Girl, 15: Charming but Insane (4 page)

‘Notice anything different about me?’ demanded Jess, halfway through the sandwich.

‘Your hair! Your hair is great! How have you made it stick up like that?’

‘No, not my hair, idiot.’

Flora’s eyes ran up and down. ‘Wow! Your tights! Fantastic! Fishnets are wicked! So Paris!’

‘Not my tights, you fool!’ yelled Jess. ‘My cleavage!’

Flora inspected Jess’s cleavage. ‘It looks great!’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re so worried about! You’ve got a perfectly good cleavage! Look at it – it’s fine!’

Jess felt deeply depressed. So Flora thought this was her very own cleavage. Suddenly she decided she wouldn’t tell Flora about the bags of soup. It was just a little secret between herself and her boobs – which were called Bonnie and Clyde, incidentally.

Jess had got into the habit of talking to her boobs. ‘Grow, you lazy so-and-so’s!’ That kind of thing. Only in private, though. Then it was just a short step to giving them names. Jess’s mum didn’t allow pets. The great advantage of boobs over dogs was that walkies didn’t have to be a special expedition. Every time Jess went down to the corner shop for a new lipstick, Bonnie and Clyde got an outing.

And Jess’s boobs were certainly getting their biggest outing yet. Jess finished her sandwich, and she and Flora strolled into the main room, where deafening rap music was pouring out of Tiffany’s enormous speakers. Ben Jones may not have noticed Jess’s cleavage, even Flora may not have noticed, but Whizzer noticed right away.

Whizzer (William Izard to his family) was one of the boys a couple of years above Jess and Flora. He played football with a demonic energy. He had big, rather rude lips and a reputation for wicked ways. He appeared before Jess and rudely and wickedly interrupted her conversation with Flora by grabbing Jess’s hand and pulling her into the dancing throng.

It was hardly the gracious invitation she would have preferred, but Jess began to go through her moves. As they gyrated and grooved, Whizzer fixed his eyes firmly on her cleavage. Jess began to wish she had worn a modest top which covered her up as far as – well, as far as her eyebrows. She wished she had at least rehearsed dancing before leaving home, in front of her full-length mirror. She feared that her newly-buoyant boobs might be getting rather out of hand. Bonnie especially – the left one – was beginning to feel a bit free-range, and it did seem a little draughty across her chest. Jess also began to worry that, in shaking up the soup so violently, she might somehow make it boil over.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Flora smooching with Ben Jones’s friend Mackenzie. Though short, Mackenzie was quite good-looking in a dark, poetic sort of way. In fact, he was probably the nearest thing to King Charles I available locally. Jess wasn’t sure whether he had a sad and tormenting secret, but she was sure one could be arranged. It would be so cool if Flora could go out with Mackenzie and she could go out with Ben Jones. First, however, she had to get rid of Whizzer.

When the number ended, she tried to retreat gracefully back in the direction of the kitchen. Whizzer, however, pounced. He put his arms round her and stuck his tongue down her throat. Jess was disgusted. He tasted of cigarettes. And Ben Jones might be watching from somewhere nearby. She struggled slightly, trying to escape, but Whizzer squeezed her more tightly, and Bonnie – her left boob – exploded and a jet of minestrone soup shot up and hit him on the jaw. Whizzer let Jess go and staggered back, clawing at his soupy chin, cussing horribly. Jess seized her moment. She ran. Out in the hall, there was a bathroom. Somebody had put a sign saying ‘Girlz’ on the door. The boys’ toilet was marked ‘Ladz’ and was Tiffany’s parents’ en-suite.

Jess flew into ‘Girlz’ and slammed the bolt across. There was a loo, a washbasin and a wide shelf above it with a huge mirror. Tiffany had decorated it for the party with loads of leaves and flowers. But Jess didn’t have time to admire the decor. She wriggled out of her plunging black top, and pulled the minestrone inserts out of her bra. The left-hand one had exploded all over Bonnie. Jess threw both bags of soup down the loo and flushed, then stripped to the waist and washed the chopped carrot and tomato and macaroni off her boobs.

‘I’m sorry about this, Bonnie,’ she apologised. ‘But it’s your own fault. If you and Clyde had just got your act together and grown a bit, I would never even have thought about inserts!’

Then she washed her bra, and put it back on. There are probably more uncomfortable feelings than climbing into a wet bra, but all the same, it was quite terrible. There was still soup in the loo. It looked as if somebody had vomitted. The thought was so sickening that, for an instant, Jess was on the edge of throwing up herself, but she pulled back just in time by imagining she was Christmas shopping in New York. Jess had never been to New York, but the shopping fantasy was a sure-fire cure for nausea. She closed her eyes and flushed the loo again.

Fully, if damply, dressed, she was now ready to leave. If there had been a window in the bathroom she would have climbed out of it, but at least when she left the bathroom she would already be in the hall, right by the front door. Her mascara was smudged. Never mind. In two seconds she would be out in the street. The lovely, dark, anonymous street.

Jess opened the door, shot out and almost collided with Ben Jones.

‘Um, hi, Jess, I was looking for you . . .’ he said, with a strange smile.

He knew! Everybody knew! News of her soup debacle was all over the county already!

‘Sorry!’ said Jess. ‘I’ve got to go home, my mum just rang, she’s not well.’ She pushed past him – too upset even to enjoy the fleeting contact with his T-shirt – and rushed out into the street. He didn’t follow, thank heavens. She wanted to be Home Alone as soon as possible. The bus stop for the 109 bus was too near Tiffany’s house. Anyone could come out of the party and see her waiting there. Unfortunately, owing to a foolish desire to appear glamorous and cool, Jess had worn her mega-high heels, so she had to teeter in agony all the way home.

