The Worst Girlfriend in the World (26 page)

‘Seriously, you’re like a six-year-old girl trapped in the body of a twenty-year-old dude,’ Francis said. ‘Pipe down, you’ll frighten the seagulls.’

There were no seagulls. They usually stuck around during winter, but you never saw them at night. That was Louis’s next topic of conversation. ‘Do you think they hang out underneath the arches by the old marina, shooting the breeze? What does shooting the breeze actually mean anyway? How could you shoot a breeze? Why would you want to?’

It was as if every single thought that entered Louis’s mind came out of his mouth at the same time. It was kind of entertaining and Louis was tucked up in a navy peacoat and I didn’t even mind that he’d popped the collar because he looked so cute and snuggly but in a rock ’n’ roll way, but I also wished he’d shut up for even thirty seconds. I wanted to ask Francis if he knew any other cool bands from the sixties, and just before we’d left the Diner and Louis had been chatting to Lexy, Francis had quietly asked me how my mum was.

But I’d barely had a chance to tell him before the others had decided that it was time to leave.

It was all right though. Francis and I were friends again and on Monday we’d watch clips from black and white films and I could tell him stuff that I couldn’t share with anyone else because he was the kind of person who’d take your secrets to the grave with him.

That didn’t mean Francis was boring or dull, but he was a steady presence on my left, matching his pace to mine, while on my right Louis pranced and swung my hand and tried to pull me faster than I wanted to go.

My goal for the next week was to finish my leather dress to wear on Saturday when we went to London. My other goal was to get Mum to pay me back for all the money I’d loaned out to her when Dad was away.

On Wednesday evening she finally handed over one hundred and thirty pounds in used notes. She actually owed me closer to one hundred and twenty but she said that the extra was interest.

‘You going to buy yourself something nice in Manchester then?’ Mum asked. I frowned, until I remembered that she still thought I was spending the weekend with Shuv. ‘Maybe some clothes? They’ve got a big TopShop there, haven’t they?’

Mum hovered in the doorway of my sewing room, which was next door to my bedroom. Back in the day, it had probably been home to four Victorian housemaids but now it was home to my proper industrial sewing machine, which the Chatterjees gave me when they bought a new one for the dry-cleaning shop. All my buttons and zippers and findings were neatly stored in an old shop display unit that my dad had bought me from a French flea market, and on the IKEA shelving were all my fabrics arranged according to colour. No one ever bothered me when I was in my sewing room, and while I totally appreciated Mum showing some interest in my life, I’d just successfully sewn the first sleeve into my leather dress and I was keen to start on the second, while my luck was still in and also… ‘Well, I don’t buy new clothes,’ I explained. ‘It’s just a waste of money when I could make something or buy vintage or second-hand clothes and repurpose them.’

Mum pulled a face. ‘Yeah, but…’

‘And at the same time, it’s educational,’ I said brightly, as I very carefully positioned the tacked sleeve under the needle. ‘Even making that wrap skirt I gave you last Christmas was working towards my future. That’s kind of ace, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose.’ Mum didn’t sound convinced but she’d loved the denim skirt I’d made her last Christmas. I’d even appliquéd little felt flowers on to it and anyway we were having an actual conversation, and Dad hadn’t put any dates on the kitchen calendar and we were deep into November now so there was no way he was going to disappear into the wide blue yonder this close to Christmas.

It was all good. Pretty much all of it. There was still the Alice thing, I thought, as Mum muttered something about an episode of
Don’t Tell the Bride
waiting for her on the Sky box, but I was missing her less and less.

I didn’t
need
Alice any more. When I thought back to being friends with her, which seemed like a gazillion years ago, my world had been much smaller. There had only been room for Alice in it.

Now my world had expanded to encompass all these new people. Not just Sage and Dora and the others, even Karen and Sandra, but Thee Desperadettes and especially Francis and Louis. Louis was properly in my life now and when I thought about the weekend in London, I’d get a shivery feeling of excitement though it felt a bit like terror too, because I knew something important was going to happen.

