Weird Read online

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  WEIRD

  FIZZ: I’ve got a week to get Josh to notice me, a week to make him fall hopelessly in love with me, a week in which to SEDUCE him.

  Maybe if I put tissues inside my push-up bra they’ll look bigger.

  JOSH: Mum raised her eyebrows. ‘Felicity Foster-Thompson? Do I know her? What does she look like?’

  That stumped me for a second. What did Fizz look like? My brain sifted possible answers at blinding speed.

  ‘She’s weird.’

  Jeremy Strong spent most of his childhood getting told off for making things up. Nowadays he still makes things up but gets paid for it instead. Result! He has written well over seventy books now. Nobody complained about his first book for teenagers, so here’s his second. Will he stop there? We doubt it. When he’s not writing, Jeremy spends much of his time pursuing his favourite hobby, extreme sleeping, at which he has now reached Blue Duvet Level. He also enjoys eating crusty bread. Obviously he’s easily pleased.

  jeremystrong.co.uk

  Teenage books by Jeremy Strong

  Stuff

  Weird

  JEREMY STRONG

  PUFFIN

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  puffinbooks.com

  First published 2008

  1

  Text copyright © Jeremy Strong, 2008

  Illustrations copyright © Seb Burnett, 2008

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition

  that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise

  circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or

  cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

  including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  978-0-14-191676-7

  This is for my daughter, Jessica, with much love and thanks for everything you have been and will be, and for all you have done.

  I would like to thank my editor, Yvonne Hooker, for her

  endless patience, sensible judgement and unobtrusive

  good taste, demonstrated over many years. May you have

  a long and happy retirement.

  Contents

  Probably More Information Than You

  Really Want to Know

  Monday: Stealth Slippers

  Tuesday: Compulsive Humour Disorder

  Wednesday: What to Do with Wheelchairs

  Thursday: Chameleon Heads for Space

  Friday: Escape of the Prunes

  Sunday: Lift-Off!

  Josh

  When I was nine I found two goats mating in my bed. Actually they were more ‘on’ than ‘in’. What they were doing looked rather frantic and scary to me. In fact I thought at first they were having a wrestling match but goats don’t do wrestling. Also, they were on my bed and were really messing it up. The sheet was untucked, they’d trodden all over the pillow and the duvet was halfway across the floor. They were making weird noises too: grunting, wheezing and squeaking and, like I said, it was a bit scary – so I screamed. (I was nine, remember?)

  Mum came hurrying to the bottom of the stairs, but not up them because she was making a Christmas cake and had muddy wellies on. (Yes, I know it’s not necessary to wear muddy wellies when you make a Christmas cake, but Mum’s always doing six jobs at once. It happened to be what she was wearing and when your hands are covered in tacky flour, pockmarked with raisins and such like, and you’ve got muddy wellies on, you don’t want to go clumping up the stairs. Satisfied?) Instead she stood at the bottom and asked what was wrong.

  ‘There are two goats mating on my bed, Mum.’

  Do you know what she replied?

  ‘Which ones?’

  Typical. Didn’t bother to do anything about it, just wanted to know which ones. She came up and watched. ‘Ted and Sylvia,’ she humphed. ‘I might have known.’

  All the animals are named after poets, usually their surnames, but Mum’s favourites are given the first names of her preferred poets. Ted and Sylvia are named after Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who famously committed suicide. Not both of them – just Sylvia. I haven’t told Sylvia the goat who she was named after in case she feels she should do the same. I wouldn’t want to be held responsible and, anyway, how would a goat commit suicide? Take an over-dose of straw? Shut itself in a confined room, block up all the ventilation points and die from its own flatulence?

  I guess you’ve probably realized – from the way I said ‘All the animals…’ – that we have more than just goats. We also have a tortoise called Byron, because he’s got a leg missing and although Byron wasn’t missing a leg he did have a club foot (which isn’t a foot you club things with, it’s a deformed foot and not much fun, though possibly better than having a whole leg missing). There’s a fox and two hamsters, a gerbil, four guinea pigs, two rabbits, three dogs, five cats, a pigeon and an eagle owl called Auden.

  That’s today’s roll-call. It might be different tomorrow. We had an alligator here once, a donkey, swans, pigs, all sorts. My own favourite was a ferret I called Obi Wan because he would appear and disappear, just like that. Obi Wan was not a poet of course, as far as we (the film-going world) know, but I named him, not Mum, because he was my favourite.

  From all this you will have gathered that I live in a zoo. It’s not a proper zoo, but it often feels like one. It’s actually a small house in an ordinary road in an ordinary town. Mum works at an animal sanctuary – The ARC, which is short for Animal Rescue Centre. There’s never enough room at the sanctuary for all the animals they get, so Mum brings her work home with her. We get the overflow.

  If you’re wondering what Dad does, he doesn’t. He escaped about a year before I found the two goats in my bed. ‘I want a house with people in it,’ he told Mum. ‘I work in an office. When I come home I want to find people. I want to sit in an armchair that isn’t full of rescued rats and have a bath without having to wrestle an anaconda. I want a bit of normality.’

