Girl, 16: Five-Star Fiasco (2 page)

‘Amazing!’ marvelled Fred. ‘All those tickets gone!’

‘Except eight,’ Jess reminded him.

‘Yeah, except eight,’ admitted Fred. ‘Hey! Why don’t we print another hundred?’

For an instant Jess’s heart leapt in excitement. Another hundred! More money for Oxfam! And more muns for them to organise all the details, which they must get around to . . .

‘Wait, no!’ she gasped, suddenly realising something. ‘If we print another hundred, there wouldn’t be room for everybody in the hall!’

‘We could stick a few extra tables out on the pavement,’ suggested Fred airily.

‘Fred! It’s going to be February! Valentine’s, remember?’

‘We could provide duvets.’

‘No, no, don’t be stupid. It’s made me wonder, though – can we fit in the people who have already bought tickets?’ A cold wave of anxiety shot up Jess’s neck.

‘Of course we can!’ Fred grinned breezily. ‘A hundred is nothing!’

‘Maybe we should go to the church hall and have another look at it. A hundred! That’s ten tables of ten people each. How big are the tables?’

‘Never mind that.’ Fred brushed her aside. ‘The really important question is: how are we going to host it? In fancy dress?’

Jess was instantly distracted by the idea.

‘We could go as animals,’ Fred pondered. ‘I could be a meerkat. I’ve always wanted to be a meerkat.’

‘You
are
a meerkat,’ Jess assured him. ‘You have their strange, lost eyes . . . But what would I be?’

‘Miss Piggy, of course!’ Fred grinned.

Jess hit him with her school bag and, as she did so, there was a horrid little crack from inside and some drops of brownish liquid spilled out.

‘Oh, that cola!’ Jess shuddered. ‘I bet it’s all over my history book!’ She opened her bag and picked out the school books, which were lightly dripping. ‘A hankie! A tissue! Give me something to mop them up with!’ she pleaded.

‘You must know by now that I never carry a hankie,’ said Fred. ‘That’s girls’ stuff. I always wipe my nose on the pavement.’

‘Oh, Fred!’ sighed Jess. ‘You’re
useless
.’

Chapter 2

It had been a mistake to barge into Mum’s bedroom without knocking. She was sitting on the bed, with her laptop on her knees, and as Jess entered, Mum snapped the lid of the laptop shut with a panicky look, as if she’d been caught out.

‘Hey, Mum! Why the guilty face? What are you up to?’ Jess bounced on to the bed and tried to prise the laptop open. Mum slapped her hand playfully, but hard.

‘Stop! It’s – a secret!’ Mum’s face went pink. Hey! Maybe she’d been ordering some kind of surprise treat for Jess! Clothes? DVDs? A day at a spa? A world cruise?

‘What kind of secret?’ asked Jess, peering into her face. Mum couldn’t usually stand up against a really ferocious grilling. ‘Is it a nice secret?’

Mum looked doubtful. She stuck out her lower lip, sighed and shook her head. ‘It could go either way,’ she said.

A sudden horrible thought came scorching into Jess’s mind.

‘You’re not looking up illnesses on the internet again, are you?’ she demanded. She remembered that terrible time when Mum thought she had Polymyalgia rheumatica! (‘Polly’ for short – it always helps to have a nickname for a nasty illness.)

‘No, no,’ said Mum hastily. ‘I’ve managed to kick that awful habit.’

‘What is it then, Mum? Come on, give me a clue. Maybe I can help.’

‘Oh, you certainly can’t help.’ Mum gave her a very sceptical look. ‘Although you could ruin it.’

‘Ruin it?’ Eagerly Jess pounced on this hint. She could ruin it! What could she ruin? Well, almost anything. The world cruise would be top of her list of things to ruin, of course. What had she most recently ruined? Well, the non-stick frying pan – by scraping at it with a metal spoon!

‘Are you ordering a replacement non-stick frying pan?’ enquired Jess anxiously, because at the height of the ruined frying pan row she had recklessly offered to pay for a new one.

Mum threw back her head and laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry about
that
,’ she said, beginning to make a move. ‘Come on! Let’s go and help Granny with supper.’

‘No!’ roared Jess, capturing her with a well-aimed rugby tackle. ‘Unless you tell me what it is, I shall go down the leisure centre and get into a fight! I’ll run away from home and live in a cardboard box with street people! I’ll marry a fish!’

‘Well, you’ll obviously do most of those things anyway,’ said Mum, giving up the struggle to escape and going limp. ‘Oh, all right.
If
I tell you – and it’s a big if . . .’

‘Yes? Yes? What?’

‘You must promise not to breathe a word to anybody.’

‘I promise!’ said Jess. ‘I really mean it! My lips are zipped!’

Mum gave her a serious, stern look. ‘Seriously, Jess. It’s . . . a delicate subject.’

Surgery! She was going to have a facelift!

‘Sure!’ agreed Jess, breathless with excitement. Maybe if Mum had a facelift she would look more favourably on Jess’s plans for a boob job.

