Narinder Dhami - Mega Sleepover 3

Fliss went into a sulk and got her Banana-In-Pyjamas toy out of her bag. Her aunt in America sent it to her. Bananas In Pyjamas are very popular in America, according to Fliss’s aunt. Personally, I think dressed up plastic bananas are stupid. Give me a toy pony any day. Better still, a real one.

Fliss started creating a little wedding veil for the banana, out of a piece of paper tissue. She’s mad on weddings. All her toys and stuffed animals have been married at least twenty times each, to different partners. It’s about time she started giving them divorces, not weddings.

I decided to cheer her up. “Of course you sing well, Fliss. We all know that.”

“Perhaps we ought to give up on being the Spice Girls and think of something else,” said Rosie.

“What? Give up? No way!” said Frankie. “We’re not going to let ourselves be beaten by the M&Ms, are we?”

Nobody answered.

Frankie sat down on the concrete of the playground. Her bottom just missed a piece of chewing gum. She pulled a notebook and pen out of her black nylon shoulderbag. We all sat round her as she wrote two headings on the page.

The first heading said, Us. The second said, The M&Ms.

“Right,” she said. “Now, think of all the reasons why our Spice Girls group is better than theirs.”

“We’re better than them at everything!” I said.

“We can sing,” said Fliss.

“We’re the greatest,” said Rosie.

“They’re ugly,” said Kenny, and we all fell about.

“Now tell me why they’re worse than us,” Kenny said.

“They’re ugly,” said Kenny again.

When we’d stopped laughing for the second time, I said, “And pathetic.”

“And copy-cats, weeds and nerds,” said Fliss.

“Is this war?” asked Frankie.

“This is WAR!” we all agreed.

That night I told my mum about it. Maybe I chose a wrong moment. At the time, she was battling with a curtain that had got stuck in one of the holes inside the washing machine.

“Mm, dear. Help me with this, could you?” was all she said.

I got my head inside the machine. A corner of the material was jammed. I had a hair grip in my pocket, from my last trip to the swimming baths. I always used grips to pin my hair under my swimming cap.

I poked the grip down the hole to loosen the bunched-up material, and promptly lost it.

“Oh, that’s just wonderful!” said Mum sarkily. “That’s going to rattle round in there forever, now. I’ll hear it every time I use the machine.”

“If I use one of the fridge magnets, I might be able to get it out,” I said.

I thought it was a brilliant suggestion.

Mum didn’t seem to agree. “Don’t you go magnetising my washing machine, Lyndsey. It’s all metal in there. Every zip will stick to the drum and I won’t be able to get anyone’s jeans out,” she said.

I had a mental image of Mum and me, each hauling on a jeans’ leg, trying to pull it out of the machine. I started laughing. Then my hiccups started.

“Oh, per-lease! Not those again,” said Mum.

She rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and looked so weird that I laughed and hicked even harder.

“Sor-hic-ry,” I apologised.

Mum was still tugging at the curtain. Suddenly, it came free and she fell over and landed on her bottom on the floor. I roared with laughter, it was so funny.

She gave me a hurt look. “How do you know I haven’t broken anything?” she said.

“You haven’t got any bones in your bottom,” I pointed out.

I should have remembered that Mum knows all about anatomy, as she teaches childbirth classes.

“I might have cracked my coccyx!” she said, which made me screech so much, I nearly had an accident. But it cured my hiccups, it really did.

I wandered out to the workshop to find Dad. I told him about what the M&Ms had done to us.

“You’ve just got to be better than them,” he said, and started to sing Tina Turner’s, Simply The Best. Now, Dad really can’t sing, so I put my fingers in my ears. When I took them out again he was saying a very rude word because he’d dropped his paintbrush and the pot he was painting got a big green squiggle all down it.

“Never mind. Make it look like a piece of seaweed,” I suggested.

“Seaweed? It was meant to be a leaping panther,” he said grumpily

If that green blob was meant to be a panther, then I’m a Brussels sprout! Still, I said nothing. I didn’t want to upset his artistic temperament. Besides, I needed to ask for extra pocket money, to make up for what I’d had to give Stu!

Then I remembered a really important question I had to ask.

“Dad,” I said. “Do you know where I can get a karaoke tape of the Spice Girls’ songs?”

“Haven’t a clue,” he said. He was being a real grump-pot. I knew his runny green panther had something to do with it.

So I rang Kenny. We’d all agreed to ask our parents about karaoke tapes and report back to her.

“You were my last hope, Lyndz,” she said sadly. “Have you asked Stu?”

I wouldn’t have thought of asking my rotten brother if the sky was blue, because I knew I’d never get the right answer. But everything was hanging on it. “I’ll report back later. Roger. Over and out,” I said.

Stu’s so-called ‘band’ was driving everyone in our house crazy. I’d seen various band members arrive and when I went up to my room, I could hear them thumping about in the attic. There was a twang and a crash, as if the guitar fell over, then a sound as if someone had dropped the drums.

And just then, like the lottery finger coming down and saying, “It’s you!”, I got a fantastic, ginormous, amazing idea as to how the Sleepover Club could beat everyone, especially the M&Ms, and win the school competition…

The only person I managed to get on the phone was Fliss. Everyone else was out.

“We’ve drawn a blank on the karaoke tapes but I’ve thought of something else,” I told her.

“Tell me, tell me,” she squeaked.

I didn’t. Not straight away, anyway. Another brilliant bright idea had dawned.

“Lyndz? Are you still there?” I could hear Fliss saying.

“Yeah,” I answered. Then I said, “I don’t suppose by any teeny-weeny chance that you fancy the idea of a sleepover?”

“Do I? You bet! When?”

“Friday? Saturday? The sooner the better. We’ve got to start practising,” I said.

“The class heats are in two weeks’ time,” she said gloomily.

Talk about dropping a bombshell! I was gobsmacked. Two weeks? We’d never have our act ready by then. Why had nobody told me?

I said those same words to Fliss.

“But Mrs Weaver mentioned it yesterday, just after all that trouble with the M&Ms,” she said.

“I suppose I wasn’t listening. My mind was full of hate. Kill, kill, kill! Death to the M&Ms!” I said dramatically.

“Was that what you rung me about, then? No, not about killing the M&Ms. The sleepover?” she asked me.

“No. I only just thought of that. My other great, earth-shattering idea was about the music to go with our song,” I said.

“I know. You’re going to ask the Spice Girls’ band to play for us, I suppose,” she said.

“Ho, ho. Don’t be a moron,” I told her. “I was listening to Stu and his friends playing the other night and - “

“You’re not going to ask them?” she said. There was pure horror in her voice, as if I’d told her the M&Ms were about to be fried in toad juice and served up to her for lunch.

“Of course not! Can you imagine my big brother even setting foot in Cuddington Primary? It would ruin his street cred for all time! But it made me think, why don’t we accompany ourselves? We could borrow a guitar, and Frankie’s got a keyboard…”