3
The Lesser Spotted Pizza Fish
After Miss Franks had given us our detentions and spent a further five minutes repeating herself ‘for the benefit of latecomers’, we all settled down to concentrate on sketching fish. She had projected a huge image of a fish on to the whiteboard for those of us who had forgotten to bring in a picture of their own (yours truly and I hope a few others).
‘It’s a crimson spotted rainbow fish,’ she said. ‘But you don’t have to draw it exactly. Just use it for inspiration.’
‘When is a crimson spotted rainbow fish not a crimson spotted rainbow fish?’ I said to Ang, who had already started to draw.
‘Dunno,’ he said. I could tell he wasn’t really listening.
‘When it is not spotted, not crimson and looks… Ang, are you even listening to me?’
‘Huh?’ he grunted. He was already engrossed in his sketch.
I hated that. I’d come within an inch of my life and all Ang could think about was drawing. I tried again.
‘What do you call a fish with a...’
‘Philip Wright!’ Miss Franks said. ‘Need I remind you that you are already in trouble? No talking.’
And of course once I was told to be quiet I could think of about a hundred jokes with fish in them. Don’t you just hate it when you get a brilliant idea and can’t do anything about it? I had all these ideas for jokes but I couldn’t get trying them out.
I closed my eyes and tried to store the jokes in my memory banks and then got on with the job of fish sketching, which is harder than you’d think (sketching not remembering – I’m good at that). I like art but if I’m honest with you, I’m no Leonardo Da Vinci. Still, I like it all the same. What’s not to like? You don’t have to write anything, you don’t have to read anything (well, hardly ever) and your mum doesn’t yell at you when you do badly. Still, it’s hard sketching fish when you are hopeless at sketching and you couldn’t care less about fish. I looked over to see what Ang was doing. He’s brilliant at art. Maybe I’d get some ideas from him. Don’t think of this as copying. Honestly, even if I tried to copy his work exactly it would look absolutely nothing like whatever he had drawn. Once I copied a picture of some fruit in a bowl that he had drawn. His picture was amazing. The fruit looked so real and ripe, like you could just reach out and pick it up. He burst out laughing when he saw my ‘copy’ and said it looked like a melted clown’s face (like he’s ever seen a melted clown). I prefer to think that the fruit looked like it had been vigorously boiled for several days and had just gone a bit runny. Ang mocks my art all the time. It’s one of his favourite pastimes. He picks up my work, has a good laugh, and tries to guess what it is. It’s a good job I have a sense of humour.
I’ve tried pretending my awful art is deliberate. That I am some kind of mad artist who sees things other people don’t, like Picasso or Frida Kahlo. Frida Kahlo is this dead Mexican artist the teacher is always going on about. She painted loads of weird pictures of herself and she had just one huge eyebrow which stretched right across both her eyes like a great big slug, which you have to admit is pretty weird. Especially since all the females I know are obsessed with hair; either growing more of it, or getting rid of it. The girls in my class don’t even want to go swimming in case it fuzzes up their hair. Imagine preferring to write an essay on Tudor England to having a splash. Girls are weird. And they don’t grow out it. Mum is always tweezing and plucking and moaning to her friend Susie about her superfluous hair. I checked superfluous in the dictionary when I heard them. It said irrelevant, uncalled for. Well, my mum is always holed up in the bathroom doing battle with her irrelevant hair. Which is ironic really because while she’s in there ridding herself of the stuff I’m in my room checking on how my irrelevant armpit hair is coming along. Crikey, I’d done it again: gone off task. Teachers say I do that a lot. Fish: Must Sketch Fish.
In the end, I actually managed to finish my picture without Ang’s help, which is pretty amazing for me. Not bad, I said to myself and stepped back to admire my masterpiece.
‘Looks like a hairy pizza made by a blind, drunk pizza chef,’ Ang said.
‘Hilarious,’ I said. ‘This town isn’t big enough for two comedians. Give it up.’
Then The Goddess Lucy came over for a sneer. God, she is beautiful when she sneers. She didn’t say anything, she just stood there staring and sneering and making occasional giggling sounds. I pushed my glasses up onto my nose (Mum says I do that when I’m nervous) and opened my mouth to speak to her and the weirdest thing happened. I moved my lips. Nothing happened. Not one sound came out. I tried again. Nothing. I was trapped in a silent movie! Lucy looked at me like I was a freak who was mouthing obscenities and walked off to join the bunch of girls who had congregated around Ang. They were all gasping at how great his drawing was and telling him what a genius he was. It just goes to show you that girls appreciate talent. Ang says it’s his Hispanic charm and Mediterranean good looks and that talent has nothing to do with it, but I’m not convinced. I bet if I had a talent girls would be around me. I bet even The Goddess would take an interest... Maybe I should take up the drums. Drummers get girls all the time.
