Shorts

As I storm down the stairs to the basement, my head pounding with furious resentment, I see the usual team of no good God Squaders kneeling in front of the dirty effigy that I think is meant to represent Jesus, but looks more like my sister’s skanky boyfriend after a particularly rough night out. “If you all have to give thanks to God at 5.30am every morning, can you at least do it in silence or better still, somewhere else far away from here?”
“.... Like Mecca,” I add as an afterthought, although I am totally certain my brother isn’t a Muslim and I am pretty sure to enter Mecca you have to be one.
They look at me blankly before my brother gets up off his scabby knees and walks over to me. “You obviously haven’t woken up with God this morning, Dolabella. Why don’t you join in and you may start to see you life in an illuminated and fulfilled way?”

What an idiot. I swear he was less intolerable before he found religion a year and a half ago. Now my brother, Enobarbus, is like a seriously tedious long haul flight without any in-flight entertainment, but this is a flight you have to take daily. Eno used to be quite cool; I actually used to beg him to come and pick me up from school on his motorbike because the popular girls in my class used to fancy him, but since he grew a beard and started to wear his hair in a greasy pony tail, only washing it once a month with an organic bar of coconut soap, and began to wear socks with his ‘rustic’ sandals, I pretend I don’t know him out in public. Sadly for me, it is not like he is the most embarrassing member of my family by any stretch of one’s imagination: my mother, Cleopatra de Cipriadi Marvolo, would happily scoop up that prize. Can you believe that I too am lumbered with that ridiculous surname and all because my jaw-droppingly eccentric mother was adamant that she kept ‘de Cipriadi’ in our family? As if there wasn’t already enough to tease me about at school.

Anyway, back to ‘the present’ and Eno’s god squad, who from the smell of things down in the basement either need a good bath or there is some seriously strong Stilton lurking in one of the corners. Anyway they are all staring at me with bloody bemused expressions, like they can’t understand why I am irritated at being woken up at the crack of dawn! “So, are you going to join us Dolly or not because if you are then there are spare bibles under my bed ñ there are a couple in Finnish if you really want a challenge?”
“So, are you going to join us Dolly or not...” I mimic at him sardonically; I am very aware this is not a mature thing to be doing in front of the opposite sex, but appearing demure and sophisticated infront of Eno’s crappy friends is not something I need to concern myself with. Anybody else might think Eno wasn’t being serious about the Finnish bible, but I know him and I know he is an absolute freak.
“I can only think of one thing more painful than getting on my knees and listening to all you moronic Matthew, Mark, Luke and Johns first thing in the morning and that would be having to do it today, and then again tomorrow.”

With that shockingly mediocre insult I spin around and stalk out of the room, the smiley face on the back of my pyjama bottoms wobbling them all out as I begin to stamp my feet up the stairs. Upstairs, Clown, my youngest brother, has just woken up and, although he is only five years old, is watching a yoga DVD and practising his sun salutations in front of the TV. I can’t wait to leave home. This family needs a live-in psychologist. The brutally honest tell-it-like-it-is type though, rather than the, ‘let’s delve deep into your past and uncover some childhood trauma’ breed that colonise Harley Street and charge £300 per hour to tell you that basically you’re screwed up because let’s face it, isn’t everyone? I know this because my older sister, Octavia, used to be anorexic and the doctor referred her to a psychotherapist based at the bottom of Harley Street, who was renowned for being excellent at aiding recovery. Octavia used to tell us all about what her therapist said over breakfast, ‘My therapist says that the reason I don’t like to eat is because Mummy and Daddy always argue and Mummy shouts at me because I remind her of him’ or, ‘I can’t eat that new potato or that baked bean because my therapist says I don’t have to’ or even, ‘I think I will just go up to bed for the morning because my therapist says that school is hindering my recovery.’
Anyway, we soon realised that what Octavia’s therapist told her and what Octavia told us didn’t exactly match up, but as Octavia said when this subject was broached, ‘if you had bothered to come to the family therapy sessions then I wouldn’t have been able to lie to you all so really it is your fault.’ She did have a point.

