The Mag Hags (18 page)

On Sunday at 3.30 pm, the girls turned up separately at Hoolio's, with Mand arriving first for a change and waiting outside the glass front double doors for the other girls. There was an air of apprehension as the five of them trooped inside to find out what state Belle's laptop was in. Hoolio was downbeat for once, which only added to the heightened sense of gloom.

‘Hello, ladies,' said Hoolio, his trademark smile nowhere to be seen. ‘Would you like to come through to the office?'

The girls walked through the spotless stainless-steel kitchen, where not even the smell of Hoolio's cakes could lighten the mood. The office was covered in memorabilia from Hoolio's glory days – there was a gold record for ‘Diggin' It (In the Mood for Love)', framed photographs with other celebrities with dubious hairstyles, a pin board covered in receipts, and a desk as messy as Hoolio's kitchen was clean and ordered.

There on the office chair sat Belle's upside down laptop on the white towel that was now splattered pink.

‘Right,' said Hoolio, turning the laptop up the right way. The white keyboard had turned a sickly plum colour. ‘Shall we begin the begin?'

‘No, wait,' said Maggie. ‘Let's all hold hands for luck.'

The girls silently formed a circle around Hoolio and the laptop, their heads bowed in a silent prayer.

‘Okay, we're ready,' said Maggie finally.

Hoolio pressed the laptop's start button. There was a grinding noise as the computer crunched, whirred, choked and spluttered, trying to come to life.

‘Come on, baby,' said Belle her eyes fixed on the black screen. ‘Do it for mama!'

A set of green horizontal lines flashed across the screen then disappeared. ‘That's weird,' said Belle. ‘I've never seen anything like that before.'

‘Oh my god, please, please,' said Wanda squeezing Cat and Maggie's hands so tightly, they were likely to have bruising the next day.

Then, as if by magic, a picture of a golden sunrise over a beach appeared. ‘It's working – that's my screensaver!' screamed Belle. ‘I took that picture. It was from our last holiday. I got up early, I –'

The girls dropped each other's hands and jumped around the room, high-fiving each other and laughing and hugging.

‘Where did you store the files for your magazine?' asked Hoolio, plugging in his external hard drive into the computer's firewire socket. ‘This will be the real test.'

The icon of the hard drive popped up on the screen and Belle showed Hoolio where the hundreds of
Mag Hags
files were stored. He quickly started dragging them over and depositing them into the external hard drive icon.

‘I can't believe it,' said Maggie. ‘This is so excellent, we're saved …'

Just at the moment, the smell of prawns sizzling on the barbecue filled the room.

‘I'd better get this baby out,' said Hoolio, ejecting the hard drive icon, ‘before she –'

Just then there was a crackle, a pop accompanied by the sound of an old man with the world's nastiest head cold spluttering into a hankie. Then the screen went blank.

‘Shit, bugger, shit, shit, shit,' said Mand.

‘Did you get it, did you get it all?' said Belle, her voice frantic.

‘I'm not sure,' said Hoolio. ‘We'll have to see what we managed to save when I plug the drive into my computer.'

It was another excruciating wait while Hoolio booted up his computer and connected the firewire lead from his hard drive into his computer. ‘Right,' he said, bending over his computer. ‘Let's have a little lookey here, shall we?'

Hoolio opened up a few documents and the girls crowded around the screen as their stories came to life, cries of ‘Thank you' and ‘Yes!' punctuating the air. There was the future formal fashion shoot, with Belle's amazing collage, and thank god, the Tyler interview, but there were also a whole bunch of files that were entirely
corrupted, which Hoolio just couldn't open including, Mand's ‘So you want to change the world?' story, The Vultron feature, Wanda's ‘How to look glamorous on a budget', Maggie's problem page, and the music reviews page.

‘So, girls,' said Maggie after checking the schedule in her notebook. ‘Here's the deal – about half of the magazine files have been corrupted and half have been saved. Looks like we've got a lot of work to do before we hand in this assignment.'

‘Then let's do it,' said Belle. ‘Let's just go for it.'

At least something had been salvaged. The girls agreed to spend every bit of their spare time working on the magazine. They had come this far, they wouldn't let it just slip away.

The girls worked tirelessly as the deadline loomed. Everything else was put on hold: netball training (Belle and Wanda), dentist (Wanda, to find out if she did need braces); flamenco dancing (Maggie, the stomping made her feel powerful), studying (all the girls put their other school work on the backburner) and, most importantly, telling one's father that his soon-to-be wife was still hooked on her ex-boyfriend and only wanted him for his money (Belle – sometimes the hardest things in life take a while to work up to).

To save time, Pierson waited a discreet distance from the school gate and the girls piled into the Rolls Royce
and were driven up the hill to the mansion. This was driving Reanne completely insane, as she was organising her wedding – surely Pierson should have been at
her
beck and call?

