The amount I’m saying that at the moment, maybe I should just get a little MP3 track with it on loop so that I can simply press a button and offer out earphones.
Dad shakes his head. “That’s not everything.” Then he looks at the carpet and rummages around in his pocket again. What he pulls out appears to be a tax form. More specifically a P45. “This was also on the table.”
I look at it in confusion.
“I’ve been lying too, Harriet. I didn’t get permission from work to come with you to Moscow.”
“But…”And when I look at him, I realise he’s been wearing the same clothes now for five days, he smells of vodka and he looks exhausted. In fact, he’s looked exhausted all week. I’ve just been too wrapped up in myself to notice.
“I don’t understand, Dad. Why not?”
“Because I didn’t need to, sweetheart. The agency lost their biggest client because of me and they fired me on Friday. On the spot.”
“But you said…”
“I know. I lied. I thought Annabel would be angry.”
“Oh.”
“It turns out she’s much, much angrier now.”
It feels like the whole world has tilted up on itself and everything is falling off the top of it. “Oh,” I say again.
“Yeah. Oh pretty much sums it up for me too,” Dad agrees and then he lies down on the carpet. “We’re not very good at this, are we, Harriet?” he says.
And he closes his eyes.
It’s only once I’ve helped him up and put him in front of the TV that I turn the yellow Post-it over.
y name is Harriet Manners and I am an idiot.
I know I’m an idiot because I’m lying in my bed, looking up other words to call myself. Ninny. Dunce. Blockhead. Twit. Ignoramus. Fool. Which is the origin of the word ‘geek’ so I think we’ve just come full circle.
I’ve made a mess of everything.
Alexa has won. Nat’s not talking to me. Annabel has gone. Dad’s unemployed. I owe ￡3,000. The entire population of England is laughing at me. My hair looks like a ball of orange fuzz.
I don’t know if I’ve been suspended or not, but only because I’m refusing to go to school to find out. For the first time in my life, I’ve decided I don’t care about my education. It hasn’t made me any smarter at all. I’ve actually managed to transform in the opposite direction. I’m like a caterpillar that’s gone back to being an egg, or an unemployed Cinderella without even a hearth to scrub.
One simple metamorphosis story and I couldn’t even get that right.
Dad and I spend the entire night trying to fix things. I haven’t told him about the back of the note, though. I think about telling him, but Annabel asked me not to. I’ve betrayed her quite enough already without adding that to the list as well.
“We’ve got to do something dramatic,” Dad tells me sternly after staring at the wall for half an hour. “We have to prove to Nat and Annabel how sorry we are.”
So we make ‘sorry’ cakes, we make cards, we film ourselves singing an apologetic song. I take Nat a mix CD, a little silver necklace that splits in half and a box of chocolates. Then a barely used bottle of perfume, then flowers with a cunningly amended poem on the card. She trashes everything apart from the chocolates, which she eats without offering me any.
Dad goes to Annabel’s law firm and stands outside with a bunch of flowers and a sandwich board that says (and on the back says ). He stands there until the security guard comes down with a note saying:
Dad says he’s not good at maths, but that’s not a number he wants to calculate.
Finally, totally defeated and unsuccessful, we give up and sit on the sofa for the rest of the evening. Then we get up the next morning and sit on the sofa for the rest of the next day. I have no idea what we watch on television because I’m not really watching it.
All I’m thinking, over and over and over again, is: How? How do I make everything go back to exactly the way it was? Because I’ll go through everything again – the bullying, the ugliness, the unpopularity – just to have my old life back. I’ve traded the only things that mattered to me for a whole load of stuff that doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. And I did it on purpose. Out of choice.
My IQ is clearly nowhere near as high as I thought it was.
“My little Tadpole,” Wilbur gasps when I eventually pick up my phone. “Where have you been?”
“On the sofa.”
“Jelly-bean, we have things to do. Everyone wants a piece of you, my little Ginger-cake. Journalists, television shows, designers, big brands. My phone hasn’t stopped, Sugar-plum, apart from when I turned it off so I could drink a coffee. The genius that is Yuka Ito has turned your little sit-down-athon into a PR coup. She’s telling everyone you’ve inspired her. You’re her new muse.”
“Uh-huh,” I say without really listening.
“You know what that means, my little Frog?”
I continue staring impassively at the television. “No.”