Drama Queen (5 page)

Mum and Mrs Jackson continued to talk about the building and its plumbing and the frequency of such things as rubbish collections. Riveting stuff. Cedric and I sat like two lemons in total silence.

‘Cedric, why don't you show Jessica your record collection?' asked his mum. (
Record
collection? Vinyl? Pl-ease!)

‘‘Cos just maybe she's not into ‘jungle',' said Cedric in a tired voice. (He was so right.)

‘No really, I can't stop,' I said. ‘I ought to be getting back. I've still got stacks of homework to do.'

‘Cedric does all his on Friday night so that he has the whole weekend free,' said Mrs Jackson.

(I was about to say that I might have something else to do on a Friday night, but thought better of it.)

‘What a good idea,' agreed Mum, but gave me a raised eyebrow.

‘Well, thank you for the coffee …' I said, backing towards the door.

‘Won't you have another biscuit?' asked his mother in a last-ditch attempt to keep me there.

‘No, really, thank you. I couldn't.'

‘Show Jessica out, Cedric,' ordered his mum. Cedric reluctantly hauled himself off his chair and went towards the door. We reached the doorway at the same time and had a really embarrassing ‘you first' session. ‘Ladies first, Cedric,' called out his mum.

In the hall, he unlatched the front door and held it open for me. ‘Sorry about my mum,' he said, looking really embarrassed. ‘She means well.'

‘Mine drives me mad too at times.'

‘That's what mums were made for, I guess.'

‘Well, see you round,' I said.

‘Inevitably.'

‘Mmm.'

Mum arrived back about ten minutes later.

‘I thought I'd never get away,' she said. ‘That poor boy.'

‘Smother love,' I agreed.

‘If I ever get like that, please tell me.'

‘You won't. You couldn't.'

‘Really?'

‘I'd have left home long ago.'

 

I returned to my
Pygmalion
essay. I was rather pleased with it, actually. I finished the last act with Prof. and Mrs Higgins (i.e. Eliza) having breakfast one sunny morning in their thatched cottage in Surrey with Eliza expecting the first of their four perfect children. I put down the last word, ‘Curtain', with a flourish. George Bernard Shaw eat your heart out. I had righted an injustice.

Next morning, Monday, I stowed the essay away in my backpack with care. Mr Williams was going to be impressed. I expected that he'd give me at least an A+ for it. I set out for school with a good feeling. This mark should go towards my GCSE coursework.

Downstairs, I stopped in the lobby to check the post. There were a load of bills addressed to Mum. And another envelope. A purple one, the kind that came with greetings cards. It was addressed in neat black handwriting to Miss J. Seymour, Flat 12, Rosemount Mansions, SW12 4QU.

That was odd. It was our address, all right. But the people who'd lived here before us had been called Hill. And they'd had all their post redirected. I checked down the names beside the other mailboxes. There was no one called Seymour in our block.
Obviously someone had got the wrong address. In which case the best thing to do was to put it back in the postbox and hope the postman would recognise the name and redeliver it. I took out my pen and scrawled on the envelope, ‘Not known at No. 12.' That should do it. I glanced at my watch. One minute to get to the bus stop. I thrust the envelope into my bag and ran.

The bus drove up with Clare waving enthusiastically from the upper deck. I climbed up to join her. She was bursting for news.

‘Did you see him over the weekend?'

‘Him?'

‘Cedric!'

‘Oh,
him
. Yes.'

‘Well?'

‘I was invited over to his place.'

‘Really.'

It was going to be tricky to cover up the total uncoolness of this visit. ‘He's got a fantastic record collection.'

‘
Records?
Like what?'

‘Well, all sorts, you know.'

‘More specifically?' demanded Clare.

‘Jungle, mainly.'

‘What's that?'

‘Some pretty cool stuff that was round in the late 90s,' I said.

‘So when am I going to get to meet him?'

‘What about inviting him to Marie's party?' I suggested.

‘What, just like that? Out of the blue? Won't he think that's a bit odd?'

‘Well, maybe we should get to know him a bit better first.'

