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  PUFFIN BOOKS

  crummy mummy and me

  Anne Fine was born and educated in the Midlands, and now lives in County Durham. She has written numerous highly acclaimed and prize-winning books Jor children and adults.

  Her novel The Tulip Touch won the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year Award; Goggle-Eyes won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award and the Carnegie Medal, and was adapted for television by the BBC; Flour Babies won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book oj the Year Award; Bill’s New Frock won a Smarties Prize, and Madame Doubtfire has become a major feature film.

  Anne Fine was named Children’s Laureate in 2001.

  Other books by Anne Fine

  Books for younger readers

  Care of Henry

  Countdown

  Design-a-Pra m

  The Diary of a Killer Cat

  The Haunting of Pip Parker

  Jennifer’s Diary

  Loudmouth Louis

  Notso Hotso

  Only a Show

  Press Play

  Roll Over Roly

  The Same Old Story Every Year

  Scaredy-Cat

  Stranger Danger?

  The Worst Child I Ever Had

  Books for middle-range readers

  The Angel of Nitshill Road

  Anneli the Art Hater

  Bill’s New Frock

  The Chicken Gave it to Me

  The Country Pancake

  How to Write Really Badly

  A Pack of Liars

  A Sudden Glow of Gold

  A Sudden Puff of Glittering Smoke

  A Sudden Swirl of Icy Wind

  Books for older readers

  The Book of the Banshee

  Flour Babies

  Goggle-Eyes

  The Granny Project

  Madame Doubtfire

  The Other Darker Ned

  Round Behind the Ice-house

  Step by Wicked Step

  The Stone Menagerie

  The Summer House Loon

  The Tulip Touch

  ANNE FINE

  crummy mummy

  and me

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  for

  FRAN WARREN

  because it was her idea in the first place

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Marilyn Malin Books in association with André Deutsch Limited 1988

  Published in Puffin Books 1989

  30

  Copyright © Anne Fine, 1988

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this book it available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193921-6

  Contents

  1 Crummy Mummy

  2 A Really Boring Ride in the Country

  3 Our Pet

  4 You Don’t Look Very Poorly

  5 Crusher Maggot’s (Stately) Home

  6 “All Right”

  7 Elk Money

  1

  Crummy Mummy

  I don’t think my mum’s fit to be a parent, really I don’t. Every morning it’s the same, every single morning. I’m standing by the front door with my coat on, ready to go. School starts at nine and it’s already eight-forty or even later, and she’s not ready. She’s not even nearly ready. Sometimes she isn’t even dressed.

  ‘Come on,’ I shout up the stairs. ‘We have to leave now.’

  ‘Hang on a minute!’

  ‘What are you doing up there?’

  Her voice comes, all muffled, through the bedroom door:

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You must be doing something,’ I yell.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Come down, then. We’re waiting.’

  ‘Can’t find my shoes.’

  I lean against the front door, sighing. With as much patience as I can muster, I call upstairs:

  ‘Where did you take them off?’

  ‘I thought I took them off in the bathroom…’

  ‘Look there, then.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘If you would only put your shoes away neatly at night, we wouldn’t have to go through this every single morning!’

  By now, of course, my baby sister’s fretting. She’s strapped inside her pushchair, and since I put her coat and bonnet on at least ten minutes ago, and she’s still indoors, her head and ears are getting hot and scratchy. She’s boiling up into one of her little rages. Already she’s trying to tug her bonnet off.

  ‘Will you come on?’ I shout upstairs. (I’m really getting mad now.)

  ‘I’m coming. I’m coming!’

  ‘Well, hurry up!’

  At last she comes downstairs. And even then she’s never dressed right. You’d think, honestly you would, that we didn’t have any windows upstairs, the way Mum chooses what to wear. She certainly can’t bother to look through them at the weather. She’ll sail down in midwinter, when it’s snowing, in a thin cotton frock with short puffy sleeves, and no woolly.

  I have to be firm.

  ‘You can’t come out like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You just can’t,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll catch your death. It’s snowing out there. It’s far too cold for bare arms. You’ll freeze.’

  ‘I’ll put a coat on.’

  But I just stare at her until she goes back upstairs for a sweater. And even then she’ll choose something quite unsuitable. She never dresses in the right sort of thing. She’d wear her glittery legwarmers to a funeral if I let her (or if we ever went to funerals). She’d sit on a beach in her thick purple poncho. If she were called in to see the headmaster, she’d rather wear those baggy flowery shorts she found abandoned on a park bench last Easter than anything sensible. She’d look fantastic – she always does – but not at all like a mother. You have to watch her. You can’t let up.

  At least she admits it.

  ‘I’m a terrible embarrassment to you, Minna,’ she confesses, buckling on two of her best studded belts. ‘I’m a Crummy Mummy.’

  Then I feel mean for being so stern.