‘It’s my do-or-die weekend,’ I said to Sage on Friday afternoon as I put the final touches to my leather dress, though part of me never wanted to see it ever again. The leather had stretched from being worked on so much and the hem had gone seriously wonky.

‘You mean it’s your do-Louis-or-die weekend.’ She smiled slyly when I shuddered because I didn’t want to
do
Louis. Not yet anyway. But kissing would be good – if he could stand still and be quiet for long enough. ‘So, shall we talk outfit options?’

‘Well, I’m wearing this, of course!’ I gestured at my grey leather dress. ‘With my —’

‘No, don’t tell us. Let us guess,’ Mattie drawled from where he was perched on top of his desk, swinging his legs and flicking through the new
Vogue
. There was a big interview with Martin Sanderson, which we’d all pored over; photographs taken in what he called his atelier (and what I called his workroom) above his first ever shop in Notting Hill. The whole building was painted in his signature shade of pink, a dull, smudgy pink like the dusky Merrycliffe skies in winter. ‘You’re going to wear thick black tights and…’

‘… either your kitten heels or those block-heel black knee-high boots,’ Dora said. She tilted her head and looked at me. ‘Maybe with Mattie’s black leather jacket. I know you despise double denim but how do you feel about double leather?’

‘I think I could make it work,’ I decided and Sage made a funny noise at the back of her throat. ‘What?’

She shook her head. ‘You’re going for a fashion look when you should go for a pulling look. Boys don’t get fashion looks. They’re not that evolved.’

I glanced over at Mattie, who shrugged. ‘I am one of the very few who are evolved, but the rest of my kind think girls should do legs
and
cleavage.’

‘No!’ I was genuinely shocked. Francis had claimed that he was far more evolved than me, but he’d been talking about emotional maturity rather than fashion. Then I thought of Alice’s strike rate and the stretchy short black bandage dresses she preferred because they made the most of her three B’s. ‘Not all boys, surely?’

Mattie looked at me pityingly. ‘Most boys don’t understand fashion.’

I thought about the smirks and nudges when I wore my cropped trousers, Chanel-ish jacket and brogues to The Wow. Even when I wore one of my Edie-esque slinky T-shirt dresses, boys looked at me in confusion because of the thick black opaques and the lack of six-inch stripper heels.

‘But if the boy was, like, in a band or something, he’d be creative and arty and he’d totally go for a girl like me,’ I pointed out, but Sage just rolled her eyes and said that most boys in bands would go out with a blonde model given half the chance, even indie boys in indie bands, and that if I was really serious about pulling Louis I’d at least have to wear bootie shorts with my thick black tights.

‘The day I wear bootie shorts is the day that I’ve suffered a mild concussion,’ I said grandly but now I was worried that I hadn’t thought hard enough about my outfit options. I hoped Sage was wrong.

There were plenty of boys who got fashion. Francis, for instance, had been full of praise for my leather dress and we often discussed sixties designers like Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki of Biba. Though even Francis had got a bit glassy-eyed when we watched a film called
Girl on a Motorcycle
because the actress starring in it, Marianne Faithfull, spent all her time in a black leather catsuit.

It was all so confusing.

‘Anyway, even if you do wear bootie shorts, you’ll have to wear a bum bag or money belt,’ Sage reminded me. She’d been to London five times, which was more than any of us. Even Karen and Sandra. She’d even been to Camden and said that the streets of London were not paved with gold but rapists, muggers, pickpockets and gangs of gypsies who’d steal your phone while they distracted you by cursing when you wouldn’t buy their lucky heather.

There was so much to worry about, but Francis had told me that London was also really exciting. It was fast and noisy and there was always something happening, something new to look at, something that you’d never seen before. He’d also said we’d have enough time before Thee Desperadoes soundchecked for him to take me to Berwick Street in Soho where there were loads of fabric shops.

‘Take lots of pictures and put them on Instagram,’ Paul told me as we left college. ‘Live tweet everything so I can pretend I’m in London too.’

