Girl, Going on 16: Pants on Fire (16 page)

‘Show him in, Granny!’ she yelled. ‘I’ll be down in a minute!’

Hastily she repaired her lipstick and ladled a bit more mascara on to her lashes. Then, looking remarkably fabulous considering what a dire day she had had, she raced downstairs. He had come round! He wanted to make it up with her!

‘He’s in the kitchen, dear,’ said Granny, returning to the TV to resume her feast of alien murder. Jess blew Granny a kiss and waltzed straight into the kitchen with a ravishing smile.

It was Ben. Jess tried not to let her smile fade, but she had to crank it up like mad to hide her disappointment.

‘Ben!’ she said. ‘Great to see you!’

Her voice kind of cracked just slightly, so you could tell she was surprised and not expecting him. His blue eyes darkened for a split second. Though not an intellectual powerhouse, he was sensitive and perceptive and had seen and understood. And been hurt.

‘Yeah, sorry to, um, disturb you, but could I have my, er, shorts and my jacket back?’

‘Oh goodness! Of course!’ said Jess. She felt so sorry for him, and so guilty about showing him her disappointment, that she felt she must make amends.

‘I’ll go and get them in a min. But first, how about a Coke? And there’s some Doritos and a dip in that cupboard.’

‘Cheers,’ said Ben. He turned and opened the food cupboard – with the grace of an angel, as usual. Jess poured the Cokes out.

‘See what’s in the fridge,’ she said. Actually, it felt really nice to be relaxing and having a bit of a snack with Ben, even if he wasn’t Fred. In a way it was a relief. If he’d been Fred, there would have been major trauma and melodrama and, frankly, Jess was so totally shattered after her nightmare day, she didn’t think she could handle any more of that kind of stuff right now.

‘You’ve got feta cheese and olive dip,’ said Ben. ‘And – hey! – guacamole.’

‘Great!’ said Jess. ‘I am almost clinically starving.’

‘So tell me,’ said Ben, ‘what happened after I lent you the shorts? Flora said you’d disappeared.’

‘Oh, just a routine bit of truancy,’ said Jess with a shrug. ‘Somehow I couldn’t face my hot date with Irritable Powell, so I thought I’d just postpone it till tomorrow.’

Ben laughed. ‘You’ve got to see Powell? Bad luck.’

‘Yes. I have been majorly bad. Miss Thorn and I are bitter enemies and she sent me to him as a human sacrifice.’

‘Wow, you’ve got so much – y’know, like, bottle,’ he said. ‘Joking about it. I’m, like, totally terrified of him.’

‘Well, he’s going to eat me alive tomorrow morning,’ said Jess, ‘so let’s enjoy my last evening on earth. Pass the guacamole, Mr Jones.’

‘How’s everything, then?’ asked Ben. ‘You were – kind of, you know – a bit down earlier.’

‘I have bounced back!’ said Jess, trying hard to make it feel true. ‘I’m determined to do this comedy show thing on my own. Flora and Fred won’t be able to be in it, though, because they’re in
Twelfth Night
.’

‘I’ll help, if you like,’ said Ben. ‘Though I’m, uhh, total rubbish onstage. I could help backstage, though. Organising stuff.’

‘Ben! You’re a gem!’ said Jess. ‘But that’s nonsense about you being rubbish on stage. I know you’d be totally fabulous. I could write some sketches just for you. Maybe we could get Mackenzie in on it, too.’ But even as she said this, Jess felt a dark crowd of misgivings gather about her heart. Ben was certainly not a natural actor or performer, except on the football field. And Mackenzie was such a control freak. He had gone out with Flora once and she’d said he was even more bossy than her dad.

They talked for a bit about the show, and how various other people might be interested in joining in. Though Jess had a kind of funny feeling of jealousy, as if she wanted to keep her show private for herself and Fred, and possibly Flora. But she agreed with everything Ben said because the conversation seemed to be taking place a long way away, somehow, and she didn’t really care about anything any more.

‘Well,’ said Ben eventually, when they had finished the guacamole, ‘I suppose I’d better go.’

‘Your clothes!’ said Jess. ‘Won’t be a min.’ She ran upstairs and entered her room. Ben’s jacket was right there on the bed, but for a panicky moment she couldn’t see the shorts anywhere. The floor was covered with several rough heaps of clothing. It looked like a scale model of the Rockies.

She was just looking under her bed when she heard the front doorbell ring. Typical.

‘Get that, will you!’ she shouted. Ah! There were Ben’s shorts, far away under the bed, right up against the skirting board. They must have fallen down the space between the bed and the wall. She crawled right under the bed and grabbed them, reversing out on her tummy and picking up loads of fluff and dust on the way.

Never mind. She really didn’t care what she looked like. She’d found the jacket and the shorts. They looked in reasonable shape – not crumpled or anything. Thank goodness for synthetic materials. Jess left her bedroom, strolled to the top of the stairs, and then gasped and nearly fell to her death with shock. Three people stood in the hall looking up at her: Ben, Granny and Fred.

‘Fred’s come for his jacket, too, love,’ said Granny. ‘What’s all this interest in men’s clothes? Are you turning into a whatyamacallit?’

‘I do hope so,’ said Jess. ‘Life as a whatyamacallit would be a lot less stressful, I’m sure.’

Her only consolation was that she was wearing pants. But she knew that, essential though it was, mere underwear could not rescue her from the intense emotional crisis that was about to engulf her.

