharing the cream from the top of the milk. We’re still eating when Mum yells at Pip that it’s time to go. She drops him off at school every morning; me and Petal have to take the bus. We don’t really mind. It gives Petal the opportunity to show off her legs before Mrs Jacklin gets hold of her, and it gives me the chance to finish off my maths homework. Even, if I’m lucky, to pick someone’s brains. Esther McGuffin, for instance, who gets on two stops before us and truly is a genius. She is very good-natured and never minds if I copy. The way I see it, it is not proper cheating as I always make sure to copy some of it wrong and have never ever got more than a C+. (On the days I don’t copy I mostly get a D.)

At the school gates I meet up with Saffy. We’re in Year 7. Bottom of the pile. Petal flashes past us, showing all of her legs, and most of her bum, in a crowd of Year 9s. Year 9s are incredibly arrogant! I can see why Auntie Megan doesn’t care for them.

On a typical school day, I would say that nothing very much occurs. Of interest, that is. It just jogs on, in the same old way. One time, I remember, a girl in our class, Annie Goldstone, went and fainted in morning assembly and had to be carried out. That caused some excitement. Oh, and another time a boy called Nathan Corrie, also in our class, fell through the roof of the science lab right on top of Mr Gifford, one of our science teachers. Then there was Sophie Sutton, and her nosebleed. She bled buckets! All over her desk, all over the floor. But these sort of events are very few and far between. They don’t happen every day, or even, alas, every week. Mostly it is just the daily slog. The best you can hope for is Nathan Corrie being told to leave the room. But that is no big deal!

In spite of all this, me and Saffy do quite like school. We are neither of us specially brilliant at anything, and we are not the type of people to be chosen first for games teams or voted form captain or asked to join the Inner Circle, but we bumble along quite happily in our own way.

The Inner Circle is a gang of four girls, led by Dani Morris, who consider themselves to be the crème de la crème (as Auntie Megan would say). They are the ones who get invited to all the parties. The ones who decide what is in and what is out. Like for instance when they came to school wearing ribbed tights and all the rest of us had to start wearing ribbed tights, ‘cos otherwise we would have been just too uncool for words, until suddenly, without any warning, they went back to ordinary ones again and threw us into confusion.

I personally wouldn’t want to be a member of the Inner Circle with the eyes of all the world upon me. I would be too self-conscious!

“We will just be us,” says Saffy.

Really, what else can you be? It is no use thinking you can turn yourself into someone completely different. I know, because I have tried it. Lots of times! These are just some of the things I have attempted to be:

Bright and breezy, exuding confidence from every pore. “Hey! Wow! Way to go!”