  So he went. Mum says he’d got boring. ‘When we married he was quite different, quite an adventurer,’ she told me. ‘I met him in the jungle. We were studying puma poo. It was so romantic. We had such fun.’

  It wasn’t such fun when Dad left. I felt I’d lost my only ally. I’m more like him than Mum. I like things tidy and clean. It really annoys Mum. She shouted at me the other day: ‘For God’s sake, Josh, you’re a teenager! Teenage boys are meant to be untidy. There’s something wrong with you.’

  ‘Mum, listen, teenagers are never like what their parents want them to be, are they?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You want m
e to be untidy – so I’m tidy. That’s not what you want, is it?’

  She was stumped. After we’d had this mini row I was up in my room and it occurred to me that maybe Mum was more of a teenager than I was. Anyway, I understood where Dad was coming from or, rather, why he was going to where he was going. We see each other regularly. He only lives two streets away. Sometimes when the animals get too much for me I slip round to his house and we tidy things. We don’t say much to each other. Just tidy. You probably think I’m weird or gay or something but I’m just telling you how it is. It’s calming – tidying things. It’s like ordering your thoughts, stacking books neatly on the shelves of your brain.

  It was Dad who got me into astronomy. He has a proper stellar telescope. It’s extraordinary what you can see. You can focus on what looks like an empty patch of night sky, look through the ’scope and there they are, stars, thousands of them. And that was a bit of sky you thought was empty. When I look up there it’s like I’m seeing escape and the future, a universe full of strange new worlds. I’m already building rockets. OK, they’re just models, but one day, who knows?

  So, anyway, speaking of strange worlds, back to the goats. Ted and Sylvia were hard at it on my bed, trampling all over where I had to sleep and I asked Mum, why? Why did they have to do that upstairs, on my bed?

  ‘It’s genetic,’ she explained.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Thousands of years ago goats lived on mountains where it was safe, and that’s where they would mate. The desire to mate somewhere high up has been passed down in their genes. That’s how evolution works. If your bedroom was downstairs it wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘So now it’s my fault?’

  Mum smiled. ‘I’m just trying to explain things, Josh.’ I wanted to tell her that sometimes I didn’t want an explanation. What I wanted was for it not to happen in the first place. Instead I gazed round my room and pointed out that the wardrobe was higher than the bed so why didn’t they go up there?

  ‘Now you’re being silly,’ she answered and went back downstairs to get on with making the Christmas cake. She didn’t bother to take Ted and Sylvia with her. Which is probably just as well. Who wants to eat a Christmas cake that goats have had a hand in making? Or a foot.

  Next day I go into school and tell my friend Charlie and he tells everyone else, including the teacher, Miss Bennet, and soon the whole school knows and me and goats are linked for the rest of our lives. It just so happened that two days later the goats were replaced by a hedgehog but by then it was too late. It was the goats that stuck in people’s minds. I’ve been called Goat ever since. If I’d waited two days it might have been Hedgehog, but there you go, that’s life in all its glory.

  Some kids might have been traumatized for ever by such an event but Mum behaved as if it was just one of those things that happen with animals and, besides, I’d grown up with it. It was my normality. It was only when I went to school and began to bring friends home that I realized not everyone lived in a house where goats mate in your bed and you might find a tortoise trying to eat your socks. I lost quite a few friends that way. It took a while before I worked out why.

  ‘That’s sad,’ said Mum, when I told her. ‘I thought children liked animals.’

  Yes, children do like animals. They just don’t like them in their face (or bed), so close up. Did you think I was exaggerating when I mentioned Dad and the anaconda? It really happened. Imagine that – taking a bath and finding that you’re sharing it with a snake from the constrictor family; those are the ones that wrap their bodies round you and squeeze you so hard you can’t breathe – which is generally fatal. I don’t think anyone would like an animal that close. And you spend your life constantly checking everything to make sure there isn’t a mouse in the muesli, a red-kneed bird-eating spider beneath your pillow or a wallaby in the wardrobe.

  That’s probably why I’m so tidy. It’s my only defence against the chaos that is the inside of my house. I guess Mum and I are just opposites. We do everything the other way round. She’s messy, I’m tidy. And then there are the doors. She has this policy of leaving all doors open, because she carries big loads around and has both hands full and therefore can’t open and shut doors. I have this policy of leaving all doors shut because I think it helps prevent unfortunate events like randy goats responding to their evolutionary programming and migrating upstairs to seek the higher ground of my bed for a bit of rumpy-pumpy.

  I’ve just had an interesting thought. Mum says Ted and Sylvia were simply responding to their DNA programming. ‘It’s genetic.’ Those were her words. That was the goats’ excuse. Maybe I should try that next time Mr Prendergast asks why I haven’t done my science homework.

  ‘It’s genetic,’ I’ll say, and Prenders will look apologetic and back off and say: ‘Terribly sorry, didn’t realize. Of course. You can’t help it.’

  But now I have a different kind of problem. We’re on work experience next week. I am so excited, not. We’re all being sent out into the big wide world so we can find out what life is really like. As if I need to know. I could tell my teachers a thing or two. I bet they don’t know what noises goats make when they’re you-know-what-ing. I bet they’ve never pushed a pig in a wheelbarrow (which I had to do once because it had a poorly trotter), or cleaned up behind an incontinent newt.

