The Worst Girlfriend in the World (17 page)

‘OK!’ Alice picked up a wide-toothed comb and ran it through my damp hair, then she gathered it into a loose ponytail and secured it with a scrunchie. ‘You ready, Franny?’

‘I’m ready!’

‘Here goes!’ She picked up the scissors and cut my ponytail right off!

‘Christ, some warning would have been nice!’ I cried as I jerked my head, which wasn’t very clever when Alice was still holding the scissors and nearly sliced into my ear.

‘Don’t panic. That’s how we always start,’ Alice soothed me. ‘Have another drink.’

It didn’t help that I was facing away from the mirror as Alice combed, then cut, then looked at me with her face screwed up either in concentration or consternation – it was hard to tell which.

We talked about
Strictly Come Dancing
and I moaned about Mr Chatterjee, who’d told me off for chewing gum while I was stuck in the window doing alterations because I was ‘an ambassador for the shop’. And Alice talked about school and how one of the Year 13s was definitely pregnant but everyone was too embarrassed to come right out and ask her.

It was as if we’d both decided that the topic of Louis was out of bounds but as Alice carried on cutting – lots of little snips now, much combing and a lot of frowning – she got quieter and I talked more and more to cover up what was turning into a tense silence.

I found myself telling her that I was now going to The Wow Halloween as part of a themed group of Warhol acolytes. ‘I’d have been happy just to have Mattie come with me as Andy Warhol but the others decided they wanted in too.’

Alice’s frown became even more ferocious. ‘I thought we were going together. We
always
go together.’

‘We are. We will. But they’re coming along too. Sage is really cool now we’ve got over that business with the dress. You’ll love her.’

‘Great. Everyone will know that you lot are a group and I’ll be stuck on my own,’ Alice complained, as the combing and the cutting speeded up. ‘They’ll think I’m totally lame.’

I’d been so excited at the thought of recreating the Factory at The Wow and bonding with Sage over Edie that I hadn’t spent even one minute thinking about how it might make Alice feel. Now I did think about it and I knew that if she’d suddenly become best mates with Ash and Vicky and wanted to go to the Halloween party as Destiny’s Child or Charlie’s Angels, I’d have been jealous and felt left out and rejected too.

This whole
thing
with Louis had started because Alice got in a strop that I was hanging with Dora and I needed to be a bit more sensitive about Alice’s feelings. Especially when she was currently armed with a pair of very sharp scissors.

‘Nobody could ever think you were lame. Everyone knows we’re best mates and we’re going to have a great time tomorrow night. It’s Halloween! We love Halloween! And it’s still not too late to go with the whole Factory thing we’re doing. You could come as, um, well, like Ingrid Superstar?’

‘Who the hell is Ingrid Superstar?’ Alice demanded and she did have a point. Despite her name, Ingrid Superstar was the most forgettable of the Warhol Superstars. Sage had already bagsied Nico so only Brigid Berlin was left, which meant Alice would have to wear a fat suit. ‘Jesus!’

‘I’m sure there’s someone else you could go as. Lots of famous people hung out at the Factory all the time. I’ll Google it in a minute. Please calm down.’ I wasn’t very calm myself. I was trying to see things from Alice’s point of view but I was a little fed up with Alice getting hissy every time I dared to mention college – and she’d been cutting my hair for ever and now my head felt suspiciously light. ‘Are you done yet? Can I see?’

‘No!’ It was a scream. ‘Don’t touch it!’ Alice slapped my hand, which had crept up to assess my new do. ‘Just don’t fucking touch it, OK?’

‘Language!’ Sean, Alice’s dad, poked his head round the screen. ‘What’s going on in here?’

‘Nothing,’ Alice said and she actually hid the scissors behind her back, which made shivers run up and down my spine. Not the good shivers. The very, very bad shivers.

‘Alice is meant to be giving me a sixties urchin crop.’ My voice was perilously high. ‘That’s the plan anyway.’

‘Shut up,’ Alice hissed at me. She cleared her throat. ‘We’re just hanging out. I pinched some Prosecco. Hope that’s OK.’

