Lottie Project Read online

  ‘Why didn’t you say I slapped you?’ I whispered.

  Jamie blinked at me nervously. ‘I’m not a sneaky tell-tale,’ he said.

  ‘Well. Thanks,’ I mumbled.

  He didn’t say anything back but his other cheek went red too.

  So perhaps Jamie isn’t one hundred per cent revolting and disgusting and infuriating. Just ninety-nine per cent. But as if I’d ever sit chewing my nails waiting for his phone call!

  Nobody rang. Not a single soul required the services of the strong reliable schoolgirl.

  ‘Why don’t you ring him?’ said Jo, still dopily deluded.

  But the next day Miss Pease from downstairs waylaid her as she was stumbling back from her morning shift at the supermarket.

  ‘Yes, Miss Pease wanted a little word about you, Charlie,’ said Jo, hands on her hips.

  ‘If she’s nagging on about my music again she’s nuts. I keep it turned down so soft I can barely hear it myself. She must have ears like Dumbo’s,’ I said, munching toast.

  Jo snatched half of it from my plate. ‘Here, spare a crumb for your poor hardworking mother,’ she said. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘So am I. You make your own. I’ve got to go to school.’

  ‘Yes, well, you can wait a minute. Miss Pease says you’ve been soliciting.’

  ‘I’ve been what?’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s the word she used,’ said Jo. She was trying to sound stern, but she looked as if she might giggle any minute. ‘Yes, that’s what she said. “I really must bring this to your attention, Josephine. Charlotte has been soliciting.”’ Jo’s voice wobbled.

  I chuckled tentatively. It was a mistake.

  ‘No, it’s not funny, Charlie. What have you been playing at, posting all these little letters in people’s flats offering to do work?’

  ‘I was wanting to help out.’

  ‘Oh, Charlie. You are a nutter. Miss Pease is right for once in her long and boring life. You can’t advertise yourself like that, especially when there are such loonies around. Some weird guy might have read about this little schoolgirl wanting work and got some terrible ideas.’

  ‘I’m not little, I’m big. And strong. But I take your point. Still, you don’t have to fuss. No-one’s phoned. Not a single sausage, and after all that money I spent on photocopying. It’s daft. The whole idea was to make a bit of money.’

  ‘Don’t worry. That’s my job. And anyway, it has worked in a way. Miss Pease says she’s got a job for you.’

  ‘Really?’ I tried to feel pleased, but Miss Pease is such a pain. She’s the sort of old lady who pats you on the head like a puppydog and relentlessly asks you how old you are, as if you might have aged five years since the last time you told her a week ago. Still, work is work.

  Only this work was worse than most. You’ll never guess what she wanted me to do. Read to her.

  I don’t really like reading aloud at the best of times. I don’t like hearing my voice go all silly and showing-off. And that’s when I can pick and choose my own book. Miss Pease wanted me to read her library book, one of those large big-print books that make your arms ache when you hold them up. My arms ached, my back ached, my head ached, my throat ached, my entire body was in ache overdrive after I read to Miss Pease for a whole hour.

  It was this terrible stupid story about some dippy woman who kept being pursued in the desert by this total nutcase in a striped nightie. Well, that’s what he was wearing on the book jacket. Instead of telling him to get lost sharpish the heroine simpered and swooned into the sand. I kid you not. And Miss Pease obviously adored this utter rubbish. She sat back literally licking her chops. Mind you, that might have been because of all the Cadbury’s Milk Tray she was eating. She got through a good half of the box.

  ‘Of course I’d offer you one, Charlie dear, but you can’t really read with your mouth full, can you?’ she said.

  ‘I can try,’ I said hopefully.

  She thought I was joking. And I thought she was joking when she handed over my wages for the reading session.

  ‘Here you are, dear,’ she said, fumbling in her purse. She handed me a ten-pence piece.

  I stared at it. Had she mistaken it for a pound coin? Even so, what a totally mingy rate of pay!

  ‘Pop it in your money box, dear,’ said Miss Pease. ‘And come back and read to me tomorrow.’

