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  PRIM IMPROPER

  IMPROPER ORDER

  by Deirdre Sullivan

  IMPROPER ORDER

  Published 2013

  by Little Island

  7 Kenilworth Park

  Dublin 6W

  Ireland

  www.littleisland.ie

  Copyright © Deirdre Sullivan 2013

  The author has asserted her moral rights.

  ISBN 978-1-908195-23-4

  All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

  British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design by Fidelma Slattery @ Someday.ie

  Typeset in Baskerville. Cover typefaces: ‘Denne Milk Tea’ by Denise Bentulan and ‘Agent C’ by Carl Leisegang, also used throughout the interior along with ‘Denne Freakshow’ by Denise Bentulan.

  Printed in Poland by Drukarnia Skleniarz

  Little Island receives financial assistance from

  The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Primrose’s life is marked by the absence of her mother.

  My own has been blessed by the presence of a particularly good one. Mammy Sullivan, this one’s for you … and also my Dad, Tim, who is brave and clever and funny and has been sporting a moustache since before they were cool.

  Thanks for having me, guys. It’s lovely to be here.

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Just in case you haven’t read Prim Improper (sad thought, but these things happen …) here’s a bit of background info to get you up and running.

  Primrose Leary is fourteen years old and goes to secondary school. Her lovely mum, Bláthnaid, was knocked off her bicycle and killed by a hit-and-run driver a year or two ago. Now Prim lives with her dad, Fintan, in his swanky house.

  Prim and Fintan do not always see eye to eye, but they are getting along better these days than they did when Prim first moved in with him. (Read Prim Improper if you want to know how bad it was at first. Or, hey, just read Prim Improper anyway.)

  OK, that’s enough, because, look, we can’t be explaining every-thing. We trust you to be able to work out a few things for yourself. But fret not: the other people (and rat) in the story are explained as you go along.

  Oh, yes, and the ‘chapter titles’ are crossword clues. You don’t have to solve them unless you want to. Anyway, the truly perspicacious among you will also be able to find where the solutions are hidden.

  PERSPICACIOUS: Has the same meaning as the word smart, but it’s longer and more impressive.

  PLUMP PATERNAL WOMAN (6)

  When I grow up I want to be a cruciverbalist. Fintan thinks that this is no sort of a job at all, but seeing as his job consists of making more and more money for people who are already far too rich for their own good, his opinion is a bit redundant.

  His title now is ‘Director of Operations’, which would be impressive except they aren’t real operations, like transplants or nose-jobs, and he isn’t the real director of anything useful, like a play or a film or even a silly little Christmas pageant like we had in primary school. I understand, of course, that he is not that kind of director, but when I pretend not to understand that, he gets all frustrated and sighs heavily and eventually his moustache begins to flutter like a big black scrubbing brush that is ruffled by a gentle summer breeze.

  The reason I want to be a cruciverbalist is not because it sounds like some sort of dark wizard (although that is one of many amazing perks). No, I want to do it because I have started doing the crosswords in The Irish Times and they are hard. Like, crazy hard. Except for the Simplex, because it has simple in the title and so I refuse to let it defeat me. So one day, when I had only gotten two of the cryptic clues, it occurred to me how amazing it would be to be the maker-upper of the puzzles, how pleased you would feel when people worked them out and how smug you would feel when they failed to do so.

  CRUCIVERBALIST: Someone who designs crossword, for a living. What I am thinking of being when I grow up. Although it may not last. A fortnight ago, I was going to be an organic farmer because of all the food and adorable Wellingtons I would have.

  So I started making up my own crossword clues, and it is kind of the most fun I have had by myself in ages. And it turns out it is an actual job. There’s no college course for it, but I will learn my skills from the University of Life. (I also plan to go to real university, but all my talk about the University of Life is really getting on Fintan’s wick, so that is why I keep going on about it when he’s in the room.)

  In real life, I think I might want to do journalism in college. Because then I could get a job at a newspaper and make sure their chief cruciverbalist has an accident so I can rise up to assume his or her place. The good thing about this plan is that you can repeat it as required, like with a shampoo, so if there are any other budding cruciverbalists at my place of work, I could take them down as well. I can do this by sneaky stairs-pushing or germ warfare, in which I catch a nasty cold and make out with all my enemies in order to pass it on to them.

  But before I become evil, I have to have the skills to back it up. I have to study and hone and do lots of crosswords so I can understand their language and use it to my own nefarious ends. My ends are not always nefarious, only sometimes they can be. But not, like, crazy nefarious. More mildly nefarious. Divilish, as opposed to devilish. Because being a divil isn’t the worst thing in the world you can be, but being the Devil is not a good thing at all.

  NEFARIOUS: Evil. People who are nefarious include Stalin, Hitler, Pol-Pot (in spite of his funny name) and The Devil Himself. Also Karen. Especially Karen, as a matter of fact.