‘OK, then.’ Mum gave her a doubtful look and flipped open her laptop. ‘I’m thinking of . . . well, there’s this online dating thing.’

Jess’s heart gave a crazy somersault. The facelift went hurtling off into cyberspace. The boob job drooped out of sight. The world cruise sailed away off the map.

‘Dating?’ Jess gasped. Her mum gestured towards the screen. A gallery of men stared out at them. Somehow they all looked shabby and desperate, as if they’d been floating on a life raft in the Pacific and had to eat their own feet to survive.

‘This is what’s available within twenty miles of here,’ said Mum with a sigh, ‘between the ages of thirty and fifty.’

‘That’s quite a big age range,’ Jess pondered. ‘I mean, thirty is, like, a toy boy, Mum.’ When it came to toy boys, Jess’s mum had a bit of history. There had been her Japanese pupil with the glossy shoes, Mr Nishizawa. Jess shuddered at the ghastly memories of this affair, particularly the time when Mr N had come out into the back garden just at the moment when Jess had been driven, by a terrible bathroom crisis, to pee behind a bush.

‘Thirty is fine,’ Mum insisted firmly. ‘I’m not old enough biologically to be the mother of a thirty-year-old.’

‘OK, OK,’ Jess agreed hastily. ‘But, Mum! Fifty is way too old.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so . . .’ faltered Mum. ‘Fifty is nothing, these days.’

Jess stared at the photos on the screen. Several of these guys had horrible thick beards, not stylish goatees. There was one called Adrian who had a beard so big you could have built a tree house in it and thrown a party.

‘Er, Mum,’ said Jess, ‘these guys all look like losers.’

‘You should never judge people by their looks,’ Mum argued, although she sounded a little half-hearted about it.

Jess sighed and stared at the candidates, all smiling awkwardly in the manner of serial killers. OK, they looked unpromising. But if one of them turned out to be even vaguely tolerable, it meant that Mum might come to the dinner dance after all. She had so far sternly refused, on the grounds that Jess might be traumatised by the sight of her mother dancing by herself. There’s something really weird about parents dancing. That was why Chaos was going to be a family event – so all the teenagers could see their parents dance, feel the fear, eat their own fists, pee themselves laughing and get over it.

‘And the fact is, Jess, I’ve already made arrangements to see one of these chaps.’

‘Which? Which?’ demanded Jess eagerly.

‘You’ll see,’ said Mum, shutting her laptop with a mysterious smile. ‘Now let’s help Granny with the supper – and don’t breathe a word to her about this, OK?’

Granny had made burgers and, to placate the gods of dieting, she’d done oven-baked wedges of butternut squash instead of chips, plus a salad.

‘There’s the ketchup,’ said Granny, helpfully placing it beside Jess’s glass (water, not cola: so saintly!).

Mum was messing about, struggling to open a bottle of wine for herself and Granny. Jess sighed. Why was their corkscrew so primitive? Flora’s dad had a state-of-the-art corkscrew that worked on compressed air or something.

‘Delicious, Granny!’ drooled Jess, lacing the burger with a bloodbath of ketchup. ‘You’re a star! And I hope there’s nothing chocolatey for pud!’ Actually, this was not quite true – Jess was secretly hoping Granny had prepared some evil concoction involving three different types of choc. Jess had made a new year’s resolution about having chocolate only twice a month. It would be torment, but her skin and her waistline would thank her.

‘No, dear, I remembered your new year’s resolution,’ said Granny firmly, ‘so I just stewed a few pears, and instead of cream there’s low-fat yogurt.’

Trying to maintain a cheery smile at this dire news, Jess got stuck into her burger.

‘How was school today?’ asked Granny.

‘Oh, it was brilliant – I gave the tickets to everybody who’d put their name down for Chaos, and they were all thrilled.’

‘What’s Chaos again?’ asked Granny, frowning slightly.

‘It’s the dinner dance, remember, Granny? Fred and I are organising it in aid of Oxfam.’

‘When is this?’ said Granny vaguely, but you could see she was really thinking about the pepper grinder, which had stopped working properly and instead was depositing huge rocky grains of fiery pepper on to the defenceless burgers.

‘Valentine’s!’ said Jess happily.

‘Where are you having it?’ asked Granny, dismantling the pepper mill with a preoccupied air.

‘St Mark’s Church Hall!’ announced Jess. ‘Fred’s dad booked it for us, and he’s going to run the bar.’

‘That was kind of him,’ said Mum, pouring two glasses of wine. ‘I hope he’s got everything under control.’

‘Oh yes, Mum, don’t worry – we’ve got everything under control and it’s going to be fine!’ Jess assured her cheerily.

This wasn’t strictly true, either. Although Fred’s dad had indeed done the booking for the hall and agreed to run the bar, all the other details – the food, the music, everything, in fact – were being organised by Jess and Fred. Jess had spent nine hours designing the most stylish tickets in the world, but, she thought, with a niggle of anxiety, they really
must
get round to sorting out the rest of it – soon.

Chapter 3