Girls to Total Goddesses (9 page)

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16

I abandoned my plan to tire Chloe out. I had been punished for my horridness. But weirdly, Chloe seemed determined to tire herself out. She insisted we watch a really scary movie in which a shapeless breathing psycho stalked young girls who were all Home Alone, by hiding in their gardens, breathing murderously outside their windows . . .

‘God, Chloe!’ I groaned at the end. ‘That was terrifying! I’m going to have to make sure all the doors and windows are double-locked!’

‘Don’t leave me alone!’ shuddered Chloe, fastening herself to my arm. We crept around checking the locks. The kitchen was full of hideous menace. The back door, though locked and bolted top and bottom, seemed suddenly fragile.

‘God, look at that door!’ I whispered in panic. ‘It’s, like, made of cardboard! Somebody could break in with just a teaspoon, never mind an axe!’

‘And then he could creep upstairs and kill us with the teaspoon!’ shrilled Chloe, joining in the hysteria.

‘Oh my God!’ I moaned. ‘We’re going to have to watch some comedy before we go to bed!’

‘I can’t!’ whimpered Chloe. ‘I’m too tired!’

‘You’ve got to!’ I insisted. ‘It was your idea to watch that movie!’

I found a
Simpsons
DVD and we watched two episodes, huddled up on the sofa under a blanket. It was hilarious, but when we finally switched it off, the silence was still deadly and sinister.

‘I can hear horrid breathing!’ I yelled in panic.

‘It’s me!’ screamed Chloe. ‘Quick! Quick! Let’s go upstairs!’

We raced up to my bedroom, and locked ourselves in. I had planned for Chloe to sleep in Tam’s room so when I got up early and started to prepare for Beast’s visit, I wouldn’t wake her up. But clearly Chloe was never going to agree to sleeping in a separate room. I have an inflatable mattress that I use whenever she stays, so we got it out and found the sleeping bag, and after some incredibly heroic dashes to the sinister bathroom, we settled down to sleep.

Chloe fell asleep immediately, lying on her back with her mouth open. I hate it when she does this, because she makes horrid noises: kind of rattlings and gaspings and snorts and mutters. She was lying on the mattress on the floor right next to my bed, so every sound was almost in my face. Also I was going to have problems getting out of bed without treading on her.

I had to get to sleep right now. I was shattered, but it was hard to switch off because so many parts of my bod were still stinging from my fall, plus my mind was racing with thoughts of Beast. I set my moby to wake me with a discreet vibrate at six-thirty and put it under my pillow. Luckily I’m a very light sleeper. Now I absolutely had to wind down.

The house was silent, but suddenly I noticed the sound of footsteps – creak, creak, creak! Oh my God! My blood froze, my heart lurched and my knees went weak, even though I was lying down. There was somebody coming up the stairs: creak, creak, creak! Creak, creak, creak, creak, creak, creak, creak, creak . . . wait a minute! How many freakin’ stairs did we have in this house?

I realised that the sound of the stealthy footsteps was, in fact, my own blood circulating in my own ears. I had to stop panicking like this. I had to get some beauty sleep because Beast would be on my doorstep First Thing.

What was I going to wear? Mentally I did an inventory of my wardrobe: it was all garbage. But it had to be perfect – and it had to be Sunday morning-ish. I mustn’t look as if I’d been tarting myself up for hours, even though that was precisely what I was going to have to do.

The best thing would be weekend casual: a white T-shirt and a denim skirt. But I knew the best T-shirt was dirty and the denim skirt was probably lying in the corner, crumpled up, under a heap of video games and other junk. I pulled the covers over my head, squeezed my eyes shut and tried in vain to empty my brain.

Twenty minutes passed, and I was still wide awake. Should I wear my black jeans or my blue dress? What did I really look like
from behind
in my black jeans? If only Chloe wasn’t here, I could have got out of bed, put the light on and tried on a dozen outfits.

Twenty more minutes passed, and suddenly it was morning and there was a knock on the door, and I flew downstairs and opened the door, and there stood Beast, only somehow he looked a bit like the guy who works in the post office, and suddenly I realised I was in my bra and pants – oh horror! I twitched awake. It was only a dream.