  GETTING ON SOMEONE’S WICK: This is like getting on someone’s goat, if they have a wick instead of a goat. I am always getting onto people’s goats and wicks. It is kind of a problem.

  DIVIL: Lovable rogue. Not to be confused with the actual Devil.

  KAREN: Karen is a horrible person. She used to be friends with my friend Ciara, before Ciara was my friend Ciara, but then she started doing this whole excludey kind of business that a certain type of mean and nefarious individual is so good at. Also, there was this whole thing last year where I punched her in the face for calling my friend Ella a ‘starey little retard’. Ella has Asperger’s syndrome, which makes her a little bit different from most people I know, but in a way I appreciate and love. Karen is a lot different from most people I know as well because she was born without a soul. She is pretty much a sociopath, I reckon. The only reason I regret punching her in the face is because it dragged me down to her level.

  SOCIOPATH: Someone who is born without a sense of empathy. They cannot relate to other human beings, and if they pretend to do so it is only because they are up to something. Serial killers and Karen are often sociopaths. Some cut-throat businessmen are as well, but my dad Fintan isn’t one, even if I sometimes think he is because he has no idea what I’m feeling half the time.

  Anyway, if I wanted to be the Devil I would have to push Karen down the stairs and take her job. That girl is nefarious personified. She broke Simone’s iPod Touch yesterday by throwing it out a top-floor window, just to see what would happen.

  Simone is one of Karen’s good friends. Imagine how she would treat an enemy. I don’t have to imagine, because she hates my guts. Luckily, I do not have an iPod Touch. I’d love an iPod Touch. Fintan is mean and does no
t shower me with enough gifts.

  FATHER

  Things never really go away, do they? They lurk and lie in wait like wolves. Horrible, un-fluffy, lurk-in-the-darkness wolves. The kind that would never swallow a girl whole but chew her up to mincey dog-breath spit, so if a woodcutter happened to slice open its wolfish tummy the last thing he would find is a happy ending.

  Happy endings are pretty rare. The most people get if they’re lucky is a happy beginning. I didn’t even get that. Mum and Dad were hardly on speaking terms when I was born. I was the little wailing white flag of truce. Or so they told me (though not in those exact words, obviously).

  Really, I think it is just easier to try to get along than to stay mad at someone for an indeterminate length of time. I mean, being angry for more than a brief period of time takes effort. You have to work at it. And what if the person you are angry with says something hilarious or offers you a delicious treat of some kind? Let’s say, for argument’s sake, a caramel slice and a cup of tea. It is hard to stay angry at somebody when you are eating something delicious that they have bought in the cool deli place adjacent to their work which wraps their treats in fancy pink and white paper.

  Fintan is lucky that that deli exists, is all I am saying. Because otherwise having a teenage daughter would be a whole lot harder for him.

  The reason I was angry with him was to do with him forgetting to pick me up from swimming class. I’d left two notes on the fridge and texted him in the morning to remind him.

  But instead he went on a date with Hedda and turned his phone off. Hedda was angry with him too. You see, he is always taking phone calls from important people while they are going places. Once he even left in the middle of a play to talk to a man in China about something. Hedda believes that if you are going to spend time with someone, you should actually spend time with them, instead of ignoring them and doing important businessman-type stuff like talking about mergers and stock portfolios and indices.

  HEDDA: My father’s girl-friend. She is far too glamorous for the likes of him. She used to have braids, but she recently got them taken out. Her hair is in this beautiful curly afro-bob now and I really want to touch it, but I can’t ask her for permission to do so, because that would be weird, right? That would be incredibly no-way-am-I-ever-going-to-marry-into-that-creepy-creepy-family Weird.

  See, the weird thing is that money isn’t even real. It is, like, this fictional concept we all agree on to make the transfer of goods and services flow more smoothly. Mum’s friend Sorrel once went to live in a commune where they used swapping and kindness instead of money. It didn’t really work, though, because once the swapping got heated, the kindness kind of went down the pan. She was the one who explained to me about money being made up and stuff. I mean, they are just bits of metal and paper. The only value they have is the one that we assign to them.

  Sorrel was the person who dropped me home after I had been waiting on my own an hour outside a now-closing swimming pool. She was the only one who was picking up her phone, which is weird because she normally doesn’t even have it switched on. She was waiting for a call from this nice organic farmer she met at a drumming circle. When she told me this, I did an eye-roll and her eyes filled with tears and she told me that I had just done my mother’s ‘Oh, for the love of God’ face.

  She waited with me in the kitchen till about eleven o’ clock. Dad still wasn’t home, but I wanted to go to bed because I had school in the morning and stuff. Luckily, I had got my homework done at Mary’s before swimming because I would have been too angry to do it afterwards.

  SORREL: My mum’s friend and a notorious proponent of all that is alternative and hippified. She does things like offer you Manuka honey and make her own hummus. I like her, but I do not believe in homeopathy.

  HOMEOPATHY: This thing That masquerades as alternative medicine but does not actually do anuthing. You put a drop of whatever ails you in water and then dilute it a lot and then use it to cure you of maladies. It doesn’t work.

