Rebecca Rocks Read online

  Anyway, I won’t have much time to laze around like this next week because I will be rocking at the rock camp all day, so I am enjoying it while I can. And tomorrow I am getting my hair cut. I am a bit nervous but I have a good feeling about it. I flicked over some of my hair in front of my forehead to make it look like a fringe today and I think it really suited me. And that was just a fake fringe! Surely a real one will be even better.

  I have a fringe! And it is all sleek and flat and I love it! I look like a whole new glamorous person. I was a bit nervous in the hairdresser’s this morning when she started chopping off the front of my hair and I could see long locks of it falling on my lap, but she spent ages trimming and shaping and spraying and drying it and when it was all finished I just stared at my reflection in amazement.

  ‘Do you like it?’ said the hairdresser, whose name was Cliona.

  ‘I love it!’ I said. And I did. I can’t remember when I’d ever actually felt so pleased after getting my hair cut. Usually I’m just relieved it hasn’t all gone horribly wrong. I met Cass, Alice and Jane afterwards, and Cass had to eat her words.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ she said. ‘You were right. It does look good. Cliona has worked her magic.’

  ‘You look kind of French,’ said Alice, ‘which is a good thing. Like you should be scooting around Paris on a moped.’

  ‘Welcome to the world of fringes,’ said Jane, who has always had a nice, well-behaved fringe.

  ‘I’m starting to feel left out,’ said Alice. ‘Maybe I should get one too?’

  ‘Then we really would look like we had band hair,’ said Cass.

  ‘True,’ said Alice. ‘Okay, I won’t.’

  Alice has trouble-free hair anyway, thanks to her mum, who has blonde shiny locks which Alice has inherited. Both she and Jane always look very well put together, unlike me. I always seem to be a tiny bit scruffy. But not anymore! Now I have my French Girl Fringe. Even Rachel admitted it looked good when I got home.

  ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘That really suits you.’

  ‘You don’t have to sound so surprised,’ I said.

  ‘God, can’t you take a compliment gracefully?’ she said, and stomped off. But she’s just in a bad mood because her saintly boyfriend Tom is going on holiday with his parents tomorrow. Even Mum making a delicious casserole for dinner didn’t cheer her up.

  OH MY GOD. Something terrible has happened. I went out to Alice’s house for a band practice today (which went very well, not that it matters now because I will never be leaving the house again, so I suppose the band is over). When Cass and I were waiting for the bus to get home, it started to rain, and we got totally soaked. Like, all my clothes were wet right down to my underwear, which is pretty revolting. Anyway, I squelched home from my bus stop in my sopping Converse and changed into my pyjamas and towelled off my hair. My hair was almost dry, and I was starting to feel normal again when I went to the loo and caught sight of myself in the mirror over the sink.

  I was so horrified I actually shrieked, and my mum came running upstairs to see what was wrong.

  ‘Look at my hair!’ I cried.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Rebecca, don’t scream like that,’ said Mum. ‘I thought you’d had a terrible accident.’

  ‘But look at it!’ I said. I couldn’t believe it. Basically, it turns out that the only thing that was keeping my fringe all flat and shiny was all the blow-drying and styling products from the hairdresser’s yesterday. Now it has gone back to its natural state, and it is just like my childhood fringe! Except I think it’s actually worse because my hair seems to have got much thicker since then!

  ‘It’s just a bit … fluffy,’ said Mum.

  ‘It’s bushy!’ I said. ‘It’s like a bushy mop!’ My hair has always had bushy-mop tendencies, of course, but at least when it’s long the weight of the hair keeps it fairly flat. But now the fringe was just sticking out wildly. I didn’t look like a cool French girl anymore. I looked like someone out of a 1980s film with giant pouffy hair.

  And then, of course, Rachel came in and started laughing.

  ‘Wow, the eighties revival has started in this house,’ she said. ‘That’s some big hair.’

  ‘Shut up!’ I said. ‘It went funny in the rain.’

