Don't tell mum: Part 1

There have been notes passed round food technology all week. We have been collecting ice cream and don’t tell mums for a month. It is the most exciting thing to have happened to us to date. We will have the house to ourselves because my dad will be at the pub. We hope my brother, Sam, won’t be in.

We have unspoken plans, all of them grand, all of them brilliant, all of them featuring ice cream and don’t tell mums. We are young enough that these things are enough to build a night around.

El and Karen arrive at six o’clock, after tea. El’s dad, Harry, drives them over. He has an allotment and an overflow of vegetables that he wants to bond with my dad over. El’s dad is childlike and enthusiastic and makes my good natured dad seem stern in comparison. Sometimes my dad defaults to this sternness; his voice becomes gruff in supermarkets, when talking about my mum and when a parent of my friend, usually El’s dad, attempts to move their acquaintance onto something more meaningful.

I smile at Harry as he says hello Chelly baby. He squeezes El’s ear and she winces, smiling, 'Dad,' Harry’s eyes shine with love. My dad stays where he is by the aga, looking at the floor. His faded pale jeans are marked at the knees, his brown hair curly and wild, like mine will be when I finally stop blowdrying it straight. We all wait for Harry to go, my dad so he can get ready for the pub, us so we can get started on our stash.

The stash almost always comes from me. My mum has a habit of leaving cigarettes around and the ouzo is a coup from a recent holiday to Greece. I never return empty handed from countries with lax drinking laws. Finally, Harry’s pristine family estate car pulls out of the drive and we run, giggling like the little girls we almost still are to my bedroom.

My bedroom is a lacking a carpet at this time. The farm tends to flood and dad thinks it a waste to put a carpet down. It is one of my greatest wishes in life to have a carpet. There is a gap between the black floor and the wallpaper where a skirting board ought to be, where a skirting board will eventually tuck a neat blue carpet into the walls, but the carpet isn’t here yet.

Instead there is a shiny black floor which we have painted with tippex and poster paints: CF loves ML, EH loves ML, KA loves ML. It is a time in our lives when we all love the same boy and there is no problem with that. Some of the tippex scribbles are dotted with brown. This is blood from where we cut our fingers with my dad’s Stanley knife. As far as we are aware this is nothing to do with angst. We have not heard of self harm. We are just bored.

The pipes knock as hot water rushes through them. The radio in the kitchen chatters on as we sit on my gold asylumesque bunk beds and look at our stash. Karen and El are already starting to shiver and I am thinking as soon as dad is finished in the bathroom I will bring the gas heater in here. I tell them my plan. 'It’s going to be fine,' I say, 'we’ll only be cold for an hour or so. Let’s have a bit of this to warm us up.' I love saying things like this; it is like I’m the boss or the adult, the one with all the ideas. We pass the ouzo around, gasping.

This is the first time Karen and El have got drunk. I am old hat at it by now. I’ve also had two drags of a spliff, one blowback and have got off with three boys. I am still at an age where I am aware of the things I have done that I shouldn’t have. Karen and El haven’t yet got off with anyone. All this is going to change tonight but we don’t know that yet.

Me and El watch Karen closely to make sure she is taking a sizable gulp. It would be typical of her not to. She doesn’t take cigarette smoke down either.
'That’s not a proper swig!' El exclaims and Karen takes another little sip. It is important not to let this sort of thing slide.

As ever, the dynamic of three isn’t completely successful, but as threes go we are a pretty good one. El is the link that keeps us together. Karen is El's friend from primary school. Karen lives with her dad and brother in a house full of books that always smells of garlic. These days, I would call it bohemian but then I just thought it was a mess. I was grateful for Karen’s house because it bridged the gap between the houses of most of my friends and my dad’s.

We sit and talk about what we’re going to do later. I suggest hedge hopping. This is something that I have taken to doing with my older friends. It entails dressing up in black clothes and travelling across the village from garden to garden. It also entails stealth, decision making, i.e. can we get over that fence, is there likely to be a dog, does one of our teachers from school live there, and builds camaraderie. It is one step up from cherry knocking and one step down from police baiting. There’s nothing more friendship building than legging it together.

Karen and El are now putting on their black clothes over their normal clothes to keep warm. I am embarrassed by this but don’t intervene as there’s nothing I can do while my dad’s still in the bath. One of us has brought a balaclava and this is the most exciting thing we have experienced in the last hour. We take it in turns to put it on and creep round the room burglar stylee. We make names up for ourselves, they are unoriginal but we don’t mind. Burglar Bill, Burglar Bob, Burglar Biff.

Showing off, I say we should have a don’t tell mum out the window. It is very important to my dad that me and my brother do not smoke. In the last few years he has given up but my mum is still addicted. Before mum and dad split up they promised my brother and me that if we didn’t smoke by the time we were 21 we would get a thousand pounds. My brother has already lost out. I still have one sneaky eye on the prize.

It is hard to see anything in my bedroom because of a blue lightbulb that I insist on having. I wanted a red one but dad drew the line for reasons I didn’t understand. I let him win the argument because of his general lack of law laying down. It’s good to let your parents win sometimes. It’s like having money in the bank.

We’re just about to light the cigarette when we hear the water chug out of the bath. 'Later,' I tell them. I know the drill. It is only five minutes between the plug being drawn and there being a knock on my bedroom door.
'Chelbo?'
'Hello.' I say, opening my door an inch. Although there is nothing to hide at the moment I want my dad to get used to this kind of behaviour, I have an idea that it will be useful in years to come.
'I’m going to the Woodys,' he says, meaning the Woodlands Pub. And I say okay. He says 'Be good' in his gruff voice and I grin like I am good. Duh. He goes out.

First things first. We light the don’t tell mum. Simultaneously I light a jos stick, marijuana scented, natch, because I am an evil genius. We take it in turns to take a drag then inhale the jos stick smoke, desperate, as ever, to get into some kind of altered state. There is only half of one of the little bottles of ouzo left and I decide we should save it for a while. I know the power of alcohol and I don’t want to lose these two before things have begun.

I put a tape on, the lyrics to which are, 'I want to be a hippy and I want to get stoned on mari-marijauna. I want to meet a runaway guy to leave home for mari-marijuana.' They are the lyrics we sing anyway. We wonder what a runaway guy is and think we must have the lyrics wrong but we have no way of checking. We have never seen a laptop; we do not know what googling is. I turn the tape over and play it again, feeling sick from all the ice cream and nicotine but not letting that get in the way of my ravey dancing. The three of us are jumping up and down with our hands in the air wearing our burglar outfits when there is a knock on the door.

I wave the jos stick ferociously, scared it is my dad then hear my brother’s voice.
'Smell?'
Karen and El gasp, start pulling off their burglar outfits. My brother is in year eleven and has an undercut that impresses them. I leave my balaclava on to answer the door.
'Yes?' I say, channeling Geoffrey from the Fresh Prince.
'Have you got any booze?' he says, all business.
'We’ve drank it all.'
'What the fuck have you got on your head?'

I close the door and Sam goes back to the kitchen. The three of us sit on my bunk bed. Delirium has been swapped for something else that we’re not sure of, something that may well be bigger than us and more threatening than we’re used to.

Karen and El start to shiver again. I turn the tape off and open my bedroom door, trying to work out who is in there with my brother. Then the kitchen door opens and I push the door shut, try and find a tape that Sam and his friends won’t take the piss out of. Aha, Vibealite.