It was obvious that we were not just hanging out. There was a huge pile of my hair on the floor and from the horrified look on Sean’s face there was not a sixties urchin crop on my head.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he boomed at Alice. Usually Sean was affable and chuckly and the coolest of dads but as he marched over to us, red-faced, eyes actually bulging, he didn’t seem so cool any more. ‘You’re not even allowed to blow-dry without supervision!’

I put my hands to my head. I had no hair! What had she done?

I jumped up from the chair and whirled round so fast that I nearly tripped over. ‘Easy there, Franny.’ Sean took hold of my arm. ‘We’ll fix this.’

‘It doesn’t look so bad,’ Alice said, but she looked like she was about to throw up. I tore myself out of Sean’s grasp so I could go crashing through the screens and race to the nearest mirror.

I burst into tears. I went from not crying to full-on weeping with added snot in the one second it took to assess the damage. Boy, was there damage.

My hair was short. Really short. About as short as you can go without using clippers and instead of leaving it long and messy at the front as I’d asked her to about a gazillion times, Alice had left me with one forlorn strand of hair. I don’t know how, I don’t know why but Alice had given me a comb-over, like how baldy old men drape their one good piece of hair over their scalps and hope it will fool the world.

‘I’m sorry, Franny,’ Alice said, her hands on her face like she wanted to shield herself from the horrific vision she’d created. ‘Your hair is really weird. It doesn’t lie flat.’

‘My hair? Weird? You…’ I couldn’t speak in sentences, only sob out the odd word. Sean marched out from behind the screen holding my sodden ponytail.

‘You are in a whole world of trouble!’ he barked. Alice shrank back. ‘Look what you’ve done to her! What were you thinking? Your mum will be here in five minutes to pick up the books. She’s going to kill you.’

That was when Alice burst into tears. Not because she’d butchered my hair, but at the prospect of her mum getting all wrathful on her arse. If Sean was normally a lovely teddy bear of a man, then Tania was a Rottweiler.

‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed to Sean. By now Chloë, Sean’s senior stylist, had come over and was staring at the back of my head.

‘I think I can see a bald spot,’ she said in a loud stage whisper.

‘You did this on purpose!’ I would have shouted but I was crying too hard. ‘You did this to sabotage me with Louis.’

‘No, I didn’t…’

‘And because I dared to maybe make some new friends.’

‘That’s not true…’ Alice was wringing her hands now. Her face was red and wet and distorted. I’d never seen her look so ugly.

‘Well, you know what? I’m going to take my new friends and keep as far away from you as possible. I never want to see or speak to you again,’ I spat and only then did I let Chloë and Sean guide me back into the chair.

It was another hour before I left the salon. I had to give up my dreams of having Edie hair and go for what Sean called a Mia Farrow. Chloë showed me pictures of a blonde actress from a sixties film called
Rosemary’s Baby
, who’d had very, very short hair with a very, very short fringe but she was gamine and beautiful and had adorable freckles and eyelashes. I didn’t have adorable anything. I just had a bald spot and a comb over.

Tania had arrived halfway through, stood in the doorway and said nothing. She’d simply watched as I cried in the chair while all Sean’s stylists gathered around and told me not to cry, and as Alice wept as she swept up the hair she’d cut even though it turned out that she’d never, ever, not once, cut anyone’s hair before.

‘What’s been going on?’ Tania had eventually asked and even when she shouted at Alice and grounded her until she was eighteen, it didn’t make me feel better.

Neither did the complimentary silver gel nails and the eyebrow threading or Chloë telling me to come back for free eyelash extensions. They couldn’t do them then because I was still crying and Chloë said they wouldn’t take.

By the time I got home, the wind viciously whipping against my exposed neck and ears, I was exhausted. Emotionally drained. It was all I could do to drag my feet up our path and lift my arm to put my key in the lock.

Mum was coming down the hall as I stepped through the front door. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said defensively before I’d even opened my mouth. ‘I’m really tired, OK?’

It was then I remembered that Dad had an overnight job delivering some slate tiles to Cornwall. With him out of the house, obviously Mum had decided that she could take a break from pretending to be a fully functioning adult.