The silver wire with the hangers soon started to fill with pages that had been written and designed. Because of Kylie Mannigan, there were some stories that Belle and Wanda had to design over again, which was incredibly frustrating; still, it was amazing how much they remembered and how much better they could make them the second time around.

Belle and Wanda were constantly bickering with the words girls – Maggie, Mand and Cat – asking them to cut words from the stories they had lovingly crafted to fit in with the design. There were heated discussions over which headlines were better, which photo more effective, but slowly and surely the magazine came together.

Tempering the seriousness were moments of hilarity when the girls would stop work and fall about laughing. Like when Mand and Cat were captioning ‘Celebrity Love Map', a guide to who was doing who, which made Hollywood seem like an incestuous little pit. Or when Mand read out her article about getting her bikini line waxed for the first time, which had them all in stitches.

The girls would plug their MP3s into the speakers and take turns DJ'ing, so every afternoon there would be something different playing. Mand would never ever
have thought that she would have enjoyed jumping around to Jason Jones, and had to admit that even cheese had its place.

Mrs Biggins took to having five teenagers in ‘her' house surprisingly well, considering she was about to have a huge wedding party in ‘her' garden. Every afternoon when the girls arrived there was a freshly baked cake or a tray of muffins, and jugs of juice or a pot of English Breakfast tea with tea leaves, which made the girls feel very special as they strained the tea through a silver strainer from a fancy silver teapot.

Belle suspected Mrs Biggins's enthusiasm was due to the absolute horror that she was about to be usurped as the lady of the manor, once Reanne got her greedy paws into Adrian.
The Mag Hag
project at least provided a distraction from the wedding being organised in a whirlwind around them. Belle figured that if she ignored Reanne's very existence, didn't give the wedding the slightest bit of energy, then the impending nuptials would never happen. But judging by the Indian marquee that was being set up on the lawn, unless Belle got some dirt on Reanne quick smart, then she really would become her stepmother, and that thought was so overwhelming, Belle could barely even entertain it.

‘You okay, Belle?' said Cat.

‘Sorry, I was thinking about Reanne. I've no idea how I'm going to stop her marrying Dad.'

‘Debs and I have got a kickboxing lesson tomorrow,' said Cat. ‘Let's see what we can find out.'

‘Thanks, Cat, but I'm afraid we're going to need a miracle.'

Cat secretly suspected she was right – after casing the joint for weeks, there wasn't even a hint of a rumour about Sol and Reanne. She hadn't got a single piece of hard evidence, and with days to the wedding, she honestly didn't know if she would.

Since Cat and Debs had been frequenting Out for Kicks they had actually found something to bond over. There was something they loved about slipping into their tracksuits and then pounding the living bejesus out of a punching bag. Cat even trimmed her ridiculously manicured nails to pack more of a punch. Kickboxing was something that neither of them ever would have thought was them but sometimes when you do things that aren't really you, you discover who you really are.

Evelyn couldn't believe the change in Debs; her cheekbones were making a reappearance after being lost beneath the calories that come from eating two family-sized chocolate blocks a day. But it was more her mental attitude that had shifted. Debs the lounge lizard suddenly had more energy than she knew what to do with – so she had begun jogging to the gym three times a week to practise her punches and kicks on her own. Well, it was more of a half-run, half-walk, but the point was, she was doing something.

On this particular Tuesday afternoon, Evelyn had
taken the day off sick – a mental health day, as she called it – and was driving the girls to their kickboxing lesson.

‘Wow Debs, you'll be a size 8 before you know it,' said Evelyn in her cloyingly chirpy voice. ‘Then you'll see why I was trying to get you motivated.'

‘Mum, do you have to claim the credit for everything?' piped up Cat from the back seat. ‘This isn't about Debs getting the body you've always wanted for her. It's about her doing something that she actually loves doing.'

‘All I was saying is that Debs is –' said Evelyn defensively.

‘I am in the car, Mum,' said Debs, addressing her mother directly for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime. ‘Don't talk about me like I'm not here.'

‘I do know that, Debs,' said Evelyn. ‘But you know, healthy body, healthy –'

‘Mum, you just don't get it, do you?' The kickboxing had released all sorts of emotions in Debs and she was suddenly finding the strength to face all sorts of demons. ‘The reason I let myself go is because I could never have your body, so why bother trying?'

‘If you're trying to blame me for your love of junk food –' said Evelyn.

‘Mum, it's about my shape. You're always going on about how I take after Dad's chunky side of the family. It is hardly great for self-esteem, if you haven't noticed.'

‘Come on, Debs,' replied Evelyn, her determined chirpiness starting to turn shrill. ‘Cat never eats junk food. You were never allowed junk food as a child.'