‘Interesting,’ Miss Franks said coming round to examine my work. ‘What were you thinking about when you were drawing it?’
‘Um, fish,’ I said.
What else? Honestly, I like Miss Franks but sometimes, I wonder about her. Still I shouldn’t complain. She never shouts or makes us learn anything and hardly ever gives homework and even when you’ve drawn a fish that ends up looking like a badly made pizza she smiles and says something encouraging like ‘interesting’. Mum says interesting is a euphemism. Then she insists on telling me that euphemisms are like code words that mean something less pleasant. So interesting she very kindly tells me, is code for rubbish. Mums can be cruel. She laughed when she said this and I pretended to be hurt but I reckon she’s right because Miss Franks is always saying ‘interesting’ about my work and I know for a fact I can’t draw. Meanwhile she tells Arty Ang things like splendid, brilliant, fantastic. These words are not euphemisms.
Euphemism is one of my Mum’s favourite words. She is always using words like euphemism and habitual and scatological (which interestingly has something to do with poo). I really wish Mum wouldn’t do this because then I end up using these words too and sounding like a know-it-all prat. At least that’s what The Yeti tells me. Mum says this is because his vocabulary is limited and he is threatened, and also that he has weight issues and that really I should pity him. Honestly, sometimes Mum hasn’t got a clue. You try pitying someone who is twice your size, has his big fat sausage fingers wrapped round your neck and is shaking your lunch money from your pockets. And then you get a detention for being late to class. Pity won’t be top of your list of priorities, I can tell you.
Just like today. I got detention again. Trouble is, The Yeti habitually mugs me on Thursdays on my way to Art. So I end up annoying the nice art teacher, having no lunch and having to stay for detention. And the school always informs Mum because that is ‘policy’, and I am running out of lame excuses for why I am always late and getting Thursday detentions. I’ve told her it’s because we have PE just before Art and that I sometimes lose my socks or put my underpants on inside out and then have to take them off and put them on the right way round, but I’m running out of ideas.
4
Angels and Saints and The Royal Family
I promised I’d tell you about Ang’s name, didn’t I? Well, wait for it: it is Angel. Seriously. Angel. And to make matters worse, it’s pronounced Ahng-hell. What kind of parents call their child Ahng-hell? I asked him when he first told me.
‘Spanish ones,’ he said. ‘My Dad’s name is Angel too. I’m named after him.’
‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘What’s your mum called, Saint?’
‘Encarnacion,’ he said.
I thought that was a weird name too but I didn’t say so because, at the time, I hardly knew Ang. He’d just moved into our street and I was trying to be friendly, partly because my Mum told me to and partly because I needed someone to play football with. It was during the summer holidays and everybody I knew was away and I was bored out of my brains kicking a football against the garage wall. Mum was fed up with it too. She said the constant thudding was driving her doolally. I told her that there is an actual place called Doolally where soldiers went nuts after being released from the horrors of fighting a war and that she shouldn’t mock, and Mum said that if I released her from this torture and went and made friends with the new boy she would buy me a new Harry Hill DVD. Bribery and corruption, don’t you just love it? Naturally I agreed.
‘Ahng-hell. That’s rough,’ I said to Angel. ‘And I thought I was bad with Philip Charles William.’
‘What’s wrong with Philip, Charles and William?’ Ang asked.
‘Individually, nothing. But strung together it makes it look like my mum has a thing about the royal family. Which she doesn’t by the way, it’s just an unfortunate coincidence.’
‘Or so she says,’ Ang said and did a kind of smirk that I didn’t like one bit.
‘Hey! Don’t push your parental problems on to me,’ I said, thinking I’d only just met this guy and there he was smirking at my family. ‘Your parents are the ones who fancy themselves as heavenly bodies.’
‘And yours as royalty,’ Ang said sounding genuinely annoyed.
Boy! this Ahng-hell business really bugged him. And then just to prove it he punched me. And then I punched him back and before you could say ahng-hells and saints and the royal family, we were having an all out fist fight. Nice way to welcome a new neighbour, don’t you think?
We were best friends after that. I got a bloody nose and Ang got a black eye which I was kind of jealous of because a bloody nose isn’t that dramatic once the blood’s been cleaned up. Whereas a black eye - that has mileage. For days everyone kept asking Ang about his black eye and giving him loads of sympathy and attention. It wasn’t fair because I’d given him the black eye yet he was the one getting all the glory.