  Sometimes I forget how useless Fintan is at this whole being-a-father business. Luckily, he is always ready to remind me with some new and stupid mishap. At least he didn’t bring up the time I stole the engagement ring he got for Hedda. See, a year and a half ago, Dad almost proposed to Hedda on a trip to New York. Only he couldn’t – because I had taken the engagement ring from its little box in a perfectly understandable fit of wanting to be told if my dad was going to make any life-changing decisions.

  MARY: Ella’s (and my beloved Felix’s) mum. I stay at her house after school most weekdays because Dad is too busy having a job to be a pick-your-daughter-up-from-school sort of dad. I like staying at Mary’s because of Felix and Ella and also because Mary is nice. I resent the hell out of being babysat, though. I am a grown-ass adolescent and should be left alone to become isolated and neglected and eventually expetiment with drugs and performance poetry. Dad is fencing me in with all this babysitting, coming-home-to-friendship-and-a-warm-plate-of-food malarkey

  I still don’t think I was wholly in the wrong. If it were the right thing for Dad, he would have proposed anyway. It’s not like the ring is hyper-important. When Mum’s friend Méadhbh was proposed to by her husband Frank, he did not have a ring at all, just a receipt he rolled into a ring shape. They picked the ring together later, because as lovely and spontaneous as a rolled up receipt from IKEA is, it would be a touch impractical for everyday wear.

  Anyway, Dad should probably have proposed when he got the ring back, or on any number of occasions over the past year or so. I apologised and stuff – I mean, he was quite irate when he got back from his holiday – but I think that time has told that I was in the right. Anyway, ever since I did that small bit of misappropriation, he has brought it up every time he does something wrong. Which is all the bloody time. Except this time. Which means one of the following:

  He has gotten over himself about it and acknowledges that it was a clever and awesome move on my part.

  He recognises that what he did this time was worse than what I did that time.

  Hedda gave out to him about it.

  When Hedda gives out, Fintan listens. This is one of her superpowers: the ability to make my thick-as-muck-in-terms-of-human-emotion father understand what he did wrong and accept responsibility for it. It is why I both like and fear her more than any of my dad’s previous girlfriends — like, because when her powers are used for good (most of the time) they can be kind of amazing; fear, because what if she uses them against me one fine day? I mean, there is a DISTINCT possibility that she will one day become my stepmother and have to give out to me about things on a semi-regular basis. Which I do not think I would like even a little bit. Because she has this way of being right and I have this way of liking to be right and I do not think that the two would complement each other very well at all at all.

  Anyway, I did not speak to Fintan for three days after the whole swimming incident. Because going to swimming lessons is troubling enough when you are a teenage girl with body hair and a healthy distrust of skin-tight fabrics. There is no reason for Fintan to make it more troubling than it already is. Although the insecure bits normally happen outside of the water. Once I’m in there, I get all focused and splashy and usually enjoy myself.

  Which is a good thing, because I don’t really like other sports. When hand–eye coordination was given out, I must have been in the corner reading a book or something. I am not good at hitting balls with sticks or kicking them into nets or throwing them into baskets. But in swimming, it’s not about racing other people or whatever, it’s about beating your own best time, and even though there are plenty of people in my group who are better than me (mainly Laura, the human dolphin), for some reason I can kind of block them out, the way I do the world when I’m reading a good book, and just do my best. This is rare for me. Which is just one of the many, many reasons that I should not be driven to associate the swimming pool with abandonment and so on and so forth.

  Fintan d
id apologise right away. But I kind of want to reinforce that it is never OK to forget you have a daughter, especially when you are the only parent that she has left. Ooh, I should totally say that to him; it will make him feel terrible. Which will teach him not to do it in future. This is a really nice caramel slice. He is lucky I do not have an eating disorder. Because how would he win me around then?

  Probably money.

  MERGER: When two companies join forces to become one company. Except some-times the smaller company doesn’t want to merge, but the big company makes it merge anyway in the name of business. Mergers make people incredibly stressed out about things going down the pan’, which is a phrase Fintan says a lot when he is worried.

  GOING DOWN THE PAN: Becoming messed up, going to the dogs. Neither of these phrases makes a lot of sense, as things can go in the pan, and sometimes even out of the frying pan into the fire, but how can they go down it? I have never seen a pan that has a plughole like a sink. They have flat, smooth bottoms, and while one can sometimes burn things that are in the pan, they generally don’t fall down anywhere and disappear.

  GIVE OUT TO: Hiberno-English for scold, berate, upbraid, chide and many other unpleasantries.

  HIBERNO-ENGLISH: English as it is spoken in Ireland (which is to say, better).

  ROOT VEGETABLE FOR THE BOOKS (6)

  I think I have grown up a lot this year. Sometimes I feel like a completely different person — one with boobs (34 B!!) and a mature and rational outlook on life and matters sociological.