  ‘It certainly did,’ said Rachel. And I couldn’t bear looking at her horrible laughing face for another second so I ran off to my room. But even there my torment continued (and not just because I could see myself and my ridiculous hair in the mirror on my dressing table). That evil Mulligan kid was in her room, and when she saw me she started laughing and put her hands up on her head as if she was puffing up a giant mane of hair! I hate her so much.

  And now someone is knocking at my door. Can’t the world leave me alone in my misery for a minute?

  Okay, maybe Rachel isn’t totally evil. She got her hair straighteners and lots of anti-frizz serum and tried to calm my hair again. It looked slightly better when she’d tried her magic, and it’s not wavy anymore, but it’s still sticking out quite a bit. Also, I get quite nervous having those hot straighteners right next to my eyes. It feels a bit dangerous. I don’t think you’re meant to use them on fringes. Anyway, I still look ridiculous. Cass rang to see about meeting up tomorrow, and I had to tell her what had happened. To her great credit she didn’t actually say ‘I told you so.’ She just expressed sympathy and said she’d try and fix it tomorrow, using her years of fringe-battling experience. Maybe the freedom of coming out has made her a more noble person?

  Huh, so much for Cass becoming more noble. As soon as I arrived at her house today and she actually saw my stupid fringe, she said, ‘Yikes! Well, I did tell you not to do it.’

  ‘Cass!’ I said. ‘That’s not very helpful.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ said Alice. ‘Come on, Cass. Use your magic anti-fringe powers!’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Cass. ‘Sorry, Bex.’

  Anyway, I suppose she redeemed herself by trying to make my hair look normal again. She said that when a fringe is really misbehaving there’s no point in trying to flatten it out.

  ‘You’ve just got to pretend it doesn’t exist,’ she said. ‘This is where hair pins come in.’

  Then she and Alice spent about five years fussing over my hair. I seem to have spent most of the last few days having my head poked at. Anyway, they tried several methods. After I begged them to try flattening it anyway, they tried calming it down with more serum, but it started to just go all greasy and icky. Then they scraped it straight back from my face, but that didn’t work either.

  ‘I think it just highlights my unsymmetrical face,’ I said miserably.

  Then they pouffed up the front in a sort of quiff.

  ‘That looks quite good,’ said Alice kindly.

  ‘Though,’ said Cass. ‘Um. It also makes you look a tiny bit like Vanessa. She does that with her hair.’

  ‘Try something else!’ I cried.

  Eventually they sort of pulled it back and to the side, so it looked softer and not so scraped.

  ‘It does need quite a few pins,’ said Alice.

  ‘But I think it works,’ said Cass. ‘Doesn’t it?’

  I suppose it does. I took all the pins out and tried to do it myself (it’s not like I’m going to have Cass and Alice around every day to be my personal hairdressers), and it looked a bit wonky but not too bad. Better than a giant eighties pouffy fringe, anyway. I tried washing my hair again when I got home and putting in lots of posh conditioner, but it didn’t make any difference; my fringe was still all big with a kink in it. They must have magical powers in that stupid hairdresser’s, I can’t see how they made it look normal for twenty-four hours.

  So much for my dream of arriving at the summer camp with a glamorous new look, anyway. I’m now more likely to spend the entire thing wearing a hat. Though what sort of hat could I wear? If only it were a winter camp, then I could wear a beret or something and it wouldn’t look too bad. But most people don’t wear hats in the summer, do they? Unles
s they’re on a beach. I can hardly go around the college wearing a giant floppy sun hat. I’ll just have to spend this evening practising with my new packet of hair pins. Why did I ever think it was a good idea to get a stupid fringe? Everyone should have talked me out of it!

  I had to get up really early today to deal with my stupid fringe. I hoped it might have got nice and flat and sleek overnight, but it hasn’t. It still looks all puffy. So I tried to reproduce what Cass and Alice did last night, and, although it took ages and a lot of fiddling around with pins, I think it worked. It didn’t look totally freakish anyway. And I used Rachel’s brilliant mineral powder and my nice new posh lipstick so people would notice that instead of my weird hair.

