Over the Moon

I said, “Hattie will be a credit to the school.”

“In her own way,” said Dad. “In her own way.”

He knew better than to come straight out and say anything derogatory about Hattie’s looks; Mum would have been down on him like a ton of bricks. It’s true that Hattie is not beautiful. It is also true that she is a rather solid kind of person. Sort of square-shaped. But she has a really good face, very strong and full of character, and it wasn’t kind of Dad to say some of the things that he did. He never dared in front of Mum, cos he knew she wouldn’t stand for it, but sometimes when it was just him and me he’d have these little digs like, “Poor old Hat, she’s as broad as she is long!” Or one time, I remember, he said that she would make a great sumo wrestler, which is totally unfair, as sumo wrestlers are fat. Hattie is not fat.

It always used to make me feel uncomfortable: really disloyal to Hattie. I know I should have said something. I should have told Dad that I didn’t like him making these sort of remarks about my best friend; but I never did. Cos me and Dad were in league. We used to point people out to each other when we went anywhere, like when Dad drove me to school in the morning. “Good grief!” Dad would go. “Get a load of that!” Or I would say, “Just look what that girl is wearing! Some people have no dress sense!”

It was our thing that we did; we enjoyed it. Mum said it was very superficial, judging others by the way they looked, but me and Dad never took any notice. We just laughed.

All the same, I did agree with Mum on one thing: I certainly didn’t need Dad discouraging me from doing my homework. I was having enough of a struggle as it was.

Mum said to me later that I mustn’t let Dad put me off.

“You know he has a problem with women asserting themselves.”

I really didn’t think I could be accused of asserting myself, just doing my homework, but Mum reminded me how Dad had been brought up. His mum had been quite old when he was born and had these really old-fashioned views, like a woman’s place being in the home and men not having to lift a finger to help with domestic chores. Dad wasn’t as bad as that, but I had to admit, he wasn’t exactly a modern man.

“You just stick to your guns,” said Mum. “I don’t care what your reasons are; anything that motivates you has to be a good thing. I’m speaking here from experience. It’s taken me the better part of thirty years to get motivated. I wasted a large chunk of my life, I’d hate to see you waste yours.”

I wasn’t sure what Mum meant when she said about wasting her life. She’d got married, she’d had me, she’d helped Dad build up the business. When they’d started out he’d been a penniless nobody; now he owned his own company. How could Mum say that was a waste?

“What was a waste,” said Mum, “was leaving school at sixteen with no qualifications. It severely limits your choices. They say it’s never too late, but take it from me … the longer you leave it, the harder it becomes. So please, Scarlett, I know you love your dad, I know you’re his pride and joy, but don’t let him talk you out of it! OK?”

I said OK, feeling a bit shaken – Mum had never spoken to me like this before, I’d had no idea how she felt – but I wailed at Hattie later that week that I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Hattie, in her sensible way, said it was because I was out of practice. She said, “You’ve lost the habit. Don’t worry! It’ll come back.” Glumly I said, “If I ever had it in the first place.”

“Well, you did,” said Hattie, “cos I remember once you beat me in a spelling test and I was jealous for simply days.”

I said, “Really?” It cheered me up for about a second, but then I lapsed once again into gloom. I told Hattie that it must have been a fluke. “Either that or I cheated.”

“You didn’t cheat! You didn’t need to. Miss Marx once said you were one of her best pupils.”

I said, “Miss Marx was in Year 2!”

“Year 3, actually,” said Hattie.

“Well, anyway.” I was feeling particularly down that day. I had just had a piece of homework returned with Unsatisfactory! scrawled at the bottom of it in rude red ink. I didn’t mind getting bad marks when I hadn’t bothered to work, but I had spent hours on that essay. It was very dispiriting; I had always thought I was in control of my life. I wasn’t used to being inadequate.

“I don’t know why I’m bothering,” I said. “I obviously haven’t got enough brain cells.”

“That,” said Hattie, “is one of the most insulting things you have ever said to me.”

“What???” I blinked. “What are you talking about? I’m not insulting you!”

“Yes, you are! You’re saying that I have chosen to be best friends with a moron. Well, thank you very much! Do you think it’s likely,” said Hattie, “that you and me would still be hanging out with each other if that were the case? People without brains,” said Hattie (she is prone to making these kind of sweeping statements) “are just totally dead boring.”

I told her that that was a horrible thing to say. “People can’t help whether they have brains or not.”

“They can help whether they use them or not.”

I said, “Huh!”

“Don’t you go huh to me,” said Hattie. “I know you, Scarlett Maguire! You think just because you’re pretty you can swan through life without bothering, but this time you can’t! Not if you really really really want to go to Founder’s Day!”

It is terrible, how well Hattie knows me. And the things she dares to say! She only gets away with it because we have been friends for so long. She is always right, of course; that is what makes her so absolutely maddening!

