Drama Queen (2 page)

‘Tea up.' Mum's voice interrupted my train of thought.

I blew my nose and took the mug she offered.

Mum sat down on the sofa beside me. ‘We'd better think how we're going to redecorate your room,' she said.

‘You don't have to try and cheer me up.'

‘You didn't
have
to bring the daffs,' she said.

I lay in bed that night listening to the traffic pass and watching the angled shadows of the headlights swing around my oddly sloping ceiling. A police siren wailed in the distance and a couple of cats started up an anguished chorus down below.

I wondered what the future would bring. I'd been flat out all day so hadn't even had time to check my mobile. I leaned over and raked it out of the bottom of my backpack. There was a text message from Clare.

welcome to your dream home
love wobble

I texted her back.

bag in basket, me in bed
sweet dreams
love j

So our life at Rosemount Mansions began. I'd like to call it a turning point. And it was in a way.

We'd moved from the suburbs into the inner city. And while Mum moaned about the dirt and the noise and the lack of a garden, for me it was the start of something new and exciting. OK, so I'll let you into a secret. I've always had this ambition to be a writer. I don't tell many people because they think it's so uncool. And I don't write much, because frankly my life back where we used to live was so-oo dull. What's there to write about when absolutely nothing happens?

But Rosemount was different. I loved the way the building seemed to have a life of its own. Whatever the time of day or night you could feel the buzz of other people's lives around you – the creak and slam of the lift door, a sudden burst of laughter, a baby
crying or the purr of a taxi waiting outside. Every sound was a story about to happen.

From my viewpoint high up over the entrance, I could see whoever came or went. And long before I could match these aerial views of people to the names beside the doorbells, I had started making up imaginary lives for them.

‘So what's the latest Rosemount news?' Clare would ask as I slid into the seat she'd saved for me in the bus. Clare lived in the nice quiet suburb we'd left. For her, my new inner city life was jam-packed with potential. Not much had happened so far. So I'd decided to make it sound more interesting.

‘Another woman disappeared into number nine. Not seen to emerge. I'm watching to see if SK comes out with a large leaking suitcase.'

‘SK?'

‘Serial Killer.'

‘Yukk. How about the clairvoyant in number one?'

(I didn't actually
know
she was a clairvoyant. I mean, she didn't have a crystal ball in her window or anything. But groups of people used to turn up in the afternoons and not emerge for hours. So I painted Clare a nice spooky picture of them inside, hand in
hand around her table, calling up the dead.)

‘Strange knocking sounds emerging from her flat. Blinds firmly closed.'

‘Spotted any talent yet?'

‘None so far.'

‘How about the guy with the hairy wrists?'

‘Mr Hyde? He's scary. His flatmate's not bad though. But we haven't established eye-contact.' (I'd seen each of these guys emerging from the same apartment on separate occasions. One with a black mac and hairy wrists, the other the same height and build but blond and blue-eyed. Never once seen together. Strange.)

Clare sighed. ‘I thought the whole point of moving to a block of flats was all those encounters in the lift. Or on the fire escape.'

Clare's lack of love life was her constant obsession. Most of the other girls in our class had, or claimed to have, some male in tow. But whether it was the double brace, or the fact that she was so devoted to those shapeless tracksuit bottoms of hers, Clare never seemed to have any luck. I wasn't bothered myself – the boys who the girls in our class went out with were really immature. Personally, I preferred to remain single until I found complete
perfection
.

‘So how on earth did
she
get
him?
' Clare nudged me and nodded in the direction of a curiously mismatched couple. A really fit guy was sitting beside a plain girl with lank hair.

‘Maybe she's his sister.'

‘They're holding hands.'

‘Are they?' At that point the girl nuzzled up to the guy. ‘I give up. I dunno. It happens,' I said.

‘It's
so
unfair.'

‘It's love. There's no logic to it.'