  ‘You’re not a Crummy Mummy,’ I tell her. ‘You do your best. And I suppose it doesn’t really matter what you look like…’

  ‘You’re right,’ she says, cheering up at once. And then, if you let her, she’d get worse. At least, that’s what my gran says, and she should know because she’s her mother.

  I like my gran. She lives right on the other side of the estate, but she comes over almost every
tea-time. She picks Miranda out of the cot, and coos to her, and then she sits with Miranda on her knee on the only bit of the sofa that isn’t leaking stuffing. Mostly, she tells Mum off. She says now Mum’s a mother of two, it’s time she grew up and pulled herself together. She tells Mum she should throw all her safety-pin earrings and lavender fishnet tights into the dustbin, and go out and buy herself a nice, decent frock from Marks and Spencers. She says Mum ought to take those horrible Punk Skunks records off the stereo before they ruin Miranda, and put on something nice and easy to listen to, like Perry Como’s Christmas Selection.

  And then, if Mum hasn’t already flounced off in a huff, Gran purses her lips together as if she’s been sucking lemons and, clutching Miranda so tightly her dummy pops out of her mouth and her face goes purple, she whispers to Mum that she’s clearly still very much under the influence of that dreadful, dreadful –

  Here, she looks around shiftily, and drops her voice even lower:

  ‘I don’t even want to say his name in front of innocent children, but you know exactly who I mean.’

  I know exactly who she means, too. She means Crusher Maggot, that’s who she means.

  Crusher Maggot is Mum’s boyfriend. It was me who first called him Crusher Maggot because that’s what he looks like, and when he first started coming round here I didn’t like him. Now I like him a lot, but it’s too late. The nickname’s stuck. He doesn’t mind, though. And now even Mum calls him Crusher Maggot.

  Gran disapproves of Crusher. She thinks he’s a very bad influence on Mum. She blames him for giving Miranda her nickname – Crummy Dummy – and she particularly hates his hair. She says it’s a hideous embarrassment.

  Crusher’s hair is fantastic. He even won a punk hair competition with it once, and his photo ended up on one of those London postcards that tourists send home to their friends for a laugh. The postcard was called London’s Burning. And there’s our Crusher, teeth bared, eyes staring, his hair in flaming red and orange spikes, scowling horribly at the photographer. We’ve got it propped up on the mantelpiece. Gran hates the sight of it.

  But, then again, when Crusher goes to all the trouble of shaving his head, Gran doesn’t like that any better. She doesn’t like his tattoo. I’ve even heard her telling our next-door neighbours how common she thinks it is. And they agreed. (They’re not keen on Crusher, either. They don’t like the noise his car makes when it starts – if it starts. They say it wakes their children.)

  Personally, I rather like Crusher’s tattoo. It only shows up when his head is freshly shaved. It says MADE IN BIRMINGHAM, and Crusher claims he was – well, on the outskirts. And we don’t see it all that often anyway, because whenever he’s gone to the trouble of dyeing his hair a different colour, he lets the spikes grow out all over.

  Crusher dyes his hair pretty often, considering. Since the postcard, he’s been green and pink, yellow and purple. Right now, he’s blue. Gran and he had a row about it only last week. Crusher just happened to stroll into the kitchen while Gran was tipping breakfast plates into the sink and washing them, so we could start on tea. Mum was upstairs, doing something in the bathroom, no one knew what, but it was using up all the hot water, Gran said. And I was giving Crummy Dummy her bottle.

  ‘Wotcha, Granny,’ Crusher greeted her cheerily. ‘I hope one of those plates you’re rinsing is for me.’

  He’s ever so friendly, is Crusher Maggot. I can’t think why Gran just can’t get used to him, like I did. But she can’t. She spun round at the draining-board and glowered at him before saying tartly:

  ‘You’ve got your feet well and truly under the table, haven’t you, young Maggot?’

  Baffled, Crusher looked down at his huge boots. But Gran kept on at him. She’s good at nagging, Gran is. (Mum says that I take after her.)

  ‘Look at your hair!’ Gran snorted. ‘It’s sky blue! It’s dreadful the way you amble around this estate looking like something that fell off the wall at the Modern Art Gallery. I’m horrified that a daughter of mine is prepared even to be seen walking along the street beside someone with hair that shocking colour!’

  ‘Your hair is blue, too,’ argued Crusher. He was hurt. ‘You had that perm and rinse and set only last week. Your hair is definitely blue.’

  ‘A faint bluish tinge, maybe,’ Gran said, blushing hotly. ‘Not sky blue!’

  ‘Not royal blue, either!’ I cried. For Mum had just sailed into the kitchen. And her hair was royal blue! It was the brightest, deepest, richest blue I ever saw. It was bluer than winter afternoons, bluer than the leggings Gran knitted for Crummy Dummy, bluer even than Sophie Howard’s gown when she played the Virgin Mary in our Nativity play last year.

