CHAPTER SIX
‘We need face masks.’
We’re in Costa having a hot chocolate and it’s Friday after school and it’s half-term at last. And that also means it’s THE PARTY at last and not that we’re excited or anything but Anna’s written a list of Things We Have To Do and printed it off, because Anna is the queen of stationery and notebooks and paper in general.
I do sometimes wonder whether I sneezed one day and she caught Asperger’s from me, or at least the bits everyone reads about, because unlike her I’ve never written a list in my life, and I’m hopeless at maths, and I don’t have a special superpower like drawing entire cityscapes from memory.
‘Look.’ Anna taps the list with an impatient finger. ‘Face masks. Hair-conditioning treatments. Manicure stuff.’
‘Y’know Gabe?’ I try to act casual. I haven’t told Anna I bumped into him. I forgot, I think, because of all the school stuff.
‘I am familiar with the concept of him, yes,’ says Anna, pulling out a pen and adding EYELINER to the bottom of her list.
‘I bumped into him the other day when I was out with Mabel.’
There’s a silence as Anna puts her pen back in the little pencil case she has in her bag, zips it up and then looks at me. She cocks her head to one side, curls an orange lock of hair round her finger and says, ‘Spill.’
‘He crashed his bike. I was awkward. He was covered in mud. There’s not that much to tell.’
‘What did he say? Did he like Mabel? Was he nice? Did you chat?’
‘He asked if I’d had sarcasm flakes for breakfast.’
‘Ooooh.’ Anna scrunches up her mouth to one side, the way she does when she’s thinking. ‘But how did he say it?’
I think about Gabe, dripping with mud, and me, standing there with a recalcitrant Mabel on the end of her reins. ‘Just like a question?’ I say, but I’m not really sure. He might have been joking. God, it’s hard having my brain sometimes.
‘Interesting . . .’ says Anna. ‘He might be at Charlotte’s party.’
She waggles her eyebrows suggestively at me, and taps her front teeth with the lid of her pen.
We finish up our drinks and head out on to Chapel Street.
I’m going a bit giddy from being in Boots, where the lights are super shiny and there’s so much stuff everywhere. There are rows and rows of lipsticks and signs that are screaming and the clatter of people putting their baskets on the counter and the smells of perfume and nail varnish being sneakily tried out by girls from Leah’s year. And old people bumbling around with baskets over their arms getting in the way and it’s all just so LOUD.
My brain is end-of-term tired. We couldn’t stop giggling in English this morning and the whole class almost ended up with an after-school detention. I reckon the only reason she didn’t do it was Mrs Markham wanted the holidays to come almost as much as we did. She flew out of the classroom even faster than us when the final bell went.
I’ve got a gift token left over from my birthday and Mum’s given us some money-off vouchers she had in her purse. We chuck everything in the basket and spin around the shop, laughing at nothing and everything until we clatter down the hair-dye section and bump straight into Holly Bloody Carmichael, who is leaning casually against the posh make-up counter, twirling a lock of her streaky blonde hair and talking to –
‘Eek,’ says Anna unnecessarily.
I try to hit reverse gear, but I end up stepping backwards on to her foot so she wobbles sideways. With a crash a cardboard display of mascara falls off the shelf. Holly looks across at us, her lip curling slightly. Gabe Kowalski, standing in the middle of the shop with a basket full of baby food, raises an eyebrow as if to suggest that we are completely inept specimens of humanity who probably shouldn’t be allowed out without our parents supervising us.
‘Er. Hi.’ I do a flapping sort of wave thing, like an ailing sea lion.
‘And bye.’ Anna pulls me by the arm back out of sight and down towards the tills.
‘Oh my God.’
She’s owl-eyed.
‘D’you think they’re –’ She stops mid sentence as the woman behind the counter takes the basket and bleeps everything through the till.
We don’t speak again until we’re outside the shop and heading for Primark where I’ve seen black fake nails that’ll cover my half-chewed stumpy end-of-finger disasters.
‘Together?’ I finish her sentence. ‘No, I reckon they were just talking.’
‘God, I hope so. He seems nice. It would be a shame if he ended up with Holly.’
I feel a lurch of dread about tomorrow night. It’s weird how you can be so excited about something and at the same time utterly sick to the stomach. ‘You don’t think Charlotte’s invited Holly and her lot, do you?’
Anna shakes her head vehemently. ‘No chance. Her mum had final say over the invites and she doesn’t approve of them.’
I’ve found the fake nails and we’re turning to pay for them when I spot the PERFECT thing to wear tomorrow. I start making my way through the sea of clothes rails. It’s getting to the point where I’m a bit seasick from shop-ness, but I just want to get to it and pay and then we can leave. I pull the T-shirt off the rail and turn to Anna, holding it up against myself, pulling a silly face.
‘TARDIS!’ Anna squeals.
‘I know.’ I beam at her because she gets it, instantly. Never mind My Little Pony, this is it.
‘Seriously? A Doctor Who T-shirt? How old are you?’
I spin round to locate the voice.
Holly, who appears to have taken on a new role as our stalker, is standing behind me with her arms folded across her chest. I spot Emma and Lucy, her foot soldiers, rifling through the sale rail, which is full of lurid skinny-fit Lycra stuff.
