Rebecca Rocks (19 page)

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Niall really was paying attention during Shane’s workshops.’

‘Look, he’s doing the “stretch out your hand to the crowd and then draw it back to your chest in a fist” move!’ said Alice.

It was quite a show. I couldn’t believe it was the same band who were mumbling away in their cardigans just a few weeks ago. Not that I have anything against cardigans. I actually LIKED their cardigans. In fact, I much prefer them to the tracksuit tops and the jumpsuits. I just thought the boys all looked the same when they were wearing them.

Anyway, they certainly all stand out now. And who knew Niall was such a showman? The only problem was that their music was still pretty boring. But you don’t notice the
boringness
so much when they’re all leaping up from behind boxes and pointing at the audience and stuff. Also, they’d even made a stage set! At one stage, the boys jumped off the packing cases
and turned them around, and they’d painted a sort of
backdrop
and stuck it to the packing cases. It was of lots of pots of paint, and it took me a minute to figure out why, and then I realised the paint was all a sort of puce colour. Anyway, it looked quite good, and of course it made Cass say that she knew we should have had a set.

‘We could easily have made a backdrop thing!’ she said. ‘It’s just a couple of old sheets. No neon signs or anything. I’m definitely doing one for the next gig.’

I suppose we’ll have to let her. She’ll keep going on about it if we don’t. And actually, it could be quite fun.

Unsurprisingly, Shane O’Driscoll was delighted by his
protégés
. When they finished – Niall stretched out his hand to the audience in a particularly impassioned fashion and then placed his hand on his heart – Shane jumped up on the stage and yelled, ‘Let’s hear it for my boys, Puce, the masters of stage craft!’ And while that was going a bit far, we did give them a big cheer. After all, they’d put on an entertaining show. And they taught us that even if you can’t afford actual trapdoors and stuff, you can get the same effect by hiding behind
something
and jumping out. Which is good to know.

Anyway, we didn’t see Richard until Puce were over, so
when all the lights came on we all hurried to tell him and the rest of the Wicked Ways how good they were.

‘The lying-down bit wasn’t too much, was it?’ said Richard.

‘No,’ I lied. Although maybe it wasn’t a lie really. The show did all work in the end.

I was a bit worried that we’d see Charlie on the way out of the campus, but we didn’t. We did see Evan, though. He looked pretty embarrassed, as well he might. But he nodded at us, and Cass nodded back.

‘I know he’s been an eejit,’ she said. ‘But he was pretty brave today, standing up to Charlie.’

‘The world is upside down today,’ I said.

And that’s still what it feels like. But even though what Charlie said was horrible, and poor Cass was a bit wobbly all day afterwards, at least we found out that not everyone is totally evil. Even people I don’t like very much. And that has to be a good thing.

Poor Jane! And poor Gemma and Josh and Alfie and Bernard
the Fairy-tale Prince. I even feel sorry for Karen, who has proved she is not totally evil. And maybe even Vanessa (okay, maybe not Vanessa). Their play was a disaster. Well, it wasn’t so much that it was a disaster as that it didn’t happen at all. It turns out that they hadn’t told Cathy about all their special effects and knife-juggling and gymnastics and stuff, and when she heard about it this morning she was horrified and said the insurance wouldn’t cover any of it so they couldn’t do it. She asked if there was any way they could work around it, but they knew that if they took out all the controversial bits there’d only be about two minutes of play left so they had to cancel the whole thing.

I am surprised at how disappointed I am. I was looking
forward
to seeing whether Vanessa really could juggle with knives or not. Jane swears she is really good at juggling, but now we’ll never know. I was actually tempted to ask Vanessa to give us a show, but I didn’t dare. Of course, the whole group feel awful about not getting to put on the play. But Vanessa,
unsurprisingly
for a girl who has already thrown several tantrums in front of big crowds, was in a giant rage.

‘I’ll sue them,’ she said furiously. ‘I’ll sue everyone in this stupid little so-called arts camp!’

‘You do that, Vanessa,’ said Karen loyally. ‘We’ll take them for every penny they’ve got!’

‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ said Bernard
nervously
. ‘I mean, we should probably have checked with Cathy about the fireworks. And the juggling. And the human
pyramid
. We just showed her the less … action-filled bits.’

‘Bernard’s right,’ said Jane sadly.

But Vanessa just kept on ranting on about knowing her rights and how she had lowered herself to come to what she called ‘this crappy little camp’ when she could have been at an international drama school in the Swiss Alps. (Jane told me later that actually, Vanessa couldn’t have been in the Swiss Alps – her mum had told Jane’s mum that Vanessa had been looking at the Swiss school’s website, but it cost, like, a million euro a week, or something. I think Vanessa thinks her parents are richer than they actually are.) She also started going on about how she’d invited all those agents.

‘This was my chance to be discovered!’ she cried. ‘And now no one will see my talent, thanks to that ridiculous fascist Cathy!’