Chapter 19

She threw Ben’s jacket and shorts down to him. He caught them. Fred’s eyes flared with sudden understanding.

‘Ah, so they were your shorts Jess was wearing this morning,’ he said.

Ben grinned and shrugged but somehow failed to find the necessary words to continue the conversation.

‘Ben rescued me from a ghastly mud crisis on the school field,’ said Jess. ‘He happened to be passing as I wallowed in slime and offered his football shorts as a temporary solution.’

‘I thought you looked very dashing in them,’ said Fred. ‘You should wear shorts more often. As an ironic fashion statement, of course.’ There was a bitter look on his face.

‘Isn’t it funny how shorts go up and down?’ pondered Granny, oblivious to the tension in the hall. ‘I remember when I was a child, football players all wore shorts down to their knees. Then the fashion changed and the shorts became so short, it made your eyes water to look at them. Now they’ve gone long again – whatever next?’

There was a brief silence as they all pondered the uncomfortable subject of football shorts.

‘Well, Fred, I’ll get your jacket,’ said Jess, and scuttled back to her bedroom. Fred’s grey jacket was lying on her bed. She had set Rasputin the bear to guard it, and he looked reproachfully at her as she picked it up. For an instant she buried her face in it, and breathed in the wonderful, sunshiny and grassy smell of Fred. Anguish flooded through her heart.

She was tempted never to leave her room again, nay, to lock herself in and wrap Fred’s jacket round her head for ever, but she simply had to get back downstairs where Ben and Fred and Granny might be having a disastrous and tactless conversation full of misunderstandings. But when she got to the stairs, the hall was empty.

Granny had gone back to her murder mystery, and the murmur of voices from the kitchen suggested that Ben and Fred had gone in there. As Jess arrived, Fred looked up.

‘Ben’s just been kind enough to offer me a glass of Coke,’ he said, with a hint of hidden outrage.

Jess knew how he felt. It should be Fred offering Ben a Coke if anything. The debris of their snack lay all over the table, somehow embarrassing, like scattered underwear.

‘However, I’m on a very restricted diet at the moment,’ Fred went on. ‘Dust and ashes, with just a dash of brackish water from the Pool of Despond. So you must excuse me this time. Gotta go – on the stroke of ten I turn into a tube of fungicide.’ He backed away towards the door, kind of nodding and shifting about in his adorable embarrassed Fred kind of way.

‘Shame . . .’ said Ben.
Shut up, Jones, don’t say another word
, thought Jess.
Or if you say anything, say you’ve got to go, too
. ‘Jess was telling me you, uh, won’t be able to be in her show at Christmas because of, urm,
Twelfth Night
.’

‘Seems not,’ said Fred, pulling a strange face which expressed some kind of pain and regret. ‘The rehearsal schedule is a life sentence.’

‘Well, I’m gonna do what I can – which, let’s face it, is, um, like, nothing at all, anyway,’ said Ben.

‘There you are,’ said Fred to Jess with a strange old-fashioned flourish of his arm. ‘I told you you’d find somebody to help. Can’t wait to see it. The Jones and Jordan Show. It has a certain something. Even alliteration. Certainly beats Jordan and Parsons. That sounds like a firm of crooked lawyers. Well, cheers.’

And Fred was gone. The front door slammed – hollowly, or so it seemed to Jess – behind him.

A moment of absolute desolation overwhelmed her for a minute. She was forced to pick up the dirty plates and glasses and wash them, so Ben wouldn’t see the despair on her face.

‘Fred’s so kind of totally, you know, like, brilliant, isn’t he?’ mused Ben. ‘What was all that stuff about – what was it? – illustration?’

‘Alliteration,’ said Jess, wiping down the table with a kind of controlled ferocity. Heartbreak makes the home grow cleaner, that’s for sure.

‘What’s that?’ enquired Ben.

‘Alliteration – we did it in English. It’s when words start with the same letter, like Jones and Jordan.’

‘Oh,’ said Ben, thinking, and a funny little smile crossed his face for a moment. ‘I always, um, you know, hated my name. But it sounds better like that.’

Jess was so desperate for him to leave she was in danger of picking him up bodily and hurling him through the splintering glass of the window. But instead she resorted to massive hints. She yawned and stretched.

‘Sorry!’ she said. ‘I’m totally shattered. It’s been a long day.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I must go,’ said Ben. He gave her an awkward little salute. There was something quite sweet about him despite his limited IQ and ludicrous good looks. At the front door he paused.

‘You and Fred – you’re, um, uh, back together again, then?’ he asked, looking at the floor, then at the door.

‘Oh yes,’ said Jess. ‘We met by chance at the health centre and it all got sorted, thanks.’

‘Great,’ said Ben. ‘Great. That is good news. Brilliant.’ And he nodded, and went out. He walked straight down the path, and turned to wave from the garden gate. He was lit briefly by a street lamp before being swallowed up by the dark. He looked kind of vulnerable out there for a minute. Jess shivered and went back indoors.

She sat by herself in the kitchen. The light seemed harsh. She saw her face reflected in the glass of the back door. She looked like an old Victorian photograph of someone criminally insane.

How could everything have gone so wrong? If only Ben hadn’t come – but he wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t borrowed his clothes, and she wouldn’t have had to borrow them if she hadn’t fled to the school field and thrown herself into the mud.

What must Fred be thinking? Should she send him a text? What did he mean by saying he was living on a diet of dust and ashes? Was it a message about how tormented he was? Was he tormented because of their misunderstanding? Or was it just Fred being Fred?