Ollie Wright
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An extract from DANNY LAMBERT TELLS ALL - A novel for Teenagers
Sunday 12th - 1.15am
I really hope Princess Anne shut all her windows tonight. She only lives a few miles away, and I’m worried that the wind might’ve carried my unfortunate midnight mini-meltdown straight over the common and right into her big house. If this is the case, I hope she wasn’t holding anything expensive at the time. This isn’t a boast or anything, but I really let rip with the rudies during the incident. I didn’t know my mouth was capable of producing such words. Some of them are probably illegal for a 14yr old boy such as myself to utter. But in my defence I’ve been very stressed lately and it was the chuffing cows finally drove me over the edge.
I shall explain, dear diary-thief. Things haven’t been particular splendid in Lambertland. My older brother Matty has been held hostage in a super grim rehabilitation lodge for the last six months, ever since a stroke snuck up on him one afternoon at work, stealing the whole left side of his body from under his nose and leaving him in a miserable life tangle at the age of merely twenty-seven. (Countless doctors have told us how massively uncommon it is for someone so young to suffer such a thing, and they’ve all said it with the same slightly excited boffin expression, as if the rareness of it is something to be a bit chuffed about.)
My Dad – from here on known as Rev – is a vicar and he’s started smoking again. He reckons none of us know that he’s taken up the filthsticks again, after a successful fifteen year healthy hiatus, but I can certainly see through the old just going for a walk to clear my head ploy. Plus, he honks like a tobacconist’s cat when he comes back in.
With these two things combined my Mum is currently a bit twitchy and stropulistic and her usually soothing soft tones have recently been replaced by a more serious voice, like a newsreader with really really bad news to relay sort of voice. Every time she speaks the theme from Panorama plays in my mind. Weird.
And if all this wasn’t craparse enough to be going on with, there are incidental miseries floating around. I’m a bit of an insomniac at the moment, which is no fun at all. The village’s broadband has died once again - at least a month to fix it this time – so I can’t distract myself with the online billiards game that I treasure and adore. And despite promises from one and all that my body would start to fill out about this time I’m still built like a pipe cleaner and I don’t know who to complain to about it.
Anyway earlier on this evening, as I was preparing for a German monologue I’m supposed to deliver for Miss Allen tomorrow, my mind was suddenly invaded by all the nastiness I have just listed. I was trying so hard to push through it and concentrate, pacing up and down rather manically wearing nothing but my undercrackers. (The vicarage has under-floor heating and it’s gone a bit wacky and won’t turn off properly. It’s boiling us alive.)
I wasn’t doing too badly until the cows started with all that mooing business. There are a lot of cows in Minchbury. They wander free from the common around this time of year, taking troublemaking trips into the village centre. They enjoy noshing from window boxes and doing their flat shatners on people’s doorsteps. And now they’ve even started scaring old people for fun. I know this because my Mum sleeps over at The Cedars rest home one night a week - just in case they need an extra person in an emergency - and the cows have started gurning through the windows late at night and troubling the residents. These are proper ASBO cows I’m talking about. Mooligans, each and every one of them.
So late night cattle chatter is not an uncommon sound around these parts, and I normally find it quite comforting. But tonight there was one strange, weirdly non-mooish moo that stuck out and started me on my funny turn. It was half squeak and half honk, like a foghorn playing a kazoo. There more I heard it the more it made me angry. Just that one off note sent me into a huge freak out and before I knew it I’d bitten into my bottom lip so hard that it sprang a stringy little leak. Strange, I know.