  Gran stared. I stared. Crusher stared. Even Crummy Dummy stared. Then Gran and Crummy Dummy both burst into tears.

  ‘Waaaah!’ screamed Crummy Dummy, and she stretched out her arms desperately to me, hoping I would protect her from this blue-topped stranger.

  ‘Aaaaagh!’ shrieked poor Gran, holding her hand over her heart. Gingerly, she stuck out a finger and prodded one of Mum’s spikes.

  ‘How can you do this to your old mother?’ she wailed. ‘A girl’s hair is supposed to be her crowning glory! Royal-blue hair! Royal-blue hair! What will the neighbours think? Answer me that!’

  ‘They’ll think she looks fair smashing,’ said Crusher. ‘And that she matches the paintwork on my car.’

  You could tell Gran was shocked. She went pale as a grub.

  ‘I’m warning you two,’ she said in her dangerous voice. ‘You’re going too far. A mother can only stand so much.’

  (This interested me. A lot. For I suspect my mum can stand almost any amount. It’s me who cracks. That’s why I have a lot of natural sympathy for my gran.)

  Gran shook her finger at Mum so hard that her new perm and set wobbled on her head like a pale-blue jelly.

  ‘If you stay royal blue, I shall disown you. Yes, I shall. I won’t come round here any more. I won’t babysit for you when you go down to the club with this – this barbarian here’ (pointing at Crusher, who looked hurt again). ‘I won’t talk to you. I’ll even cut you dead in the street. You have to choose. Royal-blue hair, or your own mother!’

  There was a horrible silence. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Mum just looked sulky.

  Gran turned to me. Prising Crummy Dummy out of my arms, she placed a kiss upon her forehead.

  ‘Farewell, sweet babe,’ she said. ‘I hope for your sake that your mother sees sense, and we are not parted for too long.’

  I got a kiss and a speech too.

  ‘Goodbye, Minna dear,’ she said. ‘I know it can be hard when a mother puts maggots before the family’

  I had some sympathy with that, as well. I’ve thought it often enough myself, when Mum and Crusher are too wrapped up in giggling together about something silly to pay any attention to me.

  ‘Bye, Gran,’ I said. ‘I, too, hope our parting won’t last for long.’

  It did, though. It lasted for days. Gran never visited once. I was pretty upset, I can tell you. I missed her coming over every afternoon and asking me about what happened at school, and helping me with my spelling homework. And Crummy Dummy missed her too, you could tell. She took to sitting forlornly with her dummy in her mouth, looking all miserable and deprived.

  On Wednesday, we caught sight of Gran for the first time since the quarrel. She was stepping out of Mr Hamid’s shop carrying a bagful of vegetables just as we came over the pedestrian walkway to the shopping centre. I waved and shouted at her through the railings; but since I was with Mum, Gran ignored me and swept off under the concrete arches extremely grandly, like the Queen Mother, pretending she hadn’t heard me call.

  ‘See where your stubbornness has led us?’ I scolded Mum, as Gran disappeared between Vikki’s Video Palace and the boarded-up wool shop.

  Mum said something rude. I shan’t repeat it. But I persisted in trying to reason with her.

  ‘Is it worth it, just for blue hair?’
r />   ‘Ask her, not me,’ snapped Mum, and pulled me after the pushchair so sharply she practically wrenched my arm out of its socket.

  So I asked her. I asked Gran the very next time that I bumped into her, picking her way around the muddy patch of the shortcut across the recreation ground.

  I spread my hands out in what the author of my Best Bible Stories always refers to as ‘a beseeching fashion’.

  ‘Is it worth it, Gran, just for blue hair?’ I cried.

  What Gran said was almost as rude as what Mum said. I shan’t repeat that, either. But I confess to being a little shocked. She is my granny, after all.

  I left the two of them to it, after that. I knew the problem couldn’t last for ever because Crusher had told me Mum’s blue was the sort that washed out. So I concentrated my efforts on cheering Crummy Dummy, who didn’t know that. I made Crusher fix up her baby-bouncer. It’s not been right since Mum took off half the chain links to wear to a dance. And I made the hole in her bottle a whole lot bigger. She’s been sucking and blowing like a smoker when the lift’s broken, trying to get the milk out, poor thing. And I cut the feet off the ends of her stripy babygrow suit. I reckon her toes were getting all squashed up.

  And I waited. But Gran never came, and Mum never even went next door to phone her. It was nearly a week.

  ‘What a stubborn pair of bats!’ was the only remark Crusher made about the whole sorry business.

  And then, just as I was despairing, there came the night of the gale.

  What a night that was! The rain beat down, lashing against the window panes till every dream turned into a nightmare. It was still dark at breakfast-time. Storm water was seeping under the kitchen door, and running over the lino in rivulets. The wind was so fierce it would have had Crummy Dummy’s bonnet off in a flash, if I hadn’t insisted Mum leave her with old Mrs Pitopoulos next door, instead of dragging her out in the pushchair.