  Though to be honest, today was so much fun I actually forgot about my fringe after a while. This morning I met up with Alice, Cass and Richard, and we all walked down to the college together. The actual campus was huge, with loads of different buildings, which was all very confusing, and we ended up wandering around in circles until we found a ‘North Dublin Summer Arts Camp this way’ sign.

  ‘You’d think they’d have put these signs near the actual gates,’ said Cass grumpily. But she only sounded grumpy because she was feeling a bit nervous. As was I. I don’t even know why.

  Anyway, we followed the sign and ended up at one of the biggest buildings. Seriously, it was about the size of our whole school, and it was just for arts stuff. And there’s a theatre somewhere on the campus as well.

  When we went inside, there were loads of boys and girls milling around looking as confused as we felt. Lots of them looked a bit older than us, which made me feel even more nervous. But eventually we found a big noticeboard telling us where all the different groups were meeting up. All the bands were told to go to the Orchestra Room.

  ‘Orchestra Room!’ said Cass. ‘That sounds very fancy.’

  It wasn’t, though. It was just a big room with a grand piano and some chairs in it and loads of music stands piled up in a corner. We all sat down and looked around at our fellow summer-schoolers.

  ‘I wonder will we be able to find Jane and Ellie at lunch?’ I said.

  ‘I was wondering the same thing,’ said Alice. ‘This place seems huge. I can’t imagine we’ll ever be able to find our way around it.’

  ‘Consider it practice for when we get to actual college,’ said Richard, but he looked very relieved a minute later when his bandmates came in. He waved at them, and they came over and grabbed some seats nearby. We didn’t know any of the other bands, but one of them included a few boys from Richard’s class in school. He didn’t seem to like them very much and with good reason.

  ‘I didn’t realise they were doing this,’ he said when he noticed them on the other side of the hall.

  ‘Is their band any good?’ I asked.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Richard. ‘Ah, I dunno, I’m not being fair. They could be good. They’re just kind of … annoying.’

  But before he could say anything else, a man and a woman walked up to a pair of microphones set up next to the grand piano and waved. Everyone suddenly stopped talking.

  ‘Wow,’ said the woman, looking a bit surprised. ‘You’re all very quiet all of a sudden! So … hi! My name’s Veronica Flaherty, and I’m a guitarist and a sound engineer.’

  Cass and Alice and I looked at each other. Veronica had been one of the organisers of the Battle of the Bands!

  ‘And my name is Tom, and I play the bass,’ said the man, ‘and sometimes the drums.’

  Then Veronica told us how excited they were about the summer arts school and gave a speech about what we’d be doing over the next three weeks, which we kind of knew already from the website, and how at the end of it we’d put on shows for everyone in the camp. Then she called in all the people who were going to be our mentors, which sounds very reality TV. There were four men and two women, and they all looked like they were in their twenties and thirties. Some of them looked quite familiar − the camp has managed to get some quite big bands, which is impressive. When a very tall skinny man in a sharp suit came out, Richard looked very surprised and excited.

  ‘No one’s going to try and make you sound a certain way,’ said Veronica. ‘We’re just going to help you do the stuff you already want to do.’ The mentors each introduced themselves, and there was more talking about what we were going to do in each week, and then we were released into the wild, or at least the rest of the college, for a short break. As soon as Veronica and Tom left the stage, Richard said, ‘Oh my God, did you see who that was?’

  ‘Who who was?’ said Alice.

  ‘It was Ian Cliff! In the suit! Ian Cliff from Verfremdungs-effekt!’ said Richard.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Alice. ‘They’re not bad.’

  Verfremdungseffekt are a Dublin band who are pretty popular, and Richard loves them. Alice went with him to one of their gigs a while ago and said they were pretty good, in a sort of melodramatic gloomy kind of way (which, now I think of it, is quite like Richard’s own band).

  ‘What does Verfremd-whatsit actually mean?’ I said. ‘It sounds a bit German.’

  ‘It is German,’ said Alice. Her mum is German so Alice can speak German better than our actual German teacher. ‘It literally means, like, alienation effect. Or distancing effect. But I don’t know what that really means. If you know what I mean.’

  We did.

  But Richard, because he is Verfremdungseffekt’s biggest fan ever, did know what alienation effect meant.

