Weirdo (7 page)

There was an edge to her voice that made Corrine stop immediately and do as she was told. Despite having almost succumbed to a full-blown panic attack only moments before, the fear of losing out on days like this was greater than any physical discomfort.

“What?” she said, gingerly hunkering down.

Samantha’s expression changed as rapidly as a cloud flitting across the sun. Her smile dissolved, her face became solemn, her eyes now more green than blue. “I’ve never had a real friend,” she said, “not someone I could tell all my secrets to. You want to be my friend, don’t you?” Her voice was pleading, a mirror of her eyes. “Or are you just like everyone else – you only want to know me ’cos of who Granddad is and what you think you can get out of it?”

Corrine felt a rush of shame that was reflected in the colour of her cheeks. “Course not,” she said, trying to look Sam in the eye without blinking. “Please don’t think that, Sam.”

“I mean,” Samantha turned her head away, stared towards the sea, “it’s all right for you. You’ve got Debbie, she’s a real friend, isn’t she? Whereas I …” she bit her bottom lip. “I’ve got a mum who’s just run off with an embarrassing bloody kid and a dad who hasn’t got the guts to stand up to her. Neither of them cares about me. They’ve just dumped me here, where everyone just thinks I’m some spoilt little posh bitch.”

“No they don’t …” A second front of panic assailed Corrine now, she couldn’t think of the right words to say. “They don’t, honest.”

“Ha!” Samantha’s head snapped round. “I heard what that
boy said the minute I stepped into the classroom. That Shane Rowlands and his scabby mates. They were laughing at me, all of them. And your precious Debbie,” her eyes narrowed as she said it, boring into Corrine’s, “doesn’t like me either. She makes that quite obvious.”

“Look,” said Corrine, reaching out her hand, “you don’t want to listen to Rowlands, he’s a knob end, everyone know that. No one care what he think. Everyone like you, Sam.”

The look in Sam’s eyes said she didn’t believe her. Corrine thought she had better go further. “And if they don’t, well … then I don’t like them either.”

“Really?” Samantha’s eyes softened, blue flooding into the green.

“I’ll always stick up for you, you know I will,” Corrine said fiercely. “I don’t take no shit off no one.”

Samantha nodded solemnly. “All right,” she said. “Give me your little finger.”

Corrine did as she was told.

Samantha ran the side of the marram grass across the top joint of Corrine’s finger, fast and deep, drawing blood. Kept hold of her hand as Corrine recoiled.

“No,” she said, digging her nails into the other girl’s hand, “wait. Now I have to do it.”

The sudden pain bringing tears to her eyes, Corrine watched as Sam repeated the manoeuvre on her own little finger, making the cut without even flinching. Then she pressed their fingers together, holding them fast with her other hand.

“Now our blood has mingled,” she said, that intense expression back in her eyes, “we’re sisters. No one knows but us. But we share all our secrets from now on. Right?”

Corrine nodded, locked in the thrall of that stare.

“Good!” said Sam, letting go of her hand and jumping to her feet. “Now let’s go and see Nana. She’s made some cakes for our tea. Come on, I’ll race you.”

And she sprinted away over the dunes, faster than a bewildered Corrine could catch up with.

* * *

Edna’s insides churned as she sat at the kitchen table. Her eyes kept darting from the clock, where the minutes dragged towards seven o’clock, and the ceiling. Sitting on her rigid lap, Noodles was being stroked to within an inch of his life.

Edna was wishing she had X-ray vision, wishing she could see what was going on up there in Sammy’s room, between her granddaughter and that … creature she had brought home with her. Wished that Eric would hurry up and get home. Wondered if she dared go up and suggest, since it was a school night, that it was time Sammy’s guest was leaving …

She and Eric had been so delighted at the prospect of meeting their granddaughter’s new school friend. Until she had opened the front door on Corrine Woodrow and gazed upon the rigid waves of garishly highlighted hair, violet eyeshadow and lipstick. Edna winced at the memory of a hand closing in on her fairy cakes, black-painted fingernails encased in a lace mitten. A thieving hand, if ever she had seen one.

Noodles, fed up now with being ground into his mistress’s thighs, looked up and yapped, jumped off Edna’s lap and shook himself furiously, sweaty-palm-dampened fur springing back to attention. Then, casting a look over his shoulder as if to say,
If you won’t sort it out then I will
, he trotted briskly up the stairs.