After that, we set about solving the Ahng-hell problem. We were both starting the same secondary school that September and he said he couldn’t take anymore ‘where are your wings’ jokes. He’d had to put up with a lot of that in primary school apparently, and I have to confess it was the first thing I thought of saying to him when he told me his name. Good job I didn’t.
First of all, he tried changing his name to Brian. We tried it out for a few days but every time I called him Brian he just ignored me because he couldn’t remember that he was actually Brian. That’s when we realised it would have to be something closer to his real name.
‘What about Angus,’ I suggested. I’ve always liked the name Angus.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Angel said. ‘Isn’t that the name of a cow?
‘That’s Aberdeen Angus. Different thing altogether,’ I said, thinking this Angus thing could really work.
‘I don’t like it,’ Angel said. ‘It’s too cowy.’
‘You could shorten it,’ I said hopefully, ‘to Ang’.
Angel looked at me like I was a total dunce, slapped his forehead and said, ‘Du-uh! I could shorten my own name to Ang.’
‘Well, why don’t you?’ I said annoyed that he didn’t like my Angus idea. And that he thought I was stupid.
‘Well, I will,’ he said.
‘Well do then,’ I said.
‘Watch me,’ he said and stomped off to find his parents.
His mum didn’t like the idea. She said it sounded like a Chinese name and said she couldn’t see why a Chinese sounding name was any better than a Spanish sounding one.
‘Because Ang doesn’t mean anything,’ Ang said in a slow voice that sounded like he was explaining 2 plus 2 to a toddler. Bad move. His mum started shouting at him in very rapid Spanish. It sounded like a machine gun going off. She could definitely win the world speed talking championships. I decided there and then that I was not going to take Spanish as my language option when I got to secondary school because I could never ever speak that quickly.
It wasn’t long before Ang had joined in the Spanish speed talking display and was rattling away with his mum. Then his dad came in to the room and joined in and the whole thing started to sound worryingly like a great bit fight. I started to squirm. They seemed to have forgotten I was there. It is at times like this that a teleport would really come in handy. NASA should divert some funding away from Mars explorations into developing a teleport. That way you could just dematerialise yourself out of awkward situations. I didn’t have a teleport so I had to just stand there and squirm but I learnt something of interest that day: family fights sound the same in all languages. Obviously, I had no idea what they were saying. The only word I could make out was Ahng-hell which they were over using, in my opinion. Ang’s dad kept making this rasping sound at the back of his throat like he was going to choke and throwing his arms up in the air as if to say kill me, I am ready to die. Which was impressive, if a bit melodramatic. I mean, come on! Ang is not a million miles away from Angel. It’s practically the same. Just then they all stopped yelling and looked at me. That was when I realised I’d said that last bit out loud. Beam me up NASA. There was a long silence, then Ang’s mum said ‘si’ which even I knew meant yes in Spanish, and they all turned to each other and had a great big hug, which was even more embarrassing than the fight. I coughed loudly, just to remind them that I was still in the room, and Ang’s dad reached out his great big Spanish arms and pulled me into the group hug which was ten hundred times more embarrassing. Excruciatingly embarrassing. Agonisingly, mortifyingly, unbearably embarrassing... I can’t think of any more words to describe the experience so I’m going to stop. After The Hug they started talking in English again. I was sworn to secrecy about Ang’s proper name, which was cool because I love conspiracies. Later, his mum wrote to the school telling them that he was known as Ang and that while the name Angel may well appear on official documents like his birth certificate, on no account was he to be called anything other than Ang. And that was that. Problem solved.
Later Ang revealed to me other dark family secrets. He has an uncle named Jose Maria and another called Jesus. I kid you not. Jesus and Mary! The Spanish obviously have a very strong sense of humour. Even their language is funny. Ang says there is actually a word hablaba in Spanish which means to talk. bla bla. Hilarious. I might have a future as a comedian in Spain. Maybe I should rethink my language options.
I asked Mum why Spanish people inflict women’s and holy names on boys and she said it wasn’t just the Spanish.
‘Have you forgotten about great uncle Enda in Dublin?’ she said.
‘Oh yeah,’ I said slowly. I had forgotten all about him.
I told Ang about uncle Enda and he was over the moon. He said now we were even, as we both had skeletons in our family cupboards. I said my great uncle Enda was still alive and kicking but he didn’t get the joke. He was too busy saying, ‘Enda, are you serious, Enda?’
