The Worst Girlfriend in the World (2 page)

‘Let’s go, Franny B,’ she demanded. ‘We’ve things to do, places to be.’

Which meant she needed to change into her trainers but not when there were boys present.

‘So, I’ll see you. We’ll make plans to hook up,’ Joey said, then swallowed hard, amazed by his own daring.

‘Yeah, great, BBM me or whatever.’ At least two of us knew that she would never return any of Joey’s messages, texts or invitations to chat, but at least Alice was letting him down gently.

‘So, Franny, thanks for the chewy,’ Chris said. ‘See you Monday then, right?’

‘Well, see…’

‘Wrong,’ Alice interrupted in a flat voice. ‘You’re not going to see Franny on Monday. None of us are going to see Franny on Monday, because Franny doesn’t go to our school any more.’

‘I’m going to college to do a fashion BTEC. You know, after the school got all pissy about my GCSE results.’ I shrugged. ‘Like, whatever.’

‘It doesn’t matter about your GCSEs, Franny,’ Alice said, like she’d been saying ever since my results had arrived. ‘You’re going to be a famous fashion designer so why do you need Maths anyway? Franny got on to the fashion course on the strength of her portfolio. Like, she actually has a portfolio,’ she added proudly, not that Joey and Chris seemed to care.

As we walked away from the boys and I waited in the doorway of one of Merrycliffe’s eleven charity shops for Alice to change into her trainers, I wondered if I’d ever get my BTEC, then get the hell out of Merrycliffe and go to London to find fashion fame and fortune. Or would my Saturday nights always be like this?

‘Oh, cheer up, Franny!’ Alice exclaimed, tucking her arm in mine. ‘I wish I was going to college and not stuck at school. School is so immature.’

‘Your mum still won’t budge then?’ Alice’s dad owned five hair and beauty salons and Alice would much rather go into the family business than study for five A levels in subjects she didn’t care about, but her mum wasn’t having any of it. She let Alice work in the Merrycliffe salon on Thursdays after school and all day Saturdays, but she was convinced that Alice was going to be the next Alan Sugar – a younger, prettier, femaler Alan Sugar. She was also convinced that Alice was going to go to Oxford or Cambridge to study Economics. It was kind of amazing how little she knew her only daughter.

‘No, but Dad’s on my side.’ Alice’s dad was always on her side. ‘I just need to come up with a cunning plan.’

‘You’ll think of something,’ I said, as we turned on to the seafront. ‘You always do.’

‘Oh God, I don’t want to think about school. It can wait until Monday. Come on! Let’s run!’

Alice and I grabbed on to each other’s hand and ran, screaming into the wind, not caring that we might wake up the residents of the many old people’s care homes that populated the seafront.

That was the way we rolled. We lived for kicks, even if the kicks were hard to come by.

It wasn’t long before we got to my house. It was a huge Victorian beast of a house that had been a hotel back in the days before aeroplanes, when people had to holiday in Britain. I couldn’t believe that anyone would come to Merrycliffe of their own free will. Like, on
holiday
, but that was the olden times for you. Now Merrycliffe was known only for being Europe’s eleventh largest container port and our house was just a house, its sky-blue paint job corroded by the salt in the air, which had also rusted its metal balconies.

It wasn’t much but I called it home. ‘Let’s do something tomorrow,’ I said to Alice as I unlatched the gate. ‘To celebrate our last day of freedom.’

‘Something exciting,’ Alice agreed.

We stood there for a while, a minute at least, trying to think of something exciting we could do.

‘Oh, look, come round mine and I’ll do your nails and then we can order some food and watch repeats of
Jersey Shore
and try really hard not to die of boredom,’ Alice said finally. ‘Sound like a plan?’

‘Let’s skip
Jersey Shore
for
Made in Chelsea
and that sounds like one wild Sunday afternoon right there,’ I said. Then we air-kissed three times, ’cause I’d read that up in London, if you’re in the media or generally fabulous, three kisses are industry standard. ‘See you tomorrow if I don’t get a better offer in the meantime.’

Alice snorted. ‘Like, that’s going to happen.
Here!
’

The house was in darkness and felt cold and stale as if it had been shut up for a long, long time, the rooms unaired, furniture swathed in dust sheets.