  Not flipping likely! I was dead depressed, and annoyed when Jo just laughed and found it funny. But she was in a good mood because she’d got herself another job, cleaning this big posh house three days a week from ten to twelve.

  ‘Three jobs!’ she said, and she sent out for pizza with three extra toppings to celebrate.

  ‘You’ll exhaust yourself,’ I said. ‘What with getting up at five and doing the supermarket and then looking after the silly little sprog in the afternoons.’

  ‘I’ll be OK. And this new job’s a doddle. The house is big, but they keep it very tidy. She’s ever so worried about the idea of employing another woman to do her dirty work. I bet she runs round with the vacuum before I get there.’

  ‘Where is it?’ I asked, my mouth drooling cheese fronds.

  ‘Oxford Terrace,’ said Jo.

  I stared at her, so shocked that my half of the pizza slipped out of my fingers onto the floor. I didn’t care. I wasn’t hungry any more.

  FOOD

  Oh, how I long for Mother’s cooking. One of her meaty stews, bubbling with barley beans and carrots. Or rabbit pie. Mother has such a light touch when it comes to making pastry. Her fruit lattice pies are famous all over the village. And her suet puddings. If I could only have a plateful of Mother’s jam suet pudding and custard! Or even a big doorstep slice of bread and dripping . . .

  I have to slice up the bread so thin here I slice my fingers too, and Louisa won’t eat her crusts even then. The baby likes his bread pounded into mush with warm milk. Mother would never dream of pampering us so. We always ate what we were given and chewed it cheerily. Well, mostly. But Louisa always plays around with her food and cries and complains something chronic, and Victor is extremely pernickety for a boy, fuss fuss fussing if he swallows a little lump in his custard. Sometimes it’s all I can do not to grab their plates and eat it up for them because I’m so hungry. I have to manage on nursery food too, no meat at all during the week, and just one slice off the roast on Sundays. I am allowed one egg a week too, but it’s a pale watery thing compared with the deep gold yolks laid by our hens at home.

  I have to make do with this niminy-piminy fare with the merest scrape of butter The only food that is plentiful is milk pudding. I shall start mooing before long.

  ‘We don’t want you to fall ill with too rich a diet,’ says the Mistress, as if servants have different stomachs from posh folk.

  Mrs Angel the cook and Eliza the maid are supposed to survive on this frugal diet too, but they eat their meals down in the kitchen and Mrs Angel is adept at keeping back the choicest portions for their own plates before Eliza serves the Master and Mistress in the dining room. I have my meals in the nursery so I miss out on these perks. Mrs Angel and Eliza treat me like one of the children anyway. They whisper and have secrets and laugh unkindly at the things I say. They are excessively tiresome. They are the childish pair. I do my best to ignore them, but then Mrs Angel calls me hoity toity and Eliza pulls my hair so that it tumbles down out of my cap. It is hard to bear sometimes. At home I was always a favourite. At school I was definitely Miss Worthbeck’s pet. All the children loved me. Even the boys. Yes, even that great lummox Edward James. But now I am openly despised and it makes my heart sore. At night I cry into my pillowcase, the sheets pulled right over my head so the children will not hear me.

  Victor sees my red eyes in the morning and says that I have been blubbing.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I say firmly. ‘I have a slight cold, that is all.’

  Perhaps that was tempting fate. Now the whole household has gone down with colds, even little baby Freddie. Mrs Angel has taken to
her bed and Eliza is trying to take charge of the kitchen, but with very bad grace. The Mistress says her ailing children must have calves’ foot jelly served to them at every meal. I ask Eliza to prepare it but she utterly refuses, saying she has her work cut out as it is and she cannot abide messing around with lumps of messy meat.

  So I have to make the jelly. The whole kitchen reeks and the walls glisten as the calves’ feet boil and boil and boil, and I skim and skim and skim, and then when I go to strain the liquid through the jelly bag my hands slip and . . . disaster! By the time I have run out to the butcher’s for six more calves’ feet and started the whole business in motion all over again I am in such savage spirits that I would cheer if a whole herd of calves stampeded through the house and trampled everyone within it with their poor feet.

