The Worst Girlfriend in the World (16 page)

‘Hello,’ Francis said flatly. He folded his arms. I didn’t know him very well but I did know that sneering and folding his arms were two of his favourite things in the world.

I decided it was best to ignore him, but not in a hostile way because he was still Louis’s mate. So I smiled briefly at him and turned my attention to Louis, who was wiping the barbecue sauce from around his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Sit down. Have a fry,’ he said. I gingerly took a small fry from the bag he was offering and held it near my mouth to show willing. ‘Weird, isn’t it? Like we hardly ever talk, then we’re Twittering it up yesterday. Now it’s like we’ve known each other for ever.’

‘Yeah, it’s strange, but like good strange.’ Of course, I already knew loads of things about Louis from years of admiring him from afar – it was hard to admire someone from afar and not get a bit stalker-y – but I couldn’t tell him that because he’d take out a restraining order. And really, he didn’t know that much about me, except he thought that I liked pictures of cats wearing sunglasses when I wasn’t that much of a cat person.

Francis had gone to the counter to order some chicken dish that probably came with a side of salmonella and Louis seemed quite happy for me to stay, so I perched uncomfortably on the edge of the plastic chair. I didn’t want to make myself too comfortable because as soon as I sensed that I’d outstayed my welcome, I’d need to make a speedy getaway.

But it turned out that Louis was really easy to talk to. He kept up a constant stream of chatter and when Francis came back to the table with a chicken burger, Louis was listing all the really gross things
in
a Chicken Hut chicken burger.

Francis sat down next to Louis, shook his head and took a decisive bite of his burger. ‘You don’t want to do that, man,’ Louis told him. ‘They get the chickens, take off all the nice bits and give them to Waitrose, then they take everything that’s left and shove it in a mincer. Like,
everything
. Nipples, eyelashes, toenails, testicles…’

‘Louis, chickens don’t have testicles,’ Francis said mildly and I’d just been thinking that myself and I couldn’t help but smile. Francis smiled back.

It looked weird on his face, like he mostly used it for sneering. ‘I don’t think chickens have nipples either,’ I said and I didn’t even blush… much. ‘But I’ve never got that close to one to be able to know for definite.’

‘Still, reckon that burgers have got chicken toenails in them…’

‘They have claws, dickhead.’

‘… and hair and teeth,’ Louis insisted quite happily. He was one of those people who didn’t seem to ever take offence. ‘You start growing extra nipples you’re out of the band, laughing boy.’

‘How will I ever get over that crushing blow.’ Francis shook his head again and carried on eating his burger, while Louis told me that Francis had been kicked out of the band when he’d got a place at an art college in London and they wouldn’t let him rejoin when he came back after a year until he really grovelled.

‘I don’t remember grovelling. I do remember you begging me to join again because the new guitarist only knew two chords and I know three.’

‘You came back to Merrycliffe after escaping to London?’ I heard myself ask in scandalised tones. ‘Christ, I would never come back here if I made it to London. Never. Not even for public holidays.’

‘Yeah, I thought that too but here I am,’ Francis said. He looked pretty gutted about it. I couldn’t blame him. I was dying to know why he’d come back, but it was probably because he’d been kicked out of art college so I didn’t want to pursue it. ‘You have been to London though, haven’t you?’ Francis asked me. ‘To see the Christmas lights or on a school trip or something?’

I could have bluffed but Francis had lived in London so he’d know that I was lying. ‘Nope. Barely made it south of Manchester,’ I admitted sadly.

‘We can’t have that,’ Louis exclaimed and now that I wasn’t simply admiring him from afar, he was even better than I’d ever imagined. Friendly and funny and not at all up himself. ‘We’re playing a gig in London in November. In Camden!’

‘Camden,’ I echoed a little wistfully. ‘I’d love to go to Camden. And Hoxton and Shoreditch and Selfridges and Liberty to buy fabric.’

‘We’re hiring a minibus to take us down. There’ll be room for you if you fancy it,’ Louis said casually. He didn’t seem to realise he was offering me the keys to the kingdom. Louis and London. Louis in London. Me and Louis in bloody London. ‘You just have to chip in a tenner for petrol.’

