Junk - Melvin Burgess [4]
Out it all came.
No going out during the week. Homework inspection every evening. Privileges withdrawn. (‘What privileges? Breathing? Using the bathroom?’) Tar, forbidden. Tar’s friends, forbidden – that was code for the ‘louts that hang out on the seafront…’ Friday and Saturday nights out, back by nine o’clock.
‘Oh, can’t we make it half past nine, please?’
If you promise to make it half past nine sharp – okay,’ replied my mother.
I was trying to be sarcastic.
Job, packed in.
I was waiting for that one. The job was supposed to be the cause of my downfall.
I was trying to be cool. I was dripping sarcasm, dripping. I wasn’t even going to bother arguing. But I was livid. So was Mum. I could see Dad looking a bit injured, as if this was all going too far. But Mum had really made her mind up.
I opened my mouth to say something clever but nothing came out – just a sort of bleat.
‘Just till you get back on course,’ said Mum, getting up and smoothing down her skirt.
‘You just think that I can’t be trusted but I did everything I could to make it blah-blahity… boo-hoo-hoo.’
I should have kept it shut. I never got to the end of the sentence. I was bawling. I rushed out of the room, but I didn’t have anywhere to go because they were sitting on my bed. Dad called out, ‘Gemma!’
Mum said, ‘Leave her…’
I rushed downstairs like a wet sponge at a hundred miles an hour. I hid in the kitchen trying to hold my breath.
Then Mum and Dad came back downstairs and I rushed back up and locked myself in my room.
‘Bastards, BASTARDS, BASTARDS!’ I screamed. There was an understanding silence.
After a bit I calmed down and I decided to play it cool and hope that the whole thing would blow over. I didn’t go out in the week… well, there was no Tar, was there? The rest of the gang were still hanging out on the beach on the seafront, but I could do without that for a few days. But at the weekend I went to work. I wasn’t going to miss that.
I had a nice little job serving tea to tourists. Actually, looking back, it wasn’t a nice little job at all, it was slave labour. And only in a place as terminal as Minely-on-Sea could serving people tea be deemed exciting. But I thought it was the bees’ nuts, and anyway it was some money in my pocket.
No one said anything to me. They let me swan off out of the house and never even asked where I was going.
When I finally got to Auntie Joan’s Tea Room, there was another girl setting out places by the window. Then Auntie Joan came stalking out and… ‘Oh… it’s Gemma… what a surprise.’
‘I work here,’ I reminded her.
Auntie Joan peered over her specs at me. She’s not my auntie… she’s not anyone’s auntie as far as I know. She named herself after her own tea room.
‘I hear you’ve been a bit naughty, Gemma,’ she said nicely.
I said, ‘Eh?’ Well, what’s it to do with her? So long as I don’t stick my tongue down my boyfriend’s throat while the customers are scoffing scones…
‘Your father got in touch,’ she murmured, looking all coyly at me.
I didn’t say a word. I just waited.
‘And I’m afraid there’s no work for you here any more…’
She didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed.
Need I say? Need I say how livid I was? The old bastard had rung up and terminated my job for me.
He had no business.
He had no right!
And as for her, the hypocritical old bat, who did she think she was?
‘Since when have you been inspector of the Moral Police?’ I asked.
‘No need for that,’ she snapped pertly. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t take responsibility for employing a girl over and above the wishes of her parents.’ And she swirled round and trotted out.
I turned round and glared at the other girl, who blushed furiously and tried to hide behind the saucers. I expect she thought I’d been holding one-woman orgies in the kitchen while the kettle boiled.
The humiliation was unbelievable.
‘See if I want to work in an establishment where the strawberry jam tastes of FISH!’ I yelled at the top of my lungs, and I stormed out. That made her wince. In a moment of badly judged intimacy,