At that point we reached the stop for Westgate, our school. The bus disgorged its load of kids on to the pavement. Clare strode on ahead of me but I lagged behind, thinking about what I'd just said.

It's love – there's no logic to it
. But there should be. Surely love is the most important thing in life? Who you ended up with couldn't simply be down to chance.

I considered the way the people up ahead of me were paired off. There was Marion, who'd been glued to Mark since nursery school – they were even planning to apply to the same colleges. And there was that boy in Year 9 with the big nose, whose name I never could remember, who'd teamed up with the girl with the dodgy legs. Then there were the drippy
Frinton twins who each had their totally uncool boyfriends. In fact, if you imagined a great cosmic game of Pelmanism, you could probably sort most of the people at school into matched pairs.

The school bell was already ringing as I reached the gates, so the last of us stragglers made a headlong dash for the doors, to avoid getting on the late list.

It was three hours later in a biology period while the teacher was droning on about ‘natural selection' that the phrase came back to me again.
It's love – there's no logic to it
.

What was this curious process that attracted one person to another? Was it the survival of the ‘fittest'? The bullfrog with the deepest croak gets the most frog wives. The strongest stag who can fight off all the other males gets the biggest harem. Were human beings just the same? All of us girls were after the ‘fittest' male, after all. And all of the males were after the ‘hottest' girl. Some people of course, sickeningly enough, attracted the opposite sex like filings to a magnet. But what about the rest of us? Did we just have to settle for what was left over? Maybe we were simply after the best we could get. We'd aim for the fittest but we'd then have to scale down our standards
until we met someone who
we
thought were the best
they
could get.

It wasn't until double maths (not my best subject) that the answer to the whole thing came to me. I was studying this problem and the words literally leaped off the neatly squared page. ‘Solve the inequality', it said.

Solve the inequality
. That was it. Love is like a vast cosmic equation. The moment you meet someone of the opposite sex, your brain does this massive piece of mental algebra: i.e. his blue eyes and perfect teeth = my glossy hair and long legs.

be + pt = gh + ll
Good Match!

Then on a second glance you start to see negatives: i.e. his dodgy trainers and sticky-out ears.

be + pt – dt + soe < gh + ll
Mismatch

Errm. Maybe there should be some brackets in there somewhere. (Algebra was not my strongest subject.)

(be + pt) – (dt + soe) < (gh + ll)
Better?

But then you may have negatives yourself, i.e. my bitten nails and snagged tights.

(be + pt) – (dt + soe) = (gh + ll) – (bn + st)
Match!

Then, of course, the more you get to know someone, the more enters into the equation. Like ambition, for instance. He might want to be a brain surgeon, whereas I might just settle for being, say, a parking warden. So the equation would become unbalanced.

bs + (be + pt) – (dt + soe) > (gh + ll) – (bn + st) – pw
Mismatch

But it could be balanced back again if I was, say … about to become a rock star (just being a parking warden while I was building up my brilliant career). And then there were things like taste: whether you liked crap films and nerdy music. And whether you were knock-kneed or athletic. And loads of minor details to take into account, like whether you were incredibly miserly or disastrously spendthrift or rancidly untidy or pathologically orderly or could cook well or dance brilliantly or were tone deaf or …

‘Jessica. Are you with us dear?' Ms Manson, the
maths teacher, was sitting at her desk beckoning to me. ‘I asked you to come up so that we could go through last week's homework together.'

So I had to put my theory on hold till after school.

It was on the way home that the thought struck me. In fact, it actually stopped me in my tracks as I was going down the street towards Rosemount. If I was right about my theory, my
scientific
theory of love, then perhaps there were some things that could be substituted, on one side or the other, to balance the equation between Mum and Dad.

Like Dad minus pot-belly and dodgy taste in films, for instance, but plus a good book. Or by making Mum more glamorous: i.e. minus saggy cardie and frown lines and maybe plus make-up.

Dad − (pb + dtf) + gb = Mum − (sc + fl) + mu

Would
that
make them match up again?