  School has fixed me up with work at Marigolds, the care home, and you know what that means – wrinklies. I’m going to be thrown to the prunes. Not only that, but I shan’t be on my own. Felicity Foster-Thompson is going as well. Felicity Foster-Thompson! Why couldn’t it be her big sis, Lauren, who looks like a goddess, walks like a goddess, speaks like a goddess and, oh, have you got this – IS a goddess? OK, she’s seventeen and maybe you think the age difference is too great but if you saw her you’d trip over your own eyeballs. Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to notice me, but she will. I’ll think of something.

  Sometimes I dream I’m saving her from impending doom. She’s drowning in the sea. I plunge through the waves, my strong arms scything the water as I speed towards her, beating off the sharks that swirl around us. I grab her as she goes under for the fifth time and, with one arm clutched round her chest (I like that bit), I haul her to dry land. Her wet clothes cling to her and I gaze down at her beautiful face and her eyes flutter open and she looks back at me and whispers, ‘Oh, Josh, you’ve saved my life. Is there anything I can do for you?’ And I casually drawl in my manly voice, ‘Well, actually, yes.’

  Unfortunately in real life I can’t swim unless my feet are touching the bottom, and Lauren is in a different part of the school so about the only chance I have of seeing her is when she goes home because she meets up with little sis, Felicity, who’s an over-excited, dentally challenged, myopic five-year-old. How she ever got into Year Nine I’ve no idea. Somebody must have made a mistake. Felicity Foster-Thompson and me on work experience, together, in a care home for the elderly. Whoopee. I’m so excited.

  Fizz

  It’s no good. Been looking in the mirror. Frankenstein’s bride. That’s who I am. And even he wouldn’t want to marry me. God, I look awful, like I’ve stumbled straight out of a horror film. I can’t decide if it’s the antique specs or the pauper’s brace. I am probably the last girl on the planet without contact lenses – and the specs are two years old. Two years! And then all my friends go and get totally cosmic braces in different colours and I’ve got National Health Service. I was obviously born under a very bad sign – quite probably the horrendously unlucky thirteenth sign of the Zodiac, The Slug, Bringer Of All The Grunge In Your Life, which represents me perfectly.

  I keep telling Mum I need cosmetic surgery (and contact lenses). She just laughs. I don’t think she even knows what cosmetic surgery is, because she’s perfect. She says. And Dad agrees.

  ‘You’re perfect, darling,’ Dad keeps telling her. Then he COMPLETELY ruins it by saying to me: ‘And you’re perfect too, Felicity.’

  ‘With my squiffy eyes and totally
antique spectacles that were unearthed in some archaeological bronze-age dig and my brace that catches the light like sharks’ teeth catch the, catch the, whatever light you get underwater. And my boobs are too small.’

  PARENTAL CHORUS: ‘Ha ha ha ha ha!’

  I mean, have they never seen OK magazine? ‘They are,’ I insisted.

  ‘They’ll grow more,’ said Mum. ‘In the meantime, try a push-up bra.’

  ‘I am wearing a push-up bra,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I need cosmetic surgery. It doesn’t cost much, only a few thousand. I am being mentally damaged by having small boobs.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Dad. Such an intelligent comment to make to a fourteen-year-old, don’t you think?

  ‘I’m not being silly. This is my life I’m talking about.’

  ‘When you’re eighteen,’ said Mum. ‘You can do what you want then.’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  Mum sighed. ‘Not negotiable, Felicity. Sixteen is the age of consent, but not the age of responsibility, or even, I might say, maturity.’

  ‘I’d be more mature if I had bigger boobs,’ I said pointedly.

  ‘How does that work?’ asked Dad. I threw an icy glance at him and he shrugged. ‘I was just wondering about the correlation between maturity and the size of your boobs. I don’t think it’s been scientifically established.’

  I hate it when he gets like that. Thinks he’s clever. I’ll show him. Maybe not today, because I can’t think of an answer, but I will, one day. I shall study all the sciences and get a million A levels and go to all the totally tip-top universities like Cambridge and Harvard and that famous one in Paris, the Sorbet (where I shall also become a top model with my new cosmetic boobs and fall in love with a totally dishy French waiter called Jules who is terribly poor but awfully handsome and who worships me, despite my affair with the French President, which gets splashed all over the pages of OK magazine, but Mum and Dad don’t even notice because they live in a World of Unawareness), and I shall study and study and become the world’s leading expert on every science known to mankind and then, the next time Dad says: ‘I don’t think it’s been scientifically established,’ I shall say: ‘Oh, but, Father dear, I am afraid your scientific knowledge is woefully out of date. I was researching the odour distribution of earwig pheromones last week and I have discovered that blah blah blah blah.’ And he’ll be stunned. And I shall sweep from the room, triumphant. Except that by then, after all that studying, I shall probably be about thirty and covered in wrinkles from top to bottom and beyond and I’ll have left home so it will all be TOO LATE. Born under a bad sign, like I said.