  TOYS AND BOOKS

  I was so scared! Jo could be cleaning Jamie Edwards’s house. I could just imagine Jamie lounging on a velvet chaise-longue in his posh William Morris-papered parlour, snapping his fingers imperiously at Jo.

  ‘Hey, you! Cleaning lady! Get me another cushion,’ he’d command. ‘I’ve spilt crumbs all over the carpet so get cracking with the hoover. And don’t sigh like that or I’ll dock your wages.’

  I could see it as clear as anything. Poor Jo would have to wash Jamie’s clothes and tidy Jamie’s bed and dust all Jamie’s possessions. Maybe Jamie had a brace of younger brothers just as bratty as him, and she’d have to wash their clothes and tidy their beds and dust their toys. If he had a baby brother she’d maybe even have to wash and tidy and dust him down.

  ‘It’s not your Jamie Edwards’s house,’ said Jo. ‘This is the Rosen family, Mr and Mrs, with two teenage daughters.’

  I practically passed out with relief.

  ‘Are you disappointed?’ said Jo. ‘Did you hope I’d get to go in your Jamie’s bedroom, eh, to tell you all about the posters on his wall and whether he still has a teddy on his bed and maybe even have a sneaky peek in his diary to see if he ever writes anything about you?’

  ‘He’s not my Jamie!’ I shrieked. ‘You are so nuts, Jo. I keep telling you, I can’t stick him.’

  Jo wasn’t the only one who teased me about terrible Jamie Edwards. Lisa and Angela had started up this stupid game too. I was starting to get seriously annoyed with them. I didn’t know what had got into them this year at school. Last year we were the three leaders of nearly all the girls and we had this special club badge with GAB on it, short for ‘Girls Are Best’, and we all called each other Gabby and we had this cheerleader chant I made up: ‘Girls are best, Never mind the rest, Boys are a pest, So Girls are best!’

  Some of the other girls got a bit fed up and drifted away but Lisa and Angela and I kept up our special girls’ gang all the time, and the three of us always went yuck and pulled a face whenever any of the boys spoke to us. I wanted to extend the rules to cover men too, but Lisa said that was daft because her dad was a man and she loved him better than anyone else in the whole world, and Angela was equally awkward and got this immense crush on this pop star and squealed whenever she saw him on the telly and she stuck hundreds of pictures of him all over her bedroom walls and kissed every one of them goodnight when she went to bed and she did inky designs of his name entwined with hers all over her school books and her ruler and her bag and even on the sleeve of her jacket, though her mum got very narked about that.

  Lisa and I thought Angela had gone incredibly crackers because this guy she likes is pathetic. Angela agrees with us now, and she’s torn down all his pictures and crossed out his name and she’s got a new jacket – but she’s in love with another pop group now, all of them, and she’s forever striking up these boring boring boring conversations about what she’d do if she could only get to meet them.

  I knew that if only I’d been able to sit next to Angela at school as I’d planned then I’d have been able to be a good influence on her and keep her under control. She was starting to get on my nerves so much I was wondering about whittling my best friends down to one. But then Lisa fell in love too. And that was worse. Because she started to go crazy over David Wood – and he’s certainly not a famous star in a band, he’s just this ultra-boring boy in our class at school.

  ‘He’s not ultra-boring!’ Lisa squeaked. ‘He’s dead cool. I love the way he does his hair. And his eyes. And he looks really old for his age, doesn’t he, because he’s so tall.’

  ‘He might look old but he acts like a toddler,’ I said, disgusted. ‘Didn’t you see him in the canteen throwing his lunch around?’

  ‘That was just his bit of fun,’ said Lisa. ‘One of his chips landed right in my lap!’

  ‘Oh wow! How could you contain your excitement,’ I said, dead sarcastic.

  ‘She ate it too!’ said Angela. ‘After he’d drooled all over it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind if he drooled all over me,’ said Lisa.

  ‘Oh shut up,’ I said. ‘Honestly. I think you had a lobotomy in the summer holiday.’

  ‘A lobby-what?’ said Lisa.

  ‘It’s an operation they perform on your brain,’ I said. ‘Don’t you know anything?’