This was too much even for Karen.

‘But Vanessa,’ she said gently, ‘none of the agents turned up.
So it’s not like they’d have seen you anyway.’

Vanessa clearly didn’t have anything to say to this. She just made a sort of growling noise and stomped out of the room.

‘Sorry you didn’t get to do the show,’ I said to Jane. Jane sighed.

‘I suppose we should have gone through more stuff with Cathy,’ she said. ‘But she seemed so pleased we were working well together. It just seemed easier to … skim over the dramatic bits. She thought it was a much shorter, sort of abstract piece.’

Poor Jane. It is such a shame after they worked so hard. She was so glum she didn’t even cheer up when we went to see Positive Trigger and a few of the other bands do their
showcase
gig. I wasn’t that excited about seeing Positive Trigger, because they’ve been rapping in the canteen every day for the last month so we know most of their songs already, but they were very good, especially Maggie’s superfast rap about what goes on on the windswept Clontarf seafront, which, according to Positive Trigger, is some kind of gangster’s paradise, even though whenever I’ve been there it’s just full of middle-aged people walking pugs and Labradors.

And there was good news today too. First of all, it looks like we won’t have to see Charlie again because he’s not coming in
to the camp for the last few days. In fact, he’s basically been kicked out. Veronica and Tom found out about what
happened
yesterday, and this morning they talked to Cass, and they started asking around, and lots of girls – and boys – told them about the way Charlie’s been acting all summer.
Veronica
and Tom were totally horrified and called his parents. And, according to Finn, who told Richard, they told Charlie that his behaviour was unacceptable, and if they’d known about it sooner, they’d have kicked him out ages ago. But all they could do was expel him for the last few days. We really should have gone and told them what he was doing instead of trying to ignore his creepy awfulness. In fact, Veronica and Tom
basically
said so this afternoon, before we went to the band
showcase
. ‘We have a zero tolerance of bullying in this camp!’ said Veronica, looking quite upset. ‘But obviously we didn’t make this clear enough. Just remember that if anyone is harassing you or making you feel scared, come and tell us or any of the other department facilitators and mentors straight away.’

If only we had. But at least he’s been punished now.
Apparently
his parents are sending him to stay with his grandparents in a farm in the middle of nowhere for the rest of the summer, where there will be no humans to harass. So it seems that’s
the end of the Crack Parrots. I suppose it’s hard on Evan and Finn, who did stand up to him in the end. But they put up with him for ages too, so it’s not that unfair. And I bet they can start a new band. I mean, they were the best musicians anyway. Maybe the next time they’ll find some bandmates who aren’t total sexist homophobic goons.

And if they do, they might have a place to practise. Because Charlie getting expelled wasn’t the only good thing that
happened
today. After Veronica and Tom told us about the
no-bullying
thing, they had an announcement to make.

‘Over the course of the camp, one thing that’s come up again and again is the difficulty of finding places to practise and to put on gigs,’ said Veronica. ‘So we thought we’d try and do something to help.’

And that means that they’ve managed to get the Knitting Factory to give over some of its studio space to keep the rock camp going at the weekends! We’ll be able to bag a studio hopefully once a week. We’ll still have to pay, but it’ll only be about a fiver. And Veronica and Tom are going to put on regular underage gigs. So we’ll definitely be able to play!

And that wasn’t the only news. There’s going to be a sort of disco on Friday night to celebrate the end of the camp, and we
can take guests. So Cass is going to bring Liz along. Which is pretty cool. Oops, speaking of Cass, she and Liz and Alice are here for our epic sweet-making session. I’d better go.

We have made loads of fudge. And it is DELICIOUS. We have come a long way from that weirdly gritty first batch all those weeks ago. Having Liz helped − every addition to the team means we can get more speedy stirring done. We sang songs while we made it too, which Cass is convinced helped us stir faster. And we added some orange zest and juice to one batch for an extra kick. Anyway, it was definitely our best ever result, and even Rachel admitted that it tasted good. Though, being Rachel, she had to be rude about it.

‘Are you sure you actually made this?’ she said. ‘You didn’t buy it in some posh sweet shop?’

None of my family have any faith in my abilities.

We did have a bit of a problem with the boxes, though. We only made two of them. It turns out fashioning a box out of cardboard is more fiddly than it looks. By the time Cass had drawn out the template and painted it red and done the logo
and Liz cut it out with a special craft knife she’d borrowed from her big sister (you’re meant to do this on a special
cutting
board but we used the chopping board from the kitchen instead. I didn’t tell Mum about this), and Alice glued it together, it was practically time for them all to go home.

So we decided that, for the moment, we’re just going to put the fudge in clean plastic takeaway boxes with little Hey Dollface logos drawn on cardboard next to them and leave them out on the stage for people to help themselves. It is much easier all round. As Alice said, ‘There’s no point in overdoing it.’

I can’t believe it’s the last day tomorrow. I wish the camp was going on for another month.