Sunday 29th September

I’m back.

In all the rush and confusion of my suspension I stupidly left my diary back at school. I’ve been praying every day that it’s in my classroom locker and not up in the dormitory where it could have been found by Pike, photostatted and shown to the world. I also had regular nightmares of Sparerib smashing open my locker with the handle of his squash racket and reading his report cards that I’d written about him. My hands trembled quite badly as I turned the combination lock backwards and forwards and then backwards again. The locker door popped open and there lay the most beautiful thing in the world. My shiny red diary. I checked if anyone was watching and then danced a jig and screamed silently with relief. (Unfortunately, for some unknown reason I’d also left an apple in my locker which was now badly decomposed and covered in two weeks’ worth of fruit flies.) I read back over my last few entries before I was suspended but then started depressing myself so I stopped and turned over to a clean new page.

Mental Note: Whenever in doubt, just turn straight over to a clean page.

21 DAYS OF HELL (NO-LIGHTS PACKAGE)

My twenty-one days at home was no picnic. In fact it was more like a Nazi concentration camp with my mother shouting orders and blasting me for the slightest thing I did wrong. She even banned me from seeing the Mermaid. (Foolishly, she didn’t ban my afternoon bike rides – so Mermaid and I met up every Wednesday and Sunday for twenty minutes in the park near her house.)

Worse news is that I still haven’t kissed the Mermaid! It’s now become so normal not to kiss her that it would be weird if I did. Last week I plucked up the courage to hold her hand but Mermaid giggled, squeezed my hand and then let it go. She says I’m the best friend she’s ever had while I get more desperate and pathetic every time I see her. I’m too scared to ask her if she still wants to be my girlfriend in case she gives me savage bat again.

I’ve never seen the folks so angry as the day they picked me up. Dad wasn’t really that mad – he was just pretending to be angry because Mom had obviously told him to be angry. I could tell by the way his eyes kept darting across to Mom after he’d finished every line of his long lecture on bad behaviour. Mom on the other hand was truly livid and remained truly livid for twenty-one days. She seemed to take the whole thing very personally and snapped at anyone who crossed her path. Things got even worse when Mom blamed Dad for my ‘drinking problem’ and then banned alcohol from the house during weekdays. This meant that Dad stayed out in the garden watering his roses until nine o’clock every night. On the weekends the folks got snot-flying drunk and had nasty fights about who was to blame for my irresponsible behaviour.

Wombat advised Mom to send me to Boys’ Town and said I was practically a criminal. She stared at me like I was a lowlife scum and said, ‘He’s definitely looking more like his father by the day.’ She then asked Mom if it was too late to give me up for adoption. Mom gave it some thought and then said it would be too complicated. Wombat looked at me full of distaste and said, ‘I suppose you’re right. I mean, who’s going to take him anyway. He’d be like Oliver!’ Wombat’s the kind of granny who kicks you when you’re down and praises you when you’re up. I now understand why Dad has repeatedly tried to kill her.

Mental Note: Beware the Wombat who kicks you when you’re down.

On the plus side I did manage to get through piles of work. In fact I think I might well be far ahead in most subjects.

The Guv called me every three days or so to chat and find out how I was doing. He told me not to feel too bad about things because one day I’d be remembered as a hell raiser. I’d always thank him for his advice and he’d say something like, ‘Advice is free, Milton. It’s just sex one has to pay for!’ The problem is that when it comes to The Guv, it’s very hard to separate the genius from the ridiculous. This gets even more difficult when he’s been drinking. He ended the last call on Friday by shouting, ‘Rather be a McEnroe than a Lendl!’ He then slammed the phone down but obviously missed the cradle because I heard a screech and a shout and then a door slam.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 597