The Worst Girlfriend in the World (27 page)

‘Not a proper qualification though.’ I knew I should stop listening, all that chuff about eavesdroppers never hearing any good, but I was rooted to the spot. ‘We both thought Franny was as bright as Shuv, but she’s not and this ridiculous idea that she’s going to do some fancy fashion degree and move to Paris to make frocks for a living? Best nip it in the bud.’

He said it so matter-of-factly that for a long moment I agreed with him. Even getting into Central St Martin’s to do a fashion degree would be lottery lucky, but to actually become a successful fashion designer – that would be like winning Euromillions when the jackpot had rolled over week after week. It was a once-in-a-generation kind of deal.

I glanced down at my leather dress. It hadn’t turned out as I’d planned, but even Barbara had been grudgingly impressed with what I’d managed to achieve from some off-cuts of cheap, thin leather. That was nothing to do with luck. It was to do with working bloody hard and I needed to be somewhere where I could harness my talent, work even bloody harder.

This was about the time that Mum should have been sticking up for me. It was the least she could do. I waited.

‘Well, she could still be a machinist, couldn’t she?’ she pondered. ‘I mean, it’s not what she wanted, but it’s a career in fashion. Sort of.’

‘Yeah, but that’s all outsourced to the Far East now,’ Dad said and I couldn’t believe they thought they had the right to decide how my life was going to be. They wanted to take my dreams and rip them into tiny pieces because their world was too small and narrow to make room for them. ‘I looked at the course fees for that fashion degree in London. Thousands and thousands a year, plus rent and whatnot. With her track record, who’s to say she’d even stick at it? She’s better off going full-time for the Chatterjees. The recession doesn’t seem to have affected them.’

Mum grunted in agreement. ‘It would be good to have her around for when you’re not here,’ she decided and I’d heard enough.

I kicked the door open so hard that it crashed back on its hinges. I really wished that I hadn’t made them breakfast, because after my dramatic entrance, both of them managing to jump even though they were sitting up in bed, I then had to set the heavy tray down very carefully on top of the chest of drawers.

‘I’m staying on at college and getting my BTEC whether you like it or not,’ I burst out. ‘And then if they’ll have me, I’m going to Central St Martin’s to do my fashion degree —’

‘Now, Franny,’ Dad said in that voice of his that he dug out when he thought I was being completely unreasonable. ‘I’m sorry you had to hear that but it is what it is. The real world doesn’t work the way you think it does.’

I knew all about the real world. It wasn’t like I’d spent most of my life at Eurodisney. ‘If you don’t want to get saddled with my tuition fees, then fine! I’ll leave home so I can be means-tested and not have to pay them.’ The unfairness of it all made me clench my hands into tight, painful fists. ‘You’re my parents! You’re meant to encourage me to be whoever the hell I want to be! Why can’t you be like those parents on
The X-Factor
who support their children even when they can’t sing a note? Except I have found something I could be really good at and you’re meant to tell me to go after my dreams and —’

‘That’s all very well, Franny, but you failed half your GCSEs.’ It was the worst thing he could have said.

I looked at Mum and she looked back at me with a wary, frightened look. Then her gaze skidded away. I was done with this. ‘I didn’t fail half my GCSEs.’ I’d given up counting how many times I’d said it. ‘I didn’t even fail my Maths and English GCSEs…’

‘Franny, please, don’t…’ It was a frantic little whimper that was easy to ignore.

‘But you did fail them,’ Dad pointed out, frowning as he glanced from me to Mum because he was still too dumb to work it out.

‘I didn’t fail them. I would have had to turn up at school to take them in order to fail them. Do you want to know why I missed school on those days? While you were God knows where in the middle of Europe because it’s too much to expect that you might phone at least once every day?’ I could feel the spittle collecting at the side of my mouth as the words flew out. They were both silent, staring at me in horror, but for very different reasons. ‘I didn’t dare leave the house because I was terrified that if I did, she’d have done something awful while I was gone. That I’d have come back to find she’d overdosed on the pills that she stops taking the minute you get into your lorry and disappear.’