Chloe stirred in her sleep and said, ‘Oh, I don’t think so’ in a totally ordinary, rather grown-up voice. What an idiot! She thought she was being so darned mature in that fantasy world of hers, and in reality she was lying on my floor clutching my cuddly duck.

It made me panic that Chloe was sleeping so soundly, whereas I was restless and jittery. Maybe she would wake early and refreshed, ready to entertain Beast, while I would fall into a concrete slumber and remain stapled to my pillow until noon.

I tried seventeen times to fall asleep, had about a hundred tiny catnaps and some really terrible dreams, in the last of which I was being eaten alive by a man from Bolton who had bad eyesight and thought I was an oyster.

Suddenly it was morning. I looked at my phone. Six-thirty. I’d had enough of trying to sleep. Even though I felt hollow and sick with fatigue, I must get up and make myself irresistible. It would be awful if I slept through the alarm and when Beast rang the doorbell, nobody answered.

Getting out of bed was a major challenge. To avoid treading on Chloe, I had to crawl to the foot of the bed and climb gingerly over the footboard. Halfway over, my groins twanged in a horrible warning: I was stiff as a board from the hip hop, the scrubbing, the jogging and, of course, the fall. Once both my feet were safely and securely on the floor (I realised now how often I’d underestimated that little treat), I made my way to the wardrobe. And when I say made my way, well, it couldn’t really be described as walking. In order to minimise the pain of my stiff muscles, I had to creep along with my legs wide apart, like a cross between a crab and a coffee table.

Carefully I opened the wardrobe door. ‘EEEEEEEEEEEUW!’ it squealed. The bitch! I would give it a good kicking later, when Chloe had gone. Right now it had stirred her from her deepest sleep. She turned over, muttering to herself.

‘I’ve never really liked her . . .’ she sighed, then dropped back into unconscious bliss. I hoped she wasn’t talking about me. Who was she talking to, in her precious dream? I wasn’t just jealous of Chloe for being able to sleep: I was jealous of the people she might be meeting in her dreams, behind my back. God! If I was this possessive with my best mate, whatever would I be like if I ever got a boyfriend?

Luckily, I didn’t have to make jangly noises with hangers in my wardrobe because I’d gone through an untidy phase recently, so all my clothes were in a great heap in there. I scooped out an armful at random and carried them towards the door, still walking with my legs apart with every muscle screaming in protest.

Now I had to unlock the door without waking Chloe. I dumped the heap of clothes and turned the key as quietly as possible: in other words, it only went ‘SNICKETY-SNACK!’ with sudden, violent, brain-shredding loudness. Chloe didn’t move. I turned the doorhandle: ‘CROCKLEWHINGE BARRATRAPPLE!’ I opened the door, slowly, cautiously: ‘SCREEEEEEENGING WHEEEEEEEEENINGER!’

‘Please, God,’ I whispered, ‘make Chloe sleep on. If you do, I promise I’ll never be a bad girl again.’

But actually I was a bad girl again right away. A really sneaky thought suddenly occurred to me: if I locked the door behind me, Chloe wouldn’t be able to gatecrash my tender early morning love-fest with Beast even if she did wake up. I could tell Chloe that I’d had to go into Tam’s room because of her snoring, and I’d locked her in so she’d be safe from the horrible breathing stalker-thing with his murderous teaspoon.

Stealthily I removed the key from the lock, and after shifting my clothes mountain into Tam’s room, I closed my bedroom door and locked it from the outside. Then I paused and listened. Chloe hadn’t stirred. It was horrid of me, but it wasn’t really cruel, because all she had to do was yell and of course I’d leave what I was doing and unlock the door
immediately
. Even if Beast was being particularly loving.

‘
I’ve always adored you, Zoe – you’re a legend! I just love your beard of scabs and black eye: everyone in Hollywood will want one
,’ he would say.

‘
Heeeeeeelp!
’ That would be Chloe from upstairs. ‘
Let me out!
’

‘
’Scuse me
,’ I’d say enchantingly, ‘
must just see to my slave
.’ I’d go upstairs, unlock the door, and tell her to stay where she was and to go back to bed, because a man had come to measure up the kitchen or something.

I set up base camp in Tam’s bedroom, tried on four dozen different outfits, and eventually chose skinny black jeans and an empire-line top. I tried thirteen different lipsticks, and finally settled for a mixture of Wild Rose and Carnival. I tried five thousand different earrings, before deciding to wear no earrings at all. They would only draw attention to my weird small ears.

