Lottie Project (10 page)

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.