Blue Like Friday Read online

  “I don’t think the heat escaping from our windows is going to melt any icebergs,” he said loftily.

  “It’s not icebergs, you dolt,” I said. “It’s the ice cap. But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s terribly wasteful.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Of their money. That’ll teach them.”

  “No!” I said in exasperation. “It’s a waste of oil, which is a scarce resource, and it means even more fossil fuel is burned, and that contributes to global warming. That’s very irresponsible of you, Hal.”

  “Oh!” he said. “I never thought of that.”

  There are a lot of things Hal hasn’t ever thought of, you may have noticed.

  “Hal, you are so weird,” I said.

  And not all that desperately intelligent either, I thought to myself, because if your plan is to make sure your mother doesn’t marry someone, putting stones in his shoes is really not terribly likely to work, is it? It might give you some small evil pleasure, sure enough, but as a master plan for influencing the future shape of your family, I’d say it scores about zilch.

  “Anyway, I don’t understand what is so awful about Alec,” I said.

  “It’s hard to explain,” Hal said shiftily.

  “Well, look, is he mean to you? Does he, you know, hit you or … um … anything?”

  By “anything” I meant those awful things you read about in the papers that bad adults do to children that make them utterly miserable and mess them up for life. I didn’t really want to think about it, but it must be absolutely terrible if that happens to you, so I made a special effort to listen to Hal, in case that was the problem. I was quite pleased with myself for thinking of it.

  “No,” Hal said. “He’s not … no, it’s not that.”

  “So, what is it, then?”

  “He’s just … there,” Hal said. “I liked it better before.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “He snores,” Hal added. “I can hear Him, even through the bedroom door.”

  “He snores,” I said. “That is not exactly a jailing offence, Hal.”

  “No, and he … er, picks his nose. I saw Him once.”

  Oh gross, I thought, but I said, “Everyone picks their nose, Hal. In private. Was he in private?”

  “Well, he thought he was, I suppose,” Hal said.

  “That doesn’t count then,” I said. “What else?”

  “He slurps his tea,” Hal said. “And he hogs the remote control.”

  “Hal, you are just describing a person being a person. Everyone hogs the remote if they get a chance. You have to make allowances for other people. That’s just … life, you know?”

  “But he shouldn’t be in my life,” Hal said fiercely. “I just don’t want Him around. It was better when it was just me and my mum.”

  “Hal, he’s been around for years; it’s time you got used to it. And if your mum is going to marry him, well, you’ll be a proper family then, won’t you? And that’s nice, isn’t it?”

  I was trying to look on the bright side, you know, cheer him up, but I think it was just that Alec was not Hal’s dad. I’d say that was the problem, nothing to do with Alec himself, not really I know that is a bit psychological of me, but it stands to reason, doesn’t it? You wouldn’t want somebody else in your family, would you, that didn’t belong there? I wouldn’t anyway. I like things staying the way they are, and I bet Hal is the same. And a stepparent is for life, isn’t he, not just for Christmas?

  Alec was going to have a rough time with Hal. I could see it coming. But I was Hal’s friend. I had to take his side, didn’t I? No matter what.

  Chapter 4

  I have two other so-called friends, Rosemarie and Gilda, but they annoy me a lot of the time—there was an incident about a jacket last term that I haven’t forgiven them for—so a lot of the time I just hang around with Hal at school. That’s not the only reason I am friendly with Hal of course; I also like him a lot. Hal is like a little white mouse with a twitchy nose. You can’t help liking him, even if the twitch drives you mad.

  The only other boy I know really well apart from Hal is my older brother, Larry. He is the very opposite of Hal in every way. Larry follows a football team, for example. You can probably guess that Hal doesn’t do anything as ordinary as that. I know which team Larry follows, but I’m not going to tell you, because if you have your own favorite team, it might be the same one, and then you would think that Larry must be a great fellow and really like him, and that wouldn’t be right at all, because Larry is the world’s drippiest drip. He’s not evil, but he’s dead boring. My mother says it’s just the age difference between us that is the problem, and when I am older I will appreciate Larry’s excellent qualities, and meanwhile I should give him the benefit of the doubt.

