LITMIR.BIZ

      “I was six,” she says, if ever I chance, just casually, to bring it into the conversation. Which I only do if I feel for some reason she needs putting in her place.

      When she is in a really huffy mood she will waspishly remind me that I didn’t get chosen to be anything at all, let alone an angel, which you would have thought I might have done, having fair hair and blue eyes and looking, if I may say so, far more angelic than Saffy. In my opinion, she would have been better cast as a sheep. (Then she wouldn’t have had a nightie to trip over, ha ha!)

      The only reason I didn’t get chosen was that I caught chicken pox. If I hadn’t had chicken pox, I bet I’d have been an angel all right! And I bet I wouldn’t have tripped over my nightie and forgotten my line, either. Saffy has absolutely no right to crow. It is hardly a person’s fault if a person gets struck down by illness.

      I have said this to her many times, but all she says in reply is, “You picked yourself.”

      What she means is, I scratched my spots. She says that is why I wasn’t chosen.

      “It was a nativity play, not a horror show!”

      It’s true I did make a bit of a mess of myself. Petal, who had chicken pox at the same time as me, didn’t even scrape off one tiny little crust. Even at the age of eight, Petal obviously knew the value of a smooth, unblemished skin. But it is all vanity! What do I care? In any case, as Saffy always hastens to assure me – feeling guilty, no doubt, at her cruel jibe – “It hardly shows at all these days. Honestly! Just one little dent in the middle of your chin… it’s really cute!”

      Huh! It doesn’t alter the fact that she had her chance as an angel and she muffed it. It is no use getting ratty with me! What I didn’t understand was why she should want to go to acting classes, all of a sudden.

      I put this to her, and earnestly Saffy explained it wasn’t so much the acting she was interested in, though she reckoned by now she could manage to say the odd line or two without bursting into tears. What it was, she said, was boys.

      “Ah,” I said. “Aha!”

      “Precisely,” said Saffy.

      She giggled, and so did I.

      “You think it would be a good way to meet them?”

      “I do,” said Saffy.

      In that case, I was all for it! Meeting boys, in that second term of Year 7, had become very important, not to say crucial. We had to meet boys! There were lots of boys in our class at school, of course, but we had already met them. We met them every day, and we didn’t think much of them. Well, I mean! Kevin Williams and Nathan Corrie. Pur-lease! Not that they were all primeval swamp creatures, but even those that hadn’t crawled out of the mud seemed to come from distant planets. Trying to suss them out was like trying to fathom the workings of an alien mind. Were they plant life? Or were they animal? They probably thought the same about us. But you have to get to grips with them sooner or later because otherwise, for goodness’ sake, the human race would just die out!

      I didn’t say this to Saffy, knowing her sensitivity on certain subjects, eg, the rabbit’s reproductive system. I just agreed with her that meeting boys was an essential part of our education, and one which at the moment was being sadly neglected.

      “I don’t know how Petal got going,” I said. “She just seemed to do it automatically.”

      Saffy said that Petal was a natural.

      “People like you and me have to work at it.”

      “And you honestly truly think,” I said, “that drama school would be a good place to start?”

      Saffy said yes, it would be brilliant! She sounded really keen. At drama school, she said, we would meet boys who were creative and sensitive, and gorgeous with it. All the things that the swamp creatures weren’t. It’s true! You look at a boy like Nathan Corrie and you think, “Is this life as we know it?”