Louise Rennison - ‘Luuurve is a many trousered thing…’

I reached down to strangle him and I was just saying, “You bloody furry freak, I’ll kill you when I get down from here…” when I saw Jas’s dad standing on the garden path with his paper, smoking his unlit pipe. He was looking at me, like I was Norma Normal.

I said, “Ah yes, I was just… thinking I’d see what your garden looked like from up here. And yep, yep, it looks very, very nice indeed. Full of stuff. Growing and so on.”

What was I talking about?

Jas’s dad is sensationally nice, or insane, it’s hard to tell. He let Angus carry his newspaper into the house, and didn’t even seem to mind when he ate it.

I managed to dig Jas out from underneath her owls. How many stuffed owls can one person collect? A LOT is the answer in her case. What is the matter with her? Also, she was vair vair grumpy when I woke her up with a kiss. It was only on her cheek but you would think she had been attacked by hordes of lesbians in cowboy outfits.

Blimey. She looks very odd in the mornings and her fringe was akimbo to the max. She looked like a startled earwig in jimmy-jams.

I said, “So, so? What happened?”

She looked at me and started early-morning fiddling with her fringe. Vair annoying.

She said, “You just ran off like a fool.”

I said, “Yes, I know, I was there.”

“Yes, you say that, but you weren’t there, that is the whole point. And everyone was going, ‘What’s Georgia doing? Has she gone mad?’ and so on.”

“Jas, if I get you a little cup of tea and a snacklet will you try to be normal and tell me everything that happened? It is a matter of life and death. YOUR life and YOUR death.”

It’s quite nice and cosy tucked up in bed with Jas and snacksies. Except that I think I have an owl’s beak up my bum-oley.

Jas was munching and rambling. “Well, first of all, after you had run off like a ninny – by the way, you run in a really weird way in those high heels. You looked like Nauseating P. Green when she’s playing hockey. Her legs go all spazzy and—”

I hit her with Snowy Owl. She almost choked on her toast.

I said, “Jas, get on with it, I have only got about fifty more years to live.”

“Well, first of all, the boys did that boy thing with Robbie.”

“What boy thing?”

“You know, slapping each other on the shoulders, shaking hands, and so on.”

“Yeah.”

Jas went on, “Robbie was saying hello to a lot of people and Masimo got his jacket on. You were just approaching the park by then; we could still see you. Masimo said to Tom, ‘She asked me about footie results. Then she ran away. Is she normal?’”

Ohmygiddygod. I said to Jas, “What did Tom say?”

“Well, he stood up for you, of course.”

“I love Hunky very much, as you know, Jazzy Spazzy.”

“Yes, he said you were quite often normal. He had seen you being normal once or twice himself. Usually when you were asleep.”

Marvellous.

Apparently after I had run off to “catch my train”, Masimo had gone home with the band, and just after he’d gone Wet Lindsay had come stropping back looking for him. Jas said her no-forehead was all crinkly and mad and her hair extensions were swishing around in a Nervy B. Central way. Then she had seen Robbie and was all over him like a rash and they had gone off together.

What, what???

I said, “Wet Lindsay went off with the Sex God?”

“Well, they did go out together once, didn’t they?”

“Yes, Jas, I know, I was heartbroken. Do you remember?”

“I mean, maybe he still likes her. I don’t know, maybe he has had a secret thing for her. Some people like lanky girls.”

“Jas, shut up now.”

“Well, I am just saying that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and so on. It’s an ill wind that—”

“Jas, that is not shutting up, that is rambling on and on about rubbish.”

She was chomping away on her Jammy Dodger like Wise Mabel of the Forest. I really, really wanted to shove it down her throat, but I knew it would take another million years to get the end of the story if I did, so I just said, “Jas, you know when you were going on and on about ‘maybe something good will happen’, and I didn’t want to go to the gig in the first place but you persuaded me? Well, did you know that Robbie was going to be there?”

“Well, I sort of thought he might. I knew he was coming home because he rang Tom and said that he had booked his ticket. And that he would be back in time for the gig.”

“But did he say why he was coming home?”

“Erm, no, not exactly, no.”

Oh noooooo. I have left the cake shop of luuurve thinking I have accidentally bought two cakes and found out that I may have only got one cake. And I might have already eaten that. I may in fact be cakeless.

I said to Jas, “We must call an emergency Ace Gang meeting.”

“Well, I thought I might go to the river with Tom and—”

“No, Jas, you thought wrong.”

Angus is still trailing me around like Inspector Morse in a furry coat (and on all fours).

Rosie said, “I hope this is worth it. Sven and me were going to practise artificial respiration on each other in case anyone chokes on the vats of mead at our wedding.”

Even the Ace Gang has no sense of community these days. Jas bleating on about missing Tom, Jools wanting to go hang around Rollo while he played footie, Rosie banging on about Sven – half-reindeer, half-fool – and Ellen… well, Ellen just being Ellen.

Ellen, Rosie, Jools, Mabs, Jas and me are all swinging on the swings. Not backwards and forwards like normal people enjoying a day in the park, but sideways so that the Blunder Boys can’t see anything. Life is not easy. The Blunder Boys are in the bushes watching us on the swings. They think we don’t know they are there; it’s pathetic. They are so noisy and keep falling over things and fighting with each other.

Now the Blunder Boys are lying down on the ground, hoping they might see up our skirts. I can see their beaky eyes blinking under the branches. If they do happen to see our knickers they will think we are doing it on purpose to attract them. Dear God.

Just then a Pekingese dog came hurtling by dragging its lead behind it, followed by Angus. Oh no. He loves Pekingese. A LOT. I hope it is a fast runner.

Anyway, I haven’t got the time to worry about everything. If careless people will let their small dogs loll around in parks they are asking for trouble. It’s a cat-eat-dog world.

The general mood of the gang is that I should play it cool until I know what is really going on. Although what Ellen knows about cool I really don’t know. She had a massive ditherspaz trying to describe how Dave the Laugh had said good night to her at the Stiff Dylans gig. Apparently, and I know this because I heard it about a zillion times, “Er, well… then he, well… and I didn’t know what he meant, but then, well, he just said… he just said to me… he said…”

I shouted, “WHAT? What in the name of heaven, Ellen? WHAT, WHAT did he say?”

And I didn’t even want to know; I just wanted to get to the bits about what happened after I left and what did people say about me and so on. But you know what people are like, it’s just me, me, me with them.

Ellen went even more divvyish. Good grief. “He said, ‘Well, good night then, Ellen, never eat anything bigger than your head.’”