Bumped into Mrs O’Donnell on the way home from school today. She asked me how I was getting on. It seems she’d heard from Mum that I was desperate to be selected for Founder’s Day. I wish Mum wouldn’t go round telling people! It will be just sooo humiliating when it doesn’t happen.

I told Mrs O’Donnell that I wasn’t holding out much hope, and she said how you never know your luck and to keep at it. ‘Work hard! That’s the ticket.”

What does she mean, that’s the ticket? What ticket? Ticket to founder’s Day? I don’t think so. I said this to Mrs O’Donnell. I said, “I really don’t stand an earthly … who wants to go, anyway? It’s only a status thing.” At which Mrs O’Donnell got excited and screeched out, really loud, in that embarrassing way that she has, telling me that I’d got it all wrong, it was a lovely, lovely event!

It turns out that she was there, about a hundred years aqo. Mrs O’Donnell, at the founder’s Day Dinner! Un-be-lieveable! She’s said I can go round and look at her photos if I want, so I think I might. It would be interesting to see her as a young girl … I can’t imagine it!

That was an entry I made shortly after my conversation with Hattie, when she had a go at me for not using my brain. Hattie had sort of bucked me up, a little bit, but I was still feeling sore about that unsatisfactory scrawled at the bottom of my homework. I just couldn’t see that I was ever going to get enough merit marks. All this effort, and all for nothing! And then I bumped into Mrs O’Donnell and everything changed.

Mrs O’Donnell is this big jolly person that lives near us. I knew she’d been to Dame Elizabeth’s some time back in the dark ages, cos she was always telling me about it, but I never knew she’d been selected for Founder’s Day. It came as a bit of a shock, to be quite honest. Like, Mrs O’Donnell? How special is she! Pur-lease! She may be extremely pleasant and friendly, but there is absolutely nothing exceptional about her. Not as far as I can see.

I made the mistake of saying this to Mum, who rolled her eyes and said, “There you go! Making judgements again.”

I said, “But she’s never done anything!”

“How do you know?” said Mum. “How do you know what Mrs O’Donnell may or may not have done?”

I didn’t, of course. All I knew was that she was a fat woman with a grown-up family and a husband who played golf with my dad. But I went to look at her photographs, just out of curiosity, and I got another shock, cos when she was my age Mrs O’Donnell was really skinny and attractive, and Mr O’Donnell, who is now completely bald and looks, when seen from a please people when I can, so I enthusiastically agreed, saying that he was really fit, cos I guessed that’s what she’d meant by saying he was a dish. Unfortunately, it was like we spoke in different languages. Mrs O’Donnell said, “He was fit, right enough! Used to run crosscountry for the school … and old fat woman here used to play hockey for the first eleven, if you can imagine that!”

I couldn’t. I just could not identify the Mrs O’Donnell that I knew with the girl in the photograph. Altogether it was a sobering experience and made me reflect on what time does to people. But it also renewed my flagging spirits. In spite of Hattie and her bullying ways, I’d almost been on the point of giving up. I mean, three lots of history homework in one week, I ask you! It was the photograph of Mrs O’Donnell at Founder’s Day with her beau that did it. That’s what she called him: her beau! In other words, Mr O’Donnell, dressed to kill with all his hair. They had been young and beautiful once, just like me!

Mrs O’Donnell said, “Those were the days …” She told me to make the most of my youth while I had it, “Because once it’s gone, it’s gone.” I get really uncomfortable when old people start talking like that. I don’t like to think of myself all lumpy and shapeless and saggy-bummed! As quick as I could, I got her off the subject and asked her, instead, how she’d managed to get enough merit marks.

She said, “For Founder’s Day, you mean? I’ll tell you the secret: I knuckled down. True as I stand here … I worked hard, I played hard, and I resisted temptation.”

“Was it a struggle?” I said.

“Nearly killed me! But I was absolutely determined to be chosen and that was for one reason and one reason only: so that I could ask Jack O’Donnell to come as my partner.” She nodded at me, and winked, like it was the two of us in some kind of conspiracy against the opposite sex. “Never knew what hit him, poor man! How about you? Who are you planning to ask?”

I told her that I hadn’t really thought that far ahead.

“Come on!” she said. “You expect me to believe that? A pretty girl like you? You could take your pick!”

I always used to preen when people said things like that to me, I really basked in admiration. Now I find it quite embarrassing; I am nowhere near as vain as I used to be. But what Mrs O’Donnell said started me furiously thinking, so that that night in bed I lay awake making a mental list of all the boys I knew, scoring them out of ten, trying to decide which one I would pick if I ever got to be selected.

Jason Francis – not bad. Six or seven.

Martin Milliband – yuck! Two would be generous.

Aaron Taylor – OK, but a bit of a dork. Five at the most.

Christopher Pitts – the pits. Zero. Double zero.