What a complete nightmare
, thought Jess as she reached her own street.
How could things possibly get worse?

Chapter 5

As Jess let herself in, she found her mum standing in the hall. She had a peculiar look on her face. Jess recognised that look. It was the same look as when her mum had broken Jess’s porcelain doll by dropping a brass Buddha on it. Not deliberately, obviously. Jess’s mum wasn’t a sadist. She was just accident prone. Now she looked furtive and guilty. Her eyes were shiny and elusive. It was the look of a dog who has peed on the carpet and is hoping to get away with it.

‘What?!’ demanded Jess. It’s important to seize the initiative at such times.

‘You’re back early.’ Her mum frowned. ‘Everything all right?’

‘The party sucked,’ said Jess, ‘and these shoes are killing me. I want a bath.’ She kicked off her shoes and walked down the hall towards the privacy of her own room and the comfort of her favourite posters and her old teddy bear Rasputin.

Jess’s room was the one thing about her home life that was just perfect. It was a ground-floor room at the back, overlooking their garden. It was private. Nobody could see in. It was quite big. And she had been allowed to paint it purple.

But now her mum sort of barred her way with an uneasy shuffling movement. Jess scowled.

‘What?’ she demanded again. Her mum was a pacifist when it came to international relations, but she could still put up a good fight at home.

‘Great news!’ smiled her mum, but the smile wavered and cracked a little. What sort of great news? Jess’s weird and rather horrid imagination kicked in.
Great news – a runaway skunk has pooed in your underwear drawer.

‘Granny’s coming to live with us,’ said her mum. She said it extra fast, so that it sounded like ‘Grannyscomingtolivewithus’. As if by getting it out into the open quickly, she would somehow avoid big trouble.

Jess considered the proposal. She loved her granny. OK, so Granny was slightly obsessed with death and sometimes acted a bit old ladyish. She could be boring when she droned on about the past, especially her favourite subject: ‘Grisly Operations Suffered by Various Old Codgers of My Acquaintance’. Oh, and there was that other obsession: ‘Ghastly Accidents and Fatal Fires Which Scarred My Tragic Childhood’. But at least if Granny came to live with them, it would mean they wouldn’t have to go and stay with her in her grim old house that smelt of haddock.

‘Cool,’ said Jess. ‘Now can I get into my room, please, Mum?’

Her mum still barred her way. ‘The thing is, darling . . .’ Oh no! This was serious. Mum never called her ‘darling’ unless somebody had died, or another war had broken out. ‘I’m really sorry, Jess, but she’s going to have to have your room.’

‘My room!?’ exploded Jess. ‘There’s a perfectly good spare room upstairs!’

‘Yes, but, you see, darling . . . Granny can’t manage stairs quite so easily any more. Since Grandpa died and she had that fall, you know – well, her house is too much for her to manage on her own.’ Jess was numb with agony. Her lovely room! And she had got it just how she wanted it! It was perfect! ‘Granny has to be on the ground floor, love. She can use the ground-floor loo, and we’ll convert the old coal shed at the back into a bathroom.’

Jess was too furious to speak. No, wait, she wasn’t.

‘Where am I supposed to sleep, then?’ she snapped. ‘Out on the pavement?’

‘Don’t be silly, love. The spare bedroom upstairs.’ Jess’s mum had the best bedroom upstairs, the big one at the front. The second-best bedroom was her mum’s study. It was lined with bookshelves and there were three filing cabinets and a huge desk. It was just overflowing with political stuff. From this nerve-centre the local anti-war campaign was organised. Papers lay about everywhere. There were huge piles of antiwar leaflets. Thousands of them. And there were the banners which Jess’s mum carried in the marches. The third bedroom was tiny. A box room. Just about enough room for a bed. Barely big enough to accommodate a pet gerbil. Hardly enough room to lie down without having your legs sticking out of the window or your head out on the landing.

‘Why can’t I have your study?’ Jess cried.

‘Jess, darling, you know why not. I need that study. There’s so much stuff. You know I have to keep the peace campaign going, love. It’s for your generation – to give you a future. To stop war.’

‘Well, I love war!’ Jess’s temper snapped. A wave of red-hot fury washed through her. ‘I think war’s terrific! And when I leave school I’m going to join the army and kill as many people as possible! Now please can I get into my room for what may possibly be the last time!’ She pushed past her mother.

What on earth . . . What had happened to her room? All her clothes had been pulled out of the drawers and tossed into cardboard boxes. The posters had been taken down and rolled up. It wasn’t her room any longer. Evicted already.

‘It looks like a bomb’s hit it!’ cried Jess. Usually it was her mum who bawled out those very words about her room. This was a moment of revenge. But it wasn’t much comfort.

‘If you’d ever seen a room that had
really
been hit by a bomb, you wouldn’t use that phrase so lightly!’ yelled her mum, trying to make Jess feel guilty in a really horrid way. ‘I’ve just started packing up your stuff, because the thing is, Granny’s coming tomorrow. It’s very short notice. Her neighbour rang me this evening. Apparently she’s strained some ligaments in her knee and it’ll be much easier to look after her here.’

‘OK, OK, I get the picture!’ Jess bent down and scooped some clothes into a bag: her jeans, a T-shirt and sweatshirt, nice warm socks and trainers.