Passion Flower - Jean Ure

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a thing!”

      “Mum, everybody reads it,” I said.

      “Does Victoria read it?” said Mum.

      I said, “No, she reads one that’s even worse.” I giggled. “Then we swop!”

      It was a mistake to giggle. Mum immediately thought that I was cheeking her. Plus she’d actually gone and opened the mag and her eye had fallen on a rather cheeky article (ha ha, that is a joke!) about male bums. Shock, horror! Did she think I’d never seen one before???

      “For crying out loud!” Mum glared at the offending article, bug-eyed. Maybe she’d never seen one before… “What is this? Teenage porn?”

      I said, “Mum, it’s just facts of life.”

      “So is sewage,” said Mum.

      Was she saying male bums were sewage? No! She’d flicked over the page and seen something else. Something I’d been really looking forward to reading!

      “This is unbelievable,” said Mum. “Selling this stuff to thirteen-year-old girls! I’m going to have a word with Mr Patel.”

      “Mum! No!” I shrieked.

      I wasn’t worried about Mr Patel, I was worried about Babe. How was I going to learn things if he wasn’t allowed to sell it to me any more?

      “Stephanie, I don’t want this kind of filth in the house,” said Mum. “Do you understand?”

      I sulkily said yes, while thinking to myself that I bet Dad wouldn’t have minded. Mum had just got so crabby.

      “She’s an old cow,” said the Afterthought.

      Mum and the Afterthought were finding it really difficult to get along; they rowed even worse than Mum and me. The Afterthought wanted a kitten. A girl in her class had a cat that was going to have some, and the Afterthought had conceived this passion.

      (Conceived! Ha! What would Mum say to that!) Every day the Afterthought nagged and begged and howled and pleaded; and every day Mum very firmly said no. She said she was sorry, but she had quite enough to cope with without having an animal to look after.

      “Kittens grow into cats, and cats need feeding, cats need injections, cats cost money …I’m sorry, Sam! It’s just not the right moment. Maybe in a few months.”

      “That’ll be too late!” wailed the Afterthought. “All the kittens will be gone!”

      “There’ll be more,” said Mum.

      “Not from Sukey. They won’t be Sukey’s kittens. I want one of Sukey’s! She’s so sweet. Dad would let me!” roared the Afterthought.

      “Very possibly, but your dad doesn’t happen to be here,” said Mum.

      “No! Because you got rid of him! I want my kitten!” bellowed the Afterthought.

      It ended up, as it always did, with Mum losing patience and the Afterthought going off into one of her tantrums. I told Vix that life at home had become impossible. Vix said, “Yes, for me, too! Specially after your mum talked to my mum about teenage filth and now my mum says I’m not to buy that sort of thing any more!” I stared at her, appalled.

      “What right have they got,” I said, “to talk about us behind our backs?”

      The weeks dragged on, with things just going from bad to worse. Mum got crabbier and crabbier. She got specially crabby on days when we had telephone calls from Dad. He rang us, like, about once every two weeks, and the Afterthought always snatched up the phone and grizzled into it.

      “Dad, it’s horrible here! When are you going to get settled?”

      I tried to be a little bit more discreet, because I could see that probably it was a bit irritating for Mum. I mean, she was doing her best. Dad was now living down south, in Brighton. He said that he missed us and would love to have us with him, but he wasn’t quite settled enough; not just yet.

      “Soon, I hope!”

      Triumphantly, the Afterthought relayed this to Mum. “Soon Dad’s going to be settled, and then we can go and live with him!”

      I knew that Mum would never let us, and in any case I wasn’t really sure that I’d want to. Not permanently, I mean. I loved Dad to bits, because he wasn’t ever crabby like Mum, I couldn’t remember Dad telling us off for anything, ever; but I couldn’t imagine actually leaving Mum, no matter how impossible she was being. And she was being. Running off to Vix’s mum like that! Interfering with Vix’s life, as well as mine. I didn’t think she ought to have done that; it could have caused great problems between me and Vix. Fortunately Vix understood that it wasn’t my fault. As she said, “You can’t control how your mum behaves.” But Vix’s mum had been quite put out to discover that her angelic daughter was reading about s.e.x. and gazing at pictures of male bums. It’s what comes of living in a grungy old place way out in the sticks where nothing ever happens and s.e.x. is something you are not supposed to have heard of, let alone think about. Vix agreed with me that in Brighton people probably thought about it all the time, even thirteen-year-old girls, and no one turned a hair.

      I said to Mum, “When I am fourteen,” (which I was going to be quite soon), “can I think about it then?”

      “You can think about it all you like,” said Mum. “I just don’t want you reading about it in trashy magazines. That’s all!”

      It was shortly after my fourteenth birthday that Mum finally went and flipped. I’d been trying ever so hard to make allowances for her. I’d discussed it with Vix and we had agreed that it was probably something to do with her age. Vix said, “Women get really odd when they reach a certain age. How old is your mum?”

      I said, “She’s only thirty-six.” I mean, pretty old, but not actually decrepit.

      “Old enough,” said Vix. “She’s probably getting broody.”

      I said, “Getting what?”

      “Broody. You know?”

      “I thought that was something to do with chickens,” I said.

      “Chickens and women… it makes them desperate.”

      “Desperate for what?”

      “Having babies while they still can.”

      “But she’s had babies!” I said.

      “Doesn’t make any difference,” said Vix. “Don’t worry! She’ll grow out of it.”

      “Yes, but when?’ I wailed.

      “Dunno.” Vix wrinkled her nose. “When she’s about… fifty, maybe?”

      I thought that fifty was a long time to wait for Mum to stop being desperate, but in the meanwhile, in the interests of peaceful living, I would do my best to humour her. I would no longer read nasty magazines full of s.e.x., at any rate, not while I was indoors, and I would no longer nag her for new clothes except when I really, really needed them, and I would make my bed and I would tidy my bedroom and I would help with the washing up, and do all those things that she was always on at me to do. So I did. For an entire whole week. And then she went and flipped! All because I’d been to a party and got home about two seconds later than she’d said. Plus

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