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She was toying with the idea of becoming a vegetarian… when it suited her.
‘Nope,’ Joel assured her.
The books he had borrowed from the library had all had sections in them on diet and he had been appalled, when he’d read the ingredients listed on the packets of some of the ready-made meals he had been buying, to see just how little nutrition some of them contained.
Robustly ignoring Sally’s irritation, he had decided he could do better himself… much better.
‘Brown bread’s better for you,’ he told Paul. ‘And besides, it’s all there is…’
Paul scowled, but he still ate the meal, Joel noticed, as did Cathy, even if she was picking suspiciously at it.
‘What’s for pudding?’ Paul asked him.
‘Fruit salad and yoghurt,’ he told him.
He had bought the fruit cheaply from a market stall late on market day and he had felt quite proud of the meal he had produced. There was a lot more to this nutrition business than he had realised. Food was the fuel that powered the body; and just like any engine the body’s engine worked more efficiently on the right kind of fuel.
‘Uggh… it’s not sweet enough,’ Cathy complained as she took a spoonful of the fruit salad.
‘Yes, it is… too much sugar’
s bad for you…’
‘Yuck, you’re worse than Mum,’ Cathy grumbled, but again she ate it none the less, Joel noted.
He looked up as he heard Sally opening the back door.
‘Lucky you, Mum,’ Cathy teased. ‘You’re just in time to have some of Dad’s delicious nutritious fruit salad.’
‘Yeah—the reason this stuff’s so good for you is that you wouldn’t want to have any seconds,’ Paul commented, but there was no malice beneath the teasing grumbling, and they had both cleaned their plates.
‘Yes, you sit down, Sal,’ Joel invited. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. You’ll never guess what Neil suggested today,’ he told her. ‘He seems to think that——’
‘Joel, how could you?’ Sally interrupted him angrily, ignoring what he said. ‘When Daphne rang me at work to tell me what you did, I could hardly believe it… do you have any idea how much that wallpaper cost?’ she demanded, her voice rising. ‘Daphne was practically hysterical. If you didn’t know which way the design ran, you should have checked with Daphne first…’
She stopped abruptly, her eyes widening as she accused, ‘You did know, didn’t you…? You did it deliberately. You deliberately hung Daphne’s wallpaper upside-down.’ Her voice had risen slightly with each word. She was trembling with anger. When Paul started giggling she rounded on him furiously, telling him, ‘It isn’t funny! Joel, what on earth possessed you?’ she demanded. ‘Daphne is furious and I don’t blame her. The whole room will have to be stripped and redecorated. I’ve had to offer to pay for the wallpaper, of course… have you any idea how much it cost…?’ Her voice was rising again.
‘Tell her to deduct the cost from the money she’s not paying me,’ Joel suggested sarcastically.
Sally flushed. ‘Is that why you did it?’ she demanded. ‘Because…’
‘Because she wheedled her way round you to get the job done for nothing,’ Joel supplied for her. ‘No… it wasn’t…’
‘Then why?’ Sally demanded bitterly. ‘You must have known how upset she would be… She ordered that paper specially, Joel. She saw it in a magazine. Imagine how she must have felt when her neighbour told her that it was on upside-down… how humiliated and mortified…’
Just as he had felt when Sally had practically ordered him to go round and do the work, Joel reflected grimly.
‘Your sister’s a snob,’ he told Sally flatly now. ‘All that matters to her is impressing other people, showing off in front of them. She watched me working.’ Watched him… she had practically stood over him like a gaoler; at lunchtime there had been a cup of tea and a couple of semi-stale biscuits. ‘She could have told me it was on the wrong way…’
Sally’s face was flushed and angry.
‘I know you’ve never liked her, Joel, but I never thought you could behave so… so… so badly… You must have known that she’d discover what you’d done.’
Joel shrugged. He had had a bit of trouble deciding which way the paper’s pattern should run himself at first, and if Daphne had bothered to treat him half decently he would have told her so, but her arrogant attitude towards him had irritated him to such an extent that, when she had come into the room to complain that he had only hung one piece of paper, instead of telling her that he had not been wasting time as she was implying but had actually been carefully studying the paper, he had said nothing.
It was Daphne herself who had bossily instructed him on how she wanted it to be hung; all he had done was follow her instructions.
‘I did what I was told to do,’ he told Sally flatly now.
