A Bump on the Head - Caroline Tailby (latest ebook reader .txt) 📗

Sam laughed. “Lovely little town. No booze-ban over there. Anyway,” He gestured behind him. “You met my girl?”
“That’s me.” I heard a gravely female voice from inside the office. Poking my head a little further around the door, I caught a glimpse of its owner. She was sitting on the desk with a nail varnish brush in her hand. She had VERY blonde hair (to me it looked like it was peroxide) that was mostly straight, but she had small curls across her forehead fashioned immaculately. Her eyes were bluish-grey and her face was practically plastered with makeup (eyeshadow, lipstick, foundation, and false eyelashes like Blousey’s). She was in a satiny mauve dress and had painted her nails red. “I’m…”
She was the second person that day I’d finished the sentence for. “Tallulah. I know you.” I suddenly realised something. “But I’m sorry…I don’t know your last name.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Tallulah said. “They know me better as just Tallulah.” Phew!
“Come and sit down, you three,” said Sam. So Bugsy and Blousey and I sat in three chairs that were in front of Sam’s desk, which he sat at. He spoke to me first. “So Liana, how did you get to America? By train?”
“We-ell…I kind of fell over and found myself here, Mr. Stacetto,” I said.
“No she didn’t. The lemonade hasn’t taken effect yet,” Bugsy cut in.
“It was Dandy Dan, Sam,” added Blousey. “His gang hit her on the head and she’s a bit confused.”
“Oh dear!” Tallulah gave me a sympathetic look. “Well, that can’t have been nice. It wasn’t, was it, honey?” She was talking to me as if I was a little kid. I was annoyed, but I didn’t show it. I pretended to be annoyed at something else. “But it wasn’t them! I was performing and somebody walked past me with a ladder…”
“Sure it was,” Bugsy interrupted me. “Anyway, I found Liana and scared the gang off.” He wasn’t letting me say a word!
“Give the kid a chance to speak, Bugsy.” Thank you, Fat Sam!
Bugsy apologised meekly. I continued. “Yes, Bugsy’s right, he did scare the gang off. Then he took me to his place and gave me the best hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted…”
“Hot chocolate?” Tallulah looked puzzled. So did everyone else. Oops, I guess.
“Oh, I…I mean cocoa. Then we came here and…”
Now it was Tallulah’s turn to finish MY sentence. “Now you’re in Sam’s office.”
“Liana was dying to meet you both,” Blousey said her twisted tale again. I think we might have chatted a bit more, if Bugsy hadn’t suddenly looked at his wristwatch and said “Hey, look at the time! We gotta go!”
“But you normally stay till past midnight! What’s the rush?” Sam asked.
“The rush?” Bugsy said. “Well, I got a kid to take care of, ain’t I?”
“You mean…” I suddenly realised what Bugsy was aiming for everyone to understand. “I’m sleeping at yours, Bugsy?”
“Sure you are,” he said, getting up from his chair. “I can’t think of anywhere else.” I chuckled at his little joke. I didn’t mind sleeping at Bugsy’s house – as long as he had somewhere nice for me to sleep.
“It was great to meet you, Liana,” Tallulah piped up. It was nice to hear her talking kindly to me, because in the film she’s a selfish b**** (sorry, can’t think of a better word!). “Make sure you come back soon. I sing a solo every night and you really ought to see it.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Blousey. “Tallulah’s got a great voice.” She was talking as if Tallulah was her best friend.
“Come on, Liana, will ya?” Bugsy said, beckoning to me. “You need some sleep but you should also tell me about that…mobile phone thingy, whatever it is.”
So I smiled, said goodbye to the others and walked out of the office with Bugsy.