To pass the time until First Thing, I sat awkwardly on the sofa reading
Heat
magazine, like a guest in my own home or somebody waiting to see the dentist. There wasn’t a sound from upstairs. I hoped Chloe would snore on till noon. There was no danger of her being woken by the front doorbell, as it’s a bit feeble and tinny and you can’t really hear it from my bedroom.

Eventually, at about nine-thirty, the doorbell gave a feeble tweet. Catapulted from the sofa by a rocket of pure love, I raced to the front door and flung it open, trying to hide the adoration and excitement that were flooding through every fibre of my being, and also hoping my scabby beard, black eye and strange table-like stance would not be too obvious.

But my love god was not there. Instead I had to feast my famished eyes on the khaki stare and limp slicked-back hair of King Nerd. ‘Oh.’ My heart sank like a stone. ‘Matthew.’

‘Paolo,’ he corrected me. ‘Remember? Beast asked me to drop these round.’ He was carrying a big packet which I assumed must be the children’s paintings. ‘Something came up and he couldn’t make it. Can I come in for a minute? I need to show you what to do. Explain it.’

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17

‘Yeah, of course, come in.’ I stood aside and Matthew draped himself over the threshold. As he passed, I got a whiff of his aftershave – although Matthew was light years away from being able to produce stubble, so I suppose in his case it should have been called before-shave. It wasn’t unpleasant, but there was far too much of it for so early on a Sunday morning: it was like being visited by a Ukrainian lemonade factory. ‘Go through to the kitchen,’ I suggested. ‘Would you like a coffee?’

Oh
why
had I said that? Was I stark staring bonkers? It was the casual throwaway little phrase I had been rehearsing all night, to lure Beast into my love den. My stupid tired brain! I had just blurted it out to the last boy on Earth I wanted to have coffee with: the boy I wanted to leave immediately, ideally before he’d even arrived.

‘Oh thanks, yeah, I’d love that,’ said Matthew, stopping suddenly in the kitchen and turning to look at me. I received the full blast of his breath in my face, and it wasn’t pleasant. It reminded me slightly of sick. If Matthew and I were the last people left on Earth, I’m afraid the human race would have to die out. Matthew stared at me rather rudely as I filled the kettle.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘Have you been in a fight?’

‘What? Oh, the black eye? Yeah, ha ha! A fight with Chloe. Not really. She elbowed me by accident.’

‘And the . . .’ Matthew indicated the chin area on his own face, drawing attention to a constellation of spots which reminded me of my own dear Nigel, whom I had taken pains to hide beneath a thick layer of plastered-on concealer.

‘Yeah, I fell down yesterday while I was out jogging,’ I admitted. ‘My hands are street pizzas.’ I displayed them. ‘And my knees.’ Matthew looked attentively at my knees, safely encased in their black skinny jeans. Thank God I had not injured my boobs – that would have given him carte blanche.

‘God!’ he said. ‘They look terrible!’ I was annoyed for a split second that he had dared to use the word ‘terrible’ in relation to my appearance. He should have put it differently, especially as he was in my kitchen waiting for a cup of my coffee, liberally laced with my milk and, being Matthew, about five of my sugars. He should have said, ‘
Never mind, you’re still magnificent
.’ No, wait! That was what Beast should have said, if he hadn’t been too goddam lazy to turn up.

I was now getting over the shock of seeing Matthew rather than Beast, and becoming quite angry with them both.

‘Decaff?’ I hissed aggressively. ‘Or not?’

‘It depends how it was decaffeinated,’ murmured Matthew, staring accusingly at my coffee jar. ‘If it was decaffeinated with carbon dioxide, that’s fine, but some companies use chemicals.’ I seized the jar and read the label, trying hard to hide my rage. Now he was dissing my coffee!

‘It says it was decaffeinated by a natural process,’ I informed him crisply. ‘I’m having some anyway.’

‘Well, it depends what they mean by “natural”,’ said Matthew with an irritated sigh.

‘Matthew!’ I snapped. ‘Do you want decaff or not?’

‘Paolo,’ he said. ‘Yes, OK.’ I noticed that he didn’t say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. I was turning into a headmistress again, of the old-fashioned, ferocious sort.