‘Don't know if you noticed, Mum, but Cat never eats anything unless she's worked out the calories beforehand!' Debs was really letting loose now. ‘You've messed us both up with all your dieting and obsession with our dress sizes.'

Cat sat dumbfounded. Debs had hit a raw nerve. Ever since she'd read Mand's article about body image, she had realised how much she thought about food.

‘Cat eats sensibly!' said her mother forcefully.

‘Not ever having what you want isn't sensible, it's deprivation,' said Debs. ‘Why don't you ask Cat why she's more afraid of a chocolate bar than a man with a machete?'

‘Caitlyn?' Evelyn only ever used Cat's real name when the situation was deadly serious.

‘You do pile on the pressure, Mum,' admitted Cat, relieved to finally tell her mother how she felt. ‘Like the time you wouldn't buy me a pair of jeans until I'd lost my “rump” as you put it. Do you know how hard it was to shrink down to a size 8 and try to maintain it?'

Evelyn knew exactly how hard it was – she'd been doing it all her life.

‘Mum, I know you mean well, but it really hurts when I only feel accepted by you when I'm thin,' said Cat as the
car pulled up at Out for Kicks. ‘There's an article in our magazine about it. You should read it.'

‘You've got to stop being such a body Nazi, Mum,' said Debs. ‘Go and eat a cake or something. Might make you feel better.'

‘I just want what's best for my girls, you're all I've got. I try to do my best …' said Evelyn, her eyes suddenly moist with tears.

‘Yes, Mum, we know,' said Cat, her heart softening although she knew that Evelyn actually having a piece of cake was far fetched. Nana is even a bigger body-Nazi than Mum, thought Cat, so she had a lifetime of ingrained habits. Cat vowed to get over herself and stop the cycle. She turned to her mother and smiled. ‘It's the three of us against the world, Mum. It always will be.'

‘Until you finally start dating again and get yourself a husband!' said Debs, leaning over and kissing Evelyn on the cheek before slipping out of the car, ready to kick all the living crap out of whatever was put in her way.

As they got to the reception desk, a tracksuited Reanne Rowles entered the building looking unbelievably flustered. For a woman who was usually as immaculately groomed as a starlet on her way to an awards ceremony, she looked a mess. Her mascara was caked beneath her eyes, her usually glossy hair was unbrushed and her tracksuit looked as though she'd slept in it.

Cat picked up a kickboxing magazine called
Can You Kick It? (Yes, You Can)
and held it to her face, pretending to be engrossed in an article in the hope that Reanne would not recognise her as anybody involved with her future stepdaughter, Corabelle Askew.

‘Is Sol here?' said Reanne, without even a cursory hello to the receptionist.

‘I don't know where he is,' said the receptionist in a stroppy, ‘Do I look like his secretary?' tone, when in fact, she was. ‘Have you tried his mobile?'

‘Yes, I've tried his mobile,' said Reanne in a ‘Don't get stroppy with me, you stroppy cow' tone. ‘Ten times today and it goes straight to voicemail. Which is obviously why I'm here. Look, just tell him to call me, there's been a change of plan …'

Just at that moment, Sol walked into the gym. ‘Reanne?' he said, hesitantly. ‘I wasn't expecting to see you today.'

‘Obviously,' she said. ‘I have been trying to reach you. We need to talk. It's important –'

A slightly tortured look spread across Sol's face, as though Reanne was about to use his testicles as pin cushions. The girls recognised the look from whenever their mother had wanted to ‘talk' to their father, or when Cat desperately needed to ‘talk' to Nate when she stopped him in the playground to explain his actions. He had said ‘Yeah, yeah, later' and never spoken to her again. It
appeared the entire male species would rather eat the contents of their own nasal cavities than ‘talk'.

‘Not here!' said Sol. ‘Not in public. Come on, let's go to the office.'

‘Hang on, I've left my handbag in the car,' she said. ‘I'll just go and get it.'

‘Okay, I'll meet you there in five minutes,' said Sol, turning around and seeing Debs and Cat.

‘Girls!' he said with a forced smile. ‘I'll be with you soon, just get in the ring and spar until I get there.'

‘Sure thing, Sol,' said Debs, who obviously had no intention of doing anything of the sort. ‘Right Cat, this looks like our big chance to find out what is really going on between those two.'

‘Quick, let's go to the office,' said Cat.

As the girls walked through the gym, there were hordes of boys punching bags or each other. It seemed Debs knew all the boys: ‘Hey Levi', ‘Hi Ben', ‘Andy!' ‘Hello Matt', she called out. The boys all stopped fighting and responded with big smiles or brief questions as to how her roundhouse kick was coming along.

‘Come on, we're supposed to be on a mission to help Belle,' said Cat. ‘Not for you to flirt with half of Baywood.'

The girls walked down to the narrow hallway at the back of the gym, where Sol's office and small kitchen were located.