It didn’t even come close to describing those five awful, wretched days in June, Thursday through to Monday, when I’d stayed in the house, curtains drawn so not a chink of blinding sunlight could penetrate, no restorative sea breezes allowed to gently sweep through the house.

Mum had been neither manic nor maudlin. Instead, she’d cried for five days straight and kept saying, ‘I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,’ and when I wanted to phone Linda or the doctor or even Dad and tell him to come home now, she’d cried harder and said she’d be sent away again and she’d never forgive me.

Neither of us had slept. I’d been too scared to close my eyes. How could I when my mother was lying on the bathroom floor telling me that there was no point in going on when she felt like this? And she didn’t sleep because all she could do was cry.

I’d spent most of the time on the floor with her, back propped up against the tub. When she’d let me, I’d held her narrow body and it seemed like it was so frail that it might snap in two with the force of her sobs. Every time I ventured downstairs to get a drink or to snatch something out of the fridge, I’d race back up again and it was always a relief to find her still foetal on our tatted blue bathroom rug. I had fallen asleep eventually, head resting on the lip of the bath, and when I’d woken up on the Tuesday morning, she was in her own bed fast asleep. ‘God, what do
you
want?’ she’d snapped when she woke to find me standing over her, watching the rise and fall of her breath to make sure that she was still alive. ‘Leave me alone, Franny. I’m tired.’

I deserved bouquets and a ticker tape parade for making it to school later that afternoon to take my history GCSE (my predicted A grade becoming a shaky C) but my Maths GCSE had been the Thursday before, English on the Monday and it wasn’t like I had a sick note or a mother who’d admit that there was anything wrong with her.

I folded my arms, mostly to stop my hands from shaking. No one said anything. The three of us looked everywhere but at each other until the silence began to feel like a person in its own right.

‘It’s not what you think, Richard,’ Mum said at last. I think her hands were shaking too because she shoved them under the duvet. ‘You know how Franny exaggerates. The thing is —’

‘It’s not what you think because you don’t think about us at all,’ I interrupted. I couldn’t believe that I was talking to them like this and that they were sitting up in bed, looking pretty shellshocked but letting me. ‘You can’t wait to disappear and the minute you do, she stops taking the pills and going to counselling. She just
stops
. But I don’t want to stop here with her just because nobody else can bear to.’

Everyone always said it was good to talk. You couldn’t bottle things up. You had to get stuff off your chest. But it didn’t feel good. It felt awful, like the worst kind of betrayal. That all the stuff we never said was unsaid for a good reason and that I was destroying our home; prising up the floorboards, tearing off the wallpaper, going through each room and smashing everything I could find.

‘I don’t expect you to, Franny,’ Mum said in a tiny, tight voice. She wasn’t even crying, though tears were streaming down my face and even Dad was brushing an impatient hand against his cheek. ‘I don’t need you to take care of me. I don’t ask you to.’

‘But if I don’t, then who will? You don’t have to drive across Europe every month,’ I shouted and Dad flinched. ‘We all know it’s why Shuv hardly ever comes home and Anna only turns up when she wants me to do her mending. I’m the only one left. That’s the reason you both want me trapped here in Merrycliffe – so I’m around to pick you up every time you fall. Well, it’s not fair!’

Dad flung back the covers. ‘Franny! Just calm down!’

‘I’m sorry, Mum, but I can’t do it any more. If you can get your shit together when Dad’s back, then why can’t you keep it together when he goes away again?’

She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand, Franny. You don’t know what it’s like.’

‘I’ve tried to but I’m sick of trying when you won’t make any effort.’ I’d backed myself up against the wall and I felt like a cornered animal with no place left to hide.

Dad hadn’t even made it to his feet but was sitting on the edge of the bed like he wasn’t sure that his legs worked. Most other dads that I knew were getting fat – Alice had told me that Sean had a personal trainer because he couldn’t do up his fitted shirts over his paunch – but Dad seemed to be getting thinner. ‘Is this true, pet?’ He looked over his shoulder at Mum, who was staring out of the window, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. ‘Are things really this bad? I didn’t think you were that depressed any more, love.’

