The Real Rebecca (3 page)
Authors: Anna Carey
It just dawned on me now (because my mind is addled with love) that Paperboy must have actually delivered the papers to my house yesterday and this morning! How could we have been so stupid as to forget that important part of his job?! The very essence of his job, really. I can’t believe he was actually on my doorstep again and I didn’t … well, actually, I suppose I couldn’t have done anything.
It would have been a bit weird if I’d, like, suddenly opened the door as he was putting the papers in the letter box. Or even looked out at him through the letter box. Also, the papers are usually delivered before I wake up. But still. I could have looked out of Rachel’s bedroom window.
I am worried about my mother. I really, really don’t think she’s followed Jocasta’s advice about starting a new book before the previous one is published. I mean, it’s been months and months since the last one came out and every time I ask her whether she’s started the new one she just gets a funny look on her face and says that ‘everything’s fine’. Which could mean anything! It could mean that she has writer’s block and will never write again, which would make my life easier but not hers, and really, although Mum being a famous writer has a detrimental effect on my life (Mrs Harrington was in fine form today, I must say. She was ‘mammy’-ing all over the place), she really does love writing and I don’t want her to stop doing it. I know it
sounds like I’m making a big deal over nothing but
normally
she likes going on about whatever she’s writing at the moment. I’ve read that most writers hate this, but she doesn’t. She says talking about her stories helps her work out any problems she has with them. So for her to be so
secretive
is very strange. I asked Dad what he thought, but he just laughed and said, ‘Rebecca, your mum knows what she’s doing. Don’t worry.’ I’m not sure she does, though. I think I have to keep an eye on her.
She does have this book party thing coming up soon, though, and her editor Lucy is coming over from London for it, so maybe she’ll (Lucy, not Mum) be able to do
something
. This party is going to be very fancy. Mum’s publishers are throwing it for her, to celebrate twenty years since her first book came out (and possibly to persuade her to actually write another one – surely Lucy and co must have realised this whole not-starting-a-new-book thing is a bit weird). Rachel and I will of course have to go – we always have to go to these things. They sound much more exciting than they actually are. We’re usually the only people there under the age of thirty and if anyone bothers to talk to us at all they treat us as if we were about five. We end up
hanging around the canapés (at the last book launch Rachel ate too many mini-burgers out of sheer boredom and Dad had to run to a chemist and get her some
Gaviscon
). So obviously I can’t wait for this party. On the plus side, I might be able to emotionally blackmail Mum into letting me get some new clothes for it. But I wouldn’t bet on it. She’ll probably make me wear one of Rachel’s old rags.
Spent most of lunchtime with Cass and Alice, sitting in the corner of the junior cloakroom, talking about Paperboy. Well, actually, we mostly talked about whether we will ever get to take part in spontaneous synchronised dance routines. You know in films where one person starts doing a dance somewhere and then everyone joins in and before you know it there’s a whole room full of people all doing the same dance? Both Cass and I dream of this happening to us but Alice says it would never happen in Ireland
because
everyone here is far too repressed. She reminded us
that the last time Mary’s (the school down the road with the ridiculous stripey blazers) had one of their boring under-sixteens’ discos back in May, it took about two hours before anyone plucked up the courage to move out onto the dance floor. You’d think we were all attached to the walls with magnets. By the time two brave Mary’s girls got out on the dance floor and got the whole thing going, there was less than an hour of disco to go. We barely got to dance at all, let alone take part in a spontaneous
synchronised
dance session. And the music wasn’t very good anyway. But Cass and I weren’t in the mood for this sort of argument.
‘Don’t rain on our parade, Alice,’ said Cass.
‘Don’t rain on our spontaneous dance routine, you mean,’ I said. And we did a bit of spontaneous
sitting-down
-dancing just to annoy her. Sitting-down dancing can be quite fun. You just move the top half of yourself. We have worked out a few quite complex routines (we have to be prepared in case we ever get to start a
spontaneous
dance session) and we used to do it quite a lot last year, to liven up boring geography classes when Kelly had her back to the class. I think it helped relieve the tension
caused by her terrifying accounts of floods and ice ages and stuff.
Alice got all cross. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘suppose you did start a stupid dance. How would you feel if Paperboy came in and saw you doing it?’