However, instead of a psychologist we have Domanica, our live in help from Slovakia. Apparently her name means demon, which suits her quite well as she has glittery black slanting eyes and really pale skin. I think she is dead ugly, but my dad flirts with her the whole time. He is such a cretin; are you allowed to call your own father a cretin? Under normal circumstances probably not, but Antony Marvolo is an exception to every rule in a completely negative sense; I honestly think the only three women he doesn’t flirt with in the entire world are myself, my older sister Octavia, and of course my mother. I don’t know why they aren’t divorced – the only time I have ever seen them touch each other was when we went sky diving as a family and my dad shoved my mother out of the dilapidated plane we jumped out of at 5,000 feet. It wasn’t even that funny – she nearly had a coronary and then threw up for the entire three-hour car journey back into London. Gross.

Back in my room I open my pink PVC curtains, which have a feathery trim. The irony of the pink PVC curtains is that I am not joking. My mother redecorated my room a few years ago as a surprise, and, well she knows I hate pink so I can’t think what came over her. I think she wishes I was one of those glittery, fashion-obsessed teenagers, like her friend Portia’s daughter who wears stilettos and make up to the gym and dresses her miniature poodle in a velvet Gucci jacket. My dog, Sebastian, is a mongrel and I picked him up from Battersea Dogs Home when I went there to do some volunteer work last August. He is lying on his back on my pillow and drooling as he snores. He isn’t the most graceful animal nor is he particularly handsome and certainly not since he got castrated last Friday. Now he has a bloody scar and it keeps winking at me when he rolls over onto his back. I didn’t really have any choice because he got the next-door neighbours pedigree Chinese Crested pregnant and then she had mongrel puppies and Mrs. Wilhelmstein was furious with me. According to her, Princess Marilyn Monroe would have won Crufts next year. Now she can’t even enter because her teats are all manky and distorted, and apparently, according to my friend Simon, whose Great Aunt breeds Chihuahuas for showing, once they pop out puppies they automatically lose points because everything goes a bit droopy, which is what must have happened to my mother.

We are all taken by surprise when Clown announces that it is his sixth birthday today at breakfast. My mother laughs and tells him not to be silly because, “darling, you were only four last year...”
Anyway, as it transpires, I do the maths, and Clown is right, he is six today. Oh dear, to me this is all very reminiscent of that Danny DeVito film of Roald Dahl’s Matilda and surely borders slightly on child neglect. I run upstairs to my room to see if there is anything new I might be able to fob off as a birthday present for Clown, but the only unopened thing I can find is the complete fourth series of Sex And The City and, although I haven’t watched it because that sort of stuff makes me want to kill myself, I don’t think it is going to be appropriate for a six year old, however mature he may be. Re-entering the kitchen empty handed I see that my mother has just presented Clown with a box that looks suspiciously like one of my father’s finest cases of red wine. My father would have a fit if he knew my mother had a second key made for his private wine cellar when he was away last year on an extreme sports weekend in Serbia. Luckily he hasn’t seemed to notice, even though she goes through at least nine bottles every week.

“Now baby,” she is cooing at my brother, “this isn’t for you to drink now, but when you are eighteen you will really enjoy it, so take it up to your room and keep it safe until then...” Last Christmas she forgot to buy any of us presents, but gave Clown a pot of Caviar she found in the back of the fridge as he was the youngest and still believed in Father Christmas, so it is not as if I am surprised, but I do feel quite sad all of a sudden and not because Clown looks upset. In fact, he seems far more interested in picking out every blue peanut M&M from the massive packet in the middle of the kitchen table. Clown goes through a packet a week and each day he eats a different colour: blue on Monday, yellow on Tuesday, red on Wednesday, green on Thursday, orange on Friday, and brown on Saturday. On Sunday mornings he takes himself to McDonald’s because, like he tells us regularly, ‘everybody needs to indulge once in a while.’

I am actually feeling dismal because blue M&Ms mean it is Monday and Monday means double dissection first thing in biology. Dissection wouldn’t be so bad if it worked on an opt-in opt-out policy, but Mr. Prickard is a prick and well, even though I got a doctor’s note saying I should be exempt from dissection classes as they caused me to suffer from mild depression and anxiety, he still forces me to participate. Last week we had to dissect a mouldy catfish, which was rank, especially as I got the side with all the fish roe on and one of the disgusting little balls jumped into my eye when the scalpel slipped out my fingers. I really hate fish, so dissecting a fish doesn’t depress me from an animal rights perspective – just a stomach churning slash vomiting point of view; any other animal, however, is a completely different kettle of fish. As a firm believer in equality for all animals, dissection classes are torturous. Actually, everything about the totally elite London day school I attend is torturous – well, except the Coleslaw Club and Ludo Medici.