My Family and Other Freaks

Carol Midgley

New York • London

© 2012 by Carol Midgley

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For lovely Lucy, who makes me laugh every day

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

I am writing this diary beneath my new Ikea duvet cover. I'm sweating like a pig on a sunlounger. A mousey-haired pig with blackheads if you want the full 3D picture. I may die from suffocation, but this is probably for the best. My life is so O.V.E.R. I cannot set foot in school ever again. I would die of shame. So, whichever way you look at it, I'm dead.

Am never coming out, even though
Britain's Got Talent
is on.

Hmmm.
Britain's Got Talent
sounds quite good. Dad is downstairs winding up my little sister Phoebe. It's his usual trick of picking up the phone and pretending to book himself on the program. “I'm going to fart the National Anthem on stage,” he says into the phone, all serious as though he's talking to the producer.

Phoebe, who has just turned three and believes literally everything she's told, is trying to grab it off him crying, “No, Daddy, pleeeeese don't fart on TV.”

This is quite funny, but I must not be tempted. I hate my parents. Hate them. If they hadn't been canoodling on the sofa again (kissing at their age—in front of me! It's practically child abuse) I wouldn't have had to take the dog for a walk
to avoid puking up and then I wouldn't have bumped into HIM—Damian Griffiths from our year—dreamy, delicious, divine Damian as Megan calls him (she reckons she's good at English but she just looks in a Roger's Thesawhateveritis) and suffered the biggest humiliation of my 12 sorry years of life.

Why are my mom and dad like this? Why can't they be like normal parents and get a divorce? My friends don't know how lucky they are having parents who hate each other. Stupidly in-love parents are a curse. My dad—and this is totally gross—pinches my mom's bum and his face goes all pink and he says, “Ooh you've still got the body of an 18-year-old.”

Hello? Is the man blind? How many 18-year-olds do you see with bingo wings and a cesarean scar? Emily Morgan's big sister is 18 and she's got a figure like Beyoncé. Mick Taylforth (who's a bit of a perv) says she's “fit as a butcher's dog” and you could “bounce a tennis ball off her
bum.” I think that's a compliment. Whereas my mom is forty-bloody-four with a backside like a blancmange. So my dad's a liar as well as a bad father.

My brother, Rick, who's 15 and growing his hair long and mostly ignores me because I am a “loser” (this from a boy whose room, the Stink Pit, smells like a wrestler's bottom—not that I've ever gone up to a wrestler and smelled his bottom), well, he says they're both selfish, and if we have any hope of going to university they'll have to split up or at the very least lose their jobs because universities only want kids from underprivileged backgrounds now. Fiona Wilde's dad left her mom for a barmaid and took her to Lanzarote and now Fiona's form teacher, Mrs. Ryan, is dead nice to her and says, “It's OK if you're late with your homework, Fiona. I know your life is chaotic at the moment.” Chaotic? She wants to come around to our house/hovel sometime. Rick says Fiona could get to any uni she wanted now without
doing any work because she's officially from a “dysfunctional home.”

Dysfunctional? University people are supposed to be clever, but they clearly don't know the meaning of the word. Am too upset to write anymore now. If this diary suddenly stops, it means I have died from
asfixya asphyxiation
not enough air.

Should somebody one day find my corpse and need to know why I lie here, this is my official last testament.

What happened was this: I took Simon to the park (that's the dog—he's named after Simon Cowell because his teeth are really white) but first went to the cupboard under the kitchen sink to get poop-scoop bags. Except of course there were none left because my mom's too busy flirting with Dad to ever bother doing the shopping so I had
to take a Tesco carrier bag instead. Simon was very well behaved—by his standards, anyway. He only burst one toddler's ball, though he did cock his leg up on someone's picnic basket but I don't think they noticed. Anyway, he did his poo; it makes me laugh because he always dances around in these tight circles before he “stoops to poop.” I picked it up because I'm a responsible citizen. It was DISGUSTING and all runny because Phoebe secretly fed him her porridge this morning when Mom wasn't looking. I tied a knot in the top of the bag and was looking for a bin when I saw him. Damian. This is the boy I have spent most biology, math and English lessons staring at for the past six months. He is The One.