  I’ll try to give you an example of what Larry is like, so you’ll understand my problem.

  “If you were a cathedral,” Hal asked me one day, “would you be Gothic or Romanesque?” (We did cathedrals at school because our teacher is into cool stuff like that. We have the best teacher ever. She’s the adult most like a kid I can think of.)

  This is a game we call Biscuits, by the way, because it began with a question about biscuits: “If you were a biscuit, would you be a Kimberley or a Mikado?” The game is that you answer the question and you explain why. For example, I would be a Kimberley—you know, the squidgy ones with the gingery outsides—because there is a bit of spice to me. Rosemarie and Gilda would both be Mikado—pink and fluffy and too sweet to be good for you. It goes on and on: “If you were a woman in the Bible, would you be Ruth or Naomi?” “If you were a hero-warrior, would you be Fionn Mac Cumhail or Cú Chulainn?” It’s quite a good game if you like that sort of thing, and you find out things about people that you wouldn’t have suspected.

  “I wouldn’t be a cathedral,” Larry butted in. “I’d rather be the Colosseum.”

  Now, that is typical of Larry. Wants to muscle in on me and Hal’s games all the time, and messing everything up.

  We both turned on him and yelled, because that’s cheating, of course. You can’t bob out and change the question, because if you let people do that, the whole game would just disintegrate, and there wouldn’t be any point to it. Rosemarie and Gilda would be two semidetached houses with mown lawns and stiff little hedges, but that wasn’t the question asked.

  “You can’t be the Colosseum,” I said sternly. “You have to stick with cathedrals. That’s how the game works. You answer the question asked.”

  “Oh,” said Larry. “I didn’t know that.”

  “And anyway,” I said, “nobody asked you. I’d be Gothic,” I said then, to Hal, “and so would you. Larry’d be Romanesque.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” said Larry. “I could be the same as you two. Why do I have to be different?”

  Larry doesn’t know anything about cathedrals, even though he is older than us. They don’t do interesting stuff where he goes to school, only math and French and economics. But he is definitely Romanesque: symmetrical and straightforward, a bit like a penguin, very black and white. Hal and I are Gothic because we’re over the top, with unexpected twists, and maybe just a little bit monstrous.

  Well, I suppose it wasn’t really Larry’s fault he didn’t understand the game properly, so to be nice to him, I said, “Let’s play I Spy.”

  Now, you probably think of this as a little kids’ game, and that is exactly what it is, but Larry likes it, even though he is practically drawing the old-age pension, because he can always think up things that are impossible to guess—words like “flange” or “pivot,” which no sane person under about thirty-five knows—but you can never say he’s cheating because there always is one of those mad things in the room, so he wins.

  I don’t mind him winning, but it gets boring after a while if you know you are never going to be able to guess the answers, though I have to admit you do get to know a lot of useless words.

  After a while I noticed that Hal wasn’
t joining in the guessing. It was a word beginning with h, and I’d tried all the obvious things like “house” and “Hal” and “hearth” and “honey” and “herringbone-patterned curtains.” (We don’t usually allow adjectives, but I was scraping the barrel.) When I looked at Hal for inspiration, he was muttering something to himself.

  “Is that a spell you’re chanting?” I asked him.

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “Hmm?” I guessed, though of course you can’t spy a hmm. (I told you, I was scraping the barrel.)

  Larry shook his head and looked smug.

  “It’s my plan,” said Hal. “I’m working out the details.”

  “Plan doesn’t begin with h,” I said, which was a very feeble joke, but I was tired of the game by now.

  “No. I mean I’m just hatching it,” Hal said.

  “Hatch?” I guessed. We were in our dining room, and there is a hatch into the kitchen. We don’t use it, because there’s a computer in front of it, so it’s barely visible, which is why I hadn’t guessed it before.