‘Seven sugars as usual?’ I enquired archly.

‘No, no!’ said Matthew loftily. ‘I’ve given up sugar. I never took seven anyway. That would be ridiculous.’

‘It was supposed to be a joke,’ I informed him sarcastically. ‘Anyway . . .’ I placed his coffee on the table, and to my alarm, he took this as an invitation to sit down. He sat down heavily and with a sort of finality as if he was planning to be in our kitchen for several decades.

I sat down opposite him. I would have stayed standing, to hint by body language that he shouldn’t stay long, but I was so damn tired I was longing to just lie down, and sitting was the next best thing.

‘So, what’s to explain?’ I enquired.

Matthew opened up the package and pulled out a huge pile of children’s paintings.

‘We want you to look at these paintings and decide which is the best,’ he explained in his tortoise-like, obvious, plonking way. I hated the way he’d expressed it: ‘
we
’ want ‘
you
’ to do this. As if he and Beast were part of a blessed company of superior beings up on some divine pink mountaintop, peering down through the clouds and conjuring up little tasks for us Neanderthals toiling below.

‘OK, fine,’ I said briskly, and in my attempt to get Matthew out of the door ASAP, I sipped my coffee much too early, and scalded my tongue.

‘The way we’re going to do it,’ he went on, moving a few of the paintings around and staring at them, ‘is to draw up a sort of shortlist. We want you to chose the best five –’

‘Well, yeth, obviouthly,’ I interrupted, annoyed that my scalded tongue was temporarily affecting my ability to pronounce the letter ‘S’, because in normal circumstances I would have liked to hiss at him like a furious little puff adder. If indeed puff adders hiss. My knowledge of zoology is not even basic, I admit. ‘Beatht told me that. Looking at children’th paintingth, it’th not rocket thienthe.’

‘I know, I know . . . I’m being a bit stupid, really, but for a reason,’ said Matthew, pushing the paintings aside. Then he raised his strange khaki eyes to mine and gave me a long tortured look. Oh my God! Matthew was going to hit on me! A dreadful sickening feeling spread through my tummy. If only I hadn’t tired out Chloe last night! If only she was sitting right here beside me now, he’d never dare to look at me like that.

‘I want your advice, really,’ said Matthew, looking bashful and brushing imaginary crumbs off our kitchen table.

‘Yeah, what?’ I tried to look and sound as ugly as possible: I dropped my lower lip in a kind of subhuman sneer, and pushed my hair back to reveal my horrid little ears. He couldn’t hit on a girl with ears that looked like squashed figs, surely.

‘There’s this girl . . .’ Matthew stared helplessly at me. His eyes went all glistening, like boiled sweets. Another wave of nausea swept over me. I tried hard to look like a bulldog. I so desperately wanted to smell bad, too, but I had made myself so fragrant for Beast that it was an impossible task, and there’s never a fart around when you want one. ‘She doesn’t know I like her, yet . . .’ he went on. ‘What I really want to know is, should I say anything?’

‘But Matthew! What about Tinkerbell?’

‘Trixiebell,’ Matthew corrected me, looking offended. I still couldn’t tell if she really was a real girlfriend, or some kind of carefully cultivated fantasy. ‘I had to finish with her,’ he said firmly but with a tasteful note of regret. ‘She was cramping my style.’

‘But she was so talented!’

‘In every relationship there’s a leader and a follower,’ Matthew informed me in a preachy voice. ‘I have to lead, because Jupiter was in my sixth house when I was born. In Swindon.’

‘Well, of course you have to lead, Matthew! That’s obvious.’

‘Paolo,’ he corrected me sternly, though looking gratified at the praise.

‘. . . so wouldn’t she follow?’ I asked mischievously.

‘No.’ Matthew looked offended. ‘She was quite rebellious really. I told her, “
How can we be a team if you keep losing the plot? I’m sorry to let you go, but it’s for the best
.”’ He sounded like Sir Alan Sugar firing an apprentice. I began to think that there really might be somebody called Trixiebell. I could only imagine how delighted she must feel right now, having been dumped by Matthew.

‘I like being free,’ he informed me. ‘Trixiebell and I weren’t suited, but I think there may be other girls who would be more my type. In fact, there is one.’ My whole being cringed at the possibility that it was me.