He was sitting down chewing a piece of grass in a really cool way with Sean O'Connor, who's a bit too weird and shy for my liking, but apparently can play the guitar so qualifies as acceptable even though he's got nerdy hair.

“Hi,” I said all casual and sophisticated—well, as sophisticated as you can be while swinging half a kilo of dog diarrhea. I call Simon to heel because I want to look like a woman in control.

“Cool dog,” says Damian.

“Thanks,” I say, trying to pull back my jacket so they can see the T-shirt Amber bought me which shows I am sponsoring an endangered cheetah. “We got him from a rescue shelter. He'd been tied to a railing outside Asda and left there. It took nine hours for the man who collects the shopping carts to realize he'd been abandoned. He was so thin they couldn't even tell what breed he was.”

“What breed is he?” they both ask at the same time.

“A Labrador/Alsatian/spaniel/beagle cross,” I say proudly. It's very rare.

“They should bring back the firing squad for people like that,” said Sean, which to be honest
was the most I've ever heard him speak. Then he said he was getting a collie from a rescue center as soon as his dad had cleared the rusty bikes out of the backyard.

This was GREAT—me basking as a rescuing heroine, them both stroking Simon, who was wiggling his bottom really sweetly and only trying to hump their legs a little bit, when suddenly Damian leaped back screaming, “Ugggh! Get it away from me. Get it OFF!!”

At first I thought he meant Simon and was thinking, Well, make your mind up, buddy. You were all over him five seconds ago—but then I saw what he was pointing at: the carrier bag from hell. Yellowy poo was spraying out of the bottom. It was spattered all over Damian's jeans like mustard, and they were his best ones from Topman, apparently. Oh Lord and Father, I'd forgotten that supermarkets now put air holes in carrier bags so stupid toddlers don't put them on
their heads and suffocate. Thanks, darling Mother. Not only am I now humiliated in front of the most gorgeous boy in school, whom I'd planned to marry but who now hates me, you apparently don't care if I die of toxomplaswhateveritis. I could end up blind or dead or, worse, having to wear bifocal glasses. Never mind Fiona Wilde—it's me who should be seeing a child therapist.

Am definitely reporting my parents to the police for child cruelty. Just been downstairs for a Mini Milk from the freezer and foolishly told them what had happened and how I wanted to die or at least change schools. They were all weird and silent at first. Then I noticed Dad's shoulders were shaking and Mom was holding her
Take a Break
magazine up to her face. They were LAUGHING.

“I'm glad you think your daughter being ostracized and sinking into childhood depression is funny,” I screech.

“You're not ostrich-sized!” says Phoebe. “You're much bigger!”

Why is this child not in bed by now?

“Oh, I wish someone had had a camera,” is all Dad said. It's the first time I've ever heard him say anything positive about Simon. Normally he just makes sick jokes about the time he went to South Korea and ate dog (note to self—am never going to that sick country). He thinks it amusing to shout “boshintang” in Simon's ear. Boshintang is dog-meat soup, but my dad is stupid because Simon can't even speak Korean. Dad says we're too soppy about animals in this country, and that something has gone wrong with evolution when it's humans walking behind dogs carrying their sh** in a bag.

Sore point, actually.

But then when he's on his own in the kitchen
with Simon I hear him talking to him in a baby voice. “Do you want a Bonio, little lad?”—that sort of thing. So he's a fraud as well as a liar and a bad father.

Text Amber with an SOS. “Def leavin home at 16,” I write. “Major crisis. BTW can I copy yr French homework? xx.” Well, I hardly have time to think about some stupid essay called “Les Vacances” (très original, professeurs) with MY problems.

Amber is my best friend. I've known her since we were two; we used to live on the same street and, as our mothers never tire of telling us, we were potty-trained together. Some people don't get Amber because she's a bit quiet and serious and obsessed with the environment. Sometimes—and I'm only saying this because I care—she can look pimply because she won't
wear makeup to cover them and only uses this non-toxic soap which is made from grass or elephant poo or something. But she's very funny and loyal and always there for me in a crisis.

Except now. Why hasn't she replied to my text? Silly cow's probably forgotten to charge her phone. Why can't people be more organized? What if her best friend needed her? Must I be forever surrounded by selfish people? These are the questions of my so-called life.