  “There, you see!” said Larry crossly. “That’s what happens when I choose an ordinary word—you win. I should have stuck with my first idea, which was ‘hasp.’”

  “Is there a hasp?” I asked, looking around. I was not exactly sure what a hasp was, but I had an idea it had something to do with windows.

  “No,” said Larry. “That’s why I had to change it to hatch.”

  This was such a ridiculous thing that we all collapsed in giggles, and for the next quarter of an hour, all we could think of to say to each other was, “Well, of course ‘hasp’ is a much more difficult word to guess, the only problem is there isn’t a hasp in the house,” and then we’d go off into gales of laughter again. “There isn’t a hasp in the house,” we’d roar, “not a one.”

  But Hal was not to be distracted, and after a while he said to Larry, “We need you for this plan.”

  Note that fatal “we.” That included me, I could feel it in my bones, but I hadn’t agreed to anything. I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t imagine what was coming next, but I knew it wouldn’t be good.

  “We need someone with a grown-up voice to leave a message on his answering machine,” Hal explained.

  There he went with that “we” again. Anyway, I wouldn’t exactly say that Larry’s voice is grown-up. It’s sort of baritone-ish, I suppose, most of the time, but it’s still at that stage where it could go off the scale at any moment. All the same, I suppose it is more grown-up than Hal’s pip-squeaky little treble.

  “No,” I said sharply. “Leave Larry out of this, Hal. Whatever it is.”

  I could just see Hal landing us all in some sort of trouble, and I’d end up, as usual, being the one having to do all the explaining, and if Larry was in on whatever it was from the outset, then he’d know everything, whatever there was to know, and I’d have a hard time trying to explain it all away with him hovering about saying, “It was all Olivia’s fault,” which is probably his favorite sentence in the world.

  Hal gave me a pained look. It’s hard to describe a pained look, but you’ll know it if you ever see it. It’s where a person looks at you as if you have said or done the most incredibly insensitive thing and deeply hurt their feelings, but they are not going to say anything because they are such a fine person, and then you feel really small, and you would do anything to prove to them that, really, you love them to bits and you wouldn’t dream of hurting them.

  “Larry won’t mind helping out,” Hal said. “And it’s nothing to worry about, it’s just a little practical joke, really.”

  “We don’t do practical jokes, Hal,” I said. “That’s not our style.”

  That’s not exactly what I meant. What I meant was that anything Hal was going to come up with was probably going to be seriously kooky. I mean, think of the kookiest idea you can imagine and then double its kooky value, and that’s the kind of kooky idea Hal has.

  “Olivia, I need to get this man out of my life,” he said. “Are you going to help me or not?”

  Now, I know that sounds as if he was going to murder someone, but I knew Hal wouldn’t really do anything totally evil. I was kind of curious to know what, exactly, he had in mind. And anyway, distracting him from leaving hot taps running just to spite his sort-of-stepfather was quite a useful thing and could be my good deed for the environment this summer, so I caved in and said, “Go on then, tell us.”

  “Well,” said Hal, “this is the plan, but you have to promise Utter Secrecy before I tell you. You must not breathe a word about my plan, especially not to anyone old enough to vote, or I won’t let you in on it. Promise? Cross your hearts and hope to die?”

  You know, if he hadn’t made it all sound so mysterious, we’d probably have lost interest in the whole project, and then it might never have happened, but he’d got me hooked now, so I nodded. I crossed my heart and turned my palm outward and vowed eternal secrecy.

  This was a bad, bad move. And the worst part is, I knew it, even at the time, but that doesn’t always help, does it? You can know something is all wrong and still find yourself getting dragged into it because the other person is so set on it.

  Oh dear.

  If this were a film instead of a book, there’d be eerie music with an insistent drumbeat in the background at this point: dooh-dooh-DOOH dooh, dooh-dooh-DOOH dooh, ka-bim, ka-bam, ka-BOOM.

  You can probably guess that All Did Not Go According to Plan.