  ‘There was a German writer called Brecht who did plays, and he wanted to remind the audiences that they were actually watching a play, not real people, so they’d be more critical and not get emotionally involved. So Verfremdungseffekt is the word he used to describe how he did this. The characters would, like, turn around and start talking to the audience and stuff.’

  I was not very impressed by this. I don’t think I’ve ever forgotten that I was watching a play. I mean, surely it’s quite obvious that the people are, like, on a stage? And acting? Anyway, Richard was still going out about how brilliant Ian Cliff was and how much he hoped they’d get him as their mentor when we left the Orchestra Room. And it turned out that we needn’t have worried about not finding anyone because as soon as we walked out into the corridor we bumped into Jane.

  ‘Oh, thank God I’ve found you,’ said Jane. ‘Something terrible has happened.’

  ‘Oh God, you’re not sick, are you?’ said Alice nervously.

  ‘No,’ said Jane. ‘Well, sort of. But only because they divided us up into groups, and I’m in the same one as Vanessa and Karen! And Bernard the Fairy-tale Prince, though I don’t really have anything against him apart from the fact he’s going out with Karen. We’re going to have to spend the whole summer camp coming up with a play together.’

  ‘Just the four of you?’ said Alice.

  ‘No, thank God,’ said Jane. ‘There’s another girl and two boys. But still!’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. And I patted her arm sympathetically.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Jane bravely. ‘It’ll be good acting practice, trying to pretend they’re not driving me mad. What’s your thing like?’

  ‘Pretty good, I think,’ said Cass. And we told her about Veronica and Tom and the mentors.

  ‘So, who’s your mentor?’ said Jane.

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ I said. ‘They’re telling us in a few minutes when we go back in. Do you have mentors?’

  ‘Not like that,’ said Jane. ‘Just facilitators. Whatever that means, exactly. Oh! I forgot to tell you. One of them is Cathy.’

  ‘Director Cathy?’ said Alice. Cathy Laverty directed our production of Mary Poppins. She was okay, in an intimidating, serious sort of way.

  ‘The very same,’ said Jane. ‘She’s still doing that scary glare thing. One of the boys started messing around at the start of the session, and she just … stared at him until he turned around, and then he shut up immediately. It’s like magic.’

  Then we realised that pe
ople were starting to go back into the various meeting rooms, so we told Jane we’d see her at lunch and headed back into the Orchestra Room. When we got back to our seats, Richard and his bandmates had been joined by the other band from their school. They were having a serious conversation about which mentor they wanted to get. Of course Richard was going on about Ian Cliff and how he was the greatest artist in Dublin and Verfremdungseffekt were the best band since the Bad Seeds.

  ‘Yeah, they’re not bad,’ said a boy from the other band. He laughed. ‘We’ll have to fight you lot for him.’

  ‘I hope we don’t get one of the girls,’ said one of his bandmates. ‘I just can’t take girly musicians seriously.’ He looked at us and grinned in what he probably thought was a charming way but which looked more like a smirk to me. ‘No offence.’

  ‘Lots of offence taken,’ I said. I could see why Richard hadn’t looked very pleased to see them here. He looked even less pleased now.

  ‘Wow, Charlie,’ said Richard. ‘I didn’t realise you were that scared of girls.’

  Charlie looked annoyed.

  ‘I’m not SCARED of them, Murray,’ he said. But before he could say anything else obnoxious, Veronica and Tom and the mentors came back in.

  ‘So,’ said Tom. ‘We’re going to give you each a mentor now! First up … Richard Murray and the Wicked Ways. Where are you, Wicked Ways?’

  Richard and the bandmates put up their hands and looked a bit nervous.

  ‘Your mentor is Ian Cliff from Verfremdungseffekt!’ said Tom, and Richard looked very relieved. Ian looked over and nodded at them in a very serious way.

  Then they called the Crack Parrots, which, it turns out, is the name of horrible Charlie’s band. I was hoping he’d get one of the women but alas he didn’t, he got some man called Simon from a band called Aniseed. And then it was our turn.