Authors: Sarah Manning

Unsticky (6 page)

BOOK: Unsticky

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‘Yeah? Then what?’ Lily was almost vibrating with the need to know.

‘Well, first he asked me to do him a favour and I thought he meant . . . well, I told him to fuck off. Well, I didn’t actually say it but I got really snippy.’

‘You give great snip!’ Lily hung up the discarded pink dress on a spare hanger. ‘Tell me everything and don’t skip bits.’

There wasn’t much to tell, Grace thought sadly - just a handful of details, which had been rattling around her head like Smarties in a tube. But she couldn’t wait to tell Lily every single one of them. Even if it was for the second time.

‘. . . and he was the most obnoxious person I’ve ever met,’ she finished ten minutes later.

‘Even more obnoxious than Kiki, because surely that can’t be done?’

Grace was forced to correct her last statement. ‘It would be a photo finish as to which one of them was more obnoxious.’

Lily was now lying on her back with her legs in the air so she could work her core muscles while she listened. ‘You have to admit, Gracie, it’s a little bit sexy.’

‘It wasn’t sexy.’ Grace’s face was a perfect match for the bag. ‘He was old.’

‘George Clooney old or, like, Hugh Hefner old?’

‘He wasn’t as old as The Cloonster,’ Grace admitted unwillingly, ‘but he wasn’t at all sexy. He was pointy. His face, the way he talked, and he just stared and stared at me.’

‘At your tits?’ Lily asked, sitting up so Grace got the full benefit of her horrified expression. ‘What a perv!’

‘Not at my tits. Just my face,’ Grace said, covering that part of her body with her hands in an effort to cool it down.

‘Well, I’d put up with some pointy creep staring at my face if I got a bag like that afterwards,’ Lily sighed. ‘Maybe it was birthday karma. The fashion gods sent you a Marc Jacobs bag to make up for Liam dumping you.’

‘He wasn’t a creep. Well, he was a little bit creepy. Oh God, I don’t know. It was all completely weird with added bits of weirdness and there’s no way I can keep the bag.’

‘Why? Because you’re worried that he’ll turn up and want to do more than stare at your face as payment for the bag?’ Lily giggled, because really the whole situation was ridiculous. Things like this didn’t happen to girls like Grace.

Grace didn’t giggle though as she waited for a wave of horror to knock her over at the thought of those long fingers on her, but no, she was still standing there on her own two feet.

‘Nothing like that,’ she insisted. ‘I’m probably going to eBay it for some spare cash.’

chapter four

The bag went home with Grace in a Peacock’s carrier.

It was like the designer equivalent of a heart buried under the floorboards. After Grace had wrapped it in plastic (a lesson learned the hard way after the damp in her flat had claimed a pair of Sass & Bide jeans as its first victim) and stashed it in her broken oven, which was doing time as an overspill accessories closet, she could still hear it. It seemed to emit a low-level static hum that left her twitchy and restless. As if something that had been asleep for a long time was slowly unfurling in the pit of her stomach.

For the next five nights, Grace would roll off her rickety sofabed and pad across to the kitchen so she could open the oven door and stare at the bag, as if it contained the mysteries of the universe. Not just a piece of card that she’d left in the side compartment.

It was still in the oven the following Saturday night. And even though Grace was six miles away from her flat in a grimy bar on the grimy Kingsland Road in the grimiest part of East London, it still had a freaky ability to make her palms itch.

‘You haven’t listened to a single word I’ve been saying,’ Lily announced querulously, and it was true. Over the ironic strains of Bing Crosby coming from the DJ’s decks, which were perched on orange crates, Grace had only caught every seventh word.
Chemical
.
Square
.
You
.
Directional
.

‘What’s directional?’ she asked, trying to sit up and look alert even though the sofa was sagging to the floor and was determined to take her with it. She gathered her hair in a loose ponytail with one hand in the vain hope of a cooling breeze on her neck.

‘Directions! I was talking about going to Bestival this year,’ Lily said. Her forehead was damp with perspiration, which was a Lily first. Normally she didn’t do anything as uncouth as sweat. ‘But my dad has to give me a car with Sat Nav first. Remember what happened last year.’

Last year they’d ended up in Devon en route to the Isle of Wight. ‘Yeah, Liam called me a stupid bitch because I screwed up the mapreading and we weren’t even going out then. Remind me why I dated him again?’

‘Because you fell in love with each other,’ Lily explained kindly.

But that wasn’t it. Not even close. Grace had fancied Liam and pestered Lily to set them up because he had dirty-blond hair and a dirty grin to match. (Once she’d got to know Liam, there had been dirty other things - like his standard of personal hygiene.) And he was in a band, which made up for a hell of a lot. Especially when they could curl up on her sofa on rainy afternoons and he’d strum Beatles songs on his guitar while Grace knitted and the rest of the world passed by outside. That had been nice, but it hadn’t been love.

‘I didn’t love him. I
liked
him. A lot. Really a lot, for the first two months. Then I didn’t like him quite so much but it wasn’t bad enough for us to split up over it, you know?’ Grace didn’t wait for Lily to agree because when Lily was seeing someone, they usually swore their undying devotion within the first five minutes. ‘Anyway, I don’t believe in love. Never have done. Never will.’

‘I’ve already told you that you just haven’t met the right guy yet,’ Lily said. ‘And I don’t think it will be awkward tonight if Liam turns up, because I really think he’s been missing you. Well, he
seems
like he’s been missing you.’

‘Whatevs. If he does turn up then I need more alcohol than the human body can usually withstand. Hold that thought.’ Grace fished around in her purse and came up with a handful of coins; none of them pounds. ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ she announced sorrowfully, counting them out. ‘Seventy-eight pence. Let’s buy a bottle of wine and put it on my card.’