  Chapter 5

  I bet you’ve been wondering when I am going to get back to the kite. I didn’t know you were so interested in kites. Maybe you weren’t, but now you are because I have made it sound interesting. I hope so.

  Well, the day after that conversation about the Great Secret Plan, I went over to Hal’s house and found him in that chilly garage again, surrounded by kite-making equipment, although the kite was pretty well finished. It was recognizably a kite, I mean, but he hadn’t painted it yet, and it looked quite dull, like an egg box, no particular color, just generally pale.

  Hal was mixing paints with an air of great concentration. I was glad to see him doing something constructive and fairly ordinary. Maybe he’d forget about his kooky plan and go back to kites. That’d be a relief all around.

  “I have to get the right shade of blue,” he muttered when I asked him what he was doing.

  “Why?” I said. “Does it matter?” I’d given up on trying to persuade him to use a more sensible color. “Most shades of blue are nice.” (There’s that word again. It’s much more useful than teachers ever let on.)

  “It has to be Friday blue,” he explained.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because,” said Hal.

  “Well, that clears that up,” I said witheringly, but Hal doesn’t really notice if you wither him.

  I was kind of curious to find out what shade of blue Fridays are if you’re Hal, so I didn’t ask any more questions, just watched.

  He dibbed and dabbed with blues and blacks and whites for a good while. He even put a tiny streak of red into the mixture. I was sure that was going to ruin it, but it didn’t. It seemed to make it go even bluer, if you can imagine that happening.

  “That’s it,” he said at last, after he’d stirred in a big glob of white. “That’s blue like Friday.” He sat back with a big cheesy grin on his face, as if he’d won a marathon or something.

  “It’s blue like the sky,” I said.

  It really was, and it was gorgeous. It was blue like the sky, china blue. It was a shade of blue to make your heart sing. It was so clear and blue a blue, you couldn’t imagine ever thinking of anything else as blue.

  He shrugged.

  The paints smelled good. When my mum or dad paints at home, it usually smells disgusting and makes your chest ache. But there was a warm smell to this paint of Hal’s. I said so, and Hal squinched up his eyes and looked hard at me.

  “Good,” he said. “You’re getting there.”

  I had no idea what he meant, which
made a change, because it’s usually the other way around.

  He painted the kite blue all over so that it was like this wonderful giant blue butterfly with its wings spread out. When it was dry, we took it to the strand for its maiden voyage.

  When I was a little girl, my parents took me to see a picture. Not a film, a painting. (My parents are like that. Other people’s parents take them to Disneyland. Oh well, lah-dee-dah.) I don’t know where it was or what the picture was called or anything, but I do remember the picture itself. It showed a lot of people doing pleasant Sunday-afternoon things and wearing their Sunday best—old—fashioned clothes, long dresses, and suits with high collars. I don’t remember any of them flying a kite, but when I thought of kite flying, I always thought of that picture. I imagined a lot of people standing about sedately, with a kite bobbing politely up above their heads, and everyone would be admiring it and giving delighted little grins at each other, and occasionally giving the kite string a little tug in this direction or that.

  But it wasn’t a bit like that. Usually we cycle to the strand, but we had to walk this time because of the kite, which was too big to carry on a bike. There was quite a stiff little breeze as we left Hal’s house, and by the time we got to the strand, it had started to get a lot blowier. I mean, windy to the point where you couldn’t be sure your clothes were going to stay on unless you buttoned everything up very tightly, so we did, because it would be a bit embarrassing if our clothes were all whipped off.

  “That’s great,” Hal shouted to me. “The kite will really take off in this wind.”

  Well, it did that all right.

  I don’t know how Hal managed to get it up into the air. He sort of hurled it away from his body several times, and it just flapped wildly for a bit and landed more or less at his feet, like a dejected dog. Then it would take off again for a few meters, but then it straggled to the sand again, where it blew and blustered and looked like a large piece of blue litter. But then he did something different, gave a twist with his wrist or something as he launched it, and suddenly it was off—and off, and off, and Hal was trotting and leaping after it, his anorak fluttering and waving as he ran.