I hold on to the T-shirt awkwardly. The coat hanger is sticking into my collarbone because I’ve still got it pressed up against my chest. I can feel myself going beetroot red all over, but I just stand there while Holly looks at us, Anna with her arms full of shopping bags, and me with a TARDIS draped across me like some kind of Primark toga. Eventually after about fifteen minutes or five seconds, I can’t quite tell, she stalks off, cracking chewing gum as she leaves.
‘Well, I think it’s nice,’ says Anna, giving a little nod of defiance. ‘And sod her. She’s just jealous because we’re invited and she’s not.’
I leave Anna at the end of Chapel Street and head down the road towards home. It’s weirdly warm, because the Indian summer they promised has arrived. On days like this I love living here. In the middle of summer when it’s heaving with holiday tourists and you can’t walk down the road without someone’s infant waving a sticky paw covered in candyfloss at you, not so much. But when autumn comes, we reclaim the town as ours. It might be tattered around the edges, and a bit dodgy in parts, but I like it here. It’s familiar. And that works for me. I turn the corner on to our road, and the red of an unfamiliar car flashes through the bushes that grow scruffily over the wall of our drive.
We don’t know anyone with a red car, and – I can feel my steps slowing almost involuntarily – I can’t face people tonight. Not ones I don’t know, anyway. I’ve done town and school, and that’s enough.
I creep up the side of the driveway, squeezing past the fire-engine-red car, noticing as I do that it’s tidy inside – ours is covered in sweet wrappers and left-over Costa cups, newspapers and the junk mail Mum opens while she’s sitting at traffic lights. This car has nothing in it but a glossy, unopened packet of Marlboro cigarettes on the passenger seat, and it’s dust free and spotless.
‘Grace.’
I see Leah’s distorted face through the glass as she wrenches the front door open from inside. She’s already changed into a pair of tartan pyjama bottoms and a batman T-shirt, her hair clipped out of her face, a half-eaten apple in her hand. She looks completely unruffled by the fact that there’s someone here and it makes me irrationally cross that she just copes with stuff.
I glare at her and walk past without saying anything, shifting the weight of my bag on my shoulder as I head straight up the stairs. I’m hungry and I want a coffee and there’s conversation coming from the kitchen, and laughing. I had this part of the day all planned and now it’s screwed up and I’m not impressed at all.
‘Grace, darling,’ I can hear Mum calling up the stairs, and there’s a tone to her voice I don’t quite recognize, ‘is that you?’
I don’t answer, because obviously it is, given that Leah has skipped back into the kitchen with her perfect-daughter halo gleaming, and who else would be making their way upstairs.
‘Grace?’ Mum calls again, the same weird edge to her voice.
I dump my bag on the bed.
My bedroom is not tidy. OK, that’s a bit of an understatement. My bedroom is a festering, chaotic, possible health hazard. I can’t actually see the carpet because my stuff is all over it, and the bed hasn’t been made because – well, I don’t have time to make the bed in the morning, and I’ve banned Mum from her ‘helpful’ tidying expeditions where she starts throwing out stuff I might need and touching everything.
I fish out my jodhpurs from the end of my bed where they’re tangled in the covers and pull them on under my school skirt, over my tights. I can’t be bothered getting changed properly, so I pull a hoody over the top of my school shirt and squiggle out of my skirt. It lies on the floor like a deflated grey jellyfish.
My boots are in the kitchen. I’m going to have to face whoever-it-is.
‘There she is,’ says Mum, and she’s got her ‘please don’t do anything appalling’ face on, the one where she looks at me with her nostrils slightly flaring and her eyes popped open just a tiny bit too much, and tries to catch my eye.
I do. not. want. to. look. at. her.
And I especially don’t want to look at The Other Person.
So I don’t.
I slide through the gap between her chair back and the wall and capture my boots from the back door.
‘Grace,’ Mum repeats as I pull on my boots, ‘this is Eve. My friend from university I was talking about the other day?’
‘Oh.’
Mum does a silly little laugh, one I haven’t ever heard her do before, and reaches across the table. She tips some wine into the two glasses that are sitting there. She leans forward and gives one to Eve-from-university who is sitting, with skinny legs in skinny jeans, and a stripy blue-and-white top and expensive-looking hair. Eve-from-university turns to look at me.
‘Hi, Grace. Wow, you look like your mum, don’t you?’
I roll my eyes.
Mum gives me The Look. ‘Grace is just off out to the stables, aren’t you?’ She leans forward, putting her chin in her hand, looking at Eve, who is rifling around in her posh-looking handbag.
‘Have a good time, darling. Eve’s staying over tonight, as she’s working in the area for a while, so we’ll try not to keep you up too late misbehaving.’
And they laugh, loudly, and clink their glasses together, and Eve stands up. She walks across the tiles of the kitchen, as if she has every right to be there, and she opens the top half of the kitchen door, and she leans her body out slightly. Then, looking at Mum, she flips open a cigarette box and pulls one out. She half raises an eyebrow at Mum who shakes her head almost imperceptibly, eyes wide again. And then Eve lights up, sucking the smoke down deep into her lungs, before turning to blow it back out into the garden.
I leave the room feeling weirdly unsettled, just as Leah is walking back in from the sitting room. Because I feel weird, I sort of shoulder barge her in the doorway so she bangs off, sideways, and yelps angrily. But I don’t turn round. I just grab my coat from the post at the end of the stairs, and leave.