Not for the first time, I wished that she’d be my mum. Be a mum. Stop being so colossally self-involved and concerned with how she was feeling so that she could notice how
I
was feeling. That my eyes were red and swollen because I’d been crying for hours and that I actually had very little hair and what hair I did have was now what Sean and Chloë kept calling a pixie cut but looked more like that Katy Perry video where she joins the army and they razor off her hair.

I couldn’t help it. I started to cry again and she sighed. Not a sympathetic sigh, but an impatient sigh like she didn’t have time for my tears when she was holding it together just long enough to get up the stairs and shut herself in her bedroom.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked in a tired voice.

‘Look what Alice did to me! Look at my bloody hair!’ As I sobbed, I realised that it wasn’t just about my hair; it was about me and Alice.

When she’d picked up those scissors and started cutting, she’d cut into our friendship too. Yeah, my hair would grow back eventually (and eventually was going to take a long, long time to come) but I wasn’t sure if Alice and I would grow back. Or if I even wanted us to.

I couldn’t begin to explain that to Mum, not when she already had her foot on the bottom stair and was giving me a long, hard look.

‘Jesus, Franny,’ she said in the flat, resigned voice that I hadn’t heard for a couple of weeks and really hadn’t missed. ‘If a bad haircut is all you’ve got to cry about then you’re a really lucky girl.’

My plan was to never leave the house ever again. Except morning rolled round as it always did and I had no choice but to go to work.

The only hat I could find was a red and blue knitted number with a bobble on, but there was no contest between wearing a stupid hat and having stupid hair.

It was very hard to sit at my sewing machine and not spill tears over a pile of shirts that needed buttons sewn on. Only the fact that I was sitting in the window and Rajesh was working that day (Mr and Mrs Chatterjee had gone to a wedding and he’d threatened to leave home if he had to spend all weekend at his auntie’s house in Walsall) kept me dry-eyed.

Raj spent two hours trying to get me to lose the hat. Even made me coffee though I would’ve sworn he didn’t know how to operate a kettle, but I refused to take it off, even though dry-cleaning shops are hot, stuffy places and I was tempting heatstroke by lunchtime.

I did tell him why I was wearing a hat and if misery loved company then Raj was the perfect companion for someone who never wanted anything to do with Alice Jenkins ever again.

‘She’s a bitch, innit,’ he said when I’d finished my sorry tale of hair loss and betrayal.

‘Total bitch,’ I agreed. I didn’t feel a single pang of disloyalty. Not one.

‘Is one thing to break someone’s heart, but to do that to her best friend’s hair is not right.’ Raj was meant to be putting dry-cleaned clothes in plastic garment bags but he was too busy shaking his head. Actually there was something I’d always wondered but never asked about before, and now I didn’t owe Alice one itty bitty little morsel of girl solidarity.

‘So, Raj, was it you who wrote
Alice Jenkins Is The Worst Girlfriend In The World
in the Burger King loos?’

He pulled down his baseball cap so I couldn’t see his eyes. ‘Like I’d give her that satisfaction,’ he mumbled. Then he became very interested in getting busy with the garment bags and I kind of had my answer. One thing to call out your ex-girlfriend, quite another for your ex-girlfriend to adopt it as her Twitter bio and get her best friend to spell it out in sequins on a T-shirt because she was so proud of the accolade. ‘Anyway, you’re better off without her, Franny, ’cause girl you fly and she be dragging you down, yo.’

I did feel dragged down, like I was in a hole that I couldn’t climb out from. I now had some understanding of why my mum took to her bed so frequently. That was where I was heading as soon as I got home. There was no way I was going to The Wow Halloween party, even though theoretically with Alice grounded I had free access to Louis all night. I was deluding myself if I ever thought he’d go for me, not when he had Thee Desperadettes as his own personal entourage and I had my shit hair.

Sorry 2 let U down but not coming out 2nite
, I texted Dora and Sage.

I refused to be drawn on the details of my no-show. They’d find out on Monday, if I decided to get out of bed and go to college and if I decided to forgo my woolly hat, which was highly unlikely.