I continued walking very slowly up our steps as I considered this carefully. Maybe if they could get them back into balance they could get back together again. They weren't divorced after all, only separated. There was still time.

I ran up the last few steps.

Bag was out on the balcony basking in the low afternoon sun and casting an assessing eye on the alley cats in the street below. I picked him up and he purred delightedly. Poor Bag, he'd spent all day alone. Maybe even he was searching for the perfect mate. Some low-life feral female who would ignore his saggy belly and cat-food-breath and appreciate him for his finer points.

B – (sb + cfb) = ?

I made myself tea, spooned out cat food into Bag's bowl and then wandered into Mum's room to check out her wardrobe. She must have some more flattering clothes stashed away in there somewhere.

Rows of nondescript khaki and grey clothing met my eye. Several pairs of worn trainers, an odd sock and a jumper I hated had amazingly survived the move undisturbed, and were still lying, fluffy with lint, at the bottom of her wardrobe. On her dressing table there was a comb, a bottle of mass-market moisturiser and a tube of lipsalve. The job of turning Mum into a love goddess was going to be an uphill task.

Bag, having finished his meal, had followed me into the room and was winding himself round my legs. ‘What do you think, Bag?' He made no comment but climbed into the wardrobe, settled on the jumper and started to knead it with his paws, purring with ecstasy as if to say he liked Mum the way she was.

‘You've no judgement whatsoever.'

I went back into my room to start my homework. The building was quiet at that time of day, waiting for darkness to fall before it came to life. I hauled files, set books and my pencil case out of my backpack and was arranging them on my table when I heard the resounding slam of the entrance door below. Someone had let themselves in.

I couldn't resist. I slipped out through our front door, tore down the stairs and peered down the stairwell. Six flights below me, swinging a knapsack of books in a way that suggested he belonged here, was a boy. I stood on tiptoe to get a better look. He was perhaps a little older than me. Not in uniform, so probably a sixth-former, but not from our school. Hmm, interesting. He was waiting for the lift. He got in and I heard its familiar wheeze and whirr as it
started up. There was a hiss and then a jolt followed by the sound of the grille being opened and slammed shut again. I estimated he must have got out on around the third or fourth floor.

It hadn't really been possible to assess his potential from six floors up but I texted Clare straightaway.

stop press!
rosemount news!
talent spotted
love j

I started on my homework with a good feeling inside. I had an essay to do on
Romeo and Juliet
. Halfway through the first page, however, I started to run out of steam. I raided the biscuit barrel three times and ate two packets of crisps but I still felt positively hollow from hunger.

Where was Mum? She usually had some good tips on English essays. She was doing this Open University course. That had been one of the problems with her and Dad. She'd get all excited about some essay that she was doing and totally forget to cook dinner. It had driven Dad mad. And it drove her crazy that it drove him mad because she thought her
OU course was really important. More important than the dinner or the loo paper that she'd forgotten to buy or all the other things that went by the board.

Hang on a minute. It was Friday. I'd forgotten she had a rehearsal. Why had I ever had that totally irrational idea that ‘amateur dramatics' would cheer her up? When I'd given her that: ‘Why don't you get out and meet people' pep talk I hadn't realised that it would entail a stupidly late dinner twice a week. I stomped into the kitchen and opened the deep freeze compartment. A small pack of fish fingers and a bag of frozen peas met my gaze.

The over-microwaved fish fingers weren't too bad swamped in ketchup. Bag rejected the really tomatoey bits. I thought, grudgingly, of how all around me in the building, people were sitting down to meals together. ‘
Pass the roast potatoes, darling … Could you manage just one more slice of chicken breast? More gravy?'
(Gravy! Sigh … When did we last have gravy?)
‘What's for pudding, Mum? Oh, homemade apple pie and cream! Yumm. How was your day? …
'

This reverie was interrupted by the sound of the lift arriving with a clunk just below. Mum let herself in carrying a jumbo size take-away pizza.