He was the only other person who’d never been to London before and he made me promise that I’d have my photo taken next to Camden Town station. Sage stood over me until I’d downloaded a tube map on to my phone and Dora wanted me to go to a particular shop and see if they had a purple leather bustier in her size and they all walked with me to the seafront and waved me off, like I was going to war and they might never see me again.

The giddy, sick feeling of excitement that made my tummy churn and my toes curl up inside my Dunlop Green Flashes (I refused to wear any other kind of trainer) intensified until I thought I might actually throw up.

I was still awake at two the next morning, mentally reviewing my outfit options but always returning to the leather dress. Then it was seven and my alarm was shrieking me awake.

It took a few seconds to penetrate my sleep-fogged brain, then I sat up with a tiny cry because I wasn’t going to spend the day doing alterations. I was going to spend a lot of the day in a minibus with Thee Desperadettes and Thee Desperadoes and Louis.

I was going to London.

I should have leapt out of bed and danced my way to the bathroom like I was in a Hollywood musical but I staggered instead, lurching into the wall every now and again when staying upright got too hard.

I had to have a barely lukewarm shower because it was too early for the boiler to come on. It woke me up quite a bit and soon I was squeaky clean and wide-eyed as I assessed my hair in the bathroom mirror.

It was three weeks since my shearing. The bald spot was no more, the tufty bit was a lot less tufty and my fringe was long enough to sweep to one side and smooth down with serum in a very gamine, sixties way. I almost loved it now.

I was also going to have to learn to love my leather dress. The thin leather had stretched so much that it was shapeless rather than A-line and made me look even more stick-like than usual, and one of the three-quarter-length sleeves was tighter than the other one. All I could do was hope that, to the untrained eye, it would look very stylish and directional.

I packed my bag with all the stuff I’d need for the next twenty-four hours. We weren’t getting back to Merrycliffe until God knows what time on Sunday morning but Lexy had already said I could stay at hers because Mum and Dad thought I’d be all tucked up on Shuv’s sofa in Manchester.

I felt a tiny pang of guilt about lying to Mum and Dad, but it was lying for their own good. And my own good because even if they had agreed to let me go, which was doubtful, there’d have been conditions attached. I was used to Mum’s benign neglect but Dad was a bit more hands-on when he was around. He didn’t mind what I got up to in Merrycliffe because there wasn’t much I could get up to, but whenever I ventured further afield there were hourly texts and phone calls.

Anyway, I was going to be fine in London. It wasn’t like I would be chugging down alcohol – no more than I would on a night out in Merrycliffe – and I’d be with older, responsible people. Well, they were older anyway.

It was no use. I still felt guilty. Enough that I decided to make them a cup of tea before I went. Both Mum and Dad had been very suspicious of why I needed to leave for Manchester at eight in the morning but Shuv had told them there was a vintage fair on and we had to get there before all the good stuff went. When it came to lying to the parents, there was still so much Shuv had to teach me.

But she didn’t have to teach me anything about sucking up. Not only did I make tea but toast too, and put the jam and butter in little dishes. Then I carried the whole lot upstairs on a tray quietly so as not to ruin the surprise, until I came to their bedroom door. It was always ajar when Dad was home because he said that once you’d had kids you couldn’t not sleep with your bedroom door ajar to hear them if they cried out in the middle of the night. Innate primordial instinct he called it, though it had missed Mum out because she managed to sleep with the door tightly shut when he was away.

Anyway, now it was ajar and I paused to listen carefully to make sure I wasn’t interrupting anything. Like, sexy times. Oh God, it didn’t even bear thinking about. But I couldn’t hear anything that was going to require me to have huge amounts of therapy, just Dad saying…

‘Well, we’ll talk to her when she gets back from Manchester, before I head off to the continent.’

My heart sank. Not just to my feet but right down to the floor. He wasn’t meant to be going anywhere. And before I could even wonder what they needed to tell me that was so important…

‘I can’t see the harm in Franny staying on to do her fashion BTEC if she passes her retakes,’ Mum said. ‘Then she’ll have a qualification to fall back on.’