Now she was here, almost ripping my bedroom door off its hinges. The first thing I noticed was the red, angry face. You could’ve seen it on Google Earth. My mum isn’t tall and not really short either, but she has the power of ten men, according to my dad.
‘Tell me what that SLAP-HEADED coward did! Tell me everything!’ Mum yelled as she stood in my bedroom, hands on her hips, her tracksuit soaked in sweat from her Zumba class.
‘Well … um … he fired me.’
‘Why?’ asked Mum.
‘Apparently no one was listening.’
Mum stared out of the window and started chewing her bottom lip. This wasn’t good. This meant she was hatching a plan.
‘RIGHT! It’s clear to me that what you need now is a new hobby. It’s not going to do any good moping around here, Spike. You have to make some new friends,’ Mum declared.
‘I already have friends and don’t want to join any more clubs, Mum,’ I pleaded.
In the vain hope of moving me up the school popularity rankings, my mum had made me join various clubs. Gymnastics, scuba-diving and Air Cadets. I hated them all.
My gymnastics career ended with me crashing into some parents who had the misfortune to be sitting near my high beam. Scuba-diving ended when I dropped an air tank on to the instructor’s foot, breaking not one but several bones. He swore and said a good selection of the words my dad said that night when I learned the story about Tom, the Pirates’ lead singer.
Air Cadets ended after the first meeting at the community centre when Squadron Leader Gary told Mum that many of his cadets went on to join the air force and fly fighter jets.
‘No son of mine is sitting in a rocket with wings, firing bombs at dangerous people, plus his ears play up just flying on holiday to Spain,’ were my mum’s final words.
Now, though, her mind was made up and resistance was futile.
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Sensei Terry has a spare place in his karate class. I’m calling him now to sign you up.’
‘Oh, please don’t—’
‘My mind is made up, Spike. I’m only doing what’s best for you,’ she said. This was one of my mum’s classic catchphrases. Along with:
‘It could kill you stone-cold dead in seconds’: applied to almost anything and everything, from food that is seven minutes past its sell-by date to swimming within an hour of eating a ‘heavy meal’.
‘What would people say?’: again, Mum is constantly worried about what neighbours and friends might say, like when my sister Amber said she wanted to get her ears pierced. This got a record high score of three Mum catchphrases within less than three seconds. ‘You want YOUR EARS PIERCED, AMBER? No way, madam. A dirty, infected needle could kill you stone-cold dead in seconds; what would people say? I’m only doing what’s best for you.’
I could only think of one way of getting out of this. Use my mum’s worry that danger lies round every corner. I think she gets it from working at the hospital.
‘Isn’t karate a bit … dangerous?’ I said, mock-innocently.
But she was wise to me. ‘Sensei Terry is all about avoiding violence,’ she said. ‘He’ll teach you to protect yourself. From murderers and that. Just what you need.’
‘I don’t need protecting from murderers.’
‘You never know,’ she said. ‘Anyway, Holly goes, doesn’t she? So you’ll have a friend there. It’ll be fun.’
‘Fun’. Now there’s a word I’d love to ban. ‘Fun’ is a word parents use to describe something that’s rubbish or boring to try to kid you it isn’t.
No, karate wouldn’t be fun. It would be yet another painful reminder that sport and me hate each other.
These are my two favourite things to do at school:
1. Closing my eyes and imagining what it would be like to throw Martin Harris into a pit of snakes.
The snakes won’t have eaten for a year and will have been told that Martin killed their Snake Dad. Martin Harris is officially my School Enemy Number One. Most of us have a nemesis. Someone who was put on this planet to make your life a misery. You’ve done nothing to them, and leave them alone, but they somehow find you and it’s as if you’ve stolen everything they’ve ever owned. Dad tells me you also get them when you’re a grown-up. The supermarket area manager is his. Though I doubt his nemesis once tried to shove his head down the toilet.
Martin Harris is Mr Perfect. Captain of the school football, rugby, cricket and swim teams. He’s also the son of the headmaster, Mr Harris, who I think created Martin in the science lab.Worse than him constantly trying to ruin my life at school is the fact that Katherine Hamilton (the girl I want to marry) thinks he’s great. This is only because she hasn’t really spent much time with me since primary school, when we used to be friends and play at each other’s houses.
2. Going home.
‘Your school years are the best years of your life, son.’
My dad told me this once, just before I stepped out of his car and into a steaming pile of dog poo, right outside the school gates.
My school is St Brenda’s. Named after one of the lesser-known saints, ‘Brenda’, who, judging from this place, must be the patron saint of boring kids to death. I walk around like I’m invisible. Sure, I’ve got my gang of Artie and Holly, but at St Brenda’s, if you aren’t great at sport, you’re about as cool as a boy caught dancing with his mum at the school disco.
All week, I’d been getting used to living in a world of being sacked. On the TV news I’d seen a football manager being fired, and now I felt an instant bond with him. Luckily for me, my sacking hadn’t involved fans waving big banners saying ‘SACK THE CLOWN’ and ‘YOU SUCK’.
Normally, I looked forward to the weekend and to that one hour on a Saturday when I was king of the hospital radio airwaves. Now all that was waiting for me at the end of the week was the dreaded karate lesson. I had been thinking about Dad’s idea of doing my own show, but two things kept coming up:
1 The sadness of doing it from my dad’s garden shed.
2 Mum never letting it happen due to various worries, like me being mauled by a wandering bear or struck by lightning.
But the reality was that it was possibly the only way I had of doing radio again. Unless the school did launch its own station, in which case I’d be the only one for the job. But I didn’t share Holly’s optimism about that. Headmaster Harris had been promising us a radio station for ages.
Right now, though, I didn’t have the energy to worry about getting back on the radio, because I was heading to my first ever karate lesson. After much initial moaning at Mum’s decision to make me go, I had to admit I was now a bit excited. This was down to two things.
Firstly, Holly had told me that Katherine Hamilton (the girl I was going to marry) would be there. This was the perfect opportunity to finally impress her.
Secondly, I LOVE fight scenes and action movies. I’ve often thought I