On the way back to his house we talked some more. I asked Bugsy a lot of questions I’d been wondering. In fact I had so many you could think of it as an interview! He was always patient enough to answer though. Here’s a few I asked:
“So how did Fat Sam get the huge business he has?”
“I don’t know. I guess he probably started out as a janitor in a roadside café!”
“And Blousey and Tallulah…I thought they were worst enemies. But now Blousey’s talking about Tallulah as if they’re best friends.”
“Well, that’s because they are now. After the huge splurge fight we had with Dandy Dan, I guess Tallulah realised she couldn’t have me and gave up. They both perform in the show as well, so they spend a lot of time together. Hey, here we are,” Bugsy put the key in the lock of his front door and turned it, and once again I was in the cosy environment of his home. I mean, it was just so warm and so homely. It was exactly the opposite of Sophie’s house when her mum hasn’t cleaned it for that week. Ugh, gross. Bugsy might live by himself but he seemed great at keeping house. “So show me this telephone thing then,” he said, making me jump. Again. But I kept my cool, taking my LG Cookie out of my pocket. “It’s exactly that, Bugsy,” I said. “A telephone. Only you can carry it around in your pocket and it’s so much smaller.”
“Show me how it works.” Man, he was curious. So I asked him what his home number was and he wrote it down on a bit of paper. It was #12486. A lot shorter than the O-Seven etc. numbers in 2010. “I’ll keep that safe,” I said, putting the slip of paper in my pocket. “You never know when these things come in handy.” The very next night that number came in VERY handy. But I’m not onto that yet. “I don’t know what you’ll need with my telephone number,” said Bugsy, “but show me how that thing calls.” So I demonstrated typing in the number on my touchscreen keypad, and the little tone sounded. Bugsy remarked that it was making a funny noise. “Well,” I said. “That’s the sound it makes when you’re dialling. Now I press this button here…” I pressed the green call button and…nothing happened.
“WHAT?!” I cried.
“What? What happened?”
“It doesn’t work!”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No! Your telephone should be ringing at this very moment.”
“Well, it’s not, so you’re right.” State the obvious. “Where did you get that thing?”
Oh, great. How on earth was I supposed to answer that without lying? So I told the downright truth.
“The Carphone Warehouse.”
“Huh?!! Never heard of it! That lemonade didn’t make a scrap of difference.”
“But I’m not confused!” I argued.
“You are, you know. Now, I don’t know how or where you got that thing but it’s non-functional.”
I banged the phone on the table in frustration. Why didn’t it work? Boy, was I in for a shock!
Bugsy suddenly turned to get something. I never found out what it was. The only thing I noticed was that his hand brushed past my phone, skimmed it…and knocked it onto the floor! “BUGSY!!” I yelled out. He spun around in astonishment. “It’s definitely non-functional now you’ve knocked it on the floor!” I said as I picked up the phone. The only word I heard from him was a meek “Oops.”
“Great,” I said. “Now I can’t turn it on.”
“Is that…bad?”
Oh, for crying out loud!!!
“Well, no!” I yelled again. I’ll admit now I had a bit of a temper fit then. LG Cookies are great phones, but they break so easily. My one cost around a hundred quid so you can imagine how frustrated I was. Bugsy apologised as I slumped on a chair and tried to calm down.
“Never mind. I’ll just leave it for a while and it’ll turn on eventually.” Hopefully.
“OK,” said Bugsy. “Well, I suppose we’d both better get some sleep. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”
“Really?” I asked, perplexed. “Why? What are we doing tomorrow?”
“What do you think? You’re new here. So I’ll show you this town, left right and centre.”
“Cool!” I brightened up, then dulled again. “Except…won’t people stare at me? What with my jeans and all…”
Bugsy put his hand on my shoulder. “That won’t happen, I promise. But let’s get some rest. You can sleep in my spare bedroom. It’s up the stairs, second door on the left.”
“Thanks, Bugsy,” I replied, then added with a grateful smile: “You’re so kind.”


Entry 5

The first dream

I kicked of my trainers and hurled myself onto the bed in Bugsy’s spare bedroom, remembering that I hadn’t got any PJs but I didn’t care. It was astonishingly soft – I’d expected a 1920’s mattress to be really uncomfortable. Boy, was I surprised. I took some things out of my pocket: the apparently smashed phone, my old blue biro that still worked, and a couple of sour-candies that had gone stale. Ugh, where did those come from?! I chucked them in the nearby wicker bin and placed the other two things on the small table next to the bed, then took a minute to observe the room. It was quite small, two by three metres I estimated, and the walls were decorated with pale-green wallpaper with a complicated tessellation design. In the dim light I could only just make it out. The floor was mostly wood, apart from a faded rug the same colour and pattern as the wallpaper. It’s funny, that rug was faded, but apart from that it looked like new. The bed had blankets instead of a duvet (I guess duvets weren’t invented in the twenties) and some feather pillows propped against the headboard. I suddenly remembered feather pillows make me sneeze. Oh, great.
I had another reason to say “oh, great”. I didn’t have my old teddy Twilight with me. I’ve had her since I was a baby, a cute white teddy bear with a silver ribbon tied around her neck. Yeah, I know still sleeping with a cuddly toy at eleven is a bit babyish, but I still find it hard to sleep well if I don’t have Twilight tucked under my arm. Oh well. I decided I was just going to have to cope.
Bugsy poked his head around the door as I stretched out under the blankets. “Comfortable?” he said. I nodded. Just as he closed the door, I went to sleep almost instantly. Surprisingly, without Twilight.
I had a dream. I was in a lounge, and to me it looked stately. Nearby, a man was sitting in a chair. He was in a suit as well (but this one looked like it had carefully been chosen), and his hair was slicked back into a style that made him look kind of wealthy. I couldn’t see his face. He was reading a newspaper. I tried to speak, to ask his name, and to ask where I was, but you know like in dreams you sometimes can’t talk, so I couldn’t get any words out. I’ll say now I was pretty miffed, until I looked at my hands. They weren’t there. I was invisible. Believe me; that was pretty cool.
A door at the end of the room suddenly opened with a creak, and I looked up in surprise. Five other men walked through it, all in suits and trilby hats and all carrying…guns. The man in the chair looked up.
“You guys have been out some time,” he said. His voice was just like Bugsy’s; not adult, not child and not teenager. It was another one of those voices that sounded vaguely familiar, but I didn’t recognise it.
“Yeah, well,” said one of the men who came through the door. “We nearly got caught. By Malone.”
Malone?!
“Quit