Frankie balanced the keyboard on the windowsill. She knocked over one of my china horses, but luckily it didn’t break or I’d have broken her!
I hit the power button and fast-forwarded the tape player to Mama. The second Frankie’s finger hit a key, I knew we were in deepest, darkest Doom-with-a-capital-D. Instead of sounding like a keyboard, it made a buzzing sound, as if twenty thousand bluebottles were trapped in it.
“You haven’t just spilt your lemonade on that, have you?” I asked her.
“No.” She frowned. Then she said, “I did upset a strawberry yogurt over it yesterday…”
“You’re hopeless, Frankie!” Kenny told her.
Frankie tried every note, but they all sounded the same. She had really truly wrecked it. Now what were we going to do?
“We might as well give up,” said Kenny.
She cracked the tab on a can of Coke, took a swig and passed it around. We all had some. Coke often gives me the hiccups, because it’s fizzy. But not this time. Even my hiccups were too depressed to hic. They stayed in my middle, in hiding.
“I want to go to the loo,” said Rosie.
“Tom’s in the bath,” Fliss reminded her.
“I can’t wait. I’m desperate!” Rosie wailed.
“There’s another loo downstairs,” I reminded her. “Through the kitchen and turn right.”
It was the original outside loo that had been built for our old-fashioned house. You had to be tough in those days. If you wanted to go to the loo in winter, you had to grab your wellies and brolly and risk sprouting icicles between leaving the kitchen door and entering the bog.
Good old Dad had put a nice little plastic conservatory roof over it, which meant you couldn’t get wet any more. Mum hated it because horrid, slimy moss grew on it - the roof, not the loo - and she had to climb on a chair to scrub it off with a brush.
“Come with me, someone, in case I get lost,” Rosie said.
“I’ll come. I want to go, too,” said Frankie.
Off they went, and while they were gone, Kenny, Fliss and I leafed through Girl Power, our Spice Girls book, to see if anything about our costumes needed changing.
By now, I’d got so hot that I’d taken Stu’s leather jacket off. I slung it on the bed but it fell on the floor and guess what? It went right to the spot where the cake had got squashed. Isn’t that typical? I told you what I thought about us being grot magnets! I’d just have to wipe it down before I sneaked it back on the coat hook in the hall.
“You know what?” I said to Fliss. “I reckon I could make myself a top out of the spare bits of bin-liner. I kicked them under my bed.”
I knelt down to look at them. My knees got all wet from the spilt lemonade. I pulled the bits of bin-bag out. Then I remembered the scissors were in the bathroom.
And so was Tom! Now we could get our own back on him.
I beckoned to the others and we lined up by the bathroom door, trying not to giggle.
“One, two, three,” I whispered. Then I yelled, “Charge!” and we burst the door open and galloped in.
Rats! He’d gone. Only a scummy line round the bath and a steamed-up mirror told us he’d ever been in there at all.
I got the scissors, laid the bin-liner on the floor and started to cut.
“That’s funny,” I said. “It’s only plastic. It should be easier to cut than this.”
Kenny had gone a funny shade. Sort of pale, with her eyes all bulgy as if she’d seen something nasty. “Er, Lyndz…” she said.
“What?” I frowned at her, wondering why she was looking at me like that. Had someone - The Goblin, perhaps - just turned me into a toad without me knowing anything about it?
I snatched up the piece of black plastic I’d been cutting. I realised what had gone wrong when my stripy cotton rug came up with it. I’d managed to cut through that as well.
“Mum’s going to murder me!” I said, my face going as pale with horror as Kenny’s.
“If you put some things on it, maybe she won’t notice,” Fliss said.
There normally were loads of things on my carpet, like books and shoes. Fliss was right. I started to breathe normally again.
There was a knock on my door. “Reggie-Veggie!” said Frankie’s voice. It was our password for the night. We always had one, for every sleepover, to keep out people we didn’t want to come in.
“Enter, Friend!” I said.
Frankie and Rosie were looking really pleased with themselves.
“I think I’ve solved all our problems!” Frankie said.
I don’t know about you, but when someone says they’ve solved all my problems, I expect them to have come up with something really good. Instead, Frankie and Rosie stood in the doorway arguing.
“It was me who heard it first!” Rosie said, looking indignantly at Frankie.
“Heard what?” I asked, shooting Fliss and Kenny a look which said quite plainly that these two had left their brains behind in the outside bog.
“We were passing the door of the babies’ room when we heard it,” Rosie went on.
She meant the room where my two little brothers, four-year-old Ben and baby Spike, sleep. It’s on a kind of half landing, between the ground floor and the floor where my bedroom is.
“It was in tune with the album. We could still hear the song as we went downstairs. Couldn’t we, Rosie?” Frankie said.
“I haven’t a clue what you mean,” I said.
“A musical instrument. As in bong-plink,” said Frankie, giving me a pitying look.
Bong-plink? I couldn’t think of anything that went bong-plink, unless it was her keyboard being thrown out of the window.
We all went down to listen, but we couldn’t hear a thing. The babies slept with their door ajar. I went in. Ben had fallen asleep with his xylophone on the bed next to him and the stick to bong it with still in his hand.
I gently slipped it out of his fingers while Frankie picked up the xylophone. We all tiptoed away.
Back in my room, Frankie hit a few bongs and plinks and began to sing - or rather, groan - Mama.
“We can’t use this!” I cried. “It’s a baby’s instrument. Everyone would laugh. The M&Ms would wet themselves!”
Everyone except Frankie agreed with me. She continued to play it. We all joined in singing. Suddenly, I saw the funny side and started laughing. That set everyone else off, until we were rolling about on the bed and on the floor, kicking our legs in the air and shrieking helplessly.
Next moment, there was a thunderous knocking on my door. We all held our breath, trying to stop laughing. It was Mum. She came in, looking very cross. Some extremely loud wailing was coming from somewhere behind her.
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