‘Really? Are you sure? Is this some kind of elaborate piss-take?’

‘No!’ Louis looked quite hurt at the suggestion. ‘Franny can come up to that fancy London gig with us, right, Francis?’

Even Francis didn’t look too horrified at the thought. He did look a little put-upon, but I was starting to think that was just how he looked when he wasn’t sneering. ‘Yeah, sure, come. Just promise you won’t drink too much, then get a kebab from a dodgy place in Archway on the way home and throw up all over the minibus like Louis’s done twice.’

‘I would never do that! I hate kebabs!’ I said and they both grinned and I was in. I was
so
in.

I floated back to college on a little cloud made of euphoria and stardust. Then, as if the day couldn’t get any better, Barbara praised my hard morning’s work and was really impressed that I was mocking up my design on a toile first. The others all glared at me.

‘Teacher’s pet,’ Matthew hissed when Barbara was busy berating Krystal with a K, who’d managed to get fake tan on the pink velour she’d insisted on buying. ‘How did you even know what a toile was?’

‘I illegally download episodes of
Project Runway
,’ I whispered back and Sage said that she did too and as we worked, we talked about the last season and a designer we’d both particularly hated and loved in equal measure. And all the time I was thinking about Louis and going to London and the only little black spot was that I really wanted to tell Alice about it.

Not in a gloating way but because I was used to telling her everything and it used to be that we cheered each other’s good times and helped each other through the bad times. And also, I kind of wanted Alice to come to London in Thee Desperadoes’ minibus because she would automatically make it ten times more fun.

Because I felt so guilty about not telling Alice I’d hung out with Louis, I agreed to let her cut my hair.

I hadn’t been going to. I still wasn’t convinced that I had the bone structure or the balls for an urchin crop, and an urchin crop wasn’t necessary since I’d decided not to dress up as Edie Sedgwick for The Wow’s Halloween party. I was going to do what everyone else did: wear what I’d normally wear and shove a witch’s hat on top.

Then Sage found my rubbery silver T-shirt dress scrunched in a heap on my work table when I said she could borrow my tape measure. ‘What’s this?’ she asked, holding it up. ‘One of your seams is puckered.’

‘It’s hard not to pucker stretch material,’ I said, barely glancing at my abandoned dress. ‘It was part of my Halloween costume. I was going to go as Edie Sedgwick, but now I’m not.’

‘Oh, that druggy heiress who used to hang out with Andy Warhol?’

I promptly stabbed myself in the finger with a pin. ‘Ow! Wait! You know who Edie is? How do you know who Edie is? No one ever, ever does!’

Sage blinked. ‘I saw that film about her with Sienna Miller,
Factory Girl
. It was amazing. She was gorgeous but so doomed…’

‘I know! Like, the world should have been hers but she was surrounded by people who fed off her beauty…’

‘Right! I read this book about her after I’d seen the film,’ Sage said and I was all set to bombard her with a thousand questions but then Paul stuck his hand up and asked who Edie was.

Nobody could ever ask me who Edie was and expect me to give them a brief one-sentence reply. I had to stop what I was doing and give Paul Edie’s potted biography and make hand gestures as I said things like, ‘And then after she’d come out of the menty hospital before she went to live in New York and became an artist, she went to this clinic where she
literally
had her legs pummelled into shape.
Literally.
’

Sage pulled up some pictures of Edie on her iPad, then she found a YouTube clip of Edie that I’d never seen before. We watched Edie and Andy Warhol appearing on a sixties American chat show – him refusing to speak because he was too cool and Edie being funny and charming and it must have been the most inspiring thing you’d ever seen if you were stuck in a small boring house in a small boring suburb – it would have totally made you want to move to New York and become an artist too.

The way I felt about Edie, the way she moved and fascinated me, was the feeling that I wanted people to have when they wore my clothes, and then I really wished I was still going as Edie for Halloween.

‘You so should,’ Sage said when I told her. She looked round the workroom. ‘Hey, Mattie, do you fancy dressing up as Andy Warhol for Halloween?’