Clare frowned considering the problem. ‘Perhaps we could bump into him on the way back from school,' she suggested.

‘He goes to Cranshaw. It's totally in the wrong direction.'

‘Where does he hang out?'

‘Errm. I think I saw him once in Costa's.' (Costa's is a really cool coffee bar that recently opened in the high street. I mean, I have seen Cranshaw guys in there. He could well have been with them.)

‘We could sit in there for ever, and their coffee costs a bomb.'

‘Umm.'

‘Tell you what. I'll come over to your place and check him out.'

‘But we can't just ring on his doorbell.'

‘We could bump into him
accidentally
.'

‘We'd have to hang out on the stairs all day.'

‘We could wait in your flat and then lure him up.'

‘But how …?'

‘I've got it. Chocolate brownies!' she announced. ‘They never fail.'

‘What?'

‘When a male gets the scent of chocolate in his nostrils, all hot and rich and gooey – he's dead meat.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Listen, we get back from school before him, OK? We get them cooking. A great whoosh of fresh hot brownie smell down the lift shaft. Then one of us bumps into him by accident – he'll be upstairs in no time.'

‘If you think so.'

‘I know so.'

Friday afternoons we always got off early. Armed with a pack of brownie mix, Clare's best new jeans and her boots with heels, we were ready for action.

‘OK,' I said, as soon as we were in my flat. ‘You get changed first while I start the brownies.'

I found a mixing bowl and Mum's electric whisk
and studied the oven. It was a gas one with all sorts of safety devices. Mum had been moaning about it for days, saying that she just couldn't work out how to use it. It looked simple enough to me.

Clare was going the whole hog. I could hear water running and there was a sickly smell of cocoa butter bathfoam wafting out of the bathroom. I glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes till lift-off!

I couldn't find anything to measure the water with, so I slopped in what looked like five fluid ounces and switched on Mum's whisk. The mixer blades were hardly making any impression on the mix so I added a bit more water for luck. Suddenly it was all going horribly runny, so I lifted out the mixer which spun a great arc of chocolate rain all over me and the kitchen. Ooops! Still, no time to lose. I could always clean up later. I raked in the cupboard for a baking tray.

‘How's it going?' called out Clare.

‘Fine! You nearly ready?'

‘Aren't
you
going to get changed?'

‘Must get this in first.'

Slam, bang, crash. I had to take out every single saucepan until I found a measly little sponge tin at the bottom of the cupboard. I poured in the brownie
mix which overflowed in a great brown slick on the worktop. Oh dear. Still. Yumm, tasted nice anyway. Shoving the tin in the oven, I turned my attention to the frosting. Thankfully there was a sachet of ready-made which I squeezed out into a bowl. Right, that was done. I dived into my room to change.

I couldn't find my jeans anywhere. Mum must've hung them up. Or taken them to wash. My room soon looked in a similar state to the kitchen.

‘Looks as if there's been a massacre in here.' Clare's voice came from the kitchen. ‘And they don't smell as if they're cooking.'

‘Better turn them up then!' I yelled.

‘Are you keeping an eye on the front?'

‘Yep. No sighting yet,' I called back, hauling on a pair of tracksuit bottoms. Very unsexy! But it was Clare who mattered.

I came back into the kitchen. She was right, not the least whiff of brownie. I peeped in through the oven door. Sure enough, the oven had done one of its ‘safety first' acts and turned itself off.

‘Keep an eye on the front and I'll deal with this,' I instructed Clare.

‘Right!' I told the oven. ‘You asked for this.' I turned it on full blast and, as an extra measure, I
also turned on a knob that said ‘Grill'.

‘There's a boy coming now, but I don't know if it's him,' called out Clare.

I dashed to my window. The boy she'd seen was delivering flyers. He paused to dump a load by our mailboxes and then walked off.

‘No. Anyway, Cedric's taller.'

‘How will we know whether or not to invite him?' Clare suddenly asked.

‘We'll have to have some sort of sign.'

‘Like what?'

I thought for a moment. ‘I've got it. If you like him enough to invite him, you eat a brownie. If you don't, you don't.'