Except it hadn’t, but my mother refused to open a window because she thought that the fresh air was full of toxic germs. Don’t even get me started on the badness of putting on lights – apparently it had been proven that even energy-saving bulbs could give you cancer but what
ever
, I put them on anyway. Blazing a path from hall to kitchen, where I shoved two pieces of bread in the toaster, stuck the kettle on, put on even more lights as I climbed the stairs and knocked on my mum’s door.

There was no reply. I pushed the door open and peered into the darkness.

‘No…’ came the piteous whine from the lump of flesh huddled under the duvet as I turned on the light. ‘Turn it off.’

‘Making toast. What do you want on it? Marmite? Jam? Is it too late for cheese?’

‘No…’

‘Peanut butter? Tell you what, I’ll let you have some of my Nutella.’ I sat down on the edge of the bed and poked at what I thought might be her arm. ‘As it’s you.’

‘Please, Franny.’ Her voice was muffled until she pulled back the covers enough that I could see her face, all squinched up in case she might accidentally breathe in some fetid, airborne virus. ‘I can’t eat.’

‘Well, tough, you’re eating ’cause I’m not going to bed until you do. I’ll just stay in here talking and talking and talking until you can’t take it any more and go down to the kitchen of your own free will and end up eating the whole box of those weird Polish cocktail sausages with the use-by date of January 2019 just to get me to shut up. Your call.’

There was no response. It didn’t surprise me.

When I came back fifteen minutes later with a laden tray, the bedside lamp had been switched on but she’d disappeared under the duvet again. I put the tray down on the bedside table. Right next to her pills, which I was sure she hadn’t taken.

There was still no response as I sat back down on the bed, but I made sure that I was pretty much sitting on her leg so she had to shift over. With a deep sigh she sat up. I shoved a mug of tea at her so she had no choice but to take it, otherwise there would have been hot tea all over the duvet and spills drove her to the very edge of her nerves.

A huge number of things drove my mum to the very edge of her nerves.

‘Been out then?’ she asked, her voice rusty because she hadn’t used it all day. She took three sips of tea and I let myself relax ever so slightly.

‘Yeah, with Alice.’

Because she’d started to nibble at the toast now, she had the energy to pull a vinegary face. She didn’t like Alice. Thought she was a bad influence, though she should have known, being my own mother and all, that I wasn’t the type of girl who was easily influenced.

But tonight, I went along with it. I told her about Alice’s re-enacting
The
Hunger Games
with two dumb boys and it was the distraction she needed to drink the mug of tea and eat her two pieces of toast. She even looked at the tube of hand cream on her dressing table like she was thinking about putting some on.

‘Alice… she’s one of those girls who’ll get pregnant before she’s even finished school. She’s probably pregnant already,’ she said disapprovingly.

‘She’s not. She won’t. She doesn’t do
that
with them, she just likes to make them suffer,’ I explained. ‘There’s not much else to do round here on a Saturday night, if we don’t go to The Wow.’

‘I suppose.’ Mum smiled so fleetingly I almost missed it. But I didn’t and for that microsecond she was who she used to be, then she was gone.

I stood up. ‘I’m going to run you a bath. I put a wash on before I went out. Should be dry by now. I’ll get you a clean nightie to change into.’

‘I don’t really feel up to it.’ She was already trying to retreat back under the covers.

‘Oh, you’ll feel much better once you’ve had a bath. And tell you what? I’ll change the sheets while you’re soaking.’ I pulled back the covers and didn’t quite haul her out of bed, but I came pretty close to it.

She didn’t shout at me. Or swear. No threats or tears, just a little bit of grumbling as she swung her pasty white legs over the side of the bed and took hold of the hand I was offering to pull her up. This was a good day.

Once she was in the bath, which I’d generously doused with lavender bubble bath ’cause I’d read somewhere that it was meant to be all soothing and stuff, she let me wash her hair. ‘You can do the rest,’ I told her, as I handed her a sponge and the bar of lily-scented soap I’d bought her last birthday.