  ‘I know one thing, Charlie Enright. You’re getting a right pain, always showing off and looking down your nose at other people. You’re getting just like Jamie Edwards.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe it’s rubbing off on her because they sit together,’ said Angela, giggling in this particularly irritating way. ‘Hey, Lisa – Charlie and Jamie, what a pair, eh?’

  ‘They’re always yacking away together, certainly. Miss Beckworth had to tell them off the other day, they were getting so carried away,’ said Lisa, giving Angela a nudge.

  ‘You’re the one who’s in danger of getting carried away – in a body bag,’ I said, giving them both a simultaneous example of my sort of nudge. I have very very sharp elbows. ‘I hardly ever speak to Jamie Edwards – and when I do it’s just to have a ferocious argument with him.’

  However, I needed to speak to Jamie in a dead-casual, almost-friendly way to find out exactly where he lived in Oxford Terrace. He knew what Jo looked like. We’d both been going to this school since we were practically babies. For years and years our mums had delivered us or collected us. I had noticed that Jamie’s mum was plump and beady-eyed like him, with lots of hair and jazzy jumpers and coloured tights and bright boots, none of them matching. He had probably noticed that Jo was much younger than the other mums, and dyed her hair to match mine and wore high heels to make her just a tiny bit taller.

  It’s awfully hard to strike up a dead-casual, almost-friendly conversation with someone you can’t stick. We’re barely allowed to breathe in Miss Beckworth’s classes anyway, let alone converse. But at playtime I took ages putting away my books and let Lisa and Angela go off by themselves. Jamie always took his time too, not at all keen to go out into the playground. He’s not the outdoor type. He’s hopeless at football and he can’t even run properly, his arms and legs go every which way. He isn’t bullied by the other boys because he can be quite quick and cutting with what he says, but he’s not exactly number one popular person with his peers. (Not like some people I could mention if I wanted to be disgustingly boastful.)

  He generally slopes off into a corner by himself and reads a book. I watched him take one out of his satchel. It was covered in the Victorian wrapping paper so you couldn’t see the title.

  ‘What’s that you’re reading then, Jamie?’ I asked.

  He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Why?’

  ‘I just want to know, for goodness’ sake,’ I said.

  ‘With you it’s usually for badness’ sake,’ said Jamie.

  ‘Let’s have a look, then,’ I said, reaching for it.

  He hesitated, holding it away from me. ‘Are you going to hit me again if I don’t let you?’ he said.

  ‘That was different. That was my book. So what’s yours? Why have you got it all wrapped up like that? Hey, it’s a dirty book, that’s it, isn’t it! Shock, scandal, swotty old Jamie’s r
eading a rude book. And you didn’t want anyone to see you’re reading it. What is it, eh? Show me!’

  ‘Get off!’ said Jamie, trying to push me away, but he was still wary of me. I snatched his book easily and opened it.

  ‘“Esther Waters”,’ I read, flicking through the pages. ‘Oooh! What a swizzle. It’s just some boring boring boring old Victorian book. Typical you, Jamie Edwards. You’re just doing some extra swotting up for your project, aren’t you?’

  ‘The Victorians thought it was a rude book,’ said Jamie. ‘They were ever so shocked when it came out.’

  ‘Well, they were shocked by anything. They were so stupid they even covered up their piano legs! If a woman raised her skirt a few inches above her ankles the chaps practically fainted dead away,’ I said scornfully. ‘So what does this Esther Waters get up to, Jamie? Is she so dead brazen she flashes her kneecaps?’

  ‘Oh, ha ha,’ said Jamie, sighing.

  I saw he had his bookmark more than halfway through.

  ‘Gosh, have you read all that? It looks terribly dull and difficult. You’re mad,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a good story actually,’ said Jamie. ‘It’s about this girl Esther—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘—and she’s a servant and—’

  ‘She’s a servant?’ I said, stopping messing about.

  ‘Yes, and she goes to this big place in the country and this footman chats her up and she doesn’t really want to go out with him but he forces her and she ends up having a baby and she doesn’t know what to do because she’s young and she’s not married and she’s lost her job . . . Why are you staring at me like that?’ said Jamie. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. It just doesn’t sound quite as boring as I thought. Maybe I’ll borrow it after you, OK?’