‘So if neither of us eats a brownie, we don't invite him?' said Clare.

‘Right.'

‘What if one of us does and the other doesn't?'

‘Hmm … problem.'

‘I know! The one who
really
wants him to come, eats two.'

We agreed on that. The delicious warm rich smell of brownies was just starting to waft from the kitchen. But there was still no sign of Cedric.

‘Maybe we've missed him,' said Clare.

‘I don't see how we could have.'

‘Maybe he got off early or he's gone somewhere after school.'

‘That would be just our luck. Hang on, there's a bus coming from the Cranshaw direction.'

Sure enough, a minute or so later, Cedric came into sight.

‘Right! That's him. Action stations!' I said. ‘Keep fanning out the brownie smell and I'll go down for him in the lift.'

This announcement coincided with an agonising electronic bleeping. ‘What's that?' gasped Clare.

‘Smoke alarm! Oh my God!' We leaped for the hallway. Smoke was billowing out of our kitchen door. ‘Open the front door. No, don't. Oh God, what shall we do?'

‘Turn off the oven!'

‘I can't. It's too smoky!'

‘We better get out of here.'

We were about to make a dash for it, when I suddenly realised ‘Bag!' I raced into my room and scooped him up from my bed. We collided with Cedric as we left the flat. He must've run up the stairs to see what the commotion was about.

‘What's going on? What's that burning smell?' He
forced his way past us into the kitchen and flung open the window. The smoke quickly thinned. Then he climbed up on a chair and deftly took the case off the smoke alarm. There was a welcome silence.

‘They're always doing that,' he said. ‘All these flats have the same smoke alarms. They overreact …' He opened the oven door, fanning the smoke towards the window.

‘Jeesus. What happened in here?' he said, looking around the kitchen.

‘We were cooking,' I said lamely. ‘Oh, and by the way. Cedric, this is Clare.'

‘Hi!' she said. Her face lit up, showing off her dimples to full advantage. ‘We've just made a batch of brownies. Would you like some?'

There you go. She really liked him. Well, I suppose in the situation, he was being quite masterful.

I took the oven gloves and hauled the baking tray out of the oven. They looked more like ‘blackies' than ‘brownies'. I sent Clare and Cedric to put some music on while I did a quick camouflage job with the bowl of chocolate frosting. Arranged artistically on a plate they didn't look too bad.

‘We need tea,' I called out.

‘I'll make it,' said Clare. She looked really pretty
when she smiled like that. Those dimples were obviously having a positive effect on Cedric.

‘I'll help you,' said Cedric.

I left them to it and took the plate of brownies into the sitting room. Things got really promising over the tea-making. Cedric and Clare discovered the bowl of frosting. I mean, it kind of deteriorated into a food fight. But then, you'd never splatter chocolate frosting over someone you didn't fancy, would you?

They came back armed with three mugs of tea. Cedric picked up a brownie and took a big bite. There was an odd crunching noise. I bit into mine. It tasted like coal but I munched on regardless. Clare was licking the frosting off hers, which was really confusing. Was that a ‘yes' or a ‘no'? I eyed her and chewed my brownie with determination. She'd put hers down. I glared at her meaningfully and took another. Somehow I choked it down. I kicked her under the table. Our eyes met. She nodded.

‘There's a party at this friend of ours, Marie's place … ‘ I started.

The words were hardly out of my mouth before Cedric had taken our mobile numbers, given us his, offered to bring a bottle and checked out what he should wear. Clare looked over the moon. How
simple it was to plant the seeds of love.

Now all I had to do was extricate myself from the equation. We were currently:

Clare + Cedric + Jessica
Triangle

When we should be:

Clare + Cedric – Jessica

i.e.:

Clare = Cedric
Nice Match!

I watched them together: Cedric was telling Clare about his bike and she was drinking in every word. (Sweet. They had forgotten I even existed.) Slipping out of the room, I pretended to make a start on cleaning up the kitchen. I could hear little snatches of their conversation through the open doorway.

‘… I changed the main frame right away.'

‘Uh-huh?'

‘I can get it up to around 20 k on the flat.'