‘There's nowhere to hide in there,' said Cat, peering into the office.

‘What about in there?' Debs pointed to a laundry basket on wheels, filled with white towels from the gym. ‘We could push it into the office. Come on, jump in and I'll cover you.'

‘Are you crazy?' said Cat. ‘I'm not getting in there with all those stinky towels!'

‘I'd do it, but the plastic bottom may not hold my weight and I could come tumbling out of the bottom,' said Debs, laughing. ‘You never know, Cat, you might enjoy all that man sweat! Go on, get in quick! And use the recorder on your mobile to record their conversation, that way Belle will have real proof to play her dad. Just hurry up before they get here.'

Cat reluctantly jumped into the stinky laundry trolley, and Debs hastily covered her with the testosteronefuelled towels. Debs opened the office door and pushed the heavy cart into the office, with seconds to spare, as Reanne and Sol came walking up the corridor.

‘I won't be long, Debs,' said Sol, with a butter-wouldn't-melt smile as he spirited Reanne into the office.

‘Sure thing, take your time.' Debs grinned at Reanne, who shot her back the fakest smile Debs had ever seen, which used only seven of the fourteen muscles necessary to make a real smile.

Cat held her nose in the pong and scrolled through
her mobile phone until she found the sound recorder. She felt quite claustrophobic and prayed that the light coming from the screen didn't show through the laundry trolley and give her away. There would be no excuse on earth that would explain why she was at the bottom of a dirty laundry basket. The thought of it almost made her laugh out loud, when she heard Reanne and Sol's voices in the room. She pressed record and held her breath.

‘You don't have to go through with this, Reanne,' said Sol, accompanied by the sound of a door slamming shut. ‘Baby, honestly, there are ways out of it, you know.'

‘It's the money that's the issue,' said Reanne, her voice whiney. ‘When he does the deal on The Vultron, we're talking mega, mega bucks. You know, beyond your wildest dreams rich. I'll have everything I've ever wanted. That's got to make me question my decision to marry him.'

‘Whatever your decision, you've always got me. No matter what happens, we'll get through this together,' said Sol. ‘Now come over here, I think you need a really big hug.'

‘Thanks, baby,' said Reanne. ‘You've always had the ability to calm me down. I feel so much better now.'

‘Come on, you, let's go,' said Sol. ‘Go and punch the crap out of a bag, you know it gets rid of your anxiety.'

‘You just know me so well,' said Reanne. ‘Maybe I should be marrying you instead!'

‘Yeah,' said Sol with a sad laugh. ‘Look, I've got to get back into the gym. I'm training someone who could be the next State champion …'

‘Who?' said Reanne, her voice suddenly sounding perkier.

‘That fat chick you just saw in the corridor,' said Sol, opening the door. ‘She packs the meanest punch I've ever had the pleasure of being on the end of, and her roundhouse kick – man!'

 

When Cat walked into Mag Hag Central, it was a hive of activity.

‘Belle,' said Cat sticking her head into the office. ‘Can we have a little chat, in private, and I mean
really
private.'

‘Sure,' said Belle walking outside and going into the big marble bathroom on the landing. ‘What is it? Not Nate again?'

‘No, no, I'm so over him, thank god,' said Cat. ‘Speaking of which, is he still your date to the formal?'

‘For the moment,' said Belle. ‘I thought it would be funny to dump him on the day of the formal, that way he won't have a date! Can you imagine his face?'

‘That's hilarious!' said Cat. ‘Have you got another date though?'

‘I thought we could go together!'

Cat grinned. ‘That's priceless. When he sees us together, he'll freak! Vengeance will be mine! But anyway,
enough of Nate Smyth-Jones, I've got something you've just got to hear.'

Cat took out her phone from her gym bag and played the recording of Sol and Reanne, which, although it was a little muffled, was clearly recognisable as them.

Belle was in a state of shock. It confirmed everything she had thought about Reanne: she was marrying her dad because he was rich; she was waiting for The Vultron to make squillions, then she would fleece him like a shearer shearing a sheep.

‘Oh my god!' said Belle. ‘I can't believe you've managed to get her on tape! My dad will
have
to listen now.'

‘Do you want to take my phone and play it to him now?'

‘He's out with Reanne – for a change. Can you download it and email it to me?'

‘Sure,' said Cat.

‘Thanks, I really appreciate it,' said Belle. ‘And tell Debs I'm sorry that arsehole Sol called her a fat chick.'

‘Actually she was cool about that. She said, “Well, I am a fat chick, but Sol reckons I can be State champion.” She reckons she'll wreak revenge in the ring.'

‘Can we keep it to ourselves just for a while,' said Belle. ‘There's something horrible about having to break your own dad's heart. I might have to wait until Zeb comes home. He'll know what to do.'