Secret Meeting Read Free

You’re only here to protect us in case anyone breaks in.”
    “I’m here to make sure you behave yourself!” shouted Rachel.
    “I was behaving myself!”
    “You were going to use that computer. You were going to do things you’re not supposed to do! You get down there.” Rachel gave Annie and me a little shove along the hall. “And you stay there!”
    “But there isn’t anything to
do
down here!” wailed Annie.
    “Oh, don’t be so useless!” Rachel herded us into the kitchen. “Go out in the garden and get some exercise!”
    Rachel is a great one for exercise. She is an exercise
freak.
She is for ever charging fiercely up and down the hockey field, billowing clouds of steam, or dashing madly to and fro across the netball court. She also goes to the sports club twice a week and swims and jogs and does things with weights. This is why she is so lean and
toned.
In other words, super-fit. She thinks Annie and I ought to be super-fit, too. She is going to join the police when she is older. I just hope she goes and joins them up in Birmingham, or Manchester, or somewhere. Anywhere, so long as it is miles away from here! Here being Stone Heath, which is near Salisbury, and very quiet and peaceful, which it most certainly would not be if Rachel started bashing about with a truncheon. She’d whack people over the head just for
breathing.
    “Go on! Get out there,” she said, flinging open the back door. “Go and get some fresh air, for a change. You’re like a couple of couch potatoes!”
    I said, “What’s couch potatoes?”
    “Human beings that sit around doing nothing all day, like vegetables. Look at you! Megan’s like a stick of celery, and as for you” – she poked poor Annie in the stomach – “you’re like a water melon!”

    “Water melon’s a fruit,” I said.
    “
Thank
you, Miss Know-it-All!”
    “Don’t you treat my friend like that,” said Annie. “You’ve got no right to treat my friend like that, and just stop
shoving me
! Ow! Ouch! You’re hurting!”
    Rachel took absolutely no notice of Annie’s howls; she is a really ruthless kind of person. She must have a heart like a block of cement. She drove me and Annieinto the garden and for
over an hour
she made us throw balls at her so that she could whack them with a rounders bat. By the time she let us go back indoors we were completely exhausted.
    “See what I mean?” she said. “You’re so out of condition it’s unbelievable! When I was your age I could run right round the playing field without even noticing it. You can’t even run round the garden!”

    She still wouldn’t let us go back upstairs. She said
she
was going upstairs, and we were to stay in the sitting room until Mum came to collect me. Well! Quite honestly, we were so faint and wobbly from all the crashing about we’d done,chasing after the balls she’d whacked, we just sank down side by side on the sofa – a big shiny water melon and a little trembly stick of celery – and watched videos all afternoon. One of them was
Candyfloss
, which was the very first Harriet Chance I ever read! I know the film practically off by heart, word for word. If ever we did it as a school production, I could play the part of Candy, no problem! I would already know all my lines. Except that Candy has bright blue eyes “the colour of periwinkles”, and blonde hair which “froths and bubbles”, whereas I have brown eyes, more the colour of mud, I would say, and mousy
flat
hair, not a bubble in sight; so probably no one would ever cast me as Candy, more is the pity. But it doesn’t really bother me; I wouldn’t want to be an actor. I am going to be a writer, like Harriet!

    RACHEL’S DIARY (THURSDAY)
    I am just SO SICK of baby-sitting. Mum says, “For heaven’s sake, Rachel! It’s only a few weeks in the year.” She also points out that I am being well paid for it, which is perfectly true. Mum and Dad pay me more than Jem gets paid for stacking shelves, AND I don’t