‘I’m fine,’ Mum insisted. ‘Everybody gets down now and again. Everyone has off days. It doesn’t mean that I’m depressed. Not like I was before.’

‘Stop lying! Nobody ever says what they really mean in this house. It makes me want to scream!’ It wasn’t enough. I had to get through to them. Shock them into having some kind of reaction otherwise they’d just go back to pretending that everything was mostly all right, nothing to worry about, let’s not make a fuss, because it was the easiest way to cope with it. ‘You know what? I’m not even going to Manchester! I’m going to London! With a rock band! And you weren’t even going to find out because you’re not that interested in anything I do that doesn’t fit in with your crummy plans to keep me trapped in Merrycliffe for the rest of my life.’

Dad did manage to stand up then and oh, now he was getting red-faced and cross because it was always easy to get cross with me. ‘You are not going to London, young lady.’

I was already halfway out of the door. ‘I am and I’m going to stay there. There is absolutely nothing worth coming back for.’ I meant it. I didn’t care if I had to spend ten years doing alterations in the dry-cleaning shops of London until I had enough saved up to go to Central St Martin’s, I was done with Merrycliffe. Done with being told that my life was never going to amount to anything.

‘You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to lose the attitude and you’re going to apologise to your mother for —’

‘I’m not apologising for anything. You should be apologising to me!’

Then I was racing down the stairs, grabbing my Marc by Marc Jacobs tote bag that always sat in the hall and racing out the front door. I ran as fast as I could along the seafront. Ran so hard I thought my lungs might burst and it wasn’t until I got to the Wow Club where we’d arranged to meet that I realised there was no one running after me.

There was no one waiting for me either. No minibus. All around me was desolation. Well, I was half an hour early.

It was especially cold on the seafront; the wind whipping up the waves, so the iron-grey sea was trimmed with white frills.

I could have walked down to the Market Diner to get coffee and maybe a bacon sandwich, because I’d left my coffee and toast on the tray in my parents’ bedroom. I’d fondly imagined that we’d eat breakfast together while I told them some medium-weight lies about how excited I was to be going to Manchester for the weekend.

Now the thought of eating and drinking anything made me gag and I huddled outside the entrance to the club. I tucked my arms around myself and wondered why I was even thinking about breakfast when my world had just come crashing down around me. Funny how it could take ten minutes to destroy your entire life, but I’d still meant every word I’d screamed: I wasn’t going to stay in Merrycliffe to stagnate and become bitter and corroded with thwarted ambition and all that other bad shit. I’d end up like Barbara. Or worse, like my mum.

But I was only sixteen and hadn’t had any plans to leave Merrycliffe just yet. I’d read about people who’d arrived in a new city or even a new country with nothing but a handful of bank notes and a dream, and ten, twenty years later they were rich and successful. I had ages and ages to go until I got to the rich and successful bit and what was going to happen to me in the meantime? Maybe I really should go to Manchester and then Shuv would have to help me. There was more to being a big sister than forking out for two different kinds of doughballs.

I heard my mobile ring. I pulled it out, only to see Dad’s face flashing up on the screen. I cancelled the call and even that was dreadful. Even that felt like the worst thing I’d ever done. Then I did something even more dreadful and I blocked his number and Mum’s and the landline. There was nothing left to say.

I’d crossed a line. It couldn’t be uncrossed. I had to get away from Merrycliffe. There was no going back now. Stuff could never be sorted out. Mum’s head would still be messed up and I’d still be the person who had to deal with it
and
I’d be grounded. Indefinitely. Worse than grounded. Dad would probably march me to college on Monday morning and make me turn in my sewing kit.

My pity party was interrupted by the toot of a horn. I looked up to see Francis leaning out of the window of a minibus borrowed from one of the local retirement homes. You didn’t get much more rock ’n’ roll than that.

‘Hey, Franny,’ he called. ‘You’re early.’