How could I wake Chloe up? Music! I leapt to my feet and lurched across the room. My groins were still strained, but I had to escape into a Matthew-free zone.

‘Oh, Matthew, you’re in lurve!’ I screamed, as loudly as possible, hoping the sound would rise through the ceiling and penetrate up to my bedroom, where Chloe lay. There was hope, although my bedroom carpet is very thick and expensive, as my parents constantly inform me whenever I spill nail varnish on it. ‘We must have music to celebrate your romantic situation!’ I roared weirdly.

I reached for the CD player, switched it on and turned the volume up to maximum. A deafening wave of classical opera came blasting out – Dad’s into Verdi at the moment.

I saw Matthew’s lips move, but I couldn’t hear a word. This, though convenient, was kind of inconvenient, too.

‘Sorry?’ I mouthed.

‘What?’ frowned Matthew.

‘You’re in lurve!’ I cried, wondering whether it would appear strange if, to celebrate Matthew being in lurve, I were to grab the broom and frenziedly knock it on the ceiling.

‘Could we turn it down a bit?’ Matthew was getting up. This was dangerous: I didn’t want him roaming free-range round our kitchen, all amorous and sweaty. He might corner me by the microwave and who knows what might happen? Swiftly I turned the volume down slightly. But it was too late. Matthew was approaching me and looking deadly serious. I darted away and executed a mad Dance of Lurve around the kitchen.

‘Matthew’s in lurve!’ I cried at the ceiling. ‘It’s wonderful! It’s amazing! Congrats, old boy!’ My groins were twanging with every step, but I had to keep moving. I know it’s hard to hit a moving target, and I was hoping it would be hard to kiss one, too. Seeing Matthew’s face closing in on you with his lips pouted would be like being frozen in terror halfway across a road and watching a runaway cement truck bearing down on you.

‘I need to ask you something,’ Matthew persisted, following me around and ignoring my strange dance and shrill celebratory cries. I had to stop this. I came to a halt on the other side of the table. He couldn’t actually kiss me across the table, because, thank goodness, our kitchen table is blissfully wide. I’d never appreciated before just how wonderful wide tables are.

Matthew reached out and switched the CD player off. What a bloody cheek! That was my CD player! How dare he come into my house and touch my gadgets without permission!

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but it was doing my head in.’ There was a sudden fierce prickling silence, in which I noticed that there was no sound whatsoever coming from the room above: despite my deafening pantomime, Chloe was evidently still fast asleep, the lazy old trout.

‘Fine.’ I shrugged. Matthew stared at me like a hypnotised snake. It was coming now: his declaration. It was
Pride and Prejudice
all over again: he was dreary and repulsive Mr Collins and I was Lizzy Bennet, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

‘The thing is . . .’ Matthew said, looking down at the table for a split second, ‘do you think . . . should I tell her how I feel?’

‘No!’ I shrieked, a bit melodramatically. ‘Not yet! I mean, observe her first.’

‘I have been observing her,’ Matthew said, observing me with horrid pale persistence, and visibly quaking like a pan of porridge coming to the boil. ‘I’ve been observing her for weeks.’

‘Her body language, Matthew!’ I urged. ‘What does it tell you?’

‘I don’t know!’ groaned Matthew helplessly. ‘I’ve bought a book on body language but hers is really hard to interpret!’

‘I know!’ Suddenly I had a breakthrough. ‘Let’s ask Chloe! She’s upstairs! Chloe is great on body language!’ I danced out of the kitchen and headed for the stairs. And Matthew, that idiotic lump, actually followed me. I whirled around, trying to sustain my crazy delight. ‘You stay in the kitchen!’ I insisted. ‘Finish your coffee! I’ll wake her up and ask her to come down and advise you!’

‘No! Wait!’ pleaded Matthew. ‘I don’t want to disturb her, and between you and me, I don’t find Chloe very . . . you know.
Simpatico
.’

‘She bloody is simpatico, you liar!’ I retorted in a desperate blast of mock frivolity. ‘Go back and wait in the kitchen and we’ll soon have this sorted for you!’ And I ran upstairs.

Swiftly I hurled myself at my bedroom door. But it was, of course, locked. Oh God!
Where was the freakin’ key?