I went back into her room, opened the window to let in five minutes of fresh air and checked the pill bottle by her bed. There were twenty-three tablets in it. There’d been twenty-three tablets in it all week. There should have been only seven left and I should have been nagging her about going to the chemist to pick up her repeat prescription. I was too tired to think about that. Instead, I stripped her bed.

I could hear a faint splashing as I came back up the stairs with clean linen and fifteen minutes later she was back in bed. Her hair was damp and she wouldn’t let me use the hairdryer because she said it would just blow dust around the room, but she was sitting up, she’d taken her pills with the glass of water I’d got her and was looking like she was present, rather than, like, absent.

‘Tomorrow, I might do a supermarket shop,’ she said. ‘We’ll make a list at breakfast. Maybe I’ll drive, so we can go to the big Morrisons in Lytham. What do you think?’

‘It sounds great,’ I said with a lot more enthusiasm than I felt. I didn’t want to spend my last precious Sunday free from the yoke of further education traipsing round the big Morrisons in Lytham. Besides, there were ten hours between now and breakfast tomorrow. A lot could happen in ten hours.

I bent down to kiss her cheek, wished her goodnight and said I’d see her in the morning.

When I got to my room, I had the sick, panicky feeling I always got when I thought about what she might be like in the morning. The only way to stop it was to stop thinking about her. To shove her far back into the furthest reaches of my head, as far back as I could, then the sick, panicky feeling would go.

Instead I looked at all my college stuff laid out, though college was still two sleeps away. I had new stationery: a really expensive set of fibre-tip pens for drawing, an A3 sketch pad and a lime-green notebook my sister Siobhan had bought me which had
DESIGNERS I MET AND LIKED
embossed on it in gold letters. I had my sewing kit in a little vintage attaché case: three different pairs of scissors, pinking shears and my chalks. Measuring tape, pins, thimble, reels of cotton and finishings. Really, it was a thing of beauty.

Draped over the back of a chair was the dress I planned to wear on Monday. It was a candy-pink and white sweater dress I’d found in a chazza. I’d put a corded trim on the unravelling hem, and fake-leather patches on the elbows like you get on old men’s cardigans. I was going to wear it with black tights and a pair of amazing cork-wedged sandals because I love an open toe with a matt tight.

(It’s very fashion to refer to things like jeans and tights in the singular. ‘I was rocking a skinny jean with a five-inch heel,’ you might say, though Alice said you’d only say that if you were a gigantic wanker.)

Apart from the pile of college stuff, my room is actually very minimalist in a space age, pop art way – probably because my sewing stuff is in the room next door, though I like to think of it more as my design studio. I’m on the third floor, just below what would have been the staffrooms in the attic. Mum never ventures up this far and Dad’s always away so I can pretty much do what I want in here.

What I wanted to do was to paper my walls in silver foil. Yeah, Christmas turkey tin foil. It was very fiddly, but I was inspired by a place in New York called the Factory, where the artist Andy Warhol had lived and worked in the sixties. He was famous for making art that riffed off of all sorts of weird random stuff like Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, even Brillo soap-pad boxes. He also directed black and white films full of sixties hipsters and he had a house band called the Velvet Underground sometimes fronted by a really cool German model called Nico and then Edie Sedgwick would dance on stage with them. Edie was this doomed, mad, utterly beautiful heiress, who’s my absolute style icon and glamour hero and numero uno inspiration. I discovered Edie when I saw a picture of her on a style blog. She was wearing just a T-shirt and black tights and was posed in an arabesque while perched on a stuffed rhinoceros. No wonder I was intrigued. Once I started obsessing on Edie, it didn’t take long to find out about Andy Warhol and his whole scene. I would have loved to be part of a scene like that, except for all the drugs and nudity, that is.

As well as clearing the Spar of all its tin foil so I could have shiny, silver walls, I also have a huge blown-up photograph of Edie, Andy Warhol and another guy called Gerard Malanga on the wall right opposite my bed. It was taken in New York, obvs, because New York is totes the centre of the universe, and they’re on the street. Literally
on the street
, rising up out of a manhole, Edie leaning back against Gerard, her long, black-clad legs stretching up to infinity, Andy staring straight ahead at the camera with his own camera poised.