Technically Grace only had one credit card left out of the eight wedged into her purse that wasn’t maxed out, but amid the scary brown envelopes that she never opened, there’d been a letter from a finance company offering her a shiny new one with only thirty-five per cent APR, whatever the hell that was.

Lily folded her arms and tried to look disapproving. ‘Are you having money problems again?’

‘When am I
not
having money problems? It will be OK. No one’s phoning up yet . . .’

‘And if they do, you just change your phone number. That’s what I’d do if I was you,’ Lily said blithely, as she stood up. ‘I’m going to the bar. I’ll get the drinks.’

‘No, you always get the drinks,’ Grace said doggedly, because if there was one thing worse than being broke, it was being tight. Anyway, she was used to being broke - the word had long ceased to have any meaning. And spending a tenner on a bottle of bad white wine wasn’t going to make much difference to the ungodly amount of money she owed. ‘Just take my card.’

‘Gracie, I don’t mind. Honest.’

‘Lily, I appreciate the offer but take my card or else I’m only going to drink tapwater and you’ll have to get pissed on your own,’ Grace said triumphantly and slapped her card down on the table.

‘God, you’re annoying sometimes.’ Lily scooped up the card with an aggrieved air because there was no truer sign of friendship than a shared pin number.

Grace watched Lily walk to the bar with an automatic sway to her hips, which made every man in the place, even the too-cool-for-skool boys with their mullets and fugly trainers, look longingly at her like she was a Siren about to lure them on to the rocks and not a former Pony Club stalwart from Godalming who
still
couldn’t pronounce Nicholas Ghesquiere’s surname properly, no matter how many times Grace drilled her. Boys never seemed to care about stuff like that though.

J. Vaughn Acquisitions Consultant

She wondered what the J stood for. Jeremy? Jonty? Jacob? Jonathan? Justin? Jezedbiah? Julian? Job?

Lily was flirting with the Aussie barman as Grace tucked her itchy palms under her arms and looked up. The door burst open and a crowd of people came in: a crowd of lanky-arsed, floppy-haired, unwashed people. And as usual, that first sight of Liam made her heart flip over because he really was pretty, but the stubble and the tattoos gave him a dangerous edge. God, the bad boys were Grace’s kryptonite.

Grace steeled herself to smile faintly at Liam. She needn’t have bothered. He was too busy attaching his mouth to the neck of a waifish girl wearing a ratty rip-off of the Alexander McQueen skull scarf, which, hello, was beyond three years ago.

‘Gracie! How’s life in the fashion fast lane? Let you out of the cupboard yet, have they?’ Dan, Lily’s boyfriend who was the Mick Jagger to her Marianne Faithfull, bellowed as he strode over and took the bottle straight out of Lily’s hand before she could put it on the table. ‘I’ll get some more glasses, shall I?’

‘Hey, baby,’ Lily cooed, patting his bottom with a proprietorial air. Grace couldn’t blame her - The Waif was travelling in a pack.

‘This is Grace,’ Liam said, sitting down and almost pushing her off the sofa so he could make room for his little friend. ‘She’s in fashion.’

Grace assumed a nonchalant expression as she was scrutinised by four sets of eyes all clocking her vintage Ossie Clark sundress and finding it sadly lacking.

‘Nice dress,’ Waify smirked. ‘I think my mum has one just like it.’

‘Oh, do you still live with your parents?’ Grace asked sweetly. ‘That’s so retro of you.’

She got a glittering smile in return and then Waify played her winning hand. ‘Well, duh. Of course I live with my parents, I’m only seventeen.’

‘You utter, utter bastard! You replaced me with a younger model!’ Grace screeched much, much later. Two bottles of wine and a really ill-advised burger from a dodgy kebab shop on York Way later. There had been a vague plan to flag down a taxi but the glowing orange light of an empty cab had been an elusive sight as they trudged past bleak industrial sites and even bleaker council estates. Still, it had given Grace plenty of opportunity to get her rant on. ‘I had to sit there and slowly metamorphose into Patricia Routledge. What time is your curfew, young lady?’

‘Who the fuck’s Patricia Routledge?’ Dan asked and Grace wished that he and Lily would piss off so she could scream at Liam in peace.

‘Hyacinth - someone you don’t know because you weren’t brought up by two people in their seventies,’ Grace snapped. ‘And I was talking to Liam.’

Liam was staring at the peeling toe of his sneakers and looking as if he wished he had an elsewhere to be. No one had asked him to walk home with them, but Heather and her public-school posse had piled into a parental people-carrier so they could go home and braid each other’s hair. Or whatever it was seventeen year olds did for kicks these days.

‘Have you fucked her?’ Grace grabbed Liam’s arm. ‘Did you dump me because you’re hitting that fashion-backwards teenybopper? It didn’t stop you from trying to get into my pants last week, did it?’ Being drunk really brought out her inner vicious bitch.

Liam obviously thought so too because he shook free from her grasp and gave Grace a thoughtful look. It was strange to see something pensive flash across his face for once. ‘I’ve been trying to figure it out all week,’ he said. ‘’Cause you’re cool and stuff, but you know what? You really want to know why I broke it off?’

‘Go on! Enlighten me with your amazing insights, Dr Freud.’

‘It’s because you’re not any fun, Grace.’

‘Grace
is
fun,’ Lily protested loyally. ‘She dressed up as a chav last Halloween, and that was hysterical.’

Dan was forced to agree, even though he wasn’t Grace’s biggest fan, because her shellsuit and Croydon facelift had been a comedic
tour de force
.

BOOK: Unsticky

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