* * *

“There,” said Corrine, stepping back from the stool so that Sam could see herself in the mirror. “What d’you reckon?”

Samantha’s cool gaze took in the transformation. Her hair had been backcombed so that it stuck up and out, her eyebrows plucked and pencilled in. Black eyeliner and thick mascara against shocking pink and yellow eyeshadow, vivid, angular streaks of blusher down each cheek and Clara Bow lips outlined in black and filled in with purple gloss.

Corrine looked from the reflection to the palette she held in her hands, a row of pouting lips in every colour from sugar pink to deep mauve, a sweet little brush to paint them on with. “This is ace,” she said. “You must have got it up London, I in’t seen anything like this round here, or I’d have …” she stopped herself just in time from saying, “nicked it”.

“Keep it,” said Samantha airily, moving her head to a different angle. A picture of Siouxsie Sioux cut out of
Record Mirror
had been taped to the dressing-table mirror. Corrine had done her best to replicate the look over the past hour, while Tommy Vance counted down the Top 40 from the transistor radio on the windowsill.

“You’re pretty good at this, aren’t you?” Samantha allowed.

“Well, I’m hopin’ to become a beautician,” Corrine said, blushing. She’d never revealed this secret hope to anyone, not even Debbie. It had just sort of blurted out without her thinking. But, she supposed, now that she and Sam were sisters …

“I expect you’re good at art as well?” Samantha continued.

“Well, I in’t bad,” said Corrine modestly. “I just … Oh, hold up, what’s that?” She heard a scratching at the door and went towards it, opening it up a crack. “Ahh,” she said, regarding the furry nose that poked through it and crouching down to stroke it. “What a sweet little dog.”

“No he isn’t.” Behind her, Samantha’s voice turned icy. “He’s a nosy little sneak.”

Noodles gave a sudden yelp and shot backwards, seconds before the shoe that was hurled in his direction pinged off the doorframe.

“What the …?” the missile deflected off Corrine’s shoulder and she slammed the door in shock.

“Ha! That told the little rat!” Samantha started to laugh.

“What’s going on?” Having reached the top of the stairs, Edna was just in time to see a lace-mittened hand reaching towards her pet and his violent retreat from it, Noodles shooting across the landing and disappearing under her bed. When she heard Sammy shriek, she raced towards the door, her own voice shrill in her ears, and pulled it open.

Corrine stared back at her with round, startled – and to Edna’s mind, guilty – eyes.

“What you now do to my dog?” Edna demanded.

“Nothing,” Corrine protested.

“Don’t you nothing me,” pent-up rage now coursed freely through Edna’s veins, “He just come running out of here like a bat out of hell! Now what have you—”

“Nana!” Samantha jumped to her feet. Edna’s eyes locked onto the sluttish apparition that appeared to be speaking with her granddaughter’s voice.

“—done?” she finished, the word choking in her throat.

Corrine didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. “I’d better go,” she said, bending down to snatch her bag off the floor.

“No, wait!” Sam called after her.

Corrine glanced backwards. “See you at school,” she said, dodging past the old woman and clattering down the stairs, out the front door, before anyone could catch her.

“What did you do that for?” Samantha snarled into her grandmother’s face.

* * *

Corrine ran halfway down Marine Parade before she got the stitch and had to slow down, still looking nervously over her shoulder every ten seconds or so.
Well, that’s that ruined, in’t it?
she thought.
I’ll never get invited back there again
. She kept jogging until she reached the safety of the Front, the panic of being shouted at propelling her to get as far away from Sam’s house as fast as possible. Corrine never stopped to think when people started getting angry. Experience had taught her that flight was safer than fight.

By the time she was at the ’musies, sadness had replaced fear. The thought of all those treats slipping from her grasp. Still, thank God she had put the lip palette in her pocket before it had all gone off.

She caught sight of a clock as she slipped into The Mint, wondering if anyone was about. Seven-thirty, it said. She scanned the room rapidly. No one here she knew. She fished in her jeans pocket for change. There weren’t much there.

Corrine thumbed some coppers into one of the slots. The machine ate the lot, laughing back at her with an electronic whoop and whistle.