I clasped my hands to my heart. ‘Oh, please say that you will.’

Dora was busy scrolling through photos of Edie and Andy and the other ‘Superstars’ who’d hung out at Andy’s studio, the Factory. ‘I’ve been really stuck for a Halloween costume.’ She gestured at her black crinoline. ‘It’s hard when you wear ballgowns on a daily basis to up your game for Halloween, but I’d quite like to dress up as this Ultra Violet woman. I might even dye my hair purple.’

Then Sage said that if we were all going, she’d skip spending the weekend in Leeds with her dad and come to The Wow’s Halloween party. ‘I’ll go as Nico from the Velvet Underground,’ she decided. ‘If anyone says a black girl can’t be a blonde German then I pity them. I’m going to rock the hell out of a white trouser suit and wear a blonde wig and a big hat.’

Obviously Paul didn’t want to be left out so he said he’d dress up as Lou Reed, the Velvet’s lead singer, and being part of a gang all with a common Halloween theme was so much cooler than wearing a witch’s hat and being done with it.

But if I was going to do Edie justice then I had to cut my hair. When I texted Alice to ask if she was up to the job, she texted back,
YES! YES! 1000xYES! Best news I’ve had all week! YAY!!!!!!!!
Cutting my hair would also make Alice happy, which was good, because stuff between us wasn’t as great as it could have been.

‘You won’t regret this,’ she promised when I turned up at her dad’s salon on Friday afternoon. She pulled me through the salon, which had black walls and floor and these cream-coloured, French-chateau-style chairs and cabinets. It was very cutting edge for Merrycliffe. All the girls who worked there wore black too. They looked up from highlighting and blowdries and manicures and smiled as Alice hurried me past them. ‘Now I know it’s an Edie look but I’ve also got these pictures of Carey Mulligan in
Vogue
so I’ve got something really detailed to work with.’

I didn’t want to look like Carey Mulligan even on the front cover of
Vogue
, but I nodded as I waited by the sinks while Alice wrapped me in a huge black robe. ‘Just remember to keep it long and messy in the front, OK?’

‘You got it,’ Alice said brightly. Then she cracked her knuckles like she was about to have a fight, which worried me a lot, but soon I was leaning back against a basin while she washed my hair and gave me a head message as she worked the conditioner through. ‘Your head actually has all these pressure points that relate to different parts of your body.’ Alice sounded like she was reading from a textbook.

‘Oh really? I thought that was your feet,’ I said.

‘It’s your head too,’ she said firmly as she kneaded her fingertips against my temples, then made circular motions towards the crown of my head. It felt amazing. ‘I forgot to ask, was the water too hot?’

‘It was perfect.’ In fact, it was probably the best hairwashing I’d ever had.

Alice did the hairdresser thing of carefully arranging a towel around my wet hair instead of making a turban like you’d do at home, then led me to a screened-off area, away from the hairspray-scented hustle and bustle of the salon. I saw her dad, Sean, busy with his scissors but before I could wave, Alice yanked me behind the screen and pushed me into the chair.

‘I thought we’d be more private here and we can have some of this, like my dad’s favourite clients.’ This was a bottle of Prosecco chilling in an ice bucket along with two glasses.

I was completely down with drinking some really posh sparkling wine, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted Alice going anywhere near alcohol when she was meant to be cutting my hair. After all, she refused to drink booze when she was doing her nails ’cause it made her brushwork go wonky. ‘Maybe you should wait until we’ve finished,’ I started to say, but Alice had already downed a glass of Prosecco in one.

‘Don’t you trust me?’ she asked in a hurt voice, as she finally handed me my glass. ‘I’m not going to make you look anything less than gorgeous.’

Alice seemed really jumpy and kept picking up a pair of scissors and then putting them down again. But I wanted things to be right between us, even though I still hadn’t told her that I’d been hanging out with Louis. I also wanted to differentiate myself from her and Thee Desperadettes by embracing my edginess. And I really needed to get in touch with my inner Edie, leech a little of her cool and daring – well, when she wasn’t having nervos and doing a shedload of drugs.

‘OK, let’s do this!’