‘Delighted,’ I said proudly. And I would. And surely so would he. Who wouldn’t be impressed by a big
spontaneous
dance routine? Well, apart from Alice the killjoy, of course. And how cool would it be if Paperboy joined in the dancing? That would be the greatest thing ever, as I pointed out. Alice reluctantly agreed that that would indeed be pretty cool. Then we talked about Paperboy a bit more seriously. We can’t figure a way of talking to him properly or even finding out his name without acting like pyschos. Why, why, why do we have to go to a poxy
all-girls
school? We wouldn’t be plotting ways to follow paperboys around if we actually got to talk to any boys about anything other than the price of the
Irish Times.
Mrs Harrington was awful at school today. We have to do an essay for our English homework, and after she wrote the choice of titles on the blackboard she looked at me in a mad way and said, ‘Now Miss Rafferty, I can’t wait to see what you come up with! Something from you is the next best thing to a new Rosie Carberry book!’ Maybe she thinks I am, like, the second coming of my mother? That is a terrifying thought on many different levels. And
obviously
my school essay will not be anything like my mother’s awful books.
At home, I asked my mum again if she’d started her new book yet. She just laughed and went off to hide in her study. I am worried. I think she could be losing her mind. She’s usually so hard-working. I asked Rachel if she thought Mum was going mad and she laughed for about twenty-five minutes. When she was able to speak, she said, ‘No, Bex, I don’t think she’s going mad. Just because she didn’t tell you exactly what she’s writing doesn’t mean
she’s insane. Actually, I’m pretty sure she has started
something
new, she just doesn’t want to tell us about it.’
I didn’t know what to think of that, so I went in to
surprise
Mum in her study, to see if I could catch her writing. But, to my amazement, she was just sitting back in her chair reading
Kiss
and
Sugar
!!! She
never
reads my
magazines
. In fact, every time she sees them she goes on about how they’re a waste of money and end up in the recycling the day I get them (just like her newspapers and grown-up magazines, as I have pointed out a million times, though of course she never seems to see any similarities). I asked her what she was doing and she jumped about ten feet in the air and told me not to sneak in like that. And she wouldn’t answer my question about why she was reading the
magazines
. She just told me to go and do my homework and stop annoying her.
What can this mean?!?
I just realised that Mum was reading the new issues of those magazines. I’d seen them in the shops but I hadn’t
even bought either of them yet. Which means SHE BOUGHT THEM HERSELF! What is going on?!
Told Cass and Alice about Mum’s strange behaviour. They were very sympathetic, but I don’t feel very
comforted
. Alice said it sounded like Mum was going through some sort of mid-life crisis and was trying to recapture her lost youth. I don’t like the sound of that. Maybe she’s going to start wearing ‘cool’ clothes and going out to clubs till the small hours of the morning. She might bring Dad along with her! Oh, God, I really, really hope she isn’t having a crisis. I don’t think I could bear the shame. She went over to her friend Gemma’s house tonight but she was dressed pretty normally (for a forty-five-year-old) so I don’t think she was going out grooving. Although it’s eleven o’clock and she’s not back yet. So you never know. Maybe she’s dancing on a table as I write.
Also, you’d think that if she wanted to recapture her lost youth she wouldn’t want to recapture being fourteen. We can’t even get into clubs. She should be trying to be about twenty and start reading, like,
Cosmo
and stuff.
Saw Paperboy again last night! And he spoke to me about something other than papers! I am very happy, even though Rachel is being really, really annoying. She kept asking me why I’d changed out of my school uniform so quickly and why I was wearing the pink bead necklace Alice got me in Berlin for my birthday. I wasn’t dressed up or anything, I was just wearing my little Sleater-Kinney t-shirt with a cat on it and my nice dark jeans, so I don’t know why she had to make such a big deal out of it. Anyway, we had just finished dinner when the doorbell rang and I practically knocked my chair over getting out to the hall first. And then I opened the door and there he was!
Paperboy! And he was just as gorgeous as ever! I smiled at him and said, ‘Hi,’ and he smiled back and said, ‘Hi, I’m here for the paper money.’ He’s got a lovely voice; it’s all sort of scratchy. I wonder how old he is? He doesn’t look much older than me. Anyway, I said I’d get the money and went in to the kitchen to get it off Mum, and Rachel was standing there with this horrible grin on her face. She kept smirking at me while Mum got the money out of her wallet, until finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and shouted, ‘What?!’ and she was all, ‘Nothing, nothing.’ I hate her.