Worry started to replace sadness. The season might be over, but Corrine’s mum still didn’t expect her to come home empty-handed of a night. Corrine thought of that fiver, so easily given to Sam, so easily spent by her. Grimaced at her own stupidity, thinking she could win that much on the one-armed-bandits.

She leaned back on the machine, slowly counting out what
little she had left. Gradually noticed the man looking at her. A lead weight came down on her stomach, her heart.

* * *

Corrine came out from under Trafalgar Pier and went straight across the Front to the public toilets on the other side of Marine Parade. In a piss-stinking cubicle covered in graffiti, she leant over the bowl and was sick, fairy cakes and ice cream curdling with a more recent addition to the contents of her stomach. Kept spitting in the bowl, trying to get the taste out of her mouth. But before she went back to the sinks and the drinking fountain, she made sure the green note was still in her pocket.

Outside, she leant against the wall for a moment, lighting up a JPS. Noticed a man hurrying out of the Gents, his head down, hands inside the pockets of his Macintosh. A few moments later, another figure appeared at the doorway and stopped there, leaning against the doorframe, one ankle crossed over the other. Smoke wreathed his head like the tendrils of a sea mist. He raised the cigarette to his lips, the light briefly illuminating a pair of green eyes behind a thick, black thatch of hair.

“Reenie,” he said, his voice soft, his accent not quite the Ernemouth norm. “And how’s the night treating you?”

“Bollocks,” said Corrine and spat on the pavement. “As usual.”

“Hmmm.” His eyes ran her up and down slowly as he took another drag on his cigarette. “Well, I could say the same myself. You got enough now, or you hanging round?”

Corrine shrugged. “Reckon I have,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “Don’t feel like goin’ home much, though.”

“Come to mine, if you want,” he offered. “It’s safe. And I can show you something that makes all this a bit more …” his eyes flicked up and down the seafront, “ … bearable. Something I’ve been learning.”

“I don’t know,” Corrine frowned. She’d heard talk like this before. Normally from the stoned mouths of the druggie losers her mother entertained.

The boy laughed. “God, Reenie. You should know you’re safe with me by now.”

“I don’t mean that,” Corrine felt herself blush. “I in’t doin’ no drugs is what I mean.”

“Not drugs,” he said, shaking his head. “Magick …”

Sean stood on the front steps of The Ship Hotel. The music had changed in his absence, blaring loud enough to spill out onto the street, along with a babble of voices. The bar was full of people, competing to be heard over Michael Jackson’s histrionic appeal on behalf of planet Earth.

He and Francesca had lingered another half an hour over the balloon glasses of twelve-star Metaxa, coffee and Cyprus Delight that Keri had provided gratis with another one of his film-star smiles. As he had promised, the upstairs remained empty until nine, and they had been able to talk further about the case. Francesca seemed to know the background. Suggested that some remnants of the scene that produced Corrine’s gang still lingered around the place that had nurtured successive generations of Ernemouth weirdos and was undergoing something of a renaissance these days: Captain Swing’s pub. That if he wanted to find anyone with a long enough memory who might be persuaded into giving him some local insight, then that would be where to look.

She had left him with a brown envelope stuffed with cuttings as she got into her cab outside the restaurant. He might
have seen them already, but this was the most interesting stuff the
Mercury
had printed. How she had ascertained that, she didn’t say.

Sean felt for the room key in his jacket pocket, pushed the front door open. Two women standing chattering in the hallway snapped their heads round as he crossed the threshold, running him up and down with glittering eyes. A thin, mousey blonde with a servile expression and a short, thickset brunette, whose pugnacious countenance was in no way softened by a liberal slathering of make-up.

Sean felt their eyes on his back the whole way down the hallway. Back upstairs, he put Francesca’s envelope on the bed. Music pulsated through the floorboards, bass-heavy, tune-light, with an over-emotional diva Whitneying away over the top. It was meant to be good-time, party music. But it had the same edge to it as the tunes of the high-rise pirates booming out of the estates on Sean’s former beat: narcotic emptiness underpinning vocal hysteria. Like an itch that you could never scratch.

It made his instincts prickle. He moved into the bathroom, picked up some hair wax and rubbed it on his fingers, teasing his hair upwards.